Prologue

Our prayers are answered not when we are given what
we ask, but when we are challenged to be what we can be.
—Morris Adler

On the Horns of a Dilemma…

Down the aisle of a United Airlines Boeing 777, past 250 seats, many filled with passengers, runs a small, frantic man screaming a blood-curdling message:

“There’s a bomb on the plane! We’re all going to diiiiie.”

Now, here you are. It’s morning at Heathrow Airport, you’re the captain of this airliner, you’re in the cockpit and in the midst of conducting your pre-flight safety check. Suddenly, the purser, your crew’s senior flight attendant in first class, buzzes you on the intercom to notify you of this disturbance.

“Half the passengers are afraid for their lives,” she told me. “They want to get off the plane.”

On these trans-Atlantic flights aboard the largest passenger jets in the world, it’s not so unusual to have passengers “act out” and engage in drunk and disorderly conduct. Your flight crew of 12-14 personnel are expertly trained in handling these situations, though at their worst, police intervention has to be called upon at times to resolve matters. But this incident… yes, this was a little over the top!

Place yourself in my shoes for just a moment. I’m Captain Dan Hanley, aged 50, at this point a commercial airline captain for ten years. I arrived at this moment, the pinnacle of my dream career, by working my way through a career in college, civil aviation training, enlisting in the military and achieving the rank of Navy Lieutenant Commander, then taking a leap of faith to achieve my life-long American Dream of being a commercial airline pilot, which had meant starting over “from the ground up” again in civil aviation and gradually advancing through the ranks to flying the largest of civilian airliners as a Captain — by now, having flown UAL passengers from New York to London about one hundred times.

Part of the long and arduous journey to my current position had involved steeping myself in the “CLR,” Command, Leadership, and Resource Management training, which emphasized the importance of coordination between the cockpit and flight attendants, and with all available external sources, such as maintenance and dispatch, in the event of a flight irregularity or emergency. Well, here we were, faced with an emergency. You don’t take a chance on whether or not you have a bomb on board the airliner, or simply a hysterical passenger engaging in a hallucination. (Are we agreed on that? Good.)

Because, according to a Federal regulation, emergency matters are to be dealt with as delegated under the principle of “Captain’s Authority.” This means, “The buck stops here,” with you, if you are the airline captain. As Captain, it is you who must exercise judgment and authority in the event of accident or emergency. These regulations expressly state that the Captain must have freedom to make operational decisions totally unimpeded by extraneous financial, legal, and political pressures.

I left the cockpit, only to discover a trembling male passenger in the jetway beyond the cockpit door. I questioned him about what he had seen, and where, but his stammered replies were semi-incoherent and not at all helpful.

To the purser, I said, “Get some paramedics and the UAL Heathrow head of security down here.”

“Captain,” a crew member rushed up to advise me, “people are grabbing their things from the overheads.”

I then addressed the passengers and crew via the public address system. “Passengers, we apologize for the inconvenience, but due to safety concerns, we’re going to delay departure until we can perform a thorough security check of the airline. In the interests of safety, please take your overhead baggage and deplane, row-by-row, with the assistance of the crew. Please, everyone stay calm and proceed in an orderly fashion as the quickest and safest way to leave the aircraft.”

Naturally, some of the passengers expressed gratitude toward me as they departed.

“Safety comes first at United Airlines,” I smiled and nodded to reassure them. I was speaking the company line, but at that moment, I still believed it.

Then, some of the crew approached me, as they escorted passengers off the plane, to say they were afraid for their lives, as well. According to regulations, they should not be made to make this flight, either, under the circumstances.

While the plane was still emptying of passengers, two flight attendant supervisors boarded the aircraft, tensely approached me and demanded to know which crew members were responsible for the delay in take-off.

“Hey, they’re just doing their jobs as my eyes and ears in the back,” I said. “We just had a bomb scare. What if we were out over the Atlantic and had to turn back over this?”

“Any delay is a costly delay,” one of them shot back.

“Well, we’ve got crew that are just as spooked as the passengers. They don’t want to make this flight now.”

The other manager pointed his finger in my face and said, “Which ones? Because we will give them a direct order to make this flight.”

“And if they won’t?” I asked.

“We’ll fire them!”

“You’ll fire them… for following the ‘CLR’ guidelines?”

“We sure will.”

I confess, I was stunned. As you’ll see in the following memoir, a lot had happened in the airline business before this incident opened my eyes to the current state of management in our evolving business. These were important, fundamental principles of life and death procedures which were being cast aside. I would have a lot to say about the incident when I would file my Captain’s Report on it later.

In any event, filing that report was the culmination of all the fateful decisions I had ever made, up to that moment in my life. The implications of its outcome reached to the very foundations of the current system we still refer to as “the American Way.” In this system, the value of human life is meaningless compared to corporate officers’ satisfaction that they are viewing the highest possible numbers on the bottom line of a quarterly earnings report. That, ultimately, is the reason I have decided to tell my story.

Fasten your safety belts, as they say, and make sure your trays are locked in the forward upright position. Here we go…