John Nance: Lockout

“What the hell are you nattering about, Horneman?”

“The profession and responsibility of flying versus the swaggering ‘Hi girls, I fly jets!’ version of daring airmen bringing it in on a wing and a prayer. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re locked in the Jurassic Age of piloting, Jerry. YES I fucked up. Yes! But you apparently can’t forgive that, because in your world, being imperfect is not the right stuff. Well here’s the truth: Real men and real pilots make mistakes.”

“I’ve made lots of mistakes!” Jerry snarled. “I’ve never claimed to be perfect!”

“Yeah, but, holding everyone else… particularly me… to a standard of being perfect is the same thing. But again, it’s all so easy because I’m not one of you.”

Jerry snorted, shaking his head, the gesture as dismissive and disgusted as he could make it.

“Well, I can see this is going to be one hell of a fun evening!”

“I didn’t start it, but I’m not going to sit here like a whipped puppy and take your unjustified contempt.”

“And what if I hadn’t pulled it out and we’d crashed, Dan? Would you accept the contempt then? If you’d survived and others died wholesale because of your screw up?”

“No one would have greater contempt for me than me, and for that matter, what makes you think I did escape unscathed? I had my own destroyed self-esteem to deal with, as well as all the added scrutiny from the chief pilot and the training department.”

“Poor you!”

“Jerry, what kills me is that you won’t even admit your own complicity in going head down on the interphone while you should have been monitoring the approach and your obviously untested first officer. What do you think the NTSB would have said about that if we hadn’t made it?”

“You couldn’t find the damned throttles! That’s the bottom line for me. Competent pilots don’t lose sight of the airspeed!”

“I’m sorry. I thought the autothrottles were engaged. As I say, I made a huge, honking mistake.”

“Yeah… and about that…” Jerry Tollefson had swiveled partially around in the captain’s seat, glaring at his right-seater with blood in his eye, daring the underling to talk back again as he played the challenged alpha wolf. “Whoever taught you to just sit there and watch the airspeed deteriorate without touching the throttles? What kind of moron doesn’t teach watching the throttle movement or listening to the engines?”

“You wouldn’t believe what I was and what I wasn’t taught, Jerry,” Dan said, as quietly as possible. “You asked me after you’d saved us where the hell I learned to fly, but I never had a chance to answer you.”

“You made the same ridiculous mistake as those systems operators at Asiana made in 2013 in San Francisco! Maintaining one’s airspeed is the prime directive.”

“Which I was never taught.”

“Excuse me?”

“Where did you learn to fly, Jerry?”

“The United States Navy,” Jerry snapped. “So where were you trained?”

“I learned in one of the toughest flight training environments you can imagine,” Dan said, earning a contemptuous sideways glance from the captain.

“Oh , really ?”

“Yeah… it might as well have been a correspondence course! It was a civilian ab initio program provided by a little airline in New England desperate for pilots… an airline that didn’t care if I had never even flown in a small plane and didn’t think it was important. The same kind of deficient ab initio course the big airlines are now trying to use. This little carrier was looking for trained monkeys to fill the legal square and didn’t even realize it themselves.”

Jerry Tollefson had leaned forward to jab at the buttons of what in a Boeing would be a flight management computer, but he stopped suddenly and straightened up in his seat, fixing Dan with a questioning gaze. “What do you mean? You telling me you didn’t even have your private pilot’s license when you got your first airline job? That kind of ‘ab initio?’”

“Private ticket? Hell, Jerry, they hired me out of my office in Seattle. I’d never even flown a small plane. I was disillusioned about my Internet business and from having too much success too fast, and I’d always, always wanted to fly. So I decided to sell my company and go the route of any other average individual without much money. I thought that was the honorable thing to do, something that would be respected as paying my dues, you know? I had no idea how contemptuous people would be about that decision.”

“What do you mean, contemptuous?”

Dan shook his head, smiling ruefully, trying hard not to say something even more sarcastic.

“It was a huge relief to sell my company and stop spending every day worrying when the whole thing might collapse. I watched my father and my family lose everything to a recession and never recover. I was very lucky to make enough and get out in time.”

“When I flew with you,” Jerry said, “…everyone was talking about our billionaire boy pilot. We figured you were slumming with the working stiffs.”

“I hated that. I still hate that impression! I’d had 2,000 hours of flying airborne computers by the time I applied here, and as I said, I had no idea I was deficient. I was trained to fly primarily by autopilot and dial in altitudes and headings and airspeeds and told to keep my hands off the controls if the autoflight system could do it better. Precisely the same malady that caused the Asiana crash in San Francisco in 2013.”

“A systems operator.”

“Yes. Exactly. I was trained to be a dumb systems operator, not a pilot. When I hit the line, I had less than 300 hours. It was before the FAA changed the rule to require 1,500.”

“Less than 300 ?”

If I’d had any idea how little I knew about stick and rudder flying, I could have bought 400 or 500 hours of quality flight instruction. But what I didn’t get a chance to practice were those basic skills. I had no idea that was a deficit.”

“And then we hire you,” Tollefson said flatly.

“Yeah. Sorry about that!”

“What’d you do, pull strings?”

Dan shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Jesus, you, too? I guess everyone thinks that. No, I didn’t pull strings. Wish I had. Someone might have told me to back off. Instead, after driving regional jets around for almost two years and seldom ever touching the yoke, I dropped an application in the box at the very moment you guys were desperate for new first officers, and after a whirlwind ground school and a few sessions in the simulator, you got the lucky number. I mean, Pangia World Airways knew my limited aeronautical background a heck of a lot better than I did.”

“Did they also know you were uber rich?”

“I wasn’t uber rich, not that it has any bearing on the situation. I’m not uber rich. But I had no intention of telling them or anyone else I was well off. It was simply immaterial.”

“So what was your net worth? Bill Gates country?”

“Hell no. I had a paltry sum compared to what I could have received if I’d kept the company several more years and taken it public before selling.”

Dan Horneman met Jerry Tollefson’s gaze for a few seconds, knowing what the response was going to be if he spoke in dollars. It was impossible for anyone with an average professional income to bridge the philosophical gap that separated their respective bank accounts. It was far more than numbers, it was a gulf measured in unfathomable terms of struggle and misunderstanding, and ultimately, it was always a case of ‘You have what I don’t, and I resent it!’”

“ How paltry?” Jerry prompted. “Speak to me in numbers.”