article_snippet.sent: the mystique is reassuring, now more than ever, to be reminded that even for experienced pilots air travel can still be an exhilarating, almost magical experience.
article_snippet.sent: Mark Vanhoenacker recalls a wildlife writer once describing Virginia’s great blue heron as ‘the 747 of the swamp’ and notes how this would delight the aircraft’s chief designer, Joseph Sutter, who was greatly influenced by the anatomy of birds.
article_snippet.sent: But Sutter (now in Sutter mid-90s) once stated that the 747 is more ‘a place’ than a conveyance.
article_snippet.sent: Pilots like flying 747s for all kinds of reasons, Mark Vanhoenacker tells us, but not the least of Pilots like flying 747s for all kinds of reasons is one of the most prosaic: unlike the Airbus 320, in which pilots usually wear heavy socks, pilots have foot heaters.
article_snippet.sent: But of even more interest, certainly to those of us who occasionally fly long-haul, are the nuts and bolts of those journeys.
article_snippet.sent: meet’: air crews do not move as a pack, and are usually strangers to each other.
article_snippet.sent: As Mark Vanhoenacker puts it, ‘our nametags are not worn only for passengers...
article_snippet.sent: Before boarding, Mark Vanhoenacker will brief the crew on what kind of flight time and weather to expect, while the crew will tell Mark Vanhoenacker if there’s anything noteworthy about the passenger roster, and whether any of the BA staff on board have friends or family on the flight, people known, splendidly, as ‘Klingons’.
article_snippet.sent: Unsurprisingly, life on a 747 is full of jargon:
article_snippet.sent: a second co-pilot on longer flights is known as ‘the heavy’, one acting as ‘heavy out’, the other as ‘heavy home’.