455. Peter Muir Delo
Retired Boulder pilot lands national air safety award
Peter Delo flew United Boeings, investigated crashes
By Todd Neff, Camera Staff Writer September 2, 2003
A lanky man with disobedient gray hair, Peter Delo bears a resemblance to the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who doesn't look much like an airline pilot.
But Delo favors military time, and one can well imagine his baritone voice sqeezed through airline-cabin speakers. Indeed, in March, Delo, 60, retired after 34 years as a United Airlines captain with about 21,000 flight hours.
Yet much of Delo's work was done in his off hours. As a volunteer airline crash investigator and air safety consultant, he saw terrible things — "smoking holes," as he calls the scenes of airline crashes — including the one blasted into a Pennsylvania field by United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001. In the process, Delo made the skies safer for everyone who flies commercial.
In an Aug. 21 ceremony in Washington, D.C., the 66,000-member Air Line Pilots Association honored Delo with their Presidential Citation for Outstanding Service in Air Safety, a lifetime achievement award.
Delo's interest in air safety may be genetic. His father, Pete, now deceased, was at 19 the youngest B-17 commander in the Army Air Forces and was fished out of the English Channel after a crash in 1943.
Rory Kay, a pilot who leads the Air Line Pilots Association safety group for United pilots, said Delo "epitomizes what a guy is prepared to do for his fellow aviators and therefore the passengers sitting behind those aviators."
For 24 years, the University of Colorado graduate and longtime Boulder resident inspected accident sites, debriefed pilots after accidents and worked with everyone from mechanics to National Transportation Safety Board officials to make airplanes safer.
While chief accident investigator for United's Air Line Pilots Association group from 1996 through 2003, Delo sifted through the wreckage of the 1991 United Flight 585 crash in Colorado Springs, which killed 25 people. When a USAir Boeing 737 crashed near Pittsburgh under similar circumstances three years later, Delo was there to assist.
What originally was deemed by Boeing to be "pilot error" later was found to be a mechanical malfunction in the rudder mechanism, Delo said.
The day of the 9/11 attacks, Delo was at Newark International Airport waiting to fly when the jets struck the twin towers. Knowing the wreckage of United Flight 175 was lost in the World Trade Center ruins, Delo managed to rent a car and drive to Somerset, Penn., where he assisted FBI investigators for six days.
"Flight 93 was not a crash, but a crime scene," Delo said.
How does a full-time pilot psychologically digest his profession's nightmare?
"You're not callous about it," he said. "But you realize if you're going to do the job, you have to get through it."
Some of Delo's most important work came in safety-related negotiations between airline pilots and the industry group representing U.S. airlines, the Air Transportation Association.
When it comes to backup equipment, pilots want everything to be working perfectly, regardless of cost, and airlines want to make money, he said.
"My job was to find a safe middle ground," he said.
There were cases, though, where Delo drew the line. Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance Systems, which tell pilots to climb, descend or turn if a collision appears imminent, once could be out of service for 10 days. Delo insisted they be back in service within three days.
He had personal reasons.
"It's saved my butt a couple of times," Delo said, in particular a near-miss with a Cessna over San Francisco.
Delo also helped strengthen pilot training in areas like flight abort (stopping before the plane takes off), coming out of a stall and dealing with cabin-pressure failures.
His work as a Vietnam-era Air National Guard mechanic in Wyoming gave him a deep knowledge of airplane hardware. He can speak the language of mechanics as well as pilots. Delo wrote an 80-page section on airplane maintenance for the United pilots' flight operations manual.
No longer piloting Boeing 767s, Delo is spending time helping wife Sharon recover from breast cancer and compiling a family genealogy. He's thinking about flying again, as well, though he's too old to fly commercial.
He doesn't plan to stop his work with air safety, though, and that's good news for the United pilots' union.
"He's a unique individual. I've got nobody to replace him with," said United pilot Rory Kay. "He's the sort of guy I'll be phoning up until his last breath."
Peter Delo of Boulder, a University of Colorado bachelor's of science alumnus, and a United Airlines captain, received a presidential citation for outstanding service in air safety from the Air Line Pilots Association, International. The award recognizes Delo's hard work and activism to make air travel safer. He has worked as a volunteer on airport safety issues on the local, national and international level. He successfully worked to reduce pilot workload and improve airline safety, and worked on a variety of other initiatives. He is chief accident investigator for United Airlines and assisted in the crash investigation of United Flight 93 in Somerset County, Pa., soon after Sept. 11, 2001.