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Regal Kowloon Hotel, Hong Kong, Wednesday, 1997-09-24 10:00 local (Z+8)
Hello, Everybody,
Another interesting—and brutal—trip that I want to record for my notes.
This goat rope started last Sunday. We showed at the Tower hangar at 06:30, thinking we were to commercial from JFK to SeaTac on American, and then on to Anchorage on Alaska Airlines. That would have given us a full night's rest before tackling the Anchorage to Khabarovsk to Hong Kong leg. However, during the night someone in crew scheduling had switched us to deadheading on Tower's L.A. flight, spending five and one half hours there, and then commercialling on Alaska Airlines to Anchorage via Seattle. That made it miserable for us and more expensive for the company. When we spend more than five hours in a place, we're entitled to a hotel, and when our duty day goes over fourteen hours, we get extra money for the hours over the fourteen.
Unfortunately for me, the captain I'm with would rather eat than sleep. He negotiated away the hotel in L.A. for the company's pickup of a good meal. He's a gregarious guy who virtually insists that you accompany him during layovers. He's badly overweight and consumes an amazing amount of food—and wants you to do the same. I would rather have gone to the hotel since I had slept only four hours the previous night.
The trip from Anchorage to Hong Kong was to be on Tower's lone freighter, and when we arrived in Anchorage, we received the news that its schedule had been changed. That resulted in another four-hour night of sleep.
Things got worse. We stumbled out to the airport, did our preflight and found some problems. It took six hours of rolling delay to fix them, so by the time we lifted off, the combination of the two short nights and the six hour delay had me already acting like a zombie.
The flight time from Anchorage to Khabarovsk is scheduled at a little under six hours, and likewise the time from Khabarovsk to Hong Kong. The schedule is unrealistic, done that way to abide within the regulation that says you can't schedule a pilot for more than twelve hours of flight within twenty-four. In reality each leg takes a little over six hours. In this case it was 6:06 to Khabarovsk and 6:33 on to Hong Kong.
I had never flown in Russian air space, and having to do it for the first time when I was dog-tired was not fun. The problem is that they use meters for altitude and kilometers for distance. The rest of the world uses feet for altitude and nautical miles for distance. I belive their way to be better, but when you're not used to it....
Actually, the kilometers rather than nautical miles wasn't a problem, but holding a metric altitude when your altimeter is in feet is a challenge the first time you do it—sort of like driving on the left side of the road rather than the right.
Landing in Khabarovsk brought home the fact that Russia is just an impoverished third world country—albeit a very big one—that had nothing left over after spending all it had on its military and space programs. Khabarovsk is a major city of over a million in population, but its airport is a dump, and the runway is the roughest by far that I have ever landed at in a large airplane. It was my leg. The touchdown was smooth but was immediately followed by a jarring rollout. Nobody had warned me, and I at first thought something was wrong with the airplane. The captain had been here before, and assured me it was just the runway when I came out with a questioning expletive.
It was worse on the takeoff, since with an additional 200,000 pounds of fuel our speed before lift off was much greater than our landing speed. We were shaking so badly in the cockpit that it was hard to see the instruments. It's no wonder to me that the freighter is having so many mechanical problems. It's being shaken to pieces each time it operates through Khabarovsk.
Speaking of a smooth touchdown, I'm enjoying an incredible run of great landings—every landing last month, every landing so far this month. I have never—not even in all the years I flew light aircraft—had such a run of great landings. It will end at some point, of course, and then I won't be able to get a good landing regardless of what I do, but it's great while it lasts.
Khabarovsk's airport was interesting. There were about twenty Russian versions of our 727 sitting around. Two-thirds of them were obviously unflyable—missing engines, dangling panels open, flat tires, etc. The terminal, to which we had to go to get our flight plan and clearance—that's done over the radio in the U.S.—was a crumbling edifice that hadn't been cleaned in ages. There was a very small elevator, room for about four persons max, that jerkingly got us up to the third floor. We elected to walk down since the continued operation of the elevator was obviously in doubt, and we didn't want to get stuck between floors.
The Russian official who gave us our flight plan and clearance was a pleasant surprise, a very distinguished looking man, a dapper dresser, who spoke excellent English. He thoroughly explained the routing out of Khabarovsk. I appreciated that, since their charts aren't that clear. Everybody was friendly, including the three guards in three different uniforms that took our passports and gave us temporary ID cards for our walk into the terminal.
After Khabarovsk, it's only about half an hour to Japanese airspace, and I welcomed a return to our normal ICAO (International Civil Avation Organization) standards of altitude and enroute navigation. Eastern Russia has no VORs, enroute navigation is by NDBs, a system that disappeared in the U.S. mainland some thirty plus years ago.
Well, time to shower and get out of the hotel room. I'll continue this tomorrow with a Hong Kong landing that actually had me a little concerned. The captain made the mistake that I used in Wrongful Act to set up a situation.
Wrongful Act is a novel, never published, that I wrote. See Wrongful Act, Chapter 30, Hong Kong for the fictional account. I made that same mistake the first time I went into Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. You can read of that at Talking of Flying—Kai Tak.
Everybody take care...and send me an email...I'm getting lonely as well as fat from having to accompany this guy on his nightly eating orgies...Terry
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