Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
Like the Comair and the Delta pilots, Pinnacle pilots voted yes.
After management gets their "yes" vote, they put away the wine and roses. The honeymoon is now officially over.
It is going to be interesting to see the Air Force Academy Captains dealing with some of their new hire FO's who decided against pursuing an education beyond high school and who have absolutely no idea of how the Air Force runs a flight deck.
XJ & Co. will be amazed when the approach briefing begins 1.5 hours prior to descent (4 hours if the destination is Quito, Bogota, or Tegucigalpa ) ... not that that's a bad thing.
I might bid over to the ER just to watch the show.
Why do you guys wait until short final (4hrs. out) to begin the approach briefing? On the 777, we start in the briefing room, 17 hours prior to touchdown. It goes something like this:
"Man, I really need a landing, I haven't had one in 6 weeks and I expire next week. So...what's the weather doing over there? And which runway will they be using, and what arrival should we use and...has anyone been in there before? Nobody? Sh!t..."
So you spend the last 3 hours loading the FMS, memorizing the taxi diagram, and the arrival fixes, and then briefing it up...and then in the final 10 minutes, they switch runways, and arrivals, and oh yeah, they are screaming descent clearances at you in Chinese, but fast, and the altimitry is in meters, and you have to use a converter paper, and you've been up all night because it was too rough to sleep on your breaks. Other than that, there's nothing to it.
Now, if we are coming into ATL on the other hand, it's more like, "Wake me up at the marker, and then put the gear down."