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The bulk of our work is handled while we’re on the ground before the flight, and then from departure to top of climb is what we call it, which is when you reach your cruising altitude, that’s when the pilots are the most busy.
There’s changing in aircraft configurations, obviously as we accelerate, we have to retract the flaps, and typically air traffic control is a lot busier when we’re in lower altitudes with other aircraft. So there’s lots of, you know, turning back and forth and potential interim level off. So, it is typically the busiest stage, but then once you’re in cruise flight, you know, the FAA actually requires that the autopilot be on once you’re above 29,000 feet.
Yeah, you become basically a flight computer monitor at that stage. So it’s our job to, of course, always be attentive to everything that’s going on. And, you know, sometimes there are distractions in the flight deck, but that’s why there’s more than one pilot. But truly it’s, you know, we’re up there to make sure that everything is going as it should be going.
As far as communication goes, we’re continuously changing the air traffic controller that we’re talking to as we traverse various sectors. And then there’s, you know, a navigation component where you want to make sure that you’re obviously on the correct course as you go. And that job is a little bit more tricky when you’re going across the ocean as it would be across, like, the continental US because of lack of standard navigation, like GPS, when you’re there.
But otherwise, it really is just kind of a, what we call the pilot monitoring stage of flight. And then once you reach the top of descent, which is when we start our decent for the destination, things get busy again. We have lengthy briefings where, as a crew, we talk through everything that we’re going to do through the arrival.
We talk about the, you know, the procedures, the approach plate, what the weather looks like, any challenges that we might face, any, you know, threats to safety and how we’re going to mitigate those threats. And that’s when it becomes a little bit more manual.