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Buenos Aires, Sheraton Hotel, Friday, 1995-12-22 13:45 local (Z-3)
The first full day of summer in the Southern Hemisphere (which means it's the first full day of winter at home). Unfortunately the weather is not good here: cloudy, rainy this morning but the sun is beginning to peak through. Temp is close to 80, which makes it muggy. It's just getting good enough that I would consider running. However, we're due to leave the hotel in about an hour and one half and commercial to Sao Paulo, then a two hour long limo (which means a dilapidated van) ride to Varicopas, sleep there the night, and then a freighter run to Santiago, sleep there the night, and then another freighter run back to Miami. At least that's the plan at the moment. Actually I hope it happens. I've never spent a night in Varicopas or Santiago. They tell me there's nothing at Varicopas (I believe that, I've been there but not to overnight) but that Santiago is interesting. We'll see.
I still don't have many details on either Tower Air's incident at Amsterdam or the accident in New York other than a mechanics report that the airplane at JFK will probably never fly again. None of our crew came through JFK, and I haven't met up with anyone who can supply me with scuttlebutt (how to you spell that?).
You've all probably heard that American Airlines lost a 757 near Cali, Columbia. That's a stroke of luck PR wise for Tower. The public and the FAA tend to focus on the last accident. So what we have is a relatively minor Tower accident being eclipsed by a serious American Airlines accident. However, yesterday's USA Today had a front page small picture in the upper right of the Tower 747 laying in the snow at JFK and a bigger spread inside.
Tower did get another airplane onto a Miami flight later the day of the accident, and Morris Nachtomi (Tower's CEO & owner of 75% of the stock) came down on the airplane to Miami. We don't know why, perhaps just as a PR thing that he had no qualms about traveling on his own airplanes.
Concerning the American Airlines accident: as we were going over Columbia yesterday, we heard a Learjet sign on with an American Airlines call sign coming out of Cali. He explained to the controller that he was an American Airlines charter. Undoubtedly he had been chartered to bring American Airlines accident team personnel down.
We haven't heard anything concrete about the why of the American accident. It sounds like he just ran into a hill from what we've heard so far. If that's so, we were wondering if communications were a problem. ATC radios down here can be terrible, and then there's the language problem. Yesterday, for example, we heard a Noreteamericano trying to communicate with a controller with a really bad radio. That plus her accent really made it difficult for him. At one point she said he was cleared to descend to FL240 (flight level 240, that's 24,000 feet—the flight level is hundreds of feet). He read back, “cleared to flight level 270”, and she didn't correct him. She was probably having as much trouble understanding him as he was understanding her. I picked up the mike and said, “I think she cleared you to flight level 240.” We had already helped him out on previous transmissions as he was having more trouble understanding than we—it was his first trip down here from his comments, at one point he said, “Is it always this hard to understand down here?”
We left Miami 32 hours late. Had that been predictable, I could have stayed home at least one more day, two if I wanted to take a chance on being a no-show because of the holiday travel crowds (which, of course, I would not have).
I flew the leg from Miami to Lima, and it was very satisfying. I only counted three things I could have done significantly better—usually there are more than that on any given leg. Coming out of what's called “cargo city” at Miami we were cleared to cross runway 30. There was traffic on final, so I brought the power up to around 45% N1 (N1 is the rpm of the first compressor stages and the last turbine stages of each engine) to expedite our crossing the runway. At about 40% is where you start to produce a lot of air behind you, enough to blow things around. The captain said to watch the power. Actually, I had done it purposely, knowing there was no one and nothing behind us (we had just made a 90 degree turn). I didn't say anything. The best rule is don't explain, don't complain, just comply.
Anyway, I bought the power back, which slowed us down, which caused the ground controller to ask us to expedite, and that got the captain a little excited. I would have been better off just bringing the power to 40% to begin with, then I would have been able to leave it there.
Then turning on to runway 27 left there, I forgot that the surface there is serrated to a degree that you have to be extra slow in the turn. I was just at normal slow, and this caused the nose wheel to scrub (slip) a little—makes a bad noise when it does that. After the departure everything went fine. I suggested to the captain that we not use the auto-brakes at Lima since it was going to be only a short stop for refueling, and we wanted to avoid brake heating. Surprisingly he okayed that (though he always uses medium auto-brakes and then chooses to click them off after touchdown if he thinks he doesn't need them), and we landed at Lima and kept the brake temperatures in the green. He later landed at Buenos Aires using his procedure and put the brake temperatures up into the amber. There's just no way auto-brake usage is not going to do that with a heavy airplane, which we were. Typically the freighters come in at their maximum landing weight. In this case (an old airplane), 585,000 pounds.
He did win the landing contest for the day. My touchdown at Lima was nice, but his at Buenos Aires was a real greaser. Too bad there weren't any passengers to appreicate it. However, when I commented on that I told him the horses and cows appreciated it. Yes, that's right, the load included horses and cows. This was the first time I'd been on a Tower freighter with large animals on board. They had a couple of handlers with the livestock. One didn't speak any English, but the other spoke a little, but I never did find out the details of the shipment. It's really expensive to ship live animals that size, so I would imagine that breeding or racing stock was involved. Oh, yes, then there's the cleaning problem afterward. <g>
This captain is a nice guy and a good pilot. However, he's a little shorter than I, and is an over-compensator. He feels to the need to be captain-like and if he thinks his authority is being challenged, he gets excited. When we boarded the airplane at Miami, the mechanic assigned to fly with the airplane mentioned that the food had been on the airplane since 02:00. At this point it was 10:00—8 hours later. The mechanic was a New Yorker, and part of the New York attitude is that you look for something to complain about. Anyway, the captain of course had to be seen as assertive, and he ordered fresh catering. So, an additional one half hour delay to get that on board in addition to the expense. I felt like telling the handlers, “Look, just carry the old catering off, then back on, and nobody will know the difference. I used to occasionally get the “fresh catering” ploy tried on me when I was a captain. My attitude was, “I'll eat what's here. If you're worried about it, don't eat it.”
The story doesn't stop there. In the rush of things, the handlers bring on fresh catering but don't bother to take off the old. We get in the air, and nobody can tell which catering is fresh and which is old. Didn't bother me, I just chose a meal and ate it. Whether fresh or stale I couldn't tell. But, the captain was not be thwarted. He and the others (except the flight engineer—like me he didn't care) didn't eat. When we got to Lima, guess what, another whole new catering order. So, the airplane was catered three times for the one flight—and any one of the caterings was more than we could completely consume. That's how expenses get out of hand.
Hey, time to get dressed and go to Sao Paulo...Terry
...still in Buenos Aires but at the airport waiting to board, 16:50 local
This terminal is not air conditioned, and I've been carrying a very heavy flight bag all over the place. The rotator cuffs in my shoulders will complain about that later. Discretion dictated that I transfer everything of value in my rolling bag (which had to be checked because it's a full airplane) to my flight bag, at least everything for which I had room. The captain warned us that this flight is especially susceptible to thievery from the bags. Last time he did it, his bag was rifled and his electric razor was stolen. So, in the middle of a crowded terminal, in the check-in line, I had to repack. I really hate checking my rolling bag. It's great for carrying-on and when operating, but lousy for checking—no locks and then strap with the hook for my flight bag is not detachable, which means it will irritate the baggage handlers by catching on things and will probably eventually get ripped off.
We got a particularly hostile passport control officer. Crew members coming in don't get stamps in their passports here, but they look for an inbound stamp for people going out as passengers. We did have a copy of the General Declaration of the flight we operated in, but commercialling out after operating in is non-standard insofar as customs/immigration is concerned. I had the other two crew members in front of me, and by the time I got to this guy he was clearly pissed. He ordered me back behind the yellow line and then took two people from an adjoining line before allowing me to approach him again. Just a power trip I guess.
They gave us a schedule change as we checked out of the hotel. After we get to Santiago tomorrow, we set there for three days. The other two guys are really mad because that means there's no chance for additional flying after getting back to Miami. They're looking at it strictly from the money standpoint. I really won't mind. I've got enough to do in this laptop to last me for a month. Of course, I would rather be home doing it, but that wouldn't have happened anyway. So, Christmas in Santiago, Chile...but then it may all change again. <g>
I'm really starting to get serious about Windows. Unfortunately this machine can't handle Windows 95. Windows is such a pain though on these slow machines. At least that's what I'm telling myself to work up a justification for a 100 megahertz or faster Pentium with 20-32 megs of memory.
David—I know you probably have occassion to use pkzip. There's now a WinZip that makes maniuplating zipped files of all current compression techniques really convenient—shareware, $30 to register. So, when you go to Windows, as everybody will eventually be forced to do probably (or at least everybody will be forced to abandon DOS)...
Jean said she got some calls from those wondering if I had been on the airplane off the runway at JFK. Thanks to all those for being concerned about my safety. Hmmm...or was it you figured that if a Tower 747 had gone off the runway, it MUST have been Terry flying. <g>
In addition to being hot and humid in here, it's noisy. There's a kids Christmas party going on, apparently for kids of Varig airline employees. There are two guests of honor—Santa Claus & Ronald McDonald. Ronald's makeup is very professional.
Looks like they're about to call the flight...Terry
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