The Bachelor, the diaper, Sully, and the tarnished pilot image.

Okay, Jake, this is me and you talking pilot to pilot down in Flight Ops, with no cameras, microphones, ABC producers refilling cocktails or shrieking hot near-pornish “bachelorettes” slobbering over you.  Here’s the deal. You’re doing more to trash the airline pilot image than Lisa Nowak the astro-nut did to the NASA image by driving ten hours in a diaper to commit a felony.

Used to see the video of the astronauts suited up and each one clomping to the launch pad like the Michelin man, legs akimbo like modern-day gunslingers because, we all assumed, they had such enormous cajones that they had to walk that way.

Lisa Nowak’s arrest revealed the truth: they’re all wearing diapers. The walk is more like toddlers with a load in their pants than steely-eyed spacemen.

You, after blubbering on national TV because Canuck Jillian Harris dumped you for the hillbilly-poonhound-two-note Wes

Wes giving everyone the finger. Kind of like him for that.

even though he was an unfaithful lying wretch, enact a neurotic, girlish negation of 75 years of airline pilot mystique by collapsing into tears on national television. Some girls like that, apparently. So what? Even if the producers scripted your remake of Jason Messner sobbing over the deck rail of a fabulous villa Down Under, you needed to be a man, think of the other jet crew reputations in the balance, and NOT blubber over the rail of the Holiday Inn in Austin.

Think of  your poor first officer: he has to worry that if your aircraft suffers a birdstrike and loses both engines, he’ll have to contend with both a deadstick landing AND you blubbering like a baby at the same time.

So get real, for the love of God, pilothood, manhood and all that’s sacred to our already beleagured profession. Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Man Up. No more “weeping” on national TV. If you must weep–like when you look at your measly paycheck as a commuter pilot–do so privately. In public, maintain your facade, discretely spend those food stamps you’re eligible for by virtue of the pay scale that puts your W-2 income somewhere between that of my lawn guy

and the second assistant manager at Lowe’s. Have any of the bachelorettes caught on to that yet? (Editor’s Note: Those unfamiliar with the airline world may not grasp the subtle distinction between the terms “airline pilot” and “commuter pilot.” It’s analogous to a physician and a chiropractor: sure, they’re both called “doctor,” but they’re nowhere near the same thing. –JB, Blog Mgr & Editor)

2. Shave. The promo pictures of you in uniform with a wino’s-growth of beard is exactly what some bored TSA schlub is dreaming about discovering at a security checkpoint so he can be the hero, summon the police and give you a breathalizer test.  Shave, put on your tie and even though it will muss your up-do, wear your hat. Your pilot hat.

3. Don’t be a hypocrite. When ABC producers found out one of your harem was two-timing you with a production staff member (pun possible, take it as you like), you vented outrage over your unwitting sloppy-seconds, but that’s unjustifiable considering that you are eight-timing the entire harem yourself, swapping spit sequentially with each. (Side note: is Gia a porn star? Seriously.)

Attention TMZ: find the porn pix or videos in her past. I don't have time.

He got fired, she got sent home in a cab–no limo–and you, Mr. Righteous, went on to the tonsil hockey finals with the rest of the concubines. Hygiene note: you really should use mouthwash in between girls, for their sake. I’m just saying.

4. Ease up on the “love” crap. Everything you do isn’t for love, you don’t fly for love or ride your show-sponsored hog for love or bungee jump, and you were about to cry then too, right?  The video below is a normal woman–normal as in not pimped and contracted by a network to kiss your ass or dry hump you–telling you to grow a pair.

Never mind “love”–you live your life as best and as hard as you can, period. Don’t mush all this stuff together. We fly jets because we get paid to, because it’s fun, because we don’t want the Dunder-Mifflin cubicle, because we’re ruined for the forty-hour-workweek in an office after years in the air,

because we thought (in my case, and I’m being honest) that you had to be really smart to go to dental school.

This is what we do, and we’re damn lucky to do it. I’m not kidding: I’m nothing special, just a lucky guy who was at the right place at the right time and got the job that thousands of others can and do perform daily. With our shirts on, shaven. And no crying.

You’ve got half the season to go to redeem yourself. Pick a flight plan: you could be the airline version of George Clooney dry-motoring a weekly variety of babe-age, or the Sully Sullenberger quiet, self-effacing proven studly pilot, or the Lisa Nowak ruin-the-legacy freakshow in a diaper.

Sadly, right now, you’re mostly the latter. I’d envy you the first option, but myself–and most of your colleagues in the cockpit–strive mostly for the middle ground, for the high standard of Captain Sullivan. Join us if you will, don’t if you can’t, wear a diaper if you need to but whatever you do, no more nationally televised blubbering, okay?

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Anyone really out there in the blogosphere? I doubt it. So, here’s a bonus: just finished mixing this; recorded the bass line a dozen times so now I have no fingertips. But still, here it is: Big Dog Whaddya think? Anyone? Anyone? Leave a comment. Or not.

Horses in my beer, plus the Roadkill Report.

Okay, a day off, finally home in Cowtown.  At this time of the year, in this berg, that means The Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. Here’s the whole thing in just 45 seconds:

You get the idea? An integral part of the experience is related to cold beer. Giddyup.

Part of my job as an airline pilot is to eat everything in sight, coast to coast. Reporting on that, then is the following recurring feature:

Now, I promise that in my travels, I’ll only post the good stuff, cool finds in obscure places that you have to try if you’re anywhere nearby. My first is one of my favorites, from Portland’s PDX International.

“Good Dog-Bad Dog” in PDX’s terminal brings you hot brats of all varieties, and you pick the toppings from a self-service bar. I always get the “Sweet Italian,” then top it with mustard and kraut. Always fast, hot and super-tasty. It’s a gut bomb that’ll get you another thousand miles down the road.

It’s great to find a place that’s beyond the usual chain fare. More info?  Check it out.

Reality, childhood, and Orion waves.

The intersection of my laziness as a person and my seniority as a pilot is this: I seldom fly early mornings, which means I often fly at night. Since our flight schedules are based on seniority and I’m not a morning person, that’s usually my preference.

In all my years of flying, staring at a night sky like black velvet strewn with jewels of varying sizes and colors, I’ve come to find what seem like old friends in the simpler constellations (remember, I’m lazy) like The Dippers, the “W” of Cassiopea, and on most nights Orion. No matter what’s going on in the cockpit, no matter what’s transpired that day, there they are every night, brighter than ever once you’re at cruising altitude and above most of the atmosphere tainted with smoke and smog and the detritus of civilization as well as nature’s continuous slop of fires and volcanoes and disastrous what not.

It’s a touchstone of distance, too, the way they lay out in the sky depending on how far and wide you’ve flown. Down in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and below the equator, the stars are all up there but at impossible angles and positions, not because they’ve moved, but because you have, having flown so many thousands of miles past your usual perspective on Earth.

I was telling this to my sweet third grader last year, describing how no matter what, when I’m flying in the northern hemisphere, I can eventually find my old friend Orion, “The Hunter,” usually over my left shoulder in the eyebrow window of the cockpit, steady as a faithful old friend. Then I know where I am in the world, in the sky, in reference to my celestial compadre.

Without a heartbeat’s pause, she asked in wide-eyed wonder, “does he ever wave to you?”

And I hated myself as a parent the very instant my mouth spoke the words, “Uh, no, honey; it’s just a group of stars in a pattern.” Because without meaning to, I’d done the adult thing, contributing unwittingly to the piece by piece dismantling of the childhood wonder I’d just been blessed to wander into. Like any imaginative child, she knew nothing of impossibility, rather, only what she could dream based on what she could see.

Me, on the other hand, after a thousand views of that night sky could only see what is, or at least what I know after childhood dominated by dreams gives way to reality dictated by fact over years and years of making a living in flight. I couldn’t see anything anymore with a perspective given over to knowledge of the impossible rather than the childhood belief in all possibility.

Maybe that shift in belief versus reality is inevitable, so maybe what I’d said was merely a part of the necessary exit from childhood, softened perhaps because it came from a parent who cherished her and her precious grade school years.

But more likely, I’m afraid, this whole incident highlights the coldness of adult-based reality: you give up your sense of wonder and with it, claim a heartless confidence in what you know, period. Then rather than living life as a dream of wide-open possibilities, time becomes a painless yet numb sleep walk from work to days off to work; lather, rinse, repeat.

I don’t really have an answer for this conundrum, and maybe there isn’t one. Clearly, the whole notion of constellations was born of some ancient but adult imagination and endures in modern times despite a millennium of science that proves all of it to be groundless in fact. Maybe that’s the whole point: it’s not that facts don’t matter because really, they do. But perhaps they coexist because there’s value in dreams, maybe even more so for the soul, than in reality.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned: my parenthood can be a bridge between the two for my precious child. I’ll strive to listen carefully and answer more slowly, with careful regard for what’s possible rather than the adult eye for what isn’t. I’ll try that perspective, too, at night at high altitude, stargazing during cruise. Not so much looking for Orion to wave at me, but grateful for the knowledge that in a child’s mind, he just might. Anything beyond that is really not important.

The fourteen–and forty-something–wannabes.

A middle-aged guy comes up to me as I’m talking to my first officer at the gate while we wait for the inbound jet. He’s forty-something, a bit raggedy around the edges, needs a haircut and a shave. I think to myself, here we go.

“You the left seat guy for the Palm Springs flight?” he asks. The lame attempt at lingo—yeah, I guess as the captain, I’m “the left seat guy”—foreshadows one of those talks where equal doses of “I know the airline slang” and “tell me the inside scoop” become a tiresome game of cat-and-mouse: no, I won’t tell you what hotel we stay in, or how much I get paid, or any “scary” stories about flying. “Uh, yes, I am,” I answer, hoping to avoid an interrogation, but knowing that’s not possible.

“Well, I’m a pilot too. I fly Cessna-182s for fun.” And he’s off to the races. My first officer steps in where he knows I’ll probably fail: he smiles, nods at the guy’s flying stories, asks courteous questions, but looks for an escape.

The guy turns back to me. “Do guys like you who fly for a living ever fly small airplanes for fun?” “No,” I tell him, “I don’t. I pretty much get my fill of flying at work and when I get home, I don’t even want to think about it.”

But his question did make me think. Because I was that guy, many years ago actually to the day: as a 14-year-old, on this very day I flew coast to coast on a Delta jet by myself. It was about the biggest event of my life to fly without parents and family from our home in Orlando to my Aunt and Uncle’s in San Francisco. The rest of the family—there were seven of us—was driving, which I’d always hated. But more importantly, my whole life since age three was dedicated to the goal of becoming a pilot. Any opportunity to fly—and at that point, I hadn’t flown on a plane since age nine—was for me the best uber-Disney fantastic miracle ever. My Dad was happy to have a volunteer, which meant only six (yikes!) in the fam-wag trundling across country.

So as a fourteen-year-old pilot wannabe, I envied “the left seat guy,” the right seat guy or anyone allowed into the inner sanctum of the flight deck. Just the thought of doing that for a living, as the Cessna guy had said, was my life’s dream.

All of my close high school buddies at the time were the same way: we were all going to graduate from college, get commissioned in the Air Force, and win our pilot wings in flight school. Then we’d fly as Air Force pilots for a number of years until a big airline recruited us. We’d be hired, work our way up the ranks, fly coast-to-coast every week on cool jets with gorgeous stewardesses.

That was the plan. After high school, I chose The Virginia Military Institute for college. Knowing myself as I did—and I really haven’t changed all that much—I realized that if I went to a regular college, I’d party too much, likely founder academically and never achieve my flying dream. VMI, however, was a direct track to an Air Force commission, and if I could surmount several hundred other candidates, an assignment to pilot training. True, VMI also came with classes six days a week, no cars, no civilian clothes, no TVs, and no girls. Yes, that was a pain in the ass, but in the end, I got exactly what I went there for: a degree, a commission, and an assignment to USAF pilot training.

Finally: USAF Flight School, and "The White Rocket."

I was one of four out of a couple hundred from VMI to get into pilot training: one washed out, one was killed in a plane crash and the other guy now flies for Delta. We did our Air Force time—

that’s another story, a great adventure—then ultimately, married “stewardesses” (she’d smack me for using that term) and now, as the wannabe guy said, “make our living” flying.

There’s not a day that goes by at work, no matter how much drudgery is included with delays, bad weather, air traffic control hassles, airline management squabbles, that I don’t at some point realize that nonetheless, I’m pretty damn lucky to be “the left seat guy.”

None of my high school buddies, despite our shared plan, made it all the way through. Every one of them fell off the path at one point or another and are now like the wannabe guy, perhaps still a “pilot” on weekends, hopefully not killing themselves in a light aircraft.

When my favorite stewardess and I were disembarking from a Caribbean cruise last week, I told her honestly that I appreciate the fact that going back to “the old grind,” like most everyone on that ship was going to do, for me meant another year of flying jets, rather than a cubicle at Dunder-Mifflin, or worse. I guess I could have explained all that to the middle-aged wannabe guy still nattering on to my first officer. But I’m not sure that’s what he wanted to hear. Still, I smile just knowing that the fourteen year old wannabe sure would.

Yet another jet pilot posting a blog.

Sure, everyone’s got a blog, and there’s a blog for everyone, right?  Everyone has something to share, from work or otherwise.

So here’s my workspace: a corner office with a window. The view is pretty good, and ever changing, thank God:

Some days it’s the “Emerald City,” jewel of the Pacific Northwest, some days it’s a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico.

Usually it’s some cool view, or sometimes, I capture the scene in a cartoon:

Or sometimes a video:

I’m surrounded by happy coworkers:

I visit new places

And meet lots of interesting people along the way.

Okay, what's the connection between pies and size?

That’s what this blog’s about: life in the air, and between flights, on the ground and the adventures along the way. Does that work for you? If so, tune in regularly.

Keep your seatbelt fastened–it’s going to get bumpy.