Air safety advocates say pilots should stay with their craft during a hijack

Press, 19 September 1986, Page 6

Air safety advocates say pilots should stay with their craft during a hijack

By JEANNE KING, of Reuter (through NZPA) New York A debate is going on about whether the flightdeck crew of Pan Am Flight 73 should have escaped shortly after hijackers took over their plane in Pakistan a fortnight ago with 384 passengers aboard. The Pan American World Airways’ jumbo’s two pilots and the flight engineer left the deck through an escape-hatch soon after they heard gunshots in what was the start of a 17-hour siege at Karachi airport on September 5. Pam Am insists that the cockpit crew were following procedures outlined in “The Common Strategy,” an anti-terrorist training programme now mandatory for American pilots. That “Common

Strategy,” worked out by the F. 8.1., the Federal Aviation Administration, security experts, and airlines, is at the heart of the controversy. The programme, which includes lessons in basic psychology for crises, contends that an immobilised plane will give negotiators more time to reason with air pirates and that one way to ensure the plane stays on the ground is for the pilots to escape. But an airline consumers’ group says the plan cut the chain of commmand on board, leaving no-one who knew how to work the plane’s emergency systems or even their radio. “You can hardly call the strategy a success when 20 people lost their lives and over 100 people were injured, perhaps permanently,” said Peter

Baron, executive director of the National Centre for Air Travel Safety. “You can’t give a flight attendant a battlefield promotion to captain the minute a terrorist pulls out a gun,” he said. Henry Duffy, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, defends their escape. He said the new guide-lines were “the right decision to render the airplane immovable. And that’s exactly what the crew did.” Captain John Testrake, the T.W.A. pilot who stayed aboard his plane when it was hijacked to Lebanon last year, applauded the Pan Am pilots’ decision to leave their ship. “It’s just better that the plane was immobilised and then they couldn’t use it as an airplane,” he said.

Mr Baron, a pilot and 1 flight engineer, agreed i that it was important to keep a hijacked plane on < the ground, but that there : was a better way. < It could have been I achieved by shooting out i the tyres. < “The tyres are almost 1 as big a target as a per- ' son, only tyres don’t move. By knocking them < out, you are effectively i buying time and you still t have a cockpit crew ’ aboard. ' “Once the crew es- 1 caped, the chain of command was severed and 1 there was no-one on the i jet trained to control any 1 of the support or emer- I gency systems in the ' cockpit ... 1 “Remember, the direct 1 cause of the final shoot- 1 ings by the hijackers > wasn’t because their de- J mands weren’t being met.

It was because the lights went out. “Had there been someone knowledgeable aboard who could have explained to the hijackers that the auxiliary power unit was about to shut down because they were low on fuel the hijackers wouldn’t have panicked.” A Pan Am flight attendant, who declined to be named, said that no flight attendant knew how to work the circuit-breakers or support equipment in the cockpit. “If we’re going to be left in charge of a $4O million or $5O million piece of equipment and those men are going to walk off and leave it to 13 women who are not trained as engineers, it’s kind of a wild strategy on their part, isn’t it?” she said. She was appalled that

the crew had left the * cockpit I “If the crew is going to ) leave the plane, then ’ flight attendants have to be made aware of how to ’ protect themselves,” said ’ another Pan Am steward. ’ Flight attendants 1 needed training on how to ' monitor auxiliary power * units when the cockpit * was unattended. She said ’ she had not had the 1 specialised crisis training that was now mandatory ( for pilots. ; Martin Shugrue, vice- ’ chairman of Pan Am, said ’ the cockpit crew’s escape from the jet was “a text- 1 book execution of exactly ’ what these airmen are ’ trained to do.” 1 A Pan Am spokesman, James Arey, also defended the crew’s actions: 1 “Each situation is dif- i ferent and obviously that ]

crew made the decision that it was possible and appropriate and the best thing to do.” Mr Baron said he was worried that what worked in Karachi may not work again. "It may have worked once, but now that every terrorist knows it can be done and how crews do it, they’ll be waiting at the escapehatch.” He said that if cockpit crew routinely left their aircraft during terrorist actions the pilots could be in even greater danger: future hijackers could kidnap pilots to make sure they had someone to fly them to their destinations or train or hire mercenary pilots. What happened in Karachi could usher in a new high tech area of air piracy, he said.