Hard Landing (34 page)

A short time later at the bargaining table, Charlie Bryan won everything he asked for.

In Miami, Atlanta, New York, Houston, and everywhere else that Eastern operated, Frank Borman’s managers were disconsolate, as if
they had spent weeks practicing for the big game only to be sent home from the locker room. The pilots’ union ordered the
ballots recounted on their wage deferral vote. Mechanics, baggage handlers, and other members of the machinists’ union arrived for the night shift in droves to enjoy
lording their victory over their managers. Some of them produced the lapel buttons that management had previously distributed—
I LOVE MY JOB. THANKS, EASTERN
—but altered them with tape to read,
THANKS, CHARLIE
.

As the machinists’ merrymaking swelled, Borman slouched to his home in Miami. While he was relating the depressing events of the preceding days to his wife, a reporter for a Miami television station came to the door.

“Colonel, what happened?” she asked.

“
We were raped!” he snapped, closing the door.

CHAPTER 8

STORMY WEATHER

R
egardless of how skillfully acquired or how cleverly deployed, airplanes do not fly on the talents of corporate management. How does it happen? What makes an airplane fly?

Lindbergh once made an instructive analogy from his boyhood in Minnesota. He and his young friends enjoyed racing across the logjams floating listlessly in the northern reaches of the Mississippi River. Some of the logs were too short and narrow to support the weight of an average-size boy. Lindbergh discovered that he had to race quickly over these logs, stepping from each to the next before any one of them had the chance to sink. The same principle applied to flight.
“Safety,” Lindbergh learned, “lay in speed.”

Airplanes do not take off or remain in the air through the pressure of the oncoming air against the bottom of the wing, as commonly thought. This pressure contributes to aircraft flight but hardly accounts for it.

In addition to being pushed from below, an airplane’s wings are pulled from above, as if on a marionette’s string. This happens because the top of a wing is contoured and the bottom is flat. As the wing slices through the atmosphere, the air slipping along the top must travel a greater distance than the air passing on the bottom. The air on top therefore moves faster.

This condition causes lift through the combination of two immutable properties of physics, each taken for granted in everyday living. The first principle is that as air moves faster, it exerts less pressure downward—just as tornadoes and other windy storms coincide with regions of low air pressure on the weather map. The second principle is that air always moves from areas of high pressure to low pressure, as the
cigarette smoke in the still air of an automobile rushes through a window crack toward the fast-moving, low-pressure area outside the window. Thus, as air cascades along the bottom of a wing, it is also being sucked, as if from a vacuum cleaner, toward the top of the wing. The faster the wing travels laterally, the greater the pressure differential above and below. The greater the differential, the greater the lift generated. Safety lay in speed.

The combination of speed and surface area created by a modern jet engine and wing is truly prodigious.
Each square foot of wing surface can support about 100 pounds, which is why a 747, with a wingspan encompassing 5,000 square feet, can hoist a half-million pounds.

Because of those tremendous speeds and surface areas, the angle at which the wing is attached to the plane and the angle at which the plane itself rises into the air are acutely critical variables. So too is the smoothness of the path taken by the air over the wing-the aerodynamics, that is. If air fails to adhere evenly to the contours on the top of the wing, buffeting occurs. If the airflow departs completely from the surface, lift vanishes, causing the airplane to “stall,” as if the marionette string had snapped or the vacuum cleaner were switched off.

So long as the wing is of proper design and in working order, only one thing can corrupt the flow of air over the surface, and that is ice, such as the ice that was forming on the wings of
Air Florida Flight 90 sitting at snowy National Airport in Washington on January 13, 1982.

That an airplane flying for a company called Air Florida should be stuck in a blizzard was richly ironic. Some months
after leaving Braniff in 1975 under the cloud of Watergate, the indefatigable Eddie Acker had had occasion to fly on Air Florida, then a three-year-old airline that operated three propeller-driven Lockheed Electras
and a single 707 jet. Air Florida
reminded Acker of the Southwest Airlines he had battled back in his Braniff days. Deregulation, though imminent, had not yet taken hold when Acker discovered Air Florida; like Southwest, it was still confined to the boundaries of a single state.

Acker realized he was desperate to take control of another airline. “Once you get hooked on the airline business,” he explained, “it’s
worse than dope.” With the backing of some friends, Acker purchased a
controlling interest in the airline for just $1.5 million.

As he had demonstrated back at Braniff, Acker was incapable of small-scale management. He began picking up used jets all over North America, tapping some of his oldest and best connections for financing. He changed Air Florida’s markings from a rusty orange to blue and green. “We operate in
a warm climate, so our jets had better look cool,” Acker explained. Passengers on morning flights got orange juice spiked with champagne—“sunshine sparklers.” And Acker began applying the Southwest Airlines pricing formula: severe discounts, especially at off-peak hours, with fares below the cost of driving. As more planes came in, boardings rose by 100 percent over the previous year, then by 200 percent, and in some months by 300 percent.

Once deregulation had hit, Acker applied the same principles in the interstate market. When United announced its withdrawal of service from Toledo, Acker backed in with flights to Florida at ultralow fares. When National Airlines was purchased by Pan Am, he grabbed National’s old route from Miami to London, offering first-class seats upholstered in sheepskin and a free ride from the airport in London aboard a Rolls-Royce limousine. Acker launched a new route from Miami to Dallas by offering “free
flights for a kiss,” by which a certain number of customers would fly free simply for smooching an Air Florida “kiss miss” stationed at the airport.

At age 50 Ed Acker was having the time of his life at Air Florida. He literally ran between offices, going the entire day without sitting. Reaching for a
dog-eared copy of the
OAG
in his pocket, Acker flipped from page to page calling out new destinations: Tallahassee, Port-au-Prince, Honduras—essentially, whatever tickled his interest.

In much the way that air rushes into areas of low pressure, airlines look for opportunities to thrust their airplanes into locations where their competitors are withdrawing. In July 1981 Pan Am, still fumbling
over its acquisition of National Airlines nearly two years earlier, cut back severely on the New York-to-Florida routes for which National had been principally known. Grabbing at opportunity, Acker threw nearly half of his planes into the void, making Air Florida overnight the second most dominant carrier along the East Coast, exceeded only by Eastern Air Lines. (A few weeks later, after President Reagan had fired the striking air-traffic controllers, People Express would join the fray.)

The New York Times
labeled Acker “the
darling of deregulation.”
Fortune
magazine suggested that Acker was “the
ablest of the entrepreneurs catapulted to prominence by airline deregulation.” Air Florida, said
The Wall Street Journal
, had become “one of the great American
corporate success stories.” It did not particularly concern the investment community that Air Florida’s debt had ballooned at a time when interest rates were in the stratosphere or that the company’s
profits were subsidized by Acker’s maneuverings in the foreign currency and stock markets. If anybody could keep on top of the numbers, Wall Street figured, it was a genius like Ed Acker.

A few weeks after he had dispatched all those planes from Florida to the Northeast, the research analysts of Wall Street turned out in force for a luncheon presentation by Acker. But when he rose to the podium, Acker said he was not able to discuss the affairs of Air Florida with them, for a reason he knew they would all understand.

“I
talked to Cunard Lines,” he said, “and told them 1 was interested in a job as captain of the
Titanic
. They informed me that I was fifty years too late.”

Having thoroughly confused his audience, Acker went on. “Not having that challenge available, I decided to try to find one comparable to that. And so I am accepting the chairmanship of a company called Pan American World Airways.” As the analysts recovered from their shock, Acker turned over the podium to someone from Air Florida and left.

Within days of arriving at Pan Am, Acker took the extraordinary step of reversing the flight cutbacks along the East Coast that the previous management had just made—the service that Acker himself had rushed with Air Florida to fill. Having enjoyed the excitement of building Air Florida, Ed Acker, it appeared, was now bent on destroying it.

• • •

It was at the height of the conflict that Flight 90 found itself delayed at Washington National that January afternoon in 1982.

The snowstorm had begun around noon, causing people to head home early. Barely two miles from the airport, in between the Washington Monument and the Pentagon, the 14th Street Bridge was clogged with cars and cabs. Bound for Tampa, Flight 90 was nearly full with passengers enjoying the low prices of the Pan Am-Air Florida fare war. Seventy-one passengers were aboard, plus three infants, three flight attendants, and two pilots.

In the captain’s seat Larry Wheaton took in the snowy scene around him and cursed the afternoon of delays. Wheaton, 34 years old, had taken off or landed in ice only eight times in his career as a 737 captain. Before joining Air Florida, he had flown for a little commuter airline in the Florida Keys called Air Sunshine, whose fleet included old DC-3S and whose chief executive officer doubled as a
dentist in Key West. Acker, then at Air Florida, had purchased Air Sunshine as a way of gaining airport
access in the Keys. For Larry Wheaton and his fellow Air Sunshine pilots, the takeover was a windfall of career opportunity. Suddenly they had the chance to step up from propeller planes to jets and from first-officer rank to captain. At other airlines pilots spent 14 years on average to reach a captain’s position on the seniority list; Wheaton had done it in barely one quarter of that time in flying for Air Florida.

Sitting next to Captain Wheaton was his first officer, Roger Pettit, who surveyed the snow and thought about school being canceled the next morning. “I’ll bet all the school
kids are just crapping in their pants here,” he said to his captain at one point. “Yahoo!” As an Air Florida pilot Pettit had conducted only two takeoffs or landings in ice; on the final rollout today he would be at the controls.

The two men knew enough about cold weather flying to have the wings deiced. Air Florida’s ground operations were handled at National under a contract with American Airlines, which brought the deicing equipment into position. But a replacement nozzle had been installed on the deicing hose, causing water and deicing chemicals to be applied in improper proportions.

When the Jetway was reeled in and Flight 90 finally cleared to push back from the gate, Captain Wheaton didn’t want to delay. Unfortunately,
the tug that American brought in for the push-back didn’t have chains on the tires; instead of pushing the big 737, it simply spun its wheels on the ice. Wheaton told the tug operator that he would use reverse thrust from his engines to back up. The American mechanic on the ramp replied that reverse thrust was not a proper procedure at this time; hot exhaust could melt snow and create ice in any number of locations on the plane, including along the leading edge of the wings. Wheaton cranked up the engines anyway. After more than a minute of reverse thrust, the plane had still not pulled away. A tug fit for the job was finally found.

Flight 90 was ordered into a taxi line behind an apple-red DC-9 flying for New York Air, another new carrier serving National Airport. Captain Wheaton, noting that he still had snow or ice on the wings, pulled as closely as he could behind the New York Air plane to bask in the heat of its engines. He apparently had not read the section of the operating manual that stated that in cold weather pilots must keep even greater distances from the engines of other planes—again, so that snow is not melted and turned to ice.

Flight 90 could have received another shower of deicing fluid, but the flight was now already nearly two hours behind schedule. “Boy, this is a losing battle here on trying to deice those things,” said Copilot Pettit. He and the captain could take some comfort from observing that other planes were taking off with a little ice or snow. Even if the men had little experience with these conditions, they were journeyman pilots. They could handle this.