Guys,It has been a fun 28 years for me and my only regret was that we senior slugs left the airline bidnez worse off than we found it. If good intentions count (and they don't) we had 'em.Our pilot group operated in the fog of self assurance for too long. Eastern? Pan Am? It'll never happen to us, etc.Back then, senior guys like me could schedule trips in such a way that our regular days off could be linked by a two-week vacation, which would stretch the total time off to four weeks. If I remember correctly, we also got five paid personal days -- and this was during a time when the airline made record profits. Drinking on deadheads to a layover was encouraged. Our biggest onboard problem was choosing between the steak and the lobster. Smoking in the cockpit was allowed and brought some pretty nice, smoking flight attendants up for a foot rub by yours truly.DC-10 Captains in 1977 made enough money to buy two pickup trucks a month. Engineers never paid for a beer. The party on layovers was generally in my room and the booze was free, courtesy of "survival kits" packed in air-sickness bags provided by the flight attendants I kept giving those foot rubs to.Nobody ratted on anybody else. Conflicts were handled in-cockpit and you could actually go into a chief pilots office and volunteer that you screwed up on something.Chief pilots back then were older guys who played a lot of golf and didn't go to the office much. They wouldn't think of telling you, as it happened in my case, that you were abusing sick leave when the truth was that you were dying of cancer. (Not that I'm bitter about that.)If you did get summoned to see the big Kahuna at the General Offices, he bought you lunch. Remember, those were gentler times.We went from a smallish, well-run, obscenely profitable airline that knew it's market to a huge company owned and managed by N.Y. bankers and MBA types that never loaded a bag or pulled a chock, and perfumed princes who I wouldn't hire to mow my lawn because they'd hold too many meetings about how to use the starter rope.I can't tell you how much I detest those guys. They took something beautiful and fun and turned it into a charnel house of back-stabbing, PowerPoint charts, elitism and idiocy. At every turn they screwed the pooch, peed in the pool and blamed us, the pilots.We went from being the highest paid in the country and being considered by management as the airline's greatest asset to being the least paid, least regarded in the industry and considered by the perfumed princes as liabilities. They made the atmosphere so rank with their incompetence that over a thousand of the most senior guys, including this one, bailed out of the best job on the planet because we have zero optimism for the airline's continued survival.Even now I get so angry when I think about it that the drugs I'm taking for this cancer thing won't calm me down. Sure, I might have fought to get my medical back and in a few years I might have made it -- but for what purpose? I'd take a pay cut coming back to the line.Besides, who the hell would care? When I was on the line and sicking out every other trip due to the uncontrolled growth of an unknown lung tumor, I heard weekly from the chief pilot about their latest pie chart on how you pilots were "gaming the system." When I spent a month this summer in the hospital literally dying, I never heard a peep from anybody at our "family airline." Not a "How are ya?" Not a "Kiss my ass" -- nothing.So much for 28 years of "loyal service"!I'll be like most early retirees -- I desperately miss the flying and I even more desperately miss you guys, but management that wouldn't be able to run a Sonic drive-through on a slow day and the "job" itself?Nah!It is time to literally drain the swamp around my hurricane-damaged house, rebuild and get on with things. Maybe I'll finally get that big rig and do the truck driving I always threatened to do. I'll definitely keep flying the Champ.It looks like, with the airlines backing out of their pensions, me and the wife will have to get jobs. I hope I can say, "Welcome to Walmart," without having a seizure.So -- goodbye, I guess.It was an honor flying with you. Thanks for covering my ass for all those years (you know who you are).I love you guys.Coonass
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/ceo-of-the-cockpit-49-coonass-says-goodbye