Funny Story, Sad Story

Sunrise over the North Atlantic

I started working for ATA-then American Trans Air—in the fall of 1989. Prior to that I had worked for Five Star Airlines, a very small charter company in Boston that had two L-1011s it leased from TWA for the winter months, used mainly to do charters out of Boston to the Caribbean and Mexico. It was my first flying job after five years as an aviation writer. That experiment had gone reasonably well, several books published and a few articles, but eventually I got tired of being at home all the time, talking to myself all day, which is really what writing is, and wanted to get back into aviation. Five Star was a great job, so of course it lasted less than a year. But it led to ATA, which meant three very long months of initial training, again on the 1011, and culminated in several weeks of IOE—Initial Operational Experience—the final stage of training before being declared fully qualified and able to fly the line.

IOE is actual line flying with passengers and crew, but done under the supervision of a Check Airman. It is required anytime you are new to an airplane or new to the position—Captain, for instance, after having flown as a First Officer. (The fact that I had qualified on the 1011 once before at Five Star didn’t matter—I had to do it again.) I had already done several IOE flights but hadn’t done a navigation check yet, which was required to fly the North Atlantic, and I still needed a few more hours and another landing. So I wasn’t surprised when I got a call at home one evening from Training, just after Thanksgiving, telling me that they had a flight set up for me, but it was a little bit different than usual and I didn’t have to do it, but I could really help them out, and maybe get all this over with quickly, if I could get to Detroit (from Western Massachusetts) first thing in the morning. They had it all set up, I would get there just in time for the flight, and the reason for the rush was that there was an ATA pilot, Jeremy Hunter, who was checking out as a Check Airman, and he needed to do a navigation check with an FAA examiner observing to qualify, and both the FAA and Jeremy were already set up and since I needed a nav check…. So I said, “Yah, I can do that, but where does the trip go?” and they said, “Las Vegas.” And I said, “How do you do a North Atlantic nav check from Detroit to Las Vegas?” and they said, “That’s the Check Airman’s problem and the FAA is aware of the situation and is okay with it.” This is going to be weird, I thought. Little did I know.

So I got up early, got down to Hartford/ Springfield airport, got to Detroit, climbed on the airplane, already loaded and ready to go, Jeremy in the left seat, FAA examiner on the jump seat behind him, quickly did the Weight and Balance, normally the last item before the pre start checklist, answered some questions from “The Fed”—the FAA examiner—and then, in the few moments while The Fed was out of the cockpit, Jeremy said to me, “Look, this is all a little crazy, but we’re going to treat this as a North Atlantic crossing, we’ll do all the usual checks and double checks of waypoints, even if they are just VORs and airway intersections, we’ll talk about 10 minute checks, midpoint checks, Equal Time Points, diversions, all the things we would do on an actual crossing, and hope he buys it. I’ll be asking questions and you can ask me questions too, in fact the more we are talking the less chance he’ll have to jump in and cause trouble, so be thinking of questions and any time it gets quiet, ask one. Okay?” What could I say? I’ll do my best. The Fed came back and off we went.

It all went well for the first couple of hours, but then we really started running out of things to say and do. I looked over at one point and saw Jeremy, his hand hidden so The Fed couldn’t see it, gesturing to say something, to ask a question. I gave him a look that said, “I’m stuck—I can’t think of anything to ask!” So he said, ”Well, look, you seem to understand how these Omegas [a long range system ATA used that is no longer in existence]are operated, do you have any questions about how they work?” I said, “Well, I have done a little research on Omega, and while I know the basic theory of operation, exactly what goes on inside those boxes is pretty much magic to me, so, yah, I have lots of questions.” Then he said, “Really? Well, I have a book that I picked up in preparation for becoming a check airman that I think you might be interested in,” and he reached over into his bag and pulled out a book and showed it to me.

I just sat there looking at it. He said, “Do you know this book?” And I said, “Yah, I know that book,” and he said, “Really, how is that?” and I said, “I wrote it.” He said, “You wrote it?” and I said, “Yah, that’s my name on the cover, Donald J. Clausing.” The Fed, meanwhile, was sliding further and further forward in his seat, listening to all this, perhaps suspecting a rat, and said, “You wrote this book?” I nodded and he said, “Let me see that,” grabbed it from Jeremy, sat back and starting flipping through it. And that was essentially the end of the check ride. The Fed read the book, Jeremy and I flew on to Las Vegas, and that would have been that except there was one more twist, and that was I still needed one more landing, one that should have been perfectly routine, a visual approach backed up by the ILS to one of the long east-west runways at Las Vegas. Unfortunately, this was one of the rare days when the wind was so strong out of the north that they had to land to the north, which meant I would have to do a purely visual approach to one of the shorter north-south runways.

A purely visual approach in a turbine powered aircraft is much more difficult than an ILS approach because it is critical that you are on the proper glide path, there is very little margin for error, and your tools for dealing with deviations in airspeed, altitude, descent rate and glide path are limited. A satisfactory landing has to be in the landing zone (“The Stripes”), on speed, you cannot descend greater than 1000 fpm in the last 1000 feet, which means you can’t just push it over and get it on down if you think you are a little high because you are already descending close to 700 fpm, and you can’t just pull the power all the way back and add a bunch of drag—you can pull the power back but fan jets put out some thrust even at idle so the fans don’t create any drag—and if you get too low or slow it takes several seconds for the fans to spool up which may be too late, and without an actual glide slope or at least a PAPI you aren’t going to know for sure if you are too high or two low until close to the ground when it is too late to correct. Your only safe option then is to go around. And while that would be the smart thing to do and show good judgment, it wouldn’t qualify as a satisfactory landing. So I thought, “Well, bad luck, but you got this far, you’re just going to have to make it work.”

I got set up on final okay, 1500 feet or so above the field, fully configured, so far so good, but wasn’t sure about the glide path. I thought I was maybe a little high, but wasn’t sure. Jeremy was starting that squirmy body language stuff that meant something wasn’t right, but I still wasn’t sure, and he said, “So how does it look to you? High? Low? What do you think?” And I said, “Maybe just a little high,” and he said, “Right. Fix it. Fix it now.” So I started aggressively correcting, as much as I could without exceeding the descent or speed limits, and as I got closer I could tell that I had it nailed, but just in time. The landing was good, on speed, in the landing zone, and rolling out I heard Jeremy say, “My airplane”—the airplane can only be taxied from the left seat, and knew I had done it. We parked, completed the checklist, congratulations all around, Jeremy was a fully qualified Check Airman, I was a fully qualified First Officer, and the Fed was off to do a line check on another airplane.

I rode back to Detroit on the jump seat, one very happy and very tired new First Officer, spent the night there and got home the next day. As a new hire in training you have no life and it had been an extraordinarily tough couple of months for everybody, not just me, and the whole family—my wife, Emmy, daughters Nicole and Hilary—were all celebrating with champagne when the phone rang. Emmy answered it, and I could tell immediately that something was very wrong. She turned pale, listened intently, a few short answers, hung up and went over to Nicole, hugged her and told her that her boy friend, Dan, had killed himself.

That was one of the saddest holiday seasons ever. Life, of course, did go on. Jeremy, who was a Boston based Captain, and I flew together many times after that, had great times, and became very good friends. The “I wrote it” story became a part of company legend. A couple of years later I upgraded and he was instrumental in my eventually becoming a Check Airman myself. We became friends with his wife Gail and son Drew and daughter Anjuli, and they with us. Over the years as bases changed and aircraft changed and company politics changed, we went different ways. Drew went to Embry-Riddle and got hired by one of the regional carriers. Anjuli got a Masters in Accounting and was working in Boston as an auditor. Then, five years ago, tragedy again: Anjuli and her boyfriend were killed in a car accident, on their way to Maine to go skiing. Then, unbelievably, a couple of years after that Drew drowned in a white water kayaking accident in Colorado.

There are some losses that are so unfathomable we don’t have words for them; this has to be one of those cases. My wife and I were back East recently and stopped in to see Gail and Jeremy. They are managing as well as anyone can. Gail told us that she said to Jeremy at the time of Anjuli’s death, “The only way we are going to get through this is to try to do good for others.” So she and Jeremy started a foundation called Goodwill Hunters ( www.goodwillhunters.org ). Very clever name, in a couple of ways, but that is also exactly what it is: a group hunting for goodwill. They do fund raisers and use the proceeds for local food banks, cleanup projects, anything of goodwill in their area along the shore south of Boston. Only now their efforts are doubled.

This all started with a phone call from Training in November of 1989. It is now August 2011. This is a good part of my life. I’m sorry it has had to be so bitter sweet.