Birdwatching while at 600km/h

There is normally a speed limit below 10,000ft for aircraft, which is 250 KIAS. Most of the time we think it's a hindrance, when departing we would normally request a high speed climb, that is, go to 300KIAS then do the climb at that speed, or 280, depending on our weight. Those speeds, are our normal climb speeds above 10,000ft.

When our FMC isn't really up to scratch, mostly because we didn't plan ahead well enough to place artificial constraints on the route legs, we too would ask for a high speed below 10,000 and use our speed to descend lower and faster, before slowing down and getting into approach config (although I do not recommend doing this).

Asking for high speed below 10,000 is used mainly to catch up on schedule delays etc, but when you do this, you must be alert! I have had a few first officers breaking a sweat when I tell them to go fast below. They seem to have a hard time adjusting to the pace and the planning ahead that's required. Most are OK with it and can do it well, but some, ABUSE IT.

I used to love abusing it, it was an adrenalin rush. In one of my previous companies, we had a very short leg of only 20 minutes. On that leg, we would take off, turn around then accelerate to the red line, and then slow down and configure for the approach and landing in time. We would do this at about 8000 - 10000 ft.

One particular day, the winds were strong up above 4000, and we needed to be at 6000ft only. After take off, I sped up, I was flying the leg. At 6000ft, on the right hand as I was a first officer in those days, the ground whizzed by quicker. The Captain was busy monitoring the instruments and I was too, but also looking out from time to time.

I saw a moving speck on the windshield. With curiousity I leaned forward. The captain saw this and asked "What are you doing?"

"I think I see something."
"Where?"
"Dead ahead, our level."
He too was looking for it. There was nothing in our TCAS. Was it a small plane?

As the spec becomes bigger, and bigger, the shape became clearer but the time to avoid it becomes less and less. Suddenly, we realized what it was.

"Bird! Bird!" I shouted.
"Oh no, this is going to be a close one!" The captain shouted.
"Evade?"

Not enough time, within a moment, the large bird whizzed accross the left side of the aircraft, only a few meters off the fuselage. We were there just stunned.

"Did anyone back there see that?" He asked.
"I don't know, the question is, did it hit the stabilizer?"

We decided to slow down and check if the trim was affected (it shouldn't, but you don't want to find out only at approach do you?). As we slowed to 250 knots, the trim wheel moved and the altitude remained. We handflew the aircraft to the landing from then.

After parking we quickly went out to check if there's anything on the left wing or left stabilizer. We found nothing.

That was the last schedule I had on that leg before I moved companies. Hitting a Pelican on the windshield at 350 knots wouldn't be pleasant, luckily we didn't hit it.

Bus chasing on a pig

Newer planes are here to stay. Mandala ordered 25 brand new A320s, Batavia already has 2 new A319s, and Lion is going to flood our skies with 739ERs. So what do we do? Our 737-300 and -400s are slower, and guzzle more fuel than them, although we aren't as bad as the -200s. But then, the recent holiday season did reveal something, sometimes passengers DO notice if we take off before an aircraft that lands before we do.

How do we go about this?

On a recent flight from Medan to Jakarta, we were late. As we were completing our boarding, a Mandala A320 next to us had already commenced their pushback. Our flight was full, and we were heavy. I looked at the first officer and asked, "Wanna beat that Airbus?"
"Sure Kep, how?"

"We filed for flight lever 350?"

"Yes."

"That Mandala I heard is filing at 350 too. He'll be doing mach 0.76 to 0.78. Shall we speed below them? Say max cruise at FL310? If we have no delays we should catch up with them just after Palembang."

"Wouldn't the chief want to have a word with you when he sees our fuel burn?"

"Hey, we're late, we're full, we got connecting passengers who don't want to miss their onward flights, so, WHY NOT?"

"Your call Kep! It's your turn to fly next anyways."

"Let's revise after we push back."

We pushedback just as the Mandala was entering the runway. With little traffic, we were soon taxying towards runway 23. As we neared the holding point, the first officer asked if there was any incoming traffic that would delay us. There was none. We asked to revise our altitude to FL310.

"Standby," was the answer.The tower came back telling us to line up and wait on the runway. So we did.
"Pigflyer 73, Flight Level Three-One-Zero is approved. After airborne turn left direct MEDIA climb FL150. Wind is calm. Runway 23 cleared for take off."

The first officer answered promptly and then turned to me, "310 approved Kep, and clear for take off."

"OK, let change the cruise altitude on the FMC."

"Ok. Done."

"Ready?"

"Ready when you are."

As we took off, I wondered how far the Mandala A320 is. We cleaned up quickly, turned to MEDIA to join W12 and asked for high speed climb. After switching to the autopilot, we revised the climb speed and manually overrode the econ cruise. After we were happy that the fuel estimates on arrivals were safe, we committed ourselves to the race.
Whilst enjoying coffee and puffing away at FL310, we'd check on the TCAS on the position of the Mandala A320 4000ft above us by selecting "UP" on the TCAS from time to time. We were catching up slowly, although we were burning 250kgs extra fuel per hour.

Unless there are significantly different winds, a given mach number at FL310 would yield a faster ground speed than one at FL350. We overtook the A320 from underneath just as we passed Palembang, and continued until we had enough distance infront of him before slowing down to our economic cruise, and then perform a normal descent.

We landed 10 minutes ahead of the Mandala, and did it all safely without exceeding any of the operational limits, with fun, and most of all regained time for our customers, ain't that right chief?

Remembering Congonhas

I woke up this morning for yet another round of flights. I switched on the TV and found a horrific scene, a plane had crashed. An A320 had crashed while landing at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport. The carnage of it all foretold the inevitable outcome, 200 people had died.

Many years ago, I went to Brazil on a holiday with some friends from Argentina. I had heard about the wonders of Congonhas and Rio's Santos Dumont. I had a pleasure of jumpseating the flights into both airports, and they were unforgettable.

Santos-Dumont was a scenic airport from a pilot's point of view, although, one could be said to be crazy to want to fly jets there. It's only 1350m with water on either end. It was definitely not a place to mess around. My pulse raced on the finals into Santos-Dumont, but it was nothing in comparison to Congonhas.

Congonhas' runway is about 2000m long. So what gitu lho! Sorry, it's 2000m long at an elevation of 2500ft. The nearest we got to that in Indonesia are Bandung and Malang, with Bandung having a slightly longer runway than Congonhas, and at a similar elevation. I had not flown into Malang so I can't comment. So what made Congonhas so scary? Bandung has no ILS at the moment, and the applicable minimas are "generous" in terms of, if the weather conditions are such that it's going to make you run for the toilet, you'd be below minimas and had to go elsewhere. Before I took the holiday to Congonhas, I already had a jumpseat ride into Bandung. I thought it would just be similar, and I was wrong.

Approaching Congonhas I quickly noticed the difference. First, it was busy. Second, you'd need the ILS there because unless you fly in and out of there everyday, there's no way you could find it, especially on a wet night! It was in the middle of a concrete jungle with lights everywhere. The crew I jumpseated did the familiar method to what we use for short runways. Duck under the slope when visual, land early and watch the speed and any wind that could send you hitting the ground lower. Once you landed, throw out whatever you have, and progressively manual brake to a halt, forget the autobrake if you got a tight schedule and cannot afford delaying due to brake cooling.

I could have ngompol (wet my pants) during that landing had the crew not told me beforehand what it would involve. Thank God they did tell me. On short final, you can see that the airport is 20 - 30 meters above the surrounding neighbourhood. Go low and you'll hit the hill, or the localizer antennae mounted on huge pylons about 100m from the airport. If you want a merciless airport, this would be it. Overrun, find yourself flying off the hill onto the buildings below. Go too low, and you won't make it onto the perimeter thanks to the hill. It was wet, it was scary, but it wasn't me flying. If it was me I could have just said, "forget this, I'm landing somewhere else."

Congonhas is just a memory, it was a thrilling one. But now, it is a sad one. In Memory of those who perished on JJ3504 yesterday.

The cheap prank

There's one way to find out whether someone does the preflight and preparation checks properly. I do this at the end of the night after a flight into Jakarta, and I know the guy taking my seat for the morning duty tomorrow has a reputation not doing those checks properly, or do this to someone who overzealously do those checks.

After you finish everything, take one last cigarette before leaving the aircraft, and use the oxygen mask as your ashtray. Always restow the mask with care. A good check should include checking the mask and that means mean you put the mask in front of your face and then open the bottle valve for a quick spray of oxygen. So, if you hear someone getting the ash in the face in the morning, you know he did the pre-flight checks properly!

A word of caution, if the chief decides to replace your target in the morning or there's an aircraft change, you'll get a call to go to the office by lunchtime!

Holiday Season

Holiday seasons mean lots of flights. The company you work for can determine whether you will have a few extra flights or a lot of extra flights. The holiday season means we have to throw our usual routine of four to five legs a day, with one day off and possibly a standby day in a week because one thing is almost for certain, minimum rests, one day off a week only and lots of schedule revisions!

The load that you fly changes too. The flights are always full, and the extra flights mean you have to chase your schedule because if you get delayed in the morning, your friend flying the aircraft after you is going to get home extra late, with their crying kids wanting to join the holiday rampage. It's not the best times for some people.

Carrying families mean you also have problems such as a family of four insisting to carry a house load of carry-on baggage in addition of their excess baggage. Sometimes, they carry so much that you end up over the weight limit. Explaining a family of 6 that their choice was to let three boxes of dolls for the kids or their 3 cubic meter box worth of oleh-oleh (gifts) or one of their suitcases of clothes to fly later in the day is sometimes harder than to explain to a shopaholic that the white dress is better than the pink dress with fluorescent green polkadots.

Then you get loud passengers that you can hear all the way in the cockpit on take off, or the dreaded baby crying louder than our engines on take off during a night flight. One thing I cannot stand is when after six flights, I have to pax back to Jakarta, sitting a row behind a crying baby and a row in front of 7 year old kids whose solution of boredom is to kick the seat in front every three seconds. All that while sitting to a know it all passenger who claims he's seen the Airbus A380 in Makassar.

The nice thing about holiday season is though, we do get good kids flying, and we love to take them into the flight deck and see their eyes go wide in amazement. We like to play with them sometimes, select the autopilot to leave the LNAV/VNAV and go into ALT HOLD and SPD. We then play with the speed a bit and they can spend 5 minutes at the moving throttles. Or change the heading a little bit and tell them "Look! No Hands!"

One thing is for certain on holiday season, you get damn tired. If you work for a company that gives peanuts for the flight hour pay, it sucks. If they give you a nice number for that, then, despite all of the grudges you may have on the season, it may be worth it. I may be tired by the end of the day, but at least the roads aren't jammed packed and I get home quicker.

Single Thrust Reverser

Landing performance we use for our revenue flights do not take into account thrust reversers. As hard as we decelerate on the reversers, many passengers do not realize that if we need to, we can brake a lot harder. We don't use the maximum available brakes much under normal circumstances as it is not our customer service policy to bang passengers' heads onto the seats in front of them.

Was given a 737 with a single reverser locked out yesterday. The dispatch papers noted that and they reminded me again before we started our first flight of the day. As a habit, I would put a post it note in front of me to remind myself of various things I need to remember about the aircraft. I wrote "T/R #1 INOP"

Our first leg of the day was to Pekanbaru, narrow clearway strip with a runway only 25 meters wide. Normally we land at runway 36 to take advantage of the uphill slope, and exit at taxiway A to the right. The slope beyond that is a steep downhill, but we normally are at low speed if we pass that intersection.

Before top of descent, the First Officer briefed for the landing. He's a young lad and a recent addition to our company. He's relatively green, and this is the first time I've flown with him with a deferred.

"Oke Kep, my landing yah. Pekanbaru, expecting 36 ILS, we come in for a straight intercept down to 1,500 unless they tell us to hold as published. Visibility is good, if they change the runway we'll go visual right hand, is that OK?"
"Yeaps, go on."
"ILS from 1500ft, visibility is good, QNH is 1012, and decision is at 200 above or 230 on the QNH. Runway is 2200 meters, landing weight will be 49 tons, ref will be 133 on flap 30, autobrake 2, the wind is 040 at 5 knots so we'll approach at 140. Standard roll and manual braking to go for exit A."
"Missed Approach?"
"Climb straight ahead to 1500ft and notify ATC. Expect vectors right hand to the downwind and redo it. Any questions?"
"Have you missed anything?"
"Oh yes, reverser on engine one is locked, so, idle reverse on number two OK?"
"Yes... want me to call for descent?"
"Landing brief complete yah Kep, ready for descent."

There was no traffic and we were cleared to descend continuously to 1500ft and cleared for the high speed below 10,000ft. Down at 1500ft and slowing our speed from 300 knots on idle power, we got busy. I told him to keep it at idle as we need to start the deploying the flaps. We steadied down to 210 before selecting the flaps to one, then 5, then 10, at 170. Nose was a bit high, and I was waiting for the glideslope to go alive. Autothrottle was still on.

Then the glideslope came alive and I called it. Since we were only at 1500ft, I reminded him to go and select 15 and gear down, I didn't want him not to stabilize at 1000ft.

"Fly the slope on manual will you?"
"Yes Kep. Flaps 30 and Set speed 140 please."

The Autopilot disconnect horn came and he smoothly descended the pig on the glideslope. The airplane slowed to 140 with the autothrottle. The air was bumpy and the aircraft started to oscillate a bit with the autothrottle lagging. The airspeed went off from the targetted 140 due to the oscillation. He switched the autothrottle off to kill the oscillation and retrimmed the pig.

"One thousand," I called, shortly followed by the automatic voice.
We then received our landing clearance.

"Five hundred... and watch the speed, 140 please slow it down abit."
"Two hundred."
"One hundred."
"Fifty... forty... thirty... go idle" I called.
The wind suddenly disappeared and we lost our 5 knots immediately. He pulled the yoke to keep the pig from falling and applied a bit of power to cushion the loss of airspeed before going idle, but it was a little too long and we floated.
"Whoops," he said.
"Hit the aiming bar," I said. I wanted him to bring it down firmly on the 1000ft markers. He hesitated to drop the aircraft and we touched down 1500ft from the threshold. There was still ample room to stop.

The whine of the ground spoilers autodeploying was heard and I hand checked it. "Spoilers deployed."

The pig derotated nicely as he opened the right engine reverser as we climbed up the hill, faster than normal.

To my horror, he said "We're fast," and pulled the reversers into full.
The pig's nose swung to the right catching him by surprise, he realised that the left reverser was locked. "Damn, single only." He yanked the rudder to the left to keep the pig from having a run around the grass, he idled the right reverser and the nose swung left now, we were below 100 knots with the wheels biting and the ground spoilers dumping whatever remaining lift we had on the wings and transferred the weights on the wheels.

"Buset! Nyante dong!" (Jeez, easy boy!)
He pressed on the manual brakes and adjusted our direction to remain on the runway.
"80... 60..." I called as we were still swinging left to right to left to right as he tried to keep us on the runway. "OK, my control."
"Your control Kep."
The swinging took his eye off the braking and I braked harder to a hard stop on the intersection.

I took the pig off the runway and onto the apron, and waited on the parking stand to allow for engine cooling, APU startup and completion of the after landing checklist. We shut down on schedule.

I looked at him and said, "enjoy the single reverser?"
"Scary on this runway Kep. Sorry, first time on a single rev."
"It's not wide, bet you were scared of going off after forgetting the single."
"Indeed. I never knew I'd do that."
"Well, there's always a first time, at least you're not a single reverser perawan (virgin) anymore. Narrow runway, overcompensated, realised the error, and tried to correct it."
"Sorry."
"Don't worry, do the next one back to Jakarta and I'd kick your butt if you swing like mad over there."

The pax deboarded, we completed the paperwork and prepared for the next leg. One of the cabin crew told us they were goyang Inul at the back. Thank God I don't sit on the rearmost part.

The next leg was perfect and the first officer focused on the brakes for deceleration on the 3000m runway. Thank God for long runways.

2 wrongs don't make a right!

The reason why you have more than one pilot in the cockpit is so that one covers the other one for mistakes, lapses and whatever else. This system works well, some airline use the supporting method where the pilot flying is supported by the one monitoring, while some use the delegative method, where the pilot flying is in charge and delegates the monitoring task to the one monitoring. It works well, when I started, the captain would tell me what I'm doing wrong or what I forgot and correct me. When I became captain, I would do the same to the first officers, especially the new ones as they're sometimes nervous.

Unfortunately, the system can break down when you have two people in the cockpit whose minds were somewhere else. This happened to me on an approach into Padang's Minangkabau airport. It's a new airport, replaces the old Tabing whose instrument procedure require some careful planning.

it was the first officer's leg, so he did the briefing. As we neared, a late descent caused us to fly over the airfield at 10,000ft before turning downwind over the sea. We planned for the ILS. Everything was routine for the approach, but the day was out of routine.

My mind was largely somewhere else that day, and the first officer just broke up from his girlfriend. We were running late and weather wasn't on our side. We did the descent on the downwind through the clouds, down to 4000ft. There was another traffic at 4000 about to intercept the ILS and descending, and I saw him on the TCAS. It was a bumpy ride.

We levelled at 4000, just on the bottom of the clouds, so we get moments of obscurity, and moments of a clear view. The reported visibility was 4000m. We were told to extend our downwind due to departing traffic. As we turned towards the ILS, we descended to 3000, in scattered rain.

As we went about our business, we were chatting too. We normally do that, but as I monitored our instruments, selecting the flaps according to the F/O's request, the rain stopped and he suddenly called visual. I was thinking, "huh?"

There was a runway in the distance, but no lights. Airports in Indonesia don't always switch their damn lights even in dull weather. As we hadn't intercepted the localizer yet, the runway was to our right, and we were a bit high.

I asked him, "You gonna go visual?"
"You betcha!"
"Swing it round then. I'll call for clearance once we're near the centerline. We're a bit high so go down but not too steep."
"Aye-Aye sir!"

He manouvered the aircraft nicely, speed was good, we were visual, we'd be landing shortly. I made the announcement, "Cabin crew be seated for landing."

I can see he's planning a turning final, not a large one, but it'll be good and safe enough.

"Landing checklist please," he called.
I took the checklist and did a quick instrument scan.

"Something's not right."
"Whaddya mean Capt?"
"Localizer's too our left now."
"Really?"
"Yes!" I suddenly realized. "Man, that's Tabing!"
"Oh shit..."
"You wanna do it or you want me to do it?"
"I still got it. Going left now for the intercept, no wonder we were high for that runway."

We were down to 2000ft. We did the error of going for whatever we saw first without checking the instruments. This is the most fundamental error one can make on an instrument approach. Landing at the wrong airport would certainly cause a major embarrassment for the airline, and probably ruin our careers.

"Yeah, just keep it smooth and we'll be OK."

We continued the approach and landed without anyone noticing the mistake we made. As we rested in the ground turnaround, we sat there looking each other wondering how we could have made that mistake.

One thing is for sure, the system is there to keep us out of trouble. That's why we have two and not one pilot. However, in the rare occasion that both are having personal problems, both must realize it and be on the extra lookout. When we didn't, the minor lapse we did could have ruined our careers. We were lucky it wasn't some other lapse that would have costed our lives. After researching, I found that a lot of mishaps happened when one is disturbed or pressured from the going ons of our personal lives. I have always avoided it, work is work, personal is personal. I've had this kind of situation before and never had a problem only this time, both me and the other guy are having problems. When this happens, BE CAREFUL.

The last time a plane landed in Tabing thinking it was Minangkabau, one or both of the pilots were having personal problems. The airline however, said it was a cellphone interference causing the ILS to make an error and guide them to another airport. So much for that, but hey, thats for another time to discuss.

Fly safe and calm everyone.