Cockpit Confidential (21 page)

Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble, acknowledging the points I make above. People pooh-pooh this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he's just being honest. He has also highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. There were two pilots on board, and
both
needed to rise to the occasion.

Nothing they did was easy, and a successful outcome was by no means guaranteed. But they did what they
had to do
, what they were trained to do, and what, presumably, any other crew would have done in that same situation. And let's not forget the flight attendants, whose actions were no less commendable. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles or heroics, but to less glamorous forces. They are, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill, and technology.

There's little harm in celebrating the unlikely survival of 155 people, but terms like “hero” and “miracle” shouldn't be thrown around lightly. A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on the river that day can be rationally explained. And a hero, to me, describes a person who accepts a great personal sacrifice, up to and including injury or death, for the benefit of somebody else. I didn't see heroics; I saw professional execution in the throes of an emergency.

And if we're going to lavish praise on men like Sullenberger, who did not perish, what of the others like him whose stories you've likely never heard, mainly because their planes didn't come splashing down alongside the world's media capital? I give you Captain Brian Witcher and his crew aboard United Airlines flight 854, a 767 flying from Buenos Aires to Miami in April 2004. They never made headlines, but what they had to deal with was almost unthinkable: a complete electrical failure over the Andes at three o'clock in the morning. Under darkness, with their cockpit instruments dead or dying fast, including all radios and navigational equipment, they managed a successful emergency landing in mountain-ringed Bogotá, Colombia.

Or consider the predicament facing American Eagle Captain Barry Gottshall and first officer Wesley Greene three months earlier. Moments after takeoff from Bangor, Maine, their Embraer regional jet suffered a freak system failure resulting in full and irreversible deflection of the plane's rudder. Struggling to maintain control, they returned to Bangor under deteriorating weather. Visibility had fallen to a mile, and as the thirty-seven-seater approached the threshold, Gottshall had to maintain full aileron deflection—that is, the control wheel turned to the stops and held there—to keep from yawing into the woods.

If you need a couple of heroes, take Gotshall and Greene, whose emergency must have been incredibly harrowing. Theirs was pure seat-of-the-pants improv. A fully deflected rudder? There are no checklists for that one.

Few things irk me more than wisecracks about inebriated pilots. The remarks always come in that slightly nervous, joke-but-not-really-ajoke style: “Hey, how about those drunk pilots we keep hearing about? I mean, I know you guys aren't half-cocked up there, but…well, are you?”

Yes, it has happened. Over the years, a small number of pilots have been arrested after failing a breathalyzer or blood-alcohol test. Most infamous, in March 1990, an entire Northwest Airlines cockpit crew of three was arrested after arriving in Minneapolis. All three, who had spent the previous evening's layover at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, downing as many as nineteen rum and Cokes, were found to have blood-alcohol levels far beyond the legal limit. Incidents like this have kept alive a lingering stereotype of the airline pilot: the hard-drinking, renegade divorcee, with crows' feet flanking his eyes and a whiskey-tempered drawl, a flask tucked into his flight case. And it's easy to jump to conclusions. For every pilot nabbed, there must be ten others over the legal limit, right?

No. Believe me, this isn't something pilots play fast and loose with. Why would they, with their careers hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates and possibly prison time as well. My personal observations aren't a scientific sample, but I have been flying commercially since 1990 and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot I knew or suspected of being intoxicated. I understand and expect that passengers worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, this should not be one of them.

The FAA blood-alcohol limit for airline pilots is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer's inhouse policies, which tend to be tougher. Above and beyond that, we're subject to random, unannounced testing for drugs and alcohol. Overseas, the regulations are even tighter. In Britain, the legal limit is set at 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. That's four times lower than the British limit for drunk driving and equates to about .02 percent blood-alcohol level.

Having said all of that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation just as it exists in every other profession. To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) have been very successful with proactive counseling programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. Not long ago, I flew with a colleague who participated in the HIMS program, an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS (the name is from a 1970s research project known as the Human Intervention Motivation Study) has treated more than four thousand pilots, with only 10 to 12 percent of participants suffering relapse. It has kept alcohol out of the cockpit and has helped prevent the issue from being driven underground, where it's more likely to be a safety issue.

Can a pilot grounded for drinking ever fly again? Among the most inspirational stories out there is that of Northwest captain Lyle Prouse, one of the trio arrested that morning in Minnesota in 1990. Prouse, an alcoholic whose parents had died of the disease, became a poster pilot for punishment and redemption. He was given sixteen months in federal prison and then, in a remarkable and improbable sequence of events, was able to return to the cockpit on his sixtieth birthday and retire as a 747 captain. Once out of jail, Prouse was forced to requalify for every one of his FAA licenses and ratings. Broke, he relied on a friend to lend him stick time in a single-engine trainer. Northwest's then-CEO, John Dasburg, who himself had grown up in an alcoholic family, took personal interest in Prouse's struggle and lobbied publicly for his return. You'll see Prouse in interviews from time to time, and inevitably you'll be struck by how forthrightly he takes responsibility, without resorting to the sobby self-flagellation of most public apologies. Always one is left, unexpectedly, to conclude that this convicted felon deserved his second chance. In 2001, he was among those granted presidential pardons by Bill Clinton.

The purpose of the watches is to tell us what time it is. Watches are required as backups to the ship's clocks, but nothing more elaborate than a sweep hand is needed. If a pilot prefers something fancy or expensive, that's his or her business. My fifteen-year-old Swiss Army watch does the job wonderfully.

Inside those black leather bags is a library of leather-bound navigational binders containing several hundred pages of maps, charts, approach procedures, airport diagrams, and other technical arcana. Additional books are the Aircraft Operating Manual (AOM) and General Operations Manual (GOM). You'll also find a headset, spare checklists, quick-reference cards, a flashlight, and various personal sundries (mine include Post-it pads, pens, earplugs, and a big batch of wet-nap packets to wipe away the dust, crumbs, and grime from the radio panels and other cockpit surfaces, which are routinely filthy).

You'll be seeing fewer and fewer of these bags, as airlines turn to digital versions of those bulky manuals. The “paperless cockpit,” it's called, and it's already here. jetBlue's pilots have been relying on laptops for several years, while United, Delta, and Southwest are moving to tablet-based platforms. Depending on the carrier's needs and preferences, an iPad or other device can be issued to each pilot, or a pair of them can be mounted and wired into the cockpit itself. The cockpit will never be entirely paper-free, but the more cumbersome hard-copy material will be more quickly and easily accessible in digitized form.

And quickly and easily
revised
. The switch to electronic manuals is the best idea I've heard in years, if for no other reason than it frees the average pilot from the savagery and tedium of having to update and revise his books, which under normal circumstances are subject to hundreds of revisions every month. The tiniest addendum to any approach or departure procedure, and bang, eighteen different pages needed to be swapped out. A particularly hefty set of revisions can take two hours or more to complete. Common side effects include dizziness, repetitive motion injuries, and suicide.

Much of the problem here is that airlines and regulators insist on supersaturating crews with data and information. What should be a relatively thin volume of useful information becomes thousands of pages of fluffery. It'll still be there, but at least we won't need to lug it around with us anymore. United says that its move to iPads will save 16 million sheets of paper annually. I can believe it. It will also save time, fuel, and visits to the chiropractor.

What happens if the first officer topples a Coke Zero all over his new iPad or drops it on the floor? Not to panic: these are reference materials, not do-or-die sets of instructions. There will always be at least two devices on board, and anything truly critical will also remain in hard copy.

It varies from carrier to carrier, but you can assume pilots and flight attendants are provided with food on any flight longer than about five hours. Some stations will stock a designated crew meal, but normally the cockpit crew gets the same food that is served in first or business class (yes, all the courses, including soup, salads, and desserts). At my airline we are handed a menu—the same one given to the passengers—prior to departure, and we write down our preferences. Passengers have priority on the entrees; we get what's left over. With the possibility of food poisoning in mind, pilots are encouraged to eat different entrees, but this is not a hard and fast rule. In practice, it comes down to your preferences and what's available.

Shorter-haul domestic and regional pilots are on their own. It's pretzels, peanuts, the food court, or whatever you carry with you.

And later that night…it's ramen time! If you fail to grasp why ramen noodles would be a must-carry item as important as clean socks and underwear, you've never been a very hungry pilot checking into a motel at midnight for an eight-hour layover. There are healthier and tastier things to eat, but ramen is cheap, never goes bad, and cooks fast. Give me a packet of Trader Joe's finest art noodles and an in-room coffeemaker, and I'll show you a feast:

Directions: (1) Rinse out coffeemaker filter basket; (2) Crush noodle brick into the carafe; (3) Fill coffeemaker with water and switch on; (4) Once carafe is full, wait three minutes, then add flavor packet and enjoy. Don't overfill, and always be sure the filter basket is clean, as coffee-flavored ramen is even worse than Creamy Chicken. Remember to carry a plastic fork to replace the metal one stolen by TSA, or you'll be forced to eat with your hands or by holding two pencils in the shape of chopsticks. For a touch of the exotic—that is, marginally less pathetic—spice up your snack with Guyanese hot sauce.

The late Mamofuku Ando developed ramen noodles during food shortages in postwar Japan. The company he founded, Nissin Food Products, once developed a special, vacuum-packed ramen for the benefit of Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi on his trip aboard the U.S. Space Shuttle. No word on whether Nissin ever thought about targeting airline workers, but I can attest to the product's easy adaptability to a life aloft.

If so, I have long been excluded from it. Beyond that, I don't know what to say. All in all, it's probably not much different from any other work environment, though things are maybe faster and looser, which is to say younger, at the regionals.

In 2003, two Southwest Airlines pilots were terminated for going
au naturel
in flight. I don't know exactly what happened and I should probably withhold judgment, as these sorts of things have a way of becoming distorted when stripped, if you will, of context. But for the record, no, I have never taken my clothes off during flight.

Well, except once. It was the summer of 1995, and a pavement-melting heat wave was sweeping across the Midwest. I was based in Chicago as a first officer on a sixty-four-seat ATR-72. The European-built ATR is a sophisticated plane, but in all that wiring and plumbing they forgot the air conditioning. Tiny eyeball vents blow out tepid wisps of air. On this particular day, a superheated haze had settled over O'Hare, pushing the temperature to 107 degrees. I was up front, finishing my preflight checks and waiting for the captain. I was so hot that I could hardly move. So I took my shirt and tie off. Pilot shirts, which are mostly polyester, are uncomfortable enough even in a perfect climate. Crank the heat and it's like wearing chain mail. I also removed my shoes.