The First Officer’s Lament Part 3: The Captain has Gone Rogue

Well, I guess Christmas is officially over for me.

Shoot! The Holidays have passed and I haven’t even finished the First Officers Lament! It’s been over two weeks since I last posted. My first New Year’s resolution is to have something up at least once a week! And not to make it too long! And not to always be drunk when I am writing! (Okay there’s my first New Year’s resolution broken!)I have to be honest with you, I got wrapped up in the holiday season, the lights, the giving, the putting on my big red dress and twirling around under the Christmas tree, “Oh isn’t it lovely!?” A few posts back I talked about the worst Christmas ever and being stuck in a hotel during the holidays. This Christmas I actually got to spend it with my family so I decided to just enjoy the time with them and pretend that my week with them was so all-consuming, that there was no possible way to write. But the New Year is here, the vacation is over. It’s time to go back to riding in cockpits with socially awkward strangers and sleeping in small town hotels. In other words it’s time to go back to work.

Acknowledge me! I am the Captain!

So when I last left you in the First Officer’s Lament Part Two, (if you missed it here is part 1 as well) we were just warming up with Captain Rob Winchester, a large opinionated, ex-Army Ranger with a penchant for rapid mood changes. The trip was filled with a lot of moments, which as a peace keeping, easy-going first officer, made my stomach churn. Old Rob had a lot of random things that he liked his way. When we taxi an airplane on the ground, we constantly receive directions from ground control. When we are given directions, the pilot working the radios, me, has to read back the directions to the ground controller. One example of a “Rob thing” is Rob likes to add an extra step where he then reads the directions back to me. The kicker is that he then expects me to acknowledge him reading back the directions to me, after I just read them back to the controller (a lot pilots will routinely repeat the taxi directions out loud but only expect you to say something if they are wrong).

This is an added measure of safety, and not a terrible practice, it’s just non-standard from what I am normally expected to do, so sometimes I forgot to acknowledge him back. Like when simultaneously, the ground controller was giving me more directions. So I’d have the ground controller telling me one thing while Rob is yelling “Is that correct? Is that correct!? Acknowledge!”

Sometimes this just makes you feel better on the inside.

Some people who are more confrontational than me might have the balls to be like, “F you man! I don’t have to do it that way just because you want it that way.” That’s what I would like to do, in fact that might be another New Year’s resolution, to say “F-you” more often to people when they deserve it. I think that has to be healthier than: repressing it all inside and exploding randomly at a later date, but presently quivering like a beaten puppy and thinking, “Please quit yelling at me!” This is just one example of many, but you get the idea, Rob is a very particular guy who likes things done his way. Just so it is clear, as a first officer, you are always doing it “The Captain’s Way.” So a Captain really only has to know one way, but as a first officer, you have to know a thousand ways of doing things. Some Captains are Burger King Captains. These are great guys to fly with, because their “way” is “have it your way” when you are flying. Rob is not one of these.I had to learn most of Rob’s ways the hard way, which is say I did something that wasn’t Rob’s way and then he would explode with, “That’s not how you do it when you are flying with me.” My favorite example of this on an approach into Dallas that I was flying. Approach control had left us high on glide path. (Glide path is basically the angle of decent from the aircraft’s current position to the runway; a high glide path means a steeper decent.) This happens fairly often and although not desirable, it is definitely not a dangerous situation when you are ten miles away from the airport (as we were), with clear skies and a hundred miles of visibility.

Since I could actually see the runway from ten miles away my normal response to this problem is usually to add flaps and maybe drop the landing gear a little earlier than normal and get smoothly back on the normal glide path. This was not Rob’s way. He turned to me and very calmly asked, “Can you see outside?”

I responded with, “Yeah.”

“What do you think?” He asked this with very little forewarning of the craziness that was about to ensue.

“I think we’re a little a high.”

“Just hold on tight, I’ve got this.”

He exploded with, “A little high? You’re more than a little high! We have to get down now!” He then proceeded to violently grab the controls, shake the plane, drop the speed breaks and pretty much treat the situation like we were on fire. I was overcome with shock and the thought of, “What the f–k is happening right now?” While I am pretty certain that everybody in the back of the airplane was busy reciting their rosaries and praying that we wouldn’t crash. When I tried to bring some sanity back into the situation by saying, “I got this, it’s going to be all right.” He simply said, “Just do what I tell you! We can talk about this on the ground.” So there we were asses and elbows, with absolutely nothing wrong with our airplane, on a calm and clear day in Texas. That was pretty much Rob’s way.The most exciting part about the trip was that at some point Rob revealed to me that he was on a diet. I have been interested in nutrition and exercise for a little while, and have even contemplated getting my physical training certificate, so I was curious to see what kind of a “diet” a man like Rob would choose to partake in. Well it seems that he was having a lot of success with something fairly experimental called “intermittent fasting.” I had read a little bit about it. It’s a little controversial but basically you have periods of “not eating.”

For the record, Rob looked more like the guy on the right.

The theory behind it is that it actually causes your body’s hormonal machinery to become better tuned at metabolizing your food correctly. There is actually a lot of compelling literature about it online (here’s a crash course: http://artofmanliness.com/2012/01/25/intermittent-fasting/). For some people it involves a daily 16 hour fast and for others it involves once every week or so, a period of 24 hours of not eating and a bunch of variations in between.

Rob’s variation was not eating for FIVE DAYS WHILE TRYING TO MAKE IT A WEEK. Nowhere have I read anything positive happening to your body while not eating for five days. I think in most cultures this is considered “starving” and it is usually not self-inflicted (Maybe you can watch those late night charity infomercials about starving kids in Africa and feel better; they are not starving, they are intermittent fasting!)

“Mandrake, I’m not eating any more. You see I feel eating robs me of my vital essence.”

I was on a four-day trip with Rob so I got to experience his gradual depletion of energy stores and mental capacity. I would ask him how he was feeling continuously, he would always respond with something classic like, “I feel great. I mean really good. It’s funny though how your mind has all these ways of trying to trick you into eating.” Like man, those aren’t tricks, that’s just what your mind does to STAY ALIVE. At one point while I was eating a sandwich, I felt him starring at it like a cartoon wolf. I asked him if he wanted some and he responded stoically, “No, no. I feel great. It’s just amazing how great your sense of smell gets after three days of not eating. I mean I can tell everything you have on that sandwich.” And sure enough he started listing off very accurately what was on my sandwich.By the last leg of the four day trip (and four days without him eating), I could really tell it was affecting the man’s performance. He was flying erratically and there were a couple of moments where he seemed unresponsive. I was getting really nervous, “Like holy shit! Is this man dying on me? Are his organs shutting down?” My lunch bag was empty at that point so I considered cutting my arm open and letting him suck on my blood glucose on final approach. On his last landing he dropped from the sky with back-breaking finesse, a sure sign that his fine motor skills were gone, really cementing my fears that he might be dying.

My view from the right seat.

As we pulled up to the gate he acted completely non-chalant, like we didn’t just have a controlled crash into the ground. “Well hey Marc, it was good flying with you.”

I said, “Yeah Rob, get something to eat.” I am not exaggerating I’m pretty sure he said that he would, in a COUPLE OF DAYS or so! So in a very long-winded and roundabout way, (I have already broken the “keep it short” resolution) the reason I tell you this story is to at least partially explain why so many pilots, especially first officers, have drinking problems.

I want to know about your immediate supervisor, have you have been around the man (or woman) in charge and been fairly certain they had “gone rogue?” Please share below!