Howdy. Well, as of yesterday I’m an honest to goodness charter pilot. I took the check ride with our Vice President and Director of Maintenance. Any flight with this guy is a hoot as long as you take the bark for bark and not bite.
A shining moment was when we were out in the canal doing maneuvers at about 500 feet. After a series of practice weather turns, he pointed into a dead end valley between three mountains rising up from the water and said,
“Take me in there. How are you going to go about flying in fly into that valley?”
I was thinking, “Shit, we’re pretty low to be going in there, but I guess he knows something I don’t. Maybe it winds around back there and I just can’t see the turn...” So I said, “Well, I’m going to stay to one side so that I’ve got room to turn around if I can’t make it out...” I could tell that he didn’t like my answer, so I added, “And I’d probably climb up a bit before trying it.”
“You’re Goddamned F*&%ing right you would!!!” He shouted through the intercom. “You would have flunked right then and there if you had taken us into that valley!!! You see THAT?!?!” he pointed into the suspect terrain. “That’s what DEATH looks like!!! Take a good F$%^ing look!!!” And with that, we headed back into Juneau to fill out the paperwork. He wasn’t done though. On the way in, he said, “Tourists will ask you to do stupid F@#$ing shit like that and you need to learn to tell them F@#$ YOU!!!” and he raised his middle finger with fervor.
There is a phase of training after the check ride called Initial Operating Experience (IOE), where I’m technically the pilot, but a check airman has to be on board showing me the ropes. One of our check airmen was scheduled to cover the routes out of Ketchikan for a few days, so he and I flew a Cherokee Six down here from Juneau this morning. Then we did a couple runs between Ketchikan and Klawock. On the first run, we were at capacity with boxes and bags of mail, but we actually had a paying passenger on the second trip. As such, I had the opportunity to practice my pre-flight passenger briefing and perform my worst landing since I was a private pilot. As we were getting back into the airplane after unloading the mail and the passenger, Michael, my trailer mate and check airman said, “Well, that’s one way to land an airplane...” So it goes.
