As most of you have undoubtedly already heard, it has often been alleged that life is a journey, not a destination. Traveling that journey, I recently took a turn up a new road with an interesting side street connected to it. By taking that route, I discovered that I was looking back at myself many years ago—almost 50 years.
This particular excursion began a year ago, when I first became interested in audiobooks. Ever since I began to re-energize and restructure my novel writing career, I had the thought in the back of my mind that getting those novels into audio formats would be an option to pursue. For those of you who aren’t aware, I have written seven novels over the years—all of them with aviation themes that run the gamut from airline stories to hypersonic flight to airships and onto elaborate multi-vessel hijackings.
The older novels have been edited extensively, updated and re-released in all the current e-book formats, plus print editions. I also totally rewrote one of them (“Open Skies,” an airline detective story) and then created something brand-new (“Captain,” which we’ve talked about here in Piper Flyer).
With the advent of MP3 players that you can wear on your hip as either a dedicated unit (like an iPod) or as an integral part of your smartphone, the ability to carry full-length books to listen to has become a totally practical—and enjoyable—experience. Add to that the fact that these audio downloads from sources like Audible.com, Amazon and the iTunes library have become quite affordable and instantly available—unlike those huge packets of CDs from earlier audiobook days. Basically, the audiobooks of today are infinitely easier to deal with, and they cost a fraction of what they used to.
So I decided to turn my own novels into audiobooks. After months of research, I elected to try it myself. I invested in the proper equipment, created a home studio, then recorded two of my novels: “Open Skies” and “Captain.” (The others will be coming soon.)
Then I got interested in doing some professional narration for others. That’s when I ran across Peter Buffington and his nonfiction aviation book “Squawk 7700.”
Billed as an aviation autobiography, “Squawk 7700” could easily be subtitled “The rise and fall of an aspiring airline pilot.” As it says on the jacket, “‘Squawk 7700’ is a first-hand account of author Peter Buffington’s experiences as a commercial airline pilot and the journey he took to reach his childhood dream. Buckle your seatbelt and prepare for an eye-opening, turbulent ride into the world of aviation from the pilot’s seat. From student pilot at age 15, to flight instructor, to nighttime cargo pilot, and finally as a first officer aboard ATR 72 turboprop airliners island-hopping the Caribbean, ‘Squawk 7700’ is a captivating aviation adventure.”
Basically, Peter tried it and didn’t like it. He discovered what he considered to be lots of major flaws, particularly in the way current regional airlines are structured and operating. The book’s been around for a while in print (and as an e-book), but when Buffington decided it was time to attempt an audio version, he looked for someone who could “talk the talk.”
Hence, we connected—and I was contracted to do the narration for “Squawk 7700.” I finished the project in November 2013, and the audio was released on Audible, Amazon and iTunes a few weeks later.
In an email exchange we had after the audiobook’s completion (I’ve never met the man in person, nor even spoken to him on the phone—our relationship is totally electronic), he asked me if I had found his story interesting. Here’s what I said:
Your story was interesting to me because it was so totally different from my own 50-year experience in aviation, which was a product of a totally different environment, era and mindset. You’ve got to remember that while you were struggling with Capt. Carlos , I had already sent in my retirement papers and was wrapping up a 36-year airline career—you entered just as I left.
It’s fair to say, as I’ve said often, that based on today’s airline environment, it’s not something that I would be interested in getting into… the reasons I wanted to fly had just about all vanished by the time I retired, and the increasing list of things that I had developed a dislike for had grown enormously.
One of the main underlying themes in my novel “Captain” speaks of that idea at length. It seems that you and I had developed a distaste for airline flying for almost opposite reasons: you couldn’t understand why more people didn’t follow the rules, while I didn’t understand, nor appreciate, why we had so many rules—with more being heaped on every month.
Your friend Sullenberger used one of my Flying magazine articles in his initial book when he said that one of the airline pilots who writes for aviation magazines said it best when he wrote, “They used to pay us for our judgment, now they pay us for our compliance.”
As one of the main characters in “Captain” said, when asked by a new copilot if a modern cockpit “should be more of a team effort,” his reply was, “… a loaded question; that depends who’s on the team.”
So all of this was the entrance sign to the road that I began to travel while I was narrating “Squawk 7700.” Each time Peter would have an encounter or a problem, I would think back to when something similar happened to me. As I said, it was a different era.
Back in the 1950s and even ‘60s, new airline pilots either came from the military (more than half of them, depending on the particular airline), or you just went out to the airport, learned to fly, bummed around, fell into various airplane-flying jobs and—maybe—got a call to come to an airline. Very few civilian pilots had formal aviation education of any sort. (Peter went to a university where he got a degree and his necessary pilot ratings.)
Because it was so unstructured, everyone had to figure it out for themselves. That meant that the result was either very bad or very good; it certainly separated the motivated from the unmotivated.
Initial training at a smaller airline like Mohawk was a far cry from the super-structure of today’s courses. In the early 1960s, the audio-visual department of our airline consisted of one copy machine. The ground school instructor (usually, an ex-mechanic) handed out pencil drawings that he had made the day before to show us where the hydraulic fluid flowed, and where the power from the battery and generators was routed to.
Our pride-and-joy visuals were two large boards with Convair 340 system schematics on them. The airline got them when they bought the airplanes from a European carrier. The good news was that the posters were in color; the bad news was that they were written in Dutch.
Every afternoon, the ground school class put their hands on a real airplane—we went down to the hangar floor and got to peek at the innards at some Convair or Martin going through overhaul.
While I’m certain that Microsoft and Apple (and the FAA) might disagree, putting real hands on a real machine meant more to me than I ever got out of any other airplane course. I certainly learned more theory with the modern methods, but there was nothing like the feel I got from laying my hands on real control cables, landing gear struts and wheel brake pads.
When it was time to fly, we trudged out in the middle of the night to find some airplane that maintenance didn’t need, then we went around the pattern enough times (plus an ILS approach or two) to cover the unthinkable: that if the captain elected to have that heart attack, you could (most probably) get the airliner down again—and at the airport, and, hopefully, in one recognizable piece.
Peter’s initial time with his regional airline was spent flying with a designated “IOE” (Initial Operating Experience) captain—a designated check pilot being paid to usher new copilots into the job. The adventures he tells about flying Capt. Carlos out of San Juan are worth the ticket of admission to the audiobook, I can assure you.
For me and my cohorts from the old days, once we could make reasonable takeoffs and landings, we rode on the jump seats of various flights until we got the required number of hours of official “observation.”
The real value of those couple of days of riding in the jump seat was that the flight’s copilot would show you how to do particular parts of your job, and he told you, firsthand, which captains needed what sort of particular care and feeding.
Then crew scheduling called and I went out to JFK (it was just renamed JFK; this was 1964), somehow found the crew room, somehow found my captain (he had shown up wearing a cardigan sweater, whistling a nonstop tune), somehow found the old Convair on the ramp filled with passengers, and somehow managed to not get very much in the captain’s way as we flew to upstate New York and back.
That was the first flight of a 36-year career, and narrating Peter Buffington’s “Squawk 7700” made me relive every nuance of it. After a few hours of narrating in the afternoons, lots of my own memories came vividly back to me each evening.
Well, I wouldn’t take an airline job today—Scout’s Honor. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t give up the job I that I really had, back when I really had it. Not for all the money in the world. I just loved it.
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36-year career as a U.S. Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, and a best-selling novelist. Over the past 30 years he has owned more than a dozen personal airplanes of varying types. Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
