Wind Stream, Part 1

Position: Abeam YZP (Sandspit)
Destination: Anchorage
Groundspeed: 362 mph (314 kts)
Winds aloft: on the nose at 155 mph (135 kts)


The old quip about the best laid plans of mice and men is appropriate today. My dispatcher had us flight planned to Anchorage flying eastbound out of Lost Wages (with the wind), then turning with the wind around the low pressure center onto a northwest track into an area of light winds aloft over British Columbia, and then drifting to the west as the winds aloft turned away from the nose. It was a darn good flight plan. We pushed back with a 92% fuel load. Last year, I would have topped the tanks just because, but Mother is real nervous about carrying extra fuel these days.

I would regret that decision down the airway.

The northerly surface winds were gusting to 43 mph when we began our taxi. A 737-800 in front of us ingested part of a wind blown newspaper into number one; it was flicked out the back of the engine as confetti. The co-pilot and I said at the same time, "Did you see that?"Lost Wages ground control had airliners on every taxiway trying to get to the north-south runways. It looked like we were about number 40 - 50 for departure when we began our single engine taxi. This was the second leg of our day and we were 45 minutes behind schedule because of a mistake aircraft routing made on the first aircraft assignment for Anchorage; they gave us an aircraft without an ADF receiver which is required for Alaskan flights. I caught the error immediately, because I fly there almost weekly and am intimately familiar with the equipment requirements. Another crew less familiar may not have and would have been busted for sure.

The insidious part: the maintenance paper trail on the aircraft showed the No.1 ADF receiver inop. As my British friend, Trevor, always says, "Hang about." There must be a #2 somewhere in this flightdeck, but I can't find the circuit breaker for the No. 2 ADF receiver. It has to be hiding from me. I called maintenance control, a branch of Mother, and asked, "Where is the circuit breaker located for #2 ADF receiver?"

They put me on hold...

Maintenance control handed me off to aircraft routing... "Uh, we're going to give you another aircraft."

"Does that mean they can't find the circuit breaker either?"

As I suspected, the aircraft only had one ADF receiver, period. Oops! Aircraft routing assumed that there was a second receiver because of the verbiage of the original write-up. This is an example of being led down the garden path, and then finding out too late (at 36,000 feet) that remedial training is in your near future, along with the pleasure of exchanging letters with the FAA for a few months.

Dispatch had given us 23 minutes of two engine burn taxi fuel, which I stretched out to 40 minutes by taxiing on one engine (burns about 60% of the two engine amount). Before we started burning into the flight fuel and forced to return to the gate for more, I emailed my dispatcher and suggested we rework the fuel figures by getting rid of the landing alternate (it was only an uh-oh alternate; the weather forecast did not require it) and moving half of the unknown contingency fuel (1,000 lbs.) to the taxi burn. He agreed and so we completed the paper trail, via the magic of email, leading to the potentially guilty party... That would be me.

Finally, 54 minutes after push, we moved onto the runway for take-off. The windsock was standing straight out and angling thirty degrees across the runway. Loose trash was being blown across our path by the dusty wind gusts... A pleasant day in Lost Wages. About 20 seconds after the engines spooled up to full thrust, we were approaching lift-off speed because of the head winds. In four minutes, we were above the airborne dirt and into the cold blue heading east, and eventually to Anchorage.

to be continued...