surreal weather....

finally at home for late Christmas celebrations this is today's surreal weather around our town:

northern lights....

after waiting for three nights now in Alaska without seeing anything i finally got lucky while departing from Anchorage eastbound and we saw a spectacular show of green northern lights!

merry christmas everyone!

layover in Alaska....

Hi everybody!

today i have a few pictures for you to show what you can do during a three day layover in Anchorage.
this time the two of us got a nice car and startet driving north towards Fairbanks, where we used to stay until a few years ago at the lovely Sophie Station and for a rememberance of the old times booked a room for a night, actually the longest night of the year on December 21st and the night does not get much longer than in Fairbanks, which ist with 64˚N only 120 nautical miles south of the Polar Circle, where the night doesn't end at all.
the reward for all the driving on ice and snow and the emergency breaking for crossing Moose was a great time on the road and really nice views and pictures of the seemingly limitless population free nature.
1400km in two days, 450 pictures and great time to remember!

here you go:

the tour:


some moose on the road...


the big dipper in the clear night-sky pointing to the north star:


the small Gulkana Airport under the moonlight:


the beauty of the alaskan nature:






the alaskan way of life - keep the engines running, its too cold to shut them down...

busy december...

while in the company a strike was barely avoided and pilots are still searching to regain trust into a management that stabed us in the back and basically deserves no trust at all, december passes by quickly and i was kept busy at home during vacation and off-days, to prepare christmas.
i will most probably not be at home with my family, but somewhere between hongkong, anchorage and chicago, exact location still open due to last minute changes on all routes during christmas.

that doesn't really help in planning a christmas party abroad since any friends i inform, would make plans and probably be frustrated by my last minute excuse.

to cope with any changes i packed a suitcase for 11 days and all temperatures from +30 to -30˚C,
planned trip is round the world with lux-baku-hongkong-anchorage-chicago-lux.
let's see what happens and if i can bring you some nice pictures to entertain your holidays.

brgds, cu
nuck


bonus:
sunrise over the atlantic ocean, flying mangos from Petrolina to Accra two weeks ago:

once every now and than...

we get the chance to be at special places at the right time and weather, and since you where waiting for a new entry for longer now i present some older pictures of one of those experiences:
it's the Ayers Rock in Australia shot on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne on a special day when we were planned to fly a little bit more south than usual due to winds and had a nice sunlight.
it was a great experiance to finally see it appear on the horizon and fly a turn passing it slightly south and we all gathered on the left windows to take a close look, knowing it's probably a once in a lifetime experience!

have a great week, keep reading,
brgds - nuck

a job with no season...

while most people living in europe or north america enjoy living with the four seasons of the year, the longhaul flying crowd has no such luxuray and is living with hugh temperature and climate changes all year, completely odd for the body and most of us need half a year for the body to adopt. during that initial time most have a constant flew, loosing their voice and occacional fewer. after that initial time the body basicly adopts and we can start to enjoy living this crazy life.

while this week it's getting winter in Europe and people at home start mounting winter tyres and crank up the heating in the houses, i was sent to Brazil - Campinas, Curtiba and Petrolina - i was fighting summer temperatures of up to 38˚C, heavy rainshowers with standing water on the runway and aquaplaning. relaxing at the outdoor-pool and eating in open street-kitchens.
next week i will be back in the winter in Europe and Asia, Novosibirsk as the other extreme on the networ has now -30˚C!

and this is how the current week (November 18 to 25th) looks like:
brgds - nuck

Campinas airport, built like an aircraft carrier,

which messes up the radio-altimeter for landing and has high risk for hard landing...

a little 25 min rainshower in Campinas:

a walk through Petrolina, one of our funniest destinations, 

because it's the only uncontrolled airport we are flying to,

that means ATC controll ends descending through flightlevel 160.

unique on the 747 operation. lovely little town but rather poor...

fun fact: tire change on a 747:

hello!
i do not consider my blog political therefore no comments about the terror in france.

my topic today is changing tires on big aircraft. unknown to most bigger aircraft carry a spare tire, just like a car, hidden somewhere in the belly, usually in the back. while also carrying some other spares like special tools, oil for replenishment and a few smaller parts, all together called the flyaway -kit by Boeing, we do not carry the jacklift to actually change a tire or other heavy tools.
we rely on getting this tools at the aiport.
next problem is the weight - while it's not a major problem to change the nosewheels, it can be changing a body- or wing-gear tyre in the back, where the majority of the weight is resting. a typical hydraulic/pneumatic jack can lift 65 metric tonnes, while the aircraft (747-8) can weigh something inbetween the empty weight of about 196 t and the full take-off-weight of 444 t. so you think of 44 t resting on the nosewheels and 100 t on each main gear truck, exceeding the capabilities of the jack.
unlaoding the cargo becomes necessary, creating some delay...

sidenote: we also have a limit on the differential tire-pressure on one axle, if it is exceeded due to a completly flat tire we need to check/change the whole axle because it may be bent! tire pressure and brake temperature on the 747-8 are monitored constantly, so even if we have a slow deflation on a tire in flight we can see that in the cockpit and advise ground staff at the destination to prepare a pit stop for a new tire.

a speciality of the 747-8 is the possibility to mount 747-400 tires on the nosewheel if both of them are replaced. there are steel-adaptors in the fly-away kit to mount them. -400 tyres are a little bit more rounded on the profile, while the -8 tyres you can see on the pictures have a little edge on each side of the profile and can carry a little bit heavier load.
-8 tyres also are inflatet to a slightly higher pressure increasing the needed PCN or Pavement-Classification-Number on the airports.
the PCN is measured by drilling samples on airport movement surfaces, it should always be higher than the ACN, you guessed it - the Aircraft-Classification-Number.
if the PCN is not high enough it basically means the aircraft will sink into the asphalt, the possibility of a truck or car to drive on a surface doesn't mean anything to us, the 747 can still sink into weaker asphalt or concrete, therefore we watch our movements very carefully.

thanks for reading, was a little bit technical today, here are some pictures of a double nose-wheel change at hongkong airport,  it took 3 hours to complete....
brgds - nuck

difference in cargo and passenger flying...

after flying passengers for more than 5 years i changed to cargo flying and today i want to point out the differences in the two jobs.
first - there is no need to be at the aircraft before the cargo arrives like on a pax plane you usually have to be on the aircraft before the passengers are allowed to board
second - there is no need to wait for passengers to leave the aircraft, land, park, paperwork leave for good and let the technicians and loadmasters take care of everything else.
third - there is no special need to check seatbelts or the galleys if times get rough and we are hit by turbulence with one exemption - if there are large animals on board like horses we want to be extra smooth, even smoother than the pax boys.
fourth - while on bigger long haul aircrafts there is always a lot of cabin crew on pax flights, we operate 80 % with only two pilots and layovers can get a bit lonely. while on occasions i had more fun and great adventures with colleges during the cargo flying over all the dining, shopping and life with 8 to 10 crewmembers abroad was in average more pleasing on the passenger operation.
it is also a lot easier to take family members and friends along without the probems of boarding through the back of warehouses and backdoors of the airports alway screating special procedures for passengers on cargo flights, that can be pretty anoying.
fifth - while pax planes tend to operate on a fixed schedule as proper as possible, especially my company celebrates flexibility and i never know exactly the time of the next flight, more or less just the off-days and vacation follows a plan.

over all i found my niche in the cargo business and love it very much, always with room for improvement. i love the time alone when i can contemplate about the meaning of life and the fun of crazy operation into airports like Latacunga or N'djamena.

the pictures today i shot on a 4 day layover in Beijing and they reflect the lonely mood of an evening where the copiloy just went to sleep and i was too lazy to go out but stayed at the lobby bar oft the Kempinsky hotel for a caipirinha and listened to the pianomusic thinking about my life again...

one of the best parts of the job is always coming home again!
cu, brgds - nuck

next time: the fun of changing wheels on a 747....

commuting...

one of the advantages of flying is that we are rather flexible on where we live and work, thus i think it's a big advantage living in Austria with good weather and perfect landscape including mountains and lakes alike, close drive to the sea at Croatia and still beeing able to work in Luxembourg where working conditions at least until now have been much better.
usually flying i find time to take pics of Vienna, the lovely city i grew up in and lived in for quite a while, before moving south to escape the traffic and noise and find my quiete Shangri-La where i can forget about the job and relax and get back to energy before heading out again...

pictures starting today flying into Vienna from the west - Tulln-Langenlebarn Airport, where i served flying, followed by the inner city of Vienna and my favorite place - home.
cu - nuck

fun fact: LX-ACV

LX-ACV is an old Boeing Converted Freighter or short BCF, which was in a former life a passenger aircraft, therefore the long upper deck, the big cargo door on the aft left is fitted then.
after conversion to a B747-400BCF it kept flying cargo and still is, it's in pretty good maintenance shape with everything functioning and performing a perfect flight today from Novosibirsk/Russia to Luxembourg encountering the first snow of the season in Novo and the first actual Low Visibility Autoland (CATIIIB-NDH) without minimum and braking automatically to taxi speed at Lux.

nevertheless this aircraft is bound for the scrapyard next year because the upcoming big check, where it has to be dismanteld and basically rebuild except for the airframe, is too expensive, even more expensive than buying another used 747-400!
you see that the age of an aircraft with proper maintenance is usually not the problem, the final flight to scrapping is just set up by the finance departement,  not by the mechanics.

you can see her landing at Novo in the morning at -5˚C after a little snow shower today.

next is an aerial of the city Wroclaw/Poland which was one of only three cities today with clear weather on the way, the rest of Russia and Europe was under a thick fog layer. the airport of Wroclaw is visible in the lower right corner, which is where i landed several times with a Canadair Jet while flying for Lauda Air out of Vienna - always a bit nostalgic to see the old smaller airports where i don't fly to anymore...

ending this post is an example of how we get the weather via Satcom, starting with ELLX is the actual weather of Luxembourg in the morning, which decodes to
time 08hrs20mins UTC, 9.20 local time, wind variable 3 kts (6km/h), variable in direction from 100 to 180˚magnetic, meteoroligical visibility 100m with an Runway Visual Range (RVR) of 175m (thats taking the strong lamps of the runway lighting and the runway direction into account - minimum for us is to land is 125m) FG means fog, and VV002 is a vertical visibility of 200 ft or about 70m with temperature and dew point at 4˚C and an airpressure to set the altimeters of 1027mbar. NOSIG is one of the airborn acronyms, that we love so much, for no significant change expected within the next two hours.

on days like today we take a little extra fuel to be able to do some holdings at the destination and keep a closer look at the weather-trends during the flight, but in the end if the airport is capable, the 747 does an excellent job in landing itself and braking, leaving just the taxi in to the crew, just as it should be, we can relax and enjoy the show of a few lights appearing in the fog.
have a nice week,
cu - nuck

Accidents....

Yesterday another accident happend, a russian airbus 321 crashed in Egypt.

while the cause of this latest accident is unknown at this time, every crash has an impact on my life as a professional pilot. what i do is to try and get real data on the accident because much of the news coverage is usually incorrect and very much dependent on the background of the newsreporters own education and technical understanding. a very good source for real data is the website www.avherald.com where, except for the comment sections, only confirmed hard information can be found.

in most cases it will take time for the investigators to point out an initial idea on what caused a crash.

the aviation industry handles accidents by alarming an investigator team, which every country has on standby. they will follow in their investigation the basic idea that every accident is caused by multiple factors instead of one single cause.

factors can be all sorts of influences on the particular flight like aircraft design, maintenance, training of the crew, technical malfunctions, weather, physical and mental state of the crew, external factors like terrorists or dangerous material as lithium batteries, the training and working procedures of the security staff at airports, aircraft systems and sefety features that should have prevented accidenst and are usually designed to capture and correct human errors and all alike...

the process leads to press statement with a first idea after a few days and a preliminary report usually after 1 to 6 months. still from there on it takes 1 to 5 years to finish the final accident report with detailed information and recommendations on how to prevent similar accidents in the future, especially recommendations on design, safety systems and training procedures.

the final reports are of course the most interesting and i do read all follow ups on all major accidents, the company is providing additionally once a year a safety lecture where accidents and less harmful incidents are discussed and sometimes information that is not publicly available is also shared.

the most uncomfort is felt by me during the timespan when the type of aircraft i personally fly as pilot is involved in an accident until the preliminary report is published. knowing the cause of an accident leads to the impression of beeing in control again and beeing able to prevent what happened.

while in an ideal world everything is controllable  in real life that does not work.

below i'll show an example of the not always ideal thing, here it's a building site in front of my hotel window in Xiamen/China yesterday. the high pitch noise of the giant stone cutting saws was even able to penetrate my earplugs and interrupted every now and then by the pneumatic hammers on the excavators. sleeping under this conditions for two days didn't leave me fit and rested as i should have been before a flight. futhermore my copilot suffered the same problem and we had to cope with it by sleeping on the flight in the seat for a few minutes every now and then. the procedure is established in the operations manual and the controls and radio of the aircraft are handled by the one staying awake. think of it just as if the other one would have stood up to go and find something to eat in the galley.

sometimes its the only way of staying fit enough on a longer flight to handle a challenging landing in bad weather after 10 hours. fortunatly by present regulations we get a third pilot for flights longer than 10 hours and we get to enjoy our nice bunks in the back for a few hours on those enlarged flights.

since hotel contracts are long term contracts we do not change hotels if there is a new building site next door for a few months. the human factors investigation of an accident review group would find out that we were not at the best fitness and rest levels yesterday...

you could also argue that investigating after accidents is too late and the target should be to prevent an accident beforehand and that is exactly what we try to do! via air-safety reports everybody involved can file proactive reports on ideas and threats and the safety team of the company will do a review and risk assessment which may lead to different procedures or negotiations with the aircraft manufacterer, air traffic control units and authorities. a good example of the near past is the change of the approach profile into Mexico City where turns were to narrow for the 747-8 and the approch was newly calculated and coded into the flight management computers, now works much better resulting in slightly longer and more stable final approaches.

all together we try to keep flying as safe as possible!

next time more fun stuff again - 

cu -nuck

so here we go, the cutting crew...

 and yesterday evening the nice sleepy sunset flying over the mongolian plateau 

from Xiamen to Novosibirsk: