Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Cockpit Confidential (10 page)
There have been several tragedies over the years in which planes attempted takeoff with iced-over wings. Most recent was a 1991 USAir incident at LaGuardia. Nine years earlier was the infamous Air Florida disaster in Washington, DC, when in addition to ignoring buildup on the wings, the crew failed to run the engine anti-ice system, allowing frozen probes to give faulty thrust readings. On Halloween night in 1994, sixty-eight people died aboard American Eagle flight 4184, a crash attributed to a design flawâsince rectifiedâin the ATR-72's deicing system. Numerous other planes have gone skidding off the end of snowy runways. Culprits have included erroneous weather or braking data, an unstable approach continued when it should have been broken off, the occasional malfunction, or any combination of those things.
I can't tell you there will never be another ice-related accident. But I can assure you that airlines and their crews take icing a lot more seriously than they used to. We've learned a lotâmuch of it the hard wayâand this has carried over into specific, formalized procedures that leave little to chance.
Several years back, I was on a train going from Malaysia into Thailand when I stepped into the restroom and lifted the toilet seat. I was presented with a mesmerizing view of gravel, dirt, and railroad ties, all passing rapidly beneath me. Those who travel will encounter this now and again, and maybe it's people like us who get these nutty myths off and running. The answer is no. There is no way to jettison the contents of the lavatories during flight.
Intentionally, that is. A man in California once won a lawsuit after pieces of “blue ice” fell from a plane and came crashing through the skylight of his sailboat. A leak, extending from a toilet's exterior nozzle fitting, caused runoff to freeze, build, and then drop like a neon ice bomb. If you think that's bad, a 727 once suffered an engine separation after ingesting a frozen chunk of its own leaked toilet waste, inspiring the line “when the shit hits the turbofan.”
At the end of a flight, the blue fluid, along with your contributions to it, are vacuumed into a tank on the back of a truck. (The truck driver's job is even lousier than the copilot's, but it pays better.) The driver then wheels around to the back of the airport and furtively offloads the waste in a ditch behind a parking lot.
In truth I don't know what he does with it. Time to start a new urban legend.
Airplanes can depart with inoperative componentsâusually nonessential equipment carried in duplicate or triplicateâonly in accordance with guidelines laid out in two thick manuals called the Minimum Equipment List (MEL) and Configuration Deviation List (CDL). Any component in these books is “deferrable,” as we put it, so long as any outlined stipulations are met. These stipulations can be quite restrictive. One of the first things a crew does after signing in for a trip is scan the paperwork for deferrals, making note of any pertinent restrictions. A malfunctioning anti-skid system, for example, might require a longer runway for takeoff and landing. The books are not contrived to allow airlines an easy hand at flying around with defective equipment. Many things, as you'd hope, are not deferrable at all, and any malfunctioning item must be repaired in a set number of days or flight hours. The captain has the final say and can refuse to accept any deferral if he or she feels it is unsafe.
The walk-around inspection, while useful, is a basic inspection not a whole lot different from checking your oil, tires, and wipers before a road trip. The most common discoveries are superficial dents, unlatched panels, minor leaks, and tire issues (cuts, scrapes, etc.). The more intensive preflight routine takes place in the cockpit. While you're bottlenecked in the jet bridge, the various cockpit instruments and systems are being tested. Maintenance personnel also perform preflight and postflight checks, both interior and exterior, with special inspections and sign-offs required for over-water flights. Watch a plane dock, and you might spot one or more mechanics fanning out beneath it while another heads up front to consult with the crew and review the logbook, ensuring everything is set for the next departure.
If your concerns rest with cabin accouterments or particle emissions from older-generation engines, go ahead and gripe. But statistically, with respect to accidents, there is little correlation between service time and safety. Commercial aircraft are built to last more or less indefinitelyâwhich is one of the reasons they're so expensiveâand it's common for a jet to remain in service for thirty years or more.
The older a plane gets, the more and better care it needs in the hangar, and inspection criteria grow increasingly strict. Factors include the plane's overall age, its total number of flight hours, and the accrued number of takeoffs and landingsâ“cycles” as they're called. The FAA recently implemented tough new inspection and record-keeping procedures for certain geriatric aircraft, covering things like corrosion, metal fatigue, and wiring.
Surprisinglyâor maybe notâU.S. airline fleets are the oldest on average. Asian, European, and Middle Eastern airlines have the newest. Many of American Airlines's MD-80s were built in the 1980s. Delta Air Lines still cares for several DC-9s that date from the Age of Aquarius, acquired during its merger with Northwest.
“Retirement” is an ambiguous term with airplanes. Planes are sold, traded, or mothballed not because they've grown old and are falling apart, but because they've become uneconomical to operate. This may or may not be related to their date of construction. Take the case of Delta and American, who disposed of their MD-11s, yet plan to retain substantially older MD-80s and 767s for years to come. Aircraft are tailored to particular roles and markets, and there's a fragile balanceâtiny, shifting percentages of expenses and revenuesâbetween whether it makes or loses money. Poor performance means quick exit to the sales block. To another carrier with different costs, routes, and needs, that same aircraft might be profitable.
Sometimes, when I hear the whine of jet engines, I think of the beach.
I don't expect that to make sense to youâunless, like me, your childhood was defined by an infatuation with jetliners
and
summers spent at a beach directly below an approach course to a major airport.
That would be Revere Beach, in my case, just north of Boston, in the middle and late 1970s. Then, as now, the city of Revere was a gritty, in many ways charmless, place: rows of triple-deckers and block after block of two-story colonials garnished in gaudy wrought-iron. (Revere is a city so architecturally hopeless that it can never become gentrified or trendy in the way that other Boston suburbs have.) Irish and Italian families spoke in a tough, North Shore accent that had long ago forsaken the letter R. Shit-talking kids drove Camaros and Trans-Ams, the old country
cornuto
horns glinting over their chest hair.
Revere's beach was the first public beach in the United States. Like the rest of the city, it wasn't the kind of place that lent itself to niceties or sentimental descriptions. The roller coasters had long ago burned, and the boulevard was dotted by biker hangouts and the sort of honky-tonk bars that, as a kid, you never dared set foot in, no matter how bad you needed to use the bathroom. Seagulls swooped and gorged on the garbage toppling out of barrels and dumpsters.
But it had the sand, and water that was clean enough to swim inâwith those long, flat, shimmering low tides that seemed to recede all the way past Nahant and into the horizon. We spent our summers hereânearly all of the weekends and many of the weekdays too. My parents would have the car packed by 10:00 a.m. I remember the folding chairs, the towels, and the endless supply of Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion, its oily coconut aroma mixed with the hot stink of sunbaked Oldsmobile leather.
I swam, dug around for crabs, and endured the requisite mud-ball fights with my friends. But for me, the real thrill was the airplanes. Revere Beach's mile-long swath lines up almost perfectly with Logan International Airport's runway 22L, the arrivals floating past at regular intervals, so low you'd think you could hit them with one of the discarded Michelob bottles poking out of the sand. I'd bring a notebook and log each plane as it screamed overhead.
They'd appear first as black smudges. You'd see the smokeâthe snaking black trails of a 707 or DC-8 as it finally turned up over Salem or Marblehead. Then came the noise. The little kids, and grown-ups too, would cover their ears. People today don't realize how earsplittingly loud the older-generation jets could be. And they were low, maybe 1,500 feet above the sand, getting lower and lower and lower until disappearing over the hill at Beachmont, just seconds from touchdown.
I remember all of them: TWA 707s and L-1011s in the old, twin-globe livery. United DC-8s and DC-10s in the '70s-era bow-tie colors. Flying Tigers DC-8s and 747s. Allegheny DC-9s and BAC One-Elevens. Eastern's 727 “Whisperjets” that did anything but whisper. Braniff, Piedmont, Capitol, and Seaboard World; TAP, North Central, Zantop, and Trans International. The term “regional jet” wouldn't exist for at least another decade. Instead we had “commuter planes.” There was PBA and its Cessna 402s; Air New England's Twin Otters and FH-227s; and Bar Harbor's Beech-99s, Pilgrim, Empire, Ransome, and Downeast.
Fast-forward thirty years:
The arrivals pattern to 22L hasn't changed. It still passes directly over Revere Beach. After I finally became an airline pilot, one of my biggest thrills was being at the controls on a 22L arrival into BOS, looking down at the same beach from which I spent a childhood looking up. But other things are different.
The demographics of the city and its beach have changed, for one. In the Revere of my youth, pretty much every last family was Italian, Irish, or some mix of the two. At the beach it was no different. Today, both the neighborhoods and the sand are a virtual United Nations of the North Shore. Those harsh, R-less accents are joined by voices in Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, and Khmer. The muscle shirts, Italian horns, and shamrocks are still there, but those sunburned Irish complexions are contrasted against those from Somalia, Ghana, Haiti, and Morocco.
And overhead, those plumes of oily smoke are gone. The jets nowadays are cleaner, much quieter. And a lot less exciting. At age twelve, I could tell a DC-10 from an L-1011 when it was ten miles out. Every plane had its own distinct profile. Today's jets are often indistinguishable even at close range, and the endless procession of Airbuses and RJs just doesn't get the pulse going, or the sunbathers pointing, the way a 707 or a DC-8 wouldâits motors shrieking, black smoke spewing behind.
Revere itself has both gained and lost character over the years. The skies above, though, have mostly just lost it.
HAT
G
OES
U
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â¦
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH AIRPORTS?
“Air travel has influenced the architecture and design of our century to a perhaps greater degree than anything else, including even the automobile.”
âJohn Zukowsky, from
Building for Air Travel
For a whole host of reasons, airports are often bewildering, maddening places. There is much to be found in the modern-day terminal to enrage, confuse, or vex the traveler. Where to begin?
Consider, for instance, the widespread phenomenon of teenage girls carrying big fluffy pillows onto airplanes. When did this start, and how did it become so popular? (Granted, it's a helpful idea, now that many carriers no longer dispense even tiny, nonfluffy pillows on all but the longest flights. The trouble is, people like me are out of the club. Grown-up men can't walk through airports with giant fluffy pillows unless we're willing to get laughed at. We're stuck with those neck brace things.) Almost as confounding is the mania of Sudoku: this generation's answer to crossword puzzles and, from what I can see, the number-one pastime of bored flyers. (I'm not saying the game isn't challenging. But so is high-diving or sword-swallowing. That doesn't mean we should all be doing it.)
