This is a little different than the norm. I’ve been reading a whole bunch of short stories recently and instead of writing about part of a flight I tried my hand at writing about part of the layover.

It was oppressively hot when I stepped out of the hotel; the sort of hot you expect in the South but still manage to be surprised by when it hits you. What was left of the late afternoon sun added to the heat and glare as it shown down through the hazy skies. I thought momentarily about heading back inside, past the cool, quiet lobby and taking up the elevator to my 4th floor room to retrieve my sun glasses but thought better of idea. It was very likely that as soon as the cool air of the hotel enveloped me I’d give up and decide not to venture back outside into the heat again. With my eyes squinting against bright light I shuffled down the cracked asphalt of the side street that the hotel shared with an abandoned banquet hall and a plumbing repair shop, towards the intersection.

A time and temperature sign across the street broadcast the fact that it was 6:13pm and 84 degrees. By the time I would complete my trip and return back down this street it would be 6:55pm, 80 degrees and a man would have disappeared. But for now I pushed forward against the oppressive heat towards the traffic light at the top of the street. Amidst the heat and glare I felt the need for a sound track and during a pause in constant drone of traffic on the main road and the Interstate I imagined crickets chirping and wind rustling through tall grass. Somehow the sound of a brass trumpet playing a downbeat jazz tune worked its way into my music and much to my surprise remained there as the imaginary crickets and wind faded away.

He was standing on the opposite side of the main road dressed in long sleeves, camo pants and a brown sort of hat that at one point in time may have sported a baseball team’s logo. At his feet was a worn, black gym back. Propped up against the bag was a ragged cardboard sign. It was the sort of sign you see homeless people holding with phrases like “please help”, “hungry” and “god bless” on them. But through the shimmering heat and blur of passing traffic I couldn’t see what his sign said. He was facing the interstate exit ramp which, when later when I took the time to think about it, struck me as odd if he was looking for a ride.

He was across the street from and he was facing away from me, towards the east while he played his trumpet. Despite that, the instrument’s sound was crystal clear in the heat during the lulls in traffic noise. I used one of these gaps in traffic to cross the intersection, my feet dragging heavily in the hot, heavy air. Clear of the main road I turned west, away from the lone trumpet player, and with one look over my shoulder I put my head down and continued on to my destination and waiting food.

30 minutes later having eaten and recovered somewhat in the cool, metallic air of the restaurant, I headed back out into heat to return to the hotel. As I pushed open the door and felt the rush of hot air I listened for the sound of the trumpet but didn’t hear anything. Heading east along the main road my eye’s scanned the shimmering surface for the man with the camo pants and brass trumpet but I saw nothing more than some blowing trash and a single motorcycling turning onto the interstate.

Far away the sound of a two-tone siren floated over the hill and down the main road on the hot, still air. The street was now deserted and I crossed back towards the waiting cool air of the hotel lobby. The flashing red time and temperature sign next to the desolate State Fairgrounds now announcing to anybody who passed by that it was 6:55pm and 80 degrees. I took one quick look back towards the intersection before turning off the side street and into the hotel driveway; there was no trumpet player and I wondered if there ever had been one.

It’s 12:15am and we’re sitting inside the cockpit of a 700 looking outside at a completely deserted ramp. The mechanic who drove us over the airplane 30 minutes before is outside on the phone complaining to a friend about how he’s still stuck at work. Momentarily I think about complaining to somebody as well but instead call Operations for the third time to see if they can find us a ramp crew to push us off the gate. After three calls I finally get a response. “Oh, they’ve all gone home now. Sorry.” Why they didn’t tell me this when I first called 20 minutes ago I don’t know. I console myself with the thought that this is what happens when you start operating outside the envelope of normal every day operations.

My evening started 10 hours early when I got on a plane in San Francisco to start my commute to work. 6 hours later I was in Dayton and heading over to the Hangar to pick up a plane to ferry to Charlotte. After waiting around for a while for Maintenance to finish fixing an issue the FO and I taxied out and headed south for Charlotte, where a Knoxville based flight crew and 35 passengers were eagerly awaiting our arrival so they could fly home. 55 minutes after taking off we were dropping back out of the sky into a mostly empty Charlotte Airport.

While taxiing in to the gate we got a text message asking us to give Dispatch a call about doing a quick Maintenance check. That didn’t sound very good and my visions of a nice comfy hotel bed were rapidly disappearing. Once at the gate we handed the plane off to the other crew and headed inside where I gave Dispatch a call and after getting handed around the room (a line dispatcher, the dispatch supervisor and then a Maintenance Controller) I was told that the lead mechanic would meet us at the gate and explain the issue. 10 minutes later he showed up and told us that the plane had been written up earlier in the day for “pulling” to the right when landing. They thought they’d fixed the problem but the only way to know for sure was to put it out on the runway and get up some speed and then slam on the brakes and see what happens. At 11:45 at night this sounded like really stupid idea to me but after talking it through with the FO we agreed that as long as we don’t go faster than 70 knots we could do it.

So here we sit, in an empty plane waiting on rampers who apparently aren’t going to show up because they, wisely, have already gone home. I spin in the Company frequency and after two tries am able to raise a Maintenance controller who tells me they are aware of the issue and are sending another mechanic over who is qualified to push airplanes. Sure enough, five minutes later a second mechanic arrives and after a brief conversation with the first mechanic, drives a tug over and attaches the towbar to our nose gear.

Because we require both a driver and a wing walker to push back what follows is an oddly choreographed ballet. First we shut the main cabin door and our mechanic serves as wing walker while the other mechanic pushes us back. Then, after I’ve set the brake the FO jumps up, opens the door again while our mechanic helps unhook the tug before getting on board and shutting the door. In the meantime I’ve got both engines going and after a bit of confusion involving ground telling us to call ramp and ramp telling us to call ground, we start rolling out to the runway for the high speed taxi.

It’s now 12:45 and there isn’t another airplane moving on the entire airport. The ground controller is also working as the tower controller and probably everything else as she clears us to taxi on the runway as necessary. A quick run through the checklists has my responding to “doesn’t apply” or “not needed” to most items as if we do everything right we are most certainly not going flying. That finished, I flip on the landing lights and the strobe and taxi out on to the runway. After checking with both the FO and the Mechanic strapped in behind us I throw the power levers up to just below the first detent (which will normally give us climb power) and release the brakes.

There is a moment of hesitation and then the plane starts surging forward, much faster than I anticipated. I pull back the power a little bit and then satisfied with things I start focusing on keeping the nose wheel aligned with the rapidly blurring runway centerline lights. In what seems like seconds the FO is calling 60 knots and by the time I get the thrust levers back to idle we are blowing through 75 knots.

As I push forward on the tops of the rudder pedals to engage the brakes I realize I’ve already got a fair amount of left rudder in just to keep the plane going straight. Applying both brakes evenly causes the airplane to veer sharply to the right, just as was written up in the logbook. By easing off the right brake and pressing the left one fully down I am able to keep the plane moving in a straight line. With the speed rapidly decreasing I ease off the left brake and by 20 knots of airspeed the plane is again tracking straight with no input.

We clear the runway just 4000 feet from where we started. Ground clears us to taxi back to the ramp and we pull back in to the gate at 12:50, just 13 minutes after we left. After shutting down the plane I fill out the logbook stating that the high speed taxi check was unsatisfactory and the airplane was still pulling to the right. I then sign it and put my employee number next to it. It’s one of the only times we ever actually put our name and employee number in the logbook. By then my FO has completed the walk around and dragged his bags down the steps. I follow him and head inside towards the hotel and the bed I’d been thinking about for the last few hours.

I cringed slightly as my FO made a call to Ground Control for a push back clearance. There is a brief moment at LaGuardia, just after you call ground control, where you get a sense of how the next little bit of your life is going to go. Either they are going to completely ignore you and keep spouting out a constant stream of instructions for the multiple of airplanes they are trying to move around too little real estate or they will immediately clear you to push back. It’s rare there is any in between. This evening we were in luck and after a little confusion about who was calling for push we were cleared for spot 23.

The clearance received, I released the parking brake and let our push tug driver that we were cleared to push. He said something back, but in typical fashion his headset didn’t seem to be working (or he didn’t know how to transmit on it) and I heard nothing. It was also possible they never actually plugged the headset cord into the access panel on the nose of the plane. This is a pretty common occurrence and I didn’t really worry about it which ended up being the right course of action as several seconds later we were rolling back off of the gate and towards Spot 23. Doubting the driver could hear me anyways I held up two fingers on my right hand and spun one finger on my left hand asking if we could start the right engine. The driver took minute to actually look over to the right side of the plane and then nodded his head. I nodded to the FO who proceeded to engage the starter.

Several seconds later the engine numbers started to come up and as the core speed passed 25% he introduced fuel flow. After a seconds hesitation the engine lit off and the fan speed and Internal Turbine Temperature both started to rise. On the 200 an engine will spin up in a matter of seconds, while the 700 and most other bigger planes can take a bit longer. With one engine spinning and the towbar disconnected I waved to the departing rampers and called for an after start checklist. With the potential for major sitting and waiting on the taxiway I was content just running one motor until we know how long we’d be sitting for.
Ground cleared us for taxi and told us to hold short of a crossing runway. By the time we got that runway there were only 4 airplanes on the other side waiting to go. Counting this as a pretty good New York experience, I gave my FO the ok to spin the other engine and within minutes we had both engines going, the flaps out and a clearance to cross the runway and monitor the Tower Controller. By the time we had finished running the taxi and before takeoff checklists Tower had cleared us into position on the runway and after a brief wait while traffic landed on the other runway we were blasting off into the darkening dusk.

It was the FO’s leg and he did a nice job of navigating the departure procedure (a turn to the right, at 3 miles a turn back to the left and then start accelerating). As we turned westward and towards home he lowered the nose to pick up airspeed. As the speed increased so did a steady whistling noise I’d started to hear just as we’d rotated but quickly blocked out of my mind due to both the level of attention a complex departure procedure requires and the fact that I really didn’t want to think about what it might mean. Now, as I finished running the after takeoff checklist and confirmed with New York Approach that we were cleared up to 10,000 feet, I took a moment to listen to the whistling which was now loud enough to make conversation difficult in the cockpit.

Prior experience told me that we had an access panel open on the nose somewhere. There are three up there, the oxygen service panel, the ground power panel and the communications panel which the ground crew plugs a headset into. This comm. door is the most commonly opened one and hence the one most often left open or improperly closed so it pops open in flight. All three doors are hinged at the bottom and have two latches on the top. The likelihood of damage to something inside the panel, even if it opens in flight is low. However it’s very possible that the door could be ripped off in the airstream and either do damage to the skin of the airframe or even worse get sucked into the engine.

Because of these potential issues it is company policy to return to the airport so they can close the door and a mechanic can make sure there is no skin damage. Even though I was pretty certain we were going to be landing somewhere shortly, that wasn’t a decision I wanted to make on my own and after briefing the FO on what was going on I asked him to work with New York ATC to keep us at a lower attitude and heading west to where I knew there were several good diversion airports. We could have gone back to LaGuardia, but after our painless escape the first time I didn’t want to temp the fates a second time.
With the FO talking to New York on COM 1 I flipped over to COM 2 where I attempting to get in touch with the company. Normally this would have involved a simple ACARS text message but our ACARS was broken so instead I had to rely on the somewhat archaic method of calling ARINC (basically a company that provides radio service coverage in order to establish phone patches as needed) and have them connect me to a dispatcher at my company. This took several attempts but eventually I had a very scratchy patch through to Dispatch and Maintenance. They both agreed with my assessment and endorsed the idea of heading west to land. By this point we were about 40 miles east of Harrisburg, PA and I told them I’d be heading there and I’d call them on the ground.

Before I could get any acknowledgment of my message the patch died and I lost them. Guessing they’d figure out what I was doing I switched back to COM 1 and let ATC know of our intent to land at Harrisburg and that while we did have a maintenance issue it was not going to facilitate us declaring an emergency. By this time my FO had gotten the weather (a nice evening thankfully) and I set us up for a visual approach to Runway 13. I then handed the radio back to the FO and let the Flight Attendant know what was going on. All he could do was laugh as the last time we’d flown together we’d had to divert because of weather and instead of getting home at 9pm (like we were scheduled this evening) we did’t get back until after midnight. I also made a quick PA to keep the passengers in the loop.

By the time I was done doing that we were descending through 8000 feet with the airport in sight. My FO briefed the approach and then after we flew through a small rain shower had me let ATC know we had the airport. An approach clearance in hand he dumped the autopilot and turned a tight final inside a military KC135 tanker who was also diverting to Harrisburg because of a medical issue. By 1000 feet the gear was out the final flaps were down. The approach comes low across the Susquehanna River. The gusty wind, although right down the runway was forming small whitecaps on the water. Despite that we made a nice landing and at 60 knots I took the plane back and taxied clear. As I turned back towards the ramp the lights of the KC135 were bumping towards the runway through the wind and dark.

The last of the rain showers had blown through an hour earlier leaving a lower layer of blowing scud and large damp patches on the ramp as I walked out to the plane. I had overnighted in Washington, DC and after a somewhat restful night had caught a shuttle to the airport to meet up with my crew and fly DCA to Knoxville and then on to Charlotte where I was to catch a deadhead back to Dayton and home. As I dragged my bag across the huge expanse of concrete and around the nose of a Mainline Airbus 320 a Delta 757 dropped out of the clouds to the north and rolled into a bank to the left to align itself with Runway 19.

My plane had just pulled up as I stared walking outside and as I arrived at the aircraft steps the last of the passengers were getting off. The captain who I was replacing (a friend of mine from new hire and upgrade training) was the last off as he headed back inside to catch a deadhead down to Charlotte. We had a quick conversation about the lastest measures being enacted by the company to screw over the pilots (they are starting to get REALLY creative) but any attempt at further conversation was cut off by the plane parked in front of us starting up and taxiing forward. I ducked through the swirling engine exhaust and up the steps of my plane where I said hi to the FO who was heading in to the terminal to grab some Dunkin Donut’s coffee (he’s a Boston area native) and then threw my flight case and laptop case upfront.

Washington has a new policy where we have to go to Load Planning (basically trailer hidden among a bunch of lav carts) to get our paperwork. While the FO headed in to get his coffee and the Flight Attendant caught up on her reading (People when I left, US Weekly when I came back) I walked over to the trailer, thankful once again the rain had stopped. Paperwork in hand I headed back to the plane trying to stay out of the puddles and avoid the APU blasts from half a dozen parked RJs. By the time I got back to the plane our busload of passengers was arriving. The Flight Attendant put away her magazines while I settled into my seat to start going over the flight release and weather.

I had made it through the flight release and forecasted weather with no problems. I then took a quick look at the current weather. As of an hour ago the visibility was down to 1 and ½ miles with rain and mist and a low overcast layer of clouds. An hour before that it was at 2 miles and rain and before that showed 3 miles and mist. There was a clear trend of the weather getting worse. The problem was that the forecasted weather was not only showing that it was going to be good at our time of arrival, but that it never was bad in the first place. Obviously there was a disconnect here. The real issue was that our fuel load was based on the weather being good and not needing an alternate. If we launched with our current fuel and then got to Knoxville only to find we couldn’t get in because of the weather we’d be in a world of hurt.

To get more information I tracked down my dispatcher’s phone number from the flight release and gave her a call. She was able to provide the latest weather, only 5 minutes old which had the visibility up to 3 miles and the overcast at 3500 feet. Also the weather current included the magic letters PRESRR meaning the pressure was rapidly rising, a sign of improving weather. Based on that information I made a quick decision that despite the forecast not being correct over the past few hours, it would be correct for our time of arrival.

The FO returned with his coffee and after I explained the situation to him, he agreed with my assessment. By then our passengers were on board and we closed the door and got underway. After a slight delay while the plane in front of us started up and taxied out, we headed out to runway 15 and were soon blasting off to the south. After a momentary level off in the clouds we were cleared on our route and to climb up 30,000. The ride smoothed out as soon as we passed through 10,000 feet and I started keeping track of our fuel. At the halfway point we had burned 100 pounds more than planned but by our next waypoint we were back on our burn schedule.

20 minutes later and 120 miles farther south we dropped back through the clouds just to the north of Knoxville. The airport came into sight about 15 miles away proving the validity of the weather forecast I’d been looking over an hour before.