Pilot Cat in the cockpit at sunset
In the air Left seat / 11,402 hours

Pilot Cat

Four hundred people are sitting behind a locked door and not one of them knows my name. They only need to know that the wing is still there and that I sound bored on the radio.

Altitude
37,000 ft
Heading
274
Souls on board
401
Contract
soon
Seatbelt sign stays on /Nobody claps for a quiet landing / The coffee is not for you /We are number four for departure / Light chop, nothing to worry about / Seatbelt sign stays on /Nobody claps for a quiet landing / The coffee is not for you /We are number four for departure / Light chop, nothing to worry about /
Tonight

The wing is still there

LHR to JFK
In cruise
Ground speed
488 kt
Outside air
-54 C
Fuel remaining
31.4 t
On time
+00:06
Pushback 21:14Gate 05:52

Everything on this page is doing exactly what it did an hour ago. That is the entire product. When it stops being boring up here, it has already gone wrong somewhere else.

The job

Four things nobody sees

Chapter I

The quiet landing

A cabin only claps for the bad ones. The good landings feel like nothing, like the runway came up and agreed with you, and everybody keeps scrolling.

Chapter II

Standing at the door

Every one of them looks at me for about a second on the way past. They are not checking my stripes. They are checking whether I look like someone who slept.

Chapter III

Three in the morning

From here every road is one clean orange line and everyone on it is certain about where they are going. It looks like a problem somebody already finished.

Chapter IV

The bored voice

The voice is a decision, not a mood. Four hundred people are listening to how the sentence ends, so the sentence ends the same way every single time.

The gallery

Three frames from the roster

Drag sideways

Pilot Cat at the controls
Flight deck

Before descent

Pilot Cat looking at city lights
0347

Somewhere over the coast

Pilot Cat in the cabin
Boarding

Door two left