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home in Oregon, Friday, 1998-05-22 09:00 local (Z-7)
I'M HOME!!!
I got home Tuesday morning, 02:00. I'm still in the recovery mode. It was a damn, long trip. I was out from April 8th, although I did manage to sneak home for a twenty-four hour period in late April while commercialling from JFK to Anchorage.
We were assembling in the hotel lobby for our last Okinawa-Thailand trip when word came that, after going to Takhli and U-Tapao, we would go to Jakarta to evacuate Canadian Embassy personnel. Needless to say, this didn't make us happy. We were all looking forward to going home, and from past experience we knew that evacuation flights can be a real hassle. Plus, you're never sure when you'll get home. However, nobody complained; the flights were for a good reason.
The Takhli and U-Tapao legs were routine but meant more than normal work for me. Tower Air Dispatch can file flight plans for most foreign countries, but Thailand is one of the exceptions. So, a crew member has to do it. The problem is that U.S. pilots are unfamiliar with the ICAO flight plan format (International Civil Aviation Organization). All ICAO member states use it save one. The U.S. is the lone holdout on that, the metric system, and the twenty-four hour clock.
Neither the captain nor the flight engineer had ever filed in the ICAO format. I, unfortunately insofar as the added workload, had. When I worked for Evergreen, we had to file our own flight plans in Madras, India. Ah, oops, Madras has been renamed Chennai, Bombay is now Mumbai—one has to stay politically correct, in tune with the Hindu nationalists. Anyway, good guy that I am, I volunteered that information and was immediately designated the crew's official flight plan filer for Thailand. At least it's nice to be needed.
That first Jakarta evac was a bitch. The second went well except that we had only four hours sleep between the two, and that after having spent twenty-six hours accomplishing the first. I can't remember ever being so tired as after that twenty-six hours. I've had longer duty days, but the workload, the heat, the uncertainty, and the hassle of this one really took it out of me, out of all of us.
The first problem was the flight plan sent to us by Tower Dispatch, the plan that I had to transpose and file with the Thai authorities. It called for a fuel load that would put us right at max landing weight upon arrival at Jakarta's Halim airport. Lots of fuel was a good idea. We knew before takeoff from U-Tapao that neither fuel nor ground services would be available at Halim. However, we were flying there with no passengers or baggage. If we were full coming out, that would add up to 120,000 pounds. The flight from Halim to Singapore, the evacuation destination, would be a mere hour and one half, burning about 45,000 pounds of fuel. Thus we could possibly arrive at Singapore 75,000 pounds overweight.
One of the major pilot complaints at Tower is that we continually have to do the jobs of others, like arriving at a hotel only to find that we have no reservations, at a ticket counter when commercialling to find no tickets, or, as in this case, expecting a workable flight plan but getting one that had to be redone. That error cost an additional two hours at U-Tapao in an airplane without air conditioning—more on that later—and imagine the anxiety it caused among the people waiting for us at Halim.
You may think, okay, just load 75,000 pounds less fuel. That, however, would be a sensible solution. The FAA doesn't like sensible solutions. They like solutions that generate paper work. Actually, we are allowed to adjust flight plan fuel to account for a takeoff weight difference of up to 30,000 pounds. Beyond that, we have to have a computer generate a new flight plan.
Flight plans are always handed to the captain. To his credit, he spotted the problem. However, when the flight plan arrived earlier at the Thai Airways operations center—Thai was doing the ground handling—they looked at and ordered the fuel load to expedite matters. We immediately stopped the fueling, but we already had too much. When the corrected plan came through, it showed 10,000 pounds less fuel than we had in the tanks. No problem, a 747 can easily burn an extra 10,000 by descending early or dropping the gear several miles before usual. It was to be my leg; I used a little of both methods.
Every captain is a mix of good and bad. One of this captain's good points is that he consults his crew and is open to suggestions. The three of us in the cockpit crew formulated a plan. We would start for Halim. If Jakarta ARTCC was for any reason unable to provide basic ATC services, we would divert to Singapore. On arrival over Halim, we would not land unless the tower was operating and there were runway lights—it would be dark. We would not require the ILS, VOR, approach lights or VASI to be working. As it turned out, everything was operating.
We would be prepared to execute a go-around and head for Singapore if we saw anything raising the risk factor to an unacceptable level, and we would definitely abort if we thought somebody was shooting at us. The nature of the unrest probably precluded the latter, but you need a plan.
We were told before takeoff at U-Tapao that the Indonesian Army had 15,000 troops surrounding Halim Airport. I doubt that was true. I saw many, but their numbers were in the hundreds, not the thousands. But it was dark, and I couldn't see much of the airport perimeter. Perhaps thousands were possible, but I think somebody made up the 15,000 figure just to make us feel good.
The flight in was uneventful. I started down 150 miles out rather than 100 and dropped the gear twenty miles out rather than five. That took care of the extra 10,000 pounds of fuel. By the way, use 6.7 pounds per gallon if you prefer thinking volume rather than weight.
I have bitched before in these messages about Tower sending airplanes without a working APU—auxiliary power unit—to the tropics. One of this captain's bad points, in my opinion, is his reluctance to leave an engine running to make up for a non-working APU. In the case of the airplane we had, the APU wasn't just not working; it wasn't even there. The APU is a small turbine engine—actually not so small in a 747; the same engine model is used as the main engines in business jets—that provides air under pressure to the aircraft's pneumatic system and electrical power. The pneumatic air is used to drive the air conditioning packs and to start the main engines.
At Halim, the captain had to leave an engine running because no ground power units, either electrical or pressurized air, were available. Usually in such a case, you leave the number four engine running since passenger loading is normally from the left side. For some unknown reason, Tower Air Operations at JFK had arranged for us to be loaded from the right side, thus making the number one engine the logical choice to leave running. Nobody thought about the fact that while you're reasonably sure the number four engine will function in place of the APU, it being the one usually used, the same probability may not exist for an engine not normally used. If my captain upgrade is ever finished, I can guarantee that in such cases, we will use the number four engine, or, if we must use left side engines, we will leave both numbers one and two running. Oh, yes, I will also have no reluctance to leave an engine running just to provide air for cooling.
They filled the airplane, every seat. Though we had been chartered by the U.S. Government, we had been told the passengers would be solely Canadian Embassy employees and dependents. I wondered at the time that Canada would have so large an embassy staff as to require a 747. However, the load was a combination of American and Canadian embassy staff and dependents as well as citizens of both countries who had taken refuge in the embassies. They were a sight. Most of the men had a two to four day stubble. Most of their clothing had obviously been lived in for a couple of days or more.
They were very glad to see us, and the few that I had an opportunity to talk to had each had a memorable experience. One couple had their house looted while they were in it. They weren't harmed, but that had to be a traumatic experience. A man stopped in a traffic jam had his car windows broken and was then robbed. Another spent four days at Jakarta's main airport, Cengareng, trying to get out. He finally gave up and made his way to the American Embassy.
We had come in and were leaving under a diplomatic clearance. We even had a special permission number from the Indonesian military's high command. However, when we called for our departure clearance just prior to engine start, we were told that it would be necessary for someone in authority to come to an office on the other side of the airport and see the officer in charge. In other words, it was bribe time.
Under Tower's procedures, the first officer is responsible for obtaining the clearance, and I really tried. I talked and talked, being as polite as possible but, hopefully, firm and not condescending. I'd give them a clearance number or whatever else they had asked for, they'd say “standby”, disappear from the frequency for twenty minutes or so, then come back and say that it was still necessary to visit the officer in charge.
Having given it our best shot but without success, the captain decided to call the U.S. Air Force for help. An Air Force bird colonel was seeing the airplane off. He was remaining in Jakarta, but had accompanied U.S. Embassy staff to the airfield. He was, in fact, the Military Liaison for the American Embassy, and had earlier introduced himself during a visit to the cockpit while the passengers were loading.
At this point we were all buttoned up, air stairs pulled away, ready to go but for engine start, so we sent our mechanic down through the hell hole to a maintenance port just behind the nose gear. He brought the colonel up the same way. We told him the problem and handed him the microphone. He did a beautiful job of explaining that the U.S. Government would be extremely unhappy if this flight were delayed any longer. Further, if anyone came over to see the officer in charge, it would be him, and heads would certainly roll.
The clearance controller's next words were to ask us if we were ready to copy our clearance. We were, and we did.
We thought we were on our way. Starting the engines would be routine cross-bleed start. The procedure is to bring the power on the one engine running, number one in this instance, a little above idle. This pressurizes the pneumatic manifold from the running engine's 15th stage compressor, except that it didn't. The engine had been running for three hours on the ground in a hot, muggy tropical climate. The engine was far hotter than normal, maybe muggy as well for all I know. Now there are a couple of relief valves that are supposed to dump 15th stage air overboard if that air gets too hot. The normal temp for that stage is, if memory serves me correctly, many hundreds of degrees Celsius, so those valves should not have opened. Perhaps the heat of the surrounding engine somehow affected them. Who knows? But Murphy's Law held, if something can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time. This was indeed the worst possible time. The valves had opened, and the air we were depending on to start the other engines was being dumped overboard, and all our recycling of switches and resetting of circuit breakers failed to fix the problem.
What to do? Well, the aircraft's pneumatic duct is also fed by 8th stage compressor air. It's not nearly at the pressure of 15th stage, but our very excellent flight engineer figured that if we ran the number one engine up really high, we might get enough air to start number two. We had to bring number one up to full power to get just barely enough air to start two. In fact, we failed twice trying to start number two because of not enough air. Finally we decided to let number two go over the maximum starting temperature—caused by not enough air—to get it going and get out of there.
The second trip into Jakarta was routine. So, there you have it. I've left out a number of things. If I get ambitious in the next few days I'll fire off another message. If not, oh, well, there will be some more unremembered experiences.
Take care, everybody,
Terry
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