She knows she will be home every night in Long Beach to walk the dogs. She plays beach volleyball. And became engaged in February. “Normal job. Normal life,†she said. “I know I made the right decision.â€

Damn glad she made the right decision. As we were flying along one night, real late and quiet a female copilot of mine was sniffling and I asked her what was wrong, she said she missed her kids and wanted to go home.
I'm not the emotional type I guess...
That's the last time I ever saw her.

Flying regular sked lines must be boring. Cleveland to Newark, Newark to Atlanta, get in the bus, go to the hotel, get some sleep, get up and do it again.

I was lucky, in that most of the flying I did with Southern could have been called bush flying. I flew scheduled routes until I gained some seniority and then could bid the European, African and Asian and South American stuff. Living in a fly camp in the deserts of Kenya's northwest territory isn't an average airline job, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to see some remarkable parts of the world, including some of Antarctica. But flying a commuter in a RJ is really a pain in the ass, when you consider all the BS you have to endure.

These days, I would become a PH, hunting guide, outfitter, gun salesman, or sailboat delivery captain. I couldn't stand the grind of the jets when I got into the 747. It was apalling after a while and I quit before age 60 from total burnout. So I can understand completely the lady's position.

Yep, with a brand new Commercial license the CFI tried to talk me into the airline path.

I wasn't having any of it. Perhaps a good career for some, if you stayed lucky with the medicals, didn't mind wearing a tie and looking neat all the time.

My first job was throwing an Ag-cat around as hard as I liked, no responsibility to passengers lives, in fact not much responsibility expected at all.

Then they started to tighten up. Even buzzing people became frowned apon. Luckily I was burnt out at 57 ish anyway.

quote:

Then they started to tighten up. Even buzzing people became frowned apon. Luckily I was burnt out at 57 ish anyway

I understand what you are saying and Im still wet behind the ears starting my 13th season. Use to, if someone stopped and started taking pictures the airshow was on, now I fly away and come back once they are gone.

That's why flying Africa and Papua New Guinea and South America in the Hercs was so much fun. In Africa, the altitude you flew at was mainly regulated by what the guys on the ground could shoot at you with. In Angola, it was Stingers, compliments of the CIA, so we always stayed at 220 or above and spiraled down above airports for landing with 45 degrees of bank and flaps fifty. Although one time, during a truce, we flew at treetop level from Saurimo near the Congolese border in the east to Benguela, our base on the Atlantic, avoiding any smoke rising from the trees, looking for elephants. didn't see a one. We used to fly down canyons in Ethiopia and down the beach in Somalia out of 12.7 range.

At Mekele, Ethiopia, we had the Fencepost One departure, seeing just how close we could get to the top of the fence along the road off the departure end. The camels and even the goats got flat when we went over. And on our last tour before rotating out of Lokichoggio, Kenya, we always used to gleefully dust off the UN compound. Really pissed them off.

We had a guy make a low pass at the yacht club in Lae, PNG one afternoon. A big colony of fruit bats with three foot wingspans lived in a tree by the post office up the hill. The captain, who from then on was known as Batman, plowed through a cluster of panicked fruit bats and took out the leading edge and the #3 engine. They gave him two weeks off with no pay, but he said it was worth it. All the Aussie expats at the club agreed.

We were cowboys and Africa was our playground, although more Hercs were shot down in Angola than in Viet Nam. I had a friend killed when his Transafrik Herc took two Stingers.

We were a rowdy bunch and regularly had to change hotels because some carachter would drop an empty vodka bottle from the tenth story of the hotel onto the sidewalk, aiming for some unsuspecting Angolan. We had some real fun, flew in some real shit, had an airplane blown up by an anti tank mine in Wao, Sudan,
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and the loadmasters used to ramp surf behind the airplane. This involved attaching oneself to the aircraft with a safety harness and a cargo strap and flying one's body behind the back of the open ramp at fifty feet flying up the Nile to Entebbe, making the hippos try to jump out of the river. I wouldn't trade it for anything now, but then I traded it for the 747, which was a big mistake. I miss the Hercs and the crazy days, but you can have the jets. All you are is a computer programmer except at takeoff and landing, when you actually get to fly the airplane.

I miss those days.

Jet,

When I read your posts about flying in Africa it brings me back to when I used to fly with Art Zoterelli over at ATI.

He told me the fruit bat story. We also had a bunch of your old PFE's working for us over there. Now they are a about as wild a bunch of reprobates as I've ever met.

You know I did a lot of the same kind of flying, sort of, as what you did on the herc. I flew for the smoke jumpers up in Alska for several seasons. Doing tons of low level para cargo drops flying in the high country while it was on fire. We flew contract for the Navy resupplying remote polar camps up on the sea ice WAY off shore.

And believe me I miss that kind of real flying. And the places it takes you. But the reality of the situation to me was simply that you can a have a fun and adventurous job in aviation. Or you can have a career. Rarely do the two go together.

If I didn't have mouths to feed I would probably still be an aviation saddle tramp. But the wife and kids changed things for me. I don't miss being gone for months at a time. I used to look forward to it.

Jets pay the bills.

Zot did his share, that's for sure.

That Alaska flying sounds absolutely great. Wish I'd done some of that. Lord knows I've dropped enough jumpers from 182's, 206's and Beech 18's, besides having a bit over 1000 jumps myself. If I had discovered Alaska while I was in my 20's, I would have stayed for all my flying life. That's one of the places that I will always want to return to.

I understand why you have to do what you're doing, what with a family and all. I've been single since the 70's so all I had to come home to were my guns and parachutes and the occasional wayward female.

There was a mass migration from SAT to ATI. I headed for Air Atlanta Icelandic, and had a sim date in Stanstead, when I decided I'd had enough. I was 58, had no life, and the prospect of flying contract for six months at a time while my four year old Mercedes mouldered under the car cover, and having to repeatedly jump an odd-dozen time zones to only God knew where was more than I could contemplate, so I quit.

I haven't flown an airplane except once since March, 1998, when I delivered a 747 load from LUX to MIA, and the hell of it is, my FO had the landing and I had to take it away from him on rollout because he just sat there with the reverser throttles in his hand, looking out the windshield. So I guess I got half of the landing on my last flight.

Hell of it is, you never know just when that last flight will be.

I have flown once since then. The charter pilot let me fly the 182 from Dar to the camp strip on the Kilombero River in the Selous in '06 on my last hunt. Didn't give me the landing, but I didn't expect him to. That was seven years between handling a throttle.

Truly, I miss flying light aircraft. My first love was and still is the venerable Twin Beech. I logged thousands of hours in them over the years, 99% taildraggers. I flew dozens of light aircraft types as well as the DC-3, the Caribou, and the PBY.

I miss the little ones and the round engined ones and the Hercs, but I don't miss the long haul stuff.

In a way, I envy you having a 777 seat and a real career, but I lost the sight in my right eye in 1966, so that kept me out of the skeds. I loved it so much that I took almost any job I could get, just to fly. And I have a myriad memories of many wonderful and also some terrifying trips.

Retirement is boring, but I get to do an African hunt every now and then and I shoot and reload a lot, and I wouldn't trade my experiences or having known the people I worked and lived with in some strange, wonderful and often dangerous places for all the gold in Credit Suisse.

I started flying when I was 14 and intended to fly the bush. How I ended up where I am is a string of unintended consequences. Nonetheless it has been a great career so far even considering the bankruptcies, and layoffs.
Remember in the movie "The Color Of Money" when Paul Newman said that selling whiskey was a good life but he wishes he had made a mark? I used to look at new type ratings, upgrades, etc. as significant accomplishments but making a mark has become a moving target for me. Right now it is making it to retirement which recently has become another moving target (age 65).
When I take a look back I am proud of what I have accomplished and like JD have made some great friends and wouldn't trade my experiences. But I will tell you this career is not what it used to be. I don't like having everything that I do recorded on a disk drive and I don't like the new generation auto flight systems. They are absolutely flawless technically in the B777. But, Technology has taken the flying skills out of the picture. I am a technician now but I can say I used to FLY jet transports and that is good enough for me, I feel for the new guys in the pipeline. I can't even imagine what this career will be like in 20 years...

I feel for them too, but they won't know what they've missed, unless they read about it.

One of the first serious books about aviation I ever read was Gann's Fate is the Hunter. That was an education that stayed with me all my life. I suppose the technology, when it works and when the user knows where he is, improves safety. But I heard the cockpit tapes of the AA Cali crash on a recurrent and the entire scenario was chilling. I landed in Bogota the same night. I flew South America extensively both in the Herc and the whale. If you become just a tiny bit complacent, it doesn't matter what you are flying, and IMHO, all this FMS technology leads to complacency.

Basic flying skills and situational awareness are more important now, if that's possible, than they were ten years ago, because when that whiz-bang crap gives you the wrong information, you had better be sufficiently self aware to prevent it from killing you.

Technology will never replace the computer located between the captain's ears, although management's attitude can be pretty well summed up: "Gee, what a great thing the airline business would be if we just didn't have to contend with all those damned crewmembers!"