A short video from Capnaux of what it’s like to be an airline pilot. When I first quit my office job as a property manager and took up flying my eventual goal was to become an airline pilot. I worked long and hard toward that goal but along the way I started to be seduced by the adventure of general aviation and the lure of the airlines started to wane. What finally killed the dream was a flight from Cyprus to London in the jump seat of an Airbus 310. I’d just finished ferrying an Aerostar, the plane not the mini-van, and was lucky enough to get a ride up in the cockpit with the pilots, obviously this was before 9/11. The beginning of the flight was great. The start up was filled with lots of switches thrown and knobs turned. Check lists read off with “Roger, check and engaged” reply’s flying around the cockpit. The co-pilot pushed the throttles forward and the big jet shot into the air. WOW! what a blast! it was like being on the flight deck of a shuttle launch, for about 30 seconds. Then the co-pilot engaged the auto pilot, slid his seat back and started filling out paperwork. And that was pretty much it for the rest of the flight. The captain was a skydiver so he and I talked jumping for a while but when the conversation dragged I went back into the cabin and drank beer with the flight attendants. I went back into the cockpit for the landing and was disappointed to see that they left the autopilot on until short final. The co-pilot did the landing and even though he’d only flown a grand total of 2 minutes that day the captain still spent the entire time taxiing back to the gate bitching him out for the shitty landing. After thanking the crew for the ride I walked off the Airbus vowing to never ever take a job as an airline pilot. I’m not saying it’s the worst job in the world, it’s just not for me.
