I (heart) Mount Hood

I see Mount Hood every time I approach Portland on the BONVL4 arrival, and it's gorgeous, but you're still about 10 miles away. On clear days, I've been known to get VFR-on-top and treat my passengers to a close up scenic tour of Mount Hood, and it is always spectacular. Still, the closest I can legally get is 4 miles from the nearest terrain 2000' below me. At that distance and at the speeds I'm flying, you don't get a true sense of the immensity of the mountain.

Yesterday I took my cousin Amanda and her friend Eli on a Mount Hood tour in a rented Cessna 172. It was the first time I've seen it up close from a light plane. I was absolutely amazed by the details I missed from just a few more miles away, such as the massive crevasses in the glaciers on the north side. At one mile away and 120 knots, you are acutely aware of just how tiny your aircraft is compared to the mountain. It's all quite breathtakingly majestic.

Flights like this remind me of what I miss about flying light planes. To be sure, the scenery from FL250 can be wonderful, but it's like looking at a master's painting from across a large room. Flying low and slow over the same landscape is like inspecting the artist's individual brushstrokes. Neither vantage point provides the complete picture; only through both do you gain a complete appreciation for the masterpiece. Seeing Mount Hood by light plane makes me want to see more of the Northwest that way. Pity it's so expensive. Perhaps once I upgrade I can look into getting a little Taylorcraft or Aeronca...

The Art of Not Scaring Passengers

It sometimes surprises other passengers when I deadhead in the back of an airplane in my uniform. "Isn't it weird being back here instead of up front?" they ask. Well, no. Between the normal schedule and equipment substitutions, we deadhead quite alot. I don't particularly care whether I fly or deadhead; we're paid the same. I've had situations where I was scheduled to deadhead but was able to get a FO off their trip early by flying the leg, and I was happy to help them out. I've also sat in back when I was scheduled to fly.

Sitting in back does afford some good opportunities for people-watching. It's interesting to watch different persons' reactions to various maneuvers and sounds. One thing becomes apparent: there are still a lot of nervous flyers out there, and more than a few that are outright fearful. You see white knuckles clenching armrests on takeoff, the worried crane of the neck on every change of engine speed, the snap to attention on gear extention. Add a little turbulence to the mix and the mask of serenity slips from a few more passengers.

Seeing all this is a bit of a revelation. Flying is so utterly commonplace to me that I make little distinction between being in the air or on the ground - either way, I'm simply at work. It is easy to forget that for many of my passengers, flying is not at all commonplace but is an utterly unnatural act that goes against all other human experience. People can be conditioned until almost anything can seem normal - but where flying is concerned, many remain decidedly unconditioned.

Seeing these fearful flyers react to utterly normal flying made me reexamine my own techniques. I tend to be obsessed with efficiency to the point of being somewhat aggressive on the controls. As an example: if I'm taking off to the east on a Boise-Seattle flight, I will climb quite steeply until I get the westbound turn from Air Traffic Control. When they give me the turn, I roll directly to 25-30 degrees of bank and hold it. As soon I'm within 30 degrees of rollout heading, I'll pitch down to accelerate to cruise climb airspeed.

Now there's nothing wrong with this technique; it does save time and fuel. Efficiency, however, is but one consideration when it comes to airline flying. The peace of mind of my passengers must be another. If climbing at a less steep pitch or using a shallower bank angle makes a difference for a fearful passenger, that's well worth the extra few seconds and drops of fuel expended.

*****

My cousin Amanda and her friend Eli are staying at my house right now; I have the entire week off work. Tomorrow I'm taking them flying in a C-172 if the weather is decent. Amanda hasn't been flying in a light aircraft in a long time; hopefully there won't be much turbulence for our Mt Hood tour. I haven't told her how badly flying the MegaWhacker screws up your ability to land Cessnas - but the landing comes last, so it's OK if I scare her then!

One interesting last note. Before taking Amanda and Eli up, I'll be flying with an instructor for single-engine landing currency. When I called him tonight to set it up, he found out I was a MegaWhacker FO and asked if I was the guy with the FL250 blog. That was a surprise! Thanks for the nice comments, Kurt, and I apologize in advance for my first few landings tomorrow...

Yellow Lights

One of the few areas that aircraft manufacturers have become fairly standardized on is warning & annunciation systems. Pretty much everybody now agrees that normal indications are represented by white or blue lettering and markings, yellow represents abnormal indications which may require attention ("caution lights"), and red indicates potentially dangerous abnormalities that must be immediately addressed ("warning lights"). Furthermore, most transport category aircraft makers have embraced the "dark cockpit" concept, which means that in normal takeoff configuration the central annunciation area should be completely dark, making any abnormalities easy to spot.

In the MegaWhacker, the annunciator panel is just below the overhead panel between the pilots, well within the normal field of vision. There are twelve red warning lights and seventy yellow caution lights, each of which have corresponding memory procedures, immediate action card items, or checklists in the emergency/abnormal book. When a caution or warning light illuminates, it is made more obvious by a flashing press-to-reset red Master Warning or yellow Master Caution light on the glareshield as well as an aural chime - three dings for warnings, one ding for caution.

It's really not uncommon to get a Master Caution. The MegaWhacker's forward baggage hold has an internal door that's right next to the lavatory door; every time passengers open the wrong door, we get a Master Caution and a "INTERNAL BAGG DOOR" caution light. The Master Caution gets the adrenaline flowing for about a half second until you look up and see it's only the bag door, and then you call the flight attendents and tell them that somebody's trying to pee on our bags. As caution lights go, it's a tame one, and it makes up the vast majority of caution lights that we see in flight.

Two weeks ago, we were descending into Boise, passing through ten thousand feet, when the Master Caution went off. We looked at the annunciator panel: "#1 ENG FADEC" was the message. At the same time, the "POWERPLANT" message appeared on the Engine Display. Something was definately up. "Number One Engine FADEC checklist, please," I called. The captain grabbed the emergency/abnormal book and thumbed through to the appropriate checklist.

This particular caution light has some notoriety at my airline. FADEC stands for Full Authority Digital Engine Control; it's a computer that regulates almost every aspect of engine operation, monitors its health, and can even shut it down for various malfunctions. If FADEC completely fails, so does your engine. There are warning lights for this, "#1 [or 2] ENG FADEC FAIL"; when it illuminates, you run the engine failure checklist on the Immediate Action Card. The yellow caution light we had, "#1 ENG FADEC," is much less serious; its checklist tells you to use caution when moving the power levers and do not use Beta range.

The notoriety comes from an incident several years back where one of our MegaWhacker captains got a FADEC caution light, failed to make the distinction between that and the warning light, and unneccessarily shut an engine down. The fallout from that incident is long and convoluted, so I won't go into it, but the #1 ENG FADEC checklist now unofficially bears his name. I doubt anyone will make that mistake again; hindsight is a wonderful thing.

In this case, I called for the appropriate checklist, it was mostly advisory in nature, and we landed without further incident. That's how caution lights generally go. They're just not a big deal if you follow the checklist. They do, however, mean that the rest of your day is probably going to be affected by maintenance. In this case it took the mechanics a few hours to find and repair the problem, resulting in the cancellation of several legs; I got a nap that felt very good since we had a 5am van time that morning.

Growth...Kinda!

One of the unique things about my airline is that unlike most regionals, its core business is not contract flying. Although we are affiliated with a major airline which is owned by the same parent company, most of our flying is generally done under our own brand, we do our own marketing, have our own reservations, and only around half of our passengers connect to other airlines.

The exception, for the last three years, has been our Denver operation. In 2003 we began contract flying on behalf of a certain Denver-based low cost carrier with nine of our CRJ aircraft. It was a fairly small portion of our total fleet but was significant in that it represented our first venture into the world of contract flying. By all accounts, it went very well. We established a new hub and crew/maintenance base in less than 90 days, and right off the bat our reliability numbers were excellent. Maybe a little too excellent: the airline we contracted with had to pay us every reliability bonus. Our success was made more apparent by the horrible performance of the previous contract carrier, Mesa.

Three years later, it's over. We're shutting down Denver and bringing the planes and crews home. What went wrong? Well, the airline in question decided they weren't willing to pay a premium for reliability after all. They opted out of our contract and put out an RFP for our flying. They did invite us to bid on the new RFP, but we weren't interested because we'd have to foot the bill for up to twenty new airplanes. So our management made the decision to redeploy the nine airplanes in Denver to our native network.

In one sense, I think this is a good thing. Our native network has been more profitable than the Denver operation was, even though those were guaranteed profits. We are in dire need of more airplanes for the native network, both to add capacity to certain existing routes and also to open new routes in lucrative markets (ie, California). So bringing back nine airframes from Denver will allow for native network growth that might've otherwise never happened, and get us into some potentially very profitable markets before someone else does.

The downside, of course, is that there is no growth so far as the pilots are concerned. The same number of airframes are remaining on property, requiring the same number of pilots. It's now unlikely that the company will exercise many of their additional MegaWhacker options. Upgrades will probably remain in the 6-7 year range. That said, I'm personally glad we're out of the contract business because that business has become a downward spiral of cutthroat competition, cancelled contracts, pay concessions, and life disruptions for many pilots. The only regionals that've thrived are the ones that pay their pilots poorly, and that's a price our pilots aren't willing to pay for growth.

Angelenos: Please Don't Be Such Slobs!

Californians, and people from LA in particular, have a bit of a bum rap in the Pacific Northwest. A lot of native Oregonians are bitter about them selling off their overpriced Californian property and coming up here to pay cash for big estates, inflating our housing prices and pushing many natives out of the market at the same time that previously sleepy towns like Bend explode in population and lose a lot of their charm in the process. While proudly announcing that you're a LA transplant probably won't provoke any verbal insult, many a Northwesterner is thinking: "Big house. BMW Z4 owner. Trophy wife. Spoiled kids. Loopy. Self-absorbed. Bad driver. Go home!"

I have nothing against Angelenos myself. I lived there for a few years and generally enjoyed it. Everybody I met there was pretty laid back and friendly, even if they needed the occasional reminder that there is life outside LA. In the aviation blogosphere, we have several Angelenos including Ron and GC, both of whom have written about some of the factors that have prompted the northward migration. But I do have one bone to pick with the fine citizens of Los Angeles. Ya'll are a bunch of freaking slobs.

After each flight, I usually help the flight attendants pick up and cross seatbelts. On most flights, there will be a few pieces of uncollected trash and newspapers to pick up, and maybe a little Bisseling to do. On any flight that originates or arrives in LA, though, you can pretty much count on heavy duty cleanup. We're talking plastic cups and food wrappers in seatback pockets, snotty kleenixes on the seats, newspapers everywhere, three unfolded blankets per occupant, scattered food trampled into the floor. We're talking utter destruction. To get the cabin really clean again would require every minute of our 40 minute turn.

We're not talking LA-Guadalajara flights here. These routes are LA-Sun Valley, LA-Arcata, LA-Bend; the seats are filled with well groomed people wearing stylish clothes and expensive sunglasses. I suspect many of these people are well off - many have second homes in Sun Valley or Bend - and probably have the education to match their salaries. Yet, these people have apparently never in their lives been taught to freaking pick up after themselves! That, or they've become too used to having a maid to pick up after them.

It's really quite simple, folks. Every flight we operate into LA is over an hour long. Our flight attendents finish their snack and beverage service early, and then make numerous passes with the trash bag. Rather than wedge that snotty napkin into the seatback pocket for me to pick up (or the next passenger to find!), it's very easy to reach over to the aisle and deposit it in the flight attendent's trash bag. Ditto for the Big Mac wrapper. And we'll be more than happy to recycle that newspaper for you. Also, please use caution when shoveling that snack mix into your mouth to ensure that half of it doesn't end up on the floor to be ground into the carpet.

Come on, people. Would you trash somebody's house this way after they invited you over? I realize you paid good money to fly on us - and I'm grateful, I really am - but that doesn't mean that the rules of etiquette suddenly no longer apply. I've held my tongue for a long time but the destruction you visited upon the cabin of aircraft 401 last night put me over the edge. I'm not asking for much. It's really no more than a Kindergarten teacher expects of her five year old students. Just extend us the common courtesy of picking up after yourselves.

Thank you!

War Stories from ADP...

In my last post I promised that I'd share some of my more interesting ADP anecdotes. I think I've written about a few of these in the past, although I'm not finding them in my archives. Actually, I just found one, about my first multi-engine student attempting to kill me twice in one flight; that story is here. If I'm repeating myself on other stories, sorry...

*****

In my first post I alluded to an eventful first hour of dual instruction on the same day I passed my CFII/MEI. It was actually supposed to be a mock checkride for an Egyptian student, Said, who was scheduled to take his Private Pilot checkride the next day. His instructor suggested that we go to Cable Airport - 5 miles east of Brackett - to get Said familiarized with the airport. I gave Said a short briefing about what we'd be doing, he said he understood, and after his preflight we took off for Cable Airport to practice some short and soft field landings.

I quickly realized that, for someone about to take a PPL checkride, Said did not know how to land. Every time he would flare out way too high (fifty feet!), get slow, get a big sink rate going, arrest it with a mighty blast of power, and float halfway down the rather short runway. I had him do full-stop landings so we could talk about it on the taxi-back, and I would explain that he needed to start the flare lower, and Said would agree, but then on the next time around he'd do the exact same thing.

This went on for a good four or five trips around the pattern, and I finally told Said that I would fly with him to help him find a proper flare height. Turning final I put my hands on the control wheel and told him to not flare out until I told him to and pulled gently on the wheel. Sure enough, he attempted to flare at 50 feet; my hands were there and pushed the wheel gently forward. To my amazement, Said then flared out at the perfect height. "Okay, now land the airplane," I said as I removed my hands from the yoke.

The instant my hands were clear, Said hauled visciously back on the yoke, ballooning back up to around 50' above the runway. The airspeed tanked, the stall horn went off. "My airplane!" I barked as I firewalled the throttle and attempted to push the yoke forward. I couldn't understand why I was having trouble doing so until I glanced over at Said; he had a death grip on the yoke and a frightened expression on his face. "Let go!" I barked (actually, it was more of a yelp). No response from Said. With my left hand, I reached over and hit him in the upper arm several times. Surprised, he let go of the yoke; I got the nose down and played altitude for airspeed, sinking to just above the runway before gaining enough speed to climb out over the bushes at the end. "Okay, that's enough for today. I'm going to fly home if you don't mind." Said was speechless during the short flight back to Brackett.

I told Said's flight instructor what happened over at Cable; he was fairly non-plussed. "Must be a case of the checkride jitters." I told him it seemed like more than jitters to me, but the instructor signed Said off for the checkride nonetheless. The next day, Said took off for his checkride and returned triumphantly a few hours later with a new Private Pilot's License. I started to understand why the Egyptian students always insisted upon this particular examiner. Later I heard rumors that they'd bring baksheesh of good cognac to the checkrides.

*****

Anas' attempt to kill me twice in five minutes wasn't the only eventful flight I had with him. A few days later, we had a multi-engine lesson introducing low speed engine cuts. With a low speed engine cut, the instructor uses the mixture to fail an engine early in the takeoff roll, without letting the student see which engine it is. The student is expected to maintain directional control while quickly retarding both throttles and braking to a stop. By now, I'd had enough problems with Anas that I was quite cautious in introducting this maneuver. I briefed it at length before the lesson, and again while we were holding short of the runway. "What are you gonna do as soon as you feel the plane yaw, Anas?"; "I'm going to cut both throttles and keep the plane on centerline." "Ok, good. Let's try one."

I told Brackett Tower what we were up to; they cleared us for takeoff on 26R with as much delay as we wanted. Anas lined up and brought the throttles up for takeoff; I hid the mixtures behind my left hand, and waited until around 20 knots before cutting the right mixture.

Immediately, the plane lurched towards the right side of the runway. Not only did Anas not retard the throttles, he made no attempt to maintain directional control. He just sat there as I cut the other mixture and got on the left rudder a second too late, the airplane departing the runway and bumping through the weeds. By the time we were back on the runway, I'd retarded the throttles and brought the mixtures back before the engines died completely. "Seneca 159, are you okay out there?" asked Tower. They'd seen our off-runway exploits. "Yeah, we need to go back to ADP," I replied. I was fortunate that 26R had no runway lights to hit. I stayed calm and professional until I was out of earshot of Anas, at which point I exclaimed to a mechanic: "He tried to freaking kill me again!" The mechanic grinned: "Welcome to ADP!"

*****

Sometime during that summer I was up in Monterey, CA, with a multi-engine commercial student whose name I don't recall at the moment. It was a fairly low overcast and I shot the ILS approach to get in, and decided to grab a bite to eat in the terminal before making our return flight. I believe the restaurant's name was The Golden Tee. I had a fairly big bowl of clam chowder, which really hit the spot. Once we were done we walked back to Million Air, paid for our fuel, rechecked the weather, and took off. Within a minute or two we were IMC.

Almost immediately after takeoff, I started getting ill. I broke out sweating in chills, my stomach was churning, and it felt like the seatbelt was suffocating me. I started looking for a sic sac or plastic bag or anything I could vomit into without making an unbearable mess. For once the airplane was completely clean. My student was looking rather concerned but was doing a fine job flying the airplane. We leveled off at 7000' when I could stand it no longer. I told him to slow down, I was going to open the door to puke. He slowed to around 95 knots and I opened the door.

Thhhwappp! In an instant, my neatly folded Jeppesen enroute chart was snatched off my lap and sucked out the door into the night. I had more pressing matters, but once I was done relieving myself of the cursed clam chowder, I realized that this was the only IFR chart for the area we'd had on board. My student hadn't bought Jeppesen plates yet because the current ones were just about to expire, so he'd been using mine. That chart (LO-3) covered our route on V27 all the way down the coast to Gaviota, where LO-5 picked up.

In retrospect, I should've fessed up to ATC. Instead, I hid my shame by referring to the VFR sectionals for the radials that defined V27. Soon enough we were on the LO-5 chart and nobody was the wiser. I never ate at the Golden Tee again, but I fortunately wasn't scarred enough to lose my love of fresh clam chowder...

*****

Jesse was a Taiwanese student who'd just started his instrument training with me. We would do a lesson every few days, with the rest of his time devoted to cross-country flying to build up his 50 required hours of x/c time. Jesse didn't speak english very well, but seemed to handle ATC communications fine on our lessons. He'd tell me where he was going everyday but I didn't oversee him closely, since he had a PPL and wasn't really my student on his independent VFR cross countries.

One day while Jesse was gone on a flight, ADP got a call from Montgomery Field Tower in San Diego. Mark, the manager, took the call, but then summoned me over to talk to them "Sir, we have your student on the ground here, and we think you'd better come and get him. SoCal Approach has instructed us to not let him take off again." I quickly realized he was talking about Jesse, and inquired what he'd done.

Apparently, Jesse was talking to SoCal approach on his way down to Montgomery Field but was not cleared into Class B airspace, electing instead to stay below it and skirt Class B to the east. Unfortunately, as he turned west towards Montgomery Field, the late afternoon sun in the haze cut visibility down to almost nothing, and he became disoriented. He overflew MYF without seeing it and almost landed at Mirimar Naval Air Station, violating Class B airspace in the process. SoCal Approach tried to help him, but he was so utterly flummoxed at this point that he seemingly lost all ability to understand and speak english. After Mirimar, he became entirely unresponsive to ATC.

At this point he found the coastline and followed it southward - directly over Lindburg Field, San Diego's airline served Class B airport. After that, he flew low over North Island Naval Air Station, and then crossed the border into Mexican airspace. He actually made a low approach to the runway at Tijuana, going around only when the tower repeatedly flashed him with a red light gun signal. He flew through Brown Field's airspace on his way back north, and then miraculously found Montgomery - where he dutifully called the tower for landing clearance. I'm still amazed that the FAA didn't pursue action against his certificate. This was pre-9/11; these days doing what Jesse did could potentially get you shot down.

Another instructor flew me down to MYF, where we searched the dark field for several hours before finding Jesse. He was tearful and speechless the entire flight home. Later, he couldn't explain what'd happened; he could barely remember any of it. I took him up for some remedial cross-country training and he performed beautifully, his english better than I'd ever heard. He flew the rest of his cross-countries with instructors and other renters; nobody ever reported a problem. It seemed to be a one time screwup of epic proportions.

*****

I have another few good stories but this post is getting long, I'll save em for another time...

RIP, ADP - Part II

When I went back to school after the summer of 2001, I wasn't planning on returning to instruct at ADP. I had about 700 hours at the time and figured that after instructing part-time during my senior year at UND, I'd be in a good position to apply at regional airlines.

Of course, 9/11 happened shortly thereafter. Suddenly UND had a glut of instructors as recent graduates returned, newly furloughed. Few of the full-time instructors were getting the time or pay they needed, to say nothing of the part-time instructors. At the same time, I realized that I really didn't want to stay in Grand Forks any longer than I needed to. In April of 2002, I was hired by Piedmont Airlines on the condition that I needed 1000 hours total time before being assigned a class date. I called around to some major flight schools around the country, but most had no need of extra instructors in the year after 9/11. The manager at ADP, Mark, said I was welcome back anytime. I left the same day I graduated from UND.

The school had changed from the last summer. There were less students, fewer of them were foreign nationals, and the Egyptians had completely disappeared. The drop in revenue was having a clear effect on profitability: fewer and fewer planes were being kept airworthy. When a plane had a crash or major maintenance issue, it was parked and used for parts. The flightline started looking more and more like a boneyard as major portions of the fleet sat engine-less and forlorn on their tails. The Seneca fleet, once ten airplanes strong, was decimated by a series of gear-up accidents and engine failures.

In my last post, Ron noted that of his flight school's fleet of 35 airplanes, not a single airframe has been lost since he's been there. Air Desert Pacific's fleet was about that size when I started. When I was there, ADP lost a Warrior in the San Gabriel mountains in poor weather (it still hasn't been found), had several Senecas land gear-up, had an Arrow land so hard the gear came through the wing, suffered several prop strikes, a nose gear collapse, a major engine fire, and a Joshua tree that totalled a Warrior during a forced landing in the desert. In the last case, a shady local prop shop was to blame; it was shut down after several other accidents, including a fatal Travelair crash. Most of these incidents were simply pilot error. Several of them were cross-country renters that'd been given a cursory checkout; a few of them had inexperienced instructors on board. One of the Seneca gear-ups was on a commercial checkride. The maintenance at Air Desert Pacific may have been sketchy but it didn't seem to be a factor in most of the accidents. I kind've think it was just the nature of the place: with so many accelerated students and short-term renters on holiday, we had a lot of different people flying those airplanes, and some of them were clods.

The diminishing fleet of aircraft resulted in less flight time, but I was okay with that. Dawn, then my girlfriend, had moved out to SoCal, so I was glad to have more free time than the last summer. I had fewer accelerated students, and got to take several primary students through their PPL checkride, which I really enjoyed. I had decent multi-engine time, so the drop in multi-engine students didn't bother me. I was one of the senior instructors, so I got more of the "challenging" students. Some simply needed a change in instruction, some an attitude adjustment, and a few simply had no business flying airplanes. When that was the case, feelings might get hurt, but the school's management at least backed me up.

In the fall of 2002, I was ramp checked by the FAA in one of ADP's better airplanes and they found 13 different airworthiness issues. The inspector didn't violate me but gave me a strong verbal warning. I'd been watching the flight school go downhill and I felt the time was right to get out of instructing. Piedmont postponed my class date indefinately when they went into bankruptcy with USAirways, and no west coast airlines were hiring at the time, but the Part 135 freight op affiliated with the flight school, AEX, had an opening. In January 2003, I ceased to instruct full time and became a freight dog.

The last thing I heard about ADP before they went out of business was that Mark quit and got a job as an engineer for Rockwell-Collins. I was glad to hear that. He was a good guy who worked tirelessly to keep the flight school going, and I often felt that he was the glue holding the whole shambles together.

Next post: my very favorite ADP stories.