PARIS WITHOUT BLANKETS
“What’s a good title for a Substack about airline life?” I ask my husband.
“Himmms,” he says, riding the m for a while on his way out the door, with a sort of Monty Python musicality-of-the-absurd. He is referring with this compact riff to several things, including a contentious relationship with his mail-order prescription for hair loss tonic, which frequently gets pulled aside for secondary screening in UK airports.
Kind of like the bricks of aged Cornish Cruncher cheese he brings home for me from London every week, and the European airport security status these have earned him as a perpetually suspicious.
Because here’s the thing: airline pilots are subject to almost all the same absolute shit everyone else is when they’re flying. Except they’re also having to run the machinery, literal and figurative, that serves to torture us all.
*
On his last trip, which was to the UK from New York, he was ready to pull back from the gate— you know, having read the 120-page briefing packet for the flight and made all relevant notes and highlights about alternative airports for landing in case of an emergency along the way, run about fifty checklists in concert with his first officer to get the jet bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the long haul, done the fueling calculations and routing plans for the transatlantic crossing and entered it into the relevant computer memories for consultation and potential necessary alteration later in response to changing circumstances, and gotten something close enough to the right proportion of coffee to water into his own meatbag to get him from take-off to his assigned crew-rest shift— when he received a notification that there was catering on board the plane he was flying that was slated to go to Paris rather than the UK. We’re talking croissants instead of scones, really shocking stuff here.
See, the plane he was flying had been yoinked from the nearby Paris gate, from a flight that left later and therefore had more time to get its shit together, in a routine procedure they call a tail-swap, when the original machine slated to make his UK crossing got a head cold or something. Now they were almost ready to get going, finally, only twenty-five minutes behind schedule (had to run all the checklists and do all the inputs again) and someone’s undies are in a bunch about Paris catering.
So he makes a few calls and he asks exactly how important it is that the French entrees go to France and the English entrees go to England. (Editor’s note: as my husband read this to check for accuracy, we received this nugget of insight: “It’s not like it matters. All the meals are Italian.”) I mean, it’s not like the lucky clucks going to Paris are going to become confused about where they’re headed because they’re served Welsh rarebit instead of escargot.
But no one else has all the information necessary in that moment to make these arrangements, so he’s on the phone talking to catering, while he watches the on-time departure window narrow and narrow and winnow away, so that his whole crew is now right up against the final bit of margin before facing a fine in London for being outside their slated gate-time on arrival— which could erase any remainder of the small profit margin of the flight.
Phew, it turns out catering can indeed send the scones to Paris, and all is well enough.
So they block out, and he lifts the parking break, which triggers everyone’s hourly pay, and they back away from the jet bridge. They’re on their way and might make it in time.
Then they get a call saying there are blankets that are supposed to go to Paris in the belly of his plane. Through the Byzantine hierarchies of administrative decision-making in our country, despite being the only one with all the information, it is not the captain’s call to make, whether these blankets’ fates are to be English or French. It will take a lot more time than is conceivable to sort it all out.
It is my husband’s reflex— “from back in the days when I was slinging bags” to just get someone on the ground crew to crawl up into the cargo hold and get the damn blankets. It is not a complicated problem, he says. Open door, person in, blankets out, on our way. But there is no open channel of communication directly to ground crew for this kind of thing, nor do they have the information they need about which blankets or where to get them.
So it has to go through several other departments, and the problem is that the different solutions, to this real head-scratcher of how to retrieve the blankets, all require different operational performances and checklists from my husband and his first officer.
Finally the plane is opened, presumably like a clam, somehow, for someone to pop in, and that someone happens to be a very ebullient gate agent from somewhere inside the airport and outside the situation, who cheerfully says “Hi there! How’re y’all doing?” when he comes through the door onto the plane.
*
Sometimes, pilots can bend the bureaucratic wormhole slightly in their favor, by doing things like requesting a new shaving kit every time they arrive at their English hotel (left my razor at home— could you please send up a shaving kit? …<vaguely suspicious look from the front desk person who has provided perhaps ten or twenty shaving kits by now>) just so they can have those nicer razors and soaps that European dignity requires.
“I don’t know how interested you are in real news,” he says to me when he gets home, “but I brought a copy of the Financial Times in case you want to see what non-American news looks like.”
“Oh, so it’s, like, real news?” I say.
“It’s good,” he says. “I took the liberty of removing the financial portions and using them as sunscreens on the flight. I’m going to get melanoma on the left side of my body because I fly westward across the Atlantic during the day.”
His entire job is this very mixture of absurdity and hilarity; he lives inside an interwoven series of deeply practical measures, nightmares, and dreamscapes— all presided over by the contortions of bureaucracy.
*
Finally the plane is opened, presumably like a clam, somehow, for someone to pop in, and that someone happens to be a very ebullient gate agent from somewhere inside the airport and outside the situation, who cheerfully says “Hi there! How’re y’all doing?” when he comes through the door onto the plane.
There is a brief exchange in which it is made clear the gate agent actually has no idea why anyone is there, either himself or the plane full of pilots and late passengers. No one has told him. All he knows is that a plane returned to the gate, and he’s there to help.
He brings some news that no American will be surprised to hear.
When the gate agent asks what brought them back to the gate, my husband says, “Oh, we’re just here to offload some blankets that were supposed to go to Paris.”
“I don’t know why you guys are doing that,” says the gate agent. “That flight left twenty minutes ago.”
How you weave the paths of insight and not so much sight has a particularity of hilarity! And the ghost of Monty Python is dying to do a show on this one : )
I love this salty insight into what goes on behind the scenes whilst we passenger class people are griping about late flights and small seats as if it didn't take a whole army of employees plus a little bit of magic to get just one flight off the ground, let alone the whole damn system. Request for future column: day in the life of an air traffic controller. Or maybe not.