Firsts, dates, and applause

I’m not always good at remembering dates. In fact, I’m pretty bad at it, so I’m happy that God has been smiling on me all these years and keeping the number of dates down to a minimum. And I even get some nice reminders, from time to time. Our kids birthdays are one day apart (or, more accurately, 364 days apart), and fall not too long after Christmas. Edi makes sure I remember those. Edi’s birthday comes a week after mine and since she won’t let me forget mine, it’s also difficult to forget hers. It was yesterday, BTW. After a week of hearing how old I am, now I get to say she’s old, too.

My aviation career has been marked with dates that roughly, or even exactly, coincide with other important dates in my life. For example, if I recall correctly, my date of hire at Comair (my first airline) was the same as Edi’s birthday. So yesterday would have been my 12th anniversary at Comair.

My date of hire at World was a day after my son was born. That’d be easy enough to remember, but if I can’t keep the date straight it gets even easier as my daughter was born 364 days later – exactly on my 1-year anniversary of my date of hire.

When I was hired at World, I actually started MD-11 airplane training (systems ground school) a couple weeks after my date of hire – January 22nd. 7 years to the day later (January 22nd this year), I positioned to Atlanta to start ground school in the DC-10. Yesterday, we blocked out 1 minute before midnight (local time), making my first minute as a DC-10 Captain coincide with Edi’s birthday and what would have been my 12 year anniversary at Comair. That should be easy to remember.

These also serve as useful markers of sorts as to just how long it can take to make it to certain milestones in the aviation industry. Everyone who gets into aviation has a little different story. Some instruct, some don’t. Some work for regional airlines, some don’t. Some want to end up at majors, others cargo, and I wound up at a non-scheduled / charter airline (and wound up with widebody experience far earlier than many others do). But just for the sake of illustration, here’s the time line for me (note, there was some waiting around in here, and also some cases where I didn’t take every available upgrade or opportunity):

Zero time to completion of ratings through flight instructor ~ 9 months
Completion of flight instructor ratings to hired with a regional airline ~ 3 years
Regional new-hire to Regional Jet Captain ~4 years
Zero time to Regional Jet Captain ~ 8 years
Zero time to widebody F/O ~ 8 1/2 years
Zero time to widebody Captain ~ 15 1/2 years
Regional new-hire to widebody F/O ~ 4 1/2 years
Regional new-hire to widebody Captain – 12 years

On one hand, some of those times seem quite long. It’s been nearly 16 years since I got into aviation. One would think I would be well advanced in the career. Indeed, I am, especially for my age. On the other hand, 16 years really is a long time. Some people have careers that last only 20 years and then they retire. I’m most definitely more than 4 years away from retirement. Our contractual early retirement age is 21 years away for me, and the FAA retirement age was just raised such that it’s now 31 years away for me. I would have over 38 years seniority just at this company, if it’s still around (I started young).

Getting back to last night’s first night flying in the left seat, the first leg was doing the part of the military work that we do that I actually quite enjoy: bringing them home. We had 264 of the United States Air Force’s finest on board and I really was pleased to be returning them to their families. On final approach, I was less focused on them, though. Being my first leg in the airplane, my attention was focused on adjusting to the non-glass environment, how the airplane was flying, and so on.

That first landing was a rather mediocre landing. I’ve done far worse in airplanes I’ve got lots more time in, so I didn’t really feel all that bad about it, especially considering I hadn’t flown a real airplane in over 3 months. And though the weather was absolutely perfect (clear, calm winds), it was a fairly short runway, so I had planned to just get it on the ground and get it stopped, and not to worry much about making it greasy smooth. I succeeded. As soon as we touched down, there was a roar of applause from the back. My first thought was, “why are they clapping, that wasn’t such a great landing?!?” Then, for a brief distracted moment, I thought, oh they’re happy to be alive given it was my first landing in the airplane. When I quickly realized that they didn’t know it was my first landing, the real reason for their applause became apparent.

Welcome home… It was an honor to be a part of your safe return.

V-