As I mentioned in my last post, I am on IOE right now at work. IOE stands for Initial Operating Experience. Basically, I have learned how to fly a CRJ in a simulator. I have been tested and qualified on that airplane. This week is my first week of actually flying the plane; the real plane. The reason they do this extra training is to help pilot's adapt to flying that plane in the real world. It's actually tougher than you'd think; depending on your thinking.

Well, starting yesterday, Captain made me do most of the flying. My first landing was in Columbus, Ohio. Surprisingly, it was really smooth! I was pretty proud of myself. When the passengers were deplaning, I had a smug grin on my face. I just wanted to look over my shoulder and say, "yup, folks, that was a right-seat landing. Right here. This guy. No big deal." All the while pointing at myself. But I'm not exactly that arrogant, so I didn't do that. But I sure thought about it.

So you know, today went very well. We flew out of Houston and did a turn out of Charlotte and Savannah. It was great. I flew each leg and it was really a ton of fun. Returning to Charlotte from Savannah was the most fun flight so far. We had bad weather in Savannah, it was raining, and the visibility wasn't great. The entire route was peppered with thunderstorms which I got to dodge. I know it may sound sarcastic, but really, it was a lot of fun. Well, after having made quite a few decent landings over the last two days, I figured that I would get this one down no problem. I was wrong.

As the ten-foot call came out, I reduced the thrust to idle, and Captain said, "A little higher, a little higher." So, I tried to get the nose up just a skosh more, when the main gear just smashed into the runway. Boom! As the nose came down to settle on center-line, I put on the reversers and continued to roll out. 'Well, at least we know we're on the ground anyway,' I thought, as I shook my head in shame. The Captain just chuckled a little. After we had parked at the gate he looked at me, "If it were easy to do, everyone would do it. We all have a rough one from time to time, so don't sweat it." He went on with a little more ego boosting, and he had me laughing within about a minute. He went on, 'Now, for your penance. Get up and stand at the door. You have to look each one of those passengers in the eye as they walk out of the plane and smile. If they give you grief, you've got to take it like a man. Chin up.'

Uneagerly (I know that's not a word), I got up out of my seat and walked to the cockpit door. The second, and I mean the second I opened it up, there was a sixty-five year old man, "Son, did you fly in the Navy?" Knowing that he was talking about the incredibly hard aircraft carrier landings, I just smiled and said, "Nope, never in the Navy. They want me badly though." A few people just looked at me and shook their heads. One gal was crying. One guy patted me on the shoulder, "Next time man, you'll get it the next time." After all the passengers got off, our flight attendant, who is a very boisterous African-American lady, figured the passengers were far to gracious to me and said, "Boy, I'ma thought you killed us." Then she erupted in laughter. "Oh, honey, I'ma just givin you a hard time. It wasn't that bad." I just stood there and smiled.

After the plane was all picked up, and I had all of my things, I made my way down to the hotel van pickup. It was an uneventful drive "home" and I was happy that there was nobody there to rib me on my seventy-thousand pounder . As I walked into the hotel I instantly felt better. I was the tallest guy in the place, and not by a few inches either. I was taller than everyone else by a good two or three feet. Apparently, there is a Little People of America convention happening at the Holiday Inn Airport here in Charlotte.

Suddenly I felt badly again "Oh," I thought to myself, "these people must have been passengers on my last flight. They were five and six feet tall before we left Georgia." I went to my room and closed the door.

Self discipline is something that a person cannot have enough of. Though I consider myself a disciplined person, I fear sometimes that my life is still not disciplined enough. I read another cockpit voice recorder (CVR) transcript tonight; this time from a Pinnacle Airlines Flight that crashed on October 14, 2004. The reason I read this particular transcript is because these guys crashed the exact same make and model plane that I fly. What was wrong with the plane? Nothing. The problem was with the pilots.

The Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) 200 series, like all airplanes, has limitations. These guys were intimately familiar with this planes limitations; you can tell by the way they spout off some of the basic numbers while they dealt with the emergency they created for themselves. At one point in the transcript, the captain says, "okay as soon as we’re abov- below thirty thousand we can start the [Auxiliary Power Unit]." That is a limitation one learns in when studying this plane. Clearly, these guys knew the plane. They also knew that the plane would have an extremely difficult time climbing out of 38,000 feet for 41,000 feet.

So ensued the discussion that occurred between the Captain and First Officer. Basically, the tone of their conversation was that of a dare at a junior high birthday party. The First Officer said to the Captain, "Forty-one it." Which, when paraphrased, says, "I dare you to take this thing to the limit." Well, I will try my best to spare the insider, technical jargon, but basically, the manufacturers of the CRJ have said clearly that this plane will have difficulties climbing from 38,000 feet to 41,000 feet (its limit) and that crews should observe special procedures while making that climb. The result of this crew's dare? Both engines flamed out, and seized. The cores of both engines locked down and they became useless.

In a twenty-minute, emergency descent out of 41,000, these guys were unable to restart the engines. In the last seconds of before their impact, the plane warned them:

TOO LOW! TERRAIN! TOO LOW! TERRAIN!
*WHOOP, WHOOP* PULL UP!

Read the complete transcript

But it was no good. There was nothing they could do to change it. Their actions from twenty-minutes before sealed their fate. Or was it just their actions from twenty minutes before?

I don't pretend to know these guys. I can't really judge them, but I am going to make some conclusions later on, and I hesitate. There is a possibly that in 5, 10, 15, 30 years that punk kid could be writing about the CVR from my last flight. So with that said, I will do my best not to destroy their memory.

I have written several times about having difficulties being a good human being. I have written about how it is so easy to be "a guy" at work, and go along with with locker room conversations and the ribald jokes. I have gone now for a few weeks without tobacco; this is quite easy considering that I am not around any of my buddies who all still use it. You know, the other day, I ordered an ice cream sundae at Denny's outside of Sky Harbor Airport and I had told myself that I "deserved it." But I didn't and I don't. I ordered it because I lack self control. I swear at work because I lack self control. The whole reason that I am spending fifty bucks on one hundred pieces of nicotine gum is because I lack self control. And that really bothers me.

"He that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much."

Luke 16:10 American Standard Version

If you download and read the transcript that I had mentioned above, you can see that there were several times before the primary incident occurred that either pilot could have interrupted the sequence of events that led to their demise. If just one had stopped and listened to his conscience, they would have lived. And is that so hard?

It might be. Especially if one is not accustomed to listening to his conscience. What's 38,000 feet? Ah hell, we're here anyway, we may as well go on up to 39. Why not 41? "Forty-one it!"

It's easy to let our better judgment go, especially when our own social acceptance is hanging in the balance. What if Captain Rhodes had said no to the First Officer? Well, word might get out that he's a chicken, or a spoilsport. Who wants to be known as that guy right? So forty-one it is.

"²¹My son, preserve sound judgment and discernment,
do not let them out of your sight;
²²they will be life for you,
an ornament to grace your neck.
²³Then you will go on your way in safety,
and your foot will not stumble;

Proverbs 3:21-23 NIV

"If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him"

James 1:5 NIV

You know, I think I would sooner be a killjoy than roadkill. A good friend of mine who is a Chief Pilot at a regional airline, much like Pinnacle, once talked to about a few of his Captains. He said to me, "I would put my family on their planes without thought or worry." And it made me wonder, 'Did people think that about the two Pinnacle pilots? Do people think that about me?' To be quite honest, that is the single greatest honor of being a pilot. That someone would willingly entrust the lives of their families to me. I know how big of a deal that is. I'm a dad. So I am on the quest to continually check myself. I don't want to ever push the limits unless there is some dire operational need.

I think that self-control starts in the small things in a persons life. I believe that's why I am on this quest to stop using tobacco, and to curb my foul language, and to read my Bible a little bit more. There is nothing fun about digging into my soul and examining it with a magnifying glass; however, I believe it is very necessary. I want you to feel safe leaving your wife, or mother or daughter or son in my care. So maybe swearing in and of itself is not that big of a deal, but it starts there, where will it stop? At forty-one thousand feet and descending?

There is a slight upside to this story. These pilots were ferrying this plane. It was just the two of them on board. Just the two of them died, and they didn't kill anyone on the ground; however, I doubt that their widows take much solace in that.

On December 29, 1972, Eastern Airlines flight 401 crashed in the Florida Everglades just off of the Miami International Airport. The circumstances causing the crash are nothing but chilling. On approach to landing, the crew of the flight arriving at Miami International from JFK noticed that one of the lights indicating the landing gear position was not illuminated. What this means is that they had a gear unsafe indication. So on the landing path, the crew opted to "go missed"; that's to say that they decided not to land.

Air traffic control instructed the crew to climb to two-thousand feet. With the autopilot on, the two pilots and one flight engineer focused their attention on the landing gear problem. Obviously, the prospect of landing without one of the landing gears down and locked was unsettling. They tinkered around the cockpit for a while trying to figure a solution to their problem. What follows is the transcript from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) from Eastern Air Flight 401.

Captain Robert Loft

First Officer Bert Stockstill

Second Officer Don Repo

23.41:40	Air Traffic Control	Eastern, ah 401 how are things comin' along out there?
23.41:44	Captain on the Radio	Okay, we'd like to turn around and come, come back in
	Captain to First Officer	Clear on left?
	First Officer to Captain	Okay
23.41:47	Air Traffic Control	Eastern 401 turn left heading one eight zero
23.41:50	Captain	Huh?
23.41:51	Captain on the Radio	One eighty
23.42:05	First officer to Captain	We did something to the altitude
	Captain to First Officer	What?
23.42:07	First Officer to Captain	We're still at two thousand right?
23.42:09	Captain	Hey, what's happening here?
23.42:10		*Sound of Ground Proximity Sensors*
23.42:12		*Sound of Impact*

Read the full transcript...

For one reason or another, the autopilot did not hold 2,000 feet, and despite altitude warnings, the crew focused on the problem rather than fly the airplane. The chilling thing about Eastern Air 401 is that there was nothing wrong with their landing gear. In fact, the plane was perfectly fine for landing. The problem was that the light bulb indicating the nose gear's position was burnt out. The plane slowly glided to impact in the Glades while the crew messed with a faulty light.

It makes you sick doesn't it? 101 people killed over a 50-cent light bulb.

The details from Eastern Air 401 are known by almost every pilot I know. We learn from this crash that no matter what is happening on the flight, someone hast to be flying the plane, and someone has got to adjust their gaze to the flight. The reason I bring up this crash is not to talk about aviation at all. I wanted to bring to light my own personal issues (as always).

Tonight I got home from a training session, and laid on my bed for about forty minutes or so surveying my friends on Facebook. I had been pretty bummed out, because I haven't seen my wife and kids in a week. I looked at such-and-such who just bought a new, huge house. I looked at so-and-so who has just become an electrical engineer. I looked at what's his name and saw that he's living a carefree, footloose life, and has no real responsibilities other than feeding his dog. Did you that what's-her-bucket has a pool in her back yard!?!

Anyway, I was just looking at all of those people whose lives are so much better than mine. After a small pity party for one, I had a reality check. Those people's lives are no better than mine at all. I'm simply looking at the wrong thing. I'm looking through the wrong looking glass. I have some pretty great things. I have a job. I have 2.5 kids who are healthy. I have a wife who loves me very much, and even though some of the romance has dwindled, we have a very healthy relationship. I have good in-laws. Heck, even my mother-in-law likes me. Most guys don't have that. I have my health. And most importantly, God still loves me; even though He shouldn't.

Tonight, I saw a lot of similarities between Captain Loft and me. I think he forgot how good things were. I think he forgot he was still flying. I think I forgot I was still living there for a minute. It's pretty scary to be looking through a shroud. I don't imagine that it's all that good a thing to go through life looking at what you don't have. Before you know it, you're looking at your doom and you figure out that what you needed you've had all along. Don't trade it for a 50-cent light bulb.