Tales from the Departure Lounge

#25 Tony Eyles (This Is Your Captain Speaking)

• Andy Plant & Nick Cuthbert • Season 2 • Episode 25

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This is the REAL life pilot episode! Tony Eyles is a first officer flying for British Airways. He joins the TFTDL flight crew to answer all your questions about planes, pilots and passengers. We take to the skies to talk about everything from turbulence to the Bermuda triangle, in an extremely honest interview about the aviation industry. 

Where do the crew disappear to half way through a flight? What do you do in the event of terrorism or a medical emergency? What does a 'heavy' pilot do? Assume the brace position and put yourself in Tony's capable hands... just don't critique his landing. 

Final boarding call: Amritsar, India

This episode is sponsored by Duolingo. Today over 4500 institutions including Yale, Imperial and Trinity College Dublin have adopted the Duolingo English Test. If your university wants to join them then get in touch at www.englishtest.duolingo.com

Tales from the Departure Lounge is a Type Nine production for The PIE www.thepienews.com

Nick:

Welcome to Tales from the Departure Lounge. This is a podcast about travel for business, for pleasure, or for study. My name's Nick and I'm joined by my co-pilot, Andy. And together we're gonna be talking to some amazing guests about how travel has transformed their. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey. Welcome to the podcast.

Andy:

Today we're joined by Tony Iles. He is a pilot. He's a first officer with British Airways.

Nick:

We've been waiting for this episode for a long time. This was a chance to bust all of those myths about flying.

Andy:

he really gives us an insight into what it's like to be a pilot, what it's like to work for an airline, what it's like to travel the world for your job.

Nick:

Everything from turbulence to the Bermuda Triangle. We tried to ask him all of those questions

Andy:

he talks about life in the bunk.

Nick:

He talked about what to do if someone's holding a knife to an air steward mid flight.

Andy:

He has that front row seat to look out on the world and the natural wonders and he still seems to be blown away by all of that.

Nick:

And what I loved, which we've got to say because we didn't capture it on the recording is that when he left the call, he had to put his glasses on to try and find the button to leave the recording studio,

Andy:

luckily computers land the planes. He's the BA pilot who takes a mini piano with him around the world. he loves observing the natural world from the front of his Boeing 777, and wants us all to keep an open mind and a sense of humour when we fly. Just don't critique his landings. Let's get some tales from the departure lounge from Tony Iles.

Tony:

If you travel too close to a storm, it's like electricity going around the windscreen. It's amazing. It's static, it'll let charge, go dancing across the windscreen. the people who were sat there, watching three pilots come down and look out the window, to look at the wing, they were getting a little bit nervous. it is interesting how people feel the need that they should comment on your landing. They have no idea how to land a 747, apparently this loadmaster just took all these pins out. And they've got all these live missiles rolling around.

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Andy:

Tony, welcome to the show. the first question that we always ask our guests is if you could take our listeners anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Tony:

I've seen a lot of the world, but I guess the most interesting place for me and still is really is India. I grew up in East London. went to school with a lot of Indian kids and people from the subcontinent there. So when I first got there, I was like, wow. Everything I experienced as a kid with my mates at school, I could see where it came from. Everyone's a businessman. No one says no. And they just, have great food and just the beautiful demeanor. And I love that.

Andy:

And when was the first time you went there?

Tony:

it was, early 2000s, and we did a train journey around Rajasthan. Sleeping on a train, that was obviously very new. the toilets on the train were very new to me as well, but just visiting the places of colour, it was just, Absolutely amazing. We ended up in Delhi and we did, Agra. We saw the Taj Mahal. There's a lot of poverty out there. So that's quite striking. You don't see that here. You don't see people who have nothing going to the loo in the streets or begging, it's just so different. It's unbelievable. But the place that sticks in my mind, and I still would say if there's anywhere on the planet, you want to go, we went to the golden temple, which is the home of the Sikh religion, near Amritsar, just walking into this most beautiful scene where it was very quiet, was just so humbling. That place sticks in my mind the most of anywhere. on this planet really.

Nick:

the golden temple is famous because they feed visitors all the time, I think.

Tony:

they do, they do. It's very basic, but the operation is incredible. You imagine that in your school kitchens or, even in airports and the food is just beautiful. And there's so many volunteers. I could walk around there all day or just sit down and just. Soak it in.

Andy:

And now I guess you go back quite often for work. You've just been to Bangalore.

Tony:

Yes. and it's still amazing. I still prefer eating on the streets. If I go to Delhi and eat in the hotel, I'll definitely come back with Delhi Belly. But if I go in Mumbai or Bangalore and eat from a street vendor for twenty rupees. just stick with vegetarian food, don't eat any meat out there, you come back okay.

Nick:

How does it work for flight crew, for pilots? What's the schedule before you have to fly back?

Tony:

It's very variable, but the shortest flight is probably six hours for our fleet, the Boeing 777. You'll go to, say, Tel Aviv. There's not much of a difference in time, so you'll get to a hotel, maybe spend one or two nights there, and fly back. And then New York. You'll just get one night there. You'll get 24 hours in New York. but still the hotels in Manhattan. The West Coast, you'll get a couple of days there. I think in my time with British airways. Has seen a bit of a demise of downtown areas like San Francisco, Denver, LA as well, they're suffering a little bit from poverty and drugs and things. You go to Vegas, it's all great being on the strip, having a few beers and, laughs with everyone. It's equally as good going down to the Grand Canyon. you can take advantage of these once in a lifetime places, a day off down route.

Nick:

You said having a couple of drinks in Vegas. What is the rule book about what you can and can't do

Tony:

you have to have no alcohol in your system at all when you go fly. That is the rule, you don't wanna have any alcohol in your system, so to say 12 hours, eight hours, is just a misnomer because you can have a lot of beer. In 14 hours, and it'll still be in your system

Nick:

Do you ever get checked? Do you ever get breathalyzed or drug tested

Tony:

there is a system where you can get randomly checked. It's never happened to me Or you can get security stuff which has happened you know globally. They've said this guy smells of alcohol And then they'll send someone to your aeroplane you know, not with my airline I've heard stories where people have been told, go to bed. you're not very well. But maybe you should edit that bit,

Nick:

It's a natural question, isn't it? how do you get a substitute pilot? Are carrying four pilots doing shift changes?

Tony:

We have a standby roster I could be at home on standby like a doctor. We get two hours to get to Heathrow. Sometimes you'll get a heads up, you get a crew that run out of hours because they're fixing the airplane and it's delaying, delaying, delaying, you have a certain number of hours you can work. Does that make sense? So if you go out of hours, They have to call someone else to come in. If we do go to New York, it's generally two pilots. If you go for longer flights, Denver's, LA's, West Coast, or the Caribbean, you go as three pilots. the third pilot will be known as a heavy pilot. on the take off and landing, he'll sit and watch you guys, right? Because three pairs of eyes, is better than two, But then, at 20, 000 feet, he'll go in the bunk. You divide the time up into three. You'll each get, say, three hours in the bunk, two and a half hours in the bunk, or if there's no bunk, you'll get a club class seat or something. And that rest ensures that you can do about 17 hours at work.

Nick:

Nobody likes a backseat driver, Tony.

Tony:

No, no, we're, we're all, we're all trained to the same standard

Nick:

but when you look at the rotor, surely there's some people you're like, oh no, I've got to spend a weekend in San Francisco, with so and so,

Tony:

We have, four and a half thousand pilots, you've probably flown with the same pilot a handful of times in ten years. it very rarely happens. there are some people you'd prefer not to, but when you get down route, Everyone can do their own thing. You can meet up every night if you want, you can go for dinner if you want, or you say, I've got things on, you don't have to stick around because you've just spent eight hours together potentially. that's probably why no one goes out with me. They've probably had enough of my stories.

Andy:

And there's a bunk in the cockpit. Cockpits look pretty small.

Tony:

the Jumbo had a bunk. That had a bunk in the flight deck and a toilet. But the 777, it looks like a toilet door, you go up a little set of steps. So above you in the cabin, There are a couple of bunks for the pilots, and at the back, there's about eight bunks for the cabin crew. And, it's a bit noisy on some aeroplanes. Definitely uncomfortable.

Nick:

They say that there's quite a lot of hanky panky that goes on in the bunk. Is this true?

Tony:

I've never seen it.

Nick:

But you must have heard those stories.

Tony:

uh, I haven't, to be honest, if you got found out, you'd lose your job.

Andy:

Obviously nobody's doing it in front of the pilots, Nick. too responsible.

Tony:

There's always that risk that someone will not be on side with that sort of activity, and if you're brazen enough to do it, you probably haven't really thought through the consequences, Security, is horrendous for air crew and cabin crew. Because if we go through the same checks as you guys, and whilst I don't want to be treated differently, you're not allowed to take yogurts through or something like that. It's just, I'm not going to hijack my own aeroplane with a yoghurt. But that's the rules, so. not many people know this, but when you have a scheduled departure, it's the time you're supposed to push back and start your engines. there's so many ducks to line up I'm surprised they ever go on time to be honest, when you take off, you've got five minutes to take off and off you go.

Andy:

It's a hugely responsible job. do you ever Let your hair down when you're overseas, as pilots.

Tony:

You sometimes go away and get a great crew, there's a skipper I went to Antigua with recently. You can buy, you know those miniature bottles and bottles of wine, BA said, we're going to charge you 60 pence for everything you take off, so the skipper said everybody on board all the crew get your crew purchase. I'll buy you a drink he knew it would be cheaper buying them four drinks at 60p rather than buying them a drink in the hotel, which is maybe, 10 bucks each or something like that. And everyone was so grateful. We all got together. We met downstairs on the first night. We felt a better, a closer unit. You know just because of that one kind axe which probably cost 40 quid or something like that,

Andy:

Good leader.

Nick:

Good economist.

Andy:

A good economist too, yeah.

Tony:

I don't know if this is allowed, but we don't use the bunks all the time if, the cabin crew will have a break during, say, a seven hour flight, maybe for an hour, so if they can go and sit upstairs and just relax, they'll be very grateful, and so, Some captains do not offer that, some captains do,

Andy:

I always wondered where the cabin crew went. In the middle of the night, you'd, wandering around looking for something, there was nobody to be seen, and they were obviously all bunked up, upstairs.

Tony:

Half of the flight it will be basically half people. They have to do certain checks going up and down and checking things are not plugged in, there's no one trying to smoke in the toilets and stuff like that. They have their own routines to do but they'll do it on half levels so half of them can get a rest.

Nick:

I watched an Australian pilot give this team talk. In the departure lounge, so he had the whole crew together and he talked about the weather conditions and it never occurred to me that you run the whole crew like a team like that and you have some discretion about breaks and you keep them all happy.

Tony:

It's all set within strict procedural guidelines, everything you do is written down in a book. If there's a problem, you look it up, you can do this. There's a very little that isn't written down, especially for cabin crew. but you are a team, and obviously when something happens in the cabin, and you're flying the aeroplane, you need to know what's going on. Even just a hint, a medical emergency, or something, they're not happy about. They don't want to be scared of you and say, Oh, the captain, he so rude. He doesn't talk to us. you want that new junior person when they're looking out on the wing to say that doesn't look right. I've had that where they gone. Yeah. I think there's ice on the wings. I think we had it on one flight. where they said, we're on takeoff. I could see this part of the wing move and I don't think that's normal. And we're like, okay. So I think the heavy went back there. First of all, I can't really see anything. So he went on his break. Then the captain went down, had a look out this window. Then I went down about an hour later to have a look. It was nothing, we couldn't see anything, but the people who were sat there, watching three pilots come down and look out the window, to look at the wing, they were getting a little bit nervous.

Nick:

You would be terrified.

Tony:

You'd be like, huh?

Nick:

and just layman's terms here, a frozen wing's not good.

Tony:

There's certain levels of ice, if you've got like on your car windscreen Some airlines say that's okay. If you can see the paintwork underneath if not Just get it cleaned off, I think, an Airbus 380 costs about 30, 000 to get that de iced completely.

Nick:

you see them, spraying the wings,? aren't they? They're spraying DI, so all the, I've seen that.

Tony:

If you're in really bad icy conditions, they'll put something else on that stops it sticking again. Because that's really bad, But we had a case with a jumbo. Do you know where the flaps move? So when the flaps move, they have the big fairings that cover up all the mechanisms inside. and one of these mechanisms one of the covers, the fairings, was broken. So they took it off. there's a big thick book like this that says, If something's not working, can we go with that? Yes, we can. But then when you looked out the window, you could just see all the metal work and all the cogs and it looks horrendous. It looked like something had fallen off, But you had to go back down there, explain to the passengers, that's normal, right? The engineers have told us about that, They're going to fix it when they get to London.

Andy:

We're getting into the territory here that is going to terrify our listeners, have you faced any emergencies, emergency landings, near crashes,

Tony:

near crashes, emergency landings, that's all in my military days. I'm glad to say that. That's all behind me. I had ejection seats and there was just two of us.

Nick:

Well, well, hang on, hang on, you're gonna glaze over this. You've ejected out of an airplane.

Tony:

No, no, no. We had

Nick:

Oh, okay.

Tony:

seats. So if anything went wrong,

Nick:

That was your fallback.

Tony:

was your get out of jail free card. Obviously we don't have that do we here.

Nick:

Do you have to simulate an ejection in a military aircraft? Do you have to do it as a practice?

Tony:

they used to have a rig, but they had so many people injure themselves on this rig, so they said, don't bother, modern aeroplanes are amazing. The engineers are amazing, their design is just incredible, and it's all built around safety. You don't see the day to day running of airliners going airborne, all around the world. You look at flight radar 24. It happens all the time,

Andy:

Ah, but Tony, the near misses, they don't get reported.

Tony:

They do. We report them. Not on the newspaper or on the interweb, but we do report them to make sure, you don't want it happening again. I've probably had one engine problem on a jumbo. It's called a surge, where there's something wrong with the engine an engine sucks in, it squeezes it, sets it on fire and then blows it out the back, right? That's how it works. And the bit that blows out the back turns a bit the front as well. So if the bit squashing the air doesn't work properly, air can go the other way. You see what I mean? It can come out the front. So that's why some people say I've seen planes come out the front of the engine and then your temperatures at the back of the engine go up. We can see all that in the flight deck. Apparently Concorde used to do it all the time, and it's easy to sort out. I've had that once, on a jumbo, we had four engines, so it was fine.

Andy:

many engines do you need to fly a jumbo?

Tony:

Two, it depends how heavy you are, but Someone says you can do things on one engine, they're that good,

Nick:

There's a friends episode. That's very famous where the hysteria on the plane is that there's something wrong with the left phalange and nobody knows what it is. And then the hysteria spreads and everybody has to get off the plane. People have talked to me about those little pointy antenna things at the front. if they've still got the sock on when you're getting on the plane, there's a major problem.

Tony:

that would be bad.

Nick:

Okay, tell me more.

Tony:

If that's a phalange or if it's got a sock on the bit sticking out at the front, then, that measures your airspeed. you shouldn't even get to near flying speed and you should notice that, You should notice that on your walk round. That's definitely one to look at. It has removed before flight, label on it. apparently A load master did that with, a load of air to air missiles. They were taking somewhere and they have, a pin on them that makes'em live. Obviously, if you are going to war and you've got'em strapped under airplane, There's a remove before flight and you take the pin out, but that's when you're going to fire them. If you've got them as cargo and someone took all the pins out. You don't take them out when you're just moving them. You take them out when you're going to fire them. But apparently this loadmaster just took all these pins out. And they've got all these live missiles rolling around.

Andy:

wow. What about human problems on planes? So I've been on flights where doctors have been asked for,

Tony:

We have some people called Medlink and you'll call them up. You say These are their symptoms and you generally get the cabin crew to talk on the SATCOM voice to a doctor and give them something from the, med kits we have on board, Obviously, if you're in the middle of the Atlantic, there are fewer places you can go to.

Andy:

How often does it happen?

Tony:

it's probably happened about five times in eight years for me. And the cabin crew are trained medically, people think they just serve tea and coffees. They have an amazing, training where they're taught how to handle emergencies, oxygen failures, crashes on the ground, fires in the air at 36, 000 feet, medical emergencies, births. There's so much that could happen in a small city that, 300 people there that you're looking after,

Andy:

What about misbehaving? You mentioned people smoking in the toilets. I imagine they do other things in the toilets as well.

Tony:

huh.

Andy:

What are the naughtiest things that people have done on planes?

Tony:

It's generally get drunk. we have a system where people get warned. We can't get involved with that because there's a possible hijacking or, they don't want to tease us out of the flight deck. We have a locked door. We stay there. The authority of the captain is written down on a piece of paper and they can get cuffed.

Nick:

I've been watching Hijack. which is a series with Idris Elba,

Tony:

he went to my school?

Nick:

Idris Elba went to your school?

Tony:

He did.

Nick:

It's obviously about a hijack. There's two pilots and it's a locked door. I would just wondered what the security policy is around that locked door. We have to be careful here because obscurity is a good thing, isn't it? We don't want people to get any ideas

Tony:

we have a camera.

Nick:

Yeah.

Tony:

That whenever we open that door, which is locked, we can check to see who's there. If there's any passengers behind the cabin crew or anyone who's coming in, we don't let them in access to the flight deck, that's what you don't want. If the cabin crew are there, we can deny them entrance because they have an emergency way of getting in. So if we're both incapacitated, they can get in but if they've got a knife to their throat or whatever, you'd still deny them entrance. You can double lock it manually. So no one can get in at all.

Nick:

And, as part of your training, do you have to face those kind of ethical or psychometric tests? About the greater good compared to, one person being threatened

Tony:

we're pilots, we're really boring. If you give us a rule, we'll stick to it, do not open the door even if, they've got a knife to their throat. You know what I mean? And you generally just go, yeah, it's my life on the line as well,

Nick:

Yes, that's

Tony:

what I mean? It's 350 people versus one and me.

Nick:

but that one person's really nice.

Tony:

I know. It's a shame, isn't it? Pilots like rules. We all have OCD to a certain extent, unfortunately.

Andy:

the next section is called any laptops, liquids, or sharp objects. what do you have to always take with you, or what are your travel hacks?

Tony:

I take a miniature piano away with me. And I'm trying to get a hold of a nice portable piano that is easy, to put together and sounds good. I rent, a keyboard or a piano in New York. Just 20 bucks an hour, you can sit and play a nice Yamaha piano because I'm learning the piano. It's so good to be able to do that anywhere, because I have the time, right?

Andy:

That's

Tony:

Does that Does that answer your question?

Nick:

Yeah, I just get the image of you playing a miniature piano at 30, 000 feet.

Tony:

No, I don't play at 30, 000 feet. That's not for anyone else's ears apart from my own, flying over this planet is amazing. I haven't said about flying over Greenland and seeing all the icebergs. You see where they start, you see where they finish and you see the Northern lights. It gives you an amazing perspective and there's a lot of this planet, there's no one on there. There's no one on the planet. It's just beautiful. It's

Nick:

amazing how you can't see people from the sky. Obviously, you can see quite a lot of details, but you can't see people running around I love looking out of the window on aircrafts, looking at geography. I know that sounds so boring to some people, but to me, it makes sense of the world that must be a real privilege the front row seat of some of the most beautiful things in the world.

Tony:

Absolutely. There's a city in north of Iraq called Erbil, and it's probably the seat of civilization. And the concentric circles of this city, it's really ancient. these places are incredible and I get to fly over them We skirted around a few hurricanes on the way to the Caribbean the other day and it was like, Oh my gosh, look over there. Just the power of nature.

Nick:

You're flying past storms and sometimes through storms.

Tony:

Storms, avoid

Nick:

planes get hit by lightning

Tony:

That's fine. That's fine. My dad asked me as a 10 year old, why can birds, stop on the power lines and not get. electrocuted, well of course they're not any of the ground or anything. So for us it's the same, you'll see these little things sticking out on on the wings. They're called wicks. And when we fly through the air anyway, We're a big metal box flying through a magnetic field, so we become charged in ourselves, so we have to dissipate that before we land But if you get struck by lightning, it'll just generally come into the airplane and go out the airplane

Nick:

and turbulence. We had somebody come on who said that they had flown through the slipstream of another plane and it had flipped the plane 90 degrees on its side and then righted itself.

Tony:

We have a weather radar you can see all the weather and you can go around it Sometimes you can't, take the path of least resistance. Have you heard of St. Elmo's fire? You know those Van de Graaff generators, you put your fingers on, and you get all the sparks and the purple glow around. If you travel too close to a storm, it's like electricity going around the windscreen. It's amazing. It's static, it'll let charge, go dancing across the windscreen. So that's a good clue that you're a bit too close to a thunderstorm, maybe. But the other aircraft, we have certain minimum times behind, say, a 380, the Super Jumbo, and you have to get airborne even as a large aeroplane, 100 seconds after it, because of that wake. Because each aeroplane creates this massive vortex behind it. that's the reason, we avoid each other.

Nick:

That ever happen to you? Have you ever had a top gun style spin?

Tony:

Nope, we have procedures if you get caught in a storm. You've got air coming over the wings, right? That gives you lift. So if that air disappears, you've got less lift. So you go down. If you're strapped into your seat, it'll be fine, but the aeroplane will just go up and down with the turbulence. It's just air that we're going up and down and it makes it time you go up and down. We're not going to fall out the sky. We're just going to go up and down and we'll try and get out of it if we can. But you can say, it's like 10, 000 feet of turbulence or it's a jet stream. That means you get home at half an hour earlier or something, there's like corridors of air that moves at 200 miles an hour, but you're in that air,

Nick:

Yeah.

Tony:

so you're not going to fall out of the sky. Closer to the ground, it's a little bit different, does that make sense?

Nick:

Perfect sense.

Andy:

The next part is called, What's the purpose of your visit? Why do you do what you do, Tony?

Tony:

I used to watch aeroplanes fly over my house into Heathrow in East London as a kid, and I thought, I want to do that,

Andy:

How did you get into it? You mentioned the military earlier.

Tony:

I applied for British Airways when I was 18 and they didn't accept me So unfortunately, I had to go to university I go in with the wrong crowd And joined the military for 20 years, so I flew helicopters and jets in the military, loved every minute of it, and then I flew, for Jet 2 for 4 years, and then I got my Charlie Bucket moment, which was to fly long haul British Airways on the 747. It's not all glamour You might go to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon and everyone wants to go to the bar or something It's sleep when you're tired eat when you're hungry. That's what I reckon you should do

Nick:

that's the golden temple again, I think.

Tony:

Yeah, exactly.

Nick:

The sky's getting busier. What are the things that you would change about the industry if you could? How do you feel about climate change? That is controversial.

Tony:

well, that's interesting because obviously I'm going to defend my industry because whether I'm flying it or not, you guys still go somewhere, right? So I'm not going to blame myself for the climate change. You look at the latest generation of airplanes, they're so fuel efficient, they sip petrol or gas, and there's lots of things in the pipeline with, With fuels that are eco friendly, but be under no illusion, Just building a motorway that makes your daily commute 10 minutes quicker, or your HS2 has so much concrete and steel involved, which is just the biggest pollutant, notwithstanding all our mobile phones. You want a new mobile phone? Yeah, let's get a new mobile phone every two years. So the whole world, commercially. is driving this. It's not just aviation. It's up there, I believe. You could argue you can see the benefits of travel, globally, amongst people, does that have a benefit that outweighs, uh, I don't know,, it's an interesting question,

Nick:

I've got some myths that you could deal with for as Tony. This thing about toilet waste dropping from the sky. Fact or fiction.

Tony:

Fiction. In our aircraft, it goes into waste tanks. And if one of them gets blocked, about four toilets don't work, which is not good on the way back from Delhi.

Nick:

Mm. Mm. Uh.

Andy:

We know somebody who blocked a toilet on an aeroplane.

Nick:

The brace position. The brace position is only given to people because it breaks their necks earlier on impact. True or false?

Tony:

No, there's been loads of studies. and they will give you the safest thing so you'll do what the manufacturers tell you to do because their lawyers will have the most money. And it's probably the safest bet really because you don't have any lap straps. We have five point harness and obviously we're busy at the time so we don't get involved with the brace position

Andy:

I heard, Nick, that, even more grim than that, that it was to preserve dental records so that people could be identified.

Tony:

You watch far too much netflix or youtube I think

Nick:

Conspiracy theories with Andy and Nick. Do you avoid the Bermuda Triangle?

Tony:

No, i've flown over bermuda lots of times Bermuda is a place where it has a frequency you can transmit on. And if you do four or five clicks it changes the intensity of the runway lighting. So on a certain frequency you can go one, two, three, four, five clicks on your radio. And it changes the intensity of the runway lighting.

Nick:

That's cool.

Tony:

It's good, isn't it? I know definitely that used to happen, but

Andy:

heard a story about air traffic control in Bermuda, that they're incredibly polite and that they want other people to be polite back to them. A story I heard, it was a BA flight coming in, BA123. calling in for a runway or whatever. And there was radio silence. They said... this is BA flight, 1, 2, 3, you know, calling for a runway. And then after three or four times, eventually the air traffic control came back from IMMU and said, good morning, BA flight. 1, 2, 3. they just wanted them to be polite.

Tony:

That sounds completely like the Caribbean. They're all so polite. But, I think what I had a female pilot, female navigator on the radio in, the Middle East. And they both tried on the radio and never got an answer. And then I tried on the radio and got an answer straight away. It was nothing to do with our radio. So that's quite

Nick:

That was on my list to ask you about the ratio of female pilots. There is a Virgin Airways advert at the moment. Sorry, your competitors. They have a female pilot as the final scene of the advert. Is there a problem with females getting to pilot positions in the industry?

Tony:

The percentage is ridiculously low when you look at, 50 percent of the population are female. I know lots of female pilots. And, they generally have to work harder to prove themselves. than some of their male compatriots. Do you know what I mean? I think it's probably more, you know, the passengers. You want to hear some of the comments that people make oh my gosh I wonder if she's gonna get someone to park it do you know what I mean?

Andy:

Where are you with passengers clapping? When you land,

Tony:

Can't hear any of it. They can do what they want

Nick:

Well, no, they can't do what they want. We've established that.

Andy:

I was always of the opinion, it's the least that the pilot could do is land the plane safely.

Tony:

We had a captain the other day. I think he landed quite heavily and all the oxygen masks fell down at the back. I didn't think he got a round of applause to be honest. But it is interesting how people feel the need that they should comment on your landing. They have no idea how to land a 747, it's like, a 220 tonne airplane on a 777 most days. You say, do you know what was going on? was it tailwind? Were the lighting conditions? what do you know about landing an aeroplane? It's interesting that everyone feels, especially if they see you at the door or you say goodbye to everyone or you talk to people, why should they comment on my landing?

Andy:

How much is done manually in takeoff and landing?

Tony:

All the take offs are a manual take off. And landing it, it can land itself, but generally when it's foggy, it will be an automatic landing, right? So you can see nothing.

Andy:

literally hands off the wheel, and it's landing itself.

Tony:

yeah, and it'll land itself. You still, gotta monitor it, because there's so many different rules, there's weather rules, things in the airport are not working, lights not working, whether the aeroplane part of it's not working, what you can do, what your actions would be, so it's... It's not that straightforward just to go look at that what a landing, you know to me But generally when people say oh, that was an automatic landing very rarely other than fog Will a pilot let the airplane automatically land? Why would you you get to land an airplane and it's your skill versus the world, I, I felt a bit robbed my last 747 flight and I got all the way down to a thousand feet and the skipper says, the wind's out of limits for you, I'll land it, and I never knew that was my last flight in the jumbo, but it was, and, and he took my landing, I was gutted.

Andy:

The last section of the podcast is called Anything to Declare, and it's a free space for you to talk about whatever you like.

Tony:

I can feel people's frustrations with airlines in general and, It's a big old machine of things to line up to get people away on time. they're putting every effort they can to sort these things out. Obviously the bounce back from COVID is still getting their head around. They haven't got enough airplanes. People haven't got enough pilots. There's all these things looming and they have to make money for shareholders. So I can feel that probably people with our industry have a lot of frustration. About levels of service, but I would like everyone to know that on the cold face with pilots cabin crew, they all try their best right on a day to day basis going to work. They're doing their best for their customers. Because essentially that's our job, right? So, don't get too upset with the people who are, on the front line as it were. It may not necessarily be their fault that the aeroplane has come in late from Heathrow, The world is an amazing place. The people in it are amazing. Just be open to other people. If we were all the same, life would be pretty boring. That's my message anyway. I'll stick with that.

Andy:

That's a good one.

Nick:

I've absolutely loved this conversation. Thank you so much.

Tony:

you're welcome. I love what you do. It was just a pleasure to help, really.

Andy:

Thanks for coming on the show, Tony.

Nick:

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for listening. As always. If you are a fan of the show. Please leave a review or emailers at sick bag, a tales from the departure lounge.com. Shout out as well to our sponsors, Duolingo. Tales from the Departure Lounge is a type nine production for the pie.

People on this episode

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Andy Plant

Host
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Nick Cuthbert

Host