Class started with one of the two people from standing bids coming in to talk to us. People from departments like this always talk about how over-worked they are, and I’m generally amazed that it actually takes two of them.

In any case, a crew’s standing bid is where he wants to be in terms of domicile, aircraft and position. You put what you want, and assuming that A) the company needs someone there and B) no one more senior than you wants whatever you want, you’ll get it. These are obviously two rather large conditions, especially coming from a guy who’s #4 from the bottom of the seniority list in the company. Actually, if you want to get technical about it, I’m not even on the seniority list yet.

In any case, it turns out that we’re eligible to bid on what domicile we want today, and it will in fact be awarded this Sunday. This is amazingly early for a new-hire pilot class, but it turns out that the bid people are about to be working on who gets to go on vacation when, and apparently this means that they need to take care of us early. This is welcome news for us– we thought we were going to have to wait forever to figure out where we’re going to be based.

So I filled out the bid form online this afternoon. It looked like this:
ORD
PHX
JFK
IAD
CLT
BNA

So that’s my dream sheet. The only other options, which I didn’t list at all, are the 4 Hawaii bases. There’s no way I’m going to get sent to Hawaii involuntarily, so I didn’t bother list it. The way it works is that if I can get my #1 choice (a likely possibility) then I will. If not, it goes down the list. There’s pretty much no way I can wind up anywhere other than ORD, JFK, or IAD, so I listed them in terms of convenience for me. Chicago’s the easiest commute for me, but I could possibly stay with Sydney in JFK, so IAD is last. If I get based somewhere that’s not ORD, and something higher up my list become available, than I can switch.

Since there’s going to be a long time before I’m actually going to have to report to any base, there’s a good possibility that I could move up in my choices before I ever have to report.

We covered the warning system and the AC electrical system today. There’s simply an astonishing amount of information one must memorize in order to fly a jet. I pointed out to Sydney that while one can fly a jet open-book, it’s often difficult to find the answer before you die. Thus the memorization. Unfortunately, there’s all sorts of things I’m being required to memorize that I could certainly look up if I really needed to know.

We watched a video on EGPWS (pronounced eee-jip-whiss by pilots who love to pronounce acronyms), which is the fancy system installed on our jets to try to keep us from flying into mountains. I was having a hard time staying awake and would start to nod off when the video would play the warning messages. “TERRAIN! TERRAIN! PULL UP!” Sounds like that will give you a bad dream.

So, there are 10 types of aural warnings on this jet. Because the names are so funny, I thought I’d type out the kinds of warnings verbatim:

• Warbler — Stall
• Siren — Wind shear
• Whoop – Whoop — GPWS mode 1 or 2
• Fire Bell — Fire warnings
• Voice — Voice aural warnings
• Clacker — Overspeed or excessive stab trim
• Horn — Gear not down
• Cavalry Charge — Autopilot Disconnect
• Warning (Triple Chime) — Warning tone that precedes an aircraft system voice advisory.
• C-chord — Altitude alert

And then there’s the AC electrical. It’s complicated, with 4 different generators, 6 different buses and all the cross-ties and auto-switching. 115 volt, 400hz, 3-phase. I wonder why 400hz 3-phase was chosen– that just seems like complicated overkill. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but unfortunately my biggest complaint about my enormous systems book is that it’s not detailed enough.

And the DC system for tomorrow… woohoo!