Read Cockpit Confidential Online
Authors: Patrick Smith
Cockpit Confidential (5 page)
That's still not much, but civil aviation is growing rapidly around the world. China alone is planning to construct over forty large airports. In the United States, the number of annual passengers, already hovering at a billion, is anticipated to double by 2025, at which point greenhouse gases from planes would rise to as much as five times current levels. If indeed we begin reducing the carbon output from other sources, as we keep promising to, the output from aviation will rise drastically as a percentage of the whole.
The reason for all of this growth is that hopping on a plane is relatively cheap and easy. That may change. Air travel will always be an economic necessity, but the kinds of flying we've become used to might not always be possible should petroleum prices climb drastically, as many predict they will. We'll still have airplanes, but the binge flyers will be long gone in the face of higher fares.
Several carriers are experimenting with biofuel alternatives to jet fuel. Air Canada, Qantas, United, and All Nippon Airways are among those that have operated revenue flights powered completely or partly by biofuel. In the meantime, many airlines allow passengers to purchase inexpensive carbon offsets when booking online. Or, for a small fee, there are third-party organizations that will offset the estimated CO
2
of your journey, investing the money in sustainable energy projects.
Now forget emissions for a minute and let's talk about other kinds of pollution:
One thing that always shocks me is the amount of material wasteânamely plastics, paper, Styrofoam, and aluminumâthrown away by airlines and their customers. Take the number of trays, cups, soda cans, snack wrappers, and discarded reading material produced during the average flight, and multiply it by the forty thousand or so daily commercial departures around the world.
Simple measures would go a long way toward reducing and reusing. For instance, why not offer passengers the option of receiving a cup with their beverage? My can of soft drink or juice
always
comes with a cup, dropped onto my tray before I have a chance to say no, even though it would be perfectly acceptable to drink from the container. And the packaging of airline food (what still exists of it) is nothing if not extravagantly wasteful. The typical inflight meal or snack consists of more petroleum-derived plastic than actual food.
Not all airlines ignore the waste problem. Virgin Atlantic's onboard recycling program asks passengers to hand in glass bottles and cans and leave newspapers on their seats to enable recycling. At American Airlines, cans are recycled, with the money going to charity, and trash from domestic flights is separated and recycled after landing. Delta recycles all aluminum, plastic, and paper products from flights into its Atlanta megahub, with proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity. But while a few carriers are stepping forward, the industry-wide effort has, for the most part, been pretty halfhearted.
Air travel is such a visual thing. Take a look sometime at the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903. The image, captured by bystander John T. Daniels and since reproduced millions of times, is about the most beautiful photograph in all of twentieth-century iconography. Daniels had been put in charge of a cloth-draped 5 x 7 glass plate camera stuck into Outer Banks sand by Orville Wright. He was instructed to squeeze the shutter bulb if “anything interesting” happened. The camera was aimed at the space of skyâif a dozen feet of altitude can be called suchâwhere, if things went right, the Wrights' plane, the
Flyer
, would emerge in its first moments aloft.
Things did go right. The contraption rose into view, and Daniels squeezed the bulb. We see Orville, visible as a black slab, more at the mercy of the plane than controlling it. Beneath him, Wilbur keeps pace, as if to capture or tame the strange machine should it decide to flail or aim for the ground. You cannot see their faces; much of the photo's beauty lies in not needing to. It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight is encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world, one flying, the other watching. We see centuries of imaginationâthe ageless desire to flyâin a desolate, almost completely anonymous fruition.
I own a lot of airplane books. Aviation publishing is, let's just say, on a lower aesthetic par than what you'll find elsewhere on the arts and sciences shelves. The books are loaded with glam shots: sexily angled pictures of landing gear, wings, and tails. You see this with cars and motorcycles and guns tooâthe sexualization of mechanical objects. It's cheap and it's easy, and it misses the point. And unfortunately, for now, respect for aircraft has been unable to rise above this kind of adolescent fetishizing.
What aviation needs, I think, is some crossover cred. The Concorde and the 747, with their erudite melding of left- and right-brain sensibilities, have taken it close. Still, you won't find framed lithographs of 747s in the lofts of SoHo or the brownstones of Boston, hanging alongside romanticized images of the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. And I may not feel vindicated until commercial aviation gets its own ten-part, sepia-toned Ken Burns documentary.
Until then, when it comes to popular culture, movies are the place we look first. One might parallel the 1950s dawn of the Jet Age with the realized potential of Hollywoodâthe turbine and Cinemascope as archetypal tools of promise. Decades later, there's still a cordial symbiosis at work: a lot of movies are shown on airplanes, and airplanes are shown in a lot of movies. The crash plot is the easy and obvious device, and more than thirty years later, we're still laughing at Leslie Nielsen's lines from the movie
Airplane
. But I've never been fond of movies
about airplanes
. For most of us, airplanes are a means to an end, and often enough, the vessels of whatever exciting, ruinous, or otherwise life-changing journeys we embark on. And it's the furtive, incidental glimpses that best capture thisâfar more evocatively than any blockbuster disaster script: the propeller plane dropping the spy in some godforsaken battle zone or taking the ambassador and his family away from one; the beauty of the B-52's tail snared along the riverbank in
Apocalypse Now
; the Air Afrique ticket booklet in the hands of a young Jack Nicholson in
The Passenger
; the Polish Tupolevs roaring in the background of Krzysztof Kieslowski's
The Decalogue IV
.
Switching to music, I think of a United Airlines TV ad that ran briefly in the mid-1990sâa plug for their new Latin American destinations. The commercial starred a parrot, which proceeded to peck out several seconds of George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” on a piano. “Rhapsody” has remained United's advertising music and makes a stirring accompaniment to the shot of a 777 set against the sky.
We shouldn't forget the late Joe Strummer's reference to the Douglas DC-10 in the Clash's “Spanish Bombs,” but it's the Boeing family that's the more musically inclined. I can think of at least four songs mentioning 747s (Nick Lowe's “So It Goes” being my favorite).
Somehow, the Airbus brand doesn't lend itself lyrically, though Kinito Mendez, a merengue songwriter, paid a sadly foreboding tribute to the Airbus A300 with “El Avion” in 1996. “How joyful it could be to go on flight 587,” sings Mendez, immortalizing American Airlines's popular morning nonstop between New York and Santo Domingo. In November 2001, the flight crashed after takeoff from Kennedy airport, killing 265 people.
My formative years, musically speaking, hail from the underground rock scene, covering a span from about 1981 through 1986. This might not seem a particularly rich genre from which to mine out links to flight, but the task proves easier than you'd expect. “Airplanes are fallin' out of the sky⦔ sings Grant Hart on a song from Hüsker Dü's 1984 masterpiece
Zen Arcade
, and three albums later, his colleague Bob Mould shouts of a man “sucked out of the first class window!” Then we've got cover art. The back side of Hüsker Dü's
Land Speed Record
shows a Douglas DC-8. On the front cover of the English Beat's 1982 album,
Special Beat Service
, band members walk beneath the wing of British Airways VC-10 (that's the Vickers VC-10, a '60s-era jet conspicuous for having four aft-mounted engines). The Beastie Boys' 1986 album
Licensed to Ill
depicts an airbrushed ex-American Airlines 727.
The
Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry
registers no fewer than twenty entries under “airplanes,” fourteen more for “air travel,” and at least another five under “airports,” including poems by Frost and Sandburg. John Updike's
Americana and Other Poems
was reviewed by
Kirkus
as “a rambling paean for airports and big American beauty.” Subjecting readers to my own aeropoems is probably a bad idea, though I confess to have written a few, which you're free to Google at your peril. Maybe it was the cockpit checklists that inspired me, free-verse masterpieces that they are:
Â
Stabilizer trim override, normal
APU generator switch, off
Isolation valve, closed
Autobrakesâ¦maximum!
LEMENTS OF
U
NEASE
HIGH ART: HISTORY, HYPE, AND THE WORLD'S BIGGEST PLANES
In the mid-1960s, aerodynamicists at Boeing faced a momentous task. Their assignment: to build the largest commercial jetliner ever conceivedâone that would feature twice the tonnage and capacity of any existing planeâand make it pretty. Where to begin?
Well, specifically, you begin in the front and in the back. “Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems,” explains the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in an issue of
The New Yorker
. “How to meet the ground and how to meet the skyâthe top and the bottom, in other words.” Thinking of a jetliner as a horizontal skyscraper, we see that its beauty is gained or lost chiefly through the sculpting of the nose and tail. The engineers at Boeing understood Goldberger's point exactly, and the airplane they came up with, the iconic 747, is an aesthetic equal of the grandest Manhattan skyscraper.
It's perhaps telling that today, strictly from memory, with only the aid of a pencil and a lifetime of watching airplanes, I am able to sketch the fore and aft sections of the 747 with surprising ease and accuracy. This is not a testament to my drawing skills, believe me. Rather, it's a natural demonstration of the elegant, almost organic flow of the jet's profile.
The tail rises to greater than 60 feet. Though it's essentially a six-story aluminum billboard, there's something sexy in the fin's cant, like the angled foresail of a schooner. Up front, it's hard to look at a 747 without focusing on the plane's most recognizable featureâits second-story penthouse deck. The 747 is oftenâand unfairlyâdescribed as “bubble-topped” or “humpbacked.” In truth, the upper-deck annex is smoothly integral to the fuselage, tapering forward to a stately and assertive prow. The plane looks less like an airliner than it does an ocean liner in the classic
QE2
mold. There is something poetic and proud even in the name itselfâthe rakish tilt of the 7s and the lyrical, palindromic ring: seven-forty-seven.
The 747 was built for a marketâhigh capacity, long haulâthat technically didn't exist yet. By the end of the 1960s, no shortage of people craved the opportunity to travel nonstop over great distances, but no plane was big enough, or had enough range, to make it affordable. Boeing's 707, a kind of 747 in miniature, had ushered in the Jet Age several years earlier, but its economies of scale were limited. Juan Trippe, the visionary leader of Pan Am who'd been at the vanguard of the 707 project, persuaded Boeing that not only was an airplane with twice the 707's capacity possibleâit was a revolution waiting to happen.
