Way back in the twentieth century, 1990s, I had a satellite shop in Elkhart Indiana. I had rented a small house and commuted back and forth from LAX to Saint Luis and then from STL to South Bend on a puddle jumper. I was married at that time to a TWA flight service manager and flew for free on TWA with my employee family card. The card was just like a credit card. It was green and made of plastic and was the same size as a garden verity credit card but had no bank affiliation.
Every two to three weeks I’d take the red eye to STL. From STL I’d fly on TWE, TWA express, to SBN, South Bend. Normally I’d stay in Indiana for a week to ten days and fly back to LAX. From STL I’d fly standby on a TWA Boeing 767. More often than not my friend Bud was the pilot. The 767, or 67, in pilot talk is wide body jet that carries 269 passengers verses a 47 which carried 366 folks. Both airplanes are wide bodied planes with 7 across seating. The airlines really loved the 67s because they only had two engines verses the 47s four engines. Do the math. TWA eventually went out of business but at that time they were still in the fight. One of the tricks that thy used was they took delivery of a bunch of 13 airplanes that Boeing had leased to Aeroflot, the Russion airline. The Ruskies had defaulted on the planes and Boeing had to repossess them. By the time Boeing got them back the planes were in pretty sad shape. They had minimal maintenance and a lot of the on board electronics were made in the Soviet block. My wife used to tell me about the troubles that she and the other flight attendants had to cope with. Worst of all were the Bulgarian built VCRs that showed the onboard movies. The pagers for service seldom worked and the interior lights were prone to regular failure.
One day I was flying back to LA on a flight from Saint Luis in a window seat. The lady sitting next to couldn’t get her reading light to work so I pivoted mine over to her to use and settled down for a mid afternoon nap. I asked her if she had complained to the captain and she said that she hadn’t. Just as I was nodding off, I heard Bud’s voice. I opened my eyes and there was Bud standing in the aisle in his TWA captains uniform complete with all of that gold trim. He said he had paged me on the intercom to see if I made it aboard his flight and I hadn’t responded. The downside of flying non-rev was after the paying travelers were all seated the non-revs got what was left. Flying from TWA’s hub in STL to LAX always flew fully seated. Fortunately for me my wife Nancy had a high seniority number. I told him the intercom was nonworking and this poor lady sitting next to me couldn’t get her reading light to work. I suggested he should write these things up on his Aircraft squawk sheet. He suggested that we grab a bite to eat when we got back to Long Beach.
When he headed back to the flight deck, the lady next to me said “You weren’t kidding about complaining to the captain were you”.
