Page 28 - TNTMay18

From the Flight Deck
by Kevin R. Dingman
26 • TWIN & TURBINE
May 2018
Big Foot Flies Again
Landing currency: category, class and type
Big Foot is no legend. Like oil and water, this was a poor choice of footwear for ying.
While recuperating from rotator cuff surgery, my landing currency was about to expire. That hasn’t happened since I first learned to fly. You know, back when we shared the pattern with pterodactyls. As my flying skills withered post-op, I wrote at the hangar
office while listening to Clapton and Chicago. Taking short breaks, I played the keyboard (should I admit to singing?), video poker and rearranged stuff in the hangar. It’s common for aviators to talk to their planes so, when no one was around, I exercised my anthropomorphic right to whisper sweet- nothings to the Duke.
I also reviewed manuals and chatted with fellow airport bums about all things aeronautic, includ- ing landing currency. I wondered how well I would land the Duke and 737 once I finally got back into the air and hoped that it would happen before the landing currency reaper came for me, or the neighbors overheard my singing.
Warning, Warning Will Robinson
GA currencies aren’t monitored by my employer, but Part 121 require- ments are tracked very closely. And just like when they kicked me off the Super 80 and sent me to the 737, the automated system responded to the ap- proaching event. The automated message interrupted my writing and Chi- cago’s “Questions 67 and 68,” but at least this time the computer said please:
WARNING THE FOLLOWING IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE
***737 LANDINGS ** 28 DAYS. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR FLEET TRAINING SCHEDULER. COMPUTER GENERATED MESSAGE.
That was sweet. Robbie the Robot (Forbidden Planet, 1956) looking after me like that. But a warning? Our flight manuals are chockfull of warn- ings, cautions and notes, each stressing critical information or describing varying degrees of awfulness. A warning typically portrays possible injury, death or serious damage to equipment. But going non-current at the airline isn’t a catastrophe, so why issue a “warning?”
Because, yes it IS a catastrophe. I asked my 737 check airman buddy and fellow Michigander Jim Kause to shed light on the approaching awfulness. He explained that if your landing currency expires, before you can return to “line” flying, you are stripped buck-naked, shanghaied to DFW and sucked into the black hole of disaster in a simulator. Well, he may not have said exactly those words, but they were inferred. By going to the schoolhouse and flying the sim with an examiner for two hours of dial-a-disaster approaches, crosswind landings and single-engine drudgery, you can regain landing currency without flying the real airplane. This is
not a stress-free option by any stretch, especially when naked.
Perhaps the question about Robbie’s warning was rhetorical: We do indeed risk serious injury if we go non-current at the airlines: serious psychological injury. Managing the Part 121 return-to-work date is therefore critical in order to get “real” landings and to thusly avoid the blood-pressure raising, life-sucking gravity well at the Flight Academy.
I decided to fly the Duke as soon as my repaired shoulder would allow, which gives me category and class landings plus a preliminary warm-up for the big iron. And to then ask my Chief Pilot Tim to send me out on a trip in order to get landings in type before the company Death Star cleared the