Eight Hours Bottle To Throttle

(More boring aviation stuff…indulge me here please)

When driving an automobile, you put your foot on the “gas” pedal or the “accelerator” to make forward progress. The engine revs according to the whim of your foot.

In an airplane they call the accelerator “doohickey” the “throttle” and it is mounted on the instrument panel on single engine airplanes and usually located between the seats on an upper or lower console in multi-engine aircraft.

You pull it out to go up and you push it in to go down. My right hand hasn’t had the pleasure of operating more than one throttle at a time thus far in my truncated flying career.

It is sort of a weird experience when you first start learning to fly an airplane because you sit really low in the seat with your legs extended outward and your feet resting on the left and right rudder pedals. The steering wheel, which you hold in your hands, has no effect on your direction of travel when the plane is rolling down the runway—you use the rudder pedals to turn so you actually steer with your feet for taxi, takeoff, and landing.

The plane’s steering wheel (or stick) controls surfaces on the wings called ailerons that cause the airplane to bank left or right into a turn in the air. The pedals that your have under your feet turn the rudder to “coordinate” the turn, making the airplane follow a smooth curve rather than slipping through the turn.

To complicate matters further, while taxiing or landing, you must engage the wheel brakes by pressing on brake pedals mounted on top of the rudder pedals. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you can actually steer the airplane by applying differential braking i.e. stopping the left wheel while letting the right wheel freely rotate. An adept pilot can make an airplane virtually pivot in place over a spot on the runway.

Having said all of that, I wonder what the hell this guy was thinking when he climbed into the cockpit of a Boeing 747 yesterday?

The guy was going to haul a load of human freight in one of the largest passenger airplanes in the world with a snoot full of liquor?

Pilots have a saying…”eight hours bottle to throttle.” I always used to go at least 24 hours myself. Flying is a pleasure, but it is also a miracle—every damn time you land a group of 200,000 parts that just spent two hours flying in formation and decided to all stay together this trip—you thank God or Jesus or Aunt Jemima or whoever that your ass has gotten back onto the ground in one undamaged piece.

I like my Jack Daniels, but there is no way in hell that I would get near the front three seats of an airplane (unless it was the first class seating section) having smelled alcohol in the past day.

I hope they put this guy under the jail…