Cockpit Confidential (36 page)
Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Once on the ground, they faced a deafening roar. The plane had been pancaked into the grass, but because the cockpit control lines were severed, the engines were still running at full power. It took several moments before the motors began coming apart. Bragg remembers one of the engines' huge forward turbofans detaching from its shaft, falling forward onto the ground with a thud.
The fuselage was engulfed by fire. A number of passengers, most of them seated in forward portions of the cabin, had made it onto the craft's left wing, and were standing at the leading edge, about 20 feet off the ground. Bragg ran over, encouraging them to jump. A few minutes later, the plane's center fuel tank exploded, propelling a plume of flames and smoke a thousand feet into the sky.
The airport's ill-equipped rescue team, meanwhile, was over at the KLM site, the first wreckage they'd come to after learning there'd been an accident. They hadn't yet realized that
two
planes were involved, one of them with survivors. Eventually, authorities opened the airport perimeter gates, urging anybody with a vehicle to drive toward the crash scene to help. Bob Bragg tells the cracked story of standing there in fog, surrounded by stunned and bleeding survivors, watching his plane burn, when suddenly a taxicab pulls up out of nowhere.
Bragg returned to work a few months later. He eventually transferred to United when that carrier took over Pan Am's Pacific routes in the late 1980s, and retired from the company as a 747 captain. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Dorothy. (Captain Grubbs has since passed away, as has second officer George Warns.)
During the documentary shoot, I traveled with Bob Bragg and the producers to the aircraft storage yards at Mojave, California, where he was interviewed alongside a mothballed 747, describing that incredible leap from the upper-deck.
A day earlier, using a flight deck mock-up, director Phil Desjardins filmed a reenactment of the Tenerife collision, with a trio of actors sitting in as the KLM crew. To provide the actors with a helpful demo, it was suggested that Bob Bragg and I get inside the mock-up and run through a practice takeoff.
Bragg took the captain's seat, and I took the first officer's seat. We read through a makeshift checklist and went through the motions of a simulated takeoff. That's when I looked across, and all of a sudden it hit me: Here's Bob Bragg, lone surviving pilot of Tenerife, sitting in a cockpit, pretending to be Jacob Van Zanten, whose error made the whole thing happen.
Surely Bragg wanted no part of this dreary karma, and I hadn't the courage to make note of it out loudâassuming it hadn't already dawned on him. But I could barely keep the astonishment to myself. One more creepy irony in a story so full of them.
Closing note: On the thirtieth anniversary of the crash, a memorial was dedicated overlooking the Tenerife airport, honoring those who perished there. The sculpture is in the shape of a helix. “A spiral staircase,” the builders describe it. “[â¦] a symbol of infinity.” Maybe, but I'm disappointed that the more obvious physical symbolism is ignored: early model 747s, including both of those in the crash, were well known for the set of spiral stairs connecting their main and upper decks (
see High Art
). In the minds of millions of international travelers, that stairway is something of a civil aviation icon. How evocative and poetically appropriate for the memorialâeven if the designers weren't thinking that way.
HE
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OVE TO
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I. Logos and Liveries
There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the logo of Pan American World Airways was one of the most recognized commercial trademarks in the world. There was nothing remarkable about the symbolâa fissured blue and white globe reminiscent of a basketballâbut it worked. The globe appeared in the 1950s and endured for almost half a century, right to Pam Am's final breath in 1991. Aspects of the airline's identity would change over the years, but through it all, the blue ball persevered. Had Pan Am survived, I suspect that globe would still be around.
Since the dawn of civil aviation, airlines have been devising and revising what they believe to be meaningful identities. As explored by author Keith Lovegrove in his superb volume
Airline: Identity, Design, and Culture
, the logo represents only a slice of this overall branding process, which takes place on a score of fronts, from cabin interiors to crew attire to the color of maintenance vehicles. But it's the logoâthe trademark, the company emblem, reproduced on everything from stationery to boarding passesâthat encapsulates identity in a single, vital aesthetic mark. Everything else revolves around this.
Many of the most renowned airline insignia incorporate national symbols or cultural associations: the shamrock of Aer Lingus, the Qantas kangaroo, the green cedar of MEA (Lebanon), the Thai Airways lotus. Subtler adaptations include Malaysia Airlines's indigenous kite design or the calligraphic brush stroke of Hong Kong's airline, Cathay Pacific. But while symbolism is optional, simplicity is a must. It has been said that the true test of a logo is this: Can it be remembered and sketched, freehand and with reasonable accuracy, by a young child? Think of the Apple apple. Pan Am's basketball fits this criterion beautifully, as does Lufthansa's crane, the Air New Zealand “Koru,” and many others. They're dignified, unpretentious, and unencumberedâand, for exactly those reasons, are able to cultivate recognition the world over. Maybe they need a tweaking or two over time, but the template of such trademarksâthe really good onesâremains essentially timeless.
And if you've got something like that, you dispense with it at your peril. Among the most deplorable branding moves ever made was American Airlines's decision in 2013 to abandon its venerable “AA” logo. With its proud, cross-winged eagle, this was one of the most distinctive and enduring icons in all of aviation. Created by Massimo Vignelli in 1967, it always looked modern. Its successor is almost too ugly to be describedâa vertical bar of red and blue, bisected by what's supposed to be an eagle's beak. Symbolically lifeless and hideous to boot, it looks like a linoleum knife cutting through a shower curtain.
No less disappointing was the elimination of the
tsurumaru
, the red and white crane motif worn by Japan Airlines. Since 1960, every JAL aircraft featured what was possibly the most elegant airline logo ever conceived: a stylized depiction of the crane, lifting its wings into the circular suggestion of the Japanese rising sun. Beginning in 2002, this ageless symbol succumbed to what had to be the most regrettable makeover in industry history, replaced by an oversized, blood-red blobâa rising splotchâoozing across the tailfin. It was a terrible decision on aesthetic merits alone, and still worse considering the crane's cultural importance in Japan.
Apparently enough people complained, however, and the
tsurumaru
has since been resurrected. Bringing it back was an unusual move, marking one of the very few times an airline has reverted to a prior logo, but JAL couldn't have made a wiser decision. (American, are you listening?)
Not that you can't retain the outlines of a classic logo and still manage to ruin it, as demonstrated in recent years by several airlines that couldn't leave well enough alone.
Take the case of cargo giant UPS. The original United Parcel Service emblem showed a bow-tied box set atop a heraldic-style badge. The work of Paul Rand, a legendary design guru who also did logos for Westinghouse and IBM, it was a wonderful heart-and-soul manifestation of the company's core mission: delivering packages. Its replacement is a singularly bland, almost militaristic “modernization.” The box and string have been deposed, swapped for a meaningless gold slash mark. If we didn't know better, UPS could be a bank or insurance company. It's the worst thing we've seen in the shipping business since the U.S. Postal Service came up with that monsterized eagle head.
A similar tragedy struck at Northwest Airlines several years ago. You might remember the carrier's circular “NW” symbol, worn in white atop the bright red tail. Unveiled in 1989, this was a work of genius. It was an N; it was a W; it was a compass pointing toward the northwest. It was all of those, and perhaps the most memorable trademark ever created by Landor Associates, one of the industry's most powerful identity creators. By 2003, it was in the waste can, bastardized into a lazy circle and small triangular arrow. Past tense, and good for that: Northwest and its ruined colophon no longer exist, having been folded into Delta Air Lines.
Delta, for its part, is owed kudos for hanging on to its famous “widget” tricorn, albeit in revised colors. The widget says one thing and says it without a hint of fuss or pretension: Delta. Aeroflot gets a mention here too. Overall, the Russian carrier's newest paint job is garishly overdone but scores big points for retaining its winged hammer and sickle, virtually unchanged since the 1940s.
And what of those logos that ought to be changed but haven't been? For starters I give you the “Sir Turtle” mascot of Cayman Airways, who looks like he just crawled out of a Bosch painting.
But needless to say, the corporate trademark is only one part of an airline's visual presentation. An airplane is a very large canvas on which to make or break your statement. Enter the paint bucket.
Decades ago, Braniff International was famous for dousing whole planes in solid colorsâblues, greens, even powder pastels. In the same way, today's de rigueur relies on perception of the airplane as a whole, rather than a separate body and tail. Traditional paint jobs approached these surfaces separately, while contemporary ones strive to marry body and tail in a continuous canvas. This has brought the once familiar “cheat line”âthat thin band of paint stretching across the windows from nose to tailâto the brink of extinction. There was a time when virtually every hull was decorated by horizontal striping, a custom now gone the way of drive-up stairs and fancy inflight meals.
With a stripeless fuselage, the tail becomes the focal point. Some airlines, such as Qantas, rely on powerful fin markings that carry the entire aircraft. Others, such as Emirates, balance tail and fuselage through the use of oversized, billboard-style lettering. Still others go for a flying warehouse extremeâan empty white expanse with few details aside from a capriciously placed title.
But the dominant theme in liveries these days is one of motion. There are enough streaks, swishes, arcs, twists, swirls, and curls out there to make anybody dizzy. And most of them, sadly, are indistinguishable from one anotherâoverwrought, gimmicky, and self-conscious. See TACA, El Al, and Pakistan International for three of the worst examples. “The lowest common denominator of brand identity is something I call the âGeneric Meaningless Swoosh Thing,'” says Amanda Collier, a graphic design veteran. According to Collier, “The GMST is what happens when any corporation tries to develop a new look. The managers will talk about wanting something that shows their company is âforward thinking' and âin motion,' and no fewer than three of them will reference Nike, inventors of the original Swoosh. The creative types smile, nod, secretly stab themselves with their X-Acto knives.”
And as a result, there are fewer lasting impressions. Airplanes blur together in a palette of motion-themed anonymity. Somewhere is a vending machine. Airline executives drop in a million dollars' worth of consulting coins and out pops another curvy-swervy variant of the GMST. With a few exceptions (Aeromexico is one), these designs are so dismally uninspired that it's hard to look at them without yawning. They are meant to be sophisticated and suggestive of movement and energy, but all they really do is make your airline indistinguishable from everybody else's. Watching from a terminal window, people are asking the one question they should never have to ask: What airline is
that
?