If you’d like to see the private posts via an RSS feed, you can now do that!
Just log in to the blog, and the RSS link at the bottom will include a feed key. Put this in your RSS reader and you should be able to see the private posts.
Aspen
There’s a short video of my captain flying an approach to runway 33 in Aspen, CO. Note that I just clicked started the camera recording and held it up to the window, but I wasn’t paying attention to the camera for obvious reasons. At one point you can hear, “Caution, Terrain, Terrain!” from the airplane, which is a pretty normal thing going into Aspen on the circle to 33. Click on the photo below to see it. It’s 20MB, and my server is a little slow, so be patient.
If you can’t get it to work in the gallery, I also uploaded it to youtube.
State
I woke up this morning with the feeling that something was wrong, and trying to remember why I felt like I’d been fighting with some problem in my sleep. It took me a few seconds to remember that it was because Jonah’s about to join the ranks of the unemployed.
I’m not generally an anxious person, but I think this is a big deal. My income is not enough to support us. When I lost my job in 2007, it didn’t seem like too big deal. A big part of that is because I left with a huge severance package, had a bunch of vacation and sick time accrued and I found a job before that ran out. Furthermore, in 2007 the U.S. economy wasn’t on the brink of what’s likely to be one of the worst depressions we’ve seen. I knew that I’d find a job flying sooner or later, even if it wasn’t what I wanted. With so much of the country currently unemployed, I’m not at all sure that Jonah will be able to find any job, much less a good one.
Yesterday started off as a great day. The night before, the flight attendant on the trip mentioned that she was going rafting with a friend in Durango and invited us along. I realized that I didn’t have any suitable clothes or shoes with me, but that otherwise it sounded like a great idea. Her friend turned out to be a PHX-based Mesa CRJ pilot, and he relayed an offer to let me borrow some shoes.
The rafting was a possibility because of the strange schedule. We got into Durango at about 11pm on Sunday night, and didn’t leave until 7pm Monday. We’ve actually got the same schedule today. I’m sure some pilots will complain about the lack of flying hours on trip, but a long overnight in Durango is a good thing.
We stay right on the edge of historic downtown Durango, so I got up yesterday morning with enough time to go shopping. I bought a strap for my sunglasses so they wouldn’t go flying off, and a lightweight pair shorts that doubles as a bathing suit. I stopped for a breakfast burrito at the Durango Diner, which was smothered in green chili, but turned out to be only mediocre.
The rafting trip was great, if a bit intense. The Animas river generally flows no more than about 2,000 CFM this time of year, but is currently up to 5,500 CFM. The folks who took us said they hadn’t seen it this high in years. Many of the guided rafting companies stop offering trips when the river gets above 5,000 CFM. While it was nearly 80°F outside, the water was absolutely frigid. I was worried my feet were going to get frostbitten. There were several moments were went paddling through solid walls of water, where I had to hold my breath and wondered if we were going to come out the other side still attached to the raft. Fortunately, none of the 5 of us went swimming. We stopped on the river to eat at Serious Barbecue, where we got “Texas Tacos”. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it was pretty darned good. A soft taco filled with barbecued pulled pork, onions, jalepeños, potatoes, cheese, and barbecue sauce. The weather was great, not a cloud in the sky—I couldn’t have planned a better rafting trip. Afterwords, it became obvious why they were so eager to have us along—the more weight in the raft and the more people paddling, the better the chance we had of keeping the raft upright.
We got back to the hotel with plenty of time to shower and take a nap before our flight in the evening. The weather was still great for the flight back to Denver. Soon after we reached our final cruising altitude (also our service ceiling) of 25,000 ft, I realized my I hadn’t turned my telephone off because it was vibrating. The amusing thing about the Dash is that my telephone tends to work just fine in the air. I try to turn it off though, because it often makes clicking noises in my headset while it’s searching for a station (not as bad as GSM phone, but still audible), and it wears the battery down. I had a text message from Jonah. “I’m sad. I’ve been laid off again.”
It only took a few seconds for everything to start feeling very heavy. I had been sailing on top of the world, thinking how great my job was. How I get to fly airplanes to cool places and go rafting for free. And then, suddenly, I’m worried about how I’m going to be able to the bills.
I listened to an episode of This American Life recently where several people who had unexpectedly lost their jobs were interviewed. One of the striking things is how, despite the fact that many of these people did everything right: they had good, steady jobs for decades, saved for retirement and so on, they still felt incredibly guilty. They felt that they had made the wrong choices and that this was somehow their fault.
And that’s how I feel. And I’m not even the one who lost my job. I feel astoundingly guilty for every dollar I’ve spent recently. We could have been living frugally, saving more. Admittedly, I didn’t know this was going to happen, and that’s why I’m angry. I was under the impression that after Jonah had renegotiated the terms of her employment, that part of that agreement was that they weren’t going to simply turn around and fire her the next month. Which is exactly what happened. If they were still considering terminating her employment, I feel like they could have let us know back when they made the original agreement. If nothing else, we could have been saving. We didn’t have to go Hawai’i. I could have bid for maximum pay this month instead of maximum time off, like I did.
But even though I didn’t know, I still feel like that I knew the state of the economy, and I should have been preparing better. On the other hand, I try to keep telling myself that I can’t live as though the world is going to end, and it’s good that I took the opportunities we had while we had them.
Bad News
Well, I found out today I’m being laid off at the end of the month. No one is hiring, which makes it difficult to be a recruiter, and everyone is putting off having wills made (and of course, land developers are in deep doo doo). Duncan had to borrow money to make my (reduced) payroll last month.
If you know anyone who needs a good researcher and editor, let me know.
Casper, WY
I just spent the night in the same hotel room for the third time. Most hotels have a few rooms they use just for crew members, so this isn’t terribly surprising. Since we check in and out at odd times (we’ll be leaving at 4pm today), it works better for them that way. And the rooms often have a refrigerator and microwave.
This has been a good 4-day trip. I flew us into Casper last night and the runway lights went out right at about 200 feet. My landing lights were shining on the pavement surface by this time, so it wasn’t a big deal. This happened because it’s pilot controlled lighting, and the lights go out after 15 minutes. Skywest landed before us and they’d clicked the lights on, and we forgot to keep them on. I clicked the mic button 3 times to bring them up to low intensity, but nothing happened, and I realized that I was on the wrong frequency. I couldn’t very well land and switch the frequency, and my captain was looking down at something else. I asked him to turn the lights back on, and he turned them up to high intensity. Right as I was in the flare. Which meant that at the most critical time, I was nearly blind. I still pulled off a pretty darned good landing, all things considered. I even tossed the props in full reverse for a bit of celebratory noise-making. No one ever uses reverse in the Dash ’cause not generally necessary, but it makes an awesome noise, and I figure if the airplane’s got it, I may as well use it.
I took some photos yesterday, they’re up in the gallery.
