Centaurus
21st Jun 2012, 12:21
Before the world of aviation changed after 9/11, it was common for the captain to invite passengers to come up front and have a look at the cockpit. I am sure many a boy or girl in those days took up flying after that. In the 1960's, pilots of the RAAF VIP Squadron based in Canberra would often invite their VIP up front, be it the Prime Minister or Governor General of the day. At Port Vila we once had the firebrand union leader John Halfpenny up the front of our 737 for the take off and the landing at Noumea. He seemed a highly intelligent pleasant bloke and nothing like what I expected of a union leader. He even encourged us to contact him if ever we needed industrial advice.
I remember when parents with children would flock to Moorabbin at week-ends to watch Tiger Moths and new Cessnas doing their stuff and they could talk to real pilots over the fence as they touted for custom from people wanting to go for a joy flight. You paid a couple of bucks and fought with your brother or sister for the seat next to the pilot. It was a lovely day out for the family and afterwards we did the Paul Hogan thing and threw prawns on the barbie.
If they existed in the suburbs I never saw hoodies or bogan gangs hanging over the fence watching aeroplanes. There no locked gates or ASIC cards and scowling airport security guards. I wonder how many kids learned their first thrill of flying from those joy flights. And if some are now airline pilots?
The following story is about those carefree days and in particular some of the passengers we used to invite up front in the 737. Most were keen and loved to see how the pilots flew the aeroplane. But very occasionally the odd screwball slipped past the watchful eye of the senior air hostess as we called her in those days.
BOOBY TRAP
The bane of flight crews and decent citizens in the cabin, are the drunks and the nutters that occasionally appear on the passenger manifest. Screaming childrenand smelly nappies can really spoil the trip, but they are not dangerous. I remember the accident report on a 10 seat Piper Chieftain that stalled and crashed killing most of the passengers at Launceston in Tasmania.The inexperienced pilot had taken several members of a local football team fromMelbourne to Launceston. Several of the passengers rolled up to the aircraft drunk.
The pilot was also a member of the team. Anxious for the charter, he accepted his friends in their condition. One drunk sat next to the pilot. The flight was turbulent, the passengers still drank and were noisy. The weather was bad with low cloud and rain, and the pilot was distracted by the noise of vomiting and loud laughter. One hour later, the aircraft made an instrument approach into the destination. The runway was seen at the last minute, and the young pilot pulled into a tight turn to land. The aircraft stalled in the turn and crashed short of the runway. Several passengers were unable to escape from the fire that followed. The pilot survived and told the Inquiry that he had been distracted by the drunk passengers and just wanted to land as soon as possible.
When I was training to be a pilot in the Air Force, we had the usual young louts who made idiots of themselves when drunk. I found it difficult to study in my quarters at the weekends with the noise of drunks banging on doors and stumbling up and down the corridors outside. I was not a muscle man, and lacked the physical size to tell them to piss off without risking a fight. This contempt of loud drunks has been with me for all those years.
As an airline pilot I was to meet these types of people and this time had the responsibility to do something about it, rather than lock the cockpit door and leave it to the cabin crew to sort out the problem. There were pilots who would do nothing to help the cabin crew in the hope that the problem would go away-the classic head in the sand approach. Often the airline agents would let unruly passengers board the aircraft, because it was all too hard to handle if these people were left behind. Onward ticketing and accommodation requirements made it an agent’s administrative nightmare, and so drunks were generally quickly shoved aboard and the doors closed before the crew realized they had a problem passenger on their hands. Once airborne and if the situation became potentially serious, I would take a deep breath, leave the first officer in charge of the flying, and go back to the passenger cabin to try and defuse things. I felt it was cowardly to send another crew member to sort out unruly passengers - -unless of course that crew member was built like Chief LittleWolf the famous wrestler and welcomed the challenge!
I was fortunate in that the problem passengers that I ran across were not violent,b ut just a darn nuisance. Sometimes the result was hilarious, such as the timewe were boarding passengers at Nandi Airport in Fiji. The refueller was topping up the fuel tanks of the 737 as the passengers began to file into the cabin from the passenger lounge. The first officer and I were setting up the inertial navigation system when one of the air hostesses told us a drunk had fallen over in the airport departure lounge, and wet himself in the process. There was a Boeing 747 boarding passengers in the next bay to us, and I hoped the drunk was on that aircraft, and not ours. In the event, we closed the doors and got away on schedule.
After lift off from the 11,000 feet long runway at Nandi International, we turned right to set course for the three hour flight to Nauru, and climbed to 33,000 feet. It was late evening, and as the lights of Fiji and the glow of sugar cane fires faded behind us, I engaged the automatic pilot and made the usual announcement over the public address system that we were expecting a smooth flight with an arrival time at Nauru of 11pm. The weather radar showed clear skies at our flight level, although far below were isolated low-level storm clouds which sometimes briefly lit up with internal flashes of lightning.
The senior air hostess, a tall attractive Fijian, knocked on the cockpit door, and brought us coffee and sandwiches. Her name was Jasmine (not her real name of course) and she was one of the most competent crew members in the airline. Jasmine had no fear of drunks or other unruly passengers, and could be relied upon to handle any unusual cabin situation with a firm hand. Having said that, she was a dangerous woman to cross after she had had few drinks, as one of the pilots found out to his cost a few weeks earlier.
The pilot concerned was a thoroughly likeable chap with a good sense of humour. He had bought some colourful T-shirts on his last trip to Hong Kong and decided to sell them to some new air hostesses who were at a party on Nauru. By late afternoon the gathering was in full swing, with people being thrown into the host's swimming pool amid much merriment. Jasmine was one of the victims, and her dunking embarrassed her, she being a full bodied woman on whom a wet T-shirt clung very becomingly. Like most Pacific islanders women she was shy and modest when sober, but after a few drinks could turn quite unpredictable. When her appearance drew admiring comments from some of the pilots and engineers present, Jasmine became darkly sullen.
The pilot, who I shall call Bill (not his true name), had sold several T-shirts, and was quietly counting the proceeds when Jasmine passed him on the way to the bar for a top-up. (booze, that is). Although she had not yet paid for her T-shirt,when Bill asked her for the money, she insisted that she had already paid up.When he queried this, Jasmine completely lost her cool and flew at Bill who retreated quickly, as Jasmine's reputation as a fighting drunk was well known amongst the local community.
To his surprise, and that of every other male within a few feet, the tall Fijian suddenly pulled up her T-shirt to display a perfect pair. Eyes popped and jaws dropped, including that of Bill who was spellbound at the sight of nature's beauty. One second later Jasmine dropped Bill with a right to the jaw, and as he fell over, she leapt upon him, tore his shirt and bit him hard on the chest and arms. She was about to savage him elsewhere, when she was dragged away by the others and thrown back into the pool to cool off.
Bill, meanwhile, decided the party was getting too dangerous, and leaping on his Honda 50cc left hurriedly for the safety of his room in the Menen Hotel, situated on the other side of the island.
Nextday, Bill and I were dead-heading back to Melbourne and he showed me the still painful bite marks on his torso. As he told me, his main worry was how to explain away the teeth marks to his wife! Some days later I was flying the Nauru to Guam service with a now demure Jasmine as the senior hostess. I asked her why she had attacked Bill and particularly why she had flashed her boobs in such a manner. Initially she was too shy to talk about the incident, but after she realized that both the first officer and I were genuinely curious, and not angry at her attack on one our colleagues, she apologized for her behaviour.
She explained that in Fiji if a confrontation occurred between a man and woman, sometimes the woman would quickly expose her breasts to momentarily distract the man then lash out and catch him off guard. Obviously that was a booby-trap in more ways than one. When I asked her why she had used her teeth on Bill, she replied that this would cause problems with the man's wife, who would believe that her husband had been playing up. Bill's fears of this were justified, as he told us later. Meanwhile I made an urgent mental note never to frolic with females from Fiji. Well not with Jasmine,perhaps...
Meanwhile back on the flight deck during our flight to Nauru, the cabin intercom chimes sounded, and one of the junior air hostesses serving in economy class, said that a "gentleman" would like to visit the flight deck. We presumed that she would escort him up front, so we unlocked the cockpit door and waited for her to arrive with the passenger.
One minute later, the door was pulled open with an almighty crash, and the grinning face of a half tanked islander appeared. He had careered off seats and passengers on his way to the cockpit, but the normally alert Jasmine had not seen him because she had been in the toilet powdering her nose and spraying disinfectant around the bowl!
I turned and saw the worried looks of passengers as they peered up the aisle at the apparition now leaning heavily into the flight deck. Fortunately he was a pleasant type, and proffering a gnarled hand, gravely introduced himself as a personal friend of the Minister for Finance. Now, one thing I learned on Nauru was tha teveryone is closely related, and that job security dictated that as an expatriate employee of the Republic, it was wise to be cordial to everyone,especially politicians and their relatives. So we offered our passenger the jump seat while simultaneously wondering how to get rid of him without causing offence.
In fact he was an intelligent fellow with a faint sense of the ridiculous. While it wa sclear that he was enjoying his momentary exalted status of being friend of a senior member of the Cabinet and in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, it was equally clear that the powerful air-conditioning system in the cockpit was unable to cope with his equally powerful beery breath. At this point, Jasmine came onto the intercom and through my earphones asked me if I wanted the"gentleman" ejected from the cockpit. Now the last thing we needed was a confrontation between Jasmine and our visitor who had powerful connections, and I certainly had no desire to return to the streets of Melbourne as a taxidriver.
I reassured Jasmine that all was well, and while explaining the instruments to the passenger, thought hard on a way of getting rid of our man without risking losing my job with the airline. The solution hit me as I was scanning the radar screen. I decided to show the passenger the workings of the weather avoidance radar, and while talking to him I moved the radar beam from ahead of the aircraft, and tilted it down towards the Pacific Ocean six miles below.
Immediately every large cumulus cloud within a hundred miles was illuminated on the glowing green screen. We were flying high above these clouds of course, but the Minister for Finance's inebriated friend wasn't to know this.
I turned to the first officer and with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, pointed at the red-coloured echoes on the radar screen, and with an authoritative tone told him to standby for severe turbulence. The passenger looked fearfully at the screen as I explained that the red blobs were thunderstorms that could tear the plane apart, and that for his own safety he had better return to his seat in the cabin real quick, and stick to water rather than whisky for the remainder of the flight. He was out of the cockpit in a flash, and the only reminder of his visit was the fast disappearing aroma of stale beer which was soon overcome by the airconditioning system. I then reset the radar beam control to scan our flight path,whereupon the thunderstorms far below vanished from the screen.
Jasmine appeared at the door of the flightdeck clearly impressed at our skill in convincing the Cabinet minister's friend that he should give up the booze. She said he had rushed to his seat and hadtightly strapped in and was giving no trouble at all! I think that Jasmine must have been quietly prepared to forcibly eject our visitor if all else had failed, as I swear that under her uniform blouse I could detect an unclipped bra hook...
After we had arrived at Nauru and the passengers had disembarked, I asked the junior air hostess why she had sent the tipsy passenger up to the flight deck, while knowing the condition that he was in. She apologized and added, "I had no choice - he was my father"...
I remember when parents with children would flock to Moorabbin at week-ends to watch Tiger Moths and new Cessnas doing their stuff and they could talk to real pilots over the fence as they touted for custom from people wanting to go for a joy flight. You paid a couple of bucks and fought with your brother or sister for the seat next to the pilot. It was a lovely day out for the family and afterwards we did the Paul Hogan thing and threw prawns on the barbie.
If they existed in the suburbs I never saw hoodies or bogan gangs hanging over the fence watching aeroplanes. There no locked gates or ASIC cards and scowling airport security guards. I wonder how many kids learned their first thrill of flying from those joy flights. And if some are now airline pilots?
The following story is about those carefree days and in particular some of the passengers we used to invite up front in the 737. Most were keen and loved to see how the pilots flew the aeroplane. But very occasionally the odd screwball slipped past the watchful eye of the senior air hostess as we called her in those days.
BOOBY TRAP
The bane of flight crews and decent citizens in the cabin, are the drunks and the nutters that occasionally appear on the passenger manifest. Screaming childrenand smelly nappies can really spoil the trip, but they are not dangerous. I remember the accident report on a 10 seat Piper Chieftain that stalled and crashed killing most of the passengers at Launceston in Tasmania.The inexperienced pilot had taken several members of a local football team fromMelbourne to Launceston. Several of the passengers rolled up to the aircraft drunk.
The pilot was also a member of the team. Anxious for the charter, he accepted his friends in their condition. One drunk sat next to the pilot. The flight was turbulent, the passengers still drank and were noisy. The weather was bad with low cloud and rain, and the pilot was distracted by the noise of vomiting and loud laughter. One hour later, the aircraft made an instrument approach into the destination. The runway was seen at the last minute, and the young pilot pulled into a tight turn to land. The aircraft stalled in the turn and crashed short of the runway. Several passengers were unable to escape from the fire that followed. The pilot survived and told the Inquiry that he had been distracted by the drunk passengers and just wanted to land as soon as possible.
When I was training to be a pilot in the Air Force, we had the usual young louts who made idiots of themselves when drunk. I found it difficult to study in my quarters at the weekends with the noise of drunks banging on doors and stumbling up and down the corridors outside. I was not a muscle man, and lacked the physical size to tell them to piss off without risking a fight. This contempt of loud drunks has been with me for all those years.
As an airline pilot I was to meet these types of people and this time had the responsibility to do something about it, rather than lock the cockpit door and leave it to the cabin crew to sort out the problem. There were pilots who would do nothing to help the cabin crew in the hope that the problem would go away-the classic head in the sand approach. Often the airline agents would let unruly passengers board the aircraft, because it was all too hard to handle if these people were left behind. Onward ticketing and accommodation requirements made it an agent’s administrative nightmare, and so drunks were generally quickly shoved aboard and the doors closed before the crew realized they had a problem passenger on their hands. Once airborne and if the situation became potentially serious, I would take a deep breath, leave the first officer in charge of the flying, and go back to the passenger cabin to try and defuse things. I felt it was cowardly to send another crew member to sort out unruly passengers - -unless of course that crew member was built like Chief LittleWolf the famous wrestler and welcomed the challenge!
I was fortunate in that the problem passengers that I ran across were not violent,b ut just a darn nuisance. Sometimes the result was hilarious, such as the timewe were boarding passengers at Nandi Airport in Fiji. The refueller was topping up the fuel tanks of the 737 as the passengers began to file into the cabin from the passenger lounge. The first officer and I were setting up the inertial navigation system when one of the air hostesses told us a drunk had fallen over in the airport departure lounge, and wet himself in the process. There was a Boeing 747 boarding passengers in the next bay to us, and I hoped the drunk was on that aircraft, and not ours. In the event, we closed the doors and got away on schedule.
After lift off from the 11,000 feet long runway at Nandi International, we turned right to set course for the three hour flight to Nauru, and climbed to 33,000 feet. It was late evening, and as the lights of Fiji and the glow of sugar cane fires faded behind us, I engaged the automatic pilot and made the usual announcement over the public address system that we were expecting a smooth flight with an arrival time at Nauru of 11pm. The weather radar showed clear skies at our flight level, although far below were isolated low-level storm clouds which sometimes briefly lit up with internal flashes of lightning.
The senior air hostess, a tall attractive Fijian, knocked on the cockpit door, and brought us coffee and sandwiches. Her name was Jasmine (not her real name of course) and she was one of the most competent crew members in the airline. Jasmine had no fear of drunks or other unruly passengers, and could be relied upon to handle any unusual cabin situation with a firm hand. Having said that, she was a dangerous woman to cross after she had had few drinks, as one of the pilots found out to his cost a few weeks earlier.
The pilot concerned was a thoroughly likeable chap with a good sense of humour. He had bought some colourful T-shirts on his last trip to Hong Kong and decided to sell them to some new air hostesses who were at a party on Nauru. By late afternoon the gathering was in full swing, with people being thrown into the host's swimming pool amid much merriment. Jasmine was one of the victims, and her dunking embarrassed her, she being a full bodied woman on whom a wet T-shirt clung very becomingly. Like most Pacific islanders women she was shy and modest when sober, but after a few drinks could turn quite unpredictable. When her appearance drew admiring comments from some of the pilots and engineers present, Jasmine became darkly sullen.
The pilot, who I shall call Bill (not his true name), had sold several T-shirts, and was quietly counting the proceeds when Jasmine passed him on the way to the bar for a top-up. (booze, that is). Although she had not yet paid for her T-shirt,when Bill asked her for the money, she insisted that she had already paid up.When he queried this, Jasmine completely lost her cool and flew at Bill who retreated quickly, as Jasmine's reputation as a fighting drunk was well known amongst the local community.
To his surprise, and that of every other male within a few feet, the tall Fijian suddenly pulled up her T-shirt to display a perfect pair. Eyes popped and jaws dropped, including that of Bill who was spellbound at the sight of nature's beauty. One second later Jasmine dropped Bill with a right to the jaw, and as he fell over, she leapt upon him, tore his shirt and bit him hard on the chest and arms. She was about to savage him elsewhere, when she was dragged away by the others and thrown back into the pool to cool off.
Bill, meanwhile, decided the party was getting too dangerous, and leaping on his Honda 50cc left hurriedly for the safety of his room in the Menen Hotel, situated on the other side of the island.
Nextday, Bill and I were dead-heading back to Melbourne and he showed me the still painful bite marks on his torso. As he told me, his main worry was how to explain away the teeth marks to his wife! Some days later I was flying the Nauru to Guam service with a now demure Jasmine as the senior hostess. I asked her why she had attacked Bill and particularly why she had flashed her boobs in such a manner. Initially she was too shy to talk about the incident, but after she realized that both the first officer and I were genuinely curious, and not angry at her attack on one our colleagues, she apologized for her behaviour.
She explained that in Fiji if a confrontation occurred between a man and woman, sometimes the woman would quickly expose her breasts to momentarily distract the man then lash out and catch him off guard. Obviously that was a booby-trap in more ways than one. When I asked her why she had used her teeth on Bill, she replied that this would cause problems with the man's wife, who would believe that her husband had been playing up. Bill's fears of this were justified, as he told us later. Meanwhile I made an urgent mental note never to frolic with females from Fiji. Well not with Jasmine,perhaps...
Meanwhile back on the flight deck during our flight to Nauru, the cabin intercom chimes sounded, and one of the junior air hostesses serving in economy class, said that a "gentleman" would like to visit the flight deck. We presumed that she would escort him up front, so we unlocked the cockpit door and waited for her to arrive with the passenger.
One minute later, the door was pulled open with an almighty crash, and the grinning face of a half tanked islander appeared. He had careered off seats and passengers on his way to the cockpit, but the normally alert Jasmine had not seen him because she had been in the toilet powdering her nose and spraying disinfectant around the bowl!
I turned and saw the worried looks of passengers as they peered up the aisle at the apparition now leaning heavily into the flight deck. Fortunately he was a pleasant type, and proffering a gnarled hand, gravely introduced himself as a personal friend of the Minister for Finance. Now, one thing I learned on Nauru was tha teveryone is closely related, and that job security dictated that as an expatriate employee of the Republic, it was wise to be cordial to everyone,especially politicians and their relatives. So we offered our passenger the jump seat while simultaneously wondering how to get rid of him without causing offence.
In fact he was an intelligent fellow with a faint sense of the ridiculous. While it wa sclear that he was enjoying his momentary exalted status of being friend of a senior member of the Cabinet and in the cockpit of a Boeing 737, it was equally clear that the powerful air-conditioning system in the cockpit was unable to cope with his equally powerful beery breath. At this point, Jasmine came onto the intercom and through my earphones asked me if I wanted the"gentleman" ejected from the cockpit. Now the last thing we needed was a confrontation between Jasmine and our visitor who had powerful connections, and I certainly had no desire to return to the streets of Melbourne as a taxidriver.
I reassured Jasmine that all was well, and while explaining the instruments to the passenger, thought hard on a way of getting rid of our man without risking losing my job with the airline. The solution hit me as I was scanning the radar screen. I decided to show the passenger the workings of the weather avoidance radar, and while talking to him I moved the radar beam from ahead of the aircraft, and tilted it down towards the Pacific Ocean six miles below.
Immediately every large cumulus cloud within a hundred miles was illuminated on the glowing green screen. We were flying high above these clouds of course, but the Minister for Finance's inebriated friend wasn't to know this.
I turned to the first officer and with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, pointed at the red-coloured echoes on the radar screen, and with an authoritative tone told him to standby for severe turbulence. The passenger looked fearfully at the screen as I explained that the red blobs were thunderstorms that could tear the plane apart, and that for his own safety he had better return to his seat in the cabin real quick, and stick to water rather than whisky for the remainder of the flight. He was out of the cockpit in a flash, and the only reminder of his visit was the fast disappearing aroma of stale beer which was soon overcome by the airconditioning system. I then reset the radar beam control to scan our flight path,whereupon the thunderstorms far below vanished from the screen.
Jasmine appeared at the door of the flightdeck clearly impressed at our skill in convincing the Cabinet minister's friend that he should give up the booze. She said he had rushed to his seat and hadtightly strapped in and was giving no trouble at all! I think that Jasmine must have been quietly prepared to forcibly eject our visitor if all else had failed, as I swear that under her uniform blouse I could detect an unclipped bra hook...
After we had arrived at Nauru and the passengers had disembarked, I asked the junior air hostess why she had sent the tipsy passenger up to the flight deck, while knowing the condition that he was in. She apologized and added, "I had no choice - he was my father"...