Mt Poas, Costa Rica

With all the recent natural disasters in the world making headlines, I'm pretty content to be steering clear of them and enjoying the mostly sunny skies of the Caribbean and Central America.

However, on a recent trip to San Jose, Costa Rica, as I was unpacking my suitcase in my hotel room, the entire building began to shake and I immediately knew it wasn't the icemaker down the hall!
Yes, it was a small earthquake....enough to knock the pictures off my wall and kill the electricity for a couple of hours but no real damage that I heard about.

The next morning's ride out to the airport had me riding shotgun in the crew van next to our driver. I can speak some limited Spanish so I asked him about the earthquake the previous afternoon. I understood him to say that "oh, we get those all the time...no big deal" or something to that effect. That would make sense since Costa Rica is right smack in the middle of a chain of volcanoes (with it's associated seismic activity) running right down the Pacific coastlines of the Americas.

Then we started discussing the volcanoes in the general vicinity of San Jose. I asked him about any major eruptions and how often they might occur. He said that about every thirty years or so they get an eruption out of one of the nearby volcanoes.

"So how long has it been since the last one?" I asked.

"About thirty years!" he said laughingly!

So with all that to think about we launched our fully loaded 757 for the 2.5 hour leg to Miami.

In a previous post I talked about the departure procedure in San Jose. This day was no different. Takeoff was on runway 07 with a steep climbout to the south, then west, and then an eventual turn to the north.

The POAS SID (standard instrument departure) takes air traffic right by Mt Poas, which lies not too far from San Jose. Typically the peak is obscured by cloud cover, but this was our lucky day. Clear skies prevailed and we would get to look straight down into the semi-active crater.

No ash cloud to worry about though. This volcano was only spewing small amounts of steam and sulfur. Let's hope it stays that way for a long time.

Looking off towards the southeast in the direction of Panama, we could see a more active peak spewing what looked like an ash cloud. Best to steer clear of this one!


No, it's not nearly as impressive as the eruption in Iceland, but it was still fun to see an active volcano from a safe distance. Volcanoes are just not something you get to see that often and if I ever get to see an eruption like the recent one in Iceland, I hope that the ash cloud and I are moving in opposite directions!




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Port-au-Prince (After The Quake)

A trip I flew to Haiti, "Third World Operations", was worthy of a post way back in early December.

That was the last time I had been back to Haiti until just recently. My employer has resumed service back into Port-au-Prince and I had the opportunity to re-visit PAP on a recent trip.

My first officer that day was new to PAP so I would be the tour guide. Our preflight duties included a complete review of the temporary restrictions governing commercial aircraft operations in and out of Haiti. We were carrying a complete packet of the latest procedures, communications frequencies, arrival and departure profiles, parking instructions, and anything else relevant to the airport. We were departing Miami in a fully loaded 767.... 223 passengers and a crew of 13.

Shortly after the quake, the United States came in to provide air traffic control services as well as medical and humanitarian aid on a massive scale. The US has been slowly returning ATC control back to the Haitians and today we were in Haitian controllers hands. That would prove to be a detriment to our goal of operating a uneventful flight!

We launched from MIA behind an arriving World Airways MD-11 and climbed eastbound across the Bahamas chain.

It was business as usual until we had to switch over to Port-au-Prince tower.

Descending in, we were cleared for an ILS to runway 10 with a circle to land on runway 28. But we were only given a clearance to descend to 5000 ft and to report inbound on the ILS. OK fine...So we continued on in and reported inbound but the controller was apparently too busy or distracted to hear us. We kept calling until he finally answered us and asked where we were? "We're overhead the field at 5000 ft" was our answer! He seemed surprised and promptly cleared us back to the initial approach fix and gave us instructions to hold and await further clearance.

20 minutes later he cleared us for the same approach and for us to call the field in sight and to enter a downwind for runway 28. So we did all that and set up for the landing. Meanwhile he cleared a Canadian Air Force C-17 to back-taxi for takeoff on runway 28. As we turned final, the tower amended the C-17's enroute clearance which resulted in them not being ready for takeoff. With us now on short final and the C-17 still on the runway, we had to execute a go-around and get back in the pattern.

So now we're back on final and the tower has cleared the C-17 for takeoff. It all was looking good until the C-17 aborted their takeoff with some sort of mechanical issue. We had no choice....another go-around!! We broke off to the right and started a climb. Just then we received a traffic alert on our TCAS with instructions to "CLIMB, CLIMB". I looked out and saw a Cessna Caravan doing a steep turn to avoid us as we were climbing and turning in the other direction. That was close!
We asked the tower for instructions and all he could tell us was "go hold east of the airport somewhere". He was completely flustered and not in control of his airspace. Now a clearance like that in the real world is just unheard of! We were clearly on our own this day.

After several minutes of us circling low over the city, he told us to come on in and land. By then we had lost sight of the airport so we had to rely on some basic VFR skills and dead reckoning to re-acquire the airport.

The third time was a charm and we actually made a landing.

Taxiing in we could see the massive amounts of relief supplies and equipment all over the airport. It must have been a huge undertaking getting all these supplies in right after the quake.
They even brought in a temporary control tower since the PAP tower was destroyed.
Sorry that it's blurry.
On the bright side, we were able to use a jet bridge and keep our passengers off of the ramp area like in the past.

After the First Officer and I finished the parking checklist we just looked at each other in disbelief and breathed a sigh of relief. That was a flight to remember!

So off with 223 passengers and on with 223 more heading back to Miami.

The takeoff and climb went smoothly. Climbing out over the bay we could see several US Navy ships anchored. Two of them were Landing Helicopter Assault ships that were helping with the relief effort.It will most likely be years before Haiti gets back on it's feet after such a disaster. But the recovery goes on and life is very slowly returning to Port-au-Prince.
Two hours later we were on final to runway 30 at Miami.

Once again it was nice to be back in US airspace.




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