Kurt Heidemann:
Today's SWAPA Number is 1380. That's the Southwest flight number that had an uncontained engine failure with an emergency landing into Philadelphia five years ago today on April 17th, 2018.
Amy Robinson:
It was a difficult day for our airline, our passengers, and the crew.
Kurt Heidemann:
So on the anniversary of that date, on today's show, we talk with Houston Captain Darren Ellisor, who was the FO on Flight 1380, about what happened that day, the investigation afterwards, and what lessons can be learned from the incident.
I'm Kurt Heidemann.
Amy Robinson:
And I'm Amy Robinson, and here's our interview with Darren.
So Darren, welcome to the show, first of all, and can you go ahead and kind of give us an overview of what happened that day?
Darren Ellisor:
Sure. We were climbing out of LaGuardia on our way to Dallas. Full plane, full of gas. We're about 18 minutes in and we're climbing through 32 5 and on our way up to 38 when pretty much everything happened at once with the engine exploded, very loud constant vibration that was just overpowering. The plane rolled off to the left, the autopilot clicked off and the autopilot warning horn went off, and the air was sucked out of our lungs and we had the altitude warning horn going off at the same time. So all of that happening at once was very disorienting when you're just doing your everyday flight and then boom, all of that happens. It was very disorienting. So, it was my turn to fly so I grabbed the yoke, which was already rolled off the left and stopped the roll. We got our oxygen masks on and tried to establish communications, which was very difficult considering all of the noise and the vibration, which was just a very severe vibration. And then we maintain aircraft control and try to handle the situation.
It was very chaotic for the first two minutes, just everything all at once, trying to bring yourself as we talk about in training, trying to bring yourself back into the green. And I don't think we were ever able to get back in the green. Maybe a lighter shade of red, but it was very difficult in those first two minutes. But I knew that my job was just to maintain aircraft control, and that's what I tried to do for that first minute or two. We talked to air traffic control. We told them we wanted to go to Philadelphia. We made the turn and the plane didn't handle how I expected it to it. In fact, when I made the left hand turn to Philadelphia, I got a bank angle warning because I went up to I think 35 degrees of bank. I thought I was just a bad pilot. I thought I was messing things up and I wouldn't find out till later that the entire leading edge of the left wing was shredded with huge holes from shrapnel, which was affecting our lift and increasing our drag. And so the plane was just not handling the way we would think in a normal single engine situation.
So, handling all these things at once was difficult. Trying to figure out, okay, which checklist are we going to run? And talking with ATC was chaotic. And then as we started to get closer down into the pattern in a downwind, we still hadn't heard from the flight attendants. At that point, Tammy Jo had taken over flying. I was trying to get ahold of the flight attendants and couldn't, and it had been several minutes, so I was started to get worried. I was starting to think we may have had an Aloha Airlines situation, like maybe the whole top has popped off and my crew is gone. And I was actually to the point where I was going to unbuckle and go peek through the peephole to see what was going on back there. And finally one of the flight attendants called up and told us that a window had gone out and that a passenger had gone out the window.
And whatever situational awareness we had gained in those minutes before was completely lost. We went straight back into the red because you don't expect to get a call that a passenger is out of the plane. So at that point we had planned on doing a long final. We had planned on doing at least a 20 mile final coming back into Philadelphia, landing to the west. But luckily it was a VFR day, clear in a million, and the runway was right there off the right wing and we made the decision to turn in. So we started our base turn and I had a lot of things to do. I had to kind of prioritize what I needed to do to get Tammy Jo set up for the approach. And the controller originally told us that we were going to land on two seven right, and then he corrected himself and said, "No, two seven left." Well, my brain latched onto two seven right, so I had all of the frequencies dialed up for two seven right, which is the normal landing runway in Philadelphia.
Luckily, Tammy Jo heard him correct himself and she rolled out on the appropriate runway, which was two seven left. Unfortunately, my mistake led us to get some glide slope warnings, which I switched the frequency to change it out. So that stopped, but it was something that ... an additive thing because we're right there in the moment, but luckily it was clear in a million that day and the runways were right there and she made a great approach in landing. It's a very long runway, so we saw that the firetrucks were set up way down at the end of the runway on a parallel taxi way. So we actually had to add power to get down to that high speed turnoff because we wanted to get to a point where we could get our injured passenger medical help as fast as possible.
So we turned off on the high speed, pulled up right in front of the trucks. Tammy Jo and I had not talked about it, about whether we were going to evacuate or not. So I asked her. She said, "No, we're not going to evacuate." So before she stopped, I made a PA. It's not an FO job, but I did it anyway. I just made a quick PA that we need to remain seated, remain seated, remain seated, since we had not talked to the flight attendants yet about what we were going to do and I didn't want a panicked passenger or flight attendant to pop a slide because then all chaos breaks loose and somebody's going to get hurt. But they did a great job back there. The flight attendants remain calm, the passengers were calm at that point and we were able to get in touch with the fire chief and get them inside the plane and get our passenger taken care of.
Kurt Heidemann:
And so you came to stop there on the high speed, basically. Is that where you exited and stopped?
Darren Ellisor:
Yes, yes. We stopped on the high speed and shut down there.
Kurt Heidemann:
Was it at all like we do in the sim? I mean, it always seems like in the sim it's just craziness and always a surprise. You obviously knew that you had to do something and you said you discussed it with Tammy Jo, but did it feel like chaos once you came to a stop or did you finally start to get a sense of relief?
Darren Ellisor:
It was still kind of a controlled chaos. Everybody was in control. There was no panic in the back of the airplane, so it was like in the sim, but you're still in the red. In the sim, it can't really duplicate that. There's the fog of war and we're still trying to communicate with people and there's always small problems that pop up. Talking with the fire chief, talking about which door they wanted to come in to get our injured passenger, and he said he wanted to come in R1, which is not something we normally talk about and teach at Southwest Airlines. R1 is the forward galley service door. And we as pilots and as and flight attendants, we talk about, "Well, that's the forward galley service door." Well, a fire chief doesn't talk like that and they don't anywhere because that's ICAO standards is call that door R1. You have R1, R2, R3, you can have R4 or 5 if you're on a really big plane. Talking to them and the lingo that they needed to talk about was difficult there at the very beginning.
Amy Robinson:
So once you knew that the passengers were secure and the airplane was all okay, did you know what to do next? Were you prepared for what to do next?
Darren Ellisor:
I was prepared. Actually, this was my second accident at Southwest Airlines. Not a lot of people know that. There was one couple years ago when I was a first officer in Detroit. We were de-icing, and luckily we had the parking brake set and the engines off while we were de-icing. An American taxied into our tail and pretty much shaved the tail off. So that was my first voyage into the NTSB FAA accident world and seeing what the response is from SWAPA, from the Company, from the NTSB and how you need to handle the aftermath. So I actually had a little bit of experience going into 1380 on what to do. And one of the first things I did was pulled out my accident card that I keep in my flight bag that SWAPA gives to all the pilots that tells you what you need to do. You know, don't make any statements. Pull the cockpit voice recorder circuit breaker. Call dispatch, call SWAPA safety, take care of your crew. I guess I've kind of memorized it since I've had a few of these things.
Kurt Heidemann:
And so all those were good steps. Anything on that list now that you're one of the pros, I guess, at it that isn't on the list that you'd recommend people do or is there anything else that kind of stands out?
Darren Ellisor:
Well, one thing that kind of stands out is the cockpit voice recorder circuit breaker and where it's located. I talked with SWAPA about this afterwards. They said on different planes, it's in different locations. Instead of putting exactly the panel number, the row and the number, they said different planes have it in different places so they can't put a specific location. I'd guess maybe something on there to say, look, it's over the captain's left shoulder, and make sure you read exactly what it says. It says voice recorder on it. And we actually pulled the wrong circuit breaker. We pulled the flight data recorder circuit breaker that day, and that's just a mess-up that we had. You know, we weren't perfect that day. We have lots of lessons learned. Luckily when the one maintenance guy in Philadelphia was there, he removed power from the airplane an hour, hour and a half later. That shut off the cockpit voice recorder. We were about five minutes or so away from the two-hour tape looping over itself and erasing the event. So it's really important that you find, identify the exact proper circuit breaker and get that one pulled.
Amy Robinson:
When did you first meet with the NTSB or the authorities? When did they first reach out to you?
Darren Ellisor:
The NTSB, they were pretty much hands off with us until the next day. That was different than my first accident in Detroit where they wanted to talk that first day. But for this one, they got in touch with the Company, which then got in touch with us at the hotel and we had a couple of hours to prepare with SWAPA lawyers. And then they wanted to talk with us in the afternoon in Philadelphia at a hotel conference room and do our formal interviews.
Kurt Heidemann:
Before the NTSB, right there on the ground in Philadelphia, were the police there? Were they talking to you? Did you have to make statements or anything like that?
Darren Ellisor:
Yeah, we did actually. The FBI came on board briefly. He was on relatively quickly. A guy in a suit identified himself, asked if this was terrorism. I told him that I'm not supposed to make any statements, but I knew that it wasn't terrorism. So I told him it wasn't and then he was gone. So it's important for our pilots to know you shouldn't be making any statements to anybody in an official capacity until you've had a chance to talk with your reps and get back into the green so that you don't say anything that you're not supposed to. And that's what the SWAPA card says for you to do. Right then at the time we had fire crews, EMTs. The EMTs wanted to check us out. They asked us if we had any injuries and if we wanted to go to the hospital. We said no. And they said we had to go into the back of their ambulance to get a quick little checkout and then sign that we didn't need medical help. We did that and that was really all the medical stuff we did, and then we went into operations after that.
Amy Robinson:
Was there a requirement to do a drug testing during any of this?
Darren Ellisor:
There was, and that's all based on the NTSBs, what they want. In my first accident, they didn't want any of that. In my second accident for 1380, they did. So we had to do the urinalysis and the breathalyzer test. You cannot eat or drink anything other than water prior to doing those tests. And I had not had breakfast when this happened. I had a banana in my bag. I was going to eat my banana and then I was going to get something in Dallas when we landed for kind of a late breakfast. So when we got into ops supervisor's office, which is where you are sequestered as a crew after an accident or an incident ... And that's Southwest standard. You land in any Southwest base, they're going to take you and sequester you in the ops supervisor's office and try and keep everybody away from you. But we're in there and this is around Easter time and there's a huge bowl of Easter candy sitting in there and we couldn't eat any of it, and I was starving. And this Easter candy is just sitting there mocking me, and we had to wait to take this test.
And so the lady finally shows up and she's got her breathalyzer machine that she turns on and she tells me that it has failed the self-test, so it's not a valid machine. So she gets her second one and it fails the self test. She does not have a third one, so she has to call another office from some other place not at the Philadelphia airport to get another breathalyzer. So they're driving that one in and on the freeway, an 18-wheeler jackknifes and explodes and shuts down the freeway. And so it was five or six hours before that breathalyzer made its way down to us down in ops, and we were not able to eat or drink anything until then. After a few hours of us complaining, she finally got permission from her bosses to allow us to do the urinalysis test and then after that we could eat while we're waiting to do our breathalyzer, which was several hours later.
Kurt Heidemann:
So Darren, while you were sitting down in ops, when did SWAPA get involved?
Darren Ellisor:
The flight attendants took the buses with the passengers back to the terminal and the flight attendants went down into the ops supervisor's office. They were there for probably at least 30, 45 minutes before Tammy Jo and I, we made sure the plane was all shut down, handed it over to the one maintenance guy that was there. We had to do the deal with the EMTs and then talking with the fire chief just to check on our injured passenger. So we were out the plane for a little longer than they were. Once we got into the ops supervisor's office, within 30 minutes of Tammy Jo and I arriving to that office, SWAPA had a rep in the room with us.
Kurt Heidemann:
And who was that?
Darren Ellisor:
That was Mike Santoro, our current vice president. Mike lives outside of Philadelphia and SWAPA called him. That was step three on my checklist, so I called SWAPA safety and had them get the ball rolling and they contacted Mike, and Mike threw on his SWAPA shirt and drove to the airport as fast as he could, and he was in the room with us within 30 minutes, which was fantastic because I told Mike, I said, "Look ..." I had not met Mike before that. I said, "Mike, we are totally spent physically, emotionally. You need to do all the thinking for us. Just tell us what to do and we're going to do it." And he helped take charge and helped us out for the whole rest of the day just leading us and telling us what we need to do and where we need to go, which was great.
Amy Robinson:
So what about your personal items, your flight bag, your basic necessities? Did they help you with any of that? Food, clothing, anything along those lines?
Darren Ellisor:
The next morning when we woke up, we had breakfast with the CISM team and the CISM team was great. They had three flight attendants and two pilots, so each crew member was assigned their own CISM team member. We had a very emotional breakfast that morning trying to talk through what happened. And that was really my first true glimpse into what actually happened in the back with the flight attendants and all the things that they had to deal with and all the great work that they did back there. The CISM team asked us what we need and I know the girls needed some things. I needed a shirt and they sent out their folks to go get all the stuff that we needed.
Kurt Heidemann:
When were you able to tell your family? When were you able to call your wife? Did they find out from you? Did they find out on the news? How did that happen?
Darren Ellisor:
My wife is a fourth grade teacher and she was at school that day. Her class was at PE, so she was alone in her room and I called her, and I never call her during the day. We only text because she's teaching, so I don't interrupt. She wasn't really worried when she got the phone call because she thought I was going to talk to her about the Boy Scout meeting that was going to happen the next night or that night. And then when I told her, I said, "Jen, I'm okay." And I told her that I was okay and she immediately panicked because she's been a pilot's wife long enough that she knows what that means. And she goes, "What do you mean?" I said, "Look, I'm okay, but there's been an accident in Philadelphia. It's pretty serious and, you know, you should turn on the news." And we went on from there. I made that phone call from the L1 from the forward crew entry door, and there's a picture out there of me on the phone on the internet somewhere. That's when I called her. And yeah, that was emotional. She got my son and took the kids home and went home for the day.
Amy Robinson:
So how long were you in Philadelphia?
Darren Ellisor:
So the accident, we landed I want to say around 11:30 in the morning. 11, 11:30. We spent probably until about 6:00, 6 or 7:00 that evening is when we left the airport and the ground ops supervisor's office and got to the hotel. We were at the hotel until maybe 2:00 in the afternoon and then spent a couple hours over with the NTSB going through everything. And then the company wanted us to deadhead home and they were asking us which deadhead flight we wanted to take to our respective cities. The flight attendants were based in Dallas and all lived there and Tammy lives in outside of San Antonio and I live in Houston. So I was looking at flights, and then John Weeks was there. He arrived that morning, John pulled the chief pilot aside and said, "You can't deadhead these people home. It would be a media circus trying to get them into the front door of the airport and waiting at a gate for a plane to take them home."
Because at that point, Tammy Jo's face and name was all over the news. I don't think they got my name until sometime the second day somehow. So the Company arranged for us to have a charter flight home, and so we left there several hours later. We made a flight to Dallas and then to drop off the flight attendants and then to San Antonio had to drop Tammy Jo off, and then I was last to get to Houston, and I got home maybe about two in the morning.
Kurt Heidemann:
When did the media finally get ahold of you, or were you able to fend them off at least for a little while?
Darren Ellisor:
They had kind of bombarded my wife the second day once they got my name before I got home. But luckily, our local police department came over and had a squad car outside the house and kind of shooed them away. So that kind of helped me. I think it was probably a little worse for Tammy Jo. We unplugged our phone and they weren't able to get my cell phone number. So I had some people trying to get ahold of me through the media, but we were able to keep them at arm's length. We were able to actually go right at a month before we made any comments to the media, before we decided that enough time had passed. We just were going to do our thing and move on with it.
Amy Robinson:
And in sort of the same vein of that, was there any conflicting information or direction that you got between Southwest and SWAPA?
Darren Ellisor:
There was somewhat. At the very beginning, a week after the accident, we did go to headquarters to kind of do a safety debrief with the Company. We talked with Gary Kelly who was there and he had told us that it'd be okay if we talked to the media because that subject came up because they were at the one-week mark. It was still pretty heavy media trying to get ahold of us. So he said that would be fine. We held off for a month before we were going to go talk to 60 Minutes when I think Tammy Jo's representative sent an email to the Company and said, "Hey, the crew is going to go talk to 60 minutes in New York." And they said, "Okay, that's fine." I think maybe some legal people at Southwest got ahold of it and said no, that we couldn't do that. We talked with SWAPA legal and they said it was fine.
So, Tammy Jo and I did do that one interview, and then she actually called Gary Kelly directly after that and said that we thought the understanding was that the crew could do media, and he wasn't aware that we were told that we couldn't. So he corrected that and I don't know, it was maybe a week or two later we did one other interview on the CBS morning show with the entire crew. That was pretty much the main media at that point as far as my involvement.
Amy Robinson:
With the NTSB investigation, did you feel like you had a good handle on being able to know what was going on there? Did we follow up enough with you on that?
Darren Ellisor:
SWAPA did. Well, to be honest, the NTSB was relatively hands off with us after that initial interview. We really only got the occasional email request or phone call and they really went through the Houston chief pilot and it was stuff like, "Give us your hours. How many hours have you flown?" They wanted just your logbook hours, which was stuff that would go into the final report. But really after the initial interview on day two we had very minimal contact with the NTSB.
Amy Robinson:
So did you see the final report just after it came out with everyone else or were you able to see it before that?
Darren Ellisor:
We were invited to the final report. It was a hearing in Washington, D.C. at the NTSB headquarters. The crew was invited, but SWAPA recommended that we don't go because the focus of the accident investigation was not on the crew; it was on the engine and everything around that situation with the engine. So the thought process was there's no reason to highlight ourselves and inject us into the situation when they're not really looking at us. So on that particular day, the crew just watched online on a web link just like everybody else.
Kurt Heidemann:
Moving beyond that, you mentioned CISM before. You mentioned legal a little bit. What roles did your reps have, your chiefs? What did they do or safety?
Darren Ellisor:
Stacy DeVillier was our Houston rep. I think he might have been, at that particular time, he was just finishing up his tour of being a rep. But SWAPA, since Stacy's a great guy, he's a good friend of mine and we go back years even before the accident. So John kind of assigned Stacy to be the single point of contact for Tammy Jo and I so that any people that wanted to talk to us, we weren't getting bombarded from all different directions. They had to go through Stacy to get to us. So Stacy was kind of very helpful as the SWAPA rep for that. We dealt a lot with Fig Newton, who was the Houston chief pilot, coordinated a lot with him. Any kind of request from the NTSB would go through him and then he would contact us. SWAPA safety, Matt Cain. Matt Cain actually arrived while we were on the ground there in Philadelphia on the first day. He flew in from Atlanta just a couple hours after the accident. So we had SWAPA safety with us hand in hand right from the very beginning.
Amy Robinson:
And is there anything that you could have used that you did not get? Were there people that you were missing or you thought that could be better put together?
Darren Ellisor:
I don't think so. We got everything ... Well, including from you, Amy. I must say you were a great help in that whole first several months as well as so many people from SWAPA. We got enormous support from SWAPA. The flight attendants, even the flight attendants, it's not their union. And they got just a ton of support from SWAPA in those first weeks and even months because with an accident like this, especially a high profile accident, it doesn't just stop after the first week. There was repercussions in all facets of our lives for years. I mean, it doesn't stop. It's ongoing. It became a joke around the dinner table. The kids would ask me, "Well, Dad, when is this going to quiet down? When is it going to stop?" And I'd say, "There's nothing on the schedule, there's no media, there's no any other things scheduled, so probably another couple weeks and I think it's all going to die down and we can go back to normal life." And then something else would happen. Another interview, another speaking engagement, another problem with the Company or media. It was never-ending. And so I guess the lesson learned there is that it doesn't just stop in a week or a month. The crew is going to need support ongoing.
Amy Robinson:
How has it affected your family?
Darren Ellisor:
It's really ... You know, it's life before the accident and life after the accident. I had a daughter that had a really tough time with it, kind of the PTSD aspect of it that even though she didn't personally go through the event, it was very traumatic experience for her. So it did affect our family and it's just something we had to adapt our lives to. This is how our life is going forward. And I will say it has quieted down even though as I sit here doing another podcast speaking about it, and I'm sure there'll be something a year from now or two years or whatever, but we just have kind of adapted our lives to this is what it is and we're still a loving family that just gets through it.
Kurt Heidemann:
So Darren, after the accident, how long were you off before you had to return to fly?
Darren Ellisor:
The accident was April 17th and I went back 4th of July. So it was right about two and a half months.
Amy Robinson:
And did you feel any pressure to have to come back sooner than that?
Darren Ellisor:
No, the Company was very good about that. They told us to take as much time as we needed. I was the first crew member to go back full-time flying. Tammy Jo went back a little bit later than that. I'm not sure the exact date. And then the flight attendants were off pretty much right at a year, so there was no pressure. I felt like I wanted to go back to flying. I could have gone to upgrade in June, but I didn't even go back to flying until July and I wanted to go get back in the right seat, get some time to get my head squared away and then go to upgrade.
Kurt Heidemann:
And so what was the return to work process? Was it just calling him up and saying, "I'm ready to come back," and they scheduled you or is there any other hoops you had to go through?
Darren Ellisor:
It was, yeah. It was easy as just calling my chief pilot and getting back to flying. I would bid a normal line and they just pulled the trips until I told them that I wanted to go back flying, and they made it happen. And it was weird. It was definitely weird at first getting back to flying, but I just needed to get it done and get back to the usual.
Amy Robinson:
During that initial event, what do you feel like lessons were learned there, and did you talk to Southwestern SWAPA about those lessons? Did you feel like you had a voice there?
Darren Ellisor:
My initial lessons learned were make sure you're flying the plane. Maintain aircraft control above all and everything else. And then we got to a point where we let ATC I won't say control the situation, but they wanted to be extremely helpful. When you call Air Traffic Control and you tell them you're on fire, which is what our initial radio call was we were on fire, even though we weren't really on fire, we never had a fire warning. But that's the radio call that she made. And when you say you're on fire or if you have an engine failure, you put that controller in the red and they want to be as helpful as possible, but maybe too helpful, and you can't let them be overly helpful. We ended up passing fuel on board and souls on board three different times to three different controllers and spending a lot of time talking back and forth with controllers.
And so one of my first big lessons learned is tell a air traffic control what you have, tell them what you're going to do, and then tell them to stand by. You know, you can tell them to shut up. And for me, what I'm going to do the next time something happens to me is I'm going to create my own discrete frequency on 121.5, and that that's my personal discrete frequency on guard. And that way I don't have to do all these frequency changes, which we kept getting multiple frequency changes as you're going from the high controller all the way down to approach control and to tower. And in the northeast area of the country where there's just a lot of radio traffic, and so you're talking to multiple controllers as you descend down through this area and you're getting frequency change after frequency change, and each controller wants to be helpful and they want to talk to you about stuff.
We didn't have time for that stuff. It was 16 minutes and 45 seconds from the time the engine exploded to the time we touched down. That's not a lot of time to deal with all the checklists that we were supposed to do or could have done, and in all the items that we needed to take care of, especially when you're in the red, when even a little task that should be easy is really hard. And so telling that controller to stand by, and for me, my personal thing is I'm going to go to 121.5, I'm going to tell everybody to stand by. I go, that's where we're going to be. We're going to be on 121.5. Don't call me. And then I'm going to run all the checklists I need to do, do all the things I need to do and then call them back. That's one of my big lessons learned.
Amy Robinson:
So what was the follow-up from SWAPA and SWA both during the investigation and during the initial aftermath? And is there anything that you would like to see done differently or something that you believe could have been handled better?
Darren Ellisor:
No, I think the follow-up from the Company was good. There were in those first month or two or three, there was a couple of things, a couple of disagreements and problems with the Company and with the crew, especially as it was with the flight attendants. So we had to step up and take care of that. But with SWAPA, everything was perfect the whole time. SWAPA was there for us every single step of the way and really just helped us through what to expect, any kind of requests we had, any kind of issues we had, whether it was legal or whether it was with the Company or whether it was with media. SWAPA was right there. So I wouldn't have changed anything in that regard.
Amy Robinson:
So from that event, what is something that has changed you and the way you fly and the way you think about flying from that point forward?
Darren Ellisor:
Well, it gave me kind of a feeling that I'm confident in our training and the fact that we have experienced and confident pilots in both seats and throughout the entire pilot group. You now, it's something we just saw recently in Las Vegas with a first officer laying the plane with a captain incapacitated. We train and we get the pilots with the best experience and that's why it's important to have a great contract, so we can recruit these pilots that have great experience that are good pilots to be able to do things like that and take over when they need to, like that one first officer in Las Vegas.
Kurt Heidemann:
So Darren, what's one more thing that you would tell those of us that haven't had to go through something like that?
Darren Ellisor:
For me, it came down to maintain aircraft control above all. And that was nothing new to me. That's nothing new to any of us. Everybody knows that, but it's something you do have to realize that when it hits the fan and it's your very worst day, it's like winning the lottery in reverse. It's your very worst day. All of us as pilots, we have to do that and that's the one job is to maintain aircraft control. And probably lastly that I was a SWAPA guy before this. I was a big fan of SWAPA. But going through this experience, really kind of hammered home that SWAPA is there for me and for my family and for my crew members that aren't even in the union, and they were there for us the entire time and not just 30 minutes after the accident, but five years later, and it's very much appreciated.
Amy Robinson:
Thank you to Darren for taking the time to talk with us today. As he mentioned, he's had to talk about this many times before, so we really appreciate him taking the time to speak with us.
Kurt Heidemann:
And please remember, as always, we want to hear from you. If you have any feedback for us at all, please drop us a line at [email protected].
Amy Robinson:
Finally, today's bonus number is five. That's the total number of crew who were on Flight 1380. Those five crew members, the professionals, we have to thank for ensuring that the flight landed safely without further injury. Their experience, while harrowing, is something we can all learn from.