Let's say you're the captain of a Boeing 747 freighter — a "whale" in cargo-pilot patois — out of Anchorage for Chicago. Except no self-respecting cargo pilot calls himself — or, rarely, herself — anything so leaden, so utterly earthbound. You are instead, proudly and defiantly, a "freight dog," a nom de guerre freighted, so to speak, with many connotations, not all of them positive.
As you pull onto Runway 6 Right at Anchorage and advance the four throttles to maximum power, air traffic control advises there's a welter of severe turbulence on your climbout. A passenger airliner might give it a wide berth, but you, with a load of time-sensitive cargo, barge right on through. Then the turbulence hits and all hell breaks loose. The whale is batted about the sky like a shuttlecock. "Shit, hang on guys," your flight engineer says. Then: "Whoa...We lost something." The radio crackles, "Ah, four-six-echo-heavy, Elmendorf tower said something large just fell off your airplane."
Something large? The National Transportation Safety Board later determines that your 747 experienced "an uncommanded left bank of approximately 50 degrees" along with amusement-park pitches, rolls, and yaws that ripped the Number 2 engine clean off the wing. While all of this is happening, perhaps you, the captain, flash to Ernest K. Gann's classic Fate Is the Hunter, beloved among freight dogs for its vainglorious pilot prose: "We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand."
In any event, you manage to keep the crippled whale flying long enough to dump fuel and return to Anchorage escorted by two F-15s for a harrowing landing. And as you taxi the jet with its mangled wing, missing engine, and smoking brakes — but the cargo still snuggled safely in the hold — your flight engineer declares: "Buddy, I don't care how many beers I owed you in the past. This one I'm going to pay off, O.K.?"
The above incident actually occurred several years ago. It was a 747-121 freighter, but the whole misbegotten adventure, from disintegrating airplane to coolly averted tragedy, would be recognized by freight dogs the world over. Freight dogs famously fly decrepit, "clapped-out," analog-only hand-me-downs from the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly embellished, make for great table rants over pitchers of Watney's at dog hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising. It's an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars' famed cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson's Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick's Café adjacent to Miami International Airport through which generations of pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school. "We tend to be the rogues of the airline world," Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. "The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We're not. It's a whole different culture."
