jungle

Years ago I flew with an interesting type, others had pointed out that he had his pants tailored without rear pockets no doubt to enhance the smooth lines of his rotund bum. Still lived with mom, pushing sixty.

Every time he began his flight deck preflight it was with eight, no more or less, handi-wipes individually applied to every surface within reach.

Jepps updates were amusing, he had a set of a dozen felt tipped markers glued to the lid of his chart case and used them liberally to trace routes and navaids on every newly changed chart. I must say I was quite taken with the number of colors used for this task over a number of hours and it brought back fond memories of a large box of crayons.

He was fluent in three languages, unfortunately English was not one of them. His FOs acted as interpreters of ACARS messages, like airport closings for weather.

One night the suffering paid off. We departed an airport in Argentina with a rapidly approaching line of very active storms. It was my leg and we were going to climb parallel to the front until an opening could be found. He directed me to turn into a narrow opening between two very violent storms, I said:"You have the controls Cappy." There was a very loud boom and a likely strike within the next minute.

So how was the tool useful? I got an extra day in Brasil while they fixed the hole in the wing.