Cockpit Conversation

Always Check NOTAMs -- Even When Running Drugs

2012-02-17T19:33:00.000Z

Pilots and regular readers know that a NOTAM (NOtice To Air[wo]Men) is a little bulletin describing a change to facilities, airspace or procedures that isn't published on the current charts and publications. They look boring. They can be tedious and repetitive to read. Most of them won't pertain to your operation. If you fly out of some little flat bit of the wilderness airport there's probably a NOTAM about the airport lighting being unserviceable from shortly after the snow melts until whenever it is that gophers go back into hibernation.

You can look them up here for Canada if you know your airport identifier. They look like this.

CYHZ
110478 CYHZ CHURCH LAKE(WATER)
CHL3 AMEND PUB: OPR TEL TO READ 902-644-3604

110792 CYHZ AMHERST(HELI)
CCB3 AMEND PUB: NEW WIND FARM 15 TURBINES 0.7 NM RADIUS 455002N 641504W (APRX 1.8 NM NNW AD) 454 FT AGL 483 FT MSL. LGTD NOT PAINTED

110796 CYHZ STANLEY
CCW4 AMEND PUB: NEW TOWER 445602N 635751W (APRX 10 NM SSW AD) 299 FT AGL 988 MSL. NOT LGTD AND NOT PAINTED

110817 CYHZ NEW GLASGOW(ABERDEEN HOSP)(HELI)
OBST LGT U/S 12 TOWERS AT WINDFARM WITHIN 2.7 NM RADIUS 453359N 625746W (APRX 13 NM WNW AD) 377 FT AGL 1460 MSL
1111301630 TIL 1202291600

110844 CYHZ TRENTON
CYTN RNAV(GNSS) RWY 07, RNAV(GNSS) RWY 25 AND NDB RWY 25 APCH: RESTRICTED OPS SPEC 099 OR 410 REQUIRED AD VISUAL SFC NOT ASSESSED CREWS MUST BE FAMILIAR WITH AD ENVIRONMENT
1112151230 TIL APRX 1203161800

110845 CYHZ DEBERT
CCQ3 RNAV(GNSS) RWY 09 AND RNAV(GNSS) RWY 27 APCH ARE RESTRICTED. OPS SPEC 099 OR 410 REQUIRED. AD VISUAL SFC NOT ASSESSED. CREWS MUST BE FAMILIAR WITH AD ENVIRONMENT
1112151230 TIL APRX 1203161800

That's less than half of the Halifax NOTAMs this afternoon. If you're really operating out of Halifax you need to read them all, plus all the ones for the place you are going, and the ones covering airspace you'll be passing through, and possible diversion airports. The float plane guys don't care about the GNSS approaches. The airlines don't care about the windfarms. No one on wheels cares about the change in the operator's telephone number for the Church Lake waterdrome, but they are filed by the order they were filed in, and no one has realized the safety benefit of somehow filtering or classifying them.

They're a fairly often neglected aspect of flight planning. If you're flying between familiar aerodromes on a regular basis, there's a strong temptation to skip them. The flight briefers don't give them unless you ask. (And I still haven't forgiven the briefer I asked for NOTAMs for a flight from Meadow Lake to Buffalo Narrows, who neglected to tell me that the airspace I was chartered to fly through was in use by the Canadian military and their international guests for fighter jet exercises. It's the only time I've called and asked to speak to the supervisor of someone paid to provide me with flight services.) I have fielded a phone call from an airborne coworker who sighted vehicles working in the vicinity of his destination runway, "Avi, could you please check and see if there's a NOTAM ..." (There was).

So I can see how if you were conducting an operation that wasn't actually legal in the first place, transporting certain agricultural products, for example, that you just might not bother to check them. But these folks would have had a better day had they done so. A US reader will probably clarify the difference, but the Americans do have what I'm going to term a special relative of the NOTAM called the TFR (Temporary Flight Restriction) which highlights what in Canada would be NOTAMs restricting airspace to certain operations. They probably did this because people were missing NOTAMs and ending up on the windshield of Air Force One, but what it probably does is make the problem worse, with people clicking on the fun little map that tells you where they don't want you flying today (hey, is President Obama in Seattle today?) and then figuring that covers the important stuff and not going through to the boring list of nav aid outages.

CAT I Takeoff

2012-01-26T16:40:00.000Z

I'll tell you about the circular yurt construction shortly, but today I couldn't pass up this story about a cat that escaped from its carrier before take-off on an Air Canada flight. Air Canada allows small pets to be carried in the passenger cabin, provided that they remain in approved pet carriers that fit on the floor under a seat. The door to the carrier was, according to the passenger 'inadvertently opened' while the carrier was being stowed. My initial guess was that the passenger wanted to give Ripples a quick snuggle before shoving it under the seat, but apparently security video shows that the CATSA inspectors who opened the cage for security screening did not secure the latch. In any event Ripples saw an opportunity and fled.

So you have an airplane, which is not a really large place, and a cat, which is not a large animal and the other had to be found inside the one. That took them a while because the cat had done what cats do and found the smallest, warmest most inaccessible compartment in the whole aircraft: an avionics bay. This is the airplane equivalent of getting into the computer rack and curling up on top of the server. Or sleeping on top of an old-fashioned TV inside the entertainment unit. They had to access the avionics through an exterior panel to remove the cat and then to ensure that it wasn't a trained terrorist attack cat that had left a little explosive payload in there--or a non-terrorist cat that had simply chewed on something or left a payload of another variety--they took a further delay to inspect the avionics.

I thought Air Canada didn't carry pets in the winter months, but here's their pet policy. They accept them in the cabin, as checked luggage and as unaccompanied cargo. They do have seasonal restrictions on pets in the baggage compartment to keep pets from being baked or frozen during ground handling.

I stand by my earlier statement that there should be a program in place whereby a passenger wishing to have a cat at their destination registers the one they have, drops it off at the airport and on arrival is given one of a similar size and colour, to enjoy for the duration of their stay.

Solve for X

2012-01-18T00:00:00.002Z

Today someone in an aviation workplace was either amused or insulted, I'm not sure which, by my excitement that he was genuinely using trigonometry for real things. I'm afraid that he may have thought that my excitement and admiration was over the fact that he knew how use trigonometry at all, but really this is just one cool part of a very cool project he is working on.

What do you think he's up to?

Helicopter Charter

2012-01-14T00:00:00.005Z

I'm not currently working with helicopters, either as a charter customer or with a company that operates rotary ring aircraft, but I had to love this trojan horse spam.

Your order for our air commuter services has been received and processed. The chopper will be at your disposal from 3.30 p.m. wednesday to 5.45 tuesday. Once again, the rates are as follows:

1 hour in the air: 824$
Takeoff / Landing: 229$
1 hour down time on the ground: 163$
Longest fly-time is 5 hours.
When flying for longer distances, a co-pilot is needed, and the cost accordingly grows by 133$ an hour.

Bill.doc 747kb

With Respect To You
Nellie Nickerson

The purpose of the spam is to get me to click on "Bill.doc," which in the original is a link to an executable. I have to commend these spammers for the completely awesome vehicle they have chosen for what I assume is a trojan horse of some sort. I love the imagination they bring to the rates. I have chartered a helicopter before, and like an airplane the rates applied to the flight time, regardless of the number of takeoffs and landings, and in this case there was no charge for the thirty minutes or so we spent on the ground between flights with the engine shut down. Perhaps somewhere in the world there is a charter rate schedule like this, but I find it hard to believe that in an aircraft where it can be hard to distinguish between takeoffs and landings, that someone would charge over one quarter of the hourly rate per one. I like the fee per extra crew member; in my experience crew usually get about half the amount clients are billed for their services, which implies that a co-pilot could be making $66 a flight hour.

Truth Be Told

2012-01-02T00:00:00.038Z

The post from a few days ago didn't actually herald my being back. It was actually an indication that I'd neglected the blog for so long that a post I had written long ago and postdated to the far future came due and published itself. I didn't have a good plan for when to schedule it at the time and had been punting it forward through time for years.

See, I'm a person of obsessions. Some last a week. Some last for years. Some dwindle and are then rekindled. I blogged pretty much daily for almost ten years. (Cockpit Conversation was not my first blog). I blogged because I wanted to, and because it was fun to read the feedback. Recently another obsession has risen to the forefront of my life and seized the time and creative spark that used to go into blogging. If it stops being fun I'll see what comes next.

But seeing as you have all been so enthusiastic about that stray post, I'll see if I can blog once in a while, maybe at a frequency like Sam's rather than my former almost daily posts. We'll see how it goes. I haven't completely lost my habit of taking notes about my flights, so maybe in the back of my mind I'm still blogging.

Happy New Year, everyone. I do like you guys. Thanks for all the fun times--and the nasty times--that you've shared with me.

Not the Weather Report

2011-12-29T16:18:00.001Z

I have a few requests to blog about the weather more, and I mean to, but somehow haven't for a while. I was going to today, with a report on the Weather Channel as a jumping-off point, but then I realized something that sidetracked me on that entry.

There's two sorts of being identified as the blogger. One is when someone who reads the blog meets me, or perhaps already knew me but figures out that I am me. Those ones are great, because if you read the blog you must know I mean well, plus you like the blog: no one goes on reading something they dislike. The kind I find more uncomfortable is when someone who doesn't read the blog and who knows me, but not as a friend, discovers that I have a blog, and who then goes quoting me out of context. You see that sort of thing done by and to politicians all the time. They end up defending stupidly innocent actions like where they shop or what their kids wore to the prom. This hasn't happened to me, but I don't think I'd like it if it did. Sometimes I think I should put my real name on the blog so that no one can "out" me, my already having done it myself. Politicians do that, too, "full disclosure"--telling the public things we don't care, just to pre-empt anyone else claiming they are hiding it.

I don't think I will do that in the near future, but I will present for your amusement ...

The Top Ten Ways to Accidentally Out Yourself On Your Own Blog

(I have caught myself doing all of these).

10. Forget to censor your own name when quoting conversations.
9. Post a photograph that shows your recognizable reflection in a shiny object.
8. Post a story about yourself that also makes the national news.
7. Leave yourself logged in to a shared computer.
6. Visit your blog from an FBO computer with a giant screen.
5. Do a real life meet up with fellow bloggers who like to post pictures.
4. Leave your blog in the browser history of someone else's computer.
3. Post the callsign of your aircraft.
2. Send e-mail to a customer from your alter ego e-mail address, with your blog URL in the signature field.

And the number one way to embarrassingly out yourself on your own blog is to ...

1. Post a video taken of an amusingly dire report on the Weather Channel, when said video was taken in the hotel room, and clearly shows your reflection in the TV throughout ... naked.

And that's why this blog entry isn't about the weather.

Projected Absence

2011-09-25T23:00:00.000Z

I'm really wrapped up in a creative project that is using the same part of my brain and my day as blogging, and for now I'm going to give it priority.

I'll try to catch up later, but here's a tidbit from my day.

While I was preflighting today I saw a Canadian Forces Airbus in military grey, with muted markings and the only colour the red Canadian flag on the tail. The FBO crew parked an airstairs truck at the forward door and a long line of soldiers came out, carrying duffel bags across the apron to the FBO. I don't know where they had come directly from, or whether the range of the airliner would support it, but it was most interesting to imagine that they were returning directly from Afghanistan. I shouted "Welcome home!" across the ramp, but it wouldn't have been audible above the sound of the APU and of other idling aircraft.

Later, after takeoff I heard the Canadian Forces callsign, with a female pilot's voice, check in with departure. She was on the same instrument departure as I was, and given the same instruction after departure. I realized that she was climbing up behind me, then was given another vector that would put her past me on the right. I wonder if they loaded more soldiers to take back to wherever they got the first lot, or if they were ferrying empty.

Dauntless Aviation

2011-09-19T20:27:00.001Z

I'm using software from Dauntless Aviation to study for the FAA exam. I definitely recommend it. It not only shows you all the questions you could see on the exam, with the correct answers, but highlights excerpts from the regulations that explain them and points out tricky parts of the questions. The merchant site is a little intimidating, but I think it's just that they are a very small company and hooked up with a somewhat aggressive payment processing company that they can't really rein in.
Today's confusion is over alternate requirements in the the US regulations. In Canada you always (with some very specialized op spec exceptions) require one alternate and there are complex but interpretable rules governing the weather conditions required to file a particular airport as your alternate. In the US you need one alternate, two alternates or zero alternates and whether you need them depends on what state you are flying in, the weather and possibly what operation type. I confess that I haven't got it all sorted out yet. I'm going to try and make a table of sorts:

Part	Type	Engine	Location	# alternates	Required fuel	Other
121	flag	turbine	?	0	2 hours

Sector Altitudes?

2011-09-17T21:51:00.000Z

Question: What action should be taken when a pilot is "cleared for approach" while being radar vectored on an unpublished route?

Answer: Remain at last assigned altitude until established on a published route segment.

In Canada, cleared to the approach I would be able to, and probably would get into an untenable position later on the approach if I didn't, immediately descend to the 100 nm or 25 nm safe altitude published on the plate, as appropriate, in preparation for intersecting a published route segment. I would tell ATC I was "leaving one fife tousand for one zero tousand tree hundred" or whatever the sector altitude was, but I'm not sure I'd be required to do that. Saying it helps me remember it, and allows ATC to know what to expect.

I remember being told by a flight instructor long ago that in the US you were not allowed to descend immediately on being cleared for the approach, and commenters here told me that yes you were, but with this question I may have finally found the case that the original flight instructor was considering. It looks like if I'm on an airway or a published transition to an approach, cleared for the approach clears me to the MEA for that route, but if I'm off airway just being vectored towards the airport, I can't descend to a published safe altitude until directed? I suspect this is more because US airspace have more published transitions and routes and less just hammering around through the clag towards the NDB at the airport.

American Weeks?

2011-09-14T22:49:00.002Z

What the heck does this mean?

Each dispatcher must be relieved of all duty with the certificate holder for at least 24 consecutive hours during any seven consecutive days or the equivalent thereof within any calendar month.

The dispatcher is supposed to have one day off every week? The dispatcher is supposed to have one week off every month? The dispatcher is supposed to have one day off every seven days, but if Monday is his day off, and it's March and March started on a Monday, and he's had the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th off so there are only three days left in the month he gets another day off because during the calendar month of March the last two days are equivalent to a week?

What does a calendar month have to do with anything? So there are different rules in long months than short ones? If it stopped after "seven consecutive days" it would make perfect sense. But what on earth could be equivalent to seven consecutive days, but wasn't adequately described by "seven consecutive days"?

And can ATPL holders automatically work as dispatchers in the US, or are they supposed to be policing their dispatchers' sleep schedules? Why would such a question be on a pilot's exam?

Also I have to know that if a drunk creates a disturbance on my aircraft I have five days to report it to the Administrator.

Lost Comm Altitude

2011-09-14T14:26:00.000Z

If you are IFR in IMC and lose contact with ATC, you still have to fly somewhere. There are a set of logical rules that dictate the timing, route and altitude of that flight. I'd expect them to be the same in both countries, and they are almost word for word.

CFR 14, Part 91.185(c)(2) (USA)
Altitude. At the highest of the following altitudes or flight levels for the route segment being flown:
The altitude or flight level assigned in the last ATC clearance received;
The minimum altitude (converted, if appropriate, to minimum flight level as prescribed in § 91.121(c)) for IFR operations; or
The altitude or flight level ATC has advised may be expected in a further clearance.

versus

AIM 6.3.2.2 (b) (Canada)
Altitude: At the highest of the following altitudes or FLs for the route segment being flown: the altitude(s) or FLs assigned in the last ATC clearance received and acknowledged;
the minimum IFR altitude (see RAC 8.6.1); or
the altitude or FL ATC has advised may be expected in a further clearance. (The pilot shall commence climb to this altitude/FL at the time or point specified by ATC to expect further clearance/ altitude change.)

Curiously, while routing defaults to the flight plan, the flight planned altitude isn't mentioned in here, unless the last clearance received was the IFR readback including the flight planned altitude. So that means that if you're departing somewhere and really don't want to fly at the MEA to destination, you'd better get the controller to say "expect flight level 230" and not just "expect higher."

American Birds Follow Airspace Rules

2011-09-13T15:13:00.000Z

Both countries have a speed limit of 250 knots below 10,000', unless you're flying an airplane so crazy that it would be unsafe to operate it at a lower speed. In Canada the next speed limit restricts you to below 200 knots below 3000' within ten nautical miles of a control zone. In the US, it's below 200 knots below 2500' within 4 nm of the airport inside a class Charlie or Delta control zone. But in a class Bravo control zone, fill your boots at up to 250 kts. I'm writing Charlie out in full for the US version because that's how they say it (we say "cee"). That will maybe help me remember.

According to a document I read recently, the low altitude speed limits were established to reduce the severity of bird strikes, but I'm guessing that was just for the 250 kt ones, because I can't see that the birds would pay really close attention to which airspace they are in. The 200 kt speed limit is probably to help ATC control different speed aircraft.

Although the Americans have most of the same airspace letters as Canada, they don't really line up. They have class Bravo control zones whereas we only have class B airspace over 12,500'. If you pretend US Bravo is Canadian C you'll follow all the right rules, ensuring you have a clearance before entering the airspace. At 200 knots or below.

We Interrupt This Sequence

2011-09-12T00:00:00.066Z

I'm going to suspend the trip I've been describing right there to describe--and solicit your help with--the process of converting a Canadian ATPL to an FAA one. I have an opportunity for an interesting short term job, and potentially others in the longer term, if I have an FAA licence. Don't worry, Americans, I'm not stealing your jobs, the job is not in the USA and is not for an American company. It's for a company based in country A that is operating an airplane in country B and that airplane just happens to be N-registered, that is, it's registered in the US. The law says that the pilot's licence has to match the airplane registration. (In many cases you have a period of time, typically six months to a year, to make the transition from in internationally respected licence such as a Canadian one to the local licence, but not for the US).

The process involves getting an FAA medical certificate, passing a written exam, and putting them together with a bit of paperwork and a processing fee. I've already had the FAA physical, and am just waiting for their approval. I'm studying for the exam so I can have that written as soon as possible. I haven't yet figured out if I need to make an appointment to write it or can just show up at a testing centre. Er, I guess that's a testing "center."

My first impression as I look at the material to be studied is that there's a disconnect between what I have and what I'm converting to. There's an assumption that someone writing an ATPL level exam has mastered the material of the private pilot level, but I have to figure that out too. The material is totally unrelated to what I'll be doing, so there isn't a lot of point in thoroughly learning and understanding it. In the US all test bank questions are available in advance, so when you're in this situation you can just learn the correct answers with out really know why. I've never taken a test this way before, but when in ~~Rome~~ Washington, D.C. Things like I've learned that "part 91" means general aviation, "part 135" is on-demand air carriers and "part 121" is scheduled air carriers. But the questions mention "domestic carriers" and "flag carriers" and "supplemental air carriers." They must be defined somewhere. My local pilot shop has run out of the FAR/AIM because the new one is on order, so I've ordered one directly from the US.

I have to figure out how aircraft approach categories (A B C D) work in the US. There's something in the questions that implies that it's not just based on approach speed as in Canada. I have to figure out how the NOTAM system works. Apparently you get different sorts of NOTAMs with different letters from different sources.

Up until now I've almost deliberately not learned about US regulations that don't affect Canadian pilots (like needing one flight attendant for the first 10 passengers (in aircraft with a payload capacity of 7500 lbs and up) of for the first 20 passengers when the aircraft payload is under 7500. With 50 to 100 passengers you need two flight attendants, and one more for every fifty passengers or part thereof after that. And it's based on seating capacity, not boarded passengers, implying that you need three flight attendants for a B737-600 with four people in the back. Or something. Maybe I can store this in a part of my brain that's reusable.

What Kind of Airplane?

2011-09-11T00:00:00.082Z

"Huh. Wow. What kind of airplane?"

As far as I remember, that's more or less the first thing I said ten years ago on learning that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. Yeah, cringe, but I was trying to distinguish between incidents like this and something that would do more damage. Some context: I had driven to work listening to a CD (or maybe a cassette tape: it was an old car) because the radio reception along my commute was poor, and it wasn't a time of day when I could expect good programming. I had arrived, grabbed the aircraft documents, inspected the airplane, ensured it had been fuelled and come back to the airside office to drop off my preflight paperwork. It was a small shared office, so I had to squeeze between my coworkers and a television set to get to the filing cabinet where I needed to drop my operational flight plan and weight and balance documents. They were staring at the TV, but then it was a media-related company so they were always staring at the TV. On my way back outside to start the airplane, someone said, "An airplane just hit the World Trade Center." The TV wasn't at an angle that I could see it. In answer to my question, he told me it was a Learjet. I didn't even know which world trade centre it was. I assumed it was in the US, but I guessed Chicago, because the old airport was right by downtown. I ran up my airplane engine wondering if the crash was a control problem or pilot incapacitation or what.

I know someone who was woken up by a call from his friend that morning and ordered to turn on the TV. After seeing the burning buildings his response was even more cringeworthy than mine. "I think I've seen this movie."

My non-pilot coworker--yeah, I've always had jobs like this--jumped in the plane and tucked Walkman (look it up, kids) headphones under his aviation ones, as usual. I told you it was a media-heavy company. He was less conversational than usual, but I assumed this had to do with low caffeine intake, not realizing what he was hearing on the radio. Half an hour or so into the flight he said something was on fire.

"Where?" I asked, looking out the window for smoke or the flashing lights of firetrucks.

"The Pentagon is on fire," he repeated.

The pentagon? What pentagon? I sifted though associations with the word, my strongest image being something from witchcraft, imprisoning demons in a chalked pentagram ringed with candles. That made no sense. Then I thought of another possibility. "You mean bombs and missiles Pentagon?" I asked. He shushed me, so I tuned the ADF to a local news station, just in time to hear a synopsis of the morning's terrorism, and that US airspace had been closed.

Before I had a chance to call flight services to find out if this would affect me, the air traffic controller whose frequency I was on instructed me to land. I landed back at our base, not a major airport, and as I was on short final an ultralight took off, the pilot and the controller who cleared him still oblivious to the day's events.

This is probably the third time I've told the story on the blog and I imagine I've told it dozens of time in real life. Every generation has to have its "where were you?" moment. Ask an old American where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot. (Yeah if you remember Kennedy, you're officially old. You're welcome). I hope the next such "everyone remembers where they were" event is a good one. There have been good ones, like humans landing on the moon. What amazing good thing could happen today that would be tweeted around the world and that would compel people to tell the story of where they were when it happened, even ten years later? What some people might consider good could be controversial, so please don't mock or condemn any commenter for their choice of an earthshaking positive moment. Is there anything? Or are we too jaded and too divided now to all be awed by an event?

Flipping Out Over Flight Planning

2011-09-10T00:00:00.000Z

You know what's kind of annoying during flight planning? When you are working with both VFR and IFR charts and you have to remember to flip the VFR chart vertically and the IFR chart horizontally. Or is the other way around? If you always work with one or the other, it's no problem, it becomes instinctive. But when your job requires you to go IFR to work somewhere VFR or vice versa, you have to work with both. Flip. Damn. Flip. Flip. Damnit. Flip.

You know what's really annoying during flight planning? When the pilot forgets her copy of the job folder at the home base and doesn't have the paperwork she needs. Stupid. We've forgotten something almost every trip. The key. The GPU. That folder. In it is has a map of the lines and a list of the lines with their altitudes and photo blocks for each job, plus photo flight forms for each area control centre that we work with. I borrow the operator's map sheets, although they don't have the pilot-related mark up information I researched, and then I call Edmonton to fax me another copy of the missing form. They are happy to do so.

I think it's sweet that Edmonton Area Control Centre, which I frequently have cause to praise, has its own logo, and adorable that that logo looks like an old CP Air 737, but if the Nova Hotel is trying to impress me by putting hotel stationary instead of plain paper in their fax machine, it's not working.

Planning complete I taxied out, yold to the King Air, clomb to cruise altitude, shove five minutes of my filed flight time thanks to a tailwind and crew about it after landing. Or I would have, had the past tense of these English verbs not changed over the years. I kind of like yold and clomb, though. They sound better than yielded and climbed. Maybe I'll start a fad to reestablish them.

yield - yold
shave - shove
climb - clomb
crow - crew

The Shadin fuel flow meter always shows more fuel on board than there actually is. Taking notes, I think it may least accurate during high fuel flows. It always overreports fuel flow and underreports fuel remaining. I kind of like it that way, because I always have more fuel than it says. I still need to be careful though. A few years ago I hit a wingtip because a particular building always looked closer than it really was, and one day I took too much advantage of that safety margin. I cracked the plexiglass cover on the nav light and it had to be replaced. Maintenance shrugged and said it was the cost of doing business. The chief pilot said only, "The new one looks much better. Can you break the other one next?" The owner didn't say anything that I recall. I work with nice people.

In Concert with the Season

2011-09-08T00:00:00.010Z

It's warm on the ground, but we're headed back to the flight levels today so the operator has cleaned out the local Canadian Tire of chemical hand and foot warmers. I've also noticed that just having a clipboard on my lap made a difference to warmth, so we have taken a sleeping bag out of the survival kit to use as a sleigh robe. I think the American for that is car blanket, but I like the imagery of sitting behind trotting horses on a frosty morning.

There's no delay on our clearance or departure and we're soon in climb direct the project area entry point. Through ten thousand feet, checklist item: oxygen on. Through 18,000', checklist item, altimeter set to 29.92. Level off and go to work. At first it's warm because it takes a little while for the warm air we've carried aloft to be replaced and/or cooled by the subzero air around us, but inevitably it happens. "I'm ready for those footwarmers now," I say, and then I untie one shoelace and fly with my sock foot for a bit. Cold. There's a bit of shuffling and swearing from the back as the operator realizes he has disconnected his oxygen while searching for the Canadian Tire bag. He takes a few deep breaths, regains his equilibrium and then passes the first footwarmer up. "It's already broken and mixed?" I ask. He says yep, it should be starting to work now. It doesn't feel warm yet, but I put it in the toe of my shoe and put my shoe back on, then repeat for the other side. Not warm.

That's what you get for buying handwarmers in the summer. These things work because of an exothermic reaction between two different chemicals. Old stock. The barrier must have broken down over the last year and the chemical reaction was spent to no one's benefit. I squish my toes a bit and ask him again if he's sure he mixed them or shook them or whatever. He says the instructions just say to take it out of the package to make it work. It is at this moment that I realize there must be two varieties of chemical handwarmers. The kind that heat when two sealed chemicals mix, and the kind we have, that react exothermically with ambient oxygen. Pro tip: if there isn't enough oxygen for a human to breathe, then oxygen-activated footwarmers aren't going to work either.

We descend out of the flight levels to do some low level work. I filed this flight plan as a "Y": IFR then VFR, but I still have to say the words "cancelling IFR" to make the transition. Now that I don't need them, the footwarmers warm up. The low level work has the fuel low level light flashing before we land, but my calculations after we fuel show that we landed with 30 minutes in the tank.

The FBO guy carries my bag for me. "You don't have to do that!" I protest. "There's lots of things in life you don't have to do," he says. The hotel is nearby and Gene Simmons' bus is parked outside. So at Slave Lake we got everyone from Nazareth to Susan Aglukark to Dwight Yoakam and here we get Kiss. Northern concert tours are the best. Enough people come from surrounding communities that the size of the audience can exceed the population of the town.

In the restaurant I ask the server what the veggie burger is like. She says "I don't know, I'm not a ..." then midsentence realizes that non-vegetarians can eat vegetarian items and ammends it to, "I've never had it." She's confused when I want to know if she knows anything about it.

"If you had a "meat burger" on your menu customers would ask you what kind of meat it was. What kind of vegetable is this? Rice? Beans?" She doesn't know but I order it anyway and five minutes later I hear another customer asking the same question. She does come over to find out what it's like, so the next customer will be able to get an answer. Dessert is Turtle cheesecake. No question there.

Next day's work is two projects in one in the city of Edmonton. I'll have to send the controllers a map so I can negotiate for each line, but neither map is any good. The maps are different scales, don't cover exactly the same area, have the rong landmarks on them and are completely unfaxable. I redraw it on a separate piece of paper, showing only the river, the major roads and the reporting points the controllers will know. I'm interrupted once by a fire alarm, but get it all done in time to meet the operator for a bedtime snack. We had dinner pretty early so we're having a snack now to tide us over to the morning. I show him my map and explain that I have renumbered the lines for the second project so that we don't have to say "line one on the second map" just "line twenty-one." He approves and he raves about my map. I'm proud of it myself.

Cabs and Cops

2011-09-06T00:00:00.084Z

The Slave Lake cab driver is cranky after waking up to a post-concert party in progress in her own home. After chewing out the appropriate child she got in her non-taxi car to drive to wherever the cab she would drive was dispatched from and was promptly pulled over by the police, who had been sitting on the party, waiting for people to try to drive away so they could stop drunk driving. From there her account of the situation involved a lot of indignant bellowing at the squeaky new police officer, something about did his mother know what he was doing, until the slightly older partner intervened with, "We know her. She doesn't drink at all." Small towns. Hard to be a small town cop and act tough for your school friend's mother, when she was the one who put bandaids on your boo-boos, and caught you smoking as you were growing up.

There are clouds here, quite a few, and the other survey airplane that's supposed to be working these blocks with us is down with a camera problem. We hang about, read the paper, and eventually decide not to waste any fuel on the mission. We call the cab again and the driver asks us if we were playing a joke on her earlier. Apparently someone called for an airport cab, but there was no one here to be collected. The person called back, asking when the cab was coming, and interrogation revealed that the caller was in Edmonton. No ma'am, not us.

Battery of Battery-Related Thoughts

2011-09-04T00:00:00.126Z

I walked all over town to find a 386/301 battery for my IFR timer and a couple of AAAs for my pulse oximeter. Who knew there could be so many different sorts of small round batteries. When buying devices, it's worth including battery availability in the comparison between brands. Everything in aviation should run off AA batteries. I carry a charger and a little pile of spare rechargeables so that when my headset battery cops out, or my flashlight isn't bright enough, I can swap them out.

Mark that against the Bose A20: the batteries are trickier to change in flight than for LightSPEED. They didn't intend you to change them in flight. They have an elaborate system of green and amber flashing lights designed to tell you your battery health and give you a chance to change them before the flight. These don't work with rechargeables, because of their square power profile: they work fine until they are almost dead then drop off to nothing too fast to give a warning. Bose tells you not to use rechargeable batteries for this reason, but I'm not leaving a trail of mercury all over the country for the convenience of flashing lights.

I keep my spare and used batteries straight in the cockpit using a pair of little plastic boxes, one red and one clear, that hold for AA batteries each. I was using it in the north and my favourite captain asked me where I got it. I didn't remember exactly, but told him I'd get him one, and I didn't, but I had to leave before I gave it to him. I asked for his postal address to send it to him, but then he had to leave, and the e-mail I had for him stopped working, but I kept the box all this time. Last time I was packing, I couldn't find my box, so I 'stole' the one I'd been saving for him, but I tell you, if you're reading this, you who forgave me for ripping the REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT streamer off the engine plug on my first morning at work, send me your address and I will be honoured to send you one.

I have to plug the computer in to use flight simulator programs. The battery runs down too fast otherwise. When I'm flying my toy flight simulator, sometimes the panel lights spontaneously turn off, and I have to cycle the nav lights to put them back on again. Bug or feature to make the whole thing as inscrutably unknowable as a real airplane?

If you thought that last thought was disconnected, how about this one: Originally the forest moon of Endor was supposed to be populated by Wookiees, not Ewoks (wook-ee/ee-wok: original, eh?) but George Lucas decided that since the Wookiee Chewbacca was clearly proficient with advanced technology (i.e. he was pilot and mechanic of the spaceship the Millennium Falcon and also repaired the damaged android C3PO), it would be confusing to show the Wookiees with a primitive, "stone age" culture on Endor.

That's stupid. That's stupid enough to make me angry. That's racist 'logic'. That's the logic that didn't let women run marathons, because they never had. You don't have to be a whiny white moisture farmer with exceptional midichlorians to study and learn things, and it is perfectly possible to learn things that your parents didn't know. You'd have to be keen, and have some aptitude for the subject to make up for the not having the experience of growing up with technology, like Anakin building his own robots and podracers, but there's no reason Kashyyyk couldn't produce competent pilots and mechanics.

You may think this post has gone entirely into deep space, but I'll bring it home by examining Star Wars stored power technology. The Death Star had a massive generator, and no fuel tanks, but the society had batteries, power converters, power couplers and other means of transferring, transforming and transporting energy. I wonder if Han Solo ever had to walk all over Mos Eisley looking for the right sort of power cell for his blaster.

Devastation

2011-09-03T00:00:00.116Z

We're going to Slave Lake again, the community that had the fire. I checked NOTAMs carefully to make sure that services were available, but there is no sign from an aviation planning point of view that there is anything wrong there. Our work is far north of the community, up above the bush and lakes of far northern Alberta, and when we're done I plan the descent to bring me into the aerodrome environment at the right speed and altitude. I'm looking for the runway, right where it's always been, perpendicular to the lake, surrounded by the town, and then I get my first glimpse of the devastation. I have landed in Slave Lake enough times that I have subconscious landmarks that help me find the way to the runway, but it's like landing at an unknown aerodrome. The swathes of nothing are startling. I find the runway nevertheless and put the airplane on it.

I ask the fueller how things have been going in the town, with reconstruction and he says that almost nothing has been rebuilt yet, in fact they hardly have a handle on how to complete the demolition. So far the burned out areas have been fenced off and the remains of vehicles are been towed away, but nothing else has been done. He and everyone else I meet in town are pretty upbeat about their situation, though. They're northerners, I guess. Life goes on and they aren't dwelling on misfortune. We call all the taxi numbers but can't get one. There's a benefit concert going on, with big name bands at a venue just out of town and everyone is taking cabs so they can drink and party. We get a ride with an FBO employee, who tells us a "secret" that I can tell you now, because it's all over. She's just been finalizing arrangements for the arrival of aircraft carrying Prince William and his new bride Kate and their retinue. This was a surprise addition to the itinerary of the royal visit, but you can't keep secrets like that in a small town. Everyone I talk to has heard that they are coming, but some think it's just a rumour to buoy their spirits, and that a prince in line to the throne of Canada wouldn't visit such a small place.

The FBO employee gave us a tour through the destroyed parts of town. Entire blocks were completely razed, just empty yards with grey crumbled foundations and a few twisted pieces of metal. There was very little that was blackened or scorched. It was just gone. Completely incinerated. The fire was so hot that the foundations now crumble to the touch. Here and there is a house that the fire jumped over, or that the firefighters managed to keep from becoming engulfed. Sometimes such relatively untouched houses are sitting between two barren holes, intact except with the siding warped in curvy waves. There's one yard where the concrete steps that once led to the front door are still standing, covered in a waterfall of molten glass. It's a ghoulish little tour.

Our driver also filled us in on some of the worst parts of the fire, not what you would expect. Everyone was evacuated from the town with no notice, and they were not permitted to return for ten days, until power, treated water and emergency services could be provided again. Imagine a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at four in the afternoon. Now imagine a KFC that was abandoned in full operation at four in the afternoon, then left there with no refrigeration, no air conditioning and no cleaning for ten days in the heat of summer. Now add in ten other restaurants, an entire supermarket, and everyone's homes. The stench, I am told, was epic.

I go out for a jog before supper, following the trails by the river, and then crossing a road onto a park playground and across the park. At the far side of the park is a fence, but not your ordinary chain link fence to keep soccer balls from rolling into the street. It's a barricade between the park and one of the burned out areas. I turn left and run along the fence, just looking for the exit, but except for where I came in, the park is almost surrounded by burned out areas. I look at the metal that is visible in the yards. There are some cars, they look ancient, aged a hundred years in a day. The post-nuclear LA scene from Terminator 2 that shows a highway full of burned out cars does not adequately represent the effect of heat. The glass and rubber is just gone, and what's left looks more like the ash casts at Vesuvius than metal chassis. In one yard two cars are stacked one on top of another and I try to envision how that came to be. There are the remains of metal garden sheds in some yards, and after seeing several examples I realize that another common theme is trampoline skeletons. The springs are gone, I guess scattered and buried in the other rubble or incinerated with the synthetic fabric of the bed of the trampoline and the tubes that once made the round or rectangular shapes are twisted too. In one yard is a living tree, it looks like a little fruit tree, and I feel badly that no one can get in through the fence to water it. It survived a fire but may die of summer.

One of the "island" homes, an intact house amid all the devastation has three coloured printed signs inside the front window, proclaiming DONE DONE DONE on blue, pink and yellow paper. I theorize at first that the resident did not want to live there anymore, but further down the street I see what is presumably the reverse side of the same coloured paper, noting NEEDS WATER, NEEDS POWER, NEEDS GAS. Locals probably were instructed to pick up these sheets and post them in their windows to alert the utilities people that the residents had returned and were requesting restoration of services. Another sign in the front yard of what must have been a duplex gives a name and phone number, saying, "I owned the other half. Please contact me so we can decide how to proceed." Even one lot of this rubble would be hard to clear. It's not surprising that so little progress has been made.

We go for dinner at Boston Pizza, me trying not to think too hard about what the kitchen must have looked like after the fire. I notice a help wanted sign, and have seen those all over town, so I ask the server. Of fifty-seven people employed at BP before the fire, only twenty-one returned to the town after the evacuation order was lifted. Restaurant servers are typically young people, free to move where the jobs are, and they took other jobs in other towns, or just saw no reason to return. BP was one of the first restaurants to reopen. It's a chain, so the franchise was probably quickly able to source and ship full replacements for everything unusable, and it was screaming busy because most returning residents couldn't use their own kitchens.

It's actually more surprising to see how mentally healthy everyone seems than it is to gawk at the destruction. I realized during my run that this is an ancient human experience. Humans built homes and humans used fire since before history was recorded, and humans have almost always returned to rebuild. I'm glad the stench was just restaurant and grocery store meat. No one was injured badly enough for it to be reported. There are a few lost dog signs on poles, "ran away during the evacuation" doesn't bode well for a little white dog, but you never know.

Advantage Cancelling

2011-09-02T00:00:00.006Z

I should report in on my new headset. It is a fine thing. It is comfortable. I even find myself looking forward to putting it on in the morning, reminding myself of a horse I encountered once that was so eager to get out of the paddock for a ride that it walked right up and dropped its head in the halter I was carrying¹. I can hear ATC clearly, and adjust the volume per ear, and there's a jack for me to connect my MP3 player. (It also accepts Bluetooth, but I don't own any Bluetooth devices to test it with). The MP3 jack is interesting because there's a three-position switch controlling how it behaves. Off doesn't allow you to hear the music at all. The middle position allows you to hear the MP3 player and ATC both at once. And the top position automatically mutes the music when there is any activity on the intercom (i.e. from another crewmember speaking or an transmission on an ATC frequency being monitored. I use the top position and it's remarkable effective.

I have some notes here that I didn't post earlier on the research I did before I realized that I would have to buy whatever headset was available. I could have ordered a headset directly from the LightSPEED website. They have international shipping, but they irritatingly only listed American units for the specifications. I wish Americans would learn that only they and the Liberians know what sixteen ounces is, and list things in grams. Also they're one of the sellers that require me to create an account in order to buy something. Hey, I want to click on the item and give you my credit card number. I could have traded in my old headset for a LightSPEED Zulu for $587 with trade-in and shipping, but the new Zulu isn't available through the trade-in plan yet.

I found this video while comparison shopping the Bose and LightSPPED. It's a little out of date, because it's the Bose A20 now, not the X and the new Zulu not the original Zulu, but it's a good discussion of the issues to consider when buying any headset.

Sennheiser lists international units on its website, but it doesn't sell headsets from the website and won't show me the location of a dealer. Their dealer-finder app maxes out at 300 nm, and finds zero that distance from where I was when I needed one. I would have loved to try one as they are known for good technology, but they don't seem to be in the 21st century. I think the headset is heavier, though, too. And then there's this, not so much about the headset as about the very attractive young lady who is wearing it.

I have to wonder about "Certified for commercial duty" though. Is there any country in which functional headsets have to be separately certified for pilots to use them while being paid? Throw one piece of balderdash like that into your marketing statement and I suspect that everything else you have to say is a deceiving distortion, too. Dumb sort of advertising to use on a very informed group. Or so we think.

Q: What do you get when you cross an ape with a pilot?
A: An ape with a big watch.

I was musing though, that my new headset isn't as good as my first ANR headset, even though the technology is better. Back then I was the only one in the company with ANR and I had superhuman abilities. Now everyone has them, so ANR is no longer an advantage over others. It's pretty much essential. I have a coworker who doesn't use ANR, just an old fashioned bulletproof set of David Clarks, and I wonder how he does it. I couldn't go back to a passive headset. I met someone recently whose first boss discouraged his employees from wearing headsets at all, because he said you can't hear the engine properly with it on. His employees weren't bold enough to tell him the reason he couldn't hear the engine, or much else for that matter, was that he had been flying for forty years without a headset.

Also, I wrote down this quotation from someone because it made me laugh, and have now completely forgotten the context: "It was so quiet it was like wearing a Bose noise cancelling headset, but without the noise cancellation, and without the headset.

1. Unfortunately for eager-horse, I was there to catch a different horse. A horse sufficiently less eager to be ridden that it bit me, if I recall correctly.

Meanwhile a reader in the USA writes:

I am wrapping up my dispatch training and am looking to talk to an active dispatcher. Do you know of anyone that might be able to answer a few questions for me?

If you can help, please drop me a line and I'll connect you two.

Morse Numbers

2011-09-01T00:00:00.031Z

Morse Code numbers are easy. You can tell when the signal you're hearing is a number, because they are all five segments long, and no letter has more than four segments. And unlike the letters, the numbers follow a perfectly logical pattern.

1 . _ _ _ _
2 . . _ _ _
3 . . . _ _
4 . . . . _
5 . . . . .
6 _ . . . .
7 _ _ . . .
8 _ _ _ . .
9 _ _ _ _ .
0 _ _ _ _ _

It's as if the five dashes are five blanks into which you enter the numbers: one dot for one and incrementing up to five dots for five, at which point the dots become the blanks and you start counting dashes. If you're expecting letters you start hearing a one and you think " E, no A, no W, no J, ah 1." With two it's "E, no I, no U, but by the fourth dash it's revealed to be 2. You also know on the fourth dash for 3, but all the others you have to wait until the end to know for sure.

I can't read Morse code as in to hear a message that is being broadcast to me. I use it only to verify. I want to verify the XT beacon, so I think, "X, that's _.._ and T is _" then I listen to make sure that's what I hear. It does leave me open to hearing what I expect, but that's not a situation that changes whether or not you have your eyes on the symbolic representation on the chart. I think it improves safety to be able to be watching my VOR needle while listening to the identifier for the next beacon.

That's all I have to say about that, but I know I have some readers far more knowledgeable on the subject than I, and I anticipate some informative comments from them.

Direct, But Not From Here

2011-08-30T00:00:00.000Z

I mentioned taking deserved flack on my PPC ride for not using the GPS (it had an expired database and thus was not approved for IFR operations) to improve my situational awareness. While approach procedures change, and airway radials get renumbered, it's very rare that an airport or navaid is actually moved and pilots are encouraged to use situational awareness tools that are available to them, whether $15,000 installations or reused pieces of cereal box. (You can make a hold entry cheat sheet that way, if you have the normal problems with holds and not the crazy, make up a new way to screw up a hold everytime ones that I devise. Hint: do not track inbound on your EFC). The GPS avaialble to me here is a Garmin 530W.

It is familiar. There's a large rectangular screen with buttons and knobs all around it. It's a navcom unit, meaning that you use it to talk on the radio as well as tell where you're going, but the radio transmission readibility is poor, so we only use it for monitoring frequencies. I suspect an antenna connection, just because that was the cause of a simiar problem in a C172 years ago, and the maintenance manager said they hadn't investigated that yet. On the left side are knobs to adjust com volume and squelch and nav radio volume, plus there are flip flops switches to exchange active and standby frequencies. That means you never adjust the frequency you are actually using, but select the new frequency on standby and then switch them. That way it doesn't sound like you're in scan mode on your car stereo.

The exact tuning procedure is easy, with one little trick. The bottom left knob tunes either comm or nav frequencies, and by default it's the commuications frequency. You push it to toggle between control of each and it will time out and go back to comm. It's a double knob, with MHz on the outside knob, and kHz, in 25 kHz steps on the inner one. I'm not someone who walks around with a perfect picture of the wavelengths and frequencies of all her devices in her head, so I'm grateful to a pilot who years ago must have forgotten the English word frequency, because while he was in the run up area he asked the ground controller to repeat it with "Vat is ze megahertz?" That simple call forever reminds me that com and VOR frequencies are in MHz and I can place the others in relation, thanks to having learned my metric prefixes in grade three.

The bottom row is buttons: CDI, OBS, MSG, FPL, VNAV and PROC, are also familiar from other modern Garmins like the GNS430, and the right side has a range rocker, the lovely Direct-to button (looks kind of like D> except that the line carries right through the letter and ends in a rightward-pointing arrow), and MENU, CLR and ENTER buttons. On the bottom left is a double knob that cycles between page groups on the outside and individual pages on the inside. Yes, this is pretty much like the GNS430. Not that that means I'm awesome with it. I have a resistance to being really good with GPS units because I fear the loss of the navigation skills I developed before they were so ubiquitous. But really I am already losing those skills, but using GPS badly. In fact, if I learn to use this so well that it needs only the least amount of my attention, and I know its limitations well, that leaves more attention over to do real navigation.

A quick example of something I've already learned and used is how to use the direct to funtion to select a track not direct from my present position, but along a particular track to a facility. It's so obvious, once you know how: select the fix you want, hit the direct-to key, and then on the screen that comes up verifying the fix you asked for, cursor through the fields to the one that shows the direct track and change it to the desired track. Hit enter twice and there is the radial/track displayed on the moving map. This can be used to intercept final approach, a VOR radial or a track to an NDB. It's great when doing the last in wind, because it provides great confirmation that I am really on track, and improves my ability to intercept a track that is a moving and very unsteady target in a turn. (Banking affects the direction an ADF needle points, so you can never be sure you're on track until you're wings level again, making it hard to know if you have to increase or decrease bank to have the turn work out).

Special Thunderstorms

2011-08-29T00:00:00.065Z

A probably not so recent anymore AIM update identified two changes in the publication for which I wanted to look up the details.

The following airports have been identified for SPECI criteria for significant temperature changes between hourly reports: about half of Canadian airports

It then lists almost half of Canadian airports, the biggest ones. Normally an aerodrome observation, called a METAR is published once an hour, but if one of a number of specific significant changes occur, like precipitation starts or ends, or the ceiling or visibility changes past a specific limitation, they issue a special update observation called a SPECI. It's pretty clear from the descriptions that they are aimed at given a pilot the best chance of making the right decision about whether or not she can land there with her equipment and training.

It doesn't say why they have added temperature to the criteria. Temperature in and of itself doesn't offer the same impediment to landing as fog, hail, or thunderstorms, but a sudden change in temperature indicates the passage of a front, which could mean an abrupt change in weather, or sometimes freezing rain.

The second change is to Met 3.13 and I was curious when I looked at it what they had changed.

(a) active thunderstorms–the cumulonimbus (CB) symbol is used when thunderstorms occur, or are forecast to occur, over a widespread area, along a line, embedded in other cloud layers, or when concealed by a hazard. The amounts and the spatial coverage (in brackets) are indicated as:

ISOLD (isolated) – for individual CBs (less than 25%)
OCNL (occasional) – for wellseparated CBs (25 – 50% inclusive)
NMRS (numerous) – for CBs with little or no separation (greater than 50%)

It looked the same as I remembered. As an instructor I used to teach students to match ISOLD to FEW (1-2 octas), OCNL to SCT (3-4 octas) and NMRS to BKN (>4 octas), where an octa, or maybe it's an okta--damn you really forget this stuff when you're not lecturing someone on it every day--is a one-eighth proportion of the sky. I houled out an older paper copy of the AIM and looked up what it used to be, and the old version omits the bits that are in parentheses in the lines quoted above. I wonder how I knew it, then. I guess it was in the old, old version, the AIP and somehow didn't get added to the new AIM until recently.

That's exactly how lore is created, but someone added it back in, so now it's information again. I love lore. Especially when it's incorrect but it can be traced back to a loopily logical origin.

Connecting the Dots

2011-08-28T00:00:00.031Z

Some people want to hear more about my flights and less about the hotels or the keys or the fuellers or the taxicabs, but my flights are a long sequence of lines with dots on them. Have you ever sat down to play a simple videogame, not a fancy one with a plot and cut sequences and realistic graphics, but the sort you get for your phone that mostly just have dots or blobs you have to shoot or catch, like Bejeweled Blitz or Pac-Man or Space Invaders or Stack the Cats and then looked up four hours later with sore fingers and almost no perception of the time passing? That's whatit's like flying photo survey, except that instead of being filled with guilty self-loathing over having wasted so much time, you have a great feeling of accomplishment of having taken seven hundred twenty three photographs without missing a dot.

Sometimes the lines are parallel with the endpoints lined up, so I can just turn around, and attack the next line, but sometimes the next line is longer or shorter or we skip one, so I need to be directed to the next one before it comes on screen. The scale jumps to zoom in as I approach the lines until it switches to what I call the "jumpscreen." (Yah, because it jumps. My creativity wanes when I'm totally focused on dots.) It depicts the track I have to cruise right down the middle of. The main dots appear on the screen green, then turn yellow and blue and sometimes red. Red is bad, and I should tell the operator if I see a red dot, but he has the same screen and has usually seen it before me, in that he isn't flying an airplane at the same time.

So there are two sorts of dots, the sometimes red one that I have to chase to make it stay in the middle and greem, and the ones on the line that I have to gobble up like Pac-Man. It makes me crave Skittles and Smarties (the Canadian kind: the American kind, which we call Rockets, aren't brightly enough coloured, enough).

I can do engine management, look up new frequencies, and all the other things you do while flying in the few seconds between dots, or in turns. And I listen to my MP3 player through the headset, on a setting that mutes the tunes as soon as there is any activity on the intercom or radio. This also has the effect of shutting the music off right away if I start to sing along, a blessing for the camera operator.

Morse Code, Part II

2011-08-27T00:00:00.121Z

This is continued from a previous post on how I remember the signals for various letters in Morse code. So far we've done V B U D E T A N S H I and O. Here's the rest of the alphabet.

More Dashes

From the previous post on the topic, one dash is T, like the top of a capital T. Follow on from this to remember that two dashes is M, like serifs on the tops of an M. Okay no one draws an M that way, but you can imagine it. I have three more letters that I think of as dash-based, even though they aren't entirely made of dashes.

There's W which is a dot and two dashes: . _ _

You could think of that as E followed by M and concoct a story about the M saying "eee" because it was upside-down, turning it into a W, but I just hear it as "da WHIS KEY" like in the song, "Coulda been the whiskey, coulda been the gin ..."

Opposite to W is G: two dashes then a dot. If your name begins with G you can think of it as ME, but for non G-named folk it's "GO GO g!" Hey, I didn't say these were going to be really good ways to remember the letters.

My last dashy letter is J, a dot followed by three dashes (. _ _ _ ). It's the only letter that has three dashes and something else besides, and its the longest Morse letter. It was in the identifier of an airport that took a long time to get to while I was training. If the letter goes on for a long time and you can't remember what it is, maybe it's a J. Or maybe it's a number. I'll have to do those later.

Palindromes are Branchy

The letters with Morse the same backwards as forwards are the branchy letters. I continue to have weird ways of equating the dashes and dots with the shapes of the letters. K is a dash, a dot and a dash _._ and I just discovered that I can't put it in parentheses or it looks like an ASCII butt. That in itself is possibly more memorable than anything I can say next, but before I knew that, I thought of the dot as the upright of the K and the two dashes as the "branches" going off in different directions. X is like K but more so, with its branches going off in all directions, so it gets two dots in the middle. Imagine it an X-wing fighter _.._ if you like.

X and K ones have the dashes on the outside, but the curvy letters P and R have the dots on the outside. There's R ._. and then P ._ _. which is annoying, because the P ought to have one less dash than the R, to represent the fact that it is exactly like an R, except missing the little downwards branch. I've always had trouble with P.

Rhythm

Obviously you have to learn all the letters by rhythm eventually if you want to be any good at this, but some of them I know only by rhythm, because they say their own names, or something I can easily associate with them.

C _._. CHARlie CHARlie
F .._. Happy BirFday (you have to say it with a lisp)
Q _ _ . _ God save da Queen (I don't know if that works for non-commonwealth people)
Y _ . _ _ becomes instantly familiar to Canadian students, as it begins the identifier on almost every nav aid colocated with an airport, so you can't not recognize it. The few that don't begin with Z, and there's even a RUSH song commemorating YYZ, the main airport serving the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area, that has the rhythm of YYZ in Morse, giving you also
Z _ _ ..

That leaves only L. I can never remember L. If I don't know what it is, it's L. . _ .. I try to say it as "a LOLlipop" but that's not working for me.

Later I'll do numbers. At first I thought, "ah, I don't need numbers and they look hard" but some nav aids do have numbers in their identifiers, and they are actually super easy.

Morse Code, Part I

2011-08-26T00:00:00.000Z

One of Amelia Earhart's weaknesses was that she did not know Morse Code, and it seems that information wasn't communicated to the ships that were providing weather and guidance for her during her final flight. I don't know Morse Code well enough to send and receive sentences, and I discovered that I can't read visual flashes at all, but I can understand all the numbers and letters at the slow speed broadcast by nav aid identifiers.

I was triggered to learn by a ground school instructor who related what he thought was an amazing story about a student who didn't have to look at the dots and dashes provided on the charts while he was identifying the nav aid, because the student had "memorized Morse Code." I knew that memorizing Morse Code was not an amazing feat, and it sounded like a way I could get an advantage in the air. I knew already that if you can spend thirty minutes on the ground to save one minute in the air, you should do it. And you can probably learn Morse Code well enough to understand nav aid identifiers in about thirty minutes. It is not that hard. This post and the next couple are my hints for achieving that skill.

First thing is, and this doesn't count in your thirty minutes, because you'd have to learn it regardless and you probably know it already, is the idea of "dots and dashes." Morse code is produced by pulsing a signal. It doesn't have to be a wire or radio transmission or use a special device. It works with any signal. It could be light, sound, touch, arranged objects. The only requirement is that it is possible to differentiate two sorts of signal. The way to do that is usually long versus short, which is why this suggestion wouldn't work, even if the guns had been operational. Although it's a space ship, so maybe they could have pulsable laser guns.

Each letter in Morse code is between one and four pulses long, in some combination of short and/or long pulses. In transcribing a message, the short pulses are written as dots and the long ones as dashes. The short pulses are also called dits and the long ones dahs. If, like me, you learn by memorizing what things look like, you can picture each letter as its corresponding sequence of dots and dashes. They're just some associations that I use when I forget which letter is which. My suggestions here are not predicated on visual learning, though. There are also a stunning number of mnemonics on Wikipedia's page on the subject.

Morse Code You Probably Know Already: O S V

It's classic rock, but if you've heard The Police "Message in a Bottle" just once, you've heard about sending out an SOS about thirty times, so you should know what that is. The official Morse code distress call is an S, O, and S sent out with no spaces between. That's three short, three long, and three short signals. The triangle is the official shape of distress, and three is its number. All you have to do is remember that S is the three dots (...) and O the three dashes (---). O is fatter, while S is skinny, so S can is the fast three and O the slow ones.

The other letter you already know is V (...-), instantly recognizable in the "da da da dum!" of Beethoven's fifth symphony. The symphony has even been used as a code signifying victory, for that reason. You can learn three more letters in relation to V.

Letters Related to V: U B D

This is just me, so maybe this doesn't work for you, but here goes. You already know V (...-). The written letter U is just like V except without the point. The Morse U (..-) is just like V with one fewer point, too. In Spanish B and V are extremely similar sounds, so I have no problem remembering that B (-...) is V reversed. And a capital D is shaped like a capital B except with one fewer thingy. Thus we get D (-..), one fewer thingy.

The Commonest Letters: E T A

If you've ever played with word games or cryptography, you know that the most common letters in English are E, T and A, in that order. Samuel Morse must have known it too, because he made them the simplest codes. E (.) is a single dot, the commonest letter and the fastest to send. A lower case e is a bit like a single dot, too. If the font is small enough: e e e . Meanwhile, T (-) is a single dash. Like the one on top of a capital T. If you put E and T together you have A (.-). But that's not how I remember A.

The A-N Beacon: A N

One of my favourite pieces of navigation history is the four course radio range, or the A-N beacon. Its operation is dependent on the fact that A (.-) and N (-.) have opposite signals. And that's how I like to remember A and N.

Hi Dots: H I

We know one dot is E and three dots is S, which leaves two dots for I (..) -- eyes are after all two dots in the front of your face -- and four dots for H (....). I think Morse code enthusiasts probably have a special Q-code for greeting one another, but if they wanted to say "hi" it would be an easy six dots.

That's enough for today. The next part of this post isn't finished yet, so there might be a few posts in between.

B737 Down In Resolute Bay

2011-08-25T00:00:00.104Z

On August 20th a Boeing 737-200 operated by First Air made a radio call "eight kilometres from the airport" the Resolute Bay airport, then crashed ten minutes later. I don't know the content of the radio call but as they don't say it was a distress call, I assume it was a routine call to airport radio. Eight kilometres is five miles, the DME of the final approach fix for the GNSS or LOC/DME approach. The plates at the link are outdated and I don't have a northern region CAP with me to check the current procedures, but there is no reason to assume they have changed.

A reporter's retelling of an eyewitness report describes the airplane coming into view not aligned with the runway and then starting a missed approach. Generally eyewitness accounts aren't worth much because humans aren't actually very good at seeing unexpected events, or at remembering what they saw, but in a community like that, the airplanes are life and everyone would be familiar with what the airplane looks and sounds like coming into land, so the report of a deviation from normal may be accurate. Here's another account, from one of the three survivors, Gabrielle Pelky, a seven year old girl, confirming that everything seemed normal. The Vancouver Sun story says Gabrielle literally walked away from the crash, but an Edmonton story says she had a broken leg, so there's either some inaccuracy here or one damned tough little girl. It's hard to imagine

An odd part of the story is that the emergency response was the best it could possibly have been, because the accident happened during a joint exercise of the military and emergency services, aimed at improving emergency response in remote communities such as Resolute Bay, response to disasters such as a cruise ship sinking or air crash. I wonder if there was a moment of confusion when a real emergency cropped up. Southern readers may find it odd that there were only fifteen people aboard a B737, but the First Air aircraft would have been configured as a combi, with cargo not only below deck as on most passenger airlines, but filling most of what would otherwise be the passenger cabin, with a bulkhead delineating the seating section.

Chances are every single resident of Resolute Bay directly knew or was related to someone on that airplane, and that almost everyone in Nunavut and the NWT knows someone who knew someone. Twelve people out of the entire Nunavut population of 33,000 is, percentage-wise equivalent to 2900 out of eight million residents of New York. Uh, that number is uncomfortably close to matching that of a disaster New York has experienced. I was going to switch to another state, but I think I'll let it stand. To the population of Nunavut, this is a major tragedy. I'm sure it's a horrible thing for First Air, too. It's a community unto itself, as large as many of the destinations it serves. My heart goes out to everyone touched by the loss.

There may have been an e-mail correspondent who was going to send something for this blog on the airplane, and the complete passenger list hasn't yet been released. I'll let you know in the next couple of weeks either by posting information on his research or telling you what it was going to be about.

Update: Here's a good newsreel from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and here's a passenger list with descriptions of the people. The researcher who died was not my arctic researcher. There's an eerie number of first-time air travellers,nervous flyers and and air crash survivors among the passengers. Remember the old joke about the passengers' belief in physics being required to sustain flight?

2nd Update: Reader Sarah linked this excellent article, showing me wrong in several respects, demonstrating the futility of speculating on these things. Commenters on the linked article continue to speculate nevertheless.

Wind, Fuel and Tie-Downs

2011-08-24T00:00:00.126Z

Before breakfast in the hotel, I get the desk clerk to fax my photo flight plan to the IFR data people and my OFP to company, then grab breakfast. They have oatmeal, my favourite breakfast food, but they only have the maple flavour. Basically, they've taken perfectly good oatmeal and put it in a paper bag with way too much salt and sugar. I can't remember whether I ate it or turned straight to the muffins, but I did try to get a muffin out of a plexiglass case. You can't really see or reach the muffins without opening the drawer, but when I pull it out it somehow locks at a negative angle and muffins start ricocheting all over the room. Someone comes to my rescue and we figure out how to disarm the muffin booby trap. Girl can operate a complex airplane but she's helpless against breakfast.

Despite it all I'm right on the dot for my filed take-off time. Airborne, I tune departure and before I can contact them, the first thing I hear on frequency is, "Are you really an F-18? That's a pretty good rate of climb."

"Yeah, we're light today. It's pretty fun," replies the pilot. 'Cause you know, ordinarily it's so boring flying an F-18.

We check in with the cheerful controller and are cleared higher. We get a rate of climb nothing like that of an empty F-18, but still fine for us and we're soon in the flight levels flying back and forth in straight lines. And dammit, I need to pee already. There's a sound from the back like a clipboard being dropped. I ask the operator if he dropped his clipboard. No, he didn't. It's that stupid heater malfunctioning again. I turn it off. So now I need to pee and I'm going to be cold in a few minutes.

I put on my gloves and coat, zip it up to my chin and continue working. I can pee in a bag if I get too desperate, but they say if you're in a cold survival situation you should hold it because it's warm. The idea is that you're losing heat if you evacuate it. I'm not quite sure I follow that idea, but I follow the straight lines, dot after dot. We use up those photo blocks and ask for more, which the cheerful controller gives us.

With an hour of fuel remaining, I start descent. I planned for thirty minutes to get down and land and I take an odd pride in the fact that landing too is right on the filed minute. We taxi to the pumps and I run and pee while waiting for the fueller. The operator makes a routine check of the camera and discovers that there is fuel on the lens. The air at altitude doesn't have enough oxygen to burn fuel at the rate the regulator supplies it to the heater, and despite the fact that this airplane is certified to almost ten thousand feet higher than we were flying, it has not been equipped with any means of controlling the mixture. You'd think there would be an automatic pressure-controlled leaning operation, but there isn't. So our theory is that the unburned fuel gets barfed overboard through the exhaust, and some of it has ended up on the camera lens. Some of it ignites in the exhaust, causing the clipboard-dropping sound, and the soot around the exhaust that I have to clean off again. But we just had both the heater fuel regulator and the entire heater replaced, so it shouldn't be doing this. Airplanes never know what they aren't supposed to do.

Or maybe that theory is bogus and the heater is working okay, but there's some fuel leak somewhere else. I do the math on the fuel burn, as I've recorded how much went into each tank during refuelling. The fuel burn is right on the money for my planning, and the difference between tanks is negligible. We talk to our AMO ("Approved Maintenance Organization" i.e. home base aircraft maintainers) and they have us check for leaks while running the fuel pumps, switching tanks, and everything else they can think of. We decide to delay departure to make sure there isn't another source of fuel leaking that could wreck our data. We open some inspection ports and eventually conclude that the fuel must have come out of the heater, and we're okay to fly again.

As we're parking the airplane at the end of the day, a November-registered Cessna 180 arrives. It's windy, and of course the wind has a greater effect on the little airplane, but the pilot taxies carefully and shuts down nearby. They've come up to Canada for hunting, fishing and visiting family here. The pilot comments on the absence of tie-downs here, and at most Canadian airports. It's true, in comparison, there are hardly any tiedown spaces for transient aircraft in Canada. It's routine in the states that there are metal cables running across the parking area, and often chains with hooks attached, making it easy for you to secure your airplane. I remember now an American friend who asserted that all airports provided tie-down chains. His experience was limited, but it certainly is common. In Canada there aren't usually even tiedown rings in the pavement outside the paid long-term area. Canadians travelling with a small airplane need to bring ropes and stakes, park on the grass and drive the stakes into the turf to secure their airplanes. Everywhere is different, but what has driven this difference? It's not about snowploughs, as the travelling couple is from Montana and they have just as much snow as here.

The Forecast That Cried "Thunderstorm"

2011-08-22T00:00:00.091Z

I'm at an airport in the afternoon and the goal is to be at another airport early tomorrow morning. Ideally we should have left several hours ago, before the summer afternoon thunderstorms developed in the mountains, but the goal didn't exist then. Or at least I hadn't been apprised of it. This airplane does not have the service ceiling to fly over these thunderstorms; flying under them in the mountains is not a winning proposition; flying through a thunderstorm would probably mean icing and turbulence beyond the limits of the aircraft, so I'm plotting a route around them. Or at least up to them, so that tomorrow we won't have to go as far.

We could leave super early to go tomorrow instead. I do the math as to when we should get up to be where we need to be when we need to be at seven am. It's something like half hour to get ready, plus half hour to the airport plus half hour preflight, plus fifteen minutes for engine start, runup and taxi, plus three hours en route, plus an hour to land, pee, refuel, taxi and take off again, plus half an hour for generally screwing up somewhere in there. That adds up to leaving at 12:45 a.m., or just enough time for me to reset my duty day. But neither of us really wants to do that, so I look again at the going around the weather option. I chat to a flight services specialist to get his interpretation of the latest radar imagery. Together we select a route that should keep me free of the storms without too much inefficiency, and I file it.

Depart, call the departure frequency, fly a heading, maintain an altitude, fly direct a fix and cleared own navigation as filed. I'm through the lower level stratus with a good view and there are no TCUs en route as far as I can see. A centre controller calls me and offers me direct destination, but I decline, citing weather concerns. The next controller says, "You're not negative RNAV today are you?" Now I'm not exactly going to the most popular airport in the country, but surely someone else is getting diversions for this weather. I call up flight services, give them a position report and ask for an update on the area of thunderstorms. The specialist says they are still a threat and describes the locations of the largest-painting cells. What the hey? We're past the biggest one, and I passed that little thing without a second glance. I ask centre for the vector direct they have been trying to give me for an hour, and then we never see anything we have to avoid the whole way.

Darn you, weather forecast. If there's nothing dangerous going on, don't make me look stupid and waste time and fuel going all the way around when i could go straight. I go straight from here on in, skip over the proposed intermediate airport and land at airport B for the night. We're in position for the morning's mission and we have enough time for dinner and a good night's sleep, despite incredibly slow restaurant service.

Whacked

2011-08-20T00:00:00.026Z

Do WAC charts exist in your country? WAC stands for ~~Wide Area Chart~~ World Aeronautical Chart, but clearly I can't remember that, therefore I just call them "WAC charts." WAC Chart is one of those redundancies that can be used to annoy the same people who cringe when you enter your PIN number into the ATM machine. A WAC is a 1:1,000,000 scale visual navigation chart, and that is a really good scale for long trips in a medium-sized airplane. WACs have not been revised in ages, and have become increasingly difficult to buy in Canada. They are still occasionally available, but haven't been printed for years, so as they go out of print, they're gone. Then, in a recent AIM update, it was announced that "the term “WAC” was removed" from GEN 5.2, the section of the Airman's Information Manual where it appeared. I always think this kind of revision is kind of 1984. The WAC has been erased from existence. Some people would argue that with modern GPS technology the need for WACs was literally a relic of 1984, but my GPS screen can't be unfolded to cover a hotel bed, damnit. They're a really good planning size.

Also, for my current job, they are the only aviation chart that identifies photo blocks right on the chart.

Pipeline Around the World

2011-08-18T00:00:00.015Z

We're flying a pipeline today. The pipeline has already been built, so presumably the owners know where it is, but they want pictures of it, and we get paid to take pictures, so we fuel up and go. The flight is a little unusual in that we're training a new camera operator, so there are three people on board. But the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

Linguistic aside I wrote the previous sentence and then tabbed over to my notes file to see what in particular I had to say about the pipeline flight. By pure coincidence, while I scrolled past the random thoughts at the beginning of the file, looking for the flight-by-flight notes, my eyes found something I wrote months ago about the expression I had just used. The grammar of the more the merrier isn't explainable through modern English grammar. The adverbial use of the is a relic of Old English þy, which was originally the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative þæt. So it literally meant something like "in what degree more, in that degree merrier." I think it's cool that I randomly use expressions of such ancient lineage and my language happily accommodates them. The people who have little fits about "hopefully" or "could care less" really don't have a leg to stand on. English has forever been about what people say, not what makes any kind of logical sense.

But merrily and numerously we taxi out for takeoff and persuade the controller to give us a departure clearance. There's a double delay and I wonder if I've managed to file the flight along some airway that is not authorized for use on Tuesdays, but the controllers are just puzzling out where to fling a CVFR flight. The first controller seemed to understand that I was CVFR, but there was a controller handoff between my calling for clearance them receiving it from centre and the new controller gave me an IFR departure. I don't really care. IFR or VFR I'm going to take off, switch to the next frequency, and follow their vectors and altitude restrictions until I'm in my photo blocks, so I accept the departure and follow it after I'm given a take-off clearance. The next controller gives me a vector that is close enough to direct my entry point that it doesn't matter, and I'm cheerfully following it when he calls back.

"Are you IFR or controlled VFR?" he asks.

"I'm on a controlled VFR flight plan."

"Have you been IFR at any point today?"

"I accepted a published IFR departure."

I think he asked me if I considered myself IFR right now. I tried to give him a professional and aviation-speak version of, "Seeing as I'm pointed in the direction I want to go, climbing towards the altitude I want, I really don't care." If we didn't have the op spec for extended single-pilot IFR duty days it might matter, but as it is it makes literally no difference to me. The only functional difference between VFR and IFR in cruise on a nice day is whether I have to read back clearances or not. And in busy airspace where most traffic is IFR, I often read back VFR clearances to fit in with the crowd. Technically under IFR the controller not me is responsible for my terrain and traffic, but it's not like I'm really abdicating those responsibilities, especially as I can see the terrain.

It shouldn't make that much difference to the controller, either. Under CVFR he's responsible for separating me from other traffic. That's the whole purpose of CVFR: to allow VFR traffic in airspace where IFR separation is required. But I don't mind. I wish I knew the words to make this controller happy. He tells me I'm CVFR and I'm happy with that. He hnds me off to another frequency.

The pipeline goes into the foothills, so that's where we're working. Usually I get a clearance for such and such photo blocks, for such an such a block altitude and then I just work, without a peep out of the controllers. But this lady won't give me a block altitude. I have to ask for every altitude change and heading change, and as often as not it's denied. There's traffic at that altitude, I can't have it. We end up skipping some lines for cloud and other lines because we just can't get by the controller. The thing about filing photo blocks is that theoretically they are supposed to give you the whole block, yours, exclusively. It never really works that way, and I wouldn't really want it to, but this controller doesn't get what is going on.

If I want to fly direct Calgary at 11,000' and there's traffic preventing me from doing so, I can continue towards Calgary at 9000' until the traffic is by me, then accept the climb to 11,000' and I have been inconvenienced only a tiny bit. If my direct Calgary course is 150 degrees and I'm restricted to south for five minutes, I've still been making progress towards Calgary and not a lot of time has been wasted in the five minutes before the controller says, "cleared direct Calgary." But if I want to fly along a line that starts exactly here and goes to exactly there on a track of 150.27 degrees (yes, my heading is displayed in front of me to two decimal places. I remember thinking +/-5 degrees on the commercial flight test was rigourous) at 11,000', it is completely useless to me to be cleared along it at 9000'. And if I need to turn NOW to get onto the line, a five minute heading restriction is worse than useless, because it will have carried me five minutes away from the start of the line and I have to turn around and go back.

In order to improve efficiency I start calling her a few dots before the end of a line, multitasking with my radio call and my dot tracking to try and get the next turn or next altitude approved before I hit the last dot and am ready to turn. It's a little overloading, as I'm focusing almost all my attention on those little dots and don't have a lot of attention over for the designations of photo blocks. The conversation is supposed to go like this:

Me: "In one mile Dotsmasher One requests left turn to zero eight five at one four thousand seven hundred."

Her: "Dotsmasher One cleared left turn zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred."

Me: "Left zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred, Dotsmasher One."

Her: "Readback correct."

Yeah, what is usually me flying around doing what I need to has turned into a four line conversation. And what is really going on includes both operators telling me what I need next and me reading back what they have said if it isn't clear or I think I have forgotten. So sometimes when I ask the controller for an altitude and she approves it I just say "Dotsmasher One." She corrects me snippily when I miss or muss a readback and the second time I apologize with, "Sorry, I'm just not feeling as though I'm IFR today." I'm turning and swooping and visually negotiating hills. There's a pause as she talks to other traffic then she calls me back just to deride me for that comment. "It doesn't matter," she says, "whether you are VFR or IFR you must always read back assigned altitudes and headings." I just bite my tongue on that one. It's a nice sunny day and she's stuck in a box with a screen while I get to fly in the mountains. I do my best to read everything back and am glad when our progress is sufficient that I am passed on to the next controller.

I give him a request based on the town I know we are working our way towards, then I realize I'm overhead it. Despite the cranky clearances we've been making good progress. The new controller finally gives us a block of airspace and leaves us alone. We keep flying along the pipeline, watching the scenery go by. There are some clouds on the horizon, but we hope we can complete the job before they cast shadows on our work. The senior operator says he wants someone to build a pipeline around the world so we can fly it, segment by segment, all the way around the world. I'd like to do that too, but I tell him he'd have to give me a bit more notice of where he wanted to land so I could arrange customs clearance. We're almost finished when clouds arrive and we're done for the day. We spiral down out of the sky towards the nearest airport for fuel.

The FSS there has a single in the circuit but no other traffic, and I let him know how many minutes I'll be in descent before arriving. I descend over a nearby navaid, then head for the airport when I can arrive at circuit altitude at a reasonable speed and descent rate. He points me out as arriving traffic, calling me a Piper Cherokee. I'm not usually too picky about what controllers call me, as long as they call me cleared to land, but I correct that one. If you're looking for a single and a twin turns up on final you may think you have a conflict.

Airports mostly look the same once you're on the ground, even if they are quite large, because you can't really see that far. We taxi to the self-serve fuel pumps and I shut down and fill out the logbook for the flight. The operator discovers that he has forgotten the company credit card, and his personal credit card doesn't work. Can I possibly ...?

I have an insane credit limit from all those years of ferrying airplanes around North America, so I toss them my credit card as I head to the terminal to find a washroom. I open the door to the terminal and see that there are airline counters and uniformed security inside. I have my pilot licence with me, but I need to make sure I can get back out again. I wave down one of the security guys and make sure he'll let me out. He tells me the code to get back out the door, and says it's written on the outside. Oops, didn't see it. I use the washroom, pick up the payphone to file an ordinary VFR flight plan home, and go back out the door. The code is written on the outside in teeny, tiny letters I didn't see. The senior operator is coming in as I go out. I tell him the code and he says, "I know." He's been here before.

It's funny these little airports. They're all the same to me. There's nothing in the CFS to indicate which ones have which level of security. It's not a function of runway length or altitude or type of air traffic service or of any other published datum. You land and look for somwhere to dump the contents of your bladder, and at some that means watering the grass at the edge of the taxiway while at others it means running the gauntlet of CATSA and throngs of passengers at the x-ray machines. It's disorienting, and without local knowledge you have to be on your toes to walk in the correct door, know the correct codes, have the correct documents and get back to your airplane.

In the meantime a small airliner has landed, but it doesn't need the fuel pumps. We all get back in the airplane and take off before the airliner needs out. We fly home. It takes a quarter the time to get back as it did to get here, because we're not circling around to get on the right lines, and we're talking only to traffic on 126.7 until it's time to talk to the airport controllers.

I land and taxi in, and the boss is waiting with a cheque for the exact amount of the fuel. The operator called ahead with the amount. Fastest expense reimbursement ever.

The Invasion Has Begun

2011-08-17T00:00:00.008Z

As I arrived at the airport in the morning, I saw this airplane. I could barely bring myself to ask the fueller about it, for fear that it would turn out to belong to some northern resource company with a stylized flame logo. But no, it's what I thought it was. What did I think it was, and who knows the story behind it?

You may name the aerodrome, too, if you're feeling sharp and sleuthy.

Alerting Services

2011-08-16T00:00:00.015Z

Flight plans serve multiple purposes. One of the purposes is to allow ATC to anticipate my arrival in their airspace, making it easier for them to provide traffic separation and other services. In Canada, except for VFR arrivals at a busy airport, that function is pretty much exclusively for IFR flights. For both IFR and VFR flights, flight plans make it clear where search and rescue should start looking for me if I don't show up at destination. Those two functions are filed together in one flight plan but can be perceived to be separate when an IFR flight plan is cancelled. Cancelling IFR to continue a flight VFR doesn't turn your flight plan into a VFR plan, as you might expect. Instead you have cancelled your flight plan, leaving only alerting services remaining. The difference between a VFR flight plan and alerting services, I discovered, is that you can't amend alerting services to reflect a revised destination. If you need the flexibility of a VFR flight plan following IFR work, you have to file a Y flight plan that actually has separate filed IFR and VFR portions.

The other way to get alerting services without activating a flight plan is to take off without a clearance. Unless From the AIM:

7.10 Alerting Service IFR Departures from Uncontrolled Airports

At locations where communication with ATS is difficult, pilots may elect to depart VFR and obtain their IFR clearance once airborne. In Canada, if IFR clearance is not received prior to departure, SAR alerting service is activated based on the ETD filed in the flight plan. However, if departing from a Canadian airport that underlies airspace delegated to FAA control, then responsibility for SAR alerting service is transferred to the FAA and FAA procedures apply. In such cases, alerting service is not activated until the aircraft contacts ATS for IFR clearance. Therefore, if the aircraft departs before obtaining its IFR clearance, alerting service is not provided until contact is established with ATS.

Once upon a time a Canadian flight plan, and thus alerting service, was not opened until the pilot opened it, but to close the window of vulnerability from a departure accident, flight services will now "assume you off" at the filed departure time. If your departure was significantly late or early, you can call in and amend their recorded departure time. That's important because the time they judge you overdue is based on adding your estimated time en route to your departure time.

ForeFlight versus Nav Canada

2011-08-15T00:00:00.137Z

A company called ForeFlight has released data for their iPad app that covers IFR procedures in Canada. It includes all volumes of the Canada Air Pilot (approach and departures plates, plus taxiway diagrams) and the IFR high and low enroute charts, and is legal for inflight IFR use. It's not clear whether the database includes the terminal charts, but it kind of has to because the information density around the big cities isn't sufficient in the regular LO charts. It doesn't seem to include the CFS data, but I can't think of information you need for safe IFR navigation that is in the CFS but not the CAP. We'll also have to wait for VFR chart data. Nav Canada is not forthcoming with its data.

There is Transport Canada guidance document and an FAA equivalent governing Electronic Flight Bags, as these systems are called. Page ten of the US version explains how the paper documents can be completely phased out once the system is verified reliable in a given operation, and wording in the Canadian version implies that it allows for completely paperless applications as well.

This isn't something astonishingly new, and I'm sure lots of you are already using such products. What caught my attention today was the price. As far as I can tell, you download the core of the app for free and then pay to add a subscription to the data you need. A ForeFlight Canada subscription costs US $149.99 for a year. For comparison, a subscription to all the editions of the CAP and the high and low charts costs $441 a year, plus taxes. If you only fly in only two regions of Canada, an annual mailed subscription of paper charts will cost you $142, so if you already have an iPad, that's the same cost for paper or electronic. The iPad is probably also about the same weight and the same difficulty to stuff in your flight bag as one LO and one region of the CAP.

Advantages of paper documents over the iPad are that they are unattractive to thieves, still work after they have been dropped or slammed in the trunk door of a cab, will probably dry out to a usable state if you get drenched by rain, are better for starting a fire in an emergency situation, you can write clearances on them, you can unfold them all over the hotel bed to have a wide-screen view of your proposed trip, and the batteries cannot run out. Also they make good auxiliary sunvisors, if you don't have a newspaper.

The iPad wins on staying the same size even if you are flying in all seven regions of Canada, being self-illuminated, allowing scrolling without having to flip the map over, letting you zoom the scale in or out and it probably has a search function. I don't know if you can mark it up with virtual post-its, but you can play Plants versus Zombies on it and check your e-mail while waiting for maintenance to release the aircraft.

What's it like flying with one of these? Does it have a function to do your cold weather corrections automatically or is there a way to mark up a plate after you get the latest METAR, to show all the cold weather corrections and the time to go on a non-precision approach? An iPad seems kind of bulky to mount on the yoke. Where do you put it? How far did you get on Plants versus Zombies?

Nerdy Flight Planning Answer

2011-08-14T00:00:00.027Z

I asked a few days ago how you would file a long IFR climb segment at a speed well below the normal filed true airspeed for the aircraft. I asked on the blog, and I also asked in real life, asked an IFR data centre employee who codes flight plans. I called the same number I call to file a photo plan and asked.

"I have an incredibly nerdy flight planning question ..."

She said that yes, they know that a light airplane won't be climbing at 170 knots and, and if it's 5 or 10 minutes in climb, don't bother filing anything special. But for a thirty minute climb, yes, code it as N120F210, for the 120 kt climb to flight level 210. I like coding IFR flights. I've always liked languages and codes and getting the grammar and spelling right. Such a nerd.

And while I'm being nerdy, I'll let you know I spent a good day's pay on a new camera, a Canon PowerShot SD1400 IS Digital ELPH, which is the same as an IXUS 130. It is smaller than almost anyhting else I looked at, has all the features I need and was on sale. It has almost four times the resolution of the old camera. I also considered a shockproof, waterproof Sony, but it cost almost twice as much, and if I'm in an aviation situation involving shock and water, I probably have better things to do than take pictures. I'm not a camera power user and probably could have spent less on a simpler camera and not missed anything, but while I'm just pointing it at things and pressing the button, I can pretend I'm going to use the zoom someday, or put it in different modes.

Free the FAA

2011-08-13T00:00:00.034Z

This article, Free the FAA, came across my desk today and I felt compelled to tell its author, through talking to my monitor, that almost everything related to air travel is a matter of air safety. Unionization gives workers the power to say no to unsafe working conditions or to refuse to sign off inadequately repaired aircraft, because the union can protect them from retribution. Disputes of any kind are a source of stress and intra-workforce friction, a documented factor in accidents. I don't think there is any community in the contiguous United States for which subsidized air service is an essential service, but if it were, the provision of such service would be a safety issue, because left to the free market, communities that the larger airlines found uneconomical to serve would be served instead by the sort of company that undermaintain and overinsure their aircraft, so that a hull loss results in an upgrade.

By Edward L. Glaeser THE FEDERAL Aviation Administration does a fine job at its main duty - making air travel safe. But it’s is also involved with a lot of things it shouldn’t be, from disputes about unionization to subsidies for rural airports. If Americans want to keep flying safely, Congress must free the FAA from obligations unrelated to preventing accidents. The agency got back to work recently after a two-week, politically charged shutdown that had nothing to do with safety. To continue some operations related to planning and maintaining airports, the FAA needed new authorization from Congress. But the Senate initially balked at a House plan that also capped "essential air service" subsidies to rural airports at $1,000 per passenger. Some Senate Democrats also opposed a House plan that, by reversing a pro-union ruling last year by the National Mediation Board, would make it harder for workers on airport projects to organize.

I'm not saying there aren't gross inefficiencies and waste in the FAA giving opportunities for cost savings without loss of function. It's a government body, and one attached to the very large government of a traditionally rich country, so that's to be expected. But it's very difficult to draw a circle around "safety" functions yet exclude some aspects of air travel oversight.

Calgary Sights & Heights

2011-08-12T00:00:00.003Z

In an account that has drifted loose from the day in which it actually occurred, I will now describe a half day free of duty in Calgary. I e-mailed everyone who responded to my Lunch invitation and whose e-mail comes up when I search on "Calgary" or "YYC," to see if anyone is up for a short notice visit. If I didn't e-mail you, and you wish I had, send me an e-mail with the name and airport identifiers that I might be putting in if I were in your neck of the woods, and you never know. I might have a free day there sometime. I search everything with the label Lunch in my gmail account, looking for the name of the town or airport, so put more than one in if you like, and avoid mentioning places you're not in the same e-mail.

No one is available for the afternoon, so I go solo to investigate the things on the hill behind the hotel. They're ski lifts and ski jumps, leftovers from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. There's not enough snow left to ski--it's summer, after all--but there was enough to climb up a big pile of snow underneath the chairlifts and pretend I'm summitting Everest. Forgot my flag, though. I do climb up the whole hill. It's a little disorienting to find when I get to the top that the hill is really just an escarpment, and that there's a boring subdivision at the top, almost level with the top of the ski hill.

Along the ridge at the top of the ski hill there is a path that goes to the bases of a number of towers. They are the tops of ski jumps. You know when you see ski jumpingon TV and the person goes off the jump and sails through the air, bent forward over their skis into a human aerofoil? That sort of ski jump. The biggest two have elevators going to the top, but the others have stairs, and there's no gate nor "keep out" sign and it's all part of a public park. I walk on up. And up. And up. Maybe they just figured sightseeers wouldn't go up all those stairs. At the top there's a platform with that same potscrubber plastic stuff you get at the loading and unloading area of ski-lifts. There's a bar to hang onto as you position yourself at the top of the ski jump. And there's the steep, steep, precipitous drop. It's kind of freaky and at the same time flattering that the Calgary parksboard thinks highly enough of me to trust me to behave safely up here. I'm a little surprised that no one has killed themselves trying to mountain bike down the ski jump, for example. The amount more daring and less common sense than me that it would take to think that was worth trying is well within human variation. Or a mickey of Crown Royal.

I go down the wooden stairs along the side of the ski jump and then back to the hotel. During dinner, Carlos replies to my call for locals. Remember Carlos? He guest-blogged about a high tech cement mixer he drove. I look it up and that was 2007. I guess a few very loyal readers may do. He lives in Calgary now and has time before his next shift to squire me around the city. He comes by in a low-slung car, definitely not a dump truck and we head downtown. He's rocking the aviator sunglasses and the Latin flair as he points out the Bow River trails and other sights during the drive.

We start off at the Calgary Tower. Every city has to have its phallic symbol. There's an elevator, so I don't have to walk up the stairs. At the top is a similarly dizzying view, with better safety features. There's a glass floor and we entertain ourselves "balancing" on the girders within it, and jumping into the "spaces." It's a fun game of mind over mind, to use the logical part of the brain to overrule the more instinctive part, the one that says, "there's no FLOOR there!" Then we walk all the way around the tower, looking at the landscape. We can see the Rocky Mountains, the suburbs, the airport, along with arrivals and departures, and some of the downtown. Part of the view from the tower is blocked by a tall building that wasn't there when the tower was built. Ironically, it't the same building the controller wouldn't give me permission to overfly at 7,100' a few weeks ago. Now I get a better look at it, closer to the ground. Carlos also explains his crazy scheme to learn to fly and build time as a commercial bush pilot in South America. I realize at this moment that we were so busy discussing his plans that I never got around to telling him that I might be working there this winter. Now he's going to kill me.

Back at ground level it's too late (i.e. within twelve hours of my report time) to have a drink at Carlos' favourite bar, so he vows to find me some dessert. He consults with his dispatcher from work while driving around the city. It's amusingly similar to me trying to get airport information from the FSS while in descent. It's late enough that the best bet turns out to be Dairy Queen, so Carlos pulls up to some young ladies on the sidewalk, cranks the charm up a several notches and gets directions to the nearest. Ice cream doesn't have to be fancy to be good, and this was quick and delicious to get me home in time for my required duty rest.

I remember asking Carlos if he wanted me to hold anything back in my description of the evening, and he said to go ahead and tell it like it was, so I must have been planning to mock him for something, but I've forgotten what it was. Probably his driving. I don't think I screamed at all though, so it's all good.

It's funny sometimes, that a guy doing his best to impress you might not come off as the most impressive, but it makes a girl feel good that he's going to the effort, so in the end she's happy. Carlos was tired and busy, but he postponed some important tasks to make sure I felt welcome and had a great time in Calgary. Yeah, tip for everyone: spend more effort making the person you're with feel important than making them believe that you are important. That takes me right back to some advice I received may years ago from another Albertan: "stop trying to show people how smart you are, and concentrate on letting them see how nice you are." It's a rare friend who will offer constructive criticism that requires them to point out your personality flaws. I don't know where he is now, but if you're out there, K'Harv, you know who you are.

Carlos came to Canada from Colombia and over the past few years I have had the privilege of witnessing his gradual mastery of the English language and his pride in his new country through our e-mail correspondence. He teased me with a put-on accent when I remarked on having expected one. He sounds almost like he was born here now. He's even writing eloquent letters to the CBC, and just had an excerpt from one on climate change read on-air on a province-wide show. You can listen to it via podcast (at minute 20:34), or read the unedited version at his new blog. He notes that the units for the diesel consumption mentioned in the letter read on air should be km/liter, not liters per kilometers.

I'm proud to have friends who stand up and speak out for what they believe in.

Nerdy Flight Planning Question

2011-08-10T00:00:00.040Z

I seem to spend about an hour a day making flight plans, maybe planning five flights for each one I depart on, because I have to be ready to go now for wherever the weather favours. You'd think after I got the one-way airways sorted out there wouldn't be much to plan, but I have to specify under instrument flight rules what we're going to do on a very non-standard flight. Instead of going from A to B by an efficient route, I'm going from A to a point that I must define precisely, but may depend on the location of the clouds on that day, then hang around in the same reserved airspace for hours, then fly to another arbitrary point to exit, and from there proceed to an airport of landing. An airport that is completely secondary to the purpose of the trip. We really don't care where we land, so long as it is long enough to take off again and they will sell us avgas.

Rather than specifying every photo line, we file "photo blocks" pre-named chunks of sky that you can see if you happen to have an old WAC chart lying around. Photo blocks have names like 093H4, and I file a list of photo blocks with the altitudes we need in each on a special flight plan form, then in the actual flight plan section I write (PHOTO BLOCK) instead of the name of an airway. I can enter the photo block at a conventionally named fix, and I will if there's one handy, but more likely we'll just be entering at an arbitrary point that I specify with latitude and longitude in the form 5100N11230W (ENT). There will be a second fix tagged (EXT) after the photo block, and everything else is like a normal IFR flight plan. Except we don't care where we land, but we still have to put something down.

On an IFR flight plan you specify your true airspeed in one block at the top and I'm used to putting down whatever fiction the manufacturer claims for the aircraft at the flight planned altitude, minus a bit for reality, and just leaving it. ATC knows that I'll climb a bit more slowly, and my initial descent will probably be a bit faster. At least that's how everyone I have flown with files and flies. But there is a mechanism by which you can specify speed changes, and any time you file an altitude change you have to refile your speed anyway, because the format is like this: N175A095 meaning 175 knots at 9,500'. But one day while listening to a departing Westjet flight being given a speed restriction in the climb, I thought about the fact most pilots don't climb into the flight levels by pulling their nose up to Vy with sustainable climb power and waiting patiently. What sufficed on an IFR flight plan down below might not be the best information for one at more rarefied atmospheric strata.

So I called IFR flight data and I asked them how an IFR flight that begins with twenty to thirty minutes of climbing at speeds significantly lower than the aircraft's normal TAS should be filed. The controller had an answer, but I wonder if it would be the same answer across the country and abroad.

What do you think the advice was? Or if you're a controller, what would you expect? I'll tell you what my guy said, in a couple of days.

Hold Short for Crossing Traffic

2011-08-08T00:00:00.038Z

There's an intersection in my town that needs a crosswalk. In the spring I tracked down the responsible person and asked how one goes about petitioning for a crosswalk. They asked me a few questions, looked up the intersection and told me that they had done a study a few years ago and determined that there was not enough traffic to warrant it, but that they would do a new study once local road construction that temporarily changes traffic patterns was done.

Their clever strategy has been to have continuous construction since then. They're constructing everything but a crosswalk. It's possible that they are doing this because studies have shown that the other things need constructing, and not just to irritate me, as I'm sure it would be cheaper to just paint a crosswalk on the street than to build all this other stuff. That's all I want, a visual marker that shows drivers that there might be someone trying to cross the road here, and that allows pedestrians to choose a good place to cross. It looks from this video to be a pretty quick process.

With a special purpose trough/brush-type tool:

With a spray gun and a steady hand:

There are some very fancy crosswalks in some cities. Here are curved ones. And there's at least one accidental crosswalk to nowhere.

Then I saw this. If all else fails, put up your own. How closely do you think the city tracks crosswalks? If I showed up with a few friends in reflective vests, some orange traffic cones, and some quick-drying white paint, would anyone ever figure out that this wasn't an official crosswalk? Here's an argument against such things. And you can go to jail for it. And I found all those looking for a video someone told me about where a crew is painting the white stripes on a crosswalk, starting from opposite sides of the street. You can guess what happened to the crosswalk, but I can't find the video.

I just got back from work and stuck my SD card in the computer to see my photos, and as suspected the fix was only temporary. Most of the photographs are completely washed out. It's possible that the camera repair shop fixed one thing and broke another, or that the blackness problem has simply remanifest itself in paler tones. Here's the last photo the camera ever took. I believe it's an exciting mountain airport.

So I'm shopping. The IXUS 115 and the ELPH 100, recommended by readers as the successor to the SD10, look to be almost the same camera as each other, maybe in different markets, but they both have the menu buttons where my thumb goes for one handed shots. I know from experience with the borrowed camera that I press those buttons inadvertently and take scenic out the window shots while in macro mode. I'm starting with those suggestions and looking, though. It maybe that an iPhone is what I need to replace camera (broken), cellphone (no bluetooth or cable connection for handsfree or headset interface) and iPod touch (only four years old, but apparently that's ancient in Mac time, and confuses everyone who sees it that it isn't a cellphone). It probably has greater image resolution than the once impressive 4.0 megapixel camera, and it's not like I'll look more nerdy toting an iPhone than an iPod touch, cellphone and camera. If I want to look like an idiot in public places, I can do that without the help of technology.

Always Check NOTAMs

2011-08-07T00:00:00.002Z

Here's an account of an aviatrix who found that her computer wasn't working to pick up the NOTAMs. She could have called 1-800-WX-BRIEF (this takes place in the USA) and asked, but she hadn't flown in a week and was anxious to get back in the sky. What possible NOTAM could affect her flight in and out of her own backyard strip, in very familiar airspace? She was so used to people admiring her prize-winning airplane that she wasn't fazed by the intercepting F-16s. I won't mention her age, because as the last line of the story mentions, she was a little put out that the FAA released it to the media.

May we all be flying as long, but further from the scrutiny of military aviators.

All I Need To Know

2011-08-06T00:00:00.001Z

I'm getting teased by my friends for having a tissue-paper airplane, and for making confusing statements like "I hope it rains on Friday so I can go to the park." It's a little odd being in an operation that depends on perfect weather, when many of the real pilot skills are about dealing with imperfect weather. It's also a new thing for me to look at a GFA calling for scattered cloud at 10,000', and have that be unsuitable weather. It's similar to the adaptation you make when you go from VFR flying to IFR flying. In that transition you look at weather that was once unquestionably unflyable and you have to further analyze it to see if the icing en route and the ceilings at destination might still allow flight. I guess in every operation you divide weather into "totally unflyable," "great," and "hmm, lets see if there's a way we can do it." Those two dividers slide around a long way, depending on the nature of the operation and the experience of the pilot.

I was amused by these URLs, which I discovered by accident when I idly typed my guestion of the day into Google's search bar.

http://goingtorain.com/
http://isitgoingtoraintomorrow.com/
and
http://isitgoingtoraintoday.com/

Large print, simple, binary, no complicated decoding. It even detects where I am correctly, except when I'm on VOIP Internet at a shack beside a runway and it thinks I'm in Montréal. I think single purpose URLs like that are hilarious. I regularly visit Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue and I have no idea why. I don't know whether Am I Awesome serves more than one answer, but it said I was "Very" so that's good enough for me.

Where Do I Get My Clearance, Please?

2011-08-04T00:00:00.068Z

A pilot may not depart on an IFR flight plan into controlled airspace without receiving an IFR clearance from someone air traffic services. Some pilots never have to think twice about where they are going to get their clearance, but they probably always operate from the same few airports and they know the local procedures. The way you get a clearance in Canada can be quite varied, and when the airports you operate out of are that varied sometimes it's tricky.

If it's a busy airport, there may be a dedicated clearance delivery frequency published in the CFS and printed on the departure plate. You tune them up and call for clearance, and if you've filed your flight plan properly they usually have it ready and waiting for you, something like, "ATC clears Flashcube Three to the Peace River airport via the Moose Three departure, flight planned route, maintain 5000', expect higher five minutes after departure, contact departure airborne 125.725, squawk 3671." You copy that all down as they say it, say it all back to them, and when they say, "readback correct" you have a departure clearance.

If there is no clearance delivery frequency, you call ground instead. Both clearance delivery and ground are manned by people in the air traffic control tower at the airport, and often both frequencies will be covered by the same person at once. You discover this when you switch to ground for taxi clearance and get the same guy, or sometimes the clearance delivery guy gives you a taxi clearance with the departure clearance and tells you to monitor ground while taxiing. Ground may send you back to clearance delivery if the IFR data people discover an error in your flight plan, but eventually you switch to tower, who may give you an amendment to your departure or change the assigned departure frequency before clearing you for take off.

If the airport is uncontrolled, but there is still an FSS on the field, you usually call them for your clearance. You include in your request for clearance the runway you intend to depart from, because at an uncontrolled airport the pilot decides that, and that may influence the clearance you receive. They phone IFR data and IFR tells them your clearance, then they read it to you, you read it back to them, they tell you you have it right, and then you have the clearance. After that you just tell the flight service specialist when you're taking off, and off you go.

If there's no FSS on the field, but there's an RCO (Remote Communications Outlet)--a relay that lets you talk to a flight service specialist who is somewhere else--you may call them in exactly the same fashion. Sometimes pilots don't even know whether I'm talking to a remote or local FSS, which can be amusing when they ask "is it okay if i park here?" When I landed at one airport recently I was talking to an FSS specialist as I landed and I asked him when I reported clear of the runway, "do I call you for my clearance in the morning?" He said yes, but when I called his frequency in the morning the specialist working it told me to get my clearance from Centre, unless I couldn't contact them from the ground.

If there is no air traffic services agency reachable at all from the ground, I may be able to get my clearance by phone from the IFR flight planning folk, or possibly through the regional FSS people at 1-866-WX-BRIEF. You just keep calling aviation-related numbers until someone consents to give you a clearance. A clearance received by telephone (and some received by radio) will have a clearance valid time window, so you can use it between two zulu times, but if you miss your window and do not depart by then, you have to call back for a new clearance. So a request for a clearance should include an estimate of when you'll be ready to go, especially if it doesn't match your filed departure time exactly.

If you have no usable frequency and no telephone service, this happens mostly to pilots of amphib aircraft or others who used really remote and unserviced strips, you can't get a clearance before departure. You can then get a clearance in the air, but in that case you have to either depart VFR and remain in VMC until you have received your clearance, or depart on uncontrolled IFR and remain clear of controlled airspace until you have a clearance. Some people do this even when there are facilities on the ground where they could have received a clearance, but they find it to be a time savings. In the US if you do it without even having a flight plan filed it's called a "pop-up clearance" and is not abnormal there, but in Canada filing a flight plan in the air when there were facilities to do it on the ground is considered poor airmanship, and it's rude because it jams the frequency and puts the workload of accepting the flight plan on people who have more urgent work to do. You can see where this is going, with oblivious US pilots annoying Canadian flight service specialists and other pilots when they do here what is perfectly normal at home. As far as I can tell, the standard Canadian behaviour of flying cross-country VFR then calling approach to land VFR at a busy airport is the US equivalent. US controllers really don't seem to like that. Would they prefer me to pick up an IFR clearance before approaching their airspace?

The last option for IFR clearances in Canada is to conduct the entre flight outside of controlled airspace and not have a clearance at all. That's perfectly legal, and an aircraft can transition between IFR and VFR flight just by changing altitude by 500' and changing the transponder code. I haven't done that in a few years.

Beware of Broken Glass

2011-08-02T00:00:00.076Z

Loyal reader majroj forwarded me this link to an NTSB study on glass cockpits in general aviation. The term "glass cockpit" refers to integrated computerized information screens that augment and take the place of traditional instrumentation and paper documentation both. Instead of the pilot having to look at a paper chart then at separate instruments showing things like altitude, heading, airspeed time, and angular displacement from a selected line, they look at a high resolution screen that combines all that information and computes time en route and descent profile. Twelve years ago these were new shiny toys that some airlines had, and I remember a "hilarious" joke a friend and I had about installing such screens in a tiny two-place airplane. Now they are commonplace. After the initial learning curve, having that much information available seems to represent an enormous decrease in workload and increase in situational awareness. But the NTSB (the agency that investigates air crashes in the United States) didn't find the evidence supported that supposition.

The study compared aircraft of similar age and performance capability, but unfortunately did not control for the fact that people who invest in glass instrumentation use their aircraft differently. The aircraft with conventional instruments were involved in more accidents overall, but fewer fatal accidents, a predictable outcome when it is revealed that the conventional instruments are in airplanes used for flight training, which involves frequent, short, local flights used for flight training, while the glass cockpits were in aircraft flown less frequently but in long distance IFR flights in less ideal weather. Training accidents tend to be runway excursions and botched landings: embarrassing, expensive, but less likely to be fatal, while an accident on an IFR cross country is more likely to involve CFIT or loss of control in icing and thus kill someone.

The study report acknowledges the problem with the comparison, but doesn't appear to have made an attempt to control for it, which is unfortunate. I'd be interested to see a head-to-head comparison of similar flying with and without the modern tools. The integrated screens are fantastic, but the two big dangers I identify are catastrophic failure and tunnel vision, when the pilot gets so caught up in the avionics that they miss the big picture. Ask me if I haven't done that, in the last couple of weeks, and you'll just get an embarrassed mumble from me. People can literally fly into the side of a mountain or mumble mumble bust their assigned altitude while trying to make the little pink line point in the correct direction. When you learn to use conventional instruments, you learn how failures manifest and how to identify them by cross-checking with other instruments. You learn to disregard bogus information from failed instruments, perhaps using exactly the same technique as your flight instructor used to simulate failure in training: putting a post-it note over it. Once the misleading information is removed from your scan, it's gone and you can make decisions using only the believed trustworthy information remaining.

When the information from all the different sensors is processed and presented together, you don't have as smooth a way of removing the faulty information. The computer tries to make sense of conflicting data and while there are circuits and algorithms designed to remove unreliable data from the equation, the loss of control in Air France 447 is probably related to integrated displays reaching incorrect or ambiguous conclusions about the state of the aircraft.

My hypothesis is that if a study were done comparing the safety of similar flights by pilots of similar experience before and after glass cockpits in small GA aircraft they would find an initial increase in safety, followed by a return to pre-glass accident rates, or even worse accident rates. That is, initially they would increase safety, but then people would start taking greater risks. It appears that psychologically people have a certain level of risk tolerance, so if you make something safer, they'll find a way to make it more dangerous again.

The issue the NTSB identified is training. Just because a GPS display requires less interpretation than a VOR, doesn't mean that it needs less training and practice to be proficient and safe in its operation. Probably the opposite. It needs more initial training and more review to get and stay proficient with just one part of that formula, a complex GPS system. I started a while ago documenting my progress towards proficiency with the G530, but I never finished, and am especially guilty for not raving at more length and detail about Max Trescott's GPS and WAAS Instrument Flying Handbook, a book which I highly recommend to anyone using or teaching on the G430/530/1000. I'm never going to finish learning how to use this instrument, but I will post some more about it and the book.

I picked up my unrepairable camera and went to a store look for a replacement. I took out the broken camera and practiced holding and shooting with one hand, to remind myself how small it was and easy to use. I pressed the on button, and pointed it at things. See, easy to balance, and my thumb doesn't change settings while I'm holding it. And I can see my feet in the formerly broken screen.

"Can I help you?" asks the camera counter guy.

"I, uh, came to buy a replacement for this broken camera, but ..."

"Now it works?"

"Yeah."

He looks at it, takes a picture of my happy-my-camera-works smile and agrees that it works.

I guess while putting it back together after determining that they couldn't fix it, they accidentally fixed it. I know it probably won't last long, so I look at the cameras for sale, but none is as tiny. The company doesn't make that kind any more. Anyone have a Canon Power Shot SD10 they are not in love with? Or one that works really well, and which they would like extra batteries and a battery charger for?

More On That Dot

2011-07-31T00:00:00.000Z

Reader Sarah found this lolcat for me, a perfect laugh at the end of a long day of chasing the red dot, trying to keep it green. Fortunately they can't make me stay late, because we need a sun angle of at least 38 degrees for the work.

It's kind of fun, really, chasing the dots, trying to keep everything as good as it can be, and still having ATC agree to what we ask. And not running out of fuel. And not having to pee before I land. The basics.

Letting Me Down Gently

2011-07-30T00:00:00.081Z

I like looking at AIM amendments. Even old ones that I should have reported on months ago. Some stuff sits in my buffer and keeps getting bumped until I have a place for it. Every country issues a sort of national pilot's handbook, a combination of sage advice, regulatory requirements, and doorstop. US pilots will be familiar with the FAR/AIM, an annually issued paperback the size of a James Clavell novel. Canada used to have a looseleaf binder about the same size. It was called the AIP--Aeronautical Information Publication--and oh boy amendments were fun back then, because they mailed them out in a sheaf and you had to individually remove the outdated pages and replace them with the new ones. I'm nerdy enough that I kind of enjoyed the ritual, but that doesn't mean I wasn't occasionally a year behind in my amendments.

Some years back, Canada needed to normalize its publications with an ICAO standard that required the AIP to be a document for foreign pilots, containing only ICAO differences, so they changed the name to the AIM (Aeronautical Information Manual), and at the same time they changed the format to 8 1/2 x 11 (that's the standard letter size here, approximately A4) and shortly afterwards started charging for the paper format. I still free update notices electronically and can look at it online.

An amendment that caught my eye was this detail explaining what to include in your flight plan:

RAC 3.16.9 The sentence “INDICATE if aircraft is equipped with a ballistic parachute system.” was added to “N/(REMARKS)”.

It certainly would be relevant to ATC and rescuers to know if the airplane they are looking for could have descended vertically to a survivable landing, or that could pose a hazard to rescuers (thanks, Plastic Pilot). I remember having an aircraft attended by local (non-airport) firefighters after a smoke-in-cockpit incident and they had no aircraft specific training. I showed them where the fuel lines and tanks were located in that airplane, where the battery was and how to shut off the engine and electrical in the cockpit. I know they would simply treat the whole airplane as a dagerous mix of fuel and electrical power, but it was a little startling to realize how little they knew about what they might be dealing with.

I've never flown an aircraft with a ballistic parachute. It's not tempting, even if it were available for aircraft over about 700 kg. My nightmare scenarios are not ones that a parachute would get me out of.

When I'm getting ready to go into town I call to ask if my camera is ready. The guy in the shop says he will call me back. Needing to actually GO into town rather than sit on the couch and wait for the camera guy to call me back, I leave. There's a message to call them. I call them. They have to call me back. This repeats a number of times. I think they have lost the camera. Finally they manage to answer the question. The camera is not lost, but it is not ready either. It is "beyond economical repair." I'll go and get it to get the SD card back, and perhaps I can get another the same and reuse the battery.

Hey, Swimsuits!

2011-07-29T00:00:00.001Z

I wasn't going to post anything today, so if women in swimsuits and inappropriate-for-the-beach shoes is not your thing, wait until tomorrow and you're not missing anything. If you like to look at pictures of scantily-clad women, then click over here and check out the parade of women with absolutely no bruises or scars. Can you imagine if your job depended on being that flawless? I worry about being in the field scheduled to work and getting diarrhea or coming down with a fever. With a little plastic surgery my belly button could look that perfect. (Ladies, when choosing an obstetrician, ask them to demonstrate their knot-tying skills. I mean honestly how does page three there get that neat perfect dimple in the middle of her belly, when my mother's obstetrician was evidently practising his sheepshank?) But forget belly button envy, I am never going to spend a day with no bruises or scratches anywhere on my body as revealed by a swimsuit.

They're pretty to look at though. I've got a suit kind of like page seven, plus the sense not to wear orange eyeshadow, so I'm way ahead. I'm also glad my job doesn't involve being photographed at the angle shown in number twelve. If you're tall and naturally skinny, go ahead and be a fashion model for a few years. You can use the money to pay for flight school which will allow you to wear more comfortable shoes for your job. You'll still get groped at work, but at least you won't be wearing a bathing suit that's too small and mess of faux pearls.

No actual nudity or toplessness there, but if your workplace is worried about that sort of thing, they might not like swimsuit models either.

Guest Posts

2011-07-28T00:00:00.000Z

I fairly frequently receive e-mails asking if I accept guest posts for my blog. Almost always these requests are from people with something to sell or promote: people who want to take advantage of the fact that your eyeballs and minds will be on the blog. As far as I am concerned, you guys are not for sale. I'm not in principle opposed to guest posts, and if someone has something to contribute I will give them recognition, but I have standards for what I accept. I'm writing this post not as a solicitation for or warning about upcoming guest posts, but to give my readers a chance to comment on the idea that I might accept them, and so I can simply link to it next time someone asks me if I accept them.

A guest post must be on a topic linked to aviation. If it is a technical topic on which the writer has considerable expertise, that link may be quite tenuous. For example I'd accept a technical post on the production of the multi-layer aluminum sheeting used aircraft skin, on petroleum fractionation, or on the transport of materials to Uranium City for construction of the runway there. It should be well- written and go beyond what I could produce on the same subject with a little research. If it treats a less technical topic, then I would prefer you write a first person account of an interesting aviation experience, something that gives an insider's view. It could be something you'd put on your own blog if you had one, or something you don't want to put on your own blog because it's too embarrassing, but that you'd like to share anonymously.

I'm not interested in posts about ordinary passenger experiences on large commercial aircraft, how to get first class upgrades, exciting places to go on vacation, or the benefits of going to a particular technical college, or anything that reads like an infomercial. I'd welcome a post from a crewmember or controller about an emergency situation, from a customer of a Canadian bushplane operator, from a student describing a first solo or an AME changing a cylinder in the field. If it's a well-written personal account with technical details by a woman in Canadian aviation, then it's probably a homerun. You may include links in the post as necessary to tell the story. Length isn't really important. If it's super short I may throw in a related story of my own or a YouTube link. If it's really long but worthwhile I might split it across more than one post.

I will introduce the guest post, stating my relationship with you, and then at the end I will link to the website you wish to promote and/or to the author's personal website. You keep the copyright, and I don't mind if you simulpost the story to your own blog. I will maintain your anonymity if it's that kind of story.

If you have an idea for something that would fit here, please e-mail me with a specific description so I can give you a go-ahead before you go to any trouble. If you have a product to sell, please include a link to a sample of your writing so I know you don't write like a comment robot. If you're just sharing an experience with nothing to sell, but you happen to write like a comment robot, I can probably fix it up for you.

National Baggage

2011-07-27T00:00:00.127Z

I watched United States President Obama on TV last night, appealing to Americans to ask their congressmen to approve raising the debt ceiling already. Don't take this coupled with my recent post on the FAA shutting down as a sign that I'm taking a sudden interest in US politics. The FAA post indicated my interest in the responsibilities of national aviation regulatory bodies, and I didn't tune in to Obama on purpose. He pre-empted the television show I wanted to watch, so that when I turned on the TV, instead of a vapid sitcom there was my neighbouring nation's president, all serious-like, quoting Ronald Reagan and explaining what taxes are used for. He's charismatic, for sure. And there's the "holy shit, the large nation we live next to is really having problems" aspect of the situation. I listened to him for the whole fifteen minutes, my attention only being broken after he left and a station commentator came on to say that Obama's solution was too complicated.

Taxes are a really hot-button item for Americans. They established a whole new country to get out of paying taxes they didn't like, and even their latest political movement, the Tea Party is named to hark back to that tax protest. This made me wonder, what really instigated Canadian nationhood, and is it still a berserk button for Canadians?

Everyone who went to school here knows that we were a bunch of separate British colonies and then the British North America Act united a few of them when the founding fathers all got hammered at the Charlottetown Conference (do you have a photo of the founders of your country all hungover after doing it?) But why did the British decide that 1867 was time these colonies governed themselves?

There'd been some rebellions in the colonies, and Lord Selkirk was sent to analyze why and figure out how to settle us down. He recommended that we be given responsibility for government. What quaint 19th century concerns were the issues in those rebellions? There seem to have been three main ones: ethnic disputes between members of the French and English populations, inequality in government land grants to different religions, and opposition to mass American immigration. I already knew that the English fighting the French was woven deep in the fabric of our nation, but I didn't realize that separate school funding and resenting American infiltration were as originally Canadian as trapping beaver and tapping maple syrup. So yup, it seems that whatever inspired you to create a country remains something your citizens care about. I do believe that goes for the the lofty ideals as well as the grievances, though. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberté, égalité, fraternité; peace, order and good government. That last link is to an essay by a smart, bilingual Canadian politician who was vilified by his opponents on the basis that he had been unduly influenced by time spent in the United States.

And now I go back to watching the American television show (How I Met Your Mother) that Obama displaced, when it would be more useful for me to be watching something in French to improve my language skills. I already did my taxes.

Now It's MY Way

2011-07-26T00:00:00.132Z

My camera still isn't ready. This is like airplane maintenance: they have to wait for the parts to arrive, and can't say when that will be. The DG works, though. They tell us that it was installed incorrectly to begin with, with not enough screws, and there wasn't even a hole for the missing screw. Odd that it worked for so long.

We're going to Vancouver again, but the GFA shows IFR conditions en route with mixed moderate icing to 16,000'. I look at the shape of the forecast areas in space and time, and judge that by my route and at the time I will pass through the area, I will be safe to file at 16,000'. On V304, that one-way airway I was told I couldn't use earlier. At most I expect a few tendrils of ice-bearing cloud above that altitude and I should be able to get a deviation around them.

The actual weather observed for the first part of the route shows the GFA to be startlingly accurate. The brown scalloped line dividing two types of weather went right through the dots representing the three Edmonton area airports that report weather, and overhead Edmonton there's a cloud shield with its edge running so precisely along that line I wonder if I'm in a simulator. I can see the International, half of City Centre and none of Namao. At sixteen thousand I'm also comfortably above the clouds, for now. And the new heater is still working. Groundspeed is low, though. The operator can see the ETA on the GPS and asks about it, because it's a good bit later than I suggested at the departure briefing. "Will we have to stop for fuel?"

"I'm not planning a fuel stop. This should switch to a tailwind as soon as we get into BC."

The clouds rise ahead of us, some convective shapes, which is why the forecast calls for icing even though it's well below freezing. A pilot expects ice in visible moisture (i.e. cloud, mist or rain) when the temperature is close to freezing, because more than a few degrees above zero, water droplets don't freeze and more than ten degrees below freezing and most of the water is already frozen, thus is unavailable to freeze onto your airplane. In convective cloud there is a lot of rapid vertical motion, so liquid water can be churned up from below into the cold levels above. The GFA is again amazingly accurate at forecasting these clouds sitting just at 16,000'. It is a tremendous economic and safety benefit to have such good forecasts. Anyone who works in Edmonton or Montréal putting out these charts, be proud.

A little further on there are a few tendrils of that cloud poking above 16,000'. I flip on the pitot and prop heat before passing through cloud tops, emerging with just a skim of ice on the windscreen and wing leading edges. It's useful to me to note where I see ice first on this airplane. Out in the sunshine again the ice sublimates. I dodge a few tops and then I'm into another cloud for a bit longer. Yeah, I guess now that I know (I believe I have Sarah to thank for the link) that there's ice in there it's time to enact my avoidance plan. I call ATC to climb a couple of hundred feet. They give me a just a moment, then call back with "flight level 200 approved." Uh, that's a bit more than I need. As I apply power to go up I realize what they heard. I explain that I need "two hundred feet" not "FL200" and they assign me 16,000' blocking 17,000'. Perfect. I'm out of all ice and have a nice view and clean wings. There's an overcast in the vicinity of Vancouver that could be interesting, depending on where they hold me. The freezing level is right around the forecast cloud tops. If necessary I can ask for an expedited descent though the region of icing, but I don't expect much, just light rime for a few hundred feet. It will be warm enough below to melt any accumulation off before final.

The headwind switches to a tailwind, an even better one than I had planned on. We'll be a little bit early. The clouds are thinning a little and I can see mountain tops poking through. It's hard to believe that we're over 2000' above the minimum obstacle clearance altitude. The rocks look to be right there. They always do, whenever you fly an IFR procedure in visual conditions, too. The controller asks me if I'm done with the altitude block and I am. The clouds are lower and this type of cloud shouldn't have ice at this altitude, either.

I've put the en route frequency up on COM1, my listening radio and am looking for a good FSS frequency to call to find out what to expect at Vancouver when the operator starts reading me METARs off his iPhone. Is this the way of the future? The FSS won't have anything more current than the METARs, so I try Vancouver's ATIS. I'm still too far out, but at least I have it tuned and ready.

I review the published arrivals for Vancouver and after the next frequency change tell the controller I'm ready for a descent. I'm not pressurized, so it would be nice not to have to dive for the airport at the end. He gives me a couple of descents, first down to fourteen thousand then ending at ten thousand feet, which is just above the cloud deck, and just at freezing. I'm laughing. Everything below me is above freezing, so I don't need to worry about ice on the descent. The controller tells me information charlie is current, and to expect a runway eight.

I'm still unable the ATIS, and I already have a post-it flagging the non-RNAV arrival for the 08s at YVR. I flag and review the ILS for 08R, the runway that goes to the non-secure side of Vancouver airport. I'm coming down V304 towards the airport, but so is everybody and I'm slow. They vector me off the airway, to the north which is a little unnerving, because I'm in IMC and that's where the mountains are, but then they vector me south, to the other side, and then east, away from the airport, descending me to 5000', then 3000', then another vector then another. I hear them advice an American Airlines that they are doing a runway change, so I pull up the approach plates and find the pages for the other end of the runways. The controller tells me to expect 26R, that's the big girls' runway. I tune and identify the ILS and accept another vector, and a descent clearance to 2000', which I'm told to expedite, then another runway change to 26L. I intercept the localizer and am immediately visual and cleared to land. You know, I'm glad I have the autopilot. That was a crazy disorienting set of vectors.

It's actually quite nice at the airport. The weather is all to the east. That's good, because we have work out to the west. Tomorrow.

There's a Comfort Inn right near the airport, but like most of the places I stay, I don't have a chance to enjoy more amenities than the bed and the internet, which tells me the weather will be good again tomorrow, so I should be prepared for an early start.

Duty Time Math

2011-07-25T00:00:00.003Z

I've questioned before the exact meaning of the rule restricting flight time when single pilot IFR is conducted. Amongst a long list of how many hours a pilot can fly in a year, 18 days, 90 days, month, week and day, there is this:

720.15(1)(a) where the flight crew member conducts single-pilot IFR operations, 8 hours in any 24 consecutive hours

Does that mean that if I ever fly IFR I may never log more than eight in twenty-four? No. Now I have an official interpretation. It only matters what you have done in the last 24 hours, so you can log twelve hours on Monday, have Tuesday off, and then fly eight hours of SPIFR on Wednesday. But you can't depart IFR on Monday, cancel fifteen seconds after departure, and then fly eight hours and one minute VFR. This could be a legitimate problem, considering all the times that the controllers get confused and give us IFR departures in VFR flight.

GUIDANCE: Where the flight crew member conducts single-pilot IFR flights, the flight crew member's total flight time, in all flights conducted by the flight crew member, will not exceed 8 hours in any 24 consecutive hours. In determining if this limitation applies to a given situation, this question must be asked - did the flight crew member conduct single-pilot IFR flights? Yes or no. If the answer is yes, the flight crewmember is limited to 8 hours of flight time in any 24 consecutive hours. The length of time spent conducting single-pilot IFR flights is irrelevant. If the pilot flew a departure under IFR and then cancelled IFR and flew the rest of the day under VFR - the answer is still yes and the 8-hour flight time limit applies.

The limitation is intended to prevent cockpit fatigue and applies to flight time not duty time. Interestingly, if you departed VFR and got an IFR clearance prior to entering Class A airspace the limitation would start then.

So imagine I flew a five hour IFR mission on Monday, cancelled IFR through 12,500' at 00Z, and landed. If I departed at 1430Z the next morning on an IFR clearance, I'd be illegal after three hours. So imagine I flew a five hour IFR mission on Monday, cancelled IFR through 12,500' at 00Z, and landed. If I departed at 1430Z the next morning, even on a VFR clearance, I'd be illegal after three hours: the regulation says any 24-hour period and during the period 1731Z-1731Z I would have flown eight hours and one minute, including some IFR flying.

But if on Monday the mission was all VFR, from 19-00Z, I could start flying VFR on Tuesday at 1430Z, no problem. Then if I were offered an IFR clearance, as I have been because the controllers like it better, I'd have to decline it at 1730Z, because that would put me IFR with more than eight hours logged in the last 24. If that Tuesday morning flight were only three hours long, I could accept an IFR clearance again at the time I took off on Monday, because then the previous five hour flight would start expiring at the same rate I was logging new time, so I'd be legal until about 00Z, when Tuesday's logged time reached eight hours.

Fortunately, we have an op spec (exception) to this rule for our operation.

I got a hold of the camera place, and they say they can fix the camera for $95. It's a bit of cash, but I really, really like that camera (a Canon PowerShot SD10) and I haven't seen anything that measures down (it's tiny), so I gave them the go ahead. They couldn't tell me when it would be ready, though.

Unwarranted Apocolyptic Speculation

2011-07-24T00:00:00.000Z

The Federal Aviation Administration is the United States agency responsible for air traffic control, aviation permits and licensing, regulatory enforcement and other air safety roles. It's kind of like Transport Canada and Nav Canada rolled into one. They are a government body, a subsidiary of the US Department of Transportation, so natually they are federally funded. The federal bill (bill as in proposed legislation, not as in a really, really large denomination banknote) that provided funding to the FAA expired almost four years ago, so ever since the agency has been financed through a series of twenty temporary extensions to that bill, as the parties involved haven't been able to reach a new long term agreement.

I would tell you what the contentious point was in the negotiations, but after so many iterations, it may be that the issues on the bill that won't pass are not the original issues. To prevent a bill from passing, or to force passage of legislation that opponents would otherwise vote down, American politicians can attach tangentially related riders to each others bills, and also name them, so that a bill proposing that no one under twenty-one be permitted to have a e-mail account could be called the "Anyone who opposes this bill is a pedophile bill of 2011" or a bill forbidding convicted pedophiles from working in ice-cream trucks could have a rider attached to it that forbade teaching kids under twelve what a condom was. So the people are discouraged from voting down either hypothetical bill lest they be branded pedophilephiles. My information on U.S. politics is largely derived from late night comedy shows, so check the comments for knowledgeable Americans explaining how this system makes sense.

Anyway, the new FAA funding bill seems to be held up by a point of labour relations, that would return airline and railroad workers to an older system of voting to form unions. The old system allowed unionization in a airline workplace only if a majority of eligible voters vote yes. That is, anyone who doesn't bother to vote is counted as a no. That sets apathy to the employers' advantage and seems to me to be open to abuse through intimidation, because employers can identify the unionizers through who attends the polls, so it jeopardizes the idea of secret ballot. The new system, only recently ruled valid, allows employees of airlines and railroads to form a union by a simple majority of only those voting. That goes too far in the other direction, in my opinion, because it allows a small group of committed unionizers to take advantage of widespread apathy and establish a union that wasn't generally wanted. I would propose a compromise that requires both a majority of votes cast, and a majority of the eligible voters to turn out. After all, if the majority of the workers can't be arsed to go to the polls to change their working conditions, I'm thinking those working conditions can't be so bad. It's still open to intimidation or employer tricks--e.g. manipulating shifts--to keep people from voting, but it avoids assigning opinions to people who didn't express them. The Democrats (the leftmost of the two main American parties) don't want to go back to the old way, so they want the labour issue removed from the bill, thus are preventing that bill from passing.

In retaliation, or some differently-worded political version thereof, the Republicans (the rightmost most of the two parties) have worded the twenty-first iteration of the extension to the old FAA funding bill to include a provision eliminating federal subsidies for airline service to thirteen rural airports, including of course airports in the constituencies of some prominent Democrats. I note that requiring market-based prices for service from rural airports would not cut people off from food or medical attention without air service. These are places like Ely, Nevada (four hours drive from Las Vegas or Salt Lake City), Glendive, Montana (three and a half hours out of Billings) and Morgantown, West Virginia (an hour and a half drive from Pittsburgh), all on paved, year-round highways. Each of those towns has its own hospital and real grocery stores. Morgantown seems pretty odd to be on that list. I think there are people in Toronto who have to drive more than an hour and a half to get to an airport with scheduled service. And the non-subsidized fares are dirt cheap. I found a round trip from Billings to San Francisco for $118! There must be some historical reason for the subsidies.

All of the above is ignorable background to what I think is the most interesting point, that if the dispute isn't resolved, the FAA's operating authority would expire. Air traffic controllers are deemed an essential service and would continue to work, but 32,000 other FAA employees: presumably inspectors, examiners, file clerks, janitors, approach designers, dangerous goods safety coordinators and all manner of other people I'm not thinking of would be out of work. I found it especially interesting that with the FAA losing its mandate in that way, they would also lose the ability to levy and collect fees. People I know in the appropriate level of US airlines are actually looking at ways to refund or stop charging FAA fees if this happens.

I'm pretty sure the delay is just a game of political chicken, and that the deadlock may be broken by the time this even posts, but it's kind of freaky to think that this is the way a country would go from a world power to a failed state. One by one government agencies would lose their ability to function. While a lot of what any given agency does might be unneeded bureaucracy, once the normal way to get a pilot licence has gone away, you'd presumably get one by paying a guy who kept the machine that prints them after his last paycheque bounced. Or maybe they'd consolidate and transfer the authority to another overworked agency, until the police or the military run everything.

Please forgive me, south-of-the-border (and north of the other one) readers for mangling your political system. Blame the news media, summer heat, and the desire to post this before it became entirely irrelevant, as opposed to after doing sufficient research.

No Photos Today

2011-07-23T00:00:00.044Z

The only thing clear about the morning is that it's clear we won't be getting any photos taken, and tomorrow's forecast isn't any better, plus there's that thing where we can't get into the military airspace on weekdays, so we fly home. About fifteen minutes before landing I put my fingers on the DG to reset it to the compass (yes, I really, really miss slaved gyros) and the knob turns but the card inside doesn't. The DG (directional gyro) consists of a vertically mounted card with the cardinal compass directions N 3 6 E 12 15 S 21 24 W 30 33 N all around the outside, and intermediate large and small hash marks every ten and five degrees in between. It is stabilized by an air-driven gyroscope, a wheel that rotates vertically around a horizontally-mounted axis. The gyroscope is connected to the card through a series of gears, such that when the airplane turns, the gyroscope remains in the same orientation and thus turns the card. This works okay, but if you turn a lot it gets out sync, and friction plus relocation over the Earth result in precession with time, as well. You address this by resetting it every fifteen minutes, or any time you are about to use it for navigation. To reset it, you press and turn a knob, which is supposed to disengage the card from the gears and allow you to turn it. Only it doesn't. I finish the flight and land with it slightly off, then write it up.

I call the camera shop about my little camera and they say they will call me back, but they don't do so before closing time. It's frustrating not to have it. I have borrowed a camera, but it's bigger, so harder to take the one-handed shots I usually take while flying, (I keep accidentally putting my fingers on the other buttons and programming it to do unknown things) and more likely not to be close at hand when I see something I want to photograph, because it doesn't fit in my little bag with my wallet.

On the bright side, I discovered a new food: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca. It has a name that makes you say, "Wait, what?" if you know the first thing about a Romance language--or at least the first thing most people seem to learn--but it's amazingly good. By leaving out some of the things I always put in spaghetti sauce and putting in some I hadn't considered I get deliciousness. My recipe is from Wikibooks, where it also explains plausibly the eyebrow-raising name. I used the Neopolitan version, because it gave me an excuse to have Neopolitan ice cream for dessert, and I'm always on the lookout for ice cream eating excuses.

Lazio's recipe
Ingredients
600 grams (21 ounces) of spaghetti
50 grams (1.75 ounces) of butter
3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
6 unsalted anchovy fillets, crushed into a paste (omit anchovies for Neapolitan version)
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
200 grams (7 ounces) of black olives, pitted and chopped
1 tablespoon of salted capers, washed well and coarsly chopped
1 to 3 small dried chili peppers, chopped (optional)
600 grams (21 ounces) plum tomatoes, peeled and puréed
1 tablespoon of chopped parsley
salt

Procedure
Put the following in a skillet: butter, olive oil, garlic and anchovy paste.
Before the garlic browns, add the olives, capers, tomato sauce and chili peppers.
Add two to three pinches of salt, mixing at high heat.
Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti in salt water (at least 4 quarts of water per pound of spaghetti being cooked). Strain it when it's al dente. Place it in a large serving bowl and coat it with sauce. Then sprinkle it with chopped parsley.
Mix and serve hot.

I'd show you a picture but ...

If you like delicious food, you might want to grow your own, but according to this news article it is illegal to do so in Oak Park, Michigan. You can grow grass that will never even be harvested for animal fodder, but not vegetables. I'd rather see people jailed for expending resources and applying pesticides and fertilizers to raise, harvest and discard weekly crops of useless lawn grass.

Oil Exploration

2011-07-22T00:00:00.002Z

I wake up in the middle of night for no particular reason. Probably a noise in the strange hotel room. I take this opportunity to check the GFA. It looks bad, not bad for normal pilots, but bad for high altitude photo flights. I also check NOTAMs for the areas we want to work. There's an easy thirty minutes worth of firefighting areas, temporary military operations areas and airways changes to transcribe. Does anyone amend their charts with all the changeover point amendments and MEA gaps? Gah, why do I set myself up to let company do this to me with so little preparation time before reporting?

One of the issues is a NOTAMed expansion of military airspace. Wait a sec. It's June. It's the time of year for Operation Maple Flag. Why am I always caught operating in northeastern Alberta during Maple Flag? It's an international air force games week hosted by Canada, because we have these vast swathes of airspace hardly anyone is using, and because it's always "mess up Aviatrix with the crazy NOTAMs" week around here. The NOTAMs actually aren't that bad, and then a little Googling reveals why. Maple Flag is cancelled this year because our forces are stretched thin overseas. It's not unprecedented. It was cancelled in 1990 when we were overextended in Bosnia, too. Man, Bosnia was a long time ago. I hope we did some good there and that people's lives are better as a result.

I go back to sleep and then I'm woken at 6 a.m. to be told we're not flying today. Joy. I get up anyway and try to get ahead on the work. My flight planning software is hung again. "Windows is checking for a solution to the problem." Has anyone ever had Windows find a solution to the problem? A guilty note to two different people who have sent me flight planning software to beta test: I really do need better software and I really did intend to use it, but even though the front end load of installing it and learning to use it would probably be amortized by a few sessions of waiting for this one to finish crashing or having to hand code a waypoint for an airport it's never heard of (how can it not know where Moose Jaw is?), I stick with the devil I know. A personality flaw perhaps.

I'm supposed to plan a flight in the "Christian Lake" area, but as far as I can tell, Christian Lake is a moody-looking male model. You can Google him if you like that sort of thing. It must go by a different name locally.

I call back the armed forces unit that controls the airspace I want to go play in. I get transferred and am soon talking to the gentleman who actually wrote the notation I'm reading on the chart, and as he discusses it I realize that I misread it. I'm so used to seeing things that say XXXXZ-YYYYZ MON-SAT that I didn't notice that this one says 1400Z MON-0100Z SAT, O/T by NOTAM. In other words rather than being active days Monday through Saturday, it's active day and night from Monday morning to Friday evening. Friday evening is Saturday morning in UTC. So we're good on Saturday and Sunday. But what about weekdays, if we need it?

During the week, the officer tells me, that airspace is occupied by "25 year olds with fighter jets". He says, "You couldn't pay me to fly there on a weekday." He is kind, friendly and polite, but also forceful, authoritative and knowledgeable. Again I admire the training that puts him there. Apparently it also equips a man to be a sharp dresser, in the absense of a savvy sister or a gay best friend.

I tell him I was told specifically that we had permission to operate in the restricted area, does he have any idea how that might be registered. I can pretty much see him shake his head over the telephone. "I wish I could give you permission to do that, but it's not safe." I convey this back to company, explaining that it's not that I don't trust them or the client to have obtained permission, but clearly this gentleman is the one in charge and he says it's neither safe nor authorized, so I'm not going. Tomorrow is the weekend, however, so we can stand down from that confrontation until the work needs to be done on a weekday. We decide to relocate to the nearest airport to the work, so we can get it done more efficiently tomorrow.

We get a taxi back to the airport and the operator asks about the drunk driver going off the road, just to give another person the opportunity to describe the excitement, and to hear how much the story varies from person to person. The described spot is the same, but this time the marks on the embankment are from hauling the car out, and the car went over into the ditch from the other side, where there is concrete.

The airplane needs some more oil. I'm down to my last couple of quarts, and I will need more before the weekend. I looked for a case to put on board before we left home, but we were out, and it was too early in the morning to buy one. The CFS says "All" grades of aviation oil are available here, but the fueller says they don't sell oil. There are a couple of airports along our route of flight that also list oil, so I ask the operator--he's a licenced pilot and has a company cellphone--to call and confirm. I don't know why I didn't just borrow his phone. It's almost comical watching him learn what I know about the telephone numbers listed for "airport operator" in the CFS: many of them connect to city hall, leaving you talking to a receptionist who has no idea about the airport. You have to ask for a number for an airport manager, and often there isn't really one. City mowing crews go out there once a week and mow the grass; city paving crews go out there in the spring and seal the pavement cracks in the apron; someone in purchasing goes out to check the levels in the fuel tanks and order more fuel when required and no one knows what to do about the smashed taxiway lights. We must have called five airports, many of which required two or three calls to get someone who could give a definitive answer and none of them could supply us with the oil. Finally I picked one with flight training and lots of general aviation. A detour, but I was sure we could get oil there. "Do you want me to call?" I offer belatedly. He prefers to do it, to finally get some closure on this asking for oil thing. And he gets a definite and friendly yes.

I file a quick flight plan, because the stopover airport is in Edmonton's terminal area and I don't want to have to go through the trouble of figuring out how to get a VFR code another way. I pull numbers out of my hat for how long it will take, and blast off for oil. I get excellent service from Edmonton terminal as always. They are busy and have to cope with traffic ranging from gliders to students to international flights, but they rarely play the "too busy" card and generally help with efficient flights. Terminal competently gives me altitudes I need for a comfortable descent and then hands me off to tower. Tower has a slower airplane in the circuit, but they just move him over to right hand circuits and clear me to a left downwind. I land and then ground asks me what I'm looking for. I name the FBO and indicate unfamiliarity and they give me perfect directions.

There's a taxiway leading into their apron area so I clear the main taxiway, enter and turn around. I must emphasize do this when operating in congested areas: don't go in without a plan to get out, and execute your plan before the environment changes or you can get stuck. We jump out and explain we're the ones looking for oil, only to find that the guy who could sell us the oil has just left. "Left as in left for lunch or as in left for the weekend?" I ask. The fellow isn't sure, but he has the grade of oil we want and he'll hapily sell it to us. We don't have cash, so he takes an IOU. Yeah, aviation is great. People are really like that. Company would have sent him a cheque the same day, except that when the camera operator goes to give the details to the person who writes the cheque, he discovers that the guy with the oil didn't put his name or company on it, just the address. We call back on Monday and get the name, so don't worry, he didn't get stiffed.

We call back ground ready to go, and they give us a different runway, just to keep us out of the way of the students in the circuit. They don't even give us a transponder code, just a take off clearance, so I guess it's not mandatory here anyway, so away we go. Once we're airborne and tower is just about to hand us off to terminal they remember the code. Punch it in (I love love love digital transponders, they save only a few seconds each time, but they are heads down seconds in busy airspace that I can really use for something else), radar identified and over to terminal who give me everything I ask for, even though I change my mind after discovering the first requested altitude is hella bumpy. The operator says he doesn't mind, but let him have one non-miserable flight.

We touch down at destination three minutes after the filed time. Why do I bother doing flight planning properly when I can make up numbers this good without? It's because I've done so much flight planning that I know what the numbers should be, somehow without even knowing how I'm doing it. I love this. I suppose whatever your job is you know things that you can't see a way you could have known, but you know it because you're experienced.

I have been to this airport before, but when I land I feel disoriented, like the apron is on the wrong side. I have no memory of this fuel pump. I look at the CFS and the apron is on the wrong side. Oh crap. Are there two airports at this town and I'm at the wrong one? Exact right time to exact wrong place? No, the larger forestry apron is just more prominent on the CFS diagram and I can hardly see it from here. I didn't fuel last time I was at this airport. And look, there's a familiar terminal behind that jet. It just looks different because there was snow on the ground last time I was here. We call the number in the CFS and the fueller comes out of a building and sells us gas, giving us a heads up that there's no fuel available tomorrow. Good To Know.

I park and then go inside the terminal, grinning as I wait for the operator's reaction. It's ordinary on the outside, but gorgeous on the inside, with comfy chairs, a big screen TV, decorations, like a fancy clubhouse. There are also two other pilots inside, also appreciating his reaction. They are on a hold, having flown some people up for the day to play golf. Round of golf, dinner and drinks and back home. How the other half, or rather other one percent, lives, eh?

Meanwhile we may be joyriding. The forecast is significantly different that when we left, and tomorrow may not be good here either. The operator texts company to see if they want us to go home instead of staying here, so we sit and talk to the pilots D. and C. while we wait for a response. They also didn't know about the one-way airway by Vancouver. D. says he knows of one one-way route, but only because it's where he trained. IFR routing should not be a code based on local knowledge. There should be a definitive list of these things somewhere. We all watch a vampire movie, or maybe a vampire subplot on a daytime TV show, we're not paying too much attention, and then share a cab into town.

The plan was to drop our bags off at a hotel then continue to a restaurant, but our hotel is very slow. One of them is dealing with other customers and the other on the phone. We wait. There's one more person ahead of us, who is slowly dealt with. They have free cookies, so I grab a couple and run them out to our buddies in the cab, telling them it's okay to bail on us if they want, but they aren't in a hurry. We wait. The clerk then comes to us but can't deal with two rooms on one credit card. She turns out to be new and in training, and the trainer goes over what she should do, ever-so-slowly. They will not cut us a break. "Can we just leave our bags here, and pick them up later when the room is ready?" Can they give us the keys and finish the paperwork while we run our bags upstairs? No. No keys until paperwork complete. When I get my room card I bolt upstairs only to discover when I get there that the key doesn't work. Bet she did it on purpose to punish me for being an impatient bitch. Oh well.

The restaurant is okay and we all have a good chat and dinner. They leave first and then when we're done we can't get a cab. Not a single one answers. So we walk about four kilometres back to the hotel. Whatever. Maybe we'll get to take some pictures tomorrow.

Many of you will enjoy following this blog, written by a pilot training under the British system, and shortly to be a Dash-8 FO. He blogs about the kind of day-by-day detail that I do, and gives you a good idea what it's like learning to fly and progressing onward from there. He'll be flying bigger airplanes than I've ever flown by the time he has less time than I had before I was paid to fly anything bigger than a C172. I explained to him that I hate him, but it's not his fault.

Carmageddon

2011-07-21T00:00:00.173Z

The public works folk in California closed down a very busy section of the I-405 for a weekend, and the predicted resulting traffic snarls were termed Carmaggeddon by the media. This merits a blog post here because air carrier JetBlue seized the opportunity to get some publicity, by advertising four dollar flights between the Bob Hope Airport at Burbank and Daugherty Field at Long Beach: opposite ends of the closed section of highway. The flight distance direct is 30 miles, but the flight was blocked at 45 minutes to allow time for taxiing and manoeuvring.

A local cycling club decided to challenge the airline to a race, and JetBlue took up the gauntlet. The challenge for the competitors was to get from a North Hollywood intersection (Burbank is the Hollywood airport), to the aquarium in Long Beach. Passengers had to drive to the BUR airport, park, check in an hour before the flight, clear security, board, take the flight and then cab to the aquarium. Cyclists just had to ride the whole way.

Here's the route filed (pale dashed) and flown (green) by the JetBlue A320. It's a little convoluted, but my sources tell me that was for safety. It's very busy low-level airspace with lots of amateur weekend pilots, so they arranged a route that would keep them in class B (the US equivalent of Canadian class C) airspace the entire way. Everyone in the airspace was required to have a transponder and a clearance, and maintain a constant listening watch with ATC. The airborne portion of the flight lasted only twelve minutes, but not having had to drive to the airport or submit to screening, the cyclists reached the destination about an hour before the airline passengers. Another race participant who took public transit arrived midway between the other two teams.

It all sounds like fun. I've operated out of Burbank (excellent FBO service, restrictive noise abatement regulations and insanely expensive hotels) and driven on I-405, but I found a back road to where I was going that I found more pleasant and interesting, despite having a few traffic lights. If a journey takes the same amount of time in a car or bike, unless the weather is very unpleasant, I usually prefer to take a bike. I don't think I've ever made an aircraft trip that would have been faster by bike, though. Maybe, if I count the times I've waited three days for suitable weather.

What Do You Mean, One Way?

2011-07-19T00:00:00.173Z

All the BC work was done in one fell swoop, and just as well because it's cloudy the next day. I'm flying back to Alberta via a little airport in the north where we have an assignment. It will be an IFR flight to the area and then VFR work in the area, so I must file a composite flight plan, a combination of IFR and VFR. This is allowed for in Canada, because flights leave urban areas IFR then continue VFR to remote destinations or even more needed the reverse, where an aircraft departs a northern area VFR, maybe on amphibious floats off a lake, then flies south to where radar coverage begins, climbs onto an airway and picks up an IFR clearance into a urban area. The box for flight plan type allows four choices: V, I, Y or Z. V is for VFR, I is for IFR and the other two are for composite plans. If the first leg is IFR, the composite plan is a Y, and if the first leg is VFR, the composite plan is a Z. You can switch back and forth more than once during a flight, but the letter still designates the first leg. I remember this because if the legs IFR, VFR are in alphabetical order, then you get the first letter, Y, but if they are in reverse alphabetical (V then I) then you file the last letter of the alphabet, Z. Not terribly clever, but if you have an operational need for composite flight plans it can save you looking it up again.

I filed out eastbound on V304, the closest to going in my direction and then when I ran out of airways pointing in the direction of my destination, and the terrain got a little lower, direct the destination. I picked up my departure clearance, but then before I taxied out ground called back and said that IFR flight planning wanted to talk to me. I have, apparently, filed eastbound on a one-way airway. Weird. I don't remember those from any part of my flight training. There is nothing I saw on the chart on the chart to indicate that it is westbound only. I ask the IFR flight planning guy, who reroutes me around to the south, how I should have known. He says I should have consulted the preferred routes in the CFS.

Now that makes no sense. If I am going between two centres that get a lot of traffic, or if I'm generally going in the direction someone on such a trip would take, I consult the preferred routes. But there isn't even an airway going to or in the direction of my destination. You'd have to be psychic to divine that V304 was not for use of eastbound traffic just from the fact that it wasn't the preferred route to Calgary or Edmonton. I accept my amended, detouring clearance and depart as advised, accepting vectors all over the place before finally being cleared direct to "maintain one fife tousand while in controlled airspace." You have to read back the "while in controlled airspace" part too, I guess to acknowledge that you are heading out into the great green beyond. (Canadian IFR charts colour regions of uncontrolled airspace green on the charts).

I have two radios on board, but one of them I have been advised not to transmit on, because ATC always complains about the readability. I monitor ATIS on that radio, or monitor the current ATC frequency when I'm using the talking radio to call flight services for something. Every once in a while, maybe two or three times in twenty flights, the receive button for COM1, the listening-only radio, somehow gets activated and I'll be listening to whatever ATIS or other frequency I have up there. I try to unpress the receive button for COM1 but it won't work and I have to reactivate COM2 in order to get it to go away. I guess I must be reaching for something and hitting the wrong button, but I'm never conscious of having done it. Maybe it's because I'm wearing gloves against the cold.

We climb up to altitude and level off over the clouds. I trim out the airplane, set the power up for cruise and finish off the rest of my cruise checks, then get really decadent and put on the autopilot. The autopilot is good not just for giving me a rest from flying, but for freeing up my mind and hands to do other checks. I pull out my pulse oximeter and clip it on the end of my finger. It freaks some people out the first time I offer it, because they assume something that will check their blood oxygen level is going to take their blood, and they don't want to put their finger inside. But it just shines a light through your fingernail and looks at the colour. The problem is that right now it's reading an oxygen saturation level of 79% for me, and that's not right. I have the operator reset my connection to the system and I'm quickly back up into the nineties where I should be. You really can't tell when you're hypoxic until your visions starts to go. It's worse than being drunk, where you usually have a clue. Like being drunk, even if you do notice, you lose the ability to make good decisions about it. As the oxygen mask manual explains, you may decide that you always wanted blue fingernails.

We clear the last of the mountains and reach the Alberta area where we have work to do. I say the magic words "cancelling IFR" and then we're left alone to fly lines under visual flight rules. The operator says the camera is fine, despite our transit through clouds. I don't know why sometimes a single wisp is a threat and at other times half an hour of solid IMC isn't. Maybe it depends on his level of hypoxia. We fly back and forth in really straight lines until that project area has been completely photographed, and I land at a little airport where we can get the fuel pump activation code by giving a credit card number over the phone. We fill up there and I file another flight plan for some higher altitude work. The heater works, but we hardly need it today, both because it's significantly warmer (yay!) and because we're shut down by the daytime cumulus we call popcorn clouds, for their ability to suddenly pop up and cover the area in white spots.

We're right overhead where he wants to land, so I do a shuttle descent, back and forth with tight turns on the ends, like the weft in a loom, because shuttle is named for the instrument a weaver uses to send the weft back and forth through the threads of the warp, to make cloth. Vehicles that go back and forth--be it from the hotel to the airport or from the airport to outer space--are called "shuttles" after the weaver's back and forth shuttle, but the etymology goes full circle because the name of the weaver's shuttle derives from the Old English scytel "a dart, arrow," and from the same root as shoot. The back and forth motion and the turning and the heat makes the operator sick. I feel badly because another human being is miserable, partly attributable to what I am doing, but there is nothing really that I can do, except put the airplane safely on the ground.

Once there, we park at the fuel pumps and then become the centre of attention from two pilots in a King Air 200. They are on one of those missions where you fly your people somewhere and you wait patiently and they are bored enough that two people they haven't met yet is a fascinating diversion. We all share a cab, us to our hotel and them to a café nearby. The cab driver delights in showing us the spot where a drunk driver went off the road at 150 km/h or so. You take your excitement where you can in a small town.

We go shopping and can't find sick bags available, so we improvise with plastic freezer bags tucked into brown paper lunch bags. Tomorrow's mission is in airspace that I'm told we have permission to operate in, but it's marked on the charts as military restricted airspace Monday to Saturday, with hours, other times by NOTAM. I call the number listed in the Designated Airspace Handbook for the controlling agency, and speak to a very polite but unambiguous and emphatic young man who absolutely cannot give me permission to operate there. He's forceful, but not in the least rude. Even as I am frustrated, I am admiring. The Canadian military has taught him this, and this is exactly the way I like to think my country's soldiers are enforcing the rules wherever they are deployed. If you can be this verbally clear without being demeaning, then nobody needs to get shot, but it's also perfectly clear that while this young man lacks the authority to give me permission to cross the line, he does not lack the firepower to stop me from crossing it by any means necessary.

Clipboard security woman, if you remember her from last year, could really use the training this man has received. And I don't just mean that she should be made to take off her silly shoes and march around in the heat or cold for days carrying heavy objects, although I'd be happy to know she was subjected to that, too. She would greatly benefit from training in giving clear definite prohibitions while being perfectly polite and respectful. I would be happy to be that good at it as a captain. I thank the soldier and ask him how I can get in touch with someone who has the authority to give that permission. I have to call back in the morning to get someone. So I will.

I'm not going to mention shuttles for nothing. Did you see this picture showing the same father and son watching the first and last space shuttle launches? It's a little daunting to realize that I've lived through the whole era of the space shuttle. What's next?

Pitt Meadows

2011-07-17T00:00:00.088Z

I'm at an airplane washing station at Pitt Meadows airport near Vancouver. It's nicely designed with a hose on a reel, a water hook-up, a drain, and some really clever metal stanchions around things you shouldn't run into, like the hose area. These stanchions are everywhere: in front of electrical meters, fire hydrants, anything that would normally have poles or pylons to protect it from vehicles and snowploughs, but they are propeller blades. I don't think they are actually propeller blades, unless someone decommissioned a lot of identical, large-propellered airplanes here, but they look just right, complete with manufacturer's stickers. I can't remember if they were Hartzell or McCauley. They just looked right.

The airplane ends up not totally clean, but better. I rewrap the hose on the reel, winding each coil next to its neighbour from to one end to the other in each layer, and then I get lazy near the end and let it wrap more loosely. As I'm putting away the soap, I see a man come up and unroll and reroll my last messy bit. Sorry, man. I can appreciate his need to have every coil perfectly set on the reel. It really does look nice that way and I regret not having done it that way for you myself.

This is not a really big airport, no scheduled flights and just a little terminal with scenic flights, but for some reason it has a giant avionics shop. They sell Lightspeed headsets, the kind I was trying to get when I got the Bose, and they have the new Zulu 2. I try it, but you can wear one and then the other all you want on the ground without really being able to say which is better. You have to go for a flight, preferably a long flight, before you know whether a headset is doing the job well. The logistics of taking one for a test flight are awkward, though, seeing as the next time I take off, I'll probably not land until I'm back in Alberta. I'm pleased with the Bose, so I'll keep it and not start a crazy game of buying extra headsets.

While I'm here, I get a tour of Maxcraft Avionics. It's quite impressive. Good avionics service is hard to get. I've ferried a lot of airplanes with every kind of broken avionics sometimes to more then one airport to try to get them working. I've also done a lot of flights with gaping holes in the panel where avionics had been removed for repair, sent off somewhere. Big doesn't necessarily mean good, but they have the diagnostic equipment, the certification from every manufacturer I can think of and must have a good reputation. The paint jobs on the aircraft in their hangar suggest that they are trusted by the RCMP and Helijet for major refits, and by a private owner with an intercom problem. Aviation electronics can be really hard to get fixed properly; I'm not sure if it's a black art or a science. If these guys are as good as the facility is impressive, then a lot of people will be coming to Pitt Meadows.

One more South Sudan link. The people, men and women, have been at war for twenty-one years and pretty much the only experienced, established institution they have is the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Considering that the median age in Sudan is 18 years and life expectancy 58, over half of South Sudanese have been at war for their entire life, and most soldiers have probably never held another job. The process of demobilizing the army is further confounded by the fact that there are almost no civilian jobs, even if people had the concept of returning to them. I found this article on the reintegration process. It has lots of pictures so you can see what South Sudanese people look and dress like, too.

Whirlwind Tour

2011-07-16T00:00:00.003Z

The weather is good in BC, so I'm checking NOTAMs for a whole list of airports all over the province. It doesn't matter which ones I check, I'll be told to fly to somewhere I didn't check, and once airborne I'll be asked to land somewhere entirely different. I check the major northern Alberta ones like Whitecourt (no issues), Fort Mac (surrounded by forest fires), Slave Lake (surprisingly normal considering what they've gone through), Peace River (unlighted obstructions), Edmonton City Centre (all the approaches are messed up), Calgary (closed taxiways) and Lloydminster (more unlighted obstructions). I'm mostly interested in showstoppers like fuel unavailability or closed runways. The obstructions are typically 300' agl and more than a mile away. Unless it's right on final approach, it's not going to be in my path, and to be honest if something went so wrong that I was at 300' agl and not just under a mile back stabilized on final, I wouldn't have room in my brain to remember where the I end up having to update my NOTAMs after I have put away my computer in the morning, so I call a briefer with my embarrassingly long list of possible landing spots. McBride, Nakusp, Vernon, Squamish, Prince George, Fort St. John, Vancouver, everywhere we might go. The briefer tells me it will take a while because it's difficult to know where the NOTAMs are filed for small aerodromes. "They aren't just listed under the airports?" I ask. Nope. It all depends on what was done in the 1940s. Vernon, for example, was a military training base or something, so although it has no air traffic services, it has its own NOTAM file. Larger aerodromes elsewhere in the province are kept in other aerodrome files. The briefer tracks it all down for me.

We head out across the mountains, VFR this time, because we want to take pictures on the way and passing through cloud gets water on the camera, and might leave streaks on the glass that would show up in the pictures. Around Whitecourt there is a lot of cloud and it's raining, so I try to dodge it all, going way south and even a bit east in an attempt to avoid getting wet. Then I make an attempt to outclimb billowing cumulus. I know where this is going, as every altitude I climb too just shows more tops. They probably can't grow faster than I can climb they way they could when I was in Florida in an ultralight, but it's still silly trying to outclimb them. I go back down below the clouds and work on outlasting them. I know the low ones don't extend that far to the west.

I'll be going through a mountain pass below the clouds and this is something that GPSes with their straight pink (the guys call them "magenta") lines aren't as good at as old-fashioned technology. I have my chart out, folded so I can see Grande Cache and the mountains beyond, just as I see Grande Cache below and just ahead. I have a pencil, and I have an accurate watch. I identify my location on the chart and I mark the time I am there, resetting the directional gyro to the compass and paying close attention to which valley I go down. I can cheat big time because the GPS gives me both terrain and exact lat-long position, but this is the way to do it, so you don't lose track of where you are in identical-looking valleys with very different things at their ends, and so that if you take a wrong turn or encounter adverse weather, you know where you were when things were good and how to get back. And it gives me an excuse to look ahead and anticipate where I will see lakes and rivers around the corners.

We cross the Great Divide, which forms the Alberta-BC border here, and marks the time zone boundary as well as the high point of the mountain range. Our destination was originally Prince George but I've gone far enough south in the avoidance manoeuvre that the valley I've chosen will bring me out just south of McBride. I adjust the range on the GPS to show the operator this. He is surprised to learn that there is an airport at McBride. To him it's just a place that we will take pictures. "Can we land there?" he wants to know.

"Pass me that book."

That book is the manual for the airplane, because when it's not a flight test at an airport with a runway twice as long as I need, I do do my calculations. Not landing distance, but take-off, because "Can we land?" really means, "Can we land and then take off again?" and take-off distance is greater. I look up the airport elevation and then follow the line for the next highest elevation, at the hottest temperature it could possibly be down there, rounding up on the weight and assuming no wind, and there is still plenty of runway available to get out of there. "Yes, we can land."

We do, and the operator double-checks the camera glass, plus we both reset our bladders before taking off and taking pictures. We continue up the valley to Prince George, where we climb up to ten thousand feet or so and take some more pictures. We continue in this fashion, a giant, province-wide game of connect-the-dots that doesn't even draw anything, but wow is it scenic. Fuel is down to a little over an hour remaining as we approach Revelstoke, but I bypass it for one more set of photos. Part of my job is to plan fuel for efficient flight, and that means not always having the happy empty bladder and full fuel tanks that one would if it were a pleasure flight. There's opposite direction traffic at Nakusp, where we're taking pictures of a ski resort next to a lake, or maybe a lake next to a ski resort. We let him go by and then descend for the second set of photos, and then it's off to Vernon to land.

Approaching Vernon, I tune their frequency and hear a skydiving airplane preparing to drop. Argh, that wasn't in the NOTAMs. Closer scrutiny of the chart shows the airport to be in a marked advisory area for continuous daytime parachute activity, so it doesn't need a NOTAM. I advise that I will hold outside the area until the jumpers are on the ground. I'm irritated with myself for not noting this earlier, and it must have come out in my voice as the operator asks me if I'm mad at the drop plane pilot. I'm not. The drop plane pilot is pretty lackadaisical about his meatbombs, assuring me that there's no conflict. I ask how long the drop will take and something about the way he starts the sentence makes me think he's going to say "it depends on whether they remember to open their chutes or not." He doesn't though, just describes the seconds of freefall followed by where they open their chutes. I follow his advice and join a downwind without crossing the field. It's a little close to the runway, because of terrain, so I fly an ugly teardrop through final and back again, then over a big group of trees to the runway. The operator says pilots always come in high here because of the trees.

I backtrack to the apron and shut down behind another airplane at the fuel pumps, then we haul ours up to the pumps and fuel. We're pumping a lot of litres in, and quite a line forms behind us as the pilots who normally take maybe thirty to fifty litres at a time wait for us to fill all the tanks with an order of magnitude more fuel. No one is in too much of a hurry, though. They help us shove the airplane off the pump so the next people can fuel. There's a washroom but no payphone in the terminal, an increasing and annoying trend these days. Cellphones die. Payphones connect. I do succeed in filing a flight plan, pretty much guessing at how long our remaining work will take and where we'll end up, then jump in the airplane and fire it up.

We taxi out and take off straight away, climbing straight out over the lake to avoid the parachutes, and then up a valley to get to altitude before the hills do in this heat. Some photos of a secret lake, and then set course for an Indian reserve. Although we're dodging jagged mountain peaks with no sign of any civilization in sight, the chart tells me that I'm approaching Vancouver's inverted wedding cake airspace and lists a frequency to call Vancouver Centre before I enter Class C. Theoretically there's a number there, written against the violent colours and squiggles of the hypsometric tints and contour lines. I think I need bifocal sunglasses. I call the controller for clearance into the airspace and to advise her of a few photo lines that we'll be flying within the area controlled by Vancouver terminal. She has trouble understanding me at first. It's amazing she receives me at all. Do they have repeating antennae out here in the barren mountains? Wouldn't they just blow down, get covered in snow, or be destroyed by rutting moose and itchy bears? She clears me into the class C, but advises me that there are too many photo aircraft in the area and the mission will not be approved. Grr. Damn damn damn. The sun angle will be too low soon, so we can't wait long. I would have got preapproval this morning before coming but it was hard to predict when we would be here and truth-be-told I had some of today's assignment mixed up with the work we did last time we were here, so I didn't realize those Vancouver area dots were new work and not completed work. Communication: important.

The first valley we're in is below the reaches of Vancouver's airspace, so they can't tell us what we can and can't do. I have to fly up a valley towards mountains while on line, which is a little nerve-wracking because it's difficult to look at terrain and photo dots at the same time. I have to assure myself that there is no risk of CFIT on the line, but I still want to look out the window. We have to take a couple of runs at some lines because it takes a bit of a run-in to get on line and from one direction there isn't room to do that. There's a lot of snow up here still and at least one photo is just an overexposed white blob from the glare of the snow.

The next area has very few lines, and is partly in and partly out of terminal airspace. I get on the first line heading towards the airspace boundary, and then call up terminal for clearance in. Nothing about photo lines, just where I am, my altitude, and where I'm going. No problem. I'm coming down a valley and at an altitude where this is a pretty normal request. The line is complete. I look at the chart and where we need to be next. Now I'm taking advantage of the poor communication I've observed between layers of control in the Vancouver airport. I'm betting this guy has no idea I'm a photo flight that was denied.

"Request to overfly Bowen Island west to east at six thousand."

"That's approved."

The operator is laughing at me, because he sees what I'm doing, and it's working. No pressure though. I can't screw up my casual "overflight" of the island. I have to be right on line, but it's not anywhere any airplane might not be. Finishing that line of photos I ask to continue to the river ahead, and that's approved, too. Sneaky, but done before the sun angle or fuel level got too low or my duty day ended. And then I land. As I roll out I see that it was almost to the minute right on the flight plan, which greatly amuses me, considering where I pulled those numbers from. I have an experienced ... hat.

We barely needed the heater, but it seems to work.

On the subject of pulling things out of body parts, we have the latest thing to be paranoid about: surgically implanted explosives. Perhaps I am glad I'm not going through the secure side of airports much these days. I wonder what proportion of the travelling public has had surgery recently enough to raise TSA suspicions. If the explosive device were disguised in a breast implant as they suggest, the incision could be hidden under the breast where it would take a very thorough search to find it, especially if one covered the mark with that make up putty and made it look like an old implant incision.

Metaphors for Life

2011-07-15T00:00:00.039Z

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

Everybody Counts

2011-07-14T00:00:00.008Z

It's a Census year in Canada, all the ones ending in 1 are, I believe. June was the census month, and my household received two copies of the official form, one addressed to the basement. There's no basement, not even a crawl space you could hide a body in. Normal people just throw out an extra form like that. But me, I'm not normal people. It says it has to be filled out, by law. I can't just throw it in the recycling. I call the number on the form. The woman says I only have to do one.

"So I can do two for fun?" I ask, because that's what sort of idiot I am.

"If you want to." Good grief. How the heck are we going to count who lives here, if that's the advice they give? But I do do two, but by the electronic method. I log into the website and enter the code from the form, and then enter an accurate count of who actually lives here. For the second form I enter zero in the number field. No one lives in the non-existent basement. Why do I do this? I expect it to reject it, and I enjoy feeling superior to computers, and being stupidly accurate. To my surprise the site has a page ready for my response, with half a dozen reasonable suggestions for why there might be zero people at an address. I pick "does not exist or apartment has been merged with main dwelling," which perfectly describes the situation.

I'm impressed. Now you can see I'm not cranky about all questionnaires. Just the vast majority of poorly written ones. My only complaint is that they required every person in the household to be classified as either male or female, no other option. Requiring one or the other has caused pain and persecution for a lot of people. Biology isn't always binary, but boxes on forms and societal pressure cause people to be physically forced into one box or the other shortly after birth, even when they aren't. The expectation and the forced compliance are so pervasive that a lot of people don't even know that not everyone is born into one of the boxes. Everyone wants to know if it's a boy or a girl, but for one in every 1500 to 2000 births in North America, a specialist is called in to decide which box the baby goes into, often via surgical alteration. And although most people have little difficulty identifying with one sex or the other, one in a hundred people has a body that differs from the standard minimum equipment list for their placarded gender. If people are equally represented in the blogosphere as in the delivery room, that's about ten pageviews a day on this blog. Hello ten people, who possibly don't all even know that your bits don't match the spec! You count too.

SouvenAIRs

2011-07-13T00:00:00.091Z

Company has rush-ordered a new heater, we're almost due for scheduled maintenance, and the weather is turning bad all over the province, and it's already bad in the neighbouring ones. It's a rare convergence of circumstances that suggest so strongly that we fly the airplane back to base, so we check out of yet another hotel and fly home VFR.

The co-owner welcomes us in, then I tidy up the airplane. I don't track down a vacuum cleaner before closing time, but I do neaten up the seatbelts, pick all the muffin crumbs out of the carpet, find my headset bag and stow my headset in it, and refold all the charts properly and sort them all back neatly in the racks where they can be reached for the next flight. When I'm travelling with an airplane, a lot of garbage ends up in locker where I store cleaning supplies. That's because I'll be preflighting, open that locker to get out a cloth and 210 spray (a type of plastic polish for airplane windshields), clean the windows, and toss the spray bottle and used wipe back in. Then I'll check the oil, get out a funnel and a couple of litres of oil. They're actually 946 mL, a quarter of a US gallon: that's the standard size all over North America, and it looks like even in Europe, maybe because the crankcases on American-made airplanes hold an even number of US quarts. Anyway, we call them litres, even though they aren't. I'll add the required oil, then when I get tired of waiting for the last drips to come out of the bottle into the crankcase, I put the lid back on the bottle tightly, and toss the bottle in the locker with the funnel and the other empties. Empty bottles don't weight much and the home airport has some kind of environmental disposal for them, so rather than run around a strange apron looking for a FOD bin, I haul them all home.

As I do so, I'm always amused by the way the bulging and squashed sides of the various bottles tell the story of the trip. Putting the cap on tightly seals in those few millilitres that didn't drip out while the bottle was inverted over the crankcase, but mostly what it seals in is air. Air at the pressure of the aerodrome where I added the oil. If it's a sea level airport, the sides of the bottle bulge out at higher elevations. If it's a mountain airport, pressure at a lower elevation crushes the bottle. I'm easily amused.

I clean things up best I can, report the minor snags (right engine has almost double the oil consumption to the left, noticeable split in the throttles to maintain equal manifold pressure above 10,000', and some hydraulic seepage). Then I am "released" from call for a few days. This will give me time to get my camera repaired, take my friend's kids to the amusement park as I've been promising for so long, and do my laundry.

Back soon with clean underwear!

---

On the subject of this stun gun, it's interesting to see that the seatback pockets are the same security hole for JetBlue as they were for Victory Airways. Whenever we'd boarded with something that wouldn't get through security, but we were going south, we'd pop it in the seatback pocket, get off and go through security and have it waiting for us back on board. CATSA never swept the airplane itself.

South Sudan Embarks on Nationhood

2011-07-12T00:00:00.092Z

I only heard about the new country of South Sudan on July 9th, the day it declared independence and haven't had time to write about them until now. The United Nations should be recognizing them as an official world country in the next couple of days. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight million people

In some places, including on the government website the name of the country is written Southern Sudan, but the official seal styles it as the Republic of South Sudan. I think the Southern Sudan references are from material describing the area before independence. They have a flag, a national animal (the secretary bird), a coat of arms, a national anthem (link plays music), a capital city (Juba) and a president. They're still using the currency and postage stamps of their northern neighbour, so I think getting mail through to South Sudan is going to be a bit like communicating with a friend when you only have the mailing address of her ex. And they've fought for twenty years over the divorce.

They say that a what a country really needs to be official is a sports team, a beer and an airline. It looks like South Sudan is getting right on that. They already have a football team, and it's even played a match already. They lost 3-1 to Kenya but it's not an offical result as they are still waiting on FIFA membership. I thought that a beer would be a no-brainer but they have a good excuse for not having one quite yet. The construction of their new brewery is a big deal because under the former Muslim regime, alcoholic beverages were outlawed. And they even have the beginnings of an airline , complete with a webpage that doesn't actually link to a booking database, just a form. The date of the maiden flight has not yet been announced, but Juba does have an airport with a paved runway (13-31), which was apparently closed on Independence Day but airlines didn't receive a NOTAM, possibly because of that communications via Khartoum thing. The Republic of South Sudan will have to join ICAO, at which point I suspect it will go straight on the list of countries in which one should avoid boarding an airplane at all costs. They're a very poor state with terribly low education and healthcare.

I met a pilot/AME recently who says he started the war in the Sudan. He was there years ago, when the Sudan had nothing of value to the rest of the world, and nothing to fight over internally but camels and goats. He was there surveying for oil. He also made a positive contribution to the national infrastructure because they discovered that he could fix things. He would call for taxi clearance at the airport and then have the clearance rescinded because the airport firetruck wasn't working. They possibly were looking for a bribe the first time, but he solved the problem by restoring the firetruck to working order, and after that there was always something that needed fixing.

I hope South Sudan gets what needs fixing fixed faster than it gets itself into new conflicts and problems. I don't suppose there's anyone reading this blog from there. Few in that country can read let alone have access to communication technology, but if you are, know that I wish your new country well. South Sudan has apparently applied for the internet country code .ss but a regime that collapsed sixty years ago has such a lock on those letters in some people's minds that it may be denied.

P.S. Beda Otwari, the Director of Administration and Human Resources for Southern Sudan Airlines is a Canadian.

Cold

2011-07-11T00:00:00.114Z

There seems to be a rule that the amount of time you are forced to stay in a place is inversely proportional to the quality of the hotel, and it rained hard overnight, so I was dreading this morning's weather, but the day dawns flyable. With the authority my company notifies us is newly vested in me, I file an IFR photo flight plan by faxing it into the appropriate number. I call Edmonton IFR data back to make sure the plan went through and everything is filed according to their standards. I am planning a VFR departure, and don't anticipate being able to make radio contact on the ground, so I ask them what frequency I should contact them on airborne. The specialist says, "Just do what you normally do."

"I've never been here in my life. There is no normal." I can look up a frequency and use that, but when I do that it's rarely the frequency they actually want me on, so why not give it to me on the phone now and spare some space on the radios. No one seems to know what to do with an aircraft that is going to pop up here wanting IFR. They had better get on that if they want the UFOs to feel welcome around here. Not everyone has intimate local knowledge.

There are puddles on the apron and the operator doesn't want anything splashed on the camera, so we drag the airplane over to the taxiway and do the run-up there. There's no one around to block. Run-up complete, I taxi out, take off, and when I'm clear of the aerodrome area I call ATC on the frequency I did finally manage to talk them out of. They give me clearance up to 16,000', and I have a ways to go, so I make it a leisurely cruise climb, cowl flaps a little bit open, and a medium power setting. As we approach the photo area they clear me higher until we're cleared all the way to our working altitude: "flight level 190 blocking 210" which means that instead of being assigned one altitude which we have to maintain, like everyone else, we have been given a block of altitudes, everything between 19,000' and 21,000' (as indicated with the altimeter set to 29.92"). This gives us freedom to fly at an altitude like 19,100' on one line and 20,300' on the next. Its cool. Actually, it's cold. The OAT is around -23C, and with each passing hour the inside of the airplane gets colder.

I'm wearing a t-shirt, work pants, a hooded sweatshirt, a winter coat, leather gloves and a baseball cap, plus of course my twelve hundred dollar electric earmuffs. My ears aren't cold. I just have running shoes on, because luggage space is limited so I just brought one pair of shoes for both working out and working. My toes are cold. My toes are probably the coldest part. I'm sitting pretty still, just thumbs and forefingers on the yoke, making the slight movements necessary to maintain my course from dot to dot.

I'm level just under FL210. The extra few hundred feet has dropped the outside air temperature to -27C. The air traffic controller asks me if I'm planning on making any turns soon. I can't read the tiny print at the edge of the poorly designed screen telling me the distance remaining on my line , but the operator is practiced at feeding me the answer to such questions. He answers and I relay the answer to ATC. "Next turn in eighteen miles." The controller tells me I may see a Bombardier jet passing. I don't, because I see almost nothing but my dots, but a few moments later there's a call from a Jazz pilot.

"Edmonton, what was that we just passed?"

The controller tells him. There's a pause, just long enough for two guys in the front of a jet to look at each other incredulously and laugh.

"What's it doing up here?" asks the Jazz pilot.

"Taking pictures," says the controller matter-of-factly. The effect on the Jazz pilots of seeing us up here must be like passing a kid on a Big Wheel tricycle on the Autobahn.

Laughing at that keeps us warm for a while. The last few lines we have to fly take us towards an area of cloud. It's more difficult to judge distance to cloud up here, I find. I guess the cues I've learned subconsciously are different, or perhaps it's because I'm so far from the ground that I can't judge them well. I thought there was no way we would get a couple of them, but the operator tells me to keep flying, and we finish both lines before reaching cloud. The next one is over cloud, though, and cloud is encroaching everywhere else, so I request descent for landing.

I bank away from the cloud and with my clearance reduce the power an inch and trim nose down for a good rate of descent. The operator reports fuel coming out of the left outboard tank. There's not all that much fuel left onboard the airplane at this point, so no reason for it to be coming out an overflow. I checked all the caps and they were all secure, with no fuel slopped in the area between the sealed cap and the streamlining flap, but I hypothesize thinks about air pressure changes burping some fuel out of a cap vent early in the flight and now that I'm banking the fuel between the cap and flap is leaking out. He says it's more than that, that he can see it as clearly blue and spraying behind us off the trailing edge of the wing. I can't see it. There's really nothing I can do about it now anyway. I continue my descent through 12,500'. Centre hands me off to the FSS and I cancel IFR with them, then continue my descent, shuttling above the aerodrome. I feel like a student pilot who doesn't do the math properly to plan a cruise descent, but at my altitude I was too close to the aerodrome to land without circling overhead, even at the highest safe descent rate.

I'm passing what would be close to procedure turn altitude when suddenly all the cockpit instruments fog over. The cold-soaked airplane has descended into warm moist air and the moisture condenses on the instrument faces like the 'sweat' you see on a cold beer on a hot day. That is something to remember should I ever be descending in IMC in such conditions. How is this not commonly a safety hazard? I guess non-pressurized aircraft rarely descend from ambient temperatures of -27 to +5 in under ten minutes, and I wouldn't have been rocking the 2000 fpm descent rate in IMC. I look out the window and land the airplane.

On the ground we shut down at the fuel pumps and I extricate myself from my headset, breathing tube, seatbelt, clipboard and yoke, then climb out of the airplane. I do a little "my toes are cold!" dance to warm them up again and tiptoe out to that outboard tank. The outer flap is secure. It's dry underneath, and the inner plug is absolutely secure, perhaps tighter than necessary. There is no damage anywhere to the wing, tank vent or any visible confirmation that fuel was streaming out. I record the exact quantity of fuel taken on board for each tank as it is fuelled and discover a 2L discrepancy between sides, with the leaking side taking less fuel, meaning it was slightly fuller to begin with. Over five hours a couple of liters difference is negligible anyway. Shrug. I'll keep an eye on it. Another theory is that the rubber seal shrank in the cold and fuel leaked into the inter cap area that way. The airplane's published service ceiling is 30,000', so you'd think it could handle summer temperatures at 21,000'. Hmm. I haven't come across a minimum operating temperature. There's a project for me, that will take precedence over writing more on this blog entry.

My feet are warm now.

Last Post

2011-07-10T00:00:00.013Z

I wrote this not knowing if it was a last blog entry I would never post, or the first blog entry in a new chapter of my blog. Today someone, two people actually, sent me Google+ invites. I thought "Eh, what could it hurt? I might as well try this out." I clicked through on one of them and started filling out the form. I never give my actual birthdate to fun services online, because that's part of the verification information for real services like banking. I give a fake birthdate that I can easily remember. For this account I decided to give the memorable date of my first flying lesson.

Immediately Google seized on this information and determined me underage. I haven't been flying for eighteen years, and apparently you have to be eighteen years old to author a blog. The screen said Google would delete my blog in twenty-nine days if I did not send them government-issued ID demonstrating that I am over eighteen. Unfortunately Aviatrix Anon does not have government-issued ID, so I knew that unless I had a friend at Google, that would be the end of my blog.

I knew that I probably did have a friend at Google, or at least a friend of a friend, but my blog contact list is on Gmail, and Google locked not only the blog, but the Gmail account. Of course that means they also locked the back-up Cockpit Conversation Redirection blog, my account through which I could access Google Help, and even my ability to comment identifiably on other blogs. I sent a fax to the Google people explaining the situation, then plea-for-help e-mail to a few bloggers with common traffic, whose e-mails I happened to have on my home account, and then I waited.

This paragraph was going to contain either gratitude to the person or persons who helped me out, or a fond farewell to all the people who have read and commented on the blog, and even met me in person, over the years. If the blog was deleted, I wasn't going to start a new one. It's too much to lose and try to start over.

While waiting for someone at Google to get back to me one way or another, I decided to try the other offered means of age verification, the credit card. I don't have a credit card with the name Aviatrix Anon on it, either, but maybe they wouldn't check. Seeing as you can get a credit card for your cat or dog and buy preloaded credit cards at the grocery store checkout, I thought it was only scammer porn sites that professed to use credit cards for ID verification, but I decided my blog was worth thirty United States cents, and Google probably wasn't running a credit card scam. I gave Google my credit card information and instantly my Blogger account was restored. Thirty cents is a cheaper bribe than I thought I'd need. Most of you probably never noticed the interruption.

So kids, if you want a blog, lie about your age. Grownups, lie about your age if you will, but make sure you don't take too much off. Either way, any credit card will do to fix your error.

I can't really recommend Google Plus, but if you use other Google services with the identity you use to connect to Google Plus, please make sure you tell it you are over eighteen.

Unexpected Landing Spot

2011-07-09T00:00:00.001Z

The next day I go to work is kind of a grand tour of the province, as we do a few lines here and a few lines there, then keep moving on to the next patch, usually without landing in between. It's odd having the feeling of having been to Calgary (more golf courses!) and Lloydminster without landing either place. Fortunately we were "on a company note" which means that company, not Nav Canada is responsible for knowing where we are, so I'm not filing a fully fictional flight plan.

One of the assignments is photographing some really small communities, little groups of six houses next to a lake, here and there. The job refers to these communities as "hamlets." Perhaps they have an association or are administered by one government branch which needs records of their growth, agriculture or nude sunbathing activity. Mine is not to question why. Mine is just to fly in really straight lines. To turn or not to turn. Tis nobler in the airplane to suffer the outrageous fortune of these clouds always being in the wrong place. When you put the word "Hamlet" on a piece of paper in front of me and then have me stare at dots for a few hours, it gives me licence to misquote Shakespeare. (Or Tennyson, for those of you about to protest). I can misquote whomever I please, but I'll quote Shakespeare more often whenever you say "hamlet." I'm actually better with MacBeth than Hamlet, and who could resist addressing the dots like Lady MacBeth. "What will this dot ne'er be green?" You get the idea. The camera operator probably pulled out his headset plugs. He does that sometimes. He claims it's because ATC keeps interrupting his iTunes.

We complete the low level hamlet work and climb for some higher altitude work, but clouds cover the target area and we are forced to abort. "Lloydminster?" I ask, turning to a heading that will allow a descent clear of clouds, and reaching for the GPS "direct-to" button. The operator asks for the chart before he decides. He passes it back to me, asking why it says "private" next to the airport he likes. I look. "It means the nearby NDB is private, not run by Nav Canada, so may not be monitored." Makes no difference to us.

I've never heard of the aerodrome he wants to use. I open the CFS and determine that it has sufficient runway, 100LL fuel and is close to the associated community. I call flight services to check NOTAMs and they have nothing concerning to tell me, so that's our new destination. It's getting a little bumpy with the afternoon, and as I descend towards the destination, so it's a relief when we pass over a lake. It's a very attractive lake, too, with beaches where my operator specifies which drinks with umbrellas in he will be ordering. I determine the wind from ground signs and verify with the windsock as I join downwind. It's quite strong, and pretty much across the runway, but we know from High River that this airplane is good at these. Prelanding checks complete, quite a crab gives way in the flare to quite a slip, and then I put down the wheels, into wind, out of wind, nosewheel, one after another.

I taxi up to the pumps and look at its elaborate key system. I pull out the CFS and see two letters at the end of the services entry that I didn't notice in the air. PN Stands for Prior Notice. I have a moment of "oh shit," but as I read the entry more closely I can see that the fuel pumps are managed by a flying club, and multiple members' phone numbers are given in the entry. We can give prior notice now that we would like some fuel sometime between now and tomorrow morning, and that should be enough. The operator calls the first number in the book, and gets a woman who says, "He just left. I think he went to the airport." Couldn't be better. "He" turns up shortly to mow the grass, and sells us some avgas.

He tells us where we can park for the night and confirms that there are cabs available "but don't call Northern if you can help it." I put the airplane away and secure the controls with a seatbelt. There are three cab companies listed in the little pilot shack at the edge of the apron. One of the numbers is not in service and the second goes to voice mail that says simply "Leave a message" -- no personal or company name. The third is Northern. They answer, with lots of talking in the background, and say they'll be here.

It's not the world's cleanest cab and the cab driver's perhaps daughter, perhaps girlfriend is along for the ride, but the driver is sober and knows his way around. He says it's not a big town, but it serves a big area. It's the biggest place in a long ways so everyone comes here for supplies. He said there were over 14,000' people from various First Nations bands, and he didn't know how many non-natives. I ask if they are mainly Cree people around here. He doesn't answer, but the passenger says she is half-Cree, half-Scottish. That's about as Canadian as it gets.

We ask for the Super-8. In the US, the Super-8 can be pretty sketchy, but in Canada they have a pretty reliable standard. You're rarely wowed by a Super-8, but very rarely have real problems at one either. We drive into town and down the main street. It's one of those places that few chains have hit yet. We pass a Mexican restaurant that looks good, a couple of Chinese restaurants, and then reach the new end of town where the Super-8 and the Boston Pizza are. I unload our gear while the operator pays, and carry it into the lobby. It looks fantastic. But they're full.

Back into the cab, and back uptown to the next place, a motel, not great looking on the outside, but nicer when I go inside. Also full. Back in the cab to the motel next to the Mexican restaurant. They have rooms, and the guy in the check in area is cheerful and friendly. We get big old fashioned keys to open our doors. Do I need to describe the motel room beyond, "The towels are brown"? It's one night. I hope. I check the weather. Should be good for the morning. I e-mail the operator through the wall that I'm going out for a walk. Arbitrarily, I turn right, and wander a block or so up the street. It's 50th Street, of course, at about 53rd Avenue. A few blocks from the centre of town. There's some sort of monument with flags across the street, so I cross over when it's clear. In small towns you have to take your time and savour what entertainment there might be. The first monument I read is to the Cree, who first lived here, who helped shape the prairies through annual fire setting, and who were very helpful to the early European explorers, and of course who still live here. The next monument is to the Winnipeg trail, once an extremely important part of the local culture, partially eclipsed by the railroad and now obliterated by the highway, but still something worth remembering. I'm getting the flavour of the town here.

And then I read the next plaque over. "Republic of St. Paul" it starts. The next bit says, "Stargate Alpha," but I'm partly anesthetized from reading historic plaques and I get a few words further before it sinks in. Wait, what?

Republic of St. Paul
~~*~~ Stargate Alpha ~~*~~
The area under the world's first UFO Landing Pad was designated international by the town of St. Paul as a symbol of our faith that mankind will maintain the outer universe free from national wars and strife. That future travel in space will be safe for all intergalactic beings. All visitors from Earth and otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the town of St. Paul.

There's a round, raised concrete platform behind the plaques, with steps going up to it, and ailings all decorated in ultramodern 1960s designs. The effect is like finding the sun while spelunking. Here I am with my capacity-for-amusement circuits tuned to the highest possible sensitivity, seeking to wring entertainment out of small town commemorative plaques. And then BLAM, the world hits me with a UFO landing pad. It's as if I were in a place I expected to be exciting and a UFO landed beside me. There is a sort of UFO beside the landing pad. A bridge connects it to the local tourist information centre, built to look like the stereotypical flying saucer. It's even open, and I buy a dozen postcards, and get a restaurant recommendation.

On the way back to the motel I notice that the landing pad is at the corner of 50th and Galaxy Avenue, and I'm staying in the Galaxy Motel. I wonder if aliens like brown towels.

The Winners Are ...

2011-07-07T00:00:00.006Z

And now, after much legitimate waiting because I was busy and just a bit of deliberate tantalizing because it's fun, are the results of the Nosewheel Roulette game.

Here is the nosewheel during my preflight inspection, on the ground at an airport expereinced readers may recognize. I actually marked the nosewheel the night before, after parking, in case I was in a hurry the next day, because I had been that day and forgot to do it on the first appropriate flight. Yes, that may not be exactly at bottom dead centre. I had intended to use a plumb bob, but the wind was howling, so that wouldn't have done any good, and I didn't bring a spirit level.

Here is the nosewheel after flight, parked in almost the same place, as we returned to the departure airport that day. It's actually both before and after fuelling, because there was an airplane parked at the avgas pumps when I arrived. I contemplated parking behind it, but that would have blocked the Jet pump, and a helicopter might have needed fuel while I was waiting. So without shutting down I taxied from the runway, to the pumps, to parking, then did a little indecisive twirl, then finally shut down where you see it.

I couldn't find my tailor's tape, the cloth measuring tape I originally used to determine the circumference, but as you can see the mark ended up fairly close to all the way around, and the wind was blowing even harder than the day before, which kept tearing the masking tape I was going to use as an intermediate, so I measured backwards from the bottom and then subtracted that from 128 to find the winning number. I measured two ways, once by cutting a piece of masking tape the right length, intending to save it until I found a ruler, but then I remembered there was a measuring scale on the edge of the chart magnifier I keep on my clipboard. I measured the masking tape with that, then used the flexible measuring tape to measure the distance directly, and both came up with ten centimetres, giving a final position of 118 cm clockwise from the bottom.

(In answer to the valid question on the original post, regarding why clockwise around the left side of the wheel: because that's what first occurred to me. I approach the airplane from the left, like it was a horse, so it doesn't get spooked, I guess, and clockwise seems like the normal way to go. True, it's not the direction the wheel rolls, but I didn't think that closely about it before making the rules).

Speaking of rules, I decided not to disqualify anyone for not following them, except that people who didn't post a guess in the comments didn't get entered at all. You'd be astonished by the number of ways people managed to not follow the instruction: "Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses." Another time I may automate the process, so be warned. Here are your winners.

No one got the exact correct answer, but Alex guessed one away (by avoiding the popular low numbers and picking the stealth fighter) at 117 cm and leisuresuitwally three away at 115 cm. I have already sent their addresses to SunglassesShop.com so their prizes are on the way. One of the comments I saw implied that a reader thought I was buying the sunglasses, so I'll reiterate that SunglassesShop.com is donating the sunglasses in return for the mention on the blog. They are sending me a pair, too. I haven't received mine yet, due to a postal strike that only just ended, so winners, please let me know that you receive yours. I will happily post photos of winners wearing or more anonymously displaying their prizes, if they care to send them to me.

Meanwhile, Don, who was certain 55 would not win, was absolutely correct. It was the furthest possible number from winning, so Don won the booby prize, the Towel of Questionable Taste. I will send it to him unless he elects to cede it to one of the people vying for it in the comments, roll it over for a future contest, or sponsor a dedicated blog entry where I burn the thing. And no, Don, you don't get to see what it looks like before you decide. It will be dispatched according to your instructions, when I next get home so I can wrap and address it.

Nosewheel Roulette Spreadsheet

2011-07-06T00:00:00.025Z

I have completed the nosewheel roulette flight and computed the results, but just to keep things both geeky and suspenseful around here, I will first present my computations for debugging and critique.

I filled a spreadsheet (Open Office - I told you we were going to be geeky) column (column A) with the numbers 0 to 128. (Yes, the numbers should only go to 127, but someone picked 128. Because a wheel is round, that wraps him back to zero, but I didn't put him in the zero box because it was a test of my algorithm having it there).

In the next column (B) of the spreadsheet I put an x next to all the numbers that were spoken for by someone, based on the posted comments. In the next column I put something else I ended up ignoring and in the final column (D), I calculated the distance each guess was from the actual by taking the lesser of:
- the difference between the guess and the answer
AND
- 128 minus the difference between the guess and the answer.

In other words, I measured the shorter distance around the wheel between your guess and the actual final position. If the difference between your guess and the answer was greater than 64, you're getting closer to the answer round the other way.

In the spreadsheet this formula was:
=IF(B4="x";MIN(ABS(F$3-A4);128-(ABS(F$3-A4))))
(There's probably a neater way to do that with modular arithmetic, but I was watching TV at the time and my brain kept resetting).

In the formula, B is the column that has an x to indicate that the number is spoken for, F$3 is the measured answer, and A4 is the guess in row 4. I copied this formula down the whole column (the spreadshhet automatically increments A4 for each row). And then finally I sorted the spreadsheet row-by-row on value in column D, the result of that formula.

I'll leave this overnight for you to find any glaring errors or controversies, before I present the results, your SunglassesShop.com sunglasses winners, and the booby towel designee.

When FL180 Doesn't Exist

2011-07-05T00:00:00.045Z

I mentioned earlier an air traffic controller saying that FL180 didn't exist today, and that I would explain later. It's later now. Altimeters work based on air pressure changes with altitude, so they need a way to compensate for air pressure changes that are not associated with altitude change. So they have a calibration factor, called the QNH in Europe and the altimeter setting in North America, that you reset according to ATC instructions as you go from place to place. Once you get high enough that you are over all the mountains and short-range traffic, the benefit of adjusting for local changes in air pressure becomes less in comparison to the benefit of not having to keep changing your altimeter setting all the time, so above that altitude, the transition level, you use the standard altimeter setting everywhere.

In non-arctic Canada, the transition level is 18,000'/FL180. That means that we fly using the local altimeter setting all the way up to 18,000' and then we switch over to the standard altimeter setting of 29.92". There are plenty of airplanes flying IFR at 17000', using the local altimeter settings and if the local altimeter setting is low, an airplane flying at FL180, using 29.92 is not a thousand feet above the airplane flying at 17000', using the local altimeter setting. For every tenth of an inch below 29.92, that FL180 airplane is a hundred feet closer to the 17,000' one. But for safety there is supposed to be 1000' separation. So there's a rule.

AIM 6.4.3 Vertical Separation Between Flight Levels and Altitudes ASL

When the altimeter setting is less than 29.92” Hg, there will be less than 1 000 feet vertical separation between an aircraft flying at 17 000 feet ASL with that altimeter setting and an aircraft flying at FL180, (with altimeter set at 29.92” Hg); therefore, the lowest usable flight level will be assigned or approved in accordance with the following table:

Altimeter Setting Lowest Usable Flight Level

29.92” or higher FL180

29.91” to 28.92” FL190

28.91” to 27.92” FL200

So on low pressure days, flight level 180 doesn't exist, but you won't be assigned 18,000' either. If you had a real operational need to fly at 18,000' when FL190 was the lowest avaialble flight level, I don't know how they'd handle it, probably with a block altitude, same as if you needed to fly between 17,000' and FL180 on a high pressure day.

Yay! Fireworks!

2011-07-04T00:00:00.002Z

I didn't have time to post this when it belonged, so I'll post it for my American friends, who celebrate their national day today.

CZEG PURSUANT TO SECTION 5.1 OF THE AERONAUTICS ACT, THE AIRSPACE WITHIN 0.5 NM RADIUS 533141N 1133037W (KINSMEN PARK, APRX 3 NM SSE EDMONTON CITY CENTRE(BLATCHFORD FIELD) AD) IS RESTRICTED DRG FIREWORKS ACT. SFC TO 3600 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA DESCRIBED UNLESS THE FLT IS AUTH BY EDMONTON TML FREQ 119.5 1107020455 TIL 1107020555

1107020455 TIL 1107020555 was the evening of July 1st, the 144th anniversary of my country being founded, and we get our faces painted, wave little paper flags, have a day off work during which we often barbecue something or attend a street festival, and then set off fireworks to celebrate. Except for places where it's not dark enough for fireworks in midsummer, so they save them for Hallowe'en or New Year's.

Happy everything that you like to celebrate with firewooks, food, fun and friends.

The Debrief

2011-07-03T00:00:00.214Z

We both cab back out to the airport for the seven a.m. appointment. I know that it will start with my own assessment and I know the greatest weaknesses of my performance. Knowing one's weaknesses is more important than not having any. I've written down a list. It starts with "I'm sorry about the paperwork problems ..."

I don't get much further than that for a while. She practically explodes. She says she still doesn't have my training records. I'm very surprised. I had understood that my chief pilot e-mailed them right away. The conversation continues, and she points me at a computer in the other room, telling me that if they were e-mailed here then I should get them for her. It finally dawns on me that the examiner, who made that GPS unit do things I still haven't figured out how to do, doesn't do e-mail. I get the camera operator to print the things off for her and I continue with my biggest weakness: not using the GPS to its full advantage for situational awareness. I didn't because it was not for IFR use and I didn't want to get in trouble for relying on an instrument that wasn't certified. But I could tell from the way she brought things up on the GPS that she was demonstrating to me how I should be using it and wasn't. And I would like to be better at using it. Maybe I should spend more time with it and less with e-mail.

She lectures me for a bit on that, a little too intensely for me to ask where the boundary is between situational awareness and reliance on an uncertified tool. When that subsides I venture that I knew my systems well, but was confused by some of the general knowledge questions because I was trying to answer with CARs numbers instead of personal judgement. And that's when the worst of it came. The operator, returning with printouts of my training later tells me that he came that close to intervening and just stopping the whole procedure. He called the chief pilot to say I was catching hell in there, but the chief pilot knows that I've been through a few of these and can keep my cool. I'm being specifically chewed out for not being familiar with the section in my operations manual that deals with company takeoff minima. I have read manuals for three different companies in the last few months, and I'm pretty close to certain that the one for Eagle makes no mention of take off minima. I just nod and say yes, I should know that stuff.

She moves on to my not knowing what 'not assessed' means, and has me turn to the appropriate part in the CAP GEN. It says "IFR departures have not been assessed for obstacles. Pilots-in-command are responsible for determining minimum climb gradients and/or routings for obstacle and terrain avoidance during an IMC departure from that particular runway(s)." I said that it means the pilot is responsible for determining a safe departure route. I'm seriously being told I'm incompetent because I didn't say "Not assessed means that the runway environment hasn't been assessed for obstacles"? Really? That's not what it means it's what it says. Is that how dumb people are? Are there people out there smart enough to be flying airplanes but so dumb that they need to look in the help to know that the "File Save" command "Saves a File" while the "File Delete" command "Deletes a File." She says she could tell I didn't know the answer, so she didn't ask me any more questions on that because she didn't want to get me upset. There's no way for me to say now "I know not assessed means not assessed, what else could it mean?" and "I practically quoted the rest of the section, isn't it obvious I knew what it meant?" I just resolve, as I do after every single interview and flight test, to remember to state the obvious. Even the firetrucking obvious. She also says that re-land capability is required for all commercial IFR operations. That I didn't know, so I'll take that hit, although I haven't been able to find it in the CARs.

I catch flack for what I knew I hadn't done, not having the single-engine climb performance, accelerate stop distance, and the like precalculated for the conditions. I deserved that. I can't quite make myself believe I should do it for every take-off, more that I should know the conditions under which it might be a factor in decision making and calculate it then. But that's what a flight test is an artificial demonstration of. There's no excuse. Maybe I'll create an operational flight plan and do it every day, my legacy to the next poor pilot to have to fill in this OFP. Don't you hate forms that demand unnecessary calculations?

On to the part in the airplane. I didn't brief the emergencies and departure. "I have been told in the past not to do that on a single=pilot ride," I explain truthfully.

"That's probably because you talk too much." Ha! She is exactly right. I talk too much. She wants me to brief them aloud, and then shut up. I'll try that next time.

More nits. She says I didn't check my instruments on the taxi. "I did that one. Probably not the same place most students do, but I know I said it aloud." She believes me. I didn't, however, double check my altimeter with the published runway threshold elevation, double check my watch with ATC or the GPS, make notations on my flight log during the flight, perform a true air speed check, groundspeed, or a revised ETA calculation. I didn't draw my hold on the map. (I've never done that. People do that?) I forgot a lot more things, enough to make me wonder how I remember to breathe on a regular enough basis to remain alive, and how I keep passing these things.

She gives me a bit of heat too for letting a company push me into doing a ride under difficult circumstances and I don't point out that she could use exactly the same advice. The really odd bit is that at the end she tells me it wasn't bad, all things considered. And she offers me a job. It's more or less the same job as I have. I guess everyone needs cheap, flexible survey pilots, but I keep the contact information under consideration.

The operator pays her fee and I go out to the airplane. When he comes behind me I ask, "do they have antelopes here?" I just saw either the smallest antelope or the biggest rabbit I have ever seen. It ran off the taxiway and through a gap in the fence. I'm going to guess it was a rabbit. I bet it chases dogs for sport.

After discussion with the clients we decide not to fly today. We'll just hang out and wait until the next weather opportunity. We find someone who can look at the heater and he tells us to start it up on the ground, but it doesn't even start. He pulls out the igniter, bangs it on the ground a couple of times and and then replaces it. The heater fires up on the next try. I wave my hand in the exhaust to see if it's warming up and it is, but apparently the exhaust should be so hot I could't put my hand in it. The next theory is plugged nozzles, but the entire heater is so old that company says we'll just order a new one. Which takes a month. We call all over the province of Alberta to see if someone has one sitting on a shelf, but the best we can do is an express order that should get us one in a week. I guess we'll be cold for a week.

Meanwhile the operator asks me, "So are we allowed to fly above 18,000' now?" We iPhone the new signature in my licence booklet to company and then we get the thumbs up from Transport Canada that we are.

The PPC Ride

2011-07-02T00:00:00.350Z

The examiner holds up to ask someone to let a student know she is going to be late for the lesson following my flight test, so I have a chance to go ahead and verify that no one has run into the airplane while it sat there, and that nothing is leaking out of it. Hour eleven of my duty day is beginning as I climb into the pilot seat. I welcome the examiner on board and quickly brief her on the location of emergency equipment. I set my prefolded charts where I can reach them and get myself buckled into my seat. The airplane starts nicely and I record the time then start working through checklists, explaining what I am doing. I made a list of which frequencies to put on which nav aids to get going, and I pre-identify what I can. I have an ADF not an RMI so I do what I always do with these and set north to the top, explaining that is to prevent me from mistaking it for an RMI and thinking it shows the correct heading. I also note to her that the GPS database is expired, hence the prominent NOT FOR IFR USE label across the bottom of the screen. I tell her she's welcome to use it for situational awareness if she wishes. I love it when the examiner has something interesting to look at so I don't freak out from the scrutiny while doing basic preflight checks.

I copy the ATIS and then call for clearance. Someone should tell them to speak slowly. I had to ask for two parts of the clearance to be repeated before I could write it down and read it back correctly. The clearance, from my notes, appears to be B △ eva 1/B M70 Rr^r 'u 4616 7600 on caus followed by A 2Z91 X25 125.42. This apparently all meant something to me at the time, because I taxied out. The examiner tolerated my careful pauses at each intersection while I consulted the taxi diagram for the airport she knew her way around perfectly. After I was clear of the parking area and established en route to the runway I made some small turns and rattled off "turning left, wings, er stick left, decreasing, decreasing, steady, steady," for the various instruments that should and should not respond to directional change on the ground. I told her that as this was the airplane's fourth flight today I would not be doing a run-up, if she was comfortable with that, and she was. The examiner had much better handwriting than me, because I remember seeing something akin to "confident and comfortable in the cockpit" written on her clipboard. I can read pretty much any way up. I didn't realize that was a thing everyone couldn't do until I saw it posited as a trick. I have a moment of "got her fooled" but that's washed away by a realization that I've lived in this cockpit for the last few days, and I do know how to fly, even if I don't have the recent specific experience common to students who have trained here.

I switch to tower frequency when I'm ready to go and they clear me for takeoff. Roll, straight, rotate, going up, going up, gear up, fly straight, climb speed, trimmed, after takeoff checks. I switch to terminal and they radar identify me and clear me direct the NDB. Level off, call level (even though I don't have to, and I'm not hinting for anything). Now concentrate on tracking to the NDB. I get two sets of marks for this, one for en route procedures and one for ADF tracking. And I'm doing it nice and straight. I'm as proud of this as a kid who can tie her own shoes. A basic skill done well. Now I have to keep doing it while doing something else: copy a hold clearance.

It looks like + U D> M70 HN IB 160 <FC 0045. That makes way more sense than the previous clearance, so I must be improving. If inbound is 160 then outbound is 340. With no explicit instruction on the direction of the turns, they must be to the right. I look at the ADF, by which I'm tracking to the NDB, and see that it falls just to the left of the top of the instrument, which according your basic flying school rules indicates a parallel entry, an initial left turn to 340, followed by a left turn to intercept the inbound track and then subsequent right turns on crossing the station. And I'm still tracking like a pro. I tell the examiner my intentions and she asks how it can left turn. Because on a parallel entry you start by going the wrong way ... and I'm an idiot. I'm looking at an instrument that is set to north and not to my course. Three forty is almost directly behind me. They have given me the easiest hold in the world, and I should have anticipated it, because it's the logical hold to give me, and because a sensible pilot would have been thinking about holding at the NDB the easiest way instead of being all proud she could tie her shoes. I know I would have caught that when I looked at the actual heading indicator to make the turn, but jeeeeez, HOLDS, why do I always find a new and exciting way to screw up my holds?!

I enter the insanely simple direct hold. I start the timer in the right place, I turn at the correct second, I have to bank a little more intercept, I time inbound, I declare the required outbound timing and outbound heading and both the intercept and time to station are to the degree and to the second. Not that it matters, as she has only the choice between "major error" and "fail" for my inability to state the correct entry without prompting. They don't have to tell you you've failed or stop the test on the first one. I should put a post it on the ADF: 'this is not an RMI.'

Crossing the NDB, the examiner asks for a block of airspace and now I'm visual to do the manouevring part of the test. A steep turn, which only passes because they don't fail you if you promptly correct excursions from tolerances, and a stall recovery, executed correctly, including the flaps first, then gear order peculiar to this airplane. What else is in the airwork? Maybe that's it. Slow flight included in the stall demonstration, I guess. Back to IFR. They clear me for the VFR-only full procedure approach at the NDB. It's direct the NDB, hockey stick, outbound, timer, don't forget to reset the DG, monitor the morse code for the NDB, turn 45 degrees, see the terrain on the GPS, yikes, no wonder this is not for IFR use. Fly out the time, hold altitude, turn inbound, established within 5 degrees of the inbound track I can start descent to the first stepdown. Reset the DG again. It drifts fast during turns at low power. Man, how is it even legal to do IFR NDB approaches with out a slaved gyro? It's never set to within two degrees. The examiner has set the correct radial on the GPS but I focus on the DG and ADF to track as well as I can, step down, step down, MDA. Should be visual, no contact. The examiner shows me the aerodrome off to the side and makes a note for herself that the track she gave me was not ideal. Unlike the VOR radials I discussed earlier, tracks to an NDB depend on magnetic fields, so they shift when the magnetic poles do, thus a long-outdated IFR approach based on an NDB no longer leads to the runway.

I fly the missed. There must have been a simulated engine failure in all that, as she gave me back my engine after the missed, and then cancels IFR then gets me a clearance for a simulated straight in ILS back to the airport we came from. I tuned the localizer before I left, and set the inbound track, because there weren't any VORs en route, so now all I have to do is slow to approach speed, double check the identifier and follow the vectors to intercept it. I'm cleared to do so. "Loc alive!" Set the DG again and intercept. I overcorrect for a moment, then settle down. Staring at the instrument, I see that it's one of the kind with dots on them. Most of them have dots, but now I'm laughing inside myself at the dots. MORE DOTS! This is what I do all day. I put that needle right in the middle of the dots and pin it there. "Glideslope alive!" It's one of the glideslope indicators that hinges at the side like a drawbridge. I put the gear down as it swings just before level and then put the nose down and descend on the glideslope. I need to pull the power back a bit more, otherwise the turbocharged engines give me more power as I descend and I'll get above the glideslope. Despite the fact that I'm descending on the glideslope, I am given a "not below" clearance, and I reach that altitude while still on the glideslope. I hold altitude and watch the needle drop away below me, until the restriction is lifted then I ask the examiner what she wants me to do. She tells me to recapture the glideslope. I tell her I would normally conduct a missed, not dive for a glideslope, but I do manage to get it back just before reaching the circling altitude. I circle out, mentally choosing points that represent my circling limits, but just as I put down my gear to start turning in, the tower asks me to extend my downwind, they'll call my base. I should have taken the gear up again, but instead I let my speed decay and make the examiner nervous before I'm finally cleared to turn in and do my touch and go. I grin to myself, glad I did one this morning. As I turn crosswind, the examiner says she wants the next landing to be flapless. Ha ha. I admit straight out that I haven't landed this airplane flapless before, that there's no checklist, but that I'll have a shallower approach angle, higher approach speed, more runway... While I'm babbling the examiner grabs the left throttle and pulls it to idle. "This should help you get down." I simulate feathering the propeller and securing that engine and it so happens that as her simulation has taken out my hydraulics, this would be a flapless landing anyway. I simulate activating the gear electrically, and wouldn't have chosen to pump down the flaps with a runway of this length. She tells me I can have the power if I need it, but I entirely forget in the flare that the "zero thrust" simulation that the examiner has set is actually not zero thrust and the residual power, afternoon warmth and lack of flaps prolongs my touchdown so far it's funny. I stop and turn off at the end.

After landing checks done, I ask the examiner for suggestions on where to park and she gets the taxi clearance for me and gives directions. There's a whole back lot full of interchangeably anonymous hangars. It's like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If I park the airplane back here I'll never find it again. The examiner knows that there is no airplane in this hangar and that the owner won't be here for a while, so it's okay to park in front of it. She's now late for her next lesson, so the debriefing will be in the morning, at 7 a.m.

"Can you please at least tell me if I can tell my company I passed?"

"You passed."

If she had made me wait, you had better believe I would have made you wait. Most of them do. I really wonder how bad some pilots must be, that they are worse than me and actually fail these things. Is my expectation of the world just too high? Like the fact that my customer today said he thought I was the most punctual pilot he had ever worked with. I mean what? How can you be more punctual than on time? And how can your job be to file a flight plan saying you will take off at 1430, and not be sitting at the hold short line waiting for a take-off clearance at 1429? Most of the job that isn't memorizing and practicing emergency procedures is calculating how long things take, and writing that down in four places.

The examiner takes her paperwork and leaves while ponder these things, fill out the journey log and gather my belongings.

There's a young man sitting in a C172 parked on the apron without the engine running. I say hi and ask him if he's practicing emergency procedures. He says no, he's just waiting for his instructor. I apologize, explaining I'm the reason she's late, and hoping I haven't got her in a bad mood for him. He's relaxed about it. He's working on his initial private pilot licence, trying to get landings right. The instructor in me makes me ask what the hardest part is. Not that he doesn't have a very competent instructor, but sometimes even the same words from someone new trigger something. He says just getting everything done, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.

The operator has gone to meet with a client, and left me with the name of a hotel where we have reservations, and instructions to get a cab there. I go and find a phone at the flying club and call one. They say I'm first in line for a cab in the area and when I ask how long that might take the dispatcher repeats You're first in line for a cab in your area! I should have hung up and called another company. I'd rather be treated with respect than have an uncracked windshield. But I say whatever and wait. There's another pilot at the club and I express some of my "phew, flight test over" relief to him and he recognizes which airplane I must have been in, from the examiner's voice getting my clearance. He was in the airplane that interrupted my ILS approach, and apologizes for that. I tell him that really it helped me out, because the closer to the airfield I get, the harder it is to keep the needles centres, so breaking me off early made me look better. I go out to wait for the cab. I wait a while. Rude and slow.

The driver is a lot nicer than the dispatcher. He turns out to be an IT guy taking a break from his career. I have supper and should be ready to collapse, but I'm still kind of wired. Maybe that was especially potent coffee. I call the front desk. "Do you guys have a swimming pool or something?" She doesn't even say 'yes,' just gives me directions. The pool has a bunch of kids in it, and I join them on the waterslide, making sure it's all clear below before I launch myself down it. It's a good one! They compliment me on my happy shrieking. One of the 'kids' turns out to be the mom. I tell her I'm decompressing from a flight test, which leads to the usual conversation about what airline I don't fly for. I tell her about taking pictures at Slave Lake and get a blank look.

"Oh, what province are you from?"

"Alberta. But we've been away."

They've been away for six months. The parents have jobs that allow them to work via the internet for a good portion of the year, and the kids are homeschooled, so they've just been travelling. "Oh where?" I ask.

"Everywhere. The whole world."

Wow. I ask about some countries I'm interested in. Cambodia? She doesn't know where it is. I tell her. No, they haven't been to Asia. Or Africa. Or South America. Or Central America including Mexico. She hasn't heard of Estonia. Hasn't been east of Germany. They have been only been to countries dominantly populated by white people who speak germanic or romance languages. I wouldn't challenge your right to call a vacation covering the UK, Australia and Western Europe a world tour, but if you're home schooling your kids, they have to know that that is not "everywhere - the whole world." She has a reason, though, but a kind of weird one, for not wanting to go to 'those places.' Her partner, not currently in the pool area, is from the Caribbean, and dark skinned, so her kids look like 'their kids.' She's afraid that they will be mistaken for locals in one of those places and taken for slaves, because that happens there. I don't know where to start. I'm not going to touch the paranoia that goes with a mother's love, or her subscription to "all brown people look alike," so I tell her that in Cambodia, children in slavery are usually sold by their own parents to feed the others in the family, or by luring runaways, not by snatching the children of the wealthy. I'm pretty sure that's the way slavery works most places these days, because capturing people that the authorities would come looking for is bad for business. I try to express that just because a country doesn't have the same standards or the same traditions as Canada, that it isn't a place you can travel safely. I've never travelled with children, but if they'll eat what's available, sleep where you tell them to and have the basic sit stay and recall training of a pet dog, I think they could enjoy travel, to the whole world.

And at the end of the day-- and it really is the end of the day--it makes me wonder how fundamentally broken my world view is. I need to see more of it, and look harder at the places I already am. I spend a few minutes in the really hot hot tub, then go to bed.

Hours Nine and Ten

2011-07-01T00:00:00.149Z

This is going to be a flight test like none other I have ever done. In every other case, I have trained to fly the specific airplane in the specific manoeuvres that will be required for the flight test and in the area where the flight test will take place. In every other case the examiner has had some relationship with the company that owns the aircraft. But this examiner knows as much about me and us as I know about her. That would be ... each other's telephone numbers.

She examines my documents, asks me when my medical and IFR is valid until, when my last PPC expired. She confuses me by saying that this won't change the expiry date of my IFR, because it should reset the two-year period, presuming I pass. If I fail it will void the rating. I spell the name of the company for her, including the accent, but she ignores that. I don't know the official number of the company for Transport Canada purposes, but presumably she finds it in the documentation. She's pleased that I have brought the aircraft documents, but needs my training records. Of course, for other PPCs I have either done the training right there and still had custody of my own documents, or company has set up the meeting and provided the examiner with all the documents. Company sort of set up this meeting, but apparently proof of my training has not been included in the communications. I get the examiner's e-mail address then call company and have my records sent. Next, the examiner wants to see the Ops Manual, to confirm that the training I have received conforms to the training required. I remember the training requirements in the ops manual and I remember being a tiny bit amused by how rigourously we stuck to them. The manual specified time to be spent on each aspect of the ground training and we really spent that long on them, possibly a first in I don't know how many companies. We got a little creative in that inventorying the aircraft survival kit counted towards the survival training, but seeing as it included us discussing each item and how we would use it, it was probably more useful than watching another video about people staying calm and remaining with a downed aircraft. The ops manual specified three hours of aircraft training, most of which was directed towards the specific task of playing connect the dots in cooperation with the camera operator. But she's not willing to take my word for it.

I don't believe I'm required to have an ops manual on board for this operation. More importantly I don't believe I have one on board. It might be in the airplane. I go out to the airplane to look for a copy, but I can't find one. I find the camera operator in the flying club and ask if he knows anything about it. He provides me with a copy on a USB stick. I return to the office with this, and the examiner is about as displeased as an examiner could possibly be to see this thing. She wants something she can leaf through. It's not a really extensive document but it's wordy Transport Canada boilerplate, too much to print. She puts verifying my training off until later and asks me about the airplane. She wants to know the procedure if the landing gear fails to extend. Okay, here we go, something I am responsible for and can answer.

"The landing gear safety systems are quite interesting on this aircraft," I begin, because they are, and because I was taught to answer systems questions in essay form, not point form. My first flight instructor insisted. I guess it sounds more prepared, less like someone grasping at any knowledge they happen to remember, the way it might in point form. She interrupts to tell me that she doesn't need me to tell me it is interesting, just what the procedure is. "Using the checklist I would verify that the airspeed is below 150 miles per hour and the gear handle is selected down. Next I would activate the STCed electric gear extension assist ..." I'm a fast talker, and the command I've been given implies that I should get this over with but I follow advice and slow down. If the electric assist fails there is a hydraulic hand pump. If the hydraulic hand pump fails there is a CO2 cartridge, and if the CO2 cartridge fails to extend the gear there is yet another step to saving the aircraft. The examiner has herself landed one of these airplanes with the gear retracted, without damage. I don't remember other systems questions. If they were asked they were also things I knew well and she moved on.

I'm asked the minimum visibility for departure from a particular airport. I look it up and it's marked "not assessed," but the terrain around is flat, and I could safely climb to an en route altitude without a published departure, so I say "one half mile," the legal minimum for an airplane where there is no specified visibility requirement and the company does not have the op spec for low visibility departures. She asks me what is the minimum required visibility for an approach at this aerodrome. I note that approaches are predicates on ceiling but that low visibility can trigger the approach ban, and recite the litany surrounding that. She indicates the advisory visibility on the plate--three-quarters of a mile, in this case--and I explain that while it is not limiting, it is a good predictor of whether the pilot will have the required visual reference at minima. She wants to know what visibility I would really take off in. I tell her the truth, probably not less than a mile. I'm thinking single pilot, unfamiliar aerodrome, only one set of eyes for both runway and instruments, no one wants pictures of fog anyway. She tells me there isn't any point in having an IFR rating if I'm going to be that conservative. I refrain from telling her that the point of the IFR rating in this operation is so I can fly above FL180 on sky clear days, and I just nod and say yes. She already knows the nature of the operation. She asks me what "Not assessed" means. I stare at it again, leaf through the CAP GEN a little. Is there some visibility requirement implied by not assessed? Not that I can think of. What have I missed here? I tell her, "It's the pilot's responsibility to ensure a safe departure ..." She's obviously not happy, but she moves on.

The theme is consistent with me squirming to answer things I can't articulate to her satisfaction. There's so much to know. I feel I know it, but even in an open book unlimited time exam it's impossible to put the right answers in the right spaces to satisfy every examiner. I seem to be particularly bad at this, rarely not knowing but frequently not satisfying. I explain my weight and balance, fuel on board and that I won't be switching tanks during the exam because the selected tanks contain more fuel than the other tanks will on landing.

Fortunately she spends no time on my pathetic nav log, except to suggest I use a pencil another time. She must have asked me more questions than that, but there's no crazy "how many vortex generators?" type questions. I identify the airplane for her through the window and am sent out to it. I see some of the flight instructors who have been in and out during the day and tell them we're going fly. If you fail any item on the ground you don't go flying, so the comfort here is that she hasn't failed me yet.

I'm almost at the door when I think of something. A performance enhancing drug that I don't usually take in this environment, because it's also a diuretic. But this is only an hour to an hour and a half flight, and my alertness could be enhanced. I ask the instructors, "Is there by chance some coffee around here?" There is, but it's not a pot of hours old coffee, but instead a really fancy high tech brewing station. I explain that there's an examiner coming down the stairs right behind me and I jut need to insert caffeine and go. This is not for pleasure. There's a jar of instant on the counter and a rounded teaspoon of that combined with some water from the kettle gives me half a cup of surprisingly palatable lukewarm double-strength coffee, which I down, just as the examiner appears. I start guiltily, "Sorry, stopped for a coffee," and lead the way to the airplane.

The First Eight Hours of My Duty Day

2011-06-30T00:00:00.382Z

So I wake up, a bit earlier than I would have liked to. This is it. Flight test day. Why am I doing this again? I remember back when I was a flight instructor when I advised my students to get all their paperwork done that they can, get a good night's sleep and arrive for the flight test rested and ready. Yeah, that would be nice. I'm not even in the right city yet, and there's no really firm guarantee that I will be. I eat breakfast: oatmeal with fruit. I go to the airport. I spray stuff on the soot stains aft of the heater exhaust and scrub it off several times. It's not having a big effect. Maybe the paint is a bit cleaner. There's a special product for soot stain removal. I've used it once, on a turboprop. I can't remember if it did a better job, but it gave me a happier feeling of doing all I could to get the smoke stains off. I clean off the bugs and walk around and make sure all the parts are attached that should be. There's a dime-sized chip out of the nose cowling and a corresponding little burr on both blades of the prop on that side. It's not a no-go item, just a "damn!" like having a scratch on your car. I'm pretty sure I got it on the runway. I saw a white chip like that fly by as I added power on the button for one of my test flights. I assumed it was paint coming off the runway stripe, but now I bet it was the result of a rock being swatted by both blades of the prop then whackign off the fuselage. It's very common for FOD to hit more than one blade in the same place.

Next I go for another test flight, to make sure none of the cleaning products ran into any crevices from which they can emerge to soil the camera, and to make sure the hydraulic fluid dripping problem is completely solved. I'm told to just cycle the gear a lot of times. So I take off, climb to a thousand feet above circuit altitude and then set the autopilot. While I'm cycling the gear it intercepts a radial and tracks towards the VOR on my command, then I turn it back to heading mode and use it to fly a circuit. A couple more engine failure drills, a touch and go, more gear cycling, and I'm ready to land. I considered doing a flapless landing, never done one in this airplane, but I'd need a longer final approach to get down without flaps, so instead I just turn base where I am and fly a normal length final. I check several times to make sure the gear is down before I land.

The operator asks me if I did a touch and go, and I say yes. "For practice?" her asks, and I agree with that too. It's nice to have done something once before being tested on it. I'll see if I can fly the ILS on the way into the flight test airport. This is so crazily unlike any flight test I've ever done. If I can do this, I can pass anything.

There is no hydraulic fluid at all on the belly or the camera, and not even a drop in the breather line, so we load up the airplane, top up the fuel, and go to work. The fueller (and a commenter a few days ago) says it is the pine trees that are spewing the yellow pollen. It's still too early to call an examiner and ask if we're good to go, so I have to trust it's going to work out. Our work is higher altitude today, controlled VFR between 15,000' and 17,700'. I accept an altitude block clearance for FL150 to FL180, then the controller calls back and amends it to FL150 to FL190 "because of the altimeter setting." I smile as I accept it, because I know why, but it's a little obscure. I only remember it because I was reviewing my high altitude rules back in February. I'll put the explanation in a later post, because this is going to be a long enough day already.

I'd tell you the exciting sights and so on of the flight, but ATC assigns us a block of altitude, then pretty much leaves us alone to fly in really straight lines. It was just three hours of being fairly cold while focusing on coloured dots on the screen in front of me and following instructions from the operator to reach each next line. I only get to take a good look around at the turns, and there isn't a whole lot to look at. It's flat. Someone is paying us a lot of money for some very boring pictures. But they're very good pictures. Until the clouds start. It's what clouds do, in the late morning, and it ends high altitude photography for the day.

I ask ATC for descent out of controlled airspace direct our landing aerodrome. They're confused because the aerodrome I've just asked to land at is not the one on my flight plan. Flight plans are primarily about going from A to B, so ATC expects us to go to B unless there's some kind of emergency or impassable weather. But for us the journey is the important part. We hardly ever land at the airport we filed. I try to guess right when I file the flight plan. but the operator just likes to pick places he's never been before. Adaptability is an important concept for a pilot who works for Eagle. He picks an aerodrome. I look at the CFS and determine that it's appropriate for the aircraft and the conditions, call flight services for NOTAMs and go there. It generally confuses ATC, but I try to keep them informed.

The cabin warms up as we descend and I set course for the newly chosen aerodrome. I've never been there before. It's just a good place to stop for fuel on the way to the flight test. The clouds are building, too. I deviate to the right to go around one buildup and then while I'm still on that heading I zone out for a moment, looking back at the GPS and thinking I've wandered off track. I correct my heading, then see the cloud I was avoiding and realize what I'm doing. Gah, I'd better not zone out like that on the flight test.

I brief myself on the destination, looking for wind signs on the ground and water and listening out on frequency for local traffic. Based on the wind and runway orientation, I can fly straight in on this heading, if I can establish that it is safe to do so, but the frequency is buzzing. I can't tell if all this traffic is at the destination or at another aerodrome sharing the same frequency, with pilots making calls like, "Ed is turning north on the powerlines, have Rod in sight."

I make a normal call to alert traffic I'm inbound to my fuel stop, and no one responds from that aerodrome. Just to make sure I make a call asking, "Ed and Rod, what airport are you at?"

They aren't at my destination, and one pilot catches my sarcasm, explaining that their abbreviated calls are because they are doing COPA flights--taking kids up for a few minutes each to introduce them to the fun of flying--and they're trying to keep coordinated while reducing frequency congestion. It's actually a good idea. They weren't chatting about cheeseburgers, just joining the circuit to land.

I satisfy myself that there is no one else at my destination and land straight in, over a bunch of dirt piles on short final, and off the runway to the fuel pumps. They are the classic little honour system flying club pumps and while the operator sorts them out --he's the one with the credit card-- I go to use the washroom and file an onward flight plan. There's a little terminal building right there and people barbecuing in front of it, but when I try to open the door to go in, they tell me to go around the back. They're reflooring the clubhouse. There are some workmen at the back, but they okay me going in and I find the toilets and then a payphone with the shortest handset cord ever. I can't get a hold of the examiner, so I just leave voicemail that I'm on target for a 2 p.m. test. It makes it a little awkward to refer to my charts and notes while answering questions, and you don't realize how much you talk with your hands until they're tethered with a metal cable. I'm also trying to share the corner that houses the payphone with a giant UNICOM radio, an anemometer, and the operator who is trying to operate an ancient credit card processing machine. Will that be Cash or Chargex? swick swick! (Chargex was the old name for Visa in Canada, but would you believe I can't find a video clip of the old commercial?) He wins the battle, takes his receipt and we go back to the airplane. The operator goes to get something out of the back to clean the camera with and comes back with his polycarbonate water bottle. Full of slush and chunks of ice. So yeah, it was cold up there. That bottle must have been frozen almost solid before we descended.

I double check fuel caps and then start up and taxi out to depart. There's one more tiny job to do before the flight test, it's right near the flight test airport, so we head off in that direction and set up for the line. There are clouds above our altitude and we don't want their shadows in the photos, so we literally hang out, circle around and try and time our passes so that we get pictures with no shadows. It only takes a few tries and we nail it, so I head for the airport where the flight test is. They're too busy to accommodate a practice ILS, as they're using the opposite runway as the ILS is on, so I just get to see the needles twitching on the spurious backcourse. I'm sure a sizable portion of my readership is thinking disparaging things about my preparation and diligence right now. You'd better be, because I sure was. I don't even know where I'm going.

I assume the examiner is associated with a flying school, but even if she isn't, most of her victims are going to be students, It's not a giant leap for me to switch to ground and say, "Request taxi instructions to the flying school."

"Which one?"

"How many are there?"

"About eight."

Eight? No wonder they were too busy to accept wrong-way traffic. I can see the sign on one of them from right where I am on the taxiway, so I ask to go there. I'll sort out where I'm supposed to be after I shut down. It's a big school with a busy ramp and I start to manoeuvre for a parking area when a guy in coveralls comes out to marshal me to another section. I follow him gratefully, but balk when his signals lead me over a rough area of bad pavement. I make a "no" face and shake my head, pointing, and he's smart enough to understand why (I don't want to damage my propellers any further), and immediately selects a different route. I shut down where he designates, and thank him. He apologizes for directing me over the bad spot, they're meaning to get that fixed. He explains that the first parking area I chose would have been blocked in by trainers in a few minutes. I tell him I'm meeting an examiner here, planning to take off again in a couple of hours. He's happy with that. The operator goes into the flying school lounge to wait for me and I call the examiner's number, leaving another message, then clean up the airplane and make sure it's ready for the flight.

It's about 1:30 p.m. so I'll have time to get weather and NOTAMs before the flight. I'm just deciding where to go for that, when my phone rings. Two p.m. is still fine, and the examiner has the go-ahead from Transport Canada to do the ride. She gives me directions to her school. It's easy to walk and leave the airplane where it is, so I take my paperwork, the aircraft flight manual and the journey log and go over.

The examiner is super busy: teaching, supervising, managing, and scheduling. She says hello and points me at a room to set up in: "the middle office." There are four. I decide not to count the one she was in, so pick the third, but she comes back and moves me to the second. Great start, examiner thinks I can't count. I rework out my weight and balance, based on the amount of fuel I actually have on board, more than I planned for, so it takes some cargo juggling to keep it within limits. I lay that out with my flight planning, licences and aircraft documents. I eat a couple of energy bars. 'm not hungry yet, as I'm used to working all day between breakfast and supper, but I know this will call for more energy. I call for a weather briefing and take copious notes, adding those to the array. The examiner comes back and gives me a copy of the approach plate for the airport I couldn't find. Turns out I couldn't find the airport because it doesn't exist, it's a made-up practice approach for flight training, based off a private NDB. Instructors keep coming into the room where I'm working and using the filing cabinet. I say hi and try to pump them for information on the traps in the route. Instructors know if students tend to descend too soon or too late, or other typical mistakes. One of the instructors can't find the approach plate he wants, and the examiner comes back to help him find it. I have been given the wrong plate. They give me the right one, on a different NDB, but the same made up approach. The examiner corrects the bearings on the plate, because the printed ones apparently don't work right. It's also in a different direction and a different distance than my original planning, so I have to redo the wind calculations. The instructor comes back and needs another plate. He sees my current CAP (approach plate book) on the table and asks if he can borrow it to make a photocopy. I tell him of course, but the payment required is one tip for pleasing this examiner. If I'd trained here with these instructors I'd know all her pet peeves and ways to avoid being yelled at. That alone doesn't pass a flight test, but it's local knowledge that can keep me from being yelled at and thus rattled.

I'm making a mess now. I had a pencil last night, but it must be in my suitcase. I can't find it in my flight bag, so I'm doing stuff in pen, which is getting ugly. You don't fail on ugly paperwork, but you lose marks and create a poor first impression. I traditionally do not lose marks on the ground in flight tests, but that's not happening today. The instructor comes back with my CAP and says simply "Speak slowly," as he puts it down and walks away. I bargain with another instructor for the advice, "Be precise." I'm still trying to get that flight plan to look right when the examiner comes in and starts the test.

I've been on duty for eight hours now. That would be a full day for some people, but I'm legal for another seven. And if I can't pass a flight test after working for eight hours, why should I be legal to fly an airplane for real?

Can You Hear Me Now?

2011-06-28T00:00:00.256Z

Morning comes early. I have no recollection of what that hotel room looked like. I was in it an conscious for maybe eight minutes total. I drag my bag down the corridor to the breakfast room with two minutes to spare before the agreed-upon departure time. The cab is already here. I shove a couple of apples and a bagel in my flight bag along with whatever I ordered last night to go, some kind of wrap, I think, and get in the cab.

I check oil and move the airplane from parking back to the pumps and do the run up there, while waiting for the fueller to arrive. He does, and I then finish my preflight inspection and set up charts for the trip and file a flight plan while it's being fuelled. Full all around and caps checked, we take off only a little behind schedule. The wind is calm, so I take off from the apron end of the runway, straight off and then a turn to the northeast as I climb enroute.

I bid adieu to the circuit traffic at Salmon Arm on the ATF and then make a general call on 126.7 to let folks know where I am. The radio doesn't sound quite right. I'm not hearing myself in my own headset the way I should be. The camera operator says he can't hear me. Oh oh. I check the plugs on my headset jack. They're fine. Just my luck to get a headset with a problem. I grab a spare headset. Oh my God it's been a long time since I wore a cheap headset. It's uncomfortable from the earseals, to the weight, to the way it fits on my head, to the amount of noise it lets in. How do people stand these things? I guess I've become a headset snob. From that point of view it's fortunate that the headset swap doesn't fix the problem, because I couldn't work in one anymore, and I'm glad my new headset isn't defective. So is the jack defective? Maybe there's nothing wrong with my old headset. I put my own headset back on and try plugging it in the jack for the other side, trying that intercom jack. No joy. The operator tries the same headset and jack swap in the back.

I can hear the operator, but he can't hear me at all. I'm literally writing notes on my little notepad, then tearing off the sheets and tossing them in the back. He suggests that the intercom may be set incorrectly. It has an electronic control panel that cycles between PILOT, CREW and ALL. I assume that those put the left seat, both front seats or all seats into the intercom circuit, but we test all positions anyway. I'm pretty much in despair about fixing it until I realize that there is a master volume knob for the whole stack and it is in two parts, concentric rings. The inner ring is set to a reasonable volume, but the outer ring, intercom volume, is somehow turned right down. I dial it up and all is well. I still have no idea how it got turned down in the first place. I haven't adjusted anything in that vicinity. I must have hit it with something. How can I have flown so many airplanes and take so long to sort that out. At least I'm in the middle of the mountains in the early morning and not in terminal airspace in a busy time.

We continue over the mountains then I start descent towards a small airport where I have been asked to land. The operator is concerned about some aspect of the camera software, so asks me not to land yet while he tests the system. I fly big circuits overflying the runway at circuit altitude while he sorts it out. It gives me a chance to verify the winds. There's no other traffic around, so my presence isn't interfering with anyone. Each time around it's "just a few minutes more" but eventually I'm given the okay to land. Because of the elevation, landing appears very fast, but it's at a normal airspeed.

We taxi in, looking for the fuel pump, which turns out to be about ten metres across gravel from a narrow taxiway, partially blocked by a tied-down Cessna. I inch by, not wanting to snag my wingtip on the tiedown, nor to put my spinning propeller over the gravel to the side of the taxiway. I go well past the parked airplane then over to the far side of the taxiway to turn around and pull up behind it, making the closest approach to the pump we can without blocking myself in behind the Cessna.

The hose isn't quite long enough to reach the furthest tank, so we ground handle the airplane a little to wiggle closer until it is. The pump isn't clearly labelled as avgas, and it's not a standard cardlock pump, so we call the telephone number in the CFS for information on fuel purchase. They confirm the fuel type, take the company name, aircraft ident and credit card information and then tell us the codes to turn on the pump. I also call Edmonton Centre to notify them of the photo blocks we will be flying in. Meanwhile the airplane and camera have become covered in fine yellow pollen. There are no obvious flowers around, it's a bit early for flowers this far north. I speculate that it's tree pollen and then remind myself that trees have cones not pollen. They're all conifers around here that I can see. I add some oil, too, and clean the windshield, then we start up and roll out to take pictures. A pretty quick turn: thirty-one minutes from engine off to restart.

We're working at about 8,000', I think, and it's cold outside, but we don't dare turn on the heater, lest the backfiring soil the camera lens, or even worse cause a fire in the aircraft. We just wear our parkas and tough it out. The outside air temperature is -7C but it's warmer than that in the airplane, with our two bodies and the multiple cameras and the thirteen computers computers that control them all generating heat. Still the low temperatures can't be good for all the electrical equipment. They aren't like us humans who have adapted to living at altitudes higher and temperatures lower than this. I'm not personally so adapted, so I am breathing supplemental oxygen and wearing leather gloves and a stretchy toque I pulled out of my flight bag. I have to admit to not being too disappointed when clouds prevent us from flying out the complete mission. We made a big dent in it, though. We land at a larger airport and then jump out and bask in the warmth of the sun while the airplane is fuelled.

I also manage to make contact with the examiner, who says that she needs seven days notice to do a PPC test, because Transport Canada needs opportunity to demand to do the ride themselves. I know that company has been working on this for at least that long, so I get the name of the person at Transport who can waive the seven day notice, and then toss the ball back into my boss' court. The examiner says that if that is worked out, tomorrow around 2 p.m. will be fine, and she gives me, when I request it, the route to plan for the flight test.

Fuelling complete, I go and park. The operator climbs underneath to check the camera and comes out raving about a fuel leak. He says there's fuel all over the belly. The fuelling was competent, no overflow, and even fuel running aft off the flaps should have reached the camera. The operator says it's staining the camera red. Wait, red?.

"The fuel we use is blue." I say. "Red is hydraulic fluid." I climb underneath to see.

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I thought something might make it look red."

I don't really see anything. There's the soot stain from the heater outlet, more of that yellow pollen, but nothing covering the belly. A thin oily stripe does run from the edge of a belly panel towards the camera array. It's consistent with dirty hydraulic fluid. He's cleaned the camera lens already. I don't know what that panel conceals. I don't see why a hydraulic line would be running that far aft, but perhaps a hydraulic leak further forward has pooled inside the fuselage then run out of this access panel. I grab a screwdriver and start loosening the panel. I rely on hydraulics to get the landing gear up and down, so regardless of what it does to the camera, I want to know what's going on here. The operator takes a turn removing screws. It's actually pretty tiring lying on your back twisting your arms overhead. We remove enough screws to peel back the panel and see what's inside. Nothing. There is no pooled fluid, no leaking line, no stains. It seems to be a coincidence that the dirty stripe starts just aft of this panel. Perhaps it was clean enough or enough in the airstream that the fluid was carried over it without staining, then it picked up some grime at the aft edge of the panel.

There are a few drops of red hydraulic fluid visible in the nosewheel hydraulic breather line. It's probably just a few millilitres, normal seepage, maybe from the altitude changes, the purpose of having a breather line in the first place. Text messages and photos go between us and the maintenance unit and they don't think it's anything serious. Except that for the mission of this aircraft is is serious. If it happened on gear retraction after takeoff, it has ruined our day's work, and it means the loss of more than a day, because the weather may not be right for this work tomorrow. We hope it happened on extension before landing.

I ask if he can check the photos now, but the resolution is so great that on the screen in the airplane they may look fine when they are really ruined. We'll have to see later. We haul our gear to the terminal then after more discussion I'm assigned to take off and cycle the gear several times to see if it happens again.

As I strap into the pilot seat I grin to myself. "Hey, first solo." I haven't flown this airplane by myself before. I taxi out "for a local test flight" and cycle the gear up and down, up and down, making sure it's locked in each position before restarting the cycle. I give myself a couple of simulated engine failures while I'm at it, to practice the procedure: gear down, approach power, engine failure, maintain direction, power to hold on the other engine, gear up, simulate feather, emergency checklist complete, give myself the engine back, start over. Instead of doing touch-and-goes I just overfly the runway. And then I land and taxi in. There's a little bit of fluid, but not much. He sends me up to do the same thing again. Cycle, cycle, cycle, cycle, up, down, up, down, up, down, make sure it's down, land. Now there is no seepage. So maybe we're good. We go shopping for airplane cleaning supplies, and call it a day.

I now have about forty minutes to prepare for tomorrow's flight test and get to bed in order to have the required rest for tomorrow's report time. Forty minutes is probably more time than I pend on preflight paperwork for a normal flight, but for a normal flight I use the standard, precalculated weight and balance, use block fuel, round times roughly and only calculate takeoff and climb performance if it's an issue because of high temperatures or marginal runways. And then I generally round up to the next highest weight, temperature and altitude that has its own line, and just verify that it doesn't ask for more runway or lower obstacles than I have. For a flight test, I want the examiner to walk in and see about six pieces of paper with neat, meticulous calculations for each phase of flight. Yeah, that's not happening, considering it takes me at least fifteen minutes to figure out how to rearrange everything on board to accommodate an examiner in the front seat and stay within the weight and balance envelope. This airplane is nose heavy, and not usually flown with no one in the back. My next problem is that I can't find the airport I was told to plan to. The examiner mentioned that the approach was a VFR-only training approach and that she would give me the approach plate, but I need to at least plan fuel to get there. I find an airport with a similar name in the approximate area, and plan to that, eventually saying "screw it, I use block fuel and average winds every day, I'm not losing sleep to do calculations per segment for this artificial situation." I know, I know, a flight test is an artificial situation, but my need for sleep is real. It's already too late for me to get the required eight hours. Maybe I'll have some time to do more paperwork in the morning.

I suddenly remember as I'm drifting off to sleep that a single pilot PPC includes demonstration of competence with the autopilot. I've not mastered it, though. I've never had a chance to practice intercepting and descending on an ILS with this one, because the only airport I've been to that has one has controllers who prefer to vector me all over the place for a close-in base below the glideslope, or a visual diagonal final. I've done a PPC before where the autopilot went below the glideslope and I simply took control and finished it by hand, with no censure from the examiner. If I or the autopilot don't set this up correctly, I'll do the same. There are a few more "better figure out how to do that" moments before I drift off to sleep. It's really embarrassing but there has simply not been opportunity for a proper practice flight.

You guys have made a few guesses as to the nature of the Aviation-Themed Towel of Questionable Taste, which will be the booby prize in the sunglasses contest. No one has come close to guessing how bad it is. It has four different aspects of badness to it. Perhaps I should rename it, the Aviation-Themed Towel of Definitely Poor Taste. The only questions about it is why did someone send it to me, and why is it suddenly so popular?

Mountain Valleys

2011-06-27T00:00:00.058Z

The next morning's weather actually is better, it wasn't just a procrastination technique on my part. I let the operator know I'm willing to do the flight. The weather at Vancouver is still marginal, but the altitudes I need through the Rockies should be ice-free, so I file an IFR flight plan for the trip. I may be able to do it VFR, depending on when the operator actually chooses to go, but I'd like a chance to fly this airplane IFR before the ride. I also get his okay on doing the approach to destination (in visual weather) with the power to one engine pulled back, so I can see what this airplane flies like on one engine.

We go to the airport, but now the operator doesn't want to leave yet. I unpack various cleaning supplies from the nose and use the leather cleaner to try and make the seats look nicer. They aren't disgusting, just a little grimy, but like all cleaners, the product isn't magical and while my effort makes the rags noticeably dirtier, it doesn't make the seats seem a lot cleaner. This is an airport where people have security badges like crazy, and I don't have one. I go on the airport website to try and find a ramp badge policy, but there doesn't seem to be one. I know I could get in trouble if I'm standing about poking at an airplane with no badge, if I'm supposed to have one. But I can't tell if I am. I call security to ask about the south side badging policy. The guy puts me on hold twice. I get the idea it's his first day. Or maybe he's the team enforcer. He seems to be telling me that it's the responsibility of whoever's hangar we're working out of. That would be the maintenance unit that looked into the EGT overtemp situation, but they aren't escorting me. They said my pilot licence would do the trick. I try to get security guy to confirm that my pilot licence is sufficient ID for a ramp check here, but he defers to my employer. Well of course THEY say I can be here. How does he know I don't work for a radical BC Separatist organization that wants to bomb the local legislature? I ask if it's possible to get a temporary badge, but apparently it would take a couple of weeks just to get an interview to apply for any sort of badge. Funny that. A friend who works at Air Canada said that the non-union temp workers they brought in to cover during the strike all seemed to get badges overnight.

I get an e-mail with an examiner's name and instructions to call and arrange the ride directly. I leave voice mail with my own e-mail and phone number and the fact that I am on the road, but am hoping to be there to do a ride on Tuesday. My guess for when we are leaving is about to expire, so I call back to flight services to change my filed departure time, just guessing a new one, I can change it again later. While I am waiting to be told to I sit down to study the aircraft operating handbook and the CAP GEN for my mysteriously situated PPC ride. I think I know most of it. I was well-prepared last time, but I'll never forget the ride I was underprepared for. It was a similar situation, "I did a ride recently. I know this stuff," but I didn't. So I study again.

When the operator is ready to go, I discover the weather is pretty good now, and also good on the webcams through the mountains. He only wants to get across the first mountain range tonight, to be sure we won't be trapped in Vancouver by coastal weather. I call Flight Services to file a VFR flight plan (can probably do the whole trip around 9,500' and get out of here more efficiently) to possibly replace the IFR flight one (at 15,000'). For some reason this is a big deal for them. It turns out that I've called on the day that some kind of changeover is happening, so they could have done it easily yesterday and will be able to do it effortlessly tomorrow, but today it's an issue. They can't have two flight plans in the system at once for the same airplane. I suggest that they put the VFR one with a proposed departure after the ETA of the IFR one and then I can change it just before departure if I go VFR, but that doesn't work for them. I can't remember how we resolved that, possibly by departing IFR and then taking advantage of the phenomenally poor tower-terminal relationship to cancel in the air. Or the ground controller was surprisingly accommodating and helped me have the best of both worlds. There's a massive banner on the control tower, cheering on the Vancouver Canucks hockey team.

I was originally planning to fly eastbound along the Fraser River to Hope and up the highway, but once airborne, I see that the more northerly route looks better initially, and that ties in with the worst of the weather being to the south, too. I request an altitude that will take me through the passes up the valley overhead Whistler Mountain, where the 2010 Winter Olympics were. I'd show you pictures, but did I tell you? My camera is sort of broken. In some sort of cosmic joke, while I fly a giant camera around, the one in my flight bag doesn't work. It still thinks it is taking pictures, but all the resulting saved images are just pure black rectangles. I hope maybe there's just a broken spring (do cameras even have springs anymore?) somewhere and that the shutter isn't opening properly. I'll try to get it repaired, and in the meantime I may be able to borrow one.

I plug a few coordinates in on the GPS and set it in terrain mode, but mostly this kind of flying is about looking out the window and making sure the valleys in real life match the valleys on the VFR chart. There are clouds above, but not in sufficient numbers to hamper my turning around if some low ones block the valley, and I don't think they will. Their bases get higher as I go up the valley. I do reach one wall of cloud. It's a cumulus build-up along a ridge that I thought I could hop over by going visually between peaks. There are too many clouds to do that, so I turn south along the valley the ridge defines, to climb in order to turn back and go over them. Normally outclimbing a bank of Cu is a poor proposition, because there tend to be higher and higher ones beyond. This I'm pretty sure is just at this ridge, with a lower plateau without the buildups beyond it. I'm right, but as we climb over it, there's a kind of a slapping sound, like a loose strap or a hatch come open. Maybe it's the new headset. Wouldn't that be rich, buy a new headset and have it be defective.

There's that noise again. Maybe it's a cable slap. The ailerons make some odd noises as a result of rerouting for the camera port in the belly. That's a little freaky, but it's all STCed and frequently inspected. The sound stops. I ask the operator if he heard it, and he did. I pull my headset plugs out to see if he still hears it. There's a long pause, but it happens again without my headset in the system. And then it's quiet. Maybe the ANR screwed up the intercom. I've been blamed for intercom problems before, back when I was an early adopter of ANR technology and everyone else with passive DC units would blame problems on freaky electronic headset girl. But the operator still hears the noise when he unplugs from the intercom.

Some minutes later I hear it again, variously a banging, slapping, popping sound. I have to adjust the trim as the operator wanders around trying to pinpoint the source. It seems more on the left than the right, sometimes further forward, sometimes further back. There is no yawing or fluctuating engine indication. We keep thinking it's stopped, then it starts again. The operator suggests turning off the heater, and I try that. It doesn't happen for a long time ... then it continues to not happen for a further long time. It seems to have stopped. Not good. The heater burns fuel. We hate to think what it's doing when it malfunctions.

We continue without further incident over the plateau and then dip down over the lake to land at Salmon Arm, the same place in the BC mountains where I surveyed last summer. I make a call on the traffic frequency and there's a small airplane up. He tells me the wind is calm. I cross over the town and join downwind, the narrow valley clearly showing why the CFS recommends using this airport at night unless you are very familiar with the area, and all the hazard beacons are operating. I land close over the trees and the golf course and roll out to the exit. There's a guy in a little airplane in the run up area. I wave and taxi in for fuel, which according to the CFS is available for another thirty minutes.

We park at the pumps and call all the numbers listed for fuel, with no reply. I walk over to the hangar where the pilot has parked and ask him when the fuel is open until. He agrees that it should still be open this time of year and says the guy was around recently. He gives me another number, and I call that. It's now about seven minutes to the time the CFS says fuel closes. The fueller doesn't want to come out now, so he agrees to come in a bit early the next morning to get us going on time.

Meanwhile, it's obvious the heater was the problem. There's a stream of soot down the belly of the airplane. I wipe off what I can and put "soot remover" on my shopping list. The pilot is done in his hangar and gives us a ride into town where we get a hotel and a quick meal. The waitress is intrigued by our "detailed maps" as we pore over the next day's flying, and she is very helpful in packing "to-go" meals for tomorrow's lunch. The time we have to leave in the morning is the same time breakfast starts at the hotel, but we can probably grab muffins and fruit to go as the cab arrives.

Emergency Headset

2011-06-26T00:00:00.143Z

I'm not sure if I mentioned that I have had some communications difficulties with ATC lately, missing calls, or having to have parts of calls repeated. I thought it was distraction, working with a new task or missing an unfamiliar callsign, but taxiing in at Vancouver I realized that moving the cord made a difference to whether or not I could transmit. What a time for my headset to die. I could get it repaired, but that would involve express shipping it to the manufacturer in Portland, Oregon and back. And I'd have no headset in the meantime.

Or no good headset. There are a couple of spare headsets in the airplane, but wow, sorry, if you've used a good noise cancelling headset for over ten years, passive no longer cuts it. I wonder how people managed with those things. I have to do a PPC ride and work in the flight levels. I can't not have it work.I was an early adopter of noise cancelling technology, reasoning that I only had the one set of ears. People laughed at my bulky earcups, but then they tried it and they bought them too.

I suppose there may be some readers unfamiliar with noise cancelling. It's also called active noise reduction (ANR), active noise cancellation, and probably some other things. Each manufacturer has its own jargon. It works by having a little microphone in each ear cup, sampling the sound that's getting in there, and then generating a noise that is the exact opposite of that noise, cancelling out the first noise. It works because sound is not a thing with form, but only exists as squished and stretched out parts in the air, so you play a sound that squishes and stretches the air in the exact opposite way, and the result is much less sound. There is no time travel technology associated, so it can't predict the future, therefore takes a moment to cut in, and works best on steady sounds, like engines, and therefore actually allows you to hear irregular sounds, like something going "clunk" or someone speaking, even better. The sound dampening provided by merely having something clamped over your ears is called passive protection, and the total hearing protection offered by a headset is the combination of active and passive. Less expensive headsets offer only passive noise reduction.

The noise cancellation still works on mine, but the wiring inside the cord has probably broken. Also the headband doesn't fit as securely and the earseals always fall off overnight. After five thousand hours of service, the headset owes me nothing. I was planning to replace it soon, but had hoped to have leisure to compare and test different headsets.

Fortunately there is a headset dealer at the Vancouver airport, less than a kilometre from where the airplane is parked. I bring my old one and then get straight to the point. "Hi, this is broken. I need a comfortable, high quality ANR headset that fits small. What do you have in stock?" The clerk asks me what my budget is. I know how much a good ANR headset costs, "A thousand dollars," I say, in a way that is intended to convey that I'll pay more if that's what it costs. (Yeah, none of the tools of my trade come cheap). I know that I can't buy new ears, that an airspace violation could cost me that much in fines, and a botched clearance could kill me. I can see the display case of headsets, but instead of going over to it and showing me what's available, he disappears to the back of the store without another word. Weird.

I look at headsets for a while. There are some David Clarks, but while they are the unrivaled leader in durability and movie appearances, they were late on the ANR bandwagon. I remember a guy who sold a homebrew ANR conversion for DCs, and it was better than what the company itself came out with. There's a Telex, but not the ANR model. I think the only ANR headset there is a Bose. Another salesman comes out to help me. I think the first guy figured he didn't know enough about the headsets to deal with me and went to get the expert. The Bose is comfortable, fits me, has good noise cancelling. You can't really tell if a headset is going to work for you until you've flown with it, but it's significant;y lighter than the old headset, and has an excellent reputation and warrantee, including a thirty-day satisfaction return policy. Ordinarily I'd buy a headset letting the seller know I was taking it for a test flight, but when I take off from here I don't know where I will land. I'll take this one based on reputation: I'm sure it will be good enough, and given a chance to test the newest model from other manufacturers, I can mail it back if they are significantly better for me.

I tell him I'll take one. But as I haven't pre-ordered, he doesn't have any in stock. And he's not getting more until September. Bose has a US military supply contract and therefore aren't super concerned about getting their headsets in small retailers' hands.

"What about this one?" I ask, of the display model. He quickly decides that it's worth selling it to me, and puts it in its box. Comes to over $1200 with the taxes. It's a Bose A20 with Bluetooth connectivity, an extra option I wasn't planning on spending $100 on, but that's what it has. Bluetooth is kind of a joke for me as my cellphone is so old it doesn't even have a jack for a handsfree headset, and I still have two perfectly functional non-Bluetooth MP3 players. Come to think of it, I bought the cellphone in a similar, "NEED PHONE NOW!" panic. Is this the way I live my life? I guess some people keep a constant awareness of products they might need, knowing which one they want most at any moment so that when their current one dies they can replace it with confidence. Actually, don't answer that. The normal way is to replace your stuff before it wears out, with newer and better. I like my stuff and hate discarding functional things. I'm going to see if I can get my camera repaired, for example.

So I stash the old headset in the back of the airplane and set up the new one. Comfy!

Also I've noticed that at least two numbers (37 and 107) have two takers each in the sunglasses contest. You don't have to read all the submissions, but to increase your chances, double-check your choice by using the "find" command on the comment list to see if it's already been picked. I'll leave the contest open until we run out of numbers or the first appropriate (not raining at destination) flight after I get a working camera, whichever comes first.

None Shall Know the Day Nor the Airport

2011-06-24T00:00:00.076Z

I did an IFR flight test on an unfamiliar airplane several months ago, so I should be good at this now. I know I know my IFR details, but this is a PPC ride, where I'll be grilled on the airplane. I have been asked crazy details on PPC rides, like how many vortex generators an airplane had (88), the identity and amperage of the largest circuit breaker (hydraulic motor and I think it was 30A), and the identity of every antenna and line sticking out of ports in the belly and engines. Sometimes you have to fall back on, "I don't know! If it comes loose or leaks a lot I'll take a picture of it and e-mail it to maintenance." But I should know how this airplane works. I spend a day with its manuals and many supplements and hope I have the right things memorized. When you're working towards a PPC ride with a particular examiner, the person training you knows what the examiner is sticky about and primes you for such questions. I would not, otherwise, have been counting vortex generators. But not only do I not know who the examiner will be, I don't have anyone training me. I'm a pilot, so I'm supposed to know how to fly this thing.

And now the monitored ride with the Vancouver examiners is unlikely, because company wants me to take this airplane back to Alberta. They're going to find an examiner for me in Edmonton. Okay, I can do that. Except maybe I can't right now, because the mountain passes are choked with stratus and fog, and there is weather all around Vancouver, too. Oddly, although I need an IFR PPC on the aircraft in order to fly it around in beautiful weather at 20,000', my regular IFR rating is sufficient for me to launch into actual IFR conditions, for a ferry flight. It's only for revenue flights that I need a PPC.

So the pilot is approved and the operation is approved, but what about the airplane? It has an autopilot. I have a yoke-mountable chart holder, and a headset with a boom mike, almost archaic (as in who doesn't have these things?) requirements for single-pilot IFR. The airplane, however, does not have leading edge ice protection. It is therefore "not certified for flight into known ice."

So we look at the icing forecast, of which this is part. Red is turbulence, blue is ice.

I'm headed from the bottom left of British Columbia, the province outlined in black, to the middle of Alberta, the next province to the east. That route goes nowhere near the one patch of blue on the whole forecast. So does that mean there's no ice? It doesn't. This seems so weird now that I have to explain it, but if you look at the bottom of the chart, right above the red Canadian flag, you see some bold yet cryptic notes proclaiming that CB TCU AND ACC IMPLY SIG TURB AND ICG. This translates to a reminder that cumulonimbus, towering cumulus and altocumulus castellanus clouds can be counted on to be full of the supercooled water droplets that cause airframe icing. An airplane without leading edge ice protection definitely cannot safely fly through such a cloud. To see where those clouds are, you have to consult the corresponding clouds and weather chart.

Even if you don't read weather, you can pick out ACC and TCU in the bubbles I need to fly through. They are 'scattered', which means that theoretically I could go around them, but what if they are inside other clouds? This looks tricky. Later in the day they are calling for better weather on the coast, but thunderstorms through the mountains. I tell them tomorrow looks better, and they believe me. And now they can't get an examiner this week in Edmonton, but there might be one at some little northern airport somewhere. I'm not sure whether I've finally done enough flight tests that I'm not panicked about this one, or whether I don't really believe they will be able to find an examiner on such short notice.

Vancouver, meanwhile, lives up to its reputation of being rainy.

I have to wait until I can get my camera fixed, because I want to properly document our game of nosewheel roulette (and I'm embarrassed to ask someone else to photograph it for me), so its still not too late to enter the contest to win a pair of sunglasses.

First Full Day of Summer

2011-06-22T00:00:00.003Z

Today (that is the UTC day, not necessarily your local day) is the first full day of summer. In the latitudes I have been operating in there was snow a couple of weeks before, and it doesn't mean there won't be snow tomorrow, but the sun has set once since it had its moment overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and will remain north of the equator until the equinox in September. Yes, it's odd that we've settled on what is also known as Midsummer's Day as the beginning of summer, but it is pretty close to marking the date of the beginning of warm weather in the northern hemisphere.

As announced earlier, today is also the date SunglassesShop.com is sponsoring a contest in which you can win a pair of SXUC mirrored aviator-style sunglasses, specifically these ones. SunglassesShop.com sells expensive brands, as well, but the website copy makes it clear that SXUC is not an expensive brand, just fun, but they do have UV400 protection. (For work I use expensive sunglasses, but when I'm not working I typically wear sunglasses in about this price so that I won't scream in pain when they get sat on, scratched, or lost. I get my optometrist to verify that they have the advertised UV protection, and he puts them in a machine and tells me they do, even though he's the one who sells me the expensive sunglasses).

After considering various options for the workings of a contest, I've decided that we will play nosewheel roulette. On my next flight, I will mark and photograph a chalk line on the left side of the lowest point of my nosewheel tire during preflight. Then I will taxi, take-off, fly an entire flight and return to parking, at which point I will disembark and re-examine the chalk mark. Your task is to predict how many centimetres clockwise around the circumference of the tire the chalk mark will appear once the airplane is stopped. This may be at the fuel pumps or it may be at the final parking location, wherever I first get an opportunity to photograph and measure it for you.

The total circumference of the tire is 128 centimetres, giving a giant roulette wheel with 128 possibilities, from zero to 127. Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses. Your e-mail should contain the same guess, so I don't need to sort out which Anonymous or which David is which, when I need to contact you for your mailing address. You can also save that step and put your mailing address in the e-mail. I won't use it for anything except maybe sending you a postcard sometime, unless you win in which case I will send it to SunglassesShop.com so they can send you your prize. If you live underground and don't need sunglasses, or want to play for glory only, and prefer to cede your prize to the next runner up, you can put that in the e-mail too.

Don't pick a number someone else has chosen, because I'll give priority to the person whose comment appears first. If two guesses are equidistant either side of the correct location, that's okay because there are two pairs of sunglasses available to be won. If there is some added complication I haven't thought of, I'll do my best to be fair.

There will also be a booby prize for the entry furthest from correct. The booby prize is a second-hand (or possibly more) aviation-themed decorative towel in extremely questionable taste. Someone sent it to me and after I looked at it, it went right back into the envelope waiting for its next victim.

Bankeþ Airplane

2011-06-21T17:16:00.002Z

In honour of the beginning of summer, this post arrives on your blogstep at the same moment as the sun is overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and I have a summer song for you.

This is possibly the oldest known English song. It dates from around 1240, so after the Norman invasion, before the great vowel shift, before foreign typesetters tossed out the thorn, and before post-inflected English had established its current SOV word order. All the eþ endings you see are the archaic third person singular, spelled -eth in Shakespeare, and omitted entirely in modern speech and writing.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu;

Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

You can figure most of it out if you know your animal-specific English verbs. The only word that doesn't exist at all in modern English is swik which means "stop". To figure it the rest out, pronounce u as ow (like what you say when you're hurt) except in the word cuccu make it a long oo and immediately before e pronounce it as v. You can find a modern translation here. There's music, too and here's a video of it being performed.

I find it interesting that some of the specific verbs related to animals are becoming obscure in English. Maybe it's just because I don't work with animals, but I would probably say that a ewe "baas" and a cow "moos," before I thought of bleats and lows. I think I only know the latter because of the Christmas carol in which "cattle are lowing."

I'm trying to think of any verbs relating to airplanes and engines that are not shared with animals. Our engines sputter, splutter, cough, roar, hum and purr. An airplane banks which I think is related to the meaning of bank "earthen incline, edge of a river," which is at least as old as this song. A banked road or racecourse would allow a chariot or bicycle to corner more easily, and the leaning sense must have transferred from the earthen bank to the vehicle. Pitch, roll and yaw are similarly not new with airplanes. Airplanes land and take off, but so do birds. A little internet research confirms the feeling I am getting here: it is easier for new nouns to enter a language than new verbs. So airplanes flooded us with new words naming the parts of the new invention, but we didn't make up many brand new words for what the heavier-than-air machines did. Honestly, if you can think of any verbs that were newly coined with the airplane, I bet they are verbed nouns.

Come back at midnight zulu for tomorrow's post, the contest I promised you, in which you can win a pair of new sunglasses.

Updated with working YouTube link.

Pop Quiz Indeed

2011-06-19T00:00:00.076Z

My boss, or perhaps I should say my customer, seeing as I am a contractor, announces what is phrased to me as "good news and very bad news." It's further broken down as good news for the company and very bad news for me. I've had very bad news just too many times in my career to break down into tears at this point. And this is a temporary job. I'm guessing off the top of my head that the company has been bought out and they don't need me any more. Or perhaps there's some air regulation I didn't know that requires me to be shot at dawn for having requested the wrong departure from clearance delivery. I really don't remember that from the CARs. A pilot has to keep up on these things! I'm braced.

The good news is that the company has received approval to do IFR work. IFR photo survey might sound like bad news for anyone involved, but this doesn't mean we'll be taking pictures of the insides of clouds, it's for an airspace technicality, like needing CVFR flight over 12,500'. The airspace 18,000' and above is designated as Class A (which the Americans pronounce "alpha" but the Canadians pronounce "eh") and it is open to IFR traffic only. So in order to fly above 18,000' we need to have an IFR operating certificate.

Why might this bad news for me? Although my IFR rating is current, renewed less than ten months ago, I need to do an IFR flight test on this aircraft type. As soon as possible. Normally it's difficult to get an expedited ride (flight tests are called "rides," I guess because the Americans call them checkrides and the shortened form came north), but Vancouver has a regional Transport Canada office, so TC agreed to do the ride themselves, with the stipulation that it is a monitored ride. Not monitored as in "this call will be monitored to ensure customer satisfaction" but monitored in that there will be one person evaluating me and another person in the airplane evaluating his or her ability to evaluate me. But from any pilot's point of view it means there will be two Transport Canada inspectors sitting in the airplane taking careful notes on the way I screw up. Joy.

I tell the bearer of these tidings that having my skills evaluated is a normal part of my job and that really the second Transport person in the airplane is there to evaluate the first one, so it spreads out the pressure rather than intensifying it. Where ever did I learn such sang froid? I think it's like handling an emergency in the airplane: it's such short notice that there isn't time to get all angsty. I just have to do it. I can fly this airplane. I can fly IFR. I should be able to fly this one IFR. I ask for the opportunity to do a practice flight with a safety pilot, during which I can practice stalls and engine failure drills. I don't know how this airplane responds with a failed engine, or what power setting will hold an ILS glideslope in zero wind, and I don't know what tricks the local controllers might have for me. The employer agrees to that, and even suggests a local Vancouver pilot who knows the airplane and the area.

And then I go and take pictures.

Altimeter Setting	Lowest Usable Flight Level
29.92” or higher	FL180
29.91” to 28.92”	FL190
28.91” to 27.92”	FL200