(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . 50 years ago: The time a CEO jumped into the Everglades to save passengers – Daily Montanan [1] ['Basil Hero', 'More From Author', '- December'] Date: 2022-12-30 Three things happened to Beverly Raposa late on the night of December 29, 1972, that she never thought possible or ever saw coming. It was a routine hop from JFK to Miami International in Florida that she and her fellow Eastern Airlines flight attendant, Mercy Ruiz, had made hundreds of times without incident. Best of all, they were flying one of the 10, new Lockheed L-1011 Tristar jumbo jets Eastern bought to upgrade its aging fleet. The Tristar was a wide-bodied luxury liner seating 250 people meant to compete with Boeing’s 747 and McDonnell Douglas’ DC-10. The four-month old L-1011 had by far the most spacious galley for preparing meals, which saved time and energy for Beverly and the rest of the crew. After securing everything in the galley, Beverly and Mercy buckled up for their final approach to Miami on that clear, but moonless night. What the two women didn’t know was that in the cockpit the green landing gear indicator light remained dark, which meant technically the L-1011’s nose gear wasn’t properly locked in the down position. The Captain went into a holding pattern, turned on the autopilot, and sent the flight engineer to the forward electronics bay (below the flight deck) where he could see through a small porthole that the landing gear was really down. But, during the scramble to troubleshoot the indicator panel, the Captain inadvertently bumped the auto pilot switch and the plane began a slow, undetectable descent. Shortly after midnight, Frank Borman, Eastern’s Senior Vice President of Operations, got the call. “Middle-of-the-night phone calls from operations usually meant one thing — “Disaster,” said Colonel Borman, who at the time had recently retired as a NASA space hero. In 1968, he and his Apollo 8 crew mates, Captain James Lovell and Major William Anders, made Time Magazine’s cover as “Men of the Year” for becoming the first humans to leave Earth and orbit the Moon. “Colonel,” the voice on the other end said, “this is System Control, I think we’ve lost one. We had an L-1011 go off the radar screen on final approach, we think it’s down in the Everglades.” What Borman did during the next 10 hours would be inconceivable in today’s culture of insulated corporate executives who trump the needs of their customers and employees by hiding behind layers of public relations pros when things go haywire. As Borman absorbed the calamitous news, Beverly and Mercy lay soaked in jet fuel in the mangled tail section of the plane, which tore off from the main part of the fuselage when it slashed into an inaccessible part of the Everglades, a subtropical wilderness of swampland, sawgrass marshes, mangrove forests, and hardwood hammocks. It was just before midnight. Nearly every passenger seated in the center of the plane died instantly from the impact, while scattered around them in the murky darkness the injured and dying could hear the croaking alligators amid the screams for help. Their only piece of luck? — the thick Everglades mud water had cushioned the crash preventing the jet fuel from exploding. “I felt like my face was being pulled,” said Beverly, “I knew I had jet fuel that had been pouring over me when I first came to and I thought, oh my God! My face is burned, and so I reached down and took some of that muck out of the Everglades, and put that on my face.” By now, Borman, who lived close to Eastern’s Miami offices, had arrived at the Eastern System Control Center where everyone knew Flight 401 was down, but no one knew precisely where. For Borman the “clock was running.” THE CLOCK! Time is keyed into the central nervous system of all astronauts whose first requirement when their spacecraft begins clearing the launch tower is to call out “the clock is running,” acknowledging the official start time of the mission. For Flight 401, the clock ran out when it hit the swamp at 11:42 p.m. More than an hour had passed without any word from the Coast Guard crews and other emergency units that had been mobilized by the authorities. In the pre-cellphone era of 1972, this was unendurable. Borman, who understood crashes from his test and fighter pilot days, had enough. There might be survivors Borman kept thinking. The rescue clock is running. He was done sitting around. The former Commander of Apollo 8, whose mission to the Moon was given 50/50 odds of success, took charge, ordered a helicopter and headed for the last known bearings Eastern had obtained from the Miami tower. His test pilot’s eyes were consumed with determination. In the distance, he spotted two Coast Guard choppers heading toward a few dim lights. “Where the hell can we land?” I asked my pilot. “There’s nothing but swamp down there.” The pilot turned on his landing lights and roughly 150 yards from the crash site found a small hummock solid enough to nest on. As soon as he heard the yells for help, Borman jumped straight into the lethal, primordial stew and started wading in chest-high water toward the voices. “I stumbled on a heavyset man trapped in a tangle of twisted metal,” Borman recounted. “Help me, help me,” he moaned. “I tried to move the wreckage away from his pinned body, but it wouldn’t budge. Someone came over to help, but we still couldn’t free him and he died right before our eyes.” Undaunted, Borman slogged through the layers of debris…and then…. he came upon Beverly and Mercy. “He (Borman) was the first person to get to me, the first person to get to our group,” said Beverly, who had the group sing Christmas songs to keep them alert and hopeful while they waited for rescuers. “I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s Mr. Borman,’” recalled Mercy who was seated right next to Beverly and was flat on her back with a broken pelvis in the middle of the carnage. “I said to myself, ‘What’s he doing here? It doesn’t make any sense.’” said Mercy. Looking back after so many years the 72-year-old Mercy said, “he reminded me of General Patton who was always backing up his troops.” “He came up to me, looked at my wings,” said Beverly, who had served Borman on many flights, “And he asked me, ‘What happened? Was there any warning?’” “I said none! We were doing a go-around, there was no warning from the cockpit… all of a sudden we went into a left bank, and those engines went into take-off power, and that was it… we hit! “Don’t worry,” he said, “We’re going to get you out of here now, and he gave his jacket to one of the injured flight attendants in front of me.” Up above, Borman could see the gathering rescue choppers facing the same problem he had…where to put down? Then, like General Patton, who famously directed road traffic to impose order on the mechanized columns racing through France during World War II, Borman gathered enough rescuers with flashlights to organize a makeshift system of ground control motioning the copters where and when to land. Before the night was out, 75 people were saved and 101 died— all because of a burned-out landing gear light bulb, which distracted the flight crew from realizing they were losing altitude when the autopilot was accidentally disengaged. In the days that followed, Borman, one of the first of only 24 humans to visit the Moon, took no bows, sought zero recognition, and except for Eastern employees like Mercy and Beverly, the public was unaware of his role in the rescue. Today Frank Borman looks back on the crash of Flight 401 and insists on crediting Eastern Airlines personnel like Beverly and Mercy for their heroic part in helping save so many lives that night. “They’re brave women,” he said. “And every single employee that I observed that night went above and beyond trying to take care of the people that were hurt.” Even now Borman resists the limelight or being given special treatment of any sort. Mercy still marvels at his egalitarian fairness and remembers a particular example that has special resonance for her in light of the recent news reports she’s seen of passengers being dragged from their seats, bloodied, to make way for other airline personnel. Eastern, she remembers had declared 1975 its “Year of the Passenger” and its Board of Directors had just promoted Borman to president and CEO. It was a Friday night, in late December, the end of a long work week, and Borman was eager to get home to his wife Susan, in Miami, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the accumulated stress of his razor’s edge life as a test pilot and astronaut. As he was boarding the flight in New York “he was unaware,” says Mercy, “that the gate agent had just bumped a first-class passenger back to coach giving his seat to Mr. Borman” (she even remembers the seat number all these years later: 2-C on the aisle). The passenger was furious. “I said, ‘Mr. Borman, I don’t think you know what the gate agent did, but the gentleman whose seat you’re in is fuming that he’s back in coach… and remember,” she told him, “this is supposed to be the Year of the Passenger.” “Mr. Borman turned purple,” Mercy remembers. He unbuckled his seatbelt and headed straight for the gate agent telling her to never displace a passenger in his favor again. He then went back to coach, personally apologized to the gentleman, and walked him back to first-class. Like Mercy, Borman also cringes at today’s smartphone videos of passenger mayhem and blames the airlines’ appalling treatment on heavily layered management, which he believes is too far removed from the employees on the line who touch the public every day. “He was always asking for our feedback and talking to the troops,” says Mercy. Borman was revered for getting into the trenches to work side-by-side with baggage handlers, mechanics and other Eastern employees to experience what they were going through. “Employee morale at Eastern was never higher,” says Beverly, “than when Mr. Borman was president.” He drove around in his old 1969 Chevy, listened to their ideas to make the airline better, gave credit where it was due, and was eager to catch potential problems early. It was the same hands-on approach that Borman, and his lunar brethren took preparing for the Moonshot. They made a point of meeting regularly with the engineers and workers who built their Apollo spacecraft to observe their efforts and thank them for their dedication, including the seamstresses who labored through every stitch of their intricately layered liquid-cooled spacesuits, which were the equivalent of miniature spacecraft, protecting them from radiation and the airless vacuum of space. Borman, whose eyes still burst with alertness at age 94, keeps trim by starting each day at 5:30 a.m. with one hour of treadmill work and lifting weights. West Point he says taught him the three words he still lives by: Duty, Honor, Country. “West Point really shaped me. I went there an 18-year old kid from a small desert town and it was a four-year period that really molded my character and my beliefs,” he said. Fifty years after seeing the Earth from the moon, Borman has amended those three hallowed words to Duty, Honor, Planet Earth. The man who risked his life going to the Moon, and again by saving so many passengers on Flight 401, believes that Earth is a precious jewel in the universe; that we are one planetary race whose responsibility is to each other and to future generations so that they may inherit a livable Earth free of rapacious exploitation in all its forms. Author Basil Hero wrote this piece while working on his book, “The Mission of A Lifetime: Lessons From The Men Who Went To The Moon.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2022/12/30/the-time-a-ceo-jumped-into-the-everglades-to-save-passengers/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/