Living the good life

Braniff International Airlines... 1978.  Braniff was the 3rd largest airline at that time.  It was a fun place to work and had a well respected CEO.  The industry was just deregulated and airlines could charge and fly where they wanted to.  Southwest Airlines was just a speck, an annoyance that Braniff tried to eliminate.

I was working 12 days a month... life was good... except for the pay.  Because of union rules you could not fly extra and make extra.  Flying more would mean we might hire less and seniority wouldn't come as fast... the union way... minimize work... you accepted it, but it didn't seem "American"...  

Everything is done by seniority.  If a new base is opened in Guam... (it was)... it was staffed by who volunteered to go or the most junior guy was force assigned there.  Since the Guam base was flying the Boeing 747 it was a very senior base.  The bigger the airplane the more money you got paid.  Longevity,  seniority and weight of the airplane dictated how much you were paid.  Some pilots preferred to sit at home and be paid while on call.  A pilot sitting at home "on Call" probably averaged 3-5 flying days per month, but got paid for the full month.

At the time we were flying The Concorde, B-747, DC-8 and the B-727.  

Concorde

B-747

DC-8

B-727

The smallest and most junior was the B-727 and that is what I flew.  San Antonio was a fairly senior base and it was very small (41 crews) so you got to know the other pilots and the flight attendants pretty quick.  Little did we know that in a few short years these new friends would be scattered all over the world...

I flew mostly in the US but there where a few trips to Acapulco.  Reno was one of my favorite layovers... mainly because of "Billy Blue Eyes".  He was Braniff's youngest captain at the time and he had a car in Reno so he could go check on his monster house under construction overlooking Lake Tahoe.  He was living the dream that we all were dreaming.

Since I didn't have a lot of seniority I also did a lot of trips to New York City and Albany New York.  Those trips were often lots of short flights (5 or 6) on the way to New York... lots of thunderstorms... familiar territory for me.  We overnighted at the Sheraton Times Square.  I got to know the deli's pretty well.  Some of the crew members tried to see some of the shows but it was always a last minute deal and cost money...  So it was one beer, lots of dill pickles and a huge corned beef sandwich for me...  The glamorous airline life...

Employees of all types were being hired and the expansion of the airline blossomed.  Soon I was a senior Flight Engineer in San Antonio and could get a good schedule.  I could have upgraded to Co-pilot in Kansas City but it wasn't much more money and the commute seemed crazy... commuting, LOL... did I ever learn about that a little further down the road.

Braniff added over 100 cities to it's schedule in a short period of time.  Management was betting that the airlines would soon be re-regulated and they wanted to establish new turf before that happened.  Costs shot up with the expansion at the same time interest rates shot up to near 20%.  I would often fly with senior Captains that were very vocal about how this expansion was not going to work.  They were worried about the survivability of the airline.  Secretly the new guys (Co-Pilots and Flight Engineers) were laughing and thinking these crusty old Captains needed to adjust to the new era or retire... we were going to live our dream...