Posts by Berck

[ed note: This wanders, perhaps a bit more than usual. I’d been awake a long time.]

I worked 5 legs today. It’s possible that’s why I’m so tired. It’s 10pm in Chicago and 11pm in Colorado Springs. I’m somewhere between the two. I woke up this morning in Roanake at 4am, but it was 2am back home. I try not to think about things like that though—if I do, they seem all that much more tiring. The job can be astoundingly consuming. Thankfully I’m able to sit in the back for this, my 6th flight of the day. I should have been able to come home on the flight that left at 6pm, but the flight was overbooked and a pilot for the airline operating the flight wanted the jumpseat. We all, of course, have priority on our own airline.

I suspect that one of the reasons I like the job is because it’s so entirely consuming. I tend to be unable to separate employment from the rest of life–something, I suspect, that’s true for most people. I watch folks who, for instance, stand in the O’Hare concourse holding a tray of free popcorn samples for hours on end. It strikes me as one of the most boring, demeaning and thankless jobs in the country. At least a janitor or sanitation worker is accomplishing something and can (I assume) derive some satisfaction from that. The worker holding a tray of free samples (rarely the same person from day to day) is sometimes loudly attempting to attract takers, but is usually just standing there, watching the samples disappear.

It’s jobs like these that are, I think, at the heart of what’s wrong with capitalism. You might say about the folks doing these jobs, “They have a job! There are worse jobs they could have. And look at how good capitalism is, it’s *created* a job that otherwise wouldn’t exist.” But the job it’s created is meaningless, and I think the job must have serious negative consequences for person doing it. Standing around for 8 hours a day proffering free samples cannot possibly result in a healthy mental state for the person doing it. In an agrarian society, at least, most people are working merely to sustain themselves. It’s often argued that the mark of a well-developed society is just that—the division of labor so that some people can make the food to support the rest of us. I think, though, that instead while it allows some of us to do things we enjoy doing (like me), it forces others to do things that devalue humanity as a whole.

I’m not sure what I would do if I were forced to work in retail. I suppose there’s probably always some other option, and I think I’d try to find it. I don’t think that others lack the ability or the motivation to find other work, but rather that the nature of our society has somehow erased whatever fundamentally human bit of our makeup that prevents us from being willing to accept such things.

This is, of course, just a hypothesis and I could be wrong on any number of levels. Maybe other people are innately different enough from me that they actually enjoy such work. Maybe other people really are able to separate employment from the rest (the other two thirds) of their lives. Maybe their able to do such things for a short time and not be damaged by them. I don’t think any of that’s the case, though.

If I could have any other job in the world, besides flying planes, I’m not sure I could think of one that I’d rather do. I’m not even sure what I’d pick as a second choice. I don’t see voluntarily doing anything else, and I think that sort of involuntary commitment (I do it because I can’t help *not* doing it and can’t think of something I’d rather do) is necessary. I suspect that’s probably true of many who continue to fly the line, particularly today. Some people luck into an excellent, well-paying career in this industry, but most don’t. I’ve talked to so many pilots who’ve bounced from one bankrupt airline to another, having to start at the bottom each time. Did they make bad choices? Certainly not—they were simply unlucky. It’s astoundingly physically and mentally demanding. It’s nearly impossible to raise a family in the traditional sense and do a good job of it. Professional pilots who fly in this country are theoretically sacrificing an awful lot to do the job they do, but I think that’s probably because they can’t help it.

Being back to work, that is.

It means sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with 3 other guys, all of whom snore. It means sitting in a crew room with spotty internet, a macbook on my lap and headphones on my ears. People laugh at me for not wearing ear buds. I’ll wear ear buds when someone finds some that I can wear for 12 hours straight and not tire of.

It means climbing out of the bunk bed only to come nap in a recliner, in a silly costume.

It means waiting around making sure that my phone is set on vibrate if I’ve got headphones on, or set on loud if I’m trying to sleep. A missed phone call is potentially a lost job.

It means navigating around hoards of stupid passengers who congregate wherever I might need to walk. Passengers who think it’s okay to stop and carry on a telephone conversation in the middle of a walkway on an airport concourse. Passengers who think it’s okay to get off an escalator and simply stop. Passengers who stand on the left in moving walkways.

There may have been some glamor to the job once. That was before the days of $49 round trip fares. Back when pilots wore hats and passengers didn’t wear pajamas.

There’s not much left in the way of glamor. That’s okay, I don’t want or need glamor. I really don’t. All I want is to get paid to fly an airplane.

It doesn’t matter much which airplane or where I get paid to fly it to or from.

I still really enjoy the job, when I get to actually do it. Unfortunately, doing the job rarely seems to mean actually flying airplanes. And, for the airlines, when it does, the job is full of absurd things.

When I got the call for the DSM round trip this morning, the flight was scheduled to depart a couple of minutes earlier. I gathered my things and got to the plane. I discovered by flipping through the paperwork that the plane had just come out of a maintenance inspection and that among other things, they’d taken apart the right engine and replaced nozzles and turbine blades or some such. That made me a little nervous. I did a thorough exterior pre-flight inspection, and then got started on the inside. There’s approximately 50 different tests to perform on the first flight of the day. They all involve flipping a switch and looking for something to happen, listening for some noise, or making sure that nothing at all happens. I spent several minutes doing all that. It’s a noisy process, and you might have heard it if you board a plane in the morning. Things you’ll hear a CRJ say if it’s the first flight of the day, “Jet Pipe Overheat, Wing Overheat, Gear Bay Overheat, Glideslope, Terrain, Terrain, Pull Up, T-CAS System Test Okay,” among others. I’m not really sure why I have to make it say all these things. It seems like these systems should be self-monitoring and if they fall, they should let me know. I think for the most part they are, but we run the tests anyway.

The Captain showed up, entered the flight plan into the computer, and then called dispatch to find out about our flight attendant. It turns out that the original one lost her badge, so another one would be sent our way. Why there’s no way to allow a flight crew member to work without a badge is beyond me. You’d think that with all the various forms of proof of ID we carry around, there’d be some other way to establish our identity. The Captain decided he’d go fetch himself some coffee while we were waiting, and that I’d tell them to board when the flight attendant showed up and finished her safety checks.

The catering guy wanted to know if we needed supplies, but since the flight attendant wasn’t there, I kept telling him to come back later. Finally I gave up and investigated the galley myself. It’s set up entirely different from the CRJ-200’s I used to be a flight attendant on, but it seemed like everything that should be there was there except ice. I got some ice, and noticed that there was no water in the aft potable water tank. The aft tank supplies the sink in the lavatory, and so I figured I’d I’d ask for some water. I flipped the switch in the galley on and off to make it run its self-test during which it lights up all the lights, on the off-chance that the lights were burned out but there was actually water back there. None of the lights lit up. That’s when I noticed that the associated circuit breakers were pulled out, collared and there was an MEL sticker next to them. MEL stands for “Minimum Equipment List” which is a giant 3-ring binder we keep in the cockpit with a list of everything that can be broken in the plane and what, if any, restrictions apply. For instance, we have two ice detection systems. If one of them is broken, the MEL says we can still fly. But we have to stick a sticker on the system, and do lots of paperwork. In addition to lots of paperwork, the item has to be fixed in a specified amount of time.

The aft lavatory water being deactivated isn’t a big surprise at all, and I figured it’s probably one of those MEL’s that they can leave for a long time. But something stuck in my head–there were no MEL’s listed in the “trip can” for the airplane, nor were there any listed on the dispatch release. I double-checked. Sure enough, nothing. A couple weeks ago, though, someone had written up the Aft Potable Water system, and maintenance had come out and deactivated the system. But then, several days later, maintenance had signed off this system as working. But the sticker was still there, and the circuit breakers were still collared.

When the captain got back, I pointed it out to him. He called maintenance, and they came out and scratched their heads. They re-activated the system and tried to fill it, and discovered that it didn’t work. So they deactivated it once again and straightened out the paperwork. That all took half an hour.

And that’s what this job means, often: bureaucratic paperwork that is in no way related to the business of flying an airplane.