Captains-Eye View: All Things Considered.

You climb into the left seat, sit down; the schedule is set, the route loaded, the jet fueled, crew in place, passengers boarded–ready for pushback. What could be simpler?

If only things were as simple as they look.

Today you’re headed to John Wayne-Orange County Airport. The runway is the shortest in the nation that we operate in and out of. The airspace surrounding the airport is in the heart of Los Angeles Center, some of the busiest airspace in the country.

Certainly, the operation is within normal limits, but make no mistake about it: everything is compressed in terms of time, options and reactions when the landing runway is that short. As a rule, we use as a standard touchdown zone of 1,500-3,000 feet but no more than 30% of the runway length, which gives you plenty of slack at DFW where the runway is 13,000 feet long. But Orange County is 5,700 total–one third gives you 1,700 feet to have the wheels on the deck, or abandon the landing. That’s in deference to stopping ability, which is critical on such a short runway.

From the left seat, there are a few more options that make the task easier.

The Heads Up Display (HUD) gives me aimpoint and airspeed information, plus dynamic considerations such as acceleration, deceleration, flare cue and throttle commands, all without ever taking my eyes off the touchdown target . Then, on touchdown, right below the speed readout the runway remaining distance is displayed, keeping me appraised of our deceleration.

But the HUD is only on the captain’s side and I know of more than one captain who won’t let First Officers land at Orange County for that reason–plus the compressed timeline and limited options there.

Fair enough. But I consider a few more factors.

Everyone I fly with has been an airline pilot for at least twenty years, because we haven’t hired anyone since the 90s. They know what they’re doing and even though it would be easier for me to just do the landing myself, I keep this in mind: if at any point on the approach I feel like it’s not going the way I think it should, I can and will direct a go-around, meaning we will abandon the approach and execute the missed approach procedure. Worst case, I’ll simply say, “I have the aircraft” and take control and fly the maneuver myself.

Okay, I don’t tell First Officers, but I’ll likely have Dispatch add an extra thousand pounds of fuel to our standard upload, just for that purpose: I want the extra pad of minutes in my pocket as we fly the approach, just in case we need to do the go-around.

From there, the approach will be for me a series of gates we must meet: airspeed, configuration, descent rate and path  must stay within strict limits (the HUD tells me everything at a glance) or we abandon the approach. That’s my call and I’m not shy about making it, have been making that call as captain for 21 years now.

For a passenger jet, this is a postage stamp of a runway. Particularly for the 737-800, which has higher than normal approach and touchdown speeds. In the back of my mind on every touchdown is the time compression induced by the short runway: we must touchdown on speed, on point, braking and reverse thrust promptly and fully. There’s really little chance of doing anything (like a rejected landing) after touchdown on a runway that short.

Take-off is no easier. Yesterday, it was the First officer’s turn to do the take-off, and he wasn’t happy with the performance data generated by the bank of computers buried in a bunker in Tulsa. They’d determined that due to the shortness of the runway, combined with the July heat and the heavy fuel load required by weather in west Texas (actually, required by ME but I didn’t tell the First Officer that), we’d need to use a setting of 25 degrees of flaps for take-off.

We normally use 1, or maybe 5 degrees.  My First Officer doesn’t like it, says it’s senseless to have that much drag hanging out there especially on a short runway with a steep climb gradient–if you lose an engine on take-off, that’s a ton of drag with the nose pointed high.

Each CFM-56 engine puts out 27,000 pounds of thrust at full power.

Yet it’s not only legal, it’s recommended by the performance “experts” and being the captain, this is my call, of course.

But not so fast: he has a good point. Yes, it’s always my call–but it’s his take-off and while I’ll always maintain veto power, as I said, these F/Os are very experienced and he has a really good point. It’s the same thing I do whenever we’re handling a systems failure or an emergency: I don’t ask “what do you think of my plan,” but rather, “tell me what I’m overlooking, what I’m not thinking.”

Which is what he did.

So right there in the cockpit, I input “15 degrees” of flaps, plus the temperature and take 2 knots of headwind I know is there and the on-board performance computer data-linked with Tulsa says we will have a two-thousand pound pad if we want to use 15 degrees of flaps instead of 25. Why not?
The difference is in the power setting–but that’s miniscule. The computer performance program looks to minimize engine temperature and thus extend engine life. Somehow, when you’re staring at the end of a 5,700 foot runway with 167 souls on board depending on you, the difference between 101.2% and 101.9% power and the associated hot section temps seem acceptable.

And there’s another quirk I’ve developed over a couple of decades as captain: many guys insist on making such critical take-off themselves, but I’m exactly the opposite.

On short runways particularly, like  Santa Ana, DCA or LaGuardia, I prefer the reverse. That is, the First Officer is the “go” guy, executing the take-off unless I say otherwise–which would be, as standard, me taking the aircraft from him and aborting.

That leaves me as the “stop guy,” monitoring everything carefully with an eye towards any anomaly–something not as easy to do if I’m executing the take-off myself.

If I see no reason to stop, my well-seasoned expert in the right seat is going to go. Makes more sense to me: on shorter runways, this simply becomes more compressed, but no different than the thought process on any runway, long or short. I try to use all of the assets available to make the best decision for all.

There’s a lot written in stone, sure, but in the flying biz, there’s just as much art and science. And while the fourth stripe gives you all the authority, it would be foolish to think it also gives you all the answers. All things considered, a cohesive cockpit crew will handle everything as it comes. That’s kind of what being a captain is all about.

You, Me, and Air France 447

My guess is that “Air France 447” probably doesn’t ring a bell with most airline passengers–nor should it, really. But it means a lot to me.

But I probably read airline accident reports with a different mindset than those for whom “flying” is actually riding, kind of like the tandem jumpers who pay to fall out of a plane hooked to an “experienced” parachutist–then say they’ve “sky-dived.” That’s because what goes on between the time passengers board my jet to touchdown and deplaning thousands of miles later rests squarely on my shoulders.

Certainly, I mourn the loss of the 228 souls on board the Airbus 330 aircraft, but I have to think beyond that. My job is to ask, when it comes to the mechanical failure the pilots of AF 447 encountered, what are my blind spots, my vulnerabilities? How can I successfully handle this challenge when it happens on my flight?

If you’re the kind that prefers to just “hook up to some guy and jump,” more power to you. That’s part of my profession, allowing you that confidence by doing the post-mortem, reading the report and figuring out for myself what I need to learn for myself–and you–when faced with a similar situation.

Want to come along and see how that’s done? Fine, here we go. Not interested? That’s fine too. See you next week.

The Accident Report

Here’s a summary of the accident from a source that is usually reliable, and here is the actual report itself if you care to read the whole thing.

Fingerpointing

Here’s the knee-jerk reaction that’s hard to avoid when you’re a pilot: there they go again, making the flight crew the scapegoats. And that’s a legitimate complaint and bias from pilots, because clearly, the aircraft experienced a major mechanical failure. The trail of accident factors in a car wreck doesn’t end with the driver: why did the brakes fail? Why did the tire blow out? Were there design issues that created the problem? Manufacturing flaws? Supervisory lapses that allowed damage to occur or go undetected? Regulatory and oversight failures that allowed the threat to exist undetected–or allowed to continue on a slower than immediate abatement schedule?

This last point is a major headache for pilots and risk factor for everyone who flies. That is, in our country, the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) has responsibility for conducting accident investigation, then reporting on causes and issuing recommendations to prevent recurrence. But the NTSB has no authority to enforce these recommendations. That authority rests with the FAA, who negotiates with the airlines to implement some of the NTSB recommendations on a gradual basis so as not to unduly affect flight operations and incur huge costs and monetary losses.

Meaning, as in the case of AF 447, that a known problem with the pitot-static system that induced the loss of control sequence of events, occurred in flight before the recommended system modifications could be made. It should be made clear that Air France is not subject to the NTSB or FAA, unless operating in the US and this accident occurred in South America. But it should also be said that this exact same pitot-static failure had become a well-known vulnerability in this model of aircraft, and that modifications to the system were being accomplished fleet-wide on a gradual basis, and that the Air France pilots’ union had long been recommending that the aircraft not be flown until the modifications were complete.

The Flightcrew

I have nothing to say about the AF 447 flightcrew other than god rest their souls. I wasn’t on the flight deck on that dark, stormy night over the Atlantic, I don’t know what they saw or felt or how the four minutes from cruise altitude to the ocean’s surface transpired or how the plane handled throughout.

The crew I care about is my own. Are we prepared for this malfunction, for complete loss of pitot-static instruments? Are we astute and engaged enough to detect the root cause of the problem and to work around the lack of airspeed and vertical velocity data?

Because it’s not that simple, although the sequence of events is very simple: the autoflight modes trip off. Meaning, the autopilot and autothrottles disengage, leaving the crew to handle power, pitch and roll inputs.

Fine. But the reason the automation quit was because it no longer had the normal performance data of airspeed and altitude upon which to base its flight control and throttle commands–so the pilots taking over manually were denied that critical information as well.

But here’s where the forest and the trees take over: as a pilot, I could waste a lot of time trying to figure out why both automated modes failed. But that’s not as important as flying the aircraft.

The tendency with advanced flight automation, and we certainly have exactly that in the Boeing 737-800 I fly, plus the Airbus fleet is the poster child for autoflight, is that it’s easy to get wrapped up in the automation function. And that is often at the expense of direct aircraft control.

At American Airlines, our boss the Chief Pilot started a campaign last year aimed at exactly this vulnerability. It’s called “Aggressively Safe,” meaning intervene in the automation cycle at the first sign of a problem with any system: disconnect the automation and hand-fly the aircraft until the validity of all automated systems can be verified and restored–or simply left disengaged.

That’s smart, considering the present vector of automation, which Boeing explicitly warns thus: “The new generation automated flight systems of the 787 level aircraft now outpaces the human capacity to do backup calculations.” In other words, a pilot can’t do the calculations associated with a flight maneuver fast enough to verify the accuracy and correctness of the automation performing the flight maneuver. Hence my boss’s wise counsel to intervene now, fly the aircraft safely, verify as soon as you can.

But in the case of total pitot-static failure, it’s not really a matter of disconnecting the automation, because it’s disconnected itself. In which case, there are two roads to go down, and one of them is a dead end.

As a pilot, I hope to god the road I choose is this: fly the jet, period. Worry about what happened later. The dead end road is to search for the cause of the failure or even worse, the cause of the automation disconnect–unless and until one pilot is decisively and exclusively flying the aircraft. Then the other pilot can concentrate on exactly that–which again, is standard American Airlines operating procedure.

But there again, the “why” of the malfunction isn’t as important as “how” of the work-around: you still have to control the jet and establish straight and level flight before anyone diverts attention to diagnostics and system restoration.

We’re fortunate on the Boeing -800 fleet to have displayed at all times an angle of attack gage, telling us at a glance the performance of the airfoil. And we also have–I assume Airbus has as well, but I don’t know–a valid groundspeed readout regardless of the pitot-static systems. Can I control the aircraft with just those two information streams? The answer is a resounding “yes,” and we practice exactly that at least once a year in the simulator.

But what you can’t easily ensure is the thought process that prioritizes aircraft control over system diagnosis and remediation. As I said, there’s a fork in the road: you either get your head in the flight game (groundspeed, engine power settings, angle of attack), or you go into the what-ifs of automation that has so many layers and so much complexity that you’re soon way deep into the forest and out of the stick and rudder flying realm. I’ve been doing this a long time–long enough to know I ain’t smart enough to travel both roads at once. And in the case of pitot-static failure, we need both of us traveling down the aircraft control road before anyone even attempts a side trip in automation land.

Going Forward

In my experience, automation failure is usually attributable to three factors: power failure, data-input error, or data/program corruption. So when the automation trips off–and it does, often enough, on an average flight–I have those three things in the back of my mind. In the front of my mind is the flight path and aircraft attitude. Stick and rudder always works. And as one wise old fighter pilot who taught crew management to captains at my airline used to say, no matter what emergency is going on in flight, there’s always time to take a deep breath and say to yourself, “Can you believe this sonofabitch is still flying?”

And that’s the key: flying. Not troubleshooting, diagnosing, or otherwise attending to systems. Unless and until the “flying” part is assured, which is easier said than done. That’s because most pilots are technicians, experienced in working with complex flight management and navigation systems. Many have engineering backgrounds and are naturally inclined to solve technical problems.

Fine–except once you go down that rabbit hole, the other guy is solo and worse, if both pilots succumb to the lure of technical “what’s it doing” or what’s wrong with this system?” tail chase–then whose undivided attention is manning the stick and rudder?

So rewind. What do I take away from this accident report? First, when the autoflight systems fail, it’s time for old fashioned stick and rudder application–period. Troubleshooting? Systems analysis? Later–and only after one pilot is firmly established and solely concentrated on aircraft control.

Second, in a pitot static failure, GPS groundspeed and angle of attack will let you extrapolate straight and level flight. On our jets, the Heads Up Display–HUD–will also display energy potential. Also, the FMS will display the required engine power setting for level flight–set it, leave it, watch it. Divide and conquer: since the HUD is only on my side, I’m flying, copilot is running through the systems checklists.

Conclusion

Like every other flight and flightcrew, I realize my own vulnerability when it comes to systems failures and autoflight malfunctions: the distracting technical rabbit hole luring pilots away from the stick and rudder application and into the layered, complex technical realm of autoflight to detect and “fix” a problem. That’s the real problem.

The designers who built the jet designed it to fly despite the systems failures, if we as pilots attend to the flying as top priority. And my old fighter pilot friend filled in the blank to the final question: just take a deep breath and keep the jet flying.

It’s just that simple, and just that complex. The irony is, if I’m successful, you’ll never know the difference, and that’s pretty much my goal, and that’s also my plan. The rest is going to be, on your part, a leap of faith.

Hawkeye, Frankenpants, and Fate.

It’s almost a pagan thought that somehow fate will always poke you back, especially when you poke it in the eye. The hawk eye.

Pagan and Catholic are like oil and water, at least on the surface, and toss in a backwash of fate and there go your pants, and at the worst time. Am I getting ahead of myself? Slow down–breathe: fate takes it’s own damn time.

I can explain. Hawkeye was a nun from the order of St. Francis sent to earth to torment my junior high school. They were The Sisters of Perpetual Violence because the smack hand could come out of nowhere and at any time, since the hawkeye missed nothing.

Between academics and vigilance against the all-seeing, punitive Hawkeye, life in the school was like the daily challenge of the nine-banded armadillo: see the road, see the traffic–but you gotta go, smashed shell or no. You just have to, and what a headrush when you live through it.

And granted this was the era of “you’ll put your eye out” and other mom-isms it was important to refute, as well as to disprove the dire prediction that we couldn’t be the heathens we were and ever expect to amount to anything, much less what we wanted to be, as adults.

Which, in the case of my small band of heretics, was to be Air Force pilots first–then airline pilots afterward. We lived and breathed it: the talk, the model planes, the gas powered planes–all of it. It’s all we could do then, but certainly not all we’d do eventually. Shiny faced like a new penny, what are you going to do? Run across that highway: time the traffic, get a little closer each time, but cross. What a rush, on the other side.

But nuns don’t care for games of chicken. You’ll be in jail by the time you’re 18, Hawkeye promised me, and in the electric chair by 21. And yet the pagan gods of defiance held me in good stead: seldom caught in the act, never busted outright. Those tires came close to my rubbery shell, but the worst of it was little more than a promise from Hawkeye: you boldbrazenimpudentdisgrace–it was all one word when she said it–having your fun at other’s expense. But some day, it will be at yours.

A lot of shells got crushed on the highway of time. Bob G. forgot about the pilot dreams and enlisted in the Navy. Terry became a mailman and a pothead; Kenny a priest, Larry sold life insurance and Mike “Pick-a-Butt” took over his dad’s heating and air business. I’m the only one who didn’t turn away from the master plan. God knows why.

The years stretched mile after mile smooth out and the rolling hills flatten as you go. Next thing you know, you’re living the dream as an everyday day-to-day.

It’s different on the inside of the dream–better, actually–and eventually the worldly difference becomes the norm. You make it up as you go. Too smart for your own good, can’t follow rules still rings true if hollow: what’s the point of the uniform, the inside track, if we need some kind of stinking badges?

No lines: duck under the rope and go . . . rip.

Felt it more than heard it, but there was no mistaking reality: a thousand miles from home, pants split open on the ass wide as the Grand Canyon and just as drafty. Hawkeye. Somewhere, she was nodding: I warned you. Rules are made for everyone, including you, Mister Duck Under The Ropes Like You Own The Place. Like my grandmother, Hawkeye labelled you with whatever transgression she’d discovered.

Think. Back up slowly, slowly, toward the agents, away from the boarding crowd. The agents are too busy to notice you driving around in reverse, but they see the hand right away.

Don’t ask, my look says. Just don’t ask. They go back to the furious clacking on keyboards that is required for even the simplest transaction. Move away, backing up like a tall truck backing into a giant garage, drafty as a cabriolet with the top down, ease in reverse toward the Men’s room . . . safe. Now what?

Frankenpants: grab the loose ends, crumple a seam, then suture with about two dozen staples. Then another dozen for good measure. They look like hell–and feel even worse: all the metal is on the inside; from the outside, my butt looks like two horse’s lips chewing my pants right up like hay.

My ass is a monster. Worse: no way to get through security. “Uh, yes, there’s metal . . . I have a bunch of staples holding the seat of my pants together. Hawkeye warned me this would happen.” True, I’m on the secure side of the airport, which is where I’ll stay for the rest of the day.

Sitting on the pants version of a Hair Shirt, the Bed of Nails, medieval devices of atonement: the staples bite, but what are you going to say? Can’t fly this approach, I’m sitting on pointy metal.  Make it three approaches, and three legs. I warned you, but you never listen.

Of course, the last leg was the worst.

No better way to ensure a smooth touchdown; so maybe we should always fly in Frankenpants. And probably we should keep that hawkeye in mind. Truly, she never meant anything but good for all of us, hoped for the best, feared the worst, and prayed for us constantly in between. Because look at you, Mister My Ass Is Stapled to the Hilt and These Pants are Going into the Dumpster in the Employee Lot and You’re Driving Home in Jeans From Your Suitcase, In The Lot In Your Underwear Changing, past is prologue.

And the hawkeye misses nothing, so you’ just better watch your step.

Night Skies and Other Lies.

Rumbly turbulence, airspeed flinches; the yaw damper reins her head; the nose and tail agree and the jet settles back on course. That bumpiness is the late afternoon frontal sheer losing it’s heat, it’s edge, power; just the teethmarks of the day imprinted on the night.  The sun sinking low leaves behind a down payment on tomorrow in the towering hell marching eastward not caring that the rest of the day has paraded off to the west. We’ll slip by.

Night flight is a watch or a vision, all about what you can’t see in the daytime, what you’d have to look up to see and even then, daytime’s relentless now shines it all down. But it’s mostly a lie anyway.

A millenium ago sailors miles below peered up at the night sky and plotted their course based on the the diamond waypoints they mistakenly believed never moved. And though blinded by a thousand miles of deep blue everywhere they looked in the daytime, nighttime gave them the vision above to plot a course ahead and the faith to steer it all day.

Above the earth our sea is as black above as below, and the irony of time is that now the night sky braces a constellation of man-made satellites not visible from the crow’s nest I sit in, but talking to the jet nonetheless.

A metal swarm below the diamond canopy mimics the geo-synchronicity of the constellations, which is also a lie: everything moves, is moving and though it looks to my eye like we’re suspended above the gossamer web of ground lights only creeping inch by inch below, in reality we flash across the ground like wild dogs with our heads out the window, letting our ears blow through time and space. The satellite tapestry orchestrating the course is no more stationary than the wide-flung constellations, but we transcend the lie by more sleight of hand.

When the earth falls away, we discount the minuteness of our own worldly time and motion compared to the magnitude of the universe and the measure of its flux. We gaze beyond our own micro-minutes in the sky, so fleeting by comparison to the eternity above; we favor the sweep of the second hand collecting years a minute at a time. In the darkest of night we substitute for the lack of vision with a structure of white lies that has bent truth and charted a course, until morning at least and then more.

Cosmic gears move and the fly-wheel spins in darkness or light; the time passes like distance in flight. Nobody cares that what’s fixed really isn’t, nor what’s in motion is really fixed, we claim a bug’s life, a gnat’s age and stretch it across a calendar so small that the universe couldn’t notice it any more that you mark the nine-day life and death of a fruit fly.

Time and distance flat-lines, the truth is all motion and sky. Distance and place and the relativity of each, the minuteness of everything compared to monolith of eternity–that’s the smirk of the universe, but so what?

When it comes to the cosmos, here’s what I see:

And I’m buying: what we lack in duration, we’ll make up in intensity; where we don’t endure, we’ll at least enjoy; where we can’t prevail, we’ll contend like a welterweight against the fatass heavyweight Time. In the absence of grace, we’ll substitute brute force:

Time and space and irrelevant place: vision is overrated anyway. Feel like flying? I do, both feel like it, and do it. “Here to there” is insignificant, because neither waypoint matters as much as the flight in between, or moreover, the fact that you’re flying at all.

And when you think of it that way, it’s kind of like giving the finger to the universe and eternity all at once. Ice Age or a gnat’s days;  light years or more beers; it’s all relative, a matter of comparison but not kind–and none of it lasts anyway.

So we’ll burn it, stoke it to an ice-blue flame, fast as she’ll go, high as we can for as long as it lasts–then into the night. Newborn of no one, headed “there” from nowhere, one more shooting star, another streak of light. A mortal patchwork of lies, sailing the infinite night.

Airline Pilots: Quirks, Perks and Jerks.

There’s a unique social strata in the pointy end of the jet, one that most who reside there can neither recognize nor deny. First, lets look at quirks.

I have to go beyond just the technical quirks, but I’ll get to that. First, though, there are various peccadillos that are a combination of profession and personality. Foremost, and maybe quirkiest, is “Last Aircraft Syndrome.” That is, those who carry over some of the procedural considerations from the last fleet they were on, using either reasoning or procedures that really don’t apply. I’m not talking about the Obsessive-Compulsive resetting of systems, although it is annoying:  like the guys who on descent, reset the cabin pressure controller to a lower cruise altitude; turning the radar to standby after switching to a different mode. Not needed, but just a little obsessive.

But the really senseless make-work stuff some have to do: reset a step-down altitude on enroute descent even though the Flight Management System (FMS) is perfectly happy with the original path no matter where you initiate descent. That shows someone who either doesn’t understand FMS, or just has to obey Quirky Reset Syndrome (QRS; yes, I made that up) no matter how distracting and pointless it might be.

Which is, I guess, my main quirk: I hate to see unnecessary clutter in procedures: don’t add stuff that doesn’t really apply. Just to the most streamlined procedures possible. “Last aircraft syndrome” reaches beyond the 727-vintage pressurization considerations or the MD-80 fuel boost pump to the APU (Boeing says it’s fine without) to the really annoying ancestor worship passengers will notice right after takeoff, when the cabin heats up.

That’s because the venerable MD-80 had a primitive air-conditioning system that put out tons of cold air at high power setting like on take-off. So on climb out, F/Os would start adding warm air to the mix with the temp controls. By contrast, the 737-800 has a great system that adds warm air automatically–no need to mess with the manual controls. But former MD-80 F/Os can’t resist doing what they did for 15 or 20 years on the Juraissic Jet . Which brings up another of my quirks: I usually grab a coffee in the terminal about 10 minutes prior to pushback. It’s usually cooled to drinkable temp right after liftoff, and that’s my routine: on climbout, I fly with one hand, drink my coffee with the other. Which doesn’t leave me a free hand undo the F/O’s addition of heat to the cockpit mix. And hot coffee and a hot cockpit don’t mix. Soon enough, though, the flight attendants will be calling from the back to complain about the heat, if I don’t get to the controls myself first.

And now having said all that, I realize this: I sure do have a lot of quirks. Now let’s look to the dark side: the jerks.

I have to admit, we do have the “jerks” in our ranks. I don’t just mean the fashion failures still wearing their outdated layover clothes from the 1980s, or the bad 1970s porno mustaches, graying hair parted in the middle (bad combovers abound, too). Those of us who married flight attendants usually have enough in-house supervision to avoid those pitfalls. But the real jerks are the ones who have clearly rejected most of the better influences.

In that group there are the lotharios, both successful and pitifully hopeless. In the former group, there are the aging party boys, 40-ish and even 50-something, still hanging out in bars, playing the bad “what’s your sign” crap. They tend to troll for women 10-15 years or so younger, and one I know–who is very successful in that arena–dates one woman for only a few months, then sends her an extensive email explaining why they can no longer date, plus a half dozen tips on what she can improve on for her next boyfriend.

If you ever see this pathetic sticker on a pilot bag: he’s “that guy.”

The latter group includes many with PPD (Pilot Personality Disorder) that sends potential dates running. I recall one puzzled F/O who couldn’t understand why a flight attendant put call blocker on him after their first date. After flying with him for a few days, I could.

The real jerks, however, make everyone on the crew cringe. The classic case is the mid-life guy, beautiful wife–often a flight attendant–and he has a flight attendant girlfriend as well. Then everyone on the crew has to pretend for his sake that we don’t know, that we don’t think he’s a damaged-goods jackass for two-timing the wife who we also like and fly with. And when she’s on the crew we have to pretend we don’t know as well, trying to make it easier for her, wishing better for her.

Those cases abound in any group of 8,000 pilots and 19,000 flight attendants.

Finally, the upside: the perks.

From my standpoint as captain, the main perk I see for me personally is that I get to fly with so many extremely high-time copilots who are completely experienced in the biz. That wasn’t always the case back when the airline was expanding in the last century and guys like me were filling the seats with just a fraction of the flight time we as a pilot group now have. That boosts the performance level in the cockpit and for the captain, who is accountable for everything that goes on in the flight, reduces the stress level.  Kind of feel sorry for the old heads who had to show me the ropes back in the 1980s. Fortunately, they’re now all retired or dead so they can’t complain about my F/O quirkiness in those days.

My best F/O memories . . .

And my payback for all of that, and atoning for my own F/O years is this one quirk of my own. On an end-of-the day flight, when the aircraft is staying overnight, when the crew is going home, I make sure I’m the last one off the jet. There are some items of switchology that can’t be done till all passengers have deplaned. As a courtesy, after our pilot checklist duties are complete, I send the F/O off with a “take-off, I’ll finish up after the pax deplane.” That frees the F/O to skeedaddle to the employee lot and get home as soon as possible.

It’s a bit of respect I can show to my crew after a long flight day, and maybe even a little gratitude for my good fortune to be in the left seat in the first place.

I guess we all have our quirks, and they’re not necessarily all that bad.

Summer Air Travel Disaster: “We” Collides with “Me”

Getting onto the jet about twenty minutes prior to pushback, I encounter an all-to-familiar scene: standing in the doorway to the cockpit is a man with a bag and a hopeful look on his face, flanked by two flight attendants giving me we tried to tell him looks.

“In this bag,” he tells me, pointing to his roll-aboard that’s about half again as large as the normal size limit, “I have $30,000 worth of fragile instruments. The suitcase is too large to fit in the overhead bin,” he continues, “so why can’t I just put it into the forward coat closet here?”

This is where his “me” collides with our “we:” I sure empathize with him regarding whatever he had in his bag. He’s thinking, in his mind, out of “me:” I have this stuff, I know what it is, I know it’s beyond the permitted size . . . me, me, and me.

That runs headlong into “we:” we are not permitted by the FAA to put anything other than crew bags in that closet ($5,000 fine for the forward flight attendant), we have a full flight, including five flight attendants whose bags already take up the allotted space for them in that closet. We already explained to you the carry-on size limits, and we have already heard what you’re going to ask next.

“Well,” he continues, after I politely point out that the closet is full of crew bags for the working crew plus a jumpseater, “Many times before they’ve let me put this behind the pilot’s seat up in the cockpit.”

I almost get nostalgic thinking back to the air travel days prior to 9-11, compared today’s world of underpants bombers, Air Marshals, pilots armed with 9mm handguns and bad people in far away countries relentlessly plotting to exploit our air travel system as a weapon of terror. That’s what we have to deal with, and we have had to change our way of thinking: there won’t be anything someone brings aboard that we’ll stow in the cockpit.

Because we as flying crewmembers have been mandated–and willingly adopt–a “group-think” that looks for threats in everything. Because we fly between 140 and 200 days a year and because we’ve been charged with stewardship of our air travel system and its security, never mind our own determination to see our families after our trip. And when you’re on board, you too are part of the “we” with everything at stake.

I take the easy way out. “We have a jumpseater in the cockpit today,” I tell him, “Sorry, but there’s no room for extra baggage.” For god’s sake, we’re not even allowed to carry critical parcels like organs for transplant any more in the cockpit–because you really don’t know what’s inside unless you open it–which we ain’t, and the flight deck is no place for surprises, period. I hate that, because I think of the organ transplant people involved at both ends of such a flight–but I never forget those on board nonetheless.

This goes beyond the obvious hassle for the other 159 passengers on board, many of whom are stuck on the jet bridge as boarding halts to deal with him. This goes beyond his disregard for those folks, their downline connections that depend on our prompt departures, and even beyond his claim to special storage space which, if a flight attendant bag was placed in the overhead bin, would deny another passenger space for his bag.

There’s more going on than that–which ought to be enough for any considerate passenger to avoid. Sure, Mr. “Critical Instruments” is only thinking out of his own world of “me,” putting us in the position of being in his “me-world,” the bad guys. But what he really needs to do is join the group-think that encircles his “me-world:” realize that the constraints apply to all, and that they are an inflexible necessity in this post-9/11 world. Join the “we” and make the trip smoother: we don’t expect to slip outside of the rules, we don’t expect to bend them, we don’t expect to be exempt.

I have to prove myself, despite my identification as the captain in command of the flight, by going through security screening like everyone else. You bet it’s a pain in my ass–god forbid if I were to actually access the cockpit–but I also embrace it: that’s the “we” that transcends the “me” for the betterment of all. Flight crew know this, so we do our part.

Yet honestly, sometimes we fail. I had an agent walk a passenger down the jetbridge before boarding in one of our smaller stations. The agent carried a briefcase-sized bag that was wrapped once or twice in cargo tape. “This man is a professional chef,” the agent informed me. “He requires this full set of chef’s knives to perform his duties, so I’ve sealed this case and he’s agreed to leave it in the overhead bin for the entire flight.”

Sigh. No, there will not be a full set of butcher knives and meat cleavers in the cabin–even wrapped in a few swipes of duct tape. When I put it that way, the agent returned to his senses, and rather sheepishly offered the normal procedure: “We can ship it as cargo, but not in the cabin.”

The fact that in 2012 we still have to have these conversations is troubling. Are we already forgetting the basic, albeit annoying sacrifices we must individually make in order to thwart those relentless dark forces looking for new ways to terrorize our nation through spectacular feats of evil?

Are we just going through the motions, but reserving exceptions in our own minds for ourselves, forgetting about the broad-based group-think that really only works if we forgo me for the best interest of all?

I sure hope not. But if we’ve already forgotten the hard lessons for which we’ve paid dearly in the recent past, if we’ve already through laziness or selfishness let down our guard, besides the fact that the bad guys win by default, one thing I can promise you is this: it’s going to be a long, hot, painful summer.

What I wouldn’t give to be proven wrong.

Questions to ask BEFORE you get on a light twin-engine aircraft.

When I lived in Hawaii, occasionally I’d lease and fly a Grumman Cougar (above), a light twin-engined propeller aircraft. The cold, hard fact with that aircraft was that if we took off with two passengers and their bags and lost an engine we were going down, period.

This I knew as a pilot–so I never flew the Cougar with any baggage, ever. But I think that many passengers might assume all is well either way–but it certainly is not.

This haunting memory always recurs every time I read of a light twin engine aircraft crashing on take-off, and sadly, that’s an all-too-common occurrence.

Cessna 401 crash after an engine failed on take-off, killing pop singer Aaliyah.

Some simple but vital questions could save your life if you’re thinking of chartering or accepting a ride on a light twin engine aircraft. But first, why do you have to ask?

The answer is simple: when you step onto my 175,000 pound twin engine jet–I have these answers specifically worked out for every flight, because the answers are crucial to all of us. You may assume that whoever is flying your light twin aircraft has answered them with specific numbers, but if you don’t ask, you’re casting your own safety to the wind. If your pilot has the answers–and provides them specifically (I’ll get to that later), step on board and have a good flight.

If your pilot says “Huh?” or even “It’ll be okay” or anything other than “here are the specific answers,” walk away immediately. Here are the Big Five:

1. What is the single engine climb gradient on this take-off, based on our projected weight and the current weather (temperature, pressure altitude and winds) conditions? Yes, I can answer that for every take-off with an exact number in two vital parameters: single engine (meaning assuming one engine quits on take-off) climb feet per nautical mile available and required.

“Required” means based on the terrain ahead, what is the minimum single engine climb gradient required for our aircraft to clear all obstacles by a minimum of 35 feet? “Available” means given our weight in fuel, passengers and bags, what is our aircraft capable of achieving on only one engine? Yes, there is a specific number to be derived from performance charts–and your pilot better have computed both. So your pilot should have a ready answer, don’t you think?

Four people were killed this week and one remains hospitalized after this Cessna twin crashed in a field in Kansas after leaving Tulsa. The cause is under investigation.

2. How much flight time does your pilot have in twin engine aircraft? Seriously, “total flight time” is not the important point here for a couple of crucial reasons. First, twin engine aircraft behave completely different from single engine planes because of the asymmetric yaw an engine failure produces. If one engine fails, the other continues to produces power and in many cases, must be pushed to an even higher power setting. Immediate rudder correction for adverse yaw–which doesn’t exist on single-engine aircraft–is a delicate operation: too much and the drag induced by the rudder kills lift; too little and the aircraft can depart controlled flight. Put in the wrong rudder, and you’ll be inverted in seconds.

If you’re paying someone to fly you somewhere, he’d better have at least 500 hours in that specific twin-engine plane–or you’d better walk away. In the above crash, the father of one of the survivors said the pilot had “flown the aircraft several times” and was “well-versed in it.” I stand by my 500 hour rule, at least when my life’s at stake. And “flight time” alone ain’t enough: proficiency, meaning hours flown within the past six months, is just as important. A few here and there? Not much recently? bad news.

Cessna -400 series interior.

3. What is our planned climb performance today? Meaning, given our gross weight in fuel, passengers and bags, at the current temperature and pressure altitude, what climb rate can we expect on a single engine? Again, this is a specific number derived from performance charts after all of the above variables are computed–and if your pilot doesn’t have the specific answer–walk away.

4. What is the engine history on this aircraft? Seriously? Yes, dead seriously: before I accept any aircraft for the day, I scan the engine history of repairs, malfunctions, oil consumption, vibration and temperature limits going back at least six months. Ditto your light twin: the pilot should be able to answer that question in detail–if the pilot checked.

5. How many pilot hours does your pilot have in this model and type of multi-engine aircraft? And when was the pilot’s last proficiency check? For example, I consider myself to be a low-time 737 pilot, having just over 1,500 hours in the aircraft–even though I have over 17,000 hours in multi-engine jets. In those 1,500 Boeing-737 pilot hours, I’ve had two complete refresher courses with FAA evaluations, plus three inflight evaluations–and I welcome that: I want to know my procedures and skills are at their peak. And I fly at least 80 hours a month, maintaining proficiency. When was your pilot’s last flight? Again, how many flight hours in the past six months?

Recurrent training and evaluation every nine months.

Not withstanding “well-versed” and having “flown it several times” as quoted above, your pilot needs to have hundreds of hours in the model and type to be flown, and preferably hundreds of hours in multi-engine aircraft. Remember the engine-out scenario on take-off I sketched out above, where the wrong rudder input can flip you inverted on take-off if an engine failure? Ditto on landing, with another set of problems, in the event of a single-engine go-around with a lighter aircraft.

Know the answers to these questions, and have your radar tuned for the following circumstances: how far are you going (short hop versus a longer point to point), and how many are on board, plus what cargo (baggage or equipment). Why? These are your cues that gross weight is going to be a critical factor in aircraft performance, making the five questions I just raised even more critical for you to ask.

Look, there are plenty of safe aircraft and pilots available to fly you around if that’s what you had in mind. Those pilots are the ones who have good answers to the above questions ready for you as soon as you ask. Be sure that you do ask, and when the answers are satisfactory–and only when they are: bon voyage.

Flying the B-2 Stealth Bomber: an audio interview with Bill Flanagan.

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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.

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?

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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