enroute Jeddah to Jakarta, Tuesday, 1997-05-06 20:30Z
Hi, Everybody,
I'm trying to stay awake, so perhaps writing a message to all will help.
It's about 13:30 Tuesday afternoon on the U.S. West coast. That makes it about 00:30 Wednesday morning in our current time zone. We're in the air, almost 3 hours out of Jeddah, enroute to Jakarta. That puts us over that part of the Indian Ocean referred to as the Gulf of Arabia. We've got a good tailwind, so flight time is a short 9 hours and 8 minutes, about a half hour less than normal for the eastbound leg, and about an hour and 15 minutes less than the normal westbound leg.
We've got 450+ Hajjis in back, many of them sick and coughing like mad. That doesn't bode well for our health. So far, over 600 Indonesians have died on this year's Hajj, way up from last year's total of 300 and some, and there's still a couple of weeks to go to get all of them back. Only 2 have died thus far on a Tower Air airplane, neither of them on my flights, although we almost lost one on my rotation before this one. Of course, all the airplanes are met by an ambulance, and they usually carry at least a couple off by stretcher.
I've got the “Hajji Hack” myself, but I'm well stocked with medicine—my flight bag is a portable pharmacy at this point: 2 kinds of antibiotics, 2 kinds of throat medicine, 2 kinds of decongestants, and 1 brand of anti-diarrhea medicine. Actually, I'm slowly on the mend and hoping I don't have a relapse.
I've got only one more cycle after this, and then I'll “time out”, meaning that I will bump up against the limit of 120 hours in the past 30 days. They'll still be able to use me for the Jakarta to Jeddah legs since, with no passengers or cargo on board, that falls under a part of the regulations that have no limit on flying. However, I'm hoping they won't try that. In any event, the Hajj will wrap up around the 20th.
I've become expert at spotting the Southern Cross. At the latitudes we're operating, it's visible low in the southern sky. We had an Australian flight engineer for a couple of the turns, both mostly at night, and he educated me on spotting it and using it to determine South. It's pretty much dipped below the horizon now, but when we first reached altitude this evening, it was easily identifiable. Now all I can see are the two lead stars used to find it.
Jeddah is changing in spite of the Saudi religious establishment's efforts to stop that. You now can't bring a TV satellite antennae into the kingdom. However, they grandfathered the ones that are already there. On the satellite stations you can, of course, get uncensored news, watch movies with frontal nudity (European stations), and become thoroughly infected with Western ideas. All the hotels, including the Sofitel where we stay, have satellite antennae.
If you go down to the waterfront at night—about a 20 minute walk from our hotel—you will see Saudi women, still with the black abaya on, but many of the younger ones now daring to draw back the veil while sitting with their family. Four of us, including a blond female purser walked down there last night. The blond was taking a chance not wearing a scarf over her head, but she had it handy in case of trouble. She even took the chance of sitting in a Baskin & Robbins. By law in Jeddah women are not allowed to sit in eating establishments the insides of which are visible from the outside. She sat almost right under one of the signs reminding customers of the law, and the guy working said nothing. At least it's not illegal for her to enter the place. On the east side of the country, when we lived there, Jean couldn't even enter eating establishments in the small town of Rahima outside the company town where we lived.
It appears at this point that Tower will have a massive furlough after the summer is over. Whether or not it will reach me is unclear, but it's obvious there will be no chance of upgrade here in the foreseeable future, and at nearly 58 there's not much of a U.S. flying future left for me with an age 60 mandatory retirement age. So, time to start exploring other options.
The prospect of ending my flying career as a first officer was really bothering me. I had been a 747 captain at Evergreen, and I really missed being a captain. Not that my time at Tower as an f.o. was a waste. I learned a lot. At Evergreen I had been a first officer for only a short time before becoming a captain, so I hadn't had much of an opportunity to see how others flew the airplane when they were the captain. The captain flies the airplane the way he wants, and first officers tend to conform to the captain, or at least not to do anyting too far outside the captain's box. Tower had quite a mix of captains, from the relatively inexperienced in the airplane to those with thousands hours in the 747. We had retired military pilots, pilots of bankrupt airlines like Pan Am and Eastern, pilots that left Continental when the union was busted there, Iranian pilots that had left when the Shah was deposed, and even a former Russian Air Force pilot. It was an eclectic group.
The airplanes are holding up well so far for the Hajj, but they're filthy, and there's a lot of little things wrong that are being ignored. For example, on this airplane I don't have any way of hanging up the microphone on my side—the bracket's gone. Also, I can't store the little writing table extending from the cockpit wall; it's broken, and a temporary velcro tape fix has fallen off leaving the wall sticky with the stuff they used to try to attach the tape. When we left Jeddah this evening, we had to check the minimum equipment list to see if there were too many static wicks missing from the wing tips. Tower doesn't spend any money they absolutely don't have to.
Missing static wicks are a classic example of a maintenance item that a carrier can scrimp on that will probably not cause a problem, but that as a contributing factor can lead to serious consequences. For us, a major problem of static buildup on the airplane was that it degraded HF communications.
Well, back to work...Terry