The Captains Airline: Pushing Back From The Brink

4.3/5 ( ratings)

SYNOPSIS The Captains? Airline: Pushing Back From The Brink Following a tragic accident during their triumphant homecoming in 1983, the entire Blue Angels team was disbanded and Naval Aviator Brad Morehouse has found himself relegated to the flight engineer seat of a commercial 727. From the lowest notch on the totem pole he watches Omega Airlines spiral downward as one crew blunder after another threatens to force the once proud captains' airlines into extinction. Leveraging his expertise on high performance teams, Omega selects Brad to be a member of a blue-ribbon committee tasked to design a state-of-the-art Crew Resource Management pilot training program. For the airline to survive, crew performance must improve. Yet the activities of that committee expose actual underlying dynamics of numerous hair-raising calamities and readers will encounter authentic bristling accounts of airplanes falling from the sky, pilots surviving accidents, haunting individual failure, and teams admirably conquering impending disaster. And Brad wrestles with his own demons; marital deceit, childhood tragedy, and professional failure, to emerge as Omega's white knight. Get a look at the macho mind-set of previous-generation pilots, the sizzle of airline romance, the rollicking good humor of capable leaders, and the grit of effective teams. See how everyday people have prepared to perform like Sully and his highly skilled crew when USAIR flight 1549 landed safely on the Hudson River in January, 2009. Such heroics were not the norm in the airline industry several decades ago. In 1978 a United Airlines DC-8 crashed in Portland, Oregon because the captain simply could not hear . . . that is "not comprehend" the flight engineer's warning about low fuel quantity. From that point forward the FAA has required all major airlines to conduct special crew training in communication and effective interaction and it worked. The success of CRM has resonated throughout the airline industry, and Blue Angel Brad Morehouse exemplifies the best of those principles as he wrestles a crippled jet in the skies of California.