Article supplied by AOPA. I knew the furnace in my condo was going to fail. One day, out of the blue, it just sounded different. It wasn’t alarming, or squeaky, or even particularly noisy. Just different. Naturally, the landlord thought I’d lost my mind. He couldn’t hear anything “wrong.”
But I knew something was wrong. In four-and-a-half decades of flying airplanes, I’ve learned to listen to machines when they talk, and the furnace was telling me that something had changed deep in its mechanical innards.
While all machines “talk,” I’ve found that airplanes are particularly good communicators, especially when they aren’t feeling well. And, like their human pilots, airplanes can communicate verbally, nonverbally, or by written communication.
Starting with verbal communication, airplanes speak in the sounds they make. Sometimes it’s a change in pitch or volume of a noise they’ve always made. Sometimes it’s a new noise. Or sometimes an old noise goes away. The wise pilot listens to the airplane.
But if you don’t listen, the next thing the airplane will do is reach out and shake you to get your attention. Nonverbal airplane communication includes new vibrations, changes in baseline vibrations, or shifts in the tactile response of the controls. Be alert for those, too.
If that still fails to get your attention, an airplane will often give up direct communication and just leave you a note. It might be in the form of exhaust streaks on the cowl, small puddles of fluid on the tarmac, or breadcrumbs of gunk in the fuel sump.
And today, many airplanes have another way of talking to us: engine monitors and engine indicating systems. They can reveal changes in temperatures, pressures, fuel flow, electrical output, and other parameters—sometimes before there are obvious sounds, vibrations, or visible clues. Knowing what “normal” looks like on these displays, and paying attention when something changes, can help demystify what the airplane is trying to tell you.
Of course, listening is only half of communication. For true communication, you also need to know the speaker’s language. If someone comes up to you on the street and starts babbling away in a language you’ve never heard before, you have no idea if they are asking you for directions, or if they’re trying to alert you that your fly is open.
As a new pilot, you learn to speak Airplane by diligently studying systems. The better you understand your systems, the quicker you pick up the language and can interpret what the airplane is telling you.
And what happened with the furnace? I could hear it talking… well, whispering… but while I’m fluent in Airplane, and can get by okay in Car, I don’t speak Furnace at all. We couldn’t communicate because I didn’t understand what it was saying.
Two months later, the poor thing up and died.
