Entries from February 2006 ↓

What follows is a posting I made to an aviation-related mailing list on February 16, 2000, in reaction to one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen. I’ve never forgotten that day, but I did forget that this text existed until I stumbled on it today. I’m archiving it here so that it won’t get lost. I should also disclose that I’ve edited it slightly for grammar, and in once place for clarity. It was a bit rough.

I watched someone die yesterday. Somehow, it’s different from hearing about a jetliner loaded with passengers plunging into the ocean. It’s somehow much more personal when it happens before your eyes, like the difference between a TV show and reality.

Downwind Restaurant is a great little lunch and dinner spot located on the Peachtree-DeKalb airport in Atlanta. The deck offers a commanding view of the airport, and I’ve spent many a lunchtime there, eating unhealthy but delicious greaseburgers and watching the students bounce Cessnas on their spring-steel landing gear.

Yesterday, as I sipped iced tea on the deck, I noticed a Piper Warrior in the pattern, making touch-and-goes. He was doing fairly well–one bounce, two at the most–and seemed to have the plane well in hand.

Suddenly, after one of his approaches, I saw the aircraft start to roll to the left. At first, I thought he’d been given a quick turn by ATC*, but I’d never seen them do that so close in. He was at perhaps 30 or 40 feet and just stabilizing in the climbout. Then the left wing continued to drop, and the nose came down slightly.

“What the hell is he doing,” I muttered, getting the attention of others nearby. That’s when I saw the helicopter, right over the runway centerline, right where it had no business being.

The student continued the turn. The bank reached 60 degrees or better, and the nose dropped. I heard someone scream, “BACK PRESSURE, PULL UP!!” It was an anguished cry, in a voice I recognized as my own. Now all eyes were on the little Warrior. The bank shallowed a bit, but not enough. The left wingtip struck the ground, far too hard. The plane began to cartwheel.

All hopes for a survivable crash evaporated as the pretty little plane turned into a ball of mangled aluminum. Seconds later, it was deathly quiet. The silence of the abruptly stopped engine, which a moment before had been developing full power, was eerie. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

The crash trucks rolled. Some hoped for a miracle, but no one who saw the crash could have long harbored any hope of survival for the pilot.

Not having been listening to the tower frequency, it’s impossible for me to know what happened, and why the helicopter and the light plane came into such conflict. The helicopter pilot apparently said he’d been cleared to land, and his approach was such that the lightplane was behind him. He never saw the plane until he heard ATC call for the equipment and turned to see what had happened.

Lessons? First, we can’t always count on ATC to be omniscient, all-knowing and all-seeing, or even infallible. A good scan of the sky ahead during the landing approach probably would have allowed the student to spot the helicopter sooner, and react in a less extreme manner. The weather was good VFR**.

The only other lesson I see in this tragedy is that as pilots, we need to remember–always–that our top priority is to FLY THE AIRPLANE. Every other duty, including collision avoidance, takes a back seat. Avoiding a collision does no good if the evasive maneuver results in a collision with the ground. The student’s last moments had panic written all over them, and that’s understandable, but he also forgot that when you bank a little plane 60 degrees at 80 knots, it doesn’t climb anymore.

Anyway, if this is judged to be off-topic for the list, I apologize.

Scott

–
Scott Johnson (s…@wowpage.com) – Controller, Atlanta ARTCC (C1/V)
Located in Douglasville, Georgia CID: 960496 SB Callsign: N20431
AIM: “DamnScot” IRC: “ScottJ” ICQ: 30730876 ICBM: N33 45.8 W084 49.5

The NTSB*** later investigated this accident, identified as NTSB #ATL00FA026, in a report released on April 19, 2001, more than 14 months after the accident. The factual report as well as the probable cause report are available online.

The pilot of the helicopter and the air traffic controller both shouldered their respective shares of the blame for the accident. The student made his own errors in judgement, and while some might hasten to attribute the crash to his inexperience, I really hold the instructor responsible. He signed the student’s logbook and qualified him to solo when he wasn’t ready. As a result, a man died needlessly. That’s the truly sad side of this story.

A conversation from last night reminded me of a song. “Who Am I” was penned by a British couple, Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch. The two were such a perfect couple and such a phenomenal songwriting team, they were known for a time as “Mr. & Mrs. Music.” The song was written in 1966, and recorded by Petula Clark, just before the two soul mates married. I’m not fond of the recording; the arrangement is obnoxious and the sound is over-produced in the way sixties music often was. Jackie’s lyrics, though, are magic.

The question of who I am crept into my mind because of something that I’ve mentioned here before. Somewhere, buried deep beneath years of conscious and unconscious suppression, I have an accent. That accent was a gift from my mother and father, both of whom grew up in small towns in Virginia. My hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia wasn’t quite so rural, but it wasn’t a big city, either. I spoke with that accent and was completely happy with it until I was around fourteen years of age.

When, as a teenager, I got my first job as a disc jockey at a small radio station, I began listening to the way other radio personalities talked. I listened to Larry Boggan on WBT in Charlotte, late at night, his clear voice and smooth diction cutting through hundreds of miles of static and fading. I listened to Charley Huddle, Dick Mountjoy, and even Alden Aaroe booming in from WRVA in Richmond. An accent like mine just didn’t fit in. Having studied the sounds of the most popular announcers of the day, I knew that a change was needed if I wanted to be successful in radio. I had to adapt.

I threw myself into the pursuit of improving my diction and standardizing my pronunciation. I practiced with tape recorders. I didn’t reserve the changes strictly for my hours on the air, either. To give myself the most practice possible, I incorporated the changes into my everyday conversation. I was at work on the problem, therefore, during nearly every waking hour. Over time, almost without realizing I was doing it, I invented a new Scott. His dialect was non-regional, his accent was largely neutral, and his vocabulary had become larger and more or less standard. Over the years, as both my career and my perspectives changed and developed, I continued to refine the way I presented myself verbally. Eventually, Scott was replaced by a sort of Scott-prime. He’s the man you hear now, the one you may think is the real me–but isn’t.

Southern accents don’t sound intelligent. I realize that I’m buying into a stereotype with that statement, and that it’s not true in every case, but for the most part, drawls don’t inspire confidence. If a surgeon described an upcoming operation to you in an accent reminiscent of Jeff Foxworthy, would you feel entirely comfortable? Even I wouldn’t, on a visceral level. Because of that, even after leaving the business of radio, I continued to be Scott-prime.

Other professionals have complimented me on my clean, intelligible speech patterns. I’ve been told that I sound very professional, and that I’m easy to listen to. I’ve been called expressive. All of these things would flatter me if they truly described me. Instead, they make me feel vaguely dishonest, because they describe a mere affectation that I’ve painstakingly created. It’s a façade that covers the accent that is, despite all attempts at denial, the real me. Because of my efforts to improve, I’m not really me anymore. That bothers me sometimes.

I haven’t used my voice as my livelihood for many years now. Where once my voice was my trademark as well as my stock in trade, it’s now just one of many tools of communication that I use in my daily life. I don’t strictly need to sound non-regional, polished, and smooth anymore. In the early years, maintaining this affectation was second nature, and almost as effortless as speaking normally. Now, the situation has been reversed. The decades have upgraded Scott-prime to my primary mode of speech, and downgraded the real Scott to mere second nature.

It occurs to me to wonder, as Jackie wonders in the song, just who I really am. Am I being honest with the world? With myself?

I’ve experimented in recent months with rediscovering my old accent, intentionally. It requires some effort, as would be expected, but when I’m speaking in that way, I also experience a certain sense of relaxation. Even though I don’t realize it or consciously feel it, it seems that there is still a small amount of mental energy that I expend to maintain Scott-prime. When I allow myself to fall into Scott mode, the absence of that small amount of stress is definitely felt. It’s like the small noises in our homes that we never notice until the power fails and we experience true silence. You don’t notice the sounds until they’re gone.

I find myself wondering what would happen if, as someone recently suggested, I simply returned to my roots, and reversed the transformation. Would people see me differently? Would people who’ve known me for years find it difficult to accept my accent, and find it less “real” than the way I speak now? How would my self-image change? Would the change complement the other changes I’m making in my life and my appearance, or detract from them?

I have more questions than answers at the moment, but the idea is well worthy of consideration.

I’ve spoken the way I do now for more years of my life than I spent speaking like a Virginian. It could be argued that the way I speak now is indeed more “real” than the pattern that fell by the wayside at age 14. With minimal effort, I could say goodbye to that Scott forever, vanquishing all vestiges of the drawling Virginia twang from my life. I could complete the transformation and never look back.

How would that feel?