What are some things that airline pilots won’t tell you?

Here are a few things pilots won’t tell you:

-pilots drink the coffee. The potable water the aircraft is serviced with is absolutely disgusting. Chemicals are inserted into the water tanks to prevent bad things from growing, but the bad taste of the coffee isn’t the coffee-its the chemicals…
-pilots don’t know where they are most of the time… (kidding for the most part) In all actuality there are much more sophisticated avionics units on most small general aviation aircraft. Those units display many aspects of geographic awareness where most of ours simply display the route that they programmed in the flight management computer before departure. They can tell you how far away They are from the next navigation facility and where They are in general terms, but aside from that and what they can see out the window, They typically only have a general idea of where they are when at cruise altitude. Of course They all carry maps, but not too many of us will open the map and follow our progress on a 3 hour flight. (That all changes as They begin descending toward the airport. Situational Awareness is extremely important then.)
-They forget about the fasten seatbelt sign all the time. When you look up at the sign (and disregard it typically) and it has been illuminated for the last 45 minutes in smooth air, They simply forgot. Lots of guys will leave it on all the time. However, sometimes They do have reports of choppy air ahead and will leave it on until They either experience it or take a wild guess that the air ahead will be smooth.
Some of us carry guns. This is certainly public knowledge, but Federal Flight Deck Officers can carry a firearm in the cockpit. Lots of protocol exists to ensure that the training, concealment, and utilization is standardized.
The vast majority of what the airlines and system term “ATC delays” are actually from a pretty simple supply-and-demand situation. There’s too many airplanes (demand) trying to land in a limited number of arrival slots (supply) at a given airport over a given time period.
Airports have what are known as “arrival rates”. A standard, one-runway airport with well-designed taxiways (including “high speed” taxiways) can safely handle, in good weather, around 60 operations an hour- one per minute.

This can be 60 landings in an hour, or 60 takeoffs in an hour, or 30 of each, or whatever combination you want to come up with, but that’s about the limit.
(This is a bit of an oversimplification- with really good design, you can usually depart faster than arrive, but bear with me for now.)
So say you’ve got this airport, and say it’s got more than enough gates for all the airlines and planes that want to use it. The only limiting factor is that 60/hour number, right?
Yeah- until crappy weather shows up. Now they can only land 30 planes per hour.
Unfortunately, the ATC system- run by the FAA- does not regulate how many flights can be scheduled into an airport. (That’s what deregulation gave us.) So the airlines that operate in there all schedule as many as they think they can get passengers for.

So during this hour, the airlines have scheduled 60 arrivals, but only 30 planes can land because it’s a cloudy, rainy day.
What happens to the other 30 flights? They get delayed.
And who delays them? ATC.
And what do the airlines call these delays? “Supply and demand delays”? “Weather delays?” Nope.
“ATC delays.”
But the reality is that they’re overscheduling delays. If the airlines and/or the airports would limit the number of flights to the BAD weather limits, the number of delays in the system would be massively shrunk.

A couple things I haven’t seen listed yet:

1. To follow up on what Mark Eastwood said, in the unlikely event of a sudden change in cabin pressure, at cruising altitude, you have about 30 seconds to figure out that oxygen mask before you black out. Of course, it’s the cabin crew who discuss oxygen masks, but they won’t tell you either, since some large percentage of passengers would panic.
2. Pilots won’t tell you how old the plane you’re on is, in general. I did have one wag on Air France CityJet joke, as we approached the English Channel, that we should review the safety card, since the Avro RJ85 we were in was an old aircraft.

   But typically, airlines take delivery of a particular type of plane over a number of years, buying used ones if they want to save money, so no one from the airline would have told you if you were aboard a 31-year-old Northwest DC-10 at the end of 2006, or a 33-year-old Aloha 737-200 at the end of 2007.
   Similarly no one from American Airlines will tell you that their MD-82 N403A is 28.3 years old while their MD-83 N9681B is only 14.4 years old. Nor is anyone from Southwest likely to tell you whether your flight is aboard a 737-800 less than a year old like N8620H, or a 29-year-old 737-300 like N694SW.