Friday, October 27, 2006

Aye! Oh! Weee!

Howdy. After I got back from San Antonio, I sat around Anchorage for a week, reading silly books and watching C-Span. By the time they were finally ready for me to start my initial operating experience, my brain had turned to putty and I’d forgotten practically everything I’d learned in six weeks of ground school and simulator training. Add to that the fact that we were taking off at 4:00 to 5:00 in the morning, and you have a recipe for the seeming disaster that was my IOE experience. Favorite quotes include “You bust altitudes like other people drink water!” and “Where do you come up with this stuff?! You’re so convincing, but SO WRONG!!” The latter was regarding bogus answers I was giving in response to questions about the IFR alternate airport requirements in our company’s Operations Specifications. Those had been covered in about week two of the training process. Obviously I overestimated my abilities to retain such information. I would have had more luck with questions about candidates for the mid-term election.

Go Me.

In any case, I’m finally flying on line after almost two months of training and initial operating experience. Yesterday was my first day off after 10 days of straight flying. I started feeling better about my performance in the airplane after about day six as well as after some of the other new guys started IOE and I could tell they were going through a very similar experience. I’m still learning a lot (read “Screwing Up”) on every flight, but it keeps getting better.

The flying is very different from what I was doing over the summer. We climb above the clouds here instead of constantly ducking underneath them. On the morning cargo flights, there were several times when I didn’t see a single thing outside the cockpit from the time we took off until the destination runway showed up in the windshield at the bottom of a bumpy instrument approach.

I was having a bit of trouble with my approaches during the first few days. Things were happening really fast and I was having some trouble maintaining situational awareness. I was I was consistently way too fast (or too high, or both) at the initial approach fix because the method I was using didn’t let me monitor the progress of the descent to tell if I was on track or not. This gave me less time to deal with actually flying the approach.

When I started flying with another check airman who had a better method of planning the descent from cruising altitude (about 20,000 ft) to the initial approach altitude (about 3,000 ft), I realized that my trouble on the approaches was starting about 50 miles before the actual approach. So once I got better at planning the descent, the approaches were much more manageable.

That’s just one example of how the learning process has gone over the last couple weeks since I got in the airplane. Landings finally sort of came together on day eight or nine. There are just a lot of things I needed to learn to think about that didn’t really apply when I was flying between the mountains at 500 feet in a Cherokee.

I’m still in Alaska though, and there are definitely some similarities. I was the non-flying-pilot a few days ago when we got bogged down a bit while taking off from a slushy gravel runway on the coast of the Bering Sea. The takeoff ended up fine, but upon landing in Anchorage, we discovered some fairly significant nicks in both propellers. Both were subsequently replaced. A memo is sure to follow.

I’m back in ground school for the next day or so in order to get on the same recurrent training schedule as everybody else. I’m hoping that we talk about IFR alternate airport requirements. I’m ready for him this time! After tomorrow, I’ll probably have about a week off. I’m thinking of trying to jumpseat down to Kansas to see the family for the first time since March. I can do that now. I’m an airline pilot. Go Me.