Last week, I had an interesting situation arise during a flight. This kind of situation would be a perfect
scenario to throw at someone during a P.C or L.O.F.T flight in a
sim. It is real world based and required the crew to work together to figure out the best plan of action. So here we go.
I had the distinct pleasure of having a 4 day trip with a Capt. that just happened to be a check airman for my company. I'm saying that because this guy was one of the best Capt's I've flown with since doing O.E. I learned more during that 4 day trip than I had in the last 3 weeks since being released to the line. He showed me a lot of things that I had either forgotten or never knew to begin with. Thankfully I haven't picked up too many bad habits since leaving training and he had only little suggestions of things I could to better. But any way, back to the story. We were on day 3 of our 4 day, so by then we were comfortable flying with
each other. This was our second leg of the day and we were on our way back to Florida having spent the night there the previous night. The weather was clear and a million and so we did not have an alternate on the release. We picked up the
atis about 150
nm out and heard the winds were out of the northwest and favoring a runway that had no approach to it. Seeing as how the weather was so nice, we planned on doing a visual approach backed up by the FMS. What this means is we were going to program in the visual approach into the FMS and use it as a back up to our own eyes. Basically when you program in a visual, it creates a 5 mile final for you in the FMS and will also give you a 3 degree
glideslope that you can use as a reference in addition to any sort of
papi or
vasi. But
that's it, it has no missed approach points or fixes or holds. It'll give you the 5 mile fix and the runway,
that's it. It was the Capt's leg so he was flying. He had me plug in the visual and so
that's what I did. We were approaching the airport all fat dumb and happy fully expecting to fly another routine visual approach. As soon as we were cleared for the approach and we switched to tower freq.
that's when things started getting real interesting. I checked in with tower and tole them we were on the visual to 31. A
noticeably annoyed tower controller replied with "All runways closed, disabled aircraft blocking the intersection of the runways, expect 30 min delay, go back to approach!" The Capt. and I looked at
each other and had the same expressions on our faces,
awww crap. I flipped
freq's again and checked in. The
controller acknowledged and said " Roger, ***5839 climb and maintain 5000, proceed direct to ***** and hold, expect further clearance at 0240z time now 0200z" First things first, we had to fly the plane. We needed to perform a semi-go around because we were almost fully configured for landing with the gear and some flaps out. So we needed to climb and clean up the plane. Second I needed to get the FMS set up for the hold. (I have done this only once since the
sims and it was an easy show me how to set up a hold question, no pressure) This is where I start sweating a little bit. I can fly the crap out of the plane no problem, I'd give my stick and rudder skills an A, but the FMS, I'd give myself a B. The one downside to getting all set up for the visual is that the FMS drops everything it has in it. In order to get set up for a hold, the fix at which you are holding needs to be in the legs page on your active flight plan. We had the visual plugged in, so there were no fixes in the box at the current time. I had to scramble to get everything programmed in and correct while manning the radios and cleaning up the plane for the Captain. Thankfully I had enough wisdom to ask
atc for a vector and the spelling of the fix, otherwise I really
woulda had my head up my arse. My first attempt to plug the fix into the box
didn't go so hot. I tried to be smarter than the computer and tried to load the approach on which the hold was located, but ended up just having to manually load the fix into the box and had to build the hold the long way. Thankfully the Capt. had some patience and
wasn't in too big of a hurry for me to get it loaded in the box. So the hold got squared away, now we have to figure out what we are going to do. Did we have enough fuel to hold here for 40min?
