The Federal Aviation Administration, which governs such matters, didn’t agree. The FAA grounded both pilots, pending an investigation.
It didn’t help the pilots’ cause any, nor the comfort of airline passengers, when one of them told the Associated Press, “I can tell you that airplanes lose contact with the ground people all the time. It happens. Sometimes they get together right away, sometimes it takes awhile before one or the other notice that they are not in contact.”
All of this took me back 64 years, when my Navy squadron was pulled out of dive bombers and assigned to four-engine transports, flying mostly out of Okinawa where the major fighting was taking place.
Our preparation for this switch was a few weeks of multi-engine instrument flying. The rest we learned on the job, reflecting the conviction that a Navy pilot with 1,500 hours in the air could fly any plane, including landings and take-offs, to which he was assigned.
On the night that I remember so vividly, we were a crew of two pilots, a navigator and a radio operator flying more than a hundred wounded Marines in double-deck bunk beds from Okinawa to hospitals in Hawaii.
Our departure was delayed by a Japanese trick our ground forces had never before encountered: Two Japanese light bombers simply joined our landing pattern. The audacity of it so startled our troops that the first plane got down before they realized what was happening and shot down the second while it was still airborne.
But by then, a covey of suicide troops had burst out of the belly of the first plane and were running about our air field attacking grounded planes and anyone who got in the way. Our hospital plane was partly loaded and they missed it, thank God, but our departure for Hawaii was delayed until the attackers were all killed and order restored.
