My mother didn’t need to hear anything more. As soon as he left, she bundled my sister and me into our white Chevy station wagon and drove to the base commissary. I was not quite five years old, my sister not quite three. At the commissary, my mother filled two grocery carts with food, candles, matches, batteries, and propane for the camp stove.

My father flew fighter-interceptors, meaning that if Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons were headed toward the United States, it was his job to intercept and destroy them because a nuclear blast at altitude would cause less damage than a ground hit. I was still young enough to form a mental picture of him as Superman, flying fast into space to smash bombs with his fist, reeling back from explosions but then shaking himself upright and flying safely home. I was too young to ask what a nuclear blast would do to him and his plane, but even when I was old enough to ask I didn’t.

The Cuban Missile Crisis now seems like ancient history, but Cold War hostilities shaped my life and the lives of many others who grew up pricking with a constant sense of threat, which stern codes of silence demanded we never speak of. That silence was deepened in families like mine: An Air Force film for children taught us to be wary of questions, even from friendly teachers, when small bits of home life could, for a spy, add up to classified information. Such a code of silence now, in an age when everyone shares every feeling on Facebook, seems as surreal as a 9-megaton bomb. Such wariness seems absurd in an era when former missile sites have been converted into picnic spots.

The author’s father near the cockpit of his F4. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he flew an F102. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

That autumn day in 1962, my mother pulled our station wagon, brimming with provisions, into the carport. Our neighbor was outside, in red lipstick and black stretch pants, smoking a cigarette and watching her two sons play around a tree. She came to help with the groceries, and when my mother asked if her husband, too, had gotten a call, she laughed. She wasn’t worried, she said; it was all just posturing. And if not, she shrugged, we’d all be dead anyway. So she wasn’t preparing for anything except Halloween.

My mother packed our countertops with Saltines and Spam, cookies and peanut butter, canned soup and canned vegetables. In the basement, she made up sleeping bag-beds and filled Coleman jugs and spare canteens with water. That night, the president appeared on television and matter-of-factly explained that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles on Cuba, and that this crisis might lead to war.

We settled in to wait. For two weeks, my mother kept my sister and me close, doing her best to cheer us. She spoke to no one, because she couldn’t risk answering anyone’s questions; she couldn’t let on that my father was involved in the crisis or tell anyone where he was.

My parents had been married for eight years by then. That they came together is an American story in itself. My father was a boy from Ketchikan, Alaska, where his grandfather had been the sheriff, and my mother was a girl whose parents had traveled back and forth from Tampa to Detroit looking for work, and who’d won a scholarship to college in Texas. She met my father in Big Spring, at an Elks Club party where she taught him to dance to the song, “Put Your Little Foot.” He was tanned and tall—nearly too tall for cramped cockpits—with extraordinary peripheral vision and the controlled aggression and high tolerance for pain and fear the Air Force then selected for in their pilots. And he was a jokester, a man who subscribed to both Mad Magazine and Scientific American.

My mother was a willowy redhead, her flirtatious charm covering an iron resolve borne of a Depression-era childhood etched by poverty and hunger. When my father was gone, she kept the car in repair, the taxes paid, and the furnace going. Whenever she could, she helped other wives cope. And she was a crack shot—never would she choose preparing for Halloween over striving to survive.

That same day, inside a few military hangars at a small-town airport in the plains of Nebraska, my father was helping rack nuclear missiles onto fighter jets, his included. Then he flew to Homestead AFB, thirty miles south of Miami. As he entered Florida airspace, he said later, the view on his radar screen was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The entire state seemed to vibrate; so many planes were flying in, it looked like a beehive, swarming with nuclear-armed aircraft, all prepared to obliterate Cuba.

What was strange to me then was the sudden silence on the base. All my life, we’d lived less than a quarter mile from the flight line, so that my father could get to a plane in fifteen minutes. I’d grown up with the sound of engines in my ears, with the crack and thunder of a fighter breaking Mach I overhead. Each night I fell asleep to jet-whine, like a lullaby. But now, all was quiet. I slept badly. I was too young to understand the crisis, but I wasn’t too young to know that if the planes weren’t flying, something was wrong.

Not one of those nuclear-armed aircraft ever took off toward Cuba to unleash Armageddon. President Kennedy negotiated an end to hostilities by agreeing to remove American missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet Union removing their missiles from Cuba.

The author’s mother in the mid-1960s. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

The crisis ended, my father came home, and we all feasted on moon pies. Our house was an abundance of loving gratitude and relieved laughter. But throughout the days of waiting, my mother had worried over one big question: If nuclear war broke out, yet the base remained standing, would she share her food with our unprepared neighbor and her two sons? Or would she apologize, then close and lock our door?

It’s hard to imagine, now, the omnipresent dread shadowing those years before the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed treaties limiting missile development and deployment. If I tell you that when I was 11, I was required to take a six-week long class called “Civil Defense,” intended to teach us how to survive a nuclear strike, you might think that gruesome or even cruel. But my classmates and I, then stationed at Homestead, Florida, listened to our fathers’ planes taking off and landing every day around the clock. And that Civil Defense class gave me private answers to my some of my impossible-to-ask questions.

Our teacher handed out a one-inch thick workbook, full of maps and math problems. I studied the expected damage and fatality at various distances from the blast site. Some people would die in the fireball or the shock wave, some later from burns or catastrophic radiation exposure. Everyone within thirty miles would die or be seriously injured.

I learned about radiation poisoning: vomiting at the lowest level of exposure; bleeding from the mouth, skin, and kidneys at the next level; delirium, coma, then death. I learned how to triage who might survive and who definitely wouldn’t. My own exposure to fallout would depend on distance and wind conditions. Using the workbook’s math problems, I calculated how soon I’d have to find a shelter before exposure killed me, and then how long I’d have to stay there as radiation levels declined. It looked, to me, hopeless. Even if I survived a direct strike, normal winds could spread enough radioactive fallout fast enough that people hundreds of miles away could die after only an hour’s exposure. Our neighbor in Kansas City, I realized, had been right.

More than 50 years after the Missile Crisis, I cannot sleep without the sound of engines nearby. I keep a turbo fan right beside my pillow, and if I’m away from home an app on my phone plays engine noise for me. If I wake in the night, and all is silent, the thought still flares through my mind: Something is wrong.

The post A Half Century Later, the Cuban Missile Crisis Haunts My Dreams appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a captain for a worldwide charter company based in Southern California, I know that from a statistical standpoint, flying on a scheduled airline is safer than ever—and cheaper, too. But those cheap fares come with a price—and much of that price has been paid by those of us who fly for a living.

Airline passengers—at least those old enough to reminisce about the days when people dressed up for flights that offered good food and impeccable service—are well aware of how conditions in the passenger cabin have deteriorated over the years. What they don’t know is how much the situation in the cockpit has been degraded. Just like you, pilots are nostalgic for the days when well-dressed passengers and better working conditions were the norm rather than the exception.

And this is cause for major concern. Nobody enjoys a sullen passenger, but the person stuffed into that row 39 middle seat isn’t responsible for the safe conduct of the flight.

If you find air travel unpleasant—and let’s face it, most people do—remember that airline pilots constantly deal with its worst aspects: surly customers, mechanical issues, jet lag, overcrowded airport terminals, long lines getting to and from the runway, and a wide variety of weather issues. We’re circumnavigating thunderstorms in summer and making critical decisions about airframe icing potential in the winter.

The vocation involves long days. A three-pilot airline crew is allowed to be on duty for as long as 17 hours. In addition, this is not a 9-to-5 gig; work might start at 8 a.m. one day and 8 p.m. the next, and much of that time is spent strapped into a seat in a space not much larger than a phone booth. Professionalism reigns, but the atmosphere can be challenging: full of vibration, wind noise, turbulence, heat, and electronic sounds from avionics. There are lights, switches, and screens to watch over, radios to monitor, controllers to talk to, paperwork to be filled out, and fuel burn to gauge. We try to find the altitude with the smoothest air for our passengers and, as Sinatra crooned, “get them to the church on time.”

That said, many aviators love flying so much that they want to do it when they’re off work. You’ll find lots of commercial pilots hanging out at smaller airports for fun. Can you imagine going to the office on your day off because you enjoyed your job that much? It takes a lot to beat that kind of passion out of a person, but the airline industry can do it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are a few common-sense changes that could make the work of flying a scheduled airline more humane—and make passengers safer, too.

One fact of airline life that often amazes civilians: The captain is not always the oldest or even the most experienced pilot onboard. A pilot’s status with the airline is based exclusively on his or her seniority with the company. As long as your conduct isn’t bad enough to get you fired, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best pilot at the airline or the worst.

Promotion from first officer to captain is based solely on your date of hire with that specific airline. You could be at the top of the seniority list at one airline, but if you move to another company, you start out at the very bottom. It makes no difference if you quit voluntarily, were furloughed, or were laid off due to a merger, bankruptcy, or liquidation of your old company. You are welcomed aboard at NewCo with the worst pay and worst schedule, flying the worst equipment to the worst destinations. As one industry veteran put it, “It’s like a hospital with a staffing problem that refuses to hire experienced doctors unless they start out as an intern, even if they happened to be an experienced surgeon from another hospital with 30 years’ experience.”

The unions are heavily entrenched at most airlines, so eliminating this system would be difficult. But at the very least, why not combine the seniority lists of all airlines into one master list? This would allow pilots to move between airlines and maintain a relative career position. It’s an easy way to bring some stability to an unstable industry.

It also would reduce the strain on the many pilots who must commute by air to their jobs because they live in a different city than the one where they’re based.
What’s the big deal about such commuting? It’s another 3,000 miles of travel each way for a surprisingly large number of pilots who live on one coast and have a job on the other, in part because of those seniority lists. Whether the airline has closed a hub or the pilot is changing aircraft, it’s less disruptive than switching airlines or uprooting the whole family. From what I’ve seen, such commuting does more than just about anything else to destroy a pilot’s quality of life. It dramatically raises stress and fatigue levels, and it’s so unnecessary. A master list would make it easier for pilots to switch jobs so they could fly routes closer to where they live.

Flying is a stressful job already. Pilots undergo periodic medical exams, and many feel that this aeromedical certification system failed us badly in the Germanwings incident. I agree. But rather than condemn the system for failing to weed out a suicidal pilot, I fault it for creating an atmosphere where an individual with mental health issues was motivated to hide his problem for fear of losing his career.

The thing most likely to head off a future tragedy isn’t more federal rulemaking, but rather a hazard-free path for pilots to get help without putting their livelihoods on the line. There are already programs in place that encourage pilots to seek help for mental health and other issues. One of those is called Project Wingman, a collaboration between one airline and the pilots’ union that established a 24/7 confidential emergency mental health hotline for pilots to report anonymously either their own or their fellow crew members’ mental health issues.

My company participates in a program called ASAP, which encourages voluntary reporting of safety issues and events that come to the attention of pilots. Employees voluntarily report safety issues even though they may involve a regulatory violation, and in exchange both the FAA and the employer waive any sanctions or enforcement. It’s a win-win, and it doesn’t require thousands of pages of rules (or dollars).

Human factors outpace mechanical failure as the root cause of accidents by a ratio of nearly nine to one. If the day ever comes when a pilot-less airliner takes to the sky, humans will still be a prime part of the equation: programming the systems, flying remotely, servicing the aircraft, and swinging wrenches to keep it airworthy.

What will we reminisce about then?

The post Can We Prevent the Next Germanwings Crash? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.