On Day 3 at the airlines, I was scheduled for a 5:15am “show time” in the dead of winter to do a Raleigh-Durham round trip followed by a short lunch break and then a Charlotte round trip. That’s a long day consisting of 7.5 hours of flight time and about 3 hours of waiting.
It was a long, cold wait for the employee shuttle bus to bring us to Terminal B or “the central terminal”. That turned out to be the most enjoyable part of my day.
When I began @ American Eagle, the company wasn’t yet concerned about fuel savings and we used to takeoff with the APU (auxilary power unit) still running. Sparing non-pilots with the techincals, all you need to know is that we turned it off during our initial climbout from the airport. As part of the process, the non-flying pilot (me, in this case) would press the “APU STOP” button, which was located just below the “FIRE DETECTION TEST” button. You now know where this story is headed.
When you press the “APU STOP” button, it silently shuts down the small turbine engine in the tail of the airplane and no one’s the wiser. When you press the “FIRE DETECTION TEST” button, all hell breaks loose in the cockpit — red flashing lights, loud aural alarms, repetitive triple-chimes, red and amber computer screen messages — the works. When you’re expecting those things, as you would during a preflight inspection, no problem. When you accidentally push that button just after takeoff on a cold dark winter morning with Captain Pattigno sitting next to you, that isn’t a good thing. He probably hadn’t been startled like that in a decade.
Fast forward, that day and the day after did not go particularly well. That’s a pretty significant hole to dig out of. There were a few tears that night speaking to my wife about how bad the first few days had gone. But the conclusion was the same as always — own the errors, believe in your skills, get back in the game, try harder and move forward.
