My moment of airline glory and the passenger’s reaction

I’m going to close my Asiana 214-inspired series on the real world of airline flying and visual approaches with one more story from my Comair days.

Generally my life at Comair was antiheroic. For example, we were stuck at the gate in Cincinnati because we had just three seat belt extenders on board and five morbidly obese passengers (out of 50 total seats) who required belt extensions. As this was our home base I called Maintenance on the radio and they drove out in a little truck to deliver the items required to meet federal regulations. Pulling in towards our parking spot at JFK, the captain said to the relaxed ramp workers, without keying the microphone, “Now put down the crack pipe and pick up the wands.” The airline’s fee-for-every-bag policy combined with the design characteristics of the CRJ meant that we were often not legal to fly with the small number of checked bags in the baggage compartment. The only way to restore weight-and-balance was to put sand bags back there but at JFK they would always run out and we’d be delayed while the ramp workers prepared new ones.

On my last day based at CVG I was done at around noon, having flown a simple out-and-back. This was ideal because I needed to drive my car and all of my stuff to New York City, to take up a new base at JFK starting the following day. A woman whom I’d been seeing had flown out as a “non-rev” passenger to join me for the trip.

Scheduling called me to say “We need to you fly one more trip today. It is just out and back to Grand Rapids, Michigan and it leaves in 20 minutes.” For the captain, however, this was to be the start of a three-leg day. He would end up in a Hilton Garden Inn somewhere in the Midwest, rather than comfortably at home with the wife and kids. Captains at Comair were wily 20-year union veterans with bitter memories of the spring 2001 strike that shut down the airline, happy memories of the fat pay deal that followed, and raging anger against heartless corporate owner Delta Airlines whose 2003 bankruptcy resulted in some scaling back of their pay (see “Unions and Airlines”). As far as the senior pilots at the airline were concerned, Delta had filed Chapter 11 purely in order to piss them off. They would take it out on the company in a variety of ways. One captain refused to allow me to use thrust reversers after landing. He wanted to burn up the company’s brake pads (no doubt rather costly parts on a $28 million airplane!). Even when we landed on a wet runway following a thunderstorm I was forbidden to use reverse thrust (the brakes worked fine, thanks to the fact that nearly all American runways are grooved, which prevents hydroplaning).

My captain for the trip to Grand Rapids wasn’t angry but he didn’t want to spend the night in a crummy hotel either. After I finished preflighting the airplane I discovered the captain talking with our flight attendant, an equable woman in her mid-50s. She had related that a friend’s husband had died recently and she was sad about it. The captain declared that she was obviously too upset to work the short trip that we had planned and instructed her to go home. Scheduling, the natural enemy of all pilots, then had to come up with another flight attendant. Flight attendant salaries are low but health insurance costs are so high in the U.S. that airlines tend to run slightly understaffed. They don’t have a room full of spare people waiting to step in. So it took about six hours for a replacement flight attendant to arrive, fresh off a plane from JFK. The captain had correctly figured that by the time a new flight attendant was found, the CVG-GRR-CVG trip would be delayed so long that he wouldn’t be legally able to fly the third leg.

Though I was anxious to begin the 11-hour drive to New York City there was nothing that I could do but wait. One of the ways that I killed time was to have a long dinner in the terminal with my female companion. Finally, however, it was time to go. I left her in the terminal and go into the plane to GRR.

By the time we got to Michigan it was pitch black outside. The airport was in the throes of a major construction project. The first 2000′ of the runway to which we were assigned was closed. The instrument landing system (electronic glide slope) and the PAPI (red/white lights that provide visual glide slope information) were shut down because they guide pilots to touch down roughly 1000′ down the runway, i.e., on a closed portion. So I had no electronic glide slope (just like the Asiana 214 pilots) and no visual glide slope (Asiana 214 had an operating PAPI prior to the accident; the wreck of the airplane destroyed the lights) and nothing to see out the window except the lights along the edges of the runway.

Making matters worse was the fact that I was sitting in the right seat of the airplane and, given the direction that we were flying in from, we’d been assigned to fly a traffic pattern involving left turns. I would have to look across the Captain and out the window to see the runway at all. This is challenging because, to save electricity, the runway lights are designed for best visibility when one is looking from a position that is aligned with the runway. It is also challenging because a Canadair Regional Jet is crammed full of switches and dials. The windows don’t provide nearly the angles of view that the windows of a light airplane or helicopter do. Heavy jets are designed to be flown by reference to instruments so the instruments are more prominent than the visual world.

If there are no red and white PAPI lights and no green needles in the airplane to indicate “too high” or “too low” how is it possible to land at all? The outline of the runway lights is critical. If the runway looks like a rectangle with 90-degree corners you’re flying right over top of it. If the runway looks like a little squashed trapezoid you’re probably grazing the treetops a couple of miles back. Somewhere in between these two sight pictures is what it should look like when on a 3-degree glide path. Unless one is completely familiar with the airport it is generally best to treat night landings as instrument landings and rely more on the PAPI and ILS than on one’s perceptions. But there was no PAPI, no ILS, and I’d never been to Grand Rapids before. It wouldn’t have been legal or practical to use the autopilot for the important parts of the approach.

Nobody was more surprised than I when the airplane touched down in the first third of the runway, the automatic ground spoilers popped up, and we turned off about two-thirds of the way down the runway and the captain took over for the taxi to the terminal (there is only one “tiller” on the airplane for making tight turns on the ground and it is on the captain’s side).

I was headed into the terminal to pick up our dispatch release (weather, flight plan, recommended fuel load, etc.) for the next flight, my mind fully occupied in congratulating myself on a job well done and reflecting on how lucky everyone was to be alive after an 80-hour jet pilot had done a visual approach at night to the kind of runway (flat pavement with edge lights) that normally only a local pilot in a Cessna 172 would use. My reverie was interrupted when a passenger pointed at me and started shouting to the gate agent and all the exhausted travelers getting off our plane and those who’d been waiting in the GRR terminal for six hours. “That’s the pilot who made our flight late. He wanted to have dinner with his girlfriend so we had to wait in Cincinnati for hours. I saw him in the restaurant and he wasn’t even hurrying.”

Related:

• My visual approach, and Asiana’s
• Asiana 214: Training with passengers in the back?
• Asiana crash thought: Positive exchange of flight controls between autopilot and human crew