NZZ Folio 08/09 - Thema: Flug LX 14   Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part 4: Where time stands still

© Daniel auf der Mauer
19:23. Claudine von Gunten on the internal phone. People would be amazed at how loud she could shout out her commands if she had to in an emergency. Linktext
It’s all down to time zones: over Canada now, it’s the same time aboard LX?14 as when it took off from Zurich six hours ago . The captain changed his watch to New York time at 30 degrees west. But when it comes to jet lag, even the professional flyers have no set recipe.

By the editors of NZZ Folio
CONTENTS

Back to part 1: Two hundred tonnes take off

It’s 19:30 by Claudine von Gunten’s watch when she switches on the lights. The cabin comes back to life, emerging from the stasis it had entered as the flight passed through a series of time zones. The aircraft has just crossed the in­visible border on its journey, between Atlantic Daylight Time and Eastern Daylight Time, with the strange effect that it is now 13:30, the same time the flight took off six hours ago.

Humans are not designed to cope with time standing still, and jet lag is our physical response. By the intern­al clock that regulates our sleep/wake rhythm, our hormone production and even our body temperature, it’s 19:30 now. The present flight, ­being westbound and thus “gaining” time, will be easier to cope with for most passengers than one in the opposite direction. This is because most humans are “owls” rather than “larks”, the terms sleep researchers use to distinguish nocturnal types from early risers. On eastbound flights, it’s the larks who’ll suffer the jet lag less.

When it comes to dealing with jet lag, a condition felt even by bees (see The experiment - Do bees get jet leg?), the professional flyers have no set recipe, either. Covolan adapts to the ­local time when he lands; ­others prefer to maintain their inner “Swiss clock” wherever they may be. After a ­tiring night flight, Claudine von Gunten keeps to a simple rule: she goes to bed and sets her alarm clock to wake her after one-and-a-half, three or four-and-a-half hours. This “one-and-a-half hour rule”, she claims, enables her to get just the amount of deep sleep she needs.

Having used most of its fuel, LX 14 now weighs 35 tonnes less than it did on take-off. On leaving North Atlantic Track D, Covolan climbed 2,000 feet to 40,000 feet after being cleared to do so by air traffic control. It’s an efficiency measure: higher altitudes, with their thinner air, mean less fuel burn. The flight is making good time, and the cockpit computer projects a landing in New York at 15:27 local time, 18 minutes ahead of schedule. This gives Covolan another ­opportunity to save fuel: from this point on, he’ll fly a little slower. The speedometer in the lower left section of the navigation screen drops from Mach 0.82 to Mach 0.808.

Not that the passengers will notice. The Airbus flies on, as smooth as a high-speed train. The 26 female and 89 male passengers on today’s LX 14 form an eight-hour international community: 55 of them connected in Zurich from feeder flights from elsewhere. “Swiss” knows the address, gender, date of birth and credit card number of everyone on board. One thing it doesn’t know is what they weigh, even though this information is ­essential to the ­pilots’ fuel calculations: the heavier the flight, the more kerosene it will ­require.

Every kilo “Swiss” flies across the Atlantic today, including the aircraft itself, will need three decilitres of kerosene to get it there. If you’re reading this magazine aboard an Airbus to New York, your copy will also have taken a schnapps glass of fuel to transport. And since every litre of fuel itself requires fuel to carry it aloft, it’s highly uneconomical to take more fuel than necessary. An aircraft arriving in New York with its tanks still half full will have carried tonnes of extra weight for no good reason.

In view of this, all airlines strive to predict every flight’s fuel requirements as precisely as they can. Not wanting to put each passenger on a set of scales before the flight, the airlines have created statistical “average passengers” instead. “Swiss” assumes a standard weight of 84 kilos per passenger, including their carry-on baggage. For each crew member, from the well-built captain to the slim flight attendant, a standard weight of 90 kilos is used (the 6 extra kilos are for the crew member’s baggage, which is carried in the ­cabin and will not have been weighed).

The “84-kilo rule” can be modified if the airline has grounds to assume that the average passenger weighs less. If just one more woman had been on today’s flight, for instance, she would have raised the percentage of female passengers to above 23 per cent, the critical threshold beyond which all women suddenly weigh 70 kilos and all men 88.

Statistically, then, the 115 passengers on today’s LX 14 weigh a total of 9,660 kilos. On top of this come 5,441 kilos of cargo, the crew and the catering supplies. So fully loaded but with its fuel tanks empty, our aircraft weighs about 146 tonnes.

For today’s flight, the dispatcher this morning calculated the legal minimum fuel requirement as 42.4 tonnes for the flight itself, plus a little more for taxiing at the airports, the pos­sible need to join a holding pattern before landing, the possible need to fly to an alternate airport, and a “final reserve”. The ­resulting total was 48.3 tonnes. In their pre-flight briefing, Covolan and Schroe­der spent some time ­discussing closed runways and the usual wait for landings at JFK before deciding to add a further 1.7 tonnes. So in the end, HB-JHA was fuelled with 50 tonnes of kerosene, of which it will end up consuming 42.8 tonnes. That’s 235 kilos for each of the 115 passengers, 3.5 kilos for ­every 100 kilometres. (These figures are based on the flight’s payload of passengers and cargo, i.e. excluding the weight of the aircraft itself.) So at current prices, the fuel “Swiss” needs to transport each passenger on today’s westbound flight will have cost the carrier around 180 francs.

Every item of baggage in the cargo hold will also have required three times its weight in fuel, as will the dry ice and the biological samples that are being transported today. Covolan is aware of the latter: the commander is always informed of any hazardous or valuable cargo prior to departure. Many a passenger would be amazed at what is stowed in the hold beneath their feet: tomorrow’s eastbound New York–Zurich flight, for instance, will carry gold, jewellery and banknotes by the kilo. (There is, incidentally, no ­access to the cargo hold from the passenger ­cabin!)

Before being loaded aboard, every piece of baggage underwent a rigorous security check: while passengers’ passport data were being transmitted directly to the US authorities as they checked in, their baggage was placed on a belt and conveyed to the vast basement beneath the terminal, where a scanner read the bar code on the tag attached by the check-in personnel. After being registered, the baggage passed through a three-phase X-ray system. If the com­puter found nothing untoward, the item would have been transferred to the sorting zone, which for flight LX 14 was the airport’s Dock E.

If the computer had spotted anything suspicious, the X-ray image concerned would have been forwarded to the screens of the security specialists of the Zurich Cantonal Police. Looking for bombs is the prime mission of the personnel here, who have 30 seconds to evaluate the X-ray image of any suspicious item. Organic material appears orange, non-organic comes out blue, and anything the machine does not identify is shown in green. On an X-ray, a mobile phone and a set of headphones can also look like a bomb’s deton­ator and fuse. And the security staff’s attentiveness is ­further tested every few minutes when the computer deliberately slips in an image showing genuine parts of a bomb. If the suspicions aroused by an item of baggage cannot be suf­ficiently allayed, it will be removed and, to avoid any future legal action, opened for physical inspection in the presence of the passenger concerned.

While flying over New Brunswick, Covolan supplies the cockpit computer with the alternate airports he would use in the event of an emergency: Bangor, Montreal or Boston. “When you’re flying you have to think ten minutes or a hundred miles ahead,” he says. Some 200 miles to the southwest lies Halifax, the city nearest the point where a Swissair MD-11 operating flight SR 111 from New York to Geneva crashed into the sea just off the Canadian coast on 2 September 1998. All 215 passengers and 14 crew members died. Covolan thinks about it every time he flies over the area. The captain that day was Urs Zimmermann, who had been his flying instructor. “When we heard the news, one thing was clear to us all: if Zimmi hadn’t been able to make it, none of us could have.”

Covolan was sent to Halifax three days after the accident, and served as a Swissair representative on the investigation team. He spent six weeks there. He met with local lobster fishermen whose harvesting grounds were the site of the recovery operation. And he met with bereaved family members, who were all seeking an answer to the question: what happened?

“Halifax,” adds Schroeder, “is one of those things that stay with you. For as long as you live, you’ll always know where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news.” He had just returned to Zurich on a night flight from Beirut when, at six in the morning, a mechanic told him that SR 111 was missing. “We didn’t believe it: we told the cabin crew it must be a mistake,” he recalls. “But then we got to the Operations Center, where CNN was on. There was a deathly silence in the place. It was like that for days afterwards, too.”

The investigation into the accident occupied up to 4,000 people for more than four years and cost 39 million ­dollars. The official final report gave the probable cause of the ­accident as a smouldering fire which had been started by a short circuit in the electrical equipment ­powering the in-flight entertainment system and had spread unnoticed ­until smoke filled the cockpit and the wiring of vital instruments was destroyed, rendering the aircraft uncontrollable.

The investigation resulted in 23 new safety recommendations, including tighter flammability standards for insulation ­materials and the installation of additional fire alarm equipment and video cameras. The accident also prompted modifications to the pilots’ rules and checklists: today, if smoke is detected in the cockpit, the standard proced­ure calls even more explicitly for immediate descent and an emergency landing at the nearest available airport.

Surveys suggest that about 30 per cent of people have a fear of ­flying. Many just avoid it. But some people can’t: if the boss sends them on a business trip, or the family insists on that holiday in the sun. Today’s flight, too, is bound to have a few passengers who give all the appearance of being experienced travellers but are suffering acutely behind their mask of calm.

The young woman in 45F who moved to the rearmost row shortly after take-off could be one such passenger. She’s eaten nothing throughout the flight, and has spent the whole time flitting nervously from one channel to another. The experts may insist that flying is considerably safer than travelling by car, but it’s unlikely to reassure her. This is because she is currently tapping into three distinct sources of fear. First, she is trapped in a narrow tube with 114 other people. Secondly, she’ll be experiencing what psychologists call a loss of control, in that Luciano Covolan, a man she does not know and has never seen, is flying the plane. And thirdly, flying is by definition an unnatural activity for any human being. Her fears may not be rational, then; but they are a wholly natural response.

The specialists have long debated how to compare the safety of different transport modes. Most such ­comparisons are based on the number of persons killed per miles or kilo­metres travelled. In these terms flying, with 0.14 fatalities per billion kilometres, is very safe: anyone with a death wish would need to fly from Zurich to New York and back once a week for 10,297 years to have a strong statistical chance of fulfilling their desire. Anyone getting into a car in Switzerland is 50 times more likely to suffer a fatal injury. So the car ride to the airport is the most dangerous part of any air journey.

Many statisticians reject such comparison criteria, though. They argue that the number of fatalities should be measured not against the distance travelled but against the time spent in the vehicle concerned. After all, they claim, people are more interested in knowing how likely they are to be killed in the next hour than over the next 800 kilometres. (Some, of course, would rather not know either.) On this basis, air travel fares less well overall, but is still far safer than travelling by car.

It’s only if the number of fatalities is considered against the number of journeys undertaken (the criterion adopted by aviation insurers) that the plane falls behind the car in safety terms. But is a drive to the local supermarket really comparable to a flight to Sydney? In their own way, of course, all these statistics are correct; but none of them will offer much comfort to anyone with a fear of flying. After all, in deaths-per-journey terms, a bicycle is even more dangerous than a plane. But who ever heard of a fear of cycling?

The experts do agree on one point, however: that air transport has become a lot safer over the past 50 years. Air accidents account for 60 times fewer deaths today than they did in 1959. As well as the obvious technological advances, it’s the improved safety management on the part of aircraft manufacturers and airlines that has been particularly crucial here.

No industry has learnt more from its mistakes than civil aviation. Covolan knows, for example, that in the unlikely event of a bomb threat being received after take-off, he must set the cabin pressure immediately to prevent it from falling any further: some bombs in the past have had pressure-sensitive detonators. He also knows that if he needed to land on only one engine, he should still deploy both the thrust reversers, which are used to brake the aircraft after landing: some time ago, before this procedure was adopted, a pilot confused left and right and deployed the thrust reverser on the faulty engine instead of the one still working, causing the aircraft to overshoot the runway.

Just as there’s always a final brush stroke to be added to an unfinished painting, the checklists and procedures for ­piloting an aircraft are constantly being further refined on the basis of new experiences. This can only happen, of course, provided such experiences are reported. And the airlines realised early on that errors will only be admitted to openly if the fear of punishment is removed.

“Swiss” maintains its own “non­punitive environment” in which incidents or non-standard procedures are openly reported and published anonymously each month in the confidential Flight Safety Review. The items appearing here include failures to enter data into the on-board computer, misunderstandings between pilots and air traffic controllers, or the pilot who experienced a stomach ache an hour after eating his in-flight meal. The aim in all this is to ensure that not everyone has to make the same mistake, and people can learn from each other. Needless to say, though, gross negligence is never tolerated. Non-punitive reporting has proved so successful in civil aviation that it is now used for hospital operating theatres, too.

The fact that Covolan and Schroeder today work behind a reinforced cockpit door with its own CCTV camera is also the direct result of an air transport incident: the attacks of 11 September 2001. Of all of the security measures in place nowadays, it’s those designed to counter terrorism that travellers find the most tedious. The people aboard LX 14 experienced this fact of air travel life most acutely before their flight. While they’ll have been largely un­aware of the 400 police and 900 security staff on duty at Zurich Airport, their progress to Gate E26 will have been halted abruptly at the security checkpoint.

They would have known already that they’d have to surrender any nail scissors here – even pilots are no longer permitted to carry them on board. But if the large rubbish bin filled with deodorants, shaving cream and bottles of mineral water is anything to go by, many people are still unaware of the limit of 100 millilitres of liquid per container (the only exception being baby food and medication). This particular restriction can be traced to 10 August 2006 and the arrest in the UK of would-be terrorists who planned to create liquid explosives on board from otherwise harmless ingredients. The modern ritual of removing shoes at the security checkpoint also stems from a particular incident: on 22 December 2001, British national Richard Reid unsuccessfully attempted to detonate a bomb hidden in his shoe while on a flight from Paris to Miami.

Some passengers, certain that they had no metal objects on their person, may have wondered why the security arch beeped as they passed through. The answer is simple: to ensure that nobody can be sure of avoiding a body search, the arch sounds randomly even when it has not detected any suspicious objects. The steady rise in terrorist attacks on commercial aviation since the first such incidents occurred in the 1970s has spawned a vast security industry. And many of the travel conveni­ences that technological advances had provided have been effectively nullified by the resulting security measures.

Having served a snack and collected the debris 15 minutes later, the flight attendants patrol the aisles with drinks once again. Some passengers are showing signs of the long journey now: creased faces, mussed-up hair, reddened eyes. After consuming their snack, two passengers seated side by side have pulled their blankets back over their heads. The flight attendants, by contrast, look as fresh as they did on take-off. As they’ve been taught by a maître de cabine and former hairdresser who gives personal grooming and styling courses, they are a one-woman or one-man show for their passengers, who will still cast a critical eye over them even after a long flight. “If you’re exhausted, it’s not the passenger’s concern,” he points out, “and they don’t want to see it or feel it.”

For female flight attendants, “Swiss’s” regulations covering the “well-groomed appearance” required call for a light application of make-up (desired), lipstick (required) and tights even in summer. There is no place on board for black or garish nail polish, tongue piercings, diamond tooth implants, leather wrist bands, good-luck bracelets or chewing gum. Any tattoos must be fully covered by the uniform, too: the use of a plaster or make-up for this purpose is not allowed.

The ten flight attendants on duty today have overcome tough competition. In 2008, some 2,000 women and men applied to become trainee “Swiss” flight attendants, of whom only 600 were accepted. It’s still clearly many ­people’s dream, even though the starting basic salary of 3,340 francs is modest, and some of the attractively long layovers of the past have fallen victim to today’s non-stop flights and denser operating schedules. On the short-haul network, in fact, the most exotic thing a flight attendant will often see nowadays is the local cabin cleaning team.

Claudine von Gunten is a teacher by training. When she applied to Swissair nearly 30 years ago, she intended to stay for just four years, long enough to see every destination. But she soon caught the travel bug and adopted the special lifestyle that goes with it: irregular working hours and being constantly on the go. Her job is her life. And, she says, she knows many long-serving flight attendants who feel the same way. On those occasions when they arrive back from a rotation too late to make it home, some even opt to spend the night in the basement of the Operations Center, where there are eight rooms, each equipped with a narrow bed, night table and reading lamp. The rooms are available for single occupancy only.

The young man in the hooded jacket in 31 K gets his mineral water refilled. The flight attendant smiles at him: eye contact strengthens their temporary bond. He would probably find it hard to imagine how loud this young woman could be if an emergency compelled her to shout one of the various commands that she knows by heart.

That particular skill is acquired in Hall BU13 of “Swiss’s” training facility, which is home to two wingless fuselages – one an Embraer 170 and the other an Airbus A 340 – with emergency slides hanging like tongues from their doors. This is where emergency drills are drummed in during ­cabin crew members’ three-month basic training and ­annual refresher courses. The attendees wear grey overalls and blue socks to minimise the risk of injury. Anyone who clings to the rubber side of the slide or hits it at a less-than-optimum angle will suffer grazes to their arms; and emergency slide training has occasionally caused muscle strains, and even broken legs. The A 340 fuselage is an exact replica of the real thing: only the cockpit instruments are missing. The success of any cabin evacuation depends directly on how well trained the crew is. So crew members practise opening the doors in combination with the appropriate verbal commands, such as the one for ditching: “Emergency! Open seat belt! Put life jacket on! Evacuate! ” The command must be audible over the sound of the aircraft and any screaming passengers, so learning to shout is a vital element in cabin crew training.

One flight attendant is pressed to the door as her colleagues play the part of panic-stricken passengers pushing against her. The crew will remain aboard until they’ve got all the passengers out. And, just as a sea captain is the last to abandon ship, the commander is the last person to leave the aircraft. If there’s no other way, he’ll abseil through the cockpit window: the requisite rope is included in the cockpit equipment.

Firefighting is another key training component for the flight attendants. “Swiss’s” Zurich aviation training centre is the only one in Europe where drills are conducted using real fire. Genuine items of cabin equipment such as a galley, seats and overhead bins are set up inside a large glass container. At the press of a button, small fires can be started: an open fire between seat rows, smoke from the lavatory, flames from a water heater or an oven. The flight attendants tackle them all vigorously with fire extinguishers, axes and blankets.

Their determination would astound the know-all in 29 E who eagerly explained earlier why Economy Class was nicknamed “wood class” in German, and who books his preferred seat so he can look a pretty flight attendant right in the face. Curiosity prompts him to turn around when the redhead back in 32 K emits a loud sob. A flight attendant hurries over. “It’s nothing,” says the woman, waving her away. “It’s this film: it’s so… so…” No emergency: just a moving story. In fact, a headache tablet is the only thing a flight attendant has had to fetch from the galley’s first-aid kit so far today.

Flights can be more eventful. Cabin crew members had to administer first aid some 700 times last year. Heart and ­circulatory problems are the commonest: the thin cabin air can be tough on the body. Thromboses are rarely a problem in flight: if they do occur, it’s usually only several days later. Each of the three galleys is equipped with a first-aid kit containing bandages and various medications: headache tablets, throat lozenges, eye drops and nicotine tablets for smokers experiencing withdrawal discomfort. For more ­serious cases, a doctor’s bag is also carried, stocked with the essentials a physician would need, from adrenalin ampoules to a urinary catheter and an infusion set.

Flight attendants are not authorised to give injections, ­perform infusions or administer prescription drugs, so a number of the contents of the ­doctor’s bag are not intended for their use. Two exceptions to this are the defibrillator, deployed in the event of heart failure, and the masks for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: cabin crew training includes familiarisation with both. And, since they may have to act as a midwife if necessary, flight attendants are also acquainted with the use of an umbilical cord clamp. If a medical emergency does occur on board, the cabin crew will assess the situation and, if they consider it necessary, will appeal for a medically trained passenger to come forward.

Occasionally, a severely ill passenger may well be making their final journey, back to their home country. “In cases like that, we want above all to ensure that they arrive,” says Jutta Inhelder, who once experienced the death of a passenger during a flight – a quiet elderly man who suffered a heart attack while his wife was sleeping next to him. It was another passenger who noticed that he had a strange look about him and was no longer breathing. It was a shock for his wife, of course. She showed little emotion, and was clearly finding it hard to take the whole thing in. The crew left the man in his seat, covered with a blanket, for the rest of the flight.

Seated in 43 G is a retired flight attendant who is travelling to New York for a two-day break. She does this at least twice a year: she’s still a passionate flyer. She folds out her tray table and deftly fills in the green immigration form for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which asks travellers questions such as: “Are you a drug abuser or addict?” and “Have you ever been or are you now involved in espi­onage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide?” Has any of the more than 50 million travellers who visit the USA each ­ year ever answered “Yes” to any of these questions? The form itself warns against doing so: “If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of the above, please contact the American Embassy BEFORE you travel to the U.S. since you may be refused admission into the United States.” With barely an hour to go before landing, it may be a little late to call the embassy now…

Text by Lukas Egli, Anja Jardine, Mikael Krogerus, Benno Maggi, Gudrun Sachse, Reto U. Schneider and Daniel Weber.

Forward to part 5: Big Apple ahead


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