Flying Whales

Whales

The UPS 747 simulator was in Dallas.  After ground school, I flew down there for training.  I met a guy named Geary Chancey, who was going to be the flight engineer for my simulator training.  We became great friends immediately.  He was a former Marine Corp pilot and had just finished training himself.

I flew all my Initial Operating Experience flying on domestic flights to Dallas or Portland.  The final flight of IOE was to Honolulu, Hawaii and I was told this was going to be my over water training leg.  The instructor/check airman was Rick Barr, who would eventually be the top management pilot at UPS.  

This was close to the end of my first, probationary year at UPS and I was due for a TLA.  During the company indoctrination classes, we had been told about TLAs.  That stands for Talk, Listen, Act.  I was going to get a chance to Talk, UPS would listen and then Act on what I said if they thought what I told them was a good idea.

They claimed that they understood that we all came from varied backgrounds that they wanted us to infuse new blood into this old company.  We were supposed to observe the company during our probationary year and then point out areas where we thought they may be able to improve.  SMH.

At the time, I took this seriously and thought long and hard about what I could bring to that conversation, that could not be brought by every other pilot.  I concluded that it was my training in the Army as an instructor and my experience in aviation as a general aviation flight instructor, flight engineer simulator and ground school instructor, airline ground school instructor and airline check airman.  Especially important were the Army classes on instructing.  I always thought they were excellent.

In observing instruction at UPS, I came to the same conclusion that I had come to at all those levels of aviation instruction.  People are put into instructor positions mostly because they know aviation, but not because they know instructing.  They make lots of mistakes as instructors.

For example, the Army classes taught me that when you are pointing to a chalk board or other exhibit, be careful to do it so that you can face the class.  If you turn toward the wall, the people in the back of the room may not be able to hear you.  I witnessed such an event in my DC-8 ground school, pointed it out to the instructor and he told me to sit in the front row.  Unacceptable. 

Management pilots would frequently use TLAs as an excuse to buy dinner or drinks for line pilots and put it on their expense accounts.  Therefore, I had a grand total of 3 TLAs during my first year.

The first was in Cologne Germany, the day after a manager had grabbed the lion's share of a bar tab and realized what he had done next day.  We all took a walk along the Rhein River and made a stop at a cafe, during which he asked us what we were expecting in the upcoming contract negotiations.  I didn't think he should be asking us that kind of stuff and I sure as hell didn't think my fellow pilots should be answering that, but they did.  One idiot even said his brother in law, who was an accountant, thought we already made too much.  That is ridiculous, because we were at the bottom of the airline industry at that time.  For some reason, we all got up and left before I had a chance to say my piece on that and that is a good thing.  I would have pissed off the other pilots and might have gotten myself fired.

Another TLA was in Denver, when a manager wanted to buy the crew dinner.  Then the final was with Rick Barr at lunch in Honolulu during a torrential rain storm.

At all 3, I explained that I thought it might be a good idea to send all of our instructors to a class similar to the ones I attended at the Non Commissioned Officer Academy at Ft. Knox, or to hire an instructor from there who was retiring from the Army.  All 3 of the managers told my they thought my idea was great, that it was one of the most original suggestions they had heard and the all took lots of notes. I retired from UPS more than 20 years later and they never created a class for their instructors.  Oh, well.  That should tell you a lot.  As I told you, Rick Barr became the highest ranking management pilot at UPS and the other guy, Doug Ward, became the chief pilot of the eastern US and Europe.  These were guys who could have gotten things done, but they didn't.
   

While all this was going on, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. UPS was part of CRAF and the entire 747 fleet was dedicated to flying supplies to the desert nations from which the counter attack would be made. 

My very first trip after being released to the line was to deadhead to Shannon Ireland on passenger airlines, wait for a 747 inbound from Navy Norfolk and then fly it to Naval Air Station Sigonella, then on to Rome.  I was scheduled to fly from Louisville to JFK airport in New York on USAir, then on to Shannon on Are Lingus.  At the gate in Louisville, I met the captain and flight engineer.  We were told by the agents at the gate that the flight would be departing 90 minutes late, because of a delay involving an inbound crew.

The captain was Ernie Medina (not that Ernest Medina) and the engineer was Clark Palmer.  We had never met before, Clark was a new hire and Ernie was one of the most meticulous pilots I have ever flown with, almost too meticulous.

We took some seats and do what all UPS pilots do when they get a chance to talk.  We bitched about the company.  When we thought it was getting close to time to start boarding, we went to the gate podium and were told that the flight had been announced, boarded and it departed.  We were astounded.  How had we missed all that? I guess we were so involved in our gripe session, we were oblivious to what was happening around us.

Ernie was very upset and nervous.  He was always careful to avoid opportunities to screw up like this.  The agents told us they had a flight departing soon for Laguardia airport and they could get us on it.  Our bags were on the JFK flight, but we could get them after we used ground transportation between the airports.  This could all be done, but it was going to be tight and stressful.

At Laguardia, we got a cab and got stuck in New York City traffic.  Ernie was very up tight.  We developed a plan for 2 of us to find the baggage carousel with our stuff and one of us to go to the Aer Lingus gate and try to prevail upon them to delay the flight, if necessary.  We finally got to JFK, Clark and I rounded up our stuff and did the OJ run through the terminal deal, only to learn that the Aer Lingus flight was delayed.  Our stress levels went down and we had an enjoyable flight across the Atlantic. 

We stayed at a little hotel near the airport in Limerick and I looked up Cleary in the phone book.  There were lots of them. It was almost like Smith or Jones in the US.  I didn't sleep well.

When we went to the airport, it was raining.  We met the plane, being flown in by me future pal, Aaron Gould, who reminds me of a cross between Ving Rhames and Carl Weathers.  When we got going, I had my first experience trying to understand foreign air traffic controllers speaking in English, which is the international language of aviation.

Being a newby, I was far behind the airplane again.  There were some differences in the way arrivals and departures were built in the charts and Ernie was working over time to keep me up to speed.  This was the first, but not the last time I felt great respect for our international captains, who could take a huge airplane and two guys who did not yet know how to do their jobs, and literally go anywhere in the world.  I had years of experience being a captain in my own country, but this was a totally new game.

We stayed in Rome for several days.  Rome was a staging airport for UPS to fly its planes into the desert.  Those countries did not want the planes and crews laying over there (I was told it was because of limited ramp space), so as soon as the plane was unloaded and refueled, it was flown back to Rome, then back to the US for another load.  Since the planes were empty, we could load them up with fuel and make it from Rome to Louisville.  The international identifier for Louisville Standiford Airport is KSDF and many of the European enroute controllers had never seen that as a destination before.  One asked me where it was.  I said Louisville Kentucky, but he did not seem to understand or know where that was.  I said Kentucky Derby.  He got it.

As we began the process of going out over the ocean on the way back, it became painfully apparent that I did not know what I was supposed to do.  Ernie had to give me a quick class.  I was to learn a year later, that my trip to Honolulu did not qualify me to fly the North Atlantic or the North Pacific.  Training on the Atlantic would have qualified for the other two, because it was the most difficult, but neither of the others worked for the North Atlantic.  When the records people learned of the mistake, they had me take a test to prove I knew the Atlantic procedures.  By that point, I had been flying it many times and it was no problem.  The test was a CYA for UPS.

Back In The Ville

So, I've come full circle with this story, geographically.  It began on a flight to Louisville in 1966 and I was back 24 years later.  It  was purely a coincidence, but an interesting one. 

Louisville is a beautiful place in the spring and spring occurs a month or more before it does in Pittsburgh.  The Kentucky Derby is held on the first Saturday of May.  There is a weeks long celebration leading up to it with parades, airshows and fireworks.

We were spending time getting our kids set up in the schools they would be attending.  Both Caitlin and Mike tested well enough to be in the advanced programs.

At work, I was getting better at my job and it was fun to experience flying as an engineer, after the time I had spent training engineers several years ago.  Flight engineers are most busy from the time they report for duty, until the airplane levels off at the top of climb. If there is any kind of hiccup in the engineer's duties, the flight will depart late.  The part I hated most was calculating the speeds and power settings for takeoff, climb and cruise.  The method involved interpolating from tables and charts and had many opportunities for error.

They look something like this.

Approaching the end of my probationary first year, I received a letter to interview with United Airlines.  Doreen was very happy.  She had been seeing me get up in the middle of the night to go to work and come back home in the middle of the night and wanted me to work for a passenger airline, with a more normal schedule.  To make a long story short, we were trying to figure a way to make that possible.

We were going to have to rent an apartment, less expensive than the house.  We were already in more debt than we had ever been, except for the mortgage and this was just to try to keep up with necessary expenses.  I was finishing the first year with low pay at UPS and would be facing another first year of low pay at United.  We weren't sure exactly how we were going to do it, but we were going to do it.  It felt like running toward a wall with an opening that we could not fit through, but we were going to try to hit it hard and crash our way through.  It was a troubling time.

I had to make it through the United interview process with all the troubles that were facing us on my mind.  I don't know if I have an objective view of that, but I felt as if I did well.  When it was done, we just had to wait for the result.

Finally a letter arrived.  I opened it and read that they had decided not to hire me.  I have to admit, that the first thing I felt was relief.  All options were now gone and I had to stay at UPS and make the best of it.  The second year at United would have had a big pay raise and with what we knew about both pay scales and all other circumstances at that time, United would have been a far better career, but I just didn't know how we could get through that first year.  The second consecutive year of low pay, with commuting would have been very traumatic for our little family.

Soon after this, I had an opportunity to upgrade to first officer, copilot, a window seat again.  Conventional wisdom says to not go into training again during your probationary year.  It is not considered wise to expose yourself to another opportunity to fail a check ride, when you can be fired without cause and do not fall under the protection of the union.  I was not worried about that.

I could have bid the DC-8 or the 747-100.  I chose the 747.  I knew more about the way the different planes were scheduled now and thought I would be on reserve as a junior first office on either.  UPS owned many 8s, but many fewer 74s.  The 74s flew long distance, trunk routes.  The 8s flew just about everything.  They were a versatile plane and could fly internationally or domestically.  

Because of all that, I thought reserve on the 747 would be easier.  Besides that, I liked the idea of flying the Whale.

The Far East

I was moving up the UPS seniority list rapidly.  Pilots senior to me were leaving for other jobs at a rapid pace.   They were not used to being treated the way they were at UPS.  The manager to pilot ratio was much higher than traditional airlines.  The fact is, pilots don't require much management.  You train them how to do their job and give them their schedule and send them off around the world.  No one needs to sit over them, making sure they do their job.  You know they have been successful when the plane arrives at the correct destination.  Nothing to it, from a management stand point.  We had so many of them hanging around, that they felt they had to do some managin'.  They were mostly a pain in the ass.

It did not take long before I was able to hold a "line of time", which means I would know in advance what my schedule was, instead of being on call around the clock.  We had a 3 month big period.  Most airlines bid for schedule every month.  There are pros and cons both ways.  If you do it monthly, you are bidding 12 times a year.  If you have a 3 month big period, you only have to bid 4 times a year, but the problem is, you are compromising the days off you want.  Let's say you have a child with a birthday in January and a wife with a birthday in February and you can't find a line you can hold with your seniority that gives you both dates off.  You have issues.  I didn't like it.  I would rather bid more frequently.  We usually had lots of time while flying or hanging around a hotel to do it and it gave you much more flexibility.  Three month bids helped the company with long term planning, but screwed up the pilots' long term planning.

The first crew I flew with was kind of memorable.  The first officer was a great guy, Curt.  The captain was an asshole.  I was a new guy, still trying to hang on with both hands.  The old saying about that is that I was 10 miles behind the airplane, which is a good thing, I guess, if the asshole wrecked it.  But he didn't give me any slack and was always pointing out my short comings.  He was also very non-standard.  He would call for a checklist that I was supposed to read and then the appropriate crew member would call the response as they assured the item was complete.  Captain A. Hole would immediately start calling all the checklist items from memory and then giving the response.  I guess he wanted to speed things up.  This made me feel like I was another 5 or 6 miles behind the plane.  Frequently, there were issues with some of the systems on the plane and when I brought them to his attention, he would tell me to do some non standard crapola procedure that wasn't in the book.  It usually solved the problem, but I was even farther behind.  It was going to be a long 3 months.

I don't remember how long it took me to get pissed off, but despite the fact that I was on probation, I finally decided to speak up.  One night, when I finally had gotten all my duties up to speed and we had time to wait, I looked at him and told him I was very impressed with his ability to memorize the checklist and recite it, but that was not the way it was supposed to be done.  I was new at this and had been feeling behind the curve and we needed to slow things down, so that I was satisfied that things were being done properly and that I was learning how to do my job, instead of just feeling like I was along for the ride.  He looked at me and said, "OK".  That was it.  But he still jumped all over my many mistakes.

Later in our bid period, Curt was not flying with us for some reason.  We had a guest first officer named Arnold.  The captain, whose name was Jeff, looked very seriously at Arnold and gave him this big speech about how he and I had been flying together for a long time and our normal FO, Curt, was not with us this time and Arnold was sitting in for him.  He said we had a certain way of doing things and we had one boss on this airplane and one boss only and it is him.  He was pointing at me.  I had to laugh at that one.

Even later in the bid period, Curt was back and we were at the end of a long night descending into Omaha Nebraska.  We were all tired, our brains were numb and our eyeballs were hanging down on our cheeks.  (Not really, I am just kidding, yo.)  We were cleared for a visual approach to one of the parallel runways 32 and Jeff was lining up with runway 36.  Curt didn't catch it either.  The only person on that plane who knew what was happening was that dumass, rookie plumber.  I said, "Hey, Jeff, that's the wrong runway".  He sat up straight, saw that I was correct and manuevered to land on the correct runway.  He thanked me.  I laughed out loud and said, "You live by the sword, you die by the sword.  If you ever give me shit about my mistakes again, I will tell everyone about the time I saved your ass from landing on the wrong runway".  That still brings a smile to my face.  (I have a friend who is still flying, who will not fly with Jeff, for all the same reasons I hated doing so.  My friend is a nice guy, not as obnoxious as I am.)

I began to get the feel for the job and later that year, I picked up a trip in open time, that was flying from Anchorage Alaska to Tokyo Japan.  I rode a DC-8 jump seat to Anchorage and wen to the hotel with the crew.  

The captain was a young guy, but he was very senior in the company.  His name was Dan and we got along very well.  We were going to be flying a load of cherries from the West Coast to Japan.  I was told that the Japanese love cherries and buy all the cherries they can from the US.  A plane load of cherries weighs 80,000 lbs.  We were fueled with 90,000 lbs. of kerosene to fly them there.  Our plane would be at its maximum allowable gross take off weight.  This would be the only time I had seen an 8 loaded that heavily.

As young as he was, Dan was an experienced DC-8 pilot.  We took off toward the Chugach Mountains and then turned to fly out along the Aleutians.  We used much of the runway and were climbing slowly.  It would be about a 7 hour flight, my first international flight with UPS and my first visit to the Far East.

We had a couple UPS employees on board, who were supposed to deal with the people in Japan, because this was a charter flight.  The cockpit was cramped, but they spent most of the flight bundled up in the seats just out side the door, sleeping.  Dan said he liked me, because I was a Florida boy and kept it warm in the cockpit.

We were flying to the Tokyo international airport near Narita.  As we descended through the clouds and I got my first view of Japan, I remember thinking, "We're not in Kansas anymore".  

As we were getting off the plane, Dan was approached by a guy who wanted us to choose our catering for the return flight.  They ignored the UPS dudes who had been sent to take care of this kind of stuff.  Over there, the people have more respect for the captain and pilots in general, than the UPS box heads do.  We went to a hotel with the tiniest rooms I had ever seen.  There wasn't much time to do any sight seeing, before we had to report for the return flight.

When the catering began to show up, Dan was laughing.  He told me he had ordered all kinds of expensive sushi and other stuff and that the company would probably be pissed when they got the bill.  I was not a big fan of sushi at that time, but there was so much to eat, that I did not go hungry.  I did try some smoked salmon and liked that a lot.  The UPS dudes slept all the way back.  They had done some sight seeing while we slept in our tiny hotel rooms.

Plumbing

I had a flight engineer rating and had been a simulator instructor for a year in Atlanta.  (I'm sure you remember that, eh?)  Now I was actually going to get a chance to fly the line as a "plumber".  I was kind of looking forward to that.  At this point, it was nice to have something to look forward to. 

After the indoctrination classes, we had a little break and I was able to jump seat home for a few days.  I wanted to drive my pickup to Louisville, so I had a way to get around.  Lou was another member of my class.  He lived in Orlando and had worked for Braniff also.  He had worked for Braniff Int., but had refused the recall to Braniff II, because he had started a little business in the interim and did not want to commute to Dallas.  He had applied to Florida Express, but not been hired, mostly because of a misunderstanding.  Then, when Braniff bought Florida Express, Lou was hired by them and came back on the seniority list below all the Florida Express pilots.  I invited Lou to drive to Louisville with me and then we went into a "crash pad" together with a couple other guys.  Crash pad is what we call a house or apartment where several pilots have a room to stay in when they are not flying, but can't get home.  We had a nice apartment.

Commuting to a job like this is a possibility and Doreen and I considered moving to Pittsburgh, our home.  We started looking for a small house, while visiting my parents.  The more I thought about the expense of buying a house and keeping a crash pad in Louisville, the more I felt that it was smarter to move to Louisville.  Doreen and I had some disagreement on this, but I thought it was a much better idea.

Once I started earning some money, I started paying Grandma Ann's utilities and taxes.  I felt better not being a complete mooch.

In Louisville, some of my friends had been buying houses, using a real estate agent named Dave.  I met Dave and we started looking for a house.  As he got to know me and understand our situtaion better, he told me he thought I should not be buying a house, but renting one and waiting until I could save for a decent down payment.  We had broken even on our Orlando home and had not been in it long enough to build up equity.  Dave helped me find a home to rent, which I thought was very generous.  He was not going to be making any money for his time.  He was betting that I would come to him when I could afford to buy.

Now I had to figure out an inexpensive way to move.  My old pal, Dan, from the Butler Graham days, had been building a trucking company after he was hired at USAir.  When I told him of my dilemma, he offered to have one of his trucks stop at the house in Orlando with some space saved for our stuff, then drive it to our house in Louisville.  I got some friends to help with the move in Orlando, then got some guys to help in Louisville.  This was in May 1990, and we got the stuff in the house just in time to go into the basement, because of a tornado warning.  We did not have any problems at the house, but there was damage to the building at the UPS Training Center.

https://goo.gl/maps/hdrEUb9jt732



So, I was going to be spending some time in this building.  First there was ground school, in which all the academics of learning the DC-8 systems took place.   Then came the simulator.  It looks just like the cockpit of the airplane and it can be "flown" by pilots, while the engineer is sitting in front of the panel that controls all the systems.  The instructor then pushes buttons and tortures the student with all the abnormalities and emergencies that can occur in the airplane.  After the curriculum is complete and if the instructor chooses to recommend the student, a simulator check ride is scheduled.  After that, the student begins Initial Operating Experience (IOE).  This is training on an actual revenue flight, with an IOE instructor.  In my opinion, the worst part of being a flight engineer is calculating all the performance data for each phase of flight.  We had to use charts in our manual and on the table top of a little desk at the panel.  This table was under a piece of plexi glass and the lighting was terrible.  This is the first time I felt that I needed to start wearing glasses.  I was starting to become a little far sighted and went to a drug store to buy a pair of magnifying eye glasses.

With successful completion of the IOE curriculum, a release to line check ride is scheduled.  If that is passed, the student is now prepared to fly the line, or at least, that is the plan.  I managed to get through all of that unscathed and was on reserve, which meant I had to hang out at the crash pad and wait to be called to work.

The toughest part of flying for UPS, is that most of the flying is done at night.  UPS is a package delivery company.  It began in Seattle in about 1907.  In 1971, Federal Express came along and revolutionized the package delivery company, by promising to deliver them overnight.  This is how airplanes became such a big part of the business.  FedEx, as it is called now, flew to nearly every city in the US, then ran a hub and spoke system out of Memphis Tennessee. UPS developed its airline to compete.

This meant there was a whole lot of night time flying going on out there and I was now a part of it.  At the time I started working at UPS, reserve was a 24 hour deal.  I could be called at any time and was responsible to be available for contact.  The UPS pilots had a very lousy contract.  When the operation began, the pilots were represented by the Teamsters, the same union that represented the truck drivers.  The pilots who negotiated the contact did not know what they were doing and I think they felt they were over a barrel.  

Things were so bad, that during the first year, 1988, several of the pilots began the steps that would lead to forming their own union, The Independent Pilots Association (IPA).  This was a very risky enterprise.  They had to pass out cards to all the pilots to get them to turn them in, saying they wanted to change representation.  This has to be done secretly, or they run the risk of being fired.  They may get their jobs back, but they have to sweat out the process, not knowing for sure how things will go.  

By the time I showed up, all the heavy lifting had been completed, and the IPA began to represent the UPS pilots in January, 1990, while I was in training.  Of course, I would not be part of that, until I completed my first year on probation.

Freight Nazis

I might have understated the difficulty of being out of work and not knowing if I would ever get another flying job.  I guess I try to forget bad times like that and I think most pilots have the "no sweat"  attitude of down playing the challenges they face.

I remember thinking about the impact all of this could have on my family.  Stress levels were as high as they could be and we had to work very hard to get on the same page.  I thought about the possible difference in my kid's future, if I didn't get back on the pilot track.  What would I do?  I was 44 years old and had never been good at anything else and never wanted to do anything else for the rest of my life.  I did not have a college degree and it felt way too late to start down that path.  

I had the responsibility of 3 other people.  If I had been single, I could have slept on someone's couch and taken a job as a flight instructor.  But, now I needed to achieve a level of income to support the four of us.  My confidence was seriously shaken.

As I said before, I was moping around with a dark cloud over my head for the 3 months of my unemployment.  When I went to the UPS interviews, I took advantage of my learned ability to compartmentalize challenging issues and focus on the problem at hand.  I knew I had to do my best and I felt good after all the interviews.  

Normally, getting a job flying airplanes for a financially solid company, like UPS, would be reason to celebrate, especially after having worked for three shaky, new entry airlines, all of which had collapsed into financial disaster.  UPS had very deep pockets.  If this employer went broke, I would know that I was the problem.

However, there were still lots of dark clouds following me around.  I would be taking a large pay cut at UPS, not just for the first year, but for many years to come.  When looking at the pay section of the contract with the pilot group, you could see that getting back to the income level I had enjoyed at Braniff, let alone Florida Express (remember, we had taken a pay cut when Braniff took over) was going to be a slow climb.  The best possibility was upgrading  but that was a giant unknown.  It depended on UPS's decisions to grow the airline.  I had certain financial responsibilities that could not be mitigated.  Selling the house had taken care of the biggest one, but we still needed a place to live.  Doreen and the kids could not fit on the couch with me.  We are forever grateful for Grandma Ann and the plan was for me to commute to Louisville, while the family stayed with her.

We supplemented my income by using credit cards and were unable to pay the total amount off each month, so we were accumulating high interest debt at very high rates.  At the end of my first year, we had more than $10,000 in credit card debt and I went to the two credit unions I had been doing business with.  One of them, the USAir Federal Credit Union, had been my checking account for almost 10 years.  I tried to borrow $10,000 from each credit union and they would not lend me the money, because my income was so low.

I rode to Louisville with Russ, a young Florida Express guy I had flown with many times, who was also in my new hire class.  He had been notified that he was hired before I was, but I was the oldest in our class, so I was the most senior member.  Russ never got over that and still whines about it, but we had fun on our drive.  

We were going to be flight engineers on the DC-8.  The 8, Douglasaurus or the Diesel, was an old plane, even at that time, but the ones we flew had been modified with newer technology engines to make them more powerful, quieter and more fuel efficient.  UPS loved them and so did all the pilots who had flown them before.  It is a relatively uncomplicated, strong and reliable jet, that can carry lots of stuff and go a long distance.

We started class with a company indoctrination.  UPS had been running its own flight operation for almost 2 years.  Prior to that, they had used several contractors to provide pilots to fly their planes, but the FAA wanted the owner to be the certificate holder.  UPS was learning about pilots and pilots were learning about UPS. Frequently, things did not go smoothly.  UPS was known as the Freight Nazis.  They had a reputation of being difficult to work for.  

I started hearing lots of stories about some of the stuff they had tried to pull.  For a new hire, on probation, this is not a good situation.  Personally, I had always tried to establish a policy of not forming an opinion about a person or company or any entity, based on the opinion of someone else.  I didn't want to show disrespect to the pilots who were telling me the stories, but I didn't want to put a chip on my shoulder toward this employer.  I needed this freaking job, bad as it was, and I also had bigger fish to fry at this time.  

Just for a few examples, UPS likes to promote from within and they were thinking about trying to make their truck drivers pilots capable of flying large jet airplanes all over the world.  They just did not have a clue.  When they broke the code on that one and had to actually hire pilots from the outside, they were not easily able to deal with the facts that these pilots, who actually had the experience to do that, were not going to be easy to push around.  These were people who had flown planes in combat, they were former colonels and generals.  They were people like me, who had other military experience and had been airline captains for years.  We knew the regulations and UPS hated when we put a wrench in their wheels with the regs.  

UPS gave a class in their indoctrination that stopped just short of calling all of us thieves.  One of the stories from those who had preceded me there was that they actually did call them thieves in the earlier classes.  I always said, "I hear what you are saying and respect that, but I have to give them at least one chance to hose me before I get pissed off at them." 

Another thing about UPS, was that they were accustomed to having long term employees.  Most people suffered through the abuse, especially in management positions, because they had a great retirement plan.  They paid less for comparable positions, but the managers were given and could purchase large blocks of company stock, to be sold at retirement for big money.  The stock at that time was private, so the company manipulated it to keep the reward at the end as high as possible.  When they started reviewing the resumes of pilots who were actually available to come to work for them, they were seeing resumes like mine, with 6 employers in 16 years.  In their way of seeing things, this was an indication of a bad employee, who could not hold a job.  If you have been reading this from the beginning, you know the situation.  Airline deregulation, company bankruptcies and many other issues had caused many of us to be "bounce arounds".  Prior to deregulation, getting hired by one of the legacy airlines was like dying and going to heaven.  Afterwards, you did not know if you had made the right choice in airlines until retirement and in some cases, not even then.

Good Santa

So, I'm staying at Weber's house in Mogadore Ohio and flying an old Aztec a little for him.  It was great to be doing at least some flying. It was therapeutic for me.  Jim was asking me why I wanted to get back into airline flying, after it had bitten me so hard a couple times.  I don't know if I had a convincing answer for him at the time, but on reflection, I guess it was just because I didn't want to admit defeat and was going to give it one more try.

Back in the days when I was flying with him, Twirly and BS, I came in with this big talk about going to work for the airlines.  Although these guys never came right out and said so, I got the impression they thought it was a pipe dream for me and never even worth the effort to try with the airlines for any of us.  Then Dan came to work there and because his dad already worked for Allegheny Airlines, which became USAir, he was talking about eventually "burning oil", jet fuel, kerosene, instead of aviation gas. Getting an airline job.  It helped me focus on doing the same myself.  It had always been my goal, from my very first lesson in a Cessna 150 and I was not ready to give it up.  Corporate flying jobs were just as risky as airline jobs had become.  Any kind of change in top management in a company could mean that the airplane would be sold and the pilots are on the street.  Badda boom, badda bing.  It's all a risky proposition.

I wasn't hearing from anyone else, so I was really pinning lots of hope on the UPS situation.  That girl was getting prettier and prettier, kind of like they do at 2 AM in a bar.

I would call Doreen at Grandma Ann's as much as we could afford and she would tell me what cool stuff I was missing with the kids.  They were at great ages, Caitlin was 6 and Mike was 4.  I remembered some of the cool stuff that had happened when I was home.

Mike had gotten a toy that was supposed to be an ice cream stand.  I asked him what kind of ice cream he had.  He told me all the regular stuff, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry.  He said he had invented a new flavor.  I asked him what he called it.  He gave me this little Mikey smile and said, "Ogee gogee."  We had a good laugh about that one.  You had to be there.

Caitlin was a good big sister.  Mike had a friend across the street from the house we sold, Jeffrey, who was a little bigger and kind of pushy sometimes.  Caitlin had stepped in and straightened this kid out many times and come to Mike's defense.  "That will be enough of that, Jeffrey."  One time, at Grandma Ann's, Doreen had picked up Jeffrey and brought him over to play.  They were playing with some kind of zip line deal in the back yard and Jeff wouldn't let Mike use it.  Mike had finally had enough of that shit and he whacked Jeff a good one.  They all three took off running around the house and by the time they got to the front, they were all pals again, as if nothing had happened. 

All three of the kids were on a soccer team.  I always liked watching their games.  They looked like a bee swarm as all the kids ran together after the ball.  Jeffrey lost interest and was just standing in the middle of the field looking at a dandelion flower as the swarm buzzed all over the field.  When he reached his hand inside his shorts and started manipulating his unit, his mom noticed and shouted for all to hear, "Jeffrey, stop that.  Chase the ball."

Our entire family was in a little nearby pizza shop once and there was a juke box.  Doreen was putting quarters in it and suddenly Mike jumped out of our booth and started dancing in the aisle.  Caitlin was so embarrassed, she tried to crawl under the table.  It was a dance no one had ever seen before and we called it the Pizza Charlie.

Once Caitlin, Mike and I were driving back home from someplace in my Ford F-150 and I suggested stopping at a little lake to see an alligator that was supposed to be living there.  As I pulled into the parking area, Caitlin got scared and started crying and Mike picked up on that and started crying also.  I had to get back on the road.  Kids kind of influence each other that way.

On one call to Doreen from Ohio, she told me she had taken the kids to see Santa at the mall.  After the kids returned to her, Santa beckoned Doreen.  He said, "Is your husband looking for a job?"  She said I was and asked why he wanted to know.  He told her some mall was looking for a Santa and that Mike had asked him for a job for his dad for Christmas.  It still tugs on my heart strings to think that a 4 year old would be that aware and do that.

It wasn't long after that, that I got a call at Weber's from George, a guy who had taken over running the ground school at Florida Express after I got it set up and then went on to UPS in a similar capacity.  He asked me if I had a pair of brown shoes and told me I had a class date at UPS in Louisville on December 27, 1989, about 3 months after I learned Braniff was going bankrupt.  The next year, I asked Mike if he would ask Santa for his dad to win $50 million in the lottery.

Ground Hog Day - Deja vu all over again.

The similarities are still painful to think about, let alone write about.  When Pacific Express went broke, a friend I had been talking to on the phone several times that day called and asked, "Do you know what's going on?"  I thought he was talking about a trip swap he and I had been working with crew scheduling and started blabbing about that.  He interrupted and said that it wasn't that, the company had suspended operation and was having all the crews working that day fly all the planes to Chico CA.  They were filing Chapter 11 under the bankruptcy laws of the country.  It was Groundhog Day, in February 1984.

This time it was a day late in September 1989.  Twirly called me, we talked frequently.  He asked, "Do you know what's going on?"  I knew the answer this time, but it still hit me like a ton of bricks, worse than PacEx.  I was 5 and a half years older now, age 44, really long in the tooth to be searching for an airline job.  We had another child in the family.  We lived in a house that the bank owned and I was paying them a mortgage payment every month.  We had just leased a new Taurus station wagon for Doreen to haul the kids around.

Years of flying airplanes had conditioned me to try to avoid panic.  Start thinking of the worst case scenario and look for ways to mitigate your situation.  As long as you are still moving, you are still OK.  It's the sudden stops that cause all the problems.

ALPA held sessions in which they had people try to advise us what we could do.  Priority number one was to get another job.  They had people explain the process of personal bankruptcy, with all its pitfalls.  They told us about unemployment compensation.  It wasn't much.  I bumped into one of the flight attendants at the office and she was cussing the Braniff management.  Somehow we got into a discussion about what a flexible word fuck was, you could use it as a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.......  

I started calculating bottom line stuff and knew that I had to sell the house.  Even if I got another airline job, the first year pay sucked so much that there was no way I could afford the payments.  Perhaps I could work something out with the bank, explaining my situation and my previous stellar credit situation, but I was not going to do that just yet.  I signed up for unemployment and hated doing so, but I guess my employers and I had been paying into that.  It was a drop in the bucket compared to my financial responsibilities.  I could try to sell the house to make a little or to break even, but I could see no way to get out of the lease on the wagon.  We had a garage sale and sold lots of good stuff for pennies on the dollar.

There were bright spots.  My Aunt Ann Cleary lived in Orlando.  She was the widow of my dad's brother, Gerard "Duke" Cleary, who had been a pilot in the Air Force and was at least a small part of the inspiration for me to be a pilot.  We had established contact with Ann, when we first moved to Orlando.  Her daughter, Char, lived in Cocoa Beach on the east coast of Florida, near Cape Canaveral.  Doreen had helped her with her son, by staying there and watching him, while Char went to nursing school.  My parents sent us what little they could.  My flame ass liberal sister in law did nothing. 

Our kids called Aunt Ann, Grandma Ann.  Doreen's parents had both died before I met her and my parents still lived in Pittsburgh, so the kids saw Grandma Ann more than their own grandparents.  She was at our garage sale and we were talking about what we were going to do after we sold the house (if we sold it).  She said we could stay with her, if there were no other options.  I didn't want to do that, but filed it away.

I was looking into the intricacies of foreclosure and calculated that I had to stop making the mortgage payment, because we needed the money for food, etc.  I was trying to determine how long we could stay in the house before the bank foreclosed.  I called the agent who had sold us the house and we looked into what we needed to do to get it ready to sell.  We decided to paint the exterior.  One of the male flight attendants painted houses on the side, so I hired him to help me paint it.  He was a good friend and gave me the best break he could, but he needed money too.

I did the same thing I had done when PacEx went broke.  I called everyone I knew, especially in the airline industry, and told them the situation and asked if they knew of any jobs.  Everyone wants to help, but some of the advise is just not useful.  I tried to be as polite as I could.  You don't want to burn any bridges at a time like this.  All of my Flex friends were doing the same things I was doing and we were now in competition for the same jobs, so everyone plays their cards close to the vest.  I reviewed and updated my resume and mailed it out to all the airlines.  I knew that I only had two good opportunities to get hired by an airline, United and United Parcel Service.  Those were the ones that did not now require a college degree.  A few of the others did not technically have the requirement, but they did in a practical sense.  It is a way to thin the vast herd of pilots who are trying to get their attention and get a job.  

I started thinking about possibly getting a job with a corporation, flying a company jet.  I began thinking about what I could do to support my family in anything close to the way I had been able to up to this point, if I was unable to come up with another flying job. Working my way to learning that flying was such a perfect occupation for me, made that last part very difficult to contemplate.  I was afraid that I would not be able to put as much of myself into another profession and would end up hating it.  I was now in such a tight crack, that I could not afford the time or money to go back to school.  Just thinking about all this now is making me feel bad.  At that time, it was almost physically painful.

One advantage I had on selling the house, was that I had a GI Bill loan.  This meant that it was an assumable mortgage.  Not to get too deep in the weeds, partly because I don't remember the details, I could have a buyer assume my mortgage.  

The perfect buyer came along.  A real estate agent brought a man and woman to see the house.  He was a dentist and she was his dental assistant.  They were not married.  He had a wife or ex-wife in Puerto Rico.  They had tried to close on another house just days before, putting it in the name of the woman, because Doc did not want his wife to be able to get her hands on it.  The dental hygienist could not qualify for a loan.  Their agent started looking for homes with assumable mortgages and found us.  Our agent explained all this and the risk that was involved.  If they defaulted on the loan, I was responsible.  I was already considering foreclosure, so I felt this was more hopeful than that.  I could always fall back to that position.  Doc was putting $12,000 down, so I felt that would not be easy to walk away from.  If they stayed in the house for a few years before defaulting, I would hopefully be in a position to resume the mortgage and rent or sell the house again.  We closed on the house about a month after we put it on the market.

I had talked to Grandma Ann and said I hoped she was serious when she said we could stay with her for a while.  She said she was.  One of the problems with that was that Caitlin had started school and we would be living in the district of a different school.  We had an older couple, Jim and Helen, living next to us who had kind of adopted our little family.  We were great friends with them. Jim was a retired Naval Aviator, a Captain, and when the school system came snooping around, he told them we were living with them.  Stories like these were keeping me going through a very tough time.

I shot gun blasted resumes and applications to all the airlines and some corporations.  Then had to sit back and wait to see what fell out of the tree.  My old friend, Jim Weber, (Sky King Himself) was managing a Fixed Base Operation at the Akron Canton Airport in Ohio.  He let me come up there to do a little flying for him.  Otherwise, I was just curling up in the fetal position and trying to maintain my sanity.

I got a response from UPS and had my first interview with them in Dallas.  My old friend, Bob, one of the guys who had been twice bitten by Braniff, was there in training.  He had been hired by UPS and was learning to be a flight engineer on the Boeing 747.

He had started the process with UPS after Braniff bought Florida Express and was called for an interview.  He asked if he could postpone the interview, because things were starting to look pretty good at Braniff right after the contract was ratified.  That day, as he was walking in his uniform out the concourse to our gates, he saw that the shut down process had begun.  He immediately recognized it for what it was and made a left turn to a row of pay phones to call UPS and ask if the interview he had just asked to postpone was still available.  They said yes, he took it and was the first of the Branflakes to be hired after the bankruptcy.  He started about a month later.

When Bob heard I was coming to Dallas for an interview, he told me he would be there in a hotel room with an extra bed and that I could stay with him.  When I got there, I told him I was thinking about mentioning to UPS that I had previous airline management experience and trying to explore that possibility with them.  Bob had been a check airman, director of training, chief pilot and director of operations for Florida Express.  He sat me down in that hotel room and spent an hour talking me out of trying to get into management with UPS.  The first and biggest issue was that the management pilots at UPS were not on the seniority list.  They were kept separate from the line pilots.  The assumption for why they do this is that they are being maintained as a scab force in the event the line pilots go on strike.  That was enough for me, but Bob went on to explain that they had so many of them, that they were tripping over each other and were just rearranging the magazines and writing useless bulletins and shit like that.  They wore suits, not sport jackets, Bob emphasized, every day.  He knew me and said I would hate it.  I can't tell you how correct he was.

My thought was that by going into management, I would be able to make more money.  The starting pay for line pilots was much lower, as I have said, but it did not get better for years.  I don't remember exactly how bad it was, but I learned that if I did not upgrade to captain, it would take many years to return to the income I had been earning at Braniff, let alone Florida Express.  But, it was a job and I really needed one.  I took Bob's advice and did not mention the management deal and neither did my interviewer.  Despite my constant state of worry and depression, I felt I did well.  I was soon called for another interview, this time in Louisville.

This time, UPS paid for an airline ticket to Louisville and a hotel room.  I had to go to a doctor's office in downtown Louisville while I was there.  What I remember about that, is that when I came out of the office to the street, some guy approached me for a hand out.  I told him my sad story and that I was there to try to find a job and couldn't afford to take anything away from my family back in Florida.  He just shrugged his shoulders in defeat and walked away.  I didn't feel any better.