As we waited for the passengers to board the aircraft, I scanned through the Hotwire app on my phone. I was trying to figure out where I would sleep that night. I had flown six out of seven days and seven flights in the last two days. Where I really wanted to sleep was my own bed, but barring some sort of a miracle, that wouldn’t happen. The last flight home left ten minutes after the flight I was flying was scheduled to arrive, from another terminal with separate security.
Which meant that for me to make my flight home, the flight I’m piloting would have to have zero delays on the ground in LAX leaving the gate; zero delays in the air from air traffic control; and zero delays getting to the gate and de-boarding in San Francisco. I would have to sprint the equivalent of a quarter mile, out one security exit and clear through another, arriving at the gate of the flight home, and they would just happen to have a seat available to me. Oh yeah, and the gate agents, for some reason would not have closed the boarding door the standard ten minutes early. So barring a serious miracle, I was not sleeping in my own bed that night. It was a nice welcome to the life of a “commuter.”
When you work in the airlines, you have a home “base” where all of your trips originate from. Throughout my career, I have pretty much always lived in my home base. For example, my home base used to be LAX. I would fly in and out of LAX and lived in Los Angeles. When a trip was over, I would get out of my airplane, walk to the parking lot, and drive home. This makes sense to most people. “Yeah, when I’m done with my work, I drive home too.”
Then for a myriad of reasons, not the least being, my wife and I wanted to find some place where we could afford to buy a house this century, we moved out of Southern California. This has had a lot of upside, but there is one big downside. I am now and for the foreseeable future a “commuter.” Which means I live in one city (Portland), but start all my trips from another (San Francisco). So, unless I want to drive a really long time (12 hours each way) or take an even longer boat ride (40 hours?) I have to hitch a ride to work on an airplane. Put succinctly, I have to ride to work in the back of one airplane to go fly a different airplane. When I am done with work flying that airplane, I need to hitch a ride home on another airplane.
This wouldn’t be so bad if I was guaranteed a seat on the airplane taking me to and from work, but I am not. First, I am subject to the schedule: are there any flights going to work, arriving by the time I need to get there? When I am done with work, is there a flight departing that can get me home? Second, if there is a flight, are there are any seats left that aren’t in the cargo compartment (hey, I would ride down there with the dogs, cats, and suitcases if I could). If the answer to any of these questions are “no,” it means I have to get a hotel at the beginning of work, at the end of work, or both. Which makes working even more silly: I have to fly in an airplane, to stay in a hotel, so that I can fly in an airplane and stay in a hotel, and then stay in a hotel so that I can then fly in an airplane to get home. When flights are completely full, like the summer and the holidays, this in not that un-normal of an occurrence. Which, is why I have always thought commuters are crazy: It sounds like a lot of work to work, why would you do that to yourself?
Side story: Technically, an airline pilot can live anywhere as long as he can make it to work (they don’t really care if you can’t make it home). I had a guy last week in my jumpseat, who commuted out of a tiny town in Wyoming. He would drive to a slightly larger town in Montana that had an airport. He would fly from there to Denver. Then from Denver he would fly to San Francisco, where he would pick up a trip to New Delhi, India. Talk about a long day at work. I have heard of pilots living in Australia that commute to San Francisco to start their trips. It makes my little hour and a half flight to SFO seem like a walk to the 7-11.
If you talk to most commuters, any extra day they get to spend at home and sleep in their own bed seems like a winning lottery ticket. Which is why on this particular day, when the captain asked me, “What time is your flight home?” I closed down the Hotwire App and put my phone away. Yes, the only flight that would get me back to Portland would require a miracle and every detail to line up perfectly. But one of those elements needed was already in place: I was flying with a lunatic who loved pushing all the legal boundaries of flying. If anyone could break a flight time record from LAX to San Francisco, it was this guy. So after six days on the road if there was a chance to get home, even a small chance, I had to go for it.
“It leaves ten minutes after we get in.”
Without even a tonal change he just nodded. “Well, we have to at least try.”
Next week: Will everything go right for our hero to make his flight home? What is it like for Marc to fly with a madman? Is it strange that Marc is refers to himself in the third person and calls himself a hero?
