Ask the pilot

How are pilots evaluated for promotions and raises? Presumably nearly all pilots take off and land safely, so how are distinctions drawn?

Where to begin on this one? Within an airline, everything, and I mean everything, from promotions to route assignments to vacations, happens in order of seniority. Pilots (and flight attendants too) bid their preferences for position, aircraft type, vacations and so forth, and these are awarded according to seniority. A first officer becomes captain not when his boss thinks he's earned a shot, but when his number is up, depending on attrition or expansion. At which point he's run through classes and put through the rigors of simulator testing.

When business is bad and airlines are contracting, the same things occur in reverse: Captains become first officers, and those nearest the bottom of the list find themselves at the unemployment office. It's all very structured and, if I can say so without refueling the ire of some pilots, blue collar. The process has little to do with merit and everything to do with timing.

If a pilot is furloughed or his airline goes bust (as happened to thousands at Pan Am, Eastern and Braniff), and he takes a job with another carrier, he assumes a position at the very bottom of his new employer's list and is back to making a probationary salary. There is no sideways transfer of skills or pay.

What are some ways in which passengers can make the crew's job easier?

Silly me, I thought it was our job to serve you. There's not much you can do for the sake of the pilots, save leaving your weapons and suicidal tendencies at home, but to help out your flight attendants and fellow passengers, here are two recommendations, common sense as they may seem:

1. Please do not stand in the aisle during the boarding process surveying the dimensions of the overhead bin. Stow your luggage quickly and move into your row so others can pass.

2. If possible, use an overhead compartment close to your assigned seat. Try not to stow belongings in the first available compartment you come to. Passengers who do this fill up the forward compartments, and those coming aboard are often forced to find a compartment behind their row. Then, after landing, they must travel backward down the aisle to retrieve their things, which clogs the deplaning process.

Why do seat backs have to be in their "full upright position" for takeoff and landing?

For one thing, it allows easier access to the aisles in the event of an evacuation. Also, it keeps your body in the safest position during an impact: It reduces the distance your head would travel backward, thus lessening whiplash-style injuries, and it prevents you from "submarining" under the seatbelt in a crash.

What is the purpose of the complicated watches I always see pilots wearing?

Their purpose is this: to tell them what time it is. Many pilots feel these gaudy little devices are an essential part of their uniform, perhaps a tribute to the days when goggled aviators used their watches to  I don't know. For a number of years I owned a Mickey Mouse watch as a kind of quietly irreverent protest to this practice (it also was the only kind I could afford). My red-bezeled Swiss Army watch also does the job wonderfully. Watches are required as backups to the ship's clocks, but nothing more elaborate than a sweep hand is needed.

And what do you carry in those black bags?

The bulk of the ubiquitous black flight case consists of aircraft operating manuals, a company operations manual and heavy leather-bound navigational binders. In these binders are the maps, charts, airport diagrams and other technical documents needed enroute. They are more elaborate than those a G.A. pilot might use, and they're tailored to the specific airline. Different crewmembers carry slightly different volumes.

The only thing a pilot dreads more than a Chapter 11 bankruptcy is having to collate and insert the constant revisions to these books. The pages are replaced by hand, one at a time. (When I was a second officer, one captain offered to pay me $5 for each batch of revisions I took care of for him.) If that sounds unnecessarily tedious, it is, and some airlines are turning to virtual manuals, equipping their crews with laptops and easily updated CDs.

The rest of the inventory includes a headset, a flashlight, and a library of checklists, booklets and miscellaneous pages of company or aircraft-related literature. Then there are the personal sundries: stickies, pens, calculators, earplugs and ramen noodles to be heated in the hotel coffeemaker during those nine-hour layovers.

Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

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