So the 700 is all kinds of fun. As much as I still think that bigger aircraft have no place at a regional airline, I do have to say that the bigger airframe is pretty cool. The good news is I’ve managed not to smack it on landing yet, although I’m sure I will. The nicest thing is with the FADEC throttles you don’t have to constantly adjust the power. Pure Happiness. Trust me. Also, the tail sits up much higher and is larger (duh) making it possible to walk under the back of the plane. Also, the wings are almost high enough to walk under. That’ll be nice next time it rains.

The OE trip I am on is pretty bad, but at least it covers my 4 days of reserve. I’m currently in Tallahassee sitting in my room watching the Red Sox play the Mets on the 3 foot flat panel TV in the room. Yep… living it up.

Sunset out of Charlotte, heading to XNA. That’s a big thunderstorm off to the right.

Yeah, it’s been a while since I graced the blog here. I’ve been busy, or at least some semblance of it. I had 2 days of ground school and then a 4 day trip and then a 1 day trip and then 3 days in the sim and then 2 days in Miami. Busy? Not as much as it sounds, but it does mean that this month has rolled right on by with out me really even noticing it. Good I guess.

Anyhow, the sim was the sim. Meaning, it’s always a pain to go in there and get abused for 3 days straight, but on the plus side you get to reaffirm in your mind that you could in fact get the plane down with a broken engine and other stuff going wrong. I was down there for differences training on the 700. Wahoo, a bigger airplane, but wait… I get paid the same for that as I do the 200. Hmm. So I am really getting paid less per seat to fly the 70 seater then the 50 seater. Yeah, that makes some sense. The 700 doesn’t handle too differently then the 200. It’s a little bit longer and has better engines. Also it’s a whole lot more automated which is nice. Either way. after 3 days of dealing with bad weather (I never saw the runway above 500 feet) and broken parts (engines, gear, flaps, electrics… you name it, it broke) I was glad to finish the PT and get out of there.

Miami was fun. I went to a Warped Tour show with a friend from high school. That was good, however it did rain later in the day so we didn’t stick around to see the bands I actually wanted to see (NOFX and Less then Jake). I did get to see Joan Jett play. It was pretty funny as most of the people there were under the age of 20 and had no idea who she was. Yeah, that makes me sound sort of old at 24 I guess. I flew back up to Dayton on Sunday morning and ended up having to take a jump seat on both legs (MIA-ATL-DAY). Thanks to the Delta 757 guys for getting me out of MIA. Also, thanks to ASA who is now is CASS for getting me home. However, this is where the rant comes in…

The crew on the ASA flight (which was booked full) didn’t actually know they were in CASS, but after they checked it with their ops people cleared me to sit up front. A 6 year CA and a 2 year FO. Anyhow, we taxi out and then shut down on the taxi way due to weather shutting down the field. For 2 hours. Yeah ATL. Anyhow, we are talking about all sorts of aviation stuff and we get talking on contracts. A little background… ASA is currently in year 4 (I think) of trying to negotiate a new contract. Basically due to the Railway Labor Act which we fall under, contracts don’t end, they simply become amendable. Because of this it is often in management’s best interests to let the contract drag on as long as possible because they can continue to pay the old wages and provide the old benefits. Nice huh? Anyhow, ASA has been going at it for 4 years now and there really hasn’t been any end in sight. There union has just put a strike vote out, meaning if it comes back as yes, they can request permission to strike. Good enough.

What got me annoyed was the captain was talking about how he was going to vote yes, but he really didn’t want to. As far as he was concerned it was mostly about pay and what the company had offered actually looked pretty good to him. Fine. The problem was that he agreed that what the company offered was really bad for junior FOs and super senior CAs. BUT HE DIDN’T CARE. HE WASN’T ONE OF THEM. What the hell. That’s what is wrong with this industry. The national motto of ALPA really is “I got mine. Screw you.” Sad. He said that he really didn’t think FOs should be paid any more then they are as they didn’t have the responsibility that captains did, and he survived just fine on FO pay so why can’t other people. Grrr.

Moral of the story? Get the airlines out from under the RLA restrictions and force management to come to the table.

An F16 touching down in Montgomery, AL

I had one of those moments last night flying from CLT to Tri Cities where I remembered why I like this job some times. We were above a slightly broken overcast with the display lighting set for night (which for the past few trips I’ve been on has been FULL BRIGHT per the captain). At least this was dim and allowed me to see the stars. Anyhow… It just was nice. Of course they slammed us down towards the runway into TRI and because our windshield had been washed earlier in the day (badly) it was like trying to land in a heavy fog due to the fact I couldn’t see anything out the front. Moral of the story? I banged it in pretty good. Oh well, you can’t have it all.

Industry commentary: Delta is dumping the pension plans. No surprise there, but bad news all the same.

Spent the past two days in 700 Differences. Fun Fun. The FAA mandates 14 hours of training so it was two “full” days. The problem is that the amount of material we have only is good for about 5 hours of training. We took lots of breaks to say the least.

We ended up having a mini ATP get together over here last night. 5 of us. 4 from here and one from Xjet. Good times. I finally got a chance to use the grill up on the roof. Nothing like electric ignition and propane.

My Roomba came today. What fun. It’s actually pretty amusing to watch it stumble around. There were only 2 times it got stuck and one of them was because I trapped it with my foot. Not too shabby for a robot vacuum cleaner. Over all the floor was clean when it was done. Also there was a fair amount of dust/dirt in the collection bin. I’m still not sure if it will return to it’s home automatically when it is done cleaning or if it will just sit there and beep sadly and wait for me to get it home. We’ll see I guess. Maybe some pictures of it tomorrow too.

I finished up my 4 day today with a relatively painless 5am van out of Charleston, WV. I walked out of the elevator and saw an old roommate of mine from JAX who is now at ASA. It was good to see him and we managed a remarkably coherent conversation for the early hour. CRW was fogged in (like it always is) but we had enough visibility to depart and broke out into clear skies about 100 feet off the ground. From there is was a turn in Charlotte and then down to Jacksonville, FL. We sat down there for 1 1/2 hours. I managed to grab a cookie at Starbucks and then headed back to the plane to read. From JAX it was a quick hop back to Charlotte where I sat for 3 hours and then dead headed back to Dayton and was home by 5:30. At least the weather was nice. The whole trip wasn’t too bad with the exception of the weather on the 2nd day (see the last post) but I was flying with good captains so the trip did go by quickly.

It’s June which means there is a new picture gallery getting started.

Sunset through the cloud layers heading to Charlotte from Rochester, NY.

Yesterday, seemed to drag on pretty much for ever. We started at noon in Lexington, KY (after a rather snazzy breakfast at Cracker Barrel) and ended about 45 minutes late, 12 1/2 hours later in Gainesville, FL. Not a bad day over all really, but due to the weather it was draining. I’ve been flying in legs this trip (because all the flying is in and out of Charlotte and we alternate legs I’ve been doing the outstation to Charlotte legs while the captain has been doing the Charlotte to outstation ones.)

LEX-CLT wasn’t too bad. There was a fair amount of building cells enroute but with some deviations around it turned into no big deal. As we got in close to Charlotte we were able to dodge most of the build ups and pulled up on the ramp just as a rather large line of storms rolled in from the west. A quick bit of background… CLT uses a traffic light system to alert the ramp of closures due to weather. The lights are normally out. If lighting is spotted within a certain distance (via human eye or some sort of monitoring system) the lights go yellow. This means that a closure may happen soon. If the lighting is closer the lights go red and the ramp closes which means EVERYTHING stops and a 15 minute clock is started. As long as there are no strikes within the set distance for the 15 minutes then the ramp goes back to yellow and eventually green. However, every time there is a strike during the 15 minute period the clock resets. Annoying? Yes. Safer? Defiantly. The number of rampers getting hit by lighting has come down a lot since the system went into place. The problem with the system is that because everything stops you can be midway through boarding (with no jet way) and the rest of the people are stuck inside. Or, half the bags can be loaded and the other half are left sitting out on the ramp getting rained on. The absolute worst is you dodge all sorts of weather to land, just beat the storm to the airport and then sit waiting to be marshaled in to the gate for an hour while the storm rolls over.

Anyhow, we landed in front of the storm and taxied as quickly as we could to the ramp. Of course we got held up at the ramp because the controller was having problems moving two airplanes around (she is one of the worst controllers on the north ramp) and eventually made it to our gate just as the rain drops started to fall. I have never seen a plane be unloaded of pax and cargo so quickly. By the time I got the walk around done everybody was off and most of the carryons were already being brought up. In the end they didn’t close the ramp anyways so it didn’t matter.

After a 2 hour sit (where I should have gotten food but didn’t) we headed back out to go to Rochester, NY. There was still weather in the area and they closed the northern departures. Nothing like spending an hour sitting out by the runway waiting to go. When they eventually did open up the north they didn’t really have a plan for getting the parking lot that the ramp had become moving. Normally, the first plane to park will be the first plane to go. Nope… not today. Instead ramp calls up and says “Ok, you are all cleared to go. Taxi to spot 2 and call ground.” So of course it’ a mad dash to start the engines and get in line. We didn’t do so well in that race. Once we actually got off the ground it was a pretty easy flight up to ROC. The weather up there was fine so that made it easier too. We did a quick turn in ROC and headed back down to Charlotte.

Of course there would have to be another line of weather rolling through so we ended up ducking and weaving a whole lot (not to mention having to slow down and get vectored all over the place for spacing. No big deal really. We broke out of the clouds at about 4000 feet and I managed to pull off one of my nicer landings. Of course the ramp in a mess and after we park I end up throwing bags to help out. Fun stuff.

Back into the airport (which has become a zoo because of all the delays) and grab something to eat. Our next flight was supposed to leave 10 minutes ago but we decided food was more important. We load up for Gainesville and taxi out. Amazingly we are only number 10. The plane behind us (a company 700) got confused on the sequence and asked ground who he was supposed to be behind. Ground told him that he was following a Mesa 900 coming around the corner. The Mesa plane started flashing its landing lights. Thinking about it now it wasn’t that funny but at the time I couldn’t stop laughing. Tired I guess. We finally made it to number one and took off with a very quick turn to the easy to avoid an area of nasty weather.

During the day it is possible to stay visual and avoid most of the weather. We have radar on board the aircraft but it is some times hard to interpret what you are seeing and what is out there. At night you can only rely on the radar and while it will show the areas of heavy precipitation it doesn’t show everything. Of course it is now 10:45 at night and dark as can be. We are in clouds and bouncing through heavy rain (as seen when we turned on the landing lights). Fortunately the ride is relatively smooth for what we are going through but every once and a while there is a bright flash from a lighting bolt somewhere. At night and especially when in the clouds, the flash from lighting travels for long distances. You KNOW when it is very close, but when it isn’t right there, how far away it is can be hard to judge. And then you have discharges.

As the airplane moves through the air it creates friction. When the air is charges (in the case of near thunderstorms and rain) the static charge builds up even more. Think about rubbing a balloon and then sticking it to your hair. Anyhow, there are small wicks that hang of the airplane that discharge any electricity that builds up on the airframe. The generally work pretty well but when there is a large amount of charge other things start to discharge as well. The first place you generally see this is the windshield wipers. There is a small bolt that hold the wiper to the arm. It starts to glow purple. Then the whole blade starts to glow purple. After that you will start to get St. Elmo’s fire, which is a fan pattern of electricity that moves across the windshield as it discharges. Sometimes it covers the whole pane of glass and sometimes just a small part. We went for the whole show. For about 30 minutes the windshields were strobbing every few seconds. The wipers were glowing and every once and a while the whole nose cone would start glowing purple like Rudolf the (Purple) Nosed Reindeer. When that happens you are SO tempted to look at it (as it is truly amazing to see). The problem is that you know what comes next. There is a HUGE bright flash of light that even if you have your eyes closed still makes you see red through your eyelids. Also the radios tend to fuzz in and out due to the electricity in the air. All and all it makes for an interesting show.

After about 30 minutes of that we broke out of the clouds into Florida and began a slow descent into GNV. The tower was closed (good thing we weren’t Southwest or we would have had to go back to Charlotte) and after a little bit of a search found the airport and landed. Thankfully our show time today isn’t until 3:00 so I was able to sleep in until 9. My plan was to go sit by the pool and study 700 differences for next week. Of course right now the rain is coming down and there is lighting all over the place. On the plus side I am getting wireless from the other building (this one doesn’t have wireless) so all is not a total loss.

Well, that about does it for this post. A little bit long I guess but a boring day in Gainesville will do that. I think the Indigo Girls wrote a song about that. Huh.