[PilotMan]

God I'm tired. Hey, at least I got to wake up without an alarm. That's always nice. I had to be at the airport by 1030a this morning to work a flight to San Francisco. Strong winds a heavy load meant that we were going to be right at the weight limit. Flight time: 6 hours and 6 minutes.

A flight is like a dance. There are many parts played by many people and they all have to come together in the right moment for it to leave on time. Flight crew, Gate Agents, Ramp Crew, Dispatcher, Load Planner, Operations personnel. When it works right, like it does most of the time flights get to leave on time. Any hiccup serves to derail the process.

Today, things just seemed to be working against us, not only the wind. As the gate finishes boarding, the flight crew finishes all our briefings, checklists and preflight, the flight attendants finish the cabin inspection, the baggage handlers finish loading the plane, all the data runs through the Load Planner who sends us our weights so we can send info back out for takeoff data.

To keep this shorter I'll paraphrase some things. Load planner had trouble with the weights. We couldn't get our normal takeoff data relayed so we had to call the dispatcher and have him run the numbers and send them to the plane. That is very rare. We had to takeoff on a little bit longer stretch of runway because we were so heavy. On taxi out, ATC had a reroute, but our dispatcher explicitly told us no reroutes because of fuel. So we had to wait some more. Eventually the reroute was approved and we left, albeit about 45 minutes after we were supposed to.

And all that is before you've even left the ground. Now add 6+ hours of flying. Today's flying was made less glamorous due to cloud cover over much of the US. Nothing really to look at. Snow in Canada, snow in Minnesota, snow in South Dakota, snow in Wy...wait I can't remember actually seeing the ground in Wyoming. Hehe. Snow in the mountains. Anyway, you get the idea.

My day wasn't done in SFO mind you. We ended up being about 35 minutes late, but we were also scheduled to deadhead (an aviation term meaning to ride as a passenger on duty) to Vancouver. Originally we only had 1 hour to make the flight, now we had roughly 25 minutes to make it. Thankfully I walked on only a few minutes from departure.

That flight ended up being about 20 minutes late because of late connecting bags that operations held the plane for. So now a 2 hours flight to Vancouver and we end up getting in here around 1045p. Clear customs and head for the hotel. I've actually never been to Vancouver before but I've heard it's one of the best layovers in the system. I won't know, it's dark now, it'll be dark when we leave. I won't see a thing. I figure out that I've spend almost 11 full hours on a plane today. Not just working, actually, physically, on a plane.

I'm starving. We are staying at the airport because it's a very short layover and I change and head out to the food court for some fast food Chinese. I call this part dinner at 1130p (eastern; I've found that life is easier if I say on my body time clock as much as practical.)

So I'm back to work in 9.5 hours. A similarly long day ahead tomorrow but I'm looking forward to hopefully grabbing some fish taco's when I get to Orange County (CA) tomorrow night.