An old friend of mine has been a Southwest Airlines pilot for years. We came up together in the same Air Force fighter squadron and served two combat deployments together. An eminently pragmatic and decent dude. So I reached out for his thoughts on recent events…
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2/ To make things easy and protect his anonymity (so I don’t have to keep calling him “dude”), I’m going to give him a call sign for this thread that was not his real call sign in our squadron. His call sign for this thread: “Doom”
3/ First, I’ve never met anyone who loves flying like Doom. I loved tactical flying but was never a “must fly” kind of guy (hence, lawyer). He’s different. Doom’s the kind of guy who can tell you the sub-model and equipment on any black dot from 20K feet away.
4/ You could have knocked us over with a feather when we found out Doom was leaving the Air Force. Every one of us thought he’d do 20+ for sure. Academy guy who breathed flying. But family was more important, and he’d still be able to fly (just not the F-15E anymore).
5/ Doom clearly does not approve of a vaccine mandate. He’s quite up to date on the efficacy data, including the disparity over time for infection/transmission and for symptomatic and serious outcomes. Doom simply thinks we’re far too early to be mandating this.
6/ Doom is especially concerned about having to take a vaccine with time-limited data (even if robust) on side effects. He’s especially worried about blood clots. He concedes they’re extremely rare but worries about pilots, who are already at increased risk based on their job.
7/ He’s also had documented Covid. The risk-reward for him, and the potential of him being grounded (potentially permanently) from a rare side effect is frightening. He weighs that more heavily than potential re-infection for a prior-infected, young, otherwise healthy guy.
8/ Doom fully acknowledges the vaccine’s effect on outcome severity but claims that shouldn’t be used as a justification for a mandate. As far as protecting the public, he believes that the efficacy on infection/transmission, especially as time goes on, doesn’t justify a mandate.
9/ Doom says that the political pressure is palpable, and it’s creating an undercurrent of distrust by acting like those who choose not to be vaccinated (right now)—especially those previously infected—are treated as a homogenous group of malcontent crazies. That’s not it.
10/ Doom knows that if you make the stick big enough and hit hard enough, you can probably get better “results” than with a carrot—but only short-term. It’s not a one-shot world (pardon the pun), and he thinks the institutional credibility loss will permeate for years to come.
11/ He wonders whether a 64-year-old passenger (or pilot) vaccinated 9 months ago is less apt to transmit Covid than a young pilot with a confirmed prior infection. He thinks the latter is a safer bet but notes it’s still (as of now) “get vaxxed or lose your livelihood.”
12/ As far as Southwest’s operational issues, Doom says that SW’s pilot crunch has been an issue for a while now. They’re running so lean that it doesn’t take much to have a downstream effect of cancellations and delays if a few people don’t show for whatever reason.
13/ Even today, he’s working a flight on which he was supposed to deadhead because there was no crew for it. Another was cancelled. Doom doesn’t have secret data of a mass sickout or walkout or formal vaccine protest. But he says the distrust is there for many, and it’s growing.
14/ That’s pretty much all Doom had to say (I think he’s doing preflight checks right now). He hopes there is no mandate and that he and others are not forced to choose between the vaccine and their job. Whether you agree with him or not, I wanted to give you my friend's take.
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