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home in Oregon, Wednesday, 1999-04-21 10:00 local (Z-7)
I have flown my LAST Hajj. It was the worst, having virtually no redeeming factor other than that I was flying it as a captain rather than as an f.o. The second half, getting the pilgrims back home from Mecca, was harder than the first, primarily because we were doing round trips, out and back without layovers. The duty days ran sixteen to twenty hours. The flight attendants had it better than the cockpit crews—the reverse of normal—as they could sleep on the empty return flight to Jeddah from whichever Indian city we were returning.
I arrived home Monday evening, so I've now had two good night's sleep and am starting to feel semi-normal, that is if my body can remember what normal is. The trip home was more tedious than usual due to the fact that I had no rest between my last rotation to India, a Delhi trip, and coming home, accomplished by commercialling on British Airways from Jeddah to London and then to New York—all in coach because Tower screwed up and failed to ensure business class. Then it was a jumpseat seat to SFO and from there to Eugene. I was up from 12:00 Saturday in Jeddah until 20:00 Monday at home—sixty-six hours. Of course, from Jeddah to home, I catnapped on the airplanes as much as possible.
Our telephone bill for the first part of the Hajj was over $500, so on the second part I contented myself with calling C.J. and forgot about picking up my email. This morning I have finally dispensed with the mountain of email that collected, and this last Hajj message wraps it up, I hope.
The memories are fading fast, and I'm not going to detail anything that happened on the second phase, just a few notes that may be of use if I ever find I want to recall the experience. There isn't any planned order to the thoughts below.
Viagra is taking Saudi Arabia by storm. Hey, if you have four wives and you're getting on in years, you need all the help you can get, especially if, as is typically the case, you didn't collect the last wife or two until you were old enough to afford them, and then, of course, you chose younger gals, and I'm talking twelve and thirteen year-olds here. It was $27 per 50 mg pill during the first half. On the second half the price was down to $20 per 100 mg. These were the illegal prices, of course, and most any pharmacist was willing to sell it illegally. One of our male flight attendants, a Palestinian by birth and a fluent Arabic speaker, brought several hundred from New York and was selling them on the ramp at the airport—incredible.
On the second phase, you're full from Jeddah to India. The airplanes are then cleaned in India—while the crew twiddles its thumbs waiting in a hot terminal or an even hotter airplane. The cleaners steal anything they can. It got so bad at one point that I asked for all the cleaners to be brought back to the airplane and interrogated. I told the interpreter that there would be no questions asked, that if they would just please return what they had taken since that time around they had taken irreplaceable personal effects from a flight attendant's bag. Of course, nothing was returned, but I had tried, and maybe it had some effect for later flights. We always made sure in the cockpit that at least one of was there to protect the contents of our flight bags.
I again had trouble explaining to the same barber in the Sofitel what I wanted. It seems hard to believe, but the situation actually resulted in my getting a skinned haircut—right down to the scalp with a clippers. Very cool in the hot weather, but Jean says I went too far this time, so I'm letting it grow out. At least I know that my head is symmetrical and that if I lose all my hair, it doesn't look all that bad. Besides, one of the flight engineers said it really makes me look like “a bad-ass captain that nobody will fuck with.” Three female flight attendants insisted on rubbing the top of my head. One of them offered to shave it clean if I'd come over to her room at the hotel they were using.
Basically I was sick during the whole second half. If I wasn't flying, eating, or getting my allotted half an hour each day in the sun, I was sleeping. I went on antibiotics the second day there and stayed on them for the whole time, finishing them up just this morning. There is a persistent cough, congested condition called the “Hajji Hack.” Most of us had it, and the real problem it causes is plugged ears while flying. I never called in sick because of it, but many did. The Hajj is, of course, one of the great distributors of disease on the planet. All those poor people gather with their national maladies, exchange them, and then carry everything home.
The last trip, the Delhi turn, was a nightmare. After we had started boarding, Saudi religious authorities came on board and insisted that men and women be separated. The normal one hour loading time went to three hours. Then, when we got to Delhi, we had to change two tires, compliments of the Indians not keeping their runways clear of foreign objects. The tires didn't blow, but they were badly cut up. It was mid-day in the heat and our auxiliary power unit had stopped working. That meant no air conditioning. First I ordered up air carts. It took over an hour for them to arrive, and then they told us that they would have to be used only to get us started, that they could never handle running the air conditioning packs for any length of time. So, I ordered a refrigeration unit, another hour for it to arrive, and then its output was pitifully small. It might have been able to cool a DC-9, but no hope that it could cool a 747.
Harassment by the IPG and the DGCA continued right up to the last. Tower finally sent over a man to give official breathalyzer tests to please them on that account. And there were no pilots or flight engineers on this phase that did not have more than five hundred hours in the seat. That meant that I was, by far, the most junior captain there, having more than five hundred only by virtue of having flown for Evergreen as a 747 captain.
The IPG as we called it, short for the Indian Pilots Group as I recall, was an organization of Air India pilots. DGCA, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation was the Indian equivalent of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Neither organization liked us being there.
By the way, if any of you are planning international travel, especially in the Middle East or Asia, be aware that many currency changers will not accept U.S. old-style bills for those denominations now that the newer style is available. In other words, you may not be able to exchange your twenties, fifties, and one hundreds unless the picture of the President is offset from the center of the bill.
The most sobering sight for the cockpit crews was the burned out remains of the Air France 747 that crashed at Madras during the first phase. The very front of the airplane, including the cockpit, was blackened but intact, laying off to the side of the main runway. A reminder that while flying is safe, it is unforgiving of error or carelessness.
Speaking of carelessness, we had a bad fuel spill on my last rotation to Bangalore. They hooked up two trucks to the airplane, and started the pump on one of them before opening the valves to the aircraft's tanks. The result: they pumped from one truck through the airplane's fueling manifold into the other truck, overfilling it and spilling Jet-A all over the place. I called for fire equipment immediately. It arrived in about half an hour. That delay, while disastrous if a fire had started, made it possible for individual Indians to make out. They were grabbing whatever containers they could and scooping up the fuel with cupped, bare hands.
Another sobering sight—the Indian-Pakistani border. Fortified and lit at night for its hundred-of-miles long length. Neither country can handle their everyday problems or their starving populace, but they can spend money on nuclear weapons. But a bright note, the Indian Hindu nationalist coalition was voted out of power. Hopefully that will bode well for keeping them from using those nuclear weapons.
Enough of the Indian Hajj. It wasn't fun like the Indonesian Hajj, but it wasn't as bad as I hear the Nigerian Hajj is. Time to get started preparing for retirement.
Everybody take care...Terry
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