Location: 100 miles east of Pittsburg, PA

Altitude: 34,000 feet

Airspeed: 300 knots

Temperature: -54 degrees C

We are clawing our way westward in the face of a 150 mph headwind. The same wind that pushed as along between Birmingham and Philly earlier in the day is now making life miserable as head towards Dayton and the end of our trip. In an attempt to reduce the wind we’ve climbed up 4,000 feet up from our planned cruise altitude of 30,000 feet but as of yet it hasn’t made much of a difference.

My FO is a downgraded captain and a good friend giving me the double benefit of trusting him and knowing he will take an active role in the flight. Too often the FO gets in the right seat and conforms to every stereotype in the book. When I was an FO I tried very hard (sometimes too hard) to stay involved and provide advice and feedback as needed. Most of the guys I’ve flown with since upgrading do the same thing but every once in a while you end up with somebody who is happy to be a paperweight. Fortunately that’s not the case this evening and together we work through our fuel, airspeed and time numbers.

The situation is actually pretty good despite the wind in our face. The weather in Dayton is forecasted to be ok at our time of arrival however later it is supposed to deteriorate with snow showers and wind. Our considerate dispatcher gave us an alternate even though we really didn’t need it. The benefit of that is that we’ve got all kinds of extra play fuel. Our new cost indexing software (basically a computer crunches all kinds of numbers including the cost of fuel, the winds, the temperature, the cost of maintenance and spits out an airspeed to fly) is telling us to go fast. Really fast. That’s good for us as it will get us home sooner, but the faster we go the more fuel we burn.

With the power levers almost all the way forward we are managing 80% of the speed of sound (about 500 miles per hour) through the air however, thanks to the wind, we are managing just 330 miles per hour over the ground. It still beats doing 65mph down I70. As the flight computer clicks down to 45 minutes remaining the glow of Pittsburgh through the solid overcast passes off our right side. Somewhere down in the darkness and under the clouds the Ohio River snakes it’s way southward forming the border between Ohio and West Virginia. I take one last look at the constellations of stars overhead as ATC gives us a descent. Away from the light pollution on the ground, and with the cockpit lighting turned down, I am always amazed at how many thousands of stars there are up there.

90 miles out and down to 16,000 feet we are still fighting over 100 mph of wind. The weather in Dayton is still holding, although now Indianapolis is reporting light snow. Dayton is landing to the east which means we will have to fly past the airport and then turn around and come back to land adding several minutes to the flight time. Indy Center hands us off to Dayton Approach who immediately improves our evening by offering us the opposite direction runway because of the light winds. We take it and my FO, who is flying this leg, rebriefs the approach.

Out of 10,000 feet I turn on our landing lights and the no electronic device sign. The lights briefly illuminate nothingness and then we drop into the tops of the clouds and the familiar gray swirling mist appears in the light beams. Several seconds later the aircraft issues a single ding to alert us that we are picking up ice. I throw three switches to direct hot engine air to the leading edge of the wings and the engine cowls to keep ice from forming. By 7,000 feet we are out of the clouds and the light from Dayton come into view. With the runway now in sight we are cleared for a visual approach.

The FO dumps the autopilot and starts the turn towards the field. As we pass through 1,000 feet the final flaps come out and the before landing check list is completed. To the west, approaching from the opposite direction is an American Airlines MD80 whose landing lights are clearly visible. I have a moments concern but then he checks in with tower reporting an 8 mile, giving us plenty of time to land and clear the runway, which we do.

I take the plane back from the FO and taxi to the gate. 10 minutes later all of our passengers are off the plane and we are heading up the jetway ourselves. Outside it is bitterly cold and the first snowflakes are starting to fall as I walk out to my car.

Today I had hot reserve starting at 5am. I managed to actually sleep for the first 4 hours of it in our “quiet room” (a quick note: it’s neither quiet or a room, but rather a large closet directly off of the Mechanic’s break room which means you hear EVERYTHING that goes on in there), which for me is pretty good. I spent the rest of the day until 3pm catching up on some Union stuff and talking to some people. By 3:05 I was in my car headed home and calling scheduling to be released. They released me but told me to call them later for a reserve time for the next day. Normally we call between 7pm and 9pm, but coming off of hot reserve we are typically given the time right away.

I called back at 8pm this evening and was told I have a 1pm reserve time for tomorrow.

Yeah, that’s right. 1pm until midnight, although I’d be legal to fly to 4am.

So let’s think about this. On day 1 I get up at 4am to get to the airport by 5am to be available to work between 5am and 7pm. Then, on day two I get flipped around to be available to work from 1pm until 4am. Does anybody see anything wrong with this?
And yet this is legal and has been going on in the industry for years despite the NTSB’s listing fatigue as one of their “most wanted” items for the FAA to fix since the 1960s.

I’m guessing the strange show time is for one of two reasons. Either there is a late night maintenance repo that needs to go to Clarksburg, WV for a heavy check, or because the weather is supposed to be bad in Charlotte tomorrow they want to keep crews available later in the day. My money is on the flight to West Virginia as it is very unusual for this company to think ahead a few hours let alone a full day.

I’ll know tomorrow I guess.

Bombing down the ILS into Charlotte the other day, I got to thinking about the big sky theory. Basically it states something like, the likelihood of a midair accident is very small because the sky is very big. I completely disagree with this theory for two reasons. First off a modified Murphy’s Law says that if something bad can happen, it will and secondly, while the sky is indeed very big, many aircraft tend to operate in the same area of it. Sure, there is in fact plenty of open sky over Bermuda, but there probably aren’t that many airplanes operating out there.

I’ve written before about mid air collisions as well as what ironically are known as “near misses” (which as many comedians have pointed out should really be called “near hits”). Just recently the company I used to work for lost a plane just west of Fort Lauderdale due to clipping another air craft in flight. It’s a sad reality of the job we do. However, there are lots of procedures and devices in place which attempt to keep us safe.

The most basic of these is our eyes. The concept of “see and avoid” does in fact work far more than we give it credit for. My closest two “near misses” occurred when I was instructing out in Phoenix. The airspace out there is incredibly busy and it wasn’t unusual to be keeping track of three of four other aircraft while trying to teach your student some maneuver. There was a common radio frequency that people would make position reports on and there were some common land marks to use. After a few weeks in the practice area I got pretty good at being able to keep a mental map of just who was over “Mr Volcano” (a small hill that looked sort of like a volcano) and who was over the “green fields east of I-10” doing steep turns. The system generally works pretty well as long as everybody makes reports and uses common phraseology.

The first close call I had came when I was working with a student on slow flight. During slow flight you slow (duh!) the airplane down to it’s slowest speed. The book says that during slow flight any increase in pitch or decrease in airspeed will cause the airplane to stall. During this maneuver the nose of the plane tends to be very high to keep level flight due to the lack of airspeed. My student was doing a nice job of holding things steady at 6000 feet and I was just about to tell him to recover when I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye. I had been listening to the practice area frequency and knew that nobody had reported that they were working in this area, and I had been reporting our position every 5 minutes, but the passing shadow was enough for me.

I grabbed the plane from my student and pushed the nose over just as very thin wing of a glider passed over the top of us by about 30 feet. As we started to descend out of 6000 feet the rest of the glider blew by. Gliders often don’t have radios because they have no electric system, so obviously they weren’t talking and it was only because I saw the shadow that we got out of their way. To this day I have no idea if they ever saw us at all.

The other close call occurred while we were doing ground reference maneuvers below 1000 feet. These basically involve the student using an object on the ground (I think we were using a parked car in the middle of a field) to perform some maneuver around. As my student rolled out at the end of the maneuver we ended up nose to nose with a Blackhawk Helicopter which was about 500 feet off the ground following one of the canals that bordered the field. Again, I had been making position reports but because the Blackhawk probably only had military band radios (they operate on UHF not VHF like the rest of us) and because they probably didn’t monitor the practice area frequency they had never heard me. Stuff like that happens and most of the time it works out ok. Sometimes it doesn’t and that’s when stuff makes the papers.

In my current job we are almost always flying under Instrument Flight Rules which means that ATC has to protect that airspace around us. That leads to much fewer traffic conflicts because the areas we operate in require mostly everybody to work under IFR as well. There are times when we go into uncontrolled airports or are climbing out or descending into smaller controlled fields were we will end up with a traffic conflict but they are rare. And during those instances our final layer of protection, TCAS, comes into play.

TCAS, which stands for Traffic Collision and Avoidance System creates a bubble around the airplane (out to about 40 miles) in which any target that enters which has a working transponder is interrogated by the system and plotted on screen. If our projected path and their projected path come within a certain distance (normally around 1000 feet vertical separation and 5 miles horizontal separation) the system will alert us to the problem by turning the target into a yellow circle on our display and verbally announcing “traffic, traffic”. If the project paths continue to merge closer than that the system will turn the target red and provide escape guidance in the form of a climb or descent. It will also verbally tell us to climb or descend and increase in urgency as needed.

Thankfully escape guidance alerts (called RAs or Resolution Alerts) are relatively rare, but can be life savers when they occur, especially if you are operating in the clouds and can’t see anything, which brings us, finally, back to our story. Heading into Charlotte with the weather down to about 300 foot ceilings and 2 miles of visibility, approach had lined us up for the ILS to 18L. They were also landing 18C (which used to be 18R until they renamed it due to the west runway, the new 18R, opening soon) which meant there were airplanes dropping down out of the soup less than one mile off our right wing.

Because of this they stagger the approaches so two airplanes don’t come in right next to each other. It is possible to have two planes approach wingtip to wingtip in the clouds but it requires special equipment (on the ground) and special training for the flight crews We are trained to do it, but Charlotte is not, so they have to keep the planes staggered coming in.

We’d just sat on the ground in Raleigh for over an hour waiting for our slot into Charlotte and now, despite the long delay (and almost all of our passengers blowing their connections) Approach told us to keep our speed up as there was traffic right behind us. That was no problem so my FO kept us at 200 knots until outside the final approach fix where he started slowing. In the meantime I’d been keeping an eye on a TCAS target about a half a mile to our west and 3 miles in front of us. It was an aircraft landing on the parallel runway, but with our 200 knot approach speed we were rapidly over taking him. During a nice day arrival this wouldn’t matter (and in fact I would have taken some pride in beating him to the airport) but due to the separation requirements during low visibility arrivals I had a sense we might have a problem.

Sure enough just before my FO asked for the gear and flaps to 30 degrees Tower canceled our clearance, turned us 30 degrees to the left (away from the other airplane) and climbing us up to 4000 feet. At this point we were already over an hour late so an extra 15 minutes of shooting the approach again wasn’t going to matter. However I was a little annoyed that they had asked us to keep our speed up and pretty much run us right into the back of the plane in front of us. It happens, but preferably not when we are running late already.

The good news was they sequenced us back in quickly, which is almost unheard of for Charlotte, and we were back on the ground 5 minutes later and the even better news is knowing the system does in fact work to keep airplanes apart in the air.

Location: 30 miles Northwest of Beckley, WV

Altitude: 31,000 feet and slowly climbing

Airspeed: 71% of the speed of sound

Temperature: -41 degrees Celsius

A 170 mile an hour west wind is blasting the left side of the airplane as we head north towards Detroit and our last stop of the day before we can head back to Charlotte and the end of the trip. To compensate for the wind the autopilot has pointed the nose of the airplane about 45 degrees to the left of our course, a number that has grown progressively larger over the last 5 minutes as the wind has increased. The good news for us is that we aren’t heading directly into it, and only about 30 miles an hour of that is pushing us backwards. The bad news is a combination of the wind and the high clouds are causing an incredibly rough ride.

15 minutes earlier and well south of the Beckley VOR we had leveled off at our planned final altitude of 30,000 feet but after getting slammed around for 10 minutes we had put our faith in a report of a mostly smooth ride from another airplane at 34,000 feet. We asked for 34,000 as well but the best ATC could do was give us 32,000. Now slowly clawing our way higher with a full load of passengers and both the wing and engine anti ice systems robbing the engines of thrust I was beginning to wonder if we’d make it to 32,000. The book said we could but a rapidly dropping airspeed indicator and a minuscule climb rate was making me wonder.

Finally, as we passed 31,400 feet the airplane decided it was ok with climbing and the airspeed started increasing again. Unfortunately the bumps did as well. After a particularly hard series of jolts I decided to make a quick PA, although verbally reassuring the passengers that we probably weren’t all about to die wasn’t help all that much with people who were suffering from motion sickness. Mission accomplished I went back to splitting my attention between the airspeed tape (which was now holding steady), the altimeter (which was creeping higher), the vertical speed indicator (which was bouncing all over the place in the bumps but holding a positive rate) and the weather radar which is all but useless at higher altitudes as it doesn’t paint frozen precipitation, which at -40 degrees is pretty much all there is.

The ride at 32,000 (once we finally got there) was a little bit better, but the next 30 minutes of flight time as we crossed over West Virginia and Ohio was mostly spent just holding on to something. ATC eventually started us back down again and as we passed between cloud layers the ride settled down. Once we descended below 26,000 the ride smoothed out completely, making me wonder if maybe we should have descended instead of climbed to find a better ride.

Now just 80 miles to the north Detroit was reporting light snow and 2 ½ miles of visibility with a 1000 foot ceiling. That wasn’t good news. The forecast had been for a mostly nice day and we hadn’t gotten an alternate were carrying just our minimum 45 minutes of emergency fuel. The situation got even worse when, as I was discussing options with the FO another weather report came out showing the visibility was now down to 1 ½ miles due to the snow which had picked up. A quick look at a map (I actually carry a Rand McNally road atlas to get a general sense of location) showed Cleveland or Akron were probably our best bets but with only 45 minutes of fuel, and even less if we actually shot the approach and had to go around, those would be long shots. If stuff got really bad I figured Flint or Grand Rapids would work, although we didn’t have approach plates for either place. I took a second to mentally kick myself for not requesting more fuel back in Charlotte but then moved on to dealing with what was rapidly turning into mess.

15 minutes out had us descending through 12,000 feet and breaking into clearer skies. A frozen over Lake Erie was visible below us, and in the snowy hazy to the north we could just make out the lake shore. Cleveland Center passed us off to Detroit approach who turned us towards the airport. Now down at 5000 feet the snow covered ground was clearly visible below us but there was a low layer of clouds to the northwest with snow squalls visible on the leading edge of them. Approach turned us on to the ILS and dropped us down to 3000 feet. As the needles centered up I could just make out the end of the runway 10 miles away, right at the edge of the cloud line.

Approach handed us off to tower who cleared us to land. At about 1500 feet the runway momentarily disappeared behind a cloud but seconds later we broke through and it came back into sight. I mentally thought through a landing on a partially snow covered runway (get it down, don’t worry about softness, get the reversers out and be gentle with the brakes) as the computer called out 500 feet. By 200 feet I could see enough detail to realize the runway was mostly clear although there was snow blowing over the surface. At 100 feet the power started coming out and by 40 feet it was gone. A last second correction for a gust of wind and we were down, on the centerline.

Rolling clear and on to the taxiway several thousand feet later I took a second to let out a long breath. We were down and the bumps and fuel worries were over. However, we were running over an hour late because of an earlier delay which meant we would be quick turning and heading right back into the bumps, the wind, and the ice and snow.

And the funny thing is I knew I was going to love every minute of it.