Now that I finished all my initial training, it was time to start my first trip as a real 747 pilot for Cathay Pacific. Finally, my puppet strings were removed, my wooden body became living tissue, and my long wooden nose shrank to the proper size – I was a real pilot (boy)! (That grasshopper that used an umbrella as a cane quit following me around too.)

Training is nothing like “flying the line.” Flying the line is normal operations, without a training captain, and without all the stress that comes with being constantly evaluated, second guessed, and instructed. I have nothing against learning. Because I’m finished with my training doesn’t mean I am finished with learning. However, I can certainly say that I am very glad to be finished with training. Talking with other copilots, they all agree that getting over that hump is a huge stress reliever.

I can honestly say that this switch to Cathay Pacific has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Maybe I’ve lived a pretty cushy life, and maybe Cathay makes it harder than it needs to be, but the stress of training took a heavy toll on my body, emotions, and family life. I don’t want to say “woe is me” but the training at Cathay is much different than the training that goes on at most U.S. airlines. I think this is in part because they fly into third-world countries, where the government doesn’t spend much money on air-traffic services like radar, radios, and airports in general. They fly with around 55 nationalities in the cockpit as far as pilot backgrounds go. They fly heavy equipment, with a world class product, and a have a sterling reputation to uphold. They have a British background that stresses perfection in all areas of flying, and they are known in the pilot realm as a checking airline, not a training airline (the trainers happily tell the trainees what they messed up, but don’t do too well at instructing). All this combines to make a training program that is much different than what can be expected if I joined a U.S. carrier’s training. At a U.S. major carrier, once someone passes the interview, for the most part, they are on the road to success. At Cathay, all is in doubt until the final line check is complete!

The point about checking vs. training may be an issue that is slipping into the past. All my training captains were excellent and did a great job, and I think part of that comes from the excellent training manager that is now in charge – Gus Larard. Gus is a great guy who backs the trainees 100% and makes sure that he and his team support us through the trials and stress that we are under while in training. When I had a hiccup or two, he was quick to let me know that I could relax and get the training I needed to be successful. There’s not much worse than being halfway around the world, having just quit a decent job, and now in a training program so tough that the perceived threat of being let go looms with every mistake.

Anyway, that is all in the PAST and I’m glad to be on my way. Yes, on my way from New York to Chicago O’Hare and then on to Anchorage. This was a short, three day trip, where the only negative part to it was that it started at 10:00 p.m. That first night, leaving JFK and heading to ORD wasn’t too bad, but the six hour flight to ANC got pretty long. We arrived in ANC around 10:00 a.m., having flown all night.

Once in the hotel, I took a short nap to catch up a bit, and then took a stroll down to the local mall to see downtown Anchorage. It was a sunny day, somewhat. At noon, the sun was barely up and the shadows were already quite long. Being winter in the far north, the sun can play tricks on “normalcy.” It was also 15 degrees, a bit on the chilly side for my stroll, but I was determined to make the best of it. I made a few purchases for Laura as she celebrates another birthday tomorrow. Consequently, if you are ever in Alaska, make sure and do some shopping, as there is no sales tax.

The flights up to ANC and back were very uneventful and smooth. The captain was very nice and helped put me at ease, as this was my first freighter flight. All through training, I had only flown passenger aircraft, and even though they are pretty much the same, there are some subtle differences. We flew aircraft BLIA, up to ANC and back. It’s a cargo version of the 747-400. I need to do a little more research, but I believe it is the newest 747 in the world! It is an ERF, or extended range freighter, and Cathay has purchased the last six coming off Boeing’s assembly line. Yes, sadly the 747-400 days are numbered, however a new variant, the 747-8 is due out in the next year or two. It is similar in looks, however it uses a newer winglet design and is much more fuel efficient.

The -400 freighter is a great airplane. I stepped onto the flight deck and everything smelled new and the instrument panels were all so clean and nice. The passenger versions that I’ve flown are nearly 20 years old, and their age shows. The cockpit on the freighter has a curtain for a door, as there isn’t too much of a security threat. Behind that is a galley with a full oven and a refrigerator stocked full of catering for us. We had sandwiches, fruit, veggies, bread, salad, cheeses, snacks, and full entrées. The meals that we heat up are usually something like cod in butter sauce, chicken parmesan, beef with potatoes, and the like. It’s awesome, and I need to be careful how much I eat, or we might have to offload some cargo to adjust the takeoff weight to account for my own body weight!

Next to the galley is a cavernous restroom. Moving farther back are six large seats, like first class seats on a U.S. domestic flights. Not as nice as lie-flat beds, but still very comfy, with power ports and all. Finally, there is a back wall with a door in the center. It opens up to the crew rest bunks. Walking in, one can turn left or right and there are curtains on either side of the inside of the door. The curtains keep the light out of the respective bunks when the door is opened. The beds are wide and there is even a window for us and a coat closet to hang our uniforms up while we sleep. All in all, it is amazing, and way better than the bunks on the passenger fleet. Those bunks are smaller because they are inside the cockpit, but because the freighter isn’t limited on space, there is a lot more room.

I flew the leg from JFK to ORD, and this airplane is a dream to fly. It’s very responsive and all the automation is new and up-to-date, as the airplane itself is only a few months old. I even got lucky and the landing just rolled it on. Again, the landings are somewhat scripted in how they are accomplished, at least on a large jet like this. It’s all about the callouts. The airplane will call out “50, 40, 30, 20, 10” as in feet above the runway on landing, in an automated voice. At 50 and 40, I just prepare myself for what is coming next, and make sure I’m lined up perfectly on the centerline of the runway. At the 30 foot call, I start to squeeze in some back pressure on the control column to start the flare (this is not to be confused with the word flair) which pulls the nose up about two degrees to slow the rate of descent. At 20, I start pulling the power to idle so that by the call of 10, the thrust levers are at full idle. Then, for the last ten feet, it’s just: keep on doing what I’m doing – holding the nose up at the same attitude, and waiting for the main wheels to touch down. If I’ve done everything correctly, we don’t feel the touchdown and the aircraft just starts rolling down the runway. The speedbrake lever moves back to the full up position, spoiling any additional lift created by the wings, and we decelerate smoothly with the autobrakes bringing us gently toward 70 knots. If I haven’t done everything correctly, we certainly feel it in our lower backs and don’t need to hear the speedbrake lever moving to know we’ve touched down! I hate those, but every pilot gets a bad one every so often.

Once back in JFK, our trip ended around 9:00 p.m. and well after all the flights to Columbus had departed. There was an early flight the next morning, and I didn’t want to pay $100 bucks for a hotel, especially for just a few hours of sleep. (Yes, $100 is the cheapest deal to be had near JFK. I long for a $35 Motel 6 or a mom and pop dive that just gives me a bed to sleep in, but alas, that’s the way NYC works.) This meant that I was going to sleep on the couch in operations there in the hangar at JFK. Ah, the life of an illustrious 747 pilot for an international airline. The couch was in a closet sized room with a company computer in there and some blankets and pillows off the passenger fleet. I didn’t even want to think about who had slept on the pillows previously or how UN-recently they looked like they had been washed. Sleep was important, so I pushed those thoughts out of my head and into the dirty pillow. The cargo handlers outside the door to my “room” seemed not to care much for closing the doors in the hallway in a smooth fashion as they worked through the night, but were bent on letting things slam their way home. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy those sounds while sleeping? To save $100 bucks, right?

I’m typing this now on my way home to Columbus, aboard a US Airways Express EMB-170, and it feels good to be headed home. Laura’s birthday is tomorrow and I’m glad I’ll be in town to celebrate with her. I do this trip two more times this month and I have a feeling that the couch in operations and I are going to be well acquainted with one another by the time I’ve been at Cathay for a few years. I do love my job, and I feel like Cathay will be a great place to be, especially as the U.S. economy continues to grind ever more slowly. I feel extremely blessed to be flying one of the greatest aircraft ever made and am happy with the choice to be where I am. I acknowledge that there are downsides to my job, as there are with everything – like stressful training and restless nights on a couch in a hangar. Even so, I can’t think of a better job than flying airplanes.

God has been extremely gracious to me as he has protected me while oversees, has proven himself faithful through all the trials and stress of training, and has given me an opportunity to join the ranks of other 747 drivers, a relatively small group of pilots. Finishing my first trip makes me feel like everything over the last six months has now become worth it. I’d leave aviation in a heartbeat if I knew my family couldn’t handle it or if it became a strain on my home life. I like to say that being a pilot is ‘what I do’, it is not ‘who I am.’ For now, I’m just going to hang on for the ride and see where this adventure leads.

TobyLaura.com

I had a pretty crazy schedule coming home from Hong Kong on my way back to Columbus, Ohio.

The last sector of my check flight was from Manila, Philippines, back to Hong Kong. Within an hour of arrival, I was scheduled to get on the flight to Vancouver, that then continued to New York. A nice little touch was that I was able to get first class on both flights, from Hong Kong to Vancouver (YVR) and also on to New York (JFK). (Click the photo for a virtual tour of their first class product) Then I was just able to make it over to LaGuardia to catch a flight to Charlotte, NC. I had to make that stop over because US Airways doesn’t offer direct flights to Columbus on Saturdays, and US Airways is the airline I have some travel benefits with. As I ran up to the gate, they were calling my name over the PA to assign me a seat. Talk about timing!

A flight attendant on that flight noticed that there was one more first class seat available and waved me up from my economy seat to sit in first — three for three on sitting in nice first class seats! Finally, the trip up to Columbus from Charlotte was uneventful (no first class, but there were no first class seats installed in this all-economy seat regional jet).

It was a whirlwind trip, taking me to six cities in 30 hours: Manila, Hong Kong, Vancouver, New York, Charlotte, and finally home to Columbus. Whew! I’m certainly glad to be back in my own house again . . .

TobyLaura.com

These are the words that every trainee wants to hear at the end of their training. It denotes the successful completion of their training and they are now officially part of the Cathay Pacific flight crew team. After starting training nearly six months ago, I desperately wanted to hear these words from a check captain and it would take the culmination of all that training to get me to the level of “checked to line” status.

After LFUS, or line flying under supervision, known as IOE in the U.S. (Initial Operating Experience) a progress check is given. If that is satisfactorily completed, it counts as the annual line check, and the new trainee is released to the line (the line being normal, everyday flying). If it doesn’t proceed well, a bit more training is given and a second progress/line check is given.

Unfortunately for me, my first progress check didn’t go the way I wanted it to. I messed up a few things that had to do with the function of the autopilot while in its approach mode. What was most disappointing is that I hadn’t flown as well as I had in the past, and when I needed to do well, I didn’t. Bummer! I was also scheduled to come home for Christmas upon passing my check. When I didn’t pass my check, I had to stay in Hong Kong over Christmas and leave Laura with her own family for the holidays.

I felt pretty bad for her because I had already graced her without my presence for Thanksgiving, and I was looking forward to being home for Christmas. So there I was, having not passed my first check, wasn’t going to be home for the holidays, not knowing what the future held for me, and the stress was mounting every day that passed. But wouldn’t you know that God was still sitting on his throne?

I clung everyday to the lyrics of a song by my mom’s choir that I had on CD, called The Anchor Holds. “I have fallen on my knees, as I face the raging seas, the Anchor holds.” Good words for me to remember and I had to ask myself, does my anchor really hold? Well, does it? It sure is easy to trust God in the good times, but what fun is that? How can God reveal himself to be sufficient for our lives in the good times? What reason is there to lean on God during life’s easiest moments and most carefree days?

Maybe I’ve lived a pretty charmed life, but the training in Hong Kong has truly been the most difficult thing I’ve ever tried to tackle, at least on the tumultuous scale of stress levels. After six months of hard work, half way around the world from home, without family, would I fall off the cliff and be sent home looking for another way to earn a living? Did I just waste half a year of my life? Would God bring me to Hong Kong, take me to the edge of the cliff, and pull me back from it, or shove me over the side? He could have done either, as his plans for our lives are best, whether or not we think so at the time.

I got hard at work in the simulator ironing out the problems that I had struggled with on my check. It was good that I didn’t pass my check with the deficiencies that I had with the autopilot because I wouldn’t have wanted to been out flying with these issues still lingering. It all clicked and finally made sense to me. My second check went splendidly, and with no problems, was ‘welcomed to the fleet.’ I was so excited I couldn’t stop smiling. The stress and turmoil evaporated off my shoulders and I was able to relax for the first time in six months.

During all this, I heard a sermon about how thorns in our lives can be used to humble us. After all this mess, I certainly had to check my ego at the cockpit door and to truly rely on God to get me through it all. I’ve learned a few good lessons from all this pain in Hong Kong, and one is that failure can teach us a lot about ourselves, and also show how much or how little faith we actually have in both ourselves and God.

When we get to a point where the stress is so high it becomes unbearable, we have to give up on self reliance and let God lead us forward. Honestly, this stress was nothing compared to an actual loss of a job, or being diagnosed with a terminal disease, or losing everything we hold dear in this life. There will always be someone who has it worse than me. However, it was still a good learning experience for me, and I will be a better person because of the lessons learned from failure.

God always proves himself faithful to those who love him. Even if my training deteriorated and I ended up getting let go by Cathay, I would still have to praise him because that would only mean he has something else in store for Laura and me. I would have to say what Job said, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” Would I want to deal with that type of stress? No way! But, being led through those dark valleys only makes us better, more humble servants.

As it is, I am now sitting in a first class seat, (copilots usually only get business class seats, but God was good to me today) at 39,000 feet in a 777-300ER, headed back to JFK, dining on a piece of steak and sipping a 2001 Red Chateau Lynch Bages wine that is wonderful (however, it isn’t as good as the wine that was served at this wedding). I’m headed home for a few days, to be with Laura, as a fully qualified 747-400 first officer, and right now, as I have Mozart playing in my noise canceling headphones, with my seat reclined and typing away, life is good.

I know that it won’t last forever, and that there is another trial just around the corner, waiting to stretch me farther, make me trust deeper, and die to myself even more, but for now, I am enjoying the moment of victory and success! Sipping wine here in my seat with the leg room and Mozart only reminds me of how good God truly is.

From Psalms 46, what I read the other morning before my check flight:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts. The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Come and see the works of the LORD, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. “The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.

TobyLaura.com

Here are a few photos showing me at some of the airlines I’ve worked for and the planes I’ve flown as I’ve gotten older and put on a few pounds. First a ramper for Delta in DFW, then in the Saab 340 turboprop, then Chautauqua’s RJ, and then Cathay’s 747.

TobyLaura.com

I just arrived back in Hong Kong from a three day trip across the Pacific to San Francisco. Photos of my visit can be seen by clicking the photo above. With almost 200 mph winds blowing West to East across the Pacific, our flight was less than 11 hours to the West coast of California, but then coming back, it was a little more than 14.5 hours.

The captain flew us to San Fran and then I flew us back to Hong Kong a few days later. Both takeoffs were at heavy weights due to the weight of all the fuel it takes to travel those long distances. My takeoff, coming back for the longer flight, was the heaviest I’ve even taken off to date, which was at the maximum takeoff weight of the 747-400 passenger plane: 397 metric tonnes, or 397,000 kgs. For my American readers, that’s heavy, at nearly 875,000 lbs! We left San Fran with 375,000 lbs of fuel, enough to run a family car for an average of 80 years. We landed back in Hong Kong with a little over 18,000 lbs left in the tanks.

Aircraft use flaps, both on the leading edge and trailing edge of the wings, to generate lift at slower speeds, like for takeoff and landing. These flaps extend, and to the untrained eye, can look like the wing is coming apart. As the flaps retract, they change shape so that they can fit back into the wing. While they are changing shape, they actually create more drag than lift, or said another way, they create more trouble than help — at least momentarily. As they create more drag for the few seconds that they are changing shape, our stall speed increases. When a wing stalls, it quits making lift and [for the purposes of simplicity] the aircraft quits flying. It actually still produces lift and is flying, but that’s for another technical discussion when you need to fall asleep some night!

As the stall speed increases, we have to be going faster, or be above that speed, to keep flying. The trouble with heavy takeoff weights like our flight out of SFO, is that there is another factor at play: maximum speed. As the flaps travel from flaps 1 to flaps up, there is an upper speed limit for flaps one, and there is a lower speed limit of stall speed. That difference between the upper and lower limit is only about 8 knots! At 272 kts, we start to get the onset of stall, and at 280 kts we overspeed the flaps. The lesson I learned that day was the importance of being right on the money as far as departure speeds as there is little room for error. It would be like keeping your car’s speed to within 35 mph and 38 mph, or something bad would happen.

It’s at those moments that we as pilots do not want an engine failure to occur. It has been said that the purpose of the engines is to keep the pilots cool — because when they quit running, just see how the pilots start to sweat. When I flew my ERJ-145 at my last job, our flaps up speed was usually around 150 kts. At these heavy weights in the 747, the flaps up speed, or clean speed, was 282 kts. That difference is an amazing value.

In this post, I bored my readers with a discussion on flying great circle routes, as the shortest path between two points on the planet. The San Francisco trip actually did not follow that route at all. To and from the West Coast, we flew a more southerly route, over the fatter part of the Earth, passing just a few hundred miles north of Hawaii. A great circle path would take us up near Cold Bay, Alaska, and just south of Anchorage. This trip was a case of caring more about the wind speed and how that could help us, instead of flying the shortest distance. We were able to gain a lot of time and fuel savings by following where the winds were pushing us the strongest, instead of flying the shortest path to SFO and back.

It was nice as we approached the coast of California. The weather was fine and we could see the 1 and 101, that run along the coastline. Those are the highways where Toyota and others film their commercials of cars running along the coast. It was also nice to be able to hear American air traffic controllers for the first time in six months. I didn’t have to strain my ears to hear what was said and the faster they talked to us, the faster I could “give it back” to them. It was amazing to return to the Bay area. The first time I was there, I was interviewing with Cathay. Before that, I had only been there on my computer, flying Microsoft Flight Simulator as a kid in junior high, wanting to be a pilot someday. In that version of the flight simulator, the airplane started off on runway 27 right, in Oakland. I would takeoff and fly over the bay and land in San Francisco in my little Cessna 172. It was fun to do it years later, experiencing the real thing.

I’ve been very blessed to have a lot of full-circle moments along my career as a pilot, where I have been able to return to places as a pilot, where I once was simply a young kid, looking out, wishing I could be a pilot. The first moment came when I was able to land my RJ into DFW. I grew up near there in Arlington, Texas, and would spend ours in the heat watching American Airlines MD-82’s launching and landing. My dad and I once snuck into a construction zone to get a better view, where not even a fence separated us from the runway. There were no signs saying specifically to stay out, so we helped ourselves. Our plan was to slip away or play dumb if the cops rolled up. Another time was when I fly into Purdue University’s airport in my RJ on a charter flight, taking the Purdue girls basketball team back to West Lafayette, IN. I had spent many hours at Purdue learning about aviation, and then got to return there as a pilot. Another time was heading Back to Bali, Indonesia with Cathay. Then there was also this SFO trip.

I tell you: I’m not very rich, but I’m a very wealthy young man. God has truly blessed my life and it’s easier to see when I put His blessings in the perspective of the “full circle” view. All I can say is that if I can do it, anyone can. If I can attain some of my dreams, then so can you. Don’t give up, stay focused, and you’ll get there too, whatever dream it is that you have. How? It’s simple, really. See, the secret is that I didn’t do any of it. We can’t do much on our own, but with His help, anything is possible . . . If you feel your dreams are falling flat and you need some encouragement, think back on how much your life has been blessed. It will help put things into perspective.

We had an extra day to relax in SFO, so I walked around downtown, as our hotel is right there in the middle of it all. I walked passed Union Square, where I interviewed, looked around in the Macy’s store, and rode the cable car down to the Wharf on the Embarcadero. There was good food on the Wharf, a great view of The Rock, a chance to see Lombard Street, and a great time riding the cable cars.

Taking this picture, with Alcatraz behind me, I saw some birds overhead, and then felt a splatter of something moist on my head and shoulders. Yuck! I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what that was. Needless to say, I’m not too happy in the photo . . .

There are some pictures of the wooden brakes used by the trollies. Basically 2×4’s that press down on the tracks are what stop the cars. At the bottom of the San Francisco hills, everyone riding can smell the scent of burning wood in the air. The cars are pulled along by a cable under the street and the driver simply pulls a lever to grab onto the cable when he wants to move forward, and then releases the cable when he wants to stop. The cables are driven by a central hub that runs several cable lines at the same time. The pictures show the cable and the pulley’s and the large operation it takes to make it all happen. Over the life of one cable, it can stretch over 100 feet. Because of this, a second pulley is set up to take in the slack, as the cable stretches. Also underground are the giant pulleys that turn the cables 90 degrees to go around the corners of intersections. If you head to Frisco, a ride on the cable cars and a view of the pulley system is a must.

It was great to be back in the U.S. however brief it was, and it was amazing to be able to do such a long-haul trip. If training wasn’t so stressful, I would actually relax and enjoy all this flying! This was a great trip, and I hope my others turn out to be as nice as this one was.

TobyLaura.com

Our 747-400 was cruising along smoothly at 35,000 feet, late at night over the Indian Ocean. I sat in my seat, staring out the window in awe and amazement as I couldn’t believe what I was able to see. For even though there was no moon and it was a dark night, the sky was ablaze with stars. Out over any ocean late at night without the “lesser light” of the moon governing the night, so many more stars can be seen. And because there are no cities over the ocean to pollute the view of the stars with Earth light, the view of the stars and Milky Way Galaxy were not short of stunning. I felt like I could read my charts in the light of the stars.

When the sky looks like this, constellations are hard to make out because there are so many other stars, that previously couldn’t be seen, that are now clogging the view. I could see Orion out in front of us and the Milky Way was arcing over our heads. The Indian Ocean below us was easy to make out, simply because it was the dark part of the view where the stars ended. The water’s horizon eerily swallowed up the stars out on the edge of the Earth, like a cosmic event horizon. The beauty of the moment was both overwhelming and terrifying, as I thought about the sheer scale and grandeur that is the cosmos above us. Read my blog entry on the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) for some insight into the true scale of the Universe.

As the captain and I sat there mesmerized by the view of the stars, some lights appeared on the horizon. As we drew nearer, they spread out and got larger. In the middle of this huge sea of blackness, a ring of lights became clearly visible. They took on the shape of a rough circle and reminded me of something similar to a scene in the movie Abyss, where lights formed in the ocean as well. Unlike the Abyss, we knew what the lights were: the Island of Réunion. It sits well off the coast of Madagascar and has two large volcanoes rising up out of the center of the island. One volcano is 8,600 feet tall and the other rises over 10,000 feet and tonight, they were unseen in the darkness. Because of the active volcanoes, no one lives in the center of the island, but everyone spreads out by the beach (wouldn’t we all?). That’s why the island, at night, looks like a ring of lights, because the darkness in the middle of the lights is actually very high terrain. There were some low lying clouds that made the islander’s lights glow with an eerie haze. In all this blackness, under all these stars, this strangely lit island, seemingly suspended in space, was quite the view to fly over on our way back to Hong Kong from Johannesburg.

I have never been as far South as Johannesburg, South Africa and I really wasn’t too sure of what to expect. The photo at the top gives you an idea of what I thought it would be like to travel to South Africa’s spot on the globe. Luckily, even though we were way down there, up was still up and down was still down (isn’t this planet cool?). You can click the sideways picture for more photos from my trip. Speaking of cool, our hotel rooms weren’t. I had also forgotten that as one passes south of the Equator, the seasons are opposite to those in the Northern hemisphere. Late November near the Cape of Good Hope is quite warm, as it is nearly summer there. The hotel had problems with its air conditioning and promised it would be fixed by the afternoon. It was still not working when we left the next day. It was okay, because even though it was warm, it wasn’t too bad, as Jo’burg is over 5,550 feet above sea level.

That height above sea level is what causes the flying in and out of that airport to be a bit more of a challenge. The higher one gets above sea level, the thinner the air is. With thinner air, aircraft engines don’t perform as well, as there are fewer air molecules to work with. Our flight into Joburg was uneventful, but on the way out was when the troubles began.

When we arrived at the airport, the temperature was already 85 degrees. We found that the APU (axillary power unit) that runs to provide air conditioning for the plane, was not working. So we went from a warm hotel to a warm aircraft! Inside the cockpit, the temperature read 108 degrees, as the plane had been sitting in the sun for some time. This was an unacceptable situation to load passengers in, so because the APU was out of commission, we’d have to start two of our four engines to do the job of cooling the cabin. As it turned out, one of the three air cycle machines (air conditioners) wasn’t working either! The fueling was being done on the left wing and the cargo was being loaded on the right side, so we couldn’t start any of the engines until one side was clear. Since we were going to board passengers via the ramp with air stairs, we elected to wait until the cargo was finished loading on the right side, so that those two engines could be running while we loaded the passengers on the left side, to try and keep the cabin as cool as possible. So, once the cargo was loaded, we started and then ran the number three and four engines (the right side) for about a half hour to cool the cabin down to something tolerable, like 80 degrees. Air cycle machines only do so much in hot weather, because unlike your car, they compress and then re-expand air to make it cooler, which can only do so much in the high heat.

The plan was to finish boarding, and then push back and start engines one and two. However, just as the last passengers were boarding, the load controller came up and told us we had a problem. They had to remove one container of cargo from the cargo hold. This could only be done with the engines shut down on that side. The captain let out an exasperated sigh, and we came up with the plan to start engines one and two, and then shut down engines three and four while the cargo was unloaded. We had to start engines one and two on the left wing, or the cabin temp would quickly rise again, with 390 people back there.

Finally, we got the all clear and it was time to push back. With all that time spent running engines, we were two hours late and right on the limit of the minimum amount of fuel needed for the long twelve and a half hour flight back to Hong Kong. It was my turn to fly us back and that would give me experience performing a max power takeoff. We took off right at our performance limit, based on temperature, weight, and hight above sea level (over a mile high on the ground in Joburg). Our takeoff weight was 371,000 kg’s, or 818,000 lbs. That’s heavy, even when not departing from a place like this.

The captain stood the power up for takeoff, and all we did was sit still with a huge, roaring rumble behind us. All four Rolls Royce RB211-524 engines, that can produce 60,000 lbs of thrust each, gave us all they had, but we just sat there for a moment. It takes a second or two to get over three quarters of a million pounds moving down a runway. We started to creep forward and the captain called, “Thrust set”. A while later, he called, “80 kts”. There are then two more calls: V1 and Rotate. V1 is called as a point of no return, so to speak. At that speed, we can no longer safely abort the takeoff, so, if after that speed is called, an engine fails, we have to continue and get into the air, or we’ll overrun the end of the runway on an abort. Rotate is called at the speed in which I need to pull back on the yoke and fly us off the runway. The captain called “V1” and I could clearly see the end of the runway coming closer. Closer. CLOSER! After what seemed like an eternity, he called rotate, and we lumbered safely into the air. The numbers say it will work (an abort that is) but even when V1 was called, the far end of the runway was quickly approaching.

At these heavy weights and high altitudes, long takeoffs are normal, however it takes a little nerve and practice to resist the urge to rotate early, prior to it being called by the other pilot, especially when the literal end is near.

It was a nice ride back as we headed out over Madagascar and then seeing the beautiful ring of lights that was Réunion Island, just south of Diego Garcia, North of Kuala Lumpur, over troubled Bangkok, and then into Hong Kong.

You might say a prayer for me as my training days are coming to a close and my line checks (flight evaluations) are quickly approaching. Flying this beast is stressful enough, but being checked on it is even worse! I’ll just have to relax as much as I can during my evaluations, and think back to the beauty that was seen in the night sky over the Indian Ocean. As stressful as this training may be, I am truly blessed to experience these travels over God’s great globe.

TobyLaura.com