I know it’s been slow. I’m working on something.

Any time now. Maybe.

I actually worked today. After not flying for more then 2 weeks, they gave me a two day trip. Deadhead to Charlotte, fly a Fayetteville turn, sit for 3 hours and then head to Chattanooga for the overnight. So here I sit in a hotel for the first time in a while. I was looking back on my schedule and over the past few weeks I think I spent more nights in a row in my own bed in maybe 3 years.

The streak has ended.

At least this isn’t too bad of a hotel.

Oh, and the good news is, I still remember how to fly.

Yes, I’m still here. I just haven’t flown too much in the last two weeks. I had 4 days of reserve, of which I flew only one leg down to Charlotte and then deadheaded back. Then I had 5 days off to go to a Union conference about negotiating with management. It was actually very interesting and I feel like it as worth my time. I just got back from that today and start a 4 day reserve stretch tomorrow.

It’s been a busy few weeks anyways. There are all kinds of rumors running around because of the slow down in the industry. Fuel prices have pushed many managements into pulling down flights that don’t make money so the regionals have lost some flying and the attrition rate (the people leave to go to other airlines) has slowed down. Because of that we have canceled all of our upcoming upgrade classes as well as all the new hire classes. Also we are offering people voluntary leaves of absence. If you can afford no pay for a month it’s a pretty good deal as they are letting you keep your travel benefits and ID so you can go places. Hopefully enough people take the leaves, otherwise they may force some people into leaves… ie furlough. That’s always an ugly thing.

Fortunately for me I am senior enough I probably wouldn’t be put on the street (unless the company just about shut down) but I very possibly could be pushed back to the right seat. I’m not overly worried about it. It’s rather unlikely right now, and if it does happen, it happens. However, lots of other people are VERY worried and making noise. Generally, I don’t think about it too much myself, but every where I turn it’s about all I hear, which of course reminds me about it. Frustrating to say the least.

Day at a time.

We have multiple ways of navigating. The most basic is looking out the window, seeing where we want to go and pointing the airplane in that direction. If where we want to go is beyond the range of our vision (or we are in weather that is preventing us from seeing) we can use other navigation systems. In general these systems can be divided into two types. There are ground based navigation aids, which are basically radio beacons on the ground that we can navigate to or from (or intercept a certain radial off of) or “Area Navigation” systems which allow us to know our exact point in space and navigate directly to another point in space. The Area Nav systems are considered more advanced because with them you aren’t stuck traveling a straight line path between two known ground navigation aids. You can go direct to any spot as long as you know your current position at all times.

The most common of these Area Nav systems is GPS (although it wasn’t the first). Just like a car navigation GPS system the plane tracks a series of GPS satellites. The satellites keep very accurate time, and by measuring the time it takes to get a signal from a specific satallite the onboard GPS system knows exactly how far is is from the satellite. The satellites are geosynchronous (meaning they orbit at the same rate the earth moves so they are in essence fixed in space) so once the plane knows how far it is from 3 different satellites it knows it’s exact position in space. (Picture 3 dots with circles drawn around them. Those circles will ONLY intersect at one point).

Other Area Nav systems are IRU (internal/inertial reference units) which gyros and accelerometers to track changes in motion. The system was originally developed for submarines and once an initial position is entered it can track location for days with very little “drift”.

Our Flight Management System, or FMS, (basically a navigation computer) tracks position using a combination of GPS, VOR/VOR (basically, the same theory as GPS but using ground based radio aids) and DME/DME (which just measures the distance from two radio aids on the ground and figures out an intersection point. It combines all or some of these data points and comes out with a blended “fix” and that’s our current position.

We use that position to navigate from point to point in space along a route that is given to us by ATC. The route is defined mostly by ground based radio aids (mostly VORs or Very High Freq Omni Direction Ranging) but also by arbitrary “fixes” that are only defined by a lat/long set of coordinates. Our FMS keeps track of not only where we are, but also where we are going (among a whole lot of other things) and draws a route map for us. It also generates the exact heading we need to fly (even taking into account winds) to get to the next fix (either real radio nav aid or made up waypoint) on our route. It passes these commands to the flight control panel, which, when we put the system in “navigation” mode passes the data to the Flight Director. The FD shows a visualization of how the airplane should be pitched and rolled to get us to where we want to go. When the autopilot is turned on it just follows the FD commands and gets us to our destination.

Now, one to the story…

We were just rotating to the west out of Birmingham, AL on the second to last leg of the trip. My FO was flying and at 1000 feet they turned us to the south in the start of a turn back east, direct to Atlanta and then North East, back to Charlotte. There is a large ridge line with some big towers just to the south of the city and I was dividing my time monitoring the flight path, my FO’s flying, and the terrain outside and inside on my display screen when I noticed the terrain (inside, not outside) had suddenly went away. There was also a white message that said TERRAIN DISPLAY FAIL. Shortly there after a yellow “FMS DR” message appeared which means the FMS is no longer able to use any of the above mentioned methods of position fixing and has gone into “dead reckoning” mode. Basically, it knows where it was, and it knows how long is has gone in what direction, but it doesn’t know how anything about wind drift. Basically it has no idea where you are. Fun stuff.

When stuff like this happens, there is (hopefully) always another layer or redundancy built in. In these case we just reverted to ground based navigation using VORs (Atlanta, Greenwood and then Charlotte). The one thing about using VORs as opposed to the FMS to navigate is you need to manually set your course to and from each station, and because the Flight Director really wasn’t designed for VOR navigation and tends weave back and forth while tracking, you often times have to use the heading mode and just track a certain course to keep the navigation needle centered. Not a big deal, but slightly more work.

My FO managed pretty well, and fortunately the flight was very short. 45 minutes later we were descending into Charlotte as the last rays of the setting sun vanished behind a darkening overcast sky. We rolled out and I took the plane to the gate where the plan was for us to swap to another aircraft before heading up to Dayton. Of course, it being day 4, that couldn’t happen as planned. Our new plane was still sitting on the ground in Louisville with a maintenance problem and no planned departure time. The plane we currently had was scheduled to stay in Charlotte overnight. So the OBVIOUS thing would be for us to keep the plane we had (which MX was able to fix the FMS problem on) and take it up to Dayton. And that’s what happened, but only after I had to called Dispatch twice and make a general pain of myself.

As I turned the plane north towards Dayton an hour later (and only 45 minutes behind schedule) the delayed Louisville inbound passed us going south to Charlotte, only their beacon visible through the murk.

Yesterday turned into a “let’s play in the bad weather” day. We started in Cinci, just beating out a huge line of thunderstorms when we took off. The Captain that brought the airplane in told us “point the nose east and go fast”. As was we were able to work our way south a bit before heading east to Charlotte. Once there we loaded back up and headed to Memphis with 70 people and 13,000 pounds of fuel. There were two distinct lines of weather, both running north-south, with the first on around Nashville and the second just west of Memphis. By taking a southern routing we were able to avoid the first line, but had to go through the second to get into Memphis.

This was my FO’s first real experience with heavy duty thunderstorm weather, so it was good he got to see it. As was, we ended up going west, past Memphis to the south, almost all the way to Little Rock before we found a nice hole (maybe 3 miles wide) to slip through and then come up the back side of the weather. For me, one of the more fun things to do in the airplane is use the heading bug and the autopilot to dodge cells. We lucked out in finding the hole to get through and enjoyed a pretty smooth ride until we descended into the small build ups below 10,000 feet. Fortunately for us, the finals for the runway were clear of any large build ups and we broke out at about 3,000 feet. After my FO made a nice landing I took the plane and taxied in to the gate.

We loaded up another 70 people and headed back out just as the rain started coming down. There were no other departures so we were cleared right on to the runway where we took a quick radar sweep and requested a heading to the west after take off. They gave it to us and we blasted off into a very dark sky. I made the turn to the west at 500 feet and kept the Flight Director off as I was banking more then it’s allowed 25 degrees. Realizing I hadn’t hand “raw data” (no flight director) since I got in the left seat, I kept it off as they cleared us to deviate in a right turn back towards Nashville. I think I managed to avoid most of the clouds as we climbed out and ducked through a wide gap in the weather. Once we got about 50 miles east of Memphis we were in a solid layer, but the radar wasn’t showing anything. The ride remained mostly smooth all the way back to Charlotte.

Despite the west rerouting going to Memphis adding almost 20 minutes to our trip, we made up the time and touched down in Charlotte only 1 minute late. We were flying the same plane we had had the day before when the door popped open, but so far it hadn’t given us any problems. That ended when I opened the thrust reversers and the left one failed to deploy. The Reverser Fail message was followed by a “HYD SYS 1 LOW” message and several other associated lights and messages. Turns out that when I cycled the reverser the Number 1 Hydraulic system burst a line somewhere and all the fluid vented. Fortunately, on the ground, the number 1 system doesn’t do much so we were ok to taxi to the gate. Maintenance came out took one look and said the plane wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

Luckily for us (and our passengers going to Fayetteville) there was a spare aircraft so we made a mad dash through the airport to get the other plane ready to go. Even with the delay we were ready to go on time, and managed to get into FAY only a few minutes late.

Today is the last day. We deadhead back to Charlotte in about an hour and then fly a Birmingham turn and then head north to Dayton, where 5 days off await me. Yippie.

Some times everything is going so well, you just KNOW something is going to come along and mess it up.

Today started in Little Rock just before noon. The plane was running late inbound so I had time to grab a bagel and eat breakfast/lunch. We got aboard and turned the plane quickly and with the help of a friendly tailwind managed to get to Charlotte only 9 minutes late. From there we headed north up to Allentown, PA. The flight up was mostly smooth with a limited amount of traffic. As my FO descended into the Allentown area there were about 10 little airplanes all over the place. Approach was doing their best to keep everybody separate but ended up putting us nose to nose with another airplane just as we turned in bound to the runway.

Fortunately our TCAS (basically a system that monitors the airspace around the plane for “intruders” and then gives resolutions based on the projected merging flight paths) caught it and started yelling instructions to climb. Of course, we were trying to descend to the runway, but traffic avoidance comes first and up we went. After climbing about 600 feet the little Cessna went underneath us and the FO leveled off and then started descending back down. At that point we saw the runway and were cleared for a visual approach. He did a really nice job of getting stabilized and making a good landing.

We are flying double legs this trip meaning each of us will take two legs in a row. That way nobody is stuck always landing in Charlotte as all we do is turns out of there. So after flying up to Allentown I took over the flying duties. The trip down to Charlotte was relatively straight forward. We left Allentown a few minutes early and due to some shortcuts we got to Charlotte almost 15 minutes early. That gave us almost two hours on the ground before we were to head up to Cincinnati, plenty of time to grab some dinner.

After stuffing my face (well, actually I just had a small sandwich and some soup) we loaded up 45 people and a jumpseater who was a former student of my FO and pushed off the gate. The line was pretty short and about 20 minutes later I rotated the plane off of runway 18R headed for CVG. At about 50 feet I called for the gear up which my FO did. That’s when the problems started. As the gear came up there started to be a very loud hum and vibration from the right side of the nose. As we accelerated it got louder until it was very hard to hear the radios or each other. We started climbing to 8000 feet, and as long as I kept the speed below about 200 knots we could at least hear each other. I gave the controls and the radios to my FO while I called our MX Control on the second radio. They agreed with my assessment that the comm door had been left open and that we needed to return to Charlotte.

The communications door, is a small door on the right side of the airplane that covers a communications panel. It’s where the ground crew can plug in a headset so they can talk to use in the cockpit. Some times, when they unplug the headset after pushing us back their either forget to close it, or close it but the latch doesn’t catch and it opens up at some point later on. Even with it open there is little danger in flight of doing damage to the actual comm panel, but the door could come off and damage the airframe or go into an engine. Also, the noise is really annoying. So for all those reasons I let Charlotte know that we would like to return to the field.

After a few vectors and a quick landing brief we were lined up for Runway 23. Fortunately we were under our max landing weight already, otherwise we probably would have had to circle around to burn off gas to land. I managed my nicest landing of the trip so far and we taxied in to the gate. Maintenance met us there while they made a quick inspection of the door (which was in fact open) and the area around it. Finding nothing broken they signed off the logbook, and after a quick refuel we were underway. Total time at the gate: 20 minutes. Not bad at all.

There was no line now so we were airborn (in a much quieter airframe) 5 minutes later, and got to CVG only an hour late.

The not so perfect end to a not so perfect day.

At least the weather wasn’t too bad.