The Perilous Shoals of Memory: Back to that Dicey NYT Mag Story

Memory is unreliable. But there's a difference between misremembering and making things up.

[TL;DR Executive summary of what's below: Patrick Smith, of Ask the Pilot, has seen maintenance records from the flight described in a controversial NYT Magazine piece. These records show no evidence of the "landing gear failure" on which the entire story was based.]

Let's step away from NSA and Edward Snowden, and even from Pooh and Tigger, for a moment. Earlier I said I would not re-prosecute the case against the recent, fantasized NYT Magazine "Lives" story on what a writer felt when an airliner was (supposedly) about to plunge to its doom. For a refresher on the story, see this -- plus later details from Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith, from Clive Irving, from the Economist's Gulliver site, and from John Warner at Inside Higher Ed.

I have two new reasons to go back into this article. One makes me think more gently of the story and the author. The other, much more harshly.
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1. I'll start with Mr. Nice Guy. The controversy over the story involved whether what was recounted by the author, Noah Gallagher Shannon, could have happened as described. To choose one notorious example:

The captain came out of the cockpit and stood in the aisle. His cap dangled in one hand. "All electricity will remain off," he said. Something about an open current and preventing a cabin fire. Confused noises spread through the cabin, but no one said a word. "I'll yell the rest of my commands from the cockpit." I could see sweat stains under his arms. "Not going to sugarcoat it," he said. "We're just going to try to land it."

I was not on that plane, but I can tell you: This. Did. Not. Occur. The dangling cap-in-hand; the sweat stains; the captain coming out of the cockpit and saying he would "yell" his commands; the "not going to sugarcoat it" and "just going to try to land it." No. But the explanation from the magazine's editor, Hugo Lindgren, was that the story aspired to describe what one writer "felt and heard," what he remembered, rather than what anyone else might recall. ("Naturally, not every detail matches everybody else's experience. Surely even people on that plane would remember it differently.")

At first, I thought this explanation was mainly artful in rendering the story un-falsifiable. I thought about it differently and more sympathetically after hearing, this weekend, a remarkable episode of the the TED Radio Hour, hosted by my former All Things Considered comrade Guy Raz.

The subject of the show was the unreliability of even the "strongest" and clearest memories. The first segment, with a legal authority named Scott Fraser, went into the very great likelihood of error, false certainty, and wishful filling-in of facts that accompanied most eyewitness recollections. The second segment, with the sociologist and economist  psychologist (who won a Nobel prize in economics) Daniel Kahneman, was even more directly applicable to the NYT Mag case. It dealt with extremely "vivid" memories that might never have happened, or with details very different from what the rememberer became "sure" had occurred. Kahneman described one of the most powerful episodes from his childhood as a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied France. And then he explained why he couldn't be sure the event had ever happened the way he "recalled." (The final segment was the writer Joshua Foer describing how he won the national trained-memory championship.)

By chance, immediately after that show I listened to a recent episode of Radiolab, which in one chilling segment reinforced the Memento / Inception / Matrix- like point that we can very rarely be sure what is "really" going on. So maybe that was the story with the New York Times. Something happened on an airplane; a passenger on that plane imagined and then remembered something else; and that something-else is what he, in all sincerity, described to us.

And then I saw an update on Patrick Smith's site.

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2. Smith, an airline pilot, has for many years written the celebrated Ask the Pilot chronicles, along with his excellent new book Cockpit Confidential. (Seriously: If there is anything you don't like, or do like, about air travel, you'll find this book fascinating.) Smith has ample reason to be believed on this topic, and no reason to risk his reputation by inventing facts. And today he says that he has come across maintenance records for that "doomed" flight that made an emergency landing in Philadelphia. What he has found is not convenient for the story Noah Gallagher Shannon told.

You can get all the details from from Smith, but here's the heart of it. Smith says that the flight crew's logbooks from the flight show this crucial notation:

"ECAM HYD Y RSVR LO LVL"

Let's break this down. ECAM is the monitoring service for system-functions on an Airbus. HYD stands for the hydraulic systems for controlling the plane; Y stands for "Yellow," to identify one of the three color-coded hydraulic systems. RSVR LO LVL means "reservoir at low level" [see, you too can be a pilot], a warning signal about potential problems with that hydraulic system.

This was the "emergency." It was not a "problem with the landing gear," which was the entire premise of the NYT Magazine article. (The yellow hydraulic system does not control the plane's landing gear, as the pilots would beyond any question have known -- you're always drilled and tested on which systems control which functions, and what happens if they fail.) There is nothing in this circumstance that would have made a professional flight crew panic or try to prepare passengers for the worst. Moreover, after the plane landed in Philadelphia, a maintenance crew found (according to Smith) that this was purely a faulty-indicator problem. The hydraulic level had been fine all along. Let Smith spell it out:

An A320 captain I spoke to says that a shut-down of the yellow system would have meant, at worst, a slightly longer-than-normal landing roll (due to loss of the right engine thrust reverser and some of the wing spoiler panels), and, in newer A320s, loss of the nose-gear steering system, requiring a tow to the gate.

There were enough red flags [in Shannon's story] to begin with, but this puts it over the top, tilting the entire account from one of eye-rolling embellishment toward one of outright fabrication.

There was never a problem with the landing gear. There was never a reason for the pilots to come out, sweat-drenched, and say brave words to the possibly doomed souls aboard. Based on what Patrick Smith has learned, there was never a reason to shut off all the lights and electricity in the plane. Memory is unreliable. But the Times Magazine story appears to be something more than that, and worth another look by the paper.