![]() ![]() A manual landing could be done, but there would be an immense amount of pressure … It's more a Hollywood script than a possibility. ![]() But you'd need to be able to do an automatic landing, and not every airport can do that. Given enough time, and depending on how technically minded you were – say if you're an iPhone user and you could jump across to a Samsung – it's possible. The first thing you would need to do is work out how to use the radios. But every take-off is done manually, there's no such thing as an auto take-off. That's dependent upon the airline, the airport and the regulator. We do practise doing automatic landings, so when the weather is bad we do practise it. Autopilot can do something like fly straight and level a lot better than a human can, because it's not prone to fatigue, it's a lot quicker at doing calculations, but it's all what we tell it to do. You know with cruise control in a car, you'd always have your foot ready on the brake just in case? That's what we're doing. ![]() When you're doing it every day it becomes second nature.Īutopilot is a great tool, but it's always under our control, we're always telling it what to do. It's a beautiful machine.ĭo you really know what every button in the cockpit does?Ībsolutely! They're all grouped into similar areas – all the electrics are in one area, all the fuel stuff is in one area… When you do your training you do several weeks of computer-based modules to learn about all the buttons, and then there's another month and a half of training in the simulator before you even get to the aeroplane. It's super high-tech and modern, the cockpit looks really space-aged. My monthly roster is a mix of training new pilots, and I get a couple of flights a month to some of the more desirable destinations: Hawaii, Bali, Singapore, Bangkok, Phuket, Japan.Įvery pilot's favourite aeroplane is the one they're flying at the moment, but the Dreamliner is fantastic. You're only there for enough time to get jet-lagged and then come home. Certainly going to Hawaii in the depths of a Melbourne winter is fantastic, but we fly all night, you get there, you sleep for a little bit, you get up, go out for dinner, try to go to the beach, sleep and fly back. People probably think it's a lot more glamorous than it is. What do you think would surprise people about your job? I've since flown several different aircraft, and at the moment I'm training the next generation of pilots on the Dreamliner. Then it was another several years before I got into an airline, when I joined Jetstar in 2009. It was a solid 12 months of study to get a commercial license. How much training did you have to go through? From that day on I always wanted to be a pilot. Just the sense of adventure, that you could go anywhere in the world on these things. I remember going out to Tullamarine airport as a kid, when they had a viewing platform there, and I was just gobsmacked at the planes. That and, how hard is it to land one of these things? And when is it time for passengers to start panicking? Recently, I had the chance to ask these very questions of Brett Manders, a former naval officer turned commercial pilot for Jetstar, who flies Boeing 787 Dreamliners across the world. "Do you really know what all those buttons do?"Ĭall me simple, but that's the question I've always wanted to ask an airline pilot. ![]()
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