THE RIGHT SEAT: Propellers, Polyester, and Other Memories.

[Larry Dighera, Moderator]

THE RIGHT SEAT
Propellers, Polyester, and Other Memories.
By Patrick Smith

A pilot remembers getting his start.

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot, author, and the host of
<www.askthepilot.com>.

This essay is excerpted from his new book,

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel


<http://www.amazon.com/Cockpit-Confidential-Everything-Questions-Reflections/dp/1402280912/>

© Copyright Patrick Smith 2012, Sourcebooks 2013, All Rights Reserved

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THE RIGHT SEAT

PROPELLERS, POLYESTER, AND OTHER MEMORIES

Boston, 1991


I REACH FOR THE STARTER TOGGLE, LEFT ENGINE. It's a scalding morning and
there's no external air, so we're desperate to get the props turning. Out on
the Logan asphalt in July, the little Beech 99 becomes a sweatbox, and
passengers won't be pleased if their crew keels over from heatstroke.
These midsummer flights to Nantucket are the worst. We're always full and the
island-bound passengers are cranky and petulant. Today we're loaded to max
weight, with fifteen passengers -- all from tony Boston suburbs, decked out
identically in mirrored aviator glasses, straw hats and Tevas -- and a luggage
hold bursting with wicker from Crate & Barrel. After several minutes of
organizing carry-ons and dusting off whichever unfortunate soul managed to trip
over the center cabin wing spar, it's time to wipe off the sweat and get
started. “Let’s go,” I say. There’s a tattered checklist in my hand, soggy
with perspiration.

The toggle clicks into place and we immediately hear the grainy whine of the
turbines. The propeller begins to spin, and a small white needle shows the
fuel flow. But twenty seconds later there’s a problem. There's no combustion.
Great. So I release the switch and everything stops. We wait the allotted
time so the starter won’t overheat, repeat the checklist, and try again. Same
result. The engine is turning, but it's not running. What's missing, I
notice, is the click-click-click of the igniters. For some reason they aren't
firing.

"Kathy, “ I say quietly, “Can you see if there’s a circuit breaker popped?” I
can feel eyes on me. The first passenger row is only inches behind us, without
so much as a curtain separating cockpit from cabin. “Ignition, left side?"
A diminutive blonde, Kathy is my first officer and something of a celebrity
around campus. She is one of only a few people I will meet over the years who,
through no small effort, made the unusual vocational shift from flight
attendant to pilot. She had worked the aisles at Delta before giving up the
peanuts – and most her salary -- for propellers. Is this what she expected, I
wonder: taking orders in a sweltering, thirty year-old contraption not much
larger than her car?

The breakers are secure, Kathy reports, running her hand across the panel the
way one surfs for an errant wallpaper seam. She motions toward the backup
radio, her eyebrows forming a question mark. I nod, and she twists in the
frequency. “Maintenance, this is aircraft 804, are you there?” We'll wait ten
minutes for the mechanics now, while the inside temp hits 106.
A turboprop engine is, at heart, a jet engine. Combusted gases spin the
turbines; the turbines spin the compressors and the propeller. It's the
combustion part that we’re missing.

After an embarrassing PA to our aggrieved customers, who by now are checking
the ferry schedule, I notice the woman directly behind me has a giant wicker
beach bag balanced on her lap. Somehow we'd missed it. "I’m sorry,” I say to
her. “You'll need to stow that bag. It can't rest on your lap for takeoff."
"Takeoff?" she says. Then she pauses, lowering her aviators and clearing her
throat. "Maybe you oughta see if you can get the fucking plane started before
you worry about my fucking luggage."

As she glares at me with insolently pursed lips, the woman's glasses reflect
the pained face of a very hot and very disappointed young captain -- one who,
barely past his 24th birthday, often finds that the hardest thing about his job
is resisting the urge to take it for granted. I restrain myself and manage a
smile, a brittle smirk. I restrain myself not on behalf of Northwest Airlink,
in whose employ I toil in kiln-like summer heat, but on behalf of the twelve
year-old kid I used to be, not all that long ago, whose dream of dreams was to
someday wear the wings and epaulets of an airline pilot. If living out that
dream means taking abuse along the way from an asshole passenger or two, well
that’s the price I pay.

[break]

Although I have only hazy memories of the day I first soloed a small airplane,
I am able to recollect my first day as an airline pilot in uncannily vivid
detail. It was October 21, 1990 -- a date promptly immortalized in yellow
Hi-Liter in my logbook. Despite the absurdly low salary I'd be earning, I
could not have been happier. This cherished day involved a drive to Sears at
9:30 in the morning, an hour before my sign-in time, because I'd already lost
my tie. And then the clerk's face when I told him, "plain black, " and,
"polyester, not silk." Later, in a thickening overcast just before noon, I
would depart on the prestigious Manchester, New Hampshire, to Boston route --
the twenty-minute run frequented, as you'd expect, by Hollywood stars, sheikhs
and dignitaries.

There was no flight attendant and I had to close the cabin door myself.
Performing this maneuver on my inaugural morning, I turned the handle to secure
the latches as trained, deftly and quickly in one smooth motion – in the
process dragging the first three knuckles of my right hand across the head of a
loose screw, cutting myself. Taxiing out, my fingers were wrapped in a bloody
napkin.

It was oddly and improbably apropos that my inaugural flight would touch down
at Logan International. Airline pilots, especially those new at the game, are
migrants, moving frequently from city to city as the tectonics of a seniority
list dictate. It’s a rare thing indeed to find yourself based at the very
airport you grew up with. And I mean that -- “grew up with” -- in a way that
only an airplane nut will understand. On that afternoon in 1990, as I
maneuvered past the Tobin Bridge and along the approach to runway 15R, I
squinted toward the parking lots and observation deck from which, years
earlier, I’d perched with binoculars and notebooks, logging the registration
numbers of arriving aircraft.

Our company was a young regional upstart called Northeast Express, and we flew
on behalf of Northwest Airlines, code-sharing their flights and using their
colors. (Northeast, Northwest, it could be confusing to some of our
passengers.) Although the airline was growing quickly, it was run with such
austerity that we didn't even have legitimate uniforms. We were given surplus
from the old Bar Harbor Airlines. The owner, Mr. Caruso, had also been the
owner at Bar Harbor, and I suspect he had a garage full of remainders. Bar
Harbor had been something of a legendary commuter airline in a parochial, New
England sort of way, before finally it was eaten by Lorenzo's Continental. I
remember as a kid in the late 70s, sitting in the backyard in watching those
Bar Harbor turboprops going by, one after another, whirring up over the hills
of Eastie and Revere.

A dozen years later I was handed a vintage Bar Harbor suit -- battleship gray
wool, soiled and threadbare in the knees and elbows. The lining of my jacket
was safety-pinned in place and looked as if a squirrel had chewed the lapels.
Some poor Bar Harbor copilot had worn the thing to shreds, tearing the pockets
and getting the shoulders soaked with jet fuel. I’m fairly sure it had never
been laundered. Our hardware too -- metal emblems for our hats and a set of
wings -- were tarnished hand-me-downs from Bar Harbor. Standing with my fellow
new-hires in our new (old) outfits for a group picture, we looked like
crewmembers you might see stepping from a Bulgarian cargo plane on the apron at
Entebbe.

The uniforms were doled out by a fellow named Harvey. Tall, gangly and bald,
Harvey was a fast-talking and distrustful sort who wore thick round glasses and
chewed a long, unlit cigar. As he explained proper laundering techniques and
recommended the use of vinegar to clean soot from our epaulets, his cigar
rolled and bobbed like a counterweight, always seeming to perfectly balance the
tilt of his head. "Keep your hats on," Harvey warned, his eyes bugging out.
"Some of you guys look so young, you'll scare the passengers!" He smiled, and
his teeth were the color of root beer.

One day, in the winter of ‘91, Harvey posted a tremendously exciting memo
informing us of a uniform revamp. We'd swap our gray service station suits for
brand new ones -- handsome dark navy with gold stripes. We'd get new hardware
too; the Bar Harbor eagle, which looked uncannily like the wings-akimbo bird
once found on the caps of Göering or Himmler, was out. According to Harvey,
our new threads were designed to keep the airline's image, not that it actually
had one, "in accordance with Northwest specs." Ostensibly this made sense,
since we were operating in their name and painting our planes in their livery,
but the truth was Northwest Airlines couldn't have cared less if we wore
banana-colored jumpsuits. It was just a way for Harvey to pull some navy blue
wool over our eyes and sell some clothes.

My first airplane was the Beechcraft BE-99, a.k.a. the Beech 99, or just "the
99." Same as those old Bar Harbor planes I'd watched over Revere in the fifth
grade. This was either sentimentally touching or gruesomely depressing,
depending how you looked at it. Some of the 99s were precisely the same ones,
still with a -BH registration suffix painted near the tail. Unpressurized and
slow, the plane was a ridiculous anachronism kept in service by a stingy and
ultimately doomed airline. Passengers at Logan would show up planeside in a
red bus about twice the size of the plane. Expecting a 757, they were dumped
at the foot of a 15-passenger wagon built in 1968. I’d be stuffing paper
towels into the cockpit window frames to keep out the rainwater while
businessmen came up the stairs cursing their travel agents. They'd sit,
seething, refusing to fasten their seatbelts and hollering up to cockpit.
"Let's go! What are you guys doing?"

"I'm preparing the weight and balance manifest, sir."
"We're only going to goddamn Newark! What the hell do you need a manifest
for?”

And so on. But hey, this was my dream job, so I could only be so embarrassed.
Besides, the twelve grand a year was more than I’d been making as a flight
instructor.

In addition to just enough money for groceries and car insurance, my job
provided the vicarious thrill of a nominal affiliation with Northwest Airlines.
Our 25 turboprops, like Northwest’s 747s and DC-10s, were painted handsomely in
gray and red. Alas, the association ran no deeper -- important later, when the
paychecks started bouncing -- but for now I would code-share my way to glory.
When girls asked which airline I flew for, I would answer "Northwest" with a
borderline degree of honesty.

My second plane was the Fairchild Metroliner, a more sophisticated, 19-seater.
It was a long skinny turboprop that resembled a dragonfly, known for its tight
quarters and annoying idiosyncrasies. At Fairchild, down in San Antonio, the
guys with the pocket protectors faced a challenge: how to take 19 passengers
and make them as uncomfortable as possible? Answer: stuff them side-by-side
into a six-foot diameter tube. Attach a pair of the loudest turbine engines
ever made, the Garrett TPE-331, and go easy on the soundproofing. All of this
for a mere $2.5 million a copy. (Somewhere out there is a retired Fairchild
engineer feeling very insulted. He deserves it.)

As captain of this beastly machine it was my duty not only to safely deliver
passengers to their destinations, but to hide in shame from those chortling and
spewing insults: "Does this thing really fly?" and "Man, who did you piss off?"
The answer to that first question was sort of. The Metro was equipped with a
pair of minimally functioning ailerons and a control wheel in need of a placard
marking it for decorative purposes only. It was sluggish, I’m saying, and
crosswind landings could be tricky.

Like the 99, the Metro was too small for a cockpit door, allowing for 19
backseat drivers whose gazes spent more time glued to the instruments than ours
did. One pilot-to-remain-nameless doctored up one of his chart binders with
these prying eyes in mind. On the front cover, in oversized stick-on letters
he’d put the words: HOW TO FLY, stowing the book on the floor in full view of
the first few rows. During flight he’d pick it up and flip through the pages,
eliciting some hearty laughs -- or shrieks. Another pilot thought it would be
amusing to dangle a pair of velvet red dice from the overhead standby compass.
That one had customers giggling, pointing, slapping him on the back, and
sending letters to the FAA. Poor Eric lost a paycheck, and earned a blemish on
his record that would have recruiters at the major airlines affixing the wrong
color stickies to his resume.

The view of the cockpit was even more entertaining if, as occasionally was the
case, somebody had spit-glued a magazine photo across the radar screen. Our
radar units, mounted in the middle of the panel and visible all the way to the
aft bulkhead, looked like miniature TV sets. At the end of a rotation pilots
would clip out a ridiculous picture from a newspaper or magazine, adhere it to
the empty screen, and leave it for the next crew. A man in a chef’s hat
carrying a wedding cake, I recall, was one memorable choice.

Next up came the De Havilland Dash-8. The Dash was a boxy,
thirty-seven-passenger turboprop and the biggest thing I’d ever laid my hands
on. A new one cost $20 million, and it even had a flight attendant. Only
thirteen pilots in the entire company were senior enough to hold a captain’s
slot. I was number thirteen. I went for my checkride on July 7, 1993, about a
month after my twenty-sixth birthday. For the rest of the summer I would call
the schedulers every morning, begging for overtime. Getting to fly the Dash
was a watershed. This was the real thing, an “airliner” in the way the Metro
or the 99 could never be, and of all the planes I’ve flown, large or small, it
remains my sentimental favorite.

I flew the Dash only briefly, and Northeast Express would be around only for
another year. Things began to sour in the spring of ’94. Northwest, unhappy
with our reliability, would not renew its contract with us. We were in
bankruptcy by May, and a month later the airline collapsed outright. The end
came on a Monday. I remember that day as vividly as I remember my
bloody-knuckle inaugural in New Hampshire, four years earlier. No, this wasn’t
the collapse of Eastern or Braniff or Pan Am, and I was only 27 with a whole
career ahead of me. But just the same it was heartbreaking. the sight of
police cruisers encircling our planes, flight attendants crying and workers
flinging suitcases into heaps on the tarmac. Thus the bookends of my first
airline job were, each in their own way, emotional and unforgettable. But that
second one I could have done without. ?

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