Playing Musical Crews, May 28, 1971
At the beginning of my tour, max crew days were 12 hours. Later
in my tour that was
bumped up to 14 hours unless
we
landed
at
type
1 or 2
(short) fields like
Quang
Tri, Dong Ha, Khe
Sanh, et al.
On the days that crews weren't scheduled to fly, we pulled 6-hour alert
shifts
at Tan Son Nhut. Usually this meant follow-up checks on
maintenance work such as engine runups and functional check
flights. This day we had been on alert at Det One since 12:30 PM,
and it was almost time for the next crew to arrive for the 6:30 PM
shift. That's when things got busy.
Maintenance had been working on one airplane all day while the flight
crew waited. It was
finally
fixed and ready to start, but by then the flight crew was already 10
hours into their crew day. So the fresh 6:30 alert crew switched
places with them and took over the 644 mission. The broken-down
crew took over the alert
duty because crew day limits only applied to flying, not engine runups.
Earlier in the day another airplane broke down at
Phan Rang and was
being repaired. By the time it was fixed, its flight crew was
completely out of crew day so they
and the airplane were stuck at Phan Rang. My
crew still had 8 hours available on our crew day so the fresh alert
crew flew us up to Phan Rang so we could bring the other airplane and
crew back to TSN.
So
we are now enroute to Phan Rang aboard the resurrected 644
mission. Full house. I'm siting on the galley floor to have
some light from the cargo compartment to write by. I'm glad I got
lots of sleep last night--it's gonna be a long night.
Non-Alert, June 7, 1971
It
was a long
night. We showed up for alert at 1830 expecting 6 hours of engine
runs and letter-writing. Instead we flew 13 hours, finishing at
0730!
The airplane had prop problems. The passengers remained on board
while the previous crew taxied out 3 times for engine runups!
Finally maintenance changed the prop valve housing.
When
we ran it up, the blade angle at flight idle was out of adjustment so
we spent an hour getting that fixed. Next we stopped at Quinhon
to drop off a maintenance team
to work on a broken airplane there. On to
Cam Ranh Bay to deliver our passengers then back to TSN again.
Back at TSN, Saigon Tea told us to take a load of passengers to
Danang, so we
waited a half hour then called back Saigon Tea. This time
they said to go on to Danang empty and pick up a
load for
Cam Ranh Bay. We
reached Cam Ranh Bay about 12 hours
into our crew day so we were pretty tired and cranky by the time the
airplane was offloaded.
Then
the forklift stalled behind the aircraft and it
had to be towed away before we could taxi out. Ah well.
It's one day closer to you.