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.
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.
posted by Windsor at 4:45 AM
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