When the going gets tough........part 2
Continued from Part 1
It was now August and I’d had to remove the mothballs from the old suit once again in preparation for another interview. It went fine, along with my psychological profiling; which do you prefer, a well crafted gun or a well written piece of prose?!
I was sent down to Cranebank to do a bit of stick and rudder in the 757. Very enjoyable, so much less stress when it’s the a/c you fly every day. My sim time was slowly but surely catching up with my flying time! The good news arrived a day or two later, I was offered a job starting in a month. I advised jmc and was told I would have to formally put in writing my wish to accept the voluntary redundancy package. It was a sad day, but I needed the security that DHL offered.
My last day at Air2000/jmc arrived and I drove to Commonwealth House with my flying life in a cardboard box. The admin was completed and I had my A4 sheet with various signatures on to show I had handed everything back. I went up to the management floor for the last time to say my goodbyes and had a huge lump in my throat as I got out the lift. This had been my first airline job and 18 months earlier I would never have expected it to end quite like this.
The Chief Pilot welcomed me into his office and I explained my position (which he was already well aware of) and I handed him a letter confirming my wish to be released from my contract. He was very sorry that things had come to this and consoled me by saying if things had been different he would have kept us all on and got rid of some of those further up the seniority list! He wished me well and assured me I was doing the right thing. His parting words were to remember what this felt like should I ever progress to the lofty heights of Chief Pilot in years to come. He had experienced something similar many years before and that was why he fought so hard to keep us. As I left his office the DFO caught sight of me and rushed over to have a word. The last time I had come across him was when he had been Chief Pilot and had signed off my ‘bumps’ all those months before. He offered his apologies too and wished me well for the future. He shook my hand hard and I turned to leave for the last time, fighting the lump in my throat, which I feared was about to jump out!
A new chapter began with more groundschool, this time at East Midlands, yet more crm and loading, performance and SOPs. With that out the way it was off to the sim at Cranebank once again for my conversion to DHL. It amazes me how the same aircraft can have such different SOPs from one company to the next. DHL had used Britannia’s SOPs when they started up and boy, were these different to the ones I had used previously! What didn’t help is the books were not exactly as should be and left lots of areas open to question/ interpretation, which, coupled to the fact that the trainers were BA meant that no-one in the sim had a definitive answer to what we should have been doing! Oh well, that would come with the line training so let’s just get on with getting the basics right.
As you can imagine, cargo ops are very different from pax. The line training was fun and the new environment, well, new. No cabin crew, no pax, no seats, NO FOOD! I settled into night freight and started enjoying spending time in many of Europe’s capitol cities. I got to know Brussels better than Manchester over the following six months! It was comparatively stress free, the flying was easy, if a little monotonous due to nearly all RVILSs, but with some great exposure to winter ops around Scandinavia! Helsinki is somewhat different to Tenerife in December!
Suzie, however, was not having such a whale of a time looking after the boys whilst I gallivanted around Europe for six days at a time. It was becoming like a prison sentence at home, with no parole for good behaviour. Just over a month had passed since leaving jmc behind and news filtered through that there had been a change of MD and the redundancies had been cancelled, just before the date itself arrived. This deflated me a little but I was determined to put the past behind me and not look back. Another week or so passed and Britannia started recruiting for summer ’03. I decided to stick where I was and put my head down. The trouble at home would not though. We discussed the issues at length and realised that I was being admirable by not wanting to let my new employer down, but was letting my wife and children down instead. We decided I had to apply to Britannia, mainly for the lifestyle issue, but to be brutally honest, it was the type of flying I wanted as well. I was not a Freight Dog at heart and was unlikely to change as long as I had a young family.
I was delighted to receive an application form, which I duly completed in my best handwriting! The call came to attend a selection day down at Gecat and within 2 mins of walking in the room there we were doing a maths test. English followed, then 2 group exercises, lunch, a psycho profile and then a chat from a Brits F/O on the training team (turned out to be an old acquaintance from OATS) about the company. Had to wait a couple of days before being called back for day two which included two interviews, one with a psychologist, the other with management and HR and a sim assessment in an HS125. Urgghhhh. Steam driven instruments! Hadn’t done much on them for a while and consequently it made exactly the same profile as DHL considerably harder! I left the sweat box confirming it’s nickname! Pheww! I thought I’d messed up in the sim and decided that I’d blown my chance with Britannia and put it down to experience. I put it out of my mind awaiting the inevitable ‘thanks but no thanks’ letter and was therefore bowled over to receive a phone call some 9 days later offering me a job at Manchester! I’d obviously been too critical of my sim performance. I suppose I knew I could have done better, but that’s not what they were looking for.
We had a celebration and I had to get the boys onto !!!!!!!!!!!!!! to look at daddy’s new livery (for the last time!) The bad news was that several guys who had passed the selection were put ‘on hold’ due to the Gulf. I wish them well throughout the summer and success when they start in the autumn.
Yet again it was groundschool and crm, seps and performance, blah blah blah. Then into the sim for my 4th OPC in a year, with my 4th different set of SOPs! I’ve had enough of all this training. I’m trained up to the eyeballs! The line training went well and it was a pleasure to meet all my new colleagues, who appeared to be a happy bunch. Part way through I was met with the news that, together with my training partner (ex Air2k) we were to be converted straight onto the 767! Great news…………just one more OPC then, making it 5 in the year! I’ve now completed ALL my training and am once again enjoying my flying and life. Based on my now quite considerable experience in the field I have written an interview techniques course in the hope of being able to pass on my observations and knowledge to future pilot job applicants. The future appears reasonably bright at Britannia and from a personal point of view, fairly stable due to the large number of retirees over the coming years. I am immensely happy to be working for them and look forward to many more years…………………but you never know in this industry.
I wish to thank my tireless wife for all her support throughout these difficult times and urge her to keep the focus as it will all turn out well in the end.
So Wannabes, if you want it enough you can do it. It all comes down to character. Don’t let yourselves down or you will only have yourselves to blame, every hurdle put in front of you is just a test of character.
Good luck and dig in for the long slog. It’s never over.
PP