Cockpit Confidential (15 page)

Moments after liftoff, we're handed over to departure control, which follows us on radar issuing turns, altitudes, and so forth as the plane is sequenced into the overlying route structure. A flight can progress through several departure subsectors, each on a different frequency. Once we reach higher altitude, we're guided by a series of Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC), commonly called “Center.” New York Center, Denver Center, etc. They maintain huge swaths of sky, rendering them somewhat irrelevant to their namesake identifiers, and are often located far from an airport. Boston Center, for instance, in charge of airspace extending from Southern New England to the Canadian Maritimes, resides in a building in Nashua, New Hampshire. Centers too are broken down into subsectors, each in the hands of individual controllers.

Eventually, descending into LAX, the above happens more or less in reverse. Center first hands us to approach control, and if the weather is bad and arrivals are backing up, these are usually the folks who'll assign a holding pattern. Around the time you hear the landing gear plunking into position, the crew is given over to the tower for landing clearance, and then it's another conversational gambol with ground and gate control before docking in safely and, of course, on schedule.

Terminology changes when we leave the United States, but almost everywhere the basic sequence is the same.

Transoceanic flights are not normally under radar control, but they do follow specific, assigned routes. These routes, known in some areas as tracks, are made up of connected points of latitude and longitude, with a gateway fix at either end where you transition to and from the normal ATC environment. Flights are sequenced based on speed and time. At each latitude/longitude fix, a position report is made to the controlling agency whose jurisdiction you're in. The person with whom you're communicating can be thousands of miles away. The reports are made by voice using HF radio, or automatically via satellite datalink, and include the exact crossing time, altitude, remaining fuel, and estimated time to the next point.

English is the lingua franca of commercial aviation, and controllers and pilots are required to speak it the world over. But, depending on the country, they might also use their local language. In Brazil, for example, you'll hear both English and Portuguese over the radio; controllers talk in English to foreign crews and in Portuguese to Brazilian crews. France, Spain, Russia, and many other countries do it the same way.

Despite the ubiquity of satellite GPS, the U.S. airspace system is still a ground-based one, and indirect routings remain common. Planes travel in connect-the-dots patterns oriented around decades-old navigational beacons known as very high-frequency omnidirectional range (VOR), or they follow long, often circuitous strings of point-inspace fixes. Crews use GPS to determine a VOR's equivalent position, creating virtual waypoints in lieu of homing to the physical beacon, but fundamentally it's the same thing. The FAA's much-touted (but poorly funded) NextGen project is intended to streamline and modernize all of this, but it's a long-term project that is just getting started.

Meanwhile, if you've ever paid attention to the air-ground communications through a plane's entertainment system (
see cockpit eavesdropping
), you've probably been mystified by the calls of controllers directing flights toward all kinds of strange, fantastical-sounding places. “United 626, proceed to ZAPPY,” you'll hear. Or, “Southwest 1407, cleared direct to WOPPO.” A look at a navigational chart reveals the entire United States—and the rest of the world for that matter—is overlaid by tens of thousands of point-in-space fixes that carry these peculiar five-letter monikers. I invented ZAPPY and WOPPO myself, but I'll bet they're out there somewhere. Most fix names are arbitrary, but once in a while they are coined in folksy reference to some geographic or cultural characteristic below. SCROD is a transatlantic gateway fix off the coast of Labrador, not far from OYSTR, PRAWN, and CRABB. Not far from where I live is one called BOSOX (think baseball). And so on. God only knows what's going on beneath BLOWN, BAABY, and LAYED, a trio of fixes over West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

It has nothing to do with emergencies. It's simply the shortest distance.

Between continents, airplanes follow what are called “great circle” routes, accounting for the earth's curvature. These routes won't make sense if you're looking at a traditional flat map, because when the earth is crushed from its natural round state into a horizontal one, it becomes distorted as the divisions of latitude and longitude stretch apart. (Depending on the layout used—what cartographers call “projection”—the distortion can be grotesque. Kids grow up believing that Greenland is about ten times larger than it really is, thanks to the preposterous polar dimensions of the commonly used Mercator projection.) If you have a globe handy, however, the logic of great circles is very apparent. Measuring with a piece of string, it's obvious that the shortest distance between New York and Hong Kong, for instance, is not westerly, as it would seem on a map, but pretty much straight north, up into the Arctic, and then straight south. Over the top, in other words.

That's the extreme, but the principle applies to many long-range pairings, and this is why passengers between America and Europe discover themselves not just high up, but high
up
—over Newfoundland, Labrador, and occasionally the icy realm of Greenland. Across the Pacific, same idea: a flight from Los Angeles to Beijing will touch the Aleutian Islands and the easternmost portions of Russia.

One night at Kennedy airport I gave what I thought were accurate instructions to a group of Muslims crouched on the floor looking for Mecca. It seemed to me they were facing more toward Bridgeport, Connecticut, so I suggested they adjust their prayer rugs a few southeastward degrees. I should have known better, because the most efficient routing between New York and Mecca is not southeast, but northeast. Required to periodically align themselves with a point thousands of miles away, many Muslims know how this works. To face the holy Kaaba at Mecca, they employ what's called the
qibla
, which is the shortest distance to Mecca from where they're praying—a kind of Islamic great circle. My friends at Kennedy were searching for their
qibla
, only to find quibble instead with an itinerant pilot who was thinking flat when he should've been thinking round.

The three-letter abbreviations are devised by IATA. That's the International Air Transport Association, the industry's worldwide trade and advocacy group. (There also are four-letter versions administered by ICAO, the civil air transport branch of the United Nations, but these are used only for navigation and technical purposes.) If the abbreviations aren't obvious, like BOS for Boston or BRU for Brussels, they can be fairly intuitive, such as London Heathrow's LHR or KIX for Osaka's Kansai International. Many of the outwardly arbitrary ones are carryovers from former names for the airport. MCO is derived from McCoy Field, the original name for Orlando International. Chicago O'Hare's identifier, ORD, pays honors to the old Orchard Field. Others are geographical associations or personal tributes, some more obscure than others. In Rio de Janeiro your plane will land at Galeão, on Governor's Island (Ilha do Governador), lending to GIG. On Maui, OGG is homage to Bertram Hogg (spoken with a silent H), Hawaii native and Pacific flying pioneer.

In one of those moments of American puritanical excess, a campaign was launched in 2002 to change the identifier for Sioux City, Iowa, from SUX to something less objectionable. The campaign failed and the letters, along with some pleasantly roguish charm, were retained. The Finns don't mind HEL as their capital city, and neither do the Syrians have a problem with DAM. Not being intimate with Japanese vulgarity, I'm unsure what that country's opinion is of FUK, the code for Fukuoka. To be safe, though, if ever you're traveling FUK-DAM-HEL, avoid speaking in acronyms while checking in.

Boston, 1991

 

I reach for the starter toggle, left engine. It's a scalding morning and there's no external air, so we're desperate to get the props turning. Out on the Logan asphalt in July, the little Beech 99 becomes a sweatbox, and passengers won't be pleased if their crew keels over from heatstroke.

These midsummer flights to Nantucket are the worst. We're always full, and the island-bound passengers are cranky and petulant. Today we're loaded to max weight, with fifteen passengers—all from tony Boston suburbs, decked out identically in mirrored aviator glasses, straw hats, and Tevas—and a luggage hold bursting with wicker from Crate & Barrel. After several minutes of organizing carry-ons and dusting off whichever unfortunate soul managed to trip over the center cabin wing spar, it's time to wipe off the sweat and get started. “Let's go,” I say. There's a tattered checklist in my hand, soggy with perspiration.

The toggle clicks into place, and we immediately hear the grainy whine of the turbines. The propeller begins to spin, and a small white needle shows the fuel flow. But twenty seconds later there's a problem. There's no combustion. Great. So I release the switch and everything stops. We wait the allotted time so the starter won't overheat, repeat the checklist, and try again. Same result. The engine is turning, but it's not running. What's missing, I notice, is the click-click-click of the igniters. For some reason they aren't firing.

“Kathy,” I say quietly, “can you see if there's a circuit breaker popped?” I can feel eyes on me. The first passenger row is only inches behind us, without so much as a curtain separating cockpit from cabin. “Ignition, left side?”

A diminutive blond, Kathy is my first officer and something of a celebrity around campus. She is one of only a few people I will meet over the years who, through no small effort, made the unusual vocational shift from flight attendant to pilot. She had worked the aisles at Delta before giving up the peanuts—and most of her salary—for propellers. Is this what she expected, I wonder: taking orders in a sweltering, thirty-year-old contraption not much larger than her car?

The breakers are secure, Kathy reports, running her hand across the panel the way one surfs for an errant wallpaper seam. She motions toward the backup radio, her eyebrows forming a question mark. I nod, and she twists in the frequency. “Maintenance, this is aircraft 804, are you there?” We'll wait ten minutes for the mechanics now, while the inside temp hits 106.

A turboprop engine is, at heart, a jet engine. Combusted gases spin the turbines; the turbines spin the compressors and the propeller. It's the combustion part that we're missing.

After an embarrassing PA to our aggrieved customers, who by now are checking the ferry schedule, I notice the woman directly behind me has a giant wicker beach bag balanced on her lap. Somehow we'd missed it. “I'm sorry,” I say to her. “You'll need to stow that bag. It can't rest on your lap for takeoff.”

“Takeoff?” she says. Then she pauses, lowering her aviators and clearing her throat. “Maybe you oughta see if you can get the fucking plane started before you worry about my fucking luggage.”

As she glares at me with insolently pursed lips, the woman's glasses reflect the pained face of a very hot and very disappointed young captain—one who, barely past his twenty-fourth birthday, often finds that the hardest thing about his job is resisting the urge to take it for granted. I restrain myself and manage a smile, a brittle smirk. I restrain myself, not on behalf of Northwest Airlink, in whose employ I toil in kiln-like summer heat, but on behalf of the twelve-year-old kid I used to be, not all that long ago, whose dream of dreams was to someday wear the wings and epaulets of an airline pilot. If living out that dream means taking abuse along the way from an asshole passenger or two, well, that's the price I pay.