I JUST HAD TO GET BACK INTO FLYING

Following the messy parting of ways in Effingham, I ended up back in Sumner, Illinois working at our family’s hardware and appliance store. I wasn’t happy. I felt like I was lost. Then, the movie Top Gun came out. Say what you will about the realism, you gotta admit, there were some good flying scenes and that got my blood pumping again. I decided to get back into the cockpit.

Barely a year after going to the store, I found myself flying for an FAR 135 / commuter airline in Sterling, Illinois. My boss, our director of operations, was a guy named Larry. I had heard of compulsive liars before, but until I met Larry I did not truly understand what one was. This was a man incapable of telling the truth. Even when there was no reason to lie, he would lie. The final straw for me came when they pencil-whipped an engine change on one of our planes. The engine was due for overhaul or replacement, and they even had the replacement engine sitting in a crate in the hangar. Yet, when a charter trip was called in, Larry elected to have the mechanic sign off the engine change as if had actually been accomplished. That did it. I applied to ComAir, and was hired.

I told a couple of my friends at work where I was going, and then I told Larry I would be leaving. He told me not to say anything to anyone. I did not tell him that I already had. Larry then, for reasons known only to him, told the other pilots I had been hired by Delta. Apparently, he didn’t want to admit I left to go to a regional airline. Like it made any difference. All he accomplished was showing himself once again for the liar he was, because the others knew that what he was telling them was a bald-faced lie. My thoughts were “Good riddance to bad rubbish” with regard to him.

ComAir was a definite improvement, but the pay was lousy. I enjoyed the job for the most part, and did make some good friends. There were only two eventful flights I recall as being particularly out of the ordinary. One was flying out of Cincinnati to Toronto in the Saab 340. As we were climbing out, I pointed out to the captain that our right engine’s oil pressure was decreasing. We monitored it for a while, and then noticed that a corresponding increase in oil temperature for the right engine. We accomplished an in-flight shut down of the engine, feathering the prop. We returned to Cincinnati, and later learned the problem had developed as a result of the oil plug not being safety-wired. It had come out and oil was leaking out the bottom of the engine. The most dangerous time to fly an airplane is right after it has come out of the shop.

The other flight that stands out in my memory was on a night run up to Grand Rapids, Michigan. We were doing our best to pick our way through a line of severe thunderstorms, fighting a losing battle. We got into some really bad turbulence, and I felt the airplane shudder. It was more like a shiver, really. I’d never experienced anything like it before or since. It was as if it started at the nose and worked its way back to the tail. It only happened one time, and it didn’t last but a few seconds. It was an eerie, even scary, experience. After that, there was still rough weather, but we eventually found our way out the other side of the line.

My most unforgettable character at ComAir was a captain named Scott. He was a real character, and one heck of a good pilot. Scott was a prankster. He would talk to the passengers over the PA, telling them that today was the flight attendant’s birthday, and encourage them to sing “Happy Birthday” to her. He would turn on the seat belt sign, listen for the flight attendant to begin her announcement that all passengers should fasten their seat belts, etc. and then just as she was halfway into the announcement, he would turn the sign off again. That sort of thing.

One day while en-route between Cleveland and Louisville, Scott called up the flight attendant on the interphone. “Terri,” he said in his deep, authoritative voice, “Air Traffic Control has begun a new Pilot Awareness Program designed to keep pilots alert during the cruise portions of flight. What they are doing is giving us a question to answer. If we do not come up with the correct answer prior to reaching the next controller’s sector, we will be required to do a one-turn holding pattern. They’ve asked us to name the Seven Dwarfs. So far, we’ve come up with Sleepy, Sneezy, and Doc, but we can’t think of the names of any of the others. We were wondering if you, or perhaps some of the passengers, could help us out.”

We were laughing our asses off in the cockpit while the flight attendant was dutifully going down the aisle, asking the passengers if they knew the names of the Seven Dwarfs. She actually brought one of the passengers up to the front of the cabin and had him talk to Scott on the interphone, giving him the names of the Seven Dwarfs. Scott wrote them down, read them back, and thanked him sincerely.

Most of the pilot and flight attendants enjoyed flying with him, and didn’t mind his jokes, because they were really funny, but Scott’s reputation preceded him. One new flight attendant advised him first thing when they reported for duty that she was not going to put up with any of his pranks.

Scott, nodded respectfully, thanked her for letting him know her feelings, and for the entire day treated her with the utmost professional courtesy. Of course, the entire time, he was plotting. Setting her up. At the end of the day, the crew terminated in Toronto. The practice was to drop off the passengers at the terminal and then taxi the airplane to the other side of the field to park at the FBO. From there, they would take the hotel van to the layover hotel. During the ride to the hotel, someone asked, “What time do we meet downstairs in the morning?”

Scott, having had all day to plan for this question, said, “Let’s see . . . they’re on metric time up here in Canada . . .” and then proceeded to explain a complicated formula to convert Eastern Daylight Savings Time to Canadian Metric Time. The following morning, the flight attendant was downstairs an hour and a half before the pilots came down to check out. She was by then concerned that she had missed the van to the airport. Should she hire a cab? And where should she go to meet up with the pilots? The FBO? The terminal? She was both relieved and angry when Scott and the first officer showed up. But, in time, she got over it.