June was an interesting month with surprise recovery trips, MX issues and some island flying.
During my first rotation, we had a standard Naples to Bedford, MA trip and halfway there we got a recovery trip assigned from the Gulfstream fleet to take their pax from TEB back to APA (Centennial, CO). So we dropped our pax, repoed to Teterboro and got the plane all cleaned and prepped again. They had the works with luggage and full catering (Wine, champagne, shrimp cocktail, cheese boards, etc.) plus we needed as much fuel as possible to make it nonstop so we were quite heavy but we made it work in the CJ. That day alone was a full duty day, 13.5 hours and more than 9 hours of flying. The next day we were doing an empty reposition leg to Scottsdale, AZ and over the rockies we had a Cabin Door caution light come on to find out that one of the 6 door locks had slipped open and soon after the Cabin Alt master warning came on. The cabin typically holds at 8000’ up at FL450 but at 17,000’ we were already rapidly approaching 11,000’ on the pressurization controller and needed to get down soon or the masks would drop. It was my leg flying so I handled the airplane and comms, told them our issue and that we needed to divert back to KAPA as the Capt ran the checklist. On our way back down we encountered moderate icing, so I flicked all the Anti-ice/De-ice on and that’s when we got a Tail Deice fail… another checklist to run and our panel was starting to light up like a Christmas tree. (It felt like the sim at flight safety, when one issue hits, there’s bound to be another.) We got back near the airport and was still too heavy to land. With everything handled we decided we weren’t urgent enough to land overweight so we did a lap in the pattern to burn off some more fuel. The plane was in MX for the next three days so we had some fun in Denver, hitting up a concert at Red Rocks and a Rockies baseball game.
Next rotation wasn’t nearly as eventful but we did get a trip out to Puerto Rico and got to see one of Nike’s custom Gulfstreams on the ramp in Palm beach. It was beautiful…
Credited 52 hours and 15 days off.
1- KISO-KAPF
2- KAPF-KBED-KTEB-KAPA
3- KAPA-KAPA (*We were headed to KSDL but had to divert back to KAPA for MX)
4- MX standby
5- MX standby
6- KAPA-KAPA (*MX eval flight)
7- KAPA-KSAF-KSJT-KTEB
8- KTEB-KMMU-KAKR
9- OFF
10- OFF
11- OFF
12- OFF
13- OFF
14- OFF
15- OFF
16- Home Standby
17-KPBI-KTOL-KFCM
18-KFCM-KMHE-KMSP-KDAN
19-KDAN-KSWF-KSTL
20- KSTL-KAUS-KSUS-KOSU
21- KOSU-KFLL-TJBQ-KPBI
22- KPBI-KPTK-KLUK
23- OFF
24- OFF
25- OFF
26- OFF
27- OFF
28- OFF
29- Home Standby
30- Travel to airplane