Well, time for another update! Yesterday I finished four horrible (but fun) days of flying. I say horrible because everything seemed to go terribly wrong...all the time. It ended with my takeoff to St. Kitts two nights ago, during the takeoff roll (in heavy rain by the way) we felt some unusual thumps and both decided it was safer to continue the takeoff rather than do a highspeed abort in the rain. Turns out we lost a tire! So we spent the ENTIRE next day in St. Kitts stuck. The company chartered a plane to bring mechanics and a new tire over, and told us to arrive to the airport at 1030am (versus our scheduled 655am departure). We did this and the airplane was not ready until about 230pm. What a horrible day in the airport terminal in St. Kitts...
Two days before this I was landing in St. Lucia's Castries airport and here is what went down...
Our airplanes have what is called a pitch connect mechanism, basically it connects out control yokes to the elevators, it is relatively common for this to fail upon landing if you go into deep reverse with the nose wheel still off of the ground. Every ATR in San Juan has a "pitch rearm" button to press incase of a pitch disconnect. However, one ATR has the button but nothing "beneath the button". This was our airplane!
So we find ourselves on day two of four landing in St. Lucia and whenever I land there I try to land soft, but if you are not going to land soft you "just land" to make sure you don't go off the end of the runway. My landing was not horrible, but somehow when I did go into deep reverse with full braking, the pitch disconnect happened...in our airplane this equals stuck the entire afternoon in St. Lucia! Not too fun...so in the end I was supposed to fly 96 hours this month, and after being removed from one day for my captain to give training to a new first officer, and after these two MTX problems I am flying like 64 hours and getting paid for 97 or 98 hours this month.
This Saturday I am going to my first Puerto Rican airshow!!! Blue Angel #7 will be doing solo performances, there will be a B-2 flyby, and sounds like lots of other cool things. It will be at the Aguadilla airport on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico.
I will be in Argentine from May 1st until early on May 5th...it should be a good time and I will upload lots of pictures after the trip. I will fly from SJU to Miami on an American 757, then from Miami to Buenos Aires on an American 777 overnight flight...9 hours south from Miami!!!
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