The End Of Something

Shenzhen, the J.W. Marriott. We arrived on a jumpseat from Anchorage about 18 hours ago, and we depart for Singapore about three hours from now. What exists on paper as a 24 hour layover is in reality about 20 hours, and getting some activity and some food and decent rest is the order of the day. And because we’re on almost the exact opposite side of the globe from where we were 36 hours ago, our body clocks are out of alignment with the sun. However we manage it, the body clock will begin to shift, working its way (at about an hour per day) toward alignment with the local day-night cycle. I got to the hotel about 3:30AM, and waited around until 6:30 to head out for a walk (with a little nap in the interim). It’s hot and humid here, so my 8 mile walk nearly did me in—partly because by my body clock I’m starting a long walk at 7:PM. By the time I’m back in the hotel (after a McDonald’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and a slice of cheese on a hamburger bun with a squirt of ketchup, yet another regional variant—simple and tasty) it’s about 10:30 local, and my body is saying it’s bedtime. This is why it’s so important to have decent blackout curtains, as getting good sleep in bright sunshine doesn’t work for most of us, and doing this job without being rested is difficult and hazardous. This time I was successful, dropping off in my darkened room about noon and waking up around 8:30 PM, just as all the restaurants out my window are shutting down for the night.

My intent was to write about some of these experiences at career’s end, a series of snapshots from a life’s work. This is my last trip as an airline pilot, capping off 31 years in the profession, just over 24 years of that time with UPS. And circadian management is a big part of what doing this job entails—apart from the regulations and company rules and arcane bits of FAA and airplane knowledge that every airline pilot navigates. I find I’m scrutinizing each little activity on my last couple trips in heightened fashion, as in so many respects I likely won’t pass this way again. I have mixed feelings, of course; nostalgia for all the really extraordinary parts of the job, but also a sense of relief that I won’t have to live under the microscope of scrutiny that goes with it—the medicals and simulator training and recurrent study and regulation reviews and check rides and paperwork audits. I’ve accepted years ago—in a kicking-and-screaming kind of way—this high-scrutiny aspect as a necessary element of the career. But I’ve always hated it and I’m eager to be out from under it.

The payoff from making peace with this scrutiny has been the world at my doorstep. Before UPS I hadn’t done a whole lot of traveling, and virtually all of that was domestic (I made two brief trips to Europe in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and we saw some Bahamian islands when I was a kid). After moving to the magnificent MD-11 in 2009, I began regularly to circle the globe. Literally. We used to take off and head East or West and keep flying until we were back in Kentucky. This was an entirely new experience for me, and I gained a little familiarity with so many places: Cologne and London, Warsaw and Budapest, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Almaty, Sydney, Dubai, parts of Canada, Mexico City. 50 places, virtually all of them places I’d not seen before—and, from the perspective of this last trip, places I’ll almost certainly never see again.

It’s been a dual experience: on the one hand, it’s exposure to how people live in other parts of the world (at least in the big cities), with the food and music and strange currencies and odd brands of automobiles and modes of dress and languages odd to my ear, and, a favorite of mine, the regional modes of transportation. Subways in China, Jeepneys in Clark, the train in Dubai, the street cars and the Star Ferry in Hong Kong. Most of the world has a different experience and outlook on life from our own, and visiting these places is the surest way to drive home this point. And on the other hand, one quickly realizes that these places are just places, like the places where we live. There are lovely little coffee shops everywhere in the world, but they’re not vastly different from the lovely little coffee shops in Appleton, Wisconsin. On the home stretch of my career I find I’m more aware of the scrutiny I’ll no longer be subject to than to the coffee shop I won’t see again. But what a privilege to have seen enough that a coffee shop in Vienna seems a bit mundane.

And for all of this I’ve been well-paid, quite beyond my expectations. It’s gauche to talk about money, but the pay of the industry is kind of the elephant in the room. It’s the thing that accords the job some status, and that in turn gives me a patina of accomplishment in the larger world—a status that, had I kept driving a city bus, I would not have been given. I don’t think of myself as caring much for that, but I’m aware that I hold that blasé disinterest from the comfort zone of everyone else thinking I’m accomplished in life—even though I know perfectly well that I’m just an ape and this is just my job. Particularly in my work setting, the uniform and four stripes puts me on the top of this particular food chain, with people deflecting to this status as a matter of course. In some concrete way, I move through life as the embodiment of a status that society attaches to the profession. 30 years into it, I’m lying if I say this is of zero account. 

For many of my coworkers, this status is expected and proper. Particularly from a background of military flying, many guys are accustomed to being at the top of the food chain. By this yardstick, of course they’d be well paid and at the top of the ladder. But my background is driving a city bus after floundering through nine years of college (for my four-year degree!). The money is not an expected thing for me. I’m not a money guy, and never have been. I’ve always been adept at spending it, but I find investing boring and the prospect of amassing wealth just supremely uninteresting (thankfully, the corollary of this disinterest is that gambling holds zero interest. The lure of the big payoff just isn’t there for me). So where many of my coworkers hold the attainment of wealth a key personal goal, I’m content just to have not screwed up. (It would be so unsurprising to find myself a slave to credit card debt, having several mortgages, a big payment on an airplane, a huge car payment, lavish vacations. I’ve flirted at the edges of some of these, but have managed to avoid the trap that ensnares so many of us—think of the number of pro football players or lottery winners who march straight to bankruptcy.) My wife deserves much more credit for this than I, but I’ll take credit for an awareness early on that her control of our finances would benefit me. And so it has been.

So many weirdnesses with the job: the strict regulation of everything, being locked down to a by-the-minute schedule, the tight choreography with 30 other people of the airplane coming and going from its parking spot, the life in hotels and the private cars shuttling us around, the extreme routinization of operating a transport jet. One of the weirdnesses is how little I understand of how the jet works mechanically. I have zero ability or expertise about keeping it running: I cannot fuel it nor put oil in it, I cannot load it nor tighten a loose panel, I’m not qualified to brush snow off the wing surfaces. I’m not even allowed to replace a burnt-out lightbulb. I’m the guy who is brought in to sit in THIS seat and manipulate THESE switches—and by way of this rarified routine we take 50 tons of stuff 7 miles up at 500 mph to a destination 3000 miles away. My world is this tiny room, and none of the zillion other employees at this huge company has the first clue what to do in this room—though their jobs are 100% reliant on mine. And that’s where the money comes from. Weirdness.

And the jet itself. I’m never far from an awareness that I’m being given the keys to a 220 million dollar machine, a machine that even today still seems absolutely magical and improbable. And that machine is responsible for all the other things that attach to the profession: the destinations and cultural experiences, the money, the food chain on which we all sit, the schedule, the home-and-gone personal life, the living half my life in hotels. To this day I’m a little giddy to do my walk-around before each flight, marveling at what a pinnacle of human ingenuity a transport jet is. The crazy amount of power needed for takeoff; the hushed inner sanctum of the dark cockpit at night; the systems that let us navigate thunder storms or fly through snow and rain. All of it. Because the actual job duties take place in the tiny room of the cockpit—where the 180 foot-long, 200 ton machine kind of disappears—the walk-around lets us connect the miraculous machine to the minute switch-throwing that makes it go. I ply my trade sitting in this seat, but when I do the walk-around—or when I stand behind the jet and watch other jets taking off and landing next to me—I’m able to connect these arcane cockpit tasks to the astounding reality of airline flight.

But time passes and things come to an end. All of the stuff that was remarkable or other-worldly 30 years ago is solidly routine now—even as I still tip my hat to its magic.  Hong Kong is magnificent, but less so on my 40th visit than on the early times. Indeed, I kind of need to look back to the photos of my earlier visits to tap into that early wonder if I am to fully appreciate it today. 

And that looking back is what I expect my retirement to be. The airline and these jets and these many workers and all these places will continue apace without me, but I’ve been fortunate to have dipped my toe in the water during my time. I’m forever grateful for this, but I’m also ready for the next adventure.