AIRLINE PILOT
Gregg Colliton, 45, has been a United Airlines pilot for 20 years. As a second officer on a Jumbo 747 jet, he flies to such places as Honolulu, Tokyo, Bangkok and Hong Kong. He learned to fly 27 years ago while in the Army, and flew spotter planes in Vietnam. The following was taken from an interview with Colliton by Michele Lingre, a Van Nuys free-lance writer.
I heard about the Detroit accident (last Sunday’s crash of a Northwest Airlines jet) on the radio when I was in Honolulu. I had tremendous empathy and sympathy for those people who died. In fact, that’s the first thing I said to my kids, “155 people died, do you know how many lives that affects?”
Besides feeling that it was a tragedy, I wanted to know what happened. I started thinking clinically, I guess. What did they do? Did they do something wrong? Was something wrong with the airplane? I look forward to seeing the report because all of us in aviation can build on this. That’s how we learn, that’s how accidents are prevented in the future.
I’m flying an airplane tonight, but I’m not going to think about the accident. You can’t dwell on it. There is nothing I can do about it. I’m not nervous about going tonight, and I don’t think the average guy is. If you don’t have that basic confidence in yourself, the mechanics and the equipment, you really shouldn’t be flying.
I know that this sort of accident is not something that happens all the time, and tragic as it is, it doesn’t mean that the industry is failing. It is not a barometer of the safety of commercial aviation. I don’t know how many departures Northwest has a day, with no problems at all.
There is more activity out there now. And that didn’t happen in the last two years. So I think this situation, the crowded skies, existed before, but now there is more focus on it. When you have an accident like Cerritos, it draws attention and somebody finally says: “What’s going on here?”
Sometimes with small aircraft, the controllers have no way of telling their altitude. But they pick them out as targets, and they will say to us: “You have traffic at your 1 o’clock position, slow, altitude unknown.” So immediately you’re looking in that direction, and then perhaps two more will pop up in another sector, and you’re looking for them at the same time that you’re flying your aircraft, making your approach.
When we see these aircraft, we tell the tower: “We have someone there at 1 o’clock, he looks like he’s about 1,000 feet below or above us.” If he comes real close to us we take evasive action.
We need more control, and now the Federal Aviation Administration has just expanded the control zone around Los Angeles International to prevent aircraft not on instrument flight plan from coming into this zone. It made more room for commercial airline traffic. I think traffic should be limited in congested areas, over major cities.
Most of our emergency training is done in a simulator in Denver. There are visual aids, and it becomes very realistic after awhile. Certainly the adrenaline flows in an emergency situation. We have immediate action procedures that must be committed to memory, and you must perform these 100% correct in order to pass your proficiency checks once a year.
We also have to watch videos and take an exam every year dealing with hijacking and bomb threats.
I was hijacked in 1971. It was on a 737 from Charleston to Newark. I came out of the cockpit for something, and the hijacker put a gun to my head. A couple people screamed. I got the hijacker calmed down a bit. We landed in Dulles International in Washington. He wanted a large aircraft to take him to Jerusalem. He was obviously a psycho. He allowed us to let the people off, and we sat there with him for four hours, and stalled. I wasn’t really thinking. I didn’t feel a big threat. Later on, I did.
He’d been drinking, and he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore, and then I took the gun away from him. I calculated it several times and it finally worked. I don’t want to make this sound like a big hero thing. It wasn’t. With terrorists, it would never have worked, they wouldn’t have listened to us.
A lot of people think the automatic pilot, or computers, take off and land the plane. That’s a misconception. Pilots fly this thing, except at cruise altitude. We’ll put it on auto pilot because it stays right on the altitude, air speed and headings that we need, the ride is smoother. We monitor it, of course.
What I like best is the actual flying. The money is not that important. When you have 400 people in the back, and you weigh 750,000 pounds, and you’re taking off from Los Angeles for the Far East, it’s exciting. It’s gratifying to get people from A to B safely, with a nice landing.
In 20 years with United. I’ve only had one problem with one engine on takeoff. We just aborted the takeoff. In the military, I had one engine problem and I landed back right on the same runway. I think it’s safe to fly. I wouldn’t fly if I didn’t feel like that.
