Mr. MCCANDLESS. Well, I wanted to pursue this. Then do I understand from your response that there was an adequate level of training for flight attendants who were assigned to any plane, irrespective of its manufacture?

Ms. TATE. That is correct.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. Thank you.

Mr. ONSTAD. I was going to say that on the working hours question, when we were faced with this strike situation, we patterned the flight attendants working conditions after the contract that the Association of Flight Attendants signed with new Braniff last summer sometime. And I think it compares quite favorably with that union contract.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. What about the alleged ineffectiveness of the flight attendants on duty during the bomb scare?

Do you have some kind of review board or something that reviews those kinds of things?

Ms. TATE. I received a copy of the report that had been turned in by UFA. There was no background on that as to who had observed this on board the flight. Then we talked to the flight attendants and also from reading the report. We do training on emergency procedures and things that they need to do, and we do door drills and commands, and continually train them on how to handle emergencies. We have found that flight attendants who've been flying for years sometimes will possibly freeze in the very beginning when they're faced with an emergency situation on board an airplane, but they always react. As far as the three new hire flight attendants on board the aircraft, there was an experienced crew on board, or flight attendants who'd been flying for several years, who offered to assist in that, and that is perfectly normal for the captain to say every crew member on board who will assist to please do so.

They were properly trained to handle the situation.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. Do I understand that all four of the flight attendants in question were inexperienced?

Ms. TATE. No; they're not inexperienced. They were new hire flight attendants.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. How long had they been flying?

MS. TATE. Let's see, this incident occurred, are you saying in December in your report-October? Those flight attendants came on the line in September, so they'd been flying about a month. Mr. MCCANDLESS. The concern again is safety.

MS. TATE. Yes.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. And the ability of your employees to function in a situation where the passengers' lives and safety is at stake.

My final question, Madam Chairman, is in one of these 800 number transcriptions that I listened to, they talked about Captain Dash, who enjoyed the flight attendant on his lap in an overseas trip recently. Have you heard anything about that?

Mr. HILLMAN. No, I'm afraid not. We get a lot of interesting stuff on the ALPA hotline. We've given you, as part of the record here-

Mr. MCCANDLESS. You understand again, I'm talking about the safety――

Mr. ONSTAD. I understand that. We get a lot of interesting allegations of the same type on these ALPA hotlines. We've given you copies of the ALPA aboveground and the ALPA underground hotline in our testimony. Mr. Adams listens to it every morning, the ALPA hotline, I do, and when we hear about these incidents, we check them out to the extent there's any substance to them. We have not found any substance to this one.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. Are you aware of this? It was on the hotline, I believe it was Tuesday, or Monday-maybe Friday of last week. Mr. ADAMS. I don't remember hearing that one, sir, I must have missed it. I know of no such circumstance.

Mr. HILLMAN. Was that on the Los Angeles hotline or——
Mr. MCCANDLESS. The Los Angeles hotline.

Mr. HILLMAN. Well, that might-we usually listen to Houston. The major ones come out of the ALPA headquarters in Houston, and the local ones, sometimes we don't dial up the Los Angeles

one.

Mr. MCCANDLESS. Is there any justification, when you hear something like that, for investigating it for purposes of some type of violation within the company policies?

Mr. HILLMAN. We do; we follow up on the incidents that come across on the ALPA code-a-phone, and I would say, I don't have a statistic, but I would say an overwhelming majority of them don't even prove to be true in many cases. The named pilot wasn't even on a trip that day, in many cases.

Mr. ONSTAD. Let me give you a perspective on this, Mr. McCandless. Because we are living in a fishbowl, because of ALPA's million dollar ad campaign against us, we know that anything we might do will end up in the USA Today the next day, and in deference to my friends in the press here, that's why they typically advertise in the USA Today. We follow up on each one of these meticulously, because we know that we know that we're going to be called and asked about it, within hours of a newspaper advertisement. And we are extremely careful on each of these items, to check them out. Mr. MCCANDLESS. With your permission, Madam Chairman, may I ask that you review this particular incident, and if there is some substance to it, would you include it in the record that's going to be forwarded?

Mr. ONSTAD. Certainly.

Mrs. COLLINS. Well, whether there is or isn't, if you'd submit it to the subcommittee, we'd appreciate it.

Mr. ONSTAD. Thank you, Madam Chairman.

[The information follows:]

At the June 13th session of the Government Activities and Transportation
Subcommittee hearing, I promised to advise you further with regard to your
question concerning an item in one of the ALPA code-a-phone messages.

I have researched our file on code-a-phones and believe that your question
relates to the following quotation from the ALPA underground code-a-phone:
"We heard that Bill Lively might get a chance to explain why he had a flight
attendant in the seat between Sydney and Honolulu." You will note that there
is no reference to any specific flight and so we are limited in our ability
to follow up on this kind of allegation. We have discussed this matter with
Captain Lively and he unequivocally denies that there has been any such
Occurrence. As I am sure you are aware, this is strictly against company
policy.

Unfortunately, we have found that ALPA code-a-phones frequently are full of
erroneous information and baseless innuendo. We concluded that this is
another case of that sort and that there is no basis for it.

I hope that this will adequately respond to your request of me during the
hearing.

Yours very truly,

Prullans

R.M. Adams, Senior Vice President
Operating & Technical Services

RMA: jes

cc: Quentin Burgess, Staff

House of Representatives

Mrs. COLLINS. Mr. Schaefer.

Mr. SCHAEFER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. A couple of brief questions. Mr. Onstad, before the strike, what was the average number of hours that an individual spent in the right seat before moving to the left seat?

Mr. ONSTAD. Let me just see if Mr. Hillman knows the answer to that. Let me just preface it by saying that basically that is a function of the fact, the fact that there was a long period of time in which we were a contracting airline. We were not growing as an airline, we were trying to save a company which had lost $500 million, and it was not in an expansion mode. Dick, do you know the specific answer?

Mr. HILLMAN. Yes, I'd just like to briefly go back to 1967, 1968; or actually, 1964, 1965, when this company was very active in the military contract business, and we expanded rapidly in those days. We had pilots flying-they're on strike now, some of them-but who hired on, and within 18 months, 11⁄2 years were flying left seat on the 707. So, in an expansion mode, when you're expanding quickly, you will move up quickly. It's a seniority system. There was a period of time in the mid-1970's when we stagnated, as did most of the airlines, and nobody moved anywhere. And we had some flight engineers that sat at that back seat there for 7 or 8 years. In 1977, we began to expand again, we hired some pilots in 1977 through 1979, who made right seat in a matter of 12 to 13 months, and flew there for 2 or 3 years. And then we started to go through a recession, and we started furloughing pilots, cutting back our marketing, our route expansion, and these pilots were then, because of seniority, moved back to the flight engineer panel, which brings up one thing I do want to make clear.

The allegations by ALPA that we have pilots today flying captain that were flight engineers prior to the day before we filed for bankruptcy is true. However, our junior captains today, just to give you an example, was a flight engineer in September 1983. We hired him in 1977 however; he checked out in 1979; he flew copilot for 18 months in a 727; he had 800 hours of 727 time, total time of a little over 10,000 hours, and he's presently an aircraft commander on a C-141 for the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He's our junior 727 captain. He's got almost 7 years of experience with this corporation, of which 18 months was in the right seat.

So it varies, based on the economy and the airline industry. Mr. SCHAEFER. And the surplus of pilots. In other words, what you're saying, is that it goes up and down.

Mr. HILLMAN. Right.

Mr. SCHAEFER. There was an article in this month's Air Line Pilot publication, page 27, and it indicates that there are several incidents resulting from communication problems. And I have here the communication from Flight 440 in New Orleans, where it's indicated that the Continental pilot failed to respond to the tower. Is this policy, is it your policy, that pilots are always to respond to communications of the tower?

Mr. HILLMAN. It's not only our policy, but it's required air traffic control procedure. In this particular incident in New Orleans, the display you saw roughed out some of the tape because they wanted to hasten it. There is a point in there, and we have heard the

tapes, where there were several attempts by our captain to confirm the clearance, and they are garbled. And cutting out, there were many, many aircraft in the area, there were severe thunderstorms, and holding patterns, and lots of airlines calling for instructions and responding to the air traffic control system. So he was trying to confirm his altitude a number of times, and you can hear his voice get cut off. So it's a very confusing tape when you hear it. It's not so bad when you read it, but when you hear it in the context of the whole tape, you'll find out it's very, very confusing.

Mr. ONSTAD. There's an important point here I'd just like to make for the record, and that is that the tape you hear is a tower tape. It's not a cockpit tape. And the guy up in that cockpit, he's up in a thunderstorm situation, like this one was, and he couldn't see anything, he was just in a soup that day. It crackles in your ears when lightning is about. It's very difficult to hear. So the quality of hearing in the cockpit is far different than the quality on the ground, and I invite any of you to test that by riding in a cockpit someday in a thunderstorm; coming out of Denver is particularly interesting in a thunderstorm, I've done that several times. You just-your ears are crackling with the lightning and stuff.

Mr. SCHAEFER. So you're saying that if there's an omission in the pilot's response to the tower, it's because of the interference.

Mr. ONSTAD. It may well be. It's just a possibility. When you get into these situations, there's all kinds of possibilities, but that's certainly a very good possibility.

Mr. SCHAEFER. But your policy is that they do respond on every occasion?

Mr. ONSTAD. Absolutely.

Mr. SCHAEFER. Can you just give me a brief explanation of your check airman program?

Mr. ONSTAD. The check airman program is a long, we'll try to make it brief. But, let me just make this point, that the check airman at Continental Airlines today is the same program-well, the program has been in place through three principal operations inspections, 12 to 15 years. We have recently changed it in response to the FAA's request, and I think Dick can tell you how we've changed it, and what it is, and how it operates.

Mr. HILLMAN. The first point that I'd want to make is that our check airmen, full check airmen are the same full check airmen that we had prior to the filing. They had all undergone the FAR 411, 413 certification under Captain Laughlin at the time. They are all still working today. The FAA interpretation has traditionally been that a check airman went to all that training, he's the man that administers proficiency checks and various check rides. The check pilot, which is designated as a check pilot in one of the regulations that talks about giving initial operating experience to captains, is called a check pilot. And we had always traditionally interpreted a check pilot to be different from a check airman.

Nothing in the FAR's gave us instructions on how to train a check pilot. Our previous principal operating inspectors, three of them, interpreted the check pilot to be different also. We would pick or choose our most qualified flying captain. We would train him in-house on the way we wanted him to handle it, and they would ride with these new, fully trained captains.