I wish I had a copy of the Dennis the Menace comic I once saw. The picture was of Dennis sliding down the banister with his mother at the bottom of the stairs. Her bubble was saying “I thought I told you not to come downstairs!”, and his reply was “I’m not coming down the stairs; I’m sliding down the banister”. I imagine it was hard for Alice to argue his point. He had found a loophole to circumvent the rule, common human nature that we see often and must watch out for as we raise our own children, and manage people in general.
I had a brief history as a substitute teacher where this concept was on display daily, and it wasn’t long before I learned how the proclivity was amplified in the preteen of our species. The first few minutes in a middle school
classroom became a struggle for power. I remember one class, where the students were in exceptional form for checking the boundaries. I granted the first request to go to the bathroom and, somewhere between the second
and third request, I began to realize the power struggle, and went with overkill, no bathroom for anybody. Pleas of unfathomable discomfort went ignored and to my recollection there were no puddles on the floor at the end of
the hour.
We are often forced to make over-reaching rules because it is impossible to anticipate all the variables that might violate the intent of a simpler boundary. I recently heard of a memo at a British company banning
paperclips, evidently because somebody had cut a finger and the company feared a lawsuit. We see other examples every day. The manufacture of all Cessna propeller driven aircraft came to a halt in 1986, after 60 years of dominating the market, because the cost of liability insurance was prohibitive after frivolous lawsuits. Assembly lines at Piper, Mooney, Beechcraft, and all competitors came to a virtual stop because they could see no way to protect themselves from the infinity of angles suing litigants could dream up. It was not until the mid 90’s when congress enacted “tort law” limits that Cessna resumed making these very reliable machines, but by then the whole landscape had changed, other manufacturers were bankrupt, and experimental aircraft had catapulted into a successful cottage industry.
For more detail on that, see:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/general-aviation.htm
Aha! The lawsuit that brought all light aircraft manufacturing to a stop, is that my connection between Dennis the Menace and aviation? Not quite. Recently, I was preparing to start the descent into Rio de Janeiro. It is a 10 hour flight from New York that requires 3 pilots so each of us can get a rest break. Since 9/11 we have instituted several layers of extra security when opening the cockpit door. Not only has the door been reinforced, but we are careful to coordinate its opening with several measures that have become procedure. This includes calling the flight attendants by interphone, pulling out a cart to block passengers, looking through the peephole from the cockpit to assure no bad guys nearby ready to pounce, and, for the same reason, checking that the adjacent bathroom is empty. As the third pilot was ending his break, I decided to take advantage of the secure configuration and squeeze in a quick bathroom break; I knew the imminent descent would be complicated by all
kinds of hard-to-achieve altitude constraints and language issues. I could only be gone a minimum amount of time.
My plan was working out great, until I was done with the bathroom and reversing the procedure to enter the cockpit. As I reached for the interphone, a flight attendant ran into the bathroom. Before she could close the door, I objected and said I was trying to get back into the cockpit. I knew she could not fully relate to how important it was for me to get back quickly, but she didn’t think that was an issue because she knew that I knew it was her in the bathroom, not a terrorist. Her plan was for me to make an exception to the rule and open the cockpit door while she was in the bathroom. In a split second I had all this summarized in my head, but still found it unacceptable because of the implications. I have seen so many exceptions to our procedures including knocking on the door instead of interphone, not pulling out the cart to pass something through quickly, not looking through the peephole, and forgetting to check the bathroom. Even though it has been 11 years since 9/11, I am emphatic that we don’t become complacent with cockpit security. Bathroom empty is the rule, even if the captain sees who it is. One reasonable exception is permission for another, and then the definition of “reasonable” becomes so subjective that you have very little assurance of anything. Maybe it is my pet peeve, but I brief it to the purser before every
flight to head off any shortcuts.
She looked at me and said,”It’s just me”, to which I replied “I am not going through the cockpit door with you in there.” She stepped back out of the bathroom while I picked up the interphone to resume the procedure. We had
some defusing chat about how I saw her logic, but that I thought it was important to maintain strict adherence to the procedure even when it might seem needless to do so. Any one of us could have been in the World Trade Center on that fateful September day; after all, it was a major tourist attraction that many of us had visited at one time or another. You might agree I got closer than the average American to that grave event because I was a Boston based captain on the 767 at the time, sitting reserve. Reserve captains are there to fill holes in the schedule. As luck would have it, for me anyway the captain going to Paris on September 9th called in sick instead of the captain to Los Angeles on the 11th. It’s a reasonable embellishment to say that I was a back-up pilot for the first flight to hit the world trade center. If the
vagaries of chance had just gone a little different, it could have been me.
I had flown that very airplane many times, with specific memories of flying old 334 to Caracus, Glascow, New York, and Chicago, and surely had flown the widebody workhorse to scores of other points in the world. I flew with most, if not all, of the flight attendants on board as well. In fact, I have a picture of my first crew as captain and I believe that is Betty Ong on my right; she is the flight attendant that was on the phone with the company when the first flight hit the tower, as calmly and professionally as she could, using the last seconds of her life to pass along important detail about the attack.
Having left Boston two days earlier, when the attacks first began (9:00AM east coast time, afternoon in Paris on September 11th, 2001), I had already arrived at the jet for the return trip home. I dropped off my bags in the
cockpit, and proceeded to operations to pick up the flight plan. When I got there the scene of the first hit was playing on the TV and officers were bringing it to my attention. I remember thinking how hard it was to speculate
why it happened; weather might be the only scenario I could come up with, but it was severe clear in New York. I don’t remember if hi-jacking had crossed my mind at this point. It was a major news event, but not enough to
clog up phone lines, so far, and I called the dispatcher in the states to confirm that we were still going to fly the trip. I asked him to call our families to relay that we were ok. He agreed, and my wife did get the call. Re-assignments do happen and occasionally it means our families are not up to date on our itinerary, but rarely. She later stated that she was not that worried because she knew I was in Paris, but the call was a relief nonetheless.
I returned to the airplane and gathered the crew in the first class section to tell them, in summary, that some of our closest co-workers had just died in a mysterious accident, but we were to continue the flight as planned. I remember, during the pre-flight, punching keys on the flight management computer and wondering how sensible it was to continue with our minds so preoccupied. But that thought could apply to the entire airline, and it was our
job to compartmentalize and focus on the job at hand. Soon the point was moot. All flights to and from the states had been grounded because a second airplane had hit the second tower. There was not much else that would
explain it, this was no coincidence, and we all knew it.
The company arranged for us to go back to the hotel, which was called the Nikko just down the street from the Eiffel tower. Traffic in Paris made this a long trip, especially on a weekday, and by the time we arrived it was almost two hours later. So much had happened while we were on the bus that we had not heard. People were gathered around a big screen TV in the lobby aghast at the scene of the first tower crashing down. Maybe the second one had come down as well, that memory is fuzzy, but I think not; I think we witnessed it as a crew in the lobby. The reaction in Paris was touching. We would be there for several more days and people, sensing that we were American, came out of nowhere to express their sympathies. A special mass was convened at a famous cathedral down the street, which was attended by the French president. The whole world was uncertain about what to expect. We did not know when, or how, or if things would return to normal. Indeed, things have been very different ever since. I was in contact with the Boston chief pilot daily. If we had known that we would be there for the better part of a week, some of us might have traveled out of Paris rather than to sit around the hotel, but we couldn’t since we were always being told to be ready to fly home the next day.
There were approximately two crews at the hotel from each city served by American. Besides Boston, that would include Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Miami. Some crewmembers were vying to get the first assignment back to the states to be with their families. The only thing I was told with certainty was that we would be launched in the same order as our original departures, and that would mean that I was first.
We finally got the assignment to operate the flight on the following Saturday. Every paradigm had shifted, and we still did not and could not know the full gravity of recent events. As we flew, I knew I had to make an announcement to ease the minds of passengers because this was not a normal operation; and to say nothing at all would seem insensitive. It was very likely that some of the passengers were experiencing apprehension about traveling by air, especially under the circumstances of recent events. I wish I could have been more eloquent; my approach was to assert that in times of uncertainty it was helpful to return to your comfort zone and focus on what you do best, which was what our crew was going to do for them.
When we arrived over Logan airport, I looked down at it and thought about how much it looked the same, but how different it now was. After parking, I checked a weeks worth of messages on my cell phone, and was heartened by the friends and family who were checking to see if I was ok, and the various ways that they had been displaced and forced to cope since the attacks. Company volunteers met us at the gate to offer support for any crewmember needing it. The most stoic of us declined the offer. I had spent a week supporting my crew and I guess I had subconsciously barred myself from being handicapped by emotion, although I was not aware of it.
The next day, however, after the long trip was complete and I knew my family was ok, it hit me. It was brief, but surprising. The entire country was still talking about it, and I was caught mid-sentence as I reflected upon my
unfortunate co-workers who had died on 9/11, and how they had drawn the short straw when they got their work assignment, and how close I came.
There is one more thing I would like to mention. I flew the first airplane from Paris to Boston after the September 11th attacks, and the backlog of displaced people was endless. I asked the other pilots if they would
mind giving up the crew rest seat since, after six days in the European time zone, jetlag would not be an issue for us. They agreed. It was a small thing we could do in the face of thousands of people in need, but a very big
thing for the individual who got the extra seat. So, at the risk of contradicting the initial premise of this story, that is what I did, even though it was against the rules. What would Dennis say to that?
Captain’s Log 