Leisure & Arts

'Charlie Victor Romeo' Offers
A Peek Inside the Black Box

By LEE LAWRENCE

New York

When "Charlie Victor Romeo" begins, everything vibrates -- the air, the chair, your rib cage. For the pounding you suffer, you could be at a rock concert. But this is no concert; this is dead serious. Scheduled to run through May 27 at the Collective Unconscious, a 54-seat theater on the Lower East Side, the play thrusts the audience into the cockpit during six flights gone dreadfully and sometimes fatally wrong. Packed tighter than in economy class, the audience watches as the pilots, their faces illumined from below by the unseen instrument panel, struggle to make sense of a world that has suddenly unraveled. The instruments are malfunctioning. An explosion has ripped through the tail. Geese have flown into the engines.

Since the play opened last October, the aviation press has hailed it for its realism, theater critics have praised its intensity and sellout performances have prolonged its run. Even rarer for such an off-off Broadway production, "Charlie Victor Romeo" has caught the attention of the military. Lt. Col. Larry Shattuck made it required viewing for West Point cadets majoring in Engineering Psychology, and Air Force Capt. John Varljen is pushing hard at the Pentagon to make a video of the play to be used as a training aid.

"We'd be the first theater on Ludlow Street with a defense contract," says co-director Bob Berger, who got the idea for the play as he was thumbing through "The Black Box," a 1998 collection of transcripts from 28 disasters. "I imagined that anybody in that situation would be dumbstruck and incapable of doing anything but scream," he says. "Even in cases of obvious human error, these guys never say die. They fly all the way."

With co-directors Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory, he started researching the project, talking to pilots and flight attendants, reading National Transportation Safety Board transcripts from cockpit voice recorders (commonly abbreviated as CVR -- hence Charlie Victor Romeo) and surfing aviation web sites. In time, the theater's technical director, Jamie Mereness, joined in, putting together a sound track that blows you away while keeping you pinned to your seat.

Air Force Capt. Varljen is among many aviation professionals who believe the play can save lives. At the Pentagon, Capt. Varljen's job is to oversee regulations pertaining to Crew Resource Management (CRM) training. This means training personnel to deal with each other under difficult conditions. Unlike the taped re-enactments produced by the Air Force, he says "Charlie Victor Romeo" captures "the emotional element" which helps to show "how stressful the event can really become."

A case in point: In the recreation of Aeroperu Flight 603, the altimeter, airspeed indicator and other instruments malfunction, giving readings the pilots know to be false. As Dave Lithgow, who has worked as a commercial airline pilot for close to 40 years and has read the transcript, describes it: "The brain of the autopilot and auto-guidance system had a stroke. All the crew had to do was turn it off and fly the plane." Yet the pilot cannot bring himself to shut off the computer even as he becomes increasingly frustrated with its version of reality.

In terms of CRM, such cases have profound implications. "We're beginning to lean toward thinking of the aircraft as another member of the crew," Capt. Varljen explains. "Especially as aircraft become smarter and smarter, it's more likely that the plane will go off and do things that you may not expect. The play," he adds, "brought this home big time."

To West Point's Lt. Col. Shattuck, on the other hand, the play demonstrates what he calls the theory of "local or bounded rationale," which interprets a situation by analyzing the various pressures and conditions under which people make decisions. About 75% of investigations into airline accidents, according to Lt. Col. Shattuck, conclude with a verdict of human error, a label he believes can prove misleading. "Humans don't purposefully do the wrong thing," he says. "It's something in the environment or the technology or in the organization that contributes to the actions they take." These can range from pressures to land the plane on time, incorrect information or training that encourages overreliance on computer equipment.

The assumption is that some thing or things are dictating an erroneous logic. A transcript is helpful, to be sure, but the text may be some 80 pages long and takes several hours to read. "To see that event unfold within a couple of minutes," Lt. Col. Shattuck says, gives his cadets an immediate "sense of what was taking place in the cockpit that led to the outcome. They gain an incredible appreciation for the stresses and pressures that pilots are under."