The Rest of September

Our anniversary was by far the highlight of the month. After that it was ALL work. I worked four days on, one day off, five days on, two days off, and five days on. Pretty brutal.

After a two day trip, I had 3 days of reserve. The first day of reserve I was called our to work a local trip. I was assigned to fly LAX to Fresno, Fresno to Las Vegas and back to Fresno. Then I was suppose to sit ready reserve at the airport for four hours before deadheading (sitting in the back of the airplane) back to LAX. I was very confident that there was no way they would call me on ready reserve in Fresno so I decided not to bring my overnight bag. Bad idea! They called me immediately after I finished in Fresno to fly to San Francisco and then onto Modesto to stay the night. Then they were going to have me fly several legs the next day and finish around 10pm. Nice. The hotel in Modesto did have deodorant, tooth brush and tooth paste, etc. I had to throw out my contacts but luckily I had an extra set in my work bag. I borrowed a t-shirt from a buddy of mine. It was a white undershirt that went down to my knees. Needless to say I only left the hotel to get some food. Day two, before I even left the hotel, crew support called to let me know that I would not be finishing that night at 10pm. Instead, I would fly an additional leg to Santa Barbara, stay the night there, and end the following night at 10pm. That's right, three days without a bag. Pretty glamorous. I ended even going home after the trip without my bag because it didn't make sense to go all the way back for it.

Skywest has been hiring for the last year. I know a lot of captains have complained about flying with the new guys. I really haven't felt that way. But that 3 day trip with no bag did try my patience a little. I had 4 or 5 different first officers. All of them had under 100 hours in the airplane or just over 100 hours. On the second night going into Santa Barbara we had weather. The ceilings were right at minimums. Los Angeles center was controlling us. They left us high. My first officer was behind the airplane. I could see that he was correcting but it just wasn't fast enough. I had to tell him to disconnect the autopilot. He could see that we were high so he extended the landing gear and called for all the flaps. This was a good move but then he was still only descending at 1000 feet/min. With all that stuff out there if you don't get a good descent rate then you really slow down. Sure enough, I had to tell him that we were at 120 knots and only descending at 1000 feet/min. I then told him to get his nose down to increase his descent. He responded affirmatively and was able to stabilize the approach and re-engage the autopilot. It just can be a lot more demanding and exhausting when I am flying with someone new. It sometimes reminds me of when I was flight instructing. We have all been there so I know how important it is to be patient and supportive, which I am, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting.

At the end of the month I had a few days off in a row. Time really flies when I'm at home. Brandon really wants to be more regular about eating and would like to hit up the gym and gain a little weight. In my efforts to be supportive and due to the fact that the reason he is not well fed is because of me, I decided to make some meals and freeze them so he would have them when I was gone. I made homemade bread one day, chili, the next day, and both chicken pot pie and chicken and wild rice casserole the day after that. I couldn't believe how much time it took to do all this. Either cooking can just really take awhile or I am very inefficient. But I hope that it will help Brandon to eat more regularly so it is really worth it.