The FAA requires commercial airline pilots to have a minimum of 3 landings every 90 days. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you take into account there are 4 of us fliers on most trips (I’m speaking international here, domestic is a whole other story and getting landings is NEVER a problem), and usually only 2 legs, over and back, someone’s going to get shortchanged–i.e. someone gets to land and somone gets to drool (oh, and talk to the passengers on the PA). Add vacation into the mix or the luck of the draw when bidding for certain days off, and 90 days can go by real fast, and here you are, getting ready to expire. This happened to me last week.
The landings desk as we call it is infamously run by the most brutal and heartless of the United schedulers. She has to be, because think about all the whining she hears when calling to assign a pilot a landings session in the simulator on their day off. So, Jennifer, aka Dominitrix, calls me, as always, choosing the ONE day I can’t be away from home (after all, these ARE days off, but whatever) and after giving me 48 hrs notice to get my butt to Denver, answered my: “But I have no one to watch my kids that day,” with an ever-so-slightly bored, “So?”
So, I beg friends to watch the kids the night before and after school the next day, and at 6 am I am on a flight to Denver, in coach (ugh) after waking up at 4 am. I get to Denver, and the dread increases. I do not like being here. Denver is a fine city, but it is forever linked in my mind with…The Chamber of Horrors, aka the United Airlines Flight Training Center. It’s the largest commercial aviation training facility in the world. All United pilots are trained there, and a bunch of other carriers, too, from China to Russia, and most notably Air Force One. It can be a crowded place–1/3 of United’s flight attendants are trained in emergency procedures at the facility, too. The C of H operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has almost 800 full-time employees.
I am scheduled for the 4 hours simulator with an instructor and 3 other pilots, also running out of landing currency. But do you think we each jump in the seat, grab three hops, and go home? Nah, that’s for sissies. I’m up first. I take off, come around for an instrument approach in low weather, and am told to go missed approach. So, I go around, I come around again, and the instructor fails an engine. I land low visibility with 3 engines running. I take off again, back to 4 engines, and just as I rotate to take off, the inquisitor, er, I mean instructor fails an engine. Again, I bring it around and land. Except this time it’s clear. But JUST clear is for weenies. He throws in a 20 knot crosswind. I land, all engines are given back, and I come around one last time, in a normal landing. This is repeated for each of us. I finally get back to the airport and barely make a 5:30 flight home. Good news, I get first class. Bad news, they only served a cold meal. But good news–liquor! I get back home around 8 pm, pick up kids, and finally fall into bed around midnight. I think I slept. But it may have been a coma imitating sleep!
This is the image United presents to the public of the Flight Training Center:
And this archive photo of a simulator looks innocent enough:
But I feel the traveling public needs to know the truth. I was able to sneak out at great risk a photo of what it really looks like inside one of these simulators (warning: disturbing image):
Needless to say, I am very much looking forward to my Sydney trip this weekend. And, no, I won’t get to land…
