The First Officer’s Lament, Part 1

“Are you feeling all right Captain?”

It’s been nine months since that JetBlue captain on flight 191, freaked out, got tricked by his first officer to leave the cockpit of the plane and was wrestled to the ground by passengers.  From a passenger’s perspective, I can only imagine how terrifying that experience would be. You are hanging out, watching movies on your iPad, taking for granted that the people at the front of the plane are taking you where you want to go safely. When you look up and see that, the guy that’s supposed to be flying is not flying at all. He’s in the cabin with you and he’s a lunatic. It reminds me of a nightmare I used to have as a little kid. I would dream very realistically that I was riding in the backseat of the car and my mom was driving. I would look up and my mom wasn’t driving at all, she was sleeping and the car was driving itself. (Now that I think about it, I’m not completely sure that was a dream or if it really happened.)

This is the guy who went nuts on Jet Blue’s flight.

Lucky for the JetBlue flight, they had a fearless first officer, Jason Wesley Dowd, who saved the day. As a traveler you may hate this story because it terrifies you to know something like that could happen. I love this story because the first officer is the hero, and the captain is outed for being a psycho asshole. (Yes I know that the “poor” captain, Clayton Osbon, was supposedly a model pilot until this incident, but I have a gut feeling that he was probably a huge D-bag to work with.) I’ve been there. I felt Jason’s pain. Every once in a while, you have to fly with a huge dick, sometimes he is just over bearing, sometimes he is actually crazy, but Jason lived out every first officer’s dream.

Being a first officer isn’t a bad job. I get to stare out the window for long periods of time. I get to land and take off and fly the plane. I still get to call myself a pilot. The only thing I don’t have is a lot of responsibility and a fat bank account. The captain is in charge. He gets all of the glory but if something gets messed up it’s his fault too. Even if it’s something I mess up as a first officer, he’s going get the brunt of the firestorm. Don’t feel too bad for him, he gets paid 50 percent more money to sit over there, so he should earn his keep a little bit.

It really only stings the pride when somebody gives me a verbal head pat like, “Oh you’re a first officer, do you get to touch the controls too?”  Usually I don’t even really mind this because most people don’t really know how being a pilot works. First officers and captains go through the same training. Both pilots are pretty much expected to know how to do everything. There are exceptions, but most guys would rather be a captain than a first officer, mostly because of the money. (Especially at a regional airline where money is scarce to begin with. At the majors a lot of pilots choose never to upgrade and forego the big pay raise to be able to get the trips and schedule they want.)

It’s good to be the captain.

Okay, the FLDS doesn’t have a lot to do with this or work that well as an anology, but you should watch “Big Love.” It’s an interestng human drama with pologamy as a backdrop.

Generally the reason one guy is a captain is because he got hired first. You don’t get promoted on your merit or how good a pilot you are. There is no staying late and working extra hard to get that big raise. You only get promoted when the company needs another captain and you’re next in line. In a way it’s kind of like the fundamentalist Mormon Church: The guy who was born before you gets a whole pride of woman but you have to sit around and wait for him to die off before you get any of the action. (Okay maybe it’s nothing like that at all. I just wanted to work in something about polygamy into this post). Tangent warning: It’s kind of interesting to me that pilots as a group, are generally fiscally and politically conservative. Yet they defend this socialist system to the death especially if they happen to be a Captain already. Tangent over.

So you might be saying, “Well still, he got hired first so he has more experience, I want him in charge of the plane.” Yeah, well sort of. But again it’s all on the need of the company. There is no consistency. One guy might be a first officer for a year and another is a first officer for eight years, just depending on when he gets hired. You sometimes see some 40 year old guy who got furloughed from another company, who has been flying for 20 years, but got hired at his current company AFTER the 27 year old punk in the left seat, with five years of experience, who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

So basically you sit in the right seat and wait your turn patiently until enough guys keel over or retire. Now I don’t have a real problem with this. It’s just how the system works and it’s never going to change, so it’s better to breathe in and accept it. I’ve learned to enjoy the view from the right side of the window and not to get frustrated that I am driving a 16 year-old car while the guy next to me is talking about his investment portfolio and vacation homes.

The best and safest cockpits to fly in are the ones where the guy in the left seat treats you as an equal, values your opinion and your experience and recognizes that he has to make the final decision but appreciates you as a fellow pilot. These guys generally keep it light; recognize that timing has a lot to do with where they are at, so they don’t get to overbearing or righteous.

“This is my cockpit, that’s why you’re not in this picure!”

The worst day as a first officer is when you have to fly with a guy who puts on the captain’s hat a little too tight. He has a lot of “technidures”, as we used to call it in the Air Force, and he expects you to follow them. (Basically, in flying there are lots of rules about how you have to do things, the prescribed and only approved method by the company or the FAA. These are the things you have to do, called “procedures.” Everything that is not covered by a procedure is called a technique. One guy may have one way of doing something that works for him, say set an alarm on his watch to check the fuel at certain intervals, that’s his technique. When guys come into the cockpit and bark all their techniques at you and expect you to follow them like procedures; that is a guy with “technidures.”)

The dudes who are wound tight with a lot of technidures make for long trips, because as a first officer, you don’t have to a lot of recourse. You have to do what he says because he’s in charge. (Unless he is totally off his rocker and a danger to the flight, then you are given authority to take over, such as in the above mentioned JetBlue flight) . Most of these guys, to prove they are in charge, constantly micromanage everything you do, pointing out any time you mess up and make a big deal about it. You just have to sit over there, take his shit like Gandhi. You quit thinking about flying and day-dream about getting to the hotel and having a beer.

“Oh yessa master, I’m just your trained monkey over here, what would I know?”

This makes an unsafe cockpit because it can spiral downward. The reality is as humans, we are all bound to make mistakes. As pilots, we are fail safes for each other. If one guy messes up something small, the other guy catches it, and the flight continues safely, without the small thing becoming something big.  But many times, the overbearing, “I’m in charge here” type of captain has a huge issue with admitting his own mistakes but focuses relentlessly on yours.  If he is being an overbearing asshole, scrutinizing everything you do, you start to get paranoid and dwell on the last thing you messed up, taking your attention away from the task at hand. Consequently you are bound to mess up again because you are not focusing on what you are doing. You start to secretly hope for him to mess up big time so you can slyly rub it in his face. These little psychological nightmares games are played out up front in the cockpit comprimising the safety of the people in back.

“When I sneak into your hotel room and put a pillow over your face, no one will cry for you.”

As a professional first officer, you become a master of conforming to different difficult personalities, so that no matter who you are flying with, you do your job as a fellow pair of eyes and advisor and have some shred of dignity left. At the end of the day, even if it was a day of verbal abuse, you make it through the trip safely and still have a job to come back too. Still, when you are flying with a huge, notorious asshole, your ultimate dream would be to lock him out of the cockpit, declare an emergency, land the plane safely, become a hero and then have national news attention pointed at him so you can say, “Look at this mother f’er! I’ve been stuck in the cockpit for days and now world you know what I’ve had to deal with.”

This is a two-part piece about being a first officer. Part two will share my worst experience in recent memory of a guy I had to fly with, who not only had a ton of strange technidures, but also was a huge blow-hard that pontificatesdoppressively for four days and basically went on a hunger strike.