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Las Vegas, Monday, 1997-07-28 00:30 local (Z-7)
Hi, Everyone,
It's a little past midnight here in Las Vegas, and with luck I'll be on an America West jumpseat to Portland at 02:05. That'll put me in Portland a little after 04:00. A cab ride to the far side of the airport will get me to where I parked the van. With a little more luck it will still be there, it'll start, and I'll be home by 07:30—unless of course, I fade too badly.
My last message was from London Gatwick. You may recall that things weren't going too well. That was only a precursor of what was to come. The next leg was to Harare, Zimbabwe (used to be Salsbury, Rhodesia), and it was the worst. We were supposed to depart out of Gatwick at 19:00, but the airplane was three hours late getting to us. This put all 450+ passengers waiting in an appropriate mood for what was to come.
We loaded them on the airplane for a 22:00 departure, hoping to get away quickly because the APU still wasn't working, and that many people heat up an airplane real fast. In fact, as the night wore on, the temperature in back actually reached 100, and at least two got off the airplane in disgust.
At this point, the airplane had the following problems:
- No APU, which necessitated air start carts.
- No forward lavatories, their pumping system had failed and they had to be blocked off. This included the upper deck lav, the one the cockpit crew uses.
- No auto brakes, which is not a biggie as far as I am concerned, but Tower policy is to use them for every landing.
- No anti-skid system, which involves a small takeoff and landing performance limitation.
- No body gear steering, which results in skidding of the body gear when you turn, and also places heavy side loads on the body gear struts when turning.
All of these things had been deferred, but when the flight engineer did his pre-flight, he found one of the body gear struts deflated. This is what you risk when you run an airplane around with no body gear steering. The side loads wear heavily on the hydraulic seals, and they finally fail. The interesting thing about the deflated strut was that the mechanic—who does a post flight check—didn't find it. We think he probably knew about it, but chose to ignore it and hope it wouldn't be noticed. Anyway, an hour's delay—with the passengers on board heating up—while the strut was reflated.
The next problem was the captain's screwup. He's a nervous sort, who insists on taking all the fuel he can carry. They gave him a zero fuel weight—everything except fuel—of 481,000 pounds. He ordered fuel to bring the total weight up to the maximum takeoff weight for that airplane of 805,000 pounds. After they had loaded the fuel, the ground handlers came back and informed us they had made a 10,000 pound error in arriving at the zero fuel weight. It used to be you were allowed to defuel, but that is no longer allowed for fear of contamination. So, they had to offload 10,000 pounds of cargo and baggage. That took time, and when the two people that I know of insisted on getting off, their baggage had to be found due to the security risk, and that took more time.
Gatwick has a 23:30 curfew, and it was obvious we weren't going to make it. It appeared the problem would now become what to do with 450+ angry passengers in an airport where all the local hotels are full. However, they got some high mucky-muck to waive the curfew because of the passenger hardship. When we finally took off at 01:00 though, we, of course, pegged the noise meters and incurred, I think, a $10,000 fine for creating noise after the curfew.
The captain will probably have to have a chat with the chief pilot. If he had loaded the fuel the flight plan called for, the zero fuel weight error would not have created a problem. Plus there's the fact that for all fuel you carry over the required fuel, you burn about 20% of it just to carry it. In other words it cost about 10,000 pounds of the 50,000 extra he loaded just to carry it. I'm too tired to figure the cost, but there's 6.7 pounds for every gallon, and a gallon costs around $1.25 I think.
Sometime during the latter part of the evening approximately twenty passengers left their seats, gathered in the jetway, and started shouting and verbally abusing the flight attendants, gate agents, and anyone else they could find. The purser came up and asked the captain to come down. He refused and told the purser to take care of it herself—an impossibility—and ordered the cockpit door locked. Fortunately, some of the airport authorities showed up and quieted them down.
We finally took off for Harare six hours late.
We arrived in Harare to beautiful weather and were picked up by the most dilapidated bus I believe I have ever ridden on. No air conditioning. It shook so badly that the maximum speed before self-destruction was about forty miles an hour. The muffler had long since ceased to function, and the diesel fumes coming up through the floor didn't help.
The bus took us into the city through a route that at one time was probably rather beautiful but appears to have been allowed to go to seed since its independence from Britain. I was interested in seeing what the population split was racially. During the ride, I saw absolutely no white or Asian faces on the street until we were in the downtown area a few blocks from the hotel; then I saw a total of six whites, all male except one.
At the hotel we were informed that it is considered very risky for whites to be on the street. In other words, in Zimbabwe, whites live in something of a state of siege. I commented that I had noticed many walls around homes, and that the walls had imbedded broken glass, barbed wire, or concertina wire on the top. One person commented that the broken glass doesn't work too well, that a pad of several burlap sacks thrown over the glass effectively removes that obstacle.
But I was there only to sleep, and I did just that for the entire five hours we were in the hotel. Then it was back to the airplane—yes, the same bus—for what appeared would be our first on time departure of the whole series of trips.
We actually did get the first engine started on time, thanks to two working air carts brought in especially for us from Johannesburg by Air Zimbabwe—for whom we were flying the subservice. Unfortunately at that point one of the inertial navigation systems went tits up, the captain's in fact. We left the engine running while we took the necessary 30 minutes to swap out his unit and then realign all of them. So, hey, we were almost on time.
We arrived in Gatwick thinking we were going to get a full twelve hours at the hotel, ferry the airplane to Paris, get another twelve hours sleep, and then deadhead back to JFK. Change of plans. We had to immediately commercial to Athens. We did get a full twelve hours there, but I could have slept a lot more. We took off from Athens at 13:00 local Sunday—yes, we were two hours late—and that made me late for the TWA jumpseat that would have gotten me into Portland about midnight. So, I jumped here, and hopefully will be in bed by 08:00.
Ah, the glamour of being an airline pilot!
Well, the battery is low, I'm fading, and I need to make sure I'm first in line for the jumpseat. I'll send this when I get home—or maybe after I wakeup after getting home.
Everybody take care...Terry
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