Cockpit Confidential (20 page)

All airlines will brag that their employees are, in some indefinable way, better than everyone else's, but it wouldn't be fair, as a general rule, to say a certain caliber of pilot goes to a certain caliber of airline. The top airlines have a gigantic pool of more or less evenly qualified applicants to choose from. Even in the headiest boom times, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of highly impressive résumés sitting on a recruiter's desk. One is not exiled to a budget carrier for lack of talent; where you end up is less about skill than it is about luck and timing. As for cargo, companies like FedEx and UPS provide industry-leading pay and benefits, and many pilots prefer the anonymity of the freight business, away from the crowds and hassles. There's a certain cachet when carrying humans versus boxes, but its value varies from ego to ego.

There is nothing inherent to flying that should keep women away. As one female airline pilot puts it: “Piloting has nothing to do with physical strength, the only obvious advantage men have over women. Technical proficiency can be trained in anyone with the proper aptitude, and this isn't gender-defined.” Fair enough, yet it's obvious to anybody who travels that the vast majority of pilots are men, and I'm unsure what discourages women from joining them in greater number. I assume they're the same things, fair or unfair, that discourage them from pursuing other traditionally male professions, and vice versa. Part of it may be the military culture that, for many decades, dominated pilot ranks.

Whatever the reasons, the field isn't as male-dominated as it used to be. By the mid-1990s, up to 3 percent of all cockpit crew-members in the United States were women—a total of about 3,500, representing a thirty-fold increase since 1960. As of this writing, the number hovers near 5 percent, rising and falling with the hiring and furlough trends.

On-the-job harassment of woman pilots is exceptionally rare, and airline seniority lists, regimented strictly by date of hire, ensure equal pay and promotion. Several of my colleagues are women, and their presence on the flight deck has become so commonplace that, on that initial meeting in the briefing room, it hardly registers that I'm shaking hands with a woman.

If you're wondering, the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals reports a maximum of 675 African Americans, including 14 women, currently working for U.S. airlines—less than 1 percent of the 70,000 or so airline pilots nationwide.

Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories and urban legends. I've heard it all. Nothing, however, gets me sputtering more than the myths and exaggerations about cockpit automation—the idea that modern aircraft are flown by computer, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. In some not-too-distant future, we're told, pilots will be engineered out of the picture altogether.

For example, in a 2012
Wired
magazine story on robotics, a reporter had this to say: “A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot, just in case.”

That's about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot's job I've ever heard. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn't just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. It isn't just
a little bit
false. It's totally false. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn't know better and would allow such a statement to be published shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. Such assertions appear in the media all the time, to the point where they are taken for granted.

One thing you'll notice is that purveyors of this claptrap tend to be journalists or academics—professors, researchers, etc.—rather than pilots. Many of these people, however intelligent they are and however valuable their work might be, are highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day realities of commercial flying. Pilots too are occasionally part of the problem. “Aw, heck, this plane practically flies itself,” one of us might say. We're often our own worst enemies, enamored of gadgetry and, in our attempts to explain complicated procedures to the layperson, given to dumbing down. We wind up painting a caricature of what flying is really like—in the process undercutting the value of our profession.

Essentially, high-tech cockpit equipment assists pilots in the way that high-tech medical equipment assists physicians and surgeons. It has vastly improved their capabilities, but it by no means diminishes the experience and skill required to perform at that level and has not come remotely close to rendering them redundant. A plane is able to fly itself about as much as the modern operating room can perform an operation by itself. “Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology,” wrote the surgeon and author Atul Gawande in a 2011 issue of
The New Yorker
. “But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.” That about nails it.

And what do terms like “automatic” and “autopilot” mean anyway? The autopilot is a tool, along with many other tools available to the crew. You still need to tell it what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. I prefer the term
autoflight system
. It's a collection of several different functions controlling speed, thrust, and horizontal and vertical navigation, together or separately—all of it requiring regular crew inputs to work properly. On the Boeing I fly, I can set up an automatic climb or descent in any of about seven different ways, depending on what's needed. The media will quote supposed experts saying things like “pilots fly manually for only about ninety seconds of every flight.” Not only is this untrue, but it also neglects to impart any meaningful understanding of the differences between manual and automatic, as if the latter were as simple as pressing a button and folding your arms.

One evening I was sitting in economy class when our jet came in for an unusually smooth landing. “Nice job, autopilot!” yelled a guy behind me. Amusing, maybe, but wrong. It was a fully manual touchdown, as the vast majority of touchdowns are. Yes, it's true that most jetliners are certified for automatic landings—called “autolands” in pilot-speak. But in practice they are rare. Fewer than 1 percent of landings are performed automatically, and the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could spend pages trying to explain. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn't need to practice them twice a year in the simulator or periodically review those highlighted tabs in my manuals. In a lot of respects, automatic landings are more work-intensive than those performed by hand.

A flight is a very organic thing—complex, fluid, always changing—in which decision-making is constant and critical. For all of its scripted protocols, checklists, and procedures, hundreds if not thousands of subjective inputs are made by the crew, from deviating around a cumulus buildup to troubleshooting a mechanical issue. I'm talking about the run-of-the-mill situations that arise every single day, on every single flight, often to the point of task saturation. You'd be surprised how busy the cockpit can become even in perfectly ordinary circumstances—with the autopilot
on
.

Another thing we hear again and again is how the automated cockpit has made flying “easier” than it was in years past. On the contrary, it's probably more demanding than it's ever been. Once you account for all of the operational aspects of modern aviation, from flight-planning to navigating to communicating, the volume of requisite knowledge is far greater than it used to be. The emphasis is on a somewhat different skill set, but it's wrong to suggest that one set is necessarily more important than another.

But, you're bound to point out, what about the proliferation of remotely piloted military drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? Are they not a harbinger of things to come? It's tempting to see it that way. These machines are very sophisticated and have proven themselves reliable—to a point. A drone is not a commercial jet carrying hundreds of people. It has an entirely different mission and operates in a wholly different environment—with far less at stake should something go wrong. You can't simply take the drone concept, scale it up, build in a few redundancies, and off you go.

I'd like to see a remotely operated drone perform a high-speed takeoff abort after an engine failure, followed by a brake fire and the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring a diversion over mountainous terrain. I'd like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. Hell, even the simplest things. On any given flight, there are innumerable contingencies, large and small, requiring the attention and
visceral
appraisal of the crew. I can't imagine trying to handle these issues from the ground, thousands of miles away.

And adapting the UAV model to the commercial realm would require tremendously expensive changes to our civil aviation infrastructure, from designing and testing a whole new generation of aircraft to rebuilding the air traffic control system. We still haven't perfected the idea of unmanned cars, trains, or ships; the leap to commercial aircraft would be harder and more expensive by orders of magnitude. And after all of that, you'd still need human beings to operate these planes remotely.

I'm not saying it's beyond our capabilities. We
could
be flying around in unmanned airliners, just as we
could
be living in cities on the moon or at the bottom of the ocean. Ultimately, this isn't a technological challenge so much as one of cost and practicality. It's a long way off—if it ever happens at all.

I know how this sounds to some of you. Here's this Luddite trying to defend his profession against the encroachment of technology and an inevitable obsolescence; it's precisely
because
I'm an airline pilot that my argument isn't to be trusted. You can believe that if you want to, but I assure you I'm being neither naïve nor dishonest. And by no means am I opposed to the advance of technology. What I'm opposed to are foolish extrapolations of technology, and starkly distorted depictions of what my colleagues and I actually do for a living.

Regardless of whether a touchdown is intentionally or accidentally firm, a flight should be judged no more by its landing than the success of organ transplant surgery is judged by the alignment of the sutures. As for an accurate yardstick, I suggest there isn't one. Levels of skill, technique, and knowledge are not the kind of thing a passenger in row 14 can pick up on. Within an airline, all pilots are taught the same methods and will fly the same procedures at roughly the same angles, rates, and speeds. A particular angle of bank might seem capriciously steep, or a landing might be clumsy, but any number of factors could be at fault. The severity of a maneuver, whether perceived or actual, is not always a crewmember's whim or lack of finesse.

Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was the US Airways captain who guided his suddenly engineless Airbus into the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, after striking a flock of Canada geese. Together with the majority of my colleagues, I have the utmost respect for Captain Sullenberger. But that's just it: respect. It's not adoration or a false, media-fattened misunderstanding of what he and his crew faced that day. As the public has come to understand it, Sully saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and superhuman flying skills. The truth isn't quite so romantic.

I was getting a haircut (what's left of it) one day not long after the accident when Nick the barber asked what I did for a living. As is too often the case, any talk of piloting at some point turns to the saga of Sully-upon-Hudson, and this was no exception. Nick grew starry-eyed. “Man, that was something,” he said. “How did the guy ever land that plane on the water like that?” Nick wasn't looking for a literal answer, but I gave him one anyway. “Pretty much the same way he's landed 12,000 other times in his career” was my response. There was silence after that, which I took to mean that Nick was either silently impressed or thinking “what an asshole.”

I was exaggerating but eager to make a point: that the nuts and bolts of gliding into water aren't especially difficult. The common sense of water landings is one of the reasons pilots don't even train for them in simulators. Another reason is that having to land in water will always be the byproduct of something inherently more serious—a fire, multiple engine failures, or some other catastrophic malfunction.
That
is the crux of the emergency, not the resultant landing.

And nowhere in the public discussion has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged. Specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger's left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country's largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a lower altitude (beyond gliding distance to the Hudson), or under more inclement weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent or skill was going to matter.