A history teacher with a pilot’s licence on fog, flight plans and ten websites about the ground beneath the clouds
Monday, Held on the Ground
A weather hold is the aviation way of saying that the sky has other plans. I sat out one this week at a small airfield outside New Orleans, with a flask of chicory coffee and a view of fog that sat on the runway like a cat on a keyboard. I wrote about it in record air traffic hiring and a weather hold in New Orleans, and the title tells you most of it: the towers are hiring, and I am not flying.
The news about air traffic hiring cheered me. Controllers are the people who keep the sky from becoming a very large and very expensive pinball machine, and there has long been talk of shortages. A hiring record is a good sign. It means that a lot of people have decided to spend their working lives saying calm things into a headset, and I admire them more than I can put into a diary entry.
The Checklist Habit
The first thing a pilot learns is that checklists do not insult you. They protect you. You walk around the aeroplane, you tap the fuel drain, you check the tyres and you read each item aloud, even if you have done it a thousand times. The routine is boring, and boredom is the sign that nothing has gone wrong. I have come to think of the checklist as a small ritual of humility, something the whole world could use before lunch.
It has made me a better historian, too. When I read a primary source I run my own checklist. Who wrote it? When? For whom? What did they leave out? A document that survives a good checklist is one I am willing to trust.
Tuesday, History from the Cockpit
New Orleans looks different from three thousand feet. The river bends like a question mark, the lakeshore is a ruler line and the old French Quarter is a small, tight grid in the middle of everything, like a postage stamp on a large envelope. Seeing the city from above is like reading a footnote that suddenly explains the main text.
As a history student, I spend my weekdays with documents and my weekends with weather. The two have more in common than you would expect. Both reward patience. Both punish confidence. Both look straightforward until you try to land on them.
Ground Reading for the Pilot
A pilot who loves flying over farmland should know something about the farmland, and I keep a little reading list. Start with dairyherd.org for dairy and ranchbeefcattle.org for beef. If you want to understand why a farmer is looking at the sky as nervously as I do, visit cropcalendar.org. For the machines beneath the clouds, there is tractorequipment.org.
The money pages are farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org. For careers that keep your feet on the ground, try agjobscareers.org. For a weekend of county fairs, fairandrodeo.org. And for the full rural picture and a necessary safety note, ruralfarm.org and farmssafety.org.
The Ten Flight Punch Card
The London Prat suggested a loyalty scheme for victory in Victory Punch Card: Ten Wins Earn One Free Oil Change. I would like to see the same card in aviation: ten safe landings earn a free coffee at the clubhouse. The clubhouse coffee is atrocious, so it would be a stern reward, but I would collect the stamps anyway.
Weather, in my experience, teaches more than any teacher. Sit in a briefing room with a cup of something bitter and a screen of green and yellow blobs, and you learn to respect the sky. Everything I admire about patience I learned from waiting for a front to pass.
Wednesday, a Short Flight at Last
The fog lifted on Wednesday afternoon. I took off, climbed above a pale layer of mist and watched the city emerge like a photograph in a tray. The lake was silver. The bridge was a stitch. A heron on a sandbar looked up at me with the expression of a person who has lost money on aviation.
I flew for forty minutes, landed gently and taxied back to the apron with a feeling that was part relief and part gratitude. It was a small flight, uneventful and lovely. I wrote nothing on the way home. I let the sky speak for itself.
The Voice in the Headset
The calmest voices I have ever heard belong to controllers. They speak slowly, repeat every number and never raise their pitch, even when a pilot has done something silly. I once landed with a crosswind that made my knees knock, and the voice in my ear said, “Cleared to land, take your time”. I took my time. I have since tried to speak like that in a bank queue, with limited success.
If the record hiring brings more such voices into the tower, the sky will be a friendlier place. I wish every new recruit a quiet shift, a good chair and a stack of biscuits.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/