Secrets from the cockpit
Today there are all sorts of rules that air crew have to follow, but in the ’80s it was a case of anything goes. A former SAA pilot spills the beans about what went on: from mile-high sex to first-class excess
IT WAS COMMON FOR THE OLDER PILOTS TO HAVE AIR-HOSTESS GIRLFRIENDS
IT’S hard to imagine it: pilots smoking in the cockpit, flirting with air hostesses and flying their planes like cowboys with absolutely no regard for the comfort or safety of their passengers. Back in the ’80s, SAA was the “ultimate boys’ club”, says Robert Schapiro – and he should know because as a co-pilot he saw it all. And often it wasn’t just the pilots who were behaving badly but the passengers as well.
In this extract from his new memoir, Secrets from the Cockpit: Pilots Behaving Badly and Other Flying Stories, he lifts the lid on some of the crazy antics he witnessed.
CHICKEN OR BEEF?
It wasn’t unusual for pilots and cabin staff to gain 10 kilograms or more in their first year of working for SAA. It may come as a shock to today’s traveller but airline food used to be surprisingly good – even in economy class.
First-class food, though, was in a league of its own. Canapés, appetisers such as caviar and foie gras, soups, main courses such as lobster and fillet steak, lavish desserts and rich cheese and fruit trays were of fine-restaurant quality.
Meats such as rare roast beef, game or duck would be carved to order on board; nothing was pre-packed.
We had crew meals provided for us, but I was advised by another pilot on my very first flight that I should wait until the passengers in first had eaten. Boy, was he right. There was no such thing as “limited choice” in first class, so ample supplies of every dish were loaded – and it was all available to the pilots once the passengers had been served (sometimes even before, if the truth be known).
Economic realities gradually forced all airlines to cut back on costly food items until airline food mostly became the ghastly paste it is today. Even crew meals were downgraded to economy-style food in foil containers. But back then our problem was stopping eating, especially as we knew all uneaten food would be thrown out at our destination.
Crew members packed on weight until they learnt to stop using their bodies as waste bins for leftover food, however tasty.
MILE-HIGH CLUB
There’s this idea that the bathrooms are the location for illicit sex but this is incorrect – most onboard sex takes place right on the passenger seats. It wasn’t unusual for the cabin interphone to ding in the cockpit with a call from a giggling air hostess asking us what to do about a couple having noisy seat sex.
We usually told them to just throw a few blankets over the couple and let them finish. I once inadvertently witnessed seat sex between strangers when I was travelling in first class from London to Cape Town.
The pair across the aisle were cordial and polite before takeoff, chatty over drinks, BFFs over dinner and staring meaningfully at each other over dessert. As the alcohol flowed, it was patently clear what was going to happen after the lights went out.
And happen it did. When the new day dawned the once-jovial couple could barely find a word to say to each other. After breakfast they turned in opposite directions and dozed.
In Joburg the guy disappeared without even saying goodbye. The woman and I both flew on to Cape Town where she fell into the loving arms of her husband.
But this kind of behaviour wasn’t just confined to passengers – it happened among the crew as well.
When I joined SAA, it was common for the older pilots to have air-hostess girlfriends. So common, in fact, that they were called “airline wives”.
The air hostesses were mostly young women who’d joined the airline for the adventure of seeing the world for a few years before moving on. The airline rarely took older women anyway; it wanted attractive youngsters who looked good in their designer uniforms.
These women were expected to maintain a certain weight during their employment and were trained to wear their hair and makeup in a prescribed style.
Some of them saw a marriedpilot boyfriend as a sort of power fashion accessory. They knew that the relationship was unlikely to go anywhere, but they felt it gave them special status among the air crew and on the aircraft. The guys, of course, were only too happy to go along.
Mostly, I tried to avoid passing judgement. It was a different era and a different workplace culture. SAA then was the ultimate boys’ club.
Sometimes these relationships lasted for years. The pilot would live at home with his wife between trips and arrange his schedule to go on flights with his airline wife.
Few even tried to keep these relationships quiet on our trips. I remember my wife, Arlene, watching in disgust as a pilot passionately kissed his girlfriend goodbye in the lobby of a Durban hotel – then waited in the same spot to give an almost-as-passionate greeting to his wife when she arrived on a visit from Johannesburg a few minutes later.
In theory, air-hostess girlfriends avoided the flights when the captain was on a planned trip with his wife. Sometimes, though, if a wife spontaneously decided to go on a trip that had already been arranged with the airline wife, say over Christmas, then the result was worthy of a Broadway farce.
I was on one such trip with both women on board. The captain was a nervous wreck. His airline wife cut him no slack. She berated him mercilessly for ruining the trip every time she saw him, including in the cockpit. Meanwhile his actual wife sat quietly in first class.
The whole crew gathered at a restaurant for Christmas lunch.
The normally garrulous captain and his wife sat at one end of the table, his face a picture of anxiety while his airline amour fumed at the other end. She drank too quickly, laughed too loudly and finally stormed out in tears.
IT WAS A DIFFERENT ERA AND WORKPLACE CULTURE. SAA THEN WAS THE ULTIMATE BOYS’ CLUB
It was fine entertainment for everyone there, but invariably these situations ended in tears or divorce.
HOLY SMOKE
When I joined SAA, many pilots were heavy smokers. It was part of the flyhard, play-even-harder culture. There was no consideration at all for nonsmokers, and pilots smoked whenever they wished in the confined cockpit space.
Unlike today, the right to smoke in the enclosed cockpit trumped any other rights. If there were three smokers on an overseas flight, one of whom might have a pipe, the whole cockpit became wreathed in a foul-grey miasma. In fact, some pilots childishly increased their smoking rate to torment non-smokers.
It was barely any better in the passenger cabin. Planes were divided into farcical smoking and nonsmoking sections.
The smoking section started a row behind the non-smoking seats, with no physical barrier separating them.
Things started to change as public attitudes towards second-hand smoke hardened. Cabin crew were unhappy about being constantly exposed to passengers’ smoke.
The habit was also costly: tobacco smoke left a tarry, sticky residue on aircraft systems, valves and instruments that was expensive to remove. And there was the ever-present danger of fire, especially when people smoked in the bathrooms.
Eventually the day came in 1987 when SAA banned smoking on all its internal flights, one of the first airlines in the world to do so. Smoking would still be allowed on international flights until it was stopped by international agreement – but not for another decade.
UNEXPECTED DETOURS
Before the attacks of 9/11 changed aviation security, we usually flew with the cockpit door wide open. Some captains went further and issued general invitations over the passenger-announcement (PA) system for passengers to visit the flight deck.
It was good public relations and helped make nights pass a little quicker for us. Children were always particularly good visitors, but adults could be obnoxious know-it-alls – especially when they arrived drunk. Weirdly, some passengers actually thought they had some say in what we were doing.
One Tuesday afternoon in my 727 days, we’d taken off from Cape Town and were heading to Johannesburg via Bloemfontein.
Once we were cruising, the captain picked up the PA and briefed the passengers on our altitude, landing time in Bloemfontein and the usual useless facts about our flight.
The cabin chief walked into the open cockpit and reported that some passengers were saying the flight was supposed to be going to Kimberley, not Bloemfontein.
The flight log distinctly showed Bloemfontein as our destination, but mistakes are always possible.
We were already out of radio range of our Cape Town office, so the captain told the cabin-crew chief to take a vote among the passengers to see how many thought we were going to Kimberley and how many to Bloemfontein.
The vote was tallied and the winner was Kimberley by a nose.
We informed air-traffic control of our new destination. After landing in Kimberley, we taxied to our usual parking spot and shut down. The ground engineer came on board and greeted us: “Nice to see you, but why are you here? We don’t have a flight from Cape Town on a Tuesday.”
The next stop we made was in Bloemfontein. It made our day a little longer, but everyone seemed happier.
Overall, though, I have to confess we didn’t always think much about passenger comfort when we were flying.
Most captains followed most of the rules most of the time, but some were cowboy pilots who followed no rules whatsoever.
Luckily, the 727 was a very tough aircraft and as long as there were no serious incidents and they flew normally on check rides, no one really tried to stop them or, indeed, seemed to care. Unfortunately for those seated in the back, cowboy flyers saw passenger comfort not as a consideration but as an impediment.
Passengers most likely to bear the brunt of this were those on the Kimberley–Bloemfontein and Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) – East London sectors.
Both were short legs and there was ongoing competition to see who could fly them in the shortest time.
DEATH ON BOARD
I was on a 747 flight to Madrid when an upset cabin-crew chief came into the cockpit during the night to tell us that a woman in her eighties had died in economy class.
The cabin crew had put out a call for any doctors on board and carried the passenger to first class, where there was more space to try to revive her.
When it was clear that nothing could be done, the crew placed her in one of the translucent body bags we always had on board and moved her away from the shocked passengers.
Later, a cabin steward decided to move her distressed travel companions to the empty upper-deck seats (once used as a lounge).
We informed SAA on company radio
PASSENGERS COULD BE OBNOXIOUS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY WERE DRUNK
and asked them to make arrangements for our arrival in Spain.
An aircraft arriving in a foreign country with a dead body is automatically impounded until a judge confirms there has been no foul play.
This can cause a long delay unless local authorities are already aware of the situation and have the appropriate officials waiting for the aircraft. We were assured that a Spanish doctor would meet our flight.
As the soft light of morning began to filter into the cockpit, I stepped back to the upperdeck cabin to see how the dead woman’s companions were doing. I got a shock.
They were dozing in the last row of seats, and as it grew lighter in the cabin I could clearly see a pair of feet in a translucent body bag sticking into the aisle behind them.
The chief had brought the woman’s body upstairs and placed it behind the seats to hide it – the same seats where the steward later placed her grieving companions.
I feared a disaster if they woke up and looked around, so I quietly draped a blanket over the jutting feet, then told the air hostess to wake them and tell them they needed to return to their original seats for landing.
After waiting 20 minutes on the Madrid apron, the doctor arrived to check the dead passenger. He was led to the upper deck and the bagged body was brought out from behind the seats.
The doctor took a quick look and asked who had determined that the person was dead. The chief held up his hand. “And how long has she been sealed in this body bag?” he asked. “About six hours,” replied the chief. “Okay, she’s dead now for sure,” he pronounced and cleared the passengers to disembark.
The last part of the story was even sadder. The woman had been due to remain on the plane for the next leg of the flight, to Frankfurt, but as she was deceased she was no longer considered a passenger.
Instead, she was classed as freight for the next leg. We were told that her passenger ticket to Frankfurt was voided and her family would have to pay, by the kilogram, for her body and a coffin to travel in a cargo hold.
I don’t know exactly how it worked, but a part of me wished we could have kept her hidden behind the seats and only “discovered” her on the last leg.
NEAR MISSES
Things often go wrong when flying. From mechanical failures to bad weather, pilots have to be ready for all sorts of emergencies. And that’s where the professionals set themselves apart from the amateurs.
I had several close calls on the 737. One time, we were headed into the sleepy Garden Route coastal city of George, located on a beautiful rolling plain halfway between Cape Town and Gqeberha. Looking inland, the plain ends at the tall Outeniqua Mountains which divide it from the much drier Little Karoo.
That inland valley ends in another line of mountains, the Swartberg range, roughly parallel to the Outeniquas. Beyond that lies the arid Great Karoo.
As we usually approached George from the coastal side, the mountains were not typically an issue. But sometimes we approached from the interior, which meant we had to cross both mountain ranges.
As the airport had no radar, in overcast conditions we first flew over the airfield at high altitude before descending over the coastal plain.
On this flight we were headed into George with solid cloud cover below. We descended to a safe altitude and then flew level, waiting until we were over the airport.
The distance-measuring equipment (DME) showed 20 kilometres to the airport, very close in aviation terms, when the clouds suddenly parted and we saw that we were passing over a mountain range.
Confident that we were already over the coastal plain, we asked to visually continue the descent instead of passing overhead at high altitude. Air-traffic control agreed to our request. The clouds closed up again below but we started to descend anyway.
However, something was niggling the captain. He decided to stop the descent slightly above the altitude of the tallest mountain until we saw the ground again.
As we flew level, I actually felt annoyed at his timidity.
Then at 4 DME, only 6km to the field, the clouds opened again. We were passing over a second set of mountains. They were very, very close.
Fooled by the close DME, without knowing the exact distance to the mountain ranges, we thought we were passing the Outeniquas, but we were wrong – we’d first spotted the Swartberge.
Luckily the captain had more sense than I did. If we’d continued descending as I’d wanted to do, we’d have flown directly into the Outeniquas.
I learnt a big lesson about assuming anything that day. I also lost another cat’s life.
THINGS OFTEN GO WRONG WHEN FLYING. I HAD SEVERAL CLOSE CALLS