Update: October 20, 2017

A WORD OF ADVICE for aspiring aviators:

As discussed below, U.S. regional carriers, faced with a crippling shortage of pilots, have been bending over backwards to attract new hires — and to hang on to the pilots they already have. Salaries have been soaring and airlines are offering retention bonuses north of $30,000. It’s hard to see a negative in this, at least on paper, but if you talk to pilots at some of these companies you’ll learn that many of them are very unhappy. Why?

Although pilots are earning more, overall quality of life at many regionals is still suffering. And that’s because things are in panic mode. The industry is being reactive when it should have been proactive. The improvements we’re seeing should have been put in place years ago. Because they weren’t, numerous airlines now face chronic understaffing issues. This results in pilots being forced to work high-stress schedules with minimal time off. One pilot I spoke to, employed by a United Express carrier, says the company is so understaffed that even senior captains are being “junior manned,” as it’s called, and conscripted into duty on almost all of their scheduled days off, typically with little or no notice. Pilots are quitting in droves, he says, retention bonuses be damned.

As a group, pilots have never had as much leverage or opportunity as they have right now, and with thousands of retirements coming up in the next five to ten years at the majors, it should only get better. However, there are systemic problems in the regional sector, and just throwing money around isn’t going to fix them. It will take a while for things to stabilize. In the meantime, it behooves applicants to do their homework and realize what they’re getting into. Things can change quickly in this business, but some regionals are, at least for now, better-staffed and all-around more pleasant places to work than others. Know which are which.

August 5, 2017

THE PILOT SHORTAGE is here. It’s real, it’s global, and it’s been making headlines. However, we need to be clear which sectors of the aviation industry we’re talking about, and in which parts of the world.

Let’s start with North America, where the first step is to draw a sharp divide between the major carriers and their regional affiliates. The majors, also referred to as “legacy” carriers, are the ones people are most familiar with — American, United, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, et al. There is no pilot shortage at these companies, and unless something changes drastically they will continue to have a surplus of highly qualified candidates to choose from. They are able to cull from the top ranks of the regionals, as well as from the military and corporate aviation pools. Even amidst an ongoing wave of retirements, a steady supply of experienced crews is unlikely to be depleted.

At the regionals, however, it’s a very different story. And by “regional” we’re referring to the numerous subcontractors who operate smaller jets (regional jets, or “RJs”) and turboprops on the majors’ behalf: those myriad “Connection” and “Express” companies, whose actual identities are concealed beneath the liveries of whichever major they are aligned with. United Express, Delta Connection, American Eagle, and so on. These carriers have been slashing flights, grounding planes, and otherwise scrambling to keep their cockpits staffed. In June, Horizon Air, the Seattle-based affiliate of Alaska Airlines and one of the country’s biggest regional carriers, announced it would be forced to reduce its busy summer schedule due to a dearth of pilots. Earlier this year, Republic Airways, a large U.S. regional carrier that flies on behalf of United, American and Delta, filed for bankruptcy protection. It blamed the filing, in part, on a lack of qualified pilots.

How this came to happen is both a long and short story. The short story is that employment at a regional carrier sucks. It’s not an easy lifestyle, and the pay has been the kind of thing that causes people to skip their school reunions. Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures. Schedules are demanding and benefits paltry; the relationship between management and the workers is often hostile; and top of all that, the regional sector is highly unstable. Companies always seem to be coming or going, shrinking or shedding planes, changing their names and realigning with different majors. This has driven thousands of pilots out of the industry, and/or has discouraged countless others from pursuing an aviation career in the first place.

Yet pay and working conditions at these airlines have always been substandard, and filling jobs was seldom a problem. So what gives? Well, what’s different is that the regional sector has grown so large, now accounting for half of all domestic departures in the United States! As recently as twenty-five years ago it was around 15 percent. In those days, pilots saw a job with a regional as a temporary inconvenience — paying one’s dues. It was a stepping-stone toward a more lucrative position with a major. Pilots are now realizing that a job at a regional could easily mean an entire career at a regional. Thus, a diminishing number have been willing to commit the time and money to their education and training when the return on investment is somewhere between unpredictable and financially ruinous.

Pilots in the United States are responsible for securing their own FAA credentials, and for logging hundreds or even thousands of hours of flight time before applying at an airline. For those who come up through the civilian channels it’s a slow and very expensive process. An aspiring aviator has to ask, is it worth sinking $100,000 or more into one’s primary training, plus the time it will take to build the necessary number of flight hours, plus the cost of a college education, only to spend years toiling at poverty-level wages, with at best a marginal shot at moving on to a major? For many the answer has been a resounding (and logical) no.

In the meantime, the FAA has enacted tougher hiring standards for entry-level pilots. Over the past two decades, as the regional sector grew and grew, airlines sharply lowered their experience and flight time minimums to fill the thousands of new cockpit jobs this growth created. Suddenly, pilots were being taken on with as little as 350 hours of total time, assigned to the first officer’s seat of sophisticated RJs and turboprops. Then came a rash of accidents, including the Colgan Air (Continental Connection) disaster outside Buffalo in 2009. Regulators began taking a closer look at hiring practices, eventually passing legislation that mandated higher flight time totals and additional certification requirements for new hires.

Some airlines blame the shortage at least partly on these tougher rules. Technically they’re right, but arguing against an obvious safety enhancement is maybe not the smartest idea. Besides, all the new regulations really have done is return things to historical norms. When I applied for my first regional job in 1990, competitive applicants at the time had between 1,500 and 2,000 hours, and most of us had an Airline Transport Pilot certificate as well. That’s more or less what the FAA demands today. Flight time totals are just one indicator of a pilot’s skill or competence, but these requirements are not unreasonable.

The regionals have finally started upping their salaries and improving benefits, in some cases substantially. The cost structures of these carriers, whose existence is primarily to allow the majors to outsource flying on the cheap, limits how much they can lavish on their employees, but frankly they have little choice. New hires at companies like Endeavor Air (a Delta affiliate) and PSA (American), for example, can now make first-year salaries in the $70,000-plus range. That’s three times what these pilots would have made in years past. Other companies are offering signing bonuses of several thousand dollars, and work rules too are getting better. Air Wisconsin, a United partner and one of the nation’s oldest regionals, says that pilots can now earn up to $57,000 in sign-on bonuses. It promises earnings of between $260,000 and $317,000, including salary and bonuses over the first three years of employment. Figures like that are unprecedented.

So, for those considering a piloting career in the United States, the situation is looking better. The problem for the industry, though, is the lag time. Somebody just learning to fly is years away from meeting any airline’s hiring criteria. So while the mechanisms are falling into place to curtail a full-blown crisis, the shortage is going to be with us for a while.

Similar shortages exists elsewhere around the globe, but they are driven by slightly different forces. You don’t have the major/regional dichotomy like you do in North America, but the airline business overall has been expanding so rapidly, especially in Asia, that carriers can’t keep up. Many have success with what are called “ab-initio” programs, whereby young candidates are chosen from scratch, with no prior experience, and are trained and groomed from the ground-up, so to speak, in a tightly controlled regimen that puts them in the cockpit of a jetliner relatively quickly. These programs are ultra-competitive, drawing hundreds of applicants for each available slot. They produce quality pilots, but again there’s a lag time problem: industry growth is far outpacing the rate at which ab initio schemes can produce cockpit-ready pilots. This has forced airlines from Asia to go hunting for pilots in the U.S. and elsewhere, sometimes offering huge salaries and incentive packages.

The Gulf carriers, meanwhile, bring in expats from every corner of the world. Of Emirates roughly 4,000 pilots, the largest percentage is recruited from South Africa, where there are lots of young pilots and a rich aviation culture, but comparatively few jobs.

 

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.

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 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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

UPDATE: February 4, 2015

I don’t know what caused the TransAsia Airways ATR turboprop to crash earlier today — an accident caught spectacularly and horrifically on video. Early reports suggest an engine failure that was improperly handled by the crew. Whatever the cause, it’s clear that CNN didn’t read my original blog post, below. The emails I sent them on this topic also went unheeded.

In the network’s coverage of the TransAsia accident, reporters Euwan McKirdy and Vivian Kam wrote: “The plane’s pilot and two co-pilots were among those confirmed dead, authorities said.”

On and on it goes. This wouldn’t be bothering so much if I hadn’t just been complaining about it only a few days ago:

 

ORIGINAL POST: January 30, 2015

I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE. How many times can the media, whether it’s a print reporter or a celebrity newscaster, make the same mistake? And why aren’t the supposed experts, often right there on camera with these people, putting them straight?

What I’m talking about is the characterization of the copilot. This has been a topic du jour since earlier this week, when it was revealed that the copilot of AirAsia flight 8501 had been at the controls when the Airbus A320 was lost, and then on Thursday when the captain of a Delta flight was locked out of the cockpit, requiring the copilot to land the plane in Las Vegas.

Good god, a copilot at the controls! The media apparently has no idea this is perfectly normal.

“Is that a problem?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked expert Dave Soucie the other night, in a discussion of the AirAsia crash. Soucie’s half-baked answer did nothing to sway the accepted notion that a copilot is something less than a “real” pilot and thus not entitled to actually fly an airplane.

I’ve harped on this before. It’s in my book. I wrote about it numerous times in my columns at Salon, and in earlier posts on this site. That nobody is getting the message is a testament either to my own lack of reach or to stubbornness on the part of journalists. Maybe it’s both. Either way, allow me to cut and paste:

Dear Anderson, et al:

There are always at least two pilots in a jetliner cockpit — a captain and first officer — and both of these individuals are fully qualified to operate the aircraft.

The first officer is known colloquially as the copilot. But a copilot is not an apprentice. He or she shares flying duties with the captain more or less equally. The captain is officially in charge, and earns a larger paycheck to accompany that responsibility, but both individuals fly the aircraft. Copilots perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do, in pretty much all weather conditions, and both are part of the decision-making process.

In fact, while protocols might be slightly different carrier to carrier, it’s not unusual during emergencies or other abnormal situations for the captain to delegate hands-on flying duties to the copilot, so that the captain can concentrate on communications, troubleshooting, coordinating the checklists, etc.

Do I seem sensitive about this? That’s because I’m a copilot.

 

 

And a copilot becomes a captain not by virtue of skill or experience, but rather when his or her seniority standing allows it. And not every copilot wants to become a captain right away. Airline seniority bidding is a complicated thing, and a pilot can often have a more comfortable quality of life — salary, aircraft assignment, schedule and choice of destinations — as a senior copilot than as a junior captain. Thus, at a given airline, there are plenty of copilots who are older and more experienced than many captains.

Now, in some areas of the world, including parts of Asia, the experience disparity between captains and copilots tends to be more pronounced, and the typical new-hire copilot has considerably less experience than his counterpart would in America. The captain of AirAsia 8501 had ten times as many flight hours as the first officer, who even after working for three years at AirAsia had logged less than 2,500 hours total. In America that would be unheard of; the average new-hire at a major airline has around 6,000 hours and often many more. In the AirAsia copilot’s defense, the raw totals in one’s logbook are only part of the story and aren’t necessarily representative of skill or talent. Airline training is never easy, and any pilot, no matter his or her background, needs to be good to succeed at that level. Still, it’s not surprising for people to wonder why such a comparatively inexperienced person would have been flying the plane during violent weather. Maybe, when this is all said and done, the correct question isn’t “Why was the copilot flying the plane?,” but rather “Why are such low-time pilots in these cockpits to begin with?” That’s a different conversation altogether. And it remains to be seen if either pilot’s actions had anything to do with the accident.

It can vary country to country, but captains usually wear four stripes on their sleeves and epaulets, and copilots wear three.

On older planes there was a third cockpit station occupied by the second officer, also known as the flight engineer. (I spent four years as a flight engineer on a cargo jet in the mid-1990s.) Once upon a time planes also carried navigators, but the last known navigator in these parts was the old Howard Borden character from the original “Bob Newhart Show.”

Long-haul flights carry augmented crews that work in shifts. There might be two copilots and a captain, two captains and a copilot, or two captains and two copilots. It varies airline to airline and with the length of flight. For example, at my airline, a ten-hour flight will carry three pilots: two copilots and a captain. Each crew member will have roughly one-third of the flight free. He or she retires to a bunk room or designated crew rest seat, while the other two remain up front.

In most conversations the term “co-” implies equal. With cockpits though, the presumption is of something less. I’m not sure exactly from where this stems. The cockpit cultures of years past probably have something to do with it. In the decades prior the advent of “cockpit resource management” and all that, the cockpit hierarchy was very rigid and the captain’s authority went unchallenged. Copilots were expected to be subservient and were seldom treated as equals by imperious captains. This culture has not entirely disappeared in some parts of the world.

Reporters’ frequent use of the term “the pilot” is another part of the problem. “The pilot” did this, “the pilot” said that. Well, which pilot exactly? Use of the singular implies that the other person in the cockpit is something other than, and presumably less than, an actual pilot. I’m not sure if reporters have a style guide for these things, but this is nothing a simple “s” can’t fix: “the pilots.” Alternately, one could say “the cockpit crew.” If a differentiation in rank is needed, I’d recommend using the terms “captain” and “first officer.” Just be aware that either pilot may be at the controls during a particular incident.

 

Epaulets photo by the author.

 

For more about pilot training, lifestyle and culture, see chapter four in the new book.