In the 1950s and 1960s United Airlines experienced a series of brutal airline disasters, one after the other, far greater than any other airline in the United States, and far more than its size justified. The government accident reports blamed almost every crash on "pilot error," which indicated something was seriously wrong with United's training program. federal officials covered up. serious violations of important federal air safety requirements by United Airlines management, and the record-falsification associated with the practice. The reason for these crashes was known to federal air safety investigators, but this knowledge was withheld from official accident reports. Withholding this information allowed serious safety violations to continue, along with related crashes.
It was during these series of air disasters that the FAA asked me to accept assignment to the United Airlines' training center at Denver. This new assignment required that I transfer from the Los Angeles office where I was working with airlines such as American and Western, who had good safety standards and attitudes, and very few crashes. Almost none of those crashes were due to the training-program-induced ignorance accompanying those at United Airlines. The decision to accept the United Airlines assignment altered the course of my entire life.
I had been a Navy and airline pilot for many years prior to joining the Federal Aviation Administration in 1962, and had worked for airlines throughout the world. (Frequent pilot layoffs in those days required changing employers frequently.)
In addition to the many senseless airline crashes United Airlines experienced in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it experienced on December 16, 1960, the world's worst air disaster (at that time). on that fateful day a United Airlines DC-8 jet plunged into the heart of New York City, killing 134...