Well, on a recent trip between the U.S. and Japan I finally had my opportunity, and I made the most of it. Throwing caution to the wind, I humbly approached the flight attendants and asked if I might take pictures of the upper deck. Once there, the flight attendant servicing the upper deck asked if I would like to take pictures of the cockpit and talk with the flight crew.
Boy, would I ever! After entering the cockpit and after my brain started working again (perhaps a minute or eternity after my jaw went thunk on the floor), I started taking pictures of the cockpit. First thing I noticed was how roomy the 747-400 cockpit is. Without the flight engineer position that earlier 747's had, the 747-400 cockpit could easily sit 4 people (indeed, it does have four chairs; two at the flight controls and two just behind those). At one point, we had 6 people in the cockpit: two, two-man flight crews (normal plus relief? it was a 13 hour flight), one maintenance worker (to quote the pilot as he pointed at his displays, "My maps keep disappearing." :o ), and myself.
The other thing I noticed was that I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the flight controls I recognized. Of course, there were about a million or so switches and buttons whose function I could only guess about, but there was a lot of the controls I recognized from Flight Simulator (NO WAY was I going to bring this up though; I just humbly said I was an aviation enthusiast and left it at that; no sense risking coming of as a know-it-all jacka**). If you look at the pictures I have attached, you can see how favorably the FS cockpit compares with the real thing.
Fortunately, I did manage to get a few shots of the cockpit that actually came out. Unfortunately, my flash was being damnably uncooperative that day, so I didn't get as many good photos as I had hoped. Of all the shots the co-pilot took of me while I was sitting in his seat, only one was salvagable to decent degree. All that being said, here are three shots of the 747-400 cockpit:
Looking straight ahead.
From the co-pilot's station.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your guest co-pilot speaking . . . hey, what's this button do?"
From the co-pilot's station.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your guest co-pilot speaking . . . hey, what's this button do?"
Oh, I should mention before anyone has a heart attack, we were on the ground at the time of these photos. None of the pictures from when they let me do barrel rolls came out. ;)
Also on the floor though...
:D
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