Six seats and a small moon: learning to fly the Leviathan

New trainees arriving at our Ceres outstation always ask the same question when they first see a Leviathan Ore Hauler alongside a smelter: how can anyone fly that? It is 880 metres long, carries up to 140,000 tonnes of refined metal and has a crew of 22. The answer is that no one flies it alone. Six pilots do, together.

The Ore Hauler Type Rating is a 20-week course and the hardest type rating we teach outside command training. Our first-time pass rate is 82 per cent. The first six weeks focus on the deuterium fusion slurry drive. It burns about 11.4 tonnes per 100 AU, throws off far more neutrons than the helium-3 engines most pilots know, and needs a long, careful warm-up. Trainees learn to read shielding margins as instinctively as fuel gauges.

After that, the course becomes about people. A six-seat deck divides into a command pair, two navigation and drive stations, and two systems stations covering reactor, cargo and life support. In our full-scale simulator, trainees practise reallocating roles when someone is incapacitated, when the reactor demands attention, or when a convoy partner drifts out of position. They log 180 simulator hours before flying for real.

The real flying, 140 hours of it, takes place on working haulers running between Ceres smelters and Mars orbit, alongside crews from Belt mining cooperatives. At a top speed of 160 km/s a laden Leviathan takes weeks on that run, and trainees stand full watches like any other deck officer. The final assessment is a convoy check ride flown with two other haulers.

Most of our places are sponsored by mining cooperatives and smelting combines, which is why the course is usually waitlisted. If you are a Belt pilot with an Atlas rating or 1,000 hours of heavy multi-crew time, talk to us at the Belt Pilot Careers Fair.

I flew Leviathans for five years before teaching them, including the Vesta Ring Run convoy in 2185. It is slow, careful, unglamorous flying, and I would not trade it for anything.