I now have 30 hours or so in
the Canadair Regional Jet and have OFFICIALLY completed my training. Now I’m just a regular old line pilot,
waiting by the phone for my next trip assignment.
My first four-day trip ended
with an 8.4 hour day in and out of Chicago.
There was a snowstorm so O’Hare airport was all hosed up. At one point when attempting to depart, we waited
a full 97 minutes from being pushed back from the gate to actually taking
off. Felt sorry for the passengers, but
hey, the captain and I were getting paid to sit around up there and read the
paper. Can’t fight the weather no
matter how hard you try.
It’s a sweet airplane. I love flying it and since I’ll be doing
nothing else for the next few years, that’s a good thing!
After the four-day trip,
which took me into Jacksonville, Lexington, Buffalo, Birmingham, Washington,
Moline, Rochester, and Columbia, I had logged 24 flight hours which was one
hour short of the required 25 hours of IOE.
So, after a two-day break scheduling called to assign me to a quick
two-day trip to finish off IOE.
I finally took some pictures
on the second trip which took us through Memphis and Fort Wayne, Indiana. On one of our flights into Chicago while I
was the non-flying pilot I had the opportunity to snap a picture of the Chicago skyline poking through the fog. The picture doesn’t do it justice – it was a
beautiful sight.
Our flight attendant for the
trip was also kind enough to humor me and take this picture of us during cruise flight at 33,000 feet
between Memphis and Chicago. This is
the right side of the CRJ cockpit
and here is the left side. I attempted a close-up of my flight instruments but it came
out kinda blurry. If you can, note the
airspeed of 0.78 Mach.
Set a new personal high
groundspeed on the trip of 525 knots (604 MPH). Now that I have finished IOE I will begin reserve duty in a
couple of days. I found a crashpad in
Chicago where I’ll be living with 9 other pilots in a two-bedroom
apartment. Kinda tight, but most of
them are only there one night a week so usually the apartment is pretty
empty. One of my buddies from training,
Matt, will be moving into the same place in a couple weeks. I’m sure we will enjoy wasting a lot of time
there.
My general schedule on
reserve is 5 days on, 3 days off. On my
days off I’ll commute back to Las Vegas which is turning out to be not such a
bad commute. Hopefully before long I
will be senior enough to hold my own lines of flying which will only have me
away 4 days a week and a more predictable schedule.
In the meantime, I’m just
thrilled to finally get to this point.
I feel almost like I’ve been in training since summer 2001 and it’s
great that it has finally paid off.
