Two of my good friends at Florida Express had been working for Braniff during their first bankruptcy. They had been hired in all the crazy hiring spurt I mentioned a long, long time ago, when I was trying to get hired at Braniff myself, but they would not call me for an interview. Not having a college degree was their reason. Now I was here with these two guys, who had been ass bitten by Braniff One, been recalled by Braniff Two, refused the recall to stay with Florida Express, then been snagged by Braniff Two, when they bought Florida Express and stapled us to the bottom of their freaking seniority list. We talked about this quite a bit. We were all uncertain about our future with this company. We were afraid that the new owners were scammers, who would suck all the assets out of the company, then declare bankruptcy. That had been their modus operandi at other companies. Several guys were starting to leave, to work for other airlines. My old pal, Tom, had gone to American. A couple guys went to work for United Parcel Service, who was starting their own airline, based in Louisville Kentucky. We were in the middle of contract negotiations and what is called a "slow down". One evening, the Orlando chief pilot was hanging around the ramp outside our operations room and pleading with crews to stop the slow down. He said the company was in the middle of trying to raise $100 million on Wall Street to expand the airline, and that they were going to lease brand new Airbus A320s. This is a plane, similar to the Boeing 737, but with modern technology that made it less expensive to operate. He knew that pilots love to hear that their company is expanding and getting new airplanes. We were mostly saying, "What slow down?" Once again, we were thinking, "If we don't get ours, you don't get yours". It is not unlike a game of chicken.
The Airbus A320s began to show up and pilots were being trained on them. Soon the stalemate was broken and we had a TA, a tentative contract, that we got to study and then vote for or against. This was my first experience with an airline union and I was amazed at how quickly the union leadership made the transition from rabble rousers to contract salesmen. It's a little complicated, but we soon learned that our BAC 1-11 copilots were getting screwed on their pay rates and were really pissed. They had supported the captains who had done so much to pressure the company to negotiate in good faith under the Railway Labor Act, which puts unions at such a disadvantage. All of us complained at union meetings and the system chief pilot got wind of the discrepancy and intervened on our behalf to make a correction that fixed most of that problem. I can't remember his name, but always thought he was an upstanding guy. I had had a small encounter with him while the negotiations were ongoing over my captain's authority and he saw my point. I would say he was a pilot's chief pilot. The BAC was going to be parked. I guess we had taught them that they were a maintenance liability. We had been acquiring B-737s and some of them were actually worse than the BACs. There were still going to be two hubs, Kansas City and Orlando, but I was not going to be senior enough to hold a captain's slot in Orlando. For the first time in my airline career, I was going to be required to commute. I was not looking forward to that. The good news was that the pay was going to increase substantially and I could remain a captain. One of my friends, who had worked for Braniff One, had been trying to get an interview with UPS. He was well aware that their airline was known as the "Freight Nazis", but knew the company had deep pockets and would not be as precarious an employer at Braniff One, Florida Express or Braniff Two. Some of the guys who had left and gone to UPS were still commuting between Louisville and Orlando on our jump seats and were telling the horror stories about life as a UPS pilot. I was thinking about this avenue myself. I knew that some of these kinds of stories are exaggerated. I remembered back to my years working for the Thorofare Super Markets company in Pittsburgh, that one of my friends there had gone to work for UPS as a package car driver. I had mentioned to my boss that I wondered what it was like working there and he said the pay was good but the company was brutal to employees. I took that comment with a grain of salt, but it is tough leaving the known for the unknown, especially when there are scary stories about the unknown. It didn't matter, because soon I was drafted into the Army. I wasn't going to be drafted into the Army this time, but I had to think about the impact of any change on my family, not just myself. I had a bid on the 737 as a captain in Kansas City, would be making lots more money and would be flying all over the country. It was a lot to consider and there were many unknowns. Pay at UPS was considerably less than it would be at Braniff under the new contract. It was even less than what we made under the old contract and you have to go through a really lousy first year on probation at a really lousy pay. Not an easy decision at all.
You may remember that I mentioned that one of my first assignments when Dixon hired me at Florida Express was to travel to all of our our stations, at the end of the spokes of our hub and spoke system, and teach the gate agents how to do the weight and balance and performance calculations. This was quite a challenge, because they did not really understand what I was talking about and did not have much interest. It didn't take long for the company to come up with a much better plan. There were PCs at each gate counter with software to do all the calculations and print out the paper work to give to the crews. All the agents had to do was enter a few numbers, such as airplane tail number, fuel on board and passenger count. This was a great system and worked for us for several years. When Braniff took over, the Florida Express pilot management group explained how well our system worked and recommended the entire airline use it, but NOOOOO! They had a wonderful main frame computer they had been using for centuries ( I think they called it the Abacus II) and we were all going to use it, because it was wonderful and they were Braniff and we were just a bunch of Branflakes and what the hell did we know. The way their system worked was, that when the main entry door was closed and we were ready to depart, we would call the station operations frequency and then they would call back with "the numbers" we needed to go fly away in our jets after they had been properly crunched. Wonderful. The problems began at a hub, because there were so many planes and only one operations frequency. There was too much congestion at a very busy time. The poor person responsible for doing all the work on this in ops could only talk to one plane at a time and they were all clamoring to be the first to call for "the numbers". Aviation VHF radios may only have one person talking at a time. If more than one try to transmit, there is nothing but garbled noise on the frequency, then everyone says, "blocked" or "stepped on" or something like that. Fun. The ops peoples started telling the crews to block out from the gates and then wait for "the numbers". In order to do that, we had to call ground control (air traffic control in charge of plane movement on the ground between gates and runways), ask for a clearance to push back and then complete the pushback and engine start. Essentially, they were rolling the shit downhill to the ground controller. We had planes parked all over the place, waiting for "the numbers". You may recall that I told another story in which I pointed out that most controllers are not dummies. After about a week of this goat rope, the controllers started asking if we had "the numbers" when we called for push back clearance and the planes began to wait on the gates. The incoming, next bank was then cluttering up the ramp and taxiways, instead of the out going planes, but it was giving everyone late departures and the airlines hate that. Despite this, the Braniff brain trust never did fix the system. We Branflakes were not impressed, especially since this was playing into our methods of encouraging the company to bargain with the union in good faith. With the main frame and the BAC 1-11, we were causing major pain.
Braniff had always had a big hub in Dallas. During the transition of absorbing Florida Express, the main hub was moved to Kansas City, with a small hub in Orlando. I think part of the reason the original Braniff failed, is that it shared the Dallas hub with American Airlines. There is more to it than that, Braniff made lots of mistakes and American engaged in cut throat business tactics, but having more than one airline at the same hub can be a mess. The marketing people decide that certain times are best for flights to arrive and depart and then try to jam all the flights into and out of the airport at the same time. The term for these mass arrivals is bank. If you add another airline, with the same idea about when is the best time to have a bank of airplanes at the airport, you have planes stacked up in holding patterns in the sky and lined up on the taxiways on the ground. There are not enough runways or gates to accommodate the onslaught. The companies play nasty games with each other to gain any advantage possible. I thought moving to Kansas City was a good move, but what do I know? It is centrally located in the country and we were now part of a nationwide airline. Braniff had the place to itself as a hub airport. Florida Express had endeavored to avoid large cities and the big hubs of other airlines. Braniff had a completely different strategy. The airline was now going to the bigger cities from coast to coast. Of course, the BAC was not suited to the larger cities and routes. It was still used to feed the hubs from smaller cities, on shorter legs. Airlines establish hubs as a way to serve nearly every airport in the country and to keep their passengers in their own system. By hubbing and spoking, you can offer flights from anywhere to anywhere. The passengers just have to go to and through a hub, most frequently by changing planes there.
Kansas City (MKC)
There were a couple ways where the BAC routes could work their way between the Orlando hub and the Kansas City hub. For example, we had been flying to and from Indianapolis from day one. Now we had some flights that went on to Kansas City instead of returning to Orlando. From there, we would fly to some other smaller cities and back to KC. My favorite such city was San Antonio Texas. During one of my trips to San Antonio, I had the misfortune of flying with our old pal, Grumpy. You may remember that he was the older guy, who retired from the Navy. I guess his demeanor as a grump served him well in the Navy, but it did not always work well at the airline. He had upgraded to captain for a short time, but was demoted to first officer when Florida Express had shrunk. At Braniff, we were all frozen in our present positions and Grumpy was really grumpy about that. He had head bumping episodes with several captains, including me and the flight attendants did not like him very much. You could tell, because they did not visit the cockpit as much when I was flying with him. One morning, after a layover in San Antonio, we were eating breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, when a Braniff captain approached our table. He introduced himself to me and asked if he could ride the jumpsuit to MKC. I said yes and we chatted briefly, then he left to meet us at the van to the airport. Grumpy was offended that this guy did not address him and this began the 'captains are assholes' narrative of the day. Grumpy began telling stories about some of his run ins with captains. This was intended to let our jumpseater and me know that he had contempt for all captains. One story was about an incident with a young captain named Pete. Grumpy told us that he called him "Pressurization Pete", because Pete had advised him about a technique to use when adjusting the pressurization system, that reduced bumps in the feel of the pressurization changes. You may have felt some of these bumps as sudden changes in the pressure in your ears. When I told Grumpy that I had taught that technique to Pete when I flew with him as a first officer, during my first year at Flex, he just had a smirk on his face. Grumpy went on and on and there was no doubt what he was doing. I could see that the jumpseater was getting the point. That is when I told them the story of my newly upgraded friend, Tom, back in my USAir days. I congratulated him and told him that now he could be the asshole, instead of working for him. He said, "Denny, the first thing I learned when I moved from the right seat to the left seat, is that all the assholes are not in the left seat." Our guest burst out laughing. As we flew on to KC, the traffic was backing up and we were cleared into a holding pattern. When you are cleared to hold, there is a speed limit as you enter and maintain the hold. Sometimes you can even slow down before you get there, if you advise Air Traffic Control. Why hurry to a holding pattern, eh? Apparently Grumpy had forgotten that and entered at our cruise speed. Because of the nature of our conversation, I was slow to correct him. I didn't want to embarrass him and get him more stirred up than he was. That was probably a mistake, but it was one of those situations where there are no good options. As he was making the first turn, he said something about how long the turn was taking and I said that might be because you are way above the holding pattern entry speed, then told him what it was. He slowed down, but not before the controller said something about the size of our holding pattern. When we were cleared out of the pattern, to proceed toward the airport, Grumpy maintained the holding pattern speed, instead of increasing to our cruise speed. I could tell from the conversation between the controller and several turbo props behind us, that we were becoming a moving road block on the arrival into MKC. I told him to pick it up and he got that Grumpy smirk again. Then, as we were cleared for the approach, he did not seem to be aware of our location relative to the final approach fix and the glide slope intercept point and he maintained cruise speed and blasted through the glide slope. I mentioned that and told him he needed to slow down and configure to land and get on the glide slope. Long story short, he scared the jumpseater and we had to go around and land on another runway. In retrospect, I should have been giving him dual instruction from the time we were given a holding clearance. He simply was not as good as he thought he was and was distracted by his contempt for any and all other human beings.
If you've been reading since the beginning of the blog, you know that I had to struggle to gain confidence at several stages in my adult life. The first time was in the Army, when I was becoming a drill sergeant. Next was the several year period after I got out of the Army and was trying to decide what I was going to do to support myself. Although I was aware of the option of just sitting on my ass and collecting benefits from the government, it was never a serious consideration for me. This would have fallen in the same category of trying to avoid the draft. My entire family would have been very disappointed in me. Homey just didn't play that shit. My confidence was doing pretty well during the 5 years at Butler Graham Airport. I was able to carry much of what I had gained in the Army into that, although there were the uncertainties of trying several different occupations that did not work out and a failed marriage. I just remember comparing myself to others. I was doing as well as people I admired and better than those I did not. Going to my first airline pilot job in California, my confidence took a bit of a nose dive for almost a year. The four year layoff from professional flying just prior to that, combined with the dramatic change in the nature of the flying made me feel behind the curve. I'm not sure what it looked like on the outside, probably not great, but mostly acceptable. However, I was comparing the way I felt with the way I had felt during the last several years at Butler. Shaky. About the time I upgraded to captain at PacEx, it was starting to hit a rhythm and I was feeling better. With today's perspective, I don't think I was a good copilot and did not like being a copilot. When I moved to Flex, I was one of the most experienced pilots on the plane and had former airline experience. I think the folks down there overrated my abilities at first, but eventually, I was living up to them. It was feeling good. I tend to jump around a little chronologically, but I am trying to establish an understanding of the roller coaster ride of my aviation career. Most of the time in Orlando was on the upswing. Things were getting better and I was feeling better about the life I was making for myself and my family. Florida Express was about a four and a half year chapter and Braniff was about a year and a half. At some point and I think it was late in the Florida Express time, something started happening and it is hard to describe. I noticed that I was having a hard time focusing to the level I had come to know was necessary during critical segments of flight, such as approach to landing. I was spending more time in an airplane seat than I was in a car seat. I had more than 5000 hours of flight time during the 7 years in California and Orlando. That is a lot for airline flying. There are all kinds of regulatory limits on the number of hours a pilot can fly in a day, a week a month and a year. As a comparison, I had flown 5000 hours during the 5 years of general aviation flying at Butler, and that was really a lot in that period of time, but it was not unusual to work from 9 AM to 9 PM as a flight instructor in the summer. This does not mean I flew 12 hours per day, but I was on duty that long and frequently flew nearly 8 hours on days like that. As I transitioned into more air taxi and corporate type flying, my hours per day, week month and year began to decline. One of the problems with flying so much and beginning to feel comfortable in the airplane is the possibility of complacency. I am not sure if that is what I was experiencing at Florida Express, but I found myself not having the kind of mental intensity that I should have at certain times of a flight. Perhaps the fact that I was noticing this situation indicate that it was not complacency, but just too much flying. I needed to slow down a little. Eventually my focus returned to normal.
The contract between Braniff, Inc. and the pilots represented by the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) became amendable soon after these new owners took over. The Braniff pilots' Master Executive Counsel (MEC) came up with the negotiating slogan, No Wholesale. Their symbol was the word Wholesale covered by the international symbol for No. The MEC is the name for elected ALPA leadership for each individual airline branch of the union. The pilots at each airline negotiate their contract with the company in the hope that each new contract leap frogs the previous ones in pay and benefits. The United States federal law that governs railroad and airline labor negotiations is called the Railway Labor Act. This act came into existence because strikes by railroad employees threatened to completely shut down the American economy. You can read up on this all you want, but for our purposes, let me simply say that the act gives the companies all the aces in the deck. The National Mediation Board oversees all airline negotiations and controls whether the pilots of an airline can go on strike or not. The presidents administration controls the NMB and the politics don't always go the way you might believe they do. Don't doubt me on this, I can provide several examples, but that is not within the scope of my story right now. One of the high cards the pilots do have is the fact that they control the airplanes and there are regulations and procedures that must be complied with. Another high card is the fact that airplanes break and must be fixed.
Contracts under the RLA don't have deadlines when they expire. They become amendable and serious negotiations don't really begin until sometime after that date, frequently much time after that date. The pilots just keep working under the terms of the previous agreement, until the NMB decides that an impasse has been reached, then there are several hurdles and flaming hoops to jump over and through all while watching a major goat rope. Things kind of ride along as usual, until the pilot group starts getting restless and tries to do something to force the company to get serious. They can put ads in papers and on TV, but most people don't give a rat's tookus about what some rich airline pilots are whining about. Of course, the Braniff pilots were not exactly rich. Remember that we pilots at Florida Express were paid far below the standard of the industry and had to take a pay cut to get in line with the Braniff pilots.
The biggest thing pilots can do is what is euphemistically referred to as a "safety campaign". This is when they study all the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) and company procedures and start operating the planes to the letter of the law, so to speak. When the pilots are happy and operating normally, they may be taking some liberties with some of that to operate more efficiently. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they are operating unsafely, it is just that some of the regulations and procedures are overly restrictive and it is impossible to operate on time when following them precisely. They are written for a lowest common denominator situation. I've probably scared the hell out of potential passengers with that, but rest assured that the pilots would never intentionally do anything that was unsafe. For example, the regulations say that we must write any and every mechanical discrepancy in the logbook as soon as we become aware of it. There are many minor discrepancies, that have no impact on safety of flight, that will not find their way into the logbook until such time as they can be repaired without impacting the crews ability to stay on schedule. Now, without getting too deeply into that and without saying anything that will get anyone (me) into trouble, let me say that we former Florida Express pilots at Braniff (Branflakes) had the perfect tool for contract negotiations in the BAC 1-11. If you have been reading my blog posts leading up to this point, you know that it was an old, tired, worn out airplane. It also had some inherent design issues. Having owned several small British roadsters, I had learned that the Brits don't seem to understand how to make reliable electrical systems in vehicles. The BAC had a little more electrical control of its systems than similar planes of its era. For example the DC-9 used cable and pulley systems much more. (Old airline joke: Why was Douglas not more involved in the space program? They didn't have a cable long enough to reach to the moon.) The BAC (pronounced bock) planes that we bought from USAir and British Aerospace had lots of hours and lots of cycles on them. The wiring was old and things were always shorting out and it was too expensive to simply rewire the planes. What I'm saying is that there were lots of mechanical problems to go into the logbook and we had been flying the planes for years and knew all the deficiencies. Writing every little deficiency in the logbook requires that a mechanic must deal with the write-ups This means that it must be cleared by either fixing it or deferring it under the Minimum Equipment List (MEL). OK, I guess this is going to open a whole new can of worms for the white knuckle flyers. Airplanes are designed with lots of redundancy. Two engines, two generators, so and and so forth. Some of these components can be deferred, to be fixed at some later time and to allow the plane to complete its schedule. For example, with an engine driven generator inoperative on the BAC, you could keep the APU running inflight and use its generator. If that became inoperative, you had to have one of them fixed. It's all covered in a very complex and elaborate manual on the plane. All of this takes time and causes delays. The daily schedule of an airline is tight and complex. After deregulation, they began to operate hub and spoke systems. A large fleet of their planes arrive at nearly the same time at one of the hub airports, then passengers do a big ant pile thing in the terminal, get on another plane and continue on to their ultimate destination. (I just scared the white knuckle crowd again with those words.) This collection of planes at the hub is called a bank. When a significant number of planes in the bank have mechanical deficiencies to deal with, the mechanics are overwhelmed. It takes less time to defer them, so the planes are sent out with less redundancy than they came in with. Then, when they get to an airport on one of the spokes, a loss of a now essential component can shut down the operation of that plane for a while. This all causes delays and cancellations and costs the airline money. It also hurts their reputation and bottom line. That is why the advertising by the pilots group can be effective. Savvy travelers know that when they see such advertising, there will probably be delays with that airline and it would be wise to book flights with the competition. Another example is the way we fly the plane. Our manuals and all of our training have us fly a squared off approach pattern to the runway. When weather permits and we are in a normal operating mode, we accept visual approaches, which take responsibility for traffic separation from the controllers and give it to the pilots. The shape of the approach pattern can be modified from the long, squared off patterns we are trained to fly and make the traffic situation at the busy airport operate more efficiently. When we don't accept the visual approaches, things are slowed and traffic can back up. That is a trap the airlines set for themselves, because they try to schedule too many planes to arrive at or depart from an airport at the same time. The limiting factor is the number of runways that can be used. Then you have more than one airline using an airport as a hub and they also try to schedule all their flights at the same time. It is a marketing thing, but it creates traffic problems. My friend, Warren, was now the BAC 1-11 chief pilot for Orlando with Braniff 2. He told me that he had attended a meeting of all the top pilots of the airline about the issues that were being created during the contract negotiations. He said that he explained to the others that the pilots were nihilistic. He liked using words like that, but he was probably right. Our attitude was, 'If we don't get ours, you don't get yours'. Our parent company, Dalfort, was trying to raise $100 million in some Wall Street deal, claiming they were going to use it to expand the airline. They had started leasing new Airbus 320s and looking like things would be upgraded. The company bought a big new home for Fibber McGee in Orlando. We were not going to let all that happen, if we were not brought along for the ride. The Branflakes were especially on fire about all this, because we felt we had been screwed by both the company and the Braniff pilot group.
Because of our old call sign, Flexair and we always abbreviated it to Flex, the Braniff folks called us Bran Flakes. We thought it was funny too. Some times you have to have a sense of humor in this bidness. Soon after the merger, it was announced that Braniff, Inc. was being sold. For the first five years after the reorganization, Dalfort, the parent company had been owned by the Pritzker family. They owned the Hyatt Hotel chain. We got to stay at Hyatt hotels on our layovers in cities where they were available. This was a definite upgrade from the Florida Express days. One of the Braniff captains had told me the Pritzkers became involved in reorganizing Braniff and restarting the airline for tax purposes. I am not an expert on this, but at the time, there was an advantage for them to own the airline for 5 years, then it ended. We were approaching 5 years since the rebirth of the airline. Part of the tax situation required that the airline did not make much profit. For 4 of the 5 years, it just broke even, paying its own way, but not really being profitable. There was that exceptional year, when United went on strike and Braniff couldn't help itself, it did very well. At any rate, the Pritzkers had helped the Braniff employees get the company back on its feet, it had established itself with a small hub in Orlando and it was moving its major hub from Dallas to Kansas City. It was now time for them to move on. The buyer was Jeffrey Chodorow. If you follow that hyperlink, you will get a little preview into where we are headed here. Chodorow had a reputation of being someone who bought businesses in distress, sucked out all the valuable assets, then dumped the company, including its investors and employees. At least, that is what was going around at this time among the employees. He was kind of a mini Frank Lorenzo. There was a lot of that going on in the airline industry at that time.
In 1987, my old employer, USAir, acquired Piedmont Airlines. USAir top management survived, Piedmont top management moved to Orlando as the new managers of Braniff, Inc. The new CEO was William McGee, who had "retired" from Piedmont in 1988. If you follow the hyperlink on his name, you will see that his obituary there does not mention his association with Braniff, Inc. Not his proudest moment, I guess. Mr. McGee came around for a meet and greet with the employees in the crew room in Orlando. I was standing there in the front row, close enough to touch him, when I mentioned the rumored history of the new owners and asked him point blank if we were in for a similar treatment. He said, "Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah." It wasn't long before we started calling him Fibber McGee. (You gotta be a real geezer to make that connection. We did not own a TV in our house, until I was 10.)
I hope my fellow airline employees don't spit on the picture of Francisco when they see this. It might mess up their computers.
In order to become a part of Braniff Inc., our pilots all had to take a pay cut. Braniff was flying 727s and we were flying smaller BAC 1-11s. Most airline pay scales are weight based, the bigger the plane, the more the pilot pay. We had been making more than the Braniff II pilots. Braniff employees were very loyal to the company. That was obvious immediately. They all talked about the glory days, before their first bankruptcy. They had 747s and Concordes in a system of both domestic and international flying. They all referred frequently to the "Flying Colors" days of varied, but colorful paint jobs on their planes.
Under Braniff Inc., the colors were more standard and uniform.
The employees were friendly toward the former Florida Express employees, in my experience. The pilots tried to get our pilots involved in the activities of the union, Airline Pilots Association (ALPA). I became a member of the safety committee and the accident investigation committee. I attended classes provided from ALPA national on accident investigation and met some legendary pilots. I attended an annual ALPA safety forum in Washington DC. The other members of the committees were very welcoming to me. It was kind of fun to fly with some of the Braniff flight attendants. We had been accustomed to mostly younger flight attendants, who had zero flying experience, but now we were literally flying with grannies. No problem, just noticeably different. One night, in the middle of a big goat rope involving major changes in our schedule, the first officer and I were in a huddle with our new flight attendants. They both appeared to be significantly older than me. The senior flight attendant addressed me as "Sweepea". I laughed and said, "Captain Sweepea". We all got a good chuckle from that one. That was one of the things I liked about the flight attendants who could hang around for years. They were all usually easy to get along with and had a good sense of humor. Just to prove a point, I will tell you about a guy I used to fly with a lot, named Dennis. He had been an undertaker and we called him "Digger". When we were on a longer flight and one of the flight attendants came to the cockpit to check on us, I always told a joke about Digger. He usually just smiled and shook his head when he knew it was coming. I explained why we called him Digger and told about a day on which the funeral home had two men who were in the place for the first visitation at the same time. The widows were there for a last minute check, when they noticed that Digger had gotten their suits on the wrong bodies. They were very upset and Digger tried to calm them and told them he would make everything right. He asked them to leave while he did his thing. Time was short, but when the doors opened a few minutes later, the suits were on the correct corpses. At this point, I would ask the FAs if they knew how he had done it. They always said no. I waited for the proper joke timing and said, "He swapped heads".
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