Some times I wonder why I got into this job and what I would be doing if I wasn’t flying. I really don’t know. I enjoyed worked tech support at Ruby Hospital. I like supervising events while in school and working front and back of house for concerts. This topic came up this evening while heading down to Columbia from Philly. The captain had asked how I got started doing this and after thinking about it for a minute I really didn’t know. For me, it’s a job. It’s a damn good job which I enjoy doing most of the time, but it’s just a job. The benefit of that is, if, for what ever reasons it starts to get not so good, either due to the way the industry is or personal reasons for me, I have no problem with walking away from it. Many of the people I work with have made the idea of them being a Airline Pilot such a core part of their identity that there is no way they could ever stop doing this, no matter how bad it got. In general those are the guys that talk about how they wanted to be a pilot for as long as they can remember, or have dads or uncles who were pilots and grew up in that environment.

On a similar note, last night flying up to Akron from Charlotte we had another Captain in the jumpseat. He was a furloughed mainline guy who is here until his recall comes up (as is the captain I am flying with). Turns out they both worked at Eastern (him as a FA and my Captain as an FO) in the mid 1980s. Needless to say the industry isn’t what it once was. The stories they told were sort of a Catch Me If You Can meets Girls Gone Wild meets The Real World. We’ll just leave it at that.

Today was supposed to be a simple 2 leg day starting very late in Columbia (5pm) and then heading up to Philly and then home to Dayton. I managed to kill time all day reading a book and walking around the neighborhood we stay in (actually, there isn’t too much there so it wasn’t that fun) and showed up downstairs for our van at 5pm. On the ride over I checked the weather on my phone (Treos Rock!) and found that PHL had 4 miles and rain. Also, the FAA had put a delay program into effect and the average delay time was 55 minutes. That didn’t sound to bad, but as we went through security (and cut the line big time) our flight was posted as “Delayed” with no update time.

Once at the gate the agent checked the system and found out that our 6:05 departure had been pushed back to 8:35. That was some rather unpleasant news. I called up dispatch to ask what they knew about it and if they wanted to entertain the thought of either us repoing the airplane directly back to DAY or maybe ferrying our passengers to CLT so they could make connections and then flying back to Dayton. They didn’t like that idea and told us our PHL-DAY flight was full and we would have to get up to PHL somehow, even if it meant waiting until 8:30 to go.

We headed downstairs to operations to get out of the way and get out of the angry passenger’s stares. Once down there I stashed my bag and went out to the airplane (which was already sitting there empty) to call up clearance and ask what they knew about our delay and if they could push anything along. The plane was reasonable cool when I got on but while waiting for clearance to check I noticed it started to heat up. After a quick examination I realized the reason for that was that one of our air conditioning packs was listed as broken and was turned off. Just in the few minutes I sat in the plane the temperature went up 3 degrees in the cabin. Clearance soon got back to me and said there was nothing they could do about the time and maybe our company could push it forward.

I headed back inside to give the Captain and the FA the bad news. They both were slightly dejected when they realized we would be getting back to Dayton rather late but knew that that was just part of the cost of doing business. I then off handedly mentioned the broken pack. The response I got to that was not something I expected. The Captain immediately called Dispatch and told them that he was refusing the airplane.

A little side story here. We have a huge problem keeping our airplanes cool during the summer. First off it doesn’t help that they are painted blue. And dark blue at that. Also, the CRJ 200′s APU isn’t really strong enough to put out enough air to run the two air conditioning packs on it’s own. At idle thrust the engines can’t do it either so on the ground, when it is hot out to begin with the plane just gets hotter and hotter. Add in 50 sweating bodies, and the whole situation can get out of control. A simple fix is to use ground based air carts to pump cold air into the cabin while we are on the gate. If you can get off the gate with out the plane getting too hot, unless you have a REALLY long wait to get to the runway, the cabin won’t get too bad before you take off and get up to altitude where the engines are out of idle thrust and the air is cooler (about 3 degrees c per 1000 feet up). The problem of course is that there are almost no air carts in the system, and the few places that have them either don’t want to spent the time to set them up, or don’t maintain them so they are broken. All of that adds up to really hot airplanes. It isn’t unusual to see 34 or 35 degrees C (almost 100 F) some days. And that’s with BOTH AC packs working.

Now picture only 1 pack. In our case it was the right pack which happens to be the one that supplies air to the cabin. The left pack, which was working, supplies 70% of it’s air to the cockpit and only 30% to the cabin. I’ve flown around single pack before and it isn’t fun. Most captains complain a whole lot about hot airplanes but don’t do anything. Now, here was a captain who was putting down his foot and saying now. With the culture at this company I fully expected him to get a call from a Chief Pilot within minutes of him refusing the airplane. Or at least for Dispatch and the Operations Supervisor to argue with him for a bit. Much to my surprise they didn’t say much. They just asked if he was willing to repo the airplane back to Dayton. With only 3 people on board the temps would be manageable so he agreed. We had paperwork within 20 minutes and about 20 minutes after that were taxiing out for departure. It did get a little warm but we were air born shortly and the plane cooled off nicely as we dodged thunderstorms the whole way up to Dayton.

I’m getting to the point in seniority now where I am really starting to pay attention to what the Captains I fly with do. Soon enough (8 months to a year if everything keeps moving along) I’ll be in that seat, and while I feel ready for it, there is SO much stuff that I just haven’t seen yet. You can’t pre plan everything, and at some point just have to start relying on your judgment, but the more I see the better. This was the first time I ever saw a Captain use their authority like this.

Sure, it certainly inconvenienced 45 passengers. There was only one more outbound flight that night and it was already close to full. Figure the other airlines were in similar situations and not everybody was going to get to where they were trying to go to that night. But to cram 45 people on a hot and under cooled airplane isn’t fair for the passengers and it isn’t fair for the crew. The operations at an airline are a joint venture between a whole lot of people but the buck has to stop somewhere and in the end, at least in the short term, it is the Captain.

Yesterday was just about the longest day I’ve done in an airplane. I was supposed to work a 2 day trip starting Sunday evening in Charlotte, but due to a bunch of things I was trying to get out of the second day but was having no luck. Our contract allows us up to 3 personal days a year. I haven’t used any yet this year and figured this would the the perfect opportunity to do so. I put the request in with one of the Chief Pilots a week prior and of course never heard anything back. I finally called one of them (we have three and they rotate on call status) on Friday and by Saturday night (the day before my trip started) I got a response back that said we were too short FOs to allow me a personal day. Got to love a contract that the company doesn’t follow. My only recourse was to call up scheduling and inform them I was going to have to call out sick on Monday, and if I was going to be out Monday I might as well be out Sunday. Of course, this scared them a whole bunch as they didn’t have anybody to cover stuff so they said they would, at no penalty to me, drop my Monday flying if I could cover some other stuff Sunday. That was fine with me so I was assigned the early morning originator out of Dayton at 5:45 down to Charlotte. They then wanted me to fly a Fayetteville, NC turn and then deadhead back up to Dayton at 1pm. That was fine with me.

Scheduling called me back about an hour later asking if I would be willing to, after my FAY turn, go into rest in Charlotte for 8 hours and then fly the late night terminator at 9:59 back up to Dayton. Since they had helped me out earlier with dropping my Monday flying, I agreed to do it.

So I got up at 3:30 to get to the airport at 4:45 to get on the plane off the gate at 5:45 heading down to Charlotte. This was the first early morning trip I had worked in about 3 months and I was surprised at how awake I actually was. The flight down was pretty easy. There was some good chop at FL280 so we came down early, but otherwise had no problems getting into CLT. Because it was Sunday, even though we were coming in with the rest of the first Arrival Bank, there wasn’t too much traffic and they gave us direct the final approach fix a ways out and let us keep the speed up. After parking I headed up to the crew room to sit out my 3 hours before I did the FAY turn. I ended up have breakfast with another crew (mmm… bagel and cream cheese) and then headed down to the gate. I flew the FAY leg and actually managed a nice landing despite the fact we were very light with only 14 people in the back. Coming back to Charlotte was a game of dodging thundercells starting to pop up, but it was early enough in the day that we got in before the worst started forming. From there I headed over to the hotel to try to get some sleep. I think I got about 4 hours and then just read a book and watched TV (NOTHING was on… I ended up watching BradGolina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith) for a while before heading back to the airport at 6:30.

Of course the flight back to DAY was delayed due to a deadheader we were waiting on coming in from PHL (where the weather was bad). They published a 1 hour delay but of course when it became apparent that the deadheader wasn’t going to make it let us go early. We managed to round up everybody who was wandering around the airport waiting out the delay and get off only about 45 minutes late. Still, that didn’t get us back to Dayton until 11:55 and it didn’t get me home until 12:45.

As I said… long day. Oh, and the kicker? My air conditioning broke so my apartment was 95 degrees when I did got home.

It’s sort of funny. I hadn’t been in AVL in over a year and then in a matter of 24 hours I was here 3 times. We stayed here last night and then flew down to CLT to do a Knoxville turn. We got about 10 minutes out of Knoxville when the radar started painting reds and purples all over the airport and surrounding area. About that time Atlanta Center reported that the airport had shut down due to wind gusts of 50 miles per hour, microbursts and hail. We had no extra gas to play with so we were only able to hold for about 10 minutes and then bug out to Asheville (only about 30 miles away). By the time we got there the weather had moved out so we refueled and headed back to Knoxville and got in with no problems. From there we hustled back to CLT (running about an hour late) where I swapped crews and headed back to, you guessed it, Asheville for the overnight.

The hotel here is ok. We used to stay about 20 minutes away in a Hilton Garden hotel that was right next to a mall so there were tons of food options. We now stay in a Fairfield Inn that is literally right across the street from the Airport. The downside is there is very little food in the area. There is a Cafeteria style place across the parking lot. I hadn’t done one of those in a while so I went there for lunch today. TONS of old people and not so good food. At least I had time to eat. Yesterday my food consisted of a bagel during a 50 minute turn before CLT-TYS and then a crew meal on the 17 minute flight over to AVL later in the day. The turkey sandwich was actually pretty good or maybe I was just really hungry.

Today we had down to CLT and then Columbia, Philly and back to Dayton. The weather looks mostly good so I don’t see to many issues. I only have one day off when I get home and then go back out for a 2 day (a CLT based trip too which means I need to get myself down there). Blah.