Boeing 747. Queen of the Skies.: Reflections from the Flight Deck. by Owen Zupp

Author:Owen Zupp [Zupp, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: There and Back Publishing
Published: 2019-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

(Image: Seth Jaworski)

CHAPTER SEVEN

ONE NIGHT OVER EUROPE.

It’s 4am and I’m writing as usual. The pre-dawn hours are always the quietest and friendliest to put my thoughts into words. Similarly, these wee hours are often the busiest for long-haul flight crews around the world as their destination draws closer. The galley begins to stir as the cabin crew ready breakfast for the sleeping passengers, while the flight crew begins to gather the latest weather and load an ‘arrival’ into the Flight Management Computer. The long hours of darkness that have passed are now building towards the final, high workload hour of the flight and a timely arrival for the hundreds of people on board.

The smell of coffee pervades the flight deck and the balance of the crew leave their bunks to join the pilots ‘on watch’ all hands will be on deck for the final stage of the journey. The glow of city lights below offer up a luminous atlas for orientation and those reliable engines continue to hum, just as they have for hour after hour through the night. This very scene is being enacted on board numerous airliners around the world as I tap the keyboard in the solitude of my ‘study’ and I recall one of the first nights I experienced that scene myself.

After a night in Bangkok, we had weaved our way over the Bay of Bengal, past India, Pakistan and onto Afghanistan where military air traffic was displayed as anonymous blips on the flight panel and ‘Boss Man’ radioed through our clearance through the airspace over Kabul. Over Eastern Europe the scratchy transmissions of HF radio had given way to the clearer tones of VHF, although the deep, broad accents still made comprehension difficult, even if the reception was clear. For a boy from the suburbs of Sydney with a lifetime of flying within the Australian coastlines, it was brave new world; but one that I found fascinating.

All through the night I had tracked our progress in an old atlas, progressively moving a small adhesive red arrow along the page. Aside from a tremendous aid for orientation, I found that the atlas brought the journey alive in a way that the moving triangle and magenta line of the ‘Nav Display’ just couldn’t manage. Despite cruising in the darkness, the terrain below seemed to come alive from the coloured topographical maps and the smaller cities which may have lacked any aeronautical significance were often rich in other ways. As my index finger pushed along the page and over borders, I was a student in history and geography as well as a pilot.

But it was as I approached Western Europe that first time that my interest was truly peaked. The nations that had filled my textbooks and imagination as a lad were now beginning to slip under the nose of the Boeing 747. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France seemed as though you could throw a net over them and yet it is hard to imagine cramming their combined history into a galaxy, let alone such a small patch of land.

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