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Tribute To The "Queen Of The Skies" Boeing "Jumbo" 747 In MSFS By Frank's MS Flight Sim Come see the highlights of the history of the Boeing 747, no longer being made but still flying (albeit in reducing numbers). I really loved researching & making this video. The 747 747 Types People with 747s 747 Disasters 747s in Museums 747s at Iconic Kai Tak Hope you enjoy. Cheers. Frank's MS Flight Sim https://www.youtube.com/@FranksMSFlightSimulator About Frank's MS Flight Sim New channel begun in 2021. Visit notable airfields and areas in Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). Themes so far include: WW2; Bush/Mt./Water/Outback strips; “Golden Oldie” strips; heritage/vintage strips; and aircraft accident investigations. More different themes to come. Expect a new video roughly each week. Provides brief, interesting information, often with history, geography, maps, pictures etc, and great places to fly in MSFS. Focus is on interesting content rather than production values.
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This is a repaint for the amazing SkySpirit 747-8i Series II. It includes the base model, high-quality textures, a VC, and custom ground service vehicles. Canadian Airlines never flew the 747-8i, as by the time the company was absorbed by Air Canada in 1999 the aircraft did not exist. The largest aircraft flown by Canadian Airlines was the Boeing 747-427. However, in our new universe, Canadian Airlines has taken delivery of one single Boeing 747-8i, available to fly any route of your choice. It flies under the registration C-FCDN and the tail number 848. The Rhys T. Eyton Memorial 747-8i Canadian Airlines named all of their 747's, and this one is no different. Like the real-life 747-427 flown under registration C-FGHZ, this aircraft honors the late Rhys T. Eyton, Canadian Airlines CEO between 1989 and 1995. Rhys was a pioneer in Canadian Aviation. He passed away in 2023. Livery Info Upon its founding in 1987, Canadian Airlines revealed its new livery using the colours light grey, dark grey, navy blue, and red. The paint scheme was an adaptation of the recently introduced livery from its predecessor Canadian Pacific Airlines. The lower half of the aircraft's body was navy blue, topped with light grey and red stripes, while the tail was blue, with approximately one-third taken up by the carrier's new logo. The new Canadian Airlines logo was a combination of Canadian Pacific's five grey stripes, representing the five continents served by the carrier. Over these stripes was a thick, bright red chevron. The chevron was a simplification of the Pacific Western Airlines logo. The chevron was placed over the stripes, which then represented "Wings over 5 continents". It was also an ingenious and subtle way to represent the takeover of CP by PWA. The same logo, in a square form, became a clever alternative to a true bilingual name on the fuselage replacing the French "e", and the third "a" in English (Canadian/Canadien). -
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Payware Miltech Simulations CH-47 is needed. This repaint shows fictitious CH-47F 80+04. 60 Boeing CH-47F were ordered by the German Airforce and to be delivered by 2030. Installation Unzip and move it to your MSFS Community folder. Enjoy! Legal This repaint is freeware; you may use and modify it as you wish for your own use. It may not be used or sold for commercial purposes, nor published on any website that charges for downloading either directly or through a membership fee. If you want to publish repaints based on it, you need written permission from the author. Thomas Roehl March 2024 -
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Payware Miltech Simulations CH-47 is needed. This repaint shows US Army CH-47F 15-08176 of 1st Battalion, 214th Aviation Regiment, 12th Combat Aviation Brigade with c/n M.8176 in its standard Woodland Desert Sage paint scheme. Helicopter is based at Katterbach AAF/Germany. Installation Unzip and move it to your MSFS Community folder. Enjoy! Legal This repaint is freeware; you may use and modify it as you wish for your own use. It may not be used or sold for commercial purposes, nor published on any website that charges for downloading either directly or through a membership fee. If you want to publish repaints based on it, you need written permission from the author. Thomas Roehl March 2024 -
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Payware Golden Age Simulations Boeing Stearman Model 75 is needed. This repaint shows Boeing Stearman Model 75 N68296 of Flugwerk Mannheim with serial 40-1797, c/n 75-0354, built in 1940 as a PT-17. In respect to the famous WW2 WAC Woman Air Corps/WASP Women Airforce Service Pilots this aircraft wears the Fifinella patch nose art. Since 2014, aircaft is based in EDFM Mannheim/Germany. Installation Unzip and move it to your MSFS Community folder. Enjoy! Legal This repaint is freeware; you may use and modify it as you wish for your own use. It may not be used or sold for commercial purposes, nor published on any website that charges for downloading either directly or through a membership fee. If you want to publish repaints based on it, you need written permission from the author. Thomas Roehl January 2024 -
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My first ever (published) repaint. Depicting the Boeing 747-300 JA8183 flown by Japan Airlines until 2009. It's not the most high quality repaint, but I tried my best . This repaint is for the payware CLS/Just Flight Boeing 747 HD. You need to own this payware aircraft in order to fly this repaint. Readme and instructions included. Have fun! -
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Repaint for the SkySpirit 767-300 V5 model for FSX and P3D in the real-world livery for Royal Air Maroc which is based out of Casablanca in Morocco and typically operates to destinations in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and North America. The aircraft was converted to a freighter in 2018 after serving as a passenger airliner for Alitalia initially and then with Royal Air Maroc. -
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Three Holer Part 3 - Hired! By Tony Vallillo (5 August 2014) The Ancient Romans said Tempus Fugit, but we all know that time passes slowly when you are awaiting important news. When John and I parted company after completing our type rating course, I reluctantly hit the road in the Fiat once again and headed back to Charleston after having spent a delightful summer in the Big D. I was now awaiting word from two airlines - American, now that I had completed the interview process, and Braniff now that I had demonstrated my superior airmanship to them. I was a bit nonplussed that I had yet to hear from Braniff for an interview; but hope springs eternal, and I was certain that once the paperwork from my rating ride crossed the desk of the Vice President of Flight I would be summoned to my reward! (It was in fact extremely unlikely that any paperwork from BESI would ever cross the desk of the VP Flight, but such is hope.) Meanwhile, of course, life went on, and even in the halcyon '70's that took cash. So I turned to the AF Reserves for some flying to pay the rent. Rent, by the way, was $165/month for an air conditioned two bedroom townhouse in one of the best complexes in Charleston. Those were the days! A nice long European trip in the C-141 would put enough in the coffers to keep the rent collector at bay for a couple of months at least, but such a trip was not on the schedule. So off I went on the first available trip, in command of a flight from Charleston to Andrews AFB near Washington DC, then to Colorado Springs Colorado where we had a layover. The next day we retraced our steps back to Charleston by way of Andrews. That two day trip would pay for a week's worth of the TV dinners that constituted the bulk of my diet at that time. But to really restock the financial larder I went to the squadron schedulers in search of a longer overseas trip. Luck was in my corner, because I was able to latch onto what appeared to be a nice long trip, albeit not in command - I would be the copilot. This was of no concern since the pay in the Air Force was not dependent upon crew position. We started out from Charleston, in the early evening as nearly always, and flew first to Dover AFB in southern Delaware. Then as now, Dover was the main logistical hub on the east coast for the Military Airlift Command (MAC, now known as the Air Mobility Command or AMC), and just about all Europe bound flights originating at any east coast MAC base transited Dover for cargo and passenger upload. After a 3 1/2 hour stopover, which allowed time to swing by the flight line snack bar and sample Dover's justifiably famous Philly Cheese steak sandwich, we launched into the midnight gloom bound for Ramstein AB in southern Germany. After a layover at Ramstein we embarked upon a long turn around to Dhahran, in eastern Saudi Arabia. By the time we returned to Ramstein almost 4 days had passed since we left Charleston; but fortunately the crew was composed entirely of "reserve bums", reservists who had no other employment and who had essentially unlimited time to devote to AF flying. We all voted to try to stay out as long as possible, since the cash register was ca-chinging merrily whenever we were away from home base. The author in the left seat of the C-141A, somewhere in the world. The C-141A, perhaps the finest airlifter ever built, sturdy, relatively easy to fly and reliable, this was the masters degree in flying for a great many Air Force pilots over the years. So we hounded the command post at Ramstein for additional flying; and, after another day had passed, we were rewarded with a short hop down to Torrejon AB at Madrid Spain. There, after another layover, we talked our way onto another shuttle down to Dhahran and back to Ramstein. At that point our luck ran out, at least as it pertained to cadging additional flying. After a long layover (a shade over 24 hours) we found ourselves headed back to Dover, and thence home. Now it so happened that our navigator on this trip (the C-141's still carried navigators at this point, since they had yet to be fitted with inertial navigation systems) was, in his other life, a ground school instructor at American Airlines. Of course I had related to him the story of my interview and my 727 training at Braniff, and he shared with me some information that proved to be the key to my subsequent airline career. American Airlines, he told me, was of course hiring pilots, so the ground school was in full swing training the new-hires. It so happened that they were also looking for ground school instructors in the 727 program, since that was the entry level into which all the new hire pilots were assigned. Why not, he suggested, try to get on as a ground school instructor. That might provide me some visibility over at AA, and the pay was not bad either. I gave this considerable thought all the way back to Charleston. By now nearly two months had passed since both the final interview at AA and the completion of the training at Braniff. Clearly my job search could use some extra juice, since neither airline seemed yet to have come to the conclusion that they just could not continue as a going business without my participation. The foot-in-the-door opportunity with AA was just too good to pass up, and the relocation to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area could be nothing but a boost for my Braniff ambitions, since the ride over to Love Field was a short one from anywhere in the Metroplex. By the time I arrived back at my apartment I had made up my mind to call the individual whose name and number Bill, our navigator, had provided. Lo and behold, upon crossing my threshold and checking my answering machine, I discovered a call from an airline that I had never heard of at that point. This alone was something unusual because due to my long interest in commercial aviation I thought that I had heard of every airline in the entire world! But Air Florida was a new one for me at that time, and even more curiously I had not yet sent them any sort of application. The phone message was to the effect that they would like me to call them as soon as I could. The date/time stamp indicated that the call had come just after I left for the AF trip, so it was nearly two weeks old when I listened to it. Since it was now late at night, I was unable to get in touch with them, so it had to wait until morning. Perhaps this was one of the 727s I could have started out as Captain on with Air Florida, had I been around Charleston the day they called. All things considered, I'm glad I was out of town! First thing next morning I called Air Florida, and discovered that they had indeed been looking to bring me down for an immediate interview! I replied that I could be there in a few hours, but the lady told me not to bother - the job in question had already been filled. I did manage to get details on how to actually file an application, and resolved to do so. It was not until a week or two later that I found out just exactly what the job I might have been offered was, and it was well that I didn't know until then, for if I had known that morning I would have gone for a one-way swim in the apartment complex pool, weighted down with cement blocks! Air Florida, it seemed, had just made the jump from smaller airplanes to several Boeing 727's, and they were looking for Captains for them. They had gotten my name, and the names of several others, from the Braniff School's 727 type rating program. They hired a number of pilots right off the street into the left seat, where they undoubtedly stayed until... This was actually the first of several lucky breaks I got in my airline career, because we all know what happened to Air Florida. After a heady climb up to the rank of major airline, which involved their flying airplanes as big as the DC-10, they floundered back into oblivion, one of the beneficiaries and also one of the early casualties of deregulation. I would obviously have taken the Captain job had I been around the house the day they called, and no doubt I would have stayed until the end. Of course I would probably have been able to secure other airline employment after Air Florida fell, but who knows where and who knows at what level of seniority. Suffice to say that, although I bitterly regretted missing out at the time, it became clear all too soon what a piece of good fortune that AF trip had been. Immediately after the Air Florida call, as though to assuage my low spirits, I called American Airlines and spoke to the head of the ground school. He invited me out for an interview, and I was on a plane to DFW that very evening. Come the next day, I was introduced to Bob Bisbee, the head of the ground school at AA, and a professional Flight Engineer from way back. You can see pictures of Bob at the panel of the original 707 and 727 acceptance test flights at AA. At this point he had taken over management of the entire ground portion of AA flight training. Joining him at my interview was the head of the 727 ground school. They were looking to hire additional ground instructors, initially on a consultant basis. This was something new to me, although the practice is much more common today. A consultant is essentially a full time part time employee, hired more or less day to day and not a full member of the company in question. I would have none of the benefits that AA offered to its own employees, but on the other hand the pay was better than I was making at the time in the AF and there would be some opportunities for limited jumpseat travel. Most importantly, I would be logging the best possible face time at the airline that was my primary career objective. After satisfying them that I knew the 727 well, I was offered employment on the spot! I got on the next plane back to Charleston to round up some of my things and drive back to Dallas in the Fiat. Remembering the delightful atmosphere at the Marquis the previous summer I decided to make that my home away from home. And so it was that by mid November I was back in the Big D, ensconced once more at the Marquis and now working, sort of, for American Airlines. I was assigned to watch an experienced ground instructor teach a class of new-hires. Each class at American at that time was composed of four students, so for the next two weeks I was the proverbial 5th wheel. I already knew the systems cold, but I was interested in two things - first, watching the instructor do the teaching, which involved the operation of those large mechanical systems trainer boards that I alluded to in a previous installment; and second, watching the students to see what sort of questions they might ask during the class. At BESI we had asked all sorts of arcane questions, the better to acquire gems of knowledge to impress our instructors and hopefully lead to a job at Braniff. These students, on the other hand, were already hired at AA, and needed to impress no one beyond the requirements of course completion. Then again, most of these AA new-hires were former military pilots, as I was, and already had a good grounding in jet aircraft systems. So the demands upon the instructor for arcane trivia were minimal to non-existent. Boeing 727 systems trainers, at the FAA Aeronautical Center at Oke City back in the mid 1980s. These were almost identical to the ones I instructed on at American in 1976. Each day after the classroom session ended I stayed late and familiarized myself with the workings of the trainer boards. These boards were the key to the system of instruction which was in vogue back in those days. Properly manipulated, they brought the operation of each system alive, and allowed the trainees to see just how things worked in real time. The instructor had complete control of what happened on the board, and by flicking the right switches at the right time could illustrate just about every normal and abnormal occurrence both on the replica FE panel and also on the animated schematic diagram. However, unlike today's technology there was no single button on the board labeled, as an example, "#1 generator trip" which would activate all of the appropriate lights, bells and whistles associated with a generator trip. Instead, the instructor had to position a small switch for each light, bell, whistle or other manifestation that he wanted to create on the board. This meant that for every normal or abnormal action that I would want to present to my trainees, I had to write down or memorize the exact sequence of switch movements on the instructor's panel that would create the proper pattern of lights on the FE panel and animations on the schematic. This is what I spent hours, and pages of notes, putting together for myself, so that I would be better able to instruct when it came to be my turn. My turn in the barrel, so to speak, came in around 2 weeks, as my "class" graduated to the simulator phase and I was assigned to work with another instructor teaching a subsequent class of 4. We instructors alternated systems, and Dick, my partner for this series of classes, took the tougher systems like pneumatics, kindly leaving me with the "simpler" systems such as APU and electrical. I later learned that I wound up impressing Dick by tackling what amounted to a full course load for an experienced instructor - that is to say half of the material - since he expected to have to step in for me and teach much of "my" systems himself. Fortunately for both of us, that was not necessary, since having just completed both Braniff programs I was fully loaded for bear! And doubly fortunate for me, since it turned out that Dick wrote a very nice letter of recommendation for me as a result of our classroom experiences, a letter that played a part in what happened about halfway through this, my first class as an instructor at AA. The first week had gone very well, and I found that I really enjoyed instructing. The students were attentive and obviously quite motivated, and it was not at all difficult to fill their heads full of 727 knowledge. Working the big boards was easy, once I got the hang of it, and I was having myself a good ol' boy time, quite appropriate considering the location of the Flight Academy midway between Dallas and Fort Worth Texas. I was even becoming quite enamored of the outstanding Tex-Mex cuisine of the area, and overall life was good. A trip to Chicago and back in the jumpseat over the weekend was the icing on the cake, and I could look forward on occasion to more such tidbits of aeronautical enjoyment. Bright and early on the following Monday morning, as we were just getting started with the intricacies of the hydraulic systems, a knock came on the classroom door and I was summoned out into the hallway. Bob Bisbee, the head of the ground school and my new boss, was there along with Jim Seymour, the head of the 727 program. Together with Dick they solemnly presented me with a sealed envelope. My first thought was that AA had come to the conclusion that they did not need ground instructors as much as they thought they did, and I was to be returned to the streets from whence I had come. But lo and behold this was not the case, for the letter inside turned out to be the holy grail that I had been seeking for what seemed to be all of my life! It was an invitation to join the ranks of the American Airlines pilots. In other words, I was HIRED! This was the official letter that made dreams come true; the letter that Bob Bisbee handed me that day in December 76. After I came down from cloud nine, which was not immediately I assure you, the plan for the start of my American Airlines career was laid out. I would continue to teach this class of new hires for the remainder of their ground school program, and following that I would join "my" class, which turned out to be the one immediately preceding this group, in the simulator phase of training. I offered to remain teaching the ground school as long as my instructor services were needed, but was told that I was needed on the line even more than in the school, so it was to the line that I would go! When we returned to the classroom Dick broke the news to our students, and their enthusiasm and congratulations were genuine and much appreciated. Then we dove headfirst into the intricacies of the hydraulics, and I was immersed in the business at hand. Nonetheless, come the day's end there was another celebration at the Marquis North; and more than one of the BESI students in attendance asked how to go about getting that ground school job at American. All during the ground school phase, we spent time not only in the classroom but also in the Cockpit Procedures Trainers. American had two of these for the 727, as well as one for the DC-10. They resembled a simulator without motion or visual, and were used for further instruction in the procedures associated with each system, as well as the accomplishment of preflight inspections and the checklists. This instruction I enjoyed immensely, and it was perhaps the highlight of my time spent in the ground school program. The CPT had an instructor console somewhat like the one in the simulator, albeit less sophisticated. From this perch I could conjure up just about every system abnormality and emergency condition that appeared in the abnormal/emergency section of the operating manual, complete with all of the attendant bells and whistles. The thing would not actually "fly", although I could put it "in the air" with a single switch that changed all of the logic and warnings to their airborne equivalents. Some of the abnormals were programmed so that a single switch would trigger the appropriate sequence of indications and warnings, while others had to be created in the proper sequence by the instructor through manipulations of individual switches. I got the hang of it very quickly, and from that moment on my students were assailed by numerous lights, bells, horns and sundry other indications of impending doom! Fortunately, mistakes were not fatal, and they all got the hang of the procedures quickly. When the time came for them to go into the simulator, they were well prepared. One of the Boeing 727 Cockpit Procedures Trainer (CPT) that I instructed in at the Flight Academy in 1976. The instructors console for the CPT. This was the original analog control that I used. According to the description for this CPT on Ebay, it has been modified to be controlled from a computer station. Back in the day, each of these switches triggered some kind of light or indication at either the pilot panel, the overhead or the FE panel. The pilots panels of the CPT. Not everything worked up here -- the flight instruments, for example, did not. This thing didn't "fly", although it could be put "in the air" in terms of how the modeled systems performed. (Note: in what is certainly one of life's stranger coincidences, one of these very ex-American Airlines CPT's was offered for sale on Ebay just a month or so prior to this being written. At this point it is still there, asking around 16 K. I'm actually surprised that some cockpit builder hasn't snapped this up already, especially since it is completely wired up and working. I imagine that the process of hooking this up to MSFS would be much less involved than doing it with an actual airplane nose section, like Joe Maldonado did at Project 727. Ah, if only Nels paid for these articles, then it could be mine!) When my guys finished up the ground school, I too went on to the simulator phase of training, paired up with a "classmate" who had gone through the ground school just prior to the class I was teaching. Of course for me it was the third time I had been through a 727 sim program, and the third time was definitely the charm. I was ready to help my partner if need be, but it turned out that he needed no help and he aced the program too! Much of what pressure there might have been was off, since I already possessed the Flight Engineer certificate, which the rest of the new hires acquired via a check ride in the simulator. I took the exact same check ride, but it was "only" for the AA qualification, and was not an FAA rating ride, thus the reduced pressure. Around the middle of the simulator training program, which lasted, as I recall, around a week and a half, we filled out our "dreamsheet"; that is, our base selection sheet. On these pieces of paper we indicated the crew base(s) that we preferred out on the line. At that time, the possibilities were: BOS, LGA, DCA, BUF, BNA, ORD, DFW, LAX, and SFO. The entire process was merely an exercise in wishful thinking, since the likelihood of a new hire right out of school going someplace like LAX or DFW was akin to the chances of an icicle surviving more than a nanosecond in hell. The reality was that there were only two crew bases realistically available to us - BUF and LGA, the latter of which really meant New York, since it covered flying at all three area airports. (BUF and BNA were literally relics of the days when Ernie Gann was a new hire. They reflected the 1930's route layout at American, with BUF the midpoint on the NY-Chicago run and BNA a linchpin on the original Mercury transcons). My college roommate was living in Buffalo at the time, so without much real thought I put BUF first on my list. Two days later, the Buffalo area was inundated in snow, even by their arctic standards. The sight of cars buried three feet over their tops on the CBS Evening News was enough to send me racing to the third floor of the Flight Department headquarters building the next morning, with an urgent request to change my number one pick to LGA! The secretary was stunned, to say the least, since this was perhaps the first time in AA history that a new hire changed a base bid to LGA. Such was the allure of the Big Apple in the eyes of all of my fellow American pilots that I had no trouble making the switch, and several days thereafter I learned that I would indeed follow in Gann's footsteps and begin my AA career in New York, albeit at LGA instead of EWR, which was the NY airport when he started out. After the final check ride in the simulator, the next step was the IOE, or Initial Operating Experience, also known in the vernacular of the peasantry as the line check. In those days this rite was performed at the assigned base, administered by a corps of flight engineer check airmen based locally, and distinct from the group that conducted the simulator checks. (In later years, starting around the mid 1980's, everything was centralized at the schoolhouse and every new hire got his or her IOE at DFW prior to reporting to their actual base of assignment.) I asked for and received a week or so to relocate to New York, and headed first to Charleston to close out my digs there, after which I turned my steps north. By pure serendipity my Air Force friend who had been recalled to Eastern Airlines earlier in 1976 was also headed to New York, and we decided to bunk together in the Big Apple. We secured temporary lodgings in the home of an AA flight engineer on Long Island, and decided to start apartment hunting in Manhattan after our respective line checks. The American Airlines offices at LGA, which in 1977 housed the Flight Office for LGA. The second floor offices right at the corner just above and to the left of the bus were the Chief Pilot's office and the associated administrative offices. Downstairs at that time were Crew Sked and the Training department, for whom I worked when I was a check engineer. This complex has a storied history - this was once AA headquarters when LGA first opened. C.R. Smith's office was once on the second floor just where there is a rounded projection in the middle of the building. The corner office which was later the Chief Pilot's office was once the office of the Vice President of Flight. The next day I reported to the Chief Pilot's office at LGA for my introduction to the legendary Captain Dan Weatherbee, and his assistant Captain Dick Wernick*, to say nothing of the many staffers who would play a big part in my first years as an AA pilot. A quick side trip downstairs to the crew qualifications department resulted in my being scheduled for my line check several days hence. (* Dick Wernick and I would spend a good deal of time together in the course of my career after he succeeded Weatherbee as Area Director of Flight - I worked for him as Manager Flying Technical, otherwise known as chief flight engineer, during the heady days of the great hiring cycle starting in 1984, and again in the early 1990's when I was Chief Pilot at JFK. He was, and is, one of the great ones.) On the appointed day, 19 February 1977, I reported to operations at JFK to earn my final seal of approval. The trip was a two day affair - JFK to DFW the first day, followed by DFW to JFK and a turnaround to PVD on the second day. I was more or less at ease, since I had already performed the FE duties in an airplane back at the Braniff school. Nonetheless, this was different. For one thing, there were four complete flights, instead of merely a portion of one. And this time I was gussied up in a three stripe version of the suit of lights - polyester, to be sure, but still impressive. And there were passengers and also, joy of joys, flight attendants along for the ride as well! Early morning walk around at ORD - the long shadow in the foreground is yours truly, taking the picture. Returning from the door check, which was done immediately after engine start early in the taxi out for takeoff. On a short taxi you had to hustle to get back up front for the main event, since on occasion certain Captains were rumored to start down the runway without the FE! After a frigid walk-around, under the watchful eye of my check engineer, I reported back to the cockpit just in time for the engine start ritual. In the simulator most engine starts involved abnormalities of some sort, but in the airplane I would discover that things went perfectly just about all of the time. Today was no exception, and we had all three running by the time the pushback was complete. In those days American required the FE to go back into the cabin after engine start to verify that all of the doors were properly closed and the slides armed. This took several minutes, and involved running a gauntlet of flight attendants who were in the aisles doing the safety demonstration. After returning to the cockpit the FE had to call the company on the number two radio and receive the "load closeout", which was the final weight and balance calculation. He then filled out the takeoff data card and provided it to the Captain for review. All of this took some time, especially for a new man, and it was fortunate indeed that my first flight was conducted at JFK, where the runways were farther away from the terminal and the taxi-out times correspondingly longer. (There is a certain satisfactory symmetry to the fact that both my first and last flights on the line for American were conducted at JFK.) I managed to get all of this paperwork done and the before takeoff checklist run with a minimum of flubs, with a little help from the Captain who took pains to taxi slowly enough so that I was not unduly rushed. I would soon discover that this sort of assistance to a newbie was just about universal among the crews on the line, all of whom had been there and done that, albeit perhaps decades ago. And so it was that I was ready when the time came to turn my seat to face forward and slide it up right behind the center console for takeoff. The 727 had no autothrottle, or at least no mechanical or electronic one - it had a biological autothrottle, and I was it! After applying an approximation of takeoff power, the throttles were turned over to the FE momentarily so that he could set the exact power using the EPR gauges. This had to be done prior to reaching 80 knots, otherwise the EPR reading would be affected by the increasing static pressure resulting from the increasing airspeed and this would render the power setting inaccurate. At 80 knots the pilot flying resumed control of the throttles, which in practice merely meant that his hands were placed upon them in the event of the need for a rejected takeoff. Once the airplane became airborne, and the gear and flaps were retracted, the throttles belonged to the FE for much of the remainder of the flight unless the pilot needed to level off or begin a climb. At American, the FE read all of the checklists, most of them from a card which usually lived in the copilot's seat back pocket. The takeoff and landing checklists were done using a clever mechanical checklist device that was allegedly of AA's own creation, and was eventually copied and improved upon by Boeing for all of their later airplanes such as the 767. The device consisted of a vertical column of sliders that could be moved left or right and covered half of the dual checklist at any given moment. As each item on the takeoff checklist was accomplished, its slider was moved to the opposite side of the stack, confirming its accomplishment and at the same time revealing an item on the landing checklist. When the checklist was complete, all sliders had been moved and the landing check was now ready for review when the time was right. The FE panel in the last remaining (as of 2008) 727 simulator at AA. The charts are laminated to the FE tabletop for easy consultation, and the mechanical checklist for takeoff and landing can be just barely seen (it is black, against the black curtain that hangs behind the FO seat) immediately to the left of the upper FE panel, just left of the generator controls and lights. During the climb, the human autothrottle had to reset climb power periodically, although once climb power was set after flap retraction, very little adjustment was typically needed. I quickly learned to check this every 5000 feet or so, which turned out to be sufficient. Most of the performance charts we needed during a flight were conveniently printed on a poster-like affair, shaped and sized to fit the engineer's desktop. This compendium was covered by a Plexiglas sheet, which protected it from many, though not all, of the hazards of flight, such as spilled food or coffee. Some of the FE desktop charts were edged with brown stains from turbulence induced spills, and the maintenance department was kept busy changing these when they got unreadable, or when they were superseded by revisions, which occurred occasionally. A quick glance at the chart for climb power and a look at the EPR gauges was all it took to keep the engines in line, with an occasional adjustment to a single thrust lever if an engine happened to be out of sync. Unlike the big recips of the golden age, we had no synchronizing gear on the airplane; any adjustments needed (the rhythmic hum-hum-hum of engines out of sync was heard and felt mainly in the seats back in steerage between the pod engines) had to be done by educated guess. The flights to and from DFW were the stretch airplane, the 727-200 (Actually, 727-223 to be exact, the American Airlines version. The Braniff airplanes were -227, or -027 for the shortie; each airline has a unique suffix for every Boeing type.) The turnaround to and from Providence the following day involved a shortie, so I got to see every airplane type we had on this one trip. By sheer coincidence the return from DFW was flown on N6842, which was originally a Trans Caribbean Airlines airplane, and the only airplane in our fleet at that time that had the electronic pressurization system installed. This presented no problem for me, since all of the Braniff stretches had it, and it was covered in the ground school over there. At AA, it was a one-off novelty at that time, and we didn't even operate it the way it should have been operated, a situation that I had tried to point out in the ground school a month previously, when I was teaching. It turned out that AA, always monomaniacal about standardization, had decided to forgo the electronic pressurization system on the -200's in order to standardize the fleet on the pneumatic version. They had to pay extra to have the pneumatics put on the first batch of -200's. When the time came, a year or so after I was hired, to order more 727's Boeing decided that they would not use the pneumatic version regardless of extra money, and our fleet wound up with an eventual majority of electronic pressurization airplanes. By that time, we had learned how to operate the system properly! The electronic pressurization controls on the FE upper panel. This flight, however, was my first opportunity to handle the pressurization system on a real flight; the Braniff check ride involved such a short trip that the altitude never got above around 12,000 feet or so, which really did not require any manipulation of the system. Today, though, we were cruising at 35000 feet, and I had to employ the full gamut of my skills, such as they were, with this system. Actually, the pneumatic system was semi-automatic; shortly after takeoff the cruise altitude was dialed in, after which the only attention it needed was an occasional tweak of the knob that controlled the rate of climb or descent of the cabin. There were a few tricks I had yet to learn, though, including how to avoid a pressure bump when the pilot retarded the throttles to idle at the beginning of a descent. A reduction of power often caused the bleed air system to start using air from the high pressure stage of the compressor section of the engine, in order to keep enough pressure in the system. This opening of the 13th stage bleed valve would put a momentary surge of pressure into the cabin, and the best way to control the pressurization outflow valve to dampen the surge was counterintuitive - leaving the cabin altitude dial set on the current altitude, one cranked the cabin rate knob not to full decrease but rather to full increase. This action provided the most pneumatic muscle to allow the cabin outflow valves to move rapidly to handle the surge from the 13th stage air. This (and most of the pressurization system's quirks) was not modeled in the simulator, but had to be passed on by the line check airmen during the IOE. The flight from JFK to DFW was long enough for a considerable tutelage during cruise, interrupted shortly after level off by the arrival of our lunches. Throughout my long career, the flight crews on AA ate what the first class passengers ate, although not leftovers (except for the Transcon Roast and Caviar) - additional meals were put aboard for us. Typically there were two steaks and one chicken. In theory the two pilots were not supposed to eat the same entree, lest there occur a debacle like the one parodied in the movie Airplane! In practice, however, seniority ruled and unless either the Captain or the First Officer was an aficionado of chicken the fowl migrated to the Engineer's desktop. Fortunately for me, I have always preferred chicken to steak, except in Argentina much later in my career, and I had no problem whatsoever with the various chicken dishes served on American. The tastiest of all was Chicken Kiev, which was an exceptionally rotund breast literally stuffed with butter which, in the process of being cooked, was of course melted and, as I would discover for the first time today, under a not inconsiderable pressure. This delicacy was served with a small stick labeled " Pierce Me", with which the butter could be liberated from within and allowed to run riot over the plate. This had to be done carefully, though, since it occasionally happened that a dairy explosion took place, spraying hot butter all over the hapless crewmember! The special American Airlines napkins, which had a small hole in one corner designed to be buttoned onto the front of the shirt, were likely invented for this very purpose. All too soon it was time to descend, and it was now that I made my first real world acquaintance with one of the truly annoying features of an otherwise classic airplane. All retractable gear airplanes have some sort of warning to alert the crew when the wheels are not in a useful position. On the 727 this was a horn which blew with little less than the strength of Gabriel's horn. The effect was similar, since both were enough to raise the dead, although the gear horn had the added potential of actually precipitating death by cardiac arrest in anyone not prepared for its strident braying. Long tradition held that the Engineer was wholly responsible for keeping the ill effects of this horn at bay; silencing it by means of a small lever mounted on the aft end of the pedestal between the pilots. Further, tradition demanded that far from merely silencing the horn, the FE must prevent it from sounding in the first place. This was done by anticipating the retarding of any throttle to the idle stop, which was one of the triggers for the horn whenever the landing gear was other than down and locked. The aft pedestal. The horn cutout is the metal bar just above the stabilizer brake release knob. A good Engineer soon developed a downright Pavlovian attentiveness to the position of the throttles and the pilots' hands in the later stages of a flight on a 727 (the 707 would also turn out to have the same system), darting quickly to the horn silence lever at the first tremor of movement from up front! Of course, the lever could be held in the silencing position, and some Engineers had small blocks of wood for this purpose. But most Captains would not allow such contrivances, since not only did that spoil one of their principal diversions - the quest to beat the FE and sound the horn (which, after the dollar ride [IOE] usually required the payment of tribute to the pilots in the form of beers on the layover), but it also in essence defeated an important safety device and was thus verboten by both the Company and the FAA. I later developed a unique system which solved the problem for me - I procured a long leather shoelace, one end of which I tied into a loop that fit around the silencer lever, and the other end of which I knotted into a small ball. This knotted end I placed into the FE desk, which was a catch all for anything and everything that was discarded on the flight deck. The desktop with the performance charts was hinged at the rear, and when it was lowered onto the string the knots kept the whole arrangement secure. Thus deployed, all it would take was a tug on the string to raise the lever, a movement I could make without even turning my seat around. No crew ever got a beer from me after that device was invented! On this first trip, though, the horn blared again and again, as the pilots took full advantage of the newbie on the panel and drove me to distraction. In between swipes at the lever, I managed to extract the landing data from the charts on the tabletop and copy it all down onto a card devised by the Company for that purpose. Then, I had to call our station operations at DFW for our special altimeter settings, which must also be on the card. In those days American was the last US airline to use what was known as QFE altimetry (Eastern had abandoned it some years earlier). The system was similar to what was in use in Great Britain and a few other places in the world - an altimeter setting was dialed in that resulted in the instrument reading feet above the field level instead of feet above sea level. An altimeter is nothing more than a specialized barometer; it can be set to display an altitude above (or below) any desired reference pressure. Normally, altimeters are set to a pressure that causes them to display feet above sea level - specifically, they are set to a pressure that is calculated to be the same as the pressure at that location would be if a barometer could be lowered into a hole dug all the way down to sea level. If, instead, the altimeter is set to the actual barometric pressure at a given level (uncorrected for the descent down the hole to sea level) then the altimeter will read feet above that pressure level, which is to say feet above that elevation. If this pressure setting is taken in the vicinity of field elevation then the altimeter will read feet above the field elevation. The 727-100 cockpit, as it looked back in 1977, and pretty much the entire time I flew it. Note the center altimeter above the standby attitude indicator. This was the altimeter we used to fly assigned altitudes below 10,000 feet, when the Captain and FO altimeters were set to QFE. In the days before radar altimeters came into common use this was valuable information, and even with the radar altimeter it was an additional and useful bit of information. For example, with this system every ILS approach had a decision height (for us) of 200 feet, as opposed to whatever 200 above ground level equated to in terms of sea level. We set the pilot and copilot altimeters to this QFE, or field level setting, when descending through 10,000 feet on descent (and conversely switched over to QNH, or above sea level going through ten on the climb). Of course, when ATC assigns an altitude, they intend for it to be flown with reference to QNH, not QFE, so there was a third altimeter on the front panels, located just to the left of the engine instruments, which was always kept set to QNH. It was to this altimeter that the pilots referred for routine level-offs, when flying below 10,000 feet. Once we descended below 10,000 feet, my seat was back facing forward again, and I spent much of the time prior to landing helping with the general outside traffic watch and running the landing checklist. This latter task was done piecemeal, starting as we left 10,000 feet, rather than all at once upon gear extension as was the case in the C-141. Anytime I observed one of the checklist items completed I could call it out and slide the tab. Only the gear and flaps required a challenge and response from the pilots. When everything was completed I became an interested spectator for the final approach and landing. This was a VMC day, but if it had been IMC I would have been monitoring the approach, ready to set power if a go-around was required. After landing and clearing the runway, I was on the number two radio again to get the gate assignment. DFW, even back then, was more or less a hub for us, and this airplane would be going on to another city farther west. We, after the passengers had all deplaned, would head out to the curb to await the crew limo over to the hotel. The layover would be a short one, and the flight back to JFK was scheduled for early the next morning, so there was no time for merriment. The check engineer and I had dinner together, which was an opportunity for additional instructional time, and all too soon I found myself on another limo headed back to the airport for round two. When I started flying them in 1977, AA's 727's had this bucolic tapestry on the bulkheads in First Class. This time I was left pretty much to my own devices as the IOE switched from instruction to evaluation. The check airman was observing my every move, but left everything to me. My previous experiences, particularly as an instructor at the ground school, now paid off handsomely, and I found that I could keep up with the flow of events without too much difficulty. The flight back to JFK was a bit shorter due to the tailwinds, but the real test would be on the next two legs. JFK-PVD was and is a very short flight in a jet - not more than 30 minutes in the air. Almost the entire cruise portion of the flight was truncated and both legs seemed to be little more than climb and descent. The -100 airplane was the type I had flown on all three occasions at the Braniff school, so it was familiar territory. When we parked at the gate at JFK after the last leg, the check airman congratulated me and informed me that I was now officially an AA Flight Engineer. He called Flight Standards to make it official, and Crew Schedule to inform them that they now had another warm body available on reserve for the remainder of the month. So began my AA career. My first flight on my own came early the next month, after a short stint with the USAF Reserves. The trip was to be the first of a great many out of LGA into ORD, and after that to CVG and SDF. The next day we returned via CLE, LGA, BOS, LGA. Throughout the following year I was on probation, which meant that my every trip was critiqued by the Captain on a form that was turned in to the Chief Pilot's office. At around the 6 month point I was given a no-notice line check with another check engineer, and his report also went directly to Captain Weatherbee's abode. A week or so later I was summoned, as were all probationary crewmembers at this point in their careers, to a review board at the Flight Office, whereupon my record was scrutinized and my progress evaluated. All was found to be in order, and my career continued. I would attend another board at the 11 month point, which was the final thumbs up-or-down event. Since I am writing these memoirs it is obvious what the verdict was! In the third month of my probation I had been sent back to the schoolhouse to qualify as an FE on the venerable Boeing 707. At first I was a bit taken aback - the 707 was a higher paying airplane than the 727 (although on probation this would not be a factor since all probationary crewmembers were paid a flat salary - in those days the princely sum of $650 per month, which happened to be $25 per month less than a new flight attendant made!). I had not entered a bid for 707 training, nor did I expect to be assigned to it based upon my looks! It turned out to be an artifact of the seniority system - if no one bid for a training assignment, it would be handed to the junior person at the base. That turned out to be yours truly. The cockpit of the 707-323 sim. Overall, except for the fourth throttle and engine instruments it looks almost identical to the 727. The FE panel of the Boeing 707-323 simulator. Note that there are four of most things, and it is a bit more complex than the three holer. The 707 school turned out to be much more laid back than either of the 727 schools I had been involved with. Not because the 707 was a simpler airplane; indeed, it was more complex in some ways. But rather because the 707 program was not, at that time, a new hire program. All of us (there were actually only two of "us" in the class, which was another novelty at the time) were line crewmembers and treated as such. The pace, both in the ground school and in the simulator, was not so frenetic as my earlier experiences had been. In addition the 707, while certainly much different in many ways, was actually the genetic father of the 727 and the ancestry showed clearly in much of the design and operation of the systems. Electrical and Fuel were simply more of the same stuff (four engines instead of three, so four generators and four main fuel tanks instead of three). The air conditioning system did differ significantly, since there were no air cycle machines for cooling; rather, there were Freon systems that worked much like a typical home air conditioner, and were somewhat more complicated to operate than the simpler system in use in the 727. Also, the air for the air conditioning and pressurization came not from engine bleed air, although that was available from each engine, but rather from a pair of turbo-compressors located above the inlets of engines two and three. These were housed in a sort of hump at the front of the pylon, and you can see the small inlet openings above the much larger engine inlets in pictures of the 707. (Airplanes designed for international operations had three turbo-compressors, on all engines except number four. This was for redundancy in the event one of them failed at some offline location without much in the way of maintenance.) These TC's, as we called them, ran off high pressure bleed air from the engine, which turned a compressor which in turn provided compressed air to the air conditioning system. I soon discovered, however, that regardless of its complexity the overall system actually worked better than the one on the three-holer, especially when cooling in hot weather. An American 707-323 parked at the hangar at JFK, shortly before they were disposed of in 1981. The engines from these birds went to the National Guard KC-135 tankers, and flew on for decades on those old birds. Walking around the 707. These engines, the JT-3's were noisy but reliable and would still be flying today if fuel were still less than $1 per gallon! The 707 flying also served to put me in contact with a completely different group of Captains than the coterie that flew the 727. These were more senior men, and some of them had flown as copilot, in the early portion of their careers, with the first generation of airmen who by now had long retired. From these 707 Captains I heard tales originally handed down from the DC-3 days, and thereby acquired a second hand acquaintance with some of the early history of American Airlines. To say nothing of getting to fly one of the truly iconic airplanes of all time! It was a piece of good fortune that I value to this day. From the time I served as a ground school instructor, prior to actually being hired as a pilot, I realized that I really enjoyed instructing. And so it was that after I got off probation I applied for the position of check engineer on the line. Due in part to my experience in the schoolhouse I was accepted and sent back to school for one of the more unusual of my educational experiences with American. Check Engineer school consisted of a small amount of ground training - more or less a recurrent training session, and several sessions in the simulator which were intended mainly to expose us to some of the errors, minor as well as major, that a new engineer could commit. But the really interesting part of it was what came first. We (there were, again, two of us check engineer candidates) were placed in a Captain's Duties and Responsibilities class, which was the first portion of Captain upgrade, and was intended to be an introduction of sorts to the Corporate Big Picture, as well as an indoctrination into the world of being in charge. It was quite an experience to be exposed to this a mere 15 months into a career, and to top it off the rest of the class, all upgrading Captains, were a great bunch of guys. Beguiled by their soon-to-be-new-found wealth, they were not reluctant to pick up the tab on occasion for those of us who were still firmly ensconced amongst the peasantry! JT-8 on the 727 - this view is from the aft galley door on the right side. From the ground you couldn't see into the lower part of the inlet, so we sometimes checked it from here, especially if ice might be present. The number two engine exposed in the hangar while undergoing maintenance. My career as a Flight Engineer Check Airman, to use the complete term, was one of the highlights of my American career. During that time I operated almost completely outside of the normal seniority system, for in those days the check airmen picked the trips they used to conduct the IOE's. The regular engineer on those trips, however senior, was paid to stay home while I took the newbie out for his introduction to line flying. I wound up sampling some delightful trips in those days, trips far more interesting than those that my humble seniority would allow me to fly on my own. By this time AA was also placing some new hires directly onto the 707, so I had all of those trips to choose from as well. In addition, we administered the 5 month probationary check rides for the new hires. These were conducted on the new hire's own trip, which was probably a junior selection. But since the check ride involved only one or, at most, two legs, I quickly found that I could manufacture layovers pretty much wherever I wanted, including in places where we had no layovers. I could create opportunities to visit friends, many of whom just happened to be female and attractive (this was, of course, in that period of time known to scholars as BS; that is, Before She)! This sublime state of affairs continued throughout the entire hiring cycle of 1977-1981. About midway through this period I was able to upgrade to FO, which turned out to be the least difficult of any of the various trips to the schoolhouse in the course of my career. In the event, I actually ended up flying as FO for but a single month, in December of 1979, but I was able to "buy" a number of individual trips as FO, usually around one every month or so. The hiring came to an end around the turn of 1981, following one of the various oil crises of the '70's. All too soon, the new hires disappeared from the school house and many disappeared from the line as well when the furloughs began shortly thereafter. Ironically, the work for us check engineers did not stop - we were now in the business of conducting IOE's for pilots who, due to the downsizing, were falling off their perches as FO's, or as FE's on more senior equipment, and re-qualifying on the panel of either the 727 or the 707. This work went on for nearly another year, after which they pretty much closed down the "office" and all of the line check engineers, as well as the two professional engineers who worked full time as what were called Manager Flying Technical, were sent back to line flying in whatever capacity their seniority would allow. Mine allowed for flying both the 707 and 727, which I did until AA retired the last of the 707's. My own last flight as a 707 crewmember was on July 29th 1981 from St Martin to JFK on ship 595 as flight 688. From then until the beginning of the great expansion of the Crandall Growth Plan in early 1984 I flew as a 727 engineer. The Big Apple seen from the 727 cockpit on the way up the Hudson for the River Approach to 13 at LGA. These are the best corner office views in the world! The Growth Plan marked the beginning of an amazing time, both at American and in the industry in general. Deregulation had become the law of the land back in 1978 or so, but the full effects were slow in coming, largely because it was and is difficult and somewhat time consuming to start an airline from scratch. By the time that enough new entrant airlines had reached a level of operations that threatened the financial security of the rest of the industry the 1980's were in full swing. Few in airline management had any clear idea of how best to adapt to this new landscape, and at least one legacy airline failed and liquidated as a result of some wrong guesses on the part of its leader. Bob Crandall's approach was, in essence, to expand American Airlines based upon the cost lowering effects of a revolutionary and controversial approach - the so-called B Scale, which involved new compensation levels for employees hired after late 1983. Once contracts were in place with all of the unions that allowed for this sort of thing, American launched what turned out to be the most massive hiring cycle ever experienced in the airline industry. In a matter of months all of the 600 or so furloughed pilots were offered recall and the structure for another round of hiring was put into place. Aftermath. This is the second incarnation of Braniff, after that airline became the first casualty of deregulation and liquidated. A smaller version was reconstituted by the Pritzger brothers of Hyatt, but this version did not last long. National Airlines had one of the more attractive liveries out there. This one has had the girl's name removed from the front of the fuselage, a victim of early PC pushback against the "I'm Dorrie, Fly Me!" campaign. Ironically, the names went on the planes in an effort to point out that they were talking about flying the planes, not the flight attendants! The sexy double entendre of the TV ads turned out to be a bit too much in that era. This is where those National 727's went! Pan Am, frantic for decades to get their mitts on domestic routes to feed their international flights, jumped at the chance to buy National just before deregulation made the whole thing a moot point. This was one of the early nails in Pan Am's coffin, because the money they paid for National would have been better spent setting up their own feeder system after deregulation hit. LaGuardia around the time I started flying there. This was the concourse next to ours, and little did we know that one day TWA and American would merge. I had been absent from the company for much of the immediate aftermath of the 1983 pilot contract negotiation, off for another stay at the University of MAC, as we called Altus AFB Oklahoma. This time I was attending the transition training program for the C-5 Galaxy, at that time the largest airplane in the world, and still a Big Magilla even in this day of A380's. I had "retired" from flying the C-141 in 1979, when I originally upgraded to FO at American; but, as it turned out, my hold on the right seat was tenuous and after I returned to the line in 1982 I was unable to sit facing forward. This led to a certain lingering frustration which in turn led me to "un-retire" myself from the Air Force Reserves, the better to get my hands on a yoke once again, a process which led me to the C-5 and the 709th Military Airlift Squadron at Dover AFB Delaware. The C-5 Galaxy at Altus AFB. I had asked for and received a military leave of absence from American to go to Altus, which lasted for three months. Upon my return in April of 1984, I received a call from Captain Dick Wernick, who was now the Area Director of Flight for New York following the retirement of Captain Dan Weatherbee (in case the name Weatherbee sounds familiar to many of you who follow aerospace, his son was a Space Shuttle Astronaut and commanded several flights of the orbiter). The good Captain Wernick asked for the pleasure of my company in his office several days hence, while assuring me that I was in no trouble (the usual reason for invitations of this nature). It turned out that with hiring being set up, and many if not all of the new hires coming to the New York base, it seemed appropriate to reconstitute the office of Manager Flying Technical, otherwise known in the ranks as Chief Flight Engineer, an office which had been eliminated in the interest of cost savings back in 1982. His request to me was that I assume that position, and take over the management of the new-hire program at LGA. My first question for him, as you might expect, was "do I have to come in and work in the office every day?" Upon being assured that this was indeed the case, my interest waned considerably, for the drive from my house to LGA in rush hour took around two hours each way. I had, in fact, pursued a pilot career precisely to avoid working 5 days a week like this! But of course, I had just been the recipient of Captain Wernick's largesse, since it was he who had approved my military leave a few months previously. As an Italian, and an aficionado of The Godfather, I knew a "... call upon you to do me a service..." situation when I saw one! So I acquiesced, thinking silently that I owed AA three months in the office, one for each month of my military leave. But Dick Wernick, always a shrewd judge of men, knew me better than I knew myself; and, as he intended, I found the work fascinating - so much so that when the time came two years hence to log a few hundred hours as an FO (a requirement for Captain upgrade) I just about had to be dragged back to the line! Captain Wernick and I pretty much set up the new hire program at the base level, an arrangement that was copied all over the system as new hires on probation migrated from LGA to many of the other bases. I personally conducted the orientations for almost all of the first two thousand or so pilots hired starting in 1984, since all but a few of them were sent first to LGA, from whence they emigrated as soon as their nascent seniority allowed. For many of them, this was a matter of mere weeks, and LGA became a vast and merrily spinning squirrel cage of new pilots coming to and leaving the base with a frequency that made keeping track of them and their probationary events such as review boards a real challenge. Meanwhile, we also sought to make them feel valued, which was a task made more than a little challenging due to the pay scale which applied to them, as Dick and I had anticipated. Finally, in addition to conducting indoctrinations for every new class, I found myself sitting as a member of the probationary review boards held each week, in which my role was to conduct a brief oral evaluation of the candidate's systems knowledge. My office at LGA as Manager Flying Technical, festooned for the occasion of my "retirement" back to the line in late summer 1986 This, too, was an idyllic time as seen from the vantage point of retirement. The level of excitement that existed in those heady days had to be experienced to be believed. American seemed to be doing everything right, and we were buying new airplanes as fast as Douglas and Boeing could turn them out, to say nothing of hiring scores of pilots every month. New cities appeared monthly in the schedules and on the bidsheets, and we found ourselves going to places that had previously been the sole proprietorships of other airlines - places like Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis, to say nothing of Honolulu. The more optimistic dreamers in the Flight Department talked of hiring that would continue without interruption indefinitely. And indeed that is almost what happened. We did not stop hiring until shortly after Gulf War One, when the economy finally took a tumble and air travel slowed. In that span of 7 or so years, we had hired around 5000 pilots, a number that was considerably larger than the size of the entire seniority list when I was hired in 1977. The new 727 Captain grins from the left seat just prior to departing on another trip! The most significant event for me during this period was my upgrade to Captain. By mid 1986 it was obvious that the time was coming when I would be able to ascend to the heights and assume the mantle of command. This was the point at which the Chief Pilots decided that I should leave the office and return to the line, the better to accumulate the 500 hours as an FO that company policy dictated as a prerequisite for the Captain upgrade. And so I did. Finally, in early 1987, I was awarded a Captain Bid at Chicago. Back to school I went, to go through the D&R (Duties and Responsibilities) class again, now shortened from the week long affair it had been in 1978 to a mere single day. After that, off to the simulator for the training and the AA Captain check ride (I didn't need an FAA "rating ride", thanks to Uncle Sam's largesse back in 1976 at the Braniff school). Thereafter I flew the 727 as a Captain in complete contentment until I was again lured back into the office, this time as one of the Chief Pilots. Throughout this entire phase of my career, which spanned more than a decade, I was always qualified in at least one of the three crew positions on the 727. I ended up flying it in every cockpit crew position possible: Flight Engineer, Flight Engineer Check Airman, First Officer, Captain, and Pilot Check Airman. My logbook shows 4276.9 hours total time in all crew positions, of which 1424 hours are in one of the pilot seats, the majority of which is left seat time as Captain. This is by no means a lot - many pilots for one reason or another logged well in excess of 10,000 pilot hours in the 727, and some spent most if not all of their careers flying it. I could have flown it for a much longer time, of course, but the exigencies of the service in the office dictated that I qualify on the Airbus A300-600R, which was the main mount at the JFK stable when I took over as chief pilot there in 1989. My own 727 qualification expired in 1990. In the course of my career I have flown 5 different airliners in one crew position or another - the Boeing 727, the 707, the Airbus A300, the 757 and the 767. Of these, my hands down favorite is the 727, because of the nearly perfect flying qualities the type has always possessed. In my experience there has never been as sweet handling a large jet airplane as the 727; and, considering that fly-by-wire is the way of the future, it is likely that there will never be again. If there were one airplane I could choose to go flying in again it would be a real coin toss between the 727 and the T-38! The Three Holer is that good! Happy Landings! Tony Vallillo Three Holer Series Three Holer Prelude Three Holer Part 1: Wrench Three Holer Part 2: Type Rating Three Holer Part 3: Hired!
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Three Holer Prelude By Tony Vallillo Authors note: Having shared with you the events of the sunset of my airline career, I turn now to the beginning; and, by the by, a panegyric to my favorite airplane! It occasionally comes to pass that a particular type of airplane becomes so intimately associated with its milieu that it achieves iconic status. In the commercial airline industry this has occurred several times. The iconic airliner of the 1920's, at least in the USA, must surely be the Ford Trimotor, and in the 1930's the DC-3 so dominated the scene that it, too, came to represent commercial aviation in that decade. After WWII things got a bit more varied, but the icon of the golden age of air transport, as the 1950's are sometimes called, may well be the Lockheed Constellation, if for no other reason than the fact that it is surely the most beautiful transport airplane ever built. The jet age has its icons as well, most notably the first really successful jet transport - the Boeing 707. This airplane became synonymous with the "Jet Set", and spawned an entire lifestyle for the rich and famous in the late '50's and beyond. Later, in the 1980's, the MD-80 can probably be thought of as the icon for the early deregulated era, and these days the new generation 737's are assuming that status, as the salad days of airline travel recede into the mists of time and memory - literally as well as poetically! You may notice that I have left out the later regulated era, the time period from the mid 1960's until the mid 1980's. This is a complicated time, with a plethora of airliner types deployed around the world in all sizes and shapes, from the DC-9 to the 747. Yet although it may be a tough call, I would certainly propose a candidate for iconic status in that transitional period. The airplane I have in mind is unmistakable in shape and design, and also unforgettable for any pilot who had the privilege of flying it. It ended up being flown by just about every major airline in the world at one time or another, and its variants remained in service with some airlines for nearly 40 years. It served as the first career step for the majority of airline pilots hired between the mid 1960's and the late 1990's. The airplane I have in mind is, of course, the Boeing 727. The second 727 test article, N72700, at LHR during testing for Pan Am's Berlin operation. Photo by Ralf Manteufel. Much has been written about the origins and gestation of the Boeing 727 series, so we need only touch on the highlights. By the time that the 707 was beginning to shrink the world, both Boeing and the airlines were thinking smaller. Smaller airports, that is. The original 707's were ground loving beasts that required runways far longer than those of most civil airports of the day. In the late 1950's, 5000 feet of runway was considered a generous length, and 7000 was enough for even the biggest recips of the time. On the other hand, the first 707's needed a good 10,000 feet of pavement to get safely airborne, and for the international flights even more was required. Runway 13R/31L at JFK, for example, was extended to over 14,000 feet at the time the 707 began service, and quite often just about all of that length was put to use! Early in the 1960's, Boeing built a slightly smaller version of the 707 which was intended to be used on shorter flights from slightly shorter runways. This was the model 720, known as such largely at the behest of United Airlines, who had backed themselves into something of a PR corner by extolling the virtues of their Douglas DC-8's over the competition's 707's to the point where it would have been downright awkward for them to have acquired the latter! So by calling the smaller edition a Boeing 720, United was able to create the illusion that what they had just purchased was in fact a totally different airplane. Such was certainly not the case. Although there were a few structural differences (mainly in the shape and size of the wing) and it was somewhat lighter, the 720 was just a hot-rod model of the short 707, and some of the airlines that operated both Boeings didn't bother to differentiate them in advertising. American, for example, simply called them all 707's. Only the pilots knew for sure! And although the airplane did have somewhat better runway performance than its bigger sibling, a number of heavily patronized airports still could not accommodate it. Rollout of the first Boeing 727 on 27 November 1962. The 727 on its first flight, February 9 1963. The principal of these under-endowed (runway-wise!) airports was New York's LaGuardia. Its two 5000 foot runways, considered exceptionally long in the days of the DC-3, weren't even long enough for the transcontinental DC-7's and later models of the Constellation, all of which had migrated over to the longer runways at Idlewild by the mid 1950's. But LGA stubbornly refused to die, since it was by far the most conveniently located of the Big Apple's three airports; and so it was that Eastern Airlines, one of the four main interested parties (the others were United, American and TWA), stipulated that the new jet that they wanted must be able to fly in and out of LGA. This was the impetus for the extraordinary high lift devices that eventually wound up on the wings of the new airplane. There was a lively battle fought among the airlines and Boeing over the number of engines. United, which had always favored more engines than fewer, insisted on a four engine layout like the 720. But none of the other airlines were interested in the higher operating and maintenance costs of four engines, and although a two engine layout was explored (and would eventually emerge as the even more successful 737), the engines of the day were simply not powerful enough for two of them to do the job on an airplane of the size being discussed. No matter how the cards were cut, it was going to take at least three engines to make the airplane perform as desired, so three engines it turned out to have -- the first US Trimotor since Henry Ford's day. This was, of course, much easier said than done. The problem of where to put the third engine was difficult to solve, and some of the proposals that were floated out of the engineering department were truly bizarre. The eventual solution is so well known today that it is hard to remember just what an outlandish innovation it was back in the early 60's, when artist's renderings of the new airplane began to circulate. But the engine-in-the-tail approach (actually pioneered by the British Trident) was completely successful, and Boeing's graceful curved inlet duct was so effective that Lockheed paid them a royalty to emulate it on the Tristar. (Douglas, more frugally, saved the money by devising an engine mount on the vertical stabilizer for its DC-10.) First introduced by Eastern Airlines in early 1964, the 727 very quickly became ubiquitous, with all of the trunk airlines except Delta getting in the game. Pilots loved it because it was the first jetliner with hydraulic control boost in all three axes, thus ensuring a light and harmonious control feel that has never been surpassed even to this day. It also featured outstanding performance for its time, and the takeoff and climb out were sprightly in comparison with the four engine jets. Passengers loved it, in part because Boeing had made the decision to retain the 707 fuselage cross section, which allowed for 6 across seating and plenty of room overhead. In those days of 36+ inch seat pitch, the coach section of a 727 was a very comfortable place indeed! It was also quiet, both inside and out, although especially with respect to its outside noise footprint "quiet" is a relative term! It was called a "Whisperjet" by Eastern, to be sure, but that could be considered accurate only by comparison with the thundering roar of the early 707's and DC-8's! It was not until very late in its operational career, when special noise suppressing cowlings and tailpipes were mandated, that the 727 truly whispered. Getting ready for the first flight. Note the logos of the airlines that had already placed orders just below the cockpit windows. Original engineering drawing of the E-1 unit (as the first airplane was referred to at Boeing at the time). This airplane actually entered service with United after the test program and flew a full career at that airline. After UAL retired it, it was donated to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it is undergoing restoration. Its introduction was marred by three fatal accidents in the first year and a half of service. The first two would be known today as controlled-flight-into-terrain (CFIT) events. A United flight inbound to O'Hare disappeared from radar screens over Lake Michigan, and after an intensive recovery operation about 80% of it was raised from the depths. Few distinct clues emerged, however, and the consensus was that the jet was below its assigned altitude and was simply flown into the water. Some months later, an American 727 flying a circling approach in bad weather at Cincinnati crashed into terrain that was hundreds of feet lower than the airport elevation. In both of these crashes the altimeter was an issue - most 727's featured a "drum type" altimeter which, in its early incarnation around that time, was difficult for pilots used to the three pointer model to read and interpret quickly. Specifically, it was easy to make an error of 1000 feet when interpreting this kind of altimeter. The type became more refined by the late 1960's and evolved into the "counter-pointer" altimeter that is still in use today on big airplanes. The third accident brought into focus an unforeseen consequence of the high performance characteristics of the 727. A United flight approaching Salt Lake City wound up high and hot on the approach, and the Captain instructed the copilot, who was flying the airplane, to leave the throttles at idle for most of the approach. By the time that the Captain recognized the excessive sink rate that developed, it was too late. Jet engines took as much as 8 seconds to spool up from idle to go-around thrust in those days - seconds that this flight didn't have. The airplane slammed down short of the threshold so hard that the landing gear was driven up through the wings, igniting a deadly fire that continued for the entire slide down the runway. The 727 achieved its remarkable field performance by a combination of power from the new fanjet engines and an extraordinary wing. The wing featured full span leading edge flaps and slats, and a trailing edge flap system that could extend a full 40 degrees to generate both lift and a lot of drag for short field approaches and landings. This was all well and good, and enabled the airplane to get into and out of LGA's original 5000 foot runways, among others. But with all of the flaps and slats deployed, and idle thrust set, some truly enormous sink rates could develop, and it was possible that such a high descent rate might not be fully appreciated until the airplane was fairly close to the ground. (This is an effect that can be seen even in MSFS). The lesson learned from the Salt Lake accident was to avoid low thrust high sink rate descents close to the ground, and pilot training for the 727 was improved accordingly. The airplane subsequently racked up a good safety record in operations all over the world for many decades. I myself followed the gestation of the 727 in my youth - it was the first major airplane type introduced after I was more or less aware of what was going on in the world of aviation. I built models of it and read books about it, and no doubt somewhere in the recesses of my developing mind there lurked the conviction that I would one day fly it. The three-holer was my favorite airplane in those days, as it would remain for years to come. Even Southwest operated the 727! This is the first one they had, which was a Braniff airplane that was "loaned" to them when they won a lawsuit against that company. A decade or so later, they leased a half dozen or so from People Express for a short time. Photo by Aris Pappas. 727 circa 1970, in the original AA scheme. When I flew this one, around eight years after this picture was taken, it had the new livery. You can see the leading and trailing edge high lift devices clearly, as well as the original smoky engine exhaust! Photo by Bob Garrard. By the time I became a pilot in the Air Force, the 727 was being flown by just about every airline in the country, the only exceptions being the smaller of the local service companies like Southern or Texas International. The rest of the local service airlines would, for the most part, eventually fly the 727 - Allegheny, Piedmont, Frontier, North Central, Ozark, Alaska, Northeast, and yes, even Southwest operated it at one time or another (Southwest operated a single Braniff-owned airplane for awhile as the result of an anti-trust settlement, and a handful of leased People Express airplanes a bit later). In fact, aside from Southern, TI and Air Cal I'm hard pressed to think of an airline that existed prior to deregulation that did not fly at least one 727! It truly was that universal, a status no airplane had achieved since the DC-3 in the 1930's. So it seemed obvious to me, as an aspiring airline pilot, that the 727 was going to play a role in my professional career, no matter what airline eventually hired me. It also seemed obvious that my first exposure to it was going to be from a seat that faced sideways most of the time! The 727 was the last single aisle airliner to feature the flight engineer as an integral part of the crew - indeed, after the mid 1960's the only new airplanes that had a position for the FE were the widebodies. It is true that the 737 flew, until the early 1980's, with a third pilot as part of the crew at some airlines (UAL, Western, and a few others), but that person was not a flight engineer, nor was there either provision or need for one - the third pilot (known in the industry as the "Guy in Back", or GIB) was promulgated by the UAL pilots and adopted by ALPA as a general policy, although it may not have been enforced at all ALPA airlines. By the time I was ready to leave the Air Force and seek my fortune, it was possible to buy training on the 727 as either an FE or a pilot. In those days of mostly military trained pilots with thousands of jet hours in the applicant pool, it was a widely held belief that the more qualifications a pilot had on his or her resume, the more likely it would be that an airline would come knocking at the door. And so most of us undertook to add as many certificates and ratings to our licenses and logbooks as we could afford. Actually, it would be more accurate to say "as Uncle Sam could afford", since all of us who were in the service had access to the GI Bill, which was perfectly happy to pay for flight training at the higher commercial levels. There were several paths to a Flight Engineer certificate in the mid 1970's. The written exam, of course, could be taken after simply signing up for a weekend ground school, and several companies dined out on that source of revenue for many years. The one I availed myself of took an approach that is now more or less standard - they had created a book composed entirely of questions and answers that were on the real test (although many more than actually appeared on the test, just like today). Familiarity with these, which could be achieved with as little as a few days perusal, was sufficient to pass the FE exam. (Before you get the wrong idea about the actual ease of taking a test like this, remember that I had, at this point, several thousand hours of heavy multi-engine jet flying experience along with all of the training that went along with it! It was this experience that made it possible to simply "cram" for the test and actually pass it.) Pan American operated the 727 in Europe and the Caribbean/Latin America. The original IGS (Inter German Service) to and from Berlin was a 727 operation. Photo by Richard Vandervord. TWA was another early operator of the 727. Photo by Bob Garrard. The Flight Engineer certificate itself could be acquired in one of two ways. Either I could seek out a certain Air Force flight engineer in our C-141 Wing who happened to be an FAA designated examiner for the FE ticket, or I could buy a slot at the full course of training at the Braniff Airline School in Dallas. Although the idea of getting the FE certificate essentially for free on a C-141 had some attraction, I soon decided that it was not the best way to go about it. For one thing, although I was an aircraft commander on the C-141, I was by no means familiar with the arcane doings back at the engineers' panel. The 141 was a complex, systems intensive airplane, and although all Starlifter pilots had studied those systems in the original trip through the "University of MAC" (Military Airlift Command) at Altus AFB Oklahoma, none of us had the level of expertise that the engineer position required. So passing the FE flight check on the panel of a 141 was by no means a sure thing. Nor was it really legal as far as the Air Force was concerned, since pilots were not qualified to sit at the FE panel, even for training. By far the most important element of the decision, however, was the fact that no airline flew C-141's, and thus none of them would be much impressed by an FE ticket obtained on that airplane! The Braniff school, on the other hand, used the 727 as its basis (although it was also possible to take the training on the DC-8). Braniff, in the mid 70's, had a requirement for employment that was unique in all of the industry - the applicant had to possess an actual FE certificate, not just complete the written. And, although it was unstated per se, it was clearly understood by the applicant pool that Braniff wanted that FE ticket to have been acquired in the 727. In order to make it possible for an individual to get an FE ticket on the 727, Braniff kindly (!) made their own school available to anyone who could cough up the 5000 bucks they charged. That was a ton of money back then, and although a very small number of pilots went seriously into hock to finance it on their own, the overwhelming majority of Braniff Education Systems (the name of the training subsidiary) students were vets on the GI Bill. Braniff pretty much had this market to itself when I got out of the Air Force, and so it was to Braniff that I decided to go. A year or two later, a few other airlines, including American, got on the GI Bill gravy train, but none of them had the success that Braniff enjoyed for a number of years. Of course, none of them required pilot applicants to have an actual FE ticket either! (Another airline that for years required applicants to have an actual qualification on an airliner was Southwest, who required the 737 type rating. They, however, did not sell the training - an applicant had to go find it someplace else.) So, having filled out the paperwork for the GI Bill funding (not for the first time - I had already gotten a CFI and taken a CFII course on the bill prior to the Braniff school), I set forth from Charleston headed west on Interstate 20 in my fairly new Fiat 124 Spyder convertible, bound for the promised land! Continued in the next installment: Wrench Anthony Vallillo avallillo767@gmail.com Three Holer Series Three Holer Prelude Three Holer Part 1: Wrench Three Holer Part 2: Type Rating Three Holer Part 3: Hired!
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Three Holer Part 1: Wrench By Tony Vallillo (19 May 2013) In the early spring of 1976 rumors abounded about the possible resumption of airline hiring. An old friend who had been furloughed from Eastern in 1973 suddenly found himself recalled to duty in early 1976, and it was he who gave me perhaps the best single bit of advice I have ever received. "Tony", he told me, "don't wait for the hiring to actually begin before leaving active duty. Put in your papers now". This was something of a daunting prospect for me, because I had been continuously employed since the day I graduated from college some 5 years earlier. The thought of jumping into the void without a job offer in hand was not a comfortable one, but the logic of his advice was undeniable. Fortunately for yours truly, the Air Force had not been keeping track of the airline recalls and was still offering early release from active duty for those pilots who would commit to the AF Reserve for a time period equal to twice their remaining active duty service commitment. So I held my breath and immediately applied for a transfer to the Air Force Reserves. My application was accepted (this was hardly news to my squadron superiors, since I had, perhaps foolishly, never made a secret of my airline ambitions). And so it was that I crossed the line from active duty to reserve duty; which in practice meant crossing the street to the 707th Military Airlift Squadron, USAF Reserve, Charleston AFB, South Carolina. Since both my old and new squadrons flew the C-141, it was largely a paperwork exercise, and I was off flying my first line mission for the reserves within the week. Thus freed from any encumbrance to immediate airline employment, I set about sending applications and/or letters to every airline that I had ever heard of. This included all of the major and local service airlines, and as many non-skeds as I could find (picture below). I had to organize a file system to keep all of the applications straight - there were over 20 of them! Every airline wanted a resume of qualifications, of course, and this brought the Flight Engineer Certificate issue to the fore. This is what started it all - my original application as a pilot for American Airlines. Note that they put the biggest and best on the cover! I had already completed the FE written exam earlier in the year, so the remaining decision was whether or not to go the whole nine yards and train for the actual certificate. And if I decided to get the ticket, where should I train? At that time Braniff Airlines, while not the only entity offering training for the Flight Engineer certificate, was certainly the most desirable place to get it, if for no other reason than that they showed a strong inclination to hire the graduates of their own school. None of the other schools were affiliated with airlines in 1976 - it was another year or two before American and one or two others got into the game. Then again, Braniff was a highly desirable potential employer in its own right, what with their enticing collection of domestic and international routes, to say nothing of their rainbow colored "jellybean" fleet of jets (pictures below)! So it was to Braniff that I applied to take the Boeing 727 Flight Engineer course. Shortly after I was accepted , I also signed up for their 727 type rating course, figuring that if an FE ticket looked good on the resume, a Captain rating would look even better! Braniff operated the most colorful fleet of airplanes in its day, such as this 727-227 approaching ORD. Perhaps the same 727 at DFW. Braniff's extensive route network made it an appealing employment choice in 1976, before the evil gleam of deregulation entered the dark and tortured mind of Alfred Kahn! The total cost of this educational experience was around 10 large, as Tony Soprano would say several decades later! That would be $10,000 for those of you who are not "made men"! (Closer to 100K in today's dollars) Although I had managed to save a few bucks over the course of my 4 year active duty career, I had nothing like 10K hanging around. In fact, 10K was very close to my annual salary in the early part of my Air Force career. Fortunately for me and my airline ambitions, my then-rich Uncle Sam had long ago provided for my education after military service through a piece of post WWII legislation known as the GI Bill. My parents had, around the time I was born, used their GI bill benefits to go to college - the first in their families to do so. I had already been to college, of course, and so instead of using my benefits for grad school or law school or something along those lines, I used them to pay for the Braniff school. The GI bill covered 90% of the cost, leaving only a manageable 1K or so to emerge from my savings account. Braniff's headquarters and training center was located at Love Field in Dallas Texas. So it was that I found myself headed west in my Fiat convertible in early June, bound for what I hoped would be the promised land. After two days of driving I arrived at what would be my digs for the next two and a half months. This was an establishment known as the Marquis North, a small apartment complex across Lemmon Avenue from Love field. It had been recommended highly by several previous BESI grads of my acquaintance (BESI was the name of the training subsidiary of Braniff - Braniff Education Systems Incorporated) as being the best place to stay; in part because BESI also featured a school for reservationists and these students, mostly young women, were known to favor the Marquis. In the event, the scouting reports turned out to be accurate, and the swimming pool at the Marquis proved to be a Garden of Earthly Delights for the entire duration of both courses, a situation which had the potential of considerable interference with the constant study that the school demanded. Fortunately I was young then (!) and my memory still sharp; indeed, sharp enough to absorb the airplane knowledge quickly and still leave at least some time for flirtation! At the appointed time we gathered in a classroom in Braniff's training center, which was on the east side of Love Field. Braniff no longer flew into Love Field in 1976, except for airplanes that were bound for their maintenance complex adjacent to the school, but they had not yet undertaken to relocate the school over to the larger DFW airport. Braniff's training center was carved out of a portion of one of the hangars, and was nowhere near as attractive or as large as the American Airlines Flight Academy, which was 15 or so miles farther west. Nonetheless, its classrooms and two simulators were adequate for both Braniff's and our own purposes. After introductions and an overview of the next few weeks' activities, we jumped without further ado into a series of lessons on the systems of the 727, starting with the APU, or auxiliary power unit. Airline and military training in those days was oriented around classroom instruction on airplane systems, followed by simulator training on procedures and often topped off by flight training in the airplane itself. Such was the case at BESI, since the Braniff 727 simulators were not approved by the FAA for rating rides for pilots or flight engineers. We would spend the first 2 weeks in the classroom, then progress to the simulator for a week or so, followed by a flight in a real 727 for the check ride. That was for the FE program. The type rating program that followed was more simulator intensive, since a great deal of time would need to be spent on such things as flying approaches and engine out takeoffs and landings. Again, as in the FE program, the cherry on the sundae was a pair of flights in the airplane - left seat, of course! In that era, the classroom training was accomplished through the use of large and often complex systems trainer units. These were about the size of a big billiard table turned on its side; and, judging from the industrial strength wheelsets they rode around on, just as heavy (picture below)! They typically featured a complete flow-chart type diagram of the applicable system which would be festooned with animated widgets representing pumps, relays and so on. As often as not, the applicable portion of the FE panel was also depicted, at several times life size to ensure good visibility from the back of the room. Portions of the diagram would light up according to the configuration of the controls on the FE panel: pump widgets would spin, and relay widgets would open and close. All of this animation served not only to educate us but also to keep us awake, since operation of the thing entailed a noisy collection of real relays and switches within the bowels of the machine! But noisy or not, they served their purpose well. Today's computer based programs, replete with similar animations, grew out of this tradition. In the days before computer based instruction burst upon the aeronautical scene, big airplane systems were taught using large mechanically animated units such as these. This batch, which were located at the FAA Academy circa 1984, are systems trainer boards for the 727, and were similar to units in use in the 1970's at Braniff and American, among other airlines. We were each issued a Braniff Boeing 727 Operating Manual, the same tome that the line pilots used in daily operations. This was my first exposure to airline operating manuals, and I was underwhelmed. These books, while certainly hefty enough, were only around half as thick as our C-141 operating manuals. Furthermore, while a reasonably adept mechanic had a decent shot at actually building a C-141 using only the operating manual (well, not really, but they were very comprehensive!), the airline books were merely descriptive, not unlike a Readers Digest condensed version of a novel. This, we were to learn, grew from the airline philosophy of training; namely, that a pilot (or FE) did not need to be able to build or even repair an airplane. He or she only had to fly it, and systems knowledge beyond that needed for actual operation was unnecessary, to say nothing of unnecessarily expensive. Our instructors were men of long tenure at Braniff, specialists in ground instruction who taught both pilots and mechanics and were thus in a position to impart far more information than was to be found in the manuals. And so they did, offering lucid explanations for the whys and wherefores of the 727. These pearls of wisdom we copied down in notebooks that we quickly procured for this purpose. Mine was particularly festooned with illustrations of my own making, for I was, even then, a visual learner! And since I had managed to lay hands on a pack of colored markers, I embellished these illustrations with color codings similar to those on the systems trainer diagrams. By the end of the course, my notebooks were in some demand as loaner items to the other students, and afterward I bequeathed them to another C-141 pilot who took the course later in the year. I would come to regret that magnanimous gesture later, when those gems of system knowledge might have come in handy, but c'est la vie! Each day we tackled another system, and as the fuel system, electrical system and hydraulic systems passed in review before us the notebooks filled up with the trivia of the 727. Even things that the instructors told us we did not need to retain were scarfed up greedily and consigned to our notes. There was a reason, of course, for all of this fact hoarding - we all knew that Braniff hired many of the graduates of this very school. We came to assume that our every move was being watched and evaluated, and so we sought to impress our invisible evaluators by trying to memorize one more factoid than the next guy. Even the smallest bit of information was pounced upon. I'm not sure if Braniff was really watching us closely, but I have never in my life seen another group so intent upon mastering a subject. A few months later, when I was actually teaching 727 ground school at American to real new-hires, I was taken aback by the relative lack of intensity of those students compared to our class (and I assume all classes) at BESI. Perhaps the difference can be attributed to the fact that the American students were already hired, and not in some real or imaginary competition to be hired. Compared to the sophisticated systems of the Lockheed I had been flying, the 727 was actually a fairly simple airplane, and thus I had little difficulty mastering it. The electrical system was an entire order of magnitude less complex than the C-141, and instead of three hydraulic systems the Boeing had only two. The fuel system and pneumatic system were essentially similar to those on the 141, or any large jet for that matter. The anti-ice system was considerably simpler - the C-141 had some kind of de-ice or anti-ice on just about every surface save for the fuselage itself, whereas the 727 had only engine and wing anti-ice. We learned a great many mnemonic devices to cement the trivia of various systems firmly in place - ditties like "break in up stairs" for the B hydraulic system (main wheel brakes, inboard spoilers, upper rudder and airstairs), a few of which, like this one, remain lodged in my memory to this very day! A page from the American Airlines Boeing 727 Operating Manual, showing the -100 series air conditioning sytem schematic. These diagrams were extensively watered down for pilot consumption. The actual maintenance manuals had the drawings showing what the real piping and gadgetry looked like; these were, for the most part, incomprehensible to pilots! Although it looks like a simulator, and I'm sure most of us flight sim hobbyists would kill for one, this is actually a fixed base procedures trainer, known in the trade as a CPT. Again, this is an FAA unit at Oke City. Braniff did not have anything like this, but American had two of them, both essentially identical to this one. They were used for cockpit familiarization and procedures drill for both pilots and engineers. I would end up spending considerable time teaching American new hires in just such trainers a few months later! There were two flavors of 727 - the series 100, or shortie version which was the first to emerge from Boeing, and the series 200 or stretch version, which came along a few years later. Aside from a different version of the JT-8D engine, and an electronic pressurization system that was one of the first set-and-forget devices I had seen on an airplane, the -200 was essentially the same save for the length of the fuselage. Since Braniff flew both varieties, and our rating rides might be on either one, we had to master both, and this provided yet another opportunity to memorize stuff! In addition to the airplane's systems, we had to master the performance charts. The FE was the keeper of the performance keys at Braniff, as at all airlines, and any questions about field length or weight limits were addressed to him (picture below). This meant that we had to become familiar with dozens of charts and tables. I immediately noticed a significant difference between airline performance charts and the ones that I, as a C-141 pilot, had been exposed to. The Air Force charts were all what we today would call "raw data" charts - graphs covered with curved lines, or sometimes multiple iterations of curved lines. They were entered at the side or bottom with a particular value and the intersections of lines and curves led to the desired result. It was complex, and fraught with the potential for misinterpretation, which was why on the C-141 both flight engineers (a 141 crew consisted of two FE's, who were charged with these calculations) often did a particularly critical calculation independently to ensure that their answers were in close agreement. Performance charts resided not only in the manuals, but also at the engineer's fingertips. The most commonly used charts were laminated to the FE table under an acryllic sheet, and could be easily consulted on the fly! By this time in history the commercial airlines had changed over to the relatively simpler paradigm of tabulated data. Instead of each FE making a single calculation of, say, required runway length based upon the conditions of a particular flight, the airline had loosed their computers on the problem of calculating runway lengths and weight limits for every single combination of conditions (runway lengths, winds, temperatures, surface condition, etc.) that might reasonably exist. These numbers were then arranged not as graphs but as tables of data, not unlike a fully loaded spreadsheet. If you wanted to know your max takeoff weight, you could first dig out the tables for the airport you were departing, and then find the combination of runway, flap setting and temperature that matched the current conditions. At the intersection of those particulars, you would find a number which would be the maximum takeoff weight. This tabulated data added up to considerably more pages than the graphical charts we had in the Air Force, since a separate set of tables was required for every airport the airline flew from. The book that contained all of these tables was called the Airport Analysis, and it was the lot of the flight engineer to carry this, as well as the entire operating manual and yet another book called the Minimum Equipment List, or MEL. This was the document that laid out, in painstaking detail, just which of the myriad of bells, whistles and geegaws installed on the airplane could be inoperative for flight. Since there were at least two of just about anything on a 727, this book was not a small one. Indeed, in those halcyon days of 3 person crews the pilot and copilot often carried their small allotment of manuals (essentially just enroute charts and approach plates) in normal sized brief cases - Halliburton's were in vogue among the Captains when I was hired! The engineer, on the other hand, toted his load in a large catalog case known in the trade as a "kit bag" or, sometimes, "brain bag". These often weighed in excess of 20 pounds, especially when the required toolkit was thrown in. The study of performance and tab data took up several days of the ground school class, and was the finale of that part of the program. Once we had passed the required written examinations on systems and performance, we were scheduled into the simulator for the second phase of training. For this and the final airplane phase we were paired up in twos. I drew another C-141 pilot from Charleston, whom I had known casually back at the squadron. Joe and I became joined at the hip, and spent a great deal of time together studying the normal procedures, checklist responses and emergency and abnormal procedures. For this we utilized a crude but effective "simulator" of our own making. Braniff had, at the beginning of the course, issued each of us with a set of color drawings of each instrument panel in the cockpit. At my suggestion, we arranged these on the wall in a corner of my living room, in an approximation of the layout on the real airplane. Although these were only about quarter scale, they were quite effective as a practice aid, and we spent many hours running checklists, starting imaginary engines, and eventually making complete imaginary flights in our "simulator". Other students emulated the concept, and soon the corridors of the Marquis North echoed with the arcane incantations of the 727 litanies. (I occasionally wonder how the course would have gone had we had MSFS and one of the good 727 add-ons available to us back then! Much better, I certainly imagine!) The 727 simulator at Braniff in those days was similar in realism to the C-141 sims with which I was familiar in the Air Force (picture below). The cab was a completely realistic facsimile of a 727 cockpit, with the addition of a station for the instructor that occupied a position behind the Captain seat. There was a motion system with 3 degrees of freedom, consisting of hydraulic legs attached to the bottom of the cab on the one end, and to pediments in the concrete floor on the other. These would stretch and contract, in unison or one at a time, to the beat of instructions from the motion computer which was one of the several mainframes that made the magic. The motion was occasionally sufficient to induce the queasiness of pre-nausea, a condition that might rear its head in the stressful circumstances of a difficult procedure. This is what a 727 simulator looked like in 1976. This unit, one of the original 727 sims at American Airlines, is now in the Wings of Eagles Museum in Elmira New York. Eat your hearts out, fellow simmers, because AA essentially gave this and 5 or 6 other first generation simulators away around 10 years ago - they could not find buyers for them! I spent a good deal of time in this very simulator over the years of my 727 career at AA. It is shown here configured with a newer computer generated visual system, with a screen for each front window. Photo courtesy of Bill Maloney. Interestingly enough, from outside of the sim the motion often correlated not at all with what the simulated airplane was doing at the moment! For example, you might be standing outside a simulator and hear the sound of engines being revved up for takeoff (picture below). This would be followed quickly by a pronounced pitch-up of the simulator cab, as from an over rotation. But the pitch-up actually created the sensation of gathering speed on the takeoff roll, by creating a situation where you were pressed into the seatback, just like acceleration. The actual rotation, when it came, was accompanied by an additional pitch up movement of the motion system, although not so pronounced as the initial movement. This is what a modern FAA Level - D simulator looks like in "flight". The motion system occasionally puts the cockpit in some interesting pitch positions to create a sensation of motion. This unit is equipped with a modern, fully enclosed wrap-around visual system, and as you see can be utilized in a normally lit environment. Ironically, a large piece of one of the old model boards for the original visual systems in use decades before lies along the wall in front of the sim! This piece was probably on its way to the CR Smith Museum. Likewise, to create the sensation of a turn, the motion would first tip the cab a bit in the direction of the turn, and then almost immediately roll it back level very slowly. Inside, the "airplane" was still in a steady bank, but of course in such a coordinated turn the sensation of bank soon disappears, thus the movement of the motion system back to level. When the pilots on the inside began to roll out of the turn back to simulated level flight, the motion would tip the cab over in the other direction briefly, and again level it out slowly. There was a lot more to it than to simply have the sim duplicate the attitude of the airplane! This picture, which shows the oirignal Boeing 747 simulator at the American Airlines Flight Academy in the late 1970's, depicts the original setup of the visual system for all of the sims. One large screen was located in front of both pilot windows, with a video projector on top of the cab aimed forward and down. Since the system was not enclosed, the entire simulator bay had to be kept in near total darkness during the time the sim was in use. The simulator also had a visual system, although this would not really be a factor in our training until the type rating program later on (picture above). Visual systems were only about a decade or so old at that time, and the Air Force simulators I had worked in lacked them altogether. Braniff's system was a second generation model board system, in which a tiny television camera with an even smaller optical probe "flew" over a large board that was decorated to look like an airport and the surrounding terrain. Similar to a model railroad layout, but to a much smaller scale, this model board was complete with roads, towns, buildings, trees and bushes, and all manner of lights including all of the lighting associated with a large commercial airport (pictures below). The camera picked up the scene it was maneuvered around, guided by a complex mechanical tracking system driven by another one of the mainframe computers. The "view from the front office" was projected onto a screen that sat about 10 feet in front of the pilot. It was in full color and was surprisingly realistic. The instructor could set things up for "day" or "night" conditions, as well as low visibility and ceilings. We typically used it for the portions of a flight below 1000 feet or so "agl". At other times, the screen showed a featureless grey that was typical of the view from inside a cloud. A close up view of the camera probe being "flown" over one of the large model boards that formed the basis of the first generation visual systems at most airlines. Tiny fiber optic lights comprise the runway and approach lights. In reality, these boards were mounted vertically, and lit from a large bank of lights at the side. Each board and its system were shared by two simulators, but both sims could not use the visual at the same time. This necessitated careful coordination between the instructors in the two sims, by phone from cab to cab. And this is what it looked like from within. This is a Citation simulator at the American Flight Academy using one of the model board visuals. American had replaced the cockpit of one of their four 707 simulators with a Citation, and had the exclusive contract with Cessna for many years for Citation training. American Airlines Photos Late one summer night Joe and I trooped across Lemmon Avenue to the big Braniff hangar on the east side of Love Field to begin the simulator portion of our training. All of the BESI schedules were in the wee hours, since this same school served the entire Braniff 727 pilot population, which at that time probably numbered upwards of 500. Naturally, the line pilots got the daytime schedules! This was less of a problem than it might seem, since even in those early days I had become a confirmed night owl, partly the result of years of all night flying over one pond or another! After stumbling around a bit in the unfamiliar surroundings, we came upon the correct briefing room, where sat a young man not terribly much older than our late-twenties selves. This would be another Joe, Joe F, who was a Braniff line FE who alternated flights in the airplane in the real world with stints teaching FE students in the simulator. We would be under his tutelage for the remainder of the program, and we were fortunate that this was so, for he was an excellent teacher! (I would also like to think that he had some good material to work with in our case, but that is an assessment which must be made by others!) Joe quickly introduced himself and ran us through the schedule of our training, which had come down from on high in the Braniff training department earlier that day. We would spend each of the next six nights with Joe in the 727 simulator, followed by a day off and then the airplane check ride. With the administrative matters dealt with, Joe F led us into the arcane rituals of preflight and inflight systems operation through which we would translate our ground school knowledge into operation of the airplane itself. We, of course, had spent the last several days since the completion of the ground school in intensive self instruction and drill on these very procedures, and we intended to put on for Joe a show that would rival the best that John Ringling North (The Greatest Show on Earth) had ever offered! So after the two hour briefing we mounted the metal steps to the simulator cab and entered what, for us, was a world of airline pilot fantasy. We were also dimly aware that, with a bit of luck, it might one day become a torture chamber to be experienced again and again! Inside the last remaining 727 sim at American. On the inside, all of the 727 sims, regardless of generation, were essentially identical save for the instructor's console, just to the left of the black IP seat at lower left. The last and most sophisticated 727 sim at American, which is still in use today for contract operations. The lighted office on the ground level is the lair of the simulator technicians, and of the several mainframe computers which animate the beast. The seats were still warm from the last occupants, a Braniff crew engaged in their annual recurrent training, known around the trade as the "sheep dip" (pictures above). Joe F wasted no time in setting up the instructor's station, and we immediately began to display our newfound procedural knowledge. First on the agenda - the preflight inspection (picture below, left). Scores of items - switch positions, fluid quantities, electrical voltages and the like were examined according to flow patterns that had been carefully worked out at Boeing during the flight test phase and perpetuated ever since at the airline training schools. Satisfied at last that all was in order, I began the litany for the start of the APU, the auxiliary power unit, a fourth jet engine on the 727 that played no part in propulsion, but rather sat between the wheel wells below the main deck and occupied itself with the generation of electrical and pneumatic power for the airplane on the ground (picture below, right) The APU start sequence took nearly a minute and had to be carefully monitored on a small panel located on the rear wall of the cockpit immediately adjacent to the cockpit door. This first start was without abnormality, thanks to Joe's sense of fair play, but it would be the last freebie! All remaining APU starts featured some kind of abnormality - either a fire or overtemp, or perhaps a failure of the APU generator or pneumatics. These situations had to be dealt with according to the procedures in the operating manual, and we kept the unwieldy thing handy on the small table that was provided for the FE immediately below his panel. This is what we were here to learn to master - the FE panel of the Boeing 727, the last such on a narrow body aircraft. It was actually fairly simple compared to any of the big recips or the widebodies. And it was child's play compared to the FE panel on the Concorde! The controls for the APU, as well as a few other ancillary functions, were located on the rear wall of the cockpit adjacent to the cockpit door. What look like myriad buttons are actually circuit breakers for the many and sundry electrical components of the airplane. APU starts and operation are monitored on this panel. Joe F then hopped into the left seat, where he could play the part of Captain and also, by looking over his shoulder, keep an eye on what I was doing on the panel. In this manner we worked our way through engine start, as I brought each engine driven generator on line in sequence and synchronized them to each other so that they could operate in "parallel" (Later jets, like the 767, dispensed with the synchronization process: each generator works on its own to power its part of the system in perfect isolation. When one fails, the other takes over the entire system after a brief nanosecond of interruption). When all three engines were started and all systems brought online, I checked everything on the panel using a scan pattern that we referred to as the "little u Big U" scan (picture below). This started in the middle of the upper panel, went down then left and up to the top of the electrical panel, then down the left side of both upper and lower panels and finally up the right side of both to end with the pneumatic system. It was there that the air conditioning "packs" had to be brought back online after they were shut off to allow all of the high pressure air to be directed to the engine starter motors. In the torrid temperatures of a Dallas summer, the FE must not delay reinstating the air conditioning in the real airplane, lest the wrath of both flight attendant and Captain fall upon his head! The famous "little u BIG U" scan! Mention that phrase to any pilot who flew as an FE on the 727 and you will get a reaction! This first session in the sim was limited to ground operations, so after we had everything running and ready for takeoff, we jumped ahead to the checklists and operations that would follow a landing and lead to the final shutdown at the gate. When this was completed, half of the four hour sim period had passed and, after a short break for coffee and a snack, it was student Joe's turn to shine! And shine he did, just as I had. In truth, both of us were "loaded for bear" for these simulator sessions. As I said, they were keeping score, or so we thought. We worked hard to put on a perfect performance, night after night. And since we each had over 4 years of large transport jet experience under our belts (and little else, unlike later years when I would have not only flying experience but a great many over-large layover dinners under my belt!) we were already quite well prepared. The next night's entertainment involved an actual "flight" in the sim, piloted by Joe F in his leading-man role as the Captain! This was even more fun than the ground operations, since Joe knew the line well, and was able to spice up our training with simulated calls from the flight attendants for more or less heat or cold in the cabin; a situation with which we would both become well acquainted when we started our line careers a few months down the road. Of course, all of that was in the mists of the future at this point, but the interaction with "the girls" was great fun and served to refine our knowledge of the minutiae of the 727 systems. Student Joe and I were doing so well after the second session that I was able to talk Joe F into letting me "fly" the sim when I was not actually working the panel (picture below). He knew that I had enrolled in the Type Rating program later in the summer, and he agreed with me that I might profit from a little extra stick time at this point. So for the next several sessions, I was able to play "Captain" when Student Joe was doing his thing in the back. This experience turned out to be useful, if for no other reason than I was able to get a feel for the simulator itself. No simulator, of course, flies exactly like the airplane, and often no two of them fly exactly like each other. This was not a real problem here since Braniff had only a single 727 sim at that point, but it was useful to have a good idea of how the sim "flew" when I matriculated into the rating program. The seats I really hoped to occupy! Flying the sim when I was not on the panel during the FE program was to be a big help later in the Rating program. The week went by all too quickly, what with studying at the pool during the day (about half the time studying the airplane and the other half studying the often gorgeous bikini clad reservation students!) and flying the sim at night. In the fullness of time the night arrived when we would demonstrate these skills not in the artificial environment of the simulator, but in a real Braniff 727 over at DFW airport. Joe and I and the other students in our class drove over to the big airport and found our way to Braniff operations, where we stood out like a gaggle of sore thumbs in our civvies! The only other similarly dressed folks turned out to be our crew for the evening. The Captain and the FO were just there to be our chauffeurs, but Mike, the chief check engineer for the 727 at Braniff, was to be our Chief Inquisitor. As an FAA designee for the FE rating, Mike would be signing the temporary certificates that we all hoped to have in hand by night's end. The Captain and Mike held a short briefing, which covered the ground rules for the flight and also the batting order. Since the airplane would not actually land for seat swaps, the first and last slots would be more interesting since they involved the engine start and shutdown procedures. The guys in the middle slots merely had to watch the panel for 40 minutes or so and answer a few questions! I was confident in my abilities, so I decided to go for one of the more interesting slots and wound up with the last one that covered the landing and shutdown. While the rest of the examinees were doing their turn in the barrel, I would be in the back in first class, enjoying a soda and some nuts courtesy of Braniff. Sadly, there were to be no flight attendants aboard, since we were all crewmembers, or at least hopefully soon to be! But before we actually boarded the airplane, we each had to demonstrate that we could perform the exterior visual inspection, known as the walk-around. This is a ritual that every conscientious pilot performs before any flight, be it in a Cessna or a 747, and it was the one part of the program for which there was no real simulation. We had learned the walk-around by watching slides showing all of the steps of the procedure and the details that we should look for. Now we had to do it on the airplane itself, and at night to boot (the slides had all been shot during the day). Out came our flashlights and each of us had a go at it, starting at the nosewheel and proceeding clockwise around the airplane. Mike peppered us with questions and required us to explain what we were looking for at each step of the inspection. It took around 10 minutes for each of us to go through this drill, and the better part of an hour passed before we at last mounted the jetway stairs and entered what we hoped would someday be the promised land! Our steed for the rite of passage was N7278, which at that time was adorned with the two-tone green version of the color scheme of that era. I suppose one of the more interesting facets of flying for Braniff was the issue of which color airplane you would get on any given trip. (Only one group of pilots at Braniff could always know for sure, and that was the 747 group. This was no doubt a very small and very high seniority fraternity, for Braniff in those days had but a single example of Boeing's biggest. It was the only orange airplane in the fleet, and it flew but one route - that between DFW and HNL. Six days shalt it labor, and do all it is able, and the seventh a DC-8 takes over while the Great Pumpkin, as it was often called, is undergoing its weekly inspection!) The first initiate turned left at the main door, along with the flight crew, while the rest of us turned right, to disport ourselves in the unaccustomed comforts of first class; which, on Braniff, featured leather covered seats, the first such on any domestic airline! We had already heard the anecdotal tales of how this came about - supposedly Braniff had made a great deal of money in South America on those routes it had acquired when it merged with Panagra. So much money, in fact, that one or more of the governments down there had balked at the notion of the northward flow of all that cash, and had demanded that Braniff spend the money locally. This, legend had it, they accomplished by buying up several herds worth of local leather, and it was with this that they festooned the first class cabins of their fleet. We had already been shown, earlier in our training, how to operate the cabin doors, and so one of our number closed and armed the L1 door. Within minutes, our classmate up front had successfully assisted the pilots in starting the engines, and before we knew it we were on our way to what at that time was called runway 17R, the only 17 on the west side of the airport back then. Clearance received, we started our roll, and very shortly thereafter (we were empty, after all!) we felt the Captain rotate and lift the bird off the runway. For the next few hours one after another of the brethren was summoned to the bridge to demonstrate his ability to keep things under control. As though to enter into the spirit of the event, we started sending requests for heat or cooling up front via the intercom, but desisted when one of our number, spurred on by the check engineer, retaliated by sending a sirocco our way, leaving us begging for some cool air, and amusing the check engineer no end! That put paid to any more torments from the rear! Finally it was my turn in the barrel (picture below). I entered the cockpit and took my place at the panel. The first thing I noticed was that the visual system on this thing was worlds better than the one in the sim! We were heading from Waco, where the pilots had been dallying about and doing a few touch and go landings, back to DFW, and the myriad lights of the metroplex glowed ahead. I checked the panel, made sure that the pressurization system was set for landing, calculated the landing speeds, and with a bit of assistance from the check FE called Braniff operations and reported inbound. They came back with a gate assignment which I shared with the Captain. These tasks completed, I busied myself with the little u Big U scan. A moment of whimsy from later in my career! In truth, there were "dog days" for engineers, especially in the dead of winter or the heat of summer. As we neared the airport, I swung my seat to face nearly forward. The FE seat on the 727 has several degrees of freedom, as it were. It can move toward and away from the FE panel, and it can move diagonally toward the throttle console (picture below). In addition, in any position the seat can be rotated to face the front of the cockpit, which is the position most FE's tend to use for takeoff and landing. Facing forward, the FE seat was positioned similar to the jump seat in the C-141, a seat in which I had spent considerable time over the years. So I felt right at home in the three-holer. When the FE seat was rotated forward and moved to the front end of its diagonal track, this is where he ended up - right between the pilots just aft of the console. He could reach the throttles from here, and indeed in cruise served as a human autothrottle! I was, of course, merely a spectator for the approach and landing, albeit an interested one. After the before landing checklist was completed, I had nothing to do but monitor the approach and cast an occasional backward glance at "my" panel. The Captain greased it on, which I would eventually learn is by no means easy in the 727, and then I was back on stage again as I ran the after landing checklist and, for the first time for real, started the APU. The taxi-in was short, but I had everything set up for arrival, so that when we came to a stop at the gate the Captain was able to shut down the engines immediately. Since we had in fact returned the airplane in the same condition we got it, I was hopeful that my performance would yield that precious white slip of paper that represented 5 large of Uncle Sam's money. I was not disappointed, as Mike congratulated me for passing my checkride (picture below). The other candidates, as it turned out, had all passed as well, and it was a happy group that drove back to the Marquis at O-Dark Thirty to celebrate. This is what 5 grand bought back in 1976. My original temporary FE certificate, issued the night I passed my airplane check ride. I haven't weighed that little since those days! Thus began my career as a flight engineer, a career that would not really end until I upgraded to Captain at American a decade later (picture below, left). In addition to the 727, I would turn the wrench on the 707 as well. Indeed, I would find the bigger airplane to be more interesting over the years that I flew it, both for the longer flights to more interesting destinations that were a feature of the 707 selections at the NY crew base, and because there was a bit more for a 707 engineer to do (picture below, right). I have piloted all three of these particular airplanes! The Ford, N414H which is shown here dolled up in American Airways markings for a publicity tour around the time of the introduction of the -200 series, later served as a sightseeing plane at Las Vegas, where I logged 0.5 hours at the controls in the right seat during a flight over Hoover Dam courtesy of the pilot. The two American three holers, of course, figured in my airline career. The legendary Boeing 707. I have always been grateful to have had the opportunity to fly this magnificent airplane, which is still one of my favorites. The FE job proved, over the course of my career, to be one of the best ones I had. Although I did not actually handle the flight controls, I had plenty to occupy my attention at the panel (picture below, left). Especially on the 707, the air conditioning system required near-constant attention to strike a balance between the comfort of the passengers and the desires of the flight attendants, many of whom were literally slaving over a hot stove in the galley! It took a while for a new FE to become attuned to the difference between what the stews perceived as comfortable and what was, in fact, comfortable for the passengers. Then again, each type of airplane had system quirks that either worked for you or against you, especially when trying to cool the cabin on a hot day (picture below, right). The 707 had an air conditioning system that used Freon heat exchangers to cool the air, not unlike your average window air conditioner. These worked reasonably well in all weather, but needed ground high pressure air to operate on the ramp - the 707's did not have APU's and always needed ground air for conditioning and engine start. The 727, on the other hand, had been designed to be more or less self sufficient at the smaller airports it was intended to serve, and was equipped with the APU and also the rear stair for boarding when no jetbridge or ground stairs was available (I had never seen that happen with passengers at AA - in fact, our airplanes had the sidewall panels of the aft stairs removed). The APU, if it was working well (and occasionally one wasn't!), could provide enough air to keep the cabin cool on all but the hottest days of summer. Unfortunately, quite a bit of our flying was done in climates like the DFW area, which in summer would give Dante's Inferno a run for its money! The flight deck of the 707 was dimensionally identical to the 727, and differed mainly in the extra throttle and set of engine instruments. The 707 FE panel was also quite similar to the 727, although the fuel and pneumatic systems were a bit more complex, as you can see. But both airplanes had the FE panel laid out in essentially the same way, which was a big help since I spent 5 years qualified on both at the same time! The 727 manufactured cold air not with Freon or some other exotic gas, but rather with what was called an "air cycle machine". This lash-up of a compressor and a turbine cooled the air by expansion, while at the same time stealing most of the moisture out of it, which resulted in the typical bone-dry environment that has been the hallmark of the jetliner cabin. Unfortunately, part of the cooling process involved passing the air-in-treatment across a pair of heat exchangers, like a car's radiator. These, located on the underside of the airplane just at the juncture of the wing leading edge, were less than effective in the dog days of a Texas summer, so the air cycle machines were often unable to produce air much cooler than 40 degrees or so. To cool the cabin of an airplane not painted white in those conditions would have required, at least initially, air of a temperature well below freezing! So the drill was to have the passengers or FA's close at least the window shades on the sunny side prior to arrival at the gate. Thus and only thus would the outbound FE have a prayer in hell of providing a cool cabin for the outbound passengers. These travails, and others as well, provided ample opportunity for the dedicated FE to hone his professional skills and come up with clever and inventive techniques to overcome the challenges of both summer and winter. A good FE, as I would rediscover later when I became a Captain, was a keeper! In periods of seniority stagnation, of which there were a few during my career, guys and gals would end up staying longer on the panel, and acquiring more experience. Of course the best of the best were the professional, or two-stripe, flight engineers. When I arrived at American we had over 500 of these fine gents (they were, of course, all men; for they had originally been mechanics in the 1940's and '50's) and they held down the bids on the FE panel on all of the widebody airplanes. We pilot type FE's, an animal that made its original appearance in the early 1960's around the time that the American pilots left ALPA and struck out on their own, had to content ourselves with the narrow bodies like the 727 and the less senior bids on the 707. The two-stripers had been offered the opportunity to take pilot training and move up to the front seats back in the early '60's, and a few of them did indeed make the jump, but most of them remained at the panel and there were a handful still flying right up until the retirement of the last airplane that had an FE panel, the 727 in the early 2000's. Some pilots chafed at the panel, unsatisfied since they were not doing the flying. But most of us rose to the occasion and tried hard to do the job as well as the older two stripe guys. One aspect of the job was quite appealing to me. With my seat rotated forward between the pilots, I could and did take in just about everything that went on up front (picture below). In addition to being a terrific way to learn the airline flying business once removed, I found that I could provide back-up to the pilots in all phases of flight, the more so since I was a pilot myself, and aware of what was going on. I considered myself as something of an engineering consultant to the Captain, not unlike Scotty on Star Trek! Once I had acquired enough experience for my input to be taken seriously, the Captains often did just that, which was a source of great satisfaction! Looking ahead, the FE had quite the "big picture" view of things, and could be very much in the operational loop, especially on the ground. It is my personal theory that one of the root causes of the proliferation of runway incursion incidents and accidents that has occurred since the 1980's is the lack of the third set of eyes on the flight decks of most airliners these days. Two pilots in a large airliner are extremely busy on the ground much of the time. The FE freed the FO up to concern him or her self entirely with location and navigation. In addition to my line flying duties, I would also become a Flight Engineer Check Airman at American, as well as Chief Flight Engineer at New York for several heady years in the beginning of the Great Expansion early in the Crandall era. All of this, however, was still in the future as I sat by the pool that night at the Marquis, savoring the sweet smell of initial success, along with a cold Lone Star, and eager to begin the next phase of my training - the 727 type rating! Continued in the next installment - Left Seat Anthony Vallillo avallillo767@gmail.com Three Holer Series Three Holer Prelude Three Holer Part 1: Wrench Three Holer Part 2: Type Rating Three Holer Part 3: Hired!
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The Tu-4 with serial number 2805103 built in Kuibyshevsky aviation plant in 1952 is the only one saved Tu-4 in Russia. A bomber is stored in Monino air museum, Moscow. In USSR was a last serial bomber equipped with reciprocating engines. Perhaps this "01 red" sent to Budapest in 1956 while Hungarian revolution, but turned back with the rest of bombers near the target. For an old WoP B-29 Superfortress model. By Kogut's Simworks. -
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