Professional Pilot Career Journal

December 7, 2003 – Goodbye ACA from FL410, Hello COEX

I’m sitting right now on Continental Flight 547. That’s right – I’m on my way to Houston to begin my next initial airline training cycle – my third in three years.

COEX assigned me a class date of December 8. I would have actually preferred a slightly later class date in order to have a little more time off, but I suppose receiving a paycheck for the month of December makes up for not being able to sit around on my ass in my apartment and drink beer for another four weeks. Which is too bad, because I was just starting to break in my furlough pants, the name I gave a pair of flannel pants that my girlfriend Carey gave me specifically for sitting around on my ass in my apartment drinking beer. When you think about it, the timing couldn’t work out better – I was only officially unemployed for one week.

However, I elected to take time off without pay for the last two weeks of my tenure at ACA in order to do some traveling. Carey and I spent a few days each in Austin, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Portland (Oregon) visiting friends and family. Actually it was quite exhausting but we had a very nice time.

My last day at ACA was actually pretty cool and a neat way to wrap up my time here. I was called to do an early morning round trip to Portland, Maine. The outbound flight from Chicago was just a repositioning flight to Portland since the last flight out the night before had been cancelled. The cool thing about an airplane with no passengers in cold weather is that aerodynamic performance is excellent and affords you the opportunity to take a few liberties with your flight. I decided that the liberty I have always wanted to take was to fly up at 41,000 feet (FL410) for the first time. FL410 is the maximum altitude of the aircraft but very difficult to reach under most conditions. I thought it poetic that the last day at ACA was in fact the only day where conditions would allow this. After leveling off at our filed cruising altitude of FL370 we requested FL410 and to our surprise were cleared to climb to it. We struggled in a 300 foot-per-minute climb through FL400 and it didn’t look like we’d made it, but in an unexpected lift from God or Orville Wright or Chuck Yeager or someone we started climbing at 1000 feet per minute and easily reached FL410. Here is a picture of my primary flight display for proof. Here is the world from nearly eight miles up. The airplane was also at its pressurization limits which I had never seen before. We only stayed up there for about 10 minutes but that was all I needed to accomplish my goal. Thus endeth my career in the CRJ. Here is the beautiful approach into Portland.

So now it’s back to the ERJ-145. Training should be pretty easy this time around and I have already done a good deal of preliminary studying to make my 60-90 days in training less painful. Upon completion of my training in Houston I’ll be heading to Newark, NJ to sit reserve in a crashpad. Hopefully I’ll actually get off reserve at this airline. Newark was my last choice of a base but it is the easiest commute from Chicago (29 daily flights that are rarely full). Also, I should hold a line sooner in Newark than I would any other base. I’m looking forward to working for a more professional company that cares about its employees. ACA gave me a number of reasons over the course of 14 months that made the prospect of starting over at a new airline not quite so bad, starting with making me pay $1160 for a last-minute ticket to get to Dulles when I began training and never refunding me the money. Didn’t care for having to find and pay for my own place to live in Dulles during training either. Oh and furloughing pilots while they were canceling flights due to lack of pilots. And management regularly accusing $20,000-a-year pilots of being overpaid and we were selfishly hurting the airline if we didn’t agree to pay cuts. There’s more but I’ll quit complaining now. However, I still have my seniority number there so if by some miracle ACA manages to be successful and start growing again I could still be recalled and return if things look better there than at COEX. Unlikely.

To avoid sounding like a broken record I doubt that I will be posting too many updates during my training cycle but I will make occasional postings. I will be training with my old roommate from two years ago, Steve Sanders. While we have talked on the phone about once a month, I haven’t seen him since we were furloughed from COEX and I’m looking forward to catching up with him – he’ll be picking me up at the airport today. No roommate this time around since as an official employee of COEX I have my own hotel room. Being paid from day one and positive space travel between Houston and Chicago will be nice. And tomorrow in Houston it will be 74 degrees. Yippee!!