turbomax97
What can brown do for you?
The last word: The bad boys of
aviation
Let’s say you’re the captain
of a Boeing 747 out of Anchorage for Chicago . Except no
self-respecting cargo pilot calls himself—or, rarely,
herself—anything so leaden, so utterly earthbound as
“captain.” You are instead, proudly and defiantly, a
“freight dog,” a nom de guerre freighted, so to speak,
with many connotations, not all of them positive.
As you pull your 747, or
“whale,” onto Runway 6 Right at Anchorage
and advance the four throttles to maximum power, air
traffic control advises there’s a welter of severe
turbulence on your climb-out. A passenger airliner might
give it a wide berth, but you, with a load of time-sensitive
cargo, barge right on through. Then the turbulence hits and
all hell breaks loose. Your 747 is batted about the sky
like a shuttlecock. “S---, hang on guys,” your flight
engineer says. Then: “Whoa ...we lost something.” The
radio crackles, “Ah, four-six-echo-heavy, Elmendorf tower
said something large just fell off your
airplane.”
Something large? (The National
Transportation Safety Board will later determine that your
whale performed “an uncommanded left bank of approximately
50 degrees” along with amusement-park pitches, rolls, and
yaws that ripped the No. 2 engine clean off the wing.) While
all of this is actually happening, perhaps you, the captain,
flash to Ernest K. Gann’s classic Fate Is the
Hunter, beloved among freight dogs for its vainglorious
pilot prose: “We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must
shake its filthy hand.”
In any event, you manage to keep
the crippled 747 flying long enough to dump fuel and return
to Anchorage for a harrowing landing. And as you
taxi the jet with its mangled wing, missing engine, and
smoking brakes—but the cargo still snuggled safely in the
hold—your flight engineer declares: “Buddy, I don’t
care how many beers I owed you in the past. This one I’m
going to pay off, okay?”
The above incident actually
occurred several years ago. It was a 747-121 freighter, but
the whole misbegotten adventure, from disintegrating
airplane to coolly averted tragedy, would be recognized by
freight dogs the world over. Freight dogs famously fly
decrepit, “clapped-out,” analog-only hand-me-downs from
the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly
embellished, make for
great table rants over pitchers of Watney’s at dog
hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the
Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the
legendary Four Floors of s in Singapore, which,
according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth
in advertising. It’s an article of faith among freight
dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed
cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at
Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Cafe adjacent to
Miami International Airport through which generations of
pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school.
“We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” Tony
Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. “The airline
pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole
different culture.”
It’s a culture that
represents the last gasp of the butt-kicking,
globe-trotting, hell-for-leather pilot worldview. Brutal
labor relations, increasingly automated aircraft, and the
dispiriting post-9/11 environment have torched whatever
adventure and romance remain in aviation. But freight dogs
never got that memo. Yes, they gripe endlessly about the
hours, the food, the lack of sleep, the death-trap airports
of Asia Minor and West Africa .
But talk to true dogs for more
than five minutes and they betray themselves as hopelessly,
permanently, passionately in love with flying and the
particular esprit that hauling cargo allows. “All I ever
wanted to do is fly,” says Tom Satterfield, an MD-11
freighter pilot. How much? Satterfield worked as a
successful chemical engineer for 20 years before
chucking it to become a freight dog when he was 41. Who
among us can declare without a trace of irony that we
absolutely love our work? I wanted to know why freight dogs
did. So I flew to Florida and hung
around Miami Springs, the honky-tonk ’hood near the Miami
airport that has been a freight-dog stronghold for
more than 50 years.
My guide was Mike Yannacone, a
DC-8 cargo captain. The DC-8 was introduced during the
Eisenhower administration; the last one rolled off the
Douglas Aircraft line in Long Beach , Calif. , in 1972.
Yannacone—who drives a Ram pickup, sports a huge
wristwatch, and wears a flight jacket emblazoned with
FREIGHT DOG—doesn’t waste time worrying about the
DC-8’s age. “I get to fly an
airplane,” he marveled when we met up at Bryson’s,
which gloriously lived up to its rep, with a barmaid who
cackled, “What’re you drinkin’, boys?” and a jukebox
blasting Mungo Jerry. Every few minutes the walls rattled as
another whale rumbled skyward a few blocks south. Yannacone
took a pull on his bottle of Sam Adams and shook his head.
“And they’re paying me.”
By volume, air cargo accounts for 35 percent of the value
of total shipped goods, nearly $3 trillion a year. Which
means that in today’s thin-inventoried,
we-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale world—where a wayward
shipment of turn-signal stalks from Taiwan can cause a
Nissan assembly line to seize in Tennessee —air
cargo is often the last, best hope to keep world trade
trading merrily away. So freight dogs are under blinding
pressure to maintain schedules that must go off with
military precision, laid down daily at dispatchers’ desks
in
Miami or Ypsilanti or Dayton or Memphis : Get the
cargo there on time. With the global-economic corollary: And
as cheaply as possible. The players include behemoths UPS
and FedEx, air-cargo’s alpha specimens. (With 669
aircraft, FedEx is the world’s largest airline.) But
there’s still room for hand-sewn, niche-filling outfits
shuttling car parts and canceled checks—even a carrier
that specializes in rushing fresh donor organs from morgues
to operating theaters via Learjet.
The cargo itself comprises
incomprehensible quantities of the mundane—160,000 pounds
of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000
pounds of Grand Theft Auto videogames—but also a full-size
armored truck filled with 4 tons of Euro banknotes; a
Sikorsky 76 helicopter for the Sultan of Brunei’s nephew;
120 tons of Beaujolais Nouveau; enough condoms to choke a
specially chartered 747
to Rio for Carnival.
Then there is the livestock:
whales; thoroughbred racehorses; rhinos; dairy cattle;
giraffes; elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which escaped and
got behind the captain’s rudder pedals); ducklings
(ditto); and a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live
crickets destined as feed for the world’s zoos.
Airline passengers make much of
plunging service standards and fewer frills—of being
treated, they whimper, “like cargo.” Freight dogs upend
the comparison. “If you’re Joe Shmo, who cares if your
flight leaves or not?” Tony Baca told me. “Grab another
flight—it doesn’t really matter. But when I’m hauling
100 tons of Nintendo Wiis, it starts mattering. That’s
millions of dollars of revenue. You have people waiting at
Target for that. One time I ended up hauling 130 tons of
Happy Meal toys. And the reason was, a container ship sank
in the middle of the Pacific. If a huge shipment has just
sunk, you can’t dispatch another ship. So you start
hauling Happy Meal toys on a 747.”
Seth Brady, a 747 cargo pilot,
recalls being initially mystified when a former employer
dispatched a Learjet out of Toledo to meet a British Airways flight at JFK
because General Motors had come up five seat backs short at
its Corvette plant. “They flew in the extra Corinthian
leather from England,” he told me, “put it on the Lear
at JFK, ran it up to Pontiac, made the new seat backs in
three hours, put them back on the Lear, and took them to
Bowling Green, Ky., in time for the production line not to
shut down.” Brady wondered “how anyone could afford to
fly all these airplanes around”—until
he was told that the cost to shut the assembly line was
$42,000. Per minute.
So the dogs fly, usually at night,
when the world’s cargo moves, in odysseys taken up on a
moment’s notice—say,
Frankfurt-Dubai-Nairobi-Entebbe-Lahore-Taipei-Hong Kong.
Many are on call 24-7, meaning they can’t touch so much as
a beer or risk violating the FAA’s eight-hour
“bottle-to-the-throttle” rule. Meanwhile, cargo carriers
are notorious for pushing everything—aircraft, pilots, and
the regulations—to the absolute limit. An investigation
published by The Miami Herald depicted an industry fraught
with decaying aircraft, shoddy maintenance, flagrant
safety-rule violations, and 69 fatal crashes of U.S. cargo
planes since 2000 that have killed 85; in a quarter of fatal
crashes there were mechanical problems that had not been
corrected before the planes were dispatched. The regulars
at Bryson’s still talk about the Fine Air DC-8 freighter
that crashed on takeoff at the Miami airport in 1997.
The cargo, improperly loaded, shifted to
the tail, causing the plane to stall and plunge into a
parking lot. The pilot’s last words were, “Oh, no.”
All those voyages that start with
a beeper call and end four weeks and 100,000 miles later
take a toll, of course. Among the afflictions is what the
dogs call AIDS—aviation induced divorce syndrome. “There
was a Wife No. 1,” one told me, “but there will not be a
Wife No. 2.” There’s also strict observance of “what
happens in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei stays
in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei.” But a
fraternal code is only partial compensation. Baca, who is
married to a flight attendant, admitted
to me that the life of a freight dog sometimes falls short
of glorious even mid-assignment. “There are days where I
get to my hotel room and feel like crying,” he says,
“because the family is going to do things and I’m stuck
in
Gambia .”
By necessity, those feelings stay
in the hotel. “I can’t worry about the kids and the
water heater when I’m shooting an approach in a snowstorm
at 3:30 a.m. in Kazakhstan ,” he says. “It weighs too
much on your head. You will make mistakes. And kill
yourself.”
From a longer article by Michael Walker that appeared
in the March edition of Men’s
Vogue. Used
by permission. All rights reserved
aviation
Let’s say you’re the captain
of a Boeing 747 out of Anchorage for Chicago . Except no
self-respecting cargo pilot calls himself—or, rarely,
herself—anything so leaden, so utterly earthbound as
“captain.” You are instead, proudly and defiantly, a
“freight dog,” a nom de guerre freighted, so to speak,
with many connotations, not all of them positive.
As you pull your 747, or
“whale,” onto Runway 6 Right at Anchorage
and advance the four throttles to maximum power, air
traffic control advises there’s a welter of severe
turbulence on your climb-out. A passenger airliner might
give it a wide berth, but you, with a load of time-sensitive
cargo, barge right on through. Then the turbulence hits and
all hell breaks loose. Your 747 is batted about the sky
like a shuttlecock. “S---, hang on guys,” your flight
engineer says. Then: “Whoa ...we lost something.” The
radio crackles, “Ah, four-six-echo-heavy, Elmendorf tower
said something large just fell off your
airplane.”
Something large? (The National
Transportation Safety Board will later determine that your
whale performed “an uncommanded left bank of approximately
50 degrees” along with amusement-park pitches, rolls, and
yaws that ripped the No. 2 engine clean off the wing.) While
all of this is actually happening, perhaps you, the captain,
flash to Ernest K. Gann’s classic Fate Is the
Hunter, beloved among freight dogs for its vainglorious
pilot prose: “We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must
shake its filthy hand.”
In any event, you manage to keep
the crippled 747 flying long enough to dump fuel and return
to Anchorage for a harrowing landing. And as you
taxi the jet with its mangled wing, missing engine, and
smoking brakes—but the cargo still snuggled safely in the
hold—your flight engineer declares: “Buddy, I don’t
care how many beers I owed you in the past. This one I’m
going to pay off, okay?”
The above incident actually
occurred several years ago. It was a 747-121 freighter, but
the whole misbegotten adventure, from disintegrating
airplane to coolly averted tragedy, would be recognized by
freight dogs the world over. Freight dogs famously fly
decrepit, “clapped-out,” analog-only hand-me-downs from
the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly
embellished, make for
great table rants over pitchers of Watney’s at dog
hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the
Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the
legendary Four Floors of s in Singapore, which,
according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth
in advertising. It’s an article of faith among freight
dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed
cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at
Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Cafe adjacent to
Miami International Airport through which generations of
pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school.
“We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” Tony
Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. “The airline
pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole
different culture.”
It’s a culture that
represents the last gasp of the butt-kicking,
globe-trotting, hell-for-leather pilot worldview. Brutal
labor relations, increasingly automated aircraft, and the
dispiriting post-9/11 environment have torched whatever
adventure and romance remain in aviation. But freight dogs
never got that memo. Yes, they gripe endlessly about the
hours, the food, the lack of sleep, the death-trap airports
of Asia Minor and West Africa .
But talk to true dogs for more
than five minutes and they betray themselves as hopelessly,
permanently, passionately in love with flying and the
particular esprit that hauling cargo allows. “All I ever
wanted to do is fly,” says Tom Satterfield, an MD-11
freighter pilot. How much? Satterfield worked as a
successful chemical engineer for 20 years before
chucking it to become a freight dog when he was 41. Who
among us can declare without a trace of irony that we
absolutely love our work? I wanted to know why freight dogs
did. So I flew to Florida and hung
around Miami Springs, the honky-tonk ’hood near the Miami
airport that has been a freight-dog stronghold for
more than 50 years.
My guide was Mike Yannacone, a
DC-8 cargo captain. The DC-8 was introduced during the
Eisenhower administration; the last one rolled off the
Douglas Aircraft line in Long Beach , Calif. , in 1972.
Yannacone—who drives a Ram pickup, sports a huge
wristwatch, and wears a flight jacket emblazoned with
FREIGHT DOG—doesn’t waste time worrying about the
DC-8’s age. “I get to fly an
airplane,” he marveled when we met up at Bryson’s,
which gloriously lived up to its rep, with a barmaid who
cackled, “What’re you drinkin’, boys?” and a jukebox
blasting Mungo Jerry. Every few minutes the walls rattled as
another whale rumbled skyward a few blocks south. Yannacone
took a pull on his bottle of Sam Adams and shook his head.
“And they’re paying me.”
By volume, air cargo accounts for 35 percent of the value
of total shipped goods, nearly $3 trillion a year. Which
means that in today’s thin-inventoried,
we-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale world—where a wayward
shipment of turn-signal stalks from Taiwan can cause a
Nissan assembly line to seize in Tennessee —air
cargo is often the last, best hope to keep world trade
trading merrily away. So freight dogs are under blinding
pressure to maintain schedules that must go off with
military precision, laid down daily at dispatchers’ desks
in
Miami or Ypsilanti or Dayton or Memphis : Get the
cargo there on time. With the global-economic corollary: And
as cheaply as possible. The players include behemoths UPS
and FedEx, air-cargo’s alpha specimens. (With 669
aircraft, FedEx is the world’s largest airline.) But
there’s still room for hand-sewn, niche-filling outfits
shuttling car parts and canceled checks—even a carrier
that specializes in rushing fresh donor organs from morgues
to operating theaters via Learjet.
The cargo itself comprises
incomprehensible quantities of the mundane—160,000 pounds
of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000
pounds of Grand Theft Auto videogames—but also a full-size
armored truck filled with 4 tons of Euro banknotes; a
Sikorsky 76 helicopter for the Sultan of Brunei’s nephew;
120 tons of Beaujolais Nouveau; enough condoms to choke a
specially chartered 747
to Rio for Carnival.
Then there is the livestock:
whales; thoroughbred racehorses; rhinos; dairy cattle;
giraffes; elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which escaped and
got behind the captain’s rudder pedals); ducklings
(ditto); and a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live
crickets destined as feed for the world’s zoos.
Airline passengers make much of
plunging service standards and fewer frills—of being
treated, they whimper, “like cargo.” Freight dogs upend
the comparison. “If you’re Joe Shmo, who cares if your
flight leaves or not?” Tony Baca told me. “Grab another
flight—it doesn’t really matter. But when I’m hauling
100 tons of Nintendo Wiis, it starts mattering. That’s
millions of dollars of revenue. You have people waiting at
Target for that. One time I ended up hauling 130 tons of
Happy Meal toys. And the reason was, a container ship sank
in the middle of the Pacific. If a huge shipment has just
sunk, you can’t dispatch another ship. So you start
hauling Happy Meal toys on a 747.”
Seth Brady, a 747 cargo pilot,
recalls being initially mystified when a former employer
dispatched a Learjet out of Toledo to meet a British Airways flight at JFK
because General Motors had come up five seat backs short at
its Corvette plant. “They flew in the extra Corinthian
leather from England,” he told me, “put it on the Lear
at JFK, ran it up to Pontiac, made the new seat backs in
three hours, put them back on the Lear, and took them to
Bowling Green, Ky., in time for the production line not to
shut down.” Brady wondered “how anyone could afford to
fly all these airplanes around”—until
he was told that the cost to shut the assembly line was
$42,000. Per minute.
So the dogs fly, usually at night,
when the world’s cargo moves, in odysseys taken up on a
moment’s notice—say,
Frankfurt-Dubai-Nairobi-Entebbe-Lahore-Taipei-Hong Kong.
Many are on call 24-7, meaning they can’t touch so much as
a beer or risk violating the FAA’s eight-hour
“bottle-to-the-throttle” rule. Meanwhile, cargo carriers
are notorious for pushing everything—aircraft, pilots, and
the regulations—to the absolute limit. An investigation
published by The Miami Herald depicted an industry fraught
with decaying aircraft, shoddy maintenance, flagrant
safety-rule violations, and 69 fatal crashes of U.S. cargo
planes since 2000 that have killed 85; in a quarter of fatal
crashes there were mechanical problems that had not been
corrected before the planes were dispatched. The regulars
at Bryson’s still talk about the Fine Air DC-8 freighter
that crashed on takeoff at the Miami airport in 1997.
The cargo, improperly loaded, shifted to
the tail, causing the plane to stall and plunge into a
parking lot. The pilot’s last words were, “Oh, no.”
All those voyages that start with
a beeper call and end four weeks and 100,000 miles later
take a toll, of course. Among the afflictions is what the
dogs call AIDS—aviation induced divorce syndrome. “There
was a Wife No. 1,” one told me, “but there will not be a
Wife No. 2.” There’s also strict observance of “what
happens in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei stays
in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei.” But a
fraternal code is only partial compensation. Baca, who is
married to a flight attendant, admitted
to me that the life of a freight dog sometimes falls short
of glorious even mid-assignment. “There are days where I
get to my hotel room and feel like crying,” he says,
“because the family is going to do things and I’m stuck
in
Gambia .”
By necessity, those feelings stay
in the hotel. “I can’t worry about the kids and the
water heater when I’m shooting an approach in a snowstorm
at 3:30 a.m. in Kazakhstan ,” he says. “It weighs too
much on your head. You will make mistakes. And kill
yourself.”
From a longer article by Michael Walker that appeared
in the March edition of Men’s
Vogue. Used
by permission. All rights reserved
