Last Tango In Paris! Final Argosy 2

By Tony Vallillo (30 June 2009)

And so begins the final month of my airline pilot career, as I now know it to be! At the time there was still a possibility that the financial markets might recover sufficiently by the last day of March 2008 to enable me to fly longer. As I hinted in the prelude to this series, my early retirement was entirely a financial decision. Our pension plan, the last one intact among the so-called legacy airlines, was very much stock market influenced, and by taking early retirement we (there were over 500 of us that retired early at AA last year) were able to cash out, so to speak, at a fairly good value. To say nothing of enabling AA to avoid another round of painful furloughs!

As March of 2008 came in like a lion, I was possessed of my last awarded bid line of flying. It was my first (and, since I was now number one in the bid status, my only!) choice for the month, and it featured four trips to the Eternal City, which of course was my favorite layover of them all! I had, however, long since decided that it would be proper to pay my friends in Paris a last visit; and so it was that I enticed two junior Captains into trading their mid-month Paris trips for the middle two of my Rome layovers. This was mutually beneficial, since neither of them had ever been able to hold the Rome schedule.

I have had an affair with the City of Light for many years. My first Tango in Paris was in 1979 when, as a fairly new airline pilot, I made the pilgrimage to the Salon International de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace, otherwise known simply as the Paris Air Show. Several more visits to the show followed, each a week-long affair that included considerable sightseeing around the major tourist venues, as well as several days at Le Bourget. Paris was thus the second European capital with which I became well acquainted, the first being Madrid from my Air Force days.

My first actual trip to Paris as a crewmember came in July of 1980. American didn't fly to Paris in those days on a scheduled basis, but a small number of the Boeing 707 fleet (4 or 5) were kept in an all-coach charter configuration, and we did a brisk business with them. That summer we had apparently done a major deal with a tour consolidator that involved 100 round trips to the City of Light, all of which originated from JFK on the 707. There were so many of these trips that they actually made bid lines out of them! In those days I was a flight engineer check airman, engaged in instructing and supervising new flight engineers on the line. I could not, of course, come close to holding one of those bid lines, but I did manage to cadge a trip from crew schedule, one that apparently fell through the cracks and had not appeared on the bid sheet!

In 1980 at American Airlines, "international" meant the Caribbean and a few trips into Mexico and Canada. No AA airplanes had flown any ocean other than the western Atlantic since the late 1960's and the South Pacific and Vietnam military charter operations. As it happened, many of the Captains on the 707 in New York did have that earlier oceanic experience, which was advantageous since no special training was provided for the Paris bound pilots! The trip I flew was piloted by two check Captains; and because I was a check FE we all anticipated an interesting flight, since the usual joke on the line about a crew composed entirely of instructors involved a monkey and a football! It was, in fact, true that I knew more about flying the NAT tracks than both of my Captains put together, having had 8 years of Military Airlift Command experience under my belt and a flight across the Atlantic the previous month in the Air Force Reserves. Between the three of us, we made it over and back in good order, and I also played tour guide to my compatriots, neither of whom had ever set foot in Paris.

It was not until the latter part of 1984, in the beginning of the Great Expansion, that American started regular scheduled trips to Paris. Initially we served Orly airport, on the southwest side of town, and over the years we carved out a good business there. So good, in fact, that we were later moved (not exactly voluntarily) over to De Gaulle-- according to rumor at the behest of Air France who envied our solo tenancy on the ORY-JFK run!

I myself never flew any of these trips, being in those days far too junior to entertain the notion of the Captaincy. In the normal course of events I might well have flown them as a copilot, but mine was not an entirely normal career! My tenure as a First Officer lasted only about 8 months, so rapid was the progression through the ranks in those heady days. For the majority of the time that I would otherwise have spent as a copilot I was busy in the office as the Manager Flying Technical for the New York base, a sort of Chief Flight Engineer, responsible for managing the probationary program. And in those days, at New York, the probationary program was a full time endeavor! Almost all of the several thousand new hire pilots in the years between 1984, when the hiring started, and 1986, when I returned to the line, were sent initially to New York. Each required check rides, review boards, and ongoing evaluations. The story of how I wound up in that job is a tale unto itself, and one that may be told someday! Suffice to say that I came to enjoy the work, and so ended up flying a desk when I might have been enjoying layovers in Paris in the 1980's! And when the Captaincy arrived, sooner than anyone expected, it was, of course, on the 727. So much for Paris!

By the mid 1990's I had once again returned to the line after another hiatus in the office, this time as Chief Pilot at JFK. Never one to exert a major effort when a minor one will do just as well, I chose to remain flying the A-300, on which I had qualified while I was a chief. Although in theory I could, upon my return to the line, have chosen just about any airplane AA had at that time, certain truths were already becoming evident: the handwriting was on the wall for the DC-10's, to say nothing of the MD-11's; the 777 had not yet arrived, and would in any event be a poor choice seniority-wise when they did; and the 767...

Well, there was always the 767. And the destinations it served were a rich smorgasbord of international delights. Paris, Zurich, Geneva, Lyon, Frankfurt, London, Copenhagen, Brussels, and a few other places that now escape the memory. But all was not sweetness and light in Boeing Land! Some of those trips involved tag-legs at the European end. Tag legs are an infernal device to serve additional destinations on the cheap - fly from New York to, say, Zurich, and then after refueling and offloading on to Geneva for the layover, repeating the process in reverse the next day. I already knew, from years of all-night Atlantic flying in the Air Force, that a tag-leg was an open invitation to every sort of trouble that sleep deprivation can bring about, and I determined to avoid that sort of flying altogether. I had become much too lazy flying the easy Caribbean schedules!

There were other thorns as well, in the 767 bouquet. From the beginning it had been something of a "you-bet-your-license" school, which was a bit unusual at American. It was the first of the new generation of airliners, but it was taught more like the original 707 school - every nut and bolt. And things got really complicated when the 757 and the 767-300 came on line, because you now had to retain not one but three airplanes worth of knowledge. Now this may not seem like much of a challenge, but believe me the older you get the harder it is! Things got so bad that when a new man took over the school and trimmed the memory work in favor of more practical exercises he scored such a big plus that he ended up Vice President of Flight. And one of the better ones, at that!

The Airbus, on the other hand, was one single airplane, with no variations among the 35 we had laying around at that time, so it was fairly simple to stick with what I knew well. And indeed, in those days, the A-300 had a few Europe trips on the bidsheet. We used it from New York and Boston to London, on at least a few of the daily trips, and especially from EWR. So Europe, after a fashion, was sitting out there waiting for me if I ever got around to wanting a reunion. This took several years, because I knew full well the rigors of all night flying. But it finally dawned upon me that, hey, I can get really well acquainted with at least one of the world's great Capitals at company expense! Why not indeed?

So I started flying to London regularly, and I instantly became aware of a great truth: there is no similarity between an airline flight and an Air Force trip! In the Air Force we flew into bases that were, at best, only in proximity to major cities, and the layover was usually on the base in the transient quarters. These varied, to be sure, but on the whole the best of them approximated a Motel 6. The airline trip, on the other hand, went to the major city itself, and we were invariably billeted in one of the finest hotels in town, courtesy of the company-union hotel committee! We didn't need to take a bus or a train into town, we were there! And so it was that I became intimately familiar with London, including such delights as the "Jack the Ripper" walking tour of Whitechapel on a really foggy evening, Harrods, the British Museum, Westminster Abbey, and the other big churches such as St. Paul's and Westminster Cathedral. Now it so happens that if you spend more than a few minutes in any of the big churches in London you will be exposed to the music of the original heavy metal instrument - the pipe organ. The pipes, you see, are made of alloys composed chiefly of lead, and some of the larger instruments are capable of putting out as much sound as a rock band, albeit of a much more pleasant and musical nature!

At this point I must digress a bit in order to make things clearer as the narrative progresses. As a youth I was much impressed by pipe organs, to the point of actually aspiring to a career as an organist. Sadly, in those days anyone wanting to learn to play the organ was taken firmly by the ears and thumped down onto a piano bench for a number of years to learn keyboard basics. This, I suppose, might be necessary; after all, I didn't climb right into a 767 when I entered pilot training! But the piano bench in question was that of the good nuns in the Catholic school I attended, and their methods of musical pedagogy differed little from the ruler-across-the-knuckles approach they favored for all instruction! (Make no mistake, I now think that this is far more effective than the current politically correct nonsense that passes for education in many places today, but that is another story, one not for this forum!) Suffice to say that no matter how hard I pressed the keys, the wrong sounds came out, and there were no cheap keyboards back then that made presentable organ noises, such as anyone can possess today. So it was that the world lost a potential organist and gained an airline pilot in his stead!

But the love of the music never left me, and now the long-dormant flame was fueled by an almost unlimited exposure to some really great music in London. So much so that I began to study again the history of this instrument, a study that pointed inevitably to France, and a gentleman with the unwieldy name of Aristede Cavaille-Coll. Cavaille-Coll was, perhaps, the greatest organ builder of all time, the Donald Douglas of the pipe organ world in the mid-1800's, which was a particularly fertile time in the history of the instrument. He operated out of Paris, and ended up building or rebuilding the organs in just about every major church in town. At the same time, a new crop of French organists was blooming, men such as Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, and Louis Vierne who took these instruments of Cavaille-Coll, with their new sonorities, and created organ music that surpassed almost anything that had come before.

The more I read of these instruments and this music, and the more I heard on recordings, the more interested I became in seeing and hearing them for myself! Now for a relatively senior pilot in the employ of an airline that flies to Paris, to wish is to do. So Paris lay within reach, although initially not from New York. The Airbus was being used for the Boston-Paris trip, and so I bid a transfer to the Boston crew base in 1998, in order to fly to the City of Light once again. On 3 July of that year, I commanded my first flight to Orly airport and began a musical argosy that endures to this day. (A year later, the BOS-ORY flight switched to a 767, and so it was that I found my roundabout way back to Mr. Boeing, to say nothing of the New York base!)

The grand Organ of St. Sulpice. This monumental case was built in the mid 1700's by the architect Chalgrin.

Pilots fly to particular places for different reasons. Some favor the food, others the culture, or perhaps the beaches or the bordellos - no two pilots are motivated by the same things! But I think I am safe in saying that there may never have been, in the history of the airline industry, another pilot motivated to bid trips by the love of organ music! I was already fully acquainted with the various other delights of Paris from my earlier pilgrimages to the air show, so it was not a matter of discovering the city; but rather the discovery of a particular jewel in the cultural crown, a jewel of which I had previously been unaware.

If all the roads of the ancient world led to Rome, then all of the roads of the organ world lead to one particular church in Paris. No, not the one you are thinking of - Notre Dame - although that church has one of Cavaille-Coll's larger instruments. The organ purist heads instead for an even larger church on the left bank, one made famous in a recent novel (The DaVinci Code) - the Church of St. Sulpice. Perched high above the west end of the nave of this great and acoustically perfect pile of stone is one of Cavaille-Coll's masterpieces. It is perhaps the most perfect fusion of instrument and space in the entire organ world.

When I first began frequenting St. Sulpice in the fall of 1998 it was off the tourist beaten path, as it had been for decades. After The DaVinci Code hit the bookshelves things changed; and today, although still not the major attraction that Notre Dame is, it sees tourists by the hundreds trooping through to gawk at the so-called Rose Line (actually, just an astronomical device set into the floor to determine the change of certain seasons) and the obelisk, both of which are plot elements in the book. You will not, of course, find the broken floor where the mad monk dug up the first clue, nor the abode of the nun who guarded it - these are purely fictional elements. But you will find at the west end of the nave, just adjacent to a side chapel featuring two frescoes by Delacroix, a small wooden door. This door opens to a medieval-looking set of circular stone stairs that lead to the organ loft high above - the cockpit from which the sound resources of nearly 10,000 pipes are commanded.

The Captain of this musical ship is the Organiste Titulaire de St. Sulpice, a position equivalent in the organ world to that of Chuck Yeager, or perhaps Neal Armstrong. In other words, a True Possessor of the Right Stuff. So exalted is this post that in the 390 years that an organ has existed here there have been only 12 Organistes Titulaire! That represents an average tenure of over 30 years! Several have exceeded 50. Since 1985, the Titulaire is M. Daniel Roth, one of the finest organists in the world, and an outstanding advocate for the instrument and its music. Under his tenure a century-old tradition has been kept alive at St. Sulpice - the opening of the organ loft for the noon mass on Sundays. Anyone who wishes to climb the stairs may visit the loft and see the maestro play, to say nothing of meeting the man and enjoying his marvelous hospitality and enthusiasm. This ritual is well known in the organ world, and when I learned of it I immediately set my sights on Paris and the church of St. Sulpice.

The obelisk, starting point of the "Rose Line". Although made out in the novel to be something sinister and mysterious, it is a simple strip of brass used in earlier times to observe the change of season.

A very distinguished list indeed - the organistes titulaire of St. Sulpice

The cockpit of a 150 year old musical instrument

Over the next few years I frequented M. Roth's abode so often that I was granted the privilege of personal friendship with himself and his lovely wife, to say nothing of a wonderful group of people that form a sort of family around the organ. I was always welcome there, and I even got to "play" the organ a few times late at night, when no one was in the church. In that loft, over the course of many Sundays, I met men and women from all over the world, all devotees of the organ and many, surprisingly, also fascinated by flight. There were even several organist-pilots among the growing group of friends I was making there. I would bid my schedules based on such considerations as who might be visiting Paris on what day, or perhaps upon what musical selections M. Roth intended to play on a given Sunday. Arcane criteria, to be sure, but certainly as good as most other motivations to fly! And so it is that now, as my career winds down to a close, I pay my respects to my good friends in Paris.

For many years we have had two trips a day from JFK to Paris. Flight 44 leaves around 18:00, give or take a few minutes as the schedules change. This was the original JFK-Paris flight and has been operated continuously since the late 1980's. By the late 1990's we had picked up a second flight, flight 120, which left several hours later, around 21:45 or so. This flight had a longer layover in Paris, since the return trip, flight 121, did not leave until nearly 18:00 Paris time. This left the entire day free for sleeping, in the not unusual event that sleep might be hard to come by the night before. Since that was often the case for me, the more so as I aged, flight 120 became my preferred choice of Paris trips. And it is my final trip to Paris tonight.

The airplane waits patiently to take us to Paris

Operationally a flight to Paris is pretty much the same as any European flight. The elements of flight planning are identical, save only for the weather and notams at destination. Tonight the forecasts are good at both ends. At JFK the winds favor the 13's, as they often do. In Paris the expectation is for a high overcast and good visibility with winds from the west. The routing, chosen as always for favorable winds enroute, is typical:

(I did not retain the flight plan for this trip, and so I cannot provide you with the coordinates of NAT Xray that night, but if you draw a line from DOVEY to BEDRA and "rubber band" it so that it crosses the closest whole number latitude at each 10 degrees of longitude, you will be "close enough for government work", as they say in the Air Force!!)

Once again I go over the flight plan in all of its detail. Planning, you see, is not only the hallmark of the professional, but the best possible preparation for even the most routine of flights. Considering the number of trips I have made to Paris in the last ten years, this flight certainly qualifies as routine. But we still look over every scrap of available information. As I do so I cannot help but think back to another flight to Paris, a flight that represented perhaps the epitome of careful planning - the flight of Charles Lindberg in the Spirit of St. Louis.

The story of Lindberg's flight is well known, told best in his own words and recreated superbly in the James Stewart film "Spirit of St. Louis". To most laymen Lindberg's flight represented a triumph of human will and endurance, and it certainly was. As for the quickly bestowed nickname Lucky Lindy (perhaps a welcome change from the very briefly used Flying Fool, which was bandied about in some press accounts before the flight!), well there certainly was at least a bit of good luck involved. But the real accomplishment of Lindberg, in my mind, has always been the meticulous way in which he planned and prepared for the flight, calculating every aspect and eventuality and measuring every risk he took against possible mitigating strategies.

He was, at least before the flight, widely thought to have taken leave of his senses for choosing a single engine airplane. Yet Lindberg's hands-on knowledge of the state of the art of engine design at the time, as well as his research, had given him confidence that the new engines could in fact run for the 35 hours or so that he calculated it would take to reach Paris. He further calculated that the weight of a second engine, together with the weight of the fuel it would consume, would actually increase the risk of the flight out of all proportion to any benefit it might bring.

He was also castigated for attempting the flight solo, since the rules of the Orteig prize competition did not require a solo flight. But again his careful calculations showed him that a copilot's weight in fuel would be worth much more than the man himself, and as a seasoned airmail pilot (Lindberg would have been number ONE on the original American Airlines seniority list had he returned to Robertson Airlines after the Paris flight!) he knew full well the capabilities of the human body in terms of staying awake. He was also confident, again from experience flying the mail, that dead reckoning navigation could be accurate enough to allow him to complete the flight successfully, thus freeing him from the need to carry a navigator and the associated equipment.

As I check the route in the FMC, after arriving at the airplane, I ponder the fact that we too have freed ourselves from the need for a human navigator, although the equipment that replaced him no doubt exceeds the weight of all but the most corpulent practitioners of that ancient profession! Whereas Lindberg tediously plotted his course and calculated his headings and distances against what little was known about the winds and weather of the North Atlantic, the computers, both on the ground and in the airplane, have done all of this for us with accuracy that is little short of miraculous. I do check over, at least casually, the fixes, courses and times on the flight plan. (Indeed, on two or three occasions out of many thousands of flights I have discovered small discrepancies in the plan, usually the presence of a seemingly spurious waypoint or the absence of one that would be expected. But nothing, ever, that would actually compromise the flight in any material way.) And we will, as part of the NAT track discipline, check each leg's course and distance prior to passing each waypoint passage on the oceanic portion of the flight, to ensure that we are in fact following the cleared track. But these are merely cross checks, important though they are. It has been literally decades since I have had to actually do the calculations for a flight plan like this. Modern student pilots learn using electronic calculators or computers, and may well have never spun a whiz wheel in their aeronautical lives! Such is progress!

The pre-departure ritual for this Paris flight is the same as for any Atlantic crossing, and soon enough we are on our way to the runway. Tonight the delays are not excessive, which is something of a surprise considering how bad the situation had become a few months ago. It is the F/O's leg, so that the last flight out of Paris will be mine. Clearance received, he throttles up and calls for autothrottle and we are off to the races once again. This departure is from runway 13R, the long runway, and involves only a simple turn to a heading of 150 degrees after becoming airborne. This done, tower sends us over to departure control, and we check in. In due course, a slight turn to the left points us directly to HAPIE, from whence we proceed to YAHOO, just a bit south and east of Nantucket Island. From the point where we crossed Rockaway Beach just after takeoff we are feet wet.

Moonrise over who-knows-where!

Our course will keep us over water for most of the flight, passing to the south of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This gets us lined up for the NAT track we will fly tonight. There are a number of available routes from JFK to the northeast Canadian coast-out points, and this one is one of the most southerly. Lindberg chose a true great circle route all the way from Roosevelt Field to Paris. His course took him over Long Island sound, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Cape Cod before going feet wet for a while on the way to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. He coasted out once and for all over St John's Newfoundland, site of a modern day VOR called Torbay. (Torbay is still used as a coast out point from time to time, depending upon the lay of the NAT routes, and I have occasionally looked down upon it and contemplated the flight of the Spirit of St. Louis.)

We could, of course, set a direct great circle course ourselves - the FMC operates entirely upon great circle navigation. All we would have to do, to more or less imitate Lindberg's routing, would be to enter direct LFPG into the FMC while we were on the ground at JFK. If we wanted to be exact about it, we could enter as our first waypoint after JFK the coordinates for Roosevelt Shopping Center, which now occupies the ground that was once the airport from which Lindberg departed. The next waypoint would be Le Bourget, since that was his destination. (LFPG, Paris De Gaulle airport, did not exist then!) It is, of course, impossible to actually fly this route in the real world, because the NAT tracks and the North American Routes don't line up that way. There may have been, of course, at least one night when the eastbound NAT routes might have included a track that was very close to the overwater portion of Lindberg's flight. But I have never knowingly flown a track like that.

Lindberg initially plotted his course on a special chart that allowed a great circle route to approximate a straight line, as it would on a globe. He then took the coordinates of this track and transferred them to a regular chart, using intervals of 100 miles as course change points. He figured that he would be making good a ground speed of around 100 mph, and hourly checks seemed like an efficient way to track the progress of the flight. In his book "The Spirit of St. Louis" he explains that it seemed too simple to lay out a course that way; and so, concerned about the accuracy of the method, he painstakingly calculated a true great circle course by mathematical means, a process which took several days to compute just the first half of the flight. Fortunately, the numbers precisely matched his plotted course, so he quit at that point! In the days before computers that must have been more trouble than it seemed worth.

We are travelling at a clip six times Lindberg's speed, and we use 10 degrees of longitude as our intervals for crosschecks and position reports. After passing abeam of St. John's we say goodbye to Gander Center at 50 degrees west and switch the radios over to 123.45 and 121.5. 123.45 is the air-to-air frequency, and it often offers entertainment as we eavesdrop upon conversations between other airliners and the occasional bizjet or military aircraft. The chatter varies depending on the goings-on in the world of aviation. There is often talk of contracts, especially when one is being negotiated somewhere. To escape from some of this prattle, I change one of the radios over to a frequency that I know to be used by a large oil platform in the area, near the edge of the Grand Banks. A call brings forth an immediate reply from the rig, and we spend a few minutes chatting about the sea conditions and life on a rig in general. I discover that the thing is built to allow the largest known North Atlantic waves to pass below the superstructure, which means that there must be at least 100 feet of clearance between it and the surface of the sea, and likely a good bit more! Helicopters are the usual means of transit between the rig and the shore, and I don't envy those pilots their work. Although things are idyllic tonight, weather wise, it can get pretty rough down there. Shortly after we contact them, we can see the flare from the rig, lighting up the ocean for miles around.

Ships passing in the night

Knowledge of the sea state and winds is, today, pretty much superfluous to our needs. But it was not always so. In the old days, during and immediately after WWII, long overwater flights were issued plans that included recommended ditching headings every few hundred miles. These were, of course, based upon sparse data and questionable forecasts, yet it was the best information known and it was carefully considered. Ditching a land plane has always been an emergency procedure of last resort, and continues to be so today. Of course we now have the outstanding performance of Sullenberger and Skiles to ponder, a performance all the more remarkable since so few jet aircraft have ever been ditched at all, let alone so successfully. But in the days of propeller driven aircraft, ditchings were nowhere near as rare.

Few people today recall the name of Captain Richard Ogg. On October 16, 1956, he was in command of Pan American flight 943 from Honolulu to San Francisco, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. The Stratocruiser was to the immediate post-war era what the 747 has been to the modern era - the largest and most luxurious airliner of its time. It was, however, a mechanical Pandora's Box, and a number of them were lost at sea or over the jungle, mostly because of problems with the engines and propellers. Flight 943 lost two of its four engines just about at the so-called "point of no return", midway between Honolulu and San Francisco. There was insufficient fuel to reach land in this configuration, so Ogg was faced with the need to ditch. Fortunately there was a Coast Guard cutter in the area, stationed along the route to serve as a radio communications relay and a search and rescue platform if needed. Ogg circled the cutter until dawn, at which time he executed the most successful ditching ever accomplished at that time. All 31 people on board were rescued by the cutter Ponchartrain, but the aircraft had split in two after touching down in the water and it sank within 20 minutes.

Ogg's water landing was in the middle of the ocean, of course, and although the seas were fairly calm they were not completely smooth despite the lane of foam that the cutter had laid down in preparation for the landing. Water landings are always tricky, since the "runway" is moving in many directions at once and touchdown must needs be made in a perfectly symmetrical attitude. (Symmetrical with the surface of the water, that is, whatever the state of the surface may be.) The first bit of airplane structure that touches the water will exert enormous drag forces on the ship, forces far more powerful than any remaining aerodynamic force that may be available to the pilot to control the plane. Thus it is that the prevailing wisdom on ditching has always been to land parallel to the swells if the swells are significant and into the wind only if the sea is calm or the wind is really strong, on the order of 50 knots or more. The wings should be perfectly parallel to the surface, which might require a bank angle relative to the horizon if the swells are more than a few feet high, which they often are in mid ocean even in the best of weather, as any cruise ship passenger can confirm!

Captain Ogg's ditching was not, of course, the only one in a recip airliner, merely the most successful. In the jet age, on the other hand, ditching is almost unheard of. Jet engines are far more reliable than the complex recip engines of the 1940's and 1950's, and multiple failures for reasons other than fuel starvation are practically unknown. So my conversation with the oil rig about the condition of the sea is more a matter of idle curiosity than important information. In any event, unless something catastrophic were to happen very soon, we will be completely out of the area in a matter of minutes and the sea may well present a totally different aspect farther on down the road.

The FO takes a picture of the moon

Soon 40 West slides by, and with it a position report transmitted by yours truly. Handling the radio communications is typically the chore of the pilot not flying, especially the HF communications. It is a poor Captain indeed who would stiff the copilot by opting out of the joys of HF position reporting! There have been rumors of such Captains, but I certainly don't have the chutzpah to carry off a Captain Bligh act like that! And in a matter of weeks it will all be a memory, so I may as well immerse myself in the totality of the flying experience, HF and all! Actually, the reporting is much easier these days, since a great percentage of the airline fleet is now equipped with some sort of datalink capability that renders voice radio reports unnecessary on the Atlantic.

Automatic Dependent Surveillance is a system that uses satellite communications to transmit aircraft position information to ATC automatically. It can be set to send this data fairly often, on the order of once a minute or even more frequently. It is already in use on the Atlantic by a growing number of airplanes, including just about all of the newer Boeings and Airbuses. Even a few of our 767's have a poor man's version of it, operating through the newer FMC's. Sometimes I wind up flying one of these birds, and the only voice report we need make over the pond is at the 30 West changeover point from Gander to Shanwick. Tonight, though, we have the older FMC and I am making all of the reports by voice. At least the frequency is not as congested as it used to be. With hundreds of flights airborne across the pond at the same time, and often the same frequency in use by both Gander and Shanwick, it might have taken 15 minutes to get a word in edgewise back in the day. All of that is behind us now, and those few of us who still use voice HF pretty much have the frequency to ourselves.

Dawn breaks, somewhere east of 30W

Time to start adjusting the sun shades!

Since this is the late flight, the dawn greets us much sooner than it does on the early trip. On flight 44, at this time of year, we might not see the dawn until we are on vectors at CDG. In December we wouldn't see daylight until we got to the hotel! But on flight 120 this morning the sun greets us around 20 West, and we will get to see something of the land beneath us, once we go feet dry over the Normandy coast.

As we pass just south of Ireland I think again of Lindberg and his epic flight, for it took him 29 1/2 hours to reach Dingle Bay. Only once have I had a duty day that long - during Desert Storm in a C-5 on a round trip between Europe and the Gulf. And on that occasion we had three pilots and took plenty of breaks. Lindy took no breaks, save for a few instances of involuntary dozing off. It was here that luck was truly with him, since he always woke up before the unstable airplane got out of control. The Spirit of St. Louis was at best only marginally stable, and had to be flown every minute. No autopilot or autothrottle for the Lone Eagle. And although he could certainly afford to be casual about his altitude, there being no other airplane in the sky between the U.S. and at least Ireland, he most certainly could not afford to be so casual about his heading.

Triple 7, probaably bound for LHR

Lindberg himself thought that an accuracy of 50 miles laterally at the Irish coast would be acceptable navigation, but he tried hard to keep the Spirit on the calculated headings. This was not always easy, since he had to deviate around storms at one point, and during the times that the sea surface was not visible he had no way of knowing how the wind was affecting his course. As it happened, it all averaged out, for he coasted in within 5 miles of his calculated track, which is a remarkable feat for almost 1700nm of dead reckoning! In the days of navigators on the C-141's, I considered 5 miles to be darn good. Even the early INS units could easily drift that much on a leg that long.

On some routings you get to see the White Cliffs of Dover

On other routings the great port of Le Havre is close by to the north

Rouen seen on the early trip, at 0'dark thirty

Rouen as we see it today on the later trip

These days, of course, we are usually within a few feet of our desired location and this morning is no different. As we approach the island of Jersey we see it ahead and below, a striking visual confirmation of the quality of our automatic navigation. And soon thereafter, the west coast of Normandy greets us. From here we will follow the Seine river much of the way, passing close by the ancient city of Rouen, which we get a good view of along the way. I had always intended to visit this town, with its ancient cathedral, but it looks like that will have to wait for a vacation. There will be no time for side trips today.

Just about every flight I have ever flown into Paris has used an arrival that transits a waypoint called MERUE, about 30 miles northwest of De Gaulle. This morning is no exception. From MERUE the arrival takes us to the Creil VOR (CRL) if landing to the west, and down south toward the Pontoise (PON) VOR if landing to the east. This morning the arrival is to the east, and we have loaded and briefed the ILS 08R, the approach to the outside runway. As we pass MERUE and turn south I remember a trip some years ago, a flight on which I took the last break. Normally, the pilot taking the last break is awakened around 30 minutes prior to landing, the better to clear the cobwebs out of the brain before handling complex fast moving machinery in close proximity to the ground! On the day in question, however, I returned to the flight deck to find the airplane passing MERUE, which can be as little as 10 minutes from touchdown in conditions of light air traffic!! Fortunately for all concerned I was already quite familiar with Paris and its procedures and environs, so I was able to spin up in less than a minute and assume command. I did, however, "counsel" the copilots about the virtues of a timely wake-up call! The expression "Wake me when the gear goes down", I assured them, was meant only in jest!

Different day - just landed on 26L, waiting to cross 26R

The early Paris flight (45) approaches terminal 2 as dawn breaks over CDG

The French controllers are among the best in the world, and we are smoothly spliced into the flow of traffic approaching 08R. In due course the FO calls for the gear and final flaps, and we slide down the glideslope just north of Lindberg's landing place, Le Bourget. He arrived at night, of course, and initially had trouble finding the field - it turned out to be the only dark part of Paris. When he touched down he was actually surprised, nay shocked, that hundreds of thousands of people were joyously celebrating his arrival. At that point he had no idea of the impact his flight was having on the world psyche. He would soon realize just what the impact would be on himself; and although he would have little privacy in many of the years to come, he would bear the burden well. He became perhaps the greatest advocate aviation ever had, and spent much of the rest of his life advancing the state of the art in aviation.

We too are eagerly welcomed, if not by hundreds of thousands at least by a few hundred loved ones, associates, and at least a few limo drivers, who patiently await the arrival of our charges as they stream out of the customs area after we arrive at the gate. We of the crew have a different protocol, and are met in due course by the bus that will take us into town. Formalities completed, we are whisked along the autoroute towards Paris, which is lightly travelled since it is nearly noon on a Saturday. Although this ride can take over an hour in the early morning rush (which is the time the crew from the earlier trip is being taken to the hotel), our transit time today is under 30 minutes. Just over an hour after landing, I am between the sheets!

The street outside our hotel in the 14th district

The Paris Metro, one of the best subways in the world~

In the heart of the Rive Gauche

There is always music somewhere in Paris!

A bit of cross-cultural pollution, which now appears all over the world, sad to say

I take a brief break for an afternoon snack -- the view from a Parisien sidewalk cafe on the Boulevard St Germaine

I allow myself only a short nap, because Paris is one of the world's great walking towns! Since this is my last tango in this wonderful city, I intend to spend it wandering around seeing once again the sights that have delighted so many so often. Our hotel is located in the 14th arrondisement (district), which is in the southwestern part of Paris, and is close to an hour's walk to the center of town, at least at the leisurely pace I set these days! So I take advantage of what may well be the world's greatest subway system, known over here as Le Metro. The closest station is but a short stroll from the hotel, and soon I am whisked smoothly (this line rides on rubber tires instead of steel wheels) to the Boulevard St Michel. Here, at the intersection of St. Michel and St. Germaine, we are in the heart of the Rive Gauche, the left bank, otherwise known as the Latin Quarter. I wander again through the crooked streets past eateries of every conceivable variety (but not all of good quality - I had the worst chicken curry I have ever had in my life here!) and make my way through the sights and smells to the banks of the Seine. There, rising above the Isle de la Cite, are the twin towers of one of the world's architectural and religious masterpieces, Notre Dame.

La Notre Dame towers over the Isle de la Cite

The delightful plaza in front of Notre Dame

The great Western Facade of Notre Dame. The tower to the left would have been home to Quasimodo

One of the great Rose Windows of the transept

Although at this hour on Saturday there is no organ music, I pay a visit to the great church to see once again the wonderful stained glass and the incredible stonework. It is hard to believe that all of this was built using only simple tools and instruments. It is even harder to imagine what it would cost to build it today! The church is crowded with tourists, as is always the case, and it takes a while to circumambulate the interior, the better to admire the great Rose Windows that crown the transepts. These and the other stained glass windows were prudently removed and safely stored during WWII to avoid potential damage. They were restored to their places at the end of the war.

Bocce Ball is an ever popular passtime, especially among men of my own vintage!

The Rick Steves Paris video was, for a time, one of the selections on board AA in business class! Here, shown on the airplane DVD, you can see the author peeking over the top of the console as M. Roth plays!

The Rue Cler

I take the long way back toward the hotel, so as to stroll along another wonderful Parisian street - the Rue Cler. I first discovered Rue Cler through a Rick Steves travel video (a video in which I unwittingly play a bit part - a portion of it was filmed in the organ loft at St. Sulpice one Sunday when I was there!). Rue Cler is a market street, with more groceries and bakeries than you can count, alive with sights and smells to stimulate the palate and whet the appetite. It is all I can do to wait until I get back to the 14th district again before I sit down to dinner!

For me, French cuisine is a mixed blessing. I cannot get enough of crepes, omelets and the like, but the French have a habit of devouring animals that, for me, represent something other than food! I do not, for example, eat duck (a target), or horse (transportation) or ostrich (something to see in a zoo)! Strangely, I do eat escargot, so I guess there is no accounting for taste! Fortunately, the omelet is one of the great contributions of France to the cuisine of the world, and I have eaten hundreds of them in Paris, all of them outstanding! Tonight is no exception. Throw in some pommes frites and a liter of eau minerale and life is good!

The organ loft at St Sulpice, with the maestro at the controls

Although the crew pickup for the return flight is not until around 4pm, I am up and at 'em by nine. Today happens to be Easter Sunday, and I have arranged my last visit to the organ loft at St. Sulpice especially for this occasion. In the late 1800's, the heyday of this part of Paris and of the musical life of St. Sulpice, the great church would have been packed to the rafters on Easter, filled with the higher socio-economic strata of Parisian society all decked out to the nines, and moved to exultation by the music of the great organist Widor, backed up by a choir of several hundred voices. These days the crowd is much smaller, although still enthusiastic, and the choir is only several dozen voices in compass. However, the organ is still the same majestic instrument, and the organist, M. Roth, is fully the equal of Widor or any of his other illustrious predecessors on the bench. True to my expectations, the day is a musical and spiritual delight, and a fitting coda, at least for now, to my Parisian organ odyssey.

The High Altar of the great church of St Sulpice

Medieval Stair Master! Three men, and two more on another unit one floor above, were needed to pump the bellows (before electric blowers took over in the 1930's) to provide air to the 10,000 pipes, all of which could be playing at the same time if the music demanded it!

After the service I bid Monsieur & Madame Roth a fond farewell (we had a retirement dinner party on the previous trip last week, with the entire St. Sulpice "family"), and turn my steps for the last time toward the hotel and pickup. As I check out, I thank the staff for the many enjoyable visits I have experienced since we started using this hotel. This has truly been one of the best aspects of working for an airline like American - the hotels we used for layovers, at least in the international division, were for the most part top notch. Nothing makes a long-haul flight more difficult than lack of proper rest, and although it may sound self serving, a good hotel is more conducive to rest than a flop-house!

At 4pm on Sunday afternoon the traffic is again light, and we arrive at the airport in plenty of time to start planning the return trip. Rather than simply await the paperwork at the airplane, I make the trek to operations, the better to say my goodbyes to the ground staff, a wonderful group of men and women who have taken very good care of us over the years. I have always enjoyed the interaction with the operations and passenger service staffs, especially at the overseas locations, since they are usually native to the country in question and have always been a font of information and folklore!

My last au revoirs said, I turn to the flight plan. Departures from Paris can follow several routes, depending, as always, on the lay of the NAT tracks. The usual departure is out over the Normandy peninsula, via either the Evreux or L'Aigle departures. If the NAT tracks commence off the Scottish coast we depart via the ATREX, NURMO or OPALE, which route us across the channel and up north over England, often close enough to London to enjoy a good view of the city. Tonight, we are headed for Evreux, since the course lies across the middle of the NAT area. This flight plan, again not ours since I did not keep the paperwork from this trip, is typical and represents a likely routing for a Paris-JFK trip:

Notice that this flight plan does not contain a NAT track -- every waypoint is listed instead. This is because flight 121 operates outside of the time frame of the westbound tracks. The NAT tracks are a one-way system, and the bulk of the westbound traffic is already in the chocks in North America when we take off from Paris. In fact, by the time we will arrive over the Canadian coast, we will already be going head to head with the lead elements of the nightly eastbound rush. The east tracks, as always, are laid out with the winds in mind, and take maximum advantage of such tailwinds as may exist. To us, those winds are headwinds, and we obviously avoid them as much as we can, so there is no real worry about actually butting heads with an eastbound flight - they will be far to the north or south, depending upon the lay of the winds.

Lined up and waiting for takeoff. The Airbus is using the full length, but we can make do with a bit less.

CDG as we pass over it upon completing the departure turn -- already above 10,000 feet, such is the performance of the 767-300!

Today the winds in Paris favor an east departure, and we plan our takeoff from runway 09R. This is a long taxi, and a hilly one as well. De Gaulle airport has some considerable grades on a number of its taxiways, although fortunately the runways are fairly level. From our gates on the south side of terminal two we have to negotiate what the English would call a roundabout, a sort of traffic circle of taxiways, and then head up taxiway November to the north side of the field. The north side is around 50 feet higher in elevation than the south side, so November has a bit of a grade, which requires some power to climb. Once on the north side we join the short line for takeoff on 09R. When CDG was opened, in 1974, this was the one and only runway, complete with the Turbo-Clair fog removal system. Now it is one of four, and Turbo-Clair is long gone, replaced by CATIIIB operations which preclude the necessity for dissipating fog. Nothing remains of it these days but the concrete bunkers on the side of the runway, bunkers that once each held an underground jet engine that blew its hot exhaust across the toughdown zone of 09R.

Another thing that has remained since the beginning, and no doubt from long before that, is the population of large hares, which we sometimes call jackalopes due to their size and gait. These creatures inhabit sizeable burrows around the non-paved areas of the airport (I can only hope they eschew the runway areas!) and are often to be seen loping about. I have even seen a red fox on a taxiway here, although it was unclear whether it was also a denizen of the airport, or merely a vulpine agent of the French animal control bureau!

Often the departure takes us right over the city itself, as on this day

One of the many chateaux in the countryside. This was taken not from a 767 (I hope that is obvious!) but from the light plane of a French attorney, a friend of mine from our local airport in Connecticut

After having run the gamut of fox and hare, we are cleared for takeoff. The Evreux departure from 09R requires a climb straight ahead on the CGN 086 radial for about 6 miles until passing the RSY NDB, which is also annotated as RNAV waypoint PG092. From that point we start a sweeping left turn to pass over the airport and fly out the 272 radial of the CGN VOR.. As we climb straight ahead initially, I bid the tower controllers farewell and a sincere Merci for many years of safe flying. Shortly thereafter it is time to turn. These departures were, at the time of this flight, flown on what we call raw data (the actual VOR radial) until the so-called RNAV waypoint, around 8-10 miles from the airport. Prior to this waypoint, PG092 on this procedure, the navigation is up to me and the pink line is only for reference - we have to have the Nav display set to show the VOR radial. This is old hat for me, and we trace a perfect line on the controller's scope. It is fascinating to consider that someday, perhaps fairly soon, this type of navigating may well be as obsolete as a four-course radio range is today! I think I'll save some of these charts! (Note: I did. My kitbag sits in my office essentially untouched since I put it down after my fini flight! Just call me sentimental!)

As we reach cruise altitude, we pass just to the south of the storied beaches of Normandy, places like Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno. In all my years of Paris layovers I have never made the pilgrimage out here, although I did take a tour to Mont St. Michel on a two-day layover some years back. Some day in my retirement I will return to France and spend a month or so seeing the rest of the country, and when I do, Normandy will be high on the list of places to go.

We are chasing the sun, which is a delightful perk on a westbound flight at dusk. The only downside is the ongoing need to reposition the sun shade every time we turn! Flight 121 varies considerably through the seasons - in summer it is entirely a daylight flight, arriving at JFK well before dark. In the dead of winter it is a night flight all the way, from taxi-out to taxi-in. Now, but a day removed from the vernal equinox, we will probably not see the sun set completely until we approach Long Island! This is one of the parts I will miss.

The Atlantic looking remarkably pacific today!

In late March it is still winter up here in Newfoundland, and there is plenty of ice on the sea.

One minor difference on a so-called "random routing" (a flight planned on a course not aligned with one of the NAT tracks) is that we must append a MET report to each position report. This is a report of the wind, turbulence (if any) and temperature at each reporting point and at the midpoints in between. Collecting data for this report takes all of about 30 seconds, but we occasionally grouse about it anyway! At one time, of course, such reports were a part of every position report over the oceans, since the airplanes aloft were the only source of information. Nowadays, the ADS-B equipped airplanes are sending this information almost every minute, and the requirement may go by the wayside soon. Not soon enough for me, however, since I will retire before the reporting requirements will!

The coastline itself, surrounded by ice on all sides!

Halifax, Nova Scotia

The remainder of the flight is routine, so much so that I am lulled into the normal routine and the fact that this is my last flight out of Paris doesn't really sink in. I wonder if it will be this way on the real fini flight! It is perhaps symbolic then, that as we approach Boston we are treated to one of the most magnificent sunsets I have ever seen. Now it dawns on me (no pun intended!) that this is the beginning of the final week of my airline career, the sunset of an era for me. Still, the thought is more pleasing than distressing, and for this I am grateful. Perhaps I will fare better, when I set the kitbag down for good, than some pilots I have known. These poor souls never got over the change in their lives that retirement wrought, and always reminded me of sailors at the dock, forever looking longingly out to sea.

The sun finally sets, after we have chased it all the way across the Atlantic!

Long Island Sound

Mid Long Island, as we approach 10,000 feet in the descent, a few minutes from landing

The sun sets as we cross Long Island sound, and I hear once again in my earpiece the dulcet tones of deepest Flatbush clearing us to descend. Back home again, no doubt about it! The landing on 31R is quite satisfying, as much so as I hope the last one will be. As I park the jet, I think ahead...my last week beckons, and my last two trips. But I am very much looking forward to the next one, for it will also be a first - my first trip on the Mercury! So join me in operations, the day after tomorrow!

Anthony Vallillo
avallillo@charter.net

Final Argosy Series

Final Argosy

Final Argosy - Under The Southern Cross

Final Argosy - King Neptune's Court

Final Argosy Part Three - Viva Tango!

Final Argosy Part Four - Adios Amigos

Final Argosy - Last Tango In Paris!

Final Argosy - Fini Flight