FLIGHTS

“We might be experiencing some lumpy air today.”

Continental Airlines captain before Honolulu to Sydney, November 1988

On a Horizon Air flight from Boise, Idaho, to Portland, Oregon, in 1998, the flight attendant in the front of the plane was yelling to the one in the back, “Get down, get down!” The aircraft appeared to be plummeting through turbulence. We weren’t enjoying ourselves. That was my 420th flight.

On a flight from Honolulu to L.A. in June 1995, my 215th, the jumbo jet we were in was about to land. About 300 feet or so off the ground, the engines fired back up to full throttle, the wheels came up, and the beast headed back out over the Pacific.

“There was a plane on the runway,” the pilot informed us. “We’re gonna come around and try that again.” My heart was pumping and my palms were sweating for the ten- or twelve-minute reapproach that seemed to take about an hour.

On a Porter Airlines flight in March 2013 to little Billy Bishop Airport (also known as the Island Airport because it’s built on an island in Lake Ontario, just off downtown Toronto), my 1,208th flight, we were only about 100 feet from the ground when the wheels came back up.

“We’ll come around and try that again,” the pilot finished after explaining that we were moving too quickly to attempt a landing. Seemed better than bouncing into Lake Ontario. Not that big a deal, but it did get my heart pumping again.

I’m not the most organized cat in the world, nor am I the anal-retentive type, but for whatever reason, starting just a few flights into my long travel career, I decided to log them. On pieces of cardboard, usually the backs of reporters’ notebooks, I write in rows the month and year, the airline, the departure city, draw an arrow, and the arrival city. Often there are extra cities and arrows in between to mark the legs of each journey. I didn’t count my two skydives. The plane has to take off and land with me in it to count as a flight. Let’s hope that trend continues.

On my 29th flight, from Honolulu to Sydney, Australia, in December 1988, our airplane hit an air-pocket over the equatorial doldrums. We dropped a few thousand feet. My buddy Tom Towers and I were playing cards; in fact, I was whipping him for about the eleventh time out of twelve at a French-Canadian game called Mille Bornes. Suddenly, our jumbo jet started falling. Our stomachs rose to our throats, only to fall back down into place with gusto as the plane sank into some solid air. At the beginning of that flight, the pilot had warned us about moderate turbulence. He gave no warning about the plane dropping like a rock near the equator, where the cyclogenesis that creates weather systems in the northern and southern hemispheres is practically non-existent. There’s no warning to give.

The term “being in the doldrums” came from that area of the sea, where sailing vessels in olden days would get stranded in open water for days due to lack of wind. In modern times, at 33,000 feet above that calm, open water, the lack of high-pressure systems and such leaves a little more space for those aforementioned air pockets.

Twice I was on Aloha Island Air flights between Honolulu and Lanai, and it felt like some little-kid-God had our airplane on a rubber band, bouncing us up and down between the islands. On one of those occasions, the only passengers on the flight were my then-wife, Nora, me, and our friend Sweetie Nelson. It was December 1993, my 155th.

As bad and as terrifying as some of these experiences in the air were, the two worst-ever flights were the 52nd and 400th.

The former was a Midway Airlines flight between Chicago and Detroit in July 1990. Northwest, the airline I was originally scheduled to fly, cancelled all of its evening flights due to thunderstorms. Midway was, like, “Hell yes, we’re going!” I paid fifty bucks to hop on this alternative. I was heading to a party to meet a bunch of college friends and wasn’t about to miss it.

It. Was. A. Live. Ing. Night. Mare.

We took off, hit the clouds, and bounced violently through the sky for the next forty-five minutes. The lady next to me worked for the Internal Revenue Service, was doing paperwork, and never batted an eye. I figured she was either as cool as a cucumber or, because she worked for the IRS, she didn’t give a shit whether we crashed.

We lurched, we plunged, we climbed, we thumped, and we rattled continuously. The wings actually seemed to flap as I gripped the armrests with my fingers and the floor with my toes, through my shoes. When we came down out of the clouds near Detroit, the transition to the smooth air was stark. What a great feeling of relief that was, although I think the journey took about four years off my life.

Flight 400 was a Delta flight with the Idaho Steelheads hockey team between Fresno, California, and Reno, Nevada, in March 1998. We were going from a game against the Fighting Falcons to a game against the Renegades, a team coached by Ron “Flockey Hockey” Flockhart. Flockhart had been suspended for a game or two for going nuts on a ref, so during the match he sat next to us in the press box and drank beer. The flight there was so bad, I thought Steelheads captain, Jamie Cooke, had suffered a heart attack. He turned blue, frozen, and speechless. I recall a lot of lateral movement, like the plane was being blown sideways, and then we’d just drop for a second or two before climbing back up.

This was life in the old WCHL. The West Coast Hockey League, known to many as the “Western Cocktail Holiday League,” was the only AA circuit where all of the teams flew everywhere, instead of travelling by bus, except for between Fresno and Bakersfield, California. For that reason, and a respectably high weekly salary cap, the league attracted some decent former NHLers and AHLers. Ex–Philadelphia Flyer and L.A. King (and Gretzky’s childhood chum) Len Hachborn played for the San Diego Gulls; ex–Washington Capital and Detroit Red Wing Darren Veitch played for Phoenix; ex–Ottawa Senator Darcy Loewen played for Idaho; and there were many others.

Most flights were on Southwest Airlines with its cattle-call boarding process. It was open, every-man-for-himself seating. Southwest used to have 737s with two areas, one in the middle of the plane and one in the back, where three seats faced three seats across from one another on both sides of the aisle. It was funky sitting backwards for take-off and landing, but the “lounge” made for easy and entertaining card playing. Six or seven of us would sit together in the lounges and play Snarples literally from the time we sat down until the plane pulled up to the destination gate. The “ding” of the captain parking the plane and turning off the seat belt sign marked the official end of the game.

On yet another Southwest flight, in December 1999, while many of the other passengers moaned and gasped and gripped as we tried and failed three times to descend through a thick fog into Seattle, our little card playing group hardly noticed the drama at all, simply relishing the fact that we got to squeeze in another hand or two.

Oddly, the 300th and 500th flights were also significant. Life lined up so that these big, round numbers always seemed to match significant, benchmark flights.

Flight 100 came in Hawaii in September 1992 during my days as a news reporter at KGMB-TV. We left Kahului Airport on Maui on a little Twin Piper propeller plane, what I referred to as a “Chevette with wings.” (The Chevrolet Chevette was a little smaller than a Honda Civic is now.) The proprietor and pilot of All Pacific Air was hired by the station to fly me and a camera guy around the perimeter of Haleakala (Holl-lay-ock-a-la) in search of the remains of a tour helicopter that had crashed. On a fixed-wing, four-seat aircraft, ripping through the trade winds, we bounced along the side of a 10,000-foot-high mountain, hoping to spot carnage. The Australian-born chopper pilot and the six Japanese tourists on board were dead. That we knew. We just didn’t know where to find them.

Haleakala in English means the “house of the sun.” It’s the giant, dormant volcano that makes up the eastern half of the island, and about 75 percent of Maui’s land area in general. Not sure what dormant means; I guess it means “barely not active,” since Haleakala has erupted with lava flow three times in the last 900 years, the last time less than 300 years ago.

Sitting in the back seat with my knees in my face, I wasn’t worried about being swallowed up by lava, but I was worried about All Pacific returning safely to the airport. There was cloud cover from the summit down to about 7,000 feet, preventing us from seeing the top of the mountain, but not from seeing the blue-coloured wreckage. What did prevent us from spotting successfully was the fact the chopper had crashed into a gulch at about the 3,000-foot mark. It was spotted later and photographed from another helicopter.

I do recall interviewing the pilot’s daughter. She was a hottie, and I barely managed to resist the temptation to hit on her. Dictionary definition of “too soon,” I guess.

She was pretty calm and pragmatic about the whole thing. Her now-late father, Peter Middleton, had been buzzing around the islands for two decades, and she was well aware of the risks. We also had to interview
the tour-company people from Hawaii Helicopters. It was one of those moments when you couldn’t help but feel like an asshole, asking about recently killed people and the safety record of the business. I didn’t enjoy the vulture element to local news.

Much like the two dozen flights before and after my 100th, the two dozen or so before and after my 200th flight were also very routine; Honolulu to Hilo, to Kahului, or to Lahui and back, or a trip to the mainland to visit friends and family. The somewhat-monumental flight 200 came as the Hawaii portion of my career wound down. I was in New York, staying with a bunch of goons, college and post-college buddies, looking to interview for gigs and relocate, when we randomly decided to go to Jamaica.

It was January 1995, and we flew Air Jamaica. We paid a whopping twenty-five dollars to upgrade to first class and drink champagne and enjoy extra legroom. We got it simply by asking at check-in. All but one of the six of us moved up. It was remarkably casual, but then again, we were flying to the land of the Rastafarians.

This was my first trip to the Caribbean. It’s incredibly undeveloped in a lot of ways — sorry, “developing”— a fact that hit us in the face as we rode by endless tin shanties along the side of the road on the way from the airport at Montego Bay to Negril. The general population is extremely poor, and the town was considered a bit sketchy. This didn’t prevent us from roaming out into the local scene and attending reggae concerts. We also frog-manned into Hedonism II.

We weren’t staying at the all-inclusive luxury resort; we were staying next to it. Pointe Village featured standard condo rentals, a pool, and some evening entertainment on the beach. There were families.

At Hedonism, there weren’t families. There were nude heterosexuals playing shuffleboard, doing naughty things in the hot tubs, and swinging on a beach trapeze. The beach was sort of cut in half and there was a clothed side as well, but those wearing bikinis or shorts weren’t allowed to cross the line into “Nude World” unless they dropped their skivvies.

Our fearless leader Tommy, who had arranged our accommodations and proximity to Hedonism, wanted us to experience the resort’s famous weekly toga party one evening.

We did this by going Navy Seal.

One by one we frog-manned from Point Village to Hedonism. There were guards at the fences that ran down between the properties to the beach, so we had to take the water route. In the dark, one guy would slowly side paddle or backstroke out about sixty yards, turn left, slowly paddle another 100 yards beyond the swim ropes that marked Hedonism’s area, and then turn and quietly make his way under that rope to the shore. This would be a beach landing the exact opposite of Normandy. There were no snipers; the only bombshells were inside. Every two minutes or so, another one of us would arrive. Really good toga party. I met two sisters from St. Louis, and I don’t mean nuns.

The strange coincidence with significant flights continued with flight 300. It was on Delta, flying back from my one and only Super Bowl. Brett Favre had led the Green Bay Packers to a 35–21 victory over Drew Bledsoe’s Patriots at Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans in 1997. Among a number of tantalizing special teams runs, Former Michigan Wolverine, Desmond Howard, had a ninety-nine-yard kickoff return for a touchdown and was named MVP. New Orleans makes Las Vegas look like church; plus, it is authentic debauchery, not commercialized or somewhat fabricated.

The best part about the trip was that Albertson’s grocery stores, headquartered in Boise, Idaho, paid for the whole thing, with some help from the local Pepsi distributor. The late Jim Reynolds, an Albertson’s VP at the time, loved our local sports radio station and was a huge supporter of the new hockey team, the Idaho Steelheads, who were one winter away from their inaugural season. I was to be their play-by-play man and was already handling the same gig in the summer for the local baseball team, the Boise Hawks of the short-season, A-ball Northwest League. Both clubs were owned by a group of men who called themselves Diamond Sports, as innovative and progressive an organization as you could find in minor-league business. I hosted an hour-long talk show in the off-seasons called Pepsi Proline. Standard stuff, we took calls from local fans and interviewed guests by phone, many of them from the NHL level. We were trying to entertain, educate, and inundate our inexperienced hockey audience, who were also our potential season-ticket buyers.

During my first winter in Boise, while there was yet to be a hockey team, Jim agreed to the wonderful idea of sending me and a sidekick to the Super Bowl.

“What the hell, let’s do it,” he said.

He gave us two corporate tickets to the game and also paid for our flights and accommodations. “Our” included local celebrity golf pro, Thor Swensson, and myself. “The Mighty” Thor had Boise’s only golf simulator at the time, was a regular on a local sports talk show, and had a larger-than-life persona. He was allegedly qualified to be my “radio producer” because of his creative organizational skills. Thor had previously invited Jack Daniels to my already-out-of-hand thirty-second birthday party. What better guy to bring to the Super Bowl?

Reporting from New Orleans during Super Bowl week was the only time I ever drank before going on the air, and I did it on purpose, because the show was entirely on tape. We weren’t there on press credentials and we weren’t interviewing football players; we were there to report on the scene and the atmosphere. Our show ran Monday through Friday for an hour at six p.m. mountain time. During Super Bowl Week, we’d head onto the very crowded streets each night at about eleven p.m., with a tape recorder, a couple of hurricanes in us and another in hand. We’d walk into bars and interview Packers fans and Patriots fans and anyone resembling a celebrity. Naturally, we included the hottest women we could possibly find to talk football. Thor, an extraordinary production assistant, held my drink while I held the microphone and actually gathered material. As for celebs, they were all sports types if I remember: Dan Patrick from ESPN, former NFL coach Jerry Glanville, and Pat O’Brien from CBS among them.

At about midnight, we’d wrap up with about forty minutes of material, drop the recorder off in the room, and proceed back outside for a night of revelry. The next evening before heading out to duplicate the assignment, we’d host the live portion of the radio program. We’d set up the remote equipment in the hotel room, basically a mixer box with two headsets connected via phone line to the studio back home — we’d welcome everyone to the show, shoot the shit for a bit, and then hit Play on the tape recorder. Forty minutes later, having stopped it a couple of times for commercial breaks, we’d hit stop for good, chat live about any football news, and then say goodbye.

Repeat effort five times, then have Saturday off, and then go to the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Mr. Reynolds was also responsible for me and my wife Nora attending the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona, in 1999, when the Tennessee Volunteers defeated the Florida State Seminoles for college football’s national championship. It was the game in which Vol’s quarterback Tee Martin threw a seventy-nine-yard touchdown bomb to Peerless Price in the fourth quarter to put the game away. That’s all I really remember, other than the FSU band playing the Tomahawk chop-chop theme and the Tennessee band playing “Rocky Top” incessantly. Beyond incessantly. Like, I’m going to shoot all of you geeks if you don’t stop, incessantly.

Thank you, Jim Reynolds. Regardless of the gifts of those two great junkets, he was indeed a great, great guy and a loving father. Rest in peace.

~

Fatherhood would actually be the theme for flight number 500. Like a dream — a spontaneous flight home to witness the birth of my son in June 1999.

Of course, Mom couldn’t dilate before I got on the ten-hour overnight bus trip to Medford, Oregon, for the start of a five-game series between the Boise Hawks and the Southern Oregon Timberjacks. She instead reached the point of no return five minutes after my head hit the pillow for the morning nap that ensued immediately after I got there. Up, to the Medford airport, Horizon Air to Portland, and then to Boise.

A few hours later, I popped home from the hospital to take our Rottweiler out for a walk. Just after I got there, a doctor declared Mom ready to pop. I rushed back for a middle-of-the-night umbilical cord cut. My son fit into the palms of my two hands.

The fact that this momentous event coincided with my 500th flight is uncanny, but that’s where the wicked-cool pattern stopped — until flight 1,000.

Just for shits and giggles: flight 600 was Seattle to Anchorage on Alaska Airlines in November 2000; 700 was Detroit to Chicago on Southwest in 2002; 800 was Chicago to Philadelphia in December 2004; and number 900 was Boston to Ottawa in March 2006 on the Boston Bruins team charter. Nothing occurred out of the ordinary.

The monumental 1,000th career flight came during a trip to Africa to film a documentary with Right To Play. In June 2007, Bruins defenceman Andrew Ference, Florida Panthers D-man Steve “Monty” Montador, Mark Brender of Right To Play, videographer Pat Gamere from New England Sports Network, and I all flew a domestic flight on Air Tanzania from Dar es Salaam, the big city on the coast, to Mwanza, the biggest city on Lake Victoria. Four of us stood in a line right next to the stairs of the airplane while Gamere took our picture. Monty held up a single index finger while the rest of us stood next to him and held up zeros. Brender screwed it up a bit; Andrew and I made zeros by making a little circle with our hands while Mark used the NBA referee technique, signifying zero by holding up his fist. No worries, Brender, it’s a cool photo to mark the milestone nonetheless.

Steve Montador, Mark Brender, Andrew Ference, and Rob Simpson, all hopping on my 1,000th flight.

Thirteen months later, the pattern of significant flights continued. Most of the previous year had been routine, but flight 1,100 was on Kenya Air from Nairobi to London, England. I was returning from another trip to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

But big, round numbers or not, in terms of really unusual international flights, there will never be another like my 286th from Tokyo to Hong Kong. There can’t be. The infamous Kai Tak (Kye-tock) Airport in HK was replaced soon after the British returned the territory to the Chinese in 1997. In October 1996, I basically spent my life savings to go over before the transfer occurred. I had always wanted to see Hong Kong, and no one had any idea what changes might take place once the Chinese took hold of this bastion of capitalism and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I also had a connection with an old friend of the family, who had a connection with a local banker, who had a connection with a tailor near where I was staying, in the Tsim Sha Tsui district across the harbour. I’d stock up on some inexpensive designer suits for my upcoming career in hockey broadcasting.

After spending a few days in Tokyo with Japanese friends I knew from Hawaii, I enthusiastically boarded a United Airlines flight for Hong Kong. Aside from one drunk having to be restrained by the flight attendants, what really stands out was the approach into Kai Tak. I vaguely remembered watching a TV news magazine segment on the subject a few years before. I was abruptly reminded of it when a U.S. Air Force veteran sitting with his wife one row back asked me out of nowhere during the initial descent, “Ever flown into Kai Tak before?”

“No.”

“Get ready.”

“What?”

“It’s crazy, man, we’re gonna dive bomb.”

“Dive bomb?”

“Oh yeah, wait ’til you see this descent. You come over some mountains, dive down, and level out through the neighbourhoods.”

“What?” Dude was tickled to share this information.

Just then, our 747 went into a steep nosedive.

I didn’t know whether to grip and lean forward with the momentum of my body weight or fight it, push on the armrests, and press my back against the seat. It was similar to coming off the highest point of a roller coaster, only in this case, the drop seemed to last a couple miles.

Steep descents are a necessity on occasion. Not steep descents like this. Finally, like that same roller coaster reaching the bottom of its drop, our plane just pulled up hard and levelled out, all in one amazingly smooth motion, as my innards sank into my seat. The drunk guy must have known what was coming.

Just moments after being able to breathe calmly again, we banked incredibly hard to the right, and I looked out the window at lights and buildings and streets rushing by, then we straightened out again, passing laundry on clotheslines strung between tenement buildings. We were looking straight out at the back porches of midrise buildings and at people’s TV sets. We were flying through town at dusk. This probably didn’t last as long as it seemed; we soon came to rest on the lone runway in Victoria Harbour. At the end of the runway, the plane pulled off to the side and parked. It was the first time I ever had to take one of those bizarre buses, with a door on each end and one on each side, from the tarmac to the terminal.

The Chinese spent a couple of billion dollars on a new airport and closed Kai Tak and ruined our fun in 1998. (In America, San Diego is the closest experience to this. Landing from the east, you briefly fly through a part of downtown below the top of some of the highest buildings.)

Flight 1,200 was significant, in that I had never flown to Sudbury, Ontario, before, and Porter Airlines took me there in January 2013. I was with co-producer/camera-gal Shannon Eckstein to shoot another hockey charity event, the donation of equipment to First Nations youngsters who otherwise wouldn’t be able to play. The trip involved a “Sudbury Saturday Night” and a lot of tequila shots with Norm Flynn and the boys from Heroes Hockey. Consider me indoctrinated. We buzzed into the Sudbury Arena for a few minutes to take in a bit of a Wolves game. It’s the absolute epitome of a classic Canadian junior hockey barn.

The shoot was for a program I produced and co-hosted called Sports Access, on AMI, or Accessible Media, a national TV and audio network in Canada that receives tax dollars to service the nation’s blind and visually impaired audience. Added dialogue, description, and natural sound are key when catering to this audience, who have to be able to “see” every episode simply by listening.

Sports Access also focused on sports for impaired and disabled athletes at a time when that movement was starting to boom. In 2015, we wrapped up its fourth and final season where I was once again coordinating producer and occasional co-host. Production quality was very basic, based on the network’s funding and infrastructure, but even with the limitations and an insanely tight schedule, we still managed to create AMI’s most popular original series to date.

Outweighing all of the production and travel opportunities for me at AMI were the sheer number of inspirational stories in the blind and disabled sporting communities. Some of these remarkable features included a brother and sister who are totally blind and toss horseshoes in their yard on a breathtaking cove on the coast of Newfoundland, a blind skateboarder in Winnipeg, amputee sailors in Nova Scotia, watching a deaf-blind woman play hockey, blind triathletes training with sighted guides, sledge hockey players, wheelchair basketball players, high-school wrestlers and swimmers who are totally blind, and a hockey writer who is visually impaired, the list goes on and on. There were even blind downhill skiers who follow sighted guides down courses at 100 kilometres an hour while wearing walkie-talkie headsets.

Let’s just say I was ready to run through a wall on countless occasions after watching someone do something completely ridiculous and inspiring, when you’d think they’d have no chance at all based on their physical limitation. Far more often, in fact, than the number of times I was inspired while covering the Maple Leafs those seasons, which I also did on a regular basis for the AMI audio channel.

Flight 1,300 was Chicago to Buffalo on Southwest in August 2014, flight 1,400 was Buffalo to Baltimore on Southwest in April 2015. Flight 1,500 was somewhat monumental. Air Canada took me from Montreal to Fredericton, New Brunswick, in March 2017, to provide live coverage of my first ever University Cup, the Canadian version of an NCAA Frozen Four. Working with the Montreal Canadiens’ excellent TV tandem of John Bartlett and Jason York, I was brought in to provide live insight and interviews from ice level.

Dropping in once or twice a season to handle a national television broadcast is a delight, but it’s also the ultimate challenge. I’m not seeing the same team forty times, or the opponent for the third or fourth time. All of the TSN and Sportsnet telecasts I’ve been a part of during the last five years have essentially been one-offs, featuring rosters the crew had never seen before nor would likely see again. It definitely keeps preparation at a premium. Thankfully, most of these gigs have been play-by-play, my optimum role, and all of the shows have come off without a hitch. Doesn’t hurt to be working with Cassie Campbell-Pascall, Louie DeBrusk, Craig Button, or Dave Reid.

Button and I did a Junior-A challenge championship game on TSN a few years back in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Surprisingly, the two Canadian teams both lost in the semis. The final was between Russia and the USA. Unexpectedly having to memorize an absurdly challenging Russian roster overnight was interesting to say the least. Often times I’ll just study a roster over and over and over and repeat the names and numbers. In this case I actually made flashcards of the two teams, flipping through them time and again until the individual players and jerseys matched up in my brain.

The fact that these two opponents were facing off in the final actually made Craig and me chuckle. Who the hell in Canada was gonna watch that championship game?

In January 2015, I did an Ontario Hockey League game in Ottawa while suffering with my first and (so far) only ever urinary tract infection. It kicked in during my flight to Ottawa. I had full-on nausea, cold sweats, and uncontrollable shivers the night before the game, slept little, and had a fever and dizziness during the telecast. I have no recollection whatsoever of the match, I just know I worked with Debrusk and Kyle Bukauskas and the first-time producer was happy with the show.

The University Cup semi-final and final in 2017 also featured a first-time producer. He did a great job. Me, I handled most everything pretty well for my first ice-level gig in three years, but I’ll never forgive myself for screwing up the open of the final. If you were to pick the one thing you least wanted to screw up, it would be the open to the championship telecast. For no particular reason whatsoever, for the first time in my career, I decided not to ad lib and instead read part of the open over the video clips. I lost my spot on my notepad and flip-flopped some players’ names. It drove me absolutely nuts.

My audio guy put it in perspective. “Hey, nobody died.” Thanks. The rest of the telecast had to be flawless. I still think about that mistake — more often than I should. You can only hope the bosses remember the good stuff.

Here’s to many more entertaining shows and to getting to 2,000 flights and beyond.

~

Fun landing at Kai Tak found on YouTube: Boeing 747 Hard Crosswind Landing Hong Kong