Shaun Newman Podcast - #281 - Greg Hill & Matt Sattler

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Both are pilots and together they co-founded Free to Fly. We discuss the travel mandates being suspended and what they are seeing in the aviation world.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast⁠

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Hancock Petroleum.com. They are two pilots who are part of a major Canadian airline, who co-founded Free to Fly, a group of aviation professionals and passengers who believe in their right to travel freely and are ardent defenders of people's rights to explore the world. I'm talking about Greg Hill and Matt Sattler. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the

Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Greg Hill and Matt Sattler. So first off, fellas, thanks for hopping back on. It was December 1st, if you can believe that, 2021, episode 223 when you guys were last on. So that feels almost like a lifetime ago. I listened to it actually this morning when I first got up. And it's a long time ago, not really, but it is. So first off, hopping back on. No, thanks for, thanks for having us back. I was afraid you were going to, on the spot, ask me what data was or something. So I'm glad you did the homework on that one. Now, for the listener, if they want to find out more about free to fly or a little bit of both of your backgrounds, I would suggest episode 223 because that was right in the middle of things.

I mean, geez, we're still in the middle of things. But we definitely talk a lot about free to fly and a little bit about your personal backgrounds. But for the listener who's hopping on today, we'll start with Greg. Can you just give a quick little background, maybe about your time, flying planes or whatever you want, Greg, your military, it doesn't matter.

And then Matt, if you want to hop on, and that way listeners can get a feel for who we're listening to today. Sure. Well, my background, flying-wise, comes out of the military way back in Saskatchew. Moushjah, Saskatchewans, where I got my wings. So I have a slight affinity for that prairie region, I suppose.

So I did 32 years between the regular force and the reserve force. And then off to the airlines where I was 15 years into it. And then last fall, I was still in the reserves with the military at the time. Lost that along with the airline aspect last fall with the mandates. And fast forward to where we are over the past week. week. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit later, but that's it in a nutshell. Are you, sorry, Matt. Just one second there, Greg. Have you been following James Top then? I got to sit, obviously, I assume you have. I got to interview him while he was walking along the road.

Is that not a redonculus feat what he's doing? How many K he's walking every day with a pack and everything else and just and motoring across Canada? Like he, I mean, it's taking them time, but I mean, literally like 40, 50k a day. Yeah. Well, it's phenomenal. And I remember when that first came out because I was right around the convoy and seeing him in his uniform saying everything that he did. It was just, I mean, that was a true act of courage as his, his walk across this massive nation, right? So I'm glad you got a chance to chat with him. Yeah, he's, uh, interesting. The entire experience, that's the only podcast I've ever had, obviously, with a guy walking down the road and he's walking and talking to you.

But sharp mind, like I could be wrong, but the early pictures of him till now, I feel like he almost looks a little bit younger. And we all know a little bit of purpose in life can do wonders. But I mean, he's carrying the weight of a lot of people on his shoulders walking on those roads. And he's gone through, you know, snow, wind, storms, everything to get to where he is. And I'm sure he'll be excited to be in Ottawa because Ontario, that, geez, Louise, that province just never ends, it seems, when you get. going through the top portion of it.

But I'll hop on to Matt. Matt, fire away and then we'll jump into some things. Sure. Well, I think of James Topp and the physical discomfort he must be experiencing. And his willingness to dedicate that amount of discomfort and time to a cause is just really quite mind-blowing, if you think about it. But my own little piece, I'm a civilian. I've gone the civilian route as opposed to the military like Greg.

I always wanted to be an airline pilot, started drawing pictures of airplanes when I was four or five years old. They were always Air Canada planes. I was taking the logos and just repetitively drawing them over and over again. And the funny thing is many of the pictures that I drew, my mom kept. And the funny thing about those is that they've, I was obviously copying pictures from magazines or photographs because I was putting the identification numbers on the airplanes.

And I came to find out years later that I actually got to fly many of those airplanes in real life. So this is a labor of love. And I think Greg would attest to that as well. In fact, most pilots would. We put our heart and souls into this as a craft, as a life's work. And I very much feel that way. So when it began to appear that we were going to have to jump through significant hurdles, untenable hurdles, in order to maintain this career,

it became more important for me to to fight for freedom as opposed to my career. So that explains the pivot there. And together, Greg and I run a group called Free to Fly, which represents about 45,000 people, among which are several thousand aviation professionals and the rest are passengers. And the one thing that we all share in common really is just our love for freedom, our love for travel, and our desire to have that remain free and open for everybody. Yeah, well, I appreciate everything you two do. I follow you guys relatively closely. Jesus, there's so many people that are doing amazing things right now to try and keep up with every last one of them is a feat in itself. And I got listeners who do. It's pretty cool to see how closely they follow your organization since you came on the podcast and feed me articles and interviews you guys have done.

And you get to have been very busy. I want to start with something. that, well, was my love for flying. And hopefully he'll put a smile on all her faces and we'll see where it goes from there. Have either of you seen Top Gun Maverick and what do pilots think of it? I haven't. I actually went off to see it over the weekend with one of my sons, but it was sold out.

So that's as close as I got. I don't know if Matt can improve on that lame story. No, I can't. I haven't seen it. The pilots haven't seen it? No. We're too busy. We're too busy, Sean. Top Gun the original was a great movie.

If you like aviation cinematography, and I think a lot of pilots enjoy it from that standpoint. But, you know, the Hollywood version of aviation creeps in and it becomes about, you know, taking risks and being, you know, a showboat and that kind of thing. And I think the one takeaway for your audience would be that pilots are generally risk mitigators and we don't go actively seeking enjoyment or fun.

We enjoy ourselves in an air. airplane by doing a good job. So I think the reality is a little bit more boring than Tom Cruise makes it out to be. You're not flipping the bird upside down to a foreign pilot? Never done that myself. No. Well, that's because you weren't in the military. I'll bait myself a bit to say when the first one came out, that was grade 12 for me. And I remember this is the standard schick that when somebody asked me about Topkin, I kind of laugh. I mean, it's a bit of within our industry. There's, there's all these throwaway cheesy lines that we toss back and forth like negative ghost rider and otherwise right but i was dating a girl at the time and i remember because i was whatever 17 probably

sitting there and i wanted to fly c-130s is a great big lumbering transports but hey i'd take whatever i could get so i was you know kind of looking at the screen and that's pretty much what i'm going to be doing right there you know we get the beach volleyball and the dog tags and the fighters and uh but no it's like matt says it's uh at least in the airline world it's uh it's i mean that's it's a great point to up Matt, I mean, that's really what we're all about is avoiding risk because you've got several hundred people sitting behind you that's on you to do exactly that. Well, I'll say this. If you enjoyed the cinematography from the original Top Gun, the new one you're really going to enjoy. Like, it is a wild ride. Don't get me wrong. It's Hollywood's wild

ride. So you certainly understand that I don't think this is how it would go in the real world. I was just curious, you know, when I watch hockey movies, right? Like, you can pick it apart because you played so much hockey in your career. Like, that makes zero sense or that's like really well done. I guess I was just curious. And pilots are like, that looks stupid already because they're doing this already. Or if you can get beyond some of the, you know, irrationalities of a movie like that and still enjoy it. Well, there was a person who showed up in our first, year of college. I went to a particularly challenging aviation college where, you know, quite a few of us didn't graduate. I was one of the lucky ones who did, but we had a guy show up for the first

week of school, and he had, I would say, about one-tenth of the attitude that Tom Cruise's character Maverick had, and he was instantly labeled Hollywood and was treated accordingly. So, you know, and was treated accordingly. So, you know, the aviation world, to Greg's point, is really much more toned down. I would suspect even in the fighter pilot community, I mean, there are big egos, but they don't manifest in showboating or anything like that. It's it's about how precise you can fly a profile, how well you can sort of meet the expectations that are on you from your superiors, and that's about it.

Well, I think listeners heard, I think it was me and twos maybe got talking about it. As a kid, I watched Top Gun every birthday from, I don't know, I was probably five onwards, every birthday. It was just like something that I did every single time. Now, that's back in the VHS days. I'd read the VHS from watch it over and over and over again. I always wanted to buzz a tower. So you're saying neither of you ever buzzed the tower?

Not personally. Well, the air show world is a little bit different, but that's permissive, right? If you do it, I've said a few times, you can pretty much do anything once, but it'd be about the one and only time that you do it. So the air show world allows that sort of stuff. But otherwise, no, it's frown. upon and the interesting thing is the aviation community is very very very small particularly in this in this country and there's ample stories out there of guys who irritated the wrong person i can think

of one right now of course i won't use names or details uh but he was uh one step away from getting hired at air canada and uh some former military colleagues walked in the door and he never got hired uh because the community is that small and he'd done some things uh just it's I wouldn't even say dangerous necessarily, but hanging as colleagues out to dry or otherwise. And that's no different than most industries, right? There's a certain culture and people want to work with those who are going to back them up and then do so safely and effectively, certainly, in our world. Yeah, for sure.

I think that that's a lot of different worlds, especially when it's, you know, as specialized as flying a plane. You probably understand very quickly it's a small world. You know, in this small world, there's a big day at June 20th. mandates being suspended. I know we all heard that because I was I was excited that day. I was hard for me not to be excited when I first heard. I'm like, holy man. Like this is finally going to go.

And then the word suspended. And you went, son of a bitch, right? Like here we are all over again, suspended. Let's talk about it. From your guys's point of view, what's your thoughts on June 20th? travel mandates, suspension. Are you over the moon or are you a little more like, let's take a step back and let's analyze this a bit more? Yeah, I'd say the latter is certainly it in a nutshell. I'll say a couple things. I guess I watched the news conference and I've joked a couple of times

over this past week and said I think it shaved a couple weeks off my life just watching the level of arrogance and propaganda that was spewed by our government. That was difficult to watch, to go out so far and to say that we regret nothing that we've done and will gladly, we'll gladly lock it all down at this latest whiff of a new variant. So that was discouraging. Now, we came out with our messaging post this suspension. And the thing we've got to keep in mind here is We're seeing the fruit of a lot of courageous, tenacious, relentless work by thousands of people. And so, hey, you don't win a war in a single battle. Absolutely, I agree with that.

And we are 100% still in a battle. There is still medical segregation in this country. If you're unjabbed, when you come back, you've got to go through all this assignee nonsense of quarantining and arrive can and et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, I'm talking to some of my colleagues that are a threat of way. from personal bankruptcy because they haven't worked since last fall. I get, myself and Matt, get endless emails in our inbox with heartbreaking stories of people that have driven across the country in hopes of being bedside with a loved one and fell half an hour short. So people that want to push back and say, this is BS, it's nothing.

That part I'll say it isn't nothing because we need to recognize the work of these people that have been fighting very tenaciously. Because if you don't, if you don't, if you don't recognize the progress that we make, you end up losing the warriors along the way. So to your point, it's, we don't even know for sure if we're getting back to work. It's it's been couched in language of subject to and otherwise. So it's lots, it's, it's still the fog of war. I guess there's lots left to be, to be seen. Yeah, the, the, the, the Choosing Warriors along the way is an interesting line, Greg, because to me, burnout was starting, I can speak for myself. I can speak for a ton of people that have been talking about this, you know, like not straying from the topic because if you don't stop, if you stop talking about it, then it gets to continue.

And you talk about all these different people that you guys have certainly come across and everything else. if you stop talking about it, then it gets to progress. And so people have been talking about it. But one of the problems you started to see is a ton of people I knew started to have burnout where they just couldn't take it anymore. Like even if that meant just turning off the channels, turning off whatever, not talking about it, going and watching a hockey, whatever it was. Some of the little bits and pieces they got back in their life.

You know, here in Alberta after Ottawa, you know, the QR codes disappeared, going to a restaurant, starting to live a few, normal things in life. But we, you know, when you hear the word suspended, that's where, you know, you got to be, you got to recharge because you can't act as if it's gone forever. Because the word suspended, we all know what that means. That means exactly what it means. That in the fall, if the pressure still isn't mounted on them, there's a very good possibility

of another variant, which we know will come in the fall. And another heightened sense of this fear campaign that's been going. on for so long. Well, Sean, it's a good point that you make. And personally, my great fear is that, you know, we regain a certain degree of normalcy. Some of our long-enjoyed rights are returned to us, not all of them. And because of where we've been and the exhaustion that we feel as a society, we're just okay with that. That's my fear, is that we are just okay with some middle ground. And I would argue that that is the great reset. It's not to take us to the extreme conclusion of the agenda.

It's to take us one or two steps closer to that conclusion. And it's done by taking us to the extreme and then giving us part of what we long for back and letting us be complacent and, you know, satiated with that. And so to a certain degree, I'm going to flip the logic around. I think the suspension word is actually a benefit, a bit of a favor being done for us, because it's a smack in the face to all of us with the reality that has always existed long before COVID. And that is we get the freedom we deserve. So this freedom isn't an inevitability.

It's something that requires a culture to sustain it. And that culture comes from each one of us valuing certain things and living our lives externally in a accordance with those values. So really, you know, this is what's happened with COVID is not a new thing. There have been just in the 20th century alone, several events that I could cite historically that are similar in nature. I would even suggest that there's a bit of evidence behind the idea that the Spanish flu was a similar type of orchestrated event. I won't say for sure, but I've seen some somewhat compelling evidence to that fact. So this is nothing new. Freedom and the freedom that we enjoyed prior to COVID is up to us to seize. And we do that in a funny way. I mean, it does require

some action and it does require some sacrifice. But that's in the extreme form. As we get back to some degree of normalcy, it becomes about awareness. It becomes about what you are willing to outwardly accept among your friends, your peers, your fellow colleagues at work, your supervisor, your spouse, it becomes about, you know, laying out exactly what you will and will not accept. And where we actually have some good news there is in the fact that unlike Canada, much of the world has managed to claw back a large degree of what existed prior to COVID. And in doing so, I think their societies, I'm thinking in particular the people in Great Britain, the people in, or I should say the UK rather, the people in the United States,

It doesn't matter whether you're in a blue state or a red state. In the USA, I've been to both recently, and the culture there is very much intolerant of any more masking, any more mandates. There's talk that the Biden administration might succeed in getting masks re-implemented on public transportation, including airplanes. And I've heard so many people who are on the opposite political side of the aisle. and I've heard so many of them say to me that I'm just not going to do it. I either won't travel or I'm just going to say no and I'm going to stand my ground. So with other countries and other cultures doing this, I think it'll be very hard to revert back at least quickly without a fair degree of fear. And this will put continual pressure on Canada and make it easier for Canadians

to stake their claim on freedom. But that's an if. The, the, the, the, the, the, the final part of that requires Canadians to stand up, to dust off their fighting shoes, their marching shoes, you know, and really come out, I mean this, you know, figuratively, but really come out and demonstrate the fact that they're unwilling to accept any reversion back without significant justification for it. And even that, I say, with trepidation. I mean, it takes a pretty extreme set of circumstances on the ground to warrant the kind of policy that we saw over the last couple of years. And I don't think anybody in our midst anyway debates that COVID was not the situation, was not a set of circumstances that warranted this type of heavy-handed governance. You raise an interesting point that maybe the word suspension is a good thing.

In that, you know, I'm sure you guys follow along just as closely as everyone else. They're talking about changing, are you vaccinated or fully vaccinated to, you know, are your shots? up to date, which means a huge chunk of this country becomes unvaccinated again. And there's a ton of people. I mean, going back to Greg, you mentioning receiving emails and hearing different stories of people who've been negatively affected by having their shots, there's going to be a chunk of the population that is going to be even angrier than what these, what, what, what, we're going to be, we are because they did exactly what the government said, fall along with everything and have been impacted to the point where now there's going to, like I'm sure you guys can speak. There's going to

be pilots that I've read articles where they can't fly anymore because they took them and, you know, they can't get a doctor to say it was the vaccine, but they're having myocarditis and things like that that make them unable to fly, unable to meet medical standards to fly a plane. maybe then by them trying to hold on it's actually more of a you know instead of lulling us all back to sleep because everybody saw the word as soon as they saw it everyone's like uh-oh i don't know that is an interesting point what are your thoughts Greg well i it's but back in when was it probably early may it seemed like there was a a brief planned media leak that's that talked about the possibility of a booster shot being required in order to meet the definition of fully

fully vaccinated. And there was a pretty quick outcry from that. And I mean, it's interesting on a number of levels. It shows how we're being governed, which is essentially by poll or by planned media link and otherwise. But I've said several times, I almost hope they do push it that way because from what I've seen and from where I sit, which I don't have view on everything, but certainly within our industry, it's palpable the anger and the outrage at the idea that I went and did what you told me to do. And if you think I'm going to go and do one more step, you got another thing common. That's a polite way of putting it. Jordan Peterson, put it much more bluntly and cross, if you remember, right? It's like I did what you said.

In hindsight, right, leave me alone. Yeah, right. Like, you leave me alone. And what we really need here, and we've said this from the outset, is to galvanize the full spectrum. We need the jabbed and the unjab to come together, link arms and say, enough's enough. These are my God-given freedoms, hands off.

You serve me, government. It's not the other way around. And that's what we need the population as a whole to get a hold of. And I almost wonder if going down that road would be a fatal mistake for them to make. and certainly amongst our colleagues and the ones that we're hearing from that went and did what they needed to do in order to save their jobs and look after their families and now we're dealing with some of those health concerns, there is no way on God's green earth. They are going to go and put anything else in their body because they've seen the potential

that exists there for harm to be done. Has the way it's been perceived, maybe from me, maybe from other people, and I don't know if this is right. You know, like there was so many soccer athletes that we saw all the videos of the young athletes falling down and whatever. And I'm a hockey guy and certainly there were some hockey players. But it wasn't like this cascade of hockey players. And so then people try and dissect that.

One of the things I noticed and I think a lot of other people, it seemed like a lot of pilots were having issues. Is that something? I mean, you guys are in the industry. You're tracking everything. Is there any credence to that? Well, I guess it, you know, the big thing that you have to do when you ask a question like that is give some kind of reference datum. And, you know, how was it before the COVID vaccines were administered?

And I'm not quite sure, you know, we're positioned to capture a lot of the injured pilots' attention in the sense that if, you know, if you're an injured pilot and you need to get help, union isn't helping you, your doctor isn't helping you, free to fly is the most obvious place to go from that point on. And that's what we're setting it up to be. This, I would think, distorts our perception of, you know, the reality on the ground. So as a per capita number, I'm not comfortable myself. Greg might have a little bit more to say there. But certainly, and this is the takeaway, certainly we are seeing medical issues rearing themselves now. among pilots that we never saw before or at least we never talked about publicly and never

made it onto our own personal radars but i would hand that over to gregg he's been talking more with these uh these folks than myself yeah well and i think what's important as well sean is over the past month just because these phone calls started coming in and were connected with groups across across the world and so i said listen we've got to get we've got to put our our heads together and work at this collectively. So we formed this global aviation advocacy coalition and put together a public statement that went, I hate to use the word viral because it's become so cliched, but it got a ton of publicity and it's got 13 organizations signing it from the US freedom flyers in the states who've been quite visible across Europe, Australia, and then some medical and scientific

communities as well, including the bigger names like Dr. Malone and McCullough and representing representing really over 20,000 flight crew and physicians and medical scientists saying there is something amiss and something going wrong here. Statistically, as Matt said, it's hard to put a finger on it. But part of the reason that that's difficult is we've taken, and this is really my main point here, we have taken a culture. Aviation is absolutely, it's not just founded, but it depends on a safety culture that's grounded in the ability to report when things go awry. It's called safety management system. So if we're in an airplane and we mess something up from a standard operating procedure or otherwise, we don't conspire with a guy beside us and say, that's just between us, right? Because nothing actually went wrong, right? Like, obviously, if a wing gets dinged or something, then everybody knows. But there's things that happen as they do in every job where it could have been done better. We come back and we immediately fill out a piece of paper and say, I did something wrong.

And the reason we do that is to avoid it reoccurring. But what we've done with pilot health now is we've created an environment because guys like Matt and myself and all of our other courageous colleagues who stood their ground, speaking out against these jabs meant we lost our ability to fly. So a CAT-1 medical certificate, which is a high-level degree of stamp on your health, your health, is a tenuous thing. And you have to be certainly from a vascular standpoint very, very healthy. But we've created an environment now where guys don't want to speak up about the issues they're having because they're worried they're going to lose their medical. And in the process, they may never get it back. And Captain Bob Snow, this American Airlines guy, I don't know if you saw the video of him. sitting there in a hospital with wires from his chest. He was palpably enraged that he had done what

he had been told in his career was over now, along with a whole bunch of other follow-ons. So that's our great concern is those who should have been vested in maintaining safety, and I'll name them in Canada, it's Transport Canada. Their civil aviation medical examiners have a duty to close gaps in the scientific knowledge of where we're going, and they failed at that. And we spoke to them very bluntly early on asking questions saying, listen, when I go flying an airplane, you expect me to do 50 things before I go and to ask very good questions. And these aren't rhetorical questions. They're questions that need answers. Is the aircraft safe to fly? Is all of the maintenance checks up to date? Is it programmed properly, etc., etc? And I have to actually find the answers.

So we said to them, listen, you've come out and said, pilots shouldn't participate in any sort of medical trial. And they said, well, it's not a medical trial. It's approved. Well, it's not. Actually, it's, it's, it's, you know, tentatively authorized under an interim order, but it hasn't been fully approved. And what they did at that point was just remove that particular line off of the internet, never to be seen again. And the questions that got asked, they just failed to to answer them. And all we're asking for here is that you treat our industry with the same. respect, caution and care that you expect from every aviation professional within that industry. You expect us to come to work and to be meticulous in finding answers to questions and yet you refuse to answer questions about these vaccines. And then these guys that are having issues, they're raising them with some of these Transport Canada doctors. And Matt can probably attest to the same. If I went into my annual medical with the Transport Canada doctor and said, But occasionally, I get some discomfort in my chest.

I probably wouldn't be working for a week or two. Well, they dug to the bottom of it. But we're hearing quite the opposite from some of these guys that are, as you said, Sean, dealing with issues that seem to be myocarditis. And sure enough, once they investigate them, that's exactly the case. And there's some that have lost their medical certification or off the line. And there's others that need to ask a lot more questions about whether or not they should be flying going forward. prior to COVID, would aviation, let's just put it across the board, was it an industry or an occupation that like encourage people to ask questions? You mentioned good questions, like to question things, to point things out. Like, was it that type of environment? Or would this be an absolute shock that pilots are questioning, getting vaccinated? That's like weird. No, we don't do that. You're supposed to just come and do your job and, and, and, um,

that's it. No, it's absolutely an environment wherein, you know, the active participation in the safety systems is an obligation on the part of every individual within that system. And that includes the pilots, maintenance personnel, dispatchers, and of course management. So, no, we've always had a clear channel for voicing concerns, one that that would obligate an answer after a prescribed period of time. You know, Greg's point about this being anomalous cannot be understated. This is like, you know, I'm struggling with an analogy, but it's really a night and day kind of flip that we've seen within the industry on the issue of COVID-19 vaccines, night and day. Even that is an understatement. Yeah, it's, I mean, the culture, it's fascinating on

some levels. I've said to people, I'd love to, I'd love to see somebody, you know, sit in the back of a of a flight deck and just even, even from a social standpoint, right? The dynamic that goes back and forth between the two. But to give you an example, just from personal experience, it was a dark and stormy night. I'll tell you a little flying, flying story. And I went off to it was Denver and I was the first officer at the time. So there's a dynamic there where I'm flying with the captain and, you know, there's some professional courtesy of Ford. Because he's, he's, He's got more on the line with his license and experience and otherwise. And I'll cut to the chase here, but it turned into an absolute gong show of an evening.

Mass of thunderstorms holding, got short on fuel, had to divert. And early on the dispatchers that Matt was mentioning who play a very, very major role in planning our flights, had given us an alternate field that seemed a bit odd to me. And I'd done enough to look at it and think, okay, it's legal, but I had I haven't seen it on the flight plan before, but dispatch knows what they're doing and what could possibly go wrong. So inevitably, it gets to the point where, okay, we have to divert because we don't have enough fuel. So off we go to this alternate field. Well, it turns out it's, I don't know if you've ever been into Castle Guard, but it's like it's a runway in a bowl with a whole bunch of high terrain.

And it's legal and ostensibly safe, but incredibly challenging because now you're trucking there with very few options. there's a thunderstorm off the end of that field. We get in there. They keep us high, which in a jet, you can't go down and slow down at the same time. So we're on our way to this alternate airfield. In the midst of that, we have a bleed air leak, which is a fairly significant emergency that occurs. So we're dealing with that emergency. And the captain was on top of everything.

He had the terrain charts out. He knew where we were in terms of, you know, you can't go down too early. Once they finally descended us, he dirtied up the airplane, meaning he dropped the landing gear. the flaps, everything, which some guys even experienced wouldn't think to do. And we, we salvaged it. We were, you know, quote unquote, the heroes. And some of this just gives you an idea of the dynamic that in the back, you're just, you're still working your way through your movie type thing. But up front, it's like you're, you are absolutely at your max, making sure everything happens. So we get on the ground, and I'm driving at a certain point here, and we finally get on the ground,

nobody's there to help us. And then Matt will know, like sometimes the worst part of the version is trying to figure out where to park when you get to the alternate, right? So we finally get off to this little building and the marshallers are bringing us in and bringing us in. And they want us to pull the nose right up to this chain-length fence. And jet engines, like you can't reverse them like a car. Like once you're there, you need a tow bar, which most people wouldn't think about. And the only reason this popped into my head is from my job previously with the military. And at the last second, I said, wait, stop, which takes a little bit of, like I'm the first officer, right? But that's our culture is as you asked, Sean, if there's a good question, you ask it because it matters.

And I said, hang on, stop. Like, I don't know if they got a toll bar that fits our particular airplane. And the captain was like, ah, they probably do. And he's trying to, he's sort of waving at the guy and the marshals are angry now. They're like, keep coming. So he finally opens a window and he screams out, do you have a tow bar? And it's like one potato, two potato. And they're like, oh, no, we don't.

Now, this isn't a safety issue where people would have died, but you would have had 100 people stranded in the middle of the Colorado mountains probably for a day while they figured out how they're going to get a toll bar there that fit the aircraft. So this very long story just shows you that in our culture there is sometimes a ton of things going on but pilots are absolutely dedicated to like every single detail whether it's the terrain around you right down to whether there's a toll bar and yet when it came time for these vaccines and the regulator whose job it is to protect us from harm as well, they just kind of shrugged and said, nah, should be good to go.

Like, well, we'll continue to assess it as we go on. And we were supposed to be okay with that. And we, and at this point, these guys are having a really hard time, even getting some of these injuries addressed, at least in a culture that makes it permissive. And if I may underscore Greg's point a little bit, I mean, what he's just described there is, is I can feel the stress that would have been present for that. But that's on the borderline of what we would consider a normal day at work. All of those things are things that we're expected to jump into on a moment's notice

without any negotiation or contemplation. It's just get to work and get it done. Because of that, at least in the Western aviation industry, the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and even many Asian countries now, the social culture that has emerged among pilots, is one that is of the highest civility I've ever seen anywhere in the world. I mean, pilots go way out of their way

to bend over backwards to accommodate a pilot and his family who are traveling as passengers or to help a colleague get their lost headset back that was left on the airplane. These are peripheral social issues, but I think they speak to the fact that this is an environment,

a flight deck and an airplane in general is an environment where the demands on the humans who are in control are so high that if they were to go up even one slight little bit, you could no longer reasonably demand the level of safety that passengers are demanding. In other words, you could demand more out of the pilots and they would probably accommodate, but safety would suffer. And this is exactly what has happened with the COVID-19 vaccine situation. It's completely buggered up the organic components of our industry, that those parts which have emerged, I would argue, naturally, in order to support the level of safety that the traveling public has grown to demand. So it really cannot be understated just how much of a wrench this vaccine. policy has thrown into the whole operation.

Well, I appreciate the stories, guys, because where I stand and where I come from, the reason I'm interested in it is coming from different companies, I've worked for different companies, don't need to throw out different names. Safety culture is an interesting thing because I've worked in companies where they have a strong safety culture. They say all the right things, but they do not like you questioning anything. don't like you, even if they're valid questions, even if there's this negative negativity towards it. And it's really interesting to be a part of that because it's actually like,

you just kind of forget about it. So I could see how a lot of people when it came to COVID and vaccines and everything aren't in positions in companies where they get to question it, get to go like, this doesn't make sense. They're just told to do something and they do it because that's what the higher ups are saying. So it's a top-down push. And I've been in those companies where you want to question things, but all it does is get people angry at you or makes it a very uncomfortable workplace. And the reason now what I'm what I'm getting to with pilots and I with your stories, to me it just makes complete sense then that up until COVID, if anything didn't make sense, pilots are compelled to point it out.

And that's how you save lives. That's how you deal with stress, everything else, right? Because of what the industry you're working. So this must be like the culture shift must be a shock, not to just you to, but to every pilot then. Even if they don't want to dig too much into anything, they're always welcome to do so. Yeah, well, it's, I guess the difference, and I hear what you're saying, because it's this, I know Mike Roe, he's I think he has a saying safety third or something like that, right? Yes.

Which it's, I always laugh. I say when I, when I speak at length, I try to channel my inner mic row because he's got a, he's got a way of speaking that I wish I had had half about. But, but he's far more eloquent in explaining it. But it's this, it's this silly statement of safety first or whatever because it, it almost removes the, the onus on you as an individual to look after your own well-being. I'd say within the pilot community, it really is a culture of professionalism. It's not done so much because, well, it's not done at all because somebody's telling you to do it. For one thing, you're going to be the first one running into whatever it is gets run into in your airplane if you don't handle yourself appropriately. So you have a vested interest in finishing your flight safely and getting yourself home to your family.

but it's also a matter of professional pride. Every time you get in an airplane, like the silliest of things, and maybe this is me because I'm excessively anal, I don't know. But even if I, you know, if I mess up a minor step in some sort of thing of programming, it's like, I'll beat myself up for like hours afterwards, right? Because you want that proverbial perfect flight,

which never happens because we're all learning and we're, that's why there's two of us, keeping an eye on each other and otherwise. But that's our culture. It's not because there's a slogan that the company lives by. And I'm sure it's the same at other companies. But it's just a different dynamic in that you're, we take seriously the fact that that everybody that sits behind this, there are family.

Like literally, sometimes your family's on board with you, right? But that's how your brain works is, is my calling. It's not, I don't want to sound cheesy about it. But, but it's just part of the professional. culture. Yeah, the professional culture piece, yeah, that's more what I was getting at more so than Air Canada says this is how we run things. When it's driven by the pilots, the employees, the professionals, that's how you get to

a really unique view of COVID and not being allowed to ask questions about it. because that isn't across the board. That is in all professions. There's lots of professions where you're not allowed to question what's coming down. And maybe that's just more blue color. Maybe that's just certain companies. I just know I've been in those settings where you're like, it's just better to just go along.

There's no point in even asking because all you're going to do is get people glaring at you and it's going to make work uncomfortable. And I just come back to with pilots and listening to you to talk. like that portion of this has to be ridiculously frustrating to probably almost every pilot across the board or anyone in the air industry for that matter, but pilots specifically. And it's, you're absolutely right, Sean, and it's that way on a visceral level. I mean, you can't, I mean, you can't really ignore it past a certain point. I mean, I know there are colleagues out there who probably are just going along to get along,

but I suspect most people who have issues with the vaccine and have seen what it's done in our industry are very much troubled by it. I go back to Jordan Peterson quite a bit, as many of us do, and I quite appreciate him talking about the psychologist Piaget, who discussed mental models and calibrated systems, you know, how a person's thought process can be calibrated with reality. And the degree to which it's calibrated is a means of sort of predicting how stable that model will be. I think it applies very much in the physical world as well because, you know, we do have organic systems that we build or that, I shouldn't say build, but that emerged somewhat spontaneously from just normal human interaction.

And these systems need to be calibrated in order for them to withstand sort of the daily grind, the bumps and bruises of being in an economy. And aviation was, I would argue, one of the more calibrated systems because of just the sheer expensive nature of being uncalibrated, And one accident can be hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of damage or more. And especially if there was some kind of negligence, I mean, there is a very real chance of destroying a multi-billion dollar company in one foul swoop. So we have no choice and really haven't since the inception of the aviation industry to do things in accordance with the reality that exists, not the reality that we wish to exist. And this is the first time in my short life, although I do come from an aviation family, and I am a history buff, and aviation history is among my favorite subjects.

This is the first time I've heard of our systems being destabilized to a point where they have to recalibrate. And I would argue that that is extreme. I mean, it cannot be understated the extent to which this is affecting the aviation industry, though subtle as it may be, it is noteworthy. And I think it's, you know, to tie this back to sort of where we see things going, it's going to take a cognizant public and a motivated employee group and some success, I think, in the court of public opinion and perhaps even in the court of law, in order to revert back to that which we once enjoyed.

The final point about calibrated systems, though, is their inherent stability means that they tend to revert back to their calibrated state when disrupted. And that is something I think we can draw a little bit of comfort for. I think there is a natural organic pressure to go back to that which worked. And we just need to help that process along. And that's what Greg and I are here to do. You know, you bring up the court of opinion, the court of law. I'm curious if you guys are seeing things as a positive light on that because I mean it was just I think everybody saw Keith Wilson's the video him talking about vaccinations were never recommended for air travelers they'd said masking and spacing but the head epidemiologist of Canada government of Canada said the scientific evidence doesn't support it and it wouldn't be effective like when you hear and see things like that maybe even I I I I heard Greg talk about it on a different interview.

Just it's not mainstream media. That's that's that's the big thing or the corporate media, right? It's not across every paper in Canada. It's got to come on shows like this and we have to talk about it. And then enough people have to. But the fact that's being said, the fact that that gets to be a social media, you know, it's overused drag, but viral. It goes everywhere.

Does that give you some like, like positive feedback? that maybe things can still go the right way, you know, like revert back. We can never go back. We've gone through this, but maybe to the point where things get to, like, people just get to travel again. The passport is a passport. Or are you like, no, because they're hiding it away that shows you once again where they're willing to go?

Well, we're up against a very dark beast. That's how it summarized it. use the word subtle describing what's happening even within our own industry. And what flashed in my mind was it's subtle because of a conspiracy of silence even within our own industry. That's the unions and the companies and the regulator and otherwise. But to your point, Matt's the optimist and I tend to be the pragmatic one. Or the pessimist would be the, but even then, I'm willing to, as I alluded to earlier, um, recognize that what happened over this past week, although it's not a win for the battle that we're fighting overall, it came about because there was enough of a shift in the culture, because the government of Canada and Mr. Trudeau got to the point where they looked like utter buffoons internationally and they could no longer lay against the ropes and be pummeled even by their own state media, which was what was happening over the last several days. So I'd say they,

even now are somewhat still on the ropes. I was, well, disgusted to be the honest word. I was going to say disappointed. I was disgusted by the fact that even our aviation industry, aside from the new CEO of WestJet, remained silent, even as the entire rest of the world and the mainstream legacy media was even calling for these mandates to be dropped. And yet the people whose bottom line is affected,

from a revenue standpoint, all these other airlines, and the unions in particular, I might add, refuse to speak out and say, listen, this is ridiculous, right? Like, this is stupid. The entire world is looking at us and we're complete buffoons. Let's stop the crap and let's get back to traveling. The new West Jet CEO whose name I always butcher, which is why I keep referring to him, not by name, but Alexis, Ben, something or other, but he was the one that spoke out. Now, I'm always quick to add whenever I mention the brief kudos to him his company outright terminated a lot of their employees last fall so to come out and and say what he did which good on him for saying it to point to point at the ridiculous nature of these mandates and yet to continue to have good men and women on the street based on

those same mandates is a little hard to figure out but anyway to answer your question there's a bit of hopefulness because we've seen what can happen when people continue to grind it out and it's a grind as you said Sean people are are absolutely tired. But there was enough people that took a break where they needed to and then picked up their tools and continued hammering away with their mayors and their members of provincial parliament and their MPs and they got out in the streets and they wrote letters.

They voted with their dollars. They used cash. All of these things matter. And we've got to keep out of because it's a long road ahead still. No. And again, I was going to say, there's the pragmatic. Now I'm looking for a little hopefulness here, Matt. Well, hopefully you won't be disappointed.

Actually, this is where I was going. Actually, Greg and I last week spent a considerable amount of time in meetings with different lawyers last week, somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen or so different, different lawyers who are all actively working on the COVID issues. And one of them had literally just come out of depositions with government witnesses. They're suing the government. I won't go too far into the detail. but the government has had to put forth witnesses in their defense.

And excuse me, it was somewhat, I wouldn't say amusing, but it was on the path to becoming amusing for this particular lawyer to see how these government defense witnesses are having a hard time making their case because they're all concerned about essentially, you know, perjuring themselves or perjuring themselves relative to statements that the government had made, or, you know, saying something that essentially throws the whole thing open.

And it really is a testament to how difficult it is to combat the truth as the truth begins to emerge in the minds of everyone. So, you know, yes, I do believe that there are unseen political forces in society, people who we don't know, who are, you know, actively, willfully, subjugating us to these conflicts, you know, these large contrived events in order to drive an agenda. And that has been going on for thousands of years. What people, you know, I think people who despair over this, they don't fully comprehend that it's extremely difficult to combat the truth. And so these types of initiatives have always had to do battle with reality. And that's a very difficult thing to do, which is why media always has to be controlled, which is why your children need to be

brainwashed from a very young age, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this becomes a highly complex machine, and at a certain point, it becomes impossible to manage. And we can, I think history bears that out, and we can take some degree of solace in the fact that this is happening right now. Conversely, in that same anecdote, the witnesses for the complainants or the prosecution are not having that same problem. It turns out there's a long laundry list of experts who have been disaffected, you know, who didn't agree with how COVID was being handled, and they just cannot wait to get their opinion on the public record. So these are the dynamics we're starting to see rear themselves, and I do find some degree of hope. in that. Well, I'm always a glass half full. So I'm hoping a little top gun maverick and ending on an opportunity of hearing people getting their chance to speak that maybe, you know, we have brighter

days ahead. I know we have brighter days ahead. I'm not even going to say maybe. I know we do. It's just whether or not it's a six month, a six year, a 30 years, as somebody once said, to me it's it's we'll wait and see now before i can let either of you go we got to do the uh the final five brought to you by crude master a shout out to uh heath and tracy macdonald heath once said on here if you're going to stand behind a cause that you think is right then stand behind it absolutely what's one thing gregg matt you stand behind well i think we've talked about it here already um this afternoon and that is uh truth is everything at the bottom at the bottom and underneath everything that we're dealing with, it comes down to truth.

And Theodore Dalrymple once said, when people are forced to remain silent when told the most obvious lies or worse are forced to repeat those lies themselves. They lose once and for all their sense of probity. And emasculated society of liars is easy to control. And that's why truth and the pursuit of truth and speaking truth are really everything and behind everything that we're doing. Matt? Greg, it's hard to follow that one up, buddy.

I would initially my impulse was to say personal sovereignty. I would stand behind personal sovereignty, but actually I would say the family, the family unit, because really it's the family unit that enables us to become our full realized selves. And without the family unit, we don't have personal sovereignty. So I stand behind family. I think truth and the family yeah those are very high qualities to to stand behind I truly appreciate you guys hopping back on it's always fun to sit down and and discuss some things with the likes of you too I look forward to following along with uh you know hopefully positive things as we move along here um keep please keep doing what you're doing I know going back to burnout there's time where the old glass doesn't look that half full, does it? And I'm sure you get told it an awful lot having the following you folks do. But appreciate having men like yourself standing up,

talking openly, continuing to push the needle back forward because for a long time there, it seemed to be going the opposite direction. But thank you so much for giving me some of your time today. Hey, thanks for having us, Sean, and we appreciate what you're doing. Keep it up. Great work, Sean. Thanks for having us. Thanks, guys.