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the Pilot
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Patrick Smith is a professional airline pilot, and a
convivial raconteur.
In his book, he tells us some of the interesting,
unusual, and bizarre experiences he has encountered, and
reveals some of the mysteries of commercial aviation that us
non-pilots don't usually get to share. |
In a more innocent age (or
perhaps better to say, when we were younger), the pilot - or
captain - of the plane seemed close to omniscient. And, of
course, we hope(d) he truly was - after all, we trust him with
our lives.
Here's a chance to see behind
the aviator dark glasses and get an insider's view of what
happens in the cockpit and to the plane in general, and why/how
such things occur.
An interesting mix of anecdote
and fact make for an easy and interesting read.
Recommended.
About the Book
The paperback book
measures 5 1/8th" x 7 1/2", and is 5/8th" in
thickness. It has 269 pages.
The book is printed onto
lower grade white paper as is standard in regular paperback
books. Disappointingly, there are no illustrations,
diagrams or
photographs (not even of the author).
The book, with a list price
of $14.00, is available from
Amazon , where it is currently for
sale for $10.50. Autographed copies can be purchased
direct from the
author's website for $17 including shipping.
The book has seven chapters,
each of which has articles on eight to ten different topics
related to airplanes, pilots, and aviation in general.
There is no index.
About the Author
Patrick Smith, 39, has been
a lifelong lover of aviation. As a little boy he used to
sneak onto planes at his local airport and pretend he was
piloting them. As a bigger boy, after a detour as a punk
rocker, he got to actually live his dream and fly passenger
planes, starting work first on regional carriers flying
turbo-props in 1990. He then progressed to having a period flying DC-8s for a freight
company before returning to passenger planes and flying as
co-pilot on 737s.
Currently his dream has been
rudely interrupted. Like many others, he was
furloughed as part of the collapse of the dinosaurs in 2001, and
has still not yet returned to work.
Clearly his eleven years of
experience, flying a range of planes both domestically and
internationally give him a lot of interesting stories and
knowledge to share with us.
What the Book Contains
Shortly after getting
furloughed, Patrick Smith started writing flight and travel columns for the website salon.com, and this book represents the
distillation of several years of columns. As such, it
tends to be a series of independent free-standing essays on
various topics, only loosely linked together, but this is not
intended as criticism, merely as explanation.
In a way, the series of
free-standing shorter pieces is good - it makes it a great book
to browse through and read bits from, rather than being a book
you have to concentrate on and read steadily through from start
to finish.
The author starts by
recounting his sense of wonder at and about airplanes and
aviation. He values the journey as much as the
destination, and unlike some of us who have long since ceased to
be captivated or enthralled by the prospect of another long
flight, he still looks forward to each experience. And
perhaps his love of planes is reflected in his frequent comments
on the appearance of planes themselves, and their paint jobs, as
objects of beauty (or lack thereof, as he sometimes finds).
It is certainly true that
the concept of flying is an amazing thing, but for those of us
who travel in 'the back of the bus' rather than in the cockpit,
there is, alas, precious little to endear such experiences to us. It is good that Smith enjoys flying, but most
of his audience no longer does.
The book is sort of divided in two parts. The first part, 110 pages and three chapters, is in
question and answer format and contains the more factual
and technical elements. The second part, 160 pages and four chapters, is
more a series of essays on topics reasonably related to aviation.
The book is proudly not very
technical. But if I had a chance to 'ask the pilot' I
wouldn't be asking him whether he thought an A330 was a more
beautiful looking plane than the A340 (Smith vastly prefers the
A340); instead I'd be asking him technical questions which only
a pilot would know the answer to.
Some of the rhetorical
questions the author asks himself are greeted with waffle rather
than an answer. For example, see if you can understand if
the answer is 'yes' or 'no' to the question 'Can a 747 fly a
loop'? on page 16.
Other answers are
incomplete. For example, a question asks what the
advantages are of winglets - the upraised bits at the ends of
the wings of many modern planes. He correctly answers that
winglets improve range/efficiency of the plane, and then gets
distracted by commenting on how some look pretty and others look
ugly. But wouldn't you like to know how much extra
efficiency winglets add? Is it 1% or 10% or ?%. He
doesn't tell us. The answer, by the way, is they give
between a 3% and 7.5% boost (see for example
this page and
this page).
Some of the factual
information he does impart could be greatly improved by adding
diagrams. He tells us about the different things that move
on a wing (slats, flaps, ailerons, air brakes, and sometimes
other things too) and it would be helpful to see some diagrams
to better illustrate some of these things.
Or, when he talks about all
the different gauges and controls in a cockpit, it would be
great to see a picture of a cockpit layout with explanatory
notes as to what the different components are and do.
However, while enthusiasts -
such as myself - would doubtless love to see more detail,
they'll also be pleased with what is provided. For
example, have you ever noticed the front blades in a jet engine
slowly turning around while the plane is sitting at the gate?
Do you know why they are turning? Perhaps you've guessed
the jet engine is cooling down (or warming up), or still slowing down. Wrong. The low friction stages of the
jet engine are being turned as a result of ground winds blowing
through them (either from the front or from behind).
While his discussion about
what happens if a jet loses power in all its engines is very
much shorter than my own article, he makes the surprising
observation that many times, pilots cut back the jet power to a
zero-power idle setting when descending. So chances are
we've all experienced what it is like for a plane to fly with no
power to its engines, without even realizing it.
He writes about turbulence,
but the question I'd like to see answered is 'why do American
pilots turn the seat belt sign on so obsessively during flights,
whereas foreign pilots - even of highest quality/safety obsessed
airlines such as Qantas - rarely bother to turn the seat belt
sign on'?
The second part of the book
has interesting essays on many different topics, and sometimes
they present surprising information. In particular, his
discussions on pilot seniority may be eye-opening. How is
promotion handled in airlines? Exclusively by hire date.
There is no element of merit or subjective discretion.
Pilots advance strictly based on their seniority, and all pilots
are assumed to be equally competent.
We passengers might consider
this to be an enormous assumption.
The reality is even more
complex, as Smith explains. As they become more senior,
pilots can choose the assignments they wish. Not all
pilots want to be captains of the biggest planes, even if their
pay does rise to spectacular levels. Some prefer to
be co-pilots (less hassle and responsibility) and some prefer
smaller planes and shorter routes (more time at home). So
a 747 pilot might be more junior than a 737 co-pilot.
Errors and Opinions
One can of course forgive
the author for having different opinions on some subjects (like
for example the subject of pilot pay!). His understandable
bias in favor of human pilots also causes him to be less than
positive about the future of pilotless (or at least, remotely
piloted) planes, and to understate the value of autopilot
systems on planes. An autopilot, he says, still needs
considerable skill to program. Probably so. But the
auto-pilot programming skill is quite different from the
hands-on unaided flying the plane skill that is currently the
main raison d'etre of pilots today.
While I don't agree with all
the writer's opinions, I do appreciate and enjoy a chance to
read them. It is interesting to see the world from a
professional pilot's perspective - for sure, it isn't the only
perspective out there, but it is an interesting and educational
one.
Opinions to one side,
there are also some surprising errors in the book. These
errors are not particularly major, but in a case where the
author thanks seven different people for help with research, and
being a book published by leading publisher Penguin, one would
have expected the factual data to be 100% correct.
One error that should be
corrected is the widely held belief, and stated in this book,
that Qantas has never had a fatality. This claim was
repeated and made famous in the movie, Rainman. Much as I
admire and respect Qantas, I have to correct this.
As you'd expect from the
world's second oldest airline, there were quite a few fatalities
in the early days of flying planes in Australia's harsh and
unforgiving outback. More recently, there were a couple of
occasions after WW2 where passengers lost their lives. A
truer claim is that Qantas has never had a fatality in a jet
airplane, and the author tells me this correction unfortunately
missed out being incorporated into the final published edition.
Another error worthy of
correction is the claim that there are double beds on some
Virgin Atlantic planes. Although this has been a promise
extended several times, over many years, by Virgin's owner, Sir
Richard Branson, it has not yet transformed into reality.
Virgin is now saying there will be double beds on their A380s,
but there are still several years until Virgin starts operating
these new super-jumbos.
There are some trivial but
puzzling errors, too. For example, the book says one
nautical mile is 6082 feet long. A standard nautical mile
is 1852 meters, which converts to 6076.1 feet, and an
English/Imperial nautical mile is 6080 ft. The author,
like me, has no idea how the number 6082 appeared in the text.
The author writes at length
about the Concorde. Unfortunately his financial analysis
of the plane's profitability - while in line with generally held
belief - is wrong.
He is
probably correct when he tells, with apparent horror, that it was costing a
ton of jet fuel per passenger flown across the Atlantic, a fact
he pointed to as proving how impossibly uneconomic the plane was
to operate. But that ton of jet fuel was costing perhaps
$300, and the passenger was paying twenty times that ($6000 one
way) for the ticket.
The
real reason Concorde was withdrawn from service and its
true massive profitability is discussed
at length in my article.
The author and I also have
to register different opinions about the cause of the mysterious
crash of TW800 on 17 July 1996. Smith concedes that 'even
mainstream commentators registered intense skepticism that
flight 800 could've blown up the way it did', but then proceeds
to dismiss their concerns, and others in what he refers
disparagingly to as 'a sideshow of at least four books and
enough WWW puissance to power a 747 through the sound barrier',
and says this is something mulled over by the intellectually
eccentric.
Others of us - including
many professional pilots - might consider
the concerns about and inconsistencies in the official TW800
story to be credible and worthy of more consideration than an ad
hominem attack on those airing them. Attack the theories,
but not the theorists, please.
Maybe we need a Volume 2?
There are inevitably many
subjects Smith doesn't touch on at all. It would be
interesting to see a discussion on these, too (and he is
continuing to write regular columns for Salon, so maybe there is
indeed more to look forward to in the future), although it is
harder to offer a second volume when you've subtitled the first
volume 'Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel'.
For example, he asks himself the
question 'which is better, Airbus or Boeing', but then shows himself
to be one of the very (very!) few pilots I've ever encountered
who doesn't have a strong opinion on the subject. Most
pilots hold strong views advocating one company or the
other, but Smith says he 'despises the question' and ends up
saying they're both equally good, although built differently
(sounds like a line borrowed from the feminists).
It would be lovely to see a
hard-hitting discussion on
maintenance practices - not just an explanation of the type of
maintenance planes undergo, but perhaps also some commentary
about whether maintenance standards truly are as good as the
airlines would have us believe, or if they may be slipping, as
some people fear. And how about outshopped maintenance -
what (if any) are the safety implications of having maintenance
done outside the airline that operates the planes?
A discussion about how much a
plane weighs could have interestingly moved in to the subject
of some of the pathetic airline excuses for inconveniencing us -
like for example, telling us we can't take heavier
carry-on's into the cabin due to upsetting the plane's weight
distribution. Is there any truth in that (answer - none
whatsoever)?
On the other hand, while
there are some meaty topics not discussed, Smith asks himself some questions
I'd never dream of asking a pilot in a million years;
particularly a hard-charging ex-USAF pilot. In particular, I
dare anyone to ask the pilot on their next flight this question
With allegories and images
in mind, which works and forms of art do you think best evoke
the spirit of aviation (whatever that is, exactly)?
Although most questions are
answered in a page or less, this question gets three pages of
rhapsodic answer. You can see Patrick Smith's answer on
pages 32 - 35 of the book.
The Pilot Answers
Patrick Smith kindly sent in
some reply comments after reading through the review. Read
his comments about why he wrote the book, his original
intentions, and other related issues,
here.
Summary
This is an easy to read, wide-ranging
and sometimes quirky book that is great for episodic reading - perhaps
something to stick in your carry-on for your next few flights.
It tells you some interesting things, some humorous things, and
adds to your general knowledge of aviation.
This review might seem, in
places,
critical; but it is not intended to be so. The book is
interesting and fun, and well worth buying and reading, just so
long as you accept it as one pilot's personal view of the world.
And pilots, just like doctors, are neither omniscient nor
infallible.
The book was designated
'Best Travel Book of 2004' by Amazon.
The book, with a list price
of $14.00, is available from
Amazon, where it is currently for
sale for $10.50. Autographed copies can be purchased
direct from the
author's website for $17 including shipping.
Excerpts and reviews can be seen on both sites.
Lastly, this review would
not be complete without a mention of the author's 'exploding
toilet' story. What exactly was this, and is it a danger
that may confront you on your next flight? For the answers
to these key questions, you will, I'm afraid, have to buy the
book and read for yourself.
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Originally published
16 Dec 2005, last update
30 May 2021
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.
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