Posts by Berck

[Editors note: For some reason this post has no stylistic value whatsoever, despite the grandeur the author imagined in his head before engaging in a spastic typing frenzy. The text is jumpy, the transitions are nonexistent, and perhaps the author should reconsider writing. In general. But it’s what you get for tonight.]

Since Jonah couldn’t get here to visit, I had to entertain myself. Yesterday, I managed to convince Sydney to brunch with me at Miriam’s, which has excellent Israeli breakfasts, but after coming home she passed out in front of MLB.com. After consulting the internets, I discovered that She & Him was playing in Manhattan. Tickets were $25, though, and that’s just more than I’m generally willing to spend to go see a band. $15 is generally my limit, but I would only be buying one ticket, so I considered it. I also discovered that the Celebrate Brooklyn festival was going on. The Ani DiFranco concert we went to last year was part of the same festival. There were three free bands playing in Prospect Park, so I decided to head down there. Had I realized the chick from Lavender Diamond is singing backup vocals on the She & Him tour, I might have reconsidered. But I didn’t realize that until today.

I considered waking Sydney from her baseball slumber to see if she’d join me, but it looked to be a hopeless cause. I knew enough to actually study a map of Prospect Park before setting off this time, since the only way we found the bandshell last time was by following the lesbians. Lesbians will always lead you to an Ani concert, but no such luck with the fans of The Jealous Girlfriends. There may be a progression there, though…

I took the Prospect Park shuttle to, well, Prospect Park. It deposited me on the wrong side of prospect park, but I knew how to get to the other side from the map in my head. The map only included the roads, though, not all the crazy little walking paths, so I had to stick to the major roads, which was pretty close to the shortest way through the park anyway. It’s not like there were cars to worry about, just mad bicyclists.

I found the bandshell, presented my driver license at an “ID station” for the privilege of having a green paper band attached to my wrist. The beer choices were the same as last year: Bud flavors or Red Hook. Red Hook is too bitter, but I’ll take it over Budweiser. I found a seat off to one side and engaged in some random texting while waiting for the music to start.

The Jealous Girlfriends are fronted by a chick who rocks, and as I’ve mentioned before, I like chicks who rock. There was no bass guitar, so the keyboardist (who had two keyboards) played the bass line. At one point, I was surprised at how much the keyboard sounded like a bass guitar, and only then did I stop staring at the chick who rocked long enough to notice that the keyboardist had wholly abandoned his keyboards and had picked up a bass guitar. Then the chick who rocked put down her guitar and played the keyboard for awhile. I’m not sure what the Indie rock fascination is for strange sounding vocals. On one of the songs, the chick who rocked put down her guitar and played keyboard. While hardly uncommon, I like it when bands switch. I think the Jealous Girlfriends could use a full time bass, though.

After the Jealous Girlfriends came Ghostland Observatory, which turned out to be a really annoying electro-hip-hop. From Austin. Not even from Brooklyn, so I don’t know what they were doing there. Fortunately, Anjeanette texted me back about this time to let me know that she was drinking at a particular intersection in Brooklyn.

After consulting Sydney’s Street-wise Brooklyn which I’d thoughtfully tucked into my shorts pocket, [A side note: Street-Wise maps rock. I highly recommend them if you plan to attempt on-foot navigation of any city in the world. They produce the only map of Rome I’ve ever thought was any good. Jonah and I buy them for any major city we plan to be walking around. They’re available at most bookstores.] I was able to successfully walk to the specified intersection.

I was under the impression that there was a bar. There was no bar. There was a hardware store. Anjeanette appeared from the other side of the street and escorted my inside. I met all sorts of people I didn’t know, and eventually came to understand that I was at a birthday party for someone I didn’t know.

It turned out to be fun anyway. Eventually, I walked out into the back ‘yard’, where a girl yelled my name. Turned out to be Anjeanette’s friend Jan, who also went to UD, but I was totally incapable of remembering her at all, presumably because I’m just that bad at social interaction. She was unable to specify where and how she’d met me, though it’s been determined that she was at several “parties” at my apartment. Very strange to be recognized by a strange girl in a strange city.

After some interesting discussions about Oklahoma, arranged marriage, the natural unsuitability of humanity to monogamy, middle-school Facebook friends and shin-kicking; as well as some healthy consumption of alcohol, I decided to head back to Sydney’s apartment. I managed to find a westbound F train which took me to an eastbound A train which took me there. There being south of where I started.

New York, despite all its claims to diversity is astoundingly segregated. Brooklyn is mostly segregating along north/south lines because the trains run east/west. Manhattan is segregated into poorly defined clumps. It’s not obvious looking at a map where Little Italy stops and Chinatown starts, but when you’re walking down the street and all the signs are in Chinese, it’s a bit more obvious.

I fly again tomorrow. It’s the beginning of my “line”. This means I’m not on reserve any longer. The company can, theoretically, only make me fly flights that it told me about a good while in advance. My schedule, through most of August, is now on Facebook. When I get my next line award, there will be more schedule up there.

I nearly didn’t get to work on Thursday. I was originally scheduled for a reserve shift that started at 11am on Thursday, followed by a flight to Houston that departed at 7:30pm. Realizing that they mostly needed me for the Houston flight and that the reserve period was a “just in case” addition to my schedule which existed merely because they could, I thought I’d call and ask a favor. I requested that they shift my reserve period to 2pm, because that would allow me to take the 8am flight to work and give me an additional day at home. Shockingly, the request was approved.

On Wednesday, though, I discovered endless problems with the weather in the Northeast. My mother didn’t get on the direct flight to Minneapolis that she’d wanted to get on, but did get on a later flight to Cincinnati. Which canceled after taxiing around for 3 hours.

Recognizing this might affect me, I started looking at the flight from JFK-DEN that night, because it was the plane I’d be taking out in the morning. If it came in substantially late, I knew that 14 CFR §121.471 specifies that a crew needs at least 8 hours of rest in the 24 hours prior to the completion of any scheduled flight in order for the flight to depart. Basically, I knew the flight was going to be late. Maybe even canceled.

So I decided to take the JetBlue that leaves at 12:55am. The JetBlue site said it was delayed an hour, so I packed and then checked it again before I got dressed to leave. It was canceled.

So I called crew tracking and confessed my problem. They told me to do the best I could do, and listed me on the flight out of Denver. The one I was going to try to take, but which was likely going to be too late.

When I got up Thursday morning I discovered that the flight was indeed canceled. I went to the airport for the 7:30am United flight. I was the 5th pilot waiting for the Jumpseat, and the flight was oversold. I obviously didn’t get on. I didn’t get on the next flight either, but somehow I managed to get on the next flight to LGA. I ran into another Freedom pilot who was also trying to get to JFK. We split a discount cab from LGA-JFK so it only cost each of us $10.

I got to JFK at about 5:30pm for my 2:00pm reserve time. Fortunately, I was in time for my scheduled flight, so no one seemed too upset.

I can’t wait to find out how bad the flights are in the winter.

[Deadhead means a flight where one is on duty, in uniform, and traveling on company business, generally for the purpose of being in position to work another flight. It does not mean simply being an airline employee traveling on an airline, like many people seem to think it means. That is, I’m not deadheading when I’m commuting.]

While on reserve, one gets to see what’s perhaps the roughest side of an airline operation. Last week, I was assigned for a trip to DCA where I would deadhead to DCA, and then work a couple flights from DCA-JFK-DCA. After taxiing around JFK for 4 hours, the flight was canceled. They still wanted to us to do the DCA-JFK leg, though. So we sat around waiting for a dispatch release and passengers for a couple of hours. We were out at a remote pad, rather than a real gate, so everything had to be bussed out to us. Two busses of passengers arrived at one point, but it turned out they were traveling to DFW, not DCA. Eventually, it became apparent that we would be unable to complete the flight before reaching our maximum 16 hour duty day, and so the flight was canceled. I got back to Sydney’s apartment at 2am that “night”, and had to be back at the airport at 8am. Which meant that I got less than 4 hours of sleep.

This week I started off with a fairly innocuous trip to Buffalo. The flight to Buffalo, in the afternoon, was over 3 hours block time. 45 minutes of that was flying.

These problems have been mostly caused by thunderstorms. In the summer, thunderstorms cause reroutes and delays at airports they’re over and can wreak havoc with an already over-extended air traffic control system. The result is that planes sit on the ground, which is better than etching circles in the sky until they run out of fuel, which also happens with some regularity.

Thus far none of it has bothered me much, other than the lack of sleep. While I feel bad for the passengers, I’m not terribly upset when we don’t make it to where we’re going on time. Since there’s nothing I can do about it, I do my best not get upset about it. I do what I can to get us places as quickly as possible, but unfortunately there’re not many options. The airlines have really boxed themselves into a difficult situation by operating so many regional jets in and out of airports that simply cannot accommodate the volume of traffic. Smaller jets means more flights, which means more delays. It also means a job for Berck, and it’s hard to get upset about sitting right seat in a jet when so many people with so much experience are finding themselves out of work at the moment. I think it’s probably just a matter of time until I find myself unemployed as well. My employer has never furloughed anyone before, but these are trying times. The current business model of the airlines is simply not sustainable with current oil prices, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the long term, the nation is forced to return to a government regulated and subsidized market.

I was scheduled for a JFK-BNA round trip today. I woke up at 6am to get to the airport in time for my flight. When I arrived at the airport, I logged on to the scheduling website first thing to print a copy of my schedule for the day. Only to notice that it had been changed, and the Nashville flight had been “downgraded” to an ERJ. (I have no idea why, but for whatever reason the company decided to send an ERJ instead of a CRJ.) Since I’m not an ERJ pilot, they told me to go home. Since “home” is Sydney’s apartment in Brooklyn, I was disappointed. They offered to let me sit ready reserve if I desired, and I told them I’d get back with them. I checked on my projected hourly totals for the bid period, which came out to 63. A 10 hour ready reserve shift would only pay 5 hours, which meant that I was still 2 shy of 70. Since I’m guaranteed a pay of 70 hours, sitting ready reserve wouldn’t result in my making any more money, so I decided to go back to Brooklyn.

When my phone rang. They had a DFW flight for me. Turns out the crew that was planning on going to DFW was late, and they decided to send us to try to make the flight on time. We did, in fact, arrive on time, amazingly, even though we left over half an hour late. Probably because of the half-hour allotted taxi, which wasn’t needed this morning.

I’m currently deadheading back to JFK on the return flight. We were held on the ground in DFW for spacing into JFK. The weather in JFK is clear skies, there’s no weather at all, but still, the system is unable to accommodate us. It was only a half-hour delay on the ground in DFW, but it looks like that’s just the beginning. We’re currently out over the Atlantic ocean in cruise flight. You don’t need much geography to know that the Atlantic ocean should not be between Dallas and JFK. I’m not sure how far off the coast we are as I can only see out the right side of the aircraft (we’re headed North), but there’s no land in sight. At least we’re not etching racetracks, though who knows if that’s to come.

My final schedule for the month of August (which, since my company works on 28-day bid periods, is July 27th-August 24th) is up on Facebook. I’m excited about the possibility more flying and less time in Brooklyn, though unfortunately not much more time at home.

I don’t watch propaganda movies, so I’m not going to watch Expelled any more than I’m going to watch Michael Moore. But, after reading an amusing article about the astounding contrary-to-fact claims in Expelled, I thought I’d mention this website for those who might be interested in the truth (or rather, lack thereof) behind Ben Stein’s claims: Expelled Exposed.

In short, Intelligent Design isn’t science simply because there are no hypotheses to be tested. Since there is nothing to test, there is no research being performed, and thus no work is being peer reviewed. Proponents complain that “the scientific community won’t take them seriously,” but they obviously don’t understand how it works. If you want to be taken seriously you need to come up with a hypothesis, test it, and publish your results. You don’t simply get to claim that, “The paradigm is wrong,” and get things changed. (Well, amusingly, Einstein was able to do this, but only because others were willing to go out and perform experiments, while mainstream science was simultaneously completely unable to detect the aether, resulting in some unrest.)

The most amusing thing I found on Expelled Exposed is that the Discovery Institute apparently once had lofty goals to actually do real science and then go promote it, acknowledging that if they failed to do the scholarly work first that they would merely be peddling propaganda. Amusingly, they haven’t produced any of the scholarly articles that they said would, but have instead moved on to movie-making. Which makes them self-proclaimed propaganda peddlers.