You once asked me if I had been a Freight Dog. I flew mostly unscheduled trips carrying anything that fit in the airplanes. Boxes, caskets, people, car parts, bull sperm, flowers…every leg was an adventure to someplace I hadn’t seen before and sometimes 3 or 4 trips a day. I always considered the term “Freight Dog” to be a term of prestige that referred to those guys who had moved up the food chain to a scheduled run like carrying mail or a contract to carry auto parts.
I found this article and thought you might like it. By these standards I guess I was at least a “Freight Puppy” J

Mike

Freight Dogs

Quote:
Black Book Frequent Fliers
They haul rhinos, auto parts, and luxury goods in jumbo jets that date to the Nixon administration. Meet the “freight dogs” — renegade airmen who keep the global economy aloft. By Michael Walker

March 2008

The air cargo business ships nearly $3 trillion of goods each year. (Photo: Lu Guozhong/Xinhua Photo/WpN)
Let’s say you’re the captain of a Boeing 747 freighter — a “whale” in cargo-pilot patois — out of Anchorage for Chicago. Except no self-respecting cargo pilot calls himself — or, rarely, herself — anything so leaden, so utterly earthbound. You are instead, proudly and defiantly, a “freight dog,” a nom de guerre freighted, so to speak, with many connotations, not all of them positive.

As you pull onto Runway 6 Right at Anchorage and advance the four throttles to maximum power, air traffic control advises there’s a welter of severe turbulence on your climbout. A passenger airliner might give it a wide berth, but you, with a load of time-sensitive cargo, barge right on through. Then the turbulence hits and all hell breaks loose. The whale is batted about the sky like a shuttlecock. “@#$!, hang on guys,” your flight engineer says. Then: “Whoa…We lost something.” The radio crackles, “Ah, four-six-echo-heavy, Elmendorf tower said something large just fell off your airplane.”

Something large? The National Transportation Safety Board later determines that your 747 experienced “an uncommanded left bank of approximately 50 degrees” along with amusement-park pitches, rolls, and yaws that ripped the Number 2 engine clean off the wing. While all of this is happening, perhaps you, the captain, flash to Ernest K. Gann’s classic Fate Is the Hunter, beloved among freight dogs for its vainglorious pilot prose: “We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.”

In any event, you manage to keep the crippled whale flying long enough to dump fuel and return to Anchorage escorted by two F-15s for a harrowing landing. And as you taxi the jet with its mangled wing, missing engine, and smoking brakes — but the cargo still snuggled safely in the hold — your flight engineer declares: “Buddy, I don’t care how many beers I owed you in the past. This one I’m going to pay off, O.K.?”

The above incident actually occurred several years ago. It was a 747-121 freighter, but the whole misbegotten adventure, from disintegrating airplane to coolly averted tragedy, would be recognized by freight dogs the world over. Freight dogs famously fly decrepit, “clapped-out,” analog-only hand-me-downs from the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly embellished, make for great table rants over pitchers of Watney’s at dog hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising. It’s an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Café adjacent to Miami International Airport through which generations of pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school. “We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. “The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole different culture.”

It’s a culture that represents the last gasp of the ass-kicking, globe-trotting, hell-for-leather pilot worldview. Brutal labor relations, increasingly automated aircraft, and the dispiriting post-9/11 environment have torched whatever adventure and romance remain in aviation. But freight dogs never got that memo. Yes, they bitch endlessly about the hours, the food, the lack of sleep, the death-trap airports of Asia Minor and West Africa.

But talk to true dogs for more than five minutes and they betray themselves as hopelessly, permanently, passionately in love with flying and the particular esprit that hauling cargo allows. “All I ever wanted to do is fly,” says Tom Satterfield, an MD-11 freighter pilot. How much? Satterfield worked as a successful chemical engineer for 20 years before chucking it to become a freight dog when he was 41. Who among us can declare without a trace of irony that we absolutely love our work? I wanted to know why freight dogs did. So I flew to Florida and hung around Miami Springs, the honky-tonk ‘hood near the Miami airport that has been a freight-dog stronghold for more than 50 years.

My guide was Mike Yannacone, a DC-8 cargo captain. The DC-8 was introduced during the Eisenhower administration; the last one rolled off the Douglas Aircraft line in Long Beach, California, in 1972. Yannacone — who drives a GPS-equipped Ram pickup, sports a huge wristwatch, and wears a flight jacket emblazoned with FREIGHT DOG — would soon spirit me into the copilot’s seat of a DC-8 simulator. “I get to fly an airplane,” he marveled when we met up at Bryson’s, which gloriously lived up to its rep, with a barmaid who cackles “What’re you drinkin’, boys?” and a jukebox that blasts Mungo Jerry. Every few minutes the walls rattled as another whale rumbled skyward a few blocks south. Yannacone took a pull on his bottle of Sam Adams and shook his head. “And they’re paying me.”

By volume, air cargo accounts for 35 percent of the value of total shipped goods, nearly $3 trillion a year. Which means that in today’s thin-inventoried, we-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale world — where a wayward shipment of turn-signal stalks from Taiwan can cause a Nissan assembly line to seize in Tennessee — air cargo is often the last, best hope to keep world trade trading merrily away. So freight dogs are under blinding pressure to maintain schedules that must go off with military precision, laid down daily at dispatcher’s desks in Miami or Ypsilanti or Dayton or Memphis: Get the cargo there on time. With the global-economic corollary: And as cheaply as possible. The players include behemoths UPS and FedEx, air-cargo’s alpha specimens. (With 669 aircraft, FedEx is the world’s largest airline.) But there’s still room for hand-sewn, niche-filling outfits shuttling car parts and cancelled checks — even a carrier that specializes in rushing fresh donor organs from morgues to operating theaters via Learjet.

The cargo itself is comprised of incomprehensible quantities of the mundane — 160,000 pounds of roses, 25,000 wiring harnesses for Chevy Malibus, 5,000 pounds of Grand Theft Auto video games — but also a full-size armored truck filled with four tons of Euro banknotes; a pair of experimental Lamborghini Countachs; a Sikorsky 76 helicopter for the Sultan of Brunei’s nephew; Michael Schumacher’s Formula 1 Ferrari; 120 tons of Beaujolais Nouveau; enough condoms to choke a specially chartered 747 to Rio for Carnival; an MD-11 filled to the gunwales with Victoria’s Secret lingerie; crates of red party balloons stamped I VOTED NEW LABOUR; a U.N. airlift of 186,000 pounds of blankets for earthquake survivors in Islamabad; a mysterious ice chest, insured for $2 million, that turned out to contain the first HIV drug cocktail.

Then there is the livestock: whales; thoroughbred racehorses; rhinos; dairy cattle; giraffes; elephants; crocodiles; piglets (which escaped and got behind the captain’s rudder pedals); ducklings (ditto); a daily shipment out of Brisbane of live crickets destined as feed for the world’s zoos; an RAF police dog en route to Singapore for treatment of an abscessed molar — he tore apart his crate and went after his handler, who barricaded himself in the cockpit while the crew donned oxygen masks, depressurized the plane, and waited for the dog to pass out from hypoxia. Or the luckier dog, the only cargo on a 747 freighter from Chicago to Tokyo, that was released from his cage to play Frisbee catch with the pilot in the cavernous, empty cargo hold and was later photographed, in an homage to freight dogdom, sitting at the captain’s station, paws on the control yoke.

Airline passengers make much of plunging service standards and fewer frills — of being treated, they whimper, “like cargo.” Freight dogs upend the comparison. “If you’re Joe Shmo, who cares if your flight leaves or not?” Baca told me. “Grab another flight — it doesn’t really matter. But when I’m hauling 100 tons of Nintendo Wiis, it starts mattering. That’s millions of dollars of revenue. You have people waiting at Target for that. One time I ended up hauling 130 tons of Happy Meal toys. And the reason was, a container ship sank in the middle of the Pacific. If a huge shipment has just sunk, you can’t dispatch another ship. So you start hauling Happy Meal toys on a 747.”

Seth Brady, a 747 cargo pilot, recalls how a former employer once dispatched a Learjet out of Toledo to meet a British Airways flight at JFK because General Motors had come up five Corvette seat backs short. “They flew in the extra Corinthian leather from England,” he told me, “put it on the Lear at JFK, ran it up to Pontiac, made the new seat backs in three hours, put them back on the Lear, and took them to Bowling Green, Kentucky, in time for the production line not to shut down.” Brady wondered “how anyone could afford to fly all these airplanes around,” and was told the cost to shut the assembly line was $42,000. Per minute.

So the dogs fly, usually at night, when the world’s cargo moves, in odysseys taken up on a moment’s notice — say, Frankfurt-Dubai-Nairobi-Entebbe-Lahore-Taipei-Hong Kong. Many are on call 24-7, meaning they can’t touch so much as a beer or risk violating the FAA’s eight-hour “bottle-to-the-throttle” rule. Meanwhile, cargo carriers are notorious for pushing everything — aircraft, pilots, and the regulations — to the absolute limit. An investigation published by the Miami Herald depicted an industry fraught with decaying aircraft, shoddy maintenance, flagrant safety-rule violations, and 69 fatal crashes of U.S. cargo planes since 2000 that have killed 85; in a quarter of fatal crashes there were mechanical problems that had not been corrected before the planes were dispatched. The regulars at Bryson’s still talk about the Fine Air DC-8 freighter that crashed on takeoff at the Miami airport in 1997. The cargo, improperly loaded, shifted to the tail, causing the plane to stall and plunge into a parking lot. The pilot’s last words were, “Oh, no.”

All those voyages that start with a beeper call and end four weeks and 100,000 miles later take a predictable toll. Among the afflictions is what the dogs call AIDS — Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome. “There was a Wife Number One,” one told me, “but there will not be a Wife Number Two.” There’s also strict observance of what happens in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei stays in Hong Kong-Dubai-Singapore-Amsterdam-Taipei. “There are days where I get to my hotel room and feel like crying,” Baca, who is married to a flight attendant, says, “because the family is going to do things and I’m stuck in Gambia.” But, he adds, “I can’t worry about the kids and the water heater when I’m shooting an approach in a snowstorm at 3:30 A.M. in Kazakhstan. It weighs too much on your head and you will make mistakes. And kill yourself.”

The night before Yannacone takes me up in the simulator, I’m standing on my balcony at the Miami Airport Hilton. It’s one A.M. The dogs are on the move. The airport’s cargo ramp is aswarm with huge airplanes beetling over to Runway 9-27 before lighting their engines and blasting into the tropical night. It’s mesmerizing. And incredibly loud. I’m jet-lagged, disoriented, hungry, and exhausted. Just like a freight dog.

Several sleepless hours later, Yannacone sits behind me in the jumpseat of the simulator, which is the actual cockpit of a vintage DC-8 mounted on hydraulic gimbals, the windshield replaced with video monitors currently depicting the nighttime view of Runway 8 Right at Miami International. On the flight deck this morning are pilot à sgrÃ*mur Karlsson in the captain’s seat and Franceny “Frank” MarÃ*n-Quintero at the flight engineer’s station. I’m in the copilot’s seat, taking in the softly glowing analog gauges and the twinkling runway lights. I’ve never been at the controls of an airplane before and I’ve never flown anything more complicated than a balsa glider. Now, Yannacone is about to turn over to me a 187-foot-long, four-engine beast with a reputation for being a brute to handle in optimum conditions. (Boeing builds airplanes, pilots used to say. And Douglas — manufacturer of the DC-8 — builds character.) Yannacone hints darkly that he’ll be throwing some curves my way.

Karlsson pushes the throttles forward while I’m instructed to stand on the brakes. The sound of whining turbines fills the cockpit. “All engines spooled,” MarÃ*n-Quintero barks. “Release the brakes,” Yannacone commands. The DC-8 starts rolling. Within seconds, the plane yaws to the left. I push the right rudder. Nothing happens. I push some more. The nose suddenly veers right. The runway lights are zipping by, faster and faster; the plane fishtails this way and that as I struggle to keep it on the centerline. “V-1,” Karlsson says, meaning we’ve reached “velocity one,” the takeoff’s decision point, after which any problems — and I can anticipate many — will be dealt with in the air.

Just as the plane seems ready to plow off the side of the runway, Karlsson calls, “Rotate!” I pull gently on the yoke, which yields like a NordicTrack exercise. “Keep pulling, keep pulling,” Yannacone commands. The simulator rears back on its hydraulic legs. “And?we are airborne,” Yannacone says. “Now you say, ?Positive right of climb’ and ?Gear up.’?” I feel ridiculous, but comply. MarÃ*n-Quintero reaches over and yanks a handle and the landing gear goes up with a thud. Cool.

As we climb, I’m astonished at the DC-8′s vague, boatlike feel. It takes constant small, deft adjustments to keep us on course. We sail along through smooth air when suddenly it gets choppy, then really choppy, then unbelievably, molar-rattling choppy. Imagine driving a Mack truck at 300 miles an hour down a road pitted with four-foot-deep potholes. I’m getting a taste of what that 747 freighter in Alaska went through just before the engine fell off. “This is severe turbulence,” Yannacone yells. “This is where you’d say, ?O.K., we need to get out of this.’” We have merely nodded at fear?

An hour later we’re on approach to Miami International. Any desk jockey with a copy of Flight Simulator on his Vaio will tell you that takeoffs are relatively easy, but landings are a bitch. Now scale that up to one of the least forgiving airplanes ever built loaded up with, say, 100,000 pounds of sushi-grade tuna. Still, I’m feeling confident. I’m descending smoothly; the flaps are set; we’ve completed the approach checklist. Then Yannacone says, “What you’re lined up with is a highway. If you want to land there, that’s fine. But the actual runway is over there.” What I’ve been smugly descending toward is State Road 836, the Dolphin Expressway, which parallels Runway 9-27. It’s put in the simulator because it’s the picture a pilot would see as he approached the airport at night and made the same idiotic mistake I just did.

After that things go downhill quickly. I overbank the plane tacking to the runway, then overcorrect in the other direction, then the other. It’s a geometric progression to disaster, like trying to keep level on a balance board and failing. Yannacone flings instructions: “Watch your altitude. Keep the nose up.” An enunciator known as a Bitching Betty starts in: GLIDE SLOPE, GLIDE SLOPE, GLIDE SLOPE. Karlsson drops the gear. MarÃ*n-Quintero calls out the before-landing checklist. “Looking good,” Karlsson says unconvincingly as the runway pitches and heaves through the windshield. “One hundred feet!” Yannacone yells. “Fifty, thirty, twenty.” We’re heeled over at least 30 degrees when we hit. An alarm sounds. “Whoa!” MarÃ*n-Quintero exclaims. I’ve crashed while attempting what the NTSB would call a “nonstabilized approach to landing,” presumably killing myself, Yannacone, and the crew. There’s a moment of silence. “Pretty good, man,” MarÃ*n-Quintero finally says, without much conviction.

I’m mortified, though I know I shouldn’t be. I’ve never flown before, so there’s no shame in crash-landing a fully loaded DC-8 freighter in simulator mode. Still, sitting in the clapped-out cockpit, surrounded by antique avionics and upholstery patched with duct tape, I get a whiff of what it might actually feel like to be a freight dog: sharing this cramped, intimate space, with potential disaster lurking behind every takeoff and landing, and trusting the competence and moxie of my cohorts to keep it at bay. Then it hits: By flaming the landing, I’ve let my fellow dogs down. And — there’s no other word for it — I feel like @#$!.

A couple of hours later I’m back on my balcony, watching the airplanes take off and land. I hear a distinctive whine, louder and more belligerent than the rest. Suddenly there it is: a DC-8 freighter, screaming like a banshee down Runway 9-27, the same one on which I’d just crashed so ignominiously. I watch as the airplane devours two and a half miles of concrete and then, as if giving its absolute all, claws into the fluffy blue Florida sky, bound for…Honduras? Amsterdam? Honolulu? Who knows? If I had a pint of Watney’s, I’d have raised it. Instead, I give the airplane and its crew a silent benediction: Happy landings, dogs.

They still the Decathalon, of course, once the desire of your affections, and lately, except for a newer and larger engine, an updated version of, The Champ
Bellanca made Champs represent but a brief pit-stop on this fine aircraf’ts ownership journey – the odds of actually flying one more rare than, not ever experiencing a frustrating encounter with a balky Eiseman mag on a 65 Continental.

Down by the border in Friday afternoon traffic? Hmm… you must really want this or sumpthin’.

All the old civilian contract Air America types that staged out of DaNang (or used their DaNang hide-away as R&R)
lived right across the street in downtown DaNang from the I-Corps FAC house at 31 Phan Boi Chau–in a little park-like setting with the US consulate on the other end of the block and the Navy’s Stone Elephant O Club a couple of blocks down the way in opposite dir. Some amazing stories re bad wx, short strips, and heavy gnd fire told over the bar late in the evenings–and these guys weren’t even part of the spook-side of Air America’s Ops! Only got down-town to drink with them a couple of times, but it was F-U-N, moreso the listening than the drinking, really. “Course, most of ‘em actually had to hit the rack early to get their Sr. Citizen beauty sleep as they flew a hellacious sched. Don’t know if I could keep pace now that I’m some of their ages–and I’m in fairly good shape! Got to hand it to those guys!