on short final
I always wanted to visit the cockpit. I still do. It’s my “dream office,” and why I didn’t pursue it in earnest, I’m not entirely sure. I was still into aircraft during my later high school years, when conversations about potential careers start to firm up, but I only remember drifting into design because it’s what my parents said I would be good at. Architecture held a bit of aspirational appeal, partially because of the occupation itself, but if I’m honest, also because I thought it would be cool to introduce myself as an architect. The idea of the profession held a certain cachet. But to be a pilot? I don’t clearly recall the reasons I dismissed it as a career choice.
If I had to speculate, I’d say it was probably because I had a very fixed idea of the track I needed to be on in order to enter the profession, namely, getting my private pilot license as early as possible (age 16) and then, well, I wasn’t really sure what would happen next. I think my parents would have been hesitant to foot the bill for lessons, but… Seeing how supportive they were of my aborted attempt at becoming a missionary pilot 8 years later, they might have entertained the idea of bankrolling me if I had shown the requisite drive and focus—two things that were in short supply toward any end at that point in my life, I’m ashamed to admit.
Another reason may have been the fact that I’d always been more attracted to the aesthetics of flying than the act of flying. I loved the way planes looked, and the way they worked, and the concept of freedom in three axes that accompanies flight, but I knew from early on that the reality of an airline pilot’s task is very constrained by rules and procedures—all good, to maximize efficiency and especially safety, but the dream of just hopping in a plane and losing yourself somewhere up there in the air doesn’t correspond with the day-to-day of cockpit life. But, as I wouldn’t learn until I actually started pilot training, there is something supremely satisfying about learning all those rules and procedures, and mastering the act of controlling a flying machine—not that I ever mastered it, but the appeal began to break through my prejudices, and, having accomplished that, to fuse with my love for the aesthetics of the activity, becoming a complete attraction. I even did have the experience of just tooling around freely in the air, many times, when I took my little 172 north up into the practice area and just did whatever my heart desired under the cloudless blue sky: turns, stalls, climbs, descents, figure eights. It was everything I imagined it would be. And I wish I had known all that prior to college.
Still, to this day, I always take a peek at the instrument panel when entering or exiting the plane, a little ritual not unlike my habit of touching the aluminum skin of the door frame, a tactile reminder that in just a few dozen minutes that same skin will be shielding the plane’s occupants from sub-zero temperatures and tornado-force winds. I flew so frequently in my early life, but the activity never, ever lost its luster. I remember the end of one flight on a 767, probably one of our many transatlantic jaunts, visiting the cockpit, tightly clutching a phrase in my mind like a talisman, one with which I hoped to impress the pilots. The connecting flight just prior had been on a then-new Airbus A320, and looking out of the window at the constant movement of the control surfaces along the trailing edge during landing, something struck me that I decided I wanted to share with the pilots of the larger Boeing. Having gotten permission, I entered the cockpit, looked around for a minute or two, and then said, in as casual a can-you-believe-those-crazy-Europeans tone as I could muster (though I’m sure it didn’t sound casual since the phrase had been throbbing in my brain for the past 30 minutes), “We flew on an A320 earlier, and it was nuts; the wing didn’t even have high-speed ailerons.” The pilots looked at each other, and one replied, kindly, “Well, it’s amazing what that plane doesn’t have,” leaning into the perennial Boeing-Airbus rivalry, something on which most pilots inevitably take a side. I didn’t exactly feel affirmed in my effort to sound more au courant about the nuances of aircraft design than the average cockpit visitor, but to the pilot’s infinite credit, I didn’t feel condescended to or dismissed either. Of course, later I learned that no airliner smaller than a 767 has high-speed ailerons—including Boeing’s own A320 competitor, the 737—and felt retroactively mortified at my comment, so it discouraged me from any further attempts to sound intelligent on the flight deck. But it never dampened my attraction to the world of flying, if not, at that point in my life, its signature profession.