The not so friendly fucking skies
Mexicana de Aviacíon Gets a Frequent Flyer
Squirrel Cage to the North Needs Warranty Work
May 31, 2007
It was May 29 and I was coming through Houston on the way back from the Galapagos—kind of long-way-around routing, but what the hey. I’d gotten up at three a.m. in Quito to take the flight out so I was running on coffee and hope. My flight, Continental 2099, left at 2:20. I was ready to get back to Guadalajara. Swarm aboard the Embraer, fasten seat belt, haul out book.
Normally the stews go through the usual about overhead bins, seatbelts, and the rest. They have to do it, everybody has heard it a thousand times, but the crew is polite about it.
Not this time. The pilot, a woman, got on the horn in a nasty voice and began dressing down the passengers as if they were recent arrivals at a reform school. We got a lot of stuff like if we didn’t sit down “I’ll yell at you, which is fun for me but…not so much for you.” In a joking tone, this would have been over the top—you don’t lecture adults you don’t know as if they were feebleminded louts—but she wasn’t joking. She was bullying. We got more of this as the flight went on. “Don’t get on my enemies list.” And then (why was I not surprised?) “You’ve got a woman driver, and I’m a little reckless.”
“Just fly the plane and shut up, how about?” I thought.
They were nothing short of poisonous, uniquely so in my experience. In forty years of fairly heavy flying, I have never run into an obnoxious pilot nor, really, an obnoxious stew. Sometimes they look tired and exasperated, as my god who wouldn’t be in their job, and infrequently a tad cranky. Though on thought I do remember one exceedingly disagreeable stew, a guy, on American. That’s total for forty years.
This was something new.
Who the hell did the dyke-bitten little bitch think she was? Air passengers aren’t ill-bred children in need of discipline by some snot-nosed drill-sergeant wannabe. They pay good money to fly from A to B. That’s all they pay for. If they wanted to be treated like first-graders, they would presumably repeat first grade.
Why do these sorry twits behave as they do? In part because the American zeitgeist encourages them. American women usually carry The Chip, the anger that so many have. They’re not going to Take It, whatever It is. They seem to be looking for some of It not to take. Some seem to equate bitchiness with manhood. Men of course do not behave that way, the cost of dental restoration having become prohibitive.
But they do it in large part because they can. In the first place, what can a passenger do? Write a letter to Continental? The result would be a mouse-click form letter: “We at Continental appreciate your comments and will look into the issue you have raised. We strive daily to provide the best….”
In the second place, I suspect that nobody at Continental is about to discipline a female pilot, who would immediately file a five-million-smacker H-and-D suit. (Harassment and discrimination.) The airlines are desperate to stuff women into cockpits, which would be fine if these were required to meet the same standards as the men, to include being civil. Any female pilot knows she can face down the CEO if she needs to.
So far as I know, only North American women are forever coiled to strike. I meet all manner of women from other countries—Mexico, France, Israel, Italy, Thailand, China, on and on. Many have responsible positions, run their own companies, what have you. If you gave them a hard time, you would probably get one in return, but they default to civility. Which is all that is required.
In times past, unpleasant behavior had unpleasant consequences. Officials of many sorts had to wear name tags and, if the people upstairs got a lot of complaints, the responsible party would hear about it. Now, no. Management is afraid to discipline people who fall into the various categories of special privilege.
In the Galapagos I was aboard the Santa Cruz (which I recommend). I’d arrived in Quito expecting to do a week on horseback in the mountains, but that fell through. By dumb luck the Santa Cruz had a cancellation so I grabbed it.
It’s a sizeable ship, carrying I think about eighty passengers, who have to be put into Zodiacs twice a day to go look at big-ass turtles. Of the three officers who ran this complex dance, two were Ecuadorian women. All three were unfailingly courteous. They were also efficient and solved the problems that invariably come up as people lose things, can’t swim, want to do something else, and such. Everything worked because they knew what they were doing and did it well. But they weren’t bitches.
My group had as guide Joanna, a native of the Galapagos, twenty-seven, a complex mixture of Spanish, Chinese, and Indian, who had learned English in eight years of working as a guide. She had a larger vocabulary in speaking than most American college graduates do in writing. I say this carefully, without exaggeration. Her husband, a Swiss, was helping her learn German. When I corrected her English, as she requested, the corrections immediately showed up in speech. She knew her biology cold, having picked it up by reading. In short, she was an impressive self-made young lady. She knew the islands as most of us know our back yards.
Every day she took about fifteen people, averaging over twice her age, to the islands. To do this she constantly had to tell people what to do, including the guys who drove the Zodiacs. She (like the other guides, probably half of whom were female) was completely in command, and had to be, as otherwise people would have been falling over cliffs, stepping on sea lions, and drowning themselves.
And she did it without a trace of the aggressive abrasiveness of that godawful Continental creature. It is perfectly possible to be a woman, to have a job carrying large responsibility, to handle subordinates and the public, without being a mouthy termagant in a padded jockstrap.
When you fly Continental, the telescreens descend and you get a message from the CEO about how dedicated the airline is to improving service, etc. He could start by telling that crew to cut the lip. Or have their vocal chords removed.
The above letter is a post on a great website done by a straight and level headed man named FRED REED. It is his personal account of a nightmareish flight with a woman at the controls. http://www.fredoneverything.net
The letter below is a reply from a guy with a similar experience with apparently the same delusional female fuck up of a pilot.
Hi Fred,
>
> Your column about the female Continental pilot certainly rang my bell. I had the same pilot on Monday, May 21, when I returned from Houston to Guadalajara. I am going to safely assume that it was the same pilot. After all, how many female pilots could Continental have flying CO2099, an Embraer, at 2:20PM from Houston to Guadalajara?
>
> On my flight, she did not berate the passengers. However, when I was boarding I heard her talking to the male co-pilot as if he were a six- year-old who had just pissed his pants. While on the tarmac waiting in line, she made some announcement with the introduction: “I am the pilot” … with a tone of voice that implied, “… and if anybody fucks with me, or contradicts my orders, or interferes with my command of this plane, then there will be hell to pay until everybody on board understands that I’m in charge.”
>
> It was so bizarre that I made a mental note to call or write Continental to let somebody know that there may be a pilot whose medication needs an adjustment. But, like you, I later told myself that such a letter would do nothing more than generate a boilerplate response.
>
> I try to be a modern and tolerant old fart, but the fact is that my personal safety radar hits the peg when there is a female pilot. Several years ago, I happened to notice a possible trend about the gender of those involved in several major air tragedies. The pilot of the plane that crashed in New Jersey shortly after 9/11 was female. The air controller guiding the planes in that Mexicana accident at LAX was female. The pilot of that plane that buried itself in a Florida swamp was female. The pilot of a commuter plane that crashed for no apparent reason in North Carolina was female. And, several more.
>
> So, I tried to connect the dots. I was living in France at the time, and one day I was tired of sidewalk cafes and naked ladies on the beach. I made a list of a dozen US air crashes, and I started phoning (on my cheapo Skype account) the airlines, NTSB, FAA and anybody else I could think of. In each call, I explained that I did not need the name, but I wanted to know the gender of key people involved in each crash.
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> My phone calls were transferred to various “public information officers” and “public affairs specialists”, almost all of whom were female because that’s one profession that has been taken over by women in the past couple of decades. I asked my question.
>
> “Why do you want to know that?” was the response in a bitchy, accusing, nasal voice. (Why do most younger American women sound like they’re talking through a Kazoo?) I never got an answer to my question, and I lost my interest. I was just pissing into the wind, anyhow. But, I’m sure that because there are so few female commercial pilots and air controllers that one or two airline crashes could skew the statistics.
>
However, I remain convinced that it is a valid question as to whether females as pilots or air controllers are a higher risk than their male colleagues.
> When you are unpacked, how about a beer?