Patrick Smith - Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections

Copyright 2013 by Patrick Smith
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When I began this book, it was intended to be little more than a mildly refreshed edition of its predecessor, Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know about Air Travel, published in 2004. The more I revised, the more it grew and changed. Eventually it became an entirely new book. The framework is similar and Ive retained some of the chapter names, but the material within is vastly different. Virtually everything has been updated or expanded in some way, and about 70 percent of the material is entirely new.

The contents are drawn from more than three hundred articles and columns originally written for the online magazine Salon, beginning in 2002 under the brand Ask the Pilot. The Q&A sequences were provided mostly by my readers at Salon, to whom I am deeply grateful for their enthusiasm and encouragement over the years.

I have done my best to ensure long-term timeliness of the information, but 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.

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 and additional reading, please visit www.askthepilot.com.

Patrick Smith
Somerville, Massachusetts

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 what actually goes on.

It isnt surprising. Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people, and at the same time its 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 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 727-100 from a 727-200 by the shape of the intake of its center engine (oval, not round). I could spend hours cloistered in my bedroom or at the dining room table, poring over the route maps and timetables of Pan Am, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, and British Airways, memorizing the names of the foreign capitals they flew to. Next time youre wedged in economy, flip to the route maps in the back of the inflight magazine. I could spend hours studying those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city-pairs, immersed in a kind of junior pilot porno. I knew the logos and liveries of all the prominent airlines (and many of the nonprominent ones) and could replicate them freehand with a set of colored pencils.

Thus I learned geography as thoroughly as I learned aviation. For most pilots, the world beneath those lines of the route map remains a permanent abstraction, countries and cultures of little or no interest beyond the airport fence or the perimeter of the layover hotel. For others, as happened to me, theres a point when those places become meaningful. One feels an excitement not merely from the act of moving through the air, but from the idea of