I am now 60 years old, so I am out of Part 135 operations. However, there is still some fire left in the hearth and so there may still be some sparks which I could offer to the Part 121 side of the aviation industry, if required.
IT WOULD BE A SHAME to pour water on the fire when the coals are still glowing, don’t you agree? After all, I have been ‘Part 121’ for almost my whole career.
I live in Mombasa Kenya and so I went up to Nairobi for an Aircrew Medical. My company Ops Department had e-mailed me to say that they would need me back in Bujumbura, on the 16th of February and please would I organise the travel arrangements as usual.
Bujumbura is the capital of the tiny country of Burundi, up in the top right-hand corner of Lake Tanganyika in the middle of the vast continent of Africa. Once there, I was to take over as Captain on a DHC-6 Twin Otter, on contract to the United Nations, in their efforts to bring peace to a country where up to a million people were killed in a carefully planned and executed act of genocide. My medical was actually okay up to the end of March, but I would be on duty till the end of the first week in April, so they asked me to get the medical out of the way early, before I went. I received their e-mail on the 27th of January, so that gave me lots of time to organise things.
My Medical Examination was with an old friend, Dr George Irvine Robertson. I have known him for over thirty years. In fact I bought our house from him, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, just north of Mombasa. It is a little paradise on Earth and I still wonder that he could have parted with it.
‘a Slaviation Salary’
The examination went well. My eyes still didn’t really need the glasses which I have been taking along to medicals for the last couple of decades. My blood pressure was 130 over 78, which is fairly good for someone of my advancing years who smokes 5 roll-ups a day and has been known to indulge in a dram of the Scottish ‘water of life’ on the odd occasion…most evenings…Okay!…on the dot of 18:00(local). But the thing which made my day was that in the ‘remarks’ column, Doc Robbie had written, “A sturdy, healthy, cheerful individual.” Now there’s a tonic to pick up the most down-hearted.
Little did I know.
After the medical, I got a taxi down to our company offices at Wilson Airport. There we have a suite of modern offices, on the third floor of Lengai House, which is named after a volcano across the border in Tanzania in the Great Rift Valley. The offices are equipped with all the latest comms and IT gadgetry. The staff is big enough for me to see quite a lot of unfamiliar faces when I walk through and they would not know me from any other visitor, unless I were to be in uniform, in which case they would not know me from any other company pilot.
I went straight to see Pam. She is Kenyan and runs the administration refreshingly well. I get on with Pam like a house on fire and always look forward to our infrequent meetings. She has been with the company for nearly ten years and I have known her since the company’s 1997 escapades into Somalia, during the El Niño floods, which expanded the thirty-metre-wide Juba River to a width of seventy-five kilometres in two days.
“Morning Pam!” I said breezily as I walked through the open door of her office. “Doc Robbie says I am still alive for the next six months. How’s things with you?”
“Oh, I’m OK till the end of the week, apparently.” Her white teeth spread across the dark contours of her face in a wistful smile.
“And then?” she now had my full attention.
“Well then, I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m leaving the company.”
“You are WHAT!?” I gasped, “WHY?”
“I think you had better go and talk to Lee.” said Pam, indicating the door with a glance.
“OK,” I said turning to walk back out of the door. “See you in a minute.”
‘she now had my full attention’
I walked down the corridor until I reached a sign reading General Manager, stuck up on the wall beside Lee’s door. The door was open and I poked my head around it to see if Lee was in. Lee and I have known each other for many years, sometimes operating for rival companies from the same base of operations, on contract to the same organisation. I like Lee and respect his management skills almost as much as I respect his flying ability… and Lee is a very competent flyer. That may sound a little pejorative, but it is a big compliment from me, as my opinion of management has been tarnished by a thirty-year display of greed, self-centred manipulation and just good old-fashioned incompetence.
“’Morning Hugh.” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Come along in.”
To my surprise, Anthea, our Sales and Marketing Manager, was sitting on the second of the three chairs which looked a bit lost in the vast expanse of Lee’s office. In fact, yes – the Office was definitely looking a little under-furnished, even by Lee’s rather Spartan standards.
“Bit quiet isn’t it?” I said, searching Lee and Anthea’s faces for traces of some ghastly sin I must have committed. “I mean, I’ve just passed my medical! I’m alive! Let’s have a party! Get my blood pressure back up into the green again!”
“Haven’t you heard, Hugh?” said Anthea.
“Heard what?”
“The company went into Voluntary Liquidation as of midnight last night.”
Suddenly, I was out of a job.
Suddenly ‘Good Old Hugh’ had become ‘Did you hear about Poor Old Hugh? Yeah! Just imagine! At his age too! What’s he going to do with himself now?’
I have had an enormous amount of fun, in the last thirty-odd years, flying into some ridiculously primitive patches with some incredibly entertaining people. I have been allowed to explore the low speed and low altitude envelopes of some of the worlds most honoured STOL classics. This profession has given me a life which many would label unacceptably privileged. My job has been my hobby. I have been showered with opportunities to examine the limits of my physical, mental and spiritual stamina. I have screwed up unforgivably and been forgiven. I have put my neck on the line and reaped priceless rewards. At my end of the aviation spectrum, I have flown with people whom I knew. ‘Passenger Briefings’ were more like a safety conversation between friends. A single flight has been the foundation of friendships which have stood the tests of hardship and unemployment and sometimes even ignominy. This really has been a truly generous profession.
And now, over night, I am back out on the street…along with dozens of my colleagues and friends…all because of insatiable greed and wilfully blind incompetence.
Do not get the impression that this is some misfortune confined to Hugh Pryor. I am comparatively fiscally fluid, as I approach the evening of my aviation career. Think more about all my colleagues who are left without physical means of support. Suddenly they have no way to renew licence requirements. Instrument ratings lapse. CRM, SEPT and Dangerous Goods courses need to be done, Instrument and Night currencies have to be maintained and Medical Examinations completed and paid for.
‘another Ferrari to celebrate!’
It is essential to keep the licence open in case a potential employer may deem it appropriate to offer what has become known as a ‘Slaviation Salary’ to the struggling workers. This, of course, all costs money, lots of it, but the Boss has taken all that away to pay for his third Ferrari. And don’t be deluded into thinking that he is losing sleep over the misery he has imposed on the gullible pawns from whom he demanded nothing less than total loyalty. (That was the subject of another pre-liquidation e-mail.) To him they are dross, to be swept away and forgotten, as quickly as possible, to make way for the next consignment of unwitting dupes.
I have been employed by four companies in the last twenty-odd years and every single last one of them has expired, due to the insatiable greed of their owners, aided and abetted by the mind-blowing incompetence of their management teams. It has almost got to the stage where if I see the words Managing Director or Vice President after somebody’s name, my hackles rise and contempt floods into my throat. It is as though the title comes with the complimentary surgical removal of any traces of common sense which the recipient’s cranium may have been harbouring prior to the recognition of his ‘Management Potential’.
All the companies for whom I have worked have been busy. The most recent one, for example, had all its aircraft out on contract to clients who were, and still are, reliable payers. So how, you might quite reasonably ask, can a project like that lose money? It is not as though there was a cash flow problem. Well I suppose there was, in a sense, because all the cash which came in had to flow into servicing the owner’s mountainous debts. So, finally, in this particular most recent case, when the debts climbed into the nine figure dollar bracket, the banks decided to pull the plug.
And the owner? Oh, he probably bought himself another Ferrari to celebrate! Frankly, I hope he crashes it…and if I was the insurance company, I wouldn’t pay him out. They withhold payments for acts of God. What about acts of the Devil?
