Last week, thanks to a faulty FMS and ACARS (fancy words for our computer calculations for navigation and performance), I had to face the daunting task of doing math in the morning (a pilot's worst nightmare). This experience was stressful, so I have some perspective on the stresses doled out by Salt Lake City's controllers today. For starters, there was a light to moderate rain/snow mix going on upon our arrival in Salt Lake, so I shot an LDA approach (an approach not centered with the runway).
I had not done one of these since I was a flight instructor doing training flights to John Wayne in Orange County, but this was not the challenging part. Nay, the issue was in the fact that everyone kept forgetting to relay us instructions until we specifically asked, "Ummm, can we slow down from the assigned 250 kts?" As fun as it is to go flying down an instrument approach at max speed, I did eventually want to deploy flaps and lower the gear. Then they forgot to hand us off to tower until we asked, and later tower forgot to hand us off to ground. Siiiigh. The captain even said, "Not the A-Squad working today at Salt Lake is it?" This was said just as a Delta airbus was forced to go-around because the controllers had not worked out the spacing properly for the parallel approach. Look, people make mistakes. It's human nature, and everything usually works itself out. It's good when people can work as a team to sort it out, but when people start working together as a team to make mistakes . . . it can obviously lead to problems.
In flight training, we would call this the accident chain. Many things have to go wrong for an aviation accident to occur. If you can just break the chain at one spot, you can recover and save the day. So when the windshield wiper on my side of the plane started moving on its own after it was turned off, one's instinct is to troubleshoot it and look down and fiddle with the knobs, but the more appropriate thing is to look outside and make sure we don't taxi into a luggage cart.
I was glad to exit the aircraft and we made our way to the good ol' Hotel RL, a hotel in Salt Lake that seems to specialize in airline crewmember lodging, and evidently little else. I mean it's fine as a hotel, but I seem to have bad luck with my rooms there. The temperature control was set to 74 degrees, but the room was showing 55 degrees as it blasted out freezing cold air. I called down to the front desk, and miraculously someone was able to go into the vent and fix it.
Things finally came together after the rain had subsided and I ventured out for a walk. I was expecting it to be cold outside, but compared to my room, it actually wasn't too bad. I walked by the Mormon temple, where I found some trees budding for the spring and then made my way to the City Creek Mall for some dinner at Chick-Fil-A.
As much as I usually hate on SLC, it isn't a bad downtown area. I mean, if you compare it to Cincinnati, for example, Salt Lake City is like the bright center of the universe. Everything is pretty clean and safe. People are actually out and walking around.
With any luck, we won't have to deice tomorrow, and it should be a much-deserved easy day of flying as we make our way up to Oregon.
