Read Online Down Around Midnight by Robert Sabbag - Free Book Online

have required waivers) and stated that he had never been denied an airman’s medical certificate. At the time, he had been on daily medication for over a decade for both hypertension and gout—“the AME in Hyannis denied knowledge of either drug”—and according to his autopsy had suffered a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, within the previous five years.
    A U.S. Navy pathologist testified at the NTSB hearing held three months after the crash that in view of Parmenter’s age and medical history, the pilot should have been found “unfit for flying duty.” The board characterized the “results of repeated evaluations” by Farrish as “equivocal medically.” Farrish did not answer a subpoena to testify. A few years later, Cape Cod Hospital appointed him chief of cardiology. He died in 1994.
    Among his fellow Air New England pilots, Parmenter had a reputation for not always flying by the book. A majority of those interviewed told the NTSB that he had “disregarded checklists and crew coordination when they had flown with him.” This is what is meant in the report by “his personal flying habits.”
    There is a call-and-response protocol between pilot and copilot required on all instrument landings. It consists of altitude, degree, and airspeed callouts, culminating in a “no contact /go around” exchange if the runway is not in sight. The copilot testified that on approach to Barnstable that night, he made all the required callouts except the “no contact” call and Parmenter did not acknowledge any of them. This is “the lack of crew coordination practices and procedures” mentioned in the report.
    It was unlikely that the copilot, with only two months on the job, still on probation, and subject to termination without cause, would engage in corrective counseling with the number-three man in the company. He could have taken control of the airplane at any point, of course, and presumably would have if he had suspected trouble, but he had been flying all day with a superior known rarely to “acknowledge checklist items or other callouts from any first officer,” according to the report, and the lack of such acknowledgment was not an indication that anything was wrong. By the time they hit decision height, “the possibility that [he] could have successfully assumed control of the aircraft [was] extremely remote.” He told the board he never saw the ground before the airplane crashed.
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    Wendy Boepple, working at the time as a nurse in Burlington, Vermont, received news of the crash early that Monday morning, informed of the tragedy in a phone call from the emergency room at Cape Cod Hospital. It was her second wedding anniversary. She flew from Burlington to Boston on a Delta Airlines pass, a perk to which she was entitled as the daughter of a Delta pilot, and at Logan Airport made her way to the Air New England counter, only to be told that all of its flights to Hyannis were booked.
    â€œI was very naive,” she told me.
    It never occurred to her, in what she views today as her “immaturity,” to exert any of the leverage implicit in the purpose of her trip. Had she simply said who she was and why she was traveling, the airline undoubtedly would have accommodated her. Instead, she ended up taking a bus.
    Her two-hour ride to the Cape was made surprisingly memorable by a reunion of sorts. She found herself sitting next to Eleanor Klimm, whom she had known more formally as Mrs. Klimm when the older woman was her fifth-grade teacher at Hyannis West Elementary. The two passengers, getting acquainted, or reacquainted, talked all the way to Hyannis, making the best of a journey that both had reason to wish were unnecessary. Mrs. Klimm, Wendy was saddened to learn, was suffering from cancer, and had traveled to Boston for medical treatment. When she asked why Wendy was making the trip to the Cape, Wendy