A Year in the Life

[PilotMan]

Ahhh, so I totally don't want to post this, but I feel like I should if only to show that shit happens to all of us. This whole mess started on Friday.

Somehow my normal routine got screwed up and I just wasn't firing on all cylinders. I left to catch my commuting flight to Newark, a 730p flight. This night I had 2 extra backup flights in addition to my normal 2. It's a 20 min drive from my home to the parking lot.

I pull into the lot and realize that I've forgotten my badges at home. I'm pretty sure this is my wife's fault. I haven't forgotten them in literally years. She wasn't home when I left, like she normally is, and therefore, it's her fault. Thankfully, she was home when I called and was able to meet me part way so I didn't have to drive all the way home. I had some time to play with, but I was really concerned that I might miss my planned flight.

The only reason that it was a big deal was that I had a 0430 wakeup the next day for the start of my trip. I didn't want to get there too late. I managed to get back to the airport and hustled onto the shuttle, then past security, then to the gate. There were plenty of seats, so that wasn't going to be an issue. I get to the gate and find out that the last few flights into Newark had been delayed by an average of 45 minutes and that the delay seemed to be carrying on. They had had some rainy, overcast weather that might have contributed to it, but it just didn't seem like they were catching up.

My flight then ends up being delayed, then they put passengers from the later flight on ours, because it's smart. Once again, I still had a seat. We finally got boarded up and blasted off, then touched down in Newark just over an hour late. By the time I got to the crash pad it was 1100. On the bright side, I had the place to myself. But I think that might have been part of the problem too. I don't know. So I quickly unpack, and then set up for the morning. I say goodnight to the wife and head to bed, in a different bed than I normally sleep in, because it had a power strip right next to it to charge my phone.

On the way to the pad I had set my alarm for the morning. I had adjusted the volume on my alarm because I had noticed that morning it was too freaking loud. I get up pretty good, in fact, I've gotten up just from the vibration of the the phone when it's gone off and been accidentally silenced. I had wanted it quieter so as not to wake up the whole room when it went off. Still, as I went to bed in a different bed, with my phone in a different place, I couldn't shake the idea that it was too quiet. I shrugged it off, strange room and all. I would be fine. You see where this is going.

I woke up numerous times, the last being around 330a knowing that I had an hour of sleep to go. Then I turned over and the room was bright. Say what? Where is that coming from? Oh, the sun. Fuck me. The sun should NOT be up at 430a. I look over at my phone, 644a. My flight literally leaves for Costa Rica in 16 minutes.

You wanna talk about an painful adrenaline rush? The fear and dread of this is comparable to anything. I haven't had this happen, this bad, in my entire 13 year career. Not 5 minutes later, the phone rings. It's just the company trying to figure out where I'm at. I throw myself at their feet. So sorry, so embarrassed. Tell them that the earliest I can possibly get to the plane is close to 730a. That makes the flight out 30 minutes late, all on me.

The company though is ok. They deal with this regularly. It happens. They were probably just happy that I was that close and it was that easy. Having to recrew that flight might have cost a 2 hour delay, depending on where the next available first officer would have been.

I have to bust ass to get out of the room to make the 700a van and do indeed get to the plane by 725a. Ten minutes later, we were pushing back.

I had plenty of time on our 5 hour flight to think about it. I won't get in trouble. My body took hours to come down from that rush. The flight seemed to fly by. Haha. Even 5 hours of it. It immediately makes me second, third, and fourth guess my alarms and report times for the next couple days. I really don't want to have to go through that again anytime soon.

[britrock88]

Glad it worked out!

(How many start times are really can't-miss in life, anyway?)

[PilotMan]

I want to explain this whole having to hold for a gate thing. So I was operating a flight from Boston to Newark, and this flight sometimes seems to take longer to fly than it does to drive. Anyway, we had been held on the ground in Boston for flow into Newark. But even after that delay, ATC got us in line in good shape that we landed in Newark early. It helps that the flight time itself is padded as much as it is. It's common knowledge that that sort of delay is common, so the extra time keeps the plane on schedule.

Anyway, we landed and were heading to the gate. I check on with the ramp controller and hear that we have to hold, that our gate is still occupied. I try and get an ETD for the plane, but I can't get a clean answer. Just that they are still loading bags and it's not looking close yet. The ramp controller has us move over to the holding ramp, called the "ballpark" in Newark, because it's kind of diamond shaped, I guess. I get on another frequency and bug our operations people about it, they say that all the gates are full, and that as soon as something opens up they may move us to another gate, but right now they don't know when or where that's going to be.

What I want you to understand is that it's an incredibly organic situation. I make 4-5 PA's to the passengers in this time, but it all really boils down to I don't really know what's going to happen next, that I'm sorry, and that I appreciate their patience. Passengers are very jaded. They think the flight crew spends all their time lying to them, and sometimes they are right. As in, I may be at the gate, nearly finished boarding and get a message that our wheels up time just got pushed back by an hour. Well at this point we are going to finish boarding and head out to the runway and see what happens next. So knowing full well that we have a delay, there's nothing I can do for the passengers at this point. All I'm going to do is wait until we get all the way out to the holding point, and after 15-20 min have burned off I can tell you that we got out takeoff time pushed back and now I can tell you it's only 40-45 min more instead of telling you it's an hour at the gate. It's in the eye of the beholder. I didn't lie, so to speak, but I didn't give the whole truth when I knew it either.

Most of the time though, I'm telling you exactly what I know. How can every gate be full, when there are open gates!?

Well, for one reason or another the plane at our gate was delayed. That starts a reaction starting with us. Operations has a list of when each and every one of those gates is going to be filled or cleared by a plane. It's all computerized and pretty easy to see. They are looking for gaps. My plane might not be scheduled go out for 2 hours, so they need to find a gap that will work.

So I take someone else's spot, but because that was a quick turn and another plane is in right behind is. Now I'm pushing 2 planes off of their parking spots. Now those 2 planes have to get moved and that trickle down effect continues.

After about 15 minutes I finally pressed ops hard and said I needed something more substantial to give the passengers. They needed to know what the plan was. They let me know that another plane was just getting ready to push a few gates down and that they were going to give us that slot after they left. Great. Now I've got something to work with.

I stayed on the plane and said goodbye to everyone. We ended up almost 20 minutes late because of this fiasco. I've talked about the dance before. It could have been bags, it could have been maintenance, it could have been staffing, it could have been planning, and yeah it could have been operations. The bottom line is that it always looks bad. And when it looks bad people just love to jump on the whole, "this company doesn't know what they are doing" bandwagon. It's so much more complicated than that. So I said goodbye to everyone and you wouldn't believe how many downcast eyes, or head shakes I got, like it was somehow something that I had done. Like I had let them down and that once again I had failed them. That it was just another day where getting to the gate on time didn't matter.

There's no way for me to show my side of this except through this medium. I just want you to understand that last minute, short notice, changes like this happen all the time. If that plane on my gate is delayed earlier, then yeah, I get a gate change notice 20 minutes before I land and don't even think about it. How many times did I call back and explain why we had to change gates before we land. Right. None. Passengers don't care, so they never see the changes that get preemptively addressed to avoid this sort of thing.

The whole thing is like I'm in a Rodney Dangerfield sketch. I tell ya, I get no respect.

[PilotMan]

Just came back on Saturday from Houston for my yearly simulator training and check ride (flight test). It was a good experience. I always manage to learn a lot and it can be a very humbling experience. No matter how hot you think you are in the plane someone can bring you to your knees in the sim, especially once nerves start to get the better of you. As soon as your confidence flags, you start to doubt yourself and suddenly you can ride yourself into the ground (not literally thank God.)

I left home on Thursday morning, with plans to get to the hotel by 130p in the afternoon. I wasn't due for my briefing until 800p so I had some time to eat and I needed a nap. My training was scheduled until 200a central time, which was damn late and the extra hour time change wasn't helping.

The nap helped, but I timed my dinner poorly and found myself eating a cold sandwich and chocolate milk out of the cooler in the training building before the brief.

Normally our training would be a full crew together, but for some reason, my Captain didn't make the trip and I had a fill in. So I was the only one that was getting trained that night. It's a double edged sword. On one hand with only me needing training I was going to get done well before 2a, but I all the attention would be on me and I would have to fly cold. I was nervous I needed to start off good.

Normal takeoff and vectors to shoot an RNAV approach to a missed approach. Followed by holding, then I had to fly as monitoring pilot while the Captain shot the same approach to another missed approach. That was followed by a CAT III ILS flown by the Captain. I'm required to do this too. Only the Captain flies this approach and I have to do it prove my proficiency and qualification.

After that I had to do another takeoff with an engine failure at our decision speed (one of the worst times for that). It's a high power setting, the plane yaws hard, gotta keep it straight and takeoff. From here it's a lot of single engine work. Single engine ILS to a go around. Back around for another single engine approach, this one to a landing.

From here it's up to a high altitude for stall recovery. Then we go to Anchorage for wind shear recovery and terrain avoidance maneuvers. After that I have to land the plane from a straight in approach with no visual or electronic guidance or even correct approach speeds. It's harder than it sounds. I have to touchdown within a specific part of the runway, it's all pure airmanship.

After that I get another airmanship test. Just takeoff, fly a pattern and land. I've done tons of these as a CFI, they are harder in a jet that wants to go 200 mph. I do well here too. It all takes just over 2.5 hours after the 2 hour briefing. I'm tired. It's almost 1a by the time we get out of there.

I head back to the hotel, hungry. So I grab a Shiner Bock and microwaveable burrito from the sundries at the hotel. It rings up $13. Gotta love hotel prices.


The next day I have to go in a little early for emergency equipment and doors training. We have to demonstrate being able to open and close all the doors (we have mock ups in the training facility). Then we have to demonstrate being able to use the portable breathing equipment, oxygen masks and life vests. We go over the medical equipment, talk about the life rafts, how to set them up, board them. We even have a full mock up of that too.

After that training it was time for my brief for the Line Orientated Evaluation. Day 2 is all about acting like everything is for real, in real time. Day 1 is all about getting it done, and Day 2 is about proving you operate correctly, standard and can handle the problems that will arise.

We start with a flight plan from EWR to San Juan PR. The flight goes out over the ocean where we have some different operating rules. Some very specific procedures that have to be followed when things hit the fan. We head out over the ocean and once we are sufficiently far enough we have an engine start to overtemp.

I'm flying, and try and save the the engine by manipulating it. I can't save it though and it blows. We have to work together to step through the correct procedures. We start to make a course back to Newark and decide that Norfolk will be a better option. It's a very busy time between flying the plane, and splitting time between talking with ATC and the flight crew.

All our work pays off and I successfully put the plane down in Norfolk. It seems like it goes fast but it was at least an hour and a half. From there we have to do more maneuvers.

We are repositioned to Denver for some new go around procedures training. This new procedure will allow us to carry more weight going into high altitude airports like Denver that have terrain around. Our limits can be based on go around performance at landing (or a number of other things). This new procedure will give us some relief from that and allow heavier weights and therefore more efficient operations. We'll only use this new procedure if dispatch tells us we need to for planning purposes. It's taken the company a year to get every one trained. The new procedure should go live later this year.

After this we had another demo maneuver. The instructor set the runway up for poor braking and some icy conditions. I landed the plane in 2 different landing configurations, the point being how much more effective some configurations are than others and when to make the decision to select one over the other.

It's a full schedule. I get done, pass, and convince the instructor to pick up some Taco Bell this time. My flight home isn't until the next day (yesterday.) I take the rest of the night off and enjoy the spoils of success. Another year trained and it feels good to get done. I set all this up so that I could be home for Mother's Day. By finishing when I did I was guaranteed to have it off. Worked out as planned.

Home for Mother's Day, home for a band concert. I'll miss a 7th grade honors night recognition and piano recital for my youngest. It's all a trade off. I can't win them all, I can only enjoy what I can get. Gotta get my bid in for June.

[PilotMan]

It's been well over 4 months since I updated everyone on things. It's really been business as usual for the most part. Mostly. There have been some personal things that have created a level of stress that makes coping so damn hard.

There's a lot of personal stuff to follow, not very pilot centered, but it's most certainly affecting my job.

Early on in spring, around the time went on a family vacation we noticed that my youngest son, Ean, would stare off into space like he was thinking really, really hard. You'd ask him what he was doing, and he said he didn't know. We wrote it off for the most part as an attention seeking behavior because of when it would happen.

FFWD through the summer to around school starting and we had continued to see this behavior, still nothing to really worry about. It wasn't until my youngest son's and I were getting some groceries and I told Ean to grab a bag of ice while we walked to the checkout. My other son and I kept walking and it wasn't until we were 20 feet away that he said, "Ean's zoning out again." I turned around and he was standing there, staring at something across the store, holding the bag of ice, somewhat awkwardly, while he shook his other hand like it was cold. I watched him, then we started to walk back and even calling him couldn't break his attention.

When we got there he really had no idea what happened. This worried me. My education background is in Psychology and I had worked with kids who had been susceptible to seizures (the staring kind, called absence) in college. I called the pediatrician and told him what we had been seeing, what I saw, and what I thought was going on. He referred us to Cincinnati Children's Hospital and we had an EEG scheduled for later that week.

During the EEG, all seemed normal, but we would find out later that he had had a seizure during the EEG and was diagnosed with Juvenile Absence Epilepsy.

So he started on medication for it right away. I messaged all his teachers because he had already started to miss some school for the Dr appts. It took about 9 days for him to reach his maintenance level for the medication and during this time his reaction to it grew worse and worse.

The day before his 13th birthday, he started vomiting and gagging. Not really vomiting, more like repeated dry heaving. That would be the first day that he would miss school. He wouldn't be back for 3 weeks.

He would heave off and on for 6-8 hours a day. The capillaries in his face broke, he was red, splotchy and his will was broken. He would cry because he couldn't take it anymore and we worked with our Dr to try and make it better.

Our pediatrician would take us off the medicine slowly and gradually as the drug left his system he would begin to feel like his old self again. The Dr from Children's wanted us to get right back on another drug, but didn't say why. We knew Ean needed to recover and we didn't care for the way the last few weeks were handled.

On October 5, just after my wife and I got back home from a walk, at 12:49 in the afternoon, my son had a Grand Mal Seizure. He was talking about what to eat with my wife when he collapsed and started convulsing on the floor. She tried to catch him, but he outweighs her by 30lbs. He landed hard.

We both new what to do, but as a parent it was one of the top 2 scariest things we'd seen. The first being the massive gash in Ean's 2 yr old forehead after he had been thrown off of a horse and landed on a rock. That would require 18 stitches to close. Here we were, on the floor of our kitchen, looking at the clock, counting the time. Hearts were pounding and the uncertainty of the next few moments created panic inside. His eyes rolled back in his head, his teeth clenched shut, liquid dripped from his mouth and he shook.

It lasted 2 minutes, after that he was unconscious for another 5 while he recovered. It was another 5 minutes before we could move him to the couch and another 15 until he could really talk to us. We asked him if he knew what happened and all he said was "I fell asleep?"

I was on the phone with the hospital and begged them for an appt ASAP. We were able to get in to see someone, but it was an hour drive from the house. No matter, anything to keep me from seeing all this again. Now we have this time bomb set to go off and no one knows when it will. It changes everything, school, home, privacy, medicine...futures.

I left for work later that week and while I was ok, I was not great. I'm sure you know that I take my job very seriously and that I have the greatest faith in my wife to be able to handle any situation. But we were both still recovering. It hadn't been an easy 6 weeks at all, and we were unsure of what his reaction to the next medication would be.

I was 3 days into my trip and the end of it had me heading to Panama for a layover before heading home on the last day. The captain told me I should go home. He would back me up, I didn't want to call in sick, I didn't want to lose pay. I should have never left on the trip. There was a big meeting that I missed with the school and my wife needed me there. I just didn't feel like I should leave the country with all this so very new and we just needed to be together.

I was in Albuquerque and I called the office in Newark, where my direct bosses were. I talked to the Manager there and explained what's been going on. I broke down. I could get the plane to Houston, but then I couldn't go to Panama. I needed to go home.

Let me tell you, that when a company responds like this, you want to work for them. You want to be there when they need you and you want to be part of the good stuff that goes on.

I was told go home. We'll put you on a positive space ticket (essentially buying me a ticket) to go home, we'll pay you for your lost time, and we'll follow up to see how you're doing. We want you to be with your family and we want to help you if you need it.

No previous company would have done that. I felt both immensely relived and immensely appreciative, yet again, that I had made it to this company. That I was working somewhere where my life was important. Where I felt like they would give me the support to take care of my family when I needed to and would be there to help if things took a turn for the worse.

We're 3 weeks or so from that day now. Ean is still having some absence seizures (he hasn't had another Grand Mal), but he is handling this new medication much better. Even though we have yet to find the correct dosage for him, his life has returned to a more normal level.

We are still trying to work out the details between the hospital and the school. We are trying to keep him happy and not focused on his new loss of privacy. His life outlook can still be good, but it's about a coin flip at this point if he will completely recover and never need to worry about Epilepsy after a few years of treatment.

The scary thing is that it's still a time bomb. My wife read a story from this weekend of a family that lost their daughter because she had a seizure in her sleep and choked on her vomit, in her bed. It's real. It's as scary as anything I've ever had to deal with. But at least my company knows that I will always put my family first, and I know, that if I ask for help from them, I'm going to get it and I don't need to worry about that part any more.

[finkenst]

.... yay generic airline 3.0. I think my employer would do the same thing: Go home.. take care of family..

[PilotMan]

This situation didn't really occur while I was writing this so I want to write about it today. So yesterday was a hellacious day. And it was all just trying to get home.

Started yesterday with a 600a wakeup call down in Panama City, Panama. I got ready and went to the Executive Lounge to have breakfast and download my paperwork for the flight back to Newark. The paperwork should have been done, but it wasn't. Oh well, frustrating. For an international flight the dispatcher is supposed to have it ready to go 2.5 hours before the flight. I need that to get my weather and load my flight plan into the Ipad.

I head down to catch the van to the airport and still no paperwork. We're now within 90 minutes of departure. The Captain uses my phone, via MagicJack, to call the dispatcher and finds out that they've been busy and he's working on it, should be done soon. Fifteen minutes into the ride, still not done. I call, and he tells me it'll be 30 minutes, with no real excuse as to why, but it's ready just as we roll up to the airport. I'll have do download everything during my preflight, which will eat up at least 15-20 minutes of time when I should be doing something else.

We clear security where for some reason, my shoes, which have never set off an alarm anywhere set the alarm off and I nearly have to disrobe before their happy. We're at the gate, preflight, and push back on time for the flight home. It's scheduled for 4 hours and 20 minutes and we're going to get in about 20 minutes early.

The weather yesterday was supposed to be light snow, no major issues and a little wind. Even when we were looking at the weather on the ride up it didn't seem that bad. They were reporting the the runway was just wet, deiced the full width and good braking action. We noticed that they had been taking turns closing the 2 main runways to clean them off, so it had to be worse than they were expecting.

FFW 4 hours and 20 minutes, and ATC never slows us, we show up and see that the runway is not just wet, it's covered in streaks of snow, and beyond the braking area it's downright snowy. The ground is covered and it's snowing way harder than *light*.

It's supposed to be 3 hours until my flight home. I check my phone and look at my flight aaaaaannnnnnd it's cancelled. It's a Saturday. I generally hate starting or ending a trip on Saturday. There are 2 direct flights home, one in the morning and this one, that was just cancelled. Disappointing, and now the game is on to try and get the hell out of Newark. I've got a crash pad, so if I get stuck I do have a bed I can sleep in, but it's my days off, and I really, really, really, don't want to waste any of it trying to get home. The next couple days are going to be hard to get out of there with the backlog of passengers from misconnects and cancelled flights.

So with Saturday already being a down day for availability, now I've got to deal with mass cancellations and every flight being crazy full. I clear customs and immigration, go back into the terminal and sit down with my laptop. Generally in this situation Charlotte on American is my fall back plan, almost religiously, due to the number of flights from Newark and to Cincy from Charlotte, but I knew that the weather was supposed to be bad there, so it seemed like a bad first option, so that had me thinking differently.

I use a combination of the app Flight Aware, the company listing information and Google flights to see the up to date times, scheduled flights and load information. My immediate options to get out were Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, take a train to JFK to take a DHL cargo flight direct, or DC.

I'm fighting the clock to get as much information as I can about when the next flights go, how they look, and what options they leave me to get to Cincy when I get there. The first available flight out was to Dulles with 1 flight from there to Cincy, but it was on my company, and they were rebooking every freaking passenger out on the remaining flights. Every passenger who couldn't get a seat was standing by (ahead of me) and tons of crew were trying to do the same thing. I also figured that Dulles was a bit of a crapshoot based on what I knew about the weather forecast. Even at this point I had no idea that both Charlotte and DC had largely been spared as EWR was getting clobbered. Dulles also doesn't really get me closet to home, even though I've got a couple airports to choose from if I need to. I really never considered it. Besides, the options to get to Cincy were poor.

Same with DHL. The flight wasn't until 8pm and it was only 245p. I didn't want to abandon all my other options for that one shot then take a train across town for the first time ever in the snow and try and figure out how to get to the cargo hanger there to leave.

So in my head I had Chicago or Detroit. Lucky for me I could try for both flights, and Chicago was up first. I listed for the flight, with the hope that I could catch one of three flights from Chicago home. The issue was that the company had cancelled 80% of the Chicago flights and so everyone wanted on this one. I used a vacation pass to increase my standing and then listed for the jumpseat. I was officially #26 and #50 on the list for a flight that holds 170 people. I sat, paced, and kept thinking about what other options I might have. Nothing was good, but you never know.

I waited until the last passenger was boarded, and I was right. It wasn't even close. It was about an hour until the Delta flight was going to Detroit. I got on the Airtrain to head over and it broke down with me on it. Is stopped short of the concourse and then the doors opened with the cold coming right into the car. Awesome. It took at least 10 minutes for people to fix the issue then the train just bypassed my stop. I had to ride along, then get on another train going back the other way. Double Awesome.

Obviously, I don't have benefits on Delta any longer. So when I'm trying to fly on them, I try for the jumpseat first, then if there are seats in the back and every other non-revenue passenger gets on, then I get a seat. Same with American. Seeing other people in uniform when you're walking up to the gate can be somewhat demoralizing.

The thing with Detroit is that it's where Delta moved a lot of their flying there from Cincy and a lot of their employees too. There's always a lot of crew going back and forth, but at least it was closer and only a 4.5 hour drive if I needed to. Delta was still selling seats on these flights so at least I know there might be a seat or two. It was one chance for one flight.

There were no more options for Chicago. If the flight left close to on time I'd have about an hour to make my connecting flight home. My last option for the night, if Detroit didn't work would be Charlotte and American. That connection would be only 50 minutes and with the weather and de-ice requirements in Newark might not even be possible.

It was still snowing in Newark, at least 5 inches had fallen by now. The Delta agent listed me and told me I had the jump seat which was surprising, she also told me I'd get on, and that they had seats, which also surprised me because they had cancelled a MSP flight that night. I figured they'd move people to this one, but good for me. It took forever to get cleaned off, but there was a sense of relief upon leaving.

It was 600p when we took off, which should have had us on the ground around 715, giving me 1 hour to connect to Cincy. I had no idea how the flight home looked other than knowing that Delta was still selling seats. Which could mean they were down to 1 or 2.

It was snowing in Detroit, because of course it was, and we were late getting on the ground. Then they moved our gate to the complete other side of the airport from where I needed to be. By the time I got off the plane with my luggage I would have had 15 minutes to go a forever distance, but like everything else this day, my prospective flight home would be delayed.

I decided to forgo food to get to the gate and get listed early. Along the way I ran into a flight attendant friend of mine who I worked with at Comair. He was now working as a gate supervisor there. When I get to the gate I find out that someone already has the jumpseat, there are 5 non revs listed ahead of me, and at the moment, if everyone shows up there is no room.

I'm going to digress for a moment and rant. The gate agent was new and she didn't understand the trials of commuting. I told her I wanted to list for the flight and she's like, do you see what time it leaves?! I told her that I had flown to Detroit for the sole purpose to take this flight and she looks at me like I've got 3 heads. I'm trying to determine if it's worth it for me wait this out and she's like to you want to go talk to customer service and see if they can help? Like there's just an enormous amount of flights to choose from to get home. Then there's the passengers.

This flight was running late because the crew wasn't there, but the plane was and passengers just couldn't wrap there heads around that. Now the operator of this wasn't Delta, it was my former company, Generic Airline 2B. A surely man asked if there was a chance that I would be working the flight and maybe my immediate response of "oh, hell no" was too flippant, but c'mon. I'm not working, I don't even work for that company. I heard him complaining that it was stupid that there was no crew, yet there I was, why couldn't they just have me go down and get the plane all cleaned off and ready for the other crew. Wow. Don't even know what to say to that. Yet in his mind, this was an incredible miscarriage of justice. To be fair, by now, the flight was going to be delayed by 2.5 hours. The crew was coming in from Rochester NY and they hadn't even left yet.

Driving was now a real option for me. The desire to get home is so strong. I had also looked at hotel options by using an app called Hotel Tonight. I could have gotten a room for about 40 bucks at a Travelodge, or 65 at a Wyndam. It would have been a short night. The next direct flight to CVG was a noon on Sunday, or I could fly to Chicago then try one of the many flights to home. Either way, the earliest I could get home was would be noon on Sunday.

Driving was going to cost me $125 for a one way, plus gas, which would have been another $30 for gas, and 4.5 hours later I would have been home, but I was also tired by this time. I would have been looking at getting home around 2am. Better than noon, but punishing on the end of the day I've had.

The Mrs didn't want me to drive. I could feel my body and mind wearing out too. So I decided to hang out and just see if I could get on this flight. If I didn't I'd be going to a hotel.

The crew showed up and my concerns about their available duty time were allayed. They didn't appear to be in danger of timing out anytime soon so that was good news.

I had gotten to talking to another gate agent who came up to help and she and I talked Steelers as her husband was a big fan. She also told me that there were going to be a couple of misconnects and that there would almost certainly be a seat for me. What a sigh of relief.

They started boarding up and indeed, they had a seat for me. The new agent told me to wait while she made a final announcement, then proceeded to unseat a no show passenger in first class and hand me his seat! Wow, was that a nice surprise at the end of the day. It didn't take long to fall asleep either.

I got to my car around midnight and my decision to try parking in the parking garage was good in that I didn't need to scrape my car. The company will reimburse me up to $35 in parking for a month, and since I don't bill them for my yearly parking and I don't have parking in Newark I figured that I could bill them for at least 1 trip a month in the garage. It was cold, and while it was very slow to crank my car did start.

Home by about 1230a, better than a hotel, better than driving, about 4.5 hours later than I thought I'd be and over 10 hours after I had finished working. My day was 18 hours in uniform and goes down as one of the longest days that I've had.

Commuting sucks.

I was scaring myself with how tired I was just on my 20 min drive home. I was slow and weaving like I was drunk, even though I was putting all my concentration into it, it was scary. It was a good thing I didn't decide to drive. From my own exposure to fatigue training in the airline business this was a clear example of fatigue. Self awareness is a big deal and the danger that comes with operating in a fatigued state is real. I was happy when I rolled into the garage, and my bed was never a more welcome sight.

[PilotMan]

Totally forgot to add the photo that I took this week as we descended into Vegas.

[CraigSca]

Yeah, I agree - traveling by air to commute sucks. It always sounds glamorous, but when you're "in it", it really is a dehumanizing means of travel.

Glad you were able to get home "early"!

[PilotMan]

So it's been a while since I've posted in here, but there was a situation on my last trip that everyone should be familiar with, that I wanted to provide a little bit of insight into.

On Friday morning I flew to Newark to start my next 4 day trip. This was the first trip that I had since our spring break vacation. Even though my vacation was only 7 days official, with my days off, I'd been off for 2 weeks. I tell you what. So much of this career is dependent on routine, that when you're in the midst of the back and forth it's fine, but once that's broken, and you've been off for a while needing to leave home, at least for me, it's just so hard to leave them behind. Once I'm out though, it chills out and things get back to normal.

So I get on the road and things feel like they are getting back to normal. I get to Newark around 1 and there's a town hall meeting at 200p where the company COO, and many others are going to be in the pilots lounge for a Q&A session with pilots. It's only 2nd time in my entire career that I've made one of these. The odds that my schedule matches up perfectly with something like this is rare. They talk about operational stuff, take questions. Things get testy, they always do, but in the end, there are a number of good takeaways, but all is still yet to be seen if it'll play out like that. It's the ultimate long plan. I mean, we're talking stuff that will take 5-10-20 years to play out.

I started work at 545p for a flight down to Tampa. That's all that I had scheduled for the day. Let's talk about Newark for a minute and something that changed there last year. For most of the last 10 years (maybe longer?) Newark was what we call slotted. That means that the airport has restrictions on the number of takeoffs and landings per hour and that companies actually own those slots. It was a response to massive delays due to overcrowding at the airport. It allowed a much more controlled and planned airport operation.

When the weather would go bad companies would cancel slots for shorter, regional flights in order to be able to operate the longer international flights that would need to use those slots because of weather induced airport delays. Now these slots were valuable. They were traded around, bought and sold like a commodity, but they did have a drawback in that no new companies could really come in and compete because everything was restricted and all the slots were already passed out.

Well, last year, the Port Authority, partly in response to the controversy that lead to the departure of a CEO, decided that it was time for Newark to become unslotted again. Now, if you're a small airline and suddenly there's a chance for you to expand into a new market, you might just take it. It's a chance to increase market share and really compete and if you're the main carrier in said airport the most effective thing that you can do is to pump a significant amount of flying in, to try and grab market share, lower operating costs, and probably by injecting so much flying in, make it harder on yourself and everyone else to operate in and out, because the airport is now going to be at or above capacity for much larger chunks of the day than it's been in a very long time. That's how the airport competition game works. If you don't do it, everyone else will, and they probably already are.

I've talked about how ground delay programs work in the past so I'm not going to start on that one again, but suffice to say, last Friday looked like Armageddon in Newark.

Storms were scattered and rolling in from the west. That was causing a chain reaction of departure gate closures that started to back things up. But it wasn't the storms that were the genesis of the issues. It was 90% volume. Just one of those days where the whole airport operation just fell apart from the approach controllers, to tower, to ground. The airport just crumbled.

As I was doing the pre-flight we had a message to call clearance for a push time. They were holding planes on gates, because the ground was so cluttered that unless they could get the plane out and off there was no room to just park them out where they could wait. Except that planes that are landing need to get to those gates too. It's like watching a toilet about to overflow.

We got the plane ready to go, but our delay time was only a guess. They said that our departure corridor was closed and no idea when it would open, but he guessed that it would be about 45 mintues to hold on the gate. When our time came up we were told that it was still closed but that we could push. I called ramp and got our push clearance and we were finally off. We didn't get far.

There were planes everywhere. Ground control was broken into two different frequencies, because of the congestion, and in their words, the airport was nearly gridlocked. My company had international arrivals that have to come into one terminal, then the plane clears customs, then it gets towed over to the domestic gates to go back out again. Those planes couldn't get out, because ground didn't have time to move them. They coudn't get to the gates, because other planes couldn't get off the gates.

We sat out another full hour before we finally got off the ground. Thank god. We were supposed to be in Tampa 30 minutes early, but instead we got in 90 minutes late. This is the new reality for the busy summer season.

Everything that I do in Newark, especially the commuting in and out is going to be made harder. I hope that it's not like that though. It's been years since it was, but let's just say, that it probably will. We've been warned.

[PilotMan]

I'll add a bonus photo from today's flight back from San Diego of the Telluride Colorado area, from 7 miles up.

[pbot]

Perhaps you can't, or don't want to comment, but would be curious to hear your insights on the Air Canada incident at SFO a couple weeks ago where they almost landed on the taxiway.

Even if the approach is being hand flown, shouldn't they still have the flight path plotted on the display to help provide guidance, as well as the guide that shows if the plane is aligned with the runway and within the glidescope?

[PilotMan]

Originally Posted by pbot

Perhaps you can't, or don't want to comment, but would be curious to hear your insights on the Air Canada incident at SFO a couple weeks ago where they almost landed on the taxiway.

Even if the approach is being hand flown, shouldn't they still have the flight path plotted on the display to help provide guidance, as well as the guide that shows if the plane is aligned with the runway and within the glidescope?

Unquestionably. Given all the tech and procedures that should never happen to an airline crew. Incidents like this one typically occur at night, or in the early morning hours. They occur after a long flight, or an overnight flight. There have been incidents similar in Atlanta and Newark, but none where 1 plane would have plowed into a line of planes waiting for takeoff.

Even if the guys were tired, they should have been even more diligent about setting up the plane for the approach. I haven't heard anything that has come out from the crews at this point, they may a good reason, but from a professional pilot stand point both guys dropped the ball. The guy flying and the guy monitoring. Someone fucked up. It's not on the controller.

[PilotMan]

Oh, and fuck Photobucket.

[PilotMan]

Pbot brought up the AirCanada incident in SFO. Check this out. I read it today and it turned my stomach.

Air Canada Flight 759 incident details from NTSB - Business Insider

[PilotMan]

So yesterday, wow. I have never had a day like I had yesterday.

Started off with a 400a wakeup (Eastern time) in Dallas and a 515a van to the airport for an early morning flight down to Houston. We sped down there, sat for a little more than an hour and headed up to Newark. I had gotten an email from my company pertaining to my flight home in the afternoon, basically saying hey, bad weather is predicted, keep an eye on your reservation because things may go badly. It's kind of a generic email, but nice to give passengers a heads up when weather may impact their travel.

Of course, it was go home day. The day when nothing should go wrong. I've done my trip, I want nothing more to do with work after that. We land about 15 early from Houston in Newark as were taxiing to the gate I mention the Allegiant flight that is just taking the runway is the noon flight back to Cincy, that if we'd have been earlier I could have taken that flight. My flight was soon enough though, at 130p. I finish up, pack up, say goodbye to the passengers and head inside to double check my gate and make sure my flight is still in good shape. It is. I grab a BBQ sandwich and eat it quickly, check my phone and see that I've already been cleared a seat. The flight is pretty open so it's nice to have that seat and an entire row to myself.

We board up, and push back about 10 minutes early. That's the last bit of good news for the rest of the day.

We taxi out and slowly pull off to one of the holding taxiways. It's not raining in Newark, but it's building pretty much everywhere else. We deviated around a couple of them inbound, but stuff was building quick. At this point I'm thinking that they've got some of the departure corridors closed down, and the one that we are trying to go out being one of them. It's not good, we're told that they are working on a reroute with ATC for another route.

Thirty minutes goes by and they've moved us into a long conga line, that isn't lined up for takeoff, but lined up to be held. There's a difference. Yes, you could take off, but you're also out of the way for other traffic that is coming out or needs to move around the airport. It's not a standard holding spot for the normal operation of the field. This is another bad sigh. The Captain comes back on about every 20 minutes to tell us that there's nothing going on. Planes aren't leaving, planes aren't coming in. A quick search online shows that inbound planes are being forced to divert for fuel. This is bad.

We hit the 2+ plus hour mark and our rules state that by 2.5 hours, you're either taking off in 10 minutes or, you're going back to the gate. You're only allowed 3 hours before the FAA starts to fine people. It's no dice. Back to the gate we go. I talk to the flight crew and they are on a day trip Chicago-Nashville-Newark-Cincinnati-Chicago. It's a long day, but they want to go home, the really don't want to be stuck in Newark. I do some math and figure out that they are dead by about 845p. You work backward to 2 hours for the flight to Cincy, plus an hour ground delay, and that works us back to about 545p. That means we have be be boarding up really no later than 515p or this crew is going to be timed out. It's about 4p now. This isn't good either.

I remember that I do have one ace in the hole, and that's the DHL flight that leaves Newark at 1040p. I really don't like the idea of sitting at the airport for another 6 hours, but at least I know that I'll be able to go home as long as the weather clears up a little. The Mrs would have to pick me up at 1230a and take me to my car. This would be the second week in a row that she's had to pick me up. The previous week, I missed the last flight home by 5 minutes because I had to change concourses to get to the plane. That time she had to drive to Louisville. This is better at least. I call them on the phone and give them my information. Those seats are first come, first serve, and after I'm listed I can't be bumped. Still, it's fucking late and I've been up a long time.

There's another Cincy flight scheduled at 330p, but delayed to 600p right now. I gamble that I have time to go over there, list for the jump seat at the gate and get back to my flight in case it starts to board up again. It's a long walk, and the airport is decimated. There are people everywhere, and the airline is renovating gates all over, so there's construction walls, and seating everywhere in the middle of the walkways while the gates get redone. It's a complete clusterfuck. Customer service lines are turning into Disney lines and it takes me over 15 minutes to get to the other gate. It was a bad idea. There are people lined up there, I could go and try to talk to the agent on the side, but the better part of valor is to let it go. I don't have time to wait in 2 places at once. I list for that flight too, just in case, and so I can keep an eye on it.

I get back to the other plane after another 15 minute walk through everyone and there's no change there. It's about 430 by this time. So I grab a chair and wait and wait and wait. The time on the flight changes about every 15 minutes to 15 minutes later. From 445 to 500. From 530 to 545p and as it does and as the minutes click by I know it's done for.

Eventually, the crew comes down from the plane and before it's been announced I know it's cancelled. Looking at my phone, the 330p flight is cancelled too. The 900p flight was already cancelled. So I guess I'm pretty much done at this point. Except I see that Delta has a flight that was supposed to leave at 630p, but it's delayed until 900p. If I can get the jumpseat on that one, the Mrs wouldn't need to come out to me. So I pack up my stuff once again, and head over to the bus and ride over to the B concourse, where Delta lives, and check things out.

It's a little quieter over there, but they are busy and delayed too. The flight is delayed because it hasn't left Detroit yet, and they aren't sure when it will. I find out that the jumpseat is still available and get listed. The agent is really nice and I tell her that I'll wait around and see if the flight leaves soon. If it gets too late, I'll give this up and stick with my guaranteed DHL flight. I watch about 5 minutes of Netflix on my phone, get distracted, walk around, people watch. There's not much else to do. I realize that I am completely exhausted. I mean, I can't concentrate, think straight, and desperately want to close my eyes.

After about 45 minutes there, the flight is already pushed back to 10p. The plane isn't leaving Detroit on time and I thank the agent, give my seat request cards back to her, and head back to the bus. I need to eat, and relax a little. I still have 3 hours until I need to head to the other side of the airport for the DHL flight. I fight my way back through the crowd, store my bag in one of our flight planning rooms and head down to the cafeteria. I get a fish sandwich and some fries and run into the crew from the previous flight again. They look down and decided to eat before they go to the hotel. I don't even think they had clothes packed for today. I eat, then wander 40 gates away back to our Pilot Operations area downstairs. It's about 800p by this time.

I find a recliner and play with the little sensor on my phone. My resting heart rate is normally about 60. After everything, it's at 87. The stress and exhaustion was just working me in overdrive. I have to try 4 recliners before I find one that isn't broken or just dangerous. Eventually I lay back, dont' even set an alarm, but I should have.

I'm asleep in about 3 minutes, tops. I wake up about every 20 minutes to look at the clock except for the end. I wake up at 910p, which is exactly when I needed to get up. I'm so damn groggy and feel lucky that I woke up when I did. I easily could have slept beyond, far beyond. I slug my stuff back upstairs, and back into the warzone. The lines are still long. The people are now laying down, in line, waiting for an agent to get them rebooked. I need to catch another bus, this one outside security and take it to the opposite side of the airport.

It's been a while since I've ridden DHL, but nothing has changed. I get dropped off and walk about a quarter mile to the building. I knock on the window and they let me in, then it's a little more waiting. The flight crew shows up, they are less than impressed with me, but are ready to go. Airport security shows up to go through all of my stuff. With no XRay machine they have to physically look through everything, then I get wanded down with the metal detector.

Finally, I get to head out to the 767, climb the yellow stairs that are rolled up to the plane and go inside. I get my brief, store my bags and take my seat. We're off on time, no delays. I get to CVG by 1230 or so, and after I get my car, I'm home by 130a. It's been 21.5 hours since I got up. I'm still in my uniform and I'm pretty sure I smell awful. It's been 13 hours since I finished work and that was after my 8 hour work day.

This day was a record breaker. I've never had this kind of a day before and I really don't care to have another anytime soon. I should have been home by 400p. I lose half a day and an evening at home. I could have gone to my crash pad in Newark and stayed there, fought the crowds in the morning and taken a 600a flight this morning, but I think that my desire to just get home was the right move. Sleeping in your own bed is far superior to the crash pad bed.

So that was that for my glamorous life. I'm home for the rest of the weekend. I will need these days to recuperate.

[PilotMan]

Last night was one of those nights that you write about.

Day 2 of a 4 day trip we left from Guatemala City in the afternoon. I was watching the NDSU game Watch ESPN on my laptop through a proxy and I was only supposed to get to see the first half, but I saw our inbound was delayed by almost an hour. I convinced the Captain to get our ride delayed so I could watch more, ended up with an extra 45 min out of it. That's really neither here nor there, and neither is NDSU winning it's 6th FCS championship in 7 years. GO BISON!!!!

Ok, that's out of my system now. We're over 3.5 hours into our flight, just getting down to 10,000ft and about to get into the arrivals flow for the approach when the FA calls up and says that we have a medical issue. A girl in the back has been passing stones and she's been bleeding. Her parents were split on the need to get the FA's involved but the mom won out and they wanted on the ground. ATC was helpful about expediting us to the front of the line, although if we had declared an emergency, I could have saved us at least 6 or 7 minutes, but you take what you can get when it's not an explicit emergency, and we were going to be on the ground in pretty short order anyway. There's not a whole lot more to gain with an emergency.

We land and Newark is struggling. Still recovering from the big weather system last Thursday that saw the airport shut down for a day. But it really lasted through yesterday. The wind had forced the airport into a configuration that drastically limits the number of arrivals per hour. So the recovery wasn't really happening fast anyway. As an international arrival there are only a few gates we can come into due to customs and despite letting everyone know ahead of time that we were time critical, there was no gate space. In retrospect, our extra 10 minutes of waiting was nothing, but at the time it really sucked.

The next flight was a short one up to Portland Maine. That plane had been on the ground since 8pm, inbound from international too, but they waited almost 3 full hours for a gate. Like I said, it wasn't pretty. Because of all of the delays, crews were timing out here and there. By the time we got our plane our FA's were about an hour from timing out. On top of that, they catered the wrong plane, and maintenance thought that our plane was staying overnight, and it had a write up that had to be fixed before we could leave. Needless to say, all those things meant a lot of coordination and a lot of things that are completely out of my control until other people make decisions. The plane needed catered, and for some reason, they only catered the front when they came, so we had to wait for them to come and do the back. It's one of those head scratchers. When it rains it pours and it never feels like anything is going right.

The company decides they need to replace our FA's as the delay wears on. We have 4. They get one replacement from one who had just shown up for short call and they pulled another who was expecting to work an overnight to Santo Domingo and back. The other 2 were pulled from an overnight flight to London. Now all of them were going to Portland Maine for 30 hours. None of them had worked a domestic narrow body trip in years. So there was a lot of complaining and a lot of laughing because they were out of their element.

The best part was the FA who had just showed up hadn't been to Portland before and even though our flight was only an hour, didn't realize that we weren't going to Oregon until we had almost landed. Aside from landing at 200a and a few hours late, it was all rather amusing for us.

Before we left, I took time and walked the cabin talking to passengers and trying to apologize, answering questions and reassuring people that we were indeed going to leave and get them there. Thank god I didn't end up looking like a liar. We got going, I got some shortcuts from Boston Center and we landed in Portland, well after the control tower had closed. I haven't made position reports landing at an uncontrolled field for a few years.

That basically means that the airspace in the area is uncontrolled. We're cleared for a visual approach and it's our responsibility to watch for traffic and communicate our position and intentions. Boston Center told us that there was no traffic on their radar in the area before they let us go, and they can't clear another aircraft on an approach until we call them back and let them know we're on the ground and off the runway. I do that and we taxi into the frigid cold night.

[PilotMan]

Just another day of weather.

Last day of my 4 day trip. My goal is to get home after finishing work at 4p. Cincy started the day with freezing rain and ice which has continued. Newark started in on their own freezing rain and snow at 4p. All of my flights on us have cancelled so I'm down to the DHL cargo flight are 1030p.

There will still be weather then but as long as both airports are open they will go. I started the day at 5am, I'll probably finish somewhere around 2 or 230a.

Only 6 hours until that flight leaves!

Ugh.