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Posts by Berck
Red Feather Lakes
I forgot to mention that pictures from the Red Feather Lakes trip are up in the gallery.
I had plenty of opportunity to blog last week, but I’ve been reading Anathem.
My first week off reserve in ORD was great. I had to pay for a night in a hotel room because my flight to Sioux Falls went without me. It left several hours late, but I was later because I was stuck in Birmingham, AL. The weather should be better next week.
My passport was going to expire on the 27th, so I had to renew it. For strange reasons, I’m required to have a passport with me at all times while I’m working. This meant I had to schedule an appointment, drive to the passport office in Denver, wait for them to make the passport, and then drive home. That took most of Friday, and $135. Mesa is contractually required to reimburse me, but they haven’t been very forthcoming about how they’re going to go about that so far.
For purely academic reasons, I’ve been researching how one might disable the RFID chips in the new passports. Everyone likes to suggest a hammer, but no one wants to specify where exactly one should aim the hammer. I’m wondering if driving over it with a car would work.
I saw an astonishing moon rise over an undercast last week. Probably the best I’ve ever seen. We were having some trouble figuring out what the light was until it got over the clouds.
Captain: What is that light?
Me: I dunno, Fort Wayne?
Captain: You think?
Me: No, I don’t think Fort Wayne is that bright.
Captain: Maybe aliens are landing on Fort Wayne.
I also got to experience -23° F in Sioux Falls. I’m pretty sure that’s the coldest temperature I’ve ever been exposed to. That’s crazy cold.
It’s been warm here, comparatively, at around 50°. We took the top off the blue car and went driving for a couple hours. That was nice. If it’s warm again tomorrow, maybe we’ll do it again, and/or hike as well.
So what does it mean?
Being back to work, that is.
It means sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with 3 other guys, all of whom snore. It means sitting in a crew room with spotty internet, a macbook on my lap and headphones on my ears. People laugh at me for not wearing ear buds. I’ll wear ear buds when someone finds some that I can wear for 12 hours straight and not tire of.
It means climbing out of the bunk bed only to come nap in a recliner, in a silly costume.
It means waiting around making sure that my phone is set on vibrate if I’ve got headphones on, or set on loud if I’m trying to sleep. A missed phone call is potentially a lost job.
It means navigating around hoards of stupid passengers who congregate wherever I might need to walk. Passengers who think it’s okay to stop and carry on a telephone conversation in the middle of a walkway on an airport concourse. Passengers who think it’s okay to get off an escalator and simply stop. Passengers who stand on the left in moving walkways.
There may have been some glamor to the job once. That was before the days of $49 round trip fares. Back when pilots wore hats and passengers didn’t wear pajamas.
There’s not much left in the way of glamor. That’s okay, I don’t want or need glamor. I really don’t. All I want is to get paid to fly an airplane.
It doesn’t matter much which airplane or where I get paid to fly it to or from.
I still really enjoy the job, when I get to actually do it. Unfortunately, doing the job rarely seems to mean actually flying airplanes. And, for the airlines, when it does, the job is full of absurd things.
When I got the call for the DSM round trip this morning, the flight was scheduled to depart a couple of minutes earlier. I gathered my things and got to the plane. I discovered by flipping through the paperwork that the plane had just come out of a maintenance inspection and that among other things, they’d taken apart the right engine and replaced nozzles and turbine blades or some such. That made me a little nervous. I did a thorough exterior pre-flight inspection, and then got started on the inside. There’s approximately 50 different tests to perform on the first flight of the day. They all involve flipping a switch and looking for something to happen, listening for some noise, or making sure that nothing at all happens. I spent several minutes doing all that. It’s a noisy process, and you might have heard it if you board a plane in the morning. Things you’ll hear a CRJ say if it’s the first flight of the day, “Jet Pipe Overheat, Wing Overheat, Gear Bay Overheat, Glideslope, Terrain, Terrain, Pull Up, T-CAS System Test Okay,” among others. I’m not really sure why I have to make it say all these things. It seems like these systems should be self-monitoring and if they fall, they should let me know. I think for the most part they are, but we run the tests anyway.
The Captain showed up, entered the flight plan into the computer, and then called dispatch to find out about our flight attendant. It turns out that the original one lost her badge, so another one would be sent our way. Why there’s no way to allow a flight crew member to work without a badge is beyond me. You’d think that with all the various forms of proof of ID we carry around, there’d be some other way to establish our identity. The Captain decided he’d go fetch himself some coffee while we were waiting, and that I’d tell them to board when the flight attendant showed up and finished her safety checks.
The catering guy wanted to know if we needed supplies, but since the flight attendant wasn’t there, I kept telling him to come back later. Finally I gave up and investigated the galley myself. It’s set up entirely different from the CRJ-200’s I used to be a flight attendant on, but it seemed like everything that should be there was there except ice. I got some ice, and noticed that there was no water in the aft potable water tank. The aft tank supplies the sink in the lavatory, and so I figured I’d I’d ask for some water. I flipped the switch in the galley on and off to make it run its self-test during which it lights up all the lights, on the off-chance that the lights were burned out but there was actually water back there. None of the lights lit up. That’s when I noticed that the associated circuit breakers were pulled out, collared and there was an MEL sticker next to them. MEL stands for “Minimum Equipment List” which is a giant 3-ring binder we keep in the cockpit with a list of everything that can be broken in the plane and what, if any, restrictions apply. For instance, we have two ice detection systems. If one of them is broken, the MEL says we can still fly. But we have to stick a sticker on the system, and do lots of paperwork. In addition to lots of paperwork, the item has to be fixed in a specified amount of time.
The aft lavatory water being deactivated isn’t a big surprise at all, and I figured it’s probably one of those MEL’s that they can leave for a long time. But something stuck in my head–there were no MEL’s listed in the “trip can” for the airplane, nor were there any listed on the dispatch release. I double-checked. Sure enough, nothing. A couple weeks ago, though, someone had written up the Aft Potable Water system, and maintenance had come out and deactivated the system. But then, several days later, maintenance had signed off this system as working. But the sticker was still there, and the circuit breakers were still collared.
When the captain got back, I pointed it out to him. He called maintenance, and they came out and scratched their heads. They re-activated the system and tried to fill it, and discovered that it didn’t work. So they deactivated it once again and straightened out the paperwork. That all took half an hour.
And that’s what this job means, often: bureaucratic paperwork that is in no way related to the business of flying an airplane.
Back to Work
Whatever that means.
I woke up this morning with my usual 4:06am telephone call from crew tracking, telling me to head to the airport for ready reserve. They asked me when I could get to the airport. I told him an hour and a half, the maximum allowable. Presumably, if I’d stated less time, then I would be released half an hour earlier. Only, they apparently haven’t been doing that right, besides I planned to dawdle as long as possible on my way to the airport.
I got there right about 5:36. I might have been early if I hadn’t waited 15 minutes for the stupid train to show up. Fortunately, Chicago is much warmer than I left it. The roads and sidewalks are snow-free, which means I get to roll my bag rather than plow snow with it. It’s also much warmer. I didn’t even need gloves this morning.
I napped fitfully on a crew room recliner this morning, listening to She & Him. I really like She & Him. Speaking of She & Him, or at least She, The Go Getter is an excellent movie. Watch it.
I’m not sure how much of the week before last I mentioned. Probably not much. The highlight was probably the flight from Allentown, PA (I kept humming Billy Joel to myself). We arrived something like 6 hours late, which was hardly a surprise given the weather. There were about 20 passengers trying to get out that night, and we were glad to take them. We called for a clearance and they told us that we had a wheels up time in 20 minutes. Given that we still didn’t have a dispatch release (the “paperwork” when a pilot tells you that, “we’re waiting on paperwork.”) or fuel, we told them we wouldn’t be able to make it. They told us it would probably be all right if we weren’t more than 10 minutes later than that. It took another 45 minutes. I have no idea why, other than gross incompetence on the part of the ground crew. I don’t remember whether fuel or the dispatch release was the final hang up, but it took forever.
So we were hardly surprised when we taxied out to discover that there was a ground stop into Chicago, which means we were unable to leave. I did some math and determined that if we didn’t take off in the next 20 minutes we would not be legal take off, because the landing time would then be more than 16 hours after I went on duty. We relayed this to the ground controller, who said he’d try to help out. He made several telephone calls, but said there was no way he could release us. So we had to tell the folks who’d been waiting 6 hours for their flight that they were not, in fact, getting to go to Chicago that night after all.
Then came the hard decision. The company wanted us to deliver the plane back to Chicago, a reposition flight with no people on it. While it wasn’t legal for me to fly under 14 CFR Part 121 (which covers scheduled air carrier operations), it was still legal to fly under Part 91. This meant it was just a couple of guys flying an airplane, which meant that as long as I felt safe to fly, it was legal for me to do so. I could have told the company that I did not feel safe operating the flight, and no one would have questioned the decision–after all, if it’s not legal for me to fly with passengers, why should I have to fly my self?
At the time, I felt fine. It was late at night, but I’d slept well the night before. The Captain really wanted to get back to Chicago as did the flight attendant, so I told them that I’d go as long as I felt fine.
It then took another hour before we could go anywhere. We got new weather, which showed that we needed more fuel. It started sleeting in Allentown, which meant we’d need to be de-iced before we could take off. We were astounded. It wasn’t like there were any other planes for the crew to work. Two or three folks on the ground single-handedly kept 20 folks from getting to where they were going.
When we got to Chicago, the astonishing part is that despite the fact that it was after 1:00am, they were still planning to send the plane back out to Appleton. The airport was a zoo. People were camped out everywhere, dozing in uncomfortable chairs or stretched out on the floor. While as a general rule, you should never fly to, from or through New York, Chicago is usually better. But, I’ll update my rule: in addition to never flying to, from or through EWR, JFK or LGA, never fly to/from ORD when there might be snow. Avoiding ATL when there’s a cloud or two in the sky isn’t a bad idea, either, though with ATL, you’ll likely just be late, though you’ll get where you were going eventually. In retrospect, as an airline pilot, I think I’ll just recommend that you don’t fly, ever. Drive a car, ride a train, paddle a boat.
If you do fly, and the weather sucks, don’t be surprised when you’re late/delayed/canceled. Amusingly, though, it’s not that we can’t fly in the weather. We can fly in most anything these days. We just can’t fly efficiently. At places like ORD and ATL, a plane needs to land and takeoff every 30 seconds. We need more spacing than that when we can’t see each other, and there’s just too many planes and not enough time to make that happen.
I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise. It strikes me as Camus’ Plague updated for the 20th century.
My schedule on Facebook is updated with my new line.
Photos from Red Feather Lakes are up on the gallery.
As a nice change, they sent me to DSM and then I deadheaded back. That beats sitting around ready reserve all day, anyway.
I’m released at 3:30pm, then back on duty at 4am tomorrow. I’ve got another DSM round trip scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. The weather people say snow Tuesday. It can’t be that bad, though, since the lowest low for the next week is scheduled for tonight, and it’s only 14°F. 14° isn’t very cold. I can handle 14°. Much more of this -10°F with -45°F wind chill, and I think I might actually be ready for Phoenix in February. Nah.
Dash 8 Denver
It’s official. I start training for the De Havilland Canada Dash 8 on February 9. Training will be another month of ground school, then a couple weeks of sims. Rumour is that Dash 8 sims are in Vancouver. That would be nifty.
It’s going to be a lot of studying and refreshing on how to fly a real airplane for me. The Dash isn’t loaded up with computers like the CRJ I’ve been flying.
Speaking of which, I’ve also gotten my line award for the CRJ in Chicago. It starts on Jan 11. I’ve put it up on my Google calendar, but won’t post it to Facebook until the final integrated schedules are up. It was actually my 5th choice of lines. It’s nothing glamorous, only 10 days off and all CRJ-200 flying. But all my trips start late enough that I can fly in to ORD that morning, and then get back to COS that evening. There’s one, maybe two nights for the entire night that I’ll have to stay in a hotel, so good-bye crash pad!