PUSHING THE ENVELOPE
by George Jonas
National Post
June 20, 2005

It happened on the night of October 14, 2004. Captain Jesse Rhodes, 31, and
First Officer Peter Cesarz, 23, were attempting to "deadstick" their
two-engine
aircraft on to a runway at the Jefferson City Missouri Airport. The pilots
had
managed to stretch their glide to within five kilometres of the approach
lights.
They had them in sight when they ran out of altitude, slamming their
Bombardier CL600-2B19 jet into a suburban home.

The crash attracted little media attention at the time. The Pinnacle
Airlines
regional jet had been on a ferry flight. The pilots perished, but the plane
carried no passengers and, miraculously, no one was hurt on the ground. The
incident didn't seem very newsworthy until last Monday, when a cockpit
recording was released by the National Transport Safety Board.

As soon as the NTSB made the flight deck conversation available, scathing
comments about the crew flooded the press, with the harshest coming from
the
pilots' peers. "It's beyond belief that a professional airline crew would
act in
that manner," one airline training manager was quoted as saying.

The 50-passenger jet glided toward Jefferson City airport that night
because of
a power-loss in flight. The jet's General Electrics CF34-3B1 engines had
quit 20
minutes earlier at Flight Level 410 (41,000 feet) Engine failure is rarely
due to
pilot error. However, the Bombardier had no business being at that
altitude;
41,000 feet was its service ceiling, a region normally explored by test
pilots.
Captain Rhodes and F/O Cesarz were test pilots only by inclination.

And ennui. The airmen had been bored.

Repositioning flights can be a yawn. Taking an empty jet from Little Rock,
Ark., to Minneapolis, Minn., is no challenge for two young men bursting
with
aeronautical energy. So the pilots first changed seats in mid-air (against
company regs, but how stodgy can you get) then decided that their assigned
altitude of Flight Level 330 (33,000 feet) was excruciatingly dull. The
handbook said their bird could do 410, so let's see it.

The crew's request for an excursion into the wild blue yonder aroused the
curiosity of a Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center controller.

"I've never seen you guys up at [410]," she said, before clearing the crew
to
climb.

"We don't have any passengers," Captain Rhodes replied. "So we decided to
have a little fun and come up here."

The controller's main job was to make sure planes don't run into each
other.
The rest wasn't her business, so she approved the pilots' request at 9:43
p.m.
"Man we can do it. Forty-one it," F/O Cesarz exclaimed happily on the way
up.

He was right. About nine minutes later, at approximately 9:52 p.m., Captain
Rhodes and his first officer were sitting on top of the world.

"There's four-one-oh, my man," F/O Cesarz declared. "Made it, man."

"This is the greatest thing, no way," replied his skipper.

The jubilant mood lasted all of two minutes and 20 seconds. At 9:54:19,
Captain Rhodes uttered a fateful word that often appears in cockpit
recordings
of airplane accidents: "Funny."

"Yeah, that's funny, we got up here, it won't stay up here," the skipper
observed. His co-pilot agreed. "Dude, it's effing losing it," the
23-year-old
Cesarz replied to his captain. His laugh had a nervous undertone.

The Bombardier lost airspeed first, then both of its engines, one in quick
succession after the other. Rhodes and Cesarz brought the plane under
control,
but couldn't restart the twin turbines. For the next 20 minutes the pilots
fought
for their lives in a sky that suddenly seemed far from limitless. Without
thrust,
they had no option but to try nursing their inefficient glider into some
airport.

They came close. Another minute and a half of flying time might have seen
the
chastened cowboys safely on a runway. But they didn't have a minute and a
half left. At around 10:15, the captain acknowledged defeat. "Can't make
it,"
Rhodes said to his junior partner. "We're gonna hit houses, dude."

There are no excuses for the crew. Playing with the equipment is foolish.
It's
just that critics in the industry seem hypocritical to me.

Aviation requires participants to be bold to the very limit of their
experience
and skill, if not beyond. Every skipper, private or commercial, who
launches
an aircraft after a major (or even not-so-major) modification or repair
volunteers as a test pilot. The industry couldn't keep planes in the air
without
them.

Aviation even has passengers participating in test flights. A recent case
occurred in February when a British Airways 747 lost one of its four
engines
on departure from Los Angeles. The captain had the choice of dumping fuel
and returning to LAX -- or continuing to London's Heathrow, via the polar
route, on three engines.

The book said the bird could do it, so the skipper of BA Flight 268 elected
to
fly on three engines over nearly 9,000 kilometres of Arctic and Atlantic
desolation. Flying low and slow, he managed to stretch his fuel as far as
Manchester, England, where he landed, without incident, though about 250
kilometres short of his destination.

Arguably, the British crew acted within the letter of the law when they
explored the outside of the Boeing 747-400's range-and-redundancy envelope,
with 351 paying "test pilots" behind them. But -- arguably -- so did
Captain
Rhodes and his co-pilot. Nothing in the regs prohibits taking an aircraft
to its
published service ceiling.

Both test-flights gained useful knowledge. We discovered the 747 flies near
its
book value -- and the CL600 doesn't (at least not this one).

Aviators are exploratory and curious by nature. The industry likes to
pretend
that the better the airmanship, the more circumspect and conservative, but
it's
not true. If it were, the best airmanship would be staying on the ground.
Aviation's real motto is: "Numbers count but chance rules." Pilots face the
death penalty for running out of luck. An additional scolding in the press
isn't
much of a deterrent.

© National Post 2005

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