That new-car smell

I got to fly a brand new jet today, it was delivered only 8 days ago. The aeroplane felt new and happy to be alive and the engines were noticeably smoother. All the switches had that extra springiness that years (or even months) of flicking tends to ware away, the cabin was spotless, all the lights worked and ... well it was like sitting in a brand new car.

Here's some weather we had to deal with a few days ago...

Hmmm...

Arriving into Brunei there was plenty of colour on the radar but the airport itself looked clear and I was able to go visual from about 7 miles. As I touched down (softly) the heavens opened up and it started to pour. Cats and dogs, and probably elephants too. It rained throughout the turnaround, so much so that the aerobridge anti-drip whatever-it's-called couldn't cope and the poor passengers had to walk through a shower to get onboard. I could't help but think of that song "the rain in spain falls mostly in the plane" as it was sort of raining inside the aircraft.

As we pushed a Royal Brunei 767 bound for London taxied down runway 21 to depart from the other (03) end... We didn't think much of it and requested taxi for 21 as it was the advertised runway. As we were taxying another Royal Brunei 767 departed 03 ... Hmmm.

Ah. Quite. As we lined up and switched on the radar we found ourselves looking at lots and lots and lots of red in the departure path of runway 21. It was the sort of red that had killed people in the past, so we also taxied all the way to the other end, span around and departed 03 with an insignificant tailwind. Next time I'll pay more attention to aircraft departing the "wrong" runway, especially when the weather gods are playing around.

Arriving into K-L 2 hours later we were given an especially outstanding display of lightning and ATC incompetence, but that's another story for another day.

The landings are getting much better, I have managed to log 20h in the last 4 days.

S.

A first

I did my first landing with paying passengers in the back at 0318z (1118 local) today, the 21st of October 2009. It was on runway 14L in K-L in beautiful weather and a very light tailwind. I flared a little too aggressively and floated far too long but no one got hurt and nothing broke.

My second landing, slightly better, was at 0611z on the same runway but with a thundercell 3nm away and a 5kt crosswind.

It's for real now, despite the bureaucracy's best efforts I have finally moved from the 3rd seat to the 2nd seat. The view is better and there are more knobs to play with. I logged nearly 6 hours today which is more than I managed in the last 12 months.

I'll be denting runways again tomorrow, wake-up call is for 3:30 in the morning. Yuk.

S.

Starry sea

Flying back from Bangkok we're skimming under a thick layer of stratus that's completely blackening out the sky. All there is outside is complete uninterrupted darkness and we could be the only object in the entire universe. Then slowly stars begin to appear beneath us. First it's just a few, then more and more until the sea is covered with little white twinkles.

The world isn't coming to an end, and we haven't started flying upside down, what we see is thousands of fishing boats out for a night of work. Seeing the tiny lights bobbing around is magical... Words fail me and I forgot to bring my camera.

A lightning flash and a kick in the bottom brings us back to reality: seatbelts on (again), select turbulence speed M0.76 (again), scan the blackness for that rogue thundercell that's hiding from the radar. The little bugger probably has friends lurking around nearby...

S.

Mandarin Meters

Flew to Guangzhou (sometimes known as Canton) a few days ago. It's a very large Chinese city about 120km inland from Hong-Kong, although from the air it looks connected to H-K in one huge urban sprawl. I'm ashamed to say I didn't have any idea this place, or the 9 million people that live in it, existed a few weeks ago. I always pictured Hong-Kong as an isolated city in the middle of I-don't-know-what ... but that's not the point.

The point is that this flight was my first ever encounter with metric altitudes. Most of the aviation world uses feet to express altitudes and will instruct us to maintain an altitude in feet. In China and Russia, for some probably communist reason, altitudes are measured in meters, separation is in meters, ATC tells us to fly meters, but the 'bus only speaks feet so we have to check a reference table every time we're given a new level.

That in itself isn't such a big deal, but ATC also speaks Mandarin to Chinese aircraft and that is very very unnerving.

I always used to scorn the people who complained about ATC being provided in French over France and Québec. I speak French so could follow what was going on easily - and even if I didn't speak the language surely knowing what I had to do would be enough?

Even flying through Spain, where Spanish is spoken along with English, wouldn't feel too odd, I would figure out what's going on using the few Spanish words I know, but being thrown into a completely new country flying to a town I didn't know anything about while flying with weird altitudes and procedures and people who speak a language that doesn't remotely resemble any other language I vaguely have a clue about on the radio really lowered my situational awareness.

I won't say they should start speaking English ... But I think I may try and learn basic aviation instructions in Mandarin before my next flight there, and I hope I go again soon because despite the culture shock and the strange noises on the radio I really feel like I've arrived somewhere different as opposed to Indonesia or Malaysia which, from the cockpit during a 20 minute turn-around, all feels the same somehow.

S.