elijahnicolas.com Driving to the Pitfick's new residence to help out in the painting after a quick morning of rakeing leaves at the crashpad. 22 hrs ago
Today’s first leg from LAX to LAS (Los Angeles to Las Vegas) went rather smoothly. I eleted to sit right seat because I haven’t done a landing from that side before. This is course made me the First Officer and my flight partner Manoj the PIC. The whole first leg went without an event except for a closed runway forcing us to amend our approach into LAS. Nothing at all really too bad. We also were move aware of how much gas we had on board and how that would factor in if we were going to be holding for more than we had already begun to do so.
My leg, we had hell broke loose. The ground shift mechanism failed and that just caused all these aural alerts to go bezerk. We couldn’t come back into LAS due to the weather minumums, so we just headed for LAX. Being that we couldn’t get the gear up, we elected to just raise it using hte bypass switch but that caused us to not have it when we lowered the gear back down on the approach into LAX. I asked for a hold around Seal Beach to troubleshoot the problem and we deiced to go for the longest runway. It was a lot of communication between approach and company and the flight attendants, but it worked out well. Coming in for the landing was awesome. I was happy that I was able to hold the nose up for quite a while and didn’t even put it down until around 70 KIAS. That made is rather smooth. We came to an abrupt stop and called for the passenger evacuation. Good times! Tomorrow should be even more fun. Adelle is coming!
Well, its a new day and I have a type rating!!! I still haven’t really been able to digest that idea, but it feels so good. I’ve been awake since 2:00AM and couldn’t go back to sleep. It’s starting to get ridiculous why I keep on feeling refreshed with so little sleep. I feel awake, but then I get really exhausted later on in the day and my muscles are starting to ache like I’ve been awake for > 24 hours. Oh well…I’m sure that my sleeping habits will get back to normal. Make sure you read the post below.
I am an official DC9 rated pilot (w/ the limitation of initial operating experience required). Just to clarify, I did all the training in an MD90 Simulator, which is of the same family and aircraft type as the DC9. It was a rough ride to start out with but the circle to land I executed went really well. I’m just happy that I’m done and ready to begin the infinite search for a career with thousands of hours of flying. I graduate this Friday, April 7th.
Here are more photos of the MD90 type aircraft. Click here!
It’s Monday April 3rd at 1:38AM and as I am writing this blog I have my final checkride is at t-minus 7.5 hours. I’ve already gotten 5 hours of sleep by going to sleep at 8:00PM, but now I can’t sleep. I already woke up at 11:00PM and was able to go back to bed, but now it’s just getting hopeless. I’m not having nightmares like last nights “QRH on fire!” I’m just not getting proper sleep or something. It really stinks. Tossing and turning…blogging, oh well, back to the bed!
This actually reminds me, after this coming Friday, this blog will have to change to something else being that I’m going to be done with the CAPT program. Should I just start another one or just continue it with a tag line, “Life after CAPT.” We’ll see which way I head, but in the mean time, any suggestions out there?
