OFFICE IN THE SKYDC-8 MAINLINER XD13974

[Music] [Music] it is a few minutes until departure time walking through the jetway is for some the start of a business trip a holiday vacation or a pleasant journey homeward bound but for others this part of their normal day in an office an office in the sky ground control this is United jet 803 taxi information for takeoff United jet 800 cleared for takeoff contact radar departure control of an airborne [Music] it's a three man office captain and first officer and second officer working area is compact but in its own way not too unlike a more familiar earthbound office like the legal volumes on a lawyer's bookshelf flight and engine instruments are dependable references the penetrating x-ray of a doctor's office comes the long-range probing eye of radar with which first officer and captain appear beyond blue skies out into the distance and through the curtain of the clouds to find the smooth clear way ahead but surely there's no other office with a view that quite compares with the three-dimensional world of flight and from the point of Vantage in that office in the sky familiar scenes and places take on a new and different aspect across the country take New York for instance flight crews know it well not the winding alleys of Greenwich Village or close-up views along Fifth Avenue the New York they know is a toy city flanked by an invisible network of radar and radio beam highways that mark the routes to places far away they see a nation from the sky and understand the changing pattern of its cities Boston neat precise a sprawling giant that is Chicago San Francisco city of the Golden Gate they see the large cities and the smaller ones and the rivers that flow between them busy waterways and quiet ones our familiar landmarks well-known and well remembered and they know the high country to the Rockies the some from the Wasatch the Sierra the ciske on new dimensions in an office in the sky eastbound from Honolulu to New York you passed through five time zones flying away from the Sun and toward the quiet evening but moving westward you're racing with the Sun across the continent and the Pacific with your head above the clouds you pass those silent sentinels of the sky that march in strange formations to the changing rhythm of the Restless wind everywhere you wander everywhere you go scenes keep changing with the miles and sculptured furrows far below our character lines on the face of the land [Music] good afternoon again ladies and gentlemen this is your captain our altitude is 28,000 feet and we are maintaining a relative ground speed of 580 miles an hour we will arrive in Los Angeles on schedule where weather is clear temperature a2 we're passing Denver which you can see off to our right Denver has a special meaning to every flight if it could be said that flight crews know one place better than any other place to which they fly it would be Denver and for good reason here is their Operating Base nerve center of flight operations for the entire system if you want to know about the operations end of running an airline go to one of the daily early-morning sessions in the Denver briefing roll here you get a comprehensive report and analysis about what's happening throughout the system a realistic exchange of information the purpose of which is to take extra good care that the main office and almost 200 flying branch offices are operating as a unit number of flights flown number of passengers schedule delays if any and why weather conditions from coast to coast and across the Pacific to Hawaii these days you do more than just talk about the weather you really do something about it once the only thing you could do was to look out the window in a way that's what you still do only now you look out of maybe a thousand windows in a thousand different places from all over the northern hemisphere the reports come in from US weather stations from Hawaii Alaska Canada from ships at sea and weather reconnaissance aircraft from Japan to the Arctic Circle in the largest airline weather and communication center in the world that raw weather data is processed into forecasts of weather and expected wind conditions for 24 hours in advance you work out your charts and maps line up your figures and random for an electronic computer your input data also includes payload reserve fuel required alternate airports and all those factors that apply to long-range flight in its electronic memory the computer retains all the performance characteristics of the aircraft and all existing airway routes then you feed in your data let the computer analyze it and in a matter of seconds you have the result a precise flight plan if wind or weather changes during flight the data is quickly reevaluated and changes are made for the fastest and smoothest route at the most advantageous altitude in his on Denver a long-range dispatcher gets the new information from the computer 600 miles away jet Mainliner 811 is on route from New York to Los Angeles and yet just as in any branch office of any business the flight crew is as close to home base as the telephone the dispatcher in Denver picks up his phone in a deal a sound of a chime and the blue light flashes [Music] United jet Mainliner answering sole call message go ahead message from weather dispatch 8:11 you should find more favorable tailwind at 3:00 1,000 feet approximately 90 knots go ahead Roger on the message will contact a RTC per clearance to 300,000 from present to 8,000 Roger a dispatcher in Denver and dispatchers in Seattle Omaha Cleveland Philadelphia or a couple of dozen other cities are checking other flight plans or other routes with other flight crews transcontinental flight plans all originated from Denver Central Dispatch to be checked out with the captains regional flight plans which are worked out locally on information from Central Dispatch are relayed back to Denver for system-wide collation and at a given moment there could be more than 100 flights in the air at the same time controlled and monitored by the dispatch center it's routine men at the base and in dispatch offices across the system back up more than 2300 other men in flying branch offices along more than 13,000 miles of mainline airway but no matter where their routes may take those 2300 flight deck officers no matter where they live at least twice each year every one of them has the same destination the training center at Denver Operating Base regardless of experienced captains with 25 years seniority or second officers with practically no seniority flight crews can never finish going to school uniforms may be exchanged for more informal slacks and sports shirts students and instructors may seem relaxed but pressure doesn't show on professional men their minds are disciplined their motivation to always keep learning is built-in there are new developments in the art about which they want to be brought up to date there is transition training to new aircraft in which they have as yet not flown and flight crews must be checked on everything they have already learned there are highly specialized electronic flight simulators which crews can fly in exact and way that they fly real planes except for leaving the ground it may take a lot of equipment a lot of classrooms and a lot of instructors to get that constant job of training done but most of all it takes the desire to fly the personal dedication to a career during which you can never stop going to school from the day you start from the day you start tip Harrison has decided that he wants to be an airline captain he's been interviewed he's been tested as to knowledge personality physical condition and then interviewed again and he's been hired in order to qualify skip Harrison already had to be a pilot with a commercial license plus an FAA instrument rating but because he has to he's willing to start in the flight crew as a second officer skip and the others with the same qualifications are given their chance on a six-month prove yourself basis so skip and the others like him start going to a school where graduation day will come only on the day they eventually retire maybe 35 years or so from now going to school as an adult isn't exactly the usual thing but skip will get used to it he'll be doing postgraduate work so to speak two times a year every year from now on it's a matter of proving to his company and himself that he has the ability to advance after a couple of months of studying after skip has been checked and rechecked what seems like at least a hundred times in the classroom in the simulators and on the actual airplanes he's in he's assigned to his first scheduled flight as second officer on a cargo liner it's a big day he may be flight ground check and makes it according to the book in exactly the same way every second officer does it yes this is his big day and he is ready for it [Music] second officer Harrison has confidence in himself and in those who share his office in the sky this is the first time they have all flown together but all flight crew training is coordinated to give interchangeability so that any captain first officer or second officer from anywhere on the system can work together as an efficient team although they may have never seen each other before and then something like three or four years from now after six or seven more sessions back at school there'll be another big day for skip Harrison the day he transitions to first officer he has a chance to move up a seat in his office he's worked hard for it and studied hard he's earned it now with an instructor sitting there beside him he has to prove his right to it [Music] the interchangeability feature of all flight crew training helps make the actual transitioning as smooth as silk under the discerning eye of the instructor who is checking him out first officer Harrison formerly second officer is doing well but he expects himself to do well so does his company he can look forward to becoming a captain if things go well that should out eight or nine years from the day he first started with an organization whose faith in training is such that on this coordinated training program it invests $2,500 a year for every man in every flight crew for every year as long as he is in service line captain's with 20 years seniority they still go to school just as they have twice each year since they started flying for United even captain's have to keep pace with the art of their profession even captain's get princey checks and ask any of them those checks in a jet flight simulator are more rugged than in a real jet all conditions of actual flight are reproduced electronically even to the muted sound of the powerful jet engines now as the crew starts to take off watch the instruments as throttles or advance full open simulator' noses up landing gear is raised the instructor and his special panel can duplicate any flight condition and crews can practice the same maneuver over and over in a small fraction of the time that would be required in airborne flight that takeoff was smoother than last time and you held your climb speed right on the button I'm going to take you back down to 12,000 at 12,000 the instructor flips the icing switch and the crew immediately takes the necessary corrective action and in simulator flights all normal radio procedures are also followed a remote TV camera moves in perfect synchronization with the pilots controls to give complete realism to the landing landing gear down Denver Tower this is United trainer over outer marker on final approach United trainer cleared to land to six left precision operation without taking up Aries is one of the reasons why the Federal Aviation agency certifies simulator time right along with actual flight time Aristotle a wise man of ancient Greece said education requires only a teacher a student and on sit on we have teachers students and so many logs that they cord up to a five million dollar training center plus the scheduled use just for training of something like twenty million dollars worth of airplanes sometimes people ask don't experts in a profession ever get beyond the need of learning the answer to that question can be given by doctors lawyers scientists or executives in business as well as by the pilots there is no cutoff point to learning or self-improvement so it is only reasonable and logical that the postgraduate program a continual retraining and demonstration of flight crew skills is a mutual effort of the pilots and their company and is mutually advantageous around-the-clock operation is routine in a training program that never really ends [Music] in addition to having the aptitude for flying every man in that office must really want his chosen career and he must work at it [Music] so you fly at night and then before the Sun is up over the horizon other crews are taking on the object is a basic one to learn a little more to know a little more and do it a little better than you did the day before [Music] some men spend hours days and weeks to improve their flying techniques and who are the men who helped them the flight instructors and the ground instructors they're pretty average as men go husband's a few bachelors some of them are ex school teachers others are former line pilots grounded perhaps by a minor physically now they are all professional instructors dedicated to their work [Music] and behind the scenes where you usually find them are the leadership and the comprehensive program are based names and titles are unimportant but represented in one small conference room are a hundred and fifty years of flying and the skills and knowledge the time alone can develop policy and administration flying technique flight safety guarantee of training standards school management the program that they set up and control classes aren't planned just for pilot types sometimes it's a seminar for dispatchers part of a full weeks concentrated study course to familiarize them with some of the practical problems of the flight crews they work with the crews they talked to over airborne telephones the crews who rely on a few doors down the hall a very special group of flying men are back school some are flight managers who during most weeks of the year are boss men management's direct contact with the flight crews others here are from flight standards and their part in the scheme of things is to give final checkout to all members of the cruise to make certain that their training is coordinated and that all phases of the program maintain the high standards company policy has established but flight manager or line captain the business of learning is never done a lot of spare time can be taken up in studying noodles and there always are new ones in air traffic control in equipment and procedures developments for family men can cover the highly technical phases of constructing model planes to the standards of a younger generation but sometimes intimate moments get sidetracked for a more serious type of homework preparing a talk you're going to give on behalf of the pilot speakers bureau the time founded on is a target audience for rehearsal they know how hard you've tried to make speech of good one and they'll make suggestions to help improve it but you know what you want to say and sometimes with or without their approval you have to pass judgment on yourself others have to let someone else pass judgment after comprehensive physicals to prove that they're still in top condition to keep the jobs at which they've spent their working lifetimes what it all adds up to is this the basis of true dependability is knowledge the kind of knowledge that can only come from the desire of the individual and the extra care of a coordinated training program throughout an interested organisation and perhaps the most important effect of all those checks and rechecks is the complete confidence that they give the flight crews in their own ability a confidence based on the college that they have earned the right to occupy a seat up front there are many offices in the sky and they fly to many places and through their windows from six miles up flight crews know a world that most of us can only occasionally see they are coordinated teams men who know what they are doing and why they are doing it they work at their profession with a skill and precision for which they have been trained which they have studied it is the profession of their choice the profession with an office in the sky [Music]