To: John From: Crew Scheduling

Merry Christmas!

I received a present from crew scheduling this year - a 7 AM show time on Christmas Day for a three day trip, meaning that I'd need to leave by 5:30 to get to the airport on time. And I didn't even get them anything.

Thus I've been indoctrinated into the elite group of "Those Who Work on Christmas Day", and I'd be performing my first "Christmas Lift" (For more tales of the holiday lift visit flightlevel390.blogspot.com).

I am based at our Gotham hub, but since we live in the SE United States, I always request to fly out of the base closest to our home. With the holidays upon us, and an increase in flying in the Northeast, this request has been denied more and more lately. My lovely wife is from the extended Gotham suburbs, so we planned to spend Christmas with her family. On Christmas eve we spent the day with all of the kids in the City (our daughter snookered an American Girl out of us), and the evening with the entire family, so I don't feel like I missed out too terribly much - although one day I hope to fly on Christmas Eve and make the "Santa Sighting" announcement. Next year perhaps.

The City that Never Sleeps is quiet at 5 AM on Christmas day, and the drive to the airport was the most pleasant I've had (well, at least the drive through Manhattan, the drive through the Appalachians to the airport in Virginia is always pleasant). I was originally assigned to this trip because another pilot dropped it, so I would only be with the crew for the first three days at which the original pilot would rejoin the crew. Nonetheless, I've blogged before that the upside of early report times, is going home early on the last day. This trip was no exception: one leg from BWI-LGA at 7 AM, and then homeward bound. Until then, however, two long duty days, with only four legs each day. This is made possible through the use of multi-hour blocks of airport appreciation time - that is, time spent in an airport waiting for your next flight. Sure would be easier if all airports had free wi-fi. I certainly don't want to challenge an entities attempts to generate revenue in these economic times, but to that point, are people actually spending $7.95 to use the internet for an hour? But I digress....

So yes, in two days a total of 8 hours and 20 minutes spent sitting in airports waiting for flights. That is a fine Christmas present indeed. I'm home now and all that is behind me. But wait, it looks like Crew Scheduling might have another present for me for New Year's....I really need to get them something....

Circadian Rhythm

3:00 AM: My wristwatch alarm goes "beep-beep, beep-beep". I reach over and turn it off.

3:03 AM: My cell phone alarm goes "do-do-do-Do-Do" or whatever song it is. I reach over and turn that off.

3:06 AM: The hotel alarm clock goes "BWANH BWANH BWANH BWANH". I reach over and turn that off

3:06:05 AM: I reach for the remote control and turn on The Weather Channel. The ensuing glow ensures that I will not go back to sleep, jeopardizing my seat on the 4:00 am crew van to the airport and earning me a trip to have coffee with the chief pilot...although the meeting is in his office and he is the only one enjoying coffee.

Such is my routine when I have an early morning "show time", which I've had a lot lately. The upside to the early show is that on the last day, you're usually done by lunchtime, or shortly after. The downside is, well, you have to get up really early in the morning. No matter how hard you try, it is hard to automatically switch from being a night person to being a morning person, and somehow managing to get to bed early at night. Many pilots write about "Circadian Rhythm", and what they do to accomodate different schedules. One that I enjoy reading writes a column in Flying Magazine, and he starts a day or two early when he has a string of early shows or an overseas flight. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to do this, no matter how hard I try. When I have the 4:15 show time, it means I need to leave the house at 2:30 to get to the airport, so I have to be up at 1:45. Wow, that sounds even more ridiculous when I write it.

On this particular morning with the 4:15 - which I've only had one of on the first day of a trip - I tried and tried to get in bed at 7 PM, but just couldn't do it. As you can imagine, one gets pretty tired the next day, and we can't have tired pilots. Our scheduling department does a good job of making sure we're finished early on such days, and I can usually be in bed in the hotel by 1:30 or so. Of course, an afternoon nap makes it difficult to fall asleep at night, which you need to do when you have another 4 AM show time the next day...

And of course, by the time your body is adjusted, the trip is over, you're at home, and your wife is demanding why you are exhausted at 5 o'clock at night, falling asleep while she is telling you about her day, or falling asleep at much more "inopportune" times....

For me, the search for the answer to Circadian Rhythm will continue, and, in the meantime, I am thankful for $1.00 large coffee at the Laguardia Dunkin Donuts for flight crew.

Living the Dream....

When The Planets Align

An airport that closes its only runway at midnight....a freak line of thunder snowshowers....a passenger stuck in the bathroom....all things that conspire to make for an interesting evening when the stars and planets align, or in our case, when the moon, jupiter, and venus are all in unusually close proximity in the evening sky.

My base airport closes its only runway at midnight each night for maintenance. I was assigned to do an "out-and-back", which brings you back to your home airport at the end of the day. There were numerous storms moving through the northeast, bringing high winds, rain, snow, and other nasty precipitation. We were due back into our airport at 11:57 PM local time, which is really pushing that midnight curfew. Upon arrival at the airport, the board unceremoniously announced that our departure time is 1:30 behind schedule, so we were already in trouble. We had 2:30 worth of layovers, so we were confident we could make up the time, and our departure time was moved up by 30 minutes, which bolstered our confidence. We launched for the City of Brotherly Love about 45 minutes behind schedule.

Due to the high winds Philly was using the two longer runways and landing to the west. While being guided for our turn at a landing, someone reported windshear on final, and apparently this renders one of the two runways unusable. We immediately were given instructions to tour the countryside, and things were not looking good for making curfew. After only a few turns, the airport opens up one of the other two runways, and we were brought right around for a nice landing by the captain on the short runway 26.

After unloading the passengers and conducting the preflight, I decided to check my phone for messages, which I usually don't do during a quick turn, which this now was due to our unanticipated tardiness. The Mothership (scheduling) called while we were in the air. I called them back, and they informed me that two of our final three legs would be cancelled, and we were to ferry an empty airplane from Buffalo back to home base. This was good news, because it meant we would make curfew, and I wouldn't be driving home at 1am. We immediately loaded up our passengers, and launched for the frozen north.

Along the way, we were treated to the unusual celestial show pictured above, which we soon learned meant that a passenger was going to get locked in the bathroom. With the flight attendant on the phone with the captain, together they managed to work out the method by which you can insert a pen into the slot that shows "Occupied/Unoccupied" and slide open the latch. This was a first for all of us, although I later learned they discuss scenarios like this during flight attendant training. I also learned two other methods by which you can get the lavatory door open if you absolutely need to. Who knew? I was distracted by this excitement, and failed to process the flashes of lightning off in the distance.

After landing at BUF, we simply needed to take on fuel and launch, as we weren't bringing any passengers with us. While we waited for the fueler to finish up, there was a bright flash - which was a lightning strike at the airport - and the sky opened up with large fluffy white flakes being driven by the winds. In airline life this indicates a trip to see the Iceman. We taxied the airplane to the deice pad, but the snow was falling so rapidly that the Iceman couldn't keep up with it. After two complete trips around the aircraft, the snow subsided enough for him to make a third and successful trip around leaving us with a clean and shiny plane. As long as it is clean and shiny, we can go flying. We lined up with the runway, did the Star Wars launch into the advancing snow flakes, and 1 hour and 30 minutes later, our night was over.

If this is what happens when the planets align, I shudder at the thought of what happens when pigs fly....

Aero-Dynamics

After a recent trip I was left pondering the science of aero-dynamics, which is quite different than aerodynamics (notice the hyphen). What I am referring to are the dynamics of human relationship while trapped in an aluminum tube far above the earth's surface. I've always heard people say that you have to like the people that you work with because you spend more time at work than at home. I will agree with that statement, but in my previous career I was never forced to sit in my cube with another person and work on the same computer using the same keyboard and mouse. I could escape into my cube from those I didn't care to spend any extended time with. Now, that is not the case.

I've been told that first officers have to be "Gumby", meaning that we have to be flexible when it comes to our co-workers. I've been lucky so far in that I haven't had to fly with "those captains". The science of aero-dynamics does, however, extend beyond the flight deck. There have been two occasions where the captain wasn't a fan of our flight attendant, and vice versa. Because I'm new, and have no track record with anyone whatsoever, I try to get along with everyone, which is my personality anyway. This works just fine until, you guessed it, the parties try to get you to choose sides (I didn't think I was in high school anymore?). Now conventional wisdom, and my personal line of thinking is, you guessed it again, it's probably a good idea to be partial to the person with whom you're sharing intimate space for the majority of your day. This in and of itself works fine until we get to the second observed component of aero-dynamics...

Captains themselves, at least at my airline, can run the gamut of personalities. This is different from my last career where, corporate culture being what it is, people tended to have similar dispositions within a company. Most of a typical flight is a laid back affair, where we simply monitor the aircraft's progress and make sure everything is a-ok. During landing, and from pushback through takeoff, there is an intricate ballet going on and one misstep can disrupt the flow of things. At least it can for this relative youngster. Being somewhat fresh out of training, I tend to follow everything by the book because, well, that's all I know. I have developed some "line flying" techniques, such as turning the air on immediately after engine start and landing, for passenger comfort (no, that is not the actual order of things!), but for the most part I don't deviate. There are captains out there that have a "flair" to what they do when it comes to checklists and flow patterns, reporting times, and, well, lots of other things. Some call for checklists, some chide you for not running them already. Some don't like FO's to start engines, some do. Some don't want you to respond to some ATC directives - particularly taxiing - without checking in with them first. Again, think "Gumby".

Ultimately, we all have the same goal: get our passengers to their destinations safely and on time, while returning to our own families. What happens in between certainly can keep things interesting.

I Heart NY

My last trip found me practicing the hub and spoke model out of LaGuardia in Flushing, NY (I never grew up, that's grade A toilet humor right there...). I guess you could say "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Or actually vice versa. You see, tropical storm Hannah was making it's way up the East Coast, right about the time we departed southwestern VA for the northeast. After a quick trip to NY, followed by an early end to the first day in Baltimore, we awoke on day two to the beginnings of Hannah. You only need to have ever watched The Weather Channel to know what bad weather can do to New York's big three airports, and we were already anticipating a change in plans along the way. We easily made it to LaGuardia in time for three hours of airport appreciation, prior to launching to Burlington, VT. Flights to Washington, DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were already starting to show as cancelled on the board. We all thought that we might be spending the night in Burlington, because there was no way we were making it back to NY. Thanks to Hannah's hefty winds, we arrived in Burlington a good 30 minutes ahead of schedule. There were already ground stops for traffic destined for Newark and JFK, but not LaGuardia. This is practically unheard of. We decided to load up the passengers as soon as we could and get the heck out before that changed. The nice tailwinds we enjoyed were now ferocious headwinds. We were only managing about 160 kts on the ride back, which gave the ice lots of time to accumulate. This was actually my first ever flight into "known icing conditions", and it was interesting, to say the least. We were being assaulted by sleet, or ice pellets as it is more commonly referred to in aviation-speak. We broke out of the rain band about 70 miles from the airport, and it was eerily clear below us all the way back. We could see the next band approaching from the south, and thought for sure we'd never leave for Syracuse.

Well, about an hour later I'm doing my preflight in preparation to depart to Syracuse. Doesn't dispatch know about the tropical storm? I guess not, because they are determined to get these 6 people to upstate NY. We made such phenomenal time on our trip to Burlington that we were still ahead of schedule, so we loaded up our 6 and pushed back just as the next rain band really started to dump some water on the airport. The path from the gate to runway 13 was wide open, but ground didn't send us straight to the end of the departure runway, which could only mean one thing. Sure enough, as we were crossing runway 22 we were told to turn "right on DD, hold short of the windsock, shut 'em down". By this time the rain is falling so heavily we can't see the terminal anymore. The captain calls operations, and I make a PA to our passengers to tell them the good news: all departures are stopped and there is no ETA on when that restriction will be lifted. The line of planes is growing behind us, at least we're first. Operations gives us 90 minutes before we have to return to the gate and release our priso....er, passengers. After the much-publicized JetBlue fiasco with the ice storm a few years ago, the Port Authority of NY/NJ has some new rules governing how long you can keep passengers on an aircraft on the ground. One hour and twelve minutes later, a mere eighteen minutes to go before we have to return our passengers, we get the instruction to start both engines, monitor tower, and be ready to go. Within five minutes we are airborne and trying to find a path through all of the red and yellow radar returns, but there is so much rain that there is no path; we are along for the ride. Our airplane handles turbulence very well, but it can't have been a fun ride for the passengers. Thankfully, the tailwind we enjoyed on the way to Vermont was still blowing this way, and it pushed us to Syracuse in about 40 minutes. The wind was blowing steadily down the runway, and I made an uneventful landing after breaking out of the low cloud deck. Tomorrow, all of this would be gone and we'd be left with beautiful weather, which allowed me to fly my first "Expressway Visual" to runway 31. I didn't get a picture of that, but I did manage to snap one prior to commencing the approach (things get pretty busy at that time...):



And one from the first morning, following the Hudson river prior to making a u-turn for landing:

Hub and Spoke

So far I'm 37 "cycles" into my SOE, or, Supervised Operating Experience. A cycle is quite simply one leg from point A to point B. All but two of my cycles have included Charlotte (CLT) as one of those two points. I don't understand how the bean counters figure out when to schedule flights and how those flights are matched to connecting flights, but I find it fascinating. We all come in at the same time, and we all leave around the same time in waves. CLT has a flow control program in place for arriving flights, to help ensure that when you get there, you'll have a gate available. The New York airports attempt this by using "wheels-up" times to control the flow of airborne traffic during heavy times, but so I'm impressed by CLT's system. When we get here, our gate is always open, and we rarely have to wait on the ramp. During push times, when everyone is racing to leave, it can get pretty cramped, especially when trying to get from the express terminal, around the two massive Airbuses that always seem to be parked at the end of D terminal. On that note, talk about poor capacity planning; who thought it would be a good idea to put international flights, especially an A340-600, like, the longest airliner in existence, right where the majority of flights - regional aircraft - have to taxi in order to leave or arrive? It's a self imposed choke point, and causes all sorts of problems at the wrong times. Depending on the ramp controller, it can be better (Jimmy!) - or worse (not Jimmy).

After 40 hours in the airplane I'm starting to really get a feel for flying it. I still have a bit of trouble coming into the smaller airports after leaving CLT, specifically with my speed. After the CLT controllers have you keep your speed up for sequencing, you have free reign at other airports, which often ends up with me high and fast. Luckily, we fly an aircraft that can slow down and drop in on a dime, but I'm trying not to use its capabilities as a crutch and instead use better planning and judgement. Coming into Roanoke the other afternoon I was so high that I couldn't slow down, and ended up having to circle to another runway (embarrassing).

Last night's flight, the only one of the day, had us leaving the relaxed atmosphere of the south for the hectic, congested airspace that is NYC. I'm actually based in LGA, but this was my first time there. Aside from not understanding what the heck they were saying, it was a beautiful night and we were actually early to arrive and early to leave. The sunset on the way back to Roanoke was a nice treat:

Christmas in August

I had no idea it had been 6 weeks since my last post, surely that can't be right. I feel like I have a pretty good excuse, having spent the last three weeks in "the box", also known as the simulator. It was tough, but I made it through. Day after day of emergency after emergency. It almost doesn't feel right sitting in the aircraft without an engine on fire or some other sort of dilemma to deal with. It's done that way so that when the real engine failure strikes, dealing with it is second nature. I wonder what happens when the real engine failure doesn't strike for two years? Better keep on top of that emergency checklist...

The real question is: was it Christmas in August last night? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it was my first flight as an airline, and yes, it did feel like Christmas. We started in Charlotte, and then flew a Chattanooga, TN turn and a New Bern, NC, turn. A "turn" in airline parlance is a round trip. On the return from New Bern to Charlotte, we were treated to the kind of sunset that makes me wonder what I was ever doing working in a cube. Of course, my camera was in the locker in the cabin, but I won't make that mistake again. There was a line of clouds to our west, and the sun setting behind then cast an orange glow on the high cirrus clouds far above. Because it was dark behind us, it felt like we were suspended in the sky, with the steady hum of those massive props doing their best to lull us to sleep. It was surreal.

On our approach into Charlotte between the green taxi lights and the red aircraft beacons, the airport was lit up like a Christmas tree. Now, I've flown in and out of the greater New York area several times at night, each time having to pick a small general aviation airport out of the sea of lights that is NYC. For some reason, that seemed easy compared to this (maybe because then I was creeping along in a Cessna 172?) The airport itself is laid out fairly well, much better than, say, JFK, but has a complex system of marshaling an aircraft from the south side of the airport to the north end where we park, using several ramp frequencies (I'm still not sure where these people sit and how they see everyone...). We were forced to weave around aircraft coming and going, it was an absolute zoo. I think my brain actually short circuited. All in due time, I guess.

Of course, I don't have a picture of any of that, but I do have a funny picture from my deadhead the other day on an Airbus. It's certainly something you don't expect to - or want to - see on your typical flight.




Today's flying will take us into the outer bands of a tropical storm. What else for the second day on the line?

Next Stop

I was trying to be incognito about the airline for which I'm flying. Unfortunately, I recently moved to a MacBook and don't have any sort of photo editing software, so was unable to remove the company logo from the simulator in the picture. Technically, with two mainline carriers (now one) and 9 airlines in the family of Express carriers, I'm able to preserve some sort of anonymity. So we press on...

I'll try to summarize all that has happened in the last month as best as possible. The last test of ground school was on QPT (qualifications procedures training) and it was a doozy. This was the first test that was not multiple choice. As it was on procedures, it didn't make any sense to be multiple choice, so I'm not complaining. I'm sure it's hard to come up with a written test on what should be practical test material. I did pass on the first try, but not by much, and there was a good-sized group that did not pass on the first try (all of whom passed on the second try). The last afternoon was a strange affair. The lady in charge of sim scheduling gave us our tentative schedules, which had completely changed since that morning. I went from having a sim partner to being in the "holding pen". I won't go into details, but my original partner is not with this airline anymore. A couple people were paired with upgrading captains so they started right away, but the majority of us ended up with some paid time off.

I've used much of my time off to work on the kitchen renovation at the new house. I'm on target to finish it before I have to return to training, which is now scheduled for the 24th of this month. My wife's annual work trip was to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, this year, so I thought I'd use the opportunity to exercise my free travel benefits. In short: that is way too far to travel as a non-revenue standby passenger in these days of reduced capacity. My daughter and I just barely made each of the three flights it took us to get to PVR, and the only way we could get home was by sampling the ZED arrangement we have with Widget airlines. Basically, a ZED is a reduced fare ticket for airline employees to use to travel on other airlines. I bought a ZED for our daughter, and I hopped a ride in the flight attendant jumpseat, which allowed us to fly on the same plane as my wife. The downside, doing so brought us to Widget's major hub in the southeast, and my airline has very few flights into and out of this hub. In fact, Widget has done a great job of keeping almost everyone out, which is amazing considering it's the busiest airport in the world. So, we got to spend the night in said city and used ZED again to get home the next day. All in all, it's probably not something I'll be doing again anytime soon.

I've exchanged emails with the first person in our class to complete sim training. He has been on SOE (supervised operating experience) for two days and is loving it. It makes me want to get in the real airplane even more, but first things first, I have to pass sim training. So now I have two weeks to brush up on callouts and immediate action items (I hope my wife is up for playing flight crew later tonight...no, she won't be wearing a flight attendant uniform, sheesh...). An immediate action item is something that is performed in response to a system failure, but must be done so from memory prior to consulting the checklist. For example, if you experience an engine fire in flight, you don't want to go fishing for the checklist to figure out that you have to shut the fuel off. You just need to shut the fuel off, which is, in fact, the first thing you do once you've identified the fact that an engine is on fire. There are immediate action items for a number of failures, so as you'd imagine it's pretty important to have these things down cold, which is what I'm off to do now. More later!

Firehose, Part 2

Glub....glub....glub....

I throw up my hands; I'm waving the white flag; I throw myself on the mercy of the court. I have officially attempted to drink from the firehose, and it is NOT a pleasant experience. Week two was spent on systems, and I must stress that five days is not a whole lot of time to spend on learning the systems of a fairly complicated airplane. In general, the older the aircraft is, the more complex it is. This is true with most things. Think about cell phones, televisions, ovens. As computers have become more prevalent and advanced in the things we use, our workload has decreased. Well, there are not many computers on my airplane. It's true that we run around with most systems in AUTO most of the time, but I wonder if there are little elves or some more primitive life form behind the panels running the show. If one of those little guys trips and falls while running from the right main bus to the left main bus, a LOT of lights come on.

After the short week learning as much as we could about the systems, we were up against the written test on Saturday. I was panicked, for lack of a better term. Even after spending a month or more of home study, and having a fairly good grasp of the overall workings of the systems, I didn't feel too good about a lot of the minutiae. There are a number of caution light combinations that illuminate in response to certain faults, and I didn't know all of the combinations. There are also a lot of numbers, such as oil, fuel, and hydraulic pressures, that can easily be transposed. We have two primary instructors, that I don't believe are line pilots for our airline. This in and of itself doesn't mean anything, but we occasionally had instructors stop in to teach a system that are line pilots, and they seemed to have a flair for making the system simple to understand. I don't know exactly what the correlation was, but having multiple instructors with different teaching styles only complicated things.

In the end, though, it was all for naught, as I somehow managed to get a 98%. (I'm not trying to brag, I'm still not sure how I got that high of a grade, but I'm glad I passed by a wide margin.) With week two at an end, we prepare to launch into procedures training for week three, which will conclude this portion of ground training. During procedures training we will start to learn what actually goes on in the cockpit, with regards to performing checklists and "flows". A flow is sort of way to visually trace a path around the cockpit and configure systems properly for the phase of flight. By performing flows, and then using the checklist to back yourself up, you can more expeditiously proceed from one phase to the next. In the words of one of the instructors at my old flight school "if you had to sit there and use the checklist as a do list you'd never get off the gate..". Now I see what he was talking about. It's hard to believe we're almost at the end, but I can't get complacent, as I'm already proactively panicking about my procedures practical evaluation...

In other news, we still don't know our base assignments yet, which is causing most of us a good deal of anxiety. I think I'm checking our employee intranet 4-5 times each day to see if it's posted yet. I have flown home as a non-revenue passenger, which, I have to say, is very cool. Our parent airline has very good travel benefits. Specifically, as a non-revenue passenger the only travelers that have a higher boarding priority are secret service agents and a couple of other government agencies. I felt a little weird getting called to board before longtime pilots considering I'm not technically an employee yet. In the end, everyone got onboard so it all worked out.

Firehose, Part 1

Week one of training is officially in the books. Airline training is often compared to "taking a drink from a firehose". It hasn't quite been that bad, but it is a lot of information in a short period of time. In a way, it feels a lot to me like starting any new job. In other ways, I feel more comfortable because of the amount of time spent up front with the home study, something that most employers don't provide you with.

Even though my airline is a wholly owned subsidiary of a "legacy" carrier, our headquarters is located in a different city. The first day was spent at company HQ. This first day was, in fact, much like the aforementioned firehose. We had people from different departments come in for 30-60 minutes at a time and attempt to tell us everything we need to know to interact with that department. For example, in 30 minutes we were bombarded with all the information that we would need in order to work with crew scheduling. Yeah, right. The relationship between pilots and scheduling is one of the most complicated and, dare I say, delicate in any industry that I have seen. It is nothing short of a true love-hate relationship, and 30 minutes is not nearly enough time. I've already decided that I am going to overcommunicate, if anything, in my quest to breach the tension that lies between the two parties. Of course, I won't be answering my phone on my days off once I have a hard line.

Day two was spent in transit to our parent company's massive training facility, which will serve as home away from home for three weeks. The first day was an easy day: we put together our Pilot Operating Handbooks, were fitted for uniforms, and some other miscellaneous housekeeping items. Day two we jumped right in to the Flight Operations manual. We had to get through 4 chapters in a single day, because our first test was the following day. Needless to say, we did it. I guess we didn't have a choice. The most difficult concept to grasp, and one that caused us some headache, is that of crew rest requirements. Basically, a crew is required to have a certain number of hours of rest for a given amount of scheduled flight time. If you've ever been ready to board a flight and had it cancelled or delayed because the flight crew "timed out", this is what happened. The tricky part comes in because rest is based on scheduled, not actual flight time. If you end up flying longer than scheduled, your required rest doesn't change, as long as your next rest time starts within certain allowances. In short, you don't want your pilots to be fatigued, and sometimes just because they are "rested" doesn't mean they are. My airline seems to really be on top of this, as I've scanned some of the lines out there and most have more than adequate rest. Other airlines, not so much so (read: pilots falling asleep over a certain Pacific island chain...)

Friday was test day, and I passed fairly easily. There were some headslappers, and some that I'm still not sure how I got right. But all that really matters is that you pass. With that test (IQT, Initial Qualification Testing) behind us, we moved on to limitations and systems, which I'll save for the next post.

To the Schoolhouse

It has been a couple of weeks, but this is the follow up to my previous post about the interview process. The approaching weekend will be my last prior to entering the frantic world of airline training, which starts on Monday. The anxiety and adrenaline levels are running high. In a way though, I've been at the schoolhouse since March 20th. My airline does what is known as AQP, which stands for Advanced Qualification Program. What this involves is a significant amount of self-study, which, in theory, shortens the actual time spent at ground school somewhat. To ensure you are studying the material, which you receive at the interview if hired, there are three take home test to complete: one on the FOM (Flight Operations Manual, the airline version of the Policy and Procedures manual), one on Systems, and one on Winter Operations. I found the third one curious, as it is as long as the other two, but there is obviously far more material on systems and policy/procedures. You might think "oh, open book tests, easy", and for the most part you'd be right. There are some tricky questions though, and you need a 90% in order to pass. I've heard that people have been sent home the first day for not achieving that number. I feel pretty good about what I have, especially after spending some time with a fellow new hire quizzing each other and talking through some of the systems. My wife keeps telling me I'm over-prepared, although I feel woefully underprepared. You know how sometimes you study something to the point that you start forgetting the material? That's where I'm at right now. We'll find out next week.

The first week consists of a day at company HQ to do the standard HR paperwork, which includes getting into the system to take advantage of travel benefits. We are very excited about this. With aircraft loads at record levels, it's not going to be as easy to travel as "non-rev" passengers as it used to be. Traveling as a non-rev relegates you to standby passenger status, and if you have been to the airport recently you probably noticed that most standby lists are long. At the bottom of the standby list are the non-revs. Despite that, I'm confident that we'll be able to take advantage once in a while. Our daughter is already plugging for a return trip to Disney.

After the first day, it's off to the real schoolhouse in North Carolina for three days of FOM, a week or so of systems, and then procedures. After that first couple of weeks, simulator training starts. I hear that the simulator department is backed up, and people are getting mini-vacations in between, but that remains to be seen. If it happens, I won't complain, as that will allow me to work on the renovations to the new house. Oh yeah, did I mention that we managed to buy a new house in the middle of all this?

More to follow as I progress through training, until then, it's back to the books.

March of the Penguins

I have a number of things to write about, so instead of saturating you in one post, I will break them into two back-to-back posts for your reading pleasure. In this one I'll talk about the interview process, or as I've chosen to call it, the "March of the Penguins". Allow me to explain...

After completing the checkrides for my multi engine and instrument instructor ratings, I had to make a beeline for home to catch a 4pm flight to Charlotte. This in and of itself was silly, as I was only an hour and half drive from Charlotte as it was. As I was sitting in traffic in Chapel Hill, NC, sweating, worrying about getting a number of things printed in time for the interview, and being hungry, I decided that I would instead drive to the interview. This gave me time to grab a bite to eat and find a Kinko's, and take my time driving to Charlotte. The flip side is that it would be a long and lonely drive home the next day after getting the boot from the interviewer, or so I thought....

4:30 am rolls around early, especially when you are up until midnight unable to sleep. There has long been an unwritten rule that when you attend an airline interview, you wear a black suit with a dark red tie. I swore up and down that I would break tradition, but here I was, wearing my black suit. I had a striped multi-colored tie on, but nonetheless, I looked like...well...a penguin. Since I had my car, I drove to the training center, and sure enough I was first. The recruiter came downstairs to collect the victims, and I was the only one there. I don't know if that helped, but I met him first. About 5 minutes later I hear noise around the corner, and sure enough, 8 more penguins march around the corner, sporting their finest black suits. Whose funeral was this exactly.

I'll spare most of the details, as you can find them on any airline interview gouge site. We started with the written, and then were broken up into two groups for the sim and human resources interview. I am still grateful that I was in that first group. I completed the HR, which was a breeze compared to some panel interviews I had in the IT industry. As a rabid flight simmer, the sim ride, given on a PCATD (basically a personal computer with a commercial level flight simulation software package installed), was like being at home. Of course, when I play at home, I'm not a nervous wreck with a sim instructor breathing in my right ear. But I must have passed, because shortly after that, the recruiter collected me and together we walked to his office, where he extended me a class date of May 12th. Of course this is what I've always wanted, but I never, never thought it would happen this soon. Three weeks later I'm over the shock of it and the realization of the impending challenge of flight school has fully taken hold. My flight school and students are disappointed and sad to see me go, but I'm going to get my three most active students as far as I can before I go.

Next up, getting ready for airline ground school...

Trading 100LL for Jet A

Let me start by saying I'm really, really, really tired. Why? I spent all day Monday and Tuesday training for my CFII and MEI ratings, was up very late each night, had my checkrides on Tuesday (passed!), drove to Charlotte for an interview, and was hired by a regional carrier flying turboprop equipment (I'm new to this game, and am not sure what I should and shouldn't post on the internet, but for now I'll be as vague as possible). That's three pretty full days right there.

I'm still in shock. I'm actually not even sure how I'm awake to write this, but needless to say I'm very excited. My new company has been around for a long time, and is in a good position to be around for longer. I can definitely see myself being with this carrier for quite some time.

Looks like my blog focus will be shifting soon to a look at airline training, which begins with a LOT of self study. I'll write more in the coming days, right now I'm beat.

Signing off...

Pursuit of Passion

As you might have noticed by following this blog, I recently made a complete career switch from Information Technology to aviation. So far, I'm not flying nearly as much as I would like, but I certainly don't miss my former job, and quite frankly don't feel like I ever did that job. It's very strange.

This past Friday night, my wife rented out a restaurant and threw a party to celebrate. Have I mentioned how awesome she is? And she does stuff like this all the time - completely selfless.

After the toast, I gave a very quick encouragement to the crowd to find and pursue their passions, but I came up with some additional thoughts on that theme that I'll add here.

In my former career, I struggled with a question that I think many, if not most, of us struggle with daily. What is my purpose? How can I leave this world a better place than I found it? Here's three things that I came up with, that might work for you.

1. Find your passion
We are all passionate about something. It doesn't have to be career-oriented, such as mine. It could be your family, a sport, playing a musical instrument, your friends, it doesn't matter. It's cliche, but what did you want to be when you grew up? We all had something - I wanted to be, you guessed it, a pilot. That could be a good starting place.

2. Pursue your passion diligently
Okay, so maybe we can't all quit our jobs and become firefighters. If your passion is cars, you probably won't be able to run off to Europe and trade rubber with Michael Schumacher on the Nurburgring. But you could join a local car club. Get involved in amateur race leagues. I used to work with a guy that drove his Subaru in auto cross events on weekends. Take a photography class, do some traveling, learn to dance. There are ways to pursue your passion without necessarily quitting your day job, although if you can, you'd have my support.

3. Share your passion
This is the most important step. I'm fortunate right now in that, my job is to introduce others to the joy of flying an airplane. If you have a musical talent, join a band or play at church. Teach an art class. Join an actors guild and perform at local venues. Take your kids to the firehouse. What good is the gift of passion if we internalize it? I'm not suggesting that you take your daughter to the driving range and hit golf balls for hours on end to fund your retirement. But if others see you get excited about your passion, it will encourage them to explore and get excited about their own passions.

Get up. Find your passion. Pursue it. And share it with someone else. Heck, maybe we can leave this world just a little better than we found it.

Over (Almost) Before it Began

Wow, didn't realize it's been almost a month since my last update. That calls for a little catch up.

First and foremost, I completed my last day as an IT professional on the 15th. I spent my last week really trying to do a good job finishing up a project I was working on, so put in some long hours. After a week like that, I really thought it would be strange flip-flopping to a completely different line of work - I was wrong. I went to the airport the next day - Saturday - and it was like I had never written a single line of software code in my life. In fact, after a week, I'm not sure that I could write code. It's like it didn't happen. People have told me that means I made the right decision....I guess we'll see, huh?

My first week, last week, was up and down, literally and figuratively. My lessons were weathered out for almost three full days. I have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, so after working Saturday and Sunday, and being weathered out on Monday, I had a weekend. The weather was a blessing in disguise, however...

As I was sitting in the FBO on Monday, one of our senior flight instructors comes in on his day off. On his off days, he sometimes flies a Cessna 402 for a small company. It so happens that he was supposed to fly it on this Monday, but a line of weather in the southeast was preventing him from doing so. As he was sitting next to me he asked "do you want to fly to Daytona Beach tomorrow?" Needless to say, I didn't have to think about it. So at 6:45 the next morning, we taxied out to the runway to head for DAB to pick up 5 passengers that had enjoyed the Daytona 500 a few days before. As we flipped on the fuel pumps for takeoff, the right engine shut off. This should have been a sign. We restarted, flipped on the fuel pumps, and again, the engine shut down. Jim flips open his cell phone and calls the other pilot to ask if he's ever experienced this phenomenon. Of course, he hadn't, and as they were talking on the phone, Jim leans the mixture, flips on the fuel pump, and, naturally, the engine keeps running. Now that we had confirmed to the other pilot that we were imagining things, we took the runway and climbed into the lightening morning sky.

3.5 hours later, we touched down in Daytona Beach. Now, any of you that are familiar with the pursuit of aviation careers will know that time spent flying a multi-engine aircraft reigns supreme. So it should come as no surprise that when Jim mentioned finding opportunities to fly this airplane on my off days, and possibly getting trained and insurance approved to fly it single pilot, I was chomping at the bit. Fast forward to the ground at DAB. We loaded up our 5 passengers, and climb slowly into the warm Florida air. With the wind at our backs, we shaved 30 minutes off the return flight. Aside from some attention-getting moderate turbulence on the way back, we landed after 6.5 hours of golden multi time.

Two days later, Jim comes in and apologizes for putting me at risk. Huh? That's what I said...apparently, the plane went in for maintenance the day following our trip, and a 5-6 inch crack was discovered in the engine block on the top just behind the gearbox, hence the title of this post. As quickly as it began, my flying days in this good 'ol 402 are over. Hmmm....maybe they'd be interested in a King Air?

The pursuit of the dream continues...

300

Not much to see here, just cracked 300 hours during slow flight with a student on Sunday. The hours are starting to build fast now, and will build even faster when I go full time next month. I might even be at 400 by the end of February! Once I get to 500 hopefully I'll start to get noticed by some regionals, although I have an "ace up my sleeve" that I'll attempt to cash in on prior to that milestone. Stay tuned...

Change

Saturday we were lucky enough to be invited to hear Carly Fiorina speak at a local recurring event called the Forum. For those that don't know who she is, she is the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, the first and only woman to ascend to that position for a Fortune 20 company. She is an excellent speaker, and has an incredible presence, which I'm sure was a tremendous asset to her in her position. I won't recount her entire story, you can read about the roller coaster ride and her controversial exit from HP here.

It is obvious that she is a very cerebral person, and several key points stood out that I've been playing over in my mind since that night:

1. Although directed at our business landscape, the theme was undoubtedly "change".

2. The most successful species isn't the strongest or the most intelligent, it's the most adaptable. This was originally a quote from Darwin.

3. By the time everyone agrees that change is necessary, it is probably too late.

4. Those that fail to change, become irrelevant and old before their time.

Heeding these and other notable points presented in her speech, I promptly decided that the time for action is now, and turned in my resignation at my consulting job (okay, so I had turned in my notice on Friday, but the speech just reaffirmed what I had done, for me anyway). So, in another 2 or 3 weeks - I'm trying to remain flexible - I will be able to answer the question "So what do you do?" with "I'm a pilot!". It is definitely scary, but I have the full support of my wife, and although I can always fall back on IT if the going gets too rocky, I have a funny feeling that I'll never look back. I certainly don't plan to!

I celebrated by doing pattern work with a student in the snow on Saturday. We called it quits when the visibility dropped to VFR minimums, but it was pretty while it lasted. At one point I remarked that it was "cool", to which my student responded "yeah, for you!".

One Way to Ring in the New Year

I celebrated the New Year in a most satisfying fashion: with my first private pilot students. I wish I had some exciting tales to tell of hanging from a balcony on Bourbon Street with various parts of strange women's anatomy pressed against me, but I'm older and wiser now (plus I did that once, and if I ever find that video tape it gets burned immediately...but I digress).

The actual New Year's eve was spent with family and friends in a condo at what we refer to as a "ski resort" here on the east coast. It was a great four day weekend, and I was almost a complete vegetable when it was over, which was the primary goal in addition to teaching our 4.5 year old how to ski, which I think we agreed was a total failure.

Anyway, with the holidays firmly behind us, I set out with my first two students, with one flight on Saturday and two on Sunday. The Saturday flight went well, aside from the fact that it took me twice as long to do things as it should have. I chalked that up to first time inefficiencies, which should be worked out with time. Fast forward to Sunday morning towards the tail end of the training flight. I had the plane because there was a bit of a gusty crosswind and it was her very first lesson, so she was following me on the controls. Just as we add landing flaps at the key position (in a Diamond) she says "what happens if I get sick?"

I tell her that I've got it from there and to just relax and focus her attention outside the plane. On base she says "I really think I'm going to be sick". As we roll onto final she says "I'm not gonna make it" I furiously dig for the sick sack and hand it to her, and just as I grease the mains on, she utilizes the sick sack. The Diamond has a bubble-type canopy, and when it is already warm out and the sun is beating down on you, it can get quite hot inside. I think that was a part of it, coupled with the timing of me taking the controls, which left her brain with little to do, other than inform her stomach that it was queasy.

Oh well, she says she'll come back, time will tell.