Two simple gestures

Sometimes, that's all it takes.

Melbourne, Florida is one of the least favorite cities I fly to. There, I said it.

It’s billed as an Orlando-adjacent airport, a gateway to the Magic Kingdom without big-airport hassles. Locals like the short walk to its gates, and TUI even offers flights to Europe.

While the place is incredibly convenient for customers, it brings its own special challenges for airline pilots. Florida Institute of Technology’s flight school is there. It is a massive operation, but they’re not alone. At MLB you’ll also find Eastern Florida State College’s aviation center, Melbourne Flight Training, and Northstar Aviation with helicopter flight training. With nice weather year-round, it’s understandable that flight schools love the area, but student pilots sharing the airspace with passenger jets makes for a challenging mix. The layover itself is nothing special, either - we’re nowhere near the water. There’s a grocery store within walking distance of the hotel, and that’s about all there is to say about that.

Over the course of a five-day trip, we had two passes thorugh Melbourne scheduled, as well as a Daytona Beach round trip (similar challenges, what with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University [Harvard of the Sky, just ask any alum] on the field). The threat of traffic conflicts with training aircraft was a constant presence over the course of the trip.

On our first pass through Melbourne this trip, the controller had four planes in the pattern, a business jet trying to make a controlled departure time, and us, waiting on a gap in radio traffic to pick up our clearance. Oh, did I mention in all this chaos that it’s often only one controller handling three stations at once? Yep. Same guy or gal, dealing with airborne traffic on the tower frequency while juggling ground control and clearance delivery duties as well. I’ve heard controllers patiently explain to students, on frequency, how IFR flight plans work, reminders of what the traffic pattern altitude is, and how to tell whether they are north or south of the field when reporting their position.

The local flight schools really should have these controllers on their payroll as flight instructors for all the services they render.

Suffice to say that Saturday night, we were on our toes as we descended for a landing at Melbourne. Back at the gate in Atlanta, a passenger had leaned forward to say hi. He was a former Boeing engineer, and his son was crazy about airplanes. They tracked the planes they’d flown on. “We’re pretty sure we’ve flown on more than half of your 717 fleet at this point,” he said. The son stood behind him, his hand on dad’s shoulder for guidance, his other hand held a folded-up white cane. “Hey thanks for flying with us. It’s always nice to talk to the folks who treat a flight as more than getting from one point to another,” I told them.

Melbourne was trying hard to sell us on a visual approach that night as we descended, but a few clouds stood between us and the field. I could almost hear the sigh as the approach controller cleared us for the RNAV approach to 27L, and handed us off to the tower. Not only would we create spacing issues by insisting on an instrument approach when they were running visuals down there, we’d have to hang a 180-degree turn on the runway and back-taxi thanks to a taxiway closure that eliminated our normal path to the gate.

But the Melbourne controller handled it like the pro he is. Minutes later our passengers were spilling into the jet bridge, eager to be off the plane and on their way to whatever was next. I was tired and a little cranky—I wanted to be off the plane even more than the customers. It had been a day.

The Boeing engineer and his son were last off the plane. As his son stepped off the plane and onto the jet bridge, he stopped and turned back toward the doorframe. His hand caressed the fuselage, picking up on an irregularity in the row of rivets that even I would have hardly noticed. He signed a question to his dad, signaling something I hadn’t picked up on at our first interaction back in Atlanta. The gate agent back at departure had run down our list of “specials,” but it had failed to register that the special assist customer with hearing impairment and the one with a visual impairment were one and the same. Now I found myself in a short conversation with him, via his father, as we explained the thing that felt out of place along the doorjamb.

“He loves this stuff,” his dad told me, as the son turned back to the plane and made a few signs toward the airplane, one of the few American Sign Language gestures that I recognize: I love you. Then he turned toward us to begin his walk up the jetway, and with misty eyes, I offered the only other ASL gesture I know:

Thank you.