The Weird and Wonderful World of Airline Collectibles.

November 20, 2015

YOU KNOW WHAT I MISS? Airline ticket wallets. Once upon a time airline tickets were issued by hand, and were often several pages thick, while boarding passes came in the form of cardstock keepsakes. When you checked in at the airport, the agent would arrange this paperwork in a paper or cardboard wallet — sometimes they called it a “ticket jacket” — emblazoned with the carrier’s logo and colors, and hand it back to you. Have a nice flight, sir. It was a small but classy touch, and a helpful way of organizing your documents. Today’s electronically issued tickets are mere receipts that can be folded into a pocket, and the boarding pass has become a similarly flimsy scrap, rendering the jackets all but obsolete. I don’t imagine this saves much money, since they couldn’t cost more than a penny each to manufacture, though if nothing else I guess it saves a few trees.

When I was a kid I had a pretty good collection of ticket jackets from airlines around the world. I had a big timetable collection too, and those are another thing I miss. Timetables. Three or four times a year airlines would publish thick booklets containing their entire network schedule — arrival times, departure times, aircraft types, etc. — plus a wealth of other information. There were seating diagrams, addresses and contact info, and, my favorite, the fold-out route map. They were useful to frequent flyers and they made neat collectibles.

Airline timetables.   Author’s collection.

For the most part timetables have been relegated to virtual status on airline websites. Hard copy versions haven’t totally disappeared, but you need to look overseas to find the few that are still out there. I’m not sure who still prints them. The newest one I own is about ten years old. Curiously, looking at the various carriers’ current online versions is something of a sentimental journey, as the basic format has hardly changed. Several of the major carriers’ online timetables are laid out exactly like the printed versions 25 years ago, with the identical fonts and typefaces!

1983 Pan Am timetable with route map.    Author’s collection.

Airline collectibles. I wonder sometimes how much my old archive would be worth, if only it still existed. Inside a gray metal footlocker once resided a good fifty pounds of airline memorabilia that my friends and I had stockpiled during our weekend forays to Logan Airport in the mid and late 1970s. We’d rummage through kiosks and weasel our way onto parked jetliners. Virtually anything wearing an airline logo was snagged and hoarded: timetables, booklets, luggage stickers and tags, silverware, pins, inflight magazines, barf bags, playing cards.

We’d also write to airline offices the world over. “Dear South African Airways, could you please send us some timetables, pictures of your aircraft or other items for our collection.” Amazingly effective this was. A few weeks later a fat manila packet would arrive jammed with posters, pictures, promotional brochures, you name it.

All gone. Gone because, for reasons that I can’t today fathom, I threw it all away.

I was 18 or 19 when I did it. The locker, a gray aluminum chest the size of a large suitcase, still sits in the attic of my parents’ house in Revere, Massachusetts. It’s covered with luggage stickers from Braniff, Eastern, Piedmont and North Central. It goes BOOONG! when you bang on it. Because it’s empty. The bottomless echo of a teenager making another bad decision.

Among the few things I hung onto are a small handful of timetables, and a sizable library of airliner postcards, which I still actively curate. Their portability, if nothing else, inspired me to save them. Postcards, yes: years ago airlines would publish and distributed postcards showcasing photographs or drawings of their aircraft. Photo on the front; blank space for writing and postage stamp square on the back. I’ve got about 500 in all, from Aeroflot to Air Zimbabwe, some of which, according to eBay and the people who sell and trade such things, are worth $20 or $30 apiece.

Here are two examples, front and back. The LOT card, showing a Tupolev Tu-134, seems to be celebrating the airline’s 60th anniversary. It says “Blue Nile International Service” along the back of the Sudan Airways 707:

I’ve got an Avianca card of a 747 on its first trip to Medellin, Colombia, marked “Historica fotograica,” and a Laker Airways DC-10 that includes a little balloon picture Sir Freddie himself, his smile beaming skyward and his autograph reproduced across the bottom. And look at this one. It’s a watercolor painting of the Brussels Airport, put out by the old Belgian carrier Sabena. I’d date it to the mid-1970s judging from the planes:

Several of my cards are renderings like that one, done in watercolor, oil or acrylics. One of them is an Aeroflot Tu-114 done in charcoal and pencil, the AEROFLOT typeface straight out of 1957, the effect all Sputnik/Gary Powers/Oswald. Where did such wonderful things come from? Who designed them? Were they commissioned? Was somebody actually paid for this work?

Some airlines were astoundingly prolific with their postcards. Lufthansa produced hundreds of them. The U.S. majors did too. My favorites are the 1960s and 1970s-era cards: the 707s, DC-8s, Caravelles and 747SPs; the old Soviet Tupolevs and Ilyushins. I especially savor the tarmac shots where the jets are surrounded by activity: workers and tug-tractors and baggage vehicles all stirring about. I love the action and drama these scenes suggest, all of the logistical and human effort that goes into getting a plane off the ground. They’re vastly more interesting than the dime-a-dozen shots of a plane aloft, nose-to-tail against a sunset or a bank of clouds.

Artistically speaking, the Eastern Europeans seem to have put the most thinking into their cards. My collections spans dozens of airlines across six continents, but it’s those from the old Soviet Bloc that are the most nuanced and creatively designed. Maybe this was a minor form of Cold War propaganda, the Eastern carriers outdoing their Western rivals in one of the only ways they knew how. Check out these examples from Romanian carrier Tarom, and the former East German airline Interflug; the Tupolev’s underbelly in black-and-white, when it didn’t need to be:

You’ll find very few airline pilots who collect such things, or even know they exist. Most pilots aren’t into airlines per se and know relatively little about them. But to me these picture cards are poignant historical markers. Not just the airline industry’s history, but my own. They are like slices of my adolescence. They take me back to junior high school, to those critical formative years of my airline nerdity. If my apartment ever caught fire and I was allowed to save one thing, my box of postcards might be that thing.

A handful of airlines still do postcards. I was excited, last spring, taking a TAP (Air Portugal) flight from Heathrow to Lisbon, to discover a display of cards for the taking, in a plastic holster mounted on one of the cabin bulkheads, each with a picture of an Airbus A320. I grabbed one. Actually I grabbed two.

Here’s an online database of airline postcards both old and new, some of which I own.

Aside from the postcards I’ve been slowly rebuilding my memorabilia collection. I’ve got some menus, a few timetables that I bought online (including a few that I’d owned previously, before the great purge of 1985 or whenever it was), amenities kits and silverware and luggage tags. Most of it is newer material that for me lacks the meaning and sentimental associations of my earlier and collection, but this time I promise not to throw it out.

I also have this. It’s a wooden sake cup from the inaugural flight of the Boeing 747-400:

Northwest Airlines, some of you might recall, was the launch customer for the 747-400, back in 1989. That spring, they had been using the jet on domestic “proving runs” mainly between Minneapolis and Phoenix. Finally on June 1st, they inaugurated international service. The first departure was flight NW 47, from JFK to Narita. My friend Ben and I were passengers on that flight. It was the day after my 23rd birthday. I still have my commemorative sake cup. The 747-400 is no longer the preeminent or the most popular long-haul aircraft. That would be its slightly smaller brother, the 777-300. But there are still more than five-hundred -400s in service. And I had a seat on the very first one.

Which brings us to the strange object you see below. This was sent to me about five years ago by Peter Hughes, the bassist for the Mountain Goats and an Ask the Pilot aficionado, who’d found it at a flea market. It is what it appears to be: a small plastic doll, about three inches tall, encased in a transparent shell, like a miniature trophy case, adorned with ’60s-era airline logos, including those of BOAC, Pan Am, and the beautiful JAL crane (still in use, miracle of miracles). It says “Cragstan” across the bottom, which I take to be the name of the company that produced the thing. The doll is supposed to be a stewardess, possibly? I don’t know, but I dig owning it:

Help support the author’s postcard habit by ordering a copy of his book

Related Stories:

AIR TRAVEL IN ART, MUSIC & FILM
PLANES, PRANKS AND PRAISE: ODE TO AN AIRPORT
MY STRANGE HISTORY OF AIRLINES REAL AND IMAGINED

June 20, 2016

I’M OLD ENOUGH to remember when people dressed up to fly. I remember my dad putting on a tie before we left for the airport. And that was on a trip to Florida, of all places, as recently as the early 1980s.

One of the reasons, though, that people once took flying so seriously, is that so few of them had the means to partake in it. Not all that long ago, only a fraction of the population could afford to fly on a regular basis. When I was in junior high, in the late ’70s, maybe a third of my classmates had ever been in an airplane. Even into high school I frequently met other kids who’d never flown. Flying today is far cheaper than it used to be. As a result, almost everybody does it.

And as the demographics have changed, so have the levels of behavior. This we’d expect. With nearly four million people flying every day of the week, across every strata of culture and class the world over, standards of decorum are going to fall. That’s fine, and I don’t want to sound snobbish about it. Maintaining simple dignity doesn’t require anything too formal. I have no problem, for example, with people wearing shorts and sandals onto a plane.

But there comes a point, and what I do have a problem with, is the idea that otherwise reasonable protocols of civility, manners and courtesy cease to apply when you’re at an airport or on an airplane.

I’ve never been privy to a full-blown “air rage” incident, but I’ve witnessed countless instances of shameful behavior: passengers cursing at airline staff; stealing from the liquor carts; leaving soiled diapers in seat pockets; etc., etc. Why, for example, do so many airline passengers find it acceptable to throw their garbage and food all over the cabin floor, then mash it into the carpeting with their feet? You don’t do this in a restaurant. Why is it okay on an airplane? It tends to be small-scale stuff — rudeness and a lack of elementary courtesy — rather than anything violent or overtly hostile, but that doesn’t excuse it.

Here is just some of what I’ve witnessed over the past several months…

I am at the airport in Dubai one early morning, waiting to catch an Emirates flight to Boston. I’m sitting in the boarding lounge when I hear a strange noise coming from behind me. Snip, snip snip, click, click, click. What is that?

I turn around, and what do I see? The guy directly behind me — a young guy in his twenties — is sitting cross-legged in his chair. Both of this feet are naked, and he is clipping his toenails. With every snip and click he splits away another crescent of toenail, which he drops into a growing pile next to his left knee.

Would you take off your socks and start clipping your toenails in a movie theater? In the waiting room at your dentist? Most people would feel uneasy doing it in the woods, never mind at an airport boarding lounge in front of three-hundred people. And while I don’t want to watch, I feel that I have to. Because I need to know what he’s going to do with that big, disgusting pile of trimmings once our flight begins to board. Is he going to collect them up and carry them to the trash? Or will he brush them onto the floor?

What do you think he does?

On another occasion I am at Kennedy Airport, in terminal four, down near the Virgin America gates. A woman and her young daughter are sitting on a bench-seat right along the edge of the corridor. The daughter is four, maybe five years old, and she’s holding a tall plastic cup brimming with round, colored candies. They’re marble-shaped candies, possibly peanut M&Ms. All at once, with no warning, the girl takes the cup and flings the entire thing onto the floor. It’s an impressive spectacle, I have to say, as hundreds of tiny orbs go clattering across the carpet, coming to rest in a great fan-shaped display of color. People turn and stare. And what does the woman do?

She stands up, takes the girl by the hand, and the two of them walk silently away, leaving the entire mess — even the plastic cup — sitting there for some unfortunate janitorial worker to sweep up.

Meanwhile, people are kicked off planes all the time for acting, and even dressing, obnoxiously. In Boston recently, jetBlue denied boarding to a young woman because they felt her shorts were too revealing. Apparently, though, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words FUCK LOVE in giant block letters is within the boundaries of decency?

I’m not a prude. Nonetheless I’m dying to understand when and how this sort of thing become acceptable. And I’m imagining this same attire in a different context. In the bleachers at a baseball game, for instance. Would that be okay? Would the guy be asked to leave? Wouldn’t he be harassed by parents who’d brought their kids along? There are plenty of little kids at airports, so why is it different here? And which is more troubling, the fact that he’s being accommodated, or the fact that somebody rude enough to put on a shirt like that exists in the first place?

I’m reminded of a shirt that was all the rage a few years ago in Asia. It was a sleeveless tee bearing the grainy image of the model Hedi Klum. She was topless, biting her lip and sticking her middle finger at the viewer. After six days in Thailand I must have seen five hundred tourists — all of them women, whatever that means — wearing these distasteful and hostile things. This one, though, is worse. Mr. FUCK LOVE takes it to the next level. I’m not a proponent of public shaming, so I’ve blurred out the faces, but if anybody deserves to be embarrassed, it’s this guy. His is a sort of brutalist vulgarity.

Next we have Ms. Stinkytoes, luxuriating in her Emirates first class suite. She shows us that boorishness these days isn’t merely for the louts in steerage. Are these the same people who buy elephant ivory and rhinoceros horns? And the privacy of her suite is no excuse (couldn’t she at least have closed the doors?). Maybe I’m overreacting to this one, but how is this any more appropriate that resting one’s bare and splayed toes on a restaurant table? This is still, for all intents and purposes, a public place, and somebody else is going to be occupying that cubicle a few hours from now. And for crying out loud, they give you socks and slippers!

What is it? Is it the stress? Is it the contempt people harbor for the airlines? Whatever the causes, flying has a way of bringing out the worst in people.

If you enjoyed this discussion, check out the author’s book.

September 29, 2015

EVERYBODY has heard the word “checklist.” Most folks know that checklists are a staple in airline cockpits, and they get the gist of it. The term is self-descriptive; you can think of it as a grocery list of sorts — a line-by-line register of specific items, used to make sure that important tasks have been completed, and none skipped. Still, a lot of people don’t understand exactly what a cockpit checklist looks like and how the reading of one is carried out. Pardon the geekiness of what follows, but here’s how it works:

Pilots use checklists for both normal and non-normal operations: for routine situations, for malfunctions, and for emergencies. (You’ll notice I said “non-normal.” That’s a classic aviation-ism, devised in place of “abnormal” for reasons I can’t possibly fathom or explain. It’s a goofy word, but for the sake of realism we’ll stick with it.)

The non-normal checklists are bound together in an overstuffed book called the QRH, or Quick Reference Handbook. This volume contains step-by-step procedures for hundreds of potential situations or malfunctions, from minor component failures to how to prepare for an ocean ditching. The QRH is divided into chapters: electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, etc. There are at least two in the cockpit: identical copies for the captain and first officer, always within easy reach.

The normal checklists are usually printed on an a card — paper or cardboard — sometimes laminated and often folded vertically and/or lengthwise. A single card will be divided into as many as a dozen separate checklists, each of which will be read aloud depending on the phase of flight. Wording varies airline to airline, but the individual lists will be titled something like this:

PREFLIGHT
PUSHBACK and ENGINE START
AFTER ENGINE START
TAXI
BEFORE TAKEOFF
AFTER TAKEOFF
CLIMB

DESCENT
APPROACH
BEFORE LANDING
AFTER LANDING
SHUTDOWN

Most of these are only five or ten items long and take only a few seconds to perform. The PREFLIGHT checklist is normally the longest, and can have thirty or more steps, depending on the airline and aircraft type. On the newest jets, checklists are presented electronically on a screen — though there’s always a hard copy as well.

Boeing, Airbus, and the other manufacturers devise an initial, standard checklists for every airplane type, and carriers then tweak them. As a result, a 737 checklist at American Airlines will read differently than a 737 checklist at Delta. The basics are always the same, but airlines tailor them in accordance with their training and SOP.

Normal checklist in an Airbus A340.

Most of the normal checklists are read aloud in a challenge/response format. One pilot reads the item, and the other pilot calls out the verification. On the ground it’s usually the first officer who reads. In the air, it’s whichever pilot is not physically flying. For instance, using C and R for challenge and response, a LANDING checklist would go roughly as follows (this is a generic example):

C: “Landing gear?”
R: “Down, three green lights”

C: “Flaps and slats?”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”

C: “Spoilers?”
R: “Armed”

C: “Autobrakes?”
R: “Three”

The pilot who is reading then says, “Landing checklist is complete.”

Sometimes both pilots are required to call out verification of an especially important item. Challenge/Response becomes Challenge/Response/Response. Trying it again:

C: “Landing gear?”
R: “Down, three green”
R: “Down, three green”

C: “Flaps and slats?”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”
R: “Thirty-Five, Thirty-five, Set”

C: “Spoilers?”
R: “Armed”

C: “Autobrakes?”
R: “Three”

At other times, the pilot reading the checklist calls out both the item and the verification. It depends.

The verbal reply to a challenge/response might be a numerical value, an “on” or “off,” or a simple “checked” or “set.” Or, it might be something specific like “down, three green,” like you see above. In that case, the pilots are verifying that the landing gear lever has been selected down, and that the warning lights agree that the gear is down and locked for touchdown. When they say “thirty-five, thirty-five,” that’s a verification that the wing flap handle is set to 35 degrees, and that the associated gauge shows the flaps having in fact reached that position.

When one pilot verifies the task of the other pilot, that’s “crosschecked.”

We also say “roger” a lot. (Or “Rogah.” For fun, I am prone to reading the PREFLIGHT checklist in an exaggerated Boston accent: rogah, radah, transpondah, etc.)

To the outside listener, the smooth, uninterrupted reading of a checklist can be an interesting and curious ballet.

Occasionally, though, a checklist is performed silently, by one pilot. The AFTER LANDING checklist, for instance, is ordinarily silent, the only call being when the first officer says “After landing checklist is complete.” He’s meanwhile made sure the flaps, slats, and speedbrakes are retracted, the trim is reset, the radar is off, and so on.

There also are supplementary checklists, such as those used during oceanic crossings and other not-always-routine operations.

Checklist used in an old 747-200 Freighter.

Checklist discipline is important. You always reach for the card, even if you’re 99.99 percent certain that everything is safe and complete. In the airline environment this discipline is taken for granted. In my entire major airline career, I have never once seen a checklist intentionally skipped.

Normal checklists are just that: check lists. You are verifying that tasks have already been accomplished. All the switches, buttons and levers should be in the correct position prior to reading. The pilots will already have run through their so-called “flow patterns,” a choreographed set of steps during which the physical button and switch-pushing is actually accomplished. For example, on the plane I fly, immediately after the engines are started, the first officer’s flow pattern includes, in a right-to-left sweep beginning at the overhead instrument panel, reconfiguring the plane’s pneumatics, turning on the engine anti-ice (if needed), turning on the center tank fuel pumps, shutting off the APU, checking the “recall” function of the main annunciator panel, and one or two other things. The AFTER START checklist then verifies that everything was done.

The non-normal QRH procedures, on the other hand, can more accurately be described as “do lists.” You don’t do anything until you’re instructed to.

That is, except for those times when so-called “memory items” come into play. These are a brief series of steps performed from memory in urgent circumstances, when time doesn’t permit the luxury of breaking out the QRH. Once the situation is stabilized, you refer to the book to make sure you did everything correctly. It will then guide you through whatever else needs to be done.

The QRH checklists can be complicated and go on for several pages. One or both pilots might be involved in the reading and verification, depending on circumstances. Regardless of which pilot’s turn it is to fly, it’s not unusual for the captain to delegate flying duties to the first officer while he or she breaks out the QRH and troubleshoots. During this process, the most crucial tasks — for instance, shutting down an engine — will require dual verification, and both pilots must become part of the conversation. Newer planes sometimes have electronic, on-screen checklists that pop into view when needed, used in lieu or in addition to those in the QRH.

Sample page from a QRH.

All of this, meanwhile, is separate from the execution of what we call “profiles.” All normal or non-normal flight maneuvers are flown according to a profile: what speeds to fly, what angles of pitch to aim for, when to extend and retract the flaps or landing gear — each of these things, and more, happen at a prescribed place and time. It isn’t about switches, levers or dials. Rather, it’s how you fly the plane. Takeoffs, instrument approaches, go-arounds, and all of the maneuvers in between, follow a specific profile. Thus, at any given airline, all crews are trained to perform the same maneuvers the same way. This ensures commonality and, in turn, safety.

Pilots have been using checklists for decades, and it’s a little surprising that other industries haven’t adopted the concept more widely. Finally their use is beginning to spread into other realms, most notably medicine and nuclear power.

If you enjoyed this discussion, check out the author’s book.

Welcome to Room 420: Rubber Floors, Mysterious Odors and Inexplicable Artwork. Plus: Mojito Madness and the World’s Worst Billboard.

ACCRA, GHANA

THE FLOOR IN ROOM 420 is made of rubber — or something that looks like rubber. It’s a pebbly, industrial-style flooring. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were made from recycled tractor tires. That would be a good thing, and either way I like it. I admire its toughness, and it lends a handsome touch to the rest of the — what to call it? — African-modernist decor of sun-faded pastels and white pine. But tread barefoot at your peril: in the shower your feet will leave inky black stains around the drain.

Outside my window, a crippled man is propelling himself down the sidewalk in a hand-cranked wheelchair with a seat made of plywood. He is wearing an oily pair of jeans, and his legs — whatever might be wrong with them exactly, or if they’re there at all — look like deflated canvas tubes. Nearby, on the wall of a construction site, in angry spray-painted letters it says, DO NOT PISS HERE!

My room stinks of cigar smoke and cologne.

Now, at least as I understand it, the accepted literary style of describing smells is to always use some fantastical or over-the-top comparison and maybe a little metaphor. “His room stank of coalsmoke and defeat.” I’m not creative enough for that, and besides it doesn’t always describe the smell accurately. I assure you this room smells precisely like cigar smoke and cologne, and I am confident that both of those things were here, in abundance, shortly before my arrival yesterday afternoon. I picture an overweight German businessman in a towel dousing himself in some awful fragrance; a recalcitrant Nigerian hooker napping in this very bed. “Kommen ve must go now. It is check-out time!”

The smell hit me the second I walked in. I thought about changing rooms but I was too tired to go dragging my stuff back to the elevator.

Plus, this is room 420. I have had this room before, and Eau de Montecristo aside, it is my favorite for an excellent reason: because it is home to the most ridiculous piece of artwork ever to grace a hotel room. Hotel artwork is a pretty competitive field — in all the wrong categories — and if you travel a lot, doubtless you’ve marveled at the many tacky, trite, or simply hideous pieces tacked to the walls by clueless hoteliers. But the winner for oddest-ever in-room picture hangs proudly above the non-useful miniature sofa in room 420 of the Novotel City Centre here in Accra. I could try describing it, but here’s your proverbial Thousand Words instead:

I can’t make out who the artist was (initials DDR?), but this was a limited edition print, number 30 of 150, and it dates from 1997, embossed with an important-looking stamp decreeing its membership in the esteemed “Novotel Collection.” I call it, “Air and Sea,” or, “O Captain My Captain” (artist unknown; ink and whatnot on paper). Perhaps in a youth hostel or backpacker joint it wouldn’t seem so jarring, but the fact this is West Africa makes it even more of an insane non-sequitur than it would be anywhere else.

I thought about taking it with me — the theft of fine arts is a booming business, you know. And here in Somerville, Massachusetts, we have the should-be-famous Museum of Bad Art. MOBAs renowned curators could do worse, maybe, than ringing up Novotel and making an offer for DDR’s masterpiece. Alas the piece is surprisingly well-secured in its frame.

Or am I being unfair? It’s a fun picture, certainly, and far preferable to some schlocky painting of an African village or an acrylic stick figure of a woman grinding grain.

Meanwhile, for guests who don’t mind lingering odors, who aren’t serious art collectors, or who don’t enjoy bouncing around on rubber floors, the Novotel still has plenty to offer. It’s clean, in a convenient location, and the staff, like everybody in Ghana, is disarmingly friendly. The poolside pizzas are the best in West Africa and the Sangaw bar, just off the lobby, is a relaxed and cozy spot to enjoy a cold bottle of Star.

It’s also a great hotel to have your laundry done — a badly needed service after a long flight and the sweaty van ride from Kotoka airport. They are prompt and do an excellent job. It’s not too expensive, and everything comes back brightly washed and meticulously folded in accordance with some unfathomable mathematical folding principle. Even the socks come back folded, looking like little origami socks.

Not everybody at the washing station is paying attention though. I’m one of those eco-weirdos who takes those sad little “help us conserve water” placards seriously; I re-use the towels and I don’t let the housecleaners change the pillow cases. And on the laundry slip, I write, in big underlined letters, NO PLASTIC! Chipping in, doing my part. No matter, here’s how my clothes come back to me…

There’s some cultural disconnect going on here, possibly — the idea that a Western guest wouldn’t want his impossibly folded boxer-briefs and socks presented in cellophane splendor simply impossible to entertain. Or maybe they think this is funny?

Which brings us down to the aforementioned Sangaw Bar. What to make of this special cocktail promotion, advertised tabletop in clear plastic easels…

Apparently for some West Africans, your idea of “Latino” is a crazy old woman smoking a gigantic cigar.

I much enjoy traveling to Ghana, and Ghanaians are some of my favorite people in the world. Always smiling, always saying hello, always eager to sell you a handmade goatskin drum or some shea butter without ripping you off. This is an amiable and proud place — if not always for reasons everyone is eager to hear about. Once, a couple of years ago, I was getting out of a taxi across from the Novotel, and as I stepped to the curb I was confronted with the following, staring at me from a newspaper kiosk…

So we know there are people who keep track of these things. And naturally some of us wonder: who finished first and second?

Accra is also home to the world’s worst billboard. It’s just outside the airport, informing arriving passengers of the country’s desperate dearth of copywriters. KILL INSECTS! ENJOY NICE SMELL. Is that the smell of dead insects? At any rate, it looks like they applied a little too much: “Hey girls, come and help daddy spread some of this toxic insecticide around the house. Douse it good now, and breathe it in! Smell that wonderful smell. Breathe in deep! What’s that? Yes, daddy also has a headache and knife-like stomach pains. But just keep breathing and spraying. Wait, oh shit, I just killed my entire family…

I digress.

Every hotel has it quirks. Inexplicable artwork, rubber floors and bizarre cocktails, there are a lot of things to dislike about hotel rooms, even the fanciest and most expensive ones: temperamental air conditioning, toe-breaking doorjambs, ergonomically hellish “work spaces.”

And here’s another one: cardboard brochures. Nowadays, each and every hotel amenity, from room service to Wi-Fi, is hawked through one or more annoying advertisements displayed throughout the room. Cards, signs, menus, and assorted promotional materials—they’re everywhere: on the dresser, in the closet, on the pillows, in the bathroom. I wouldn’t mind if this laminated litter was placed unobtrusively, but it tends to be exactly in the way, and I resent having to spend five minutes after an exhausting red-eye, gathering up these diabolical doo-dads and heaving them into a corner where they belong. One’s first moments in a hotel room ought to feel welcoming, not confrontational.

Food and room service are another topic entirely. Speaking of West Africa, be careful never to dine too hungry at the Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal, where the surly poolside waitress might, eventually, bring you the pizza you ordered ninety minutes ago, and where the in-room menu offers such delectables as:

Chief Salad
Roasted Beef Joint on Crusty Polenta
The Cash of The Day
Paving Stone of Thiof and Aromatic Virgin Sauce

That last one sounds like a chapter from a fantasy novel. Head instead to Le Layal, a great little Lebanese place up the street where, once you get past the “Testicles with Garlic” and the “Homos with Chopped Meat”, the menu is both coherent and tasty.

So the phones are open. If you’ve got comparable examples of hotel weirdness, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

UPDATE: November 15, 2014

Well, subsequent stays at the Novotel City Centre in Accra reveal that the “Novotel Collection” is more bountiful than we thought. We now have three contenders for the for strangest (worst?) hotel artwork of all time. Move over “O Captain,” you’ve got company. Down one floor, in room 302 we behold this remarkable creation. For now untitled, it appears to depict a severed robot head in the throes of a mind-meld with a giant strawberry…

And not to be outdone, also on the third floor, yet another demented masterpiece awaits us, perhaps the most impressive of the lot…

We notice a consistency here — an opposing-panels “faces” theme — though somehow this unifying principle doesn’t make the pictures less ridiculous. How to choose a favorite?

Anyway here’s an idea. Maybe you should visit Ghana. If you’re considering a first-time trip to West Africa, I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s friendly, safe, affordable, and there’s tons to do.

HIGHLIGHTS IN TEN DAYS…

Day 1: Arrival. Check in to your non-smoky room at the Novotel and enjoy the afternoon at leisure. Walk down to the Arts Center to try out your haggling skills, and maybe come away with one of those not-too-overpriced drums. Later have dinner at Tandoor, Africa’s best (and spiciest) Indian restaurant.

Day 2: Accra. Visit the Osu coffin makers, and finish the afternoon with a sundowner at Osekan, a seaside bar/restaurant not far from the hotel. Ghanaian food tonight at Buka, or at Asanka Local if you’re adventurous. If you’ve never had Ghanaian food, start easy and order the red-red, or the Jollof rice with chicken.

Day 3: Get an early start and head west to Elmina Castle, the famous slave castle about two-and-a-half hours west of Accra. (Skip Cape Coast Castle and head directly to Elmina, about 20 minutes further.) After a tour be sure to wander around the harborfront area. Get right down in there, onto the sand in into the little alleyways between the houses. After lunch continue west to the small town of Axim, near the border with Ivory Coast.

Days 4 and 5: Spend two nights at the Axim Beach Hotel, a rustic seaside place on a beautiful beach. Take some time to wander Axim town, with its ramshackle main street and nearby slave castle.

Day 6: Depart Axim early and head east to Cape Coast, stopping at Nzulezo floating village on the way. Once in Cape Coast grab a bus or tro-tro up to the frenetic city of Kumasi, about a five-hour drive away. Stay at the Four Villages Inn.

Days 7-8. From your base in Kumasi, take a tro-tro out each morning and visit the nearby Ashanti towns. Buy some Kente cloth and don’t forget your schnapps (this will make sense to you later).

Day 9. Fly back to Accra — no bus or tro-tro; you’ve had your fill of that — and spend your final night in room 420. Have a pizza and a crazy lady mojito.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE AUTHOR’S PHOTO GALLERY FROM GHANA

And please consider donating to this campaign:

AN OLD-TIMEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SESSION.

Eons ago, in 2002, a column called Ask the Pilot, hosted by yours truly, started running in the online magazine Salon, in which I fielded reader-submitted questions about air travel. It’s a good idea, I think, to touch back now and then on the format that got this venerable enterprise started. It’s Ask the Pilot classic, if you will.

Q: On a flight from London to New York, I noticed that our 747 was flying almost parallel with, and very close to, a Lufthansa plane. It remained next to us for at least a couple of hours as we crossed the Atlantic. We were close enough that I could clearly see the tail emblem and the Lufthansa name on the fuselage. I assume our pilots were aware of it, and vice versa?

What you describe is common when flying between Europe and North America. The east-west routes across the North Atlantic consist of a series of one-way parallel “tracks,” as we call them, made up of sequential points of latitude and longitude. Flights along the same track are sequenced by time, one behind the other. Or, they are stacked vertically, with a minimum of 1,000 feet between each plane. The tracks are 60 miles apart, however, so you were likely on the same track as the Lufthansa jet, a thousand feet higher or lower, and slightly offset horizontally.

Offsetting horizontally reduces collision hazards, unlikely as they are, and helps avoid wake turbulence. Standard offsets are 1 mile or 2 miles (pilot’s choice) to the right. A plane one or two miles away horizontally and only a thousand feet lower or higher will basically appear parallel to you.  

The tracks go west-to-east in the evening, when the vast majority of planes depart North America for Europe, and east-to-west in the mornings and afternoons, when most flights are headed the other way. Those going against the flow — a morning flight from New York to London, for example — will be assigned a “random route,” clear of the organized tracks. Each track is assigned a letter designation. The locations of the tracks are different every day, varying with weather and winds aloft. Track “A” on Tuesday might consist of a totally different string of latitude/longitude fixes than Wednesday’s track “A.”

Separate from ATC communications, there’s an open radio frequency (VHF 123.45) used on the track system that allows crews to talk to each other. While this is useful for passing on information about turbulence and whatnot, a lot of the conversation is casual. The likes of “What’s up? Where are you guys headed?” is heard all the time. It’s quite possible that your crew and the Lufthansa crew were chatting at some point.

Q: How come there are no direct flights from Europe to Hawaii? The distance is somewhere around 6,000 nautical miles from the bigger Western European capitals, but that’s well within the reach of long-haul aircraft.

I can’t imagine such a route would be profitable. It has two critical factors working against it. First, it’s a very long distance. Second, it’s a leisure destination with little premium-fare traffic, meaning that yields would be low. Cheap tickets, limited first or business class traffic, and long distances: that’s a terrible economies-of-scale combo that will only work if you can consistently fill a jumbo jet to the gills. And even that’s no guarantee of turning a profit. And how many Europeans are interested in vacationing in Hawaii in the first place? There are many closer sun-and-sea options: Turkey and the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean resort islands, Thailand, etc. Heck, there wasn’t even a Hawaii to New York nonstop until just a couple of years ago when Hawaiian Airlines came in to give it a try (the route continues, though I’ve been told it only makes money in the winter high season). Most people headed to Hawaii will connect through one of the bigger West Coast cities.

Q: I love watching airplanes in the night sky, but what do all the different lights mean? You’ve got green lights, red lights, white lights; steady lights and flashing lights. What does it all mean?

Wow, you’re really going to make me do this? If you insist. Mind you there are variations, but here’s a generic rundown:

Navigation lights (wingtips and tail): Colored lights that show a plane’s orientation: red on the left, green on the right, white in the back.  Always turned on.

Anti-collision lights (on the wingtips and sometimes the upper or lower fuselage as well): Very bright, white flashing lights that basically mean “look out, here we are!” Used night and day. Turned on just prior to the takeoff roll; turned off again just after landing.

Rotating beacon (upper or lower fuselage): A red flashing light used any time aircraft is moving. Turned on just prior to taxiing or towing; turned off again after engine shut-down. Means, “stay clear!”

Landing lights (most commonly wing-mounted and/or mounted on the nose gear strut): Very bright, white, forward facing beams. Used during takeoff, approach and landing.  Always off for taxi and cruise flight.

Taxi lights (normally on nose gear strut): White, forward facing beams. Assist with ground visibility during taxi. Usually left on for takeoff and landing as well.

Runway turnoff lights (if installed, wing-mounted): Bright white lights aimed slightly askew, to aid in high-speed turns when exiting the runway.

Logo lights (if installed): Spotlights mounted in the top of the horizontal stabilizer and aimed at the tail. Shows off your carrier’s ugly logo and helps pilots and ground controllers identify traffic.  On for taxi, takeoff and landing; optional during cruise.

 

EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO patricksmith@askthepilot.com

Related Stories:

Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 1
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 2
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 3
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 4
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 5
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, Volume 6
Q&A WITH THE PILOT, COVID EDITION

Portions of this post appeared previously in the magazine Salon.

Comments (28)

July 9, 2015 · Filed under Uncategorized

Laying Over

June 12th, 2015

THERE’S A SEGMENT in Cockpit Confidential where I reminisce about layovers. I talk about different cities, different hotels, the sometimes strange items available through room service, and so on.

The quality and duration of airline layovers can vary quite a bit, from ten-hour naps at the Holiday Inn Express in Kansas City, to the chance to spend several days in a place like Cape Town, Buenos Aires or Hong Kong.

My YouTube channel includes a pair of videos highlighting two of my favorite layovers: Cairo, Egypt, and Dakar, Senegal. I have additional footage from Georgetown, Guyana, that I haven’t edited yet. I should maybe do more of these?

The Senegal video is in two parts:

PART ONE
PART TWO

The other one is here:

CAIRO

 

Related stories:

POVERTY, HEDGEHOGS, AND THE WORLD’S WORST AIRPORT
SOUTH LATITUDE: SEARCHING FOR SOUL & SKY IN FLORIDA AND BEYOND

Comments (5)

June 13, 2015 · Filed under Uncategorized

Remembering Cairo

With Egypt in seemingly continuous turmoil, here’s a photographic toast to one of the world’s most fascinating cities.

June 11, 2015

THE ENDLESS STREAM of dispiriting news from Egypt, topped by this week’s suicide bombing at the Karnak temple in Luxor, has me thinking about my many visits to that country.

My first, in 2002, was a ten-day, small-group tour from Cairo through the Sinai and down along the Red Sea coast. Memories include Saint Catherine’s monastery, the snorkeling at Ras Mohammed, and climbing Mount Sinai at 4:30 in the morning in the company of five thousand Russian pilgrims. Later, before the overthrow of Mubarak and the ensuing chaos, I was fortunate to visit Cairo several more times.

As a rule I’m not much of a cities person — I’ll take the jungles, the mountains, the countryside villages — but this is a special case: Cairo, the de facto capital of the Islamic world, with its countless grand mosques, teeming bazaars and ancient ruins. I have taken more pictures in Cairo than anywhere else; at every turn I was digging out my camera. I’d never call the city “picturesque” — it’s far too hectic and overwhelming for a word like that — but it’s a palette of endless texture and detail, color and commotion. Even without riots and revolution, there is simply so much of everything. The imagery doesn’t stop: the spectacular detailing of a thousand year-old minaret; the ramshackle clutter of the souqs and storefronts; a donkey cart piled with strawberries; women in full cover walking along some back-alley road at sunset.

And lest we forget the Giza Plateau. Sure there are tour buses everywhere, and the spectacle of Ukrainian women tottering through the sand in six-inch heels and miniskirts. But it’s the Pyramids! Sure there’s a Pizza Hut only a few hundred yards from the paws of the Sphinx. But it’s the Sphinx!

To be fair, Cairo is also massively overcrowded, filthy, and draped in heavy smog. Traffic is unmanageable beyond words. There’s little sanitation, and the volume of roadside trash can be staggering; I once saw an impromptu traffic island constructed entirely of garbage. Even the Pyramids are strewn with litter. In summer, with temperatures poking into the triple digits, the noise and fumes become unbearable — the air above the city seems to condense into a superheated, tea-colored broth.

There are nearly twenty million people in greater Cairo. That sounds impossible until you find yourself looking out at the city from the walls of the Citadel or from atop the minaret at Ibn Tulun. Suddenly it is very believable. There is Cairo in every direction — a mammoth, horizon-wide sprawl of concrete and dust and humanity. It’s so densely, suffocatingly packed as to seem almost a single continuous structure — hundreds of thousands of buildings scorch-fused together by the sun.

What to do when it’s all too much? Simple, just head for the world’s greatest restaurant, the inimitable Abou Tarek. Everybody in Cairo, if not in all of Egypt, is familiar with Abou Tarek, a four-story building on a grimy street of tire and muffler shops, just off the eastern end of 6 October Bridge, a few blocks in from the Nile. It’s been there since 1950, founded and (still) owned by Youssef Zaki. Zaki is maybe Cairo’s closest thing to a celebrity chef — a sort of Colonel Sanders of Egyptian fast food, whose portrait stares down at you from the walls. On my last visit, Zaki himself was on the premises, shaking hands.

Walk in, take a seat, and within thirty seconds you’re dining on the restaurant’s sole entree, that most delectable of Egyptian treasures: a steaming bowl of koshary. Koshary is a carbohydrate bomb of noodles, lentils, chickpeas and fried onions, topped with a spicy tomato sauce and however much chili sauce you can handle. All for the equivalent of about $1.50.

You have to feel terrible for the many Egyptians who make their livings through tourism. I think of Abdou, for example, an independent driver and tour guide whom I came to rely on for sightseeing. Abdou was friendly, punctual, spoke good English, and he never overcharged — about as ideal a host as you could hope for. I can only wonder how he’s getting by.

ALL PHOTOS BY PATRICK SMITH

 

Cairo airport isn’t much to write home about, but I’ve seen worse. Here’s a Royal Jordanian A320 on the CAI tarmac.

 

What you can’t see in this picture are the hundreds of Ukrainian tourists on all sides of me, including the dozens of women in four-inch heels and miniskirts.

 

At the back of the main Giza complex, looking toward the desert.

 

Overview of Giza. If you point your camera in the right direction, Giza looks like it’s the middle of nowhere. But central Cairo is only about 20 minutes away.

 

Bean cart.

 

One of my favorite pictures. Typical Cairo street scenery.

 

Antique souvenirs in a shop in Cairo’s Coptic section.

 

I can’t remember where exactly this was taken. In the Coptic area somewhere.

 

Sultan Hassan Mosque, downtown Cairo. The last Shah of Iran is entombed in this building.

 

Nighttime in the famous Khan el-Khalili

 

One of my favorite travel photos, this is an overview of the Ibn Tulun mosque. I got this shot after climbing one of the mosque’s minarets (after paying an “entrance fee” to one of the guards).

 

Rooftop of the same Ibn Tulun.

 

Rooftop life, central Cairo.

 

I can’t recall which mosque this is. Does anybody recognize it?

 

Strawberry cart in the Khan el-Khalili

 

Dumpster denizen.

 

Wall and shutters in Cairo’s City of the Dead.

 

This one more or less speaks for itself.

 

Then and now. Was it by accident, do you think, that Obama and Khadafy were placed right next to each other. And at the center, of course, the now deposed Hosni Mubarak.

 

Sunset from Al-Azhar Park

 

Lastly, the greatest restaurant in the entire world. The inimitable Abou Tarek!

When you’re done looking at the pictures, I hope you’ll click over to YouTube and have a look at my “Twenty-Four Hours in Cairo” video. It’s a mish-mash montage from one of those layovers a few years ago. The best part is right at the beginning, the opening twenty seconds or so where I’ve got the camera out the window of Abdou’s taxi. The sound is what I’m talking about. Blaring above the traffic noise is a sunset call to prayer, which concludes with an amazing echo effect. Then, just as the echo peters out comes this booming, apocalyptic groaning noise. It’ll make your hair stand up. Is it a truck horn? A bus? Whatever it is, it gives me the chills. The whole sequence was recorded more or less by accident, but it’s very dramatic. Play it loud!

I have no idea if Abdou is still doing the tour guide thing, but if you’re headed to Egypt and need somebody to show you around, here is a scan of his business card. I can’t recommend him more highly…

 

Portions of this post originally ran on the website Salon.

 

Comments (9)

June 11, 2015 · Filed under Uncategorized

Pilot Report: Long Live Air Malta!

April 30, 2015

Here’s a new feature, the “Pilot Report,” in which I review and grade flights aboard different airlines. Welcome to the first installment: a trip with Air Malta.

Flight KM397, Amsterdam to Malta
Business Class, Airbus A319
Duration: 2.5 hours

Let’s start with a disclaimer: we hereby acknowledge that experiences aboard a given carrier can vary flight to flight, depending on the class of service, the temperament of the crew, and so on.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Air Malta, particularly after lackluster flights on SAS and Air Portugal recently, but I came away impressed.

The online booking process was quick and hassle-free. I set out to book in economy, but decided to splurge when I was offered an upgrade to business class for only a couple of hundred dollars extra, round-trip. The carrier’s website is user-friendly and allows for advance seat selection even with last-minute reservations like mine.

The check-in staff at Amsterdam were contract employees, but friendly and helpful nonetheless. We departed right on time.

The Airbus A319 was packed almost full in economy, but was mostly empty up front. Air Malta doesn’t have a formal business class, per se. Instead, in the forward rows, the center seat of each three-seat block folds down, forming a table between the remaining two seats. It’s a kind of on-the-fly business class that allows them to adjust the number of rows based on demand. Other European carriers do the same thing.

Juice or champagne were offered prior to push-back, along with a selection of newspapers. There was a hot towel service shortly after takeoff, followed by a hot lunch. The meal was served economy class style, with everything together on a single tray rather than separate courses.

Neither the presentation nor the food itself was anything fancy, but it was perfectly satisfactory for a short-haul airline whose network doesn’t expand beyond Europe, with flight times seldom exceeding three hours.

The personal-sized champagne bottles were a nice touch. Cabin attendants were gracious and attentive.

After landing, I was walking through the arrivals hall when I realized that I’d left my passport in the seat pocket. Air Malta’s airport staff were patient and helpful, and I had the passport back within fifteen minutes.

Air Malta’s uniforms are stylish and professional, both for ground and inflight employees. In fact the carrier’s whole identity — its uniforms, its Maltese cross logo and its livery — is handsome and distinctive.

There was just a good feeling to the whole experience, start to finish. To satisfy fussy fliers, both the creature comforts and the human touch have to be done right, and Air Malta seems to understand this.

Here’s hoping they survive.

Malta is primarily a leisure destination, with a busy summer season and a much quieter winter. This is a tough environment for any airlines to operate in, with very thin margins on fares.

And the discount carriers are making things tough. On the return flight to Amsterdam, the Air Malta check-in line was mostly empty. Just across the lobby, the lines for Ryanair and EasyJet were teeming. For those headed further afield, Emirates now flies to Malta via Cyprus.

Air Malta was founded in 1974. In the old days its mainstay fleet was the Boeing 737 and 720. Today it operates only ten aircraft, all of them narrow-body Airbuses, serving about 35 destinations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, some of them seasonally.

It’s maybe unfair to mention this, but Air Malta also played a role, albeit unwittingly, in one of the worst terrorist attacks in aviation history.

It was an Air Malta 737 onto which Libyan operatives smuggled the bomb destined to blow up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The explosive device, hidden inside a radio and packed into a suitcase, traveled from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to flight 103, bound for London and onward to New York.

The two men who stood trial for the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, had been employees of Libyan Arab Airlines. Fhimah was the station manager in Malta. Much of the investigation into the bombing took place on the island. During my vacation there, it was a little eerie walking past the Libyan Airlines ticket office, just inside the gate to the old city of Valletta.

By the way, the term “pilot report,” which I’m adapting into a gimmick for my blog, is in fact a technical term quite familiar to aircrews. PIREPs, as they’re known in shorthand, are reports of meteorological phenomena encountered in flight. Conditions are passed along to company dispatchers or air traffic control, and made available to other aircraft. If a captain comes over the public address system to warn of impending rough air, often he’s acting on the advice of a fresh PIREP.

PIREPs make their way into the pre-departure paperwork as well, topping off a hefty and at times indecipherable sheaf of charts, bulletins and forecasts. Approximately three-quarters of a pilot’s training is devoted to unraveling the secrets of weather coding, which come in the form of byzantine transcriptions like this one:

KCMH UA / OV APE 230010/10TM 1516/FL085/TP
BE20/SK BKN065/WX FV0 SM HZ FU/TA 20/TB LGT

That’s a single, simple PIREP (something about smoke or haze near Columbus, Ohio). The archaeologists who figured out the Rosetta Stone practiced for years on aviation weather packets. Unless you’re a professional cryptographer, you’ll have to agree my own PIREPs are more enjoyable.

 

ALL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR

Comments (41)

April 30, 2015 · Filed under Uncategorized

Pilotless Planes? Not So Fast.

UPDATE: April 21, 2015

ON APRIL 10th, The New York Times published an op-ed of mine about cockpit automation and the future role of the airline pilot. This was my sixth op-ed to run in the Times, but easily my favorite, given my long-simmering frustration over the topic in question.

As my regular readers are aware, one of my biggest pet peeves is the public’s widely held belief that jetliners essentially “fly themselves” — the result of a too-gullible media that takes at face value the claims of researchers, professors and tech writers who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the operational realities of commercial flying. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology.

YOU CAN READ THE STORY HERE.

In the actual newspaper they gave it excellent placement, center of the page, with a graphic showing a Chinese military hat being buzzed by mosquitoes. I’m right between David Brooks and Paul Krugman. Brooks is pretty well-known. Krugman won a Nobel Prize. Not sure what my big claim to fame is. I hope you’ll share the link with friends, and feel free to jump in and leave your thoughts in the Times‘ comments section.

Really the piece is less about the future role of pilots than it is about our current role. My main point being is that it’s pilots, not some computer, that is flying your plane. I only wish they’d give me more space. There’s plenty more to say on the subject. Since the Germanwings disaster, the cable channels, op-ed pages and blog sites have been chattering away about the supposedly diminishing role of human beings in the cockpit.

For instance there was Flying magazine’s Peter Garrison writing in the Los Angeles Times. “From shortly after takeoff to shortly before touchdown,” explains Garrison, “airplanes fly themselves while pilots talk with controllers and one another and punch data into flight management systems.”

That’s up there among the most insulting and misleading characterization of how commercial airplanes are flown ever to appear in print. Garrison is an experienced pilot and should know better than to reinforce this pervasive mythology through such flip and deceptive descriptions. Pilots become their own worst enemies sometimes, not realizing how statements like this are interpreted by the public.

Not to be outdone was John Cassidy on the New Yorker website. “In some ways, human pilots have become systems managers,” Cassidy says. “They prepare the aircraft to depart, execute the takeoff and landing, and take the controls in an emergency. But for much of the time that a routine flight is in the air, a computer flies the plane.” That was good of him to remind us that pilots indeed “execute the takeoff and landing,” which is to say they perform them by hand, but the rest of it is more of the usual nonsense.

The photo accompanying Cassidy’s story shows a simple button marked “autopilot.” I’m not sure what that blue button is for, or what aircraft the picture is from, but the actual autoflight control panel on any jetliner is, suffice it to say, a lot more complex.

There’s more: In the Toronto Globe and Mail, reporter Paul Koring wrote an article called, “Aviation is Fast Approaching the Post-Pilot Era.” He quotes David Learmount, a “veteran aviation expert,” who predicts that “pilots won’t be in cockpits in 15 years but in an airline’s operations room, rather like the U.S. Air Force pilots flying Global Hawks [military drones].” What utter and shameless rubbish.

And my old friend Missy Cummings was at it again, this time fooling a reporter at CNN.com. “Pilots only spend three minutes per flight flying a plane anyway,” she spouts. That’s a disgusting and deceptive thing to say. What she might mean is that pilots spend a relatively little amount of time (though it’s more than three minutes) steering the plane by hand. But they very much are flying it for the entirety.

Occasionally, well-intentioned people will bring up U.S. Airways hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger as a good example of why pilots are still necessary. Point accepted, but still I don’t like this, because it implies that pilots are only valuable in the event of an emergency or some unusual circumstance. On the contrary, even the most routine flight remains a very organic, hands-on operation subject to almost limitless contingencies that require human input. Cockpit automation is merely a tool, and it needs to be told what to do, how to do it, when to do it and where. And though a pilot’s hands aren’t gripping the steering column for hours at a time, as it might have in the 1930s, they are manipulating, operating, and commanding the various systems and subsystems that carry you to your destination.

Here, let me give you a quick demonstration:

I was asked by somebody to talk them through a typical maneuver. A descent, for example. How would I descend my 767 from, say, 25,000 feet to seven thousand feet, with the autopilot on? Well, it’d happen as follows. This is going to be incomprehensible to most of you, but that’s part of the point:

After being cleared to the new altitude, in this case 7000 feet, I’ll first reach up and dial “7000” in the altitude window on the mode control panel. The other pilot will verify this. The next series of steps depends where exactly on the arrival profile we are, but it’s common to activate a VNAV descent using the DESCEND NOW prompt from the descent page of the FMS. Typically I’ll already have the page set up for maybe Mach .79 and maybe 315 knots. This will give you a pretty good rate of descent.

At around 11,000 feet or so, we need to slow down in order to hit the 250 knot restriction below ten thousand feet. You can let the plane do this on its own, in VNAV, but sometimes that carries you off the profile and creates more work, so I come out of VNAV by hitting the VERTICAL SPEED switch. The VS window opens and I dial it back to 1,000 feet-per-minute, or maybe less. The plane’s rate of descent immediately begins to slow. And the instant I hit the VERTICAL SPEED switch, the IAS window also opened, allowing me to set in 250 knots. The thrust levers come back and the plane decelerates.

Now, all I have to do is tweak the rate of descent until I safely hit 250 at or near the 10,000 foot target. I might use 1000 feet-per-minute initially, then reduce it to 500. Whatever it takes. Using the spoilers can be helpful here too (the rectangular panels that rise from the top of the wings). I may already have been using them earlier in the descent if VNAV wasn’t quite holding the profile, or if ATC seemed antsy, etc.

Then, at 10,000 feet and 250 knots, I select FLCH. The 250 knots is now locked in the window and the plane will now hold that speed. I can descend at idle, or use thrust to play with the vertical speed rate, speed-on-pitch style, depending. We’ll be issued several more altitude changes, and I’ll stay with FLCH the rest of the way down, at least until joining up with whatever instrument approach is being used. Some instrument approaches, though, are flown in VNAV, which I’ll reengage later, when it’s needed, and use the speed intervene function of the IAS control to maintain the approach and landing speeds.

And that’s just the altitude control. We’ll have a number of course changes as well, to be dialed in and flown using whatever methods are appropriate (LNAV, heading select, LOC or APP mode…)

And so on. So, why not have the autopilot do this? It is doing it. The autopilot has been on throughout this scenario. This is the automation at work. Point being: it’s the pilots, not a computer, that is controlling the operation. And this is why it is so infuriating when Missy Cummings says pilots are only flying the plane for three minutes.

Granted the 767 is an older plane. It was designed in the late 1970s. There have been a few minor upgrades to the plane’s avionics since then, but nothing major. The plane is still operated exactly as it was when the first 767s were delivered. Frankly, though, even on the newest models, the basics of cockpit automation haven’t changed that much in thirty or more years. The interface between pilot and technology on a 787 or an A350 isn’t drastically different from how it was on a DC-10 or an old 747-200 in 1972. And the Airbus A320, like the one in the Germanwings crash? Its platform technology was developed in the 80s.

People will speak of planes being “highly computerized.” In some respects that true, but not in the sense that people think, and in fact it’s pretty rare for a pilot to refer to any piece of cockpit equipment as a “computer.” That’s just not a word that we use. Obviously certain components are computerized, but look around the typical cockpit and what you’ll see are lots of levers, knobs and switches. Hands-on stuff. Even the most advanced flight deck is yet to have a QWERTY keyboard anywhere on board. Pilots still use an old, ABCD EFGH style keypad to enter data into the FMS or ACARS. Much of our allegedly high-tech equipment is clunky, old-fashioned and user-unfriendly.

To be clear, I’m not arguing the technological impossibility of a pilotless plane. Certainly we have the capability. Just as we have the capability to be living in domed cities on Mars. But because it’s possible doesn’t mean that it’s affordable, practical, safe, or even desirable. And the technological and logistical challenges are daunting to say the least.

To start with, it takes the better part of a decade to design, build, and test-fly a conventional commercial plane. Neither Boeing nor Airbus has a new aircraft platform currently under development, let alone one flyable by remote control.

Not only that, but pilotless planes would require a gigantic — and gigantically expensive — rebuilding of pretty much the entire civil aviation infrastructure, from a totally new air traffic control concept to the redesign of airports. How many hundreds of billions would that cost, globally? And that’s after developing a fleet of tens of thousands of aircraft that are safe and reliable enough for automomous operations. And you’d still need pilots to operate these aircraft from afar!

It’s not impossible, but it would be a hugely more formidable task than people are led to think.

As I write in the Times, though, it’s not the future that concerns me so much as the present. I’ll be long retired and probably long dead before anybody is zipping around on pilotless planes. What riles me up is the simple wrong-ness of so much of what people think they know about a profession that in fact they know very little about, how simple they think this concept would be to develop, and the smugness with which they pronounce pilots as all but obsolete. It really insults me. And the public, for its part, deserves an accurate understanding of how planes fly, and of what pilots actually do for a living.

SEE THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY HERE.

New York Times illustration by Alvaro Dominguez.

 

Patrick Smith is the author of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

 

Comments (115)

April 21, 2015 · Filed under Uncategorized

« Older Posts

Newer Posts »

Questions & Answers

Essays & Stories

"I wish I could fold up Patrick Smith and put him in my suitcase."

- Stephen Dubner,
Coauthor of Freakonomics

Terminal Madness: What Is Airport Security?

"Always excellent."

– James Fallows,
The Atlantic

Blog Archives

Follow Us!

RSS FACEBOOK

Subscribe to our mailing list

Subscribe

COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL

Second Edition Now Available

Advertisement

Author's Featured Photo

Copyright © 2024 Patrick Smith / Aerophilia Enterprises, LLC
Site developed by LeandroArts