Yesterday was the first day of class, so I didn’t expect to learn much. Fortunately, for once, we didn’t have do undergo drug testing and fill out endless reams of paperwork like I had to on my last 3 first days. Instead we did a brief review of material in the General Operations Manual. This included things like, “How many hours after giving blood must you wait to serve as a required flight crew member?” (72) Or more complicated very-boring questions about required weather, derived alternate minimums, exemption 3585. Or the 7 conditions under which the Captain has to perform…
Here’s a totally reasonable, factually correct article discussing Colgan 3407. It’s rare that the news media fails to make glaring errors in reports about airplane crashes. I’d like to commend the New York Times on doing a decent job, here.
The plan was to get up at 5am, leave home at 6am in oder to get to Phoenix in time for a 7:30pm flight to Seattle. That didn’t happen. It snowed last night. This made me somewhat apprehensive about setting off pre-dawn on summer tires. We’ve only got one set of snow tires (because we almost never absolutely need more than one car to drive in the snow, so I’ve been putting off the $400 expense of having another set of snow tires. The snow tires were on the red car, but Joanna wanted to drive the blue car while…
In a few minutes, I’m going to start my last Jet trip. I fly to Fort Wayne for tonight, back to ORD tomorrow and then a round trip to a city whose 3-letter code I do not recognize. Presumably I’ll have to figure it out before I get there. Dash 8 training starts Monday. Sydney seems to think I’ve been less than clear on this. So there it is. It’s three weeks of ground school, then the rumor is that we’ll have a week off, then simulator training in Vancouver.
I just flew a totally acceptable tight visual approach into Harrisburg, PA. Because I flew a tight pattern, I went right over the cooling towers on Three Mile Island. There was quite the condensation cloud, and a substantial spot of turbulence in the thermals. It’s really hard to fly a visual pattern to the left from the right seat, because you can’t really see the runway until you’re halfway around the 180 degree turn, so you have to guess a bit. I was pleased with my work. That’s more than I can say about last night. Last night was fairly…