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Beebe got on the radio: “Portland tower, United 173 heavy, mayday. We’re — the engines are flaming out. We’re going down. We’re not going to be able to make the airport.” That was the last radio transmission from Flight 173. Captain and crew had other things to worry about. The big airliner was left ghosting through the air over Portland, a high-speed glider, its pilots desperately scanning the light-strewn cityscape below for a safe place to land ... or crash. And, because it was dark, the best they could do was aim for a dark spot below, and hope any trees weren’t too big. As it turned out, they probably couldn’t have picked a better spot.
The front page of the Portland Oregonian on the morning after the plane crash was entirely devoted to coverage of the event. (Image: Oregonian)THE FINAL DEATH toll in the ensuing crash-landing was 10: eight passengers and two crew members — flight engineer Mendenhall and senior flight attendant Joan Wheeler. Another 23 passengers and crew members were seriously injured, including Capt. McBroom. And 156 passengers and crew members were unharmed or suffered injuries too minor to require treatment. The crashing airplane snapped off trees, tore out power lines and flattened two houses on the ground. Both houses were vacant and dark. It’s interesting to contemplate that if one of the vacant houses had had its porchlight left on, McBroom would probably have picked a different place to land, and the death toll might have been different — probably higher, possibly much higher. Investigators determined that the initial problem was a maintenance one — the one that caused the loud landing gear. Ironically, the landing gear was just fine, locked in place and ready for service; but, by flying around for an hour troubleshooting it, the crew had lost track of time and fuel, and had come up about five minutes short on both. The other lesson that investigators took from the crash was a big one, and it has unquestionably saved lives in the years since this crash — probably hundreds of them: The lesson was that commercial jetliners are too complicated to be flown according to a strict chain-of-command hierarchy, in which the pilot barks orders and information only flows back to him if he asks for it. Instead, a more collaborative team approach was needed, so that one person’s momentary weakness or distraction would not be deferred to by members of the team who happened to be in a position to know better. The result was an initiative called Crew Resource Management, or CRM, developed several months after the crash by NASA psychologist John Lauber, who had extensively studied cockpit communication under even more complicated flight conditions. The most important element of CRM is a recognized way for authority to be respectfully questioned. CRM was adopted by United in 1981, and other airlines quickly followed suit. By the mid-1990s its benefits were so obvious — especially in contrast with certain other countries that at that time were still following the old model — that the FAA made it mandatory. (Somewhat controversially, Malcolm Gladwell actually cited and described the Flight 173 crash and the ensuing adoption of CRM in his wildly successful book Outliers, in which he compared the accident rates for American and Korean airlines and attributed the lower accident rate among U.S. planes to CRM.) So the family members of the 10 victims of the Flight 173 crash have that much consolation for their loss: their loved ones’ deaths on that winter night continue to save uncountable others from a similar fate.
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Background photo is a hand-tinted postcard view of Yaquina Head Lighthouse, from a linen-stock postcard printed in around 1920.
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