An Unexpected Ferry

I was scheduled to finish my three day sequence by 8pm and, assuming all went as planned, should be relaxing at home by 9.  We started on Sunday afternoon with a pretty long 3 leg day and just under 8 hours of flying followed by a slightly shorter 2 leg day with just over 5 hours in the cockpit and finished up with one 3 hour leg home. We call these 3-2-1 trips and they’re usually difficult to get, especially for someone junior like me. Day three started out in Detroit, Michigan in a pretty nice hotel across the street from a mall with good restaurants and a movie theatre…not a bad layover. It was a nice fall day with rain in the morning and a cool cloudy afternoon. As a Texas boy, I appreciated a break from the heat and was happy that I had remembered to pack something warm.

We left Detroit on time, even though our jet came in a little behind schedule, and made good time with a tailwind of almost 120 knots for much of the flight. (The image above shows the wind in the bottom right hand corner as we approached St. Louis). About 30 minutes before landing, I sent a “changeover” report to the company. The changeover is an electronic report used to advise the company of our expected touchdown time so the ramp personnel know when to expect us. As usual, we got a printed response that listed our arrival gate and connecting gate information for the passengers and crew. This is the same gate information you hear the flight attendants read over the PA system during an arrival. Since this was the last leg of our trip, the words “No Crew Connect Info” were listed for the pilots and flight attendants. This was good news since it isn’t unusual to get a re-assignment at the end of a trip when the company is short of pilots and or flight attendants. As you can imagine, it is incredibly frustrating to be headed home with the family expecting you for dinner only to find out that you are needed for another day or two or work.

We landed on runway 35C at DFW and crossed 35L before contacting the ramp tower for taxi clearance to our gate. As we entered the ramp, we heard the words no pilot wants to hear in the last 5 minutes of a long trip…”1941 you need to call operations, they have a message for you.”

Long story short, 30 minutes later instead of sitting on the crew bus on my way to the parking lot, I was sitting in the right seat of an MD82 bound for our maintenance base in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were probably drafted for the ferry assignment because we were conveniently arriving home when Crew Tracking realized they needed a couple pilots for an unscheduled flight. We were easy pickings.  Our assignment was to fly the jet, empty, to Tulsa, spend the night, and deadhead home in the morning on the first flight we were legal to take. If you consider that we spent a little over an hour in the cockpit and were paid 5 hours for the extra day, it really wasn’t such a bad deal.

The really interesting thing about the evening was how the aircraft flew when it was empty. On a normal flight, the maximum takeoff weight for an MD82 is 149,500 lbs…but minus 140 passengers, 3 flight attendants, catering and enough fuel for an average flight, the aircraft weighed just over 100,000 pounds as we pushed away from gate A26.

It was my leg and as we taxied out onto runway 35L for departure, the Captain told me he would help me steer around the corner and that I had the brakes and throttles. The tiller, or steering wheel, is located on the Captains side of the cockpit which leaves only the rudder pedals on my side to steer and the pedals don’t have enough authority to get around a sharp corner. There was a heavy UPS MD-11 taking off in front of us so I elected to come to a full stop on the runway and set takeoff thrust on the engines before releasing the brakes. We are actually required to do this if we come to a complete stop on the runway before being cleared for takeoff, but tonight I really just did it for rush of acceleration I was expecting. After being cleared for takeoff, I pushed the throttles up to about 1.4 EPR and allowed the engines to stabilize before calling for the auto-throttles to set takeoff power. Once we had achieved takeoff EPR, I released the brakes and felt acceleration like you rarely experience in an airliner. Without that extra 50,000 lbs, the aircraft accelerated to rotation speed in no time and as we reached V1 and VR I smoothly pulled the nose up to almost 25 degrees to maintain V2 (minimum flying speed) plus 20 knots for the first 1000 feet of our climb before accelerating to a normal climb speed.

In that first 1000 feet, the VSI (vertical speed indicator) was pegged out at 6000 fpm and as I lowered the nose and accelerated to 240 knots as per the departure procedure, our climb rate never got below 4000 fpm. Once established at 240 knots, we were able to maintain at least 5000 fpm all the way to 10,000 feet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an MD80 climb that fast and I was a little surprised the departure controller didn’t make a comment about how light we must be.

We made it to our cruise altitude in record time and had a few minutes at cruise to contemplate the most unpleasant part of flying a light airliner…the landing. I’ve been on the MD80 my entire airline career and don’t have anything to compare it to, but I can tell you that this aircraft is a bear to land when it’s light. Nothing feels normal…the controls are light and touchy and the engines don’t like the power band required to fly an approach at this weight so you always seem to have a little too much or not quite enough power.  The touchdown is often not a pretty sight. The struts are designed to withstand a hard landing at 130,000 pounds (the max landing weight for an MD82), so without the extra weight to smooth things out, the touchdown is either going to be a greaser or it’s going to hurt your back side…nothing in between. I began making excuses for the landing as we joined the final approach course. I’m a little tired…big bug on the window…sure are light tonight…joking of course, but excuses don’t count after the fact, so you have to make them early and often. My landing was smooth and while I would love to claim it was the result of great skill and experience, I must admit that it was more about luck than anything else as I actually misjudged the runway and touched down a little earlier than expected. The Captain made some off handed remark about a blind squirrel finding a nut every now and then. He was just jealous.

We cleared the runway to the east and got in behind a “follow me” truck that guided us to a parking spot on the maintenance ramp in unfamiliar and alarmingly dark territory. You can't see the wing tips on an MD80 from the cockpit, so taxiing through tight and unfamiliar locations, especially at night, can be a bit unnerving.  As we completed our parking and shut down checklists, a mechanic appeared in the cockpit behind us. He had lowered the aft stairs and walked up to greet us. He was a friendly guy and also our ride back to the terminal where we would catch the hotel van for our nights rest.

This was a fairly old jet, built in the mid 80s. At first I though maybe it was being moth-balled. We’re currently parking 2-3 MD80s per month as we replace our older equipment with newer and more efficient 737s. We were happy to learn that the old girl was just in need of a few inspections and would fly again soon…maybe just not this light.

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Hermine's Revenge

In my 18 years as a commercial pilot, there have only been a handful of approaches memorable enough that I remember them in detail…Dallas, Ft. Worth in an ATR-72 in 1996 when I encountered wind sheer while flying an approach I probably shouldn’t have accepted in the first place…Toronto, Canada in the winter of 2002 in an MD-82, flying an ILS in white-out conditions with a strong 90 degree crosswind to a runway that was in serious need of a plow…New Orleans, as I mentioned in my last post, when I practically lost count of the number of approaches we shot in a single 24 hour period and yesterday, September 8th , 2010 at DFW, flying through the remnants of Tropical Storm Hermine. (The picture above shows the sun coming up over Hermine as she sat on Dallas, Ft. Worth.)

The Today show began this morning with a story entitled “Hermine’s Revenge,” an appropriate title given the events in and around the Dallas, Ft. Worth area yesterday. The airport officially soaked up 5.23 inches of rain as of 3pm, but nearby areas of town recorded as much as 9 inches. There were 5 confirmed tornadoes that touched the ground within the city limits and countless funnel clouds and rotations that mercifully remained aloft. The local stations today are streaming video of homes and businesses without roofs and area residents who were plucked from rising flood waters by fire and rescue crews. Clearly, it was a difficult day for those on the ground, but it was a significant challenge for those of us in the air.

My day started with a 4:15 wake-up call and a 6am departure for a short flight to DFW and a scheduled landing around 8:45 am. I watched the Weather Channel as I dressed at the hotel and couldn’t help but wonder if I would in fact be spending the night at home tonight as planned. We departed a few minutes ahead of schedule with a light load of passengers and enjoyed beautiful clear skies, a smooth ride and a gorgeous sunrise until we got to within about a hundred miles from DFW.

We had ample fuel on board, fully expecting to burn more than planned on this flight. Our official alternates were Dallas Love Field and Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wasn’t crazy about either of these choices...Love field is generally only put on the flight plan to fulfill a legal requirement…if you could land at Love, then you could certainly land at DFW, so what good is it? Tulsa would normally be fine, except that yesterday, there was a line of storms between DFW and Tulsa that I didn’t want to cross. The Captain and I discussed this before we departed and preemptively decided that something west of the airport like Abilene would better suit our needs. Hopefully we wouldn’t need it.

About a hundred miles out of DFW and just about the top of descent, we were told to slow as much as practical and told to expect holding over the Glen Rose VOR, a navigation point on the arrival southwest of the airport. At that point we started our calculations for “bingo” fuel. I’ve discussed this before, but bingo fuel is the fuel needed to fly from the holding point to the airport, execute a missed approach then continue from there to the alternate airport and land with acceptable reserves. We calculated our bingo fuel and estimated that we had enough fuel to hold for approximately 30 minutes. (The picture below was taken just prior to entering the hold.)




Holding was short and sweet. We began our entry turn into holding and were then cleared to DFW via radar vectors. The weather at the field was as bad as I’ve seen it in a very long time with heavy rain reported at and around the airport, visibility less than a mile and winds from 140 degrees at 12 gusting to 28 knots. We initially received vectors for the ILS approach to runway 13R, a runway on the far west side of the airport, but as we were approaching the airport, four jets in a row missed the approach due to windshear on short final. With the reports of windshear isolated to the west side of the airport, we received clearance to land on runway 17C, a north-south runway on the east side of the airport.

The ride during the last ten to fifteen minutes of our arrival was pretty uncomfortable. We entered heavy rain about 30 miles from the airport and endured continuous moderate turbulence and airspeed fluctuations as high as 25 knots until about 1500 feet on the approach. The speed fluctuations calmed down after we joined the final, which was a good thing, since anything more than about 15 knots inside the final approach fix would probably result in a divert.

As an added concern, the rain was so intense that our on board radar was attenuating. Radar attenuation occurs when a strong weather cell reflects all of a radar signal, preventing that radar from detecting any additional cells that might lie behind the first cell. When approaching a line of thunderstorms and trying to find a path through to the other side, it is good practice to tilt the radar down in an attempt to “paint” the ground on the back side of the storm. If you are unable to paint the ground on the other side of the storm, then the weather ahead is so dense that the radar signal is unable to penetrate it and thus, unable to detect what may be on the other side. For us, the intensity of the rain was preventing the radar from being able to “see” more than 5 to 8 miles ahead of the aircraft. In this scenario, a pilot is forced to rely on reports from aircraft ahead, ground radar and what little warning is available from the limited sight capability of the on board radar.

Regional Approach Control brought us in 10 miles in trail of the aircraft ahead and vectored us to intercept the ILS to runway 17C. Once on the localizer, we intercepted the glide path and began to configure for landing. Thankfully, the turbulence seemed to subside somewhat as we descended below 1000 feet and the airspeed fluctuations dropped from plus and minus 25 knots to a little less than 15. The tower was reporting RVR of 4000 feet at the touchdown point, the minimum allowable visibility for me, the First Officer, to fly the approach and land, so I continued at the controls. We were still flying though heavy rain at this point, so I asked the Captain to set my windshield wiper to high as we passed through 500 feet. The Captain activated both wipers and noted that he could see the ground when looking straight down, a good sign that we would soon see the runway. At about 400 feet, the approach lights came into view and the runway was in sight shortly thereafter.

There is such a thing as touching down too smoothly. It is possible to waste thousands of feet of runway while holding the jet off in an attempt to “grease” it onto the runway. (The touchdown is the only thing anyone remembers.) When landing on a wet or short runway, it is much better to comfortably, but firmly place the aircraft on the ground. If you’ve ever sat near the wing on a large jet, then you have seen the ground spoilers deploy after touchdown. These spoilers, depending on the aircraft, are usually activated by a “weight on wheels” switch or by wheel spin-up. If an aircraft lands too smoothly, especially on a wet runway, then the wheels will not spin-up and there may not be enough weight on the wheels to deploy the spoilers. The spoilers are designed to do two things, both important when landing in inclement weather or on short runways. First, they create drag. Second, they kill lift and put the aircraft’s weight on the wheels allowing more traction and more effective breaking. Both are vitally important.

In this case, we touched down smoothly enough that the spoilers did not deploy. I felt two expansion joints in the runway pass beneath the main gear with no reaction from the spoiler lever, so as I lowered the nose to the runway, the Captain manually deployed the spoilers, which put our weight where we needed it and gave us the traction we need to stop the aircraft on the runway. The runways at DFW are both grooved and shaped in such a way that water drains to the side. So as I applied the brakes, the aircraft felt more like it was on a damp runway than on a runway subjected to hours of heavy rain. We slowed at a normal pace and exited the runway.

I must admit, that I can recall precious few approaches that successfully elevated my heart rate. I pride myself in being good at what I do and being calm and professional as I execute my duties. This approach…got my heart beating. As we cleared the runway I became aware that my heart was racing and that I was very happy to be on the ground. There’s an old aviation saying…maybe you’ve heard it…that it’s “better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground.” I was very happy to be on the ground.

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