Ask the pilot

The airport city of Miami International -- a metropolis for airline geeks to savor.

By Patrick Smith

Mar 21, 2003 | Miami International Airport is the nexus of air routes connecting South and Central America to the United States. It's a plane spotter's heaven, and airliner geeks with tripod-mounted Nikons and binoculars press against windows and chain-link fences, snapping pictures and recording tail numbers. (Or at least they used to. Our current fears and hysteria have, as might have been the case in Cold War Bulgaria, caused the banishment of such eccentric pursuits from most of the country's airports.) I remember once taxiing past a gaggle of spotters near runway 30, sliding open the right-side window, and exchanging waves with our admirers.

As a Latin crossroads, Miami International probably has more Spanish-speaking pilots running through their checklists in a given moment than do Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago combined. All that's missing is the right soundtrack. Maybe Willie Colón doing "Como un Huracan" as the planes roar away. Lined up for takeoff, widebodies from Lufthansa or Air France seem prosaically out of place among the spicy liveries of Avianca, Mexicana, and Aerolineas Argentinas.

Famous as a kind of aviation chop shop, the airport is also home to droves of maintenance and salvage companies of varying eminence. The newest copy of the BellSouth Yellow Pages devotes 12 full pages to MIA, with a "Parts and Suppliers" heading that covers more than five single-spaced columns. In the airport's corners and crevices one finds dozens of anonymous storage yards and rows of ramshackle hangars.

The old abandoned propliners are mostly gone now. The carcasses of the DC-3s, DC-7s and C-46s that were once strewn about the field, bleached and rusting in the grass, have been broken up for scrap. But there's no shortage of jet-age relics still to be found along the MIA perimeter -- dilapidated Douglases and Boeings in different stages of dismemberment, giving the airport's far reaches the look and feel of an East L.A. garage: A DC-10 without landing gear. A wingless 727 with its markings sloppily whited out. An L-1011 with a gaping hole beneath the tail the size of a two-car garage, its No. 2 engine cannibalized and carted away.

In some cases, though, it's hard to tell which of the venerable machines are derelict and which are operable. This is the fifth-busiest air cargo center in the world, trading more gross tonnage than places like Singapore, JFK or Heathrow, and in the middle of the night, many of the seemingly orphaned DC-8s and 707s fire up their turbines and fill with freight. Still others touch down, arriving in the humid predawn hours from Cali, Bogotá, Guayaquil or Tegucigalpa with pallets of produce and flowers, cages of tropical birds, and god only knows what else.

Beyond the tarmac, the people, roads and buildings around Miami International form a kind of airport city -- a thriving, round-the-clock hive of industry, where every surrounding establishment, it seems, extends one vital tendril or another to the MIA apron. This is true of most large airports -- a shockwave of aeronautical commerce blowing out from an epicenter of terminals and runways -- but there's something peculiarly, decadently flavorful about Miami. It's a hot, oily, concrete-flavored character, but a character still.

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In the breakfast bar of the Holiday Inn Express on 36th Street, a long, noisy boulevard that runs parallel to MIA's runway 09L, I meet two young pilots sitting at a table. They're dressed in polo shirts and sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups, brand-new leather flight cases resting at their feet. Their names are Richard and Marty, and they are training to become 737 first officers with an upstart Mexican airline.

This innocuous breakfast scene is a routine many pilots will identify with at once: the anxious wait in the motel lobby for the simulator instructor. We chat briefly, but the sense of preoccupation is nearly palpable. I know what they are going through: thoughts abuzz nervously with checklist items and emergency callouts -- all the things to do, and not do, when the engine catches fire during takeoff. And it will, very soon. "OK, guys," the instructor will chirp, stepping off the elevator, "Let's go play." The pilots will fling their cups into the trash, and off they'll go in a rented Camry to one of the nearby flight academies, to sweat away four hours of mock disaster.

Marty tells me he is 24 years old and has 300 flight hours, total, which is something I can hardly fathom. When I was a 300-hour pilot, about 15 years ago, the biggest thing I'd flown, and would fly for almost the next thousand hours, was a four-seat Cessna.

Outside the Holiday Inn, 36th Street is alive with 18-wheelers puking out clots of greasy smoke. There are six lanes of highway, then a series of ugly lots and fortress-style buildings. Then comes the long, clay-colored wall that marks the property line of the MIA complex itself. A 767 is one of several planes sticking its nose over the wall, almost touchable to the passing traffic like an elephant reaching its trunk to children at the zoo.

I walk west along 36th, then double back and come east again. The whole way I'm getting socked by wake turbulence. Except it's from trucks, not planes, as the sidewalks here are dangerously skinny. There are hundreds of bellowing vehicles but not a single other pedestrian in view. One more reason to hate Florida, I think to myself. I pass the palm-ringed parking lots of a half dozen chain motels, each one more or less identical to my Holiday Inn Express, their suffixed names, generic amenities and chemically greened lawns the stuff of canceled flights (like mine) and quickie layovers.

To my right is a store, Tally-Ho Airline Uniforms, and another one called Oshkosh Pilot Shop. Across the street a gigantic, windowless brown building rises like the wall of a canyon, marked only by a huge sign that declares simply, in an oversize jolt of meaningless flummery, "AeroThrust."

A silver canteen pulls up to the streetside entrance of an unmarked hangar, and a crowd of workers in blue overalls -- they seem to be mechanics -- gather quickly, shouting to one another in Spanish. I have been told that to be an airplane mechanic at MIA one needs to be Cuban. As it was explained to me by a somewhat resentful Dominican who'd lost his job here, the business is controlled by a kind of impenetrable Cuban mafia. Many of the older guys, he told me, had trained in Russia before finding their way to South Florida. "Little Havana is only three miles away. This is their airport."

Whether this is true or not I can't say, but I remember flying here many times, arriving just after sunrise, and how the mechanics would bring us shots of Cuban coffee while we refueled. Two or three of those and we'd be jittering all the way to San Juan.

Next Page: Sitting in first class on seats that might have been salvaged from an Everglades wreck

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