The Earth's Shadow

There it is at twelve o'clock... The Earth's shadow peeking over the eastern horizon. It never ceases to amaze me! Our main sequence star, the Sun, is slowly setting behind the tail. My face is pressed against the Captain's side windscreen watching the clouds beneath us fade into a brilliant orange hue. We are crossing the plains of Kansas at ten miles per minute enroute to the edge of the Empire.

What became of the sixteen (16) nights spent with my beautiful wife? Are they receding behind the tail, too? Was it all a dream conjured up by crew scheduling to keep me happy? No, it is not a dream... I can still smell her on my shirt. OK, now I remember... She told me to hurry home.

The e-mail alert light is flashing... Better shake the lace out of my head and get back into the flight deck. The co-pilot rips the message out of the mini-printer and reads (without geezer glasses) the message from Mother. We are on a weather avoidance route and She wants a PIREP (Pilot Report) concerning the weather conditions. The reply, written in shorthand that only pilots and dispatchers understand, is on the way in less than a minute.

Darkness envelops us from the east... Day one will be over in 600 miles.

Sixteen Nights

Count 'em! I have slept with the wife of my youth for sixteen (16) nights (consecutive) in a non-vacation environment... All because of the annual training requirement. I could get used to this!

No, better not get used to it. Tomorrow morning begins a four day trip. Time to start folding t-shirts.

School House Day #3 and beyond...

The performance engineers, one of them being a hot looking woman in a very short and tight skirt, lectured us today on how they calculate take-off distances, fuel burn, and landing weights.

OK, stand by one moment, please. If memory serves, day number one of this ground school threatened we pilots with career damaging consequences for staring at a women in a short skirt for more than a few seconds. In the PC world, it is called "uninvited attention". This has got to be a test, right? The airline would not really send a math geek disguised as a hot woman in a short skirt to talk to 41 pilots about runway distance remaining, would they?

I am confused...

School House Day #2

Finally, the sweet technical subjects that I love, as in flight controls, hydraulics, electrical, fire detection and protection, fuel, engines, landing gear, navigation, pressurization, pneumatics, weight & balance, etc... The instructor is a young man that has no interest in being a line pilot, which in itself, is very unusual. Most school house instructors are retired airline pilots or young men trying to sneak through the back door into line operations. Nevertheless, his presentation is excellent.

During breaks, I am walking over to the simulator bays to talk with my buds that are finishing up their training today. They are briefing me about the latest emergency scenarios the sim instructors are throwing at us. Unlike some pilots, I love sim training. It is friggin' cool! Where else can you have a catastrophic engine failure and fire, without the paper trail and media coverage?

Well, that is next week. I have to concentrate on ground school this week.

School House Day #1

There are 41 pilots in my annual recurrent ground school. I am on the back row with eight other trouble makers trying to stay awake while a young PC warrior flails us with the sexual harassment hammer. He has presented past cases pulled from the files of Doom that represent ruined careers of a few evil, middle aged, white male airline Captains. This morning we sang songs of love and tolerance in the Crew Resource Management class with over 40 flight attendants in attendance. A few of them actually teared up with emotion telling stories about Captains whom they perceived were rude or short with them over operational matters.

We have been in this school house for almost eight hours and have not discussed one thing about actual airline ops. Incredible!

Hmmm... I wonder what a Captain from the Golden Age of airline flying (1946-1973) would say about this curriculum? I think it is safe to say it would not fit the PC model.

Back and Forth

Back and forth we go, coast to coast, over and over until we get it right, or that is as it seems. Day three of a four day trip finds me in San Jose packing my bags for another eastbound marathon. After this trip I have my annual ground school training and a six month simulator check capped off with a line check (that is a check airman sitting behind the crew on a scheduled flight observing the pilots). January is a busy month for me.

My co-pilot is a twenty something male whom I have never seen before this trip. Flying over the Midwest last night I pointed out the little airport where I took my first checkride for a private pilot license in 1969. He proceeded to ask me if Wilbur or Orville had been my instructor.

Wow! That was a first for me... Initially, I had a flash of anger over the remark, until I remembered myself asking an old Captain, who has flown West, if his E6B (a circular slide rule) was in the Smithsonian, or something close to that. What goes around comes around. After that, I laughed at the young one's remark. Pretty clever, actually....

Crosswinds

I am in a reflective mood tonight enroute to Anchorage. Behind the cockpit door are 124 passengers, a full load. One of those passengers is the wife of my youth. She loves to travel with me, whenever and wherever her job allows and, of course, when the airline will let her take an empty seat, which is getting rare nowadays. But as I keep reminding her, it's job security... Sort of... My wife is a small person, a wispy and beautiful human. She would fit in the flightdeck coat closet... If only....

My co-pilot is a thirty something male who I have flown with before. In fact, when he was a new hire, fresh from the co-pilot machine, we had an emergency immediately after take-off one dark and stormy night (any airline emergency always happens on a dark and stormy night; it is a given... Just ask any airline pilot...) and returned to land without incident... Except for the voluminous amounts of paperwork. He was cool and calm under real (not simulated) pressure, so I naturally like flying with him. Another plus is that he flew at another airline (which declared bankruptcy and closed their doors) that hired a bunch of friends of mine from the old days. I love to ask him if he knew or flew with any of my old friends. We giggle while discussing their little idiosyncrasies, then I always ask if he knows what happened to them. They scattered to the four corners of the airline business, as we all do, hoping their little corner will last until retirement, but rarely does. I would imagine most of them are grounded, yet still looking up at the contrails remembering the day.

Outside, the winds are howling from the southwest at 150 m.p.h. giving us a direct crosswind. Our little Airbus 319 is holding her nose into the wind to keep the course line to the next navigation waypoint known as Laire. A few minutes ago, I sent a position report via email to our dispatcher, who sent us the latest Anchorage weather. It is cold (9 degrees F) but clear with light surface winds.

The Force is balanced tonight... All is well.

2006 at 540 m.p.h.

We punched a hole through the thin veneer of 2006 at 540 m.p.h. over New Mexico. Unlike Captain Kirk and his crew, we had no problems entering a new time continuum... All instruments and computers in the green. The radios crackled with Happy New Year wishes from pilots and air traffic controllers who were unlucky enough, like me, to be working at midnight, instead of partying with friends and family. In my minds eye, I watched 2005 recede behind the aircraft at 9 miles per minute until it was out of sight.

I called the flight attendants and told them that we had just crossed the event horizon of the new year, then wished them a Happy New Year. They, in turn, made an announcement to the 150 passengers, but we heard no cheers. There is too much background noise in the front of the aluminum tube.

We departed in 2005 and will arrive in 2006. That is cool!