Many pilots judge and measure their lives by the airplanes they fly. There has always been a sort of rivalry or snootiness between fliers of different types, styles, and forms of aircraft. Jet drivers tend to look down their noses at piston-pushers; tail-dragger pilots think theirs is the only way to land and taxi. Transport people swear by big airplanes with bathrooms. Nobody knows what to do with helicopter pilots and fighter pilots look down on everybody.
Not only do we measure our lives by the type of airplane we fly, we also tend to box our existence into the make and model.
I can’t recite my airline career to you in terms of the years that certain things happened. My only solid reference to the twenty seven years I spent flying the line are the airplanes I flew. I can’t relate my stories and memories in any other way.
Every one of my memories of my airline life can be referenced by the airplane I was on. Stories always start with: “When I was flying engineer on the DC-8” or “That year I was co-pilot on the 777.” It is only by cross-referencing the airplanes I flew (and still fly) with specific memories of other things that I can get a real handle on them.
I suppose this is nothing unusual. On the way to Oshkosh this year I visited Charlotte Michigan, where I lived as a six to nine year old child. I hadn’t been back there for over forty years and had no frame of reference to use to find my old neighborhood, house, and other landmarks.
Finally, I gave up looking for street names that I couldn’t remember and started looking for the geographical reference points that a six to nine year old would recognize. I began to look for old playgrounds and my old elementary school. I found the playground within minutes of looking and by remembering my old walking route to school, found it as well. My life back then was solidly based in the landmarks of kids. My flying life has always been rooted firmly in what I was flying.
General aviation is a little harder to tack down in that way. When I instructed, flew charters, towed banners and hauled dead bodies I literally could fly a dozen or more kinds of airplanes a week. No permanence there. Because of this, I can’t refer to that time as the era when “I flew the Cessna 182” or “was on the Piper Navajo.” That time of my life, (which I seem to be starting up again) was based not so much on what I was flying as were I was flying it. You know – my Lakeland years, my Tallahassee years, etc.
I don’t know if your memories work like mine but when I think of a specific airplane I flew I can almost feel what it was like to fly it. Remembering the forestry flying I did bring me back briefly to the sights, smells and feeling of flying in an over 100 degree cockpit for five hours at a time. I can smell the grease pencil the forestry observer used to mark the plastic covered map he was using to direct bull dozers’. I can almost feel the gritty, smelly feeling of flying through smoke for days on end.
If you ever get to go back and actually visit the kind of airplane you flew the feelings flood in even more intensely. It has been over twenty five years since I last sat in a 727 flight engineer’s seat but I got the chance last month when a horse transporting seven-two was in town. My butt is wider and my eyesight is way weaker but I slid into the engineer seat like my last trip ended yesterday.
By the way, don’t try slipping into a 727 engineer seat without training. You can really hurt some vital parts – if you catch my drift. Watch out for that armrest and beware of the metal box that holds the logbooks and the MEL.
Some airplanes I’ve flown can even be broken down into sub-sets. The Boeing 727 is a great example of this. When I started flying engineer on it in 1979, most of our seven-twos were 400 series aircraft. They all had the more primitive “block four” auto flight systems and some of them still had pneumatic pressurization instead of the electronic controls they all subsequently got.
You can really get behind when you are working a pneumatic pressurization system. There was an art to operating it which is lost now because unless one of them is still flying in South America somewhere, none of them exist outside of desert bone yards.
The fact that a lot of us pilots have been doing this for quite a while is impressive in itself. In more basic terms – we’ve survived! We have lived to tell the tales.
Hardly anybody has run the pressurization system of a DC-8 manually. If you mention using the “lolly pop” to mitigate the pressurization bump to anybody who hasn’t been a DC-8 engineer they would have no idea what you are talking about. You can tell everybody you know about how you needed to ease the hydraulic handle (which was next to the lollypop) very gently so as to not knock the knees of the pilots with the control column, but the idea of a hydraulic handle is foreign to younger, more modern pilots.
As aviation and its pilots age the language we use to describe our experiences changes as well. We have gone from talking about low-freq ranges and NDBs to discussing “intercept direct-to” and “Vnav waypoints”.
Our aircraft have changed so much in the past thirty years that we can scarcely recognize the new ones. Most are made out of plastic now and the whole idea of whirring gyros and trying to accomplish a standard rate turn with a needle ball and airspeed are almost too far in the past to remember.
Who knew that in such a short time we would go from asking a human on the ground about the weather ahead to looking at actual, real-time weather on a color screen in our cockpits?
The airplanes you fly all have their own nicknames. If you don’t have one for your aircraft, I suggest you come up with one soon.
Obvious nicknames like “flying milk stool” for the Piper Tri-Pacer or “Buff” (Big, Ugly Fat __er) for the B-52 are easy. It might be harder to figure out what somebody is talking about if they refer to a “Fluff” (Fat Little Ugly __er) for the Boeing 737.
Here are a few other aircraft nicknames, in case you are wondering:
- Three Holer – Boeing 727 (also known as the trash hauler)
- Long Beach Death Tube – MD-88
- Death Dart – F-16
- Suck-Blow – The Cessna Skymaster
- Tritanic – Lockheed L1011
- Fluff – again, the Boeing 737 (aka: the football)
- Atari Ferrari – Boeing 757
- Dump Truck – Boeing 767/200
- Near Jet – Cessna Citation
- Cajun Clipper – DC-9
- Scare Bus – Airbus of any type
- Target – any aircraft that isn’t a fighter. All fighter pilots recognize only two kinds of airplanes: fighters and targets. If you aren’t one, you are the other.
Pilots are a self-depreciating bunch, so I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that any of these nicknames are meant to put down the airplane in question. We take on the mantle and nicknames of the airplanes we fly eagerly. For example, I flew the Cajun Clipper as a copilot and later a captain for years. During those years I had dozens of copilots who flew the Buff and were proud to tell me so.
Is it really what you fly or how you fly?
In all the hoopla of pilots in a group trying to impress each other with who’s aircraft is bigger, faster, or has more bathrooms and TV screens in the cockpit I think we miss a basic premise of flying and piloting. It really isn’t what you fly so much as how you fly it when it comes to who is the better pilot. A perfectly executed crosswind landing in a Cub shows much more piloting mojo than a poorly executed one in a 777.
It is more impressive to me that a pilot can do a flawless instrument approach in a Skyhawk with minimal avionics and no copilot than a pilot who monitors the auto flight systems of a 747 on an ILS. In the world of “who’s plane is bigger” the 747 driver gets the nod but in the real world the better pilot is the one I look up to.
It may be that in the future we will lose even that distinction. It is hard to judge a pilot by his or her landings if they are all done automatically by auto flight systems. It is already difficult to praise a pilot who simply followed the flight director needles to a successful holding pattern, approach or departure.
With the loss of being able to differentiate ourselves our pilot skills we, being human, will have to come up with other ways to make fun of and feel superior to each other. That shouldn’t be too difficult in the coming years. With the advent of VLJs, composite aircraft out the wazoo and at least one new LSA being announced every day we should have enough stuff to keep us busy fighting for aviation social position well into the twenty-second century.
