Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  I return to my seat, work a little more on a presentation, gaze out the window, doze. A few hours later another flight attendant comes to my seat. I’ve been invited, she says, to return to the cockpit for the landing at Heathrow. Would I like to go? I am out of my seat before she finishes the question.

  I’m given a headset. As we speak a city rises in the windows above the computer screens, its miniaturized perfection turning steadily on the drum of the sea. I point to it. That’s Copenhagen, on the Sound, the Øresund, the pilot says, smiling and making a slash in the air, between Denmark and Sweden. I try to remember the name of the place on the coast near the city where Isak Dinesen was born and died. Copenhagen is a city the copilot recognizes by sight; a city that means he is almost home to England. Here in the cockpit I first see the world as a place where the miles between Copenhagen and London are all but an afterthought, the endpapers to a day of work in the sky over Eurasia—a place where an entire city shines up, its name and situation on the planet read as easily as the sign for a highway exit after a long drive.

  The captain points out the arc of the Frisian Islands, off the north coast of the Netherlands, and I remember one of my favorite books as a teenager, that contained brief histories and sample texts for hundreds of languages. The entry for Frisian, a language I had not heard of until I read this book, described how closely related it is to English. I hear a controller tell the pilots to “call now London.” As if the plane is tracing the progression of language as closely as the waypoints that form the route—as if to see and hear this from above was the only purpose of airplanes and radios—the voice of an English controller soon begins to direct our descent.

  I have never before sat in an airliner’s cockpit for landing. Much of what I experience this afternoon will continue to amaze me for years to come, even after I am myself a pilot: the dramatic siren when the autopilot is disconnected—for the now-obvious reason that it should never disconnect without the pilot knowing—and another auditory marvel, those voices of the plane that crisply announce our heights as the runway approaches. At 200 feet, fifteen seconds above Britain: “DECIDE.”

  Even more striking than the autopilot and the voices are the earlier portions of the descent. I see, for the first time from the inside of a cockpit, something of the nature of airliners, something that I first began to understand from that Saudi plane I watched as it parked at JFK so many years ago. I see what a 747 has done to a hazy and half-remembered morning in Tokyo: suddenly we are among the scattered afternoon clouds that were below us; they are billowing past and over us until London is recalled from beneath them. I have loved flying for as long as I can remember, and yet until today I didn’t even know what it is to be a pilot, that a job existed in which the sight of a city could grace a day so simply.

  Four years later, I’ve become a pilot. I am walking in the airport in Los Angeles, about to fly to London as a passenger. Suddenly I spot the copilot who was so kind to me on that flight from Tokyo, who went out of his way to show me something I will remember for the rest of my life. I call out, say hello, and explain from where I think I remember him. After a moment of hesitation he recalls our previous meeting. We speak for some time. He congratulates me for having joined his profession and company in the years since we last met. Then, for the second time, he flies me to London.

  Three years later I am in a bar outside Tokyo, or perhaps a café in Beijing or Singapore. I see him and say hello. I have now just started to fly the 747, which he still flies. In this sense my journey feels more complete than at our previous meeting. We talk for a few minutes, then say good-bye. When we next meet it will be at a churrascaria in São Paulo, several years later again. We share a meal together, an amiable chat, then bid each other farewell, until some other year and city.

  If my connection with this colleague is so memorable, it’s in part because it began with the first landing I ever watched from the cockpit of an airliner. But it’s also because such an ongoing personal bond, although to outsiders it may sound like hardly a bond at all, is relatively usual. If aviation overturns our locally grown senses of time and place, it changes our sense of community as well. For many who work in this business of connecting people and places, the nature of our work means that many kinds of connections are not possible, while other friendships are valuable precisely because they are so rare, attenuated over both time and the fullness of the planet.

  —

  I’m often asked what actually happens when pilots go to the airport—where we park, if we drive to work; how long before a flight we’re obliged to be at the airport; whether we meet our colleagues somewhere before a flight, or if we come together only on the airplane.

  When I arrive at the airport for work, I first check my bag in, if I’m going on a long trip. Then I go to a large office area that stands on its own level between the arrival and departure floors that are so familiar to passengers. I sometimes take the stairs, a chance for movement before half a day spent all but motionless in the cockpit. Roughly equal shares of the floor space in this office area are devoted to computer terminals, meeting rooms, and a bustling café. At a computer terminal, coffee in hand, I scan the notices that have been published since I last came to work. These may relate to a new procedure or piece of equipment—for example, when a new computer system was installed on 747s, we were informed via such notices about the technical modifications that had been made to the aircraft and the changes required to certain cockpit procedures.

  At some point, I must also remember to formally register that I am actually at the airport, via a swipe of my ID card. Otherwise at my report—the time I’m due at the airport, typically ninety minutes before a long-haul flight—someone will call my cell phone to check that I’m not stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, or drinking coffee on the couch at home, having misread my schedule.

  At report time, I head to another computer terminal outside a designated meeting room. Here I meet the other pilots and greet the flight attendants. Friends often assume that I work together with a fixed set of colleagues—a few pilots and a group of flight attendants, a more or less permanent team. The reality, at least in my corner of the profession, could not be more different. The total number of pilots and cabin crew on a 747 flight may be sixteen, occasionally as many as twenty. When I arrive at that meeting room, it’s likely that I have never before met any of the people with whom I am about to cross the world. Our nametags are not worn only for passengers.

  Our preflight briefing has two components. In the joint portion, we speak with the flight attendants about our journey together. They tell us what is different in the cabin today—perhaps a large group of blind passengers are onboard, or a royal family, or, as on a recent trip of mine, several hundred police officers traveling for a sponsored charity run.

  The most relevant details which we give to the flight attendants are the time, and whether and when turbulence might be expected—both determined to some degree by the forecast strength and location of the high winds. We also speak about the route, and whether we will cross any remote areas of the world, such as Siberia or northern Canada or the mid-Atlantic Ocean, or mountain ranges that would change our procedures in the event of problems with the cabin air. We discuss any specific precautions for our destination, regarding malaria, for example. We check if anyone is bringing friends or family along with them—passengers who, because they accompany a crew member, may be affectionately referred to as Klingons. Not least, we check that we all agree on the location of our aircraft—no small matter in a large airport.

  We may then discuss recent changes to our manuals or a specific safety-related scenario. The most fruitful discussions take place around situations that have different implications on opposite sides of the cockpit door. For example, pilots have elaborate procedures to follow in the cockpit in the event of a loss of cabin air pressure. The flight attendants, too, have procedures for this. The coordination of these two, at a busy time and across a large aircraft, speak
ing behind oxygen masks over mountains that may limit our ability to descend, is not straightforward. At regular intervals we practice scenarios such as these together in a training center, outfitted with a mock-up of an airplane cabin and cockpit, with discussions afterwards to review the identical technical situation from our different perspectives. The briefings before each trip are a chance to recall those exercises together, as the newly formed team might be faced with such a situation only a few hours later.

  Separate from our discussion with the cabin crew, the other pilots and I review the technical details of our flight—the route, any closures or temporary deficiencies at airports we will fly near, any minor problems with the aircraft, known as acceptable deferred defects, that we must look up in a voluminous manual.

  Weather is an important topic. Our briefing typically starts with a map that displays our entire route. Sometimes, such as for certain northerly routes to Japan, these maps are centered on the North Pole. It takes a moment to decide which way to hold such a piece of paper, because it hardly matters. The charts are scattered with curious, weather-related markings—meteoro-glyphs, we might call them. We point out the jet streams and the regions of potential turbulence or storms or icing, drawn to look like clouds though they are often the size of countries. Typhoons and hurricanes are marked with a simple circle with two spinning tails; it resembles the technical icon in our manuals that denotes a pump, which is not an inaccurate analogy. There is a symbol for volcanoes—a pyramid with the top missing, with little worried dashes of lava pouring up from it—and one for radioactivity. A pen traces over this world at hundreds of miles per second. Turbulence here, icing possible there; a spilled drop of coffee; more turbulence there, during the breakfast service tomorrow, unfortunately; storms here; a volcano there.

  Next we consider the weather at our destination and the airports near it, accounting not just for the specialist aviation forecasts—written in a code now so familiar to me that I use the forecasts even when checking the weather at home—but also for each pilot’s experience, as other pilots may already know well the atmospheric eccentricities of a destination that is new to me. São Paulo, for example, is famous for its heavy rains, which are not always forecast. In San Francisco, the winds often blow more strongly near the ground—a reversal of the sky’s usual arrangement of motion, although even forceful winds near the ground there are rarely turbulent. At Narita Airport, near Tokyo, however, even light winds can be surprisingly bumpy. Over the years this rhythm of forecast and experience accumulates to a satisfying awareness of the meteorological personalities of the world’s cities, as if they were characters, colleagues we have naturally come to know well.

  Flights often use a little more fuel than a straightforward calculation would suggest. The wind forecasts sometimes turn out to be not quite accurate, or the taxi out takes longer, or we cannot fly at our optimum altitudes, or congestion delays our arrival. We are given a statistical allowance for all this, based on a detailed history of fuel usage by flights on that route. Individual planes may also be given a fuel factor, an increase in fuel that reflects the consumption history of each aircraft, each individual hull, which can be thought of as similar to a handicap in golf. Outside the briefing room, once our fuel decision is agreed, we enter it into a computer that transmits it immediately. Fueling a long-haul airliner is not a quick process, and by the time we ourselves reach the aircraft, less than an hour before departure, it should be well under way.

  —

  One of the milestones of every pilot’s career is their first solo, the first time they fly without an instructor. Ceremonies and traditions abound; upon landing, a newly soloed pilot may be drenched with a bucket of water or have their shirttails cut off. I soloed near Phoenix, Arizona, in the early part of my flight-training course.

  After my first solo, the remaining visual flight training consisted of a mixture of solo flights and flights with an instructor onboard. Near the end of this period of mixed flying my instructor pointed out something I had not realized. When you return to England to start your instrument training, he told me, all of the flying will be done with an instructor onboard. Enjoy your last solo flight, he said as I walked out to the aircraft on a sunny afternoon, because unless you later decide to fly privately, you will never again in your life be alone on an airplane.

  He was right. Many small planes can be flown by a single pilot. Yet commercial jetliners do not have two pilots merely for redundancy. Everything about how they are designed and operated assumes the presence of two pilots—a captain and a copilot, more formally known as a first officer. Both first officers and captains are pilots and do roughly the same amount of flying, but the captain—who must sign many documents before and after each flight and, like the postilion of horse-drawn coaches, always sits on the left—has additional managerial responsibilities, and ultimate legal authority, as commander of both the aircraft and its crew.

  Most other tasks are divided strictly between the pilot flying—whether they are flying manually, or through an autopilot—and the pilot not flying, or pilot monitoring. Captains and copilots alternate between the pilot-flying and pilot-monitoring roles. One of the least appreciated aspects of airliners is that they are designed to be flown not only by two pilots, but by two pilots swapping between what are essentially different jobs.

  The captain decides who is the pilot flying for each leg, a decision that must account for several variables. For example, pilots must perform a number of flights and a number of landings within a specified period, in order to maintain what’s called recency. Weather is another consideration; as a copilot I am not allowed to be the pilot flying for an automatic landing in fog, for example. So if we are flying from London to New York, and fog is forecast for our return to London in a few days’ time, the captain may say to me: “Why don’t you take it out? I’ll bring it back.” Out is New York; back is London; it, the controls of the 747. Longer flights feature an additional copilot, known as the heavy. A captain, meeting the two copilots for the day’s flight, may ask which one of us is heavy out and which is heavy home. On some long trips a captain may not be the pilot flying in either direction, because both copilots need a landing to maintain their recency. The longest flights have two heavies—a total of four pilots, one pair in dreamland while the other pair flies.

  The interaction and cooperation between the two different pilot roles—pilot flying and pilot monitoring—is highly formalized. Not only the tasks but the language that accompanies their completion is specified in exacting detail. When the flying pilot decides to lower the landing gear, for example, they do not reach for the lever themselves. They say: “Gear down.” The monitoring pilot repeats the instruction out loud, to check that it has been heard correctly, then checks that the speed and altitude are appropriate for this instruction, and only then actually moves the lever. The division, then, could be likened to that on a road trip with someone you get along well with. Only one of you drives. The other checks and gives directions, changes the music or temperature, passes snacks and drinks, searches in a guidebook or on a smartphone for the best diner in the town ahead, calls the motel to see if they still have a room.

  The checklist is an important aspect of aviation safety that has been recognized by other fields in recent years; it has migrated most notably to medicine, where checklists have been shown to dramatically improve compliance with a seemingly simple series of important steps, such as those that reduce infections after the insertion of lines into arteries and veins. But what surprised me most about the use of checklists in the cockpits of airliners is their strictly interactive nature.

  When it comes to all the most important checklists on an airliner, it takes two. One to read the checklist items, known as the challenges, and one to respond. The flying pilot calls for a checklist by its name—landing checklist, for example. Only then will the monitoring pilot remove the checklist from its holder (many planes have electronic checklists now, but the principle is similar), and read
its title out loud, followed by the first item, which might be “speedbrakes.” The flying pilot will then check that the speedbrakes are armed, and only then reply: “Armed.” The monitoring pilot will check that this response is the correct one, and then move on to the next item. When the checklist is complete the monitoring pilot will announce: “Landing checklist complete,” and stow it carefully.

  The teamwork that flows from such clearly demarcated roles shapes everything about our hours in the cockpit. If I’m the pilot flying and I wish to stand up to stretch my legs, I must turn to the pilot monitoring and say: “You have control.” I am no longer driving; you are. Only when they respond: “I have the airplane,” or “I have control,” may I reach to undo my seat belt.

  This formalized cooperation between pilots (similar principles of roles and teams are at work among the flight attendants, and between them and the pilots) is like nothing I have experienced or read about in any other context. Yet this remarkably close working environment, this highly structured mesh of roles and teamwork, takes place among strangers. We fly away together, and are very much alone together, high above the sleeping Arctic or Sahara, and then we are alone, too, in a far-off and foreign city, where we share our jobs and our foreignness, and we may eat and talk together until late in the evening. The next day some of us might meet up to explore a new neighborhood, or rent a car to see the nearby countryside, or join a colleague who has a hobby we are inclined to share. That night, or the next, we cross back over the world together.