We All Know One…
This sort of video makes me proud that I work with the AOPA Air Safety Foundation as one of their seminar and FIRC instructors. “Can’t have fun with flight safety training? Then you shouldn’t be in flight safety training” is what my old instructor, Jesse Hinson, always said. He also said: “Kevin, you have no future in aviation.” What a visionary!
If you don’t think pilots like the one in this video exist, think again. Just last week I saw a guy in a Christian Eagle, who was showing off, fly into a farm silo. He wasn’t killed, but the plane was.
Visit my site at: http://www.kevincreates.com
what the end of a four day airline rotation feels like
All professional pilots have been there. A time during a long trip when your brain turns to porridge. http://www.kevincreates.com
A Land Without VORs – and Decent Bombing Targets
take me to your men's room.. it's been a thousand years
They are coming.
I am talking about the day when VORs will no longer dot our countryside looking like giant orange white and red mechanical nipples. We more experienced older pilots will then tell the youngsters coming up about a time when we navigated using fixed stations on the ground. They will be amazed and aghast at stories of left-right needles, increased sensitivity near the stations, the “to-from” dead zone where the flags flip as you passed over the station.
Space-based navigation is okay I guess, but my question is: how will we navigate when the aliens invade from behind the moon? If you remember from the movie “Independence Day” that if it wasn’t for Jeff Goldblum we would all be dead by now. He was the one that discovered that the invaders were using OUR OWN SATELLITES to attack us! All I can say is thank gawd he had an Apple Computer!
So, what are we going to do when all of our GPS satellites are taken over by slimy gooey space aliens? How are we going to effectively bomb Afghanis and Iraqis if we can’t triangulate their position from outer space? How can grandma hope to find the podiatrist if she can’t use her car-based GPS? It will be bedlam and the world as we know it will end!
I have two suggestions to solve this problem. First, everywhere of consequence that we fly to should have large arrows that we have painted on the ground pointed at them. For example, pilots trying to find Atlanta could follow red “Atlanta” arrows laid out all over the country pointing in the direction of that city. Want to fly to Minneapolis? Just look for and follow the arrows! They do this sort of thing all the time in hospitals and doctor’s offices. It can’t fail for air navigation.
Targeting people in Afghanistan and Iraq is a little harder without GPS coverage. I suggest that we offer free “American Sucks” bracelets to all people in both countries that want them. We can then track everybody individually and if we later decide to bomb them we can just dial-up and track their bracelets.
Meanwhile, keep you eyes to the skies and don’t trust your GPS. It may be trying to lead you into intergalactic slavery!
Fly Hollis
a great writer, humorist and a person who would occasionally have a beer with the pilots on a layover
Go to Hollis Gillispie’s website right now:http://www.hollisgillespie.com/index.htm
She was a flight attendant at Delta Airlines for a while, but I am glad that like me, she escaped the corporate world and expanded her creative empire. Of course, her creative empire is successful and makes money while mine is kind of a Third World creative empire, but I think that it is only a matter of time until I can pull my creative kingdom up from Haiti status. Perhaps, someday if I work very hard, I can mold my creative empire into a sort of upscale Honduras.
Her creative empire? Most likely a Monaco, or a Tahiti.
Buy her books. Buy many copies of her books and give them to everybody you know. She has the flight attendant personality that every sane pilot wanted to fly with. I imagine that she would bring you up a half coffee – half hot chocolate with whipped cream and two sweet and lows if you asked and would be nice enough to keep the Visine out of the drink and would refrain from the urge to spit in it.
Start off by purchasing multiple copies of these three books:
Trailer Trashed
Confessions of a Traveling Slut
Bleachy-Haired Honkey Bitch.
They are a mandatory part of any pilot or aviation enthusiast’s library. You say they aren’t about flying? Neither was “The Little Prince” you effete aviation snob, but you bought and read it anyway even though you didn’t understand it. (I don’t think anybody understood it)
History will never know what would have happened if Hollis and I had flown a trip together and maybe even had a Shreveport Layover at the Sherveport Holiday Inn (right next to the “Wines of the World” bar). Nothing romantic to be sure, but I bet we would have had a few drinks at that bar, maybe smoked a Winston or two and would have won, quite handily, the nightly bar fight.
Now — immediately — click:http://www.hollisgillespie.com/index.htm
to go to Kevin’s site: http://www.kevincreates.com
Sleeping Pilots? Let’s all take a Deep Breath…
Just five more minutes, Mom!
Okay, I’ve finally heard enough crap on the radio about what people THINK happened to the North West (aka: Delta) flight that missed MSP the other day. I have thirty five years flying, twenty seven of them as an airline pilot (including around 20,000 hours in transport jets) and will try to help you out with some opinionated facts.
First, given their work hours and life styles, it should come as a shock to nobody that airline pilots take naps while flying. They just aren’t supposed to do it at the same time. The way you do it is ask the other guy or girl if they mind you taking a little snooze. After you make sure that they are going to watch things and stay awake, you push your seat back (so you won’t inadvertently kick a rudder pedal) put your head back and cut zees. There is no federal aviation regulation saying the “pilot not sleeping” must put on an oxygen mask. That would be stupid, because having a reg like that would mean that the FAA admits we take naps.
Second, there is no alarm that tells you the plane missed its destination. That would also be stupid because having an alarm like that presupposes that all pilots in a crew would be asleep. Having said that, new generation, long-range jets like the Boeing 777 do have a crew alert system. If the crew doesn’t move any switch in the cockpit for a pre-determined amount of time the airplane starts giving them louder and louder “crew alerts” until they key a mike or push a button. This was designed into very long range airliners.
The aircraft radios would only be heard if you had the volume up, so ATC calling every ten seconds does you no good if everything is muted. Ditto for other aircraft trying to call you. There is an ACARS system (automatic crew alert) that is designed to transfer data, but the alert for that is a very quiet “ding-dong”. This is because you get so many ACARS messages during a normal flight that if it were noisy it would drive you nuts. There is a printer but it runs fairly silently and is out of direct view of the pilots. So, a WAKE UP sign would be pointless.
Airliner crews are required to maintain contact with their airline via a radio and to keep them from having to listen all the time there is a system called SELCAL. (pronounced “cell-call”). It flashes a light and has a slightly louder chime to alert the crew. In noisy cockpits, this is also pretty hard to hear.
It is very unusual that the crew was out of contact with ATC for over an hour. Normally, if things are quiet for more than a few minutes, pilots get on the frequency and ask ATC: “still there?” to make sure they haven’t missed a frequency change. Personally, I think these guys either really were arguing or both were asleep. Even without communication with ATC they normally would have noticed they hadn’t started down yet for MSP.
The Flight Attendants? Should they have called? Nope.
The flight was only 150 miles past MSP when ATC finally got its attention. That translates into 15 to 18 minutes assuming a normal cruise of around 485 knots. A delay that short would not even get the FA’s attention unless the pilots had forgotten to turn on the fasten seatbelt light.
Here is what would happen with the automation if both pilots were asleep or arguing or just clueless. When programming the FMS (flight management system) prior to flight many pilots don’t put in the arrival procedure, they just put in the destination airport and plan to program the arrival and approach later when they get closer. If the jet flew in cruise with the autopilot on past MSP the FMS would have dropped out of VNAV/LNAV (vertical nav/lateral nav) into Altitude Hold and Heading Hold. The plane would simply keep flying straight and level off of the last heading the FMS gave it until the fuel ran out.
Basically, the pilots probably had the volume down and were either asleep, arguing really loudly or very very stupid.
Given our history with 911 and such I am surprised that the didn’t scramble the fighters sooner, assuming they ever did. You can bet your ass that if they were anywhere near a politician (ie: Washington) they would have been shot down. www.kevincreates.com
Another Day Ends at my Imaginary Airfield
It has been a nice day for hanging out at the grass strip — even if it is an imaginary one. We got our last cutting of hay off of the runway a few weeks ago and the cool weather has made the grass go dormant for another winter. No more mowing.
My dog is laying up against the side of the hangar, soaking up what sun there is to soak while anticipating her upcoming dinner that is always served in a 1986 dodge D150 hubcap under the Waco which is right next to the Tiger Moth.
The sun is setting behind red and orange hued trees that only have a week or two left to hang onto their leaves. They too will become dormant as will most of my fair-weather flying for another year. The time is coming when the days get shorter, nights get colder and my aviation time will be made up mostly of repairing RC models, giving safety seminars and FIRCS and trading lies with old co-pilots.
Good winter flying is great but rare and the clear snow-covered days are paid for by the dark, wet and dreary ones.
Oh well — if I still smoked, or for that matter, drank, I would be enjoying a Winston and a bourbon before pushing my chair back into the hangar and closing the doors for the night.
Now that my only vices are sloth, ignorance and television I shuffle back into the hangar’s office and wonder what is on the tube tonight. http://www.kevincreates.com http://www.cessnaflyer.org
Balloon Boy Boffo!
CNN has once again proven that it is the National Enquirer of television news. Six year olds have figured out their ways and can get themselves an entire day of free publicity just for the asking.
Wow — Now all I have to do is get somebody to have sex with George Clooney in our club’s Aeronca Chief and I can promote my new book, Fly Like You Mean It!
whackadoos foil-heads and puppet masters — pilots I have known
If you put any group of pilots together for any period of time you are bound to end up with some great stories about the weird characters they have flown with. Flying is dynamic in nature. There are very few areas of human endeavor more fluid, fast and frenetic than aviation and it often attracts weird people. All of you out there know what I am talking about.
Pilots can literally go from “zero to six hundred” in a few minutes. We can traverse oceans, mountain ranges and deserts with ease. We can also, with equal speed and ease, screw things up to the point that people and equipment gets hurt or destroyed.
You would think that the so-called “awesome responsibility” of carrying people through the air at high rates of speed in highly technical and complicated machinery would make us a paranoid bunch of anal-retentive jerks. It could be imagined by the public that we all wear huge wristwatches, carry around our licenses even when we know we aren’t flying and say things like “roger that” or “say again” when people ask us simple, non-flying questions.
Stress related misbehavior is not an imaginary condition for some pilots. People respond to stress and responsibility in a variety of ways and for some pilots, being in charge of such a dynamic enterprise as flying makes them a little crazy.
Most pilots would never talk about the responsibility of carrying people (sometimes large groups of people) through the skies in all kinds of weather. They usually come up with glib sayings like: “well, I always get to the scene of the accident first” if asked about the dangers of flight.
I personally think that airline pilots and general aviation pilots have about the same amount of stress. While it is true that when I flew airliners I often carried more than two hundred people at a time, it is also true that general aviation pilots usually carry their families – which, in my opinion, is the highest in-flight stress of all.
Protection from Radiation and Handballs
When I was a “co-king” on the DC-9, I flew with a captain who always wore a baseball cap when he was flying. That doesn’t sound too weird until I add that the hat was lined with aluminum foil to, in his words, “block the gamma rays.” Other than his fear of radiation that could penetrate planets with relative ease but was stymied by cooking foil, he was a good pilot and operated a safe and competent cockpit.
When I was an engineer on the 727, we had a captain in our base who always wore gloves when he flew. Not just regular or even flying gloves, which would be weird enough – he wore handball gloves. You know – the ones that have padded palms and no coverings for the fingers?
He would make a great show of putting them on and looked like a demented Italian sports car driver in the way he would pull them on like a latter-day O.J. Simpson testing the fit for a rapt jury.
I would like to say that like “captain gamma ray” he was harmless and a good stick, but unfortunately, he was a jerk and pretty much a bad pilot. Oh yeah… he also had a habit of irritating and alienating the flight attendant crew, which meant that my job of flight engineer now included apologizing to everybody constantly about his behavior.
Thank God for Human Factors Training
These two examples of the wacky side of piloting were guys I was flying with during those heady years before cockpit resource management was in existence and morphed into the human factors religion it is today. When you flew with an eccentric captain you adapted to him and didn’t report him to management unless you were convinced he was going to kill passengers and bend airplanes.
Eccentric captains begin their career as eccentric copilots and flight engineers, but their behavior before they become aircraft commanders is curtailed by career concerns. First, the captain you are flying with if you are acting strange could simply tell you to knock it off. If you didn’t stop doing what he didn’t like he could have you thrown off of the trip. I have seen this done a few times and actually had to do it once when I was a captain. You literally beach a crewmember at the next stop where he or she can be replaced by a reserve pilot.
Getting thrown off of a trip is the nuclear option and can be a career killer. There is nothing an eccentric copilot or engineer needs less than the attention of management to their antics.
Because of this, most pilots wait until they attain the freedom of being pilot in command before they foil their first hat, put on their first pair of flying hand-ball gloves, or bring their first puppet on board.
That’s right – I said puppet.
We actually had a captain who brought “Freddie” (short for “Freddie the Fox”) with him on every trip. This pilot was so socially inhibited that he would have Freddie ask the rest of the crew for things. I am not making this up. I have seen Freddie in action. Imagine how impressed I was as a young flight engineer when on the very first leg, Freddie looked across the pedestal at the copilot and said: “gear up”.
By know those of you who know me or have at least read some of my stuff may be wondering what kind of craziness I bought to my airline cockpits when I was a capain.
I always resorted to humor. Mostly gallows humor, but I almost always had a wisecrack handy for any occasion. Under normal conditions, I drove my crews crazy with my off the wall comments, my self-centered activities, my newspaper reading and my constant search on the ADF for just the right oldies AM music station. I cared deeply about safety and doing a good job, but I showed my care by pretending I didn’t care. This, I think, would make almost any civilized society consider me mentally damaged.
Unusual circumstances, abnormals and emergencies were an entirely different matter for me. The best way to tell if I was truly worried about something when we were flying was a sudden lack of humor on my part. Scary stuff made me quiet, not hilarious.
Since every pilot has to be a little bit crazy to think that they can climb into a complicated machine that can literally fly through the air at high rates of speed, we have to assume that in the sense of having an inflated ego, we all are mentally flawed at least a little.
Problems arise in flying when pilots go one step beyond being a little crazy and begin to do really outlandish things. How do you draw the line between a pilot who laughs maniacally during a normal landing after he makes that same FAA bashing joke for the millionth time into the voice recorder from the guy who has literally gone around the bend and will fly you into the next building because he suddenly thinks it is the wrong color?
I hate to say this, but it is up to the rest of us pilots to police our own. We are the ones who have to recognize crazy when we see it. We are also the ones who have to recognize stupid when we see that, but stupid is a subject for an entire other column, if not a book.
We can’t count on the FAA to weed out the nut-jobs. The FAA has it totally backwards when it comes to mental health. They outlaw even the mildest anti-depression drug and won’t allow you to take medication along those lines if you want even a third class medical. On the other hand, they have no method to recognize the people who aren’t taking medication but are successful at hiding their depression or other mental health problems from the AME for thirty minutes every three years.
In other words, getting treatment for what little mental confusion or craziness you have is totally forbidden. You are being encouraged to hide your mental small mental problems from the Feds just long enough to allow them to flower into full-blown big mental problems.
Maybe the FAA will eventually change its tune. It wasn’t that long ago that pilots routinely hid their cardiac and high-blood pressure symptoms because high blood pressure medications were disallowed.
For now though we pilots are the first and last line of defense for the flying public when it comes to our behavior and the mental attitude of other pilots we know. So, if the next time you see me heading out to the airplane wearing a tin foil hat, some cool gloves and looking all serious and stuff you might want to stop me and recommend that I go lie down somewhere. http://www.kevincreates.com http://www.cessnaflyer.org
Achtung! Der Horses are Coming!
where is der dressage ring cycle?
Cool air is finally wafting its way over us Parisians in the bluegrass. The grass is actually blue in color now because of all of the mold that has grown on it during the past four month’s deluge.
It is a good thing that the latest version of forty days and forty nights is over because we are only one year away from the much touted and much feared WEG.
WEG, for those of you who are just now crawling out from your storm cellars, stands for World Equestrian Games. It is a huge deal if you are European or happen to like horses, and according to economic forecasts, we’re all going to be rich.
For example, last time they held these games, they were in Germany. The games there brought twenty bazillion deutschmarks into the German economy – enough to fully outfit twenty armored divisions and the air support necessary for them to reach Minsk by spring. Negotiations to get the games there were fueled by a desire to placate the recently re-unified country who, during the talks, kept talking about how nice it would be to own Poland again.
The salesmanship and charm that we Kentuckians brought to the table when the WEG was considering committing the heresy of locating in the United States included many shrewd and bold moves. Officials from our commonwealth made many trips to Europe, culminating in the European horse community being willing to give us anything if we would simply leave.
Kentucky state officials did something similar when it came to getting the Toyota plant many years ago. They hung out at the Japanese baths and hotels for so long that the Toyota executives were willing to offer them anything if they would just go home. Tokyo property values were plummeting and many hotel and restaurant workers in Eto were fleeing to the mountains to form anti-Kentucky revolutionary groups.
Now that we have the WEG coming here we can expect a huge jump in our economic status and development. For example, somebody is going to have to pick up the trash when our visitors from around the world drop their Toblerone wrappers on the ground.
Just before the games begin we can expect a major influx of foreign horses; little economical ones from Asia, bigger equines from the huge farm regions in Eurasia, and literally thousands of horses who can’t understand a word of English. To them, the word “Whoa” means “stomp that spectator into a bucket of warm goo.” (I am just paraphrasing here because I don’t speak fluent “euro-nag”).
Horses will bring in their own food from around the world if they intend to do well here. American horses eat grass and maybe a little grain. Other horses from around the world eat differently. For example, in Norway, the horses eat mostly sno-cones fortified with lederhosen.
So, Parisians, prepare yourselves for thousands upon thousands of non English or Spanish speaking visitors from the other side of this funny little globe we call the earth. Remember that many of our garages and tool sheds can be converted into “training barns” that can bring upwards of twenty thousand deutschmarks a month in rent.
