CEO of the Cockpit

I was in a tent and it was raining, but at least it was warm. Standing behind a plywood podium in a “forum tent” at a recent Florida Fly-In, I had been invited to give a little talk to the experimental airplane crowd on what airline flying was really like.I was more than a little […]

The employee cafeteria in the ground-training building is a sad place, filled with the forced boisterousness of the indentured student.Facing either a five-day stint for recurrent or the “serious time” of a five-week initial, the diners found in this plastic forked purgatory gather at round, Formica-covered tables festooned with pepper and salt shakers, the current […]

Holiday Inn bars really aren’t so bad if you need a place to spend the afternoon on a long layover. I had gotten into Memphis at noon and didn’t have to leave until the next morning, so sometime around four I gave up on cable TV and found myself in my normal corner booth in […]

The flight to Denver was going well enough. Light chop in the clouds at three-three-oh and only an hour and a half before we got to the front range of the Rockies.Today’s cockpit conversation wasn’t about the ride or the destination, though. It was about next month and our holiday schedules. The line-of-time bid results […]

The warm, carefree days of summer appear to be over as I sit in my 757 pondering the outside conditions as we prepare to yet again to voyage to Schwarzenegger’s lair — Los Angeles Intergalactic Jet Port.”Information Juliet is current,” began Todd, my co-pilot for this four-day hostage crisis. “One thousand overcast, two miles in […]

Neighborhood parties usually aren’t my thing. When it comes to drinking beer in the backyard while dozens of unaccompanied minors are screaming and running around my ankles, I’m not easy to get along with.This neighborhood beer bash had an important difference that made it more fun for me: It wasn’t in my back yard. This […]

It had been a long day and the last thing I needed when I came back up to my layover motel room after dinner was a long talk with my flight bag. It was still up, though, and had something on its mind.Say what you will about luggage, but when your flight bag of the […]

“You should write a book,” said Jenny, our senior flight attendant for today, who was standing behind the center console of our airplane.She was no doubt referring to the fact that so far today not much had gone right and we could fill at least a romance-novel-sized tome about our trials and tribulations up to […]

Three guys are in the cockpit for today’s flight from Los Angeles to the beautiful splendor of Newark, N.J. Normally, having a jump seat rider in the cockpit for such a long flight is a huge pain in the butt. Today, it’s not so bad because the seat is filled with the butt of Jeff, […]

Finally, the long winter has passed, and we pilots are finally able to shed our heavy uniform coats and show up for work in our summer attire — white shirts with epaulettes.The winter uniform coats are great for “experienced, healthy” (meaning chubby) captains like myself, because the formal jacket covers a lot of the results […]