September 2012
I was walking through all the airplanes at this great little fly-in I attended. There were several classic birds there including a cabin-class Waco, a tricked-out Luscombe 8 and two beautiful Cessna 140s. Admiring the loving restoration, I couldn’t help but notice how tiny the cockpit was and how close the seats were back then. Were people that much smaller five and six decades ago? The answer, I discovered, is you betcha.
Our country’s prosperity, which brought with it a better diet and better health care, has resulted in Americans growing taller and living longer. Twenty years ago, America had the tallest people on the planet. Now, with the rest of the world catching up, folks in the United States are only the ninth tallest folks on earth. Before you chalk up just one more thing America has fallen by the wayside on, we now have another category in which we are number one. Americans are officially now (drumroll, please) the heaviest people on earth.
As aviators, of course, weight is a huge part of our sport. We have to weigh things before we put them in our airplanes, and we have to balance that weight relative to the aircraft’s center of gravity lest we become test pilots.
But what about those people we have to board as well? You can ask them their weight, though that question is not always graciously accepted or answered. I have a bathroom scale that reads about 10 pounds light. I regularly have my passengers step on the scale, and they’re often relieved to see they weigh less than they thought. (Of course I add the 10 pounds back on there when I do the calculations.) But if your experience is anything like mine, except when I’m flying Young Eagles, I rarely board a person who is the typical FAA 170-pounder anymore.
And apparently, it’s not just me. The latest statistics show the average male in this country now weighs 194 lbs and the average woman now weighs 165. How do we fit in a Luscombe?
How did we aviators get so large? Well, part of it is that hundred dollar hamburger thing we do. According to one study, about 70 percent of recreational General Aviation flights are planned around eating.
The number we see commonly is that each of us needs about 2,000 calories a day. While that may be a good rough guesstimate for most folks, you can actually calculate the calories you burn on a typical day just as accurately as doing
weight and balance.
For example, let’s take that average 165-pound female we met in a previous paragraph and multiply her weight by 11. That gives us 165 x 11 = 1,815. That’s how many calories you’d need to maintain your weight if you just stood still and didn’t move all day.
Now let’s allow for some activity. If we’re a typical pilot, we’re over 40 years old and our metabolisms have slowed considerably since we were pups. A moderately active metabolism will add about 30 percent more calories. In other words, we’ll take the original 1,815 calories and add 30 percent to end up with an additional 545 + 1,815 calories. Our 165-pound lady can consume 2,360 calories without gaining or losing weight.
Ah, but the hamburger, that mystical, fabled hundred-dollar sandwich we all chase… Here’s some food for thought: the Big Mac is 550 calories, about half of which is pure fat. Add a small helping of french fries and you’ve got another 230 calories. Add a small chocolate shake and there’s yet another 400 calories. You can see that one meal can easily take quite a toll on your allowable calories for the day.
But McDonald’s only has a drive-through, not a fly-through, so maybe it isn’t the example to use. So let’s fly to a typical airport greasy spoon café and see what kind of burger we can scare up. A recent study of “specialty burgers”—those are the double and triple or quadruple patty with things like heaping piles of avocado or ranch dressing or barbecue sauce—indicates a typical count of somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 calories. All at one sitting. (No wonder those darned Luscombes are getting kinda snug.)
As hamburger aficionados, pilots are in good company. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan fed his cavalry a variant of the modern hamburger so they could eat on the go. This may be the first example of what today we call fast food. Horse soldiers put a piece of meat under their saddles so the selection could get minced and tenderized as the men rode, long before anyone thought of making a sandwich out of ground beef.
By the 17th century, Russian ships began landing in the German port of Hamburg, often delivering the first samples of tartar sauce made to enhance the flavor of a steak. Eventually restaurateurs in the New World, anxious to get the business of the legions of 19th century émigrés, began offering a dish for the homesick, the Hamburg Steak.
In the beginning, this dish consisted of a piece of nearly raw meat in a dish with some onions and some breadcrumbs on the side. In no time, chefs were adding tomatoes, slices of pickle and just about anything else that might prove a novelty. When the breadcrumbs were replaced by pieces of bread… voilà, the iconic American hamburger was born.
So as pilots, we can join the swelling ranks of…well…the swelling. As long as we’re dedicated to flying to eat, the bigger we’ll likely get. Despite all of the mystique around weight loss regimens, most experts will agree that your weight is the result of a constant struggle between calories in versus calories out. In other words, if you take in more calories than you burn, you’re going to gain weight. Conversely, burning more calories than you consume can help you keep your figure.
Since it’s unlikely many of us are going to give up the tradition of flying to eat, we have to come up with ways to burn more calories. And what better time to burn calories than while you’re en route to wolf down another $100 hamburger? Consequently, the publishers have put together a list of exercises to burn calories while you’re flying:
1. Use your thumb and index finger to grab your tongue. While holding it firmly in place, sing all three verses of Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” That’s enough to put anybody off of food.
2. Place your index fingers alongside the yoke and then move them in sort of a calisthenics fashion—out, back and up, out, back and up. Then shout, “Rock on, Jack LaLanne!”
3. Speaking of shouting, turn your headset volume way down. It will make you want to scream at ATC in order to be heard, which burns more calories than whispering.
4. Wedge seven tennis balls between your seat belt and your tummy. That will allow you to know what it’s going to feel like after you eat a big burger and fries.
5. Download the new app that allows you to turn on your Garmin G1000 and watch “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” with Richard Simmons.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
So be careful, or that cockpit you keep squeezing into will surely keep getting smaller and smaller. Has to be those little airplanes and their accommodations built for munchkins, right? Couldn’t be anything else, right?
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man. Send questions or comments to editor@piperflyer.org.
