Screw scheduling

In the few short months I've been at my company, I've learned who the good people in dispatch and crew scheduling are and who are not so bright. Yesterday I had a very bad encounter with one of the persons who's not the best. Sometimes they make decisions that just get me scratching my head and going "Why???...what the hell are you thinking"? This particular person has a reputation for being not the brightest. He has good intentions, but the implementation of his intentions leave little to be desired.

The grand plan for yesterday was for me to reposition to another aircraft that had a captain on it, but no f/o. At the time I was on an aircraft, but had no captain. So far, so good. Sounds like a good plan, but its how the plan was put into action that really sucked. I get a call in my hotel room at 0 dark thirty saying "Your to reposition to another aircraft"...ok. fine...."Well your flight leaves at 1:00pm local time, gets into XXX airport at 4:30pm and you are to rent a car and drive to XYZ airport to meet up with the plane." So I'm thinking that's pretty crappy, but at least I'll have some duty time left over and will still be able to fly should a trip come up, ok, not so bad. So I get up from bed, stumble over to the computer and punch in driving directions from XXX to XYZ.......4 hour drive!!!! The gears in my head are turning...."what is this crap? this person is going to completely waste a day repositioning me. Not only is he going to waste my day, but the day of the captain I'm going to meet up with. So I called the genius back and ask what their reasoning was. Their reply was that it was the cheapest way of doing things. Again, a little more brain power used and they could have found a flight into an airport that was 2 hours closer and the same price as the ticket to XXX. It wouldn't have completely wasted a day. Just about 4 hours which would have left 10 hours of duty time and plenty of time to do a trip. Oh well, what are you gunna do?

Broken thingys

When flying old aircraft, broken/deferred/inoperative equipment just becomes the norm. I have gotten used to the fact that on most flights, there is going to be something that is not working. Most of the time its little things like a burnt out light bulb or indicator that's not important to the safety of flight, but on today's flight, lots of stuff broke. By the end of the flight, we had filled out 2 pages of maintenance write-ups and essentially grounded the aircraft.
This particular aircraft was one of the oldest in the fleet. It has over 34,000 hours on the airframe. It's serial number is 13. It was manufactured in 1966. Yes folks, that's 1966, the plane is 40 years old. Personally, I think its about time to retire this old bird to the scrap heap.

Real life vs. Simulator

Its not often that real life flying the line is what you encounter in the simulator. The other night was an exception. There were lots of thunderstorms out there lighting up the sky as we weaved around them. Every time there was a big flash of lightning, all the windows of the cockpit would light up white. As we were bouncing along, I thought to myself "this is almost exactly like the sim". In the simulator thunderstorms are re-created by some turbulence and white flashes. This flight was pretty close to what the sim is minus the engine on fire, hydraulic system failure, 200 Ft ceiling and 1/2mi visibility that is always the norm in the sim. As much as I thought the sim was cool, its still no match for the real thing.

Another really cool thing about flying the real thing is what I like to call the "Space shuttle approach". This is when you are left high and dry only a few miles from the airport. This approach will come from either poor descent planning on the pilots part or air traffic control forgetting to give you a lower altitude until you are close to the airport, either way, its a good thing we don't have passengers to think about. I don't think they'd appreciate how fun they are for the pilots. The shuttle approach is fun. You get to fly the plane outside of the normal 1G environment. First you bring the throttles to idle, then extend the airbrakes. This creates a nose down pitch attitude and gets you a little light in the seat. If your speed is low enough, you can start extending the flaps, if not you pitch the aircraft nose high to bleed off airspeed until you can extend the flaps and gear. As soon as you get the flaps and gear extended, start the dive to the runway. Depending on how fast you need to lose the altitude, you can vary your nose down pitch attitude from -5 to -10 degrees nose down. With full flaps, gear and airbrakes extended the vertical speed indicator is pegged at 6000 Ft per min down. This configuration will get you down in a hurry. Typically this dive only lasts 10-20 seconds before the plane is again on glidepath and the airbrakes get retracted. Once your back on glidepath, its back to the normal 3 degree glideslope and ref +10. Fun stuff.

Nice Rugby Tackle

A few weeks ago, one of my good friends from college made sports page headlines when he tackled a fan that had run on to the field during a Twins-Red Sox game. Nate Reese a.k.a "Sunshine" by all of us UND rugby alumni made a sweet tackle that would warm the heart of any wing forward. Quite an impressive display of tackling prowess for a semi-retired fullback. If you look at the video, you can see a terrific tackle with awesome form. Friggin sweeeet! http://www.kare11.com/video/player.aspx?aid=28734&bw=

Terminally Stupid Asses...aka TSA

Gotta love the TSA. I can honestly say I hate that agency with a passion. It is run by morons, staffed by the dregs of society and couldn't protect a tree fort from a terrorist attack. Recently they elected to make my life and the life of commuting pilots considerably more difficult. For the past year there had been a rule that all commuting pilots or crewmembers attempting to jumpseat on a flight at an airport which their airline did not serve, needed to have a boarding pass or gate authorization in order to pass through security. With this rule there were exemptions that allowed airports to follow this rule or not. Most airports chose not to follow the rule. As of Monday July 10th, this rule became permanent and without the exemptions. This now means that all airline pilots and crewmembers must now wait in line at the ticket counter and get a boarding pass before going through security. This is a gigantic pain in the ass and adds unnecessary time to our commutes.

As pilots, we have to pass a 10 year criminal history background check. Our ID badges are proof that we have passed this check and we pose no threat to the flying public. Muhammad Terrorist buys a ticket, checks in online and proceeds to go through the same security checkpoint and screening that we do. Since he bought a ticket and prints out his boarding pass, he gets directly to the security checkpoint without ever seeing a ticket agent or going through the so called "additional layer" of security that the ticket agents are supposedly providing. Pilots, on the other hand, must go wait in line, talk to a real live human and get our boarding pass before we can go through security.

It just doesn't make any sense. Why are the TSA going after pilots and crewmembers who have passed an FBI background check and have the ID as proof? This rule is a complete waste of the paper its written on. If they want to keep our skies safe make rules that will actually enhance safety.

Catching up on some pics......

Here is my office. Its old, dirty and extremely hot sitting on the ramp, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. This particular plane is a little different from the other aircraft in our fleet. It was used as a test aircraft for single pilot certification so all the engine instruments are over on the Captains side.
here's the real "Con Air". I saw this up in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
The aircraft I'm flying now and the plane I plan on flying in a few years. I grabbed a pic of the 747 taxiing by while on a freight delay in LAX.
Speed is pretty cool. Too bad my disposable camera isn't. It was to be a pic of the GPS showing a ground speed of 496kts. We had a pretty nice tailwind on that flight.
Another view from my office. I think we were on approach to Great Falls, MT.

Ahhh, its good to be home. I just enjoyed a nice 10 day break at home. As much as I love my job and flying, I miss my lovely fiance' and little boy terribly. Next job I'm looking for something that's going to keep me home more often. Being away for 20 days straight is rough. The nice paycheck I'm going to get is nice, but money isn't everything.

No Brakes....sorta #2

When my leash gets tugged, I must obey. I call my pager "the leash" because I am required to be in the air within 45 minutes of getting the page. So while I'm "green" or on duty, my activities are limited to things that will allow me to drop what I'm doing and get to the airport as quickly as possible. Hence the abrupt ending to the last post. To continue the story.....

After we checked the Anti Skid system on the ramp and it tested normally, we decided the next course of action would be to get on the phone with maintenance . They wanted us to perform a high speed taxi test and check the brakes again. We told them that we would be unable to do the test at the airport we were currently at due to the short runway and the fact we were already halfway through loading our freight. We told maint. that we were going to do what we call MEL the item. Basically what we do is look up the inoperative item in a book we have in the plane. In the MEL book it tells us what items can be inoperative and what we as pilots need to do if an item is inoperative. Typically it involves placarding the item and pulling the circuit breaker to render it completely inoperative. This is the procedure we used to "MEL" the Anti Skid system. In addition to the physical disabling of the system, there are also performance penalties that need to be applied when calculating our take off and landing distances.

While calculating our numbers for take off, I applied the 1000 ft penalty to our take off roll and came up with a number that caught my attention. At the current temp. and pressure altitude our takeoff distance required was 20 ft shorter than the length of the runway. This meant that if we were to accelerate to V1 (Takeoff decision/Go or abort take off speed) in theory we would be able to stop the plane and have 20 ft left over. The reality of that number meant that legally we could depart the airport, but if we were to have an emergency that would require us to abort our takeoff around V1, we'd more than likely overrun the end of the runway. The numbers published in our take off performance charts are based on a brand new aircraft, new brakes, new tires a clean runway with zero rubber on it and a test pilot at the controls who is expecting an engine failure. We are flying a 35 year old aircraft, brakes-not new, tires-not new, runway-not new or cleaned of all rubber and as far as the two guys up front, we are not test pilots. With all this good stuff going in our favor, its a good idea to really brief the takeoff to make sure we know exactly what the plan is in case we have to abort. By not having Anti Skid, we would not be able to use the brakes hard or we'd risk blowing the tires. So in case of any abort calls above 100kts we would pull the drag chute to help us stop. Thankfully the takeoff went normally and we got out of there with out a hitch.