Stephen Keshner: Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

I’ve come to admire the Filipino people for their strength, their faith, and their perseverance, and to detest the Marcos family and their friends for systematically looting an entire Nation.

Captain Jimmy “Rambo” Fratella is an inch or two shy of five feet tall, and he’s a classic example of the “small man complex.” He is a bodybuilder with a very short fuse. I have been in bars with him when he has gotten in people’s faces at the drop of a hat, looking to show them the big man hidden inside, ergo the “Rambo” tag. Jimmy is our Captain today, backed up by First Officer Dan Johansen, and I’m the Second Officer-Flight Engineer.

Typhoon season in the northwest pacific is no fun. We are flying a standard pairing, a turn to Guam, Saipan, Tokyo, and back to Guam. The trip takes three plus hours each way, and guaranteed, a storm will be parked over “Omelet,” an imaginary navigational fix on our route between Saipan and Tokyo.

Sure enough, this afternoon’s weather is as expected, with the remnants of a typhoon shaking our DC-10 up pretty good. The rough ride has been going on for half-an-hour with no end in sight. The interphone “dings,” and I pick up. An “Air-Mike” (Continental Air Micronesia) Flight Attendant asks, “how much longer is this turbulence going to go on, the snake is getting nervous.”

“What snake is getting nervous?” I ask.

“The cobra in first class.”

“What cobra in first class?”

Rambo and Dan take a sudden interest in my conversation.

Condescendingly, slowly, so that even an idiot like me can understand, the girl explains that an older Japanese woman, who boarded in Saipan, purchased two First Class seats — one for herself and one for a wicker basket, containing her cobra. The weather seems to be making the snake nervous, and it is thrashing about inside the basket… so, when is it going to stop being so bumpy?”

Now I understand. “I’ll be right back to you.”

In my heart I’m sure I’m being set-up for a joke, but I dutifully explain the conversation to the guys. Dan jumps out of his seat to take a look. Two minutes go by, and he returns saying that there’s a wicker basket strapped into a first-class seat back there, and for me to try to secure the lid.

Now I know that they’re fucking with me. Hazardous material “Hazmat” rules call for cargo of various kinds to be secured in very specific ways in the belly of the plane. Most of us pilots remember the Hazmat classifications by a game equated to how one normally goes to the bathroom… that is “explosive-gasses-liquids-solids…” Explosives are category I, gasses category II, and so forth… I can’t think of any category which permits cobras. Dangerous cargo is not allowed on board, and poisonous snakes would not be allowed in the cabin of any airplane, period!

I’m thinking that not even our luded-out Saipanese Gate Agents could be stuporous enough to allow a woman to walk into the cabin of an airplane carrying a live cobra.

As I go back to take a look, the plane is rocking and rolling in the storm, and I’m holding on to whatever I can cling to in the turbulence. I’m also trying to figure out just what kind of a gag I am walking into.

Sure as shit, sitting in the first class section is a well-dressed Japanese matron. On the seat next to her is a three-foot tall wicker basket, strapped in, but being jostled from the inside by some living creature. The basket has a lid on it, and the flight attendants have piled some blankets on top, in a poor attempt to keep it closed.

I don’t believe it, I am on an airplane carrying three hundred passengers, riding out a storm at thirty-seven thousand feet, and we’ve got a terrified, pissed-off cobra on board.

“Holy shit, there IS a cobra on board!” I scream back into the cockpit.

“Rambo” and Dan are working hard to keep the airplane straight and level, their eyes and hands busy jumping between their radar screens and the flight guidance panel. I’m on my own. Grabbing my heavy flight bag, I race back to the snake. Gingerly, I remove the flimsy blankets from atop the lid, and replace them with my bag. Duct-taping the bag around the seat, the basket, and the armrests, I instruct the Senior Flight Attendant to move nearby passengers to empty seats, further away from the snake.

Amazingly, nobody has taken notice of the activity surrounding this scene, the flight attendants themselves seem oblivious to the danger. Its got to be Nature’s ultimate valium, the betel nut they all seem to chew in Micronesia.

Every five minutes for the next two hours, I check back on the situation. Eventually we are out of the “chop,” in smooth air, and the basketwacker seems to be at rest in his wicker home.

At the gate in Tokyo, I climb out of the cockpit in time to see the lady and her basket leaving the airplane. She is calmly carrying her “pet” up the jetway, no big thing! My flight bag has been cut free, and is now resting on the first-class seat.

During refueling and cabin cleaning, we three pilots sit in the cockpit with the door closed. We finally have a chance to talk about what just went on. If Jimmy Fratella follows the rules, he will have to write up an “irregularity report,” describing the entire incident.

At least four people will be fired over this: the ticket and gate agents in Saipan, the Air-Mike flight attendant who helped strap the snake in, and the gate agent in Tokyo, who blithely escorted the lady and her cobra out of the plane and up the jet-way.

“Nobody would believe this anyway,” says Rambo, electing not to write up any report at all. God only knows what happened at customs and immigration, we got out of town.

Summertime, Manila non-stop to Honolulu, is about a nine hour flight, an all night deal. Our first two hours had been a bitch, torrential rain, turbulence, the works. In severe-clear for the past half-hour, Captain Chuck Cooper finally succumbed to his exhaustion.

While Chuck was hanging comatose in his seatbelt harness, Roy Steele, our Co-pilot was gently maneuvering the DC-10 around storm cells, using the heading select knob on the flight guidance panel.

I’m tonight’s Second Officer, Flight Engineer, sitting sideways, back at the panel, monitoring systems. My mind wanders to an impression of last night’s fun, and I laugh out loud. I can see clearly now Captain Chuck, balls-naked, sloshing around on a rubber mattress, slick with hot soapy water, being worked over by two Philipina girls.

Roy Steele and I have snuck the Mama-San’s karaoke machine microphone into Chuck’s “private” room. I hold the mike to his mouth, as he makes a noble attempt at “You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh…,” particularly hard to accomplish with your dick being sucked by one girl, and you’re singing through the fine, straight pussy-hairs of a second girl, who’s sitting on your face.

Hearing this unique rendition over the loud-speaker system, the Mama-San freaks out! Roy and I split post-haste, and head for Rosie’s café for breakfast, then it’s back to the hotel for our afternoon siesta, before our flight home. I don’t know what time Captain Chuck left his two friends.

As I start to nod off myself, my head growing heavy, I notice that the engine gauges for the number two engine are doing a jig, they start rolling back, and then they quit.

“Power loss #2!” I yell out.

Chuck, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot, is awake immediately, instantly focused. Roy, pushes up the power on the two remaining engines, applies rudder, and is controlling the airplane.

Three things come to mind immediately. First, we can’t maintain this altitude with only two working engines (I break out the “drift-down” charts that tell us by weight, what altitude we can maintain). Second, it’s got to be fuel contamination, so we are going to lose the #1 and #3 engines. And third, we are in the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean, it’s the dead of night, hours from anywhere. Ditching, injuries, blood, sharks… fuckin’ Manila, what a shithole, giving us watered down gasoline.