Life east of \”30 West\”

Deep Thoughts

Just finished another six day trip and did a short one-day recurrent training event thereafter in Atlanta.

 There’s been a lot of upward movement at the company, many people getting their first captain’s seat, A LOT junior to me which gave me a little pause. 

Domestic captain or international FO?

 By the quality of flying, the people I met and the overall operation, I think I’m going to sit in the right seat for a few more years and transition to international captain. 

It’s not really that far off and it might be worth waiting a little extra longer for my first captain’s seat rather than coming back to domestic.  I can hold domestic captain now, in a few bases with decent seniority, but I’ll betchya in another year I’ll be able to hold 767ER captain.   And hell yeah, I’ll be all over that.

 In New York, I’d made “fast friends” with a lot of the pilots and it seems like the people I’m usually flying with are part of the same “Flying Club” that I enjoyed being a part of in DFW and SLC, but the trips are WAY better.   Corky, Alpha Oscar, CougarBait, “The Force”, Cube, Staplegun how’d I ever go a career without flying with these guys? :) 

I’ve only flown two trips this month and had a phenomenal time with the pilots.  Just like I told a former college roommate over dinner a few days ago, I think transitioning to the ER has really saved my career because I didn’t realize how bored to death I was being the senior know-it-all FO on the MD-88/90.

 Yup, it’s that much fun.  Call me an a-hole if you’d like, but yes, international absolutely freaking rocks.  Change it up, fly to weird places, enjoy the culture.

 Rinse… 

Repeat!

 Recurrent.  Six months?

Yup, every six months.

 On the MD-88/90 program, I did a recurrent every twelve months.  I’d get perhaps two or three landings per day, lots of cycles in and out of hubs and build a much quicker familiarity with the operation. 

Now, I’m getting two or three landings a month so I don’t have the repetitive nature of domestic to grow accustomed to the aircraft like I was able to build so quickly.  Due to the nature of the domestic narrowbody operation, I was able to feel like a pro after a few short months. 

The 767 still feels very new, but luckily, the MD-88/90 taught me not to be a slave to automation, mistrust the autopilot/autothrottle (as another JC’er that works for my airline was able to witness when he sat in on our sim — nice to meet ya Chris! )

 So a combination of no one every getting a lot of time flying the airplane, not dong many takeoff and landings in an average month, the FAA wants ER captains and FO’s to go through recurrent twice per year.  But that’s not a bad thing. 

The “six month” recurrent check is a non-jeopardy event.  We mostly spend the brief talking about the simulator session, there’s no oral evaluation, trade some international stories between one another and a few maneuvers in the simulator. 

Today, we had an item called a “First Look” maneuver.  It’s not briefed, they can’t even tell you what it’s going to be, but it’s a type of pilot “quality control” where they give you a random event, watch how you react and feed that de-identified information back to the training department to see if people are able to react to a non-briefed event.  That way, if people aren’t able to avoid killing themselves, they can reintroduce that into the training cycle. 

Our “First Look” event was a flap malfunction during climb which resulted in us coming back and shooting a pure visual approach into ATL with a massive crosswind.  It’s not a problem, just stay with the airplane, think about the vector that the wind is affecting the aircraft, target the touchdown zone and formulate that the aircraft is going to want to “float” down the runway.  You’re at a high speed because of the flap malfunction so you want to be on speed, on glide path and consider “ducking under” the glide path. 

Oh, no glide slope or VASI.  Do you remember how high you should be when you pass over the first flasher on the approach lights?  That comes in handy when trying to determine if you’re high on the approach.  You’ve got to remember this stuff, work out a plan and execute it off the top of your head in a team.  Real time, no pausing, no brief and you’d better land in the touchdown zone, buddy!

 Next, we did some RNP approaches into Atlanta, Quito and Bogota.  They’re not too bad and we’re really not allowed to accomplish them in the aircraft because not all of our 757/767 fleet has GPS/PEGASUS FMS units installed.  ALL have FMS, some have the PIP FMS boxes… Ehh, minutia that you’re probably not interested in.

 Perhaps you are.  You can have an FMS.

 All FMS units in our fleet have laser-ring gyros.  All of them are “drift corrected” with DME-DME, unless, of course they have GPS drift corection.  The units with the GPS drift correction are massively accurate.

 We took a quick break and a JC user that works in flight operations stopped by to introduce himself.  It was a pleasure meeting ya, Chris!  He got a chance to sit in on the second half of our simulator period.

 This time, we departed London-Gatwick, joined the North Atlantic Track system with me being the flying pilot, and we had an engine failure over the ocean.  There’s a litany of special procedures we need to follow when this happens, including diverting to nearest suitable alternate (adequate and suitable are two different terms, we’ll go into this on another web log entry) which happened to be Shannon, Ireland.

  So, considering I had another JC user in the observers seat, I wanted to make sure I did a decent job with the single engine approach and landing because if I ended up borking the maneuver, I know I’d hear about it on the forum! 

All went well.  I’m good for six more months.

 Six months from now, I’ll do more of a traditional recurrent with an oral evaluation, graded maneuvers and a hell of a lot more jeopardy. 

777 Trivia.

Apparently, when the 777 first came out, the simulator was easier to fly than the real aircraft.  With the 777 being fly-by-wire, many of the operators lobbied Boeing to change the flight control software to fly more like the simulator.   So when you fly the 777 simulator, the real aircraft is programmed to fly the same way! Betchya didn’t know that!