FreightDawginIt

St. Elmo's Fire

2011-03-05T20:54:00.006-06:00

Only a short clip of the awesome light show on our way around a few winter thunderstorms in Illinois. The video does not do it much justice. About 2 seconds into the video, you see a bright flash. That was not caused by lightning, but a burst of static electricity, called St. Elmo's fire. Most of the tiny flashes you can see are originating from the windshield wipers spreading across the windshield.

Few more flying pics

2011-02-23T19:08:00.004-06:00

Niagara Falls From FL300
Obviously its go-home leg. Warp Speed ahead.
Can you find KGVQ?

Smoke Toilet

2011-02-20T15:27:00.003-06:00

There are only a few reasons to rush something when flying. An indication of a fire is one of them. Fire is not something to be taken lightly. It must be treated with the utmost urgency. Nothing raises the hair on the back of my neck like talking about a fire on board an aircraft. Nothing gets my attention in the cockpit faster than an indication that there may be a fire on board. The other day was the first time I've ever had to deal with a potential fire on board my aircraft in flight.

It started out as a normal routine day. We had a late show time of 1130am coming off a long overnight, so for once I was well rested and ready for the day. The plane still had some left over snow on it from the night before, so after boarding up we headed on over to the de-ice bay to get hosed off. The Captain and I remarked to each other that the de-icer was really spraying it on thick. It looked to us like he was trying to empty the truck of fluid on our plane. He was really giving it a bath. (I think we both took notice of this and tucked it away in our short term memory banks for later use.) After spraying we completed our after de-icing checklist and made our way to the runway. After a 10 minute atc delay we took the runway for departure. It was a nice clear day with light winds out of the east, I was looking forward to a nice easy flight. Little did I know that flight would only last 8 minutes in the air.

As we turned on the runway, rechecked our headings an initial altitude, I took control of the aircraft. I brought the thrust levers up, released the brakes and had the Captain set thrust. Everything was normal. We accelerated down the runway, he called "V1, Rotate........V2" and we lifted off. He called "positive rate" I called for the gear to be raised and thats when we started to "smell that smell, oohhhh that smell" to quote some Skynard. It was that acrid, smoldering stink of type 1 de-icing fluid going through our environmental system. Only this time, it was stronger and more concentrated than I have ever smelled it. About a second after it hit our olfactory nerves, thats when the master caution single chime went off. I quickly glanced over at the eicas and saw the Smoke Toilet caution message staring back at me. The very next thought out of my tiny pilot brain was, "shit, thats not good" followed very quickly by my saying"I have the controls and radios, perform the QRH for smoke toilet. From previous experience running this checklist in the sim, I knew at the end of it we were to land at the nearest suitable airport. So while the Captain was busy performing the QRH, I informed the tower we were declaring an emergency and returning to the airport.

It was a busy time in the cockpit with the Captain running the checklist, calling the flight attendant to have her check the lav and pulling circuit breakers while I was flying the plane, talking to atc and setting up the aircraft for an approach back into the airport. Thankfully the weather was nice and made flying the plane an easy task. Since we were in such close proximity to the airport, all I did was make a left turn to put us on a left downwind for the runway we had just departed. Since the Captain was busy with the QRH, I had to plug in the ILS to the FMS, plug in the ILS frequency into the RTU, set the proper V-speeds for our current overweight landing, put the flaps out, the gear down and run the before landing checklist. By the time the Captain caught up with everything, I was already turning a 3 mile final. He double checked everything I had already done and re-completed the before landing checklist. The approach and landing was about as normal as could be in that situation. The landing was a greaser and we taxied off the runway to have the local Crash Fire Rescue (CFR) come take a look at the lav for us.

Now I know what you may be thinking, why are they not stopping on the runway and evacuating the passengers? Theres a fire on the plane!! The flight attendant went back and checked the lav while we were in the air. She reported there was no indication of a fire. So with her verification and the fact that we've heard stories of de-icing fluid causing a smoke toilet message, we decided not to do an evacuation. We did however pull into the de-icing bay and have CFR come on board and inspect the lav for us. They did not find any indication of a fire. So we started up an engine and headed over to the gate. The passengers de-planed and we got on the phone with the company to find out the next step. Little did we know that the next step wouldn't happen for another 5 hours and ended up with the flight being cancelled due to weather in DTW, but thats another story in itself.

A year in photos

2010-12-13T11:47:00.006-06:00

I know its been a long long time since I've posted, but you know the old saying "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all" well, I've been subscribing to that theory. Some of my previous posts were leaning towards the negative and my attitude towards aviation in general was pretty dismal, so I decided to take a break. Here is whats happened in the last 12 months as told thru my cell phone camera. Chronologically, these pics start with the most recent and go back for the last 12 months since I last posted. Every one has its own special meaning and reason for being posted.

Minimums, Minimums

2009-11-28T14:14:00.004-06:00

In the midwest where I normally fly, its pretty rare to have an airport socked in by fog. It happens on occasion, but usually burns off by mid morning. A few weeks ago was the exception to the rule. DTW fogged in around 6am and stayed that way most of the day. In one flight we logged 2 CAT II approaches, one to bare minimums, a missed approach, holding, a near diversion and a low visibility taxi. I have not flown in such foggy weather like this since my freight hauling days.

It all started out with a 4:45am wake up call. This was to be day 2 of a 4 day trip with 2 easy legs. We were going from AVP-DTW-OMA for a 20 hour layover. Everything was very routine and normal until I started my walk around and took a look at the fuel panel. As part of my walk around, I normally open up the fuel control access panel and turn the panel on. This way I can see how much fuel has been loaded on the plane. It struck me as very odd that we were loaded up with nearly 9,000lbs of fuel for a 1:15 minute flight. Typically we wouldnt take much more than 6,000lbs. So I immeadiatly figured we had an alternate. I finished up the walk around after a few minute delay in the -200 F.O slice of heaven and headed up to the cockpit. As I was taking my jacket off and stowing it, the Captain turned around and said "This is going to be an interesting morning" and handed me the flight release. I took a look at the weather in DTW and saw exactly why we had 9,000lbs of fuel, DTW was forcasting light winds, 1/2mi visibilities with fog and a 100ft ceiling. Temporarily from about an hour before we arrived to 2 hours after our arrival time the forecast dropped to 1/4mi visibility and fog. Since the visibility forecasted was less than the published minimums of 1/2mi vis, we needed to add 2 alternate airports and enough fuel to fly to the farthest alternate plus 45min of reserve fuel. Hence the 9,000lbs of fuel on board.

The self loading freight boarded up and we shut the door and pushed back. We were expecting a flow control delay into DTW on the taxi out, but it never came. We lifted off a few minutes later into a black, starless early morning sky. Since it was my leg, during the preflight briefing, I infomed the Captain that I would be flying at long range cruise to conserve fuel. As the airplane leveled off at our cruising altitude of 28,000 ft, I pulled the thrust levers back and set LRC power to bring our fuel flows from around 1250lbs per hour to around 1000lbs. This 500lb reduction in fuel flow would come in handy in about 45 min.

As fast as airplanes are, they are not fast enough to outrun the sunrise. Enroute to DTW, the sun was making its way over the horizon. Thankfully the sun was behind us, because its much easier on the eyes at O'Dark thirty. But with the sunrise comes the fog. We were monitoring the ATIS through our automatic acars updates and in the span of about 20 min, we went from atis L to R. That means the weather at the airport changed 6 times in a very short period of time. The visibilities were fluctuating between 2200 rvr and 800 rvr depending on runway. Pretty soon we get the call from ATC telling everyone that DTW is only accepting Cat II and III aircraft. Thankfully both the aircraft and the crew (us) were Cat II certified. This means that we use a little different technique and procedures to land when the visibilities are less than the standard 1/2 mile vis or 2400 rvr. We are allowed to land with an rvr of 12ooft. For those of you wondering what RVR is, that stands for runway visual range. Since we were able to do a Cat II approach, we continued to DTW while those who were not able to shoot the approach were given holding instructions.

The closer we got to DTW, we could see what the problem was. We could see the buildings of downtown Detroit sticking through the thick layer of fog. Closer to downtown, it was a thin low laying layer of fog and clouds. The closer to the airport you looked, the thicker and more dense the clouds/fog got. As we were on downwind for 3R, we heard an aircraft or two get cleared for the approach. Then as we were about to turn base, the approach controller stated the rvr had dropped to 800ft. This is lower than what we are authorized for therefore we could not commence with the approach. Neither could the other 3 or 4 aircraft in the pattern at that time. Since we were so close to the airport and off any published airways, the approach controller put us into a radar vectored holding pattern near the outer marker. At this point its all asses and elbows in the cockpit because we are very busy flying the aircraft, checking our fuel state, checking weather at our alternates, talking to dispatch and trying to make PA announcements to the passengers to try and keep them in the loop. Granted we had been doing most of these things enroute and had come up with a gameplan in case we couldnt make it in to DTW, but now we needed to start planning on putting it into action in case we infringed on our bingo fuel. We came up with a bingo fuel number a little earlier in the flight. Bingo fuel for us that morning was enough fuel to get from DTW to our alternate, shoot an approach and still land with 2100lbs of gas in the wings. In midstream of getting all this done, approach announced the rvr on 3R had gone back up to 1200ft. So we momentarily stashed the plans and preperations to divert and re-prepared for the approach. We were vectored on to 12 mile final behind company traffic and cleared for the approach. The aircraft in front of us was switched to tower frequncy and shortly thereafter we were as well. It was about this time when the weather decided to throw another wrench into the morning. The aircraft in front of us contacted tower and informed them that they were inside the final approach fix on the ILS approach to 3R. Tower then cleared them to land and informed them the rvr was back down to 800ft. For them, its not too big of a deal because they are still legal to continue the approach and continue to the Decision Height and can "take a look", for us, it creates more of a problem because we cannot legally continue the approach. We were outside the final approach fix, therefore could not continue the approach. By the time we got a word in with tower, we had already proceded past the final approach fix and were heading down the ILS. Tower cleared us to land, but we couldnt, so we informed him that we would have to go around. A few seconds later tower issued missed approach instructions and I poured on the coals and performed a go around manuver. While we were in the process of the go around, we were handed back off to approach. The controller informed us that the rvr to 4R was still at 12oo and asked if we could accept that. We quickly agreed that we could and would like vectors for that approach. Again its all asses and elbows in the cockpit because we just got done performing a missed approach and now we have to set up the plane for an approach to a different runway. While getting vectors for the new runway, we re-loaded the FMS, tuned in the ILS, briefed the approach, re-checked our fuel situation and sent for new landing numbers for the new runway. We accomplished all of the required tasks and started making our way down an ILS for the second time. Approach handed us off to tower and shortly thereafter we were again cleared to land, the current rvr was 1200ft. We had just cleared the final approach fix when we heard tower clear an aircraft for takeoff. Tower then stated the rvr on 4R was 800ft. The Captain and I exchanged looks and both agreed to continue the approach to the decision height. Once you are inside the final approach fix, you are still legal to continue the approach even if the visibility gets reported less than the minimums for the approach. The autopilot was doing a good job of tracking the localizer and glideslope and I was keeping the speed pegged right at our ref speed. At 200 feet to minimums the Captain announced he was going heads up. I slid my thumb over the autopilot disconnect button and started to prepare for go around number 2. We were about 40ft from DH and I was just getting ready to go around when the Captain announced "Runway in sight, my controls" I quickly glanced out and could see the approach lights whizzing by in the fog below. A split second later the runway appeared and just as "Chuck Roberts" called "50" the Captain retarded the thrust levers and started to flare for landing. I could see a few stripes of the runway centerline in front of us, but that was about it. We were cleared to taxi off the runway at taxiway V and contact ground. We crawled down the runway and finally saw the taxiway. We made the turn and told tower we were clear of the runway. We flipped over to ground and told them where we were and what gate we were going to. He cleared us to taxi to the gate. I left the landing lights and strobes on because it was like soup ou there. We couldnt really see a whole lot in front of us. We slowly made our way to the gate, pulled in and shut down. I think both of us were a wee bit sweaty because that was one eventful flight.

Death of an Airline

2009-11-09T12:15:00.002-06:00

While there will be planes in the sky with the Midwest paint job, they will not be operated by any Midwest pilots or flight attendants. As former employee number 46262, I will miss Midwest airlines. Its a shame what has happened to such a great little airline. Here's to you Midwest Pilots, my hats off to you for holding the line and staying strong even though you were going to lose the battle.

Pilot Shortage...huh?? What????

2009-10-17T21:32:00.007-05:00

I'm no mathematician, but even I can see there is the potential for a very large pilot shortage in the next 10 years. All the numbers crunched down below are very rough estimates. I know I've left airlines off of both lists, but I think my numbers are in the ballpark. Granted I've been hearing about pilot shortages for years and admit I bought into the hype, but I think the next shortage will be for real. Here's why.....

At the regional level, where the major airlines get most of their new hires these days, we have roughly 21,500 pilots in the pipeline as Part 121 airline pilots. In recent years, the majors had been on a hiring spree because the age 65 rule had not been passed yet. They were hiring to offset pilots getting forced out at 60. Most of their new hires were from the regional level because the military does not put out the numbers of pilots they used to. The regionals were expanding and getting bigger, while their pilots were moving on to the majors. This created a shortage of pilots at the entry level jobs at regionals. The airlines started out with minimums in the thousands of hours, only to find themselves running out of pilots with thousands of hours, so they dropped their minimums. The minimums continued to drop all the way to as low as it could possibly go, a wet commercial ticket and 200 hours. With the passage of the age 65 rule, the recession, ultra high gas prices of 2008 and the Colgan crash, everything has ground to a halt. The airlines are shrinking, pilots are getting furloughed, capacity is being cut, airframes are being retired faster and the industry has started going backward. Right now, we are in the valley, 2 years ago the industry was on a peak. In 5-7 years, we will again be reaching for a peak, this time twice as high as the one in 2007. This is where the potential for a pilot shortage is going to play a major role in pilot economics.

Regionals -

Air Wis - 700
ASA- 1700
Colgan - 400
Comair - 1450
Compass - 350
Eagle - 2700
Expressjet - 2700
Go Jet - 250
Great Lakes - 325
Horizon - 700
Lynx - 100
Mesa = 1400
Mesaba - 1150
Piedmont - 450
Pinnacle - 1300
PSA - 500
Republic et al - 2000
Skywest - 2800
Trans States - 450
TOTAL - 21,500 Ballpark

Majors -

Air Tran - 1600
Alaska - 1400
American - 11,600
Continental - 4800
Delta/NW - 12,300
Fed Ex - 4800
Southwest - 5900
United - 6400
UPS - 2900
US Air - 5200
TOTAL - 57,000 Give or take a few thousand

As you can see from the numbers above, there are roughly 21,000+ Part 121 regional airline pilots flying today. There are nearly triple that number at the major level. In roughly 2 years, all those OLD pilots that stayed in after turning 60, will start hitting 65. My guess is that roughly 35-40% of the current major airline pilot group will be retiring in the next 10 years. That is a lot of seats to fill. With the recent passage of the new 1500 hour with ATP license as a minimum to become an airline pilot, the new pilots coming through the ranks just got dealt a huge blow. This in turn is going to thin out the ranks of people aspiring to become airline pilots due to the extremely high barrier of entry. I'm guessing the enactment of this new law will cause a significant drop in the number of potential airline pilots. Besides, who in their right mind would drop $100,000 plus on a career that is going to start off paying you less than $20,000 to start. Something is going to have to change. Pilot pay, especially at the regionals, is something that will need to be addressed. The simple fact is that you are not going to attract the best and brightest applicants to this career with the profession being dragged through the mud by airline management. I think the last 10 months have shone a lot of light on the fact that an airline pilot career is not as glamorous as it is portrayed to be. The dark side of the career has reared its ugly head and the masses are slowly starting ot realize that the dream that was to be an airline pilot has evaporated in the last 10 years. Captain Sullenberger has graciously used his fame as a platform to inform the public what the airline career has spiraled into. I think the publics eye's are opening and this will deter future pilots.

So when the majors start hiring again, (5 years is my guess) and they start to drain the regional pool, what pool are the regionals going to hire from? Flight instruction is down across the board, the aviation colleges are going to have a pretty tough sell on the airline career nowadays. Who is going to want to drop the big bucks on an aviation degree only to go out and have to scrounge up 1500 hours after graduation. If you went the college way, you'd be 24-25 before getting your 1500 putting you way behind the career curve. Besides, once all those seats get filled in at the majors, they will stop hiring for quite some time. A high school freshman that is looking into an airline career this very day can look forward to possibly being a regional pilot for life. Its going to be a game of musical chairs for a few years. When the music stops and you are not lucky enough to be at the major of your dreams, good luck getting in.

I don't see the majors ever really having a problem finding pilots. I believe the industry is not done contracting and will only get smaller in the future. This will create less jobs at the majors. But when they do hire, and hire they will, who is going to take that sub $20,000 regional job? Looking back, knowing what I do now, I would have chosen another career. Maby the people looking at this job for a career now are having second thoughts......

I still cant make up my mind

2009-10-10T16:20:00.003-05:00

I love flying. My current job has turned flying into a job, but I'm dumb enough to still love it. Question is, do I love it enough to stick it out for the long term? Right now I'm teetering on the verge of not flying anymore. I still cannot make up my mind as to whether I want to jump ship and head over to ATC or stay the course and keep on flying.

Pros of jumping ship -

Money....and lots of it. A hell of a lot more than I will make as a pilot for at least the next 7-10 years.

Stability-...Lets face it, being a pilot is a very unstable job.

Retirement...Currently I'm in charge of my own retirement. By the time I'm old enough to collect social security, it'll be long gone. At my current employer's rate of a measly 3% match, I'll literally have to fly 1000 hours a year till I'm 65 to have a decent retirement, only to die 2 years after I retire, because I worked till I was 65.

Schedule...A semi-sorta 9-5 where I can be home every night vs. being gone for at least 3 days in a row, mostly 4.

Cons -

Schedule.....I am really getting used to being home with the boys. I have been averaging 14 days off a month for the last few months. Sept and Oct I have had 17 days off. My schedule has been commutable, so I have been spending a lot of time at home lately and have been getting used to it. Do I really want to give that up to work a "9-5"

Travel benefits - with ATC, I will have none. At leas now, Erin, the boys and I have some bennies.

Commuting.... . Hmmmmm. 45min flight on planes that are increasingly full and not on a very good schedule vs. a 2 hour drive each way.......almost a toss up.

I've been weighing the pros and cons for a few months now and still cannot come up with a decision. I like my schedule as it is now and like the travel benefits, but HATE the pay and hate commuting. What should I do with my life for the next 30 years.......thats the $6,000,000 question.

The glass wall

2009-10-05T10:06:00.002-05:00

In the corporate world there is a saying out there that a glass ceiling is in place for women and minorities that keeps them from climbing the corporate ladder past a certain position. While that may be true yet extremely hard to prove, there IS a "Glass Wall" in aviation.

The glass wall I am referring to pertains to pilot hiring. It can sometimes be very difficult to find a corporate aviation job after being an airline pilot. Airline pilots get labeled with the "Airline Stink", that means that once an airline job is on your resume' it will stink it up and drop your application into the circular file (garbage can).

The glass wall didn't get erected due to the pilots having poor skills or lack of ability, it was put into place to protect employers from less than ethical pilots. When the airlines hit rough times, the first thing to go are the "highly paid, under worked" pilots. These out-of-work pilots need jobs, so they scour the corporate companies to find jobs. Those that are lucky enough to find a possible job usually have to be trained in on the plane they they are going to be flying. Training costs the companies money. Lots of money. For example, a type rating on a Gulfstream V can run upwards of $30,000. That's a lot of money to invest in an employee. These pilots would get hired on at their new company, complete their training, fly for a month or two then get recalled by their airline. These less than ethical pilots would then jump ship back to their airline leaving the company in the dust eating all those training costs they just paid for. This scenario has played out many times at many different companies, hence the erecting of the glass wall. Being a furloughed airline pilot is a big black mark on your record in most corporate aviation circles.

I'm beginning to wonder if the airline stink is going to apply to me in the future? I've never ruled out a nice corporate job as a career job, but is being an airline pilot now going to hinder my job prospects in the future? I guess time will tell.

On a side note. Life is good. I'm getting used to being poor, yet having 15-17 days off a month. Commuting is getting tough due to all the cutbacks, but we're managing. Thanks to Obama-hood spreading the wealth around, we bought a house and put the $8000 tax credit to good work paying off the wifes car and replenishing our savings. Its awesome to finally be a home owner. Hopefully soon I'll get to some line flying stories, but the flying has been pretty boring lately.

Lesson Learned

2009-08-10T11:19:00.003-05:00

There is an old saying in aviation. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. When you are at the backside of the learning curve, you do things that more expierenced pilots would not do. Why? Because the expierenced pilot has already done that and realized its not a good idea. But thats how pilots learn. You need to learn your limits, learn what you can and cannot do. That comes with expierence.

I've been a professional pilot since May of 2000. I got my first flying job a week after taking my Commercial/Instrument/Multi checkride. At that point in my career I had zero expierence. The more hours I flew, the more expierence I got. A botched VOR approach with the weather at minumims boosted my level. I only got on the ground by pure luck, I'll have to tell that story at a later time. But the incident stuck in my head as a learning expierence because now I wont do that again. Yesterday we were dodging a few thunderstorms enroute to an outstation when I remembered another learning expierence from a few years ago.

After I got out of college, it was very hard to find a flying job. The industry was still reeling from 9-11 and I barely had 1000 hours. It took a while, but I finally landed a job flying a Navajo and Twin Commander for an aerial photography company. It was at this company that I had several more learning expierences. The one that I was thinking about yesterday had to do with thunderstorm avoidence.

We were in the middle of IL doing our summer work. The forcast was calling for clouds for the next few days, so we decided to pack up our stuff and head back to base. There were scattered t-storms in the area and both planes headed back north. The expierenced pilot flew VFR at 5500ft. My dumbass thought I'd do better with the storms if I flew IFR at 11,000ft and used my onboard radar and ATC to avoid the wx. Somehow I thought I'd be better able to see the storms and keep myself out of trouble. My thinking was flawed. It was on climbout I quickly realized the error of my ways and changed plans. As we were climbing out, I was talking to atc and trying to work out a plan to get around a few cells I was seeing. Due to atc being busy with traffic and my inexpierence with t-storms and avoiding them, I made the mistake of penetrating a thunderstorm cell. Thankfully I only managed to scare the crap out of myself and the photographer and didnt do any damage to the plane or photo equipment, but at the time I was convinced I did.

I saw the clouds as I was flying tword them. I didnt think it was a cell because I didnt see any rain below the clouds and the tops were not that high. I thought it was just going to be a bumpy cloud. A quickly found out how wrong I was. As soon as I entered the cloud, we were immediatly jolted by moderate to severe turbulence, deafening rain (thankfully no hail) and a violent up draft. I entered the cloud at 10,000ft and rapidly got shot up to 12,000. I slowed the airplane, dropped the gear, and just tried to maintain wings level. I told ATC I was in a cell and was going to descend as soon as I exited the storm. Thankfully it was a small cell and I punched out after about 30 seconds. We got bounced around so bad, the laptop that was in the co-pilots seat ended up in my lap and most of the unsecured stuff in the cabin got tossed everywhere. As soon as I saw clear air, I started descending to get out of the rough stuff. I dropped down below the cloud deck and proceeded to fly VFR the rest of the way back to base dodging the cells by avoiding the rain which I could now see.

So, lesson learned. Dont screw with thunderstorms. Listen to more expierenced pilots and ATC is not to be relied upon to keep you out of the rough stuff. Its another one of those dumbass moments that I learned from and will never do again. I'm just glad I moved up the learning curve a lot before I ever got to the airlines. Some of the low time regional guys have no expierence outside of the airlines. Sometimes you need to scare the crap out of yourself to learn. Its a shame that some guys do that with 50+ passengers in the back with them.

Two Screws

2009-08-06T14:08:00.003-05:00

Who woulda thought that 2 little screws could down an aircraft? Turns out, 2 little missing screws really can delay a flight for over an hour.

At my airline, we have several outstations in the system that serve as maintence bases. What that means is that crews will fly the planes in to the outstation, then mechanics will take the planes to the hangars to work on them overnight. While the crew is enjoying an excellent reduced rest overnight in style at the local Clarion or Best Western or whatever low level, cheap hotel there is in the area, the mechanics are up all night working on the aircraft. In the morning, the mechanics bring the plane back to the gate is all is well.....sometimes. Mechanics are not perfect, they make mistakes. Its up to the pilots to catch those mistakes before taking an airplane into the air. I just happened to catch an error that the mechanics made.

As I was putting my flight kit in the fishbowl, I hapened to notice 2 little screws were missing on the panel in front of my oxygen mask. Having come out of maintence, I made a comment to the guy I was flying with that the plane wasnt out back together yet. I then showed him the missing screws. We called the mechanics to come take a look and fully expected them to DMI it (DMI means deferred maintence item). DMI's are usually for non-important items such as scratch's and worn paint. But when the mechanic stuck his head in the cockpit, he let out a noticable "ohhh". He knew that the screws would have to be replaced and could not be deferred. We figured since this was a maintence base, replacement screw's would be readily available. Nope. Not even close. The first attempt to fix the problem resulted in a second trip to the hangar because they brought the wrong screws. The second attepmt was more sucessful, but the damage was already done. By the time we got out of there, we were 1:20 late and most of the pax had missed their connections. Doh!!!!!

Pitter Patter

2009-07-15T15:48:00.002-05:00

There are some things in life that just put a smile on your face. It doesnt matter how bad your day is going, if you think one little thought, it'll put that smile right back on your face. The other morning, I had something happen that's been putting a smile on my face for a few weeks.

The wife and I run our "divorced" schedule as we call it. I typically work 3-4 days trips over the weekend to maximize the time the kids are at home. Erin has an 8-5 job, so she has to get up early in the morning to get to work. With our current living conditions, Micah's crib is in our room. When Erin gets up in the morning to go to work, she will put Micah in bed with me. Usually he is awake and wants to play, but this one particular morning, we both stayed peacefully at sleep. I didnt even know he was in bed with me. It was when Micah woke up and decided it was play time that I had my smile moment. I was dead asleep on my stomach somewhere in dreamland when I felt a little pitter patter on my left shoulder. Micah had woken up and decided to wake me up. He didnt cry, didnt make any noise, just rolled over and woke me up by tapping me on the shoulder. I rolled over and saw a his big smile and bright blue eyes just begging me to wake up and play. I cannot think of a better way to wake up.

Decisions Decisions

2009-07-03T14:31:00.003-05:00

If you are into making snap decisions in a hurry, applying for a federal job is not for you. If you like to take months to make a decision, you have found the right place. The nice thing about taking your time, is you get the chance to think things all the way through before you make a decision. The government being its normal self has given me an additional 6 months to decide if I really want to jump ship on this flying gig and head on over to Air Traffic Control. I was recently hired for a Tracon in an area near where I'm from. They set a tentative class date several months from now, so I have plenty of time to decide if I really want to take the job.

I like flying. I am very good at it. But over the last few months, flying has turned into work. There's the old saying "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life" I think my love of flying is dying off. My company has been draining my enthusiasm for coming to work in equal proportion to my draining bank account. For example, last week I had recurrent training. It cost me money to come to work. I had to commute in a day early, get a hotel for 2 nights, pay for all my own food and pay for 2 days of daycare. I got paid 3.75hrs of pay for each day of 9 hours of work. So that was worth about $180. Hotel was $45, daycare $130, food $30 for a total of $205 for a net loss of $25. Worth it??? Not any more. I know what I'm worth and its not $24 per flight hour.

So, do I stick it out with this crumbling career and declining profession? Or do I jump ship? I'm leaning twords getting out.

Roll the trucks

2009-06-19T07:24:00.005-05:00

One of the nice things about airline flying is that for the most part, there is no "pucker factor". What I mean by that is, there are not a lot of tense moments where you really have to start excercizing your pilot abilities. Flying freight, you have your fair share, part 121 is a lot more tame. Having said that, I can only think of once or twice where there has been some pucker factor at my airline. The other day was one of them.

So there we were about a half hour into our flight from IND to LGA, we had been level in cruise for about 5 minutes, diligently studying our manuals when we get a single chime master caution and the overspeed clacker starts going off. "The manual's" get tossed to the side while we look to see what the problem is. It was a Flaps Fail Caution message. Crap.

The CRJ-200 has been having flap issues for years. This plane is just an overgrown Challenger corporate jet and is actually not very well designed for airline use. One of the glaring issues is with the flaps and flap actuators, they have the tendency to fail quite a bit. Today was my day to have a flaps fail problem. Luckily for us, we got the easiest of the flap failures to have. We were in cruise flight, flaps at zero degrees, had lots of gas and plenty of options available. It could have been much, much worse. Take an Air Canada Jazz flight for example, they had the worst scenerio possible. On approach to an airport in northern Canada, the weather was so bad at the destination airport that they had to go missed. The pilots went to raise the flaps and the flaps failed at 45 degrees down. Now they are in trouble. What they did, caused even more trouble and came very close to crashing. Instead of declaring an emergency and landing back at the original destination, they decided to divert to their alternate airport. The big problem with that is with flaps at 45 degrees down, you are limited to 170kts and your fuel burns are going to be astronomical. Long story short, they landed at their alternate with 500lbs of fuel on board. They absolutly had to land because they did not have enough fuel to go around. They had about 2 minutes of fuel left when they landed. Since this incident, Bombaridier and the FAA have thrown several band aid's at the fix in the form of AD's, but have yet to come up with a working fix.

So back to the flight at hand, we ran the QRH for the flaps fail and between the two of us in the cockpit, we decided the best course of action would be to divert to DTW. We were a little past Cleveland when the caution message went off, so DTW was the best fit for us in terms of distance and suitability. We clued in dispatch as to what was going on and informed him that we were going to divert. We told ATC we had a problem and were going to head to DTW. They asked if we were going to declare and emergency. Had it been clear and a million, we probably would not have, but seeing as how there were storms in the area of DTW and the ceilings were around 800agl, we decided the priority handleing would be beneficial. We made a big u-turn and headed back west to DTW. We descended down early to burn off as much fuel as practical before coming in for a landing. It was the first time I'd ever declared the full emergency. We got cleared direct to the airport as soon as we made the turn. Thats the first time ever that we headed to the field without doing an arrival. After every flight we usually debrief the flight and ask ourselves what we we did right, could have done better, ect. After making the turn to DTW, it was at this point in the flight where I could have done something better. I was the one to make the passenger brief to the pax, I tried to be as clear and concise as possible, but when you are making stuff up on the fly, there are bound to be a few ahhh's and um's in there. I made sure I hit the high points that we were diverting to DTW, the plane was safe, it was a precautionary landing and after landing they will see the fire trucks on the side of the runway, but not to worry because they were there just as a precaution. On the descent in, we had to dodge a few TS cells, but the ride was still good. We got vectored in for a 10 mile final and flew the ILS to 22L into the airport. It was interesting because our ref speed at flaps zero was 165kts, I hadnt done an approach that fast in a long time. The approach and landing were nice and smooth. We used a lot more runway than we normally do, but that was to be expected. The fire trucks followed us down the runway just to be safe in case we smoked our brakes. The plane was fine after landing so we taxied to the gate.

Overall the pucker factor was pretty low, it was basiclly a non-event, but was definatly out of the norm. After a few hours on the ground, we swapped planes, loaded up the passengers and headed back on our trip.

Dealer had an Ace up his sleeve

2009-06-07T14:36:00.002-05:00

Well its official, the dealer had the Ace in the hole. The house wins. I lose. No more left seat for me at this airline. I didnt quite get to the magical 1000 hours, but managed to knock about a third of it out. I am a lot closer to that goal than I was a year ago, so that has to count for something. But due to having such low seniority and having my re-call rights to my seat expire, unless I wanted to be come a regional lifer, the left seat is gone here. So, now what?
1. I can stay at my airline and go bankrupt on FO wages
2. I can leave this career and go find a real job
3. I can try and find another Captain gig somewhere....ha
4. I can put my degree and expierence to work in an industry related field.

OK....here's some of the thoughts about my choices running through my tiny little pilot brain.

1. My schedule right now is about as good as its ever going to get. Since "the screwing" (my displacement) I average 16-18 days off a month with commutable schedules. If I were to be pay protected right now, I'd be the happiest pilot on the planet. My sked is exactly what I got into this job in the first place for. The downside, I cannot afford to pay my bills. I bring home less than $1,200 a month, I shit you not. As great as my sked is, I cannot afford to stay here. Besides, if I dont want to be a regional lifer, I need to get that 1000 jet pic, not gunna happen for a very, very long time at this airline. I know that I'm not going to get hired at the next level as soon as I get those hours, but at least it makes me eligible.
2. Gettin out of the industry gets more appealing by the paycheck. But I have to be honest with myself, a) Who is going to hire a lazy throttle jockey with no real world expierence besides working in a bar b) I know I could never, ever sit behind a desk for 40 hours a week. What the hell could I do? and c) Even after all the B.S, I still love to fly
3. There are a few jobs out there, but the only possibilities so far are not in the United States. I'd have to travel half way around the world just to fly a plane. The money would be good, but if there is one thing I have realized over the few years I've been a Dad, the kids grow up fast and you cant get that time back. While I'm not ruling any possible jobs out, they'd have to be the right one for me to leave.
4. So this brings me to my last possibility and to date, the most promising. Just about a year ago after I had finished upgrade, I was doing a little internet surfing and came across the FAA's hiring website. For shits and giggles I filled out an application to become an air traffic controller. I filled out the app, clicked submit and then completely forgot about it. It wasnt until 6 months later that I was checking my email and noticed a strange email address in the "from" column. I nearly marked it as spam and deleted it, but curiosity got the best of me and I opened the email. Come to find out it was the FAA asking me to come take some sort of entrance exam for ATC down in Chicago. After talking with the wise one (Erin), she convinced me to go take the test just for fun to see how I would do. On a cold wintery sunday night I drove down to our friends house in Chicago so that I could spend the night there and not have to drive all the way from WI on a monday morning. My friend and I managed to have a good time that night drinking beers, eating Mexican and playing Tiger Woods on the playstation till about 2am. When my evil cell phone alarm clock went off at 630am, I was none too pleased. I seriously thought about rolling over and going back to sleep, but decided that since I'd already driven all the way down there, I might as well go take the test. So, I hopped in the car and headed to the hotel where they were adminstering the test. Needless to say I was not in the best of mental states. Even some greasy goodness from McDonalds couldnt shake off the cobwebs from the previous nights fun. I was tired, prolly smelled like stale beer and rotten salsa and had some nasty gut rot that slowly eeked its way out my tail during the course of the day. I felt bad for the girl sitting next to me taking the test, I can only imagine how foul I must have stunk. So after 4.5 tortuous hours of taking this very long test, much to the relief of everyone around me, completed the exam and bolted out the door. A few weeks later after having convinced myself I failed the test, got my results, 93.7, not too shabby for being hung over and having the runs like I had just drank a gallon of Mexican tap water ;)

So that brings me up to where I am now. After having passed the test, submitted where I'd like to work and played the waiting game for the last 6 months, I finally have an interview with the FAA for an ATC position. The only gotcha at this point is that I do not know where I've been selected to work. I will find out at the interview. All I know is that its for a specific state, not a specific facility. I am really only shooting for one specific facitlity. If they happen to want to send me to a po-dunk little tower in the middle of cowchipville, I'm going to pass on the job. I'll know more in a few weeks.

I'm glad I left

2009-05-25T08:26:00.002-05:00

The following is from the NTSB website. Unfortunatly, I could have told you something like this was going to happen. I know the CA, he was in my initial new hire class, sadly I had a feeling about him. The best thing to come out of this incident is that nobody got hurt and the only damage is a little bent metal and hurt feelings.

NTSB Identification: ERA09LA282
Nonscheduled 14 CFR Part 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
Accident occurred Sunday, December 21, 2008 in Jamestown, NY
Aircraft: DASSAULT/SUD FAN JET, registration: N165TW
Injuries: 2 Uninjured.

This is preliminary information, subject to change, and may contain errors. Any errors in this report will be corrected when the final report has been completed.

On December 21, 2008, about 0100 eastern standard time, a Dassault Falcon 20, N165TW, was substantially damaged following a runway excursion after landing on runway 25 at the Chautauqua County/Jamestown Airport (JHW), Jamestown, New York. The airplane was registered to Sierra America Corporation and operated by Ameristar Jet Charter, Inc. The airline transport-rated pilot and commercial-rated co-pilot were not injured. Instrument meteorological conditions prevailed at the time, and an instrument flight rules flight plan was filed for the 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135 cargo flight. The flight originated at Tulsa International Airport (TUL), Tulsa, Oklahoma at 2200 central standard time.

The Director of Operations for Ameristar Jet Charter reported that during the landing roll at JHW, the airplane overran the runway and came to a stop approximately 100 feet into the runway overrun. The co-pilot was the pilot flying during the approach and landing, and control was transferred to the captain when no braking action was observed. During the excursion, the nose gear struck a snow berm at the end of the runway. The crew taxied the airplane to the ramp, where damage to the nose landing gear strut was discovered. Subsequent examination of the airplane by Dassault engineering personnel revealed wrinkling of the fuselage skin and a 0.5-inch separation in the nose gear bin assembly.

The operator reported that a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) was issued by the airport reporting patchy snow and ice on the runways. The operator reported that during the landing, the runway was "ice covered" and that braking action was "nil."

The captain reported in his written statement that the drag chute did not deploy when activated by the co-pilot during the landing roll. The tail cone deployed, however the chute was found partially hanging out of its pod.

The 0055 weather observation for JHW included the following: overcast ceiling at 1,300 feet, surface winds calm, 10 statute miles visibility, temperature 18 degrees Fahrenheit (F), dew point 12 degrees F, and an altimeter setting of 29.68 inches of mercury.

Its been a while

2009-04-04T18:23:00.002-05:00

Its been a while since I've posted anything, I know, I'm a blogging slacker as of late, but it has been hard to find positive things to post about. Being displaced to first officer from Captain has been a tough move. Its a pretty bitter pill to swallow. I suppose I wouldnt mind so much if it was not for the abhorrently low pay. The schedual I have now is actually pretty good, but I had actually gotten used to being an abused reserve Capt. I miss Minny, miss my friends up there, miss having the ability to have Erin and the boys come visit on weekends I was working, miss the paycheck and miss the PIC turbine time. I dont miss 9 hour ready reserve sits and being jerked around by screw scheduling, but I'd take those anyday over being back in the wrong seat.
Money is not the most important thing in life, but when you dont have it, trouble cannot be too far behind. It is this driving factor that has me sending out resume's all over the world. I've been actively looking at jobs from Japan to the Middle East. Its a really tough market out there right now. Just ask any of the thousands of furloughed pilots out there trying to find work.
Making the decision to leave my freight job for this one was a gamble, right now its not paying off. In the game of Blackjack, I have been dealt a 5 with the dealer showing the King of Diamonds. Come the end of May, I'll know if the dealer is hiding an Ace and I'm royally screwed. But with any luck, I'll have found a new job by then.

The Biggest Bus

2009-03-14T18:22:00.002-05:00

Here is a pretty awesome website of the cockpit of the A-380. Not that I ever want to fly one, but two cupholders would be quite awesome ;) Notice how their are 2 tillers, I can see the cock fights in the cockpit already ;)

Test Flight

2009-03-04T13:11:00.002-06:00

Flying at an airline can be pretty boring unless there are weather issues, mechanical issues or passenger issues. When all is right with the world, everything works like a well oiled machine. After a few trips where nothing goes wrong, can get a little repetitious. That's why when I received a call from crew scheduling the other day to do a functional flight, I was more than happy to accept. What my company calls a functional flight, is more commonly called a test flight by the rest of the world.

The plane I was to be taking for the flight had been written up by another Captain for rolling slightly to the left when the flaps were selected to 45 degrees. When the flaps were in the transition between 30 - 45 degrees, it would require 1/4 deflection in the yoke to counteract the roll. The aircraft had supposedly been fixed, twice. A few days earlier, the plane had been on its first test flight to see if the problem was corrected, it wasn't. In big bold letters in the aircraft logbook. TEST FLIGHT UNSAT Aircraft still rolls to the left.

Personally I did not see any problem doing the flight, my FO on the other hand, wasn't so thrilled. He was a low timer and had never done any flying outside of the airlines. I had to explain to him that if he was uncomfortable with the flight, don't do it. Nobody is going to force you to do the flight. Nowhere in our company training did we ever get trained as test pilots. But seeing as how he was sitting ready reserve at the airport, it was either do the flight and get done with work at 1400 or sit there till 2000. I think it was a reluctant decision on his part, but he called screw scheduling and told them he would like to do the flight.

Par for the course at my company is the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing. This flight was a typical snafu. It took about an hour to coordinate with crew scheduling, dispatch and the mechanics before we could get a ride to the plane. We hitched a ride over to the hangar from the terminal with a couple of mechanics in their pimped out van. By pimped out I mean run down, busted windows, filthy torn seats with springs sticking out and a lovely stench that only a mechanic can appreciate. After we showed up to the aircraft, I asked where the flight release was. That was the wrong question to ask, because nobody knew. I was told it was already at the aircraft before we left the terminal. The mechanic at the hanger looked at me like I had two heads. The dispatcher swore up and down he sent it to the hangar. We went round and round about where the release was. Finally, after an hours delay, it finally showed up. I took a look at the release and quickly deduced we really did not want to fly all the way to KRST which is how we were filed. After talking with the mechanic and finding out exactly what he needed from me for the flight, I decided to make my own amendments to the flight plan. I know, I know, heaven forbid a pilot use a little common sense and judgement and make a change. So I got on the phone and talked to the controllers running the show at the airport we were at. We discussed that this was a test flight and what we needed to do. It was decided that the best course of action was to depart, head about 10 miles north of the airfield and get put in line to land again. This would give us ample time to exercise the flaps to see if they were indeed fixed.

After a full briefing with the mechanic that would be riding with us and the FO, we kicked the tires and lit the fires. Seeing as how we did not have any pax on board, it was cold out (-16C) and we didn't have a lot of fuel on board, the aircraft would finally perform like a real jet should. I told the FO that rotation and initial pitch attitude would be radically different than what he was used to. When we were cleared for take off, I poured on the coals and good ole Barbie shed her much deserved nickname if only for a few minutes. Upon hearing "Rotate" Barbie launched herself away from terra firma like she grew a pair. Nearly reminded me of my LearJet days. While I had a wide grin on my face, I took a quick look over at the FO and his eyes were as wide as saucers. Don't think he thought Princess was capable of climbing out at a sustained 20 degrees nose up, but sure nuf, she did. I pitched it for V2+10 and she clawed for altitude like two fat guys fighting over the last twinkie on Earth. 400ft agl passed quickly and I called for "Heading Mode", took the FO until we were nearly at 800ft agl to get the button pushed. Before he knew what hit him I was speeding up and calling for "Flaps Up". As we climbed out ATC vectored us north so we could run our tests. We slowed the aircraft and started putting the flaps back down. Sure enough, when we selected flaps 45, in the transition the aircraft started rolling left. We received a turn from ATC to put us on a downwind leg and repeated the test. Same result, rolled to the left. I looked over my right shoulder at the mechanic and asked if he wanted to try anything else. He couldn't think of anything else we could do so we headed back to the field. The landing was uneventful. Princess has a tendency to float down the runway when she's light, but seeing as how I was not going for any style points on the landing, lets just say I made it a "functional" landing.

After snuffing the fires, I wrote up the aircraft. Test Flight UNSAT!

How bout dem apples?

2009-02-20T07:59:00.002-06:00

Here it is folks. The quick and dirty of what one can expect to make as a regional airline first officer. The pay rates that I am using are from an airline that is one of the lowest paying airlines out there. The company management knows that they have people lined up around the corner to take the job, so they feel no need to "raise the bar". Pilots will eat their own young for a job. Companies know this, therefore any time contract negotiations come around, they will use and abuse the RLA to the fullest extent possible to keep wages and work rules down. Quite honestly, I completly understand. Why pay your employees more and give them better work rules when they consistantly give you top performance anyway? It doesnt make any sense to reward your employees for a job well done, when you can keep costs down and drag out negotiotions for years on end. I think I heard somewhere that the average legnth of contract negotiations was somewhere around 3-4 years. Think about it, thats 3-4 years a company can continue to operate at old payrates, old work rules, old cost structure with basically no reprecussions. The beatings will continue until morale improves!!!!! But I digress.

Back to the topic at hand, the reality of First Officer pay at airline X. The numbers are ugly folks. No ifs, ands or buts about it. I am going to completely dispell any rumors that pilots make a lot of money being airline pilots at regionals. Especially at airline X.
2nd year First officer pay rate = $24 an hour. Sounds like a pretty good deal huh? You may think that if you are working a normal 9-5 40 hour a week job, but pilots dont get paid like that. Far from it in fact. We typically get paid a monthly rate of hours. For airline X, its 75 hours PER MONTH! So instead of making $3840 a month, Mr. Poor FO would only make $1800. Not good. And thats not even factoring ineverything that gets taken out of a paycheck. Let us dissect this monster paycheck even further.

Ok, as with a lot of companies, airline X is on a 2 week pay schedule. So if we take that $1800 and chop it in 2, we are now looking at a $900 paycheck every two weeks. Ok, not bad. Not great, but not bad. But hold on just a second, Uncle Sam hasnt gotten his cut. Uh, oh.... We now need to start chopping away at that $900. We need to pay, Federal, Medicaid, Soc security, and State income tax. Lets call it15% in taxes. So we take our $900, chop away $135 and we get $765. I suppose that could be a liveable wage, but thats not the only thing to come out of a paycheck. For arguments sake, lets say you need health insurance. Thats gunna cost ya and arm and a leg, HA! That'll set you back an additional $80 a paycheck. Now we are looking at bringing home $675. But oh wait, theres more. Over the last several years, airline pensions have been utterly decimated. Bye Bye retirement. For the younger folks out there, I got bad news for ya, your retirement nest egg is all on you. So this means our thrifty pilot is going to need to add to a 401K. Lets say he really wants to lead a life of luxery when he retires and puts 10% into his 401K. Thats another $90 gone. Now we are sitting at a whopping $585. Uh oh, thats pretty friggin ugly. Now I could keep going, but I'll let the bleeding stop there.

If you take some poor schmuck FO that is sitting reserve and never breaks guarantee, he is looking at bringing home $1170 a month or $14,040 a YEAR!!!! OUCH!!!!!! Better stock up on Ramen noodles by the case, live at home with the parents and have a bicycle as your only mode of transportation because you cant afford much else. For a single person with no responsibilities, I suppose you could live on that, but how can you expect to support a family on wages like that. I cant.

Granted the numbers used in this scenereo are from airline X and most other regionals have 2nd yearpay rates in the $30+ range, this is just to illustrate how ugly things can get. Also, I did not add in per diem into the numbers. I dont count it as part of a salary. That is money provided to defray costs associated with being away from home. Thats money being used, not being made, so I dont include it.

I tried my best to avoid first and second year FO pay. I passed on going to the regionals years ago because freight paid better. I knew there were risks involved in coming to a company as a "street" Captain. I made my choice and now I have to live with it. Its too bad the past year or so in the indstry has been so horrendus because the choices I have made are forcing me to rethink my career path. Even though the wife has a decent paying, stable job, we will have a really hard time making ends meet with me on FO pay. Rent, daycare, car payment, student loans, cell phones, utilities, 529 plans for the boys, food, gas, insurance and medical expenses are going to chew up most of what we will bring home. So, I'm out. Its been fun, but unless something drastic happens at my company in the next few months and I somehow get back in the left seat, I gotta work on an exit plan. I have something brewing, but dont want to talk about it just yet. We'll just have to see what happens, but I can promise you one thing, if by summer I am not a Captain again, I may just have to change the title of my blog. I am not going to wait 5 years to upgrade again at a crappy regional, hope and pray I get my 1000 hours of turbine PIC, just to make me eligible for the next level only to get there (if i ever get there) just to be tossed out to the street in 10 years because the economy hits another rough patch. This career is not a dream anymore. Its just a job. The days of making lots of money, having lots of time off, seeing the world and having a nice fat pension are OVER, never to return! There are many factors that have seen to that (pilots included) So for those of you reading this and are on the outside of the profession looking in wishing you were on the inside, dont say you havent been warned. Once you get in, its not the profession you may think it is. Flying, its like crack for smart people.
How do you like them apples?

Colgan Tragedy

2009-02-13T19:35:00.003-06:00

As many of you have heard, there was a fatal crash of Colgan flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY. Everyone aboard the plane -- including 45 passengers, a crew of 4, a pilot jumpseating home -- and one person in a house destroyed by the plane were killed. It is a tragic accident and my thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of all involved. ALPA, the Air Line Pilots Assocication, my pilot Union, has an emergency relief fund set up for just such occasions. Here is the link for those that are interested. Alpa Relief Fund

As is typical with most crashes, mainstream media has NO CLUE what it is like to be an airline pilot. Please take what you hear and see from television desk jockey's with a grain of salt. Leave the conclusions up to the NTSB

Displacement

2009-01-24T11:27:00.002-06:00

*** Disclaimer, this is going to be a very negative post, read at your own risk***

This industry has been taken a beating for the last few years. 2008 in particular. There have been lots of changes going on and hardly any of them good. The merger between Big D and Big Red has finally started to trickle down to my little pond. As a result, my company now thinks they are overstaffed, therefore in order to save money they are taking 30 Captains and displacing them to First Officer. This includes yours truly.

While I knew there were risks involved with making a switch to an airline, I certainly did not forsee a merger, nor $130 a barrel of oil, nor the collapse of the housing market nor the downfall of Wall St nor the passing of the God Awful age 65 Rule. All of these things combined spelled doom for my airline career. While I consider myself lucky to have gotten hired and progressed to Captain in such a short time, I am still bitter about having to return to the right seat. If this displacement lasts until June and I do not have my seat back, that will essentially be the end of my flying career as I know it now. The displacement is effective Mar. 2 I have 90 days from the effective date to have recall rights to my seat. If the 90 days pass and I am not back in the drivers seat, I can kiss Captain good-bye permanently because then upgrades will be based strictly on seniority. And seeing as how I am very low on the seniority list (1050 out of 1300) it will be years before I see the left seat again at my current company. I am simply not going to endure first officer pay for the next 5 years. Its not fair to me, my wife or my kids to have to put up with such a financial burdon and to have me gone 20 days a month. At least as a Captain, we can enjoy a decent paycheck to make up for the fact I am gone a lot. But its simply not worth it to make welfare wages. Quite honestly, I'd rather be furloughed now and collect unemployment than to go back to F.O wages. I did the math, I'd make more on unemployment than I will flying 95 hours a month as an F.O. If I am going to be spending so much time away from my family, I want to be fairly compensated for it. Getting a $400 paycheck on the first of the month is a slap in the face and not nearly what I am worth.

A few years ago, I could still see the light at the end of the tunnel. Landing a dream job at either UPS or FedEx has been a goal as long as I can remember, but now, even those dream jobs are not looking so hot. As I type this, both companies are considering furloughs. I had once thought those companies were both relativly safe bets for career stability, maby not so much anymore. The profession is continuing its downfall. Some of the great perks such as non-rev pass travel is almost not worth it anymore. Companies are starting to charge their employees more and more to use the pass bennies. On some carriers, its amlost easier to just buy a ticket. As a group, pilots are working more and making less. Its been going that way since 9-11. I do not see a turn around coming. Personally I see work rules getting worse, pay getting smaller and fringe benefits that once were great, dissappearing all together. This once great career is being constantly eroded.

Take what I have written with a grain of salt. I am in a pissy mood over the displacement and am venting. But how would you feel if you went from making $50K to less than $20K for no real good reason other than some beancounter thought it could save a few dollars? I, like a lot of other furloughed/downgraded/ laid off pilots have families and dreams. My dreams of buying a house, financing my kids college and living a comfortable life are all up in smoke for a while because of this very, very unstable career I have chosen. Therefore, I have a foot out the door. I am working on getting another job outside of flying. If all goes well, I can leave professional flying and being gone for 20 days a month behind me and do what I should have done all along, fly for fun, not for a career.

Micah B.

2009-01-19T13:49:00.003-06:00

Taking nearly a month off of work was just what the Dr. ordered. Granted not getting paid for a few weeks hurt the old pocket book, but the time with the family was well worth every penny of lost pay. While I was home, I had the chance to revert back to my normal scruffy self. It was glorious not to have to shave!! Here are some pics of the new baby. Beware, on my days off I go outta my way not to look like an airline pilot, hence the nice beard ;)

X-mas blog

2008-12-25T01:54:00.002-06:00

Happy holiday season to all my readers. Blogging has been slow lately, but so has the flying. 5.5 hours is all I will fly this month as I am thoroughly enjoying my time off at home away from work. Thanks to Micah and the federal government, the holiday season will be at home this year. :) !!!!

As with most companies out there, mine does not believe in paternity leave. Well, at least any sort of paid leave. In order to spend any time at home with the family after the baby arrived, I had to take an un-paid leave of abscense. It was either take FMLA or sit 9 hours of ready reserve for most of December including X-mas eve, X-mas day and New Years eve. To me it was a no-brainer. Family is infinatly more important than work. You cant put a price on being home with the family for the entire holiday season. Personally, I cannot wait to see Jack's face in the morning when he see's all the loot Santa brought. It will be awesome!!

Happy holidays to everyone! (especially to those serving in the military overseas and anyone who has to work and be away from their families)

Early arrival

2008-12-11T21:52:00.002-06:00

Sometimes the best laid plans just don't work out the way you planned them. Yet its those times when you just have to "wing it" that make the best memories. Despite our best efforts to plan the birth of the baby, Micah had his own plan. Here is the new arrival with his big brother. Micah Brian was born at 22:59 on Monday. He weighed in at 8lbs 13oz and was 21in long. Both baby and mother are doing great and Jack is being a wonderful big brother.

Green needles

2008-11-30T14:10:00.003-06:00

Over the past year and a half, I have been spoiled. The Barbie jet is an easy plane to fly and the FMS practically does everything for you. It takes care of our routing, flight planning, weight and balance numbers, company communications, performance numbers, fuel planning and a host of other things. Mental fuel calculations are a thing of the past. To check the fuel status all that needs to be done is press a button. A screen will pop up on the MFD that gives you everything you wanted to know about your fuel situation. How much you are burning, how much you have used, how much you will use to your next checkpoint, how much to destination, how much to your alternate, how much you have left over until you hit reserve fuel. Lets say that the alternate is not looking good, it will calculate your fuel burn from your destination to a new alternate. Anything you need to know can be calculated with a few button pushes. When the FMS is broken, a lot of things are lost.

It just so happened that recently I flew a plane without the FMS and ACARS (our way of communicating with the company through text messages). Lets just say those flights were busy. We call those flights Green Needle flights because without the added benefit of the FMS and its GPS navigation, we basically have the same navigational capabilities as an IFR Certified Cessna 152. On our display screens, any time we are using VHF navigation, the needles we see are green, hence the nickname of a Green Needle flight. All we have to navigate with is dual VHF Navs. My Dads Bonanza with his Garmin 430 has better navigational capabilities. Having no FMS means we do not have the ability to go direct to anything except VOR's that are in range. In order to navigate, we need to do it the old fashioned way by getting out our paper maps and doing some good old knob twisting to stay on course. Our entire route needs to be checked against the map to see that we can do it. We pretty much need to stay on the Jet Routes because the service volumes of the VORs need to be taken in to account in case we are doing any off route navigation. Either that or ATC needs to treat us like a DC-9 and give us vectors everywhere. This morning I happened to catch a mistake by our dispatcher. The way he had us filed, we could not comply with his routing. The route started off using a Jet Route, but over eastern PA, it started taking us off the airway and going intersection to intersection. With an FMS, no problem, but without one, we couldn't do it. So I had to call dispatch to have them re-file us along some airways. Several times during each flight ATC would clear us direct to a fix that we were unable to go directly to. We would just have to tell them unable, or have them vector us. In all actuality, it was kind of refreshing to fly the old fashioned way. It reminded me of my single pilot 135 freight days when I had to do everything myself. Everything from getting atis over the radio to using maps to navigate. Having a glass cockpit really spoils you.

Working for my money

2008-10-30T20:11:00.006-05:00

The last few months have been relatively quiet on the flying front. Last month we received a new CFM (company flight manual) and checklist (that took several trips to get used to). Other than that, most of the trips I've flown have been pretty cut and dry easy trips, until recently. My last 3 day trip was the longest 3 day I've ever flown. Funny thing is, it was basically a 2 day trip because we only flew 1 leg on day 1.

Day 2 was anything but fun. We were scheduled for 4 legs and 6:33 of flying time, by the time the day was over, we blocked over 8 hours. How might we block over an hour of extra time whilst not having any atc delays or diversions? By doing 3 aborted takeoffs and 2 gate returns of course!!

The day started out a good one. We had an 11:30am show, which allowed us to sleep in and catch a few extra zzzz's. The plane was supposed to be a good one. Nothing MEL'd (broken) and no major write ups in the past week or so. Looking back through the logbooks, the plane looked like a good one. So we loaded up the passengers and headed off on our merry way to our base in the south. The taxi out was normal, all checklists were completed prior to our crossing the hold short line of the runway. There was nothing out of the ordinary that gave us any clue that we would not make it to our base in the south for a very long time.

We were cleared for take off and I proceeded to taxi the plane on to the runway. As it was the FO's leg, after lining up the aircraft with the centerline, I transferred control to him and he asked if I was ready to go. I said "yup, let's roll" and with that, he started to bring up the thrust levers and released the brakes. We started rolling down the runway as the FO continued to advance the levers, he then called for me to "set thrust", it was right about this time that things started to unravel. As I reached over to grab the thrust levers, we first heard the single chime of a master caution followed by a caution message for IDG 1 DISC. I knew we had not reached the magical 80kts yet, therefore I aborted the takeoff. I said "Abort, I have the controls!" and preceded to abort the takeoff by bringing the thrust levers to idle, applying a little bit of reverse thrust and toe brakes. We were not going more than 50-60 kts when the process was started and we had a lot of runway in front of us, so I didn't slam on the brakes. As we were slowing down, the caution message changed from IDG 1 DISC to GEN 1 Off. While I was slowing the aircraft, the FO was on the radio telling tower that we were aborting takeoff. Tower told us to take any left turn and asked what the problem was and if we were going to try again. The FO looked over at me with the deer in the headlights look, so I got on the radio and told tower there was an indication problem and we would be stopping on the taxiway to run some checklists and to stand by. (In the FO's defense, he was a newbie with only a few hundred hours of flying time. I had flown with him in august on his second trip off OE and he has improved a lot since then, but is still very green) We ran the QRH procedure for rejected take off and I made a quick PA to the passengers that we had an indication problem, we were going to contact company mechanics and I would get back to them in a few minutes. I called the company and informed our dispatcher what had happened and asked to talk to maintenance. A gruff sounding mechanic came on the line and I explained to him what happened. I made sure he knew the the IDG DISC came on before the GEN 1 Off and that I ran the QRH for GEN 1 Off and that it called for me to reset the generator. As I reset GEN 1, the caution message disappeared. He then said the plane should be fine and we could try again. (At this point, the little man in my head was telling me that this did not solve the problem and I should have listened to him.) So after a quick PA to the pax that the indication problem was solved and we were going to try again, we proceeded to head back to the end of the runway for departure.

After completing our checklists again, we took the runway for attempt number 2. This time, I had a sneaking suspicion that we were going to get the message so I was prepared for it when it came. And just as expected, right about the time the engine reached take off thrust, DING!, GEN 1 Off caution message. "Abort, I have the controls" I said. This time as we taxied off the runway, I had the FO tell tower we were returning to the gate. This time I knew the plane was broke broke and needed to have a mechanic come take a look. As we pulled in to the gate, a slightly rattled gate agent came on board and headed my way with a barrage of questions. We decided the best course of action would be to have the pax deplane because the fix was not going to be a quick one. It was at this point that I pulled out the MEL book and took a close look at the procedures for MEL'ing the Generator and the IDG. Turns out that there were 2 separate MEL procedures. One for the generator and one for the IDG. As the mechanic finally made his way to the plane, I explained to him was the problem was. I explicitly told him we had the IDG caution message first, then the GEN 1 off. He took a look at the books, the plane and called the company mechanics on the phone. When he came back to the cockpit, he informed me that the company mechanics thought it was a generator problem and he was going to do the procedure to MEL just the generator. Those guys are the experts, so I went along with what they were telling me even though the little man in my head was telling me this wasn't going to fix the problem. The mechanic had a 50/50 shot at picking the correct MEL to use and I was guessing the opposite of what he was picking.

So the mechanic did his thing, and we loaded up the passengers and pro ceded to gather the mountain of paperwork that we needed to get back out again. Our flight plan with ATC had expired, so we needed to get our dispatcher to send us a new release as well as re-file our flight plan. After checking the paperwork and making sure that we were going to be in compliance with all the requirements of the MEL, we headed back out the the runway for attempt number 3 at leaving.

All I really need to say about aborted take off number 3 is that is was almost routine at this point. I'm sure if anyone ever listened to the CVR for the 3rd abort, they would have heard some "choice" words aimed at the airplane that would have looked a lot like this on a NTSB transcript $%&#!! #### plane!! Piece of @#$%*. &&##$$@!!! Needless to say, I was pissed. I can only imagine what the 50 people sitting behind me were thinking. As we pulled into the gate, again, I could see the mechanic standing on the jetbridge. I really wanted to say, I told you so, but kept my mouth shut. As he came on board the first words out of his mouth was "I supposed I should have deferred the IDG huh?" That statement pretty much summed up my thoughts at the moment.

So finally, after 3 aborted takeoffs, 2 gate returns and several hours behind schedule, we finally lifted off the runway and continued on our trip.

Odd behavior

2008-10-16T20:41:00.002-05:00

One of the nice things about being based in a place that I like is that Erin and Jack can come visit when I'm working. Thanks to an old rugby teammate, I have a sweet deal worked out for a crash pad and there is plenty of room for the whole family to come for a visit. It makes being gone for 5 days at a time much more tolerable. We have done several of these "weekends" since being based here and they are fun for all. It was on the return trip that I noticed the reason for this blog.

Erin and Jack had to catch a 5:00 flight back home. I had to fly that night, so I brought them to the airport and hung out with them until they had to get on the plane. Turns out that the 5:00 flight was delayed for an hour, so to kill the time with our restless 3 year old, we went to the playground that is on the concourse. This particular playground has a large mock up of an airplane. It has stairs that lead up to a cockpit area that the kids can play in, a cargo area and stubby wings with little engines on them. Jack loves the thing. It keeps his active little mind going crazy with all sorts of fantasy's. What is remarkable about this, it that he normally pretends to be daddy and fly the plane. He likes to start the engines, pretend to take off, play ATC, fly the plane and have little kid fun. Thats what I'd expect from normal kids playing. What Erin pointed out to me while we were watching Jack play was anything but normal.

While Jack was up in the "atc" tower, Erin leaned over and asked if I was paying attention to several of the other kids at the playground. Normally I'm pretty oblivious to things so it was not out of the norm to have her point something out. What I noticed was confusing, disturbing and odd. There were 2 brothers, probably about 8 and 5 that were pretending to blow up the airplane and parachute out. As I watched these kids play, numerous bells and whistles were going off in my head. In this day and age, you would think that parents would tell their kids that pretending to blow up airplanes while you are in an airport is a bad thing. I for sure would have had words with Jack if I had saw him behaving that way. I know kids will be kids, but that sort of behavior is not something that they come up with on their own. They had to learn it from somewhere.

I found myself in a moral dilemma. Here I am, in full uniform, watching some grossly inappropriate behavior by some little kids. Do I say something to their parents? Do I possibly say something to the authorities? What was making this decision especially difficult was the fact that these kids were of middle eastern descent. Would I have been having these thoughts if they were white? Are these just kids being kids or is there something more sinister going on here? In the end, I did nothing. But I'm sure I wouldn't be the only person to raise an eyebrow at some kids pretending to blow up a plane in an airport.

Green on Green on Green

2008-09-13T18:20:00.003-05:00

*this blog was started several weeks ago. I've been a blogging slacker as of lately.

Not a whole lot has been happening on my end over the past few weeks. Recent cutbacks in our total block hours has left us with a plethora of reserve captains, therefore flying has been relativly slow around here. As of today, I have a whopping 14 hours for the month and havent flown since the 3rd. So while sitting some awesome ready reserve, I happened to run into an FO that I flew with a few weeks ago. It remeided me of our trip which was an eye opening expirence for me.

Green on green is a term used when you have 2 pilots that are new to an aircraft and/or seat. 100 hours in the aircraft is the benchmark that is used to determine the green status. On this particular trip, I was green as a Captain and this was the very first trip off of O.E for the First Officer and the Flight attendant. So on this trip, we were a green on green on green crew.

I'll start off by saying that the trip went very smooth with no problems what so ever. For those that read this blog that are passengers, green on green is not a bad thing. It usually just means more work for the captain because we have to pay extra special attention to what the F.O is doing as well as teaching and helping in addition to normal captain duties. This was a stark contrast from my first trip that had me paired up with an expierenced F.O that had more hours in the CRJ than I did.

The Green trip had us flying from MEM to CLE. The autopilot was deferred, so that added more to our workload, plus CLE has a lot of construction going on, which means there are a lot of notams for closed taxiways, runways and non standard markings. Moving the plane on the ground in CLE takes extra special care because of the construction. I flew the first leg and used my F.O as the autopilot once we were in cruise. He was happy to be flying and did a great job. The flight was uneventful right up until we started preparing for the approach. I took the controls and had the F.O set the plane up for our arrival. The weather was clear and a million so we were planning on doing a visual approach backed up by the ILS. I stated I wanted to set up for 6L because the atis was stating that was the landing runway. The F.O proceded to get the FMS, radios and V-speeds set up. This is where he made a few simple mistakes that were caught with a little oversight. No big deal, just a few clicks of the speed setting knob and everything was right with the world. Our approach and landing were normal, but once we got on the ground, things started to unravel a little bit. After landing, the F.O has a lot of work to do. They need to complete their after landing flow which includes raising the flaps, turning off the landing lights and strobes, starting the APU, calling ground to get taxi instructions and calling ops. For a new F.O, doing all this, plus getting complicated taxi instructions at an airport they have never been to, can be a little overwhelming. That turned out to be the case here. After several bungled attempts to read back our taxi clearance, I had to step in and do it for him. He was close, but you need to be very precise especially when reading back hold short clearances. I made sure to taxi slow so that he could keep up with everything that was going on and could keep his situational awareness. We made it over to the gate with no problems and proceded to shut down the plane and head to the hotel.

The next day was just about the reverse of the previous flight in. On our taxi out, I needed to get on the radios again to read back some of our taxi instructions. He proceded to fly the plane very well and made a nice approach and landing back in MEM. I definatly got to learn a lot on that trip. It opened my eyes to the fact that not all F.O's are created equally. Some are going to need a little more oversight than others. But thats my job now. To oversee that everything related to my aircraft works as safely and efficiently as possible.

National seniority list.

2008-08-19T16:37:00.003-05:00

In the airline industry, our lives revolve around seniority. Everything is based on they seniority system. Schedules, pay, vacations, QOL (quality of life), furlough order and aircraft you fly are the bulk of what your seniority number (SEN #) governs. At every airline, you are given a SEN # the day you are hired. Your life then revolves around that number for your entire career at that airline. The one glaring issue I see with this system is that when you leave your airline for "greener" pastures, you have to start over again from ground zero. Or in the case of pilots from now defunct airlines, ATA, Skyway, Champion, Aloha, just to name a few, they had built up significant careers, paid their dues and had gotten used to a certain lifestyle. Now these pilots are forced to start over from the bottom. Why? Because of the seniority system currently in use. A national seniority list could have mitigated this major down slide.
The second glaring issue that pilots are facing today is the division within the ranks. ALPA is our national pilots union, yet they do not operate like a national union. We are divided into separate pilot groups depending on who we work for. While ALPA may represent my carrier, they also represent carriers that are in direct competition with my carrier. It creates a rift between pilot groups. It used to be in years past that ALPA would be representing one pilot group (group A) in contract negotiations, they would be trying to help group A, but in their efforts, they would be hurting another pilot group (group B). Then when it came time for group B to negotiate, the company would say "group A agreed to this, therefore you need to agree to this". And so the race to the bottom started. A national seniority list could have mitigated this down slide.
While I respect ALPA for all they have done over the years, times have changed. The industry has changed. The single carrier seniority system is archaic and needs to change. If we pilots are to do anything to take back our profession, we need to change how things are currently run. I want to make an example of how our current system fails the pilots. I'm going to use NASCAR as an example. In the world of NASCAR, the drivers are professional (pilots). They have worked hard to build their experience driving in the lower echelons of racing and eventually worked their way up to the big show. Now that they have made the big show, they sign a contract to drive for specific race teams (airlines). They drive for this team for the required amount of time and at the end of the contract, they can either be re-signed or leave for another team. For example, Dale Jr recently completed a contract and then decided to switch teams. Now when he did this, he didn't have to go back to racing go-carts, he didn't go back to square 1, no, he slid right into the same position he vacated, only at a different company.
Now lets plug an airline pilot into that equation. Lets say a 20 year 767 captain for American who lives in Chicago wants to move to Atlanta, yet not commute. Delta is an airline based in Atlanta, they also fly 767's. In today's world of single carrier seniority, if that AA captain were to leave AA for DAL, he would go back to square 1 as a brand spanking new FO. In today's system, that kind of move is virtually impossible. Nobody in their right mind would make that kind of move. A national seniority list can mitigate that kind of down slide.
Now lets take that same pilot and put him on a national seniority list. Because he has been on the list for 20 years, all he would have to do is take a look at where he would be over on the Delta seniority list and based on his seniority and where he would sit, he can decide if a lateral move is feasible.
A national list would also unify the pilot groups we currently have. Imagine a union so strong and united that if even the smallest of regional carriers goes on strike, every single solitary plane flown by pilots on that list is grounded. Everyone from United and UPS all the way down to Great Lakes and Colgan, stopped flying. The days of companies dragging their feet for years on end during contract negotiations would be over. Companies would be forced to maintain a certain status quo or risk losing pilots to another company. The divide and conquer tactic now used by management would get tossed right out on the street. No more "well, if you take this concession, we will get brand new 777's, if you don't, they will go to our competition". Lateral moves within the industry would now be available. Mergers and the associated seniority list disasters would be a thing of the past. Stapling of pilot lists would never happen again. I know its just a pipe dream. I'm sure it'll never happen, but it would be nice.

Reserve

2008-08-12T11:41:00.003-05:00

A little over a year ago when the decision was made to leave my former company, I had a simple understanding of what my life was going to be like at the airline. It was understood that if I became a Captain quickly, in all reality, I would not hold a line for a very long time. This will be the case for my entire stay at my current airline. I will never hold a line. That being said, I knew what I was getting into before I left, so I cannot complain about it.

Sitting reserve here at the airline is still leaps and bounds better than at my former company. For the most part, trips are put into my schedule ahead of time. Only once has crew scheduling called and given me a 90 minute show time. Due to the ability to commute, it is very rare that I need to commute in a day early or out a day late. I am even able to modify my reserve periods so that I can get ready reserve on the first day of a rotation and a.m reserve on the last day. Every once in a while I'll get lucky and get a hi-speed the day before my last day of the rotation. This way, I get an extra day off because I can catch the morning flight home and spend an extra day at home. Anytime I can spend more time at home is a mega bonus.

Jungle flying continued...

2008-07-28T18:06:00.004-05:00

So we push back from the gate about 2 and a half hours after our original push time. Turns out, this will be a good thing and a bad thing. The line of storms I had mentioned earlier had really started started forming into a solid line. There were a few gaps between MSP and DSM, but they were closing by the minute. The good thing about pushing so late is that the later DSM flight actually left about 5 minutes before we did. We ended up following them in their attempt to find a gap to fly thru. With out having them as guinea pigs, I would have been pioneering my way through rough territory solo. Not that its a bad thing, but having someone lead the way, really helps. So with the help of our on board radar and the other DSM flight leading the way, we picked our way thru the line of storms. It was a rough ride, but nothing too bad. As we broke out of the clouds around 8,000 ft, we could see the airport which was about 25 miles away. At this point it was going to be a race to the field between us and the thunderstorm. This was also the point where I had a discussion with the check airman about what are we going to do if we cant land in DSM. We did not have an alternate filed because the ceilings and visibilities did not call for one, so I needed to think quickly to give ourselves an out in case we didn't beat the storm. I am semi familiar with the layout of Iowa and the airports we fly to. I knew approximately where the storm was and what airports where ahead of the weather. I quickly picked Cedar Rapids as our "go to" airport in case we didn't make DSM.

As we were preparing for the approach into DSM, the winds dramatically shifted. We were expecting to land on runway 23, but the winds were now favoring 31. While we were busy preparing for the runway change in the cockpit, the controllers were now busy trying to vector traffic for the new runway. We were approaching from the southwest, while another regional jet was approaching from the northeast. We were given a right turn to a heading of 270 to swing us around for the new runway. At the same time the other regional jet was given a heading to join the final from the northeast. The next thing I hear on the radio is "Company callsign, 5789 make an IMMEDIATE left turn to heading 200 for traffic!!" That's all I needed to hear, I clicked the auto pilot off and made a freight dog style turn to the new heading. It wasn't a hard turn, just a little too quick for the check airman's taste. He had his head down while he was preparing the FMS, so he wasn't prepared for the abrupt turn. It spooked him. (later, after all the dust settled for the day we asked the flight attendant if the passengers got scared when I made the turn. She said nobody really noticed. They were already getting beat up from the turbulence and vectors, so when I made the hard turn, nobody really cared.) So now we need to do a 360 to let the other jet do their approach first. All the while the storm is approaching the field. As we make our turn inbound, we could see the storm sitting only a few miles north of the airport. The tower cleared us to land and gave us the updated winds, 290-330 at 30 gusting to 45, nice. Right after we dropped the gear and put in our final notch of flaps, tower came on and gave us a windshear warning. The checkairman and I exchanged looks and I said we were going to continue because it is still acceptable according to our manuals. Somehow the aircraft in front of us landed, so we thought we could make it as well. Wrong! As we were passing through 500 feet above the ground, we got the windshear warning on our display screens. This means we are obligated to go around. So I call "go around, go around thrust, flaps 8" and I proceed to go around. At this point its all asses and elbows in the cockpit. We are extremely busy flying the plane, re-configuring, making radio calls, re-setting up the FMS and telling atc that we are outta there. There was no way I was going to try another approach. I decided to head right to Cedar Rapids, so we did.

So now we are on our way to CID. It is only 80 miles or so away, so now we are extremely busy getting ready to go to a new airport. We need to notify dispatch we are diverting and get a new release, notify the flight attendant and passengers, check our fuel status, get out the new approach plates, get the weather at CID, prepare the aircraft for another approach, call station ops at CID and let them know we are coming and fly the plane. Busy, busy, busy. That 80 miles goes by quickly in a jet. In all, I think it took less than 20 minutes to go from go-around to landing in CID. As we landed in CID, we did not have a gate to park at. There was another plane at the gate, so we sat for an hour on the ramp until the gate opened up. Our dispatcher wanted us to gas'n'go. I was going to have none of that nonsense. If we were going to try and go back to DSM, I wanted to look at the radar and get the big picture. I was not about to go trouncing thru that line of weather again with out seeing what is really going on. So as we pulled to the gate and I started making my way up the jetbridge, a ramp agent asked me when we were leaving again. I said I didn't know yet and I'd get back to them. They then made a remark that the flight was cancelled and we needed to move the plane a.s.a.p for another inbound flight. As politely as I could, I told them to settle down, I'd talk to the company and find out what is happening. I got on a computer at the gate and took a look at the radar, there was no way I was going to head back thru that line of storms. It was now in between CID and DSM and making its way to our location.
When I got on the phone with our dispatcher, the first words out of his mouth were "well we can just gas you up and send you back out". To which I replied "O.K, but we are going to have to sit here for a few hours until that line of weather clears. These passengers have been through enough today, I don't think heading back into those thunderstorms is a good idea." He quickly relented and asked to speak with the station manager. They then cancelled the flight, but here is the kicker, they wanted to cancel the flight and blame it on weather so that they didn't have to reimburse any of the passengers. At this point the check airman had enough. He got on the phone and took over. He made absolutely sure that the passengers were taken care of. Weather may have been a contributing factor as to why we were in CID, but ultimately it was our dispatchers fault for telling the gate agent in MSP an erroneous cargo weight, compounded with a mechanical problem that led to an aircraft swap. Had we left on time, weather would not have been an issue.

After getting the passenger situation handled (we had to take our case all the way up the chain of command to a big company regional manager), we were then told to ferry the aircraft to MEM to continue on our trip in the morning. Fine, but by the time we got our new release, fuel and got the plane ready to go, the storms were approaching the airport quick. We fired up the engines and started to make our way to the runway. Tower advised us that the storm was sitting off the departure end of the runway. We could see it out the windows and it was close. As soon as we were cleared for take off and made the turn on to the runway, we realised we couldn't make it. We would have departed right into it. So we had to taxi back to the ramp where we sat in the plane for the next hour and a half waiting for the storms to pass. By this time, we had timed out. We were limited to a 14 hour duty day while conducting I.O.E. So we were now going to overnight in CID. Only problem with that....a serious lack of hotels. Due to all the flooding and our stranded passengers, there was not a hotel to be found for 40 miles. By the time we found one, it was approaching 10:00pm and we had been on duty since 7:30am. Even though the hotel we found was 40 miles away, it wasn't all that bad. It was a casino resort and the rooms were fantastic. It was a nice ending to a day from hell.

Although this was a really hard day, I wouldn't have traded it for anything. On one of my training sheets, there is a whole checklist of things that need to be covered. Many of the things on this list you just talk about. In this one day, we checked off about 50% of the things we needed to cover because we actually did them. I'm also glad this was with a check airman, I was glad to have his help and experience sitting in the right seat.

Welcome to the Jungle!

2008-07-12T16:45:00.004-05:00

Sitting in the right seat, you really don't have all that much responsibility. The typical F.O duties are to do the walk around, get the clearance, set up the FMS, V-speeds and read checklists. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, the Captain shoulders 100% of the responsibility and is accountable for everything that pertains to that flight. My first day of Captain O.E gave me more experience in that department than anything I have ever experienced before.

Day one was to be a 5 leg day. MSP-DLH-MSP-DSM-MEM-CHA was our scheduled trip. Due to some extreme circumstances, we flew 3 legs and didn't even make it to DSM. Our first out and back went very well. It felt weird to sit in the left seat and taxi the plane, but it was still a rush. Leg 3 is where "it" hit the fan.

Our planned flight was MSP-DSM. That's Minneapolis to Des Moine, IA. Its not a long flight and should have been a cake walk, but it was not to be. The first sign things were going to go bad was when we showed up to the gate. A quick glance at our release showed the plane had a deferred pack. A pack is an air conditioning unit that cools the cabin. We have 2 on board, but when one is not working, the plane doesn't cool very well. The weather in MSP was hot. 86 degrees F and sunny. This meant the plane was going to be hot and hard to cool down. The second sign things were trending downwards was we were going to have a full plane with a jumpseater up front with us. On short flights, we are usually weight restricted due to the aircraft being naturally nose heavy and a relatively high max landing weight. We overheard the gate agent talking to our dispatcher about weight and balance, we heard our dispatcher tell the gate agent that the magic number for getting the jumpseater on was 1600 in cargo. So when the cargo slip was handed up to us and saw 1680, we thought we were good to go. We closed the door, pushed back and began our long taxi to the other side of the airport. As soon as we began our taxi, we noticed the cabin temp rapidly climbing. All three of us sitting in the cockpit were sweating, I can only imagine how badly we'd have been sweating if we were in back with the Pax. The cabin temp reached over 95 degrees F. With only 1 pack operating, it was impossible to keep the cabin cool. We got all the way over to the far side of the airport and got a dreaded call from operations. We were nose heavy and needed to return to the gate for ballast or needed to kick the jumpseater off. We had already been taxiing for 15 min and another 15 back to the gate was not welcome news. ATC was not all the pleased either, because now we had to go against traffic to get back to the terminal. As we were crossing at the aiport on our way back to the ramp, we get a call from the flight attendant. There was a passenger on board that has a medical condition that is being aggravated by the cramped quarters and heat. I haven't had a medical problem on board before, so this was new to me. We quickly got on the radio with station operations and told them we would be returning to a gate and we needed one immediately. We told them we had a passenger on board that was having difficulty and we needed to get to a gate. We called back to the flight attendant and asked if the passenger would need medical assistance. Apparently the condition was worsening and she requested the paramedics meet us at the gate. Thankfully Ops. was on the ball and found us a gate, ramp crew and paramedics on short order. As soon as the engines spooled down, we dropped the door and the passenger was able to get the medical attention she needed.

So while we attended to the passenger in the jetway, we had another 50 pax sitting in a hot aluminium tube that is not getting any cooler. As soon as we could, we de-planed the pax. It was unfair to them to have to sit in that aircraft. So now I had to make my first captain decision. Do I re-board the pax on to this hot plane and put them through this ordeal again? Or do I try and find another plane to use. I chose option 2. There was no way I was going to take that plane again unless it cooled down. Even with the ground air hooked up, all window shades down and Gasper's open, the plane did not cool down. So, we politely told dispatch we were not going to take this aircraft unless it cooled down. Thankfully, there was another plane sitting at the gate right next door that we could take. Now its time for an aircraft swap ballet.

While the pax were switching gates and getting ready to board the new plane, the check airman left me in charge of the release and getting us fuel. I had known from the previous attempted flight that there was a line of thunderstorms popping up across our route of flight. When I checked the radar for the previous flight it was a line of popcorn cells. By now, it was developing into a fairly solid line. I took a look at our routing and saw that this line of storms would be smack dab right in the middle of our route and pushing their way towards our destination of DSM. You could see from the radar loop that the storms were building into a pretty massive line of activity. The line extended south west from the U.P of Michigan all the way to Nebraska. So now I'm thinking I need all the fuel I can get in case we need to fly around a bit until we find a hole to poke through, only problem is, dispatch doesn't want to give it to me. He seems to think we'll be O.K with only 500lbs of "C" fuel. (C fuel is contingency fuel. Just in case gas.) I, on the other hand, think 1500 lbs (about 40 minutes worth) is better. He tried to push me into accepting only 500 lbs, because he said the storms we not supposed to hit DSM for another few hours, but I wasn't buying it. I may be a new captain, but I've been around enough to know when asking for a little more gas is the smart thing to do. So finally after a 15min phone call to get the extra gas, he relents, he gives us 1400lbs. Not quite what I wanted, but its the best we could do and still take all 50 pax.

We load up all the pax, take care of the paperwork, get the plane all ready to fly and head off for attempt number 2 at getting to DSM. I'll finish the flight in another post......there's plenty more to come.

The Left Seat.

2008-06-27T20:54:00.003-05:00

Perma-reserve here I come! The dreaded ATP/Upgrade Checkride has been passed. One more sim session and I'm released to the line to begin my life as a new Captain. Today has been the culmination of 15 years of aviation. 4 years spent working on my private pilots license. 4 and a half (very fun) years at UND (much to my parents chagrin), 2 years of aerial photography, 2 and a half years freight doggin, 8 months of part 121 airline experience and a whole lot of hard work, sacrifice and effort, have brought me to this point in my career, Airline Captain.

Initially being an airline pilot was never a goal which I had set for myself. I had hoped to avoid the regionals all together by flying freight, but it was not to be. The terrible manner in which I was treated at my former company forced my hand into coming to a regional. At one point there were dreams and aspirations of flying for my former company, becoming captain, building the coveted 1000 hours turbine PIC, maby making assistant chief pilot and moving on to my dream job from there. But that was not to be. The winds of change shifted in a new direction and landed me here. My family and I couldn't be happier.

I just want to take a moment and thank everyone who has helped me get to this point. Most importantly, my loving and very, very, very tolerant wife Erin. Without your support, I never would have been able to further my career in the manner in which I have. Love you Hun! Second, to Mom and Dad, if it wasn't for you guys (and your college money), I never would have taken up flying in the first place. Third, to Mukwonago Mom and Dad, with out you guys picking up the slack when I'm gone, I don't think I'd be able to do my job with out worrying about Erin and Jack being without me. Lastly, I'd like to thank all the former flight instructors, captains and boss's who have tolerated my cantankerous ass over the years and taught me a great deal about flying and life in general. Thanks again, I appreciate all of you.

Half way there.

2008-06-14T09:18:00.002-05:00

Being a Captain entails a lot more responsibility than sitting in the right seat. There is a saying out there that if the shit hits the fan, look to your left for help. That's all well and good if your sitting in the right seat. Now every time I look left, I'm looking at my reflection in the window.

Groundschool was interesting. The instructor had a unique approach to teaching the class. On the second day of class he started asking us questions. They were questions that we should have known, but didn't. Questions such as " You are on a 3 mile final into MEM, the tower controller wants you to switch runways from 18C to 18R. Can you switch runways with out getting new landing numbers?" I think most of us answered correctly, but when he asked us if we were sure, we all backed down. He then got pissy with us and for the first of many times over the next week and a half, he let loose with his trademark saying " C'mon now, ya''ll is Captains now, you need to know this shit". He was right, but teaching by fear is not something any of us were used to, nor had seen before. There was a standing joke in class. We would make a big deal out of what time it was when we got stumped for the first time. We made it to 9:30 once. The rest of the time he'd always get us before 9. It took us a few days to realise his teaching technique. He was using the knock em down then build them back up approach. It worked. By the time groundschool was over, we were impressing him with our vast wealth of knowledge and even stumping him with a few questions of our own.

At my company, they do the checkride a little differently than other places. Typically when you do a checkride, you have an oral exam for a few hours then go hop in a plane or simulator for the flight portion of the test. At my company, they split it up into separate events. After completing the ground school, you then take the oral part of the type ride. For a lot of us, me especially, its a nerve wracking event. For Captain type rides (we call it a type ride because we get a type rating at the completion of the checkride) anything is fair game. The examiner can ask anything they want about the plane, our flight manuals, regulations, weather, systems and so on and so forth. For me, this is the hardest part. There is a vast amount of knowledge that needs to be memorized. On first officer orals, they are pretty relaxed and easy. Captain orals are a whole different ballgame. You are expected to know the aircraft and every little rule that applies to it forward and backward. My oral exam was on Thursday. Thankfully I passed with flying colors and can now move on to the fun part of the training, the Sims!!! The way I see it, if I can get through the oral, I'm 90% done. The flying is the easy part, I can make this plane do what I want, when I want. On fire, single engine, bad weather, no auto pilot, bring it on. I love this part of the training. Its all down hill from here :)

The new Second Officer

2008-05-29T16:13:00.004-05:00

Yeah, I know its a geeky title, but our little family is getting a little bigger. First Officer Jack now has a Second Officer on the way. The due date is Dec. 13 2008. We couldnt be happier.

How can you spot an airline pilot?

2008-05-20T22:19:00.003-05:00

There is an old joke out there about how you can spot an airline pilot. Goes a little something like this.....

A desk clerk at a hotel gets a frantic call from a guest
"Front Desk..."
"There is a naked pilot walking down the hallway!"
"How do you know he is a Pilot, Ma'am?"
"Well, he's wearing a big watch and he just stole my USA Today"

A recent event from this weekend reminded me about that little gem. All I have to say is WOW! This is the stuff Legends are made of. Pilots tend to have rather inflated ego's. When it comes to story time, we are always trying to one-up each other. This pilots story will top all of them....ENJOY!!

P.S. He is so famous now, he made Lettermans Top 10!!!!!!!!

2 weeks and counting

2008-05-14T20:55:00.002-05:00

Time to knock the cobwebs out and get to business. Its learning time again. Upgrade class is now 2 weeks away and the preparations have begun. All 3 of the flying bibles have been regularly opened and read repeatedly. Information that was stored in the recesses of the brain have been re-energized and brought into active memory. It has been a while since the brain has been stimulated in such a way. Flying the line has dulled the once sharp intellect of this crusty former freight dog.

Broke Broke

2008-05-03T08:22:00.004-05:00

One of the nice things about flying for an airline is that our maintenance is really pretty good. Our planes are in good shape. More often than not, there is nothing broken or MEL'd on the aircraft. That was rarely the case at my former company. Up until the following story occurred, only one of my flights had been cancelled due to a mechanical problem. That's a pretty good track record considering the hundreds of flights and over 500 hours I've flown since coming on line. The following day was going to be an exception.

It was day 4 of a 4 day trip and the crew was looking forward to finishing up the trip. We were scheduled to do 5 legs and around 7 hours of flying that day. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we flew ZERO. It all started out in PIT. We got to the airport, trudged through security and made our way to the gate. The gate agent was waiting for us and had our paperwork ready for our inspection. The weather was looking good and we were not anticipating any delays all day long. She checked our ID's and sent us down the jetway. We all did our usual ballet of storing our bags, powering up the airplane and making our respective nests. After making of said nest, I headed out to do the walk around. It was a first flight of the day, so I had to open every panel and do a couple of extra steps that don't get done on a normal walk around. As I was rounding the right wing tip, and looking down the length of the wing, something caught my eye. Something was amiss. It took a second or two to actually compute what I was seeing. Part of the aircraft was missing. On the underside of the wing there are several flap actuators that move the flaps. They are all covered by plastic fairings that improve aerodynamics. These fairings are in two parts. The front part attaches to the underside of the wing while the rear part attaches to the flap itself. On the innermost actuator, the one closest to the main landing gear, the entire back half of the flap actuator fairing was missing! The bells and whistles in my head immediately started going off. I remembered from training that we were allowed to fly the aircraft with certain parts missing, but I didn't think we could fly the plane with such a large part missing. I believed our CDL (configuration deviation list) only accounted for little things like static wick's and the brushes attached to the main landing gear doors, not entire fairings.

So after inspecting the area thoroughly, I continued on with the rest of the walk around. Everything else was normal so I made my way to the cockpit to first inspect the books to see if it had already been written up and then inform the Capt. of my findings. An inspection of the logbooks and write up sheet showed nothing about a missing flap fairing, so informing the Capt. was next on the list. He was puzzled by the news, so we both headed out to the right wing to inspect the area again. Upon the second inspection we noticed that the screws were missing on the inboard side, yet still attached to the outboard brackets. This led us to the conclusion that it must have fallen off in flight on the previous flight. So we headed back up the jetbridge to call the company. They sent a mechanic out, he took some pictures, threw up his hands and said there's nothing he can do. The flight was to be indefinitely delayed due to maintenance. Needless to say, we were not a happy crew, the gate agent was not at all pleased and the passengers were even more upset. If there was one bright spot in this gloomy morning, it was that the company has a maintenance base not too far from PIT, they had a spare fairing and we could be out of there in a few hours.

So a few hours passed and the mechanics from the repair station finally showed up. They had the part and were planning on taking a half hour for the repair. What they didn't plan on was the brackets being bent out of shape. When the fairing ripped off, the screws were still attached on the outboard side of the fairing, the fairing bent the brackets in the process. The mechanics didn't bring new brackets, so this further delayed our day. The company finally cancelled the flight and told us we were to still ferry the plane back to base so we could complete our last out and back of the day.

A few hours after that, the plane was finally fixed. The paperwork completed, it was time to go. The jetbridge pulled away, the door closed, we were going to be on our way finally. Or so we thought. We fired up the apu, started running our first checklist and DING, we get a master caution. Stab Trim, Mach Trim. Ok...we press the buttons to re-engage....nothing. Quick call to the company, we are told to pull a few circuit breakers, wait 30 seconds then reset them. Procedure accomplished...same result. Plane is down again! This time maintenance comes out, inspects the avionics, finds the problem, but doesn't have a replacement part. For the second time that day the plane was Broke Broke.

Calm before the storm???

2008-04-22T12:26:00.002-05:00

Life is good. There really isn't anything to complain about right now. Sure there's stuff on the horizon that is vexing, but for the time being, all is well. Being TDY'd (assigned to a base other than my domicile) for the month is working out great. The company foots the bill for a hotel room and pay's per diem for the whole month. When the schedule came out, originally I had 17 days off and 86 block hours. In addition to that, nearly every weekend off, plus I was home for Jack b-day for the first time since he was born!! I managed to pick up a few trips for other F.O's and brought my flight time up to 99:22 still with 14 days off. All the extra flying plus the per diem will make for a livable paycheck for once. We can use it. Next month I have to go back to sitting reserve, but its only for part of the month. I'll be heading to upgrade class at the end of the month, so that cuts into the days I have to work. Crew planning was nice enough to work with me on my May schedule and gave me Late Ready Reserve on the start of my rotations and A.M reserve on the last days. Pretty excellent considering I can stay at home all day on day one, catch the 18:00 flight and still arrive in time to start my late ready rsv. Then on the last day, rsv ends at 18:00, so I can catch the 18:50 flight home. Pretty commutable if you ask me.
So is this the calm before the storm? Good times now, turbulence ahead? Possibly, but for now, I'm just going to enjoy my time with my family, my time left in the right seat and having such a cool job.

Delta and Northwest merger

2008-04-14T21:41:00.002-05:00

Things are gunna change. The airline industry as we know it is due for a drastic overhaul. Ever since the Wright Brothers launched on their historic flight over 100 years ago, people have been losing money in aviation. Making a profit in aviation is one of the hardest ways to make a buck. In fact, you stand a much better chance of losing money than ever making any. The best way to blow a million dollars is to invest in aviation. You could fill a book with all the defunct airlines that have come and gone over the years. This year will see a lot of additions to that book (it already has). I think 2008 is going to be the year of Airline Darwinism. By the end of the year, only the strong are going to survive.

Using the word "strong" in referring to airlines might not be the wisest word to use. Airlines have been bleeding money since day 1. Southwest is the only exception to the rule. Even they could be in trouble with the price of oil over $100 a barrel. I know they have some fantastic fuel hedges, but I'm not quite sure when they run out. When that happens, watch out, airlines might actually start charging what the seat is actually worth. Therein lies the problem. Airlines have never charged enough for their product. Ever since de-regulation the airlines have been in competition with eachother. The continually use predatory pricing to drive out the small carriers in hopes of driving off the competition so they may then raise prices and make a profit. In doing this, they offer their seats at a discount. So much of a discount they take a loss on operating the flight. What the airlines don't seem to understand is that there is a never ending supply of idiots that want to start up low cost airlines to compete with the majors. They can never raise their prices enough to make operating profitable. Hence, airlines are not exactly financially strong.

Delta and Northwest merging is going to shake up the industry. I think that there may be more mergers on the horizon. There will be a reduction in capacity, rise in fares and I'm predicting massive layoffs. I hope I'm wrong, for my future and the future of every other airline employee out there, but it does not look good. Delta is claiming that there will be no layoffs and no base closures, I dont buy it. No merger has ever gone smooth, this will not be an exception.

Captain

2008-04-04T18:32:00.004-05:00

Well, its been 2 years since I've flown with my left hand, I wonder if my hand is going to remember how its done? It's official, I've made the list. The only list I've cared about for the past few months. The Vacancy List for Captains. I'm pretty excited to be on that list. It means a great deal to me professionally, personally and financially. I was awarded a CRJ-900 position for my company.

On a professional level, it is another big step in the career. I'll finally get around to getting my ATP license. (I've been putting it off for a long time because I'm too cheap to pay for my own checkride.) I'll be logging that all important turbine PIC time and I'll move one step closer to getting that "dream" job.

Personally, I've been looking forward to this for a while. It was difficult passing up on an instant upgrade at my last company. Looking back, it was the absolute best thing I could have possibly done. I talk to my friends that did decide to stay and take the upgrade and none of them are happy they stayed. I know I would have been miserable and that would have translated into my family being miserable as well.

Financially, this is a big, big step in the right direction. First year pay at a regional airline is an insult. Doing a little math the other day, I calculated my pay to be $12.82 an hour after taxes, health insurance, 401K Ect. When you factor in that reserve pilots rarely break guarentee of 75 hours, you can see that we are extremely underpaid. Making captain will nearly triple my take home pay.

Looks like its time to hit the books again. Class does not start for several weeks, but I plan on heading in to class fully prepared.

A little break

2008-03-11T11:00:00.004-05:00

Thanks to a small subsection in our pilot contract, I was able to procure an extra 5 days off this month. I'll be switching bases from the Motor City to our base in the frozen tundra, so the company had to give me 5 "moving" days. I took full advantage of the extra days off and went snowboarding out west.

First off, I have to say thanks to Uncle Den for letting me come out and crash at his place. I really appreciate your hospitality and I had an absolutely wonderful time. My second thanks goes out to my beautiful wife for letting me go without her. Unfortunately its tax season for her and she is not able to take any time off from Jan. 1 thru Apr. 15th. It would have been great to have some other people come with me, but nobody was able to come on such short notice, maby next time.

And now to the highlight and purpose of the trip, the snowboarding.... It was fantastic!!! Luck was on my side and I happened to show up the day after the mountain got a fresh coating of 6 inches of powder. Den happened to live about 15 minutes from a little mom'n'pop place called Pebble Creek in Inkom, ID and I must say, that place was great. It had nice steep vertical, lots of trails, great natural snow and a variety of terrain. The best run was a double diamond named "The Rock". There was 1-2 feet of fresh powder in the tree line which made for some awesome runs down the mountain. I was able to make first tracks down a lot of my runs due to the many lines I could take through the trees. It had been a long time since I had such great conditions for snowboarding. Pebble Creek is far superior to any of the little hills they have in WI. Not only is it "real" snowboarding, but it's cheap too! $35 for a day pass, $25 for a half day. I hope to be able to do it again next year.

Overall it was a great trip. Idaho is a very scenic state with picturesque mountains and a quiet laid back atmosphere. I loved it out there. I'd love to spend more time out there.

SNAFU Day, part 3

2008-03-03T04:37:00.002-06:00

So, continuing on with the story. Needless to say, we arrived back in DTW late. I had already missed my flight home and knew the flights out of DTW in the morning were oversold. This left me with 2 choices. Stay in DTW and hope I can get a jumpseat in the morning, or race across the terminal to catch the last flight to MSP. If I caught this flight, I could spend the night in a lounge chair in ops, then catch the 7 a.m. back home. I'd get in about a half hour sooner than if I were to fly out of DTW. So I choose to race to the last flight.

Enroute from PIA I kept a close eye on our arrival time and on my outbound flight. Thankfully the flight had been delayed several times and with every 5 minute delay, the chances of me getting there in time increased. By the time we landed, I knew I'd have enough time to catch the flight. As soon as we pulled into the gate, I grabbed my flight bag and bolted out the door to do my walk around. Having completed my final flight duties for the trip, I grabbed the rest of my stuff off the plane and headed for the gate.

DTW is a large airport. It takes a solid 15 minutes to get from the Baby gates (B&C gates) to either of the hammer head gates (A 1-10 or A 70-75). I made it in 10. By the time I arrived at the gate the flight had already started boarding. After most of the pax had boarded, I made my way up to the counter and asked if the jumpseat had been taken. Much to my surprise it was not and the gate agent was great. She got me listed and sent me down the jetway to have the Capt. sign my jumpseat form. The flight was full, so I had to ride up front, but I didn't mind, any seat is a good one. The Capt. and F.O were really nice guys and we chatted about the usual industry topics until we pushed back.

The flight was routine for the first hour. It was the last half hour that made things interesting. I was half asleep in the jumpseat when the chime call came in from the Flt Attendants in the back. I didn't pay much attention until I heard the word smoking. The F.O finished his conversation with the F.A and then turned around to tell the Capt. what was going on. Apparently they had a drunk passenger who smoked in one of the aft lav's and was now being belligerent with the F.A's. I was kind of surprised when both the Capt. and F.O said they had never had someone smoke onboard before. They seemed kind of surprised by it, as was I. A few minutes later the F.A called up again. This time it was bacause a little girl sitting in the seat directly in front of the drunk passenger had vomited all over the seat in front of her. According to the little girls father, she was allergic to cigarrette smoke. The drunk passenger had caused the little girl to get sick. The F.A's have had enough and wanted something done about the unruly pax. It was decided that the police should get involved and should meet the plane at the gate.

After we landed and were taxiing to the gate, I could see police cars parked at the bottom of the jetway. As we were pulling into the gate, there were 4 stern looking cops and a gate agent standing there waiting. The Capt. made the announcement to the pax that everyone should remain seated until the police have boarded the aircraft and have taken the offending passenger off the plane. As soon as we parked at the gate, the pilots killed the engines and ran through their shut down checklists and told me to open the cockpit door. They wanted to see what was going on. The police came on board, took the pax off the plane and that was the end of that.

Sitting in the jumpseat, I get to sit back and observe how a crew interacts. I was able to absorb what was going on and saw how the mainline pilots handled the situation. The flight went from a routine flight home to a learning expierence in the span of about 10 minutes. I was glad to have been sitting in the cockpit. I can now take everything I saw and use it later on in my career if I ever have this happen on one of my flights. The flight crew was very professional in how they handled things.

So that was the end of that long, snafu'ed day. All in all, good times.

Murphy's Law

2008-02-28T09:07:00.003-06:00

Murphy's Law : If something can go wrong, it will. That was the case the other day on our last leg of the day. And of course that happens to be the last leg of the 4 day trip and the most crucial leg of the day because it is the one that will make or break my ability to make my commute home. The most underblocked flights you will ever find are the one's that are the last flight of the crew's trip. This would have been the case for this trip, but due to severe incompetence on the part of our out station personnel, we ended up being late.

Earlier in the day we had been delayed for about an hour waiting on an inbound aircraft. This compressed the rest of the day and caused the rest of our flights to turn into quick turns. As a crew we did the best we could to make the turns go as quick as possible. This included helping the flight attendant clean the cabin between flights and flying as quickly and safely as possible. By the time we got to our last turn, we had made up for the hour delay and then some. We were enroute to our last out station and were discussing our options for getting back to DTW early. Our scheduled arrival back into DTW was going to leave me about 30 min to catch my flight. Thats not a lot of time, but its managable if I really hustle. So in order to hedge my bets, while enroute to our last out station, we got approval from dispatch to leave 10 minutes early if all pax were at the gate and ready to go. We called the station when we were in-range and let them know, 1. we were going to be early and 2. we would like to leave 10 early if possible.

You would think with enough heads up and prior planning, the station would be prepared. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When we arrived, we parked at the gate right away. We were early, so the gate had plenty of time to off load the pax and bags and load everything back up. An efficient out station can get us turned in less than 20 min. Not the case this day. We spent 55 minutes blocked in at the gate. Not only did we arrive early, but we left late!!!! Things got so bungled, we ended up blocking out 5 minutes late. When stuff like that happens, it makes you want to pull your hair out and scream at the world, but that would accomplish nothing. Especially when theres more to come.

Murphy's Law not only applied to the turn at the out station, but for the rest of the flight. The next delay came in the form of de-icing. There was some light snow falling and its always better to de-ice than to not, so we headed over to the de-ice pad for a spraying. Thanks to an error by the de-icing crew, they needed to re-spray an area of the aircraft they missed on the first pass and added an additional 5 min to our already delayed flight and my ever evaporating chances of getting home. The next delay came from ATC. I was planning on flying fast on our way back to base, but ATC had other ideas. As soon as I leveled off at our cruising altitude and inched the airspeed up to 320kts, we got the bad news from the controller that he need us to slow to 250kts for flow control into base. Great. The next delay came from the company. When we sent in our in-range message, we found out our gate was C-36, the most distant gate we have in terms of distance from our ops/bag room and from the gate my flight was leaving out of, A-3. The next kink in the chain came from ATC again. We had planned on landing on the runway that was close to the gate. It was normal for us to land on this runway when approaching from the south west, yet this night, ATC had other plans. Instead of landing on the runway close to the gate, they wanted us to land on the farthest runway possible. Not only was it far on the ground, but we now had to fly over the airport, get in the pattern for the approach on the far side of the field and get dumped in on a 25 mile final. Arrrgh. As I'm sitting there looking at our arrival time on the FMS, every change we make to the flight plan eats away at my ability to make my flight home.

So, to complete the flight of delays, it would only be fitting that we have to sit and wait for rampers at the gate. We pull up to the gate....and wait....and wait....and wait. 9 minutes we waited for rampers to come park the plane. Wonderful. Needless to say by the time the pax got off loaded, I did my walk around, dropped my flight bag in ops and headed to the gate, the flight was loooong gone. Oh well, these thing happen.

Coyote Ugly

2008-02-21T16:30:00.003-06:00

So, seeing as how I have a 5 hour airport appreciation tour today, I have a bunch of free time to sit around and do nothing. I figure I might as well finish my tales of Coyotes and drunken passengers.

So as I said in my last post, the 6 hour delay inccured in ATW created a domino effect on the rest of the day. The second domino to topple was our ROC turn. We were suppposed to do ATW-DTW-ROC-DTW-PIA-DTW and were supposed to duty off at 7:30pm Eastern. But due to our late departure from ATW, we were not going to make our ROC turn, so they canceled it. I miss out on 3+ hours of flying, get jipped out of 1.5 hours of pay(we only get paid 50% of the leg value if the flight cancels) and a bunch of passengers get delayed and have to go through the hassle of re-booking on other flights.

Domino number 3 was our PIA turn got delayed. Turns out the plane we had was going to do a BUF turn, then we were to take it to PIA. So instead of a 3:30 departure, we were now delayed until 6:00. This caused domino number 4 to fall because now we were scheduled to return to DTW after my commute home left. I was dissapointed I wouldnt make it home, but there was still an outside chance I could make the last flight to MSP in order to make the first flight to MKE in the morning (the first flight out of DTW in the morning was waaaay oversold, so was the noon flight). I could tolerate spending the night in the sleep room at MSP if I could be home by 10am the next day.

So this brings us to the most interesting flight of the day. The inbound flight to PIA was normal. Gusty winds caused my landing to be less than stellar, but it was passable none the less. The turn took longer than we had hoped due to our late arrival and the fact our gate was occupied for 20 minutes. So we finally loaded up, de-iced and headed to the runway. We double checked our flight times and saw that we were going to block in at around 15 hours of duty. Plenty legal seeing as how we are allowed up to 16 hours, but at 16:01 we are illegal and in big trouble. It was the Captains leg, so he was flying. We recieved take off clearance and proceeded to take the runway. The Capt. lined the plane up with the centerline and brought the thrust levers up. He called for me to "Set thrust" and at this point, I took my eyes off the runway and started fine tuning the thrust levers to set take off thrust. It was just as I was about to take my hand off the thrust levers that the Captain let out an "Oh Shit" and I felt the plane swerve to the left. I quickly looked up and saw a Coyote running at the aircraft on the runway. It was about 30 feet in front of us and running full speed ahead. We only had about a tenth of a second before we were going to run it over. It then made a quick u-turn and started running twords the edge of the runway right before it went under the plane and out of my line of sight. The Captain grabbed the thrust levers and aborted the take off. We were not going all that fast, less than 80 kts, so the abort was not as critical as a high speed abort. We cleared the runway, told tower what was going on and proceeded to run the aborted take off Q.R.H (quick reference handbook) procedure for an aborted take off.
We finished that up and taxied back to the gate. I hopped out and did a detailed check of the landing gear, fairings and fuselage. I didnt see any damage, guts or hair, so we must have missed it. I hopped back in the plane and started getting ready to go. By this time the Capt. was on the phone with dispatch letting them know what happened. I overheard him tell them the plane was fine, we still had enough gas to get to DTW and we were ready to go. It was at this point that crew scheduling wanted to get involved because they thought we were going to go over our 16 hours of duty and they wanted to cancel the flight. It took 10 minutes of conversation and convincing to prove to the schedulers that we could complete the trip and block in before the magical 16th hour when we turn into pumpkins. So after all that, it was finally time to head back to the motor city. We ended up blocking in right at 15:30 min of duty which left us with 15min to spare.

I gotta head to the gate, I'll finish the day on another post. The next flight was pretty interesting too.

All iced up

2008-02-20T08:33:00.003-06:00

I thought the days of busting my hump for 16 hours a day were over, guess not. The other day was the longest day I've had in quite a while. It all started out in ATW. The forcasters had been calling for massive amounts of snow in the area starting in the morning. I rolled over and tried to slide out of the hotel before I woke the wife up. (She drove up to ATW to spend the night with me while I was working). It was 5:15am Central. I quickly checked the weather and saw that ATW had been getting freezing rain all night. The temps were right at 0 and the radar was painting an ugly picture. I checked Big Reds website and saw that the flight was still showing "On-Time". So I put myself on auto-pilot and did the shower, shave, get dressed dance. I headed down to the lobby to meet up with the rest of the crew to catch a 5:45am van. The first sign that things were nasty out was the ice covering all the cars in the parking lot. They all had a solid coating of freezing rain ice adhereing to all surfaces. The roads were just as slick. It was a slippery ride to the airport. Thankfully its a short ride from the hotel to the airport. As we pulled to the terminal and hopped out of the van we noticed some angry faces inside the terminal. That usually equates to cancelled or delayed flights. We grabbed our bags and asked the van driver to hang out for a few minutes in case our flight had canceled. It didnt, but we were told of an hour delay due to a ground stop into DTW. So the van driver headed back to the hotel and we went out to the plane to inspect the ice. The first clue that conditions were bad on the airport was the fact that the ramp was a complete sheet of ice. In order to demonstrate this fact to the disbelieving Captain, I took my flight bag and went flight bag bowling across the ramp. (For those who are wondering, it was out of sight from passengers and the only people who saw this were the Captain and Flight Attendant) As we approached the plane, we saw the full extent of the ice. The plane was covered in a solid 1/2 inch of ice. There were 6 inch icicles hanging from the wings and tail. We tried to open the door to the plane, but it was frozen shut. There was nothing we could do about it, so we headed back to ops. The freezing rain wasnt letting up, so the captain got on the phone with dispatch to inform them on the situation developing. Long story short, the flight was delayed indefinatly so the Capt. decided to head back to the hotel. Certainly didnt break my heart because Erin was still sleeping in the hotel room. I figured we could go get some breakfast. I called the hotel to have them send the van back, but to my dismay she said they were unable to do so. Appearantly the van slid into a snow bank and was out of action for the morning, so she called a cab for us. After about 45min the cab showed up and we headed back to the hotel. I managed to sweet talk the manager into giving us free breakfast coupons and proceeded to head back to my room. After filling up on the breakfast buffet, Erin and I proceeded to veg out in front of the t.v until the capt called and said we were heading back to the airport for another try.

Attempt number 2 was almost as comical as attempt number 1. The station managed to use an entire truck of de-icing fluid (700 gallons) trying to de-ice our plane. They then went over to re-fill the truck and while they re-filled, the plane iced over again. Most of their efforts were thwarted by mother nature. It wasnt until about an hour later when the freezing rain stopped and the heavy snow started that they were able to fully de-ice the plane. But by this time they had used all of the glycol they had and were now using Delta's de-ice truck. Glycol runs about $4.00 a gallon, so you can do the math on how much it cost to get our flight out. So after several de-icings, we finally blocked out 6 hours late. The domino effect has started. The rest of the day was just as eventful with an aborted take off and a drunk passenger smoking in a Lav, but those stories are for another day.

p.s spell check is inop on the blog, so please excuse my poor spelling.

The big project: Jepp vs. LIDO

2008-01-21T14:19:00.000-06:00

There is one great thing I like about my pilot group here at the new company. We are united on several subjects. First, we would like a new contract and 99.47% are in favor of a strike in order to get it. Second, we all despise LIDO and view it as an unsafe and unnessicary change. I'll try and point out some of the differences between the two formats for you.

* thanks to Brian, I found a way to post a LIDO chart. *

As you can see, there are lot's of colors, but no briefing strip.

The biggest difference between Jepps and Lido is the fact that there is no briefing strip on the Lido's. Information that we use for the briefing such as frequincies, courses, intercept altitudes, airport and touchdown elevations and missed approach procedures and minimum descent altutudes are scattered all over the place as opposed to the Jepps where it is all comparmentalized into the Briefing Strip. The challenge with the Lido is to find all this information and deliver it in a clear and consice manner. There is a lot of wasted time hunting and pecking at the approach plate to find all the information we need to cover. I'm making good progress in trying to find a flow to the Lido's, but its a slow process.

On a side note, I feel I am ready for the upgrade to the left seat so I have put my bid in for it. Hopefully in a few months I'll be heading back down south for upgrade training. I'm hoping for an April or May class, but Captain slots seem to be drying up, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

A Big Project

2008-01-12T10:25:00.000-06:00

Recently I've been thinking a lot about doing something more than just being a line pilot. There is more out there than just flying a plane from point A to point B. I have always had a particular interest in aviation safety. I'm an avid reader of NTSB reports and as morbid as it seems, I enjoy reading about accidents and incidents. There can be a lot to learn from other people's mistakes. The industry seems to be learning quite a lot from past experiences and the safety record over the last decade or so has shown just that. There have been fewer major airline crashes in this decade than ever before. The worst loss of life accident since 2001 was the Comair crash in Lexington in 2006. This can be directly related to the industry learning from past mistakes. There is a saying in aviation that the Reg's (FAR's) are written in someone else's blood. For the most part that's true. Aviation has typically been reactive rather than proactive when it comes to implementing safety procedures. For example, FAR 121.438 (2) (b) No person may conduct operations under this part unless, for that type airplane, either the pilot in command or the second in command has at least 75 hours of line operating flight time, either as pilot in command or second in command. This Reg is a direct result of a Continental DC-9 crash in DEN in which a very inexperienced FO was paired with a very inexperienced CA. This Reg was a reaction to the crash.

In order to help continue the upward trend in safety, I've decided to get involved with my company's safety committee. I recently flew a trip with the chairman and happened to strike up a conversation about my wanting to volunteer. Little did I know that I'd get put to work right away. During our flight we talked about some of the things that are safety related that could use improvement at the company. I brought up the fact that the companies recent change from Jepp charts to Lido's has caused a lot of stress in the cockpit. Our training for the new charts was less than stellar therefore is causing some minor difficulties in the cockpit during the transition. Standardization has taken a bruising because these charts are radically different than the Jepps we all know and love. Our approach briefings have gone from a streamlined recital of information to a random babble of information bits. I proposed the committee come up with some sort of company standard briefing. This way we can all get on the same page, so to speak. The chairman thought it was a great idea and said "Alright, your our man. Get to work on it and let me know what you come up with". Great. I'm not even on the committee 30 seconds and I have a huge undertaking to accomplish. I'm not complaining, but it's a bit of a daunting task. I need to come up with something the entire pilot group will use. I need to find a way to standardize 1300 pilots. This oughtta be interesting.

Completing the sweep

2007-12-30T08:43:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I started a 4 day trip that will officially have me finishing out the year on the road. In 2007 I will have missed every single major holiday due to work. Easter, 4th of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Eve all away from the family. Just to start off the new year on the right track, I'll be spending new years day on the road as well (just a hint of sarcasm there). 2007 was a wash as far as holidays go, hopefully 2008 will be a little better.

2007 was a good year. Got married, got a better job, watched the Squirt grow into a little boy. Life around the house has improved significantly now that I'm home more. My Ameriscare days had turned me into a sullen beast of a pilot that had me spending too much time complaining and enough time appreciating the good things in life. Being home a soft 6 days a month really took its toll. Now I'm home closer to 12-15 days a month and I think its really made a change at home. Although 2007 did not start off very well at all with the loss of my friend Dan Hughes and his F/O Terry Patty down in Mexico, the year progressively got better as it went along. Hopefully the upward trend will continue in 2008.

Wheelin and Dealin

2007-12-19T09:55:00.000-06:00

All this month, I've wheeled and dealed to get 4 day trips worth the most amount of flying time. I managed to cheat the system and get myself assigned a high speed line instead of a reserve line. (You might be asking yourself what a high speed is. A high speed can go by many names, stand up overnight, CDO, stand up and illegal just to name a few. It is a duty period that extends through the night hours. You will fly the last flight into an airport and the first out in the morning while staying on duty all night long. A typical flight leaves base at 9:30pm, gets into the outstation around 10:30pm. You pack up all your stuff and head to the hotel to try and catch a few hours of sleep before your return flight. Typically the first flights of the day leave around 6:00am so that means a 5:30am show time, 5:00 van and a 4:30 wake up call. So if your lucky, you can get more than 4 hours of sleep between flights.) Some people like high speeds, but I'm not a big fan. You dont fly much. So you may be asking yourself "why did he bid for a high speed line if he doesn't like them?" because I am an official line holder now and can now pick up open time, drop and swap trips whereas on reserve, I couldn't do any of that. So, I took full advantage of the loophole in the system and as soon as I was awarded a line, I went through and swapped'n'dropped everything I could for 4 day trips. I managed to do quite well for myself for the first time out. I got rid of most of the high speeds and picked up several 4 day trips to bring my credit hours over 90 for the month. The real downside is that I couldn't get rid of my high speeds on the 24th, 25th and 26th. I tried everything, but it looks like I'll be on the road for x-mas. I kinda had a sneaking suspicion this would happen seeing as how I am low man on the seniority list. It sucks, but comes with the territory.

Todays commute

2007-12-11T14:23:00.000-06:00

KMKE 112019Z 28007KT 3/4SM R01L/4500VP6000FT PLSN BR FEW006 BKN016 OVC024 M01/M02 A3003 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 1 1/2 P0004
KMKE 111952Z 27004KT 1 1/2SM PLSN BR BKN008 OVC022 M01/M02 A3003 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 3 SLP179 P0007 T10061022
KMKE 111943Z 28003KT 1 1/2SM PLSN BR BKN008 BKN017 OVC024 00/M02 A3004 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 3 P0008
KMKE 111922Z 28004KT 1 1/2SM PL BR FEW008 OVC019 00/M02 A3005 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 3 SNE22 P0005
KMKE 111912Z 32004KT 1 1/2SM SNPL BR SCT008 BKN013 OVC019 00/M02 A3005 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 2 1/2 P0003
KMKE 111852Z 29004KT 1 1/2SM SNPL BR SCT005 OVC015 00/M02 A3005 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 2 SLP185 P0011 T00001017
KMKE 111849Z 28004KT 1 1/2SM SNPL BR SCT005 OVC015 00/M02 A3006 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 2 P0012
KMKE 111752Z COR 31006KT 1 1/2SM SNPL BR BKN005 BKN009 OVC020 00/M01 A3007 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 1 3/4 RAE32FZRAB35E51SNE1656B47PL CIG 004V008 SLP191 8/7// 4/007 933018 P0003 60035 T00001011 10006 21006 55012
KMKE 111741Z 32005KT 1 1/2SM FZRAPL BR BKN005 BKN010 OVC038 00/M01 A3007 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 2 RAE32UPB32E35FZRAB35SNE1656PL P0006
KMKE 111732Z 32004KT 1 1/2SM PLUP BR BKN005 OVC038 00/M01 A3006 RMK AO2 RAE32UPB32SNE1656PL P0005
KMKE 111652Z 36005KT 1/2SM R01L/3500V4500FT RASNPL BKN003 OVC020 01/M01 A3006 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 3/4 RAB10E26B52SNE10B26PL PRESFR SLP187 P0012 T00061006
KMKE 111650Z 35005KT 1/2SM R01L/2400V4000FT SNPL BR BKN003 OVC020 01/M01 A3006 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 3/4 RAB10E26SNE10B26PL PRESFR P0011
KMKE 111634Z 34004KT 1/2SM R01L/4000VP6000FT PLSN BR BKN005 OVC020 00/M01 A3009 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 1 RAB10E26SNE10B26 CIG 004V008 PRESFR P0006
KMKE 111632Z 32005KT 1SM R01L/5000VP6000FT PLSN BR SCT005 OVC020 00/M01 A3010 RMK AO2 SFC VIS 1 1/4 RAB10E26SNE10B26 P0005

Today is by far the worst weather day I have seen in a long, long time. For those that dont read metars, is says in plain English, light winds, visibilities fluctuating between 1/2 and 1 mile, freezing rain, drizzle, fog, snow, snow pellets, rain and freezing rain pellets (whatever those are). I wish I had my camera with me so I could take a picture of the flight information screens they have in the terminal. There is not a single flight operating on time, 75% are cancelled and the few that are operating, are hours behind schedule. I am curently sitting in the terminal, hoping I make it on a flight to work. All the morning flights were cancelled so that means everyone that is brave enough to still attempt to travel today had been rolled back to the flight I am trying to take. The flight went from having 47 open seats at 8:00am to being at -27 available currently. When I showed up to the gate I knew the only way I was going to make it on the flight was if I signed up for the jumpseat. So as I approached the gate agent, I took a peek behind the counter and to my dismay I saw 3 jumpseat forms already filed out. Uh, oh. Not looking good. About the only thing I have going in my favor is that I take priority over them because they are all off-line jumpseaters. My company is affiliated with Big Red and therefore I have a higher boarding priority than they do. I hate to have to pull rank like that, but I'm trying to get to work. If I didnt have to be at work tonight, I would let them take the seat. Well, we'll see how this goes...I'm off to the gate.

2007-12-06T19:52:00.000-06:00

Here are a few photos I've taken over the last few weeks. Sunrise's may be beautiful, but I still hate seeing em. It used to be that if I saw one, that meant I was flying all night. Now it means that I got up really really early in order to to be flying at the crack of dawn.

Home
A Fatty in Memphis
This last one is pretty cool. We were following company traffic a few miles ahead of us at FL320. We chased their contrail half way across the country from Detroit till they descended for Tulsa. We kept on truckin to Oklahoma City.

We have a traveler

2007-11-28T23:00:00.000-06:00

Its official, Squirt is a good traveler. This years pilgrimage to Connecticut for Thanksgiving went extremely well. No cancelled flights, no bad weather, no delays and Erin didn't have to do it all alone (one way at least) or with the flu. Jack had a great time in the airports and really enjoyed being on "Daddy planes". He wasn't really flying on Barbie jets, but he didn't know the difference. He got to experience what we read about in his bedtime books every night. It was cute to see him looking out the window of the plane and recite things from his books. I'm looking forward to bringing him flying more in the future. It'd be nice to have Erin and Jack fly out and spend the night some night when I'm working. Now that we know he likes it, hopefully we'll be able to take him more places. I want him to love flying as much as I did as a kid.

Outta the norm

2007-11-12T18:44:00.000-06:00

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 150nm 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?

4 hr delay to LGA Part 2

2007-11-06T11:00:00.000-06:00

Departure +2:00

After getting bored in the plane again, the Capt. and I stopped in the arcade for a few quick games of Tekken 4 (we were bored and really had nothing better to do). So after exhausting our quarters, we headed back to the plane to see if there were any updates on our wheels up time.

Departure +2:45

While querying dispatch about the wheels up time, the powers that be decided to load up the plane early in anticipation of us getting released earlier. So we loaded up the passengers and finally closed the door 3:10 late.

Departure +3:15

I call up ground control and tell them we are pushing from the gate. They advise that they can call center about our release time 15 min earlier that our proposed time off. We still had plenty of time, so we took our sweet time taxiing out to the penalty box (a place that controllers put planes that have taxied out, but are not departing right away).

Departure +3:45

We taxied out on one engine to save on gas. Every little bit helps when you are heading into the east coast. We decided to fire up number 1 a few minutes before the controllers at the airport were to call center just in case they released us earlier. Good thing we did because exactly 15 min prior to our wheels up time, we got the word from tower that we were cleared for immediate departure. I gave the people in back the good news and we were airborne in moments.

There are a lot of similarities between flying cargo and flying pax. Getting delayed is just one of them.

Hidden Costs

2007-10-31T21:59:00.000-05:00

There are a lotahidden costs you don't hear about when getting your first airline job. It's been steadily draining me since my interview. First came the interview, the company paid for the ticket to their headquarters, but they have the interview so early in the morning that you cannot take a flight in the day of the interview. So you must come a day early and spend cash on a hotel room. (I had a bunch of hotel points saved up, so it was a freebie for me, but others paid upwards of $90) Second comes training costs. Most companies are paying a salary or some sort of stipend for you to come to training nowadays, but it didn't used to be that way. Not too long ago guys had to pay for their own hotel and suffer the long lasting effects of not getting any pay during training. My hats off to you aviators, I would not and could not afford to make such a move. Third comes the all important, I wanna look like a real airline pilot flight bag. I'm cheap so I bought the $90 one, but if you want a good one, it'll cost you upwards of $300 for a nice leather one. Fourth comes the uniform. Nothing completes the "looks like an airline pilot" look better than a honest to God airline uniform. Most airlines are going to charge you $700 plus for a couple of shirts, pants a goofy hat, dorky trench coat and a blazer. Sorry if I seem a little jaded against the trench coat and hat, they are outdated and copied by too many other people. I just don't like wearing the same hat as the sky caps that check your baggage at the curbside check-in. Maybe just a stuck up prick, but I worked hard to be where I am and don't feel that just anyone should be wearing the hat and scrambled eggs. (Should have stayed a pilot tradition) But anyways, Fifth, the suitcase. You have to have a black one and just no ordinary bag will do. Ask Erin, she'll tell you. I've chewed up 3 suitcases in the past 18 months. I finally broke down and bought a good one, that cost an arm and a leg, but should last me many years. Sixth but most certainly not least is a new headset. Back in the good old days of flying freight, we didn't use headsets. We just threw in some ear plugs, blasted the speakers at full volume and shouted to each other across the cockpit. Now that I am flying planes that are younger than myself and have decent avionics, I can wear a headset again. Only thing is, David Clarks just don't cut it anymore. Not only do they look out of place in a jet, but they are uncomfortable to wear all day. I really need a decent pair of jet headsets such as the Telex 850's, only they are $420 plus and out of my budget at the moment. So with this short list of stuff you must have (uniform, flight kit/bag) and stuff you should have (nice suitcase and headset) you are looking at over $1,500 in crap that you'll need to become an airline pilot. Just a heads up.

4 hr delay to LGA Part 1

2007-10-28T15:46:00.000-05:00

Show time -2.0

I had a notion that tonight's flight was going to be delayed. I had been watching the Weather Channel and saw that LGA, EWR and JFK all had 1.5 to 2 hour delays posted. I checked the TAF's and saw the reason why, low ceilings, low visibilities and rain.

Show time - 1:45

I check big airlines website to see if they are showing a delay on our flight, shows "On Schedule"

Show time -1:00

Check CrewTrac (our scheduling website) to see if our show time has changed. Nope, just showing a minor 5 min delay to LGA

Show time -:45

Hop in the shower to get ready to head downstairs to meet up with the rest of the crew. Wx channel still showing delays to LGA, big airline's website still showing on time.

Show time -:20

Meet in the hotel lobby. Captain and I discuss the wx in LGA. We bet each other on how long of a delay we are going to have. He's optimistic that things will go smoothly, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are headed for a long night.

Show time -:05

We arrive at the gate area to see that its full of people wanting to get to NYC. The gate agent has our paperwork waiting for us, checks our ID's and lets us down the jetbridge.

Show time +01

I make my nest in the cockpit, stash my overnight bag in the back and head out to do the walk around. I finish the walk around, head back to the cockpit and start getting the plane ready for departure. I enter in the flight information into the ACARS, send that off to company and then go to request our PDC (pre departure clearance- at bigger airports you can request your IFR clearance digitally thru the FMS). The reply I get from the computer is an ominous one. We have an estimated wheels up time that's 4 hours from the current time. Uh oh, here we go. I show the Captain the message and he has me call clearance over the radio to confirm. A quick call and they say LGA has a ground stop in effect and re-confirms the 4 hour delay. About 30 seconds later the gate agent pops her head in and asks us if we've heard about the 2 hour delay. We give her the correct news that its a 4 hour delay, not 2.

Departure +30

The crew heads out to the terminal to stock up on supplies for the long night ahead of us. The CA grabs some food, the FA grabs some Cinnibuns and I manage to scrounge up my old freight dog favorite, Rockstar.

Departure +1:45

I get bored and start taking pictures. I love the fact that I now have a toilet on board. Gone are the days of whizzing in Gatorade bottles.

Flying again

2007-10-22T09:02:00.000-05:00

Life is good. I'm spending more time at home. More time with the family and less time on the road. Cant argue with that. The new office is growing on me and the more time I spend in the cockpit, the more comfortable it becomes. The FMS is becoming second nature. The FCP (flight control panel) is no longer just a bunch of buttons, it has become a useful tool to make the flight as smooth and efficient as possible. And I'm gettin a hang of how things operate at the new company. Looks like I'll be sitting reserve until at least December, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. I usually know about trips ahead of time and am learning how to "massage" the system to get the most flight hours in while spending the least amount of time at base. Just like with my old company, I try to avoid being at base like the plague. I snapped a few pictures the other day. Its still pretty impressive to see a Big Red 74-4 (747-400) taxi out in front of us and then start its take off roll on the way to the Orient. Never used to see that with the old company.

Bus Butt

A good view of a few of the Finger Lakes in N.Y.

The office. Taken around the same time as the pictures above.

In another post, I'll go over some of the stuff you can see in the pics of the new office.

Long time no post.

2007-10-16T16:51:00.000-05:00

Well I know it's been quite a while since I've posted, but I've been busy. A lot has happened in the last few weeks and I haven't really had the time or resources to post. First things first, Erin and I finally tied the knot. The wedding was awesome, Erin was beautiful, Jack wearing a Kilt was the hit of the wedding and everything went off with out a hitch. I couldn't have asked for a better day. A special thanks go out to "The Mom's" for putting together such a great day and to "The Dad's" for letting the Mom's spend so much money. Another thanks goes out to everyone who made the journey to the Midwest for the wedding. It was good to see everyone and I hope you had as good a time as Erin and I did.

Now back to some flying stories. At my last posting I was just about to start my O.E flying. In the few weeks since then, I've finished up with that and started flying as a regular line pilot. In the few short weeks that I've been flying the CRJ, I've decided that my personal nickname for it is going to be Princess. Long gone are the days of jumping in, lighting the fires and blasting off at 6,000+ f.p.m climb rates. The CRJ needs a lot of attention and tender loving care before it'll do something you want and I can forget about any kind of a decent climb rate above 20,000ft, because Princess just doesn't have the muscle. For the first time ever I had to ask ATC for a "slow climb" because the plane wouldn't maintain a 500f.p.m rate up to our cruise altitude of FL320. Around FL270 she started really dropping off in performance and by the time we hit FL300, we couldn't maintain 500f.p.m so we either had to level off till we burned some gas or ask for a slow climb. Thankfully we didn't have much traffic around us and the controller let us crawl our way up there. Granted we were heavy with lots of gas and a full compliment of 50 pax, but the lack of performance really caught my attention. I think that's about the only gripe I have about the plane. Cant argue with that.

So now that we have the one glaring issue of the aircraft out of the way, I can move on to things I like. First things first, I love the glass and the flight director. Much to my surprise I am still able to handfly the plane as much as I want. Typically I'll hand fly it to FL180 then let "Otto" have his chance. Then on the way back down, I'll take over again at 10,000 ft. I was a good stick and rudder guy before, but the glass has brought it to a whole new level. I've gone from being pretty smooth in the freighters to very smooth with the CRJ. Its all thanks to those little pink bars right there in front of me on my PFD (primary flight display). As long as I keep snug with the FD, things are gunna work out just fine.

The second thing I like about the Princess is the seat. Its fully adjustable, reclinable, has lumbar support and is a dramatic improvement over any of my previous aircraft. I can sit in the cockpit all day and not get as uncomfortable as I'd get after 15min in a Lear. The third thing I like is the fact that the cockpit is quiet. In cruise I can take my headset off and kick back and relax with the speaker on and not have to shout across the cockpit at the captain. We can have a normal conversation with out straining our vocal chords. The fourth thing is the fact that all our planes have identical avionics and components. There are a few minor differences such as whether it is a Flaps 8 or 20 bird or has Mach transducer selector valves (I have no idea what the are, so don't bother asking), but that's about it. No more spending 5 min looking around the cockpit trying to find switches and gauges. There is plenty more to write about, but its late and I'm getting hungry.

And so it starts.

2007-09-24T05:41:00.000-05:00

Almost 2 months to the day after beginning training, I'll finally be flying the real thing. My IOE (initial operating experience - I fly around with a check airman for the first 25 hours or so) starts in a few hours. I really get tossed into the deep end on my first day because we have a 6 leg, 8 hour flying time, 14 hour duty day that has us making 4 quick turns and a short layover in our base in the Midwest. This will be followed by a 5 leg day and a reduced rest overnight on night 2 with an early morning departure (6am show time) back to our base in the south followed by a deadhead back to the motor city.

It'll be nice to finally fly again. I'll write more about it later this week after I have a few hours under my belt and can actually speak from some experience about the line.

Type rating #3

2007-09-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

Ahhhhhhh. It feels good to be done. All this studying, all this time away from home, just for one thing, to pass the dreaded checkride. Its like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I can finally relax a bit. It feels great to have passed the checkride and become an official employee and airline pilot, but the greatest thing about passing, is now I can go home!!!!!!!! That was my primary motivation to keep me going and keep me focused. All I really cared about was finishing as fast as I could so I could go home. If the training schedule was left to my sadistic thought process, I would have gone to class 7 days a week, gone straight into Goofus sessions, done the sim's on consecutive days with no days off and had the checkride tacked on immediately after finishing sim training. That alone would have dropped 3 weeks off. But thats just me.

Personally I think my training here was pretty good. I was lucky enough to pick a sim partner that has more time flying the CRJ than I have total time. He was lucky that he didn't get stuck with a rookie to jets. It worked out good for the both of us. Our sim instructors were top notch! Both Matt and Mike were honest, fair and extremely knowledgeable. Their instruction was invaluable when it came to the checkride. Both my sim partner and I were prepped and ready for anything the examiner threw at us.

I stopped by the training center yesterday and officially got my 3rd type rating added to my license. It feels good to be done, but will feel even better when I get home.

Almost done

2007-09-11T16:27:00.000-05:00

Well its been a long......long.....very long time down here in the mid south and I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. After spending the past 49 days in training, my checkride is fast approaching. It cannot come soon enough. I am dying to go home. I miss my family and I've had enough of this place.

All our sim sessions went very well and I had a lot of fun learning the new jet. It fly's like the Falcon, but that's the only similarity. The cockpits are as different as they come. The Falcon is dirty, old, outdated and has steam gauges. The CRJ is new, semi-state of the art and a breeze to fly with the FMS and auto pilot. The procedures at the new company are vastly different. The hardest thing to learn was letting go of old habits. The auto pilots in the Falcons were very un reliable and I only used them as cruise baby-sitters. The A.P. in the CRJ is great. When coupled with the FMS, it'll do just about anything you want. Holds are a thing of the past. All you need to do is press a few buttons on the FMS and "presto!" it'll do it for you. Situational awareness is dramatically enhanced as compared to the Falcon. Now I have a moving map display of where I am, where I'm going and where I'm going next. Its great. I've finally learned to trust the auto pilot and let it do the work.

Thankfully there are only a few more days left. After the checkride I have to do a L.O.F.T flight, walk around and 4 fam flights (flight were I just sit in the cockpit and watch) then I'm released to do my O.E (operational experience, I fly with a check airman for 25 hours) then I'll be released to the line. I'm hoping that after the fam flights I can go home. Hopefully in a weeks time I'll be at home, sleeping in my own bed next to soon to be wife.

The Flight Simulator

2007-09-03T01:45:00.000-05:00

Its finally time to go have some fun. The flight profiles have been memorized, checklists burned into long term memory, flows burned into muscle memory and call outs that can be spit out in my sleep. Put this all together and you have a pilot ready to step into the hot box.

Some guys (like my sim partner) loath the sim. They hate getting engine failures, V1 cuts, fires, single engine approaches, stalls, go arounds and hand flying the plane. I am at the other end of the spectrum, I love it. I get to go in there and do what I do best, fly the plane. A funny part about my training so far is that I'm getting chastised a little bit by the instructor because I don't use the auto pilot enough. Typically after takeoff and you are climbing through 600ft agl, the normal call is "auto pilot on". I am hand flying as much as I can and usually don't turn "Otto" on until the instructor tells me to, or we get busy in the cockpit trying to fix something or prepare for an approach. Another airlineism I need to get used to is calling for things on the flight control panel. I'm so used to doing things myself that I find myself reaching up and setting things that I am not allowed to touch when I'm hand flying. For example, if I'm hand flying and ATC gives us a new heading, I cant reach up and turn the heading bug to the new heading, I have to ask for my sim partner to set it. I think I'd learn my lesson if the instructor was sitting in the back seat with a yard stick and gave my hand a whack every time I went to reach for something I wasnt supposed to touch. I had to laugh tonight when I read my comments from the instructor. He wrote in big bold letters "HANDS OFF THE FCP WHEN HAND FLYING". We joked about it during the debrief. I suppose I could make things easy on myself and just use Otto more, but whats the fun in that? The airlines are trying to turn me into something I really don't want to be, a button pusher.

I gotta tell ya though, flying glass is friggin sweet. This is a hellva lot easier than steam. It makes me a much better pilot. I'll get into the details of how glass is better in a later post. Here are some pics of the sim. They are a little blurry so I'll see if I can get some better pics.

The new office

2007-08-26T21:52:00.000-05:00

Here's some pics of the new office.....sorta. This here is the pre-office study gizmo that us f.n.g's use to practice flying like the company wants us to. Prior to the invention of the G.F.S (graphic flight simulator a.k.a Goofus) pilots would spend many an hour sitting in front of a cardboard cut out of a cockpit. There you would pretend to push buttons, flip switches and chair fly all your flight profiles. Now we sit in the cradle of technology and push touch screen computer monitors that actually do something. Every time we push the screen to flip a switch or push a button, the cockpit actually responds like the real thing.....sorta. It has its limitations. For example, we do a lot of knob turning in order to set our v-speeds, heading bug, speed bug, ext. On the goofus, we have to touch the screen to get a box to illuminate, then we repeatedly press the screen to set whatever we are trying to set. Only one dirty finger on the screen at a time too. Because of this, it is time consuming to try and get things dialed in the way we want them.

The Goofus may be awkward to learn to use, but I love the thing. It is light years beyond sitting behind a "paper tiger". I love the fact that we can do just about anything with it. Anything you can get in the sim, we can go over in the goofus. It can simulate all of the failures you will see in the sim as well as gives us a semi realistic platform to learn to fly the glass. If the instructor wants to give us a hot start, all he does is push a button and when we go to start an engine, it'll simulate a hot start. Cool stuff.

1 month down, 1 to go

2007-08-19T17:28:00.000-05:00

I know its been a while since I've posted, but the past 4 weeks have been spent cramming my head full of a lot of information. Everyone calls airline training "trying to drink from a fire hose". They are correct. The sheer amount of information that needs to be absorbed is astounding. We have 3 main books that are our new flying bibles.

The first book is our Flight Operations Manual. This book governs how we operate. It contains information ranging from how we are to keep our hair to what we do with unruly pax. Bible number 2 is our Flight Manual. This book contains all our new procedures for flying. It makes sure that every pilot at the company is on the same page as far as what we do in the airplane. This way every pilot flys the same way. (for the most part) It also contains our memory items and limitations. These chapters need to be committed to memory verbatim. The limitations chapter is almost 50 pages long and has items on every page that must be committed to memory. This book also contains our expanded checklists and flows which also need to be memorized. Further on the the book, we have our maneuvers and profiles. This is a template for how we fly the aircraft. We have call outs and procedures that must be followed to a "T" for every flight regime.

Bible number 3 is the systems manual. This is where we find all the information we could ever want about the plane. We must have every switch, light, lever, knob and system memorized as well as how they all interact. We need to have detailed, working knowledge of how every system in the plane works. All 22 chapters in the book need to be read, highlighted and read again. This way we have a good understanding of how the plane works.

After you have digested and memorized the contents of the three bibles, you now get to show off your newly acquired knowledge by taking an oral exam with a check airman or a fed (if your having a real bad day). The oral exam can be a tortuous event for those that come unprepared. I've heard the horror stories of guys busting for even the smallest of errors or forgotten items. This can last anywhere from an hour to 3 hours if the check airman has to drag every answer out of you. After you pass the oral, its then on to cockpit procedure training to finally go learn how to fly the plane the way the company wants you to. Then if you pass a phase check, basically a mini checkride in a pseudo sim, you get to go to the sims.

Currently I am sitting here in my hotel taking a little study break. I finished up the ground school this week and am studying for my oral exam that I take early this week. Hopefully that'll go well and I'll get to start my cockpit procedures training towards the end of the week. If everything goes according to schedule, I'll start my sims in 2 weeks, finish them on time and take my checkride in another 4 weeks. Of course this is just a tentative schedule. All it takes is one broken sim, someone ahead of me needing retraining, a busted checkride or numerous other events to throw a wrench in the works. So I'm hoping everything will go as fast as possible. All I really care about is finishing up so I can go home.

Splat

2007-08-07T18:07:00.000-05:00

Here's the aftermath of a flock of birds on the takeoff roll a few weeks back. Luckily we didn't suck any into the engine's. The score for that encounter: Falcon 2 Birds 0.

Lawyer anyone?

2007-08-02T11:34:00.000-05:00

If anyone ever is told by an employer that they require a training contract, walk away. I wish someone had given me that advise before I signed my life away for my former job. The contract I signed is so absolutely one sided that it leaves the pilot zero protection from the company should things not work out. It basically states you must pay the full amount of training if you quit or are fired before the time limit is up. You also must agree to have your paychecks withheld, that you agree to go to court in the company's hometown and you will have to pay all legal bills for the company should you lose your case. I had the "rose colored glasses" on when I signed this contract. Had I taken a step back and realised how bad it really was, I would have gone to ExpressJet instead.

This contract only benefits the company. The pilots only get screwed by signing it. For example, the schedule change last year. They can force the pilots into whatever they want. The pilot has no recourse. They are forced into the terrible schedule because they cant quit, or they'd owe the company money. The company doesn't care if it kills any semblance of a family life you may have, you work the schedule, or else you owe. They could force you to never have a day off if they wanted, technically they could force you to be on call 24/7 and there is nothing you can do about it because you signed that contract. Another pitfall is that it is also not prorated. So lets say you are a good pilot, always show up on time and fly your ass off for the company for the required time limit. 1 day before your contract is due to expire, they can fire you, take you to court and sue you for the entirety of the contract. Why? Just because the contract says they can.

I knew that I'd have to pay some sort of money to get out of my contract at my company. They have been prorating the contract for other pilots who have left the company early, so I figured they would do the same for me based on the precedence they have started. I found out the hard way that I was WRONG! They refuse to prorate it and informed me they plan on suing for the entire amount of the contract. I tried to reason with them, even offered thousands more than the prorated amount, they refused.

So here I sit, in training for an airline trying to absorb all the information they are throwing at me, and I have impending legal action looming over my head. Try memorizing 10 pages of limitations while also worrying about how your going to defend yourself in court against a lawsuit that you cant afford to defend yourself against. So anyone know any lawyers in the Dallas area that is willing to do a little pro-bono work? Please, send them my way.

For all those aspiring pilots out there that read this: Be careful in your career choices! This industry is filled with landmines and pitfalls that you must be careful to avoid in order to get to your dream job. Watch out for training contracts, there are plenty of good companies out there that will hire you with out one. There are lots of jobs out there, choose wisely.

Training, where the fun begins.

2007-07-26T12:00:00.000-05:00

Ahhh the brain. I haven't really had to use it in a while. I haven't really had to study hard since Lear training last summer and even that was a joke. I got pretty tired of the instructor saying "works good, lasts long time" when I tried to ask some systems questions.

Part 121 is a whole new ballgame as far as training goes. I can plan on the ground portion taking 4 weeks. Sims to take 2 and OE another week and a half. In total, I can expect to be training for 2 months, ugh! Its a really long time to be away from Erin and the Squirt, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve that'll allow them to come visit once or twice. Thanks to all the points and miles I've racked up over the last year or so, I have a few nights worth of hotels, a few airline tix and even enough for a car rental, so having them come down to see me wont cost a ton of $$.

During college I was a big fan of "C's get degrees". I only applied myself when I absolutely needed to or just plain felt like it. It worked. I graduated......eventually. If it were up to me, I woulda stayed longer cause I had such a good time, but the parental units said "enough is enough". Back to the original topic of using the brain. I actually enjoy using my brain on occasion. Especially when the better I do at something, the quicker I'll get some sort of reward out of it. Kinda childish, but its how I operate. I figure the harder I work in ground school, the better I'll do, then hopefully in a few months when I bid for Captain, they'll remember how good I was and I'll get awarded the upgrade. Besides, I love being a good pilot. I take pride in my flying abilities and owe it to myself and the people riding behind me to be the best at my chosen profession.

Well its back to the books. Have an FOM test to study for, then I need to memorize about 15 pages of limitations, 4 pages of memory items, read somewhere around 1500 pages of materials that need to be permanently burned into my memory, learn my new plane inside and out, every system, light bulb and switch, every regulation and then I'll finally go get to fly a simulator. All for an annual salary of $13,800 after taxes!!!! Yeah baby!!! Welcome to the big leagues!!!!

Its official

2007-07-17T15:06:00.000-05:00

Well the Pros have outweighed the Cons. I have decided to become reformed freight trash. I am crossing over to the light side and will start my training to become an "airline pilot" in a short period of time.

It is not my dream job, in fact far from it, but it should enable me to spend more time with the family and upgrade in a very short time. Like I said in previous posts, I had hoped to avoid the regionals, but the intolerable conditions at my present company have forced my hand. I think it says something about my company when 4 out of the 6 guys in my class have forgone an upgrade and left early. In fact, only 1 of us will become a Captain here, the rest have left or are in the process of leaving. As for those who have come after me, they are leaving too. In fact one guy only lasted 3 months before he bailed for greener pastures. The promise of a quick upgrade and that all important Turbine PIC is not worth the crap we have to put up with to get it. There is no way I'll put my family through another 18 months of this garbage. I do believe I have scraped the bottom of the barrel with this company. Things can only get better from here. Even though I have gotten the formal invitation to upgrade, leaving is a better option for me and my family.

Had I gotten this job straight out of college, I'm sure I'd have been really excited that I landed the job. As it is, my excitement level isn't exactly sky high. In fact its more blase' than anything. I'm conflicted because I know I'm passing up an upgrade and instant PIC turbine for another damn paycut. I've come to realize that my career progression is going backwards. I started out making over 30K flying a Navajo. I then went to a company to fly Beech 99's for a paycut to 26K. Then on to jets for another paycut in base salary. And finally I fly the biggest plane to date for a friggin airline and I'd make more working at McDonald's than I will for the airline!
This is not how things are supposed to go. Your pay should increase with the size of plane you fly, not decrease. And it doesn't stop there. After I make Captain at my new company, I'll be making a decent salary well above 50K, when I leave to go to my dream job, I'll again have to endure another paycut. Granted its only for a year, but still, you go from making close to 100K to 35K for a year and it'll take you a few years to again reach the 100K mark. Ugh. Remind me why I'm doing this again? Oh yeah, truck driving school was full.

Big changes are comin' round the bend

2007-07-16T13:55:00.000-05:00

Stay tuned for some news. It has to do with my posts from several months ago concerning dancing with the devil that brought me. All I'm going to say is that I'll be going to training somewhere on some plane. More to follow later.

Sittin around.

2007-07-04T18:40:00.000-05:00

I've been doing a lot of sitting around lately. Thankfully I've been in some pretty cool places and decent hotels. I wish i had my camera with me on this rotation because I could have gotten a lot of great pics. I spent my weekend in the Oakland/San Fran area and I'm spending the holiday by myself in Anderson, S.C.

I had not been to San Fran since I was a kid, so it was cool to go check out. Seeing as how I'm such a huge History Channel dork, there were a lot of historical things to go check out. My new all time favorite place to hang out is the USS Hornet. It sits docked at the old Alameda Naval Air Station and was about a 20min walk from my hotel. I spent 7 hours there on Sunday and still didn't get to see everything. In fact, my clothes that I wore that day still smell like aircraft carrier. It was awesome to have followed in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong as he first returned to Earth from the Moon. (The Hornet was the aircraft carrier that picked the crews of Apollo 11 and 12 from the ocean) I was able to take 2 tours of the ship. The first was the engine room tour that brought us into the depths of the ship. We got to see the engine rooms, parts of the galleys, the catapult, brig, weapons assembly room and a host of other sights that you cannot see on your own. The second tour was of the Island above the flight deck. I got the chance to sit in the Captains chair.....pretty neat stuff. The ship is a historical landmark. Every inch of the nearly 900ft long ship has a story to tell. From fighting the Empire of Japan in WWII to the coasts of Vietnam, the Hornet saw it all. It was difficult to soak in all the history involved with the ship. I'm still contemplating things I saw that day. If I ever get the chance to go back, I'll get there even earlier next time to I can spend the entire day there. Absolutely astounding!

That was Sunday. On Saturday the Captain and I walked down to the docks to catch a ferry over to San Fran. For 11 bucks we caught a ride to and from the Fisherman's Wharf area of the city. I don't remember much about my last trip to S.F because it was so long ago, but I do remember seeing a picture of me sitting on a crapper in a cell at Alcatraz. I have vague recollections about a story told to us on the ferry over to the island that they had a trained shark to swim around the island. I know its a bunch of BS now, but back then I thought it was cool. We went over to where they sell the tickets for the Alcatraz tour and to our dismay they were sold out until the next Thursday. (Note to self: plan ahead on vacations) So we then proceeded to see the sights around the area including Lombard Street, the Seals in the bay, all the seafood restaurants and the SS Jeremiah O'Brien. Again, thanks to the History Channel and Modern Marvels for my prior knowledge about the ship. It was cool to go see in real life.

Here are some more gratuitous pics of "been there, done that".

The view from my hotel room in Queretaro, Mexico

I'm probably going to get thrown in some sort of CIA jail, but here's a pic of White Sands Missile Test Range that I snapped on our way into ELP.

Decisions decisions.

2007-06-30T20:57:00.000-05:00

Well its the end of June and overall its been a pretty good month. I flew a lot. Made some really good money and notched another 100 hours in the logbook. The only downside is spending so much time away from the family. If things were like this year round, I'd be a much happier pilot. But as things go, months like May and June are few and far between. In fact the most hours I had flown in any month prior to May was 103 and that was last June. 68 was my high for the 11 month span between big paychecks.

Freight has been decent to me as far as pay goes. Its the QOL (quality of life) that really takes a beating. If I stay on and upgrade my pay will go up quite a bit, but the QOL will still suffer. Just how much is turbo jet PIC worth? Is it worth a $36,000 base salary? Is it worth living my life tied to a pager? Is it worth only seeing my family for several days a month? I keep telling myself that my next job will be better, but will it? If we (Erin, Jack and I) tough it out for another 18 months at my current company, is it really going to be worth it in the end? Am I going to be able to land a job that will significantly increase my QOL to make up for lost time? Is turbo jet PIC really worth that much? I don't know. I thought I could do it no problem, but lately it gets harder and harder to look at my pager on Sundays and realize I'm not going to see my family for another week or two. Now Jack is able to say " I miss you Daddy" and "Come home soon" and its hard to hear when I'm 1,000 miles away sitting in some dump hotel waiting for my pager to go off so I can go build hours for that better job. Is turbo jet PIC worth that? I don't think so.
As much as I like money, its not the most important thing in life. If we can be happier with me making less, but home more, then that's what needs to be done. My career is important, but my family comes first.

Vintage freight dog planes.

2007-06-26T10:17:00.001-05:00

You'll see here pics of an actual flying Convair 440. This plane is still doggin it for a company in Laredo, TX. Special thanks go out to Robert from Barker's for letting me check out his planes.
Thats a whole lotta knobs and switches to throw.
This slow 440 has a better GPS than our jets.

I don't even think I could start the beast. That's more levers than I've ever seen. Notice how the Copilots throttle quadrant has very little wear. Whats that tell ya?

Ahhh, the powerful Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp. I'd love to hear the 2000 horse power engines rumbling down the runway.

More pics

2007-06-25T16:00:00.001-05:00

HAZMAT: Its too dangerous for the travelling public, but its OK for freight dawggers.
Since its OK for Dawggers, Lets just load up the whole plane with the stuff and bring it to Mexico.
I just love how my seat is duct taped together. Oh, wait sorry, "Cargo pit Taped". A fancy FAA approved duct tape.
Another nice clean plane.
A pretty sweet Cosair sitting on the ramp at IWA. I could have gotten a better shot, but our cargo truck parked in the way.

The Coolest plane in the world!!!!

2007-06-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

If I ever won the lottery, this would be my project!!!! I saw this sitting out on the ramp in ELP a few months ago and finally got the chance to see it up close. I think its the most badass plane I've ever seen. It looks like a mini B-58 Hustler. I've done a little research on it and haven't come up with much. All I know is that its old and hasn't flown in a very long time, but from the looks of it, its a screamer. Those 4 pure turbo jets sitting under the wing turn old dinosaurs into a lot of noise in a hurry. I'm guessing that it'll cruise in the Mach .90+ range. I would love to fly it! Drinks on me for whoever can guess what type of plane it is.

The Powerful Garmin 496

2007-06-09T12:41:00.000-05:00

For the last few weeks I have had the privilege of flying with a powerful tool that greatly enhances my safety of flight. Its the only piece of "glass cockpit" that I have available to me and I love it. I just wish I had one of my own. Sadly I'll be returning it to my Dad next week because it is his. I've just been using it for a few weeks while he's been on vacation and not flying a lot.

The Garmin 496 is the coolest thing since sliced bread! It has so many useful features that I don't even know where to begin. It is far superior to anything we have on board our aircraft in terms of situational awareness. In the following pictures I'll describe how the Garmin helps.

Above you'll see a picture of a nasty line of thunderstorms that were heading towards our original destination of Memphis. The Garmin was the only picture of the radar we had available to us prior to departure due to the fact we were picking up our cargo on a cargo ramp and there were no weather computers that we could use to check weather. Our only weather we get is in text form that comes out with our flight plan. The TAF for MEM was ugly, calling for heavy rain and thunderstorms at the time of our arrival. As usual, our dispatcher gave us no heads up about the weather and tried to rush us to get airborne. He could have cared less about trying to send us to an airport that was about to get slammed with brutal thunderstorms. All he wanted was for us to get in the air and figure things out later. Thankfully I had the Garmin handy so the captain and I could take a good look at the Nexrad radar. The really cool feature of the GPS is the ability to overlay the radar with your flight route. This way you can see exactly where the storms are in relation to our flight path.

So instead of going to MEM, we changed our destination to LIT because the storms had already passed and there was no ground stop holding us back. Enroute we were flying at FL410 and could see several hundred mile ahead of us. Looking ahead we could use our eyes to see the part of the storms that were higher than us. Usually any time a storm is above our flight level, we try and steer well clear because they tend to be the hail and tornado producing type of storms. During the day its pretty easy to steer clear, but at night, its not so easy to pick out where exactly the cells are sitting. The Garmin will let out know exactly where they are.

Below you will see our radar. As you can see its painting a target off to our left. If you scroll between pictures, they are all from around the same time period. You can see what we are seeing out the windshield, on the Garmin and on our radar. I'll take the 496 over the other two.

And finally a picture of our all powerful, all knowing, super advanced, state of the art for 1989, Trimble 2000. As you can see, its a very, very basic GPS that does not off much in terms of situational awareness. In fact it is more of a hindrance than a help because they are never in the same place in any of our aircraft. Since they are our primary source of navigation, you are constantly scanning the entire cockpit to get your heading from the GPS. With the Garmin, I can plop it right in front on me on the glareshield and it drastically cuts down on how much time is spend looking all over the cockpit.

I've only scratched the surface of what this thing can do. I'll have more posts about some of the other features later. I'll sure be sad to give it back, but I'm glad to have had it while I did.

No good deed goes unpunished

2007-06-06T10:14:00.000-05:00

There is a saying among us line pilots here at my company, No good deed goes unpunished. What we mean by that is usually every time we do dispatch a favor and help them out, they usually screw us on something else a short time later. For example, I did dispatch a huge favor and agreed to work a day off so they could get a trip done. Otherwise they would have had to scramble to find another pilot, plane or crew to do the trip and that would have been a big headache and probably cost the company a lot of money. When the dispatcher called to see if I would do the trip for him, he was practically begging. So being the nice guy that I am, I agreed to help them out. This meant I'd get paid my paltry extra day rate (half of what a regular contract pilot would charge) and I'd miss out on time at home with the family. I was scheduled for 3 days at home, so now I was down to 2. The way I see it, I did them a huge favor. Do they remember it a few days later? Hell no!
I know I'm just being paranoid, but it seems they like to punish you every time you do them a favor. They never reciprocate the favor. For example, after working my day off and spending reduced time at home with the family I get a page from dispatch saying they were airlining me to our base in the north and the flight was the first one out in the morning. They all know how much I hate going to base, yet they do it anyway. But what makes it worse is after I get to base, I call in let them know I'm sitting at the airport ready to go and to please find me a trip out of here. The dispatchers gives me the usual "Oh yeah, no problem, we'll see what we can do". So as I'm sitting around the crew lounge, in walks my buddy with all his traveling bags. After a little conversation he tells me he got paged for a trip that's going to Mexico and he's taking the last airplane at the base. Pissed off couldn't even describe how mad I was. Not only did dispatch airline me to base, but then once I got there, they passed me over for a good mileage trip and left me there with no plane to fly!!! This is what I mean by punished. I do them a huge favor over the weekend and they royally screw me when I come back on duty. So now I sit here at base burning money at the rate of $60 a day when I should be out on the road, flying and making money. The airlines are looking better every day. I'm getting sick of this shit.

The Devil I know, Part II

2007-06-01T05:23:00.000-05:00

In my previous post I said I consider myself over qualified for a regional airline. Considering that several regional airlines have been advertising positions with my Alma Mater, I'd consider my time and experience level to be at or above most of the applicants for these positions. Honestly, I really never saw myself as a passenger guy, but given how things have gone in the past year or so, I'm actually considering flying pax. I've been looking at other jobs out there and one sticks out in my searches. It'd be for a regional, but this particular carrier is desperate for pilots. They are looking for guys like me that can upgrade really fast. I figure that if I were hired at this particular regional by the end of June, I'd make Captain by the end of the year. If it wasn't for the first year pay, I'd probably jump ship sooner rather than later. I'm going to weigh my options and see where I end up.

Pro's of going to this airline.
Better schedule
Better aircraft
More flying
121 time
Bases that I could easily commute to
I'd be home more
Better pay than my current job if/when I'd make Captain
No more Mexico with ratty equipment
Glass Cockpit time
The airline is in decent financial shape
I could potentially get my 1000 PIC turbine quicker than my current company
No more "On Demand" flying
No more backside of the clock flying, unless I bid for it.
No more sitting in hotels for days on end wondering when the next time I'm going to get a trip.
NO More Life tied to a Pager!!!!!!!!!!

Con's of making the switch
I'm still under contract with my current company.
I'd take a gigantic pay cut until I made Captain
I don't know if I could afford the pay cut.
Making captain in under a year is not a sure thing.
Did I mention the pay cut?
Sitting reserve for a long time before I'll have enough seniority to hold a line
I'd have to fly pax.
Training is long and I'd only get paid $400 a week
I'd still only get 10 days off a month
I'd be at the bottom of a seniority list
I'd have to wear the monkey suit and shave every day.
It'd cost me a lot of money I don't have to buy out of my contract
I'd start logging PIC turbine quicker here.
I kind of see it as a step backwards in the career chain. My current company was supposed to skip this step.
And yet again, the pay.

I'm sure there will be other things to add to both lists. Erin and I would have to sit down and have a really long discussion about our financial situation should I seriously consider doing this. Who knows whats going to happen. I just need to keep my options open and see what comes along.

The Devil I Know

2007-05-29T12:11:00.000-05:00

Its been a year since I've officially come "on line" and been flying for my current company. At my last logbook entry I've logged around 2250 hours total time with 1350 multi engine, 540 turbo jet and plenty of night and actual instrument time. Now I've come to a crossroads about what to do with my career.

With my current total time and experience, I'd consider myself over qualified for most regional airlines. They're are a lot of regionals hiring guys with a wet commercial ticket and 500 hours total time. On the other hand, I'm a few hundred hours short of meeting the fractionals hiring minimums. They want 2500 hour total time and an ATP of which I am missing both. My chief pilot has already pulled me into his office and told me that he was looking into upgrading me. They are looking to upgrade 2-3 of us First Officers in either June or July. The question is, do I really want the upgrade? Lets face it, I have a lot of gripes about how my company operates. I'm still bitter about the 5 and 2, 12 and 2 schedule they forced on us. Our planes seem to be falling apart at the rivets. I don't fly as much as I'd like and I spend way too much time away from home. BUT, I absolutely need 1000 hours turbojet PIC to reach my ultimate career goal of UPS or Fed Ex. Do I want to dance with the Devil that brought me, take the upgrade and sign away another 18 months of my life? Or do I search out other gainful (turbojet pic) employment when my contract runs out at the end of the year?

Switching to the left seat would mean a huge pay increase. If things stayed busy and I flew a lot, I could easily double my current salary. But even more important than the pay would be the golden turbojet PIC time I could accumulate. To me, that's worth more than the pay increase. Every 6 minutes in the cockpit is another .1 in the logbook towards my career goals. The whole reason I took this job over ExpressJet was for one simple reason, quick upgrade! Like some people say, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.

Checkride

2007-05-24T19:39:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting in our base in the South and the pager goes off. It says I have my sim ride the next day and to be at headquarters in the morning. I knew this was coming, but I was hoping to get a trip out of here instead of doing the checkride, but the flying Gods have spoken. Its not that I don't want to do the sim, but I'd rather be out on the road flying and making money instead. I was doing a little calculating and all I need is another 2500 miles and my mileage pay gets another bump up. With the rest of this week shot, I'll have to get the miles next week.

I had a really good time flying the sim last year. It was the first time I had ever been in a full motion sim. In fact the very first time I ever stepped foot in the box, the guys flying did a fantastic job of showing me how realistic the motion was. My sim partner and I showed up at the sim at our ungodly assigned time of 1am for our 4 hour slot in the box. Turns out the sim had been having some issues earlier so the guys going before us were only half way through their session when we arrived. The instructor asked if either of us wanted to sit in and watch the next session. I volunteered because I had never seen a company crew at work and I wanted to see how they flew. The guys I was going to watch were a couple of Lear guys going through a transition into the Falcon, so I figured I could pick up some pointers on how things are done. Well, I certainly got a lesson. Let me give you a little background info before I dive into their sim session. The Lear and the Falcon are two different animals on the ground. The Lear can be taxied by either the FO or the Captain. It is a more traditional aircraft where you steer with your feet. The Falcon is a big pig (as compared to the Lear) and uses a steering tiller while on the ground. The typical fashion a take off is completed in the Falcon is with the Captain using the tiller until 80kts and then you transition to using the rudder for directional control. So in my very first simulator experience, I got to see a crash.

It turns out that the Lear guys were unaware of the tiller procedure and somehow had managed to make all of their previous takeoffs with out incident, but this was not going to last for long. As I sat in the jumpseat observing, I saw the instructor input an engine failure at 100kts. So when the guys hit 100kts on the takeoff roll, the right engine was going to fail. This would cause the crew to abort the takeoff. As the crew prepared for the takeoff, they briefed the departure and then called "tower" (the instructor) and were cleared for takeoff. As they added power, I got to experience the motion for the first time. It was awesome, just like the real thing. I had to hang on to my seat to keep from falling backward. As the plane accelerated it felt just like the real thing. All my inner sensations were moving around and I felt like we were really moving. Then things got real interesting. At 100kts the right engine failed. The only problem was the crew wasn't expecting this and the plane started to veer to the right. So the sim started to rock me to the left. Then the flying pilot tried to correct to the left but over corrected and the plane veered to the left. Then the non-flying pilot sitting in the captain seat tried to correct with the tiller and he over corrected to the right. So I got tossed to the left again. By this time things in the cockpit were out of control and the plane ran off the runway and they got the dreaded red screen of death. I was still sitting in the back seat grinning from ear to ear because I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It was a great way to be introduced to a full motion sim.

So back to why I like the sim. The sim gives you the chance to do things that hopefully you will never have to do in real life. You get to practice V1 cuts, single engine operations, stalls, steep turns, hydraulic system failures, electrical failures, missed approaches, holds and a host of other things. During my initial training we had multiple sessions that allowed us to practice. This time around I get one shot at it and that's it. I kinda wish I had more time to play around, but its all work and no play for this session. Some guys get all bent out of shape and nervous about recurrent checkrides, but I just see it as a way for me to showcase my talents and show the chief pilots I'm ready to upgrade.

A really good month

2007-05-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

So far May has been a great month for flying and making some much needed $$. Thanks to the cool schedule change, I got to spend the first week of the month at home with the fam and then got to do 5 and 2's for the rest of the month. What I mean by 5 and 2's is I work from Monday-Friday and I'm usually home by late Friday night. I don't mind 5 and 2's, but it was the dreaded 12 and 2's from the old sked that I hated. But with the new sked, I can bid a line for what days I want off. Seeing as how I'm high up of the seniority list for FO's, I usually get my first choice of lines. By choice this week, I'm working a 12 and 2. I could have had last weekend off, but instead I decided to work my days off in exchange for double my daily salary. With the expenses of Squirts surgery quickly approaching, we can use the extra money. In addition to the extra money for days off worked, I'm finally making some real good money in mileage. I'm not going to get into specifics about how much I'm making, but if I were to make this kind of money year round, it would be on par with Captain pay at most regional airlines. Its too bad this kind of money doesn't come around regularly (but it soon might). Anyways its back to sleep for me. I'm sure I'll have another trip waiting for me when my required rest is up and I again go green.

Taking a stand

2007-05-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

When it comes to planes there is flyable broke (MEL) and there is grounded broke (broke, broke). MEL broke is tolerable depending on what is not working. Grounded broke is bad. On my latest flight this week I ran into problems with a grounded broke issue and had to take a stand against flying the plane.

On our Lears, as with all jet aircraft, we have a Yaw Damper. When the Y.D is on, it automatically controls the rudder to prevent Dutch Rolling. Without getting into a discussion about aerodynamics, a Dutch Roll is where the plane wants to rock back and forth without any inputs from the pilots. At high speeds planes have a tendency to do this if you make a turn. The Y.D basically keeps the passengers from getting motion sickness. On this particular flight the Y.D had a mind of its own. Several times the rudder made un-commanded movements and yawed the plane slightly to the right causing the plane to start rocking. Anytime you have a control surface move without you manually doing it or you telling autopilot to make the input, you have a problem. We were on our way from the Mexican border enroute to a fuel stop in LA for our eventual destination of our base in the North when the anomaly occurred. Normally if something out of the ordinary occurs in flight, if it only happens once we can chalk it up to aircraft gremlins, but if it happens twice or more, you have a problem. During climb out the rudder made its first un-commanded movement. Granted it was not a hard movement, but it was very noticeable. The captain and I both chalked that up to a gremlin. Several minuets later it did it again. This is where I had to take a stand.

After the second occurrence, I considered the Y.D to be a problem. The captain did not see it my way. He wanted to continue the trip to our fuel stop and then on up to our base in the North. I told him that any un-commanded control movement like this is a big deal and we should ground the plane. He saw it as an inconvenience and we should just ignore it and we’ll write it up when we get to our base in the North. Then it happened again. That galvanized my position that the flight should be discontinued and we should divert to the nearest suitable airport which happened to be our base in the south. The captain wanted to continue to our fuel stop and we’d talk about the situation then. That’s when I told him that there was no way I was going to continue the trip with the rudder making un-commanded movements. He can continue to our fuel stop and ground the plane or we can go to our base and ground the plane, but either way, I refuse to fly the plane any further in its present condition. Needless to say he was not very pleased with me, but safety of flight comes first before finishing the trip so he could get home. So we diverted to our base in the south. It happened to be closer to our present position and in perfect range for a normal descent from our cruising alt of FL410. In some miracle of modern technology I managed to pick up the ILS about 90 miles out and flew it all the way in to the airport for an uneventful landing.
I really hate having to cancel trips and down aircraft especially when we have freight on board, but when it’s an issue of being grounded broke, it really isn’t a hard call to make.

Record setting day

2007-05-11T14:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Back to work

2007-05-07T00:59:00.000-05:00

Thanks to our new schedule I was able to spend last week at home. It was much needed because Jack is on the mend and couldn't go into daycare for the week. He is healing up nicely and seems to be doing just fine. I think he really enjoyed having Daddy home for the week. I know I sure enjoyed it, but by Friday, I needed a squirt break. After 7 months of being home only 6 days a month, having 10 straight days at home was giving me the "aviation itch". As Erin will attest, its time for me to go back to work. So after bumming a ride with the parents to my wonderfully run down base in the North, I'm sitting here not so patiently waiting for the pager to go off so I can go poking holes in the sky in a Lear.

Catching up on some Pics

2007-04-27T11:05:00.000-05:00

With lots of time to do nothing while the Squirt is recuperating in the Hospital, I can catch up on some pics from the last few weeks. I don't have Internet at the house, so I'll take advantage of the net here at the hosp.

Jack and Mommy getting faces painted at Easter

My little Bomber Pilot

Squirt flying the plane

Jack and Daddy flying

Big Jack and Little Jack sitting on Grandpa's plane.

Sick little guy

2007-04-26T16:23:00.000-05:00

Well as usual, things change. When I left for recurrent on Monday, Jack had what was called a Carbuncle. Its a nasty pus filled thing that kind of looks like a boil. His Dr. tried treating it with a high load of antibiotics and some TLC, but as the week progressed, his "owwweee" as Jack called it, got progressively worse. As we were taking a break in class yesterday, I noticed 4 missed calls, 2 voicemails and a text message. I had my phone on silent, so I didn't notice the calls for a few hours. I immediately know something was wrong and called Erin to find out what was up. Apparently his owwee had gotten swollen and more infected. It was so bad that she brought him in to the hospital. The Doctors decided that it was bad enough that they had to operate. Its the kind of call that nobody wants to hear, especially when you are 2000 miles away and cant be there for your family. As soon as I got off the phone with Erin, I walked over my boss's office and told him of the situation, the first words out of his mouth were "Go Home"! His second action was to immediately get on his computer and find me a flight that would get me home a.s.a.p. (M.M, I cant tell you enough how much I appreciate how you handled the situation.) The next problem we faced was what to do about class. Thankfully I had been studying for a few months and studied hard during the week so the class wasn't a complete waste. I asked if they could bump the checkride up to the next day, but they said they were not able to do that. I then asked if it would be alright for me to take the final right now and that way all I'd have to do is come back to do my sim. They agreed and gave me the test right then and there. I flew through the test in record speed and was on my way back home in less than 20 min.

Here is the owwweee the night before surgery.

Here's the Little Trooper and Mommy before heading to the cutting room.

After scorching through my final, I hustled out the door to grab my stuff from the hotel so I could make my flight home. My company had bought me a "cheap" ticket home on Air Tran, but that would have gotten me home at around 11:00pm. But I knew from experience that Midwest had a direct flight that would have gotten me home by 9:30. I took the gamble and decided to head over to the Midwest counter at DFW. Jumpseating is more of an art form with my company due to the fact that we are not in the CASS system and we only have 2 jumpseat agreements. But thanks to Larry O. and the great guys up front flying the trip back to MKE, they gave me a ride home. I couldn't have been more grateful.

Thankfully Jack pulled through the surgery with flying colors. Currently the fam is spending the night in the hospital while Jack recovers. Hopefully he'll be able to go home tomorrow and will quickly recover.

Things are gunna change.....

2007-04-24T22:21:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time on a rowdy drunken rugby trip to middle of nowhere Iowa, there was a speech given on the bus by the man, the myth and the Legend, Mr. Paul "Hollywood" Green. Hollywood had earned his nickname from his hard nosed rugby and his brutal tackling. Well, maby not very hard nosed (he didn't like to get dirty), and I don't remember him ever making a tackle, but that's besides the point. But the one great thing about him that made him useful to the team was his ability to tell a good story and give a good laugh to all that surrounded him. On this particular bus trip, we had just lost a close game to our division rival. We spent the night in Des Moine and drowned our sorrows at the local bars. The next morning we had to take the long ride back to Milwaukee. It was on this ride that Hollywood gave his famed "Things are gunna change" speech. I don't remember too many specifics of the speech, just some of the finer points, but the punch line was "things are gunna change". It had the bus rolling with laughter. I believe my partner in crime Sands even had beer come flying out of his nose because he was laughing so hard. From then on, "things are gunna change" became Hollywood's mantra. I thought about it the other night when I was thinking about my current situation with my company. Thankfully things have started to change.

For the first time in a long, long time, positive things have started coming from the company. The first of the positive things came in the form of a decent pay raise and bonus for all pilots. I think this was very needed because pilot morale had hit bottom. The most popular thing to talk about amongst ourselves was what jobs we were looking at. Nobody liked our current schedule and the company basically told us we could take our complaints and shove em. Everybody wanted to leave. We even had guys that had been with the company for a long time, quit to take less paying jobs. So the pay raise took a little bit of the edge off our unhappiness, but didn't really satisfy our main complaint of the schedule. So finally after 7 months of a brutal 5 on 2 off, 12 on 2 off schedule, we got our much needed schedule change. We now have a bid system in place so we can bid for lines that we want and we will now all have 10-11 days off a month instead of just 6. Personally, I'm optimistic that its going to work out well. Gone are the brutal 12 and 2's and in comes more time at home!!

On another note, I'm back at our base in the south for my annual re-current training. Its time to hit the books and brush up on things I haven't looked at in quite a while. I was mildly disappointed to find out that we only get a checkride in the sim and not several sim sessions, but I'm over it. It looks like I'll be done early Friday morning and hopefully will be home early that same afternoon. I'll post more about re-current at a later time.

The little things.

2007-04-12T00:48:00.000-05:00

Its the little things in life that really matter. This goes for aviation as well. Sometimes the fine print can affect the outcome of a flight. Last night was just such an occasion. It all started out with the captain and I airlinin from a broken plane to a working plane at our base in the south. We were then to take the working plane to MMCU or "Chi-wah-wah" Mexico to pick up a load of the usual auto parts and from there proceed back to civilization to clear customs inbound and then we had 2 drops, one in Jackson, MS the other in Montgomery, AL. The weather was clear in Mexico, really nasty windy in our base in the west (28kts gusting to 40 with low level wind shear and blowing dust), crappy in Jackson and marginal in MGM.

On the leg to Hawkins/Jackson/Armpit of the south, the fine print will decide the outcome of the flight. The weather forecast for one hour prior to our arrival thru 1 hour after our arrival was calling for 500ft overcast ceilings and 3 miles visibility. Based on this weather, we are legal to launch because Hawkins has an ILS which requires 1/2 mile visibility to land. Since visibility is controlling, meaning the forested visibility is what we use to decide if the flight can go or not, we launch. Here is where we run into the fine print. if you take a look at the remarks section of the ILS approach in to HKS, you'll see the little words "glide slope is unusuable when control tower not in operation, only localizer minimums allowed during this period." Somehow this had slipped my mind as we were looking at the flight plan before we launched. It wasn't until we were in cruise that I noticed the fine print and brought it to the attention of the captain. This now brings the outcome of the flight into question. HKS was our original destination, JAN (Jackson) was our alternate. The weather at both destination and alternate were the same (they are only about 8 miles apart). But the ceiling for the Localizer approach into HKS was sitting right at minimums. This means that our flight went from being a sure thing to get into HKS, to not quite as easy as we'd thought.

Its a pretty long flight from our base in the west to HKS. Its 881nm or little over 2 hours normal flight time. Thankfully for us we had a monster tailwind that pushed us along at 550kts ground speed. That's about 80kts faster than normal and is the highest cruise ground speed I've ever seen in a Falcon. I kept the power in on the descent and hit my all time fastest speed in a big pig of 591kts or 681.9 miles per hour. As we got closer to HKS we picked up the asos or automated weather. The forecast was holding true at 500 ft ceilings and 3 miles vis. So we briefed the approach as if we were going to fly the Localizer (magical beam that guides us to the centerline of the runway) approach, but if we happen to receive the glide slope (magical beam that guides us to the ground) we would follow that down to the minimum descent altitude (the closest to the ground we can go without having the runway environment in sight) and hang out there(mda) until we see the runway or hit our missed approach point. At which time we would go missed and proceed over to JAN for an ILS approach.

The approach was textbook good. I'm pretty proud that I nailed everything despite it being 4am and I was dead tired. Center gave us vectors the put us about 5 miles outside the outer marker. I feel like I cheated because I used the autopilot until we were established on the localizer. But when he cleared us for the approach, I clicked off "Otto" and hand flew the rest of the way. As we arrived over the outer marker, the glide slope indicator was functioning normally so I flew the approach as if it were a normal ILS, following both the LOC and GS needles until I hit our MDA of 500ft above ground level. At which point I leveled off and we started to look outside the cockpit for the runway. We were in a ragged cloud base, so we were in and out of the bases for a few seconds, but we saw the runway and I managed to plop it down in the first 1/3 of the runway.

Had we not read the fine print, I'm sure the outcome would have been just the same. It just would not have been legal. Technically we were not supposed to use the glide slope at all, but I wasn't about to make my job harder by not using it. Had the ceilings been a few hundred feet lower, we never would have made it in, but missed approaches are for another story.

More important little things are spending time at home. Friday is Jack's 2nd birthday. I feel bad because I missed his first birthday last year because I was in Texas going to training, but I'm going to be there this year!!!!! I took Friday off so I can be home with the little guy on his big day. Next week is vacation for me, so there wont be any posts for a while, but I'll be back.

Night shift

2007-04-05T21:25:00.000-05:00

Lately I've found myself flying what the pilots in my company call night shift. Typically anytime we duty on after about 5 in the afternoon, we end up being awake all night and don't get to sleep until the sun comes up the next morning. While I like flying at night, I'm not a big fan of night shift.

There is no typical day when it comes to my schedule. A lot of time, night shift is not planned for and can catch you after you've been awake since early in the morning. If the pager goes off, you are expected to go fly. Even if you have been awake all day. Last week I had a prime example of not being prepared for night shift. We had flown in to our base in the south with a perfectly working airplane, only to see it taken by another crew to finish a trip. We were told that there were no working planes at our base nor were any scheduled to come in, so we were to be without a plane for the foreseeable future. We went into our FAA regulated 10 hours of rest around 6pm with a green time of 4am. (Green time is when the company can page me for a trip.) We had no plane, so we weren't in a hurry to get to bed. I got some decent sleep and get up in time for free breakfast at the hotel. I'm awake and out of bed by 8:30am. I call in to see the status of planes in maintenance, hoping one would be fixed so I could go fly. Dispatch tells me that there will be a plane available, but not until tomorrow. So I plan my day as if I had the day off. I go to the Y and work out, have lunch with friends, go running and pick up another company pilot at the airport and bring him to the hotel. So I've had a busy day. Around 5pm I feel the vibration and hear the familiar beeping coming from my pocket. I've got a page from dispatch saying I have a trip. I call in to find out whats going on and am told I have an ASAP trip going to Mexico then to Indy. The plane came out of maintenance earlier than expected, so they booked us a trip.

We grab our stuff from the hotel and hurry to the airport. We get there and start our duty at 5:30pm. This means we now have 14 hours of duty time left. Just wonderful considering I've already been awake for 9 hours and could potentially still be on duty after being awake for 23 hours. My body does not like being up for 24 hours and lets me know on a regular basis. I've found that my best fatigue fighter is Rockstar energy drink with its whopping 160mg of caffeine really do the trick. If you take a look at the site Rockstar is linked to, you'll see a drink called WiredX344, good God that's an insane amount of caffeine!! (I'll have to give it a try)

The trip went pretty smooth and we didn't encounter too many delays along the route, but we did end up flying until 4am. The weather at Indy was marginal with 1000ft ceilings and gusty winds out of the north at 30kts, but even though I had been awake for 19+ hours, I still shot a good approach and managed to grease the landing. After we off loaded our freight and the excitement of landing in gusty conditions subsided, the fatigue really started to set in. The main problem with that, is we still had 3 hours of duty time left and the guy in charge up in dispatch wont let us go to the hotels anymore. In the past, if we ended a trip at the crack of dawn after flying all night, the guys in dispatch would send us to bed right away even if we still had half our duty left. The guy in charge now hangs us out at the airport and wont let us go to the hotel until we are almost out of duty time. Its a real sore subject with all of us pilots. This guy is universally disliked by the entire pilot group for just that reason. Thankfully the FBO had a real nice pilot lounge so the captain and I could relax, but by this time, my eyes didn't want to stay open.

So after sitting at the airport until we had only an hour of duty left, we finally got permission to go to the hotel. By the time I checked in to the hotel, it was 7am, the sun was up and I had been awake for 22.5 hours. I was dead tired and went right to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. 10 hours later the pager went off to send me on my way for another night shift.

Part 2

2007-04-02T22:09:00.000-05:00

So we blasted off from po-dunk IA on our way to our base in the south. The flight was uneventful and the plane flew just fine. After some minor re-routing from ATC due to storms along the FINGR.3 arrival, we landed just about the same time our freight arrived. We loaded up our cargo, topped off the tanks and again hustled into the sky. Going into Mexico is not fun. Add in night time in mountainous terrain and you have yourself an interesting flight. On the way over, I updated our Jepp plates and carefully reviewed the arrival and approach we could reasonably expect. We always put more emphasis on briefing approaches in Mexico due to the fact that they are usually always associated with some sort of DME ARC and/or are non precision approaches. A majority of the time we are arriving after approach controllers have gone home and are operating on limited ATC services. There are numerous step downs/altitudes to comply with along our approach, so the captain and I discuss our plan of attack. Its my leg, so I'll be doing the easy work while the captain is calling out the step downs, tuning the radios, talking to ATC and guiding me along the ARC to our inbound radial. Once we hit the inbound radial, I start my inbound turn to the VOR. I track the inbound radial and start stepping down my altitudes. As we get closer to the VOR the needles get more sensitive so I have to stay on top of things to keep the needles centered. As we pass over the station, we make a slight turn to the left for the final approach segment and start our descent to the MDA (minimum descent altitude). It just so happens that its a clear night so we saw the runway from 20 miles out, but we follow the approach path anyway. Accepting a visual approach at night in the mountains is a recipe for disaster. I make a decent landing and we taxi over to the cargo ramp. We off loaded our cargo(actually the Mexican ramp workers off loaded for us) and found out we had another trip waiting for us. We were to head back to Laredo, fuel up, clear customs and head back to another Mexican city to pick up freight. From there we were to fly to our base in the south west to clear customs again, fuel up and continue on to our base in the south for a crew change. Turns out the cargo was going to our base in the north, but we didn't have enough duty time left to complete the trip. Didn't break my heart that we couldn't finish the trip, but I was sad to see our plane go. It was one of our better Falcons. So after about 9 hours in the air and 13.5 duty hours, we ended our day and headed to the hotel for some much needed sleep.

Good week.

2007-03-29T15:06:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-27T11:45:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-22T04:45:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-03-15T21:00:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-13T00:50:00.001-05:00

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

Cool stuff.

2007-03-11T01:09:00.000-06:00

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

2007-03-09T20:58:00.000-06:00

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

2007-03-07T20:57:00.000-06:00

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.

2007-03-06T11:44:00.000-06:00

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 $$.