The gravity of jet flight.

Ever since the first time I flew in formation with another jet, the most stunning realization of flight remains the very un-worldliness of tons of jet-propelled metal suspended in mid air.

It’s never so evident as when you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with another jet, but still you know in the back of your mind as the earth falls away yet again that the miracle of suspended gravity is underway just the same.

I never forget all the moving pieces we depend on or immutable laws we’re bending by leaving the ground behind, and that’s as it should be–that’s what I get paid for. Still, it’s almost a shame that we’ve made that part largely invisible to those who pay us to work the magic.

That’s the part I like best, the planning, the clearance, then the execution of the bazillion orderly steps from sign-in at the airport to the final (at last!) closing of the cabin door and the removal of that jetbridge shadow from my side window. We’re free to fly.

Sure, that magical moment is hard to reach. Yes, getting there is a hassle: I have to navigate between every-nine-months recurring scrutiny of testing, oral, written and simulator evaluations with my license on the line every single time.

That’s in addition to the no-notice evaluations in the cockpit by the FAA and company evaluators and the harsh reality of the old USAF flight training mantra, “You’re always only two rides from the door,” meaning if you fail two checkrides, you’re wings are gone–and that remains true today in the airline biz: at any time, the FAA can invoke their right to evaluate you in the simulator and the aircraft, and your license is on the line. You are always just two rides from the door, and that’s the end of your career, as many have found out, in a matter of an hour or two.

Plus there’s the hassle of random drug and alcohol testing at the end of a trip (going home after a twelve hour day? Not so fast . . .) and the bi-annual FAA flight physical with an EKG data-linked to FAA Headquarters for unmediated scrutiny and a thumbs-up, thumbs-down decision made each time in an office hundreds of miles away.

And for those pilots on the lower end of the seniority list, due to the brutal economics of the airline business, there’s the ever-present (and often witnessed) displacement: you get notified that you’re no longer in your aircraft category or crew position–you’re demoted or worse, now based a thousand miles from your home. See to it that you get to work on time. That just happened to about 350 pilots in San Francisco as that pilot base was eliminated.

Once all that’s behind you, liftoff equals pure freedom–restricted of course by the layers of regulations, details, navigation, instrument approaches and performance variables of fuel, altitude, airspeed and weather.

But I wouldn’t trade this:

For any other work on the surface of the planet, period.

And I realize that there are different hassles in the back, way different from the career-ending obstacles we face up front. Nonetheless, I still see by comparison an element of nuisance rather than real threat, and it’s mated to a dismal outlook unwarranted pessimism (do you not have any views from the cabin?) which is rooted mostly in the Dental Theory: everyone loves a horror story about a dentist’s office visit, and no one wants to hear anything else.

Did you watch that? He’s right: flight is a miracle–but everyone’s pissed off about something nonetheless. You’re sitting in a chair in the sky going 500 miles per hour . . .

Sure, I know: air travel ain’t what it used to be. But air travelers aren’t either:

I’m fortunate that this particular harsh fact of air travel is mostly “in the back,” as up front the unrelenting economic and professional pressures we bear are set aside as they must be in order to concentrate on keeping the miracle of flight going despite the best efforts of gravity and physical laws dictating the impossibility of what we’re all doing at 41,000 feet. I’m not sure why that doesn’t happen in the back of the plane as well, but the cocktail party stories are about the worst, rather than the best experiences in the air.

Nonetheless, there’s still always this:

Utah in the fiery throes of dusk, if you care to look out and down six or seven miles. And even if you don’t, there’s always this:

Which is you stepping off the jet a couple hours and a thousand miles later–and that wasn’t ever going to happen by surface transportation, was it? Not in the time you had to do it, or with hotels and gas, in any less of a cash hit.

Sure, we both have to pay some dues to let the earth fall away and revel in the suspense of gravity and the shrinking of earthly life in both distance and perspective, don’t we? But how much of the good and the bad along the way is a matter of focus, yours and mine ?

That’s the difference between magic and mundane, and in the inevitably bumpy mileage above and below the clouds, the view depends on where you look, and if you even notice what there is to see.

What was it like to fly at 80,000 feet and 2,000 miles per hour?

We go one-on-one with SR-71 driver Bill Flanagan.

Be there.

Vietnam: A Fighter Pilot’s View

In Vietnam, the air war was complex, deadly, challenging and forty years later, it’s still not well understood.

Fighter Pilot Ed Rasimus has a unique, 3-point perspective:

100 air combat missions in an F-105 in 1966, then another 150 in F-4s in 1972,

and now, 40 years later, the opportunity to reflect on the experience:

To download and save, click here.

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the SR-71’s first flight, with

Bill Flanagan

who flew the Blackbird and helped develop and test its out-of-this-world systems.

Don’t miss it.

Shipwrecked, with smarter friends.

It occurred to me as I drove in to the airport: major league storms forecast for the afternoon, so what are the chances of getting out, or more importantly, getting back into DFW? Still, the facts of life in the airline pilot biz are this–roll with it. Be safe, but stay flexible. Can’t worry about stuff like that.

From the practical standpoint, you have to keep one major factor in mind: fuel. Jet fuel is flexibility, loiter time, options, both on the ground and in the air. Never a problem at American: the Dispatcher has already added a few extra thousand pounds. Now we just need luck, which means timing, essentially. That is, the storms need to stay outside of the danger zone that prohibits ground crews from handling the aircraft. We’re fine inside the jet, but standing next to seventy-five tons of metal and jet fuel, with a tail poking up nearly four stories high, is a danger for the ground crews. Once we push back, fine.

MyFirst Officer was already a castaway, based in Los Angeles, lives in Denver, but sent to fly out of Miami for the month, assigned to this DFW trip. He’s been flying for the last 5 days straight, bounced from one trip to another by Crew Schedule. The cabin crew was the usual suspects–we’d been flying this San Francisco turn all month. They were senior enough to hold the schedule; I was too, but beginning on that day to wish I’d stayed home.

As soon as we cleared the gate and our ground crew was clear, I fired up the radar. An ugly hook of weather from the west was advancing on the airport. On taxi-out, the tower assigned us a runway on the east side of the airport.

“Remind them we’re westbound,” I told the F/O as I pushed up the throttles and swung us out onto the taxiway.

“The west side is shut down due to weather in all departure corridors,” came the tower reply. “Contact Clearance Delivery.”

Which means our route is cancelled. Good thing we have tons of fuel–now we’re launching off the east side, heading north, then west. San Fransisco via Kansas City, adding another 150 miles or so to the route.

And now we get to painstakingly reprogram the navigation system with the new route and runway, then verify every waypoint, something I won’t do while we’re rolling. But I figure we’ll have plenty of time at the end of the runway with a few dozen other jets in line as everyone heads for the east side.

“Not my choice,” I tell Gilligan. “I’d rather go south to Waco, then west to Abilene, then north.” He shrugs. He’s just out of laundry, tired of traveling, and missing home.

I was right: huge line waiting for takeoff, as everyone gets squeezed out of the west side. But I was also wrong. As soon as we reached the end of the runway, the tower called out the take-off sequence–and we were number three. We looked at each other in disbelief, then I looked at the radar. The line was moving so fast that I couldn’t imagine the airport being open more than another fifteen or twenty minutes.

Within ten, we were airborne, arcing off to the east before we could finally turn north. The radar picture to the west was an ugly blob of dark red hooking around from the southwest, marching on DFW like Sherman’s army.

Lucky break, sneaking out before the thunderheads, but a pain to weave our way west. But the 737-800 is my best friend: we climbed right up to 40,000 feet, saving us a trip to Kansas on our way to San Francisco: by the time we reached Tulsa, we could top the weather and headed west.

That’s when the Air Traffic Control frequency began the bad news: “All aircraft inbound to DFW, slow as much as possible; airport currently not accepting arrivals.”

Bad news, but not for us. Then:

“All aircraft for DFW, the airport is closed, the tower has been evacuated due to tornadoes.”

Tractor trailers literally storm-tossed south of DFW Airport.

That’s real bad news. But still, not for us–except something began to pick at the back of my mind. Didn’t I park between the towers?

“DFW is now closed for damage; estimating at least 2 hours.”

That’s something I’d never heard before. I pictured the inbound jets, imagining what they were going through: first, slow down as much as possible, buy time, save fuel and weigh options. The usual close-in alternate airports are probably out, given the size of the nastiness sweeping west to east. Which means a bailout to the far alternates like Oklahoma City or more likely, to the south like Austin or San Antonio. Which would mean huge delays with dozens of other jets waiting for fuel and god-knows-when DFW will reopen anyway. Probably be dead in the water wherever you land.

Which brings me back to us, knowing we too would be dead in the water at San Francisco International, figuring our return flight would be cancelled. Which brought up the big question:

I know there’s at least a pair of jeans in there. But doing turnarounds, I haven’t paid attention to much else. Although Mrs. Howell seemed to have a complete wardrobe aboard for just a three hour tour (Ginger too), my crew was a little short–except for Gilligan, but after five days on the road, his laundry situation couldn’t have been much better.

Regardless, gravity took over–we landed at San Francisco International and of course, our outbound flight back to DFW had been cancelled. And all I had as far as outerwear was, of course jeans. No matter.

One $8.99 souvenir T-shirt later (concession stand guy: “They’re 2 for $15;” me: “I really don’t even want one but I’m shipwrecked”) and I join my entire crew of castaways at Kinkaid’s on the San Francisco Bay to watch the sun go done over a bowl of chowder.

Heck of a storm, we all agree, having seen the CNN coverage of multiple tornadoes charging through our home-drome. “And,” I add, “The down side of seniority.” Like the flight attendants, who are on the top of their seniority heap, I too have the close-in parking at the terminal reserved for the fifty senior pilots at the crew base. But parking on top, with no protection for the car.

“Well,” I wondered out loud. “I wonder what’s left of our cars.” We get the up-close parking, but the airport restricts us to the roofless upper deck for employee cars.

Mrs. Howell, wearing a sweater over her uniform dress because unlike the real Mrs. Howell, she hadn’t planned on being shipwrecked, looked at me quizically.  “I’m sure they’re fine. I’m near the bottom level.”

Some of the more than 40 jets damaged by hail in the storm, awaiting inspection and repair.

“Mine’s on the top deck.” Where it’s supposed to be, right?

She laughed, and her colleagues joined in. “We NEVER park up there. Now you know why.”

I learned eventually–when I got back to DFW. Now the car has a new set of dimples:

Alas, the Minnow sustained about twenty hammer blows in the shipwrecking process.

Well, so much for following directions. And the shipwreck itself wasn’t all bad, what with the sunset on the bay and the lobster bisque soup. The next day brought something I hadn’t seen in a good while: sunrise from the cockpit. But with the time change between home base and the west coast, even that wasn’t a problem.

So I took a lesson from Mrs. Howell, being sure to have a full change of clothes in my suitcase–and parking more judiciously when the sky turns nasty.

Not a bad haul from what was supposed to be a just three hour tour.

.

The Air War in Vietnam: A Fighter Pilot ‘s Perspective

JetHead Live goes one-on-one with fighter pilot and author

Ed Rasimus

Veteran of 250 Combat Missions

and author of When Thunder Rolled and Palace Cobra.

JetHead Live: Airline Pilot & USAF General Carol Timmons

From flying US Army UH-1 helicopters as an Army pilot, to flying USAF C-141s and C-130s as an Air Force pilot,

to flying for United Airlines as a 767 pilot and her current command of the Delaware Air National Guard,

General Carol Timmons

goes one-on-one with JetHead Live!

To download and save, click here.

Also available free on iTunes, just click on the logo below.

Airline 101: “Why couldn’t you hold the flight?”

I was standing by the gate counter yesterday, printing my flight plan and other required paperwork for my flight to San Francisco, when a pair of businessmen hustled up to the gate, out of breath.

“Tokyo? That flight departed on-time twenty minutes ago,” the agent told them.

One guy threw his bags down in disgust. The other pleaded his case. “We were late on your flight out of Chicago. You couldn’t hold the Tokyo flight for us?”

Uh-oh; I’ve heard this one a few times, and it never ends well.

“I’m sorry,” the agent answered honestly. “We had to depart on time. We’ll give you a hotel room tonight and put you on the flight tomorrow.”

Here’s where I could have explained–if it was any of my business–but I kept my yap shut, finished my flight planning and scooted down to my jet. Because I’ve learned that “why couldn’t/didn’t/can’t you hold the flight” isn’t really a question anyone who missed a flight actually wants answered. They really just want to chew the ass of anyone convenient and while I understand the passengers’ frustration, most at that point are either not listening or find little solace in the answer. But here it is.

On a DFW-Tokyo flight, the clock ticks in several significant ways and yes, fifteen or twenty minutes either way are make or break–especially on international flights. Here’s why.

I’ll start with the flight crew. The FAA limits on-duty time for pilots for one good reason: as pilots, we have to perform perfectly for every take-off and landing. The landing, in an international flight scenario, is often done upwards of 12-14 hours after your pilots started their day. That’s because Tokyo-Narita with some wind conditions pushes the flight time to that limit–there is no twenty minutes of slack to wait. Do you want your pilots at the ragged edge, sleepless in the main, for more than 14 hours before they face the delicate approach and landing through European or Asian weather? In the mountain bowl of south America after flying all night?

I hate to say it, but the same problem exists on domestic flights: your pilots may have started their day in Boston, flown to Miami, then DFW and no, they do not have 20 minutes to spare before there’s either a crew change or a cancellation on your LAX or SFO flight. And with both international and domestic flights, there are connections to consider: many on-board will miss their arrival city connection if the flight is delayed to accommodate late passengers. This is crucial–and heartbreaking–departing DFW for other gateway cities like LAX, JFK or Chicago where folks are trying to connect to an international flight. There may be other enroute or destination factors that add an inbound delay–we can’t start out behind the timeline in deference to connecting passengers already on board–and at our destination waiting on their outbound flight and downline connections.

It’s even worse on an international segment, because on a flight of 12-16 hours like Tokyo, Rio, or Delhi, a headwind even 10% greater than planned can add significant misconnect risk in the destination cities. Holding a flight “just ten or twenty minutes” is playing roulette with hundreds of other passengers’ travel plans, plus the FAA limits on flight crew on-duty times.

And here’s the final twist most passengers don’t know or probably, really don’t care about: ALTREVs.

Huh? Yes, another aviation acronym you can add to your lexicon: Altitude Reservation. The airways across the Atlantic and Pacific are crowded and every airline naturally wants the optimum, shortest, wind-friendliest flight path across the pond. Since all the jets can’t fit into that same optimum lane in the sky at the same time, flights are assigned a track time–and you’d better be there at that time.

Same factors affect that as well: greater headwinds, weather deviations, or rerouting in the 3-4 hours over the US before “coasting out” (another cool term for you, “coasting out” = “at the coast, outbound”) can play havoc with your arrival at the track entry point. Early is no problem–just slow down inbound. But late? You can be sent across at a lower, slower, longer track altitude and course which again plays havoc with arrival times, connections, and the aircraft’s outbound leg with yet another set of passengers with preset arrival times and connections on their itineraries.

So there it is: your flight is just one thread in the complex tapestry that is an airline flight with passenger connections, crew duty limits, and track times to be maintained, and each segment is part of the larger rhizome that is an airline operation: it’s all intertwined and interdependent. There’s really no way to build in enough flex time (for example, 14 hours is both the limit and the flight time on some segments and many, many crew days) to “just hold the flight.”

Yes, sometimes we can–and we sure do! That would be in the case of a destination with no connections and probably at the end of the day (who connects in Des Moines?) if the crew time was not a limiting factor.

See why I didn’t try to explain all this to the understandably distraught business guys?  But maybe they–like you–would feel a little more at ease if they understood the big picture answer to “why couldn’t you hold the flight?”

And now you do, so share that with others who might need to know–I’ll be down at the jet pre-flighting, because we really need to depart on time, don’t we?

Bee Haydu, WWII Pilot

Like thousands of other pioneering women, Bee Haydu flew as a pilot for the US military in WWII.

Hear her story, in her own words:

This podcast and all previous JetHead Live! episodes can be downloaded free at iTunes.

Just click the logo below.

To purchase Bee Haydu’s book “WASP Letters Home,” click here.

So Where Are You Now?

It’s always the same: long, snakey boarding line, tall, short, fat, thin; tickets in hand, bags slung over shoulders and arms, dragged, carried; shuffle aboard. All going somewhere, and “there” is what matters, to you–I understand that. Why else would you be flying?

For you, here is no more than partway “there,” and I understand that too. I’m up front, plotting your escape, ensuring the hundreds of details so you don’t have to worry about the thousands of pounds of fuel and steel you’re going to ride in the sky like a broad winged condor rather than creep across the surface of the earth like ant. The litany of escape that is the pre-departure checklist: verify those waypoints loaded in the flight guidance system; the fuel burn, the departure sequence, speeds, climb, GPS departure track, enroute fuel burn, winds aloft–everything I need to have settled in my mind and cast in stone before I commit us all to flight.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember you–in fact, I do, and I wonder where you are now, after I left you with both feet on the ground whatever thousands of miles forever ago. Sure, there are many I remember, and some I can’t forget.

You were down in Houston. With your mother, for months. The Shriner’s burn ward. You couldn’t have been more than ten years old, a full body wrap, burned over most of your body, but finally well enough to travel, to go home and resume the life of a fourth grade girl somewhere in the midwest. I felt for you because I knew you were in such pain, the body wrap making you hot on top of third degree burns, as the agent told me; maybe not well enough for this trip but needing to go home, and pain medication wearing off.

Then the delays–thunderstorms; sorry, honey, it’s not safe for us to take off yet. I watched the radar, waiting for the storm to march by and I felt for you, way in back–I can see the cabin temp climbing there in the July sun roasting our aluminum tube bogged down on the Houston ramp. I cock the jet sideways so as not to blow any smaller aircraft off the tarmac, then push up the right throttle–we’ll deal with the fuel imbalance later–adding bleed air to force the max cooling out of the cabin air conditioning, never mind ours up front. The First Officer gave me an “are you nuts” look, and I shot one back that said don’t say one word. You needed that air; you get it.

I want to know that now, years later, you’re healed, you’re well, you’re not in pain, you’re flying comfortably to a bright future. Where are you now?

And you were the young man with the panic in his eyes, standing in the forward entry door with his fiance giving him a look that could bend a spoon. The agent was on her cell phone, calling the hotel van driver who’d brought them to the airport. No luck. The groom had left his wedding suit on the van which was now heading to another city.

You don’t have time to get back through security if he brings it to the curb she tells him, in her mind’s eye watching the dream wedding somewhere in Mexico crumbling into chaos. He’s like a deer in headlights, letting her down instead of making her dreams come true.

“I can go get it,” I assure them, “If you can get the van driver to turn around.” Even if I really can’t get back though security by departure time, the jet’s not leaving without me. But no dice: the hotel can’t reach the van driver. No wedding suit.

The agent and I exchange glances, both stifling a smile: they’ll get it, eventually. Golden plans, platinum dreams, bronze reality but forging a future of hearty, burnished metal that will weld them strongly nonetheless. Got to close the door now; it’s time to go.

And you were the elderly man wearing his natty suit, in the wheel chair. Cane in hand, eyes looking miles and miles away. Leaving Florida and most of his life too: his wife was down below, in the cargo hold. He was taking her home, one last time. The agents fussed over him, keeping him close. But there was really nothing to be done besides just plain old caring, seeing in him the path of loss and leaving. He seemed calm; sad, distant, but some peace from somewhere, wherever his distant eyes focused, somehow sustained him. Because he knew.

He knew that like him, we were all headed west to where the sun eventually sets. Some at the start of the inevitable trip, not yet even far enough down the road to be able to look back much less laugh about the wedding suit that had to be bought in Cabo to replace the one that drove itself to Tulsa.

Some healing from the cruelty visited out of nowhere, a branding undeserved, a childhood hell unforeseen–but I needed to know, surmounted. Where are you now, all of you? Maybe east of me, and I’m east of the dignified gentlemen late in his journey; the young couple a distance behind but really, not so much.

Maybe that’s what the widower knew that we’d all learn: we’re all headed west. Sooner, later–but west. What matters most is not the journey, but the caring along the way. For a while, when we flew together, I did just that. And wherever you are, you should know: I still do.

We talk one on one with WWII Pilot Bee Haydu, one of a small number

of women pilots serving in the AAF during wartime.

April 8th–don’t miss it!

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Fearful Flyer? Here’s Help.

For many travelers, flying is stressful, even fearful, largely due to the uncertainty and unfamiliarity of the flight environment.

JetHead Live! presents a thorough discussion of those factors that will help ease a traveler’s mind. We talk with musician Art Hays, a professional who has traveled the world touring with Matchbox 20 and continues traveling on other gigs. But he, like many other uncomfortable flyers, has questions about flying–and we have the answers to put him at ease :

This podcast and all past JetHead Live! episodes are available free on iTunes. Just click on the iTunes logo below.

She was a military pilot in WWII. Hear Bee Haydu’s story in her own words.

April 4th on JetHeadLive!

Food Porn: Pie in the Sky.

Two flight conditions in the cockpit combine to produce an interesting result: boredom and hunger. The natural remedy is something to eat, which in turn is also something to do. Kills two birds with one stone.

Boredom, however, can extend to the food as well, as many passengers who fly the same routes often begin to notice. Since pilots fly the same flight segments sometimes for the whole month, the same entree does become a little monotonous.

“Tastes just like chicken,” like rattlesnake and alligator, because it is chicken. Not that it’s all bad, because sometimes there are items that you can’t refuse even though you probably should. But again, there’s the aspect of “something to do” that overrides that aspect of caloric discipline. I mean, there flight might be four hours, maybe five. What are we going to do?

I’ll tell you what: you’re going to stuff this into your pie-hole (where else would it go?) and not think twice afterwards. Pie in the sky is not to be questioned but, it is never a given. It kind of shows up here and there, but normally, the longer the flight the better the chance of running across some version.

Now, a side note to all of my flight attendant friends who groan and say, “Ewww, you eat that stuff?” Let me just say, don’t “ewww” me: we see you in the galley stuffing all of it, especially sundaes, into your faces, standing up, of course, and wiping your hands on the galley curtains. If there’s any “eww” factor–you get credit for an equal dose.

Meanwhile, speaking of stuffing face, here’s the rare and exotic flying lemon cream with crumb topping, normally seen on transcons, but it has been spotted enroute to Seattle lately:

There are circumstances, however, when you might want to pass on the full tray and just go for the bookends, appetizer and dessert:

That would be on the occasion where you knew that there was decent food at your next stop, like my all-time favorite in the San Francisco International Terminal: Tyler Florence’s Carry-Out inside Napa Grocery. The best deal going (literally, carry-out) is his side-special:

My three favorite sides are his famous macaroni-and-cheese (you’ve probably seen him make it on Food TV), grilled asparagus, and potato salad. That’s going to get you through a couple thousand air miles with no chance of hunger pangs.

For the quick-turn, there’s nothing better than a quick “Big Dawg” in Santa Ana’s John Wayne Orange County airport:

And speaking of dogs, I never pass up “Good Dog-Bad Dog” in the Portland Airport–no matter what hour of the day. Here’s a breed of dog you might not have ever considered, but it’s perfect, and perfectly portable: the breakfast dog, topped with scrambled eggs and sauteed onions:

Going for a little lighter fare? One of my all-time favorites is Matasuki in the Washington-Reagan Airport in DC, where the shrimp dumplings and miso soup will take the chill off of a day at altitude:

And speaking of noodles, the best on the planet are in Seattle at The Noodle Shop, a small Vietnamese kitchen with huge flavor:

Takes the damp chill off of a Pacific Northwest day in nothing flat.,

And finally, for those big jobs, like from New York to Seattle, there is the Weapon of Mass Destruction, the Hot Pastrami and Provolone Hero from the LaGarbage Employee Deli:

Afterward, you will not be hungry until somewhere over the Dakotas, at the earliest, and that slight hunger pang can be dispatched quickly with something small, like the cherry cheesecake:

Then once you’re safely on the ground in Seattle and finally at the hotel, there’s bound to be room for a bowl of clam chowder across the street at Roasters:

Go ahead, enjoy–you have at least twelve hours off after that long inbound flight. As I said, this is not only about hunger, it’s something to do as well. Never mind nutrition–that’s for a life at sea level. If you’re going to fly, you’re going to have to eat–it’s kind of the tradition in the airline pilot ranks.

Spicy tofu carry-out at O'Hare will set your hair on fire.

Well, there you have it: flying and food, a natural combination. Actually, there’s so much more food strategically located at airports around the country and whether you’re in the cockpit or the cabin, your mission ought to be to stay calorized in flight. Judging by the food offerings at airports coast-to-coast, I can tell you that if you find yourself hungry at 35,000 feet–it’s really your own fault.

Bon Apetit, and may god have mercy on whoever has to sit next to you, cockpit, cabin–or anywhere else.

Air Travel and Sundae Prayers.

There are things we expect, things we ask for, and things that drop in our lap. The hard part is knowing the difference and at the same time, appreciating our own good fortune without any further questions. But that’s just not human nature–gratitude and minimal expectations–is it?

Let me start with myself, for the sake of full disclosure–and don’t worry, I’ll get to you as well.

I’ve been flying jets long enough to be Category 3 qualified, which in my jet means I’m certified to hand-fly down to fifty feet above the runway in dense fog or obscured skies, day or night, to land if it looks to me to be prudent.

And yet, having done this for most of my life, that’s not where the extraordinary satisfaction of the workday comes from. Maybe it’s intangible, or more accurately, a tacit reward you get out of the blue (pun intended), and maybe even that itself seems pretty mundane compared to what you’d think would matter about driving eighty tons of pig iron around the sky.  But here it is:

“Sundaes,” I was told by a very wise senior flight attendant when I was a very junior airline pilot, “are like a blowjob: if offered, you take it–but you never ask.” Maybe that’s why it’s special when that offer comes. But throughout the years, I never ask. Which is why this is more the norm:

Don’t get me wrong–I love flying one of the most advanced technology birds in the sky, I thrive on the challenges and the minute demands inherent in every flight. But I’m way beyond anyone’s stereotype of this job, and more like the stereotype of every job.

I have little or no patience for other than the essentials of flight. I’ll say up front that I’ll do anything to help the very young, the very old, those who don’t speak the language and those with special needs. But other than that, I do my best to remain invisible. Because overall, like you, I’m just trying to get through the workday without hassles or repercussions.

Now, shall we move on, and in fact, move back?

These are my colleagues on the far side of that armored and thank God, bolted shut flight deck door. They have to deal with hundreds–you read that right–hundreds of passengers a day. Yes, that’s their job, and they’re damn good at it, better than I’d ever dream of being (see above). But there’s more to it than meets your eye.

He or she has been working nonstop for several days by the time you board, in many cases. That includes the hassles of hotels and transportation, little sleep or food due to schedule constraints, and throw on the added stress of increased hours and decreased pay, the industry standard, and the end result is predictable if you put yourself into the situation. Flashback–here’s me meeting The Missuz after one of her 3-day death marches, particularly when she was on callout reserve:

Probably will be no “sundaes” in the near future in this typical scenario, not that I’d ask. Because she, like most flight attendants in the sky, has just spent several days being deliberately nice to many people who don’t know the meaning of the word. So, you get the point: for all of the good parts about a flexible schedule, travel privileges (a cruel hoax, I say, but that’s another subject) and escape from any kind of office-bound (ugh) or desk-bound (yikes) work day, there is as you have to expect the grind-aspect of any job.

Now, let’s get to “the traveling public,” or as we like to say, “the pax.” I believe that there may be a common preconception among a large portion of “the pax” that may be less than accurate:

And the major contrast between the visualization–actually, the idealization–of air travel like this is not all on the crew side of the daydream. Rather, some of the dreamers show up out of costume for their own daydream:

No sundaes for you, probably ever–not that you’d need one, but you probably would ask. But the point is this: we’re all big on aspirations, but how about the follow-through? We’re certainly all human, but where’s the balance between expectations and obligations? Is there any connection between the way we act and what we get in return?

I’d like to think too that some of the behavior we see in the travel arena is different than what you’d see at the homes of everyone on the plane, but I guess I shouldn’t assume that. Regardless, the point is this: we all have expectations that rely on others, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that others have expectations of us as well. Pilots, flight attendants, passengers–we all tend to forget that.

But if you forget, the results are predictable. Which is why, as the senior flight attendant explained to me, when it comes to sundaes or anything else of a special nature in the air travel realm: if it’s offered, take it; otherwise, just don’t ask.