Welcome to the 2024 installment of “An Ask the Pilot Christmas.”

I traditionally start off with gift suggestions, but this year I really don’t have any, save a shameless plug for my book. I mean, it does make a kickass stocking stuffer.

You can expect chaos at the airports, of course. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), roughly 62 billion people are expected to fly between now and New Year’s Eve, 96 percent of them connecting through Atlanta.

In fact I don’t know how many people are projected to fly. I haven’t been listening. In any case, it’s the same basic story every year: the trade groups put out their predictions, and much is made as to whether slightly more, or slightly fewer, people will fly than the previous year. Does the total really matter? All you need to know is that airports will be crowded and flights full. Any tips I might offer are simple common sense: leave early, and remember that TSA considers fruitcakes to be hazardous materials (no joke: the density of certain baked goods causes them to appear suspicious on the x-ray scanners).

For years I made a point of working over the holidays. When I was a bottom-feeder on my airline’s seniority list, it was an opportunity to score some of those higher-quality layovers that were normally out of reach. Other pilots wanted to be home with their kids or watching football, and so I was able to spend Christmas in Cairo, Edinburgh, Budapest and Paris.

That’s how it works at an airline: every month you put in your preferences: where you’d like to fly, which days you’d like to be off, which insufferable colleagues you hope to avoid, and so on. There are separate bids at each base, for each aircraft type and for each seat – i.e. captain and first officer. The award process then begins with the most senior pilot in the category and works its way down. The lowest-rung pilots have their pick of the scraps.

Festi-fying my hotel room.   Accra, Ghana, 2013.

Eventually the process reaches a point when there are no more rostered trips to give out. Those pilots left over — the bottom ten or fifteen percent — are assigned to what we call “reserve.” A reserve pilot has designated days off, and receives a flat minimum salary for the month, but his or her workdays are a blank slate. The reserve pilot is on call, and needs to be within a stipulated number of hours from the airport — anywhere from two to twelve, usually, and it can change day to day. When somebody gets sick, or is trapped in Chicago because of a snowstorm, the reserve pilot goes to work. The phone might ring at 2 a.m., and you’re on way to Sweden or Brazil — or to Omaha or Sacramento.

Looking back, holiday flying has provided me a number of those sentimental vignettes guaranteed to make a person maudlin once they’re retired and looking back…

One of my favorite memories dates back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop flying from Boston to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Martin. (Kathy, who also appears in my “Right Seat” essay, was one of three pilots I’ve known who’d been flight attendants at an earlier point in their careers.) There were no meal services on our Dash-8s, but Kathy brought a cooler from home, packed with food: huge turkey sandwiches, a whole blueberry pie and tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jumpseat. The pie we passed to the flight attendant, and she handed out slices to passengers.

Quite a contrast to Thanksgiving Day in 1999, when I was working a cargo flight to Brussels. It was custom on Thanksgiving to stock the galley with a special meal, and the three of us were hungry and looking forward to it. Trouble was, the caterers forgot to bring the food. By the time we noticed, we were only minutes from departure and they had split for the day. I thought I was going to cry when I opened the door to our little fridge and saw only a can of Diet Sprite and a matchbook-size packet of Tillamook cheese. The best we could do was get one of the guys upstairs to drive out to McDonald’s. He came back with three big bags of burgers and fries, tossing them up to us just as they were pulling the stairs away. Who eats fast food on Thanksgiving? Pilots in a pinch.

On New Year’s Eve, 2010, I was flying over the city of Bamako, Mali, in West Africa. Fireworks explode only a few hundred feet from the ground, but when enough of them are going off at once, it’s quite the spectacle when seen from a jetliner. At the stroke of midnight, the city erupted in a storm of tiny explosions. The sky was lit by literally tens of thousands of small incendiaries — bluish-white flashes everywhere, like the pulsing sea of lights you see at concerts and sporting events. From high above, this huge celebration made Bamako look like a war zone.

Notre Dame, 2017.

I’ve also spent a number of holidays traveling on vacation. Thanksgiving in Armenia, for instance. Another Thanksgiving in Timbuktu.

And with that in mind, here’s some advice…

Do not, ever, make the mistake that I once made and attempt to enjoy Christmas at a place in Ghana called Hans Cottage, a small hotel situated on a lagoon just outside the city of Cape Coast.

They love their Christmas music at the Hans Cottage, you see, and the compound is rigged end-to-end with speakers that blare it around the clock. And although you can count me among those people able to tolerate Christmas music (in moderation, and so long as it isn’t Sufjan Stevens) there is one blood-curdling exception. That exception is the song, “Little Drummer Boy,” which is, to me, the most cruelly awful piece of music ever written. (It was that way before Joan Jett or David Bowie got hold of it.)

It’s a traumatic enough song in any rendition. And at the Hans Cottage Botel they have chosen to make it the only — only! — song on their Christmastime tape loop. Over and over it plays, ceaselessly, day and night. It’s there at breakfast. It’s there again at dinner. It’s there at three in the morning, seeping through the space under your door. And every moment between. I’m not sure who the artist is, but it’s an especially treacly version with lots of high notes to set one’s skull ringing.

“Ba-ruppa-pum-pum,ruppa-pum-pum…” as I hear it today and forever, that stammering chorus is like the thump-thump of chopper blades in the wounded mind of a Vietnam vet who Can’t Forget What He Saw. There I am, pinned down at the hotel bar, jittery and covered in sweat, my nails clattering against a bottle of Star lager while the infernal Drummer Boy warbles into the buggy air.

“Barkeep!” I grab Kwame by the wrist. “For the love of god, man, can’t somebody make it stop?”

Kwame just smiles. “So lovely, yes.”

Related Story:
LETTER FROM GHANA: WELCOME TO ROOM 420.

Photos by the author.

November 1, 2024

Forgive me for being morbid, but did you know that no fewer than six major airline crashes occurred on Halloween?

That’s right, six.

Ranked chronologically, they go like this…

1. On Halloween morning, 1979, Western Airlines Flight 2605 crashed in Mexico City killing 73 people. The crew attempted to land on a closed runway in the fog. The DC-10 hit a truck, then careened into a building.

2. On the night of October 31, 1994, American Eagle Flight 4184 went down near Roselawn, Indiana killing all 68 passengers and crew. Investigators found that a design flaw allowed ice accretion to cause an uncommanded aileron reversal, which threw the ATR-72 into an unrecoverable dive. The plane’s de-icing system was redesigned.

3. Two years later the day, TAM flight 402 crashed after takeoff from São Paulo, Brazil, after a thrust reverser deployed during climb. All 99 people aboard the Fokker 100 jetliner were killed.

4. Exactly three years later, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic near Nantucket, killing 217. Investigators determined that the first officer intentionally crashed the Boeing 767.

5. On Halloween night, 2000, the crew of Singapore Airlines Flight 006 attempted takeoff on a closed runway in Taipei, Taiwan. The Boeing 747 collided with construction equipment and burst into flames. Eighty-three of the plane’s 179 occupants died.

6. On October 31, 2015, Metrojet flight 9268, a Russian charter flight heading from Sharm El Sheihk, Egypt, to St. Petersburng, was destroyed by a bomb after takeoff. All 224 passengers and crew on the Airbus A321 were killed. It is believed the bomb was planted by operatives of the Islamic State group.

There you have it. There can’t possibly be a calendar day with a record worse than October 31.

There’s nothing going on here other than chance, of course. Bad luck is bad luck. Still it’s peculiar. I’m not normally superstitious, but can you find any patterns?

I had this to mull over on Halloween night, flying a 767 to Europe.

WHERE DO flight numbers come from? Do they hold some hidden meaning?

Yes and no. Ordinarily, flights going eastbound are assigned even numbers; those headed westbound get odd numbers. Another habit is giving lower, one- or two-digit numbers to more prestigious, long-distance routes. If there’s a flight 1 in an airline’s timetable, it’s the stuff of London–New York.

Numbers might also be grouped geographically. At United, transpacific flights use three-digit numbers beginning with 8, which is considered a lucky number in some Asian cultures. Four-digit sequences starting with a 3 or higher are, most of the time, indications of a code-share flight.

Technically, a flight number is a combination of numbers and letters, prefaced with the carrier’s two-letter IATA code. Every airline has one of these codes. For Delta, American, and United, it’s DL, AA, and UA, respectively. Lufthansa uses LH; Emirates uese EK. Sometimes it’s alphanumeric, as with JetBlue’s B6.

If you didn’t know about this practice, you probably became familiar with it after the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which from the start was referred to as “MH370.” In the United States, we tend to ignore these prefixes, but overseas they are used consistently. In Europe or Asia, the airport departure screen might show, for instance, flights CX105 or TG207. That’s Cathay Pacific and Thai Airways. When filling in your immigration forms, you should use the full designator.

These airline codes are sometimes random or meaningless, but when they do have a meaning it can be fun to decipher. Many are straightforward: BA for British Airways. Aeroflot’s SU comes from “Soviet Union.” Others are more esoteric. For instance, EgyptAir’s choice of MS, which would seem random until you realize the Arabic word for Egypt is “Misr.” Maybe someone can explain why Finnair’s code is AY.

Flight numbers along a given route can remain unchanged for years or even decades. When I was a kid, Lufthansa’s daily departure from Boston to Frankfurt was flight 421; the inbound from Frankfurt was 420 (a reversal of the east/west practice described above). Lufthansa still uses these numbers. In the old days the aircraft was a DC-10 or sometimes a 707. Today it’s a 747-400.

American’s morning departure from Boston to Los Angeles had been flight AA11 as far back as the 1960s. That ended on September 11, 2001. After an incident, one of the first things an airline does is retire the number of the affected flight. I had taken flight 11 once, when I was a freshman in high school. It was a DC-10 at the time.

The longest-surviving flight number might well be Qantas flight QF1. This is the Sydney-London run. Begun in the 1940s along the so-called “Kangaroo route,” the flight would make multiple stopovers along the way. Today it’s a one-stop via Singapore.

What other old numbers are still around? If you know of any good ones, tell us in the comments section.

Photos by the author.