In the mid-1960s, aerodynamicists at Boeing faced a momentous task. Their assignment: to build the largest commercial jetliner ever conceived—one that would feature twice the tonnage and capacity of any existing plane—and make it pretty. Where to begin?
Well, specifically, you begin in the front and in the back. “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems,” explains the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in an issue of The New Yorker. “How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky—the top and the bottom, in other words.” Thinking of a jetliner as a horizontal skyscraper, we see that its beauty is gained or lost chiefly through the sculpting of the nose and tail. The engineers at Boeing understood Goldberger’s point exactly, and the airplane they came up with, the iconic 747, is an aesthetic equal of the grandest Manhattan skyscraper.
It’s perhaps telling that today, strictly from memory, with only the aid of a pencil and a lifetime of watching airplanes, I am able to sketch the fore and aft sections of the 747 with surprising ease and accuracy. This is not a testament to my drawing skills, believe me. Rather, it’s a natural demonstration of the elegant, almost organic flow of the jet’s profile.
The tail rises to greater than 60 feet. Though it’s essentially a six-story aluminum billboard, there’s something sexy in the fin’s cant, like the angled foresail of a schooner. Up front, it’s hard to look at a 747 without focusing on the plane’s most recognizable feature—its second-story penthouse deck. The 747 is often—and unfairly—described as “bubble-topped” or “humpbacked.” In truth, the upper-deck annex is smoothly integral to the fuselage, tapering forward to a stately and assertive prow. The plane looks less like an airliner than it does an ocean liner in the classic QE2 mold. There is something poetic and proud even in the name itself—the rakish tilt of the 7s and the lyrical, palindromic ring: seven-forty-seven.
The 747 was built for a market—high capacity, long haul—that technically didn’t exist yet. By the end of the 1960s, no shortage of people craved the opportunity to travel nonstop over great distances, but no plane was big enough, or had enough range, to make it affordable. Boeing’s 707, a kind of 747 in miniature, had ushered in the Jet Age several years earlier, but its economies of scale were limited. Juan Trippe, the visionary leader of Pan Am who’d been at the vanguard of the 707 project, persuaded Boeing that not only was an airplane with twice the 707’s capacity possible—it was a revolution waiting to happen.
He was right, even if vindication didn’t come easy. Boeing took a chance and built Trippe his superjet, nearly bankrupting itself in the process. Early-on engine problems were a costly embarrassment, and sales were alarmingly slow at the outset. But on January 21, 1970, Pan Am’s Clipper Victor (see Tenerife story) made the maiden voyage on the New York–London milk run, and the dynamics of global air travel were changed forever. It’s not a stretch to consider the advent of the 747 as the most crucial turning point in the history of civil aviation. For the first time, millions of flyers were able to cover tremendous distances at great speed—at affordable fares. Fast-forward forty years, and the 747 is one of the bestselling airliners of all time. Of all passenger jets still in production, only its little brother, the 737, has sold more copies.
In the second grade, my two favorite toys were both 747s. The first was an inflatable replica, similar to those novelty balloons you buy at parades, with rubbery wings that drooped in such violation of the real thing that I taped them into proper position. To a sevenyear-old, the toy seemed enormous, like my own personal Macy’s float. The second was a plastic model about 12 inches long. Like the balloon, it was decked out in the livery of Pan Am. One side of the fuselage was made of clear polystyrene, through which the entire interior, row by row, could be viewed. I can still picture exactly the blue and red pastels of the tiny chairs.
Modeled in perfect miniature near the toy plane’s nose was a blue spiral staircase. Early version 747s were outfitted with a set of spiral stairs connecting the main and upper decks. It gave the entranceway the look and feel of a lobby, like the grand vestibule of a cruise ship. In 1982, on my inaugural trip on a real 747, I beamed at my first glimpse of that winding column. Those stairs are in my blood—a genetic helix spinning upward to a kind of pilot Nirvana. (Alas, later-variant 747s adopted a traditional, ladder-style staircase.)
In the 1990s, Boeing ran a magazine advertisement for its 747. The ad was a two-pager, with a nose-on silhouette of the plane against a dusky sunset. “Where/does this/take you?” asked Boeing in staggered script across the centerfold. Below this dreamy triptych the text read: “A stone monastery in the shadow of a Himalayan peak. A cluster of tents on the sweep of the Serengeti plains. The Boeing 747 was made for places like these. Distant places filled with adventure, romance, and discovery.” I so related to this syrupy bit of PR that I clipped it from the magazine and kept it in a folder. Whenever it seemed my career was going nowhere (which was all the time), I’d pull out the ad and look at it.
The nature and travel writer Barry Lopez once authored an essay in which, from inside the hull of an empty 747 freighter, he compares the aircraft to the quintessential symbol of another era—the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe. “Standing on the main deck,” Lopez writes, “where ‘nave’ meets ‘transept,’ and looking up toward the pilots’ ‘chancel.’ … The machine was magnificent, beautiful, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations.”
No other airplane could arouse a comparison like that. The 747 is arguably the most impressive and inspirational work of art—call it industrial art, if you must—ever produced by commercial aviation.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, designers seem to be thinking in different directions. “Air does not yield to style” is a refrain attributed some years ago to an engineer at Airbus, the European collective that is Boeing’s main competitor. Right or wrong, he was addressing the fact that modern aircraft designs have become so bland and uninspired as to be nearly indistinguishable from one another. In addition to the 747, Jet Age romantics recall the provocative curves of the Caravelle, the urbane superiority of Concorde, the gothic confidence of the 727. Planes don’t look like this anymore. They’re a lot less distinctive. And this, we’re told, is because in the name of efficiency and economy, they have to be.
But is this really the case, or is Airbus being lazy? The 747 is one of several good-looking planes to emerge from Boeing since the 1970s, yet Airbus has given us only one true head-turner—its long-range A340. It has produced a line of aircraft at once technologically exquisite and visually banal. At best, Airbus’s philosophy seems centered around a belief that not enough people think air travel is boring. (It’s a peculiar cultural juxtaposition—the Americans elite and tasteful, trumping those boorish Europeans. Who knew?)
I was once standing in an airport boarding lounge when a group of young women, seated near a window, began giggling as a small jetliner passed by the window. “Check out that goofy plane,” said one of them. It was an Airbus A319, which you have to admit looks vaguely, well, dwarfish—as if it popped from an Airbus vending machine or hatched from an egg.
Bad enough, but the pinnacle of aesthetic disregard was achieved upon rollout of Airbus’s biggest and most ballyhooed creation: the enormous, double-decked A380. With a maximum takeoff weight of more than a million pounds, the Airbus A380 is the largest, most powerful, and most expensive commercial plane in history.
And possibly the ugliest. There is something grotesquely anthropomorphic about the front of the A380, its abruptly pitched forehead calling to mind a steroidal beluga. The rest of the plane is bloated, swollen, and graceless. It’s big for big’s sake, yet at the same time conveys an undignified squatness, as if embarrassed by its own girth. It is the most self-conscious-looking airliner I’ve ever seen.
And is it really that big? When the 747 debuted in 1970, it was more than double the size and weight of its closest competitor. The Airbus A380 weighs in at only about 30 percent heavier than a 747. Meanwhile, its well-publicized capacity limits of eight-hundred-plus passengers is likely to be seen only in rare, high-density configurations. With airlines concentrating on first- and business-cabin amenities, most A380s are set up for about five hundred riders—slightly more than most 747s. The A380 is big; revolutionary it’s not.
Though you wouldn’t know it listening to the media. The puffery got going in spring 2005, when the A380 took to the air for its maiden test flight. “The most anticipated flight since Concorde leapt from the pavement in 1969,” cried one news report. “Straight into the history books,” said another of the “gargantuan double-decked superjumbo.” Oh, the humanity. Over on the Airbus website, they were channeling Neil Armstrong, inviting visitors to listen to the “first words of chief test pilot Jacques Rosay.”
And what of the future? While the A380 was being doused with champagne and hyperbole, the 747 was flying into its fourth decade of operation. The bulbous new ’Bus wasn’t much to look at, but it was loaded with high-tech gadgetry and the lowest seat mile operating costs ever seen. The 747’s last substantial redesign had been in 1989, and for all its history, it was rapidly approaching obsolescence. Would the A380 soon be the only true jumbo jet?
Finally, in November 2005, as if the ghost of Juan Trippe himself (he died in 1981) had drifted down for a pep talk, Boeing made the move it should have made sooner, announcing that it would, after several false starts, go ahead and produce an advanced 747, designated the 747-8. (The nomenclature is a departure from Boeing’s usual ordered suffixing of -100, -200, -300, etc., but a wily overture to Asia, where the bulk of sales were expected and where the number eight is considered fortunate.) The plane entered service in early 2012. The freighter version, introduced by Luxembourg-based Cargolux, was first. Lufthansa debuted the passenger variant later in the year.
The passenger 747-8 has a fuselage stretch of 12 feet and room for about thirty-five additional seats. Those are minor enlargements, but extra seating is secondary. Boeing’s real mission was to upgrade the plane’s internal architecture to cutting-edge standards, drawing from advancements already in place on the 777 and 787. Airlines can bank on a 12 percent fuel efficiency advantage and an eye-popping 22 percent trip cost advantage over the Airbus.
The big question, though, is whether there is room out there for two jumbo jets. It remains to be seen whether the 747 and A380 can coexist in an industry in which long-haul markets have steadily fragmented, trending toward smaller planes, not bigger ones. The need for an ultra-high-capacity aircraft is still out there, but not in the numbers of times past.
One way that Boeing has hedged its bets is by showcasing a freighter option right from the start. Cargo variants typically arrive later, not first. The 747’s well-established history as an outstanding cargo-hauler ensures a certain sales buffer, should the passenger model stumble. And if the whole thing flops? Boeing has put up about $4 billion for the 747-8, with most of the R&D borrowed from prior, already-funded projects. Airbus spent three times that amount concocting the A380 from scratch.
But in my opinion, the best thing about the new 747 is the obvious one: the way it looks. Prominent tweaks include a futuristically raked wing, an extended upper deck, and scalloped engine nacelles that cover the engine and reduce noise, but from every angle, it remains true to the original profile. If anything, it’s prettier.
As a kid, watching a whole generation of planes go ugly in front of me, I often wondered: why can’t somebody take a classic airliner, apply some aerodynamic nip and tuck, imbue it with the latest technology, and give it new life? Not as a retro novelty project, but as a viable, profitable airliner. The 747-8 is that plane. Boeing’s back-tothe-future gamble may or may not make a profit, but either way it’s still pretty slick.
Over in Toulouse, Airbus swears that its A380 is no white elephant. And how can we not agree? Look at that forehead again; that’s not doing justice to the grace of elephants. Does air yield to style? Maybe that’s the wrong question, for obviously it yields to a little imagination and effort.
Epilogue: It was a friend of mine, not me, who became the first pilot I knew to fly a 747, setting off for Shanghai and Sydney while I flew to Hartford and Harrisburg. The closest I’ve gotten is the occasional upstairs seating assignment. The upper deck is a cozy room with an arched ceiling like the inside of a miniature hangar. I’ll recline up there, basking in the self-satisfaction of having made it, at least one way, up the spiral stairs.
I had an upper-deck seat to Nairobi once on British Airways. Prior to pushback I wandered into the cockpit unannounced, to have a look, thinking the guys might be interested to learn they had another pilot on board. They weren’t. I’d interrupted their checklist, and they asked me to go away and slammed the door. “Yes, we do mind,” said the second officer in a voice exactly like Graham Chapman’s.
Almost every jetliner sold in the world today comes from one of two camps: the storied Boeing Company, founded in Seattle in 1916, or the much younger Airbus consortium of Europe. It wasn’t always this way. For years we had McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and various throw-ins from North America and abroad: Convair, British Aerospace, Fokker. All those companies are gone now.
And we shan’t neglect the Russians. Things are quieter now, but the Soviet design bureaus of Antonov, Ilyushin, and Tupolev assembled tens of thousands of aircraft over the decades. While the bulk of these were Western knockoffs turned Cold War pumpkins, hundreds remain in service, and a handful of newer prototypes have been introduced.
America’s first jet was the Boeing 707, third in commercial service behind England’s star-crossed Comet and the Soviet Tu-104. The 707 debuted between Idlewild and Orly (that’s New York and Paris) with Pan Am in 1959. Boeing has since given us the 727 through 787. The number sequencing is merely chronology and has nothing to do with size. There also was a kind of short-bodied 707 called a 720. The 717 designation (see below), was reserved for a military version of the 707 but never used in that capacity.
The original Airbus product, the A300, didn’t debut until 1974. Subsequent models range from small twins like the A320 to long-ranging widebodies like the A330 and A340. The numbers follow a pattern similar to Boeing’s, but they jumped a few and haven’t kept as firm with the chronology. The A350, for example, is still under development, while the A380 has been flying since 2007. The A360 and A370 were skipped entirely; who knows why?
Minor variations of the Airbus numbering system are enough to drive a plane-spotter mad. The A300-600 is really just an extended A310. An A319 is nothing more (or less) than a smaller A320. It was shortened even further as the A318, then stretched again into an A321. This mishmash of numbers, in this traditionalist’s opinion, cheapens everything. That each model wasn’t simply given a “dash” suffix is irritating. On our side of the ocean, a 737-900 is still a 737.
But then, when Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and took over that company’s production lines, it took the MD-95, which was really just a souped-up MD-90, which was really just a souped-up MD-80, which was really just a souped-up DC-9, and rechristened it the Boeing 717. The DC-9, first flown in 1965, was now brand new, as it were, as the 717. That just isn’t right. McDonnell Douglas, for its part, had previously abandoned its popular DC prefix and switched to MD, scrambling up the digits for good measure. Everyone’s heard of a DC-9, but what the heck is an MD-80, MD-83, or MD-88? Answer: a modernized DC-9. Everyone’s heard of the DC-10, but what’s an MD-11? Answer: a modernized DC-10.
A lot of older planes carried non-numerical designations. Names, in other words. Most were good choices, understated and dignified: Constellation, Trident, Vanguard—and most memorably, Concorde. There was something so wonderfully evocative about the sound of that word: Concorde. It described the plane perfectly: sleek, fast, stylish, a little bit haughty and probably out of your league. Others used names in conjunction with numbers, like Lockheed’s L-1011 TriStar. There was also the British Aerospace One-Eleven, which in its proper spelled-out form was both a name and a number.
The 787 falls in the name-number combo category, though I’m not especially fond of the “Dreamliner” designation. Somehow the imagery there is a little too wobbly and ethereal. People don’t want their planes nodding off. It could have been worse, though. Back in 2003, before Boeing had settled on a name, Dreamliner was in contention with three other possibilities. They were: Global Cruiser, Stratoclimber, and eLiner. Global Cruiser sounds like a yacht or a really big SUV. Stratoclimber sounds like an action hero, and eLiner is almost too awful to contemplate—sort of like “iPlane.”
Regional jets—RJs as they’re known—come primarily from Canada’s Bombardier and Embraer of Brazil. China, Russia, and Japan have recently entered the field. Oddly, for all of their prowess in the big-plane market, American manufacturers have never developed an RJ. Older regional planes, including several turboprop models, have been exported from Canada (de Havilland), Sweden (Saab), Holland (Fokker), the UK (British Aerospace), Germany (Dornier), Spain (CASA), and Indonesia (IPTN). Even the Czechs (LET) manufactured a popular seventeen-seater.
Turbulence: spiller of coffee, jostler of luggage, filler of barf bags, rattler of nerves. But is it a crasher of planes? Judging by the reactions of many airline passengers, one would assume so; turbulence is far and away the number-one concern of anxious passengers. Intuitively, this makes sense. Everybody who steps on a plane is uneasy on some level, and there’s no more poignant reminder of flying’s innate precariousness than a good walloping at 37,000 feet. It’s easy to picture the airplane as a helpless dinghy in a stormy sea. Boats are occasionally swamped, capsized, or dashed into reefs by swells, so the same must hold true for airplanes. Everything about it seems dangerous.
Except that, in all but the rarest circumstances, it’s not. For all intents and purposes, a plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket. Conditions might be annoying and uncomfortable, but the plane is not going to crash. Turbulence is an aggravating nuisance for everybody, including the crew, but it’s also, for lack of a better term, normal. From a pilot’s perspective it is ordinarily seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue. When a flight changes altitude in search of smoother conditions, this is by and large in the interest of comfort. The pilots aren’t worried about the wings falling off; they’re trying to keep their customers relaxed and everybody’s coffee where it belongs. Planes themselves are engineered to take a remarkable amount of punishment, and they have to meet stress limits for both positive and negative G-loads. The level of turbulence required to dislodge an engine or bend a wing spar is something even the most frequent flyer—or pilot for that matter—won’t experience in a lifetime of traveling.
Altitude, bank, and pitch will change only slightly during turbulence—in the cockpit we see just a twitch on the altimeter—and inherent in the design of airliners is a trait known to pilots as “positive stability.” Should the aircraft be shoved from its position in space, its nature is to return there, on its own. I remember one night, headed to Europe, hitting some unusually rough air about halfway across the Atlantic. It was the kind of turbulence people tell their friends about. It came out of nowhere and lasted several minutes, and was bad enough to knock over carts in the galleys. During the worst of it, to the sound of crashing plates, I recalled an email. A reader had asked me about the displacement of altitude during times like this. How many feet is the plane actually moving up or down, and side to side? I kept a close watch on the altimeter. Fewer than forty feet, either way, is what I saw. Ten or twenty feet, if that, most of the time. Any change in heading—that is, the direction our nose was pointed—was all but undetectable. I imagine some passengers saw it differently, overestimating the roughness by orders of magnitude. “We dropped like 3,000 feet in two seconds!”
At times like this, pilots will slow to a designated “turbulence penetration speed” to ensure high-speed buffet protection (don’t ask) and prevent damage to the airframe. This speed is close to normal cruising speed, however, so you probably won’t notice the deceleration from your seat. We can also request higher or lower altitudes or ask for a revised routing. You’re liable to imagine the pilots in a sweaty lather: the captain barking orders, hands tight on the wheel as the ship lists from one side to another. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crew is not wrestling with the beast so much as merely riding things out. Indeed, one of the worst things a pilot could do during strong turbulence is try to fight it. Some autopilots have a special mode for these situations. Rather than increasing the number of corrective inputs, it does the opposite, desensitizing the system.
Up front, you can imagine a conversation going like this:
Pilot 1: “Well, why don’t we slow it down?” [dials a reduced Mach value into the speed control selector]
Pilot 2: “Ah, man, this is spilling my orange juice all down inside this cup holder.”
Pilot 1: “Let’s see if we can get any new reports from those guys up ahead.” [reaches for the microphone and double-checks the frequency]
Pilot 2: “Do you have any napkins over there?”
There will also be an announcement made to the passengers and a call to the cabin crew to make sure they are belted in. Pilots often request that flight attendants remain in their seats if things look menacing up ahead.
Predicting the where, when, and how much of turbulence is more of an art than a science. We take our cues from weather charts, radar returns, and, most useful of all, real-time reports from other aircraft. Some meteorological indicators are more reliable than others. For example, those burbling, cotton-ball cumulus clouds—particularly the anvil-topped variety that occur in conjunction with thunderstorms—are always a lumpy encounter. Flights over mountain ranges and through certain frontal boundaries will also get the cabin bells dinging, as will transiting a jet stream boundary. But every now and then it’s totally unforeseen. When we hit those bumps on the way to Europe that night, what info we had told us not to expect anything worse than mild chop. Later, in an area where stronger turbulence had been forecast, it was perfectly smooth. You just don’t know.
When we pass on reports to other crews, turbulence is graded from “light” to “extreme.” The worst encounters entail a postflight inspection by maintenance staff. There are definitions for each degree, but in practice the grades are awarded subjectively.
I’ve never been through an extreme, but I’ve had my share of moderates and a sprinkling of severes.
One of those severes took place in July 1992, when I was captain on a fifteen-passenger turboprop. It was, of all flights, a twentyfive-minute run from Boston to Portland, Maine. It had been a hot day, and by early evening, a forest of tightly packed cumulus towers stretched across eastern New England. The formations were short—about 8,000 feet at the tops, and deceptively pretty to look at. As the sun fell, it became one of the most picturesque skyscapes I’ve ever seen, with buildups in every direction forming a horizon-wide garden of pink coral columns. They were beautiful and, it turned out, quite violent—little volcanoes spewing out invisible updrafts. The pummeling came on with a vengeance until it felt like being stuck in an upside-down avalanche. Even with my shoulder harness pulled snug, I remember holding up a hand to brace myself, afraid my head might hit the ceiling. Minutes later, we landed safely in Portland. No damage, no injuries.
So that I’m not accused of sugarcoating, I concede that powerful turbulence has, on occasion, resulted in damage to aircraft and injury to their occupants. With respect to the latter, these are typically people who fell or were thrown about because they weren’t belted in. About sixty people, two-thirds of them flight attendants, are injured by turbulence annually in the United States. That works out to about twenty passengers. Twenty out of the 800 million or so who fly each year in this country.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that turbulence is becoming more prevalent as a byproduct of climate change. Turbulence is a symptom of the weather from which it spawns, and it stands to reason that as global warming intensifies certain patterns, experiences like the one I had over Maine will become more common.
Because turbulence is so unpredictable, I am known to provide annoying, noncommittal answers when asked how best to avoid it.
“Is it better to fly at night than during the day?” Sometimes.
“Should I avoid routes that traverse the Rockies or the Alps?” Hard to say.
“Are small planes more susceptible than larger ones?” It depends.
“They’re calling for gusty winds tomorrow. Will it be rough?” Probably, but who knows.
“Where should I sit, in the front of the plane or in the back?”
Ah, now that one I can work with.
While it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, the smoothest place to sit is over the wings, nearest to the plane’s centers of lift and gravity. The roughest spot is usually the far aft—the rearmost rows closest to the tail.
As many travelers already know, flight crews in the United States tend to be a lot more twitchy with the seat belt sign than those in other countries. We keep the sign on longer after takeoff, even when the air is smooth, and will switch it on again at the slightest jolt or burble. In some respects, this is another example of American overprotectiveness, but there are legitimate liability concerns. The last thing a captain wants is the FAA breathing down his neck for not having the sign on when somebody breaks an ankle and sues. Unfortunately, there’s a cry-wolf aspect to this; people get so accustomed to the sign dinging on and off, seemingly without reason, that they ignore it altogether.
If you can picture the cleaved roil of water that trails behind a boat or ship, you’ve got the right idea. With aircraft, this effect is exacerbated by a pair of vortices that spin from the wingtips. At the wings’ outermost extremities, the higher-pressure air beneath is drawn toward the lower pressure air on top, resulting in a tight, circular flow that trails behind the aircraft like a pronged pair of sideways tornadoes. The vortices are most pronounced when a plane is slow and the wings are working hardest to produce lift. Thus, prime time for encountering them is during approach or departure. As they rotate—at speeds that can top 300 feet per second—they begin to diverge and sink. If you live near an airport, stake out a spot close to a runway and listen carefully as the planes pass overhead; you can often hear the vortices’ whip-like percussions as they drift toward the ground.
As a rule, bigger planes brew up bigger, most virulent wakes, and smaller planes are more vulnerable should they run into one. The worst offender is the Boeing 757. A mid-sized jet, the 757 isn’t nearly the size of a 747 or 777, but thanks to a nasty aerodynamic quirk it produces an outsized wake that, according to one study, is the most powerful of any airplane.
To avoid wake upsets, air traffic controllers are required to put extra spacing between large and small planes. For pilots, one technique is to slightly alter the approach or climb gradient, remaining above any vortices as they sink. Another trick is to use the wind. Gusts and choppy air will break up vortices or otherwise move them to one side. Winglets (see winglets) also are a factor. One of the ways these devices increase aerodynamic efficiency is by mitigating the severity of wingtip vortices. Thus a winglet-equipped plane tends to produce a more docile wake than a similarly sized plane without them.
Despite all the safeguards, at one time or another, every pilot has had a run-in with wake, be it the short bump-and-roll of a dying vortex or a full-force wrestling match. Such an encounter might last only a few seconds, but they can be memorable. For me, it happened in Philadelphia in 1994.
Ours was a long, lazy, straight-in approach to runway 27R from the east, our nineteen-seater packed to the gills. Traffic was light, the radio mostly quiet. At five miles out, we were cleared to land. The traffic we’d been following, a 757, had already cleared the runway and was taxiing toward the terminal. We’d been given our extra ATC spacing buffer, and just to be safe, we were keeping a tad high on the glide path. Our checklists were complete, and everything was normal.
At around 200 feet, only seconds from touchdown, with the approach light stanchions below and the fat white stripes of the threshold just ahead, came a quick and unusual nudge—as if we’d struck a pothole. Then, less than a second later, came the rest of it. Almost instantaneously, our 16,000-pound aircraft was up on one wing, in a 45-degree right bank.
It was the first officer’s leg to fly, but suddenly there were four hands on the yokes, turning to the left as hard as we could. Even with full opposite aileron—something never used in normal commercial flying—the ship kept rolling to the right. There we were, hanging sideways in the sky; everything in our power was telling the plane to go one way, and it insisted on going the other. A feeling of helplessness, of lack of control, is part and parcel of nervous flyer psychology. It’s an especially bad day when the pilots are experiencing the same uncertainty.
Then, as suddenly as it started, the madness stopped. In less than five seconds, before either of us could utter so much as an expletive, the plane came to its senses and rolled level.
As air flows around a wing at high velocity, its temperature and pressure change. If humidity levels are high enough, this causes the cores of the wingtip vortices described in the previous question to condense and become visible, writhing behind the plane like gray, vaporous snakes. Moisture will condense around other spots too, such as the flap fairings and engine attachment pylons. You’ll witness what appears to be a stream of white smoke pouring from the top of an engine during takeoff. This is water vapor caused by invisible currents around the pylon. Other times, the area just above the surface of the wing will suddenly flash into a white puff of localized cloud. Again, this is condensation brought on by the right combo of humidity, temperature, and pressure.
One of those buzzwords that scare the crap out of people, winds-hear is a sudden change in the direction and/or velocity of the wind. Although garden-variety shears are extremely common and almost never dangerous, encountering a powerful shear during takeoff or landing, when airplanes operate very close to their minimum allowable speeds, can be dangerous. Remember that a plane’s airspeed takes into account any existing headwind. If that velocity suddenly disappears or shifts to another direction, those knots are lost. Shears can happen vertically, horizontally, or both, as in the case of a micro-burst preceding a thunderstorm. Microbursts are intense, localized, downward-flowing columns of air spawned by storm fronts. As the air mass descends, it disperses outward in different directions.
Windshear got a lot of press in the 1970s and 1980s, when relatively little was known about them. The crash of Eastern flight 66 in New York in 1975 is considered the watershed accident after which experts began to study the phenomenon more carefully. Since then, windshear has become relatively easy to forecast and avoid. Major airports are now equipped with detection systems, as are planes. Pilots are trained in escape maneuvers and can recognize weather conditions that might be hazardous for takeoff or landing.
This would have been a “compressor stall,” a phenomenon where airflow through the engine is temporarily disrupted. The compressors of a jet or turboprop consist of a series of rotating airfoils—each blade is, in essence, a tiny wing—and if air stops flowing smoothly around these airfoils or back flows between the sequential stages, your compressor is stalling. It can damage an engine, but chances are it won’t.
Miscellaneous engine peculiarities, compressor stalls included, can sometimes put on a show. Aside from a bang, you might see a long tongue of flame shooting from the back, or even the front, of the cowling. Tough as it might be to accept, the engine is neither exploding nor on fire. This is the nature of a jet. Any time the engine is running, fuel is combusting, and certain anomalies will unleash this combustion rather boldly.
The stalling compressors of an Alaska Airlines 737 once made the news when, by chance, a burst of flame was captured by somebody’s camcorder on the ground. The video was alarming, but the stall was effectively harmless. And when this sort of thing happens at the gate or during taxi, passengers have been known to initiate their own evacuations. One such panic took place aboard a Delta plane in Tampa, Florida. A stampede of frightened passengers made for the exits, refusing to heed flight attendant commands. Two people were seriously hurt.
While it may surprise you, it’s not the least bit uncommon for jets to descend at what a pilot calls “flight idle,” with the engines run back to a zero-thrust condition. They’re still operating and powering crucial systems, but providing no push. You’ve been gliding many times without knowing it. It happens on just about every flight.
Obviously an idle-thrust glide is different from the engines quitting outright, but even then, the glide itself would be no different. There’s no greater prospect of instant calamity than switching off the engine in your car when coasting downhill. The car keeps going, and a plane will too. In fact, the power-off performance of a large jet is better than that of a light Piper or Cessna. It needs to glide at a considerably higher speed, but the ratio of distance covered to altitude lost—close to 20:1—is almost double. From 30,000 feet, you could plan on a hundred miles worth of glide.
Total engine loss is about as probable as a flight attendant volunteering to give you a shoe-shine, though it has happened. Culprits have included fuel exhaustion, volcanic ash, and impacts with birds. In several of these incidents, crews glided to a landing without a single fatality or injury. In other cases, one or more engines were restarted before reaching the ground.
Pressurization is one of those things that few folks understand and that many fear needlessly. Something about the word “pressurization” causes people to picture the upper altitudes as a kind of barometric hell. I’ve been asked, “If the plane wasn’t pressurized, would my eyes pop out?”
Cruising in an airplane is not the same as dropping to the Marianas Trench in a deep-sea diving bell. The cabin is not pressurized to keep your eyes in but to allow you to breathe normally at high altitudes, where the air is thin and oxygen levels are very low. The system uses air drawn from the compressors in the engines and regulated through valves in the fuselage to squeeze the rarified, high-altitude air back together, recreating the dense, oxygen-rich conditions at sea level. (Or close to it. Pressurizing all the way to sea level is unnecessary and would put undue stress on the airframe, so the atmosphere in a jet is actually kept at the equivalent of 5,000 to 8,000 feet, meaning that you’re breathing as you would in Denver or Mexico City—minus the pollution.)
That’s all there is to it.
Great, you’re thinking, but what about a loss of pressurization: the plastic masks dropping, people screaming…
Yes, a cabin decompression is potentially dangerous. During cruise, depending on the altitude, there’s a differential of somewhere between 5 and 8 pounds per square inch between the pressure inside the plane (high) and the pressure outside (lower). You can think of the fuselage as a sort of balloon, with up to 8 pounds of force pushing against every inch of it. Introduce a hole or a leak into the picture, and you’ve got a problem. Loss of pressure means loss of oxygen, and if this happens explosively, such as from a bomb, the resultant forces can damage or outright destroy the plane.
However, the overwhelming majority of decompressions are not the explosive kind, and they are easy for a crew to handle. Odd things have happened, such as the bizarre Helios Airways accident in 2005, but crashes or fatalities from pressure problems are extremely uncommon, even with a fairly rapid decompression brought on by a hole or puncture.
If cabin pressure falls below a certain threshold, the masks will deploy from the ceiling, exposing everybody to the so-called “rubber jungle.” Should you ever be confronted by this spectacle, try to avoid shrieking or falling into cardiac arrest. Instead, strap your mask on and try to relax. The plane will be at a safe altitude shortly, and there are several minutes of backup oxygen for everybody.
Up front, the pilots will don their own masks and commence a rapid descent to an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet. If the descent feels perilously fast, this isn’t because the plane is crashing: it’s because the crew is doing what it’s supposed to do. It might be jarring, but a high-speed emergency descent is not unsafe by itself.
One afternoon I was working a flight from South America to the United States. All was quiet high over the Caribbean, when suddenly there was a loud whooshing sound that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. I could feel my ears popping, and sure enough, a glance at the instruments showed we were quickly losing pressurization. The captain and I put our masks on, took out the book, and began to troubleshoot. Part of that troubleshooting involved one of those steep descents. Commencing such a drop is a multistep process: set 10,000 in the altitude window; select “flight level change” from the autoflight panel; increase the speed command to a point slightly below maximum; deploy the speedbrakes; retard the thrust levers to idle… To the passengers, I’m sure it felt like a roller coaster, but everything was carefully coordinated. The autopilot was engaged the whole time, and no limits were exceeded.
Should a pressure loss occur over mountains or other high terrain, pilots will follow predetermined depressurization routes, sometimes called “escape routes,” that allow for a more gradual descent, in stages. Even if crossing the Andes or the Himalayas, there is always the opportunity to reach a safe altitude before supplemental O2 runs out.
The short answer is no. No commercial aircraft is unsafe or anything remotely close to it. The long answer is more nuanced. Whether regional aircraft are, on some level, less safe than mainline jets is open to debate. There is no practical reason why anybody should outright avoid smaller planes, but it’s still a debate worth having:
Size, strictly speaking, isn’t the issue. I can’t speak to claustrophobia or absence of legroom, but there is almost nothing about an airplane’s size that correlates one way or the other to the likelihood of it crashing. A modern turboprop or regional jet can cost tens of millions of dollars, and if you haven’t noticed, that money isn’t going into catering and sleeper seats; it’s going toward the same high-tech avionics and cockpit advancements you’ll find in a Boeing or Airbus. These planes might be small, but quaint they are not. And, so you know, pilots bristle at the term “puddle jumper” the same way an environmental scientist bristles at “tree hugger.”
Of course, a plane is only as safe as the crew flying it, and there has been controversy over the training and experience levels of regional pilots. With wages and working conditions at regional carriers notoriously substandard, it has become increasingly difficult for these companies to recruit and retain experienced pilots. New hires have been brought aboard with surprisingly low flight time totals. More about this in chapter four (see regional pilots).
Love them or hate them, RJs are here to say. In the United States, RJs now account for more than 50 percent of all flights. There are literally dozens of different “Express” and “Connection” affiliates hitched up with the majors. Unbeknownst to most travelers, these carriers operate independently from the majors, sharing little more than a flight number and paint job. They are subcontractors, with entirely separate management structures, employees, and training departments.
If you’re impressed by big numbers, you’ll be grabbing for the high-lighter when you find out a 747 tops off its tanks at just over 45,000 total gallons. It takes around 11,000 to fill a 737 or A320. A fifty-seater with propellers might hold less than a thousand gallons. Paltry in comparison, but still enough to drive your car from Washington to California six times. Fuel is stored in the wings, in the center fuselage, and even in the tail or horizontal stabilizers. The cargo jet I used to fly had eight separate tanks, and much of my job was moving their contents around to keep them balanced.
Flights rarely depart with full tanks, however, as lugging around excess tonnage is expensive, impractical, and limits cargo or passenger payload. The amount to be carried is a somewhat scientific undertaking, with some hard-and-fast rules. Crews do not ballpark the load with a cursory glance at a gauge, as you might do in a car before a road trip. It’s the dispatchers and flight-planning staff who do the calculating, in strict accordance to a long list of regulations. They are intricate, especially when flying internationally, and can vary from country to country (a plane is beholden to its nation of registry, plus any local requirements if they’re more stringent), but the U.S. domestic rule is a good indicator of how conservatively things work: There must always be enough to carry a plane to its intended destination, then to its designated alternate airport(s), and then for at least another 45 minutes. The resulting minimum is nonnegotiable. Sometimes, if weather criteria so dictate (the particulars are very specific), two or more alternates need to be filed in a flight plan, upping the total accordingly. If traffic delays are expected, even more will be added. And although dispatchers and planners devise the figures, the captain has the final say and can request more still. Carrying surplus fuel costs money, but not nearly as much as the hassles of diverting.
The preflight paperwork includes a detailed breakdown of anticipated burn, which is carefully tracked once the flight is underway. Remaining fuel is compared to predetermined target values as the flight progresses from waypoint to waypoint. The totals are monitored by the crew and dispatchers, the latter receiving updates via datalink transmission. You have a solid idea, well in advance, of exactly how much fuel you’ll be landing with. If for some reason that number drops below or close to what’s legally required (unexpected headwinds, a mechanical issue), there’s ample time to plan a diversion.
Do airlines cheat to save money? You’ll periodically come across scandalous-sounding news stories describing planes dispatched with “reduced fuel loads,” allegedly resulting in unsafe situations when these flights are hit with delays and holding patterns. Carriers are, in some situations, cutting back on the carriage of extra fuel, which is heavy and expensive to haul around. But note the word extra. It’s the above-and-beyond fuel that airlines look to reduce, not regulatory fuel. While these cutbacks allow for less wiggle room, they are not dangerous. The penalty isn’t crashing; it’s having to divert earlier than you’d like, with logistical hassles for passengers and crew.
Given all of that, the idea of running the tanks dry would seem far-fetched. Yet a small number of fuel depletion accidents have occurred. Understanding how and why they occurred would entail pages of boring (for both of us) analysis that I haven’t the space to explore. These were once-in-a-billion mishaps. Most of them happened decades ago, and suffice it to say the stories were a lot more complicated than an airline being cheap or a copilot waking from a nap and exclaiming, “Holy shit, we’re almost out of gas.”
People will sometimes complain to authorities about what they take to be streams of jet fuel trailing behind airplanes low to the ground. What they’re actually looking at are trails of water vapor—the condensed cores of the vortices spinning from the wingtips (see wakes and vortices). This is common when humidity is high. You will sooner see sacks of hundred-dollar bills being heaved overboard than fuel being spit away for no good reason.
And then, yes, it’s to lighten the load. The maximum weight for takeoff is often greater than the one for landing—for a few reasons, the obvious one being that touching down puts higher stresses on an airframe than taking off. Normally, a suitable amount of fuel is burned away en route. Now, let’s say something happens after takeoff and a plane must return to the airport. If the trouble is urgent enough, the crew will go ahead and land heavy. But almost always there’s time to get within landing limits, and rather than tossing passengers or cargo overboard, the easiest way of doing this is to jettison fuel through plumbing in the wings. (I once had to dispose of more than 100,000 pounds this way over Northern Maine after an engine malfunction, a procedure that took many minutes and afforded me a lavish night’s stay at the Bangor Airport Hilton.) Dumping takes place at a high enough altitude to allow the kerosene to mist and dissipate long before it reaches the ground, and no, engine exhaust will not set the discharge aflame.
Not all airliners have this capability—just the bigger ones. The 747, the 777, the A340, and the A330 all can dump fuel. A 737, an A320, or an RJ cannot. These smaller jets must circle or, if need be, land overweight. For some, landing and takeoff limits are the same, in which case it doesn’t matter.
Know that nine times out of ten, a plane dumping fuel and executing a precautionary return is not in the throes of an actual emergency. The term “emergency landing” is used generically by passengers and the press. Crews must formally declare an emergency to air traffic control and will do so only in situations when time is critical, there’s the possibility of damage or injury, or aircraft status is uncertain. The great majority of precautionary landings, even those when fire engines are lined up along the runway, are just that: precautionary.
Planes are hit by lightning more frequently than you might expect—an individual jetliner is struck about once every two years, on average—and are designed accordingly. The energy does not travel through the cabin electrocuting the passengers; it is discharged overboard through the plane’s aluminum skin, which is an excellent electrical conductor. Once in a while there’s exterior damage—a superficial entry or exit wound—or minor injury to the plane’s electrical systems, but a strike typically leaves little or no evidence. In 1963, lightning caused a wing explosion aboard a Pan Am 707 over Maryland. Afterward, the FAA enforced several protective measures, including fuel tank modifications and the installation of discharge wicks aboard all aircraft.
In 1993, I was captaining a thirty-seven-seater when lightning from a tiny embedded cumulonimbus cell got us on the nose. What we felt and heard was little more than a dull flash and a thud. No warning lights flashed, no generators tripped off line. Our conversation went:
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” [shrug]
“Lightning?”
“Might have been.”
Mechanics would later find a black smudge on the forward fuselage.
Photos of what are taken to be duct-tape repairs are periodically passed around through email and posted on blogs, putting people in a frenzy. It always looks worse than it is. The material isn’t duct tape at all, but a heavy-duty aluminum bonding tape known as “speed tape,” used to patch superficial, noncritical components until more substantive repairs can be made later on. You’ll see it on flap fairings, winglets, gear doors, and the like. Speed tape costs hundreds of dollars per roll and is able to expand and contract through a wide range of temperatures.
This is a great illustration of what I like to call PEF, or Passenger Embellishment Factor, the phenomenon that accompanies so many accounts of dodgy takeoffs, supposed near misses, and so on. Earmark this page for the next time you’re subject to a water cooler tale like this one.
Not to belittle your powers of observation, but distances aloft can be hard to judge, and passengers have an extremely common habit of underestimating separation with other aircraft. During cruise, planes will always be a minimum of 1,000 feet apart vertically or three miles horizontally. Flights on the transoceanic track systems (see oceanic routings) frequently encounter one another more or less as you describe. It can be startling—a 747 is a big ship, and even from a thousand feet away it looks awfully close—but it’s perfectly safe and routine. The rules are different for takeoffs and landings. With simultaneous approaches to parallel runways, for instance, planes can be at the same altitude and a mile or less apart—though they remain under the very close watch of ATC and must also maintain visual contact with one another.
As for seeing people through the windows, this is classic PEF and something that I hear all the time. Even when an airplane is parked at the gate, a few feet away and stationary, it can be difficult to see anyone inside. Aloft, you have never been remotely close enough to another plane to see its occupants, trust me.
People have a habit of embellishing even the basic sensations of flight. They can’t always help it—nervous flyers especially—but the altitudes, speeds, and angles are perceived to be far more severe than they really are. During turbulence, people sense that an airplane is dropping hundreds of feet at a time, when in reality the displacement is seldom more than ten or twenty feet—barely a twitch on the altimeter (see turbulence). It’s similar with angles of bank and climb. A typical turn is made at around 15 degrees, and a steep one might be 25. The sharpest climb is about 20 degrees nose-up, and even a rapid descent is no more severe than 5 or 6 degrees nose-down.
I can see your letters: you will tell me that I’m lying, and how the plane you were on was definitely climbing at 45 degrees, and definitely banking at 60, and how you definitely saw people through the windows. And you’re definitely wrong. Sorry to sound so bossy, and I wish that I could take you into a cockpit and demonstrate. I’d show you what a 45-degree climb actually looks like, turning you green in the face. In a 60-degree turn, the G forces would be so strong that you’d hardly be able to lift your legs off the floor.
Bird strikes are common, and the damage tends to be minor or nonexistent—unless you’re looking at it from the bird’s point of view. As you’d expect, aircraft components are built to tolerate such impacts. You can see web videos of bird carcasses being fired from a sort of chicken-cannon to test the resistance of windshields, intakes, and so forth. I’ve personally experienced several strikes, and the result was, at worst, a minor dent or crease.
I should hardly have to mention, however, that strikes are occasionally dangerous. This is especially true when engines are involved, as we saw in 2009 when US Airways flight 1549 glided into the Hudson River after colliding with a flock of Canada geese. Modern turbofans are resilient, but they don’t take kindly to the ingestion of foreign objects, particularly those slamming into their rotating blades at high speeds. Birds don’t clog an engine but can bend or fracture the internal blades, causing power loss.
The heavier the bird, the greater the potential for harm. Flying at 250 knots—in the United States, that’s the maximum allowable speed below 10,000 feet, where most birds are found—hitting an average-sized goose will subject a plane to an impact force of over 50,000 pounds. Even small birds pose a threat if struck en masse. In 1960, an Eastern Airlines turboprop went down in Boston after an encounter with a flock of starlings.
Your next question, then, is why aren’t engines built with protective screens in front? Well, in addition to partially blocking the inflow of air, the screen would need to be large (presumably cone-shaped) and incredibly strong. Should it fail, now you’ve got a bird and pieces of metal going into the motor. The incidents above notwithstanding, the vast improbability of losing multiple engines to birds renders such a contraption impractical.
Ice or snow on an airplane is potentially very dangerous, especially when adhered to the wings. The devil isn’t the added weight, but the way it disrupts the flow of air over and around a wing’s carefully sculpted contours, destroying lift. You’ve also got slick runways to contend with and assorted other challenges.
Ice or snow piles up on a plane parked at the gate the way it piles up on your car. But while a cursory brushing is a safe enough remedy for driving, it doesn’t work for flying, when even a quarter-inch layer of frozen material can adversely alter airflow around the wing—highly important during takeoff, when speed is slow and lift margins are thin. To clean it away, planes are sprayed down with a heated mixture of water and glycol alcohol.
While it appears pretty casual to the passenger, the spraying procedure is a regimented, step-by-step process. Different fluid mixtures, varying in temperature and viscosity, are applied depending on conditions, often in combination. A plane might be hit with so-called Type I fluid to get rid of the bulk of accumulation, then further treated with Type IV, a stickier substance that wards off subsequent buildup. Pilots follow a checklist to ensure their plane is correctly configured for spraying. Usually the flaps and slats will be lowered to the takeoff position, with the APU providing power and the main engines shut down. The air-conditioning units will be switched off to keep the cabin free of fumes.
When deicing is complete, the ground crew will tell the pilots which types of fluid were used, as well as the exact time that treatment began. This allows us to keep track of something called a “holdover time.” If the holdover time is exceeded before the plane has a chance to take off, a second round of deicing may be required. The length of the holdover depends on the kind of fluids used, plus the rate and type of any active precipitation (dry snow, wet snow, ice pellets; light, moderate, heavy). We have charts to figure it out.
Deicing fluid isn’t especially corrosive, but neither is it the most environmentally friendly stuff in the world. And although it resembles apple cider or an apricot-strawberry puree, I wouldn’t drink it; certain types of glycol are poisonous. At upward of $5 a gallon, it is also very expensive. When you add in handling and storage costs, relieving a single jet of winter white can cost several thousand dollars. Another method is to tow aircraft into specially built hangars equipped with powerful, ceiling-mounted heat lamps. In some ways, this is a greener technique, though it uses hideous amounts of electricity.
Snow will not stick to an airplane during flight. Ice, however, is another story. Owing to airflow and aerodynamic forces, it tends to adhere to the thinner, lower profile areas and not to larger expanses. It will build on the forward edges of the wings and tail, around engine inlets, and on various antennae and probes. Left unchecked, it can damage engines, throw propeller assemblies off balance, and rob the wings of precious lift. In a worst-case scenario, it can induce a full-on aerodynamic stall—the point when a wing essentially ceases to fly.
The good news is that all affected surfaces are equipped with devices to keep them clear. On propeller-driven planes, pneumatically inflated “boots” will break ice from the leading edges of the wings and horizontal tail. On jets, hot air from the engine compressors is used instead, bled to the wings, tail, and engine intakes. Windshields, propeller blades, and various probes and sensors are kept warm electrically. These systems use redundant power sources and are separated into independently functioning zones to keep any one failure from affecting the entire plane.
Airframe ice comes in three basic flavors: rime, clear, and mixed. Rime is the common one, appearing as a sort of white fuzz. The rate at which ice accretes is graded from “trace” to “severe.” Severe icing, most commonly encountered when flying through freezing rain, is a killer. It’s also quite rare, and it tends to exist in thin bands that are easy to avoid or fly out of. On the whole, inflight icing is considerably more of a threat to smaller noncommercial planes than it is to airliners. Even in the heaviest precipitation, seeing more than a trace amount of rime on a jetliner is uncommon.
An icy runway is a slippery one, needless to say. Airports issue so-called “braking action reports” for each runway—even different portions of a runway—which pilots make careful note of, along with the latest wind and weather reports. Together, this data helps determine whether it’s safe to arrive or depart. Because there must always be adequate rollout distance on landing, as well adequate room to stop following an aborted takeoff, operations are prohibited when braking reports fall below a certain value or when snow, ice, or slush exceed certain depths. Takeoff and landing speeds, as well as the power and flap settings to be used, are often different in snowy weather than they are in dry weather. And if you’ve ever looked closely at a runway, you’ll see they are cut laterally by thousands of grooves spaced inches apart. This helps with traction, as do the sophisticated anti-skid systems found on modern planes.
I’ve made plenty of winter-weather landings. One thing that always surprises me is the way in which fresh snowfall can make a runway difficult to see and align yourself with. In normal conditions the runway sits in stark contrast to the pavement, grass, or whatever else is around it. When it’s snowing, everything is white. Runways are outfitted with an array of color-coded lighting. Most of the time you pay only cursory attention to these displays. That is, until the moment you break from a low overcast, just a few hundred feet over the ground with a half-mile of visibility, and find yourself confronted with a landscape of undifferentiated whiteness. Those lights and colors are suddenly very helpful.
There have been several tragedies over the years in which planes attempted takeoff with iced-over wings. Most recent was a 1991 USAir incident at LaGuardia. Nine years earlier was the infamous Air Florida disaster in Washington, DC, when in addition to ignoring buildup on the wings, the crew failed to run the engine anti-ice system, allowing frozen probes to give faulty thrust readings. On Halloween night in 1994, sixty-eight people died aboard American Eagle flight 4184, a crash attributed to a design flaw—since rectified—in the ATR-72’s deicing system. Numerous other planes have gone skidding off the end of snowy runways. Culprits have included erroneous weather or braking data, an unstable approach continued when it should have been broken off, the occasional malfunction, or any combination of those things.
I can’t tell you there will never be another ice-related accident. But I can assure you that airlines and their crews take icing a lot more seriously than they used to. We’ve learned a lot—much of it the hard way—and this has carried over into specific, formalized procedures that leave little to chance.
Several years back, I was on a train going from Malaysia into Thailand when I stepped into the restroom and lifted the toilet seat. I was presented with a mesmerizing view of gravel, dirt, and railroad ties, all passing rapidly beneath me. Those who travel will encounter this now and again, and maybe it’s people like us who get these nutty myths off and running. The answer is no. There is no way to jettison the contents of the lavatories during flight.
Intentionally, that is. A man in California once won a lawsuit after pieces of “blue ice” fell from a plane and came crashing through the skylight of his sailboat. A leak, extending from a toilet’s exterior nozzle fitting, caused runoff to freeze, build, and then drop like a neon ice bomb. If you think that’s bad, a 727 once suffered an engine separation after ingesting a frozen chunk of its own leaked toilet waste, inspiring the line “when the shit hits the turbofan.”
At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. (The truck driver’s job is even lousier than the copilot’s, but it pays better.) The driver then wheels around to the back of the airport and furtively offloads the waste in a ditch behind a parking lot.
In truth I don’t know what he does with it. Time to start a new urban legend.
Airplanes can depart with inoperative components—usually nonessential equipment carried in duplicate or triplicate—only in accordance with guidelines laid out in two thick manuals called the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) and Configuration Deviation List (CDL). Any component in these books is “deferrable,” as we put it, so long as any outlined stipulations are met. These stipulations can be quite restrictive. One of the first things a crew does after signing in for a trip is scan the paperwork for deferrals, making note of any pertinent restrictions. A malfunctioning anti-skid system, for example, might require a longer runway for takeoff and landing. The books are not contrived to allow airlines an easy hand at flying around with defective equipment. Many things, as you’d hope, are not deferrable at all, and any malfunctioning item must be repaired in a set number of days or flight hours. The captain has the final say and can refuse to accept any deferral if he or she feels it is unsafe.
The walk-around inspection, while useful, is a basic inspection not a whole lot different from checking your oil, tires, and wipers before a road trip. The most common discoveries are superficial dents, unlatched panels, minor leaks, and tire issues (cuts, scrapes, etc.). The more intensive preflight routine takes place in the cockpit. While you’re bottlenecked in the jet bridge, the various cockpit instruments and systems are being tested. Maintenance personnel also perform preflight and postflight checks, both interior and exterior, with special inspections and sign-offs required for over-water flights. Watch a plane dock, and you might spot one or more mechanics fanning out beneath it while another heads up front to consult with the crew and review the logbook, ensuring everything is set for the next departure.
If your concerns rest with cabin accouterments or particle emissions from older-generation engines, go ahead and gripe. But statistically, with respect to accidents, there is little correlation between service time and safety. Commercial aircraft are built to last more or less indefinitely—which is one of the reasons they’re so expensive—and it’s common for a jet to remain in service for thirty years or more.
The older a plane gets, the more and better care it needs in the hangar, and inspection criteria grow increasingly strict. Factors include the plane’s overall age, its total number of flight hours, and the accrued number of takeoffs and landings—“cycles” as they’re called. The FAA recently implemented tough new inspection and record-keeping procedures for certain geriatric aircraft, covering things like corrosion, metal fatigue, and wiring.
Surprisingly—or maybe not—U.S. airline fleets are the oldest on average. Asian, European, and Middle Eastern airlines have the newest. Many of American Airlines’s MD-80s were built in the 1980s. Delta Air Lines still cares for several DC-9s that date from the Age of Aquarius, acquired during its merger with Northwest.
“Retirement” is an ambiguous term with airplanes. Planes are sold, traded, or mothballed not because they’ve grown old and are falling apart, but because they’ve become uneconomical to operate. This may or may not be related to their date of construction. Take the case of Delta and American, who disposed of their MD-11s, yet plan to retain substantially older MD-80s and 767s for years to come. Aircraft are tailored to particular roles and markets, and there’s a fragile balance—tiny, shifting percentages of expenses and revenues—between whether it makes or loses money. Poor performance means quick exit to the sales block. To another carrier with different costs, routes, and needs, that same aircraft might be profitable.
Sometimes, when I hear the whine of jet engines, I think of the beach.
I don’t expect that to make sense to you—unless, like me, your childhood was defined by an infatuation with jetliners and summers spent at a beach directly below an approach course to a major airport.
That would be Revere Beach, in my case, just north of Boston, in the middle and late 1970s. Then, as now, the city of Revere was a gritty, in many ways charmless, place: rows of triple-deckers and block after block of two-story colonials garnished in gaudy wrought-iron. (Revere is a city so architecturally hopeless that it can never become gentrified or trendy in the way that other Boston suburbs have.) Irish and Italian families spoke in a tough, North Shore accent that had long ago forsaken the letter R. Shit-talking kids drove Camaros and Trans-Ams, the old country cornuto horns glinting over their chest hair.
Revere’s beach was the first public beach in the United States. Like the rest of the city, it wasn’t the kind of place that lent itself to niceties or sentimental descriptions. The roller coasters had long ago burned, and the boulevard was dotted by biker hangouts and the sort of honky-tonk bars that, as a kid, you never dared set foot in, no matter how bad you needed to use the bathroom. Seagulls swooped and gorged on the garbage toppling out of barrels and dumpsters.
But it had the sand, and water that was clean enough to swim in—with those long, flat, shimmering low tides that seemed to recede all the way past Nahant and into the horizon. We spent our summers here—nearly all of the weekends and many of the weekdays too. My parents would have the car packed by 10:00 a.m. I remember the folding chairs, the towels, and the endless supply of Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion, its oily coconut aroma mixed with the hot stink of sunbaked Oldsmobile leather.
I swam, dug around for crabs, and endured the requisite mud-ball fights with my friends. But for me, the real thrill was the airplanes. Revere Beach’s mile-long swath lines up almost perfectly with Logan International Airport’s runway 22L, the arrivals floating past at regular intervals, so low you’d think you could hit them with one of the discarded Michelob bottles poking out of the sand. I’d bring a notebook and log each plane as it screamed overhead.
They’d appear first as black smudges. You’d see the smoke—the snaking black trails of a 707 or DC-8 as it finally turned up over Salem or Marblehead. Then came the noise. The little kids, and grown-ups too, would cover their ears. People today don’t realize how earsplittingly loud the older-generation jets could be. And they were low, maybe 1,500 feet above the sand, getting lower and lower and lower until disappearing over the hill at Beachmont, just seconds from touchdown.
I remember all of them: TWA 707s and L-1011s in the old, twin-globe livery. United DC-8s and DC-10s in the ’70s-era bow-tie colors. Flying Tigers DC-8s and 747s. Allegheny DC-9s and BAC One-Elevens. Eastern’s 727 “Whisperjets” that did anything but whisper. Braniff, Piedmont, Capitol, and Seaboard World; TAP, North Central, Zantop, and Trans International. The term “regional jet” wouldn’t exist for at least another decade. Instead we had “commuter planes.” There was PBA and its Cessna 402s; Air New England’s Twin Otters and FH-227s; and Bar Harbor’s Beech-99s, Pilgrim, Empire, Ransome, and Downeast.
Fast-forward thirty years:
The arrivals pattern to 22L hasn’t changed. It still passes directly over Revere Beach. After I finally became an airline pilot, one of my biggest thrills was being at the controls on a 22L arrival into BOS, looking down at the same beach from which I spent a childhood looking up. But other things are different.
The demographics of the city and its beach have changed, for one. In the Revere of my youth, pretty much every last family was Italian, Irish, or some mix of the two. At the beach it was no different. Today, both the neighborhoods and the sand are a virtual United Nations of the North Shore. Those harsh, R-less accents are joined by voices in Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and Khmer. The muscle shirts, Italian horns, and shamrocks are still there, but those sunburned Irish complexions are contrasted against those from Somalia, Ghana, Haiti, and Morocco.
And overhead, those plumes of oily smoke are gone. The jets nowadays are cleaner, much quieter. And a lot less exciting. At age twelve, I could tell a DC-10 from an L-1011 when it was ten miles out. Every plane had its own distinct profile. Today’s jets are often indistinguishable even at close range, and the endless procession of Airbuses and RJs just doesn’t get the pulse going, or the sunbathers pointing, the way a 707 or a DC-8 would—its motors shrieking, black smoke spewing behind.
Revere itself has both gained and lost character over the years. The skies above, though, have mostly just lost it.