CHAPTER
1
THE WORLD OF THE AIRLINE PILOT
A Profession at Century’s End
The day begins at “Oh dark-thirty.” The sun rides high over the Atlantic Ocean. The North American continent still slumbers.
Thousands of professional airline pilots are awakening in the predawn darkness, fumbling toward full alertness. Soon they will sit in the noses of winged metal tubes, marvels of late 20th century technology, which will hurtle through the air at speeds that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Behind these professional airline pilots, completely oblivious to their technical skills and the rigors of the occupational world they inhabit, will sit hundreds of thousands of passengers, strapped to their seats, trapped and trusting.
In the span of one lifetime, commercial aviation has made progress that would shame the wildest flights of science fiction fancy. What might a pioneer aviator of the 1920s have thought of a prediction that before the century ended, the few hardy fools who entrusted themselves to the cramped passenger compartment of a Boeing 40B mailplane, would become today’s millions of routine travelers? And what would that pioneer aviator have thought of his profession, transmuted through the decades to century’s end?
The world of modern airline pilots, like the world of the first airline pilots, who turned a mere job into a profession, still begins with the ritual of flight preparation. For every flight, whether predawn or at midnight, professional airline pilots draw on a legacy passed down through the decades. The preflight ritual, almost religious in its intensity, is full of obeisances to costly lessons learned in other eras by other pilots, who flew vastly different aircraft, primitive by today’s standards. Modern preflight preparation is more than a routine—it is a rite as old as the professional aviator’s calling; and like nothing else in the workday, it links modern airline pilots to their forebears who flew the ungainly aircraft of yesteryear. Just as in 1927, airline pilots at century’s end carefully apply the skills of their craft, checking a thousand details, each with the potential of life and death, as they set about making the nation’s air transportation system actually work.
Pilots who flew airliners in the era of wooden wings would recognize instantly the physical stresses modern airline pilots face. If a grizzled old captain of a Ford Trimotor lumbering along between Omahaand Chicago should suddenly, by some sci-fi time-warp, find himself at the controls of the latest generation glass cockpit, fly-by-wire marvel, he would be utterly lost, in a technical sense. So much has changed—equipment, procedures, the very language of flight.
But the basic process of flight, of readying both pilot and airplane, would be eerily familiar. The “Old Guy” would understand. The wrenching impact of interrupted sleep, the physical and psychological tricks by which airline pilots have always deceived their bodies into functioning in mid-day form, these would be the same. Men like Dave Behncke and Rube Wagner, “Doc” Ator and Walter Bullock, Homer Cole and John Huber, Byron Warner and John Pricer—legendary pilots from the dim days of the industry’s infancy—these men would understand cold dawns and protesting bodies. They would understand the physical toll an airline pilot’s calling exacts, for they lived lives of too many mornings begun too early, and too many days extended too long. They knew their profession robbed the footstep of its spring, prematurely creased the face, and accelerated the complaints of age. It still does—all the technological progress in aviation at century’s end hasn’t changed that.
But what one of these ancestral pilots would have thought of the flying environment, we can only imagine. What would A. M. “Breezy” Wynne, the American Airlines pilot who fought so hard to stave off the defection of his airline from ALPA in 1963, have thought of the ground control chatter at Chicago’s O’Hare? A somewhat younger contemporary of ALPA’s founders, Wynne would likely have found the machinegun delivery of O’Hare ground controllers too exasperating to tolerate. Airline pilots of the 1990s are so inured to the self-consciously rapid hyperventilations of today’s tower-to-cockpit communications that they routinely tolerate such tart admonitions as: “951, DON’T YOU DARE TURN LEFT BEFORE THE STUB!”
Old Breezy Wynne, a man of commanding presence, might well have turned on the tower’s verbal scattergunners with withering effect: “Sonny, what the hell is a STUB?”
But modern pilots, taxiing in a queue of perhaps a dozen aircraft for takeoff, are almost obligated to respond with a “Roger” to even the most confusing, nonstandard instructions. If they can’t figure out for themselves what “the stub” is, they’ll take further measures to ensure the safety of their flight—certainly they won’t trust the verbal show-offs running ground control for that! But they won’t halt the frenetic pace of operations to correct a single ambiguity that is strictly local in its application. The system has to flow, and without the daily adjustments applied to this imperfect system in the cockpit, it just won’t work. The “Old Guy” would remember that, all too well.
But the pace of operations before takeoff is only a prelude to the rapid-fire world aloft. From the moment a modern pilot enters the company operations area, the task at hand is subject to a peculiar interface where aviator meets computer, meets machine, meets programmed response. At bottom, modern airline pilots must still do what the pilot of a Ford Trimotor did in 1929—meet the professional responsibility of getting the airplane aloft and the passengers to their destination, safely. The biggest change is that airline pilots of yesteryear suffered from an information deficit—modern airline pilots are besieged by an informational overload.
Danger has many faces, and the most insidious is the one that presents multiple threats, subtly masked. Modern airline pilots get so much information that they have the constant problem of separating what’s nice to know from what’s absolutely necessary to know. In a world aloft, where computers control everything from preflight plans to enroute sequencing, modern pilots are enmeshed in a system of dependency. Pilots depend on controllers, flight dispatchers, weather forecasters, and an almost unlimited array of auxiliary players. Yet just like pilots of 1930, modern pilots are ultimately responsible for the safe and effective functioning of the crucial apex of the air transportation system—the single point at which the vast array of supporting staff concentrate their efforts—the cockpit. All the gewgaws of computerized modernity haven’t changed that—or lessened the essential danger each pilot faces in making this crucial apex work.
Danger, of course, is inherent in the professional airline pilots’ calling and is not the real issue. Every pilot understands danger, instinctively, as have pilots in all eras, old as well as new. Even among their mutely trusting passengers, few perceive flying today as really dangerous. Scratch the surface of “Joe Public’s” perceptions, and a fanciful airline pilots’ world emerges, where fabulously rich aviators take lengthy vacations and only occasionally “work” while flying to glamorous places—not dangerous in the least! Perhaps flying was dangerous once, but not now, not today! Such is the “conventional wisdom.”
If a popular news magazine were to feature the question, “Is Your job Killing You?” which era would it represent, 1930 or 1990? If the news magazine, in its lists of the most dangerous occupations, cited “timber cutters/loggers,” with 129 deaths per 100,000 people employed, as the most dangerous of all jobs, nobody would be surprised—in 1930 or 1990. If the next most dangerous job classification was “airplane pilots,” with 97 deaths per 100,000, then surely the magazine must be of 1930 vintage, or thereabouts. How could it be otherwise, when the third most dangerous job is “asbestos worker,” with 79 deaths per 100,000? Being a pilot is more dangerous than working with asbestos? Surely the news magazine must date from some bygone era, one in which pilots regularly engaged in wing-walking and rum-running—a 1920s period piece of Jazz Age journalism.
The news magazine is Parade, the popular supplement to Sunday newspapers. The date is Jan. 8, 1989!
Of course, not all the pilots in this survey of dangerous jobs were airline pilots. Many were crop dusters, charter pilots, flight instructors, helicopter emergency medical pilots, military jet jockeys. But few pilots arrive in the cockpit of an airliner without serving a long apprenticeship in this extended aviation system. Before pilots can become airline pilots, they must pass through the dangerous years of initiation, while they build the necessary pilot time and qualifications.
But danger is not the point. Pilots, for reasons psychological and practical, have always made light of flying’s dangers. For professional airline pilots today, unlike the “Old Guys,” danger lies not in the routine hazards, or even the hazards of routine. The most consistent danger confronting pilots today, as pilots, is something that outsiders are only vaguely aware of—the hazard of change—rapid, remorseless, unremitting change. This change assaults pilots in the way they live, the equipment they fly, the conditions of their employment, and the structure of their corporate world, once so immutably secure, now so fragile and shifting. For airline pilots at century’s end, change is a condition of daily life; and while an old pilots’ adage holds that no two flights are ever quite the same, the variety of original experiences that each pilot endures on an almost daily basis is unlike anything any previous generation of pilots has known.
Despite all the changes that have occurred in what is now nearly a century of commercial aviation history, one unvarying constant links modern professional airline pilots to their professional forebears. That constant is the undeniable fact that airline flying is a physically demanding profession that inevitably takes its toll—whether in 1930 or at the century’s end.
“If this job is so easy,” a familiar lament of contemporary airline pilots goes, “then why am I always falling asleep at the dinner table after a three-day trip?”
Critics who charge that airline pilots are “overpaid and underworked” should follow a typical airline crew through a routine workday.
First, consider the question of pace. In some ways, modern airline pilots confront physical challenges that the men who flew in open cockpits never knew. Rising at 03:30 for a dawn takeoff from Chicago to Cincinnati would be just as tough on the pilot of Boeing “Monomail” in 1930 as on a Boeing 757 pilot today. But the “Old Guy” who flew a Monomail would be home after one roundtrip. The hours would be long. He might have to battle the terrible mix of low-altitude weather a modern jet captain can generally avoid (except during the critical terminal phases of flight); but once finished, the “Old Guy” could take what was left of the day off. He wouldn’t suffer from multiple crossings of time zones, or exposure to high-altitude radiation, or the possibility of errant electronic impulses from his cathode-ray–laden cockpit.
“Acute circadian rhythm disfunction” (a physiological complaint modern flight surgeons see all too often) wouldn’t trouble the airline pilot of 1930 after a long hard flight in a Monomail. The modern flight deck crew, however, will find their work day extending far beyond the limited time zones that encompass a Chicago–Cincinnati trip. Unlike the “Old Guy” in his Monomail, their day will not end with a return to Chicago. Their trip will continue, perhaps to another intermediate stop (say Minneapolis, with a four-hour ground wait interspersed—perhaps planned, perhaps caused by a faulty food service cart that can’t be secured in its bay and might come hurtling out to cripple a cabin attendant during takeoff). Next, they fly across the continent in either direction, perhaps easterly one day, westward the next. Time zones blur during a three-day trip, the diurnal rotation of the earth advances or retards a pilot’s physiological mainspring, and eventually the circadian rhythm will take its revenge on human biology, ravaging the most basic functions of the human organism, sleep efficiency first, other more sinister effects later.
By the time our modern B-757 crew has checked into a hotel, three time zones and 12 to 14 hours after waking up, only a sadist would say that they have been “underworked.” And the day is but a prelude to tomorrow, when they will have to do it all again. The tempo is wearing, and the physical response to the time compression that is so much a part of modern airline piloting rivals anything pioneer pilots endured.
James H. “Jimmy” Roe, ALPA stalwart and friend of Dave Behncke, was a man whose career on TWA spanned the spectrum of aviation from props to jets. When Roe retired in 1961, he admitted that the new era of jet aviation was too much for him. Roe was no shrinking violet, and he was in good shape for his age, despite a lifetime of personal high flying to complement his reputation as a bachelor bon vivant. Near the end of his life, Roe declared that the pace of jet aviation had made him accept retirement with equanimity.
“There was a graciousness to the old days,” Roe said in the late 1970s from his Arizona retirement home. “Flying was an adventure for the passengers, high style, like an ocean voyage, and the captain was like an ocean liner captain. We had time to actually get to know our passengers, to mingle. All that ended with the jets.”
A hint of disgust crossed old Jimmy Roe’s face. Perhaps these were just the ravings of a septuagenarian, doting on a dimly remembered past that never was. Perhaps not.
Roe, like many of the first generation of professional pilots who survived into the dawn of the jet age, knew that the pace of modern aviation was taking a toll on pilots that was mysterious and unsettling. These transitioning pilots instinctively knew that the pace of modern jet operations was taking something out of them that the great piston queens of the 1950s, the DC-7s, and Superconnies hadn’t. Their speculations were haphazard and intuitive, based more on their own anecdotal evidence than on science. But the Old Guys knew that despite the physical dangers of flying a Monomail in 1930 over rough terrain at low altitude, something far more sinister and insidious was lurking over the horizon for airline pilots. These airmen had never heard the phrase “jet lag” before they began flying the new jets. But they discovered what jet lag was soon enough.
Modern pilots are only now beginning to come to terms with the physiological stresses of a workplace the Old Guys barely glimpsed. Most pilots believe that the lives they live, in the cockpit and in the stressful environment of airline deregulation and corporate thimble-rigging that has trailed in its wake, are being shortened by hazards that ordinary people only dimly perceive. It is an article of faith among pilots, particularly those who fly international routes, that long hours of exposure to high-altitude natural radiation, combined with the new cockpit environment that emits substantial amounts of radiation on its own, has combined to put them at serious risk. Pilots believe that the medical establishment simply lacks the scientific tools to define the hazards they face, and they point out convincingly that it took years for the doctors to “prove” that smoking was a health hazard. Pilots flying the line today, almost without exception, believe that they face health risks that medical experts either misunderstand or ignore.
As for the psychological hazards of working in an industry that moves at the whim of capital-investment decisions, that shows scant regard for the personal and professional effects these decisions have on pilots whose cockpits are at the critical apex of modern air transportation—perhaps that is the greatest change of all.
The Old Guy flying the Boeing Monomail in 1930 would understand—he lived in the same kind of world—and he hated it! He hated it so much that he decided, collectively, with all the other Old Guys who flew similar planes under similar circumstances, to do something about it. They formed a union called the Air Line Pilots “Association” (being somewhat uneasy, owing to the conservative habits of most pilots, about using the “U” word in their title). They formed ALPA because they had to. They used it to protect themselves against exploitation by their employers—as a kind of insurance policy for their budding profession. Many of the Old Guys (whose names are mostly unknown to modern airline pilots) didn’t like the idea of forming a union. They hoped that their employers would recognize their contributions and reward them accordingly. They wanted desperately to make their companies succeed, and they hoped against hope that the sacrifices they made to this end (and they weren’t just financial sacrifices either) would win for them the kind of fair play that pilots traditionally expect of each other. But when that fervent hope failed, the Old Guys closed ranks, and they marched—not always in a straight line—toward a future for themselves that would be secure and that they believed airline pilots of the future would inherit.
If the future didn’t turn out exactly the way the Old Guys hoped, it wasn’t because they didn’t know about financial sharks who swim in troubled economic waters. Commercial aviation during the 1920s and early 1930s, when the Old Guys were establishing the traditions that modern airline pilots still honor (often without knowing it) and creating the profession of airline piloting out of thin air and dreams, had more than its share of shifty operators who appreciated only the “bottom line.” The Old Guys fought them, insisting constantly that aviation was qualitatively different from other kinds of business—that the bottom line wasn’t all there was to it—that some things couldn’t be quantified neatly on a balance sheet. The Old Guys knew all about economic chaos—deregulation, if you will. They had grown up in a deregulated world, as barnstormers, jackleg charter operators, fly-by-night mail contractors. If a job existed, and it had anything to do with flying an airplane, the Old Guys had done it. They knew about being exploited—about working long hours under dangerous conditions for low pay. They knew Frank Lorenzo’s predecessor—his name was E. L. Cord.
When the new airlines began forming during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the first generation of airline pilots seized the opportunity to build a “profession” for themselves. The Old Guys, through ALPA in all its multitude of activities—lobbying, politicking, and cultivating a favorable public “image” of themselves—had almost single-handedly created the regulated system of air transportation that made the American industry the standard by which all other commercial airline systems of the world were measured.
Modern airline pilots confront a world as difficult and dangerous as anything the Old Guys faced at the dawn of commercial aviation. The threat comes as much from erosion of the profession’s status as from the normal hazards of aviation. People who opt for a career in an airliner’s cockpit do so because they are pilots—men and women who know how to fly an airplane. But to make a “profession” out of the mere job of flying that airplane, these same men and women are learning that, in aviation’s brave new world, mere technical excellence is not enough. They must, willy-nilly, become experts in corporate restructuring, financial analysis, mergers, acquisitions, and leveraged buyouts.
“I haven’t flown an airliner in a year,” said TWA First Officer Larry Garrett in the late 1980s. Assigned then by the TWA Master Executive Council to track the maneuvers of Carl Icahn, Garrett described himself as a “Committee Puke” who would much rather have been flying. “I didn’t sign up for flight training to be a financial analyst. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have done it. I didn’t, but here I am. The only way I can keep my job as a pilot is to become a financial analyst.”
The world of the modern airline pilot is in some ways a more intractable one than the Old Guys faced, because the political climate is so much more unfavorable than the one they faced. Luck had a lot to do with it. The Old Guys were fortunate that, just as they began to build ALPA, American public opinion began to change, evolving into one friendly to organized labor. It was a time when a popular bias against big business ran strong. The Great Depression of 1929 left most Americans firmly convinced that corporate power was dangerous when too concentrated and that the leavening hand of government regulation was necessary to control it.
Modern airline pilots have inherited a world the Old Guys would hardly recognize. Instead of a pro-labor bias, the popular climate is decidedly hostile to organized labor; instead of a bias against big business, the public seems to lavish affection on mere wealth, no matter how sleazily acquired. Flashy real estate moguls, Wall Street sharpies, and illegitimate manipulators of paper empires caught the public’s fancy during the era of deregulation—not the builders of real wealth. The country, instead of distrusting corporate power, seemed (if the results of national elections since 1980 are an accurate guide) to worship it.
The airline pilots of the 1930s in many respects had it easier than modern airline pilots. C. R. Smith and Eddie Rickenbacker were no less predatory than Frank Lorenzo and Carl Icahn, but social and political circumstances restrained their instinct for the jugular. Nothing illustrates this better than the comments of Representative John Martin, a Colorado politician who, following passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, weighed in with his view of government’s role in protecting airline pilots from the vagaries of free market capitalism.
“In my opinion,” Martin said, “the piloting of these great airplanes, which hurtle through the air at 200 miles per hour, loaded with human lives, is the most responsible, the most skillful, and the most dangerous occupation that mankind ever engaged in.
“Nothing in the past history of the world,” he said, “nor anything today is
equivalent to the position of a pilot at the controls of one of these gigantic
airplanes. They are the picked men of the country. It is a profession in which
many are called but few are chosen. These men ought to be as free from worry
or concern about their economic condition or future as it is humanly or
legislatively possible to accomplish. If there is anything we can put in the
legislation that will keep worry from the air pilots, it ought to be done”
[emphasis added].
Could any serious politician at century’s end make this kind of statement? Things have changed, and these changes extend far beyond the overheated political rhetoric from the half-remembered days of 1938. Modern airline pilots live in a different, far more dangerous world—professionally.
But perhaps there is a bright side. Billy Joel, that eminent philosopher of rock music, has a lyric every contemporary airline pilot ought to keep securely tucked away for reference in these tough times: “The good old days weren’t all that good, and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.”
Pilots are still pilots, ALPA is still here, and most pilots still see ALPA as the bedrock upon which their profession rests today—just as they did in 1931, the year of ALPA’s birth. Critics scoff at the notion of unity among pilots, calling ancient notions of a “brotherhood” of the air outdated and naive. They point to the internal stresses that nearly fractured the profession in the 1980s as sure harbingers of ALPA’s demise. Perhaps they should remember Mark Twain’s letter of correction to a newspaper that had printed his obituary prematurely: “Reports of my death are much exaggerated!”
Despite everything, pilots still are part of a tangible community, just as they were in 1927, with a community mentality born of shared experiences and a perception that the things they have in common outweigh the things that divide them.
Certainly, anybody who knows the history of ALPA understands that the union was built on broken bones. A lot of forgotten aviators paid the price required to build the wages, working conditions, and traditions of modern airline pilots. History is not pretty, and it is not an uninterrupted success story. ALPA’s history is full of martyrs and lost causes. But ALPA has survived.
The Old Guys who built ALPA dealt with managers who were no more inclined to give anything away than are today’s. A single-minded pursuit of the concept of unity across company lines was almost obsessive among the Old Guys. It came naturally to them, for they shared a set of common experiences. The Old Guys had flown the mail together, barnstormed together, gone through flight training at Randolph or Pensacola together, or they all knew somebody who had, and thus psychologically felt as if they had shared these rites of passage. These shared sets of common experiences gave the Old Guys a “brother pilot” mentality that might sound corny today, but was much more than a mere abstraction to them. The sense of kinship was tangible, meaningful, and it linked them to each other like no other experience save war. Indeed, the shared experiences of the Old Guys often did include war. More than any other factor, this shared experience is what allowed the Old Guys to put aside their parochial interests and act collectively. They thought of themselves as a “band of brothers.” Brother pilots. With unity across company lines, they conquered.
Ancient history? Enter any room where airline pilots gather to work or talk today. Attend an Executive Board meeting of the many MEC chairmen of ALPA. Then participate in an MEC meeting. Listen to the conversation, the concerns, the jokes. Whether it’s Delta, TWA, United, US Airways, or code-sharing airlines like American Eagle, they’re the same! Despite all the changes wracking the profession since the Old Guys first began imagining ALPA during conspiratorial meetings at the Troy Lane Hotel in Chicago in 1931, this one indisputable fact remains—pilots are still pilots! Something links them together, and airline pilots of today are still part of this ancient league, no matter which uniform cap hangs in the cockpit. They are pilots who happen to work for different airlines.
After Continental? After the demise of Braniff, Eastern, and Pan Am? Aren’t these old notions now outdated, an abstraction, irrelevant in the era of deregulation, Frank Lorenzo, and alter-ego airlines?
Hardly! How else can the cohesion that has linked the overwhelming majority of professional airline pilots be explained? In the 1980s, through two terrible ordeals—on Continental and Eastern—an astounding percentage of ALPA members voluntarily paid crushing assessments to sustain. . . the brotherhood. The fact that most ALPA pilots continued to pay their assessments to the bitter end, and that non-ALPA groups, like the Southwest Airlines pilots’ company union, which contributed $50,000, and the American Allied Pilots Association, which contributed $90,000, to help support the Eastern strike of 1989, proves that the ancient idea of a kinship of the air still exists.
ALPA remains the living embodiment of that sense of kinship. Despite all the changes afflicting the world of modern airline pilots, despite B-scales, and the multiple tribulations of deregulation, internal disaffection, and external enemies, most pilots still recognize ALPA for what it is—the last redoubt of the most formidable weapon remaining to them, the capability to act together across company lines to protect their profession in times of crisis. That weapon springs from a fundamental sense of shared interests—”brotherhood,” if you will. The vehicle that transports that weapon to war is ALPA.
So long as most airline pilots are willing to pay the price, ALPA will remain viable. So long as airline pilots realize that unity across company lines is a formidable weapon, and that ALPA is the only keeper of that faith, that ALPA is “us,” not “them, then ALPA will survive. So long as most professional airline pilots continue to defiantly wear their ALPA tie tacks and lapel pins in public, ALPA will live.