Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [43]
For the next eight minutes, the flight crew tried to figure out what was wrong. Why wouldn’t the light go on? The captain ordered two different people to try to visually confirm that the gear was down, but they couldn’t see anything in the dark. The first officer pulled out the nose-gear light to inspect it, but had problems putting it back in. All the while, the captain offered advice and issued orders. The entire cockpit crew was focused on getting that green light on.
At 11:40, a half-second alarm tone went off in the cockpit, indicating that the plane had deviated from its altitude. The transcript from the cockpit voice recorder shows that no one said anything about the alarm. It was as if they hadn’t heard it at all. The crew continued to speculate about possible reasons for the light problem. But then, two minutes later, the first officer noticed another problem.
“We did something to the altitude,” he said.
“What?” the captain said.
The first officer backtracked: “We’re still at 2,000, right?”
Then the captain said, “Hey, what’s happening here?”
Another warning sound began to beep, more insistently this time. Two seconds later, the plane crashed into the Everglades, nineteen miles from the airport.
Investigators would find that the plane had been in fine working order—except for the lightbulbs in the landing-gear indicator, which had burned out. While the flight crew worried about the light, the plane had dipped toward the earth. When it sliced into the soggy marshland, it disintegrated on impact. The wreckage was scattered over an area 1,600 feet long and 330 feet wide. A total of 101 people died.
The crash, and several other unnervingly similar accidents in the 1970s, convinced aviation researchers that pilots needed to be trained to avoid such myopia—or what is known in the industry as “task saturation.” “This happens to everybody under stress,” says Rogers V. Shaw II, who trains pilots for the FAA. “If there’s not enough training, you get channelized on one thing, and you forget the whole big picture.”
Today, Shaw trains pilots to proactively scan their instrument panels, over and over again, to counteract the tendency to fixate on one problem. He also teaches pilots to make sure one member of the flight crew remains focused on flying the plane at all times. And he hammers home the importance of open communication and dissent. “In the early ’70s, the captain was God,” says Shaw. “Now a lot of people send their captains to charm school, if you want to call it, so that they can create a climate where everybody feels that, if they see something they don’t like, they can discuss it.”
It would be a mistake to say tunnel vision is no longer a problem in cockpits. But it is a more manageable problem. On July 19, 1989, a United flight en route from Denver to Chicago suffered a catastrophic engine failure while cruising at thirty-seven thousand feet. The plane became almost impossible to control. But the flight crew, working together, managed to spontaneously invent ways to rein in the bucking plane. Forty-five minutes later, they crash-landed the plane in Sioux City, Iowa. Of the 296 people aboard, 184 survived. The plane’s captain, Alfred C. Haynes, credits luck and the crew’s training for the high survival rate. Immediately after hearing the initial explosion, Haynes checked to make sure someone was tasked with flying the plane, according to an account he wrote after the crash. When he saw that his first officer was focused on doing just that, he turned to investigating the cause of the explosion. “There were 103 years of flying experience in that cockpit when we faced our end…but not one minute of those 103 years had been spent operating an aircraft the way we were trying to fly it,” Haynes wrote. “If we had not worked together, with everybody coming up with ideas…I do not think we would have made it to Sioux City.”
Police officers, like pilots,