Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

(Taken from Berck’s camera phone.)

I’ve been sitting ready reserve at the airport for the past several days. The excitement in the crew room started yesterday with an email indicating that 100 CRJ captains and 80 CRJ FO’s are likely to be displaced. Exactly what this means is a bit up in the air, and it sure sounds like some of us might be out of a job. There’s still nearly 200 pilots below me, so I should be okay for the immediate future. The excitement is that if they do what they say they’re going to do, I have the option to fly a Dash 8 turboprop out of Denver. It would mean a substantially lower paycheck, but the ability to live at home is awfully appealing. I went ahead and listed my first 3 preferences as Dash 8 in Denver, Grand Junction and then Phoenix. If I get it, this also means going back to ground school.

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!

One either has things to blog about or time to blog, but the two seem to be mutually exclusive.

Things always go wrong when I fly with Matt. Last time I flew with Matt, we had a maintenance divert. When I met him yesterday evening in the crew room, he asked, “How’s it going?” “Well, things were going great, but now I’m going to be flying with you…”

Not that I don’t like Matt–In fact, I really like Matt. He’s a new captain, upgraded from flying turboprops and has a real respect for FO’s. And sometimes I can actually tell him something he didn’t know, which is tons of fun for me. Especially since he welcomes the information much like I do, unlike many captains who will simply discount anything a first officer says.

My trepidation about flying with Matt is a result of the fact that the last time I flew with him we had to divert to Dulles on our way to DFW. Airline crews have a knack for discovering a relationship between trivial, unrelated pre-existing conditions and unfavorable significant events. In other words, what most people would call superstitions. Last time Matt and I flew together, something unusual and frustrating happened, ergo next time Matt and I fly together something unusual and frustrating will happen. This is, perhaps, surprising among pilots when you consider that we’re the champions of an activity that for so long was regarded as impossible or even mystical, but which in modern times is one of the most potent symbols of the success of technology.

The night didn’t start out terribly promising. Jonah and I went to the airport at the same time; it was a bit early for me, but I wanted to get her there in time for her 7:10pm flight. We managed to get to the airport (and through security) before 6pm.

Despite the astoundingly good weather, both of our flights were delayed. This might seem like a strange coincidence to those of you who haven’t flown to or through New York. Those of you who have understand that almost every flight to or from New York either leaves or arrives late. Usually both if the weather is good. If the weather is bad, the flights are all canceled.

I do not pretend to understand all the little things that conspire to make this the case, but I do understand one thing: The primary cause of the problem is capitalism. There are too many flights, and the airlines have no economic incentive to fly fewer flights in order to make things work. Air traffic in the New York area is a splendid example of the complete and utter failure of airline deregulation. The free market may work for some things, but it does not work for air travel.

The good part is that the people who get the most upset about the inconveniences are the rich, Republican business travelers whose first class seats are purchased with the blood of the exploited working class. The same travelers who also insist that the free market is the solution to all the world’s problems.

I got a text message from Joanna as I was starting my jet’s engines. I like that it’s generally the FO’s job to start the engines. The sad part is that the jet is so long and the engines are so far back there that I can’t hear them starting. Unless there’s a ground crew with a headset plugged up to the aircraft, then I can hear the engines over the intercom, which is strangely satisfying. The actual starting procedure is almost disappointingly simple. I push a button to arm the fuel pump for the engine to be started and then push another button that says, “START”, to actually start the engine while simultaneously starting a timer. At an ITT of no more 120ËšC and an N2 of at least 20% RPM, I release the lock on the thrust lever and move it up from shut-off to idle, and watch to make sure everything happens. Pushing buttons is fun. If I do it wrong, the computer will either ignore my request to start the engine and sound alarms at me to tell me that I screwed up and remind me that it’s smarter than I am. Humanity is such obsolete technology when it comes to flying.

Anyway, her text indicted that they were expecting a 70 minute taxi. I wasn’t surprised. Ground control had us taxi into a second line for takeoff, next to the primary line which was obviously well over 50 airplanes long. We pulled up behind a 747 which looks really big from the cockpit of a CRJ, and shut down the engines to wait.

“DING-DONG,” said my plane. “I’m off one,” I told Matt. “I’ve got one,” he responded. I pushed a couple buttons, adjusted a couple knobs, and rotated a dial on the overly complicated comm panel and said, “What’s up?”

The somewhat annoyed voice of the better looking of the two flight attendants filled my headset. “We’ve got a passenger who won’t sit down. She’s afraid to fly, and demands that we let her off the plane now. She is irrational and uncontrollable.”

I conveyed the situation to the Matt, who called company operations. There were many conversations regarding the identity of the passenger in question, her traveling companion, the severity of the situation and so on.

Matt called ground control, “We have a, erhm, passenger issue and need to taxi back to the gate.” I would love to put an audio clip of the conversation that ensued on the blog, but unfortunately the folks who archive JFK ground seem to have been slacking the past week. In any case, the conversation went something like this:

ATC: I need you to be more specific.
Captain: We have a passenger who refuses to sit down and we can’t go with her on board.
ATC: Okay, let me explain this to you. The only way I can get you back to the gate is to let the 3 aircraft in front of you take off in front of the uncountable number of planes that they are currently in sequence behind. This is unfair and will inconvenience everybody. In order for me to do that, I need to put something substantial in my logbook. “Passenger won’t sit down,” will not cut it. Something along the lines of, “Unruly passenger,” will.
Captain: Our flight attendants have stated that the passenger is irrational and do not feel safe with her on board.
ATC: That’s what I needed to hear. Air France 456 heavy, Delta 345, and Comair 5432, an unruly passenger has just made your day. Start ’em up and get ready to go.

It took an hour to get back to the gate and get the passenger unloaded. She was so, “scared of flying,” that she made it from Spain on an airplane earlier in the day just fine. I wanted to have the cops meet us, board the plane, and take the woman off in bracelets, but it seems that Matt is a kinder soul than I and had a gate agent met the plane instead.

That wasn’t the end. We discovered after landing that we had a fat woman who needed a wheel chair and who the flight attendants claimed couldn’t walk. This was a problem because we were in a remote parking area with no jet ways, which meant that she’d have to walk down stairs. Most places that have such parking have a lift to get invalids on and off the plane, but it seemed that Dulles had no such device for us. After letting most of the passengers off, we had to close up the plane, start the engines and taxi to a gate with a jet bridge so the woman could be removed. She walked off.

That wasn’t the end. When we finally got to the hotel at 3am, we discovered that our company had failed to make reservations for us. It was very, very late by the time I finally got to sleep last night, and I had no trouble sleeping until my alarm woke me up at 11:30am.

Maybe forever. The worst part? I’m not going to get home tonight.

I was supposed to fly IAD-ATL-IAD-JFK today. I got up this morning too early and as I was about to head down to the lobby for a 7:00am shuttle to the airport, my phone rang. Crew tracking was letting me know that our IAD-ATL-IAD flight was “downgraded” to an ERJ because our CRJ was still broken. (We brought it in with some Maintenance deferrals which expired last night and needed to be fixed before the plane could be flown again.) Since I can’t fly an ERJ, this meant I could go back to bed and show up for the IAD-JFK portion of the flight.

I got to the airport at about 12:45. The flight was posted as delayed to 2:30pm. So I had time to get a sandwich at Potbelly Subs. I like Potbelly; I think they’re a Chicago thing, but it seems there’s one in the IAD airport. Previously, the only one I’d eaten at is in Midway.

It’s now 6:00pm. The plane is still not fixed. The weather has gotten bad enough that there’s a constant string of canceled flights and the line at the customer service counter is a few miles long. I’m starting to think that I’m not going to get out tonight at all, and even if I do, it looks like I’m not going to make it home tonight.

And that really stinks because this was my only break this month with 3 days off in a row.