Brussels, Belgium, 1998
At midnight at the Brussels airport, three men in olive uniforms stand next to me at a checkpoint. They are straight and tall with skin like cinnamon—that distinct, horn-of-Africa brown. Their suits are crisp and spotless, with gold hash marks and sharply crested hats. The captain looks at his watch, and you can almost hear his sleeve, stiff as aluminum, snapping taut like a sheet.
I am tired and sweaty and the wheels of my luggage need oil. The three men nod without smiling. They are pilots, but the impression they make is closer to one of soldiers, of an elite military unit protecting some corrupt head of state. Surreptitiously I read the tags affixed to their cases, and I learn they are a crew from Ethiopian Airlines. Minutes earlier I’d spotted their jet parked on the mist-shrouded tarmac, its old-fashioned livery a throwback to an earlier, more prestigious time: three colored stripes twisting sharply into a lightning bolt, bisected by the figure of the Nubian lion. High on the tail, the letters EAL fill three diagonal flashes of red, yellow, and green.
I feel my pulse quicken. “Nice flight?” I ask the captain.
In perfect English, he answers. “Yes, not too bad, thank you.”
“Where did you come in from?”
“Addis,” he says. And of course he is referring to Addis Ababa, that mysterious Ethiopian capital. “By way of Bahrain,” he adds. He speaks quietly, flatly, but his voice is dark and full of command. He’s well over six feet, and it feels like he’s looking down at me from a great distance, sizing me up with the same grievous scrutiny he’d give a bank of approach lights appearing out of the Addis fog.
I look at the first officer, and it strikes me that he’s probably no older than twenty-five, a fact obscured by the seriousness of his uniform. I remember myself at that age, and I’m unable to decide in what amounts his presence mocks or impresses me. Here’s this young man who somehow rose from the rugged, war-torn highlands of East Africa to unprecedented dignity, carrying his nation’s flag to places like Rome and Moscow and Beijing. In his passenger cabin, Ethiopian traders, Russian bankers, and Eritrean warriors fling themselves to impossible corners of the world.
And the next time somebody asks why I chose to become an airline pilot, I’ll stammer and stare off, wishing I could just spit out the image of these three men in the doorway. I already know that later I will try to write this down, and when I do it will be impossible to find the right words.
But first is the matter of the Monster, which needs to be preflighted and prepared for the eight-hour crossing to New York.
From the van I catch sight of its ink-dark silhouette, out on the cargo pad, looming out of the murky Zaventem night. “Monster” is my affectionate nickname for the Douglas DC-8. Or not so affectionate, really, as I assume the lumbering hulk of metal is destined, one way or another, to kill me. Sure, it’s my first jet. And sure, it’s big. But it’s also ancient. The real airlines gave up flying these things nearly two decades ago, and the cockpit looks like something from a World War II Soviet submarine. Hell, the DC-7, its immediate and piston-powered predecessor, had a rudder covered not with aluminum or high-tech composite, but with fabric.
I’m the second officer—the flight engineer—and the preflight is all mine. I work at my own pace. Most guys can, even for an international run, get the DC-8 ready in less than an hour. I stretch it to a meditative ninety minutes. To me, there is, or there should be, something Zen about the act of preflighting.
It begins in the cockpit with a flip through the aircraft logbook, making sure the signoffs are there and taking note of items that have recently been deferred. This is followed by an intense, top-to-bottom panel check. Every radio, instrument, light bulb, and electronic box is given the once-over. Then I take a seat at the engineer’s panel—my office, as it were—highlighter in one hand and coffee cup in the other, running through the twenty-page flight plan, marking up the important parts: flight time, route, weather, alternates, fuel planning.
When all that’s done, I stock and set up the galley. Third in command on this trawler means preparing the food and emptying the trash. I don’t mind. The cooking duties are a welcome break from the headier duties up front.
Next is the exterior check, or the “walk-around,” as we call it. I circle the plane clockwise, eyeing the various lights, sensors, doors, and control surfaces. It’s a leisurely, almost peaceful stroll—except for the landing gear bays.
A look into the gear bay of a jetliner is, if nothing else, sobering—the prowess of human engineering starkly unmasked. We take for granted the ease and safety of howling through the air at 600 miles per hour, but a glimpse into the bays shows you just how complex and difficult it all is. An airplane is such a smooth, streamlined thing from afar. Down here, it’s an apocalyptic collection of cables, pumps, and ducts. I’m ostensibly checking the tires, inspecting the brakes, scanning for any wayward hydraulics. I’m also looking up at hideous nests of wires, impossible snarls of tubing, and struts thicker than tree trunks, shaking my head, wondering who in the name of heaven ever conceived of such a terrifying assemblage of machinery, and who would be stupid enough to trust it all.
Returning to the cockpit, my duties include monitoring and supervising the intake of fuel. This morning we’ll be needing 121,000 pounds of the stuff. That equates to 18,000 gallons, to be divided among eight tanks inside the wings and belly. En route, maintaining proper balance and engine feed requires periodic shifting. The tank valves are opened and shut by a row of eight hand-operated vertical levers that run across the lower portion of the second officer’s workstation. Trimming up the tanks, I look like a madman trying to play a pipe organ.
Working with lots of fuel means working with lots of numbers. They don’t require anything too elaborate—I’ll add them, subtract them, portion them in half or a quarter—but they are big, six-digit affairs that are constantly changing. That’s bad news for me because I’m terrible at math. It’s funny, because I often hear from aspiring pilots-to-be worried that below-average mathematics skills might keep them grounded. There’s a lingering assumption that airline pilots are required to demonstrate some sort of Newtonian genius before every takeoff—a vestige, maybe, from the days when airmen carried slide rules and practiced celestial navigation. “Dear Patrick, I’m a high school junior who hopes to become a pilot, but my B-minus in honors level pre-calculus has me worried. What should I do?”
What these people don’t realize is that I would have killed for a B-minus in elementary algebra. My final report card from St. John’s Prep, class of 1984, read something like this: B, B, B, A, D. That’s math at the end. I can only vaguely define what precalculus might be, and I frequently struggle to make change for a dollar or add up my Boggle scores without electronic assistance. Not to fear: I never graded lower than 97 percent on any FAA written exam, and my logbook records no math-related mishaps.
The basics are what pilots encounter. Routine arrival assignments demand some quickie mental arithmetic. Modern flight management systems will hash out descent profiles automatically, but on older planes you have to run the data in your brain: “Okay, if we need to be at 14,000 feet in 60 miles, assuming a 2,000 foot-per-minute descent and 320 knots groundspeed, at what point should we start down? It’s a sort of high-altitude SAT question, with ATC and the rest of your crew assuming you know the answer.
Thus, the most indispensable gauge in the DC-8 was not furnished by the designers at Douglas, who conceived this hideous ark back in the mid-1950s, when men were men and could fly and do long division at the same time. I’m referring to my $6.95 calculator from CVS—the one flight-bag accessory more indispensable than an emergency checklist, aircraft deicing guide, or bag of ramen noodles. Mine is marked with a Day-Glo orange sticker, affixed in mortal fear that I might otherwise leave it behind.
Fueling takes half an hour. And now, from outside, comes the diesel roar of a pallet-lifter. Out on the apron sits a disordered array of boxed and shrink-wrapped cargo, tonight about 50 tons of it, waiting to be packed on board. When it’s empty, a glance into the freight deck is like peering through a long, empty highway tunnel. I walk back there sometimes, imagining what that space must have looked like twenty or thirty years ago, when the plane carried passengers for Air Canada. In 1982, I flew to Jamaica with my family on an Air Canada DC-8. This very one, possibly.
Time for some noodles and one of those dreadful cucumber sandwiches from the snack tray. Just me and the Monster. These pre-departure routines have a way of enhancing our love/hate relationship. The DC-8 speaks to me. I will kill you, it says, if you don’t take proper care of me.
So, I take proper care.
In a drizzly predawn darkness, we lift off.
It’s eight-plus hours to New York. That’s nothing by modern standards, but still it’s a long time. We’re somewhere south of Iceland. I’ve got my shoes off. Foil trays of half-eaten chicken sit on the floor, and a trash bag is bursting with discarded cups and cans of Coke Light.
Transoceanic flying induces a unique feeling of loneliness. Out here, you are on your own; there is no radar coverage or conventional air traffic control. Flights are spaced apart by time and speed, sequenced along paths of latitude and longitude. We report our positions to monitoring stations hundreds, even thousands of miles away, silently via satellite link—or, in the case of the old DC-8, over high frequency radio. There’s something in the crackle and echo of an HF transmission that intensifies a sense of distance and isolation.
“Gander, Gander,” calls the captain. “DHL zero one one, position. Five eight north, three zero west at zero five zero four. Flight level three six zero. Estimate five eight north, four zero west at zero five four six. Next: five six north, five zero west. Mach decimal eight five. Fuel seven two decimal six, over?” That’s our current location, ETA for the next reporting fix, speed, altitude, and remaining fuel. A moment or two later comes the acknowledgment from a controller in far-off Newfoundland, his voice so faint he may as well be on the moon.
For the second officer, the cruise phase is pretty relaxed. There’s not much to do, and thoughts will wander—sometimes in the wrong direction, resulting in a distinctly maudlin karmic brew:
In an interview years ago, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut was asked how he’d choose to die. “In a plane crash on Mount Kilimanjaro,” was Vonnegut’s answer. And if you think about it, there’s something poetic, almost romantic about that—a jet getting lost in the fog, smacking into the side of that big Tanzanian mountain.
Granted, you’d be hard pressed to find people who think of airplane crashes as anything but the cold hard triumph of gravity over some hulking contraption, but for those of us in love with air travel there can be something almost mystical about them. It’s not the Hollywood stuff—the explosions, the fireballs, and all that. It’s a deeper thing that requires a context and the passage of time—the disaster as a nugget of history, spiced with drama and mystery. And not every crash can lay claim to this special aura. Lockerbie and Tenerife had it (see Tenerife story); ValuJet in the Everglades did not. Sometimes there’s mystique, and sometimes there’s nothing but the sorrow of a violent death.
This is what I’m pondering, midflight across the Atlantic Ocean. And it’s that latter category, I figure—that most mystique-less and prosaic of crashes—that awaits us, should we plummet to a sudden and watery doom. Three guys in a cargo plane? We’d be lucky to get a mention in the paper. Depressing.
A pilot’s worst nightmare, other than his airline going bankrupt or the caterers forgetting the meals, is an onboard fire. This old jet has two identical fire detector systems for its 150-foot-long upper cargo deck. These are rotary dial things with yellow annunciator bulbs at the bottom. The bulbs say: CARGO SMOKE. Of course, this is an airplane laid out when Eisenhower still had a combover, so guess what? Thanks for the heads-up, but there’s nothing to actually put the fire out with once it has been detected. (DC-8s are all but extinct and were taken out of the passenger-carrying business a long time ago, so don’t worry.) There are bigger, brighter lights in this cockpit, but it’s those square, innocuous-looking yellow lights that I do not ever want to see come on, particularly when the closest spot of land, two hours away, is the glaciered coast of Greenland.
I’m also aware, however, that in the compartment behind us are 20,000 pounds of fresh-cut flowers from Belgium and the Netherlands headed to America. The scent of the flowers has made the cockpit smell like baby powder. And it happens that when thousands of pounds of flowers are piled together, they tend to give off clouds of microscopic dust—tiny bits that fill the air like a fragrant cloud of powder. Meanwhile, the DC-8’s old-fashioned detectors are designed to detect not flames or heat, but smoke particles, and are very susceptible to false alarms triggered by dust or powder.
So I’m staring at the warning lights, waiting for them to tell me we’re on fire over the middle of the ocean. Or is it only dust? And I think about how, after planes crash at sea, they go out on a boat and toss flowers into the waves, and how if something happened and we found ourselves in a watery grave, we’d save everyone the trouble by spreading a veritable slick of tulips halfway to Labrador.
Making matters worse, the captain takes out a chart and starts playing with the GPS. “Ha!” he shouts. Bored and curious, he has plotted the exact latitude and longitude of the wreck of the Titanic, which is 40,000 feet below us (28,000 of air and 12,000 of salt water), just a short ride south of our course.
“Oh come on,” I say. “Don’t be doing stuff like that.”
I sit in front of my instrument panel—a wall of dials and switches, all arranged in a perfect working sequence, with a collective purpose nothing short of mechanical infallibility. Green lights, red lights, blue lights, circular windows with quivering white needles. In modern planes it’s all LED or liquid crystal, but these are the old-style analog gauges, which give the cockpit that U-Boat look. Old, and dizzyingly complex for just that reason. I slide back my seat and consider it all, with the criticism and respect an artist might give to his canvas.
In that moment I am a maestro of ordered technology. But if only you could see what lurks behind that console. The maintenance people sometimes take the panels off, and there’s pandemonium back there: wildly knotted bundles of wires and cables, like a spaghetti factory has exploded. Most people have never seen the guts of an airplane—those vast and complex blocks of machinery conspiring to fool gravity. When you look at the eyes of a pretty girl—that superficial beauty of an iris in the sunlight, do you consider the tangle of optic nerve behind it? And in that brain of hers, what is she thinking? Like a fire secretly smoldering behind me, amid all those flowers. And when it’s finally too late: CARGO SMOKE.
No, not this time. And a few hours later we’re safe at Kennedy.
And doesn’t it always end this way? Amazing that it all works, all those wires and pumps and moving parts—almost infallibly and every time. But it does, and that’s the point about these spooky ruminations. It’s our imagination, not our technology, that is prone to failure.
The other lesson here is that we’re all afraid of flying on some level and that it’s perfectly healthy to be that way. Particularly if you’re a pilot. Our job, in essence, is the management of contingency. Passengers will ask pilots if we’re ever frightened; do we consider the possibility that the next flight could be our last? This always has struck me as both a profound and asinine question. “Yes,” I’ll answer. “Of course I am scared. I am always scared.” You can take that with the wink it deserves, but nonetheless, it contains a nugget of truth. Fires, explosions, physics gone bad—all the nasty scenarios the simulator instructors love—it’s all there, coiled behind the instrument panel, waiting to spring in a game of comfortable, though never perfect odds. And the pilot’s role is to spring right back. Do pilots worry about crashing? Of course they do. As a matter of practicality, they have to. It’s their job. It’s in their best interest, and yours as well. 
Your tray has to be latched so that, in the event of an impact or sudden deceleration, you don’t impale yourself on it. Plus it allows a clear path to the aisle during an evacuation. The restriction on seat recline provides easier access to the aisles and also keeps your body in the safest position. It lessens whiplash-style injuries and prevents you from “submarining,” as it’s called, under the seat belt. Keep your belts low and tight. Nothing is more aggravating than hearing a passenger voice the theory that should a crash occur they are guaranteed to perish, so what’s the point? Most crashes do have survivors, and something as simple as a properly buckled belt could mean the difference between serious and minor injury.
Raising your window shade makes it easier for the flight attendants to assess any exterior hazards—fire, debris—that might interfere with an emergency evacuation. It also helps you remain oriented if there’s a sudden impact—rolling, tumbling, etc. Dimming the lights is part of the same strategy. Burning brightly, the glare would make it impossible to see outside. And by pre-adjusting your eyes, you won’t be suddenly blinded while dashing for the doors in darkness or smoke.
This pertains to twin-engine Airbus models: the A320 series (includes the subvariants A319 and A321) and the larger A330. In the United States, the largest operators of these types are Delta, United, jetBlue, and US Airways. Almost every frequent flyer has encountered this sound at one time or another. Crews rarely make efforts to explain it, leaving passengers befuddled and sometimes worried. Because the noise is akin to a motor repeatedly trying—and failing—to start, there’s often the assumption that something is malfunctioning.
What you hear is a device called the power transfer unit, or PTU, which is designed to ensure adequate hydraulic pressures during single-engine operations. To conserve fuel, it’s fairly routine for two-engine planes to taxi with an engine shut down. Each engine normally pressurizes its own hydraulic system, but with a motor not running, that leaves one system without a power source. That’s where the PTU comes in, helping left power the right, or right power the left. Since it is activated only when the pressure falls below a certain level, the PTU cycles on and off, on and off, on and off. Due to pressure fluctuations, the noise will sometimes continue even after both engines are up and running. It also does a self-test when the starboard engine is started, so you’ll hear it then as well. Some Boeing aircraft also employ a PTU, but the operation is slightly different and it doesn’t bark like a dog.
Another noise peculiar to Airbus models is a shrill, prolonged whine heard at the gate prior to departure and again after landing. This is an electric hydraulic pump used to open and close the cargo doors.
Filthy, germ-laden, rotten, disgusting, wretched, skanky, rancid, putrid, fetid, and fart-filled are just a few of the adjectives used to describe cabin air, and legion are the accounts of flyers allegedly made ill by microscopic pathogens circulating throughout a plane. In reality, the air is very clean.
On all modern aircraft, passengers and crew breathe a mixture of fresh and recirculated air. Using this combination rather than fresh air only makes it easier to regulate temperature and helps maintain a bit of humidity (more on the humidity in a moment). The supply is bled from the compressor sections of the engines. Compressed air is very hot, but the compressors only compress; there is no contact with fuel, oil, or combustion gasses. From there it is plumbed into air conditioning units for cooling. It’s then ducted into the cabin through louvers, vents, and the eyeball vents above your seat. (The AC units are known to pilots as “packs.” That’s an acronym for pneumatic air cycle kit. Usually there are two per plane.)
The air circulates until eventually it is drawn into the lower fuselage, where about half of it is vented overboard—sucked out by the pressurization outflow valve. The remaining portion is remixed with a fresh supply from the engines and run through filters, and the cycle begins again.
Studies have shown that a crowded airplane is no more germ-laden than other enclosed spaces—and usually less. Those underfloor filters are described by manufacturers as being of hospital quality. I needn’t be reminded that hospitals are notorious viral incubators, but Boeing says that between 94 and 99.9 percent of airborne microbes are captured, and there’s a total changeover of air every two or three minutes—far more frequently than occurs in offices, movie theaters, or classrooms.
One persistent urban myth holds that pilots routinely cut back on the volume of airflow as a means of saving fuel. It’s especially regrettable when even our most august and reliable news sources parrot this baseless assertion. Case in point: the following is from a 2009 issue of The Economist: “Typically an airline will strike a balance by using a 50:50 mixture of fresh and recirculated air,” says the magazine. “Although pilots can reduce the amount of fresh air to save fuel. Some are thought to cut it back to only 20 percent.” My mouth dropped open when I read this. I love that sentence, “Some are thought to cut it back to only 20 percent,” with its oily overtones of conspiracy.
To start with, pilots cannot tinker with a plane’s air-conditioning systems to modify the ratio of fresh to recirculated air. This ratio is predetermined by the manufacturer and is not adjustable from the cockpit. On the Boeings I fly, we have direct and accurate control over temperature, but only indirect control over flow. If you asked me to please “cut it back to 20 percent,” I would politely inform you that this is impossible. The switches are set to automatic mode prior to flight, and the packs more or less take care of themselves. So long as both engines are turning and everything is operating normally, the flow is perfectly adequate. Only when there’s a malfunction are the settings changed.
I am not as familiar with Airbus models, but let’s talk to somebody who is.
“Airbus series aircraft, from the A320 through the much larger A380, do provide a way for pilots to vary airflow,” says Dave English, an A320 captain and aviation writer. “But not in the way characterized by The Economist.”
English explains that the Airbus controllers have three positions, labeled HI, NORM, and LO. “Almost all the time you’re in the NORM position, and flow control is automatic. The HI position is used when you need a rapid change in temperature. The LO position does as the name implies. It reduces flow and provides some fuel savings, but they are minimal and this isn’t used very often. Company guidance is to use LO whenever the passenger load is below a hundred. It’s not a big change. Sitting in the cabin, it’s almost impossible to notice the difference.”
You’ll occasionally notice a strong odor when the plane is on the ground—a pungent smell similar to the exhaust from an old car or bus that fills the cabin shortly after pushback. Usually this happens when exhaust gases are drawn into the air conditioning packs during engine start. The wind is often to blame, causing air to backflow or blowing fumes through the pack inlets. It normally lasts only a minute or so, until the engine is running and stabilized. It’s unpleasant but little different from the fumes you occasionally breathe in your car while stuck in traffic.
If passengers have one very legitimate gripe, it’s about dryness. Indeed, the typical cabin is exceptionally dry and dehydrating. At around 12 percent humidity, it is drier than you will find in most deserts. This is chiefly a by-product of cruising at high-altitudes, where moisture content is somewhere between low and nonexistent. Humidifying a cabin would seem a simple and sensible solution, but it’s avoided for different reasons: First, to amply humidify a jetliner would take large quantities of water, which is heavy and therefore expensive to carry. Humidifying systems would need to recapture and recirculate as much water as possible, making them expensive and complicated. They do exist: one sells for more than $100,000 per unit and increases humidity only by a small margin. There’s also the important issue of corrosion. Dampness and condensation leeching into the guts of an airframe can be damaging.
The Boeing 787 has the healthiest air of any commercial plane, thanks to filters with an efficiency of 99.97 percent. Humidity too is substantially higher. The plane’s all-composite structure is less susceptible to condensation, and a unique circulation system pumps dry air through the lining between the cabin walls and exterior skin.
None of this is disputing that people don’t occasionally become unwell from flying. While the air is clean, the dryness is bad for sinuses and can break down mucous barriers, making it easier to catch what bugs might be present. Usually, though, it’s not what passengers are breathing that makes them sick, but what they are touching—lavatory door handles, contaminated trays and armrests, etc. A little hand sanitizer is probably a better safeguard than the masks I occasionally see passengers wearing.
Neither am I disputing that the airplane isn’t a potentially exquisite vector for the spread of certain diseases. The benefits of high-speed, long-range air travel are obvious—and so are its dangers. Once after arriving on a flight from Africa, I noticed a lone mosquito in the cockpit. How easy it would be, I thought, for that tiny stowaway to escape into the terminal and bite somebody. Imagine an unsuspecting airport worker or passenger who has never before left the country, and suddenly he’s in the throes of some exotic tropical malady. Actually, it’s been happening for years. Cases of “airport malaria” have been documented in Europe, resulting in several deaths after faulty or delayed diagnosis. It’s just a matter of time before this happens in America, if it hasn’t already. It is instructive, fascinating, and frankly a little scary to see just how efficiently global air travel can spread pathogens from continent to continent.
This is one of flying’s most enduring fallacies, similar to the one just covered about reducing airflow to save fuel. Not only is it patently false, but it also would have a rather undesirable effect on a plane’s occupants: shortage of oxygen brings on a condition known as hypoxia. Although hypoxia can, at first, make a person feel giddy and relaxed, it also induces confusion, nausea, and migraine-strength headaches. A pilot would have to be pretty sadistic to provoke that kind of mass agony. I remember the multiday hypoxia headache I endured some years ago in Cuzco, Peru—an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, let alone a planeload of customers.
Oxygen levels are determined by pressurization, and almost never are the pressurization controls tinkered with during cruise unless there’s a malfunction. Crews set up the system before departure; the rest happens automatically. While en route, the cabin is held at the equivalent of somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level, depending on aircraft type and cruising altitude (see pressurization).
And pilots are breathing the same air as everybody else. An aircraft fuselage does not contain separate compartments with different pressure settings. The entire vessel is pressurized equally from front to back. This includes the cabin, cockpit, and lower-deck cargo holds.
At the gate, planes are cooled or heated one of two ways. The first is through an external air supply plumbed into the cabin through a valve in the lower fuselage. This is the heavy yellow hose that you sometimes see running between the airplane and the jet bridge. The second way is via the plane’s auxiliary power unit (see APU). This small turbine engine supplies air and electricity when the main engines aren’t running. Although the APU tends to be more effective, the general rule is to rely on external air, if available, because it’s cheaper. Pretty much all carriers, however, have a policy that allows crews to start the APU if conditions become uncomfortable. Despite the emphasis on saving fuel, no captain would be penalized for using the APU to cool down an overheated cabin (or warming up a cold one).
So why do passengers find themselves sweating in a crowded cabin? The culprit might be an inoperative APU or an insufficient or malfunctioning ground source. If things get bad enough, speak up. It is well within your rights to complain to a flight attendant. They, in turn, can request we turn on the APU or check out the ground connection. Although we have cabin temperature readouts in the cockpit, we often rely on the cabin crew to let us know when temps are becoming extreme.
One small but effective way of keeping a plane cooler is to close the window shades between flights. Flight attendants will sometimes ask passengers to lower their shades as they disembark.
That’s called a packs-off takeoff. The air-conditioning packs run on bleed air from the engines and, in the process, rob some of their power. Therefore, certain heavyweight takeoffs require that one or more packs not be used until safely airborne. It depends on weight, runway length, and temperature. The predeparture performance data—a printout of all relevant speeds, power, and flap settings—tells the crew if this is necessary. The packs will be switched off just prior to the roll, then turned on again during the early portion of climb—usually around the time of the first scheduled power reduction, at a thousand feet or so (see climbout cutback).
It seems that a week can’t go by without hearing or reading a story about a passenger who went cuckoo and tried to yank open an emergency exit, only to be tackled and restrained by those around him, who thought they were on the verge of being ejected into the troposphere. While the news never fails to report these events, it seldom mentions the most important fact: You cannot—I repeat, cannot—open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight. You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure. Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over 1,100 pounds against each square foot of door. Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are much less, a meager 2 psi differential is still more than anyone can displace—even after six cups of coffee and the aggravation that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby. The doors are further held secure by a series of electrical and/or mechanical latches.
So, while I wouldn’t recommend it, and unless you enjoy being pummeled and placed in a choke-hold by panicked passengers, you could, conceivably, sit there all day tugging on a handle to your heart’s content. The door is not going to open (though you might get a red light flashing in the cockpit, causing me to spill my Coke Zero). You would need a hydraulic jack, and TSA doesn’t allow those.
On the nineteen-passenger turboprop I used to fly, the main cabin door had an inflatable seal around its inner sill. During flight the seal would inflate, helping to lock in cabin pressure while blocking out the racket from the engines. Every now and then the seal would suffer a leak or puncture and begin to deflate, sometimes rapidly. The resultant loss of pressurization was easily addressed and ultimately harmless, but the sudden noise—a great, hundred-decibel sucking sound together with the throb of two 1,100-horsepower engines only a few feet away—would startle the hell out of everybody on the plane, including me.
On the ground, the situation changes—as one would hope, with the possibility of an evacuation in mind. During taxi, you will get the door to open. You will also activate the door’s emergency escape slide. As an aircraft approaches the gate, you will sometimes hear the cabin crew calling out “doors to manual” or “disarm doors.” This has to do with overriding the automatic deployment function of the slides. Those slides can unfurl with enough force to kill a person, and you don’t want them billowing onto the jet bridge or into a catering truck.
Cabin windows need to be small—and round—to better withstand and disperse the forces of pressurization. This size and shape also helps assimilate the bending and flexing of a fuselage that results from aerodynamic forces and temperature changes. For these same reasons, it’s beneficial to place the windows along the flattest portion of a fuselage, which is why they’re sometimes aligned in a less-thanoptimum viewing position.
The Caravelle, a French-built jetliner of the 1960s, had triangular cabin windows—rounded at the corners, but distinctly three-sided. The Douglas DC-8 was another exception. Not only were its windows squared-off, they were uniquely oversized, with almost twice the glass of today’s Boeings or Airbuses. (And one of my favorite tidbits: Look closely at an Air India jet and you’ll see that each cabin window is meticulously outlined with a little Taj Mahalian motif that makes each jet reminiscent of a Rajasthani palace.)
But what about cockpit windows? Aren’t they much larger, and square-ish? That’s true, but they also are made of multilayered glass thicker than a bank teller’s and bolstered by high-strength frames—unbelievably resilient against pressure differentials, hail, and oncoming birds. I once saw a video of maintenance workers attempting—and failing—to shatter a discarded cockpit windscreen with a sledgehammer. Swapping out a single pane of cockpit glass can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Despite the many Hollywood depictions to the contrary, I am not aware of a passenger ever being sucked through a ruptured cabin window. I can, however, vouch for the story of a British Airways captain who was partially ejected through a blown-out cockpit pane. He survived with minor injuries.
Special thanks to Gregory Dicum’s enjoyable book Window Seat for help with this one. The phenomenon described is called a “glory,” or a “pilot halo.” They’re common under the right conditions of cloud cover and sunlight angle. The aura of colored bands is caused by sunlight diffracted and reflected by water droplets inside the cloud. Sometimes you do see the airplane’s shadow directly in the halo’s center; other times only the rings are visible.
At 35,000 feet the outside air temperature is about 60 degrees below zero and there is not enough oxygen to breathe. That’s worse even than economy, and transporting animals in these conditions would not please most pet owners. So, yes, the underfloor holds are always pressurized and heated. Usually there is one zone designated specifically for pets. This tends to be the zone in which temperature is most easily regulated. Maintaining a safe temperature is straightforward during flight—there’s not a lot to it, and controls are set the same way, pets or no pets—but it can be tricky on the ground during hot weather. For this reason, some airlines embargo pets for the summer months. The flight crew is always told when live animals are below. Passengers are known to send handwritten notes to the cockpit asking that we take special care. This isn’t really necessary, and there’s only so much we can do, but go ahead if it makes you more comfortable.
Few rules are more confounding to airline passengers than those regarding the use of cell phones and portable electronic devices. Are these gadgets really hazardous to flight? People want a simple, fits-all answer. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. It depends on the gadget and how and when that gadget is used.
Let’s take laptops first. In theory, an old or poorly shielded computer can emit harmful energy. However, the main reasons laptops need to be put away for takeoff and landing is to prevent them from becoming high-speed projectiles during a sudden deceleration or impact and to help keep the passageways clear if there’s an evacuation. Your computer is a piece of luggage, and luggage needs to be stowed so it doesn’t kill somebody or get in the way. This is why, after landing, flight attendants make an announcement permitting the use of phones but not computers. There’s still the possibility, remote as it might be, of an emergency evacuation, and you don’t want people tripping over their MacBooks as they make for the exits.
Next, we have tablet devices like Kindles, Nooks, and iPads. From an interference perspective, it’s tough to take a prohibition seriously now that many pilots are using tablets in the cockpit. The projectile argument would appear similarly specious: nobody wants an iPad whizzing into his or her forehead at 180 miles per hour, but hardback books are just as heavy, if not heavier. If we’re going to ban tablets during takeoffs and landings, why should books be exempt? The FAA is mulling this over as we speak. It’s possible that by the time you’re reading this, the tablet rules will have been relaxed.
And finally the big one: cellular phones. Can cellular communications really disrupt cockpit equipment? The answer is potentially yes, but in all likelihood no, and airlines and the FAA are merely erring on the better-safe-than-sorry side. You want something meatier, I know, but that’s about as accurate an answer as exists.
Aircraft electronics are designed and shielded with interference in mind. This should mitigate any ill effects, and to date there are no proven cases of a phone adversely affecting the outcome of a flight. But you never know. If the plane’s shielding is old or faulty, for example, there’s a greater potential for trouble.
Even if it is not actively engaged with a call, a cell phone’s power-on mode dispatches bursts of potentially harmful energy. For this reason, they must be placed in the proverbial off position prior to taxiing, as requested during the never-tedious pre-takeoff safety briefing (see briefing babble). The policy is clearly stated but obviously unenforced, and we assume the risks are minimal or else airline personnel would collect or inspect phones visually rather than rely on the honor system. I’d venture to guess at least half of all phones, whether inadvertently or out of laziness, are left on during flight. That’s about a million phones a day in the United States. If indeed this was a recipe for disaster, I think we’d have more evidence by now.
That said, cell phones may have had a role in at least two serious incidents. The key word here is “may,” as interference can be impossible to trace or prove. Some blame a phone for the unsolved crash of a Crossair regional plane in Switzerland in 2000, claiming that spurious transmissions confused the plane’s autopilot. Interference was cited as a likely contributing factor in a fatal RJ crash in New Zealand in 2003. In another case, a regional jet was forced to make an emergency landing after a fire alarm was allegedly triggered by a ringing phone in the luggage compartment.
Those are extremes. What would interference normally look like? You imagine a hapless passenger hitting the SEND button and suddenly the plane flips over. In reality, it’s liable to be subtle and transient. The electronic architecture of a modern jetliner is vast to say the least, and most irregularities aren’t exactly heart-stoppers: a warning flag that flickers for a moment and then goes away; a course line that briefly goes askew. Or something unseen. I’m occasionally asked if I have ever personally witnessed cellular interference in a cockpit. Not to my knowledge, but I can’t say for sure. Planes are large and complicated; minor, fleeting malfunctions of this or that component aren’t uncommon, and their causes are often impossible to determine.
It’s possible that airlines are using the mere possibility of technical complications as a means of avoiding the social implications of allowing cellular conversations on planes. The minute it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt that phones are safe, a percentage of flyers will demand the right to use them, pitting one angry group of travelers against another, with carriers stuck in the middle. If indeed airlines are playing this game, count me among those sympathetic who hope the prohibition stays in place—not out of technical concerns, but for the sake of human decency and some bloody peace and quiet. The sensory bombardment inside airports is overwhelming enough. The airplane cabin is a last refuge of relative silence (so long as there isn’t a baby wailing). Let’s keep it that way.
The chimes you hear are one of two kinds. The first kind is basically just a phone call. The flight attendant stations and cockpit share an intercom system through which any station is able to call another. When a call is made, the recipient’s phone will “ding.”
Chimes also are used by pilots as a signaling device for the cabin crew. On the plane I fly, we create this sound by cycling the seat-belt sign an appropriate number of times. Airlines have their own rules for how many chimes mean what and when they’re given, but the basics are the same: ordinarily, those after takeoff indicate the plane has passed through 10,000 feet, at which point passengers can use approved electronic devices and flight attendants may contact the cockpit without fear of interrupting a critical phase of flight. During descent, it’s equivalent to, “We’ll be landing soon, so please get the cabin ready.”
None of the signals, by the way, has anything to do with landing clearance. Often, after the second round of descent dings, you’ll hear a flight attendant announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have been cleared to land, so please put away…” I don’t know when this habit got started, but in reality the flight attendants have no idea when the plane is cleared to land. They’re using the term for convenience. Actual landing clearance, assigned by air traffic control, usually comes much later, sometimes only seconds prior to touchdown, and it is not something communicated between pilots and cabin crew.
For the record, it is not true that a runway must be vacant before a flight is cleared to land on it. Flights are cleared to land all the time with other arriving or departing planes still on the strip. It simply means that you may go ahead and land without further communications with the control tower. If the runway is not vacant in time, ATC will cancel the clearance and have you go around.
At United Airlines, one of the few purveyors of this oddly intriguing form of entertainment, this is called Channel 9 in honor of its position in your audio panel. It’s either fascinating or tediously indecipherable, depending on your infatuation with flight. It is sometimes unavailable, at the crew’s discretion, because of the unfriendly letters people send and the litigation they threaten when it’s perceived the pilots have made some “mistake.” Also, passengers not familiar with the vernacular may misinterpret a transmission and assume nonexistent or exaggerated troubles. Let’s say a controller asks, “United 537, um, do you think you can make it?” This is a common query pertaining to whether a plane can hit a specific altitude or navigational fix at a specific time or speed. Depending on the controller’s intonation—or the pilot’s reply, “No, we can’t make it”—such innocuous exchanges might have a passenger bursting into tears and picturing his wife and children.
If you’re tuned in, listen up for some of the more colorful airline call-signs. While private aircraft use their registration numbers for radio identification, commercial flights use a call sign and flight number. Usually that call sign is simply the airline’s name. “Delta 202, descend and maintain eight thousand feet.” Many, though, have adopted idiosyncratic handles, Pan Am’s “Clipper” being the most famous example. “Clipper 605, you are cleared for takeoff.” One you’ll hear quite a bit is “Cactus.” Originally the call sign of America West, it was later taken up by US Airways after the merger of those two companies and remains in use. Aer Lingus uses the classic “Shamrock,” while at China Airlines it’s “Dynasty.” A “Springbok” is an antelope and also the handle of South African Airways. British Airways’ “Speedbird” refers to the nickname of an old corporate logo—a delta-winged bird of sorts—originally used by Imperial Airways, one of BA’s predecessors, as far back as 1932. Others from the past are New York Air’s “Apple,” Air Florida’s “Palm,” and ValuJet’s unfortunate choice of “Critter.”
In the late 1970s, riders on American Airlines’s DC-10s were entertained by a live-action video feed from the cockpit during takeoff and landing, projected onto the movie screen. Nowadays various airlines show the view from a nose, tail, or belly-mounted camera. Passengers can switch between shots using their seat-back video controls. On Emirates you can choose between a forward view and one that points straight down, showing what the plane is passing over. (The latter resulted in a rather silly controversy in Britain when nude backyard sunbathers worried that overflying passengers were getting a free peepshow.) Some Airbus A340s have a tail-mounted camera showing an aft-facing view—a fun, if dizzying, perspective that lets you watch the runway falling away on takeoff.
In America, commercial flying is governed by a vast tome known as the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs—an enormous, frequently unintelligible volume that personifies aviation’s boundless tendency to take the simplest ideas and present them in language as tangled and convoluted as possible. Of its crown jewels, none is a more glittering example than the safety briefing—twenty-five seconds of useful information hammered into six minutes of rigmarole so weighed down with extraneous language that the crew may as well be talking Urdu or speaking in tongues.
Whether prerecorded and shown over the entertainment system or presented live the old-fashioned way, the safety demo is a form of camp—a performance art adaptation of legal fine print overflowing with redundant airline-ese. “At this time we do ask that you please return your seat backs to their full and upright positions.” Why not “Please raise your seat backs?” Or, my favorite: “Federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling, or destroying any lavatory smoke detector.” Excuse me, but are those not the same bloody things? Doesn’t “tampering with” pretty much cover it?
With a pair of shears and common sense, the average briefing could be trimmed to a maximum of half its length, resulting in a lucid oration that people might actually listen to. All that’s really needed is a short tutorial on the basics of exits, seat belts, flotation equipment, and oxygen masks. This shouldn’t take more than a minute.
Once upon a time, when riding along as a passenger, I would shoot dirty looks at those who ignored the demo and even made a point of paying undue attention just to help the cabin staff feel useful. After a while, realizing that neither the FAA nor the airlines has much interest in cleaning up this ornamental gibberish, I stopped caring. Note: this does not excuse those passengers who insist on carrying on conversations over the announcements, effectively doubling the volume. Whether we need to hear a flight attendant explain the operation of a seat belt is disputable, but we definitely do not need to hear the guy in row 25 talking about his favorite seafood restaurant in Baltimore.
Reach into the seat pocket, and you’ll discover a pictorial version of the same fatty babble: the always popular fold-out safety card. These too are a pedantic nod to the FARs. The talent levels of the artists speak for themselves; the drawings appear to be a debased incarnation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Still worse are the cards spelling out the emergency exit row seating requirements. The rules covering who can or can’t sit adjacent to the doors and hatches were a controversy for some time, and one result was a new standard in FAR superfluity—an excruciating litany set to cardboard and packed with enough regulatory technobabble to set anyone’s head spinning. Exit row passengers are asked to review this information before takeoff, which is a bit like asking them to learn Japanese in twelve minutes.
As for announcements made by pilots, there are company guidelines for acceptable tone and content. You’ll find stipulations against discussions of politics, religion, and anything derogatory. Sayeth your General Operations Manual, chapter five, verse 12: Jokes, off-color innuendo or slurs of any kind are forbidden. Thou shalt maintain only nonconfrontational rapport, lest the Chief Pilot summon and smite thee. Rules might also restrict—and not without good intentions—the use of potentially frightening language or alarming buzzwords. One airline I worked for had a policy banning any announcement that began with the words, “Your attention please.” I strongly advocate the recitation of college football scores be added to the list of prohibitions, but that’s just me.
“Your attention please. Southeastern Central Nebraska Tech has just kicked a last-minute field goal to pull ahead of North Southwestern Methodist State, 31–28.”
We should also be careful not to overburden people with information they can’t use. Take the weather. Does anybody care that the wind is blowing from the southwest at 14 knots or what the dew point is? They want to know if it’s sunny, cloudy, rainy, or snowy and what the temperature is.
Another no-no is, or should be, launching into complicated, jargon-rich explanations. “Yeah, uh, ladies and gentlemen, looks like 31L at Kennedy just fell to less than an eighth. It’s under six hundred right now on all three RVR. They’re calling it Cat III, and we’re only Cat II up here, so, um, we’re gonna do a few turns over the VOR, then spin around and shoot the ILS to 22L. They’ve got a three-hundred and a half over there.”
Thanks.
To a degree, each of these is open to interpretation, but there are four standard cabins: first class, business class, economy class, and Ryanair. Or, okay, there are three: first, business, and economy. The latter is often called coach or tourist, and you might hear first and business referred to collectively as the “premium” cabins.
An airline may configure a plane with all three classes, two of them, or just one. The number of cabins, as well as the seating styles and amenities within, will differ from plane to plane and market to market. The premium cabins on longer-haul flights tend to be markedly more luxurious—with private sleeper pods, widescreen video, and so forth—than those found on shorter hauls. As a general rule, first class is more luxurious (and more expensive) than business, but it’s relative. Long-haul business class is usually fancier than domestic U.S. or intra-Europe first class.
Several airlines blur the distinctions through gimmicky branding techniques. Virgin Atlantic has only one premium cabin, which it calls “Upper Class.” China Airlines has “Dynasty Class,” while Alitalia’s premium passengers relax in “Magnifica Class.” To sweeten the implications of “economy,” Air France sells tickets for “Voyageur” class. British Airways offers three different economy classes and three different business classes, all with different names, depending on the route. If that’s not confusing enough, Continental Airlines (now part of United) came up with something called, in all possible obfuscation, “BusinessFirst.” Somewhere in the fine print, and in the price, you can figure out which of the traditional subdivisions they’re talking about.
On many intra-European flights, classes are partitioned on short notice according to demand. The seats themselves don’t change, but the dividing bulkheads and curtains are slid along tracks. On Air France, economy becomes business by virtue of blocking out the middle seat of a three-abreast block. Another popular trend is dividing economy into two sections, one with extra legroom and, in some cases, a fancier seat. “Economy Plus” or “Economy Comfort” are among the branding terms, though technically it’s still, well, coach.
While people will never stop complaining about the discomforts of economy class, it happens that premium class, be it first or business, has never been more extravagant than it is right now. Not since travelers slept in private berths in the 1940s have things been so swanky up front—though definitely in a sleeker, twenty-first century flavor. Not long ago, a fat leather seat and a doting flight attendant were the hallmarks of inflight luxury. Today, competition and technology have brought us all kinds of eccentric goodies. On outré-chic carriers like Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates, and Qatar Airways, one finds a stand-up cocktail lounge and even an inflight beauty therapist. Passengers doze in individual mini-suites with 6-foot seat-beds, down-filled duvets, and electric privacy barriers. Cabin staff perform turndown service while you slip into designer pajamas, and there’s sometimes a pull-up ottoman if you’d like company during dinner. Circadian-friendly phases of ceiling lighting are adjusted by the crew, including constellations projected onto the overhead bins during nighttime hours. On its transatlantic flights, Turkish Airlines brings along a business class chef.
It goes without saying, of course, that most folks aren’t riding around on expense accounts and haven’t got $9,000 to drop on a seat to Hong Kong. If it’s any consolation, economy class has its modern-day frills as well. Live TV, on-demand movies, and inflight Wi-Fi are among the common amenities. Some Asian and European carriers have switched to shell-style seats that, when reclined, slide forward rather than tip rearward, preserving space for the person behind you. And although complimentary meals are increasingly rare on shorter flights, buy-onboard options are affordable and often tasty.
People are under the impression that airlines continue to cram ever more seats into their economy sections. This is mostly untrue. Airlines cannot simply shove in as many seats as they want; commercial planes are certified for a maximum occupancy based on, among other things, the number of emergency exits. Actually, economy class layouts have hardly changed since jets first became popular in the 1960s. In the early days, carriers flirted with five abreast seating on narrow-body planes instead of the standard six, or nine-abreast on a 747 instead of the ten used today, but these were short-lived schemes. The cross-sections of airliners as you see them today are basically unchanged from forty years ago. If anything, they are slightly roomier. The Airbus A380 has the same ten-abreast floor plan as the 747 but is wider by approximately a foot, while six-abreast aircraft such as the popular A320 have a few more inches of head and elbow room than the 707s and 727s of old.
It’s legroom, though, not elbow space, that flyers gripe about most. The distance between rows is called “pitch,” and here too, historically, things have been better and worse. It’s true that carriers have been tightening up the rearmost rows to accommodate those roomier (and more expensive) “Economy Plus” sections up front, but anyone who flew the old PeoplExpress remembers how pitiless and pitchless a cabin can be laid out. Or Laker Airways, whose “SkyTrain” service ran between the United States and London in the 1970s. Sir Freddie Laker, the airline’s flamboyant founder, configured his DC-10s with a bone-crushing 345 seats—about a hundred more than most DC-10s at the time (the plane had eight full-size exits that helped keep this legal, and there was no first or business class).
If you ask me, what makes economy uncomfortable is only partly to do with legroom. It’s more about the shapes of the seats themselves and the dreadful ergonomics of the surrounding space. Each time I settle into an economy chair, I silently wonder what malformed extraterrestrial it was designed for. “Settle in” is the wrong term; you don’t attempt to relax so much as balance yourself in place. The pressure points are all wrong, your legs are unsupported, there’s no place for your arms, and lumbar support is nil. The tray tables and armrests are the wrong shape and in the wrong location.
The most obvious way to make economy more pleasant would be to have fewer seats in the first place, but until people are willing to pay substantially higher fares, this a nonstarter. Engineers are also faced with the challenge of designing a frame that is lightweight and extremely strong, able to withstand several times the force of gravity. Nevertheless, there’s no excuse for the poorly designed seats we’re accustomed to. Through the use of high-tech materials and a bit of imagination, a chair can be safe, lightweight, sturdy, and comfortable all at once. Indeed, ergonomically sculpted seats from innovative manufacturers like Recaro and Thompson Solutions have been on the market for years. If only more carriers would buy them.
In addition to a seat that actually conforms to the shape of a human body, below are six things that ought to be standard in any economy class:
Whether or not you’re comfortable back there, remember to get up and stretch at periodic intervals. With long-haul flying times now surpassing the gestation periods of many small mammals, there are growing concerns about an affliction known as deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, brought on by the immobilizing confines of an airplane seat. Also called “economy class syndrome,” it’s a condition where potentially lethal blood clots form in the legs and can spread through the body. Those with preexisting conditions (obesity, smoking) are at higher risk, but all passengers should avoid remaining sedentary for extended periods. Stand, stretch, take a walk up the aisle. Ultra-longrange jets are often outfitted with inflight buffet zones and lounges—socializing areas laid out with drinks and snacks. More than just a perk, the idea is to entice people to move around at regular intervals. For those who wander in barefoot after sleeping, the buffet zone on the A340-500 has a heated floor.
None of us enjoys the tedium of boarding and disembarking. Bottlenecks in the aisles and the throat of the jet bridge can be eternal, and it takes several minutes just to get from the doorway to your seat, or vice versa.
If you want to make things slightly easier on your fellow travelers, here’s a simple recommendation: when boarding, please do not place your carry-on bags in the first empty bin that you come to. Use a bin as close to your seat as possible. It drives me crazy when I see a guy shoving his 26-inch Tumi into a bin above row 5, then continuing on to his assigned seat in row 52. I know it’s tempting, but this causes the forward bins to fill up quickly. Those seated in the front must now travel backward to stow their belongings, then return upstream, against the flow of traffic, slowing everybody down. Then, after landing, these same people have to fight their way rearward again while everybody else is trying to exit. Am I wrong to suggest that assigned bins might be a good idea? There are a lot more seats than bins, you can argue, and not everybody carries the same sized carry-ons, but I’m convinced there’s a way to make it work. If nothing else, airlines should make a gate-side announcement requesting that passengers please use compartments at or near their seats.
The traditional method of filling a plane from back to front has been part of the problem. A lot of airlines now board by “zone” or “group” instead. One element of these techniques is to board window and center seats first, followed by the aisles, so that fewer people have to squeeze around one another. Another option is to board rows out-of-sequence, in staggered sets rather than consecutively. You call every second or third row, allow people to stow their bags, then repeat. According to one study, you can load a plane up to ten times faster this way.
Not that it makes a whole lot of difference, as many people hate getting on a plane early and will wait as long as possible, ignoring the boarding calls. These last-minute boarders cause at least as many holdups as the bin-hoggers.
Another recommendation: families with kids in strollers should be boarded first, and upon arrival they should be asked to stay in their seats until everybody else has exited. How many total hours are wasted each day waiting for parents to assemble their strollers and gather up the approximately 90 pounds of travel gear that is apparently required by every child younger than five?
Using multiple doors also speeds things up. We don’t see them much in the United States, but boarding bridges that attach to both the forward and center doors (on those planes that have them) are common in Europe and Asia. A number of gates at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport have unusual bridges with access to the rear doors as well, passing over the plane’s left wing. (Boarding and disembarking almost always takes place on the left side of the plane. The right side is used for cargo and baggage loading, servicing, and catering.)
Meanwhile, I’m sure you’re wondering about those situations, of which there are far too many, when a plane stops short of the terminal, accompanied by the embarrassed crew announcing that “our gate is currently occupied” or that the marshaling personnel aren’t yet in place. Yes, the arrival station is kept abreast of every flight’s ETA, so why, why, why, is the gate not ready on time? I’m afraid I haven’t got a good answer. There can be more to these situations that meets the eye—a plane’s assigned parking spot is based on arrival and departure times, passenger loads, customs and immigration issues—but I suspect that understaffing has a lot to do with it. Pilots find this as frustrating as the rest of you.
Clapping upon landing was still widespread as recently as the late ’70s and early ’80s. No surprise that it scarcely happens anymore. The number of Americans who fly at least twice a year has more than quadrupled in the past quarter century. The familiarity of the routine, and the hassles that come with it, have rubbed away whatever sense of excitement or novelty was still there. It remains somewhat common overseas, however, where passengers aren’t (yet) as jaded. In the past few years, on trips I’ve taken to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, cheers and applause could be heard on roughly a quarter of the landings.
Do crews feel offended or insulted? Not in the least. It isn’t a critique of the landing or a judgment on the pilots’ skills. Neither is it an outburst of relief at having cheated gravity and lived to tell about it. Even the most nervous flyers are more optimistic than that. I wouldn’t deconstruct it too much. It pretty much speaks for itself and needn’t be taken too seriously. It’s just having fun, and to me it lends a folksy, humane touch to the end of a flight.
And you’ll notice, when it does happen, it’s a strictly economy class phenomenon. People in first or business never clap. You’ll be apt to look for a socioeconomic meaning to this, and maybe there is one, but the dynamics of economy class—more people sitting closer together—lend itself to the occasion. There’s a certain communal spirit, especially after a long-haul flight, when you’ve spent several hours in a relatively intimate space with hundreds of people. In a way, the applause acts like a big collective handshake.
Another thing you don’t see much anymore are passenger visits to the cockpit. People seem to think that security rules prohibit such visits, but that’s not so. It can’t be done in the air, of course, but you’re more than welcome to drop by when the plane is parked at the gate, before or after a flight (just be sure to ask a flight attendant first). Kids will sometimes come up, often with their parents in tow, to look around and maybe get their picture taken in the captain’s seat, but adults almost never stop by on their own. Which is too bad. Meeting the crew can be helpful for nervous flyers, and most pilots are flattered by somebody taking interest in our odd little workspace.
On a typical 747 with four hundred passengers, a mere quarter of them will be lucky enough, if that’s the correct word, to be stationed at a window. In a ten-abreast block, only two of those seats come with a view. If flying has lost the ability to touch our hearts and minds, perhaps that’s part of the reason: there’s nothing to see anymore.
There’s something instinctively comforting about sitting at the window—a desire for orientation. Which way am I going? Has the sun risen or set yet? For lovers of air travel, of course, it’s more than that. To this day, the window is always my preference, even on the longest and most crowded flight. What I observe through the glass is no less a sensory moment, potentially, than what I’ll experience sightseeing later on. Traveling to Istanbul, for instance, I remember the sight of the ship-clogged Bosporus from 10,000 feet as vividly as I remember standing before the Süleymaniye Mosque or the Hagia Sofia.
For pilots, obviously, there isn’t much choice. We spend hours in what is essentially a small room walled with glass. Cockpit windows are surprisingly large, and although there’s often little to see except fuzzy gray cirrus or pitch-blackness, the panorama they provide is occasionally spectacular:
Other views aren’t spectacle so much as just peculiar…
One afternoon we were coasting in from Europe, about 200 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Gander Center,” I called in. “Got time for a question?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Do you have any idea what the name of that strange little island is that we just passed over?”
“Sure do,” said the man in Gander. “That’s Sable Island.”
Sable Island is one of the oddest places I’ve ever seen from aloft. The oceans are full of remote islands, but Sable’s precarious isolation makes it especially peculiar. It’s a tiny, ribbony crescent of sand, almost Bahamian in shape and texture, all alone against the relentless North Atlantic. It’s like a fragment of a submerged archipelago—a miniature island that has lost its friends.
“Island,” maybe, is being generous. Sable is really nothing more than a sand bar, a sinewy splinter of dunes and grass—26 miles long and only a mile wide—lashed and scraped by surf and wind. How staggeringly vulnerable it appears from 38,000 feet.
I’d flown over Sable many times and had been meaning to ask about it. Only later did I learn that the place has been “the subject of extensive scientific research,” according to one website, “and of numerous documentary films, books, and magazine articles.” Most famously, it’s the home of 250 or so wild horses. Horses have been on Sable since the late eighteenth century, surviving on grass and fresh water ponds. Transient visitors include grey seals and up to 300 species of birds. Human access is tightly restricted. The only permanent dwelling is a scientific research station staffed by a handful of people.
But all right, okay, enough with the terrestrial stuff. I know that some of you are wondering about UFOs. This is something I’m asked about all the time. For the record, I have never seen one, and I have never met another pilot who claims to have seen one. Honestly, the topic is one that almost never comes up, even during those long, dark flights across the ocean. Musings about the vastness of the universe are one thing, but I cannot recall ever having had a conversation with a colleague about UFOs specifically. Neither have I seen the topic discussed in any industry journal or trade publication.
I once received an email asking me about a supposed “tacit agreement” between pilots that says we will not openly discuss UFO sightings out of fear of embarrassment and, as the emailer put it, “possible career suicide.” I had to laugh at the notion of there being a tacit agreement among pilots over anything, let alone flying saucers. And although plenty of things in aviation are tantamount to career suicide, withholding information about UFOs isn’t one of them.