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Rio de Janeiro, Othon Palace Hotel, Sunday, 1996-03-03 00:30 local (Z-3)
I'm trying to stay up late. We're due to leave the hotel at 18:30 today to operate to Sao Paulo (short one hour block time) then on to Miami (miserable 8 hour leg). The idea is to sleep as close as possible to the wake up call (17:30). I'm beginning to fade pretty badly, though, so I won't make it much beyond noon sleeping. If I wake up before ten, I'll go down for the free breakfast and then come back to bed to try and sleep some more.
This is my second trip to Rio. I mentioned on my first trip that being able to look out on Copacabana Beach and Sugarloaf restored a little of the excitement I used to feel when visiting foreign countries. Well, Rio is now just another destination on this second visit, one more large city with all the problems large cities have. Oh, well.
We arrived here Friday night after multiple delays out of Miami, more delay out of Sao Paulo, and then a two hour bus ride from the airport in heavy traffic. The bus ride didn't have to be that long, but an extra half hour got added on to it when the bus driver rear-ended a car in front of him. There were two women in the car, and we were in the center of three jammed lanes. The woman driving the car got really pissed. The bus driver tried to get out of it by claiming all he'd done was hit the bumper a little. That was ridiculous since everybody could see that the back of the her car's trunk had been pushed in a little. The bus driver stayed in his seat, and the woman stood outside screaming at him in a driving rain. They finally exchanged information, and we were once again on our way. The police never did show up.
In line with my program of trying to be politically and socially correct as I near the end of my probation, I consented to accompany the captain, flight engineer, purser, and one of the flight attendants to one of the captain's favorite eating places here. It was interesting, but expensive and I ate far too much. I bowed out of a similar trip this evening to a more expensive place. I just don't need to eat heavily and then go to bed two nights in a row. I figure I showed myself sufficiently friendly last night.
The captain I'm with is okay, but he can't relax in the cockpit, and the tension in him carries over to everybody in contact with him. He's one of Tower's senior captains, #17 on the list. He's an Air Force Academy graduate and retired from the Air Force after twenty years. He flew the leg from Miami to Sao Paulo, and I took it for the short leg from Sao Paulo to Rio. The weather was really crappy. When we were finally ready to leave Sao Paulo, they told us the weather at Rio had dropped below IFR minimums in a thunderstorm. The captain elected to remain on the ground until the weather came up. My call would have been to have taken off, which we could have done legally since the forecast for our arrival time was acceptable. Usually, thunderstorms don't stay in a localized area very long. In fact, after a half hour wait on the ground at Sao Paulo, the Rio weather went above minimums. Had we taken off instead of waiting, we would not have had to hold, but this guy is the nervous type.
The approach into Rio is always interesting, made more so by the fact that this was only my second time in. The problem is that they hold you high until you're much too close in for a normal descent. I knew I was going to have to dump it, but unfortunately my idea of how to do that was different from what the captain's was, and that created some confusion. I learned from it though. Next time I'm the flying pilot on this leg, I'm going to inform the captain while still on the ground at Sao Paulo how I plan on handling the necessity of a very steep approach. That way, we can settle on how to do it before taking off.
The approach was made more difficult by the fact that, since we were in clouds, lightning, and heavy rain, we had to keep the engine anti-ice on. You have to do that anytime the TAT (total air temperature—that includes the compression effect—i.e. the temperature rise caused by your speed) is below 10 degrees Celsius but warmer than -40 degrees Celsius ambient (the still air temperature). For the engine anti-ice to be effective, you can't bring the power levers all the way back; you have to keep them up to at least 45 to 50 percent of N1. N1 is the rpm of the outer rotating elements of the engine, including the fan, initial compressors, and the last of the turbines. What it amounts to is that you have to carry power at a time when you want as little power as possible.
I slept until 14:00 last afternoon, but not straight through. I had to coerce the hotel into putting a phone in my rooms with an RJ-11 jack in it. They chose 09:00 in the morning to do that. I'm trying to ensure that I can communicate promptly via e-mail wherever I am just in case the renewed interest in my weight & balance program actually bears some fruit. Right now the Avia Presto ground handling company in Amsterdam is showing some interest in it. I won't make any real money from them if they decide to use it, but it will be nice to know something I spent so much time is being used.
Anyway, when I finally got up, I was really hungry in spite of having made a pig of myself the night before. The first order of business was to get something to eat. Now, both Argentina and Brazil have 1 to 1 exchange rates with the U.S. dollar, and in Argentina they will take your U.S. money at any restaurant. So, I decided they would probably do this Brazil as well, and even if they didn't, I could find an ATM and get Brazilian currency, which I have been able to do in both Argentina and Chile.
My assumption was wrong: McDonald's wouldn't take my money. I tried at another place and the story was the same. Next I started looking for ATMs. However, it was Saturday, and the ATMs I found were inside locked doors. Apparently they're open here only when the banks are open. I did find one that said 24 hours, but it was behind locked doors as well. A sign on the door said it would open if you ran your card through an exterior card reader...but it didn't work. Finally, I gave up and went back to the hotel, by now a fair ways away, and paid their exorbitant exchange fee. I paid $4.80 to get $35.20—quite a rip off.
By the way, for those of you contemplating using Windows 95, which I am on my home machine but not yet on my laptop, be aware that if you do, you will still have DOS available. It's DOS 7.0, but Microsoft doesn't like to emphasize that it's there. Actually, it boots just like previous DOSs and then calls Windows, except they've written it to default to calling Windows while displaying a Windows logo on the screen to hide the DOS commands coming across. You can disable both the automatic call to Windows and the hiding behind the Windows logo if you like.
I'm fading. I'll see if I can log on on from here and send this.
Terry
p.s. Couldn't get through to Compuserve from Rio. I'll send it from Miami when I get there.
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