Was the Costa Concordia’s captain a coward?

Perspective

January 29, 2012|By Patrick Smith

(Guardia di Finanza/AFP/Getty Images)

There are many carry-overs between flying a jet and cruising the high seas. Some of the most common aviation terms are drawn from the nautical world, and the glamorous, nascent days of transoceanic flying provided the ultimate amalgamation of these two realms; Pan Am’s famous Clippers were, technically speaking, flying boats. Thus, as an airline pilot, it’s with unavoidable interest that I followed the plight of the hapless Francesco Schettino, renegade captain of the once majestic, then quite sideways Costa Concordia cruise ship.

The captain of a jetliner, no different from his cousin on the bridge of a ship, is charged with the safety and well-being of both a multimillion-dollar machine and its cargo of trusting passengers. Pilots train, retrain, and train again – a constant regimen that is nothing if not a long crisis-management rehearsal. Presumably it’s similar for those at sea, and so the image of Schettino scrambling into a lifeboat seems a touch, well, irresponsible. Maybe even pathetic.

On the one hand, Schettino looks like a coward. Under other circumstances, his exchange with the Italian Coast Guard would have been hilarious. “You go aboard!” commanded the coast guard captain, exhorting Schettino to return to his ship. “Don’t make any more excuses.”

In this light, Schettino is the anti-Sully, shuttling himself to safety while hundreds of his passengers remained behind in peril. Captain Chesley Sullenberger and his first officer, remember, stayed in the thick of things, ensuring that all were accounted for before their Airbus sank beneath the icy Hudson River.

Then again, the whole “down with the ship” thing shouldn’t be romanticized. Whether from a legal or moral perspective, self-sacrifice is a remarkable thing to expect of someone, regardless of his job. Would Schettino’s presence on the capsizing vessel have even made a difference? That’s unclear, but choosing to leave the ship could have been an entirely practical decision. He was not obligated to drown out of some perverse, old-fashioned sense of duty.

It’s the same with pilots. You follow your training to the extent that you can – your checklists and procedures and, in the end, your good judgment. Preparing for an evacuation on the runway, for example, requires adherence to a set of steps as well as critical coordination with the flight attendants. Neglect these and a perfectly survivable crisis can become a catastrophe.