My reasons.

The two most beautiful things in the world to me. My reasons for wanting to be home.

More doom and gloom.

Ford Motor Company announced a deep cut in production for the rest of the year. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060819/ap_on_bi_ge/ford_production_cuts
The trickle down effect will hit my company hard and fast. If the people quitting from the new schedule don't cover enough cost savings, I'm guessing furloughs and lay off's by the end of the
year. I think its going to be a "wait and see" situation. This also puts me in a difficult position as far as what do I want to do with my career. If offered a captain position, do I take the upgrade and sign my life away for another 18 months? Or do I say no, pass on the PIC Turbine time and get another job? I'll have a lot of hard questions to ask myself and my family if and when that time comes. At this point, who knows what's going to happen?

Gettin the shaft.

Aviation sucks, flying rocks! Now if you could just get both to rock, we'd have a good thing going. Today was a compilation of highs and lows. The high was that I took my Lear Jet checkride and passed. The low was that when I got back to the office to sign all the paperwork, I got some terrible news from the chief pilots office. The ever so wise company has decided to change our schedule. As of September 1st we are now going to a 5 on 2 for 2 weeks of the month and a 12 on 2 off schedule for the remaining 2 weeks. This means that my job has now made it impossible for me to commute to work. Not only does it suck for me, but a lot of other pilots who commute as well. I'm guessing that there will be a mass exodus of pilots in the next few months. Our quality of life just dropped to zero. We went from having 110 days off a year (poor by pilot standards) to 96 days off a year (unacceptable). In a typical month, we would only get 6 days off. That is totally garbage.

I can see things happening like this......

Friday rolls around after being on duty and away from base since Monday morning. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere and the only airline flights get you back to base in the early afternoon on Saturday. There's a half day wasted. You get home, spend a little time with the family and go to bed early because you are exhausted from getting up at 4a.m. to catch the earliest flight. You get up Sunday morning and possibly spend 12 hours with the family before going to bed again. 6a.m. Monday morning, the pager goes off and your on the road again for 120 hours or 5 days and repeat. Out of the 168 hours in a week, you spend 130 on the road away from the family. Now that's if you live at base. For a commuter like myself, I'd get even less. I'd get back Saturday afternoon and leave Sunday afternoon. I'd get a whopping 24 hours at home with my family 2 weekends a month. I will not tolerate this at all.

My family is much more important to me than this job. If having them move to my base were an option, I might consider staying, but it is not. Unfortunately it is time to look elsewhere for another job. As with many aspects of aviation, things just don't work out the way you plan.

Sim time.

The simulator is can be fun or hell depending on how you look at it. I love it. It gives me the chance to practice maneuvers and procedures that hopefully I'll never have to do in real life. As with my last simulator sessions with the Falcon, I get the chance to get the feel of the aircraft before I ever get in and fly it for real. I'm hoping that the real aircraft is a lot less sensitive than what is portrayed in the sim, because it's a handful. So far it has been the most difficult aircraft I've ever had to fly. It handles like a fighter, but that's not necessarily a good thing when your first learning to fly it.

The Lear is a very fast aircraft. Like I stated in earlier posts, it has awesome performance. When you apply that terrific performance to a pilot that is just learning to fly the thing, its spells "red screen" in the sim. Thankfully neither my sim partner or myself has killed eachother in the sim yet. The other guys in my class, not so lucky. In the sim, we get the chance to "feel" how the plane fly's. The Lear has completely different handling characteristics than the Falcon. The first difference is that I finally get to taxi again. In the Falcon, the capt. has a steering tiller and handles all the taxiing. The Lear has a little button on the yoke that will engage the nosewheel steering. On takeoff, we will almost always be doing a reduced thrust takeoff. Full power is just not needed unless you are hot and heavy. Besides, the plane is extremely loud and doing reduced thrust t.o's reduces the noise level so as to not upset the surrounding neighbors or noise sensors. Once the plane is in the air and climbing, its still a little strange to see the vertical speed indicator (VSI) pegged at 6000 feet per min. Everything happens a lot faster in the Lear. As soon as you start accelerating you need to be on the trim, otherwise its going to get away from you and the control forces can get pretty heavy in a hurry. Steep turns are a handful as well. You need to almost man-handle the aircraft to get it to remain within tolerances while transitioning into and out of the turn. Its completely different from the Falcon. Stalls are still taking some getting used to. Its hard to break the habit of letting the nose drop to recover from the stall. Everything that I've flown previous to now required the nose to drop for recovery. Now all I do is add power and continue to add back pressure to the yoke to maintain pitch attitude. The plane will power its way out of the stall. In the sim, I've had the tendency to release a little of that back pressure, the nose drops and I lose altitude, but I've gotten a handle on it now. The other major difference between the planes is our approach speeds. The Pig Jet is slow, typically our ref speeds are between 115 and 122, so our approach speeds at ref+10 are around 130kts. The Lear is quite a bit faster. Today in the sim we did a flaps 0 approach and our ref speed was 159kts. You come zipping down the ILS at those speeds. Well I have 1 more sim session before the checkride. I'm looking forward to it.

Back to school

Well its back to study mode again. Gotta kick the rust off the old brain and buckle down for some heavy duty memorizing. The Lear training is a bit different than what I had for the Falcon. Different instructor, different hotel, different systems, different atmosphere all together. I like it.

I'm learning a lot about the Lear, but this time there isn't the extra pressure of learning my first jet, dealing with 3 weeks of training, starting a new job, being away from Erin and Jack for so long and being a "new hire". I think all of us in the class were nervous about the job back in April. Now that we've had a few months to fly the line and see how things really work, we are coming into this class much more relaxed. Its nice to be back in class with all my buddies from my new hire class. Out of the 6 in my original class, we all got called back for Lear training, but do to some short staffing, two of the guys got called out of class to go fly the line. Hopefully they'll be able to hop in the next class whenever that rolls around.

The systems on the Lear are much simpler than those on the Pig Jet. Bill Lear designed a pretty good airplane. I like the fact that there isn't an Aux Bus and associated Load Shed items so the electrical system is easier to understand. The fuel system is also simpler. No feeder tanks to worry about, just a "trunk tank" a.k.a. fuselage tank. And the memory items list is shorter and easier to memorize. Another plus is that the engine on the Lear is almost identical to the Falcon. The only major difference is that the Falcon has a fan in the rear. Other than that, its the same exact engine. The same engine that's used on the military F-5, F-20 and T-28 trainer. So when you hear a Lear take off, its just about as loud as some military jets.

The downside to the Lear is that we have 4 different models with 2 separate engine models that requires that we memorize more limitations than the falcon. Also, no two cockpits are going to be alike. Bill Lear would sometimes walk down the assembly line and go up to an aircraft that's being built, point to something and say "I think that will go better over there." Then what ever he had moved, would be displaced on that aircraft only.
Jokingly, the instructor says we'll be spending the first 30 min of the flight looking around the cockpit for all the switches.

Well I don't have much more time to write, its back to studying. The sim starts Saturday, I cant wait.

Its Fun Time!!!!!!

Well I finally received the page I've been waiting for, its time for Lear class. I'm pretty excited to get the chance to fly the famous Lear 24. It is notorious for being loud, fast and about as close to a fighter jet as I'll ever come. One of its nicknames is the "Baby Fighter Jet". There have been stories floating around about its astounding climbing ability. Such as on a cold day and with minimum fuel one of our pilots was able to go from brake release to 10,000ft in under 90 seconds. That is an amazing number for a civilian aircraft. If you do the math and calculate in a 15 second takeoff roll, you get a sustained climb rate of over 8300 feet per min. That's simply awesome! The "pig jet" my pet name for the plane I'm currently flying will typically hold a sustained climb of about 2000 ft per min. On a cold day with a light load, it might be able to hold 4,000 ft per min, but that's pushing it. Usually anytime you see a climb rate like that on the pig jet, your losing airspeed pretty quickly and you can't hold that climb rate for very long.

These planes also burn more gas at idle speed than a Boeing 737. That's why its so important to get these planes up to high altitude as fast as possible. The higher up in the atmosphere you go, the less fuel these engines use. I'm sure I'm going to have plenty of more tidbits of information to pass along once I start flying it. But until then, its time to study hard and learn as much as I can in groundschool and the simulator. Hopefully I'll have time to report on the class and sim in the upcoming weeks.