Proficient Pilot: Times have changed

Barry Schiff began writing The Proficient Pilot in February 1991. This is his 340th monthly column.

I wasn’t old enough to drive, but I did shove airplanes in and out of hangars with a tug that had a clutch and stick shift. Not as much fun was washing airplanes and sweeping out those big hangars.

Others working the line were older than I was. In a misguided effort to fit in, I began to smoke as they did. I suppose I couldn’t resist the peer pressure. In those days, everyone smoked, including athletes, doctors, and movie stars (except for my boyhood idol, Roy Rogers). When you went to the movies in those days, you had to peer through clouds of smoke hovering over the audience to see the screen. One day, though, theater managers segregated smokers by designating the left sides of auditoriums as smoking zones.

Many airline pilots smoked, too. When I was hired by TWA in 1964, cockpit and passenger seats were equipped with ash trays. Meals served to both pilots and passengers included a complimentary packet of four cigarettes.

There was also another kind of smoke in the cockpit. When I was a new-hire co-pilot, I recall having my head down, calculating takeoff performance while the captain taxied the Connie toward Albuquerque’s Runway 26. I hadn’t noticed that he had opened his side window. I noticed immediately, however, when he fired a .38-caliber revolver at a rabbit munching on wildflowers alongside the taxiway. I don’t know if the passengers heard the gunfire or smelled the cordite from the spent cartridge.

Early in my career, passengers could smoke anywhere on the airplane. Soon, though, the first-class and coach cabins were divided into smoking and non-smoking areas. These were jokes. If you were in the last non-smoking row of first class, for example, you’d have smokers immediately behind you.

An airline crew was invariably a mixture of smokers and non-smokers. The captain, of course, would determine whether or not smoking would be allowed in the cockpit. There was a sure-fire way for a passenger to tell if his captain was a smoker or not. If the pilot turned off the No Smoking sign immediately after liftoff, you knew that he was a smoker. On the other hand, a non-smoker usually waited to turn off the sign for what seemed like an eternity to a passenger waiting desperately with cigarette in hand.

Eventually, of course, all passenger smoking was banned on U.S. jetliners. Some passengers, however, ignored the ban by trying to defeat the newly installed smoke detectors in the lavatories. This invariably sounded alarms that resulted in these passengers occasionally being greeted at their destinations by men in blue.

The FAA, however, was reluctant to ban pilots from smoking for fear that the discomfort created by nicotine withdrawal would have an adverse effect on safety.

If the captain of a given flight didn’t smoke, then, of course, no one else in the cockpit did either. But captains who did smoke could expect an unusual number of smoking “stewardesses” to visit the flight deck. I’ve seen so much smoking going on in a cockpit that you could seriously describe the air inside as IMC. When the flight attendants would open the cockpit door to return to the cabin, a cloud of smoke usually followed. What they had been doing was no secret.

It wasn’t long, though, before the FAA did ban pilots from smoking during flight. But that didn’t stop all smoking. After all, the captain still was Herr Commandant, and the word spread quickly as to who smoked and who did not. First officers who did not smoke bid their flights so as to avoid such captains. Those co-pilots who did smoke, however, attempted to fly with captains similarly addicted.

Then came 9/11, and everything became even more restrictive. A captain could be arrested for carrying nail clippers through security. This was particularly stupid when you consider that every airline pilot has access to a fire ax in the cockpit. Nor can a pilot now leave the flight deck to visit the lavatory without first coordinating this with a flight attendant.

The early years of the jet age might have been relatively unhealthy and politically incorrect in a variety of ways, but they sure were a lot more fun.