Christmas Approach to New York
“Welcome back home in New York, boys, and a merry Christmas.”
Shortly before Christmas I often flew to New York to meet the board – for meetings and the Christmas party. Most of the time I was sitting up front, right up front: in the cockpit. As a company representative you were not supposed to take a First Class seat away from a full-fare passenger. And if you are in the very front, you should be useful. So, with my navigator and radio licences, I was happy to take over radio communication and ease the workload in the cockpit.
Approaches into JFK in the early evening hours around Christmas meant, for the pilots, one thing: “Oh hell, stress ahead.” Weather, traffic, slots – and everyone wants to get home in time. New York in pure form.
At CAMRN, a virtual waypoint on the arrival route, you would be handed over to New York TRACON, the terminal radar approach control for all New York area airports. Pan Am, whenever possible, wanted to land on the “Pan Am Strip”: the legendary runway 31L. 14,500 feet long, 200 feet wide – and, in the winter evening dusk, a sea of lights almost as impressive as the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.
It was part of the controllers’ ritual to give us 31R first. 9,999 feet – perfectly flyable, but too short for Pan Am’s taste and less convenient for taxiing to the Worldport terminal. So radio communications often went something like this:
“New York Approach, Clipper Resolution Heavy requesting three-one left.”
After a short pause we would usually get the expected clearance for 31L, together with the instruction to fly the famous short “S” to fit into the sequence. And at the end of the vectoring came the transmission that has stayed with me to this day:
“Welcome back home in New York, boys, and a merry Christmas.”
Radio traffic from a time when not every single word was regulated – with the rough cordiality of the New York controllers. No grand pathos, no staged moment, just a short sentence that captured exactly what many on board were feeling: arriving, coming home, being through.
Outside, the last cloud layers went by; inside, the instruments were blinking. We worked through the remaining checklists, touched down and taxied to the Worldport. From a technical point of view, the flight was unspectacular. And yet this approach has stayed in my memory – not because something went wrong, but because, in a highly standardised environment, something very human came through for a brief moment.
That warm “Welcome home and merry Christmas” from the otherwise so direct, hectic New York TRACON controllers and the approach to the Pan Am Strip in the Christmas dusk are still among my fondest memories of a time that ended far too early in 1991. A part of my heart is still attached to New York – not only as a sticker on my old Halliburton flight case.
Perhaps this scene fits my work today because it captures a principle that always applies in Aviation, Crime & Crisis: in the background you have checklists, structures and procedures. In the foreground, it is about people – about getting them home, about safety and responsibility when something has gone wrong.
Today I no longer accompany Christmas approaches into JFK. But I still work where things have – in a figurative sense – “really blown up” and yet a calm landing is needed: in crises, when suspicions arise and in sensitive constellations involving law-enforcement authorities, regulators, embassies and other state bodies. That attitude – bringing people safely “home” through difficult situations when others have already stepped out – also shapes my work as an attorney in Aviation Crime & Crisis and in Internal Investigations.