Night Flight

It is to be a normal flight tonight—so the dispatcher tells us—from Lima up to Houston, all six and a half hours of it, all unaugmented (just two of us up front), and all dark. The route takes us up the coast to Guayaquil, where we go feet-wet over the Pacific, then coast-in near San Jose, Costa Rica. From there it's up across Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula, and then more blue water over the Gulf. Dispatch says the only problem area should be the Pacific coastal waters—just a few of the regular thunderstorms that hang out there, he says.

Yeah, they hang out there all right, like restless malcontents at a pool hall. Some nights they don't even notice you're in the neighborhood. Other nights...well, this is to be one of those “other” nights. 

But it starts off innocently enough. (That's been a pattern in my flying career—“innocent” starts.) The first officer, Perry, notices meteors. A shower seems to be underway to our front right. We dim the cockpit lights and watch for them as the Big Dipper rears up above the northern horizon dragging hundreds of points of light with it. It makes me think of St. Exupery's Fabian leaning out his window and gazing up at the night sky before leaving for his nightly mail route in a biplane across Argentina. St. Exupery writes that Fabian “looked at the moon and reckoned up his riches.” His wife joins him at the window, knowing he was already on his way. She points to the sky and says, “See, your road is paved with stars.”

And for us indeed it is. A feeble moon sinking into the west, to our left, reddens the sky in that direction and soon we pass the first thunderhead—a sentinel posted out to warn the others that we are coming. The cell passes between us and the setting moon. The storm eclipses moon and becomes ablaze around its edges—a colossal anvil silhouetted with shimmering ochre moonbeams. Few human eyes ever feast on such a divine orchestration of cosmic and earthly beauty.

Satisfied that my cup runs over tonight with heavenly vistas, I tend to the normal cockpit duties of long-cruise Mach Rangers: fuel burn analysis, monitoring the auto-flight devices and keeping track of where our best divert airfields are (should the fit suddenly hit the shan). That done for now, I yawn and fire-up my Kindle for a spot of reading.

I'm half way through Huxley's Brave New World, and am trying to be brave enough to finish it. It's a chore. I tire with it quickly, yawn some more and rub my eyes. Brave New World is putting me to sleep. I switch to Horowitz's Inside of a Dog. Now this is much more interesting, as a dog is a big part of my life. Horowitz says dogs don't lick your face when you come home because they love you, rather because their olfactory senses want to see where you've been and what you've eaten. Interesting, but I know Horowitz is full of the stuff that hits the fan. My dog licks me because she adores me.

Neither can Horowitz hold my attention long. My eyelids grow heavier. But this languor is about to change.

Perry, who is flying the jet tonight, is fiddling with the radar. He's painting bright red splotches up ahead, just where Mr. Dispatcher said they would be. We douse the floods and lean forward hoping for Mark-1 Eyeball contact. The horizon ahead and to our right is ablaze with strobes and flashes. As we move northward the perpetrators of the flashes raise their heads above the horizon, a long unbroken line of them. They have tired of waiting for us and have taken to slinging fiery arrows at each other.

We must DV8 (that's ACARS-speak for “deviate”) far left of course. CenAmer control approves and we swing farther out over the Pacific, only to see even more thunderheads blocking our starry path. What would Fabian do?

“I’ve made my plans,” he told his young wife. “I know exactly where to turn.” Perry and I are lacking of Fabian’s cocky assurance. We must place our faith in Mr. Bendix’s  X-band wizardry.

Before long we are over a hundred miles off course and getting more off. The FMC—the 767’s brain— gets worried, tells us we have “insufficient fuel.”  We know once we turn back toward course the landing fuel projection will return to near normal, but the FMC can't read our minds. It doesn't know when or if we will ever turn back. The jet thinks we are going to miss the North American continent and burn our last gallon somewhere west of California with the wheels still in the wells.

At last we find the storm system's west flank and turn back east. But now we are in the soup—“embedded” with the sparring giants. The depressing murk enshrouding us flashes with sparks flying from their stupendous clashing swords. We begin to weave between the battling giants hoping they don't notice us. Strangely, not a ripple in the air disturbs us.

Headed back north now, the FMC gets happy again as it re-calculates our landing fuel projection. Then we break out of the gloom and feast our eyes on the Big Dipper, dead ahead. I yawn, call back for some strong coffee and reach for my laptop. I ponder a new blog post and a name for it: Night Flight. I hope St. Ex won't mind.

Wondering what happened to Fabian? "Only too well he knew them for a trap. A man sees a few stars...and climbs toward them, and then—never can he get down again but stays up there eternally, chewing the stars….But such was his lust for light that he began to climb."

 Perry relaxes. The sun is up. 

Unlike Fabian we have gotten through.

The Black One

In January our chief pilot decided to clean house. Her target: The bag room. It's a huge repository—probably 3,000 square feet or more—for pilots to store their bags, sundries and paraphernalia when off duty. The interior is walled into separate long corridors with multiple layers of shelves along each side. The shelves are home to layover bags, duffels, pubs bags, storage bags, boxes, back packs and hang-up bags of all sorts and sizes in which commuting pilots and even some locals store their extra stuff.

My layover bag resides there. I rarely drag it home. I keep layover clothes, toiletry kit and other items in it that don't need to regularly go home. That lets me make the commute to and from work with only a small back pack that I don't have to gate check on those oh-my-aching-ass 50-seaters. I once figured that the 10 minutes I spend waiting for my gate-check bag to be retrieved—twice for each round trip commute—added up to 25 hours in a year's time. A full day out of my life every year standing on that lousy noisy hot/cold jet bridge. But now, with my nifty system, I breeze off the Rjs like a bat out of a cave.

But back to the bag room. The room is so expansive you can lose your bags if don't take careful notice where you left them. It's common to see a pilot wandering through the complex scanning with wrinkled brow, looking for his stuff. During the first five minutes of his search, he will draw at least two “It's the black

one” remarks from passers-by. They're all black, thousands of them—I'm not exaggerating. He will force out the obligatory chortle, curse the perpetrator of the remark under his breath and continue to scrutinize the melange looking for his name, initials, or a tell-tale sticker he put on to aid in picking it out.

At first it's interesting to stroll through the halls looking at the stickers and decals:

military units, ball clubs, flags, college letters and logos from other airlines the owner may have flown with. But after months and years looking at the stickers you tire of their sight. They remind you of the huge chunk of your life you're spending away from family and dog.

The place is dusty, musty, dimly lit and even at times a bit spooky. It's easy to imagine the ghosts of pilots who passed through those corridors hundreds of times across a career. Some now retired. Some gone west.

When our chief pilot planned the clean-out she had her staff place an orange dot sticker on every flight bag, layover bag, hang-up bag, and container of any sort. She told us we had 60 days to take the dot off. After that she would consider all dotted bags and items abandoned and would dispose of them. 

I was there the day she and her staff collected their bounty. The amount of abandoned bags staggered the imagination. They were piled high in every place available and then the long process began of going through the contents. They sorted items for trash and charity. She told us what they found in her monthly newsletter. Here's a sampling:

• A vintage leather flight bag in mint condition with original manuals, last revised 1987. 
• Complete newspapers from 20 years ago in unread condition.
• A VCR with a pile of movies from the1980s.
• Bags of long ago retired and deceased pilots.
• Medical certificates from the late 70s.
• Prescription medicines of many kinds, lots of them, some dating back to the 70s.
• Enough bottles of wine beer, and liquor to supply a tiki bar.
• Flight attendant bags.
• Flight manuals from long obsolete aircraft (747-100, DC-9, B727).
• Layover pictures from 30 years ago.
• Several “recreational items for personal entertainment.” [Hmmm.] 
• A petrified banana.

So, when I leave these portals for good, some 15 months hence (if not earlier) I'm thinking I just might leave something in the room. Maybe I'll leave that layover bag, but I'll take the clothes and stuff out of it. I'll leave something interesting in it as a surprise to a future cleaner-outter. It'll be my legacy.

But what?

I won't.

The Right Thing

Picture this: A flight is delayed at the gate. A man sits in his seat and weeps. A flight attendant asks if she can do anything. He tells her his problem. She tells the captain. The captain gets the flight out as soon as he can and calls ahead to ask the connecting flight to hold for the man. The connecting captain holds. The man arrives in time to see his sick mother just before she dies.

 

All this really happened.

Bigwigs at desks in company headquarters crack whips on underlings to get flights out on time because they think that's the most important measure of their competitiveness and their pressure is felt at the operational level every hour of every day. If I'm even one minute late getting off the gate I'll get a nasty gram from ACARS asking me why I delayed.

Nonetheless, the bigwigs undoubtedly jumped with joy and patted each other on the back when they read the news about what their crews had done. Who gets the credit? The bigwigs publicly say their happy crews get the credit, but  they know the drill. Crap always flows downhill, but sweet fragrance wafts upward. The bigs wink and sip. They created the caring culture that got this man to his dying mom in time and won them high accolades in the press.

And the crews? The flight attendant that cared enough to tell her captain about the man’s problem? The mainline captain who went above and beyond to arrange for the connecting flight to hold? The regional jet captain who refused to release his parking brake (and burned into his layover) until the man was safely aboard? If you asked them why they did it, they’ll shrug and say, “Credit had nothing to do with it. It was the right thing to do.”  

Did you notice I mentioned the connecting flight was a regional jet? That’s important, because it demonstrates that the regional crews are in tune with those whom they hope to someday join. They aspire to come up to the big leagues, and when I hear that they care about their passengers like that, I’m ready to see them across from me in a big cockpit.