I knew it was going to be a long day from the moment I woke up. The pounding on the hotel door could only mean one thing - I'd slept in. "9 o'clock!," I gasped, as I blinked at the alarm clock I hadn't set the night before. After stumbling to the door, I told my First Officer, Stan Miller, that I'd be 10 minutes. He just grinned, knowing he'd caught his Captain in bed at 9 in the morning.
I really didn't care, though I was upset at myself for sleeping so long. Of course, it had been a long day the day before too. A faulty APU when we were leaving Salt Lake City had delayed us almost two hours. That, and the game went into overtime last night. It's breaking some unwritten rule of manhood to turn off a game in overtime, isn't it? And you'd think a pilot of 20 some-odd years would be able to sleep in the vicinity of an airport, but whoever's idea it was to put a hotel right between the main runways of LAX should be shot. Even with my head covered, I could always hear those overseas 747's coming on the butt end of the redeye (or so we called it in closed circles).
10 minutes later I was in the lobby, looking sharp, but feeling like crap. I told Stan to shut up before he had even said anything. He really was a great guy and an excellent First Officer, though he had about as much experience flying as a 16 year old does driving. It took me several years to become a first officer on a 737 and here he was, my right seat man, almost fresh out of flight school. Still, I liked him - what he lacked in experience, he made up for in smarts. He knew the procedures manuals front to back, though I doubted that would matter much when the crap hit the fan.
We had to wait another 10 minutes for a new flight attendant. She was a rather air-headed blonde, but had obviously got a leg up with her looks and/or body. We called girls like here 'temps', because they usually washed out sooner than later. Judith Rowe, the purser, was pretty ticked when she finally came down. The 'temp' was still giving us all her excuse for being late when we hopped on the shuttle to the airport which was just a few blocks up the street. Judy was a great flight attendant, probably the best I'd known, but she didn't take any crap from anyone. I figured she'd have me reporting the blonde, that is, if we were late departing. It was a pretty cruddy looking day too. Hot, but you wouldn't know it by looking - the smog was mixed with a morning fog that had visibility down about as low as I'd seen it here. I'd been making these hops for over a year now. The glummy heat made me feel even worse - of course, sometimes you just have days like this and there's not much you can do about it.
We got to the airport, hurried through security, filed our paperwork, and I hurried down to begin my walkaround. This 737-400 had come in early that morning from Tucson. Or was it Phoenix. Didn't matter, really. I was pretty particular about my aircraft walkaround, though I'd only found a few minor things in my 22 years of doing it. I looked up and noticed that the tower could hardly be seen through the fog.
I continued the walkaround, noting the wind direction. Few pilots worried about wind direction before takeoff, but I always was afraid of something catching fire on the ground and not knowing which way the wind was going to blow the flames. Anyway, that'd be a pretty stupid way to end a career, burned up in your own plane because you parked with a burning engine up-wind.
By the time I got back up to the cockpit at T-20 from departure (everything revolved around departure time), Judy was pretty much on a rampage. Nothing was going right. 'The office', as we called Delta corporate, had messed up something with the flight papers and they had to be resent. I swear that more time is wasted waiting on pencil pushers at corporate than on anything else in commercial aviation. I moved up to my seat, and Stan was already there checking everything out - just like the manual instructs. Our clearance was approved about 10 minutes late (T-10). We'd be departing 7L on the Gabre Five departure. Judith checked in with us and let us know that the passenger list might be late - we had some baggage on the plane without its owner. This usually wasn't a real big deal before Sept. 11th, but now if a passenger was left behind, so was his bags. Of course, we all knew that if someone was crazy enough to put a bomb in their bag, they were probably crazy enough to die because of it.
At T-5, I went back to see how close things were going. Stan and I had gone through the pre-taxi checks. The gate agent poked his head in with the final load sheet and a bewildered looking old man. I figured the owner of the offending baggage had been found. I turned back to Stan, who was looking back waiting for my head nod. That was his cue to request our push and start. I signed off and was on the way back through first class when Judy hollered at me. "There's some guy in the front row that's being a real jackass!," she said.
I had to chuckle, though doing so to her could be dangerous. Apparently this 'jackass' thought that Judy hadn't closed the port door correctly. He insisted on seeing 'the captain' and was apparently telling everyone in the area that it wasn't his fault if the door flew open in midair, though as he spoke, the plane was being pressurized making such an occurrence almost impossible. I quickly walked back and could tell which guy she was talking about. I just walked up to him, looked at the door, and asked Judy, "How many times have you closed this here door?"
"Hmmm... around 4 or 5 hundred times," she replied.
"Well I've only closed it twice, but it looks like you've done an excellent job." The guy got the point, though I heard him muttering something rude as I hurried back up to my left hand seat. Before I could get there, Stan had started the preflight passenger briefing. I usually liked doing that myself, but we were running late. T-1 and we had our push and start clearance. I tapped off the wheel brakes a little early, just to make sure that some computer back at 'the office' registered an on-time departure. I looked up and could see that the fog had lifted, at least a little bit. "Good", I thought.
As we pushed back, Stan and I hurriedly programmed our course in the FMS. We were running behind and had more checklist to complete.
As we went through the engine start-up procedure, an APU warning light lit up. "Oh no!", I thought. "Not again." It was the same light that had come on the night before. In the 737-200's we used to ignore most of the warning lights, as more often than not they meant nothing. But in this newer -400, a warning light usually got your attention. I cycled the APU discharge switch again and the light went out. "Whew..." I thought. As long as the engines turned, a bad APU could be fixed when we landed. Once we were in the air, we wouldn't need the unit's bleed air to blow across the engines, in essence jump starting them. They fired up just fine and I wondered if I'd even write up a maintenance advisory.
We went to Tower and were advised to go 7L and that we were number 2 for takeoff. Wow, I thought, must have timed this one just right. We might even get there early. As we taxied, little did I know how wrong I was.
The contents of this story are © Jared "Smitty" Smith.
Read more of my stories and see screenshots at http://smithplanet.com/fs2004/