Some experiences in the cockpit need to happen several times for a pilot to learn the lesson, while some only need to happen once. This is definitely a story of the latter.
We were approaching LaGuardia on a winter night post-storm and the winds at a medium intensity — something like 320@17G23, with low-level windshear advisories. We were assigned the Expressway Visual 31 approach, so the winds were lined up mostly down the runway, but still some work to do. I was still on probation (most airline pilots are for their first year) and flying with Captain Luukkonen, a very senior captain who’d surely done this approach hundreds of times in his career.
As we crossed DIALS at 2500’ and started configuring the airplane, you could feel the constant chop. As flying pilot, I was definitely feeling the heat — senior captain, gusty winds, visual approach at night to a runway which was essentially a very tight circle-to-land. This was no “straight-in, let the autopilot do the work”. We weren’t authorized to overlay RNAV back then, so it was pure visual references, hand flown all the way, especially with possible windshear out there. In that scenario, I want to have control of the airplane and feel what it’s doing, so that I can react quickly.
Even with all of that in mind and working to keep up with the airplane, flying 101 must be at the forefront of your thinking. Airspeed, airspeed, airspeed. You just don’t want to get slow on this approach.
On that note, I was doing fine…until the last mile of the approach. The descent begins over the straight portion of the Long Island Expressway and is constant until the runway. That straight portion lasts a few miles until you reach Shea Stadium (I am dating myself a bit, but hey, I was lucky to have known/seen Shea), where you make basically a 135 degree turn to the left, fly around the stadium, over the compost site, over Flushing bay and land on Runway 31.
As any pilot knows, when you bank an airplane, you trade off some of your vertical lift for horizontal lift. That’s a trade that comes with a price, which you pay for with loss of airspeed. Well, normally, that’s a relatively gentle thrust lever movement forward. On this night, it would take more than a little as we hit windshear and simultaneously probably lost 10 knots of airspeed. That’s when I felt the captain’s right hand grip my left hand and push the thrust levers way forward. Mind you, he probably said “airspeed” once or twice before he decided to go the man-to-man contact route, but it was justified.
Anyway, the story ends with a decent landing and a huge lesson learned about jet engines. They don’t react to pilot commands for power like piston engines do. It takes a couple of seconds to get what you want and in my case, I was just a little too slow in adding power. The truth is that the more you fly, the more you learn to feel the shear and anticipate the resultant airspeed change. But on that night, I learned a lesson and have never had to learn it again.
