To Serve…
My job is to serve you, the traveling public. My job description is to get you from point A to point B safely, and as on time as possible.
At times pilots find ourselves extremely worn out when we are at work. A long day of flying, with weather, mechanical delays, de-icing, and a bunch of other issues that we deal with on any given day can wear any man, or woman, out.
I often catch myself walking from one gate to the other, completely blocking out all the passengers I walk by.
However, I always make a point when I get to the gate of the flight I’m operating to take a quick look around for any service men or woman. If there are any there, I always go and shake their hands and say thank you and spend a few minutes talking with them.
One thing that we should rally around as a country, republican, democrat, Christian, atheist, etc is our troops. You may not support the war, but you should always support our troops! It wasn’t their decision to go to war, but it was their decision to possibly give their lives to protect yours.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Simple day...not so fast
Time: 5:10 PM
“We have added a trip to your schedule for tonight. You will be operating a flight to St. Louis departing at 8:00, then ferry it back to Detroit”.
Sounds good! Not much you can do about these calls when you are on reserve. You simply wait around for a call like this; throw on your uniform and head to the airport. That’s not the interesting thing about this story.
I arrived at the airport at 7, one hour to departure as required by our company policies. In the crew room I checked in(yes, we have to check in), took a glance at the weather, grabbed my charts, said hello to a couple pilots and flight attendants and headed to the gate to get the plane ready for the flight.
Time: 7:52 PM
All passengers are on board, we have all the required paperwork and it’s time to shut the door(turn off your cell phones). Just enough time for a few checklists and then a call to ground to get our pushback clearance.
Time: 8:10 PM
“Set thrust” the captain says as I push the thrust levers up to the required spot for takeoff. We will be in St. Louis in an hour and a half.
Time: 9:40 PM
“Spoilers green…..80 Knots” I say as we touch down and start to slow to exit the runway. Coming into St. Louis we had to descend through a thick, wet layer of clouds and picked up a fair amount of ice. It isn’t warm enough on the ground for it all to melt off prior to our departure back to Detroit. We are going to have to get De-Iced. Pulling into the gate, we tell our operations that we are going to need to be De-Iced prior to departure. Their response “Uhh, we don’t have anyone here that can do that”
WHAT!!!! How can a major airport hub, like St. Louis, not have de-ice crews available? Turns out that they had sent them home for the evening, without taking a look outside and noting that the temperature was below freezing and incoming aircraft would pick up ice.
So what happens? Well, we can’t depart with ice so they had to call a De-Ice crew to come in from home. This took approximately 45 minutes to get them to the airport and then another 30 to get them into the truck and out to our plane to spray us down. So now our 10-minute turn in St. Louis just turned into a 1 hour 15 minute wait.
We won’t get home until almost midnight now. This is just an example of how a very simple day in the airline industry can turn into something completely different.
RightSeatPilot
“We have added a trip to your schedule for tonight. You will be operating a flight to St. Louis departing at 8:00, then ferry it back to Detroit”.
Sounds good! Not much you can do about these calls when you are on reserve. You simply wait around for a call like this; throw on your uniform and head to the airport. That’s not the interesting thing about this story.
I arrived at the airport at 7, one hour to departure as required by our company policies. In the crew room I checked in(yes, we have to check in), took a glance at the weather, grabbed my charts, said hello to a couple pilots and flight attendants and headed to the gate to get the plane ready for the flight.
Time: 7:52 PM
All passengers are on board, we have all the required paperwork and it’s time to shut the door(turn off your cell phones). Just enough time for a few checklists and then a call to ground to get our pushback clearance.
Time: 8:10 PM
“Set thrust” the captain says as I push the thrust levers up to the required spot for takeoff. We will be in St. Louis in an hour and a half.
Time: 9:40 PM
“Spoilers green…..80 Knots” I say as we touch down and start to slow to exit the runway. Coming into St. Louis we had to descend through a thick, wet layer of clouds and picked up a fair amount of ice. It isn’t warm enough on the ground for it all to melt off prior to our departure back to Detroit. We are going to have to get De-Iced. Pulling into the gate, we tell our operations that we are going to need to be De-Iced prior to departure. Their response “Uhh, we don’t have anyone here that can do that”
WHAT!!!! How can a major airport hub, like St. Louis, not have de-ice crews available? Turns out that they had sent them home for the evening, without taking a look outside and noting that the temperature was below freezing and incoming aircraft would pick up ice.
So what happens? Well, we can’t depart with ice so they had to call a De-Ice crew to come in from home. This took approximately 45 minutes to get them to the airport and then another 30 to get them into the truck and out to our plane to spray us down. So now our 10-minute turn in St. Louis just turned into a 1 hour 15 minute wait.
We won’t get home until almost midnight now. This is just an example of how a very simple day in the airline industry can turn into something completely different.
RightSeatPilot
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