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In the very early days of my flying career, I was an Air Force pilot, flying the proverbial cargo plane full of rubber you-know-what out of a variety of places. (None of which, sad to say, was Hong Kong!) Based, as I was, on the southeast coast of the United States, my trips usually went to Europe and the Middle East, with occasional forays into South America and even Africa, as the geopolitical situation dictated. But since this was still the Vietnam era, and there was an ongoing and heavy logistic operation across the Pacific, we were occasionally tasked with flights from the CONUS (Continental US) to Southeast Asia. Most of these missions went via the northern route, through Alaska and Japan on the way to Vietnam.
An aside: we east coast crews were often turned around at Yokota Air Base, near Tokyo, where a west coast crew, with the connivance of the local command post (manned exclusively by west coast pilots!), would take over for the lucrative run into Saigon or Da Nang. The lucrative nature of these flights lay in certain details of the US tax laws, which state in part that pay earned in a combat zone is excluded from taxation to a certain extent. Although the poor grunts usually had to endure a full 30 or 31 days in-country earning this benefit, it actually accrued the moment one crossed a certain line of longitude, not far offshore of Vietnam. Aircrews, then, could get credit for a given month with a single turn-around from, say, Tokyo to Saigon and back. West coast crews habitually made it their business to accrue this credit every month, and they often did so by purloining the last two legs of what had been, until Tokyo, an east coast trip! Small wonder that there was little love lost between east and west, and the twain seldom met peacefully!
On one occasion, however, our squadron was assigned a trip to Southeast Asia that went via what we called the Mid-Pac route. This was via Travis AFB, near San Francisco, and Hickam AFB, Honolulu, thence onward to Clark AB near Manila in the Philippines before proceeding in-country. I was, at the time, a relatively new copilot, and to this day I'm not quite sure how I was assigned this trip, but fly it I did! I spent the layover in Honolulu driving all around the island, since I knew that the odds of seeing the place again were slim. Indeed, through all the rest of my Air Force flying I never returned to Hawaii, and it seemed that that particular pin in the globe would forever represent only one visit!
When I entered upon my airline career my employer, although not a real player in the Hawaii market, nonetheless had a single weekly flight to Honolulu from, of all places, St. Louis! This was the last remnant of what had once been a route to Micronesia and Australia in the early 70's. Of course I never flew this trip, even though it was operated with the 707, which at that point I was qualified to fly as a flight engineer. A year or so after I came aboard we dropped the flight altogether, and Hawaii was off the menu until deregulation opened up the route to all comers. By that time, of course, it became an all wide-body operation, far beyond my simple seniority means; thus the stuff of dreams, and not of actually flying!
Time marched on, as is its wont, and my seniority marched with it. Eventually it came to pass that I could actually fly to Hawaii if I wanted to change bases. New York, at least for us, has never had non-stop service to Honolulu, since the Caribbean has usually been the destination of choice for East Coast vacationers. But I have always been loath to pick up and move across the country, so Hawaii remained confined to the wish list.
All that changed recently, with the publication of a temporary (TDY) assignment to Chicago for the month of June. TDY assignments are fairly common in the airline industry, and they serve to balance the need (or the lack of need) for pilots in certain bases at certain times of the year. It's often better all around to rotate a few pilots into a location where they are needed in the short term in lieu of actually relocating them permanently. A TDY assignment can be a good deal, because the company provides a hotel for the pilot, and depending upon the location of the base, this might be like a month long vacation, with a few flights thrown in!
I had been on the lookout for one of these TDY's for several years, and naturally I bid this one immediately. So it was that I found myself looking at the Chicago bid sheet in mid May, poring over a rich selection of Hawaii flying. In addition to Honolulu, Chicago crews fly to Maui, an island I had never visited. Careful scrutiny of the bid lines revealed a selection that included three Honolulu trips and a Maui trip. Some pre-month trading resulted in a swap of one of the HNL trips for a Dublin Ireland trip, which was, at the time, a new route for us. This was quite serendipitous, since I am half Irish! June was beginning to look like a great month!
I'm a cheap date when it comes to Chicago TDY's, because I have relatives living just west of ORD, upon whom I can inflict myself for some freeloading, thus unburdening the Company of the expense of the hotel! Over my sincere objections, my kin even threw in rides to and from the airport! Family visits and Hawaii and Ireland! What could be better?
TDY's can be approached in several ways. One could, in theory, spend the entire month (including days off) at the temporary location. I did this in the early days of my career when I had a TDY to LAX. Alternatively, one might "commute" to the location, arriving just in time to fly one's trip. A majority of airline pilots commute to work by air these days, using their pass privileges for the travel. Commuting to a TDY location is a bit easier since it is official business, so to speak, and commands a higher boarding priority. A middle of the road approach, which I actually took in June, involved staying over a portion of the month, and returning home on some of my days off.
Since I hadn't been to Hawaii in over 30 years, a bit of preparation and study was in order. I arranged for a copy of the Pacific Jepps to be sent several weeks prior to the beginning of June. These were studied and the arrivals and departures flown a number of times in Flight Simulator. With the addition of some add-on scenery packages it was possible to get a really good idea of what the terrain was going to be like, and where it lay in relation to the approaches and departures. I even got an idea how long it would take to taxi over to the reef runway. (A considerable time, as it happens!) Thus forewarned and forearmed, I proceeded to Chicago to visit the kin and command my first flight to paradise west.
Long westbound flights often leave in the morning, so as to take
advantage of the time differential and thus stretch the travelers'
day. Flight 73 is no exception, being scheduled to depart ORD just
before 0900L, which allows for arrival in HNL a few minutes before
1300L, plenty of time for the passengers to hit the beaches for some
afternoon sun and surf! At a scheduled time of 9:00 block-to-block,
this flight is just a few minutes shorter than Rome to JFK, and is
fairly typical of the mission profile for the 767-300ER at our
airline.
Since my kin live just minutes west of ORD, I can enjoy the double luxury of sleeping-in much later than I could if this trip left from JFK, and the benefit of the hour difference between tummy time (eastern) and central time. The drive to the airport is only 30 minutes or so by the back roads, which, even in rush hour, are not heavily traveled. This is just as well, because getting to our operations at ORD, at least from the street side of the terminal, takes quite a while! It is located in the bowels of the earth, below the ramp level at the very end of the concourse - a considerable hike indeed. Stepping off the elevator and stowing my kitbag, I feel a bit like a miner reporting for duty!
The operations complex is vast, as befits its status as the nerve center of one of our major crew bases and hubs. Since it has been quite a while since I have had the need to darken its doors, it takes me a few minutes to explore it all. The first thing I must locate, of course, is the mailroom. There is no escaping the tyranny of the Jepps, not even on the way to paradise!
Having discovered, to my delight, that there are no revisions to post
for this trip, I set my sights on the international planning room.
Here I discover a trip folder for flight 73 (this one is colored
pink, apparently to differentiate it from the European trip folders,
which are white) already partially stuffed with paperwork - mostly
weather charts and the orientation and plotting chart. A quick check
of the computer reveals that the dispatcher has already finalized the
flight plan, and a couple of keystrokes starts the printer clattering
as it gets to work on a seven foot long swatch of former cultivated
conifer!
My previous research has already revealed that there are two basic route choices between ORD and Hawaii, one that goes over San Francisco (actually, OAK) and the other more southerly route over the LA area of southern California. Today the dispatcher has proffered me the northern route. On the flight plan it looks like this:
dct PLL, dct PLL275065, dct FOD, J94 ONL, J148 OAL, J80 OAK, dct BEBOP, R464 BITTA, MAGGI3 PHNL
I am delighted with the northern route, because, among other things,
it is steeped in aviation history. As we will see later in this
series, the very first commercial flights between the mainland and
Hawaii were flown over almost precisely this same route from OAK to
HNL.
We'll level off first at FL 320, close to optimum for an airplane weighing around 370,000 lb, and climb to 340 and eventually 360 as we burn fuel and get lighter. The time enroute is forecast to be 8:29 and we'll burn almost 98,000 lb (roughly 16,000 gal.) of increasingly expensive fuel in the process. Weather at HNL is forecast to be just what the tourists ordered - east winds and scattered fair weather clouds with a temperature in the low 80's. The dispatcher has chosen Maui, OGG, as the alternate, and the weather is the same there. Things are looking good!
Planning for this trip is just about identical to the planning for the trip to Rome. The only real difference, beyond the underlying geography, is the route structure itself. There are 9 routes between the west coast and the Hawaiian Islands, and these routes, unlike the NAT tracks, are fixed; that is, they do not change location day by day. Therefore the routes are printed on our charts, with courses and distances indicated, and no plotting is necessary enroute. (Actually, plotting is now rarely required, even on the NATs, as a result of changes that took effect after the Golden Argosy series was written.) The majority of these routes are one-way routes, either east or west bound. Only four of the nine routes are two-way streets - the outer two of the seven between Hawaii and California and both routes from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest. Like the NATs, they lie about 60nm apart.
Our chosen route, R464 (pronounced by most these days as Romeo 464,
but by old time dinosaurs like your humble author as Red 464!) goes
from a waypoint named BEBOP (an old pop music reference that only I
and a few of the more senior flight attendants would recognize, no
doubt!) to BITTA, a point around 170nm northeast of Oahu. Had we
been flying via the southern route, as we will later in the month,
our route would have been R576, 200 or so miles to the south. The
total feet-wet distance is just shy of 2100 nm, with a maximum
distance of over 1000 nm from land, which makes this the longest true
over-water segment I've flown in the 767. (It is true that, on
occasion, an entire Atlantic crossing will be technically feet-wet
from Rockaway to Ireland or Normandy, but those routes never get more
than 200 nm or so from land until east of Newfoundland, and the
maximum distance to an enroute alternate is rarely more than 700
nm.)
There are no real "enroute" alternates on this routing. Unlike the North Atlantic, where you not only have alternates at each end of the route, like Gander and Shannon, but also alternates in the middle, such as Greenland, Iceland and the Azores, the Hawaii routes offer no dry runways anywhere between the mainland and the islands themselves. Our alternates for the over-water portion of the flight, therefore, are SFO and HTO, which is Hilo, on the big island. We thus have only one ETP (Equal Time Point), and it is much more closely akin to the old "Point of No Return" that made for such suspense in "The High and the Mighty". This point, whatever we choose to call it, lies roughly halfway between the coast and Hilo, since the enroute winds will be below 50 knots for the entire crossing. We'll talk more about this, and the history behind it, later in the flight, after we go feet-wet!
Fuel planning is also much like that described for the Rome flight.
Today the enroute burn is around 98,000 lb. The destination
alternate, Maui, which lies 102nm from HNL, would require just shy of
5000 lb of fuel to reach, should that be necessary. Enroute reserve
fuel is now calculated at 5% of the enroute burn instead of the 10%
that we used at the time of the writing of the
Golden Argosy
series, a reduction carried out after an exhaustive study of the
actual fuel burns on tens of thousands of oceanic flights. That
works out to bit over 4000 lb. Add to that the destination reserve
fuel of 4200 lb (30 minutes worth of holding) and an additional 5700
lb added by the dispatcher (who, having worked this flight for years,
is wise to the ways of the Pacific) and the total release fuel here
at ORD is 116,300 lb. That is quite a bit, but nowhere near the
actual capacity of this 767-300ER, which is 160,000 lb. Of course,
if we actually had 160,000 lb of fuel today, some of the planned 200
or so passengers would be staying home! By the way, 116,300 lb is
just shy of 20,000 gallons, which, at today's (June 2005) jet fuel
prices of over $2 per gallon, works out to well over $40,000. That's
$200 per person just for their share of the fuel! By comparison, the
per-capita share of what it costs to keep me smiling up in the left
front seat on this flight is less than ten bucks! I guess I'm
something of a bargain!
Weather enroute is forecast to be such as to justify the appellation "Pacific". Clear skies will be on tap at altitude for both the overland and over-water portions of the flight, and smooth sailing aloft and alow. Hawaii itself is much like a great deal of the Caribbean - you can use the same forecast and hourly weather reports during most of the year - easterly winds and fair skies with temperatures in the mid-80's. This trip is shaping up to be a real treat, for the crew as well as for the passengers!
Planning complete, we gather up the paperwork and ascend from the
bowels of the earth to the gate level once again. The FB, the relief
pilot, has already started on the preflight, and when we arrive at
the gate, he is busy doing the walk around inspection. As we get our
bags stowed and the nest built, he returns to report that all is
well, and that both wings and the various and sundry other
appurtenances are firmly attached to the fuselage. The bird awaits
only the breath of petrochemical life to bear us on our way to
paradise! And now, with the passengers aboard and settled, it is
time to get to work!
Continued in "Golden Hawaii, Part 2 - To the Coast"
Anthony Vallillo
avallillo@charter.net
