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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Flying Beech 99's, ogling Gulf Air's stunning stewardesses and other career highlights. Plus: What are the scariest airports?
Oct 25, 2002 | Special thanks to those of you who didn't interpret last week's sob story as a kind of entitlement tantrum. Not all pilots have such whoppingly woeful pasts, and my point was only to chronicle one of the many less than glamorous experiences so common in the profession. There are thousands of pilots with equally humiliating résumés. Be happy I spared you the accounts of my own personal bankruptcy filing and how I've eaten nothing but macaroni and cheese for the past decade.
On that note, it was 12 years ago this week, according to my logbook, that I made my first-ever flight as an airline pilot. (Logbooks are good for one other thing aside from what I mentioned last time: rekindling this or that better-forgotten memory.) The company that hired me, now defunct, was Northeast Express Regional Airlines, which did business as the commuter affiliate of a certain major airline. We carried its passengers, code-share style, as a corporate surrogate along routes in the Northeast. Our planes, like its planes, were painted handsomely in red, but we were neither owned nor otherwise associated with it. That would be important later, when the paychecks started bouncing.
But for now I was finally an airline pilot, and on Oct. 21, 1990, I departed on the prestigious Manchester, N.H., to Boston route -- the 15-minute run frequented, as you'd expect, by Hollywood stars, dignitaries and sheiks. I'll always cherish that day -- having to drive to Sears at 8:30 in the morning, an hour before my sign-in time, because I'd already lost my tie. And then the clerk's face when I told him I needed something "plain black" and "polyester, not silk."
My first airplane was an old twin turboprop, the BE 99, aka Beech 99 or just "the 99." It was a ridiculous anachronism posing as a viable mode of commercial transport, fooling nobody and forced into continued service by a cheap (and doomed) airline. But it was my first job, and hey, for 800 bucks a month why turn down danger and embarrassment? There was no flight attendant and I had to close the cabin door myself. When I performed this maneuver on my inaugural flight, I twisted the handle and dragged the first three knuckles of my right hand across the head of a loose screw, cutting myself badly.
I remember flying into Logan that morning, at the controls of the silly 99 and looking over at the terminals from, finally, a pilot's point of view. I thought of my days in grammar school when I'd come to this same airport and roam these same buildings, watching the planes and wishing I could fly one of them. On Valentine's Day, 1991, I went for my captain's checkout on the 99. I was 24 years old.
Next up was the Fairchild Metroliner, a more sophisticated, 19-seat jetprop. I got my captain's rating for this one in late '92. Then came the De Havilland Dash 8. The Dash was a 37-passenger job and the biggest thing I'd ever laid my hands on. A new one cost about $8 million, and it even had a flight attendant. I loved that plane and it remains my favorite. I went for my captain's check on July 7, 1993. I was 26. Only 13 of us, out of more than a hundred, got to fly the Dash from the left seat. I was number 13, bottom of the bottom, but I would call each morning begging for overtime.
By the following summer I was out of work. I bounced around from job to job, at one point plying the featureless Midwest in a French-built ATR, and was later based at JFK as captain on the Jetstream 41, a sexy 30-passenger machine built in very unsexy Scotland. My bloody-knuckle takeoff from Manchester in 1990 was forever my answer to the "What's your proudest moment?" question when I interviewed for those positions. But there were also some moments I kept to myself:
There was the time we flew in from Halifax, Nova Scotia, when I swore at the immigration officer in Boston and she wouldn't let me into the country. I was tired and cranky and our plane had been hit by lightning during the descent. The officer was rude and I said something I shouldn't have. Next thing I knew I was in a holding cell -- a kind of no-man's room where, technically, your citizenship is not yet applicable -- with a group of handcuffed Haitians. I got a call from my boss about that one. He wanted to know why I was late for my outbound flight to Newark, and I told him it was because I was no longer an American.
My most savored practical joke, however, was one I never got around to actually pulling off. A few of our Metroliners and Dash 8s wore names, stenciled in white beneath the cockpit windows. There was, for example, the "Spirit of Partnership," the "Spirit of Acadia" and even the "L'Esprit de Moncton," in honor of our new routes into the Canadian Maritimes. My plan was to sneak onto the tarmac and stencil some names onto planes that didn't have them. I wanted to christen them after some infamous and colorful former employees -- pilots who'd recently been terminated (and whose names are changed below).
The first was going to be the "Spirit of Skip Fallon." Skip was a guy nobody could stand, and he'd been let go a few months earlier. Then there was the "Clipper Mark Levereaux," another canned character. Mark was a really nice fellow with a body odor problem and an indescribably bizarre personality. He sure deserved a Metroliner. There were the "Captain Charbennau," the "K.C. O'Brien," and others. I had the stencils and paint ready.
At the last minute somebody talked me out of it. I'd gone over the line when I was ready to name a plane after one pilot who still worked there. This was Dick Harris, whom I hardly knew and probably had never spoken to. He was an older and overly serious guy with a big flume of white hair. A friend of mine used to call him "Santa Claus," which I always thought was the funniest thing in the world because somehow he did look like Santa Claus even though he didn't have a beard.
