Jun 14 2007
Second crossing to Frankfurt
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.
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