6

There were times-tonight was one-when Joe Patroni was grateful that he worked in the maintenance baitiwick of aviation, and not in sales.
The thought occurred to him as he surveyed the busy activity of digging beneath, and around the mired A6reo-Mexican jet which continued to block runway three zero.
As Patroni saw it, airline sales forces-in which category he lumped all front office staff and executivescomprised inflatable rubber people who connived against each other like fretful ~hfldren. On the other hand, Patroni was convinced that those in engineering and maintenance departments behaved like mature adults. Maintenance men (Joe was apt to argue), even when employed by competing airlines, worked closely and harmoniously, sharing their information, experience, and even secrets for the common good.
As Joe Patroni sometimes confided privately to his friends, an example of

this unofficial sharing was the pooling of information which came to maintenance men regularly through conferences held by individual airlines.
Patroni's employers, like most major scheduled airlines, had daily telephone conferences-known as "briefings"-during which all regional headquarters, bases, and outfield stations were connected through a continent-wide closed-circuit hook-up. Directed by a head office vice-president, the briefings were, in fact, critiques and information exchanges on the way the airline had operated during the past twenty-four hours. Senior people throughout the company's system talked freely and frankly with one another. Operations and sales departments each had their own daily briefing; so did maintenance-the latter, in Patroni's opinion, by far the most important.
During the maintenance sessions, in which Joe Patroni took part five days a week, stations reported one by one. Where delays in service-for mechanical reasons -had occurred the previous day, those in charge were required to account for them. Nobody bothered making excuses. As