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A New York Times bestseller
For millions of people, travel by air is a confounding, uncomfortable, and even fearful experience. Patrick Smith, airline pilot and author of the web's popular Ask the Pilot feature, separates the fact from fallacy and tells you everything you need to know...
•How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them
•Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety
•The real story on congestion, delays, and the dysfunction of the modern airport
•The myths and misconceptions of cabin air and cockpit automation
•Terrorism in perspective, and a provocative look at security
•Airfares, seating woes, and the pitfalls of airline customer service
•The colors and cultures of the airlines we love to hate
Cockpit Confidential covers not only the nuts and bolts of flying, but also the grand theater of air travel, from airport architecture to inflight service to the excitement of travel abroad. It's a thoughtful, funny, at times deeply personal look into the strange and misunderstood world of commercial flying.
It's the ideal book for frequent flyers, nervous passengers, and global travelers.
Refreshed and vastly expanded from the original Ask the Pilot, with approximately 75 percent new material.
- Sales Rank: #42335 in Books
- Published on: 2013-05-07
- Released on: 2013-05-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 5.50" w x 1.00" l, .80 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Review
"Brilliant...A book to be savored and passed to friends."
-- William Langewiesche, Vanity Fair
“Nobody covers the airline experience like Patrick Smith. He brings balance and clarity to a subject all too often over-hyped. And, he's a damned good writer.”
-- Clive Irving, Conde Nast Traveler
“I wish I could fold up Patrick Smith and put him in my suitcase. He seems to know everything worth knowing about flying.”
-- Stephen Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics
“Patrick Smith is extraordinarily knowledgeable about modern aviation, and communicates beautifully in English, not in pilot-ese. Th ideal seatmate, companion, writer and explainer.”
-- Alex Beam, Boston Globe
“A brilliant writer, Patrick Smith provides a laugh-a-page tour of a misunderstood industry -- a journey into the world of aviation, stripped of the mumbo-jumbo and filled with humor and insight.”
-- Christine Negroni, aviation correspondent and author of Flying Lessons
"Patrick Smith doesn’t just know everything about air travel, he possesses a rare knack for explaining it in lucid and witty prose."
-- Barbara Peterson, Condé Nast Traveler
“Patrick Smith is one of the best writers around, period, which certainly makes him by far the best writer ever to have earned a commercial pilot's license. A soaring accomplishment, indispensable for anyone who travels by air, which means everyone.
-- James Kaplan
"Wonderful"
-- Rudy Maxa
“Patrick Smith manages to demystify the experience and remind us of the magic of aviation. Also he has a great sense of humor – which is critical when you are wedged into seat 14D on a regional jet.”
-- Chris Bohjalian
“Brilliantly down to earth and reassuring”
-- Cath Urquhart, The Times (London)
"What a pleasure it is reading Patrick Smith's surprisingly elegant explanations and commentary. The world needs somebody writing E.B. White simple and sensible about a topic everyone has a question about."
-- Berke Breathed
“Patrick Smith doesn’t just know everything about air travel, he possesses a rare knack for explaining it in lucid and witty prose.”
-- Barbara Peterson,
Condé Nast Travele"Cockpit Confidential is the document that belongs in the seat-back pocket in front of you."
-- David Pogue, New York Times correspondent and PBS television host
About the Author
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot and the creator of the popular Web site askthepilot.com. His Ask the Pilot column ran regularly on salon.com from 2002 until 2012. He has appeared frequently on television and radio, including on PBS, the Discovery Channel, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio. Patrick lives near Boston.
Charlie Thurston has appeared on stages across the country, including Trinity Repertory Company, Arden Theatre Company, Baltimore Center Stage, Intiman Theater, Chautauqua Theater Company, and Riverside Theatre. Charlie holds an MFA in acting from Brown University/Trinity Rep.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
The Painter’s Brush
More than ever, air travel is a focus of curiosity, intrigue, anxiety, and anger. In the chapters that follow I will do my best to provide answers for the curious, reassurance for the anxious, and unexpected facts for the deceived.
It won’t be easy, and I begin with a simple premise: everything you think you know about flying is wrong. That’s an exaggeration, I hope, but not an outrageous starting point in light of what I’m up against. Commercial aviation is a breeding ground for bad information, and the extent to which different myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories have become embedded in the prevailing wisdom is startling. Even the savviest frequent flyers are prone to misconstruing much of what actually goes on.
It isn’t surprising. Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people, and at the same time it’s cloaked in secrecy. Its mysteries are concealed behind a wall of specialized jargon, corporate reticence, and an irresponsible media. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren’t the most forthcoming of entities, while journalists and broadcasters like to keep it simple and sensational. It’s hard to know who to trust or what to believe.
I’ll give it my best shot. And in doing so, I will tell you how a plane stays in the air, yes. I’ll address your nuts-and-bolts concerns and tackle those insufferable myths. However, this is not a book about flying, per se. I will not burden readers with gee-whiz specifications about airplanes. I am not writing for gearheads or those with a predisposed interest in planes; my readers don’t want to see an aerospace engineer’s schematic of a jet engine, and a technical discussion about cockpit instruments or aircraft hydraulics is guaranteed to be tedious and uninteresting―especially to me. Sure, we’re all curious how fast a plane goes, how high it flies, how many statistical bullet points can be made of its wires and plumbing. But as both author and pilot, my infatuation with flight goes beyond the airplane itself, encompassing the fuller, richer drama of getting from here to there―the “theater” of air travel, as I like to call it.
For most of us who grow up to become airline pilots, flying isn’t just something we fell into after college. Ask any pilot where his love of aviation comes from, and the answer almost always goes back to early childhood―to some ineffable, hard-wired affinity. Mine certainly did. My earliest crayon drawings were of planes, and I took flying lessons before I could drive. Just the same, I have never met another pilot whose formative obsessions were quite like mine. I have limited fascination with the sky or with the seat-of-the-pants thrills of flight itself. As a youngster, the sight of a Piper Cub meant nothing to me. Five minutes at an air show watching the Blue Angels do barrel rolls, and I was bored to tears. What enthralled me instead were the workings of the airlines: the planes they flew and the places they went.
In the fifth grade I could recognize a Boeing 727-100 from a 727-200 by the shape of the intake of its center engine (oval, not round). I could spend hours cloistered in my bedroom or at the dining room table, poring over the route maps and timetables of Pan Am, Aeroflot, Lufthansa, and British Airways, memorizing the names of the foreign capitals they flew to. Next time you’re wedged in economy, flip to the route maps in the back of the inflight magazine. I could spend hours studying those three-panel foldouts and their crazy nests of city-pairs, immersed in a kind of junior pilot porno. I knew the logos and liveries of all the prominent airlines (and many of the nonprominent ones) and could replicate them freehand with a set of colored pencils.
Thus I learned geography as thoroughly as I learned aviation. For most pilots, the world beneath those lines of the route map remains a permanent abstraction, countries and cultures of little or no interest beyond the airport fence or the perimeter of the layover hotel. For others, as happened to me, there’s a point when those places become meaningful. One feels an excitement not merely from the act of moving through the air, but from the idea of going somewhere. You’re not just flying, you’re traveling. The full, beautiful integration of flight and travel, travel and flight. Are they not the same thing? To me they are. One can inspire the other, sure, but I never would have traipsed off to so many countries in my free time―from Cambodia to Botswana, Sri Lanka to Brunei―if I hadn’t fallen in love with aviation first.
If ever this connection struck me in a moment of clarity, it was a night several years ago during a vacation to Mali, in West Africa. Though I could write pages about the wonders and strangeness of West Africa, one of the trip’s most vivid moments took place at the airport in Bamako, moments after our plane touched down from Paris. Two hundred of us descended the drive-up stairs into a sinister midnight murk. The air was misty and smelled of woodsmoke. Yellow beams from military-style spotlights crisscrossed the tarmac. We were paraded solemnly around the exterior of the aircraft, moving aft in a wide semicircle toward the arrivals lounge. There was something ceremonial and ritualistic about it. I remember walking beneath the soaring, blue-and-white tail of Air France, the plane’s auxiliary turbine screaming into the darkness. It was all so exciting and, to use a politically incorrect word, exotic. And that incredible airplane is what brought us there. In a matter of hours, no less―a voyage that once would have taken weeks by ship and desert caravan.
The disconnect between air travel and culture seems to me wholly unnatural, yet we’ve seen a virtually clean break. Nobody gives a damn anymore how you get there―the means coldly separated from the ends. For most people, whether bound for Kansas or Kathmandu, the airplane is a necessary evil, incidental to the journey but no longer part of it. An old girlfriend of mine, an artist who would have no trouble appreciating the play of light in a seventeenth-century painting by Vermeer, found my opinions utterly perplexing. Like most people, she analogized airplanes merely as tools. The sky was the canvas, she believed; the jetliner as discardable as the painter’s brush. I disagree, for as a brush’s stroke represents the moment of artistic inspiration, what is travel without the journey?
We’ve come to view flying as yet another impressive but ultimately uninspiring technological realm. There I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that if tipped onto its nose would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I’m at 33,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean, traveling at 600 miles per hour, bound for the Far East. And what are the passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, tapping glumly into their laptops. A man next to me is upset over a dent in his can of ginger ale. This is the realization, perhaps, of a fully evolved technology. Progress, one way or the other, mandates that the extraordinary become the ordinary. But don’t we lose valuable perspective when we begin to equate the commonplace, more or less by definition, with the tedious? Aren’t we forfeiting something important when we sneer indifferently at the sight of an airplane―at the sheer impressiveness of being able to throw down a few hundred dollars and travel halfway around the world at nearly the speed of sound? It’s a tough sell, I know, in this age of long lines, grinding delays, overbooked planes, and inconsolable babies. To be clear, I am not extolling the virtues of tiny seats or the culinary subtlety of half-ounce bags of snack mix. The indignities and hassles of modern air travel require little elaboration and are duly noted. But believe it or not, there is still plenty about flying for the traveler to savor and appreciate.
I’m hesitant to say that we’ve developed a sense of entitlement, but it’s something like that. Our technological triumphs aside, consider also the industry’s remarkable safety record and the fact that fares have remained startlingly cheap, even with tremendous surges in the price of fuel. Sure, years ago, passengers could enjoy a five-course meal served by a tuxedoed flight attendant before retiring to a private sleeping berth. My first airplane ride was in 1974: I remember my father in a suit and tie and double helpings of fresh cheesecake on a ninety-minute domestic flight. The thing was, getting on a plane was expensive. This will be lost on many people today, young people especially, but once upon a time, college kids didn’t zip home for a few days over Christmas. You didn’t grab a last minute seat for $99 and pop over to Las Vegas―or to Mallorca or Phuket―for a long weekend. Flying was a luxury, and people indulged sporadically, if at all. In 1939, aboard Pan Am’s Dixie Clipper, it cost $750 to fly round-trip between New York and France. That’s equal to well over $11,000 in today’s money. In 1970, it cost the equivalent of $2,700 to fly from New York to Hawaii.
Things changed. Planes, for one, became more efficient. Aircraft like the 707 and the 747 made long-haul travel affordable to the masses. Then the effects of deregulation kicked in, changing forever the way airlines competed. Fares plummeted, and passengers poured in. Yes, flying became more aggravating and less comfortable. It also became affordable for almost everybody.
I have learned never to underestimate the contempt people hold for airlines and the degree to which they hate to fly. While some of this contempt is well deserved, much of it is unfair. Today a passenger can, in a backpack and flip-flops, traverse the oceans for the equivalent of a few pennies per mile, in near-perfect safety and with an 85 percent chance of arriving on time. Is that really such an awful way to travel? Meanwhile, if you’re that insatiably eager to revisit those luxurious indulgences of aviation’s golden years, well, you can do that too, by purchasing a first or business class ticket―for less than what it cost fifty years ago.
Most helpful customer reviews
87 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
Often Opinionated, Occasionally Pedantic, Always Entertaining
By takingadayoff
Expecting an update of Patrick Smith's earlier book, Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel, I was surprised to see a completely different book. Yes, he still answers questions that passengers are curious about, such as how dangerous is turbulence, and what is in the air supply in the cabin, but he goes into many other topics that are of interest to people who enjoy flying. He discusses airline logos and liveries (the paint jobs on the planes) and airline names.
Smith is often pedantic and always opinionated, and it all makes for an entertaining book. He has some definite thoughts about the service on airlines, which is a little surprising, since he is a pilot for a major U.S. airline (but he doesn't say which one), and he also has some comments about passengers, which are usually less strident, such as his puzzlement over why sudoku is so popular. Just don't get him started on airport security.
One important reason Smith's book may appeal to more people than a straightforward question and answer book would, is that Smith is not only an industry professional, but he's often a passenger, traveling for fun, so he knows what it's like to sit in coach. This dual point of view, which is apparently not very common among airline employees, many of whom don't care to travel on their own time or dime, gives Smith more perspective, so he's not just the lecturer here, he knows your travelin' pain.
Not only does he travel, he enjoys airports, flying, and seeing new places. He intersperses his question and answer sections with musings on travel. Most entertaining, in my opinion, were his ramblings on questions of design, such as airline logos and slogans.
Smith is a little too honest to completely allay your fears about flying, but I appreciate the straight talk and it gives him a lot more credibility than if he told you not to worry, he's got it covered up in the cockpit. He does have it covered, but there are no guarantees, and he's weathered a couple of hairy experiences.
Although you might want to save those sections for when you're on terra firma, much of the book would be quite diverting while you're stuck in the middle seat.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
For the real airplane lovers...
By Jill Meyer
Are you a nervous flyer? Are you someone who'd rather drive than fly? Are you someone who doesn't get excited looking at the lights of planes as they line up in the night sky outside a busy airport, coming in for a landing, one after the other? On the other hand, do you know what the terms "OAG", "triple 7", and "Runway Two-niner" refer to? If you're the latter and not the former, you'll enjoy Patrick Smith's new book, "Cockpit Confidential".
Patrick Smith - the name "Smith" is a nom-de-plume - is an airline pilot and blogger, who operates out of Boston. He used to blog for SALON magazine but I'm not sure he still writes for them. In any case, he has his own website, askthepilot.com, and this new book. His previous one, "Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Flying", was published in 2004. Smith has been been a pilot and in love with all forms of air travel since, as a child living in Boston, he'd sit on the Revere beach and watch in awe as planes landed at nearby Logan Airport. He grew up to make a living as first a pilot for a commuter carrier - flying up and down the Atlantic seaboard and all around New England - and then he "graduated" to flying cargo jets for a freight airline. Finally, he's now flying for an international passenger airline. (I think it might be Delta, from what I've been able to glean from his writing. Or, if not, American.) He has been subjected to layoffs during his career and is quite honest about how he - and other pilots - struggle with the on-going airline politics and economic ups-and-down that make a pilot's career somewhat haphazard.
Okay, Patrick Smith and I are airline fanatics. And, probably so are most people reading this review. Most of us fly a lot - Smith is lucky that he gets paid to do so - and we like to see new places. We're also fascinated by the arcane of the airline industry - old tickets from the 1940's and clips from newsreels of passengers boarding a plane in the 1950's outfitted in suits and ties and hats. We know what local airlines were swallowed up by what larger airlines, and we know airport codes. Patrick Smith is talking to US in his book. We "get" him, and he "gets" us.
His new book talks about his own, long love of flying. He writes about how difficult it is to "catch on" in the airline industry, and how that industry has weathered crashes - both physical and economic - and the changing requirements of the TSA. Smith doesn't like the TSA - who does? - and is not shy in giving some recommendations which might not please the politically-correct among us. Looking at the September 11th terrorist attacks in particular, he talks about how the TSA and other government groups reacted by imposing the wrong "rules" in the hopes of making airplane travel "safer". "Safer" than what? Smith recounts the many terror attacks and hijackings of airplanes and airports in the 1970's and 1980's that we've seem to have forgotten. Is the taking away of a butter knife from the flight bag of pilot Patrick Smith by over-zealous TSA officials going to make the plane and the passengers Smith is going to fly be any "safer"? Hell, no. And what about those stupid restrictions on 4oz of toothpaste and mouthwash? Good lord, it's half the battle of flying today just getting through TSA security.
Author/pilot Patrick Smith covers Sept 11th and many other subjects in his new book. It's not a book most readers will be particularly interested in, but for those of us who read his blog, look-in-awe at his YouTube videos of night-landings at JFK taken from the cockpit, and enjoy flying and the history of flying, this book's for us.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Not a frequent flyer? Buy this book.
By Fast Eddy
If you are a road warrior and aviation aficionado, as I am, you won't learn much that is new from this very easy to read tome. On the other hand, if you don't know much about how the airline industry works or what goes on in the cockpit, you will learn a great deal. The author covers a lot of ground and never gets too technical for the average reader. Well worth the price of the Kindle edition.
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