Stephen Keshner: Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot

I was working my ass off, trying to hold the rocking DC-10 steady as we approached Los Angeles International Airport. We’d lost an outboard engine, unsuccessfully tried to relight it, and completed our emergency check lists.

Notifying the LAX controllers of our emergency, we’ve been cleared for an immediate approach. Now on final, about fifteen miles out, we are tracking the localizer inbound. We haven’t reached “Roman” yet, the final approach fix at glide-slope intercept.

Everybody’s sweating. It’s pitch black outside, and we’ve endured two hours of abnormal and emergency situation struggling to land safely. Now down to only two engines, and no hydraulics in the number one system, we reach the outer marker. I begin a let down, following the glide-slope to runway two-five-right on the south side of the airport.

“Engine fire!” screams the Second Officer, as red warning lights and fire bells pour more noise and adrenalin into our already intense cockpit.

The airplane yaws wildly to the right as the engineer and non-flying pilot pull back the power on the burning engine, and discharge the Halon. I increase the amount of left rudder pressure, fighting to keep the aircraft in control….my left leg is already quivering from the extra rudder pressure I’ve been keeping in.

Flying on one engine, I brain-fart, forgetting to get the flaps up, to firewall the power on the one remaining engine, and to dive for airspeed… speed is life right now. With our landing flaps still out, the drag is unforgiving. Shit, I’ve forgotten everything…our air speed deteriorates rapidly and we stall, the airplane is falling, plummeting, we are all screaming advise over each other’s panicky voices. We crash!

Maniacal screams pierce the silence. L.L. Bataan, Director of Training, “Do you know how many people you just killed?” Bataan, his neck-cords popping in rage, shrieks again “…well, do you realize how many people you just killed?”

My silence serves to infuriate him further, so he advises that “your fucking stupidity just killed a couple of hundred people on board this fucking airplane!”

I remind him that, in fact, I probably took out another few hundred people on the ground. “Truth be told, L.L., I think my fucking stupidity started another riot in Los Angeles. I figure, after the looting and insurrection, I bet millions die due to my fucking stupidity!”

L.L.’s not amused, but he has calmed down. He gives me another double engine failure and fire, and I get it right this time, landing smoothly to end the four-hour simulator session. “Welcome aboard, son, congratulations!”

“Hi. My name is Steve Keshner, and I’m an attractive female bookkeeper.”

The woman on the phone laughs, “One Moment.”

“Hello, this is Will Deals, can I help you?” A man’s gravelly voice.

“Hi. I’m Steve Keshner, I’m an attractive female bookkeeper.” More laughter, from Will this time.

That’s how in 1983 I came to meet Mr. William Macon Deals, Will Deals, an even sleazier fellow than me. His illegal, sexist ad in the Jacksonville Times Union and Journal intrigued me:

Aviation Company seeks attractive female bookkeeper.

I had just moved to Jacksonville, Florida with the last of my ex-wives. I was a forty-year-old kid, a loser, selling used cars by day, an Adjunct Professor of Accounting at Jones Business College at night. That is, I was doing nothing, going nowhere. Time to settle down, settle in, get the old life in order.

Though I’m neither female nor attractive, Will Deals invites me to come in and talk about the job. Deals’ Aviation, a flight school, charter outfit, and maintenance facility, was a ragtag affair located in the corrosion corner of Craig Airport.

According to Mr. Deals his bookkeeper had left him, he had no outside accounting firm, and no financial statements for the past seven months. To prevent his life from being too easy, he was also converting his bookkeeping system from manual to electronic data processing.

“You need an accountant, not an attractive female bookkeeper,” I advise. “I can’t afford an accountant.”

“How much are you going to pay your attractive female bookkeeper?”

“Two hundred dollars a week.”

We look at each other for a while, sizing each other up. Deals blinks first, and offers me two hundred a week and flying lessons, to become his attractive female bookkeeper.

“I accept. “Will” I ask, “what led you to advertise for an attractive female bookkeeper?”

“I meet a lot of pretty girls that way,” this real dry with no hint of humor. “Oh.”

That’s how I became “Keshy,” an attractive female bookkeeper, and how I wound up in the aviation business.

The first person Mr. Deals introduced me to was his Chief Flight Instructor, Ms. Madeleine Bruckie. Madeleine had one glass eye and a body odor problem. I later learn that this condition is an occupational by-product of the many trips made between an air-conditioned office and those hot little airplanes. Back and forth all day, sweating, cooling, re-sweating, re-cooling… B.O. Central.

Madeleine would become my first Flight Instructor. She was a remarkable woman, a single-parent who had fallen in love with flying in Ohio, working days as a waitress, and learning to fly at night. As a one-eyed wonder, Madeleine had somehow managed to obtain the waivers necessary to become not only a pilot, but a Flight Instructor as well. She was one tough, competent cookie, Ms. Bruckie.

After meeting Madeleine, I was introduced to the other flight instructors. They were all foreign born kids, in the States to learn to fly, and to eventually try to get flying jobs with any major American carrier. The flying opportunities are far more plentiful in the United States than in Europe. Unlike the rest of the world, we allow foreign pilots easy entrée to fly for American carriers. Most other country’s rules are very restrictive as regards entry into their pilot pool.

When Madeleine took me out for my first flight lesson and taxied me onto the active runway, she told me to firewall the throttle, “go as fast as you can down the middle of that concrete strip.” What a rush. On that first flight, I fell in love with flying, and never wanted to be an attractive female bookkeeper or anything else, ever again.

Madeleine gave me ground school training, before and after each lesson. Leaning over the charts, the center button of her flight shirt would occasionally pop open, encouraged by the weight of one of her remarkable and unsupported chests. Madeleine’s nipple would poke through her blouse, and wink at me. Transfixed, I could never remember which of Madeleine’s eyes was real or glass, and which would catch me staring. I was never caught admiring Madeleine’s “third eye,” but thoroughly distracted, I never learned much from her ground school sessions. I’m sure that if she thinks of me today, it’s as a notvery-bright ground school student, with limited powers of concentration.

I was able to squeeze in flight lessons between work assignments, and I was fortunate enough to be taught not only by Madeleine, but by Maxellende DeCorte, “Maxie,” a brilliant, young French aviatrix; Oystein Aaro, capable in the air, a dick-led Norwegian disaster on the ground; Stigo Brandvik, a wild and crazy Norwegian guy; and Perry Dervas, a Greek with attitude.