Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Cockpit Confidential (28 page)
On a typical 747 with four hundred passengers, a mere quarter of them will be lucky enough, if that's the correct word, to be stationed at a window. In a ten-abreast block, only two of those seats come with a view. If flying has lost the ability to touch our hearts and minds, perhaps that's part of the reason: there's nothing to see anymore.
There's something instinctively comforting about sitting at the windowâa desire for orientation. Which way am I going? Has the sun risen or set yet? For lovers of air travel, of course, it's more than that. To this day, the window is always my preference, even on the longest and most crowded flight. What I observe through the glass is no less a sensory moment, potentially, than what I'll experience sightseeing later on. Traveling to Istanbul, for instance, I remember the sight of the ship-clogged Bosporus from 10,000 feet as vividly as I remember standing before the Süleymaniye Mosque or the Hagia Sofia.
For pilots, obviously, there isn't much choice. We spend hours in what is essentially a small room walled with glass. Cockpit windows are surprisingly large, and although there's often little to see except fuzzy gray cirrus or pitch-blackness, the panorama they provide is occasionally spectacular:
- New York City. The arrival patterns into LaGuardia will sometimes take you along the Hudson River at low altitude, skirting the western edge of Manhattan and offering a breathtaking vista of the New York skylineâthat “quartz porcupine,” as Vonnegut termed it.
- Shooting stars (especially during the annual, late-summer Perseids meteor shower). Most impressive are the ones that linger on the horizon for several seconds, changing color as they burrow into the atmosphere. I've seen shooting stars so bright they were visible even in daylight.
- The Northern Lights. At its most vivid, the aurora borealis has to be seen to be believed. And you needn't traipse to the Yukon or Siberia; the most dazzling display I've ever witnessed was on a flight between Detroit and New York. The heavens had become an immense, quivering, horizon-wide curtain of fluorescence, like God's laundry flapping in the night sky.
- Flying into Africa. I love the way the Cap Vert peninsula and the city of Dakar appear on the radar screen, perfectly contoured like some great rocky fishhookâthe westernmost tip of the continent, and the sense of arrival and discovery it evokes. There it is, Africa! And further inland, the topography of Mali and Niger. From 30,000 feet, the scrubby Sahel looks exactly like 40-grade sandpaper, sprayed lightly green and spattered with villagesâeach a tiny star with red clay roads radiating outward.
- The eerie, flickering orange glow of the Venezuelan oil fieldsâan apocalyptic vista that makes you feel like a B-17 pilot in 1945.
- Similar, but more depressing, are the thousands of slash-and-burn fires you'll see burning throughout the Amazon. Some of the fire fronts are miles longâwalls of red flame chewing through the forests.
- Compensating for the above are the vast, for-now untouched forests of Northeastern South America. Over Guyana in particular the view is like nothing else in the worldâan expanse of primeval green as far as the eye can see. No towns, no roads, no clear-cutting or fires. For now.
- Climbing out over the “tablecloth”âthe cloud deck that routinely drapes itself over Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.
- The frozen, midwinter oblivion of Northeastern Canada. I love passing over the jaggedy, end-of-the-world remoteness of Newfoundland, Labrador, and Northern Quebec in midwinterâa gale-thrashed nether-region of boulders, forests, and frozen black rivers.
- The majestic, primordial nothingness of Greenland. The great circle routes between the United States and Europe will sometimes take you over Greenland. It might be just a brush of the southern tip, but other times it's forty-five minutes across the meatier vistas of the interior. If you've got a window seat, do
not
miss the opportunity to steal a peek, even if it means splashing your fast-asleep seatmate with sunshine.
Other views aren't spectacle so much as just peculiarâ¦
One afternoon we were coasting in from Europe, about 200 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Gander Center,” I called in. “Got time for a question?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Do you have any idea what the name of that strange little island is that we just passed over?”
“Sure do,” said the man in Gander. “That's Sable Island.”
Sable Island is one of the oddest places I've ever seen from aloft. The oceans are full of remote islands, but Sable's precarious isolation makes it especially peculiar. It's a tiny, ribbony crescent of sand, almost Bahamian in shape and texture, all alone against the relentless North Atlantic. It's like a fragment of a submerged archipelagoâa miniature island that has lost its friends.
“Island,” maybe, is being generous. Sable is really nothing more than a sand bar, a sinewy splinter of dunes and grassâ26 miles long and only a mile wideâlashed and scraped by surf and wind. How staggeringly vulnerable it appears from 38,000 feet.
I'd flown over Sable many times and had been meaning to ask about it. Only later did I learn that the place has been “the subject of extensive scientific research,” according to one website, “and of numerous documentary films, books, and magazine articles.” Most famously, it's the home of 250 or so wild horses. Horses have been on Sable since the late eighteenth century, surviving on grass and fresh water ponds. Transient visitors include grey seals and up to 300 species of birds. Human access is tightly restricted. The only permanent dwelling is a scientific research station staffed by a handful of people.
But all right, okay, enough with the terrestrial stuff. I know that some of you are wondering about UFOs. This is something I'm asked about all the time. For the record, I have never seen one, and I have never met another pilot who claims to have seen one. Honestly, the topic is one that almost never comes up, even during those long, dark flights across the ocean. Musings about the vastness of the universe are one thing, but I cannot recall ever having had a conversation with a colleague about UFOs specifically. Neither have I seen the topic discussed in any industry journal or trade publication.
I once received an email asking me about a supposed “tacit agreement” between pilots that says we will not openly discuss UFO sightings out of fear of embarrassment and, as the emailer put it, “possible career suicide.” I had to laugh at the notion of there being a tacit agreement among pilots over
anything
, let alone flying saucers. And although plenty of things in aviation are tantamount to career suicide, withholding information about UFOs isn't one of them.
UST
C
OME
D
OWN
TERMINAL MADNESS: WHAT IS AIRPORT SECURITY?
In America and across much of the world, the security enhancements put in place following the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, have been drastic and of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational and pointless.
The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Comprehensive explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. It's the second variety, unfortunately that has come to dominate the air travel experience. I'm talking about the frisking, x-raying, body scanning, and confiscating that goes on at thousands of concourse checkpoints across the globe. These procedures waste our time, waste our money, and humiliate millions of us on a daily basis.
There are two fundamental flaws in our approach:
The first is a strategy that looks upon every single person who fliesâold and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passengerâas a potential terrorist. That is to say, we're searching for weapons rather than people who might actually use weapons. This is an impossible, unsustainable task in a system of such tremendous volume. As many as 2 million people fly each and every day in the United States alone. Tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the idea of guards trying to root out every conceivable weapon at an overcrowded terminal.
The second flaw is our lingering preoccupation with the tactics used by the terrorists on September 11âthe huge and tragic irony being that the success of the 2001 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first place. As conventional wisdom has it, the 9/11 terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box cutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. It was not a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was, instead, a failure of
national
securityâa breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA levels. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindsetâa set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. In years past, a hijacking meant a diversion to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of passive resistance. The presence of box cutters was merely incidental. They could have used anythingâonboard silverware, knives fashioned from plastic, a broken bottle wrapped in tapeâparticularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. And so long as they didn't chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.
For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and began to fight back. The element of surprise was no longer a useful tool. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they're about to die. It's hard to imagine a hijacker, be it with a box cutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It's equally hard to imagine that organized terrorists would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.
In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen againâguards pawing through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Not to mention even a child knows that a deadly weapon can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.
The folly is much the same with respect to the restrictions on liquids and gels, put in place following the breakup in 2006 of a London-based cabal planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. The threat of liquid explosives does exist. We recall Ramzi Yousef's detonation of a nitroglycerine bomb aboard a Philippine Airlines flight in 1994âa test run for the so-called Project Bojinka, the long-forgotten al-Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy eleven widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. But such explosives are not easily concocted, and the idea that confiscating snow globes and ice cream cones makes us safer is, let's admit it, more than a little ridiculous.
But of all the half-baked measures we've grown accustomed to, few are sillier than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. As this book goes to press, a program is finally under testing in the United States that will soon allow on-duty pilots to bypass the normal checkpoint. It's a simple enough process that confirms a pilot's identity by matching up airline and government-issue credentials with information stored in a database. That it took twelve years for this to happen, however, is a national embarrassment when you consider that tens of thousands of U.S. airport ground workers, from baggage loaders to cabin cleaners and mechanics, have been exempt from screening all along. Many of these individuals have full, unescorted access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a large percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. An airline pilot who once flew bombers armed with nuclear weapons is not to be trusted and is marched through the metal detectors. But those who cater the galleys, sling the suitcases, and sweep out the aisles have been able to saunter onto the tarmac unmolested for years. If there has been a more ringing, let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I'd like to hear it. Although nobody is implying that the hardworking caterers, baggage handlers, and the rest of the exempted employees out there are terrorists-inwaiting, this is nevertheless a double standard so staggeringly audacious that it can hardly be believed.
