Stewart also balked, refused to speak with a BA Air Safety investigator and drove the 25 miles straight home to his small, 500 year old restored medieval house in the travel poster cliché Berkshire village of Wokingham. His wife, Samantha, a thinly, attractive, red haired, ex British Airways flight attendant, remembers that, “It was the same sort of morning as after any long trip. He was tired, but w3e talked about Mauritius, because we’d both been there together on vacation. An hour later, he said, ‘I’m off to bed, but you might get a call from BA, because there was a go around.’ It wasn’t anything I thought important.”
It was. “He got a call around eight that evening saying the crew had been suspended,” Samantha Stewart says.
Three days later, Glen Stewart wrote letters to both Brian Laversha and Tim Luffingham unstintingly praising their airmanship under difficult conditions and accepting full responsibility “as both captain and handling pilot” for the November Oscar incident. British Airways investigated the affair, and after a tortuous fourteen drafts that Stewart and his crew continued to claim were riddled with errors, finally issued a report castigating Stewart and chiding Luffingham and Laverska as well. Stewart was demoted to first officer, to fly out the rest of his career in the right seat, and his air transport pilot’s license was concurrently altered to copilot status by the CAA.
That was too much for a proud, stubborn Scotsman who began flying RAF aircraft at the age of 21, who had devoted virtually all of his adult life to British Airways, and who was being disciplined for – as he saw it, doing the best he could to get his passengers to their destination without unnecessary expense and awkwardness. On April 2, 1990, Glen Stewart resigned from BA, spent the next three days learning how to use a word processor, and set out to appeal the CAA’s license downgrading.
Others saw it differently, of course. Stewart was not a star aviator. Recently, he had been receiving grades of “average” on his every six month simulator check rides, and instructors had noted that he did not perform well under pressure. During his final flight he made a number of minor errors that were caught by Luffingham and Laverska – mis set switches, faulty cross checks, some awkward flying. He was slow moving and methodical in a trade where some decisions must be made expeditiously. Indeed, the prosecution at Isleworth would claim that he had been too slow moving and methodical in flying the necessary go around that November day.
There is a common assumption that the biggest airliners get the best pilots. It is not necessarily true, for there are no merit promotions in the cockpit. Pilots move up based on seniority – the length of time they’ve been with the company. The flight engineer on a weary 727 flying between Cleveland and Cincinnati might be an ex Blue Angel with golden hands, while the captain of the same line’s shiniest 747-400 Big Top en route to Bangkok might be an average Joe who started out in Cessnas and has managed to make it through thirty years without busting a regulation or bending the metal. That Stewart was flying one of British Airways’ bigger and more complex aircraft was a reflection of the airline axiom, “A captain is nothing but a copilot who’s been with the company longer.”
Yet why the Stewart case ever came to trial remains the subject of speculation. There is considerable feeling that British Airways was not sorry to see it happen – that the prickly Stewart was a loose cannon who could have made things awkward for an airline that is famously concerned about its public image. Some feel that Stewart could have revealed some debateable company procedures, such as the unfortunate all weather dispensation policy. For Stewart to be branded a criminal would effectively negate whatever his accusations might be.
Stewart himself felt he was hauled into court “because British Airways and its supervisor the CAA condoned, wished, hoped, prayed, pressurized me to keep quiet, but preferably dematerialize,” and that when he didn’t, they had no option but to publicly punish him.
Others suspect that empire building within the CAA legal branch should be considered – that this looked like a juicy case for an aspiring prosecutor to take public and demonstrate that even the flag carrier’s jumbo jet captains daren’t take on the Aviation Authority’s cops and lawyers casually.
“Glen was the first line pilot they could go after,” Samantha Stewart opines. “A management pilot landed a Concorde on fumes, and they never did a thing to him.”
Management pilots are those with company executive rank. Director of Flight Training, Concorde Chief Pilot and the like and indeed in 1987 one of them demonstrated airmanship that many argue was far more faulty than Glen Stewart’s. Despite the pleas of his flight engineer to divert, he pressed on and landed at Heathrow with so little fuel that the supersonic transport had its forward tanks topped off before the passengers could be disembarked, to stop it tipping backwards. Only when press accounts of the incident surfaced did British Airways quietly retire that captain, his license and pension – unlike Stewart’s, untouched.
Said one Hong Kong based L-1011 captain, British albeit not a BA pilot, “My personal opinion is that the fleet manager who authorized November Oscar’s approach with an unqualified crew should have been the one in court.” Six weeks after the incident, British Airways anounced that it was no longer granting all weather dispensations.
A senior British Airways captain quoted by a London newspaper at the time said, “The aircraft was certificated for three crew who are supposed to cross check each other’s movements. The other flight crew members are back flying again [In fact, Brian Laversha had also resigned from BA.] So why is it Captain Stewart is in the dock? Even if, at worst, it was a flying cock up, how can that be construed as criminal? There but for the grace of God go a lot of pilots. Are we to be prosecuted for every little slip up?”
But was it just “a little slip up?” My sympathies for Stewart were being surely tried, for the approach he’d flown was one that I was tempted to say I’d have discarded and reflown long before things got out of hand. Many professionals privately agreed that they’d have thrown it away as well, though Samantha Stewart characterized them as “a few clever Dicks who think they’re too smart for it ever to happen to them.”
Still, it was well known among Classic Fleet crews that the early 747’s Sperry autopilot required lots of gentling before it would lock onto an ILS. “If your strictly within speed and intercept parameters, it will capture the localizer. If not, it will never capture. It’ll bracket and get worse and worse,” says another BA Classic captain.
In retrospect, Stewart might have demanded of the controller a longer final approach, to allow the autopilot time to settle down. But at eight in the morning, with night flights from all over the world converging on Heathrow, the rules need to be flexible. Stewart was in fact placed five miles behind the traffic he was following rather than the legal minimum of six, and he was asked to fly a hasty approach beyond the autopilot’s capabilities. The controller who put November Oscar in this position, however, was not in the dock.
“They showed Glen the courtroom in advance, so he’d know what to expect,” Samantha Stewart recalls, “but he was horrified. He was a terribly moral gentleman and here was a dock where rapists stood. They at least during the trial let him sit with the BAI.PA people who had organized Stewart’s defence, but during the sentencing, he had to sit in the dock with a policeman. It was awful for him.”
The trial took eleven days of extremely complex, technical testimony, before a lay jury of nonpilots the average age of which was 26. And before a judge who, well into the trial, admitted that he still didn’t know where a 747 flight engineer sat. Some jurors napped, not surprisingly, for the testimony detailing the sequence of checklists, button pushing, instrument indications and warning lights that marked November Oscar’s progress down the Heathrow 27R ILS was a complex yet dry recitation. Stewart himself used homemade pocket notes of indicator light colours and switch sequencing during the approach to ensure that he’d got it right.
“It’s a very, very complicated procedure,” another British Airways 747 captain admits. “Flying that aircraft on automatic demands a workload that can actually be too much, especially if you don’t have a good copilot.”
Stewart, in defence of his actions during the company’s own inquiry, had doggedly raised issue after issue, some of which danced around the question of exactly what had gone wrong and why. Accused, for example, of failing to file immediately upon landing the necessary MOR – ‘mandatory occurrence report.’ Stewart argued that because he had at least initiated the go-around from decision height and had landed successfully out of the second approach, it didn’t constitute an ‘occurrence.’ Few agreed.
He argued that nowhere was it officially written that a proper go around required a pitch up in the airplane’s attitude of three degrees per second, which the airline claimed was the proper technique. (Stewart had applied back yoke that rotated November Oscar at a rate of less than one degree per second). Well, maybe not, but it is the way to get the job done.
At one point, Stewart created a transcription of every oral call-out, checklist response and radio transmission required by company and CAA regulations during the approach and demonstrated that simply reading the script aloud, nonstop, took seven minutes. The entire approach itself had consumed only four, thus demonstrating that the letter of the law required the impossible. It was an interesting point, but nobody cared.
Much was made by Stewart and his supporters of the fact that November Oscar was dispatched on its next leg, to Nairobi, before recalcitrant autopilot could be examined for possible faults. And that four crucial pages from the airplane’s maintenance log, which might have detailed repairs to that autopilot, are to this day missing. “There was a coverup,” Flight Engineer Laversha insists. “That was made obvious by the fact that they sent the airplane right out again, and nobody was given an opportunity to examine it.” But if the autopilot indeed was malfunctioning, isn’t it the crew’s job to detect that and compensate for it?”
Much of the trial revolved around arcane legal points and Stewart himself was never even called to testify on his own behalf. His BALPA lawyers apparently believed that he would only continue to raise issues not relevant to the manner in which the charges were worded. He at best would seem to be mitigating his actions, at worst could incriminate himself further.
When the verdicts were announced, Stewart’s many supporters in the courtroom cheered , for the first of the two found him not guilty of endangering people on the ground. “Even the ushers were on our side,” Sam Stewart recalls. The second verdict, however, branded him guilty of criminal negligence in endangering his passengers.
How he could be guilty of one and not the other baffled even a member of the prosecution team, who after the trail commented that the judgement was ‘bizarre.” It is said that when the jury told the judge they’d come to a decision on the first charge but hadn’t yet agreed on the second, he suggested with some impatience that they get their act together and wind the thing up, thus prodding the jury to perhaps made an overly hasty assessment.
Still, Judge George Bathurst-Norman did seem to hold a degree of sympathy for Stewart. He turned down the CAA’s demand that Stewart pay £45,000 in court costs and assessed only £1,500, and his refusal to levy a mandatory jail sentence reflected to observers the sense that Bathurst-Norman felt the case should never have come to trial.
Stewart appealed the decision. Lawyer Arthur Mitchell, an aviation specialist, raised a variety of subtle legal points, most notably the defence that the CAA had no legal right to itself bring a prosecution. “In fact, the CAA itself was fault,” Mitchell later said, “for permitting a situation to exist in which the BA Flight Operations Manual contained a provision that Glen would be expected to use, by which it could authorize Glen to make the approach without a qualified copilot. The approach was actually illegal at the fault of British Airways, yet they were not charged.
“Had that provision not existed, Glen would have diverted to Frankfurt with cozy fuel reserves, to await better weather at London. It would not have been a long wait and would have given an opportunity to refuel, resulting in less stress on the eventual approach to London.”
Stewart’s appeal was summarily rejected.
“The great problem is that aircraft accident and incident investigation has always concentrated on finding out what happened rather than why it happened,"”says David Beaty, a former BOAC pilot and today one of the world's leading authorities on human factors in aviation. “Glen got himself into an impossible position on that approach and took fifteen seconds too long to do something about it. That would be enough for the typical investigating body. In England, an investigation is actually an allocation of blame, and the cause of the mistake disappears in the process. The idea of taking something like this into a court of law is absolutely wrong. You will never get near the truth that way.
“A mistake was made,” Beaty admits, “but it was a collective mistake. Loads of other people made mistakes too, and that has not sufficiently been brought out.”
In the end, I rejoined the Stewart camp, embarrassed to admit to myself that I, too, would never have understood the pressures under which a modern day airline captain operates unless friends and acquaintances who do it every day made it obvious to me. That I too might in fact have continued with the approach, convinced that it would be more expedient to sort it out while descending than to get myself into a box that might cost me a reprimand. A lot of lip service is paid to the myth of command residing in the cockpit, to the fantasy of the captain of the ship as ultimate decision maker. Too often today, however, the commander must first consult with the accountant. (The sound you hear is the outrage of airline executives the world over insisting that nothing is ever allowed to compromise safety. True, in a perfect world.)
“As a small boy, Glen lived near RAF Leuchars at the end of the War, and he used to watch the Coastal Command B-24 Liberators take off and land. That inspired him to become a pilot,” David Beaty muses. “I was flying Liberators out of Leuchars at the end of the War, and it makes me sad to think that perhaps one of those airplanes he watched was mine.”
On December 1, 1992, three years and nine days after B747-136 G-AWNO set off car alarms in the Petra Hotel parking lot, William Glen Stewart left his small house in Wokingham without a word to his wife. He drove some nine hours to a beach ten miles from his birth place in Scotland, near RAF Leuchars.
Stewart attached a hose to the exhaust pipe, led it into the car through a nearly closed window and in moments had asphyxiated himself. He did not leave a letter or any explanation for his action.