Shell Card

Military charters—troop movements either to or from the United States—don’t work the way scheduled service trips do. They don’t even work the way a normal civilian charter does. Which makes them hard to describe or explain without getting awfully confusing. It’s a little like trying to explain baseball to a foreigner: a very simple game, really, hit a ball that’s been thrown to you somewhere where the other guys can’t catch it. You get three tries, and if the pitcher throws you pitches that aren’t any good, you get to go to first base for free after four of them. Except for foul balls, which count as strikes. Unless you already have two strikes, and then they don’t. And so on. Baseball starts simple and gets complicated fast. Likewise with military charters, but let me try to explain, because unless you understand something about how a military charter works, a good part of this story won’t make any sense, and the not making any sense part will probably then become the focus, which would be too bad because this is really a Christmas story.

A military charter typically starts or ends at an Army air field, an Air Force air base, or a Naval or Marine air station. (We’ll assume here the trip is one “going over”—leaving the US for some hot spot overseas, but the same process happens bringing troops back.) The airplane for that trip has to be flown into the air base from somewhere else—“ferried in”—by one crew, and will be picked up to start the trip by another crew that has commercialed in separately. This allows the working crew—the crew who will begin the actual troop movement—to be fresh and maximizes their duty day, which maximizes the length of the first leg. Because these troop movements typically cover such long distances—Hickam Air Base in Hawaii to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is not unusual, for instance—that first crew almost never takes the troops the whole way. So another crew is prepositioned further down the road—Bangor, Maine, Shannon, Ireland, Frankfurt, Germany, are typical crew change points—and that crew picks up the flight and takes it from there. Typically that crew cannot go all the way either, but hands it off to yet another crew who often complete the final leg to the destination, and do a “turn”—turn the aircraft around and fly it back empty to the crew who brought them the aircraft. That crew has had 18 hours of so of crew rest and they take the airplane back to the first crew, who have had two days or so of crew rest, and that crew brings it back to the States somewhere, wherever it is needed for its next trip.

When everybody gets to where he or she is supposed to be—everyone is in place—and the airplane isn’t delayed anywhere, it all works fine, but even at its best it is a complicated operation. The troops don’t get any stops for rest—they are on the aircraft the entire time from departure in the States to arrival at the final destination. You never hear any complaints, though, mostly because they’re military and it’s just part of the job, but also because they know they are on a civilian airliner with hot meals and pretty girls, and they know that the alternative would be a sling seat on a C5 with MRI’s, and that the closest thing to a flight attendant would be a loadmaster.

ATA, then known as American Trans Air, flew many missions into Mogadishu, Somalia, beginning in December of 1992. The crew changeover points for these missions were typically Shannon, Ireland and Cairo, Egypt. I did several of these missions as an L-1011 First Officer between Cairo and Mogadishu, which meant I had to first “position”—get myself from the US to Cairo using the regular commercial airlines—well enough ahead of the arrival of the actual aircraft to have my legally required crew rest and be ready for my leg. One trip in particular stands out because I was commercialling over on TWA out of JFK to Cairo, and as it happened a very senior TWA crew, consisting mostly of management pilots and check airmen, was also on the aircraft positioning over to do a Mogadishu “turn” out of Cairo as well, just a few hours before our scheduled mission. We exchanged pleasantries, and they said it would be their first mission to Mogadishu, and expressed some apprehension about the whole affair. (I think TWA had contractual limitations on using line pilots for these kinds of trips, which meant management pilots had to do them—I don’t think they were exactly willing volunteers.) Anyway, I said I had been there before, that it wasn’t any real big deal except for the odd chance of getting shot at (nervous laughs all around), but that there were a few things to watch out for which I would be glad to go over if they were interested.

And they certainly were interested. I told them that the airport was basic and limited: one runway, no taxi way, and a small ramp, “small” meaning room for only one civilian wide body at a time (they were going to take in a 747). That meant you had to be right on schedule, and it meant taking a lot of extra fuel in case things didn’t work out and you had to hold waiting for room on the ramp.

“No taxi way” meant you had to turn around at the end of the runway, on the runway itself, and then taxi back to the ramp. The tricky part here is that the runway was only 150 feet wide and wide bodies like the 747 and the 1011 need a minimum of 142 feet to turn around—a very small margin of error on either side—and if you blew it you would bury a "truck"--a whole set of main landing gear--in the sand on the side of the runway, grounding you for days and shutting down the airport. No one wanted to be on the airplane that did that. But, I said, there is good news: it isn’t shown on the airport diagram, but there are extra little half moon shaped turn around points at both ends of the runway, which give you quite a bit more room to turn and really take most of the sweat out of it. They were relived: turning a wide body on a 150 foot wide runway is something most pilots spend their entire careers trying to avoid.

Finally, I said there is no fuel available in Mogadishu, which means you have to tanker fuel—carry extra fuel with you—so that you can go on to Djibouti, the nearest facility that did have fuel. (Djibouti is both a city and a country, like “New York, New York.” It is on the horn of Africa, and is an ally, of sorts, of the United States. Mostly I think they like our aid and our business, but that’s another story.) I told them that Djibouti won’t take credit cards for the fuel, not even American Express, only cash or Captains’ checks (checks the company provides that the captain can use to make cash purchases. Surprisingly, they are accepted nearly everywhere.) One of them said, “Oh that’s no problem, we have a Shell card, it won't be a problem.” That was news to me, but I didn’t say anything. Maybe they knew something we didn’t—they were TWA after all, everyone had heard of TWA, but American Trans Air? (The usual response to "American Trans Air" was, “Is that part of American?”) I said to my captain, “How come we don’t have Shell cards?” He shrugged and said, “Who knows.”

So that was that. We landed in Cairo and went to our separate hotels. The next day we left for Mogadishu and on our arrival overhead the airport we saw their 747 below us, taxiing back into position for takeoff, presumably headed to Djibouti, so we assumed everything had gone alright for them at that point.

This was in December of 1992, months before the infamous "Blackhawk Down" catastrophe, but Mogadishu, in fact, all of Somalia, was already a very dangerous place. Rebels were assumed to have air-to-air missiles, so we took different, random routes over Somalia into Mogadishu each time. (The route from Cairo took us down the length of Egypt, over Sudan, over Ethiopia, and then across Somalia. I never heard of any missiles being launched, but you never knew.) Once on the ground at Mogadishu, the airport itself was squeezed between the ocean and a bluff probably 100 feet high that ran the length of it. Looking up at that bluff from the ramp you could see militia types walking around with rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers. A lot of troops were actually camped on the airport grounds, and the bad guys would occasionally lob a mortar onto the field just to keep everyone from sleeping too well. Again, not while I was there, but it kept you on your toes. No one needed to tell us that we needed to make a quick turn. Nonetheless, it still probably took two hours or so to off load the troops, get all their gear unloaded and get cranked up and turned around and on our way.

The hop to Djibouti for fuel was a short one, less than an hour, so by the time we got there it had probably been three hours or so since the TWA 747 had left Mogadishu, plenty of time to get to Djibouti and refuel and go on its way. So we were surprised to see it still on the ramp when we taxied in. The captain, the flight engineer, and I all headed into what passed for a terminal, really just a two story building with various government offices, to start the fussy process of paying landing fees, filing ICAO flight plans, and paying for handling, lav cleaning, air stairs, and water service, none of which we needed but were obliged to pay for anyway—your tax dollars at work around the world. We were even more surprised to see the entire TWA crew sitting in the terminal lobby, looking quite disheveled and unhappy—ties had long ago come off—and something much worse than the weariness of an already long day had set in.

“Hey, guys, how’s it going? What are you guys still doing here?” someone said.

After several moments of silence and irritated looks all around, one of them finally said, “They won’t take our Shell card.”

“Wow, bummer. What are you going to do?”

“We’re trying to get some cash wired in, but the company says it could take as long as 48 hours.”

“We tried to tell you” wasn’t what they wanted to hear. After a couple of awkward attempts at sympathy, our flight engineer—flight engineers are, if nothing else, experts in the practical world of thinking on their feet—perked up and said, “You know, $50 can go a long ways in this part of the world.”

“Really?” one said. “Do you think that’s all it would take?”

“I don’t know, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to try.”

So one of them, I think maybe their flight engineer, went upstairs to the fueling office, and came back down after less than five minutes with a big smile on his face. “You were right. They find they can accept our Shell card after all.” Smiles all around.

So we all refueled, got our lavs cleaned and water serviced, paid outrageous amounts of money for it all, and headed out again on our separate ways, which in our case meant back to Cairo where the crew who brought the airplane into Cairo was waiting to take it back to the States.

When we got to Cairo most of us on the crew elected to stay on the airplane and ride it back all or part of the way to the States, even though we had rooms reserved for us in Cairo and could have gotten off there and later made our way back home commercially. But with big first class seats to sleep in and racks of movies to watch, staying on the aircraft with another crew to do the work made getting home a lot easier and a lot quicker. The company didn’t care because we saved them from having to pay for hotel rooms in Cairo and plane fare out of there, so everyone was happy and we set off for the next refueling stop which was scheduled for Shannon, Ireland.

When we got to Shannon most of the crew elected to stay on, but the captain and I had had enough of airplanes for one day, and we were kind of looking forward to a night in Shannon, and we knew we would have an easy trip back to Boston where we both lived the next day. So we got off and were picked up by Conway transporters, our regular crew bus providers, so regular that we knew the drivers by name, and were taken to the Limerick Ryan, our favorite hotel in the Shannon-Limerick area, a place we had spent so much time in it was almost a home away from home. (It has since been converted into something like a retirement home, I think, to the dismay of all crew members from the many airlines that used it over the years.)

The core of the Limerick Ryan was an older Irish mansion, and added to that over the years were restaurants, bars, lounges, and a rather ugly, ‘60’s era tower that housed the actual rooms. (No one minded, you didn’t spend much time in your room.) By the time we got there the public bar was closed, but, one of the great traditions of both English and Irish hotels, the residents’ bar—a private bar for guests only—was still open. (Actually, the residents’ bar has no hours and will stay open as long as there are guests to serve, and after that there is always the Night Porter who will fetch a Guinness for you. You never have to think about a having a Guinness all the way to Ireland only to find out that the bar is closed when you get there; a way will be found to accommodate you.) The residents’ bar was more like a living room, and the staff had decorated it for Christmas, there was a fire in the fireplace and it was all very relaxing and quiet, the perfect end to a long day that had started in Cairo. And then it got even better: someone said, “Oh, Sean, give us a song, will you?”, and Sean said, "O'course I will," and someone else sat down at the piano and Sean sang Christmas carols for us for a half an hour or so, and I was reminded of James Joyce’s great short story The Dead, which also took place around Christmas time in a musical setting with snow falling over all of Ireland.

The next morning, standing outside waiting for Conway to take us back to the airport, there was no snow, but there was the smell in the air of coal being burned, a smell that I loved because it took me back to my childhood, to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where we had lived for three years when I was a boy. And amongst those memories, I tried to imagine how a place like Mogadishu, and a place like Shannon, could both exist at the same time, and how one could hardly be any worse off, and the other could hardly be any better.