The cold truth is that at this particular point of their careers, many silver-haired, blue-eyed, firm-jawed air line captains begin to think of themselves as airborne bus drivers: Los Angeles one day, Honolulu the next, Tokyo the day after that, followed by two days of dodging Tokyo taxis and then back home. What could be more boring?
Even the flying itself becomes a chore. An airline pilot is not permitted very many decisions. He does not fly from Los Angeles to Honolulu, for example, the way he might like to fly. There is a prescribed flight plan. It tells him when to take off, how high to fly, how fast to fly and in which direction. If he began his career as a military pilot, soaring and zooming amongst the clouds, that rather pleasant sort of flying is nothing but a fond, and increasingly hazy, memory. The airline pilot’s credo is straight and level. Soaring and zooming amongst the clouds is a no-no. Not only does it remind the passengers that they are indeed five miles above terra firma, going 600 miles an hour, but it has a tendency to dump filet mignon, creamed peas, Baked Alaska and other items on the airborne menu into their laps, with a consequent rise in letters of complaint to the Customer relations Department.
For those captains with sufficient seniority to “win” the most desirable flights, there is normally nothing they can do but suffer in silence, taking what little consolation they can from their pay, which runs about $5,000 a month.
But once in a great while (after all, there aren’t that many corporations which can justify the full-time use of a 747), there is a little light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. When the notice was posted on the Pilot’s Bulletin Board that Chevaux Petroleum International, Inc., had arranged for the semi permanent charter of three wet 747’s, which would be engaged in both passenger and cargo operations, worldwide, it caused something of a stir.
There was, at first, some concern in the Personnel Office about the lack of response. Only one senior captain had submitted his name. No other captain, senior or otherwise, seemed interested in assuming command of a 747 which would be required to fly anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, unscheduled, without even a flight plan prescribed by company headquarters.
After waiting a week, another notice was published and, like the first, it attracted only one senior-captain volunteer. A week later, a third notice was posted and it, too, resulted in just one volunteer. At that point, some serious thought was given to the problem, and a spy was discreetly posted at the bulletin board.
The spy reported that the first senior captain who had read the bulletin board had smiled broadly, and then, glancing over his shoulder, had ripped the notice from the board and jammed it into his pocket. He had then submitted his name as a volunteer for what, until that moment, the company had regarded as a very distasteful assignment.
After a notice of the vacancies was sent to each eligible pilot by registered mail, every senior 747 captain but one (who was known to be carrying on in Paris with a blonde stewardess from Air Finland) put his name down to “bid” for one of the eight pilot slots. The final selection of the eight pilots was conducted in the company 300-seat auditorium. A firm of certified public accountants had to be engaged to determine precise seniority. Sixteen international flights had to be delayed or cancelled entirely because their scheduled pilots insisted on being present at the bidding.
There was even a nasty fistfight between Capt. Rollo van Brunt and Capt. Elmo Kildare. Since both Captain van Brunt and Captain Kildare had joined Global Airways on the same day in 1946, it was necessary to compare their previous military flying experience to determine who was most senior. Captain van Brunt had been an Army Air Corps fighter pilot; Captain Kildare, a Marine aviator. Words were exchanged, during which Captain Kildare apparently referred to Captain van Brunt as a “pimple-faced fly-boy,” and Captain van Brunt responded by referring to Captain Kildare as a “seagoing bellboy.”
They were finally separated and peace was restored. Both were determined by the C.P.A.’s to have insufficient seniority to win pilot seats. They did, however, just barely manage to win co-pilot seats, each one willingly giving up command of a scheduled 747.
No Global Airways co-pilots (referred to as “first officers” by everybody in Global but pilots) or flight engineers were able to successfully bid for the wet-charter co-pilot and flight-engineer spots. They were filled by senior captains, the junior of whom was 52 years old and had 11,000 hours of flight time.
None of them ever had cause to regret giving up the New York-Paris-Rome or Los Angeles-Honolulu-Tokyo scheduled runs. They had quickly been accepted as members of the Chevaux Corporate family. Within six months, they had been admitted to membership in the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., and quickly came to prefer the K. of C. uniforms to those of the airline. (They had all been awarded status as Knight Commanders of the Golden Eagle Feather, the regalia for which included: a three-cornered cap patterned on that worn by Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar; a uniform tunic with thicker and twice as many golden stripes around the cuffs as that of Global Airlines; and navy-blue trousers with a bright-carmine stripe down the seam. Customs officers and other officials seemed to melt at the sight.)
But the fight over seniority did not die. The best assignment on the wet charter was flying Mr. Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux himself. Not only did Mr. de la Chevaux’s flights generally circle the globe as he inspected Chevaux operations (there was more than enough time to inspect whatever needed inspecting while the huge aircraft was being unloaded of its cargo of oil well supplies), but he liked a little game the pilots had taught him called Bandits at Twelve O’Clock High.
By listening to what are known as “In-Flight Advisories,” filed by scheduled-airlines pilots as they made their routine, prescribed way from one airport to another, it was quite easy to locate them in the air. At this point, Mr. de la Chevaux would be summoned to climb the ladder from the main part of the fuselage to cockpit, where he would be installed in the co-pilot’s seat.
He would then peer out the window until he saw, for example, Global Airways Flight 304, Miami-Buenos Aires.
“Bandits,” he would then call, “at 12 o’clock high.”
A bell would then ring in the cabin below, and Chevaux technicians, being flown to or from a distant Chevaux oil field, would dash to the windows. The Chevaux plane, throttles to the fire wall, would then close the distance between them. A fighter-type pass would then be made by the Chevaux 747 against the Global 747. The roaring zoom would not be close enough, of course, to cause any danger whatever of an in-flight collision. However, it would be close enough so that the Global 747 would encounter the turbulence from the Chevaux 747 engines, giving the Global passengers a little thrill and making Global pilots yearn wistfully for the day when they, too, would acquire enough seniority to abandon aerial bus-driving for real flying.
The wet-charter pilots had quickly picked up again an esprit de corps and a certain é1an that many of them had last known as nineteen-year-old P-38 fighter pilots in World War II.
They swaggered into Flight Planning Offices around the globe, wearing their Battle of Trafalgar hats at a rakish angle, their half-Wellington boots, and their brilliant-yellow flight jackets, the back of which carried a representation of the Chevaux Petroleum Corporate logotype and the words CAJUN AIR FORCE. On the front was embroidered their personal insignia, golden wings in the center of which were names they hadn’t used in thirty years: ACE TIGER THE DETROIT KID ALTOONA AL and the like.
“Any of you kids got the heading from here to Sumatra?” they would ask, or “When was the last time anybody flew into Zamboanga in a 747?” They knew, of course, that the replies would be negative, and that the senior captains of not only Global, but Pan American World Airways, Trans World Airlines, Northwest Orient Airlines and the others were eating their hearts out.
They were, of course, quite cordially loathed and despised by the scheduled-airlines pilots, but they accepted this as a natural reaction of the have-nots toward those who have it made.
When
the word came down from Chevaux Corporate Headquarters to the chief pilot that a 747 would be needed to haul Mr. de la Chevaux and a preliminary oil-exploration crew to Abzug, the chief pilot immediately wrote in his own name as pilot on the flight manifest. He had never, in thirty-five years of international flying, ever heard of Abzug and, wherever it was, he wanted the privilege of being the first man to put a 747 down in it. With a little bit of luck, he was soon going to qualify for the Guinness Book of Records as the man who had landed more 747’s on more obscure and inadequate airfields than anyone else.
The co-pilot and flight-engineer slots were filled from among the other 747 pilots on a strict seniority basis, despite howls of protest from co-pilots and flight engineers (all of whom had been senior captains, pre wet charter) that the old guys got to have all the fun.
It was necessary to park the Chevaux Petroleum 747’s at New Orleans’s Moisson Airfield. Bayou Perdu International Airport, hailed at the time as an engineering feat of the magnitude of the Aswan Dam in Egypt (it was, in fact, slightly more expensive), had been built to handle the smaller Douglas 707 Intercontinental jets. While the runway would hold up under the far greater weight of the 747’s, the taxiways and parking stands would, if 747’s parked on them for more than a few hours at a time, sink into the swamp on which the airfield had been built.
As it happened, however, on the Abzug trip, it was not necessary to go into Bayou Perdu International at all. The oil rig available for the exploration, a brand-new, all-electric rig from Tulsa’s Unit Rig Company, had already been loaded aboard a 747 in Tulsa for shipment to Borneo. The last-minute decision by Mr. de la Chevaux to go to Abzug fitted in neatly with this; for the fifty-man contingent for Abzug (the seismologists, map men, surveyors, plus the rig crew) was already in Texas, where they had watched a football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints. The game had actually been played the day before, and arrangements to have the contingent released on bail from the Dallas County slammer had been nearly completed. (There had been a misunderstanding between the Bayou Perdu fans and some fans of the home team.)
A radio message was sent to Tulsa, ordering the 747 to Dallas. Then, after loading the rest of his crew and the Rev. Mother Emeritus Margaret H.W. Wilson aboard a small Sabreliner (kept around for errand-running of this sort) and stopping briefly at Bayou Perdu International Airport to pick up Mr. de la Chevaux, the chief pilot flew to Dallas.
The original crew of the 747, bitterly complaining about special privilege in high places, was returned to New Orleans in the Sabreliner. The football fans, and their bus, were released by the Dallas County sheriff, who insisted (to insure their departure from Texas) that they be escorted from the county jail to the airfield and seen aboard the aircraft by a sizable contingent of sheriff’s deputies under the supervision of three Texas Rangers.
The oil-well-drilling equipment had been loaded aboard the aircraft before, of course, it was known that one of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., flaming-yellow buses would also be going along. It was therefore necessary for the cargo to be unloaded and then reloaded. This action took place in the hot sun, and was performed by the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., themselves, most of whom were painfully hung over.
This off-loading, onloading by a half-hundred men in what appeared to be military uniforms was the source of Don Rhotten’s report that “fifty uniformed men were leaving the country.”
Wesley Greenpaw, editor of the Love Field Gazette —an advertising handout intended for free distribution to travelers—whose ambition it was to become a famous television newscaster like his idol, Don Rhotten, had recognized a story when one occurred under his nose. He had sauntered out to the airplane and struck up an acquaintance with one of the Chevaux crew.
“Hi, there!” he said, in his best television-journalist manner. “What’s new?”
The first response to his inquiries was a suggestion that he perform a physiologically impossible act of reproduction; but he was diligent and, before he was picked up and carried off the field and stuffed inside a Dempsey Dumpster by several of the ornately uniformed laborers, he had learned that whoever these really nasty people were, they were going to someplace called Abzug. It was absolutely apparent that trouble was in the offing. Five minutes after the 747 had zoomed off into the blue, the three Texas Rangers who had been ordered to see them out of Texas and who had mysteriously disappeared, reappeared. They were handcuffed to one another and to a Texas jackass, on which they rode backwards and stark-naked save for their cowboy hats and a large sign reading, “I will never call anyone a Dumb Cajun again,” which hung around the neck of the rearmost Ranger. Only real troublemakers, Wesley realized, would dare do something like that to three Texas Rangers at once.
There was some talk of having the Texas Air National Guard pursue the Chevaux 747 and shoot it down in flames to restore Texas’s honor, but wiser heads prevailed while Wesley Greenpaw was on the telephone to Don Rhotten’s newsroom. It was agreed that throwing the next two hundred and fifty Louisianans who dared cross the border into Texas into the slammer would be enough and probably more profitable.
Wesley was somewhat disappointed to learn that Don Rhotten never ever, as a matter of policy, personally talked to his news sources; but the man on the phone, who assured him he was very close to Mr. Rhotten, promised to keep Wesley in mind for the next slot that opened up on “The Rhotten Report” news staff. That made Wesley feel a lot better.
The flight from Dallas across the Gulf of Mexico and then across the Atlantic was quite pleasant. There was an opportunity to play Bandits at Twelve O’Clock High twice (once over central Florida with an Eastern Air Lines 747 carrying 340 Bronxites to the sun and surf of Miami Beach, and again over the Atlantic with a Pan American 747 en route from Rio de Janeiro). Then there was a Sing Along with Reverend Mother who played popular tunes on the air horns mounted on top of the bus, until the captain sent word that while he liked a jolly song as well as anyone else, he was having Air Traffic Control on the radio.
Mr. de la Chevaux, who always took a personal interest in every detail of operations, was shown the charts of their routes on one of his frequent visits to the flight deck.
“Why?” he asked, pointing to a couple of specks in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast.
“Why what, Skipper?” the chief pilot asked.
“Why are they called the Canary Islands?”
It was an interesting question, one that had not previously occurred to the chief pilot.
“Maybe,” he ventured after a moment’s thought, “that’s where canaries come from.”
“Let’s go get some canaries,” Mr. de la Chevaux said. “I tink duh Archbishop be happy wit a couple of l’il yellow canaries.”
“Roger, Wilco, Skipper,” the chief pilot said. He reached for his microphone to inform Central Atlantic Area Control that Chevaux 747 Three was diverting from direct Dallas International-Abzug International to make a fuel-and-supply stop in the Canary Islands.
“Roger, Chevaux Three,” Central Atlantic Area Control came right back. “Understand diverting to Canary Islands. Say again your original destination.”
“Abzug International,” the chief pilot reported.
“Hold one, Chevaux Three,” Central Atlantic Area Control said. Then, three minutes later, “Chevaux Three, where is Abzug International?”
“Right outside the capital of Abzug,” the chief pilot replied. The distilled essence of his thirty-odd years of international flying was that every nation in the world had an international airport right outside its capital. The fact that he himself had been able to find such an airport on his own map had struck him simply as one more example of map-making sloppiness. There was bound to be an Abzug International, and he planned to find it by flying to Abzug and then getting on the horn and asking for directions.*5
(*5 This is actually how much long-distance aerial navigation is accomplished, airlines public-relations photographs of pilots poring seriously over ae
rial navigation charts and “shooting the sun” with a sextant to the contrary. The navigation technique is simplicity itself: the plane is flown to within two hundred miles of where it is supposed to be, and then the pilot gets on the horn:
“London Area Control, this is Global 555. Do you have me on radar?”
Whereupon the London Area Control Tower replies, “Roger, Global 555. We have you on radar at Three-Zero Thousand feet, One-Five-Zero miles north-northeast of this station.”
“Thank you, London Area Control. Just checking to see you’re on the job,” Global 555 will reply, and then change the radio frequency. “London Approach Control, this is Global 555. I am at 30,000 feet, 150 miles north-northeast of Heathrow. Please furnish landing instructions.”
This method of navigation not only does away with the bothersome chore of computing all sorts of bothersome figures (distance and airspeed, for example), but obviates the necessity of messing up aerial charts with grease-pencil marks.)
“Chevaux Three,” Central Atlantic Area Control said, “we are unable to find Abzug International on our charts. We are unable, as a matter of fact, to find any airfield at all in Abzug. All our charts show is mountains and desert, both marked ‘uninhabited and unexplored.’ ”
“Ah, Roger, Central Atlantic,” the chief pilot said, “close us out in the Canaries, will you?”
“Roger, Chevaux Three,” the radio said. “Central Atlantic transfers Chevaux Three to Las Palmas at this time.”
The chief pilot turned to the co-pilot. “Did he say where we are?”
The co-pilot shrugged. “No, Ace, he didn’t. Maybe you should have asked him.”
“Well, what do you expect from an air-traffic controller who can’t even find Abzug International Airport?” the chief pilot replied. He spoke to the microphone again. “Canary Islands Area Control, this is Chevaux 747 Three. Do you have us on radar?”
Chapter Twelve
MASH 06 MASH Goes to Morocco Page 13
