John Nance: Lockout

Dan could see Jerry’s jaw muscles gyrating, absorbing the irritation of such a demeaning order, but he held his tongue for nearly thirty seconds until Breem had closed the cockpit door behind him.

“ Alrighty , then!” Jerry said, rolling his eyes in an expression of utter contempt.

“Is he always like that?” Dan asked, as much to commiserate as to confirm.

“Oh, yeah! Pompous asshole with delusions of adequacy.”

“An original Stratos Air alumnus?”

Jerry Tollefson nodded and then stopped.

“Yes. They’re not all like that, but this one is a really angry dinosaur. Angry and mean.”

“I’ve heard of him, of course, but never met the man before tonight.”

“You didn’t miss anything.”

Jerry busied himself for a few moments with building his nest in the left-hand captain’s seat, arranging his crew bag and the company-supplied iPad as Dan Horneman had just done on the right side. Satisfied all was in its place, Jerry sat back, taking in the broader nighttime view from the cockpit of Flight 10.

The lights of Zagreb, Croatia, some eighty miles to the east were visible to their right as the Airbus cruised along at 37,000 feet, and neither pilot spoke for several minutes.

Jerry snorted, shaking his head, one more thought incapable of suppression. “The thing I can’t stand about Breem is his air of superiority and his constantly demonstrated disgust for the rest of us.”

Dan let the words parade by, trying hard not to focus on the concept of hypocrisy as related to Jerry Tollefson. He tried to see Breem through Tollefson’s eyes without seeing Jerry in the same light, but the effort was failing. He wondered if Tollefson, too, had suddenly realized the ludicrous nature of his hypocritical slam.

No, Dan concluded, he’d never see it.

The autopilot was doing the flying, but now that their perceived common antagonist had left the cockpit, Dan could feel tension rising between himself and the captain, evaporating what moments before had been a fleeting brotherhood between the two of them based on a classic “we’re okay, but he’s not okay” bond.

Without Breem, Dan was now the outsider, and there was, indeed, an elephant in the cockpit—a big one—and it was going to be a miserable flight if someone didn’t throw a spotlight on the beast.

“So, Jerry…” Dan began, intending to slip gently into the subject of their near-disaster in Anchorage years before, but Jerry Tollefson was already locked and loaded.

“So, Dan …” Jerry echoed, sarcastically, “Had enough fun playing airline pilot?”

Dan glanced over at the left seat and tried hard not to overthink his response. He’d expected something snarky, and clearly he wasn’t going to be disappointed.

“Well, I’m still here.”

“Yeah, so I noticed. With all your millions, I thought you’d have bought your own jet by now and just hired one of us poor schmucks to fly it.”

“It may be difficult to understand, Jerry, but I enjoy this challenge of being an airline pilot.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoying the process?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“Well, that makes one of us at least.”

“Look, Jerry…”

“So… when we last tried to crash together up in Alaska, you didn’t have a lot of flight time. Had much since?”

“I had just checked out, if you recall.”

“Oh, I certainly do recall,” Tollefson replied with a snort. “It was almost the last thing I ever recalled. It’s interesting, talking about the merger of North Star and Pangia, since it was Pangia that hired you. At North Star, we had this irritating little tendency to hire competent pilots rather than raw trainees. Pangia, apparently, doesn’t differentiate.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them for almost a minute.

“Okay… Jerry, look, I know we got off on the wrong foot three years ago…”

“Ya think ?” Jerry snorted, turning to face the copilot. “But I wouldn’t exactly call it getting off on the wrong foot, Danny. I’d call it perhaps the worst crew introduction in airline history.” He paused studying Dan’s stoic expression for a few seconds, reconsidering the force of his pent up anger. “Look, Dan, you’re obviously a nice guy, but your flying sucks, and the memory of that botched approach still scares the hell out of me. But… as I say, I guess you’ve had a lot more experience since then.”

“More than three years.”

“Good!” Jerry kept his eyes on the right-seater as he reached out with his left hand and pointed to one of the instruments on the forward panel. “For example, you do now know about this little thing here called an airspeed indicator?”

“You really can’t let this go, can you?” Dan asked.

“Well, I admit I get a mite testy when people try to kill me with a complete lack of aeronautical skill, okay? Or were you going to tell me it was all systemic and not really your fault? Use crew resource management as an excuse for no individual accountability?”

Dan cleared his throat, internally holding onto the throttle of his own anger.

If you were my employee, I’d fire your ass on the spot! Dan thought.

“Jerry, I don’t do excuses, okay? But the fact is, if you’ll recall, you gave me a visual, manual approach in high winds that day, and then, because you got distracted by a cabin smoke problem, I was totally solo, and I wasn’t—”

Tollefson whirled on him, his voice raised. “You damn near killed a planeload of innocent passengers and me, Dan, and the real cause is apparently because you decided to come over and slum a bit, pretend to be an airline pilot, but one who didn’t understand the basic fact that we need at least some wind over the wings. I’ve never had to take the airplane away from a copilot or a captain before, or since!”

“So that’s the bottom line, right?”

“What?” Jerry replied, the word spoken with the report of a bullet propelled by contempt.

“Not that I’m a bad pilot, or even a good pilot who made a bad mistake, but that I’ve got too much money and therefore can’t be part of the club.”

“ What? If you don’t know how to fly safely… if this is some dilettante exercise, playing airline pilot… you shouldn’t be here. That’s all I meant.”

Dan was shaking his head angrily, energetically, letting the dampers fall away from his usual reluctance to engage an unnecessary fight.

“Okay, bullshit, Jerry! That’s just frigging bullshit! You just tipped your hand, Buddy. The real truth is, I’m a permanent outsider here because I have too much money and I was a success in another field. And… and… because I failed your testosterone check. Right? But that overblown Alaskan bush pilot cowboy shit is just as toxic as it is intoxicating. Hail the Arctic Eagles! If you’re not swaggering enough and macho enough to impress us, you can’t join the club, because you don’t have the right stuff! And if you have too much money, you’re automatically excluded.”

“None of us cares a whit about your money, Horneman, and this has nothing to do with bush flying. We’re professional pilots, and what we do care about is precision and safety and competence!”

“Jerry, you were exuding that cowboyish bush pilot attitude from every pore the day we almost bought it with my mistake. Remember turning off the autopilot and the autothrottles and even the damned ILS? What ever happened to the company rule about using all available nav aids?”

“You were relying too much on the automation!”

“Of course I was. You’re right. Know why? Because that’s how I was trained! But you don’t need automation because you guys never make mistakes, do you? As long as you survive, that is. I’m surprised you don’t rank each other by how many enthralled women throw their panties at you when you walk down the street!”