I have been very busy these last few months, but lately the little man in my head has been telling me to post, so here I go...
I'm sitting in Ottawa right now, in my hotel room just before I go out for supper and a pint or two of Strongbow. I just got back from ice skating on the Rideau, munching on beavertails and drinking hot chocolate. A beavertail is a deep-fried sugary thing by the way, get your mind outta the gutter. We are here for a few days - we took one of the bosses' kids here for a big badminton tournament. Man, it must be nice to be rich.
I fly corporate / charter for a decent sized company in a big city in Canada. we currently operate 2 Citation 550's, with another larger aircraft on the horizon. I am now Ops Manager of our outfit - I'm not sure, but I think that means I go to jail if we fail an audit. It also means that about 50 lbs of paperwork goes through my desk each week, which is about the only downside to this job. I am responsible for our various manuals, like our Ops Manual, our SOP's, etc. I also do entry of all our flight and expense data into the computer system (to track our budget and to keep track of flight and duty times and crew currency) and generally making sure we are audit-worthy at all times. On top of that, I fly as captain with 4 other pilots. Yeah, it's only a slowtation, but I'm happy and my paycheque hasn't ever bounced.
95% of our flying is corporate - taking the upper management to meetings and vacation spots, and 5% is charter, taking random rich people to random rich people destinations. We could do more charter work, but our bosses want the planes to be available for them most of the time, so we keep it to 3 days a month or less.
For those of you who aren't familiar, the Citation 550 is slow, stable and very easy to fly. There is a single-pilot variant in the US, but we'd have to keep the weight below 12,500 lbs to do that in Canada and that wouldn't let us take enough fuel to get anywhere, let alone passengers. Our instruments are analog, but we do have GPS (the Garmin 430 / 530 combo and the KLN90b) and a couple of other nice things, like tablet computers that hook up to the XM satellite system and let us see radar, metars and tafs along with a graphical display of the western hemisphere, giving us a great visual picture of exactly what the weather is doing and where. Yeah I am sure that other corporate jets have more sophisticated stuff, but I'm a simple guy so this is more than enough gee-whizz for me. We also have thrust reversers which are pretty damn cool if I say so myself. If you ever see a 550 taxiing around the airport, randomly deploying the t/rs, wave and say hi, and I'll wave back
I have flown more than 200 hours since I started 6 months ago, which isn't bad for corporate. I'm not here to build time anyway, I'm more concerned about lifestyle and it suits me. My schedule is always planned well in advance, which is also awesome. I was used to the medevac pager and I'm sure that damn thing took years off my life. In a month I'll generally do a few daytrips taking the bosses to business meetings, and then a couple of longer 4 or 5-day layovers taking them to a vacation spot. Now that I'm Ops Manager I have a little more say in what trips I do, so if a sweet one comes up (a week in Nassau for example) and I whine and plead, I generally get it. I do keep in mind that the other guys work hard and deserve a few plums, so don't think I hog 'em all. Just most
We don't get per diems, we get company credit cards. I keep my spending reasonable, but I do enjoy a big supper and maybe a beer or two at night. The 15 lbs I have gained since I started here proves it, trust me
We stay in decent hotels too, or at least ones where they don't chain the sheets to the bed and have to share a bathroom with the needle-junkie down the hall. If you have ever stayed in a Super-8, you know where I'm coming from More pilot geek stuff: Our planes can climb to around 37,000' with a full load, but we have to burn off a couple of thousand pounds of gas before we can hit FL390 or 400, which is where we like to be for long flights. We average a thousand pounds per hour fuel burn over long flights, but that goes up a lot more if we are doing short hops - we average 1,600 pounds per hour for anything an hour or less. Fuel burn is the single biggest factor in everything we do. When I plan a trip, I make a few phone calls to the various fuel companies and find out what the absolute best fuel price for our destination(s) are, and then pick our FBO based on that. It's also a pain in the ass, to be honest. I call Colt, AvCard, AvFuel, Multiservice and a couple of other places, find out if they do contract fuel with anyone on the field, then haggle with them, then call the various FBO's and haggle with them, then get the fuel companies to fax fuel releases to the FBO's, then follow up on that with phone calls, etc. But we can save literally thousands of dollars per fill-up depending on whom we buy fuel from, so it's a very real consideration.
When I plan a trip I fire up Jeppeson FlightStar on the trusty ol' laptop, and input the various details. It downloads the predicted winds and plans my routing, then I print out my flight plan. The whole flight-planning process takes maybe 3 minutes, and I am eternally grateful to Mister Jeppeson for doing all the hard work for me. Then I call our home base FBO and tell them our hangar pull-out time (60 minutes before we are supposed to be wheels-up) and remind them to hook up a gpu, and give us ice and newspapers. I print out the approach charts for our destination and our alternate. On board we have a tablet PC that holds all the Jeppview stuff anyway, so if we end up diverting somewhere I can just load up the approach charts on it, but it's still nice to have hard copies to peruse.
So once that's done, I arrange for passenger and crew rental cars and accomodation (if required), special catering (if requested) and any other requests our pax might have. That could be stuff like putting a particular brand of beer on board, or it could be removing all peanut-related items from the aircraft, or making sure to address certain people by certain titles, or whatever. Rich people get to determine a whole lot of details about their lives, and it seems they get used to that very quickly.
If we go across the border (and we do a LOT of flying to the US and the Caribbean), then I also call customs and fax them whatever paperwork they want, then follow up with a phone call. Customs is one thing I do not want to screw up, so I generally triple-check every little thing. We have sat phones on board the aircraft so if we are late departing or whatnot then I can just call them from the air and update our arrival time. So far it's been pretty smooth, the only bump was a jerk in a large US city who insisted that I fill out old customs forms from 3 years ago 'cause he liked the format better than the forms they actually use now. It wouldn't have mattered much, but he made my pax wait until I was all done filling out the 'old' forms ( I had printouts of the new ones but he didn't accept them). My passengers pay roughly 10x the commercial airfare rate to fly with me, and the main reason they do that is to save time, so I really hate it when I cause them any sort of delay. Anyway, all the other trips have been great as far as customs goes so that's a decent batting average. Hell, when we go to Nassau our arrival report consists of hugging the customs lady, so I could have it a lot worse
When I arrive at the airport, my job consists of either setting up the cockpit or setting up the rest of the aircraft (coffee, ice, pop, magazines, etc). If it's the cockpit then I get the ATIS then pull out a little performance chart book we have. It shows us all our Vspeeds and thrust settings for various weights, temps and pressure altitudes, so I record those on a little card we keep on our cockpit panel, and then go through our various system tests. While I'm doing that the other pilot is making sure the back of the airplane is clean and all our commissary stuff is set up. Or I'm doing the back part and he's setting up the front part, it really doesn't matter.
Once our pax show up, we load their bags and then run to the washroom for a final good-luck pee, and we are all on our way. Our SOP's are typical 2-crew stuff, one pilot flies and one pilot works the radios. Our SOP's are based on a large air carrier's, and they seem to work pretty good so far.
Back to the technical stuff: Cruise speed isn't particularly impressive from a jet standpoint - we average around 380kts on a good day, 360 most other days. My last airplane was an MU-2 which was a hundred knots slower, and as my career advances I end up going faster bit by bit, so I won't complain
We have a flushing potty in the back of our airplanes, in it's own little room with a curtain. That's nice for long flights, but I haven't actually used it. Our pax don't seem to mind it, and after sucking down a few beers on a 4-hour flight they generally give it a work-out. I don't have anything to do with cleaning it, thank Jebus. Whatever we pay the people who service the lavs, they earn it and more.
This is the first airplane I have flown where I make extensive use of the autopilot, and that has been the subject of some thought by me. I like to hand-fly, but otto is always perfect. It's frustrating to realize that a machine has better hands and feet than I do though. Yeah I have better judgement, but somehow that's not much consolation. Anyway, 'cause I'm egotistical and insecure, I still handfly up to at least FL180, and then let otto do his thing. On the way down, I generally take over through 10,000' or so. But when the weather is down it's so much easier to let him fly the ILS to minimums that I confess I let him do that from time to time. When I first started using it, I insisted on handflying all my approaches, my reasoning being "I want to have my skills razor-edged in case the autopilot fails". The thing is, we have 2 of the damn things. And we never fly if otto is sick, so the odds of my having to save the day are pretty slim, sigh. And again, otto flies a mean ILS and never accidentally stomps on the rudders etc. I am grateful to have him on the long hauls, but it's still depressing in a way. //end autopilot rant
My fellow pilots are all great to work with - we all just want to get home safely and with as little hassle as possible, and we work together to achieve that. I have never been pushed to fly in scary weather, and have never been pushed to fly a broken airplane. Our mantra "This is NOT a bush operation". I am on salary which is also really nice. This is the first time I have been able to predict exactly how much I will take home every other Friday, and what's even better is I still have a few bucks left over once I pay my bills.
Lately I have been thinking about buying a house, but I'm worried that if I somehow luck out and AC calls, I couldn't make the mortgage payments any more. AC pays well eventually, but the first 2 years are pretty scandalous. 37k or so to live in Toronto? Anyway, I am very happy here and the only reason I would leave is if AC called, but I just wish I could see a few years into the future so I know if they ever will.
So that's my life at the moment. It's full, but I enjoy the job. I know that I am really, really luck to have this job, and I know it wasn't cause I am a great guy or anything - I essentially won the lottery. So I work hard to show the owners how grateful I am, and I hope I am living up to their expectations. For the first time it feels like I have arrived, not like I'm just passing through. I never realised it before, but that particular peace of mind is worth it's weight in gold. For those of you who are struggling with your career, I wish you inner peace and outward prosperity, and sooner rather than later. Right now it seems like it's a good time to be a pilot, and I hope to see you all in the flightlevels. As you overtake me by 80 knots, don't forget to wave and say hi
