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 uneventful until our flight from Dayton back to O’Hare. It was my leg, and I pushed the thrust levers forward as the Captain transferred the flight controls to me on the roll as we turned on to the runway. “Set thrust,” I called out, took my hand off the thrust levers. They’re the captain’s for the remainder of the takeoff roll. A few seconds later I heard, DING DING DING and looked inside to see my screens go black. I was trying to process what was going on as the Captain called, “Abort Abort,” pulled the thrust levers to idle. I started braking, and then transferred control of the aircraft to him. I told tower we were aborting on the runway, coordinated an exit, explained that we did not need any assistance, and immediately made a PA telling the passengers to remain seated and explained that we’d had a, “a minor mechanical malfunction” and asked that they remain patient while we sorted it out. I wondered, as I said it, how stupid that sounded. “Minor,” I said. How minor was it if we aborted the takeoff for it? Would I suggest that an engine failure was also a minor failure? After all, we have two of them!
What had happened was the right engine-powered generator temporarily went offline, then came back. In the process of AC Bus 2 switching to the APU generator for its power source and then back to Gen 2, my screens went blank and then came back. By the time we pulled off the runway, the only evidence something had gone wrong was a few lingering status messages about things like the Yaw Damper 2 and Mach Trim offline.
We went back to the gate, and a Mechanic came out and fixed the problem. Hah! What really happened was a mechanic came back and broke the plane even more. He deactivated Gen 2, signed some papers that said we were good to go without it.
We’re okay to go without one of the engine driven generators because we have an APU (Auxillary Power Unit) that also has a generator. We just have to leave the APU running for the whole flight. We usually shut it down after take off, but there’s no reason we can’t leave it running. That way, if one of the two remaining generators fails, there’s another ready to take up the slack. Even if both of them fail, we’re still okay because we’ve got an ADG (Air Driven Generator)–basically a little windmill that pops out of the side of the plane if we lose all AC power.
The rest of the flight ORD was uneventful. The Captain took the next leg, to Cedar Rapids, in the same plane with the inoperative generator. Shortly after takeoff, I went through my normal after takeoff flow. I turn off the manual override on the fuel crossflow, dis-arm both thrust reversers, switch the pressuration bleed air sources from the APU to the engine, tell the computer that we’re now climbing instead of taking off, and set the appropriate climb thrust. The final thing is to turn off the APU. I reached up and pushed the APU start-stop switchlight as I realized that we needed to leave the APU on, otherwise we’d be down to one generator.
I realized it as I was pushing the button in. It’s a “switchlight” because it’s a switch, and a light. It’s a two-position switch. You push it in, and it’s on. You push it in again, and when you let go, it pops out, and it’s off. I’d pushed it in, so the APU was still running. Until I took my finger off.
I didn’t take my finger off, because I realized my mistake. I did utter a few choice profanities.
“What’s up?” the captain asked.
“My finger is in the wrong place.” He looked up at my finger, on the lit-up APU switchlight. I watched a recognition of our situation as well as my stupidity come over his face.
“Well, you can’t very well stay like that for the whole flight,” he said.
I took my finger off the button. As the APU shut down, nothing too bad happened since the left engine generator picked up the load. Since it was Bus 2 that was affected, my screens once again went dark for a few seconds. Yaw Damp 2, and the Mach Trim kicked off. The only real down side to this is that the autopilot would have disconnected were it engaged, but fortunately, the Captain was hand flying at the time, so it was no big deal. I restarted the APU, re-engaged the yaw damper, the mach trim, and made sure everything else was fine. It was. I felt like an idiot.
Otherwise, it’s been a pretty good couple of days. I nearly hit a very large bird on takeoff from Cedar Rapids this morning, but fortunately we missed it. I’m sure my spastic right banked turn probably freaked out the passengers a little, though. I’m enjoying my last few flights in the jet. I’m sure I’ll miss it, but I bet the -8 is a ton of fun.
Speaking of which, my class was postponed a week. It now starts Feb 16th. Since I wasn’t able to bid for a schedule for the bid period starting Feb 9th, because I was supposed to be training, I don’t have a schedule.
So the training department called me and told me to pick up open time, otherwise scheduling would assign me whatever trips they wanted.
I was looking forward to having the week off. I’m not sure if they can force me to pick up open time, but I figured it was better to pick up a trip that I liked rather than wait to see what they assigned me. So I picked up a silly little 2-day that’s commutable. It’s right in the middle of the week, so hopefully they can’t do much else with me. I’m pretty sure they can’t make me sit reserve. Furthermore, since I picked up the trip from open time, I think they need to pay me on top of my guarantee for it. It’s only 6 hours, but that’s $174 over what I’d make otherwise.
There’s probably more to write, but it’s very much bed time.
