was recovered with six spent cartridges. So was the note on the airsickness bag, and Burke’s identification badge, which he had used to avoid going through security.
When I got there, the crash site looked like an outdoor rock concert where everyone had left trash all over a hillside. There were hardly any big pieces of the plane besides landing gear forgings and engine cores. It was a very disturbing feeling being at the scene of a mass murder, knowing what had happened in the sky above us. The smell in the air was a mixture of jet fuel and death.
I had known one of the flight attendants on the plane, and it was horrifying to imagine what the crew and passengers went through. Working on this sort of investigation focuses your attention on how to prevent similar tragedies in the future. It renews your dedication to never let it happen again.
In the wake of Flight 1771, some groups of airline workers were subjected to security requirements similar to those set for passengers, better methods of employment verification were instituted, and federal law required employees to turn in their IDs after being terminated from airline jobs. But larger problems with security would still need to be addressed. Standing on that hillside in California, I couldn’t have imagined the way cockpits would be breached on September 11, 2001.
In my role helping with accident investigations, I also was called upon to talk to passengers who survived crashes.
On February 1, 1991, there was a runway collision at Los Angeles International Airport between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Airlines Flight 5569. It happened in part because the local air traffic controller cleared the USAir jet, a 737–3B7, to land while the SkyWest commuter plane, a Fairchild Metro III, was holding in position to take off on the same runway. All ten people on the SkyWest plane died, and twenty-two passengers were killed on the 737. I was given the task of interviewing some of the sixty-seven survivors from the 737.
The NTSB gave us a long questionnaire, with questions such as: What announcements do you recall hearing? Did the emergency exit lights come on? Which exit did you use to escape? Did you help anyone else get out? Did anyone help you get out?
All of these questions were designed to help the airline industry learn from these events and improve the next outcome.
It was not especially pleasant work investigating accidents, but I was grateful for the opportunities to do so. When I talked to survivors, I listened carefully, trying to understand, and I filed away the details, in case I’d ever need to draw on them.
4. “MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE”
I GREW UP in a home where each of us had our own hammer.
When I think about the work ethic and the values that carried me through life, and through seven million miles as a pilot, I think at times about the hammer my dad gave me as a boy.
He had married my mom in 1948, bought a piece of farmland from her parents, and borrowed $3,000 to build a house on it. It was a very small ranch house, just one bedroom. But over the years that followed, my dad devoted himself to enlarging the homestead again and again. He built a series of additions with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: my mother, my sister, and me.
My parents were born in Denison, Texas, and my mom only lived in two homes her entire life, and they were within one mile of each other. The first was her childhood home, built around 1918 by my grandfather, Russell Hanna, who used materials he found right there on the property. He cleared the land of a great number of large stones, cut them with the help of a hired hand, and used them to build the house and other farm structures. From that home, my mom at age twenty-one moved just down the road to the little place she built with my dad. She’d live there, on Hanna Drive, for the rest of her life.
Certainly, my maternal grandfather could have named that gravel road First Avenue or Main Street or whatever. But the road led to his property, and so it bore his name. That’s where I grew up, 11100 Hanna Drive, an ever-expanding house next to Lake Texoma, eleven miles outside of Denison.
My dad’s father, who died before I was born, owned a planing mill—a final processing plant for lumber—and my paternal grandmother continued to be involved in the office operations after he was gone. It was right there in Denison, and when I was a young boy, I’d visit and play happily in the huge mounds of sawdust. The place was thick with the sounds of giant woodworking machinery and the wonderful smell of lumber. There was also a cool device on my grandmother’s desk, a coil-springed gadget shaped like a human hand and made of stamped-out sheet metal. My grandmother stored envelopes and paperwork between the hand’s fingers. Having grown up in that mill, my dad had a love and knowledge of woodworking, and of making things with his hands. By adulthood, he was a very able handyman.
That helps explain why, every few years when I was a kid, my dad would announce that it was time to enlarge the house. He and my mom would decide we needed a new bedroom or a larger living room. “Let’s get to work,” my dad would say, and we’d pull out the tools. He was a dentist, but he had taken drafting courses in high school. He had a big plywood drafting table he had made himself, and he’d sit there for hours with his T square and a pencil, drawing up plans. He was always reading
The goal was to do everything ourselves, to learn what we didn’t know and then have at it. My dad taught himself to do the carpentry, the electrical installations, even the roofing—and then he taught us. When we were doing the plumbing, my dad and I would heat the copper joints together, holding the solder, letting it melt from the tip of a soft wire. When we did electrical work, we knew we had to get it right: If we didn’t, we risked electrocuting ourselves or burning down the house. None of this was easy, but it was satisfying on a lot of levels, and we were learning how to learn.
My father liked to use craftsmen’s adages, such as “Measure twice, cut once.” The first time I heard that particular phrase was after I had cut a piece of wood to go in the framing of one of our hallway walls. I cut it without paying close enough attention and it turned out to be too short.
“Go get another two-by-four,” my dad told me, “and this time, measure more precisely. Then start over and measure everything again. Make sure you get a consistent answer. Then cut the board a little wide of the mark, just to give yourself an option. You can always make a board shorter. You can’t make it longer.”
I did as I was told, very carefully, and the board fit right where it belonged in the wall. My dad smiled at me. “Measure twice,” he said. “Cut once. Remember that.”
THE FOUR hammers in the house, one for each of us, got a huge workout. In the morning, before it got too hot, my dad would send us up on the roof to pound nails into the shingles. He never considered hiring a contractor or a roofing crew. For one thing, we didn’t have extra money for that. And besides, as my dad saw it, this was a great family activity.
My sister, Mary, smiles at her memory of my dad driving us into nearby Sherman, where he had once come upon a certain house owned by a stranger. He loved that house. So when we were in grade school, he’d bring the whole family to sit in front of it while he sketched on a drawing pad, studying the parts of the structure that he liked. One day he’d sketch the roofline. A week later he’d come back and sketch the front steps. He wanted our house to look like that house, and he found his way by sketching the particulars.
My sister likes to say that watching my father expand our house showed her that anything is possible. “You can learn anything you want to learn,” she says, “if you sit and figure things out logically, if you study something similar, if you keep working at it. You can start with a blank piece of paper and end up with a house.”
This idea that “anything is possible” has been a bit of a mantra in my adult life, especially in my marriage. Lorrie reintroduced me to those words. And at the same time, my father’s example remains there in the back of my mind, showing me the way.
That’s not to say I always fully embraced my father’s sense of the possibilities. On Saturdays, when my sister and I would have loved to sleep in, he’d wake us up at 7 A.M. so we could get an early start on whatever the latest expansion was. We’d work until lunchtime and then he’d suggest that we take a nap so we’d have the energy to get back to work later in the afternoon.
Even if we couldn’t fall asleep, we pretended, so he wouldn’t send us back to work right away. “Just keep
