pièce de résistance - expect the unexpected.
I owe a lot of old bold pilots who shared their knowledge with me to be able to write this last piece. Most of it under instruction, some of it watching and listening and a bit from massive boll@ockings. Most of all I owe a mate who crashed and died in somewhat similar circumstances for the impetuous in sourcing every bit of knowledge that I could find. He was flying with a grade one @rsehole.
The aircraft was the MD 80 - gem to fly and a real pilots aircraft. We had been launch customers which meant they were nice and shiny with lots of teething troubles with the new automatics..including a HUD...mainly centred on computor programming. We didn't get what it said on the box but being a company run by interceptor pilots it was click click and fly the bird.
The year was early 80s before the dreaded year of 1985 which gave us the micro downburst crash and the revision of flying procedures - not that that would have helped us as we had a similar procedure already and it didn't work.
I was at the peak of my abilities...early thirties having done three legacy carriers basic training with some great instructors and procedures as well as a some from the dregs of the gene pool who only got where they did because of who their mum or dad knew.
Life was generally great. We worked hard but we were given loads of money to play with some great toys. As I FO I had a standard home made clip board manual. This covered postage stamp sized diagrams of ALL civil airfields that could take us in an emergency (fire or smoke) which was also used for pre flight planning. Our PNR planning across the alps including drift downs and a sheet from a German radio times with the wavelengths of all of the commercial radio stations in Europe as above 10,000ft we had music playing through the cockpit speakers.
80% of our crew were young women and some times the senior girl would be in her early 20s.
We checked in early, did a very quick look at the weather then went to their briefing and emphasised that we were a crew and ANYTHING that happened we wanted to know and would help them with. This paid dividends and not only the flight deck service. The jump seat would be normally occupied by one of them for take off and landing. We night stopped three nights out of four where we went out as a crew with the flight deck paying for the drinks and often helping the girls with their share of the bill.
Flying was barber pole, visuals and short cuts whenever possible, and manual flying except in gin clear conditions when eyeballs would be outside. We had a healthy rivalry with the girls marking our landings and getting p@ssed off when we knocked 10 mins off flight time when they had to serve a three course lunch.
Last edited by blind pew; 19th Aug 2015 at 09:45.