Down For Repairs

Just a short post today.

No work trips for me this week. It's been nice having all these days off.


The time for vacation has finally arrived! Next week I expect to be on a cruise ship in the Southern Caribbean enjoying the sunny skies from sea level.


Maybe I'll have some vacation stories to blog about.

After that I'll be down for some much needed knee surgery in early February. I hope to be airborne again in a couple of months.


Stay tuned and thanks for reading.



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The Water Emergency

Today I had the rare long layover. I typically try to get short layovers and spend as little time in hotels as possible. It gets old in a hurry.


But today our pickup time wasn't until 4:30 PM so I had some goofing off time. I spent that time with a short walk over to a nice shopping center in Palm Beach and grabbed a sandwich at a deli.

Then back to the hotel for a few hours of pool time before pick-up.


This was to be an easy day...only one leg home to DFW.

We boarded an almost full plane and headed out to runway 9L behind an AirTran Boeing 737. Inbound traffic was fairly heavy so we had to wait about ten minutes for our turn to launch.



Takeoff was to the east out over the coast. The sun was just setting as we made a wide left turn back towards the west and started the climb up to 34,000 ft.

Then passing 10,000 ft the cockpit chime rang.

"We don't have any water in the aft lavatories or the coffee makers!!!" one of the girls practically screamed.

Then the chime rang again.

"There's no water in the forward galley and lavatory!!" our #1 flight attendant shouted.

I was flying so I had the FO deal with the girls. They desperately wanted to know if there was anything we could do to get the water flowing again. To them it was an emergency. (In their defense, having to deal with a planeload of irritated rich Palm Beach passengers might have seemed like a genuine emergency!)

Apparently the ground crew had serviced the water back at Palm Beach but when they finished, they forgot to turn a valve back on that would pressurize the system. So the result was that we had no water pressure and there was nothing that we could do from the cockpit to fix it. (This wasn't the first time that this had ever happened.)

Hearing this the girls collectively asked, "Can we go back and get it fixed?"

After we both stopped laughing, the FO told them that we couldn't go back and to just put some water bottles and wet naps in the lavs. I then made a PA about the water problem and apologized for the inconvenience and on we went to DFW.

Other than the water emergency, the flight went just fine...smooth skies, a decent landing, an open gate, and another flight was in the logbook.



For a look at some more of my photos, please aviate over to Plane & Simple