the whale

One of the few mistakes the company made in procurement of new planes was purchasing the 747-400 Combi in 1989 to replace the DC-8 freighters. The planes were in a half passenger, half freight configuration with a main deck cargo hold. There simply wasn’t enough freight business on the main line to justify the things so they were stored, brand new, in the Arizona desert. Three years later, they realized that the extended range of the 400cseries afforded an opportunity to extend their routes into the Pacific. They were brought out and put into service on the Vancouver- London-New Delhi, Osaka, Seoul and Hong Kong routes and to appease Quebec, Montreal-Paris route.

They compounded their mistake by initially operating these routes with two pilots. Thanks to a weak dithering response by the newly formed ACPA, (Air Canada Pilots Association) it took the personal courage of two captains threatening to cancel the inaugural Hong Kong flight unless a third pilot was added.

it wasn’t long before i became restless again. My pension would be based on my best five years, so in 1992 i had exactly five years to go and the 747-400’s had come back from the desert. You could smack the fleecelined seat cushions and see clouds of desert dust emerge. By bidding them i’d have to leave VR and be based in Y and be on reserve again. Reluctantly, i took the plunge and successfully bid the slot. i soon realized that on reserve, commuting was not for me. So we would move back east and Joyce and i could shuffle down to Niagara on the Lake. Before that happened, ground school and simulator training for thirty pilots at the Boeing Plant near Seattle was part of the airline's 747-400 purchase agreement. i was lucky enough to garner a slot on the first course. it was only a short drive from Tsawwassen, where i lived, to Seattle so we had a bit of a breather before heading east. The training was superb and i felt like a real airline pilot rubbing shoulders with students from all over the world. Our Boeing simulator instructors had many tales about Asian and other international pilots to compare ourselves to and our take away was that they placed Canadians high on the international scale of professionals or so they told us.

Dozing For Dollars

Try to imagine being a train driver in a single-manned engine cab crossing the Nullabor Plain of Australia. You are trying to stay awake staring at three hundred miles of absolutely straight railway tracks converging to a tiny dot where the sky meets the dead flat horizon. The Trans Australian Railway uses an alerting device called a dead man’s throttle, a handle on the master controller, which if the driver falls asleep and releases his grip, engine power is cut off and all the train brakes are thrown full on getting the attention of any passengers who might be aboard and upsetting any lurking nearby Kangaroos. What does this have to do with all the latest chirping about pilot fatigue?... read on McDuff i know, i know… hah! hah! hah! That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

The faint after-glow of sunset was fading behind our port wing. We’d just left Tokyo ATC’s airspace two hours after leaving Seoul eastbound out over the North Pacific. The westbound trip the day before was like a recurring nightmare what with the usual frustrating yet easily rectified airport ground delays at Vancouver that compounded into further ATC slot time clearance delays then made worse by strong headwinds, turbulence and the normal eyeball searing glare of flying westbound into a never ending blazing noon. The North Star i’d started out on so many moons ago was a far, far cry from our present mount, a Boeing 747-400.

On previous trips, both of us crew had tried all the gimmicks that wise guy frequent flyer nerds and aeromedical quacks had recommended to stay awake to no avail. it’s quite funny to watch someone fall asleep sitting up; their heads loll onto their chest then some wicked synaptic brain fart wakes them and their heads snap up like the cracking of a whip only to repeat the sequence moments later. When you are really tired no matter what you do your brain will eventually just shut you down into a virtual coma. best seat in the house

Anyway, as we were wondering how we were going to stay wake for the remaining nine hours of flight my trusty side-kick asked if i remembered the Boeing pilot response warnings from ground school. i was ashamed to admit i’d forgotten all about it because i’d never experienced such a warning nor knew of anyone who would knowingly admit to having one. Ask any flight crew, pilot or flight attendant, and they will tell you the best way to fall asleep in your hotel room when your body is totally out of synch with the time zone is to read your company manuals. You’ll be in dreamland in mere seconds. So we threw caution to the wind and decided to take the risk and start reading our onboard manuals.

Here’s what we found, verbatim, under (EiCAS), the Engine-indicating and Crew-Alerting System: an electronic display and warning system to monitor various flight systems.

PiLOT RESPONSE

Caution Beeper after advisory message PiLOT RESPONSE displayed, FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time.

Pilot Response EiCAS Alert Message

Miscellaneous EiCAS Memo Messages

Message Level Aural Condition

PiLOT RESPONSE

Warning Siren After caution message PiLOT RESPONSE displayed, FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time.

PiLOT RESPONSE

Advisory FMC does not detect crew activity in monitored area within a specific time

Translating from manualese into English means that if everything goes quiet in the cockpit and nobody activates any of the Flight Management functions, ( nobody talks, nobody makes a radio call, nobody initiates a data link message or nobody activates a switch) for a specified time a sequence of visual and aural alerts are triggered. it starts with a visual advisory message on the EiCAS coloured amber saying, “PiLOT RESPONSE”, accompanied by an aural low volume beeper which probably wouldn’t wake your average deep sleeper pilot and it means: wake up sleepy head. Then, if there is no cockpit response to that message a visual alert saying “PiLOT RESPONSE” is repeated except this time it is in red, accompanied by a loud siren meaning: do something stupid. if there is still no response the stall warning stick shaker is activated and that machine gun like rattling should almost awaken the dead.

What the manuals we were using didn’t define was what is meant by, “specified time”. A quick call on the old Sat Phone to maintenance central revealed the specified time to be thirty minutes. Picture yourself sitting doing nothing for thirty minutes without moving a switch or checking some function or answering a radio or crew call from the back and the worst challenge; not speaking a word to the person you’ve been sitting beside for the last few hours…unless of course it was your wife.

So we set about to challenge the system. We promised each other to sit silent, do nothing and touch nothing for thirty minutes to activate the warnings… or so we thought. Less than ten minutes in and without thinking i said something to my accomplice so we had to start the timing again. Now, twenty minutes in and a radio message from ARiNC in San Francisco had to be answered. Start again. Twenty five minutes in, turn up the heat on the top deck. Start again. Time was dragging on increment by advancing increment but by golly we were staying wide awake trying to beat the computer. Finally twenty nine and half minutes in, almost there, and “thwack” the flight deck door bangs opens and, “Hey you guys want a coffee?”

“ARGCH…#**&!%$^?”

By this time, the sky to the east was lightening and we could see the lights of Dutch Harbour in the Aleutians ahead so we knew the radio would get busy as we came under radar control so we gave up. Yet, for the whole crossing our little game had kept us wide awake. i had to wonder if this is what Boeing had intended or did they think the pilot response computer warning would make up for a two pilot operation on an airplane that could stay aloft for sixteen hours or more.

Finally, relief pilots were added on all long haul flights. The extra pilots were formally called cruise pilots but because they earned their pay while euphemistically sleeping in the bunk or in a first class seat, in effect dozing for dollars, they were known in the pilots’ lexicon simply as…Dozers. At least it’s better than what second officers on the 727 were called…voice activated data links! it’s amazing even today's pilots, their unions and regulators are still at it...bellyaching about crew fatigue and doing zip about it.

As i found out on my Lagos trip, being on reserve can be advantageous in spite of the drag of bring on call 24 hours a day. Air Canada was a leader in banning smoking in passenger aircraft cabins starting in 1971 when it offered seat selection in non-smoking sections. in the cockpit, it was left up to the crew to decide whether to smoke or not. The captain of course had a built in veto but the seniority system allowed for parties of both persuasions to bid around perceived offenders at least for block holders. People on reserve one way or another just sucked it up and got on with it. Like most airlines, Air Canada had elected to seek an extension on the no smoking rule on its Pacific routes because of the majority of the huge smoking demographic of the Asians. The company decided to be the first international carrier to take the plunge in spite of possible revenue losses. it made its no smoking policy worldwide simultaneously with its inaugural scheduled passenger flight to Japan, flight 891, YZ(Toronto)- VR(Vancouver)KiX(Osaka) September 20th 1994. There were two us on reserve that day...me and my nemesis from the sad last Lethbridge departure, Dennis the menace. Now he would spoil the last of my two measly claims to fame as an airline pilot, the company’s first flight to Japan. i had always wanted to go to Japan. Being senior, i had a choice of the YZ-VR leg or the VR- KiX leg. The duty day was too long for the whole flight

YZ-KiX; naturally, i took the VR-KiX leg. in the event the media covered the departure from YZ where Denis was captain and Denis shows up in the Air Canada official historic time line as Captain on the company’s first flight to Japan. They even got the name wrong saying it was Rene not Denis although that could have been Denis`s middle name after his father, my former Winnipeg boss.

My first Officer was actually a check pilot, George McKay. i don`t know if the company was out of reserve pilots and drafted him or asked him to hold my hand because i was the first Air Canada pilot to have a pacemaker or whether my previous outspoken behaviour had caught up with me. Either way, i couldn`t have had a more amiable companion. We had many cockpit visitors, Among them Canada`s first woman astronaut, Roberta Bondar and the Air Canada CEO, Hollis Harris sat in the jump seat for landing. i didn`t know it at the time but his testimony would tilt the courts ruling in a multimillion dollar lawsuit in our favour years later. We also met the Air Canada CEO in waiting, Robert Milton. Knowing what i know now i should have kicked his sorry little butt out over the North Pacific when i had the chance.

Our arrival was shown on Japanese National TV, NHK, and we were treated like royalty with a lavish diner and many bouquets of flowers. Now i really did feel like a bride and not a Bride`s Maid.