Cockpit Chronicles: Flying the Danger Zone

Hello Every One!

During my five years on the DC-10, and during my time flying the Airbus A330, I flew to India many times. Loved India!

Our routing from Amsterdam to India took us over Iran—about four hours of a ten-hour flight. It is a large country.

The landscape below was usually brown, but on one trip, it was bizarrely blanketed in arctic white snow for the entire four-hour crossing.

We normally departed Amsterdam in the morning and landed in Mumbai or New Delhi around 10 p.m. Our return flights left India at 1 a.m., which meant an 11 p.m. pickup from the hotel. I always tried to get a solid eight hours of sleep before the 10 p.m. wake-up call.

But no matter how well rested you are, 3 a.m. is still 3 a.m.

On one such overnight flight, I was struggling to stay alert and drinking plenty of coffee. We were over Iran in pitch-black darkness.

A little background: In 1974, a Turkish Airlines DC-10 suffered a cargo-door failure while climbing through approximately 11,000 feet near Paris. The explosive decompression collapsed part of the cabin floor and severed critical flight-control cables. The airplane crashed in a forest, killing everyone aboard.

That accident led to changes to the DC-10’s cargo-door safety systems, including a second lock and second warning light in the cockpit.

So there I was over Iran, my eyelids getting heavier, when a yellow light flashed in the corner of my eye. I jerked alert.

What was that?

A few minutes later, just as I was starting to fade again, the yellow light flickered once more.

I snapped to full attention and grabbed another cup of coffee.

Then the light came on steadily.

It was the warning light for the same cargo door that brought down Turkish Airlines 981.

I consulted the emergency checklist. The guidance was to monitor the second cargo door warning light. If that one illuminated, we were to depressurize the airplane and descend immediately to 10,000 feet.

There was one problem: According to our navigation instruments and charts, we were about 40 miles from Tehran, surrounded by mountains, with a minimum safe altitude of 20,000 feet along our route.

If that second light came on, our only option was to divert into Tehran.

Fortunately, it never illuminated, and we made it to Amsterdam.

I didn’t need any more coffee for the rest of that flight.

A few months later, I told our dispatcher about the experience. He said they treated a diversion into Tehran 'like a ditching in the ocean': They expected to get the people back, but they didn’t expect to ever see the cargo or airplane again.

Later, Northwest Airlines secured government approval for a shortcut between Amsterdam and India over Afghanistan.

In the spring of 2001, the DC-10 chief pilot was in Amsterdam to fly the first trip over Afghanistan. I told him Osama bin Laden was waiting in Afghanistan for an American airliner to overfly his position so he could shoot it down.

The chief pilot assured me that bin Laden’s shoulder-fired missiles could only reach about 12,000 feet.

I pointed out that Afghanistan had mountains more than 20,000 feet high.

He assured me that the State Department had approved the route, assured Northwest it was safe, and added that bin Laden 'would never climb those mountains'.

I told him I would not fly over Afghanistan.

And so I gave up the India flying I loved and started picking up domestic trips.

On one flight from Los Angeles to Detroit that summer, we had a congressman riding in the cockpit. He was there because he served on the aviation oversight committee.

Once we reached cruising altitude, I turned and asked whether he knew Northwest was flying over Afghanistan. He said he didn't, and would look into it.

A couple of months later came 9/11 and everything that followed.

As part of the 'everything that followed', I flew a 747 from Germany to Kuwait with 400 soldiers aboard. Our route took us directly over Baghdad. Looking down at the war zone below, I was glad for two things:

We were high, and it was dark.

One more story, this time from my DC-8 days.

I had a trip into Haiti during a blockade to deliver a load of generators for the U.S. military.

There was no ground support available for us, so we had to carry enough fuel for the round trip and keep the number four engine running while we unloaded. We needed the engine to restart engines one, two, and three.

As I headed outside for my walk-around inspection for the return flight, the sergeant told me to make it snappy.

"There are snipers in the hills."

That was the quickest walk-around of my career! LOL.

Back here at home, I love having tribute bands from completely different genres on Friday and Saturday—and that’s exactly what we have this weekend: a Metallica tribute on Friday and a Michael Jackson tribute on Saturday!

And, due to popular demand, we’ve lifted the age restriction for our concerts. All ages are now welcome, so bring the family and make an evening of it!

See you soon,

Lorenzo