The Long Green Yonder

Most people think of the man with two jobs as a relatively underpaid worker who is forced to moonlight to pay the household bills. The cop and the fireman, who get as little as $2,400 annually, wash windows and work as handymen for a few extra dollars a week: the $3,000-a-year schoolteacher drives an ice-cream truck to send his son to college. But the biggest moonlighter of them all is the airline pilot, that rugged capitalist of the sky, who makes as much as $30,000 a year (as a jet captain) and spends his off-duty hours piling up even more of the long green.

The pilots get their golden opportunities from federal regulations, which limit their flight time to 85 hours each month. Even with flight planning, flight delays and layovers in faraway cities, some pilots spend about half of each month at home. The man who puts it to good use can make an income stretching in the heavy five figures or build an entirely new career. Says one who does: "Some pilots use their spare time to become expert fishermen. Some become low-handicap golfers. I devote my off-duty hours to making money, of which I happen to be very fond."

Among some of the leading dual careerists :

P:Delta Air Lines Captain Luther L. Caruthers raises orchids in his four College Park, Ga. greenhouses for sale to wholesale florists.

P:American Airlines Captain Walter Steiner bought Milwaukee-based Precision Gears, Inc. from his family in 1950, has built it into a $500,000-a-year company, which will soon move into a new factory.

P:American Airlines Captain Don Tillett bought the Sitton Septic Tank Co. of Chicago for $35,000 four years ago, increased the gross to almost $130,000 last year.

P:Braniff Airways Captain George R. Teskey is one of three stockholders in a Dallas wholesale brick-and-tile distributing company, House of Bricks and Tile, Inc., which grosses about $250,000 a year.

P:Trans World Airlines Captain E. G. Gorman, an ordained Methodist minister, taught philosophy at San Jose State College during leaves of absence, preaches Sundays at San Francisco Protestant churches of nearly all denominations.

P:Pan American World Airways Captain Robert Fordyce, a New York-based executive recruiter, takes 20% of the first year's salary of each of the $20,000 executives he places in industry each year.

The most outstanding pilot enterprise is Flight Safety, Inc., owned (89% of the stock) and operated by Albert L. Ueltschi, 41, Pan Am captain, and, since 1944, pilot of the company's executive plane. In eight years Ueltschi has parlayed the money he raised by mortgaging his house into a million-dollar-a-year business employing 46 fulltime employees in New York, Chicago and Houston. Flight Safety provides instruction on new procedures and new aircraft to more than 800 professional pilots who fly the executive airplanes for some 200 major corporations, including Gulf Oil Corp., United States Steel Corp., American Can Co., International Harvester Co.

Each company pays Flight Safety $750 per pilot for the first year's instruction, $600 for each additional year's refresher course. Ueltschi estimates that Flight Safety's charges are one-tenth of what it would cost a company to maintain sufficient instructors, equipment and flight procedures. In addition, the pilots put in time (cost to the companies: $50 an hour) in a twin-engine translator and a just purchased Convair 340-440 simulator that can simulate every possible flight condition from ice to fire to mechanical malfunction. "There is not a pilot anywhere we could not drive to the breaking point," says Ueltschi. "We hold funeral services every afternoon."

Since the moonlighting pilots are careful not to let their off-hour jobs interfere with their flying, airlines executives find no reason to complain. In fact, they tend to sympathize with the worry of many of the pilots--that some physical defect might be uncovered at one of their periodic examinations, bar them from flying. But if and when that happens, some of them will have some moonlight to brighten the way.

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