Cockpit Confidential (16 page)

Although I have only hazy memories of the day I first soloed a small airplane, I am able to recollect my first day as an airline pilot in uncannily vivid detail. It was October 21, 1990—a date promptly immortalized in yellow highlighter in my logbook. Despite the absurdly low salary I'd be earning, I could not have been happier. This cherished day involved a drive to Sears at 9:30 in the morning, an hour before my sign-in time, because I'd already lost my tie. (And then the clerk's face when I told him, “plain black” and “polyester, not silk.”) Later, in a thickening overcast just before noon, I would depart on the prestigious Manchester, New Hampshire, to Boston route—the twenty-minute run frequented, as you'd expect, by Hollywood stars, sheikhs, and dignitaries.

There was no flight attendant, and I had to close the cabin door myself. Performing this maneuver on my inaugural morning, I turned the handle to secure the latches as trained, deftly and quickly in one smooth motion—in the process dragging the first three knuckles of my right hand across the head of a loose screw, cutting myself. Taxiing out, my fingers were wrapped in a bloody napkin.

It was oddly and improbably apropos that my inaugural flight would touch down at Logan International. Airline pilots, especially those new at the game, are migrants, moving frequently from city to city as the tectonics of a seniority list dictate. It's a rare thing indeed to find yourself based at the very airport you grew up with. And I mean that—“grew up with”—in a way that only an airplane nut will understand. On that afternoon in 1990, as I maneuvered past the Tobin Bridge and along the approach to runway 15R, I squinted toward the parking lots and observation deck from which, years earlier, I'd perched with binoculars and notebooks, logging the registration numbers of arriving aircraft.

Our company was a young regional upstart called Northeast Express, and we flew on behalf of Northwest Airlines, code-sharing their flights and using their colors. (Northeast, Northwest, it could be confusing to some of our passengers.) Although the airline was growing quickly, it was run with such austerity that we didn't even have legitimate uniforms. We were given surplus from the old Bar Harbor Airlines. The owner, Mr. Caruso, had also been the owner at Bar Harbor, and I suspect he had a garage full of remainders. Bar Harbor had been something of a legendary commuter airline in a parochial, New England sort of way, before finally it was eaten by Lorenzo's Continental. I remember as a kid in the late '70s, sitting in the backyard and watching those Bar Harbor turboprops going by, one after another, whirring up over the hills of Eastie and Revere.

A dozen years later, I was handed a vintage Bar Harbor suit—battleship gray wool, soiled and threadbare in the knees and elbows. The lining of my jacket was safety-pinned in place and looked as if a squirrel had chewed the lapels. Some poor Bar Harbor copilot had worn the thing to shreds, tearing the pockets and getting the shoulders soaked with jet fuel. I'm fairly sure it had never been laundered. Our hardware too—metal emblems for our hats and a set of wings—were tarnished hand-me-downs from Bar Harbor. Standing with my fellow new hires in our new (old) outfits for a group picture, we looked like crewmembers you might see stepping from a Bulgarian cargo plane on the apron at Entebbe.

The uniforms were doled out by a fellow named Harvey. Tall, gangly, and bald, Harvey was a fast-talking and distrustful sort who wore heavy, round glasses and chewed a long, unlit cigar. As he explained proper laundering techniques and recommended the use of vinegar to clean soot from our epaulets, his cigar rolled and bobbed like a counterweight, always seeming to perfectly balance the tilt of his head. “Keep your hats on,” Harvey warned, his eyes bugging out. “Some of you guys look so young, you'll scare the passengers!” He smiled, and his teeth were the color of root beer.

One day, in the winter of '91, Harvey posted a tremendously exciting memo informing us of a uniform revamp. We'd swap our gray service station suits for brand new ones—handsome dark navy with gold stripes. We'd get new hardware too; the Bar Harbor eagle, which looked uncannily like the wings-akimbo bird once found on the caps of Göering or Himmler, was out. According to Harvey, our new threads were designed to keep the airline's image, not that it actually had one, “in accordance with Northwest specs.” Ostensibly this made sense, since we were operating in their name and painting our planes in their livery, but the truth was Northwest Airlines couldn't have cared less if we wore banana-colored jumpsuits. It was just a way for Harvey to pull some navy blue wool over our eyes and sell some clothes.

My first airplane was the Beechcraft BE-99, aka the Beech 99, or just “the 99.” Same as those old Bar Harbor planes I'd watched over Revere in the fifth grade. This was either sentimentally touching or gruesomely depressing, depending on how you looked at it. Some of the 99s were
precisely
the same ones, still with a -BH registration suffix painted near the tail. Unpressurized and slow, the plane was a ridiculous anachronism kept in service by a stingy and ultimately doomed airline. Passengers at Logan would show up planeside in a red bus about twice the size of the plane. Expecting a 757, they were dumped at the foot of a fifteen-passenger wagon built in 1968. I'd be stuffing paper towels into the cockpit window frames to keep out the rainwater while businessmen came up the stairs cursing their travel agents. They'd sit, seething, refusing to fasten their seat belts and hollering up to cockpit.

“Let's go! What are you guys doing?”

“I'm preparing the weight and balance manifest, sir.”

“We're only going to goddamn Newark! What the hell do you need a manifest for?”

And so on. But hey, this was my dream job, so I could only be so embarrassed. Besides, the twelve grand a year was more than I'd been making as a flight instructor.

In addition to just enough money for groceries and car insurance, my job provided the vicarious thrill of a nominal affiliation with Northwest Airlines. Our twenty-five turboprops, like Northwest's 747s and DC-10s, were painted handsomely in gray and red. Alas, the association ran no deeper—important later, when the paychecks started bouncing—but for now I would code-share my way to glory. When girls asked which airline I flew for, I would answer “Northwest,” with a borderline degree of honesty.

My second plane was the Fairchild Metroliner, a more sophisticated nineteen-seater. It was a long, skinny turboprop that resembled a dragonfly, known for its tight quarters and annoying idiosyncrasies. At Fairchild, down in San Antonio, the guys with the pocket protectors faced a challenge: how to take nineteen passengers and make them as uncomfortable as possible. Answer: stuff them side by side into a 6-foot-diameter tube. Attach a pair of the loudest turbine engines ever made, the Garrett TPE-331, and go easy on the soundproofing. All of this for a mere $2.5 million a copy. (Somewhere out there is a retired Fairchild engineer feeling very insulted. He deserves it.)

As captain of this beastly machine, it was my duty not only to safely deliver passengers to their destinations, but also to hide in shame from those chortling and spewing insults: “Does this thing really fly?” and “Man, who did
you
piss off?”

The answer to that first question was sort of. The Metro was equipped with a pair of minimally functioning ailerons and a control wheel in need of a placard marking it “for decorative purposes only.” It was sluggish, I'm saying, and crosswind landings could be tricky.

Like the 99, the Metro was too small for a cockpit door, allowing for nineteen backseat drivers whose gazes spent more time glued to the instruments than ours did. One pilot to remain nameless doctored up one of his chart binders with these prying eyes in mind. On the front cover, in oversized stick-on letters, he'd put the words HOW TO FLY, stowing the book on the floor in full view of the first few rows. During flight, he'd pick it up and flip through the pages, eliciting some hearty laughs—or shrieks. Another pilot thought it would be amusing to dangle a pair of velvet red dice from the overhead standby compass. That one had customers giggling, pointing, slapping him on the back, and sending letters to the FAA. Poor Eric lost a paycheck and earned a blemish on his record that would have recruiters at the major airlines affixing the wrong color stickies to his résumé.

The view of the cockpit was even more entertaining if, as occasionally was the case, somebody had spit-glued a magazine photo across the radar screen. Our radar units, mounted in the middle of the panel and visible all the way to the aft bulkhead, looked like miniature TV sets. At the end of a rotation, pilots would clip out a ridiculous picture from a newspaper or magazine, adhere it to the empty screen, and leave it for the next crew.

Next up came the De Havilland Dash-8. The Dash was a boxy, thirty-seven-passenger turboprop and the biggest thing I'd ever laid my hands on. A new one cost $20 million, and it even had a flight attendant. Only thirteen pilots in the entire company were senior enough to hold a captain's slot. I was number thirteen. I went for my checkride on July 7, 1993, about a month after my twenty-sixth birthday. For the rest of the summer, I would call the schedulers every morning, begging for overtime. Getting to fly the Dash was a watershed. This was the real thing, an “airliner” in the way the Metro or the 99 could never be, and of all the planes I've flown, large or small, it remains my sentimental favorite.

I flew the Dash only briefly, and Northeast Express would be around only for another year. Things began to sour in the spring of '94. Northwest, unhappy with our reliability, would not renew its contract with us. We were in bankruptcy by May, and a month later the airline collapsed outright. The end came on a Monday. I remember that day as vividly as I remember my bloody-knuckle inaugural in New Hampshire four years earlier. No, this wasn't the collapse of Eastern or Braniff or Pan Am, and I was only twenty-seven, with a whole career ahead of me. But just the same, it was heartbreaking, the sight of police cruisers circling our planes, flight attendants crying, and workers flinging suitcases into heaps on the tarmac. Thus the bookends of my first airline job were, each in their own way, emotional and unforgettable. But that second one I could have done without.

All modern aircraft are operated by a two-person crew consisting of a captain and a first officer. The latter is referred to colloquially as the copilot—a misleading and misunderstood term. The copilot is not on hand as a backup or a helpful apprentice. The captain does not say to his underling, “Here, son, how about you take it for a minute.” Copilots are fully qualified to operate the plane in all regimes of flight, and they perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do. Pilots take turns at the controls. If a crew is going from New York to Chicago to Seattle, the captain will fly the first leg and the first officer will fly the second. The pilot not flying is still plenty busy with a long list of chores: communicating, programming the FMS and navigational equipment, reading checklists, and so forth. The captain has ultimate authority over the flight, and a larger salary to go with it, but he may not be the one physically steering the plane. (How he got to be captain is a function of seniority; more on that later.)

Captains wear four stripes on their sleeves and epaulets; first officers wear three. Outside North America, you'll notice slightly different uniform designs, sometimes with stars, crests, or other markings.

A few older aircraft still in service, such as the classic model 747, require a third pilot. This is the second officer, aka flight engineer, whose workstation, including a wall-mounted instrument panel, is on the right side of the cockpit behind the first officer. His job is the management of a multitude of onboard systems—electrical, hydraulic, fuel, pressurization, and others—as well as backing up the captain and first officer.

If you're wondering about the navigator, that's a job description that hasn't existed on western-built planes since the early 1960s. The last known navigator in the United States was the Howard Borden character from the old
Bob Newhart Show
.

Maybe the single most annoying habit of the media is when, in a discussion of virtually any aviation incident, reference is made to “the pilot.” I fail to understand how, after decades of experience, the press cannot make it clear that there are, at a minimum, two evenly credentialed pilots in the cockpit. Use of the term “pilot” is fine, but only as a generic reference to either crewmember. To cite “the pilot,” at the exclusion of
the other pilot
, is misleading and incorrect—not to mention rude to first officers like me.

Regulations require that long-haul flights carry augmented crews of three or four. This allows for a rotating series of rest breaks. It's slightly different from airline to airline, but usually flights between eight and twelve hours duration will bring along an extra first officer. All three pilots will be in the cockpit for takeoff and landing, but once at cruise they will begin swapping out, one at a time. Thus each pilot spends roughly one-third of the flight on break—sleeping, eating, watching movies, or otherwise relaxing. Flights exceeding twelve hours will carry
two
extra pilots, and they break in pairs. On a fourteen-hour flight, each team of two will work about seven hours.