Essays & Stories - AskThePilot.com

Patrick Smith's Essays & Stories section on AskThePilot.com represents one of the more sustained bodies of first-person aviation narrative produced by an actively flying commercial pilot in the internet era. Smith, a First Officer on Boeing 757 and 767 operations for a major U.S. carrier, has maintained the site since its origins as a Salon.com column around 2002, ultimately expanding it into a catalog of more than 100 entries spanning safety analysis, cultural observation, and memoir. The essays listed — ranging from transatlantic psychological reflections in "En Route Angst" to airport infrastructure critiques in the Dakar piece to post-September 11 security commentary — collectively constitute an ongoing, informal record of commercial airline operations as experienced from the flight deck across roughly two and a half decades of profound industry change.

For professional and corporate pilots, the section carries a particular resonance that purely technical or regulatory content cannot replicate. Pieces like "En Route Angst," which addresses whether pilots think about crashing during flight, approach subjects that remain largely unspoken within crew culture but are nonetheless present in any honest accounting of the job. Smith's willingness to address cognitive and emotional dimensions of airline flying — written from inside an active line career rather than from retirement — fills a gap that union publications, training syllabi, and professional journals consistently leave open. Similarly, the Mojave "airport graveyard" essay engages with fleet retirement cycles and the industrial metabolism of commercial aviation in ways that carry direct relevance for operators and flight departments tracking aircraft valuations and type transitions.

The international dispatch essays — Mumbai, Dakar, Hispaniola — document the operational realities of flying into airports and regions that receive scant attention in standard route planning resources. Smith's Dakar piece, which identifies the airport as among the worst in his experience, reflects a category of professional knowledge that accumulates through line flying but rarely gets written down: the texture of infrastructure quality, ground handling reliability, and environmental conditions at secondary international ports. For Part 135 and business aviation operators dispatching to non-hub international destinations, this kind of qualitative field reporting, even when framed as literary travel writing, carries informational weight that supplements official ICAO documentation and NOTAM systems.

The broader significance of the Essays & Stories archive lies in its function as a longitudinal document of commercial aviation's cultural and operational evolution from the post-deregulation era through the post-pandemic recovery. Smith's references to smoky 707s at Revere Beach, to the immediate aftermath of September 11, to the emergence of ultra-long-haul routes and cargo operations, trace a continuous thread from the jet age's mature phase into the present restructuring of airline networks, labor markets, and aircraft generations. His 2013 book *Cockpit Confidential* reached the New York Times bestseller list, suggesting that demand for literate, experience-grounded aviation writing extends well beyond the professional pilot community into the traveling public — a constituency whose perceptions of flight, safety, and pilot competence directly shape the political and regulatory environment in which all aviation professionals operate.