I’m taking some grief (from people I don’t even know…. yeah you JC crew people) for not updating this thing. My excuse? Hmm… I don’t really have one.

Anyhow, I had a day from hell yesterday. Actually, it wasn’t really that bad, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

I started in Little Rock at 5am. That nice thing about LIT (and other airports out that way that we fly to) is that they are an hour back and hence a 5am show is really a 6am show and it doesn’t feel so bad. So our 5am show meant a 5am van (show time…. van time… when the airport is only 5 minutes away, what’s the difference?) My alarm (both of them actually as I use my cell phone and then set the hotel alarm clock for 5 minutes later “just in case”) was set for 4:15. 45 minutes is PLENTY of time to get up shower, get dressed and check the weather for the day. Yeah, I’m a geek. I punch in all my destinations in aviationweather.gov before I get started. (Holy Crap! A Link!)

So I am slightly surprised to hear my cell phone making noise and look at the clock and see it saying 3:55. Did I manage to mess up setting my alarm on the cell phone? Better that way, but I cheated my self out of 20 minutes of sleep. But then I get to thinking, that isn’t my alarm ringer. That’s the dreaded “unknown ID” ringing. There are very few numbers that show up that way. In all honesty, there has only been one recently. Crew Scheduling. Having just woken up about 10 seconds ago, my brain doesn’t think fast enough to prevent my arm from reaching over and answering the phone. The conversation goes something like this:

Me: Uh… hello?
Crew Sched (in WAY too upbeat of a voice for the hour): Is this FO Pearson-Pomerantz?
Me: Yeah.
CS: Ok, just want to let you know that we have changed your deadhead at the end up the day. You are still on 3346 but it goes to Philly and then you will take 2555 back to Dayton. Ok?

Let’s pause here for a second. My brain was slowly catching up. I actually could think about my schedule. As I had it it went something like fly Little Rock to Charlotte. Then switch crews (my crew was luckily just deadheading back to Dayton) and fly CLT-PIT and then PIT-DCA and then deadhead home from DCA to Dayton. The thing is that deadheading bit wasn’t going to happen for another 7 hours so why in the name of sweet baby Jesus (or something like that) were they calling me now? Ok, back to the phone…

Me: Hang on… you just woke me up. This is the deadhead at the end of the day?
CS: Yeah. Wait… you show in 5 minutes how did we wake you up.

And then I got a little angry.

Me: You do realize that I am an hour back in Little Rock. I don’t show for over an hour.
CS: Oh… Yeah, that’s right. Sorry. But you have been notified of that change. Have a good one.

Of course by the time I was able to think of a good insult she had already hung up. And of course I wasn’t able to go back to sleep either. The day was getting off to a bad start already.

It got a little better. There was a cab waiting at the hotel to get us to the airport (it normally is late). The cab driver refrained from making strange small talk the whole way there. The line at security wasn’t too long (even when cutting in the “crew line” you still have to wait a while to get through the scanners). There was actually a gate agent waiting to let us out to the plane. The plane wasn’t broken.

Of course we are full going back to Charlotte (we are full everywhere these days). However, we were weight restricted to 49 people and 50 bags. What do they do? They don’t look at the restrictions and load 50 people and 67 bags. I don’t see the restriction either (not really my job to check that unless there is a problem) and send the numbers in only to find we are over weight by 800 pounds. We can fix that somewhat by changing our fuel numbers, but the moral of the story was that 2 standby passengers had to come off. Late departure.

We made up the time going to Charlotte where I switched to another plane for the flight to PIT. Again, we were restricted to 50 passengers and 55 bags. They load 50 people and a jumpseater plus 65 bags. Overweight again. We made it work, but the rampers got very angry when we told them they couldn’t add 4 more bags that just showed up. READ THE RESTRICTIONS PEOPLE!

The flight up to PIT was quick. Our jumpseater (Mesa guy going home) fell asleep as soon as we took off. Those of you that have sat in a CRJ jumpseat know this is pretty hard to do. He was just hanging forward in the shoulder straps. Very funny. Anyhow, I end up having to shoot the ILS 32 to about mins which is always fun and land just as it starts raining pretty hard. Yeah! Nothing like a walk around in the rain!

We plan on a quick turn but due to the fact that the weather in DCA is going to hell quickly and our dispatcher didn’t see the TEMPO TSRA OVC006 in the forecast (temporary thunderstorms and low ceilings means you need an alternate) We delayed for a while we got the new paperwork and fuel taken care of. The potential problem was that the wind was from the south and there are no good instrument approaches into DCA from the south because you can’t land straight in because of the Whitehouse and all the other stuff up there. The lowest we could get was 2 1/4 miles visibility (what you need to see forward when you pop out of the clouds at your minimum altitude in order to find the runway). We got the paperwork right and headed over to DC. By the time we got there the weather was fine and were able to land using the River Visual. Fun Fun.

At this point I headed over to the mainline gates (well, E170 operated by Republic so not mainline) to fly up to PHL. Turns out the flight that scheduling had on my schedule didn’t actually go to Dayton. Because it was Saturday there were no more flights to Dayton. And of course they didn’t even have me listed on the PHL flight. A quick call to scheduling fixed that and I got on board. We pushed about 5 minutes late and then got right off the ground. Of course there was some little kid sitting across the isle from me and he was screaming the whole flight. It normally is a 20 minute flight but we got vectored all over the place and it ended up being 45 minutes. Still plenty of time to catch my PHL-DAY flight. (I was supposed to get into PHL at 2:40 and leave for DAY at 3:30). Anyhow, we pull up to the gate in PHL and we sit for 20 minutes as the jet bridge breaks down. I call scheduling to let them know I am running behind and to see if they will hold the DAY flight as if I don’t get on that I will be stuck in PHL and tomorrow is my 7th day. They say it is running a little late and not to worry. When they say that I am worrying already.

I finally get off the plane (and have to go down on the ramp to get my bags as they didn’t bring them up) and run over to catch the shuttle to the express gates. I get over there and sure enough the flight is running behind. I is now 3:15 (15 minutes from departure) and it hasn’t even left Allentown (where it was coming from) yet. The natives at the gate are getting restless so I head upstairs to the crew room. It used to be kind of nice and as of recently has turned into a dump. Oh well. I manage to kill 45 minutes trying to fix my Sabre account (no luck) and then see in Sabre that the plane in on the ground and expected to depart at 4:30 (it’s 4pm now) So I head back downstairs just as a huge thunderstorm hits the airport. The plane isn’t at the gate yet, but rather waiting just off the gate for the storm to move off so the ramp can re open and marshal them in. And there it sits for 45 minutes. The airport is getting to be a mess with tons of flights canceling and switching gates and people getting angry and of course I’m in uniform so I hide as best I can.

The plane finally pulls up to the gate but there is no gate agent to move the jet way (she actually quit about 30 minutes into the whole thing). Another agent pulls the jet way on eventually and the people get off. Then for some reason the flight cancels. Uh oh. I immediately call scheduling and tell them that if it’s a reposition flight to see if I can ride on it so I can get home. They don’t even know it’s canceled yet but they will get back to me. They call me back 10 minutes later and tell me that I am cleared to go on it. I get let out to the plane and talk with the crew (one of which I went through sim with last month) and find out that the plane is fine, but one of the air conditioning units is broken and the other isn’t working too well and the cabin temp got over 100 degrees. Sounds like a good reason to cancel to me. With just a few people in the back (read: I and the FA and two other nonrevs that I managed to get on) it was actually pretty cold.

So we are all set to push off the gate and get out of there when somebody bangs on the door. The FA opens it and it is the ramp supervisor saying that there is a dent in the back of the plane by the baggage door and they want to take some pictures of it just to prove that it was there before they touched the plane. They then call MX over to verify it isn’t a problem, which it’s not, but end up wasting another 25 minutes. We finally get out of there at 7:45.

I originally was supposed to be home at 2:10. That got changed to 5:10 when they switched my deadheads around. I didn’t get into DAY until 9:15. Blah. At least I have today off which gives me time to do all sorts of stuff, which I’m actually not doing now because I’m writing this. Go figure.

I haven’t disappeared. I promise. I haven’t even let this website go like a whole lot of other ones I’ve had have done. For some reason the (and this is the not tech version) the front end to the back end of the blog stopped working. No idea why it happened, but I was able to patch it back together and it seems to be working ok now. Of course, I really can’t even write much now as I just set my alarm clock for 3:50am. Nice. I hate early morning show times.

A very happy 4th to you and yours. The highlight of my day was doing laundry (about 1/2 done) and watching the Roomba vacuum the floor. Yeah, I worked hard today. I had tried to pick up some open time for tonight (a CLT turn) but was denied. The irony is that scheduling called me around noon today to junior man me for tomorrow to fly the same trip. I didn’t answer the phone of course, but when I listened to the message I called them back and took the trip. Might as well get it out of the way with as they can do 3 JMs a month and we are very short this month. Also, 6 hours of flight pay for about 5 hours away from base is pretty good. After I get back from that I head out on a 3 day trip and then Mom and Kas are coming into DAY for a visit. Good thing I vacuumed today!

Dayton did their 4th of July thing last night. The fireworks were done over the river, about 2 blocks from my house. I could of actually seen about 80% of them sitting my living room but I went up on the roof were about 50 other people were watching them. Over all a slightly disappointing performance, but there were some cool hanging parachute flare type things that were neat. There was a party I was thinking about going to today, but it never worked out. Ah yes, the exciting life I lead.

My schedule for this month started out looking pretty bleak, but due to some trip trades and a personal day later on I will end up with 3 days off, 4 days off, 3 days off and 3 days off. Not too bad over all.

Dad, this one is for you. Extra points if you can name the place: