Saturday, April 29, 2017

My Accomplishment for the Week

This week I have assessed the scope of required revisions to TDG Act training, helped the PRM analyze the root cause of audit findings, verified the capabilities of an FBO in another province to service our aircraft, met with control tower supervisors, and checked the insurance coverage on an airplane that will not be flying this year. You'd think I was a fricking grown up.

I also flew an airplane a couple of times. Remember when I used to go to work in order to fly airplanes? How did I get here from there?

If you are at the beginning of a pilot career, and you have skills you are willing to contribute related to scheduling, regulatory compliance, training, or management of manuals, highlight this on your resume. If I knew then what I know now, I would have walked into the office of the chief pilot of my choice and parlayed my previous experience managing revisions of regulatory compliance manuals into a PPC. I could have had quite a different career. Or maybe I would have ended up here sooner.

But that was not my accomplishment for the week. It was this line in a comment on an older entry of this blog:

Reading your blog inspired me to give pilot career a one more shot and went on with the training. Now I am a training captain in a real airline.

Wow. I inspired someone! Finding out you're inspiring is even better than chocolate. If someone inspired you, even if it was a long time ago, or even if you think they are too famous or important to care, consider sending them a note.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Jean-Paul Vinay

This post is about Jean-Paul Vinay, a Canadian whose work is used worldwide, but most people ho use his work have never heard of him, and credit it vaguely to "the military." He was a linguist, not a member of the armed forces.

In 1950, he founded the department of linguistics at the Université de Montréal where he set up the university's linguistics program as well as courses in translation and interpretation. He served as chairman of the department until 1966. In 1968, he joined the University of Victoria in British Columbia and headed their linguistics department. He retired from the university as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics in 1976.

In 1958, he co-authored Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais, a comparative stylistics textbook considered to be a pioneering work in translation pedagogy. The work is recognized internationally, has recently been translated into English and is still used in translation and linguistics courses today. In addition, he was the editor-in-chief for The Canadian Dictionary/Dictionnaire canadien, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1962.

Jean-Paul Vinay is considered to be among those who have profoundly influenced the development of translation in Canada. He died eighteen years ago today, in Victoria, British Columbia on April 10, 1999. Translation style guides are very important in Canada, and people in his field and family probable honour him for those, but that's not the achievement I'm referring to.

He's the guy who designed the ICAO radio phonetic alphabet. His original 1952 version ran Alpha, Bravo, Coca or Coco, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Metro, Nectar, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Union, Victor, Whiskey, Extra or X-extra, Yankee, Zulu.

So yeah, for anyone familiar with today's version: Coco, Metro, Nectar, Union, and Extra are pretty odd. People didn't like them, for various reasons, and we settled into the current version. I found this discussion of the choices of words interesting.

The tendency of infer that because a word may appear “bad” in isolation, either phonetically, structurally or because it is unfamiliar and that its replacement by an apparently “good” word will achieve an improvement, is one to be considered with the utmost caution. The criterion as to whether a word is “good” or “bad” is fundamentally the measure of its success in relation to all the other alphabet words (and with spoken numerals), together with its success for transmission in noise. For example, the word “”FOOTBALL” has a higher articulation score than the present spelling alphabet word “FOXTROT” i.e. it is correctly identified when it is spoken, a greater percentage of the time. “FOXTROT” however, is the preferred word because it is less often erroneously recorded when other words in the spelling alphabet are spoken; therefore, the overall intelligibility of the alphabet is raised by using “foxtrot” rather than “football”.

I wonder what Q would have been had a non-Canadian concocted it.

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Overflow Valve

I didn't really send it. I wrote that last blog post right after completing the form, and I really wrote that on the form, but in the sober light of the next dawn, before the Purolator truck arrived, I was hit by a fit of sanity and reprinted the pages on which I had expressed my personality and frustration, replacing them with blandness.

In the same vein, when today I received the form letter telling me "Good afternoon Mr. Aviatrix, Your submission has been received and will be sent to a regional TDG Inspector for review. The inspector will contact you if they require more information or corrections to your documentation," I didn't write back asking, "Is it your department policy to address all persons in authority by male honorifics, or is that an individual initiative on your part?"

Also I went for a nice little flight today. We brief an emergency procedure before every flight, and today it was an engine failure before rotation. "Okay," I said, "so we're rolling down the runway at full power and for some reason we need to stop."

I paused for breath and my co-worker said, "Coyote on the runway," at the same time as I added, "Maybe there's a coyote." Great minds think alike. "So, clearly there's a psychic coyote on the runway." The runway here is long enough to stop after reaching rotation speed, so I brief that I pull power idle, brake as required, tell ATC, and get off the runway to try that again, once the brakes have cooled. I also brief the full procedure for if an emergency stop were made on a runway too short to accommodate it, necessitating magnetos off, fuel off, inform ATC and electrical off, then evacuate when the aircraft is done crashing into whatever is past the end of the runway. If the day starts somewhere that an engine failure on the roll could leave me without braking room, I brief to the specifics of the environment.

After run-up I was held short of the long taxiway because the controller said, "there are a couple headed your way." I hear other people call for taxi and also get held short, so I move up a bit so there is room for whomever is behind me, but not so much that there isn't room for whatever the couple I'm waiting for are. Not a couple of coyotes, though. Turns out to be a Navajo and a Beech 1900. Once they pass I am given clearance to taxi, and discover I'm catching up to the aircraft ahead of me. Kind of unusual for me. I taxi slowly. They turn a corner and I see that the slowpoke has a foreign registration. That makes sense. Tourist. The locals and the people who come here often enough to know the coyotes by name taxi fast.

I get my clearance and depart. There are no literal coyotes. Today.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

Like Chocolate for Manuals

So I had to revise a manual, create a document and complete a thirteen-page form because of a regulatory change. I was not impressed. The final page of the form suggests that I "Please provide additional information that may assist Transport Canada in their review."

I found chocolate assisted me in writing this document. Perhaps you will find the same in reviewing it.

I have now potentially outed myself to a Transport Canada Transportation of Dangerous Goods reviewer, and to any blog readers they happen to show it to during the process of assessing the penalty due for suggesting that chemical assistance helps with Transport Canada paperwork.