Dear United Staff, Spokane Base,
Last Friday, June 4, 2010, coming home to Spokane on UA 0583, I passed the one million milestone on United Airlines!
I’m sure you have a lot of customers who have flown much more than that on United, but for me this is a significant milestone because it represents God’s graciousness to me for an incredible number of hours in the air that have all happened safely and without a single significant mishap.
Actually, these one million miles on United are only a fraction of the total amount of flying I have been involved ever since 1977. When we moved to Spokane in 2003, I decided to start keeping track of and logging every single leg of a flight I have made here in the US and around the world. (Perhaps it’s part of a habit I developed years ago as a missionary bush pilot in Africa.) As of last Friday, I’ve flown 776,697 miles and spent 1,733 hours in the air on 614 individual flights just during these past seven years.
Because of my role in leading an international non-profit Christian mission organization, my role takes me to many unusual and remote places around the world. My guess is that for every mile on United, I spend another two miles on other airlines—particularly those in Third World countries. As a result, there are a lot of stories I could tell. And, although I am so thankful that I’ve never been on any flight that has had a major incident, there certainly have been plenty of “interesting” moments, such as:
• An Ethiopian Airlines 727 that ingested a large bird over the Nairobi, Kenya game park that totally demolished the center engine. The pilot had to dump fuel to make it back for a safe landing!
• An Air Mongolia landing at Beijing, that was so hot and fast the pilot had breaks screeching down the entire length of the runway and only got stopped at the VERY end!
• An Air France 747 with one of the very first auto-landing systems that made it on the ground at Charles DeGaul, Paris in zero-zero visibility only to have to shut down right in the middle of the runway and be guided by a “follow-me” truck because it was impossible to see even the edge of the taxiway.
• An Air Afrique Airbus out of Mauritania for Marseille with a furloughed Pan Am crew who finally invited me to sit up front with them so I could translate from French to English in order to understand what the cabin crew and the tower were trying to tell them!
• An Air Zaire 737 where the pilot also invited me up front only to discover he was using a portable GPS unit on the dashboard as his main navigation gear!
• A charter flight in Congo on a Shorts 360 with so many passengers, the pilot just decided to have me STAND right behind his seat for the entire flight!
• The coldest flight ever in a Tupolev 134 in Kazakhstan where I was literally scraping the ice off the INSIDE wall and window next to my seat.
As you can probably imagine, I could go on and on.
What I would like to say to all of you, however, is how much I have appreciated the service I have received over the years on United. I know that circumstances always arise to make air travel difficult, especially during the present time we live in. I’m sure you all deal with plenty of passenger complaints of one type or another. I’ve probably heard as many of them as you have. But, from my experience over all these years of flying commercial airlines is that United has provided me with a solid consistency that I have grown to appreciate.
So, although the food may be better on South African Airlines, the flight attendants younger and cuter on Air Asia and the entertainment system a lot more entertaining on Singapore Airlines, I, for one, am quite satisfied and grateful for the safe and dependable service I have received in traveling all of those one million miles on United Airlines!
Thanks for all you do in keeping up the “friendly skies!”
Jon Lewis
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