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Final Call
The View From The Cockpit
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Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome on board from the captain. My name is Colin Hilton and I shall be doing the flying this morning. Our route takes us from the airport to the wider world of aviation, with perhaps a glimpse of a personality or two enroute. Judgment will occasionally be clouded and I anticipate a little turbulence in relationships, besides odd flashes of inspiration. Do not let such rumblings spoil your enjoyment of the service. The crew today will be on hand to assist your journey. They will happily answer queries on aspects of flight safety. These may not all appear on the card in the seat pocket, neither should you expect the commercial pressures attending us to feature in the in-flight magazine. Once in the cruise we might see the origins of flight, while I shall speak to you later on the consequences of flight at 35,000 ft to our health and environment. In the meantime, do please sit back, relax and enjoy the read.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd.; August 2004
388 pages; ISBN 9781433702150
Read online, or download in secure PDF format or MobiPocket
388 pages; ISBN 9781433702150
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The earliest autopilots came about before the war as a means of combating the tedium of flights lasting as long as eighteen hours. They were known colloquially as ‘George’, so that pilots could switch them on and say George had control. It was important for pilots to know who actually had control of the aeroplane, as both had the same set of controls. When I learned to fly I used to have to say, You have control, Sir. When I flew for a while out of Cushing Field near Chicago, we all sat in a wooden house like the Waltons lived in, watching TV. Within a space of ten minutes, two returning aircraft crashed in the maize. No one was hurt, though I thought the episode was funnier than the TV. When we opened the door of the second aircraft, upended in a ditch, the pilots were fighting like Laurel and Hardy. You said you would… actually you said you were going to… Nowadays the autopilot, along with autothrust, is comprehensively linked to the engines, as well as the flight and navigation systems. As we see during the approach, there are two separate autopilots so as to create a failsafe system, one that cannot possibly go wrong. As a result, it is technically possible to program the navigation computer with a route to a destination and have the aeroplane do ninety-five per cent of the flying. Passengers tell me it is done by autopilots these days, so I tell them they are offspring from a stupid donkey. Let us analyse that a little closer. Only I get the aeroplane pushed back, started, taxied and taken off. Only I retract the flaps and gear, while only air traffic says where we go during climb and descent and often on airways too. They tell us our levels at each stage and both runway and approach for landing. We each intervene to avoid collisions and weather, or to choose alternative levels or airports. I set up the approach and ninety-nine percent of the time, do the landing. I hit the brakes if we are running out of concrete and I drive the aeroplane back to the gate. Apart from this, the autopilot does everything these days. A feature of aircraft with which you are about to collide is they remain in the same position in the windshield until point of impact. Any aeroplane that appears to be moving relative to the windshield, even if slowly, will miss you. The only confirmation I have seen of this (because you are not supposed to just sit there watching events unfold) is seeing aeroplanes crossing on other airways separated by a thousand feet. You get closer and closer and then the jet along with its condensation trail flies overhead so close you can see streaks of oil along its underside. This is why for night flights aeroplanes were soon fitted with navigation lights like those of a ship, red on the port side and green on the starboard, along with white at the tail. To remember these, think short words and long words i.e. red, port and left, or else green, starboard and right. As a result, when Elton John sang: Daniel is leaving tonight on a ‘plane I can see his red tail-light, heading for Spaaaaaaain… the aircraft was in breach of the Air Navigation Order and should have been reported as compromising flight safety. Aircraft do not have a red tail-light, they have a white one or even sometimes three of them: one on the tail cone and another on each wingtip. I think what Mr John had done was to mistake the red stroboscopic anti-collision light on the belly for the navigation light and I have written to him requiring an amendment along these lines: Daniel is leaving tonight on a ‘plane I can see his anti-collision light, heading for Spain on a Bognor departure. © Elton John and Colin Hilton.
