An Airline Pilot’s Life just got better: 15 embedded videos of commentary and photos from first solo to supersonic solo to airline captain upgrade and more!
The links are embedded in the Kindle edition and accessible in both paperback and hardcover through a QR code. Here is a screenshot (the links are active in the Kindle version:
Live the adventure, firsthand, with narrative commentary, photos and video. Here’s a sample:
Live the flying with your own copy; makes a great gift!
You deserve a post-holiday gift for yourself. For a limited time, you can grab a signed copy of Amazon #1 New Release and winner of “Best Non-Fiction of 2020:”
The perfect reward for yourself, or the gift of inspiration for any fledgling aviator or anyone considering the airline pilot career field: from first solo in a Cessna 152 to supersonic solo in a USAF T-38, then on to seven years as a USAF pilot, then 35 years in the cockpits of the world’s largest airline, most as captain.
Here’s what readers and book reviewers are saying about this insider view of the airline pilot world:
Written with heart, wry wit, and honesty. Chris Manno has a strong eye for dialogue and for detail, and both are put to use in this entertaining, info-packed memoir of a pilot. –J. Beldon
Wow; just, wow. Great read. Refused to put it down. –NB
Right from the beginning of this book, I was hooked, reading the story of what could have been a deadly end to a planned jump from an airplane. –Maryann Miller
An honest peek inside a life well-lived, An Airline Pilot’s Life is the best memoir I’ve read in years. –Jennifer Silverwood
Get your signed copy HERE. Or, just scan the QR code below to go directly to the order page.
We never forget, those of us who were airline pilots and flight attendants on that awful September day. Since then, we’ve added to our aircrew ranks a whole new generation of pilots and flight attendants who were just kids when the twin towers fell. And yet, they are part of the aircrew tradition, inner circle, and the sacred trust to never, ever forget.
Here’s what that cataclysm looked like from the crew view on that day. Those who were crewmembers will remember, those who are new crew will live it in a way like no others, because this is their realm and their legacy to carry forward. And those who aren’t in the crew ranks, well, here’s what that fateful day was like.
From Air Crew Confidential: The Unauthorized Airline Chronicles, the new release from Dark Horse Books:
“Yes, why,” Mandy repeated into the handset. She hoped she didn’t sound peeved, but she was. “Why are we descending?”
And descending fast, barely fifteen minutes after climbing and leveling off at cruise altitude.
“Why,” the first officer repeated, then she overheard the captain talking in the background. “We’re not exactly …”
More garbled cross-cockpit talk that she couldn’t make out. But it sounded urgent. We’re not exactly sure? How are the pilots flying the plane “not sure” why we’re descending?
Gary poked his head out of the forward galley curtains, hands upraised as if to echo her own what the fuck? Mandy searched his eyes but couldn’t decipher the fine line between annoyed and concerned. But Gary wasn’t smiling.
“Look,” the first officer said at last. “We’re pretty busy. We’ll call you back when we can.”
The interphone went dead. The engine roar rumbled back to a whisper and the nose dipped lower. The seatbelt sign chimed on.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Gary commented quietly in passing. He checked the seatbelt and passengers in First Class as Mandy made her way down the long aisle to do the same in coach.
There was at least another two hours of flying time left. Descending? Why? What don’t we know? What don’t they know?
“Miss,” a passenger held up his hand like a kid in a classroom as she passed. “Why are we going lower?”
She made her face blank..
“Oh, just routine,” she lied, now wavering herself on the razor’s edge between annoyance and concern. “Fasten your seatbelt, please.”
She scooted aft before he could ask another question. Turbulence rocked the jet. A couple passengers let loose an “oh!” and one cursed.
Darcy met her in the aft galley.
“This is weird,” she said.
Mandy nodded.
“I called up front. He said they’re busy, will call back.”
The P.A. crackled. Background noise from the cockpit filled the speakers, scratchy, distant.
“Ah, folks, from the cockpit …”
Just spit it out, Bill. Or Bob, whatever name applied to the interchangeable pilot man in the left seat. They were terrible at ad-libbing announcements. The P.A. went dead.
Mandy crossed the line back to annoyance. Come on, guys, give us some idea of what we’re doing. The cabin interphone chimed.
Darcy grabbed the handset just a nanosecond before Mandy could reach for it. The rudder fishtailed and the rear of the plane swayed.
The groan of hydraulic motors driving the slats forward and down from the wing leading edge shook the cabin.
“He says we’re in a holding pattern,” Darcy said at last. “Landing at Billings, Montana.”
What? Why, Mandy wanted to ask but held her peace. Why Billings, and why holding for Billings? There couldn’t be more than two aircraft inbound to that Podunk in an entire hour.
“Okay,” Darcy said. “You’re sure?”
Sure about what? Mandy sighed. She’d actually dialed Crew Sked that morning, but decided to save the sick call for the baby shower Saturday instead. Now she wished—
“He says Air Traffic Control has ordered all aircraft to land immediately,” Darcy said quietly. The aircraft slowed and the deck became level again.
“What? Seriously? Why.”
“He didn’t say.”
“Ah folks,” the P. A. rasped from the overhead speakers, “This is the captain again …”
Just talk, she wanted to scream. And never mind ‘this is the captain;’ don’t you have a name? Aren’t you ‘Captain Smith,’ or Jones or Miller or whatever no-name name pilots always have?
“We’re diverting into Billings, Montana, because …”
Now they’d go illegal for sure, run out of crew duty time, and be shipwrecked in Billings-effing-Montana. Should have just stretched the sick call through Saturday and—
“… because the FAA has ordered all aircraft to land due to some sort of national emergency.”
What? Call lights began to chime in the cabin.
“…. Ah, we don’t have any more information than that at this point in time …”
A hydraulic pump whined again. The aircraft floor seemed to buoy upwards. Flaps. And glancing out the window, ground details spelled out ‘we’re pretty close to landing.’
“We’ll have more info for you as soon as we get on the ground. Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”
That’s it? What the actual frig was going on? She turned to Darcy whose eyes were wider than she’d ever seen on a human. The air grew warm and stuffy, probably because the first officer hadn’t pre-cooled the cabin for the unplanned descent.
“Fourteen-F” Darcy said carefully, her voice quavering. “Got a cellphone signal. He’s says there’s been a terrorist attack on New York City.”
Two plus two, Mandy thought; national emergency, terrorist attack. But where do airliners fit in? She set the thought aside and did a final cabin walk-through. The scowling air noise doubled in strength, then the main gear thumped into place with a thud that shook the floor beneath her feet. They were very, very low. Her cellphone buzzed in her pocket.
“At least two flights hijacked. Are you okay? –Dad.”
The blood drained from her head. Attack? New York? Hijacked? She plopped down on the jumpseat next to Darcy and strapped in. She handed Darcy the cell phone, flipped open like the wide jaws of a faceless joker. A faceless, heartless joker. Darcy covered her mouth and closed her eyes.
Fight it, Mandy urged herself. You’re looking at this through a straw, seeing only a tiny bit of the picture. Classmates all flying today too—what if? If you’re going to predict the future, at least make it something good. Kerry’s based in New York now; Samantha just transferred to Boston.
The interphone chimed and Mandy snatched the handset from the cradle.
“Mandy in back,” the words floated out of her mouth on their own, out of habit only, her mind flying fifty miles ahead of her heart, threatening to implode. What if?
“My partner says we lost one of ours,” Gary said. “Into the World Trade Center.”
She dropped the phone. Darcy picked it up and replaced it on the aft console, then stared at Mandy. She shook her head, covered her eyes.
Rolling, turning, more flaps; tears—no, stop that. Later, maybe later. Avoid the eyes looking backwards, the passengers wired like copper, conducting an electrical current of worry and concern over fragments of details discovered as cell towers answered when the airspeed slowed.
We lost two of ours. Into the World Trade Center.
A molten core, boiling tears of fear and knowing sadness, threatened but Mandy kept the lid on. There was a job to do, procedures to walk through, and things to disarm and stow and check and report and not think, please god not think but just do.
Into the World Trade Center.
They taxied in forever, it seemed. For heaven’s sake, the airport wasn’t that big! She peered out the round exit porthole and a line of jet tails stretched to the edge of the runway—five, six? He couldn’t count them all.
“Boston,” Darcy said, holding up her phone. “CNN says it was our Boston flight.
And Mandy knew, just knew. The she could not forget what she’d learned from Aunt Coreen after her cousin had taken his own life.
“There’s that second or two,” Aunt Coreen had said, “When I wake up. Just a few heartbeats, really, when I don’t yet remember what happened, that he’s gone.”
These, Mandy decided, were those seconds, heartbeats. She didn’t quite know yet. And she didn’t want to wake up, not to the loss, the grief, the fear and pain.
And the certain knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again. More taxiing, turning, creeping, slow. Still moving. The certain knowledge that there was pain and loss, and it wouldn’t go away. Ever.
Darcy took her hand and squeezed. Mandy squeezed back and savored the last few moments of peace before she’d actually have to know, to own, and never forget.
Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved
From Aircrew Confidential: The Unauthorized Airline Chronicles
Available soon in paperback and Kindle (pre-order HERE).
Not every airline adventure–or misadventure–made it into An Airline Pilot’s Life, if only for the sake of controlling the page count. You can read an excerpt from the book that puts you in the DC-10 cockpit for my first copilot landing at LaGuardia in this month’s Airways Magazine.
Meanwhile, here’s an incident where we tangled with windshear on approach to Raleigh-Durham Airport and to be honest, I wasn’t sure we’d successfully escape. Read on:
The weather at Raleigh was iffy, with thunderstorms moving from east to west, towering cumulus that ranged in height between twenty-five and thirty thousand feet. That, in the context of airline operations, was simply North Carolina in the summertime.
The MD-80 cockpit felt crowded with three of us crammed into the small compartment in the pointy end. It wasn’t unusual to have a jumpseater but for some reason, the space that day seemed too small. But, the back of the jet was equally crammed with all 142 passenger seats full, so the extra pilot on the jumpseat, who was actually an FO I’d enjoyed flying with in the past, was a reality so he could join some buddies in Raleigh for a golf outing.
Enroute, my excellent, experienced, retired Air Force FO requested the Raleigh-Durham Airport weather. That flight segment always seemed quick to me, maybe because I was more accustomed to the longer Seattle or Boston legs out of DFW, so I was glad he’d gotten an early start on the weather.
“The airfield is clear,” he said, and handed me the weather that our onboard printer had spit out. I glanced at it with my non-engineer’s pilot eyes: Instinct mattered as much as data, to me. I looked for the big picture, the hidden details, like what signs are there foretelling what’s to come. Pressure falling rapidly, towering cumulus northeast. Yeah, the airfield’s clear—but. Something felt wrong.
“Let’s plan flaps 28,” I said, which doesn’t sound extraordinary: the MD-80 standard approach configuration was 28 degrees of flaps because it saved fuel. I didn’t hold with that, personally, having flown the MD-80 for twenty-plus years myself. There were less times when 28 was actually required than not, and I liked having the power up on approach because of the added drag of 40 flaps because it made for better go-around response under normal circumstances.
But “what wasn’t there,” what the weather report didn’t explicitly state, gave me pause: flaps 40 meant flaps 15 for go-around, which was extra drag we wouldn’t need if there was a hint of wind shear. Flaps 28 was less drag on the approach and since it would be paired with flaps 11 on the go-around, if we were to fly a go-around, which was also an extra margin of performance we might be glad we had. Layers of thinking and prevention, that’s all part of the captain’s job.
We started a long enroute descent straight into runway 05L. We’d briefed the approach as an ILS, my preference, even though the weather was currently VFR. I always prefer the precision approach and the missed approach, myself. That way, if we request the ILS, there’s no ambiguity about what we’ll do on the missed approach. So many pilots brief “Missed approach will be with the tower” which is really no brief at all. More importantly—and I often have to correct this—if you’re cleared to fly the ILS, you’re expected to fly the published missed approach, not “go with the tower.”
Ahead to the east of the field, the sky darkened to a bruised blue and clouds stacked well into the stratosphere. We had a good radar paint ahead which showed just enough mileage between us and the storms to execute the missed approach if needed. The winds seemed steady off the nose, maybe even increasing slightly, which foretold the approaching gust front from the storms east of the field.
We never saw it coming: below a thousand feet, in clear air, with the runway in sight, we lost over twenty knots of airspeed instantly and began to sink. In a heartbeat, the WAGS (Windshear Alert And Guidance System) sprang to life, commanding a pitch-up and calling out “Windshear! Windshear!”
I kicked off the autothrottles and I was already hand-flying, so I aimed the nose towards fifteen degrees of pitch and firewalled the throttles. Still, we continued to sink, even at maximum thrust from both engines.
“Fifteen degrees,” my FO called out to cue me, “We’re still sinking, airspeed minus ten.”
I caught the five-hundred foot marker on the radio altimeter tape out of the corner of my eye. Shit. And we were still sinking.
We’d been ambushed: an outflow boundary from a thunderhead behind us had tossed us a huge tidal wave of tailwind. Slowly, gradually, we regained flying speed and crept skyward at barely two-hundred feet per minute. We cleaned up, executed the missed approach and as we did, we requested clearance direct to Norfolk. We cruised the twenty minutes to Norfolk in relative quiet.
“You just never know,” I told my FO as we taxied in to a gate at Norfolk. He just nodded. We’d done everything correctly, but: you just never know. You’re vulnerable on approach, dirty, slow and low and I was just glad for my instinctive bias towards flaps 28, just based on a hunch.
The jumpseater actually deplaned in Norfolk—said he’d rent a car and drive back to Raleigh, even though we’d be returning there ourselves after refueling. About half of the passengers deplaned too, because I guess they’d all had enough flying for the day, especially with the closeup look at the dirt a few miles from the Raleigh runway.
Procedures, instinct and luck—a little bad luck and a lot of good—and we made it to Raleigh a few hours after the storm had passed. Sometimes, it’s just that way.
This is the true story that is Amazon’s #1 new release in Commercial Aviation, now available in paperback! Now you can live the pilot’s life yourself, from early years flying gas-powered, control line aircraft, to soloing in a Cessna 152, to USAF pilot training and soloing a supersonic T-38, to many years as an Air Force pilot in the Pacific, to American Airlines and a decades-long airline pilot career around the world, most of it as captain.
You’re in the pilot’s seat, living every step of the journey, hands-on, first person; the unvarnished truth that is the reality of a pilot’s life.
Critics have called this “the real thing,” “an extraordinary adventure,” and “the closest most of us will ever get to flying a jetliner.” It’s all here, from the flying the DC-10 to captain upgrade to the MD-80 left seat, to instructor/evaluator, pilot union elected officer, to the Fokker-100 and eventually, the 737-800.
Live the dream yourself, every approach, every tight spot, every behind-the-scenes adventure in a vivid, fast-paced real life story.
From Goodreads: “Reading this book, one learns what goes into the making of an airline pilot, as well as what is in the heart and soul of an airline pilot. I highly recommend it on both counts.”
Want to live the airline pilot life from an insider’s view? Here’s your chance: for the past two years, I’ve been writing an insider, no-holds-barred true story from day one in my forty-plus years of airline and Air Force flying.
It’s over four hundred pages of details and the real-life, true adventures of flying jets for a lifetime, both USAF and at American Airlines for nearly thirty-five years, twenty-nine as captain.
Watch this space for upcoming excerpts, and the official release date in both paperback and Kindle from Dark Horse Books. Now, the manuscript is in its final rewrite stage:
Soon, very soon, you can have your own copy, and live the life yourself. If you enjoy the stories and adventures that are the JetHead blog, you won’t want to miss this true story.
I’ve been flying the 737-800 for just over 11 years and in that time I’ve logged over 6,000 pilot-in-command hours in the aircraft. Here’s my simple appraisal of the jet based on this firsthand experience: the design and engineering of the 737 is superior to every other airline jet I’ve also logged over a thousand pilot hours in, including the DC-9-80, DC-10, and F-100.
The 737-800 Next Gen and Max are safe, reliable, engineered and built to the highest standards in the commercial aircraft industry. I’d rather fly a Boeing jet than any other airliner flying today.
I’m not alone in this thinking: the pilot’s union–my union–which represents the pilots of the world’s largest airline, issued a statement that says the Boeing 737 Max is safe to fly. The FAA has issued a similar statement. The FAA oversight of U.S. airline operations has resulted in an air travel system that is the safest in the world.
In my experience, the current media hysteria–especially on social media–is pointless and counterproductive.
The social media hysteria over the 737-Max is absurd.
The reality of the situation is this: both Boeing and Airbus have made advanced airliners affordable and available worldwide. The problem is, not all countries have the aviation oversight infrastructure to ensure the safety of flight operations, to include regulation, inspection, enforcement pertaining to maintenance, pilot standards, training standards and pilot experience.
Passengers in the far corners of the world see a shiny new Airbus or Boeing jet at their departure point and make assumptions about the above factors based on the modern appearance of the airliner–but often, the exact opposite is true: there is little or no aviation oversight, low pilot and maintenance experience levels, poor or no record keeping, little inspection or enforcement, and generally a low-quality flight operation.
Every US pilot of a 737 is trained to recognize and handle every abnormal situation that occurs in flight, which is a factor in every airliner flying, regardless of make or model. The flying public can be certain that their pilots in the United States, Canada, Europe, most of Asia and all Down Under airlines have the same training, experience and capabilities. Period.
The news hype–especially the screaming of digital media–is a tragic side effect unrelated to the facts of the recent airline accidents so widely reported. The reality is, above and beyond the chaotic noise of social media and and the reckless bandwagon pronouncements of those who’d promote themselves or an unfounded agenda: once the investigation is complete, we will have answers–not until.
Meanwhile, I will continue to fly the Boeing 737 Next Gen and Max based on my firsthand experience that assures me the aircraft is well-engineered, sturdy, reliable and most importantly, absolutely safe.
I'm a 30+ year airline pilot, 24+ as captain. Flying the Boeing 737 coast to coast, north and south, every week and making these observations as I go.
The views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect my employer’s views.
RT @MomsLoveFreedom: I’m excited to announce “For the Love of Dallas,” my new show that begins shooting next week! The show highlights thos… 2 months ago
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