Why?
Good question, I'll tell you why.
I have 3 hours to kill at London City is why. I could've gone home, sure, I could have adopted a penguin. My point is, I didn't. I decided to kill time here (kill time, that is - not the penguin. Penguins are awesome).
Today and the next two days work a little like this:
1. Get up Way Too Early
2. Operate some Frankfurt/Zurich sectors
3. Wait
4
Easy enough? Yeah, you'd think that, because it doesn't look to bad. Actually, you're right, it's a pretty easy tour. All I have to do is keep myself from spending monies on hotel food - or 'going out and eating' food. This shaln't be difficult because at the moment I have no money. I shall be a model of fiscal responsibility thanks to my rather appalling fiscal situation. I feel somewhat like the UK economy, in this respect.
Today's big gotcha was a problem with the aircraft I took to Zurich this morning - the autobrake had failed at some point during the night and so we were presented with the MEL sat on the centre console. If you learn one thing about airline flying, it's that opening up a flight deck to see the MEL open at a relevant page on the centre console is a big sign that your day just got more complicated in some way.
MEL - Minimum Equipment List.
A book that, counter-intuitively, lists everything that you can go without. It lists systems, items, failures etc that are acceptable to dispatch with and the special procedures you need to execute/complete to make the flight safe.
As a rule, if something is missing or broken and it's not in the MEL, you cannot go (it's not quite this simple - there's another list called the CDL and also the engineers can 'defer' some defects and you can still go). All sorts of things are in the MEL - for example you can fly without a winglet (vertical bit on the end of the wing) - so long as there's no passengers and you're flying back to a maintenance base, and several other things.
Stuff I've had in the past included having a engine bleed out (only half as much air conditioning) - meaning we couldn't fly above FL310 (31,000ft), and the Right-hand side MFD (Multi-Function Display - go go pointless acronyms!) - which is basically my screen with a map on it - meaning that any low-visability stuff had to be flown from the captain's side.
Today it was Autobrake. Dead easy. Brake Manually. I kid you not.
Other than that, an uneventful day. I shall now go back to aimlessly wandering around the internet in search of funnies.
tl;dr: Mike bored.
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