There was no satisfactory way to deal with the time zone problem. Some pilots tried to stay on home time, sleeping in Tokyo when it was bedtime in Connecticut, eating when it was dinnertime back home. But that meant doing everything contrary to the local clock. Where did you find dinner at six in the morning? And who could face the dreariness of being up all night in a sleeping city, locked in a room watching Bonanza reruns in Japanese?
So you dragged your carcass out of bed after three hours of dozing through the jackhammers and went to dinner with your crew. And then you went to bed again. You were so tired you ought to be comatose for eight or more hours, making up the sleep deficit.
Wrong. The body clock wasn’t buying it. At three in the morning you were awake, bone-tired, restless, impatient. Six hours before pickup. So you read and watched the television reruns and thought about nothing in particular. Thirty minutes before your wake-up call, you fell asleep.
Jim Wood used to do this. He stumbled around, packing his stuff and getting himself dressed. He stared at himself in the mirror, not liking what he saw, and he thought: I hate this goddamn job.
And then one day everything changed. He didn’t hate the job anymore.
Sixteen years. Sixteen yessirring, three-striping, pride-swallowing years. That was how long it took Jim Wood to progress to the left seat of a Pan American jet. He was the first of his class of new hires to do so.
It happened all of a sudden. Pan Am’s pilot seniority list, measured by the age of the pilots, looked like a large rat passing through a snake. The list was constricted by an entire generation of pilots, all nearly the same age, hired during and just after World War II. They were the second wave of the Skygods, direct descendants of the Masters of Ocean Flying Boats. When their group reached the captain’s seat, beginning in the early sixties, the top of the seniority list remained plugged for the next decade and a half.
Now, all in a collective gaggle, they were reaching the pumpkin hour of their careers. As each Skygod hit the mandatory retirement age of sixty, the occasion triggered a new captain’s vacancy.
Sixteen years was an unnaturally long apprenticeship. Too long for some, because after that many years of responding to commands, of thinking like an apprentice even when you already had more time in your seat than the captain had in his, it was simply too overwhelming to assume responsibility for the whole show.
Most, like Rob Martinside and Jim Wood and Pat Dryer, laughed about it. The loneliness of command. It was a joke. They made mock-serious statements like “Ah, what a relief to have that burden off my shoulders” when they took off their four-striped coats. “The toughest thing about being a new captain,” observed Don Arneson, “is to keep from grinning all the time.”
But for a few of the longtime new hires, it was very damn lonely. The first officer’s seat had gotten to be a comfortable niche. None of the truly difficult decisions was theirs. In the right seat all they were expected to do was fly, which was something they could do pretty well after this many years. All the deciding, the head-scratching, the worrying was accomplished by the guy in the left seat. And that was just fine with them. Now here they were, forty-some years old, having expected to be a copilot all their lives, and they were suddenly supposed to be a commander. It was like appointing the helmsman of a ship the captain. Steering was one thing; deciding the course of the ship was quite another.
Pat Dryer had no such problem. In the early days of his career, Dryer had been a respectful and polite young first officer. By the seventeenth year of his servitude in the right seat, he was insufferable. He would walk into the operations office, peruse the flight schedule, and inquire, “What asshole am I flying with today?” He had taken to flatly ignoring captain’s orders that he regarded as inane. He would be chewed out by the chief pilot, then go back to his ways. Even the good guys, the easygoing captains, had come to dread flying with Dryer.
And then came the day when Dryer graduated to the left seat. It was a different Dryer. He appeared in the operations office, resplendent in his new regalia. No one had seen him smile for years. Now he was beaming like a Cheshire cat.
“What asshole are you flying with today, Pat?” asked the dispatcher.
Dryer pointed to his chest. “This one.”
The advancement of new captains continued. The old constriction in the seniority list—the fat rat stuck in the snake—had finally worked its way to the exit point. There were almost too many parties for the pilots to attend. Every week contained an agenda of retirement bashes for old captains and wetting-down parties for new ones. Every day someone showed up in a crew room looking like Lord Nelson in his glittering new captain’s outfit. Shiny stripes glinted like veins of gold.
An old airline ritual was revived—cutting off the necktie of a newly promoted captain. In Skygod culture, it amounted to symbolic circumcision. Freshly severed necktie remnants were littering the crew-room floor.
One effect of the new promotions was that the generation gap in the cockpit all but disappeared. No longer were captains white-haired sages who, when so inclined, shared their wisdom with dutiful junior pilots. Now captains and first officers were nearly the same age. Almost all of them—captains, first officers, flight engineers—had been hired between 1965 and l968. All three airmen in the cockpit had similar histories, which made them peers in experience if not in rank.
Given this new equality in the cockpit, it was natural to believe that the day of the Skygodly Master of Ocean Flying Boats was over. After all, the new captains were enlightened, weren’t they? They would never offend their junior crewmembers. They would be fair and generous with their crews. They would be admired and respected by their copilots. They would inspire reverence and, most likely, secret yearning in the hearts of the flight attendants.
All this turned out to be dead wrong. One of the anomalies of airline training is that years of schooling and practice go into learning to fly, but virtually no formal training is given in the nuances of command. Many pilots just happen to be natural leaders. For them the command of an airliner comes easily. A small number happen to be naturally quarrelsome or uncommunicative. For them the management of a cockpit crew is an exercise made in hell.
It was a maxim in airline flying that the most insecure captains were also the most monumental pains in the butt. Those who doubted their own skills were quick to believe that their crew members were trying to kill them. They sat there in lonely trepidation, worrying that disaster was about to strike, snapping at the first officer and imagining that the crew was conspiring against them.
Such a captain was John Demura. Demura’s name always popped up in after-hours debriefings in the layover bars and lounges. As a captain of the new vintage, Demura was already getting himself compared to the most tyrannical of the Skygods.
As a new hire, Demura had slipped through the normal airline screening process—the interviews and background checks and probationary period. For sixteen years he sat there stewing in the right seat, waiting to explode like a land mine.
“Get the London weather,” he would order the copilot right after takeoff in New York.
“But we’ve got six and a half hours to go, John.”
“I know how many hours we have to go. I want the weather now.”
Demura didn’t trust the weather any more than he trusted copilots. Everything, even the elements, was conspiring against him. He checked the weather at least once every hour all the way across the ocean.
Captain Demura made frequent trips to the chief pilot’s office to report the shocking inadequacies of his crews. He told the chief that most of them were grossly incompetent. Some were so bad they ought to be fired.
“Funny,” said the chief. “A lot of them have been coming up here and saying the same thing about you.” He counseled Captain Demura to go out and have a beer with his crew. “Take a flight attendant along. You might even learn something.”
Demura didn’t, of course. Other captains tried talking to him, mainly because the
y were anxious for the new breed—their generation—to be known as kinder and saner captains than the leather-noses who had preceded them. It didn’t work.
Eventually a significant number of copilots refused to fly with Demura. Flight attendants walked en masse off his airplane. Engineers debated whether to poison him. “I think he’s nuts,” declared a first officer after getting off a trip with Demura.
The chief pilot became concerned. He removed Demura from flight status and had him examined by the company flight surgeon. The flight surgeon referred him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist spent time with him and then delivered his judgment: Captain Demura was sane. A little neurotic, perhaps, but undeniably sane.
So he returned to flying duty. The story got around, of course, about Demura’s troubles and his stamp of approval, which earned him a unique distinction: Demura was the only pilot in all of Pan American who was certified sane.
One day in 1982, it was Rob Martinside’s turn. He showed up an hour early. He felt conspicuous in the new uniform. The four gold stripes glowed like neon bars. The braid on the visor of his new hat weighed, it seemed, about forty pounds. He felt like a guest at a costume party.
He could feel people looking at him. Did they know he was wearing this outfit for the very first time? Could they tell that until today he had never actually been an airline captain?
The toughest venue was the crew room. The crew room was a place where you could get eviscerated for any sign that you were taking yourself too seriously. Wearing your new captain’s outfit in the crew room in Berlin could be just such a sign.
So Martinside slunk in the door, doing his best to be invisible. No one looked up. The inhabitants were reading newspapers, perusing bulletin hoards, slouching in the beat-up leather chairs.
Martinside had already stashed the gold-bedecked hat. The only pilots who wore their hats at the Berlin base were new captains and check captains and a few suck-ups who aspired to be check captains. It was a joke that copilots never wore hats except when they ceased to be copilots and were suddenly issued their splendid new gold-encrusted captain’s hats, which they then wore everywhere—in the crew room, in the bedroom, in the lavatory.
In the cockpit, Martinside noticed something strange: people were asking him questions. Him. “How much stored fuel do you want, captain?” “Okay to load the restricted articles in the aft cargo, skipper?” “What airport do you want for a takeoff alternate, captain?” “Captain, what do you want to do about. . .”
Martinside stared at them blankly. They were talking to him! During the seventeen years he had sat in the right seat, invisible and mute, no one had ever asked his opinion about anything. Now they were deluging him with questions about everything from jet fuel to toilet paper.
His first officer was a short, freckled pilot named Red Parsell. Parsell and Martinside went way back together. Parsell had been hired about six months after Martinside, and trailed him on the seniority list by some five hundred numbers.
Red was behaving funny. “What’s the matter, Red? You act like you’re not having fun.”
“Aw, hell,” he said, “I’ll get used to it. It’s just seems. . . peculiar. Us junior pukes all alone up here. After all these years. You know, like they let the monkeys run the zoo.”
Red was right. It was peculiar. They had been copilots for so many years they were brainwashed to think it wasn’t safe unless they had a real card-carrying Skygod there in the left seat.
After they landed in Hamburg, Martinside said, “Your leg, Red. You fly us back to Berlin.”
Parsell stared at him. “Aren’t new captains supposed to fly all the legs until they have a hundred hours in command?”
“So we’ll record it that way in the logbook. Meanwhile, it’s your leg. Okay?”
Red Parsell smiled for the first time that day. “Well, sure it’s okay. . .”
By the end of their six-leg day, alternating flying duties, seventeen years of brainwashing had been laid to rest. They told jokes. They kidded each other. They made bets on who could make the slickest landings.
The monkeys were running the zoo. They were loving every minute of it.
Martinside was in no hurry to leave the cockpit. He sat there for several extra minutes, savoring the moment. He looked at the instrument panel. He gazed out at the new view from the left cockpit window.
Seventeen years. Here he was. It was worth it. For the first time he placed his signature in the aircraft logbook. He signed his name directly over the printed words Aircraft Commander.
By the time he had stuffed his manuals and headset and flashlight back into his briefcase, Red was packed and gone. So were the passengers. Martinside walked out through the jetway. That was where they got him.
He barely saw it coming—an apparition lunging at him from the shadows, large, mustachioed, wielding a—what the hell? It looked like a huge shears.
It was a huge shears. The apparition seized him by his black uniform tie, snatching him nearly off his feet. Martinside saw the shears coming for his throat.
Rrripp! Martinside’s tie was slashed away just below the knot.
The apparition was Larry Phillips, a first officer of immense size, black-mustached and evil-looking. “Gotcha, Captain,” said Phillips.
The rest of the new-captain ritual followed at the crew watering hole, where it was Martinside’s responsibility to provide an uninterrupted flow of Pilsner Urquel for the rest of the night.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Strike
We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.
—from the film Network, reiterated by Pan Am employees February 28, 1985
It should have been a normal day in Berlin. You could feel the wet winter fog gathering out there on the runways of Tegel Airport. You knew that at sunrise, when the temperature and the dew point came together on the thermometer, it would be another gray-murk, phlegm-thick German morning.
At five-thirty the crews began checking in for the first wave of departures to destinations in West Germany. A half hour later, while they were sitting in the cockpits, going through pre-flight checklists, swilling their first coffee, a runner from the pilots’ union office made the rounds of the cockpits. The word had come from New York: The strike is on.
Strike? It was the news they dreaded—and expected—on this befogged morning. Well, damn. . . I guess so. . . charts and manuals and flashlights back into the flight kits. . . slide the seats back. . . hats and coats back on. . . leave the cockpit. . . looking and feeling sheepish. . . avoiding the perplexed stares of the boarding passengers. . .
It was the most unnatural act of their airline careers. They hated it. They thought of themselves as professionals. You didn’t walk off your airplane and leave your passengers in the lurch.
But that’s what they were doing, all over the Pan Am system, descending the boarding ladders, bags in hand, leaving pilotless airplanes behind them like ghost ships in the darkness. And each in his private thoughts wondered: Why the hell are we doing this?
A strike at Pan Am was as rare as a visitation by aliens. The former National employees had seen a lot of it during their years at the George T. Baker airline, where labor brawling was a way of life. But at blue-blooded Pan American, the Imperial Airline, a strike was viewed with the same distaste as getting sucked into a bar fight. It besmirched the airline’s image. There was something about it that just wasn’t. . . imperial.
But that was before Ed Acker. Times had changed.
“We don’t expect profitability until the third quarter of this year,” Ed Acker had told his employees. That was in 1983, following his first full year as Pan Am CEO. The 1982 loss of nearly half a billion dollars put Pan Am in history books—it was an airline industry record.
The third quarter of 1983 came and went. Another loss.
The third quarter of 1984. A loss of over $200 million.
You could hear a loud metallic sound reverberating across Pan American property. It was
the sound of ACKER BACKER pins hitting the trash bins. The mood was turning ugly.
Pan Am’s United States-based employees were represented by five separate labor unions: the Air Line Pilots Association; the Flight Engineers International Association; the Independent Union of Flight Attendants; the transport Workers Union, representing the airline’s 5700 mechanics; and the Teamsters, whose membership included clerks, ticket agents, and reservations personnel.
Traditionally, labor disputes at Pan Am had been settled in a Runyonesque, mock-tough guy style. Union officers sat down with company negotiators. Everyone talked tough for a while, made preposterous demands, hinted at shutdowns and lockouts. Then they would get around to arguing about the real issues—pay scales, work rules, contract renewal.
Such a negotiator was Jim MacQuarrie, the pilots’ union chairman. MacQuarrie was a gruff, cigarette-smoking former fighter pilot with the face of an ex-pugilist. His negotiating style was to lock gazes with the guy across the table and tell him, just for openers, that he was going to break his balls, which got the talks started on the right note.
Eventually they would come to a sticking point. The negotiators would hunch over their legal pads, scribbling meaningless notes. Nobody would have anything to say. MacQuarrie would glower across the table and bang his fist down. “You guys are stalling. Get off your asses and negotiate, or we’re gonna slam the door so hard it’ll be heard in Juan Trippe’s tomb.”
That usually worked. They would resume negotiating. Afterward MacQuarrie and his union guys and Marty Shugrue and his company guys would go down the street to the Cattleman to knock back several scotches and talk airplanes. It was great fun, like a private club. For years that was how labor disputes were resolved at Pan Am.
And then appeared C. Raymond Grebey.
Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am Page 24
