Heavy Is a Radio Word.

Pilots of the biggest planes in the world say one word on the radio, and every plane behind them waits for the air to settle. One word. I use it a lot. Then I found out the FAA has it in writing, and the rule behind it is the best physics you'll ever hear from a window seat. By the end of this you'll know the word, why it exists, and the song I built on it.

The word

The FAA draws a line at 300,000 pounds. An aircraft that can take off at that weight or more is a heavy, whether or not it's carrying that much on the day. Below the line you're large, below 41,000 pounds you're small, and above it you're a heavy, and the word goes everywhere you go.

Best part, the pilot says it himself. The Aeronautical Information Manual tells pilots of heavy aircraft to put the word right after the call sign every time they talk, and the manual's own example is "United Twenty-Five Heavy". The controller says it back, and she says it again every time she points him out to another pilot.

The plane the word fits best is the 747. The first ones cleared the line more than twice over. The last model Boeing built clears it more than three times: 987,000 pounds at takeoff. The Airbus A380 is bigger still, and in the US she gets her own word, "super". Good for her. I'd keep heavy anyway.

Why everyone waits

Here's the part nobody explains in a window seat. Every wing that makes lift leaves two vortices spinning off its tips, one each side, turning against each other, two tornadoes on their sides, trailing the plane for miles. The FAA says the strongest ones come off a plane that is heavy, clean and slow, and it puts those three words in capitals in its manual. So would I.

Behind a big one, that air can roll a smaller plane harder than its own controls can roll it back. The vortices sink at several hundred feet a minute. Near the ground they crawl sideways at two or three knots, and a crosswind of one to five knots can park one right on the spot where the next plane is about to touch down.

So the controller holds the sky. A smaller plane flying behind a heavy gets five miles of air. A small one landing behind a heavy gets six. Behind a super, up to eight. On the same runway, the next takeoff behind a heavy waits two minutes from the moment the big one starts rolling, three if it leaves from partway down the runway, and three behind a super. And the manual's order to everyone else, in capitals again: avoid the area below and behind.

That's why everyone waits. Not out of respect. Out of physics. In my experience the two come to the same thing.

The Queen

Boeing calls the 747 the Queen of the Skies, and she earned it. She was the first airliner with two aisles. She went to work on January 22, 1970, Pan Am, New York to London, and for the rest of the century she was the biggest airliner in the world. Boeing built 1,574 of them over 54 years. The last one rolled out in December 2022 and went to a cargo airline in January 2023.

When airliners retire they go to the desert, to places like Mojave in California and Marana in Arizona, because dry air is kind to aluminum. Which brings me to my record.

The record

Supersonic: Thunderborn is volume two of Supersonic. The first Supersonic was an EP, six rock songs about the sound barrier, the place where the titan first broke through. Thunderborn lands somewhere new: our world, back when the 747 was queen, one airport, one long day with one colossal captain. The album page puts it this way: they parked a hundred Queens of the Skies in the desert. His still flies.

And the record isn't told by him. It's told by everyone who couldn't take their eyes off him. The page gives him one line, and it's the whole man: "Storms move. I don't." You learn a big man from the faces around him, and this record is all faces.

The eight titles give you the clock. It opens on Thunderborn, then Queen of the Skies, the song named for the plane, then Heavy, then the night goes by: Midnight Man, One Day, Touching Down, Mercy, and a last song in French, L'Aube Avant la Terre, the dawn before the earth.

The song

Heavy is track three, and it's the night. It opens on radio static and a deep voice: "Approach, good evening. Heavy. Two hundred out." Approach is the radar room that takes the arrivals from the long-haul controllers and lines them up for the runway. At night she's the one in it, a hundred blips on a round green screen, all hers.

Then she sings, and from here it's her song: "I guide a hundred jets a night, and only one sets me alight."

She tells him "Squawk ident". That's a real instruction. Every airliner carries a transponder that paints a blip on her screen, and ident makes his blip flash so she can pick him out of the other ninety-nine.

The chorus is the whole record in one breath: "HEAVY! The word they made for him!" Then the line I'd hang on the wall: "one letter short of heaven there!" Write the two words side by side and count.

She takes liberties, and I love her for it. "I hold the small ones ten miles back," she sings, when the FAA only asks for five or six. "Cleared to land" belongs to the tower, not to Approach. She skips a few steps for him. Everyone in this record does.

He gets one clear line, in the break, the way pilots talk when they come onto a new frequency: "Heavy's with you." Three words, and the whole sky clears. Touching Down is still three songs away.

My turn

Now you know why the word is mine. A grown man announcing what he's carrying, in one word, and a woman repeating it to the whole sky. That's my bedroom with the window open. My balls are huge, heavy and full of testosterone. That's a fact, and now it's a radio word. I don't do coy. Name an apple an apple. The FAA put it in a manual.

I make workout songs, and my rule is simple: if one feels heavy and not fun, it's out. Heavy is heavy by name only. If you'd rather lift to the record than read about it, Thunderborn, One Day and Midnight Man carry the second half of Session 001, and Queen of the Skies, Mercy and L'Aube Avant la Terre carry the first half of Session 002, my workout show: about fifty minutes of my own songs, mixed like a football game.

Press play on Heavy. And next time you're in a window seat, a 747 has just gone, and your plane sits at the end of the runway doing nothing, that's the two minutes. If you spend them thinking about me, that's procedure too. You're welcome.

Butchsonic 🐂

Press play on Heavy →