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The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Jeff Diercksmeier · The Flyboy Podcast

0:09
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing: cool flying stories.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Jeff Dirksmeyer.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: Jeff is a civilian trained pilot.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: He's flown with over nine different airlines through five mergers, and he retired as a captain with American Airlines.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: He spent 27 years in the Wright seat as a co-pilot and then as a captain for the last 10 years of his career.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: He's flown a variety of aircraft, including the 727, the BAE-146, the MD-80, the DC-9, the 737, the 757, the 767, and the Airbus Series 319, 320, and 321, as well as a whole bunch of little airplanes, including Pipers and Cessna's.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: Jeff has almost 30,000 flying hours.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: And along the way, he's been a union accident investigator for ALPA, USAPA, and APA, and he's participated in eight accident investigations, including five with fatalities.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk about some of those as well.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: So with that, Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Great to be here, David.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely great to be here.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Jeff, with such an amazing career over so many years, when did you first know you wanted to be a pilot?
1:25
SPEAKER_00: Well, David, it's uh everyone's got their origin story.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: And for me, I was sitting in the back of a Nord 262 turboprop on the Swift Air, uh flying from San Luis Obispo down to Orange County, uh actually to Los Angeles, International Airport.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Was in college, making five bucks an hour working at a on-campus television station.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: It was early in the morning, and uh I thought, hey, you know, maybe I'd like to be a flight attendant.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: I knew a buddy that was flying for Western at the time, flying DC 10 just to Hawaii, said it was a riot, had a great time, party all the time.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: I thought a few more minutes, I thought, nah, I think I'd like to be a pilot.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm 21 years old.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, I thought about flying at some point in time and getting a private pods license, but never as an avocation.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: And quite frankly, I was just screwing around at the local junior college, working with a bus and truck theater company, having a great time.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: So I get home that night after uh working at the television station, and uh my next door neighbor happened to be in the uh nuts and bolts portion of aviation.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: He had a company that made widgets for aircraft, and he subscribed to Aviation Week in Space Technology, which is the uh greatest magazine in all of aviation, especially at that time.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: So his copy happened to be delivered into my mailbox.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: This is October of 1978, right at the dawn of airline deregulation.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: So I get home that night, it's about nine o'clock, I grab the mail and I go, oh, look, Aviation Week, and here's a picture in airplanes and stuff.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is interesting.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: I open it up, and here is the headline in uh Aviation Week in Space Technology: demand for pilots to outstrip supply in the 1980s.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: So they're predicting a pilot shortage in the 1980s.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, holy smokes, that sounds like it's for me.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Um I talked to uh my folks and uh got out the yellow pages because that's in the days.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if your uh listeners know what the yellow pages is.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And I started off at the Alpha Flight School, the Bravo Flight School, the Charlie flight school, and somebody didn't answer the phone.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Somebody else said, Well, we can get you a demo flight next week.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: And I got to an outfit at uh Orange County Airport, now known as John Wayne Airport, and they said, Hey Jeff, I think we got an instructor, and uh believe the engine's running.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: How soon can you be here?
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And I hustled on down there.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: I took the demo flight, and uh that from that day forward, I knew what I want to do for the rest of my life.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: And they said, it's very easy.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: All you do is you get your private, your commercial, your instrument, your flight instructor, we hire you, your flight instructor instrument, a multi, a multi-instructor instrument, you get your ATP and you're off to the airlines.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: I was young, dumb, and stupid enough to go, right on, sign me up.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: So I started flying a week later, and nine months I had my private commercial instrument, CFI, double I, and a multi-engine rating, and I started working.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: I flew seven days a week.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: I loved every aspect of it, had a great cadre of guys along with me that we all pushed each other.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: Hey, this guy got a ground instructor rating.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get a ground instructor rating.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: This guy got a 7-2 engineer ticket.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Back in those days, those are the sorts of things that a civilian pilot needed.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: You needed uh not just a uh 7-2 written, you needed the full ticket, which I did.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: So we pushed each other along, hit the commuters as we called them back in those days, and never looked back.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: You mentioned uh the demand for pilots in the 1980s.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: I experienced exactly the same good fortune on the military side.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: They literally took me into the Air Force and sent me to flight school, even though I had never flown an airplane, didn't have a good pilot's license.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: They sent me through a little screening program down in Hondo, Texas, to make sure I could solo an airplane after a few rides.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: Then they said, okay, good enough.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: Come on, you're going to flight school.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: Good deal.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: We were both very fortunate.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious to know, with all the different types of airliners that you've flown, how are they different?
5:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, from the MD eighty to the 737 to the 757.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean, as a passenger on them, they're all big airplanes to me.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: How do they handle differently?
5:28
SPEAKER_01: How do they fly differently?
5:30
SPEAKER_01: And what's the experience like on the flight deck?
5:32
SPEAKER_00: That's a great question, especially since uh I went to the dark side and finished my career flying the uh Airbus aircraft.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm sure you've had guys on the podcast, the old uh if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going, guys, and you know, I don't want to side stick, give me something I can hang on to.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: But the way I always equate it is that uh you're on the internet and you get to the same results.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: But the way Airbus does it and the way Boeing does it is different.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: One's going it PC route and the other one's going the iOS route.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: One's just a IBM PC and the other one's Apple.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: So those of us that you know have gone from one platform to the other, no, there's a real steep learning curve if you've been a Microsoft guy forever and all of a sudden you've got to start freeing out Apple and vice versa.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: And uh I would say that we get to the same point.
6:22
SPEAKER_00: We absolutely get to the same point.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: And while I was not necessarily leery about going to uh Airbus after having fly, I mean it started off Steam Gauge, uh flight engineer 727, you know, sitting sideways and twisting and turning and doing all sorts of stuff to being uh finally I f most of my flying the last five years was Airbus 321 NEO going to Hawaii, Los Angeles, Hawaii.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you, that's the job to have right there.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: It was fantastic.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Hence the shirt you're wearing.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, uh my randspooner, exactly.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: That's the uh official retired airline pilot garb uh out of my neighborhood.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: I hope that answers your question.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Actually, I want to probe a little bit more.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: I like the analog of like a PC to a Mac and how they're different.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: So can you give us some examples of how flying a Boeing airliner versus an Airbus airliner is different?
7:17
SPEAKER_00: I I'm sure like you, I love watching YouTube videos and watching uh Instagram videos and you see pilots flying.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: You have a you have a picture, cockpit picture of someone landing a uh 737, whether it's a Max or whatever.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: And man, they got this going and they're doing this stuff, and then you hear that trim wheel, all this stuff going on.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: It's a very it's it's manual, right?
7:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's more it's more of a manual aircraft.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And then you watch uh Airbus guy landing the airplane, and uh they got the stick and they're just kind of doing this.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Throttles aren't moving at all.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: They don't move in the Airbus, and you get down to about 30 feet, and uh voice says retard, retard, retard, and you just pull the power off and you land the airplane and you taxi off the runway.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: It's just uh there's a a real mindset difference in the way that Boeing engineers develop their airplanes and the way Airbus engineers develop their planes, with you know, we've all got control laws and all that stuff is built in.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: It's you live that as an Airbus guy, it's in the background as a Boeing guy.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell So for me it's all my time I've only flown single seat.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: So what is it like?
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh can you give me a sense of the crew dynamics where you've got a flight engineer, a first officer, a captain?
8:35
SPEAKER_01: Put us in the cockpit.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: What's that sort of that teamwork like?
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Let's say you're flying to Hawaii or you're flying on along uh sortie across the ocean.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: I can I'll take this back uh to uh 1549, Sully's accident, uh Sully and Jeff Skiles on the uh on the Hudson.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: I participated in that investigation.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: I did the cockpit voice recorder.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: People will ask, and Sully happened to be a friend for 10, 15 years prior to that uh incident.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: We actually taught crew resource management together at the airline.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: We did uh beta testing of bringing pilots and flight attendants together in a training environment with crew resource management.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: So we'd known each other for years.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: So it's if people would ask them, well, how how long had you and Jeff flown together?
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you know, how did you rate how are you gonna make this work out?
9:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the first time they'd ever flown together.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: People are always shocked by that.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: It's training, training, training, training, SOP, SOP, SOP.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: So I jump in the jet, I'm in Los Angeles, we're gonna head over, 2200 nautical, we're on our way to Hawaii, it's a beautiful, great day.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: Guy slides in the right seat.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: I know he's competent, I know he's trained, I know what to expect out of him, he knows what to expect out of me.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Each of us do our work, and we end up working together successfully, and off we go.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: So if I can ask, you mentioned uh Sully's incident where he landed on the Hudson.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: Can you share anything about that accident investigation that you participated in?
9:59
SPEAKER_01: You know, I've seen the movie with Tom Hanks, I've read Sully's book.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh were there any things that stood out to you that were particularly surprising, unexpected?
10:08
SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And I will say no to surprise or unexpected but the way that everybody lived.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: Except everybody lived.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: So, David, if one and Sully will tell you this, if one person had died changes dynamic drastically.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: Just yep, it's it's all over.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: But the fact that 155 people walked away from that incident, every it was daylight, there was no ice on the Hudson, where they touched down was right across from the ferry terminal.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: The response, immediate response just changed the whole dynamic.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Um as indicated, I did the cockpit force recorder, and listening to the focus that both pilots had.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: Jeff had just come out of training.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Nobody you want more in the right seat when the shit hits the fan than a guy that's just out of training, right?
10:58
SPEAKER_00: Because he's used to this.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: He's used to two engines on fire and no coffee in the back.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: Give me the checklist and off you go.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: In the simulator.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: In the simulator.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: In the simulator.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: What happens, you know, in the real world.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: This that harkens back to uh Al Haynes and the United DC-10 flight, Lots of Hydraulics, where Captain Al, you know, give me the checklist.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: And I think Denny Fitch was the name of the engineer.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: Can't remember.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: He said, There is no checklist.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: We don't have a loss of all hydraulic checklists on this all hydraulic airplane.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh so with that and that was what happened.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh and amazing.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: That was uh uh Sioux City, and uh the number of people that were saved in that accident by that crew working together was spectacular.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Oh, when they landed in the cornfield.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Just using engine power, bringing a uh guy, uh Czech airman from the back of the aircraft up to you know, using all their uh humanware, software, uh hardware, everything all together to a successful outcome.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: People died in that accident accident, but um it amazing.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: So take it with Sully and Jeff.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: Those guys work together brilliantly, and every warning's going off in the cockpit, everything, the uh continuous repetitive chimes, the fire warnings, the ground proxes barking away.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: And you got 300 seconds to figure out what to do.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: And the way that they work together, all the way down to the bitter end where uh Sully says, Got any other ideas?
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Jeff said no.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: And the cockpit for his quarter uh indicates sound of impact.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: They did everything that they could, boom, and great egress, great emergency response.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: So I'm perhaps that I'm not that I'm surprised by it, but just hearing the cool, calm, collected nature and I knew that would happen with Sully.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: There's no question about it.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: I uh when I we first found out that there was uh, you know, an aircuff in the Hudson, and I was dispatched by my union and the company, and I finally get my wife calls me.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: She goes, You're not gonna believe who it was that landed in the Hudson.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I said, Who?
12:58
SPEAKER_00: It's Sully.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, huh, we don't have anything to worry about then, because I know the guy did a great job.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty frickin' cool.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: It was.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about in in-flight emergencies on an airliner.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: What's the most common type of in-flight emergency?
13:14
SPEAKER_00: A responsive passenger.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh my wife was a flight attendant, and we've spoken about this numerous times.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: It's the early morning departure, somebody's been up since three o'clock, they didn't get their breakfast, they're at the airport, maybe they even had a pop in the bar, they're not feeling all that good, their blood sugar level, we don't know, but at that time is probably very low.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: They step up and either collapse right in the aisle or they get to the back of the front of the aircraft in the galley and boom, down they go.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: Ding ding.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Hey, Kem Jeff, uh, we got somebody unresponsive on the galley floor.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh stand by for additional information.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: So those sorts of things happen all the time.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: In my experience, that is the most common.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm very fortunate and I never had anybody require an AED in the back of the aircraft, the automatic external defibrillator, any uh injectable drugs, but it was that sort of very common thing that happened all the time.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Walk us through if you would.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm curious.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: My wife was actually on a flight where they diverted into another city along the way, flying coast to coast.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: So put us in the cockpit.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: Tell us what happens.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: Like let's say you're at altitude and all of a sudden you have a passenger who's had a heart attack or some significant medical event.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: What happens step by step?
14:24
SPEAKER_01: What do you do?
14:25
SPEAKER_00: First thing we hear is ding ding.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: So flight is that's calling for the back of the airplane.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And as indicated, hey Captain Jeff, we got a passenger, 45 years old, down in the aisle, we're calling for a healthcare professional in the back of the aircraft.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: We'll get back to you.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna let them do what they need to do in the back of the aircraft, call for a health care professional, get the med kit out, get the AED out, do whatever they need to do, and we start our game plan between the uh captain and the first officer.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: All right, where are we?
14:53
SPEAKER_00: And how soon can we be on the ground?
14:55
SPEAKER_00: And we're game planning for the short term and then for the long term.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: As the information comes forward to the cockpit, hey, we got a doctor on board and we've just we gave this person some orange juice and they're feeling a little bit better.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Doc says we're good to go, or Doc says, hey, we're not good to go.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: We have a uh company, at least that I did now, I've been retired for almost five years now, but we used a company called Medlink.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: And we were able to call V Medlink, uh, set up a phone patch through dispatch, and then we would just relay the information from the back of the aircraft to the front of the aircraft, and there was a form that the flight attendants would use, and we've got mail passenger, 45 years old, sitting in 313B, suffering from the following symptoms, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: And medlink was the one then that makes that decision.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: They assume the liability for the airline, that's part of it.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: And uh so we would work in coordination with them.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: And and Medlink has the ability, let's say we're we're out of the I don't know, we're we're we're in a flyover state.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: And you know, going and dropping the aircraft into Buffalo, Wyoming might not be the best thing.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: It might be be we could be on the ground in 20 minutes, but the best thing might be to press and head over to Denver or someplace they know where uh hospitals are that can provide those sorts of critical care.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: And then we just work our way through that the whole time.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: Will a notify dispatch also say you got a medical emergency going on board the aircraft, and then that's when we would set up the call with Medlink.
16:27
SPEAKER_00: So we got a division of duty in that situation, and one guy's gonna fly and talk on the radio, and the other guy is then going to deal with the flight attendants, the doctors in the back, and medlink.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: So the workload increases, but we know it's like your aircraft, your radios, you just press.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm working in the back with these guys.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: And it could be the captain assigning those duties to the first officer or the captain saying, I'm gonna go ahead and do this.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: And the whole time, where are we, where are we going, how soon, where can we be?
16:56
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: The majority of the time, Medlinkus says, press, you're good, guys.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, it sounds like they got in control in the back.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: When they don't, and it's land immediately, ATC, hey, made a made, made a medical emergency on board.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: We want to go to XYZ, pull the plug, come out of the sky, work with the flight attendants because they still have to prepare the cabin.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: The dynamic, the the workload just moves up, up, up, but you manage the workload.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: Once you're all squared over the back of the aircraft, we land, and uh hopefully all the ground guys have been notified about what goes on.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of stuff happens in what can be a very compressed length of time.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: But it's again, procedures, procedures, procedures, SOP, SOP, SOP.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: So, Jeff, what's the worst weather you've ever flown through to land an airplane?
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh well, the worst weather, uh just as in general is Philadelphia.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Holy smokes, right?
17:50
SPEAKER_00: Philadelphia.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, basically you're talking two runways east-west, and when it's wintertime and the blizzards are blowing, it is just horrible.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: One runway open at a time because they've got a plow one runway and brush one runway, and then they're they're trying to retrieve and they're trying to launch off of that thing, just in general.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: And then thunderstorms in the summertime, holy, it's just that's Philadelphia.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: Now, me personally, uh in the left seat, and it wasn't the worst weather, and it wasn't even the most challenging, but it just proves the way we train at the airlines our equipment.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: I was a brand new captain.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: I just checked out on the uh Airbus 320 series, and I had a Seattle trip.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: We have increase in minimums for the first hundred hours for what we call euphemistically a baby captain.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, at a hundred and a half.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: A baby captain.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: A baby captain.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: You go around, yeah, yeah, okay.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: I can't, that weather's a little bit too long.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: And that's correct to a certain point until you get into weather where you really have weather.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: And what comes to mind was Seattle.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Brand new captain, going up to Seattle, and they've got the lowest minimums uh in the country, at least in the U.S.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: That's 300, 300, and 300, 300 touchdown, 300 RVR, runaway visual range.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: So 300 feet.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like nothing.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Not at 169.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: So anyway.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: You're you're moving it at like that's that's two seconds.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: So Airbus 321 with our autopilot and auto land system, it's a no-brainer.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: You hook that thing up and you just let the airplane do what it's supposed to do.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Now we've trained in the simulator for this.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: You've done, and this is this is really zero-zero because George lands the airplane.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: We pull the power back when it uh when retard, retard, retard, you come into reverse, but the autopilot has landed the aircraft.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: And now the aircraft is on the ground and you slow down.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to turn off the autopilot because when you come up to a taxiway and you try and turn off that the autopilot's still on, you're right back on the airplane.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Whoa, whoa, whoa.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: So part of my brief planning in those situations to the first officer's always, don't let me forget to turn the autopilot off.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: You're so excited that George has landed the airplane in such a fashion.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: It's like, thank God all that's over.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: But then just taxiing to the gate in a 300 RVR situation, extremely challenging.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: And large airports like CTAC, uh, we have SMIGs route, SMGCS, and those routes are utilized during low visibility.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: So there's giant pink meatballs painted on two taxiways with arrows and lines.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: So you know, okay, I'm spot number five, and now I'm cleared to spot number four via SMIGs, and you're crawling.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: You're taxiing at uh less than a walking pace.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: And just to get the aircraft then into a position where you can actually get in the gate, that's challenging.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: And so it just proved to me what a great aircraft the Airbus was, and uh that our training absolutely worked, and I was a land of the airplane that way.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: I think I was on that flight with you.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: Well, you might have heard a big sigh out of me when we touched down.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: So No, what I heard was a yelp from my wife.
21:14
SPEAKER_01: She's sitting next to me, and I'm looking out the window.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: We're landing at SeaTac, and I like we're in the clouds, in the clouds, in the clouds.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden I see the runway.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: We land on it.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: I said, oh shit.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: And my wife's like, don't ever say that to me when we're on an airplane.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: It was like, you know, zero, zero.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: I think we were on that video.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: It was walks off.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: So, Jeff, what's the closest call you've ever had in an airplane?
21:43
SPEAKER_00: So what comes to mind immediately, I was flying for what we then called a commuter.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Nowadays we have I was a commuter guy, unpressurized turboprops, you know, twelve legs a day.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Twelve legs a day we would fly.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: And uh all down in the kill zone, all at three thousand feet, Ontario, LA, Orange County.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: LA, Ontario, and do that twice more.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: So 12 lakes.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I was flying a piece of equipment called a Bondarani, and uh it was made down in Brazil.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Great airplane.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh PT six engines, those are bulletproof.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, you shoot them and and they just keep gladly going on.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: So we were headed up to uh Bakersfield and had a been vectored uh for the ILS and was a long straight in.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: We had gone over to the I can't remember if we were on the tower yet, seven or eight miles out, or we're still talking approach control.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: And uh we can see the airport.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: It's out there.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: It's a typical Central Valley day, a little bit of haze, midday.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: And out of my periphery, I see a little airplane, single engine, and it's approaching from the 11 o'clock position, and it comes right under the airplane.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: I it was so close, my reaction was to lift my feet off of the rudder pedals.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: That's how club I that's how close it was.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: It was just visceral, like I'm lifting my feet.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Like lifting my feet is going to do anything to keep this aircraft from running into us.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: It was dead on underneath us, and I it was close enough, you know, I could see the guy and I could see the checklist in the window wedged uh, you know, between the glare shield and the window.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: And then it was over.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: Copilot and I, we looked at each other and went, well, that was close.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: Hey Tower, you see anybody out here?
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's a guy who's out there, and uh, you know, he really wasn't supposed to be out there, and uh off you go.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: And just lived to fly another day, landed, and pressed on back to Los Angeles.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: That one really I still think about that one.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So, Jeff, with all the flying you've done, what's the strangest runway surface you've ever landed on?
23:44
SPEAKER_00: You got great questions, David.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: I think I got a good answer to this one right here.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh one of my one of my first job, wet ticket ATP, right, 1,501 hours.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: I've got maybe ATP for our listeners.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: So I was a newly minted airline transport pilot.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: So in our world, we get an ATP at 1,500 hours.
24:07
unknown: Okay.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh you take that check right.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: That allows you then to go to work in those days for various airlines.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: All the big airlines wanted ATPs, but the reality is it's it's just uh another check ride.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: It's the PhD of all your licenses, and then you add on additional ratings.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: So it was a wet ticket, it was brand new.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: And uh I threw my sea threw my sea bag over my shoulder with uh a pot and a pan, a coffee pot, and off I went to Puerto Rico to uh live out, in essence, in the jungle in uh Dorado outside of San Juan, and fly an airplane uh called an Islander.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: It was a BN2A.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Most people know about the Trilender, the three-engine uh aircraft weighing on each engine and one back in the tail.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: This was an Islander, high wing, uh straight stiff gear, non-retractable, and it drove on the ground like a truck and it flew like a truck.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: So very stout airplane, stole capabilities, and short takeoff and land.
25:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh fantastic, thank you, S-D-O L, short takeoff and land.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: And we flew to a little airport down in uh the British Virgin Islands called Virgin Gorda.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Beautiful uh resort down there, and uh just a how the scenery spectacular flying down there.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: Loved it.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: So this was the only north-south runway in all of the Caribbean.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh now the trade winds, they you know, the uh prevailing winds east-west, but it was north-south because that's the orientation of the island.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: The island wasn't wide enough, there was nothing there to be able to make an east-west runway.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: So we would make this approach down uh from the southern end of the island around an old copper mine and then slip in, and it was a runway of crushed coral.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: They had just dug out the mountainside, and there's a beautiful lagoon right there, and they had filled it all in with crushed coral.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: And crushed coral is great because it doesn't have the graininess that uh sand has.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: You don't have fodd for an archive damage issues landing on crushed coral, and it was always fantastic.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: It was just so much fun to slip around that corner by that mine and just go full flaps and drop the airplane in and taxi up to the little hut.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: That's all that immigration and custom was with a hut.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: Guy down there said, Oh, welcome, man.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: How are you today, Captain Dux?
26:19
SPEAKER_00: And uh, because they couldn't say Dirksmeyer, so I was Captain Dux.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: And uh off we went.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: And then it was a back taxi.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: There was no uh taxiways, no fillets or anything.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: You just went down the other way, turn around, cobbed the power, and uh since it was a stole airplane, it was really fun.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: We wouldn't do the with passengers on board, but empty leg.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: You just get the aircrane off the ground, push it over, hold it in ground effect, let it accelerate, and then just pitch out over this beautiful lagoon, beautiful blue lagoon, and then hot foot it back to wherever you're going, usually St.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: Thomas or back to San Juan, grab another load and head on back down.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: That sounds like fun flying.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: Jeff, we know flying can be dangerous.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: Are there any close friends you've lost?
27:01
SPEAKER_01: Anyone you want us to remember today?
27:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh certainly.
27:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh Captain Greg Lindemod, great, great guy.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, my first, well really my second real airline.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: I flew for Sun Country as a flight engineer on the 7-2.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: Old Braniff guys put that airline together.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: Super guys.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: And I I learned what it was like to be cool under pressure and how a cockpit operated flying with those guys.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: Then I got my dream job at PSA, Pacific Southwest Airlines, and that was a uh MD-80 and 727 outfit uh down in San Diego.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: The name PSA still exists.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Tragically, they had their accent over the Potomac, but they're now a wholly owned subsidiary of American Airlines.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: But this was the original PSA that ultimately was merged into U.S.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: Air back in the late 1980s.
27:48
SPEAKER_00: So uh this also happened to be the first accident that uh I worked as an accent investigator.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: We had the BAE-146 high-wing four-engine uh jet.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: So I've got four-engine jet time on an airplane that didn't weigh but a hundred thousand pounds, if that much.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: This is a great airplane to learn to fly in the airline environment.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: You'd only go to flight level 290, 29,000 feet.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: That's as high as you could go.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it'd go to 30, but in those days, you never flew at 30.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: All because of the 2,000-foot separation, it was either 290 or 310.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And just a fun airplane, 100 passenger, two flight attendants in the back, and we flew up and down the uh West Coast, best flying, San Diego all the way up to Bellingham, Washington, and the sunset every evening, fantastic.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: So I flew with Greg a number of times when I was a new hire.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: We always had a great time.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: Greg had been out on a medical.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'll I will tell you, I was flying with Greg one day, and we were in uh Las Vegas.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: We're walking into the, and we're talking the old, old, old terminal.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: And this is ancient history for your uh listeners and viewers.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: But he goes, see that hole in the brick right there?
28:54
SPEAKER_00: I said, Yeah.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, that was during a hijacking, and uh a guy had a shootout with the cops, and that was from a bullet that uh one of the hijackers had shot at the uh at the cops.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: So, well, okay.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: Flash forward a number of years later, uh, I had seen Greg again in Las Vegas.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: And hey, Greg, how are you, buddy?
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Where you been?
29:14
SPEAKER_00: And he showed me his arm, and he had this huge, very fresh scar on his arm.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh Greg had owned a campground up in the mountains in eastern San Diego, a number of cabins and a little pond and stuff, and he was rehabbing uh this facility and then renting out cabins, and he was working overhead with skill saw.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: And the skill saw kicked back on him and came down and almost took his arm off.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: Came down to and I said, Greg, I you're so lucky that you didn't lose your arm.
29:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, and you get to come back and you get to fly, and you this is just so, so lucky.
29:51
SPEAKER_00: Next time that I heard Greg's name was PSA 1771, where we were just merging with U.S.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Air at that time, and a disgruntled U.S.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: Air employee uh had been fired for stealing liquor money.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: He was a ground pounder baggage guy, and he had been stealing liquor money from the drop safe that's in operations.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: Flight attendants in those days, it was all cash, fill out their form, and they take an envelope and they drop it into a little drop safe, and he'd been stealing out of the drop safe.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: And so he got fired.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: He was uh not happy about this.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: He got a buddy of his to give him a 45 revolver.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: He bypassed security, which you could do in those days.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: We live in an insanely different world today in 2026 than we did back in uh 88.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: Bypassed security, he still had his ID, his ID had not been removed by the company, flew as a non-rev in a BAE-146, LA to San Francisco.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh the station manager who had fired this guy was in the back of the aircraft.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh we surmised that um he was sitting next to our chief pilot, our PSA chief pilot.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: They knew each other, there wasn't a lot there uh there wasn't a big load on the aircraft.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: And uh in flight, then on the cockpit voice recorder, there was a sound of a gunshot, sound of another gunshot.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: The uh bad guy had written out a suicide note on a barf bag.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, you've done this to me and you've ruined my family, I'm going to ruin your life, I'm gonna do all this.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: Kills our guys in the back, forces way in the cockpit, because in those days we were trained, hey, you comply with the bad guy.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, no, we don't we're not looking at uh airplanes as weapons of mass destruction, like in 9-11, or uh German wings crashing the aircraft and people dying.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: That's so the flight attendant let him into the cockpit.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Or Dubai air.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you very much.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: How about that?
31:45
SPEAKER_00: In real time in the last two days.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: So they let him in the cockpit, and um the uh the guy killed our captain, charter captain, charter first officer, stuffed the nose of the airplane over.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: He knew enough to s push on the yoke and stuffed the nose of the airplane over, and the airplane went as close to supersonic as it possibly could, and then killed himself, one last gunshot prior to impact.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: So the guy didn't have the guts to see the whole thing play out.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: As the aircraft is going down very eerily, the transponder, which was set over on the captain's side, was squawking 7,500 for hijack and 7,700 for emergency.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: So Greg was still alive enough to try to tell people, hey, something happened to us.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: This is what happened.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: We were in a hijack situation or emergency situation.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And uh that airplane hit the ground and killed everybody on board.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh massive loss of life.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: And it was uh and he was just a great guy.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: So I think of Captain Greg Glendemod all the time.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: He was a he was a great guy to fly with.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: He was new as a captain.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: We were flying together, so we had that going on together.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: We're new guys and new captain, new first officer.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: So sorry to hear that.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: For everyone on board.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: So Jeff, when you talk to young people and they tell you they're interested in becoming a pilot, what advice do you give them?
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Go for it.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: It's the greatest job in the world.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: And then it's are you sure you want to do this?
33:19
SPEAKER_00: Do you have the intestinal fortitude to do what it takes to take time and money?
33:25
SPEAKER_00: And if you can get around the time aspect and if you can get around the money aspect, go for it.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: And I've had the pleasure over the last probably ten years, last five years of my career, and then five years afterward, of mentoring a number of young pilots.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's been very, very rewarding.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I'm proud to say uh one's sitting in the cockpit at uh United Airlines, one sitting in the cockpit at American Airlines, uh, another's at a regional right now, working their way up.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm very positive.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: But you gotta want to do it.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: You have to really, really want to do it.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: You've got to be willing to say, hey, listen, I'm gonna after I get my ATP and I get that conditional, conditional job offer from that regional, I'm gonna go wherever the regional tells me to go.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: If I'm going to Richmond, Virginia, or I'm going to Poughkeepsie, I'm going and I'm gonna make it work out.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: And you just gotta put your time in.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: As you know from the people that are in the industry, we're a seniority-driven business and we're an hours-driven business.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: And you get that job, your seniority is gonna dictate what you fly and where you fly, and you get those hours, and that's what the majors are gonna want.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: So it it's really been fun watching, and I still stay in touch with some of them after uh they've been hired by the majors and just seeing how they're doing, and it's it's very, very rewarding.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So, Jeff, here's my last question for you today.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: With almost 30,000 flying hours.
34:45
SPEAKER_01: You mentioned you retired about five years ago.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: How important is being a pilot to your sense of identity?
34:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't list myself in my emails as Captain Jeff Dorksmeyer.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: It was easy for me to walk away.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh I turned 65, I set the parking break, and I was able to walk away.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: One reason why is uh I'd had cancer twice the last five years of my career, and I was lucky enough to come back.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: I was able to come back twice, uh, including my final stent last nine months, flying to Hawaii, flying to Mexico, just getting the the just loving everything.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: And I was able to walk away and just I don't miss it uh because God's telling me, hey man, you got kids, you got grandkids, press on, you know, go live the rest of your life.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: But the mindset that a pilot has, we're as you're my you know, David, you're a linear thinker.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: It drives people nuts.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: There's a problem, let's work the problem.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: I just want to talk about the problem.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, no.
35:47
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna work the problem.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's has uh has worked quite well for me in just all aspects of my life.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: Let's just, you know, you're linear, let's think about these things, let's be calm, let's deal with these issues, let's come up with an answer to it, and then let's just go forward and press on.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Here, here well, Jeff, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
36:08
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: My pleasure, David.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed every moment of it.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: So before we sign off today, I just want to let folks know my novel, Have Blue Sky, about the F-117 Stealth Fighter, will be published on Veterans Day, November 11th, 2026.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: And you can pre-order a copy now on Amazon or AppleBooks or Barnes and Noble.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh, have Blue Sky is the title, and I hope you enjoy it.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: So with that, we'll sign off for today.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions, and hopefully we've fulfilled that mission today.
36:49
SPEAKER_01: New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: Until our next sort of push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.