over central Saudi Arabia, Friday, 1999-02-19 04:30 local (Z+3)
Back again, and again in the back, this time ferrying from Jeddah to Delhi on my first '99 Hajj flight. Again there are no passengers, but this time there is only one set of fourteen flight attendants. However, there are two cockpit crews. The cockpit crew operating to Delhi will lay over there and operate tomorrow's flight back. My crew, deadheading on this leg, will operate back just as soon as we can load passengers and fuel, which shouldn't take more than one hour but probably will.
My crew is a “heavy crew”, meaning we have a third pilot—an additional first officer. Neither Tower's procedures or FAA rules require this, but since this is a subcontract for Air India, we are contractually committed to go by the Indian pilots' union's rules, and they require an additional pilot if the duty day goes beyond twelve hours. Our duty day is scheduled for fifteen hours; it will run at least sixteen, probably more. Tower is cheating. Indian rules specify that the additional pilot be able to occupy either pilot seat. That means a captain. Tower uses a first officer, knowing they won't get caught for that. So, on the way back the two first officers will relieve each other, but I and the flight engineer will have no relief.
Heavy crewing usually cheats first officers in that it cuts down on the number of takeoffs and landings they get. If one first officer is with two captains, he almost never gets to takeoff or land. If he's one of two first officers, he usually gets every third leg if the captain shares things equally among all pilots or every fourth leg if the captain makes the f.o.s share every other leg. I do it differently. The senior f.o. gets to choose whether he wants the takeoff or the landing; the junior f.o. takes what's left...and I get to run the radio. <g>
Though that means I don't have as much fun, it avoids currency problems for the f.o.s, and if it creates a currency problem for me, I can always take legs as necessary.
It took us over four hours to clear immigration and customs when we got to Jeddah. It should have taken fifteen minutes. We went through three cycles of surrendering our passports and then getting them back before we were finally relieved of them in exchange for a “crew permit”. The crew permit originals, each listing a maximum of ten people, are held by a designee until you get to the hotel. The hotel then makes a copy for each individual; that's his license to be out and about in Saudi Arabia without a passport. Guess whose name got left off the crew permits delivered to the cockpit crew hotel. My name somehow wound up on one of the crew permits delivered to the flight attendant's hotel. No matter at first, I slept the entire time in the hotel, but you have to exchange your copy of the crew permit for your passport when you leave. In addition to getting my name on the wrong piece of paper, they also got four of the flight attendants' names on the sheets delivered to the cockpit crew hotel. When we left for this flight, this confusion caused us to be held up in immigrations for two hours while they straightened things out. Had Tower taken care of the visas in New York, there would have been no delay because with a visa, you don't have to go through the passport-crew permit business. The dilemma now is that the Saudis want our passports for three days to get the visas. However, we have to have our passports when we operate, and there is never a time when we are not scheduled to fly for three days. So, at the moment it appears we will be stuck with the delays each time. Eventually those delays, especially the departure delays, will cause enough problems that somebody will do something...hopefully. A bribe would, of course, get the visas into the passports within the space of a couple of hours, but Nachtomi's policy is not to pay bribes, and I agree with that. Once you start down that road, it's hard to go back...and it gets more and more expensive.
I'm disappointed in IBM Net, the ISP I use when on the road. Heretofore they have had local phone numbers in all countries in which I have wanted to log on, except of course in Saudi, where nobody yet has local numbers. However, I wrongly assumed IBM Net would have numbers in at least one of the Gulf countries: Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, or Qatar. Phone calls from Saudi to those countries are relatively inexpensive. However, when I attempted to log on to send the first message, I discovered there are no IBM Net drops in those countries. It appears my best bet is to use AT&T's USA Direct to call an IBM Net local number in New York. I'll try that when I get back to Jeddah and have had a good rest.
Cockpit crew members are in the Sofitel Hotel here in Jeddah. It's conveniently located near Jeddah's center. There's a 24-hour supermarket across the street, cheap laundries on either side, 24-hour pharmacies three blocks towards the Red Sea (west), and the U.S. Embassy is another two blocks beyond the pharmacies...and the hotel has a good breakfast. Two small problems: the pool has been drained for repairs, and the bidets in the bathrooms don't have the central squirters.
I will have to rough it insofar as the lack of a central squirter, but I can solve the pool problem by walking to the Dorrat Hotel one kilometer east. That hotel is entirely taken up by Tower flight attendants, mechanics, and management staff. It doesn't measure up to the cockpit crew union requirements for a hotel, that's why the pilots aren't there. However, I quote from a handout concerning that hotel given to cockpit crews upon arrival in Jeddah.
“You are cordially invited to visit the Hotel and make use of its facilities and beach transportation. If you plan on staying over, you must advise an Inflight Supervisor. You just need to give them your name, not who you are rooming with.”
The last sentence is a polite way of saying they don't care who is sleeping with whom. However, such gossip is quickly spread anyway. Pilot breakfast gatherings are often punctuated with remarks such as, “Say, did so-and-so score with what's-her-name, you know, that long-legged blond.” Somebody always has the answer.
Occasionally serious and successful unions result. The purser on this flight met her husband, now also a purser, while both were flight attendants on the Hajj a few years ago. They married when they got back to the U.S., and each year since they've both done the Hajj.
Unfortunately there are bad results as well, like the captain who divorced his wife of twenty years to continue a relationship with a flight attendant he met during the Hajj, or the flight engineer whose wife of even more years threw him out when the flight attendant with whom he had affair and then dumped got even by telling the wife. AIDS isn't just acquired immune deficiency syndrome, it also stands for airline induced divorce syndrome.
Damn, I'm getting a low battery warning already. My battery is wearing out. It just won't hold much of a charge any more.
Later...Terry