Tuesday, November 1, 2005

I'm now really an airline pilot!

9:24 PM - Sunday, Nov. 01, 2005
I'm now really an airline pilot!

CRJ-200 Checkride

Whoohooo! Finally, after nearly 9 weeks of living in the freaking Red Roof Inn and wracking every little cell in my brain, I can check off that “airline pilot” box. I remember back about 10 years ago, when I was a junior or so in college, I first had the notion that this would be a box I’d someday want to check off. I was attending Context Associated’s “Pursuit of Excellence”. Actually, I’d completed the Pursuit, and spent a week at the next program, called “The Wall”. So a few months later I was sitting in a lecture hall, writing down the Top 100 Things I Want To Do In My Life. I still have that piece of notebook paper, jammed on both sides with outrageous ideas. And down about 10 from the top (right between “sky dive” and “Sing With Barbra Streisand”) was “a stint at airline pilot”. Ha! So the lessons I see in all this are – 1) be careful what you wish for, 2) be very clear about what you wish for, 3) write down your intentions, and 4) be as outrageous as necessary – anything is possible! (Though I should probably start with voice lessons if the Streisand thing is going to happen next!)

So the initial frustration of having our checkride postponed by 4 days is over. I definitely spazzed out, fearing that I’d forget everything I’d been trained to do in that plane between our last sim session and the checkride. But in the end it worked out. (Isn’t that how it works usually?) Steve and I both flew pretty rough at first, and we’re sure that the examiner took into account our training gap when he was trying to decide if we should be deemed official or not. But despite the little mistakes I made in the 2-hour flight, I proved that I did learn enough to be called “First Officer Recke”. (Yeah, thanks dad – great name for a pilot, I know….)

Our checkride started with about a 2-plus hour oral examination. Tony, our examiner, started with the first button on the overhead panel and worked his way down. We told him, tag-team style, what each switch/button/knob did from a systems perspective. And then we answered questions about the airplane’s limitations for awhile, before reciting a dozen or so memory items that have to be done in case of an emergency (rejected take off, cabin fire, asymmetric breaking, engine fire, etc.). When that was successfully behind us, we worked out a performance problem, proving that with certain failures on a snow-covered runway in Roanoke, VA (a “special” – read “treacherous” – airport in ASA’s eyes) with a certain load of passengers and baggage, that the plane would be able to take off from or abort safely on that length of runway under those atmospheric conditions. We ended up having to move a few pax from the front of the plane to the last few rows of seats to get the center of gravity balanced right, but it wasn’t a difficult problem. Then came the flight.

Steve and I decided I’d fly first from, the right seat, and he’d be my Pilot Not Flying from the left. Since we’ve both been F/Os in training we’ve had a little bit of negative learning going on since ½ of our training sessions have been in the captain’s seat. The good news is that I have a much better understanding of what it takes to become a captain, and I also have proved that I can land the plane from that seat (almost as well as from my own seat, interestingly).

So I had a normal take-off (which made us suspicious!) and then the onset of problems ensued. Engine failures, electrical problems, smoke in the cargo bay, autopilot failures, and smaller stuff that was easily handled. We flew a few monitored ILS approaches (like they were Category II, but the wx was Category I), and a couple of hand-flown non-precision (GPS) approaches, all into New York’s JFK (whose airport elevation happens to be 13’ above sea level, but I’ll get to that later). I stayed ahead of the plane, and managed to keep an eye on Steve, who was rarely ahead of it. My landings were decent, all close to centerline and within the touchdown zone.

Thankfully I made only a few little errors, and they were “nit-picky” things that were discussed in the de-brief post flight. However there was one big error that I made, and I wasn’t surprised. Visual approaches have been tricky for me all throughout training, and the one on my checkride was no exception. I was cleared for the visual approach back into ATL (we’d been shooting IFR approaches into JFK, elevation 13’). ATL’s airport sits just over 1000’ above sea level. So when you’re flying over the runway numbers just about to touch down, your instruments are reading very differently. But we don’t brief an approach for a visual, we just fly it. There is a certain protocol that must be followed, such as when to put down the first few degrees of flaps, and when to lower the landing gear, but it’s very subjective. Tony put me at 4000’ (about 3000’ above the ground) on a downwind and cleared me for the visual approach and the landing. I knew turning final that I was still too high, and although I had all the flaps and gear down to increase the drag and thus get lower faster, it still wasn’t going to work out. I dove for it (in a commercial pilot kind of a way, of course, not a Maureen Griggs kind of way) but knew about 2-3 miles out that it wasn’t going to happen. Fearing that I’d just messed up my checkride I told Steve (who was in charge of radio communications as Pilot Not Flying) to tell the tower that I was going to go around and that I needed vectors back for another stab at it. This time I flew the pattern at only 2000’, and was able to better plan the descent and landing to touch down exactly where I needed to be at just the right speed. End of checkride! And Tony commented, “Congrats, that was a satisfactory ride.” SO anti-climactic, eh?!

Then Steve flew, and from the very start he was rough. It was obvious that we had both been out of the sim for nearly 5 full days! He forgot to ask for the flaps to come up after his normal take off, so I asked him if he was ready. Then something else happened that he forgot to do, and I tried to make it quiet and just do it. But the examiner missed nothing. He told me to stop prompting him. So the next time Steve forgot something, I didn’t say anything but just handled it. And Tony then said, “Erin, if you don’t stop helping him I’ll fail you both!” And so it was. I thought Steve would make himself get ahead of the plane, knowing that I’d not be able to help him, but he barely managed to stay up with it sometimes. He just had a bad case of checkride-it is, and was rusty to boot. But there were moments when he seemed like he was going to pull it all together, and others when I wasn’t sure he was conscious over there. Eventually, and after an especially nice visual approach, he made his final landing (at which point neither of us was sure he’d passed). Tony leaned over between us, mumbled something about Santa Claus, and said, “Well, I suppose this was satisfactory….” Ugh. An auspicious beginning, but a beginning nonetheless!


The following day we had our LOFT flight, line-oriented flight training. It was much more of a training event rather than an evaluation, which was a good thing since we nearly became a lawn dart! In a LOFT event, the aircraft goes from Point A to Point B. Something we don’t get to do much of in Sim World, since we’re always practicing approaches and dealing with problems. Everything went fairly well, until Steve’s last approach into ATL. It was another dreaded visual, and it almost sucked us in. The visuals are a little unrealistic in the Day VFR setting in the sim. Near the big cities there are buildings, and the shorelines are accurate, but between cities and airports lies miles and miles of green nothingness. And it’s a bit hard to tell exactly how high we are or how far away from the airport we are. Thus, the near-lawn dart situation: we were cleared for the visual approach into ATL (elevation 1020’) after having practiced visuals into JFK (elevation 13’). We’d had the same problem the previous day on my checkride, but rather than being too low, I flew in too high to land. But Steve was far enough out on a straight-in approach and was descending lower and lower. Too low, it seemed to me, but I wasn’t sure (I’d loaded the visual approach wrong into the Flight Management Computer and we didn’t have the distance from the airport available). So I didn’t say anything. But after a few seconds it seemed like we were WAY too low, and the Radar Altimeter was agreeing with me. If my calculations were correct, we’d become a smoking crater in another 10 seconds or so. But that “First Officer’s Syndrome” was gripping me, and I kept trying to rationalize the problem. Either Steve wasn’t thinking clearly, or the RA was not functioning properly, or my brain was fried. Or any combination of the above. But another few seconds later it showed us at 300 feet above the ground and still a few miles out from the runway. So I spoke up, rather startlingly to Steve, and we averted a disaster. Weird how when something seems wrong, it’s still possible to not speak up, for various reasons. That’s how many accidents have made their way into the pages of NTSB reports….. Good lesson for me - again.

The good news is that now we have our “licenses to learn”, and the 7th is my first IOE (initial operating experience) trip. I have a 3-day trip with a fellow named Chris, followed by a 1-day trip with a fellow named Greg, and then the weekend off. And then I’m scheduled for another 3-day trip with a woman named Amy, which will be fun. With any luck that last trip will involve a woman flight attendant, making us an all-female crew! The IOE captains will keep me out of trouble and teach me the Real World in the CRJ. And about two weeks from now I’ll but just one of the rest of the F/O’s at ASA. Yippeee!

No comments:

Post a Comment