So early this morning the phone rang. I was up until 5ish (which would be 11 p.m. east coast time), so I was kinda irritated that the phone rang a little after 7. More importantly (and unfortunately), I wasn’t awake enough to realize I shouldn’t answer it. And I definitely shouldn’t have …
Instead of having another day here, going to jazz (again) tonight, and doing a Kuwait turn at a civilized time tomorrow, scheduling begged me to fly an airplane back to the states this afternoon. So I agreed. What a disaster that turned out to be. Before even going to the airport I learned this airplane had lots of things wrong with it and one of them in particular made it questionable as to whether we’d even depart.
When we got to the airplane, there was a Captain on it who had been on the plane all the way from Thailand (he flew it from there to Kuwait and stayed on to deadhead home). He told me a bit more information that made me a bit concerned, but then after looking through everything there were some significant differences in what we were going to try to do and I decided it’d be worth trying to make the flight. The big (potential no-go) problem was our navigation systems. One of the three was already inoperative and one of the other ones had a problem two legs earlier that made it suspect. Navigating across the North Atlantic with only one system is illegal, immoral, fattening, and stupid (among other things). But based on the most recent leg, we thought we could determine for certain if it worked before coasting out, so we decided to give it a go.
Indeed, we figured out whether it would work or not. As we taxied out, we encountered a problem different from the ones that had been experienced before, but related to that same nav system. Back to the gate we went. While we were at it, we also discovered another problem (with the flaps) that was related to one that was already known but showed up in a different way than had been previously reported.
The mechanics worked on both problems and thought they had them solved. The flap problem was, but the nav problem wasn’t. We taxied out a second time and wound up going back to the gate a second time. Pretty much everyone involved was puzzled. At that point, the other Captain went to the hotel and I told headquarters that I wouldn’t take the plane tonight until it was really fixed. It looked like they’d need parts that aren’t in Leipzig, so I figured that was the end of my day, too.
The mechanics, meanwhile, wanted to do some more testing. So they made a few changes and we went driving around the airport for about an hour more, troubleshooting various things. Some people drive Lamborghinis that get 8 mpg. I drive a DC-10 that got about 100 gpm (gallons per mile) tonight. That ain’t cheap! On the bright side, they ruled out some parts, and they did definitely identify a bad one that wasn’t obvious earlier in the day. I’m far more confident now that they’ll be able to fix the problem.
So… back to the hotel for us, for an unknown period of time while they find all these parts – at least 4 of them all together, surely totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars, never mind the delayed trips, fuel and so on. They say the way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large one…. now we know having DC-10’s helps… 😉
V-