Fifty-Eight years ago this morning a group of young men reported to 1307 Baltimore in Kansas City, Missouri.   I was among them.  On the outside of that building was a backlit logo.  It showed a stylized depiction of linked halves of a world globe.  On top of that TWA was displayed in large red letters.  As we passed through the doors, we were entering the Jack Frye Training Center where all TWA pilots, Flight Engineers and Hostesses were trained.  It changed our lives forever.

We came from many backgrounds, military and civilian, but we all had one goal, to become airline pilots, a small but growing fraternity of what was considered by many to be the elite of the flying profession.  To be hired by TWA, the abbreviation for Trans World Airlines, was an additional honor, as it was one of only three American Flag Carriers at the time to have both domestic and international routes, the others being Northwest Orient and Braniff.

Our “New-Hire” class was designated as “”64-07” and there were twenty pilots assigned to it.  Nineteen showed up that morning, the twentieth several days later.  His car had broken down driving through the mountains of Colorado, and he had to wait for it to be repaired.  Shortly after we were all seated in our classroom, Russ Hazelton, a newly upgraded TWA Captain who was assigned as our class advisor, stood before us.  He informed us that we were not to be initially trained as pilots, but rather as Flight Engineers on the Lockheed Constellation.  That came as quite a shock.

We were PILOTS after all, not mechanics, the profession where the Flight Engineer pool had formerly been drawn from.  Hazelton informed us that we would be issued two “seniority numbers” one for the pilot list and a second for the flight engineer position.  We were to be designated Pilot-Flight Engineers, or P/FEs, and would eventually transition into the pilot position.  What he didn’t tell us was that wasn’t guaranteed.   Due to a current labor dispute on the airline between the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and the Flight Engineers International Association (FEIA) over who would occupy the third seat on all future airliners, we might indeed be trapped there forever, unable to upgrade to First Officer and eventually Captain, which was the top of the pyramid for the airline pilot profession. Continue reading 58 Years Ago Today. →