Patrick Smith - Cockpit Confidential

Copyright 2013, 2018 by Patrick Smith

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Originally published in 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Patrick

Cockpit confidential : everything you need to know about air travel : questions, answers, and reflections / Patrick Smith.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

(paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Air travel--Miscellanea. 2. Airplanes--Piloting--Miscellanea. 3. Aeronautics, Commercial--Miscellanea. 4. Airlines--Miscellanea. I. Title.

HE9776.S584 2013

387.7--dc23

2013001395

C ONTENTS

A UTHOR S N OTES AND A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cockpit Confidential was first published in 2013. In this second edition, the contents have been significantly refreshed and updated. Id estimate about 20 percent of the material is new. As in the original version, I have done my best to ensure long-term timeliness of the information. However, please bear in mind that commercial aviation is a landscapeor skyscape if youd ratherof ever-shifting facts and statistics: airlines come and go; planes are bought and sold; routes are swapped and dropped; now and then comes a tragedy. I apologize in advance for any portions thatthanks to an industry that never stays stillare in any way no longer accurate.

Special thanks to my agent, Sophia Seidner, and to Shana Drehs at Sourcebooks. Logistical, proofreading, and creative support was provided by Julia Petipas. Acoustic accompaniments by Bob Mould, Grant Hart, Greg Norton, and the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy.

All thoughts and opinions herein are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of any airline, agency, or entity.

For further information, questions, and additional reading, please visit www.askthepilot.com.

Patrick Smith
Somerville, Massachusetts

I NTRODUCTION

The Painters Brush

More than ever, air travel is a focus of curiosity, intrigue, anxiety, and anger. In the chapters that follow, I will do my best to provide answers for the curious, reassurance for the anxious, and unexpected facts for the deceived.

It wont be easy, and I begin with a simple premise: everything you think you know about flying is wrong. Thats an exaggeration, I hope, but not an outrageous starting point in light of what Im up against. Commercial aviation is a breeding ground for bad information, and the extent to which different myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories have become embedded in the prevailing wisdom is startling. Even the savviest frequent flyers are prone to misconstruing much of whats going on around them.

It isnt surprising. Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people and one thats cloaked in secrecy. Its mysteries are concealed behind a wall of specialized jargon, corporate reticence, and an irresponsible media. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, arent the most forthcoming of entities, while journalists and broadcasters like to keep it simple and sensational. Its hard to know who to trust or what to believe.

Ill give it my best shot. And in doing so, I will tell you how a plane stays in the air, yes. Ill address your nuts-and-bolts concerns and tackle those insufferable myths. However, this is not a book about flying, per se. I will not burden readers with gee-whiz specifications about airplanes. I am not writing for gearheads or those with a predisposed interest in planes; my readers dont want to see an aerospace engineers schematic of a jet engine, and a technical discussion about cockpit instruments or aircraft hydraulics is guaranteed to be tedious and uninterestingespecially to me. Sure, were all curious how fast a plane goes, how high it flies, how many statistical bullet points can be made of its wires and plumbing. But as both author and pilot, my infatuation with flight goes beyond the airplane itself, encompassing the fuller, richer drama of getting from here to therethe theater of air travel, as I like to call it.

For most of us who grow up to become airline pilots, flying isnt just something we fell into after college. Ask any pilot where his or her love of aviation comes from, and the answer almost always goes back to early childhoodto some ineffable, hard-wired affinity. Mine certainly did. My earliest crayon drawings were of planes, and I took flying lessons before I could drive.

Just the same, I have never met another pilot whose formative obsessions were quite like mine. I have limited fascination with the sky or with the seat-of-the-pants thrills of flight itself. As a youngster, the sight of a Piper Cub meant nothing to me. Five minutes at an air show watching the Blue Angels do barrel rolls, and I was bored to tears. What enthralled me instead were the workings of the airlines: the planes they flew and the places they went.

In the fifth grade, I could recognize a Boeing 727100 from a 727200 by the shape of the intake of its center engine (oval, not round). I knew the logos and liveries of all the prominent airlines (and most of the nonprominent ones) and could replicate them freehand with a set of colored pencils. I would spend hours cloistered in my bedroom or at the dining room table, poring over the timetables of the worlds great carriersPan Am, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, and British Airwaysmemorizing the names of the foreign capitals they flew to. It wasnt just planes; it was places too. Next time youre wedged in economy, flip to the route maps in the back of the in-flight magazine. Those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city pairs were, for me, a kind of junior pilot porno.

Thus I learned geography as thoroughly as I learned aviation. For a lot of pilots, the excitement of flying is confined within the walls and windows of the cockpit. The world below remains an abstraction, its countries and cultures of limited interest beyond the airport fence or the perimeter of the layover hotel. For others, as happened to me, one feels an excitement not merely from the act of moving through the air, but from the idea of going somewhere . The full, beautiful integration of flight and travel, travel and flight. Are they not the same thing? To me, they are. Either one can inspire the other, sure, but I never would have traipsed off to so many countries in my free timefrom Cambodia to Botswana, Sri Lanka to Bruneiif I hadnt fallen in love with aviation first .