home in Oregon, 1998-02-09
Hi, Kids,
This is going out as an e-mail message to David and Mark. I'll print a copy and snail mail it to Janice—whom I hope will soon have an e-mail address.
Some e-mail setups don't permit long messages, which this will be. If it's truncated on reception, let me know and I'll resend it in parts.
From about November 9 of last year to my arrival home last night was one of the more hectic and stressful periods of my 58+ years on this planet. It included working Thanksgiving, Xmas, and New Year's. A lot happened that I wanted to put in family messages, but there simply wasn't time. I'll not try to recount everthing. To begin with, that's impossible; even the interesting things fade from memory too quickly. However, I'll give you a little background and the major happenings.
The time crunch was primarily due to Tower's continued policy of understaffing. They really ran short of pilots, especially of first officers. They had to pull me off my guaranteed days off to complete the FAA required once-a-year 3 day ground school. That recurrent ground school was supposed to be completed by the end of November. They scheduled me for it twice that month but both times grabbed me at the last moment to fly. The FAA permits a grace month—December in my case—and Tower had to have me complete the requirement before the end of the grace month or pay a stiff fine to the FAA, a thousand dollars for each hour flown by the crew member during the grace month. The same thing happened with the once-every-six-months required simulator check, also scheduled in November, although they only grabbed me once off that, but that got thrown into December as well, again with the same penalty facing Tower.
November was bad, but December was worse, although my misery was alleviated by the pleasure of spending some time with Mark around Xmas. I enjoyed that. I hope he and I can do that more often.
December's problems were exacerbated by my having to fly with the one captain with whom I simply cannot get along. Suffering in silence takes an emotional toll that I hate paying.
It looked like relief would come during the first of January, but that didn't happen. What did happen was that I was inserted at short notice—a couple of days only—into January's captain upgrade class as the low man. The company removed the guy immediately preceding me in seniority at the last minute. He'll turn 60 this coming April and they decided against spending money training him when he'd fly, at most, only a month as a captain. He immediately resigned in protest. He'd been planning on doing it and then applying to foreign carriers that don't have the age 60 rule—the U.S. is the only country that forces airline retirement at that age.
When I went to work in December, I had parked our van in the economy parking lot at the Portland Airport, expecting to not be out all that long. My December days off were mostly taken away and there the van sat. I had two days off between the end of December's flying and the beginning of the upgrade ground school. Returning home I planned to jumpseat into Portland and retrieve the van. However, Portland had a major snow and ice storm that brought the city to a halt, and I jumpseated directly to Eugene from SFO. That left the van snowed in at PDX and still running up a parking bill. Further, Jean needed the van to haul some stuff for our kitchen remodeling. So, when I went back to work after the two days, we drove her car to PDX and switched it with the van—and paid the $186 parking fee.
Since I was jumpseating on UPS, she had to drive me in the van to the cargo side of the airport. There we both had a lapse of memory, and I left without keys to her car. What followed was a comedy of errors. We both relized a few hours later what had happened, and I had her send keys via UPS Next Day Air to my hotel at JFK. However, they never arrived due to an addressing problem. Our backup plan was a set sent to Faun, which she took out to the airport, found the car, and hid a key in one of those little magnetic key holders. Returning from the ground school, I wound up at 03:00 in the morning in the rain crawling under the car in an unsuccessful attemp to find the hidden key. Soaked and dirty, I had to walk the entire distance of that long parking lot—we had parked at its very end—to find a phone and wake Faun for more explicit instructions on the location of the key. When things go bad, they really go bad.
The upgrade ground school was a nightmare. Crew scheduling treated the class as a hot reserve. Since I was the low seniority man, they pulled me first each time they ran out of first officrs. They did it three times—and for some of the more brutal flying rest-wise I've ever done.
The second time was the worst. They came into class in midafternoon and gave me a ticket to L.A. on another carrier's flight leaving in a couple of hours. I had to rush to my hotel, get my uniform and flight bag, and then return to the airport and run for the flight. When I got to L.A., I immediately walked to our LAX-JFK flight to operate back. The flight was already six hours late, having had to wait for me to arrive. When we got back to JFK, the weather was below Tower's landing minimum. We diverted to Philadelphia and sat there for twelve hours until the fog cleared at JFK. Another Tower airplane, the daily flight from San Juan, had diverted to Philadelphia earlier, and its 450+ angry Puerto Ricans were already in the terminal. They had nearly rioted, and the Philadelphia police riot squad had been called to quell the disturbance.
Not having been warned of that, I walked into the terminal and was immediately surrounded by shouting passengers from that flight. I tried to answer their questions at first but gave up and shouldered my way through the crowd when one of them tried to spit on me—he missed. An airport official who watched the whole thing later told me he was about to send in the police to pull me out. The riot squad was still stationed around the periphery.
By the time I reached my hotel at JFK, I had been up for 52 hours.
The required six days of upgrade ground school was finally completed in ten days. I was alone with the instructor the last day as I had been pulled the most. During the whole ground school period, it was on again, off again as to whether they would keep me in the class or not.
Crew scheduling tried to use me after I finished the class, and did in fact pull all my days off. However, at that point I rebbelled and pointed out that my vacation was scheduled for the last two weeks in January, a period that they themselves had earlier assigned to me when I had expressed no preference for vacation. I told them I had already spent the first couple of vacation days in the extended ground school, would have to spend the last days of it at the simulator, was sick from exhaustion, and was going home regardless of the consequences.
There is, however, no rest for the weary—or was that the wicked? <g> I stopped by our mailbox as I arrived home. It contained an official FAA letter telling me they didn't like the looks of my last electrocardiogram, taken November 14, and that I had to consult a cardiologist and have a 24-hour Holter monitor put on me. The last paragraph of the letter said that unless they received the results of the Holter monitor and the cardiologist's diagnosis within 30 days of the date of the letter, January 5, they would lift my medical.
So close to getting back to the left seat—so far from getting back to the left seat. We look in vain for fairness in this life. My electrocardiogram had recorded a single PVC—premature ventricular contraction.
I won't recount all of my thrashing around and the conflicting opinions I received as to the best way to proceed. Suffice it to say that I decided to play it straight with both Tower and the FAA. I called the Chief Pilot and alerted him to the situation, though I knew it might knock me out of the simulator schedule. After all, sim time costs Tower $800 an hour. I couldn't blame them for not wanting to spent 16 hours of time on me at that rate with no assurance I could continue flying.
When I saw the cardiologist, he did a basic exam and then advised that I abstain from all caffeine for 48 hours before putting on the portable Holter monitor. That was on a Monday. On Wednesday at 14:30 by the clock on the monitor they hooked me up. That night I fell asleep certain that my flying was over because I could feel my irregular heart beats. At 14:31 by that same clock on Thursday I ripped the monitor off myself—that's allowed—and took it to the doctor's office.
To say that I reacted badly to having that thing on me is putting it mildly. What would be a helpful diagnostic device for people with serious heart problems had for me become an FAA snitch surveilling the inside of my body to give the bureaucracy the power to again end my flying career for no good reason. That's my opinion, of course.
The Chief Pilot gave me the benefit of a doubt—they badly need more captains—and left me scheduled for the simulator. I left for sim training in Miami not knowing the results from the Holter monitor. I checked in with Jean while enroute and received the news that it revealed PVCs, but that in the opinion of the cardiologist they were not excessive. I'm still waiting for the FAA's verdict.
The simulator training continued the nightmare.
A little background here: to fly as the pilot-in-command of an airplane weighing more than 12,500 pounds, you have to have a type rating on your license for that specific model of aircraft. For truly large aircraft, type ratings are granted directly by the FAA. An FAA inspector gives you an oral exam covering the aircraft's systems—usually a three hour grilling—and then, on a later day, the same or another inspector gives you a check ride in a simulator—also running to about three hours. The oral happens after the required days of ground school. The sim check happens after six periods of sim training, each period consisting of four hours—two of which you act as the captain, two that you act as a first officer to your sim partner while he sits in the captain's seat.
I didn't need the FAA oral or sim check. I got my 747 type rating when I qualified as a 747 captain at Evergreen. All I had to face after the required training was a “proficiency check”—a half hour oral and then a two hour sim check administered by a company check pilot. It's the same check all captains must take every six months.
However, I was paired with a sim partner that wasn't already typed in the airplane. He needed to prepare for the full treatment. He was young, very sharp, and highly motivated. In all previous simulator training, I had done as well as my sim partner, usually better. Not so in this instance, and that was hard to take. Fortunately, this young man—in his early thirties—was a good guy. He at no point looked down his nose at his aging, almost retired, sim partner who was subject to occasional brain farts.
Everybody makes mistakes in the sim, and I was able to save him from his mistakes a number of times—about half the number of times he saved me from my mistakes. Actually, he crashed it once, and I didn't crash it at all. However, his crash was because they gave him an impossible situation. I'd have crashed out of that scenario as well. They give you those kind of things if you're doing really well. It keeps your ego in place. They didn't need to give me an ego adjustment.
There was one thing I could do better than he: steep turns. I can do steep turns consistently, no gain or loss of altitude, no gain or loss of airspeed, right on the money every time. Through the years I keep doing them well, whether in an airplane or simulator.
I've always had trouble taking simulators seriously. They don't fly like the airplane, and you don't have all the cues you do in the airplane. But in this job one must accept that you have to know how to fly both the simulator and the airplane even though they're greatly different. I've always resented that.
The other thing that I had to face was that part of me wanted to fail. If I failed, I would have had an excuse to quit flying immediately. I wouldn't have to leave home, I wouldn't have to put up with a company that abuses its pilots, I wouldn't have to suffer the massive time zone changes, I'd have time to pursue other things that are important to me. I am, in the end, my own worst enemy; maybe we all are.
But I got through it all. The check pilot even congratulated me on a job well done, though I think he was being a bit gratuitous in doing that.
There are two more hurdles left—aside from the possible FAA medical problem. The first is called I.O.E, initial operating experience. You fly as a captain, but another captain, a check pilot, sits in the right seat with the authority to instruct you and to override you if you screw up. Captain I.O.E. lasts about thirty hours at Tower. I've never had problems with I.O.E. I do well in the real world with its numerous cues. But, who knows, my lack of anxiety concerning it could yet be my downfall.
The second is a unique requirement imposed upon Tower by the FAA. Tower's number one route is JFK-Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is at the extreme limit of an older 747's range, and all Tower has is old 747s. Normally you plan to have a minimum of 30,000 pounds of fuel left when you arrive at your destination. Tower has a special dispensation to lower that to 15,000 pounds for arrival at Tel Aviv—or back at JFK when coming in from Tel Aviv. That leaves little margin for error—less than 30 minutes in fact, probably more like 20. So, an FAA inspector has to observe each new Tower captain on either a JFK-Tel Aviv leg or Tel Aviv-JFK. It's not a big deal, but you're always at risk when the FAA is onboard.
Okay, I'm done. Everybody take care....your old, fat, balding father.