Christmas Trip Tips

Bumpy night, Christmas trip night

Reroute called, canceled flight

Round yon lobby bar pilots sip drinks

Christmas layovers sometimes can stink

Fly in moderate rime

Fly in moderate rime*

Seventy-one percent of people on this planet are not Christian. In the United States, 62% say they are, but only 30% of the 62 say they ever attend church.

It makes you wonder why Christmas trips, or more accurately, getting out of Christmas trips, is such a big deal to your ordinary subsonic people-moving airline driver.

Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday are the two most “I don’t want to be on a trip” days of the year for flight crews, with Super Bowl Sunday leading the pack in frivolous pilot sick-outs, personal drops, sudden grandparent deaths, and questionable car accidents on the way to the airport.

For pilots who are not contractually bound to be available because they are on call, a sort of Christmas miracle happens every year. Pilot phones cease to work and their ringers go as silent as a holiday-abandoned chief pilot’s office.

Even though most people in the world do not give a wet willie about Christmas, a great many of them want to travel. 

In the United States, over three million people will be showing up at various airport check-in lobbies getting ready to complain about their upcoming flight delays, rough rides, lack of food, no overhead space, and children sitting behind them nestled all snug in their seats who are behaving like they have forgotten that their toy collections future depends on Santa judging their goodness or badness.

This is not to say that a Christmas trip for a pilot can’t be memorable and fun. For example, most newly minted captains who have waited for years as a copilot to finally wear those four gold stripes are usually junior enough to have to fly on the holiday. Most of us recall our “Captain Christmas trip” with a gauzy kind of happy nostalgia.

My first Captain’s Christmas was spent at the Shreveport Airport Holiday Inn. We spent 36 hours there, and the only place open to get a meal or a drink was the “Wines of the World” bar adjacent to the ABC Liquor Store (also open for your holiday brain-cell-killing needs).

I remember the Wines of the World bar (a misnomer—nobody there looked like they had seen any of the world outside of Louisiana) as a festive place, festooned with red and green colored lights and a vibrant poster of Spuds MacKenzie wearing a Santa hat that said, “Merry Christmas to All, and to All a Bud Light.”

I spent 14 years of my professional piloting life schlepping around on Christmas airline trips and layovers.

Yep, 14 Christmas Eves and or Days away from home. I did this to myself through a combination of juniority, greed, bad bidding, and abysmal dumbness. 

I do not know if 14 is a high or low number compared to other pilots, but my years and years of  flying Navidads give me the gravitas to give you current and future yuletide yoke yankers a few tips and advice.

I learned that being on call—our airline called it being on “reserve” for Christmas Day—is a very bad idea. You will be called out, usually when the kids are opening presents or late in the day when you are tired. 

My advice if you are suffering from “holiday juniority,” you should not be on reserve and pick a horrible holiday trip instead. At least it will give you some certainty and allow your family to travel to the in-laws for a decent Christmas.

Picking your trips for December is different from any other month. When I knew I was probably going to have to fly over Christmas, I always tried to get the best layover possible. Believe me, if your seniority can hold it, a long San Diego layover beats a shorter Jackson, Mississippi, any time.

Some pilots like to wear funny hats and ties during their Christmas trip. After all, what is the company going to do about that? Make you be away from home over Christmas? 

I never got into dressing silly and left that activity for more festive, albeit sometimes lame, pilots. You could always find me, especially during my Boeing 727 engineer, copilot, and captain trips, wearing a simple black sweater, black pants, and shiny black plastic “narc” shoes. Maybe I would have green socks, but that was about it.

Stay away from trying to be witty and holiday-bouncy on your airplane’s public address system with goofy songs and Christmas poems. Remember, most people, especially if you are flying international, aren’t Christian, and passengers in the U. S. of A are about half and half divided on the whole let’s be festive thing. They just want to get to their destinations so they can have dinner table fights with their families.

Never, ever eat anything given to you by a passenger. Airlines spend all kinds of time warning us about eating the same coach meal when we are flying, and then pilots start snarfing up free Christmas cookies given to them by unknown passengers who may have Hep A through Z.

I hope that if you are flying the azure skies of our planet during the holidays that you have fun, make memories, and avoid FAA enforcement actions. 

Remember, if you are junior enough or unfortunate enough to have to fly on Christmas, you will most likely be flying on New Year’s too. And that is a totally different inebriated animal.

*parody poem by Kevin Garrison