Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  The imprecision of the approach was due in large part to pilot fatigue caused by “multiple stresses,” states the report, which “in concert with [the pilot’s] personal flying habits . . . and his age contributed greatly to a marked human performance degradation.” Among the multiple stresses on the pilot, who was understandably exhausted, were underlying “aeromedical factors.” These are itemized in the report and are crucial to an understanding of what happened. I’ll get to them, and to things like “crew coordination,” later.

  The term “precision approach” is not a poetic construct. It speaks to the level of refinement with which an instrument landing must be performed if it is to be executed successfully. The margins are narrow and the tolerances low. The standards are sufficiently exacting that ILS instruments do not even register certain deviations beyond a selected point. The aircraft is moving fast, so small corrections must be made rapidly, but at the same time they must be—there’s no better word for it—precise. Allowances for what you might call oversteering are not generous. Minor errors have a domino effect. I say minor errors because with minor adjustments they are easily correctable—easily correctable during visual flight, when a pilot can see where he’s going. On instruments, he is flying blind, and minor errors don’t remain minor for long.

  The destiny of Flight 248 began taking shape when the plane was a few miles out, about two minutes north-northeast of the airport and a minute or so before impact, when the captain approached the outer marker three hundred feet high. Crossing the marker ten seconds later, he was two hundred and twenty feet high. He had to nose down to pick up the three-degree glide slope that would bring him into Hyannis on runway 24. Leveling off after he intersected the glide slope, he overcorrected, however. Imagine the plane bouncing off the hypotenuse. So he nosed down again.

  It was now thirty seconds before impact. And he was coming in at too steep an angle. The seven degrees at which he was pitched in his attempt to pick up the beam took him below it at too high a speed. And he never knew how far below it he was. His position relative to the glide path would have appeared on the cockpit instrument panel as a full-scale deflection—the needle on his glide-slope indicator reaching the farthest point on the meter—nothing more specific than that. When the needle hit two and a half degrees, the glide-slope indicator quit measuring. Reading no deviations beyond that point is the technology’s way of accepting the inevitable. Low on a precision approach by more than two and a half dots, you’re no longer flying the airplane—nor even aiming it—you’re just holding on.

  He was angling in at seven degrees. Moving at a ground speed of 123 knots, he was shedding altitude at almost 1,500 feet per minute. As stated in the report, he intersected the glide slope in a descent “that he was unable to arrest” before hitting the canopy.

  After that it was all thunderous noise and kinetic energy.

  Thus ended the life of a pilot by the name of George Parmenter and the youthful innocence of several American air passengers who had invested their faith in the statistics governing such travel.

  Evaluating George Parmenter’s performance in the last minute of his life, a minute in which he made a tragic mistake, one runs the risk of forgetting the more than twenty-five thousand hours of flight time—more than thirty-five hundred on instruments—and forty years of aviation in which he didn’t.

  At eight A.M. on the morning of the crash, Doris Parmenter answered the phone at her Centerville home and handed the receiver to her husband, who just twenty hours earlier had returned from Waterville, Maine, where mechanical trouble, after a day of flying, had grounded him overnight.

  As she told the editor of the Cape Cod Times, “I heard him say, ‘OK, I’ll be there. When do you need me?’ I said to him, ‘You’re not! Let them get somebody else this time.’ ”

  George Parmenter, almost sixty-one, a vice president and cofounder of Air New England, who flew only occasionally for the airline, only as a replacement pilot, was being called in on short notice again, summoned at the last minute to fill in for a line pilot who had phoned in sick.

  In the interview she granted the editor of the Times, Doris Parmenter continued:

  “He said a lot of people were depending on the airline to get them somewhere. And I said they never get someone else—they always call Old Faithful. And that was about the last conversation I had with him. I followed him outside and said, ‘Have you got your flight bag? Have you got your notebook?’ He needed his notebook because he had been working on gasoline allocations the night before—this was the time of the fuel shortage. I handed him his notebook and he got into his truck and that was the end of that.”

  Parmenter reported to work forty-five minutes later, scheduled for twelve and a half hours of duty. Late that same day, on the ground in Hyannis, anticipating the end of the shift, he was visibly upset, witnesses said, when informed that additional flights had been scheduled and his workday had been extended. To his original flight schedule, which called for twelve trips among four destinations, two more flights of two legs each had been added.

  Parmenter and the plane’s first officer put in fourteen hours of duty that day, including nine hours and sixteen minutes of flying. Parmenter’s only intake of food during that time, according to the NTSB, was a Danish pastry with his coffee in the late afternoon. After fifteen takeoffs and fourteen landings, they were executing their fifteenth approach for landing when Parmenter crashed the plane.

  “A prominent figure in New England aviation,” in the words of the Boston Globe, Parmenter was a legend among local flyers, a pioneer of commercial air service on Cape Cod. Having settled on the Cape after the Second World War, during which he had flown for the Marine Corps, he and Doris, a Dennis native, founded the Cape & Islands Flight Service, which they operated for some twenty years, until the merger in 1970 that gave birth to Air New England.

  “George Parmenter, throughout his airline and military career, was a hard worker,” said his friend John Van Arsdale Sr., founder and president of Provincetown-Boston Airlines, who gave the eulogy at Parmenter’s memorial Mass four days after the crash. “This was most clearly demonstrated this past Sunday. That day George knew there was a job to be done and he was personally ready and willing to assume more than one man’s fair share.”

  In his eulogy, which was quoted in the Cape Cod Times, Van Arsdale was echoing a sentiment shared by all of Parmenter’s friends, when he said, “Flying was his life.”

  One of Parmenter’s closest friends was Delta Airlines pilot Angus Perry, a Centerville native, who died in 2003. Recently, I talked to Perry’s daughter Wendy, who attended the service for Parmenter at which Van Arsdale spoke.

  Wendy Boepple, now in her midfifties, is a registered nurse and mother of four. She lives with her husband, a physician, outside Boston. Wendy remembers Parmenter as “a typical Marine,” and her affection for him is palpable. Beneath a gruff exterior, she says, was a man of tremendous warmth. She grew up knowing him as Uncle George, nurtured on the adventure stories that he and her father would tell.

  Back in the fifties, she told me, on days when the ceiling was low, her father and Parmenter, with two planeloads of newspapers to deliver and only one plane rigged with the proper equipment, would “fly wingtip to wingtip” through the fog between Cape Cod and Nantucket. The stories the two men told, like all proper tales of derring-do, were invariably fraught with bravado: We made it. . . . Yeah. That was easy. . . . Yeah, now all we have to figure out is how we’re gonna make it back.

  Flying for the Perrys was a family affair. Many were the times in Wendy’s childhood, she said, that a clear day would find her and her sisters and brother heading with their dad to the airport, where “he would borrow one of George’s planes and take us up.”

  George Parmenter lived to fly, and to see him grounded would have been unthinkable to anyone in the local aviation community. “I cannot imagine George Parmenter as a man who for some reason was unable to fly,” Van Arsdale said. “None of us clos
e to aviation can understand how this accident could happen.”

  One of the members of that community was Dr. Grover Farrish, a Hyannis internist and a pilot himself, who served as the Federal Aviation Administration’s local aviation medical examiner (AME).

  Some four pages of the twenty-five-page accident report are devoted to George Parmenter’s medical history. In 1963, suffering from persistent hypertensive cardiovascular disease, he was permanently removed from flight duty as a reserve officer in the Marine Corps. Predisposed to hypoglycemia and suffering from chronic high blood pressure, he was periodically denied FAA medical certificates, those required of a civilian pilot, over the course of the next five years. Not until August 1970, after a physical examination by Grover Farrish, did he receive the second-class medical certificate that again made it legal for him to fly. In 1971, after another examination by Farrish, he was issued a first-class certificate. And for the next seven and a half years, reports the NTSB, first-class certificates were “issued to the captain at 6-month intervals on the basis of physical examinations and cardiovascular evaluations performed by the same AME.” On the application for his last certification, four months before the crash, Parmenter, when asked, listed no medications (his use of any would have required waivers) and stated that he had never been denied an airman’s medical certificate. At the time, he had been on daily medication for over a decade for both hypertension and gout—“the AME in Hyannis denied knowledge of either drug”—and according to his autopsy had suffered a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, within the previous five years.

  A U.S. Navy pathologist testified at the NTSB hearing held three months after the crash that in view of Parmenter’s age and medical history, the pilot should have been found “unfit for flying duty.” The board characterized the “results of repeated evaluations” by Farrish as “equivocal medically.” Farrish did not answer a subpoena to testify. A few years later, Cape Cod Hospital appointed him chief of cardiology. He died in 1994.

  Among his fellow Air New England pilots, Parmenter had a reputation for not always flying by the book. A majority of those interviewed told the NTSB that he had “disregarded checklists and crew coordination when they had flown with him.” This is what is meant in the report by “his personal flying habits.”

  There is a call-and-response protocol between pilot and copilot required on all instrument landings. It consists of altitude, degree, and airspeed callouts, culminating in a “no contact /go around” exchange if the runway is not in sight. The copilot testified that on approach to Barnstable that night, he made all the required callouts except the “no contact” call and Parmenter did not acknowledge any of them. This is “the lack of crew coordination practices and procedures” mentioned in the report.

  It was unlikely that the copilot, with only two months on the job, still on probation, and subject to termination without cause, would engage in corrective counseling with the number-three man in the company. He could have taken control of the airplane at any point, of course, and presumably would have if he had suspected trouble, but he had been flying all day with a superior known rarely to “acknowledge checklist items or other callouts from any first officer,” according to the report, and the lack of such acknowledgment was not an indication that anything was wrong. By the time they hit decision height, “the possibility that [he] could have successfully assumed control of the aircraft [was] extremely remote.” He told the board he never saw the ground before the airplane crashed.

  Wendy Boepple, working at the time as a nurse in Burlington, Vermont, received news of the crash early that Monday morning, informed of the tragedy in a phone call from the emergency room at Cape Cod Hospital. It was her second wedding anniversary. She flew from Burlington to Boston on a Delta Airlines pass, a perk to which she was entitled as the daughter of a Delta pilot, and at Logan Airport made her way to the Air New England counter, only to be told that all of its flights to Hyannis were booked.

  “I was very naive,” she told me.

  It never occurred to her, in what she views today as her “immaturity,” to exert any of the leverage implicit in the purpose of her trip. Had she simply said who she was and why she was traveling, the airline undoubtedly would have accommodated her. Instead, she ended up taking a bus.

  Her two-hour ride to the Cape was made surprisingly memorable by a reunion of sorts. She found herself sitting next to Eleanor Klimm, whom she had known more formally as Mrs. Klimm when the older woman was her fifth-grade teacher at Hyannis West Elementary. The two passengers, getting acquainted, or reacquainted, talked all the way to Hyannis, making the best of a journey that both had reason to wish were unnecessary. Mrs. Klimm, Wendy was saddened to learn, was suffering from cancer, and had traveled to Boston for medical treatment. When she asked why Wendy was making the trip to the Cape, Wendy explained to her fifth-grade teacher what she had not explained to anyone at the Air New England counter, which was everything she knew at the time from the call she’d received from Cape Cod Hospital: that her husband, sometime in the middle of the night, had been admitted through the hospital’s emergency room. His name was Paul. He was twenty-five. He was a medical student. He’d been in a plane crash.

  It was something I had seen him reading.

  “I was reading the New England Journal of Medicine.” Paul Boepple, since I’d seen him reading that night on the plane, had lost some of his hair, and what remained of it had lost some of its color. His facial index had dropped a few points, but the sharp line of his brow and the severity of his gaze were all the visual evidence I’d have needed to pick him out of a lineup.

  Sitting in my living room, wearing shorts and sandals and sipping a beer, he appeared to have lost none of the personal qualities in evidence when I’d first encountered him. He showed the same thoughtful, introspective reserve of the young medical student who during the flight had kept quietly to himself, the same seriousness of purpose that had led me, when the plane was taking off from LaGuardia, to single him out among my fellow passengers as the one grown-up onboard. In outer aspect and demeanor, he was much of what you would expect in a doctor and everything you would want in a pediatrician.

  On a Sunday afternoon in June, taking a couple of hours out of a weekend visit to Wendy’s mother in Centerville, he and Wendy had driven down to my place. Meeting this way proved easier for them than coordinating time in their schedules at home, and it saved me a trip to Boston, where Paul practices and teaches pediatric endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Wendy works as an emergency room nurse at North Shore Medical Center in Lynn.

  Paul had brought with him some newspaper clips and a copy of the accident report. He obviously had kept a file at some point, and it was neater and better organized than mine. Among the news clips he showed me was the wire story that the Associated Press had moved in the early morning hours right after the incident. Headlined “Air Crash Kills Pilot; Woods Slow Rescue” and datelined Yarmouth, Massachusetts, the story had been cut by Wendy’s father from the Kansas City Star. George Parmenter had not been the only one flying that night. Angus Perry, on Monday morning, in the cockpit of a 727, had been preparing for takeoff from Little Rock, Arkansas, when someone handed him the paper, and there, buried in the twelfth paragraph of the seventeen-paragraph story, he read the name of his good friend George. Leaving the cockpit to telephone home, he returned a few minutes later with the information that his son-in-law had been aboard the plane that Parmenter had been flying.

  In an exchange of correspondence before he and I talked, Paul had pointed to “some personal threads of the story that impact my perspective,” conditioning his cooperation with me on knowing more about my “planned coverage of the events.” After I outlined for him what I intended to do, he revealed his wife’s connection to Parmenter, explaining that he was thus “sensitive to how the incident is portrayed.” In none of our subsequent conversations did either he or Wendy frame the events of that night in a context that would su
ggest how difficult a time it must have been for them. But the simple accretion of detail they provided, in its matter-of-fact way, evoked a stark poetic sentiment: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.”

  Falling on the eve of the couple’s wedding anniversary, the tragedy marked the end of a weekend that had found them flying from New England to New York City, where Paul’s father, stricken with colon cancer, was undergoing surgery. From New York, Wendy returned to work in Burlington. Paul returned to Cape Cod. As part of his curriculum at the University of Vermont, Paul was serving an externship on the Cape, attached to a community practice in Hyannis, seeing patients and making rounds with a local primary-care physician—a program for “getting out into the real world”—between his third and fourth years of medical school. He was staying with Wendy’s parents in Centerville. Wendy’s mother, a nurse who worked as a clinical instructor in the Coronary Care Unit at Cape Cod Hospital, had helped him secure the position, and it was she who was scheduled to meet him at the airport.

  The plane crashed on Father’s Day.

  Paul was admitted to the hospital after being carried out of the woods. Wendy was notified at two A.M. Information was sparse. “The guy who called didn’t know anything,” she said.