Friday, August 03, 2012

Confusing Flight Services

This isn't a complaint about flight service specialists being confusing or providing confusing services. Canadian FSS are exceedingly awesome. It's a story about how I confuse flight services. I'll start at the confusing part. Airports, callsigns and aircarft type changed to confuse you.
"Beaver River Radio, this is Aviatrix"

[obligatory pause long enough to make me reach for the CFS to check that I have the correct frequency. Turns out that answering me on the radio isn't the only duty a flight services specialist performs]

"Aviatrix, Beaver River Radio"

"Beaver River, Aviatrix is a Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker Airplane overhead Skunk Lake on a VFR flight plan from Home Base to Skunk Lake. Request to amend my flight plan: new destination Home Base, eta 1915."

[pause, this one not obligatory]

"Aviatrix, confirm you are overhead Skunk Lake on a flight plan to Skunk Lake and you want to amend your destination to Home Base?"

"Correct."
See we left home base with work to do at Skunk, Chicken, Elk, and Slime Mould, but the Chicken work was really easy and the Slime Mould work was cancelled en route, leaving us with enough gas to go home once we were done with Skunk. I wonder if that FSS guy called the folks on the ground at Skunk to see why an aircraft on a flight plan to there would elect to go home rather than land, when they were already overhead. Probably not. I'm sure they figured it out.

We touched down at Home Base three minutes late at 1918. Someone hit a bird on takeoff not long before we arrived, so they sent us to go hold for a bit while the guys in pick up trucks cleaned up the little feathered corpse. I hope it was just feathers, with no aircraft parts mixed in. It was all over by the time we got to the runway.

1 comment:

zb said...

"Airports, callsigns and aircarft type changed to confuse you." - You're sure this wasn't meant to be "... amuse you"?

Glad to see you keep your humor, just like the header indicates. Also: Glad to know that Canada looks much better than most Canadian places are called.