On Airplanes and Ambulances

Where I've been and where I'm going. Or: changing the nature of work.

I just reported my first airline story in two months: Delta is opening its next Delta One business class lounge in Boston, and I was there for a sneak preview. It’s an impressive concept with a unique offering, prioritizing dining rather than creating a traditional “lounge” space. I think it’s a good approach that makes sense for the Boston market. You can head over to TPG to read more about the lounge and see photos.

The rest of this post is a bit of a personal update on my career and work. If you subscribe solely for airline reporting and behind-the-curtain stuff, you may want to skip the rest of this one. I’ll be back to the usual programming next time, and ideally, I’ll be publishing here on Substack more often starting now.

With that out of the way…

It’s felt weird to disconnect somewhat over the past few months, even as news in the airline world has continued at its exhaustingly inexorable pace, including Spirit’s widely expected bankruptcy filing and Southwest’s pivot.

This fall, I’ve been undergoing a sort of career restructuring, which is very much a work-in-progress. I left my fulltime staff position at TPG in October, and, after a break of sorts, I’m transitioning into a new role as Contributing Aviation Editor for the site. I’m thrilled to get back to the airline beat after my time away, but I’m also excited that my new role will allow me the flexibility to spend some time on other projects, too — and not just in media.

I’m a journalist, but I’ve also been certified as an Emergency Medical Technician on-and-off for the past 15 years. I started with my local volunteer fire department starting in high school, joined my college’s EMS squad, and worked out of a hospital system in New York City before grad school. I stopped for a while shortly after I returned from grad school abroad, but recertified in 2020 and got back into it.

The author being painfully dweeby in 2012.

I’ve always wanted to get a more advanced certification, though: Paramedic. Becoming a paramedic is a long, arduous process that entails a ton of additional responsibility, but it’s worth the effort. Being a paramedic involves having a much greater understanding than EMTs of how a wide range of illnesses and injuries actually affect the body, and they can use a variety of advanced assessments and treatments to help patients who are experiencing true emergencies. To give a sense of the difference: My original EMT course was about 110 hours long, over a college semester. The paramedic course takes approximately 1,200 hours of classroom, lab, and clinical time, plus at least as many hours spent reading and studying outside of class.

I took a prerequisite anatomy and physiology class last fall and started the full program in January. The hybrid class I’m taking held all of the lectures over a Zoom-type platform, so I was able to fit those around my work travel. I finished the classroom portion late last month, and have a short break before I start clinical hours at a hospital and in an ambulance — I’m hoping to finish all of the requirements by late spring.

Originally, I planned to take the course on the side, while staying business-as-usual at my fulltime job. It would be a challenge, and I’d basically go 18 months without any free time, but I could manage that (largely thanks to my wife, who has been the world’s most patient, supportive, and understanding partner throughout this whole thing). Once I finished the program and got my certification, I could figure out what I wanted to do: Maybe start working on the ambulance more right away, or maybe just hold the license and be mostly inactive for a while, having gotten the class out of the way, until I was ready to make a career shift. Plus, the paramedic certification also felt like a good piece of journalism layoff insurance — I wasn’t concerned about anything imminently at my job, but anyone who’s ever worked in media knows how quickly things can go south, and that it never hurts to have a backup plan ready to put into use.

But 2024 got weird on the airline beat, and the perfectly normal year I hoped for at work, while focusing my spare energy on paramedic school, didn’t happen. Instead, we got a plane crash on January 2, and while it seemed at first like that would be the aviation story of the year, a loose door plug plummeted into the news cycle a few days later and set off a firestorm. Since then, it’s been a constant stream of endless aviation news, while also plugging along on several special feature assignments.

I managed to keep up with everything for a while, but I started feeling pretty significant burnout at work this summer. The energy I was putting into the paramedic program was certainly part of it, since the spare time I normally would have used to recharge was instead going to classwork and studying. Still, I’m fairly certain that the burnout at work would have happened anyway, given my frequent work travel, the odd hours covering breaking news, and other general stress this year. Maybe it would have been a little bit later, but the modern professional working world coupled with the strange demands of beat journalism can be truly exhausting.

I do love being a journalist, though, especially on the airline beat, and I’ve enjoyed working at TPG and the unique coverage opportunities I’ve gotten while working there. But my mental and physical health had begun to deteriorate by midsummer, and I was doing some form of work — increasingly ineffectively — during virtually every waking moment. Seriously, I haven’t read a new book, watched more than a few episodes of TV, or even really exercised since late-winter.

Even worse, I was spending less time with my family, while my wife was left picking up more and more of the slack with our son and around the house. Things were unsustainable and something had to give. I didn’t want to drop the medic program, though, especially given the work I’d already put in. At the same time, I had no interest in walking away from the media career I’ve worked so hard to build. My wife and I talked through everything, and we realized that it might be time for me to take a scary step towards a change that I’d been talking about since we met, but always saw as a “someday” kind of thing.

The author on the airline beat

For a long time, I’ve played around with the idea of building a more flexible work setup by combining aspects of both my journalism and my EMS careers. Move to freelance journalism, set a more dynamic schedule, and continue focusing on airlines while broadening my coverage and chasing some other interests, all while working part-time or, ideally, per diem on an ambulance. The downside, of course, would be that I’d be giving up a steady paycheck and benefits, and at least the framework of a regular work schedule, even if I often ended up outside of that.

But still, by making this leap, I also could take on other media projects as my interest and capacity allows, maybe work on a book proposal, and, the key part of this all, I’d be able prioritize my family in my schedule and my life by building everything else around them (at least, once I finish the paramedic program and training).

So, that’s what I’m working towards. Or at least a version of it.

I’m fortunate to work with an incredibly supportive editor at TPG, who helped me craft a new working arrangement and create this new freelance-based role. Since leaving my fulltime position in October, I’ve been able to use the past few months to finish the classroom part of my paramedic program and start a new per diem job as an EMT, while dabble in a few other things — including some local reporting, which has been really fun, and something I’ve wanted to do for ages. I don’t know whether this will be my work set-up for the long-term, or whether I’ll want to go back on staff somewhere in the near-future, but for now, I’m excited for the direction I’m heading in.

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate you. I’ll be using this newsletter to share more of my reporting from TPG (and potentially elsewhere) in the future, just like I was before, but may include some original reporting as well. I like to think of using this Substack as a long-form Twitter replacement (which is ironic, since Twitter was always described as “micro-blogging,” so I guess I’ve come full-circle back to an old-school blog.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. What do you want me to write more about? What should I be reporting on that isn’t really being covered elsewhere? What are you interested in learning more about? Shoot me an email or leave a comment!