Cockpit Confidential (12 page)

With scattered exceptions (Denver, San Francisco, Washington, Vancouver), there is nothing comparable in America. To the contrary, some of our most expensive airport renovations have been terrible disappointments. jetBlue's wildly overrated home at JFK, for example. Terminal 5—or “T5” as the carrier likes to call it—is a $743 million, 72-acre structure that opened in 2008 to considerable promotion and fanfare. Inside, the atrium food court and rows of shops conspire to make yet another airport feel like yet another mall. The Wi-Fi is free, and so is the noise and claustrophobia at the overcrowded gates. But it's the exterior that's the real tragedy. Although the streetside facade is at worst cheerless, the tarmac side is abominable—a wide, low-slung, industrial-brutalist expanse of gray concrete and ugly brown sheathing. Once again it looks like a shopping mall. Or, to be more specific, it looks like the
back
of a shopping mall. All that's missing are some pallets and dumpsters. The facility's only visual statement is one of not caring, a presentation of architectural nothingness, absolutely empty of inspiration—precisely what an airport terminal should
not be
. Is this the best we can do?

It's ironic that Eero Saarinen's landmark TWA Flight Center sits directly in front of T5, itself part of the jetBlue complex. Regarded as a modernist masterpiece, the Flight Center opened in 1962 and was the first major terminal built expressly for jet airliners. It is supposed to serve as an entryway lobby and ticketing plaza for T5, though for now it remains semi-derelict and only partly renovated. I wish they'd finish the thing so more people could appreciate what is widely considered the most architecturally significant airport terminal ever constructed. Saarinen, a Finn whose other projects included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the terminal at Washington-Dulles, described the interior as “all one thing.” The lobby is a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, at once futuristic and organic. It's a kind of Gaudi inversion, a carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by a pair of cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.

And just to the north of T5 used to be the National Airlines Sundrome, designed by I. M. Pei. It opened in 1970 and was named in honor of National's yellow and orange sunburst logo and its popular routes between the Northeast and Florida. After National was folded into Pan Am, the terminal was taken over by TWA. Later it was used by jetBlue, then abandoned and torn down.

Pei and Saarinen, a half-minute walk from each other. Our airports ain't what they used to be.

Am I making too much of this? While terminal design and passenger friendliness are important, isn't it the operational aspects of an airport—the state of its runways, taxiways, and logistical infrastructure—that ultimately matter most? Indeed, but here too the situation is worrying, as any American who travels globally can attest. Once again, it's a funding issue. Our airports are failing, and nobody wants to pay for them. There's little in the federal budget, while airports and airlines lack the lobbying strength of the pharmaceutical industry or the military-industrial complex.

“Other parts of the world are more enlightened in their aviation policies than we are,” said Greg Principato, North American president of the Airports Council International, speaking at a conference in 2012. He added that members of the U.S. Congress have a poor understanding of how the upkeep and renovation of U.S. airports needs to be funded. “They have a sense that airports are economically important,” he explained, “but don't really understand why.” Principato warns that the declining state of its airport infrastructure puts the United States “at risk of being turned into a feeder system for the global aviation network.”

At my airline, sign-in time for domestic flights is sixty minutes prior to departure. For flights overseas, it's ninety minutes. That's pretty standard. When the flight is headed overseas, things start off in the crew lounge. After introducing ourselves, we gather up the paperwork and move to a cubicle to review it all. The paperwork contains the full flight plan (see below), all necessary weather reports and forecasts, and a slew of supplemental information. There are dozens of pages in total, covering everything from taxiway closures to the phone number of the layover hotel. (Some of this material is laser-printed on standard-size office paper, but most of it comes rolling off in splendorous dot matrix.) For transoceanic flights the route needs to be manually plotted, old school, on a chart. Once you're at the plane, your gear (headsets, manuals, clipboards, etc.) needs to be stowed and assembled, and the interior and exterior inspections completed. The cockpit systems and instruments have to be checked; the logbook has to be reviewed; and all of the route, wind, and performance data have to be loaded into the plane's flight management system (FMS). And don't forget the most important task of all: looking over the menu and deciding which entree you want for dinner.

Somewhere in there, the pilots and flight attendants will huddle up for a pre-departure crew briefing. Sometimes this meeting takes place in a designated briefing room before heading to the aircraft; otherwise it happens on the jet prior to boarding. It starts with an exchange of names. The captain then speaks for three or four minutes, going over the flight time, anticipated turbulence, arrival weather, and anything else pertinent or peculiar. Long-haul crews are sometimes together for a week or more. Aside from the practical aspects, the briefing is, if nothing else, an introduction to the people you'll be spending the next several days with.

On domestic flights all of this is quicker and more casual. The majority of the prep takes place in the cockpit, and the paperwork packet is much lighter. The gate agent will run most of it off the podium printer and hand it to the captain or first officer. The crew briefing is little more than the captain calling aside the lead flight attendant and going over the flight time, turbulence, and weather. Sixty minutes is more than ample time to prepare. There are no menus.

Airline pilots do not file flight plans—or plan their flights for that matter. Almost everything that needs to be researched, filed, or requested, from the flight plan itself to foreign overflight permissions, is taken care of backstage, so to speak, by teams of licensed dispatchers and planners working in the airline's operational control center, a sprawling facility that looks like the old mission control room at NASA. We shouldn't give dispatchers short shrift; their job is a critical one. Officially, responsibility for a flight is shared fifty-fifty between the captain and the dispatcher. From pushback to touchdown, a flight remains in constant contact with its dispatcher via radio or datalink.

And maybe you're wondering: What is a flight plan, anyway? Technically it's a document filed with air traffic control listing the operational vitals of a flight, such as aircraft type and registration, requested routing and altitudes, and flying time. The crew never sees this document, or even a copy of it, usually. What we do see and carry with us, however, as part of that great big paperwork packet, is a comprehensive printout, several pages long, containing not only these vitals but a highly detailed, waypoint-by-waypoint breakdown of the flight, start to finish, including everything from anticipated fuel burn figures to wind and temperature analyses to aircraft performance data. We call this document the flight plan. Really it's not, but in practice it is.

In the aviator's world, there are two kinds of speed: speed relative to the air (airspeed) and speed relative to the ground (groundspeed). It's that first one that keeps a plane flying—the air pushing against the wing and holding it aloft. Remember in chapter one, sticking your arm out the window of the Toyota and getting it to fly? Well, you wouldn't need to be driving 60 miles per hour if, instead, you had 60 miles-per-hour worth of wind blowing straight at you. You wouldn't have to move; the wind would be doing all the work. Your arm, which is to say the wing, would be registering 60 miles per hour of airspeed, even as your groundspeed sits at zero. It's the same idea with an actual plane, the chief benefit being that taking off or landing into a headwind means that less runway is needed.

Because of air traffic constraints and noise abatement rules, into-the-wind operations aren't always possible, and you're sometimes stuck with a crosswind or tailwind. Tailwinds are beneficial during cruise, but not for takeoff or landing. Racing down a runway, a plane will be pushed along by a tailwind, increasing groundspeed and using up valuable real estate, with no benefit to actual flying speed—that is, airspeed. For this reason, takeoff and landing tailwind limits are usually very low, at a meager 10 knots or so.

The plane accelerates to a predetermined speed, at which point the pilots lift the nose to a specific angle and begin the climb. The particular speed at which this happens, the amount of engine power used, and the runway distance required are different for every occasion and are calculated beforehand. It depends not just on the weight of the airplane, but temperature, wind, and other factors.

Inherently, takeoff is the more critical point than landing. Here, the airplane is making the transition from ground to flight, and its grip on the latter is much more tentative than it is when coming down. It's landings that fearful flyers hate, but in deference to the principles of lift, gravity, and momentum, this anxiety is misplaced. Not that you should be, but if you insist on being nervous, takeoff is your time—from just prior to liftoff through the first twenty seconds or so of flight.

After breaking ground and raising the landing gear, the pilots follow a profile of target speeds and altitudes at which they retract the flaps—often in stages as the plane accelerates—all the while banking and climbing to assigned headings altitudes. It can be noisy, with multiple power changes, turns, and pitch adjustments. If it feels unusually hectic, chances are good the crew is following a noise abatement procedure on behalf of residents below. These can require complicated profiles with low-altitude turns and steeperthan-normal climbs.

Planes heading east might initially turn west after takeoff. Those headed south might at first go north, and so on. Your pilots aren't lost, they're simply following a published departure pattern. Airports can have dozens of these standard instrument departures (SIDs, as we know them). The one you fly will be assigned by ATC as part of your predeparture clearance. Taking off from runway 31L at JFK, for example, the SIDs require that you
always
make a sharp left turn to the south, regardless of your destination. The purpose is to keep flights adequately sequenced and separated, clear of obstructions, and clear of traffic from nearby airports. Eventually you'll be worked into the higher-altitude structure and sent in the proper direction, but expect a number of turns, sequential step climbs, and speed adjustments in the first several minutes of flight. And the last several as well—on arrival it happens the same way, except these patterns are called STARs (standard terminal arrivals).

Every airliner is certified for takeoff with one of its engine failing at the worst possible moment. From the passenger's perspective, this is just about that point when the plane's nose is lifting into the air. From the pilot's perspective, this moment is known as V1, or “takeoff decision speed,” referring to the speed beyond which discontinuing the takeoff is no longer an option. V1 is different for every takeoff, as determined by weight, runway length, wind, temperature, and flap setting. If a malfunction of any magnitude occurs at or past this point, crews are trained to
continue the takeoff
, as per regulation planes must be capable of accelerating and climbing away, even with total failure of an engine. This guarantee extends beyond the airport perimeter to account for buildings, mountains, antennae, and whatever else. For each airport—indeed each runway—data are computed not only to ensure the ability to fly, but also to avoid off-airport obstructions.

Now, what about prior to that V1 point? With a full load, doesn't an aborted takeoff guarantee you'll be careening off the end of the runway? No. When all the numbers are crunched, two things are certain before any commercial jet begins to roll. First, as we just saw, the plane must be able to climb away safely following an engine failure at takeoff decision speed, V1. Second and no less important, the same jet must be able to come to a safe stop if the takeoff is aborted at any time
prior
to that speed. Think of V1 as a fulcrum. If there's a problem after V1, the crew knows the plane will fly and clear obstructions. If there's trouble before V1, it knows there's room to stop. This includes applicable penalties for ice, snow, or any other performance-altering peculiarities of a runway. And this is one of the reasons flights may be weight restricted when using short runways. Not because the runway is inadequate for takeoff, but because it's inadequate for an
aborted
takeoff.