Living in London

I flew a 727 today. We took off from Heathrow in the early afternoon and flew a nice gentle circuit around London before I brought her down in a rather “bouncy” landing dead centre on the runway.

The 727 is anything but nimble, and a humble servant to Newton’s first law. At about 86 tonnes, whatever direction she is headed in is the direction she's going, unless you apply continuous force to change her mind.

Okay, so I didn’t really leave the ground — but from inside the cockpit you would never know it. I spent about an hour and a half in a full-fledged flight simulator. This thing sat 10 feet off the ground on a half-dozen hydraulic pistons and was able to emulate the the full motion of the plane, complete with turbulence and a heck of a rough landing. It was quite an adrenalin rush.

I love to understand how things work, and spending more than an hour flying in the cockpit of a large aircraft satisfied a lifelong curiosity of what it is really like to fly a commercial aircraft. Let me just say that flying in three dimensions is much harder than driving in two.