Catch Me If You Can Page 0,14

never fly together in the same plane," said the talkative captain. "Unless we met at a company meeting or some social function, which is improbable, we might never encounter one another. You'd be more apt to know more captains and more flight engineers than co-pilots. You might fly with different captains or different flight engineers and run into them again if you're transferred, but you'd never fly with another co-pilot. There's only one to a plane.

"There're so many pilots in the system, in fact, that no one pilot would know all the others. I've been with the company eighteen years, and I don't think I know more than sixty or seventy of the other pilots."

The captain's verbal pinballs were lighting up all the lights in my little head.

"I've heard that pilots can fly free, I mean as a passenger, not as a pilot. Is that true?" I prompted.

"Yes," said the captain. "But we're talking about two things, now. We have pass privileges. That is, me and my family can travel somewhere by air on a stand-by basis. That is, if there's room, we can occupy seats, and our only cost is the tax on the tickets. We pay that.

"Then there's deadheading. For example, if my boss told me tonight that he wanted me in L.A. tomorrow to fly a trip out of there, I might fly out there on Delta, Eastern, TWA or any other carrier connecting with Los Angeles that could get me there on time. I would either occupy an empty passenger seat or, more likely, ride in the jump seat. That's a little fold-down seat in the cockpit, generally used by deadheading pilots, VIPs or FAA check riders."

"Would you have to help fly the plane?" I quizzed.

"Oh, no," he replied. "I'd be on another company's carrier, you see. You might be offered a control seat as a courtesy, but I always decline. We fly on each other's planes to get somewhere, not to work." He laughed.

"How do you go about that, deadheading, I mean?" I was really enthused. And the captain was patient. He must have liked kids.

"You want to know it all, don't you?" he said amiably, and proceeded to answer my question.

"Well, it's done on what we call a pink slip. It works this way. Say I want to go to Miami on Delta. I go down to Delta operations, show them my Pan Am ID card and I fill out a Delta pink slip, stating my destination and giving my position with Pan Am, my employee number and my FAA pilot's license number. I get a copy of the form and that's my 'jump/ I give that copy to the stewardess when I board, and that's how I get to ride in the jump seat."

I wasn't through, and he didn't seem to mind my continuing. "What's a pilot's license look like?" I asked. "Is it a certificate that you can hang on the wall, or like a driver's license, or what?"

He laughed. "No, if s not a certificate you hang on the wall. If s kind of hard to describe, really. If s about the size of a driver's license, but there's no picture attached. It's just a white card with black printing on it."

I decided it was time to let the nice man go back to his comfortable seat. "Gee, Captain, I sure thank you," I said. "You've been really super."

"Glad to have helped you, son," he said. "I hope you get those pilot's wings, if that's what you want."

I already had the wings. What I needed was an ID card and an FAA pilot's license. I wasn't too concerned about the ID card. The pilot's license had me stumped. The FAA was not exactly a mail-order house.

I let my fingers do the walking in my search for a suitable ID card. I looked in the Yellow Pages under identification, picked a firm on Madison Avenue (any ID company with a Madison Avenue address had to have class, I thought) and went to the firm dressed in a business suit.

It was a prestigious office suite with a receptionist to screen the walk-in trade. "Can I help you?" she asked in efficient tones.

"I'd like to see one of your sales representatives, please," I replied in equally businesslike inflections.

The sales representative had the assured air and manner of a man who would disdain talking about a single ID card, so I hit him with what I thought would best get his attention and win his