terry.liittschwager@gmail.com

  page updated 2020-11-23

Talking of (My) Flying — especially the 747

For repeat visitors to this page, I've tried to make it easy to identify recent additions by listing the topics by latest update as well as alphabetically. Also, if you press your PageDown key, you'll be taken to the most recently updated topic. Subsequent presses will take you to the next most recent and so on.

I overnighted in many places worldwide. To me, the experiences I had on these visits were part and parcel of flying. I tell of some of them here, but since they could well have happened to any visitor, I've put them in the color and font size of this paragraph to allow easy skipping for readers that are interested only in that which is directly related to flying. And I've used the same for other information not relevant to flying the airplane.

And, for any who may be interested in the kind of daily life I led flying internationally, the 1990s FLYING/EMAIL
JOURNAL page may be of interest. Occasionally, when there's a topic overlap between this page and the journal, I've put in a link to the journal entry.

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Introductiontopic last updated 2018-03-06

This page is sort of a mini-memoir of the 30 years of my life spent flying, 18 of those doing it for a living. When I try to relate how I feel about that experience, two things happen.

First is an acute sense of loss in no longer doing that. Even now, as I write this, 20 years after retiring in 1999, I feel this profound sense of loss. At least it's better now than four years ago when I first started this "Talking of Flying" project. Off and on, I gave up continuing because it was too emotionally uncomfortable. The first year of retirement was a lot worse, the sense of loss at times severe enough to bring forth a sob or two, and there were times that I simply sat and quietly cried, and that was when I wasn't even wanting to think of what had been.

Second is frustration in deciding how to proceed. How I should organize what I want to say, how much I want to say, and how detailed it should be. That's been true throughout this project and will probably be true as long as I work on it. I've handled that problem by adopting a piece-by-piece approach, as you can see by the top of this page, and numerous “topic to be continued....” statements throughout. And some topics have little or no content. That happens when a new topic occurs to me. Rather than trying to remember it or write it down, I just put the bare topic title in the html code. If I live long enough, I'll fill all the topics.

I miss almost everything about flying, especially flying as I knew it in the decade of the 1990s. That decade was the high point of my life. I was flying 747s on international routes; the world was the playground. Flying was my life; it defined me, and I hated having to stop. Someone once joked that the best thing to do with a retiring pilot is to walk up behind them after their last flight and shoot them in the head. There's at least a small grain of truth in that. Fortunately I had and still have an understanding spouse. C.J. is the best thing that ever happened to me. To this day, whenever on television or in a theater a 747 is shown, she still squeezes my arm affectionately when I remark, “I could fly that.” Whether or not I could actually still do so is open to question, but it would be fun trying.

What I hope to explain here over time is just how great flying was for me, how much fun, how satisfying, and the great sense of being truly useful that it gave me. I don't believe in “callings”, people being “called” to do things, but if I did believe in that, I would probably have considered myself called to fly. What I do know, though, is that growing up with a flying-father, and handling the controls that I could reach when I was still too short to reach the rudder pedals, gave me a committed sense of that being what I wanted to do. There used to be a saying that I would hear at the airport, an inside jest, but with a bit of truthful attitude. It was simply, “If you're not a pilot, you ain't shit!” I really believed that then. It's not true of course, never was, but to this day, for me, I feel my life would be greatly, overwhelming lesser had I not been a pilot. In short, I really was and still am hung up on flying.

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Airsicknesstopic started 2019-01-27

I've never been airsick, but I've seen others airsick many times.

That instance of my most personal involvement with airsickness occurred in the late 1980s when I was flying for Horizon Air. We were going into Bellingham, WA in a 19-seat SA-227 Metroliner, no flight attendant, and no cockpit door separating crew from passengers. It was a short, but very turbulent leg from Seattle. Bellingham was known for turbulence, but this day it was really bad. The fragrance of vomit reached the cockpit on downwind for rwy 16.

As the passengers exited the airplane, one of them stuck his head in the cockpit to tell us that a young boy had vomited, to which I replied that, yes, we had already smelled it. When the last passenger exited, I told the ground crew that we needed a cleanup in the cabin. That nonplussed them—we were running late and they were short-staffed—so I told them to bring out the necessary items for cleaning, and the first officer would take care of it. He heard that and sheepishly said he was already half-sick himself and would surely puke it he tried that. Thus it was that the cleanup task fell to me.

A Metroliner has a center aisle, and about halfway back I found there what had probably been the boy's last meal, and I set to cleaning it up. The first officer came back after a bit, apparently feeling the least he could do was lend moral support. That ended, though, when the brush I was using wasn't picking up small pieces of meat imbedded in the carpet, and I switched to using my bare fingers. That was too much for him, and he left the airplane again.

My saddest involvement with airsickness involved a young man who showed up at the Eugene Airport wanting an introductory flight. I put him in the left seat of a Cessna 150 and off we went. It was a beautiful day, sunny and clear. Things were going well until he suddenly announced he was getting airsick. I had briefed him before the flight that in case of airsickness, we had sick sacks, and I quickly opened and handed him one. However, he asked if he could just stick his head out the window. I said, yes, but cautioned him to make sure he puked out of the aftmost part of the window lest the vomit be blown back into the cabin.

I idled the engine and started reducing airspeed, turning back toward the airport. In a few moments, he opened the window, stuck his head out as far to the rear as possible, and puked. When he brought his head back inside, he sat quietly for a bit, and then said, “I lost my teeth.” Unsure that he had actually said what I thought I heard, I asked him what he had said, and the answer was the same. I was at a loss for words.

Shortly he asked if I thought there was any way we could find his teeth. I pointed out that we had been over 2,000 feet above farmland and the possibility of finding his teeth was essentially non-existent.

I felt like apologizing, at least in part, for not having warned him that if he had false teeth, it would be better to use the sick sack in case the teeth didn't stay in his mouth while vomiting. It had just not occurred to me that a robust man in his twenties might have false teeth. I didn't do that. though, because I thought it would be adding insult to injury.

My messiest involvement with airsickness involved flicker vertigo. I had heard about that phenomenon but never observed it, and I've never seen it since. I was giving instruction to a student, and he had turned into the sun with the engine idled. Without any warning whatsoever, he did the projectile vomiting bit directly forward. It was a mess.

topic to be continued....

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Approachestopic last updated 2015-03-08

If you're a pilot, do you remember practicing accuracy landings? The way I was taught to do them in 1969 at the Springfield, Oregon airport was to close the throttle on downwind abeam the approach end of the runway. From that point on you if you had to touch the throttle you had failed. Touchdown was to be between the end of the runway and, as I remember, a white mark painted on the side of the runway a couple of hundred feet from the end. There were no other runway markings, not even runway numbers. If you landed beyond that white mark, you had failed. The runway was only 2000 feet long and narrow. If you touched down short of the paved runway you also failed. There were a few feet of gravel before the runway and some level grass before the gravel, so there wasn't real danger in touching down a little short, but there was enough of a lip at the end of the runway pavement to let you know you had indeed landed short. I caught that lip a few times.

My idea of a perfect approach in the 747 would be to do the same thing I had done in accuracy landings in a Cessna 150, except that it would start at the top of descent, typically 35,000 to 39,000 feet. I was never successful in flying that perfect approach. I didn't often get the opportunity to try. The descent and approach environments of the airports 747s operate into usually preclude such. The two airports where I occasionally was able to try were Anchorage International and Tel Aviv Ben Gurion.

topic to be continued....

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Biographicaltopic last updated 2019-01-05

My route to flying for a living was not direct. Life is what happens to you while you're planning other things. When I graduated from high school in 1956, I planned to get in two years of junior college. At the time the Air Force was requiring two years of college to apply for pilot training. The Navy was requiring a four-year degree. I favored the Air Force. My father favored the Navy because he felt their training was better. Having a degree certainly wouldn't hurt my chances with the Air Force, so my plan included a decision point after completing junior college. I could then try for the Air Force or I could continue on to a degree and then have the potential choice of Air Force or Navy. My back up plan in case I couldn't qualify for flight training in either the Air Force or the Navy was to try for medical school, and that would require the four-year degree.

My carefully thought out plan went out the window when, two weeks after high school graduation, my father died in an aircraft accident. I came close to dying with him. He was at the time an agricultural pilot—a crop duster if you will—and I was working with him as a flagman. He and I and a loader crew had gotten to a landing strip north of Sacramento, CA at first light to spray rice fields. There was a rule that prohibited spraying if the wind was stronger than 10 mph, which it was. Another rule prohibited spraying if the temperature was over 90F. When it became obvious that wind less than 10 mph and a temp less than 90F were not going to coincide, he decided to take the airplane back to the airport. I had the choice of riding back with him or with the loader crew. The plane was an old Stearman converted to a spray plane by replacing the front cockpit with a hopper, and I would often climb into the empty hopper for a flight back to the airport. The Stearman had no starter, so it had to be hand propped. I was too short and too light to do that, so I climbed into the cockpit to operate the magneto, mixture, and throttle controls. My father hand propped the engine. After it started, I got out of the cockpit and climbed into the hopper, but then I decided I wanted to go with the loader crew because they were going to stop for breakfast, and I was hungry, having yet had nothing to eat that morning. I climbed out of the hopper, stood on the lower wing, and yelled into my father's ear that I was going with the loader. He nodded and I left the wing. That was my last moment of seeing him alive, of conversing with him. In a way it was fitting in that I had to yell to overcome the engine noise and was hanging on to the side of the airplane to counter the force of the propwash. He loved flying, and I had grown to love it as well.

Had I been looking in the right direction, I would have seen the accident happen. Shortly after takeoff a large hawk came through the propeller and hit him full in the face. Whether the bird strike killed him or merely rendered him unconscious is unknown. The airplane was trimmed for level flight, and it flew into one of two 550′ radio towers two miles from takeoff, hitting one tower at the 500′ level. The engine continued south, the left wings went east, the right wings west, the cockpit came straight down, and Sacramento's radio station KFBK stopped transmitting.

My father's death in 1956 started a chain of events I was unprepared to handle. It's not surprising that a 16-year-old who had just lost his only parent and was now on his own would make mistakes, but the number and severity of the mistakes I made was amazing. It wasn't until I met C.J., my wife, in 1975 that I was able to start digging out of the very deep hole I had dug. In 1989 when I eventually slid into the captain's seat of a 727, I figured I was finally out, the hole had been filled. In 1990 when I sat down in the captain's seat of a 747, the hole had been replaced by, if not a mountain, at least a hill, and from my standpoint I was sitting on top of it. Maybe the hill wasn't the mountain that it might have been had I been able to fly in the military, but it was definitely a hill. My flying dream had been realized, not as I originally intended, but realized nonetheless, and that's a very good feeling, one that I have been able to keep with me even though I still very much miss flying.

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Dhahran/Desert Shield/Desert Stormtopic continued 2019-05-22

In July 1981, I landed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia as a passenger in a TWA 707 chartered by Aramco (Arabian American Oil Company). The flight, referred to within Aramco simply as "the charter", departed Houston weekly, refueled in Paris, then proceeded to Dhahran, Aramco's Saudi Arabian headquarters at the time. I had a window seat on the right side. It was the first and would be the only time in my life that I looked out an aircraft window and instantly decided I did not like a place, although I later mellowed some in my dislike, proportionate to my visiting as a pilot rather than as desk-bound software developer, but at the time I had no expectation that could ever happen.

It was a very stark desert—no vegetation whatsoever in what I could see out that window—and a dirty desert at that, and a polluted dirty desert as well. I wondered how often the empty plastic shopping bags blowing about were ingested by engines. Visibility was restricted to a couple of miles in what I was to learn was a relatively constant haze from flaring oil wells and rock crushers.

I left in 1982 believing that I would never set foot in Saudi Arabia again, and that was okay by me. But I was back in 1991/1992; this time as a 747 captain for Evergreen International Airlines (EIA) flying U.S. military cargo into Dhahran and Riyadh—Operation Desert Shield (the buildup for the war) and then Operation Desert Storm (the combat phase of the war). That was a whole different relationship with Saudi.

In the supply train of EIA 747 freighters setup between Dover Air Force Base in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield, one crew took the airplane to Brussels and rested there waiting to return the airplane to Dover when it got back from Saudi. A crew waiting in Brussels took it to Saudi—usually to Dhahran. That crew stayed on the airplane while it was unloaded and then brought it back to Brussels. Flight time either way was 9+ hours. Time to unload was unpredictable, but always was at least four hours, usually a few more more, and on one miserable occasion was 14 hours. They threw the crew flight time rules out the window, and since it was international flying there were no duty time limitations.

As a low seniority captain, I was assigned to the far more grueling Brussels-Saudi Arabia leg. Going down to Saudi wasn't bad—the weather there was always good— but coming back to Brussels without rest and into northern Europe's often-IFR weather was very fatiguing. The military had their go-pills (dextroamphetamine) for the return trip, but they weren't available to us.

Having lived in Saudi Arabia in 1981-82 and in the years following having kept track of what was happening in the Middle East, I was opposed to what we were doing in Desert Shield/Storm. I believed it to be a lose-lose situation for the U.S., feeling that the best thing we could have done was to simply stay out of it, but, if we had to pick a side, we had picked the wrong one. That I held this view became known within our pilot group, and I was routinely asked about it in the cockpit on the legs to and from Saudi and the long in-cockpit waits while we were being unloaded in Saudi.

I always started my explanation by agreeing that Saddam was indeed a murderous tyrant, but so were the rulers of Kuwait and Saudi, and for the same reason as Saddam: to sustain their power and privilege. Therein lay the problem: all sides in the conflict were bad. Regardless of whom we supported, we would be supporting bad guys, a lose-lose situation. Saddam's tyranny was well known, not so much that of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, especially Saudi with its prohibition of tourism and a free press.

So, if the U.S. had to choose a side, which of the bad sides, for our own self-interest, should we choose? The murderous Saddam was a secular leader with but a pro forma adherence to Islam. His expansionist ambitions were territorial and limited to his immediate neighbors. Not so Saudi Arabia. They were Islamic fundamentalists (Wahhabism) financing madrasas throughout the world to teach their version of Islam. Their ambition was global. It was no contest. Saddam was the lesser of evils.

Not only was Saddam the lesser of evils in my opinion, he also served as a bulwark against Iran, a Shia theocracy. It was reasonable to expect that if we overthrew him, Iraq's Shia majority would become the governing power, and Iraq would no longer be a check on Iran.

When Desert Storm ended, all those U.S. troops had to be repatriated. EIA had about a dozen 747 freighters at the time but only one passenger 747. My first flight in it was to return U.S. Army troops based in Hawaii. My crew took the flight from Dhahran to Bangkok, where we were relieved by a waiting crew, and we went to the hotel. The flight and the overnight in Bangkok were memorable.

I had flown the leg into Dhahran with the empty airplane, so it was the first officer's leg. We weren't particularly heavy, and per standard procedure we planned a reduced power takeoff, also known as a derated thrust takeoff. As usual, the flying pilot, the f.o., took his hands off the thrust levers when I called V1, but by that time I was getting nervous; I didn't feel the aircraft was accelerating as it should—close, but not enough—so I reached up and started advancing the thrust levers and told the f.e. to set max power. He was concerned and anticipated the command—already had his hands on the lower part of the levers—and immediately did so.

After we got to cruise mode, we talked about the takeoff. The f.o., too, had become concerned and was about to call for max power when I did so. We checked and re-checked our reduced power takeoff calculations, but found no error. Then we checked our fuel flow at our cruise altitude and speed to see if we were heavier than we had been told, but we were not, at least not significantly. The only thing we could come up with was that our lack of performance was due to the combination of the very high temperature AND the very high humidity, two things that usually do not go together in those extremes, temp around 50C and humidity above 95%. Our performance tables were corrected for temperature but not for humdity, and moist air is less dense than dry air.

At Bangkok we—the three cockpit crew and fourteen flight attendants—turned the airplane over to the next crew and went to the hotel. I was expecting a nice long sleep and then a leisurely departure the next afternoon. Such was not to be. The flight attendants had hatched a plan during the flight. They had heard of Bangkok's famous sex shows—or infamous depending on your point of view—and they wanted to see one, but they wanted someone older and wiser to accompany them. That was to be me. I learned of the plan when two of the gals knocked on my door with the proposal. At first I tried to persuade them to recruit the f.o. or the f.e. for their adventure, but they wanted the captain. Long story short, the cockpit crew and all of the flight attendants save one set off in tuk-tuks and a taxi, the taxi being for the old men of the cockpit. Our destination was the Queen's Castle on Patpong One, a well-kown sex show venue.

I used what we saw when we entered the Queen's Castle when I later wrote a novel. Go to Queen's Castle for what my fictional protagonist sees upon entering. We observed what he saw and more during the hour or so we spent there.

topic to be continued....

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Flight Instructingtopic started 2018-03-30

I gave 1731 hours of instruction including single and multi-engine land, single-engine sea, and instrument instruction. I hadn't intended to make a living instructing, or even use it as a stepping stone to an aviation career. I was settled into an IT career and had gotten my instructor's license just to make a little money on the side to help me recover what I had spent getting my licensing through my Commercial. But fate intervened. It was 1974, my first wife was divorcing me, and I had a GTF at the University of Oregon working on an MS in Computer Science, teaching one class a term, and instructing on the side. I was standing at the scheduling counter at McKenzie Flying Service at the Eugene, Oregon airport. No computer scheduling then, just a pad of big sheets, one sheet for each day, rows for the airplanes and instructors, columns for the hours of the day. The Chief Pilot came up to me and said something like, “Terry, we need another full-time instructor, and you can fly charters, too. Do you want the job?” I paused for the time it took to think: my life is shit, so I may as well do what I like and the hell with the rest of it. I said, “Yes.”, and with that, I changed careers. I completed the academic term and the class I was teaching, but I never did finish my Masters.

I never regretted that quick decision, but I did underestimate the difficulty of, at age 35, going from a career in which I had an impressive resume to one in which I had a very thin resume.

topic to be continued....

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Flight Trainingtopic started 2018-03-31

I can't remember when I wasn't able to fly insofar as being able to manipulate the controls I could reach. That was a function of a father teaching his son to do what the father loved to do, and starting the doing of it before the son now has a memory of it. In those early experiences, whether sitting in my father's lap or on cushions in a seat, my legs couldn't reach the rudder pedals, so my father took care of that.

There were many such flights. While I can't remember the details of most of them, I do remember one in particular. As best I can figure, I was nine years old, so it would have been in the summer of 1949. My father and another pilot were tasked with taking two Stearmans from a small Chicago area airport to Jackson, Mississippi—about 700 miles. The aircraft had been converted to “crop dusters” by replacing the front cockpits with hoppers and mounting 450HP P&W engines in place of the original 220HP Continentals.

It was an IFRRR trip (I Follow Roads, Railroads, and Rivers). Neither aircraft had a radio or anything but the most basic navigational instrumentation, probably just airspeed, altimeter, and wet compass. Dusters weren't set up for cross country flying. We left early in the morning—me sitting on my father's lap—and arrived before dark. We would have had to refuel at least once, but I don't remember that. What I do remember is that we got lost when, in the afternoon, we ran into thunderstorms. That forced us down low, and the visibility in heavy rain was poor. It also taught me that when you're in an open cockpit in the rain, you keep your head out of the windstream. Rain at 100mph or so hurts bare skin.

Clear of the thunderstorms but now lost, my father saw a runway—no adjacent buildings, just a narrow paved strip—and landed. The second airplane flew the trip off our right wing and slightly behind, and he followed us in. There were farmhouses some distance away, and while my father and the other pilot were staring at their spread-out maps, a farmer showed up and saved us the trouble of walking to one for information. He told us where we were, and we continued on.

My plan was to get my student pilot license at age 16, my private pilot license at 17, and my commercial at 18. But by the time I turned 16, family and financial difficulties delayed that first step, and my father's death shortly after created conditions that had no room for flying. Finally, though, in 1969 I went out to McKenzie Flying Service (MFS) at the Springfield, Oregon airport to formally learn to fly.

Almost all the pilots training at MFS were doing so under the GI Bill. I was the exception, paying for it all myself. But Milt Ruberg, the owner of MFS and the airport as well, generously allowed me to accrue significant balances and pay them off without interest as I could afford to do so. MFS operated a Part 141 flight school. That meant you could potentially keep the costs down by doing everything in minimum times that were significantly less than the hours required under Part 61, and that's what I did. I got my Private at 35 hours and my Commercial at 160 hours. It helped that I basically knew how to fly before I began formal training, though it had been 13 years since I had flown informally.

At the time, the only reason I got a commercial license was because that was the cheapest way to an instrument rating. Back then an instrument rating and a commercial weren't in any way linked as they are now. It had become obvious that in Pacific Northwest weather, you couldn't reliably go anyplace without being IFR rated. The requirements for an instrument rating were a private license and 200 hours or a commercial license, so I combined my IFR training with the commercial license training and took my instrument rating checkride two days after my commercial checkride.

I've heard that these days they frown on giving instrument rating checkrides in actual IMC. Such was not the case in 1970. The checkride was in a 172, and what I most remember about that ride was that while in a hold that had been assigned by ATC at the request of the examiner, we were icing to the point that even with full throttle the rpm of the fixed-pitch prop was dropping. I wasn't worried as I knew we'd shortly be making an approach and be below the freezing level, and I said as much. However, the examiner decided to use it as a teaching moment, to show me a trick if you will. He put the nose down sharply and overspeed the engine for a couple of seconds. That slung off the prop ice, and when we popped back up to our hold altitude, we again had proper rpm. Our transponder didn't have Mode C, so ATC was none the wiser.

topic to be expanded here....

The table below is, I think, self-explanatory.

datehours at
checkride		license⁄rating aircraft used
for checkride
1969-04-048soloCessna 150
1969-05-2035private pilotCessna 150
1970-03-01160commercial pilotCessna 150
1970-03-03161instrument ratingCessna 172
1970-04-18190flight instructorCessna 150
1973-09-12441seaplane ratingPiper J3 on floats
1974-11-05804instrument instructorBeechcraft B24R
1975-07-03973ground instructor, advanced & instrumentn/a
1977-03-011658multi-engine ratingCessna 310
1978-12-012358multi-engine instructorCessna 310
1979-09-102725ATP licenseCessna 310
1984-10-254532CE-500 type ratingCessna Citation
1985-09-304944flight engineer licenseB-727 simulator
1987-04-116014SA-227 type ratingSA-227 Metroliner
1989-10-237412B-727 type ratingB-727 simulator
1990-09-157617B-747 type ratingB-747 simulator

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Hajj Flyingtopic added to 2018-09-16

The Hajj is the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Transporting pilgrims to and from Mecca for the Hajj was referred to as “Hajj flying” or “flying the Hajj.”

I flew the Hajj out of Jakarta, Indonesia, five years running starting in 1995 on the Gregorian calendar, year 1415 on the Hijri calendar, which is the calendar that determines when the Hajj occurs. The Hijri calendar is a lunar calendar and the years are 10 to 11 days shorter than Gregorian calendar years. Thus, while my first Hajj flying started in May, the second and third started in April, and the fourth and fifth in March of the respective Gregorian years. Our Hajj flying began with five weeks of full inbound flights to Jeddah, empty from Jeddah back to Jakarta, then a ten-day break, then five weeks of full outbound flights from Jeddah, empty from Jakarta back to Jeddah.

During these years, Indonesia was sending around 200,000 pilgrims to Mecca each year. Garuda Indonesia, the country's national airline, contracted with the carrier I flew for, Tower Air, for three to five 747s each year during the Hajj period. My trips were mostly out of Jakarta's Halim airport, where there was a terminal dedicated to Hajj operations. There is no airport at Mecca. Jeddah's King Abdulaziz International 100km away is the air terminal for Mecca.

Our hotel in Jakarta was the Jakarta Hilton, which at the time was the largest Hilton in the world. On arrival in Jakarta for the first flight to Jeddah, we'd check in and keep our rooms for the entire Hajj schedule, roughly 12 weeks. Our overnight hotel in Jeddah was the Sofitel, about a mile east of the Red Sea and half a mile east of the American Consulate. Google Earth shows both hotels still exist, but both appear to have changed names.

Our route from Jakarta to Jeddah was almost a great circle: eastward from Jakarta, cross the southeastern tip of Sumatra, over the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka, cross the southern tip of India, over the Arabian Sea to Oman, enter Saudi Arabia in the Rub Al Khali desert, then to Jeddah. We used the same route for the return. It was typically a 10 hour flight westbound, a little less eastbound. The scheduling of the westbound flights often put us on that part of the route between Sumatra and Sri Lanka during the time of maximum convective action, and we often had to contend with a north-south line of thunderstorms crossing our east-west track. Typically the line was too long to go around, too high to go over, so we would pick our way through using radar. But these were old airplanes with old radars, and it was not uncommon for us to blunder into cells and get beat up badly.

A Tower Air purser was in charge of the cabin, but the flight attendants were Garuda Indonesia employees, all women, who came out of retirement each year for the peak load situation. Most of the passengers didn't speak English, but the Garuda gals spoke excellent English. And they did a great job. Tower Air pursers, both male and female, often remarked that it was easy duty for them, that the Garuda flight attendants took care of everything. On the empty legs, if the captain permitted, which I did and encouraged, they would visit the cockpit, and I found them to be very gracious.

The only complaint I ever heard about them was from a male purser who preferred to sleep on empty legs. His favorite sleeping place was the crew bunk area up in the tail of aircraft that had that. Believing in ghosts, the Garuda gals thought that to be dangerous since that was where the bodies were kept of pilgrims that died during the flight, a common occurrence. The purser, of course, would go up there to sleep anyway, but the problem was that the flight attendants would keep waking him up to make sure he was okay.

There was a certain irony in my being a captain on Hajj flights. Tower Air was a Jewish-owned airline, so what you had was a Jewish airplane flying Muslim pilgrims captained by an atheist.

topic to be continued....

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Half Moon Bay, Californiatopic added to on 2019-08-24

My father managed the flight operations of West Coast Aviation at the Half Moon Bay, California airport during the time I was ages 11 to 14, the years 1951 to 1954. I spent weekends and summers at the airport, working without pay as the gas boy. My remuneration was getting lots of airplane rides.

The pilot I most liked to ride with went by the nickname “Buzzy”, so-called because he liked to buzz the beaches in an Aeronca Champ. Occasionally he was harassed, from his standpoint, for his activities by the CAA (the forerunner of the FAA), but that didn't really bother him. Having been a World War II P-47 pilot in the European theater, and having been shot at a lot flying ground support missions, he wasn't overly concerned about government bureaucrats.

South of the town of Half Moon Bay there were cliffs back from the beach. His favorite maneuver was to fly directly at a cliff, pull up at the last moment into a wing over, and dive back down towards the surf. Great fun, except that he did scare me once when the main gear brushed the top of a wave.

He also liked doing loops and spins, especially spins. The Champ is a two-seat, tandem airplane. He sat in the front seat (Champs are soloed from the front), I in the back. I think spins are more exciting from the back than the front. There's something about not having any serious structure in front of you for a few feet—and being above the pilot—when the aircraft nose is pointed at the ground and rotating.

The incident Buzzy was most notorious for was when he caught a surf fisherman's line in his tailwheel. Reportedly, the line pulled all the way out of the reel before breaking and was still trailing from the airplane when Buzzy returned to the airport. The fishermen, mad as hell, came to the airport and confronted Buzzy, who apologized for having caught his line and paid him for a new reel given that the old reel had heated up and smoked during the incident.

The Half Moon Bay airport occasionally became the alternate for aircraft coming in from Hawaii when San Francisco International and all other bay area airports were socked in. A half dozen or so times in the years I was there, my father and I got to the airport in the morning to find DC-4s, DC-6s, and Boeing Stratocruisers that had come in before daybreak. The passengers and flight crews had always departed on buses before we got there, so the only airline personnel around were ground handlers and maintenance types. The big attraction for me was that if I hung around and asked nicely, I sometimes got to visit a cockpit. One memorable morning, I not only got into the cockpit of a Pan Am Stratocruiser but was treated to sandwiches from the galley as well.

The DC-6 had reversible pitch propellers, and it was on one of these mornings that I watched one back up under its own power, the first time I had ever seen an airplane do that.

Another first time sight took place one afternoon when an airplane burned. There was a taxiway at the south end of the field where pilots could park and walk to restaurants at the small beachside community of Princeton. A visiting pilot had parked his Cessna 195 there. When he started the engine to leave, it caught fire. When the smoke from the airplane was seen, everyone rushed to the site, but all anyone had were hand extinguishers, and they were ineffective. I got there as flames were extending rearward from the engine and enveloping the cockpit windshield. With things heating up, everybody backed off to a safe distance and watched the wings start drooping. Next came a small explosion and fuel spillage, which immediately ignited. By the time the Half Moon Bay Volunteer Fire Department arrived from town five miles away, all that was left was a pile of melted aluminum with the engine in it, part of the tail, and small parts of the wing tips. There was an amazing amount of black smoke.

The Cessna 195 was powered by a Jacobs R-755 engine. They were prone to carburetor fires when starting. Cessna T-50/UC-78 aircraft, the so-called bamboo bomber, also used the R-755. West Coast Aviation had one, mostly used for multi-engine instruction by my father. Occasionally I would get to ride along. I remember two fires when starting the engines when I was sitting in the back. The protocol was to cut off the fuel, but keep the starter running, which would suck the fire back into the engine. That worked for the fires I saw, but for every start, a guy with a fire-extinguisher was outside just in case.

The chief mechanic at West Coast Aviation—and only mechanic most of the time—was also a pilot of considerable experience.

I saw my first dead human body as the result of an aircraft accident. The small harbor town of Princeton-by-the-Sea was adjacent to the airport. There were two piers jutting out into the ocean: one public, one private. A pilot and passenger, both drunk, took off in a J-3 Cub and started buzzing the public pier. After a couple of successful passes, the pilot failed to pull up in time, and the J-3 smashed into the pier, killing both occupants. One of the fatalities went into the water. Several from the airport, including my father, felt there was a good chance the body would wash up on the beach down from the pier and positioned themselves along the bluff over the pier and waited. I accompanied my father, and as I remember it wasn't a very long wait until we spotted the body in the surf. Dad and another man waded in, pulled the body up on the sand, and then carried him up to the top of the bluff. I tagged along but did not assist. I remember, though, that his skin was very pale and his eyes were sunk deeply into his skull.

The airport had a black market in 100 octane fuel. At irregular internvals a guy would show up in and old station wagon with 55 gallon drums in the back. The story was that the tanker trucks bringing fuel to San Francisco Intnl were required to return empty, which meant that if the storage facility they were delivering to couldn't quite take a tanker's entire load, they had to dump the excess. This guy had a deal with the tanker drivers to let him take care of the overflow. Whether true or not, who knows. What everybody knew, though, was that you could buy 100 octane at bargain prices and no tax.

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Jakarta Halim WIHHtopic started 2018-03-14

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Jeddah, Saudi Arabia OEJNtopic started 2018-03-19

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Kadena Air Base, Okinawatopic started 2018-02-18

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Kai Tak Airport, Hong Kongtopic updated 2019-11-10

Kai Tak at Hong Kong was the airport I most enjoyed operating into, especially the Rwy 13 apprach. If you followed the IGS, a modified ILS, all the way to the ground, you'd impact the side of a mountain near some orange and white surfaces arranged in a checkerboard on the mountainside. At minimums you had to have the checkerboard in sight, shortly after which you'd make a 47° right turn to line up with the runway. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai_Tak_Airport for details.

I went into Kai Tak using that approach for the first time when I was on my 747 captain's IOE so there was a check airman in the right seat. The weather was not good. There were thunderstorm cells along our approach course, heavy rain, lightning, and the ceiling at the airport was just a little above the minimum required to shoot the approach. Other aircraft were ahead of us and continuing their approaches, so I figured the check captain wouldn't criticize me for continuing in the marginal weather. Passenger comfort wasn't an issue as were in a freighter.

We were being vectored in from the north, having come from Chitose, Japan. When we were on what was more or less a downwind leg, the check airman said something like:

I can tell you what you're going to do wrong, but that won't keep you from doing it. Everybody does it wrong the first time, especially in weather like this. When we drop out of the cloud, you're going to see high-rise buildings to your left that are higher than we are, and that's going to make you pull back some. Then you're going to see the runway off to the right, and you're going to start turning toward it too soon. So, on short final you're going to be too high and having to make a last minute turn to line up.

That is exactly what happened, but I got it down. A strong crosswind didn't help. The check captain just laughed. I was glad there weren't any passengers.

I had the next day off, and I took advantage of beautifully clear weather to walk to as close as I could get to the base of the orange and white checkerboard on the mountainside. I stayed there for around three hours watching the approaches. I was particularly interested in how the Cathay Pacific pilots did it since they were based there. They stayed on the localizer or a little to the left of it and delayed their turn to final as late as possible. From that time on, I ran my approaches to Rwy 13 as I had observed them doing.

The Rwy 31 approach was straightforward. We were typically lined up miles out. However, strong winds out of mainland China could make the ride down final very turbulent. There was even a note on the approach plate to that effect. I remember one approach before I had moved to the left seat that was particularly bad. It was the captain's leg, and she (yes, a gal as a 747 captain, relatively rare back then), and she was having a helluva time. At one point I remarked, “What are we in, a Cessna 150?” We were, in fact, in a 747 freighter right up against the max landing weight, but we were moving around more than I ever had in any 150. It was a heavy crosswind to boot. I was glad it was her leg.

thepointsguy.com/news/crazy-landings-at-kai-tak-airport has some nice images of aircraft on the Rwy 13 approach.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_605 is Wikipedia's article on the China Airlines Flight 605 accident after landing from the Rwy 13 approach.

I consider my life having been greatly enhanced by my experiences operating into Kai Tak, all the more so as I write these words at age 80 about an experience that pilots can no longer have.

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Khabarovsk, Russia UHHHtopic last updated 2019-02-20

If you fill the fuel tanks of a 747-200 freighter to maximum capacity and also load cargo up to its maximum zero fuel weight, you'll be more than 100,000 lb over the maximum allowed takeoff weight. With full fuel tanks, you could fly from Anchorage to Hong Kong, but the money is in the cargo, so you max out the cargo and put in enough fuel to get you to wherever along the route from Anchorage to Hong Kong has the cheapest fuel. In the late 1990s Khabarovsk was, for a time, that place.

There are a half dozen entries in my 1990s FLYING/EMAIL JOURNAL involving Khabarovsk:

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-09-24.html#khab target='_blank'

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-09-25.html#khab target='_blank'

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-11-02.html#khab target='_blank'

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-11-07.html#khab target='_blank'

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-11-20.html#khab target='_blank'

https://terryliittschwager.com/Journal/1997-11-22.html#khab target='_blank'

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Landing the 747topic last updated 2015-03-15

The 747 was the easiest airplane I ever flew insofar as getting consistently good landings. Greasers were common.

The 747s I flew were the -100 and -200 aircraft, the so-called classics. Some of the -100s didn't have talking radar altimeters, in which case the flight engineer would read off the altitudes. Coming down the glidepath on speed in a stabilized approach, flaps 30, nose 5 degrees up, at a typical landing weight, the fuel flow would show about 5,000 lbs per hour for each engine. Radar altimeter calls came at 100, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 feet. When I heard the 50 foot call, I'd bring the power back a little and raise the nose 2 degrees. At 10 feet I'd bring the power all the way back while raising the nose another degree, and then I'd wait. I was usually rewarded with a nice touchdown of the main gear, both wing and body. Then a relaxation of elevator pressure would put the nose gear on.

When the main gear was on, the speed brakes/spoilers would automatically deploy. The speed brake handle was on the captain's side of the center quadrant. When it came back it made a fair amount of noise. When I'd hear the handle start back, I'd move my right hand to the reverser levers mounted on the thrust levers. When the speed brake handle had moved all the way back, the reversers would unlocked, and I'd lift the reverser levers to a standing position. That deployed the reverser doors but left the engines at idle. If you wanted the reversers to have maximum effect, you had to get them out while the aircraft's speed was still high. If the runway length and the taxiway I wanted permitted, I preferred getting the reverser doors out but not powering up. As the aircraft slowed, the probability that the reversers would blow runway contamination in front of the engines increased, especially if you powered up. Powering up was done by pulling the reverser levers back from their standing position. To come out of reverse you moved the reverser levers forward and then down to their stowed position flush with the thrust levers. That closed the doors and left the engines at idle. Good operating procedure required that you be out of reverse by 80 knots. Below that the probability of blowing runway contaminants forward of the engine air intakes gets too high, and the reversers have lost most of their high-speed effect as well.

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Last Trip, Last Flight, Last Landingtopic last updated 2018-06-13

In late July 1999, I commercialed into Luxembourg for what was to be my last trip, though at the time I didn't expect that to be the case. I thought that there would be at least one more trip, maybe two. My life had been complicated by choices and was to be further complicated in the next few days by conditions outside my control.

See Journal entry 1999-08-03 for last flight detail.

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Medina, Saudi Arabia OEJNtopic started 2018-03-19

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Mile High Clubtopic last updated 2020-02-25

Back in the late 1970s I was instructing and flying charters out of Eugene, Oregon, and I carried a pager. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were at a movie on a Friday night when the pager went off. I exited the movie, found a phone, called the answering service, and then the number they gave me, which turned out to be the Village Green, a resort hotel in Cottage Grove, a small community about 30 miles south of Eugene. The party I reached wanted to charter an aircraft to get them down to Novato, a town north of San Francisco that had a small airport, and they needed to get there before the night was out. I agreed to do it on condition that I would bring my girlfriend, to which the client replied that that was no problem, that he was with his girlfriend as well. The Cottage Grove airport was just across the highway from the Village Green, and we agreed that I would pick them up there in the airplane, a Cessna 210T.

After a pleasant flight, with good conversation in the airplane, we landed in Novato around midnight. Our two passengers left in separate cars. We didn't have enough fuel to get back to Eugene, and there was no fuel available at that time of the night at Novato. However, I knew that Sacramento Executive airport had 24-hour fuel, and we had plenty to get there. While the airplane was being refueled, we went into the still-open restaurant lounge and had drinks—coke for me—and sandwiches.

Thus it was that around two in the morning of Oct 28, 1978 that we found ourselves at 10,500 on V23 between the Redding VOR and the Fort Jones VOR in N515RT, a Cessna C210T—in my logbook #5—summertime, clear skies, calm air, good autopilot, bodies still reasonably flexible. We moved the two front seats back as far as possible, got naked, and joined the mile high club. I didn't really expect it to be any kind of a turn-on, we were just doing it to be able to say we had done it, but we both remarked afterwards that it had been a real turn-on.

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N475EV/N615FF “Christine”topic last updated 2018-11-29

I flew this airplane as N475EV at Evergreen International Airlines and then as N615FF at Tower Air. At Evergreen a few started calling it Christine after the autopilot took it into a 95° bank, nose down 30° to 35°. The Christine reference was to a car with that name in a 1983 horror novel by Stephen King and later in a movie adaption. The car had a mind of it's own.

The Links to the NTSB report and a Seattle Times article of the incident are below.

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-recs/recletters/A92_31_35.pdf

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19911219&slug=1323954

The incident happened in the dark on Dec 12, 1991 at about 0520 Eastern Standard Time over Canada.

Some weeks earlier, I had flown the airplane from Hong Kong to Anchorage. Not long after reaching our initial cruising altitude and with the autopilot engaged, the airplane started a very slow bank to the right. It was my leg in daylight on an absolutely clear, beautiful day with the Chinese mainland to the left, the Pacific to the right, and the bank became obvious fairly quickly. In the incident a few weeks later, it was night, and the crew didn't notice the slow roll to the right until the inertial navigation system (INS) gyros tumbled and their FAIL lights illuminated. It was the f.o. who saved the day. He was the first to recognize they were in a steep right-wing-down bank and correctly recovered, leveling the wings first and then taking care of the pitch. They lost almost 10,000 ft, and approached or exceeded mach 1.0. One report was that they reached mach 1.25, but the speed we most often heard was 1.09. The NTSB report says 0.98. Parts of the airplane came off, and they made an emergency landing at Duluth, Minnesota. A Boeing recovery team came to Duluth, inspected the airplane, made repairs, and flew it to Seattle. Eventually it was returned to service. Tower Air was still flying it as N615FF when I retired from there in 1999.

In my case, weeks earlier, I watched the airplane roll for a bit to see if it would right itself, but when the bank reached 10°, I disengaged the autopilot, leveled the airplane, and then re-engaged the autopilot. The airplane stayed level and returned to the proper course, and we continued on without further incident.

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Night Freight in Spaintopic continued 2020-02-03

A recent exchange of comments on aviation.stackexchange.com triggered memories of the year I spent flying night freight in 727-100s out of Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain. Fond memories, including things that these days some will likely consider questionable. But this was thirty years ago now, and what you did in Spain at night on freighter flights was not viewed in the same light as it would be now.

I'll fill in the subtopics as I get around to it.

  • First European Airspace Flight

    • In 1989, Evergreen International Airlines (EIA) had a subcontract with Iberia Airlines, the Spanish flag carrier, for two 727-100s to fly night freight out of Madrid-Barajas. A newly minted 727 captain, I was assigned to the contract, flying as a first officer until a captain slot opened. We flew two weeks on, two weeks off. For purposes of the contract, we were domiciled at JFK, and Iberia provided tickets from there to Madrid on their flight that operated every evening. On my first time out on the contract, I had jumpseated from my home in Oregon to JFK during the day for that evening flight. It was a couple of hours late departing JFK, which meant that it would arrive after the time that heavy ground fog was forecast for Madrid. The forecast was correct, and the flight diverted to Seville, where we sat until midafternoon waiting for the fog to clear in Madrid.

    No problem, I thought, as I wasn't scheduled to fly until the evening of the next day. What I didn't know was that a first officer scheduled for a flight the evening of the day I arrived had been taken ill, and they put me into his slot as the only available f.o. I found this out when I was met at Madrid-Barajas at the arrival gate by the EIA local ground support manager and taken directly to the airplane.

    The captain had been briefed on the situation and was great. He asked me if I had ever flown in European airspace before. When I replied that I had flown only in U.S. airspace, he said he would do everything as necessary, that I shouldn't worry about anything, that I could just sit there like a bump on a log if I wanted.

  • Jumpseat Liberties

    • We weren't picky about who we allowed to jumpseat. If an individual had credentials that would get them through security to the freight ramp, we'd take them. One evening shortly after I first arrived and was still flying as an f.o., we had a male Iberia flight attendant wanting to jump to Barcelona. The captain was a gregarious soul and struck up quite a conversation with him in which it came out that he was working on his pilot's license. When we got to cruising altitude, the captain, after checking with me to see if I minded—which I didn't—asked him if he'd like to get in the right seat and handle the airplane a bit. He of course said yes, and we switched seats. The guy was doing okay, and just before descent, the captain asked me if it would bother me to let the flight attendant land the airplane at the captain's direction. I said no problem, and the captain told him to stay in the seat through the landing, that the captain would instruct him on what to do and would assist or take the airplane as necessary. It all went well; the flight attendant flew the approach and landed the airplane. The captain, of course, had his hands either on the control yoke or very nearly so just before and into the flare, keeping up a running verbal commentary as to what to do. He may have helped the guy a bit in the actual touchdown—I couldn't tell for sure—but for all practical purposes the flight attendant had landed the airplane.

    Between my last two duty tours, instead of going home, I brought my wife over for two weeks of driving around Spain and Portugal. She arrived a couple of days early, and I wanted to put her in the jumpseat for a trip the first leg of which was up to Amsterdam Schipol. We had friends there that we had called, telling them that we'd be on the ground at Schipol for about an hour to unload/load if they wanted to see us, which they did. The problem with the plan was that my spouse didn't have proper ID to get her on Madrid-Barajas freight ramp. No problem though, I punched a hole in one end of her Oregon Drivers License, put it on her with the usual ID card clip, and she went through security with us. The guard didn't even look up. I could have marched her through without bothering with the fake ID. On the way out after the trip, he at least looked up, but apparently seeing a plastic ID card clipped to her jacket was enough for him as he said nothing.

  • Spanish Beer Problems

    • Not being a beer drinker, I never had a problem with the Spanish beer, but during the time I flew freight out of Madrid, I did have to occasionally put up with first officers that showed up impaired by a hangover, the Spanish beer apparently being more potent than American beer in that regard. The first clue was often their slipping on a oxygen mask as soon as they sat down in the seat in an attempt to lessen the effects. Whether that really did any good, I can't say. I think that they were all legal in that it had been 12 hours since they last imbibed, but Spanish beer was apparently far more potent than they were used to. We were told that was because it contained formaldehyde. True or not, I do not know.

    What I do know is that there were beer vending machines in the operational areas, and we did get the occasional loader who had obviously had too much. Thus, our flight engineers took the checking of the locks holding down the ULDs seriously.

  • Stansted new pilot prank

    • We had a nightly run to London Stansted Airport. The single runway had a significant hump in the middle, high enough that an airplane on the ground near either end could not see the other end. At night, which it always was at the time of our arrival except in summer, an arriving aircraft would see the runway lights of the full runway. Then as the airplane went into the flare, the runway edge lights for the last third of the runway or so would disappear, giving the appearance that the runway left was too short. Some captains were wont to use that to prank first officers whom had never been into Stansted before, not warning them beforehand. On my first run into Stansted, the guy I was with properly warned me, and I always alerted others new to the run.

  • Valencia Landings without Clearance

    • Spanish ATC in Valencia was, should we say, very laid back, so much so that we had to get used to the tower controller often not being at his post when we arrived around 04:00. Thus, though we would call Valencia tower when the enroute controller handed us off, if we got no response, we would continue our approach, land, and taxi to the freight ramp. Usually at some point the tower would answer our continued calls and clear us, but occasionally not.

  • Valencia to Madrid Speed Competition

    • The last leg of one of our runs was Valencia to Madrid, a straight-line distance of about 93 nautical miles. A competition developed as to who could fly it in the least amount of time. For a couple of weeks, I held the record at 24 minutes, but then another captain did it in 23. One captain claimed he had done it in 22, but his flight engineer let it be known that the overspeed warning clacker had sounded during the flight. You could fly the leg however you wished, but if the overspeed warning—a distinctive loud clacking sound—went off, the run didn't count. The time was measured from brake release at Valencia to touchdown at Madrid Barajas. Spanish ATC was extremely permissive. They approved whatever you requested, and at first light in Spain there was nothing in the air back then besides us. Thus in clear weather and the early morning calm, it was playtime.

    Everybody started the same way: line up when cleared for takeoff at Valencia, stand on the brakes, go to takeoff power, then release the brakes. At the brake release the flight engineer started a timer.

    subtopic to be continued....

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Overloaded 747stopic updated 2019-08-08

  • We had departed Miami for Trieste, Italy with a Carnival Cruise Lines crew and as much equipment as the airplane could handle. A new cruise ship was waiting there to be put in service.

    The paperwork said the airplane was at max gross. The takeoff, at least as I remember it, wasn't any different than any other max weight operation, but once we got going, the flight engineer alerted me that we were burning fuel at a higher rate than we should for our altitude. That meant we were overweight, but the question was by how much. While we were working that out, we got a SELCAL from the Tower Air chief pilot. That the weight and balance paperwork didn't match what we had on board had been discovered on the ground. They had loaded the lower holds with as much equipment as they physically could. Then they ran a weight and balance and discovered the airplane would be 30,000 lbs over. They ordered that much to be removed, and ran a new weight and balance. However, the excess 30,000 was never actually taken off the airplane.
  • While I was still an f.o. at Evergreen, we got to the airport at Chennai, India—called Madras back then—after an overnight to find them loading pallets of tightly bound fabric, possibly clothing. The pallets were not covered, and the f.e. alerted the captain to the fact that they were wet, probably because they had set out overnight in the rain. The question was: When had they been weighed? When they were dry or after they'd been rained on? As usual, Air India operations—the flight was a sub-service for them—had only excuses, maintaining the load manifest weights were correct. We knew that was false; they constantly underreported weights, but the critical question was how badly overweight we would be.

    Fortunately, the terrain at the end of the runway sloped downward. You could lift off the end of the runway and not have to climb at all. The captain's plan was to let the airplane run, rotate just before the end, then put the nose down some to get additional speed before climbing, which is what he did. Working backward with the fuel flow at cruise, the f.e. estimated we were around 25,000 lbs pounds greater than what we had been told.
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Pilots I Flew Withtopic last updated 2020-11-23

I've never been good at remembering names, but I do remember flights, situations, and overnights I experienced with individual pilots. I've assigned each pilot a somewhat descriptive nickname (for me) and ordered them alphabetically by that name. No real names are used.

  1. Sleeper

    The joke in our pilot group was that the 12+ hour flight from JFK to Tel Aviv was only 5 hours long for him. When flying with him, you could expect to be the only one awake in the cockpit for extended periods.

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Post Retirement Flyingtopic last updated 2015-06-14

I retired in 1999. When people asked me why I didn't continue flying for pleasure, my rejoinder was that I was spoiled, that I wanted my four engines, fourteen flight attendants, and oceans to cross. Finally, though, in August 2014 I went out to Hobby Field in Creswell, Oregon and checked out in a Cessna 172.

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Regretstopic started 2019-07-27

As my retirement years roll by—it's July 2019 as I write this paragraph—there are incidents from the flying years that keep coming to mind: small things, things of little importance even when they happened, things that likely are not remembered by anyone but myself, but they're still disquieting to me. They're things I should have handled differently than I did. Here's the start of a list:

  • On a Tower Air flight from Tel Aviv to JFK with a stop at Athens, we had a mechanical problem at Athens that couldn't be deferred or quickly fixed. Parts were going to have to be flown in. I was in the operations office when the decision was made to spend the night in Athens and put the passengers up in a hotel. Hurrying back to the airplane to make the announcement, I picked up the microphone and started talking before realizing I was out of breath from the hurried climb up the aircraft boarding stairs and then up the stairs from the main deck to the upper deck. The result was an obviously unprofessional announcement sandwiched in between gasping for air that haunts me to this day.
  • Tower Air hired a management pilot out of another carrier for his management expertise in the area he had been working at his previous carrier. He was 747 captain-qualified and, like at his previous carrier, crew scheduling used him as a ready reserve for last minute needs. This didn't set well with the Tower Air pilot group, and the word was out to not put him into the left seat should he be assigned to you as a first officer.

    I had just upgraded to captain when I got him as a first officer on a red-eye from San Francisco to JFK. I should have offered him the left seat, but I didn't. I at least gave him the leg, but I should have offerred him the left seat. I allowed peer pressure to dictate my actions. That was wrong, and I still regret it.
  • Hauling a planeload of U.S. troops into the Balkans in the late 90s, I made a bad p.a. Our destination was a recently built runway out in the middle of nowhere to support the NATO effort there. The runway was short for a 747. There were no taxiways but a large turnaround at the east end of the strip served as a ramp. It was a visual approach. No ILS, VASI/PAPI or approach lights had yet been installed. I was concerned that if I touched down a little long, I would have to pile on the brakes. With that in mind, I made a p.a. before the approach that included an unnecessary statement, saying specifically that the flight attendants should make sure they were seated and strapped in for the landing as we might have to use heavy braking. Not only was it unnecessary, it had the effect of scaring the flight attendants a bit. Not one of my better moments.

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San Francisco KSFOtopic started 2019-02-21

My history with San Francisco International Airport goes back to 1951. Back then I was only a kid getting the occasional ride, usually in a Cessna 120 or 140—or if I was really lucky, a 170— as a reward for being the gas boy at the Half Moon Bay Airport 10 miles to the southwest. Light aircraft traffic into SFO was still common then.

After I left the area in 1954, I didn't turn up at SFO again until 1969. I had flown a Cessna 150 from Eugene, Oregon down to the old Santa Cruz Skypark. Leaving there after midnight for the return to Eugene, I didn't have enough fuel to get to anyplace that would have fuel readily available at that time of night other than SFO, so I took the little 150 into San Francisco International. None of today's complicated airspace designations then. It was VFR and the only requirement was to contact the tower before five miles. I was expecting fancier handling, but with no traffic and nearly 01:00 in the morning, the tower told me to fly up the Bayshore freeway and then cleared me to land. I don't remember the runway.

For the next decade and a half, I didn't operate into SFO except for flying the occasional charter from Eugene. Then, in 1985 I went to work for Wings West Airlines, a San Luis Obispo based commuter airline flying Metroliners, both SA-226 and SA-227 models. They were expanding and opened a small domicile in Klamath Falls ,Oregon (LMT). Each crew did two round trip flights a day LMT to SFO and return.

The challenge was to work our small Metroliners into the final approach flow while minimizing the delay for both us and the

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Subic Bay, Philippinestopic updated 2019-02-24

When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in 1991, many U.S. Navy dependents were evacuated to the U.S. I captained one of the flights returning them to Cubi Point NAS at Subic Bay. My crew picked up the flight in Anchorage and refueled at the U.S. Air Force base at Yokota, Japan.

It was an interesting flight. First, this was my first 747 passenger flight. Evergreen Airlines was primarily a freight carrier—thirteen 747 freighters as I remember—but with one passenger airplane. Captains with my low seniority didn't often get to fly it.

Next was an unexpected request at Yakota. We had stopped just for fuel, but an Evergreen ground representative came aboard with a problem. The company had told him to get on the flight, but he had been at Yakota for some time, had run up quite a hotel bill, most of which was in arrears—Evergreen was notorious for not paying hotel bills on time—and the rep couldn't pay it personally, or so he said. The hotel was holding his luggage until the bill was paid. Evergreen captains carried a company American Express card, and I used that to get the luggage out of hock.

When you're flying passengers, there are a few things you do differently than when flying freight, nothing greatly different, little things really: don't bank more than 20° when with 4,000 feet of the ground, try to give the pax a smooth ride, don't scare them with the noise caused by dropping the gear at high speed—that kind of thing—and if you're not used to doing them, you forget. What I most tended to forget was communication with the cabin crew: notifying them through 10,000 feet, warning of turbulence (or avoiding it rather than punching through it), alerting them just before descent.

We had flown through the previous night and then the day, so we went to bed immediately upon arriving at the Whiterock Beach Resort Hotel just off the base. I awoke after midnight from a solid sleep and decided to explore the hotel and grounds. In the lobby I ran into my flight engineer in full uniform. My first thought was that he knew something I didn't, but that was not the case. Having been in the military and having been to Subic Bay before and familiar with the area, he had decided to visit a local bordello, and, in his words, "It impresses them when you're in uniform."

For my part, I chose to go for a walking exploration of the Whiterock resort area. Thus it was that in the wee small hours I eventually found myself at the hotel pool. Not seeing another living soul (and nudist that I am) I slipped off my clothes and swam a couple of laps in the large pool. Then, standing in the shallow end, I noticed that there were two good-looking, filippine, young women in the barest of bras and panties watching from the second story walkway of the hotel rooms alongside the pool. I wondered if there would be any problem with my swimming naked, but any fear of that disappeared when the two young ladies were joined on the walkway by two Caucasian men with military haircuts and in their underpants—it was a warm and humid night. They were obviously taking a break from their activities and would have no problem with my lack of clothing.

I hauled myself out of the pool and, lacking a towel, sat unclothed on a poolside chair to air-dry. After a few minutes, a uniformed security guard approached, smiling, and sat on a nearby chair. We talked for at least half an hour. He never once took note of or mentioned my lack of clothing.

topic to be continued....

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Taxiing the 747topic last updated 2015-02-22

In the air you have no sense of the 747's size, but on the ground you're well aware that it is big in relation to it's environment, and moving it around as it should be done and in the occasional challenging situation was a lot of fun. The 747 is steered on the ground by a tiller to the left of the captain and one to the right of the f.o. The captain pulls back on the tiller to turn left, pushes forward to turn right. The f.o. does the reverse.

Both operators I flew 747s for specified a max taxi speed of 25 knots. I seem to remember Boeing recommending 20 knots. I also remember deliberately exceeding 25 knots when the occasion called for it. When you're in the cockpit, you're high enough (around 29′ as I remember) that you seem to be moving more slowly than if you're in a lesser elevated cockpit. A 747 with four engines running at idle power will accelerate to greater than 25 knots, actually quite a bit faster if you let it run. The 747s I flew had the old Carousel inertial navigation systems, and we used their groundspeed readout to monitor our taxi speed. Riding the brakes to keep the speed down would lead to brake heating problems, so what you did was let the speed build up to a bit above 25 knots, then use the brakes to bring the speed down to around 10 to 15 knots, and then get off the brakes and start the cycle all over again.

The fastest sustained taxi speed I ever employed was 40 to 45 knots at Narita International, Tokyo. It was a freighter flight, and because of a loading problem we were pushing the 23:00 curfew. We were the last airplane out, and the tower cleared us for takeoff about half way down the parallel taxiway for the runway. We knew, though, that they would rescind that clearance if we didn't start our takeoff roll by 22:59. Narita tower allowed a full minute for a 747 takeoff, and they were always punctual. It was my leg, and when I started slowing to make the two 90 degree turns to line up, the f.o. suggested that he not acknowledge any further transmissions from the tower until we were airborne. I agreed as I had been thinking the same thing but wasn't going to say it unless necessary. We didn't want to go back to the gate, and we knew nobody else wanted us to even if they would feel duty bound to rescind the takeoff clearance. The tower said nothing, though, and we started our takeoff run a few seconds before 22:59. Being close to max gross weight and with that fast long taxi, I knew the tires would be hot, so after takeoff and after the flaps were up, I dropped the gear for a few minutes to cool things down and preclude a wheel well overheat.

If you're on a narrow taxiway, you can't see the edge of the taxiway out the side cockpit window. If you're on a narrow taxiway coming to a T on another narrow taxiway, the perspective is even more interesting. The nose gear is behind you, so you need to put yourself out over the grass before turning, which means all you see is grass, both to the side and to the front. This was the case at JFK when coming out of the Tower Air ramp transitioning from taxiway QG into a left turn onto Q. When making a sharp 90° turn you need to slow to five to seven knots, which means that when the turn soaks up your forward motion, you need to apply additional power to keep from coming to a stop in the turn, which, if that happened, would require lots of power to get the turn going again. That would be embarrassing. Too much power going into the turn or when actually in it, would risk the nose gear skidding, and that would be embarrassing.

I really worked on making that turn well during my time at Tower. The idea was to make it smoothly, once in the turn, without using the right brake or jockeying the power or using the left brake beyond what was absolutely necessary. The taxiway from the ramp was long enough that even at idle power the aircraft was approaching its max taxi speed when getting close to the turn. I'd go for one smooth application of both brakes to bring the speed to five knots just as nothing but grass was out the front or side windows, then I'd crank the tiller hard left while bringing up power on the right outboard engine. About 75 degrees or so into the turn I'd start bringing the power back on the right outboard engine and bringing it up a little on the other three while moving the tiller toward neutral. If I did everything right, we'd straighten out on the centerline at five knots, at which time I'd bring the right outboard engine back to idle.

I've always been a centerline addict whether taxiing, taking off, or landing. Sitting as high as you do in a 747 made that a little harder to judge when taxiing. However, if the taxiway had the little metal reflectors metal imbedded in the taxiway centerline, the challenge was to put those reflectors between the two wheels of the nose gear. You could tell you were doing that when a small movement of the tiller either way got you a slight bump.

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Tel Avivtopic started 2018-03-14

In 1995 I went to work for Tower Air. New York Kennedy to Tel Aviv Ben Gurion and return was their bread-and-butter route. Tel Aviv weather was usually good. Visual approaches were the rule. A left downwind approach to rwy 30 was most frequently assigned (onshore wind), straight in to rwy 12 (offshore wind) was next.

We had special company fuel rules for Tel Aviv. Our standard requirement was that we would land with 30,000 lb remaining. We could be dispatched to land with 25,000 lb if the captain and dispatch agreed. If the captain, dispatch, and the chief pilot agreed, we could go down to 20,000 lb, but Tel Aviv was special. We could be dispatched to land with only 15,000 lb, and that was in our op specs. Tel Aviv ATC was well aware that 747s coming in from JFK had minimal fuel, and they never delayed us.

Tel Aviv was one of the airports that I occasionally got to try what I considered a perfect approach. I was never successful in doing it from the top of descent, but I occasionally managed to do if from abeam the end of rwy 30 on a left downwind. The visual circuit procedures called for a left base altitude of 2000 ft for 747s, so, when traffic allowed, I'd request a close-in turn to base, and they always approved it. We'd already be at flaps 5, so abeam the rwy end, I'd go to idle thrust, drop the gear and start stepping the flaps down. If all went well, I'd touchdown on speed in the landing zone without having to add power. If I misjudged and it appeared we were coming up on the the usual 3° glidepath, I'd bring the fuel flow up to 5,000 lb per engine and all would be well. It wasn't a game all of us played, but I wasn't alone.

I could always count on getting to Tel Aviv at least once a month, usually more. Depending on the winds, the flight to Tel Aviv took from 10.5 to 12 hours. The flights departed JFK around 23:30 local, which meant that in the winter we flew through the night, then through the daylight of the next day, and landed after dark in Tel Aviv. Winter or summer, though, and whatever the winds, we'd get to the hotel and go straight to bed, which meant I'd wake up around 01:00 to 03:00 local time.

My first flight to Tel Aviv was the first time I had been to Israel. When I awoke that first time, I decided to take a walking tour of the area. Our hotel at that time was the Hilton Tel Aviv, located at the south end of Independence Park on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean. It was an interesting, middle of the night outing.

Israel is the Holy Land, considered such by many, and properly capitalized according to standard English usage. I try to follow standard rules of English, so I have capitalized it. However, I'm not a religious person, so there really isn't anything “holy” to me, and what I encountered that night didn't didn't fit the usual concept of a holy land. That didn't bother me, iconoclast that I am, but I was surprised.

The first seemingly out-of-character discovery was that Independence Park north of the Hilton Tel Aviv at night was/is a gay cruising area. Even today, 25 years since I was there as I write this, if you Google Independence Park, Tel Aviv the first result you see proclaims it “one of the hottest places in the city for gay cruising after dark.” I, of course, didn't know that then, or even that the park-like environment I was in was called Independence Park, but it didn't take long to understand why it was populated in the wee small hours.

When I hit the north end of the park, I descended from the bluff to the beachfront road, headed south, and came across an older guy using binoculars that were huge insofar as the casing holding them. That had to be night vision equipment of the time, not nearly as compact as now. He appeared to be looking out to sea, but what was he looking at? Keeping an appropriate distance off to his side, I walked toward the water, looking as I went. In just a few feet the object of his surveillance became obvious. There was a couple, guy and gal, proving that with the flexibility of youth, you can pretty much do anything standing up that you can do lying down. Whether or not they were aware of me or the old guy with the special binoculars, I'll never know. I watched for a bit. I would have watched longer had they shed their clothes, but they had not. I've never understood the attraction of having sex with clothes on.

The best show, or worst depending on your point of view, but certainly the most incongruous with “holy” was yet to come. On the bluff opposite the Tel Aviv Marina, there's an open concrete plaza. It's actually the top of a partially underground car park, and it's still there. If you have Google Earth, go to 32 05 07.68 N 34 46 10.48 E if you want to look at it. I came up from the beachfront to this well-lit plaza. It was deserted—it was around 03:00— save for three people. A young, good looking blonde gal was lying on her back on a concrete picnic table; I remember her blonde hair spilling off the end of table. On top of her was a guy, perhaps in his thirties, and he was pounding away, but not too quickly. A second guy was standing beside the table watching. While I could have given them a wide berth, I chose to walk past them. Why not? The bizarre thing, though, was that as I did, the guy watching asked me something in what I took to be Arabic. When I stopped and replied that I didn't understand, he asked in passable English if I had a light for his cigarette. I told him that being a non-smoker, I did not, and he went back to watching. I, too, watched for a bit before wishing them all a good evening—I think the girl smiled at me—and I continued across the plaza. Thus ended my first evening in the Holy Land. Some believe first impressions are the truest.

In later conversations, I was told the girl was probably Russian. Israel was experiencing an influx of Russian Jews under their policy that any Jew can immigrate to Israel. And, of course, the last group in gets the dirty duty, so lots of blond Russian prostitutes at the time.

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Transition to Jetstopic started 2019-01-05

In 1988 I was an SA-227 Metroliner captain for Horizon Air, based out of Portland, Oregon, commuting from our home on the McKenzie River east of Eugene, OR. The Metroliner was fun to fly, fast, and extremely maneuverable in taxiing, especially if you turned off the nose wheel steering and let the nose gear freely castor. Up to eight legs a day, average leg about 40 minutes, and no autopilot, which meant you got extremely proficient hand flying in IMC. I was never so good on instruments as I was then. An approach down to minimums—and truth be told sometimes less—was routine.

I was 48 years old, content, and had stopped sending out résumés, but I had sent out many while at my previous employer. One of them was sitting in a file at Evergreen International Airlines based in McMinnville, Oregon. Evergreen had recently hired away a Horizon vice-president to be Evergreen's Director of Flight Standards, and at Evergreen the Flight Standards Director did the hiring. Newly arrived, he was faced with the problem of filling a slot in a Boeing 727 class when one of the scheduled attendees decided not to come to work for Evergreen. It was Thursday, and the class was to begin Monday next. He went to that file of résumés received but not acted upon, started leafing through them, and saw my name. Though we were not personal acquaintances, he knew me by reputation.

I was on my way to work, driving up Interstate 5. No cell phones back then, but it was my habit to stop at the last rest area before Portland to check with my wife for any last minute messages from crew scheduling. There were none, but a guy from Evergreen had called and wanted me to call him ASAP, which I did. When I identified myself to him over the phone, his next words were, “Terry, do you want to fly jets?” I've never forgotten those words, never will.

I said, “Yes!” but when he told me the class was to begin Monday—only three days away—I demurred, explaining that I wouldn't be comfortable not giving Horizon a proper notice, that they had been good me, and I wouldn't feel right not doing the same for them. He then said he had already called them and gotten clearance to offer me the training slot with the understanding that it would start Monday, so I agreed, but I immediately called Horizon's SA-227 chief pilot to verify that all was well with him insofar as my quick exit from Horizon. It was, and the trip sequence I was driving to became my last for Horizon and my last in a propeller-driven aircraft.

topic to be continued....

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Weight & Balancetopic last updated 2020-03-02

The first computer program for aircraft weight & balance that I wrote and that was used commercially was in the late 1970s. I was an instructor, charter pilot and eventually chief pilot at McKenzie Flying Service at the Eugene, Oregon airport. We had an FAA Part 135 air taxi certificate and, for a small FBO, a thriving charter business using Cessna 172, 182, 310, 340, Beech King Air A90, and Grumman Traveler and Tiger aircraft. The language was Fortran and the system a DEC RT-11.

The next was as an SA-227 Metroliner captain for Horizon Air. The captains did the weight & balance for each flight, looking back to see where people were seated and drawing lines on a graphical form. I bought an HP-28S calculator and programmed it for the task. The Metroliner had 10 rows: row 1 had a single seat on the right side (opposite the door), rows 2-10 a seat on each side. All I had to do was enter a 10-digit number, one digit for each row: 0 if the row was unoccupied, 1 if one seat was occupied, 2 if both. Doing that was much faster and more accurate than the paper system.

In 1988 I joined Evergreen International Airlines (EIA) as a 727 first officer. When it became known that I had worked as a software engineer and had developed weight & balance applications, they approached me with a problem. EIA had two 747 freighters. They also had a POI (principal operations inspector, an FAA employee assigned to monitor an airline's operation) who was a knit picker when it came to weight & balance. Per regulation, the weight & balance form for each flight was kept for 90 days. He was regulary redoing the weight & balance calculations looking for errors, which he frequently found. They were typically simple arithmetic errors. Adding the pallet weights manually and determining each position's effect on the c.g. (center of gravity) was error prone even when using a calculator. Typical 747 cargo configuraions had 40 to 60 positions. Far more often than not the errors had no significant affect on the weight & balance, but technically speaking they were errors, and he was fining EIA for them. Hence the need for a system that was not so error prone. The problem was only going to get worse as EIA was planning on getting more 747 freighters.

The “C” programming language was well on it's way to becoming a defacto standard, and I used the project to learn it. After implementing the 747 on the program, I then put the rest of EIA's aircraft models on it: the 727, the DC-8, and the DC-9. They used the program until they ceased operation in 2013.