Here’s a perspective….just one but it’s all I’ve got……
Many things have defined my career. Some, each time I read about them, replay themselves so vividly in my mind I feel the pain and emotion of actually being there, yet I wasn’t…. the United DC-10 at Sioux City…..Neil Williams doing his inverted approach in a Zlin….the Korean 747 at Guam…..the American DC-10 at ORD….the BOAC 707 engine fire at LHR…..and many more. I give thanks that people like Davies wrote “Handling the Big Jets”….that Gann wrote “Fate is the Hunter”….that Johns wrote the “Biggles” stories, that St Exupery wrote “Wind, Sand and Stars” and “The little Prince”….that Bennett wrote the “Complete Air Navigator”…that Kermode wrote “The Mechanics of Flight”……that I saw “Dawn Patrol” and “The Dam Busters”, “The Great Santini” and “The High and the Mighty”, that I read “The Flight of the Intruder” and “Goodbye Mickey Mouse” and that Cecil Lewis put pen to paper for the generations that followed. I can’t forget flying with a survivor of the TAA Viscount crash at Mangalore….I can’t forget being interviewed by Chief Pilot who had flown a Convair down the Brisbane River with an engine in reverse pitch…….or a Chief Check and Training Captain who had rowed at my old school and but months later was flying P-40s in the desert…….
Thus with the “Dispute”. It happened. And I was actually there. I could no more forget it than forget my name or any of the thousand stories that make up the lore of aviation and sit in my treasure box alongside rapidly tarnishing wings and gold bars. I cannot forget the years that my children grew up without me close. I cannot forget polar routes across the Arctic, new airlines and lost airlines, wide-eyed junior F/O’s and the sheer joy of sunrise after long Pacific crossings and the Northern Lights. All so far from home.
Don’t ask me to “get over it”. Don’t ask me to forget that some colleagues voted in secret ballots to encourage me to persist….yet had already signed “contracts”…..that Hawke was ready to do, say or spend anything to do his masters’ bidding….and that many….my family included, could not see why I wouldn’t cross a picket line to save my life. I cannot ever forget that. I can never forget pilots who parroted the mantras “What’s the Federation done for me?”….”I made a decision for my family”….I just took my job back”….as though those oft-repeated words from an Abeles script could hide the treachery beneath.
But I work with those people. I have hired them, shared cockpits with them, checked them, counselled them, mentored them. They are humans…they did what they did. I did what I did….what I voted to do….what 20 years of active AFAP membership had prepared me to do. I sleep well at night. I stay away from melancholy and grief over lost years and wasted emotion….
But I cannot forget and nor should any pilot. Unity is strength…yet frail. Solidarity is the key….yet our weak point. It could happen again…now or soon or in some far distant sky…..but it could happen.