First Emergency as an Airline Pilot
In late 1995 I was flying as a Shorts 360 FO for American Eagle / Executive Airlines out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was my first airline job.
In the beginning it was very exciting. The first few weeks I was just learning to catch up to the captain. They expected the FO paperwork to be accurate and they wanted it now.
After several months though, it became commonplace. I was now in the most dangerous position a pilot can be in, “complacency.” I could do the paperwork in seconds and even improvise on the fly if they threw a few more bags in the back. I held the checklist in my hand but never looked at it because I had it all memorized. We flew the same routes over and over, day after day. It got to be something like, “Hey look, there’s a strange car in Juan’s driveway” type of complacency. It was that automatic.
Nearly all of our flights were short hub and spoke out of SJU, to places like St. Thomas (STT), St. Croix (STX), Mayaguez (MAZ), Ponce (PSE), and the occasional flights to Punta Cana (PUJ), La Romana (LRA) or Santo Domingo (SDO) – the last three being in the Dominican Republic.
To say the planes knew the way we were going was not that much of an exaggeration.
The flying was simple. It was almost always good weather, barring the occasional thunderstorm or the very rare Tropical Storm/Hurricane (which we usually closed for anyway.) It was always great visibility and although windy at times, basically simple flying.
We departed from both runways but almost always landed on Runway 10, as it was shorter than 8 and kept us out of the way of the American heavies landing on Runway 8. Because the runways were not parallel, there was an interesting arrival procedure in use most of the time: The jets would come in on the Lagoon Visual/ILS runway 10, and at the last minute break out to the left and land on runway 8. We in the Shorts, coming back from STT or STX would fly the “Olympic Visual” from a right downwind leg of 10, turn a close in right base staying over the old Olympic village and staying over the Lagoon to stay out of the way of the arriving jets.
It sounds goofy (and it was) but it worked.
Fatigue Was a Factor
I was finishing up two consecutive three day trips with captain Rafeal Rodriguez, a great guy and one of my favorite captains. I bvelieve he just retired from American in Miami. On this day we were tired, and had one more STT turn before we were done. I had already booked my non-rev seat home to Orlando (MCO) on the 4:05 American flight.
Shortly after takeoff, I was doing the climb out checks, as Raffy was Flying Pilot. As I was setting climb power, I noticed that the left engine was acting very erratically. It was surging back and forth between idle and normal power.
“Hey Raffy, I can’t get the left engine to settle down. Something flaky is going on.”
He looked at the gauges, looked at me and said “shut it down.”
I stared at him. What? He wanted me to do what? “Excuse me did you say shut it down?”
“Yes, kill it and cage it. Engine in flight shutdown procedure please.”
“You mean the QRH? The emergency procedure? OK let me get that out.” I was still struggling with the idea that we were shutting down an engine.
As I was going through the procedure he told me, “Call tower and tell them we are coming back single engine, request priority landing.”
“We’re going back?” He looked at me incredulously “What, you want to go to St Thomas on one engine? Of course we’re going back.” It was finally hitting me that we had an inflight emergency. I called tower, declared the emergency and they cleared us to land on Runway 10.
“Call the company and tell the passengers” he said. I called Ops and told them we were Returning To Base (RTB) on one engine. I got on the PA and informed the passengers that we were having a problem with the left engine and we were going back to San Juan to get a different aircraft.
No Special Procedures During Emergencies
Tower asked us if we could do the Olympic Visual as there was an American Airbus A300 on 10 mile final. Raffy shook his head at me. “Uh no tower, we’re going to need a normal downwind for this one.”
They approved it and vectored the Airbus away to make room for us.
I was now in alert, emergency mode and was watching everything, reading every checklist and studying Raffy intently, because obviously this guy was a consummate professional and had been ready for the situation with no hesitation. More on that later.
We landed without incident, taxied in on one engine (a bit of a challenge but Raffy handled it), and went through the complete shutdown procedures. We handed the plane off to the mechanic who came in to see us and I walked out in to the cabin and saw many frightened passengers. “Why do you look so scared? I was telling you everything was OK.”
One passenger started to laugh, “That thing?” he said, pointing to the loud speaker, “We couldn’t hear a word you were saying. It was not hi fidelity.”
“Oh wow I’m sorry to have worried you.” “No problem, you guys handled it well.”
We got another airplane towed over and loaded up again. Interesting note: We had 33 passengers before, this time we were down to 24. Ha ha I guess they all didn’t share that one passengers confidence.
What I Learned
After we returned from STT Raffy walked me over to the MCO gate while I checked in. I had remarked to him how impressed I was at his decision making process and how quick he did everything. He shared with me:
“You know, I used to do a complete emergency ‘what if’ briefing before every takeoff. I still do silently. I can see now I need to bring it back out loud, and do it with the FO. You are evidence that even good pilots can get complacent and not be ready when something happens. Even though it happens rarely, it still happens. Some day this is going to happen to you, and you will be ready, right?”
He was right. I do a complete emergency briefing before every takeoff, out loud if someone is with me. I have contingency plans set up, such as “if I have to put it down I’ll go over there.” I review the memory items for engine failure and fire, both total and partial failures. Instrument failures, radio failures and others are included as well.
That day taught me the danger of complacency, especially when compounded by some fatigue. To quote another magazine, “I Learned About Flying From That.”