”I`ll tell you, there was any number of times, it hurt me so bad I wish the plane would have hit the ground. I`ll say that. But it only would have been better for me. It wouldn`t have been better for the other 88 people on the airplane, so that`s a selfish thought. But I just thought, God, it would have been so much better for me if the damn thing would have crashed.”
-Harvey ”Hoot” Gibson
The rancor in his voice burns off at the sight of a corn crib that has turned to gray in the futile fight against the Illinois winter. The news stories that have defined his life for the past dozen years, the accusations that he jeopardized other people`s lives for the sake of his own kicks in the cockpit come to a halt at a narrow road with a corn field on one side and a white frame house on the other.
He isn`t thinking about TWA Flight 841 now, which is exceptional. By his own admission, ”It`s what occupies my mind totally, all the time, like an albatross.” Instead he looks at the corn field, flat as a board, of course, except for the silver tip of a silo in the silky sky, and floats back in time. He is 5 years old, maybe 4. The time is 1938, maybe 1939. He is a farmer`s boy, Harvey Glenn Gibson, soon to be called ”Hoot” because of his uncanny portrayal of an owl in the school play, the son of Harvey and Arlene Gibson.
He is on the porch when he hears the sound, up close and powerful. He starts running ”like hell” to that field and there it is, a barnstormer painting spins and loops across the sky.
Pretty soon the road is filled with cars, 20 or 30 of them.
Because the barnstormer has landed on the Gibson farm, the little boy is offered a free ride.
He sits on the lap of the 1st-grade teacher; she is scared to death. He thinks this is even better than doing loop-the-loops on the schoolyard swing. ”We went up there and did all these loops and spins and everything,” he says, more than 50 years later. ”I thought that was pretty neat. He really got my attention. I liked those air-planes.”
He moves to the lawn in front of the house. He remembers lying on the grass at nightfall when he was a boy, watching those old Ford tri-motors grope across the endless sky. ”I had no idea how big the world was at that time. I read about all these different countries in school. I thought these planes were going to all the different places in the world. I didn`t know they were going to Keokuk.”
He remembers Thel Campbell, the salt-of-the-earth former military instructor who taught him to fly in nearby Earlville. And he remembers the first time he soloed, at 14, after Campbell bet the local dentist he could get the Gibson kid up by himself in less than two hours of lessons. It took an hour and 45 minutes.
”He asked me if I was ready and I said, `Yup.` I didn`t know enough to be scared back then. I was yelling and screaming, just singing and everything, flying around. It was a pretty good feeling, no one else in there with me.”
He remembers a way of life that was so sweet and simple, so unfettered by the anger and torment that would shape his later years, it seems hard to imagine that it happened at all.
”I went a long way, didn`t I?” he says. ”I`m just not sure where I went.”
Storybook career
When Hoot Gibson slipped into the captain`s seat of TWA Flight 841 from New York to Minneapolis on April 4, 1979, he had logged nearly 16,000 hours of flight time. With 82 passengers and seven crew members on board, it was the kind of trip he could handle in his sleep. The takeoff at 8:25 p.m. was routine. So was the climb to 39,000 feet in the clear night air over Michigan. All went as planned.
To that point his career had been a wonderful storybook, from the skies above eastern Illinois to the skies above the world. ”Being a (commercial)
pilot was always a dream,” says Gibson, now 56. ”I thought if nothing else, I could always be a cropduster.” As a high school freshman he and his family moved from Rollo to Earlville, a town of 1,100 about 75 miles west of Chicago. By his own admission, he rarely allowed academics to interfere with high school, making the prospect of getting out of town as dim as ever.
At 18, he married his high school sweetheart and they started a family. He spent two years in the Marine Corps, stationed in such exotic places as Japan and Hawaii, and returned to Earlville. He worked there at Marathon Electric, making electric motors and offering flight instruction on the side. After a divorce and a move to Chicago, he worked at Midway Airport as an air- traffic controller. He had several jobs flying for charter operations, and in 1963 joined TWA as a cockpit engineer in charge of monitoring the mechanical systems of the aircraft.
Sixteen years later, his life was the embodiment of professional success. He was a Las Vegas-based TWA captain making $70,000 a year. His career as a flier was going exceptionally well. There seemed little that could possibly change it.
Until 9:47 p.m. that April night as Flight 841 neared Saginaw.
That was the moment at which Gibson heard a slight buzz and saw the control wheel of the plane turn slowly to the left, about 10 degrees. The plane was turning to the right and the autopilot was trying to correct it. The buzz continued, and the plane, a Boeing 727 built in 1965, started to shake, continuing a roll to the right. Gibson disconnected the autopilot. He grabbed the wheel and turned it all the way to his left with both hands. No response. He punched down on the rudder pedal with his foot all the way to the left. No response. He turned to his co-pilot, Scott Kennedy, and uttered one simple sentence:
”This airplane`s going over.”
The plane did a complete roll, then another before going into a spiral dive at 630 miles per hour. The forces of gravity increased with each foot of altitude the plane lost, pinning passengers to their seats. They reached for the oxygen masks that had popped out, only to find they could not move their arms. So strong was the pull of gravity, passengers could not hear their own screams.
Inside the cockpit, flight engineer Gary Banks whispered to himself:
”It`s all over. I wonder what it`s going to feel like to hit the ground.”
But the inevitable didn`t happen. Instead, a last-ditch decision by Gibson to drop the landing gear slowed the plane enough to regain control of the aircraft and prevent it from crashing.
Flight 841 fell from 39,000 feet to 5,000 feet in 44 seconds, the longest recorded dive by a commercial jet in which the plane did not crash. Two more seconds and the aircraft would have hit the ground.
When Gibson brought it in for an emergency landing at Detroit Metro Airport on badly damaged landing gear, he received an ovation from the passengers. Newspapers and TV stations all over the country reported on what happened, and Gibson was something of a hero.
But not for long.
It was discovered that the cockpit voice recorder had been erased, fueling suspicion that the three-man crew of Flight 841 had something to hide. Then there was the matter of Gibson`s private lifestyle.
In the air, Gibson had the reputation of being a by-the-book aviator. Away from the job, however, he had the image of a swashbuckling cockpit cowboy, an accomplished acrobatic pilot leading the fast-track life of a bachelor in Las Vegas.
”I was just flamboyant enough, had enough of a crazy reputation that I fit the mold of screwing around with the airplane,” he says. ”The reputation carried over from racing cars and motorcycles and that type of stuff.”
Unbearable situation
In 1981, after a two-year investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the dive had been caused by deliberate and
unauthorized actions of the crew. Board investigators theorized that the crew, convinced that the performance of the plane would improve with increased wing span, used cockpit circuit breakers to get the flaps on the trailing edge of the wings to extend in mid-flight. But the wrong circuit breaker was pushed, the theory went, triggering a series of unanticipated mishaps that resulted in loss of control of the aircraft.
Gibson protested the decision. Insisting that he`d done nothing wrong, he wrote to the safety board saying he was willing to take a lie-detector test. The two other members of the Flight 841 crew also described the circuit breaker theory as outlandish. Gibson questioned the integrity of the investigative process, contending that the board had relied heavily on work done by the manufacturer, Boeing, to determine the airworthiness of its aircraft.
Despite the investigation, Gibson continued to fly. And because the safety board finding of wrongdoing in the case was based largely on circumstantial evidence, no disciplinary action was taken against him by either the Federal Aviation Administration or TWA.
But Gibson`s situation within the flying industry became unbearable. On several occasions colleagues challenged him, saying that despite his claims of innocence, they knew he`d been fiddling around. ”Hey, man, you may have fooled everybody else but you didn`t fool me,” the co-pilot of a 747 said to him in the cockpit during one flight. ”I know you did it.” At hotel bars during layovers, at cocktail parties and training seminars, it was more of the same.
Flight attendants were no more charitable. Gibson was captaining an L-1011 out of O`Hare International Airport one day in the early `80s when a flight attendant learned he was piloting the plane and demanded to be taken back to the gate. It was pretty much the same on an L-1011 flight out of Los Angeles. After the plane had leveled out to cruise, he was walking back to the galley when a flight attendant recognized him and said loudly enough for several passengers to hear: ”If I had known you were flying this airplane, I would have gotten on the public address system and told the passengers that I recommend they follow me off the airplane.”
Before the TWA incident, Gibson had been something of a pied piper for aviation, and one of his greatest pleasures in Las Vegas was teaching teenagers how to fly. After the incident, several of those he had instructed wanted nothing to do with him. They tore Gibson`s name from their logbooks so there would be no proof he`d ever taught them.
”For a long time he was just dissolved,” says Landon Dowdey, a Washington lawyer who represented Gibson in several legal attempts to clear his name and became a close friend. ”He went through years of nobody saying anything other than, `There goes that kook.` ”
In 1981 Gibson filed suit in federal court against Boeing and the safety board on the grounds of libel and violations of his privacy. He ran up tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs. But his lawsuit was dismissed, the court declaring that neither Boeing nor the board had shown actual malice in its dealings with Gibson, a finding of malice being a necessary ingredient in any successful libel suit. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
Gibson left the U.S. and moved to Costa Rica at the end of 1979 to get away from the rumors and innuendo. In 1983 he developed a bleeding ulcer that required hospitalization in Las Vegas, and he was forced to take a three-year medical leave from his TWA job. He returned to TWA, advancing to 747 captain before retiring in 1989.
Gibson continues to live in Costa Rica and is hoping to commercially develop a piece of beach property he owns there. But much of his life since retirement has been related to Flight 841, poring over thousands of pages of transcripts and depositions for holes and inconsistencies in the government`s investigation of the incident.
There were many who told him to forget the whole thing and get on with his life. They didn`t see what good it would do trying to fight it, and they saw the toll it was taking on him, particularly after he went on medical leave and was no longer commercially flying.
”We worried about his health and his mental state,” says his brother Ron, an associate superintendent in the Naperville school district. ”Flying was such an integral part of his being. Without that, what purpose would he have?”
But Ron Gibson also saw in his older brother the same stubborn pride that had pushed him to fly in Earlville at a time when his grandfather thought he was crazy and his parents wondered when he would go out and learn a real trade.
”It`s become a mission,” said Ron Gibson of his brother`s fight to clear his name. ”He`s never, ever given up.”
After 12 years, the fight may finally be paying off.
New evidence
Last October, the Air Line Pilots Association, citing new evidence, asked the safety board to reopen the case and conclude that the dive had been caused by a mechanical malfunction. According to an affidavit filed with that petition, the same plane that Gibson flew that night in April 1979 had been taken on a test flight by TWA two years earlier because of suspected problems with the plane`s autopilot. Despite the safety board investigation, and lengthy civil litigation, TWA had never disclosed the test flight. The pilots union discovered it only by coincidence.
During that test, the autopilot appeared to have been disconnected while actually remaining engaged. Subsequently, according to the affidavit, the plane became extremely difficult to fly and was forced to return to Kansas City.
Gibson now believes the same thing happened to him during Flight 841:
When the plane began its turn to the right, the autopilot did not properly disconnect but instead caused the plane`s controls to jam. Boeing insists that nothing is wrong with the autopilot system of the 727. But the Air Line Pilots Association, as a result of publicity surrounding the petition, said last month that it can now document nine similar instances of control problems on 727s because of false autopilot disconnections.
The petition is in the hands of the safety board, and it could be years before any decision is made to reopen the matter. But Gibson, who spent $10,000 during a recent seven-month stay in Washington preparing documents in the case, is defiant.
”Now I`m in the driver`s seat for the first time,” he said. ”Nobody can hurt me, not only because I`ve never done anything wrong. They can`t do any more to me than they`ve already done.
”I`m in a position where the truth is beginning to come out, and there`s a lot more to come out. I honestly think someone is liable to get killed. Before the day is over today, you could have two airplanes crash.”
Back to Earlville
The center table of the Earlville Cafe is in full session when Hoot Gibson walks in. Patrons look up from their quiet chatter. Broad smiles break out across weathered faces, and they all say, ”Hoot Gibson!” as if giving the answer to a trivia question.
They know about Flight 841, and they aren`t surprised that Gibson has fought so hard, so long, to clear his name. He may have become a high-profile flyboy who doesn`t come back to town very often, but he is still one of them. As 49-year-old Gale Smith puts it, ”It`s hard to kick a farmer and keep his face in the mud.”
All over town the reaction is the same, because in Gibson`s darkest moments, he could always come back to Earlville.
”If you need anyone to stand and holler for you, we will,” says Donna Schrecengost, as she rises from the planting of spring flowers in front of her home nearby to give him a hug.
Gibson holds a special place in the heart of Earlville, and it isn`t because he was a choir boy in his youth. Schrecengost, who graduated from Earlville High School with Gibson in 1952, remembers the time he hung by his legs from a light pole on a bet.
”People here know him so well and knew that he was a devil on wheels,”
she says. ”But they also know he isn`t going to put the lives of all those people at risk for a thrill.”
Gibson drives by the old high school, remembering the time he snuck a few barnyard animals in one night so they could get a taste of the academic life. He stops by the old Clearview Airport with its rotted-out hangar and caving roof. Then he goes over to the farm house of an old boyhood flying friend named Nick Sellers.
”Hoot Gibson!” Sellers cries. He`s wearing a rain hat like the one Gilligan used to wear on TV, and when he takes it off he reveals a bald dome that seems to stretch from Earlville to the Iowa line. He has the smile of a little boy, particularly when Gibson coaxes him to take a spin in the little one-seater he keeps hidden, like a fine bottle of wine, in the barn behind a spattered tarpaulin.
The plane, a Baby Great Lakes Sellers built by hand, is 16 feet long and about 4 feet high. Watching Sellers maneuver his 6-2, 230-pound frame into the seat conjures an image of trying to get excess toothpaste back into the tube. He takes off from a field behind the barn into the blue haze, the drone loud enough to drown out a tractor working the land. He flies low to the ground, then does slow circles on the sky.
”It`s like driving off the road,” says Gibson as he stands and watches. ”You can go wherever you want.”
Sellers is up for only a few minutes, but when he taxis back toward the barn the grin is radiant. ”It flies!” he says with a laugh.
”It looked great!” yells Gibson. ”It looked great!”
On the way to the barn, the two trade stories about the good old days of flying. Like everything else, they quickly conclude, it isn`t the same now.
”Nobody flies anymore,” Sellers says. ”It used to be, somebody was always dropping in on you.” But he believes that he and Gibson have been among the lucky ones.
”I love flying,” says Sellers, still glowing, still exhilarated. Then he looks over at his friend, who 40 years earlier sailed over these same flatlands of corn and hay and soybean as if he`d been born up there. And he instinctively realizes that whatever was said about Hoot Gibson, no one could ever take that from him.
”And I know Hoot does too.”
