You sir, don’t know what you are talking about. I was in on it from the beginning. We are a new operator to ETOPS. We took the existing IFOM and dove-tailed in the two relevant AC’s. That’s it. Yeah, eventually we’ll probably go to electronic plotting, but the reliability of iPads and the storage of electronic records needs to remedied first. And we might go to “on-demand APU ops, but it takes an Ops Spec or two, and we want to start this year. Tech Ops had the hardest job. Why make it harder?

The B737 is NOT a great ETOPS airplane, but you go with what you got.

As far as CKAs doing the checking? That’s the seniority system. CKAs are captains that have applied to be CKAs. There are numerous experienced FOs and a few CAs that can do it, but they don’t want to commute or live in California. Again, you go with what you’ve got.

There seems to be a lot of “tech-cedure” circulating as well. All you need to know or procedures to follow are in the IFOM. Don’t make it hard.

 

I completely agree with Halin - the dudes that set-up our etops program did not come from "the squadron", and imo - they got it right. I've been around almost 3 decades and can attest firsthand to some of the stupid things we've done. This isn't one of them. The training was great and the several crossings I've done were, procedurally very clean and straightforward.

It amazes me how many mainline aircraft (UA/DL) are out there making HF position reports still.

 

I’m guessing that it was because they were having CPDLC problems.


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UAL does still plot. We make position reports on certain fleets because the CPDLC isn’t Satcom.

 

Our CPDLC will revert to HF datalink if Satcom is not working. I didn’t realize that wasn’t standard...


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I can’t speak to the 737 “Guppy” fleet, but that was the deal with our 757-300’s. It apparently sent out some sort of nuisance message to ATC if we attempted the VHF logon going to Hawaii.

 

"Oahu Center.... hello?"


"Oahu Center, how do you read?"


"They're not responding. Try it on HF."

 

FIFY........

 

HAL finally does. Took us a decade to get a working tablet. I’m assuming that was our hold up, but I had nothing to do with the approval.