Cockpit Confidential (17 page)

The luxuriousness of crew rest facilities varies with airline and aircraft type. On bigger planes like the 747, 777, or A380, crews have surprisingly spacious quarters outfitted with bunks. They can be above deck, below deck, or squirreled away somewhere in the main cabin. Some are built into a removable, lower-deck pod reached via a ladder or staircase. (Q: Where is the captain? A: He is sleeping in the cargo compartment.) Flight attendants too are entitled to inflight breaks, though their digs aren't always as cushy as those for the pilots.

In Europe and other parts of the world, so-called ab initio programs are increasingly popular, whereby carriers select, groom, and train young pilots from the ground up, so to speak. Little or no flying experience is prerequisite. More traditionally, however, commercial airlines will not hire a pilot without substantial prior experience. In the United States, the typical major airline applicant already possesses thousands of hours of flight time (including various FAA licenses and supplemental ratings) and a college degree to boot.

Accumulating that prior experience requires that a pilot choose one of two paths: civilian or military. Advantages to the military route include having your training costs covered by the government and that airlines tend to hire military pilots with fewer total hours than their counterparts who come up through civilian channels. Drawbacks include intense competition for a limited number of slots and mandatory service time lasting several years. Historically, upward of 80 percent of airline pilots were recruited from the armed forces, but that number has fallen to around 50 percent at the majors. At the regionals, it's around 15 percent.

The civilian route is a long, unpredictable, and extremely expensive slog.

Step one is primary flight training. At a minimum, you're going to need an FAA commercial pilot certificate, with multi-engine and instrument ratings. A flight instructor certificate (CFI) isn't a bad idea either. The good news is you can do this piecemeal, at your own pace, taking lessons at the local flight school an hour at a time. On the downside, it's going to cost tens of thousands of dollars and demand plenty of dedication. Alternately, you can enroll in one of many aviation colleges—Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University being the most popular—that combine primary training with a bachelor's degree. This is a faster, more consolidated, and even more expensive method.

The next step is to get as much flight time as possible. The fact that you've got a commercial pilot's license from the FAA might impress girls at a party (though it never worked for me), but it does
not
entitle the holder to a job with an airline—far from it. You still need to accumulate hundreds or even thousands of hours of logbook time before an airline will take you seriously. Prepare to spend at least a few years instructing, towing banners, or engaged in some other means of ad-hoc experience-building—the pilot equivalent of odd jobs, none of which pay well. Once you've hit 1,500 hours, you'll want to study up for what's called an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate, yet another FAA credential to help sharpen your competitive edge.

Oh, and if you haven't done the Embry-Riddle thing, you'll also be expected to have a college education. When it's not an outright requirement, airlines strongly prefer candidates with at least a four-year degree (though contrary to popular belief, it needn't be within a science-, math-, or technology-related field; there are plenty of airline pilots out there who majored in economics, music, literature, and philosophy).

After a while, provided you're resilient enough and haven't been hauled off to debtor's prison, you've got a nice, fat logbook and all the boxes checked. You're finally ready to apply for that airline job.

At a
regional
airline, I mean. To make a baseball analogy, you've graduated only as far as Triple-A. You can now look forward to several added years of little money and lots of hard work before a major will consider moving your application into the right pile—assuming any of them are hiring. There's a fair chance you'll be spending the rest of your career at this level. In decades past, flying for a regional was considered a temporary apprenticeship, a stepping-stone before moving on to a more rewarding career at a major. That progression, never a sure thing, is today even more of a gamble. The regional sector has expanded so greatly that a position at one of these companies, for better or worse, is looked upon not so much as a means to an end, but as a permanent career.

Here's how it unfolded for me:

Extreme parental generosity funded my initial training. With mom and dad footing the bill, I began taking flying lessons in my late teens, two or three times a week, at an airport outside Boston, working fast enough to obtain my commercial pilot's license by age twenty-one. (I took it easier on the academic side: I had an associate's degree from a local community college, eventually converting it to a four-year degree through a correspondence program.) From there, I became a flight instructor, accumulating 1,500 hours in various Pipers and Cessnas over a three-year span. My big break came in 1990, when I was hired as a first officer on a fifteen-seat regional turboprop, to the tune of about $850 a month (
see The Right Seat
).

That airline went bankrupt four years later. I then worked briefly at two other regionals before getting a job as a flight engineer on a DC-8 freighter—my first jet. Four years after that, I was at last offered a position by the large passenger airline in whose employ I hope to remain for the rest of my career. I'd amassed about 5,000 flight hours and was thirty-five years old.

While that's a fairly standard résumé, it's the hiring trends more than anything else—the health of the airline industry and how many positions open through attrition and expansion—that determine where, when, and if a pilot finds a job. The regional sector has the highest rates of turnover and attrition, while the mainline carriers can go several years at a time—sometimes a decade or more—without taking on a single new pilot.

The application process is standard across the industry: Having met a carrier's minimum requirements, you submit an application and wait for the phone to ring. The rest is out of your hands. Aside from getting a written recommendation or two from pilots already on the property, there is little you can do to improve your chances. Networking, as understood in the corporate world, does not exist at airlines.

Once hired, airline training curricula are highly similar across the industry. Whether a pilot is learning to fly an RJ or a 777, the duration and structure of the regimen are about the same.

New-hires will spend a month or more at an airline's training center. The first thing all of them must endure is a weeklong course known as basic indoctrination, or “basic indoc.” It's not as scary as the name implies—nobody gets his head shaved or is forced to do push-ups—but it's several tedious days devoted to administrative paperwork and learning company-specific rules and procedures. In addition to filling out insurance forms, you'll spend a lot of time going over something known as operations specifications (ops-specs, we call them), which is about as exciting as it sounds. Trainees can phone home and mesmerize their spouses with all they've learned about takeoff visibility criteria and the required ceiling minima when selecting alternate airports.

The hands-on airplane training takes around three weeks to complete. Which plane you're assigned to is determined by your bidding preferences, in-class seniority (determined by lottery or date of birth), and which vacancies happen to be available (more on that later in the chapter). Before you move on to the full-motion simulators, practice takes place in computerized cockpit mock-ups—high-tech minisims. These machines have fully working instruments and controls, but do not have visuals and do not physically move. You will get familiar with the plane's various systems, rehearse different malfunctions and emergencies, and “fly” instrument approaches galore.

“Systems” is pilot patois for a plane's internals—its electrical layout, its hydraulic and fuel plumbing, the workings of its autoflight components, and so forth. It used to be that flight crews underwent lengthy systems training in a classroom setting, but nowadays the emphasis is on self-study. The company will mail you a package of books and CDs, and you're expected to have a healthy systems knowledge
before
showing up for training. This takes strong self-discipline and the careful compartmentalizing of information—lots of it.

Then come the simulators. You've seen the sims on television—those giant paint-shakers with their creepy hydraulic legs. Everyone has heard how astoundingly true-to-life these contraptions are, and maybe you take this with a grain of salt. Don't. A session of mock disaster in “the box” is exceptionally true to life. The 3-D visuals, projected onto wraparound screens, aren't the most realistic—the renderings of terminal buildings and landscapes, for example, wouldn't win any CGI contests—but the airplane and its systems behave precisely as they do in the real world.

Each session lasts about four hours, not including the time spent on prep and debriefing. It might comprise a series of “snapshot” maneuvers, whereby the sim is repositioned for various drills, or it might follow the real-time pattern of an actual flight, gate to gate, complete with paperwork, radio calls, and so on. Captains and first officers training together are tested both individually and as a working team. Behind them sits a merciless instructor whose job it is to make them as miserable as possible.

That's being facetious. The instructor is a teacher, a coach, and the point here isn't to wash people out. Just the same, I'd rather be almost anywhere than sitting in a full-motion simulator. There are plenty of would-be pilots and aerogeeks out there who would sell their families into slavery for the chance to spend an hour in one of these damn boxes. (You can actually rent them out, though a sixty-minute block of time runs thousands of dollars.) Which is a bit ironic, because there is almost nothing on Earth I enjoy less. I hate simulators, and they hate me—which, if you think about it, is the optimum relationship.

Although flunking out completely is rare, every pilot will botch his or her share of maneuvers. It's not at all uncommon to need an extra sim period or two, and for certain exercises to be repeated. Washout rates at the major airlines are quite low—1 or 2 percent maybe—but never is success taken for granted. Fail a check-ride, and you'll be given another chance, sure. Fail it a second time, though, and things start to get uncomfortable. The majors tend to have an accommodating, gentlemanly approach to training. Regional carriers aren't always as patient and aren't known for their touchy-feely training environments.

After a final sim check, a pilot graduates to the actual aircraft for what we call IOE, or “initial operating experience.” This is a series of revenue flights completed under the guidance and tutelage of a training captain. There are no warm-ups; your very first takeoff will be with a load of paying passengers seated behind you.

Those assigned to international routes also receive a brief course in long-range navigation. Additionally, there's “theater training” specific to airports or regions that are especially challenging. Parts of South America, for example, or Africa. For first officers, this is usually self-study, though for captains it entails flying there in the company of a training pilot before being allowed to do so on their own.

And finally it's over. Except that it's not, because pilot training never really stops. Once or twice each year (the frequency varies, depending on your seat and which programs your carrier is approved for) it's back to the training center for a refresher. Recurrent training, it's called—a mandatory rite of study and stress culminating in a multihour sim session. Assuming it goes okay, you're signed off and sent back to the line.

To give you an idea, here's a breakdown of one of my latest recurrent sim sessions:

We begin with a departure from Washington-Dulles. At the moment of liftoff, bang, the left engine fails and catches fire. For good measure, the instructor has set the weather at bare minimums for a Category 1 ILS approach, and asks that it be hand-flown, sans autopilot. Then, a quarter mile from touchdown, we're forced to go around when a 747 wanders errantly onto our runway. Next scenario: We're at 36,000 feet over the Andes, when suddenly there's a rapid decompression. This would be fairly straightforward over the ocean, but in this case, the high terrain means we have to adhere to a preprogrammed escape route and a carefully scripted diversion path. It gets busy. This was followed by a pair of wind-shear encounters—one each during takeoff and landing, a series of complicated GPS approaches, and an engine-out departure at Quito, Ecuador, where again mountainous terrain entails unusual and tricky procedures.

And that was just the first day. Practice? Is that the right word? Perhaps, though I can't imagine that this is how an outfielder might feel shagging flies before game-time. If nothing else, at least the time passes quickly. And when it was over, my sense of relief was exceeded only by a renewed resentment for those who believe that flying planes is easy and that modern aircraft basically fly themselves (
see automation myths
).

Wait, we're still not finished. You've also got random “line checks”—periodic spot checks whereby you'll work a trip in the company of a training captain—as well as unannounced jumpseat visits from the FAA. I love my job, but I do not, even a little bit, enjoy having to fly all the way from Europe with an FAA inspector peering over my shoulder for eight hours, scribbling unseen comments into a notebook.