Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Cockpit Confidential (22 page)
The captain arrivedâa large, slow-moving fellow in his fifties who I'd never met before. He stepped into the cockpit and discovered his first officer drenched in perspiration, dehydrated, wearing only his trousers and a Sony headset. He didn't speak at first. Then he sat down, turned to me, and asked calmly: “You
are
going to put your clothes back on, aren't you?”
I told him I'd get dressed again as soon as the inside temperature fell below 95 degrees, provided I was still conscious. I offered to put a T-shirt on, but the only one I could reach, from my hand luggage, was a Hüsker Dü
Metal Circus
tour shirtâan artifact from 1983, as greasy and discolored as the burning Chicago sky.
“Arright, fine,” said the captain. “Just don't let anyone see you.” And so I flew bare-chested, all the way to Lansing and back.
It's true. However, with the exception of a privilege that allows access to the auxiliary cockpit jumpseats, the perks extended to us are no different from those enjoyed by any other airline employee. Normally, all full-time workers and their immediate family members (nowadays this includes domestic partners) are entitled to complimentary, space-available transportation throughout their carrier's network, with upgrades to first or business class if empty seats permit. Sometimes there is a small per-segment charge and a yearly fee; it varies company to company.
In addition, reciprocal agreements between carriers allow employees of one airline, plus their eligible family members, to fly on another, subject to what are called “ZED fares.” That's an acronym for Zonal Employee Discountâa new, simplified system that replaces the more complex ID fare arrangement that had been in place for decades. Again, all travel is standby only, and ZED fares do not permit upgrades. Still, it's a fantastic deal. If I want to fly from Bangkok to Seoul on Korean Air or Thai Airways, it'll cost around $70 one way, fees and taxes included. New York to Amsterdam on KLM, about $100.
If you're looking to bring a friend along, or you want to reward that babysitter who puts up with your bratty kids, most airlines grant a limited number of reduced-rate tickets each year, commonly called “buddy passes,” that can be given out to friends, extended family, the woman whose cat you ran over, etc. Buddy passes are considerably more expensive than the passes used by employees themselves, but they're fully refundable and reservations can be changed without penalty.
Traveling on your benefits is generally referred to as “nonrevving.” The root term, nonrev, is shorthand for nonrevenue, as the airline makes little or no income from your patronage. Nonrevs are often conspicuous at the boarding gate: they're the ones sweating, looking nervous, and occasionally weeping as they wait for their name to be called at the last minute. Seats are never guaranteed; careful planning, patience, and flexibility are a must. All employees have one or more nightmare tales of getting stuck somewhere. I could tell you about the three days I spent at Charles de Gaulle airport, trying and failing to reach Cairo, and the nonrefundable trip through Egypt that it cost me.
Contrary to what a lot of travelers think, first and business class seats are
never
awarded to employees ahead of eligible passengers. I'm sorry if the opportunity for you to upgrade wasn't available on a particular flight; the rules for mileage redemption and whatnot are Byzantine and they don't always seem to be fair. Please direct your complaint to the airline's pricing, marketing, or frequent flyer departments. All I can tell you for sure is that no premium seat is ever blocked for a freeloading employee. If one of us is riding there, that seat was not available for upgrade and would otherwise be empty. The one exception would be an occasion when an on-duty crewmember is being repositionedâdeadheaded, as we sayâon an international flight, when work rules may stipulate a seat in business or first.
Despite our generous benefits, it might surprise you to learn that pilots are not, on the whole, especially adventurous travelers. Not to badmouth my brethren, but the average pilot's lack of wanderlust has never ceased to depress me. Nowadays pilots are required to hold passports, but it wasn't always this way, and in the past I encountered many a coworker who possessed neither a passport nor any particular interest in leaving the country. I remember one pilot who, it was revealed during casual conversation about vacation plans, had no idea what the capital of Spain was. Other employees too: I recall a young flight attendant on a layover in QuebecâCanada!âwho would not leave her hotel room for fear of, as she put it, “culture shock.”
You can find this attitude in any line of work, I suppose, but it's especially frustrating to find it in the airline business. Travel is what we do. Our customers spend years saving up for once-in-a-lifetime adventures, yet here are airline workers, whose benefits allow them to reach far corners of the world at little or no cost, who scorn the very notion of global travel.
Though maybe we shouldn't be shocked. After all, this is a mindset shared by millions of Americans. I am well aware that most citizens lack the time and money to go zipping around the planet, but the truth remains that too many Americans are shamefully, even willfully, disinterested in the world beyond their borders and have, at best, a superficial awareness of geography. One
National Geographic
survey revealed that 85 percent of Americans between ages eighteen and twenty-four were unable to locate either Afghanistan or Iraq on a map. Sixty-nine percent couldn't find Great Britain, and 33 percent of young Americans believed the U.S. population to be between 1 and 2 billion.
Is it healthy for the citizens of a nation that wields so much power, economically and militarily, to be so oblivious, if not xenophobic? Are global influence and global ignorance not, in the end, mutually exclusive? Do we ignore the rest of the world at our peril?
Traveling abroad, I'm often struck by the lack of American tourists compared to those from other nations. Several times I have been on group toursâin Botswana, Mali, Egyptâand out of ten or fifteen people, I was the only American. The Brits, Dutch, Australians, Germans, Israelis, and Japanese, on the other hand, are everywhere, joined by growing numbers from China and India. Nations like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have relatively tiny populations, yet per capita they travel far more widely than Americans. Granted, foreigners tend to receive a lot more vacation time than we do, and our country's geography, bookended by a pair of large oceans, makes long-distance travel difficult. At heart, however, this is less about practicality than a peculiar American inertia.
If it were up to me, every American student, in exchange for financial aid, ought to be conscripted into a semester or more of overseas service. And certain international travel, like the purchase of a hybrid car, should be tax-deductible.
All of that being said, I don't wish to idealize or romanticize the act of travel. There is plenty of beauty and splendor in the world to behold, it's true. But there is a greater amount of despair, poverty, pollution, and corruption. Travel can be relaxing, educational, and all the good things in between. And it can also be demoralizing and soul-crushing. Visit any number of places and you will see, right there in front of you, how the world is falling to pieces; how the planet has been ravaged, how life is cheap, and how there is little that you, with or without your good conscience, can do about it. It's enough to make you rush straight home and flush your passport down the toilet.
There are those who say the world is righting itself. We are, the thinking goes, on the cusp of some great, inexorable push toward social and ecological justice. We are moving this way because, with our backs against a wall of human-engineered oblivion, we have to. Well, I'm not sure I agree with that. My eyes have shown me too much of a world that is filthy, overcrowded, and desperate.
The downside of travel: a firsthand view of the planet's more unfortunate realities. This is a matter of perspective, of course, and one can easily argue that experiencing the world at its worst is in fact
more
valuable than savoring its grander, friendlier aspects. Perhaps if a critical mass of people took the time to see and confront these stark realities, things would be different.
The first step, in any case, is
getting out there
. I have, figuratively speaking, fished my passport out of the toilet more than once. I'll keep going, and you should too.
Layovers for international crews are usually at four- or fivestar properties in the heart of the city. I have fond memories of multiday layovers in places like Cairo, Amman, Cape Town, and Budapest. At the JW Marriott in Mexico City, the guestrooms have exposed beams, Aztec ceramics, and floor-to-ceiling views of the mountains. The right room, the right city, and the right amount of time, and your layover becomes a miniature paid vacation.
In Brussels, Belgium, back in my cargo-flying days, I logged over a hundred nights in the Hilton on Boulevard de Waterloo, where the facecloths are folded like lotus flowers and the man who comes to fix your toilet is wearing a suit. We got the executive floor, up on 23, with marble walk-in showers and a vista of the imposing, if perpetually scaffold-enshrouded, Palace of Justice. Once, after an especially late arrival and with our normal rooms occupied, I was given a deluxe apartment suite with a six-person hot tub and an eight-place dining table. The walls in that room, I'm sure, could have told stories of celebrities and NATO generals. And then, each morning, the gardenside buffet: a full American breakfast with omelets cooked to order.
In the Brussels Hilton, at last, I began to feel like, well, an
airline pilot
, in that '60s movie, Pan Am captain sort of way. Even on a sixty-hour layover I felt bad leaving the room. Why bother sightseeing when I could lounge around in my Hilton bathrobe, watching the BBC and slipping out to the lounge at cocktail hour?
But what a squander that would be. Brussels is an ideal jumping-off point for day trips. And so, after polishing off my omelet, I'd force myself out of the Hilton and onward to Antwerp, Paris, Luxembourg, or Liege. Antwerp's sumptuous railway station is itself worthy of a trip. Other excursions were up to moody Ghent (St. Bavo's Cathedral and the famous van Eyck triptych), tourist-choked Brugge, or the three-hour ride to Amsterdam.
Belgium's weather is perpetually gray, and one of my late-night customs in Brussels was taking long walks in the pre-dawn fogâpast the Royal Palace and along the park; cutting left to the spectacular Grand-Place, with its gables and filigreed rooftops; up toward the Botanical Gardens and seedy Gare du Nord; then down the length of Waterloo. I abandoned these red-eye constitutionals after the night I had my arm smashed by a drunken vagrant. My elbow still aches from the contusion, having fallen backward against the curb while dodging the man as he slashed at me with a ballpoint pen. The stressful part wasn't the fall, or even the pre-dawn police car ride to a Belgian hospital, but having to call in sick for the trip home, a predicament that cost my airline untold thousands of dollars. The flight was delayed a full day in wait for my replacement, who had to be flown in from the States and legally rested. I spent two days recovering in my room, watching movies with my arm wrapped in gauze and dripping with orange anaesthetizing gel. In the days after my injury, fancifully embellished rumors of the assault began to circulate among my colleagues. Versions of the story included one where I was knocked unconscious by a gang of marauding Moroccans, and another where I was chased and beaten by a pimp. I denied nothing.
So the dazzle (and danger) of commercial flying isn't totally buffed away; you just need to know where to find it.
And chances are it won't be at a HoJo's in Pensacola. Things are a lot less swanky on the domestic front. Relaxing layovers in a downtown Hilton or Westin aren't uncommon, but neither are nine-hour overnights at a cookie-cutter motel next to the runway. Even the shorter stays are in decent places, but they're the kind of generic, fast-food hotel you find everywhere; you've seen their office park contours and over-fertilized lawns all over the country: Fairfield, Courtyard, Hampton. I know these places well, mostly from my regional pilot years. My ballpoint pen collection is like a drive down I-95 or a loop around O'Hare, and I possess an unsettling ability to tell a Holiday Inn Express from a La Quinta blindfolded, by the smell of the lobby.
Rest and recovery, not local attractions, are the focus when time is limited. Thus, in the minds of pilots and flight attendants, some destinations are perceived not as cities at all, but as rooms, beds, and amenities. I have been known to bid my trips in strict deference to three things: the tastefulness of wallpaper, the firmness of a mattress, and access to food. In most people's minds, forty-eight hours in New York City are a lot more fun than eleven hours in Dallas. That is, until you've spent back-to-back nights at the Five Towns Motor Inn near Kennedy airport. When the Hyatt in San Francisco airport stopped allowing crews into their lounge for complimentary hors d'oeuvres, I began bidding Miami instead, where the free breakfast at the AmeriSuites included pancakes and fresh fruit.
All of us love the guilty pleasure indulgences of a five-star high-rise, but there are a lot of things to dislike about even the nicest and most expensive hotel rooms: temperamental air conditioning, toe-breaking doorjambs, ergonomically hellish “work spaces.” And here's another one: cardboard brochures. Nowadays, each and every hotel amenity, from room service to Wi-Fi, is hawked through one or more annoying advertisements displayed throughout the room. Cards, signs, menus, and assorted promotional materialsâthey're everywhere: on the dresser, in the closet, on the pillows, in the bathroom. I wouldn't mind if this laminated litter was placed unobtrusively, but it tends to be exactly in the way, and I resent having to spend five minutes after an exhausting red-eye gathering up these diabolical doo-dads and heaving them into a corner where they belong. One's first moments in a hotel room ought to feel welcoming, not confrontational.
Food and room service are another topic entirely. Be careful never to dine at the Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal, where the surly poolside waitress might, eventually, bring you the pizza you ordered ninety minutes ago, and where the in-room menu offers such delectables as
- Chief Salad
- Roasted Beef Joint on Crusty Polenta
- The Cash of the Day
- Paving Stone of Thiof and Aromatic Virgin Sauce
That last one sounds like a chapter from a fantasy novel. Head instead to La Layal, a great little Lebanese place up the street, where, once you get past the Testicles with Garlic and the Homos with Chopped Meat, the menu is both coherent and tasty.
I shouldn't complain, seeing that most of my rooms are paid for. Yes, airlines cover the cost of all crewmember accommodations while on assignment. We are responsible only for incidentals. An hourly per-diem is also added to the employee's paycheck to cover meals. If you see a pilot or flight attendant paying for a room, chances are that he or she is off duty and on the front or back end of a personal commute. If an assignment begins early in the day or finishes late, leaving insufficient time to fly in or out, we're on the hook. Some crewmembers buddy up in crash pads; others will rent a room close to the airport (
see commuting and crash pads
).
Pilots spend a third or more of their lives on the road, sleeping in hotel rooms. It's a disorienting, at times depressing way to live. But for those who enjoy traveling, it can also be exciting and enlighteningâeven a touch glamorous.
