"I've been with this company 20-something years," Shunick says. "I see ice on the wings, I know what it is."
This is the point where I, as a frequent flier, start feeling really nervous. Of course, we're always in a rush for takeoff, and when the pilot gets on the intercom and talks about how we're going to be delayed because they're doing some safety check, I roll my eyes just like anyone else.
But contamination on the wing is serious, serious business. This is not just better-safe-than-sorry; this is, literally, life and death.
So, of course, the flight attendants were freaking out. The pilots had pushed back from the gate and were preparing to taxi to the runway. The flight attendants felt they had to do something to get the pilots' attention.
"We had to think of something fast," Walker says. The three recalled that, as they gazed out the windows looking at the ice on the wings, the passengers seated nearby wondered aloud what they were doing. Those inquiries, they thought, might have provided enough cover to persuade the pilots to change their minds. "So we decided," Walker says, "we'll say that the passengers are asking about it."
It fell to Burris to make the call. She phoned the cockpit and explained that she'd heard comments; the passengers were concerned about the ice on the wings.
It was a lie. But from the point of view of anyone who's ever been a passenger on a plane, I think it was a forgivable one.
After Burris made that call, First Officer Gannon came out of the cockpit and inspected the wings himself. As he came back toward the flight deck, as Walker would later write in a memo to the FAA, he grumbled, "Now we have to de-ice to cover our ass."
Cover our ass. Not prevent a major catastrophe, but cover our ass. Nice.
So de-ice they did, and the plane took off. But the incident was so alarming to Walker that, immediately upon landing at Sky Harbor, she made her way to the airline's on-site offices. She explained how Gannon had twice blown her off and it was only after their third attempt to raise the issue that he finally obliged.
Walker says the company was alarmed enough to get a FAA representative on speakerphone. The FAA rep asked Walker to make a written statement — and asked for statements from Burris and Shunick, too. All three were happy to comply.
But without thinking of the ramifications, they made a mistake. In their statements, they repeated their claim that the passengers had raised the issue of the icy wings.
Later, when the FAA was investigating the matter and summoned the three for sworn testimonies, they would volunteer the truth: They'd made up the passenger concern just because they didn't know how else to get the pilots' attention. The discrepancy in their accounts would later become a major issue.
But they weren't thinking about that in 2003, moments after their safe landing in Phoenix, as they prepared their statements. They were only thinking about what might have been. "I'd never in my then-18 years written up anybody for anything," Walker says.
Burris agrees; she'd never lodged a complaint either. "But this was a potential catastrophe. To fly with contamination . . . You just don't do that."
As it turns out, the flight attendants weren't the only people who thought the pilots' actions that day were troubling. Unbeknownst to them, the de-icing crew at the Calgary airport filled out an "irregularity report" of their own.
"At about 6:15 [a.m.], my de-icing partner . . . approached a member of the flight crew, asking if they were going to require a de-icer," wrote Arnie Getz, a Calgary-based worker. "They said no, that they were fine."
That seemed odd to him. "We were both surprised," Getz wrote, "because we could see the frost on the wings and the fuselage." Yet only after the plane had pushed back for departure, Getz noted, was it towed back into position for de-icing.
