Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

I just got my schedule for December. I have 31 days off. This means that my last day flying as an airline pilot will be November 30. I’m absolutely clueless about where to go next. Aside from applying for unemployment, I really don’t even know what the next step is. Last time I found myself unemployed, flying jobs were really easy to come by, as we were in the middle of a huge pilot shortage. It’s a very different story now, with tens of thousands of pilots out of work, many of whom are far better qualified for what few jobs there may be out there.

It might be time to move to Alaska, but there’s not much hiring going on there, either. I’m willing to consider just about anything at this point, but there’s also the issue that I like living in Colorado. If I take a job somewhere else that doesn’t pay any better than what Jonah’s making now, I’m not sure that we’re much better off. Things will get better, and in 2 years or so, I think it’ll be pretty easy to find a flying job again. But I’m not really sure how to hang out in the mean time. I’m considering going to college, but that means a lot more loans, and I’m not sure that a college degree would get me anything that I don’t have now.

I probably should have started searching for jobs today, but I can’t seem to find the motivation. The whole thing is just terribly depressing these days. I’ll probably see if I can find any part time flight instructing work in the area, but even that’s very doubtful.

November 20, 2009

Dear Berck,

Recently, we announced the loss of 26 CRJ and 10 Dash 8 aircraft from the United Airlines system. As a result of the loss of business, we must continue to reduce our staffing levels.

Due to these circumstances, we find it necessary to furlough you effective December 7, 2009.

A furlough is never an easy decision, and I assure you we have exhausted all of our available options.

Thank you for all your hard work and support. It is our intention to make every effort to recall you from furlough as quickly as possible.

Sincerely,

VP, Flight Operations

Mesa Airlines, Inc.

It’s never a good sign when things go wrong the first leg of a 4-day trip.

The flight started on time and there wasn’t a cloud in Denver, despite the afternoon thunderstorm forecast. This should have seemed ominous enough, but we plowed ahead. The inbound flight arrived a little late, as usual, and we just managed to get the door closed for an on-time departure with less than 15 seconds to spare.

It was my leg, and I was bit annoyed that with a departure from Runway 34R we were unable to get a westbound turn, or a climb higher than 10,000 feet for what seemed like an eternity. Flying the wrong way while not even being allowed to climb seems like such a waste of time and fuel.

My Captain ran the climb check, but didn’t get a chime when cycling the seat belt sign on and off in order to let the flight attendant know that we were above 10,000 feet. So he tried calling her, which also failed. I engaged the autopilot and tried my side. No luck. The lights on the com panel didn’t light up at all, and before long the flight attendant was banging on our door to let us know that the intercom wasn’t working. Which we already knew.

Captain seemed to think we should continue to Montrose, but I pointed out that this wasn’t a wise plan. First: I knew that we would not be allowed to depart from Montrose without a working PA/intercom system. There aren’t any of our mechanics, nor are there any Dash parts in Montrose, which meant that we could be stuck there for days while a mechanic and parts are flown in on another plane. The second, more justifiable reason for turning back to Denver is that it’s the safest option. Without communication from the flight attendant, it’d be difficult for her to notify us if there was a fire in the cabin, or for us to notify her if there was a fire in the cargo compartment. (The Dash 8 is equipped with a sophisticated cargo fire suppression system: There’s a smoke detector in the cargo compartment connected to a light in the cockpit. There’s a hatch at the back of the cabin which permits the flight attendant to crawl back there with a fire extinguisher. Seriously.) Furthermore, in the event that other things go wrong, we’d be unable to order an evacuation, or have the flight attendant prepare the cabin. While we could theoretically open the cockpit door, security procedures are such that we should not do so.

Fortunately, the Dash flight deck door doesn’t have a normal sort of peep hole, but rather a small, rectangular bit of glass with a flap. We could open the flap, and write short messages that the flight attendant could read, after getting her attention by banging on the door.

We showed her a, “GOING BACK TO DENVER, PREPARE FOR LANDING,” note. The dispatcher and maintenance concurred that going back to Denver was the best option. The Captain (who was relatively new to being a Captain) was worried that the company would get mad that we we went back to Denver over a relatively minor issue. I assured him that it would be much harder to justify to the FAA why we went to Montrose. And, as I suspected, the company was glad we went back to Denver.

I managed a decent landing to runway 7, fortunately I’ve got enough experience with Denver to know that the approach to runway 7 is usually slam-dunk (they leave us way too high for too long), and it’s made worse when you get vectored back for the arrival from a pretty high altitude.

The passengers seemed relatively understanding. In general, I’m amused that they get upset when you inform them that the weather is too bad to allow us to safely fly somewhere, but as soon as you mention that the plane is broken in some way, they’re perfectly glad to sit around and wait.

The mechanics showed up and tried some unpromising things. Microsoft has trained them well, and they decided to turn all the power off and back on to see if that fixed the problem. Fortunately, it did not. Nor did opening up the giant rack of avionics equipment and replacing several of the large, heavy, expensive-looking electronics boxes. They gave up, and told us to find a new plane. Fortunately there was a spare in Denver that day.

I had enough time to get a hot pastrami sandwich at Heidi’s before this decision was finalized. I ate half the sandwich while getting the paperwork ready for departure. We had an uneventful flight to Montrose, where I elected to land the smaller of the two runways because the wind favored it and it would be a shorter taxi. I put the props in full reverse on landing in order to avoid back-taxiing on the runway. The Captain took us back to Denver and executed one of the best landings I’ve seen in a Dash. Both of us knew that he’d be unlikely to repeat the performance this week.

We still had to go back to Montrose, then back to Denver before we’d be allowed to set off for Durango, our destination for the night. On the third Denver landing for the day, I got cleared for the visual while midfield, 6000 feet above the runway at 210 knots. That’s the sort of thing the Dash is good at, though it doesn’t happen often in Denver. I made what I thought was an impossibly short approach with flaps 35, but I underestimated the Dash’s go-down/slow-down abilities, and had to carry a lot of power. But it was fun and still reasonably well-done.

We got to Durango at about 11:45pm, which was only about 45 minutes late. Not too bad, all things considered.

The otherwise nice hotel in Durango managed to screw up and I got stuck with a smoking room. Fortunately, it wasn’t terribly smoky, otherwise I think I would have demanded that they find a hotel somewhere else with a non-smoking room available. I’m still not happy about it, even though they gave me a free lunch in the posh hotel restaurant. I made it clear that I would not accept a smoking room tonight (we come back after a short round trip to Denver), so we’ll see if they fix the problem. Our contract with them states clearly that they are to provide us with non-smoking rooms.

Long term outlook on life is still uncertain. Some of the Dash classes for jet pilots who will be trained to replace me are being pushed back a bit. I’m thinking it might be more toward the end of the year that I get furloughed, but it’s so hard to tell, and the company isn’t talking.

Flying jobs are still pretty much non-existent and I don’t really have any plans. Theoretically, it’s better to find a new job before you lose the old one, but I’m guessing I can collect unemployment for awhile. And since I don’t actually know when this job will end, I don’t want to leave it for a job that I know won’t be as good.

I’ve got some time off next week, so I’m headed to Knoxville for a long-overdue visit. Jonah doesn’t get to come, since she has to work more normal hours at her new job.

On the plus side, when I do lose my job this winter, it’d be a great time for you guys to come visit. I’ll have time (if not money) to entertain you!

And worse, I’m not sure why. I’m not sure how much better I could have done at the interview.

I had a two hour break between flights in Denver on Wednesday. When I turned my phone on, it indicated that I had a voice mail, which meant that either Mesa wanted to change my schedule or one of my parents had called me. Anyone else would have sent a text message. In any case, I feared bad news.

Imagine my surprise when the message unexpectedly started with, “Hi, this is Dee Marsh from Lynx Aviation. We’d like to extend an invitation for you to interview on Friday…”

My immediate reaction was unfettered glee, but that was quickly tempered by a realization of the complications fraught by the message. First, I was in the middle of a 4-day trip and would have arrange time off in order to attend the interview. Second, Lynx Aviation is wholly-owned by Frontier airlines, which you may or may not have heard, is in the middle of bankruptcy. Taking a job with a bankrupt airline is not immediately obvious as a good move. Furthermore, Republic Airways Holdings has just announced that they’re buying Frontier, which is even more of an unknown for Frontier/Lynx. Finally, I’m not yet furloughed from Mesa, which means that taking a job with another airline would involve giving up my recall rights.

The Republic buyout scared 2 pilots who were scheduled to start ground school in Lynx’s July 13 class. As a result, they needed to fill the class quickly, thus the short-notice interview. I tried to see if I could beg off for a later interview date, but they explained that I’d pretty much won the interview lottery. Generally they only interview pilots who are recommended by other Lynx pilots, but their list of 40 people didn’t contain any that could make it to an interview on short notice as they all lived out of town. So they called the best-qualified local pilots, which included me. But there was no guarantee that they would get to me without a recommendation in their normal course of interviews.

So I set about trying to figure out how to make it to the interview. I was about to fly to Durango, and wouldn’t get back to Denver until Thursday night. I was supposed to fly back to Durango and overnight there again Thursday night as well as Friday night. I happened to be flying with the Captain ALPA (our union) representative, and asked him what he thought I should do. He said that the only way I was likely to get out of it was just to call in sick. I didn’t want to do that for a couple reasons. The first one was that I was simply not sick, and I don’t generally lie. The second reason was that it would be terribly unfair to a reserve pilot. I’d have to call in sick after I got to Denver, and we had only half an hour before we turned around to fly back to Durango. That meant that a reserve pilot would be called on short notice and the flight would be delayed. None of this seemed responsible.

So I went for broke and called the Chief Pilot. I explained that I was going to be furloughed in October or November, that I had job interview on short notice, and I needed a couple of flights covered. He was surprisingly completely agreeable and arranged for me to take “personal time off” for those flights. I was astounded.

The interview was at 1pm in north Denver on Friday. My flight back to Denver on Thursday night was very late. I was hoping to be able to eat dinner with Robert on Thursday night, but I didn’t get back to the apartment until midnight or so. And then I spent a couple of hours catching up my official log book with my flights from the last couple of months. I’d figured I wouldn’t bother updating it until I got furloughed and had plenty of time to waste on such nonsense.

I got up a few hours later and printed out all the forms and arranged the paperwork for the interview. Pilot interviews require an insane amount of forms, documentation, and proof of having done and not done all sorts of things. Additionally, pilot interviews are extremely technical in nature. While there’s the normal sort of ridiculous interview questions involved, “Why do you want to work here? What are your strengths and weaknesses?” there are also a whole lot of technical questions that are very similar to an oral exam for a check ride.

And unlike a check ride or normal interview, I didn’t have much time to prepare. I brushed up as best I could with the sort of knowledge that pilots are expected to know, but only bother remember for interviews. Maximum holding speeds, VOR service volumes and so on.

I put on my suit. Dad bought me a suit to go to a wedding years ago, and I wear it for job interviews and the occasional wedding. Well, and once to get fries and custard with BeManda. I’d hoped not to be wearing the suit for interview purposes for some time, and reflected that it had been nearly two years, which is apparently as long as I ever get to work at any once place.

I collected all my papers, licenses, passport, logbooks and so on and put them in Jonah’s car, since her’s has the working air conditioning. (Odd how that worked out, that Jonah has the air conditioning and she never uses it.) Normally I just drive with the top down, so air conditioning isn’t really needed in Denver. But in a suit, that wasn’t really practical, so I figured borrowing her car was the better bet.

There were only two other pilots there, interviewing for a total of 2 spots. That’s pretty good odds and made me fairly confident. I was the only current airline pilot there. One guy flew in Alaska for the past few years and the other had been working for Great Lakes, but wasn’t any more. After about an hour’s worth of telling us about Lynx (much of which was, “At least we’re not Mesa Airlines”) we took a written test. The questions appeared to come from the ATP written, which is the most absurd and difficult of all the FAA written tests. I’d passed the test with a 96% years ago, but it had been awhile. And almost none of the knowledge was actually useful to airline pilots. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at useless knowledge and only missed 5 out of the 40 questions which they said was pretty good.

Since I had to get back to the airport for my flight to Durango, they were nice and let me go first for the grand inquisition. Four people, from pilots to HR people took turns grilling me on everything from what annoyed me to how to fly an instrument departure from Durango, CO. (They actually handed me a set of Durango plates to ask me about. I actually laughed out loud, since that’s the place I fly most often these days.)

I tried hard to point out all the ways in which I would be a pilot for them. I already do basically the same job, to and from the same airports, in an older/smaller version of the plane they fly. I fly a Dash 8 200, they fly the new Dash 8, the Bombardier Q400. I even told them how I was honest with Mesa in order to get time off for the interview, ’cause that’s just the sort of person I am. I’m not sure if it came about as boasting, but it seems like that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to do in an interview. I think.

I also had to fly the stupidest “simulator” ever. It was basically a computer with Microsoft Flight Sim, yoke, rudder pedals, and a throttle quadrant hooked up. They warned me that I wouldn’t be able to fly it very well, and that was okay. I couldn’t fly it very well at all. It’s got about as much in common with flying an airplane as playing a first person shooter has to do with fighting in urban war. I didn’t fly it very well, but I think I did a reasonable job of demonstrating that I know instrument procedures. I hope. It’s the only part of the whole process I didn’t think I did an excellent job on.

The whole thing took 4.5 hours. They told me that they would let me know this week, and that if I don’t hear from them by Thursday to give them a call. That actually seemed a little strange. It seems like if I don’t hear from them, then they probably don’t want me. I’m trying not to read too much into it, or worry too much until I hear one way or the other.

If I got the job, I’d be able to stay where I am. The pay is exactly the same, though I’d be starting at the bottom again, so I’d be sitting reserve and the working conditions wouldn’t be quite as good as what I’ve got now. Since they only have a Denver base, there’s no danger of them shipping me somewhere else.

If I don’t get it, I’m probably going to have to move. And there’s no guarantee that even that would get me a job somewhere. Lynx is pretty much the only airline hiring right now. I’m hoping this is yet another case of my being in the right place at the right time. On the other hand, last time I thought I had a shoe-in to do the same job for different people, I didn’t get that job. And I was sure that interview went well, too.

Here’s hoping I don’t go crazy waiting for that phone call.