I did just see this story and I'm always surprised when this happens. I have never personally witnessed this on the job but I know of several instances of it happening.

When I was just starting out at ACA I had an overnight with a Captain who was an alcoholic (which I didn't know at the time). He hit the ground running on our overnight and drank hard. I knew I couldn't keep up and left him in the bar. He seemed fine the next morning but for all I know he may not have passed a breathalyzer. He later entered the HIMS program (see: http://www.himsprogram.com/ ) and dried out.

When I was the Chief Pilot at ACA, I was the company management person assigned to deal with the pilots in the HIMS program there. Out of 1600 pilots, we had 3 guys in the program. All of them were good guys who knew they had a problem and were working hard to straighten out their lives and save their careers. I was required to have an interview with them once a month and report to the monitoring doctor (in Colorado). These guys did great and were extremely dependable.

Some others who never got into the program, but should have, ended up losing their job over it. The two things that will get your fired at an airline are substance abuse and sexual harassment.

HE got his job back with back pay (probably around $100k)

SHE got fired but later filed suit (for what, I don't know) and got a reported 7 figure settlement.

Stranger than fiction, isn't it? Absolutely true. His defense came down there being no proof of the incident, coupled with the fact that the Director of Operations got his story garbled when testifying before the arbitration board.

What if there are 5 parallel runways pointing due west (or at least pretty close, say like 274 degrees)?

OK, here's the rest of the story for you.

The plane they were flying was the J-41, a 29 seat turboprop. This was pre-9/11 so it had the crappy old cockpit door of that time which had a gap at the top of about an inch or so.

Now it's not really possible to look through this opening and look down into the cockpit, because the ceiling of the plane is right where the opening is. However, right inside the cockpit door, attached to the cockpit ceiling is a clear plexiglass cover which secures the aircraft operating documents there so that they're visible to an inspector (kind of like the certificates in an elevator): the Airworthiness Registration, the Operating Certificate, the Radio Station License.

Looking straight through the one inch slit, you can see the plexiglass, and the plexiglass had a nice reflection of what was going on below it, which was one crew member's head in the lap of the other and a certain rhythmic bobbing motion.

The FA did not report this activity to any supervisor. She just gossiped about it so much that it finally got around to a supervisor somewhere and caused an investigation. The FO was called in and she unraveled like a cheap suit, confessing everything.

There is some concern about this exposure. Basically, up at altitude you don't have the shielding effect of the atmosphere and are getting much greater exposure to solar radiation. And this is much stronger over the poles where the ozone layer is much thinner (is that right? is it ozone that does the shielding?)

I've never seen any data on this, but the conventional wisdom is that it has an aging affect. I've flown with a few guys who actually rub on skin protection at altitude.

"The only on-board "turbulence sensor" is the weather radar and it will indicate intensity of precipitation using colors (green, yellow, orange, red, magenta). We'll fly through green, though happily fly around it if it's not too far. We'll start thinking of longer deviations for yellow and starting with orange we'll start to go to extremes to avoid it."

Would magenta be like a hurricane or something?

Not as good as when I was 20 or 30. My years in turboprops were hard on the ears. I wore a David Clark headset along with ear plugs during that time.

The MD-88 was very quiet by comparison and the 767 is a pleasure to fly.

university of michigan did a study on this. effects are different at different times of the year, but the polar route is def. the most exposure. passengers won't usually have enough flights on these routes to make a difference, but crew who fly the route routinely can approach their occupational limits (if they even applied since it's outside the borders of the US and OSHA doesn't apply outside our borders) on an annual basis.

Here's the FAA rules about alcohol:

A pilot may not attempt to fly an aircraft or even attempt to be a crew member of a civil aircraft:

* Within 8 hours after consuming alcohol;
* While under the influence of alcohol;
* While under the influence of any drug that impairs a person in a way which is is contrary to safety;
* While having a blood alcohol concentration equal to or greater than 0.04 grams per decilitre of blood or grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath.

Many companies have stricter rules. At ACA it was "twelve hours bottle to throttle." I think it's the same at Delta, but I don't have my Flight Operations Manual handy.

Yes they do. When your name comes up for testing, you are met at the gate upon arrival and escorted to the test site (at the airport). Breathalyzer if it's an alcohol test; pee in a cup if it's a drug test. The test usually takes just long enough to ensure you miss your commute home.

In my years at Delta, I've been tagged for a random test only twice.

Had to think about this one, but no I don't.

Air Marshals are present on only a small percentage of flights and, when present, would only deal with an unruly passenger if they deemed him to be an immediate threat. Part of their Secret Squirrel training says that a disturbance (such as an unruly passenger) could be an attempt to flush out any law enforcement officers, thus enabling the other, more discreet terrorists on board to take effective action.

I dealt with a problem passenger on the ground before departure once when I was a Captain at ACA. He was giving our FA some grief and she needed backup. I also saw a case once where it resulted in a guy being taken off the plane in cuffs after he told the Captain that he didn't have to do what the Captain said.

My most recent brush with this was about 3 months ago in Nice. We had the son of Princess Caroline of Monaco (a real Prince) get on the plane drunk. Technically we're not supposed to take a passenger who is drunk, and the Captain was ready to have him pulled off the plane, but he was apparently a docile drunk and the Nice station manager was nearly having a fit that we were even considering taking the Prince off the plane. Ultimately the Captain left it up to the FAs since they would have to be the ones dealing with him. They gave him the thumbs up. International crisis averted.

I'm just waiting for someone to mention "Brokeback Mountain".

Their first indication of this would probably be another passenger complaining that someone has been in there so long. While there's no stated time limit, if it really did approach an hour and a flight attendant was aware of it, I'm sure they would alert us because this would have to be considered suspicious. They would attempt contact, I'm sure, to see if the person needed assistance and as a last resort would enter the lav (they can be unlatched from the outside).

7500' is very short for a 747 and is probably out of the question for a fully loaded one, but AF1 has the luxury of traveling with very light loads when they want to.

I couldn't tell you much about aircraft tires, but I can tell you that impact is not one of the big problems. We usually touch down at a very acceptable descent rate. Now going from zero to 150 mph instantaneously takes some tread off them.

You don't see blowouts that often because we look at them before each flight during the walk-around inspection. When a tire starts to look worn, or we find a cut or puncture, we notify maintenance and they make the determination to either change it right then or sign it off for further service (sometimes limiting it to, say, 5 more landings before being changed).

A single blowout on landing isn't really a big danger, is it?

Yeah the company has a contract with the hotels and, of course, they pay for it. Our union has a hotel committee that ensures that the hotel meets contractual standards (I'm referring to the pilot's contract with the company which covers everthing from work rules to pay rates). One thing we've been pushing for lately is to have free internet on overnights. That's almost taken for granted in the U.S. now, but overseas many places still charge for it and it can be high (like 18 Euro for 24 hours in Berlin...about $27).

We stay in nice places, 5 star hotels in many cases. I'm not complaining.

As far as upgrading, I've never asked, but any extra cost would fall to the pilot. You can't be comped instead...it's use it or lose it.

Well played sir. Well played.

Thanks Matt.

I sometimes marvel at the fact that a mere 15 feet below where I'm sitting it is about 7 miles of nothing right down to the ocean (and a bitterly cold ocean at that). I am also impressed with the extreme reliability of these planes. Back and forth across the Atlantic, day in and day out. They really have worked a lot of the bugs out since Lindbergh's time.

I don't really think the fear is all that irrational because, as you note, it's not really natural. I think the rest of us are in a societal-induced state of denial. "Must be ok, everyone else is doing it and they seem to be living."

You just need to become assimilated...

The typical trip is 3 days. Report time 1.5 hours before flight time, usually some time in the afternoon on day 1, but could be as late as 8:30 pm. So I catch a commute up in the late morning and then kill time in the crew lounge.

Depart in the late afternoon or evening. Arrive in Europe between 1 and 5 am Eastern time, 7-11 am destination time. Go to hotel. Take nap. Explore city. Meet crew for dinner etc. Try to sleep that night.

Day 3 - return to JFK, arriving in the afternoon. Commute home.

We have longer trips too, sometimes just with longer sits. Like a 5 day trip to Nice, with 72 hours on the ground. Or last January I did a 10 day Moscow which was:

Day 1 Depart JFK
Day 2 Arrive SVO
Day 3 Depart SVO; arrive ATL
Day 4 Depart ATL
Day 5 Arrive SVO
Day 6 Depart SVO; arrive ATL
Day 7 Depart ATL
Day 8 Arrive SVO for 48 hour layover
Day 10 Depart SVO; arrive JFK

Schedules vary month to month. You can bid to have at least a day off between trips if you want. Some guys like to stack their trips together so they only commute to NY once a month. They might do three 3-day trips back to back. In between trips they stay in a crash pad in NY.

I like a day or two off between trips.

fyp.

You don't see many mainline Delta jets at CVG any more. It's been taken over by the RJs. I was once based there and loved the area and the airport. It's a shame.

The typical descent angle for final approach is 3 degrees. That's what most Instrument Landing Systems (ILSs) are set at (the actual angle is always printed right on our approach plates).

If it's even 3.5 degrees (only half a degree different) it appears noticeably steeper. The surrounding terrain can sometimes give the illusion of steepness that is not actually there. The airport that comes to mind is Lindbergh Field in San Diego. Final approach follows the contour of the city as it descends towards the runway. It feels like you're diving into a bowl, but the glideslope is still right around 3 degrees.

All the preceding applies to heavy transport category aircraft. I remember back in the 70s and 80s, they used to fly Dash-7s into Philly and that plane (a 4 engine turboprop) had tremendous STOL capability (Short TakeOff and Landing). It would actually approach at a 7 degree glide slope, which would feel something like a Space Shuttle approach.

So not sure what kind of plane you were on in Copenhagen. If it was a prop, it might have been as steep as you felt it was. If it was a jet, it was probably an illusion.

Perfectly is your key word here. Schweizer (sp?) makes some incredibly sophisticated gliders...very smooth and aerodynamic. I've never ridden in one but I've read other pilots' accounts that they are incredibly quiet...just slipping through the air.

That's what I expected when I flew gliders while living in Hawaii. But I was in a training glider with gaps in the canopy (didn't fit perfectly flush to the fuselage as in a Schweizer) and it was noisy in flight. I was very disappointed in that.

So in the comparison you are positing, you might notice the drag as a slight (2 kts?) decrease in cruise speed, but you might also notice a difference in sound. Again this assumes the first case was perfectly smooth and aerodynamically clean.

To keep occupied during portions of a flight when there isn't much to do, do pilots ever make up little games to play with each other? (I'm thinking of the car games everybody plays as a kid on long car trips.)

What is your climb rate upon takeoff?
and decent rate on approach?

I had this exact thing happen. I don't know the aircraft type, it was on Czech Air from Prague to Frankfurt. I'd like to know about this too.

Great thread, thank you.