Pro Pilot: Far from routine

Flying overseas can present piloting challenges, such as when landing at the two largest cities in India: Mumbai and New Delhi. Smoke floats up from the farm fields below, where farmers practice stubble burning—the deliberate burning of the straw stubble that remains after wheat or other grains have been harvested. Add pollution from millions of cars and forward visibility can be seriously reduced. Fortunately, FedEx pilots who fly McDonnell Douglas MD–11 jets into those cities rely on a head-up display with FLIR, a forward-looking infrared camera system that can penetrate the smoke.

In some parts of the world, radar coverage is nonexistent—for navigation, traffic and terrain avoidance, or weather. Flying into Manaus, Brazil, one of the most remote spots in the Amazon rainforest, FedEx pilots regularly dodge huge tropical storms using only their eyes and onboard radar.

This is old-school flying. Pilots make position reports to air traffic control and give estimates of their time to the next reporting point, sometimes broadcasting “in the blind”—not knowing who may be receiving it. When landing, they always fly a complete nonradar approach as there’s no guidance from ATC below.

But, for all these piloting challenges, the greatest challenge in developing countries remains the language barrier. Although English is the language of aviation, controllers in some nations may still be difficult to understand.

“When the guys in Delhi are really working the traffic, their chatter can get pretty swift, and with their accents it’s tough to understand them,” one FedEx pilot said. “In the U.S. we have great controllers with great radar, who speak good English. Overseas, it’s even more important to do your homework, be prepared and anticipate what the controllers may ask of you. You can’t get behind; you’re moving so fast. So, the more you know, the more you’ll keep out of trouble.

“One good thing about the controllers in remote spots, they’re pretty much, ‘Yes sir, whatever you want.’ You tell them what you’re doing and they follow along,” he said. Since those controllers don’t actually have the ability to guide aircraft movements, they leave the flying to the pilots. The only time a controller might speak up is if he hears an obvious traffic conflict developing.

Then, there are the little differences—the things that remind a pilot he’s not in Memphis anymore. “When arriving in Mumbai, you have to stop and sign the big book—a large, ancient book of yellowing pages where all arriving pilots sign in,” the pilot said. It’s part of the Indian bureaucratic obsession with forms, stamps, and red tape that are a holdover from the days when the British Empire ruled India.

To deliver your package from here to there, it might travel by jumbo jet across the world, perhaps in an MD–11, Boeing 777, or Boeing 757, but then its last leg of the journey could be aboard an airplane as small as a Cessna 208 Caravan. When your very important package is headed to Saba, the five-square-mile Caribbean island that is the smallest municipality of the Netherlands, pilots must plant their tires on one of the shortest commercial runways in the world. Only 1,312 feet long, flanked by high hills and with cliffs dropping to the ocean at both ends, it’s a landing that will focus a pilot’s attention.

When a delivery must be made to a country embroiled in military conflict, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, FedEx turns to its many military-trained pilots who are experienced in the procedures to approach and depart these dangerous airports. They often make a “corkscrew landing.” Also called a “spiral landing,” the corkscrew maneuver reduces the chance of being hit by antiaircraft fire by starting the landing at a position high above the airport and then descending rapidly in a steeply banked spiral. The aircraft circles down while staying within the boundaries of the airport and its protective shield of artillery. It’s a stomach-churning landing, especially if you’re in the cargo area with no windows.

A similar spiral pattern is flown on takeoff until the jet reaches what is deemed a safe altitude, above the reach of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. These landing and takeoff patterns became standard operating procedures when flying into Baghdad International Airport after a cargo aircraft was struck (but not downed) by a missile in 2003.

If you think FedEx delivers only Christmas presents and volleyballs, you’d be wrong; FedEx cargo jets frequently carry unusual cargo, including live animals, historical artifacts, and fine wine.

FedEx flew its first load of giant pandas on its Panda Express in 2010, when it used a new Boeing 777F to fly two of the rare bears nonstop from Washington, D.C., to Chengdu, China. Since then, more flights have carried pandas between zoos in China and America. Caretakers are granted special flight privileges to accompany the pandas onboard the aircraft.

When the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago was renovated in 2008, FedEx relocated seven whales to a host aquarium, each one in a specially built container. FedEx has also carried exotic animals such as white tigers, rhinoceroses, and sharks. In 2010, FedEx flew 70,000 sea turtle eggs from the Gulf of Mexico to Florida’s Atlantic coast to protect them after an oil spill.

A FedEx pilot recalled one unusual flight: “I flew a walrus out of San Diego. He was a big boy, with the huge tusks. When he shook, he shook the whole airplane. We carried him in a 727, in first class, right behind the cockpit area. We took him from the San Diego Zoo to Ohio, but I don’t remember his final destination. I also flew an MD–11 nearly full of little chicken hatchlings—you could hear them chirping in the cockpit.”

FedEx sometimes transports priceless works of art, such as 127 crates of objects from Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan mountaintop citadel in Peru. The artifacts were collected by archaeologists nearly a century ago and preserved by the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. FedEx flew the objects from Newark, New Jersey, to be exhibited at a new museum in Cusco, Peru.

FedEx aircraft transported 90 tons of Titanic memorabilia, recovered from the bottom of the ocean—including a 3,000-pound chunk of the steel hull—for the traveling “Titanic: The Artifacts Exhibition.”

Perhaps the tastiest load carried by FedEx was 504,000 bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau wine transported from France to Japan in 2004 for the annual uncorking celebration. In that peak year of the Beaujolais craze, the shipment amounted to 630 tons of wine carried on seven jumbo jets.

If you want your piloting to make a difference in the world, FedEx is often called to support humanitarian missions. The record heaviest shipment for a FedEx jet was a charter flown for UNICEF from Paris to Nairobi that carried 218,000 pounds of protein bars to aid the 2011 Somalia famine relief effort.

For pilots who find hauling passengers from Orlando to Newark is just a little too routine, perhaps they should strive to land an international piloting position flying freight.

Dennis K. Johnson is a freelance writer and pilot living in New York.