I Have Control

A pilot's view of changing airliner technology

Keith Spragg

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785003981
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Luftfahrt

Between 1967 and 1997 Keith Spragg progressed from the greenest new co-pilot on a piston-engined Vickers Viking to a fully qualified jet captain. He then went on to become an experienced pilot trainer and examiner, ultimately flying ten different types with nine different airlines. The story of that journey, told in I Have Control, is a personal one but is also part of the wider story of airline development. Keith witnessed many changes and it was not only the aircraft that changed; the training, attitudes and culture of airline pilots themselves were transformed over that period. Under the day-to-day demands of disrupted rosters and unsociable hours, the moments of humour and the need to squeeze as much fun as possible out of every day, the significance of these changes was not always obvious. Now, with time to reflect, the small boy's fascination with flight lives on. While the job changed, the rewards, the comradeship and the sense of privilege continued. But now Keith asks tough questions about the application of technology. Is the modern flight deck fit for purpose? Have we sacrificed skill on the altar of technology? How should the industry respond to the prospect of artificial intelligence and pilotless airliners? His account will be of interest to all aviation enthusiasts and is illustrated with 8 colour photographs in a four-page colour section.

CHAPTER 1

As It Was

The light is fading as we drone over featureless stratus cloud towards Wolfsburg at the entrance of the Centre Corridor that leads to Berlin. My captain, known to everyone as Speedy because his reactions are so slow, is tapping his foot in time to the brass band music that I know is playing through his headphones. His bushy eyebrows move randomly. The smoke from his cigarette curls lazily up from his hand on the control wheel before it is drawn away through the open side window.

‘Tempelhof is below limits, Speedy,’ I say. He doesn’t respond, so I wave the weather reports under his nose. He takes them, scanning them without a word.

God, he annoys me! I’ve got nearly 2,000 hours and reckon I know a bit about flying, but I’m completely ignored. Under the regulations, we are forbidden to enter the corridor unless the cloud base at our destination is at least 300ft and the visibility is more than 600m.

In a few minutes it will be too late; we can’t turn round in the corridor.

‘Hanover?’ I prompt. The ash on his cigarette grows another quarter of an inch. I wait. The foot keeps tapping and, bizarrely, I seem to detect Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ running through the harmonics from the engines and propellers. Why can’t the Old B… make a decision?

Eventually, he takes a long drag on his cigarette, holds it nearer the window so that the ash is whisked cleanly away, and speaks. ‘We’ll just have a look,’ he says.

Have a look? What’s he talking about? We’re not allowed to ‘have a look’. But I know he won’t listen to anything I say, so I get out the charts for an Instrument Landing System (ILS) approach to runway 27 Left at Tempelhof. I study the go-around procedure and the route we will have to take from there to Hanover. We have enough fuel, but not much extra.

I change frequency to the American controller in Berlin, who identifies us on radar and, when we get nearer to the airfield, starts to give us vectors towards final approach. We descend into cloud and it is immediately darker. There is light turbulence. Ice starts to form on the airframe and round the engine air intakes, but this soon changes to rain, rattling like hail on our cockpit. Water flows in through the windscreen and drips onto our knees. I get an update on the weather – it’s worse, but Speedy only grunts.

‘You are cleared to descend with the glide path.’ The controller sounds bored, near the end of his shift and ready for a drink. ‘Contact Tower now gentlemen, Good day!’

The gear is down and locked, checklist completed, we’re cleared to land or go-around. Apart from the final extension of flap, which in this aircraft is never made until a landing is assured, I have nothing to do but monitor the instruments and call the heights.

‘One hundred above!’ I call at exactly 300ft above airfield level. We must have the approach lights in sight at 200ft or apply full power and climb away. It is fully dark now and still turbulent.

‘Wipers!’ I flick the rotary switch on the overhead panel and the archaic system of rods and cranks whirls into life, though the wipers make absolutely no impression on the water streaming over the screens. I can’t see a thing outside.

I am impressed, reluctantly, by the precision of Speedy’s flying. The electronic instrument landing beams are very narrow at this level and the lower speed of the aircraft demands larger control movements, but he keeps the needles exactly centred. He makes swift, nervous corrections to the control wheel. His eyebrows are thrashing about now too and his face is twitching.

‘Minimums!’ I call, moving my hand toward the throttles to make sure they go fully forward.

‘Full flap!’ Speedy shouts.

What? Full flap means we’re landing, but nothing beyond the windscreen has changed. I can’t even detect a lightening of the black void to indicate we’re over the approach lights.

‘Full flap!’ Speedy curses, so I select it, feeling the aircraft pitch down as the drag increases, open mouthed in disbelief, amazed at how Speedy keeps the needles centred, despite the change of trim. His movements are now an intense blur.

Outside, we are still in complete blackness and streaming rain. There is a swish of tyres on wet tarmac and then one dim light slides down the right-hand side of the aircraft. There’s another, and another, on the left this time, and then a string of runway lights appears to show that we are slowing in the centre of the runway.

We turn off the runway and taxi to the apron in silence. Speedy is a criminal and I’m an accessory. But I’m in awe of the most amazing piece of flying I’ve ever seen, a display of unbelievable skill.

When the doors are opened everyone is disturbingly normal. The engineers and the customs men are all as courteous and welcoming as ever. Don’t they understand that Speedy has got us here by a miracle? He’s made a completely blind landing hand-flying an ancient aeroplane with very basic instruments.

He has already packed his stuff away and got his raincoat on while I complete the paperwork. He picks up his briefcase. He never says good morning or goodbye; usually he just stalks off. He’s an ignorant, bad-tempered old tyrant. But tonight he pauses to look me in the eye. Could that be the ghost of a smile on his lips? He gives a broad wink, and then he is gone.

CHAPTER 2

To Berlin

There aren’t any characters nowadays, I thought. Not like there used to be. I was browsing through my old logbooks, thinking about the early years of my career as an airline pilot. The pages from 1967 and 1968 contained only the bare facts of each flight:

REGISTRATION:	G-AGRW	TYPE:	Vickers VC1 Viking
FROM:	Schipol	TO:	Tempelhof
DEPARTURE:	1400	ARRIVAL:	1630
TOTAL TIME:	2 hours 30 minutes

Here and there, when the captain had graciously allowed me to land the aircraft myself, he had added his signature to authenticate the claim.

When I turned a page, a photograph slipped out. It revealed a youthful version of me sitting at the controls of the piston-engined freighter. My uniform carried a single gold stripe. The windscreen was edged in wood and the profusion of large, strangely shaped levers and mysterious dials had clearly not been influenced by modern ergonomic design.

Memories surfaced quicker than I could organize them: the excitement of living in the divided city of Berlin, the hippy phenomenon and student riots, and how cold it used to be in the unheated aircraft. The flight deck had been noisy and everything vibrated, but, despite its nickname of ‘The Pig’, the Viking handled beautifully in the air. The flying control surfaces were linked directly by pushrods, cranks and cables to the control column – no power assistance – and the airflow made it come alive. Flying it had felt like stroking a wild animal.

I reached for a drink and suddenly I could smell that cockpit once again. Spilt coffee had made the controls and radio panels sticky. The odours of fuel, leather and hot electrics, mixed with the accumulated dust and grime of the cargoes we carried, came back to me. At once I was slouching again in that comfortable leather co-pilot’s seat.

An idea was forming: it seemed to me to have been an extraordinary journey from junior co-pilot on a piston-engined freighter to modern airline captain. Should I write about it? Would anybody want to read what I wrote? The lack of a literary tradition was discouraging. I knew of only two memoirs by airline pilots: A Million Miles in the Air by Captain Gordon P. Olley¹ and Fate is the Hunter by E.K. Gann.² Olley was an Imperial Airways pilot who wrote his book in 1934. He was an early pioneer who made seventeen forced landings during his first passenger service from London to Paris; his story was obviously justified by its historical significance. Gann was an accomplished professional writer whose record of his airline experiences from the 1930s, through World War II and into the 1950s has become a classic; it is regarded as compulsory reading for anyone who flies.

There was nothing that had been written later, a fact that argued for doing something about it, but alongside these two great books, any effort of my own would be modest indeed. I am just one of many people who did this job. I fought no wars, had no crashes and never got my name in the papers. I would have to concentrate simply on what life was like for an airline pilot during my years in the job. It would be nice to capture some of the magic, but that would involve describing emotions, which is the very antithesis of an airline pilot’s creed. Flying may be seen by some to be an exotic way to earn a living, but the truth is, of course, more prosaic and my erstwhile colleagues would be quick to ridicule my efforts if I tried to glamorize it. Pilots are no different to people in any other profession. The slim, grey-haired veteran who commands immense respect, looking elegant in his immaculate uniform, exists; so too does one of the best airline pilots I flew with. He was a short, overweight, unshaven scruff who carried his manuals and night-stop gear in a plastic carrier bag. All I could do would be to aim to keep it simple, to confine myself to my own personal impressions and to be honest. At the very least I might encourage some of my contemporaries, who have more interesting stories to tell, to pick up their pens or settle to their word processors.

It didn’t seem enough. I dismissed the idea several times, but further thought made me conscious of another story that ran parallel with my own. During the time I was airline flying, the aircraft changed significantly. From hastily designed post-World War II piston-engined types with low power, poor performance and very basic equipment, we progressed to high-performance, pressurized jets. Then came the sophisticated autopilots, remarkably accurate navigational aids and computerized Flight Management Systems. The progression from simple, manually operated equipment to semi-automatic machines was a story about to be re-enacted in many other fields, not least in the cars we all drive. My own unspectacular participation in the history of aviation had coincided with a revolution in technology. I had first-hand experience of the highs and lows of that revolution.

The accident rate had improved dramatically during my time, too. I couldn’t claim any responsibility for that improvement, but I had occupied the best possible seat from which to see it happen. I had taken part in the changes in working practices that were demanded during that revolution. People are still made out of the original model human being, with the same potential for brilliance and incompetence, but the way pilots go about their work is very different now from how it was when I joined an airline and I witnessed that change at first hand. When I reflected on the changes, I saw them as a war between skill and technology. Like all wars, it had destroyed some of the good along with the bad. What was needed for safe, reliable airline operation was a perfect blend of skill and technology. But skill had been annihilated. Technology had won the war against accidents and the depletion of human skill was collateral damage. Now we are seeing the consequences. Perhaps I had a story to tell after all.

* * *

I joined my first airline in 1967 and flew as an airline pilot continuously, except for two brief periods of unemployment, until 1998. As I get older, I begin to realize just how short a period of time that is. The rate of technical progress during that time seems incredible. Thirty-one years represented about one-third of the total history of aviation up to the time I stopped flying and nearly half of the history of airline flying.

The order for me to proceed to Berlin had arrived by telegram. Today, in the age of email and mobile phones, it is difficult to understand the fear that form of message could generate. The typed strips on the yellow paper, its buff envelope, the uniformed delivery lad on his red bicycle, all these were associated with bad news by my parents who had lived through the war in Coventry, bringing up my brother and myself during the tough years of air raids, rationing and shortages. Even more than twenty years after the war had ended, while they were proud of what I had achieved and pleased that I had got the job I wanted, they still had difficulty seeing aeroplanes as anything other than evil things that crashed or dropped bombs.

But times were changing. The piston-engined airliner was being abandoned as a transport system at just about the same time as the telegraph concluded its role in the world of communications.

It is not just the technology that has changed. The way people go about their jobs has changed, too. Speedy would not survive in an airline today; his uncommunicative arrogance and cavalier attitude to regulations would be unacceptable to management. Although still legally liable for the safety of the aircraft, its crew and its passengers or cargo, a captain today is allowed very little discretion. He is expected to make decisions by consensus, discussing problems with the first officer and cabin crew, and to consult with air traffic controllers, engineers and operations specialists by radio. Above all, the company’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) guide his every action. Even Speedy’s immense flying skill would atrophy in a fly-by-wire airliner where computers move the controls and the idea of disconnecting the autopilot is frowned upon. To me, even in 1967, Speedy was out of date, a relic.

Of course this happens, to some extent, in every field of human activity. The old generation must give way to the new. But in airline flying, a relatively new industry driven by technological progress, that ancient struggle is accelerated. New technology demands new attitudes. Pilots acquire new knowledge and learn new skills all the time, but attitudes develop more slowly and less consciously. While we can always learn how new technology works and master the techniques of operating it, our understanding of the job itself, our values and priorities, are informed by our previous experience. Attitudes are formed mainly in our teens or twenties and are resistant to change thereafter. So eventually, as the job changes, we get left behind.

No doubt the young pilots I flew with at the end of my career saw me as a dinosaur. It is an odd conceit we perpetuate when we imagine life evolving in a continuum from cavemen to spacemen. Our experience contradicts that model. Children take space travel, genetic modification and nanotechnology for granted and yet, by the time they come...