Tranquility
It may sound like an odd statement, but for a charter/corporate pilot, the best flights are when you have the plane to yourself. No passengers to cajole, no luggage to carry, no concern as to whether or not they’re comfortable in the rear cabin or whether the bumpy air over West Texas is making them feel nauseous, and it’s time to look for the sick sack.
A pilot can fly solo in all the single-engines and most twin-engines, including the turbo-props (jet engine with a prop), with a few exceptions (gross weight in excess of 12,500 pounds). In the world of corporate fan jets (jet engine with no prop) — like the Lears, the Gulfstreams, the Citations, the Falcons — only a few offer single-pilot capabilities, although more and more are coming online. To cruise aloft at 400 knots usually requires two pilots due to the cockpit load (work required to fly the plane, manage the comm and nav gear, not to mention all the bells and whistles), but technology is making more corporate jets single-pilot friendly.
Unfortunately, by the time I gave up aviation as my sole vocation, I had never gotten typed to fly a jet. One of life’s regrets.
For me, during the early 1980s, I had it pretty much made. The guy who owned the Holiday Inn on South Padre was an OB/Gyn based in Orange County, California. He had made it big in property investment, with motels in Texas and one in Las Vegas. He’d fly to Brownsville, stay at the Holiday Inn with his wife, and use the Cessna 414 he’d bought for $275,000 cash ($928,000 in today’s dollars) to fly around Texas looking for other motels to buy, of which he had several.
The rest of the time, he’d leave me based in Brownsville with the plane, and let me run my own Part 135 charter service, Aero-America Charter. Flew passengers around the southern U.S. and Mexico.
The 414 had the same cabin as the 421, but it was underpowered, lacking the latter’s geared engine and higher horse. With full fuel, I could only put approximately 600 pounds of people and baggage on board. I’m not going to admit I flew it over gross, but let’s just say I learned how much weight I could put on board and still fly it safe. Based, in part, on the temp and altitude at the departure and destination airports.
To say I had it made would be an understatement. The company (FBO) I had previously worked for, also based in Brownsville, Hunt Pan-Am, required me to show up at work at 8 a.m. The new job required nothing of the sort. I was free to sleep until 10 a.m. if I didn’t have a charter flight scheduled that day, or if the doc and his wife weren’t in town.
The only stipulation was, I had to wash the plane myself. Based on what he was paying me, I think about $18,000 a year at the time ($61,000 in today’s dollars), the doc’s logic was, “I’m not going to pay extra to have the airplane washed and waxed. Let Gregg do it.”
Which really wasn’t a bad deal. The exercise was worth it, and without the plane wash, I was getting little exercise. Dare say I was gaining one of the traits of a professional pilot – my waist line was starting to expand.
For the $18,000 a year, I flew between 30 and 40 hours a month, and spent more time than that waiting around airports for my passengers to return for the flight home.
The rest of the time, I slept until 10 a.m. and went to the beach and read a good book. During the winter, I’d sleep until 10 and lie on the couch and read a good book. Always waiting for the phone to ring. This was obviously before the era of the cell phone, which meant, at the beach, no one could contact me. I’d phone my answering service every hour or so to see if anyone had called to book a charter flight. Only provision was, I couldn’t drink a beer while on call.
Tough life, but somebody had to do it. A year-and-a-half or so after the doctor bought the 414, he bought a fancy motel/resort in Shreveport and re-located the plane there. Not nearly as nice as Brownsville, and that began my downfall with the operation. Without my South Texas contacts, the charter business became a shell of its former self, and most of my time was spent flying around the Ob/Gyn and his general manager. The latter was based in Vegas, managing the motel, Best Western, the doc owned there, but once the Shreveport resort was purchased, he relocated there. Suddenly, I went from having no boss at my heels, free to run my own charter service out of the Brownsville Airport, with, instead, a GM who suddenly thought he was king of the hill.
The Shreveport motel property, actually it was located in adjacent Bossier City, was really a gem. It had a large entertainment showroom attached to it that attracted some top talent: Rich Little, Joey Heatherton, Ray Charles, George Jones, Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell who showed up with Tanya Tucker and a lot of cocaine, Jose Feliciano, and a host of others, whose names I now can’t seem to remember.
The best part of that job, though, was before the charter operation got moved to the Shreveport Airport. Before the move, the GM would call and ask me to fly to Las Vegas and pick him up. Six hours to Vegas, with no passengers along for the ride. Just me and the plane at Flight Level 240 (24,000 feet MSL). With the 8-track (dinosaur era) playing Jimmy Buffett, I’d depart BRO at around 7 a.m.. I did about five trips like that. Six hours with a fuel stop in El Paso, which was about the halfway mark.
From the air, the mountains of midstate New Mexico and Arizona are a thing of beauty. Just me, the plane, and the sky. Pure peace and tranquility, except when air traffic control passed me off to the next sector. I kept down the radio volume to reduce the chatter; just loud enough to hear me being called.
The rest of the time I’d sit in the cockpit, with the plane on autopilot, monitoring the gauges, watching the earth pass under my wings while listening to Buffett sing songs like “A Pirate Looks at 40 (years old),” which seemed old to me back then.
Funny how time flies by.