This condition causes lift through the combination of two immutable properties of physics, each taken for granted in everyday living. The first principle is that as air moves faster, it exerts less pressure downward—just as tornadoes and other windy storms coincide with regions of low air pressure on the weather map. The second principle is that air always moves from areas of high pressure to low pressure, as the cigarette smoke in the still air of an automobile rushes through a window crack toward the fast-moving, low-pressure area outside the window. Thus, as air cascades along the bottom of a wing, it is also being sucked, as if from a vacuum cleaner, toward the top of the wing. The faster the wing travels laterally, the greater the pressure differential above and below. The greater the differential, the greater the lift generated. Safety lay in speed.
The combination of speed and surface area created by a modern jet engine and wing is truly prodigious. Each square foot of wing surface can support about 100 pounds, which is why a 747, with a wingspan encompassing 5,000 square feet, can hoist a half-million pounds.
Because of those tremendous speeds and surface areas, the angle at which the wing is attached to the plane and the angle at which the plane itself rises into the air are acutely critical variables. So too is the smoothness of the path taken by the air over the wing-the aerodynamics, that is. If air fails to adhere evenly to the contours on the top of the wing, buffeting occurs. If the airflow departs completely from the surface, lift vanishes, causing the airplane to “stall,” as if the marionette string had snapped or the vacuum cleaner were switched off.
So long as the wing is of proper design and in working order, only one thing can corrupt the flow of air over the surface, and that is ice, such as the ice that was forming on the wings of Air Florida Flight 90 sitting at snowy National Airport in Washington on January 13, 1982.
That an airplane flying for a company called Air Florida should be stuck in a blizzard was richly ironic. Some months after leaving Braniff in 1975 under the cloud of Watergate, the indefatigable Eddie Acker had had occasion to fly on Air Florida, then a three-year-old airline that operated three propeller-driven Lockheed Electras and a single 707 jet. Air Florida reminded Acker of the Southwest Airlines he had battled back in his Braniff days. Deregulation, though imminent, had not yet taken hold when Acker discovered Air Florida; like Southwest, it was still confined to the boundaries of a single state.
Acker realized he was desperate to take control of another airline. “Once you get hooked on the airline business,” he explained, “it’s worse than dope.” With the backing of some friends, Acker purchased a controlling interest in the airline for just $1.5 million.
As he had demonstrated back at Braniff, Acker was incapable of small-scale management. He began picking up used jets all over North America, tapping some of his oldest and best connections for financing. He changed Air Florida’s markings from a rusty orange to blue and green. “We operate in a warm climate, so our jets had better look cool,” Acker explained. Passengers on morning flights got orange juice spiked with champagne—“sunshine sparklers.” And Acker began applying the Southwest Airlines pricing formula: severe discounts, especially at off-peak hours, with fares below the cost of driving. As more planes came in, boardings rose by 100 percent over the previous year, then by 200 percent, and in some months by 300 percent.
Once deregulation had hit, Acker applied the same principles in the interstate market. When United announced its withdrawal of service from Toledo, Acker backed in with flights to Florida at ultralow fares. When National Airlines was purchased by Pan Am, he grabbed National’s old route from Miami to London, offering first-class seats upholstered in sheepskin and a free ride from the airport in London aboard a Rolls-Royce limousine. Acker launched a new route from Miami to Dallas by offering “free flights for a kiss,” by which a certain number of customers would fly free simply for smooching an Air Florida “kiss miss” stationed at the airport.
At age 50 Ed Acker was having the time of his life at Air Florida. He literally ran between offices, going the entire day without sitting. Reaching for a dog-eared copy of the OAG in his pocket, Acker flipped from page to page calling out new destinations: Tallahassee, Port-au-Prince, Honduras—essentially, whatever tickled his interest.
In much the way that air rushes into areas of low pressure, airlines look for opportunities to thrust their airplanes into locations where their competitors are withdrawing. In July 1981 Pan Am, still fumbling over its acquisition of National Airlines nearly two years earlier, cut back severely on the New York-to-Florida routes for which National had been principally known. Grabbing at opportunity, Acker threw nearly half of his planes into the void, making Air Florida overnight the second most dominant carrier along the East Coast, exceeded only by Eastern Air Lines. (A few weeks later, after President Reagan had fired the striking air-traffic controllers, People Express would join the fray.)
The New York Times labeled Acker “the darling of deregulation.” Fortune magazine suggested that Acker was “the ablest of the entrepreneurs catapulted to prominence by airline deregulation.” Air Florida, said The Wall Street Journal, had become “one of the great American corporate success stories.” It did not particularly concern the investment community that Air Florida’s debt had ballooned at a time when interest rates were in the stratosphere or that the company’s profits were subsidized by Acker’s maneuverings in the foreign currency and stock markets. If anybody could keep on top of the numbers, Wall Street figured, it was a genius like Ed Acker.
A few weeks after he had dispatched all those planes from Florida to the Northeast, the research analysts of Wall Street turned out in force for a luncheon presentation by Acker. But when he rose to the podium, Acker said he was not able to discuss the affairs of Air Florida with them, for a reason he knew they would all understand.
“I talked to Cunard Lines,” he said, “and told them 1 was interested in a job as captain of the Titanic. They informed me that I was fifty years too late.”
Having thoroughly confused his audience, Acker went on. “Not having that challenge available, I decided to try to find one comparable to that. And so I am accepting the chairmanship of a company called Pan American World Airways.” As the analysts recovered from their shock, Acker turned over the podium to someone from Air Florida and left.
Within days of arriving at Pan Am, Acker took the extraordinary step of reversing the flight cutbacks along the East Coast that the previous management had just made—the service that Acker himself had rushed with Air Florida to fill. Having enjoyed the excitement of building Air Florida, Ed Acker, it appeared, was now bent on destroying it.
• • •
It was at the height of the conflict that Flight 90 found itself delayed at Washington National that January afternoon in 1982.
The snowstorm had begun around noon, causing people to head home early. Barely two miles from the airport, in between the Washington Monument and the Pentagon, the 14th Street Bridge was clogged with cars and cabs. Bound for Tampa, Flight 90 was nearly full with passengers enjoying the low prices of the Pan Am-Air Florida fare war. Seventy-one passengers were aboard, plus three infants, three flight attendants, and two pilots.
In the captain’s seat Larry Wheaton took in the snowy scene around him and cursed the afternoon of delays. Wheaton, 34 years old, had taken off or landed in ice only eight times in his career as a 737 captain. Before joining Air Florida, he had flown for a little commuter airline in the Florida Keys called Air Sunshine, whose fleet included old DC-3S and whose chief executive officer doubled as a dentist in Key West. Acker, then at Air Florida, had purchased Air Sunshine as a way of gaining airport access in the Keys. For Larry Wheaton and his fellow Air Sunshine pilots, the takeover was a windfall of career opportunity. Suddenly they had the chance to step up from propeller planes to jets and from first-officer rank to captain. At other airlines pilots spent 14 years on average to reach a captain’s position on the seniority list; Wheaton had done it in barely
one quarter of that time in flying for Air Florida.
Sitting next to Captain Wheaton was his first officer, Roger Pettit, who surveyed the snow and thought about school being canceled the next morning. “I’ll bet all the schoolkids are just crapping in their pants here,” he said to his captain at one point. “Yahoo!” As an Air Florida pilot Pettit had conducted only two takeoffs or landings in ice; on the final rollout today he would be at the controls.
The two men knew enough about cold weather flying to have the wings deiced. Air Florida’s ground operations were handled at National under a contract with American Airlines, which brought the deicing equipment into position. But a replacement nozzle had been installed on the deicing hose, causing water and deicing chemicals to be applied in improper proportions.
When the Jetway was reeled in and Flight 90 finally cleared to push back from the gate, Captain Wheaton didn’t want to delay. Unfortunately, the tug that American brought in for the push-back didn’t have chains on the tires; instead of pushing the big 737, it simply spun its wheels on the ice. Wheaton told the tug operator that he would use reverse thrust from his engines to back up. The American mechanic on the ramp replied that reverse thrust was not a proper procedure at this time; hot exhaust could melt snow and create ice in any number of locations on the plane, including along the leading edge of the wings. Wheaton cranked up the engines anyway. After more than a minute of reverse thrust, the plane had still not pulled away. A tug fit for the job was finally found.
Flight 90 was ordered into a taxi line behind an apple-red DC-9 flying for New York Air, another new carrier serving National Airport. Captain Wheaton, noting that he still had snow or ice on the wings, pulled as closely as he could behind the New York Air plane to bask in the heat of its engines. He apparently had not read the section of the operating manual that stated that in cold weather pilots must keep even greater distances from the engines of other planes—again, so that snow is not melted and turned to ice.
Flight 90 could have received another shower of deicing fluid, but the flight was now already nearly two hours behind schedule. “Boy, this is a losing battle here on trying to deice those things,” said Copilot Pettit. He and the captain could take some comfort from observing that other planes were taking off with a little ice or snow. Even if the men had little experience with these conditions, they were journeyman pilots. They could handle this.
The copilot prepared to take the controls. “Slushy runway,” he said to the captain. “Do you want me to do anything special for this or just go for it?”
No, Wheaton said, “unless you got anything special you’d like to do.”
The FAA control tower, meanwhile, was bubbling like a coffeepot in an old Maxwell House commercial. It had been only five months since President Reagan had fired the striking controllers, and the tower was severely understaffed. The airport having been closed for part of the day, the controllers had to cram as many planes down as possible, while also relieving the backlog of tardy departures. At the moment an Eastern flight, barely two miles away, was being directed to a landing on the same runway. The controllers were cutting it close.
“Palm 90,” crackled the control tower. (Air Florida flights were addressed as Palm, New York Air as Apple.) “Palm 90, taxi into position and hold. Be ready for an immediate.” That meant taking off as quickly as possible to clear the runway. “No delay on departure, if you will,” the controller emphasized.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just been cleared on the runway for takeoff,” the cockpit announced. “Flight attendants, please be seated.”
The captain released the cockpit controls to his copilot. “Your throttles,” he said.
“Okay.”
With no time to lose, the copilot throttled the engines even before he had completed his hard turn into the runway. Flight 90 rolled down the runway … and rolled, and rolled. It was having trouble getting speed. The 737 seemed sluggish, heavy.
The engine settings were at the highest level deemed prudent, yet still the plane was rolling listlessly. Neither pilot was aware that ice had formed in the engine sensors.
Pettit noticed that the gauges on the cockpit control panel were suddenly haywire. “God, look at that thing!” he cried. “That don’t seem right, does it?” The airplane continued lumbering beneath him, like wounded game trying to make a break.
“That’s not right!” the copilot again said.
It was up to Captain Wheaton to decide to abort the takeoff. There was still time. But he sat silently as the copilot prepared to pull back on the stick to get the 737 off the runway. Aborting the takeoff in this kind of slush would be risky, particularly with airplanes coming in behind them to land. Indeed, as Wheaton and Pettit tried to make sense of their senseless gauges and their stubbornly slow speed, they heard the Eastern flight behind them acknowledging that it was “over the lights.”
At that moment, perilously close to the end of the runway, Air Florida Flight 90 reached the intended takeoff speed of 138 knots. But the speed had been calculated on the presumption that the engines would be performing properly; the engines in reality were severely underperforming, even though the cockpit controls showed them to be at full power.
As Flight 90 lifted laboriously from the runway, the nose pitched up. Had the engines been cranked high enough, it probably wouldn’t have mattered, since safety, after all, lay in speed. By the same token, had the wings been free of ice, the improper engine settings wouldn’t have been such a problem.
Flight 90 was doomed.
The stall warning sounded. Below lay the ice-covered Potomac, ahead the 14th Street Bridge, clogged with commuters bound for the suburbs of Virginia.
“Larry!” the copilot cried. “We’re going down, Larry!”
“I know it.”
Twenty-four seconds after leaving the runway, Flight 90 slammed into the bridge. All but five aboard died, most from fractured heads, necks, and chests.
The icy rescue effort, in which one heroic bystander dove into the chilled waters to attempt a rescue, created some of the most dramatic footage seen in the history of prime-time news. The country was left with an unshakable image of a tail fin emblazoned AIR FLORIDA poking through the icy surface of the Potomac.
In the days ahead an estimated 100,000 reservations evaporated.
A few months later the company’s chairman suffered a stroke. Donald Lloyd-Jones, who had been nosed out by Bob Crandall in the horse race for the presidency of American two years earlier, was brought in to try to save the company. It was too late. Debt levels were too high for Air Florida to tolerate such a decline in patronage on top of all the damage inflicted by Pan Am. In droves, passengers that Acker had once coaxed from Pan Am to Air Florida were now being coaxed back to Pan Am. In a matter of several weeks some $14 million in revenue vanished from Air Florida, and now there was no stock or futures-trading profit to cushion the blow. Lenders moved to seize the company’s assets. The IRS slapped on a tax lien. Air Florida, the Cinderella story of airline deregulation, filed for bankruptcy.
Filling the service void, once again, was Eddie Acker.
Acker had settled quickly into the corner office on the 46th floor of the Pan Am building, the same suite where once, as a Braniff executive, he had negotiated the purchase of the Latin American routes from Juan Trippe. The 46th floor was an extraordinary place, not only for its great, gold-lined route map but for its burled walnut furniture and the commanding southerly view of Manhattan, with the Empire State Building in the foreground and the Hudson River cutting a ribbon in the distance. The various chairmen of Pan Am—not just Trippe and Acker, but also the four hapless chief executives who had served in between—sat so high over New York City that not a single distraction from outside could be heard, other than the occasional roar of a jet airplane.
Though Pan Am was losing $1 million a day, Acker saw no merit in continuing the flight cutbacks that the preceding management had instituted. The alternative was for Pan Am to grow its way out
of its problems, which among other advantages was fun. In addition to restoring the East Coast service that helped push Air Florida over the edge, Acker soon added more cities to the route map. Still waving his copy of the OAG, he added one after another—Warsaw, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and others. Before long he was flying a new Pan Am flight to his home in Bermuda. Newly remarried, Acker was urged by his wife to launch service to the French Riviera; when he encountered some internal opposition to the idea, she was incredulous. “Why don’t you just tell them to do it?” she demanded. (Service to Nice was launched.) Pan Am swarmed into the Caribbean, putting Frank Borman and Eastern on the defensive.
To pay for all this new service, including the new airplanes, Acker simply heaped on additional financial obligations. Acker could always get a plane deal financed. Thus to the liabilities and fixed costs Pan Am had already accumulated—in buying the 747s, then in buying National Airlines, and then in covering the losses generated by both moves—Acker heaved on still more.
For all his impulsiveness—even if he managed Pan Am as a kind of multibillion-dollar amusement—Acker had a guileless and unpretentious quality that made him extremely popular. He would stoop over to pick up cigarette butts on the concourse of Pan Am’s Worldport terminal at JFK. He counted his chauffeur among his closest confidants on corporate matters. If he mistrusted the data he was getting from the revenue department, Acker would call his limousine and head off to the administrative offices in suburban New Jersey to flip through hundreds of ticket stubs, returning to Manhattan with his fingertips reddened from the carbon-copied tickets. Moving to improve on-time performance following the purchase of National Airlines, Acker demanded that airplanes push away from the gate even when passengers were still standing in the aisles. When his critics at one point attacked him for managing by intuition, Acker refused to deny it.
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