Murphy’s Law states that “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Murphy’s Law of Airline Pilots states that “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong and on the last leg of the trip before going home.” Well, without fail, this happned yesterday. It was supposed to be an easy 4-leg day…St. Louis to Pittsburgh then up to Hartford, Ct and back to Pittsburgh and then finally home to Richmond. We were supposed to start at 600a and be done by 230p.

We get to the airport in St. Louis at 515a, 45mins prior to departure. We arrive at the gate to find our airplane is missing. Hmm. Further investigations revealed that the airplane we were supposed to fly was one we actually flew 2 days before and it had an inoperative APU (Auxilary Power Unit). An APU basically is a mini jet engine at the back of the airplane which gives us electricity and AIR CONDITIONING while on the ground and the engines are not running. If anyone has been watching the news lately, they’ll see that most of the country is in the grips of a massive heat wave. AIR CONDITIONING would be nice to have! We’re told by the gate agents that maintenance came and took our plane and were working on it. Now we could only assume they were fixing the APU because, yea, that would make sense! Turns out they were acutally replacing the entire unit! Cool! I’ll take any delay if it means we have A/C, esp in the 145 beacuse the cockpit is essentially a mini-greenhouse, and last time I checked, I’m not a plant. So, 2 hours later, the plane arrives at the gate with a fresh APU and frosty-cold A/C. Whew…dodged a bullet! The passengers were also surprisingly understanding. So the gate agents boards the plane pretty much as soon as we get situated in the airplane. I go to do my walkaround of the airplane and find that one of the tires is showing thread…means it needs to be replaced. Now you would thinking coming from Maintenance they might have noticed this, but no. So, the airplane has to be jacked up to change the tire, and you can’t jack the airplane up with people on it…so…people go back in the terminal to wait…again. 1 hour later, we’re finally pushing back for Pittsburgh 3 hours late with frosty A/C and a fresh new tire.

The next two legs were pretty uneventful. On arrival back into Pittsburgh from Harford, Ct, Murphy starts to mess with us. Part of the afterlanding checklist is to start the APU so we can continue to cool the cabin once we get to the gate and shut the engines off. So, I go to spin up the APU, turn the switch to start and…usually there is a clicking and clacking of electrical relays opening and closing…and…of course there was nothing, but a Caution message on one of our screens that says APU FAIL accompanied by a APU HI OIL TEMP. I knew it was too good to be true. We couldn’t get away that easily. A brand new APU with maybe 3 hours on it and it’s broken…unbelievable, and it’s 99 degrees outside to boot. So we pull into the gate, dump the people off, and what comes strolling down the jetway…a fed. Or should I say and FAA Inspector. He informs us that he’ll be riding down to Richmond with us in the cockpit. Just a routine line check. Lovely. Just keeps getting better. FAA Inspectors aren’t nescessarily bad, they’re just kind of stressful and a pain, I think. Sitting there. Watching. Taking notes. Plus, having a third person in an already crammed in a tight non/ A/C’d cockpit makes it even better. Add to that those typical late-day thunderstorms are starting to pop and wouldn’t ya know it, right over our route from Pittsburgh to Richmond.

2 reroutes later, we’re finally in the air, and it my leg going to Richmond. We end up having to fly West almost to central Ohio before we can turn southeast towards Richmond to avoid the worst of the weather adding about 20 extra minutes to the flight. We get to Richmond and I manage a decent landing in a nice crosswind when I know in the back of my mind the fed in the jumpseat is watching every little control input I do.

I felt really bad handing off the airplane to the next crew. It should be illegal to operate that airplane with no APU when it’s that ungodly hot. The temperature in Richmond was 104F / 40C when we handed it over to them…good luck with that, boys…

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….

Better late than never…

 I love flying during the summer time, the changes in the weather can sometimes be like night and day…for instance…cold fronts. We left Dulles last weekend headed for Providence, RI. Dulles was on the south side of the front with hazy skies, low visibility, hot muggy and sticky. Somewhere over New Jersey change happened. The visibility went sky high (horrible pun) and it cooled down. I’ve never seen the air so clear, especially in July!

Our arrival into Providence from the south over Block Island

So, we get into Philly this morning around 930a and don’t show until 530a the following morning…makes for an extra long day to sit! So what to do, what to do. It’s the weekend before 4th of July in the city where America began = lots of people and lots of stuff going on! The weather couldn’t have been more perfect, 75ish degrees and near no humidity.

June is essentially over…where the hell did it go! Almost 100hrs of flying-scheduling is kept me busy in June. I got the 4th off, and I didn’t even bid for it. Bonus! But July will probably be just as busy, with another 90hrs+ scheduled and I’ll be moving…going to be a crazy month. Tomorrow is another busy 6 leg day…Life on the line continues…

The picture above is from my hotel room looking over downtown and the waterfront. Fireworks blowing up on the right.

 

So this 4-day I’m flying a US Airways pairing. Airways pairings are so much less stressful than flying the United side. Namely…no dealings with Chicago or Dulles whatsoever. All the Airways flying is out of Pittsburgh and the busiest place we go to is LaGuardia. A much more relaxed pace! Tonight I’m in UPS-land…Louisville, KY…early to bed…full day of flying coming up tomorrow…blocked right to the max at 7h59m. Whew…until then….

I can’t even begin to explain how much sitting around was done yesterday…brought to you by Chicago O’Hare and thundestorms. Let’s start in Omaha, Nebraska. We were scheduled to depart at 1645…we get to the airport around 1600 look at the boards and our flight just says delayed…never a good sign if it doesn’t say how long it’s delayed for. When we get to the gate the line at the gate is about 20-30 oeople deep. Great. Another good sign. I cut to the front of the line to see the distressed gate agent and ask how long the delay will be. “Significant. Hours.” Was all he could muster in between dealing with the lovely passengers who are all going to miss their connections.

So we get comfortable. Pull out the book, pull out the ipod, and find a corner of the terminal where we can hide from the angry passengers. Scheduling calls about an hours later to inform us that the plane is off the ground (finally) however, our release time to Chicago is almost 5 hours later. Great.

So we kick back and relax (even more) because we’re not going anywhere anytime soon and I engage in one of my favorite aiport pastimes - people-watching. If you haven’t done it, I highly suggest you try it. It’s esp. entertaining when people are delayed hours upon hours. When people lose all control over where they’re going and when they’re going, they want to try to regain some of that control, and the results are usually pretty funny to watch. I feel bad for the gate agents who have to take the brunt of all of the attempt to regain control. I dont know how they do it and I have an enormous respect for them.

Anywho, so when all is said and done, we end up only having 5 passengers on the flight to O’Hare, most of the others got out earlier on flights that diverted into Omaha needing gas before continuing to Chicago. We push off the gate and taxi to the holding pad out by the runway to sit and wait for our slot. About an hour later, just as we’re getting ready to start the engines, ATC calls us and tells us that Chicago is now groundstopped and it’ll be at least another hour before they release anyone to go. Joy. And of course, this happens just after we told the people in the back that we were going to be off the ground shortly. That’s the way it goes, I guess.

So…1 hour and 15 mins later, the groundstop is done and we are finally released. But the delays aren’t done yet, oh no! There’s still normal in-the-air delays going to O’Hare. We eventually get there about 1130 at night, right around 6 hours late…and we still have one more leg to go! Load up a full-boat for Roanoke, Va pretty much as soon as we get the last person off the plane from Omaha. Add in the time difference from Central to East and we didn’t get to Roanoke ’till 230a and to the hotel until about 315a since the hotel doesn’t have a 24 hour shuttle. Ah, the life.

This trip finally ends today! But what’s in the forecast, more thunderstorms…at least we’re staying well clear of Chicago.

So we take off from Dulles yesterday headed for the thunderstorm-infested Northeast. There was a Comair flight that took off in front of us…somewhere over Eastern Maryland:

 ”Comair 212 hold at BROSS as published. Latest word is Boston is groundstopped and you should never have taken off”

Oops. Someone messed up.

Anyways…6 legs yesterday and 5 today. They all kinda blend together…I think we end up in Nebraska tonight…I think…

So…the seniority lists came out tonight. They’re published once a month and basically, in the airlines, seniority is everything. It determines everything from the schedule you get to whether or not you get bumped off a flight when you’re commuting…so it’s pretty important. Well, my number, since hire, has gone up almost 30 places in my base, and almost 100 numbers in the company as a whole! For a small company like ours, it’s a big jump, and I’ve only been here 7 months…kinda crazy.

6 legs tomorrow starts a 4 day trip…gonna be a long day…

 until then…

Hi. Thanks for stopping by. I’ve always wanted to start a blog on my experiences as an airline pilot. Now I finally have the medium! I think it’ll be interesting to look back in a few years and reflect on where I’ve been and hopefully where I’m going.

 Ok, so, let’s see…where to begin. I’m 24 years old and I’m a first officer on EMB-145. I’m sure those of you in the industry will be able to figure out who I work for eventually, but at this point, it’s best if that remains a mystery. Most of my flying is done on the east coast and the midwest United States. I’ve been flying since 2000 and have been flying for the airlines since Jan ‘07. Before that I was a flight instructor for 1.5 years. I’m not even sure I want to do the airlines for the rest of my career, but for right now I’m having a blast!

So that’s me…I start a 4-day trip on Saturday which will take me to far-away destinations like Dayton and Omaha! Fun fun!