Blytheville

                Hey everyone, I just commuted into MIA and im sleeping in the crew room since I have to be on ready reserve duty at 6AM. I normally do this when I commute in to start a period on because I actually get more sleep this way. The flight I normally take lands in MIA at 10:45PM. If I went to my crashpad I would have to wait for the hotel van then walk to the crashpad, probably wouldn’t get there till around midnight. My wake up time would be 4:20AM to get dressed and catch the shuttle back to the airport, so I think it makes more sense to stay here the first night. It’s not all that bad; we have a quiet room we can go in that has a couple of recliners. I can go to sleep when I want and all I have to do is get up at 5:30 and sign in on the computer and come right back and go back to sleep and wait for any phone calls.

                Before I get some sleep tonight I figured it would be a good chance to catch everyone up a little bit on a recent trip I had last week. I was on my normal S1 reserve duty and got the call about 7AM that I would be taking an empty plane to our heavy maintenance base in Blytheville Arkansas, about 70 miles north of Memphis. In our slow turboprop this is about a 3 and a half hour flight. We were then supposed to get driven to Memphis to catch a flight back to Miami that afternoon. Well as usual things don’t go as planned. The Captain and I left the gate pretty much on time but as we were taxing to the runway we got a fault on one of our anti-icing systems. After failing to get it to reset the Captain and I decided we didn’t want to take it until it got looked at since there were forecasted icing conditions along our route of flight. We notify maintenance and taxi back to where we started. 4 hours later we headed out, maintenance said they may or may not have fixed it, they changed a part they thought would fix it but not 100 percent sure. Even if it did fault again we had new routing that would allow us to avoid the icing conditions. Also in a worst case scenario we could just fly lower then we normally do and be in temperatures warm enough. Well sure enough same problem occurs as we taxi out but with our new routing and the option of flying lower we go with it.

                Turns out to be a non eventful flight however because we left so late we were going to miss out flight home and have to spend the night in Blytheville then take the flight to Miami the next day. This was my first trip to Blytheville, the airport is nearly abandoned, there was grassing growing out of the taxiways and pretty much the only group of buildings on the field is where they do our maintenance. Growing up in Oklahoma im pretty used to smallish towns, however I found myself in a bit of culture shock in this small northeast Arkansas town. It was everything you picture a small hick town to be, luckily though our hotel was nice. The next morning met the captain for breakfast at the Perkins in the hotel (didn’t see Tiger Woods) then we headed to Memphis. Our driver was one of the mechanics from Blytheville and needless to say it was an entertaining ride. Also that morning I found out that as soon as I got back to Miami I was going to be flying to Nassau and back.

                Got back to Miami and had just enough time to run into the terminal and grab a bite to eat then headed out to the plane to start my pre flight duties for the Nassau Turn. As soon as we landed in Nassau an extremely heavy rain shower came over the airport but thankfully it let up in time for me to do my post/pre flight walk around. I’ve made it 2 months in Miami without an umbrella or a raincoat. Felt I was pushing my luck to much so today I purchased a raincoat since im sure were going to get a good bit of rain from the passing Hurricane this week. That’s it for now, stay tuned.  

S1 Nassau

                Hey everyone, sorry I’ve been slacking this past week on posting. Had the weekend off so didn’t really have any motivation to post. All this month I have the S1 shift, which if you recall from my post about schedules that means I have ready reserve at the airport from 6AM-2PM. It sounds terrible but really im sort of adjusting to it well. I normally still stay up pretty late about 12-1AM just because that’s what im used to and I work best that way. I’ll basically take a nap at the crash pad from the time I go to bed to 4:20AM when my alarm goes off. I take the 5AM shuttle to the airport and usually sign in by 5:30AM. Once I get signed in and to the crew room I go right to our “quiet” room where we have a couple of recliners, I’ll get comfy in those and finish off the night of my sleep, sometimes I’ll sleep all the way till 11-12 if im not called, so in the end I still get an easy 8-10 hours of sleep. It’s also nice because more often than not I get to sleep through about 6 of my 8 hours on duty.  All of this works great until your phone rings at 6:20AM.

                Yup that’s what happened to me last week. Just as I was getting comfy to finish off my night of sleep my phone rang at 6:20AM and it was crew scheduling. Apparently the plane that stayed overnight in Nassau was broken and I was assigned to ferry a new plane out to Nassau to rescue the passengers. Captain and I blasted off with an empty airplane and no flight attendants to Nassau at 7AM. After we were shutdown I learned I was being marooned in Nassau until the broken plane was fixed and they would fly a new Captain out later that day to take the fixed plane home. Not really sure why they just didn’t have the captain I flew out with also fly back with me but whatever, crew scheduling often times has a mind of their own. After getting things sorted out I learned I would be sitting in Nassau for about 4 hours. Took the time to get some breakfast do a little shopping around the airport and got some reading in. 

                The new Captain finally showed up 2 flights later and we quickly got on our way back to Miami. Flight went pretty smoothly, again a completely empty plane with no flight attendants. It was my leg flying home and was met with a nice 15kt crosswind, doesn’t sound like much but the ATR has a relatively narrow wheelbase and a high wing which causes it to become a handful in even a small amount of cross wind. We flew through a good downpour on final which quickly became a stout little cell with a lot of lightning which caused us to have to sit in the plane for an extra 15-20min due to the ramp closing once we parked.

                That was pretty much the excitement from last week. I’ve been keeping a photo album on facebook, here is the public link which should allow anyone to view this one album even if you’re not a member of facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150208132207880.318424.507817879&l=49a1206d98&type=1

Land of the Seminole

                Hey everyone, happy Tuesday. Hope all of my friends and family back in Oklahoma are staying cool, looks like the heat wave has somehow been turned up a notch this week. Im on day 4 of 7 of being away, my last day is Friday then I will be flying up to New Jersey to spend my weekend off with my grandparents and fiancé. Today Im going to write about an interesting flight I had a couple of nights ago.

                I was sitting S3 reserve and got the phone call around 3PM that I would be flying up to Tallahassee and back leaving at 5:50PM. This is normally a route served by the jet but they cancelled today for some unknown reason and they decided to send an ATR in its place. Got to the plane about 45 minutes before departure, I like to give myself plenty of time to get everything situated up in the cockpit and get all my pre flight duties accomplished without having to rush. In a later post I’ll give a detailed description of everything I do during a typical flight.

                We left the gate pretty much on time. I was going to fly us up to Tallahassee and the Captain was going to fly us back. This is how its normally done at the airlines, the Captain and First Officer switch off between the “Pilot Flying” and “Pilot Monitoring” roles. The pilot flying is obviously the one controlling the aircraft and the pilot monitoring is working the radios and running the checklists. Took off on 8R out of Miami and made our left turn to head NW towards the land of the Seminoles. Everything was going smoothly until passing about 10,000ft we got an alert that we had a bleed air over hear. This wasn’t a huge problem but it needed to be addressed. The Captain gave me the radios and control of the plane, which I all ready had, while he ran the appropriate checklists. After talking to maintenance operation control they wanted us to return to MIA since we don’t have any maintenance available in Tallahassee. Making an enroute return takes a fair amount of work to accomplish. There’s a handful of different people that need to be notified of what’s going on, flight plans have to be changed, and the Captain has to make the dreaded PA to the all ready unhappy passengers. Reason they were all ready unhappy is that the problem we had affected the air condition system in the plane so they were pretty warm in the back and all ready getting cranky. I landed us back in Miami without any issues and the passengers were sent back to the terminal for now.

                Next issue we had was finding a new plane to continue the flight. Turn out we all ready had 3 ATR’s broke in Miami, because of that it took them another 45 min to an hour before we were assigned a new plane. We ended up launching again for Tallahassee with the same passengers at about 9:20PM, about the time we were supposed to be getting back from Tallahassee. This time things went a lot smoother, our routing took us up over Tampa Bay then out over the gulf a short ways to Tallahassee. While we were over Tampa I looked out my side window and saw the fireworks from the Orlando theme parks which were neat to see from about 100 miles away. I luckily made a nice smooth landing in Tallahassee for our very unhappy passengers. One thing that is often beneficial about the ATR is that there is a cargo compartment between the cockpit and the cabin, because of this we rarely actually see our passengers. On nights like that it’s a good thing however I felt sorry for our flight attendants in the back.

                After having to wait for our last paperwork for a good 15 min we finally took off back to Miami. Some weather had built up to the NE of Tampa that provided us a very nice light show for about half the flight. So far that’s one of my favorite things is watching a big towering cumulonimbus cloud light up like a firework from the air. Also this time as we were flying of the Tampa area I had a great overhead view of the area where I will be getting married next summer, was neat to see it all from the air at night. Finally got to the gate in Miami at 1:23AM, we had both been on duty since 2PM so it turned into a very long day. It was worth it for the sites I got to see though.