Ask the pilot
When a routine flight is plunged into weirdness after the crew smells smoke, how to deal with a possible emergency -- and a plane full of foreign tourists.
Editor's note: Read Part 2 of the story here.
By Patrick Smith
Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Airplanes, Tourism, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot
June 6, 2008 | It's the winter of 1994, and for now at least the payroll checks are clearing and business is good. On a clear, bitingly cold evening we're readying for a scheduled flight from Boston up to Charlottetown, in the Canadian Maritimes.
Charlottetown is the capital of Prince Edward Island, PEI, the smallest and maybe the most charming of Canada's provinces. We do a lot of flying up there, carrying snowbirds down to Florida through our hub at Logan. Our route will take us over Maine and New Brunswick, and across the Bay of Fundy -- close to where Swissair will splash to its fate four years from now.
It's 8 o'clock as the final passengers are coming up the stairs of our 19-seater. The weather is icy but clear. The sky seems as black as the vacuum of space -- that New England January darkness that falls with an almost palpable heaviness.
Patrick Smith, born Patrick R. Santosuosso of Revere, Mass., a fourth-generation descendant of Neapolitan olive growers who changed his name to impress a girl, is sitting in the left-hand pilot seat. My first officer, brand-new, is Mike, a former Navy fighter pilot from San Francisco whose wife has recently left him for a Chilean businessman. I am 27 years old, and he is 26. A couple of young hotshots, you could say -- though Mike, who is tall and square-jawed, his thick black hair closely cropped, looks the pilot part substantially more than I do.
Our plane is the Fairchild Metroliner, a long, skinny turboprop known for its tight quarters and annoying idiosyncrasies. The plane's derisive nicknames include "lawn dart" and, if you'll pardon me, "the Texas tampon," in tribute to its profile and factory of origin. Most of us call it simply "the Metro." At Fairchild, down in San Antonio, the guys with the pocket protectors were faced with a challenge: How to take 19 passengers and make them as uncomfortable as possible? Answer: Stuff them side-by-side into a 6-foot-diameter aluminum tube. Attach a pair of the loudest turbine engines ever made, the Garrett TPE-331, and go easy on the soundproofing. For the crew, provide the tiniest, most ergonomically vicious cockpit possible. Remove the autopilot. All of this for a mere $2.5 million a copy.
(Somewhere out there is a retired Fairchild engineer feeling very insulted. He deserves it.)
As captain of this beastly machine it is my duty not only to safely deliver passengers to their destinations but to hide in shame from them as they arrive at the aircraft, chortling and spewing insults: "Does this thing really fly?" and "Man, who did you piss off?"
The answer to that first question is, sort of. The Metro is equipped with a pair of minimally functioning ailerons and a control wheel in need of a placard marking it for decorative purposes only. In other words, the plane is sluggish, slow to respond. Crosswind landings can be an adventure.
The typical flight is very, um, interactive. The Metro is too small for a cockpit door, allowing for 19 back-seat drivers whose gazes spend more time glued to the instruments than ours do. I have doctored up one of my chart binders with these prying eyes in mind. On the front cover, in oversize stick-on letters, I have put: "HOW TO FLY"; I stow the book on the floor in full view of the first few rows. During approach I'll pick it up and flip through the pages, eliciting some hearty laughs -- or shrieks.
The view of the cockpit is even more entertaining if, as occasionally is the case, somebody has spit-glued a magazine photo across the radar screen. Our radar units, mounted in the middle of the panel and visible all the way to the aft bulkhead, look like miniature TV sets, and are used to detect storms and precipitation. On clear autumn days when we zip up the coast between Boston and Portland, Maine, or from the Cape down to Newark, N.J., they are switched off. Those with lively imaginations might clip out a ridiculous picture from a newspaper or magazine and adhere it to the empty screen. A man in a chef's hat carrying a wedding cake, I recall, was one memorable choice.
As a final insult, the designers made sure there is absolutely no room for pilots to store their equipment. Our books -- leather binders full of maps and instrument landing charts -- have to be stacked on the floor near the center pedestal between the two seats. During takeoff they'll sometimes slide beneath the curtain and go skidding down the aisle.
Add a couple of pornographic magazines to those books and charts, and you can understand just how embarrassing things can get. I'd like to tell you such a mishap is apocryphal, except I know the person it happened to. Let's call him Eric, and pretend he was from Lewiston, Maine. That's the same Eric who thought it would be amusing to dangle a pair of red velvet dice from the overhead standby compass. That one had customers giggling, pointing, slapping him on the back and sending letters to the Federal Aviation Administration. Poor Eric lost a paycheck, and earned a blemish on his record that would have recruiters at the major airlines affixing the wrong color Stickies to his résumé.
As you can doubtless tell, things are a bit faster and looser, which is to say younger, at the regional carriers. We are 20-something kids, many of us making poverty-level wages, sitting at the controls of million-dollar aircraft. The incongruity of it all can make us silly.
But back to our flight to Charlottetown.
Next page: The lights of the rocky coast of Maine are off to the left when I first notice the smoke