Confessions of Captain X

It Should Have been routine.

We were bringing a 727 into Saginaw, Michigan. The weather was clear and we had already begun our descent. I could see the airport spread out below me in a little geometric spill among the snowbanks.

In one of those board-room maneuvers that have become endemic in our industry, my company had recently merged with a smaller airline. This had given us some new and, to me, unfamiliar routes. Although I knew about 200 U.S. airports like the palm of my hand, I had never been to Saginaw. (Some details of this otherwise true account have been altered to protect my airline.)

Boarding the plane, I had introduced myself to my copilot and flight engineer, who were new to me. They were employees of the now-absorbed smaller airline. My copilot was a man of about my age, 42.

Saginaw was the second leg of our trip. The flight had originated in Miami and, following the custom of our industry, I had turned the controls over to the copilot after the (continued on page 140) Captain X(continued from page 104) first leg. During our preflight check-out, I had asked him how long he had been driving the Seven-Two.

"Eight years," he said as he busied himself with the hundreds of details that go into every preflight check list.

"Eight years," I said to myself. "That's pretty good."

While I was qualified to fly the 727, my experience on it had been mostly in training flights. I was glad to have a man at my side who had such intimate knowledge of the plane.

"And you know Saginaw," I said.

"Been flying there since I joined the company," came the slightly smug reply.

Terrific. Superterrific.

Through Flight Control, we had learned that the airport was undergoing renovation. The longer of the two runways--about 6800 feet--had been temporarily shortened. It was now about 5500 feet, which was well within the requirements of a 727 but considerably short of the 7000 or so feet that would be considered average. The second runway--runway 14--was about 5000 feet.

Now, 5000 feet on a 727 is cutting it pretty close. The plane can land in a shorter space, but unless you've been making your home in that cockpit for quite a while, you really don't want to go around testing a plane's minimum landing requirements.

"How do you plan to take her in?" I asked as we neared Saginaw. (As captain, I'm the copilot's chief and mentor. From gate to gate, no matter who is actually handling the controls, the captain is responsible for everything that happens.)

"Runway fourteen," he said. "I'll bring her in at a forty flap."

A plane's flap setting is crucial to the landing procedure. The farther the flaps are down, the lower the nose is tilted. It's what we call the deck angle. The usual flap setting--the one I had been performing day in and day out along the Southern tier--is 30 degrees. By choosing a 40-degree setting, my copilot was indicating that he was planning to alter our deck angle, increase the amount of drag and lessen our velocity. These factors would enable us to land the plane at a relatively slow 120 knots and come to a stop well within the 5000-foot limit.

It took me about half a second to conclude that my copilot was making the right decision, and I again congratulated myself on drawing Mr. Spock as my first officer.

So there I sat, ignorant and blissful, my arms folded across my chest, my soda and my peanuts at my side, with 152 equally ignorant and blissful passengers in the cabin behind me. None of us had the faintest idea that we might have about 97 seconds to live.

One of the great thrills of flying is that you're constantly getting to experience what other men spend their entire lives clawing and scratching to achieve--that awe-inspiring, ego-swelling phenomenon called The View from the 40th Floor. I never tire of it. The landscape is constantly changing. I wouldn't trade offices with Donald Trump on a bet.

But The View from the 40th Floor takes on a special significance when you're coming in for that delicate operation called the landing. You're not sitting in an office with your feet up on the desk, you're sitting at the tip of a falling arrow. Every decision is potentially a matter of life and death. You're scanning your instrument panel. You're making many small adjustments in your ailerons and your elevators. You're watching to see that your wings are level, your air speed's steady, your landing gear's down, your angle of approach is proper. And while you're doing all that, and while you're looking at your engine pressure and your compass headings and your rate of descent and your altitude gauges, you're also looking through your windshield and you're comparing what you're seeing on the ground with what you've seen a thousand times before in a thousand other similar landings. It all happens very fast and your actions are instinctive.

When the airport is new to you, however, when the terrain is just a little different from any you've ever seen before, when it's a plane you're not quite comfortable with and it's coming in on a configuration that is used only in the most unusual circumstances, sometimes your instincts don't work right. And when that happens, all you can do is marvel at what a weird feeling this is and look to your supercompetent copilot for support.

As I sat there, I couldn't help thinking, Isn't it strange how, when you come in at a steep angle toward a runway you've never seen before, you have the optical illusion you're about to crash?

I rolled a peanut over on my tongue.

The ground rose closer.

And isn't it strange, I thought, the way it looks like you may not even clear those trees down there, but even if you do clear those trees, you're certainly going to hit those lights, and aren't you lucky that Mr. Spock here knows so much more than you, and that the lump rising in your throat, which seems to be getting larger with every passing moment, is apparently not rising in his much more knowledgeable one?

In 20 years of service, I've listened to more than my share of dead men's chatter on voice recorders. I've sat through too many postcrash conferences and listened to too many ghostly conversations coming from those charred and battered "black boxes." (Actually, they're orange or yellow--the better to spot them in the wreckage.) And I know that often the last word a pilot utters before his plane disintegrates in a fiery ball is shit. That may not be a very noble way to depart this planet, but that's the way ill-fated pilots usually go.

I can't swear that that particular Anglo-Saxonism was the one that escaped my lips at that moment, but if it wasn't, it wasn't for lack of thinking it.

Snapping forward, I grabbed the yoke with one hand and pushed the throttles forward with the other. We were a good 100 yards short of the runway, and we were doomed to crash.

"Power...full power!" I cried.

I knew that my only chance, if I had a chance, was to bring the nose up, push the throttles to the limit and hope like hell we would clear those approach lights. Straining forward against my shoulder harness, I slammed the throttles against the fire wall.

The plane leaped forward.

I won't even venture to guess what the passengers thought at that moment. Even through the closed cockpit door, I could hear the first of what would be many crashes as dirty food trays, coffee pots and various pieces of overhead baggage shifted violently in their compartments. Within seconds, the air speed indicator shot from 122 to 143 knots. The plane bolted, flared--then hit the pavement. Later inspection would show that our main gear had cleared the end of the runway by less than 30 inches.

But that wasn't the bad part. The bad part--the part that would make me wonder how my mother's little boy had ever come to be in this predicament--was that we were now hurtling down a dwarfsized runway at a speed approximating a Grand Prix race car's!

As any pilot will tell you, when you have executed a landing as sloppy and screwed up as this one, there is only one right thing to do. It's an embarrassing and inelegant maneuver called a go-around. You shove the throttles forward and lift the plane back off the ground.

Unfortunately, that is not the procedure my reflexes chose to perform. In the split-second's confusion caused by the (continued on page 178) Captain X (continued from page 140) poorly planned landing, my instincts overrode my training. I decided to stop the goddamn airplane!

I cut the throttles, reversed the engine thrust, raised the spoilers (the big noisy flaps on the tops of the wings) and hit the brakes.

Outlandish noises reverberated in the cabin. Everything that was not nailed down in the galley flew against the forward bulkhead. Along the aisle, the overhead compartments began springing open--pop, pop, pop--showering overcoats, garment bags, pillows, blankets, you name it, onto the hapless heads of the people below them. All the oxygen masks came down, dangling before the bewildered and panic-stricken eyes of our whiplashed passengers.

Still the plane roared on.

I sat clench-jawed at the controls. I could see the end of the runway rising before me. The plane was skipping and skidding along the pavement, its tires alternately grabbing and sliding as we heaved and rattled across the asphalt. My feet were clamped hard on the brake pedals. I was sure that in another few seconds the plane would nose-dive off the far end of the runway and explode in the same fiery inferno we had so narrowly averted at the runway's near end.

God have mercy on us all.

The fact that that didn't happen seems, to me, a bit of a miracle. Somehow, the combined forces of brakes, spoilers, reversed thrust and Lady Luck slowed our momentum, and the plane shuddered to a halt. We were sitting with our nose practically overhanging the end of the runway, but we were breathing.

The next few minutes are unclear. Somehow, I managed to get the plane to the gate, and those poor scared passengers managed to crawl out of the valley of death and onto sweet terra firma. ("Thanks for flying with us, and we do hope you'll choose us again the next time you travel!")

The three of us in the cockpit sat whitefaced and stonily silent. Finally, I suggested--softly, and as offhandedly as possible--that the flight engineer might want to go out and get a cup of coffee.

"Roger!" he said. I'd never seen a man exit a cockpit door as fast as he did.

That left just me and Mr. Spock.

"I will try to put this as kindly and succinctly as I can," I said. "Just what the bloody fuck did you think you were doing back there? Just what the bloody fuck did you, in your eight distinguished years of flying Seven-twos, mean by coming in on such an erroneous and obviously half-assed approach angle? Didn't you in your infinite wisdom see that we were all about two seconds away from becoming crispy critters on this north-woods landscape?"

Mr. Spock squirmed.

I won't belabor this poor fellow's humiliation. Suffice it to say that it was intense and well deserved.

I later learned that everything he had told me during our preflight check-out was true. He had been flying 727s for eight years. He had been coming into the Saginaw airport since the day he joined his company. As a flight engineer! This was only his third trip as a copilot! He had never actually landed a plane at Saginaw, and he had never made a 40-flap landing in his life!

Let's take another look at that incident, and this time, let's see it for what it really was.

Factor one: Both my copilot and my flight engineer were new to me.

This in and of itself is not unusual. My airline has more than 5000 pilots, so I'm obviously not going to know them all. But in the old days, I at least knew how they were trained.

Since deregulation, there have been a large number of mergers involving hundreds of air routes and thousands of employees. This means that on a significant number of flights, part of the crew will have been trained on one airline, part on another. Many of today's crew members come from small airlines that have neither the money nor the equipment to give them the sophisticated jet training they need. The result can be disastrous.

This was demonstrated on a snowy afternoon in November 1987, when a Continental DC-9 tipped a wing on takeoff from Denver's Stapleton Airport and broke into three pieces, strewing glass and twisted debris along 500 feet of windswept runway. Twenty-eight of the 81 people on board were killed. Subsequent investigation showed that the captain had spent a mere 33 hours in the captain's seat. His first officer, who was at the controls at the time, had been hired a couple of months earlier from a small commuter airline in Texas. He had never taken off in snow.

I can assure you that I have been much more careful in questioning my copilots since that landing at Saginaw.

Factor two: I, as captain, didn't know the airport.

Before deregulation, when a crew tookoff in an airplane, there was at least a pretty good chance that their destination was familiar to one or more of the crew members. Because the industry was so controlled, air routes were fairly static.

Today, it's different. For example, in 1982, the regional airline Texas International acquired Continental Airlines to become Texas Air. That new corporation launched New York Air in 1983 and bought Eastern in 1985. Meanwhile, Continental added Frontier Air and People Express to its burgeoning fleet. By 1987, 40 new cities had been brought into Continental's system. Texas Air Corporation had patched together a work force of 61,000 people, including approximately 8000 pilots and copilots. You can imagine the chaos.

Factor three: The copilot and I were about the same age.

All pilots advance by seniority. But the seniority track at an unprofitable airline can be much slower than it is at a profitable one.

I'm convinced that this unevenness of seniority contributed to our near disaster in Saginaw. I had been with my airline 13 years and I had long been a captain. My copilot had been with his airline 12 years and he had barely made it past flight engineer. What could be more natural than that he would not want to admit--to me, of all people--that he had never actually landed in Saginaw?

It's been said that a pilot's ego is exceeded only by the size of his wrist watch. In this case, my copilot's ego (ably abetted by my own complacency) almost killed us.

•

In terms of takeoffs and landings, Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport is today the world's busiest. It is one of the best-designed airports in the world, and it is ideally suited to deregulated hubbub.

The "rush hour" at Hartsfield begins about seven A.M. Until now, it's been quiet. The sky looks like gun metal. In another few minutes, the planes will start swarming. For me, passing through, it's about an hour before flight time.

How can I begin to describe this to you? This business nowadays is so incredibly complicated. Take the people up in those ramp towers. There are about ten zillion things that can go wrong at those airplane parking places--called aprons--they're looking at. You have hundreds of workers and literally millions of hardware pieces.

Take a look around this tower. Over there, in the corner, there's a monitor just for passenger loading. It has the names and locations of every booked passenger, plus their times of arrival and what flights they'll be departing on. At a desk next to that, there'll be a computer just for fuel deliveries. The fuel for these planes has been banked in huge storage tanks. It's snaked underground to the various gate areas, where it's pumped up by truck and filtered to the airplane bodies. You have another worker who just deals with the baggage problems. When there's a late-arriving flight, he'll send a signal to the guys out in baggage and it will trigger an alert to watch out for certain baggage numbers.

Sometimes, when I stand here and watch this activity and the computerized data and all the phone calls and keyboard antics, I thank my lucky stars that all I'm doing is flying this equipment.

Here come the passengers. You have to worry about security check points. Their bags are going out to the baggage area. And here comes the fuel; it has to be carefully monitored, and you have cargo to load, and you have livestock and postoffice pallets. Wheels within wheels. And what's that? That's a food truck down there. You look through the windows and you have a truck--on a runway, damn it! Some apprentice is driving, and he hasn't seen a marker, and he's out there on the runway, and we've got a 747 landing! Gimme a break!

And what's this? Weather info. They're reporting storm cells--lightning in Delaware--and there's a guy on to tell us there are a dozen more airplanes coming and they're all landing here because it's the only field open to them. Wheels within wheels. It's incredibly machinated. Here's security on the phone. They have a woman trying to board with a target pistol. She says it's OK because she's going to a shooters' convention, and how's she going to shoot if she can't take her pistol with her? Pistol, indeed. And what's this from the ticketing department? (Tell her to take that damn pistol....) They have a businessman there, and he has a quick change of schedule, and we're supposed to pick out his bag, which is gray and says Samsonite on it.

Lord in heaven, preserve us. It gives you ulcers just thinking about it.

Fortunately, I don't have to worry about those ramp-tower problems. All I have to do is check in with my computer terminal. The computer keeps beeping and spitting out what looks like gibberish: 1184/10 RLS 2 ATL 1148Z 0648L-TUC 1535 0835L Ship 411 H/B767/R EBFT Type ECN FL 390 Route A1X 1452 ATL.J14.VUZ..ARG..BUM..LBF..HIA..GEG..PHX..TUC. ETE-347 Ramp WT 268200 LWT 225653 Payload 137/032000 Taxi 16/05 Target Gate ARVL Fuel 12.2 Scheduled Gate H05

That's my future talking, My computer is telling me that I'll be leaving from Atlanta at 6:48 A.M. local time. I'll be flying to Tucson, crossing various way points. I'll have such and such a weight and I'll have such and such a fuel consumption.

The computations involved are incredibly complicated. They'll have taken into account all my fuel burns and wind conditions; they'll have me changing compass headings (what we call vectoring around), or going higher, or descending, and it will be figured with a precision I couldn't have duplicated by myself. The pilot signs the waiver and takes responsibility for the flight, but it's a whole corporation flying around up there.

This increased sophistication has led to two distinct consequences. On the positive side, we've made flying so organized. We've got routers and schedulers and supervisors and meteorology departments; it's a pretty far cry from guys in flight jackets with white scarves flying. But on the underside of that is a kind of Copernican trade-off. Homo sapiens (read the captain) has been shoved from the epicenter. He twirls around the system with a host of gray figures, getting less and less glory--and, on occasion, less money from it.

"Pilot as overhead" has become an increasingly big issue nowadays. It has been spurred, in large part, by advances in technology. "Why should we pay you so much money," ask our executives, "when all you're doing up there is reading dials and pushing computer buttons?" A pilot isn't paid for all those hours when nothing is happening up there--he's paid for those seconds when suddenly there's a crisis confronting him and no computer on earth can save him, or his passengers.

In the early Seventies, on an approach into Denver, I encountered a force I couldn't explain. We were almost on the runway when suddenly we plunged; it was as if some hand had pulled a rug out from under us. "Whoa!" said my copilot. I jammed up the throttles. Luckily for us, we were well into our landing flare by then. Just as the power came on, we made contact with the runway. As it worked out, we pulled a reasonably good landing out of it.

Other pilots haven't been so lucky. There was a 727 that hit the ground in New Orleans. There was an Allegheny jet that fell to earth in Philadelphia. There was a United on take-off that suddenly dropped and hit a radio antenna. What they all had in common was a phenomenon called microburst.

The most analyzed crash since the discovery of microbursts happened on August 2, 1985, when a Delta L-1011 made a fatal attempt to land in Dallas. What I'd like to do now is fly that landing with you, just the way those crewmen did. The only difference is, you'll walk away from it.

•

In the training hangars of every major airline, giant white capsules known as simulators are hunched up on arms that look like the pods on a lunar module. These computer-driven cockpits cost $10,000,000 to $12,000,000. Their effectiveness is such that they've become the sole means of pilot training. When you get on an airplane nowadays, it's a very good bet that your junior most pilot will have had nothing other than simulator training.

When a plane goes down, the investigators pull the data out of the flight recorders and airlines feed them into their simulators. Because the doomed flight to Dallas carried extremely sophisticated recorders--measuring 42 parameters to the microsecond--the capsule can create a harrowing facsimile of the real crash.

When you enter a simulator for an L-1011, you find that it looks exactly like an airplane cockpit. The only real difference is that you can't see any daylight out there. The windscreen is black, like a television set with the picture turned off.

By pushing some buttons, you can bring up an "airport." If you push the O'hare button, you'll see the skyline of Chicago, and it will look exactly as a pilot sees it. When you press Dallas, you'll see four runways staring at you. The one we're approaching--from the north--is 17L; it's on the far left.

The forecast on the evening of August second was anything but ominous. The National Weather Service was predicting a "slight chance" of thunderstorms. There were no sigmets (significant meteorological conditions) issued.

The captain of the flight was one Edward N. Connors. He was what we call "a good stick": a 30-year veteran with 30,000 hours of flying time and a clean safety record. The man to his right was First Officer Rudy Price. Price was 42. He was a 15-year veteran. He had been flying an L-1011 since 1981.

These two men, along with their flight engineer, Nick Nassick, had taken off earlier from Fort Lauderdale. They planned to stop at Dallas, then go on to Los Angeles. They carried 152 passengers and eight flight attendants.

Most of the flight had been uneventful. In fact, they had joked about that as they began their descent pattern. "Another exciting day in the life," one of them chuckled.

Reading from these comments has a very strange effect on me. The speakers are gone, but their voices live after them. I know of no other calling in which one of the requirements is to mount your own death as a kind of miniature theatrical production. As you read from these files, you want to shout--you want to warn them somehow. But they always do the same thing. Their tragedy is engraved in the files of the National Transportation Safety Board.

They were vectored for approach. There was a Learjet ahead of them. The plane in front of that was an American 727. The controller asked the American pilot if he could see the airport yet. His reply: "As soon as we break out of this rain shower we will."

According to the files, it was now 6:03 P.M. A warning horn sounded, saying that they had pulled back their engine power. They were traveling at a speed of about 180 knots. They were converging on the radar beams that were guiding them home. They were less than five miles from touchdown.

As we bring our "plane" down, we see the landscape adjust itself. The runway grows closer. We're able to make out the lighting details. The field keeps enlarging just as it would if we were a real plane landing. We see Hertz and Avis signs, even buses and taxicabs on the ground.

Now it's 6:03:03. The plane gets a message from the approach center: "Delta one ninetyone, reduce your speed to one sixty."

"Be glad to," they say. They've still got that Learjet ahead of them. It's a typical tight schedule, and they have to slow to maintain air separation.

6:03:11: Now they're locked on the "localizer beam." This is a parabolic beam that's sent to planes from the runway threshold. Stay on that beam and you'll stay locked on your glide slope. There's still nothing remarkable happening.

6:03:31: "We're getting some variable winds," says the controller. He remarks that there's a shower to the north of the airfield somewhere. Oh, yeah--they can see it. One of the crewmen even remarks about it: "Stuff is moving in." It looks like they're going to hit a few raindrops.

6:03:46: They're "handed off" to the control tower. Basically, what this means is that they're on their own hook now. They're so close to the ground, there are no more instructions for them. They're going to put their wheels down, then they'll be directed to the gate.

Flaps and gears checked. The American has landed. The Learjet is landing. Nothing strange is being reported to them. Everything is happening just the way it's supposed to happen. On the flight engineer's panel, all the lights are twinkling greenly.

6:03:58: The rain begins falling. The captain keeps the controller informed. "Delta one ninety-one, out here in the rain," Connors tells the controller. "Feels good," he says.

6:04:18: "Lightning coming out of that one."

"Where?" says Connors.

"Right ahead of us," Price tells him.

Price is the one flying. Connors is monitoring him. He hasn't seen the lightning, probably because he's been studying the instrument panel.

In the court trials, they would try to make a big deal of this. Here were these pilots flying straight into lightning, they'd argue, and they didn't abort. This was an obvious case of negligence, said the attorney.

Well, if you'll allow me to speak in the dead men's defense: What Connors was doing--what I would have been doing--was mentally computing the dangers of that lightning bolt. He was measuring those dangers against the data from his instruments, and he was concluding, quite logically, that there was no imminent peril confronting them. The airwaves were silent. Not so much as a bump had been reported.

The mood of the crew was anything but tense at the time. In fact, the flight engineer decided to extract some dry humor from the situation. In a jibe at Price, who was driving, Nassick was laughing and saying: "You get good legs, don'cha?"

At 6:05, the rain started pounding.

At 6:05:05, they were at 1000-foot altitude. Price was still steering. Connors was monitoring him. They began to drop toward the runway markers.

In the next 30 seconds, all hell broke loose.

•

Picture a hose with a very strong nozzle pressure. You point it to the ground and turn on the water full blast. The water comes out and hits the ground like a bomb exploding. The spray goes all over. Like a starburst of water.

That, simply put, is the principle of microburst. That such things even existed in the atmosphere was considered fantastical. They had never been recorded, so there was very little information about them. In fact, when meteorologist Dr. Ted Fujita published evidence of the phenomenon, some of his colleagues laughed at him. Such intense downward air currents couldn't exist near the ground, they commented through the snickers. No more laughter was heard after an Eastern crash at Kennedy, in 1975, that proved the devastating effects of this rogue wind.

Here's what takes place when a plane encounters a microburst: First and foremost, the crew has no warning. The first thing they'll see is a rise in air speed. The plane will seem to lift, even though they haven't increased their engine power.

So they cut back their power--then they enter a downdraft. The draft may be so narrow that it will elude airport wind meters. This draft, plus the rain, will hit like a mallet. The plane will drop. It will get caught in a swirling motion. Within less than a second, the plane will exit the head wind and enter a tail wind--and that will rob it of flying power.

At 6:05:12, flight 191 was at about 900 feet. That's when they were hit by a strong gust of head wind. Their air speed increased and they began to go high on their glide slope.

At 6:05:19, there was a warning from Connors. He told Price, "Watch your speed." He could sense that they had trouble coming. Ahead, through the windscreen, he could see a gray wall approaching. The cloud burst open on top of them.

At 6:05:20, they heard the sound of the rain. It was a veritable flood. They had no visibility. One second later, a comment from Connors: "You're gonna lose it all of a sudden." And a moment later, "There it is."

Connors probably knew what was happening, he just didn't understand the intensity of it. He knew that their climb would soon be followed by a fall-off and, anticipating that, he was reaching for the engine throttles.

The next 30 seconds were, to say the least, memorable. Even when you experience it in a simulator, you will not soon forget it. You can feel the cab bucking. You get a violent, sharp rolling motion. Those giant lift arms are beginning to shake like a funhouse ride.

Amazingly enough, Connors and his crew initially stayed on the glide path. Lightning and thunder exploded around them. Witnesses on the ground described the descent of a solid dark rain wall. Even a few feet away, they couldn't see that an airplane was caught in the storm.

The flight deck was buffeted. The roar grew excruciating. Connors was screaming: "Push it up! Way up!"

Their angle of attack, which was 5.3 degrees, went to 19 degrees. They were sailing in with their nose uptilted.

The plane at that moment weighed 324,800 pounds. It was 178 feet long and had a 155-foot wing span. Imagine, if you can, trying to ride such a bronco through two gale-force winds traveling in opposite directions.

"Hang on to the [expletive]!" That was a cry from Connors. The engines were screaming. They had the throttles pushed to the fire wall. The plane was still slipping. They couldn't see the runway. The deck rolled and rocked. That was when, suddenly, their stick started vibrating.

Among the various safeguards that are built into airplanes, and which are also a part of these sophisticated simulators, are automatic "shakers" that will warn of a stall condition. When your control yoke starts shaking, it means that you're about to lose the lift that's holding you off the ground.

"Whoop... whoop.... Pull up!"

That's the Ground Proximity Warning System. It's a computerized voice that actually shouts at the flight-deck crew. Its Cassandralike wail tells you you're descending too fast. When that warning goes off, you must react instantaneously.

On the ground at that moment, the world was going crazy. Motorists were stopping. They couldn't see the road in front of them. Along highway 114, there was a 60-mile-an-hour wind gust. Signs were uprooted. A fertilizer trailer overturned.

Connors worked feverishly. He was lowering the nose again. If you're fighting a stall, you have to try to get your air speed back. You push on the yoke. The nose began lowering. From a 13-degree up angle, it swung to an eight-degree down position.

What was remarkable about this was that they almost pulled a miracle out of it. The majority of pilots would have been splattered across the ground by then. These guys were still flying. More than that, they were landing it. Their wheels touched the earth at 6:05:52, leaving a six-inch-deep impression behind them. But they were still a mile out from the runway and they had highway 114 in front of them.

When the plane hit the ground, it was doing 169 knots. It rose in the air, touched again and then flew forward. A Toyota was crossing the highway. A wing struck the car, sheering its roof and spilling fuel.

The plane lurched toward the airfield.

There was a cry from a crew member.

There was a shout from a second crew member.

A pair of white water tanks rose like specters.

The last voice you hear is the controller's:

"Delta, go around."

•

Of the 163 people who were on that airplane, 137 died. Twenty passengers, sitting in the back of the plane, unhooked their belts and scrambled out of the chaos.

The men who were flying, of course, were not among them. The plane pierced a tank and Ed Connors and his crewmen were instantaneously pulverized. All that remained were their voices on the flight recorder.

•

There have been several new developments in the battle against microbursts. We've learned to deploy more wind meters and use them with more sophistication. Some airports now are installing Doppler radar systems, which can scan greater distances and give earlier warnings of wind anomalies.

As of 1990, all our planes will have onboard warning systems. They'll also provide the pilot with pitch-up guidance in order to take full advantage of the airplane's power and flight dynamics. We might never have had such systems were it not for that Delta accident. It was a high price to pay.

Although I'm looking forward to new developments in safety technology, I don't think the engineers have all the answers. Too often, their approach is simply to eliminate the human factor. That's clear enough; after all, we pilots are the dunces, aren't we? It only takes sense to turn the plane into a robot. You can fly it like a drone--use one of those boxes with a control rod sticking out of it.

The only problem is, these planes aren't like space rockets. We are not firing missiles into a black vacuum. We are transporting real people through an ever-changing atmosphere, and only a real living pilot can make the split-second decisions needed to see a plane home safely.

Still, we airline professionals tend to be pretty realistic about the life-or-death nature of our duties. There's an old saying in our industry: When an air traveler dies, it makes no difference whether he's going to heaven or hell. Either way--come on, you know this--he has to change in Atlanta.

"There I sat with 152 passengers. None of us had the faintest idea that we might have 97 seconds to live."