Cecil Ewell

Cecil Ewell's counting the days until next Christmas. Thet's when he'll celebrate his 60th birthday by retiring as Chief Pilot for American Airlines, a job he's held since 1993. In this month's Profile, AVweb's Joe Godfrey talks with Captain Ewell about his naval career, 25 years flying the line, the pilot sick-out in February, and advice to pilots looking for a job with a major carrier.

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Capt. Cecil EwellCecil Ewell was born December 25, 1939, inLos Angeles, Calif. After graduating from high school in Nashville, Tenn., he earned afootball scholarship to the University of Florida. He finished the pre-med program with aBachelor’s Degree in Chemistry and was accepted to medical school. Those plans changed oneweekend when he and some friends went to Jacksonville for some beach R&R and saw theBlue Angels. He ran over to the office at NAS JAX and enlisted while still in his swimmingtrunks.

After two combat cruises in his five years in the Navy, he joined American Airlines. Hespent the next 25 years flying the line and worked as a check airman/instructor pilot onthe Boeing 727, Airbus A300, and Boeing 757/767. He was named Fleet Supervisor and Managerof the B767 at American’s Flight Academy and became Chief Pilot in 1993. As Chief Pilot,he supervises more than 9,500 pilots and 1,000 ground employees, all aspects of flighttraining, ten crew bases, 2,200-plus trips a day, and a budget of $3.5 billion. As ChiefPilot, he’s also in the hotseat between management and pilots. Last February, the hotseatgot hotter when many of American’s pilots staged a "sickout" to protestAmerican’s consolidation of Reno Air. After 31 years at American, he’ll spend the lastthree months of the year training his replacement and retire on his 60th birthday.


How did you get interested in flying?

Just before my senior year of college, I was home with my parents in the Chicago area.One day I was driving down a road and passed a little airport, and some guy was out flyinga J-3 Cub. I stopped and talked to him, and wound up selling everything I owned and tookflying lessons. I got my private ticket and flew about a hundred hours in that J-3 beforeI went into the navy. It was time well spent. The T-34 was a snap after flying thattaildragger. If I were going to own an airplane today, the J-3 is what I’d own.

Capt. Cecil EwellWhere did the Navy send you?

We were still living in southern California, so I joined at Los Alamitos. From there Iwent to Pensacola, then Meridian, Miss., and I got my wings in the summer of ’65 inBeeville, Texas and went right to Miramar for F-4 training. When I got out of that, Iwalked to the next hangar and joined my squadron which was VF-154. I flew two combatcruises on the USS Coral Sea and the USS Ranger, and flew about 150 missions oversoutheast Asia.

How did you wind up at American?

I almost didn’t. My wife was a flight attendant for American, so that was my firstchoice. I hadn’t heard from American and I was going to fly for Western Airlines up inL.A. About two weeks before I got out of the Navy I got a telegram from American. I gotout of the Navy on the first of November, 1968, and started at American three days lateras a flight engineer on the 727. I spent ten years as an engineer and six more years as acopilot, and made captain in 1984. I’ve flown almost everything American flies: the 707,the 727, the MD-80, the A-300, the 757, the 767, the MD-11 — and I’m not going totriple-seven school but I flew it for about an hour and a half at Boeing before we decidedto buy the airplane.

I wanted to fly for American, but I’d advise anybody that’s looking for an airline jobto hit all the majors. The guys I was in the Navy with have all ended up in about the sameplace whether it’s Delta or American or United or Northwest. We’ve all become wide-bodyinternational captains. So I’d say the opportunities are there no matter where you decideyou want to work.

Did you have a particular route or airplane you liked to fly?

I liked Paris and London. There’s just so much to do there in your time off. I stilltry to fly once a week. I don’t go to Paris and London once a week because I can’t affordthree days away, but when I fly international that’s where I like to go.

I’ve always liked every airplane I’ve flown. I loved the MD-11, loved the 727, andeverything in between. My favorite always seemed to be the one I was flying. Modernairplanes are much more overpowered and much more responsive — and the bigger they are,the easier they fly.

I got to fly a fun airplane last year. They flew me out to El Centro and I got to flywith the Blue Angels. I logged about an hour and a half of stick time.

Capt. Cecil EwellHow do you spend your day?

I usually get here between 5:30 and 6:00 in the morning and I’ll get home by 6:00 or6:30, but at least two days a week I don’t get home until after 11:00 at night. Normallyon Saturdays and Sundays I don’t come to the office, but the phone rings incessantly. Wehave 2,200-plus trips a day, worldwide, around the clock, and with that many operationsthere’s always something going on. I move from operational problems to labor to trainingto planning budgets for next year to hiring. We have a $3.5 billion budget next year, sothat alone is a lot of work.

And I give a lot of speeches. I never write them, I do it all off the top of my head.After six years of doing this, I never would have dreamed that it would present thechallenges that it has, but I’m amazed at the things I’m able to do now that I couldn’t dobefore. But I’m not sure I’d ever do this again if I had to make the choice. It’s anenormous amount of work and the financial return doesn’t really justify the time spent.

What’s your favorite part of the job?

Hiring. I call each and every applicant we decide to hire and offer them a job. I givethem the class date and invite the wives or husbands down for the first few days ofnew-hire training just to give them a flavor for the way the company operates. That’s thebest part of the job.

What’s your least favorite part of the job?

I hate the labor part. I’m in the middle between management and pilots. I’ve been inour union, APA [Allied Pilots Association], for31 years. I think — and [American Airlines CEO] Don Carty and [Vice President ofOperations] Bob Baker would agree with me — that having the union is important. But Iheartily disagree with the way business is being conducted there right now. I’ll admitthat the company, American, isn’t perfect. But it’s an absurd thought that there’s someplot going on to break the union.

First, I would know it if there was. There aren’t any secrets. Both American and theunion leak like a sieve, so it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on at both places.Secondly, nobody around here has the time to develop a plan like that.

Unfortunately, I think American is now suffering from … I hesitate to use the word"mistakes" … but let’s say some past ideas that weren’t so wonderful. But, Ithink the pendulum will swing back and things will be okay. Don Carty has had a lot ofinherited baggage, and they’ve been taking him on since he walked in the door. I’m not theleader of his fan club, but I know he wants to change this place and so far he hasn’t hada chance.

February was a tragedy. We’ve got a very small percentage of people that will never behappy, but that’s their problem. We can’t make rules and procedures that treat everybodyelse unfairly just because of those few. We have the finest pilots in the world here and Ithink it caused a lot of them to rethink what goes on and how it affects them. It’s ashame that it happened, but maybe something good will come out of it. I’ve gotten a lotmore involved in this than I wanted to, but at some point in time you have to be willingto stand up and say "that’s not the truth."

Capt. Cecil EwellHow is the current crop of pilots different from when youjoined American?

The flight time is much higher, specifically the military flight time. That’s becausethe airlines — all of them — haven’t been hiring. So they’ve spent more time at theregionals or in the military building time. The military time is higher, too, because thecommittment now is 10 or 11 years, and when I came up it was just five. I came to workwith 1,200 hours. I had 400 carrier landings, so it was pretty high-quality time, but nota lot of it.

Our average new-hire today has between 3,500 and 4,000 hours, and a lot of it ismultiengine time. A lot of that time is pilot-in-command time, but that’s not arequirement. And type ratings … I don’t put a lot of stock in people running out andspending $10,000 for a type rating. I’d never recommend that to anybody. If they’re readyfor a type rating, we’ll give them one.

How have American’s hiring procedures changed since you’ve been here?

About two and a half years ago, even though we were still calling back furloughees, Iknew that we were going to have to hire new pilots. In the past, the human resourcesdepartment had hired pilots, which I thought was a real bad idea. My boss, Bob Baker, andI had a few intense conversations on this with different areas of the company, buteventually I got the hiring program. So we decided that there would be some basic pilotrequirements, but number of hours was not going to be one of them. A pilot can have 10,000hours, but if it’s all in a 172 it’s not as valuable to me as a 1,500-hour F-16 pilot. Sothat’s why our time requirement says "commensurate with experience" instead of anumber.

My big concern is what’s in their heart and what’s in their heads. We spent about ayear developing a new-hire program which is now working like clockwork. We base a lot ofinitial call-ins on recommendations and family members. Where can you get a betteremployee than a son or daughter of someone that’s worked here for awhile? Better than 80%of the people that get through the door here get a job, versus about 30% at United.

We charge applicants $100. We’re not making any money on that deal, it’s just to coverthe background checks and the Records Act that the government requires us to do. We’vehired 802 people since the program began, and I think we’ve lost five who didn’t make itthrough school, and those were all flight engineers. I’d say that while today’s pilotsgenerally have a better grasp of computer skills, the flight engineer position is a moremechanical position, and I think we were a little more mechanically inclined when I cameup.

We’ve seen no difference in proficiency between men, women, and minority groups. I haveno quota set by either the company or by the government. That’s because we’re fair. Aslong as we’re fair, we won’t have the government in here telling me what to do.

Are you hiring now?

We’ll hire almost a thousand people this year and I see no end to the hiring in sight.

How has cockpit resource management changed since you’ve been with American?

It has evolved from what I call the "feel-good" system to realizing that inany crew there’s a captain and he or she is in command. At American we don’t call it"CRM," we call it "Human Factors," and it’s a more realistic,operationally-oriented approach that has evolved from the "I’m-okay-you’re-okay"attitude of the past. Somebody is in command. That doesn’t mean he or she has to be ajerk. We try to train our people to deal with other people, with the acklowledgement thatthere is a captain that will have the final authority on how the aircraft is operated.

Human factors have also changed along with the automation of the cockpit. The captainmust be able to select the level of automation that’s best for the situation. Flying theairplane fully automated — or with no automation — is probably not the answer. There’s amiddle ground, and in our training we focus on different levels of automation. Forinstance, an engine-out is a different level of automation than a Category III approach,and those are different from a non-precision approach. We’ve taken advantage of technologyas it has evolved, but my philosophy is that the day you allow the computer to do all yourthinking for you, you’re on your way to restland.

Do you get along with the FAA?

Our normal everyday contact is with our Principal Operations Inspector (POI) that holdsthe certificate. I deal with the POI or the Pricipal Maintenance Inspector (PMI) almost ona daily basis, but someone that works for me deals with them every single day on one thingor another. Every airline has a different POI and PMI, and each one of them is anindividual. So we argue a lot about a level playing field. If our guy makes me do certainthings, then I want everybody to have to do them.

I’m very straight-up with our POI. We hide nothing from him. If something happens, Icall him immediately, even if it’s something he’d never know about, because I think it’simportant to keep that relationship up-front. Then when things come up, we work throughthem and fix them. If I see something that needs fixing, I fix it and tell them I’ve doneit. I don’t wait for them to tell me to fix it. If discipline is needed, I do it.

The worst thing about the FAA is the legal stuff. I’ll give you an example. We have aprogram called ASAP—American Airlines Safety Action Program. I flew the line for 25 yearsbefore I took this job, so I know what goes on in the world. I also know that I probablyonly know about 10% of what’s going on. We encourage pilots to self-disclose, like "Ihad an altitude bust and the controller said ‘no problem’" … well, we want that guyto tell us about it, without fear of ending up with two weeks off.

It’s not a certificate protection program. If you do anything intentionally, you’re outof the program. But we’ve made some dramatic changes in our operations based on theinformation we’ve gathered from the cockpit. Every week, the event review team — made upof the union, the company, and the FAA — meets to go over these reports. We thought itwas such a good idea that everybody else ought to be doing this, too. Well, for two years,we’ve been fighting FAA legal who are afraid that by doing this they’ll be accused ofabrogating their right to enforcement. We think they’re wrong about that. In no way doesthe ASAP program affect the FAA’s ability to take corrective action if they deem itneccessary. And I will never support a program that limits my — not the FAA’s — abilityto discipline somebody that needs it.

My understanding is that they’ve recently loosened up on this, and we may see this kindof program industry-wide. If that happens, I’ll host a get-together here at DFW and we’llshow them what to do and how to do it. And that’ll be free. My philosophy is that anythinghaving to do with safety is not for sale, we just give that away.

This sounds a little bit like an airline version of NASA’s Aviation Safety ReportingProgram.

It is, and we participate in that, too. It’s similar, but it’s a few steps forward,since we review every single one of them with an eye to operational changes. We changedour procedures on the Super 80’s altitude set-and-hold knob based on ASAP reports. Wefinally discovered what was causing the altitude busts, and fixed it.

The legal issues are that this is information that you want in-house, but notnecessarily to the public. Let’s say that we report fifty altitude busts for last year andDelta, for instance, says, "well, we didn’t have any." That could be becausethey didn’t know about them. So we want the information so we can improve operations, butwe don’t want it used against us by the competition.

Capt. Cecil EwellYou’re planing to retire at the end of the year. What’s next?

I’ll probably take about six months and do nothing for awhile. I won’t miss getting upat 4:00 a.m. and going to bed at midnight. I’ve had a lot of lawyers asking me to be aconsultant and expert witness, so I’m not going to work for a living, but I’m not going tojust go sit in a rocking chair, either. Pilots at American have a tremendous retirementprogram, the best in the industry. I’ve been very fortunate, so I’d like to do somethingto help others. I don’t know what that is yet, but it’ll show up.

Is there a J-3 Cub in your future?

Oh, maybe if I found one, I might do it. We do a lot of 707 training here for the thirdworld, and KC-135 training for the Air Force. The guys that do that are retired 707captains, and they’re very, very good at it. One of those captains is based at a littlefield just west of here, has a J-3 Cub, and wants me to come down there and fly it. Sowe’ll see how that turns out.

I’ll play some golf. Spend some time with my granddaughter. I’ll miss the flying, butmostly I’ll miss the people.


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