Stuck in Memphis

Weather today looks just like last night. TLH is where the red box is.

The saga of this week continues. When we showed last night for the Tallahassee to Memphis leg, the weather was ominous but GOC (Global Operation Control...our dispatchers) gave us almost an hour of extra contingency fuel, which does wonders raising the comfort level. On the way out to the airplane, I took these pictures b/c this was the cleanest airplane I've seen in a long time, having just come from a "C" check in JAX. Sure is a pretty beast! Anyway, just a minute into the walkaround, things started to go south. You see the red lights on the wingtip? Just like with a boat, the other side should have green lights, but they were not working. That's a no-go item at night. The mechanic did not see a quick  way to fix the problem b/c the circuit breaker kept popping. Not a good feeling, a short somewhere out on the wing which is full of gas! GOC re-routed a 727 into Tallahassee to pick up the freight and we thought we were done for the night. The nightly haul out of Tallahassee is worth several million dollars b/c there is a firm in Dothan that deals in refrigerated oncology shipments that MUST get where they're going without fail...something like $30,000 per box! By the time the 727 got to us, the mechanic had come up with one more bright idea; he checked the cannon plug for the lights ...basically a wiring harness plug in the wing...and found it to be loose. He tightened it and that seemed to fix the problem, so now the ramp had to reload us again. We ended up being about 1 1/2 hours late, and the 727 had to land for gas anyway. We plowed through the weather getting the crap beat out of us and finally landed in Memphis just in time to check in for the return trip to Tallahassee. Oh, and the circuit breaker for the right wind lights popped on landing. Hmmm.
Next chapter; the sort was and hour and a half late, but we went out to the new airplane and they started loading freight, so we were looking ok. Then I noticed the lights in the cockpit kept flickering every couple of minutes (pretty good considering how tired I was). It reminded me of what happens when the electric hydraulic pumps are first turned on. I figured that the ground power unit was about to go out, so I started the APU (our little jet-powered onboard generator) and switched the electric power source to it. Still flickering. I finally  checked the hydraulic pressure and found that the right hydraulic pump was cycling on and off. Strange and not good. The quantity was also a little low, maybe a leak? Called maintenance. We're getting a rep as a crew now! Airplane was hard down with no spare 757 in Memphis. They had to transload the freight to a 727. Back into substitution for us. I got to my favorite Memphis hotel about 5:00 this morning only to find that they had raised the Fedex corporate rate from $43 to $59. What a day (night). My first hard down airplane as a Captain, and one of only a handful ever for me at Fedex in over 15 years!