Page 22 - March 18 TNT

Once a Doctor, Always a Doctor
by Kevin Ware
Due to the somewhat insecure nature of the business, many pilots who fly airplanes for a living also have a backup career. When those secondary skills are called for while aloft, it can make for some novel deviations from regular pilot duties. In my case, being
a doctor with an emergency medicine background has from time to time added to the interest of the trips I fly as a pilot professionally. A couple trips over the past year or so to Alaska and Europe are cases in point.
Fellow corporate jet pilot Doug and I leave Skagit Regional Airport just north of Seattle in the Lear 35 just before dawn. It is a cold winter morning, and we have seven passengers on board the business jet with the plan to leave three in Ketchikan, two in Juneau, and take the remaining two to Valdez. We are to wait there for a couple of hours, then reverse the whole procedure, ideally getting everyone back to Seattle by dinner time.
A small arc of the sun is visible on the eastern horizon as we start down from FL360 near Annette Island, about 70 nm southeast of Ketchikan. The weather report says it is snowing in Ketchikan with visibility of one to 2 miles, scattered clouds at 2,000, broken at 2,500 and overcast at 3,000. The wind is from the west gusting 12 to 20 knots. Anchorage Center clears us for the instrument approach to Runway 29, and hands us off to the local frequency. Ketchikan Flight Service tells us there is snow on the runway, and braking action is unknown. We break out of the clouds at 2,500 feet about 2 miles from the runway, to see that at 144 knots we are a bit high and fast. This is not where we want to be given the runway conditions.
The power comes all the way back, full flaps go down and pretty soon we are nicely established on the glide path, doing the calculated correct speed of 132 knots. We make a smooth landing in blowing snow, the thrust reversers are deployed, and I tentatively test the brakes. They seem OK, although hard to tell with all the deceleration generated by the jet engines.
An Alaska Airlines 737 crew behind us on the same approach asks about braking. We are nearing the end of the runway and nail the brakes to see what happens. Good braking, we tell them. It is pretty clear their concern, (like ours) was not the instrument approach so much as rather what was going to happen once on the airplane was on the ground.
When we exit the taxiway and enter the Aero Services ramp, the Learjet nearly comes to a crunching stop. No one has plowed the ramp and the Lear’s high pressure, small diameter tires
20 • TWIN & TURBINE
March 2018