I woke up this morning at some point before Sydney’s movers arrived. I’d landed at DCA at 3am night before last, so an 11am flight seemed awfully early. Sydney’s belongings and I both left Brevoort Place at the same time. Sydney’s living in Park Slope now, and I have a dirty, unfinished apartment in Bed-Stuy for a couple weeks.
The radar map for the Midwest looked like someone dropped a bomb on Chicago. I was surprised that we managed to depart only an hour or so late. My captain decided that he wanted to fly the leg back to JFK tomorrow, so I took us over to Chicago.
The takeoff was normal, other than the flight attendants telling us they weren’t ready after telling us they were ready and we had taxied into position on the runway. Fortunately, they got it all sorted out before we got takeoff clearance. I hand-flew us all the way up to Flight Level 320 (which is, more or less, 32,000 feet.) Many captains seem to get nervous when I’m hand flying, so usually I turn the autopilot on somewhere above 10,000 feet, but I’ve been leaving it off more and more lately. I managed to keep things almost as smooth as the autopilot, maybe even smoother in some cases, and my captain couldn’t have been very nervous since he was revising his approach plates during the climb. The jet can sometimes be a handful without the autopilot–it was designed to be flown with the autopilot on for everything other than takeoff and landing. But today everything cooperated, and I only had one intermediate level-off on the climbout, so there wasn’t too much work.
The ATIS at ORD said the winds were out of the north at 10 knots, gusting to 30 knots with an overcast layer of clouds at 700 feet, 4 miles visibility. Not bad, but enough so that I’d have to shoot an approach. The gusty winds got me a little worried, but I figured it was time to start getting used to it, especially since I’m going to be Chicago based before long.
We broke out of the clouds at about 600 feet, and I left the autopilot on until about 500 feet. The turbulence was kicking our butts, so I figured I’d just go ahead and let the autopilot deal with it. At about 150 feet, I was showing 3 reds and 1 white light on the PAPI, which was fine since I had the runway in sight, and the glideslope guides to a point 1,000 feet down the runway. (PAPI is a series of lights that look red or white depending on whether you’re above or below the glideslope. 2 red and 2 white is on glideslope, 3 reds means slightly low. At about 100 feet, we got a pretty substantial updraft, and I was fighting to get the plane down. I chopped the power to idle at about 50 feet, which is way high, but the runway wasn’t that long and I didn’t want to float too long. I touched down about 1,000 feet past the touchdown zone, which was farther than I wanted, but at least it was a nice, smooth touchdown. I’m sure the wet runway helped. Right after touchdown, I heard the DING of the Master Caution system. Procedure is for me to state, “Cancel and Identify,” and for the nonflying pilot to read the EICAS screen and tell me what happened. I was having quite the time fighting the crosswind so I didn’t say anything, assuming the Captain would tell me what was wrong. We had one of the thrust reversers deferred, but I couldn’t remember which one, so I yanked on both, knowing that it would only let me activate the one that was armed. It turned out to be the right one. (We’re allowed to fly without reversers assuming Maintenance disables it, and the paperwork is complete. I’d never landed with only one reverser before, so I wasn’t sure how much yaw into the good one I’d get.) Since the captain didn’t say anything about the master caution, I assumed it probably was something we could deal with after I got the plane stopped. The plane pulled to the right quite a bit with the one thrust reverser working on that side, and the wind pushing us that way didn’t help either. I had nearly full rudder deflection to the left, which also operates the nose wheel steering, but the plane kept going right. I figured the nose wheel was slipping, so I used differential brakes to the best of my ability to try to keep us on the center line, but I still drifted 75 feet to the right of the center line. We were coming up on the end of the wet runway, so I was braking pretty hard and the anti-skid system was working–the first time I’ve ever felt the anti-skid. As we slowed through 80 knots, the Captain stated, “Nose wheel steering INOP,” and it all made sense. As we slowed down to a crawl, I gave the controls to the captain, who ascertained that the nose wheel steering was, in fact, not working. I made a quick call to the tower to let them know we had lost steering and would be stopping on the runway. They responded by telling the United plane behind us to go around. The Captain was able to get the plane off the runway using differential brakes and differential power, though it wasn’t pretty or fast. Once clear of the runway, we pulled and reset the circuit breakers for the nose wheel steering which brought it back online. (Turning things off and back on again seems to fix any number of mechanical problems on the aircraft. I wonder if Microsoft is manufacturing aircraft systems these days…)
In retrospect, I really should have said, “Cancel and Identify”, because it would have been nice to know right away that the nose wheel steering had failed. My captain said he waited so long to tell me what was wrong because he’d strangely assumed that the caution was related to the thrust reverser. I’m not sure why the system doesn’t bother mention that it’s having a problem until AFTER the main wheels touch down, but while the nose is still in the air. Maybe the nose wheel steering system doesn’t actually activate until there’s weight on the main wheels, I’m not sure. On the other hand, if the system had told us there was something wrong in the air, we’d probably have assumed the worst, declared an emergency, landed on a long runway and so on, none of which was really necessary.
The annoying thing is that this is apparently a common problem with CRJ-900’s. Last week, a CRJ-900 had to perform a high-speed abort on the takeoff roll because of the same problem, and it’s not a lot of fun to keep the plane on the center line without nose wheel steering in an abort.
Now I’m at the hotel in Chicago for the night. We leave early in the morning, then I’ve got ready reserve tomorrow once I get back. I’m not sure why, since tomorrow is my 6th day on duty, so I can’t fly past midnight, and I can’t be sent to overnight anywhere since I’ve got Monday off. I should be able to still get on a flight home, though!