It gives me paws....
Not much does but the other day, as we were departing Port Harcourt....
You guys know the difference between a fairy tale and a 'sea story', right? The one begins, 'Once upon a time...' and the other begins, 'Now this is no sh1t...' So don't say you haven't been warned!
We were departing DNPO for Lagos with a left turn out, the long way around, to cross the VOR at FL070 or above. So far so good.
I was flying, so that I did all that jet pilot stuff they tried to teach me in school, using ROL mode to get turned around towards the fix and then going into heading select, meanwhile checking that we would make our crossing altitude by climbing in VFLCH.
There were two little blue blips on the TCAS which I blithely took for no big thing, since they appeared to be lower than us. Then with just 3.6 miles to run to the fix Approach told us that we needed to cross at FL090 rather than FL070. Huh?
Ah yes, a closer look at the blips showed a possible conflict. Turns out an inbound had been given the same crossing altitude.
Hmm, what to do? I had plenty of speed in hand so that I just got rid of the autopilot and pitched up. We crossed at FL090 plus with a 'TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC' TCAS alert and the traffic just 800 feet below us. I guess I misread the altitude of that traffic as 'minus' when it was 'plus' and missed the potential conflict.
There was very little time to play with the autopilot to make it climb the aircraft for us, so that is probably just as well that I do like to keep my hand-flying skills up.
This sort of thing happens all the time, actually. When you try to explain to Approach just why there is no separation between aircraft on different radials close to the fix, you often hit this barrier of total incomprehension. You are on the 280° and he is on the 320° so how can there be a problem if everyone is following orders? At five miles? Doh!
We had sighted the deadly Port Harcourt bovines the evening before the Air France cow strike, and we reported them to the tower as present on the approach end of the runway. They promised to 'do something.' Well, whatever got did wasn't enough, obviously. And this was not some big deal, 'Cows on the runway! Sound the alarm!' but just, 'Oh yeah, okay, thanks and cleared for takeoff.' That attitude almost cost a lot of people their lives, actually. Yet here it was treated mostly as an occasion for cheap humour.
Everywhere you look at most Nigerian airports there are bits crumbling, since years now. I remember when I first started flying out of Lagos, when every morning would see flush lights unbolted and carted away to be melted down for scrap value. Nowadays both Lagos and Port Harcourt have a certain gloomy quality at night, when you have to really know the place to miss the holes and find where you are going. God only knows how some stranger would be expected to operate there on a night arrival.
Even shiny-new Abuja has painted lines fading out with no one bothering to restore them. And a set of 'Stop' lights on the taxiway that until recently remained permanently lit, so that you had to either break all the rules and cross them or else sit there and wait for a few months.
There is some screwed-up mindset at work one could call false pride. The locals will not fix the problems but they certainly will not allow ICAO, for instance, to send outside experts to fix things for them. The infrastructure has gobbled millions in wasted investments while remaining very, very unsafe.
I like to think I 'know where the rocks are' but I could probably be caught out bv something overlooked. So how about someone who hasn't flown there for over 20 years?
The place is a high-profile accident just waiting to happen. You know, rip the gear off in an unnotified pothole, veer off the runway and send a fully-loaded airliner up in flames.
Come to that, the Hydro Air Cargo 747 has been left parked at the main terminal in Lagos, right out in plain view, ever since the accident. It is not as though these folks feel that they have anything to be embarassed about! All around Nigeria there are wrecked or junk aircraft parked right there on the ramps.