Our cruising altitude will be 3,000 feet. That’s not very high for an aircraft that usually gets up to ten times that, but we are just going to circle the airport and come back down to land. The cockpit of a 747-400 is on the upper deck: we’re nearly nine metres off the ground. Mark Vanhoenacker, the British Airways pilot who is sitting to my right in the first officer’s seat, while I sit on his left in the captain’s chair, tells me that we’ll be light today, too. “We’re going to have a take-off weight of 250 tonnes,” he says in his calm American voice. “If you were taking off from Singapore, you’d have a weight of 390 or even 395 tonnes.” Do the maths and you’ll see just how much fuel it takes to get a fully loaded 747 from Asia to Heathrow, a distance of just under 7,000 miles.
Vanhoenacker guides me through the checklist. This crucial aspect of aviation safety has become a model in other fields, most noticeably medicine; it’s a call-and-response exercise in which every aspect of the plane’s readiness to fly, or land, or do almost anything else, is verified by both the pilot flying the plane and the pilot monitoring the flight. As Vanhoenacker puts it in his book, Skyfaring: “The division… can be likened to that on an American-style road trip with someone you get on well with. Only one of you drives. The other checks and gives directions, changes the music or temperature, passes snacks and drinks, searches in a guidebook or on a smartphone for the best diner in the town ahead, calls the motel to see if they still have a room.”
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