Managing delays: Gaining time without rushing

When delays present a threat, ignoring the clock can keep you safe while you catch up

I showed up to the airport gate early. It was a quick round trip—about 120 miles each direction, about 35 minutes in the air, and here I was more than an hour and a half ahead of the flight, studying weather, NOTAMS, and the deferred maintenance items on our aircraft, well before the ship even pulled up to the gate. As I looked up, the occasional gaze of a passenger met my scan across the boarding area. For 16 years, I interacted with passengers regularly. For the last month, I flew with a line check pilot in the right seat—although I wore four stripes and sat in the left seat, it was still technically “acting as pilot in command,” with the check pilot still having ultimate power if I made a bad decision.

Moving to the left seat triggers a perspective shift greater than the four-foot move leads you to believe. The pressure to depart on-time is on you; slowing down to keep the operation safe is your duty. “Your new job is to say ‘no,’ when everyone else says ‘go,” an experienced captain told me. It was solid advice.

That evening I’d sit in the left seat, with the training wheels fully removed for the first time. For years, if anyone referred to me as captain, it was an honest, well-intentioned mistake and I brushed it away with a smile. Now, the title would stick, all questions would be aimed at me, and there was no glancing over to the check pilot to double check my decisions.

On this flight, there was a twist—the right engine-driven hydraulic pump had failed on an earlier flight and was deferred. We have an electrically-driven auxiliary pump that we’d use to pressurize the system, but there was a massive performance penalty—more than a 10,000-pound penalty added to our takeoff weight. By my best logic, a perfect storm of the aux pump failing and an engine failure at V1 would leave the landing gear dangling, and the extra drag in that scenario forced the weight penalty to ensure that climbing with one engine and the extra drag with the landing gear slowly retracting.

It was two days after Christmas. The flights were all full, and nobody was traveling light. We’d have to leave passengers and bags at the gate to meet our weight penalty for takeoff. It was a rough situation, but coordination with the gate agent, dispatcher, and central load control maximized the number of folks we could cram aboard and still be legal.

The first officer showed up at the gate, and we chatted away from the passengers’ earshot. He was a brand new first officer with about 60 hours in the plane, and I was likely the company’s newest captain, with less than 24 hours since the check pilot had submitted my final paperwork. We figured those facts could be carefully omitted from the “welcome aboard” announcement.

I’d changed airlines at a moment best characterized as an anomaly in the industry. I was climbing into the left seat after about 18 months with the company—a short time as a first officer, historically speaking. But with almost 16 years in the right seat as a first officer, it was time to make the move. Historically, we had to wait years after starting at an airline to have the seniority required to hold the left seat. But as pay for first officers has improved, staying in the right seat to hold a better flying schedule became an attractive option. A shift in attitudes regarding work-life balance has made the left seat less desirable than in years past, and with fewer pilots bidding for the upgrade to captain, the left seat at some airlines has gone incredibly junior. At least one class at United has offered the left seat as an initial award for new hire pilots; at Delta, some pilot trainees have been awarded upgrade to captain before they finished initial training as first officers.

While my tenure as the company before the upgrade was brief, I was at least staying on the same fleet. Each instructor and check pilot breathed a sigh of relief and thanked me when they found out that I had years of airline experience and about 700 hours in the Boeing 717 before upgrading. “You did this the right way” was the chorus they sang.

In retrospect, I cannot even fathom doing my first upgrade into a new aircraft type. Learning a new airplane and also settling into the duties that accompany the fourth stripe on our uniforms would be a massive undertaking. It happens regularly, though.

As I finished my last trip before they cut the training wheels loose, the line check pilot gave me a parting caution: your first hundred hours never go smoothly. Slow down and use the manuals, checklists, and your team to work through the challenges.

Sure enough, I leaned on my team that first round trip—my dispatcher, once notified that the gate agents were trying to load up the airplane full of people and bags, sprang to my aid. Through coordination with load planning, they were able to tell the gate agents how many people and bags we could carry so they could limit boarding—it’s a lot less challenging to keep people off the plane than it is to remove them once they’re settled into their seat.

My first officer was sharp. He was fresh out of training, but his prior job was flying F-18 fighter jets for the United States Marine Corps. Handling a single-seat fast-mover whose mission in life is to blow things up is a far cry from airline service, sure. But the discipline and thoroughness that comes with that job carries well into the airlines, and he handled his tasks efficiently and swiftly while I handled the weight penalty. If anything, I had to slow him down. Several times he mentioned feeling like he was behind until I looked him in the eye. “Friend, when I feel that way, here’s what I do,” I said, as I reached for my left wrist. “I take my watch and turn it 180 degrees, so that when I go to look at it, it’s just a wristband. Working faster creates all sorts of threats. Use your normal speed on tasks, and don’t rush the checklists. We can eliminate dead time between tasks, though, and that’s where we’ll gain our time back.”

We pushed off the gate about two minutes late—and that was because the ramp was congested with incoming traffic; we had to sit tight while we waited our turn. In Birmingham, it was Groundhog Day all over again, but this time we knew the process. I warned the gate agent we’d be weight limited, got the dispatcher working on a revised weight limit to coordinate with load planning, and each time I felt the pressure to check my watch, I found a wristband where I expected a watch face. We were sitting good enough on time that I could step outside to do the first officer’s preflight walk around—I wanted the breath of fresh air as much as anything.

We pushed on time. There was a tiny delay for spacing into the flow of Atlanta arrivals, and all I had to do was taxi a little slower than normal to arrive at the end of the runway just before we hit our departure time window.

An hour later, I stood at the bus stop, waiting on my ride to the employee parking lot. I looked down to check the time and smiled as I turned my watch the right way around. We’d parked almost 20 minutes ahead of schedule.