McDonnell Douglas MD-80

He spent 27 years in the right seat as a co-pilot and then as a captain for the last 10 years of his career.

He's flown a variety of aircraft, including the 727, the BAE-146, the MD-80, the DC-9, the 737, the 757, the 767, and the Airbus Series 319, 320, and 321, as well as a whole bunch of little airplanes, including Pipers and Cessnas.

Jeff has almost 30,000 flying hours.

And along the way, he's been a union accident investigator for ALPA, USAPA, and APA.

Good deal.

We were both very fortunate.

So I'm curious to know, with all the different types of airliners that you've flown, how are they different, you know, from the MD-80 to the 737 to the 757? I mean, as a passenger on them, they're all big airplanes to me.

How do they handle differently? How do they fly differently? And what's the experience like on the flight deck?

He had been with Delta since becoming an airline pilot in 1989, and before that, he had been an F-16 pilot with the US Air Force, as well as an instructor pilot.

In this time he'd accumulated over 15,000 hours of flying experience, about 11,000 of which were on MD-80 series aircraft.

The first officer was 46-year-old David Phillips.

He had been with Delta since 2007, where he had flown the 737 and MD-88, and before that he'd been with another airline as a flight engineer on the 727.

Before starting his career as an airline pilot, he had flown with the US Navy.

Over this time, he had racked up about 11,000 hours of flying experience, about 3,000 of which were on MD-80 series aircraft.

Both pilots had spotless safety records and were variously described by colleagues as being highly skilled and professional team players.

At 25 minutes past nine that morning, flight 1086 took to the skies above Atlanta.

Lutz was now a professional pilot carrying passengers around Europe.

Over a decade later in 1995, Crossair had acquired some MD-80 aircraft.

These were some of the largest and most modern passenger aircraft in the Crossair fleet, and they represented an exciting opportunity for pilots in the airline to upgrade for mostly slower propeller aircraft.

A number of pilots at the airline, including the captain, were chosen to train on this new fleet of aircraft.

The airline decided that he should not continue with this conversion course, and that they would give him another chance to upgrade in a few months.

This chance came around in June that same year.

Yet again, the captain had major problems with the MD-80's digital flight guidance system.

These issues continued throughout the course, and the captain ultimately failed the type rating exam at the end.

So for me, it's more or less the fifth or sixth aircraft.

[laughs] I started on the MD-80, going through all the Airbus aircraft, and finally landed on the 767, which I was flying now for about 14 years.

I started in 2012, and as I told you before, I had my last flight on the 767 last week coming from Montreal.

And what about the 767 makes crews and passengers alike love the aircraft so much? What, from your perspective, makes people really love this aircraft?

That is certan-certainly a point.

TWA had a, had an MD-80 depart St. Louis years ago and had a, uh, engine failure on takeoff, uh, pretty significant engine failure.

And, uh, they cleaned the airplane up.

They started the memory items.

Yeah.

It was funny, y- I remember my v- as a new hire at American Eagle, I missed the shuttle one time in an Am- like, in, back in the day, American Eagle and American were all owned by the same company, and we would have the train, same training center, so you had these 23-year-old kids along with the, you know, crusty 55-year-old MD-80 pilots, and, you know, we're all in the same cafeteria and everything, you know, so.

But anyways, I missed the shuttle 'cause there wasn't enough room or whatever, and this American guy, "So you can ride with us," 'cause we, American owned their own hotel at the time [laughs] that all the pilots stayed at, so we all went to the same place.

So he let me and another of my new hire buddies into the car, and he looked around, and he goes, "Boys, this is the one thing I treat myself to every year in training.

And I'm, I'm, you know, like everyone, I'm thrilled to set a, a, a happy ending.

And if I were to walk out on it just for a second, um, if you kind of go back in time and you would talk to a group of, um, or Donald Douglas engineers, particularly Douglas ones about seven through seven versus, um, uh, the, uh, MD 80, uh, DC nine, uh, they would always say, you know, the wing, the wing on the DC nine fuselage is built around it like that.

It's just on there so strong and that, you know, how the wing is mounted on the seven three isn't as good.

Um, and this, I don't know, it kind of shows that they're all wrong.