On the JFK to Amsterdam leg I was determined to make it as flawless as possible. Instead I made 3 mistakes, one of them truly embarrassing. The first was just after liftoff. The non-flying pilot (the one doing the radio work) is supposed to call “positive rate” as soon as the aircraft is off the ground and has accelerated to what is called the V2 speed. This alerts the flying pilot to call for “gear up”. Just before liftoff a cargo door light came on, indicating one of the cargo doors was not fully closed. I allowed this to distract me and didn't call “positive rate”. No real problem, and it's a call that is frequently missed, but I was off to a bad start. The door light was a false indication; it went off in a few seconds.

The second mistake was the embarrassing one. It would take a few paragraphs to explain it, but suffice it to say that I overlaid an INS waypoint while that waypoint was in use. This type of error comes under the heading of “there are those who have and there are those who will.” But I have always managed to stay in the “those who will” classification...until now. Physically what happens when you make this error is that the aircraft makes an unscheduled turn. I caught the error immediately, stopped the turn using the proper procedure, and corrected the error. However, as luck would have it (bad luck that is), the captain was back talking to a flight attendant. He, of course, felt the turn start, knew we shouldn't be turning, and returned to the cockpit. By the time he got to his seat, I was well into correcting the problem. He just grinned and said, “I've done that.” I'm glad he had, and when I was a captain, I had f.o.'s who made that same error. In fact, when flying as an f.o. I've had captains make the mistake. Still, I was embarrassed and said so.

These were old style navigation systems where you had to keep inserting waypoints as the flight progressed because the system had a maximum of 10 waypoints that you entered using the latitude and longitude. Current systems get their entire flight plan entered before takeoff as there is no practical limit on the number of waypoints, and they won't blindly accept that kind of overlay.

But the day was not over. When we landed at Amsterdam and pulled off the runway, the captain called for flaps 5. I moved the flap lever to flaps 1. The problem here is that some 747 operators are convinced that retracting or extending the flaps while making a turn causes flap track problems. The theory is that, since the flaps and the nose gear steering are both hydraulically powered, using them both at the same time when the engines are at low power (taxi idle) contributes to the 747's history of flap track grief. Not all operators subscribe to this theory. Evergreen didn't, we routinely operated the flaps while turning during taxi, but Tower does. Now the rest of this situation is that the flaps quickly retract from their 25 degree landing position to flaps 5, but it takes about 30 seconds to go from flaps 5 to flaps 1. Thus, what the captain was wanting was to quickly get the flaps up as far as he could before the next taxi turn. When I missed the flaps 5 detent and dropped the lever into the flaps 1 detent, he felt he had to bring the aircraft to a stop until the flaps had completed the transit. He took it well, it's another error that is not uncommon, but Schipol ground control (that's Amsterdam's airport name) saw that we had stopped, and inquired as to whether we knew where we were going. Oh, well, some days things just don't go well.

What I knew but what it was not politically correct to say, was that this particular flap problem had been corrected on all 747s. However, this fact was not reflected in Tower Air procedures.