Life east of \”30 West\”

We’re a little delayed out of Frankfurt this morning. The international hotels will either give you a delay notification through the television messaging system (like Weisbaden) or with a note underneath your door about the amended pick up time.

Primarily, since the flight is so long and sometimes your max duty day can be short enough not to leave a lot of leeway for going on duty and then getting delayed, it seems like they do a pretty good job of keeping you informed about delays and such.

Frankfurt, by the way, is a great airport to be delayed in because there’s an employee cafeteria which had great prices on all sorts of food, and it’s inexpensive, exceptionally clean and friendly. You can get most of your German favorites served fresh, or one of their daily specials which may be anything.

I guess my biggest challenge this morning is deciding whether to go have breakfast downstairs at the hotel, getting dressed and heading toward the hauptbahnhof for a sandwich or just waiting until arriving at the airport for grub.

**UPDATE** Had the schnitzel!

The other crossing to Frankfurt went well. With each oceanic ‘coast in’ and ‘coast out’, I’m starting to feel a lot more comfortable with the procedures and I think I’ll stop telling the other pilots that “Hey! I’m new!” and probably just go with the flow.

On the way to Frankfurt on the second crossing, we flew over Scotland. The Scottish sound a lot like “Shrek” on the radio, it’s very interesting.

“Del.. TAH WAN zeeeeeeero seeeex, contICT ConTROlllllll aaaaahan won turr-TEE point dddddREEEE sevum FAAAAAAhve.”

We also had what they call a “Pegasus GPS” aircraft. So all of the position reports are done thru SATCOM so the aircraft electronically produces it’s own position reports so we don’t have to speak to anyone across the Atlantic more than probably twice as we chance from Gander radio’s airspace into Shanwick. Plus, with having three intertial reference units and a GPS, the navigation performance is absolutely phenomenal.

We need an RNP, or “Required Navigational Performance” of 12, but I think the most I saw was about 0.04, which is amazing.

Last night, we more or less stayed around the hotel because the chef, who always introduces himself and creates special “crew only” dishes had a pretty good deal. Plus, there’s an American musician that all of the flight attendants are in love with who was playing at the hotel lounge. He’s a guy that they call “Cheyenne” who is a Hawaiian with long black hair and resembles one of the guys from that show with Chuck Norris in it.

He mostly plays a bunch of soft rock hits, but the flight attendants just love it. I guess I got a glimpse of why the “Bingo Crowd” enjoys Wayne Newton so much.

Most of the other crews were downstairs as well and a lot of them are discussing how hard it’s going to be to give up the international gig to go back and fly as domestic captain. So just as I’m arriving to the international scene, there are a lot of other co pilots making the transition to domestic narrowbody captain.

It’s a good sign or a bad sign, depending on how you look at it.

It more or less means that I’ve REALLY kept my career advancement on hold the last few years because I have the seniority to do the same as well, but it’s good that as folks around my seniority are bidding OFF of international, that my seniority will continue to rapidly improve on the ER, which is fantastic. I don’t have the pressures of paying for ex-wives or stuffing a college fund for three children that have their hearts set on studying dance at “Julliard” so there’s not a big drive to rush off to upgrade to captain.

It might be interesting just to stay as ER FO until I can hold ER captain, which is only a couple thousand seniority numbers away which isn’t bad on a seniority list of over 7,000 pilots.

The next day started out with a mid-morning suprise. We were going to be delayed for eight hours because of a late inbound flight, so I was able to go into Wiesbaden during the day and explore the town.

Wiesbaden is an interesting town because a few parts of the city have natural springs set up where warm mineral water flows from fountains, it’s very interesting.

I was the ‘flying pilot’ on the trip back to New York this evening and I’m starting to get a very good handle on the international procedures. I thought I’d never understand the entire flow of the operation, but just as “Staplegun” promised, “…a few ocean crossings and you’ll get the gist of it” and fortunately, he was correct.

Since we were so late and most of the west bound aircraft had already departed, we were able to fly at our requested altitude and a much higher speed.

A little about how the track system works. Each day, the airlines and the various authorities get together and determine six or seven (I don’t know for sure) different “tracks” or paths across the Atlantic ocean. They’ll look at things like winds, weather turbulence, and good dose of “other” and figure out what the oceanic tracks will be.

Like today, we flew “Track D” which on an oceanic clearance looks like this:

OCEANIC CLEARANCE
1825 070612 EGGX
CLRNCE 453
DAL107 CLRD TO KJFK VIA MALOT
NAT D
MALOT 53N020W 52N030W 51N040W 50N50W KOBEV YQX
FM MALOT/1944 MNTN F360
M082
ATC/LEVEL CHANGE
END OF MESSAGE

We’ll generally get this over ACARS, which is like a “Blackberry” of sorts in the cockpit, or thru voice on VHF, HF or I presume SATCOM as well.

Basically the track says that after we’re out of the continental European control area, we’re cleared to JFK via the waypoint “MALOT, Track “D” which is 53N020W (latitude and longitude), etc, then we’ll exit the track system over KOBEV and coast-in over YQX (Gander). They’re expecting us over MALOT at 1944Z and we’ll climb to flight level 360 and maintain mach 0.82″

The important thing about the times that they expect you over the entry point, flight level and airspeed, is that on the North Atlantic Track system, there is no radar coverage and you’re in RVSM (reduced separation) airspace. Your only quasi-guarantee that you won’t run into anyone over the ocean is position reporting (electronic in FMC-equipped aircraft or voice on the HF radio in non-FMC’s) and making darn sure you’re crossing your waypoints at your expected times. Being more than 3 minutes late or early over your position requires a notification to oceanic radio.

So this is my first flight post “training-wheels” with two regular pilots and a regular operation.

Naturally, JFK was a mess departing, but after some negotiation we were able to push back and start the engines within about 30 mins.

The flight across the Atlantic was significantly easier as I had some familiarity with the operation and had seen a lot of the “different’ things before.

Frankfurt is an interesting airport. If I were to say they “over control” that would be a misnomer. They’d like you to keep a certain speed to a certain fix before the runway and both decelerate and slow to a maneuvering airspeed at which you’ll decelerate to landing speed and do so.

I’t’s kind of a mess but it largely makes sense.

After landing, we get to the hotel and the captain, other FO and I head immediatley to the Wiesbaden hauptbanhof to get a bratwurst and a couple of beers for breakfast.

It sounds bizarre but between the beer and the bratwurst and senf, it makes it a lot eaiser to catch some ZZZ’s after arriving.

Germany is fantastic. Whoodathunkit.