Archive for the ‘Flying’ Category

I’ve got a solid line. Apparently I figured out how to work PBS (our new, preferential bidding system, because it did a pretty decent job. The most important thing was that I get the 14-17th off to go to Sydney’s graduation, and I got that. In addition, I got a couple other saturdays off. I only have 4-day trips, which was what I wanted. If I had 1 or 2-day trips, I’d have to drive to the airport way too often. A rough sketch of the overnights is on my google calendar (DEN means I’m working, but I’m done when I get back home), as well as all the details on facebook.

Anyway, this new bidding system is a very good thing. If it didn’t work out for some reason, I’d have been on reserve all next month because I missed the cutoff date for rosters. I hope I continue to have reasonably decent lines as more people get furloughed and the base goes more junior. For now, I’m pretty darned happy.

In addition to going to New York, it looks like Jonah and I are going to be able to go to Hawaii next week for a couple of days. The Sunday after next we’re going to see Vienna Teng in Boulder. (I just happened to get that day off by chance–I didn’t bid for it because I didn’t know about the concert until after I bid).

The downside is that I’m making a lot less money. Ahh well.

I did not get the FAA job in Anchorage I applied for. This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that I didn’t get it because I’m not a retired, disabled veteran. I can understand veteran’s preference. What I can’t understand is that as long as a qualified disabled veteran applies, no one else is even considered. Had I realized that, I’m not sure I’d have bothered apply.

‘Thank you for applying on our external vacancy announcement, AAC-NOE-09-AJW334B-113303, Airspace System Inspection Pilot, FV-2181-H. Qualified 10-point preference eligibles who have a compensable, service-connected disability of 10 percent or more were referred to the selecting official. Other 10-point preference eligibles, 5-point preference eligibles and non-preference eligibles may not be selected as long as two or more qualified preference eligibles in the highest priority group are still available and interested. I am sorry to inform you that, at this time, your application was not included in the group that was referred. Additional information on veterans’ preference in hiring can be located at http://opm.gov/veterans/html/vetguide.asp. Please feel free to contacty me if you have any questions at [email protected]..

I finished up IOE with 21 hours (the FAA minimum required for a turbo-prop is 20 hours) on Friday. I wasn’t sure what my schedule would be like, but I knew that weekends off in the future were somewhat unlikely. Neal was free Friday evening, so I cooked elk bolognese with the remainder of the elk that Nathan gave us and we had a fine dinner. I managed to stay up pretty late considering that I’d gotten up at 4am that morning and flown in from Casper, WY.

Crew tracking called that night to tell me that I would be on reserve at noon the next day, and that furthermore, I’d be on ready reserve. We all slept in until about 11am, Jonah made us some Belgian Waffles from Liege and I headed to the airport in the snow. When I got up, I checked my schedule and they’d already assigned me a flight to Jackson Hole. Because it was reasonably warm, the roads were mostly just wet, but the visibility was terrible. I didn’t make it to work at 1:30pm like I was supposed to, but it didn’t really matter because our flight was delayed.

About the time our plane arrived from Durango, dispatch gave our plane to the 10:30am Jackson Hole departure which still hadn’t left because their plane was broken, and left us with the broken plane. The standby electric hydraulic pump was broken, but they assured us that it’d be fixed soon.

We eventually left around 5pm and got halfway to Aspen when I saw something flash. It was the L GEAR UNAFE warning light. I asked my captain if he saw it. He said, “You saw it too? It did it 5 minutes ago and I thought maybe I was seeing things.”

We called dispatch on the radio who patched us to maintenance who told us to return to Denver, primarily because there’s no mechanics in Jackson Hole. So we came back.

The mechanics fiddled with this and that, but weren’t really sure what to do, and about then the plane that went to Jackson Hole (the one we were supposed to take the first time) came back, so they moved our passengers to that plane.

It turns out that this was the 4th attempt for many of these passengers to get to Jackson Hole. Most of them were on a late-night flight out of Denver on Friday night, and after hours of waiting for deicing, the ramp crew in Jackson Hole gave up and went home. So the flight canceled.

We finally got to Jackson hole at about 10pm last night, and I had to get up at 5am this morning for an early flight back. The skies completely cleared up overnight and the flight back was beautiful.

By the time I left for Jackson Hole last night, my schedule said that after coming back in the morning, I’d be working the last flight to Jackson hole tonight, with 13 hours in between of doing nothing. My schedule changed several times since then.

The latest is that I’m supposed to go to Aspen and back in an hour or so, then go to Casper and back, and then I get to go home for the evening. I come back in the morning at about 10am to go to Grand Junction, then overnight in Casper.

I’m dead tired, but seriously enjoying it. Life is so much simpler now that I’m based out of Denver. I don’t have to stay at a crash pad, or spend hours riding trains to get to Kelsey or Sydney’s apartment in New York. When I get a couple days off, I can drive home, and don’t have to hope there’s room on a plane to get me home, and I can drive to work in the morning instead of flying in the night before.

If I were commuting, I’d be seriously annoyed that my overnight was canceled tonight. Since I live here, it means an extra night in my bed.

I’m hoping the rest of this trip is pretty easy. The weather in Denver had been pretty rough. When I landed Friday morning, the control tower was in the clouds and we didn’t break out of the clouds until just above the point at which we have to go around.

Instrument approaches still fascinate me, even after a year of flying for the airlines. I can fly a plane by staring at some needles and dials, and then, as if by magic, the runway magically appears right below us as we break out of the clouds. As fun as that is, I’d still rather be able to look at the mountains I’m flying over rather than staring into the white murk for hours on end.

I’m getting a little better at flying the Dash. Fortunately, I’m nowhere near as bad as I was when I first started flying the jet.

Durango is shaping up to be another excellent overnight. It looks like we stay right downtown in walking distance of all kinds of things, including a brewery. Unfortunately, we got in too late tonight for me to go exploring, and we leave pretty early in the morning. But I’m sure I’ll be back with a decent overnight eventually.

The flight in tonight was interesting in that the weather was being reported as high enough that we didn’t need to shoot an instrument approach, but because of terrain, ATC wouldn’t descend us low enough to break out of the clouds until we were pretty much over the airport.

I was flying, and just flew a full traffic pattern to land on runway 21. My third IOE instructor coached me through it a little bit, and I managed an acceptable approach and landing. I did get slow at one point, and my pitch control was, perhaps, a bit erratic. But I’m confident I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

A quick round trip Aspen turn tomorrow, then I’m home in the afternoon and get to spend the night at home before going back to work on Thursday. So incredibly nice to be able to drive home…

I just now discovered a nifty little Google Maps tool that lets you make maps. It’s probably been around forever, but I just now noticed it.

So I made a map of all the destinations that we currently go to in the Dash 8 out of Denver. The blue ones are overnights, the green ones are cities we go to, but don’t overnight at.

I was supposed to start IOE on Monday, but that didn’t happen. I did manage to start on Tuesday.

My IOE instructor was exactly the sort of guy you want teaching IOE—he’s the most senior guy on the airplane, been with the company for years, very knowledgeable, by-the-book, and patient. He had me fly the very first leg.

Takeoff wasn’t terribly smooth, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. The plane feels a lot like flying a very heavy Cessna 182. It’s twitchy in pitch, but very slow to respond in roll. I’d brought my leather jacket with me for some silly reason, despite the fact that it was well over 90°F in Arizona. The plane wasn’t cooling very well at all, though my instructor insisted that wasn’t normal. The ILS was out of service is Tuscon, but it was a clear day and we had the field in sight from pretty far out. The Dash flies slow enough, that I immediately felt a lot more comfortable on the approach than I ever did on a visual in the jet. In the jet, I was constantly convinced I was going to screw it up, and everything was so twitchy. I had no trouble hand-flying the Dash all the way in. We started off impossibly high—had we been in the jet, we would have needed to go around. No problem in the Dash. Pull the power back, put the gear down, the props at full speed and it comes right down. I had to add power in no time to keep from getting slow.

Everyone says the plane is very hard to land. The landing gear are like giant stilts, and they don’t give at all. My instructor talked me through the landing. It’s strange because we fly the Dash at 120 knots on approach, even though the ref speed might be as slow as 85. At 200 feet, I pulled the power back to around 12% torque and held it off the runway until it wanted to land, but still pretty flat, just like he told me to do. It rolled right on, just like I knew what I was doing.

The flight attendant was astounded that it was my landing and congratulated me on it. I also flew the leg back to PHX from TUS, then my instructor flew the last leg which took us to Yuma for an overnight.

The hotel in Yuma had a “social hour” where they served free beer. I had my free beer, then managed to go straight to sleep, even though the sun was still up. This proved fortunate, since I had to wake up at 4am the next morning to start my 5 leg day.

As we were preflighting the plane, my captain’s telephone rang. It was crew tracking, notifying us that the 4 legs after we returned to Phoenix would be downgraded to a jet. The flight attendant still worked them, and they had nothing else for me to do.

So I flew us back PHX and had another good landing. I’d just missed a flight to COS, and the next one wasn’t leaving for hours, so I rode Southwest back to DEN where Jonah picked me up. In 3 days I wound up with a little more than 4 hours of flight time, and spent nearly twice that going back and forth to PHX. I should be done with PHX flying unless they send me out there on reserve or I voluntarily pick up a trip.

I had Thursday off, and went back to work on Friday. For the first time in my airline pilot career, I drove to work! That was terribly exciting. I parked in the employee lot, rode the bus directly to the concourse and didn’t even have to go through security. I did have to spend some time getting my fingerprints in the system.

I found my airplane, and an older male flight attendant was stocking the galley. I introduced myself, and started a preflight. I was completely unable to get the power cart to supply power to the airplane, but I felt a bit better when none of the rampers could help me either. My Captain eventually showed up, and another ramper figured out how to get the power cart going.

I have to do paper weight and balance on the Dash. It’s probably good for me to add up some numbers now and again. On the jets in JFK I also had to do a paper weight and balance, but I only had to add up 3 numbers at once. Now I have to do 6.

The flight to Jackson Hole from Denver yesterday was excellent. The skies were mostly clear with a thin cirrus layer somewhere above us. We were cruising at 24,000, which means the view is a lot better than in the jet at 34,000 feet. There was the occasional small puffy cumulus cloud below us, casting shadows on the snow-covered Rockies. I’d left my camera in my bag which was in a closet on the other side of the flight deck door, so I didn’t get any pictures.

We’re staying at the Snow King Resort in Jackson Hole, WY. I feel at home in the west. I don’t feel terribly out of place wandering around with BDU’s and flannel shirt. My captain and I got lunch and beer at the Snake River Brewery. The beer was okay, but the buffalo burger was excellent. After happy hour ended, we were going back to the hotel, but the captain talked me into stopping by another bar, 43° North. Despite being a Friday night, it was pretty dead. Jackson Hole is busy during the ski season, which is over now, and the summer tourist season, which hasn’t started yet. We left after a live band started playing “soul/funk” covers. The singer was the only black member of the band. In fact, he was the only black person in the entire bar. Maybe the entire city. So it was funny watching him sing, “Play that Funky Music White Boy.”

I walked back into town this morning in search of breakfast. I didn’t see anything promising until I turned down a street and started meandering back to the hotel. It was a very small establishment with no indoor seating, but some seating outdoors, and a window at which to order. I paid $5 for an absolutely wonderful breakfast burrito. Eggs, fried potatoes, several kinds of meat, several kinds of cheese, peppers, and who knows what else. The name of the place is “D.O.G.” which stands for “Down on Glen”. I’ll definitely go back.

I’m off to DEN and then Gillette, WY now…. Supposedly one of the least favorite DEN overnights.