I open a Coke Lite. The other two pilots will be here shortly. But for now it's just me and the Monster, and this pre-departure ritual has a way of enhancing our love/hate relationship. The DC-8 speaks to me. I will kill you, it says, if you don't take proper care of me.
So, I take proper care.
In the foggy predawn darkness we lift off.
Eight-plus hours to New York is a long time. Somewhere south of Iceland I've got my shoes off. There are sections of newspaper piled on the aft jump seat, remnants of some quality time back in Brussels. Foil trays of half-eaten chicken sit on the floor, and a trash bag is bursting with discarded cups and cans of Coke Lite.
Transoceanic flying induces a unique feeling of loneliness. Out here, you are on your own; there is no radar coverage or conventional air traffic control. Flights are spaced apart by time and speed, sequenced along paths of latitude and longitude called "tracks." Pilots report their positions to monitoring stations hundreds, even thousands of miles away, silently via satellite link -- or, in the case of the old DC-8, over high-frequency radio. There's something in the crackling, echoing transmission of an HF transmission that intensifies a sense of distance and isolation.
"Gander, Gander," calls the captain. "DHL zero-one one, position. Five-eight north, three zero west at zero-five, zero-four. Flight level two eight zero. Estimate five-eight north, four-zero west at zero-five four six. Next: five-six north, five-zero west. Mach eight-six. Fuel seven two decimal six, over?"
Basically that's our current location; ETA for the next reporting fix; speed, altitude and remaining fuel. A moment or two later comes the acknowledgment from a controller in far-off Newfoundland, his voice so faint he might as well be on the moon.
For the second officer, the en route phase is pretty relaxed. There's not much to do, and thoughts will wander -- perhaps in the wrong direction, resulting in a distinctly maudlin karmic brew. The devil finds work for idle minds.
In the cargo compartment behind us are 80,000 pounds of fresh-cut flowers from Belgium and the Netherlands headed to America. ("But what placed within it could compare with religious faith?" wondered Barry Lopez.) The scent of the flowers has made the cockpit smell like baby powder. I think about how, after planes crash at sea, mourners go out on a boat and toss flowers into the waves, and how if something happened and we found ourselves in a watery grave, we'd save everyone the trouble by spreading a veritable slick of tulips halfway to Labrador.
And consider another thing: When thousands of pounds of flowers are piled together, they tend to give off clouds of microscopic dust -- tiny bits that fill the air like a fragrant cloud of powder. Meanwhile the fire-detection system of the DC-8 is designed to detect not flames or heat, but smoke particles, and they are very susceptible to false fire alarms from dust and powder.
Tires nothing -- a pilot's worst nightmare, other than his airline going bankrupt or the caterers forgetting the meals, is an on-board fire. My battered jet has two identical smoke detector systems for its 150-foot-long upper cargo deck. These are rotary dial things with yellow annunciator bulbs at the bottom. The bulbs say: CARGO SMOKE.
Of course, this is an airplane laid out when Eisenhower was president, so guess what? Thanks for the heads up, but there's nothing to actually put the fire out with once it has been detected. There are bigger, brighter lights in this cockpit, but it's those square, innocuous-looking yellow lights that I do not ever want to see come on, particularly when the closest spot of land, two hours away, is the glaciered coast of Greenland.
So I'm staring at the warning lights, waiting for them to tell me we're on fire over the middle of the ocean. Or is it just the flowers?
Making matters worse, the captain starts playing with the GPS and all of a sudden shouts "Ha!" Bored and curious, he has just located the exact latitude and longitude of the Titanic, which is 40,000 feet below us (28,000 of air and 12,000 of saltwater), just a short ride south of our course.
"Jesus," I say, "don't be doing shit like that."
I sit in front of my instrument panel -- a wall of dials and switches, all arranged in a perfect working sequence, with a collective purpose nothing short of mechanical infallibility. Green lights, red lights, blue lights, circular windows with quivering white needles. In modern planes it's all LED or liquid crystal, but these are the old-style analog gauges, which give the cockpit that U-boat look. Old, and dizzyingly complex for just that reason. I slide back my seat and consider it all, with the criticism and respect an artist might give to his or her canvas. In that moment I am a maestro of a most precariously ordered technology.
But if only you could see what lurks behind that console. The maintenance people sometimes rip the panels off, and trust me, there's pandemonium back there: wildly knotted bundles of wires and cables, like a spaghetti factory has exploded. Most people have never seen the guts of an airplane -- the hideous blocks of machinery conspiring to fool gravity. Unseen hydraulic pumps are grinding, stressed metal is moaning. When you look at the eyes of a pretty girl, that superficial beauty of a green-speckled iris in the sunlight, do you consider the bloody tangle of the optic nerve behind it? And in that brain of hers, that cottage-cheese glob of viscera, what is she thinking? Like a fire secretly smoldering behind me amid all those flowers. And when it's finally too late: CARGO SMOKE.
No, not this time. A few hours later, we land at Kennedy.
And doesn't it always end this way, which is to say, safely? That's the thing about these spooky ruminations. It's our imagination, not our technology, that is most prone to failure.
Though perhaps that's a good thing as well. We're all afraid of flying on some level, and is that not perfectly healthy? And the pilot's job, in essence, is the management of contingency. Fires, explosions, physics gone bad, all the nasty scenarios the simulator instructors love -- they're all there, coiled behind the instrument panel, waiting to spring in a game of comfortable, though never perfect, odds. And the pilot's role is to spring right back. Do pilots worry about crashing? Of course. As a matter of practicality, they have to. It's in their best interest, and yours too.
Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here.
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