He'll take you up; he'll bring you down.

Heard of Michael O'Leary? He's a moron, albeit a very rich and successful one.

He owns an airline. His airline is Ryan Air, of Ireland. It's the premier lost-cost flying cattle car company in Europe. But people ride his planes because his prices are nasty, rotten dirty cheap. They're cheap because he is always looking for ways to cut corners. He has cut employee pay to the bone, and can't do much more damage, so he has come up with another idea: DO AWAY WITH THE CO-PILOT.

Now, you know we don't call the guy or gal who sits across from the captain a “co-pilot” in this industry―the military does that. We call them “First Officers,” or F/O for short. The reason we do that is because they do not merely assist the captain, they are second-in-command. Mr. O'Leary wants a flight attendant to be second-in-command. (I think he still calls them “stewardesses”).

Think I'm making this up? Click here and read: Ryan Air
O'Leary told Bloomberg Business Week, “Why does every plane have two pilots? Really, you only need one pilot.” He likened flying a modern airliner to playing a computer game. “Let's take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it.” Now let's see how this might work. Hmm. 

Okay, I'm descending through stormy skies toward our destination. I'm tired and very lonely, since I'm the only one on the flight deck. This plane needs to go back to the manufacturer so they can move about a hundred switches, buttons and knobs over so that I can reach them. Suddenly I'm feeling dizzy and ill. Must be that rancid kidney pie they fed me, for which they docked my minimum wage pay. So I “ring the bell” that Mr. O'Leary envisioned, and up comes a voluptuous stewardess, giggling and looking back over her shoulder at her peers. Her fists are balled against her cheeks. “I get to fly the plane!” she squeals. Her co-workers clap. “Good for you, Rose. Go get em', gal!”

I hear the passengers applaud and cheer. They're happy. They didn't have to pay for this innovative new safety initiative, and they're getting their money's-worth.
  
My vision fades in and out as she squirms into her seat, tugging at her mini-skirt. She exercises her fingers.

“Okay, where is the button,” she asks with coy giggle.

“What button?” I ask, fighting to stay conscious.

“You know, the Sully button!”

“The what?”

“Like that American chap. You remember, Captain Sullen-whoever. He landed the plane in the river when the engines went dead. That button!” She looks at me waiting for me to praise her aeronautical knowledge.

“He used this,” I say, pointing to the control yoke.

“Oh!” she said. “Yes, they told us about that. They said when you push it the houses get bigger. When you pull back they get smaller. Keep pulling back and they get big again ."

"That was a joke," I informed her.

She looked puzzled and shook her head. “I don't get it.”
 
“How did they come to choose you for the emergency pilot training.”  

She gleamed. I was Miss Ryan Air, 2010. I'm on the cover of the calendar.”

I manage what feels like my last breath. “There's no one button, Lassie. There's lots of buttons. Didn't they teach you that?”

“Yes, but I was really tired that day they taught me. Just, like, totally wiped out, you know. Too much partying, you know. We were very excited about getting accepted to Mr. Ryan's stewardess school.”

I try to refresh her memory on the sequence of events and the procedures to get the plane down, avoiding the thunderstorms, calculating the landing and go-around performance criteria, getting out the proper STAR charts, and approach plates, tuning and identifying the proper frequencies, testing the auto-land system...but she interrupts me, her head shaking, eyebrows furrowed. She sure looks cute when she furrows those brows.

“They went over that stuff right after lunch. I was, like, really drowsy. I don't remember much.

“Have you ever even flown a plane?” I ask.

“Oh, no!” she giggles.

“Simulator?” I press.

She blushes. “Captain!”

“Oh! But this one guy in my class, he, like, had some flying lessons once in a Cessna, or whatever, and he, like, taught us a lot!” Her head is nodding assurance to me. Just before my vision goes away, I manage to say,

“Get him up here!”

“Oh, I can't! He's not here. They promoted him to captain. He's flying another plane.”

She tosses her head up and giggles in glee. “Oh! He was so cute!”

I'm fading now. The last vision is the Level 4 thunder cell straight ahead on the radar weather display. As the world around me melts away, the last I hear is a voice from the open door to the cabin.

“Remember, it's just a big computer game, Rose. Keep pushing buttons until―”

Losing consciousness, I become the luckiest person on the plane.

Click here on this Moody Blues classic and imagine they're saying "Michael O'Leary" when they say "Timothy Leary." You'll get the picture.

Sunset over Newfoundland

Quote of the post:

The appropriation of a concubine, I remembered from a certain night in Peking, was a most delicate business.
-Earnest Gann

About Sully

So, what do I think about Sully?

That question has been fired at me from all quarters lately. (Sully is US Airways Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the “Hudson Hero.”) Here's what I think.

Sully isn't a hero. He’s a highly trained, experienced professional who sits up in the executive office of his jetliner and does his job. His paramount goal is not to crash because he knows he will be the first to the crash scene. He knows the first and last things that will go through his mind at the point of impact will be his instrument panel. He has a keen awareness that there are two kinds of pilots: those who know they are going up for their last flight and those who don't. The trusting souls sitting behind him are not his main safety concern; he knows if he takes care of himself his passengers will be the happy beneficiaries of his prioritization efforts.

What do I like about what he did? Two things. First, he quickly assessed his options and methodically sorted them. 

When one option fell through he had another one waiting. The river was the last resort. This is the result of decades of thinking miles ahead of fast moving jets; of double and triple checking every switch position, every setting, every plan and bit of information; of recognizing when something isn't right by the way that little bristle of hair on the back of his neck feels.

None of this is taught in classrooms or textbooks and not all of it is intuitive. It's picked up in the cockpits of Phantoms, Hornets, C-130s, B-52s and the like. It's also painfully earned in the lonely cockpits of small single-pilot cargo planes carrying packages at night in storms and icing with absolutely no one but yourself to rely on. Most of us earn our tickets to this profession. That day on the Hudson all those years paid off. He knew what to do.

The other thing I like about him is his demeanor. He shrugs off the hero hype—my kind of guy. In age, background and experience we're practically equals. We both have pretty wives so used to living alone they can't understand what the big deal is when their friends ask them how they cope. And we're both old ugly geysers. The younger pilots wish we would step aside and let their seniority improve. Despite our likenesses I don’t pretend that I could have done as good a job as he did.

In the wake of Sully's experience I'm getting more attention from people. As I strolled through the plane, as I often do before push-back, one of my passengers recently said, “You look like Sully!” He was smiling approvingly. I think that perception gave him confidence.

A couple of days later another one teasingly asked me if Sully trained me. My immediate teasing answer was, “No. I trained Sully.” That brought on a round of laughs from several rows away. Everybody knew who Sully was.

Still another man politely beckoned me to his first class seat and said, “People are looking at you captains in a whole new way now.” His smile indicated the “new way” was something positive. I wondered why anyone would think of us in any other way. But then there was the “Summer of 2000.” Oh. 

Forgot about that. That's another story.

I hope you've got a Sully type up front next time you fly. The statistics say your chances of having one improves with the size of the plane you're on. That's just a fact of life we have to live with. Smaller planes pay less (way less) and draw entry-level job seekers.

I do one thing now, as a result of Sully's unscheduled swim, although it may at first seem minor. We get a final weight and balance report that comes out of our printer just before take off. We enter any last minute changes in that information into the performance pages of our computer. This tweaks our expectations of what the plane can and can't do when we put the spurs to her. A little note on the bottom of that page tells us the exact number of people on board including crew. It's called the SOB count. It means Souls on Board (I'm certain some of those souls are a subset of SOBs). That's information I might need if I find myself standing or laying beside a bent bird talking to rescuers, so I put the little sheet in my shirt pocket.

I remember once explaining to my mother what SOB meant in the people count. She looked astonished and said, 

“Souls!?” Then she uttered a painful grunt.

So, I lift my glass to Sully. He's an SOB but not an SOB. He's one of the good guys. So is his first officer, his flight attendants and every other airline professional out there plying the skies. They're not lucky, they're good.

Here are a few cool (no pun) pics from the last few trips.

The Hush House at O'Hare. They test engines here.


Gate C9 in Denver with reflection in the window. The de-icing
boom is on the right. The colored lights are the auto park system.
Under the lights you can see a poster in the terminal of
Katie Couric framing me.


Descending into Denver, you can see where the plane
ahead cut a hot slice into the cloud deck as he went down
through it.



Heading east across eastern Montana you can see
a contrail on the right side of a flight ahead and
below us. On the left is the shadow of his contrail
on the snowy ground.



Again in eastern Montana, the shadows of contrails.
The vertical one is crossing traffic. The horizontal one
is ours.


One of this blog's followers asked for a shot of the
terminator (read the MAR 11 2008 post for more
info on the terminator).


Are we there yet?



One recent day in Denver the airport was assaulted
by zillions of tumbleweeds. It was bizarre. Watch this video
taken at the gate after we blocked-in.