V Australia 777 Delivery Flight Down to the Checkered Flag

V Australia 777 Delivery Flight 12 : Down to the Checkered Flag

February 10, 2009 By Ken

My name is Ken Pascoe and I’m the fortunate guy who was one of the Captain’s for V Australia’s first Boeing 777-300ER delivery flight from Seattle to Los Angeles and then the big one, Los Angeles to Sydney. This is Part twelve of the epic trip.

Last night I had a quiet meal with Dave, Paul, Kev, Andy, Marto and our CASA friends Clive and Paul. After that I headed back to the Hotel, ran through the urgent mail, uploaded the last three days of blog entries, and hit the sack. I think it was about 1am and I had had it – the last week has been full on. I left my mobile on, but didn’t set an alarm, figuring a sleep til lunch time would do me good.

At 3:30pm I rolled out of bed and looked at the laptop and mobile (which I had slept through). Tonight has turned from a PR event towards a Simulator LOFT. One thing I didn’t mention yesterday was that we dispatched out of BFI with a center tank fuel pump U/S. Yes, the plane is brand new, they didn’t swap us a repainted one at the last minute. I think.

Those of you with access to the DDL will know that LAX-SYD with only one center tank pump inop is a vastly different exercise from yesterdays little hop. We had all hoped the pump would be fixed and all efforts (including cannibalising another aircraft) have been made – so far to no avail. I should stop at this point and thank the engineering team who I know have been flat out trying to fix it since we left the aircraft yesterday for the comfort of the Hotel.

An additional complication at the moment is the lack of SATCOM on the aircraft. This problem has also had all sorts of resources thrown at it last night, so far to no avail. Although the SATCOM has worked over the past week – it did not for yesterdays flight. Loss of SATCOM takes out the FANS/CPDL