Professional Courtesies

I've been traveling quite a lot on commercial air carriers to position for various flights. Lots of travels back and forth to Toronto mainly, but other places as well when we have had to do crew swaps mid flight because of flying time and working day hour restrictions.

Either way, it's a lot of airports, securities, loading onto over packed airplanes and dealing with all of the hassles that I've come accustomed to avoiding with private air travel! It is in these instances that we tend to use certain tools of trade to help aide in making the experience as stress free as possible. It's amazing how far a smile and aircrew security badge will go. Whenever traveling through security I always have my aircrew badge even if just flying home for holidays and not working. Putting it into the bin with my change and other loose articles immediately grants me some slack with the security personal. No longer am I some skid with no credibility, but am a person with which whom they can be a little more relaxed. This usually results in no taking off the shoes and a quick blast through the metal detector.

On my latest commercial flight from Toronto to Calgary last week, we had just finished our flying day and hoped over to the main terminal, still in full uniform. While we could have changed prior to getting there, we leave it on to help get through all the security bullshit and also, depending on the airline, to maybe even get an upgrade. Airlines such as Air Canada with executive class are more susceptible to upgrade a pilot in uniform to business class than anyone else (unless they're willing to pay for the upgrade). Unfortunately that night the flight was completely full and there were even a couple other pilots in the back of the plane with us in economy. However, once there, the flight attendants were very friendly and we were offered free meals, snacks and pretty much anything else they could legally provide to us.

It is professional courtesies like this that help make these situations much more tolerable. I certainly would have preferred to have flown myself back to Calgary and logged the flight hours instead of flying commercially, but as our jet fleet grows the planes are needed all over the country and to accommodate this we are frequently positioning crews via commercial air travel. I don't think I positioned even ONCE, while on the turboprop fleet, but since getting on the jet, I've likely flown at least a dozen times commercially for the purposes of repositioning.

So, when it's necessary to make the sacrifice to travel for work like this, the professional courtesies go along way to make the experience as pain free as possible. I'm sure this is similar in many other jobs as well.