747 Cockpit

When you’re the captain of a Boeing 747, one of the most exciting places to be is inside the 747 cockpit. The 747 cockpit is a place where dials glow softly and instruments tell you how fast and high you’re flying. Most importantly, controls in the 747 cockpit include an inertial navigation system that tells you where you’re going.  The747 navigation system links to GPS and other signals from the ground—a lot like the kind you might find in your car.

In my first book, “Where Does Daddy Go” Little Fly spends a lot of time in the 747 cockpit. He likes looking at the pilots manipulate the controls inside the cockpit. He discovers that they move levers that do something called “running the flaps”. The flaps, on the front and back of the wings, are used during take-off and landing. They are also used when the plane is flying at lower speeds to give the plane extra “lift” at those times. While Little Fly is in the 747 cockpit, he is astonished to discover that it only takes a small lever to lift the plane’s 18 giant wheels after it takes off.

In “Where Does Daddy Go,” Little Fly goes to Anchorage, Alaska, and to Tokyo, the capital city of Japan. He spends about 28 hours in the cockpit to get there and back, and thinks he also deserves pilot’s wings when he gets back to Morgan and his mom in Boston. But in fact it takes many years of very serious training to fly big planes like a Boeing 747. In my own flying career, I have spent more than 16,000 hours inside the cockpit. And I still learn something new every day.

More places to learn about a 747 cockpit:

Boeing’s 747 family (http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/index.html)

Boeing 747 cockpit lighting (http://meriweather.com/747/over/fdlight.html)

Boeing 747 cockpit picture (http://www.militaryfactory.com/cockpits/747_cockpit.asp)

 

Want to know more about the inside of a 747 cockpit? Get your copy of Where Does Daddy Go now!