It’s good to be the Captain!
We met Jack Greiner three years ago, when he introduced us to his newly completed Rose Parakeet. Since then he has built a Pietenpol that he flew from Longmont, Colorado, to the 2011 Antique Airplane Association in Blakesburg, Iowa, and back, and started building a Hatz after his return. At 91, this shows a great faith in the future, as it should take Jack three or four years to complete.
During our original interview, he told us the story of his December 8,1942, hiring with American Airlines, and we made an agreement to sit down with him for more 1940's-50's airliners stories. Finally, during the last AAA Fly-In, our respective schedule allowed us to sit down together, and listen to a few of his fascinating stories.
However, the transcription of this conversation comes with a disclaimer. Those tales have to be understood in their post-WWII context, a very different period from the one we are living in. They might make a few cringe, but will most certainly put a smile on the face of a majority of the boys.
And so was speaking Jack:
“In 1947, I was a brand new DC-3 Captain for American Airlines. During an eastbound flight from Chicago, the stewardess came to me saying: “Jack, you have to come back in the cabin and look at this.” A girl was sitting halfway in the cabin, on a single seat to the right and was asleep. It turned out that she had a brand new inflatable bra. As we had climbed out, the cabin pressure lowered, while the pressure differential between the cabin pressure and the air pressure inside the bra increased.
This in turn increased the apparent size of her bust, to the point that it seemed to be ready to blow up with some potential for bodily harm to the passenger.
I told the stewardess that I had no clue about how to handle the situation and told her to wake the passenger up, locate the valve for that thing and help her release the excess pressure.
That was the end of that incident.
One stewardess one day had a “mechanical” problem with her garter belt, if you know what that is. Every time she had to lean over a passenger to pass a cup of coffee, one of the hooks would unfasten, shoot straight up and lift her skirt. She would then have go to the back of the airplane to fix herself up in order to continue her service.
After too many back and forth trips, she finally came to me to fix it for good. There was a pair of pliers in the airplane toolbox, and, so I told her to lean over and turn around. I used the pliers to squeeze back to shape the offending piece of metal, and, back in business she was.
I had a passenger die on me on a DC-6 flight, and yet, he walked off the airplane when we arrived in New York.
He had a heart attack and when I went back in the cabin to check on him, he had no pulse. We respectfully laid him down in the aisle away from the other passengers, and, by I do not know what kind of miracle, he came back to life on his own.
On a hop from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, continuing on to Chicago, I had the wife of the consul of Mexico in Canada as a passenger. She must have been about 9 3/4 months pregnant when she boarded.
She stumbled badly getting into the airplane in Windsor, and went in labor shortly after take-off from Detroit. It was a typical Detroit summer weather day, hot and sticky with unstable air. At 2500 ft, turbulence was really severe.
I started climbing out to get some still air. Reaching 9000 ft, it smoothed out, Charlie Zangger, my co-pilot told me “I hope you know what you are doing, because, as every farmer is aware, when going from high to low pressure, every cow drop their calves.”
It dawned on me he was right. I gave him the airplane and started sharpening my trusty old pocketknife before finally disinfecting the blade with alcohol.
I was ready for the worse, but she luckily waited until we made it in Chicago, and was loaded into an ambulance”
Pilots like tall tales, and as the saying goes, every pilot story is 99 % fiction. The fun part is to figure out where the little kernel of truth is hiding.
This, none-the-less, shows that being an airline captain during the post-war era meant being second only to God.
As Mel Brooks could have said if he had any interest in airliners: “It’s good to be the Captain!”
By Gilles Auliard