Top Ten Pilots

Whether they sit in the pilot seat, at the helm or the conn, every spaceship needs someone to do the steering. After finding a captain, first officer, doctor and engineer, the fifth crew member I need to recruit is the pilot. It wasn't until I started compiling this list that I realised how few pilots in fiction are portrayed as anything other than fantastic.

Deserving of honourable mentions are M.A.S.K.'s Matt Trakker, Brad Turner and Vanessa Warfield, who all drove land vehicles that at the push of a button became aircraft as well as Miles Mayhem whose helicopter turned into an aeroplane and Millennium Falcon pilot extraordinaire Han Solo from Star Wars.

Here's my list of Top Ten Pilots:

10 - Mary Margaret O'Connell
Maggie to her friends. Northern Exposure's sarcastic and intelligent bush pilot would make a great companion on those those long isolated flights. She is the only woman to make the top ten which is disappointing because it seems art is barely imitating life and real life female aviators like Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart.

9 - Geordi LaForge
One of the visual metaphors used to illustrate the technological advancement of Star Trek: The Next Generation saw them put a blind man in the driving seat. Geordi would become a better engineer than he was a helmsman and it would be the VISOR that gave him sight or his friendship with Data that would involve him in stories rather than his piloting abilities, but the precision with which he exercised the rest of his duties would have made him a safe pair of hands at the conn.

8 - Pilot
Farscape's pilot was simply called Pilot and as such didn't really have much of an identity outside of his duties. He was bonded to Moya, the living Leviathan ship, and guided her, was aware of her pain and was only able to leave her under very extreme circumstances.

7 - Virgil Tracy
The five Tracy brothers are probably all very good pilots, but Virgil pips the others to the list because he sits at the controls of my favourite of the Thunderbirds, namely heavy duty transport plane: Thunderbird 2.

6 - Tom Paris
Star Trek: Voyager's conn artist broke the Warp 10 barrier at the cost of his own health, helped design and build the first Delta Flyer, raced in the Antarian Trans-stellar Rally, failed a Ledosian pilot's course with the best possible excuse and flew Captain Proton's holographic rocket ship, a shuttle called Alice, two Delta Flyers and was at the helm of the USS Voyager all the way home.

5 - H.M. Murdock
Apparently he excelled himself serving as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam war, which is probably what sent him Howling Mad. After being accused of a crime he didn't commit, he joined The A-Team. Murdock could fly just about any helicopter or plane The A-Team needed him too and more impressively he even managed to get B.A. Baracus in a plane, fool.

4 - Anakin Skywalker
From The Phantom Menace podracing to the chasing his son's X-Wing in A New Hope, via the weaving dogfights of the animated Clone Wars, the once and future Sith Lord from Star Wars proved he had the skill and the midichlorians to be a phenomenal pilot.

3 - Hoban Washburne
Wash to his friends was clearly a good pilot and would have been welcome in any crew, but it was his sense of humour that helped make Firefly and Serenity a joy to watch. He would prefer to run and hide, but was an asset when forced to stay and fight. Wash could outrun the fastest of Alliance ships with manoeuvres like his Crazy Ivan. He was a leaf on the wind, watch how he soared.

2 - Hikaru Sulu
Star Trek's helmsman aboard two USS Enterprises, but could also turn his hand to flying a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, a Huey helicopter and he also manually docked a shuttlecraft during a combat situation on his first attempt. I pretty much believe that Sulu could fly practically anything.

1 - Cat
Red Dwarf's resident Felis Sapien probably seems like an odd choice, but when the boys from the Dwarf lose their mothership it's the Cat that becomes Starbug's pilot of choice. He has what Kryten describes as "superior reflexes and nasal intuition". It's easy to see how superior reflexes would make him a great pilot, but nasal intuition may take a little explaining. The Cat's olfactory awareness is better than Starbug's sensors and he can smell things that threaten the ship even in the vacuum of space. Clearly impossible, but very impressive nonetheless. Ironically for a character described as "mind-meltingly shallow" and largely defined by his fashion sense and sexual urges, piloting seems to be the one thing that he takes seriously even to the point of resenting a rogue baked potato timer in the cockpit.

Who are your favourites?

Next Month: Security Officers

Top Ten Engineers

Every spaceship needs an engineer to get it off the ground, to add to the ever expanding crew roster of captain, first officer and doctor. In compiling this list I realised there is a great deal of overlap in fiction between engineers, inventors, mechanics and scientists. I suppose engineers are more concerned with fixing existing engines than they are with inventing new ones.

Here's my list of Top Ten Engineers:

10 - Bruce Sato
In addition to being M.A.S.K.'s mechanical engineer and Matt Trakker's right hand man is also a toy designer and a Confucian philosopher. Sato drove Rhino, the truck which converted into M.A.S.K.'s mobile HQ. In the cartoon his mask was called Lifter and it created an anti-gravity field that enabled him to lift heavy objects, while his second mask in the toy range was called Grasshopper and allowed him to jump great distances (and presumably worked exactly the same way as Lifter, but in reverse).

9 - Charles Tucker III
'Trip' to his friends, Tucker worked on the Warp 2 NX-Beta program and so was enormously proud of the Warp 5 engine aboard his NX-01 Enterprise. The NX-01 left Earth unfinished and Trip was forced to install parts of it on the move. Despite the lack of exposure his species had to alien and holographic technology somehow Trip successfully managed to fix both repeatedly.

8 - B'Elanna Torres
Following the death of the USS Voyager's Chief Engineer, Torres sufficiently impressed her captain to be promoted to the position over a superior officer. She proved to be very adept with warp engines, transporters, holograms, robotics and arguing.

7 - Reginald Barclay
Nervous and obsessive compulsive, but genius holographic engineer who suffers from bouts of holodiction, transporter phobia and arachnophobia. Served on two USS Enterprises, Jupiter Station and the Pathfinder Project. He was briefly the most intelligent man that had ever lived, de-evolved to a spider and successfully achieved two way communication with the distant USS Voyager.

6 - Geordi LaForge
Originally Star Trek: The Next Generation didn't have a regular Chief Engineer, but over the course of its first season the writers realised they needed one. Hence possibly the fastest promotion in Star Trek. LaForge was Chief Engineer on two USS Enterprises. He was an expert in computers, holograms, cybernetics and thanks to a bit of time travel he also invented the intermix chamber for Earth's first ever warp flight.

5 - 'Brains'
Aircraft, submarines, spacecraft and huge tunnelling drills: the inventor of the Thunderbirds built them all. 'Brains' is clearly a mechanical genius and he has obviously earned his nickname, but deserves even more credit for using the excellent alias of Hiram Hackenbacker.

4 - Kaywinnet Lee Frye
Firefly and Serenity's 'Kaylee' just seems to understand engines intuitively. On her first day aboard she diagnosed a problem whilst having sex with the ship's subsequently former engineer. Mal offered her a job on the spot and she managed to keep his boat in the air, even without a port compression coil in proper working order.

3 - Montgomery Scott
Known to just about everyone as 'Scotty'. He was Chief Engineer aboard two Enterprises and an Excelsior. He was the inventor of both transparent aluminium and transwarp beaming. Scotty also got a reputation as a Miracle Worker. His attitude to technological improvement is probably best summed up with the quote "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain" and yet he was still capable of keeping up after he spent 75 years in a transporter beam in stasis.

2 - Miles O'Brien
O'Brien was an enlisted man with a wealth of engineering and tactical experience. He served as Transporter Chief, married and raised a daughter aboard the USS Enterprise-D, but O'Brien was apparently a man who liked a challenge. He transferred to the recently abandoned Deep Space Nine as Chief of Operations and transformed it from an almost derelict space station in orbit of Bajor to a fully functioning one at the mouth of the wormhole, which then enabled it to become "the most important piece of real estate in the Alpha Quadrant". He fixed the design faults of two USS Defiants and retrofitted DS9's weapon systems and saw it through two wars. It seemed that there was nothing he couldn't fix.

1 - Rom
His skills went unappreciated in a culture which prizes business acumen above all things, but Rom was possibly the only waiter in the universe capable of successfully combining Ferengi, Cardassian, Bajoran and Starfleet technology. Rom signed on as a Diagnostic and Repair Technician, Junior Grade in DS9's waste extraction and also worked as an unlikely spy, terrorist and mercenary, before becoming Grand Nagus of the entire Ferengi Alliance. He had a talent for seeing the bigger picture which saw him save the Prophets from genocide, design the minefield at the mouth of the Wormhole which prevented the Dominion from receiving reinforcements and changed the course of the war saving billions of lives. Rom might just be the single most important character in all of Star Trek. When I first published this, Rom was at number #4, which was deemed too high by one reader. I reassessed what I'd written and instead decided that Rom was more deserving of the top spot.

Who are your favourites?

Next month: Top Ten Pilots