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.