Though I won’t get to post this until I return home, I’m writing this on day 21 of my 22-day trip this month. I figured it might be better to just write all the ‘drama’ in one long post at the end of the trip. This, of course, is that post.<\/p>\n
I previously wrote about schedule reliability. This month turned out to be no exception. My original bidline had 7 flights originally scheduled. I wound up not doing 3 of them at all, and 3 of them were not on time. One of them, the best performance of the whole month, departed 19 minutes late (technically on time), but arrived 36 minutes late.<\/p>\n
I was supposed to start on the 4th (Election Day) with an evening commercial to Baltimore to operate (ferry) from Baltimore to McGuire the next day, and then points beyond ending with a return home in the 9th. I had days off scheduled for the 10th through the 15th but had volunteered to work those prior to the beginning of the month thinking they’d likely use me and I could earn some extra money for Christmas shopping (or something like that). <\/p>\n
Because I was scheduled to leave late in the day on the 4th, I decided I’d go vote in person instead of sending in my absentee ballot. The afternoon of the 3rd, scheduling called begging me to do something totally different starting the next day. They were in a jam and could cover my flying with several other people, but could find any one person to operate what they (then) wanted me to do. They thought it was odd when I hesitated at the offer of a trip to Honolulu. I told them I needed to leave late in the day and they said they could do that. That change wiped out the first three legs of flying on my original bidline. At the time, all they had for me to do was commercial to Indianapolis, work from there to Riverside (the old March Air Force Base), to Honolulu (rest), and then to Winnipeg. They assured me (correctly so) that there would be more to follow.<\/p>\n
I was up pretty late and it’s a good thing. At about 1:30 in the morning, my commercial (to Indianapolis) appeared on the schedule… for 11:30 a.m. Yikes! Had I not been up to get that, I very likely would have missed it. In the morning, it was a mad rush to finish getting ready so I could leave the house in time to go to the airport. Luckily, the polling place for us was at the high school right across the street from the house and there was no line (I heard many horror stories throughout the day). We ducked in and out as quickly as possible and I made my commercial to Indy.<\/p>\n
Though I wasn’t counting it as ‘originally scheduled’, the next day’s flight out of Indy was delayed an hour. The connection in Riverside was scheduled too short (it was a ferry from Riverside to Honolulu) which caused us to be an hour and 38 minutes late getting into Honolulu. Unfortunately, they had originally scheduled the ground time in Honolulu for 15 hours and our minimum is 14 hours. I’ll spare the details, but there was a long convoluted discussion about the required rest period and time in the hotel which apparently involved the flight attendant union. The result, though, was that we delayed the next day’s flight to Winnipeg by 38 minutes.<\/p>\n
Then, it got ugly. The flight out of Honolulu was a live flight. The ultimate destination was Kuwait. We ordinarily tech stop in Leipzig but the DC-10 can’t fly from Honolulu to Leipzig non-stop so another stop needed to be made on the way. For some reason (which I’ll never know), they chose Winnipeg. If you draw a great circle line from Honolulu to Leipzig, it goes right over Anchorage, Alaska, which is where the MD-11 usually stops on that trip. In Anchorage, they have longer runways, handle the weather much better, the passengers can get off the airplane, and the whole operation just runs better (in my opinion anyway). In Winnipeg, they had planned to leave the passengers on the airplane, change crews, fuel, and go.<\/p>\n
Now, at first glance that sounded like a bad plan to me. I figured the airplane would break and it’d be a big disaster. What actually happened was a blizzard. We were able to land okay but they couldn’t take off. The previous airplane on landing reported breaking action “poor” (The scale is nil, poor, fair, and good), which, for the first half of the runway, was a little optimistic. The tower was calling the runway conditions for part of the runway at 1\/4″ slush and the rest 1″ slush. The temperature was right at freezing and the precipitation varied from snow to ice pellets to freezing rain. Basically, the weather was awful.<\/p>\n
I had the engineer run the data for departure just to see what it would be like. We figured they could only put about 60,000 lbs. of fuel on, which probably wouldn’t even get them to Bangor (Chicago? Detroit? Cleveland?). I suggested such a strategy to dispatch and the outbound crew, which, by the way, included the chief pilot and the DC-10 fleet manager (did I mention we’re understaffed?). We deplaned and went to the hotel, had a little late night crew debriefing and hit the sack.<\/p>\n
Early the next morning, my phone rang. It was scheduling asking me if I would be willing to take the airplane out to Leipzig. The crew had been on the airplane with the passengers all night and was going to the hotel to get rest. I told them I’d be happy to but that they were going to have a hard time finding a complete crew because some of the flight attendants had already left on early flights. Indeed, they nixed that plan. When I went to leave on my 3:50 p.m. commercial flight to Toronto (then Baltimore .. then limo to Dover), the airplane was still sitting on the ramp collecting snow. They finally did let the passengers off and they were wandering aimlessly around the terminal hoping to keep moving sometime later that day. What a mess.<\/p>\n
Happy to be leaving that behind, I went to Dover, arriving late at night. The next afternoon, I operated what was definitely the least complicated flight of the month, arriving in Leipzig the next morning (early, no less). <\/p>\n
I was really looking forward to my three day layover in Leipzig. There was a Monday night for some jazz and a day to do laundry. I had it all figured out. I even found my engineer for the outbound trip and we went out together a couple times. While we were enjoying the jazz at the Cafe Protzendorf, my phone rang. I generally don’t answer my cell phone oversees (it costs no less than a buck a minute and I figure if it’s scheduling I probably don’t want to talk to them anyway). I figured I better check the voicemail just in case it was important though. It was scheduling telling me they needed me to commercial to Bishkek early the next morning. Unfortunately, I had planned to do laundry the next day. So much for clean clothes.<\/p>\n
When I got back to the hotel room, I discovered that they also wanted my engineer and first officer (who I had yet to make contact with due to being at a different hotel) to tag along. I called to see if they had made arrangements for our arrival in Bishkek (visas, hotels, etc.) and was told to call back in the morning and that they were really busy. So I called back in the morning. No dice. I suppose I should explain that it’s common in ‘very’ foreign places for them to arrange for someone to escort us through the airport, handle visas for us, and so on. And, of course, they’re supposed to set up transportation to the hotel (in addition to, obviously, booking said hotel). <\/p>\n
So off to Bishkek we go with no help on the other end. If I were a real pain, I would have just sat in the immigration line until I starved to death. Who knows if World would have ever figured out where we were. They wanted cash for our visas and when we finally got ‘out’, there was no indication that anyone was interested in taking us to any particular hotel, though there was an eager English-speaking cabbie hoping for some late-night business. Since I was already into an expense report for the visas, and since my patience for figuring out the pay phone was long gone, I whipped out the cell phone to call the company. I sat on hold for 10 minutes (at $5 a minute) while they booked me a hotel, and then told me we’d have to take a taxi. Lucky day for the cabbie. All that (among so many other things) made its way into my letter to the Vice President of Operations…<\/p>\n
Since this is getting long, I’ll spare the whole story about their plan for us to ferry from Bishkek to Kuwait, get off our airplane, which was going on to Leipzig, so that we could layover and then get on a different World airplane going to (drum roll please), Leipzig… only get us to Leipzig with just too little time for legal rest before our next flight. Sometimes their creativity is truly stunning. Needless to say, we talked them out of that dumb idea and just deadheaded on our airplane (the one we operated from Bishkek to Kuwait) back to Leipzig. The upside was that left me time to do laundry. <\/p>\n
Of course, we would have wound up having legal rest anyway because (as is so often the case), the flight delayed out of Leipzig. They sent an airplane on a trip that wound up so broken (I don’t know what with) that they had to do an airplane change in Bangor (ferried another one there and the broke one back to Baltimore to get fixed). Yikes. So nearly a day late, we were off to Bishkek again (that’s trip #2 if you’re counting). This time, we had hotel information ahead of time…<\/p>\n
But what several of us (me and some of the flight attendants) didn’t have was a plan to leave Bishkek. By this time, I was well into my days off and I couldn’t have gotten back to the U.S. in time to turn right around and commercial all the way back to Turkey for my next bidline trip. I figured they’d commercial me from Bishkek to Adana, but they just hadn’t figured out how. They did have a plan at one time that involved me laying over in London. Now, if you get out your globe and draw a line between Kyrgyzstan and Turkey, you’ll see just how close London is. There isn’t a magic marker fat enough for that to make any sense. But our delay solved that little problem since I didn’t have enough rest to legally make the flight to London.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately (for World), the delay created a different problem with me leaving Bishkek. The flights both to London and to Istanbul apparently don’t run every day of the week. Flying me to London two days later (than the original plan) wouldn’t work because it requires a layover (as in an extra day) and there wouldn’t have been enough extra days left. And the flight to Istanbul two days later didn’t have any economy seats left. I checked on the price of a business class ticket to Adana (through Istanbul) and it was almost $1600. Never fear, our travel department had a better idea. While I was busy with jazz and local cuisine, travel figured out they could book me in business class just to Istanbul and then in economy class to Adana for the low low price of $2800. That idea was so outside the box, it never would have occurred to me…<\/p>\n
As if I hadn’t had enough of the twilight zone, that got me into my second bidline trip (after my non-existent days off) which consisted of two round trips from Adana to, you guessed it, Bishkek. You’d think after all that I could pronounce Aktyubinsk and Kyslorda, but every time I keyed the mic, the lazy side of me kept calling them, simply, “control.” I’m sure they’re used to it by now. <\/p>\n
The first round trip delayed a couple of hours. When we got to Bishkek, I thought maybe we could turn around more quickly than the three hour ground time they normally have planned. Instead, they (the customer) delayed the flight even further to wait for some connecting passengers. We came close to the limit of our duty day. Fortunately, they got their act together just before we were going to have to go to the hotel. Unfortunately (for them), there is a curfew at the stop after Adana and, though the next crew was able to take the airplane out of Adana, the airplane couldn’t depart to go back to the U.S. and had to spend the night. <\/p>\n
We all had three days off in Adana between the trips. I tried to get caught up on email, writing, and a variety of other things. My catching up was periodically interrupted with things like sleep (as much as possible), a rather lengthy crew party, shopping at ‘the ally’ (a street outside the base in Adana with shops that cater to ‘us’), and the free breakfast buffet every morning without fail (I have my priorities). The food in Turkey, by the way, is fantastic. Think Mediterranean meets Middle Eastern. I’ve never really liked olives before but I even enjoyed some of those (and tolerated others). <\/p>\n
The second round trip would have departed right on time, but there was a … problem with the planning that resulted in having to take a weather related delay. Though there’s more to the story, the short version is the dispatcher had made a calculation error regarding our arrival time at our alternate airport. I caught it about a half hour before departure but the time it would have taken to get more fuel (to change alternates) was going to be about the same as the delay we needed to make ourselves legal. So we blocked out 19 minutes late (20 minutes constitutes a customer delay) and made some other adjustments resulting in a 36 minute late arrival. That’s the closest I came to “as originally scheduled on time” all month. And once again, they not only couldn’t shorten our turn time in Bishkek, but they stretched it out, this time, due to immigration processing paperwork on some outbound passengers. <\/p>\n
One other element of drama relates to the makeup of the flight attendant crew I had for the last week. It would be impossible for me to recount all of the stories, and some of them are just plain inappropriate (and both they and I might agree, that’s a high compliment). A couple of them in particular (New Yorkers) were a non-stop barrage of junior high meets South Park meets George Carlin (if not someone even more crude). <\/p>\n
So now, I’m making my way home. Yesterday, I finished up three weeks of worldwide bizarro drama, some of it so strange even I find myself squinting and blinking. Tomorrow, I rematerialize at home, rejoin the family for Thanksgiving, and resume, if only for a few days, the more recognizable roles of home life. But likely, it will be short lived as I go on call on December 1st…<\/p>\n
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Though I won’t get to post this until I return home, I’m writing this on day 21 of my 22-day trip this month. I figured it might be better to just write all the ‘drama’ in one long post at the end of the trip. This, of course, is that \u2026 Continue reading