Roehris Aviation Pages - Gallery on the job

My new life, my second career so to say, started just days after my last A300 flight for Hapagfly. I just had enough time to fly home from Frankfurt, wash all my clothes, and pack them again to join my new classmates who were planned to attend the same typerating course on the morning of the 4th october in Vienna. And I still thought we were directly heading for an A320 typerating...
	Once again unpacking suitcases in a new home. I was really happy to have one of my best friends from the former Swissair Aviation School Pilot's course with me. After sompleting the Swissair course together with me, Elias had jobbed as an employee on the registry of deeds (Grundbuchamt) in the world famous ski resorts of Davos and St.Moritz in the Swiss alps, as a salesman in a mountaineer equipeemt shop, and as an website programmer, hoping and waiting for the chance to join an airliner career. He was inches from this point when the swiss low fare airline Helvetic grabbed him and put him into a Fokker 100 typerating course, only to drop him again after having the rating and the mandatory six landings.
	Despite marrying in the meantime, and becoming proud father of a lovely little daughter, he did not lose his target, and was really glad when Austrian called him to duty shortly after me. Happyness was complete when we learned that we would join the same typerating course. So there we are, sitting in Vienna, and waiting anxiously for the things to come.
	The next morning, we met our friends. Interestingly, four of the six new-hires are Swiss citizens. Jakob (left) who flew Canadair Reginal Jets for Tyrolean Airlines three years before joining AUA, Francoise (right aft) who programmed FMS data at LIDO/Lufthansa Flight Nav in Zurich and joined the course ab initio (poor her, but she managed everything in a really impressive way, congrats!), Elias and me (right side). And then there are Roman (left aft), our only real Austrian guy who is a Lufthansa ILST course (combined engineering/pilot school) graduate and flew Dornier 228 in all corners of the world (Antarctica, Spitzbergen, Greenland) for the German Aerospace Center (DLR), waiting for a Lufthansa Cityline job (who would actually never come). And Martin (left mid) who did the Lufthansa Flight Training as well, and flew Piper Navajos and Cessna Citation Encores waiting for a LH Cityline job.
	The noname dream team (Austrian forgot to give us a course designator, so we are referred to as the "nonames").
	On the first few days we were offered our new laptop, a very cool thing.As soon as you enter the dispatch room and plug your laptop to the LAN, or if you start your wireless antenna while in the Austrian crew buildings, the laptop updates himselft automatically, and pulls the newest revisions, electronic route manual charts and updates, and the emails as well as fleet bulletins onto the Austrian Crew Portal.
	The self briefing terminals, where the documentation for shorthaul flights is put together and printed.
	Our meteo corner in the dispatch, where you can get realtime weather information by real meteorologists.
	And an overview over the dispatch, where long- and shorthaul flights are prepared and discussed by pilots and dispatchers.
	To celebrate our fist days in the "new town", Elias and I purchased some goodies in the evening and tried to cook "italian style".
	The "Lord of the bottles"...
	...is already looking forward for my menu to be finished.
	The "Chef de poele"...
	...is fighting with the spaghetti, but fortunately only in a humoristic way. :-)
	In the meanwhile Elias is playing with my cam - with very impressive results I have to admit!
	Finally the work is done, and we wolf down our well earned spaghetti.

But the start at the new employer Austrian Airlines (AUA) had some surprises to say at least. Nobody mentioned that we had to do an Operators Conversion Course (OCC) on the MD80 before getting to the "A320 karma". We had to attend this OCC prior to the A320 typerating training. It was very demanding indeed, and the biggest shock was the fact that it was a real "assessment during employment", with failure and possible furlough by AUA as a possible result of the course! I guess I would'nt have tore down all the links to Hapag-Lloyd if I had known this footnote prior. The OCC consisted of several days of theoretical classroom training in Vienna. We heard about aerodynamics, jet characteristics, OM A theory, received a quick MD80 "minityperating" with the most important systems and operating procedures to be able to fly and work in the simulator later on. And there were some lessons to brush up some basic navigation skills (holding entries, QDM/QDR interceptions, precision and nonprecision approaches, operation in the metric altimeter environment of the former russian states) in order to be prepared for the 15 (!) sessions of 3h30min duration on a MD-81 simulator in Zurich.
	Roman and Martin are trying to fill their brains with MD80 procedures. A tough programme...
	Because we did not fly the MD80 in real, but only during the 15 sim sessions, we had to do a "mini typerating" only, so a large wallpaper was the only thing we had to train our moves and speeches.
Soon we were off to Zurich, to our "drill camp". There we first learned to hand fly a jet (again for the more experienced members of our six-strong class, and quite a new world for the "ab initio" pals). But in any case, the MD80 was a new experience for everybody, featuring a direct steering via control tabs, and giving completely different steering forces and feelings at different speeds. If the "Mad Dog" (called so by american pilots because of his long body, standing on very short "legs", giving him the looks of a "Dachshund") is flown at approach speeds (130-160kts), you need very large aileron and elevator inputs to keep the lethargic bird on track and the yoke forces are swampy, compared to high speed enroute flying (340kts/M0.82), where the MD responds to every little bit of input with an immediate and large change, and yoke forces are really heavy. So we fought our first lessions to get used to the feels of MD flying, and the the lesson plan already called for skillful flying, to do first QDM/QDR interceptions, and fly raw data SID's (departures). The lesson targets were always set to a very high and hardly achievable level, and many of us lost several kilograms of body mass during these three weeks, just out of hard work and high stress levels (no joke). The flight director, autopilot and autothrust was just allowed during the approach briefing and during one approach during the whole 15 sessions, the whole rest was flown manual thrust, manual flying, no flight director, and with minimal tolerances. A real challenge after two years of lazy line flying!
	Myself fighting the "mad dog". I needed quite some laundry soap these weeks to clean all the shirts from several liters of sweat...
	But as much as we cursed ybout this f*į%ing plane in the beginning, as much did we like it after the course, and several of us were a bit sad that we would not be able to fly one of these beasts for real after all this sweat. Ironically, the two last MD80 of Austrian Airlines (which were phased out of the fleet only in Summer 2005) were located just some 500m away from the simulator. They were parked on the SR Technics premises adjacent to the simulator building in Zurich, waiting for the new owner to fly them out to new horizons.
	For me, the time of shuttling back and forth between the place my heart calls home and my workplace has begun again.
	These pictures have been taken on an AUA A319 on its way from Vienna to Zurich.
	My birthplace region. We are located east of Kempten in southern Bavaria, and look towards southwest over the eastern part of Lake Constance. The Lindau peninsula is visible as a small cluster on the closer shoreline, and my birthplace Rorschach lies on the adjacent shoreline in the last beach to the right.
	The way between my homebase and my hometown.
	Shorty before touchdown on Zurich's runway 14.
	And yes, we got new uniforms. For all who requested some info about how different it is compared to the Hapagfly one - well, it's just another uniform. Black instead of "marine blue", and a red instead of the striped tie. :-)
	Still three stripes, still no hat :-)
	I hope you enjoyed these first impressions of my life "austrian style", and I will post more as soon as life gets more airborne again (March 2006).

First steps into a new world...
MD-81	AUA OCC Course in Vienna (Classroom) and Zurich (Sim)	04.10. - 24.11.2005