AK Range report.

Okay. So, I'm now about 500 rounds into the test run.  Another 500-1000 to go depending on how well I can survive the heat.  I got it rough sighted in last week and put a couple of hundred rounds through it. Today I finished tweaking the sights so they were as spot on as my tired ol' eyes can get it. Then finished the first box of 500 I had with me.

I actually got a FTF today I had about 100-120 rounds left out of the box and on the second round of a topped off 30 round magazine I had the round hang up and hold the bolt back about half way.

Yes, I know. AK's never jam.  Whatever.  This was bad enough I had to drop the mag and pop the dust cover off to get the round out from behind the bolt.

So, 500 rounds through, not been cleaned or oiled since I put a light, LIGHT coat of hopes on it after I first got it and 1 malf so far.  I've had AR's perform better.  Just saying.

I do have to say that Randy Kline, the gun smith at Jacksonville, TX who put it together, did an excellent job and the trigger is one of the smoothest I've ever had on a military rifle.  I highly recommend him for AK and FAL work.

I'll try to get the next 500 rounds put through it over the weekend if possible.  But it's slow going.  That rifle heats up enough that I can't hold onto the front grips without asbestos gloves after barely 100 rounds.  I had the thing literally smoking today, even with long breaks between magazines to let it cool down.
 

Trust me, I was never really gone.

Okay, aside from some stray thoughts I haven't posted here in a long time.

Trust me, I was never really gone.  Life just got really really busy for a while.  But that's soon to change, it should get even more so now.

Anyway, back in May, having had enough of Columbus and Ohio. I sought out a job in more polite climes.  I found one in Dallas fairly quickly and that's the short answer.

I'm a captain on a Falcon now.

The last month(s) I've been in indoc. training and then Flight Safety at DFW getting the type rating and then, finally, yesterday was the line check/299 checkride.  Sounds pretty simple, huh.

Not really.

The Falcon type I got is on a design that predates pretty much all of modern aviation's innovations, dark cockpit concept, ergonomics, standardization of instrumentation, etc. etc.  It was pretty much the first corporate jet on the market and as the saying goes, if you've seen one Falcon jet, you've seen one Falcon jet.

That being said, it's a very tough bird that'll take lots of abuse and aside from being underpowered (for a jet) it's really easy to fly.

Other than that, the 2 week initial type rating course that we were supposed to take at FS, turned into a 5 week exercise in hurry up and wait.  About the 3rd day of classroom of the 7 "book larnin'" days we were informed that the sim's visuals had broken and they were trying to fix it.  They'd know more soon and they would keep us updated as they learned it.  Apparently what happened was the Mylar screen that the visuals are projected onto had torn.  Well, the screen is vacuum formed to a curved frame and is kept that way by a constant vacuum action.  Then we find out that only Rockwell Collins, the original manufacturer of this screen system, had the ability to fix it, and they'd be a week getting a team together and getting down to Dallas to fix it.  So, we do our first two days of sim sitting in front of a poster on a wall pretending to flip switches and punch buttons.  Fun.

When that was finished they told us that there was a vibration that was causing the tears in the first place and they needed FAA approval to change the software to remove the vibration and fix the problem.  At this point we were going day by day as to when the sim would be back up.  The FAA being, well the FAA, it took them a week to shuffle the paperwork.

BUT....

By that time, they'd found "structural faults" in the hydraulic legs the sim rode on.  These legs move the entire sim around to simulate aircraft motion.  Now, FS was telling us we'd be week by week instead of day by day.  Hey, paid time off!  Except, part of my paycheck was on hold till I'd finished my line checks.  So, basically, FS cut my pay by 1/3 for a month.

Finally, replacement parts were in, paperwork was shuffled, stamped, folded, spindled and mutilated by as many levels of bureaucracy as possible and 21 days after the last time I showed my face at the DFW training center, I was back for 7 straight days of sim sessions and my type checkride.  Which was 28 days after the training started and 14 days after it was supposed to have finished.  So, 7 days of motion sickness, H'Ray!  You see, even though the sim gets close to what you'd feel flying the actual airplane, it's still not reality and the balance portion of your ears are still telling you one thing while what's actually happening is another.

Anyway, yesterday we finished up with the checkride and I now have 3 full fledged type ratings on my pilots license. Learjet, which allows me to fly the Lear 20 series, the Lear 30 series and the Lear 55. Lr-40/45 which covers two more Lear airframes and basically means the only Lear I can't fly right now is the 60.  And the Falcon.  But I know guys who have half a dozen or more type on their licenses so 3 isn't such a big thing.

Oh, as an aside, under my license's limitations section, it now says English Proficiency.  I would never have known that being proficient in the English language would be a limitation.  I guess if you would ask the French, they'd say it was.

Of course, right after the checkride, we sped over to the airport to get our line checks and what we refer to as our 299 ride done.  Basically it was all the portions of the checkride that FS couldn't do, because they were either company specific or required to be performed in an actual airplane, not a sim.

That was fun, motion sick and all.  It basically turned yesterday into a 16 hour marathon.

On the bright side, my pay jumped by a 1/3 yesterday, so H'Ray for disposable income!

Oh! The move. That was... fun.

My friend Phlegm Fatale coordinates and schedules moves for a national freight company.  I'd used her before to move from Tulsa to Columbus and she/They were both cheap and very good at doing it.  So I contacted them for the move to Texas.  The same relocube cost me 3 times the Tulsa to Columbus price! OUCH! So, I went to UHaul to try to save some money.  The price they quoted me for buying and installing a hitch and electric connector on my Jeep, the trailer and packing boxes and materials was going to keep the move under a grand even including gas, hotels and food on the move.  Except they wont rent trailers to soft top Jeeps.  Which, if you ask me, is Jeepist on their part and we should picket them for being all jeepaphobes and jeepist.  Anyway, they would have ended up costing me half again as much as said national freight company quote for a truck, car trailer, etc. etc. so I went back to national freight company and had them do it.

You know, pretty much every line item that I budgeted for the move ended up costing about a grand more than I planned.

Part of the reason it was so much more expensive to move to Texas than to Ohio is all the jobs are down here and everyone is moving here.  So all the equipment ends up in the south.  The moving companies practically have to pay people to get their equipment up to the north.

While I'm at it, I really need to send out huge thanks to my friends in Texas for letting me couch surf while trying to find an apartment that I could afford and was within my insanely short response time of the airport. Lawdog, Phlegmmy, daniels, Desi, Thank You all so very much.

And that's pretty much what I've been up to in a nutshell for the last several weeks.  And aside from some minor stuff like internet for my apartment and buying new furniture, things are starting to settle down.  Although I still don't know if they'll give me time off for blogorado this year.

Life of a Charter Pilot....

Or, Thems the ways it goes...

So, the day after New Years, we're on a trip that takes us from home base, to Music City, to City of the Rising Dead Bird, then south of the border, WAY south, to Honduras, sit for a while and then bring them back.  Supposed to have been 8 days on the road, most of that outside of the US.

Except

We were flying the airplane into Music City tonight, the night before, so we could be ready for an early launch tomorrow.  And as we're descending into the approach we get a lovely CAS (caution and advisory system) message announcing the right engine chip detector has... detected.  Great.  It's a white message in the air, as opposed to amber or red, only because there's not a blasted thing we can do about it while we're flying.

Of course as soon as we touch down it goes all amber and chimes at us.

Now, rather than racking up nearly 15 hours of flight pay, we're possibly losing this trip and stuck here.

Dammit, I'm trying to bank enough in flight pay each month to pick up my rotary rating by the end of the summer.

And with that I'm done whining.

Ah Spring...

When a young man's thoughts lightly turn to fancy...

Or thoughts fancy turn to light. Something like that anyway. You know what the view outside my apartment looks like right now? First day of spring?

Fuck you Al Gore.

A Night in the Day in the Life of a Charter Pilot.

Okay, fun day Saturday. Saturday night/Sunday morning... not so much.

But first let me give you a basic lesson in meteorology. And believe me, any lessons from me will be about as basic as you get.

The life cycle of a thunderstorm, as we pilots learn, can be characterized into 3 stages. (This comes from AC 00-6A rev.1975)


LIFE CYCLE
A thunderstorm cell during its life cycle progresses through three stages - (1) the cumulus, (2) the mature, and (3) the dissipating.

The key feature of the cumulus stage is an updraft. The updraft varies in strength and extends from very near the surface to the cloud top. Growth rate of the cloud may exceed 3,000 feet per minute.

Precipitation beginning to fall from the cloud base is your signal that a downdraft has developed and a cell has entered the mature stage. Meanwhile, updrafts reach a maximum with speeds possibly exceeding 6,000 feet per minute. Updrafts and down drafts in close proximity create strong vertical shear and a very turbulent environment. All thunderstorm hazards reach their greatest intensity during the mature stage.

Downdrafts characterize the dissipating stage of the thunderstorm cell and the storm dies rapidly.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with my flight Saturday night? Well, let me tell you about my day.

Saturday started pretty early. I'd promised a friend that I would help him set up a table at the gun show and help out where I could. The gun show was fun and I got home around 6:30. I'd barely gotten seated to eat dinner when the phone call happened. Ah, the dreaded phone call. There's a pop up trip to Tampa Bay.

On a side note. When the weather is as bad as it was in Texas this last weekend, you can bet we'll get pop up trips. You see, the airlines won't be able to get in somewhere because the weather is too bad and the people who get bumped from the flight will invariably call the charter outfits to get them where they want to go. Because when the weather is so bad that a jumbo jet can't get through them, the much smaller corporate jets will... Umm, you see it's like this. A massive thunderstorm will take a larger passenger jet and really shake it up, so to speak, but a jet that's only a 10th the size of an airliner when it penetrates the storm will.... Okay, think about it this way. The turbulence in a large thunderstorm that's producing tornadoes will affect a small relatively light corporate jet differently than a larger airliner because... the small jet is safer because...

Yeah, I don't get it either. People, listen carefully. If the airlines can't make it somewhere because of the weather. There's a VERY good reason they can't. I can guaren-damn-tee you that that corporate jet is no safer. Some charter outfits will take your money and the loss of the airplane, the crew, you and your loved ones are just the price of doing business. Yes, it can be that cynical and cold with some of the outfits out there.

Anyway, we load up the guy, his wife and kids and plot a route that looks to be the safest and away we go.

We'd filed for 41,000 ft and we were slowly clawing our way up there. At about 39,000 ft, that's about 7 and a half miles straight up, we hit one of those updrafts I mentioned above. The vertical speed indicator shoots through 6000 ft/min and hits the peg. We blast through our assigned altitude and through the next thousand feet. We topped the updraft, or flew through it, around 42,500 feet and then the downdraft took over. We got sucked back down to under 40,000 feet with us doing everything we could to NOT get sucked into the thunderstorm proper. Ignitors on, throttles to max temp... We get 5 minutes of max temp before "bad" things happen to the engines, or at least that's what the engine manufacturer says. We get a block altitude of 39,000 to 43,000 feet and got our airspeed under control and continued on.

You see, we're experienced Lear pilots and we weren't scared at all. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Oh, and 43,000 feet wasn't enough to get over the storms. It was just all that plane could do.

The rest of the trip was... uneventful. Till we got back from Tampa and had to descend through that shit again.

Fun times... fun times.

And I finally hit my pillow just after 5am.

Home... Sort of.

I'm home. I spent a grand total of 24 days on the road last month. But since we can't count recurrent training and off days worked to that total, I only "logged" 16. Fun. They would have turned me around and sent me on another week out, but I gently reminded them that they have other pilots and I bribed the schedulers.

I'm definitely not drinking with the right crowd.

Right now, since we've lost a few pilots and added an airplane, we are so short handed that I can expect the same sort of schedule for the foreseeable future.

My bosses excuse for not hiring to even replace the loses is that he and the DO will fill in the schedule as needed. Except neither he nor the DO will fly on weekends or late nights. So the rest of us are getting cosy with the term Chronic Fatigue.

That's the nature of Non-scheduled 135 charter. No regulated days off. So if they wanted to fly us 10 hours a day, every day of the month, they can. The idea being that we'll have non-flying days and enough crews to cover the airplanes so no biggie. Except, when you have X number of crew and X+1 airplanes...

My boss blew up at one of the other guys for not agreeing to work his days off. Seeing as how we only have 6 hard days off (2 three day stretches) as it is. It's kind of hard to not sympathise.

The rumor is we'll lose our hard days off before we replace lost pilots.

And my bosses insistence that we're slow doesn't really jibe with the full flight schedule.

Edit: The trip that my friend got into hot water for not doing, didn't happen. See, the trip would have been on a Friday and that's weekend time for my boss and the DO. So, they weren't available for the trip because you see the weekend and all...

I'm Home!

Sort of.

The checkride went smoothly. Really, during the checkride, the guy flying has it easy. It's the guy sitting right seat that has it hard. Checklists were flying everywhere. Anyway, it went without a hitch. That came after we climbed out of the sim. My little day trip tomorrow morphed into a 6 day trip. So, by next thursday I'll have spent 12 of the last 12 days on the road. Our boss being the giving soul that he is has decreed that recurrent doesn't count as road time. Because, you know the whole away from home in a hotel flying everyday after sitting in a classroom all morning really isn't flying because... umm...

Like I said he's a giving soul. He has no problem giving away our time. Company policy is anything over 16 days on the road per month is considered 'overtime', and we get a little stipend for it. And before you see dollar signs cha-ching before your eyes, it's little. By not counting recurrent time, he gets an extra week out of us. It's a win/____ situation. But enought griping. I've got to finish laundry, get my uniforms ironed and repack.

T-t-t-t-training Day Two.

Okay. I'm definitely getting more tired. Today was more classroom and sim. We finished up flight controls. Mostly the secondary flight controls, CRM, Electrical, Flight Planning and Performance, and Weight and Balance.

CRM (cockpit resource management) is funny, depressing or frightening. Depending on what your company is like. For me it's depressing.

Electrical is just a nightmare. The old story goes that Mr. Lear, being an electrical engineer, loved to go in and rewire the airplanes to meet any customer request. The end being that electrical diagrams are almost literally individual per serial number. Yeah, I get headaches too.

The sim was more of the same. 600 RVR taxi and takeoff, V1 cuts, air restart, DME Arc to a Localizer Back Course followed by a miss and hold, then a VOR or NDB approach, and then a raw data ILS. And no autopilot today. Weee?

Are ya bored silly yet?

T-t-t-t-training Day One.

Same old, same old. Basic housekeeping paperwork, Intro and Rules, then Limitations (Hey, I don't think the airplane does what you think it does...), Avionics (There are 4 different RVSM kits available for the airplane. How many do of them do you have in your fleet? Five.) and Flight Controls (H'Ray cables and pulleys). Forty Five minutes for lunch then into the sim for: Start Malfunctions, Taxi, Noise Abatement, Air Work (Steep Turns, Stalls, Slow Flight, and Dutch Rolls) Just in case you were wondering, that's not were some little blonde kid with his finger in a dyke mugs you at knife point. A precision approach coupled with the autopilot to low mins, missed approach and a engine failure in flight followed by a single engine approach to landing. All in an hour and a half. Yeah, I'm tired. I've said this before. It's like trying to fill a dixie cup with a fire hydrant.

AR Build Update.

Does anyone know where there are Bolt Carrier Groups available. And I don't mean at outrageous 300% markups. It's enough to make a man depressed even.

I promise.

I will post tomorrow. I'm just beat right now.

Flu Update

yeap, I still got it.

The Downside of a Day in the Life of a Charter Pilot

One of the downsides to my job is the whole enclosed space thing. You see, if someone, say a passenger for instance, has a case of the flu when he walks on the plane in Miami. We're pretty much looking at catching the flu at some point in the three hour flight back to Kansas.

Blogging will resume when I have rejoined the land of the living.

Yet another Day in the Life of a Charter Pilot

So, here I sit, or lie more accurately, in a hotel room in Secaucus, NJ. Just a stones throw from Teterboro airport. It's day one of a 5 day goat rope around the eastern United States. Exciting, huh.

I'm also watching Waitress on TV. Andy Griffith is fucking genius in this. "I made sweet love to her all through 1948." Imagine Sheriff Taylor saying that. I laughed till I got the hiccups.

Merry Christmas to all.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I'm finally home. My six day Bahama trip turned into me flying all over the hemisphere. After dropping off the passengers in Nassau, we quick turned back to Oklahoma, then I proceeded to see the following airports:

(in no particular order)
Aspen
Las Vegas
Edmonton, AB
Panama City, Panama
Nassau
Home

I slept in Nassau twice. So, I saw the hotel and no time for anything else. The other airplane that went to Nassau spent the entire time sitting there. I think they bribed the schedulers. I don't have any proof, but I've hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to ferret out the truth. Oh yes, I will know the Truth!

My employer is gracious enough to give me tomorrow and then I head out again for 3 days.

Hug your loved ones.

A little whine

with my Sunday brunch.

Sorry for the silence yesterday. I was prepping for a late night run to Las Vegas and back. And by late night I mean finishing at 5 am this morning. The 120 knot headwind out didn't help much. But it sure was nice coming back. The hard part is trying to get to sleep after and then trying to get up early enough not to be a zombie all day and keep my circadian rhythm on some semblance of normalcy.

I'm failing miserably.

AR Build Update.

Or The Tail of the Barrel.

I'm getting word from the various AR manufacturers that I'm looking at anywhere from 12 weeks to 9 months for a lead time on the barrel I want.

WTF over?

Edit: This is an official Bleg. If y'all know of anyone out there with a 16" GI contour AR barrel with a mid-length gas block, please let me know.

Out of Pocket.

I'm getting ready for a 5 day trip starting tomorrow. My job being my job, every now and then we get a "paid" vacation to somewhere nice. This trip sends us to the Caribbean. Yeap, that's right. I get to spend a nice weekends relaxing on the beaches of Grand Cayman with the Caymanites Caymanonians Caymanists Caymantans Islanders.

Apparently, Thanksgiving is a November tradition only in the U.S. or October, if you're Canadian.

So, I'll be soaking up the sun alone while you all are shivering away in your homes with your turkey and stuffing and ham and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies and warm bread and yams with the mini marshmallows (mmmmm....) all the while surrounded by friends, family and loved ones.

Leave it to me to find the cloud in that silver lining.

The winter of our discontent... Day in the Life of a Charter Pilot

Sorry, I've been out of pocket for the last few days.

I had a one day trip turn into an overnight, turn into a full 2 days. I'm just getting home.

Fabreeze is your friend.

Wanenmacher Wrap up

A quick Wanenmacher Gun Show wrap up.

My feet hurt.

That is all.




Sorry, couldn't resist that one. The show was a madhouse on saturday and only slightly less so on sunday. I ended up not seeing any of the show except for what I caught friday after setting up. I had a couple of people complain that they would have bought something on saturday, but they couldn't get to the table for the crowd. I didn't get a second to even sit down both days. The tables we had were right in front of the concession stand and I couldn't get half a moment to even go there to eat. Saturday started out with a table full of Glocks of all makes with more underneath. Saturday ended with one lone Glock 23. Anything that was even remotely compact went. We had 4 pallets of Remington .223, the last of which went sunday morning by 9.

On the non-feet-divorcing-me side, aside from a couple of small things like a scale and calipers, I'm all set up for reloading. A friend from here in town picked up everything and built a 24" bull barreled varmint-er AR-15 with a nice scope and bi-pod. He started with nothing but a bare lower and by 5 pm sunday he was pushing the take down pins in. Not a bad deal. He also won the deal of the show award by finding a very rare trap door rifle for $75. The rifle is easily worth 100 times that. And yes I meant 100 (one hundred).

I want to send out a big thanks to Old NFO. First for getting me the C&R application. Second for pointing me towards Norgon's ambi-mag release. Third for swinging by when he'd spotted any deals for me. I just with I'd had a second to take advantage of them. Next time... Next time.

All in all, I'd have to give the show a big two thumbs up. For the largest gun show in the states, it's definitely a mecca for enthusiasts of all sorts. If you've never been, it's a must. Just make sure you've got a copy of a local FFL's license so you can get the transfers done if you're from out of state.