Enroute we’ll often talk to each other about what we do in our time off. In one of those conversations I found out that one of the other copilots was going to go pick up a new airplane after his trip was completed.  Several years ago he had trained for and received  his ASES rating and had recently renewed his currency in preparation for buying an airplane. He lives in northern Illinois, near several lakes and decided to buy an  LSA capable of landing on the water. He chose a Sport Hornet equipped with amphibious floats. I had no idea what it looked like so he pulled out a photo that he had printed from the company web site. You can find it in their photo gallery from the Sport Hornet link above. He said that he will have it at Oshkosh this year parked in the manufacturer’s display area. It looks like a pretty nice machine.

The only other small airplane conversation that I have had so far was with the current captain on my crew. He and his family were at a social event recently and a family friend asked the captain’s son what he planned to do after he graduated from college (he is just finishing up his junior year). He said that he thought he would go into aviation like his dad. That was a complete shock to his parents since their son is majoring in a field totally unrelated to aviation. Before he entered college he had been taking flying lessons and had progressed through his solo flight, but the academic load in college was too great for him to efficiently divide his time, so he stopped taking the flying lessons and concentrated on his education. The captain has had no recent light plane experience so he asked me if I could help out with any information that he might be able to use.

I sent out a message on Twitter and received a reply with some information about flight schools in the captain’s home area and then provided additional information that his son could access through the internet during his senior year to reacquaint himself with the aviation.  There is a tremendous amount of information available online now, even when compared to what it was 3-4 years ago when he was taking his lessons. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I mention multiple crew members on these trips because we are not paired as a ‘hard’ crew throughout an entire trip. This particular trip lasts 14 days and includes 9 individual flight legs. Yes, I know that doesn’t sound like much flying in 14 days, but the shortest flight leg is seven and a half hours. By the time the trip is completed I will have worked with 5 different captains and 6 other copilots. Our training and standard operating procedures allow us to do this without a loss of safety or drop in efficiency. We know what is going to happen each step of the way during normal operations and know what to expect of each other if an abnormal situation occurs. It’s really nice to be able to operate this way and adds a bit of stability to what lately has been an unstable profession.

A friend I flew with recently sent me a link to the Publisher’s Letter in the June 2009 issue of AircraftOwner magazine. Greg Herrick is the publisher of the magazine. He is an aircraft collector, museum operator and president of the Aviation Foundation of America. He is a strong promoter of our aviation heritage, especially the Golden Age of Aviation and wrote the Publisher’s Letter about the way that the latest airline merger is progressing. It’s a very interesting read.

I ran across a couple more items during my internet ramblings this week that some of you might find interesting. Both were found on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog. Bruce Clay, Inc. is an internet marketing firm. This first item is directed at those of you readers who fall into the ‘Geek with cooking tendencies’ category. It is referred to as the Table of Condiments that Periodically go Bad. It may explain why some of those things in the back of your refrigerator are getting a little fuzzy and/or changing color.

The second item is more for those of you who are involved with client-vendor relationships. It applies all those arguments that you hear during your contract negotiations to everyday events.

Thanks for being patient.

Duty Not Including Blogging.

In the civilian world instead of additional duties you have life. I had a little over a week off between trips this time and never did make it out to the airport. The first couple of days I wasn’t worth much good to anybody since I was still in the time-zone fog generated by the last trip. Then a project in the back yard popped up on the to-do list.  A picket fence with gate needed to be built around a new vegetable garden.  Two days and four bags of concrete and that project was completed. The next day I was going to go to the airport.

Not so fast. My truck, which the day before had run just fine, was barely making enough power to get up our driveway. That’s not a good sign for a diesel F-350. I spent a day troubleshooting. Nothing I could find was causing the problem. These days if you don’t have a device that plugs into the vehicle’s computer the troubleshooting process is mainly looking at the engine and scratching your head. Oh for the days when you could open the hood of your vehicle and see around the engine and all the way down to the ground. There was an engine block symbol lit up on the dashboard display that led me to the owner’s manual.  Yes, the truck had fuel in the tank and yes, the cap was on the fuel filler.  That left three items on their list. One was the emissions system which I was neither qualified nor capable of checking. The other possibilities were that the fuel in the tank was bad or there was water in the fuel filter.  The fuel tank had just been filled a couple of days prior, so water in the fuel was a possibility. I did more research and found the process for draining the fuel filter and checking the fluid that was drained. It didn’t look like any water was present in the drained fluid and an attempt to run the engine showed no change in the dismal performance. Time to call in the experts.

I limped the truck down to our friendly neighborhood mechanic and said to call when they came up with a solution. I got the call. It seems that there is an acknowledged but ignored problem with the wiring harness in the engine compartment. Since everything that goes on with the engine is passed to the computer, a problem with the wiring harness passing the information can manifest itself in all sorts of problems. In this case, three of the fuel injectors were not getting the word that they were supposed to be supplying fuel to the engine.  A day and a half later I had a new set of wiring harnesses, a beautifully running truck and an emptier bank account. On the drive back home the engine ran great but I found a different problem.  I didn’t have an operational cruise control. I hate it when that happens. The truck went back into the shop two days later so that they could try to find where all the necessary electrons are having their party rather than visiting the cruise control module. It took them about 2 hours to find a bad connection in one of the new wiring harnesses. The mechanic ‘adjusted’ the pins in the connector, but it back together and gave it a test drive.  All fixed.

I couldn’t leave the truck in the shop for them to continue their work the day I that found the cruise control problem because the next day I had an appointment to get my latest FAA medical exam.  Even though my position is First Officer (copilot),  I hold a full type rating in the 747-400 and I often find myself sitting in the left seat acting as the captain while the ‘real’ captain takes his/her break. For that reason I am required to maintain a Class I FAA medical, renewed every six months.  The exam doesn’t take long, you just can’t phone  it in yet. Maybe someday we’ll have one of those Tricorders that Dr. McCoy had, but I doubt I’ll still be flying then. The AME that I use is a great guy. He’s an ex-AF flight surgeon and an outstanding photographer. The walls of his office are lined with aircraft photos he has taken. He is also the medical representative for the Reno Air Races and a member of the Reno Air Racing Association board of directors. My biggest concern with passing the medical exam is usually centered around the eye exam. Some day I’ll learn which of those lines near the bottom of the chart is the one that is the pass or fail point. I wear glasses for both near and far vision and probably should go get a new prescription since it has been two years since my last prescription was filled, but I am also a world-class procrastinator.  I passed the eyesight part of the exam this time with just a little squinting and procrastination has again set in concerning the trip to the optometrist.

The rest of the time I have been home that hasn’t been filled with miscellaneous small projects and throwing the frisbee for the dogs has been spent trying to prepare for my airline’s annual recurrent training. April is the month that my training is due and I am scheduled to visit the training center in about two weeks, very shortly after my next trip. So far, my study emphasis has been on the systems part of the training.

Each year the training session reviews half of the systems on the aircraft and we are evaluated on our knowledge with a computer-generated multiple-choice test. This year we only have to cover: Warning Systems, the APU, Engines, Navigation, Flight Instruments, Autoflight, Pneumatics, Ice and Rain protection, Air Conditioning, Pressurization and Emergency Equipment. We have three manuals for our aircraft. Two are called the Aircraft Operating Manual (AOM), Volumes I and II and the third is the Cockpit Operating Manual (COM). Volume II of the AOM covers the mechanical systems of the aircraft. It is a 3″ thick binder of letter-sized pages, light reading for those cold, stormy nights. The COM covers emergency and abnormal operations. So far I have managed to read the AOM volume II chapters associated with the appropriate systems, their associated chapters in the COM and have waded through the online question bank. There is another question bank in booklet form with different questions that I am taking with me on my next trip. I’m also carrying volume one of the AOM to read through. that volume is only about 1.5″ thick. It contains expanded explanations of all our checklists, flow patterns and preflight inspections along with the approved methods for accomplishing flight maneuvers, such as instrument approaches, engine-out approaches, GPWS and traffic warning maneuvers.

My next trip has a 68-hour layover in Nagoya, Japan, so now I’ll have plenty to do on the layover. And here I was afraid I’d get bored…