Catch Me If You Can (4 page)

I suddenly noticed the uniform jacket and cap each lacked something. “Where’s the Pan Am wings and the Pan Am emblem?” I asked.

Rosen regarded me quizzically and I tensed. I blew it, I thought. Then Rosen shrugged. “Oh, we don’t carry those. We just manufacture uniforms. You’re talking about hardware. Hardware comes directly from Pan Am, at least here in New York. You’ll have to get the wings and the emblem from Pan Am’s stores department.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, smiling. “In L.A. the same people who supply our uniforms supply the emblems. How much do I owe you for this uniform? I’ll write you a check.” I was reaching for my checkbook when it dawned on me that my checks bore the name Frank Abagnale, Jr., and almost certainly would expose my charade.

Rosen himself staved off disaster. “It’s $289, but I can’t take a check.” I acted disappointed. “Well, gosh, Mr. Rosen, I’ll have to go cash a check then and bring you the cash.”

Rosen shook his head. “Can’t take cash, either,” he said. “I’m going to have to bill this back to your employee account number and it’ll be deducted from your uniform allowance or taken out of your paycheck. That’s the way we do it here.“ Rosen was a veritable fount of airline operations information and I was grateful.

He handed me a form in triplicate and I commenced to fill in the required information. Opposite the space for my name were five small connected boxes, and I assumed rightly that they were for an employee’s payroll account number. Five boxes. Five digits. I filled in the boxes with the first five numbers that came to mind, signed the form and pushed it back to Rosen. He snapped off the bottom copy, handed it to me.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Rosen,” I said, and left, carrying the lovely uniform. If Rosen answered, I didn’t hear him.

I went back to my room and dialed the Pan Am switchboard again. “Excuse me, but I was referred to the stores department,” I said, acting confused. “What is that, please? I’m not with the company, and I have to make a delivery there.”

The switchboard girl was most helpful. “Stores is our employee commissary,” she said. “It’s in Hangar Fourteen at Kennedy Airport. Do you need directions?”

I said I didn’t and thanked her. I took an airport bus to Kennedy and was dismayed when the driver let me off in front of Hangar 14. Whatever stores Pan Am kept in Hangar 14, they had to be valuable. The hangar was a fortress, surrounded by a tall cyclone fence topped with strands of barbed wire and its entrances guarded by armed sentries. A sign on the guard shack at each entrance warned “employees only.”

A dozen or more pilots, stewardesses and civilians entered the compound while I reconnoitered from the bus stop. I noticed the civilians stopped and displayed identification to the guards, but most of the uniformed personnel, pilots and stewardesses, merely strolled through the gate, some without even a glance at the guard. Then one turned back to say something to a sentry and I noticed he had an ID card clipped to his breast pocket below his wings
.

It was a day that threatened rain. I had brought a raincoat along, a black one similar to the ones some of the pilots had draped over their arms. I had my newly acquired pilot’s uniform in a small duffle bag. I felt a little like Custer must have felt when he chanced upon Sitting Bull’s Sioux.

I reacted just like Custer. I charged. I went into one of the airport toilets and changed into the uniform, stuffing my civies into the duffle bag. Then I left the terminal and walked directly toward Hangar 14’s nearest entrance.

The guard was in his shack, his back toward me. As I neared the gate, I flipped the raincoat over my left shoulder, concealing the entire left side of my jacket, and swept off my hat. When the guard turned to confront me, I was combing my hair with my fingers, my hat in my left hand.

I didn’t break stride. I smiled and said crisply, “Good evening.” He made no effort to stop me, although he returned my greeting. A moment later I was inside Hangar 14. It was, indeed, a hangar. A gleaming 707, parked at the rear of the building, dominated the interior. But Hangar 14 was also an immense compartmented office structure containing the offices of the chief pilot and chief stewardess, the firm’s meteorology offices and dozens of other cubicles that I presumed accommodated other Pan Am functions or personnel. The place was teeming with human traffic. There seemed to be dozens of pilots, scores of stewardesses and innumerable civilians milling around. I presumed the latter were clerks, ticket agents, mechanics and other nonflying personnel.

I hesitated in the lobby, suddenly apprehensive. Abruptly I felt like a sixteen-year-old and I was sure that anyone who looked at me would realize I was too young to be a pilot and would summon the nearest cop.

I didn’t turn a head. Those who did glance at me displayed no curiosity or interest. There was a large placard on a facing wall listing various departments and with arrows pointing the way. Stores was down a corridor to my left, and proved to be a military-like cubicle with a myriad of box-holding shelves. A lanky youth with his name embroidered on the right side of his shirt rose from a chair in front of a large desk as I stopped at the counter.

“Can I he’p ya?” he asked in molasses tones. It was the first real southern drawl I’d ever heard. I liked it.

“Yes,” I said and attempted a rueful grin. “I need a pair of wings and a hat emblem. My two-year-old took mine off my uniform last night and he won’t, or can’t, tell me what he did with them.”

The storekeeper laughed. “We got mo‘ wings on kids ’n gals ‘n we got on pilots, I ’spect,” he said drolly. “We shore replace a lot of ‘em, anyway. Here you are. Gimme yore name and employee number.” He took a form from a file slot on his desk and laid it on the counter with a pair of golden wings and a Pan Am cap badge and stood, pen poised.

“Robert Black, first officer, 35099,” I said, affixing the hat emblem and pinning the wings on my tunic. “I’m out of Los Angeles. You need an address there?”

He grinned. “Nah, damned computers don’t need noth-in‘ but numbers,” he replied, handing me a copy of the purchase form.

I loitered leaving the building, trying to mingle unobtrusively with the crowd.

I wanted to pick up as much information as possible on airline pilots and airline operations, and this seemed a good opportunity to glean a few tidbits. Despite the number of pilots and other aircrewmen in the building, they all seemed to be strangers to one another. I was especially interested in the plastic-enclosed cards, obviously identification of some sort, that most of the pilots sported on their breasts. The stewardesses, I observed, had similar ID cards but had them clipped to their purse straps.

A couple of pilots were scanning notices tacked on a large bulletin board in the lobby. I stopped and pretended to look at some of the notices, FAA or Pan Am memos mostly, and was afforded a close-up view of one pilot’s ID card. It was slightly larger than a driver’s license and similar to the one in my pocket, save for a passport-sized color photograph of the man in the upper right-hand corner and Pan American’s firm name and logo across the top in the company’s colors.

Obviously/ I reflected as I left the building, I was going to need more than a uniform if I was to be successful in my role of Pan Am pilot. I would need an ID card and a great deal more knowledge of Pan Am’s operations than I possessed at the moment. I put the uniform away in my closet and started haunting the public library and canvassing bookstores, studying all the material available on pilots, flying and airlines. One small volume I encountered proved especially valuable. It was the reminiscences of a veteran Pan American flight captain, replete with scores of photographs, and containing a wealth of airline terminology. It was not until later I learned that the pilot’s phraseology was somewhat dated.

A lot of the things I felt I ought to know, however, were not in the books or magazines I read. So I got back on the pipe with Pan Am. “I’d like to speak to a pilot, please,” I told the switchboard operator. “I’m a reporter for my high school newspaper, and I’d like to do a story on pilots’ lives-you know, where they fly, how they’re trained and that sort of stuff. Do you think a pilot would talk to me?”

Pan Am has the nicest people. “Well, I can put you through to operations, the crew lounge,” said the woman. “There might be someone sitting around there that might answer some of your questions.”

There was a captain who was happy to oblige. He was delighted that young people showed an interest in making a career in the airline field. I introduced myself as Bobby Black, and after some innocuous queries, I started to feed him the questions I wanted answered.

“What’s the age of the youngest pilot flying for Pan Am?”

“Well, that depends,” he answered. “ We have some flight engineers who’re probably no older than twenty-three or twenty-four. Our youngest co-pilot is probably up in his late twenties. Your average captain is close to forty or in his forties, probably.“

“I see,” I said. “Well, would it be impossible for a copilot to be twenty-six, or even younger?”

“Oh, no,” he answered quickly. “I don’t know that we have that many in that age bracket, but some of the other airlines do have a lot of younger co-pilots, I’ve noticed. A lot depends, of course, on the type of plane he’s flying and his seniority. Everything is based on seniority, that is, how long a pilot has been with a company.”

I was finding a lot of nuggets for my poke. “When do you hire people; I mean, at what age can a pilot go to work for an airline, say Pan Am?”

“If I remember correctly, you can come on the payroll at twenty as a flight engineer,” said the captain, who had an excellent memory.

“Then feasibly, with six or eight years’ service, you could become a co-pilot?” I pressed.

“If s possible,” he conceded. “In fact, I’d say it wouldn’t be unusual at all for a capable man to make co-pilot in six or eight years, less even.”

“Are you allowed to tell me how much pilots earn?” I asked.

“Well, again, that depends on seniority, the route he flies, the number of hours he flies each week and other factors,” said the captain. “I would say the maximum salary for a co-pilot would be $32,000, a captain’s salary around $50,000.”

“How many pilots does Pan Am have?” I asked.

The captain chuckled. “Son, that’s a tough one. I don’t know the exact number. But eighteen hundred would probably be a fair estimate. You can get better figures from the personnel manager.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “How many places are these pilots?”

“You’re talking about bases,” he replied. “We have five bases in the United States: San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, Miami and New York. Those are cities where our aircrews live. They report to work in that city, San Francisco, say, fly out of that city and eventually terminate a flight in that city. It might help you to know that we are not a domestic carrier, that is, we don’t fly from city to city in this country. We’re strictly an international carrier, serving foreign destinations.”

The information helped me a lot. “This may sound strange to you, Captain, and it’s more curiosity than anything else, but would it be possible for me to be a co-pilot based in New York City, and you to be a co-pilot also based in New York, and me never to meet you?”

“Very possible, even more so with co-pilots, for you and I would 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.”