Prepare Yourselves... 2021 AEs
04-25-2021, 10:53 AM
#2571
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jun 2015
Position: 320/A
Posts: 875
Originally Posted by PilotBases
I remember poking my head up front after landing in a NW DC-10 at Gatwick probably 20 years ago, skipper gave me the charts for perusal. Definitely a different world.
I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.
Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.
Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.
100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.
04-25-2021, 12:45 PM
#2572
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Mar 2019
Posts: 932
Originally Posted by zippinbye
Did you never cross the pond prior to iPads? Nothin' wrong with that, but the charts you mention from 20 years ago are no different from those that I carried until about one year ago (The Atlantic and Pacific Hi charts and the Delta-specific Orientation charts).
I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.
Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.
Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.
100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.
I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.
Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.
Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.
100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.
04-25-2021, 06:49 PM
#2573
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jul 2007
Position: B737 FO
Posts: 664
Originally Posted by zippinbye
Did you never cross the pond prior to iPads? Nothin' wrong with that, but the charts you mention from 20 years ago are no different from those that I carried until about one year ago (The Atlantic and Pacific Hi charts and the Delta-specific Orientation charts).
I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.
Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.
Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.
100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.
I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.
Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.
Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.
100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.
04-26-2021, 10:59 AM
#2574
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jul 2008
Posts: 4,921
Originally Posted by tcco94
So I'm a pretty young new hire, live in SLC. I'm 85 or so from bottom. Missed SLC by one or so, went with a dream bid of 7ER out of LAX and got it. Seems a lot of people complain about the flying as you said. I haven't flown in over 1 year, coming from junior line as a regional captain. What's the issue with the "ugly" flying as said? Is it the overnight length and red eyes? This will be my first airplane at Delta and from the trips I see this will be a huge QOL boost from my previous flying (pre-pandemic). But I don't know what I don't know. I do understand someones trash is another man's treasure and don't want to fall in the habits of a new pilot falling for the shiny jet syndrome and such. I guess I'll see but still the flying I've seen and expect doesn't seem too horrible to me. Not enough for me to regret my bid. Even with the dying fleet thing.... Unless we expect that to be a dramatic changing in 2 years, but based on the bid it feels like that's not the case.
And I'll be off the fleet and on the 320 back home in SLC before I see the end days or 7ER or dwindling days. Maybe my optimism on that? I've read this thread on the bad trips and looked them up in open time and such. I just still don't see some of the bad or ugly flying. But my perspective of commuting to NYC220 vs LAX7ER seems like a huge QOL improvement and furthermore excitement for trips/work.
And I'll be off the fleet and on the 320 back home in SLC before I see the end days or 7ER or dwindling days. Maybe my optimism on that? I've read this thread on the bad trips and looked them up in open time and such. I just still don't see some of the bad or ugly flying. But my perspective of commuting to NYC220 vs LAX7ER seems like a huge QOL improvement and furthermore excitement for trips/work.
04-26-2021, 12:36 PM
#2576
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Feb 2015
Position: 73na
Posts: 286
Originally Posted by hockeypilot44
In the past, ugly trips out of LA start with a redeye or start mid afternoon and finish on east coast around 1am east coast time which isn't horrible, but then have a 6am departure 2 days later which is 3am west coast time. That means you're waking up at 1am body clock. Do that a few trips and your sleep schedule gets messed up. I can handle an occasional redeye. I can't handle multiple ones in a week.
04-26-2021, 04:45 PM
#2577
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Feb 2008
Posts: 19,273
Originally Posted by Omar 111
Those trips aren’t legal anymore. Section 12 P.1.b- no departures may be scheduled between 0000-0500 pilot base time for Sea, Slc & Lax pilots for flights in Eastern/ Central time zones.
04-26-2021, 05:20 PM
#2578
Gets Everyday Off
Joined APC: Aug 2016
Position: Relaxed
Posts: 6,947
Originally Posted by FangsF15
Im thinking something along the lines of what American had to do when they accidentally allowed their pilots unlimited drops over a Christmas a couple of years ago. Don’t remember the details, but management had to pay up big time, with a very lopsided deal for the pilots to fix their own self-inflicted mess. Sounds familiar...
04-26-2021, 08:07 PM
#2579
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Feb 2015
Position: 73na
Posts: 286
Originally Posted by sailingfun
We once had LAX trips that went back east and had 3 consecutive 6 am reports. Delta got rid of them only after we almost planted a 727 6 miles short of of 9R at ATL. They also eliminated tag on legs after a all-nighter at that point. Tag ons were the norm. We often flew a all nighter to ATL from LAX and then sat for 2 hours before flying to MIA or TPA.
04-26-2021, 10:16 PM
#2580
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Feb 2015
Posts: 319
Originally Posted by sailingfun
They also eliminated tag on legs after a all-nighter at that point. Tag ons were the norm. We often flew a all nighter to ATL from LAX and then sat for 2 hours before flying to MIA or TPA.
2185, 2186, A029, A030, A031, A032, A034, and A036
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