What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  At the climax of the show I was supposed to be dragged into the Wicker Man by vestal virgins in diaphanous drapes. In practice we used anybody from the catering girls to girlfriends, and most of the time they were covered by an old sheet.

  I was lucky to survive intact in Norway. The female stagehands were somewhat robust and took their sacrificial duty rather too seriously. I emerged with bite marks and scratches, which looked like I’d had an argument with a barbed-wire fence.

  Returning home, I used my time to sign up for a Multi Crew course – effectively a bridge into the world of airline flying. I spent two weeks at Heathrow in the classroom and 20 hours in a simulator, learning the basics of flying as part of a team. The flying I had done on the Cessna was terrific experience, but much of it was single pilot. Airliners and a single-pilot mentality don’t mix. I learnt a lot; I liked being part of a team.

  The Cessna now lived in Santa Monica. After the European section of the Brave New World tour had concluded, we’d returned to the States. I had flown it back across the Atlantic, this time via a more northerly route, to start the tour in Toronto. When I returned to California, a local doctor in Santa Monica bought a half share. I reasoned it would be cheaper to keep it there and, anyway, I was busy enough.

  I still had one last solo album to deliver, so I combined a trip to Los Angeles to write with Roy with a mission to sell the last piece of the Cessna. The doctor was keen to overhaul the engines and get a new interior – virtually a new plane – and he wanted an autopilot, so I agreed to pay for one if he bought the aircraft.

  When I arrived back in the UK a friend asked me to sit in on a simulator assessment he was undergoing. I would be the ‘sandbag’ – the dead weight acting as co-pilot and helping him operate the systems on the 737 simulator.

  The guy in the back was the chief pilot of the airline. I was on best behaviour. I flew the flight test profile to give my buddy a rest.

  ‘Where did you learn to fly like that?’ the instructor asked. I explained that I had been flying around the USA, Europe and the Atlantic without an autopilot for a couple of years.

  ‘You’ll be giving me your CV next,’ he joked.

  ‘Funny you should ask . . .’ I pulled out the envelope.

  We chatted a bit, and I was put in his in-tray as ‘potential first officer’.

  I got a part-time job doing sightseeing flights out of High Wycombe and I volunteered for a few charity days. At home one evening at the beginning of June 2000, the phone rang. It was the chief pilot from the simulator.

  ‘What are you doing on Monday?’ he asked. I got the impression from his tone that he was going to tell me. ‘Boeing 757 course. 8 a.m. Monday start. Full-time. Can you do it?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. I can do it.’

  I put the phone down. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do it, but I would worry about that on Monday.

  I duly turned up at British Airways Cranebank Flight Training centre, or Braincrank, as it was not so affectionately known. I was out of my comfort zone, a fish out of water. My life has been a continual succession of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ moments. Deep down, I think I probably enjoy it. You are never so alive as when learning something new and overcoming adversity.

  Up till now I had been in the luxurious world of the voluntary airline pilot or commercial pilot. Now I was in the ‘take no prisoners’ commercial world. As another pilot author has observed, the commercial type rating is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

  My eventual employer would be British World Airlines – one of the UK’s longest-lasting independent airlines. Their job was outsourcing. Other airlines needed spare capacity in the summer, enter BWA. Summers were therefore busy and winters desperate, because aeroplanes sat idle on the ground, but costs didn’t have the decency to follow suit.

  Their idea in acquiring a medium-haul 757 was to break this cycle and achieve year-round demand with an aircraft that could fly the Atlantic just as soon as operate a shuttle service an hour down the road.

  Training pilots to fly their new machine was contracted out to British Airways and, in fact, I was earmarked to fly with British Airways as a co-pilot for 20 ‘sectors’ to accelerate my ‘line’ training.

  ‘Line’ training is supervised flying with real passengers. It happens after ground exams have been passed about aircraft systems and performance, which takes three weeks of hard grind. Next is another 15 sessions in a simulator and a final check.

  Not done yet: a week of security training, emergency equipment training, putting out fires training, jumping down slides, opening doors and, finally, bobbing around in a swimming pool in a life raft.

  The Boeing 757 is a beautiful brute. Beautiful because of its elegant, swan-like nose. It sits high on its landing gear, looking almost like a bird of prey coming in to land. A brute because the benevolent madman who designed it put two engines in with 40,000 pounds of thrust each.

  Think of it as half the power of a jumbo jet strapped on to a quarter of the weight. A lightweight 757 is climbing off the runway with a vertical speed of 60 miles an hour – in excess of 6,000-feet-per-minute ratio of climb.

  My first empty take-off at Shannon Airport was overwhelming. The outside world is so much more real than the simulator. The plane was so light its take-off speed was very slow, and I felt more like I was in a lift than an airliner.

  Base training completed, uniform obtained, hair cut short, and equipped with that most ludicrous item, a pilot’s hat, I showed up for my first day at work with passengers.

  On 28 July 2001 I flew from Heathrow to Frankfurt and back, and then Heathrow to Munich, where I night-stopped. There was only casualty. On only my second landing, at 200 feet going into London, the windscreen was suddenly full of this large white gull, coming directly at me. At the last moment it veered over the windscreen and there was a loud thump as it splattered on top of the cockpit.

  ‘Was that a bird strike?’ I muttered as we approached touchdown.

  ‘Mmm,’ was the response.

  At Munich I waited, in uniform, by the bus stop for the crew bus to take me to the hotel. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted an Iron Maiden fan, and he spotted me. Bedecked from head to foot in badges, cut-off biker denim and Maiden shirt, he made a bee-line for me.

  He stared at me and said, ‘Excuse me . . . but is this the bus stop for Munich?’

  ‘Er, no. Next one up.’

  He turned and walked away. He never knew – nobody knew, except me – that I was an airline pilot. Unbelievable.

  Black September

  Maiden world was in a state of relaxed hiatus. The dust had settled after my rejoining, and my Muhammad Ali ‘We are the greatest’-style wind-ups in the press had, by and large, been grudgingly acknowledged. Nobody likes a clever dick, all of which goes with the territory of being lead singer.

  The crucial statement as far as I was concerned was the one I had made regarding Brave New World. I declared our intention to deliver an album that would set us back on the path to an adventurous future, not a piece of nostalgia or thin pastiche of former glories. There were plenty of cynics who didn’t believe me, and we proved them all wrong.

  The summer and autumn of 2001 saw me hopping from Janick’s house to Adrian’s, and scribbling lyrics and melodies to what would end up being tracks on the new Dance of Death album. My interest in the occult had led to a trip to the ruined fortress of Montségur in France. Climbing to this castle in the clouds was jaw-dropping in itself, but wandering inside its quite small remaining walls led to my imagination running riot. Game of Thrones is nothing compared to the slaughter that took place in Montségur, and the extinction of Catharism that precipitated it.

  While wandering through the countryside, Rennes-le-Château and the Arthurian forest of Brocéliande also got paid a visit. My experience with Chemical Wedding and my love affair with Blake all added resonance to my peripatetic adventures.

  All of this I did in between my flying roster. It
was astonishing to experience what might be termed a ‘proper’ job. Unlike music, airline work had strict rules governing how hard you could work, like the railways. When the flight was done and paperwork completed, the door was closed. People simply went home and relaxed. What a concept. I began to enjoy my new-found sloth. ‘Sorry, I can’t do that; I am on standby’ became my excuse for turning down most things.

  I was released from flying with British Airways after 16 flights, and joined British World Airlines. The headquarters were at Southend, but the aircraft was based at Stansted.

  I started flying their one 757 and, in a small break, Iron Maiden asked me to go to New York to do some press. It was just a couple of days and an interview with MTV in the morning before my flight back to London later in the day. I never made the interview and I never made the flight, because that fateful day was 11 September 2001 – the day the skies stood still.

  I had my 757 technical manual with me, good little student that I was, so as to make use of the long chunks of dead time waiting around. I sat with it on my lap on the roof of my hotel, where there was a small sundeck and indoor pool.

  A little old lady emerged from the lift and quizzed the pool attendant: ‘Have you heard anything about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center?’

  I looked up. I thought to ask something but then didn’t. Probably a light aircraft, I mused. There were plenty of small planes that criss-crossed the city, all with single engines. London didn’t allow them unless they were Spitfires over Buckingham Palace for the Queen. It wasn’t the first time that a plane had collided with a building in the city. In the 1940s the Empire State Building had an air-force bomber embedded in its upper storeys. I went back to my 757 manual.

  More people emerged from the elevator, and now quite a crowd was outside on the sundeck, peering in the direction of Greenwich Village – the hotel was just south of Central Park.

  ‘What sort of aircraft was it?’ I asked one of them.

  ‘An airliner.’

  I put down my manual. Airliners don’t just fly into tall buildings on clear September mornings. I went onto the sundeck. There was nothing to see. Then I heard the air-ripping sound of military jets: a pair of them, flying low. This, I thought, is not good, and maybe standing on a roof is not smart.

  Down in my room, I turned on the TV. One tower was down, the other ablaze. My mobile rang. It was Merck Mercuriadis.

  ‘Have you seen what’s going on?’ he asked.

  I phoned down to reception: ‘I’d like to extend my stay.’

  Nobody in New York City was going anywhere soon.

  The aftermath was like a slow, surreal dream. The awful carnage at Ground Zero contrasting with the calm and peaceful central New York; thousands of people simply walking around in the sunshine, interspersed with constant sirens. On 8th Avenue, I watched as fire trucks raced back to the scene. The firemen were entirely brown and grey with the toxic filth from the building. In the gutter lay a child’s cuddly bear, covered in dust and resting in a pool of water that had leaked from the fire hoses on the truck. Its beaded eyes looked out as if to say, ‘All of my innocence is now lost.’

  The bars in New York were full. The TV news showed replay after replay, while every few minutes another ‘suspect package’ was discovered.

  Next day, I wandered the streets and tried to give blood, but in vain. The queue was round the block, but sadly all the blood in the world couldn’t bring the victims back. We were all sent away with bits of paper saying we would be contacted if needed.

  The city was like a ghost town. An eerie pall of white smoke and fumes was creeping up from Ground Zero. The wind had changed, and the aerial dust and God knows what else it contained stung my lungs. ‘Healthier inside’ was my reaction.

  New York was in lockdown, and the airport was in meltdown as normal activity slowly tried to assert itself; there were thousands of people camped in and around the terminals at JFK. It was like watching newsreel footage of the evacuation of Saigon, except this was twenty-first century America. After five days of being stranded I finally made it back.

  The September 11 attacks changed everything. The world became paranoid, common sense went out the window and politicians eager to make gestures clashed with pilots who thought many of the security measures just window dressing. A classic was an early confrontation over the liquids policy. On one flight, the captain I was working with was incensed at having his bottle of water confiscated.

  ‘If I want to make a mess,’ he thundered, ‘I have 34 tons of kerosene at 600 miles an hour to make a mess with.’

  But it did him no good. I nearly came to grief with two tins of baked beans. Security pulled them out.

  ‘What are these?’

  The clue is in the label.

  ‘There’s liquid in there,’ she challenged.

  ‘Tomato sauce, yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, is there more than 100 mils?’ she demanded.

  Thankfully, a supervisor intervened. With an impish grin he inspected the cans.

  ‘Ah,’ he stated. ‘These, you see, are Marks & Spencer baked beans.’ He turned to my accuser. ‘Not much liquid in Marks & Spencer beans – mostly beans.’

  Best of all was Captain Clusterfuck. Not his real name – but close. Captain Clusterfuck had thought to take a jumbo-sized marzipan fruitcake through aircrew security at Gatwick. As the cake went through the X-ray machine, sirens erupted, red lights flashed and the X-ray machine operator turned pale. The fruitcake showed up as high explosive, and the problem was the marzipan. Gelignite smells like almonds.

  The world changed for ever and one of the casualties was my first airline. British World went bust shortly before Christmas 2001. At least I was a fully qualified, line-trained Boeing 757 pilot. Not much use in a world where the aviation industry was on its knees. At least I wouldn’t have to try to make excuses to my airline about working on a new Iron Maiden album now.

  A Close Shave

  It was decided that 2002 would be a year of rest and recuperation for the band. Maiden had been battered but had come through more intact than ever. As usual, my idea of rest and recuperation was to nibble away at a couple of new projects.

  Back in the mists of time I have no clear recollection of who suggested the idea of a metal version of The Three Tenors. The idea was interesting. Managers and, in particular, agents were salivating at the prospect of selling out venues with me plus two other alleged legends warbling away. Nice idea, but the devil, as always, was in the detail.

  I wanted Ronnie Dio from Black Sabbath and Rainbow and Rob Halford from Judas Priest alongside me, and I think probably everyone else on the planet would have done, too. Rod Smallwood was vehemently against Ronnie. I suspect it was because he didn’t see eye to eye with Ronnie’s manager, Wendy Dio. In any case, Rod suggested Geoff Tate, Queensrÿche’s singer, to complete the triumvirate.

  I went to LA to try to write an album with Roy Z for the project. Even with Geoff Tate on board, the album was difficult. I wanted any record to use all three voices to their strengths, but also to combine in unexpected ways. It was a tall order in a short timespan.

  The song that Roy and I came up with was called ‘Tyranny of Souls’, and it borrowed from the three witches in Macbeth. Each witch corresponds to a voice, and I wrote the melody, the phrasing and lyric to reflect what I considered to be the essence of my fellow tenors. In the demo of the song I even did a little imitation of their styles to give them a clue as to the intentions of the project. ‘Tyranny of Souls’ was only one song. I would need several more if I was to make an album of material that did the three of us justice. I had a stage format and presentation that allied with the demo song, but it would take a lot more thought and design to keep an audience entertained for two hours. It wasn’t simply a question of bolting vocal girders together to form the Sistine Chapel.

  Pressure from management made me look long and hard at the idea. If there wasn’t time to do it right, better not to do it at all, was
my attitude.

  A meeting with Geoff Tate sealed the fate of the project. We didn’t see eye to eye about almost everything. I never wanted him in the first place. I always would have picked Ronnie Dio.

  ‘Tyranny of Souls’ was thus recycled as the title track on my new, and last, solo studio album, the rest of which didn’t yet exist. I wouldn’t be writing it for a while. I had just been headhunted for a start-up airline, out of the ashes of British World Airlines.

  In mid-February I was moving the furniture into Richard Branson’s old office building, from where he coordinated his balloon adventures. The desks and chairs were from a skip, including a very nice boardroom table that British Airways had declared substandard.

  The airline was called Astraeus, and it rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of British World Airlines and the remnants of Go, the BA subsidiary. It was the start of the best airline experience ever.

  Even while Maiden world appeared to be snoozing to the eyes of outsiders, in reality it was always busy. Even when ticking over, Maiden is a huge responsibility to manage, and we had taken on the challenge of Clive Burr and his struggle with multiple sclerosis. In March 2002 we played the first of a series of benefit shows at Brixton Academy. Clive’s chirpy irreverence was still intact, even as he struggled to find any kind of equilibrium with his condition. One day he would be walking around, the next he would be in a wheelchair. There was no clear pathway for the disease, except that it was ultimately incurable with present levels of technology.

  Clive was a big Second World War history buff, and we chatted about aircraft and the fact that I was shortly about to start a course to learn to fly a 737.

  May saw me down in Gatwick, huddled over a computer-based training programme that may well have been a pirated copy of Lufthansa software. The clue was in the awful jokes inserted every 40 minutes: ‘So, now you know everything about ze 737 air-conditioning system – so you are a cool guy.’

  The hoops to jump through were the same as with British Airways, so after groundschool, simulator and base training, I entered the on-the-job training, which was abbreviated on account of my experience as a first officer on a 757. I had quite an interesting experience on my first day at work.