Professional Pilot Career Journal

September 1, 2005 – My month in Houston

August was a great month for flying. Mostly because I was Houston-based. But only for a month.

Here’s some background. When Carey and I signed papers to build our Las Vegas home, they gave us an estimate that it would be completed in the November – December timeframe of this year. Since Las Vegas is closer to Houston than to Cleveland, I made the decision to transfer to Houston so that when we moved into our new house I would be commuting to Houston from Las Vegas and not have to worry about Cleveland anymore. A “system bid” came out in May which is the tool we use to transfer bases, bid for captain slots, etc… I figured that if I bid for Houston on the June bid, I probably wouldn’t really be transferred until October or November which would work out well in the timeframe of our move.

Unfortunately, my transfer happened much sooner than I wanted (effective August 1^st), and as always with construction, the completion of our house has been pushed back to January. So I was faced with the prospect of commuting from Cleveland to Houston for the last five months of this year. That’s just plain dumb, because who wants to commute when one already lives in a perfectly good domicile? Luckily, another system bid was released in July so I bid to be transferred back to Cleveland effective today. So now my commute to work has been reduced from half a day back down to a nice 25 minutes. I’ll transfer back down to Houston in a few months when we actually move.

That’s the background. Now, here’s what I thought of being based in Houston for the last month.

Other than the silly commute from Cleveland, it was GREAT! I did some of the most enjoyable flying of my career so far. It was a nice change from doing multiple flights from CLE – JFK – CLE – LGA – CLE – JFK – CLE – LGA – CLE – JFK – CLE – LGA -….. OK you get the idea. The average flight length of a Houston flight is about 1:56 instead of Cleveland’s 1:30 which results in flying to more faraway places and having to do fewer legs in each trip, meaning a less exhausting day. So that part was very nice.

For the first two trips I had long overnights in Saltillo, Mexico and short overnights in smaller Texas cities like College Station. I like having overnights in these kinds of places because it is more laid back and less crowded. The third trip was a long overnight in Dayton, which sucks, but at least I got a lot of my consulting work done. All of my flights either started or finished in Houston except for two flights into Newark. I don’t like flying into Houston quite as much as Cleveland but it beats the hell out of Newark. I still can’t stand that place.

The last trip of the month was the most unique. The first day was a round trip to Fort Myers, right after Hurricane Katrina made its first landfall. We were far enough north that the only thing we had was a little bit of wind. Then overnight in McAllen, Texas where I saw the biggest cockroach I have ever seen – yuck. The next day we flew back to Houston, then to Leon, Mexico. From there we flew into Los Angeles – I’ve never flown into LAX in my life so that was an interesting experience. We arrived around 11:00 PM pacific time, thoroughly tired.

The next day the captain and I rented a car, met one of his friends and drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to a small airport called Camarillo where we had lunch and watched an airshow. It was a nice drive on a beautiful day and it was great seeing the Pacific Ocean again. We got back to Los Angeles around 4:00 so we could rest up for our red-eye flights that night. We departed LAX at 12:20 AM, arrived in Leon at 5:45 AM central time, then took off for Houston at 7:00 AM. Arrived around 9:00 AM to finish our trip.. This was the first red-eye flying I have ever done and I was curious to see how I would handle it. I actually was quite wide-awake and alert the whole time, somewhat to my surprise. I didn’t really even sleep very much the next day even though I spent much of it on an airplane flying to Oregon for business meetings. Doing the red-eye Los Angeles trip was an experiment for me because once we move to Las Vegas and I am based in Houston again I wanted to know if it would be a viable option for me to bid these types of trips. They’re really nice because you only have to fly 3 out of the 4 days and you finish up so early the last day that I will usually be home in Las Vegas by noon. After doing this experiment, I may end up bidding pure red-eye schedules after the move. I really enjoyed the flying and I like spending 24 hours in Southern California on my trips – almost feels like I’m not even at work.

Everything continues to go well at the airline in general. By the time I return to Houston I will be in the top 100 of the 600 first-officers based there so I will be able to essentially pick my schedules and probably have no less than 16 days off per month. Still planning to hold off bidding for captain for reasons I discussed in previous entries.

Now I am looking forward to vacation! Carey and I will be spending a week at the beach where we got married last year and don’t have to return to work until September 15^th. It will be a nice break.

For kicks, here is the latest map of airports where I have landed. Blue airports are where I first landed in small aircraft, red airports at ACA, and green airports at ExpressJet.