HOW DO PILOTS KNOW WHERE THE AIRPORT IS?

Contributor | I’m going to reveal one of the biggest and best-kept secrets of the aviation world.

If you look into the cockpit of any airliner, you will be amazed by the plethora of knobs, switches, and push buttons. Between the right and left side, totaled, are more than 100 of these. And they all work! There are switches to control the cabin lighting, Navigation lights, inter-connector switches – just think of anything on the airplane, there is probably a switch or button or knob to control it.

In between the Captain’s and First Officer’s seat are quite a few levers and pull knobs, mostly dealing with the airplane’s engines.

And in front of each seat are several larger glass screens, one of which displays the weather radar -always good to avoid big thunderstorms!

But two of those screens, one in front of each pilot, is the big, humongous secret navigation system!

What no one has admitted, until now, is that the main screen for each pilot is really not a screen at all!

It is really a window to allow the pilots to see: Homing Pigeons!

Each airport worth mentioning houses large flocks of Homing Pigeons. And daily, these are shipped out to all other airports, so that each departing aircraft has a pair of Homing Pigeons to show them the way to their destination airport!

So besides monitoring all those other knobs and switches (even one to let the Flight Attendants know the Captain needs fresh coffee!!), which display such mundane things, like airspeed, compass heading, turn and bank instruments, altimeters, fuel gages, gyro-horizons, radios, both pilots keep a constant view of the homing pigeon in front of them.

If the pigeons lean left, the pilots steer a bit more to the left. And the opposite should the pigeon lean right.

(Funny story here – one of the pigeon breeders taught his pigeons to be politically liberal or conservative. And he shipped some of the political pigeons to far-off airports. So when the pigeons would be acting as Flight Directors, of course the Liberal Pigeon could not turn right, and the Conservative Pigeon could not ever turn Left. Quite the old fur ball in the sky’s that day, to be sure!)

So that is the gigantic, humongous, Top-Secret means of airplanes navigating from one airport to another! Please don’t tell everyone, though, or the pilots will lose a great deal of self-confidence. Then they will have to go back to the Air Force to become trash haulers again while they give their egos a big boost.