Filed under: Uncategorized
So another month is coming to a close. I’m currently on a 4-day trip in beautiful Burlington, VT right now getting ready to go do battle again with the thunderstorms that just love play havoc with every airport on the east coast.
Yesterday was supposed to be a fairly easy day with just 4 legs, and we only had to fly 3 of them. Our first leg was a deadhead leg from Albany to Washington. A deadhead leg for those of you not familiar is a flight where we ride in the back (or in the jumpseat if they need the room) and get paid. Usually for repositioning purposes. Anyways, so myself the captain and the flight attendent were deadheading on the flight. No sooner had I taken my seat then they announce a ground stop for the entire Washington area (Baltimore, DCA, and Dulles) with an update in 2 hours. Essentially a ground stop means nothing goes in and very little, if anything, goes out. So rather than have 50 people sit on the airplane for 2 hours, the captain decided to offload everyone back into the terminal. 2 hours later we’re blasting off for Dulles. Somewhere over easten Pa, the thunderstorm gods deemed it nescessary to move over Dulles again requiring another groundstop. This time we’re already in the air and our options get somewhat limited. They end up making us hold (park in the sky) over Harrisburg, Pa which also happened to be our alternate airport should we not be able to make it Dulles. After about 15 minutes, we’ve reached our “bug-out” fuel which is the fuel quantity remaining that, should we reach it, we’ve already decided we’re going to go to our alternate, get some more gas and try again. So that’s just what we ended up doing. Being in the back, and in full uniform, I might as well have had a sign over my head that said “Ask me anything about what’s going on!” Everyone sitting around me was asking about procedures, connecting flights, pretty much anything. So after about an hour on the ground in Harrisburg, we blast off again for Washington and land there about 30 minutes late, just squeeking by another cell that had just passed over the airport. So 6 hours after our original departure time, we finally arrived in Dulles, but our day hadn’t even started yet! We were hoping that maybe scheduling had cancelled our Syracuse turn and we could just go Burlington and go to sleep.
We’re not that lucky. We get the gate and are met by applause of 50 people waiting for us to take them home. Oh but it’s not that easy! We get to the airplane and discover a procedure that we have to do to determine the fuel quantity in one of our fuel tanks. One of the sensors that tells us how much fuel we have in each tanks was not working correctly. So in order to determine how much fuel we have in each tank, there are magnetic sticks that drop out of certain points on the wing and indicate how many gallons we have. The procedure of dipping the sticks isn’t difficult in itself, but the airplane has to be ‘level’ before we take the readings and the process for determining if it was level essentially caused the airplane to ‘lock up’ a couple of time which required us to ‘reboot’ it. Add 30 extra minutes. The night just keeps getting longer. Fast forward 20 minutes we’re full of 50 folks taxiing to the runway when they tell us they have a reroute. Most big airport have certain points in the sky that the route all of their traffic over to get them into the airspace system, and there’s not very many of these at Dulles, esp. going north. It just so happened that there was a thunderstorm parked right over one of our points which required air traffic control to reroute us. Fast forward 20 more minutes, we finally have our new route and depart for Syracuse about 4.5 hours behind schedule.
I guess one nice thing about being late, esp. going to small airports like Syracuse, is that there is really no need for anyone to go from Syracuse to Dulles late at night since most everyone was probably connecting to another flight which they had now missed. So we get to SYR and they tell us we’re going out empty! No bag, no passengers. A nice relaxing break for once! The rest of the night/early morning was pretty much uneventful. We got back to Dulles around midnight which put us and 50 people trying to get home to Vermont in around 2am. Our company requires us to do a full instrument approach when the tower is not operating at night, much like last night. Even though we could see the airport from 50 miles out, we were still required to do a full instrument procedure into the airport…just to be safe.
Now it’s on to day 3. 4 more legs and I think the airplane we’re picking up doesn’t have an APU which is a mini jet-engine in the back of the plane which gives us air conditioning and helps us start our engines. With thunderboomers in the forecast again, this could turn into a very long day…
Until then….
