Professional Pilot Career Journal

December 4, 2004 – Interesting reserve trip

So I get called last Sunday by scheduling on the first of a block of five reserve days. They assign me to a 3-day trip with overnights in ICT (Wichita) and ONT (Ontario).

First of all, I’m floored that I’ve actually been assigned to a real trip. In the last six weeks, I have never done more than one flight in a day or had an overnight longer than 10 hours, which is typical for reserves. Not that I’m complaining since I bid reserve by choice. I was actually pretty caught up on my contracting work so I was looking forward to doing some actual flying. The first thing Carey and I start wondering is where the hell Ontario is. Figuring it is somewhere in Canada, we pulled out the road atlas and start scanning several Canadian provinces for a city called Ontario (probably because we were confusing it with the Ontario province). Then I notice on my schedule that ONT is in the Pacific time zone, and then it hits me that this is Ontario, California, just outside Los Angeles. Anyway, needless to say I was excited about my first professional flight into California.

The first day of the trip was a LONG day. We started at 1700 and did three legs ending in Wichita at 2345– that was 4.6 hours of night flying alone. So we get to Wichita, and stand out on the curb for 40 minutes waiting for the hotel shuttle to pick us up. We called multiple times but the hotel phone system wasn’t working so we were pretty much stranded at the curb not ever knowing if anyone was going to pick us up. Seriously – the worst part of this job is dealing with hotel transportation. So then finally we get the company to switch our hotel to the airport Hilton. We go over to the Hilton and their room key machine is barely working. It took 20 minutes for them to make three keys. We were unbelievably pissed at this point, and couldn’t even drown our sorrows in a few beers because by the time they got our keys made the hotel bar was closed. NOT a good night. At least I got to sleep in the next morning.

But things would get better. The next day was scheduled just two legs – Wichita to Houston then Houston to Ontario. The first flight was uneventful, then we took off out of Houston for the night flight to Ontario. It was absolutely beautiful. We flew over west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California’s Mojave Desert. It was so dark that the view of the stars was incredible. An airplane flying at 35,000 feet serves as an excellent observatory because there is very little atmosphere to mess up your view of the stars. The bands of the Milky Way were distinctly visible. Somewhere over Arizona a meteorite shot into the atmosphere and lit up the entire sky – it was kind of scary, actually. We had a tremendous headwind – actual flight time was 3 hours and 16 minutes. I think that’s the longest flight I have done as an airline pilot.

The next day I woke up to a view of the San Gabriel Mountains, palm trees, and get this: the SUN. I hadn’t seen the sun in about a week so seeing it rising in southern California nearly brought tears to my eyes. We went to the airport and as we were boarding the plane, one of the passengers starts freaking out about how she’s claustrophobic and the plane is TOO SMALL. Which is hard for me to understand given the fact that the car she drove to the airport was probably about 20 times smaller. So we get her off the plane, then she starts complaining about how she has to get to Houston and she can’t believe the way we have “treated” her and she wants to get back on. Needless to say, we didn’t let her back on the plane. Having a panic case on a 3-hour flight is not a good idea, so we were perfectly happy to let her spend the day in Ontario thinking about the proliferation of regional jets in the industry. I don’t understand why people who have a fear of flying would buy an airplane ticket. So we get out 20 minutes late because of her, rather pissed off, but my mood is quickly restored to pure happiness as catch the clear skies view of the southwestern desert all the way to Texas. We arrive back in Houston in the afternoon to catch our deadhead flight back to Cleveland to end the trip.

Once we get back to Cleveland, I call to get released to go home, but then scheduling says “Nope – you’re all flying to Indianapolis for the night.” So now I’m in a bad mood again, because my wife had already cooked dinner for us and was on her way to pick me up so we could spend a nice evening together, and I had to call to tell her to turn the car around and go back home. The word to describe this particular moment was “disappointment”. But that’s how reserve goes. We fly to Indy in horrible weather to finish day three of this trip. The next day was a flight back to Houston, then deadhead to Cleveland to HOPEFULLY end the trip.

Unfortunately, we were two hours late getting out of Indy which meant it was going to be really tight trying to catch our flight from Houston to Cleveland. It happened to be the last flight of the day, so if we missed it this trip was going to now be five days long with us spending the night in Houston. The whole flight from Indy to Houston we kept doing the math and finding there was no way we were going to catch that flight. But by some miracle, we got a straight in approach to Houston, landed almost right at our gate, and decide to make a run to catch our deadhead flight. We arrived at the flight about one minute before they closed the door. We made it home, and the trip was over.

It was an up and down trip. I thought it was good to write a report about it because it is a good description of how life is for a reserve airline pilot. Overall, I really enjoyed the trip despite the pitfalls. But was I happy to finally get home that night – I’m not used to being gone three nights in a row and it felt really good to walk in my front door.