>I had the pleasure of that job for 37 years+ and have been
>retired for a year now. It's fading from my memory much too
>quickly. The amazing thing to me is the technological change
>from hand/eye coordination skills of DC6 days to
>programing/management skills of Triple 7s and the like that
>occurred during my career. The airplanes that people such as
>Paul and Howard design and build are almost beyond
>comprehension in their complexity, yet are still user
>friendly. But piloting airplanes is a much smaller fraction
>of the job today. By this I mean one's mind is on other
>subjects- security, terrorist attacks, litigation from folks
>who ignore fasten seat belt signs, failing economics,
>maintaining ones' health for physical exams twice yearly,
>and of course, Profiency checks yearly. Flight Attendants on
>the other side of barred, bullet-proof and locked cockpit
>doors, firearms or Taser training. Paramedic training.
>There's a lot more than just checking weather, figuring
>fuel, and taking off. Requires a lot of focus. Sounds like a
>lot of negativity there, but it's all worth it when that
>Mechanic gives you the salute and you head out with two or
>three hundred trusting souls! But you are right, they don't
>talk about it much, so I'll shut up! Best regards,
Well said, Dale.
Sounds like you and I shared a lifetime of experiences!
Well, Doc, it does get boring once you get to altitude and start trying to keep your eyes open until it's your turn to take a break. The enroute stuff over the oceans is demanding but repetitive and sometimes irksome when the HF receivers are making more noise than talk and you've got to get a position report done and your little piece of the sky isn't secure until you get the report made etc. etc. That's a bit mundane.
What isn't mundane (or wasn't before you've been booted out of the seat by the unforgiving taskmaster of old age) is the anticipation of sitting down in the left seat of a state of the art 130,000,000 dollar machine with 400 trusting people in the back and doing all the right things to get them safely where they want to be. That is one of the greatest highs you can experience.
As Dale suggests, the tools that Paul and Howard and thousands of skilled and dedicated individuals have given us are amazing devices. The privilege of being in command of such a machine on such a mission was never a ho hum thing for me. I'm blessed to be able to say that there wasn't a single time in 38 years that I didn't put on the blue uniform in great anticipation of what the next few days held in store for me.
Those tools, the training I received and, yes, the dedication and singleness of purpose that went into accepting the responsbility of commanding that machine and taking responsibility for those lives combined to make that career one of unparalleled satisfaction and pleasure each and every time I went to work. I feel blessed to have been afforded the privelege of doing so.
Flying the big modern machines (I finished my career flying Boeing 747-400s for the last four or five years) is almost a foreign experience compared to when I began on DC-6s and 7s and Convair 340s and old Boeing 707-720s. The glass cockpit, flight management system based navigation systems and the unbelievable power and reliability of modern powerplants seems only a half step below what we watched Captain Kirk do on Star Trek (shoot, just before I left we were getting trained on "phasers" to put on stun and disable the bad guys!)
The modern airliner can be programmed before departure to do pretty much everything except raise and lower the gear and flaps. If Air Traffic Control would leave you alone (tough to do when you share the sky with hundreds of others)you could program the flight management systems to climb, level off at optimum cruise altitude, follow the programmed flight plan within literally several feet of centerline halfway around the world, climb to a higher altitude when fuel burn made it more efficient to do so, descend at an optimum rate to arrive over the approach fix to the airport precisely on speed and altitude, follow the Instrument Landing System to the runway, touchdown like a feather, brake to a stop and...oops here's where the programmers dropped the ball, the flight attendant would have to wake up the pilot to taxi to the gate! Guys, this is something H.G. Wells would have marveled at!
No, it's never quite that easy and despite the capability to do what I just described, there is a lot more involved in the real world of getting from Point A to B around the world; an awful lot of it having more to do with politics and legalities and security than with airplanes and flying. It's just a reality of the world we live in.
Yeah, we do let the fancy computers do a lot of the mundane stuff enroute but, rest assured, the drivers are, for the most part, pilots at heart and even though the airplanes are capable of all I've described, the men and women who fly them want to do just that ... fly them. I flew glass cockpit, "autoflight" capable airplanes for about twelve of my 38 years in the cockpits. Doing so was a chore to learn and a blessing to use after gaining competence in doing so.
There are certain conditions under which we are required to use, for instance, the autoland capabilities and when those conditions exist we do do so. Interestingly enough, with the 747 this is absolutely necessary because the airplane can land itself when those in the cockpit see nothing but fog in the windshield. Because we sit so high in the upper deck flight deck and because the body angle at touchdown is so great, the rules require that the airplane land itself in "minimum" conditions. After it has landed, the nose lowered and it has braked itself to a near stop the flight crew is finally low enough that they are able to taxi carefully to the gate (utilizing special low visibility lighting systems in place at airports at which such low minimum approaches are authorized.
I used these capabilities less than a handful of times in my dozen years of autoland capable service. Pilots like to fly and, unless the rules require otherwise, your pilots will almost certainly be doing so.
The modern airplanes are a delight to fly. You might think of them as airborne 18 wheelers (exactly the number of wheels on a 747) but to the pilot the plane is no bigger than the instrument panel behind which he sits. As my first instructor at the airline told my troubled stick buddy, "the instrument panel's no bigger than the one on your Cessna. If you get the panel to go where you want to go the rest of it will almost certainly come right along behind it!" Wise words!
Of the big ones I flew, the B757 was hands down the sweetest airplane to fly. With both engines running (fortunately, aside from training exercises, I never experienced the alternative) it performed like a fighter. Remember, these airliners are required to fly at max gross with an engine failure at critical speed on take off. Thus, with both engines at full thrust, they have more than twice the power they need to fly. Wheeeeee! It was totally honest and had the feel of an airplane a fraction of its size. The automated systems were flawless in my experience and you, frankly, felt like Sky King at the controls.
To be fair, I've got to admit that passengers then (and now) hated the '57. The coach seats were too small and too close together and the blue rooms (heads) too often separated from the passengers by flight attendant service carts. Much as I enjoyed the steering, I got more evil looks from passengers after the flights than on the rest of my career put together. Too bad.
The B-727 was the most fun to fly. Much less sophisticated than the modern iron it required a familial touch to perform at its best. For a young Captain it was the perfect airplane to teach you both how to fly to the best of your ability and, as a captain, how necessary it was to always be aware of the performance of your crew, taking nothing for granted and always being right with the airplane at all times. Handled great, was comparatively underpowered and had a lot of drag in the landing configuration. It took a lot of attention but paid great dividends in satisfaction when you did it right. I loved flying it.
I spent 13 years on the DC-8 as a co-pilot during the stagnant years of the oil crunch, the DC-10 grounding and other dark nights of the industry in the '70s and 'early '80s. It was a truck, but a great passenger airplane. Stable and comfortable. I endured it but it wasn't an airplane I'd dream about it retirement.
I went from the wonderful and modern 757/767 fleet into the B747-100 and 200 series. This was like a step back into the dark ages. After many years of state of the art avionics, a quiet flight deck and good ergonomics, this was like asking for a vacation in Hades. Noisy, dark, round dial "jurassic" instruments and antiquated nav systems; it was a chore to haul around the world. But the opportunity to fly to Europe was irresisteable to a lifelong domestic US driver. I loved the trips to London and Paris and Frankfurt and all over the Pacific. Especially thought provoking were trips to Saipan and Guam from South Korea where the arrival to Saipan took us directly over Tinian where the Enola Gay departed for that fateful journey over Hiroshima. A mixture of discovery, awe and contemplative sadness about what the landscape said about the human condition ... whatever your feelings politically.
The 747-400 was, simply put, the finest tool for its job of anything I've ever been associated with. A well lit, quiet cockpit with pretty much everything I could ever contemplate to make the pilot's task easier and safer. The flight management system and data link communication capability made international navigation and position tending easier than when under constant radar coverage domestically. The range and power of the 400 put the old "rope start, round dial, jurassic jet 747-100s" to shame. The four engines gave a sense of confidence to the pilots which is rapidly becoming passe with the preference of the airlines for more "efficient" two engine jets for just about every purpose including flying for thousands of miles over open oceans and far from anyplace to land should one of the "redundant two" crap out in an untimely location.
It might just be a curmudgeonly old pilot talking but, I think as the -400s give way completely to the twin jet tidal wave, you...no, now, we...the passengers give up just a little bit of what we had before. Don't get me wrong. The modern engines are incredibly reliable and efficient and in the modern economic world there is probably no choice but to embrace that economy. Nonetheless, when one of four engines fails in the middle of the ocean, you've got an inconvenience. When one of your two fails, you've got an emergency.
That's sort of where your "Big Iron" pilot might start to earn his stripes. Take heart, after 38 years of associating with thousands of them, you're in good hands. They're good at what they do. And they love doing it. It was the greatest job in the world. God, how I miss it.
