a video that nobody's ever asked for is an animated cockpit confessionals starring me
and some poor person stuck flying with me but here it is animated cockpit confessionals coming up
hey 74 crew welcome back if you don't know me my name is Kelsey i'm a 747 pilot my channel 74 gear
is all about aviation cockpit confessionals is my only non-family-friendly series on the channel
and a few weeks ago i recorded this confessional that you're about to see
and then i decided you know what i'm gonna pull that out of the normal series i'm gonna have it
animated so even though i tell these stories in first person i always have to say this i'm not
involved with these stories in any way i tell them in first person just to make them easier to tell
a lot of these stories have been sent to me from different crew members around the world
usually through instagram so now that we've cleared that up let's get into it
if you don't live in your airline's base and you're jump seating meaning flying for free from
another city to get to your base where you need to be for work in the airlines you're known as
a commuter the thing is is that for example if you have a 6 a.m flight that you have to start working
on as a crew member if you have a 6 a.m flight there's not usually going to be a flight that's
going to get you in at 3 or 4 in the morning which means you have to come in the night before so if
you come in the night before and get it 8 pm and you don't have to show up for work until 4 or 5 in
the morning there's a long stretch of time that you have nowhere to sleep you have a couple of
options one your very very cheapest option which you're not supposed to do at any airline is sleep
in your crew room at every airline base there is a crew room and in that crew room you'll have
maybe a microwave some tv some couches the crew will hang out there and sit there and relax maybe
if they have like a three hour sit at an airport they'll all go down there and hang out it's just a
quiet place that we can get away from the terminal and get away from the plane have a snack they have
a refrigerator in there they have some snacks and you can just kind of hang out and just kind
of get away from everything that's your crew you can sleep there you're not supposed to sleep there
does it happen sure it happens that's your first option your second option is to go to stay at a
cheap motel i've stayed at cheap motels in my life cheap motels can be gross you can have bed bugs
you can have all kinds of stuff it's not great but it's better than paying a 130 or 140 bucks
a night which is usually the cost of staying at the hotel so you normally stayed as a crew member
so what happened was back several years ago the airline started coming up with an idea of how to
attract flight attendants and pilots to come work at their airline and that was to give something
called commuter hotels so crew members that didn't live in their base the airline would give them
four hotels that they would pay for for them to sleep in so if you came in in that scenario at 8
pm at night and you weren't flying until 7am the next day you'd call up and say i need a commuter
hotel and they'd set you up with the hotel that you would normally stay at in that city you would
have a place to sleep you would be free it'd be great you'd be well rested you'd be able to go
to work so these commuter hotels started off as a great idea the thing is is you'd only get four and
at the regionals you would usually do four trips which means that it'd be easy that you may use a
commuter hotel at the beginning of all those trips and at the end if you didn't get a hotel where you
needed it to go home you would now have that same option of sleeping in the crew sleeping
in a crappy motel or paying 140 or 150 bucks a night and at the regionals when you're a new
pilot you just don't have a lot of money so this story takes place when i was at the regionals and
and we're flying and we're on the last day of a three-day trip now i'm flying with a pilot named
enrique good friend of mine we're still friends of this day so me and enrique are talking and he
said hey what time's your flight home and i said oh i'm not going to make the flight home tonight
we're getting in too late he goes oh really that sucks i still have three more options to make a
flight home tonight i was like good for you he says man i never use my commuter hotels do you
want one of my hotels i was like yeah i really do because i only got four and i was out in like
number three and i was already in the middle of the month so i knew at some point i was gonna be
in trouble i was gonna run out and i was gonna have to either sleep in the room or pay for my
own hotel which i didn't really want to do so he's like bro i'll hook you up i'll get you one
of the hotels no big deal so when we land we have one more leg to go before we're done for the day
we land he calls up the schedulers and says hey i need a commuter hotel so they get it all arranged
and a couple minutes later they call them back and say all right great you're booked at the
airport hilton and it's this is your reservation number okay great so he hangs up the phone looks
at me and says now the only thing you need to do is convince the people the front desk that you're
enrique hernandez something you may not know is that in your pilot uniform if you confidently say
just about anything people will believe you i mean people don't believe that i'm an airline pilot but
people will believe most of the stuff that you say if you confidently say it and you're in your
pilot uniform it's kind of like my superpower and that's where i wear it for my videos
so we ended up landing and we're back at our base i'm like enrique thanks so much for the hotel man
i really appreciate he's like yeah no problem i wait for the hotel van to show up jump in the van
head over to the hotel jump out confidently walk up to the person at the front desk and i say
hey i'm here to check in for my hotel name's under enrique he looks at me a little bit strange starts
typing in his computer then he says to me uh can i see your badge and i say actually that's
kind of the problem i was sitting in the terminal there waiting for my flight i'd set my badge and
my wallet on the counter while i was sitting over there i ran over to grab some food and
somebody stole it so without my badge and my id i can't fly that's why they put me up at the hotel
said you don't have a badge or any identification at all i said no that's kind of the problem
i'm going to get a badge but not till tomorrow so he says okay what's your last name and without a
beat i looked him dead in the eye and i said hernandez as he's frantically typing away on
his computer there all i can envision is i'm gonna end up getting rejected here probably in trouble
with my airline and then i'm gonna end up having to sleep in the crew room because i don't have any
extra money and i was thinking this is going to be terrible now the crew is an awesome place and i
used to love to hang out there it was a big social spot everybody to hang out there everybody would
hang out and talk and you'd see old friends and it was awesome but it wasn't a great place to sleep
imagine like a 19 year old drunk frat guy designed it that's kind of what it looks like like three
large black leather couches a table from the 70s a tv that was on the wall that no one could ever
seem to get to work it never had any signal didn't have a hookup for movies but it was there it was
big and that's kind of what our crew room looked like it was kind of hood but it was an awesome
place to hang out the only problem with the croom was ricky you see the thing is is because
the crews would come in there and hang out all the time and we'd eat microwave food and be in a
hurry we would drop a lot of crumbs ricky was our mouse he wasn't invited but we couldn't kill him
we couldn't ever find him they tried to kill him they put traps all over the place
but he would dart from one couch to the next day or night shooting around picking up little pieces
of food that people had left well i don't know how he got the name ricky but that was ricky and
i wasn't about to be sleeping because ricky the only place he could hide is underneath the couches
i wasn't about to pick a couch and then wake up with like a mouse in my shirt or something gross
like that so i was sitting there envisioning that happening and then he looked up to me and he says
just to confirm your name is enrique hernandez looked at him dead in the eye yes sir absolutely
hands me the card to the room he says all right mr hernandez enjoy your stay took the
card walked off and luckily i ended up moving from that base i never saw that guy again i'm
sure for a fact he was just waiting for me to come in because we would come in as a crew
and we all had our badges and that was the only way you were ever going to get checked in for a
fact i know that guy was going to be waiting to see me the next time i saw him but i transferred
bases and then a couple months later i ended up leaving that airline i never saw him again but
well man obviously you know my name's not enrique hernandez if you want to see more animation and me
in the same video check out this video here and if you want to see more cockpit confessionals
check out this video up here i look forward to hearing from you until then keep the blue side up