Even in the no-drama mundanity of today’s air travel, there’s still a larger-than-life aura about the middle-aged white guy in the pseudomilitary hat up there in what pilots call the “pointy end” of the plane—if only because we entrust the pilot with our lives.
Weaving the slightly hairy final approach to Washington National or Quito or Juneau, bouncing through the low-visibility “goo” on a stormy night with gusting crosswinds, we may contemplate mortality, but not for long. Chatting away, watching the movie, pecking at laptops in the dimly lit cabin, we have faith. The pilot’s twang—“buckle up until we get through this little bit of choppy air”—reassures. Nothing to worry about here. We’re not going to die tonight. Sit back and relax.
A favorite pilot joke: “The only difference between God and an airline pilot is that God thinks he’s a pilot.” In no other profession does the law, tradition, and the unique physical isolation of the airborne craft give more responsibility and power to a nonmilitary official. A “pilot in command,” the FAA’s term for the person, ideally the captain, who bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of the flight, no matter what. When the aircraft door closes, the captain’s word is law.
We want our airline pilots to fit this mold. Like Sully Sullenberger—not just a fine pilot who deftly floated that US Airways jet safely onto the Hudson River with no engines, but a guy adulated as a miracle worker. We want pilots who look and talk like pilots are supposed to—the way Warren Burger looked exactly like a Supreme Court Chief Justice. Tall and fit, military bearing, a little gray at the temples. And we love that soothing “aw-shucks-we’re-out-of-gas” pilot drawl—echoes of the legendary Chuck Yeager and the hollows of West Virginia, as Tom Wolfe observed in The Right Stuff.
Never mind that that airline pilots aren’t really heroic adventurers, that they worry more about paychecks and pensions and work schedules than dead-stick landings and the magic of flight. On average, airline captains today are overwhelmingly white, straight, and male, just over age 50, often with years in the military. (Rough estimates are that only 1 percent of US airline pilots are African American and 5 percent are women.) They tend to be conservative in their personal habits, play golf, drive boats and other mechanized toys, and love their families. They’re fastidious and well ordered—neatly groomed even when casual. Pilots tuck in their Polo shirts. Nearly all have a bachelor’s degree, and many have a master’s or higher degree. They’re healthy in body and, presumably, in mind. “We’ve been tested, poked, and peed in a cup our whole lives,” says a longtime pilot for American.
The pilot icon is powerful and traditional, reinforced by the fact that pilots think and act and talk and do their jobs much the way they did 50 years ago. But in the decade since September 11, there have also been real changes in what happens up in the pointy end of the plane, and how pilots relate to their passengers, their machines, and their jobs.
The Disembodied Voice Behind the Steel Door
Most obvious of these changes is the Inviolable Cockpit (or, in correct terminology, the “flight deck”)—isolated physically and psychologically behind the bulletproof door. The ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoldering when airlines took steps to beef up security: first, by fortifying the cockpit. The imperative was obvious: protect the “front office” from potential threats “back there.” Cockpit doors that once gave way to a hard, swift kick were replaced by reinforced steel (costing an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 apiece, installed) designed to withstand not just bullets and small explosives but a 300-joule hit—the impact of an NFL lineman running at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. Add to that serious locking systems and new security protocols for entering the pilots’ sanctum sanctorum. The goal was to keep terrorists away from the controls, but the effect was also to explode the old pilot-passenger paradigm.
By law and ancient tradition, the airline pilot’s first responsibility—as with any captain at sea—is the care and welfare of his passengers or, as airline pilots sometimes call their flocks, “the people.” By September 12, 2001, the same “people” had become potential threats. So much for visits up front to meet the captain and friendly, serene pilots strolling through the cabin; now it was all about protecting the cockpit.
Nothing more epitomized the abrupt attitudinal shift in this relationship than the voluntary arming of pilots. By 2003, trained airline pilots could volunteer to become “federal flight deck officers,” sworn law-enforcement officials entitled to carry firearms into the cockpit—and many did. The Department of Homeland Security won’t say, but estimates are that well over 10 percent of commercial airline pilots are qualified to tuck a pistol into their flight bags, and training classes in New Mexico are consistently full. The largest pilots’ union estimates that armed pilots are on about 15 percent of domestic flights. The goal of the program, according to the law that created it, is “to provide a final, deadly-force deterrent to an attempted hostile breach of the flight deck.” The pilots’ new job description: “defender of the flight deck”—the last line of defense in a potential death struggle for control. Not exactly the avuncular chaps who once pinned junior pilots’ wings on little Johnny.
Nobody gets in or out of the cockpit easily. When pilots need what FAA delicately refers to as “a physiological needs break,” it’s a minor production. Calls on the intercom to the flight attendants, peering through the peephole, guarding the cockpit door with a drink cart, everybody on alert—you wonder how the poor guy can relieve himself. Just fetching the pilot a bottle of water entails a security ritual—a predetermined “secret word” or word exchange that crew and pilot agree to during a preflight crew briefing, sometimes a secret knock or a numeric-pad code entry. So pilots thnk twice about leaving the cockpit. Better to call for an F-16 fighter escort if there’s a disruption in back.
In truth, not all pilots mind the lack of passenger contact. Sure, they understand they’re in a customer-driven business and instinctively feel protective of their charges in back. “I see an 80-year-old lady,” says a Delta pilot, “and that’s my mom traveling.” But that’s not what they love about flying, and it’s not quite personal. More like: “If I, the pilot, get there safely and securely, so will the hundreds of folks sitting a few yards behind me. If I’m OK, they’re OK.”
Observe the way pilots communicate, a fine balance of honesty and patronizing obfuscation. There’s the script to rely on, but if there’s an “anomaly” (pilot-talk for anything from a balky radio switch to a hair-raising near disaster)—a medical diversion, an engine problem, major turbulence—pilots keep it short and nonspecific, with a unique brand of understatement. There’s never a “storm” or “lightning” or “wind shear” or “icing.” Instead, it’s “rain showers,” “bumpiness,” or a “slight chop,” or seeking “a more comfortable altitude.” A flaps malfunction is a “flight control issue”; a failed landing gear is a “hydraulics issue.” An emergency landing is an “unplanned arrival.” Pilots try to be honest, but minimalist. “Big technical descriptions terrify people,” says one pilot. “Passengers don’t understand the redundancy built in” to modern jets—in other words that there’s a backup if something important breaks.
The new cockpit isolation changed the dynamic with passengers, but the “front office” has always been a refuge of order and sequence for pilots, where routine and repetition and ritual are recognized and the power and control of flight are centered and unmistakable. The first thing its occupants do when arriving for duty on board is start “building their nest,” setting up the cockpit “just so.” Seats and headrests are rearranged, hats and personal items stowed. One pilot touches the cabin door frame in the same place every time he climbs aboard. Another arranges the flight plan and other papers on the console between the seats by securing them with a rubber band that is always in just the same spot. Still another captain, a germ freak, carefully cleans each cockpit button and toggle switch with alcohol swabs.
Actually, the pointy end is not entirely private. For much if not most of the flight, Big Brother is watching, or at least listening. By federal rule, airline cockpits are under mechanical surveillance. Automated voice recorders capture for posterity everything said, every sound in the cabin, during the last two hours of the flight. The point is to assist accident investigators trying to determine what went wrong if a large plane goes down, but the “black boxes” (really not black at all but high-visibility bright orange) capture every off-color joke, every slur at airline management, every heartfelt personal revelation to your buddy who’s been occupying the same SUV-sized space with you for the last eight hours. And that means posterity. To be recoverable after a crash, they’re built to survive 3,400 times the force of gravity, water pressure at 20,000 feet for 30 days; and 30 minutes of heat up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, not that much less than the surface of the Space Shuttle on reentry.
Until recently, airliner cockpit voice recorders held only a half hour of sound, so pilots who said something off-key had plenty of time to just keep quiet as they landed and taxied to the arrival gate, confident any embarrassing statements would be recorded over and so disappear forever. Crash investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board wanted to know more, though, and the new two-hour recording time required as of 2012 equals nearly the entire length of the average domestic flight.
Audio recordings worried workplace privacy advocates, but what really disturbs airline pilots more is another NTSB “most wanted” recommendation—for video surveillance of the airborne nest. Crash investigators would dearly love to see in living color, as well as hear, what was happening in the cockpit of a downed airliner—for example, whether pilots were sleeping or one became suicidal, or who had what controls.
Pilots say they understand the desire to find out “what happened” shortly before a crash, but expanding cockpit surveillance makes them livid. By law, cockpit voice tapes are to be used only for crash investigations; they must remain strictly confidential—only written transcripts are normally made publicly available as part of an investigation; pilots agreed to audio recorders in the first place, in the early 1960s, only on that condition. (On the other hand, air traffic control tapes of cockpitto-ground communications are public and accessible.) To their consternation, though, some of these disturbing—and, for grieving families, intensely private—“last words” tapes have since found their way to the Internet.
Videotape ups the ante in a YouTube world. Count on clips of crashing cockpits rocketing instantly around the web. More prosaically, who wants to be videotaped up-close and personal in their workplace for hours on end? Some veteran pilots say it would make them “walk off the job” and exercised unions lobbied hard against cockpit video. So far it’s worked. The FAA has proposed standards for the safe installation of video in airline cockpits, but it hasn’t ordered airlines to actually install it.
Siri on Steroids?
If more isolated pilots have grown a little more distant from and patronizing toward passengers, their relationship with their airplanes has only become more deferential since the 1990s, as aircraft automation and technical sophistication has accelerated. No, planes don’t somehow “fly themselves” automatically, but for most of the flight big jets aren’t really being flown by humans, either. Pilots are relying on something called a flight management computer. Their “inner Sullenberger” is an assemblage of integrated computer-driven systems that does so many things so reliably that flight engineers, once the traditional third officers in jet cockpits, became largely superfluous by the mid-1980s. What computer automation really does best, though, are routine tasks—like holding a constant speed and course and altitude—so pilots can anticipate and respond to the hard stuff while scanning for errant private planes and assessing the darkening thunderclouds up ahead.
Before the flight, the onboard computer is loaded with information about the route of flight, the weight of the plane, the fuel load, current and predicted winds and temperatures, and planned altitudes. In flight, the computer reports to the flight crew via a small computer screen (a “control display unit”) that sits between the two pilots. At the heart of the computer system is the autopilot—“George,” as pilots often call it. As in, “George is changing our heading 2 degrees” or “George is acting up today” or “What does George want?” George flies the plane better than humans 99.9 percent of the time in normal conditions—so well, in fact, that pilots are strongly encouraged to “engage” him/it as soon as possible after takeoff. You’d think human pilots might resent these automated doppelgängers, but they don’t. Many are hard-core techies, after all.
Pilots are mainly there to monitor what’s happening during normal cruise—essentially all of the flight that occurs after the plane takes off and starts to climb until it sets up for final approach 50 miles or so out. (Another old pilots’ joke: “In the cockpit of the future there will be only one pilot and one dog—the pilot to feed the dog and the dog to bite the pilot’s hand if he tries to touch anything.”) The autopilot (along with autothrottle) flies the preloaded flight plan, adjusts the throttles and pitch of the plane to control speed and altitude, and smooths out changes in heading and speed. The flight management computer monitors the plane’s precise position, checking it against GPS, signals from radio navigation beacons, and distance-measuring equipment on the ground. The altitude stays precisely steady—avoiding the need to constantly fiddle with controls to correct for thermal dips and gusts—and it stays headed on the preassigned route of flight. The passengers’ ride is smoother and it’s a helluva lot easier on long-haul pilots than flying the plane “by hand”—actually manipulating the controls to make frequent slight corrections—for hours on end, as pilots had to do before George arrived. Other “electronic crew members” implement human direction. With the autopilot engaged, pilots can turn the plane 8 degrees to a new heading by twisting a dial or knob and, if necessary, punching in “heading mode” on a cockpit console, which in turn electronically directs the plane’s physical control surfaces (ailerons and rudder) to move the precise distance to effect the desired turn.
The goal is to make flying essentially mistake-proof or, more realistically, as Boeing puts it, “error-tolerant.” Over the last decade, both Boeing and Airbus have made leaps in creating ever-more-intricate cockpit automation that is not always applauded by pilots or, for that matter, by safety experts. They fret that all the whizz-bang automation may distract from, or even undermine, the basic “stick and rudder” skills pilots need to get out of a jam or, more precisely, to handle “anomalies.” In an online aviation newsletter, one Airbus pilot calls the advanced Airbus 330 “a video game, not an airplane,” while a Boeing pilot blogger describes the ultrasophisticated 787 cockpit as “17 computers in a Kevlar frame” that “seems like it was designed by Apple.”
How much cockpit automation is too much is a hot topic for airline pilots and aerospace manufacturers alike. It has been since the first autopilot—a gyroscopic, biplane-mounted contraption—wowed the crowd at a 1914 aeronautic exhibition in Paris when it let the daredevil pilot-inventor Lawrence Sperry not only lift his arms from the biplane’s steering stick but actually walk out onto the wing as the plane kept flying straight and level. (Two years later, the same young pilot crashed into Long Island’s Great South Bay while demonstrating the technological wizardry to an engaging New York socialite; reportedly some body part bumped the gyro device and both fliers were rescued, naked, by duck hunters. It was a very early example of overreliance on cockpit technology.)
Now flight computers and autopilots can—and do—land heavy jets and bring them to a complete stop on the runway. The “auto-land” function is not often used, but it can still be the best way to get an equipped aircraft on the runway in pea-soup fog—near what pilots call “zero/zero” ceiling and visibility. Using a very precise radar altimeter to show just how many feet the plane is poised above the runway, it determines just when to “flare” the plane—raise the nose at the last moment before touchdown (figure 10 yards or so above the pavement) to slow the descent and avoid a “hard” landing—then automatically brakes it to a stop.
The next logical step—announced at the Paris Air Show in June 2011—is essentially a “panic button” for pilots about to crash. The device—the designer calls it a “digital parachute”—would let computers take full control of an aircraft in jeopardy and return it to safe flight. It’s handy to have in worst-case situations where pilots have become disoriented and stall at higher altitudes. Ultimately, such a gadget might even be able to land an aircraft at the nearest appropriate runway, even with an incapacitated pilot.
Does all the new whizz-bang automation make pilots superfluous, mere automation managers? Not until passengers feel comfortable flying on pilotless drones. Human pilots still normally do the challenging tasks like takeoffs and landings. Auto-land can get a plane on the ground, for example, but won’t work well in wind shear or heavy crosswinds; human “hand-flying” is more sensitive and may provide quicker, smoother corrections to last-second wind bursts. And besides, pilots like to land their own planes—not just for safety in tough conditions, but also out of pride. Landings are one of the few phases of flight that passengers actually feel and can appreciate. “Passengers always grade you on the finish,” says an American 767 pilot.
Humans are also better, by and large, when it comes to handling the “anomalies.” Like when the automation stops working, the hydraulics fail, an engine stops turning, or the middle-aged man in 23D is having a heart attack. An international 777 pilot with more than 30 years’ experience puts it drily this way: “Today’s aircraft technology has made flying so much more reliable and the [flight management] systems do work all the time—except once in a while they don’t.”
The broader issue—call it the “2001 question” from Stanley Kubrick’s movie of that name—is raised in an FAA report: “For any given situation, who will have final control authority?” The pilot or the flight management computer? Aircraft manufacturers and their automation designers have somewhat different philosophies. Airbus has tended to favor the machine—its automation is designed essentially to prevent the plane from getting outside its safe “flight envelope” no matter what the pilot does. Meanwhile, Boeing tends to give the pilot the final word—and its adherents can be adamant. A Boeing-flying Delta captain puts it this way: “When shit hits the fan, a pilot should be able to disengage all the magic and fly the airplane with basics.… All you can do is hope the software engineers haven’t screwed you with some magical sub-mode that, [sitting] in an office with a nice warm cup of coffee, makes sense at the time.” For every fan of Airbus’s “make-it-impossible-to-crash” approach, there’s a proponent of Boeing’s support for new cockpit technology only where “there is no adverse effect to the human-machine interface.”
The debate is not just a matter of philosophical nuance. Consider what happened in 2010 when one of the first commercially flown A380 superjumbos, among the world’s most sophisticated new airliners, blew an engine over Singapore. The three highly skilled senior Qantas captains on board were deluged with 54 computer-generated error messages on their cockpit screens, and it took all three nearly a half hour just to unravel all the warnings. Only then could the pilot in command land the massive plane by hand, with 469 passengers on board.
Demigods and Whiners
Pilots whom passengers see as demigods, airline management sees as high-maintenance, high-cost whiners. And pilots tend to reciprocate that high regard. The last decade’s financial stresses only exacerbated labor-management tensions. That couldn’t help but affect the tenor of the flying experience, subtly but pervasively, for travelers. When everybody from pilots to flight attendants to baggage handlers are angry at their employer, passengers sense it.
As airlines declared bankruptcy, one by one, during the last dismal decade, they used the legal leverage that Chapter 11 provides to dump labor contracts, cancel debts, and renegotiate pay levels downward. By the end of the decade, pilots’ salaries at the big airlines were down as much as 40 percent and so-called work-rules changes meant more work for that lower pay. By 2012, the once-glamorous, high-paying job of commercial airline pilot ranked 104th on a list of the 200 best and worst US jobs prepared by CareerCast.com, based on income, employment outlook, environment, physical demands, and stress. Airline pilots were ranked a notch above hairstylists and a little below auto-body repairers.
More lasting than the pilot salary squeeze was the decade’s impact on junior pilots’ prospects for career advancement. As strapped airlines cut capacity, stored unused planes in the desert (the lack of humidity minimizes corrosion), and curtailed new routes, fewer pilots were needed. Thousands were furloughed, others downgraded ignominiously from captain to first officer, or from large aircraft to smaller ones. Then the FAA decided in December 2007, after decades of debate, to extend the mandatory pilot retirement age from 60 to 65. Copilots who had been patiently waiting their turn to move from the right-hand seat to the captain’s chair on the left, some for up to 20 years, now had to wait longer for the old guys to leave.
By 2011, the most junior captain at American had 19 years’ flying experience, according to the Dallas News, and very, very few major airline captains were under 40. American has seven pilots over 60 for every one under 40, with the average captain and first officer aged 54 and 49 respectively. It’s all a far cry from the 1980s, when it was not uncommon to see major airline captains in their mid-thirties, with only five to eight years of seniority.
At the average large passenger airline in 2011, pilots and copilots combined averaged close to $180,000 in total salary, pensions, and benefits added together, according to government data compiled by the Air Line Pilots Association. (Express cargo pilots at UPS and FedEx made about 50 percent more than the average passenger pilot.) Typically, airline captains made almost a third more than their generally younger and less-experienced first officers, and the most senior international passenger airline captains pulled in a quarter million or so a year, benefits, bonuses, and overtime included.
Of course, beyond the monetary compensation—not to mention that few captains work more than four days a week to satisfy monthly minimums of 70 to 80 hours at the controls—there’s also plenty of psychic reward. Listen to Paul Morrell, a former Northwest pilot, now deceased, reflecting on one of his last flights: “As an airline captain … I fly above things; I take in the awesome beauty and raw natural power of God’s nature and universe. I can turn down the lights in the cockpit on a dark night and count the stars, see satellites, watch the planets, the constellations, and even the aurora borealis on winter nights at the higher latitudes. I’ve flown over the Rockies, the Badlands, the Grand Canyon … and I can describe them all as if they were my best friend.” Even for the old-timers, the senior captains, it’s still about the jolt they get from flying. For those who got in at the right time, it’s not exactly a hardship profession, even if some say it’s not what it used to be.
Still, as hard as it is to weep for the handful of former $300,000 senior captains who became $200,000 senior captains, consider the other end of the pilot spectrum—the tough world of pilots at the regional or commuter airlines, the carriers that handle half of US flights and typically contract with the big airlines to deliver more than 160 million passengers a year to big airline hubs. Airline pilots get their start at these commuter airlines, and they’re hardly getting rich; many are barely getting by.
As major airlines filed for bankruptcy protection over the last decade, one of their first acts was to cut what they paid these carriers, their regional “partners.” Next down the food chain, the regional airlines, now hurting, cut what they paid their already-strapped pilots. As reported by pilotcareer.info for 2011, regional airline captains—average age 41, with ten years’ experience—make only about $70,000, far less than their major airline counterparts. Entry-level regional copilots earn as little as $20,000 a year—just half again more than the minimum wage, annualized.
That said, pilots have to start somewhere, and it’s not an easy path. They “fly hard,” in the words of an American Airlines pilot who apprenticed in the Air Force instead of the commuter airlines, sacrificing pay and conditions to accumulate enough hours for a shot at the majors. Their working days consist not of one takeoff, a six-hour cross-country cruise, and a single landing, but rather a series of short-haul flights in high-traffic-density airspace, multiple takeoffs and landings at crowded airports, and pressure to turn the plane around fast for the next haul of passengers to connect with a major airline’s hub. Not to mention surviving on Big Macs and crashing on couches in crew lounges. How could it not affect safety?
How Pilots Think
There’s still a strange duality to the airline pilot’s mind—poets soaring through the skies and, at the same moment, emotionless engineers and managers. Isolate the problem, ignore the distractions, focus on solutions, even when all hell is breaking loose. Pilots rarely admit to fear, but acknowledge flying moments when they are “fully alert.” Their final words recorded on black boxes recovered after a disaster often reflect a determination up to the last moment to fix the machine, more powerful than fear or even resignation to imminent death. As Sullenberger’s Airbus jet is screaming toward the Hudson River at 170 miles per hour, a few hundred feet up, with every warning horn in the cockpit blaring, he calmly asks his copilot 17 seconds before the potentially fatal impact: “Got any ideas?” To which the equally calm answer is “Actually not.”
The calm seems born of a preternatural self-confidence—their earthbound spouses and teenage kids sometimes say “God complexes”—that reassures subordinates and passengers alike. Veteran airline pilots make decisions definitively and swiftly, even if not always correctly, and they rarely look back. “Follow me over the hill, boys” works better than collegial debate in a crisis. And how could they not have confidence—given the awesome power and responsibility that goes with flying big airplanes full of hundreds of souls?
A fully fueled 747 waiting at the gate and loaded with 400 passengers isn’t going anywhere unless the pilot agrees it is ready to fly. It doesn’t matter if company dispatchers are tearing their hair out trying to keep on schedule or if the departure gate needs to be cleared to unload the next jet waiting on the tarmac. Recently, an Atlanta-based pilot “refused” an MD-88 when one of its two coffeemakers, located in different galleys, shorted out, raising concern about an electrical-circuit problem on the plane. American Airlines pilots were accused of using a raft of “frivolous” maintenance discrepancy write-ups to cause schedule havoc in a September 2012 labor fight. Then there’s the widely recounted tale of the major carrier pilot who, during an intense labor-management standoff in 2000, reportedly refused to fly a nearly full, fueled-up Boeing 777 to Frankfurt, Germany, because the toilet-paper holder in a coach lavatory was broken.
The captain can also refuse to fly if he’s concerned about a sketchy passenger. Pilots are notified of, and often meet, those of their passengers who are armed. (Including federal air marshals, prisoner escorts, VIP “protective” agents and police, there can be quite a few.) And if the captain insists on more fuel aboard his flight, it has to be loaded—even if airline bean counters object. In an emergency, the pilot in command even has the legal right—indeed, the duty—to refuse a direct instruction from air traffic control if he genuinely believes it will endanger his flight. (Pilot response to controller in that case: “Unable.”)
Pilots cherish this power and authority—enough to shoulder the huge responsibility that comes along with it. A senior Delta captain, puts it this way: “For me it’s about being totally in control when I’m flying an airplane. I’m solo. Every decision is ultimately mine, for good or bad. Autonomy. Independence. If a doctor makes a mistake, he buries one person. I have five seconds to decide [about a whole planeload].” As pilots, “we’re in an organization, but we’re at the top of it,” he adds. “When it comes down to it, all we have [from others] is input.”
In that sense and in other important ways, for all that piloting has changed, it remains much the same as it was at the dawn of the jet age. There’s still the reassuring adherence to routine, repetition, and ritual, the incessant checks and double-checks, the rhythm of the cockpit interaction, the circadian confusion, the bad food, the constant struggle against boredom to stay sharp. In the end, though, even whiny passengers, terror threats, and endless labor battles can’t wash away the power and romance and the joy of flight.
What Pilots Do
Plumbing the pilot mind is one thing, but what do those people do up there for hours behind the reinforced locked door?
Start with the takeoff. Takeoffs are a kick for pilots. Even the most seasoned captains who’ve made thousands of them still talk about the “rush” they get from 75,000 pounds of thrust per engine at their command (on the original Boeing 777), hurtling down the runway, and lifting off. Pilots and first officers (aka copilots) are required to brief each other on all the what-ifs before every takeoff. If an engine fails, what heading do we fly to return to the airport, what runway do we use, who will fly the plane, and who will communicate with the tower?
Once the takeoff roll starts, the pilot will abort if something’s not right, typically as long as the plane’s speed is below 100 knots (some airline standard operating procedures prescribe 80 knots). Faster than that, it gets dicier. Then pilots generally “reject” the takeoff only for four things—an engine failure, an engine fire, a wind-shear warning, or if the pilot for some reason doubts the plane will fly. And taking off safely isn’t just a matter of going as fast as you can and then pulling back on the yoke. There’s a specific threshold of runway speed the plane needs to reach. Take off too early and you risk a stall—and crash. Take off too late and you risk running off the end of the runway—and crash.
There’s a well-learned ritual to avoid these unpleasant outcomes. The pilot flying the plane (whether it’s the captain or the first officer) handles the controls while the other pilot (now called the “pilot monitoring,” formerly the “pilot not flying”) keeps his eyes locked on the airspeed and engine-performance gauges in front of him. As the plane accelerates down the runway, the nonflying pilot “calls out” the plane’s increasing speed (always in knots, not miles, per hour)—“ninety knots … one hundred … one-ten”—until the speed hits “V-1,” the predetermined critical “decision speed.” In the last seconds before reaching V-1, the captain (and commonly only the captain, even if the copilot is flying the plane) makes the key decision to either take off or “reject” the takeoff. If everything’s normal, the plane accelerates down the runway until the nonflying pilot gives the signal to lift off: “Rotate.” The nose rises off the runway into the air and the plane gathers speed going airborne and reaching velocity V-2—the speed fast enough for safe flight, even if one engine decides to stop working.
Takeoffs and landings can be intense, honest-to-God piloting tasks that the flight crew enjoys. But these busy times can be fairly few and far-between, punctuating long hours of relative boredom while the plane is cruising straight and level at high altitude on autopilot. In those hours, an experienced American Airlines 767 pilot estimates, the job demands only about 10 percent of the flight crew’s active attention.
Cruisin’—“Staying Ahead of the Plane”
When pilots aren’t manipulating the controls, their primary work is, as some put it, to “stay ahead of the plane.” Monitoring what’s happening around them, how the plane is flying, and what’s likely to happen next, whether other aircraft are nearby, what the weather’s doing, how much fuel is left, where they could land in an emergency—anticipating the what-ifs. The pseudoscience term is “maintaining situational awareness.” Lose it and the plane, with all its technology, is flying you, rather than the other way around. Pilots sometimes refer to “not having the big picture”; some air traffic controllers used to call it not “getting the flick,” as in not seeing the whole movie.
“Staying ahead” starts long before takeoff, even before passengers board. There’s the traditional walk around the aircraft at the gate—typically the copilot’s visual inspection of landing gear, tires, undercarriage, checking for fuel or hydraulic leaks, looking at the fan blades in the jet engines for nicks or anomalies. Then there’s the time-honored challenge and response of the preflight checklist. Before aircraft “pushback” from the gate, every item is visually checked, every key button or switch or circuit breaker pushed or toggled or verified, every gauge read. Dozens of preflight items must be checked on a jet airliner. The flight crew has done it a thousand times and could easily recite it in their sleep, but they need to do it carefully and take it seriously every single flight.
Once in flight, the checking continues—confirming that the plane is really where the onboard navigation system says it is and that the aircraft is performing “nominally,” or within acceptable limits. They’re checking that the preflight weather briefings they printed out at the flight operations office an hour before takeoff are still valid, by monitoring high-frequency radio reports from other planes up ahead on the same flight tracks and altitudes.
They’re also keeping a close eye on how much fuel is left and how fast it’s being expended, a particular concern since spiking fuel costs pushed airlines to carry as little “extra” as needed for safety so as to cut excess weight. Headwinds that slam against Europe-bound planes at 140 knots (160 miles) per hour, or turn five-hour flights from Los Angeles to New York into seven-hour journeys going the other way against the jet stream, can drain the required fuel reserves with remarkable speed. When Australia’s Qantas Airlines in 2011 moved its nonstop Sydney flight from San Francisco to Dallas, nearly 1,200 miles farther from Australia, passengers were occasionally treated to unplanned visits to refueling spots like Noumea in New Caledonia in the far South Pacific. So pilots en route keep an eye on weather, not only at the scheduled destination, but also at remote landing strips that might be needed in an emergency—when a monsoon over Midway or a snowstorm in Shemya in the Aleutians might matter.
Passing Time
Isolated from passengers and other crew for ever-longer stretches of automated cruising, the front office can get pretty boring. Transoceanic pilots don’t even have to check in regularly with air traffic controllers by high-frequency radio anymore; an automated communications device called ACARS (aircraft communications addressing and reporting system) can automatically report to ground controllers how the flight is going, along with its position. Pilots battle that boredom much as they have for decades—by talking, eating, griping, and sometimes dozing, though not necessarily in that order.
What can they possibly find to talk about for hours on end?
Hangar Flying
The term is from an earlier age, when pilots hung around the airplane hangar chewing the fat when the weather was too lousy to fly. Tall tales of amazing feats of piloting—landing in howling crosswinds, debating off-the-wall air traffic controllers who, in one pilot’s words “sometimes want you to defy the laws of physics,” harrowing scrapes with strange-acting folks who just might have been scoping things out for bad guys. Protocol requires hangar fliers to pretend to believe one another’s stories—however embellished. Don’t they get bored telling the same stories over and over? “Hell no,” says a Delta pilot. “It’s a different audience” every trip. Sometimes they even learn a technique they later use to avoid a fatal mistake.
Women
There’s an unmistakable macho—some say downright sexist—cast to the cockpit, an old nautical term pilots vastly prefer to the more politically correct “flight deck.” The captains and more senior pilots who set the tone are often ex-military. (Veterans accounted for 90 percent of airline hires in 1992, though only 28 percent of new hires in 2008, according to Aviation Information Resources.) “When you’re with women, you talk about flying,” they like to say, “and when you’re flying, you talk about women.” It can get a little nasty. A Southwest Airlines pilot in June 2011 took off on a rant against “ugly” flight attendants that was eventually heard by thousands. Forgetting his open microphone, the man complained loudly about a “continuous stream of gays and grannies” at his Houston base, home to the airline’s “ugliest.” The pilot was suspended, then reinstated after “diversity training.” More typical is a somewhat softer edge. After all, airline pilots are exposed to literally every creed and ethnicity every day they fly.
On the other hand, as mentioned, only some 5 percent of the Air Line Pilots Association’s 53,000 union members are women, and there are estimated to be only about 450 female airline captains worldwide (about one in nine women airline pilots overall)—not all that surprising given the 20-year career track to make captain at major US airlines and women’s relative lack of seniority in the profession. Some male pilots prefer it that way. A Delta pilot, for example, professes to having “no problem” flying with a woman pilot—unless the woman is in the left-hand seat as pilot-in-command. “That,” he confessed, “could be a little weird.”
Dumb and Greedy Airline Execs
Bitching about airline management has long been a favorite way to pass the hours in the cockpit. It’s almost mandatory. Nearly every major airline pilot knows he can run an airline better than the folks in charge. Griping about airline bosses—how little they do for how much they make, “how great it used to be” at the airline—is more than a constant source of cockpit chatter; it’s practically the lingua franca of pilots worldwide.
The Scheduling Game
When and where pilots fly, what days they have off, where they fly to, is determined monthly at most airlines through an elaborate, seniority-based “bid” system that everybody tries to game. Beating the system means everything from stringing together the most consecutive days off to avoiding working the most weekends to scoring a weekend layover in Paris or Bali, not to mention being home for the family graduation or anniversary or Little League championship. The game can border on the obsessive. Two Northwest pilots overflew their Minneapolis destination by nearly 150 miles in 2009 when they were apparently so busy playing with new scheduling software on their laptops that they forgot where they were flying. Their explanation for 78 minutes of radio silence was entirely believable to those in the business.
Distractions—Food, Sex, and the Written Word
Sometimes sick of talk, pilots read. FAA rules limit cockpit reading to “publications … related to the proper conduct of the flight,” at least during what the FAA calls the “critical phases of flight”—taxi, takeoff, landing, and generally flight below 10,000 feet—but some pilots give that a liberal interpretation once the plane is cruising at altitude. Besides, the back page of USA Today includes a map of national weather; what could be more relevant to flying? If you happen to also glance at the sports scores inside the paper hours out over the ocean, who’s to know?
The FAA’s “sterile cockpit” rule prohibits “nonessential” activity such as eating or chatting or reading during those critical phases, but once the plane is safely en route, it’s an open secret that pilots read almost anything—at least as long as it doesn’t absorb their attention. Beyond flight manuals and FAA notices, that can include car and airplane magazines, crosswords, maybe even a little light porn. (Female pilots have filed sexual harassment lawsuits alleging they found trashy stuff left behind by preceding crews). But heavy reading is frowned upon. Studying law books to prepare for the bar exam is considered too distracting.
Newer electronic distractions—like personal laptops and smart phones—present a temptation, too. They can’t come out during the “sterile” parts of the flight, and some airlines ban them altogether. On the other hand, the FAA in late 2011 allowed American Airlines pilots to substitute iPads for pounds of bulky paper navigation charts and flight manuals they’re otherwise required to carry; these “electronic flight bags” are likely to proliferate. For less “official” electronics, though, real-world practice seems to vary, at least on long flights. Does it ever happen that DVDs show up in cockpits on long overnight flights over the ocean when boredom can be overwhelming? Well, there are electric power outlets in the cockpits, and laptops fit nicely propped up on the cockpit glare shield; pilots concede it’s not unheard-of. “The copilot is looking to the captain,” says an Atlanta-based pilot who flies long-haul. “What if the captain asks if there’s anything good on Netflix?” The FAA was concerned enough to issue a carefully worded notice to the airlines in April 2010 to emphasize that distracting personal electronic devices in the cockpit can “constitute a safety risk.”
Another distraction that captures the imagination, though undeservedly, is cockpit sex. It’s a fantasy—even if that doesn’t mean it never, ever happens. In August 2011, for instance, a photo surfaced of an accommodating Cathay Pacific flight attendant apparently “pleasuring” a pilot in the cockpit—though there was no evidence it was actually in flight. The sedate New York Times reported the individuals were “in decidedly compromising positions.” Allegedly stolen from the pilot’s laptop, the photo quickly went viral, forcing the eminent Hong Kong airline to halt a multimillion-dollar international advertising campaign featuring the slogan “Meet the Team Who Go the Extra Mile to Make You Feel Special.” That incident aside, forget the male fantasies of unattached young hotties cavorting in the cockpit. Multiple rounds of US airline employment cuts have raised flight attendants’ median age from 30 in 1980 to 44 in 2007; in 2012, American’s averaged about 51 years old.
A more mundane cockpit time-killer is eating. What pilots consume depends partly on what their unions negotiate with each airline, partly on what cash-strapped flight attendants haven’t wolfed down first. Some enjoy First Class fare; others make do with “crew meals”—a kind of hybrid that still involves some aspects of “real” food.
Eating in the cockpit still has its rituals. In the days of unreliable refrigeration and iffy catering, pilots and copilots were not allowed to eat the same meal (seniority got first choice), and sometimes had to stagger their mealtimes. The reasoning: if the first eater survives for a couple of hours, odds are that the other pilot won’t keel over from eating the dish. That’s still the case in some international destinations for certain food. Flying out of a Southeast Asian hub on a big US airline, only one pilot gets the seafood. Still, food poisoning is rare. An FAA study of pilot “incapacitation” in the cockpit released in 2004 found that only two out of 39 incidents during a five-year period were potentially due to food poisoning. Domestic pilots living on airport fast food were probably poisoned just as often.
Struggling Against Sleep
Even with all the talking and eating and griping and reading, during that fourth or fifth engine-droning hour across the Pacific at night, a quick nap can be almost physiologically irresistible—particularly when your internal clock says it’s three a.m., the autopilot is engaged, and only the soft, warm glow of the instruments lights the nearly silent cockpit. That’s when one pilot tells the other he intends to “meditate” for a while … with his eyes closed. Or that he plans to take a “flight management respite” or “study the back of [his] eyeballs” or lie back and “examine the circuit breakers” whose switches lie just above his head on the ceiling instrument panel. Occasional cockpit napping—albeit in violation of FAA rules—is no secret in the trade.
By contrast, on ultra-long-haul flights, the FAA wants pilots to sleep—just not while they’re at the controls. Regulations require “augmented” crews (normally, an extra pilot) for very long flights, even an entire second crew (a total of four pilots) for those 16-hour trans-Pacific jaunts, and there need to be “adequate sleeping facilities” for relief pilots. A reserved First Class seat will do, but that costs the airline serious lost revenue, so large intercontinental jets are designed with hideaway sleeping nooks for crew that passengers never see. Depending on the airline, crews on extended-range Boeing 777s, for instance, rest in bunks in “upstairs” space above the coach cabin. (There’s a special escape hatch down to the main cabin; look for the “dummy” overhead luggage compartment above a coach seat in the far back.) Up a narrow stairway near the tail of new-model Boeing 747s, over the rear lavatories, there’s a place for eight flight-attendant bunks, each six and a half feet long by 30 inches wide, almost a twin bed.
For the longest of the long-range jets, sleeping accommodations for pilots can be pretty comfy, depending on the aircraft and how the airline configures it. The 787 features a “loft” space for cabin crew above the main cabin, reached by a small ladder; there’s also a pilot-only double bunk just behind the cockpit. Meanwhile pilots on some of Airbus’s new 9,000-mile-range jets enjoy their own enclosed bedrooms, complete with proper-sized bed, comfortable seat and reading light, in-flight entertainment, and a pilots-only lavatory. On the A380 and the A340, the world’s longest-range commercial airliners, look just behind the cockpit.
Just in case, though, long-range planes like the Boeing 777 and 747-400 have fail-safe mechanisms to keep pilots awake and alert. A “crew alertness monitor” pops up a visual caution message—“pilot response”—on the cockpit computer screen if the aircraft’s controls or switches or radios aren’t touched for a preset period of time, say 15 to 20 minutes. A few minutes later, if there’s still no activity, a cautionary beeper sounds. If there’s still no response after 30 minutes or so, all hell breaks loose; a loud and continuous “wailer” alarm goes off—an especially rude awakening.
When the Cockpit Goes Wrong
It’s rare, but even pilots, these icons of calm and stability, sometimes behave badly, miscommunicate, or just screw up.
Pilot intoxication—by drugs or booze—is an obvious, if rare, concern. Denzel Washington’s cinematic antics in the movie Flight aside, the last major crash in the United States known to involve alcohol occurred in 1977, when a Japan Airlines DC-8 cargo jet crashed on takeoff at Anchorage, according to a report by Alan Levin in USA Today. The rule for pilots is simple: at least eight hours “from bottle to throttle.” (Some airlines require 12 hours.) And blood alcohol levels in the United States must be below .04 percent—half the legal limit in most states for driving a car. Airlines can have their own tougher zero-tolerance rules; some suspend pilots with just .02 blood alcohol. (Half a glass of beer is roughly at the limit in the UK.) Violators face severe punishment. Beyond firing and disgrace, there are criminal sanctions—15 years in federal prison is the penalty for operating a common carrier under the influence.
Still, it happens. Of 11,000 vocational pilots tested at random each year, a dozen or so fail, which translates to a one-in-a-thousand chance of having a pilot with a problem, even if not obviously impaired. That said, nobody in aviation hesitates to turn in a pilot smelling of booze, be they security screeners, fellow employees, or passengers, though there have been some close calls abroad. Like the Aeroflot flight to New York in December 2008, where Moscow passengers refused to take their seats aboard the Boeing 767 after the pilot slurred and garbled his “welcomeaboard” greeting. The airline blamed the mutiny on the passengers’ “mass psychosis” but nonetheless found a new crew, according to press reports. (According to the London Telegraph, a Moscow Times correspondent on the plane reported that a carrier representative reassured concerned passengers that “it’s not such a big deal if the pilot is drunk. . . . Really all he has to do is press a button and the plane flies itself.”)
Alcohol is one thing, but when pilots lose it psychologically, it shakes our faith in their deserved reputation for preternatural cool. After all, many have endured high-stress flying, handling a fighter jet in tight formations, landing on aircraft carriers at night in rolling seas, some even certified in the military to transport nuclear weapons. So pilot freakouts like the March 2012 incident involving a 49-year-old JetBlue captain who had to be locked out of the cockpit and restrained are incredibly rare. During the New York–Las Vegas flight, he told his first officer, “We’re not going to Las Vegas,” followed ominously by “We need to take a leap of faith.” On the other hand, airline pilots don’t typically get rigorous psychological evaluations once they’re hired.
The chilling story of Egyptair Flight 990 still haunts the profession. On Halloween Night 1999, the Boeing 767 crashed into the ocean 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, en route from New York to Cairo. The NTSB found nothing wrong with the aircraft. Instead, it concluded that the first officer had committed an act of mass suicide-homicide. In the drily analytic language of the official post-crash findings, the plane’s “impact with the Atlantic Ocean” was “a result of the [copilot’s] flight control inputs.” The reason for his action was officially not determined, but the cockpit audiotapes revealed that, when he was alone in the cockpit, the first officer disconnected the autopilot, shut down the engines, and put the plane into a dive. Then he calmly repeated—11 times—“Tawakalt ala Allah.” Translation: “I rely on God.”
Possible suicidal impulses aside, a more subtle kind of cockpit dysfunction has long been seen as a serious, sometimes fatal, safety issue. The psychobabble term—“cockpit resource management”—covers a lot of ground, but it’s all about how pilots interact with each other and with the complexities of the airplane, how they communicate and make piloting decisions, prioritize problems, and delegate tasks in a crisis; how flight problems get solved or not. The 1978 crash of United Flight 173 brought the issue into stark focus. On approach to Portland from Denver, the crew of the DC-8 became preoccupied by an instrument-panel light that had failed to illuminate to confirm that the landing gear was down and locked. They were so engrossed in diagnosing the landing-gear problem that the plane was left to circle the airport for an hour. It simply ran out of fuel and hit fir trees and electric power lines short of the runway.
The spectacular crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac River on takeoff in a Washington, DC, snowstorm in January 1982 is still the textbook example of failed cockpit teamwork, though. As the plane accelerated down the runway to take off, ice-clogged exterior sensors generated cockpit readings that overstated the plane’s actual engine thrust. Throughout the Boeing 737’s takeoff roll, the copilot tried to warn that the instrument readings showing adequate engine takeoff power were exaggerated, but he ultimately deferred to the flying pilot’s misplaced faith in their accuracy. Here’s the cockpit voice recorder transcript from AVweb.com:
| 15:59:51 | CA (Captain): It’s spooled. Real cold, real cold. |
| 15:59:58 | F/O (First Officer): God, look at that thing. That don’t seem right, does it? Uh, that’s not right. |
| 16:00:09 | CA: Yes it is, there’s eighty [knots of speed]. |
| 16:00:10 | F/O: Naw, I don’t think that’s right. Ah, maybe it is. |
| 16:00:21 | CA: Hundred and twenty [knots]. |
| 16:00:23 | F/O: I don’t know. |
| 16:00:31 | CA: V-One [the takeoff “decision” point]. Easy, V-Two [the rotation point] |
| 16:00:39 | [Sound of stick shaker—a device that noisily vibrates the control yoke to warn of an imminent stall—starts and continues until impact] |
| 16:00:41 | Tower: Palm 90 contact departure control. |
| 16:00:45 | CA: Forward, forward, easy. We only want five hundred [feet of altitude]. |
| 16:00:48 | CA: Come on forward … forward, just barely climb. |
| 16:00:59 | CA: Stalling, we’re falling! |
| 16:01:00 | F/O: Larry, we’re going down, Larry.… |
| 16:01:01 | CA: I know it. |
| 16:01:01 | [Sound of impact] |
The Air Florida captain wasn’t really hearing his copilot’s reservations about the takeoff speed, but a deeper issue troubled safety experts: the copilot, assessing the problem correctly, couldn’t bring himself to overcome the ingrained deference to his superior and just grab the controls. The airline paradigm, after all, is military and hierarchical—that’s why they’re called “captains” and wear more stripes on their sleeves. And in military flying, where most senior airline pilots still come from, the chain of command is sacrosanct. Today there’s much greater focus and training on how pilots work together and communicate in the cockpit. In the past, says an experienced Delta captain, “the first officer would watch [his captain] fly into a mountain before he would say something. Today he’ll speak up quickly when he sees a deviation.” But “that doesn’t mean we take a vote” on how to fly, he quickly adds.
Communication lapses inside the cockpit can amplify subtle failures to communicate with ground controllers and accumulate to trigger disaster. Look no further than history’s deadliest airline accident, when two fully loaded jumbo jets collided on a fog-shrouded runway in the Canary Islands in March 1977. A KLM flight taking off from one end of the runway hit the top of the Pan Am plane taxiing in the opposite direction. The senior KLM captain mistakenly assumed the Pan Am plane had already left the single runway and that his Boeing 747 had clearance to take off, even though members of his own flight crew were in doubt and initially questioned the captain’s misunderstanding. Amid a cascade of other communication errors, the copilot, age 32, seemingly hesitated to repeatedly challenge his superior. The final words on the cockpit voice recorder came from the Pan Am captain staring into the onrushing lights of the KLM jumbo jet: “Goddamn, that son-of-a-bitch is coming straight at us!” Six seconds later came the KLM captain’s reputed last words, a phrase not uncommonly heard on post-crash voice recorders: “Oh, shit.” Pilots are now required to “read back” to controllers what they’ve been told to do, to confirm that they hear and understand the instructions. A simple acknowledgment won’t do when dozens of planes are sharing the same radio frequencies near busy hubs at rush hour. Just answering “Roger” is mostly for Hollywood.
Sometimes in international flying, the communication problem is as basic as simple language comprehension. Take the 1993 crash of a US-made China Northern Airlines MD-80 in a fog at Urumqi in northwest China. About 10 seconds before impact, the Chinese pilots heard an audio alarm from the plane’s ground proximity warning system indicating that the plane’s landing approach was dangerously steep. The cockpit voice recorder picked up the pilot’s last words in Chinese: “What does ‘pull up’ mean?” In 2008, English became the official (not just traditional) worldwide language of aviation—required of international pilots and controllers everywhere.