The best thing that happened in my long aviation career was being hired by United Parcel Service [UPS] in January 1988. Even more remarkable was my inclusion in the very first pilot class at the newly formed UPS Airline ... initially as a B-727 First Officer. Within three years I'd risen to the lofty position of a B-747 Captain, remaining as such until my retirement in 1999 at age 60. Being hired in the first pilot class as the "token New Zealander" seemed too good to be true ... and for the first two years of the Airline, we did suffer from the growing pains of pilots working for truckers.

As a former employee of Orion Air, I had no illusions that the marriage of a highly specialized group of aviation personnel, to the conservative and egalitarian UPS would be easy. Both parties would be in conflict for some time until an acceptable middle ground could be determined.  Unfortunately, UPS aggravated the situation by hiring airline management personnel, who had neither the experience nor expertise to direct and lead the air operation into the brilliant future that was clearly attainable.  

From the earliest days of the operation in 1988, this management group displayed an almost total lack of respect or concern for the line pilots being hired into UPS. Was this attitude by deliberate directive from Head Office, or did it simply develop unchecked in Louisville? Whatever the reason, the result was the same ... a complete  loss of credibility of the Airline management by the pilots, and a resort to grievance  procedure in an attempt to have even the most basic terms of our initial Contract followed.

Among those crew-members hired in 1988, there existed the collective wisdom of years of airline management, operations and scheduling for the very same airplanes that UPS now controlled in a less efficient manner than before. Also, under the management structure peculiar to UPS, these experienced crew-members could only be considered  "hourly wage workers" and their opinion and knowledge was therefore inadmissible. However, on the credit side, the isolation created by this archaic philosophy and hostile management environment forged the 1000 plus members into one of the strongest airline pilot unions in the USA ... the Independent Pilots Association [IPA]. With the IPA, we had quality leadership, credibility, mutual trust and the ability to really make the operation work. The rest is history.

By the time our employment with UPS had settled down into a normal airline routine, I was flying the B-747 ... happy as a pig in the proverbial. It was the ultimate attainment of my pilot career ... upgrading from that piece of British junk, the Bristol Freighter, to the C-130, to corporate jets, to the B-727 and finally to the Queen of the Skies.

Our early B747's where -100's and -200's, the so called "Classics" that had come from PANAM and TWA, converted from passenger to cargo configuration. A wise old airline pilot told me that the hardest thing about flying the 747, was getting the job in the first place. He was right ... the 747 was a dream to fly: very easy to handle, fast at Mach .84 to .86 in cruise, superb redundancy with its 4 engines and multiple backup systems. The 747-400 [with winglets, quieter engines and a glass cockpit], came to UPS a few years after I'd retired.

I don't feel that I missed out on the -400. My belief is that any version of the 747, is still a 747 ... and I flew them with great pleasure!

Copyright©2015 Peter Tremayne, Reno NV