Isat in the forward jump seat, fo- cusing all of my attention out the windscreen at the narrow strip of black pavement in the middle of a very brown California desert. Somebody in the 727 cockpit had called the black pavement a runway. I was certain that the airplane wouldn't fit. Perhaps if the guy in the right seat flying the airplane wasn't one of my classmates, I would have had more confidence that the wheels would touch down on the right spot. It would have been bad form for me to ask the check airman to give it a try first. This was a day of reckoning. It was the last big hurdle in our training process. If my two classmates and I kept the airplane in one piece, we would move on to the next step, our line operating experience (LOE). We had been hired by a cargo airline that had been contracted to operate UPS's growing fleet of brown and white airplanes. At the completion of our LOE we could officially be called "freight dogs," or for those of us in the business: "air cargus caninus."
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