Eugene pair want to help airlines keep things calm at 30,000 feet.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

It was "plane" insanity.

Intoxicated identical twins - tall, lanky, 22-year-old aspiring models with long auburn hair - were screaming profanities and fighting with each other, and punching and spitting on flight attendants on United Airlines Flight 857 as it sailed over the Pacific Ocean, en route from San Francisco to Shanghai.

It was April 19, 2001, and Jim Dunn of Eugene had thought he'd seen it all during his more than three decades as a commercial airline pilot.

Dunn, the captain on the flight, was so worried during the incident that he left the cockpit of the massive 747 to investigate. Convinced he had a dangerous situation on his hands, especially after one of the women tried to open a door at 30,000 feet, he diverted the flight and landed in Anchorage.

United wasn't happy about his decision. It cost the airline $200,000, says the 64-year-old Dunn, now retired. But he knows he did the right thing, he says. Shortly after, he adds, he tried to communicate to United executives the urgency with which flight attendants needed training to deal with problem passengers. But, he says, they refused to listen.

And even in these post-Sept. 11 days, they're still not listening, says Dunn, who has been trying to launch his Eugene consulting business, Plane Reactions, since he retired in 2002.

Along with his partner, Eugene psychologist Zak Schwartz, a 55-year-old anger management specialist, Dunn's aim is to train flight attendants and federal air marshals to identify potential problem passengers before they board a plane, and to defuse situations before they occur.

They would train flight crews in psychological techniques and crisis intervention. For example, before a plane ever leaves the ground, flight attendants and air marshals would make a personal connection with potential troublemakers, such as engage them in conversation and praise their positive attributes. In other words, a positive interaction that could make an incident less likely to happen.

After all, Dunn and Schwartz say, most problem passengers are not terrorists.

Passengers such as Rigoberto Alpizar, a mentally ill man who was shot to death by an air marshal in Miami on Dec. 7 after he ran off a plane screaming that he had a bomb. Or passengers such as University of Oregon graduate student Bogdana Atanasova Georgieva, who was arrested by airport police in Salt Lake City on Jan. 11 after the United Airlines Eugene-to-Denver flight she was on was diverted after she got into a physical confrontation with a fellow passenger and reportedly lunged toward the cockpit.

The problem, Dunn and Schwartz say, is not only a fear-based, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy by airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration, but the reluctance of airlines to train their crews in the skills and techniques to handle most problems.

"That's really our issue," Schwartz says, "to bring these skills in some way. We think we could help an airline do that at low cost and high effectiveness."

Dunn and Schwartz met about five years ago, after the infamous San Francisco-to-Shanghai flight. After moving the twins to another row and thinking he had solved the problem, Dunn says they began to scream and fight again.

Dunn became worried that passengers might try to subdue them and was reminded of a situation just eight months earlier on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City when a 19-year-old man was unintentionally suffocated by passengers restraining him during a mysterious delusional fit.

Dunn says he now knows he should have separated the twins and put them in different rows, preferably in different sections of the plane, something he learned from Schwartz; just like separating children in a classroom.

Dunn tried to get the attention of corporate honchos at United, saying something needed to be done to educate flight crews.

"I got no support whatsoever," Dunn says. "I became very surprised and appalled."

He began to research other airlines, only to discover that a lack of anger-management training, which he says the Federal Aviation Administration does not mandate for flight crews, was pretty much the norm.

"Unless it's a lawsuit, they just want to forget about it," he says.

So Dunn began to wonder, "Who the hell do I have to see to find out what I did wrong?"

His daughter, Kelly Dunn, had an answer for him: Go see Schwartz, the master of defusing volatile situations involving large, potentially out-of-control crowds. After all, if Schwartz has been able to do it at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta all these years, why couldn't he do it at 30,000 feet?

Schwartz has been training security personnel at the annual summer fair on how to handle crowds and rage and drugs and alcohol for years. Kelly Dunn had worked for him before and suggested to her father that they should meet.

"I think we make a pretty good combination," Dunn says.

What happened in Miami (the federal marshal shooting of the mentally ill man) was predictable, Dunn says.

"We can't fault either party," he says, sitting in his spacious Mediterranean-style home on University Street. "We can only fault the system. (The shooter) said he was only doing what he was trained to do. What we're really preaching here is that no one is really trained to evaluate, address and solve problems."

On the day of the Miami incident, Dunn wrote to about 40 leading news organizations across the country, from ABC News to CBS News, to The New York Times and The Washington Post, suggesting to editors and reporters that they should speak with him about the shooting. There were no takers.

For the past four years, Dunn says he has been trying to get airlines - including his former employer, United - to let him and Schwartz come in and make a presentation to airline crews. Thus far, he hasn't been able to get through to one decision-maker.

Hank Krakowski, United's vice president of corporate safety in Chicago, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Dunn says the excuse he hears is that airlines are strapped for cash since the downfall in business caused by the 2001 terrorist attacks, and that there's no way they could spend money on a program such as Plane Reaction's. Dunn says that's ridiculous, and that airlines would probably even save money. But that issue, mixed with the big corporate egos at most airlines in the United States, is not a good combination, Dunn says.

The approach by Dunn and Schwartz has merit, some say.

"I think it's a good idea," says Bob Kudwa, former vice president of flight operations for American Airlines who now has his own airline safety and security consulting firm, Kudwa & Associates, in Colorado Springs, Colo. "The problem that we have in the airline industry is that we've lost $40 billion since Sept. 11."

So if spending money doesn't have to do with operating the airline, it's not going to be spent, Kudwa says. There's also an attitude that, "If it's not invented here, then it's not very good. If it's not my child, then it's ugly."

Add the money issue and the ego issue to the nervousness and anxiety that go along with flying on commercial jetliners nowadays, and it's not the best scenario for a cozy, cuddly psychological approach to dealing with problem passengers, Kudwa says.

Dunn and Schwartz, however, say if not now, when?

Flight attendants' first priority on a flight is not food and beverage service, says Schwartz. "Their first priority is safety in the cabin, and keeping everyone alive on that flight."

Dunn and Schwartz spoke and presented their business plan at two airline industry symposiums and trade shows in 2003, one in Montreal and the other in Vancouver, B.C. They say it was warmly received.

"They said, 'This is exactly what we need,' ' Schwartz says of many flight attendants who were there. "But they aren't the check-writers."

Although they would certainly like Plane Reaction to reap a profit, that's not why they started the business, Dunn says. "My motivation was to try and help the poor damn folks who have to do this every day - the flight attendants."

CAPTION(S):

Jim Dunn (left), a retired United Airlines pilot, and Eugene psychologist Zak Schwartz have started a consulting firm, Plane Reaction, to help airlines deal with out-of-control passengers.