Record setting day
Yesterday was one loooong day. It was a record setting day for me with 11.4 hours in the air, 17 hours of duty and 3963 miles flown. For you that follow their 135 regulations, yes I did go over both flight and duty hours for the day, but due to the ability to massage the system, its all legal in the eyes of the feds. Personally I'd like to see more stringent regulations considering flight and duty times, but that's besides the point. The day started at 1am central time when I got a rude awakening call from Captain Scarecrow. He wanted to meet in the lobby exactly when our FAA mandated 10 hours of rest were up so we could head to the airport. Normally I would have been pissed to have been called about work during my rest period, but I wasn't sleeping so it wasn't a big deal. I knew about the trip ahead of time so I was expecting the call. We piled our junk in the van and headed to the airport. Our trip was scheduled to take us from SHV-ABQ-BTR-FLL-MDST-FLL. MDST is Santiago, Dominican Republic. I was pretty excited about this trip when I heard about it due to the fact that it is a great mileage trip and I'd never been to the D.R. before.
The first leg over to ABQ was pretty uneventful due to my new borrowed toy from my dad. I'm using his Garmin 496 with Nexrad radar to pick my way around storms. Its such a powerful tool, I wish I had one for myself. I'll do a post on the 496 at a later time. We got to ABQ around 4:30am and loaded up our cargo for the trip to the D.R. We had to make a slight change to our planned fuel stop on the way to FLL because our charts and approach plates were going to expire, so we headed to our base in the south. We switched out the old charts for the new ones and picked up a life raft. It was at this point that I mentioned to the captain that we should take some cash along for the trip out of the country. I've read plenty of articles in Professional Pilot to know that its always a good idea to take a few thousand dollars in cash anytime you travel outside the country. On the flight to our base, I mentioned several times that we should pick up some cash, but did he listen to me? I'll get to that later.
The trip to FLL was the longest leg I've ever done in a Lear. We did a 2.9 hour leg and flew 1114nm. When we landed, we had exactly 1000lbs in the tanks which was the bare minimum. We topped off our tanks and cleared customs outbound. The next leg to the D.R. was a beautiful flight. I wish I had brought my camera with me this week because I could have taken some great pics. We were up at FL410 and had a great view of the Caribbean and the islands. I didn't get to see a whole lot of the D.R due to the clouds on the flight in, but it looked pretty green. When we got to the airport it was a typical visit, all I saw was the airport, but this is where it gets interesting. As captain Scarecrow was inside doing paperwork, I was out at the plane in charge of refueling. The fuel truck comes over and the driver doesn't speak a word of English and my Spanglish isn't very good either. But what I got from the conversation was the word "Cash". He would not take any of the credit cards we had in the plane and refused to fuel the plane. I hate to say I told you so, but that was a big "I frigging told you so!!" to the captain. It took several hours for the company to finally fax over an appropriate credit card that the fuel truck guy would accept. So after spending a few hours out on the hot ramp all I wanted to do was go back to the states. Our last leg was to be under part 91 regulations, so this is where we can massage the system into letting us fly over our 10 hour of flight time and over our 17 hours of duty. The trip to FLL couldn't have gone quick enough for me. I was dead tired, sweaty, smelly and all I wanted to do was get out of the plane. We finally landed for the last time, cleared customs and headed to the hotel for some much needed rest. All in all, it was a great day.
The first leg over to ABQ was pretty uneventful due to my new borrowed toy from my dad. I'm using his Garmin 496 with Nexrad radar to pick my way around storms. Its such a powerful tool, I wish I had one for myself. I'll do a post on the 496 at a later time. We got to ABQ around 4:30am and loaded up our cargo for the trip to the D.R. We had to make a slight change to our planned fuel stop on the way to FLL because our charts and approach plates were going to expire, so we headed to our base in the south. We switched out the old charts for the new ones and picked up a life raft. It was at this point that I mentioned to the captain that we should take some cash along for the trip out of the country. I've read plenty of articles in Professional Pilot to know that its always a good idea to take a few thousand dollars in cash anytime you travel outside the country. On the flight to our base, I mentioned several times that we should pick up some cash, but did he listen to me? I'll get to that later.
The trip to FLL was the longest leg I've ever done in a Lear. We did a 2.9 hour leg and flew 1114nm. When we landed, we had exactly 1000lbs in the tanks which was the bare minimum. We topped off our tanks and cleared customs outbound. The next leg to the D.R. was a beautiful flight. I wish I had brought my camera with me this week because I could have taken some great pics. We were up at FL410 and had a great view of the Caribbean and the islands. I didn't get to see a whole lot of the D.R due to the clouds on the flight in, but it looked pretty green. When we got to the airport it was a typical visit, all I saw was the airport, but this is where it gets interesting. As captain Scarecrow was inside doing paperwork, I was out at the plane in charge of refueling. The fuel truck comes over and the driver doesn't speak a word of English and my Spanglish isn't very good either. But what I got from the conversation was the word "Cash". He would not take any of the credit cards we had in the plane and refused to fuel the plane. I hate to say I told you so, but that was a big "I frigging told you so!!" to the captain. It took several hours for the company to finally fax over an appropriate credit card that the fuel truck guy would accept. So after spending a few hours out on the hot ramp all I wanted to do was go back to the states. Our last leg was to be under part 91 regulations, so this is where we can massage the system into letting us fly over our 10 hour of flight time and over our 17 hours of duty. The trip to FLL couldn't have gone quick enough for me. I was dead tired, sweaty, smelly and all I wanted to do was get out of the plane. We finally landed for the last time, cleared customs and headed to the hotel for some much needed rest. All in all, it was a great day.
posted by Windsor at 2:04 PM
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