An Exhilarating Waste of our Time and Attention
An aviation incident, not an
emergency
I was on the phone with Doc
last night, as he reports at Plane
Chase,
discussing Jet Blue 292's progress as its pilots grappled with the core
of their emergency: the intersecting bureaucracies that so visibly hold
us hostage when possible.
As Doc relates, he IM'd me a little bit before 6 PDT to
turn on CNN. So we chatted for a bit and by 6:06 the whole drill was
obvious. It was clear that this thing was no big deal, that the landing
would be perfectly normal, except that the two nose tires would burn
off and that there would then be a shower of sparks as the nose gear
ground down its rim until the aircraft came to a stop. Since there's
nothing
flammable on the outside of the aircraft, the sparks would cause no
damage, and the only real effect was that the aircraft's nose would be
about 6 inches lower than normal. In fact, the pilots have a written
procedure for a cocked nose gear and the attendant emergency landing.
This is the second reason pilots are paid the big bucks
– not
only because they can coolly land a compromised plane with 140 souls on
board (as the passenger manifests phrase it so eloquently) but because
they can
do so while dealing with the myriad experts whom the system has
assigned to . . . do what, exactly? To protect each expert's individual
department's turf, of course.
Here again, on a tiny scale, we could see the problems that
surround
every emergency, from a Katrina or Rita to something as energizing but
non-threatening as a cocked nose gear. What's obvious to everyone with
a little experience and, in this case, with an explicit written
procedure in place, is no match for the need for everyone with the
slightest authority over the situation to take up as much room as
possible in the mind of the collective.
This somewhat jaded former aviator pines for the reality that
most
people with some experience wish would have happened. The AirBus 320
should have:
- Flown past the tower at Burbank or Long Beach, as they did, so a
JetBlue mechanic or pilot confirm that the
problem was a cocked nose gear, as described in the aircraft's flight
manual and Emergency check list.
- Proceeded directly over the Pacific, as they did, to
dump fuel down to the max recommended emergency landing weight.
- Land as soon as possible at Burbank, the flight's origin,
where the emergency
crews are more than sufficient and where the runways are plenty long
enough.
(in fact, the braking effect of the grinding nose gear was
considerable. I'll bet Flight 292's rollout was measurably less than
normal – the nose gear has no brakes, so this is the only
case
where it helps slow the aircraft)
- Get the company's paying customers on another Jet Blue
aircraft
as quickly as possible: at Burbank or Long Beach or even Oakland
– wherever another AirBus is available.
- If no aircraft is available, get them back to the terminal
they
had just left – Burbank – as quickly and as
undramatically
as possible, so as not to inconvenience them more than necessary.
Number 3 is important because it's rarely the initial problem
that bites an aviator in the ass. It's the second problem, combined
with the first, that then spins off harmonics of woe and wisps of
chaos. The more time you spend wandering around in the local area,
the more likely that problem #2 will mate with problem #1 and spawn
their bastard offspring.
The Last Thing to do was what they did: Fly around for 3 hours and then
land at LAX where JetBlue has no presence, where the passengers have no
desire to go and
where the longer runways and larger fleet of emergency equipment and
broadcast journalists are meaningless.
Remember, this was an
incident, not an emergency, though it met the technical definition of
an emergency.
Confusion in an Emergency Expands to Match the Time and
Voices Available
Call it the Emergency
Corollary to Parkinson's
Law (which all of us should re-read every year). It's the
lesson
I've taken away from a LOT of aircraft emergencies, usually under
compromised conditions. The
System
– experts in nicely creased trousers, as distinguished from
aviators, who are rarely well-creased – doesn't give a shit
about the safety or convenience of those exposed to
risk. What The
System
cares about is not rationality, but about covering the ass of every
Department
Manager within earshot and expanding the influence of the more
ambitious among them.
A rationality meltdown killed most of
Katrina's victims, not her winds and rain. That's what kills most
people
in most
emergencies, where all the knowledge for proper action is
usually present, if the participants would only follow
whatever
procedures they can remember and then follow their common sense.
Naturally, the labeling of something as an emergency is the surest way
to get most of us to abandon our common sense.
The same meltdown of rationality that we
witness in every corporate planning meeting is present in every
emergency. The only difference is the part about people dying. In
combat, time is
short, so the well-creased Majors
& Colonels don't
have time to
dream up yet another conversation about the situation. Maybe that's why
it's called war time.
Here's an actual
transmission by the control tower at Ton Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon,
fall, 1967:
"Roger,
Air Force F4C with one engine out and low oil pressure on number 2,
you're third for landing in the Emergency Traffic Pattern."
"Light this
Candle!"
In The Right Stuff,
Tom Wolfe described a similar orgy of bureaucratic indecision over
launching Friendship 7, Alan Shepard's initial sub orbital flight in
1958. This was the first time we'd launched a Redstone rocket with
a human sitting on top of of the seven stories of seething liquid
rocket fuel. Every perfectionist engineer and manager improvised new
reasons why the 15 minute flight shouldn't launch quite yet, cascading
into a four hour delay and forcing Shepard to finally relieve himself
in his flight suit, itself a hilarious anecdote. A few delays later,
At T minus 2 minutes and
40 seconds there was another hold. Now Shepard could hear engineers in
the blockhouse agonizing over the fuel pressure running high. He could
sense what would be coming next. They were going to talk themselves
into resetting the pressure relief valve inside the booster engine
manually. That would mean postponing the launch for another two days at
least. He could see it coming! They were going to scrub the whole
thing, lest they
hold
themselves accountable for his
hide if
something went wrong! This was not a job for
Smilin' Al. It was time for the Icy Commander to arrive and take
charge. So he got on the circuit and put the glacial edge on his voice,
as only he could do it, and he said:
"All right, I'm cooler
than you are. Why don't you fix your little
problem . . . and light
this candle."
Light the candle!
he says. The words of Chuck Yeager himself! The voice of the rocket
ace! Oddly enough, it seemed to do the trick. Realizing the astronaut's
irritation, they began wrapping up the process and declaring their
systems "go."
The Rightest Stuff
They talk about the hours of boredom punctuated by the moments of
terror, but pilots rarely talk about their core lifesaving skill:
getting the administrators to shut up long enough to put this
promiscuous aluminum tube on the ground.
4:17:42 PM 
|
|
