To fly back to where we started on this road trip would usually mean that we could book a flight and just go. Unfortunately, thanks to ongoing industrial action, the only way that we're going to be able to fly back, is if I fly the plane myself. Fortunately as this is my mind that we are going around inside, I get to make all of the rules and so after we've parked the car, we can just put our luggage on the plane ourselves.
You can sit up the back if you like but there won't be any cabin crew and it's more fun to sit up front anyway. The plane that we've been assigned is a De Havilland Rocket: registration VH-OMO¹.
Always walk around your aircraft to do a visual check to see if anything may be awry. Entire airliners full of hundreds of souls have been brought down by something as simple as protective tape left covering the pitot tubes; which has affected the instrument readings for things like airspeed and the altimeter.
Also kick each and every one of the tyres on the landing gear. Again, flying through the air at hundreds of knots might be perfectly fine but if the gear fails on the ground during landing, then you might get a faceplant and a meal service of dirt².
We'll go through the normal start up procedures and input the set of frequencies for radio and squawk that we've been given by ground control. The thing I like about aircraft and one of the reasons why I think that being a commercial airline pilot would be brilliant is that so much of the decision making process has been eliminated and checklists exist; which means that smarter people than I have thought about this kind of thing deeply. Of course, to get to that kind of precision and orchestrated order has cost many lives and who knows how many dollarpounds.
-Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar requesting advisory for pushback and taxi to the active.
The glamour jobs in an airport are the pilots who get to dress up in fancy uniforms. However it is the vast unseen army of people doing the unglamorous and at times awful jobs who really deserve the most credit and the highest honour.
When I think about all of the baggage handlers who have to send millions of pieces of luggage around the airport and match them up to the proper planes, it does my head in. There are front line staff like the people at Customs, Quarantine, Passport Control etc. who have to do a job which is both insanely important and yet utterly reviled by some people.
There are also the cleaners and the people who work in the cafés and shops who have to deal with the literal muck of the public. I think that it is borderline criminal that the people who have the most awful jobs are often in the most precarious employment circumstances while the people who work in management get paid many multiples that of the average worker. I wonder how long that the CEO of QANTAS would last if he had to clean up people's actual vomit and poop. That's why I find his comments at the moment, so very reprehensible.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Proceeding from gate two one, via Delta, then Alpha to Alpha one three. Hold short on Apron before entering active Runway one eight?
- Thank you Tower.
One of the things that even after reading through a list of procedures and looking at a radar instrument panel, is how Air Traffic Control makes sense of all of those aircraft at the same time.
The human brain while being a marvel, is still a relatively easily confused bit of kit. The most number of discreet packets of information that people can reliably handle at once is 23 on average. This relates exactly to the question of how many beans are in a pile and 23 appears to be the answer for most people that they cease to be individual beans and just become one pile. It also helps to explain why the optimal size for a classroom of children tends to top out at about 24 because beyond that, children cease to be individuals and begin to blur into a mob.
ATC has to deal with many aircraft at once and do their bit to ensure that they don't run anywhere near each other; both in the air and on the ground. I think that being Tower in ATC is perhaps simultaneously the most critical and the worst job in an entire airport.
- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar, Depart runway one eight, climb to six thousand?
- Roger that. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Depart runway one eight, climb six thousand, on heading one seven four to checkpoint Zulu two, bank to heading two six three.
If I am on a plane and it happens to crash into the ocean, then my plan to deal with the situation is pretty much exactly the same as if I was on a ship on the high seas - drown.
Unless there is an obvious way that I can get to a lifeboat, then I know that I am done for. While that might sound incredibly defeatist, so far I have managed to be immortal. As I also have a pretty keen sense of self preservation, it also means that I am unlikely to go on a ship on the high seas and it also means that dying because of a catastrophic failure on an aircraft, is not out of the question. The interesting thing about the Destroying Angel, aka The Grim Reaper, aka Mister Death, is that he's also working through a list of procedures, checklists, and appointments. He doesn't particularly care what class ticket that you bought on the airline either³. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? Poor old Death has a mountain of paperwork that he has to work through and he also reports to the Big Boss. That's an awful job.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. We have banked to heading two six three and will be leaving your airspace shortly. Thank you Tower. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar over and out.
¹Omo being the name of a popular brand of washing machine powder; which I quite like as the registration of an aircraft.
²It is still unknown to me why Tower always wants to know what the meal service on board any given aircraft is.
³Death usually flies economy class. Death also has an exemption to be able to carry offensive weapons on board - but not in overhead luggage.
No comments:
Post a Comment