Latest / So There I Was / High Wire Episode 55

Transcript

High Wire Episode 55 · So There I Was

• 0:00
  Quiet numbskulls, I'm broadcasting. You're listening to the podcast, so there I was.
• 0:06
  It's how all great aviation tales begin.
• 0:10
  This is episode 55 with Cam. 55. Hard to believe.
• 0:17
  It doesn't seem right.
• 0:19
  And what a great interview Cam was.
• 0:21
  This was a lot of fun, yeah. Reached out to us through email, and it turns out he spent a few years as an American Airlines
• 0:29
  pilot, but is also a very talented author. And he wrote the book Highwire, which is this,
• 0:38
  week's show title, obviously. Fun book to read. Initially published, was it the week
• 0:45
  after or the week before 9-11?
• 0:47
  I think it was the week before because they pulled it. Yeah. They pulled it off the shelf. It was way too close to 9-11. It involved a terror
• 0:56
  And so he republished it recently and I've read it, it was a fun read, uh, keep you on
• 1:02
  the edge of your seat.
• 1:03
  It's like, man, the next, next thing coming down the pike, what is it?
• 1:06
  And it was good, good twists and turns, but well-written, fun to read.
• 1:09
  So, uh, he has an amazing story himself, just a personal story.
• 1:14
  I mean, how he got to the United States and how he became a pilot and, and, and, and,
• 1:22
  got to the United States and how he became a pilot. And he had some pretty.
• 1:29
  Amazing flying stories to boot. Born in Iran, taken to India as a young teenager, left in a boarding school. He and his brothers made it to England, then
• 1:37
  made it to the United States to go to university. And he had a friend at work
• 1:41
  who took him for an airplane ride and the rest as they say is history. He had
• 1:45
  an absolute ball doing that. So one other thing I do want to mention though before
• 1:51
  Before we get out of the way and go to cam here, Fig, is our new sponsor, Factor.
• 1:56
  I mean, is that great or what? We appreciate the support that we are getting from people around the world as this show
• 2:03
  is getting bigger, people are reaching in and trying to help out.
• 2:06
  And so we want to spread the word for Factor.
• 2:09
  We're going to talk more about it later in the show, but I'll tell you right now, go
• 2:12
  to factormeals.com slash sothereIwas50 and use the code sothereIwas50.
• 2:19
  So there I was five zero to get 50% off your first box Amazing stuff. That's meals ready in two minutes pre-cooked, but man, this ain't TV dinner stuff
• 2:31
  this is gourmet good stuff and they've got,
• 2:34
  Keto and vegan and high protein and all kinds of really really neat options for you to choose,
• 2:44
  So, I think the next thing we do though is get out of the way and listen to high water
• 2:48
  We really appreciated that.
• 2:49
  Music.
• 3:02
  So there I was crossing the pond and you could see that I wasn't exactly fond.
• 3:08
  So there I was, Teterboro, New Jersey, at the airport, one of the older Learjet versions,
• 3:17
  happened to be Frank Sinatra's airplane, big Lady Barbara in the front of it.
• 3:23
  We come in about an hour before the flight, due to the pre-flight, and I'm looking at
• 3:27
  oxygen, and oxygen is right at zero.
• 3:31
  So I get a hold of maintenance, it was a company that was out of Long Beach, and I call the
• 3:36
  guys up and I said, guys, you got oxygen at zero, we got to get it serviced.
• 3:41
  Guys are on our way out there.
• 3:43
  He said, no, you got to fly the airplane, you got to bring it all the way out here,
• 3:47
  you know, at zero oxygen. I said, you got to be kidding me, you know, it's a Lear.
• 3:50
  You know, we're going to go out 35, 37,000 feet going back out there.
• 3:55
  He said, you bring that Lear jet, you grab them and you bring them out here or you're
• 3:59
  you're fired where you stand.
• 4:02
  And like a complete dipshit, I flew the airplane with zero oxygen and brought it to Long Beach.
• 4:09
  Because I was looking for work and it was hard to get and scared the crap out of me.
• 4:16
  Well, so there I was. Wow. Well, welcome to So There I Was.
• 4:21
  This is Fig and I am actually out of the woods
• 4:25
  from Turkey, almost killing expedition. Where are you, my co-horse repeat?
• 4:31
  I'm home again tonight for almost 48 more hours. Then I'm off to Europe.
• 4:35
  Glad to be home for the ending, ending my vacation.
• 4:38
  And what you just heard there was the first of many funny, good stories.
• 4:43
  I'm sure coming up from our guest tonight, author, retired American
• 4:48
  captain, Cam Majd, and he is the author of High Wire coming out, going to hit
• 4:54
  one of Amazon's number one bestsellers next week and we are excited to have you
• 5:01
  with us, Cam. Welcome aboard. Yeah, welcome aboard, Cam. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.
• 5:06
  This is great. So, you've got quite the history. You got some of it pre-show.
• 5:11
  Let's just hop right into that. Usually, we ask how do you get into aviation.
• 5:16
  But you were not born in the United States. So, I'm going to ask how did you get to the
• 5:20
  the United States. Give us a little background there and tell us about your
• 5:24
  travels and travails, if you would.
• 5:27
  There was lots of that. I was born in Iran. I lived there for the first 13 years of my life.
• 5:33
  And then went to India. My father took me and a couple of brothers and kind of dropped us off.
• 5:39
  And so we were there for about three and a half, four years.
• 5:41
  Went to school, boarding school, kind of learned the languages, learned English, learned a little bit of, you know, how to speak Indian.
• 5:48
  And then I went over to England in 1974. Lived there in London for a year.
• 5:54
  Tried to get to the United States. It was not as easy as one would have hoped. I took 11 tries,
• 6:00
  went on the 11th try. They finally said, screw it, we better give these guys a visa or they're
• 6:04
  never going to leave us alone. Got a visa for myself and two brothers and I gave up everything
• 6:15
  we had out there in 16 hours and was on a Pan Am flight from London to Dulles the very next day.
• 6:22
  Wow.
• 6:23
  So dropped off in India at the age of 13. That's special.
• 6:28
  Wow. That took- Yeah, boarding school. Yeah, boarding school.
• 6:31
  That tells me it took some real perseverance and a vision on your part.
• 6:35
  What point did you go, I've got to get there?
• 6:39
  This is not for me. I want to get there. You know, it was kind of an instinctual thing here all your life.
• 6:45
  You know, you're looking for something bigger and better to do all your life.
• 6:49
  As far as coming to the United States, it was a dream. It wasn't my dream.
• 6:53
  It was everybody's dream.
• 6:55
  We sat there and I was watching Popeye in black and white and there were neighbors TV,
• 7:00
  when I was four years old, five years old, you know, and, and, and watching American
• 7:04
  football and, and it's a world of curiosities, a world of excitement, color, all the things
• 7:09
  that was, you know, absent.
• 7:11
  Are you telling me that Popeye speaks Farsi?
• 7:18
  That's the whole shebang. Yeah. Yeah. And it's amazing. Yeah.
• 7:22
  You can still get a burger on, on pay you next Tuesday.
• 7:27
  Very cool. Oh, that's awesome,
• 7:30
  So you got to the States, sounds like you're about 17, 18 years old?
• 7:34
  I was 17 years old, I finished high school. I got here in December of 1974 and went right
• 7:41
  into high school and I only had about three months of the 12th grade to finish,
• 7:45
  before I went into January and I think by April or May school was over. So that was
• 7:50
  my introduction to America, was last four months of high school in Arlington, Texas.
• 7:56
  And just, of course, went through that pretty, it wasn't very difficult at that point because the level of education, you know, overseas was just different.
• 8:04
  You know, what you were studying in India and in England was just, you know, when it came to a lot of things other than, you know, say history, you know, the math, you know, literature, some of the other stuff.
• 8:13
  It didn't, it wasn't a very difficult transition. You were way ahead of your peers when you got to the United States.
• 8:20
  You know, unfortunately, yes, I think in a way. So everybody is asking,
• 8:24
  how are you going to get through high school?
• 8:25
  Are you going to get through the finals? You know, and I just looked at the books and said, we'll manage.
• 8:30
  And then you got through it. But again, you know, America is America.
• 8:33
  It still doesn't matter what the education or anything like that.
• 8:36
  It's still, I mean, it comes to colleges, universities, you know, the top six or eight best ones
• 8:40
  in the world are all here.
• 8:42
  But anyhow, that was it. So I went to college across the street, UTA, UT Arlington.
• 8:48
  Just got restaurant jobs, got a job at TGI Fridays back then,
• 8:52
  there was only one, and Greenville Avenue in Dallas, that was the only, the original one,
• 8:56
  and then worked my way behind a bar, became a barback and a bartender,
• 9:00
  and a cold, wintry day, a fellow bartender got his pilot's license and he said,
• 9:05
  "'Cam, you wanna go out on a flight?"
• 9:07
  And I couldn't believe that he's asking me to get on an airplane.
• 9:10
  You know, to me, an airplane was an airplane. I mean, you don't just get up and go.
• 9:14
  That was my first pure introduction. So grab me up, we took me in a little Cessna
• 9:20
  and we went up at Redbird Airport.
• 9:23
  Just did a couple of touch and goes and I said, this is it. This is what I want to do the rest of my life.
• 9:29
  Use tip money and learn how to fly. I would go back years and decades later,
• 9:37
  and I would meet that same bartender, actually, Morgan Winans. Morgan, if you can hear this.
• 9:42
  Thank you for getting me into the field. Morgan, I would go, what are you doing here,
• 9:48
  dude? You're the one that got me into this. You got to go out, and he wouldn't.
• 9:53
  An interesting thing is, fast forward 30 years, I'm at the end of a jet bridge in Honolulu,
• 9:59
  getting ready to pick up an airplane. And it's a Czech airman bringing the airplane in from
• 10:03
  somewhere. You do the normal thing, you know, ask for the rides and the paperwork and all of that.
• 10:07
  And we were doing all that. And I'm talking to the Czech airman, there's a tall guy about 20
• 10:11
  feet away and he's staring down at us. And I'm talking to this guy, very aware of these other
• 10:16
  set of eyes that are staring at me. And then, you know, the guy takes a couple more steps forward,
• 10:20
  staring again, you know, and a couple more steps still. He's right on my shoulder here,
• 10:24
  staring right dead ahead in my face, you know, it's looking right at him. Like my natural reaction
• 10:30
  is like, you know, I didn't know she was married, you know, but jokes aside. And he says, your camp.
• 10:40
  You know, yeah. And it was Morgan. He had made it, he had flown for Eagle for, you know, many years
• 10:48
  and gotten through the, you know, the system into American airlines and was just getting
• 10:52
  get his check right. He was only about a year or so from retirement.
• 10:56
  Yeah, but he had managed to get it and it was, it was pretty, pretty special.
• 11:00
  That's pretty awesome. Wow.
• 11:02
  That's a, that's a, that's a nice crossing of the T and dotting of the I for that story. That's awesome.
• 11:07
  So obviously you got bitten hard by the aviation bug. And so that was your focus at that point.
• 11:14
  It was, and it was, it wasn't the easiest time. This was 1978 is when, yeah, when I first started one of the, the year I soloed out
• 11:23
  of Arlington Airport, a place called Cawthron Aviation, I think it was called.
• 11:28
  It was 19 December or so of 1978. And it wasn't the best time to get into the regulation that just hit in.
• 11:35
  So good airlines, you know, Braniff having difficult times, and we all know, you know,
• 11:40
  what happened to Eastern and Pan Am and the rest of them.
• 11:43
  Yeah, there you go. There's a lot of guys on the road, a lot of guys furloughed, not the best time to be wanting to get into that.
• 11:52
  Again, like you guys know, I mean, that's what we all have in common regardless of where we're from.
• 11:58
  We're all pilots. Bitten by the bug, we just are. And so I just kept learning how to fly.
• 12:04
  I transferred with Fridays from Dallas to Southern California, and I just used tip money
• 12:10
  and I would go to the, you know, I got my private pilot's license out of Torrance Airport.
• 12:17
  And I would just grab anybody I wanted.
• 12:18
  Fridays, I wanted to go to Catalina for five bucks. You know, Palm Springs for 15 bucks.
• 12:23
  So I just divide up the cost of the plane by the number of people, seats there were.
• 12:27
  Oh, it was always taken.
• 12:28
  So yeah, I did that, because people were going, you gotta be kidding me.
• 12:32
  I mean, you know, you take a little Cessna and you put it right on the deck, 10 feet above the water.
• 12:37
  You go all the way to Catalina, it's only 20 minutes.
• 12:40
  But it's pretty cool, even though you're only doing maybe 100, 150, or 30 miles an hour, whatever it was.
• 12:45
  You get over there, land, you know, have a Buffalo burger and come back.
• 12:49
  It's an afternoon.
• 12:51
  And so these guys loved it. So I got some time that way and learned how to fly.
• 12:56
  Then I taught flight instructions, did that for a while.
• 12:58
  But even there, there's a story there even. The school that I was at, Martin Aviation,
• 13:03
  they didn't have any openings.
• 13:05
  There was just too many instructors for the number of people that wanted to learn how to fly.
• 13:08
  And I was walking out of the class, the school one time, and I saw this guy that's coming in,
• 13:13
  this foreign-looking guy. I said, what are you doing here? He says, I wanna learn how to fly.
• 13:17
  I said, where are you from? I'm from Iran.
• 13:19
  I said, you go in there to those guys and you tell them you want to learn how to
• 13:22
  fly, but you need them. Farsi speaking instructor.
• 13:27
  I went to Friday's to do my shift that night. I think there was a phone call.
• 13:32
  It says, uh, can, can you start tomorrow?
• 13:34
  Uh, we've got a guy here that wants, you know, okay, here we go.
• 13:38
  Hey man, if you aren't always working your ball, right. You know.
• 13:43
  Well, whatever you have to do. I mean, it's crap.
• 13:48
  That's very cool. Well played, sir. Congratulations. Yes, well played.
• 13:53
  So, you built some time CFI and then, um... Well, yeah.
• 13:57
  So, I was doing both jobs, a standing bar at night and doing CFI stuff, CFI, double
• 14:02
  I, MEI, AGI, you know, every I that I could come up with.
• 14:05
  Then at nighttime, I was a standing bar and of course, TGI Fridays, you know, it was a
• 14:10
  place to go back to. And a lot of pilots would come through there, a lot of furloughed pilots, you know, a lot
• 14:15
  of Air Cal guys that were, you know, had private pilot jobs.
• 14:19
  And of course, you know, once they were pilots, uh, they didn't much pay for drinks for a lot of times.
• 14:24
  Not supposed to say that, but, you know, what are they going to do?
• 14:30
  And so made some contacts and these guys, you know, they needed a warm body in their planes once in a while.
• 14:35
  They would just say, Hey, Cam, you know, I'm, I'm doing a test for our flight.
• 14:38
  I'm going from here to whatever you want to come. And I just jump on and got some time that way.
• 14:43
  King Airs, Leers, you know, whatever.
• 14:45
  And then just kind of went around the country wherever I could get a job, like most of us did.
• 14:50
  I mean, if you guys did military, you know, God bless you, you went through the hard courses
• 14:55
  and you got all the training and all of that.
• 14:57
  But general aviation, especially back then, I mean, you did whatever you had to do to get hours
• 15:01
  and then to get heavier equipment, you know, bigger planes, jet time, whatever.
• 15:05
  So there was a lot of that going on. Went around the country wherever I could get a job,
• 15:10
  three months here, six months there.
• 15:11
  Ended up eventually out of Van Nuys flying Lear jets.
• 15:16
  When the time came to do that, I was, you know, again, just as the warm body sitting in the right seat
• 15:21
  for Lear 135 operations, just kind of a charter operation.
• 15:24
  They lost one of their captains, so I went into the owner's office at the point,
• 15:30
  and I said to him, you know, give me five hours of time in the left seat
• 15:36
  with one of your pilots that I have out here.
• 15:39
  And then put me up with the hardest checker, check airmen that you want.
• 15:43
  And if I pass, then make me your lowest paid captain and work me harder than anybody can.
• 15:47
  And if I don't, then don't worry about it. I'll pay for those five hours out of my paycheck.
• 15:51
  So you don't have to worry about it. So I'm talking to the owner, he's across the table,
• 15:55
  he's listening, but director of ops is sitting to my left and I can just see his head is just
• 16:00
  shaking the whole time. He's shaking like that. And I'm trying to tell him to shut up.
• 16:04
  Don't shake your head. I'm not done talking. Let me do my thing. This is hard enough as it is,
• 16:10
  this dude. So the owner tells me, I'll let you know my decision,
• 16:15
  calls me up that night says, if you're crazy enough to do this,
• 16:18
  I'm okay with it. Okay. So I get five hours. I get a check.
• 16:23
  You put me up with a check him and I pass and I'm now the lowest grade captain, but they take the thing to the insurance company.
• 16:31
  And the insurance guy goes, what did you do?
• 16:34
  Since you gave the guy five hours of trend. you want us to insure him and you? What are you nuts? So at that point everybody was committed
• 16:43
  so they ended up after all of this is over, after I'm the captain, they send me for a
• 16:49
  two week at SEMU flight at DFW airport. Two full weeks, full school. I was like, couldn't,
• 16:56
  we have just done this to begin with? Because it's a jet you have to get what's called a
• 17:03
  with type reading in the airplane.
• 17:05
  It's not, and that's not a simple thing. You have to know systems cold inside and out.
• 17:12
  That's a big deal, so.
• 17:14
  And training's expensive. Yes, it is. So that was a commitment.
• 17:17
  Yeah, it was. That's a great story.
• 17:23
  Oh my God. So, and now is this the outfit you were with when you were, were flying.
• 17:28
  Were you and Tito bro with no oxygen? Yeah. From Tito bro to the West Coast.
• 17:32
  No, no, this was national jet charter. It was, it was a good outfit.
• 17:36
  Uh, it was a lot of work, but the other outfit, and I probably shouldn't mention their name.
• 17:40
  It was out of Long Beach, the other place where, you know, the guy said,
• 17:44
  get on the plane, come over here. You fight where you stand.
• 17:47
  And, uh, like a dumb shit, I did exactly what I was told. But I still remember it and 40 years have passed.
• 17:55
  You live to fight another day and you learned a lesson and, oh man, that was a bad position to be in, right?
• 18:01
  Terrible. There were no jobs. There were literally no jobs. I couldn't fly. I couldn't tow banners for seven
• 18:08
  bucks an hour. I ended up eventually, I got this job flying in Navajo between Orange County and LAX.
• 18:15
  What? What?
• 18:18
  Talking about ridiculous, this outfit had a chief pilot, again, I'm not going to mention
• 18:24
  names or anything, but imagine one passenger, I don't know if you guys know, it's like eight
• 18:30
  seats or something like that, you go in, you load up the guy's bag, we sit over here, and
• 18:35
  on my training flight, the guy that's training was two pilots.
• 18:39
  There was director of operations, which was the other gentleman, and then I was the only pilot.
• 18:43
  So I'm in the left seat, he's in the right seat, and he turns around and we have one passenger in the airplane, the one single passenger is sitting behind me in one of eight seats.
• 18:54
  And he turns around and he starts briefing this guy as if he's briefing in a 747.
• 18:58
  And he says, well, in the event of decompression, we're going to do it, we're going to like 1,500 feet, they got elevators that are taller than this, you know?
• 19:07
  What decompression? We're not even pressurized. Uh, so he says the whole thing here, he just, uh, well, we don't have any
• 19:16
  oxygen, but you know, it's just embarrassing. You know, the job was paying 10 bucks an hour or something like that.
• 19:21
  We go to LAX, you know, and it's his leg, he lands the plane and it's just, he, he greases it on.
• 19:27
  I mean, it's just, it's a beautiful landing.
• 19:29
  I'm going, Gi, there's no way in heck I can do this.
• 19:31
  So he lands it and we just rolling down, you know, two, five left.
• 19:35
  And, um, and it just turns around and says, sorry.
• 19:38
  I'm like, oh shit, this guy is sorry for this. I am in deep trouble.
• 19:45
  Next one, you know, about, you know, I don't know, two or three landings later, he comes
• 19:48
  in and just bounces it all over the place.
• 19:51
  I mean, we had like four or five landings out of that one.
• 19:54
  I got no apologies for this one. Just sorry for this other one.
• 20:00
  Anyhow, a lot of stories like that.
• 20:03
  So I didn't have the luck, the opportunity to fly some of the great airplanes that you
• 20:08
  guys did in the military.
• 20:09
  But, uh, you got a lot more character now. It was, well, I don't know.
• 20:17
  Let's go with that, but I want to, I want to just back up for a second, the, uh, we,
• 20:23
  we do have non-aviation listeners.
• 20:25
  And so would you just describe what a, uh, it's a Piper Navajo, right?
• 20:30
  It's a piston driven, twin engine, small airplane with eight seats.
• 20:34
  Right. Yes. Flying into LAX. Right. It's funny.
• 20:40
  You'd go down LAX, you know, on that second floor, you see Delta, American, United, and
• 20:46
  then you'll have the name of this little airline with one airplane and two pilots.
• 20:50
  So if you, you know, it was, there we were. And it was Orange County to LAX, which if you had to drive it was, you know, it was,
• 20:58
  what 40 minute drive in your, it's a seven or eight minute flight in your, uh, in your Navajo
• 21:04
  or maybe maybe 10. Yeah. But half the time they would say, you know, cause they don't want you
• 21:09
  there. They really don't have time for airplanes. So the guy would say, as you get into approach
• 21:14
  into LAX to go, you see, you see that high school next to you on your left. Yeah. So just circle
• 21:20
  over it until I tell you, what do you mean? So there you would be one, two, three, five, 10 And turn some gifts.
• 21:30
  Oh, that's right. So it wasn't eight or 10 minutes. I mean, I took 20, 25 to get there, but.
• 21:37
  And it was a job, you know, and it paid 10 bucks an hour. Wow.
• 21:40
  And so I can only assume that people that your, your passengers were, were avoiding, they live, they live closer to orange County and they didn't want
• 21:47
  to drive, so they would take your, your flights to LAX to catch up.
• 21:52
  Jet going to wherever.
• 21:54
  Yeah, it did. It was the connecting flight, you know, but back then,
• 21:59
  I mean, it wasn't like passengers, you know, I don't think we ever got plural on any of the legs with it. You know?
• 22:05
  Did you do cargo flying at all, you know, to build time?
• 22:11
  I did a very brief time here. I mean, some of the bigger airplane airlines
• 22:15
  on the East Coast, there was a lot of Learjet time.
• 22:18
  So, and then we'd fly whatever they gave us, but one of my, you know, and there I was stories,
• 22:26
  you know, listen, we've all had those. I've got five times in my whole career
• 22:29
  where I really wish I was on the ground, but one of them was a cargo flight.
• 22:33
  You know, 39,000 feet in a Lear, early, early model, 24, 23, 24 series.
• 22:40
  And I don't know if you guys are familiar with Lear just at all.
• 22:43
  They have a backup pressurization system. It's got a little cherry pick where you get to open
• 22:48
  and close the outflow valve.
• 22:50
  The Southfield, what I was a part of, was really just a shady maintenance operation.
• 22:55
  The primary system didn't work, so they had us use the standby system the entire time.
• 22:59
  You know, when you climb up, close the outflow valves, you're going down,
• 23:02
  you open the outflow valves using the cherry pick.
• 23:05
  Just beat up on your ears a little bit, but other than that, you know, we managed it.
• 23:08
  And again, it's a job. You do whatever the heck the job was. It wasn't like now,
• 23:11
  where people pay you to become an airline pilot.
• 23:15
  You really had to work to get a job. And so we're at 39,000 feet, middle of the night,
• 23:20
  two in the morning, I'm FO,
• 23:22
  and there's a captain out there in the left seat, and the outflow valve just lets loose,
• 23:26
  the secondary system just lets loose, opens wide up, and you get full-fledged,
• 23:31
  this explosive decompression.
• 23:33
  The whole thing, the noise, the crystallization of the moisture.
• 23:37
  Of course you reach for your oxygen, but thankfully we had oxygen,
• 23:41
  but you can't put them, you can't don them, you can't put them on your head, anything like that.
• 23:45
  None of the stuff works. You're kind of holding it with one hand on your face.
• 23:49
  You know, as we dive down into the deck, get down to 10,000 feet.
• 23:53
  And I'm looking over here, the captain, it's just his hands are just shaking.
• 23:57
  And back then, you know, he was smoking, obviously, and he was a smoker, so I just took the plane and said,
• 24:02
  dude, light one up right now.
• 24:05
  We need to relax, we gotta get this thing down.
• 24:08
  And of course, none of the cargo in the back was tied down. So in the explosive decompression,
• 24:13
  as you got, whatever it was, 15 degrees, nose deck and nose down deck.
• 24:17
  All of that cargo went against the door, just slid against the door.
• 24:22
  So we come down, we land in Kansas city. Yeah, of course we can't get out of the cargo is jammed your door shut.
• 24:28
  Oh my God. No, they got to go open the door from outside, pull the cargo out, pull us out.
• 24:35
  So we can go around and clean up around here.
• 24:38
  Oh my gosh. I'm assuming Kansas City was the closest when this whole thing went down.
• 24:44
  It is. We were right over, I think it was two in the morning. Of course, all the cargo
• 24:48
  back then was, we were based out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. A lot of car parts over there.
• 24:53
  And you just take those car parts and take them wherever. And of course, it's just, again,
• 24:58
  fly by night operation here. Middle of the night, you went out, you fueled your own airplanes.
• 25:04
  This was December, January, February, probably putting in, you know, 500 gallons in layers
• 25:10
  at wingtips, you know, at two in the morning.
• 25:13
  Was that a gravity feed? It was like a filling station type or was it a pressure feed? That was it.
• 25:19
  No, it was a gas station. You know, you pulled your car up to the edge of the wingtip, you grabbed the thing and
• 25:25
  he shoved it down and it was just, it felt like it fits your car, but we would do it.
• 25:30
  Know, one guy would be out there for about 30 seconds, you know, and the other
• 25:34
  guys in the, you know, in the car with max sheet, the car is parked right next to the wingtip.
• 25:39
  Then you switch after 30 seconds, the other guy goes in and you go in and you
• 25:42
  do that. Five below the 20 knot wind, uh, holding that metal nozzle starts to get a little dimple.
• 25:50
  Yeah, it doesn't matter how many, well, how many layers of clothing you were.
• 25:53
  It was just cut right through that stuff, especially as Southern California boy
• 25:58
  over here. Oh, yeah. Oh, that is terrible.
• 26:04
  So let me ask this. How did you wind up getting out of the flight deck of that thing?
• 26:08
  There weren't any windows on that thing you could get out through, were there?
• 26:11
  No, no. We waited. We pulled into the local FBO, and when we're on the radio, we told them we can't get out.
• 26:17
  I mean, as embarrassed as we are, we can't get out.
• 26:21
  So they came in, they opened the door from outside, they pulled all of the cargo out, they got us in.
• 26:26
  We all shook our heads. I was just embarrassed and scared and everything else going, really?
• 26:32
  I mean, you make me fly with a standby system for days on end.
• 26:37
  And again, back then it wasn't like you could say, screw you.
• 26:39
  I'm out of here. I'll go to the union, that stuff.
• 26:42
  You said, yes, sir. Because there was six other guys waiting for the job.
• 26:45
  You had that job and you're glad to have it.
• 26:47
  Yeah. Yeah. And fortunately there was someone on the ramp that night that knew
• 26:50
  how to open the door of a Lear.
• 26:52
  I mean, that's, yes, it worked out. The gods were with us. Wow. Yeah.
• 26:59
  I guess lacking that, they would have had to call crash crew or something like that over. Yeah.
• 27:04
  There was, there was a lot of that stuff. Listen, you, you guys, uh, you're both military.
• 27:10
  You've had, I'm sure you, your own stories, which were, you know, going to be hair raising as hell.
• 27:14
  Uh, we all have our stories, but again, in, in our, in the, in the general aviation world,
• 27:18
  especially back then, I mean, today it's different. You're going to get a job with people that are going to have to treat you well because
• 27:25
  If they don't, you'll go get a job somewhere else.
• 27:27
  It's a different time right now. This is unprecedented times right now.
• 27:31
  Yeah, they've been talking pilot shortage for the 40 some odd years that I've been around.
• 27:36
  And I never saw it till just now. But I'm looking at this, so many good,
• 27:40
  good buddies of mine, they're all retired, like me, they hired everybody in the early and mid
• 27:44
  80s. Now they got everybody retires and all at the same time, bring them on at the same time,
• 27:49
  they'll leave at the same time. So that's what's going on. Obviously, that's what's going on. But
• 27:54
  To this extent? I mean, I had never seen it. I never thought this would come, but I'm kind of thrilled that it has.
• 28:00
  We are in truly unprecedented times.
• 28:04
  It is good for the younger generation. No doubt about it. Yeah.
• 28:08
  It's amazing. People ask me all the time, is it safe? Because you've got a lot of young, young people out there in the cockpit.
• 28:15
  And my answer is, you know, invariably, yeah, safe. It's safe.
• 28:19
  Because, listen, we all work for major airlines, and we know what the training is like,
• 28:23
  and we know what their proficiency is like. And we know what, if somebody is not ready,
• 28:27
  they just, they don't beat you up and they just make you go back and do it again and again until
• 28:32
  you're ready. And if you're not ready in a very, very rare case, then they'll find something else
• 28:37
  for you to do. But almost always they train you to the point where you're good and you're
• 28:42
  comfortable. That's one of the things that are just wonderful. I mean, look at this, looking at
• 28:45
  the safety records of these airlines. I mean, just where we are compared to where we were
• 28:50
  Not long ago.
• 28:51
  Uh, it's pretty amazing. I'm just the way the training went on American airlines.
• 28:55
  So the, the difference that, that I saw in the 35 years I was there.
• 29:00
  That was day and night. Right.
• 29:01
  And I don't think anybody isn't on it anymore. Now there's, there's a thing called ASAP, right?
• 29:07
  American was one of the first ones to go to that, right?
• 29:09
  Uh, when I left ASAP was very much a thing.
• 29:12
  Um, so that took over the NASA, you know, so for the listeners that don't know what that is, ASAP is aviation safety action program.
• 29:19
  And the airlines have, I believe, whereas not just the airlines, the military is doing it as well.
• 29:26
  And there's some corporate aviation, the charter groups that are doing it.
• 29:32
  And the best way to describe it is if you punish a mistake, then the only errors you will discover
• 29:39
  are those that can't be covered up and the ASAP program has been designed to.
• 29:46
  Give forgiveness in exchange for full disclosure. So when something bad happened, you came forward
• 29:53
  and said, well, this is what we were thinking. This is what we saw. This is what we heard.
• 29:56
  So in the old days, pilots used to clam up because you're going to get some time on the beach.
• 30:01
  But not anymore. You give full disclosure. And as a result of that, as long as it wasn't,
• 30:07
  what they call a willful disregard, there's five big things, drugs and alcohol involved,
• 30:12
  criminal intent, that kind of stuff. But as long as there was, it was an honest mistake,
• 30:18
  and it was something like at-risk behavior, now there may be additional training so that you
• 30:22
  don't do it again, but there isn't punishment on your ticket and your ability to earn a living.
• 30:28
  And so they've been able to discover all these problems that have been hidden for years.
• 30:32
  So I'll relinquish my soapbox now. That was a very good explanation, my friend. Well done. Well done.
• 30:39
  Yeah, it really was, but listen, it's a wonderful, wonderful program.
• 30:45
  And if anybody's not sure how wonderful, it's one of the very few things that the company
• 30:50
  and the unions agree on.
• 30:53
  It's that wonderful because it really has made things so much better.
• 30:58
  I mean, that's why we are in, I believe, that's why we're in the safest period in commercial aviation history.
• 31:05
  The rates have plummeted, the rates of accidents and deaths have plummeted,
• 31:09
  and that's a beautiful thing.
• 31:10
  Well, here's a couple of quick stats here in regard to that.
• 31:14
  So I'm doing a lot of interviews here, and in that process, I kind of got an opportunity
• 31:19
  to read up a little bit on this.
• 31:21
  You know, you've always heard that flying is safer than driving cars, but nobody that I know of
• 31:27
  has really put stats to it, so I looked it up.
• 31:29
  If you want to go get in your car, go get a gallon of milk, your chances of getting into a serious accident
• 31:35
  is about one in to 5,000.
• 31:37
  If you're gonna go get on an airplane, go from A to B, your chances of getting into
• 31:42
  of serious accidents, one in 11 million.
• 31:45
  And then there's some other weird statistic added to that. And I don't remember exactly what the number is, but it's like your,
• 31:51
  your odds of dying in that accident that you just talked about,
• 31:54
  you're one in 11 million, your odds of dying are less than half, well below half.
• 32:01
  So things are going to happen. But of course, everything is always sensationalized on the news, right?
• 32:06
  Airplane comes out of the sky and people die.
• 32:09
  And of course, that's all is on the news for days and days and days.
• 32:12
  That's why everyone's terrified of it.
• 32:14
  But because you're helpless in the back, you know, it just, that is what it is.
• 32:19
  Okay. Well, this is a wonderful path to wander down.
• 32:24
  Let's get back to, Hey, so I would like to ask Cam how, so where, when did you start your airline career?
• 32:31
  I'm assuming maybe you didn't go right to the major airline.
• 32:36
  Did you go to a regional first or how'd that work?
• 32:39
  No, I didn't. So it was, again, you know, I started off with, with flight instruction and
• 32:43
  just work my way around the country.
• 32:45
  Uh, we went to Dallas, I flew a King Airs in the right seat and then the left seat.
• 32:50
  And then some Lear jets in the right seat. I came, uh, went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, uh, did some, some Lear flying and
• 32:56
  then ended up in a Van Nuys airport.
• 32:58
  And where the story that I was telling, you ended up on the left seat of a whole Lears and then, uh, then the airline started to call.
• 33:05
  So I got a job, you know, I got interviews with United, uh, you know,
• 33:10
  Uh, and then, then I started, you know, doing some of that.
• 33:13
  I got a job with a continental, but back then continental had just finished,
• 33:18
  you know, all of their, uh, they were going through a lot of trauma.
• 33:21
  Oh yeah. They had a big strike in the mid eighties. Just a strike.
• 33:25
  And yeah, they had a strike.
• 33:27
  They had, you know, scabs and all of this stuff that was happening.
• 33:29
  It wasn't, it wasn't a, my eye was just on American the whole time.
• 33:32
  So I went in, I put my, my stuff in and, and I got a chance to go,
• 33:36
  go through the interview process. I had two interviews, then I got rejected.
• 33:41
  And I go, oh my God, that's the end of that. A lot of people got rejected.
• 33:45
  And I found out, I wanted to dig into it and see why I got rejected,
• 33:48
  and it turns out that I got rejected because I had two tickets.
• 33:51
  I was living in Texas, I left Texas to come to California, and I got two speeding tickets
• 33:57
  within 30 minutes of each other. And it really pissed me off.
• 34:01
  And I said, I'm never gonna pay you. Oh, you didn't pay him.
• 34:04
  I'm never, yeah, right.
• 34:06
  Inside, just on two sides of El Paso. And I said, I'm never coming back.
• 34:12
  And I let them both went to warrants for my arrest.
• 34:15
  Oh no. Speeding tick.
• 34:18
  So those two speeding tickets cost me two years of seniority. So I, I, I corrected them. I went
• 34:24
  back pleading with my, you know, uh, hat in my hand and I, and I, and, and they said, okay,
• 34:29
  we'll come back again. And so they did all three rounds over again. And, um, and it was, it was
• 34:35
  great. So I went there five visits and my last visit, um, you know, was, was the captain's
• 34:41
  review board, you know, where you drop in your, your log books in the morning and he don't see
• 34:46
  GMP, I think I told you this story here, is it's one of the moments,
• 34:49
  it was a defining moment in my aviation career.
• 34:51
  I walked into, it's the very last thing that you do after five visits, probably total of eight or nine days
• 34:57
  of interviews and testing, everything else.
• 35:00
  I walked in and these guys have had my log booth, they've been looking at all my licenses, everything,
• 35:05
  and two gentlemen sitting out there,
• 35:09
  and the guy looks at my name, you know, and then, you know, Camp Camp, you know, Maj,
• 35:13
  It just doesn't sound, you know, it's not John Smith, you know.
• 35:17
  And it says, where are you from? And this was, you know, mid 80s, you know, 86, 1986.
• 35:23
  And not as popular a time to be, you know, you're from Iran.
• 35:28
  No, no. Like every time we were, you know, axis of evil for six months,
• 35:32
  we all became Persians. Yeah. You know.
• 35:35
  And so we were out there and this guy's looking at my stuff and he says, you know, where are you from?
• 35:42
  And to me it was, I want to be in a place that I either belong or a place that I don't belong.
• 35:48
  So I was just straightforward. I was born in Iran, here I am. So I told the guy that,
• 35:52
  I don't know if he noticed something in my voice, in my behavior, something,
• 35:57
  you know, but it just turns around, this old guy and says, son, I couldn't give a crap where you're
• 36:02
  from. All I care about is what kind of pilot you are. And when I heard that, I said, I am home.
• 36:07
  Nice. Absolutely.
• 36:09
  I have arrived, I am home. It was truly a defining moment in my life and one that I'll never forget.
• 36:15
  That's awesome. So that was in 1986. That's awesome. And you flew what models of airplanes at American?
• 36:22
  Everything American had. The first five years, I went through five airplanes. In the next,
• 36:27
  30 years, I went through three. First, you're excited, you want to do everything. I did
• 36:31
  I did engineer on the stuff, you know, 7-2 DC-10.
• 36:35
  And then I did FO and everything else, Super 80, DC-10, 7-6, triple.
• 36:40
  And then I did left seat on all the buses and the 777 and punched out on the big one.
• 36:47
  Hey Fig, have you heard about Factor? It's America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit.
• 36:52
  They deliver these amazing meals straight to your door.
• 36:55
  Oh really? That could be a game changer for us pilots constantly on the go and all.
• 37:00
  Absolutely. And during the prime spring season when we need convenient meals to fuel us for our
• 37:04
  flights, Factor can be a lifesaver. No more worrying about finding wholesome food when we're in a hurry.
• 37:10
  I couldn't agree more. With Factor, we can skip the grocery store, skip the chopping, prepping,
• 37:16
  and have so much time. Just imagine the convenience of having ready-to-eat meals.
• 37:21
  And the best part is that their meals are fresh, never frozen, and ready in just two minutes.
• 37:26
  No need to sacrifice taste or quality when we're pressed for time.
• 37:30
  That's true. Plus they offer different options to cater to our dietary needs and goals.
• 37:34
  If we're watching our calorie intake, they have calorie smart meals with around or less than
• 37:40
  550 calories per serving.
• 37:41
  And for those days when we need an extra boost of energy, their protein plus meals with 30 grams of protein or more per serving will come in handy.
• 37:49
  It's perfect for keeping us alert and focused during our flights.
• 37:53
  Absolutely, repeat.
• 37:54
  With Factor's diverse menu, we don't get bored either. They have options that fit different lifestyles, including keto, vegan, plus veggie and more.
• 38:03
  It's like having a personal chef. Don't forget the add-ons.
• 38:06
  We can supplement our meals with breakfast items like their delicious apple cinnamon
• 38:09
  pancakes or replenish our snack supply with their assortment of 45-plus options.
• 38:15
  That sounds like a dream come true. Not only is Factor a convenient choice, but it's also a sustainable one.
• 38:21
  They offset their delivery emissions, source renewable electricity,
• 38:25
  and even offer sustainably sourced seafood in their meals.
• 38:28
  Well, that's fantastic to hear. So let's head to factormeals.com slash sothereIwas50, five zero, and use the code sothereIwas50
• 38:36
  to get 50% off our first box.
• 38:39
  It's time for us to enjoy delicious meals without the hassle.
• 38:42
  The hassle. I'm with you, Repeat. Code SoThereIWas50 at factormeals.com slash SoThereIWas50 for 50%
• 38:52
  off your first box. Let's savor every bite and keep soaring through the skies with full bellies.
• 38:57
  Cheers to that, Fig. Here's to fueling up, saving time, and conquering the skies with Factor By Our Side.
• 39:04
  Fig, have you heard of the Nocillicast podcast? Nope. What is that? Sounds like a show for nosy chinchillas or something.
• 39:14
  No, it's a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. But don't worry,
• 39:22
  they don't only talk about Apple products.
• 39:26
  That's good. What's so special about this podcast? First of all, it's been running every week for nearly 18 years without missing a single
• 39:34
  episode.
• 39:35
  That's longer than most marriages last these days. Wow, that's impressive.
• 39:39
  I can barely commit to a gym membership for 18 weeks, let alone 18 years.
• 39:44
  Right? Well, the host Allison Sheridan provides excellent reviews for the tech she's actually using.
• 39:51
  But be warned, she's going to cost you money with her recommendations if you follow them.
• 39:55
  Oh, great. what I need another reason to drain my bank account. There you go. But it's worth it.
• 40:01
  She reviews hardware and software that she's actually using. And she teaches how to use
• 40:06
  the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad in a segment called Tiny Tips. But she also wanders into
• 40:11
  other tech like teaching the audience about solar and solar batteries and how she's using
• 40:15
  the Tesla full self-driving beta right now. And let's not forget about Bart Bouchats,
• 40:20
  the security specialist who joins her every other week to talk about the latest security
• 40:25
  news and what you can do to protect yourself from various scams and hacks that are attacking
• 40:30
  your computers. Sounds like they got it all covered.
• 40:34
  I'll have to check that out. They definitely do.
• 40:36
  And you can find it at podfeet.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
• 40:40
  Who knows? Maybe you'll become a tech geek like Allison and Bart.
• 40:45
  All right. What was your favorite girlfriend? Because mine's the triple seven.
• 40:51
  I was going to say, you knew about her. Well, you landed in Kansas City. It's everybody.
• 40:58
  I love your sense of humor, man. Everybody.
• 41:01
  I was ready with my death, so there I was staying here. But we can come back.
• 41:05
  But yeah, everybody says that I know what is a triple seven. I mean, it's the queen.
• 41:11
  It is just beyond wonderful. It took me a while to understand what an Airbus is,
• 41:18
  you know, and why they don't have a yoke. But by the time I was on that for seven years,
• 41:23
  and I kind of start to enjoy it towards the end, especially when the Neos came out,
• 41:28
  And I was doing a lot of Hawaii flying with that.
• 41:30
  So I started to like that, but it was, it's no triple seven.
• 41:33
  That there's nothing that always said, you know, Airbus wants to grow up and be a triple seven.
• 41:37
  Cause I had a lot of the systems that were, you know, somewhat similar,
• 41:40
  but so there I was staying here. Just how open can we talk? Yeah.
• 41:45
  Is this, we are here for all the stories you've got.
• 41:49
  Well, you don't believe me. You don't have the time here.
• 41:55
  Together to get to that point. but I will, you know, but I just, just so I don't, I was thinking about it just as, as thing was
• 42:02
  going on. So there I was, first year flight engineer, doing my thing in a DC-10, first
• 42:08
  guy on the plane. I'm in the cockpit running around and trying to be, you know, as, as
• 42:12
  conscientious as I can to do a good job. Flight attendant walks in and she's one of the older
• 42:18
  ladies. I'm going to say she was late sixties, maybe seventies back then. I'm, I'm, you know,
• 42:24
  late 20s maybe 30 years old and she walks up to me and she puts out her hand just like that and says you know why you can't masturbate with this hand?
• 42:36
  No, I don't know why this is because it's mine. Oh, my God. What have I done?
• 42:45
  What kind of place is this? Oh, my God.
• 42:51
  So talk about things that stays with you. 35 years later. Yeah.
• 42:54
  She could smell the green on you. So that was her thing, right?
• 42:59
  Harass the new guys. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've all had that right.
• 43:03
  Flight attendants. First flight.
• 43:04
  You have them run all the way down with a bag of, you know, trash bag, air sample,
• 43:09
  air sample, you know, turning the seat belt sign on and in the middle of it.
• 43:16
  And as they start making the announcement, he turned it off.
• 43:19
  Uh, doing a captain has a switch.
• 43:26
  Yeah, you don't get to do that in cargo flights. You're down here going, we're flying,
• 43:31
  ladies and gentlemen. We had a guy that did that, actually did that. I was on the plane.
• 43:35
  So ladies and gentlemen, we're flying over Kansas. Kansas is a dry state. Please,
• 43:38
  you have to put away all your drinks. People, you know, putting away their alcohol.
• 43:43
  Oh, that's perfect.
• 43:46
  So you got to do something here. We got all those miles to go.
• 43:49
  Well, yeah, yeah. I have several questions, but I don't want to go too far off script.
• 43:54
  How are we doing on our, uh, yeah, we're about, we're a little over 40 minutes in,
• 44:01
  round numbers. How many flying hours did you end up retiring with from United Airlines? I'm sorry,
• 44:08
  from American Airlines. That was a Freudian slip. Yeah. You know, I didn't, uh, my total hours at
• 44:13
  the end was just under 20,000 hours. Um, yeah, but, but I did not fly as much as a lot of other
• 44:22
  people did. But that also included the five or so thousand hours that I brought when I started
• 44:28
  with American. So yeah, I didn't fly as much as many other people. It would have been significantly
• 44:36
  more, but it was still a lot. Well, you had other interests and activities, right? Which.
• 44:44
  I did. There was a lot going on. Yeah. That's fairly common, actually. There are some
• 44:50
  professional airline pilots that they fly their asses off and then there's others that enjoy the time afforded off because they have other activities or
• 45:03
  whatever right so you know we call it the chase the money or chase the lifestyle. My first day as a new hire there was a guy standing in the front of
• 45:10
  the room he was about 75 80 years old teaching the base skin doc and said Every one of you needs to make sure you have an outside interest, a hobby, be it fishing
• 45:22
  or basket weaving or engine repair or something.
• 45:26
  But don't make this your hobby too, because when it goes away at retirement, you will die quickly.
• 45:34
  This is, you need to be interested in other things. Right.
• 45:38
  And that's good advice.
• 45:41
  Yeah. Regardless of what you do, whether you're flying or not, but you obviously had interest
• 45:45
  in writing. We'll segue into that in a little bit. I think it's a little early to do that yet.
• 45:50
  I want to hear more about your book as we get there, but I think you've got a couple
• 45:53
  other fun stories in the cockpit.
• 45:55
  Let's go there. What's the funniest thing you saw, the scariest thing you saw over those years?
• 45:59
  And it doesn't have to be in the American cockpit. Again, five incidents in 44 years.
• 46:05
  Mentioned one of them. one was again, flight engineer in a DC-10, leaving Chicago right at dusk. You know, 3-2
• 46:13
  left, the T-1 back then, whatever numbers have changed now. Six or eight years earlier,
• 46:17
  American had lost another DC-10 there when an engine left, you know, the number one engine
• 46:21
  left the plane. And so same, we're going down the runway, we're past V-1, and for those
• 46:26
  who don't know what V-1 is, this is kind of a go, no-go speed. You can't reject because
• 46:30
  you don't have enough runway to stop. I'm the F-E, Captain Wynne Evans in the left seat.
• 46:36
  The number two engine just blows up, literally blows up. One of the N1 blades, titanium blades, just gave out and it went right through the engine.
• 46:45
  So we are committed to lifting off.
• 46:48
  The airplane is just shaking and shuddering and bells and horns and whistles.
• 46:55
  Wynn did a great job, slowly took us up in the air, and of course the interphones ringing.
• 47:00
  Immediately the tower is telling us there's 50 feet of flame shooting out on number two.
• 47:05
  And I'm getting phone calls, calls from the interphone. They're saying that the wings are on fire.
• 47:10
  Saying, what the hell? How then the wings are on fire?
• 47:12
  So they're seeing the reflection of the fire on the wings and the
• 47:16
  dusk light and things that the wings are on fire.
• 47:19
  So crazy stuff. I mean, forget all the systems. We lifted the gear, I think, out of 5,000 feet.
• 47:25
  Raise the gear. Work that way.
• 47:30
  A lot was going on. We worked our way over the lake, dumped the fuel, came back,
• 47:34
  landed in a sea of flashing lights and then taxied right into the gate. Passengers all
• 47:38
  got off. We were the last ones to leave. We walked out and everybody was clapping and
• 47:43
  applauding and all of this other stuff. Fast forward two hours, us and all of our passengers
• 47:49
  are getting on the last DC-10 going home. And so we are now passengers working our way
• 47:55
  back into the coach section. I'm the last one to get on the plane. And again, everybody
• 48:01
  is looking. They want to talk to you, they want to shake your hand. Everybody's helping me with my
• 48:05
  bag, trying to find a place for it. And yeah, you can't do anything wrong, right? I take a seat,
• 48:10
  I sit down, you know, and then I'm talking to people and I'm occupied, but the airplane isn't
• 48:15
  going anywhere. It's talking, oh shit, why is it not? 15 minutes, fast forward, you know,
• 48:19
  there's a guy coming up here on the front of the plane and he, you know, there's a.
• 48:25
  And he looks up at his ticket, his boarding pass, and he looks up at the seat numbers,
• 48:29
  you know, takes another two or three steps, looks at his boarding pass and his seat numbers.
• 48:33
  She does this four or five times till it gets to my seat.
• 48:37
  And looks down at his boarding pass, the seat, you know, and then up and down two, three times.
• 48:41
  Shit, they sold my seat.
• 48:49
  So I had to get up, try and find where my bags are, because they were all over the plane,
• 48:54
  you know, and try and get them and just embarrassingly leave the plane.
• 48:58
  So hero time was over, it was time to find the hotel. You went from hero to zero in a couple hours, just like that.
• 49:03
  I could just feel people's hearts breaking for me.
• 49:10
  They got kicked out.
• 49:15
  That's crazy. That is crazy. That guy that took your seat is lucky.
• 49:18
  He wasn't lynched by the crowd.
• 49:21
  Hey, he's a great guy. It was fun. A lot of that going on. I'm sure you guys have stories.
• 49:32
  A couple of those. I think ours are probably more tactical. My, my, uh, civilian airline career has been blissfully boring and let's hope
• 49:41
  that it, uh, stays that way as I knock wood on my forehead, shut down a couple
• 49:47
  of engines here and there, but you know, nothing, nothing like, Oh, you know.
• 49:51
  Any other, any other crazy passenger or, uh, Hey, there was good, crazy flight attendants or any crazy passenger stories, any issues with that?
• 49:59
  That's the thing I don't have to worry about. Uh, yeah, you know, a few, you know, nothing that, that was, was, was crazy,
• 50:07
  crazy.
• 50:07
  I mean, we've had guys light up. We've had celebrities light up in one particular case.
• 50:12
  I don't want to mention a name. You know, it was a she and, you know, lit up in the bathroom.
• 50:16
  And of course, you know, you get all this fire warnings and stuff.
• 50:19
  You go back in and she does it a second time. You say, well, listen, you can't do this.
• 50:23
  You said it's only a $10,000 fine. I'll pay the $10,000 fine.
• 50:27
  No, it's not going to be a $10,000 fine. You do this again.
• 50:31
  We're landing somewhere and somebody's coming up with a handcuff.
• 50:34
  So that was that. But we had a couple of guys. We had another guy that got up in the cabin and did it a second time.
• 50:43
  Of course, we had our conversations and he stopped. This was a Honolulu trip.
• 50:49
  Landed over there and I said, I want to speak with this guy, see what it is.
• 50:54
  And he came up and he wasn't doing well.
• 50:56
  There was a lot of mental issues and some other things.
• 51:00
  And you could tell that pretty quickly. So just trying to find a way to make things as easy for him as possible that time.
• 51:07
  I looked at the medication he was taking and kind of helped him along the way, but nothing
• 51:10
  that was frightening scary.
• 51:13
  I've been lucky with that. We like that. That's the last thing you need, right?
• 51:17
  We do too, like I always said, you know, whether it's an engine that blows up, it's your responsibility
• 51:23
  or, you know, you're running out of toilet paper, it's your responsibility, you know, it's just all yours.
• 51:28
  Actually, I'm going to break, I'm going to do a point of personal privilege and privilege
• 51:32
  and break in with one, then my wife is a retired flight attendant and her call sign is sandwich girl.
• 51:41
  There is a story there. She came out of college.
• 51:47
  She worked her last two years in college as a tour guide, worked another six or seven
• 51:51
  years as a tour guide, and got sick of going all over the world, 10, 11 months a year,
• 51:56
  gone 25 days a month, and no social life.
• 52:00
  And after many, many years of that, she went, you know, I love to travel, but I can't keep
• 52:04
  doing this and have any kind of a social life, so I want to become a flight attendant.
• 52:08
  And she had wanted to become a flight attendant earlier, but she said, I'm going to do that.
• 52:12
  But she was making good money as a tour guide, but she goes out and goes to a open house,
• 52:19
  at Logan Airport and goes through all the things and they go, Oh, great.
• 52:24
  Well, we'd love to have you down for a class date. And it's two weeks from tomorrow.
• 52:29
  She's like, I've got an Australia trip next month. And they said, well, it's two weeks or not at all.
• 52:37
  She goes, okay, I'll be there.
• 52:38
  And then she drove down to get rid of her job. And of course, her boss pulls out the calculator and goes,
• 52:43
  you see how much money you're giving up to go be a flight attendant? What are you, nuts?
• 52:47
  It's like, no, no. It's something I want to do. I'm going to go do it.
• 52:49
  And so she did. And she got based in New York.
• 52:51
  And probably her second or third trip after finishing her initial training out on her own
• 52:56
  as a due flight attendant, she's on an L-1011.
• 52:59
  And she's pushing the sandwich cart up the aisle about three rows and handing out food
• 53:03
  and pushing the cart up the row and handing out food.
• 53:05
  And about the fifth or sixth time she goes to do it, She said, this old blue haired woman reaches out and pulls on her skirt.
• 53:12
  She said, she pulled off my skirt so hard. I thought she was going to pull it off.
• 53:15
  And she goes, sandwich girl, sandwich girl, you forgot me.
• 53:22
  My wife goes, oh my God. I said, what'd you do? She goes, well, I gave her a sandwich.
• 53:26
  I said, well, did she at least say thank you?
• 53:29
  No. She said, where's my drink?
• 53:32
  And my wife didn't miss a beat. She goes, drink boy on the other side of the cart there is going to take care of you in
• 53:37
  She said at that point, she turned around, walked back in the galley and sat down on the jump seat for a minute and put her head in her hands and just went, I was a tour guide for eight years.
• 53:44
  I was making great money. I've got a degree in hotel management. I've been all over the world and I gave it all up to become a sandwich girl.
• 53:51
  But you know what her biggest mistake was? Telling me the story. Her call sign has been sandwich girl for 22 years.
• 53:59
  That's right. Damn this girl.
• 54:03
  You know, if you're doing cargo, you obviously, you know, you haven't been around this.
• 54:10
  You know, they're there for safety and security and you know all of that. Yes, they are.
• 54:15
  And you just hate to see that, hate to see how someone were treated and the way that was. That
• 54:21
  was one of those things that we really had no patience for, you know, you just couldn't do it.
• 54:26
  And I had a number of occasions where something would go wrong, either, you know, with an employee
• 54:32
  or a customer or a passenger or something, just no tolerance for that, right?
• 54:36
  I mean, yeah, they, they are trained. They are certificated airmen.
• 54:40
  They have FAA certificates. They operate equipment.
• 54:42
  They are there for a reason to save your damn life when things go to crap.
• 54:47
  Hey, I, I just had a flash. So, so something, one of you guys just said, I, I got, I'm going to tell this quick story.
• 54:54
  I, uh, I was flying the seven 57 at the time and, you know, they board at door two, uh, left
• 55:01
  to not door one left. So you have to walk through first class back and forth
• 55:06
  if you're gonna go out and do the walk around. Well, I was gonna go do the walk around.
• 55:09
  And as I'm coming back, they had already started boarding and of course they board first class first.
• 55:14
  So I'm making my way through first class why these people are boarding.
• 55:17
  And there was a celebrity and his family on board.
• 55:21
  I think they let him down first because they were like, I'm not gonna say names,
• 55:25
  but you'll know who this is. He's a chef or something. and he got famous by doing this show.
• 55:33
  He's got spiky white hair, right? Spiky blonde hair.
• 55:37
  Anyway, I'm on my way back to the cockpit and his wife with this giant bouffant hairdo says.
• 55:47
  Oh, excuse me, excuse me. Can you put my bag up here?
• 55:50
  And I went, sure, you know, I'm standing there. Why not? You know, I pick it up, put it in there.
• 55:56
  And she goes, now, I would like a rum and Coke. he would like and then the other kids, I'm like,
• 56:02
  you know what, I'm gonna send the purser back here and make sure you get taken care of, because...
• 56:08
  I gotta go get your airplane ready to go. Oh, okay. You're wearing polyester, you know,
• 56:16
  you got a tie. Everybody looks alike, right? That's right. You know, a lot of it is an innocent
• 56:23
  mistake, but there is, you know, you're hearing more and more about stuff that is not. I have
• 56:28
  never seen abuse like this or violence or anything, stuff that you're hearing on radio.
• 56:33
  I'm sorry. Oh, yeah.
• 56:35
  That you're reading about all the time here. I've never seen.
• 56:38
  So, these flight attendants, they deserve much more than this.
• 56:42
  I could never do their job. I couldn't either.
• 56:44
  There's a reason they don't arm the flight attendants. I should say it. Right?
• 56:49
  No, we depended on them. I mean, if there was something wrong, whether it was passengers or equipment or anything
• 56:56
  that was out there, I know you need them to be completely and utterly depend on them.
• 57:01
  Such an integral part of this. And you can't go, uh, you can't go if you don't have them.
• 57:05
  I mean, you, you know, you have to have the right amount depending on how many, uh, seats you got.
• 57:10
  So it's, uh, cause they're, cause they're there specifically to get people off an airplane in an emergency.
• 57:16
  Really? Exactly. So where did you come up then? Let me, let's move into it and say, where did you come up with the plot for your
• 57:24
  book and, and let me preface this for a little bit, I was saying this pre-show before we went live.
• 57:29
  I'm probably two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the book now. It is a great read. It's called high wire,
• 57:37
  By Cam Majd. I'm telling you go to Amazon get yourself a copy. This is a great adventure.
• 57:46
  Mystery slash terror novel and it is really well written I've read a lot of books by
• 57:52
  other quote-unquote famous authors that I don't consider their writing nearly
• 57:58
  as as artful as this. Your writing is masterful. So how did you come up with
• 58:02
  the plot for this? Was it well wealth sitting earning your 20,000 hours or somewhere else or where'd you go? There was a lot of that. A lot of Acars paper
• 58:12
  was wasted. Okay, hang on. Acars. That's a new acronym. Give it to me, Fig. Automatic,
• 58:19
  communication and it's oh cam what's a car standing or help me it's how we it's
• 58:30
  how we text back and forth with dispatch and sometimes a TC yeah yep yep and you
• 58:37
  can print you can get you get your weather forecast at your destination just print you can just forward the paper if you need some scratch paper
• 58:46
  right on. Which is, I think that's what Cameron was going with that.
• 58:50
  Yeah, okay. I'm sorry about that. I interrupted your flow there. Yep, sorry.
• 58:56
  No, not at all. I should have mentioned that. But anyhow, it's all about fly-by-wire. When I first
• 59:02
  learned and understood the systems of fly-by-wire and how it works, it was pretty amazing to me,
• 59:09
  safe it is, how light it is, how predictable it is.
• 59:11
  And so I'm going to ask you to define fly-by-wire. In aviation, the flight controls, the original planes all the way back to 1902,
• 59:21
  I mean, it was pulleys and cables. Pull the yoke and he moved it around and something
• 59:25
  pull something and the ailerons or rudders or whatever moved and the airplane moved through
• 59:30
  the air like a fish moves through water. Well, as airplanes became bigger, then obviously the
• 59:36
  pulleys and cables no longer worked and now came in a hydraulic system, a special fluid under
• 59:41
  extreme high pressure, 3,000 pounds per square inch, moving through some complicated piping
• 59:48
  to move those same very, you know, the same flight controls. But again, maintenance on this was
• 59:53
  difficult. They were very heavy. And so came, you know, fly-by-air, where, you know, it's
• 59:58
  essentially you're doing the same thing as you're still turning flight controls, but you're doing
• 1:00:02
  them through wires and computers and a series of small motors. So in a nutshell, even though we
• 1:00:08
  still have the yoke, we still, you know, 777 has a yoke, you know, these airplanes all have yokes.
• 1:00:14
  You know, airbuses, and you're still turning a yoke, you're pulling, you're pushing, really all
• 1:00:18
  all you're doing is typing on a keyboard.
• 1:00:20
  And it is that keyboard, even the feel, what you feel here is artificial.
• 1:00:26
  Some of the machines that are created to make you feel as if you're doing something
• 1:00:30
  when all you are doing is typing on a keyboard.
• 1:00:32
  So when I saw this and I learned about the system and it's so safe and it's so solid,
• 1:00:39
  but it's designed to be safe and solid based on some kind of failure,
• 1:00:44
  electrical failure, mechanical failure of some kind.
• 1:00:47
  But they're computers and computers only do what you tell them to do.
• 1:00:51
  So in my world I said what if somebody tells this computer to do the wrong thing,
• 1:00:56
  and it doesn't understand it just like a virus that you get on your own personal
• 1:01:00
  computer on your phone or something else. What if a virus is created that tells this
• 1:01:05
  computer that the information you're getting is right when it is not right.
• 1:01:09
  So I brought in an engineer from Airbus, one from Boeing. I sat them down on a Mexican
• 1:01:14
  restaurant with chips and salsa in the middle and a tape recorder going and I
• 1:01:17
  ran the scenario by them and this is what they told me I don't know how practical this is but if I were you I would send a copy to both Boeing and
• 1:01:26
  Airbus's security department. Wow.
• 1:01:30
  I immediately put a copy on there and I FedExed it to both security departments saying dude I'm an airline pilot I'm
• 1:01:40
  I'm writing this, I was told to do that, so here you have it.
• 1:01:43
  It is the same, like I'm writing the next story about Afghanistan, and my sources are people
• 1:01:47
  on the ground in Afghanistan, and one of them is a reporter,
• 1:01:50
  and she said, every phone call you start to my satellite phone, you start it with,
• 1:01:55
  this is a book, this is research for a book,
• 1:01:58
  because some guy's sitting on a, you know, in a cubicle, some pray in DC,
• 1:02:03
  you know, constipated, with a cup of coffee, you know, in their hand, or a jar,
• 1:02:07
  and they're listening to a conversation.
• 1:02:09
  You make damn sure that everybody, so that, anyhow, that's how I start all those conferences. Same way with this.
• 1:02:14
  A lot of research, real, actual research, and that's what it was.
• 1:02:17
  And it's not, cut the 737 MAXs. Fig, you can talk about that a lot more than I can.
• 1:02:25
  The whole, is it MCAS system? Is that what it's called? It's software.
• 1:02:28
  It's maybe not a system. It's software.
• 1:02:30
  It's software. It's a computer telling this guy that this airplane is about to stall
• 1:02:34
  and pushing the nose down where you want the nose up.
• 1:02:37
  And it did that all the way to the ground.
• 1:02:40
  Look at that Air France Airbus, what was that, 15 years ago when an air show in Paris, it goes right into the trees.
• 1:02:46
  So this does happen, the idea that airplanes and computers will do things that they should not do is not as uncommon as it sounds.
• 1:02:54
  So in my world I created that, what if the information these computers are getting is,
• 1:03:00
  they feel that it is legitimate, they're still machines, they're still systems, and then what happens?
• 1:03:06
  You know, so through research, I created that. And then after that, it was okay, if I have the story now, who's going to tell
• 1:03:11
  the story and in my world, the story was, it was always going to be a male, you
• 1:03:15
  know, cockpit, it was going to be a pilot, you know, man.
• 1:03:18
  And, um, of course, as you, uh, both well know, uh, you know, uh, 15, 20, 30 years
• 1:03:25
  ago, in a long time ago in the cockpit, we had, uh, this, you know, a little
• 1:03:29
  tradition that was always playboy pictures, sitting in nooks and crannies in the cockpits, you got in there, you looked at them and
• 1:03:36
  Oh, wait, wait, wait, hold on a second, I don't know what kind of place you were.
• 1:03:41
  I've never heard this before.
• 1:03:44
  Listen, that is not that that is not all black here. I'm looking at. Oh, my God.
• 1:03:53
  Well, in theory, in theory. OK, go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt.
• 1:03:58
  In theory, if that had happened one night, We were on a DC-10 and a flight engineer shows up, she's a female.
• 1:04:07
  Today you only have 6% of the pilots on the cockpit are female.
• 1:04:11
  So imagine what it was 20 years ago, it's a lot less than that.
• 1:04:14
  Female shows up, it's a girl and we do our introduction, she's on probation
• 1:04:19
  and the other guy reaches over and pulls out one of these pictures without even thinking about it, none of us were thinking about it, just routine.
• 1:04:24
  And hands it over and starts to hand it to me and we both go, oh shit.
• 1:04:28
  You know and we both realized and she's seen it of course by now and she's gracious and she's wonderful about it you know and then we look at it and of
• 1:04:38
  course you know quickly you know we fold and put it away back or it was for the
• 1:04:42
  next guy.
• 1:04:43
  All the way was an all-nighter, you know red eye la to Kennedy and all the way out there
• 1:04:48
  I go. How strange is it? How weird was it for her to come into a place where?
• 1:04:55
  You know, it's it's it's not normal It's not just a male dominated that doesn't do it justice when you know one or two out of a hundred people are female
• 1:05:04
  It's not male. It's only yes, you know, it's a football team, right?
• 1:05:08
  You know, and how strange is it for someone, and I understood that somewhat being, being
• 1:05:14
  from Iran, you know, I mean, I was sitting there with all this F-16 and F-18 and F-14
• 1:05:19
  jocks and carrier landings.
• 1:05:21
  Here's a guy that was a bartender, you know, you know, it's, you know, camel jacket coming
• 1:05:26
  in here and then flying airplanes.
• 1:05:29
  And so I was a little bit familiar with not, not feeling, you know, not, not someone even
• 1:05:36
  not belonging even though I always belonged I always felt that this was
• 1:05:40
  home you know and no incident ever occurred to counter that but it's still in my mind there was always that feeling so by the time I landed at Kennedy I
• 1:05:48
  said man it's gotta be it's gotta be a female you know so that she gets the
• 1:05:53
  blame she gets the blame that you crashed it because you're incompetent
• 1:05:57
  because you were hired on a quota because you know on and on and on and And then, and then I made her, you know, generation, you know, immigrant, because that's where, you know, home is and what was familiar with.
• 1:06:10
  Nice. So, so how, how, how long did it take you to write the book?
• 1:06:14
  You know, this book took six months, but I've had, you know, books that have taken 10 years.
• 1:06:21
  Well, so let me back up and ask you, so what, what, what, how did you get started writing and what was your driving force to write?
• 1:06:30
  You know, write a story. You know, I'm never much of a reader and to my embarrassment.
• 1:06:37
  You know, and it's not something that I gloat about, but it is true, it's just the way it is.
• 1:06:42
  I have not read many, many books in my life, but I did read The Firm. Oh yeah. So one of those long
• 1:06:48
  all writers, you know, The Firm by John Grisham and I got through it and I didn't have to get
• 1:06:53
  through it. It was easy to get through. And by the time I got to the end, I was so immersed with the
• 1:06:57
  the characterism, with the writing, and with just the fun of it, and I said, you know,
• 1:07:02
  I think I can do this.
• 1:07:04
  So I went and bought a novel, it's a little novelette, you know, it's How to Write a Damn
• 1:07:09
  Good Novel, it says, it's only, I don't know, 100 pages or something, you know, and I managed
• 1:07:14
  to get through that, and I just came home and typed in chapter one in Microsoft Word.
• 1:07:18
  That's awesome.
• 1:07:22
  You know how many writers are killed to hear that? Right?
• 1:07:26
  They're like, give you a, now listen, the, uh, this other one, silent
• 1:07:33
  voices has taken a lot longer.
• 1:07:35
  Well, just to put you at ease, um, you know, repeat and I are both Marines.
• 1:07:39
  So we, we really don't read much either. We were really like pictures.
• 1:07:42
  Pictures are good for us.
• 1:07:44
  Picture book, make it a picture book. Next exactly. Flew with a lot of Marines, really good guys.
• 1:07:52
  They're all ashlock. If you're out there somewhere, I salute you.
• 1:07:56
  There you go.
• 1:07:58
  There you go. Oh, I often say for someone who likes to sleep late and doesn't like to run, I
• 1:08:01
  went in the wrong branch of the military. What were we thinking?
• 1:08:07
  That just didn't work out well for me at all. So awesome. So, all right.
• 1:08:11
  So what's the name of your other book you're working on now?
• 1:08:16
  Silent Voices, it's about two sisters, two American sisters, that look alike, they're a few years apart.
• 1:08:25
  One is born and raised in the Northeast, knows nothing other than just life here.
• 1:08:31
  And the other one was lost at birth and she is in Afghanistan and she thinks she's an Afghan girl.
• 1:08:40
  Raised in a, her mother was a journalist, so at birth, an event took place,
• 1:08:46
  and she was separated, and so she's raised, even though she's blonde hair, blue eyes,
• 1:08:52
  you know, light skin, she feels like she's cursed with all of that, she doesn't understand it,
• 1:08:57
  she's a complete Afghan, she's having to dye her hair with henna so she doesn't attract any more unwanted
• 1:09:03
  attention that she's already getting.
• 1:09:06
  And the story takes place 30 days before the US pullout, you know, in July of 21. Okay.
• 1:09:12
  And they learn about each other and, you know, then they have to fight each other
• 1:09:17
  while they're fighting forces that are not, you know, that are not kind to them.
• 1:09:22
  And so there's a lot of real, you know, underground Afghanistan,
• 1:09:26
  the way it was during that period of time, you know, and in the events that take place.
• 1:09:32
  And when they find each other eventually.
• 1:09:36
  You know, it's, it's on a mountain top, you know, as, as, as forces are coming in to kill them both.
• 1:09:41
  Wow. When's this book going to be done? Cause I want to read that one too.
• 1:09:46
  Right. 90 days. Okay.
• 1:09:50
  Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, that's awesome. And how did you, uh, are you, are they're not self-published? I don't believe. Are they?
• 1:10:00
  No, the first two books were, uh, were published by, uh, Bantam Dell, you know, Random House now.
• 1:10:06
  And Highwire was nominated for Edgar's, by the Edgar Awards.
• 1:10:12
  Right, I forgot to mention that, my apologies.
• 1:10:14
  Yeah, so what I did was, so it did the thing, and actually Highwire, the original version of Highwire was sold prior to 9-11,
• 1:10:24
  and the books were actually being sold into the bookstores on the week of 9-11.
• 1:10:32
  It was scheduled that way and the original cover had an airplane that's 767 and at a
• 1:10:42
  bank angle over New York and big letters across the top was faster than the speed of terror.
• 1:10:49
  The book was sold in 2020 and it was scheduled to be sold the week of 9-11 and anyhow, they did not delay it.
• 1:11:00
  Pretty much the only thing I missed was Muhammad Ata's name.
• 1:11:02
  Oh my gosh. You know, and so the first printing was supposed to be 244,000 copies in the US alone.
• 1:11:11
  Of course, nothing nearly like that happened. Some people thought it even, I had written a book in one week, you know, about 9-11 and
• 1:11:19
  then so there was some backlash towards that, which, you know.
• 1:11:25
  So anyhow, fast forward 10 or 15 years, I forgot about it, went about my life, did other
• 1:11:31
  things. And then I just reverted the rights back to myself, you know, a while back.
• 1:11:37
  And, uh, and so I'm, I'm putting it out there myself the second time, you know, an audio book version, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right.
• 1:11:46
  But I'll tell you, see, the fact that it's random house, Bantam that, that tells me that should tell you, uh, he's no slouch.
• 1:11:53
  This man could put words on paper that are compelling to read.
• 1:11:56
  So it's a lot of fun.
• 1:11:58
  So you were, so the book original, uh, release was just a victim of timing, bad, that horrible timing.
• 1:12:05
  Yeah, but there were so many victims that were so much worse than me.
• 1:12:08
  I mean, I wasn't going to sit there, you know, and then feel bad, you know, I still went
• 1:12:12
  to a second printing.
• 1:12:14
  I still got nominated for the Edgars, you know, and it was a big event, it was wonderful
• 1:12:18
  to see all of that, wonderful to be a part of all of it.
• 1:12:22
  But you know, it was, it was just the way it was, you know, it's just one of those things.
• 1:12:26
  So maybe that was a poor choice of words there, Fig, but, but yeah, the nice save there, Cam,
• 1:12:30
  well done. Yeah. I hate when that happens. Just leave it to the dumb marine.
• 1:12:39
  Oh man, right? Yeah. You guys must know each other for a while.
• 1:12:44
  Just a couple years now. Coming up on 30 or so. You're finishing each other's sentences.
• 1:12:52
  Perfect. What's your favorite one to wrap us up with then?
• 1:12:57
  Just a quick version here. Okay. No, take your time.
• 1:12:59
  The Moody Blues have been my favorite band all my life. I mean, I used to listen to them.
• 1:13:06
  Nice. You know, Knights in White Satin when I was two years old, probably. Well, not that old. But.
• 1:13:15
  Prior to American Airlines, we're flying the main two guys that are out there,
• 1:13:20
  to fly them for a concert someplace. And one of the two, he's fascinated by what I'm doing.
• 1:13:28
  And in Lyric Jet, I don't know if you're familiar, there's not enough, the older versions anyhow,
• 1:13:33
  there's not enough room to stand, so you gotta really just kneel on your knees.
• 1:13:37
  So he was kneeling on his knees for an hour, fascinated by what we're doing.
• 1:13:42
  And I'm looking at this guy, I've been listening to you since I was in diapers.
• 1:13:47
  And I'm fascinated by him, his fascination. So anyhow, we land, we go wherever we're going,
• 1:13:52
  and I'm just dying to go to this concert.
• 1:13:54
  But I mean, how do you do that? How do you tell the guy, A, I can't afford your ticket,
• 1:13:59
  B, how do you even get your ticket?
• 1:14:01
  So I kind of created the version somewhere in there. And I don't know how I did it.
• 1:14:07
  I walked up to the guy and said, man, I know, been listening to your stuff,
• 1:14:12
  and I really would wanted to see it, but it's a shame, I think it's sold out.
• 1:14:16
  Uh, sold out, sold out, no problem. Come here.
• 1:14:21
  He grabs his thing from around his neck and puts it around mine.
• 1:14:25
  Backstage pass.
• 1:14:27
  We flew these guys for a week and I was, I got the backstage pass. I would go in.
• 1:14:34
  I mean, he was, they were singing. I was so close. I could touch them.
• 1:14:38
  Talk about, you know, it wasn't always loads of cargo, man. It was, it was, it was awesome.
• 1:14:43
  Big, big, That's awesome.
• 1:14:44
  That is absolutely fantastic. Oh, man.
• 1:14:49
  Makes me want to consider flying passengers, you know.
• 1:14:54
  Geez. Well, Kim, we can't thank you enough for your time. Your stories are fabulous.
• 1:15:00
  It's been very captivating. And I'm telling people, go get his books.
• 1:15:05
  You are not going to be sorry. He is quite the writer.
• 1:15:10
  So thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate it. We need also to thank somebody else, huh, Jake?
• 1:15:16
  Who might that be? I, first of all, I want to say thank you to cam and I really have enjoyed this, but I, we, uh, we got to say thanks to Dave Hamilton.
• 1:15:25
  That's the man, Dave Hamilton, Mackie cab, help us put all this together.
• 1:15:29
  The brains behind the tech here.
• 1:15:31
  I just follow what he tells me to do and it all comes out great.
• 1:15:35
  Well, thank you guys, Pete and Fig. Um, you know, I have enjoyed it very much.
• 1:15:40
  I've done, um, you know, quite a few of these here in promote, trying to promote this book.
• 1:15:43
  This is, you guys are fun. I can tell you that.
• 1:15:45
  And the way you pick up for each other and do that, I mean,
• 1:15:50
  we used to be wingmen, you know, it's been a pleasure.
• 1:15:53
  Yeah, yeah, we'd fly, we'd fly together.
• 1:15:56
  Let's see who else we got to thank here. Oh, I know who it is.
• 1:16:01
  Oh, it's the guys that make the Air Force sound good. The Dose Gringos. That's right.
• 1:16:07
  The Dose Gringos. So thanks to the Dose Gringos for letting us use their music.
• 1:16:11
  It gives our show a little extra character. Perfect theme.
• 1:16:15
  The word, so there I was, right in the middle of this song. We love it.
• 1:16:20
  We also have a couple quick announcements. We have now a Patreon page. So if you go to
• 1:16:25
  so there I was that us slash Patreon, it will take you to our page. And you can help support
• 1:16:31
  us to bring this show to you every week. This is going to be show number 55. Cam. So we're,
• 1:16:37
  we're now over a year, we had a couple shows that we did a couple weeks where we did two shows in
• 1:16:41
  one week. So this is our one year anniversary show coming up big. So that's awesome. That went fast.
• 1:16:49
  And we've got a glossary page up there because we say terms all the time in aviation that
• 1:16:54
  we have no idea what it means, like ACARS, not one of the three of us know what it is.
• 1:17:00
  We know it's ACARS. It is what it is. It does what it does.
• 1:17:05
  So, yeah, we're going to have to look up what ACARS actually stands for and get it in the
• 1:17:09
  glossary. And if you heard other terms that you don't understand and you want them in the glossary,
• 1:17:13
  shoot us an email at fig at. So there I was dot us or repeat it.
• 1:17:18
  So there I was that us we're planning on a show in show number 75,
• 1:17:24
  how to become a pilot.
• 1:17:25
  So whether you're 14 or 44 or 64 and you want to fly airplanes,
• 1:17:30
  get some questions into us, we're going to help put a compilation to show together about what it takes to become a pilot these days.
• 1:17:37
  It's a, which is kind of a popular thing for some reason, all of a sudden.
• 1:17:42
  Yeah, it's not easy, but boy, the rewards have been fabulous for us, and we know they
• 1:17:50
  will be for you too if you've got any kind of drive to do that.
• 1:17:53
  We've had the cross show swaps here with the NocellaCast at podfeet.com and the Audio Ground
• 1:17:58
  School podcast, and that's over at parttimepilot.com, and of course, factormeals.com slash sothereIwas50
• 1:18:05
  5-0 and use the code, so there I was 50 to get 50% off our first box.
• 1:18:11
  I don't know, Fig, do you have any special advice for anybody between now and the next time we get together?
• 1:18:17
  Aircraft communications, addressing and reporting system, ACARS.
• 1:18:20
  Don't sit on the ejection handle, damn it.
• 1:18:24
  Right. Stay safe and check six.
• 1:18:29
  Music.