How About Piston-Pounding Freight Dogs? Show of Hands?

For some reason I can still hear clearly the Horizon Air Assistant Chief Pilot posing this question to my class of newly hired Dash 8 first officers in August of 1997.  On this first day on the job twelve of us sat in an over-airconditioned room, bolt upright in our dark suits and red power ties silently speculating as to the experience and background of our fellow classmates.  The first day of class at a new airline is, without exception, exactly the same throughout the industry.  Nobody wants to be the first to stand out and say I've done this, or I've been doing that, I've flown these, or I was involved in this.  It's as if we can each continue harboring the notion that we are the superior candidate so long as nobody else opens their mouth and lays waste to our private claim.  Instead, everyone mills around making the tritest of small talk and purposely avoiding any mention of airplanes, airlines or flying.  Sports, movies, the weather, these are all accepted first-day-of-class topics, but a moratorium on any and all aviation speak is strictly, if not audibly enforced.

Finally, at nine o'clock, after we've all had too much coffee, the Assistant Chief Pilot (ACP for those given to abbreviations, Ass-Chief for those given to the vulgar) calls us to order and welcomes us to the Horizon Air family.  He quickly dispenses with the normal formalities before getting down to brass tacks.  After a long draw from his java he asks the question each of us has been dying to ask ourselves, where is everyone from?  To our delight and relief he does not follow the accepted practice of starting with the poor bastard in the front row, far left and working his way down (though I'm always in the back row, a benefit of having a last name that begins with U).  Instead he asks first how many of us are coming from another airline.  A few timid hands begin to raise.  Corporate flying?  A few more hands.  Military? A couple more. Charter flying?  Another smattering of hands.  Finally after another pull of his coffee, and with a barely perceivable smirk and a hint of insightful sarcasm he asks, "and how many of you are piston-pounding freight dogs?".  From the back row my hand goes up, and out of the corner of my eye I become aware of one more hoisted hand.  Our eyes quickly meet and we exchange a knowing nod.  Here, among the prima-donnas I found a friend.

Freight Dogs, by the most basic definition, are pilots who fly aircraft engaged in the transportation of cargo.  A more colorful (and accurate) description would be financially destitute pilots who fly aging, sparsely equipped aircraft engaged in the often precarious transportation of cargo at odd hours of the night and in all kinds of dodgy weather.  Thus,  the fortunate pilots working for FEDEX or UPS are never referred to as freight dogs as they fly state-of-the-art machines to sophisticated parts of the word for exorbitant amounts of money.

There are three sub-categories within the greater freight dog hierarchy.  On top of the pyramid are the heavy-jet globetrotters.  These are the cats flying old stretched-fuselage DC-8s and early model B747s on government contracts to garden spots like Lagos, Nigeria or Bangalore, India.  They will spend about three weeks of every month on the road and cross multiple time zones on a regular basis.  They are often in their mid to late fifties, thrice divorced, completely void of any normal circadian rhythms and may or may not have their mail forwarded to a van down by the river.  It's a hard life usually leading to an early and sudden cardiac-related death induced by too much fast food and an incorrectly set alarm clock.

Load 'em up!  Main cargo deck of the MD-11F.  Johannesburg, South Africa.

Next down the food chain are the silver medalists, the turboprop drivers.  My time spent on this particular rung remains the most fun I've had in aviation.  Large turboprop aircraft like ATRs, Metroliners and F27s will typically be used where a fair amount of lift is needed over a route with multiple short haul legs.  These airplanes will cruise at altitudes ranging from 15,000 to 25,000 feet where a jet engine is grossly inefficient.  Turboprop freight airlines have traditionally been a stepping stone on the path to a major airline flying job, but have fallen out of favor among career-minded pilots in recent years due to the advent and use of the regional jet by smaller airlines like Skywest.  Some of my fondest (and most hair-raising) memories are of city hopping through southeast Alaska in old F27s.

 Departing Juneau, Alaska in a Fokker F27.  The horrifically loud Rolls Royce Dart engines led to it's being nicknamed the "forty-five thousand pound dog whistle".

Finally, after sifting through the primordial ooze of the non-scheduled aviation barrel you'll find the piston-pounders.  Low on experience, but big on dreams these young pilots ply their trade in light twin-engine aircraft like the Cessna 402 or the Piper Navajo flying priority freight for often shady, fly-by-night companies in the relentless pursuit of valuable multi-engine flight time.  One has very few rights as a piston-pounder as the operators know full well that for every butt that straps into one of their cockpits there are 10 butts willing to do it for less money.  You fly what they tell you, where they tell you, when they tell you.  You've got the flu?  Too bad. Move the boxes.  You're wife's in the ER?  Too bad.  Move the boxes. You  haven't had a day off in three months?  Too bad.  Move the boxes (respect to Martin Scorsese).

Regeneration

Back in the antediluvian days of the blogosphere I maintained a website that chronicled my experiences flying air cargo to the far corners of the globe aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-11.  To my great surprise it attracted a modest following and even pulled in a few quid via adsense.  Utterly void of any sort of useful information, it was nothing more than a haphazard collection of musings, rants and Seinfeldian observations concerning  the airline industry and the flying life in general.  Some people, apparently, found it mildly entertaining as my inbox exploded with kind farewell notes when I finally pulled the plug in 2007.

Gemini Air Cargo MD-11F on the ramp in Accra, Ghana circa 2005.

What I've come to realize in the intervening nine years is that, for all my whining and complaining, I really do love the flying life and I draw great joy from sharing it with others through the written word.  It's also proven to be therapeutic.  It does me a world of good to talk about flying, especially with other aviators.  I have doctor friends who run in doctor social circles, lawyer friends who run in lawyer social circles, IT friends who run in IT social circles and so on, but because I live in small town, Oregon, fifty miles from nearest major airport I have no professional peer circle in which to commune.  I am blessed with a handful of dear, close friends who listen politely when I need to unload, but the simple fact is that a person who is not in the life will never understand the life.  It's a little like being in the Mafia.  Or Fight Club.

I'll never know the apprehension one must feel the split-second before sinking a 10-blade scalpel into a patient or the hand-wringing agony of waiting on a jury to decide the fate of a client, for these professional lives are not mine.  I am, however, intimately familiar with the heart-pounding stress of lining up a fully loaded jet on a snow-covered runway at LaGuardia and the creeping trepidation of descending through the fog into Juneau, Alaska at night.  And, for that matter, the sobering responsibility of holding 175 lives in my hands.  This is the life.  This is the world of professional flying, and it's my sincere hope that those who don't fly will enjoy my pointless ramblings and those who do fly will read the occasional passage and say, "Oh, yeah.  It's just like that...".

Note:  I am not Ernest K. Gann, Richard Bach or Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  I'm a dumb kid from Silverton, Oregon who barely made it through Mr. Scrugg's freshman writing class.  Please bare that in mind.

Also, I know I'm comma happy, and I'm working on it...