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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

If you’ve ever had a question or concern about air travel, from turbulence to the technical aspects of how planes fly to the service cultures of the world’s airlines, chances you’ll find an explanation below.

The contents of this site are drawn from articles and columns originally written for the online magazine, Salon.com. They have been adapted, revised, and expanded. Scattered passages also appear in the author’s 2004 book, ASK THE PILOT, published by Riverhead Books.

Logistical, proofreading, and creative support was provided by Julia Petipas. Acoustic accompaniments by John Darnielle, Bob Mould, David Gedge, Joe Strummer and the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. And a special acknowledgment to Andrew Leonard at Salon.com, without whose gamble on a cold call almost ten years ago these pages would not exist.

Special thanks also to Sam Antar and the Online Media Legal Network / Citizen Media Law Project

More than ever, air travel is a focus of curiosity, intrigue, anxiety and frustration. In the segments that follow I will provide answers for the curious, reassurance for the anxious, and facts for the deceived.

I certainly have my work cut out for me. Air travel is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, urban legends and assorted crackpot notions. There is so much bad information out there that it’s hard to find a starting point, and I am astonished by the extent to which certain myths and misconceptions have become embedded in conventional wisdom. This isn’t surprising, maybe, when you consider that commercial flying has exactly the right ingredients to nurture such phenomena: it’s scary to millions of people, and reliable guidance is hard to come by. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren’t the most forthcoming of entities, while even the elementary principles of flight — how does a plane stay in the air? — aren’t understood by vast numbers of travelers. And the media, through its habitually sensationalist and error-laden coverage, reinforces many fallacies.

I will tell you how a plane stays in the air, yes. I’ll address your nuts and bolts concerns and tackle those insufferable myths. Importantly, however, I will not burden readers with jargon or gee-whiz specifications about airplanes. I am not writing for gearheads, aviation aficionados, or those with a predisposed interest in planes; my readers don’t want to see an aerospace engineer’s schematic of a jet engine, and a technical discussion about cockpit instruments or aircraft hydraulics is guaranteed to be tedious and uninteresting — especially to me. Sure, we’re all mildly curious how fast a plane goes, how high it flies, how many statistical bullet points can be made of its wires and plumbing, but as both author and pilot, my infatuation with flight goes well beyond the airplane itself, encompassing the fuller, richer drama of air travel in whole.

I have limited fascination with the sky itself; I feel no ecstatic glee at the breaking of any “surly bonds.” As a youngster, the sight of a Piper Cub meant nothing to me. Five minutes at an air show watching the Thunderbirds do barrel rolls and I was bored to tears. My enthrallment was, and remains, with the workings of the airlines themselves. In grade school I’d pour over the system maps and timetables of Pan Am, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, and British Airways, memorizing the names of the foreign capitals they flew to, then drawing up my own imaginary airlines and tracing out their intended routes. Next time you’re aloft, flip to the route maps in the back of the inflight magazine. I could spend hours studying those three-panel foldouts and their exploding nests of arcs and lines, immersed in a kind of pilot porno.

Thus did I learn geography as rapidly as aviation. For many pilots, the world beneath those arcs and lines remains a permanent abstraction; countries and cultures meaningless beyond the airport perimeter. For others, as happened to me, there’s a point when those places become real. The point, suddenly, isn’t just the airplane, but the place it happens to be going: the full and beautiful integration of flight and travel; travel and flight. Are they not the same thing?

If ever this struck me in a moment of clarity, it was a night several years ago on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. Though I could write for pages about the wonders and strangeness of West Africa, one of the trip’s most vivid moments took place at the airport — the arrival scene as our plane touched down from Paris. Two hundred of us descended the drive-up stairs into sinister midnight murk. We were paraded solemnly around the exterior of the aircraft, moving aft in a wide semicircle toward the arrivals lounge. There was something ceremonial and ritualistic about it. I remember walking beneath the soaring, blue and white tail of Air France, the plane’s auxiliary turbine screaming into the darkness. Through the glass doors we passed, digging out our yellow fever cards, and into the cauldron of West Africa. It was all so, to use a politically incorrect word, exotic. And the airplane was the centerpiece.

For most people, however, whether they’re bound for Mali or Missouri, the airplane is little more than a necessary evil, incidental to the journey but no longer part of it. On one hand this was perhaps inevitable. Progress, we can argue, in the technological sense, isn’t correctly executed until something once considered extraordinary has become ordinary, Perhaps, but at the same time, a 747 is not a television set or some other gadget that people engage in passively. It carriers you, literally, through the sky and to a distant part of the world. This is something our predecessors could not have fathomed. No other product of industrial design have managed to change civilization to the degree that the jetliner has. It is easy to equate the commonplace with the tedious. In this case, we do so at our own peril.

This isn’t being romantic, necessarily. It’s also a common-sense appraisal of the sheer magnitude of being able to throw down a few hundred dollars, hop into a plane and travel thousands of miles to far-away continents. If you can’t appreciate that, what can you appreciate?

It’s a tough sell, I know, in this the age of long lines, endless delays, overcrowded planes and inconsolable babies. The indignities and hassles of modern air travel require little elaboration and are duly noted. Heck, as a kid in mid 1970s, I remember passengers breaking out in applause at every smooth landing. I remember dressing up to fly, and double helpings of fresh cheesecake on a 90-minute domestic flight. Then the effects of Deregulation kicked in, changing forever the way airlines competed. Fares plummeted and passengers poured in. By design, flying became cheap and accessible. And it also became immensely more aggravating and uncomfortable, prone to all of the bother and breakdown one might expect when 250 million people have sudden run at a particular infrastructure.

Let’s be clear, I am not extolling the virtues of tiny seats or the culinary subtlety of half-ounce bags of snack mix. But believe it or not, there is still much about flying for the typical traveler to savor and appreciate, not the least of which are the industry’s remarkable safety record and the fact that fares have remained startlingly affordable, even with tremendous surges in the price of fuel.

I’m hesitant to say that we’ve developed a sense of entitlement, but it’s something like that. In 1939 aboard Pan Am’s Dixie Clipper, it cost $750 to fly round-trip between New York and France, equivalent to well over six-thousand dollars today. On my bookshelf at home is an old American Airlines ticket. It’s a flea market find and it dates from 1946. That year, somebody named James Connors paid $334 to fly each direction between from Ireland and New York. This past summer, Aer Lingus was selling tickets on that same route for under $300.

This reality is all but lost on a flying public that, six decades later, can traverse the oceans, in near-perfect safety, at the equivalent of a few pennies per mile.

American Airlines ticket coupon, 1946. Photo by author.

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Turbulence: spiller of coffee, jostler of luggage, filler of barf bags, rattler of nerves. But is it a crasher of planes?

Judging by the reactions of many airline passengers, one would assume so; turbulence is far and away the number one concern of anxious passengers. Intuitively this makes sense. Everybody who steps on a plane is on some level uneasy, and there’s not a more poignant reminder of flying’s innate precariousness than a good walloping at 37,000 feet. It’s easy to picture the airplane as a helpless dinghy in a stormy sea. Boats are occasionally swamped, capsized, or dashed into reefs by swells, so the same must hold true for airplanes. Everything about it seems dangerous.

Except that, in all but the rarest circumstances, it’s not. For all intents and purposes, a plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket. Conditions might be annoying and uncomfortable, but the plane is not going to crash. Turbulence is an aggravating nuisance for everybody, including the crew, but it’s also, for lack of a better term, normal. From a pilot’s perspective, it is normally seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue. When a flight changes altitude in search of smoother conditions, this is by and large in the interest of comfort. The pilots aren’t worried about the wings falling off, they’re trying to keep their customers content and relaxed (and everybody’s coffee where it belongs).

In the cockpit we see the altimeter jiggle ever so slightly while the anxious flier perceives a free-fall, overestimating the roughness by orders of magnitude. “We dropped like 3,000 feet in two seconds!” In truth altitude, bank, and pitch will change only slightly, and inherent in the design of airliners is a trait known to pilots as “positive stability.” Should the aircraft be shoved from its position in space, its nature is to return there, on its own and with no drastic input from the crew.

I remember we hit some pretty rough air one night on the way to Europe, about halfway across the Atlantic. It was the kind of turbulence people tell their friends about. It came out of nowhere and was bad enough to knock over some carts in the rear galley. I had my seatbelt on, as pilots always do, but reflexively put my hand against the cockpit ceiling to brace myself. During the worst of it, to the sound of crashing plates, I recalled an email. A reader had asked about the displacement of altitude during times like this. How many feet is the plane actually moving up or down, and side to side? I kept a close watch on the altimeter. Fewer than 50 feet, either way, is what I saw. Ten or twenty feet, most of the time. Any change in heading — i.e. the direction our nose was pointed — was all but undetectable.

At times like this pilots will slow to a designated “turbulence penetration speed” to ensure high-speed buffet protection (don’t ask) and, worst case, to prevent damage to the airframe. This speed is close to normal cruising speed, however, so you probably won’t notice the deceleration from your seat. They can also request higher or lower altitudes, or ask for a revised routing. (This is common domestically, but difficult to coordinate on oceanic crossings. Over the ocean, unless conditions become severe, you’re more or less stuck with a crappy ride.)

You’re liable to imagine the pilots in a sweaty lather: the captain barking orders, hands tight on the wheel as the ship lists from one side to another. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The crew is not wrestling with the beast so much as merely riding things out. Pilots will sit back and allow the plane to buck and buffet rather than attempt to recover every lost foot or degree of heading. Even in the roughest air a jet stays pretty much on an even keel. Indeed, one of the worst things a pilot could to during severe turbulence is try to fight it. Some autopilots have a special mode for these situations. Rather than increasing the number of corrective inputs, it does the opposite, desensitizing the system.

Up front, you can imagine a conversation going like this:

Pilot 1: “Well, why don’t we slow it down. [reaches for the speed control selector and dials in the reduced Mach value]

Pilot 2: “Ah, man, this is spilling my coffee all down inside this cup holder.”

Pilot 1: “Let’s see if we can get any new reports from those planes up ahead.” [Reaches for the microphone]

Pilot 2: “Do you have any napkins over there?”

There will also be an announcement made to the passengers, and a call to let the cabin crew to make sure they too are belted in. Pilots often request that the flight attendants remain in their seats if things look menacing up ahead.

Planes themselves are engineered to take a remarkable amount of punishment, including stress limit criteria for both positive and negative G-loads. The level of turbulence required to dislodge an engine or bend a wing spar is something even the most frequent flyer — or pilot for that matter — won’t experience in a lifetime of traveling.

Now, so that I’m not accused of sugar-coating, I concede that powerful turbulence has, on numerous occasions, damaged planes or injured their occupants. With respect to the latter, these are typically people who fell or were thrown about because they weren’t belted in as requested. About 60 people, two-thirds of them flight attendants, are injured by turbulence annually in the United States. That works out to about 20 passengers. Twenty out of the 800 million or so who fly each year in this country. Repeat: twenty out of 800 million.

When pilots pass on reports to other crews, turbulence is graded from “light” to “extreme.” The worst encounters entail a postflight inspection by maintenance staff. There are definitions for each degree, but in practice the grades are awarded subjectively.

I’ve never been through an extreme, but I’ve had my share of moderates and a sprinkling of severes. One of those severes took place in July, 1992, when I was captain on a 15-passenger turboprop. It happened during, of all flights, a 25-minute run from Boston to Portland, Maine. It had been a hot day, and by early evening a forest of tightly packed cumulus towers stretched across eastern New England. The formations were short — about 8,000 feet at the tops — and extremely nice to look at. As the sun fell, it became one of the most picturesque skyscapes I’ve ever seen — buildups in every direction forming a horizon-wide garden of pink coral columns. They were beautiful and deceptively violent — little volcanoes spewing out invisible updrafts. The pummeling came on with a vengeance until it felt like being stuck in an upside-down avalanche. Even with my shoulder harness pulled snug, I remember holding up one hand to brace myself, afraid my head might hit the ceiling.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that turbulence is becoming more prevalent as a byproduct of climate change. Turbulence is a symptom of the weather from which it spawns, and it stands to reason that as global warming intensifies certain patterns, experiences like the one I had over Maine will become more common.

Thanks to the vagaries of turbulence, I am known to provide annoying, noncommittal answers when asked how best to avoid it. “Is it better to fly at night then during the day?” Sometimes. “Should I avoid routes that traverse the Rockies or the Alps?” Hard to say. “Are small planes more susceptible than larger ones?” It depends. “They’re calling for gusty winds tomorrow, will it be rough?” Probably, but who knows. “Where should I sit, in the front of the plane or in the back?”

Ah, now that one I can work with. While it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, the smoothest place to sit is over the wings, closest to the plane’s centers of lift and gravity. The roughest spot is usually the far aft.

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If you can picture the cleaved roil of water that trails behind a boat or ship, you’ve got the right idea. With aircraft, however, wake effect is exacerbated by a pair of vortices that spin from the wingtips. At the wings’ outermost extremities, the higher pressure air beneath is drawn toward the lower pressure air on top, resulting in a circular flow that trails behind the aircraft like a pronged pair of horizontal tornadoes.

The vortices are most pronounced when a plane is heavy and slow — that is, when the wing is working hardest to produce lift. Thus, prime time for an encounter is during approach or departure. As the vortices rotate — at speeds that can top 300 feet per second — they begin to diverge and sink. If you live near an airport, stake out a spot close to a runway and listen carefully as the planes pass overhead; you can often hear the vortices’ whip-like percussions as they drift toward the ground.

As a rule, bigger planes brew up bigger, most virulent wakes, and smaller planes are more vulnerable should they run into one. The worst offender is the Boeing 757. A mid-sized jet, the 757 isn’t nearly the size of a 747 or 777, but thanks to a nasty aerodynamic quirk it produces an outsized wake that, according to one study, is the most powerful of any airplane.

To avoid wake upsets, air traffic controllers are required to put extra spacing between large and small planes. For pilots one technique is to slightly alter the approach or climb gradient, remaining above any vortices as they sink. Another trick is to use the wind. Gusts and choppy air will break-up vortices or otherwise move them to one side. Winglets — those upturned fins at the tips of the wings — also are a factor. One of the ways these devices increase aerodynamic is by mitigating the severity of wingtip vortices. Thus a winglet-equipped plane tends to produce a more docile wake than a similarly sized plane without them.

Despite all the safeguards, every pilot has, at one time or another, had a run-in with wake, be it the short bump-and-roll of a dying vortex, or a full-force wrestling match. Such an encounter might last only a few seconds, but they can be memorable. For me it happened in Philadelphia in 1994:

Ours was a long, lazy, straight-in approach to runway 27R from the east, our 19-seater packed to the gills. Traffic was light, the radio mostly quiet. At five miles out we were cleared to land. The traffic we’d been following, a 757, had already cleared the runway and was taxiing toward the terminal. We’d been given our extra ATC spacing buffer, and just to be safe we were keeping a tad high on the glide path. Our checklists were complete, and everything was normal.

At around 200 feet, only seconds from touchdown, with the approach light stanchions below and the fat white stripes of the threshold just ahead, came a quick and unusual nudge — as if we’d struck a pothole. Then, less than a second later, came the rest of it. Almost instantaneously, our 16,000-pound aircraft was up on one wing, in a 45-degree right bank.

It was the first officer’s leg to fly, but suddenly there were four hands on the yokes, turning to the left as hard as we could. Even with full opposite aileron — something seldom used in normal commercial flying — the ship kept rolling to the right. A feeling of helplessness, of lack of control, is part and parcel of nervous flyer psychology. It’s an especially bad day when the pilots are experiencing the same uncertainty! There we were, hanging sideways in the sky. Everything in our power was telling the plane to go left, and it insisted on going right.

Then, as suddenly as it started, the madness stopped. In less than five seconds, before either of us could utter so much as an expletive, the plane came to its senses and rolled level.

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You will sooner see sacks of hundred dollar bills being heaved overboard than fuel being spit away fuel for no good reason. What you’re looing at is water vapor. As air flows around a wing at high velocity, its temperature and pressure change. If humidity levels are high enough, this causes the cores of the wingtip vortices described in the previous question to condense and become visible, writhing behind the plane like gray vaporous snakes.

Moisture will condense around other spots too, such as the engine attachment pylons. You’ll witness what appears to be a stream of white smoke pouring from the top of an engine during takeoff. This is water vapor caused by invisible currents around the pylon. Other times the area just above the surface of the wing will suddenly flash into a white puff of localized cloud. Again, this is condensation brought on by the right combo of moisture, temperature, and pressure.

Not only can you sometimes see wingtip vortices, but even cooler, you can often hear them from the ground:

You need to be very close to a runway — preferably within a half-mile of the end. The strongest vortices are produced on takeoff, but ideally you want to be on the landing side, as the plane will be nearer (i.e. lower) at an equivalent position from the threshold. A calm day is ideal, as wind will dissipate a vortex before it reaches the ground. About 30 seconds after the jet passes overhead you’ll begin to hear a whooshing, crackling and thundering. It’s a menacing sound unlike anything you’ve heard before. See — or hear — for yourself in this footage captured on my iPhone.

It was taken at the Belle Isle Marsh Reservation, a popular birdwatching spot about a half-mile north of runway 22R at Boston’s Logan International Airport. The plane is a straight-wing (no winglet) 757. Excuse the atrocious video quality, but the sound is acceptable and that’s the important thing. You begin to hear the vortices at time 0:45, and they continue pretty much to the end. Note the incredible gunshot-like noises at 0:58.

Play it loud!

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Windshear is a generic term for a sudden change in the direction or speed of the wind. It’s a scary word in the ears of most passengers, but shears are commonplace and seldom hazardous.

The normal variety, that is. Unusually powerful shears, on the other hand, can be deadly, especially if encountered during takeoff or landing, when planes are operating close to their minimum flying speeds. A plane’s airspeed accounts for any existing headwind; if that headwind rapidly disappears or changes direction, valuable knots are lost and the plane can stall. The worst-case scenario is encountering what’s known as a microburst — an intense, localized, downward-flowing column of cold air spawned by a storm front. As this air mass descends, it disperses outward in different directions, resulting in a shear that acts both horizontally and vertically, stealing away airspeed while “pushing” a plane toward the ground.

Luckily, we have come a long way in understanding and detecting this phenomenon. The crash of Eastern Airlines flight 66 in at JFK airport in 1975 was the watershed accident after which specialists began to study microbursts and windshear more closely. Since then, unsafe conditions have become relatively easy to forecast and avoid. Major airports are now equipped with windshear detection technology, as are cockpits. (The plane I fly has two different windshear warning systems.) Pilots are trained in escape maneuvers, and can recognize which weather conditions might be hazardous. In North America, the last major accident blamed on windshear occurred more than 25 years ago.

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The short answer is no. No commercial aircraft is unsafe, or anything remotely close to it. The long answer is more nuanced. Whether or not regional aircraft are, on some level, less safe than mainline jets is open to debate. It’s a debate of statistical minutia, and there is no practical reason why anybody should outright avoid smaller planes, but still it’s a debate worth having.

Size, strictly speaking, isn’t the issue. The metric correlating bigger with safer is a tough one to uproot, and for the most part it’s wrong. I can’t speak to claustrophobia or absence of legroom, but there is almost nothing about an airplane’s size that correlates one way or the other to the likelihood of it crashing. A modern turboprop or regional jet (RJ) can cost tens of millions of dollars, and if you haven’t noticed that money isn’t going into galleys and sleeper seats; it’s going toward the same high-tech avionics and cockpit advancements you’ll find in a Boeing or Airbus. These planes might be small, but quaint they are not. And so you know, pilots bristle at the term “puddle-jumper” the way an environmental scientist bristles at “tree-hugger.”

Of course, a plane is only as safe as the crew flying it, and there has been a good deal of controversy surrounding the training and experience levels of regional pilots. With the entire airline industry in turmoil, and with wages and working conditions at regional carriers notoriously substandard, it has become increasingly difficult for these companies to recruit and retain the best pilots. New-hires have been brought on board with very low flight time totals and thrust into a high-stress, high-workload environment. More on this later.

Love them or hate them, smaller planes are here to say. The regional airline sector has grown tremendously over the last twenty years, and now accounts for a full 50 percent of all domestic departures. There are literally dozens of different “Express” and “Connection” affiliates hitched up with the majors. For the most part they operate independently from their major airline “parents,” sharing little more than a flight number and paintjob. They are subcontractors, with entirely separate management structures, employees, training departments, etc.

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There you are, belted in for landing at a window seat. The approach is smooth, the weather clear. Down, down, down you come. At five-hundred feet or so you can make out the writing on billboards; touchdown is only seconds away. Then, without warning, the engines roar. The aircraft pitches up sharply and begins to climb, groaning and shuddering as the landing gear retract and the flaps are reset. The ground falls away; the plane banks sharply. You grip the armrest. What the heck is happening? A long minute later, the PA crackles and the captain speaks. “As you’re aware,” he says, “We had to abandon our approach and make another circuit. Seems that air traffic control had us spaced a bit too tightly with an aircraft ahead. We’re circling back around for another approach and will be on the ground in about ten minutes.”

If you fly enough, you have experienced this scenario one or more times. The maneuver is called a go-around, and it holds a special place in the fearful flyer’s pantheon of worries. I read about go-arounds all the time, luridly described in emails from terrified travelers who wonder if they’ve narrowly escaped with their lives. In fact go-arounds are fairly common and seldom the result of anything dangerous. In most cases it’s a minor spacing issue: controllers aren’t able to maintain the required separation parameters, or the aircraft ahead has not yet vacated the runway. Not an ideal situation, but let’s be clear, this is not a proverbial near-miss. In all likelihood, the reason your plane is going around is to prevent a near miss. Actual instances where a collision is narrowly averted do occur, but they are exceptionally rare.

Other times, traffic has nothing to do with it. A variant of the go-around, spoken of somewhat interchangeably, is the “missed approach,” when a plane pulls off the same basic maneuver for weather-related reasons. If, in the course of an instrument approach, visibility drops below a prescribed value or the plane has not made visual contact with the runway upon reaching the minimum allowable altitude, the crew must climb away (often followed by a diversion to an alternate airport). A go-around will also be initiated any time an approach becomes unstable. Glidepath deviations, a too-high rate-of-descent, severe crosswinds, a windshear alarm — any of these may trigger one.

As for the steepness or suddenness of the climb, that is the manner in which any go-around is executed. No need to dilly-dally around at low altitude. The safest direction is up — as quickly as practical. The abrupt transition from a gentle descent to a rapid climb might be noisy and jarring, but it’s perfectly natural for an airplane.

From a pilot’s perspective go-arounds and missed approaches are not terribly difficult, but they are one of the most work-intensive phases of any flight. This is one of the reasons you might not hear from the pilots for several minutes. The first step is advancing the power to go-around thrust, retracting flaps and slats to an intermediate position, and rotating to a target pitch — somewhere around 15 degrees nose-up, depending on the aircraft. Once a climb is established, the landing gear is raised. Flaps and slats are then retracted, followed by additional power and pitch adjustments. Once at level-off, the flight management system (FMS) may need to be reprogrammed, the autoflight components reset, checklists run, the weather checked, and so on. All of this while taking instructions from air traffic control. There’s lots of talking and a rapid succession of tasks.

And when you finally do hear from the cockpit, the explanation is liable to be brief and, much as I hate to say it, maybe not as enlightening as it could be. The truth is, pilots and microphones aren’t always a good mix. In our attempts to avoid technical jargon and simplify complicated situations, we have a proclivity for scary-sounding caricature. Granted passengers do not need a dissertation on the nuances of ATC spacing restrictions or approach visibility minima, but statements like, “We were a little too close to that plane ahead,” paint a misleading, if not terrifying picture. Later that night, passengers are emailing their loved ones with a tale of near-death, whereas the pilots have forgotten about it. Not because they are daredevils who revel in danger, but because, quite frankly, it wasn’t anything serious.

Which is not to ignore those occasional, actual near-misses. The congested environment at many airports, especially those with criss-crossing runways, has contributed to an uptick in potentially dangerous incursions. The trend is a troubling one, and all involved parties — pilots, controllers, and regulators — need to work together to lessen the odds of a tragedy. Worrisome to some extent, yes, but remember there are somewhere on the order of 25,000 commercial departures in the United States alone every single day, yet each year maybe a half-dozen incursions are deemed to have been legitimately serious — and chances are even those us weren’t particularly harrowing. Meanwhile the vast majority of go-arounds are what they are: routine maneuvers executed to keep you out of trouble, not in response to it.

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They’re just aerodynamic fairings. While they help prevent the formation of high-speed shockwaves along the surface of the wing, mostly their purpose is a nonessential one, streamlining airflow around the flap extension mechanisms inside.

There was a case not long ago when a group of passengers became alarmed after noticing that one of these fairings was missing from their aircraft. They refused to fly because — as the media reported the incident — “a piece of the wing was missing.” In reality the fairing had been removed for repairs after being damaged by a catering truck. Flying without a fairing might entail a slight fuel-burn penalty, but the plane remains perfectly airworthy. The wing itself is not affected, and the flaps can extend and retract normally. (Whether any part is allowed to be missing, and what the penalty might be, is spelled out in the plane’s Configuration Deviation List. More on that later.)

Flap fairings on an Embraer regional jet. Photo by author.

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This pertains to twin-engine Airbus models: the A320 series (includes the sub-variants A319 and A321) and the larger A330. In the United States, the largest operators of these types are Delta, United, JetBlue and U.S. Airways. Almost every frequent flyer has encountered this sound at one time or another. Crews rarely make efforts to explain it, leaving passengers befuddled, and sometimes worried. Because the noise is akin to a motor repeatedly trying — and failing — to start, there’s often the assumption that something is malfunctioning.

What you hear is a device called the power transfer unit, or PTU, which is designed to ensure adequate hydraulic pressures during single-engine operations. To conserve fuel, it’s fairly routine for two-engine planes to taxi with an engine shut down. Each engine normally pressurizes its own hydraulic system, but with a motor not running, that leaves one system without a power source. That’s where the PTU comes in, helping left power the right, or right power the left. Since it is activated only when the pressure falls below a certain level, the PTU cycles on and off, on and off, on and off. It also does a self-test when the right engine is started, so you’d hear it then as well, regardless of hydraulic pressures.

That’s the short answer, which ought to appease the typical nervous or curious rider. For gearheads, or those wishing to impress (or bore) their seatmates, here’s a description by correspondent Dave English, Airbus A320 captain and aviation writer:

“The A320 has two main hydraulic systems that operate flaps, landing gear, flight controls, cargo doors and brakes. These are called Green and Yellow. This has nothing to do with the color of the hydraulic fluids; they’re just useful labels. The Green system is powered by the number 1 (left) engine-driven pump. The Yellow system is powered by the number 2 (right) engine-driven pump. Should we lose or shut down power to an engine-driven pump, there is a neat device called PTU — a two-way reversible motor pump that allows the Green system to pressurize Yellow, or Yellow to pressurize Green. When you taxi with only one engine running, the PTU kicks in to power the opposite side.”

Due to pressure fluctuations the noise will sometimes continue even after both engines are up and running. You’ll occasionally hear shortly after takeoff, and again during approach, when it aids with the deployment of flaps and landing gear.

“Operators have complained about these noises to Airbus engineering,” adds Dave English. “But retrofitting the entire PTU is unlikely. It’s a good design, needs no electricity and has very few maintenance issues. It’s just loud.” English points out that the PTU racket is not audible from the cockpit. “But,” he admits, “It’s annoying as heck in the main cabin.”

Some Boeing aircraft also employ a PTU, but the operation is slightly different and it doesn’t bark like a dog.

Another noise peculiar to Airbus models is a shrill, prolonged whine heard after gate arrival when the engines are shut down. This is an electric hydraulic pump used to open the cargo doors.

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The truth is, some airports will always be safer than others, but none are categorically unsafe. If they were, no commercial airline would be flying there. Pilots speak of certain airports as “challenging.” Please bear in mind that “challenging” and “unsafe” are wholly different things. As in any profession, some tasks are more difficult than others, but they remain well within the capabilities of the people trained to perform them and the machines they’re trained to operate.

What separates those challenging airports from less challenging ones is usually one of two things, either alone or in combination — runway length and surrounding terrain. Many Andean and Himalayan airports are known for tricky flight patterns due to nearby peaks. New York’s La Guardia, Chicago’s Midway, and Sao Paulo’s Congohnas airports are known for their stubby runways.

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Takeoffs and landings are more scientific than people realize. We hear a lot about pilots needing to possess expert judgment and seat-of-the-pants skill. While maybe that’s true, there is almost nothing subjective about choosing where to land on or take off from. A pilot does not eyeball a runway and conclude “I guess that looks about right.”

On every takeoff, two things are assured: First, that a plane can safely climb away if an engine quits at the worst possible moment. That worst moment is known as V₁, referring to the speed beyond which discontinuing the takeoff is no longer an option. If a malfunction of any magnitude occurs at or past this point, crews are trained to continue the takeoff, as per regulation planes must be capable of accelerating and climbing away, even with total failure of an engine at or above V₁. This guarantee extends beyond the airport perimeter to account for buildings, mountains, TV antennae and whatever else. For each airport — indeed each runway — data are computed to assure not only the ability to fly, but to avoid off-airport obstructions with a failed engine.

Second, if takeoff is discontinued up to that moment, this same plane must be able to stop on the remaining pavement. This includes applicable penalties for ice, snow, or any other performance-altering peculiarities of a runway. This is one of the reasons flights may be weight restricted when using short runways. Not because the runway is inadequate for takeoff, but because it’s inadequate for an aborted takeoff.

Landings work much the same way. Taking weight, wind, and weather into account — including penalties for a surface slickened by ice, snow, or rain — data must show that a plane can stop within a maximum of 85 percent of the total available distance.

It goes without saying, though, that shorter runways leave limited margin for error, and history records numerous overrun accidents, some of them fatal. During severe weather things can get squirrely. Low visibility, gusty crosswinds, slippery surfaces turbulence, can combine to throw an approach off kilter. The best way — indeed the right way — of dealing with an unstable approach is to discontinue it.

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Filthy, germ-laden, rotten, disgusting, wretched, skanky, rancid, putrid, fetid, and fart-filled are just a few of the adjectives used to describe cabin air, while legion are the accounts of flyers allegedly made ill by microscopic pathogens circulating throughout a plane. In reality the air is substantially cleaner than people give it credit for.

On all modern aircraft, passengers and crew breathe a mixture of fresh and recirculated air. This combination, rather than using fresh air only, makes it easier to regulate temperature and helps maintain a bit of humidity (more on the humidity in a moment). The supply is bled from the compressor sections of the engines. Compressed air is very hot, but the compressors only compress; there is no contact with fuel, oil, or combustion gasses. From there it is plumbed into air conditioning units, known to pilots as “packs,” for cooling. It’s then ducted into the cabin through louvers, vents, and the eyeball gaspers above your seat.

The air circulates until eventually it is drawn into the lower fuselage, where about half of it is vented overboard — sucked out by the pressurization outflow valve. The remaining portion is re-mixed with a fresh supply from the engines, run through filters, and the cycle begins again.

Studies have shown that a crowded airplane is no more germ-laden than most other enclosed spaces, and usually less. Those underfloor filters are described by manufacturers as being of “hospital quality.” I needn’t be reminded that hospitals are notorious viral incubators, but Boeing says that between 94 and 99.9 percent of airborne microbes are captured, and there’s a total change-over of air every two or three minutes — far more frequently than occurs in buildings.

One persistent urban myth holds that pilots routinely cut back on the volume airflow as a means of saving fuel. It’s especially regrettable when even our most august and reliable news sources parrot this baseless assertion. Case in point, the following is from a 2009 issue of The Economist: “Typically an airline will strike a balance by using a 50:50 mixture of fresh and recirculated cabin air,” says the magazine. “Although pilots can reduce the amount of fresh air to save fuel. Some are thought to cut it back to only 20 percent.”

My mouth dropped open when I read this. I love that sentence, “Some are thought to cut it back to only 20 percent,” with its oily overtones of conspiracy.

To start with, pilots cannot tinker with a plane’s air conditioning systems to modify the ratio of fresh to recirculated air. This ratio is predetermined by the manufacturer and is neither arbitrary nor adjustable from the cockpit. The rate and volume of airflow too are pretty much automatic. On the Boeings that I fly, we have direct and accurate control over temperature, but only indirect control over flow. If you asked me to please “cut it back to 20 percent,” I would politely inform you that this is impossible. The switches are set to automatic mode prior to flight, and the packs more or less take care of themselves. So long as both engines are turning and everything is operating normally, the flow is perfectly adequate. Only when there’s a malfunction (an overheat, a fan failure, or some other glitch in the plumbing) are the settings changed.

I am not as familiar with Airbus models, but let’s talk to somebody who is…

“Airbus series aircraft, from the A320 through the much larger A380, do provide a way for pilots to vary airflow,” says Dave English, an A320 captain and aviation writer. “But not in the way characterized by The Economist.”

English explains that the Airbus controllers have three positions, labeled HI, NORM, and LO. “Almost all the time you’re in the center NORM position, which is automatic. The HI position is used when you need a rapid change in temperature. The LO position does as the name implies. It provides some fuel savings, but they are minimal and this isn’t used very often. Company guidance is to use LO whenever the passenger load is below a hundred. It’s not a big change. Sitting in the cabin, it’s almost impossible to notice the difference.”

Another Airbus pilot I spoke with says that his carrier requests switching to LO if the airplane is less than 60 percent full. He adds, “We rarely ever move the switch out of automatic.”

However, if passengers have one very legitimate gripe, it’s about dryness. Indeed the typical cabin is exceptionally dry and dehydrating. At around 12 percent humidity, it is drier than you will find in most deserts. This is chiefly a by-product of cruising at high-altitudes, where moisture content is somewhere between low and nonexistent. Humidifying a cabin would seem a simple and sensible solution, but it’s avoided for different reasons:

First, to amply humidify a jetliner would take large quantities of water, which is heavy and therefore expensive to carry. Humidifying systems would need to re-capture and re-circulate as much water as possible, making them expensive and complicated. They do exist: one sells for more than $100,000 per unit, and only increases humidity by a small margin. There’s also the very important issue of corrosion. Dampness and condensation leeching into the guts of an airframe can be damaging. The sensible tactic, need it be said, is to drink lots of water, (assuming you can find a crew willing to dispense it, or you’re able to sneak some past the TSA scarecrows.)

The Boeing 787 will have the cleanest air of any commercial plane in existence, thanks to filters with an efficiency of 99.97 percent. Humidity too will be substantially higher. The plane’s all-composite structure will be less susceptible to condensation, equipped with a unique circulation system that pumps dry air through the lining between the cabin walls and exterior skin.

None of this is disputing that people don’t occasionally become unwell on planes. Usually, though, it’s not through what they are breathing, but what they are touching — lavatory door handles, contaminated trays and armrests, etc. A little hand sanitizer is probably a better safeguard than the silly masks I occasionally see passengers wearing.

Neither am I disputing that the airplane isn’t a potentially exquisite vector for the spread of certain diseases. The benefits of high speed, long-range air travel are obvious ones – and so are its dangers.

Once after arriving on a flight from Africa I noticed a lone mosquito in the cockpit. How easily it would be, I thought, for the that tiny stowaway — and perhaps unseen others — to escape onto the tarmac, or into the terminal, and bite somebody. Imagine an unsuspecting airport worker or passenger who has never before left the country, and suddenly he’s in the throes of some exotic tropical malady. Actually, it’s been happening for years. Numerous cases of so-called “Airport malaria” have been documented in Europe, resulting in at least four deaths after faulty or delayed diagnosis (no surprise). It’s just a matter of time before this happens in America, if it hasn’t already. It is instructive, fascinating, and frankly a little scary, to see just how efficiently global air travel is able to spread pathogens from continent to continent. Throw in the long-term effects of climate change, and the term “tropical disease” may eventually lose its meaning.

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This is one of flying’s most enduring fallacies, similar to the one just covered about reducing airflow to save fuel. Not only is it patently false, but cutting back on oxygen would have quite the opposite effect on a plane’s occupants. Although the symptoms of hypoxia can, at first, make a person feel giddy and relaxed, they also induce confusion, nausea, and migraine-strength headaches I remember the multi-day hypoxia headache I endured some years ago in Cuzco, Peru — an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy let alone a planeload of customers.

Oxygen levels are determined by pressurization. and almost never are the pressurization controls tinkered with during cruise unless there’s a malfunction. Crews set up the system before departure, dialing in the intended cruising altitude and/or elevation of the destination airport. The rest happens automatically. While en route, the cabin is held at the equivalent of anywhere from around 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level, depending on the aircraft type and cruising altitude. In other words, you’re breathing as you would in Denver or Mexico City — minus the pollution.

And pilots are breathing the same air as everybody else on a plane. An aircraft fuselage does not contain separate compartments with different pressure values in each. The entire vessel is pressurized equally from the forward pressure bulkhead to the aft pressure bulkhead. This normally includes the cabin, cockpit, and lower-deck cargo holds. The crew could don its masks, I suppose, but how realistic is it, honestly, to picture the pilots sitting there with oxygen masks on, dialing down the pressurization to partially suffocate the passengers?

Be on the lookout, by the way, for a woman named Diana Fairechild, who sometimes appears on TV and is occasionally quoted in news stories. Fairechild is the author of Jet Smarter, a once-upon-a-time bestselling exposé that took the airlines to task over various safety and comfort issues. Fairechild was a flight attendant for many years at United and Pan Am, and in her book and through her website she assumes the role of passenger advocate — a sort of Ralph Nader with a tray of pretzels. Among Fairechild’s regular and fraudulent talking points are ones about pilots reducing fresh air and/or oxygen. Several of the points she makes here, for example, are grossly inaccurate.

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Few rules are more confounding to airline passengers than those regarding the use of cell phones and portable electronic devices. Are these gadgets really hazardous to flight? And if so, why are the rules enforced so arbitrarily?

Before getting to cell phones, passengers should know that the restrictions pertaining to computers, iPods, and certain other devices have nothing to do with electronic interference at all. In theory, a poorly shielded notebook computer can emit harmful energy, but the main reasons laptops need to be put away for takeoff and landing is to prevent them from becoming high-speed projectiles in the event of an impact or sudden deceleration, and to help keep the passageways clear during an evacuation. Your computer is a piece of luggage, and luggage needs to be stowed so it doesn’t kill somebody or get in the way.

In the case of iPods and the like, it’s about the headphones. During takeoffs and landings, you need to be able to hear and follow instructions if there’s an emergency. That’s hard to do if you’ve got your MP3 player cranked to 11. Similar to the requirement to raise your window shades, it’s in the interest of situational awareness. A bit excessive? Maybe, and after all, flight attendants don’t go around waking people up or quizzing them on evacuation procedures. But what the heck, it a slight safety enhancement that doesn’t cost anything.

Now, as for cell phones. The million-dollar question: Can cellular communications really interfere with cockpit equipment? The answer is potentially yes, but probably not. You want something meatier than that, I know, but that’s about as accurate an answer as exists. Although cellular phones are unlikely to screw anything up, regulators are erring on the better-safe-than-sorry side.

Cockpit hardware and software use radio transmissions for a number of tasks. Whether transmitting, receiving, or simply sitting idle, cell phones are able to garble these signals. As you might expect, aircraft electronics are designed and shielded with this interference in mind. This should mitigate any ill effects, and to date there are no proven cases where a cell phone has adversely affected the outcome of a flight. But you never know, and in some situations, i.e. in the presence of old or faulty shielding, it’s possible that a telephone could bring about some sort of anomaly.

Now, notice that I say “anomaly” and not “flaming wreckage.” You imagine some hapless passenger hitting the SEND button when suddenly the airplane explodes, flips over, or nose-dives into the ground. In reality, should it occur, interference is liable to be subtle, transient, and in the end harmless. People have a hard time grasping that each and every in-flight problem is not an impending catastrophe, and this is no exception. The electronic architecture of a modern jetliner is vast to say the least, and most irregularities aren’t exactly heart-stoppers – a warning flag that flickers for a moment and then goes away; a course line that briefly goes askew. Or something unseen. I’m occasionally asked if I have ever personally witnessed cellular interference in a cockpit. Not to my knowledge, but I can’t say for sure. Planes are large and complicated; minor, fleeting malfunctions of this or that component aren’t uncommon.

Having said that, cell phones may have had a role in at least two serious incidents. Some blame a phone for the unsolved crash of a Crossair regional plane in Switzerland in 2000, claiming that spurious transmissions confused the plane’s autopilot. In another case, a regional jet forced to make an emergency landing after a fire alarm was triggered by a ringing phone in the luggage compartment. There have been many other, anecdotal reports of trouble allegedly brought on by phones.

Even if not actively connected, a cell phone’s power-on mode dispatches bursts of potentially harmful energy. For this reason, all phones must be placed in the proverbial “off position” prior to taxiing. This is usually requested at the beginning of each flight as part of the never tedious pre-takeoff safety briefing. The policy is clearly stated, but obviously unenforced. We assume the risks are minimal, or else phones would be collected rather than relying on the honor system. I would venture to guess that at least half of all cellular phones, whether inadvertently or out of laziness, are left on during flight. That’s about a million phones on about ten thousand flights every day, just in the United States. If indeed this was a recipe for disaster, I think we’d have more evidence by now.

One popular theory holds that the cell phone ban was originally enacted not out of safety concerns at all, but at the behest of wireless providers who stand to lose millions of dollars because calls made from aloft are untraceable and callers cannot be charged. Not quite, but there’s a nugget of truth in there. In America, the existing restrictions were laid out in 1991 by the FCC, not the FAA, and calls placed from fast-flying aircraft tend to jump from antenna tower to antenna tower, resulting in technical problems for the communications companies. But this is entirely separate from, and does not negate, the interference issues.

Currently under trial is an onboard communications system that is able to collect and re-transmit cellular signals by way of a laptop-sized server and a series of small base stations, called “picocells,” spaced throughout the passenger cabin. Weighing about 20 pounds, a picocell automatically commands your phone to operate at greatly reduced power. Calls are then routed to ground stations one of two ways – either via satellite, or directly using special towers and a dedicated frequency band. This should eliminate both the cockpit interference hazard and the tower-to-tower signal bouncing that, for the time being, makes high-altitude calling impossible.

In the meantime, it’s possible that airlines are using the mere possibility of technical complications as a convenient way of keeping the cell phone debate off the table. The minute it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt that phones are safe, a certain percentage of flyers will demand the right to use them, with the result pitting one angry group of travelers against another, with carriers stuck in the middle. If indeed airlines are playing this game, count me among those sympathetic, and who hope the prohibition stays in place — not out of technical concerns, but for the sake of human decency and some bloody peace and quiet. The sensory bombardment inside airports is overwhelming enough. The airplane cabin is a last refuge of relative silence. Let’s keep it that way.

Heaven help us. As a last resort, perhaps we can have “chattering” and “non-chattering” sections, akin to the old smoking and nonsmoking.

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Raising your shade will help you remain oriented if anything happens. In other words, it allows you keep track of which way is up, and which way is out. Additionally it allows the cabin crew to assess any exterior hazards (fire, debris) during an evacuation. It also allows natural light into the cabin, helpful if things go dark, and makes it easier for rescuers to see inside.

You’re probably wondering about the tray tables and seat-back regulations, so I’ll explain those too:

Your tray must needs to latched so that, in the event of a crash or rapid deceleration, you don’t impale yourself on it. Plus it allows for a clear path to the aisle, which is very important during an evacuation. The restriction on seat recline during takeoffs and landings provides easier access to the aisles and also keeps your body in the safest position. It lessens the potential for whiplash injuries and prevents you from “submarining,” as it is called, under your seat belt during an impact. Keep your belts buckled low and tight. Around 70 percent of airplane crashes include survivors, and a properly fastened belt could mean the difference minor injury and something a lot worse.

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It seems that a week can’t go by without hearing the latest story about a passenger who went cuckoo and tried to yank open an emergency exit, only to be tackled and restrained by those around him, who thought they were on the verge of being ejected into the troposphere. While the news never fails to report these events, it seldom mentions the most important fact: You cannot – repeat, cannot – open the doors or emergency hatches of an airplane in flight.

You can’t open them for the simple reason that cabin pressure won’t allow it. Think of an aircraft door as a drain plug, fixed in place by the interior pressure. Almost all aircraft exits open inward. Some retract upward into the ceiling; others swing outward; but they open inward first, and not even the most musclebound human will overcome the force holding them shut. At a typical cruising altitude, up to eight pounds of pressure are pushing against every square inch of interior fuselage. That’s over 1,100 pounds against each square foot of door. Even at low altitudes, where cabin pressure levels are less, a meager 2 p.s.i. differential is still more than anyone can displace — even after six cups of coffee and the frustration that comes with sitting behind a shrieking baby.

For good measure, the doors are held secure by a series of electrical and/or mechanical latches. So, while I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you enjoy being pummeled and placed in a choke-hold by panicked passengers who don’t know better, a person could, conceivably, sit there all day tugging on a door handle to his or her heart’s content. The door is not going to open (though you might get a red light flashing in the cockpit, causing me to spill my Coke Zero). You would need a hydraulic jack, and TSA doesn’t allow those.

For the sake of argument, let’s say a guy does have a hydraulic jack hidden in his luggage, and is able to pop open an exit at 33,000 feet. At the very least, depending exactly how fast the door opens, it’s going to be excessively noisy and confusing, with oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling and people’s belongings flying around. The aircraft might be damaged if debris strikes the wings, engines, or tail. But, there’s a pretty decent chance that the only person ejected from the jet will be Mr. Jack himself, and possibly one or two others in the vicinity who aren’t wearing their seat belts. When the fuselage of an Aloha Airlines 737 ruptured during flight in 1988, stripping away several feet of cabin ceiling and sidewalls, only one occupant — a flight attendant — was pulled overboard.

On the 19-passenger turboprop I used to fly, the main cabin door had an inflatable seal around its inner sill. During flight the seal would inflate, helping to lock in cabin pressure while blocking out the racket from the engines. Every now and then, the seal would suffer a leak or puncture and begin to deflate, sometimes quite rapidly. The resultant loss of pressurization was easily addressed and ultimately harmless, but the sudden noise — a great, hundred-decibel sucking sound together with the throb of two 1,100 horsepower engines only a few feet away — would startle the hell out of everybody on the plane, including me.

On the ground the situation changes — as one would hope, with the possibility of an evacuation in mind. During taxi, you will get the door to open — as well as activating the door’s emergency escape slide. As an aircraft approaches the gate, you will sometimes hear the cabin crew calling out “doors to manual” or “disarm doors.” This has to do with overriding the automatic deployment function of the slides. Parked at the terminal, you don’t want them billowing onto the jet bridge or into a catering truck. Those slides can unfurl with enough force to kill a person.

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None of us enjoys the tedium of boarding and disembarking. We walk, we stand, we wait; we walk, we stand, we wait; we wait, we wait, we wait. Those bottlenecks in the aisles and the throat of the jet bridge can be hellish, and it often takes several minutes to get from the doorway to your seat, or vice-versa.

If you want to make it slightly easier on your fellow travelers, here’s a simple recommendation: when boarding, please, for the love of god, do not place your carry-on bags in the first empty bin that you come to. Use a bin as close to your seat as possible. It drives me crazy when I see a guy shoving his 26-inch Tumi into a bin above row 5, then continuing on to his assigned seat in row 52. I know it’s tempting, but this causes the forward bins to fill up quickly. Because airplanes are boarded back-to-front, there are no spaces left for those whose seats are in the forward part of the cabin. They are forced to travel backwards to stow their belongings, then return upstream, against the flow of traffic. Then, after landing, the same thing happens in reverse, only now it’s worse because everybody is moving up the aisle en masse, hurrying to get off. Heaven help the poor sod who has to navigate rearward to retrieve his stuff.

Am I wrong to suggest that assigned bins might be a good idea? People I’ve spoken with are skeptical — there are a lot more seats than bins, they argue, and not everybody carries the same sized carry-ons — but I’m convinced there’s a way to make it work. If nothing else, airlines should make a gateside announcement requesting that passengers please use compartments at or near their seats.

The basic philosophy of boarding a plane from the rear might itself be part of the problem. If you ask me, planes should be boarded not back-to-front, but outside-in. In other words, window and center seats first, followed by the aisles. A lot of the existing congestion is caused by people having to squeeze around each other to reach their outboard seats. If I’m in seat C, I often need to stand and move into the aisle in order to let the window-seater get past me.

A different option is a process in which rows are boarded out-of-sequence, in staggered sets rather than consecutively. You call every second or third row, allow the passengers to stow their bags, then repeat. According to one study, you can load a plane up to ten times faster this way.

Not that it makes a whole lot of difference, as many people hate getting on a plane early and will wait as long as possible, ignoring any sequenced boarding calls. These last-minute boarders cause almost as many hold-ups as the bin-hoggers. Others simply waltz onto the plane whenever they feel like it, regardless of which rows have been called.

Another recommendation: families with kids in strollers should be boarded first, and upon arrival they should be asked to stay in their seats until everybody else has exited. How many total hours are wasted each day waiting for parents to assemble their strollers and gather up the approximately 90 pounds of traveling gear that is apparently required by every child under five?

Using multiple doors also speeds things up — a technique used fairly commonly in Europe and Asia, but rarely in the United States. A number of gates at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport have unusual boarding bridges with access to both front and rear doors. The aft-door passageway actually runs over the plane’s left wing.

One thing you’ll notice is that boarding and disembarking almost always takes place on the left side of the plane. The right side is used for servicing and catering.

Meanwhile I am sure you’re wondering about those situations, of which there are far too many, when a plane stops short of the terminal, accompanied by the embarrassed crew announcing that “our gate is currently occupied,” or that the marshaling personnel aren’t yet in place. I know what you’re thinking: if an airline is aware of every flight’s ETA then why, why, why, can it not have the gate ready on time? And what about those situations where the adjacent gate is sitting there empty? Can’t we simply use that one, and let a later arrival use the occupied gate?

Suffice it to say there’s a complex choreography to where and when airplanes park, based on arrival times, departure times, passenger loads, customs and immigration issues, etc. The how and why of it isn’t necessarily obvious. That said, you’re preaching to the choir. Pilots find this as frustrating as passengers do.

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I came of age, flying-wise, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and the phenomenon was still widespread. No surprise that it rarely happens anymore. The number of Americans who fly at least two times a year has more than quadrupled in the past quarter century. The familiarity of the routine, together with the many abrasive hassles that come with it, have rubbed away whatever sense of excitement or novelty had remained.

Clapping remains somewhat common overseas, where passengers aren’t (yet) as jaded. In the past few years, on trips I’ve taken to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, cheers and applause could be heard on roughly half of the landings. And I wouldn’t say this pertains only to remote routes on lesser-known airlines — these were big-city arrivals on carriers like Malaysia Airlines and Air France.

Do crews feel offended, or insulted? Not in the least. The jubilation, or lack thereof, isn’t a critique of the landing or a judgment on the pilots’ skills. Neither is it, unless something particularly unsettling occurred en route, an outburst of relief at having cheated gravity and lived to tell about it. Even the most nervous flyers are more optimistic than that. I wouldn’t deconstruct it too much. It pretty much speaks for itself and needn’t be taken too seriously. It’s just having fun, and to me it lends a folksy, humane touch to end of a flight.

When it does happen, clapping is strictly an economy class phenomenon. You’ll be apt to look for socioeconomic meaning to this, and maybe there is one, but the dynamics of economy class — more people sitting closer together — lend itself to the occasion. There’s a certain communal spirit, especially after a long-haul flight, when you’ve spent several hours in a relatively intimate space with hundreds of people. In a way, the applause acts like big collective handshake.

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It has nothing to do with potential emergencies — i.e. keeping close to airports in case a diversion is needed. It’s simply the shortest distance. Between continents, airplanes follow what are called “great circle” routes, accounting for the earth’s curvature.

These routes won’t make sense if you’re looking at a traditional flat map, because when the earth is crushed from its natural round state into a horizontal one, it becomes distorted as the divisions of latitude and longitude stretch apart. (Depending on the layout used — what cartographers call “projection” — the distortion can be grotesque. Many of us have grown up believing, for instance, that Greenland is about ten times larger than it really is, thanks to the preposterous polar dimensions of the Mercator projection.)

If you have a globe handy, however, the efficiency of great circle routings is very apparent. Measuring with a piece of string, it’s obvious that the shortest distance between New York and Hong Kong, for instance, is not westerly, as it would seem on a map, but pretty much straight north, into the Arctic, and then straight south. Over the top, in other words. If you’re flying this route, don’t be baffled when you see the frozen Hudson Bay and Siberian tundra passing beneath you rather than the Golden Gate Bridge or azure Pacific seas.

That’s the extreme, but the principle applies to many long-range pairings, and this is why passengers between America and Europe discover themselves not just high up, but high up — over Newfoundland, Labrador and occasionally into the icy realm of Greenland. (If you are going to pass over Greenland, keep an eye on the moving map display and be sure to crack open your window shade, lest you miss one of the most spectacular views ever to be seen from 35,000 feet. Along the coast you can spot fields of icebergs, their twisted, wind-sculpted tops discernible from seven miles up. At slightly lower latitudes you can still catch compelling views of upper Quebec, Labrador, or Newfoundland. The expanse and remoteness of northeastern Canada is something to behold.) Across the Pacific, same idea: a flight from Los Angeles to Beijing will pass over the Aleutian Islands and portions of easternmost Russia.

One of my favorite stories is about the time, one night at Kennedy airport, when I gave what I thought were accurate instructions to a group of Muslims crouched on the floor looking for Mecca. It seemed to me they were facing more toward Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I suggested they adjust their prayer rugs a few southeastward degrees. I should have known better, because the most efficient routing between New York and Mecca is not southeast, but northeast.

Required to periodically align themselves with a point thousands of miles away, many Muslims know how this works. To face the holy Kaaba at Mecca, they employ what’s called the Qibla, which is the shortest distance to Mecca from where they’re standing (or crouching) — a kind of Islamic great circle. (It is said Mohammed could ascertain the Qibla from anywhere without aid of scientific instruments). My friends at Kennedy were searching for their Qibla, only to find quibble instead with an itinerant pilot who was thinking flat when he should’ve been thinking round.

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In the majority of cases, “weather delay” is a misnomer. More correctly it’s a traffic delay — the product of saturation at departure point, destination, or someplace in between. When storms erupt or a fog bank rolls over an airport, separation requirements change. Routings become blocked; flights must be funneled into instrument approach patterns; the dominoes start falling.

When arrival sectors become sufficiently clogged, holding patterns are assigned. Jets will be stacked above and below one another, a thousand feet apart, waiting their turn to land in what becomes a giant, downwardly spiraling helix. To avoid airborne gridlock, departing flights are sometimes kept on the ground until specified, pre-planned release times. Things change quickly, for better or worse. Storms pass and airways reopen; storms worsen and they constrict. Departure slots can be amended on short notice, and this is why airlines hate when customers go wandering off during gate delays.

Teams of trained dispatchers, who hold FAA Dispatcher licenses, work in a huge room, typically at the airline’s home base or largest hub, that looks like NASA control, handling the nitty-gritty of delays. Via radio, phone or computer, they are in constant contact with the crew, even (especially) while aloft, with whom they confer and coordinate.

Often, though, delays strike even in clear weather, and as many a frustrated traveler can attest, the problem of delays has worsened over the past several years into a full-blown crisis, with bottlenecks victimizing tens of millions of flyers.

We hear lots of flak as to what, at heart, is causing this mess, from antiquated air traffic control equipment to more frequent and widespread storms to freeloading business jets clogging up airways. Those are all contributing factors, but they ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. In the end this isn’t about weather, outmoded ATC, or too many private planes; the real culprit here is the airline industry’s obsession with pumping more and more airplanes — particularly smaller regional jets (RJs) — into an already saturated system. More takeoffs, more landings, more delays.

The number of flyers has more than doubled over the last 30 years, and so has the number of planes carrying them. Yet the size of these aircraft has been shrinking. In 1980, going from New York to Miami, you stepped aboard a 275-seat L-1011 or, at the smallest, a 160-seat Boeing 727. Today, don’t be shocked if you’re riding in a 70-seat RJ (owned and operated not by the mainline carrier from whom you bought the ticket, but one of its code-share affiliates). The average jetliner now has 135 seats — far fewer than it used to. The use of RJs, which carry up to 90 or so people, has increased 300 percent in the past ten years alone, and today these planes account for an astonishing 50 percent of all commercial flights. That’s half of the traffic carrying perhaps a quarter or less of all passengers — a highly inefficient ratio.

On the point of air traffic control, I would agree that we ought to modernize our shamefully out-of-date system — for instance by taking greater advantage of GPS technology to reduce the horizontal distance limits between aircraft. But in the end, you can only squeeze so many arrivals into and out of a major airport as its runways will allow. What is typically spun as an airspace issue is ultimately an airport issue.

Short of building dozens of new and bigger airports — about as likely a proposal as constructing a civilization on Venus — the only reasonable alternative is for airlines to consolidate flights and use larger planes. Unfortunately, competitive forces make this almost as far-fetched. There are a lot more airlines than there used to be, and market shares have fragmented. Thus, one of most effective competitive tools is the ability to offer many as flights as possible to the busiest cities. More airlines, more flights, smaller planes.

And passengers, after all, are getting what they demand. When airlines come around asking for opinions, their customers invariably answer yes, absolutely, they want as many flights to choose from as possible. Instead of offering five departures a day between LaGuardia and Chicago, why not ten? If the demand isn’t there to fill ten big planes, farm out the difference to RJs. In this way, frequency has become one of the holy grails of airline marketing; having more flights to pick from sells more tickets.

It’s an illusion, of course, when those flights don’t actually leave or arrive when they’re supposed to, but it works. Airlines sell it, and people buy it.

But for the heck of it, let’s try an informal poll. You’re a frequent flyer who travels often between Chicago and New York — the country’s heaviest domestic market. Instead of a choice between a dozen daily 737s or A320s, a third of which arrive an average of 30 minutes late, how would you feel about picking among a half-dozen widebody planes instead, with all of them arriving on time? Apply this line of thinking system-wide, and I suspect many ATC bottlenecks would be eliminated. (Not only that, but the larger economies of scale would save millions of gallons of fuel while reducing emissions.)

Expecting airlines to consolidate in this fashion is a bit like expecting them to return to the days of three-cheese omelets in economy class, but I can’t help throwing it out there. They, along with their customers, are resigned to a certain, apparently acceptable level of inconvenience. Expect to be dealing with this hassle indefinitely.

We’ve reached a point where government involvement is a viable option — specifically, limits on aircraft size and/or a mandatory cap on departures at the busiest airports during specific time periods. That’s a bold step, but the remaining choices hold comparatively little promise. Let’s review some of the commonly suggested alternatives:

1. We need to modernize air traffic control

See prior question. Although enhancements are long overdue, they would primarily benefit the higher altitude, en-route airspace sectors, with minimal impact where it is needed most — in and around airports. Benefits would include shorter flight times, fuel savings, reduced emissions, and somewhat better traffic management during inclement weather. Those are all good things, but they neglect the reality that a runway can accept only so many arrivals and departures per hour.

2. So, why not build more runways?

For lots of reasons, not the least of which are the long and contentious battles that runway construction projects inevitably trigger between airport authorities, politicians, and anti-expansion neighborhood groups. At my hometown airport, Boston’s Logan International, it took thirty years to get a badly needed, 5,000-foot stub of a runway completed. No less daunting are the funding and technical issues. Taxiways have to be constructed; complex lighting systems installed; navigational aids put in place; flight patterns developed and test-flown. Denver’s sixth runway carried a tab of $165 million. And Denver, at least, had the room. At La Guardia, Newark, or Kennedy? Where would it fit?

3. How about encouraging carriers to serve underutilized satellite airports instead of saturated hubs: Stewart instead of JFK; Portsmouth instead of Boston; Long Beach instead of Los Angeles?

This is one of the more annoying and persistent red herrings. To begin with, big, busy hubs are just that because of the number of passengers who connect there. People transfer from flight to flight — from small plane to big plane; from international to domestic, and vice-versa. Satellite airports offer limited amounts of point-to-point, so-called O&D traffic, such as leisure flights heading to Florida, but there are virtually no connecting options.

Therefore, unless a carrier is going to move its entire operation into a satellite airport, the end result is actually more aircraft being dumped into the system. If American Airlines were to begin flying from Stewart-Newburgh (located northwest of New York City) to London, it would not do so instead of flying from JFK, but in addition to flying from JFK. Or take the example of Southwest Airlines, which has capitalized by drawing million of flyers into cities like Manchester, Providence, and Islip, providing an alternative to the hassles of Boston, Kennedy and LaGuardia. Have its competitors at those crowded airports reduced their schedules in response? Heck no. If a certain number of passengers are siphoned away, the tendency isn’t to cancel flights outright, it’s to reduce the size of the aircraft. A 767 becomes a 737; a 737 becomes an RJ. The competitor keeps the same number of planes in the air, while Southwest’s adds yet more. Airline competition is seldom a zero sum game. The market splinters, and it keeps on growing — sustainability be damned.

These very same points are what make the high-speed rail “solution” similarly misunderstood. I welcome high-speed rail options, and there’s no reason to oppose trains on their own merits. But any effect on air traffic would be negligible at best.

4. What about restrictions on private business jets at large, congested airports?

I’m open to the idea of corporate jets paying higher fees toward maintaining our air system’s infrastructure, but these planes do not exceed more than about five percent of operations at any major commercial airport, and usually less.

5. If we accept that airline schedules are to blame, how about a fee system that charges them a premium to fly at the busiest times?

So-called “peak-period pricing” is a popular and controversial idea, akin to levying heavy tolls on downtown automobile drivers as a way of reducing traffic jams. In cities like London, apparently, such disincentives have met with success. But jetliners are not cars, and airlines are not private motorists. The result would be higher fares with a minimal effect on congestion. With average ticket prices as low as they are, it’d be relatively easy for airlines to pass along a modest rise to customers. You already pay extra to fly at the choicest times, and you’d probably pay more.

Technology will not fix the problem. Neither will scapegoating private jets, patronizing small airports, bleeding the airlines or fantasizing about new runways. If you ask me, the only realistic hope is for carriers to abandon their self-defeating fixation with frequency and their berserk addiction to regional jets. Fat chance, I know, so try to look on the bright side: you’ll be pleased to know that between 75 and 80 percent of all flights do arrive on time. Not to mention, flying is astonishingly safe, fares are cheap, and while you might be a little late in getting there, planes go pretty much everywhere. The cost of an airline ticket is roughly equivalent to what it was in the early 1980s, and it’s possible to fly between practically any two major cities in the United States, or the world for that matter, without so much as a fuel stop.

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Marathon tarmac strandings receive tremendous media attention and are great at stoking the public’s never-to-be-underestimated hatred for airlines. But in the grand scheme of things they are rare. Around 1,500 flights annually face tarmac delays exceeding three hours. That sounds like a lot until you remember there are more than nine million departures each year. As for the new three-hour rule, be careful what you wish for, and don’t say I didn’t warn you:

For instance, picture yourself on a delayed airplane going from New York to San Francisco. Parked out on the taxiway in a snowstorm, your assigned wheels-up time is only a half-hour away. But because the three-hour tarmac limit is about to elapse, the plane must return to the gate.

After docking, several passengers, having missed their connections in SFO, choose to get off the plane and go home. Their luggage too needs to come off. And because going back and forth to the terminal burned 1,000 pounds of kerosene, the plane must be refueled. Removing people, luggage, and revising the fuel load will additionally entail a new weight-and-balance manifest, and possibly a whole new flight plan. Coordinating all of this will involve a large number of personnel — most of whom are, at the moment, dealing with other flights — and require a considerable amount of time. Let’s be conservative and say, despite the falling snow, icy tarmac, and logjam of tardy planes, everything takes an hour. You’re now a bare minimum of 30 minutes later than you would have been without returning to the gate. Throw in the need to de-ice, or the possibility of the crew running up against duty time regs, and it’s substantially worse.

And oh, missing that wheels-up time means you’ll be assigned a new one, and lo and behold it’s another two hours away. Your three-hour delay just became a five-hour delay.

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Note: segments of the following answer are borrowed from my 2004 book, Ask the Pilot.

All modern aircraft are operated by a two-person crew consisting of a captain and a first officer. The latter is referred to colloquially as the copilot — a misleading and misunderstood term. The copilot not on hand as a backup or a helpful apprentice. The captain does not say to his underling, “Here, son, how about you take it for a minute.” Copilots perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do, and are fully qualified to operate the plane in all regimes of flight, including emergencies. In fact it’s common in certain abnormal situations for the captain to delegate the hands-on flying duties to the first officer while he runs the checklists, troubleshoots, talks to ATC, etc.

In normal operations pilots take turns at the controls. If a crew is going from New York to Chicago to Seattle, the captain will fly the first leg and the first officer will fly the second. The pilot not flying is still plenty busy with a long list of chores: communicating, programming the FMS and navigational equipment, reading checklists and so forth.

Regardless of who’s driving, the captain has ultimate authority over the flight, and a larger salary to go with it (though not as large as it used to be). Captains wear four stripes on their sleeves and epaulets; first officers wear three. Outside North America you’ll notice slightly different designs with stars, crests, or other markings.

The upgrade from first officer to captain is strictly a seniority thing. You are eligible for captain training when your date of hire merits it, period (there’s more on seniority lists in a later question).

A few older aircraft still in service, such as the 727 or classic model 747, require a third pilot. This is the second officer, a.k.a. flight engineer, whose workstation, including a wall-mounted instrument panel, is on the starboard side of the cockpit behind the first officer. His job is the management of a multitude of onboard systems — electrical, hydraulic, fuel, pressurization and others — as well as backing up the captain and first officer.

If you’re wondering about the navigator, that’s a job description that hasn’t existed on most western-built planes since the early 1960s. The last known navigator in the United States was the Howard Borden character from the old Bob Newhart Show.

At most carriers, flights over eight hours planned duration bring along an extra first officer, designated as the “relief pilot.” This allows for a rotating series of breaks, with each pilot spending roughly one-third of the flight relaxing or sleeping (or eating or watching movies). Flights exceeding twelve hours will ordinarily carry both an extra first officer and an extra captain, allowing for even longer breaks.

The luxuriousness of crew rest quarters varies between airline and aircraft type On bigger planes like the 747, 777 or A380 crews have the benefit of surprisingly spacious sleeping quarters. They can be above deck, below deck, or squirreled away somewhere in the main cabin. Some rest facilities are built into a removable, lower-deck pod. (Q: Where is the captain? A: He is sleeping in the cargo compartment.) Smaller models like the 767 employ a cordoned-off seat in first or business class.

Flight attendants too are entitled to inflight breaks, though their rest digs aren’t always as cushy as those for the pilots. Sometimes it’s just a modified economy seat.

Maybe the single most annoying habit of the media is when, in a discussion of virtually any aviation incident, they make reference to “the pilot.” I fail to understand how, after decades of experience, the press cannot make it clear that there are, at a minimum, two evenly credentialed pilots in the cockpit. The Associated Press is habitually the worst offender in this regard. Use of the term “pilot” is fine, but only as a generic reference to either crewmember. To cite “the pilot” at exclusion of the other pilot (as was done to excess in the aftermath of the 2009 US Airways Hudson River accident), is misleading and incorrect – not to mention rude to first officers like me.

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You’ll often hear of pilots making upwards of $200,000 a year. A limited number do, but they are the gray-haired captains nearing retirement, on the highest rungs of a major carrier’s seniority ladder. These are fellows that airlines and pundits love to make examples of during contract negotiations, but in truth they make up a very small portion of all pilots out there. Seldom do we hear about the pilots making thirty, forty, or sixty thousand. Or, at the regionals, seventeen or twenty thousand.

There are those of us make a decent living, sure, but believe me it didn’t come easy, and overall the profession isn’t as nearly as lucrative as it once was. Since 2001 the biggest carriers have slashed pilot wages by some 30 percent. Pensions have been gutted and benefits cut. Starting salaries at the majors are around $30,000. Even with yearly raises, it currently takes eight or ten years tenure before one is earning six figures.

That is, provided a pilot is fortunate enough to reach that level. Most who set their sights on the majors never get that far and have to settle for a career at the regional level, where salaries are considerably lower. I’m one of the lucky ones, although it took me 15 years with a series of bankruptcies and furloughs along the way. Flying, it has been said, is a lot like acting, painting, or playing minor league ball. Reward awaits the fortunate, but countless others toil in extended, even perpetual purgatory for their art. Pilots coming from the military tend to enjoy a more expedited career path, but for the 50 or so percent of us who take the civilian route it’s a long, tough slog from primary training to a seat with Delta, American, United, et al.

It all starts with a fresh commercial license and a few hundred logbook hours. But entry-level jobs are tough to come by and financially humiliating. If a pilot is fortunate he’ll slip straight from flight school, where his FAA qualifications ran $50,000 or more, on top of a college education, to a first officer position at a regional making $20,000 or under. And that’s best case. More likely he’ll first spend some time flight instructing, towing banners, or some other means of ad-hoc experience-building — the pilot equivalent of odd jobs. Once established at a regional he can look forward to at least a couple, and more likely several years of little money and lots of hard work before a major carrier will take his resume seriously — assuming any of them are hiring.

The trick is to grab a seniority number as quickly as possible, and hope for the best. Rewards come later, not sooner, and always be prepared for the industry’s cyclical scourges. Risks are inherent in many professions, but aviation is especially unpredictable — and unforgiving.

Readers should be cautious of sources citing “average” pilot salaries. Those averages might pertain only to certain sectors of the industry — the major carriers, for instance, neglecting the approximately 50 percent of airline pilots who work at the regionals. They also fail to explain that a given pilot is liable to be in his fifties by the time he earns his captain stripe and a respectable income, after decades of mediocre pay and perhaps layoff or two. A pilot’s early and mid-career struggles aren’t routinely quantified in the bullet-point salary rankings.

Another thing to be leery of are quotes of hourly pay rates. While it’s true that most pilots are compensated by the hour, these are flight hours, not “work” hours as most people think of them. A hundred dollars an hour might seem outlandish, but it is engineered to account for the off-the-clock ancillaries of the job: preflight planning, downtime between connections, and periods laying over in hotels. Only a fraction of a typical multi-day assignment is spent in the air. Thus, over the course of a month, perhaps 70 or 80 hours of actual flight (pay) are recorded, but a pilot might be on duty for 250 hours and away from home for two weeks or more. (This disparity spawns foolish claims that airline pilots work far less than the typical full-time employee. I recently heard a radio commentator remark snarkily about pilots “only working 70 hours a month.” A pilot works 70 hours a month the way a football player works an hour each week.)

How much do you think a pilot should be paid? What is your passage worth? That’s a tough one to answer, and admittedly it sets up a trap. Does a lawyer “deserve” $250,000 a year? Or, through the other end of the telescope, does a teacher or a social worker “deserve” $22,000? That’s making moral judgments on a market-determined product. But, just for fun, let’s try something: Let’s pretend you’re traveling from Paris to New York on an airline whose fares are dirt cheap and whose pilots are compensated by voluntary passenger donations. A cup is passed around at the conclusion of each flight. How much is safe transport across the ocean worth to you?

In practice, it’s worth about six bucks. When you average out the pay rates, the typical Boeing 777 captain makes roughly $190 per flight hour. Between Paris and New York, this captain will transport 250 passengers on a trip lasting eight hours. That hashes out to a contribution of just over $6.00 per passenger. The captain gets six dollars of your fare. The first officer gets between three and four.

Now let’s try a regional. A fifth-year CRJ-900 captain at Mesa Airlines (d.b.a. US Airways Express and other affiliations) earns $69 per flight hour. His plane has 80 seats. For a two-hour flight, you’ve given him $1.72. A new first officer at Mesa makes $19 an hour. On that same trip, he collects all of forty-seven cents from each customer.

When it’s all said and done, the business of flying planes is a blue-collar job, much as some pilots are loath to admit. We are sometimes so defensive about what it means, or doesn’t mean, to be a professional, that we’re unable to accept this.

Nevertheless, despite the negatives, and despite the struggles and setbacks endured over the course of my own career, I’m obliged to admit that I enjoy my job tremendously and wouldn’t trade it for anything. A berth at a major airline, at least when the ink is running black and people aren’t flying planes into buildings, is still a good one.

That hard part is getting there, as quickly as possible, and staying there. Once secure on a seniority list, a pilot’s destiny has almost nothing to do with merit and everything to do with timing. Experience and skill, for all of their intangible value, are effectively meaningless. Seniority is the currency of value, and we are fiercely protective of it. Nothing is more important than, as we call it, our “number.”

All of a pilot’s quality-of-life variables are assigned via seniority bidding. You bid for position (captain or first officer), aircraft type, base city, monthly schedule, vacations, and so on. What you actually end up with depends on your relative position within the ranks: your number within the airline overall; your number in that base; your number within a specific aircraft category; your number number number. First officers become captains only when a slot becomes available, and only when seniority permits them to. How talented you are, or how swell a person you are, will not earn you a faster track to the left seat. Neither will how many lives you managed to save in the throes of some emergency. Only your number can do that. It’s at once fair and unfair; the ultimate insult and ultimate egalitarian tool — dehumanizing, maddening, and immensely important. When business is bad and airlines are contracting, seniority moves in reverse: captains become first officers; and junior first officers become cab drivers. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, more than ten thousand airline pilots were furloughed in the United States, yours truly among them.

And when a pilot resigns, is furloughed, or is otherwise cast off from one airline chooses to work at another, the seniority system dictates that he begin again at probationary pay and benefits, regardless of experience. He resets that fancy watch and begins again, effectively as a brand-new rookie.

Imagine you’re an airline captain. You’ve been with the same employer for 20 years and you’re making a respectable, if not spectacular six-figure salary. Then one day this airline goes bankrupt and closes is doors, a la Eastern, Braniff, Pan Am, and no doubt others still to come. Suddenly jobless, you apply for a position at one of your former competitors. Lo and behold you’re hired. Back to normal, right? Not quite. In addition to the normal and expected challenges faced by anybody who takes up residence with a new company, I’m sad to report that you will not be hired on as a captain, and you will not be bringing in anything close to your most recent salary. A quarter of it, maybe. You take your place at the bottom of the seniority list, and the long, slow climb begins again. This is industry standard and there are no exceptions. Not even if you’re name is, say, Chesley Sullenberger. “We’re all proud of you, Sully. Sorry about the demise of U.S. Airways. You’ll be an asset to our airline and we’re happy to have you. Unfortunately, you’ll need to remove that fourth stripe from your epaulet, since with us you’ll be flying as a junior copilot. Many of your captains, younger and far less experienced than you, might feel a little uneasy, but so it goes.”

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Let’s take the second part first:

A certain pilot took advantage of parental generosity to fund his initial training. He took flying lessons during high school, an hour at a time, and earned a private pilot’s license before he turned twenty. From there he added various other ratings and became a flight instructor, eventually accumulating about 1,500 hours in various Pipers and Cessnas before getting a job as a first officer with a regional airline in 1990. A decade later, when he was at last hired by a large passenger airline, he’d amassed about 5,000 logbook hours, most in regional airliners and the rest as a second officer on a cargo jet.

That’s a fairly typical resume with fairly typical numbers, though applicants from the armed forces have, on average, fewer total hours than civilians. Above and beyond flight time, most airlines also ask for a college degree — though it needn’t be within a science or technology-related field.

Once in the interview room, pilots are not hired based in experience per se. During the interview process, which can take one or two days, a candidate with 3,000 hours is not always outqualified by somebody with two, three, or four times that many. Once the prerequisites are met, all candidates are on equal footing and, as in most professions personality and overall impression become the make or break factors. I wouldn’t call experience overrated, exactly, but it’s something like that.

Once hired, airline curricula are highly alike. Whether to fly an RJ or a 777, the duration and structure of the training 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 or as the name implies — nobody gets his head shaved or is forced to do push-ups – but it’s a tedious several days devoted to administrative paperwork and learning company-specific rules and procedures. When you’re done filling out insurance and payroll forms you’ll spend a lot of time going over something called Operations Specifications, which is about as exciting as it sounds. Ops specs, as we call them, are a long, highly technical rundown of the various operational protocols that the airline is approved for. In the evenings trainees can phone home and mesmerize their spouses with all they’ve learned about things like takeoff visibility criteria, instrument approach minima and the weather requirements for determining alternate airports.

The hands-on airplane training takes around three weeks to complete. Which plane you’re assigned to depends on your bidding preferences, seniority, and which vacancies happen to be available. Among new-hires, seniority is most often determined by age, with the oldest pilots at the top.

Trainee first officers are paired up — either with another new-hire or with somebody who is upgrading to captain or transitioning from another aircraft type. As a rule pilots are qualified only on one aircraft model, and only in one seat, at a time. A longtime employee moving from plane to plane (from an A330 to a 777, say), or from seat to seat (first officer to captain), will be put through the exact same syllabus as somebody brand-new.

Before moving on to the full-motion simulators, practice takes place in computerized cockpit mock-ups – high-tech mini-sims. These machines have fully working instruments and controls, but do not have visuals and do not physically move. You and your partner will get familiar with the plane’s various systems, rehearse different malfunctions and emergencies, and “fly” instrument approaches galore.

“Systems” is pilot patois for an airplane’s plumbing, circuitry, and assorted moving parts – its electrics, hyrdraulics, pneumatics, warning systems, and so forth. It used to be that flight crews underwent lengthy systems training, sometimes lasting two weeks or more, in a classroom setting. Nowadays the emphasis is on self-study. The company will mail you a package of manuals and CDs, and you’re expected to have a healthy systems knowledge before showing up for training. This takes a large amount of self-discipline and the careful compartmentalizing of information – lots of information.

In addition to studying the mechanical guts of their machines, pilots learn “profiles” — step-by-step procedures that dictate how various maneuvers are to be flown, from normal takeoffs to those single-engine missed approaches. Profiles cover numerous data points: speeds, altitudes, pitch targets, flap and slat schedules, autoflight programming, etc. Things must be done in exactly the right order at exactly the right time, and these steps can differ substantially, aircraft to aircraft.

There are tests to pass at regular intervals, including a comprehensive systems exam. 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 likely you take this with a grain of salt. Don’t. A session of mock disaster in “the box” is something hardly believable until you’ve done it. The ride is an exercise in both mental and physical exertion.

A state-of-the-art sim takes months to construct and costs tens of millions dollars to acquire and maintain. They are surprisingly roomy inside. The forwardmost portion is a perfect replica of a cockpit; the aft section contains two or more observer stations, storage areas and computer consoles. The 3-D visuals, projected onto wrap-around screens, aren’t the most realistic – the renderings of terminal buildings and landscapes, for example, wouldn’t win any CGI contests – but they are accurate where it counts. Runways and approach lights look exactly like the real things. Meteorological conditions, from visibility and cloud cover to winds and turbulence, can be replicated with remarkably accuracy.

Each session lasts about four hours, not including the time spent for prep and debriefing. It might comprise a series of “snapshot” maneuvers, whereby the sim is repositioned for various drills, or it might be choreographed like an actual flight, gate to gate, complete with simulated 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.

A friend of mine is a new-hire first officer at a regional airline. He’d always been a desktop sim enthusiast, but had never been in the real thing before. On the phone recently he summed up the experience like this: “Why didn’t you warn me? Why didn’t you warn me just how gut-churningly unenjoyable simulator training would be?”

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 60-minute block of time will run 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, or for certain exercises to be repeated. Washout rates at the major airlines are quite low – one or two 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.

As a rule, the major airlines tend to have an accommodating, humanistic approach to training. Regional carriers, on the other hand, aren’t always as patient, and aren’t known for having touchy-feely work environments. Insult to injury, new-hire regional pilots aren’t always paid a salary, and in some cases they are footing the training bill themselves (these schemes are much less common than they were ten or fifteen years ago, but they still exist).

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 real-life 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. This might consist of a two-day combination of classroom and simulator time. Each pilot will then complete two or more transoceanic IOE crossings. Additionally there’s “theater training” specific to certain areas or to foreign airports that are especially challenging. Parts of South America for example, or Africa. For first officers this is usually self-study, though for captains it must include a flight into that airport or area in the company of a training pilot before being allowed to carry passengers there.

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, semi-annual rite of study and stress, culminating in a multi-hour simulator session during which a sadistic instructor, that teacher and coach, dutifully inflicts all manner of potential catastrophe. Assuming it goes okay, you’re signed off and sent back to the line.

I usually start to prepare about 30 days ahead of time. This includes going over my manuals and watching a series of company-issued CDs. Because I fly international routes, I need to brush up on many regulations and procedures that a domestic pilot would not. For instance how to program “critical terrain routes” into the flight management system; how to execute an emergency diversion when flying in the North Atlantic “track” system; or going over the protocols of ICAO position broadcasts used in regions of the world that do not have radar or traditional ATC.

The actual on-site training only lasts a day or two, but it’s action-packed. To give you some 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. We adjust the pitch and yaw to maintain control, then carefully follow the engine-out climb profile; retracting the flaps and slats on schedule, running the necessary checklists; then fall back into the pattern for an emergency landing. Along the way, we contact our company dispatcher, brief the flight attendants for a possible evacuation; make an announcement to the passengers. 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, he orders us to go-around. Seems a 747 has wandered errantly onto our runway. “Ah, shit,” says the captain. A hand-flown, single-engine missed approach is well within the jet’s capabilities, but believe me it’s nobody’s idea of a good time.

Next scenario: We’re at 36,000 feet over the Andes, when suddenly there’s a rapid decompression. We don our oxygen masks and commence an emergency descent. Over the ocean this would be fairly straightforward: re-program for a safe altitude; set in the descent speed; deploy the speedbrakes; turn clear of the tracks; and break out the checklists for the rest. The nearby high terrain, however, means we must also adhere to a pre-programmed escape route and carefully scripted diversion path. It gets busy.

This was followed by a pair of windshear encounters – one each during takeoff and landing, and 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? Doesn’t every profession require its participants to keep their skills up to par? Perhaps, though I can’t imagine that this is how an outfielder might feel shagging flies before game-time. Somehow the tension is greater, the stakes higher.

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.

On top of the regimens described above are random “line checks” — informal spot-checks whereby you’ll fly a leg 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 in the cockpit peering over my shoulder for eight hours, scribbling unseen comments into a notebook. And between it all, pilots must always remain familiar with countless pages of regulatory arcana, not to mention keeping abreast of the never-ending flow of operational memos, manual revisions, and so forth.

To be fair, training does have occasional moments of enjoyment. A few spare minutes at the end of a sim period might allow for a little off-script fun. I can tell you what it’s like to fly a Boeing beneath the Verazzano Bridge at 400 miles-per-hour, among other activities that are off-limits in an actual plane.

Some maneuvers are both fun and enlightening. I remember the time a particularly bold instructor gave us a simultaneous failure of both engines. In the real world such emergencies are so rare that there is little formal training for them. But there we were, a hundred-ton glider at 33,000 feet over Long Island Sound. “What are you going to do?” mused the instructor with a cackle.

“Land.” answered the captain.

And we did, just barely, brushing the approach lights at the foot of runway 31R at Kennedy.

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In a highly unstable industry, where starting annual salaries are below $20,000, it is becoming increasingly difficult for regional airlines to attract and retain experienced pilots.

Tenure at a regional was once assumed to be temporary. It was a job one took before, fingers crossed, moving on to a more lucrative slot with a legacy carrier. This progression was never a sure thing, but if nothing else it served as a carrot that kept a supply of young, talented, and highly motivated pilots moving through the ranks. Nowadays this path has slowed to a trickle, and many pilots are finding out that a job with a regional means a career with a regional — one with minimal payback for the cash and commitment it takes to get there. This prospect has a growing number of regional pilots bailing out of the business altogether. Meanwhile the replacement pool isn’t nearly as impressive as it used to be.

Pilots hired by major airlines normally possess around 5,000 hours of cumulative flight time. At the regional level it’s considerably less. When I was hired into my first cockpit job, in 1990, I had accrued 1,500 total flight hours and possessed something known as an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate from the FAA. Those were, at the time, average to below average qualifications. How things change. Lately at the regionals, new-hires have been coming on with as little as 300-500 total hours and a basic FAA commercial license. On the face it of it, this poses a serious implications for safety, does it not?

The short answer is no. Logbook totals aren’t necessarily a good prognosticator of skill or performance under pressure. A given pilot’s smarts are not so easily quantified, and as the accident annals will attest — from Eastern 401 in the Everglades to KLM at Tenerife — low-time crews hardly own a monopoly on stupid mistakes. All pilots undergo rigorous airline training programs before they’re allowed to carry passengers, and the largest regionals have state-of-the-art training facilities on a par with any major, and have carefully tailored their curricula with low-time new-hires in mind. Not to mention, there are plenty of senior regional pilots out there who are at least as experienced as their big league counterparts.

The long answer is more complicated, and maybe not so rosy. I remember myself as a young, 500-hour pilot and imagine being assigned to a regional jet. Would I be qualified to the letter of the law? Sure. But am I the best and safest candidate for the job? No. The reality is, there are valuable intangibles that a pilot that green simply does not possess. In addition, the efficacy of regional airline training programs can vary. Not all have generous budgets. Also important are the effects of the overall work environment at the regional level. People would be shocked to learn just how unfriendly many of these companies are to their employees, crewmembers especially. Schedules range from tedious to backbreaking, and the pay, as we’ve seen, is the kind of thing that causes people to skip their college reunions.

Thus, I suppose it is fair to say that regional airlines have become, on some level, less safe. Mind you that we’re wrangling with statistical minutiae: less safe is not the same as unsafe, and this is by no means an admonition against flying aboard RJs. Nevertheless it warrants our attention.

Although, by the time you’re reading this, it’s likely the rules have gotten tougher. If voted into law, the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, measure will bring important changes to training and hiring protocols. The law would require that pilots possess an airline transport certificate (ATP) in order to be eligible for a cockpit job with virtually any commercial carrier. Requirements for an ATP include a minimum 1,500 hours of flight time (broken down over various categories), and satisfactory completion of a written test and in-flight examination. Additionally the law will somewhat redefine the ATP certificate, with a focus on the operational environment of commercial air carriers, requiring specialized training in things like cockpit resource management (CRM), crew coordination so on. (You’d take that for granted, but believe it or not the existing ATP requires no specific training in actual airline procedures, and no prior experience in large aircraft or those requiring more than one pilot. Albeit one needs to pass a written exam and inflight evaluation in a multi-engine aircraft, but for the time being you can obtain an “airline transport pilot” certificate having logged 1,500 hours flying Pipers and Cessnas.)

These changes will make it easier to weed out those pilots who lack the acumen for airline operations. For those who progress, it will allow an easier transition from general aviation into the high-demand training environment at a regional. It will lower their training costs and, ultimately, make for safer cockpits. And theoretically at least, it should encourage the regionals to begin offering better wages and benefits, since, for a would-be pilot, obtaining an ATP will entail a financial investment approaching or exceeding six figures.

As mentioned earlier, most regional carriers, even those wholly owned by a major, are independent subcontractors, with their own separate employees, training departments, and collective bargaining agreements. A young pilot (or flight attendant) might get a thrill from flying an aircraft that says United or Continental on the side, but it’s the small print — Connection, Express — that counts. If a crewmember at United Express wants to drive a 777 for United Airlines, he submits his resume and hopes for the best, just like anybody else. He is no more an employee for United than the kid at the concourse yogurt stand. American Eagle is one partial exception, whereby limited numbers of pilots are granted flow-through rights to American Airlines.

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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. In fact, the bravado and machismo often associated with men is exactly the kind of trait that acts against being a good pilot.” 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 equal 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 three percent of all cockpit crewmembers in the United States were women — a total of about 3,500, representing a 30-fold increase since 1960. Because most of these pilots (along with many male pilots, myself included) were hired in a relatively short span during the pre-2001 boom years, they tended to fall into those unstable lower portions of airline seniority lists and were most vulnerable to furlough. Their total dropped sharply, to around one percent, following the airline apocalypse triggered by September 11th. Then, as regional carriers began hiring like crazy, it started climbing again. As of 2010 the number hovers near five percent, rising and falling with the hiring and furlough trends.

Certain airlines have become especially well known for their recruitment of women — outreach efforts that resulted, in part, from prior lawsuits and/or a reputations for discrimination. United Airlines is home to almost 500 women flyers (I keep wanting to use the word “aviatrix”), the highest number at any carrier in the world.

As maybe you’d expect, affirmative action-style hiring has incited the same controversies and feelings of resentment in aviation as in other fields: women are sometimes accepted with lesser qualifications than competing males, a policy that, while not unsafe (all candidates meet minimum requirements and endure the same training), raises the ire of more experienced candidates who’ve struggled to land a job and were passed over.

That being said, on-the-job harassment of woman pilots is exceptionally rare. Airline seniority lists, meanwhile, regimented strictly by date-of-hire, assure equal pay and promotion for every crew member, male or female. 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 US airlines — less than one percent of the 70,000 or so airline pilots nationwide.

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This is your captain sleeping…. er, speaking.

Passengers won’t be happy to hear about it, but crew fatigue has long been a serious issue. Fatigue has been cited as a contributing cause in several accidents, including the 1999 crash of American Airlines flight 1420, at Little Rock, Arkansas, and that of Colgan Air flight 3407 in 2009. At least two crashes involving cargo jets — one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the other in Kansas City — have been blamed more directly on pilot tiredness.

The airlines and FAA are very resistant to the tightening of flight and duty time regulations. Some regulatory loopholes have been closed in the past few years, but even these small these changes faced vociferous opposition by carriers and their lobbyists. During federal hearings in August, 1999, on the heels of the Little Rock crash, John Meenan, vice president of the Air Transport Association said to Congress, “There has never been a scheduled commercial airline accident attributed to pilot fatigue — not one, not ever.” That had to be one of the most jaw-droppingly disingenuous comments I’ve ever heard. That there aren’t more fatigue-related incidents is testament to pilots doing a good job under tough conditions, and not a justification for legally sanctioned somnambulance on the flight deck.

Ask yourself this: whom would you prefer at the controls of your plane on a stormy night: a pilot who smoked a joint a week-and-a-half ago, or one who had six hours of sleep prior to a 14-hour workday in which he’s performed half a dozen takeoffs and landings? The first pilot has indulged in a career-ending toke; the second is in full compliance with the rules. I have to assume that the FAA realizes the foolery of such enforcement policies, but it nonetheless procrastinates, performing study after study and poring over data from NASA circadian rhythm experiments in an attempt to answer one of the world’s most perplexing questions: is exhaustion a detriment to job performance?

And frustratingly, most of the agency’s focus has been on long-haul flying. The circadian-scrambling effects of a 12 or 14-hour nonstop are indeed of concern. But it’s also true that long-haul fatigue is comparatively easy to manage. These flights carry augmented crews and have comfortable on-board rest facilities. Layovers are a minimum 12-hours long at luxurious hotels. The more serious problem is at the other end of the spectrum: short-haul regional flying. Regional pilots fly punishing schedules, operating multiple legs in an out of busy airports, often in the worst weather, with short layovers at dodgy motels. I have flown regional routes, back-of-the-clock cargo, ordinary domestic, and, more recently, long-haul international. In terms of fatigue issues, that list is in descending order. The latter two are by far the easiest and most civilized. Sure it messes up your circadian cycles, but I’ll take a 12-hour red-eye ocean crossing followed by 72 hours at the Marriott any day over having to wake up at 4 a.m., fly six legs in a turboprop, with eight hours of supposed rest at the Holiday Inn Express before having to do it all over again.

And it isn’t cockpit time per se that presents the toughest challenges. The real menaces are the long stretches of duty time and the fact that legal layovers can be painfully short. On a given workday, a pilot might log only two hours on the flight deck. Sounds like an easy assignment, except when those two hours come at either end of a 14-hour duty stretch that began at 5 a.m., most of which was spent waiting out weather delays and killing time in the terminal. Or, a pilot may have packed eight full hours of flying, making numerous takeoffs and landings, into that same span.

Now imagine multiple days like that, back to back. In FAA-speak, the layover buffers between such duty spells are known as “rest periods,” and they are subject to adjustment based on the number of hours a pilot has flown or been on duty. if a crew signs off in, say, Chicago at 9 p.m. for a layover, with a scheduled sign-on at 7 a.m. the next morning, that’s a ten-hour rest period. It doesn’t sound terribly abusive, until you start subtracting the time spent waiting for the hotel van, driving to and from the airport, scrounging for food and so on. Currently a pilot is considered off duty, and on rest, shortly after his final flight of the day shuts down at the gate. But with paperwork and other duties to attend to, his rest clock often begins ticking while he is still at the airport — sometimes still on the plane! And, the next morning, it ends not in the hotel lobby, but back at the airport at the moment of sign-in. What exists on paper as a ten-hour layover might only seven hours in the hotel room and five hours of actual sleep.

The ultimate horror is something called a “continuous duty” or “stand-up” layover. A crew signs on at, say, 9 p.m. and flies a single short leg, arriving at 11 p.m. The next leg isn’t scheduled until 6 o’clock in the morning. The crew “stands up” until then, technically on-duty the entire night, maybe catching a nap at the motel. My copilot and I once spent a stand-up overnight dozing in the aisle of our Dash-8 turboprop on the tarmac in Bangor, Maine.

The most productive step regulators can take is eliminating transit time from what it considers “rest.” Although it brings ambiguity into how long a layover will actually last, and is difficult for airlines to work with, a pilot’s rest clock should not begin to tick until the minute he latches the door of his hotel room, and it should stop ticking no later than the minute he checks out. Eight hours behind the hotel room door, minimum. At the major carriers such provisions are already commonplace, but at the regional level it’s another story. I also advocate that pilots be allowed cockpit naps, as is permitted by regulations in Canada and other countries. Such a proposal is seen as radioactive by the FAA, unfortunately, and is kept off the table.

In discussions of the fatigue issue, there has been a growing and somewhat discouraging focus on the practice of commuting — whereby a crew member lives in one city but is based in another. More than 50 percent of crewmembers “commute,”as it’s called, pilots and flight attendants alike. Commuting can be stressful and tiring, but on the whole pilots are pretty good at disciplining themselves when it comes to getting adequate rest prior to work. The problems are the assignments themselves — again, especially at the regional level, where crews endure long duty days sandwiched between minimum rest layovers, with only ten or twelve days off each month.

Any attempt to restrict or regulate commuting presents complications and is going to be resisted. Roughly 60 percent of pilots and flight attendants commute, sometimes over great distances.

In many ways this would be a call to restrict what a crew member can or can’t do in what is effectively his or her free time. Who’s to say that sitting on an airplane is more stressful or fatiguing than anything else a pilot might be doing in the hours before he or she shows up to work? And although commuting is a privilege that allows crews to live where they please, it can also be a practical necessity. Aircraft and base assignments change frequently, and having to uproot and move each new bid posting — especially if you’re making $30,000 or less and trying to support a family — would be enormously disruptive and expensive. Moreover, can you really expect a junior pilot or flight attendant to live in, say, Boston, New York City, or any other expensive metropolitan area, on a regional airline salary?

Crewmembers commonly rent a part-time residency called a “crash pad,” where they’ll stay, if needed, on either end of a commute. (The décor and sanitary standards of the average crash pad are topic for another time; I once shared an apartment with six other pilots that we divided up with cubicles fashioned from plywood.) Others, when it’s affordable, purchase hotel rooms. A few have been known to sleep in cars.

For those assigned to international routes, commuting is comparatively easy. Our rotations tend to be longer, with some lasting ten days or more, but we have fewer of them. An international category pilot will typically commute in two or three times each month, while a regional pilot on domestic runs might have to do it five, six, or seven times.

Commutes through two or more time zones are not uncommon. I know a pilot who commutes to New York from Alaska. Another from France. I know of a flight attendant who makes the trip from Santiago, Chile, and one from Barcelona. Legend has it there was once an Eastern Airlines captain domiciled in Atlanta but who lived in Wellington, New Zealand.

I also disagree with the contention that high-tech cockpit automation exacerbates fatigue. Pilots grow complacent and bored, the thinking goes, to the point of shirking their duties and in some cases falling asleep, thanks to the low-workload environment in a modern cockpit. It’s a persuasive argument, but my feeling is that boredom and automation have relatively little to do with one another. Or, better to the point, they haven’t any more to do with one another than they’ve had in the past. Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long periods of quiet. Duties come and go, ebb and flow. It has always been that way. Boredom was a factor 60 years ago when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It’s going to be a factor in any profession where there are long stretches of reduced workload — such as when flying across oceans — and when a large percentage of tasks become repetitive and routine. But there is little about modern automation per se that makes boredom particularly acute. I operate eight-, nine-, even 12-hour nonstops all the time. There’s a certain tedium that I expect and have to deal with. But is it because of the automation? Heck, if I had to have my hands on the wheel that whole time, expending full concentration, I’d be five time as bored and ten times as exhausted.

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Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was the captain of U.S. Airways flight 1549. He guided his suddenly engine-less Airbus into the Hudson River on January 15th, 2009, after striking a flock 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, captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and superhuman flying skills. The reality isn’t quite so romantic.

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. Sullenberger performed admirably in the face of a serious emergency, but had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city or at a lower altitude (beyond gliding distance to the Hudson), or in inclement weather, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent or skill was going to matter.

I was getting a haircut 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 automatically turns toward 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. “Actually, gliding into the river was probably a lot easier than gliding to an airport,” I added. “Sully had the benefit of a long, open river runway of water, and didn’t have to worry about crashing short or running out of room.”

There was silence after that, which I took to mean that Nick was either silently impressed by this exquisite new knowledge, or was thinking “what an asshole.”

I was exaggerating somewhat, but eager to make a point: that the nuts and bolts of gliding into water aren’t anything an average pilot couldn’t handle with relative ease. The common-sense of the maneuver is one of the reasons pilots don’t even train for them in simulators. Another reason is that a water landing is presumed to be the byproduct of something extremely serious — a fire, multiple engine failures, or some other catastrophic malfunction. That is the crux of the emergency, not the resultant landing, be it on solid or liquid surface.

And with almost unlimited space, gliding into the Hudson was a much easier task than attempting to hit a fixed point — i.e. a runway — whereby the management of speed and descent rate have to be exactly right. With heavy swells, an ocean ditching would be exceptionally dangerous, but I’ll take landing in a long, calm river any day over the challenges of making it to a distant runway. And from a pilot’s perspective there are many worse nightmares than having to splash-land a jetliner on a calm river in broad daylight.

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 his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. Don’t forget 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 January 15th, 2009, can be rationally explained. 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 would never suggested that pilots were merely “doing their jobs,” but I didn’t see heroics; I saw the professional execution of difficult tasks in the throes of an emergency.

I can’t help thinking about Al Haynes, the United Airlines captain who, ably assisted by three other pilots, deftly guided his crippled DC-10 to a crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. A disintegrated engine fan had bled out all three of the plane’s hydraulics systems, resulting in a total loss of flight controls. Using differential engine power to perform turns, all the while battling uncontrollable pitch oscillations, that Haynes and his crew were able to pull off even a semi-survivable landing (112 people were killed; 184 survived) is about as close to a miracle as you can get. But in his many interviews and speeches since then, Haynes has always bristled at the “hero” label.

And there’s a longstanding unfairness to the whole pilots-as-heroes thing that really gets under my skin. Over the years there have been countless aviators who, confronted by sudden and unusual danger, performed admirably, with just as much or skill and resolve as we can ever hope for. But they weren’t as fortunate. By virtue of circumstances beyond their control, they and many of their passengers perished. And for this they are denied the kind of acclaim we lavish upon the telegenic survivor.

And if we’re going to praise 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 the news cycle, 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 Bogota, 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 (is there any other kind at BGR?). Visibility had fallen to a mile, and as the 37-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.

Me, I’ll take a daylight ditching in the Hudson over either of those. 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, and no procedures, for that one.

In case you’re wondering, starting first officer pay at American Eagle is about $21,000 per year. At the time of their incident, Sullenberger and Skiles each had greater than 20 years tenure at U.S. Airways. Their salaries were around $105,000 and $71,000 respectively.

And no, there are no raises or bonuses given out for heroics, be they real or perceived.

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I do a fair bit of mythbusting. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories, urban legends, wives’ tales and other ridiculous notions. I’ve heard it all.

Nothing, however, gets me sputtering more than the myths and exaggerations about cockpit automation — this pervasive idea that modern aircraft are flown by computer, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. The press and pundits repeat this garbage constantly, and millions of people actually believe it. In some not-too-distant future, we’re told, pilots will be engineered out of the picture altogether.

This is so laughably far from reality that it’s hard to get my arms around it and begin to explain how, yet it amazes me how often this contention turns up — in magazines, on television, in the science section of the papers.

One thing you’ll notice is how these experts tend to be academics — professors, researchers, etc. — rather than pilots. Many of these people, however intelligent and however valuable their work might be, are highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of flying planes. Though pilots too are part of the problem. “Aw, shucks, this plane practically lands 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 can fly itself about as much as the modern operating room can perform a surgical procedure 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.”

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, how to do it, and when to do it. I prefer the term autoflight system. It’s a collection of several different functions controlling speed, thrust, and both horizontal and vertical navigation – together or separately, and all of it requiring regular crew inputs in order work properly. On the jet I fly, I can set up an “automatic” climb or descent any of about six different ways, depending what’s needed in a given situation.

A flight is a very organic thing — complex, fluid, always changing — in which decision-making is constant and critical. Emergencies are another thing entirely. 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 a cockpit can become — with the autopilot on. For all of its scripted protocols, checklists and SOP, hundreds if not thousands of subjective inputs are made by the crew, from deviating around a cumulus buildup (how far, how high, how long), to troubleshooting a mechanical issue to performing the takeoff and landing.

One evening I was sitting in economy class when our jet came in for unusually smooth landing. “Nice job, autopilot!” yelled some knucklehead 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 they are intended for extreme low-visibility conditions. But in practice they are very rare. Fewer than one percent of landings are performed automatically, and the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button I wouldn’t need to practice them twice a year in the simulator or need to review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals.

Another thing we hear again and again is how the sophisticated, automated Boeing or Airbus 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 flying –- not merely the hands-on aspects of driving the plane, but familiarity with everything else that the job entails, 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 skill set is necessarily more important than other.

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. But 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 don’t simply take the drone concept, scale it up, build in a few redundancies, and off you go.

I would like to see a drone perform a high-speed takeoff abort after a tire explosion, followed by the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring an emergency 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 subjective appraisal of the crew.

And adapting the UAV model to the commercial realm would require, in addition to gigantic technological challenges, a restructuring of the entire commercial aviation infrastructure, from airports to ATC. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars, from the planes themselves to the facilities they’d rely on. We still haven’t perfected the idea of remote control cars, trains, or ships; the leap to commercial aircraft would harder and more expensive by orders of magnitude.

And for what? You’d still need human beings to operate these planes remotely. Thus I’m not sure what the benefit of this would be in terms of cost.

It amuses me that as aviation technology progresses and evolves, so many people see elimination of the pilot as the logical, inevitable endpoint. I’ve never understood this. Are modern medical advances intended to eliminate doctors? Of course not. What exists in the cockpit today is already a fine example of how progress and technology have made improved flying — making it faster, far safer and more reliable than it once was. But it has not made it easy, and it is a long, long way from engineering the pilot out of the picture — something we needn’t be looking for in the first place.

I know how this sounds to some of you. It comes across as jealousy, or I sound like a Luddite pilot trying to defend his profession against the encroachment of technology and an inevitable obsolescence.

You can think that all you want.

I am not against the advance of technology. I am against foolish extrapolations of it.

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The only people more insufferable than aerospace academics yammering about the prospect of pilotless planes (see automation myths, Chapter 4) are the desktop simulator buffs who think they can hop into a 767 and fly it like a pro. They were given some false confidence back in 2007 when the popular Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters” tried to find out if a nonpilot could land a plane. The “Mythbusters” series always struck me as a fun and useful idea for a program. A sort of Snopes.com of the airwaves, it seeks to prove or dispel various urban legends. With commercial aviation as rich as it is with mysteries and misconceptions, it’s perhaps no surprise that plane-related topics are among the show’s most frequent.

This time, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman attempted to find out if a person with no flight training, namely themselves, can safely land an airliner. Their answer turns out to be yes, probably. The correct answer is no, but who am I to quibble?

“Mythbusters” sets things up in a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a “generic commercial airliner,” which is to say a rather unrealistic one. A seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructs the hosts via radio. On the first try, they crash. The second time, they make it. But all they really do, essentially, is land a make-believe airplane in a contrived, tightly controlled experiment. It was not, I’m sorry to say, very realistic.

Most disappointing, “Mythbusters” tells us that the hosts could have made it much easier on themselves had they simply taken advantage of their plane’s automation. Once again we’re fed the oft-repeated baloney about how landing a modern aircraft requires not much more than punching a few buttons. Ironic how a television program whose purpose is to cut through the crap and set the record straight manages not only to get it wrong, but in the process perpetuates the widespread misunderstanding of what cockpit automation really is and how it works.

To repeat what I said earlier: Out in the field, automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. The technology is advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to use it properly… well, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first. You might here a surgeon make a comment about the “simplicity” of a certain procedure or operation, just as a pilot will sometimes speak of an airplane that is “simple to fly.” That in no way implies that the layperson could give it a go and be successful, and it does nothing to diminish the knowledge and experience required to perform at that level in the first place.

Most jetliners are certified for automatic landings — “autolands” in pilot-speak (though in practice they are rare; I see perhaps two or three each year). That’s a misleading and too-simple term, because the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn’t need to rehearse them twice a year in the simulator or need to consistently review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals. The technology is there if you need it — for that foggy arrival in Buenos Aires with the visibility sitting at zero — but it’s anything but simple. In most respects, an automatic landing is more challenging, more complicated, and more work-intensive than a manual one.

Now, to be fair, the question of whether a nonpilot could land an actual jetliner depends somewhat on the meaning of “land.” Do you mean from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway, with someone talking you through it? Or do you mean the whole, full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown.

You’ve got a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won’t become a cartwheeling fireball. But the scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly becomes incapacitated, and only a brave passenger, who has perhaps a little desktop sim time under his belt, can save the day. He’ll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down.

The chances of success in this scenario are approximately zero percent. There is a very outside chance of being talked through a series of descents and into setting up an autoland procedure, but this scenario would be fraught with complications and the chances of disaster extremely high. The person would have to be coached from 35,000 feet all the way to the point where an automatic approach could commence, complete with any number of turns, descents, decelerations and aircraft configuration changes. I reckon that would be about as easy as dictating brain surgery over the telephone to somebody who has never held a scalpel. I wonder if our would-be hero would be able to find the microphone switch with which to contact air traffic control, let alone the maneuvering, programming, navigating, communicating and configuring it would take to get the thing safely on the ground. Keeping the plane upright would be the easiest part. It’s the small stuff that presents the greatest challenge: working the radios, dialing in changes to the autoflight panel, updating speeds and altitudes.

A few of you might remember the film “Airport ’75.” A 747 is struck near the flight deck in midair by a small propeller plane, and all three pilots are taken out. I almost hate to say it, but dangling Charlton Heston from a helicopter and dropping him through the hole in the fuselage wasn’t as far-fetched a solution as it might sound. It was about the only way that jumbo jet was getting onto the ground in fewer than a billion pieces. The scene were Karen Black, playing a flight attendant, coaxes the crippled jumbo over a mountain range was, if less than technically accurate, useful in demonstrating the difficulty any civilian would have of pulling off even the simplest maneuver.

Luckily there has never been a case where a passenger needed to be drafted for cockpit duty. I guess that means either it never will happen, or is destined to happen soon, depending how cynical you are about statistics. A few years ago, here in New England, after the lone pilot of a Cape Air commuter plane became ill, a passenger took over and performed a safe landing. The TV news had a field day with that one. As it happened, the passenger was a licensed private pilot and the aircraft was a 10-seat, piston-powered Cessna 402.

Watching planes land, it strikes me that their tires must endure an awful lot of stress.

Flat tires aren’t common, but they happen once in a while. Blowouts of a plane’s forward (nose gear) tires are by nature pretty innocuous. Those involving main-gear tires beneath the wings and fuselage are a little different, and can be dangerous.

The most probable time for a tire failure is during or shortly after any sort of high-speed braking event — such as a takeoff abort or an attempted sudden stop after landing. The brakes generate tremendous amounts of energy and heat, some of which is transferred to the tires themselves. Although airplane tires are filled with inert nitrogen and affixed with fuse plugs that cause them to automatically deflate, rather than burst, failure of a main-gear tire at high runway speed can still induce all sorts of unpleasantness, from reduced braking capabilities to the chance of fire. Making things worse is the possibility of a single failed tire propagating the failure of those around it. A runway abort with multiple expired tires can be a dicey operation, and should a burst occur anywhere near takeoff speed the smartest course of action is to continue the takeoff and deal with the problem once airborne.

In 1986 a Mexicana 727 went down after takeoff from Mexico City killing 167 people. An overheated brake caused one of the plane’s four main tires to burst, with shrapnel severing fuel, hydraulic and electrical lines. It had been erroneously serviced with air instead of nitrogen. Inflation pressure too is important; a too-low tire can generate intense temperatures. In 1991 a Canadian-registered DC-8 crashed in Saudi Arabia killing 261 people. A single, underinflated tire transferred energy to a second one, and both came apart during takeoff. Bits of material then began to burn after gear retraction. Fire spread through the cabin as the plane circled back, with seats and their occupants ejected through the fuselage. And last but not least, the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000 was linked to a fuel tank puncture brought on by a burst tire.

Though, to be clear, most blowouts, even at high speeds, turn out to be harmless. Modern airliners are protected with highly sophisticated anti-skid systems, brake temperature readouts in their cockpits, and wheel-well fire suppression systems in the gear bays. Those catastrophes above involved models now obsolete. One of them was a DC-8, a plane that I’m all too familiar with, having worked aboard a freighter version for the better part of four years…

Late one night in 1998 we were prepping for takeoff out of Brussels, Belgium, at our highest allowable taxi tonnage when the ground controllers gave us a long, circuitous route to runway 25R. Rolling along the apron in predawn darkness, we suddenly heard a bang and felt a shudder. A small pothole, we concluded, and kept going, as otherwise the aircraft felt normal. Just as we turned onto the runway and were cleared for takeoff, we heard a second bang, followed rapidly by a third, and then a fourth. And with that, the airplane — all 355,000 pounds of it — seized and wouldn’t move.

The first noise we’d heard was one of the DC-8′s eight main tires violently giving up the ghost. At max weight and after several sharp turns along the taxiways, it was only a matter of time before the adjacent one met a similar fate. With two gone, stress on the remaining two sent them popping as well. We were lucky things happened when it did, and not at 150 knots, with the threshold lights fast approaching. The runway was closed for seven hours until the crippled plane could be unloaded, de-fueled, and towed away for repairs.

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How about some honest and statistical encouragement, please, for those of who are terrified of flying?

Can I cure your fear of flying? That depends more on the nature of your fears than my skills of explanation. The catch is, most pilots aren’t psychologists, and not everybody’s fears are rational. In a high percentage of cases, what fearful flyers actually fear has little or nothing to do with flying itself, and cannot be explained away by statistics or straight talk. They don’t need a pilot; they need a mental health professional.

A certain level of fear is absolutely normal, whether you’re a first time flyer or a seasoned crewmember. I can’t be surprised that millions of reasonable people find it hard to reconcile with the notion of traveling hundreds of miles-per-hour, far above the earth, inside pressurized tubes weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Flying is not natural for human beings, and while it doesn’t quite violate the laws of physics, it does seem to violate any and all common sense. Technology has made it work, but while airplane travel isn’t statistically dangerous, inherently it’s another story.

As for stats. Bill James, the baseball academic, likes to say, “Never use a number when you can avoid it.” Normally he’s right, and I don’t enjoy dishing out numerical platitudes. We’re so used to abstract validation of air safety that it no longer makes us think. A few statistics, however, are worth our time.

For example this one, which you can almost visualize: Each day in the United States alone more than 20,000 commercial flights take to the air. Globally, extrapolation yields about 50,000 daily trips. That’s every day, every week, every month. The ten most popular airlines alone make close to six million flights per year. Of these, the number failing in their attempt to flout gravity can be totaled in astonishingly short shrift.

How short? Here in the United States we are riding strong amidst the safest-ever stretch in the history of commercial aviation. As this manuscript is being prepared in mid-2010, we have not seen a large-scale crash involving a major airline in eight-and-a-half years. That’s a record dating back to the advent of the jetliner itself. Our last catastrophe was that of American Airlines flight 587 near Kennedy airport in November, 2001. Since then, the only major-carrier fatality was that of a small boy killed when a Southwest Airlines 737 overran a snowy runway in Chicago in 2004. The boy was in an automobile struck by the skidding plane. Granted there have been several nonfatal incidents (Sully-upon-Hudson) and a handful of tragedies involving regional planes. but even with these included the nation’s fatal accident rate has fallen 83 percent in the past decade.

This, despite the industry’s unprecedented fiscal woes. The fallout from September 11th gave us thousands of layoffs and four major carrier bankruptcy filings; then came the 2007-2008 fuel-spike crisis, followed by a terrible recession. Say what you want of passenger service, but although our largest airlines have been reeling financially, they have remained impeccably safe.

Here’s some more: In a 2003 study published by American Scientist magazine, University of Michigan researchers Michael Flannagan and Michael Sivak reevaluated the old flying-v-driving contention. To be as conservative as possible, their technique calculated probabilities based not on kilometers covered, but on numbers of takeoffs and landings, when over 90 percent of air crashes occur. And they considered highway data only from rural interstates — the safest driving environment. Their data showed that if a passenger chooses to drive, rather than fly, the distance of a typical flight segment, he is 65 times more likely to be killed.

Worldwide, it’s no less impressive. Looking back over a 30-year span, the data is remarkable. Globally there are twice as many commercial aircraft, carrying twice as many passengers as existed in 1980. Yet, per passenger-miles flown, air travel is an estimated five times safer. Narrowing it the past ten years, the number of people flying annually has increased by roughly 20 percent, to just over two billion. Over that span, the number of annual major accidents has held steady at around 15.

How we got to this level is owed to a long and seldom-acknowledged collaboration between the airline industry, regulators, pilot groups, and international organizations like ICAO. (ICAO — Eye-kay-oh, the International Civil Aviation Organization — is the civil aviation directorate of the United Nations, and sets global protocols on a wide-range of safety and operational issues, from runway markings to approach procedures.) Not long ago, as air travel was beginning to rapidly expand in places like China, India, and Brazil, experts warned of a tipping point. Unless certain deficiencies were addressed, we were told, disasters would become epidemic, at a rate of up to one per week. Fortunately they were addressed, most notably in the areas of crew training and cockpit technology, and the end result is that we’ve effectively engineered away some of the most common causes of crashes.

Yet you wouldn’t know it, tuning in to the news. And that’s what makes all of this so ironic: the media’s relentless hyping of minor mishaps, precautionary landings and terror alerts, leads many to believe that airline travel is more perilous than ever, when exactly the opposite is true.

Keeping it that way, however, is going to take some effort. In the eyes of some, we are closing in on a tipping point. They cite, among other problems, regulatory foot-dragging, lax hiring and training standards for pilots, and a general attitude of complacency. And while I shouldn’t have to say it, here goes: At some point our luck will run out. There will be another catastrophic accident. Affirming this today is a good way of reducing the shock later on. It’s not to suggest that we let our guard down; it’s to recognize the inevitable and acknowledge that no system, no matter how good, can ever be perfect.

Unfortunately, when it happens, we should probably brace ourselves for the reaction. The dearth of any calamitous disasters for such a long stretch all but guarantees an explosion, if you’ll pardon the expression, of sensationalist coverage and panic. The spectacle attributed to nonevents over the past few years is a depressing precursor of what’s to come. The worst thing about the crash will be the loss of life. The second worst thing will be the overreaction, hype, and lack of context.

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But assuming such a high level of safety exists, why are the airlines so silent about it? Why not use it to their advantage?

Not only are they silent about it, they are prone to exacerbating people’s fears by being such lousy communicators. Airlines have a terrible habit of responding to anomalies — be it a minor malfunction or a catastrophic crash — in one of two ways: either with total silence or, perhaps worse, by employing hideous oversimplifications. The result is nearly total lack of trust from the public. People dislike airlines and don’t believe anything they say — partly because they never actually say anything; or, when they do, it’s both condescending and terrifying.

As a rule, airlines in America do not use safety as a marketing tool. All employ the word in a vague and general fashion, but seldom with regard to specific programs or innovations. To do so would be on one hand statistically manipulative, and on the other hand a potential form market suicide, undercutting the presumption of air safety in general. Not to mention the humiliation a given carrier would endure should a disaster transpire. For airline A to sell itself as safer than everyone else, there needs to be a presumption of danger aboard its competitors. This would entail some dubious statistical maneuvering. Since the terror attacks of 2001, American Airlines has had one fatal accident; the other network carriers none. For United or Delta to brag of having a better record than American, is, if mathematically accurate, shamelessly underhanded.

Few of us require a primer on the ruthlessness of corporate advertising, but in this case there’s a risk factor that compels the airlines into a collective honesty. With casualties so rare, the statistical swing from a “safe” airline to a “dangerous” one hinges on select few events drawn from thousands, or even millions, of departures. Reputations can be lost through a single act of folly or stroke of lousy luck. Quite understandably, airlines have no desire to put their competitive eggs in such a precarious basket.

Furthermore, the moment any airline dares put safety into the mix, the issue loses its statistical context and becomes a play on passenger emotions. All airlines will suffer if an already nervous public begins to openly and increasingly contemplate its mortality while surfing Travelocity. Flying is safe and a majority of people, including most fearful flyers, assent to this reality with little or no protest. That’s good enough for the airlines.

Having said all that, there are ways to play the game slyly. An airline is never faulted for boasting that its crews receive the best training possible; the preflight demo rambles imperatively of seat belts and oxygen masks; the captain reminds you that nothing is more important than the well-being everybody on board. But this is not a mass-market pitch. Protocol permits any airline call itself safe. Just not safer.

One of the bullet points of a recent JetBlue’s advertising campaign is that of “new planes.” The service lives of aircraft, as readers of these pages should know, extend for decades. In America, comparing crash records on the basis of old versus new is no less specious than doing American versus United. Is the implication here one of safety? Perhaps “new” refers only to greater luggage space, clean carpets and a cutting-edge entertainment system. After all, who doesn’t like new? Should you take it a slightly different way, however, well, I’m betting JetBlue doesn’t mind that either. The suggestion is made coyly and noncommittally, if at all.

Just because an airlines doesn’t showboat its safety initiatives doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Cynics will be eager to cite a seeming trail of greed and criminal negligence: airlines ruled culpable for certain crashes, maintenance practices occasionally found suspect, and so on. But I hasten to remind you how much a carrier stands to lose should one of its planes go down. To suggest the industry, along with its Federal overseers, are playing fast and loose with the lives of the traveling public is a terrible distortion.

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We in the west occasionally hear of the dangers of flying aboard certain airlines overseas. Are such fears justified?

We need to begin this discussion by acknowledging that there is virtually no such thing as a “dangerous” airline, anywhere. Some are safer than others, but even the least safe airline is still very safe.

The region of the world with the worst reputation by far is sub-Saharan Africa, where scores of small companies operate without anywhere near the oversight or resources of airlines in the west. But even here the statistics can be misleading. It’s important to make the distinction between mainline African air carriers, which are very safe, and lower-tier cargo and non-scheduled commercial operators. Flying on South African Airways, Tunisair or Ethiopian Air Lines, for example, all of whom have respectable records, is not the same as flying aboard some Congolese cargo runner or upstart air taxi outfit. Africa’s “dangerous” airlines are not even airlines as most people think of them.

Takeoff from Kumasi, Ghana, on an Antrak Air truboprop. Photo by author.

“Americans have no reason to be afraid of foreign carriers,” says Robert Booth of Aviation Management Services, a consulting firm in Miami. “Plenty of these companies have cultures of safety that meet or exceed our own,” he points out.

That’s a sensible assessment, though some airlines are preceded by their own reputations. Take Russia’s Aeroflot for example. Once upon a time, measured in raw crash totals, Aeroflot had a comparatively poor record. On the face of it anyway. Several asterisks were required, not the least of which was that Aeroflot, in its heydays, was a truly gigantic entity — roughly the size of all U.S. airlines put together — and it engaged in all manner of far-flung operations to distant outposts, such as rural Siberia and even Antarctica.

During the 1990s Aeroflot was splintered into dozens of independent carriers, one of which — still the largest, but nowhere near the heft of the original — inherited the Aeroflot name and identity. Based in Moscow, the Aeroflot that exists today operates about 90 aircraft and transports around seven million passengers annually. It has not had a serious accident in more than a decade.

Korean Air is another. In 1999, Korean was put under FAA sanction and had a code-sharing arrangement with Delta temporarily severed after a string of fatal incidents earlier. People still hold this against them, despite the Korean government’s ambitious overhaul of its entire air system, and despite a sterling critique by ICAO in 2008. It ranked Korea’s aviation safety standards, including its pilot training and maintenance, as the highest in the world, beating out more than a hundred other countries.

Frankly, in certain regions I’d be more comfortable with a local carrier that knows its territory and the quirks of flying there. One example I love to cite is LAB — Lloyd Aereo Boliviano — the national airline of the poorest country in South America. Founded in 1925, LAB plies the treacherous peaks of the Andes in and out of La Paz, the planet’s most highly situated commercial airport. Since 1969, LAB has suffered two fatal crashes on scheduled passenger runs killing a total of 36 people. This is not a mainstay airline, but two crashes in 34 years amidst jagged mountains and the hazards of the high Altiplano, is outstanding.

How about Ethiopian Airlines. Many of us remember the videotaped crash of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines 767 in 1996, but that carrier, now approaching its 70th year of operation, is statistically one of the continent’s safest. When you consider Ethiopia’s economic troubles, rugged terrain, and the myriad challenges of African flying in general, EAL’s record — three fatal events, including that hijacking — is exceptional. (For good measure, its passenger service standards put those of most American airlines to shame.)

In America, the FAA, whose penchant for safety is outdone only by a fondness for annoying acronyms, has come up with the International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program to judge standards of other countries, using criteria based on ICAO guidelines. Classifications are awarded to nations themselves and not to specific airlines. Category 1 status goes to those who meet the mark, and Category 2 to those who don’t. Countries in Category 2, do not “provide safety oversight of air carrier operators in accordance with the minimum safety standards.” Because the categories pertain to countries and not individual airlines, and because the restrictions apply unilaterally, IASA has its critics. Category 2 airlines can still operate to and from the United States, but may not add capacity. Yet reciprocal service is unaffected. Hence, if a Venezuelan airline is embargoed from adding round trips in the busy Miami-Caracas market, American, United, Delta or Continental are happy to jump in. Robert Booth finds the program’s logic badly flawed. “If a country’s oversight is supposedly inadequate, how come our airlines can fly there without penalty, but theirs can’t fly here?” Booth recommends a bilateral capacity freeze to level the field and encourage governments to meet better standards.

In 2005, the European Union began compiling a long and controversial airline blacklist. The list is reviewed every three months. The most recent version bans select airlines from various countries, as well as all carriers from Congo, Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Gabon, Sierra Leone and Swaziland.

But importantly, the vast majority of the forbidden operators are airlines that a typical traveler wouldn’t ever fly on in the first place. They consist mainly of marginal cargo outfits, most of them based in West and Central Africa. To give you some idea, the highest profile names on the blacklist have belonged to Indonesia’s national carrier Garuda, North Korea’s mysterious Air Koryo, and Afghanistan’s Ariana. The latter is a company with a storied history going back more than 50 years, but for obvious reasons lacks the resources to currently meet European standards.

Below is a list of airlines that have gone fatality-free for at least the past 30 years. Certain small companies have been omitted, though I’ve chosen to retain national flag carriers where applicable, regardless of size. All qualifying airlines have been in existence since at least 1980:

Air Berlin
Air Jamaica
Air Malta
Air Mauritius
Air Niugini (Papua New Guinea)
Air New Zealand
Air Portugal
Air Seychelles
Air Tanzania
Air Zimbabwe
Aer Lingus
All Nippon Airways
Austrian Airlines
Bahamasair
Britannia Airways
Cathay Pacific
Cayman Airways
Finnair
Hawaiian Airlines
Icelandair
Lacsa (Costa Rica)
Meridiana (Italy)
Monarch Airlines (UK)
Pluna (Uruguay)
Royal Brunei
Royal Jordanian
Syrianair
Tunisair
Tyrolean Airways (Austria)
Qantas

I chose 1980 to best account for the changeover period from older, first-generation jets and propliners to what most would consider modern fleets. Most of the above airlines have perfect records pre-dating 1980. Several, including Air Jamaica and Tunisair, have never recorded a fatality. Opening up the list to airlines with one fatal mishap in the past 30 years takes in, just for starters, Royal Air Maroc, TACA, Yemenia and Mexicana. Even the much maligned Air Afrique, a West African collective that went bust in 2001, listed but a single accident in over three-plus decades of flying. Ghana Airways, another African star until its demise in 2004, had an even cleaner record, marred by a single fatality in 1969.

Whether the fortunes of some of these carriers attests to exemplary levels of oversight and professionalism, or merely to luck, is open to some argument. Air Zimbabwe, to pick one from the list above, is a tiny outfit with only a handful of aircraft. Compare to American Airlines, with hundreds of planes and thousands of daily departures. American has outcrashed Air Zimbabwe 5-0 since 1980 but plainly the comparison is unfair. Nonetheless, any unblemished legacy lasting 30 years is impressive on its own accord, particularly when the setting is an underdeveloped nation with substandard facilities and infrastructure.

And remember that even the worst airline, statistically, is still a better bet than driving.

Airbus A330 of TAM Linhas Aéreas at Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo by author.

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Is it true that Qantas, the Australian airline, has never suffered a fatal accident?

Quick, what’s the safest airline in the world? If you’re like most people, you probably think it’s Qantas. The 90 year-old Australian icon, known also for its striking kangaroo tails and koala bear TV commercials, is famous for being the only major airline to have never had a crash. That’s the myth, perpetuated far and wide, which understandably Qantas doesn’t exactly rush to dispel. Let the record show, however, that the history of Qantas is scarred by at least seven fatal incidents.

All of these, to be fair, took place prior to 1951 and well before the introduction of jets. The carrier has been perfect ever since. A 60-year run might not be as impressive as a 90-year run, but either way Qantas posts an impeccable resume.

But as we saw in the previous question, so do many airlines. And for all its merits, Qantas is a relatively small company (135 planes on its roster as of 2010), and historically a strong percentage of its flying has been of the long-range, intercontinental variety. This equals fewer takeoffs and landings, when the majority of accidents occur. Other perennial long-haulers include Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Emirates, all of whom, coincidentally or otherwise, boast similarly stellar, if not quite perfect records.

Qantas stands as a kind of anti-Aeroflot. Whereas many people’s perceptions of Aeroflot are based on silly caricature — vodka-swilling pilots at the controls of patched-together Cold War rustbuckets — an even greater number have fallen for the myth of the Immaculate Qantas. This false history was even immortalized by Hollywood, through an exchange between Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie “Rain Man.”

“All airlines have crashed at one time or another,” Cruise says to Hoffman. “That doesn’t mean that they are not safe.”

“Qantas,” responds Hoffman. “Qantas never crashed.”

I love that exchange because it’s Cruise’s character, not Hoffman’s, who makes the valuable point.

“Qantas”, incidentally, is the name of a rare, winged Tasmanian marsupial known for its unique flying skills and longevity. Either that, or it’s an acronym for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, founded in 1920.

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So, if Qantas isn’t the safest airline, which is?

I’m hit with this question all the time. I do not have an answer because, frankly, there isn’t one. Considering just how rare crashes are, such comparisons are little more than an academic exercise. When differences are determined by a small handful of incidents spread over thousands or even millions of departures, the distinctions aren’t particularly meaningful. There are sites on the Web that happily serve up airline-v-airline safety data, but I advise that people not bother playing this game. You can drive yourself crazy poring over the fractions of a percentage that differentiate one carrier’s fatality rates from another. If you feel more comfortable picking Delta over United, or Lufthansa over China Airlines, go for it. Will you actually be safer? On some miniscule statistical level, possibly; on a practical level, no.

This same line of reasoning extends to equally popular aircraft-vs-aircraft debate. Which are more trustworthy, 737s or A320s? Answer: take your pick. Virtually every established airline, and every certificated commercial plane, is “safe” by any useful definition.

The nervous flyer’s tendency is to make distinctions in an abstract, purely statistical sense rather than a practical one. For instance, go to databanks like Airsafe.com and you can spend hours comparing and contrasting accident rates. But really, is airline A, with one crash in 20 years, a safer bet than airline B, with two crashes over that same span? Would a careful audit of training, maintenance, and day-to-day operations determine that AirTran is, when hashed out to the third decimal place, a riskier bet than American, Delta, or United? Possibly, but for reasonable intents and purposes they’re all up to par.

There are, and always have been, newer and smaller airlines that run highly professional, button-down operations up to the highest possible standards. At the same time, some the world’s eldest and most respected carriers are occasionally guilty of deadly malpractice. Averaged out, it’s essentially a level playing field, and asking which is the safest airline to fly is a bit like asking which is the best lottery to play. If you’re wondering which criteria to employ, whether you’re headed for Madison or Madagascar, stick with price, schedule, and service.

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In the past you have alluded to the 1970s and 1980s as a “Golden Age of Air Crimes,” rife with bombings and other terror attacks against airplanes. Can we have some more perspective on this?

The grandiosity of the September 11th attacks, with their Hollywood thriller plotline and operatic fireballs, has gummed up our memories. We talk of having entered some unprecedented “age of terror,” sometimes called the “post-9/11 era,” when in reality politically motivated violence against civil aviation has been with us for decades.

PERSPECTIVE:

THE GOLDEN AGE OF AIR CRIMES….

1970: A Pan Am 747 bound for New York is skyjacked after takeoff from Amsterdam. The flight is diverted to Cairo where all of the 170 occupants are released. Radicals then blow up the plane.

1970: In the so-called “Black September” hijackings, five jets, including ones belonging to TWA, Pan Am, and Israel’s El Al, are commandeered over Europe during a three-day span by a group called the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Three of the five planes are diverted to a remote airstrip in Jordan, rigged with explosives and blown up. A fourth is flown to Egypt and destroyed there. All passengers had been freed before the aircraft were demolished.

1971: A man using the name DB Cooper skyjacks and threatens to blow up a Northwest Orient 727 flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. Over southwestern Washington he parachutes out the back of the plane with a hefty ransom and is never seen again, dead or alive.

1972: A JAT (Yugoslav Airlines) DC-9 en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb explodes at 33,000 feet. The Ustashe, a.k.a. Croatian National Movement, admits to the bombing.

1972: Explosion aboard a Cathay Pacific jet flying from Bangkok to Hong Kong kills 81 people. A Thai police lieutenant is accused of hiding the bomb in order to murder his fiancée.

1972: In the arrivals lounge of the Lod airport near Tel Aviv, three men from the Japanese Red Army, recruited by the Palestinian PLFP, open fire with machine guns and grenades, killing 26 people and injuring 80.

1973: As passengers board a Pan Am 747 at the airport in Rome, terrorists spray the plane with gunfire and toss grenades into the cabin, killing 30.

1973: Eighty-one perish as an Aeroflot jet explodes over Siberia during an attempted skyjacking.

1974: A TWA 707 flying from Athens to Rome (part of Tel Aviv-New York service), falls into the sea near Greece, the result of an explosive device hidden in the aft cargo compartment.

1974: A man detonates two grenades aboard an Air Vietnam 727 when the crew refuses to fly him to Hanoi.

1976: A Cubana DC-8 crashes near Barbados killing 73. An anti-Castro exile and three alleged accomplices are put on trial but acquitted for lack of evidence.

1976: Air France Flight 139, bound from Tel Aviv to Athens to Paris, is hijacked by a combined force of PFLP and Revolutionäre Zellen (RZ). The plane is diverted first to Benghazi, Libya before continuing to Entebbe, Uganda. At Entebbe, 105 hostages are held until the plane is raided by commandos from the Israel Defense Forces. During the raid, three passengers, seven hijackers, one Israeli and approximately forty Ugandans are killed.

1977: Both pilots of a Malaysian Airline System (today called Malaysia Airlines) 737 are shot by a skyjacker. The plane crashes into a swamp.

1985: The Abu Nidal group kills 20 people in a pair of coordinated ticket-counter assaults at airports in Vienna and Rome.

1985: Shiite militiamen armed with grenades and pistols storm TWA Flight 847 on a flight from Athens to Rome. The plane is taken on a breathtaking, two-week odyssey to Lebanon, Algeria, and back again. At one point passengers are removed, split into groups, and held captive in downtown Beirut. The sole casualty is a U.S. Navy diver who is shot in the temple and dumped on the tarmac. All remaining hostages are eventually released, but not before the Israeli government agrees to free more than 700 Shiite fighters captured in southern Lebanon. The photograph of TWA captain John Testrake, his head out the cockpit window, collared by a gun-wielding terrorist, was broadcast worldwide and became an unforgettable icon of the siege.

1985: An Air-India 747 on a service between Toronto and Bombay is bombed over the North Atlantic by Sikh militants. The 329 fatalities remain history’s worst single-plane act of terrorism. A second bomb, intended for another Air-India 747, detonates prematurely in Tokyo before being loaded.

1986: As TWA flight 840 descends through 10,000 feet toward Athens, a bomb goes off in the cabin. Four people are ejected through a tear in the 727′s fuselage.

1986: At Karachi international airport, a Pan Am 747 is preparing for departure when four heavily armed members of the Abu Nidal group seize the aircraft. When Pakistani forces storm the plane, the terrorists begin shooting and lobbing grenades. Twenty-two passengers are killed, and 150 are wounded. Although all four terrorists were captured and sent to prison in Pakistan, they were released in 2001.

1987: A Korean Air Lines 707 disappears over the Andaman Sea en route from Baghdad to Seoul. One of two Koreans suspected of hiding a bomb commits suicide before he’s arrested. His accomplice, a young woman, confesses to leaving the device — fashioned from both plastic and liquid explosives — in an overhead rack before disembarking during an intermediate stop. Condemned to death, the woman is pardoned in 1990 by the president of South Korea.

1987: At Los Angeles International Airport, a recently fired customer service agent, David Burke, sneaks a loaded gun past security and boards a Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) jet on its way to San Francisco. During cruise he breaks into the cockpit, shoots both pilots, then noses the airplane into the ground near Harmony, California, killing all 44 on board. (Unbelievable as it might sound, the government’s response to the incident was not to implement security screening for ground personnel, but instead for pilots and flight attendants.)

1988: Pan Am flight 103 is carrying 259 people when it disintegrates a half-hour after takeoff from London-Heathrow. The majority of the wreckage falls onto the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 more people. The largest section, a flaming heap of wing and fuselage, drops onto the Sherwood Crescent area of the town, destroying twenty houses and ploughing a crater three stories deep. The concussion is so strong that Richter devices record a 1.6 magnitude tremor. Until you-know-what, the destruction of flight 103 represents the worst-ever terrorist attack against a civilian US target. One of the most intensive criminal investigations in history would bring two Libyan operatives, al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life, though he was released by the British government in 2009.

1989: Libya will also be held responsible for the bombing of UTA flight 772 nine months after Lockerbie. Most Americans don’t remember this incident, but it has never been forgotten in France. A hundred and seventy people from 17 countries, including seven Americans, were killed when an explosive device went off in the forward luggage hold of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 on a flight from Brazzaville, Congo, to Paris. The wreckage fell into the Tenere region of the Sahara, in northern Niger, one of the planet’s most remote areas. A French court eventually convicted six Libyans in absentia for the murders, including Mohammar Khaddafy’s brother-in-law.

1989: In an attempt to kill police informants, members of a cocaine cartel blow up Avianca Flight 203 bound from Bogota to Cali. There are no survivors among the 110 crew and passengers.

1990: A young man claiming to have explosives strapped to his body forces his way into the cockpit of a Xiamen Airlines 737 and demands to be flown to Taiwan. Running out of fuel, the crew attempts a landing at Canton (Guangzhou), when a struggle erupts. The plane veers off the runway and collides with two other aircraft.

1994: Riding along as an auxiliary crewmember, Auburn Calloway, an off-duty Federal Express pilot scheduled for termination, attacks the three-man crew of a DC-10 with a spear gun and a hammer, nearly killing all of them. His plan, before he’s finally overtaken by the battered and bloodied pilots, is to crash the huge airliner into FedEx’s Memphis headquarters.

1994: An Air France Airbus A300 is stormed by a foursome of extremist Muslims in Algeria. The plane is forced to Marseilles where seven people die when French troops rush aboard for a rescue. News footage shows an Air France pilot hurling himself out of a cockpit window while an explosion flashes behind him.

1996: An Ethiopian Air Lines 767 is hijacked over the Indian Ocean. The jet runs out of fuel and heads for a ditching off the Comoros Islands. Hijackers wrestle with the pilots, and the plane breaks apart upon hitting the water, killing 125.

1999: A deranged 28-year-old forces his way onto the flight deck of an All Nippon Airways 747 carrying 503 people and stabs the captain to death with an 8-inch knife.

1999: Air Botswana captain Chris Phatswe steals an empty ATR commuter plane and slams it into two parked aircraft, killing himself and destroying virtually the entire fleet of his nation’s tiny airline.

And let’s not forget what might have been. We were fortunate to interdict in the plans of Ramzi Yousef, nephew of September 11th mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a master mixer of hard-to-detect liquid explosives. In addition to his links to the 1993 World Trade Center prelude, Yousef was the man behind “Project Bojinka,” a plan to blow up a dozen jetliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean. Before he was apprehended in Pakistan in 1995, Yousef had completed a test run on a Philippine Airlines 747, killing a Japanese businessman with a small under-seat bomb.

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Which are the largest airlines?

It depends how you measure it. The easiest method is just to tally up the total number of passengers carried in a year. A more accurate metric is something called a revenue passenger kilometer, or RPK. One passenger traveling one kilometer equals one RPK. In other words, flying a hundred people from Cape Town to London outscores flying them from Dallas to Phoenix. Except, running Dallas-Phoenix 12 times a day can make up the difference. Thus RPKs account for customer volume, frequency of flights and distances flown.

By almost all metrics the world’s biggest airline, at the moment, is Delta. Historically Delta hovered around third place in terms of both passenger totals and RPKs. Having acquired Northwest, which sat in the 8th/11th position, Delta vaults into first by a wide margin. The combined carrier will transport approximately 120 million passengers annually, racking up some 28 billion RPKs.

As for the rest of the top ten, those measuring techniques become important. In passenger totals, Southwest holds second place, with over 101 million annual boardings, but drops to 6th if you’re using RPKs. Emirates is now the planet’s tenth largest airline in RPKs, yet fails to crack the top 20 in passengers. By the same token, little known China Southern is at number 7 in total passengers, but 16th by RPKs.

The 20 largest airlines in the world, ranked by RPKs

(excludes regional subsidiaries)

1. Delta Air Lines
2. American Airlines
3. Air France / KLM 4. United Airlines
5. Continental Airlines
6. Lufthansa
7. Southwest Airlines
8. British Airways 9. Emirates
10. US Airways
11. Cathay Pacific
12. Singapore Airlines
13. Japan Airlines (JAL)
14. Qantas
15. China Southern
16. Air Canada
17. Air China
18. All Nippon Airways (ANA)
19. Thai Airways
20. Ryanair

Carriers swap places year to year, and by the time you’re reading this it’s not out of the question that another major merger will have occurred. Nevertheless, the list above is apt to look more or less the same three, four, or even five years from now.

You’ll notice that Air France and KLM are counted together. I wish this weren’t so, but that’s the way the data is tracked. The two companies merged in 2004, but have kept separate operational structures, with independent fleets and employee groups.

You might be tempted to think of the biggest airline as the one with the most aircraft, but capacity differences make this reasoning specious. American Eagle, for instance, has more planes than JAL, Qantas, or All Nippon, but is nowhere close when it comes to passengers or RPKs. For the record, Delta wins with 750 jetliners, followed by American with just over 600. Air France’s 260 (not including KLM) comprises the largest non-US fleet, followed closely by Lufthansa and China Southern. FedEx, incidentally, has 340 jet freighters, and UPS 220. Obviously these totals are subject to frequent change as planes are bought, sold, mothballed and retired.

Surprisingly, maybe, there are fewer than a dozen airlines worldwide claiming membership to what I like to call the “Six Continent Club” — providing scheduled service to at least one destination in each of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia/Oceania. At the moment, Delta is the first and only US member since Pan Am, alongside Emirates, British Airways, South African Airways, Singapore Airlines and a short list of others.

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Year after year, carriers outside the United States tend to be profitable while our own biggest airlines slip deeper and deeper into the red. Why is this?

That’s an enormous question that would require an entire book of its own to adequately answer. Competitive environment, state ownership and subsidies, and the price of labor all play a role. Here’s a list of the best performing airlines in 2008, measured in net profit:

1. Qantas
2. Lufthansa
3. Turkish Airlines
4. Singapore Airlines
5. LAN (Chile, Peru, Ecuador)
6. Emirates
7. Aeroflot
8. Southwest Airlines
9. Air New Zealand
10. COPA (Panama)

Plenty of stars on that list, but almost no stars and stripes.

Not all of those ten are privately run, which brings up the issue of governments providing tax breaks, subsidies and other favors for airlines they sometimes own outright. There’s a widely held assumption that this is done excessively and unfairly, but in truth the degrees vary. For example, many EU and Asian carriers are up in arms over the massive expansion of Emirates, which they attribute to coddling of the carrier by its owner, the government of the United Arab Emirates. However, as revealed in a recent article in Air Transport World, audits by two renowned investment houses concluded otherwise. “We could not find anything in Emirates’ accounts which indicated that the business is subsidized directly or indirectly or given undue preference,” said one representative. People point out that Emirates pays no corporate income tax, but as the ATW feature notes, it also bears significant social costs by providing housing and education for thousands of expatriate employees.

We’re foolish to go searching overseas for answers. The problem isn’t between the US airlines and those in other countries, it’s between the US airlines themselves.

After September 11th, the toxic ramifications of terrorism, war, and chronic economic infirmity went on to hand the largest US airlines their worst-ever financial scorching. By 2002, the country’s top four carriers at the time — American, United, US Airways and Delta, a kind of Four Airlines of the Apocalypse — accumulated $9.6 billion in red ink. Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways all declared bankruptcy — the latter twice. Layoffs were in the tens of thousands. Then, just as things began to turn around in the mid-2000s came unprecedented spikes in fuel costs followed by a pummeling recession.

While the entrenched old-timers have been gasping for survival, rapacious low cost carriers (LCCs) opportunists like jetBlue, Southwest and AirTran have expanded meteorically. Unencumbered by high labor tabs and the need to support ponderous, decades-old infrastructures, these adaptable youngsters maintain expenditures far below those of the legacy carriers, and have the profits to show for it. (And if you think this is strictly an American craze, see Europe, where enterprises like easyJet and Ryanair are giving mainstay carriers a literal run for their money. LCCs have sprung up in Malaysia, Australia, Kuwait, Hungary and Slovakia. In Brazil, the airline Gol has poached a quarter of the market.)

For the legacies, one survival tactic has been the outsourcing business to regional jet operators. RJs today are responsible for an astounding 50 percent of all commercial flights in the United States. At first, RJ deployment tended to mirror that of their predecessor turboprops, going hub-and-spoke on routes of 500 miles or less. In time, RJs proved able to capitalize on longer runs previously the sole domain of Airbuses and Boeings. Thus, whether Chicago-Peoria or Chicago-New York, RJs are profitable across a wide swath of markets.

In a lot of ways the US airline as we knew it has ceased to exist. At any large airport today, legacy jets sit tethered to the gate looking like wounded creatures on life support. All around them maneuver nimble packs of Canadairs and Embraers, either circling voraciously or going happily about their business, depending how you see it.

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Has this not provided an upside for the consumer, however?

It sure has. Although things have been catastrophic for the legacy carriers and their workers, passengers have reaped the benefit of dirt-cheap fares. The legacies have had little choice but to match the ticket prices offered by LCCs, one result being that airfares in 2010 remain approximately where they were in the mid-1980s. The real cost of air travel — the price of a ticket adjusted for inflation — has fallen sharply over the past 20 years, even with tremendous surges in the cost of oil. Long after Deregulation, fares have continued to drop as airlines have worked to squeeze cost from their product. Amenities and customer service aren’t what they used to be — on the whole they’re acceptable, and of late they’ve been improving — but what do you expect from carriers whose profit margins come down to a few pennies per passenger? Airlines sell what people claim to want. And more than anything else they want rock-bottom fares.

Another seldom acknowledged reality of air travel in 2010 can be seen in the airlines’ route networks. On the domestic front, you can fly between almost any two airports in America with, at worst, a single stopover. A few decades ago, that one-stop trip from Tucson, Arizona, to Bangor, Maine, would have entailed awkward transfers through two, three, or maybe four other cities. Internationally, transoceanic routes have fragmented, allowing people to fly direct from many smaller hubs in the US to points in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Nobody enjoys holding patterns or sitting on a tarmac, but in earlier days the overall journey time would have been longer — not to mention pricier.

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Why are airplane seats so bloody uncomfortable?

That depends where you’re sitting. Ironically, as we whine about the lack of space and perks in economy class, premium class service — first and business class — never been more comfortable and extravagant than it is today. Not since the sleeping berths of the 1940s have things been so swanky up front — though definitely in a sleeker, 21st century flavor. Once upon a time, plush leather seat and a doting stewardess were the benchmarks of world-class service. Today, competition and technology have combined to give us all kinds of eccentric luxuries.

On outré-chic airlines like Singapore, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates and Qatar Airways, one finds a stand-up cocktail lounge, and even an inflight beauty therapist. Passengers doze in individual mini-suites with six-foot seat-beds, down-filled duvets and electric privacy barriers. Cabin staff perform turndown service while you slip into designer pajamas, and there’s sometimes a second pull-up chair if you’d like company during dinner. Wide-screen video units offer a choice between hundreds of movies and TV shows. Multiple, circadian-friendly phases of ceiling lighting are adjusted by the crew, including constellations projected onto the overhead bins during nighttime hours.

Of course it goes without saying that most people aren’t riding around on expense accounts, and haven’t got seven thousand dollars to drop on a premium seat to Hong Kong. If it’s any consolation, economy class has its modern-day frills as well. Live TV, inflight Wi-Fi and satellite radio are among today’s amenities available for a nominal fee. Although complimentary meals are increasingly rare, buy-on-board options are affordable and often surprisingly tasty.

Most people are under the impression that airlines continue to cram ever more seats into their economy sections. This is mostly untrue. Airlines cannot simply shove in as many seats as they want. Commercial planes are certified for a maximum occupancy based on, among other things, the number of emergency exits. Most are pretty close to this limit as it stands. These regulations are non-negotiable, and thanks to structural and pressurization concerns you cannot simply cut new exits into the fuselage to account for more rows.

Actually, economy class layouts have hardly changed since jets first became popular in the 1960s. In the early days carriers flirted with five abreast seating on a 727 or 707 instead of the standard six, or four-abreast in a DC-9 rather than five, but these were short-lived schemes, and the cross-sections of airliners as you see them today are basically unchanged from 40 years ago. If anything, modern six-abreast aircraft like the 757 and A320 are slightly wider than the six-abreast 727s and 707s of old. The Airbus A380 has the same ten-across floor plan as the 747, but is wider by approximately a foot.

It’s legroom, not elbow room, that flyers tend to gripe about. But here too, historically, things have been better and worse. The spacing between rows is called “pitch” in the biz, and anybody who flew the old PeopleExpress remembers how pitiless and pitchless a cabin can be. Or Laker Airways, whose “SkyTrain” service ran between the US and London in the 1970s. Sir Freddie Laker, the airline’s flamboyant founder, configured his DC-10s with a bone-crushing 345 seats — about a hundred more than average (the DC-10 had eight full-size exits that helped make this legal).

Not that there still isn’t plenty of room for improvement in the average economy class chair. I don’t know about you, but each time I settle in to one of those things I silently wonder what malformed extraterrestrial it apparently was designed for. “Settle in” is such the wrong term; you don’t attempt to relax so much balance yourself in place. The pressure points are all wrong, your legs are unsupported, there’s no place for your arms, and lumbar support is nil. The tray tables, the armrests, the seat pockets — everything is the wrong shape and in the wrong position. It’s irritating, because things could be a lot more comfortable through modest improvements in basic design.

The most obvious way to make economy class more pleasant would be to install fewer seats in the first place, but this a nonstarter. Profit margins on coach fares are somewhere between tiny and nonexistent, and and just breaking even requires a jam-packed cabin. Cramped quarters, in other words, are unavoidable. Engineers are also faced with the challenge of designing a frame that is lightweight and extremely strong, able to withstand several times the force of gravity. Nevertheless, while the requisites of profit, weight, and crash resistance impose limitations, there’s no excuse for the poorly designed seats we’ve grown accustomed to. Through the use of some high-tech materials and a bit of imagination, a chair can be safe, lightweight, sturdy, and comfortable all at once. Sleek, ergonomically sculpted seats from innovative manufacturers like Recaro and Thompson Solutions have been on the market for years. If only more carriers would buy them.

In addition to a design that actually conforms to the shape of a human body — hardly a radical or financially crippling notion — below are some recommendations. Those of you who do a lot of traveling outside the United States will recongizne that many of the these features are already found aboard the better Asian, European, and Latin American airlines:

1. A wider, adjustable armrest that can actually be shared by two people sitting side-by-side.

2. Lumbar support. Existing seats lack any kind of support. They have only a gaping hole into which your lower back sinks, dragging down the rest of your body.

3. A tray table that extends to reach the body, so a passenger doesn’t need to hunch over to eat or work. Ideally, the tray should have a curved leading edge to better fit your torso. We’re all shaped differently, but a slight indentation would be suitable for virtually anyone. Said tray should be the sort that unfolds from the armrest, not from the seat in front. This solves the hunch-over problem and avoids the hazard of laptop-crushing caused when when the person in front of you suddenly reclines, pinching your screen between the table and the upper cushion.

4. An adjustable footrest. The chance to periodically raise one’s legs makes even short flights considerably more bearable. The various souped-up economy cabins out there — marketed as Economy Plus, Premium Economy, etc. — emphasize legroom as their biggest selling point. I can’t speak for everybody — I’m under six feet tall — but a bigger issue is the inability to periodically liftmy legs.

5. On-demand, in-seat video with a personal screen of at least nine inches. Keeping passengers happy is all about the art of distraction, and the chance to watch a movie or TV is an ideal timekiller. The same goes for a decent selection of magazines. What ever happened to the inflight libraries that airlines used to stock?

6. An adjustable headrest. Not the flimsy, half-assed kind found on some planes, but one that fits more snugly, holding your head in place and allowing you to sleep.

7. A fold-out, ring-style cup holder. Helps prevents spills and frees up space on your tray table.

With long-haul flight times now surpassing the gestation periods of many small mammals, there are growing concerns about an affliction known as deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, allegedly caused by protracted exposure to the confines of airplane seats. Also called “economy class syndrome,” it’s a condition where potentially lethal blood clots form in the legs and can spread through the body. Passengers on lengthier trips should avoid remaining sedentary for extended periods. On Singapore Airlines’ 17-hour megahauls between the US and Singapore, passengers are encouraged to visit the plane’s inflight buffet lounge — a stand-up bar and socializing area laid out with snacks and beverages. Part if the intent is to entice people to stretch their legs at regular intervals. For those who wander in barefoot after sleeping, the buffet zone has heated floors.

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How about some thoughts on the service standards of US airlines compared to those overseas?

It wouldn’t be fair to call service standards at major American carriers the laughing stock of the world, but it’s close to that. Pick your continent: Asia, Europe, South America, even Africa — almost without exception, US carriers are heartily outclassed by their foreign competitors.

How we got to such a shameful position is the subject of debate. Is it a fiscal thing? A cultural thing? A little of both? It has been a long, hard slide, though most folks agree that it began at or around the moment president Jimmy Carter attached his signature to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1979. From that moment on it was a race to the bottom, with competitive chaos inspiring a battle so fierce that, from the airlines’ perspectives, undercutting the competition became more important than pleasing customers. By 2001, what extravagances still existed were widely curtailed in the battening-down that began after September 11th, and the trend continues. It has reached a point where an economy class seat in a foreign market is on a par with a first class seat in the US domestic market. I can vouch for that. My recent experiences aboard Korean Air, Emirates, and LanPeru, all in economy, were as good or better than any first class domestic segments I’ve experienced in the last few years.

In my opinion there’s something systemic at hand that transcends the bottom line. It is easy to assume that with a falloff in profits comes a falloff in the quality of your product, but what we have today is the nadir of a prolonged decline that was ongoing even through the mid-1990s — the airlines’ most profitable period in history. Overseas, in the meantime, even financially struggling companies are, for the most part, able to uphold their good reputations. For them, profitability and performance are not zero-sum variables.

Emirates 777 first class seating. Photo by author.

Honestly, in light of how inexpensive fares are, together with the razor thin margins our airlines are forced to work with, we’re foolish to expect luxury. On the other hand, there are no excuses for filthy cabins, rude staff, and a depressing lack of amenities. What the airlines haven’t quite figured out, and hopefully they will, is that satisfactory service needn’t be elaborate. The average passenger doesn’t expect to be pampered. What he or she expects, and deserves, are respectful employees, clean facilities, convenience, and modicum of comfort. As I wrote in my book several years ago: Nobody is lobbying for a return to the prissy pretensions found aboard planes in decades past. In the premium cabins you’ve earned the right to some grandiloquent fun, if that’s your thing, after handing over $6,000 for a ride to Paris or Tokyo, but a backpacking college kid in row 45 is not interested in living out a bourgeois fantasy of the 1940s. He is not covetous of a velvet-clothed cheese cart or a serving of grilled salmon with braised fennel and leeks. What he yearns for is a halfway comfortable seat, something to watch or listen to, maybe a sandwich, and for God’s sake an occasional bottle of water.

And here is some advice: if you’re going to do something, don’t be half-assed about it. Certain small touches might seem frivolous, but in fact they are meaningful statements about attitude and commitment. If you’re making a point of keeping pillows aboard your aircraft, they should be useful pillows. Flying across the Atlantic on Air France, economy class passengers get a comfortable feather pillow wrapped in attractive blue cloth. It’s a small and presumably inexpensive item, but it’s a nice one. On an American carrier, assuming there are pillows at all, they tend to be hunks of foam about the size of a slice of bread, with coverings so flimsy that they tear apart like tissue paper. Thanks for nothing. Or, if you’re going to offer gratis cocktails, be dignified about it, and don’t, as one airline does, precede the meal service with a stern-sounding public address announcement reminding people that your generosity extends only to “one, and one only, beverage per passenger.” The problem isn’t the one-drink rule itself, but the idea of scolding people about it as if they were children.

Economy class meal on Sky Airline of Chile. Photo by author.

But although a decent experience should not be difficult or expensive for an airline to provide, certain things make it harder than it needs to be. For one, the air travel experience encompasses more than just a ride on a plane. The experience does not begin and end at the boarding door. It begins and ends at the airport, and a lot of what travelers encounter there is beyond any carrier’s control. I’m largely talking about security, yes, and its multitude of accompanying hassles (see security essay in Essays and Stories section).

And while maybe it sounds hackneyed, it’s also patently true that passenger allegiance is ultimately earned or squandered not through physical comforts, but through the attentiveness and dedication of your employees. I’ll never say that anybody else’s job in this mad business is an easy one, but if workers cannot muster the necessary levels of commitment, then something is systemically wrong and needs to be fixed before any of the rest will matter. Free drinks, on-demand video, and a decent meal are welcome touches, it’s true. But they’re all for naught when I’m dying of thirst in the middle of an overnight flight, unable to get one of those too-small bottles of water because the flight attendants have spent the last five hours gossiping in the galleys and ignoring the passengers. Or when a gate agent takes your boarding pass without so much as making eye contact.

It is worth mentioning that in an industry where the average is six weeks, Singapore Airlines flight attendants endure five months of schooling. That is considerably longer than pilot training at most carriers. I am not suggesting that Singapore’s model is reasonable target for a US major — it’s not. For any US airline, hoping to emulate the Singapores of the world would be at best quixotic and at worst financially ruinous. But the deeper point is that an airline’s most valuable service asset is the professionalism, grace and courtesy and of its staff. End of story.

So which airlines are tops, exactly? Let’s see what SkyTrax says. SkyTrax is a prestigious air travel advisory group that ranks carriers on a scale of one to five stars. Currently only six airlines meet the group’s strict criteria for 5-Star status, awarded only to those “at the forefront of product and service delivery excellence, often setting trends to be followed by other airlines.” They are, alphabetically:

Asiana Airlines (Korea)
Cathay Pacific (Hong Kong)
Kingfisher Airlines (India)
Malaysia Airlines
Qatar Airways
Singapore Airlines

Dropping down a notch, 29 carriers manage to hit 4-Star status. This is where you’ll find most of the mainstay Asians and Europeans, plus a few surprises. The list includes Air France, Emirates, British Airways, Lufthansa, JAL, Korean, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Swiss, Thai, Turkish and South African Airways. The sole US finisher is jetBlue.

The rest of the Americans are all in the 3-Star category, having achieved “a satisfactory standard of core product across most travel categories, but poor or less consistent standards of staff service / product quality in selected onboard or airport features.” This is the biggest group by far. Delta, United, American, US Airways and Continental join the likes of Ethiopian Airlines, Aerolineas Argentinas, Pakistan International, Iberia and dozens of others. Southwest is here too.

It could be worse. Thankfully there are no Americans among the 25 or so names on the 2-Star list. Here you’ll find Cubana, Uzbekistan Airways, TAAG Angola and Biman Bangladesh. And Ryanair.

The 1-Star list contains but a solitary finisher, the mysterious Air Koryo of North Korea.

First class, Emirates 777. Photo by author.

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I would argue one of our airlines’ biggest collective failures is not one of onboard service, but one of communications. Airlines have lost the ability to deliver timely or accurate information to their customers.

In spite of what most people think, airlines do not, as policy, intentionally lie or mislead. What passengers often take to be lies are more accurately garbles, caused by the faulty transfer of information. Such is the rigidly compartmentalized structure airlines, where specifics of a circumstance are passed along from department to department, each with its own priorities, vernacular, and expertise. It’s not unlike that game played in grade school, where a short anecdote is whispered around the room, growing more and more scrambled each step of the way. At the airport, the person in charge of picking up a microphone and announcing that your plane delayed is liable to have little understanding of what the problem actually is.

But regardless of the reasons, time and time again, and against their best interests, airlines fail at getting the truth out, and that’s a problem. Not only does it violate basic, common sense protocols of customer service, it also helps allow rumors, myths, and conspiracy theories to flourish unchecked. It stokes anger, and it stokes the anxieties of nervous flyers, aiding and abetting their fears. As lazy and ineffective communicators, airlines have a terrible habit of responding to anomalies — be it a minor schedule disruption or something more serious — in one of two ways: either with total silence or, perhaps worse, by employing hideous oversimplifications. The result is nearly total lack of trust from the public. People dislike airlines and don’t believe anything they say — partly because they never actually say anything; or, when they do, it’s both condescending and terrifying.

A flight from Las Vegas is cancelled because “it’s too hot to fly.” A crew aborts a landing because, “a plane crossed in front of us.” In Flagstaff, Arizona, one day, counter staff inform a group of delayed passengers that volunteers were needed to give up their seats. When passengers ask why, they were told, “We need to lighten the load. The plane has been having problems and we’re afraid one of the engines might cut out.”

I once received a letter from a man who’d been onboard an plane that suffered a compressor stall just after takeoff. Compressor stalls are caused by an airflow disruption within a jet engine. They don’t occur very often, but when they do, they tend to manifest themselves vividly with loud bangs and, occasionally, bursts of flame. Nine times in ten the phenomenon is transient and harmless, though once in a while components are damaged and the engines needs to be shut down. Either way, people react to the noise and flames as you might expect them to — with fright.

In the letter-writer’s case, the stall had been potent enough that the crew returned for a precautionary landing. Passengers were shaken up; some were crying. Once on the ground, the passengers disembarked and were hurriedly herded to a replacement plane. It was chaotic, disorganized, and virtually no explanation was provided aside from a short announcement by the crew and a vague reference to engine trouble. Days later the man sent the airline a formal query. With nobody offering evidence to the contrary, he wondered if he’d come close to perishing in a disaster. As he saw it, the plane’s engine had practically exploded outside his window. “Is it true,” he asked the airline, “the plane could have flown with a failed engine?”

The airline sent him an apologetic form letter and a hundred-dollar voucher for future travel. All well and good, except he didn’t want a voucher, or even an apology. He wanted to know what had gone wrong, and how treacherous it truly was. Why couldn’t each passenger have been mailed a no-nonsense summary of what happened, describing the general innocuousness of compressor stalls, and a reminder that all commercial planes are certified to fly after a powerplant failure?

Of all front-line employees, pilots are potentially the most valuable for soothing anxieties and explaining the nuances of abnormal situations. But they too are sometimes part of the problem. Pilots are generally forbidden from speaking to the media following an incident. Sadly, this has a tendency to carry over in the way they speak about anything. They are afraid of saying the wrong thing; of being blamed, scapegoated or punished should something be misconstrued or taken from context. Crewmember manuals contain stipulations about PA announcements and general interaction with customers, and captains are sometimes put through a brief version of charm school prior to earning that fourth stripe, but too much of the emphasis is on how not to communicate — which phrases never to say, which terms and scary-sounding buzzwords to avoid. Thus pilots are prone to euphemizing to the point where things sound goofy — a compressor stall described as an “engine pop” — or else more harrowing than they really are.

One time I was riding in economy class on a flight into Boston. Just before landing, at about a hundred feet over the runway, the pilots aborted the landing and went around. There was no reason to believe anything remotely serious had occurred, but the sense of fright emanating from those around me was palpable. Eventually, one of the pilots gave an explanation. “Ah, well, sorry about that,” he began. “Another plane was still on the runway, so we needed to break off the landing. We’re circling back and will be landing in a few minutes.”

Nothing else was offered. I sat there in silent anguish. “Please, say more,” I thought. “You need to say more!” But he didn’t, and rather than quell the passengers’ anxieties, he had made them worse. “A plane was still on the runway?” came a raised voice from a few rows down, followed by nervous laughter. “Jesus!” A college kid sitting diagonally from me was visibly shaken, explaining to his seat mate that he had never before experienced such a thing. Later that evening, no doubt, he’d be regailing friends with the harrowing tale of his “near miss.”

Which it was not. The go-around was the result of a simple spacing issue — not a near miss at all, but a maneuver performed well in advance of one; indeed, to avoid a near miss.

“Carriers in general could do a better job of communicating,” admits one airline spokesperson that I spoke to. “In fact, you might say it’s difficult to overcommunicate.”

Admittedly there’s the proverbial can-of-worms when it comes to full disclosure; lawsuits often arise from what appear to be harmless, even helpful, remarks or actions. And there’s little benefit to overwhelming people with the arcana of aircraft operations. Sometimes, “It’s too hot to fly” is an all-too tempting alternative. Layering things in technical mumbo-jumbo can leave people suspicious and shaking their heads.

“If you try to get too technical about something,” adds the spokesperson, “it can come across as serious when it’s actually routine. My sense is that most customers would like to have timely updates about a delay, and a general, honest sense of what caused it. Beyond that, I don’t think drilling down into a lot of details adds much.”

He may have a point. When those aboard jetBlue flight 292 were faced with a stuck undercarriage and an impending emergency landing back in 2005, the flight crew made every effort to let customers know they were in very little danger. Yet rather than accept this, according to some who were there, many passengers assumed the pilots were lying! I receive letters all the time from people accusing airline staff of falsifying the “truth” of supposedly life-threatening situations. In reality this almost never happens, but it’s a notion deeply ingrained.

Perhaps at the heart of the matter, though, is the simple fact that carriers pay little penalty for acting as their own worst enemies. Fostering and reinforcing skewed perceptions of air travel has little effect on their balance sheets. Profitability is another issue altogether, but planes remain full, and a majority of people, intellectually if not emotionally, grasp that flying is safe. Why stir the pot?

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Please address the growing practice of airlines charging for things that used to be free. Checked bags, food, a blanket…

These things were never free; they were covered by the cost of your ticket. With fares so low these days, airlines are resorting to the practice known as “unbundling” as a means of recouping lost revenue. Flying is going a la carte: $25 for a second piece of luggage; $20 for a take-home fleece blanket and hypoallergenic pillow; that old beef-or-chicken entrée is now a $6 sandwich wrap. Unbundling can leave customers feeling nickle-and-dimed, but it’s a smart idea that in that those looking for perks can have them, absorbing a higher share of the cost. Is it not better to charge a premium for specific items, not all of which everybody wants, rather than raise prices across the board?

But unbundling should only be taken so far. In 2010, in a move that ignited controversy, Fort Lauderdale-based Spirit Airlines began charging up to $45 for carry-on bags. This pushes the concept to the edge of the envelope. Beyond it, really. It goes against the spirit, pardon the pun, of unbundling. Let’s be realistic, a carry-on bag is not an optional item — not when the airline already charges a fee for checked luggage. It’s neither a perk nor an incentive for reducing volume in jam-packed overhead bins.

How far can unbundling go? In a column a few years ago I joked that airlines would soon install pay toilets. Well, the same month that Spirit unveiled it’s carry-on fees, Europe’s Ryanair announced it would start charging 1 euro for the use of a lavatory.

I also joked that airlines would soon be selling advertising space on their overhead bins and tray tables. No sooner had I opened my mouth when, riding on a US Airways jet, I folded down my tray table and discovered a cell-phone ad staring me in the face. Call me a romantic, but perhaps airlines wouldn’t have so much trouble making money if they weren’t so willing to sell their souls.

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Which are the oldest airlines?

Airline genealogies are complicated, as many have changed names and identities, or have blurred their pedigrees through mergers and acquisitions. But most airline historians — there really are such people — agree that the world’s oldest continuously operating airline is Amsterdam-based KLM. That’s Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij if you’re speaking Dutch, founded in 1919. Here are the five oldest still flying under their original monikers:

KLM (1919)

Qantas (1920)

Mexicana (1921)

Aeroflot (1923)

CSA Czech Airlines (1923)

For a while, runner-up Qantas was running advertisements trumpeting itself as the oldest. “What else would you expect from an airline,” it asked, “that’s been flying longer, continuously, than any other?” Not quite. We presume the Aussies were discounting KLM on account of its quasi-merger with Air France, but the two companies continue to operate separately, and KLM’s founding date beats that of Qantas by a full year. Other pioneers include Colombia’s Avianca and Bolivia’s Lloyd Aereo Boliviano (LAB). Rugged terrain and lack of roads made some of these countries natural spots for aviation to take hold.

In the United States Delta is the eldest, harking to 1928. It had previously been Northwest, which got its start two years earlier.

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Why do flights from the US to Europe always depart in the evening and land in the morning, plunking down their exhausted passengers at the crack of dawn.

Mostly it’s about two things: passenger connections and aircraft utilization. Flying from New York to Paris, for instance, a sizeable percentage of passengers will be continuing onward to places elsewhere in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, etc. Arrivals are timed to dovetail with these connections. Not to mention, many of the folks who boarded that evening in New York actually began their journey much earlier — in, say, Salt Lake City, San Diego, or New Orleans; Syracuse, Roanoke, or Harrisburg. Returning westbound, same thing: landing in New York (or Chicago, or Houston, or Dallas or Miami) in the mid-afternoon leaves ample time for connections to points throughout North America.

It’s similar with flights to Asia. Flying from Chicago to Tokyo, you will take off in the morning and arrive in the afternoon. Later, a bank of departures will leave Tokyo destined to cities deeper in Asia. Say to Bangkok, for instance, where you’ll touch down about 11 p.m. That aircraft spends the night, then returns to Tokyo early the next morning, landing at midday and allowing easy connections back to North America.

This way too, the aircraft spend minimal time on the ground. Lease payments on a widebody jetliner are in the hundreds of thousands dollars per month, and a plane can’t make money resting idle on the tarmac. Airlines strive to keep their jets in the air as much as possible, scheduling the quickest feasible turnaround times (figure 90 minutes, minimum, for an international flight).

One wrinkle is with flights to and from South America, where service is often an all-nighter on both ends. An aircraft arriving after sunrise in Buenos Aires can’t turn around and fly back to New York, or it will get there after dark with little or no opportunity for connections. Many airlines bite the bullet, letting their aircraft sit for ten or twelve hours before heading back again in the evening. (My carrier often uses this opportunity to deep-clean its interiors. Even our normally filthy cockpits come back scrubbed and vacuumed.)

Some carriers do provide limited service focusing on what’s called “origin-and-destination,” or “O&D” traffic, better suited for flyers who aren’t connecting. British Airways, for example, has traditionally offered daytime flights to London from certain US cities. Leave Boston around 9 in the morning, and you’ll reach Heathrow around 8 p.m.

On a given flight, half or more of the passengers might be transiting the first arrival point. Some well-known carriers wouldn’t be half the size they are if not for the number of transfer passengers moving through their hubs. Indeed, some of our largest and most profitable airlines hail from city-states with relatively tiny populations, where O&D traffic is only a portion of the total. Singapore Airlines and Emirates, for example. Singapore has one of the world’s largest all-widebody fleets, hubbed in a country smaller than metro Philadelphia. Emirates, with a population base half the size of Massachusetts, flies over a hundred widebodies, with 50-plus Airbus A380s still on order. It comes down to strategic position, literally. Their success is less about carrying people to Singapore or Dubai, but carrying them through Singapore or Dubai. By fortune of geography these countries make excellent transit hubs along some of the busiest long-haul routes. They are also quite wealthy, able to build the high-tech infrastructures and gleaming airports in which these esteemed brands can flaunt themselves. Award-winning onboard service doesn’t hurt, either.

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What are the longest scheduled nonstop flights?

As of right now, Singapore Airlines holds both the number one and number two slots. Number one is the airline’s service between its home city and Newark, flown in all-business class configuration using an Airbus A340-500. Time aloft can be as long as 18 hours, depending on wind and weather. The runner-up, about an hour shorter, flies between Singapore and Los Angeles. (Remember great circle routes; flying time between New York and Los Angeles is close to six hours, but between both cities and Singapore the distance is nearly the same.

Singapore’s outstanding service and entertainment options make such epic durations tolerable, but bring something to read and leave your circadian rhythms at home. The effects of traversing ten time zones and the International Date Line make for quirky logistics: Leaving LAX at 9:15 p.m., passengers land at Singapore’s Changi Airport just after sunrise two mornings later. On the return trip, the plane takes off just after 4 p.m. and lands at roughly the same time, on the same day. With a strong-enough tailwind it’s possible to travel backwards in time, as it were.

The following list is subject to change as airlines revise their schedules, but here are the other longest flights as of summer, 2010, measured in nautical miles:

1. New York-Singapore: 8,288 (Singapore Airlines)
2. Los Angeles-Singapore: 7,621 (Singapore Airlines)
3. Atlanta-Johannesburg: 7,334 (Delta)
4. New York-Hong Kong: 7,014 (Cathay Pacific, Continental)
5. New York-Johannesburg: 6925 (South African Airways)
6. Los Angeles-Melbourne: 6,883 (Qantas)
7. Toronto-Hong Kong: 6,787 (Air Canada)
8. JFK-Mumbai: 6,777 (Air-India)
9. Vancouver-Sydney: 6,741 (Air Canada)
10. Los Angeles-Sydney: 6,507 (United, Qantas, Delta, V Australia)

One holdout, at just under 10,000 nautical miles, is London-Sydney, called the “grail route” in some circles. Using a 747-400, Qantas once tinkered with this elusive prize, and discovered it could, under optimum and fairly unpredictable conditions, make the run without having to pit-stop in Singapore or Bangkok or Bahrain. But this was so pushing the envelope that it proved a real teeth-chatterer for the carrier’s crews and dispatchers, who were forced to juggle the logistics of fuel, weather, and diversion planning with utmost attention and accuracy. Not to mention it being untenable for advertising: “Qantas to London. Nonstop. Sometimes.”

Boeing’s 777-LR once made an 11,600-mile promotional flight, and on paper would seem capable of handling the journey. But bear in mind that just because a plane can do such things in a publicity stunt doesn’t mean it can do them in regular scheduled service. You have EROPS restrictions (extended range operational legalities for twin-engine planes) to deal with, local airspace constraints, wind patterns and seasonal weather variations, and so on, all affecting flight times. An aircraft’s range is never a fixed mileage. It’s always different.

And that two cities can be connected means little to an airline unless there is an exploitable market to justify connecting them. London-Sydney is not the longest possible flight, but it may be the longest possible flight guaranteed to provide a steady supply of passengers. More formidable pairings are at least conceivable, should demand exist. The most intriguing of these are Sao Paulo-Tokyo, Auckland-London, and Buenos Aires-Tokyo, all clocking in a shade under 10,000 nautical miles. Shattering the 10,000 frontier — Buenos Aires-Seoul, anyone? — remains, let’s just say, a long-haul longshot.
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Almost every high-profile airplane crash is trailed by a conspiracy theory of one sort or another. Could you clear up lingering doubts and suspicions concerning a few of these?

Almost every high-profile airplane crash is trailed by a conspiracy theory of one sort or another. Could you clear up lingering doubts and suspicions concerning a few of these?

Where to start? Conspirobabble stretches back to the death of Dag Hammarskjold and the heydays of the Bermuda Triangle. The modern era got going with the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 by a Soviet fighter. Since then, the Internet has become a potent incubator of myth and misinformation, spreading pseudo-truths with the lackadaisical tap of a SEND button. Five minutes with a keyboard and mouse and you’re privy to more feverish speculation than the old Grassy Knollers ever could have dreamed of.

Prior to 2001, the 1996 TWA tragedy was probably the most mulled over disaster in the minds of the intellectually eccentric. Flight 800 blew up like a giant roman candle in the July twilight off Long Island, the result of a short circuit setting off vapors in an unused fuel tank. What came next was a sideshow of at least four books and enough World Wide Web puissance to power a 747 through the sound barrier. Even mainstream commentators registered intense skepticism that flight 800 could’ve crashed the way it did. After all, fuel tanks don’t simply explode.

Except, under very unusual circumstances, they do. Indeed it’s not likely, but it’s neither impossible nor unprecedented. The airplane, an old 747-100 destined for Paris, had been baking on a hot tarmac up until departure, superheating the vapors in its empty center fuel cell (a 747 does not need full tanks to cross the Atlantic). Later, an electrical short deep in the jet’s mid-fuselage bowels provided the ignition. At least two other fuel tank explosions have taken place. A Thai Airways 737 once burst into flames while parked at the gate in Bangkok, killing a flight attendant. Per FAA behest, airlines have begun phasing in a system that uses nitrogen as an inert filler in vacant tanks.

We heard more whispering after American 587 went down in New York City less than two months after 2001 terror attacks. The scenario goes like this: a bomb destroyed the plane, and the government, along with the airlines, fearing further paralysis of the economy and our collective psyche, decides to pass off the crash as an accident. Officially the crash was caused by crew error, compounded by a design quirk in the A300′s rudder system, but the mongers have other ideas.

Then we have September 11th itself. If you haven’t been paying attention, cyberspace is awash with claims that the attacks were an inside job. The specific assertions are too numerous and complicated to list here exhaustively. They vary site to site, overlapping, underscoring, complimenting and contradicting one another to the point of madness. The Pentagon was struck with a missile, not a 757; the planes that hit the World Trade Center were remotely controlled military craft; the real flights 11, 175, 77 and 93 never existed, or were diverted to secret bases; controlled demolitions felled the twin towers. And so on. The point of such a conspiracy, we’re told, is to make Americans more malleable and subservient to their leaders and the military-industrial establishment (as if we haven’t been subservient enough).

The same technological magic that makes the spread of wild conjecture so effortless should, you would think, make countering and dismissing it no less easy. Strictly speaking, indeed it does. But it all depends who’s paying attention. Fact is, the human proclivity for believing in conspiracies is a lot stronger these days than our proclivity for analyzing and debating them. Maybe that’s human nature, or maybe it’s some perverse/inverse fallout of technology. Either way, there are lots more people around hungry to make us believe something than make us not believe something. A pro-conspiracy Website is certainly a lot more exciting, and will garner a lot more hits, than an anti-conspiracy Website. Both kinds are out there, but it’s the conspiracy traffickers, regardless of their credibility, who believe more passionately in their cause, and consequently garner more attention.

It’s not beyond reason that some aspects of the 2001 attacks deserve more scrutiny than the 9/11 Commission lavished on them. But those who most urgently wish us to believe so have done themselves no favors by expanding the breadth of their contentions beyond all plausibility. Depending which version you listen to, the critiques of the official story range anywhere from compelling to dubious to lunatic. Okay, I’m genuinely curious about why surveillance video from the Sheraton hotel near the Pentagon was confiscated and never made public. On the other hand, I’m told that the aircraft that struck the World Trade Center were artificial images projected by laser, and that the “real” flights never existed. There’s so much flak out there, it’s difficult to tell what’s genuinely mysterious and worthy of a closer look, and what’s nonsense. I propose a conspiracy theory that the conspiracy theories are themselves part of the conspiracy, intended by the conspirators to discredit the idea of there being a conspiracy — and to divide and conquer those who might sleuth out the truth.

Confusion aside, I can tackle a few of the more commonly heard myths that pertain to the airplanes and their pilots, point-by-point:

The terrorist pilots lacked the skill and training needed to fly jetliners into their targets…

This is an especially popular contention with respect to American flight 77. Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour was a notoriously untalented flier who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater. Yet he is said to have pulled off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon. The pilots of American 11 and United 175 also had spotty records and had flown only private planes. They should have had great difficulty navigating to New York City, and even greater difficulty hitting the twin towers squarely. To bolster this idea that the hijackers were Oswaldian pawns, the conspiromongers often invoke impressive-sounding jargon and fluffery about high-tech cockpits, occasionally trundling out testimony from pilots.

Reality: The September 11th cabal’s feats did not require in-depth technical knowledge or a high degree of skill. To put it mildly, the attackers, as private pilots, were completely out of their league; however they were not setting out to perform single-engine missed approaches or Category-3 instrument landings with a failed hydraulic system. They were setting out to steer an already airborne jetliner, in perfect weather, into the side of a building. Maintaining essential up/down/left/right control was not an overwhelming demand, nor was navigating toward New York or Washington in clear conditions. Though, for good measure, Mohammed Atta and at least one other of his group did buy several hours of simulator training, from a private academy in Florida, on a Boeing 727. (This was not the same type of jet used in the attacks, but it didn’t need to be.) Additionally they attained manuals and instructional videos, widely available from aviation suppliers and bookdealers.

Hani Hanjour’s flying was hardly the show-quality demonstration often described. It was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his loops and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it. Striking a stationary object — even a large one with five beckoning sides — at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn. If he’d flown the same profile ten times, half of them he’d probably have tumbled short of the target or overflown it entirely.

As for those partisan pilots who sometimes chime in on websites, take them with a grain of salt. Ask around and you’ll discover that the majority of airline pilots feel the way I do.

The non-wreckage of Flight 77…

According to the would-be detectives, it wasn’t a passenger jet that hit the Pentagon, but either a radio-controlled fighter or a missile. The conspicuous dearth of wreckage proves this. This is the “magic bullet” of September 11th. Almost no recognizable pieces of the supposed, 80-ton 757 were found at the scene. Why wouldn’t the wings have sheared off, many bloggers have demanded to know. Where’s the tail? “Airplane crashes leave wreckage,” insists one Website, complete with a slide show of past disasters showing the plainly visible remains of tails, wings, and sections of fuselage.

Reality: Airplane crashes do leave wreckage, though not always in the shapes and sizes you might expect. Flight 77′s demise was an exceptionally high-speed, head-on, explosive collision with the reinforced masonry façade of an office building — a type of impact rarely seen in air disasters and guaranteed to cause total destruction. The wings of an airplane, going 400 miles per hour into bricks and reinforced steel columns, do not, under any circumstances, bend or shear off. They shred into fragments, along with the rest of the plane.

Many small parts of flight 77 were found in semi-recognizable condition, most of them inside the building and hard to discern amidst the rubble. A slice of aluminum skin from the upper fuselage, for instance, along which part of the American Airlines livery is still visible, was photographed on the Pentagon lawn.

The hole truth…

The impact pattern with the Pentagon façade, we are told, is inconsistent with the size and shape of a 757. The hole is too narrow. And there is no outline of where the wings or tail would have struck, as seen on the World Trade Center towers.

Reality: The hole is not too narrow. The fuselage of a 757 is about 13 feet across, which roughly matches the entry wound into the Pentagon. Many conspiracy sites inflate a 757′s fuselage height and diameter, citing values that include its landing gear or tail. In any event, we shouldn’t expect an aluminum airframe colliding with heavy masonry to leave a silhouette. The damage will be greatly dispersed — exactly as the Pentagon footage shows — and points of impact will not necessarily be obvious. We saw ghostly, wingtip-to-wingtip outlines of the 767s that struck the World Trade Center because the exterior of those skyscrapers was a thin curtain wall of glass and lightweight steel. The Pentagon was an immensely more formidable structure, and the damage, both of the plane and to the building, reflected this exactly as it should have.

Eyes and ears…

Numerous witnesses saw a small plane or missile-like object streaking toward the Pentagon.

Reality: As professional investigators will attest, eye and ear-witness accounts of airplane accidents are notoriously unreliable. But for the record, an even greater number of people spoke of seeing an American Airlines 757 streaking toward, and smashing into, the Pentagon. Their testimony is conveniently absent from the conspiracy sites.

One of those people was Mike Walter, a news reporter who was stuck in traffic near the Pentagon on September 11th. He watched the jet slam into the Pentagon and was interviewed widely. “Referring to the American Airlines jet metaphorically as a weapon,” explains Walter, “I’d described it as being like ‘a cruise missile with wings.’” This quote was taken out of context to support the conspiracy theories. It was even cited in Thierry Meyssan’s l’Effroyable Imposture, a book that became a number one bestseller in France. Walter says, “It’s tough being in journalism and seeing your own words being used to persuade people to believe something that simply isn’t true. Anyone who has seen the full text of that interview knows that I was clearly talking about the American Airlines jet. Because that’s what I saw.”

Radar ruse…

Watching on their screens, some air traffic controllers believed flight 77′s radar track was that of a military plane.

Reality: Why wouldn’t they have thought so? How many civilian jetliners zoom around a city, spiraling down to tree-top level at 400 knots?

The wreckage of United flight 93…

Flight 93′s impact in Shanksfille, Pennsylvania, was evidenced only by a tiny impact crater barely a few yards across, and no bits of aircraft bigger than about two feet were recovered. This suggests that flight 93 either never existed or had gone down elsewhere, and the crash scene was put together as badly improvised theater.

Reality: The damage caused by flight 93 in Shanksville was more extensive than many websites portray, and the lack of sizeable pieces is fully consistent with an aircraft striking the ground at a tremendous rate of speed (over 500 miles-per-hour). According to the black boxes, the skyjackers put the 757 into a near vertical dive at maximum power. Similar to the case of American 77, this sets up a crash dynamic different from the vast majority of airplane accidents. For the sake of comparison, have a look at the debris field from the crash of American Eagle flight 4184 near Roselawn, Indiana, in 1994. This was a commuter plane that dove into soft earth at half the speed of United 93, yet only the tiniest pieces remained.

Etc…
Elsewhere in this rat’s nest, I cannot speak for aspects that extend beyond the aviation side — such as the purported demolition of the twin towers, etc. Simple extrapolation tells us to be wary.

It’s distressing that so many people become married to a preposterous idea based on little more than erroneous interpretations of some pictures and selective, manipulative use of evidence. But maybe this is like arguing religion. Evidence, or a lack of it, has little to do with what motivates many believers. At the heart of their convictions is something utterly unprovable. It’s faith.

Having said all that, I don’t wish to belittle the idea that perhaps some important truths have been concealed, and it is hardly my intention to give our fearless leaders undue credit. Considering the extent to which we’ve been chicaned, shystered, and condescended to in recent years, why should we trust them? We shouldn’t, frankly. But we also need to remember Carl Sagan’s famous quip about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof.

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