Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain (30 page)

Cleared for takeoff, Thurman took the Citation down runway two-three at 3:41 p.m. and lifted the plane uneventfully into a left traffic pattern, the kind favored by pilots and airports because, with the pilot seated on the left, left turns provide greater visibility and feel more natural. A right turn requires a bit more strain to achieve desired visibility.

The Citation achieved an airspeed of about 200 knots and then slowed to below the “gear-down” limit of 174. The plane’s altitude was about 1,300 feet as it headed out about a mile, made another left, and headed back for runway two-three.

“He was trying to give us a sense that day of the smoothness of the aircraft,” said Anderson. “I recall him saying over and over again how smooth the aircraft is and how quiet it is, compared to the King Air.”

The landing after the first loop was fine; Thurman handled it all like a pro, the landing gear was lowered, and the flaps were extended. As is done on touch-and-goes, the plane immediately raised its flaps and took off again from runway two-three.

With the landing gear and flaps retracted now, Thurman pulled the right throttle back to demonstrate the single-engine climb capability. The right throttle was then returned to normal thrust and a left traffic pattern was again flown. The altitude this time was between 2,800 and 3,000 feet.

On this pass Thurman advanced the throttles to demonstrate the acceleration of the jet. Both Hall and Anderson, in interviews with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), recalled that Thurman had used the speed brakes to reduce the airspeed below maximum gear-lowering speed, 174 knots. But he lowered the landing
gear, extended the flaps, and retracted the speed brakes, bringing it in for a second normal landing on two-three.

For the third pass, Thurman invited Hall to take control. Seated in the right seat, Hall put his hands on the control yoke and familiarized himself with the responsiveness of the aircraft. At this point, Thurman had Hall fly a zero-flap approach, later called “unbelievable” by an experienced pilot, given that this would be Hall’s first landing in the Citation and the hardest one you can make.

Hall would tell NTSB officials that Thurman did not recommend a final-approach airspeed, but Hall thought that the speed flown was “considerably faster than the reference speed on the airspeed indicator.”

Thurman was handling the throttles and made a few power adjustments. Hall was handling only the control yoke and trim.

This was not an expert landing. The touchdown was long (about midway down the runway), at which point Thurman immediately prepared for a fourth takeoff.

Hall was a bit startled when the aircraft suddenly lifted and began to float in the air about ten feet above the ground. He told the NTSB investigators that he was surprised, until he realized that Thurman had not lowered the flaps to the takeoff position, causing the aircraft to do what is called “ballooning.”

There was no comment from the tower as they surely observed this oddity. It was also considered unprofessional for Thurman to fail to tell Hall that he had not lowered the flaps.

Still, neither of the passengers was alarmed by it; no one aboard seemed to say, “Whoa, what are we doing here?” Professionalism seemed to be in play. They were ready to go again.

This time, due to the arrival of other traffic in the air, the tower told Munson to enter a right pattern on takeoff. This is the more difficult pattern for a pilot because his view of the direction he is headed is not as clear. Still, it was not something that he hadn’t done before.

The right downwind leg was entered at 3,500 feet and 200 knots indicated air speed (KIAS). Munson reduced the throttles to dissipate airspeed and altitude. Hall and Anderson would both recall that the throttles were reduced to a point where the landing gear warning horn sounded. The horn indicated they were going too fast for the landing gear to be extended.

Thurman shut off the horn.

“I knew that when we were at 3,500 feet, those throttles were pretty much all the way back,” Hall told the NTSB.

Seconds before four p.m., the tower controller contacted Munson and told him to extend the downwind leg of his pattern for about one mile. One other plane was landing and another taking off ahead of him. Twenty-two seconds later, the tower told him he could begin his base turn “anytime now.” He would come into runway one-nine over Greenburg Road on the north end of the airport.

Thurman piloted the aircraft into its base leg at once. Neither passenger recalled him using the speed brakes, and both said that he did not lower the landing gear or extend the flaps on downwind.

Flaps are used on wings to slow the aircraft sufficiently to allow it to land. When an aircraft slows too much, the wings don’t develop enough lift to keep it in the air. With the extension of the flaps, or “flaps down,” the surface area of the wing increases to create more lift. At the same time, the flaps create more drag, or friction, on the plane, so they are only used when it is necessary to reduce speed.

The flaps are panels built into the wings at the rear of the wing surface. They can be lowered in varying degrees to adjust for the amount of extra lift required. Anyone who has flown in an airplane has experienced the activation of flaps. In commercial jets, you can hear the noise of the electric motors that lower them and can feel the pitch of the plane change as they are extended. It feels as though brakes are being applied in midair.

Flaps are also used sometimes during takeoff, to allow the plane
to become airborne faster. Once in the air, however, the flaps are retraced to allow for faster flight.

Thurman was about to approach the ground with too many things wrong with his basic mechanics. On strike three for the final out of an inning, he knew to roll the ball to the mound for the opposing pitcher to warm up with. It came naturally to him; he knew the game’s subtleties. His piloting skills weren’t as natural.

Mistakes were being made.

Jerry Anderson was happy to avoid the media for decades. With a common name, and with an eventual move to Florida, he just disappeared from sight. Yes, he had been linked to Munson through the tragedy, but no, it was not something he wanted to relive at all, despite his remarkable good fortune to have survived a plane crash. He’s never been to the grave site and says he’ll never go.

“Thurman was my friend,” he said twenty-eight years after the accident during a long conversation with me. “We sort of lived vicariously through each other. He loved to talk to me about real estate and aviation, and while I would have loved to talk more about the Yankees with him, that was office talk as far as he was concerned, and when we were together, he preferred to leave stories about his ‘day job’ out of the conversation. And that was fine; we had plenty of other things to discuss.”

Anderson has had a fine career in commercial real estate and still pilots a plane. He is the chief operating officer of Sperry Van Ness Commercial Real Estate Advisors, overseeing the firm’s day-to-day
operations, including marketing, technology, finance, operations, and human resources. He is coauthor of several audiotape programs on commercial real estate, and one of his books,
Success Strategies for Investment Real Estate
, is a classic in the field.

He is a frequent guest speaker around the world on real estate investment, and has appeared on NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS over his career without anyone realizing his connection to the fateful flight.

“It’s so ironic,” he notes, “that I recovered reasonably well in terms of physical signs of the accident. Dave Hall became an air traffic controller. He works in a dark, closed environment. He had the more disfiguring scars on his arms, his face, his hands—the wrinkled skin. I became a public speaker and have few noticeable scars. A little on my right ear and right side of my face, but you have to look carefully. Some on my arms, but I can keep them covered. Ironic how that worked out.”

Anderson spoke little of the fateful day to anyone until the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2004, when I had suggested to Willie Weinbaum, a producer at ESPN, that they might try to locate him. They were doing a feature on the anniversary, and Willie had asked me if I could suggest something that hadn’t been done. I told him I didn’t think I’d ever seen an interview with the two passengers.

Willie managed to track down Anderson, who had left Canton in 1982. Jerry agreed to talk for the first time. Three years later, he expanded on it with me.

“Thurman used to talk about the autobiography when it was in progress,” he says. “He was pretty excited about doing it.”

That was news to me, as I hadn’t detected much enthusiasm from him at the time, other than heading off any would-be biographers from doing unauthorized books. But it was nice to hear.

“It’s funny, the things you remember, the things you forget,” he said to me. “For instance, I couldn’t remember that David and I went to different hospitals after the accident.

“I don’t think about it often, but I do if I’m landing on a runway marked one-nine. For a number of years after the accident I would fly into Canton and I always hated when I had to land on one-nine. But my flashbacks aren’t of the accident but of the moments before.

“I also always try to avoid flying on August 2. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I guess on that one, I am. One year I couldn’t avoid it, though; I had to be in Los Angeles for a speech and that was the way it worked out. Well, you won’t believe this, but I’m on the plane, a commercial jet, and I’m sitting there and hear, ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard. I’m Captain Munson, and I’ll be your pilot today …’”

“No kidding.”

Anderson first learned of Munson when Thurman was a high school star, one year ahead of Jerry. Jerry, a swimmer, would read the local sports section in the
Canton Repository
, and Munson’s name was always there. Very much in the football stories, a lot in basketball—the “glamour sports,” so to speak. And of course, he was in the baseball stories, but high school baseball didn’t get that much coverage.

They first met while Anderson, a student at the University of Akron, was taking some classes at Kent State. They would see each other from time to time over the years back in Canton, but became really close after the 1975 baseball season when handball brought them together more frequently at the local YMCA.

“He was so competitive in handball, and he had such quick hands,” said Anderson. “He’d never really played before, not seriously, and yet he was as good as anyone. It would piss me off, because I was a very good player. In the off-seasons after 1976, 1977, and 1978, he’d return to the Y, tired from the baseball season, and I’d beat him for a few weeks. But then as January and February came around, he was ready to beat me. And he did, almost all the time. We wound up playing doubles together and even won a tournament.

“He did love real estate. He would talk to me about it a lot. I became his confidant. Jess Tucker, a big Canton developer, used to suggest investments for Thurman, and he’d run them by me. Tucker had bought a massive piece of land in the seventies and got Thurman to invest in it. He was one of ten partners in what would become Belden Village, a major shopping center. I guided him through the process. It helped that Thurm knew Canton. He was a visionary, and just as he could see the coming innings of a baseball game in progress, he could see a good real estate opportunity. He knew what could work and what probably wouldn’t. I think he probably owned real estate worth about $1.5 million eventually. And he had that good sense to know if something was going to be built on the wrong street.

“I believe he once told Diana, ‘If anything ever happens to me, don’t sell Belden Village!’”

Today, if you go to the west end of Munson Street where it meets Everhard, at the top of the hill, you can see the shopping center (which is now called Westfield Mall). Yes, there is a Munson Street, the subject he was supposed to have addressed that afternoon.

“He was really a man’s man,” says Anderson. “The self-confidence, the cigar, the swagger. But he had this odd sense of humor too; he could be very clever with this.

“One day I remember we were hanging around the airport when he still had his King Air, not too long before he bought the jet. It was about three p.m. and he had to go to Toronto for a night game. He said, ‘Would you fly right seat with me? I’ll be tired after the game and you can fly it back.’

“So I went! It was just an impulse, but it wasn’t a long flight, and the beauty of engaging in aviation is the ability to do such a thing.

“So we land in Toronto and quickly went through customs, but then someone from the airport said, ‘Oh, you guys must be ballplayers!’

“And Munson said, ‘Yeah, and we’re here to thump you guys.’

“They asked him for an autograph, which he was always happy to
sign, despite a reputation otherwise, and then he turned and said to me, ‘C’mon Willie, give ’em your autograph,’ and he told them that I was Willie Randolph. I’m a five-foot-seven white guy and Willie was already an American League All-Star who had played in three World Series. But they were all like, ‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Randolph.’

“So I signed and we had a good laugh over that, and he said, ‘C’mon, let’s get outta here before they discover us.’”

To Anderson’s thinking, Thurman had no displeasure with the Yankees by 1979, and talked about playing for Cleveland strictly as a matter of convenience. Despite later statements from people who said he had given up on that notion by ’79, he would tell Anderson, “This shit’s wearing me out. I’d really like to play closer to home.”

Munson and Anderson had no formal business relationship, other than two guys with common interests, until May 1977. And while Anderson collected no Yankee or Munson souvenirs, has no autographs, no caps, he did hold on to a ticket from a game on that May day when he sat in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse with Thurman during a rainout and first talked about a business arrangement together. It would be their first formal collaboration. Anderson would find real estate investment opportunities, and Munson would find investors among fellow ballplayers. That would be the basis of their business.