Sequence Failed Continuity 11-10-11

Anderson, South Carolina

The following link will take you to a fifteen-minute high-resolution film. Nothing will download to your computer. The film is compressed for instant viewing. It is an intensely compelling first person narrative by the American Airlines pilot originally scheduled to fly Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles on Sept 11, 2011. He challenges us to think about where we are going in life. My response to the film is pasted below the link.

http://www.youtube.com/user/peterscheibner#p/a/u/0/cLj4akmncsA


Sequence Failed Continuity
Anderson, South Carolina

A good friend of mine served as a captain on wide-bodied jets for several decades. One could easily describe him as a pilot’s pilot, a guy filled with class, technical acumen, and just the right measure of self confidence without being arrogant. If you’re trusting someone to carry you to the far side of the world eight miles above cold stormy North Atlantic waters at night, dodging level-five thunderstorms capable of squashing 747s like empty coke cans, it’s to your benefit to have one qualified with such character.

Yesterday my captain and I were in the gym talking. He often graces me with the most interesting tales of his storied career in aviation while I’m on the stair climber. He described a rather disquieting, perhaps dangerous phenomenon occurring on flight decks of commercial jets.

Newer generations of jets virtually fly themselves, relieving pilots of many tasks involved in getting three hundred people to their destinations safely. For those driving cars, it’s a bit like being relieved of clutches, gear shifts, front-end starter cranks, butterfly valves, and chokes. Those driving mini-vans and SUVs point the things and go, with seven kids in the back. Many newer Airbus and Boeing wide-bodies are capable of far more. Pilots can point them and go, with three hundred in the back, even letting go of the wheel for extended times. Stories are told of flight deck crews being sound asleep for hundreds of miles. Recently, attempts by air traffic control to hail a jet by radio failed; everyone was asleep at the wheel. The jet overshot its destination by hundreds of miles; yet landed safely.

Aviation safety is surreal. When one considers the thousands of large jets airborne at any time, the lack of accidents is truly astounding. Per mile, flight is more than a hundred times safer than family mini-vans. Automation of jets has contributed much to high levels of safety. It’s rare for pilots to fall asleep on the job or commit other faux pas, but when it happens it’s sometimes useful to have planes thinking for themselves.

Pilots ultimately earn their pay by having the right stuff when they encounter extraordinary conditions. Having the right stuff allows pilots to apply decades of experience to very fast thinking and countermand a set of potentially fatal events. The right stuff includes a powerful but subtle sense of how planes feel in all circumstances, having a sense of attitude, air speed, and dozens of other flight metrics. My friend wonders if too many years of flying automated planes can take the edge off vital skills. He cited an Air France wide-body lost over the Atlantic several years ago. He wondered if younger pilots lacking skills and experience of older pilots who learned how to use clutches, gear shifts, front end starter cranks, butterfly valves, and chokes failed to sense a deadly sequence of events leading to a power stall. Air France’s Airbus rode that power stall all the way to the stormy Atlantic waters eight miles below, with three hundred in the back.

Those of us living and working on the ground face decisions every day, ones requiring us to pay attention to dozens of life metrics. Failure to do so can leave us stranded on a deserted road, bankrupt, divorced, unemployed, depressed, facing catastrophic illness, dead. As a nation and as three hundred million individuals we are seeing daily the consequences of not paying attention to financial metrics in our individual and corporate lives. Millions inattentive to the metrics of alcoholism and addiction find themselves in hospitals, jails, and morgues. Metrics of physical health are ignored by millions more, leaving them imprisoned in bodies caught in fatal power stalls of obesity, chronic illness, and neoplastic nightmares. Perhaps most compelling is our widespread failure to pay attention to spiritual metrics, leaving millions of us in existential crisis, depressed and despairing, wondering “Is this all there is?” Many of us have never filed a flight plan with our intended destination. We don’t know where we are going or how to get there.

Steve Scheibner got up on September 10, 2001, went to his computer, logged on to his employer’s website, and requested a scheduling assignment for the following day. He asked for American Flight #11 from Boston’s Logan airport to Los Angeles. As a senior pilot he expected to be scheduled for the flight. The next morning about 8:30 AM he watched his TV with three hundred million others as American Flight #11 tore a smoking hole through the American psyche. He had what could be considered nothing short of an epiphany, just realizing ‘his’ flight had burned a wormhole through our national lassitude. He was ‘supposed’ to have flown that plane to LA, not watch it immolated on his TV.

Our national prosperity has long allowed us to feel like self-confident wizards behind the curtain in the Emerald City of Oz, pulling levers to make smoke and tell big stories. In rising stock markets we’re all financial geniuses. In times of low unemployment we’re all sought-after corporate wunderkind. With no money down we’re king of the hill in our McMansions. Who needs God? Foxhole prayers might help a bit when oncologists tell us we have cancer or “there’s nothing more we can do” or our boss informs us our services are no longer required. In many ways we have come to find in life that our “Sequence Failed Continuity;” a highly-veiled phrase in aviation for describing a flight’s failure to safely reach its destination. We find ourselves unable to countermand a set of potentially fatal events, without a plan.

Steve Scheibner had a flight plan filed years before he put in for American’s #11. He decided long ago the Kingdom of God was his destination of choice. His life goal was to live an exemplary life, guiding others into filing flight plans for themselves and making it to the Kingdom. When one has seen his own smoking hole on national TV, one quickly realizes there aren’t enough levers to pull to countermand a set of potentially fatal events. This wise American pilot knew to let go of his costly training and allow Another to fly in the left seat. Moving to the right seat, Scheibner was determined to allow the Pilot of his life to guide him though the turbulence of level-five thunder cells and even the progressive structural collapse of the World Trade Center, if it had come to that for him.

Good pilots know about the merits of situation avoidance. Sometimes it’s not possible. Scheibner had no way of predicting the scenario of 9-11. He simply followed His flight plan put in place centuries earlier. There are times when we have no idea why life takes its hairpin turns. Sometimes we are called to travel through smoking holes, other times we stay home and watch TV. We can trust that we will always optimize our journeys if we allow Another to file our flight plans.

In the 1930s a wise writer implored us “to fearlessly consider the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?” Do we believe God has the character qualifications to trust Him to carry us to our final destination even if the Sequence Failed Continuity?

At least one wise pilot decided to let The Pilot give him a life plan: “To seek, trust and glorify God through humble service and continual prayer. To raise up qualified disciples as quickly as possible so that one day I might hear God say, “Well done my good and faithful servant.” This American pilot finds himself on a journey that will last all Eternity.

Have you filed your flight plan with Him?