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.
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