Miami, Hilton Hotel, Wednesday, 1995-12-20 15:30 local (Z-5)
The big news of the moment is that a Tower Air aircraft has slid off the runway in New York. I just heard about it about an hour ago from the flight engineer I'll be flying with tonight (that is if this flight goes tonight). I phoned Jean and she had heard it on the radio. Then I tuned in CNN and sure enough, a quick shot of one of our 747s off the runway in the snow.
I don't have any details yet except that the captain apparently decided to abort the takeoff. I hope he had a good reason for aborting. Trying that is something you wouldn't want to do on a slippery runway unless absolutely necessary. The problem is one of directional control during the abort, and obviously they lost that. Really, staying on a slippery runway during a 747 abort is really just a matter of luck. The difficulty is that the engines don't really reverse evenly. On a runway that's not slippery, that's no problem—the nose gear will keep headed in the right direction, but if the nose gear doesn't have traction....
This comes at a bad time for Tower. I found out from the engineer that about 10 days ago in Amsterdam, a Tower airplane drug a wing tip and an engine pod. The FAA gets really upset when things happen close together. Their whole show is management by crisis. They always feel they have to do something, even if it has nothing to do with what actually happened.
My guess is that Morris Nachtomi (Tower's owner—75% of the stock) is going to have a hard time keeping his seat mile cost down to 4.5 cents in the light of all this.
I have to apologize for a brain fart. In the last message I said that Joe McCarthy headed HUAC. Wrong. McCarthy was a senator. He was contemporary with HUAC but did not head it. Obviously a senator cannot head a House committee. Basically he was doing in the Senate what HUAC was doing in the House—destroying people's reputations without cause. The Senate finally wound up censuring him, and the House finally wound up disbanding HUAC. Unfortunately both did a tremendous amount of harm before they were stopped.
The sun is shining, temp is close to 80, and I'm going for a run.
Terry