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Chapter Six
At the time, I remember thinking environmental protection should not mean crawling down the partially opened rear stairs of a Boeing 727 passenger jet into a muddy field at San Francisco International Airport.
I had boarded a regularly scheduled Sunday afternoon flight to Los Angeles where I was producing a one-half hour public service television show for the USEPA on the dangers of toxic substances in anything we might eat or drink.
I sat next to a World War II pilot on that cloudy, rainy day in a United Airlines 727. Wisps of clouds raced by as we ascended. I hated the 727 with its three engines in the rear of the plane. It took off and landed like a wounded duck, as far as I was concerned, yet the airlines used it for the shorter flights. It always seemed to land with a deep thud that made me close my eyes on the approach, wondering if it had landed safely, and it seemed to lift off at the very last moment from the end of the runway.
As we climbed, I noticed a vapor streaming from the wing tips. I pointed it out to the former pilot I had just met. He said not to worry too much: they were probably jettisoning some excess fuel.
“But why?” I asked. “Why would they be jettisoning fuel after the takeoff?” It wasn’t long before we knew the answer. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: “We don’t want you to be alarmed, but we have to return to the airport.”
I looked at my seat partner who seemed calm. He had been regaling me with stories of his fighter pilot days in World War II in the Pacific. “I don’t know what it could be,” he said. “Probably some malfunction in the navigation system, or some of the dials aren’t giving accurate signals.”
That was when the airline pilot told us what was actually happening. “We are returning because a warning light is telling us something is overheating in the cargo bay,” he said over the intercom. “It may be nothing, a light malfunctioning, but we would like you to grab your ankles as we approach landing, just in case.”
That was possible when flying in the 1970s. Seats were farther apart. In fact, airlines competed to offer more leg room rather than less in those days.
Though my heart beat a little faster, I didn’t think anything could really be wrong. But my partner and I grabbed our anklesas we approached, just in case. The plane had been circling while continuing to jettison fuel.
We heard the landing gear lock and the jet engines reverse thrust to slow down the plane as we landed, so I thought the flight was over. Suddenly there was a much louder THUNK, then the plane tilted crazily and began to slowly rotate. Those of us grabbing our ankles could see nothing, but I had the sickening feeling that I was going to die.
The THUNK was followed by a screeching of metal, but I had no idea how long that lasted before the silence. It was a silence that I honestly thought meant the end—I think we all felt that way—even though my mind was racing. Was it even possible this was what the afterlife must be? A limbo of sorts with nothing to see or hear? It was as if, at that moment, I had left my body, and whatever had become of me was hovering overhead.
But then I heard screaming, and a group of uniformed pilots suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was only later that I realized they were off-duty pilots hitching rides home on the weekend. At this moment they happened to be in the right place at the right time. At least six of them rousted passengers out of their seats.
Most of us were in shock. They had to literally grab some of the passengers and throw them down the inflated chutes that had opened before it dawned on the rest of us that we needed to get the hell out of there.
Being near the tail of this 727, my partner and I had only one escape route. There was an exit staircase that opened under the tail, but it was only partially open. We crawled our way down those steps and found that the tail was sitting in the mud. When we stood up to look around in a slight drizzle, hands and knees covered in the mud, we saw we were in a wet field beside one of the runways. The nose of the plane was buried in a small, corrugated metal shack that must have stopped its slide.
My partner said immediately, “It has to be one of the landing gear.”
“What landing gear?” I asked. I looked up and down the runway we were beside and saw no landing gear. My partner had taken out a miniature Minolta camera and began clicking away in all directions as people continued to crawl or slide out of the plane. Some lay on the ground moaning, as sirens from approaching rescue vehicles screamed louder.
The pilots and crew members herded us away from the fuselage. I saw no smoke, and so thank God, maybe no fire. They were also shouting, “No pictures, please, no pictures, please,” which my partner, of course, ignored. When I looked down the runway that crossed ours, I saw a small object lying in the middle of it. It was our landing gear: four wheels still locked to the strut that anchored it to the wing.
The ex-fighter pilot told me that he had once crash landed on a beach and broken his back in the Philippines during World War II. It underscored how lucky we were this time. The United pilot must have landed too soon with too much fuel in the tanks. I had flown enough to know planes usually take off with more fuel than is safe to carry when landing, in case they were stuck in a holding pattern before descending to the tarmac. The extra weight may have caused the wounded duck to hit the runway harder than was safe. But the pilot’s skill probably saved us by keeping the plane’s nose up, said my seat mate, despite the impact that could have flipped us end-over-end.
So I cancelled the television show that weekend, even though United Airlines offered to put me on the next plane to Los Angeles—once the runways were cleared.
There was no map of what we should or could do in those early days. But making the public aware of what was happening to our air and water was a priority. Administrator DeFalco wanted the public to know why we were here and what needed to be done to protect the environment.
It was the dawning of an awareness of how human activity affected the environment, of the growing danger of toxic chemicals that Silent Spring author Rachel Carson had written about. We would educate and inform the public about our mission.
Harlan Green © 2022
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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