Catch me if you can

Obviously, I reflected as I left the building, I was going to need more than a uniform if I was to be successful in my role of Pan Am pilot. I would need an ID card and a great deal more knowledge of Pan Am’s operations than I possessed at the moment. Put the uniform away in my closet and started haunting the public library and canvassing bookstores, studying all the material available on pilots, flying and airlines. One small volume I encountered proved especially valuable. It was the reminiscences of a veteran Pan American flight captain, replete with scores of photographs, and containing a wealth of airline terminology. It was not until later I learned that the pilot’s phraseology was somewhat dated.

A lot of the things I felt I ought to know, however, were not in the books or magazines I read. So I got back on the pipe with Pan Am. ‘I’d like to speak to a pilot, please,’ I told the switchboard operator. ‘I’m a reporter for my high school newspaper, and I’d like to do a story on pilots’ lives – you know, where they fly, how they’re trained and that sort of stuff. Do you think a pilot would talk to me?’

Pan Am has the nicest people. ‘Well, I can put you through to operations, the crew lounge,’ said the woman. ‘There might be someone down there that might answer some of your questions.’

There was a captain who was happy to oblige. He was delighted that young people showed an interest in making a career in the airline field. I introduced myself as Bobby Black, and after some innocuous queries, I started to feed him the questions I wanted answered.

‘What’s the age of the youngest pilot flying for Pan Am?’

‘Well, that depends,’ he answered. ‘We have some flight engineers who’re probably no older than twenty-three or twenty-four. Our youngest co-pilot is probably up in his late twenties. Your average captain is close to forty or in his forties, probably.’

‘ I see,’ I said. ‘Well, would it be impossible for a co-pilot to be twenty-six or even younger?’

‘Oh no,’ he answered quickly. ‘I don’t know that we have that many in that age bracket, but some of the other airlines do have a lot of younger co-pilots, I’ve noticed. A lot depends, of course, on the type of plane he’s flyingand his seniority. Everything is based on seniority, that is, how long a pilot has been with a company.’

I was finding a lot of nuggets for my poke. ‘When do you hire people; I mean, at what age can a pilot go to work for an airline, say Pan Am?’

‘If I remember correctly, you can come on the payroll at twenty as a flight engineer,’ said the captain, who had an excellent memory.

Then feasibly, with six or eight years service, you could become a co-pilot?’ I pressed.

‘It’s possible,’ he conceded. ‘In fact, I’d say it wouldn’t be unusual at all for a capable man to make co-pilot in six or eight years, less even.‘

Are you allowed to tell me how much pilots earn?’ I asked.

‘Well, again, that depends on seniority, the route he flies, the number of hours he flies each week and other factors,’ said the captain. ‘I would say the maximum salary for a co-pilot would be $32,000, a captain’s salary around $50,000.’‘

How many pilots does Pan Am have?’ I asked.

The captain chuckled. ‘Son, that’s a tough one. I don’t know the exact number. But eighteen hundred would probably be a fair estimate. You can get better figures from the personnel manager.

’‘No, that’s okay,’ I said. ‘How many places are these pilots?

’‘You’re talking about bases,’ he replied. ‘We have five bases in the United States: San Francisco; Washington, DC; Chicago; Miami; and New York. Those are cities where our aircrews live. They report to work in that city, San Francisco, say, fly out of that city and eventually terminate a flight in that city. It might help you to know that we are not a domestic carrier, that is, we don’t fly from city to city in this country. We’re strictly an international carrier, serving foreign destinations.’

The information helped me a lot. ‘This may sound strange to you, captain, and it’s more curiosity than anything else, but would it be possible for me to be a co-pilot based in New York City, and you to be a co-pilot also based in New York, and me never to meet you?’

‘Very possible, even more so with co-pilots, for you and I would never fly together in the sameplane,’ said the talkative captain. ‘Unless we met at a company meeting or some social function, which is improbable, we might never encounter one another. You’d be more apt to know more captains and more flight engineers than co-pilots. You might fly with different captains or different flight engineers and run into them again if you’re transferred, but you’d never fly with another co-pilot. There’s only one to a plane.

‘There’re so many pilots in the system, in fact, that no one pilot would know all the others. I’ve been with the company eighteen years, and I don’t think I know more than sixty or seventy of the other pilots.’

The captain’s verbal pinballs were lighting up all the lights in my little head.‘I’ve heard that pilots can fly free, I mean as a passenger, not as a pilot. Is that true?’ I prompted.

‘Yes,’ said the captain. ‘But we’re talking about two things, now. We have pass privileges. That is, me and my family can travel somewhere by air on a stand-by basis. That is, if there’s room, we can occupy seats, and our only cost is the tax on the tickets. We pay that.

‘Then there’s deadheading. For example, if my boss told me tonight that he wanted me in LA tomorrow to fly a trip out of there, I might fly out there on Delta, Eastern, TWA or any other carrier connecting with Los Angeles that could get me there on time. I would either occupy an empty passenger seat or, more likely, ride in the jump seat. That’s a little fold-down seat in the cockpit, generally used by deadheading pilots, VIPs or FAA check riders.

’‘Would you have to help fly the plane?’ I quizzed.

Oh, no,’ he replied. ‘I’d be on another company’s carrier, you see. You might be offered a control seat as a coutesy, but I alwys decline. We fly on each other’s planes to get somewhere, not to work,’ he laughed.

‘How do you go about that, deadheading, I mean?’ I was really enthused. And the captain was patient. He must have liked kids.

‘You want to know it all, don’t you?’ he said amiably, and proceeded to answer my question.

‘Well, it’s done on what we call a pink slip. It works this way. Say I want to go to iami on Delta. I go down to Delta operations, show them my Pan Am ID card and I fill out a pink slip, stating my destination and giving my position with Pan Am, my employee number and my FAA pilot’s licence number. I get a copy of the form and that’s my ‘jump’. I give that copy to the stewardess when I board, and that’s how I get to ride in the jump seat.

’I wasn’t through, and he didn’t seem to mind my continuing. ‘What’s a pilot’s licence look like?’ I asked. ‘Is it a certificate that you can hang on the wall, or like a driver’s licence, or what?’

He laughed. ‘No, it’s not a certificate you hang on the wall. It’s kind of hard to describe, really. It’s about the size of a driver’s licence, but there’s no picture attached. It’s just a white card with black printing on it.

’I decided it was time to let the nice man go back to his comfortable seat. ‘Gee, Captain, I sure thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve been really super.’‘

Glad to have helped you, son,’ he said. ‘I hope you get those pilot’s wings, if that’s what you want.’

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