You are currently in the Archives section. Please be aware that some information and links in the archived page may be outdated.

Click here to return to the Archives' main page to see the list of archived articles.

A R C H I V E S

CAPTAIN CARGO

Captain Cargo grew up in Southern Africa, where, at the age of nineteen, he started flying by accident. After ten years spraying tsetse flies, locusts and other nasty insects, interspersed with spells flying tourists and Hemingway wannabes around the Okavango Delta and Kalahari Desert, he moved to the United Kingdom. After obtaining a UK ATPL, he joined an airline that flies freight for a major parcel delivery company. He has been doing it ever since, and now flies a Boeing 757 freighter around Europe, mainly at night. Mail to: CaptainCargo@aircargonews.com

"LOST CARGO"

     We were on one of the Spanish runs, enroute from Brussels to Vittoria and then on to Valencia, where we stayed near the beach and got a free breakfast. We were at flight level 280, the stars clear in the moonless sky, on an easy run with only one more night before going home. The flight engineer, Fred, had just brought us coffee, always a good method of inducing turbulence. Paris gave us a radar heading, and I placed my coffee on the footrest at the bottom of the instrument panel, then reached down to turn the heading bug on the CDI. My hand caught the coffee, knocking the cup over. The coffee spread across the GPS, running between the buttons, and the screen started blinking. An error message appeared, then the screen went blank, flickered, went blank again.
     “Damn,” said Trevor, the first officer. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I switched the GPS off before it started smoking or popping circuit breakers.
     “Better get the charts out,” I said. Paris inquired whether we were on the heading, and I turned the heading bug. Trevor pulled out the High Altitude chart. We hardly used them anymore, relying, perhaps too much, on the magic of satellite navigation. I probably hadn’t looked at one for at least three months. I drank the drop of coffee remaining at the bottom of the plastic cup.
     “Want another?” Fred asked.
     “No thanks. I’d probably spill it on the radar.” Trevor was fighting with the map. They’d changed them recently, and the VOR and reporting points were now in print so small that they were almost impossible to find. The charts were also not necessarily aligned to Magnetic North, making it difficult to work out which direction you were going, let alone where you were.
     “2434, direct Belen,” Paris said.
     “Direct Belen, ..........2434.” Trevor read back. I turned right slightly, guessing which way it must be from here. It was more than two hundred miles away, and not even on the same chart. Normally I’d just punch it into the GPS.
     “Give me a heading,” I said to Trevor.
     “It’s not on this chart,” he said, and reached for the chart folder.
     “Give me the map.” He passed the chart over, and I spread it out over the control column. I searched in vain for the Spanish border.
     “.........2434, confirm routing direct Belen?”
     “Uh... can you give us a heading?” Trevor asked. In the sky around us a thousand pilots laughed.
     “Turn right ten degrees,” the French voice replied, curt, not friendly like before. He gave us a frequency change, glad to be rid of us. Ten minutes later we’d found where we were on the chart, though we stayed on a radar heading until we picked up Bilbao VOR.
     Forty minutes later we were overhead the VTA, doing the ILS procedure from the hold. I’d have to call the company when we landed and tell them the GPS was unserviceable. We were supposed to inform Air Traffic Control. We slid down the glideslope on 04 and touched down gently. I pulled the speedbrake just as we hit the bumpy patch, and held the nose up as our fillings shook loose. I selected idle reverse, stayed off the brakes and cleared at the end of the runway
     Sitting in the crew room twenty minutes later, we were told we weren’t going to Valencia, after all. They wanted us to go back to Brussels. We’d be arriving at the start of the morning rush-hour.
     Ah, well. At least we knew the way.