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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Can an airliner get a speeding ticket? And, isn't it a bad thing when an engine bursts into flame?
Sep 13, 2002 | Readers have come forward with some amusing, if cynical, comments regarding the preflight safety briefing offered by the cabin crew. The style of these briefings has always been a pet peeve of mine -- their importance betrayed by turning a few minutes of important information into several minutes of profligate banality. The speech has become, at this point, pure camp -- legal fine print turned into (bad) performance art and honed to ludicrous perfection.
Some background: In America, those of us involved in the day-to-day operations of commercial flying work under the jurisdiction of a vast web of rules known as the Federal Aviation Regulations, or FARs. Commercial aviation has grown tremendously both in size and complexity, which naturally has increased the size and scope of applicable regulation. However, while size and scope are one thing, decipherability and practicality are something else.
The FARs are an enormous, frequently unintelligible volume. Their fatty babble shows off aviation's flair for the arcane, and there is no more glaring example of prolix rigmarole than the dreaded safety briefing. Any frequent traveler will tell you that the best sleeping pill for an anxious flyer is the rote recitation covering seat belts, life vests and oxygen masks -- so weighed down with extraneous language that it's completely without impact.
The briefing card outlining the requirements for seating in exit rows has set a new standard. Those requirements were controversial for some time. The result: an interminable, bafflingly verbose card packed with enough technobabble to set anyone's head spinning. Exit-row passengers are asked to review this card before takeoff.
On one recent flight passengers were subjected to the phrase "at this time" repeated on thirteen occasions. "At this time we ask that you please return your seat backs to their full and upright positions." Why not, "Please straighten your seat backs." Meanwhile almost every airline includes the following: "Federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling, or destroying any lavatory smoke detector." Aren't tampering with, disabling, and destroying essentially the same things? How can you destroy something without having tampered with it?
With a pair of shears and common sense, a typical briefing can be trimmed to about half its length with no sacrifice of information. The result is a cleaner oration that people will actually listen to. As part of a college paper on air safety, I once turned a typical 6-minute briefing into 2.5 concise, polite minutes of useful instruction.
I'm impressed by the sheer complexity of an airliner's cockpit. There are hundreds of controls and displays. Private planes don't have nearly so many. Is there a key subset that you primarily use?
The seemingly Byzantine array of instrumentation does contain a subset (or a few subsets) used more frequently than others. The cockpit has many controls that are rarely, if ever, touched (unless they're in the simulator, where the greasy smudge of many a nervous pilot's finger can be found on switches and buttons not routinely needed).
The contrast in the cockpits of large and small airplanes exists for the reason you'd expect: The capabilities of airliners -- including small jets and turboprops -- are immensely more formidable than those of, say, a two-seat Cessna. Much of what you see controls the workings of what pilots refer to collectively as "the systems." That's shoptalk for the electrical, hydraulic, air conditioning, pressurization, and fuel systems, among several others. Then there are navigational computers and displays, as well as controls and displays for the engines. Not to mention the instruments pertaining to flight itself -- altimeters, airspeed indicators, and so forth, which are much more elaborate than those aboard light planes. And much of this exists in duplicate or triplicate.
There's a general similarity among airplane models, but a pilot of one jet would not be expected to hop into another and understand its operation. Separate certification is required for a transition from one type to another, and a typical training course takes weeks.
