Too Many Legs in Too Many Days
In July of 1996 I changed airlines from American Eagle over to Mesa / Florida Gulf. Many thought this was a lateral or even downward move, but in retrospect it was the right thing to do. Eagle was stagnating, and not getting jets any time soon. Even though Mesa flew only turboprops at the time, they became the first USAirways Express and United Express carrier to fly regional jets in 1997.
This rapidly improved the upgrade rate as Jet Captains were quickly getting snapped up in to major airlines, or as soon as they had not only 1000 turbine PIC, but also some jet time. I made captain in 20 months at Mesa. I would have been still a starving FO in San Juan in March of 1998.
But that’s a story for another article. Maybe the next one. Let’s talk about the challenges of being a Beech 1900 FO in the busy Florida Gulf system. My second crew base was in Panama City, FL. Not much of a hub is it? Mesa practiced what is known as “outbasing”, where a small amount of crews are based at the hub outstations, and just a few reserves at the hubs. It made commuting difficult but it saved the airline millions of dollars a year on hotel rooms for overnights. You see, the crews would start in the outbase early in the day, and finish in base the same day. No hotels needed …
Except for this one shift that we had in Panama City (PFN – Bay County airport. Not there anymore, now a big housing development.) It was a weekend shift so it almost always went to the junior crew. Of course, I was the junior FO. The shift was two consecutive 8 leg days.
It started at 7am Central in PFN, with 1:25 leg down to Orlando (MCO). Sit for an hour and a half and then in fairly rapid succession do the following:
1:25 back to PFN
:30 over to Ft. Walton Beach (VPS)
:30 back to PFN
1:15 down to Tampa (TPA)
1:05 down to Marathon in the keys (MTH)
:50 over to Ft. Lauderdale (FLL)
:50 back to MTH and then oddly enough, to a very nice Holiday Inn with a Tiki Bar for a pleasant overnight. Probably because if you add up all these scheduled legs it comes out to be 7:50, or just 10 minutes under our daily scheduled maximum of 8 hrs. Frequently it could go over but it was a rather nice, long overnight – from 5:30 evening to 8:30 in the morning, which counted as an extended rest period. Any rest period longer than 9 hours pretty much reset the clock, which is a good thing, because the next day we did the whole thing in reverse.
Started at 8:45 we left MTH to FLL
FLL back to MTH
MTH to TPA
TPA to PFN
PFN to VPS
VPS to PFN
PFN to MCO and sit for 3 hours 10 minutes before heading back to PFN. This was too long to sit around the crew lounge so I used to offer to take the captain over to my house, 20 minutes from the airport. I’d provide dinner.
The junior captain was Tom Kombrink. Tom is an interesting guy. We didn’t exactly hit it off at first, but when you fly with someone day in and day out for 8 months, … well you kind of get to know each other. Once we figured each other out we became really good friends. Tom enjoyed coming to my house for dinner, especially since my roommate Joe and my neighbor Mike always made it an “event” and cooked something amazing. Mike had a turkey fryer and frequently would “drop a turkey” just for us and some other neighbors.
I’m getting away from the meat of the story, no pun intended.
The Last Flight of the Day
The final flight to PFN left MCO at 9:30pm Eastern, so it arrived in PFN around 10 pm central. Near 8 hours of flying spread over about 13 hours of duty, so pretty much a maximum day.
Late night Fatigue
This particular night Tom and I had decided not to go to the house, so we were pretty wiped out. It was my leg so Tom had the radios and checklists. Shortly after take off my display processors failed. I got two big red X’s to look at. It was dark, and we were in and out of the clouds.
After the displays failed I immediately switched my attention to the back up “peanut” gyro and the magnetic compass. I told Tom I was doing this and he started to pull up checklists to fix the problem, while still handling the radios, calling to company with our out and off times, and filling out the paperwork.
Since we were both tired we continued like this for about 5 minutes, when I suddenly came to my senses. Tom’s displays were working fine. I brought this to his attention. “Hey Tom, your displays are working. Can we switch?” He said, “Yeah Duh, why didn’t we think of that?” We did the control transfer procedure and I took the radios and began working the problem. It turned out to be a switch that was a little sticky (yeah this happens) so I wiped it down with an alcohol wipe and reset it. We were back in business. We switched back to me flying. (In case you were wondering, we didn’t have autopilot. I never saw an autopilot in airlines until I got to the CRJ.)
Once we got to altitude and had time to talk we reviewed the incident. Tom and I both agreed that the effect of two very long days in a row, pretty much up at the maximum limits of flight time and duty, had put us off our game. We should have thought of the switch immediately.
As a result we included it in our pre-takeoff briefing from then on. “If you have an instrument failure consider switching controls.”
The shift went away a few months later. While we certainly did enjoy that Marathon overnight, nobody really missed those two long days right after one another.
Epilogue
I learned that we have backup systems for a reason. It’s rare but there are times you need them.
However, the big lesson I learned is that I have a point of fatigue which I can reach, and there are signs if I pay attention. This became critical in my decision making process from then on, and even more so today.
