Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

the city my way. I turn a corner, and I’m face to face with La Scala, Milan’s beautiful Opera House. My God, it is La Scala, an exact replica, in the middle of this city being reclaimed by the Brasilian jungle. Investigating further, I find that the inside is an exact duplicate as well.

During Manaus’ heyday, Enrico Caruso had been invited to perform for this community of ultra-wealthy lovers of the opera. He promised to come on one condition, that they would build for him a decent opera house. Wanting to impress Caruso, who was then the world’s foremost tenor, the City Fathers did the ultimate, they replicated La Scala in downtown Manaus. Caruso died just before the project was completed. The opera house, mansions and cathedrals, lonely in their magnificent isolation, are surrounded by millions of square miles of unimpressed Amazon jungle.

Spocula

Captain Jimmy Spock, “the Spocula,” and I take the active runway at JFK, 31 left. We are bound for TLV, Tel Aviv, an eleven and a half hour flight, and the plane is maxxed-out, taking off at maximum gross takeoff weight, 820,000 pounds. It’s already late, about two in the morning in New York, and the weather is shitty. A nasty rain is falling, and there is a low, skuddy ceiling of clouds. The RVR (Runway Visual Range) is greater than 600 / 600 / 600, so we are legal to go. We file Philadelphia as our takeoff alternate.

After numerous delays already this evening, we’re finally taxiing out to the active runway. Cleared for take- off, Spock brings the power up, and we start rolling down the runway. At rotation speed, about 185 miles per hour, Jimmy lifts the nose-wheel, off the ground. Just then his entire instrument panel, hinged along it’s bottom border, swings down against his control column. With his right hand he calmly pushes the panel forward, away from his yoke, while continuing to fly the departure with his left hand. I am stunned, unable to help him at this most critical time of flight, unless he tells me to take control of the aircraft. Not wanting to distract him, I remain silent, bringing up the gear on schedule.

Jimmy’s doing a great job perfectly flying the Canarsie departure out of Kennedy airport. After we climb out to reach 5000 feet, he gives me control of the plane.

“Fuckin’ maintenance guys, they forgot to put the fuckin’ screws back into the entire top of my friggin’ panel!”

“Fuckin’ Billy Abel, that coke-snorting son-of-a-bitch,” this from Jerry Lovell, our Professional Flight Engineer. Rumor has it that our V.P. of Maintenance, Billy Abel, is a coke-head, and has been taking short-cuts with maintenance items, any thing to keep the planes flying, that’s why Morris has hired him back.

“Yeah, one of our maintenance guys tells me,” Lovell confides, “that the ‘F.F.’ (Tower Air’s two letter prefix in the computers) stands for ‘fuck it, fly it’.”

“Great.”

Abel was originally fired a few years back, after one of our South American freighters got an engine fire indication. When the crew blew the fire bottles and the fire warning lights and bells didn’t stop, they diverted and landed in Manaus.

There had been no fire, but an inspection revealed that none of the bottled fire extinguishers on any of the engines (two per engine, and one in the tail for the APU) were filled with any Halon at all, they were empty. During every walk around, our flight engineers are trained to look for a green disk on each engine nacelle, indicating that the fire bottles are full, that they’ve not been discharged. Somehow these bottles were empty, even after having been inspected by Maintenance.

Billy Abel, head of Maintenance, surrounds himself with his own boys, his goombas, guys who value their jobs and money over morality and ethics. He was recently hired back by Morris Nachtomi for reasons unknown.

We don’t have the big picture,” Spock assures me.

Jim Spock pushes the panel back into place, as Lovell works over his shoulder, tightening down the screws with a Phillips head screwdriver. I am flying out now, being radar vectored from present position direct to Bancs, a navigational fix in Canada, enroute to the North Atlantic tracks.

We have just almost died. Had Jimmy Spock not caught the heavy panel in time, it would have wedged behind his yoke. Neither of us could have controlled the plane. At more than 800,000 pounds, the aircraft would have pitched up radically, stalled, crashed and burned, no doubt about it. We are carrying almost 500 men, women and children, and 325,000 pounds of Jet-A fuel. I grow very cold inside.

With the situation stable now, Jimmy asks me, “What’s the last thing that goes through the co-pilots mind as the plane crashes?”

“What’s that, Spockula?”

The Flight Engineer!”

The mood has been lightened somewhat, and we’re on our way to Israel.

These flights to Tel Aviv are the longest that we have, eleven hours eastbound, and about twelve hour westbound from TLV-JFK, pushing against the jet stream. At this time, Tower Air flys more Hasids to Israel than El Al does, with nine scheduled flights per week. Jimmy Spock, who is the number one pilot at Tower Air, has been flying the New York-Tel Aviv-New York run for seventeen years.

Jimmy has his own method of flying the 747, and although we are dispatched as a PRD flight ( a planned re- dispatch ), in seventeen years, Spockula has never yet had to land at his original, shorter dispatch point and stop for fuel. That is, he has always had the fuel necessary at the planned redispatch point to be allowed to continue on to Tel Aviv. No matter what the flight plan or the engineer’s charts call for in way of power, speed or settings, Jimmy just adjusts the throttles to give us a two and a half degree pitch attitude. He claims the plane is most efficient long range that way, and he’s never been wrong.

Getting proper rest is always a problem in Tel Aviv. From the time we land, till we get into our rooms, three hours are gone, and its nine P.M. Tel Aviv time. If we went to bed right away we would sleep until early the next morning, and be unable to get back to sleep during the day in preparation for our long, long flight back, all through the night.

Spock has also developed his own unique system for overcoming sleep-disorders and back-of-the-clock problems. With only twenty hours in Tel Aviv, Spock has taken me under his wing, and his routine goes something like this:

Upon our arrival at Ben Gurien Airport, we still have to clear Customs and Immigration, find taxi-service to the Sheraton and diddle with the hotel reservation clerks, since screw-scheduling forgets to make our reservations half the time.

Spockula checks into his room, showers, changes, and we hit Joey’s Bar, which stays open all night. To call Joey’s eclectic, would be to do it a grave injustice. It’s an acid-trip of neon, wall art, and a polyglot of every ethnic and sexual type, crowded into one tight spot. Jimmy and I drink until just before dawn. By six A.M., we head back to the hotel for our breakfast.

Daylight never touches Jimmy Spock, ergo “Spocula.” We’ve finished a breakfast of made to order omelets ( no bacon ) by eight am, and head for bed. We’ve now been up for thirty hours. When our heads hit the sheets at 9 am, we have no trouble sleeping straight through to our 9 P.M. wake-up call completely refreshed, ready to fly back through the night to New York City.

The Bomb

We’re pushing back from the gate at Charles De Gaulle, heading for JFK.

Once back in the alley, we’re clear to start engines ‘4-3-2-1… “Starting four…

We have four good starts, call for taxi clearance and are cleared to taxi to runway 27.

'Ding Ding,” the interphone rings, it’s the purser. The flight attendant at five-right, in the far aft right side of the airplane, has reported what appears to be “an unknown devise” in the lay sink, as pointed out by a passenger.