No excuse

I really have no excuse not to blog more often. I commute in an airplane seat over four hours each way to Chicago, and soon it'll be over five (or six!) hours to JFK. I have a laptop, and have all that time to write something down. So that's what I'm doing now. "Cruising at an altitude of 37,000 feet, the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign." But I'm in my seat, where my ass will be parked for the whole flight. This plane is too small to be walking around and bumping into people.

I just finished a trip out of Dallas that I picked up as open time. I've learned how to be sneaky with my reserve schedule since I wasn't getting much flying. I drop the days I have on reserve (they allow me to drop the day, but it reduces my pay guarantee by a pro-rated day rate) and then find open trips to fly as "make-up time." This makes up for the reduction in pay, and gives me an actual schedule of flying. A neat way to circumvent sitting on my ass all day waiting to get called to fly. This way I can effectively build my own schedule out of open trips and not lose out on much pay, if any.

Since I'm based in Chicago I usually stash my flight kit bag (with all my manuals and navigation charts) in the pilot bag room at O'hare. I remembered this on Saturday morning when I woke up, and realized I had to fly to Chicago to pick it up before beginning my trip out of DFW! Damn. I flew to Chicago, slept the night at my brother's, then flew to DFW Sunday morning to START work. Oh well. It beats sitting around waiting for a call that never comes.

So I had layovers in Abilene, TX, and Fort Walton Beach, FL. The Fort Walton Beach overnight was nice and long-- we arrived at 3:30pm and had the rest of the day and night free. The hotel is on the beach, and I could sit on my room balcony looking out at the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn't terribly warm out, but beautiful nonetheless. The captain and flight attendant and I met at 4:30 and walked down the street to a pizza joint called Helen Back. We sat on their back deck, over the water on the intercoastal waterway. Boaters can dock their boats and walk into the bar. Awesome. Had a few beers and some yummy pizza, then walked back. I took a stroll on the beach for a few minutes, then went down to the jacuzzi and relaxed. I absolutely love the ocean-- any water, really-- because the sound of the waves is just so relaxing. It's unbelievable how just the sound of water can completely clear my head and put me at ease. Needless to say, I slept with the balcony door open so I could hear the waves crashing on the beach.

I think my next coupe blogs will be about things that annoy me in the industry -- mostly stupid people -- or just make me laugh, so look out for that!

Always Be Prepared

No, I wasn't a Boy Scout, but in light of the recent US Airways "Miracle on the Hudson," I suppose I can talk a bit about airline pilot training.  Hopefully I can shed some light on the intensity of the training, as well as maybe shed some light (a future blog perhaps?) on my job itself.

I'll start off by saying the absolute first thing every pilot learns, from day one of his private license training, is to always keep an eye out for a decent emergency landing site.  Always.  Even on the first day I was flying around Long Beach, my instructor simply pulled the throttle to idle and said, "your engine just failed..." Always have a plan for an emergency landing, whether you're in a Cessna or a 747.

Every New Hire pilot at any major airline brings with him (just so I don't have to keep typing "/her") at least a thousand or two hours of flying time, and a Commercial or Airline Transport Pilot License.  Regional airlines require fewer hours of time, but all the same licenses and medical standards.

Once they show up for the first day at their new airline, they go through anywhere from two to five (I did five) weeks of ground school.  This includes five days of company indoctrination (company policies, Federal Aviation Regulations, safety & security, etc.).  The other one to four weeks is learning about the systems of the particular aircraft you will be flying.  One day air conditioning, two days engines, two days electrical system, and so on and so forth.  By the end, your pilot knows EVERYTHING about that plane from how the thrust reversers are triggered to the height and wingspan of the plane.  Yes, I even know how the poop is flushed.  Every button, every sensor, every light.  After this intense school-style training and a written exam, an FAA representative gives each pilot a thorough (45 minutes to 2 hours, typically) oral exam on the plane's components and systems.

If they pass that, it's on to the simulator.  This is typically about two weeks (ten days, 4 hours at a time) of training.  Most major and regional airlines have full motion simulators (fun!) and if not they outsource the sim training to a facility that has them.  The main focus here is operation and crew standardization (so everyone knows their job and can be paired with any other pilot without problem) in the cockpit.  At least half of the time, though, is spent focusing on emergency situations.  The sim instructor needs only press a button to make the simulator lose an engine (or both), blow open the cabin door, or fail the flaps.  I'd say I spent a good six days of my training flying around with one engine inoperative, and no, I did not crash once.  You go over failures of dozens of systems in cruise flight, while landing, and on takeoff.  Especially on takeoff-- engine failures just after V1, or the point at which you would not be able to stop safely on the runway while in your takeoff roll.  Tons of that.  Yes, with one engine out, you can still safely takeoff, climb, circle, and land.  In one instance, I was flying along at 30,000 feet, when we simulated a rapid decompression, hydraulic failure, and failure of all five electrical generators in flight.  That means oxygen masks on, blank instrument screens, no flaps, and I had to pull a mechanical lever to get the landing gear down.  But we landed safely at Albuquerque airport.  Oh, and no regular brakes, so we had to hand pump the parking brake to stop.  But it's possible.  Nice to know, isn't it?  Obviously, two engines out is a little tougher.

After the sim training, you get a two hour "checkride."  An FAA rep gives you a practical exam in the sim to test your knowledge and demonstration of flight operations, including (in fact, focusing on) emergency and single-engine operations and approaches to land.  If you mess up and "bust your ride," you'll have to retrain and redo the checkride on a different date.

Once you pass the checkride, a new pilot (including experienced pilots simply switching to different aircraft) will typically start their online flying (flying in scheduled operations with passengers or cargo) with a designated Initial Operating Experience Captain.  IOE is what they call it at American and Southwest, but I don't know if the nomenclature is the same across the industry.  For a certain amount of flight hours (around 15-75) the rookie must fly with this "teaching Captain" to finish the formal training.  After that is done, he is good to go.

But wait!  There's more!  If you order now, you get the steak knives absolutely free!

For First Officers (the young studs in the right seat), we are required to come back for (thankfully, abbreviated) ground school and the associated FAA oral and sim exams every 12 months.  For Captains (the old farts in the left seat) it's every 6 months.  We re-do all the systems info and demonstrate once again that we can indeed still manage an emergency situation in the air.  Yes, every six or twelve months every pilot at every airline has to go back and play "you bet your job" with an FAA checkride.  You bust, and you can't fly.  And to top it off, it'll be harder to get a job at a different place with busted checkrides on your record.  Yup, each bust goes on your FAA record, not just your company record.

So.  By no means would I ever diminish the skills and cunning and awesomeness of Captain "Sully" and his First Officer of US Airways, but rest assured, they were more prepared for these circumstances than you would believe.  Every flight we pilots fly is treated as having a possibility of any emergency.  I think the majority of pilots nationwide would have made the same decision as Sully did to ditch in the Hudson.  But his experience and wisdom truly came into play with how fast he made the decision.  At first they wanted to head to the airport over in Jersey and land there, but later chose to ditch.  A pilot with much less experience would probably have made the same decisions, but perhaps even only 10 or 15 seconds later.  That 10 or 15 seconds could have been disastrous.  Could have been the same outcome, but who knows. 

Let's not ever find out...

The Sandwich and the Stink-Man

I have been commanded to start a blog.  No, it wasn't by God, or even those inner voices.  My wife has been harassing me for months to start a blog, and she finally just said I had to.  So I caved.  And now, I'll share with you some of my stories of pilotdom.  I'll start with last week.

I have flown a whopping ten hours this month so I don't have a lot to talk about at work.  I had two reserve days on duty, where I'm on call.  I didn't expect to get called to go fly, so when I flew from SFO to Chicago, I went straight to the El train to go to my brother's house, where I stay.

Now, I'll preface what happened next by saying I'm a big believer in karma.  You do good and it'll come back to you.  And vice versa.  On the train, the signs and announcements say no eating or drinking.  I almost never eat on the train, but this time I was just starving, and I had to eat the sandwich I had in my bag.  So I take it out and unwrap it, and also open up my yogurt.  Yum!

Instant Karma.  No sooner than I had taken my first bite out of this delicious turkey and cheese sandwich (they're always yummier when someone else makes them) than a large bearded, dirty  man came on board.  I'm not talking about any old bearded, dirty man.  I'm talkin' seriously messed up hair.  I'm talkin' dir-tay.  And I'm talkin' stink-y.  He sat right behind me and the stink was overwhelming.  I couldn't breathe in, couldn't eat, couldn't even concentrate.  This was karma kicking me in the rear.  Every time I breathed in, I gagged.  I tried to take a bite of the sandwich, and only caught a waft of the stink-man behind me.  I even had unusually devastating gas that day, and decided to let one loose.  That actually helped-- temporarily.  And my fart was nasty, too.  No, not nasty-- Nas-tay.  But it was an improvement.  It was all I could do to keep from throwing up.  I'm serious, I almost blew chunks all over the train.  So I packed up and got off the train on the next stop, and went to a different car.  Ahh, my sandwich.  Unimpeded by stink-man.  Wonderfully, delicious, stink-less, turkey & cheese sandwich.

So yeah, I may have some fun stories about work.  Maybe not as exciting as landing in a river, but still fun.  But instead, for my first blog, you get the sandwich and the stink-man.  Keep an eye out and I'll tell you all the secrets of the airline pilot fraternity.