Cockpit Confidential Read Online Free PDF

passengers, already hovering at a billion, is anticipated to double by 2025, at which point greenhouse gases from planes would rise to as much as five times current levels. If indeed we begin reducing the carbon output from other sources, as we keep promising to, the output from aviation will rise drastically as a percentage of the whole.
    The reason for all of this growth is that hopping on a plane is relatively cheap and easy. That may change. Air travel will always be an economic necessity, but the kinds of flying we’ve become used to might not always be possible should petroleum prices climb drastically, as many predict they will. We’ll still have airplanes, but the binge flyers will be long gone in the face of higher fares.
    Several carriers are experimenting with biofuel alternatives to jet fuel. Air Canada, Qantas, United, and All Nippon Airways are among those that have operated revenue flights powered completely or partly by biofuel. In the meantime, many airlines allow passengers to purchase inexpensive carbon offsets when booking online. Or, for a small fee, there are third-party organizations that will offset the estimated CO 2 of your journey, investing the money in sustainable energy projects.
    Now forget emissions for a minute and let’s talk about other kinds of pollution:
    One thing that always shocks me is the amount of material waste—namely plastics, paper, Styrofoam, and aluminum—thrown away by airlines and their customers. Take the number of trays, cups, soda cans, snack wrappers, and discarded reading material produced during the average flight, and multiply it by the forty thousand or so daily commercial departures around the world.
    Simple measures would go a long way toward reducing and reusing. For instance, why not offer passengers the option of receiving a cup with their beverage? My can of soft drink or juice always comes with a cup, dropped onto my tray before I have a chance to say no, even though it would be perfectly acceptable to drink from the container. And the packaging of airline food (what still exists of it) is nothing if not extravagantly wasteful. The typical inflight meal or snack consists of more petroleum-derived plastic than actual food.
    Not all airlines ignore the waste problem. Virgin Atlantic’s onboard recycling program asks passengers to hand in glass bottles and cans and leave newspapers on their seats to enable recycling. At American Airlines, cans are recycled, with the money going to charity, and trash from domestic flights is separated and recycled after landing. Delta recycles all aluminum, plastic, and paper products from flights into its Atlanta megahub, with proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity. But while a few carriers are stepping forward, the industry-wide effort has, for the most part, been pretty halfhearted.
    The Airplane in Art, Music, and Film
    Air travel is such a visual thing. Take a look sometime at the famous photograph of the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903. The image, captured by bystander John T. Daniels and since reproduced millions of times, is about the most beautiful photograph in all of twentieth-century iconography. Daniels had been put in charge of a cloth-draped 5 x 7 glass plate camera stuck into Outer Banks sand by Orville Wright. He was instructed to squeeze the shutter bulb if “anything interesting” happened. The camera was aimed at the space of sky—if a dozen feet of altitude can be called such—where, if things went right, the Wrights’ plane, the Flyer , would emerge in its first moments aloft.
    Things did go right. The contraption rose into view, and Daniels squeezed the bulb. We see Orville, visible as a black slab, more at the mercy of the plane than controlling it. Beneath him, Wilbur keeps pace, as if to capture or tame the strange machine should it decide to flail or aim for the ground. You cannot see their faces; much of the photo’s beauty lies in not needing to.