Although I was offered the job, Singapore Air required a thirty-five thousand dollars cash deposit, as insurance against my leaving early on the five year contract. I didn’t have the money, and it never worked out at Singapore, however my luck soon changed at Continental.
Most airlines pay “wide-body” or differential pay, the larger the equipment, the greater the pay. Not so in those days at Continental. Nor did Continental pay extra for international flying as is common elsewhere. Therefore, there’s no incentive to move to Hawaii to fly large equipment.
When the new equipment bid came out I was thrilled and stunned to learn that I had been awarded a right-seat job on the 747. It had gone junior, since none of the senior guys in LAX, Houston, or Denver wanted to commute, or move to Honolulu without a pay increase.
Now I was faced with the challenge of getting through upgrade training on the largest airplane in the world, without having flown a lick in four years.
It wasn’t pretty. After three weeks of systems ground-school, and two weeks of simulator training, having worked my ass off, I came out the other end of the process as a marginally acceptable 747 pilot. I was now the most junior co-pilot in the Honolulu 747 base. I was on reserve, but I was in pig heaven. I was flying airplanes again, no longer a panel-nigger or switch-nigger, in the unfortunate vernacular.
Since neither my sim partner nor I had ever flown right seat in a large swept-winged jet for a “121” outfit before ( F.A.R. part 121 refers to the regs covering major airlines), Continental had to give the two of us a couple of hours of touch and goes in the actual airplane, and in the presence of an FAA examiner, before we could legally fly the line carrying passengers.
Amazingly, one night we took an empty 747, filled it with a few hundred thousand pounds of fuel, and took off from Houston to Reno. There, we spent a few hours taking turns doing touch and goes, that is taking off and landing, continuing the landing roll right into another take off, and so forth…what an eerie experience it was to look back into that cavernous shell and all those hundreds of empty seats.