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home in Oregon, Thursday, 1996-02-22 20:00 local (Z-8)
No, I have not dropped off the face of the earth...almost, though. <g>
I and the rest of the crew I was with did get on United from Sao Paulo (where I was when I last wrote) to JFK, but it was close. United had a flight going to JFK and one going to Miami. They cancelled the Miami flight, and that threw everybody on to one airplane. Tower didn't have a flight from Sao Paulo to Miami that day either. It was a jammed airplane. I sat next to an American who turned out to be the chief of security for all U.S. consulates and the U.S. Embassy in Brazil. We had an interesting conversation. He, of course, spoke Portuguese and was reading a Brazilian paper. He roughly translated the article he was reading, and the conversation took off from there.
The article was a report on testimony given by both the former chief of police and the current chief of police of Rio de Janeiro. Whichever of them testified first said that 9 out of every 10 police officers in that city are corrupt. The other one agreed. The embassy employee thought a figure of 90% was a little low!
Corruption in Brazil, indeed in all of South and Central America, appears to be endemic—much more so than here.
When I got home, I fired up my computer, and it promptly got very flaky, then finally died. Numerous card reseating, telephone calls, and trips to town failed to remedy the problem. I finally solved it by buying another machine after the outfit attempting to repair the old one said they thought it might be a cracked motherboard.
Buying the new machine was just the start of the problems. I successfully brought over one of the hard drives, the trackball, and the CD-ROM drives from the old machine, but it was a long and tedious process, confusing to both me and the people supplying the new machine, an outfit called Practical Computers in Springfield. It should have been easy, but it wasn't.
I had to bring up DOS and Windows 3.1 on the new machine to salvage the info off the old hard drives...or at least I thought I did. After I succeeded in that—with time running short insofar as my days off were concerned—I tried to install Windows 95. Disaster. I finally had to uninstall Windows 95. I went back to work thoroughly disgusted. When I came home this time, I immediately set to work to get Windows 95 up. It is up now, I'm using it, but it's been 4 days of misery, phone calls, downloading drivers, trips to town, etc. It's not well tuned yet, but I'll tackle that on my next set of days off, and I still want to bring over an extra serial/parallel port and an extra IDE port from the old system.
Anyway, a while ago, I was playing music on the CD-ROM driver, downloading Netscape Navigator from Netscape, and balancing my check book on Quicken all at the same time. The machine is a Pentium-100, 16 mb extended memory, 15" SVGA with 2mb memory, 800mb and 340 mb hard drives, 3.5" diskette, 28.8 modem, sound card with 2 speakers, and a tape drive for backup. I really didn't want to spend the money for a new machine since I'm unsure of the outcome of probation at Tower, but a computer is a necessity of life for me. <g>
The last trip sequence was interesting. The first two legs were JFK to LAX (Los Angeles), two overnights, and then back to JFK. I had never met the captain before. When I got to ops, I saw one captain there. I approached him, extended my hand, and said, “Are you Parkes?”
His reply was, “Captain Parkes to you.” Not a good beginning and it stayed at about that level. Oh, well, win a few, lose a few. There are some days like that.
The next legs were JFk to Miami and then down into South American again with some commercialling and lots of schedule changing, finally back to JFK and then to LAX, from where I came home last Sunday. This time the captain and flight engineer were Texas good 'ole boys. That's both good and bad. They were a delight to fly with insofar as the flying is concerned, but their political outlook is really hard to take. Plus, the captain is one of these guys who really pushes for the crew to stay together and socialize. Since I'm coming up on the probation decision, I felt that politically I had to go along. I've already had one captain wonder out loud whether I could survive probation being a non-drinker and not much for sitting in the bars with the rest of the crew...and he was only half joking.
The flying with these two included two interesting situations. The first was on a leg from Lima to Miami. After a whole day of on again, off again rescheduling in Santiago (thus keeping us awake all day), we finally got out of Santiago to Lima in the evening in one of the freighters. The captain flew that leg. After refueling in Lima, we took off for Miami—I was flying.
As we climbed through about 10,000 feet, the flight engineer announced that we were losing oil out of the #4 engine. That oil tank holds 7.0 gallons. The book calls for shutting down the engine if it drops below 1.5 gallons. He made his announcement at about 2.0 gallons. Jet engines leak rather than burn oil, and the oil pressure within the engine is directly proportional to the engine rpm. The standard procedure for engine oil loss calls for pulling the engine back to idle power. If that stops the leak, you can leave it there and then still have it available for the approach and landing. We pulled the engine back, and that did pretty much stop the leak, but it left us with a heavy freighter staggering to gain altitude on three engines. Our climb rate was down to a couple hundred feet a minute, and we were headed for the Andes, with peaks in the area in the neighborhood of 20,000.
I lucked out in that I had the easy part—flying the airplane. The procedures call for the flying pilot to do just that and only that: fly the airplane and stay out of the problem as much as possible. All sorts of accidents have been caused by the situation of an airplane wandering around the sky while the crew was totally absorbed in a problem. The United DC-8 that went down in Portland was that kind of situation, everybody was working a problem with the gear and nobody was paying attention to the flying and they ran themselves out of fuel.
Anyway, I got to have fun experimenting with the airplane on three engines while the captain had to negotiate a quick reroute to get us over the sea since there was no way we could top the Andes in the distance we had remaining before reaching them. After the reroute the captain had to decide what to do. Technically we could still reach Miami, but because of not being able to climb to the higher altitudes, we would use a lot of fuel and would land in Miami with only around 15,000 pounds. There was a solid hour of intense radio traffic between us and New York trying to figure out what to do. It was all complicated by the fact that with all the trouble Tower has had lately, we couldn't afford an engine shutdown. That would mean the FAA would get involved.
Finally, the captain decided to land at Panama. The problem then became that on arrival at Panama we would be 50,000 pounds over the maximum landing weight. The solution was that we dumped 50,000 pounds of fuel over the Pacific just before starting the descent.
We spent seven hours in Panama in the heat and humidity. The ideas of what should be done cycled between going to the hotel and waiting for an engine to be flown in, trying to fix the engine on the airplane, or just loading it up with oil and trying for Miami. We finally did the latter after the mechanic with us found a couple of small leaks and tightened things up. It didn't fix the problem, but it did cut down on the loss rate. We landed in Miami with about 3 gallons of oil in that engine after having used the engine normally.
The wait in Panama was complicated by the fact that our cargo was 100 tons of fresh Salmon. After we arrived in Miami, we were told they had actually started three DC-8s toward us to download our cargo.
Well, I'm tired of typing. I'll relate the second item later and tell you what Jean was doing while I was flitting around.
Terry
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