“A Place, Not a Conveyance”
The design, power, and cockpit foot heaters that make the 747 feel like home to pilots.
By Mark Vanhoenacker
Mark Vanhoenacker in the cockpit of a Boeing 747-400.
Photo by Nick Morrish/British Airways
By Mark Vanhoenacker – All week, Mark Vanhoenacker will be sharing stories about piloting and planes excerpted from his book Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot. Out now from Knopf.
Occasionally one airplane catches the imagination of pilots and cabin crew, or even of the general public. More than a few colleagues told me they decided to learn to fly only because they wished to fly the 747. I am never surprised when a colleague’s email address contains some version of those famous numbers. I occasionally go to an exercise class near the hotel I stay at in Vancouver—exercise is sometimes the best antidote to long-haul air travel, whether because it resets the body’s clock or only tires you out into sleeping better, I do not know—and the instructor will often sing out, at the start of a pose in which we are lying on our stomachs but lifting all our limbs: “Lift your arms, lift your shoulders, like a 747 taking off.”
It’s often assumed that an airline pilot can fly any kind of airliner. Pilots typically take a set of exams, both in classrooms and in the air in small planes, to obtain a series of licenses that culminate in a general air transport license. Then we obtain a type rating,a separate license to fly one specific kind of aircraft. When we switch to a new aircraft, the new type rating replaces the old one, and usually we are no longer permitted to fly the previous type. Some pilots fly a dozen types or more in their career. I may fly only three—the smaller, short-haul Airbus A320 series airliner I started on, the Boeing 747-400, and probably one new type, between the 747’s retirement and my own.
A pilot’s relationship to his or her aircraft is like how people respond to a prized car they have owned for a decade or two.
The bond between a pilot and his or her current type of airplane is hard to pin down. Language is perhaps the best analogy. Indeed each aircraft type or family has its language, or at least its own dialect, and analogous devices and procedures often have different names on different aircraft. Acquiring these words and their correct usage is a significant part of the work we put into a new type rating. In a phenomenon called type reversion, a pilot inadvertently refers to a term or procedure from a previous aircraft type. There is a friendly rivalry between the pilots of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, which in addition to everything else are two competing realms of language. On the Airbus, the fully stowed position of the flaps is called flaps zero. On the 747, the same position is called flaps up. Once, soon after I switched from Airbus to Boeing, flying with a senior captain, I mistakenly asked him to select flaps zero. Before moving the flaps, he turned to me, with a clearing of the throat and a smile—from over the glasses resting halfway down his nose—that said, What are these youngsters coming to?
We spend much of each day, or night, inside our aircraft type; when we sit down, it will feel like a second home. Our connection to it will even color our experience of travel as a passenger. When I fly as a passenger on the Airbus, it has the familiarity that alienates, like walking past a restaurant where you broke up with someone long ago. In contrast, when I fly on a 747 as a passenger I feel a peculiar comfort or satisfaction that is something more than knowing what the various noises mean.
Emotionally, a pilot’s relationship to his or her type is perhaps similar to how some people respond to a prized car they have owned for a decade or two. But different cars are not as different to drive as different airliners are to fly, nor do they exclude other cars from your driving life.
Pilots tend to like powerful planes. I’ve often heard complaints about one long-retired aircraft type that pilots felt was underpowered; the joke was that it only ever got airborne because the Earth eventually curved away beneath it. In contrast, every pilot I’ve talked to who has flown the Boeing 757 has mentioned, unprompted, how powerful its engines are. But equally often I hear wide-eyed pilots marvel at the efficiency of a new airplane, after they contrast the amount of fuel burned between an older and a newer, more efficient aircraft on the same route.
The differences in the cruising speeds of airliners are small. Still, some airplanes and their pilots spend their hours in the sky habitually overtaking others. It feels good—how could it not?—when you are pulling ahead of other aircraft even while maintaining your most efficient speed.
Other differences between aircraft are so small in the context of such Earth-crossing, mile-vanquishing vessels that it feels ungrateful to dwell on them. Airbus cockpits are beloved for their foldout tables, an enormous enhancement to the pilot’s quality of life when completing paperwork or a meal; I also found the cup holders and sun visors were more intuitively located on the Airbus. Some planes have windows that open, a blessed feature when you’re dining in the cockpit between flights and wish to feel the breeze on your face, especially if you have flown from somewhere cold to somewhere warm and have only three-quarters of an hour until you must fly home to winter. Some airplanes have a bathroom inside the cockpit; for this reason the 747 is often called the ensuite fleet. (When I started to fly 747s, the cockpit lavatory, a standard airplane fitting, contained a most unlikely feature: a baby changing table that was only later removed to save weight.) Many long-haul planes have pilot bunks. On some airplanes you have to pass through the passenger cabin to reach the bunks or lavatories; on others, like the 747, you need never leave the cockpit area and can move freely between the bunk and the bathroom in your pajamas.
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