The airplane you next fly on might be twenty, thirty, or even forty years old. Does that make you nervous? After all, you can hardly expect to drive 1,000 miles in a vintage 1970 car without a breakdown or two. But if you treated your car as well as airlines treat their airplanes, you could probably drive it your entire life.
A big commercial jet receives about eleven hours of maintenance for every hour it flies.
Smaller commuter airplanes, with their simpler designs and systems, may receive only six hours for each hour of flight. No, airplanes don’t break down that often; it’s simply that airlines are heavily invested in making sure their aircraft are always in peak operating condition. Low- level mechanical problems can mean lower fuel efficiency, which can quickly become
expensive. (Airlines in the United States alone consume over 10 billion gallons (38 billion liters) of fuel each year; a difference of even 1 percent in efficiency is a matter of millions of
gallons.) Of course, more serious mechanical problems cause delays or even accidents, which are extremely expensive, or even disastrous, for the airline.
Each commercial airplane has its own maintenance schedule, based on a certain number of hours in flight and cycles (takeoffs and landings). Mechanics inspect every aircraft at least once each day, looking for obvious problems and giving special attention to
concerns logged by the pilots and flight crew (called squawks ). If any repairs are needed to an item on the airplane’s official minimum
equipment list, the airplane may be kept longer. Then,
every six or seven days, two mechanics give the aircraft a more thorough review (sometimes called an A Check ), which can usually be performed overnight.
Airlines are required to keep every page of maintenance paperwork for their airplanes, including pilots’ logs and mechanics’ checklists—even if nothing was found wrong. That’s no small feat, as each year the average commercial aircraft gathers about twelve inches of paperwork.
All commerical aircraft are boarded from the left. Some historians have linked this convention to the custom of mounting horses from the left side (which may have started when soldiers had swords hanging along their left legs). It would be incredibly difficult to change this arrangement because all airports are designed around this configuration.
When you board an airplane, check the little metal registration plate above or on the side of the open door. This plate often tells you what year the airplane was built.
Once every month or so, the aircraft gets a B Check, in which between ten and forty mechanics look over every major system (hydraulics, electrical, brakes, and so on).
Then, every eighteen to twenty-four months, the maintenance crew takes the airplane out of service for ten to forty-five days for an even closer inspection. If that weren’t enough, every four years or so, the airline pulls out all the seats and many of the interior fixtures in order to check the fuselage for signs of stress or other wear and tear. And after eight or nine years, the mechanics tackle the biggest job of all: They strip the entire airplane down—literally taking apart every system in the aircraft, including the engines—check every item, and then put it all back together again.
Plus, you might think your mechanics down at “Heinrich’s Auto” are good, but did the person who checked your brakes have to pass a federal certification exam? Did she precisely follow written procedure and then document the work in detail, including noting the serial number of every part she replaced? Airline maintenance has gotten a bad reputation in recent years, but the truth is that these mechanics are extremely well trained and are under constant peer and supervisor review.
It’s no wonder that some estimates place maintenance costs at about $1 million per airplane per year. In fact, while most airplanes are removed from service after about twenty or thirty years, there are still aircraft from the 1930s that are providing safe and efficient commercial service in some places around the world. So next time you read a newspaper article implying that airlines are flying old aircraft, remember that the word old is relative.
The glass windshield on a Boeing 777 is about one inch thick.
FIRST HUMAN-CONTROLLED POWERED FLIGHT
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew 120 feet in twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Later that day, Wilbur Wright flew 850 feet in sixty-nine seconds. Over a year later, on October 5, 1905, Wilbur Wright flew twenty-four miles in thirty-eight minutes.
FIRST SKYWRITING
Milton J. Bryant first wrote words in the sky over Seattle on July 19, 1913, though which words exactly have been lost over time. However, the first commercial use of skywriting was in May 1922, when Captain Cyril Turner wrote “Daily Mail” over London. (Later that year he wrote “Hello USA” over New York City in an effort to drum up an advertising contract.)
In 1911, thirty-two-year-old Calbraith Perry Rogers became the first person to fly across the American continent. He paid for the trip by naming his airplane after a popular soda: the Vin Fizz. During the forty-nine-day journey he crashed at least nineteen times (various sources define crash differently; some say he crashed as many as sixty times), and by the end of the flight, he had replaced every part on the airplane except a rudder and one wing strut. Sadly, a year later he was killed after a midair collision with a seagull.
FIRST IN-FLIGHT MOVIE
While there is some controversy over this record, it’s likely that the first in-flight movie was the silent film classic The Lost World (complete with animated
dinosaurs), presented on Britain’s Imperial Airways in April 1925, en route from London to Paris.
FIRST GUN FIRED FROM AIRPLANE
Lieutenant Jacob Fickel shot at ground targets on August 20, 1910, from a Curtiss biplane over Sheepshead Bay, New York.