STORIES THAT ONLY A FREIGHT DOG KNOWS
You know you’re an old freight dog when: your airplane was old before you were born. You have not done a daylight landing in the past six months. ATC advises you of
smoother air at a different altitude, and you don’t give a shit.
When you taxi up to an FBO on rainy nights and they roll out the red carpet, but quickly take it back when they recognize you. Motel Six drivers try picking you up but they can’t find where in the hell you parked on the airport.
Center asks you to “keep the chickens down” so they can hear you talk. Your airplane has more than 75,000 cycles. Your company call sign is “Oil Can”. The lady at the FBO locks up the popcorn machine because you plan on “making a meal of it”.
Your airplane has more than eight faded logos on it. You wear the same shirt
for a week, and no one complains. Center mispronounces your call sign more than three
times in one flight. Your Director of Operations mysteriously changes your max. take off weight during the holiday season. Every FBO makes you park out of sight of their building.
You walk barefoot through the FBO, because you just woke up. You mark every ramp with engine oil. All the other airlines hold to see if you get in. You request the visual approach with 300’ overcast and ½ SM vis. You make no attempt to deviate around weather.- you don’t bother to check the weather because you’re going anyways.
You have an emotional reunion with your newly assigned DC-3 because you used to fuel it 25 years earlier when it only had 18,000 cycles on it and the windows weren’t painted over.
You’ve slept more nights at Willow Run than in the house you grew up in. Upper management thinks a derelict fuel truck for you to sleep in is a “crew domicile”.
You hope to someday make it to the big time… Atlas Cargo!
You carry your own personal step ladder in the back of the aircraft. You’ve changed tires, starter generators, and radios but you’re neither an A&P or an avionics tech. You have a camping hammock to tie between the landing gear struts. Life is good.
You might have a secret Mexican family in Del Rio, Texas. The tip tanks also serve as
an alarm clock when they run dry. You become VERY proficient at night time aileron
rolls to stay awake. You lose your radios and the approach controller says, “Hey, Mailbag 216, wake up! I know you’re sleepin’ up there!”
 On clear nights you consider it normal to make a low pass or two to clear the
ground fog and scare the deer pigs and sheep off the runway at Presque Isle.
You fly with a Captain who has twice dead-sticked a DC-3 At night to a safe landing and
once had to declare an emergency because his copilot tried to pee out an old antennae hole on a Convair 240 and was nearly emasculated.
If you can identify with the above, you’re a FREIGHT DOG!
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Author: Robert J Firth
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