Your Route Is Clear

This incident occurred the day I realized that I perhaps I should start blogging some of my adventures again. It was just such an Aviatrix day. Over ten hours logged, and once upon a time I would have had a sheet of paper under my operational flight plan on my lapboard and filled it with cryptic notes that would allow me to recreate the whole day for you, but a girl has to sleep and do her company paperwork sometime, so here's just that slice, complete with its life lesson.

We were assigned to work in military airspace, and I had been given a sheaf of papers including maps, the names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of what seemed like half the chain of command and their administrative assistants, plus instructions that we did not need to telephone anyone, just call RADIO CONTROL on such-and-such a VHF frequency ten minutes out. "Radio control" is an odd way to address an ATC entity, so I looked up the military installation in question in the CFS (directory of all Canadian airports) and found that the frequency was that listed for the local tower. Now that made sense. I called them up as instructed, with a proper efficient position report and request, "Basename Tower, this is Aircraft Type Foxtrot Alfa Victor X-Ray, forty miles northwest, nine thousand fife hundred. Request entry to CYR for previously approved air work one zero tousand seven hundred." (Someone is now itching to point out that if I was going to be truly proper I would have said "niner" and maybe I should have, but Canadians usually just say nine. I would have remembered to say niner for an American base, I hope). The numbered CYR is the designated airspace controlled by the military base.

The response is something to the effect of, "Go ahead your PPR number." PPR is a common abbreviation for "prior permission required," but I don't remember seeing such a number in my sheaf of papers. I have a quick re-read and no, there isn't one. My fellow crewmember already has his cellphone out texting company and in barely more time than it took me to indicate to the controller that I would try to get that for him, the number is provided to me. It was "six". Okay it was 2012-0006, but essentially the number between me and the airspace in front of me was six. I provide it in turn to the controller and we breathe a sigh of relief when it acts like an unlocking code to the secret levels of the video game and he says, "Your route is clear."

That sounds like permission, but it's not standard civilian phraseology, and I want to be absolutely sure. I'm organizing words in my head for the clearest, most succinct and professional way to say, "I am a civilian pilot unversed in military ATC differences, please confirm that means we are cleared as requested," when he buries that slightly fuzzy phrase in a question containing a pile of acronyms and numbers so deep that I don't know where to start asking. I think the best I can come up with is, "I'm sorry, I don't know what that means." I've been through military control zones across North America and while there are usually some quirks, I've never been at such a communications impasse before. Eventually I figure out that he is asking about the exact location of the work relative to the trans Canada highway. Yeah, one of the numbers turned out to be the local designation for Highway One and I think the rest were terms relating to the land covered by the restricted airspace. He stopped using them. We go back and forth a bit on this. He says "over" or "out" after every transmission, which is in fact part of the rules in aeronautical radio procedures, but in practice is only used when reception is terrible.

He's asked me to remain east of the highway, which is essentially an east-west highway. We don't seem to share enough common vocabulary or reference points to discuss this. He says "Wait out," which I presume to mean standby. He then comes back and asks me to fly a holding pattern. That's unexpected for a VFR aircraft. Usually a controller would just tell me to hold outside the zone, or give me specific holding instructions, but I can handle this. I'm five minutes from his airspace now, so I just fly a hold right there on the inbound track, working out that I need a one minute thirty-five second outbound leg and a fourteen degree outbound correction in order for a rate one turn to bring me perfectly back onto the inbound track, with six minutes showing to the destination. I call him back to ask for an estimate of how long I might have to do this for, but there's no answer. Eventually he comes back and tells me I'm cleared to work, "do not proceed east of [three digits spoken singly] dot one four." Now sitting where you are reading this, even with my obfuscation of my exact location, it's probably obvious to you that he was giving me a longitude, and I did figure that out after a second or so of staring stupidly out the window. It was just such an unexpected way to designate a meridian of longitude. I read it back as [three digits] degrees, fourteen minutes and told him that our our work straddled [meridian]°14'. We were at an impasse, so we lobbed the whole problem back to company to sort out on the phone and found some other work to do.

They called us back with an approval when we had not quite enough fuel to do the job, so we landed and refuelled and came back up to discover that "dot one four" meant decimal one four degrees, not fourteen minutes, so I had only to remain west of [meridian]°09', which I could do, and we quickly completed the job. It hadn't initially even crossed my mind that I'd be given a longitude in decimal degrees. Who navigates in decimal degrees?

Afterwards I lamented to my coworker the failure to communicate, and he was the one that came up with the realization that we were not talking to a military air traffic controller at all. We were talking to a comm tech down there on the ground with a radio, whose principle job was to keep people from blowing each other up on the range. When he said "out" he may have sometimes meant he was putting down the radio and walking away. And he probably had even less idea of what I was saying than I did of what he was saying. Because as the conversation got difficult I retreated to the most excruciatingly correct formal aviation radio language I could muster, trying to measure up for this terribly important military tower controller who didn't have time for anyone who didn't file flight plans in mach numbers, when really he might have been just as intimidated by my pilot jargon, causing him to try to duplicate it, and coming up with phrases that didn't mean what he thought. He hadn't once called himself "Basename Tower," just "Range Radio."

We had to return to that zone on another day and by changing my perception of the person I was speaking to, I changed my experience completely. I finished the mission by saying, "Thank you for your service," allowing him and others in earshot of the radio to perhaps realize that they had not really provided any air traffic control service to me, and that I was really thanking them for serving our country.

That made me wonder how often I have attributed to someone else too much authority or too much knowledge and, in trying to approach them at the level which I think they are expecting, have intimidated or alienated them. In future I will remember that the person in the metaphorical or physical intimidating tower is possibly not disdaining me at all, but in the same situation of trying to appear informed and in control. Maybe that would even work on the Springbank Tower controllers. And if someone is just being unnecessarily officious, they'll think they're being condescended to, which they deserve.

The Empire Will Be Pleased

The title is what my coworker said through his Darth Vader oxygen mask as we descended from the flight levels in an unpressurized airplane after completing a tricky piece of work. We descended overhead Banff, Alberta. It is so spectacularly beautiful there that I was distracted from the work I was supposed to be doing. I was even raving about the remarkable pointiness and ridginess and beauty of the scenery to the air traffic controller. The air traffic controller was meanwhile excited by the fact that I could still talk to him. We went from the flight levels to dodging in and out of those spectacular stripey peaks and we still had excellent two way radio communications. And then we landed at Springbank. Springbank is the Buttonville of Alberta. Screaming busy with training traffic, and controllers who tell you what you want instead of listening to what you requested. The best was the one who gave me an instruction to turn right, and then chewed me out for deviating from the straight out departure clearance I had been given. Such a startling contrast from the service I got from the very next controller they handed me off to. I cannot turn right and go straight at the same time, although with some of the aerial work I do it almost seems that way. If you have the opportunity, you should go to Banff and fly around at about 11,000' in the spring. I think you should put it on your bucket list. I'm a not a stranger to mountains, Banff just seems to have especially amazing ones.

Always Check NOTAMs -- Even When Running Drugs

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

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

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

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

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.