Stephen Keshner - Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

To get my weight-to-height just right, I went at it whole hog, jogging for months. I rented a suit for the interview. Some friends from CAL Honolulu base had preceded me out there, and I lunched and had dinners with them, to catch up on old friendships and to pick their brains for information about Singapore Airlines and life in Singapore.

Wishing to have a good night’s rest before my important interview the coming morning, I booked a massage through the hotel, for six in the evening. This was to be a legitimate massage, not the “steam and cream,” so common in the orient.

At six P.M., I dutifully present myself at the hotel’s health spa, and I’m introduced to this gnarled, chestnut-colored Malaysian woman who was to do the honors.

Disrobing in her private cubicle, and positioning myself face-down on her table, I was almost asleep by the time the old lady nudged me to turn over. This was going to be perfect. I was going to have just enough energy to crawl into my own bed for a great night’s sleep. Lapsing back into my stupor, I was totally relaxed when her mouth engulfed my penis. My entire body levitated off the table. My mind, racing to catch-up with this unexpected sensation, directed my mouth to say, “What? What?”

“Theengensahr.”

“What?”

“Theengensahr.”

She pointed to my unresponding member… “You have to make certain that the engine is working.”

I mentally slap my own forehead, oh “The engine, sir” is what she had been saying, while offering me this extra service.

The speed of thought is faster than the speed of light, I’ve always believed. Unbidden, my brain instantly asks my dick and my conscience, in that order, whether I can lay here with my eyes closed, pretending a young, pretty girl was fellating me for love, not for money. The answer came back, and “no thanks” was my response.

I’ve told this story to Geri, who finds it hilarious, as I do.

Once, I told it to D.B., and when I was finished telling him the story, he looked at me in his shit-eating, fish-eye way. “Now Steve, your tellin’ this story to me now, not to your wife,” waiting for me to confess my guilt.

I broke out laughing, not saying another word.

Although I was offered the job, Singapore Air required a thirty-five thousand dollars cash deposit, as insurance against my leaving early on the five year contract. I didn’t have the money, and it never worked out at Singapore, however my luck soon changed at Continental.

Most airlines pay “wide-body” or differential pay, the larger the equipment, the greater the pay. Not so in those days at Continental. Nor did Continental pay extra for international flying as is common elsewhere. Therefore, there’s no incentive to move to Hawaii to fly large equipment.

When the new equipment bid came out I was thrilled and stunned to learn that I had been awarded a right-seat job on the 747. It had gone junior, since none of the senior guys in LAX, Houston, or Denver wanted to commute, or move to Honolulu without a pay increase.

Now I was faced with the challenge of getting through upgrade training on the largest airplane in the world, without having flown a lick in four years.

It wasn’t pretty. After three weeks of systems ground-school, and two weeks of simulator training, having worked my ass off, I came out the other end of the process as a marginally acceptable 747 pilot. I was now the most junior co-pilot in the Honolulu 747 base. I was on reserve, but I was in pig heaven. I was flying airplanes again, no longer a panel-nigger or switch-nigger, in the unfortunate vernacular.

Since neither my sim partner nor I had ever flown right seat in a large swept-winged jet for a “121” outfit before ( F.A.R. part 121 refers to the regs covering major airlines), Continental had to give the two of us a couple of hours of touch and goes in the actual airplane, and in the presence of an FAA examiner, before we could legally fly the line carrying passengers.

Amazingly, one night we took an empty 747, filled it with a few hundred thousand pounds of fuel, and took off from Houston to Reno. There, we spent a few hours taking turns doing touch and goes, that is taking off and landing, continuing the landing roll right into another take off, and so forth…what an eerie experience it was to look back into that cavernous shell and all those hundreds of empty seats.

The very first time I was called out for a trip, it was to be with Captain Psycho Saroyin. Jerry Paddy Lester would be our Flight Engineer.

Courtesy and common sense dictated that, as I introduced myself to the Captain in the Ops office, I made a definite point of telling him that this was to be my first actual flight on the 747, and that I hadn’t flown for a number of years. In other words, watch your ass, and mine, I might be dangerous. Saroyin’s face registered no emotion as he grabbed his flight bag, a tennis racket, and headed for the airplane.

Our trip was to be from Honolulu-Sidney, layover for two days. Then Sidney-Melbourne-Sidney, layover, returning once again to Hawaii. In my excitement, I never noticed that both Saroyin and Lester had gathered up pillows and blankets as we entered the plane.

The Captain elected to take the first leg, HNL-Sidney, which was fine by me. It would give me the opportunity to watch him operate, as I got more comfortable with the airplane. As the PNF, pilot not flying, my duties were communication, navigation, and to back-up the Captain.

Pyscho took off from runway 8 right, the reef runway, turned right to an assigned heading, and we climbed to our initial altitude of 5,000 feet. Throwing on the autopilot, Saroyin says “you have it,” and both he and Paddy build cocoons for themselves, actual nests of many blankets and pillows, and they both drop immediately into a sound sleep.

This is going to be interesting, since winter flying north-south across the equator is a bitch. The storms that band the globe from 10 North through 5 North, and from 5 South to 10 South are brutal. The cells can be thirty miles thick, stretch for hundreds of miles, and climb above forty thousand feet.

Most passengers think that all a plane has to do to avoid weather is to climb above it, or to go around it. Not true. Indiscriminate climbing is out of the question, since the weight of the airplane determines how high

you’re capable of going. The initial altitude a fully loaded Boeing 747 is able to reach is about 29,000 feet. Burning about 25,000 pounds of fuel an hour lightens the plane gradually, allowing the pilot (assuming the concurrence of Air Traffic Control) to climb an additional two thousand feet every few hours. No way however, could we ever climb high enough, given our weight and time en route, to climb above the kind of storms we were going to face this evening.

As to deviation, when you take off on an eleven-hour-plus journey, fuel conservation is a real concern. Deviation must be kept to a reasonable minimum if you want to have enough fuel to reach your destination, plus some in reserve.

I was now “alone” in the cockpit, brand-spanking new, having to fly, communicate, navigate and do weather avoidance, constantly scanning the weather radar. On a moonless night, which this was, there is nothing to be seen out the windscreen, zero, nada, a black hole.

We were about an hour into the flight, only at 29,000 feet, when the first band of storm cells appeared on my scope. Playing with the radar, adjusting it’s pitch and range settings, showed me that we were not going to top these storms. I was going to have to decide the best way to penetrate this line of death, which stretched across the entire horizon of my radar scope. Choosing a path towards the yellows and greens, avoiding the pinks, reds and violets, I turned on the seat belt sign, put on the sparklers, (the ignition switches to “flight start” — continuous ignition), the nacelle anti-ice, and prepared for the worst. I also called back, and told the cabin crew to take their jump seats.