“Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Pilots.”

I doubt Willie and Waylon couldn’t pass an FAA administered flight crew drug test, and their “mamas” knew that, the song notwithstanding. But what about the rest of us?

Sure, airline pilots realize the challenges and constraints put on them by the profession, including constant flight evaluations, performance monitoring (any other profession data-stream and archive performance for analysis and critique?), invasion of privacy (any other professions require annual disclosure of  physicals, mental health, arrests and convictions?) and recurring random drug and alcohol testing.

Enter Covid-19. which dwarfs the above career threats we’ve all accepted, endured and tolerated up until now.

Rewind just six months in the U.S airline industry and the picture was much different: the mid-1980s hires, pilots who are now nearing mandatory retirement (another unique airline pilot reality) which would create a massive pilot shortage across the airline industry. “If you get hired today,” the siren song went, “You’ll be a captain in five years.” Massive seniority catapult, the retirements were supposed to be.

Pilots at regionals felt they could be picky about which major airline they hire on with: I have a friend who flew for Comair for over ten years, waiting and adamant about only working for Delta Airlines eventually. After three years at Delta–when he could have gone to several other carriers years earlier–he’s now on the street for at least three years.

Another friend at Emirates reports their pandemic-mandated pilot cuts weren’t done strictly by seniority–rather, management took the opportunity to boot dozens of pilots with attendance records and other personnel issues the airline didn’t want to deal with ever again. Not furloughed–terminated.

And many snooty pilots shunned the quiet financial dynamos like Spirit, Frontier and JetBlue, holding out for a marquee carrier like United, Delta and American, only to witness their peers who DID hire on with these powerful Low Cost Carriers upgrade to captain and enjoy a job security despite the pilot cuts (some are still hiring pilots) even as the “snooty pilots” are furloughed by their own carriers, with recall nowhere in sight.

No matter who they are or where they came from–the military, regionals, corporate, cargo or general aviation–all airline pilots have taken a beating, weathered harsh early flying jobs, invested unimaginable sweat equity, personal sacrifice, and expense, just to call an airline cockpit home. Now this.

Me and my USAF pilot buds.

Ex-military pilots who maintained an ANG or AFRES connection may be able to get back onto active military service once again, but even that’s with drastically reduced pay and much more demanding flying in terms of time away from home and family, much less the risk involved in military versus civilian flying. Other may be able to make their “side hustle”–if they have one, into a financial lifeboat for the near term.

Yes, pilots laughed at me when I fought my way through 65 on-campus graduate hours to earn a PhD as they enjoyed their boat/motorcycle/airplane/toys, but I’ve been teaching at a university for the past 17 years and just upped my class schedule, mostly for the additional income.

I know several pilots who struggled through law school while flying fulltime and at least now have gainful employment despite the dried-up aviation opportunities. Others have real estate licenses, teaching credentials and I even know one first officer who’s on track with a management training program at a major box store chain. Not what we expected, but smart because it pays the bills.

But it all comes down to this: if you want to be an airline pilot, beyond the many unreasonable demands of the industry and the government agencies that oversee the licenses required to hold the flight privileges, the fundamentals of personal and financial disaster lurk just below the thin veneer of airline pilot reality: flying is a great career–until the career vanishes.

I’m rooting for the pilots still clinging to their seniority lists despite reduced flight hours and the defacto pay cut that produces. I’m hopeful for the smart pilots who had the foresight to hire on with the Low Cost Carriers who are poised to dominate the airline biz in the post-pandemic years ahead. And I’m empathetic to those pilots who were simply victims of a very capricious airline industry, despite the rosy predictions of only a few months ago.

For everyone else: “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be pilots.”

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An Airline Pilot’s Life: Windshear Flashback.

Not every airline adventure–or misadventure–made it into An Airline Pilot’s Life, if only for the sake of controlling the page count. You can read an excerpt from the book that puts you in the DC-10 cockpit for my first copilot landing at LaGuardia in this month’s Airways Magazine.

Meanwhile, here’s an incident where we tangled with windshear on approach to Raleigh-Durham Airport and to be honest, I wasn’t sure we’d successfully escape. Read on:

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The weather at Raleigh was iffy, with thunderstorms moving from east to west, towering cumulus that ranged in height between twenty-five and thirty thousand feet. That, in the context of airline operations, was simply North Carolina in the summertime.

 

The MD-80 cockpit felt crowded with three of us crammed into the small compartment in the pointy end. It wasn’t unusual to have a jumpseater but for some reason, the space that day seemed too small. But, the back of the jet was equally crammed with all 142 passenger seats full, so the extra pilot on the jumpseat, who was actually an FO I’d enjoyed flying with in the past, was a reality so he could join some buddies in Raleigh for a golf outing.

Enroute, my excellent, experienced, retired Air Force FO requested the Raleigh-Durham Airport weather. That flight segment always seemed quick to me, maybe because I was more accustomed to the longer Seattle or Boston legs out of DFW, so I was glad he’d gotten an early start on the weather.

“The airfield is clear,” he said, and handed me the weather that our onboard printer had spit out. I glanced at it with my non-engineer’s pilot eyes: Instinct mattered as much as data, to me. I looked for the big picture, the hidden details, like what signs are there foretelling what’s to come. Pressure falling rapidly, towering cumulus northeast. Yeah, the airfield’s clear—but. Something felt wrong.

“Let’s plan flaps 28,” I said, which doesn’t sound extraordinary: the MD-80 standard approach configuration was 28 degrees of flaps because it saved fuel. I didn’t hold with that, personally, having flown the MD-80 for twenty-plus years myself. There were less times when 28 was actually required than not, and I liked having the power up on approach because of the added drag of 40 flaps because it made for better go-around response under normal circumstances.

But “what wasn’t there,” what the weather report didn’t explicitly state, gave me pause: flaps 40 meant flaps 15 for go-around, which was extra drag we wouldn’t need if there was a hint of wind shear. Flaps 28 was less drag on the approach and since it would be paired with flaps 11 on the go-around, if we were to fly a go-around, which was also an extra margin of performance we might be glad we had. Layers of thinking and prevention, that’s all part of the captain’s job.

We started a long enroute descent straight into runway 05L. We’d briefed the approach as an ILS, my preference, even though the weather was currently VFR. I always prefer the precision approach and the missed approach, myself. That way, if we request the ILS, there’s no ambiguity about what we’ll do on the missed approach. So many pilots brief “Missed approach will be with the tower” which is really no brief at all. More importantly—and I often have to correct this—if you’re cleared to fly the ILS, you’re expected to fly the published missed approach, not “go with the tower.”

Ahead to the east of the field, the sky darkened to a bruised blue and clouds stacked well into the stratosphere. We had a good radar paint ahead which showed just enough mileage between us and the storms to execute the missed approach if needed. The winds seemed steady off the nose, maybe even increasing slightly, which foretold the approaching gust front from the storms east of the field.

We never saw it coming: below a thousand feet, in clear air, with the runway in sight, we lost over twenty knots of airspeed instantly and began to sink. In a heartbeat, the WAGS (Windshear Alert And Guidance System) sprang to life, commanding a pitch-up and calling out “Windshear! Windshear!”

I kicked off the autothrottles and I was already hand-flying, so I aimed the nose towards fifteen degrees of pitch and firewalled the throttles. Still, we continued to sink, even at maximum thrust from both engines.

“Fifteen degrees,” my FO called out to cue me, “We’re still sinking, airspeed minus ten.”

I caught the five-hundred foot marker on the radio altimeter tape out of the corner of my eye. Shit. And we were still sinking.

We’d been ambushed: an outflow boundary from a thunderhead behind us had tossed us a huge tidal wave of tailwind. Slowly, gradually, we regained flying speed and crept skyward at barely two-hundred feet per minute. We cleaned up, executed the missed approach and as we did, we requested clearance direct to Norfolk. We cruised the twenty minutes to Norfolk in relative quiet.

“You just never know,” I told my FO as we taxied in to a gate at Norfolk. He just nodded. We’d done everything correctly, but: you just never know. You’re vulnerable on approach, dirty, slow and low and I was just glad for my instinctive bias towards flaps 28, just based on a hunch.

The jumpseater actually deplaned in Norfolk—said he’d rent a car and drive back to Raleigh, even though we’d be returning there ourselves after refueling. About half of the passengers deplaned too, because I guess they’d all had enough flying for the day, especially with the closeup look at the dirt a few miles from the Raleigh runway.

Procedures, instinct and luck—a little bad luck and a lot of good—and we made it to Raleigh a few hours after the storm had passed. Sometimes, it’s just that way.

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A Pilot’s Diversion Strategy

“Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.”

–Iron Mike Tyson

The factors that shape a diversion strategy are both quantifiable and variable. Variables include weather, traffic density, airport crowding, holding pattern location, and what I call wild cards, which I’ll discuss later.

Quantifiable factors include altitude, speed, distance, time and fuel. Though there are many foundational points upon which to anchor a diversion strategy, I center mine on the one controlling factor common to every other facet of the decision: fuel.

That’s one very simple and unifying parameter that is reliably quantifiable and easily revised accurately. So, let’s start at the beginning with known fuel numbers. First, what is your required (you, the pilot, determine this) minimum on-deck fuel? Set that number in stone. For example, in a 737-800, I want 6.0 as a minimum in a divert situation. 5.0 is adequate, but in a divert situation, you really need to pad everything.

Next, the added fuel for holding. Dispatch adds holding fuel to a release when you and they agree on how much you’ll likely need based on destination variables like weather, construction, traffic density and more.

The reserve fuel added for holding presumes you can hold for a specified time, fly an approach to a missed approach, then proceed to a landing at your alternate with your agreed upon (6.0, in my example) fuel.

But in the fuel planning phase, no one knows exactly where you’ll hold nor at what altitude. So, you have to work backwards from your approach to your holding fix: how much fuel will you need from holding to missed approach? Flight planning systems figure an estimate, because again, you can’t know for sure where you’ll be sent to hold.

And here’s where we encounter a few wild cards: we’re not sure where or at what altitude we’ll hold, so we really can’t confirm a fuel flow or total enroute burn. Also, we can’t rule out spacing and delay vectors enroute to the initial approach fix, nor non-optimum speed and altitude assignments along the way. Same thing with the missed approach: there could be multiple vectors, speed restrictions and worst of all, a much lower altitude for the cruise leg to your designated alternate.

Throw in another factor: priority. If you’re planned to land at the same time as international flights that have been airborne for eight or more hours, you may find—contrary to what ATC might say—that you are vectored around or behind these flights. All of these factors can radically affect your fuel burn for the worse.

Step one: as you enter holding, you can and must determine the probable fuel burn from holding to your destination. Add that to your on-deck minimum. In my example:

Holding at an intermediate STAR fix:

6.0 + 2.5 = 8.5

Now we need to add the planned enroute burn from missed approach to your designated alternate. From DFW to TUL, a typical alternate, that would be an unadjusted 4.5. But we need to adjust that, adding a significant pad for the wild cards I cited above. I’ll add another 2.0. We have:

8.5 + 6.5 = 15.0

So, 15.0 is your bingo fuel: at 15.0 we’ve lost the ability to go missed approach and divert. What’s the next step? Figure the minimum fuel from your holding position to your alternate. Add a pad for the wild cards, and you have your bingo from holding.

If it takes me 2.5 to get from holding to TUL, I add a pad (1.0) and add that to my on-deck minimum:

3.0 + 6.5 = 9.5.

So, 9.5 is my bingo from holding direct to my alternate.

Why the difference? Simple: if you’re holding for a variable that may clear (weather, closed runway, traffic sequence, runway change, and more) you may have an option besides divert. As long as my enroute burn from holding to destination is equal to or less than the burn to my alternate, once the holding cause is eliminated (“DFW is now VFR”) we can proceed safely to our destination and land with 6.5 or more.

And here’s another wild card you can play: ask for a different holding fix. Chances are, in major airport areas (ATL, JFK, MIA, ORD, LAX) the answer will be no. But in many other places, ATC may grant your request. You can even fudge it by adding “for weather” to your request, which sounds the same as what it really is: “For whether or not we can hold longer.”

A different fix offers one more good option: if you’re not in a stack, you won’t have your fuel burn incrementally increased as you’re assigned a lower altitude. Add to this asset an EFC synergy. Some pilots like to “Go Ugly Early” and divert if their EFC exceeds their planned holding time. But, if you’re sitting high at a comparable fix away from the descending stack, you can safely loiter till your EFC just to see if the EFC shortens, as it often does.

For example, if you’re given a 50 minute EFC and have planned for 35 minutes of holding, chances are decent that if you’re still holding at 20 minutes, that EFC might be cancelled or revised to within your holding fuel.

A second wild card is to find a different suitable alternate, possibly close-in. For example, instead of OKC or AUS for DFW, if the weather movement allows, AFW, DAL and even SPS (daytime only) maximize your loiter fuel and when you’re refueled and outbound, you’ll be cleared from tower to approach, rather than tower to departure then center, which may get you slapped with a traffic flow wheels-up delay.

Other good reasons for choosing a different alternate include crowding (you don’t want to be the last jet in line for fuel or a gate) and even time of day for staffing requirements. Finally, if you’re going illegal as a crew as soon as you divert, do you really want to spend the night in Abilene, or would Austin be more “sensible?”

Regardless, the bottom line is this: your minimum on-deck fuel. Add generously padded buffers for the wild cards, plus figure both from missed approach and direct divert. Monitor both figures. The 737-FMS will display both direct and missed approach fuel predictions—monitor both. We also often put in three or four different potential divert airports and monitor both figures for all of them.

As captain, I ask two things of the first officer. First, “What am I missing?” Not, what do you think of my plan—I really want to know what I’m not thinking of and what would be better. And second, I have the FO pick a divert alternate, and monitor both numbers. That keeps us both in the loop, keeps both sets of eyes on all the fuel numbers and finally, two heads are better than one. They both need to be fully in the game.

And that, fellow aviators, is one pilot’s strategy. Good luck and fly safe.