The jumpseat conversation: what you actually talk about with the pilots at 3am over the Atlantic
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#1 Non crew ask me this constantly, so let me answer it here and see if everyone's version is the same. The long haul flight deck visit in the quiet hours (with the door procedures followed, obviously, before anyone comments) is one of the strange pleasures of the job. So what do you talk about?
From nine years of it:
Mortgages. Pilots talk about mortgages more than any group of people I have met. Rates, remortgaging, the buy to let they should not have bought. I know more about the UK property market from the flight deck than from anywhere else.
Other airlines. Who is hiring, who is not, whose roster is worse, whose pension is better. The pilot version of this forum, live.
Food. What they were given versus what we were given. Whether the crew meal is worse in the front. It is not. They complain anyway.
The weather ahead. This is the actually useful part. A good captain will show you the radar and explain what the next two hours look like, and that changes how you plan the service.
Their kids. Long haul pilots and long haul crew have the same guilt and the same photos on their phones.
Nothing. Some of the best flight deck visits are the ones where the first officer is doing a crossword and the captain is looking at the stars and nobody says anything for ten minutes and you drink your tea. At 3am over Greenland that is a kind of peace.
What I have never heard discussed on a flight deck: the actual flying. It is done, it is normal, it is not interesting to them. Which is reassuring.
Your version?
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#2 US version is identical with one addition: the union. Every visit includes at least five minutes on the contract, the next contract, or the contract the other airline got. Mortgages second.
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#3 The crossword silence over Greenland is exactly it. Fourteen years and the best flight deck visits have been the quiet ones. And you are right that they never discuss the flying. I once asked a captain if the turbulence over the Bay of Bengal worried him and he looked at me like I had asked whether stairs worried him.
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#4 German flight decks add a category: the correct way to do something that is already being done correctly. It is affectionate. Mostly.
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#5 The radar explanation is the part I always ask for. Once a captain showed me the line of storms across the ITCZ and said 'your bar service has forty minutes' and he was right to the minute.
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#6 SFO to Asia, and our 3am is over the Pacific with nothing below for hours. The conversation on those is about food, always food. Eleven hours in and everyone is planning what they will eat in Tokyo.
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#7 In training, and 'they never discuss the flying' is the most reassuring sentence I have read this month.