Fit to Fly: My grandmother lived a long life and then passed away. I found this out descending into Cancun while sitting sideways in a 727 (AKA flight engineer). I thought I was alright and flew the leg back home, but made some dumb mistakes. Later, when I moved up to copilot, a close cousin and his wife both died a tragic death Near Buffalo, NY (leaving kids behind age 5&3). As fate would have it, a scheduled layover in Buffalo aligned perfectly with the wake, so I just flew the trip. I did something stupid, something like zoning out during the non-precision approach and forgetting some of the call-outs. Ever since that experience I have maintained a rule not to fly between the death and the funeral of a loved one.
The flu hits you, sometimes like a ton of bricks. Once, as a 727 copilot, the symptoms came on at a city that was only served by my company. I reasoned that I felt well enough to fly safely, and the logistics of calling in sick would cancel the only flight that could get me home. So, I flew the trip uneventfully. I don’t remember whether I told the captain at the time, I must have, because the next time I saw him, he told me that he was hit with the flu shortly after that. The moral to that story is that calling in sick is as much about being contagious as being able to safely fly the jet.
I got hit with laryngitis, but otherwise felt fine. So I went to work as MD 80 captain and told (whispered to) the FO that he would get radio duties, and he agreed. We made it work for a 2-3 day trip. I suppose we were safe, I suppose I could have managed some kind of radio communication if necessary, but why? In hindsight, I don’t know what I was trying to prove with my aversion to calling in sick. When I got to the end of my career, with all kinds of sick time in the bank, it was sort of a treat to be sick so I could use that time up. The joke at work was all it took was eye trouble, as in, if you can’t see yourself going to work for whatever reason, that was “eye trouble”.
Once I got hit with the flu during a layover in Caracas, Venezuela. I did the right thing, in the sense of calling crew schedule and getting off the trip. But, they wanted me to stay and convalesce in Caracas, to which I did not agree because of the political circumstances at the time. There was some safety in having your name on the flight general declaration papers, and I wanted to get out of that country before my name was removed. They flew in a replacement captain from Miami, and I deadheaded out.
I once was about to leave the house when I saw one of my favorite fruits in the refrigerator. I love mangoes, but the skin sap is like poison ivy to me. So, knowing it would otherwise go to waste, I carefully cut it up trying to avoid the sap and enjoyed the fruit immensely. Probably about six hours later, I was sitting in the right seat as a check pilot, cruising my way to Vegas. I must have rubbed some of the sap into my eye, because it was puffing out making me look like Quasimoto. Here is a case where I hid from the passengers because I did not want to concern them about my fitness to fly. That evening, while they were whooping it up like you are supposed to in Vegas, I was on the phone with my doctor friend and buying concoctions to bring the swelling down before tomorrow’s flying. I guess this time I really did have eye trouble.
Captain’s Log 