> The Captain of the Air France flight had logged 346 hours of flying over the past six months. But within those six months, there were only about four hours in which he was actually in control of an airplane—just the take-offs and landings. The rest of the time, auto-pilot was flying the plane. Langewiesche believes this lack of experience left the pilots unprepared to do their jobs.
They should really be talking about the First officer. The captain knew exactly what to do but wasn't at the controls of the plane until after it had already been stalled.
Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone.
If anything airline pilots should be taught to troubleshoot a plane more and fly it less. Maybe if the First Officer understood the correct way to exit a high altitude stall and that applying inputs to his control cancelled out the other pilot's inputs the plane likely would not have crashed.
A big plane in a normal condition doesn't require much attention and can fly itself. Humans are best at exceptional circumstances (in theory) and computers best at doing the boring and tedious work.
Flight hours in this context are pretty meaningless, they should be judged by percentage of abnormal incidents survived in a simulator instead.
Maybe the whole cockpit should be disconnected after takeoff and turned into a simulator where the pilots can just practice disaster scenarios for the duration of the flight. Worst case they get a chance to ace a real disaster in the mix.
I like the idea of what'd happen if there were some runaway misaligned incentives and it ends up that long haul pilots are forced to vividly relive airline crashes for their entire 14 hour flight to Australia. Years later everyone can agree that it's beneficial ("It's always been done that way") but they can't remember why they started doing it.
Projected Headline: "According to investigators, pilots mistakenly believed their readouts and controls were still in simulation mode until seconds before the aircraft struck the mountain, killing everyone aboard."
I mean, yeah, practice for when the automation breaks is good, but during the flight? That's just creating more mode-switching error cases.
> Not sure how flying a plane while it's essentially doing nothing is helpful to anyone.
When we train engineers for oncall, we take a look at incidents they saw while shadowing. Just X days shadowing doesn't really cut it, they have to be meaningful.
I see the comparison to flying pretty clearly.
Chaos engineering and game days are excellent ways to get engineers more experience in a system. Does the aviation industry have something similar?
Commercial pilots perform frequent recurring training in highly accurate flight simulators which can recreate just about any kind of system failure or emergency situation. It is normal in this training that they are given multiple simultaneous failures, along with confusing or unhelpful ATC instructions.
Some professional pilots choose to engage in leisure activities that improve their aviation skills. Sullenberger was a glider pilot. I know a few ATPs that fly aerobatic aircraft on the weekend.
Many people who love flying really love flying. I once met an extremely attractive woman who was a pilot. The problem was that flying is all she ever wanted to talk about. (I should say that that's just a problem for me. If I loved flight too then I'd be head over heels.)
> If anything airline pilots should be taught to troubleshoot a plane more and fly it less.
Air France 447 is generally viewed as showing the opposite need.
The disaster happened because the pilots were not at all involved in the flying process and suddenly thrown into a problem situation without that situational awareness.
If anything training is already very focused on troubleshooting. And yes systems knowledge could be better. But there's many cases where there's just no time for it and that human awareness is no important. But they are kinda zoned out, similar to when you're a passenger in a car and have less geographical awareness due to not being involved.
AF447 is often misunderstood, there simply is no easy root cause for that particular accident. Or any other aerospace accident, it always is a combination of multiple factors.
That the instruments readings were contradictory is indisputable, but when the anti-stall alarms are blaring in the cockpit, and the plane is literally falling from the sky for 3.5 minutes, than pulling the stick full back is not the way to go. In fact, pulling the stick back, even when applying full power, never has been, and never will be the way to get out of a stall.
The Thales pitot tubes were clearly faulty. The flight system output was absolutely contradictory. But understanding which instruments and which readings a pilot could potentially rely on in such a situation goes down to fundamental, basic airmanship. And for that, the blame lays solely on Air France and on their pilot training.
Pulling back to avoid overspeed is important, but stalling is certain death. And if the VMO and flutter flight-test videos are anything to go by the plane will definitely let the aircrew know they are getting there.
Agreed, the crew was confused and stuck in bubble where they believed pulling up would get them out of a stall, it didn't. Until the very end, they didn't come to the correct conclusion.
Again, training, alarm logic combined with a, in itself trivial equipment failure, led to the disaster. Picking only one of those factors, and all those I didn't mention, is just ignorant.
> In fact, pulling the stick back, even when applying full power, never has been, and never will be the way to get out of a stall.
It works perfectly well in an Airbus when operating in normal law AIUI because of envelope protection. The problem is that it doesn't work in alternate law which was the active mode at the time. It suddenly became necessary to control the aircraft like a "real" aircraft without a computer altering the inputs, and the pilots weren't prepared for that.
447 occurred from a design flaw in Airbus aircraft that have independent joysticks instead of the Yoke available on Boeing fly-by-wire.
The first officer who had more experience than the pilot flying the plane was unaware that the pilot was pulling back on the joystick. If the plane were properly designed as Boeing fly-by-wire craft were designed, eg, 777 at the time, then the accident wouldn't have happened because the first officer would have realized the pilot was pulling back on the yoke for the stall.
A principle in safety is that you want things encoded in the "hardware", eg, you can't put your car in reverse without putting your foot on the brake, even though you are taught this in driver's ed.
The Airbus designers forgot this major principle by using independent joysticks, a lesson not forgotten by the Boeing fly-by-wire craft.
Sure it was a design flaw but again the captain wasn't at the controls.
The first officer and the relief first officer were the ones who were at the controls. The relief first officer (who was the most experienced with that airplane of the pilots) wasn't aware the first officer (the most junior of the pilots) was pulling up on the stick because of the independent inputs.
You can absolutely try switching to reverse at 200km/h in a manual transmission. car at cost of your tranmission and potentially your bones in you hand. If you do it while rolling forward it will make funny sounds.
Apart from that the pilot flying the aircraft was totally confused and pulled the nose up while having stall warning and actually stalling. That is quite some remarkable screw up not understanding to stall and thinking having your nose at an high attack angle while having 100% engine thrust will solve anything in this situation. Sure with non-independent joysticks the other might have called the non nonsensical maneuvers earlier and prevented it. But the lack of awareness in instrument flight of that pilot is quite remarkable.
Can and should be able to are different things. I would imagine on a manual transmission they want things to be simpler so they have to make trade-offs and can't encode certain things without adding hardware.
But it's still not something anyone except the "I like direct control of the machine" types actually want, average users would probably prefer the safeguards.
Thing is, pulling the nose up silenced the stall warning. In the end, the flying crew was, wastly over-simplyfied, convinced to get out of a stall by pulling up. That alert behavior was changed by Airbus.
Blaming the pilots, or flatout stating that one design pholosophy is better than the other, is just ignorant. That's worse than all those soccer coaches knowing everything better on subdays, or whatever the US equivalent is, because at sport no lives depend on it.
And regardless of the latest Boeing fuck ups, everyone in aerospace knows that. And the people designing those planes and systems are fully aware of that, and know what they do.
Edit: The Vanity Fair piece also focuses on the stick behaviour and fly-by-wire systems. I cannot emphasize it enough, that pullong up silenced the stall alarm. The issue was that flight crew never realized that they were still in a stall. Pilot training aroubd that particular edga case, including simulator training, was ammended. As was the stall alarm behaviour. Fly-by-wire and stick behaviour had not much to do with it.
On a different note, for everyone blaming the pilots for being clueless amateurs (I exagerate, but I do get the impression): they died too on that flight. Inclusing the family of one of those pilots. Flight crew had as much skin in the game as possible. And before people start crying for remote controlled planes, how much risk does a pilot sitting in cubicle hubdreds of miles away from the plane actually take?
"Blaming the pilots, or flatout stating that one design pholosophy is better than the other, is just ignorant."
I work with safety, I study it.
The Airbus was poorly designed. You want to have forcing functions in the hardware, not depend of operator training, the "software" in safety terminology.
Airbus should have had the proper design philosophy so that the forcing function was in the "hardware", eg, the yoke of Boeing.
The poor choice of having independent joysticks brought the plane down.
Not certain why the FAA, which does know better, approved of the Airbus design.
That alone is worthy of a study. Was it politics?
In summary, safety guidelines mandate putting safety in the "hardware" of real forcing functions and not "software" -- training. That is the reality. 447 crash occurred because of poor Airbus design and the FAA for approving this design that goes against safety principles.
On physically connected controls this can happen as well.
It is why some flight instructors actually carried a hefty stick into cockpit - sometimes the best solution was to physically hit the trainee pilot to get them out of nervous hold on controls that you couldn't always overpower.
> you can't put your car in reverse without putting your foot on the brake
I rarely put a car in reverse while putting a foot on the brake. Handbrake on sure, but my foot is almost always on the accelerator when reverse engages, same as with forward gear
Certainly it was a design flaw, but also a major fault in training. Any properly trained pilot should have been able to detect a stall situation and pushed stick forward.
Aside: Magenta the color is interesting - the color code is #ff00ff. When I used to use the BBC Micro you had 8 colors by combination of red, blue, green on and off. Magenta is red and blue on, green off. So the color is a result of lack of memory for more colors. Probably the same reason for planes.
I started this particular subthread, and I actually do know how to spell fuchsia.
In college once I made a reference to "my red notebook over there" and the entire room (all women except for me) erupted in "that's not red; that's fuchsia" with one lagging voice adding, "or hot pink."
So yeah, I can spell it, if only because I had never heard of that color before then and I looked it up.
The funny thing is that real Fuchsias display such a diversity of colours as to make naming the colour rather pointless. It is not substantially more sensible than calling a colour 'rose'. I'll think I will stick to the hex codes ;)
I feel like this is true with the new crop of personal 'evtol' aircraft. There's a lot of marketing being said about being so "easy" to fly that even your "concierge" could do it. I do wonder how much aviating you could do in those things and if they even have a "manual" mode so to speak.
Vortex ring state is an extremely real danger with these craft, the computer is what stands between the occupant and a fiery death. Hence the concierge treatment.
There's no manual mode per se with something like a quadrotor, even a simple one requires really unintuitive applications of thrust to affect things like yaw. You could fly one in 'rate' mode though - where the stick deflection commands pitch/roll/yaw rates directly.
Unlike a 172, it's pretty unstable flown like that, and most people would turn such a craft into a smoking crater shortly.
I have crashed an experimental heavy lift multirotor (80kg payload on board) due to VRS. Was maybe 30 feet off the deck, no time or altitude to recover. That was a fun one to explain.
I'm still a bit unclear here; I'll have to give examples.
I have "several" quadcopters. I don't actually know how many I have at the moment, but in addition to enough components to fill a couple of five-gallon buckets, the three I use most regularly are:
* an Autel Evo 2 Pro
* a 5" FPV quad
* a 3" FPV quad
The Autel is a dedicated photo/video quad. It's stupidly easy to fly, to the point that I can put the controller down and come back 20 minutes later to find that it hasn't moved.
I use the 5" for fun, mostly freestyle stuff. The 3" has enclosed props and is intended for videography. Neither of these have GPS. While they do have flight controllers, they are optimized for minimal input latency and do not attempt to automatically keep themselves upright whatsoever. Flying them is much like balancing a dinner plate on top of a broomstick; it requires constant input adjustments. That's difficult at first, but after ~20 hours of practice it starts to become unconscious. I've been doing it for a few years now and really don't even think about it anymore.
Prior to the availability of ARM STM32-based flight controllers, I believe there were some fully analogue solutions out there that allowed similar flight characteristics.
At the most detailed level, all of them are sending a PWM signal to each individual motor. Controller input is translated from 4 axes (pitch, roll, yaw, throttle) to the appropriate changes in the PWM signal for each motor.
I _think_ I could probably set up a fully manual quadcopter and get it to fly predictably without a flight controller, by using the radio receiver on the quad to output PWM directly to the individual motors. I'd have to set up the controller so that input on each axis is "mixed" appropriately to the respective per-engine output channels. The result should be (barely) controllable. I bet wind and the dynamics of lift would be much more difficult to deal with, but I think it'd be doable.
10 years from now nobody will be able to back an old car out of a parking space because old cars don't have backup cameras.
This doesn't make backup cameras bad but it does require that new drivers be trained for what happens when they fail. This idea is fairly new for driving instruction but it used to be mandatory for pilot training.
I started flying in 1999, and I have to say, this article more closely resembles my flying then than my flying now. Dual VORs, one with ILS, no LORAN, obv no GPS, and all pitot/static vacuum gauges. Not CHT, I think it had an EGT, no fuel flow or digital engine monitor. I remember when I went from a C152 to a C172 and finally a 200RG Arrow, one of the biggest learning curves was folding/unfolding your maps faster to keep up and keep a clean sterile cockpit.
Its hard to state how much aviation has progressed in the last two decades.
What's wild is that a lot of that equipment (or barely newer versions) is still standard fare at flight schools. It's possible to get a fancy glass panel if you look. But you'll probably still fly a 172.
It'd be nice if the regulations would make designing clean sheet airframes a viable business again.
Consider part 43, appendix A: It is legal for an owner to change a worn out tire. It's also legal to service wheel bearings. If, however, in the course of reassembly a new brake rotor or pads are installed instead of the old ones, illegal work has been performed. Part 43 also says nothing of actually inflating tires, so it's unclear— in the letter of the law— whether or not filling flat tires is approved.
There's probably an advisory circular around somewhere that expounds on this, but it illustrates well the over regulated[0] nature of GA in America[1] where the results of regulation do not necessarily effect safety. We have 50 year old (on average) airframes flying around with engines designed in the 1940s (on leaded fuel, no less). It costs $40,000+ to rebuild these engines, due largely to laws about who can work on them and the monopolies on who can provide which engines. It's only like this because the FAA is, for whatever reason, unable to work to a real solution.
[0] This is a specific complaint, not an argument for a general rollback
[1] Yes, I am aware that aviation is even more regulated elsewhere-- and that costs are increased while participation is decreased in those places
A refreshing exception to this is the Experimental Amateur-Built (EAB) category, basically home-built aircraft. Subject to a different set of regulations, the owner or pilot of an EAB category airplane has surprisingly wide latitude to install equipment, perform maintenance, experiment with the power plant, and so on. I can't so much as run a USB charger out to the panel of a Cessna 172, but I can make major engine and airframe modifications to an EAB airplane and do the annual condition inspection if I was the builder.
Consequently, a lot of the innovation that's happening in General Aviation, including avionics, safety systems, ignition and fuel systems, is happening in the EAB world, with the Certified world catching up later.
With pretty onerous restrictions on how fast the plane can go, how powerful the engine can be, and once sold, a lot of those restrictions on Certified aircraft apply to you as the new owner.
Everything that you just said is incorrect, at least in the USA, where the overwhelming majority of all E-AB aircraft are built and operated.
There are no airspeed restrictions on experimental amateur built aircraft, other than the 250kt limit under 10,000 feet that applies to all aircraft.
There is absolutely no restriction on engine power output for E-AB aircraft.
The only significant restriction for the second owner of an experimental amateur built aircraft is that they cannot get a repairman’s certificate for the aircraft. This means they will have to hire a licensed A&P mechanic to perform the annual condition inspection. Other than that they can still maintain or modify the aircraft exactly as the original builder could.
I refer you to FAA advisory circular AC 20-27G for further info.
In the EU pilot-owners can self-certify their aircraft for unleaded fuel, provided that the engine is unmodified and that its manufacturer has approved the use of Avgas UL 91. Print an AFM supplement page and put on new fuel quality placards and you can release the aircraft to service yourself. EASA has a set of "standard changes and standard repairs" (CS-STAN) that offer simplified procedures for some common modifications and repairs and this is one of them. CS-STANs have been around for about a decade now.
In the US you still need to go and purchase a supplemental type certificate for your specific aircraft type for this, I believe.
GA is a much smaller phenomenon in Europe than it is in the US but that's not because regulators are out to make it more complicated.
People are always surprised when I tell them I want to defund the FAA. They have irreparably harmed a beloved hobby of mine for generations. The list is quite frankly endless.
So, someone complained about some audit. Like almost wveryone else who went through whatever audit, myself included at time (I went through EASA audits, SOX audits, non-SOX accounting audits, customer audits). If people wouldn't complain, the audit would be to lax to begin with.
I guess most of it is because these light aircraft just won't die. These are simple, well built machines, and treated well and with the appropriate maintenance, they can last essentially forever. Because they have been in use for so long, we know just about every failure mode, and they were build in a time where the idea of safety was comfortable margins and aerodynamic stability. It results in robust machines suitable for training.
Sure, they are slow and inefficient, but these are not airliners where the point is just to get passengers to their destination as effectively as possible. Here, flying is the entire point, who cares if it is slow? And the fuel costs are less than buying and maintaining a more modern airplane when you already have a 50 year old but still usable 172.
Clean sheet airframes exist of course, like carbon fiber, high performance machines, good for those who want high performance, but usually, that's not a priority for flight schools.
A 172 might be a luxury. I flew mostly C152's during my flight training. The only times I got to fly a 172 was when my instructor had to fly morning traffic patrol and invited me to fly for him.
Nicer airplane, though. Nowhere as cramped as a 152.
I remember walking up to a 152 for my first flight lesson, peering inside, and then laughing. You can just reach over and touch the other side of the plane without leaning inside, it's only as wide as your arm is long (well, I suppose it depends on your arms, but you get the idea).
> And as I got to know the airplane, I could estimate the fuel burned on a trip within a gallon. Leaning was done by pulling out the mixture until the engine got rough. It was much later when the fancier planes got EGT gauges, and decades after that with EGT readouts for each cylinder
Correctly leaning a piston engine to balance the power output, manifold pressure, EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature), CHT (Cylinder Head Temperature), Peak Pressure Point and RPM is a fascinating subject. After a series of mysterious spontaneous combustion events in my home flight simulator, I found a 1999 article by John Deakin of AVweb, and was finally able to investigate and resolve the issue and take my Constellation up to FL220 - and back down again - with all four engines intact!
I've found no other more informative article on the topic!
Particularly interesting to me is that the 'engine getting rough' behaviour that the C172 author describes is actually due to the variation of fuel flow to the different cylinders. When you lean the engine, the fuel flow isn't reduced identically to all the cylinders, causing the power output to become unbalanced. John Deakin points out that "virtually all factory big bore engines suffer from this uneven power distribution, which sets an artificial limit on just how lean we can run." Radial engines have superior fuel flow, because the fuel is driven by centrifugal force into each cylinder equally from a central pipe!
The Lockheed Super Constellation in my flight simulator shows no roughness when leaned, because it has radial engines. However, it's still susceptible to detonation due to the higher combustion speed when leaned. That's what was causing the fires. Interestingly, one feature which my flight simulator doesn't replicate - but was present on the Super Constellations in real life - is a 'spark retard' control. That would allow power to be squeezed out of the engines even more efficiently by letting the engines run leaner without detonation, artificially delaying the spark to compensate for the more violent combustion.
> Particularly interesting to me is that the 'engine getting rough' behaviour that the C172 author describes is actually due to the variation of fuel flow to the different cylinders. When you lean the engine, the fuel flow isn't reduced identically to all the cylinders, causing the power output to become unbalanced.
You can get balanced injectors[1] to solve this, and then you can more aggressively lean before the onset of roughness.
Indeed, EGT, CHT, Manifold Pressure and RPM were all available on the real Lockheed Super Constellation as well as the pre-WWII Lockheed Constellation. They also have a gauge labelled 'Brake Mean Engine Pressure', which also reports a super useful piece of information for working out the ideal mixture.
To be noted, they also had a flight engineer on board who was tasked to monitor all of those indications, and to operate the engines and aircraft system based on the indications.
No such prudent measures are taken with my flight simulator. But I'm somewhat proud of being able to manage as captain, first officer, radio man, navigator and flight engineer simultaneously. Crash rate is down to one in tens of flights as well ;)
I know this article is more about pilots, but recently watched The Parallax View (1974)[1] and there's a scene where Warren Beatty goes to an airport, walks on the tarmac and boards a plane.
He finds an empty seat, a flight attendant comes over and has him pay for the ticket, all while the other attendants are offering drink service before the flight takes off and everyone is smoking.
I don't know how period accurate it is, and maybe it was embellished to make the plot smoother, but I couldn't help thinking how different air travel was 50 years ago in regards to being a passenger.
I flew all over the country working on the first CAT scanners in hospitals in the late 1970s. I would show up for work with my packed suitcase in the trunk of my car knowing I would be sent somewhere as soon as I walked in the door of work. I'd often travel to two or three cities every week.
Once I was told which hospital I was going to, I would pull out my flight book--a printed thin manual that contained all the latest flights for all the major airports in the USA. I'd select which time suited me and either call the airline to book my flight or just drive out to the airport, walk up to the airline's ticketing counter, and pay by company credit card.
Now I'm talking about a flight I intend to take within an hour or two of being told where I was going to go. Not tomorrow or next week or next month. I needed to go right now. And I wasn't paying extra to do it!
Being the seasoned traveler, I knew not to bother to board the plane till it was ready to go. There were times when I'd arrive at the airport, parked my car, walk to the door of the airplane just as they were closing the door. (No security checking involved.)
The "stews" could spot us frequent flyer business travelers a mile away. They knew we didn't ask for much and often preferred to just be left alone.
In the 90s there was a small airfield near my home in the US that Continental had some basic puddle jumper service at. There was a small office that could reasonably hold about 50 or so people that was between the parking lot and the tarmac. There was practically no security. One could go from buying the ticket in cash to boarding the plane in five minutes. Checked luggage was handed to the attendant at the bottom of the stairs.
It was nice as it connected to a major international airport on the far side of town. Instead of an hour long drive each way it was a 15-minute drive, barely leaving the neighborhoods. Free parking at a generally safe part of town. Really easy to get in and out, no hassle.
It operated until 9/11 happened. From what I understand pretty much all commercial operations there really died out, as it was also an air national guard and coast guard base.
Gosh I forget the name of the airfield at the moment but by any chance was it near the Clearlake suburb of Houston (Hobby perhaps?)
I used that airfield to get to Bush international several times back in the day. It was strange flying from one airfield to another in the same city to connect to my regularly scheduled flight.
When I was ten years old or so I was going to fly home from Spain to Sweden together with my younger sister. My mother worked for a travel company that also operated the aircraft. There were no seats available but we had school starting after the summer break in a few days. So it was considered important that we get home.
They decided to put us in the cockpit in the DC-8, which had five seats, pilot, co-pilot, engineer (?) and two more seats. We got to partake in the takeoff and landing as observers, whilst using the flight attendant’s seats during the flight. I it was great as kid to experience that. That isn’t likely to happen today. (Cockpits probably don’t even have extra space.)
I remember that flying in the 90s was a hell of a lot smoother than after 911. I recall once (1998) getting to the airport 10m before departure time, running through the airport (with help from airline agents), and making the departure (a bit sweaty).
This would be impossible today.
I wonder how much of this was move to deregulate vs. increased consolidation in today's market.
>I remember that flying in the 90s was a hell of a lot smoother than after 911.
When living in Redwood City, from 2000 to 2001 I could leave my apartment, park my car at SFO, get through security, and get to the plane's gate within 50 minutes.
I did 15 minutes from front door to gate once when I lived 7 minutes from the airport.
Even Heathrow T5 it’s only 10 minutes from entering he building to getting to the gate, 15 it you’re in B or C gates. I’ve done 33 minutes from Paddington to a gate for a flight leaving T2 in the past.
The entire process when I flew from Spain on Sunday took 6 minutes from signing the rental car form to sitting next to the gate.
Airports are now giant shopping malls. The incentive is for you to hang out and be a good consumer. Too short, no shopping. Too long, they need more chairs, space and wifi.
Even in 2015, in O'Hare Chicago, there were like 5-6 passengers, including me and family that were late due to a late connection and the flight doors had closed. The bridge was not retracted yet. No one was in the counter either. But we could see the pilots and all of us started yelling and waving at them. They got the door opened and we all got in. That was nice of them. Don't remember if it was United or Delta
If it was Terminal 1, it would have been United; Old Terminal 3 would have been Delta. Source: lived in Chicago many years and flew a lot in and out of ORD.
I have gone from airport drop off to gate in less than 10min numerous times at Portland airport (PDX), especially if it’s United which has gates in the E terminal.
I find Baltimore very quick in the US - I prefer to fly to/from BWI back to the U.K. than from IAD. The experience is all about how well staffed and equipped the airport is for the number of passengers.
My first time flying was 1982. Back then you dressed up to fly (suits and ties for the men, dresses for the women). Metal detectors had been in place for less than a decade (before that, “skyjackings,” where the plane was directed to go to Cuba, were a monthly if not more frequent occurrence). In-flight service included drinks in actual glasses and metal silverware for any meals (when I moved off-campus, I liberated some airline silverware to augment the dining-hall silverware I ate with in my apartment). Meeting arrivals at the airline gate was a common practice (as was saying goodbye at the gate).
It was as absurd as people wandering around a plane defecating on the tray tables. More ridiculous is how gullible classism has always been, continuously and eagerly falling for marketing hype.
There’s a scene at the end of the movie Fletch (1985) where Chevy Chase uses a plane ticket made out in another person’s name, and no one blinks an eye.
Can confirm. My first snowboard trip was to Mount Hood, Oregon, in the late 80s. I only went because something came up and my friend couldn't go, so he just gave me his plane ticket. The person at the ticket counter just asked me, "Are you Kevin Johnson?" I said "Yep", and walked onto the plane.
In the late 1980s, I flew under my suitemate’s father’s name to get to college once (he had to change his travel date and sold me his ticket which was under his father’s name so his dad would get the frequent flyer miles).
My father flew on commercial airliners somewhat frequently throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s in Europe, Africa and the Americas, and told me that travelling by air was just like catching a bus in South America.
There's nothing I would like better than being able to get hold of a proper timetable for a given airport, but sadly this doesn't seem to be easy. Airlines book their slots months in advance, so its not as if they don't know when they'll be flying.
There are still regular schedules. Flight 1172 will have the same scheduled route and time one day after another. But with computers, the visibility into the schedule is both obscured (because they’ll show you only the flights with open seats) and less necessary (because they’ll show you only the flights with open seats). Crewing requirements mean that it’s important to have some stability in operating schedules. The stereotype of flight crews staying in a hotel at the far end of their flight is only the case for long-haul flights which comprise a minority of flights. Most crew will be on an out and back itinerary for their working days, sleeping in their own beds at the end of the day.
I flew quite a lot in Europe in the 90s and it was definitely a completely different experience compared to nowadays.
I do remember walking on the tarmac yes. I had my ticket before but could seat wherever. I could just show up 60 to 30min before take off. I was also - as a kid - always asked by the stewardess if i wanted to visit the cockpit.
I remember telling that to a friend of mine who was 10 years younger and never flew before 9/11 and he thought I was making it up.
I have walked on the tarmac plenty of times in the last 10 years either at smaller airports or at very large airports. At large airports it's because smaller flights don't get to park right up to the terminal so you have to board a little bus that takes you from the airplane to the terminal and vice-versa.
At smaller airports it's because planes that small (100 or fewer passenger jets) don't really need the big walkways.
> I could just show up 60 to 30min before take off
I do that every time I fly domestic out of SFO. Super fast airport :)
Like I said: it happens at very large airports where not all connections fit around the terminal building, and at very small airports where the terminal itself is small.
Many international airports do the tarmac thing for smaller regional-ish flights. In Europe those regional flights can easily be to a different country.
I haven’t walked over tarmac from a terminal to a plane since
checks
Sunday.
Showed up 45 minutes before the flight and still lamented how early it was. Despite security and passport control the longest time was spent walking through the duty free section.
Same thing happened to my friend. In the 90s sometime his dad just asked if his kid could go and they said sure and pointed him out all the buttons and the controls.
> I could just show up 60 to 30min before take off
In the early 90's I showed up at a check in counter for a domestic flight from SYD 1 minute before scheduled departure time and the lady there apologized and told me that I missed the flight because it had left a little early.
I think I remember a Trump Shuttle print ad from, presumably, 1989 or 1990, saying that you'd better not show up for a flight at 6:00:01 if the scheduled departure is at 6:00:00.
This principle still works for Swiss and Japanese trains, but it might be a little harder for people to relate to for air travel nowadays!
I don't ever recall seeing people paying for a flight on-board but I did fly from Las Vegas to Reno (and back again later) to visit UNR and walked up to the Hughes Airwest counter, paid my $45 for a ticket, walked out to the tarmac and up the ramp and sat down on the plane. Maybe 15 minutes from parking to sitting down. The stewardess checked my ticked when I got on the plane to make sure I was on the right flight.
Nice article. Recent crashes with pilots failing to understand modern avionics are in dark contrast to this level of understanding and craft in the airplane.
> I never flew to Vermont or Maine, the last two states I now need to have visited all 50
This is too bad, VT has some great airports. I used to enjoy flying from B01 (Granville, NY) up to B06 (Basin Harbor, VT) for lunch. They had a nice restaurant right off the runway. Then I'd head over to KLEB or KRUT, fuel up, and then back to B01. This was in a 1949 Piper Clipper ca. 2004, handheld radio, VFR. Wasn't much different than described in the article, but I never spent much time in controlled airspace except for however many hours was required in training (mostly at KLEB IIRC).
Apart from some minor electronics improvements (like easier radios), that all sounds remarkably similar to my experience learning to fly twenty years ago. Still all paper charts, compass, time, VORs. Was definitely rewarding to get the navigational calculations right. Planes were the same too!
Having learned sailing in the GPS-and-chartplotter era, I sort of miss that. Time to get buy the HO tables for the sextant, I suppose…
I also got my license around that time with eb6, paper charts, VORs, NDB approaches, … and I don’t miss it a bit. Nostalgia - yes. But not missing it. I like to fly direct, I like to get LPV approach to 200 feet at an airport that would never ever ever would had had an ILS installed, I like traffic and weather on ADSB, I like my ForeFlight, and list goes on. The new technology helps to make flying safer. Yes, you need to know how to use all of this. And yes, it’s complicated. But the benefits are great too.
Sure, just like I’m really happy having for instance AIS for collision avoidance on the boat.
I never got to fly with all the modern automations, though. Fuel prices shot up drastically around the time I got my license, and so I let it expire after a couple of years.
There's a good quote in that “Children of Magenta” article:
“We appear to be locked into a cycle in which automation begets the erosion of skills or the lack of skills in the first place and this then begets more automation.”
Though this comment from that 2015 article aged like milk:
“Airbus planes, by the way, are no more or less safe than their main rival, Boeing.”
Every so often I like to play the mirror game. Pick some arbitrary date in the past (my birthday, release of Star Wars, etc.), then see what I get when I take the time between now and then and go that distance back from that date. In the case of my father who’s turning 92 this year, the mirror game takes me all the way back to 1840.
I took lessons in the early 90s, didn't finish, then took lessons again in the early 2000s and again quit. The second time I took lessons at Hanscom field.
In both cases things had not really progressed much at all beyond his experience 50 years ago. I learned the slide rules and the paper plotting and all that stuff just like him. I did have an electronic flight computer that was like a handheld calculator, but learning it all by hand was required. It is not hard to understand at all for anyone who was headed towards engineering. The radios were super primitive and didn't even have electronic displays, they had rotating dials inside the radio that just spun to the number.
By the time I took lessons at Hanscom it was a Big Airport (TM) and it kind of stunk. The quaint taxiway names were not in use. I'd sit there and wait 20 minutes in line to take off behind traffic and pay for the whole thing.
If I somehow got the bug to go back and do it again and actually finish I would want to go to a smaller airport. But I'd probably end up back at Hanscom field cause at this point I live like a mile away and it would actually be convenient, even if I did have to sit there and hemorrhage money sitting in line to take off.
I did not really get the old man yelling at clouds vibe from him about glass cockpits. More like he finds the complication challenging.
An interesting trip down memory lane for those of us who learned to fly later. But he went and ended it with a bunch of "old man yells at cloud" nonsense. Yes, airmanship needs to be cultivated in an era of glass cockpits, but that doesn't mean the glass isn't head-and-shoulders above the steam gauges. The only reason the steam gauges existed were because they were the best we could do at the time. Hopefully the next step is incorporating augmented reality.
I read the final part as more nostalgic than scornful of modern equipment; after all, the author does acknowledge that each generation of radio equipment was more capable than the previous. It's not surprising though that after fifty years, one might feel a little out of one's depth with more modern equipment - reduced to being "child of the magenta", as the author puts it. I don't know; I just think one can afford to be more charitable towards anachronisms when someone's been at it for half a century :)
Augmented reality on the flight deck is nearly there... The Airbus A220 (also known as the Bombardier C-Series) may optionally be purchased with heads-up-displays. Similarly, the Dash 8 Q400 can be retrofitted with a HUD. Curiously, HUDs are actually required for some instrument procedures in the USA.
HUDs are ancient history. They have been around for decades and JHMCS has been around on the military side for over a decade. I'm honestly surprised some level of HoloLens 2/Magic Leap 2-esque AR hasn't been demoed yet for the civilian side.
That would certainly be useful for enhancing situational awareness, particularly for TCAS. I can imagine a floating red circle around a conflicting flight with a line extending out in the direction of flight (which is rather difficult to judge by sight alone). Too much would be distracting, of course, but I can't see any reason why it couldn't be developed with as much care and testing as traditional avionics are.
Yea, a few old-timers still complain about pilots being dependent on The Magenta Line, but I would trade my paper-and-pencil flight planning and my E6B any day for a GPS moving map and ADS-B In. ADS-B alone has been a massive game-changer for traffic awareness with basically no downside (aside from cost to outfit the fleet). Modern engine management systems also allow you to fine tune your operation of the machine to a degree that was impossible to do "by ear" in the old days.
I'd liken it to automotive advancements as well. I would never even consider taking a long road trip in a carbureted classic car. Yet GA pilots are flying with the equivalent engine technology to this day. Total madness.
During the Vietnam war, my dad was stationed at an air base in Alaska. For the buildup for the war, they needed more transport aircraft. So a lot of piston engine machines were resurrected from the boneyard and pressed into service.
But the mechanics could not get them to produce the rated power. They were all set up exactly according to the manual. Finally, the AF resurrected a few geezer mechanics from WW2. These fellows simply listed to the engines, asked for a screwdriver, and had them working properly with a turn of a screw.
I don't remember filet mignon, they'd let you up into the cockpit to meet the pilot, and they'd give you these cool wings you could pin on your shirt, and they'd give you a free deck of united playing cards if you asked for them.
Sometimes I'll take advantage of that and chat with a them for a few moments. Then I leave them alone because they've got more important things to do than idle chitchat with an engineer.
Rows of people (much/most of the plane) smoking, with a flimsy curtain dividing them from the on-smoking section. Getting off with your clothes smelling like an ashtray.
And stewardesses (before they were called "flight attendants") would sometimes ask if it was okay to be seated in a smoking section. I agreed once when I was around 16 years old. Big mistake. I sat next to a dude that chain-smoked the entire flight from San Francisco to St. Louis.
I once ended up in the smoking section by accident. The smoking section was almost always in the back of the plane and I was in the habbit of requesting a seat "as close to the front of the plane as possible." But once time the smoking section was in the front, and I didn't realize this until the no-smoking sign went off and everyone around me lit up. It was a nightmare.
Happily, there were empty seats in the back and I was able to move. Thank God, because it was a trans-Atlantic flight.
I bet if you paid the inflation adjusted fare you payed then, you could fly first class now and have that food plus a lot of other benefits such as increased safety, quieter flight, higher cabin pressures which will result in a more comfortable flight.
This kind of writing is written less to inform others than to trigger nostalgia in people with a similar background to the writer. It's laden with jargon and uncontextualized events that you need to be an insider with similar experiences to comprehend and appreciate. Overall it's a kind of written social proof of having been there, done that, for other people in the writer's ingroup.
I do it myself when talking to an older software engineer for the first time, it has a purpose - but it's not super interesting to outsiders.
"Children of the magenta" should be required reading/listening for anyone interested in aviation.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...