Sao Paulo, Saturday, 1995-05-20 19:00 local (Z-3)
Back on the road again. I tried jumpseating on UPS and it worked out well. There's even a free parking lot at the cargo center on the south side of the Portland Airport at the UPS base, although Jean took me up there this time. The advantage of jumpseating on UPS is that they have a jumpseat reservation system that considerably increases your assurance of getting on. It also allows me to delay leaving until later. So, I flew all night, slept for 7 hours during the day, and left on my Tower trip in late afternoon. The disadvantage is that you have to go through their sort center in Louisville, Kentucky and cool your heals there for a few hours. The sort center is impressive, the largest operation of its kind in the world.
At the time I thought it was the largest operation of its kind in the world, but I heard later that Fedex had one larger. I don't know what the truth is.
I operated JFK to Miami Friday evening, spent 2 hours at Miami, and then operated to Sao Paulo (8 hours) after that. Got here, came to the hotel room and collapsed for 7 hours. An hour from now we'll leave the hotel to return via the route we came. Interestingly, the 10 hours in the air to get here is a legal duty going JFK-Miami-Sao Paulo but not in the reverse direction. The reason is the difference between domestic and international flight time limitations. In domestic, you can't schedule a pilot for more than 8 hours. In international, you can schedule him up to 12 hours. The definition of domestic is that both origin and destination are withing the 48 contiguous states. Thus, when we return to Miami, we will have reached the domestic limitation, so we have to climb in the back and let another crew take it Miami-JFK.
We heard a little excitement on the JFK-Miami leg. An aircraft lost pressurization and came on frequency declaring an emergency and requesting an emergency descent. The pilot got a little confused and forgot to unkey his mic while running the emergency check list. We could hear them trying to get the items done while talking when wearing the emergency oxygen masks.
The leg was hard on us due to numerous reroutes. It was the captain's leg, so I was doing the radio work and was, as they say, busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. The biggest problem with a reroute is feeding in all the latitude/longitude coordinates in the old equipment we have.
Miami-Sao Paulo was interesting in that I had never flown the route before. We went out over the Bahamas then down, winding up over the Amazon rain forest at sunrise. It's kind of sad, really, to see what they've done to the parts of it that we were over—massive clearcuts that run for miles. It is big, though. It was 898 nautical miles between the VOR (radio navigation station) at Belem and the VOR at Brasilia.
I haven't seen anything of Sao Paulo since it's just a minimum rest trip. I'm told it's Brazil's largest city. The hotel is just off the airport. They say it's an hour's drive to the city proper. The hotel is fine, but out the window I can see 56 apartment buildings (7 rows of 8 buildings each row), all identical, all 4 stories, all concrete gray and appearing a bit dilapidated. I'd guess there are about 100 apartments per building.
I expect to have trouble understanding the foreign controllers on the return trip. I'll be running the radios, but I'm more rested this time then on the Athens-Kuwait-Frankfurt trip where I had so many communications problems.
Well, time to see if I can log on successfully from here. It's always a bit of a challenge.
Terry