Mornings have been different over the last while. Usually I wake up and tip toe around the house getting my things together for the day's flying. Recently, however, I usually stealthily slide out of bed and sneak down the hall to the kitchen only to find mama and baby sitting in the rocking chair, the smaller of the two having a healthy snack. The older one at the other end of the hall will now sleep through just about anything so the covert ops I was engaging was all for not.
Things have changed, then changed again, then changed yet again for me over the last couple of years. Aside from going forth and multiplying, I have also changed positions at work, and I have also moved to a different place of employment. All steps in a direction that have lead to a nice balance in this ridiculous industry.
Today it will be a long one. A rough guess tells me about 8 hours of flying - 3 different airports and thousands of miles but returning home to my own bed at night. That's the best part of this job I've found, I only have to slum it in a hotel maybe 6 days a month. I say 'slum it' because my bed at home is what trumps the king size, four pillow, private and clean Marriott anytime because of the side effects of being at home - my little family.
I am flying with someone I haven't seen for a while. It will be good to catch up. It's not terribly early departure this morning, for a change. Starbucks is open and I indulge. Arrive plenty early and get on task. 45 Minutes later we are ready and strap in. The first leg is empty so we can depart at our hearts content. It's early Sunday morning and the airways are quiet. Smooth air and direct to the FAF. I enter my request for direct to the FAF in the FMS and I get a bunch of dashed lines indicating the box doesn't know where that is. Interesting. I check spelling etc. and still, the box glows ignorantly back at me. Standoff. My left index finger reluctantly swoops in to save us - 'XXXX Center, seems to me we have an issue with our FMS, any chance for vectors to the FAF...?'
'Sure. Left heading 340, intercept the localiser, cleared ILS 2 approach'.
'Thanks.'
Roll it out and exit to the ramp. We couldn't take a huge amount of fuel out of home base due to landing weight restrictions on such a short repositioning flight. Fuel truck does it's thing while I try to figure out this FMS problem. Looks like only the enroute portions have been downloaded during the update. No problem for us, we are perfectly capable of flying airways, traditional approaches and visuals without the FMS. MEL takes care of it. Carry on.
Load up the back and off we go. We have a light load and the atmosphere is cool. We climb straight to FL410. A little paperwork and then we wait. These long legs are not the kind of flying that interests me at all. Seeing new distant places is great fun, but I pay for it with these long droning cruise portions. I do have a great colleague to chat with, and since we haven't flow together for so long, time passes quickly with the catching up.
Fairly quick turn and we are off again, heading back home. Starts out cloudy and bumpy but as we climb above FL360 it begins to let up. Smooth at FL400. 20 knots on the nose is great for a westbound flight. And we wait.
3 hours later we start our descent. The weather is beginning to change. We saw the massive CB's a hundred miles back and we are expecting to have to do a little fancy footwork to get to the ground. The radar has been on for a while and we are making a plan to get through this mess. The word 'deviations' is common now as we switch to the Approach controller. We use the radar and our eyeballs to assess and decide we would like to fly direct to a waypoint further down the arrival which puts us East of most of the returns; it also looks good out the window. Requested and granted.
Now there is another airplane on the same Arrival behind us, I can see them on TCAS and I hear them talking to the same controllers on the way in. We make our request for the new waypoint due to weather and I know those guys can hear us, I also know they have weather radar and I'm pretty sure they have eyeballs. Silence. They say nothing and carry on flying the Arrival as published. We get maybe two decent bumps but that is all where we are. Then, I hear that airplane calling Center asking for a lower altitude. A few moments later and with increased anxiety they ask for lower again. These guys are fighting for their lives. They are told to 'standby 1'. They come back with 'we need lower immediately'. Stress is high and I can hear the turbulence bouncing his voice box around. They are trying to duck under that big dark animal. They are cleared to lowest vectoring altitude. They are behind us on the arrival, but several thousand feet below us. In the end they made it out and landed. I saw them taxi by when we were unloading our passengers. I couldn't help but wonder why they did what they did. Were they preoccupied, were they surprised by the fast moving weather, did their radar show something different from ours? Or were they too proud to 'follow' another airplane and thereby implying that that airplane 'knows better' and an ego was threatened? Aviation is full of type A personalities and unfortunately ego sometimes does play a part in decision making. I won't ever know what the reason is but I wonder about it from time to time.
Half an hour later in my truck heading home I see the animal we dodged hunting for a place to lay its frozen eggs. It did and the hail was bad enough to break siding and windows a few blocks over from my house. I think those other guys were damn lucky it didn't decide to unload that while they were underneath.
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