October 24, 2022

LOTS GOING ON in the aviation world, beginning with the fact that I’ve retired my yellow highlighter. That’s right, I no longer carry a yellow highlighter as part of my pocket-flap ensemble of necessary cockpit gear.

Some months ago, you might recall, I talked about how, in the pocket of my (wrinkled) polyester pilot shirt, you’ll always find three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie. The highlighter I’d use for marking up the flight plan. I’d go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc.

Well, now that our flight plans have gone digital, there’s not much call for this. We still carry a hard copy version of the flight plan, it’s true, but at this point it’s just a backup, rolled and stuffed into a cubby hole near the center pedestal. And you can’t use a highlighter, really, on an iPad.

What I’m not letting go of, on the other hand, is my beloved red Sharpie.

The Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep other pilots from drinking from it (there are sometimes four of us up there). I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat on the 767, there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference info — a distillation of bullet points from the flight plan.

I prepare the sheet prior to departure, while still at the gate, as part of my preflight prep. The photo below is an example of a sheet used on a flight from Europe to the U.S. Here’s what it all means…

A. This is the flight number.

B. Planned flying time, wheels up to wheels down.

C. Arrival and departure times. Scheduled times are in red, in both local and UTC (Greenwich time). In this case, we’re scheduled to depart at 1110 local, and arrive at 1430 local. Or 1210 and 2030 respectively, in UTC. The addendum in pen, added after departure, is our arrival time based on when we actually took off. Today we’ll be 25 minutes early.

D. Fuel figures, in thousands of pounds. Block (B), minimum (M), and landing (L). Block fuel is our amount at pushback, which today will be 105,700 pounds. Minimum fuel is the lowest amount with which we’re permitted to commence the takeoff roll, in accordance with a slew of rules that we’ll save for another time. Landing fuel is our anticipated total at touchdown.

E. “300” is our initial expected flight level (altitude). That is, 30,000 feet, or “flight level three-hundred.” Below it I’ve written the name of the entry fix of our anticipated oceanic track, as well as our intended crossing altitude and speed. “LIMRI” is the fix name, and we hope to cross the Atlantic at 35,000 feet and Mach .79. This info will be added into the template of our oceanic clearance request.

F. We have 211 souls on board. That’s everyone: passengers, crew, and all the whiny kids riding in laps. The number below is the “assumed temperature” engine de-rate value used for takeoff (another topic for later). I’ll enter this into a datalink template later on; maintenance uses it to track engine performance.

G. This is the title of our assigned departure procedure (a series of initial routings, speeds and altitudes). We are cleared to depart via the “BELKO 6A.” I write it down because European departure controllers, on check-in after takeoff, often ask you to verbally verify which procedure you’re flying. Although you’ve got it loaded and have verified all the fixes and restrictions, the names can be confusing and easy to forget.

H. “T/A 50” means a transition altitude of 5,000 feet. This is the point at which our altimeters must be set to the standard pressure value of 29.92. This altitude varies country to country. “NADP” is a reminder that this airport requires us to fly a special noise-abatement departure procedure, with slightly different parameters for flap retraction and the setting of climb thrust.

I. Phonetic letter code (Foxtrot) for the most recent departure ATIS (Google it if you must), which I’ll pass along to ATC when necessary.

J. This empty section is where the arrival notes will go, later on. Items here might be the transition level for the destination airport, our gate number, and any anything else I might need to remember in a pinch. You might see radio frequencies here. For example, when flying into Los Angeles, controllers will often shift you from the north complex to the south complex, or vice-versa, on short notice, causing a flurry of arrival, approach, and taxi revisions. To stay a step ahead, I’ll write down all of the communications frequencies for tower, ground control and apron, in sequence, for both north and south sides. This info is on our charts, obviously, but it’s easier to have it on my cheat-sheet, ready to go, and not have to hunt around on my tablet while ATC is yelling at us.

Full disclosure: none of this is typical. Most pilots don’t bother writing much down aside from the flight number and maybe the departure fuel. But I’m a touch OCD, and, I don’t know, I’m just more comfortable this way. And it saves me from having to scroll through my iPad.

I suppose a regular pen would work just as well, but I like it all in red.

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THINGS I BRING

February 19, 2020

THE TIMELINE of an aviation career, for some of us, is punctuated with dark occurrences. Furloughs, rejection letters, bankruptcies. And now, sigh, I’ve lost my beloved calculator.

I bought the thing 23 years ago, if I remember right, at the old Osco store on Highland Avenue near Davis Square. It was your basic flip-top model, dual solar and battery, with fat buttons and an oversized screen for better low-light viewing. I paid about four dollars for it.

When you own anything for 23 years, you grow fond of it. The same chemicals and synaptic energies that attach us to pets, or even people, I suspect, are the ones that, albeit on a lesser level, attach us to inanimate objects. These objects mark the passage of time. They carry with them the memories of past jobs, past relationships, former eras of our lives. I hope that isn’t being too oddly sentimental, or insulting the very nature of what it is to be human. Regardless, I miss my calculator.

Two weeks ago I was working a flight to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was the relief pilot on this leg, sitting in one of the cockpit jumpseats with the calculator on my knee. It was shortly after takeoff and I’d just finished running through the waypoint times and working out the breaks schedule. I was about to put it back into my briefcase bag when something distracted me. I placed it on top of my roll-aboard bag, which was stowed standing up, an arm’s reach away to my left — and promptly forgot about it.

That’s the last time I saw it. At some point it must have gotten jostled to the floor, where I presume it still is, kicked into a corner and set upon each flight by heavy luggage. Perhaps another pilot picked it up and tucked it into one of the cockpit cubby holes. (Sure we have a lost-and-found boxes in our crew bases, but who’s going to return a cheap plastic calculator?) Or maybe he threw it away. The truth is, most pilots don’t bring or use calculators. It would’ve been a peculiar artifact to find.

You can see the calculator in the picture below, taken in 1998. No, that’s not a U-boat circa 1944; it’s the flight engineer’s station of a Douglas DC-8. This was my office for about four years, shuttling cargo to and from Europe and across the U.S. The calculator is on the ledge, lower left. Notice it has an orange sticker on its case. I added the sticker for the same reason that I use a bright red bumper on my iPhone: to keep me from leaving it behind. So much for bright ideas, literally.

The calculator was a necessary instrument on the ancient Douglas. The weight, balance, and fuel calculations were all done by hand. It was simple arithmetic, but these were big, six-digit numbers. Not so much on the 767. It’s the dispatchers, loaders and planners who do all the serious number-crunching. They upload the results to us and we plug them in. About the only things we calculate manually are the waypoint crossing times and maybe the start/end times of our crew rest breaks. This is hardly anything technical; they’re just figures of convenience jotted down in the margins of the flight plan, requiring nothing more than adding or subtracting a few simple numbers.

But there are fewer things that I am worse at than adding or subtracting simple numbers. I am, in fact, so bad at even basic math that I can barely make change for a dollar. Solving a problem like “14 plus 28” is, to my mind, like contemplating quantum physics. And running the times, forget it: If you cross one waypoint at 14:26, and the next one is 47 minutes later, what time will that be? Are you kidding? Where the hell is my calculator?

I guess I’ll start using my phone. On the bright side this means one fewer thing to carry around.

And what do pilots carry around?

Once upon a time — meaning not very long ago — we lugged with us heavy black briefcases stuffed with maps, charts, and manuals. Pretty much all of this technical arcana now lives electronically in an iPad or other tablet device. Of all the advances seen in commercial aviation over the past two decades, this is probably the one most welcome by pilots. Because not only did those books weigh a ton, they required almost constant revising. Every two weeks a thick packet of pages would show up in your mailbox. The tiniest addendum to any approach or departure procedure, and bang, eighteen different pages needed to be swapped out. A particularly hefty set of revisions could take an hour or more to complete. Page in, page out, page in, page out. Side effects included dizziness, blindness, repetitive motion injuries and suicide.

Now all we do is tap a button that says UPDATE. United Airlines says that its switch to iPads saves twenty million sheets of paper annually. I can believe it. It also has saved time, fuel, and visits to the chiropractor.

We still carry flight bags, but they’ve gotten a lot smaller and contain mainly personal items and sundries. Some pilots use a soft-sided briefcase; others use gym-stye bags or even backpacks. My preference, at the moment, is an offensively overpriced Tumi briefcase that I bought about six years ago and quickly learned to hate, with a series of undersized exterior pockets that are exactly too small for anything I try to fit in them.

Inside this Tumi is a repurposed toiletries bag. This is where I keep my flight essentials. The most substantial object in here is a headset. The headsets supplied in our cockpits are old David Clark models — those Space Age green things that NFL coaches used to wear on the sidelines. They’re heavy, bulky, antiquated. So, like many pilots, I bring my own. I’ve been thinking about splurging on a noises-canceling set, but for now I use a cheap, reliable Telex. I also have a 26 year-old Sony that I sometimes bring. This was a present that I bought for myself in 1993 when I checked out as a Dash-8 captain.

You’ll also find pens, earplugs, a solar-powered flashlight, a calculator (RIP), sunscreen, masking tape, and a big packet of wet-naps used to wipe away the dust, crumbs, and grime from the radio panels and other cockpit surfaces, which are routinely, astonishingly filthy. And three or four clothes pins. The cockpit sun visors are flimsy things that don’t do much in the way of blocking the sun. To keep from going blind, I augment the visors by clothes-pinning up sheets of paper, a map, or maybe a folded garbage bag.

In the shirt pockets of my uniform you’ll always see three things: a ballpoint pen, a highlighter, and a red Sharpie.

The pen is used for all the things people use pens for. The highlighter I use mainly for marking up the flight plan. I’ll go through it page by page, striking the important parts in yellow: the flight time, the alternates, the dispatcher’s desk number, the airport elevations, deferred maintenance items, ETP coordinates, etc. Every pilot does this in his or her own style. Many don’t do it at all. I have a bad habit of coloring the flight plan even when it’s not my leg to fly, irritating the pilot whose turn it actually is.

The red Sharpie is my tool for what we’ll call high-emphasis tasks, the most critical of which is putting my initials on the cap of my water bottle, to keep anyone else from drinking from it. If there’s a redispatch point along our route, I’ll mark it on the flight plan with a red “RDP.” I also use it for my scratch-pad notes. When I’m in the first officer’s seat there’s a clipboard along the bottom ledge of the window, just to my right. I keep a folded piece of paper there on which I jot down various quick-reference figures: the flight number, en route time, block fuel, minimum takeoff fuel, transition levels, planned oceanic crossing altitudes and speeds, radio frequencies. All in red.

That’s aviation for you. Where the smallest and most mundane things — I mean physically, tangibly, the smallest accoutrements — are often the marks of experience. I’ve been flying commercially for thirty years now. My advice to the aspiring aviator is this: bring a Sharpie.