HOURS OF STRESS...

(Looking back on these "blissful" days...without regrets but with mixed emotions..)

HOURS OF STRESS, MOMENTS OF BLISS

It must have been in the early seventies.

Life was boring, uneventful, with an early wake up, a drive from Paris to Charles-de-Gaulle airport for a twelve hours shirt, a return in the evening, thirty minutes of driving around the apartment in the hope of finding a parking spot for my Renault 16, a quick evening at home, and again, an early wake up in the morning back to the airport. As an operation supervisor, a team of about twenty handlers shared my daily professional life. On the inaugural day following our move from Orly airport to Charles-de-Gaulle, three DC8-63 were flown to Paris, all carrying Strawberries from California but because the size of the ground equipment fleet was still not adjusted to handle such a “major” event, only one of the airplanes handling airplane could be timely offloaded and the load transferred to fresh fruit brokers from Rungis (*) while the cargo of the two other airplanes simply melted under the sun.

Our CDG station was still in infancy and although the handling of transiting airplanes in a given time frame provided the shot of adrenaline, something was still missing. I cannot recall why and when, but the idea came to me to offer my services to another airline and I caught an evening train to Frankfurt with the hope that I could land a job with Overseas National Airways. In these days, many charter companies had a “European head office” in Germany as a direct result of the presence of American troops in Europe since the end of world war II, and I Liked their logo very much. It was some kind of a ship's helm and made me think about the ocean.

(The "helm" : it made me think of the ocean...)

An uneventful meeting took place early the next morning. ONA knew exactly what I was looking for but no opening existed in that time. My dream of travelling to exotic places had to go back on its shelve, in the back of my mind…. but life works in strange ways as a few months later as was on my way to our headquarters in JFK to settle a transfer from our French operation to the Offline operation department, a name that had the flavour of adventure. I simply hated my very first missions: taking care of a load of Micro-wave telephone systems on their way to Saudi Arabia onboard a B747-200 for the account of Western Electric. Ryad was hot, the hotel was empty, the pool water even warmer that the air, and besides beating world records of pigging up on the shrimp cocktails at the coffee show, the adventure was not really there. Long hours spent in flight between Rome and the Middle-East, the routine of the week-ends in Rome waiting for the transit of our Milan-Rome-New York weekly flights, the flying in first-class on Alitalia, it was all nice but finally not so exciting and I was not sure it as really worth it! I nearly quit and wondered how I could return to the “safe” life of station ops.

(Airport plate, KJFK, Kennedy International Airport)

As a French national, I was lucky: one of my assets was …. speaking French and this would prove to be a big “plus” in the future…air operations in Ivory Coast, Morocco, Algeria, Chad, or other nations, formerly a part of the French “empire” in various places of Africa. I guess the big change took place during a trip to Teheran, shortly after Ruhollah Khomeyni, who had spent hundred and seventeen days in the French safe haven of Neauphle-le Chateau, had returned to Iran to start the Islamic Revolution. If I do not recall the exact details of the mission, I clearly remember that we were picking-up some “properties of the US government”. My being of French national came as a help when it was time to file a flight plan back to Frankfurt at the ATC office of Mehrabad airport, close to Teheran. Picture of the “revolutionary leader” were all over the walls and when the ATC personnel found out that I was French, they came forward and hugged me. Although the airplane was of US registration, and Seaboard World Airlines was as American as could be, I did not feel any animosity from the staff, even if all of this operation was touchy and, as it is often the case in times of political uncertainty, we could have been stopped under all kind of reasons. With a very short time on the ground in Teheran, loading had to be completed as quickly as possible, and certainly had my shot of adrenaline on that day, to such an extent that I even started to feel pride and eagerness to stay in this position with the company.

(Ruhollak Khomeyni, leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, returning from 117 in France. A few weeks after, Seaboard World Airlines was picking us "properties of the United States")

Seaboard was a “medium size” airline with many activities besides flying scheduled services to various part of Europe and within the continental US. By then SWA operated some twenty-two airplanes, B747 as well as DC8, and sure enough, the future was brightening up. Saudi operation, Air-India wet lease, Alitalia business, all of this contributed to a kind of “change from within” as I was becoming, slowly but surely, a “World’s citizen”. My life in France was behind me, so was my marriage, I was simply “en route” for wonderful adventures, international airports, without knowing that eventually stress would a part of my life and that I would have to learn to fight it if I wanted to continue with flying around the world. With the acquisition of Seaboard World Airlines by the Flying Tigers Line, the station ops in CDG drastically changed and even if I had wanted to withdraw from my “flying activities” as a manager for Offline Operation, I could not…it was too late…the Charles-de-Gaulle activity was by now limited to “palletized trucks”.

It is with pure bliss that I learned of my integration into the Charter Operation group of the airlines founded by Robert Prescott, a former pilot of the American Volunteer’s Group, in 1946. A “glorious” job was waiting for me and to this date, I still remember my first visit to the FTL Headquarters at 7401 World Way West, on the Los Angeles airport, meeting people who had been doing the job for years and could teach me much more than what I had learnt during the previous years. The was Max S, Gene F, “Charles” Chuck C, Jochem D, from Holland, Ted B…,Ted S., Maynard E… Glen van W…..Roger P….. The was also Carol Mc C. whose father had been a Flying Tigers pilot…Heading the group was Edwin Ned W, all of these great people making the airline what is was with its “can do” spirit. Fighting against time was really the essence of the job with one additional condition: making sure that the job was correctly done, which was not always an easy task. A new mission, a new challenge! One had to be constantly aware that even if the mission was easy, things could turn sour at any time. I learned the importance of having a “plan B”, I learned about keeping my mouth shut when it was necessary, keeping for myself sentiments or opinions that I would have otherwise clearly expressed a few years back, I admitted that I did not know everything, that my days with SWA were no guarantee that I knew to correctly do the job. The pleasure of Flying and conducting missions across the world was very much present….so was the stress: dealing with airport officials in Kaddafi’s Libya, turning an airplane around in war torn Soudan, beating the curfew in Hong-Kong, offloading dead cattle with a winch, counting dead people in the street of Calcutta as we were stuck behind a municipality cart recovering unfortunate people who had dies during the night. I learned the intricacies of the” domino theory” applied to airline business, so that when a situation would become desperate, it could help me taking the “right” decision. I also learned about the “do’s” and “don’t” of the profession, which above all amount to acting like “a mensch” (**) or at least pretending to be one, when in fact, I realise now that I was more of a brat than a mature adult.

I hated conflicts, but sometimes conflicts were necessary to overcome a given issue, I hated psycho-rigid people and I met many of them, and many times, I also hated myself for being unable to come up to the same professional standards as “the others”….although I realised that I was not like them and did not want to be. Stress in Algiers, where we delivered emergency equipment following an earthquake killing five-thousand people and injuring nine thousand. Stress in Surabaya, where it took me over two hours of witnessing animal suffering, before finding a solution to save a cow having managed to catch one leg between the door sill of the airplane and the ramp…Luckily, there were also moments of pure bliss, ranging from a simple shower and a set of fresh clothes following a shower in the aftermath of a cattle flight, to more sophisticated moments, on the top of a Hong-Kong building, drinking a pint of San Miguel, a beer produced locally.

( A B 747-100 flown by Fling Tigers : on the upper deck were three berths)

Other moments of bliss would also include flying the B747-100, simply because I knew that sleeping berths were available, and I could catch-up with much needed sleep. It was not necessarily the “big issues” which could bring stress up…as just asking for a GPU to be brought to the airplane in New-Delhi could trigger anxiety. In India, one could never say if instructions given to ground personnel were really understood. Handling agents would simply shake their head in a “strange way” which I translated by: “I will say yes to your question but I am no convinced that I will find the equipment you need, that the equipment needed will properly operate, and that we do have on the airport the kind of equipment you mentioned”. Short crew rest could be both stress and bliss as we would have to keep an eye on the clock to ensure timely crew wake-up even if we were resting in a de-luxe suite at the Nikko Hotel. On one of the mission I was assigned to, Flying Tigers carried military equipment urgently needed by the Gendarmes in New-Caledonia, a French Island in the Pacific Ocean. “Kanak” independentists were virtually at war with the representatives of the French Republic. The cargo was picked up in Charles de Gaulle during a sub-service for the private airline UTA which did not have the lift capacity. If the mission itself was not so difficult, a “composite load” in Paris and a 50 minutes offload in Nouméa, thanks to the French army, it took me two good weeks to recover from it once back in Europe.

(Havoc hit the city of El Asnam in Algeria on october 10th, 1980, one of my first emergency missions conducted with a Flying Tigers airplane. The acquisition of Seaboard World had been officialized 10 days before..)

By 1988, had lost twenty-seven kilos and had to downgrade de size of my uniform pants by two sizes.

Thanks to good doctor Pierre P, my GP who was also a gifted aerobatic pilot and flew a Stampe & Vertongen SV4 in Etampes, a mere 45 miles from Paris, I was pretty soon given a large bunch of prescriptions which would keep in a dedicated “flying pharmacy” along with medication which may be needed. Although I was by then addicted to the job, my body did not agree with the lifestyle.

Shortly before taking off from Brussels with a load of “industrial goods”, as I was climbing the stupid ladder connecting the upper deck with the main deck, my foot slipped and I missed a step. The physical impact was so painful that I had to get off the airplane in Dubai, our fuel stop, and repatriated to Europe. Diagnosed with several muscles in the abdomen being torn, I had no choice but slowdown for a few weeks while the pain was taken care of by morphine drops….wrong thing to do !

(San Miguel : a beer brewed in Hong-Kong since the 19th century)

(An addictive way to treat pain.....luckily, Icelandic days were not not so far away......)

But life sometimes has asurprise in store and for me, the next blissful moment was ahead of me: I had been assigned to Iceland, the ideal place to fix my body and take care of my soul.

(*) Rungis : the biggest food market in Europe, located between Paris and Orly airport

(**) A Mensch is a man of trustable word, high moral standards, someone who can be and example to a community. It is a “Yiddish” word.