I got into flying at a very early age. I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I abandoned my interest in trains for an obsession with airplanes, but there is a surviving third grade assignment wherein I declare my intention to be an airline pilot. My first plane ride took place at the age of 11, and I flew three more times before scheduling my first flight lesson at the age of 13. Throughout my early teens, I scrimped and saved money from odd jobs just to take one flight lesson at the end of each month. Later I worked as a line boy for the flight school, which was a dream job in that I got paid - in flight time! - for doing something I'd do anyways, namely hang out at the airport. I soloed on my 16th birthday and passed the Private Pilot checkride on my 17th.
My story isn't at all unique. Airliner cockpits across the nation are populated by thousands of former airport kids. Like me, they built models, read aviation magazines, bummed rides off local pilots, washed and fueled airplanes, and in many cases learned to fly before they could drive. All of us were bitten hard by the flying bug very early on, and it predestined us for a lifetime aloft.
I've since flown with and met many of these former airport kids. As it tuns out, nearly all of them are significantly older than me. Most were making a nuisance of themselves at the airports of the 1960s and 70s; I didn't start flying until 1994. I didn't know it at the time, but the airport kid was a dying breed. Among airline pilots of my generation, the vast majority started flying in college or later. The few I've met who began flying young had pilot parents. The trends behind this change have only accelerated since then, and I fear that airport kids are becoming few and far in between.
The primary factor is money. The cost of flying has been outstripping inflation for years. Regulatory changes, increased liability, fuel price spikes, and the greater complexity of even basic aircraft have all contributed to the spiraling costs. Perhaps the greatest cause is that there are simply fewer general aviation pilots flying now than at any time in the past 40 years. Pilots who learned to fly in the 60s can recall renting a Cub or Taylorcraft for mere dollars. As late as the mid 1980s a Cessna 150 could be had for $15 per hour. By the time I started in 1994 it was up to $38/hr. Now it's hard to find any rental airplanes for under $75/hr. This is putting aviation well out of the reach of kids, at least those without well-to-do parents willing to pay for their offspring to partake in an expensive and moderately dangerous hobby.
A second constraint is the decreased availability of training. The general aviation airports of the 60s and 70s were busier places than the airports of today. The decline of the pilot population has caused many of the businesses that served them to close down. This trend has been very noticeable the last few years as fuel and other costs have pushed general aviation activity way down. Here in the Twin Cities area, roughly half of our flight schools have shut down in the last five years. Many smaller airports, including the one I learned to fly at, have been left without any flight training options at all. The would-be airport kid of today might ride her bike to the airport only to find that there's nothing going on and nobody to talk to.
The third barrier is security. This is a recent development thanks to the events of seven years ago today. Although those attacks didn't involve general aviation, apparently some ne'er-do-well somewhere talked about the possibility at some point, and that was enough. Where airport kids could once wander around even busy general aviation airports almost at will, now even many sleepy uncontrolled fields confront them with security fences and controlled-access gates. Although it's debatable whether these would pose much of a deterrent to the truly nefarious, there's no question that they're quite effective at keeping the merely inquisitive at bay.
My aunt approached me at a family function last month to inform me that my 11 year old cousin has recently become obsessed with flying. He's building airplane models, reading every aviation book and magazine he can get his hands on, and flying heavy jets on Microsoft Flight Simulator. In other words, he's me 15 years ago. How much would it cost, my aunt asked me, to get him in the air? She was visibly crestfallen when I told her that dual instruction would cost at least $110 per hour. This isn't a poor family, but like many they don't have that kind of cash lying around on a regular basis.
I suggested that she get him involved in Civil Air Patrol or the Experimental Aircraft Association. Both offer great opportunities for hands-on aviation experience, and the CAP even offers low-cost flight training for teens. My cousin is fortunate that there's a CAP wing and EAA chapter near his house; they may be the only opportunity for him to follow his dreams of flight at a young age. Many kids aren't so fortunate.
I can hear some hard-nosed pragmatist somewhere grumbling "So what if kid's don't fly? If they really want to fly, they'll do it when they're older." Yes, perhaps. As you get older, life does tend to get in the way. I have passengers remark to me on a very regular basis, "You know, I always wanted to learn to fly...." These are people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. I have not yet heard one single person express regret that they pursued their goal of learning to fly.
There's another, more practical reason to mourn the death of the airport kid. A great many former airport kids have gone on to become professional pilots because, well, they had the bug and couldn't imagine doing anything else with their lives. Most of the professional pilots my age, on the other hand, didn't start flying until they'd already decided to pursue an aviation career in college or later. Their reasons vary and I suspect the fun of flying was one unifying factor, but a large part of the draw was undoubtedly the lifestyle and compensation that an airline career offered at the time. With the profession now a mere shadow of its former self and training costs ever skyrocketing, I suspect fewer and fewer people will make that choice in the future. There may come a day when the airlines need former airport kids to fill their cockpits, only to find that there are none left.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
God's Country
For the most part, I don't particularly care where I lay over. I bid my schedule primarily for efficiency, number of days off, weekends off, and credit hours. I try to avoid really early show times when possible. However, I don't pay too much attention to the layover cities. Most of them are about the same to me, and while I can generally find something fun to do on longer layovers in most places, the recreational possibilities don't affect my bidding.
There are two prominent exceptions: Missoula and Kalispell. I enjoy our Montana layovers very much. Even when I flew for Horizon they were among my favorites; now they're the very best places I fly. Just the thought of going to Montana makes me happy. Seeing four long Montana layovers on this month's awarded line totally made up for having zero weekend days off.
My fondness for Montana layovers partially stems from my time at Horizon; I spent a lot of time in the state so now an arrival in Kalispell or Missoula is almost like a homecoming. After hours upon hours of the relentless anonymity of the plains, it's cool to start spotting recognizable landmarks and suddenly find myself in familiar surroundings. Unlike many of the places we fly, I'm pretty familiar with Montana's geography. Here I know where I am in relation to real places, not just navigation stations and fixes. As we approach our destination, the scale decreases and I can soon pick out my favorite spots in town: cafes and bars, parks and hiking trails. I know exactly where to look for the airport and the best way to work around the terrain in making my descent. Then we land and park and I take my first deep breath of clean mountain air, and there's no doubt that I'm in my happy place. I could be sitting in a New Jersey landfill and merely hearing someone mention Montana would instantly summon forth that unmistakeable crisp scent - a mixture of pine, cedar, and a whiff of woodsmoke.
My attachment to Montana isn't merely nostalgic. In many ways, it's a welcome change from the daily grind of the job. Many of the airports NewCo flies to are practically indistinguishable from each other. Air traffic control tells us when to descend and when to turn and what speed to maintain, and they eventually put us on a straight-in visual approach (with ILS for backup, of course) three to five miles behind preceding traffic. The only thing left to think about is whether it's a left or right turn off the runway to the terminal! Mountain flying, on the other hand, makes you sit up, pay attention, make some decisions for yourself, and demonstrate a little finesse. Many of our pilots don't have any mountain flying experience, so it's fun showing them the ropes of flying into FCA and MSO.
On the ground, too, Montana is quite different from most of the places NewCo flies. Most obvious is the physical beauty of the place; it takes my breath away every time I visit. Of course, living in Minnesota now, it's a pleasure to just see mountains. The wild, remote feel of the place adds to its unique appeal. Montana has great swaths of wilderness that run right up to and even intrude upon its few populated areas. As I was climbing Mount Sentinel on the UM campus in Missoula this week, a mule deer trotted by not thirty feet away. It occurred to me that there aren't too many college campuses in America where you can climb a mountain and view wildlife.
Beyond the grandeur of the mountains, Montana has a different feel to it that you'd never mistake for the Midwest or eastern states. Although the places we fly in Montana are the largest cities in the state, they are nonetheless small towns by most standards. They have the pleasant attributes often associated with small towns across the nation - friendly people, walkable downtowns - but lack the negative aspects, namely small-town boredom. It seems as though there's always something going on, and of course there's plenty of outdoor adventure to be had in every season. Unlike Midwestern small towns that have been dying for years as their youth move to urban areas, Montana's small towns are actually growing as outsiders (ie Californians) move in. It probably helps that Montana doesn't have big city lights to lure the kids away; Seattle and Denver, the nearest major cities, are both several states over. All this gives Montana's towns a vibrant feel that you wouldn't expect for a place so isolated. That's not to say Montana is in any way cosmopolitan - indeed, it often feels 20 years behind the rest of the US. For someone my age, that's half the charm, as it's like stepping back into my childhood.
On my Missoula layover this week, my FO and I walked through the University of Montana campus and climbed Mount Sentinel (more popularly referred to as "doing the 'M'"). Later the whole crew got together at the Press Box to cheer on the Griz over fresh trout and pints of Moose Drool. Next week we're hoping to score last-minute tickets for a Griz home game. The week after in Kalispell, I'll introduce my FO to Moose's Saloon. If the snow holds off, we might rent a car and drive up to Logan Pass; otherwise the weather should at least be warm enough to repeat this spring's hike to Avalanche Lake. It's going to be a good month!
There are two prominent exceptions: Missoula and Kalispell. I enjoy our Montana layovers very much. Even when I flew for Horizon they were among my favorites; now they're the very best places I fly. Just the thought of going to Montana makes me happy. Seeing four long Montana layovers on this month's awarded line totally made up for having zero weekend days off.
My fondness for Montana layovers partially stems from my time at Horizon; I spent a lot of time in the state so now an arrival in Kalispell or Missoula is almost like a homecoming. After hours upon hours of the relentless anonymity of the plains, it's cool to start spotting recognizable landmarks and suddenly find myself in familiar surroundings. Unlike many of the places we fly, I'm pretty familiar with Montana's geography. Here I know where I am in relation to real places, not just navigation stations and fixes. As we approach our destination, the scale decreases and I can soon pick out my favorite spots in town: cafes and bars, parks and hiking trails. I know exactly where to look for the airport and the best way to work around the terrain in making my descent. Then we land and park and I take my first deep breath of clean mountain air, and there's no doubt that I'm in my happy place. I could be sitting in a New Jersey landfill and merely hearing someone mention Montana would instantly summon forth that unmistakeable crisp scent - a mixture of pine, cedar, and a whiff of woodsmoke.
My attachment to Montana isn't merely nostalgic. In many ways, it's a welcome change from the daily grind of the job. Many of the airports NewCo flies to are practically indistinguishable from each other. Air traffic control tells us when to descend and when to turn and what speed to maintain, and they eventually put us on a straight-in visual approach (with ILS for backup, of course) three to five miles behind preceding traffic. The only thing left to think about is whether it's a left or right turn off the runway to the terminal! Mountain flying, on the other hand, makes you sit up, pay attention, make some decisions for yourself, and demonstrate a little finesse. Many of our pilots don't have any mountain flying experience, so it's fun showing them the ropes of flying into FCA and MSO.
On the ground, too, Montana is quite different from most of the places NewCo flies. Most obvious is the physical beauty of the place; it takes my breath away every time I visit. Of course, living in Minnesota now, it's a pleasure to just see mountains. The wild, remote feel of the place adds to its unique appeal. Montana has great swaths of wilderness that run right up to and even intrude upon its few populated areas. As I was climbing Mount Sentinel on the UM campus in Missoula this week, a mule deer trotted by not thirty feet away. It occurred to me that there aren't too many college campuses in America where you can climb a mountain and view wildlife.
Beyond the grandeur of the mountains, Montana has a different feel to it that you'd never mistake for the Midwest or eastern states. Although the places we fly in Montana are the largest cities in the state, they are nonetheless small towns by most standards. They have the pleasant attributes often associated with small towns across the nation - friendly people, walkable downtowns - but lack the negative aspects, namely small-town boredom. It seems as though there's always something going on, and of course there's plenty of outdoor adventure to be had in every season. Unlike Midwestern small towns that have been dying for years as their youth move to urban areas, Montana's small towns are actually growing as outsiders (ie Californians) move in. It probably helps that Montana doesn't have big city lights to lure the kids away; Seattle and Denver, the nearest major cities, are both several states over. All this gives Montana's towns a vibrant feel that you wouldn't expect for a place so isolated. That's not to say Montana is in any way cosmopolitan - indeed, it often feels 20 years behind the rest of the US. For someone my age, that's half the charm, as it's like stepping back into my childhood.
On my Missoula layover this week, my FO and I walked through the University of Montana campus and climbed Mount Sentinel (more popularly referred to as "doing the 'M'"). Later the whole crew got together at the Press Box to cheer on the Griz over fresh trout and pints of Moose Drool. Next week we're hoping to score last-minute tickets for a Griz home game. The week after in Kalispell, I'll introduce my FO to Moose's Saloon. If the snow holds off, we might rent a car and drive up to Logan Pass; otherwise the weather should at least be warm enough to repeat this spring's hike to Avalanche Lake. It's going to be a good month!
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Stay Away, Stay Alive
In the summer of 1993, a family friend took me flying in his 1946 Piper Clipper. It was only my second flight ever, but I was already mad about flying; contemporary notebooks saved by my mom are filled with airplanes conceived only in my twelve year old mind. Our friend Paul kept his airplane on his own property, as he had carved out a 2000 foot landing strip in the center of his Christmas tree farm. I had just got new glasses that day; I recall the airplane being somewhat blurry as I helped Paul push it out of his hangar.
Shortly after we got airborne with the aid of a hump in the middle of the strip, we turned to the west and were confronted with a great cumulonimbus cloud that filled the sky. It was at least 50 miles off but was impressive even at that distance; lightning crackled on the horizon. "If you ever see one of those," Paul instructed the young pilot-to-be, "stay far away. Those will spit you out without so much as half a thought."
Fifteen years and 5300 hours later, Paul's words of advice have stuck with me. I give thunderstorms a wide berth. Of course, to do that you must know where they are, and that isn't always very apparent. It takes a mixture of technical skill and hard-won experience to stay a safe distance from storms at all times.
I learned to fly in Minnesota and earned my advanced ratings in North Dakota, but most of my formative experience since then was in the western US. They do have thunderstorms out there, particularly in the Rocky Mountain states, but they're nothing like the monsters spawned in the Midwest, and they seldom form lines that pose a problem for circumnavigation. Therefore I was somewhat nervous about this summer's thunderstorm season, my first in the Midwest - and as a Captain, no less. It turned out just fine. I didn't have any days flying in absolutely horrendous conditions, but there was enough ugly stuff to build some valuable experience.
In an ideal world, one would avoid thunderstorms by visual means only. This is a foolproof way to stay out of dangerous weather, and to avoid harmless but annoying bumps as well. Unfortunately, visual avoidance isn't always an option. Nasty storms often continue long into the night, when it's difficult to gauge distance from lightning. Beyond that, storms aren't always well-defined, and can occasionally be obscured by widespread cloudiness not related to the storm itself. When picking your way through a line, you might have to penetrate an area of moderate precipitation between heavy cells. For all these reasons, the FAA requires airliners to be equipped with operable weather radar with few exceptions.
The theory behind radar is simple: radio waves are sent out, and precipitation sends them bouncing back to the antenna. The radar unit measures intensity by the number of waves it receives back, and distance by the time differential between transmission and reception. The result is displayed either on a dedicated screen or - like the JungleBus - on a Multifunction Display. Light precipitation is depicted by green shading, moderate by yellow, heavy as Red, and extreme precipitation is shaded magenta. The pilots can adjust the angle at which the radio waves are sent out from the aircraft; this is called tilt. They can also adjust the receiver's sensitivity; this is called gain. Advanced units may have some other features, but these controls are the pilots' primary means of controlling the radar.
The use of these controls, and the interpretation of the results, is considered a bit of a black art in the aviation world. The problem, especially in the flight levels (> 18,000'), is that you are above the freezing level. Frozen precipitation doesn't show up very well on radar; the most detectable part of the storm may be 20,000 feet below you. Therefore, at altitude you must aim the tilt somewhat downward. This is mostly problematic because terrain reflects radio energy even better than precipitation, and the resulting "ground returns" can make it very difficult to distinguish between the ground and actual storms. It's worth noting that radio waves aren't sent out at the exact angle you set the tilt to, like a lazer beam, but scatter somewhat above and below that angle. At greater distances, this results in a great range of altitudes that may return echoes. It also varies according to the size of antenna; a small antenna scatters the radio waves more widely. At 50 miles range and a slight downward tilt, a small antenna could be returning everything from ground level to 50,000 feet.
Therefore, the usual practice is to adjust the tilt downward until the ground return is readily distinguishable. At you decrease tilt, the returns come steadily closer on the scope; this is how you know it's the ground, and not actual precipitation. Then you increase the tilt until the ground returns are at 3/4 of the set range. In other words, if you have the display set so that the top edge represents a distance of 200 miles, the ground returns should start around 150 miles away. If you decrease the range, you need to readjust the tilt so the displayed area will show echoes below the freezing level.
The use of gain depends on the unit, but a common technique is to increase the gain until the ground returns at the furthest displayed range are yellow or red. This will ensure the unit is sensitive enough to display even light precipitation at closer ranges.
The Q400, as I've mentioned before, had a terrible radar. In retrospect this was excellent training as it forced the pilot to adjust the controls exactly right to get any useful information. The JungleBus' radar, by comparison, is a dream to use. In cruise with no storms nearby, I'll set the range to 300 miles with the tilt around zero; it regularly picks up storms at 200+ miles away in this configuration, which gives me enough time to query ATC or dispatch and make a plan. The automatic gain mode is smart enough that I seldom need to set gain manually. It even has an automatic tilt mode that changes the tilt as you adjust the range, although it usually needs some fine-tuning.
The usual advice is to avoid moderate precipitation when possible and stay out of heavy and extreme returns, and to avoid by twenty miles any storms classified as severe. The rub, of course, is that one must decide what exactly constitutes a severe storm. The issuance of a convective SIGMET is a strong clue, although this can be done for merely obscured cells. On the radar, you look for large areas of extreme precipitation, oddly shaped cells, or strong gradients (where precipitation goes from light to heavy in very little distance). Visually, you look for cumulonimbus that greatly exceeds your altitude.
Avoidance technique depends on the type of storm. If it's a simple airmass thunderstorm lying along my route, I'll just request a simple deviation upwind of the cell. If it's a widespread area of storms or a line connected to a larger weather system (such as a squall line), I need more information than my onboard radar can provide to make strategic decisions. Having looked at radar, prognosis, and surface analysis charts before flight definitely helps me get the big picture, but I need more recent data to make decisions from. This is where air traffic control and dispatch come in. ATC can display rudimentary radar data on their scopes, but the onboard radar is usually better for tactical maneuvering. ATC's real value is in letting us know what other flights have been doing. It's unlikely that anybody else flying along our route would've penetrated severe weather without telling someone; the holes that they used will be used by many other flights after them. Our dispatcher has access to the latest radar image similar to those your local TV meteorologist displays, and can give us routing suggestions to keep us in the clear. Areas of weather are generally described relative to VOR navigation stations; if we are unfamiliar with any identifier, there is a national reference chart in our Jepp binders.
Squall lines can be tough to deal with; they may stretch hundreds of miles long. Jets have a distinct advantage over smaller aircraft here, because we can deviate hundreds of miles without adding a ton of flying time or fuel required. The major thing here is to ensure that your dispatcher's route planning reflects any likely major deviations, and you therefore have the required fuel on board. Then it's simply a matter of flying around the line, or if you must, finding a gap to sneak through. Again, ATC is a huge help in finding these gaps. Onboard radar isn't as reliable because you often can't tell what lies beyond visible gaps due to attenuation. This is when a return is so intense that it reflects all the energy your radar unit sends out, so you can't tell what lies beyond it. You really don't want to go through what looks like a nice gap only to find a solid wall of red or purple beyond it.
Honestly, truly ugly weather isn't the greatest challenge for most. If it's red or purple, you simply don't go there. Only an idiot would penetrate a severe storm. The harder call is when it's not that bad: mostly moderate returns with perhaps just a touch of red, or the occasional flash of lightning. If this is the only stuff in the sky, it's a no-brainer to avoid it. The tough call is when it's potentially the only gap through a severe line, or is on final approach or an ATC assigned vector. In reality the tiebreaker is often TCAS; if you can see a proceeding aircraft go through without complaint, it's probably OK. This approach surely has its limitations; an extreme case was Delta 191 deciding to continue their approach to DFW through a severe cell because nobody else had gone missed approach.
Severe weather avoidance is as much an art as it is a science. Technical knowledge is surely a baseline requirement, but experience and technique are ultimately just as important. I'm glad I had the Q400's crappy radar to train on, and relatively benign scenarios this year to prepare me for future battles. And quite honestly, if I had to choose one or the other, I'm glad I got to experience a Minnesota winter as a first officer before going out and doing it as a Captain. Speaking of which, it won't be long. Dawn returned to school on Tuesday, and right on cue, the sky clouded over and the temperatures dropped twenty degrees. I saw changing leaves for the first time today. Snow will fly before long, for sure.
Shortly after we got airborne with the aid of a hump in the middle of the strip, we turned to the west and were confronted with a great cumulonimbus cloud that filled the sky. It was at least 50 miles off but was impressive even at that distance; lightning crackled on the horizon. "If you ever see one of those," Paul instructed the young pilot-to-be, "stay far away. Those will spit you out without so much as half a thought."
Fifteen years and 5300 hours later, Paul's words of advice have stuck with me. I give thunderstorms a wide berth. Of course, to do that you must know where they are, and that isn't always very apparent. It takes a mixture of technical skill and hard-won experience to stay a safe distance from storms at all times.
I learned to fly in Minnesota and earned my advanced ratings in North Dakota, but most of my formative experience since then was in the western US. They do have thunderstorms out there, particularly in the Rocky Mountain states, but they're nothing like the monsters spawned in the Midwest, and they seldom form lines that pose a problem for circumnavigation. Therefore I was somewhat nervous about this summer's thunderstorm season, my first in the Midwest - and as a Captain, no less. It turned out just fine. I didn't have any days flying in absolutely horrendous conditions, but there was enough ugly stuff to build some valuable experience.
In an ideal world, one would avoid thunderstorms by visual means only. This is a foolproof way to stay out of dangerous weather, and to avoid harmless but annoying bumps as well. Unfortunately, visual avoidance isn't always an option. Nasty storms often continue long into the night, when it's difficult to gauge distance from lightning. Beyond that, storms aren't always well-defined, and can occasionally be obscured by widespread cloudiness not related to the storm itself. When picking your way through a line, you might have to penetrate an area of moderate precipitation between heavy cells. For all these reasons, the FAA requires airliners to be equipped with operable weather radar with few exceptions.
The theory behind radar is simple: radio waves are sent out, and precipitation sends them bouncing back to the antenna. The radar unit measures intensity by the number of waves it receives back, and distance by the time differential between transmission and reception. The result is displayed either on a dedicated screen or - like the JungleBus - on a Multifunction Display. Light precipitation is depicted by green shading, moderate by yellow, heavy as Red, and extreme precipitation is shaded magenta. The pilots can adjust the angle at which the radio waves are sent out from the aircraft; this is called tilt. They can also adjust the receiver's sensitivity; this is called gain. Advanced units may have some other features, but these controls are the pilots' primary means of controlling the radar.
The use of these controls, and the interpretation of the results, is considered a bit of a black art in the aviation world. The problem, especially in the flight levels (> 18,000'), is that you are above the freezing level. Frozen precipitation doesn't show up very well on radar; the most detectable part of the storm may be 20,000 feet below you. Therefore, at altitude you must aim the tilt somewhat downward. This is mostly problematic because terrain reflects radio energy even better than precipitation, and the resulting "ground returns" can make it very difficult to distinguish between the ground and actual storms. It's worth noting that radio waves aren't sent out at the exact angle you set the tilt to, like a lazer beam, but scatter somewhat above and below that angle. At greater distances, this results in a great range of altitudes that may return echoes. It also varies according to the size of antenna; a small antenna scatters the radio waves more widely. At 50 miles range and a slight downward tilt, a small antenna could be returning everything from ground level to 50,000 feet.
Therefore, the usual practice is to adjust the tilt downward until the ground return is readily distinguishable. At you decrease tilt, the returns come steadily closer on the scope; this is how you know it's the ground, and not actual precipitation. Then you increase the tilt until the ground returns are at 3/4 of the set range. In other words, if you have the display set so that the top edge represents a distance of 200 miles, the ground returns should start around 150 miles away. If you decrease the range, you need to readjust the tilt so the displayed area will show echoes below the freezing level.
The use of gain depends on the unit, but a common technique is to increase the gain until the ground returns at the furthest displayed range are yellow or red. This will ensure the unit is sensitive enough to display even light precipitation at closer ranges.
The Q400, as I've mentioned before, had a terrible radar. In retrospect this was excellent training as it forced the pilot to adjust the controls exactly right to get any useful information. The JungleBus' radar, by comparison, is a dream to use. In cruise with no storms nearby, I'll set the range to 300 miles with the tilt around zero; it regularly picks up storms at 200+ miles away in this configuration, which gives me enough time to query ATC or dispatch and make a plan. The automatic gain mode is smart enough that I seldom need to set gain manually. It even has an automatic tilt mode that changes the tilt as you adjust the range, although it usually needs some fine-tuning.
The usual advice is to avoid moderate precipitation when possible and stay out of heavy and extreme returns, and to avoid by twenty miles any storms classified as severe. The rub, of course, is that one must decide what exactly constitutes a severe storm. The issuance of a convective SIGMET is a strong clue, although this can be done for merely obscured cells. On the radar, you look for large areas of extreme precipitation, oddly shaped cells, or strong gradients (where precipitation goes from light to heavy in very little distance). Visually, you look for cumulonimbus that greatly exceeds your altitude.
Avoidance technique depends on the type of storm. If it's a simple airmass thunderstorm lying along my route, I'll just request a simple deviation upwind of the cell. If it's a widespread area of storms or a line connected to a larger weather system (such as a squall line), I need more information than my onboard radar can provide to make strategic decisions. Having looked at radar, prognosis, and surface analysis charts before flight definitely helps me get the big picture, but I need more recent data to make decisions from. This is where air traffic control and dispatch come in. ATC can display rudimentary radar data on their scopes, but the onboard radar is usually better for tactical maneuvering. ATC's real value is in letting us know what other flights have been doing. It's unlikely that anybody else flying along our route would've penetrated severe weather without telling someone; the holes that they used will be used by many other flights after them. Our dispatcher has access to the latest radar image similar to those your local TV meteorologist displays, and can give us routing suggestions to keep us in the clear. Areas of weather are generally described relative to VOR navigation stations; if we are unfamiliar with any identifier, there is a national reference chart in our Jepp binders.
Squall lines can be tough to deal with; they may stretch hundreds of miles long. Jets have a distinct advantage over smaller aircraft here, because we can deviate hundreds of miles without adding a ton of flying time or fuel required. The major thing here is to ensure that your dispatcher's route planning reflects any likely major deviations, and you therefore have the required fuel on board. Then it's simply a matter of flying around the line, or if you must, finding a gap to sneak through. Again, ATC is a huge help in finding these gaps. Onboard radar isn't as reliable because you often can't tell what lies beyond visible gaps due to attenuation. This is when a return is so intense that it reflects all the energy your radar unit sends out, so you can't tell what lies beyond it. You really don't want to go through what looks like a nice gap only to find a solid wall of red or purple beyond it.
Honestly, truly ugly weather isn't the greatest challenge for most. If it's red or purple, you simply don't go there. Only an idiot would penetrate a severe storm. The harder call is when it's not that bad: mostly moderate returns with perhaps just a touch of red, or the occasional flash of lightning. If this is the only stuff in the sky, it's a no-brainer to avoid it. The tough call is when it's potentially the only gap through a severe line, or is on final approach or an ATC assigned vector. In reality the tiebreaker is often TCAS; if you can see a proceeding aircraft go through without complaint, it's probably OK. This approach surely has its limitations; an extreme case was Delta 191 deciding to continue their approach to DFW through a severe cell because nobody else had gone missed approach.
Severe weather avoidance is as much an art as it is a science. Technical knowledge is surely a baseline requirement, but experience and technique are ultimately just as important. I'm glad I had the Q400's crappy radar to train on, and relatively benign scenarios this year to prepare me for future battles. And quite honestly, if I had to choose one or the other, I'm glad I got to experience a Minnesota winter as a first officer before going out and doing it as a Captain. Speaking of which, it won't be long. Dawn returned to school on Tuesday, and right on cue, the sky clouded over and the temperatures dropped twenty degrees. I saw changing leaves for the first time today. Snow will fly before long, for sure.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
A Tree Dies, A Plane Flies
An old aviation axiom is that when considering how aircraft stay aloft, one should forget all that garbage about Bernoulli and Newton - airplanes remain airborne on money alone! The wiseacre's corollary is that if God had meant man to fly, he would've given him more money.
This does not seem to apply to the airlines. The fools & charlatans who run our airlines have charged less for tickets than it costs to operate the flights for years on end. Eventually, the airline will reduce its costs via bankruptcy or the threat thereof, and they'll find some investor rubes to pump a bunch of money back into the airline, nevermind that the business plan remains essentially unchanged. Should that fail, the government will generally step in to prevent such a keystone of the economy from going out of business. It's only when a great number of factors line up with just the wrong timing that airlines go under. Otherwise the cycle starts over again, generally with "new" management as the last team bails with their golden parachutes.
But I digress. If airliners do not fly on money, one could make the argument that they fly on paper. "A tree dies, a plane flies!" goes a common refrain. While even those poor GA pilot souls trudging through the dark ages with steam gauges and VORs do so in a nearly paperless fashion, we airline types still waste an embarrassing amount of paper each and every flight. Although some of it is due to ACARS printer usage in flight (printing ATIS and clearances), the majority is contained within the pre-flight paperwork package. At my airline, this is generated by the flight's dispatcher and printed off by the gate agent approximately 45 minutes before the flight. It contains several copies of the dispatch release, the flight plan, takeoff and landing performance data, and the weather package.
At Horizon, this was all printed on inkjet printers, which gave a neatly separated stack of papers between 20 and 40 pages. It lended itself to organization quite nicely. You're never going to believe this, but RedCo is still soldiering along with 20-year old dot-matrix printers at almost all of their stations. I really have no idea where they're getting the replacement ribbons. They can't still be in production, can they!? In any event, this results in one large unbroken sheet of paper being handed to the Captain, like a scroll. If unrolled it would stretch around 20 to 30 feet long.
The very first thing you do in Captain OE is figure out how to separate this scroll into its constituent parts, then process them, and then stow them in the most convenient parts of the cockpit. Everybody has their own method. Our aircraft logbook containers are aluminum and usually contain one sharp edge that's great for tearing the paper, but I can do a passable job tearing it straight by hand. It's not as easy as it sounds - while there is a lot of white space (ie wasted paper) in the scroll, it seems that there's absolutely none of it between the sections you need to tear apart. Therefore one needs the touch of an artist to rip the paper crisply and cleanly, leaving the adjoining text on each of the adjacent sections untouched.
Once I've ripped off the releases and flight plan, I'll wedge them between the thrust levers so my FO can access them since they are both required early in the FOs duties. Next comes the performance data. I roll this into a mini-scroll with a diameter of about 3", then squish it so it's a flat wad of 4" pages. This makes it the perfect size for a nook on the right side of the center pedestal. This too, I leave for my FO, as performance data is part of their duties. Finally I tackle the weather package, always the longest piece of paper.
I spend more time perusing the weather packet than any I do on any other preflight duty. I consider it insurance against a FAA violation. Even on good weather days, there is plenty of potential for a "gotcha!" to be hiding in that weather package. A big problem is that there's so much information to digest that it's easy to miss something. You'll have several hours of METARs for departure, destination, and alternate airports, plus TAFs, NOTAMs, PIREPs, winds aloft, SIGMETs, and convective SIGMETs. The NOTAMs section is often the longest section (particularly during airport construction or forest fires), and the ripest for a "gotcha!" hidden among its contents. Most pilots don't spend nearly enough time on it, I think.
Incidentally, Horizon had longer weather packages than NewCo. Besides the above elements, they included area forecasts and AIRMETs, as well as reports, forecasts, and PIREPs for enroute weather. I liked that. While it was more for the Captain to work through, and was unnecessary on good weather days, it really helped situational awareness on bad days. I dislike flying somewhere 1000 nm away and having no idea what the weather is like enroute should I have a mechanical diversion. We can access weather reports and charts via computer at the gate (and I do very often) but there's no way to print them out and take them with you.
Once I'm finished with the weather package, I roll it back up and stow it in a cubbyhole on the back of the center pedestal, where it's easily accessibly to both me and my FO. Then I return to the dispatch releases. I review them to make sure all the information is correct, and once I'm content that the flight can be safely completed as planned, I sign them both. One of them I fold up into a 1"x8" square with the fuel planning info and filed flight plan facing outward; this fits perfectly where the center pedestal and main instrument panel come together, and makes for easy reference in flight. The other copy gets handed out to the customer service agent along with our weight and balance paperwork just before the aircraft door is closed. I file the copy that we keep with the company at my home base when I complete the trip. The two release copies are the only parts of the pre-flight paperwork package that gets saved; everything else gets thrown away after the flight.
When I'm well into my preflight flow, I return to the flight plan page. This has a more detailed breakdown of the fuel planning numbers on the dispatch release; I'll review these to make sure they're legal numbers and I'm comfortable with our fuel load, and enter them into the Performance Initialization page on our FMS. Then I use the waypoint list to verify that I correctly entered the flight plan into the FMS earlier in my preflight flow. I fold up the flight plan page and stow it in a slot at the top of the glareshield where my FO and I can easily reach it. During the clearance briefing, my FO will use it to again verify that I entered the flight plan correctly. Bad data entry is a prominent cause of screwups and worse in glass cockpits, so we take cross-checks pretty seriously.
There's one other piece of paperwork to take care of before we go. At NewCo, we do our weight and balance manually, using good ole' fashioned arithmetic and a circular mechanical calculator for figuring center of gravity. This is recorded on a weight and balance form with a carbon copy. The copy gets handed out the door with the second copy of the release, along with the bag count form given to us by the rampers. The original weight and balance form gets trashed after we record the information on our copy of the release.
We're in the process of flight testing our forthcoming electronic flight bag. The first thing it will let us eliminate is Jeppesen charts, which due to frequent updates are a huge source of wasted paper in aviation. Our company and aircraft manuals, too, will electronically reside on the EFB. Later, I suspect that some portions of the preflight paperwork package will be beamed to us on the EFB. We'll still need a few hard copies of the release for regulatory purposes, but most of the clutter will be cut down. Until then, at least the JungleBus cockpit has plenty of nooks and crannies to put it all in!
This does not seem to apply to the airlines. The fools & charlatans who run our airlines have charged less for tickets than it costs to operate the flights for years on end. Eventually, the airline will reduce its costs via bankruptcy or the threat thereof, and they'll find some investor rubes to pump a bunch of money back into the airline, nevermind that the business plan remains essentially unchanged. Should that fail, the government will generally step in to prevent such a keystone of the economy from going out of business. It's only when a great number of factors line up with just the wrong timing that airlines go under. Otherwise the cycle starts over again, generally with "new" management as the last team bails with their golden parachutes.
But I digress. If airliners do not fly on money, one could make the argument that they fly on paper. "A tree dies, a plane flies!" goes a common refrain. While even those poor GA pilot souls trudging through the dark ages with steam gauges and VORs do so in a nearly paperless fashion, we airline types still waste an embarrassing amount of paper each and every flight. Although some of it is due to ACARS printer usage in flight (printing ATIS and clearances), the majority is contained within the pre-flight paperwork package. At my airline, this is generated by the flight's dispatcher and printed off by the gate agent approximately 45 minutes before the flight. It contains several copies of the dispatch release, the flight plan, takeoff and landing performance data, and the weather package.
At Horizon, this was all printed on inkjet printers, which gave a neatly separated stack of papers between 20 and 40 pages. It lended itself to organization quite nicely. You're never going to believe this, but RedCo is still soldiering along with 20-year old dot-matrix printers at almost all of their stations. I really have no idea where they're getting the replacement ribbons. They can't still be in production, can they!? In any event, this results in one large unbroken sheet of paper being handed to the Captain, like a scroll. If unrolled it would stretch around 20 to 30 feet long.
The very first thing you do in Captain OE is figure out how to separate this scroll into its constituent parts, then process them, and then stow them in the most convenient parts of the cockpit. Everybody has their own method. Our aircraft logbook containers are aluminum and usually contain one sharp edge that's great for tearing the paper, but I can do a passable job tearing it straight by hand. It's not as easy as it sounds - while there is a lot of white space (ie wasted paper) in the scroll, it seems that there's absolutely none of it between the sections you need to tear apart. Therefore one needs the touch of an artist to rip the paper crisply and cleanly, leaving the adjoining text on each of the adjacent sections untouched.
Once I've ripped off the releases and flight plan, I'll wedge them between the thrust levers so my FO can access them since they are both required early in the FOs duties. Next comes the performance data. I roll this into a mini-scroll with a diameter of about 3", then squish it so it's a flat wad of 4" pages. This makes it the perfect size for a nook on the right side of the center pedestal. This too, I leave for my FO, as performance data is part of their duties. Finally I tackle the weather package, always the longest piece of paper.
I spend more time perusing the weather packet than any I do on any other preflight duty. I consider it insurance against a FAA violation. Even on good weather days, there is plenty of potential for a "gotcha!" to be hiding in that weather package. A big problem is that there's so much information to digest that it's easy to miss something. You'll have several hours of METARs for departure, destination, and alternate airports, plus TAFs, NOTAMs, PIREPs, winds aloft, SIGMETs, and convective SIGMETs. The NOTAMs section is often the longest section (particularly during airport construction or forest fires), and the ripest for a "gotcha!" hidden among its contents. Most pilots don't spend nearly enough time on it, I think.
Incidentally, Horizon had longer weather packages than NewCo. Besides the above elements, they included area forecasts and AIRMETs, as well as reports, forecasts, and PIREPs for enroute weather. I liked that. While it was more for the Captain to work through, and was unnecessary on good weather days, it really helped situational awareness on bad days. I dislike flying somewhere 1000 nm away and having no idea what the weather is like enroute should I have a mechanical diversion. We can access weather reports and charts via computer at the gate (and I do very often) but there's no way to print them out and take them with you.
Once I'm finished with the weather package, I roll it back up and stow it in a cubbyhole on the back of the center pedestal, where it's easily accessibly to both me and my FO. Then I return to the dispatch releases. I review them to make sure all the information is correct, and once I'm content that the flight can be safely completed as planned, I sign them both. One of them I fold up into a 1"x8" square with the fuel planning info and filed flight plan facing outward; this fits perfectly where the center pedestal and main instrument panel come together, and makes for easy reference in flight. The other copy gets handed out to the customer service agent along with our weight and balance paperwork just before the aircraft door is closed. I file the copy that we keep with the company at my home base when I complete the trip. The two release copies are the only parts of the pre-flight paperwork package that gets saved; everything else gets thrown away after the flight.
When I'm well into my preflight flow, I return to the flight plan page. This has a more detailed breakdown of the fuel planning numbers on the dispatch release; I'll review these to make sure they're legal numbers and I'm comfortable with our fuel load, and enter them into the Performance Initialization page on our FMS. Then I use the waypoint list to verify that I correctly entered the flight plan into the FMS earlier in my preflight flow. I fold up the flight plan page and stow it in a slot at the top of the glareshield where my FO and I can easily reach it. During the clearance briefing, my FO will use it to again verify that I entered the flight plan correctly. Bad data entry is a prominent cause of screwups and worse in glass cockpits, so we take cross-checks pretty seriously.
There's one other piece of paperwork to take care of before we go. At NewCo, we do our weight and balance manually, using good ole' fashioned arithmetic and a circular mechanical calculator for figuring center of gravity. This is recorded on a weight and balance form with a carbon copy. The copy gets handed out the door with the second copy of the release, along with the bag count form given to us by the rampers. The original weight and balance form gets trashed after we record the information on our copy of the release.
We're in the process of flight testing our forthcoming electronic flight bag. The first thing it will let us eliminate is Jeppesen charts, which due to frequent updates are a huge source of wasted paper in aviation. Our company and aircraft manuals, too, will electronically reside on the EFB. Later, I suspect that some portions of the preflight paperwork package will be beamed to us on the EFB. We'll still need a few hard copies of the release for regulatory purposes, but most of the clutter will be cut down. Until then, at least the JungleBus cockpit has plenty of nooks and crannies to put it all in!
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Eye of the Storm?
"NewCo? Why the heck would you go to NewCo?"
My friend (and one-time sim partner) Jill asked me that in June of last year. Dawn and I were at a barbecue at Jill's house, and quite a few other Horizon pilots were there. As tends to happen when pilots gather, the talk soon turned to flying. I'd mentioned that I was working on getting a one year leave of absence to fly Metroliners for Ameriflight. Everybody agreed that was a pretty nutty move. Almost as an aside, I mentioned that I'd recently put in an application at NewCo. Nobody knew who they were except Jill, whose father was a 747 Captain at RedCo. She knew about the flowdown in place at NewCo, and merger talk was already swirling around RedCo. I could understand her disbelief that I'd give up a stable job with one of the best regional airlines to gamble on a startup with such an uncertain future.
Going to NewCo was indeed a roll of the dice - the ultimate outcome of which, I hasten to add, is still very much in question. For the moment, however, it's a very good place to be. It's one of the few airlines still hiring. There are actually quite a few airlines that are furloughing pilots. Horizon is one of them, as they transition both Q200s and CRJ700s out of their fleet and replace them with fewer Q400s. My friends still at Horizon are facing 10 to 12 year upgrades. Lately I've been calling them less and less frequently; not only is it rather depressing to hear their woes, but I feel like I'm gloating when I update them on my situation.
When airline pilots get stuck at struggling carriers or get furloughed, they rightly tend to chalk it up to a stroke of bad luck in a volatile industry. When luck goes their way, though, many hold it up as proof of their superior genius. I can make no such claim in this case. Dawn actually had to talk me into attending my NewCo interview. How could I know, a year ago, that oil prices would double and make three quarters of the regional airline fleet obsolete? The only thing I can take credit for is seeing the handwriting on the wall at Horizon, and even that was staring me in the face for several years before I could bring myself to admit it. As early as January of 2005 I had a good friend leave Horizon for Skywest and strongly urge me to do the same.
The reality is that most people looking to get hired at their first airline will throw out applications to every regional hiring, and will accept the job at the first airline that hires them. Where their career goes from there is utterly luck of the draw. The seniority system prevents one from switching companies without significant penalty, so one's fortunes are inextricably intertwined with the those of their employer - which can change daily in this industry! I feel horrible for all those who went to quality airlines like Horizon or ExpressJet and are about to find themselves on the street. Many are younger kids who can move back in with Mom & Dad if all else fails, but a significant portion are mid-life career changers with families to support. NewCo is hiring some of these pilots, but there aren't many other places to go right now. Many will flight instruct or fly freight at below-poverty wages. A few of those will die in the process. Such is this industry. The public perception of us as overpaid grandees grows in irony by the day.
As for me, my fate remains to be seen. For the moment, NewCo is an oasis of calm. I'm enjoying Captainhood immensely; I'm advancing in the ranks steadily as junior pilots upgrade. I even have a pretty decent line next month. This all may well prove to be merely the eye of the storm, as the combined RedCo/WidgetCo might yet furlough and flush every current NewCo pilot off the property. I'm more optimistic than I was a few months ago. RedCo and WidgetCo pilots have already negotiated and approved a joint contract which contains a three year no-furlough clause effective the date of merger closing. RedCo management and their union signed a letter of agreement (LOA) that puts several programs in place to mitigate furloughs until then. It already eliminated the expected furloughs for this fall. I don't think any of this will save me if the economy goes south in dramatic fashion, though.
It's instructive that the very favorite moments in my job occur when I'm disconnected from the earth's surface, when the industry's woes and union politics and dealings with other employee groups that've been screwed over a few times too many all melt away into the ether and I can simply enjoy moments of rare beauty shared by the few of us lucky enough to call the sky home. I experienced such a moment early yesterday morning, just after departure from Louisville. We climbed through a thin layer of clouds in the lower flight levels, and everything turned very pink for a moment, illuminated by the rising sun. Then we broke out into a brilliantly clear sky with a continuous gradient of color ranging from orange in the east to cobalt overhead and a deep purple in the still-dark west. The pink layer of wispy clouds rushed only feet below us at tremendous speed, and I caught our shadow ringed by a brilliant halo bouncing back and forth. In that moment it didn't matter who I flew for or how stable my job was. It made me very happy to think that halfway across the continent, a Horizon pilot would experience a similar moment and enjoy their job every bit as much as I do.
My friend (and one-time sim partner) Jill asked me that in June of last year. Dawn and I were at a barbecue at Jill's house, and quite a few other Horizon pilots were there. As tends to happen when pilots gather, the talk soon turned to flying. I'd mentioned that I was working on getting a one year leave of absence to fly Metroliners for Ameriflight. Everybody agreed that was a pretty nutty move. Almost as an aside, I mentioned that I'd recently put in an application at NewCo. Nobody knew who they were except Jill, whose father was a 747 Captain at RedCo. She knew about the flowdown in place at NewCo, and merger talk was already swirling around RedCo. I could understand her disbelief that I'd give up a stable job with one of the best regional airlines to gamble on a startup with such an uncertain future.
Going to NewCo was indeed a roll of the dice - the ultimate outcome of which, I hasten to add, is still very much in question. For the moment, however, it's a very good place to be. It's one of the few airlines still hiring. There are actually quite a few airlines that are furloughing pilots. Horizon is one of them, as they transition both Q200s and CRJ700s out of their fleet and replace them with fewer Q400s. My friends still at Horizon are facing 10 to 12 year upgrades. Lately I've been calling them less and less frequently; not only is it rather depressing to hear their woes, but I feel like I'm gloating when I update them on my situation.
When airline pilots get stuck at struggling carriers or get furloughed, they rightly tend to chalk it up to a stroke of bad luck in a volatile industry. When luck goes their way, though, many hold it up as proof of their superior genius. I can make no such claim in this case. Dawn actually had to talk me into attending my NewCo interview. How could I know, a year ago, that oil prices would double and make three quarters of the regional airline fleet obsolete? The only thing I can take credit for is seeing the handwriting on the wall at Horizon, and even that was staring me in the face for several years before I could bring myself to admit it. As early as January of 2005 I had a good friend leave Horizon for Skywest and strongly urge me to do the same.
The reality is that most people looking to get hired at their first airline will throw out applications to every regional hiring, and will accept the job at the first airline that hires them. Where their career goes from there is utterly luck of the draw. The seniority system prevents one from switching companies without significant penalty, so one's fortunes are inextricably intertwined with the those of their employer - which can change daily in this industry! I feel horrible for all those who went to quality airlines like Horizon or ExpressJet and are about to find themselves on the street. Many are younger kids who can move back in with Mom & Dad if all else fails, but a significant portion are mid-life career changers with families to support. NewCo is hiring some of these pilots, but there aren't many other places to go right now. Many will flight instruct or fly freight at below-poverty wages. A few of those will die in the process. Such is this industry. The public perception of us as overpaid grandees grows in irony by the day.
As for me, my fate remains to be seen. For the moment, NewCo is an oasis of calm. I'm enjoying Captainhood immensely; I'm advancing in the ranks steadily as junior pilots upgrade. I even have a pretty decent line next month. This all may well prove to be merely the eye of the storm, as the combined RedCo/WidgetCo might yet furlough and flush every current NewCo pilot off the property. I'm more optimistic than I was a few months ago. RedCo and WidgetCo pilots have already negotiated and approved a joint contract which contains a three year no-furlough clause effective the date of merger closing. RedCo management and their union signed a letter of agreement (LOA) that puts several programs in place to mitigate furloughs until then. It already eliminated the expected furloughs for this fall. I don't think any of this will save me if the economy goes south in dramatic fashion, though.
It's instructive that the very favorite moments in my job occur when I'm disconnected from the earth's surface, when the industry's woes and union politics and dealings with other employee groups that've been screwed over a few times too many all melt away into the ether and I can simply enjoy moments of rare beauty shared by the few of us lucky enough to call the sky home. I experienced such a moment early yesterday morning, just after departure from Louisville. We climbed through a thin layer of clouds in the lower flight levels, and everything turned very pink for a moment, illuminated by the rising sun. Then we broke out into a brilliantly clear sky with a continuous gradient of color ranging from orange in the east to cobalt overhead and a deep purple in the still-dark west. The pink layer of wispy clouds rushed only feet below us at tremendous speed, and I caught our shadow ringed by a brilliant halo bouncing back and forth. In that moment it didn't matter who I flew for or how stable my job was. It made me very happy to think that halfway across the continent, a Horizon pilot would experience a similar moment and enjoy their job every bit as much as I do.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Airline Refugee Camp
"So what'd you do before this?"
It's a pretty standard question asked between pilots flying together for the first time, usually in the early stages of the trip. Inquiring about each other's background opens a rich vein for conversation, but also gives a Captain the means to gauge his FO's experience level and adjust his style accordingly. At most regionals, the majority of FOs are at their first airline. The more experienced FOs might answer the last job question with a reply of "I did the corporate charter thing for a few years," or "I was a freight dog for a while." The average response would likely be "I flight instructed for a year." The last few years, God help us all, the answer could even be "I just passed my commercial-multi checkride!"
NewCo is an interesting exception to the rule. Our hiring minimums are very high for a regional (ATP minimums with 1000 multi); that, along with the recent glut of furloughed pilots industry-wide, means that almost everyone came here from another airline. Nearly every regional and even a few majors are represented. Just to list the people I've met or flown with: ACA (Independence Air), Air Wisconsin, American Eagle, ASA, ATA, Big Sky, Champion, Chautauqua, Colgan, Comair, Commutair, Delta, ExpressJet, GoJet, Horizon, jetBlue, Mesa, Mesaba, Midwest, NWA, Piedmont, Pinnacle, Republic, Shuttle America, Skyway, Sun Country, Trans States, and a few others I'm forgetting. A good visual representation of that diversity can be had by going to our crew room and looking at the flight bags on the racks, all adorned with stickers from the above airlines and airplanes from the B1900 to the B777. I jokingly refer to NewCo as "Airline Refugee Camp."
A lot of cockpit conversations center on what life was like at each other's previous airlines. Although I've found that pilots worldwide are amazingly similar creatures, every airline does have its own unique culture. It's influenced by a number of factors, including geographic location and whether most pilots are natives or immigrés, commuters or living in base, average crewmember age, working conditions, level of unionization, size of crews (one flight attendant vs two or more; it has a huge effect on crew dynamics), etc. This can vary significantly by fleet. Horizon was dominated by Captains who were older family men native to the Pacific Northwest, and that greatly influenced the culture there. However, the Q200 crews had a number of (relatively) young Captains who were not native, many of whom were hired from UND, and that gave the Q200 it's own unique culture. There are some regionals where a majority of pilots are young, unmarried, away from home, and flying with flight attendants of the same demographic; this gives a few airlines a frat house or even summer camp feel. As an example, when a pilot from a certain RedCo Regional was arrested on a layover a few months ago while drunkenly stumbling around the woods wearing nothing but a wristwatch and flip-flops, with a similarly attired flight attendant, nobody from that airline was too surprised. Most regionals lie between the extremes of this airline and Horizon, and the differences are interesting to talk about.
Besides being a good source of conversation, our pilots' various airline backgrounds give an interesting peek into how different companies do things. Each airline is so standardized and you get so used to doing things a certain way that you forget there's more than one way to skin a cat, and feline epidermis removal methods vary pretty widely across the industry. When we come across a situation where NewCo's procedures seem strange, invariably I'll say something like "Hmm, at Horizon they did it like this..." and then the other guy says, "Wow, at Comair it was completely different, we did this...." The same goes for aircraft idiosyncrasies. I'm coming to realize that the JungleBus was designed by throwing together various features from Boeings, Airbii, Bombardiers, previous E-Jets, and the odd Antonov or two.
Everyone had their own motivation for coming here. Some, like me, were stuck in the right seat on a stagnant seniority list. Some were furloughed, or in the process, or had seen the handwriting on the wall. Many were originally from Minneapolis or the upper Midwest and looking for an opportunity to come home. A few were retired and looking for some extra income. For more than a few, life was so bad at their last regional that any change was necessarily an improvement (here's looking at you, Mesa!). A lot of our pilots have suffered career setbacks and you might expect that to lead to embitterment, but I've found most are just happy they were able to make the jump to NewCo. Giving up one's seniority and years invested in an airline is tough to do, so I like to think that our pilots are a proactive bunch by nature and that contributes to the optimistic mood here even as we face the possibility of a mass furlough as a result of this merger.
Although being an "Airline Refugee Camp" is the defining characteristic of NewCo's culture now, that will probably change. Eventually the flow of furloughees will dry up, and a new generation of experienced flight instructors and freight dogs unable to get a regional job for years will fill the ranks. Alternatively, it's possible that in a year or two NewCo's roster will be filled with RedCo and WidgetCo furloughees and the Camp will have an entirely new band of Refugees. As for the rest of us? It's never too late to add "freight dog" to one's resume!
It's a pretty standard question asked between pilots flying together for the first time, usually in the early stages of the trip. Inquiring about each other's background opens a rich vein for conversation, but also gives a Captain the means to gauge his FO's experience level and adjust his style accordingly. At most regionals, the majority of FOs are at their first airline. The more experienced FOs might answer the last job question with a reply of "I did the corporate charter thing for a few years," or "I was a freight dog for a while." The average response would likely be "I flight instructed for a year." The last few years, God help us all, the answer could even be "I just passed my commercial-multi checkride!"
NewCo is an interesting exception to the rule. Our hiring minimums are very high for a regional (ATP minimums with 1000 multi); that, along with the recent glut of furloughed pilots industry-wide, means that almost everyone came here from another airline. Nearly every regional and even a few majors are represented. Just to list the people I've met or flown with: ACA (Independence Air), Air Wisconsin, American Eagle, ASA, ATA, Big Sky, Champion, Chautauqua, Colgan, Comair, Commutair, Delta, ExpressJet, GoJet, Horizon, jetBlue, Mesa, Mesaba, Midwest, NWA, Piedmont, Pinnacle, Republic, Shuttle America, Skyway, Sun Country, Trans States, and a few others I'm forgetting. A good visual representation of that diversity can be had by going to our crew room and looking at the flight bags on the racks, all adorned with stickers from the above airlines and airplanes from the B1900 to the B777. I jokingly refer to NewCo as "Airline Refugee Camp."
A lot of cockpit conversations center on what life was like at each other's previous airlines. Although I've found that pilots worldwide are amazingly similar creatures, every airline does have its own unique culture. It's influenced by a number of factors, including geographic location and whether most pilots are natives or immigrés, commuters or living in base, average crewmember age, working conditions, level of unionization, size of crews (one flight attendant vs two or more; it has a huge effect on crew dynamics), etc. This can vary significantly by fleet. Horizon was dominated by Captains who were older family men native to the Pacific Northwest, and that greatly influenced the culture there. However, the Q200 crews had a number of (relatively) young Captains who were not native, many of whom were hired from UND, and that gave the Q200 it's own unique culture. There are some regionals where a majority of pilots are young, unmarried, away from home, and flying with flight attendants of the same demographic; this gives a few airlines a frat house or even summer camp feel. As an example, when a pilot from a certain RedCo Regional was arrested on a layover a few months ago while drunkenly stumbling around the woods wearing nothing but a wristwatch and flip-flops, with a similarly attired flight attendant, nobody from that airline was too surprised. Most regionals lie between the extremes of this airline and Horizon, and the differences are interesting to talk about.
Besides being a good source of conversation, our pilots' various airline backgrounds give an interesting peek into how different companies do things. Each airline is so standardized and you get so used to doing things a certain way that you forget there's more than one way to skin a cat, and feline epidermis removal methods vary pretty widely across the industry. When we come across a situation where NewCo's procedures seem strange, invariably I'll say something like "Hmm, at Horizon they did it like this..." and then the other guy says, "Wow, at Comair it was completely different, we did this...." The same goes for aircraft idiosyncrasies. I'm coming to realize that the JungleBus was designed by throwing together various features from Boeings, Airbii, Bombardiers, previous E-Jets, and the odd Antonov or two.
Everyone had their own motivation for coming here. Some, like me, were stuck in the right seat on a stagnant seniority list. Some were furloughed, or in the process, or had seen the handwriting on the wall. Many were originally from Minneapolis or the upper Midwest and looking for an opportunity to come home. A few were retired and looking for some extra income. For more than a few, life was so bad at their last regional that any change was necessarily an improvement (here's looking at you, Mesa!). A lot of our pilots have suffered career setbacks and you might expect that to lead to embitterment, but I've found most are just happy they were able to make the jump to NewCo. Giving up one's seniority and years invested in an airline is tough to do, so I like to think that our pilots are a proactive bunch by nature and that contributes to the optimistic mood here even as we face the possibility of a mass furlough as a result of this merger.
Although being an "Airline Refugee Camp" is the defining characteristic of NewCo's culture now, that will probably change. Eventually the flow of furloughees will dry up, and a new generation of experienced flight instructors and freight dogs unable to get a regional job for years will fill the ranks. Alternatively, it's possible that in a year or two NewCo's roster will be filled with RedCo and WidgetCo furloughees and the Camp will have an entirely new band of Refugees. As for the rest of us? It's never too late to add "freight dog" to one's resume!
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Long Way Home
Well, if I have any readers left...no, I haven't abandoned my blog. My lack of attention to it even has a good excuse attached. Our internet at home (which is to say, the neighbor's wifi that we've been mooching off of) has been down for several weeks, and I've been doing a CDO line so there's no time for updating at layovers. My online time has been limited to an hour here and there at coffee shops.
I need to start carrying a notepad with me to write my posts. That's how I did it in the beginning, but a year or so ago I started writing all my posts from within Blogger. That coincided with a decline in the frequency of my posts, as it takes a pretty conscious effort to begin a post in Blogger whereas random scribbling in a notebook will often turn into something decent. I can actually feel my "writer's muscles" atrophying. Just as skipping the gym for a few days makes it that much harder to go back, not writing for a while really affects ability and motivation. I miss it, so I need to change my habits to write often even in the absence of regular internet service.
I left you last time with a photoblog from Paris and a hint that the return leg didn't go quite as planned. I'm only now calm enough to write about it objectively; at the time I was almost too angry to speak, much less write. It shouldn't have bothered me so much, because we've had a pretty good string on non-revving luck the last few years. It was just the manner in which we got stuck an extra day in Paris that made it seem disproportionately awful.
I had five days off of work, a long weekend of Friday through Tuesday. We flew out on Friday afternoon, on RedCo's direct MSP-CDG flight that arrived early Saturday morning. For our return, RedCo had two flights on Tuesday, CDG-MSP and CDG-DTW. Both were too uncomfortably full to depend on them for getting me back to work in time. However, WidgetCo had several quite empty flights leaving on Tuesday. We settled on a CDG-JFK flight leaving at 9am Tuesday morning, as it had over 90 seats available. Due to the impending merger, we fly for free on WidgetCo; however, we still have to get paper tickets for their flights. I did this and listed on their reservations system before we left the States.
That Tuesday, we woke up early, packed, and descended into the Bastille station of the Metro, which we used in conjunction with the RER for the hour-long commute to Charles de Gaulle Airport. We arrived at the airport before 7am, which was more than two hours early - enough time, we thought, to make the fight.
Alas, French bureaucracy colluded with universal airline worker indifference to frustrate best laid plans. There were two 767's worth of passengers queueing to check in at the WidgetCo counters, with two (later three) agents to check them all in. The queue snaked back and forth several times, then out and around the corner of the check-in desk for a total length of perhaps 200 or 300 feet. It moved at a glacial pace. There was actually a separate desk for non-revs, but we had to stand in line with the regular passengers until our passports could be checked by security personnel. That took over an hour, at which point we were put into the steadily lengthening non-rev line. By the time we got to the front, it was 35 minutes to departure. "You're too late" was the unsurprising verdict.
No worries. There was a WidgetCo flight leaving almost three hours later for Cincinnati with over 40 seats open. I asked to be transferred to that flight, but the agent brusquely noted that our paper tickets said New York, not Cincinnati. Nevermind that they're free tickets, or that every other airline accepts non-rev tickets for approximately the same stage length no matter the printed destination. He wasn't going to let us get on that airplane unless we had paper tickets that said Cincinnati on them. He pointed us in the direction of the WidgetCo ticket counter. We grimly left the line we'd spent two hours in and joined the queue at the ticket counter.
"No, we can't reissue tickets here. We're not allowed to touch them. You'll have to have the RedCo ticket counter change them." I duly trekked down to the RedCo counter, which was closed. It shared counter space with Air France, so I asked an Air France ticket agent whether they could reissue the tickets. "We can't, and we actually staff the RedCo ticket counter. They can't reissue them...but they should be able to issue new tickets if you call your company." Ah-hah, now we're getting somewhere! I ran to a nearby convenience store, purchased an international calling card, hunted down a pay phone that'd actually accept it, muddled my way through the French instructions, and called the RedCo non-rev line. Finally, a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Armed with the ticket code, I ran back to the now-open RedCo counter...where I spent another half hour in the queue. Finally, a supervisor came out from the back office to help me.
"I'm sorry, we cannot issue staff travel passes here."
"Uh, you're a RedCo station, right?"
"Yes, but we use Air France personnel and software. We're unable to issue paper tickets."
"So, um, I'm limited to the two RedCo flights, eh?"
"They're completely full. Perhaps you can come back tomorrow? Actually, tomorrow is pretty full. Thursday perhaps?"
By now we'd been at the airport for nearly four hours and I was getting a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. I returned to the pay phone to list us for the direct flight to Minneapolis, which left at 12:50pm. If we missed that one, there was a flight to Detroit at 2pm. We trudged back to the same long queue that made us miss the first flight, since the WidgetCo check-in was now also RedCo check-in. It was all handled by the same Air France agents. The security personnel insisted that we stand in line for the passport check again, then sent me back to the ticket counter for a bonus round of queue standing because they wanted to see a paper ticket. The RedCo ticket counter of course confirmed that the security agent was wrong and our paperless ticket was sufficient for travel.
Somehow we still had enough time to stand in line, check in, go through security and customs, and arrive at the RedCo gate with time to spare. When we checked in, I inquired about the loads and was told that it was marginal. "Ok, so if we miss this one, can they bump us to the Detroit flight or do we need to relist?" I was told that we could be carried over, same as at any other station.
The Minneapolis flight was full indeed. A few non-revs did get on, but we were several numbers away. There were only a few RedCo agents there (and again, they were incognito Air France agents); the lead agent was openly hostile to non-revs, at one point exclaiming "I am really getting sick of you standbys!" As soon as the flight closed, she made herself scarce. I summoned one of her underlings over and asked to be transferred to the Detroit flight leaving in an hour. "I can't do that, but you can have them do that at the Detroit gate."
We picked up our backpacks and humped it over to the Detroit gate, in another wing of the terminal some distance away. It was deserted when we got there; to our dismay, the first RedCo agent to show up was the one who was sick on standbys.
"We were listed on the Minneapolis flight and didn't make it. Can you transfer us to this flight?"
"Well, are you listed?"
"No, we were told we could be transferred."
"They were wrong. If you're not listed, you're not going."
Mind you, this is completely contrary to the way things are done at every other RedCo station I've been to, but I was quickly finding that they had their own way of doing things here. I ran to a nearby pay phone, retrieved the trusty calling card, listed us for the flight, and returned to the gate.
"Sorry, I can't check you in now. Check in closes one hour before the flight. You're not getting on."
It took every ounce of restraint in my being not to lunge across the desk and strangle the woman. By her rules, one would have to list and check in for the Detroit flight before the Minneapolis flight even left! It got even worse when the DTW flight went out with several empty seats. The agent was absolutely indifferent to our standing.
I made another international call, this time to crew scheduling to inform them that I wouldn't be at my home base for reserve the next day. They told me there was a chance I wouldn't get used, in which case everything would be fine, but for now I was still on call as of noon.
We weighed our options. The RedCo flight loads the next day looked bad, and they wouldn't get me to MSP in time anyways. There was one flight out of Amsterdam that'd get me into MSP in time for reserve; the loads were ugly for that one too, but we still considered it. I even bought train tickets to Amsterdam (210 euros) before we realized that was a lot to spend for a long shot and we'd be getting into Amsterdam late at night without a bed. I checked the WidgetCo flight to JFK for the next morning, and it was quite open. That got into JFK one hour before a RedCo flight left for MSP. If everything worked out right, I'd be home only a little into my reserve period.
At this point it was 4pm; we'd been at the airport for 9 hours, with nothing to eat or drink, standing in lines with heavy backpacks on our backs most of the time. We were too exhausted to take the train back into Paris to enjoy our extra night. I refunded the train tickets and we went to the CDG Hilton. Note: if you're ever stuck in CDG, the Hilton has an awesome airline crew rate of 79 euros (vs a rack rate of 750 euros). That was an interesting experience, seeing how far the Hilton goes to insulate their American clientele from ever realizing they're in a foreign country. The faucets were even American-style, with hot on the left.
Wednesday morning, we got to the airport three hours early, and had no problem getting on the rather empty flight. Our "luck" broke down at JFK, where we landed on time but had a nearly one hour taxi in, making us miss our connection to MSP. The next flight left at 5:50pm with an arrival time of 8pm. I was staying in close contact with crew scheduling this entire time, and they were doing everything in their power to not assign me a trip. Unfortunately, they took several sick calls in quick succession, and told me they needed me in MSP for a IAH flight with a scheduled departure time of 7:05pm. I told them the MSP flight was pretty full and wasn't scheduled to get in until 8, at which point I'd have to race home to get my uniform. They positive spaced me and told me the flight would be waiting on me. At this point I was in full-blown panic mode, with images of my impending firing playing out before my eyes. Dawn left on a flight to DTW at 4:45pm, assuming she'd get to MSP after me.
I could expend more words on that JFK-MSP flight than everything I've written so far, but it's a very long post already. Suffice it to say that severe thunderstorms compounded the usual JFK silliness, and I spent more time on the JFK-MSP flight than the CDG-JFK! I arrived in MSP at 3am. Fortunately, the guy I was to be flying with was having commuting troubles of his own, so they weren't holding the IAH flight just for me. He still hadn't arrived when they junior manned someone to take my place, so in the end I didn't delay the flight any worse than it already was. I still got a MFA ("Missed Flight Assignment") on my line. Strictly speaking, I was in compliance with our contract's commuter clause so I shouldn't have been subject to any discipline, but the company claimed it didn't apply and I wasn't going to have the first test case be an extreme example like coming back from Paris. In any event, I was pretty impressed with the way NewCo handled the discipline: they referred it to our union's Professional Standards committee, which contacted me, got my side of the story, and told me to be more careful in the future. Case closed.
The fact is, there were three flights with open seats that we couldn't get on for various reasons. If I have to be more careful than having three open flights, I'll never be able to go anywhere. However, I have learned one crucial lesson: when France is involved, be ridiculously early and carry a plethora of backup passes for every conceivable situation.
I need to start carrying a notepad with me to write my posts. That's how I did it in the beginning, but a year or so ago I started writing all my posts from within Blogger. That coincided with a decline in the frequency of my posts, as it takes a pretty conscious effort to begin a post in Blogger whereas random scribbling in a notebook will often turn into something decent. I can actually feel my "writer's muscles" atrophying. Just as skipping the gym for a few days makes it that much harder to go back, not writing for a while really affects ability and motivation. I miss it, so I need to change my habits to write often even in the absence of regular internet service.
I left you last time with a photoblog from Paris and a hint that the return leg didn't go quite as planned. I'm only now calm enough to write about it objectively; at the time I was almost too angry to speak, much less write. It shouldn't have bothered me so much, because we've had a pretty good string on non-revving luck the last few years. It was just the manner in which we got stuck an extra day in Paris that made it seem disproportionately awful.
I had five days off of work, a long weekend of Friday through Tuesday. We flew out on Friday afternoon, on RedCo's direct MSP-CDG flight that arrived early Saturday morning. For our return, RedCo had two flights on Tuesday, CDG-MSP and CDG-DTW. Both were too uncomfortably full to depend on them for getting me back to work in time. However, WidgetCo had several quite empty flights leaving on Tuesday. We settled on a CDG-JFK flight leaving at 9am Tuesday morning, as it had over 90 seats available. Due to the impending merger, we fly for free on WidgetCo; however, we still have to get paper tickets for their flights. I did this and listed on their reservations system before we left the States.
That Tuesday, we woke up early, packed, and descended into the Bastille station of the Metro, which we used in conjunction with the RER for the hour-long commute to Charles de Gaulle Airport. We arrived at the airport before 7am, which was more than two hours early - enough time, we thought, to make the fight.
Alas, French bureaucracy colluded with universal airline worker indifference to frustrate best laid plans. There were two 767's worth of passengers queueing to check in at the WidgetCo counters, with two (later three) agents to check them all in. The queue snaked back and forth several times, then out and around the corner of the check-in desk for a total length of perhaps 200 or 300 feet. It moved at a glacial pace. There was actually a separate desk for non-revs, but we had to stand in line with the regular passengers until our passports could be checked by security personnel. That took over an hour, at which point we were put into the steadily lengthening non-rev line. By the time we got to the front, it was 35 minutes to departure. "You're too late" was the unsurprising verdict.
No worries. There was a WidgetCo flight leaving almost three hours later for Cincinnati with over 40 seats open. I asked to be transferred to that flight, but the agent brusquely noted that our paper tickets said New York, not Cincinnati. Nevermind that they're free tickets, or that every other airline accepts non-rev tickets for approximately the same stage length no matter the printed destination. He wasn't going to let us get on that airplane unless we had paper tickets that said Cincinnati on them. He pointed us in the direction of the WidgetCo ticket counter. We grimly left the line we'd spent two hours in and joined the queue at the ticket counter.
"No, we can't reissue tickets here. We're not allowed to touch them. You'll have to have the RedCo ticket counter change them." I duly trekked down to the RedCo counter, which was closed. It shared counter space with Air France, so I asked an Air France ticket agent whether they could reissue the tickets. "We can't, and we actually staff the RedCo ticket counter. They can't reissue them...but they should be able to issue new tickets if you call your company." Ah-hah, now we're getting somewhere! I ran to a nearby convenience store, purchased an international calling card, hunted down a pay phone that'd actually accept it, muddled my way through the French instructions, and called the RedCo non-rev line. Finally, a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Armed with the ticket code, I ran back to the now-open RedCo counter...where I spent another half hour in the queue. Finally, a supervisor came out from the back office to help me.
"I'm sorry, we cannot issue staff travel passes here."
"Uh, you're a RedCo station, right?"
"Yes, but we use Air France personnel and software. We're unable to issue paper tickets."
"So, um, I'm limited to the two RedCo flights, eh?"
"They're completely full. Perhaps you can come back tomorrow? Actually, tomorrow is pretty full. Thursday perhaps?"
By now we'd been at the airport for nearly four hours and I was getting a tight knot in the pit of my stomach. I returned to the pay phone to list us for the direct flight to Minneapolis, which left at 12:50pm. If we missed that one, there was a flight to Detroit at 2pm. We trudged back to the same long queue that made us miss the first flight, since the WidgetCo check-in was now also RedCo check-in. It was all handled by the same Air France agents. The security personnel insisted that we stand in line for the passport check again, then sent me back to the ticket counter for a bonus round of queue standing because they wanted to see a paper ticket. The RedCo ticket counter of course confirmed that the security agent was wrong and our paperless ticket was sufficient for travel.
Somehow we still had enough time to stand in line, check in, go through security and customs, and arrive at the RedCo gate with time to spare. When we checked in, I inquired about the loads and was told that it was marginal. "Ok, so if we miss this one, can they bump us to the Detroit flight or do we need to relist?" I was told that we could be carried over, same as at any other station.
The Minneapolis flight was full indeed. A few non-revs did get on, but we were several numbers away. There were only a few RedCo agents there (and again, they were incognito Air France agents); the lead agent was openly hostile to non-revs, at one point exclaiming "I am really getting sick of you standbys!" As soon as the flight closed, she made herself scarce. I summoned one of her underlings over and asked to be transferred to the Detroit flight leaving in an hour. "I can't do that, but you can have them do that at the Detroit gate."
We picked up our backpacks and humped it over to the Detroit gate, in another wing of the terminal some distance away. It was deserted when we got there; to our dismay, the first RedCo agent to show up was the one who was sick on standbys.
"We were listed on the Minneapolis flight and didn't make it. Can you transfer us to this flight?"
"Well, are you listed?"
"No, we were told we could be transferred."
"They were wrong. If you're not listed, you're not going."
Mind you, this is completely contrary to the way things are done at every other RedCo station I've been to, but I was quickly finding that they had their own way of doing things here. I ran to a nearby pay phone, retrieved the trusty calling card, listed us for the flight, and returned to the gate.
"Sorry, I can't check you in now. Check in closes one hour before the flight. You're not getting on."
It took every ounce of restraint in my being not to lunge across the desk and strangle the woman. By her rules, one would have to list and check in for the Detroit flight before the Minneapolis flight even left! It got even worse when the DTW flight went out with several empty seats. The agent was absolutely indifferent to our standing.
I made another international call, this time to crew scheduling to inform them that I wouldn't be at my home base for reserve the next day. They told me there was a chance I wouldn't get used, in which case everything would be fine, but for now I was still on call as of noon.
We weighed our options. The RedCo flight loads the next day looked bad, and they wouldn't get me to MSP in time anyways. There was one flight out of Amsterdam that'd get me into MSP in time for reserve; the loads were ugly for that one too, but we still considered it. I even bought train tickets to Amsterdam (210 euros) before we realized that was a lot to spend for a long shot and we'd be getting into Amsterdam late at night without a bed. I checked the WidgetCo flight to JFK for the next morning, and it was quite open. That got into JFK one hour before a RedCo flight left for MSP. If everything worked out right, I'd be home only a little into my reserve period.
At this point it was 4pm; we'd been at the airport for 9 hours, with nothing to eat or drink, standing in lines with heavy backpacks on our backs most of the time. We were too exhausted to take the train back into Paris to enjoy our extra night. I refunded the train tickets and we went to the CDG Hilton. Note: if you're ever stuck in CDG, the Hilton has an awesome airline crew rate of 79 euros (vs a rack rate of 750 euros). That was an interesting experience, seeing how far the Hilton goes to insulate their American clientele from ever realizing they're in a foreign country. The faucets were even American-style, with hot on the left.
Wednesday morning, we got to the airport three hours early, and had no problem getting on the rather empty flight. Our "luck" broke down at JFK, where we landed on time but had a nearly one hour taxi in, making us miss our connection to MSP. The next flight left at 5:50pm with an arrival time of 8pm. I was staying in close contact with crew scheduling this entire time, and they were doing everything in their power to not assign me a trip. Unfortunately, they took several sick calls in quick succession, and told me they needed me in MSP for a IAH flight with a scheduled departure time of 7:05pm. I told them the MSP flight was pretty full and wasn't scheduled to get in until 8, at which point I'd have to race home to get my uniform. They positive spaced me and told me the flight would be waiting on me. At this point I was in full-blown panic mode, with images of my impending firing playing out before my eyes. Dawn left on a flight to DTW at 4:45pm, assuming she'd get to MSP after me.
I could expend more words on that JFK-MSP flight than everything I've written so far, but it's a very long post already. Suffice it to say that severe thunderstorms compounded the usual JFK silliness, and I spent more time on the JFK-MSP flight than the CDG-JFK! I arrived in MSP at 3am. Fortunately, the guy I was to be flying with was having commuting troubles of his own, so they weren't holding the IAH flight just for me. He still hadn't arrived when they junior manned someone to take my place, so in the end I didn't delay the flight any worse than it already was. I still got a MFA ("Missed Flight Assignment") on my line. Strictly speaking, I was in compliance with our contract's commuter clause so I shouldn't have been subject to any discipline, but the company claimed it didn't apply and I wasn't going to have the first test case be an extreme example like coming back from Paris. In any event, I was pretty impressed with the way NewCo handled the discipline: they referred it to our union's Professional Standards committee, which contacted me, got my side of the story, and told me to be more careful in the future. Case closed.
The fact is, there were three flights with open seats that we couldn't get on for various reasons. If I have to be more careful than having three open flights, I'll never be able to go anywhere. However, I have learned one crucial lesson: when France is involved, be ridiculously early and carry a plethora of backup passes for every conceivable situation.
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