If you think the cowboy culture on safety in the BP Gulf Spill is recent, here’s an inside story form St. Patrick’s Day in 2000.
Rodney Chase, head of US Operations for BP was on corporate aircraft flying from New York to inspect a house he was building on Nantucket. The two pilots were Amoco pilots BP inherited in the Amoco/BP merger. They were trained in the Amoco safety culture. The weather was bad on Nantucket. The two pilots said they couldn’t land. Mr. Chase advised the pilots “that any BP pilot worth his salt would land the plane. He didn’t want to mess with an hour car ride from Boston. He told them you will land the plane, that’s an order. If you don’t, the two of you are fired when we hit the ground back in Boston. Flying with the wind they tried to get the plane down. Here is a newspaper account of the result.
On this day in 2000, a corporate jet overshot a runway at Barnstable Municipal Airport early in the evening of an icy and windswept St. Patrick’s Day, sideswiped vehicles on Route 28 and ended up in a parking lot across the street from the airport.
No one on the plane or ground was injured, though two people in a car nearly struck by the Falcon 9000 jet were taken to Cape Cod Hospital as a precaution.
After coming to a stop in the T.J. Maxx Plaza parking lot, the plane spilled an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 gallons of fuel that leaked into storm drains and eventually into Hyannis Harbor. The wing tanks and fuselage of the jet were damaged when it ripped through a chain-link fence at the perimeter of the airport.
The plane was carrying a single passenger, an executive with BP-Amoco identified in news reports as Rodney Chase of Chatham.
William King of Bridgewater, survived kamikaze attacks on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill during World War II – only to nearly perish from a plane skidding off a runway back home.
A passenger in a car sideswiped by the chain-link fence dragged behind the plane, William King of Bridgewater, survived kamikaze attacks on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill during World War II – only to nearly perish from a plane skidding off a runway back home in the U.S.
The $25 million corporate jet was heavily damaged, but miraculously no one in the plane or on the ground was injured in the mishap all though it ripped through 600 feet of chain link fence.
So, are you surprised that a corporation with top people who behave like Rodney Chase would cut corners and cause deaths in the process? This is an organization that needs to be totally dismantled from the top down. The current leaders are just Rodney Chase with different names.
By the way, the two Amoco pilots retired shortly after his incident with what was reported to be a nice severance package to keep quiet. Mr. Chase left soon thereafter, guess he was just too much of a risk to keep around.
