Winter Wonderland
Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? On the Ramp, Type IV is glistening. A beautiful sight, on fire tonight, flying in a winter wonderland…
So there we were, on the runway at KABE, Allentown, PA. The visibility was 1/4 mile in moderate snow and the runway was contaminated. Not recently plowed and now navigable, but contaminated. Braking action poor.
APU deferred.
Sometimes it pays to be a first officer. All this was in the sim, and tonight I had a change in the training pace.
Up till now, I’ve trained with Dean, a former Marine. We’re both first officers in training; we had to swap seats halfway through the lesson so we could each get some time in the proper seat.
Last week, my body battled a midnight-4 a.m. schedule and lost. A hint of a previous sinus infection resurfaced and invaded my ears… not a pleasant situation. I took a week of gorilla medicine and got better, but now I’m back in the sims with a new sim partner. Michael is an upgrading captain who got blindsided by the flu earlier this month.
So there we were, on the runway. We had to do an unpressurized takeoff (all the bleed air from the engines focused on the wing and cowl anti ice, couldn’t spare any for passenger comfort) but the first one was an abort - the left thrust reverser came unstowed. Then we got off the ground, and the right engine rolled back to idle and died. We ran the checklists and got it running again, just in time to have the right wing overheat. We had to lose the wing anti-ice, and we were faced with a decision - what to do? Land at Allentown? Divert to Harrisburg?
Yeah, we decided to go to harrisburg. The instrucor said good choice — but to go land at Allentown anyhow. The instructor said if we landed there, we’d get an appreciation for contaminated runways.
We did. I appreciated the extra 80 feet of runway we didn’t use.
Then we swapped seats. It got ugly. Then it got better.. and all worked out in the wash.
I swear, though.. if the sims were any reasonable protrayal of the real CRJ, I wouldn’t let my mortal enemies even set foot in one.
My captain died.
We landed.
My captain rose from the dead. We took off again. The engine blew up. I did a single engine Localizer. We lived.
I love the challenge so far.. but if I make it to the line, I’m gonna be breathing a sigh of relief when I push the power up on my first takeoff.. knowing the engine probably won’t quit - - but that I’ll be prepared for it, just in case.
Bedtime. Tomrrow’s another day.