Being an Airline Pilot, 6 months in: Donuts in the sky

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Remember the scene in the movie Pushing Tin where the New York controllers are acting certifiably insane, spitting out terse instructions at a mile a minute, and doing a bunch of other nutty things that would get them locked up in the non-aviation world?

Oh, wait: that was the plot of the entire movie. And on the other side of an overcaffeinated controller's microphone is the headset of the pilot who has to fly those commands.

I'd never be able to fly the old 172 into Newark at noon, but it's an everyday thing for me now as a Dash driver. Even after all the times I've done it, I still get a bit of a thrill out of the crazy dance NY Approach makes up to wiggle everybody in there at once. They whip up a fresh batch of nuttiness every time, and always seem to throw into the airplane jambalaya a Boeing 767 to follow on the way in—and as the FO I'm almost always the one flying the "ins". On the days I don't end up behind a seven-six, it's an A380 instead: the plane that's so big that it doesn't look like it should fly; a 600-ton, half-billion dollar bumblebee that could seat every single person in my old high school and still have seats left over.

It's just another day in the Newark stew, and that's what the "stay above the heavy's flight path" thing you memorized for the test and promptly jettisoned from the memory banks way back in the old ground school days was babbling about. I hardly ever used that in the old days, but it seems like I use that 80% of the time in Newark. I'm not sure I could fly an ILS into EWR without staying half-a-dot high now.

In fact, one day we were maintenance delayed departing for EWR, so we arrived an an off-peak time. Since it was slower than normal—which in New York airspace means there are only a million planes instead of a full bazillion—we weren't assigned the usual "Speed 190 to BUZZD/DOOIN" that we always get, and it got me off my game. I'm so used to having to scream in until 5 miles out, then chop the power and push the props up to slow down enough to drop the gear and flaps that I'm better at that than I am at the textbook-prescribed profile now. Imagine keeping your 172 doing 120 until 2 miles out and you'll get a feel for what it's like every day there. (Of course, some people do that anyway.)

I had a line check in January on a Rochester-Newark leg. (One of the nice things about getting your private certificate is that you never have to take a checkride again if you don't want to. We get them twice a year.) The first half of the flight was as uneventful as the second half wasn't.

That day they told us to expect holding, which isn't unusual going into any of the big 3 NYC airports (Newark, JFK, and LaGuardia). However, on this flight every time we were coming up on the holding fix we were given they'd change their mind and just give us a delay vector (a turn away from the airport) instead. This happened over and over again. All the while we're getting closer and closer to our divert fuel, which due to the weather that day was a pretty high number. Finally on the third time they tell us to proceed to a fix and hold, with not much time before we got there.

Unlike when I went into Newark for the very first time, I was ready and waiting for them to throw their best pitch at me. They tried hard to beat me, but since I was waiting for their fastball, I had the holding pattern entered into the FMS (even if just barely in time) and was ready to hit "Arm hold". Seconds before we got there, they told us, "Fly heading 160. Expect ILS 22L." So all three of us gave a big sigh of relief, because we calculated that we only had 10 minutes of holding fuel available. As we're going in, we get "Fly heading 070, vectors for resequencing." Oh no! It looks like I'm going to have to divert for the first time ever and on my first line check!

After a short while, we thankfully get, "Proceed direct Teterboro. Best forward speed." Things went uneventfully after that, even though some of our autopilots are worse than instrument students at intercepting courses, which explains the slight wiggle (the "Honeywell shuffle") after the last sharp turn in the picture below. We ended up landing with less than 100 pounds over our divert fuel: what a day for a line check.

Even the check airman (who's been there about a decade) remarked that that was one of the craziest things he's ever seen, but we handled it very well. Pretty good for a rookie FO who hasn't done a line check before. Sure, our LOFTs (Line Oriented Flight Training: basically a simulated regular turn on the line with some twists and failures thrown in for fun and training) and recurrent scenarios aren't all that different, except it's totally different because you're on the ground in a sim without a plane full of pax behind you.

Here's what that excitement looked like from above. The flight starts at the upper left and goes to the bottom right. All that's missing is the Yakety Sax music:

Screenshot from FlightAware.com

With the next post, the Becoming an Airline Pilot series draws to a close. Next week, I'll wrap it up with a buffet of short observations and anecdotes of life on the line having people's lives on the line.

See the series index.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Being an Airline Pilot, Week 10: We're all counting on you

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In back, no one knows you're a rookie. After all, the months and months of training and evaluation you undergo to get signed off to sit up front is designed precisely to ensure that by the time you're in that seat, you have what it takes to take dozens and dozens of people and millions of dollars of airliner to where they're supposed to be.

But no one said it was going to be easy.

Human resources interviews almost always have the infamous TMAAT questions: Tell me about a time... Pilots have the same thing, except ours are STIW stories: So there I was...

So there I was, waiting for our plane to get fixed so we could finish up the last leg of the day, get to the hotel, and call it a day. It had been a rather routine day so far. We were swapping into a different aircraft for this last brief leg to State College, PA, where we would spend the night.

Unfortunately this one had a problem with one of instruments. The Captain's side attitude indicator (the instrument that shows us whether we're level, pitched up or down, or banked) was fine, but my side showed a climbing right turn even while we were on the ground. The mechanics were called out, and they figured it would be a relatively fast fix. Just swap out the computer that feeds the instruments on my side and we'd be on our way. That quick fix would end up being the first thing that wouldn't go right that night.

Two hours later, with our 11:00 p.m. departure already 90 minutes late and counting, the mechanics gave up. The fight was going to be cancelled. However, by sheer luck one of our other planes taxied to the gate next to us. It was scheduled to be done for the night. We called dispatch and asked if we could take that one instead so the mechanics could work on ours overnight. They agreed, and the flight was back on.

A little over two hours late, we pushed back from the gate. Everything was going normally once again. Although usually the Captain flies the legs out of Dulles, a quirk in the day's schedule meant that it was my leg to fly instead. I was happy, since it meant I'd be landing at an airport that wasn't either Dulles or Newark.

I've discussed TAFs, or Terminal Area Forecasts, several times. The best post I have on them so far is An Incredible Forecast from an Incredible Storm, which is about Hurricane Sandy's effects reaching into the Cleveland area. You'll enjoy reading it, and that link will open in a new tab so you won't lose your place in this post.

The TAF for this night contained nothing to worry about. Four miles visibility and a high overcast layer. Easy peasy, even if it was night time.

One of the things about TAFs is that they're forecasts, not observations. In other words, like all forecasts, they're educated guesses. And tonight the forecaster guessed wrong.

The weather was fine until we got within 50 miles of the airport. The weather observation said the weather there was 1/4 mile visibility, which unfortunately was only half as much as we needed to shoot an approach. How could it be that wrong?

Since our only option was to turn around and head back to Dulles, we decided to slow down to conserve fuel and give the weather time to change. I wasn't optimistic about that happening, though, since 1/4 mile probably means night fog sitting over the airport. Since the winds were very light, there wouldn't be anything to push that fog away. Nevertheless, these people have waited for hours to get home, so we might as well give it the old college try. (Since we were going to State College after all.)

The weather hadn't improved by the time we arrived at the final approach fix. That meant we couldn't even legally try an approach. However, we could fly holding patterns over the final approach fix until either the weather improved to 1/2 mile or more (which, again, I considered extremely unlikely) or we reached our divert fuel level and had to go back to Dulles, whichever came first.

We had enough fuel to hold for approximately 50 minutes. After that, we would have no choice but to try again tomorrow. In the hold, the clouds were broken, meaning there were holes, so we could get occasional glimpses of the ground. This means, naturally, that all those passengers in back could see the ground, too, and probably wondered why we were flying around in circles.

Unfortunately, what they couldn't see from their sideways-facing windows that we could see out the front was a fog bank that started a few miles from the airport and extended as far as we could see. It was less than 1000 feet thick, but it covered everything ahead. And with no wind to move it, it almost certainly wasn't going anywhere. In the battle between fog with nowhere to go and no hurry to get there versus our fuel tanks with nowhere to go but down, I was 99.9% sure the fog was going to win.

We were preparing to divert back to Dulles. We had been holding for 45 minutes and calculated that we would be able to go around the holding pattern only two more times before having no choice but to go back to where we started. We had gotten our passengers six miles from home, but couldn't take them the rest of the way.

The entire time, we had been monitoring the AWOS (Automated Weather Observing System: a robot weather station) over the radio. It droned on, "visibility one-quarter; fog". (If you want to know what it sounds like, you can hear it via phone at (814) 865-8799. You can find one for your local airport by searching airnav.com.) As we were turning outbound again, we heard, "visibility one-half, fog."

Wait! Did that just say 1/2? Let it loop again just to make sure we heard it correctly.

We did, and it did. And all we needed was a half-mile to start the approach! We immediately asked ATC for permission to commence an approach, and since it was 2 in the morning, with no one else in the sky at that late hour, we immediately received it.

As we turned inbound, we could see a long notch where the fog was still present but less dense, almost perpendicular to the airport. It was only about a mile wide, and happened to be passing over the airport at that exact moment. How quickly it was moving would determine if we would be able to make it in before it closed up again. It was going to be extremely close, and there would be no second chance. If the notch was gone by the time we got there, we had no choice but to head straight back to Dulles.

I turned inbound, intercepted the course, and started down. We were still in a bit of a cloud layer, so I was concentrating only on the instruments now and would be for the rest of the flight, no matter what happened from here on out.

"One thousand to minimums," the Captain said, starting the standard approach call-outs and counting down how much further we had to go before the missed approach point.

"Five hundred to go."

"Two hundred."

"One hundred."

"Approach lights in sight!"

I looked up. "I have the runway. Landing."

It ended up being one of my better landings. Good enough, in fact, that the planeload of passengers in back broke out into a hearty round of applause! (And crew scheduling probably clapped, too, because we ended the day only two minutes from exceeding our maximum FAA-allowable duty limits.)

It was close indeed. By the time we had reached the gate and opened the cabin door to let our weary-but-relieved passengers out, the notch in the fog had passed on. I don't know what the AWOS was saying, but I could barely see the terminal now, and it was less than 100 feet in front of us. But we were safe on the ground now where visibility was no longer an issue, except for making for a longer, slower cab ride to the hotel.

Since I was still a certified newbie, I had never been on an overnight at State College. I couldn't see anything out the window of the cab except fog, so I had no idea what the 2:30 a.m. scenery looked like. Once the sun rose, the fog began to burn off. It cleared up by the early afternoon, and as we were driving to the airport to fly the afternoon flight back, I had quite a shock.

State College has that name because it is the home of Penn State University. The road that goes from the hotel to the airport goes directly through the campus. As a matter of fact, it goes right next to Beaver Stadium: the fourth-largest stadium in the entire world, with a seating capacity of almost 107,000 people.

And I couldn't even see it on the drive in!

You see that road running directly in front of the stadium? I couldn't see the world's 4th-largest stadium from the road that night!

As if getting a round of applause on landing wasn't enough, many of the passengers stopped to say thanks as they were passing the cockpit door. One of the nicer things about being an airline pilot is that it is a meaningful job. We connect friends, loved ones, soldiers, and businesspeople. One of them said he was extremely relieved to make it because he had a big job interview in the morning.

By sheer coincidence, I happened to be having lunch in the hotel restaurant late the next morning. There was someone at the table next to mine, facing away from me. As I waited for my order to arrive, I heard the chatter typical of an interview. They were wrapping up the formalities and moving into casual conversation while they finished their meals. From behind, I heard, "I almost didn't make it here today. Last night the weather was terrible and my flight almost had to go back. I don't know how those pilots managed it, but we got in. They did a great job!"

No compliment means more than one you hear when the one giving it doesn't know you're around. Not bad for a rookie.

See the series index here.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Being an Airline Pilot, Week 9: Sitting Reserve

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Did you ever wonder what happens if an airline pilot gets sick, has their car break down on the way to the airport, or can't make it in for some reason? In other jobs, the other workers pick up the slack that day. One airline pilot, however, can't just decide to do the work of two people that day.

So does a planeload of passengers end up stranded at the airport because one person got the sniffles?

Nope. That's what reserves are for.

Welcome to reserve. It's a long staircase and you're at the bottom. And the escalators are out of order, rookie.

Being on reserve is where the fresh meat just out of training ends up. Once you get a line, you know what trips you'll be doing, on what days, and for how long. However, before you get there, you pay your dues by sitting reserve. Instead of knowing what you'll be doing—or even if you'll even do anything at all that day—you sit around waiting. And waiting. Aaaand waiting.

How long you'll be on reserve depends on what airline you fly for. At some, it can be a few months; at others, it can be several years. They all have one thing in common, however.

No matter if it's a few weeks or a few years, it's too long.

Pilots are different from most people. That's not news to anyone who knows a pilot (after all, my wife has been saying that for years). One of the ways we're different is that we're one of those rare lucky ducks who actually want to go to their job. Pilots want to fly. We're not good at sitting around all day wishing we were flying. (Most of us did enough of that before we got paid to do just that.)

Unfortunately, that's exactly what reserve ends up being many times: a whole day sitting around not flying, but not knowing you're not going to fly until your shift is over. Then heading back to a hotel room that you paid for yourself (unless you happen to live in base) and getting ready to do it all—or nothing at all—tomorrow.

Getting paid to sit around sounds like a pretty nice job, doesn't it? It's not. Imagine going to your job and being told you're to sit in the break room for the next 8 hours. And then the same thing the next day. And the day after that. And while you're imaging that, keep in mind all the time, money, and effort you spent to get that job in the first place, and now maybe you'll get to do that job, and maybe you won't.

It you still don't think it sounds that bad, or you just want to experience life as a brand-new airline pilot, sit in an uncomfortable chair and stare at this picture for the next 8 hours:

"So, what do you do for a living?" "This." "You watch the baggage carousel go in circles for a living?" "Exactly. I got a degree, paid almost $100,000 in plane rental and instruction costs, and spent years of my life passing 7 different FAA checkrides to sit here and make sure that carousel doesn't go anywhere. And so far it hasn't."

It may sound like you're being punished for making it all the way to this level, but in reality you actually do serve a very important purpose. If a crewmember gets sick, or gets stranded out of position due to a broken aircraft, or is going to "time out" (exceed the maximum duty hours the FAA allows), etc., you are called to step in and fly. You keep passengers lives from being disrupted by the inevitable.

If it weren't for reserves, thousands upon thousands of passengers each day would be stranded. Instead, 99% of them never know there was a problem. As a reserve, you're the reason they get home or to that important meeting or start their long-awaited vacation. You are the buffer that takes a minor scheduling burp and turns it into a non-event.

If you keep that in mind, and also keep in mind that it will eventually be over and you'll join the rest of the lineholders one day, you might be able to tolerate the long days of uncertainty. New airline pilots are often shocked at the transition. Some of them jump ship and head to a different airline, thinking that maybe things will be better somewhere else. It isn't; the grass is just as brown on the other side of the fence while you're on reserve. It gets better, but it takes patience.

To occupy my time, I spent the first few weeks getting to know every nook and cranny of Washington-Dulles. After a while, I knew the airport as well as Eero Saarinen himself. You know you're starting to become a reserve veteran when:

• You can rank multiple different restrooms in preferential order
• The hotel knows you by phone number
• The information desk volunteers ask you questions about where things are

One game I created for myself to kill time was to guess where a particular flight was heading to without looking at the sign. After a while I got pretty good at being able to simply look at what the gaggle of passengers lined up in front of it was wearing, how many kids there were in line, or how the group was behaving, and usually tell where they were going. Mix of weird/trendy clothed people and people in business attire? San Francisco. Lots of strollers? Orlando. People actually having fun while standing in line? They're headed to Las Vegas and have already started partying. And so on.

Unfortunately, the game lost its appeal once I had been there long enough to have many of the flight time/destination pairs memorized. It's 5:15 p.m. and a bunch of people are lined up at D32. Seattle. It's 7:20 at D31. Denver. And so on.

One of the positive things about reserve, besides being the one who makes the difference between Little Suzie making it to grandma's house this afternoon or tomorrow morning, is that my photography skills improved from all the time I spent wandering around taking pictures. I also got to see some things I'd never seen before, like what it looks like when the "hood" is popped on a jet engine:

Here's yer problem. You were out of blinker fluid. Topped it off for you and cleaned the bugs off the windshield.

Or an interesting little bend in the otherwise-straight C/D concourse:

"Paging Captain Biv. Captain Roy G. Biv, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone."

And a terminal floor so immaculately polished you could almost fly in it:

Whoever is in charge of waxing the floors here seriously deserves a raise.

The good news is that, like all things, it eventually comes to an end. Once you get a line, quality of life improves dramatically. As I noted above, how long you're on reserve will depend on what company you're with. For me, it was 3 1/2 months, as I finished IOE on September 22nd and got a line on January 1st. That was long enough.

This post has been all about what it's like to not fly. However, I spent a lot of time actually flying while on reserve. In the next post, I have a nail-biting "so there I was" story that happened to me on a reserve trip.

See the series index here.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 8: IOE 3--the World's Newest Airline Pilot

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This is it. The last time I'll be evaluated. Well, at least until the next time I'm evaluated, since airline pilots do recurrent training every six months. But at least this is the last time before I get signed off and released to the line.

It's also the difference between being an airline pilot and being an unemployed pilot.

A good way to start the last trip.

This trip, much like the last, is simply another series of days like those I'll expect once I become a full-fledged member of the pilot group. However, since this time I'm specifically doing a trip that goes back and forth into Newark, I'm introduced to one of the more unpleasant aspects of flying into one of the NYC 3 airports: the GDP.

To everyone who's not an airline pilot, and to me up until this trip, GDP stood for Gross Domestic Product. Not anymore. Going into Newark, it stands for Ground Delay Procedure, a name which sounds more official and less unpleasant than "Hurry up and wait."

It had been an unseasonably hot September thus far. Temperatures had steadily been in the upper 80s to low 90s, which is not pleasant in an aircraft that doesn't have air conditioning if the engines aren't running. Today was a very pleasant change: beautiful blue skies, a gentle breeze, and about 70°. That last part was important, because upon getting the clearance we found out that we were going to be ground stopped for at least an hour and 45 minutes. We weren't going anywhere, but at least we'd be comfortable while we waited.

At least it gave me time to lock down my flows more and review some of the Blue Book. I was starting to get settled in, but still had a long way to go before I felt polished. But that is, after all, the point of IOE: to get experience under supervision in order to be polished enough to be set loose on the line. You won't be polished to the point of bright and shiny, but you'll be good enough to go out and get that way.

But if you get through IOE and you're still learning (and, like all things in aviation, you will always be learning), what happens if you get paired with a Captain who is brand new?

Don't worry: the FAA has already done the worrying for you. They won't allow a crew to be paired with one another unless at least one of them has 75 hours in their position. In other words, a brand new First Officer (like me) can't be paired with a brand new Captain. Somebody needs to know what they're doing up there, after all.

Seventy-five may seem like a strange number, but it actually has some merit. Once I had about 60-70 hours, I started feeling like I was actually contributing to the smooth flow of the flight instead of being a drag on it. By 75 hours in, I felt like I wouldn't be uncomfortable or unsafe flying with a newly-upgraded Captain—which was a good thing, because once I had barely squeaked over 100 hours, I ended up being paired with one who had a total of 3 Captain hours. That flight went quite smoothly.

Having all that downtime while sitting on the ground gave me a chance to talk to my IOE Captain about what I was doing well and what I needed to do to ensure I'd be ready to be signed off in a couple short days. As before, my flying skills were quite good, but my flows lagged behind. They were getting better and faster and I got more locked in, but still needed a bit more before being sign-off quality.

The difference in our personalities came into play in a quite beneficial way. In this case, we were polar opposites: I am a big-picture, intuitive kind of person, and he is an extremely detail-oriented, methodical person. That was exactly the kind of person I needed to learn from. As we talked things over during our delay, we figured out why my flows still had work to do.

It turned out my relatively large number of hours as a general aviation pilot before moving to the airlines was a negative in this case. I had picked up some habits that work fine in a 172, but not in a Dash-8. I was trying to do everything at once, and since there are so many things to do, I would often overlook something. In a small plane, it is possible to do almost everything at once, since all there is to do is a basic GUMPS (gas, undercarriage, mixture, props/pumps, and switches). In an aircraft like this, it isn't possible to just get everything done without a methodical process for doing so. That methodical process is the heart of a flow.

After that, I concentrated on not skipping ahead to something until I had completed what was supposed to be next. I broke the big flow into a series of smaller units, no more than 2-4 things in a chunk, and worked those chunks until each one was automatic, then strung those chunks together to make up the entire flow. By slowing down and concentrating only on what chunk I was on and what I was supposed to be doing in only that chunk, my performance during the second-to-last-day improved dramatically. I probably would never have figured that out unless I had someone as methodical as he was to make me see it.

The last day had come. The night before, we had deadheaded (flown as passengers instead of crewmembers) down to Dulles after the first three days at Newark. Those three days—despite a few more GDPs—went much smoother than the first and only time I had been here before. The controllers were still up to their old tricks, but I was ready for them this time. They had caught me by surprise the first time, but I wasn't about to let that happen again. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." As part of the action, I even ended up shooting the Stadium Visual to 29 one day, which was the first time I'd ever done a charted visual approach. No problem. Bring it on.

The last day was here. As long as things went as well today as they did the day before, I'd be done. It was a short but fast-paced day, with one turn (going from one airport to another, dropping off the planeload of passengers, and then going back to the original airport with a new load of people) to one of our shorter routes, and then finishing with the shortest flight in our entire route structure: Dulles to Charlottesville, VA.

I ended up making the flight back in only 17 minutes. Although it was just a normal, uneventful flight to the passengers in the back of Flight 3601, that flight was the end of a long journey for me. It felt like it took months to reach this point—because it did! After 41.92 hours of IOE, I was officially signed off and deemed competent enough to be the world's newest real airline pilot. (For a few minutes, at least.)

I wouldn't be going home triumphantly, however. I, unfortunately, was immediately going to be starting two days on reserve before heading home. It certainly was better than going home for good, and I celebrated by going back to the hotel, turning on the television, and watching more TV that day than I'd watched in months, blissfully unaware of what being on reserve would end up being like.

And just like that, I was no longer becoming an airline pilot. I was now being an airline pilot.

See the series index here.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 7: IOE 2

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In the last post, I had just started my first week in the actual aircraft as a newbie on IOE (Initial Operating Experience). This week, it's a new trip, same old thing: learning life on the line.

The FAA requires at least 20 hours of IOE in the kind of aircraft we fly. Since last week's trip wasn't 20 hours long, I get to do at least one more. We can technically do up to 100 hours (and some airlines do, just to ensure the 100 hours in the first 120 days requirement in (g) of the same regulation is met), but we typically receive 25-40 hours and then are signed off. That means I may be set loose on the line after this trip, or may get another one to ensure everything that needs to be covered gets covered. Since my first week on IOE was rather uneventful, that means there's still a lot left I haven't seen.

Personally, like most pilots I feel confident enough in my skills that I think I'll be ready after this trip is over. After all, the first week went well, and I'll only get better with experience. However, I'm not in a huge hurry to be released into base, because while I'm still on IOE status, the more annoying parts of the job don't affect me yet. I'm still deadheaded positive space to my assignments, meaning I'm guaranteed a seat to work. Once I'm signed off, I'll be flying on a standby space-available basis, which can be a pain sometimes. Also, I don't have to pay for hotel rooms, since those are still automatically covered should I time out or be cancelled in base. Those benefits vaporize as soon as I'm signed off.

The week goes smoothly, just as the previous one did. Too smoothly, in fact. Once again, everything went as it should operationally speaking. There were no maintenance issues, the weather didn't pose too many challenges (just the same air mass thunderstorm dodging as last week, with the exception of a major thunderstorm that rolled directly over Washington-Dulles—but even it got there a half-hour before we did, so it was already gone before we showed up), and there were no real air traffic delays. This trip, like the last, was the sort of four days every lineholder dreams about.

Until the last leg of the last day, when the weirdness at WEARD began.

Successful flights are all alike; every unsuccessful flight is unsuccessful in its own way. (Although Anna Karenina was written 30 years before the Wright Brothers' first flight, the principle that comes from its first line is one every pilot should ponder. After all, aviation is, as Wikipedia succinctly describes it, "...an endeavor in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure.")

That said, this isn't about an unsuccessful flight; it's about one that didn't go as expected up front. In the back, the passengers had no idea that anything was out of the ordinary, in large part because this was just an ordinary day going into the beautifully complicated airspace overlying Newark-Liberty International Airport. They also had no idea it was my first time ever flying myself in there.

We weren't originally supposed to be going to Newark in the first place. Our original Rochester-Dulles flight was replaced with a Rochester-Newark one for reasons only known to the crew scheduling department. That was fine with me, since I was looking forward to the challenge and the opportunity to learn something new. That's what IOE is all about!

Getting put into a holding pattern going into Newark isn't all that common, but it isn't out of the ordinary, either. Sure, the airspace over the NY 3 airports (Newark, LaGuardia, and JFK) is exceptionally congested, but ATC amazingly manages to fit all these fast metal tubes into their slots with less holding than one has a right to expect. They have several tricks up their sleeve to accomplish this.

One trick, which you've probably had happen to you if you've ever gone to one of the NY 3 later than approximately noon, is by ground stopping aircraft before they have a chance to take off. If you've sat in the airplane (or, with larger delays, sat in the boarding area and stared at the "Flight delayed until 5:30 p.m. for ATC" sign) at your original city until your wheels-up time, you've experienced this.

If the flow still gets too heavy, the controllers tend to give delay vectors instead of outright holding patterns. So instead of heading straight for the final approach fix, they may have you turn away from the airport anywhere from 30-180 degrees for a brief interval to open up some space and kill a bit of time. Often this means you're still heading generally toward the airport, but taking the long way there.

One of their last resorts is the holding pattern. Naturally, this means that I would get one on my very first time in! No problem: after all, entering holding patterns into the FMS is something we spent time on way back in the third week of ground school, right?

Ever wondered what the ground track looks like for a holding pattern? Now you know, thanks to FlightAware.com

That doesn't look all that unusual, and it's not, except for one thing: that's not how I was supposed to fly that hold!

I am amazed and awed at how good a job New York Approach does in managing to get all their blips in a row, all day every day. Of course, one of the ways they keep it rolling is by being flexible, sometimes by the second. Another way is by having no patience with those who can't keep up. New York Approach is definitely no place for noobs. Which I was.

We were flying blissfully along, waiting to get to Newark and end a nice trip. Then, only 12 miles from WEARD intersection, we get this out of the blue (or, in this case, "into the blue"): "Clearance limit WEARD hold as published at WEARD expect further clearance 1650 time now 1615." [I left out any punctuation because punctuation implies that the controllers actually breathe when speaking.]

Hancock VOR, where we were coming from, is circled in blue at the upper left. Newark is circled in magenta at the bottom. The red box in between is WEARD intersection. (IFR low-altitude en route chart from VFRmap.com)

Notice that racetrack pattern northwest of WEARD? (There's a zoomed-in version below where it is probably easier to see.) That's the published holding pattern. And now I was 10 miles away from it. No problem in a car. Less easy in an airliner going almost 5 miles a minute.

Once again, thanks VFRmap.com

I had 2 minutes to program the hold into the FMS. It's a published hold, so the computer should know what it is, right? It knows all the holds during missed approach procedures, so why should it be any different for published holds en route?

As it turns out, and as I would learn, the FMS doesn't know any en route holds. When you program it, it just creates a holding pattern based on your current heading unless you tell it otherwise. In many cases, this amounts to the same thing as the published, since the chart designers often arrange it in such a way as to have the published hold be on the heading you're likely already on. (If we had been coming from the north, this would have indeed been the case here.) In this case, however, since we were coming from the northwest instead of the north, it wasn't the same thing at all.

And I had less than 30 seconds left to figure that out.

By the time I had my chart out and the intersection located, we were already in the holding pattern.

The wrong pattern, that is.

Notice that the racetrack next to WEARD was oriented generally north-south. What we actually flew looked like this:

Once again, thank you FlightAware.com

That's exactly what you'd expect from entering a holding pattern on present heading from Hancock, and definitely not a north-south pattern.

Fortunately, in this case it was no big issue. We were in the middle of nowhere (we were 66 miles away from the airport; not even in the same state as Newark), and the long EFC (Expect Further Clearance) time meant that they just wanted to keep us out in the middle of nowhere until something opened up. They didn't care how we twiddled our thumbs, as long as we stayed out of their hair.

As it turned out, we got extremely lucky, because we weren't even in the hold long enough for anyone besides ourselves to notice. As soon as we started our turn to start the second time around, we were told to continue on our way. And that's where the weirdness continued.

Everything was back to normal until we were getting close to landing. As it turned out, it was just a normal afternoon arrival into Newark, but since I'd never been there before, nothing about this afternoon was normal for me.

I was assigned 180 knots until 5 miles out. That's pretty standard at Newark, but definitely not a textbook approach for us. I handled it as well as could be expected for a first-timer, utilizing the turboprop's slow-down-and-get-down capabilities to my own fullest capabilities, managing a professional-quality landing. Nonetheless, I had to ask for some advice while doing so, and since this is something I'd be facing day after day on the line, we arranged for me to fly one more trip on IOE, this one going continuously in and out of Newark.

Which means one more week and I'm set loose on the line.


The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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Becoming an Airline Pilot, The Series

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There are a lot of posts in this series, since there is a lot that goes into becoming an airline pilot. Here's a table of contents for you.

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 0: Before the beginning

Part 1: The pre-hire stage
Part 2: The interview
Part 3: The post-offer stage

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 1

Ground school: Basic Indoc

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 2

More ground school: Systems

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 3

Still more ground school: FMS lab and final exam

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 4

Part 1: Welcome to the simulated jungle
Part 2: Simulator training grinds on

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 5

Checkride time

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 6

IOE (Initial Operating Experience) 1

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 7

IOE 2: Weirdness at WEARD

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 8

IOE 3: the World's Newest Airline Pilot

Being an Airline Pilot, Week 9

Sitting Reserve

Being an Airline Pilot, Week 10ish

We're all counting on you

Being an Airline Pilot, 6 months in

Donuts in the sky

Being an Airline Pilot, one year in

Pro Pilot Ponderings

Being an Airline Pilot, two years in

Time flies when you do
Here I go again

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Becoming an Airline Pilot, Week 6: IOE (Initial Operating Experience) 1

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To the 37 passengers on board, this is simply Flight 5006, a quick flight from Washington-Dulles International to Greenville-Spartanburg, SC. Sit back for 90 minutes, sip on a Coke, and everyone is back home from where ever in the world they're returning from. Probably some interesting places, since Dulles was designed to carry the East Coast's overseas traffic. Paris, London, Dublin, Berlin, Abu Dhabi, Sao Paulo, and a hundred more come through IAD, and we take them the rest of the way home.

For me, it's my first flight as an airline pilot, and there's no chance of me sitting back and sipping anything. Not even the big bottle of water next to me.

It's my very first flight and we're already pointed straight at a thunderstorm.

Many people are surprised to find that the first time a new First Officer flies in their new airliner is with a load of passengers on a normal revenue flight. I hope that the previous several entries in the Becoming an Airline Pilot Series have given you some insight into why this shouldn't be surprising after all.

There is a surprise, however. The simulator training in (mostly) realistic, multi-million-dollar equipment with extremely detailed cockpit layouts and hydraulic/servo motion allows for a relatively smooth transition into the real thing. The ability to create demanding scenarios and drill them over and over again actually makes a day as a real airline pilot in a real airliner one of the easier parts of training!

That's not to say there's nothing left to learn or that it's easy. The simulator training covered the technical skills required to fly according to the company's OpSpecs and procedures. It left practically no time for the ancillary operations involved in getting a daily airline flight off the ground, and it is entirely impossible for it to simulate each flight's flow.

This is not the same flow as the cockpit flows described earlier in the series. Instead, this flow refers to the dozens of little things that have to come into place before the start switch is selected to "2". Most of them happen simultaneously and wrap together into a small packet of paperwork that's passed out the door just before the real flight begins.

The flight attendant prepares the cabin while the captain reviews the aircraft's logbooks and the dispatch paperwork and weather reports, catering (which is our case is a fancy word for "drinks") drops their items off to put away, bags are loaded while the passengers board, the fueler loads us up with a few thousand pounds of Jet-A, the ATIS and clearance is obtained and the flight plan entered into the Flight Management System (FMS, which we spent a whole week on way back in ground school), the cargo report detailing the number of bags and where they were loaded is dropped off, the weight and balance (just like you did ever since you were a student pilot, although a bit more complicated) is calculated and its paperwork filled out, and if these things are all done properly, the Fasten Belts sign is turned on, the cockpit door shut, and the fun starts.

Except since it's my first day, it's all just a bustling jumble going on around me while I try to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing at each moment. I have a decent idea of what I'm supposed to be doing; just no clue when exactly I'm supposed to be doing it. That's because I haven't developed that sense for the outside flow going on.

"What are we supposed to be doing now?"

I hear that a lot the next few days. If I knew the answer, it would already be done. Instead, I guess.

"The Before Taxi checklist?"

"We haven't even started up yet!"

Wow, was I wrong. Duh. We're not going anywhere without the engines running.

"It's your leg, so you should be briefing me so we can do the Before Start checklist."

Wait, it's my leg? On my very first real flight, I have to fly the thing, too?!

One of the misconceptions people have about the airlines is that the Captain is always the one flying. That's not the case. Instead, the flying legs are usually split evenly by taking turns. Usually the Captain does the first leg, but in this case since I'm in training I'm going first this time. No opportunity to sit back and watch him operate the first time: instead I'm going right into the fire.

Let's do this.

Before every airline flight, the designated Pilot Flying gives a briefing of that leg's plan: the runway in use, the departure, the flight plan, what turn procedure has been assigned in case of an engine failure on takeoff, etc. I run through mine and we start the engines.

After the Before Taxi checklist is done, things proceed rather normally. Although it's my first time in the cockpit of an airliner, it's far from my first time in a cockpit, so I'm familiar with how to talk to controllers. Although Dulles, like many large airports, has a ramp controller in addition to the usual ground and tower frequencies, it's just another person to talk to.

We finally take the runway. Once we're lined up, the aircraft is mine. I push the throttles up and we start rolling. It wants right rudder, I give it right rudder. It rotates differently than a 172 because it's 84 feet long, but I treat it smoothly yet firmly and it climbs away happily.

As I noted in one of the simulator posts, being Pilot Flying is a bit of a blessing in disguise for the next hour and a half, since the Pilot Not Flying has more work to do than the Pilot Flying. For the first time ever, I actually have a time when I'm in a Dash-8 cockpit and can relax for a while! In the sim, the hours are so expensive that once one task is accomplished you are thrown right into the next one with no adjustment period or break. In the real airplane, you sit there and monitor while the plane flies steadily along until it's time for the descent and the workload starts coming back.

After dodging some typical late-summer—since ironically I started on Labor Day—thunderstorms en route, I fly an uneventful approach to a surprisingly good first landing ever. One of the most common and unfortunate misconceptions about flying (one sadly shared by many pilots, who should know better) is that a good landing means a good pilot. Actually, there are so many things that go into accomplishing a successful flight that the landing is just the cherry on the cake. You can have a good cake with a bad cherry and it's still a good cake, but a good cherry with a bad cake is still a bad cake. Unfortunately, most people don't see the rest of the cake, so they only judge it by the cherry.

On the way back to Dulles, the roles are reversed and I'm back to my "normal" First Officer duties. The pop-up thunderstorms on the way in turn out to be the leading edge of a cold front moving in, and on the way I get my best-ever picture of a distinctly visible front, which is quite a treat for a weather-lover like me. It's something I never would have gotten in the old 172, because it's not equipped to fly through a front like that. With a 22-ton airliner, onboard weather radar, and controller vectors, we just pick a heading and outmaneuver the front instead. This will be just the first of many weather treats (some delicious, some not) I'll see over the following days, weeks, and months.

Years of studying and teaching about fronts, and my first day on the job I get to look down on a textbook example of one.

That wouldn't be the last weather I'd see for my first day on the job. On the next leg, we traded off once more and I was once again Pilot Flying. Our destination, Charleston, WV (whose airport is named after Chuck Yeager, so there's a good omen) was being poured on by rain in a 400-foot overcast ceiling. That means my first instrument approach. If you're going to have to shoot an approach the first day on the job, having twice the minumums required is a good way to start, and it, like my first one of the day, went smoothly.

After my first overnight, the rain cleared up for the next morning's flight. Unfortunately, it left a heavy mist behind it, dropping the RVR (Runway Visual Range: basically, how far you can see down the runway) to 800 feet. That means that if I stood at the end of my driveway, I would barely be able to see the trees at the end of my back yard. It's never pretty when the visibility is crappy enough to be measured in RVR instead of miles. Good thing it's not my turn to fly.

Except the Captain had me fly this leg too, just for the hard experience. As soon as I rotated I was in IMC (Instrument Meterological Conditions: "the soup"), but having an ATP means having an instrument rating for a reason. We broke out just a few thousand feet up and it was a pretty day the rest of the leg, since cold fronts do often clear the air after they pass through. It's always amazing how nice it can be only a few thousand feet up while the weather for those stuck to the ground is terrible.

The rest of the trip proceeded much like this, day by day. When you're in IOE, you're not just paired with anybody: you're paired with an experienced Captain whose job it is to watch you closely and give you opportunities to learn. This one certainly did, and I certainly did learn. It was only a 3-day trip with 10 legs, but I felt amazingly better by the end, yet still daunted by how much I still had left to learn before I could get signed off.

After my first trip was over, I was actually a bit disappointed to have 3 days off. I would have kept right on flying if I could have. (One of the signs you've found a good job for you is when you don't have to drag yourself to the office.) Unlike in sim, my self-evaluation ended up being almost identical to my IOE Captain's evaluation in my training folder: "Larry flies the plane very well. Needs to focus on the details."

On my last day, I got to look down on a rainbow, which was a nice way to bookend the rainbow I saw on the way home from sim training:

Try seeing that from any other office window.

Although the first trip went well, a lot of that had to do with it being a relatively uneventful stretch of days in general. With the exception of some normal summer thunderstorms (and some delay vectors going into Dulles to let a storm that was directly over the airport pass) and that instrument approach the first night, there weren't many big challenges thrown my way. When everything is going right, that rigid structure and lack of drama is precisely why flying is safer than walking.

However, there were still plenty of hours left in IOE before I would be eligible to get signed off and be released to the line. How would I do when everything stopped going right? You'll find out in the next post.

See the series index here.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.