19 April 2004 01:56
i'm watching M*A*S*H right now. this show is way up my favorites list. strangely enough, hawkeye's humour appeals to me :).Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...
that suicide is painless...
it dawned on me today sometime after lunch. we holding short awaiting our ifr release--the "clearance says to expect three minutes" had stretched to a full seven and counting. i had my foot up on the circuit breaker panel, and was leaning back watching the rain wiggle off the windshield while ildly arguing with my captain over which navaid we should put on the number one radio. it dawned on me that i had definately chosen the right profession, i just have the wrong job inside of that profession.
technically, it's not so much of a dawning as it is a reaffirmation. the original dawning came late in the fall of my sophomore year when I was taking a few solo spins around the pattern to practice my landings. it was a bright sunny day in east texas, traffic was light, i'd just finished greasing one on. this was no ordinary landing. a teething baby could have laid in the back seat and slept through this landing. this landing was poetry in motion. but i must tell you, pure yells of sheer delight don't sound very good recycled through the intercom system. i made the landing, cleaned up on the roll and took off again, i was two hundred feet up in my climb out when i looked back through the rear windows and realized just how good that landing had been. it was at that moment that it dawned on me that i had chosen correctly when i enrolled in aviation, that a year and a half of college weren't for naught. (i don't know if you've noticed the setup, but i was being prepared for some um, lessons in humility two and a half years further into my aviation career.)
our operation requires half-decent weather to fly, we can't fly in instrument conditions. our morning flight had gone well, we were five hundred feet below our normal altitude, but the clouds actually seemed to be climbing. we scanned our next region on the way home, and it looked doable at three thousand. it was a little dicey getting through the santa ana canyon. too high and you can't see anything but cloud innards. too low and you can't see the high-tension wires crossing the valley. in the aviation community the santa ana canyon is referred to as the local "blood alley", but don't tell mom that.
we decided it was just a little too hairy, so we got an ifr clearance after lunch to head back up to the inland empire. this put us up at the opposite end of things. first too low puts you in conflict with mother earth. now too high put's you in contact with something else that's solid...ice. at five thousand feet we were imc at 1ºC. they vectored us around for an approach into chino. our intention was to follow the approach until we were below the clouds (which we expected to happen around 3000 msl), cancel ifr and then proceed to our region. however, we didn't fully break out until we were below 1500, there was a scattered layer around 1600 or so, not to mention the intermittent rainshowers. i was enjoying myself immensely. for starters, i'm just the FO, so i don't have to make any decisions, it's the captain that get's all the flak if something goes wrong. so he was tryign to figure out what to do while I was able to just concentrate on flying. speaking of which, i hadn't flown an ils since last may at the latest, and i still managed to keep the needles within two degrees all the way down to our break out. i was pretty tickled about that, but i'm probably just setting myself up for another lesson in humility again.
wayne (the captain) opted to land to figure things out, which i personally wouldn't have done if i were him, but he's the guy in charge, so i was more than happy to land at a different airport. that's part of what my job is lacking, is variety, although yesterday provided it's fair share of variety. so we parked at the tower and sat there with engines at idle for fifteen minutes while he called base and tried to figure a game plan out. the airport was pretty sleepy, the rain lightly drizzling down. i'm sure the tower crew was happy to have us there, we provided an interesting topic of conversation as we landed, sat there with the engines running, then taxied out and took off again. they know who we are, since socal doesn't work with us if the clouds push us down, they hand us off to the towers depending on the region. since i've started here in october, i've done about 70 landings, and all of them but this one were back at base. my boss was taking a plane over to john wayne the other month to get some avionics work done on it, he had the hardest time with socal, they kept trying to clear him to work the region over john wayne, not to actually land there.
i have to admit though, getting an ifr release from base usually is about one minute, getting it from chino was closer to nine. they had to work us in with the ontario departures, which usually climb out just ne of chino. that and most departures from chino go east, we were actually a tower-enroute back to base, it's probably the first time that particular clearance has been requested from chino in years, if not ever. but at anyrate, we killed about an hour with that little stunt, before winding up back on the west side, doing a region just south of lax. the weather that had been there earlier had moved ne (ie, over chino), so it was actually beautifully clear.. first time i've seen catalina in a few weeks. this summer's going to drag with all the smog. it'll be really nice when winter with it's clear days and santa ana winds rolls back around.
eventually i'll get a job (i hope) where i can do a lot of cross-country work. not the same runs week after week, but variety and challenge anew. a job where i can get paid to do something really fun like shooting approaches to minimum at a strange and exotic airport like Paris, TX. it has it's downsides, i actually spent close to 20 hours at the fbo in paris. they had nice couches and cable tv.. but it was still extraordinarily boring. but i learned a lesson from that 20 hours. always always always always always take a good book. so i carry a book with me on every flight now.
but in the meanwhile, my current job is actually a very decent one. sure, it has the tendency to get kinda boring between the "leave the ground" and "return ot the ground" moments, but it's the same way on those cross countries. some of the longest hours i've spent were in a king air at 14000 feet over southwest kansas headed for salina. the problem is it's not kosher to read a book while flying.. something to do with "see and avoid." oh well. that's where a good co-pilot comes in handy. but i spent three hours flying to kansas one time by myself--an absolute blast. although that did happen to be the same weekend that weather grounded me in paris texas on my way back.
so i'm enjoying what i have, even if socal is the only approach control i've talked to in a year. i'm just looking forward to something new at the same time.
01:56 email me permalink / commentary (0)
