Somewhere between DC and Kansas City.
I was based at Washington’s Reagan Airport for a decade and flew this route ALL the time. I’ve flown between these two cities carrying passengers holding tickets for US Airways, American, United, Frontier, Midwest, and Southwest Airlines. The only thing of note is not to park at the wrong airline’s gate. That confuses people and makes you look silly. When you fly for a regional airline that operates under the flag of many airlines, it helps to look at the cocktail napkins handed to the passengers to remember where to park.
I say somewhere between the cities, but I know exactly where we are.
I can look down at the lights of a city and read them like a fingerprint. Cincinnati is off our right, which means Lexington, KY, is off our left.
Yup. There it is. Draw a ninety-degree line from Lexington to the west, and you’ll find Louisville.
Yup.
I was Louisville-based for a year.
When you don’t live where you’re based, you commute by plane between home and work, and you pay for your own lodging if you have to come in the night before or leave the next day.
Some crews pay for shared apartments, called crash pads. Think of a normal-looking apartment on the outside, but the inside is filled with bunk beds in every feasible room. It’s been decades since I shared a crash pad. At the time, even the dining room was a bedroom. Each of us had our own towel hung in the closet on a coat hanger. The closet smelled like a bunch of wet towels.
During my stay in Louisville, I paid for a room at the cheapest hotel near the airport. It had a crew rate of $28 a night.
It had free Wi-Fi, which the front desk would gladly give you the code for. It was from the nicer hotel next door.
This hotel had free breakfast. The breakfast room had a loaf of bread in its plastic bag that you, and every other guest, had to reach into to get your slice. It had a communal tub of butter and a jar of jelly. Both were filled with crumbs, and the jelly had bits of butter in it. The same went for the butter. If you were lucky, you’d get only butter on your smear.
One night, because the staff knew me so well from my frequent stays, they gave me the honeymoon suite and were so proud to do so. I was honored and showed my appreciation, but, well, it was weird to sleep in a round bed. And it was in a wing of the hotel too far away to reach the neighboring hotel’s Wi-Fi.
I stayed at a gnarly hotel in Philadelphia when I was based there. I imagine some hotels only exist because of paying flight crews or guests who don’t read reviews. This one was the kind that still had keys with plastic room-number tags attached. It still had the communal ice trough, and my favorite part was that the rooms didn’t have ironing boards. There was one on each floor, in the hallway. It wasn’t uncommon to see a grown man in his dress socks and underwear ironing his pants when you returned from the ice trough.
Back to the cities and their fingerprints below.
I love reading stories of Depression-era boxcar life: the hobos catching rides, migrating with the weather for seasonal labor.
Though I’m no hobo, I love the fantasy of it. They had codes they would leave at the entrances to towns to tell those behind them what to expect. Free food, abundant work, or angry old men ahead.
There was a time in my career when I got a charge out of wandering into a neighboring hotel if it had a better free breakfast. I liked to pretend I was a wanderer, eating breakfast and jotting notes on the hotel bedside pad.
On one of those mornings, while I was enjoying my “free” lobby waffle, a business traveler asked me what I was in town for.
When I mentioned airline crew, he commented on my being one of those hobo airline pilots.
Mission accomplished.
I smiled and said, “I’m not even staying at this hotel!”
I should have left a code for the hobo airline pilots behind me. I should have scribbled one on the bedpost to say, “Go next door. Better lobby waffles.”