Worst job: I'd say working for a certain husband-and-wife team, with their headquarters New Jersey, and a satellite operation in southeast Florida. The pair split their year, half up north, half down south. We preferred it when they were on the opposite end of the coast as us!
We were expected at the airport six days a week from 9-6, despite our flight schedule, even if we had flights scheduled well before or after those hours. Our one day off a week had to be different from any other instructor's, which was a pain because my roommate worked there, and we liked to go out and have some fun once in a while. Unacceptable at this outfit.
It gets better... On our "down time" inbetween flights, we were expected to wash and change the oil in the rental airplanes. For free. Yeah, I'll get right on that, making your puke-green '79 chickenhawk look "pretty." Uck.
I found out during my tenure there that the husband was an Eastern scab, and talked about the original pilots "whining because they can't pay for all three houses." That explains a lot about his management, or lack thereof.
When he moved into this airport, there were four small offices (all adjacent) left for rent. He only needed two, but rented all four (at $800 a month apiece, I believe, and each about half the size of a convenience store) specifically to keep out the competition. Shortly after he signed the lease, someone else moved out and the competition moved in anyway, leaving him paying twice as much for rent as he needed.
He turned one of the offices into "his" office. He promptly bought a little video camera system so he could watch (and listen to) us from his office. I'm not exactly sure what he was doing in his office while he was watching us...
uke:
Maintenance and inspections were all outsourced to a shop 100 miles away that would do an "annual" on anything we brought them for $300. Riiiiiiiiight. He threatened to fire me one afternoon when I refused to use one of his 152s with rust caked up on the rudder cable nuts. He didn't want me using the other one I had picked, which was a leaseback. "If you want to have local maintenace look at it, then I'll take it over." Of course, he wouldn't do that.
I think I've ranted about this aspect on this board before -- his lack of preventative maintenance ended up costing him $65,000 in repair work on his charter Navajo, when four of the six cylinders on each engine was blowing less than 20/80. Ah, sweet karma.
The charter pilot said that when they took off and
slowly started climbing on its previous flight, the Bahamian controller said, "Daaaaaammm, mon, how many people you got in dat ting?" :laugh: The pilot refused to fly it to the "maintenace" base until somebody local checked it, and that's when the compression problem was found. He didn't like using the place on the field for inspections because, in his words, "they're just looking for trouble."
And don't get me started on his wife. She was a private pilot, single-engine, and couldn't navigate between two airports without a LORAN. They were 30 miles apart,
on the coast! She also liked to tell me how to do my job as an instructor, telling me I shouldn't use the 172's for primary training, because they're "too much airplane" for a student. Nevermind the guy who wanted to use it was 6'5", about 275 pounds, and was happy to pay the extra money! "Too much airplane," she says. "125 pounds overweight, no way," I say. Yeah, I'm sure a well-kept 152 would handle it fine, but given the above maintenance program, I wasn't going to find out.
And Dave, if you're reading this and still wondering why the sound stopped working on your little spy cam, it's because we broke a pencil lead off into the little microphone hole about two days after you installed it right over my desk.
imp:
