Dan: 0:00

Paul Drusch has been a commercial airline pilot for decades. And when I asked him our lightning round question, what phrase strikes fear in the heart of someone in your profession? He had one of the most terrifying answers I've ever heard on the show.

Paul: 0:16

So we have a system called EGPWS, Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, and it'll give you one of two alerts that, boy, if it happens, it kinda comes out of the blue and it will make you stand up and take notice in a big hurry. It'll either start screaming at you, wind shear, wind shear.

EGPWS Warning: 0:34

Wind shear, wind shear, wind shear.

Dan: 0:37

Wind shear is a sudden shift in wind speed or direction.

Paul: 0:42

Like a severe tailwind or a downdraft

Dan: 0:45

Mm.

Paul: 0:45

That require you to instantaneously firewall the engines and try to get the airplane away from the ground as quickly as possible lest you hit the ground.

Dan: 0:54

And then there's another alert on there.

Paul: 0:57

Terrain, terrain, which means it is detected that there's terrain that you're approaching rapidly and if you don't alter course, you're gonna run into.

EGPWS Warning: 1:04

Terrain, terrain, pull up. Terrain, terrain, pull up.

Dan: 1:09

So those are warnings where you have to act immediately.

Paul: 1:13

Right. And we practice that every year in the simulator, wind shears and terrain warnings.

Dan: 1:19

Can you remember a time when you got one of those warnings unexpectedly and you had to react?

Paul: 1:25

Well...

Dan: 1:27

Turns out, he can. And he'll tell us about it coming up on the show. I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a harbor pilot, a veterinarian, an audiobook narrator. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Paul Drusch what it's like to be an airline pilot. We'll talk about why your captain is probably more annoyed about that maintenance delay than you are, how pilots keep track of all those lights and switches in the cockpit, and what you do when you notice there's an engine on fire. Stay with us. At Paul's airline, more than 16,000 pilots go to a website every month and bid on where and when they'll fly the following month. Seniority decides who gets what, which works out pretty well for Paul.

Paul: 2:37

At my seniority now, I'm I'm fairly senior. I've been here a long time. I can not quite pick and choose, but I can get 95% of the stuff I want, whether that is the destination I get to fly, what day of the week I wanna fly, whether I wanna fly the early trip there or the late trip there, and and I can do a different destination every week if I want to.

Dan: 3:02

Do you typically know who your copilot is gonna be before you show up for a given flight?

Paul: 3:07

Yes. Most of the time, you'll know when the bid's published, you know, we bid the month prior. They'll be published on the fifteenth or sixteenth of the previous month, and then you can look at each trip you have next month and pull up the crew manifest to see who you're flying with, not just the pilots, but the flight attendants.

Dan: 3:22

And are are you able to sort of angle to be with certain people that you like, or is that out of your control?

Paul: 3:28

No. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, for a long time while I was on the narrow body, I wouldn't say exclusively, but 90% of the time, I I flew with a really good friend of mine. He's more of a brother to me than my actual brother. We lived near each other. We used to carpool to work together. We had a great time, we respected each other. I mean, it was just a great dynamic. So we were able to they call it buddy bidding. We were able to buddy bid.

Dan: 3:52

These days, Paul is mostly flying international to destinations like Doha, which is a fourteen hour haul.

Paul: 3:59

I didn't particularly like Doha. I do Doha, and that's not an indictment on the Qatari citizens or anything else. I don't like it because I don't like the fourteen hour flight. But there is no denying that it is an efficient use of my time while I'm at work. You know, the European flying, when I go to Europe, I'm only flying seven and a half, eight, nine hours a leg, and then coming back seven or eight, nine hours a leg, and you get paid by the hour. Right? So a London trip pays me sixteen hours, but a Doha trip for the almost the same footprint pays me twenty seven hours because the flying is so much farther. Does that make sense?

Dan: 4:34

It does. Yeah. And I I don't think it ever clicked for me that you were paid by the hour. I mean, you are a salaried employee though. Right?

Paul: 4:43

Well, not really. We are hourly employees. I mean, my whole paycheck is based on how many hours I fly every month and every year. There are some minimum guarantees, but, you know, if I fly seventy hours this month, I get paid for seventy hours. If I fly ninety hours this month, I get paid for ninety hours.

Dan: 4:59

Well, it seems like there's a lot baked into the definition of hours. Like, if you're

Paul: 5:04

Yes.

Dan: 5:04

Waiting at the gate for some maintenance problem, is that on the clock or off?

Paul: 5:08

That's off the clock. You you've cracked there. You've code cracked the code. Now when I say off the clock, I I do get a per diem, but the per diem is really not worth it.

Dan: 5:16

Wait. So if you're sitting at the gate and you're waiting on maintenance to fix some dumb thing that we've all endured as passengers, you're not getting paid for that.

Paul: 5:25

No. The way it works for us, the minute the doors of the aircraft are closed, all the doors, the entry doors, the cargo doors, the galley doors, all the doors are closed, and we have completed our before start checklist, and we're ready for departure. I can release the parking brake with the concurrence of the ground crew, and that's what starts the clock for me to get paid. It's actually

Dan: 5:45

Wow.

Paul: 5:46

A micro switch in the parking brake that knows that we have released the brake and we're ready to go to work.

Dan: 5:50

Oh, this is great. You know what's funny about that is I do a lot of flying and, you know, frequently, we're hearing the captain come over and give us an update on whatever the maintenance thing is. And there's frequently annoyance in their voice. And I always just thought, you know, they just wanna get on with their day the way the rest of us are, but I didn't realize it's also like I mean, it's taking money out of your pocket, essentially.

Paul: 6:13

Well, either that or really because we're still ultimately gonna get paid for that trip as long as we complete the trip. But what it more than likely is doing is reducing the amount of layover time you have down leg. Right? You know,

Dan: 6:26

Yeah.

Paul: 6:27

Again, on the wide body, when you fly one leg to Europe and layover, and the layovers are usually in the twenty four hour range to get you ready to come back the next day. If you're three hours late, now your layovers just become twenty one hours. But yes, look, maintenance delays, weather delays, they're probably more frustrating if you can believe it for us than it is for the passengers, and not just from the monetary aspect, but from all sorts of aspects.

Dan: 6:53

One of the most defining features of a pilot's work is the checklist. There's one for every phase of a flight, and a separate one for nearly every emergency.

Paul: 7:04

There's the before starting engines checklist. There's the after starting engines checklist. There's the before takeoff checklist, etcetera. And then there are the engine failure checklist, the cargo compartment fire checklist, the emergency depressurization checklist. I mean, there's a multitude of checklists and way too many for anybody to ever remember by, you know, by rote memory, but it's it's very well cataloged, it's very well organized, and and it has to be, you know, the especially the emergency procedures checklist have to be available to us very rapidly so that we can handle any kind of problem because when you're hurdling through the air at 600 miles an hour, you know, seven miles above the ground, stuff can get pretty ugly pretty quickly.

Dan: 7:44

What are your emotions around those checklists? Like I I imagine for a lot of listeners in different professions, sometimes checklists are kind of a a buzzkill, you know, it's like make work or bureaucratic work, like what are your feelings about them?

Paul: 7:59

No, no, absolutely not. I mean, it's just become part of the routine. I I look at it as kind of a comforting thing because if I got the checklist accomplished, I've done everything that I can do, that manufacturer wants me to do or the FAA wants me to do or my company wants me to do, and if I've got all those things accomplished, I'm doing my job. Anything else would be kind of shirking my responsibility, which, you know, it's not a that's, again, not a good idea for the kind of profession I'm in. And it keeps me from second guessing myself and going, well, can I could I have done something better? You can always do something better, but as long as I'm doing at least what's on the checklist, I'm doing 99% better than, you know, not doing anything or trying to do something from memory.

Dan: 8:43

The checklists tell Paul what to do, but all those switches and lights in the cockpit, and there are a lot of them, need to be verified in a specific order too. Pilots call it a flow.

Paul: 8:56

For instance, when we preflight the aircraft and we look at the overhead panel and all the switches and buttons and lights that are up there, you go through kind of a a flow, a pattern of looking at every light and every switch to see if it's in the right position, and the light is either on if it's supposed to be on or off, if it's supposed to be off, and any kind of anomalies.

Dan: 9:14

That's so it reminds me of, for one of my books, was interviewing lifeguard consultants, people who teach lifeguards, like, how to do what they do. And and one of the things I remember is they taught them a pattern for scanning the pool. It was like, you don't wanna just do it randomly or let your eye, you know, just wander. You wanna do it with discipline where you're kinda sweeping the pool every number of seconds. It sounds like there's a similar logic here.

Paul: 9:37

Yes. Absolutely. And and and going back to the checklist thing, I mean, and and I don't wanna try to take credit for all that is good in the world, but, you know, I know that the whole checklists have been a thing for at least the close to fifty years I've been flying and and much longer than that, but we have kind of kind of convinced other industries, other or or other professions to get in love with the idea of doing checklists to eliminate threats and errors. Most prevalently, I think, surgeons, doctors, and hospitals have kind of adopted very similar checklist scenario or or checklist protocols like we have in flying.

Dan: 10:16

Tell me about the middle of a flight. So you're you've reached cruising altitude, you engage autopilot, I think

Paul: 10:24

Sure.

Dan: 10:24

You can tell me. And then, are you able to relax at that point, or are you sort of actively monitoring a bunch of things? And if so, what are those things?

Paul: 10:31

Okay. So the answer is yes to both. So we reached cruising altitude, autopilot's on, but below 10,000 feet, and normally, we cruise in the mid thirties to low 40,000 foot levels in a commercial airline. But below 10,000 feet, we have something called sterile cockpit. Below 10,000 feet, there is to be no extraneous conversation whatsoever. It is strictly about the operation, strictly about flying airplane, communicating with air traffic control, navigating, etcetera.

Dan: 11:00

The reason for the sterile cockpit is that takeoffs and landings are the highest risk parts of the flight. But in the middle, the pilot can relax, at least a little.

Paul: 11:11

Well, above 10,000 feet, it it opens up a little bit. Right? Your vision opens up a little bit in that it's not as frenetic the pace, and you do have communications always with air traffic control, and you do have navigational consideration. But that's when you can turn to the other guy and go, okay. So tell me about yourself. Are you married? You got kids? You know? And and we can engage in a conversation. Always secondary to us flying the airplane. And by I mean what I mean by flying the airplane, the autopilot is is doing what we tell it to do, but we're always programming the flight management computer, which tells it where we're going and, you know, how to get there. We're always communicating with air traffic control, as you progress along the flight, you're changing frequencies all the time.

Dan: 11:50

And what are you the the communications with air traffic control, are are there just certain kind of ritualized check ins, like, every 15, or is it more opportunistic? Like, something happens, then you contact them, or what's the rhythm there?

Paul: 12:03

Over the ocean, it is checking in over every waypoint basically across the ocean, every lat long point that's designated.

Dan: 12:11

So quickly, waypoints are basically named intersections in the sky. Some of them have goofy names like Elvis near Memphis. There's one near Orlando called Bambi. So anyway, Paul's checking in at every one of these sky intersections when he's flying across the ocean.

Paul: 12:30

Within major countries, you know, in The United States and Europe, etcetera, the countries are divided up into air traffic control sectors. And you're controlled by one controller in that sector at a time, and the communication is pretty continuous. They will tell you what altitudes to climb to, what you know, to fly direct to a waypoint or fly a heading or, you know, speed up, or slow down, or do a bunch of different things, point out traffic, etcetera. And then they'll hand you on to the next controller when you reach the border, the boundary of their area of control. So, the communication is pretty constant throughout an entire flight.

Dan: 13:06

So like, just give us a snippet of that, like what what would that sound like to be, you know, checking in with air traffic control in the middle of a flight? They would say what and you would say what?

Paul: 13:15

Okay. So normally, I would, you know, we would get a controller, the previous controller would give us a frequency. They'd say contact, you know, New York Center on 12345, and we would acknowledge. You always acknowledge with the call sign, you know, American Airlines flight 123 will contact New York 12345. And we put that into the the radio transceiver head. You know, we we select the frequency manually with our fingers and manipulate it with a series of buttons, and then you hit a transfer button and you transfer to the new thing, and then the the radio transfers over to the new frequency. And now you check-in, and there are requirements for the check-in. I mean, that is standardized. The standardized requirement is you state who you're talking to, who you are, and what flight level or what altitude you're flying at. So it would be American it'd be New York Center, American 123, FlightLevel350. And then they would acknowledge with either sometimes it's just as simple as Roger, which means they understand and they see you on their radar and they know you're there. Other times, it may be, okay, American 123, proceed direct to Nantucket, you know, and they'll send you on your way. You know, most of our flight planning, believe it or not, is not a straight line from point a to b. We fly over different waypoints and it can be a crooked line, but air traffic control, in most cases, do the best they can within the confines of traffic or in and around you, traffic crossing you, etcetera, crossing your flight path to straighten that line out as much as possible.

Dan: 14:45

Are there certain airports that are harder to land at than others?

Paul: 14:49

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. In The United States, the two that come to mind are LaGuardia and Washington DC, Washington National, Reagan National.

Dan: 14:59

And why why those places?

Paul: 15:01

Well, primarily because they're so real estate constrained, very short runways.

Dan: 15:05

Okay.

Paul: 15:06

In the case of DC, you've got lots of restricted airspace. I I don't know if you guys are familiar with what has happened lately. About six or eight months ago, there was a helicopter that hit a, a regional jet. I mean, there is a lot going on. It's busy airspace, the runways aren't very long. In the Northeast, in the wintertime, the weather can be terrible. If you ask me, what kind of airport should we build in Washington DC? I'd say, have to start all over again because there's just isn't a real estate there on that little peninsula that the DCA is on. And the same thing for LaGuardia. The runways in LaGuardia had to be extended on piers to run out over the Long Island Sound just to make it long enough for modern airplanes to have sufficient runway to land and take off on.

Dan: 15:48

If you're flying into an airport you've never been to before, do you have to do some kind of prep in advance? Or are there enough systems where you can kind of feel confident even if you've never been there previously?

Paul: 16:02

The short answer is yes. I mean, any pilot worth his salt will always do some preparation. Now, certain airports are what we call qualification airports because there is something so particular about them. The company actually has an electronic folder, if you will, of pictures of the airport, of verbiage that tells you what to look out for and what some of the the threats are. Some of them even have video of previous aircraft arriving to show you some of the markers and some of the checkpoints that you need to look at.

Dan: 16:34

After a quick break, where does that stereotypical pilot voice come from? Stay with us.

Dallas Taylor: 16:42

I'm Dallas Taylor, host of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast. On our show, sound designers, musicians, and experts reveal the secrets behind the most iconic sounds in the world. From the I'm loving it jingle to the sound effects of Star Wars. From the Netflix to-doom to the music and sounds of Zelda. To unlock your sonic world, follow Twenty Thousand Hertz right here in your podcast player.

Dan: 17:12

Let's talk about the people side for a bit. I'm curious what your interactions are like with flight attendants. Like, can a great flight attendant make your work easier in some way?

Paul: 17:24

Yeah. I think so. Absolutely. Let me preface the whole thing by saying that my wife is a former flight attendant, that's how I met

Dan: 17:30

Oh, no kidding.

Paul: 17:31

So I I have a

Dan: 17:31

So you have a great relationships with them.

Paul: 17:33

I've got a soft spot in my heart, and I I'd like to think that that shows in the way I I treat and communicate with the flight attendants. I mean, I understand their job and as as best I can without having done it myself, and I'm sympathetic to it. And we have always what's called the purser, which is the number one flight attendant. She's the lead flight attendant, or he or she is the lead flight attendant in the back of the aircraft. And, you know, the good ones are worth their weight in gold, and the bad ones, you know, you hope that they can improve because and and take a lead from the really good ones because the good ones can head off past your problems before it becomes something that I need to interact with.

Dan: 18:09

Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So the good ones are just kinda deflecting nonsense from you and letting you focus on your work.

Paul: 18:16

Absolutely. Yeah. Because as the captain, I am in charge of everything. I am in charge of the entire crew, and I am responsible for the entire crew and all the passengers. And I have to make sometimes I mean, I always say that, you know, 90% of my job is great, and that 10% of my job that's not great is usually personnel problems. And and I don't mean necessarily crew members, I'm talking about passenger problems.

Dan: 18:39

Well, tell me about some of those. Like, if something goes wrong and it's one of the 10% moments, like, what is it?

Paul: 18:45

Oh, well, it can be anything from and I'm sure you've seen the YouTube or news videos, you know, people that have imbibed too much, drank too much, and now they're deciding to, you know, make some commotion in the back.

Dan: 18:59

And and so you're getting called into these situations as just kind of authoritative reinforcement? It's almost like you've gotta bring the principal in because the student was sufficiently bad to get the authorities involved. Is that the vibe?

Paul: 19:12

Yeah, right, right. We, you know, jokingly call it the voice of God, you know. First thing you do is you pick up the microphone and say, you know, understand that people are causing a disturbance in the back, kick your seats immediately, otherwise, we will be, you know, diverting to Gander Newfoundland or something. You know, you gotta come up with something and and you don't wanna you don't wanna sound you know, I'm kinda making light of it now. But again, a good flight attendant, a good a good purser will lead with that and make it so that I really only have to write a report and then not necessarily have to take any kind of good action on it, you know, a severe action like calling the police.

Dan: 19:47

I wanna talk for a minute about the pilot voice. I mean, I feel like that's a real similarity between pilots is this very authoritative, but also calm, reassuring voice. And and it just makes me curious. I've got three hypotheses here I wanna run by you. You tell me If it's one or the other or a blend. Is it trained? Like, do do they consciously cultivate that in you? Or is it selected for, like, the kind of people who make good pilots are already people who just have that kind of authoritative reassuring vibe naturally? And or is it three that it's become a kind of cultural norm where when you spend a lot of time among your peers who are captains, you catch on, that's the way they talk, and so you adapt.

Paul: 20:36

Look, to be perfectly frank, it is probably the last choice, choice three. But let me just tell you that I hate my voice. I mean, it's good that when I go listen to this podcast after we're done, I'm gonna go, god, I sound terrible. Because I I I don't sound like what I think I sound like. Let's put it that way. And I don't know if anybody does.

Dan: 20:52

Mhmm.

Paul: 20:53

But experience certainly allows you to, I think, be a little bit more calmer. You realize that the passengers and the flight attendants are looking for somebody that's gonna be calmer and not panicked or frantic on the on the microphone. So maybe it is just kind of a something that's evolved over time, but it's also a factor of your experience and and, you know, your time doing the job.

Dan: 21:17

Paul's experience gives him a lot of confidence in the cockpit. But on a flight to Doha about a year and a half ago, that confidence was tested in a way nobody could anticipate. It starts with that terrain warning we heard at the top of the show. A group or possibly a nation state in the region was deliberately jamming and spoofing GPS signals.

Paul: 21:41

Jamming means you lose GPS altogether. You don't have the signal from the GPS, in which case the airplane has redundant systems that allow it to use an inertial reference system and, you know, some other things, ground based navigation aids. But it's the spoofing thing that's more difficult. The spoofing thing actually makes the aircraft think it's in a place other than where it really is.

Dan: 22:05

Oh my.

Paul: 22:07

And again, this enhanced ground proximity warning system that gives you the terrain terrain warning uses the GPS position to know where it is, to know where the terrain is. Right? So they had been spoofing us, and we knew they were spoofing us. And the sun's coming up over at that time, we were still flying pretty close to Israel. We were about 60 miles to the Southwest of Tel Aviv. And at, you know, 35,000 feet, we're sipping on a cup of coffee, and we get terrain terrain pull up, whoop whoop, pull up, telling us to pull up. Now, you know, here sitting at my desk going zero miles an hour, I know that at 35,000 feet, I'm higher than any terrain in the entire world.

Dan: 22:46

Right.

Paul: 22:47

But in that moment, when I'm talking about, you know, going out on my boat tomorrow with the copilot, sipping a cup of coffee, you know, the coffee goes over your shoulder and you're grabbing the wheel and go, woah, what am I you know, because it's telling me to pull up.

Dan: 22:59

Yeah.

Paul: 23:00

It was all because of the GPS spoofing, but boy oh boy, you wanna talk about a heart stopper, that was it.

Dan: 23:08

Ugh. Were you already grabbing the yoke in that moment before your brain could slow you down?

Paul: 23:14

Yes. Absolutely. I mean, immediately, like I said, I dropped my cup of coffee. It went all over the floor behind me. I grabbed the yolk. I did not disconnect the auto-pilot. We were in cruise, but I immediately looked down to see what I've got. And the worst part about it was not only did we get the oral alert, but it because the computer didn't recognize where we were or what altitude we're at because the GPS also feeds altitude information to the the EGPWS system, the the warning system. It shows on our nav display, you know, we got five television screens basically in front of us, and one or two of them are nav displays. Copilot has one. I have one. It showed red as if we were gonna be flying right into the side of a mountain Oh my. In front of us. Now good news was it was daylight. The sun was coming up. I had visual contact with the ground below me. There weren't much clouds, basically over the desert, so I could tell that we weren't there. And I knew we were on course even though the GPS thought we weren't on course, but it still is one of those things that, you know, it's like waking up from a nightmare thinking, okay, where am I? You know, am am I am I where I think I am?

Dan: 24:20

Paul has also had real not spoofed emergencies in his career. Many years ago, he flew for a commuter airline in a 19 seat turboprop plane. He was flying eight or nine legs a day, just two pilots, no flight attendant. Somebody would hand him his lunch in the cockpit during turnarounds. And to keep their lunches warm, the pilots would tuck them under their seats where there was a heat register. So one day, he takes off out of Roswell, New Mexico.

Paul: 24:48

And a couple, maybe fifteen-hundred, two-thousand feet in the air, I start smelling something that smelled like it was burning. And so my immediate reaction was to turn to the copilot and say, hey. Check your lunch. Make sure you're not burning it on the the heat register underneath your seat. And as he's reaching underneath the seat to see if his Styrofoam container was melting on the heat register, I hear some screaming in the back. I slide open the cockpit door, and I see nothing but smoke. I can't even see the second row of passengers. There's nothing but smoke in the back of the cockpit. I look forward and it looks like our right engine is starting to fail, and then we get a fire warning on the right engine. So we have basically had a catastrophic failure of the right engine. So we donned our oxygen mask. The good news is we're, you know, no more than five miles out of the Roswell Airport. Roswell's got one of the longest runways in the world. So and the weather was great. I mean, I a lot of things went our way that day. The weather was awesome. It was a sunny day, not much wind. We declared an emergency with the tower, which is another one of those scripted things that, you know, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, and told them what we needed. And we made a, basically, a 180 degree turn back around to the airport, and we landed on the same runway we took off on, but going the opposite direction from the way we took off because the wind was favorable for it. With the made a call to the tower, they called out the ARFF crew, the airport fire rescue people, and they met us on the runway, and we evacuated the airplane. Luckily, it was the engine on the opposite side of where the entry door was, so we evacuated the airplane out of the entry door and the crash fire rescue people, formed the, right engine and basically, we trashed the airplane, totaled the airplane that day.

Dan: 26:27

Wow.

Paul: 26:28

And nothing it was just a catastrophic failure, the engine. There's nothing we did wrong, it's just, it was time for the engine to give up.

Dan: 26:35

And I mean, what were your emotions in that situation?

Paul: 26:39

So it's, you know, we we train for that. I mean, we go to training every 12 months, it used to be every nine months, they lengthened it every twelve months. I wish it was nine months to be honest with you, I thought I was more proficient. But we trained, and we trained back then the same. We trained for engine failures. We trained for fires. So when it actually does happen, you'd be surprised at how calm you are in that this isn't anything different than I hadn't seen in the simulator or, you know, I hadn't seen before. It's after the event that your hands start shaking, you think, wow, that was pretty intense. As a matter of fact, this particular company, as soon as we got to the terminal, there was a phone call from the chief pilot up in Farmington, New Mexico, is where they were based, telling us, hey, nice job with that. And listen, we got another airplane that'll be there in an hour, and you guys are gonna take that back to Albuquerque. And to which I responded to the chief pilot, I said, I don't think so. I think I said, I think we're done for the day. I said, I'm gonna go buy the copilot a beer, we're gonna get good night's rest, and if you're lucky, we'll be ready to fly tomorrow morning. Because I wasn't about to get back in an airplane after that kind of intensity. Just it's just too much stimulus for for somebody to wash away in an hour.

Dan: 27:47

Let let's talk about maybe the the opposite side of the spectrum. What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen from the sky?

Paul: 27:55

Wow. I I I like I said, the view out the front is unbelievable. You know what Saint Elmo's fire is? It's a static discharge, basically. In in certain situations, certain environmental situations, air when the airplane flies through, you know, clouds that are highly charged with the positive electrons, it builds up on the nose of the airplane, and you'll get this Saint Elmo's fire that that sparkles across the windshield like little lightning bolts. I mean, that's beautiful. I've seen I've flown you know, we don't we don't fly through thunderstorms, but I have flown around thunderstorms and close enough to thunderstorms to see them light up like, you know, the most amazing lights of of lightning inside the clouds, outside the clouds, etcetera. I've seen vertical lightning going straight up. I mean, straight up vertically going up, not down. I've seen the Alps. I've seen, like I said, the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, the the Northern Lights just about a month ago. You know, I was going to cross the North Atlantic, and you see the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis.

Dan: 28:58

Man, I bet that was amazing.

Paul: 29:00

It is. It's seriously amazing stuff. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that I'll call the flight attendants up and say, hey. If one of you guys a minute, you want might wanna come up and take a look this.

Dan: 29:08

Wow.

Paul: 29:08

So, one of the beautiful things about this job is the variety of the scenery that I get to view out the front window. And I mean, my view was a hell of a lot better than the view you guys have out those side windows, trust me.

Dan: 29:20

Those little tiny windows that we have, yeah. So Paul, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? And what does it mean?

Paul: 29:35

Alright. If I told you that, the other day going into Philadelphia, had to shoot a cat three, would you know what I'm talking about?

Dan: 29:42

Shoot a cat three. No idea.

Paul: 29:44

It has nothing to with cats, and it has nothing to do with really shooting anybody. Okay. So when the weather gets really bad, you know, we haven't really talked about this, but 99% of the landings and 100% of the takeoffs are all manually done by the pilots. We we take off every time manually, no autopilot, and the aid of some of our flight instruments, but not to the extent that we're we're always controlling airplane. In certain instances, when the weather is really, really bad for the approaches, and when I say really, really bad, you know, less than a half mile visibility in fog, We can do a cat three approach, which is approach basically down to the ground till you can barely you'll see the runway lights two seconds before touchdown.

Dan: 30:26

Oh, man. That's so stressful.

Paul: 30:29

And it's called a cat three approach.

Dan: 30:31

And just to jump in quickly, cat three is what? A a categorization of weather or

Paul: 30:35

Yes. Category three is the most severe. So cat

Dan: 30:39

Okay.

Paul: 30:39

Normally, it's a visual approach, which means I can see the runway for at least 10 miles in the air. A cat one is no lower than about a half mile visibility, and then cat two is less than a half mile visibility, and cat three, like I said, is is 50 foot visibility, basically.

Dan: 30:57

Oh, man. That's terrifying.

Paul: 30:59

So so that's the the phrase. If you're talking to another pilot at the bar and go, yeah, we shot a cat three in here today. You go, yeah, me too. You know, was pretty bad, wasn't it? You know, the weather was pretty bad.

Dan: 31:10

What is the most insulting thing you could say about a pilot's work?

Paul: 31:14

Well, I I just had this conversation on a bus to the parking lot, to the the parking lot in Orlando. I had a family that wanted to know, you know, you're a pilot, of course, I'm in uniform, yes, I'm a pilot. And the the kid, you know, kind of a smart aleck kid, made some comment about, well, an autopilot flies the airplane anyway, you're just sitting there watching. And I think that's the most insulting thing is to think that that I'm a glorified babysitter, and it can't be anything more farther from the truth because it isn't as it's certainly not boring and it's certainly not routine. No flight is routine. And so, you know, if you think it's just an autopilot flying airplane and I'm just along for the ride, it's that's insulting, I guess.

Dan: 31:54

What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Paul: 32:00

Beside the airplane itself, which is the obvious tool, I mean, that that to me is the biggest part. The the the whole performance part of it is is very cool. It's kinda like being a Formula One driver or something. But I guess if you're talking about personal tool, most of us wear headsets with boom mics on them. I have a Bose A20. Shout out to Bose if you wanna send me a new one. It's getting a little old. I got a Bose A20 headset, noise canceling, audio quality is awesome, the microphone quality is awesome. It's just a really nice headset that makes the loud or louder environment that I fly in that much better, more comfortable.

Dan: 32:37

So I know your airline has mandatory retirement at 65, you're sneaking up on that deadline, like, what are your feelings about that policy and and as you kinda get close to the end of the race here?

Paul: 32:52

Well, look, I get it. I get that, you know, everybody has to be put out to pasture at some time. Do I think I'm ready to be put out to pasture? I I don't. But I'm, you know, I'm just one guy and I'm certainly nobody's making the rules based on what Paul thinks. I'm gonna miss it a lot. I know some guys are happy to retire. I will not be one of those guys. I mean, good or bad, this is the thing aside from being a husband and a father that defines me. I mean, you know, I I I'm I'm probably to answer your question, I'm probably gonna go and get a flying job somewhere that that allows me to fly beyond 65. It it won't be with a commercial airline because that's against the regulations. But I can do some corporate flying, I might, you know, I can do some instructing. I prefer not to instruct, I'd rather actually do the flying than talking. But I'm definitely gonna miss it. This is I don't know how to put it. I mean, I'm a lucky guy.

Dan: 33:50

It it does seem a little extreme. I mean, if we can have 92 year old senators or whatever, it seems like we could have a 68 or 71 year old airline pilot.

Paul: 34:02

Yeah. Well, yeah, but I'll play the devil's advocate. First of all, you know, the mantra we used to go by when, you know, we were negotiating for a contract and looking for a pay raise, and, you know, people would say, well, shouldn't be paid like a doctor gets paid, And the mantra we always, you know, defaulted to was, well, yeah, a doctor can only kill one person at a time and, you know, I can kill 280 people at a time, you know. And and where I'm going with this is that this is a profession that is very much a performance based profession.

Dan: 34:31

Yeah.

Paul: 34:32

You know, I mean, baseball players have to stop playing as they get too old and, you know, even surgeons need to stop operating as they get too old. It's the same thing with pilots. I mean, you do slow down. I I'd like to think I haven't missed a step but maybe you talk to some of my co pilots and go, yeah, he's about ready to go. You know, I I don't know. I don't think so. But you you understand what I'm saying?

Dan: 34:50

Yeah.

Paul: 34:50

But at some point, there's got there's no doubt that I wouldn't be able to do this job, so they have to have some endpoint. Right? An endgame to it. So.

Dan: 34:57

Why do you think being a pilot is one of those careers that people are just drawn to it? I mean, don't you have that sense? I mean, e even not being a pilot, it feels like of all the pilots I've met or heard about or read about, it was something baked into them early. Why is that?

Paul: 35:15

Well, you know, my dad was an airline pilot. I'd like to think that even if he wasn't, I'd probably still be doing this because this is all I've ever wanted to do since I don't know, I can remember. Five years old, maybe. You know, at any given time, you're either the hero or the goat in this profession, you know. I mean, when Sully Sullenberger saves everybody's life and lands in the Hudson River, everybody thinks, oh, it's so glamorous to be a pilot. Look at it. He's like a a movie star, you know, a superstar. And then, you know, when you're on the bed in the back of the airplane, we got a mechanical, and I'm up there with my kinda depressed voice telling you we're gonna be another two hours while we try to fix something, then you're the goat. And the goat not is in greatest of all time. You're the goat as in, you know, go out and eat some grass in the pasture goat. So if you're asking me, it's the greatest profession in the world, but, you know, we've talked about some of the downsides. We haven't even talked about the amount of time I've been away from my family in the thirty six years I've been doing this, you know, the the the holidays that I've missed, the birthdays that I've missed. You know, there is downside to the profession.

Dan: 36:11

Would you still choose this career if you were starting out again today at age 18 or 20 or whatever.

Paul: 36:17

Every day and twice on Sundays. Absolutely. Absolutely. This is me. This is who I am.

Dan: 36:33

Paul Drusch is a commercial airline pilot. Paul said that being a pilot is all I've ever wanted to do since I can remember, and he's not alone. Pilot is one of those jobs that kids dream about alongside astronaut, veterinarian, doctor, professional athlete. What do those jobs have in common? They're legible to children. A pilot flies planes. A vet heals animals. Kids can picture the work. And they carry prestige. So when a kid says, I want to be a pilot, adults smile and nod. Meanwhile, no eight year old dreams of becoming an enterprise SaaS accounting exec. Even though plenty of adults will discover they're perfectly suited for that kind of work. Does that missing aspiration matter? In elementary school, no. In high school, probably. You can't aspire to a job you've never encountered. Imagine if Paul had never met a pilot, never absorbed the idea that this was a life a person could have. He probably still would have built a good life, but not this life. Not the life where he finds himself saying, this work is me. How can we expose kids to a broader palette of professions? I think it matters because somewhere out there right now is a kid who would come alive doing work they've never even heard of yet. Completing checklist after checklist, bidding for your favorite routes, rehearsing emergencies until the response becomes instinctive, and carrying strangers safely through the dark toward the people waiting for them on the other side. Folks, that's what it's like to be an airline pilot. A special thanks to Mary Deverter for recommending Paul. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next week, not two weeks, next week for another installment of our airport series.