A Jagged Path

This was written in 2016 before I went to ground school.

***

I've decided to change airplanes.

For an airline pilot, this is kind of a big deal. The equipment you fly at an airline determines a bunch of things: it sets the route structure you'll spend your time plying; it dictates your seniority (since overall seniority in the company is less immediately important than your relative seniority in your fleet and seat); it dictates the minutiae of your work schedule (and, in our case, your sleep schedule).

And there's the equipment itself. An airplane is an airplane, maybe, but each transport jet is kind of its own world, and we must immerse ourselves in the particulars and minutiae if we are to operate it efficiently and safely. And that's an involved undertaking.

I come to my current job by way of about eight years at regional turboprop airlines. That means I flew passengers on short-haul routes, flying many short legs in the course of a typical workday. Lots of legs, mostly hand-flown, down at low altitudes in the weather. Lots of instrument approaches, lots of paperwork and refuelings and weight-and-balance calculations. Lots of repetition of checklists--over and over again multiple times every day. Eight years of this. This contrasts pretty sharply with my current job flying international cargo on a heavy jet. I tend to fly very few legs, almost all of them long-duration legs flown under automation at high altitudes above the weather.

So life in these two jobs is very different in pretty much every way. The only commonality is that in both cases I'm operating a pretty complicated machine in the contemporary ATC and IFR environment.

When I came to my current employer 15 years ago I began in the old Douglas DC-8, first as a flight engineer (a new job for me) and then as a First Officer (copilot). This was my first experience with a heavy jet (or any jet, though a turboprop motor is in fact a jet engine that's used to drive a propeller instead of moving the aircraft purely by exhaust thrust), and it represented quite a change from the flying I knew. Most DC-8 workdays consisted of two legs: one leg after sundown from some city--Milwaukee or Detroit or Denver or Cleveland, etc.--into our package sorting facility, and another before sunrise back out to our starting point. Two legs per night, 10 legs per week. Week-on, week-off; that meant about 20 legs per month. This contrasts with my turboprop days where we averaged six to eight legs per day.

The upshot of this was that I was now flying a much larger, heavier, faster airplane and had much less time with my hands on the controls to master the task. It happened, of course, but it took me a year in the DC-8 to log as much time as I would have accumulated in a couple months of my previous job.

After eight years on the DC-8 I moved to the MD-11, where I found this same situation amplified and extended. Now I was flying a VERY heavy jet on VERY long legs. Typically one leg of nine or ten hours every other day.

The MD-11 is a challenging airplane. It can be unforgiving, with a history of punishing certain kinds of mistakes very severely. It's not an especially tricky airplane to land, but mistakes on landing can be problematic. And because of a couple design details, it's one of the fastest airplanes in the terminal environment and on approach, which makes it a challenge for controllers to integrate it with other traffic, and a challenge for pilots to play well with other airplanes (we're routinely told we're rapidly catching the airplane in front of us since we commonly are flying 30 knots faster than anything else in the pattern). And for this most challenging airplane to fly, we get our hands physically on the controls about 1/4 as often as with the DC-8 (which means about 1/16th as often as with my prior turboprop flying).

This is not a great combination. More challenging flying, less opportunity to practice. This is even further exacerbated by the fact that a portion of the copilots' time is spent as International Relief Officers--a third crewmember whose job is to give the other two flying pilots a rest period during long flight legs (since no pilot can be in the seat more than 8 hours in a day). Most F/Os on the MD-11 spend at least some of their time at IRO duties, and the IRO virtually never does the takeoff and landing. So the already-much-reduced number of legs is further reduced to below 50% for the F/O.

All this has factored into my thinking about what airplane to bid. The MD-11 has allowed me to see the world--literally. I've circumnavigated the globe in the last eight years probably 40 times or more, which activity, world travel, has been No. 1 on my bucket list forever. And it's an extremely comfortable airplane: quiet and spacious and with great visibility. It has a bunk for rest periods, a small galley with an oven and hot cup and refrigerator, and plenty of room for crew and jumpseaters. And it typically involves a one-long-leg-to-the-hotel workday, with the plusses and minuses that entails.

But with my background, I've long been leery that this is the right working environment for me--regardless of how much I may like it. My time on the airplane has allowed me to get mostly comfortable with the airplane's challenges and limitations, but always there is a sense that the airplane waits to bite if you step out of line. And the nature of the work we do with the airplane gives us the bare minimum opportunity for keeping abreast of these challenges.

My original plan was to settle in on the MD-11 and stay there until I could hold the captain's seat. But this would have required my changing domiciles and commuting up to Alaska. And after years of stagnation--almost nobody was leaving Alaska to make new captain spaces there--this was an uncertain path for progression. Add in my skepticism about the challenges of the MD-11--and my sense that learning a new airplane might be all for the good--I decided it was a good time to move over to the 757 / 767. I get to stay on my beloved international schedule, and I'll have the chance to learn a new airplane as a co-pilot--rather than step into the commander's chair in an unfamiliar machine.

***

(Shift back to the present day.)

And so it worked out. Another consideration at the time was my awareness that an upgrade to captain would likely be available sooner on the 757, and that (as the most numerous aircraft type in our fleet—by a large margin) I’d just have many more flying opportunities on this fleet than on the MD-11. And the situation unfolded thus.  I had barely finished my copilot training on the 757 before I got notice that I’d been awarded a captain upgrade on the fleet.  And that’s another post.