Secrets from the Cockpit: Pilots Behaving Badly and other Flying Stories by Robert Schapiro

Author:Robert Schapiro
Format: epub

Chapter 15

Near Misses

I had barely completed a year on 727s when SAA stopped operating the type and sold them to another carrier. Typical of a state-run enterprise, they screwed up the sales contract so badly that the airline was required to refit the machines with modern avionics before delivery – the same equipment they’d refused to provide their own pilots with because of the high cost.

I made my last 727 landing on a Friday in Keetmanshoop, and started my 737 course the next Monday in Johannesburg. At least I got the weekend off.

Aside from taking roughly the same number of passengers, the Boeing 727 and 737 had few similarities. The basic 737 was a lightly built jet with two engines and two pilots. Nicknamed ‘Fluff’ (Fat Little Ugly Flying Fucker) or ‘Fluffy’ by its pilots, the 737 was a 727 with all the fun and performance removed. But it was an accurate example of how future airliners were going to look and fly.

Our flying instructors were ex-727 pilots. They advised us to pretend it was a nice aircraft and to not make jokes about it to other 737 pilots. And not to keep calling it a light twin. SAA later purchased an advanced 737 version that actually performed quite well.

In the mid-1980s, SAA decided to decentralise some 737 internal crews to Durban and Cape Town to reduce their hotel expenses in those cities and improve crew utilisation. I was one of the lucky pilots selected to live in Cape Town. By this time I was married to Arlene, whom I’d known since we performed in a school play at Herzlia. We’d lost touch while I was in the air force but reconnected during my early days at SAA. Both of us were delighted to be leaving Johannesburg to go back home.

We bought a beautiful old gabled home in the Cape Town suburb of Fresnaye that we were told had been built for a retired sea captain. It had a curved teak bay window to give the old salt an unobstructed view of his beloved ocean, and a large cellar for his equally beloved wine collection. Apparently, he had loved children and liquor with equal gusto and his happy spirit remained in the house. The German couple we bought it from had received a higher offer from someone else but decided to sell it to us anyway because they thought we seemed a nice young couple – and because they hoped we too would have children in the house. We were living there when Morgan was born.

SAA’s 737 co-pilots were the hardest-working pilots in the airline. Because the 737 only had a two-person flight crew, the co-pilot did most of the flight engineering (systems management) duties, in addition to regular flying. We often flew five legs a day, which could leave you quite tired on the last few sectors. It was particularly exhausting if bad weather required full instrument approaches at a couple of destinations. That was when you had to be careful not to make mistakes, as tiredness made it much easier to screw up.

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