Good week.

So finally after several weeks of not getting much flying done, I seem to be back in the groove. I've flown more hours this week than I have in any week so far this month. The week didn't start out so hot, but its picked up nicely. My week started with a page from dispatch on sunday afternoon saying I was airlining to Moline, IL to meet up with a captain and then we were to drive to Des Moine, IA to pick up a plane. I normally hate when the company does stuff like this in order to save money, but I was in a good mood and didn't let it get me down. I was to be meeting up with a captain I like flying with, so it wasn't all that bad. Besides, they found me a flight that left in the early afternoon on Monday, so I could spend the morning at home with Jack. Anytime I can spend a few more hours at home, I'm happy. So after taking the squirt to the Y to go swimming, I dropped him off at daycare and headed to the airport. Normally I wear my monkey suit (pilots uniform) even if my ticket is paid for so that I don't have to check my bags and the Thousand Standing Around don't steal my shampoo and contact solution. But that day, I just didn't feel like dressing up or shaving so for the first time in a long time I checked my bag. That was my mistake of the day. I got to Moline, waited at the carousel, watched everyone else from my flight get their bags, waited, watched and slowly came to the realization that my bag was not coming. So I walked over the the baggage counter and explained my bag was missing. The girl working the counter was very nice and quickly scanned the bag tag and told me my bag was still sitting in Chicago. Wonderful. I took it in stride, didn't even get mad. I told the girl we were going to DSM and asked what are my options were. She said the bag would be on the next flight that would be arriving in 3 hours. The captain and I talked it over and decided that we were not going to wait for the bag and that we'd drive to DSM and have the airline send it there. I was told that the bag would be in DSM by 9:30am the next day, so I gave the girl my number and we headed off to the rental for the 2.5 hour drive to DSM. True to her word, the bag showed up at 9:30 and I called in to dispatch to say we were now good to go.

About and hour and a half later the pager went off. It was going to be a good trip. We were going from IA to our base in TX then on down to Monterrey Mexico to drop off some freight. I was pretty stoked to be getting a trip out right away. We quickly checked out of the hotel, dropped off the rental and grabbed a taxi to the airport our plane was at. This was supposed to be an a.s.a.p trip which means that we are supposed to hurry our tails off and get airborne as fast as we can. Dispatch could really help the cause if they would do a little of the leg work. We get to the plane and it wasn't fueled nor was the flight plan there. Had they called ahead and ordered fuel we could have been wheels up 45min sooner than we actually were. So after a fueling delay we were finally in the air and I was making some money. Pager is going off, I'll have to finish this later.

Improvements

A few months ago I was flying with a captain that I generally disliked and the feelings were mutual. He thought I was a dumb lazy pilot and didn't like flying with me. I thought he was an ass, cheapskate and always in too much of a rush. Since then we have flown several more rotations together and I'm happy to report that we are now friends. It all started with a band named Dropkick Murphy's.

During the week that our plane had been damaged by the line service guys in RFD, the captain and I had plenty of time to get to know each other better. We spent the better part of the week in rental cars instead of airplanes. It just so happened that I had along a CD that a friend of mine had burned for me. It was my Irish drinking song CD that had a lot of tracks from Dropkick Murphy's. The captain and I had been sharing drinking stories when we got started talking about rugby and that I still play (whenever I get the chance, which lately is not very often). I mentioned that one of my rugby buddies made this CD for me and asked if he wanted to hear it. He said he did, so I played the CD. He loved it! We probably listened to it 10 times that week while driving all over the Midwest. After that he seemed to open up a bit and relax. We shared more stories and came to realize that he wasn't such an ass and I wasn't so dumb and lazy.

I recently flew with the guy last week and had a good time flying with him. It was enjoyable. Now I'm not dreading finding out I'm being paired up with him. Originally I would have classified him as being a 10%er, but now he's in the majority of cool guys to fly with. Just goes to show theres hope for almost anyone, including a dumb lazy FO such as myself ;)

Dark age navigation

So I'm about to wrap up a 4th week of very little flying and a lot of being away from home. Meanwhile some of the lucky guys in my company are flying their tails off and are racking up the hours. I'm beginning to think I've caught some sort of curse because I have not had a month this bad since training. It all started 3.5 weeks ago when the line guys at RFD dropped the Lear on its tail. Ever since then I've been sitting around on broken planes, wishing I was up flying. Its a bit disheartening to be sitting in hotels watching the flight tracker as my company planes criss cross the continent. So anyway, this brings me to my blog of the day.

After being repositioned to base yesterday, I sat around for 30 hours before I got trip out. Wouldn't you know it, I finally get a trip and the plane is....wait for it.....wait for it....you're never going to guess......broke! But it was a flyable kind of broke until later in the trip. Turns out this plane had been hit by lightning the previous week and as a result had developed a lot of gremlins. There were multiple MEL's on the plane, but the one that stood out was the GPS. We use the GPS for almost every phase of flight and about 98% of our navigation. We use cutting edge GPS technology in our planes......for 1991. All kidding aside, they may be old systems, but they work (most of the time) and make navigating easy. Tonight was one of the times that it did not work. In fact, it had been removed from the plane and replaced with a chunk of foam with an MEL sticker on it. So instead of being filed a /G like we normally are, we are reduced to navigating the old fashioned way by using ground based nav aids. We actually have to pull out the maps, find our course, tune and identify the VOR's, track radials and fly point to point instead of the more typical direct route. It's a lot more work than we are used to, but its a nice change. Brings me back to my roots of learning to fly in C152's without the benefit of GPS's. The only planes that I have ever flown without having a GPS installed or having some sort of hand held unit, have been C152 trainers. In college all our planes had them. My dads plane has one. At my first aerial photography job I had an old hand held unit I would use. At my second photography job we had them, nice ones too, Garmin 430's. At my first 135 freight job we had decent KLN-90B's and now we have really old Trimble units. So navigating by pressing the "Direct to" button is much more the norm than going from VOR to VOR.

We got lucky tonight and happened to get a trip in the wee hours of the morning so ATC was in a kind mood. On our second leg ,back to our base in the south, we received vectors for most of the trip. It negated having to fly point to point, but we still had to figure out where we were by tuning VOR's, figuring out what radial and DME we were and cross referencing that with a map. Alas, on the leg to our base the plane developed more gremlins and we wrote up the issues and grounded the plane again. Unfortunately there are no other planes here so we are s.o.l and I find myself not flying because I'm sitting on a broken plane. Gotta love freight dogging.

Bored pilots.

So in a previous post I was trying to remain optimistic that things would get busy and I'd spend a lot more time flying instead of getting hotel rot. Well, its been 3 straight weeks of broken planes and very little flying. I am pretty sick and tired of sitting on my ass in hotel rooms crewing broken planes. It has been such a bad month that its the 15th already and I'm no where near making mileage for the month, which means I'm not making any money. I need to fly a certain number of miles for the month in order to start making mileage money. Once I meet that number, I start building towards a decent paycheck. Typically I'll meet that mark around 30 hours in the air. So far this month, I'm several thousand miles and around 15 hours short of the mark. Its not that there is no flying to be done, our company planes have been busy, at least the ones that are not broke. So I'm attributing most of this to bad luck and will try to remain optimistic about the rest of the month.

(O.K, rant over. I'm pissy about not flying and just want to go home. So here is some stuff that's not negative.)

In order to fend off hotel rot, you need to get out of the room and go do stuff. Sometimes this can be hard to do. For example when the hotel is in the middle of nowhere and you have no means of transportation. Luckily for the past few days I've been in a great location to be stuck. Today I got the chance to go do something that I haven't ever done. I went with the captain to a gun range and shot some guns. I've fired rifles before, but never handguns. I picked out the Glock 9 automatic as my weapon of choice. It was a fun experience and I didn't think I was all that bad a shot.








Due to a serious screw up by dickscratch....aahem...cough..cough, excuse me, dispatch. We were awoken before the butt crack of dawn to drive to base to crew a plane. Turns out that plane was, wait for it....wait for it....your never gunna guess.....broke! But it was not entirely a waste of time because I got to snap some cool new pics. So here is a pic of the cleanest cargo falcon you are ever going to see. And no, it was not washed. That's a fresh paint job. Just don't look too close cause you'll see all the runny paint. I give it a month before the cowlings are blackened with soot and it looks like the rest of the fleet.







I'm a cockpit buff, so I was pretty happy to get the chance to sit up front in a 737-200 to snap some pics. As you can see, these guys are roughing it (steam gauges, no FMS, old school gps) just like the rest of the company pilots.

My 12 day is over tomorrow and I cant wait to get home!!!!

Rugby Hits

I love rugby. These hits are brutal. I love it!

Cool stuff.

So as we were taxiing out for departure the other day, happened to snap a video of a Fed-Ex A300 coming in for a landing. As you can see in the video the Bus manages to land and taxi off in less than 4000ft. There is a pretty impressive smoke cloud that bursts from the tires upon landing. You can tell the pilots were trying to get the Bus planted on the runway and stopped in a short distance. In the lower right hand corner you can see the 4000ft remaining sign. They must have been empty or pretty close. That's pretty impressive for a plane with a max take off weight of 375,100lbs and weighs nearly 200,000lbs empty.




This is a pretty low quality video of a departure in a Lear 25. I should have had the camera on the other side of the cockpit. I'll take another video later and post it. But as you can see, everything happens pretty quick in the Lear. In the span of 78 seconds we go from being cleared for take off to about 2000ft agl. That was a pretty mellow departure a far as Lears go. If I was trying, I could have pitched up another 10 degrees or so and really skyrocketed up. Usually we save those departures for noise abatement departures and uncontrolled fields when we have been cleared to a higher initial altitude.

Slow week

So in my earlier post I was optimistic that I was going to have a good week flying and I'd be out making some $$. Well, this week didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. Turns out I sat in Tampa for 4 days before I got a trip. Then once I got a trip, take a wild guess what happened.....wait for it......wait for it..........you are never gunna guess........plane broke! We get airborne and as soon as the gear is in the wheel well, I go to turn on the Yaw Damper and nothing happened. I press the button again, nothing happened. We have a secondary damper, so I engaged that one and informed the captain about what was going on. It was a real bummer because we had a great trip planned that would have really racked up the miles. We took a look in the MEL book to see if we could write it up and continue the trip, but as luck would have it, it was a no-go item. So we landed at our planned fuel stop in Baton Rouge and downed the plane, trip cancelled. In the last 2 weeks, I've flown a total of 6 hours and spent 240 hours or 10 days away from my family. Needless to say, I'm not a very happy camper right about now. But on the plus side, I was stuck in Tampa. I got to go to the beach and enjoy some nice weather. I finally made it down to the stadium where my #2 favorite football team the Buccaneers play and I'm paired up with a guy I like hanging out with, so all in all, could be worse. Here's a couple pics of the stadium. I got a kick out of the Missile statement.

Here is a view from the ramp using my handy dandy zoom function of my camera. If someone knows what kind of jet that is in the picture, let me know. I couldn't figure it out.



Here is a pic of the very busy ramp over at Raytheon in TPA. The ACC basketball tournament was going on that weekend, hence it was a very busy place to be. The North Carolina Tar Heels were staying at our hotel. Its been a while since I've seen so many tall people walking around.



Snapped this one over the Florida panhandle on the way to Baton Rouge.

The Journey Begins

I finally got around to sending off an application to Cathay Pacific. The date was March 6, 2007. I'm going to keep track of how long it takes to get an interview and or get a job there. Cathay would be my number 3 choice as to where I spend my career. Numbers 1 and 2 are UPS and Fed-Ex. I don't really see myself as a passenger pilot, but if I were to fly pax, then Cathay or Southwest would be where I'd want to work.

My main reasons for choosing the companies that I want to work for are 1. Stability in the market place. 2. Quality of life 3. Pay 4. Benefits/Retirement packages. 5. World wide route structures (Except WN)

With the airlines being as fragile as they are, I want to work for companies that are going to be around for the next 50 years. I want my family to have some sort of stability in an otherwise unstable working environment. I'd hate to be a mainline captain who has flown for an airline for 30 years only to come upon retirement and see the airline crumble and your pension disappear. TWA, Eastern, Pan Am and United (pensions) come to mind. There are more failed airlines out there than corrupt politicians (and that a lot). I've come to realize that my retirement is going to be self funded. I cannot rely on a company for a pension nor the government for social security. That being said, my 4 choices for places to work have the best retirement packages and chance for longevity out of all air carriers.

Quality of life has become an important issue to me lately. As of this current moment in space and time, my quality of life is around 10%. My current job has me away from my family 24-25 days a month. I only see Erin and Jack 6 days a month. 6 very short days. My job leaves me with a home life that is almost non-existent. During my 12 day rotations, I am away from home for 2 weeks and only go home for 2 days. This is what drops my QOL to such a low level. If I were a single guy and didn't really care too much about a home life, I wouldn't mind as much. But I want to be home with my family, not sitting in a hotel half way across the country for 12 days in a row. This is by far the worst schedule I will ever work with. Never again will I subject my family to such a crappy schedule and poor home life. But this is the price I have to pay for a decent paycheck and the golden nugget of quick PIC Turbine time.

After paying my dues at my current company, I can expect a large bump in pay. I make enough to get by now, but after a few years with any of the other aforementioned airlines, I'll be making more than enough to get by. I'll make enough to be able to support my family and meet my financial goals. The most important being the ability to pay for Jack's and any other siblings he may have (2 more if it were up to Erin) college educations. If you want an idea of what pilots at Cathay make, check this out.

So while I meet the current requirements for a Second Officer (auto pilot babysitter) position, I'm about 99% sure I wont get an interview until I tack on another 1000 hours and some PIC turbine to my resume'. I'm a lot closer to getting a job with Cathay than I am to Fed-Ex or UPS. They both want 1000 PIC turbine and would want to see some "heavy jet" time, meaning MD-11, DC-10, A300, A330, DC-8 etc. This means another step in the ladder after I get done with my current company. Besides, as with most aviation jobs, its all who you know, not what you know, that will get you an interview. I need to get out and meet some more pilots from these companies.

Of course who's to say in the next few years I wont stumble upon a golden corporate job or something better, but for now, I'm steering my career in the direction of these companies.

A new week.

So last week was a wash. I spent most of my time in hotels and rental cars repositioning from one broken plane to the next. I spent a grand total of 15.5 hours in rental cars driving all over the Midwest and only 5 hours actually flying. Its a pretty rough week when I only fly 1000 miles during the entire week. But I'm optimistically looking forward to this rotation. I'm on my 12 day and paired up with a guy I love flying with. I'm hoping we get a lot of trips and keep pretty busy, but I have little faith in the plane we are flying. Its the relic from the earlier picture I posted of it sitting in front of a museum. It broke down last week and was supposedly fixed over the weekend, but we wont know for sure until we fly it. This plane is the "Pride of the fleet". So we'll see what happens. Currently I'm sitting in a hotel in Tampa waiting patiently for the pager to go off so I can go make some $$.