Tending the Fire in the Sky

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself. –Mark Twain

F_N =( \dot{m}_{air} + \dot{m}_f) V_{j} – \dot{m}_{air} V

That’s the violence hanging in the air, waiting for you to torch it off. Starts simple, starts at a cold standstill. Tons of metal locked inert, waiting. Fill ‘er up.

Then:

\dot{m}_{air}     is the rate of flow of air through the engine
\dot{m}_f     is the rate of flow of fuel entering the engine
V_j\;     is the speed of the jet (the exhaust plume) and is assumed to be less than sonic velocity
V\;     is the true airspeed of the aircraft
(\dot{m}_{air} + \dot{m}_f) V_j     represents the nozzle gross thrust
\dot{m}_{air} V     represents the ram drag of the intake

Say what? All I know is the magic incantation of “Starting Engines Checklist,” the ragged rush of high pressure air channeled by a flick of my wrist into the right engine starter. The brute force of hot air at 45 PSI drives the rotor blades like Niagra Falls spins the turbines that light half of the east coast.

Fuel lever up, wing spar and engine shut-off valves snap open and dual high-pressure pumps ram jet fuel through lines metered by a bank of computers in the lower deck below your feet: spray nozzles, burner cans and a whomping thud as the pressure builds and the dragon breathes a ring of blue fire, a scorching gale at 700 degrees and a hundred miles an hour that would knock a dumptruck sideways. Seen it myself.

Now we’re cooking, smoothly whirling a blowtorch driven series of rotors, compressors and turbines idling at 30,000 rpm and 400 degrees centigrade. You’re saddled up, strapped on–never felt better than to have a fistful of thrust to move you and the metal at mach speed, whenever you say so.

And there are those who live with the aggregation of interlocking numbers, the formulas and structures of chemical reactions that gather in your right hand and though everyone riding the cliche in back thinks you’re that guy–you sure ain’t.

It’s never been about the fifty-headed abacus of numerical relationships that while you have to acknowledge put the beast together, forged of alloys and bonded of thousand degree welds and strung with heartstrings of titanium and vessels coursing with combustibles of unspeakable explosive energy, channeled just feet from where you sit in a controlled explosion that will continue for hours–you aren’t even thinking about ground stuff, things that don’t move–because when it’s all in play, we move like lightning.

That’s the real stuff–don’t give a damn about the paperwork or the tons of pulp and blather to make everyone riding the fire not notice that they are.

But they are.

And every flinch of an engine indication, the jet’s EKG synthesized on a bank of CRTs before you, and every nuance of the fuel burn and the hand-in-hand air nautical miles per pound of fuel, every bit of that is the pulse you feel and notice with the slightest shift, tending the fires.

Everything in the sky once you’re there is paid in the currency of fuel. Every air mile is a consumable and there’s only so much on board. Don’t know so much distance and altitude as I do minutes of fuel.  Don’t really care.

It’s that glass blue flame, the thousands of degrees and the 450 miles per hour cooling and feeding the twin blazes that gulp the air then blast it out the other end with fifteen times as much force. It’s out tons of steel and fuel and bone and flesh arched overhead and flung across the sky, dragging the twin white vapor wakes that testify to the tremendous engineering wonder holding us up like it was easy. And it won’t stop till I say so.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. –Robert Frost

I have my own idea.

Airline Flying 101: Anatomy of a Landing.

So, where does the planning for landing actually begin? In cruise? Near the top of descent?

Nope.

It’s first thing in the morning, as soon as the alarm goes off–you’re thinking about the weather at your destination. That’s the deal: you know the jet, you know your own skills, you can count on your First Officer’s skill level–that’s a given at American Airlines–so what’s the wild card? The weather.

Having said that, let’s clarify this: we really don’t care about the weather–we care about the change. That is, the trend: what is progressing, and how fast?

The weather report is a snapshot, too soon to be history. And the forecast is a guess, really no better than your own–if you can detect the trend and the rate of change. Now, it’s true that pre-flight planning is based on both the snapshot and the prediction–but as a pilot, the only thing that really matters is how the weather is changing. Because real life in flight–unlike plans–is all about change, and so is weather: it’s never static.

So we’re pulling up the destination weather at regular intervals, but not to decide what we’re going to do when we get there. Rather, it’s to compare how the weather changes during the enroute time in order to understand what the weather is doing–how it’s changing, therefore how the air mass we’ll need to navigate is actually behaving.

Because it’s not like “the good old days:”

Halfway across the Pacific Ocean, fill ‘er up again against the possibility of bad weather in Korea. Weather data was harder to come by and so there was little or no way to get a string of accurate weather data comparisons in order to plot the changes and the trends.

When hours and thousands of miles later we did get close enough to Japan to pick up weather data for Korea, decision time: bad weather? Glad we have the extra gas. Good weather? Dump the extra USAF issued gas in the Sea of Japan and land in Seoul lightweight.

Those days are long gone.

And in the airline world, we have other things to tend to enroute anyway.

Well yeah, there’s that: dinner, maybe a sundae to deal with too. But more importantly, it’s time to line up the static facts for landing so as to have them firm in your mind in order to play them against the weather change when you’re finally on approach.

First, aircraft weight. You can predict the enroute burn pretty well, add that to the zero fuel weight and you’ve got the basis for your approach speed. Now, determine the worst case landing distance by taking the weight to the correct chart to determine the best case landing distance.

Then, determine the corrections for degrading factors: runway surface (wet, icy) and winds (tailwind and crosswind). Take the runway headings of the likeliest approaches and determine the wind angles and the tailwind penalties for for each. Now, get those azimuth ranges (deviation from centerline) set in your head and the landing distance incremental additive for each (for example, runway 4, the tailwind starts over 130 degrees  or 310 degrees) so two things you need in your head: what’s the distance per knot, and based on the landing distance (worst and best case) what’s the max number of tailwind knots you can take. Ditto the crosswind.

And what’s your plan if any limit gets even close? Got that all in your hip pocket? Good. Tell the other guy.

I hate the word “brief,” which every aviator uses when they really mean “verbal walk through.” But that’s what you do a hundred miles out, a verbal walk through. By then, the field conditions are about what you can expect for landing because you’re about 30 minutes out.

So your verbal walk-through includes the approach procedure, plus the numbers (weights, stopping distances, penalties and runway options) and what you plan to do. Also, it’s good common sense to ask the other guy to do all the calculations separately and compare.

Now you both have the plan in your hip pocket, you both are following the plan rather than making it up as you go, and both confusion and ambiguity are reduced on approach.

Now, just get the small details firmed up in your head: wet runway? Windy? Firm touchdown? Speed additives for various contingencies? Brake settings? Know what you’re going to do–and tell the other guy.

So there you have it. Plot the weather trends in your head from wake-up to final approach. Know the static factors such as gross weight, stopping distance, wind angles and tailwind values plus the incremental corrections, flap settings and approach speeds, then play them against the dynamic factors such as winds, temperature, precipitations, runway length (prepare for a last second runway change!) and surface conditions.

The landing plan is one big, complex balloon animal: you squeeze one part, another part will balloon out. We know the static parts, the limits and just how far we can squeeze in all cases–if we do our work ahead of time. And we always do.

So there you have it. You’re ready for the fun part, landing the jet. Enjoy.

Coming on Wednesday:

What’s it like to ride 4 million pounds of explosives into space?

My one on one interview with astronaut Mike Mullane.

Subscribe now!

Podcast: Flying for the Royal Dutch Air Force & KLM Airlines

From flying low-level formation in the Netherlands in a Royal Air Force NF-5 to the worldwide flying as a KLM Airlines Captain, Martin Leeuwis shares his flying experiences on this Jethead Live podcast.

Captain Martin Leeuwis

To download and/or save, click here.

To view Captain Leeuwis’s cartoon books, visit www.humor.aero

Next week: Astronaut Mike Mullane, one-on-one on JetHead Live!

A Wing and a Prayer, and the Everlasting Moon.

Only poets and saints have ever flown like this, riding a wing and a prayer. Darkness like sadness, spread to the end of the world, save the glow of cathode ray tubes painting the hearbeat of the seventy ton schooner, riding the howling eastbound jet stream.

That’s always a rush, surfing that gale, especially this time of year. But that’s what it takes, that’s what the 160 folks in back expect; never mind the details of turbulence and winds and fuel flow–those are yours to deal with alone. Just the way you like it.

You catch a glimpse back there now and again, but the view’s better ahead; quieter, a vortex of unseen electrical, pneumatic and hydraulic function, the lifeblood of the jet, blooming through the animated tapestry sprawled from bulkhead to bulkhead and overhead and nowadays you don’t know where the jet ends and you begin. Not that it matters: you’re comfortable in your second skin, aluminum and titanium, blood and bone–it’s one and the same for now.

And in the reassuring light of the cabin, what they don’t know won’t hurt them: through the night, an alabaster glow fires up the undercast ahead, swelling and spreading like a false dawn. The spectral blister swells to bursting and time reels backward for you–the western Pacific; the South China Sea, a world of time and distance ago.

Dark as deep space, a cloud deck below, the endless nothing above. Jets everywhere, formations in and out, stacked and you busy with courses and altitudes, your jet’s performance–then that ghostly glow below; angry rising–before you think you say it, as soon as you do you’d beg the words back on your life: “What the hell is that?”

Ivory-bone light melts up through a swirling veil of striated cirrus laid like a blanket on the Korean countryside frozen cold in the dead of winter.

“The moon,” comes the deadpan reply from another aviator. And you just let that smolder and die in the darkness; betrayed by the indifferent moon climbing it’s sky arc just like you did yours. What the hell–we’re pals–we’re going to be, through thousands of air miles over years and skies around the globe.

And it’s the aviation childhood still: less than a thousand hours of flight time; everything’s a wonder, an answered prayer or a silent wish playing out across a thousand miles at Mach speed. Like today: major league tailwind drives the groundspeed up to nearly 700mph.

Unseen from above, the miles past so fast sometimes. And that glow below, now a thousand years later and as many miles hence, you just know. Time to start down–just as your old friend climbs up. We’ll trade spots in the sky, share one more curtain call.

And surely we’ll cross paths again, however many more times we can. No surprise now–but just as stunningly bright as ever. It’s all too familiar, but in a good way: a wing and a prayer and the everlasting moon; the the essence of flight that never loses its brightness.

From flying fighter jets in the Netherlands to the captain’s seat on a KLM jetliner, Captain Martin Leeuwis has done a lifetime of amazing flying.

We go one-on-one with him on our audio podcast next week.

And later this month: 3-time space shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane joins us on JetHead Live.

Subscribe now for updates!

Podcast: What’s it like to be a Boeing-777 Captain?

Ever wonder what it would be like to be a Boeing 777 captain for a major airline?

Want to know how the 777 stacks up against the DC-10 and MD-11 from a guy who’s flown all three?

Here it is:

 To use your own player: click here to listen (or right click and “save” to download).

Don’t have an audio player?  Click here to listen on Pod-o-Matic!

(running time approximately 28 minutes)

Wednesday:

From flying low-level fighters in the Royal Dutch Air Force to the captain’s seat at KLM,

Captain Martin Leeuwis shares his flying stories on JetHead Live!

Also Coming Soon:

What’s it like to fly the space shuttle: my interview with 3 time shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane. Subscribe now!

Airline Flying 101: Anatomy of a Take-off.

Take-off? That’s easy, right? You fasten your safety belt, move your seat fully upright and stow your tray table. Ready. Right?

Not even.

But if that’s the full extent you prefer to be aware of, fine. Otherwise, read on as we take apart this very complex, important maneuver.

The planning starts long before you strap yourself into your seat in the back of the plane, and here’s why.

Take-offs come in all sizes and shapes because of several variables–so there’s no “one size fits all” logic or protocol. What are the variables? Well, aircraft weight, runway length, winds, runway surface condition and temperature are the basics, and each has an effect on performance.

You might think runway length is the great reliever, right? Miles of runway, like at DFW or Denver mean simple, low-risk performance, right?

And you might think a short runway or nasty weather are the “problem children” of take-off performance. But let me give you the pilot answers: no, no, and furthermore, no.

Throw out what you’ve been thinking about take-offs as a passenger, and strap in tight (is that tray table up? is Alec Baldwin playing “Words” in the lav while we all wait for His Highness to finish?) because you’re about to test drive some “pilot think:”

I don’t worry about taking off–I worry about stopping.

Why? This sounds so simple that when you think about it, you’ll have to agree: aircraft are made to fly–not drag race.

Huh?

Look, accelerating 85 tons to nearly 200 miles per hour builds tremendous kinetic energy. Not a problem for the landing gear if you take off because it’s simply rolling. But if you must stop, the brakes and wing-located speed brakes have to dissipate that energy within the length of the asphalt ahead.  The runway length is finite, the aircraft weight is unchangeable once you’re rolling. So where is the point of no return, the point after which there’s not enough runway to stop?

Brakes are key--and checked visually before EVERY take-off.

As a pilot–particularly as the captain who makes every go-no go decision no matter which pilot is actually flying–you must know when that instant occurs. That magic point is not a distance down the runway but rather, a maximum speed: “Refusal Speed.” In other words, the maximum speed to which we can accelerate and still stop within the confines of the runway if we choose to abort the take-off.

But there’s a catch, of course.

Refusal Speed is only half of the go-no go decision. Part Two is just as critical: what is the minimum speed I must have in order to take-off if one engine fails, continuing on the other. I can hear this already: why the hell would you want to continue the take-off on one engine?

To which I’d answer back, what if the failure happens above Refusal Speed? In other words, there’s not enough runway ahead to stop your high-speed tricycle.

Okay, that minimum speed–the speed you must have in order to continue the take-off in the remaining runway on one engine–is called “Critical Engine Failure Speed.”

All of the performance numbers for each unique take-off are computed, with corrections for the many variables to be made by the pilots.

Now you have the two controllers of the go-no go decision; one a minimum speed (you must have Critical Engine failure Speed achieved to continue safely into the air) and one a maximum (if you attempt to abort in excess of Refusal Speed–you ain’t stopping on the runway).

So which is the deciding factor? Well, in modern day jets under average circumstances, the “max” speed is normally way in excess of the “min” speed. In other words, you normally achieve the min required for single-engine continued take-off before you reach the max allowed for stopping. So, in ordinary circumstances, Decision Speed–which we call V1–is Refusal Speed.

In other words, we know we’ll secure adequate flying speed for a single-engine take-off before we hit the max abort speed. So we use the max abort speed–Refusal Speed–for V1.

Pilot-think lesson one: it’s easier to deal with a single-engine aircraft in the air than it is to stop a freight train on the runway. Which goes back to my earlier point: airliners fly great but make only adequate drag racers, stopping on the drag strip remaining being the challenge.

Add to that the wild card: the captain must decide in a split second as you’re rolling toward V1 if any malfunction that occurs will affect the ability to stop the jet: did an electrical system failure kill the anti-skid system required for max braking? Did a hydraulic failure eliminate the wing spoilers figured into the stopping distance?

Some jets require very little system support to fly–but a lot of factors to stop: the MD80 will fly all day without hydraulics, electrics or pneumatics–but it ain’t stopping on a “balanced field” without electrics and hydraulics.

Get my pilot-prespective regarding my preference to take a wounded jet into the air rather than wrestle it to a stop on a runway?

And remember, those speeds are “perfect world” scenarios. But on your flight–like every flight–despite the engineering numbers from which the stopping distance is computed, there are the real life factors which screw them up: wet or icy runway, tailwind, old tires, old brakes, rubber on the runway because of aircraft touchdown on landings.

Not a problem on an average day, but corrections to the numbers and your pilot-think must be made if any of those variables are present.

Now, have you deduced the worst-case scenario with the two controlling speeds, Critical Engine failure Speed and Refusal Speed? That is, you will exceed the max speed for stopping before you attain the minimum speed for single-engine flight?

That’s simple: you can’t take-off. In practice, we adjust the flap setting or even reduce the gross weight: back to the gate–some cargo and/or passengers must come off. Hardly ever happens that we return to the gate because we plan ahead–and that’s why you hear of a flight being “weight restricted,” meaning some seats will be empty by requirement before you even board. Now you know why.

But really, that’s not even the worst case scenario from a pilot’s perspective (sorry about your trip, if you’re one of the passengers left behind on a weight restricted flight–but you probably got some compensation for it). Rather, it’s when the two numbers are the same.

That is, the minimum speed required for flight is equal to the max speed for stopping.

That’s called a “Balanced Field:” the runway distance required to accelerate to minimum single-engine take-off speed is also the maximum velocity from which you can safely abort and stop on the runway.

That’s a “short runway” problem, like in LaGuardia, Burbank, Washington National or Orange County, right?

Wrong–it’s everywhere, like Denver’s 14,000 feet of runway (compared to LaGuardia’s 7,000) on a hot summer day; ditto DFW; also Mexico City even on a cool day because it’s at 7,500 feet elevation. And it can occur anywhere due to rain, ice or snow.

So here’s your plan, and as pilot-in-command, you’d better have this tattooed into your brain on every take-off: once you enter the high-speed abort regime (by definition, above 90 knots), know what you will abort for–or continue the take-off. Be ready for both–without hesitation.

LaGuardia: 7,000' between you and Flushing Bay.

It’s easier to decide what you will abort for than won’t–because the “must stops” outnumber the “can stops” and remember your pilot think: it’s often safer to continue than stop. And here are my Big Four Must Stops: engine fire, engine failure, windshear or structural failure.

So rolling past 90, I’m thinking over and over, “engines, engines, engines,” zeroing in on any malfunction in order to assess if it’s an engine problem–if not, it’s likely not a “must stop” situation; I’m aware of windshear but don’t even start the take-off roll with any of the conditions present; structural damage we’ll deal with as necessary. Otherwise, we’re flying, folks.

Got all that? Good deal: now you understand the important interrelationship between Critical Engine Failure Speed, Refusal Speed and the all important concept of V1.

And now that you understand the complex, split-second conditions surrounding the go-no go decision on your next take-off, you can relax and just put all of those crucial factors out of your mind.

Because rest assured, they’re at the forefront of mine, or that of whatever crew into whose hands you’ve entrusted your life.

Special Note:

Coming in 2012–The JetHead Podcast! Interviews with real pilots, hands-on first-person  descriptions of airline piloting and aircraft flying from the folks on the front lines of commercial aviation!

Subscribe to JetHead to receive notice of podcasts now in production!

FlyJinks: Well that was really stupid.

Mimi has always been one of my favorite flight attendants: self-assured, smart, and a real sharp tongue coupled with a very sarcastic sense of humor. Rewinding to my DC-10 First Officer days, (okay, I’ve been a captain for 20 years now, do the math), I recall Mimi’s dedicated enthusiasm for a practical joke on a new flight engineer, an old tradition back in the days when we had new pilots and flight attendants joining our ranks literally by the thousands.

Although I usually took no part, I always got a laugh anyway. For instance, I can’t recall how many times I watched a captain send a new flight attendant back to the cabin to get some “air samples” in a barf bag. The passengers must have thought they were nuts.

Mimi’s plan involved luring  the engineer into the cabin to deal with a problem in the lav. Yes, the engineer wasn’t called “the plumber” for nothing. He’d put all of the hydraulic pumps to high pressure (hey, I was a DC-10 engineer way back), then all the fuel boost pumps back on, grab his hat and a few tools and head for the cabin.

DC-10 plumber's station. I did a year there . . .

Mimi was an expert in creating certain particularly vulgar sculptures from bran muffins and apple jelly, two items in the breakfast pastry stock in First Class. What she–and other flight attendants–would sculpt looked like the output of a German shepherd after digesting five pounds of raw meat, then squatting on your lawn.

The plan was to lay the sculpture next to the seat or on the seat in the lav, then call the engineer: “Look what someone did . . .” When he shrank away in revulsion, the flight attendant would scold him, then with her bare hands pick up the reshaped bran muffin  and wave it around like it was nothing, freaking out the engineer who was visualizing German shepherd output the whole time.

Funny. So Mimi creates her masterpiece, then slips it gingerly into a side pocket on her uniform dress (fragile! don’t spoil the shape!) and walks up the aisle through First Class toward one of the forward lavs.

She told me later she wasn’t exactly sure what happened, but on the way to the forward lav, a bump of turbulence jolted her sideways and her hip hit the credenza below the TV screen in First Class. The end result was her standing before the first row of First Class, and the oblong sculpture had flopped out of her dress and plopped down between her legs on the carpet. As if she’d just done the nasty deed right there.

Despite the gawking, the horrified passenger looks, other flight attendants told me Mimi just reached down as if it were nothing, snatched up the offending torpedo, and walked forward, eventually ending up in the cockpit.

“The deal’s off,” she told me, a finger to her lips. The Flight Engineer was off the hook–at least on that leg. Pretty sure she got him later.

While we’re on the DC-10–my second favorite jet to fly, behind the 737-800–maybe I could relate the tale that involved a half dozen flight attendants in the lower galley in their nightgowns calling me and one of my favorite pilots (we still see each other and back up the facts to whomever else has trouble believing the true story) from the cockpit one at a time for a “slumber party,” with 275 passengers upstairs clueless except for the fact that so many flight attendants seemed to have vanished.

Well, maybe next time.

Captain Who? Captain YOU.

You’re the captain: try it on like a pair of pants (Waist a little tight? Lay off the brownie sundaes the flight attendants sometimes offer) and walk around. Four big ol’ stripes, hat too with the scrambled eggs elaboration on the hat bill. You’ve arrived.

So, what’s the first thing you do when you get to the airport? Check the weather? The jet? Right?

Hell no. You sign in and get your per diem started, as cash flow is key. So, check the weather? Stupid. If you’re just now “checking the weather” you might as well be one of the passengers with the glazed doughnut look noticing with reasonable consternation that they will arrive into different weather many miles away.

Of course you checked it–departure, enroute and destination–as soon as you got up this morning, then probably an hour ago, so that now you can see the trend. You might have picked up a thing or two about the behavior of air masses after spending 30-some years working aloft, plus you’ve learned the peculiarities of particular destinations, how the topography casts an orographic effect on the winds and the weather. Where’s the weather data from: National Weather Service? NOAA? Nah–from “My Radar” on your iPhone where you get a complete depiction of the radar picture in realtime of the entire route of flight; back it up with the radar picture from FltPlan.com which also shows the full route and destination regional radar.

Okay, now the flight plan. What’s the most important thing there, the route, the altitude, the jet? Again, hell no.

The motion lotion: the fuel, the burn, the reserve, the loiter time. The rest of the junk? What evs–we’ll get airborne and see what’s what. You know from experience at every destination what kind of bingo fuel you’re going to be comfortable with. The route changes with traffic flow and Air traffic Control’s best guess at managing the crowd crisscrossing the national airspace. But unlike the old Air Force days, you can’t just fly up to a tanker, hold position, get plugged and tank a few thousand pounds. You sure miss that, don’t you?

Anyway, add your years of air sense to the weather trending you’ve determined is going on today, add in the time of day for traffic flow (how are the lines at the grocery store right around lunch time? get it?) and you get an idea of what’s the minimum fuel required.

So you make sure you have what you need and if not, a quick call to Flight Dispatch: “Could you add 2,000 pounds to the release, please?” Don’t know about other airlines, but never have had a dispatcher balk at my request. Once we agree, sign the flight plan electronically and print all ten yards worth of dead tree. Shame about the trees–all this information is being electronically uploaded to the flight management system on board via data link anyway.

Origami: fold that up in components–Take-Off Plan (speeds, weights, distances), Flight Plan (points, times, distances, winds, temps, ground speed, true airspeed, Mach, fuel burn) and the Other Ten Yards (temporary airspace notes, changes, aircraft systems notes, procedural changes, temporary restrictions) of stuff you might need to know and that a battery of attorneys after any incident will want to use as ammo to say, “You should have known this.” Now you do.

Next? The jet? Time for the jet? Yes and no.

You want to get there as the last passengers deplane so as to meet the pilots who flew it in for a quick, “Good jet” (you do the same when you pass a jet to another crew) or, an explanation of maintenance issues they may have noted in the logbook.

Fine. Once the other pilots and flight attendants leave, what? Stow your gear? Read the maintenance logbook? Start the preflight?

Not so fast. First, scrounge the outgoing catering for an unopened bottle–maybe two!–of water. Stash that (it’s just getting removed by the caterers anyway) in the cockpit first. Dehydration is a major physical stress of a career at altitude which affects a pilot’s ability to work as efficiently and smartly as possible. Can’t do much about jetlag or hotel sleep interruptions, but this is one issue you can influence directly.

Okay then, switch both inertial reference unit to “align” so that they can engage all three independent GPS systems on board to interrogate a dozen or two satellites and pinpoint our navigation starting point as accurately and as soon as possible. Stow your stuff–take your hat off first, because the Heads Up Display projector over your seat will knock it off your head for the thousandth time if you don’t, then lock the cockpit door behind you when you leave–don’t need any wayward caterers or cabin cleaners or passenger entertainment system techs milling about in the cockpit where they have no business.

Now what? Get lost. You’ve checked out the maintenance status of the jet on the computer, you’ve familiarized yourself with the Take Off Plan and the Flight Plan and are satisfied with both–so stay out of everyone’s hair. They all–cabin cleaners, flight attendants, copilot–have lots of stuff to do and they know what they’re doing, so let them.

Now’s your time to swing through Flight Ops to check your mailbox for any vital info stuffed there, but most of that you’re aware of from various electronic sources anyway. But always best to check.

By now we’re 30 minutes to pushback. Take your seat in the cockpit? Nah–first things first, or maybe better said, last things: coffee. Needs to be too hot to drink now, which means just right for taxi out, take-off and climb. There’s just something righteous about sipping a good cup during the early phases of flight that sets the upbeat tone, and even the upbeat heartbeat during a busy time.

Where do you get such a cup?

Mac D’s, honestly. The best–not the gourmet battery acid of Starbucks or “Whomever’s Best” (though you gotta love “Pike’s Perk” in Denver and “Brioche” in LAX) but good old, down to earth full taste McDonald’s coffee.

You sniff derisively at that? Fine, drink whatever you want in your cockpit on climbout. Okay, now you head for the cockpit. As the Big Cheese? El Hefe? Numero Uno?

Heck no–as invisible as possible. No eye contact, no glad handing. You have enough to do on the flight deck, so get it done. Just leave the marketing and PR for the departments getting paid to look after such things.

You wish.

Slide by the passengers on the jetbridge carefully, quietly. Introduce yourself to the #1 flight attendant–just your first name, they already know you’re the captain. Offer to help them in any way you can throughout the flight.

On the flight deck, thread your way into the fleece-covered left seat. Adjust the lumbar and thigh pads, the seat height, which needs to be just right to get all of the info on the HUD (“Heads Up Display”) projected on the glass before you. Comm cords and headset hooked up.

Set up your comm panel: flight interphone monitor and transmit, speaker on so the ground crew can contact you. All VHF radios off–no distraction between you and the ground crew during pushback.

Test the quickdon oxygen mask–clean it out with a Sani-Comm swab, set 100% oxygen flow, test the communications function. You want that thing working at altitude where your time of useful consciousness in a depressurization is limited to second without it.

Now your air sense check, start right above your head, yaw damper engaged (means it’s getting valid attitude info from the inertial reference units), switches normal on map display and nav functions; over to the pneumatics and pressurization, proper cruise and landing altitudes set;  the window heat on, probe heat off; turn on one electrically driven hydraulic pump to send 3,000 psi of pressure to the flight controls so a wind gust doesn’t yank the elevator column back into your gut. Switch to onboard electric power, assure airflow, decide which fuel boost pumps will go on before engine start based on the correct fuel loading–now’s the time to find a discrepancy there.

The office.

Then the challenge and response litany of preflight. Then the all-important (it damn well is) route check of every waypoint in the navigation system.

Finally, the ticket agent manning the jetbridge will step into the cockpit and say, “All bags stowed, all bins are closed, we’re ready to pull the jetbridge when you give the okay.”

“Is everyone down,” you ask in mock seriousness; the agent knows all passengers must be seated before the jetbridge is pulled away.

“Yes, they’re all down.” He walked right into that one.

“Well try to cheer them up,” you say, because you are such a smart ass. In a moment, you hear the main cabin door whomp shut and the door warning light panel indicates that now your jet’s buttoned up.

Ground power and air are gone. We pressurize hydraulic and pneumatic systems. The number one flight attendant checks in, “we have 16 up front, 144 in back, five working crewmembers, we’re ready,” then seals the cockpit door shut. At last .

Your headset comes to life as the Crew Chief below, seated on the pushback tug, notes the jetbridge clear of the aircraft and calls, “Ground checks complete, cholks removed, steering  bypass pin installed, cleared to release brakes and call for push.”

The F/O is on it, calling ramp. As we ease back, the Crew Chief calls, “Clear to start engines.”

Love it. Hack the clock to time the start sequence, then hit the Engine Start Switch and say, “Turning number two.” High pressure air whooshes through ducting and into the big hi-bypass fanjet and engine instrument depictions on both large CRT’s come to life.

Once both engines are humming along at idle, the ground crew signs off and gives you a salute, meaning they’ve cleared out and you can now roll the 80 ton jet without squishing anyone or anything .

You salute back, then nudge the 54,000 pounds of thrust gathered in your right hand and she begins to inch forward. Another sip of coffee as we taxi out, an inward smile through the litany of pre-takeoff checklist.

This is going to be a blast.

Early dusk, the latter dawn.

“So soon as early Dawn the rosy fingered shone forth at the island, we roamed over the length thereof .”

The Odyssey, Book XII

It sneaks up on you: one moment it’s full afternoon daylight on the west coast; climb to 41,000 feet and blast into the eastern sky at 500 knots across the ground–then here she comes. The sky tires, breathes out, dismisses the brilliance and in it’s place a striation like a sideways rainbow drapes the earth.

You know from the basics of atmospherics and sunlight that the thickest layer of atmosphere hugging the earth carries the ball for the entire sky: thick, dense air, roiled up with moisture and heat and particulate pollutants and ash and the crud of the day sit fat atop the earth and reflect the sunset behind you in the layered band ahead and below.

The day doesn’t necessarily go down without a fight. From above, the glowering of the day’s heat on broad expanses of badlands lifts whatever moisture there is in the swirl of adiabatic and orographic torture of the air and turns it violent, raking the earth–a sideshow from way up top where we sit. Here the air is at -50C and whatever moisture exists is such wispy-thin lenticular gauze that we don’t even use the engine anti-ice: the ice crystals are too fine to accumulate.

And even the towering violence below yields to the encroaching dusk, losing the heat of the retreating sun and collapsing like colossal waterfall over the tired landscape below.

Seems there’s always that notch in the middle of the sky, the sinking vee as if we were a boat cutting a wake, backlit by the sinking sun. Almost pointing the way ahead: here’s where you go, here’s where you sink into the darkness. Remember it; you don’t stay aloft forever any more than that towering storm that fell apart and returned to earth in a torrent. And you’ll do it in the dark–so remember the colors.

Behind, it’s an angry passage, a red lip drawn thin and tight, black above indigo, descending on the horizon as the sun races off to the west dragging the day with it.

Nothing easy in this leave taking, in fact it’s a raging morality play: go big, go horizon to horizon with a broad brush and a flaming palette but in the end, as always, darkness wins.

And here’s where the cockpit lights come up and the warm instrument glow emerges from the shadow of the the sun’s brilliance spilling into the windowed gazebo, the light fleeing west with the rest of the day. The widowed earth makes do, light reduced to a scattered carpet of jeweled arteries, the highways, the traffic so far below you can’t see it in the day, but long beaded strands at night connect the towns like spindly glowing veins creeping along, relentless.

Fair enough: can’t see the ground, nor can anyone seven miles below see us chalking the sky with a miles-long contrail of white vapor spun out like cotton candy in one long strand, pointing to where we’re going, showing where we came from. Guess we’ll do our thing separately, earth and sky, because the light’s gone but the spirit’s still flying. We’ll find our way back, find our way back  to the earth, all soon enough–that much is written in stone.

But for now, darkness or dawn, we sail on.

Flying Home.

No matter who you are and which way you’re pointed, somehow, you’re going home. Maybe not now, but eventually and the place defines where you’re bound. Because what’s ahead is most clearly determined by what’s behind; where you’re going by where you’re from. Really, there’s no “to” without a “from,” and the ultimate “to,” the eventual “at last,” is always home.

A lot of home, then, is in the leaving and sometimes you can see it clearly; sometimes you can’t. But you can appreciate the separation when it happens before your eyes, though you try not to look. There’s a bit of loss ahead, if only for a moment but it’s there, reinforcing the value of home carried aboard in every parting.

Other times, home just about comes along for the trip.

Little ones travel like rock stars, trailed by adult roadies hauling enough of home to make it so for the kids. Now that’s okay to look at, refreshing, almost, in the world of to and from: home is parents caring for kids, being a family. That’s almost enough to make up for the home more often left behind with family too; distance being more than just a measurement.

In that case–maybe even more so than in the families dragging “home” through an airport–you can see what’s left behind and it’s even more powerful often than what’s immediately ahead. Because home throughout the miles is always ahead, eventually.

But there’s not always unlimited miles to go, you have to realize.

Yes, home is home but there aren’t always more miles ahead than behind on the journey. That’s not always easy to acknowledge, but it’s true. We’re all along for the ride, however many miles that entails and whichever way you want to cross them.

But some of us are just tagging along for all the miles. And when you realize the journey for what it is, day after day, mile after mile, you come to see the reality, the duality of the crossing: there’s doing it–then there’s living it.

Here’s the plain old doing: plans and performance, weight and balance, thrust, speed, lift, ceiling, cruise winds, fuel flow, amen.

Everyone’s underway, doing whatever they do, going wherever they will, being whoever they are, and living the miles how ever they do. Probably it’s not easy if the ride is all you’re along for, enduring the here to there, mindful (or not) of miles to go and the distance to or from home nonetheless.

Still I’d like to think that there’s more I can do in the actual flying to make the journey more than just a death march en route. Besides the safe passage at shotgun speed and above and beyond the course and track.

If nothing else–at least after sufficient java–I can live it out, rather than just do the job. Someone on board should do more than just endure. Someone should transcend the details and grasp the height and speed of the journey, the distance between here and there and the island of now between where and when.

Yeah, we’re miles above the thunderheads–doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the swelling curves of colossal power and beauty back lit by the retreating sun. With the lightest touch–so you won’t notice in back–I steer between the valleys trenching the boiling stacks and darting lightning exchanged between angry towers.

So much to go around; so much we go over but no matter what, we’re on the way as fast as we can practically get “there,” aren’t we? Might was well do more than just endure: let’s inhabit the ride.

We can do some wide-angle musing over the monolithic man made  greatness which, from the god’s-eye view, seems delicately intricate and much less significant on the grand scale of creation. That passes quickly, inevitably.

There’s always the seductive magnificence of disaster playing out on a epic scale below, a detailed tapestry scrolling below.

I mean, why not? It’s all between here and “home” anyway, between you and whenever, wherever you finally find home. Sure, your compass whether you realize it or not always points to and from–that’s how you know where you are, based on a straight line from where you’ve been.

But that doesn’t mean you have to stop “being” along the way, especially since often you get there sooner than you think due to factors like an unseen tailwind virtually undetected from 7 miles above the dirt, but pushing you along nonetheless. Then “there” comes abruptly, arriving in ways you might not have considered, bringing you home one last time.

Home, eventually, in the business of to and from has a certain finality; the journey a finite continuity. The flight is more than just science, although it’s every bit of that. The enduring legacy is the journey lived, the hours on the wing, and the appreciation of reality of flight, over and over, higher, faster and wide-eyed throughout.

For those who fly–that truly is home.