Lockout

CHAPTER FIVE

Cockpit, Pangia World Airways Flight 10 (1610 Zulu)

With Captain Bill Breem and his first officer seizing the designation of primary pilots, Jerry Tollefson and Dan Horneman had been relegated to the status of relief crew and left to watch the takeoff from the cockpit jump seats. As planned, ten minutes into the flight, Jerry and Dan headed back for their programmed sleep period in the cramped underdeck crew rest facility.

“Programmed” always seemed so oxymoronic, Dan thought as he settled in. Some pilots could drop off on cue, but he had never been one of them. In addition to dozens of random thoughts keeping him awake, there was the “gee-whiz” factor of being a crewmember on such a sophisticated machine, and it hadn’t worn off yet. The amazed little boy in him was usually too excited to drift off to sleep and instead demanded—demanded—permission to stay up just to watch himself lounging in such a technologically advanced cocoon.

This time, however, sleep came uncharacteristically fast. It was startling when the alarm function on his cell phone corked off after almost four hours, the watch showing him it was 1951 Zulu and alerting him that it was time to get back to the cockpit.

Dan rolled out of the crew bunk and made his way up the narrow stairs to the main deck and into one of the restrooms, closing the door for a moment of solitude and looking at the deep circles under his eyes in the mirror. He loved this job, despite feeling like an alien in Pangia’s pilot culture, but there was no evading the reality that he was approaching a meltdown of cumulative fatigue. The impromptu vacation days in Tel Aviv he’d looked forward to were supposed to address that fatigue, but now they were gone.

The circles aren’t too bad! he thought, admiring his full head of dark hair which always seemed to fall into place with little or no effort. His face had never been described as thin, but his facial features were angular, almost chiseled, like an emotionless sculpture, according to Laura, the one lover he missed the most. Long before his tryst with Janice Johnson, Laura had given up trying to understand the world-girdling schedule she considered ridiculously unnecessary and had tossed that backhanded compliment at him the morning they’d parted for good. Strange that he would remember that so clearly among all the other things she’d said that morning—especially the hurtful words, like saying he would never be happy until he decided he deserved the things he’d worked so hard to acquire.

The rebound girlfriend he’d found after Laura had also backed away, equally unsure he was ever going to be comfortable in his own skin.

Gotta start dating again, he promised himself. He felt no compelling need to find a mate or make babies, but… it just wasn’t much of a life without sex and female companionship, and every pretty woman he saw just reminded him of what he’d lost when Laura finally gave up.

“You’re filthy rich, and I’m eager to sign a pre-nup, and there’s no reason not to retire right now!” she’d all but screamed. “Why the hell are you doing this? Buy your own damned jet! What are you trying to prove?”

The vivid memories faded again, and he sighed and straightened his tie, checking the crisp, professionalism of his image before leaving the restroom in time to tag along behind Jerry Tollefson as they made their way forward.

With the cockpit door closed and sealed, Dan watched Tollefson stoically endure the overly officious handoff briefing from Captain Bill Breem before sliding into the left-hand captain’s seat. Breem’s briefing was the usual litany: their current position, altitude, airspeed, headwind, weather, and fuel remaining, along with their estimated time of arrival in New York, but it was delivered in the fashion of a master about to turn over the wheel to a rank amateur. Breem and his copilot were scheduled to return to the cockpit in five hours and take the arrival and landing at Kennedy.

“So,” Breem finished, “your job, Tollefson, is to wake the A-Team in five hours, and don’t break anything in the meantime.”

Dan could see Jerry’s jaw muscles gyrating, absorbing the irritation of such a demeaning order, but he held his tongue for nearly thirty seconds until Breem had closed the cockpit door behind him.

“Alrighty, then!” Jerry said, rolling his eyes in an expression of utter contempt.

“Is he always like that?” Dan asked, as much to commiserate as to confirm.

“Oh, yeah! Pompous asshole with delusions of adequacy.”

“An original Stratos Air alumnus?”

Jerry Tollefson nodded and then stopped.

“Yes. They’re not all like that, but this one is a really angry dinosaur. Angry and mean.”

“I’ve heard of him, of course, but never met the man before tonight.”

“You didn’t miss anything.”

Jerry busied himself for a few moments with building his nest in the left-hand captain’s seat, arranging his crew bag and the company-supplied iPad as Dan Horneman had just done on the right side. Satisfied all was in its place, Jerry sat back, taking in the broader nighttime view from the cockpit of Flight 10.

The lights of Zagreb, Croatia, some eighty miles to the east were visible to their right as the Airbus cruised along at 37,000 feet, and neither pilot spoke for several minutes.

Jerry snorted, shaking his head, one more thought incapable of suppression. “The thing I can’t stand about Breem is his air of superiority and his constantly demonstrated disgust for the rest of us.”

Dan let the words parade by, trying hard not to focus on the concept of hypocrisy as related to Jerry Tollefson. He tried to see Breem through Tollefson’s eyes without seeing Jerry in the same light, but the effort was failing. He wondered if Tollefson, too, had suddenly realized the ludicrous nature of his hypocritical slam.

No, Dan concluded, he’d never see it.

The autopilot was doing the flying, but now that their perceived common antagonist had left the cockpit, Dan could feel tension rising between himself and the captain, evaporating what moments before had been a fleeting brotherhood between the two of them based on a classic “we’re okay, but he’s not okay” bond.

Without Breem, Dan was now the outsider, and there was, indeed, an elephant in the cockpit—a big one—and it was going to be a miserable flight if someone didn’t throw a spotlight on the beast.

“So, Jerry…” Dan began, intending to slip gently into the subject of their near-disaster in Anchorage years before, but Jerry Tollefson was already locked and loaded.

“So, Dan…” Jerry echoed, sarcastically, “Had enough fun playing airline pilot?”

Dan glanced over at the left seat and tried hard not to overthink his response. He’d expected something snarky, and clearly he wasn’t going to be disappointed.

“Well, I’m still here.”

“Yeah, so I noticed. With all your millions, I thought you’d have bought your own jet by now and just hired one of us poor schmucks to fly it.”

“It may be difficult to understand, Jerry, but I enjoy this challenge of being an airline pilot.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoying the process?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“Well, that makes one of us at least.”

“Look, Jerry…”

“So… when we last tried to crash together up in Alaska, you didn’t have a lot of flight time. Had much since?”

“I had just checked out, if you recall.”

“Oh, I certainly do recall,” Tollefson replied with a snort. “It was almost the last thing I ever recalled. It’s interesting, talking about the merger of North Star and Pangia, since it was Pangia that hired you. At North Star, we had this irritating little tendency to hire competent pilots rather than raw trainees. Pangia, apparently, doesn’t differentiate.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them for almost a minute.

“Okay… Jerry, look, I know we got off on the wrong foot three years ago…”

“Ya think?” Jerry snorted, turning to face the copilot. “But I wouldn’t exactly call it getting off on the wrong foot, Danny. I’d call it perhaps the worst crew introduction in airline history.” He paused studying Dan’s stoic expression for a few seconds, reconsidering the force of his pent up anger. “Look, Dan, you’re obviously a nice guy, but your flying sucks, and the memory of that botched approach still scares the hell out of me. But… as I say, I guess you’ve had a lot more experience since then.”

“More than three years.”

“Good!” Jerry kept his eyes on the right-seater as he reached out with his left hand and pointed to one of the instruments on the forward panel. “For example, you do now know about this little thing here called an airspeed indicator?”

“You really can’t let this go, can you?” Dan asked.

“Well, I admit I get a mite testy when people try to kill me with a complete lack of aeronautical skill, okay? Or were you going to tell me it was all systemic and not really your fault? Use crew resource management as an excuse for no individual accountability?”

Dan cleared his throat, internally holding onto the throttle of his own anger.

If you were my employee, I’d fire your ass on the spot! Dan thought.

“Jerry, I don’t do excuses, okay? But the fact is, if you’ll recall, you gave me a visual, manual approach in high winds that day, and then, because you got distracted by a cabin smoke problem, I was totally solo, and I wasn’t—”

Tollefson whirled on him, his voice raised. “You damn near killed a planeload of innocent passengers and me, Dan, and the real cause is apparently because you decided to come over and slum a bit, pretend to be an airline pilot, but one who didn’t understand the basic fact that we need at least some wind over the wings. I’ve never had to take the airplane away from a copilot or a captain before, or since!”

“So that’s the bottom line, right?”

“What?” Jerry replied, the word spoken with the report of a bullet propelled by contempt.

“Not that I’m a bad pilot, or even a good pilot who made a bad mistake, but that I’ve got too much money and therefore can’t be part of the club.”

“What? If you don’t know how to fly safely… if this is some dilettante exercise, playing airline pilot… you shouldn’t be here. That’s all I meant.”

Dan was shaking his head angrily, energetically, letting the dampers fall away from his usual reluctance to engage an unnecessary fight.

“Okay, bullshit, Jerry! That’s just frigging bullshit! You just tipped your hand, Buddy. The real truth is, I’m a permanent outsider here because I have too much money and I was a success in another field. And… and… because I failed your testosterone check. Right? But that overblown Alaskan bush pilot cowboy shit is just as toxic as it is intoxicating. Hail the Arctic Eagles! If you’re not swaggering enough and macho enough to impress us, you can’t join the club, because you don’t have the right stuff! And if you have too much money, you’re automatically excluded.”

“None of us cares a whit about your money, Horneman, and this has nothing to do with bush flying. We’re professional pilots, and what we do care about is precision and safety and competence!”

“Jerry, you were exuding that cowboyish bush pilot attitude from every pore the day we almost bought it with my mistake. Remember turning off the autopilot and the autothrottles and even the damned ILS? What ever happened to the company rule about using all available nav aids?”

“You were relying too much on the automation!”

“Of course I was. You’re right. Know why? Because that’s how I was trained! But you don’t need automation because you guys never make mistakes, do you? As long as you survive, that is. I’m surprised you don’t rank each other by how many enthralled women throw their panties at you when you walk down the street!”

“What the hell are you nattering about, Horneman?”

“The profession and responsibility of flying versus the swaggering ‘Hi girls, I fly jets!’ version of daring airmen bringing it in on a wing and a prayer. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re locked in the Jurassic Age of piloting, Jerry. YES I fucked up. Yes! But you apparently can’t forgive that, because in your world, being imperfect is not the right stuff. Well here’s the truth: Real men and real pilots make mistakes.”

“I’ve made lots of mistakes!” Jerry snarled. “I’ve never claimed to be perfect!”

“Yeah, but, holding everyone else… particularly me… to a standard of being perfect is the same thing. But again, it’s all so easy because I’m not one of you.”

Jerry snorted, shaking his head, the gesture as dismissive and disgusted as he could make it.

“Well, I can see this is going to be one hell of a fun evening!”

“I didn’t start it, but I’m not going to sit here like a whipped puppy and take your unjustified contempt.”

“And what if I hadn’t pulled it out and we’d crashed, Dan? Would you accept the contempt then? If you’d survived and others died wholesale because of your screw up?”

“No one would have greater contempt for me than me, and for that matter, what makes you think I did escape unscathed? I had my own destroyed self-esteem to deal with, as well as all the added scrutiny from the chief pilot and the training department.”

“Poor you!”

“Jerry, what kills me is that you won’t even admit your own complicity in going head down on the interphone while you should have been monitoring the approach and your obviously untested first officer. What do you think the NTSB would have said about that if we hadn’t made it?”

“You couldn’t find the damned throttles! That’s the bottom line for me. Competent pilots don’t lose sight of the airspeed!”

“I’m sorry. I thought the autothrottles were engaged. As I say, I made a huge, honking mistake.”

“Yeah… and about that…” Jerry Tollefson had swiveled partially around in the captain’s seat, glaring at his right-seater with blood in his eye, daring the underling to talk back again as he played the challenged alpha wolf. “Whoever taught you to just sit there and watch the airspeed deteriorate without touching the throttles? What kind of moron doesn’t teach watching the throttle movement or listening to the engines?”

“You wouldn’t believe what I was and what I wasn’t taught, Jerry,” Dan said, as quietly as possible. “You asked me after you’d saved us where the hell I learned to fly, but I never had a chance to answer you.”

“You made the same ridiculous mistake as those systems operators at Asiana made in 2013 in San Francisco! Maintaining one’s airspeed is the prime directive.”

“Which I was never taught.”

“Excuse me?”

“Where did you learn to fly, Jerry?”

“The United States Navy,” Jerry snapped. “So where were you trained?”

“I learned in one of the toughest flight training environments you can imagine,” Dan said, earning a contemptuous sideways glance from the captain.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah… it might as well have been a correspondence course! It was a civilian ab initio program provided by a little airline in New England desperate for pilots… an airline that didn’t care if I had never even flown in a small plane and didn’t think it was important. The same kind of deficient ab initio course the big airlines are now trying to use. This little carrier was looking for trained monkeys to fill the legal square and didn’t even realize it themselves.”

Jerry Tollefson had leaned forward to jab at the buttons of what in a Boeing would be a flight management computer, but he stopped suddenly and straightened up in his seat, fixing Dan with a questioning gaze. “What do you mean? You telling me you didn’t even have your private pilot’s license when you got your first airline job? That kind of ‘ab initio?’”

“Private ticket? Hell, Jerry, they hired me out of my office in Seattle. I’d never even flown a small plane. I was disillusioned about my Internet business and from having too much success too fast, and I’d always, always wanted to fly. So I decided to sell my company and go the route of any other average individual without much money. I thought that was the honorable thing to do, something that would be respected as paying my dues, you know? I had no idea how contemptuous people would be about that decision.”

“What do you mean, contemptuous?”

Dan shook his head, smiling ruefully, trying hard not to say something even more sarcastic.

“It was a huge relief to sell my company and stop spending every day worrying when the whole thing might collapse. I watched my father and my family lose everything to a recession and never recover. I was very lucky to make enough and get out in time.”

“When I flew with you,” Jerry said, “…everyone was talking about our billionaire boy pilot. We figured you were slumming with the working stiffs.”

“I hated that. I still hate that impression! I’d had 2,000 hours of flying airborne computers by the time I applied here, and as I said, I had no idea I was deficient. I was trained to fly primarily by autopilot and dial in altitudes and headings and airspeeds and told to keep my hands off the controls if the autoflight system could do it better. Precisely the same malady that caused the Asiana crash in San Francisco in 2013.”

“A systems operator.”

“Yes. Exactly. I was trained to be a dumb systems operator, not a pilot. When I hit the line, I had less than 300 hours. It was before the FAA changed the rule to require 1,500.”

“Less than 300?”

If I’d had any idea how little I knew about stick and rudder flying, I could have bought 400 or 500 hours of quality flight instruction. But what I didn’t get a chance to practice were those basic skills. I had no idea that was a deficit.”

“And then we hire you,” Tollefson said flatly.

“Yeah. Sorry about that!”

“What’d you do, pull strings?”

Dan shook his head with a rueful laugh. “Jesus, you, too? I guess everyone thinks that. No, I didn’t pull strings. Wish I had. Someone might have told me to back off. Instead, after driving regional jets around for almost two years and seldom ever touching the yoke, I dropped an application in the box at the very moment you guys were desperate for new first officers, and after a whirlwind ground school and a few sessions in the simulator, you got the lucky number. I mean, Pangia World Airways knew my limited aeronautical background a heck of a lot better than I did.”

“Did they also know you were uber rich?”

“I wasn’t uber rich, not that it has any bearing on the situation. I’m not uber rich. But I had no intention of telling them or anyone else I was well off. It was simply immaterial.”

“So what was your net worth? Bill Gates country?”

“Hell no. I had a paltry sum compared to what I could have received if I’d kept the company several more years and taken it public before selling.”

Dan Horneman met Jerry Tollefson’s gaze for a few seconds, knowing what the response was going to be if he spoke in dollars. It was impossible for anyone with an average professional income to bridge the philosophical gap that separated their respective bank accounts. It was far more than numbers, it was a gulf measured in unfathomable terms of struggle and misunderstanding, and ultimately, it was always a case of ‘You have what I don’t, and I resent it!’”

“How paltry?” Jerry prompted. “Speak to me in numbers.”

“About $500 million.”