Advantage Cancelling

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 It's a little out of date, because it's the Bose A20 now, not the X and the new Zulu not the original Zulu, but it's a good discussion of the issues to consider when buying any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

Guest Posts

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.

Heads Up for a Pop Quiz

I get a lot of requests to advertise on this blog. It doesn't gather millions of eyeballs, but I suppose it's a niche market of people who trust me, and advertisers are feeling around for a way to reach people. I know I should just ignore the robotic linkfarm spam, but I often respond anyway, explaining briefly how vastly unlikely it is that I would ever place a link to their site on my blog. I know it just confirms me as a live one, but it amuses me to reply.

Every once in a while my "Sorry, I don't participate in linkfarms" or "Why would I link to a site scraper?" gets a response from a real human being, who isn't always a linkfarmer or a barely literate employee of a scammer. The problem with linkfarmers trying to look like legitimate bloggers is that sometimes legitimate bloggers end up looking like linkfarmers.

My first contact with John of the cleverly named Golf Hotel Whiskey was like that. I had looked at the site briefly, not parsed the name, seen something I thought was a generic travel review site, and given him a brush off. He defended himself, I took a second look, and while it still isn't a regular read of mine, I acknowledge it as original work, related to aviation and worthy of respect. Another site I dismissed as a site-scraper is How It Flies. I told him flat out that it's obvious that all the content has been scraped directly from Wikipedia, making not only the material unoriginal, but the concept. Paste a chunk of text from any Wikipedia article into Google's search engine with quotation marks around it, and you'll see how popular it is to build a site by plagiarizing Wikipedia. Keith argues that the Wikipedia material is just the seed and that his site has a different purpose. I'm still not entirely convinced, but it isn't advertising supported, so he must be doing this out of conviction. I'll let him explain.

I understand your aversion to site scrapers. I debated long and hard before incorporating Wikipedia content for a number of reasons. One is that the quality is inconsistent, but mostly because their focus is not what I'm aiming for. Their writing is for a general audience while How It Flies is oriented towards pilots. Over time I imagine that the articles will shift focus as people edit them. Their content focus is also limited. I'm looking to have a much larger collection of photos as well as videos. All of this though takes an immense amount of time and my calculations showed that, without seeding the site with content, I would never have the critical mass necessary to create a useful resource. I have been stunned at the results. Since adding wiki articles a little over a month ago, traffic to the site has quintupled.

Besides the different focus, we're also making the information from Wikipedia more useful by creating structured data. Wiki information is one big text file. I've been able to get a great deal of the information into a database which will eventually allow people to search and manipulate it in ways I can't even foresee.

A big-name company interested in grassroots marketing but completely unrelated to the topic of my blog sent me an "infographic" they thought I might like to share with my readers. It was ... an infographic. Someone with some amount of skill in information presentation had crafted it, but still, it had nothing to do with anything. I told him that if it weren't for linkfarm spam, his missive would win the award for the lamest attempt to be featured on my blog that I have received all year, and that I very nearly opened Microsoft Paint to make him an infographic he could put on his wall to commemorate that stunning failure to impress me. "I may yet sponsor a reader contest to do so," I claimed.

Perhaps this inspired me, because recently an advertiser actually associated with a vaguely aviation product enquired about the price of links or banners and instead of saying "no" I said, "I don't do banners, but I would do a contest giveway." I was thinking, "I don't want to burden my readers with ads, but if I can give them something, that's different." And the manufacturer thought it was a fair deal. So I'm just deciding what sort of contest this will be.

Fellow blogger Michael 5000 runs a weekly honour-system quiz which I always have a great time attempting, despite my woefully poor knowledge of art, American literature, and music. I think I may start a similar regular feature: only aviation-related. You would be on your honour not to use Google, Wikipedia, books, posters, roommates or other resources not already located within your own head to answer the questions posed. I think this is probably not the best choice for a contest with a prize, because it would literally reward people for cheating. I don't want to do an open-book quiz, because then it just turns into a Google/Wikipedia competition, and that's no fun.

I have been thinking for years of doing a "how well do you know me" quiz covering everything from random eggs and burrowing mammals to my most abused adverbs, and that would favour long-term and attentive readers, but seems a little narcissistic. (Wow there are a lot of ess sounds in narcissistic). And it might be tantamount to just giving the prize to my friends.

I did a giveaway a while ago where I asked contestants to explain why they were the most deserving of the prize, but you were all so nice to each other that you all just awarded the prize to the first cute kid entrant. Another option is to ask for your creative work, such as your speculation on what the dot was asking me. (Let me tell you, after five hours of keeping it centred, the dot is usually asking me to do unspeakable things).

I'm leaning towards a game of "nosewheel roulette". I make a chalk mark on the nosewheel, normal to its low point on the ground, then I taxi out and do a flight. After shutdown I get out and see where the chalk mark ends up. The pockets on the roulette wheel correspond to the number of centimetres around the circumference of the tire from bottom dead centre to the chalkmark. Whoever guesses closest wins a prize. The downside is that it's purely a game of chance, but the upside is that it's easy to judge, impossible to cheat, and someone gets free stuff. I'll let you know the circumference of the nosewheel when the contest is on.

First a Safety Lecture, Then Bikinis, And Finally Naked Women

The title above is not a clever play on words. It is a factual description of the following post. The links contain increasingly NSFW material, as described.

I am a pilot. My primary job is the safety of the flight. As the pilot of an aircraft without a flight attendant, my job includes briefing the passengers on the emergency procedures for the aircraft, ensuring they comply with safety regulations, and assisting them in evacuation if necessary. A secondary responsibility is passenger comfort. This involves requesting routing that maximizes calm air conditions, proper operation of pressurization systems, smooth control handling, making reassuring cabin announcements, and sharing my jelly beans.

When an aircraft has flight attendants, it is still the responsibility of the pilot in command to ensure that these things happen, it's just that the P-I-C delegates some tasks to the flight attendants. The flight attendants' primary responsibility is the safety of the flight. If everyone is complying with the safety regulations, that leaves the flight attendants time to work on their secondary duties of catering to passenger comfort. This involves serving drinks and meals, handing out headsets, resetting the entertainment systems, and the like. Way too many passengers mistake the flight attendants' secondary duties for their primary function, and think that when the flight attendant asks them to put their carry-on item all the way under the seat in front of them, that the flight attendant is being a busybody. Respect the FA as a safety professional who will get you a drink if all is well, and you'll have a nice flight. Treat them like an inconvenience who won't get you a fifth drink and who has their head in the way of your carry-on during taxi, and you get Stephen Slater, plus the cops meeting your flight.

Fortunately, flight attendants are not often called upon to go to the limits of their training with respect to ensuring your safety, and most seem to be able to tolerate unreasonable passenger behaviour within the limits of their patience. Some of them go above and beyond in the entertainment department, too: telling jokes, singing songs, and otherwise livening up the flight. The rest of this blog entry is about the "otherwise."

Irish discount airline Ryanair -- I believe I have another blog entry about them in the pipeline for later -- publishes an annual calendar featuring members its cabin crew in bikinis. Some people are outraged. The airline gets lots of free publicity. The women who choose to participate get some exposure. The charity-of-the-year gets some cash. A few passengers are stupid about it and need to have their attention drawn to the second paragraph of this blog entry. The thing is, good looking women in bikinis look good. People are going to look. And the thing about advertising is that you have to get people to look.

This ad from Russian airline Avianova starts off with the words "Few know how airplanes are washed ..." The rest is women in bikinis and soapy water. There are a couple of firefighters, too, but lets just say the same care was not taken in casting and costuming. Avianova. Fares from 250 rubles. "Welcome."

Not to be outdone, competitor Aeroflot is issuing a flight attendant calendar of its own. As I understand it, these images are part of a customer appreciation gift to Aeroflot frequent fliers. The Russian site that published them has several more images, including a number that represent multiple images for the same month, some clothed some not, as if they hadn't yet decided what level of undress the final calendar would represent. That seems a little suspicious. Wouldn't you decide on the images before turning them into calendar pages? But I suppose considering how easy it is to overlay the name of the month and the dates, and that the look of the printed image is going to influence the shots chosen, it makes as much sense as anything. Adme says they found the images on an Aeroflot flight attendant bulletin board, from which they have since been removed. I admit to curiosity about the missing calendar girls for February, March, April, June, July and December. I want to see some photos of the flight deck. And the flaps.

Notice again the red shoes. My red shoes are more like the ones in the Virgin ad. Much nicer. And to think I left those shoes off my hundred items list. I did, at least, remember a bikini.

Glamour in the Skies

UK airline Virgin Atlantic has a new television ad is sidesplittingly funny, and underscores the cultural difference between North America and the old country. I can't seem to embed it, so you'll have to go here to watch it and then come back.

It's simply clever. James Bond is of course a British product that has worldwide recognition and the whole ad is reminiscent of the title sequence for a James Bond movie, which by association probably makes it seem racier than it is. The ad takes you through a whole airline trip without breaking stride. I especially love the line of passengers going through the airport scanner on their way to the airstairs. It incorporates the airport experience while eliding most of it.

Maybe someone will complain that the women are presented as sex objects, but they need to look around and see all the people in the ad are sexy, including the men going through the scanner and pole dancing on the shrimp forks. And the women are powerful sexy, almost stomping on the tiny men at the beginning. The strongest "where are they going with this?" moment was the FA opening her jacket to produce the scene change. I love the way the standard flight attendant gestures describing the locations of exits and the floor illumination morph into a dance sequence.

I could probably go nuts watching it for symbols of one sort or another. Almost all the shapes and sets are sexy people or airplanes or parts of airplanes. I see a € Euro sign in the moon, and the Statue of Liberty represents both the USA and France.

And then they poke fun at all that surrealism by actually referring to the flying flight attendants in the final lines. I can't hear the response clearly: it sounds like "She's in my ambulance," but I've been assured that it's, "She's in Miami." I don't know where I get the final sibilant.

Also, I have shoes like that, and I love them, but they aren't really practical for air travel. I empathize with the woman taking them off in the last shot. Tiny details of not taking itself entirely seriously, like that one, may be how this ad manages to dance along the line between sexy and sexist without stepping over.

Brightline on the Flight Line

My first flight bag was actually an insulated lunch bag that my flight school sold me with the headset. The insulation served as padding and there was a pocket on the side into which I could cram sunglasses or charts. I later graduated to a laptop bag, which was good for charts, but didn't hold the headset. I tried using a document case like the big airline pilots carry, but my cockpit didn't accommodate it. I now use a messenger bag leather messenger bag I bought at a Danier sale. It has lots of pockets which although not perfectly suited to the things I carry, I now am accustomed to navigating to find my stuff when I need it. It's tough and looks good, and the leather feels nice. Animals definitely are made out of excellent stuff.

When I fly single pilot, I put my bag in the copilot seat and secure it with its own strap, then open all the pockets that contain things I need in flight. An additional pocket contains things that I won't necessarily need in flight but which I could need if I'm stranded somewhere I didn't expect to go on this flight: a change of underwear and socks and my cellphone charger. One tends to use one's cellphone a lot during irregular operations.

You could fly with your stuff in a Spider- Man backpack from Zellers and you would probably be able to dig most of it out when you needed it, but it's nice to have something that looks professional and that both protects your gear and makes it more accessible. There do exist bags designed specifically as flight bags. A reader sent me a link to a YouTube clip featuring the Brightline bag. They've clearly put a lot of thought into it.

The Brightline bag does solve a few common flight bag problems. My headset is the same size as the blue one in the demo so it doesn't fit in the little end pocket on many flight bags. I do like the water bottle pocket and the dedicated spare battery pocket, and having it break in half.

At $US 129.00, it's quite expensive for a bag, but it's not out of the ball park for flight bags. I don't know about the material or how durable it is. Will the pens poke holes in the little pen pocket? Does it stand up to catching on the sharp metal bits at the edge of the fuel selector panel? I like how compact it is, and they may be right that it does the job of bigger bags, becaue my bag is not stuffed full. But an advantage to having a larger bag is that I can stuff my sweatshirt and a couple of books in it, whereas if I wanted to add that much to the Brightline book, it wouldn't fit. If I felt my current bag were worn out, I'd definitely consider this bag, but I'm happy enough with the leather one to keep it until it gets ratty.

When I searched my inbox to find the name of the reader who sent me the link, so I could credit him or her, I found insteada message from the manufacturer, offering me a commission if I were to sell any bags. I had archived that message probably without even reading it, because I don't advertise on the site. But then I thought: as I'm going to post about this bag anyway, if someone was going to buy it anyway, then what's the harm in having them buy it from this site and have some of the money go towards building houses for Cambodians? So if you like this bag enough to buy it, do it by clicking the link below.

BrightLine Bags for Cambodia

I eventually realized that I didn't find the original message because it came to my personal mailbox, not my Cockpit Conversation one, because this reader is also a former student who figured out long ago who I was, and thus knows my real e-mail address. He doesn't have a blog, but I can tell you he once took a little Cessna out and overflew a prison, inside a charted restricted area, but didn't get in trouble, because he asked permission of the proper authority first. It was a ballsy little demonstration that that's how the system works.

Database Specification FAIL

I just booked a flight with a company that until today I considered a major Canadian airline. Their online booking system has changed slightly since they switched to SABRE and now they have input constraints that I hope would result in serious marks being docked in an elementary programming course. The company serves all regions of Canada and also offers international flights. But they come up with this:

Please spell your first and last names as they are on your government issued photo ID that you use for check-in. For example if your name is on your passport as Thomas Jones, please enter it as Thomas Jones, and not Tom Jones. Information entered into the name, address, password and cardholder name fields must be entered without special characters. Special characters such as apostrophes, hyphens, periods, symbols or accents (e.g. ^ à é # ) are not accepted in these fields by our system. (e.g. Enter Stéphanie Ducharme-L'Heureux as Stephanie Ducharme LHeureux, St. John's as St Johns, and Apt. # 123 as Apt 123).

I find that unprofessional to the point of insulting. If the purpose of the data is to collect the customer's name and home town, then collect that, not some garbled bastardization thereof. If the purpose is to compare the data with a straight ASCII database, then it is the duty of the programmer to strip or convert unwanted characters. I fly airplanes for a living and I think I could write a function that cleanly replaced accented characters with their unaccented equivalents and removed other special characters from a line of input, in not much more time than it would take me to write and format the dialogue telling the user to. But I'd be more likely to work a little harder to allow my database to spell my customers' names correctly. Asking a person to corrupt her own name for the purpose of buying an airline ticket is requiring a person to lie about her identity and herself. If an airline can't hire a programming staff that can deal with the concept of special characters, it makes me wonder if they can hack the complexities of time zones and confidential information. This would make me laugh if it didn't disgust me.

Update: I wrote them an e-mail to tell them that myself and I promptly received an autoreply beginning ...

Dear Guest,

If your issue is of an urgent nature (you’re traveling within the next 72 hours and/or needing a change or cancellation to an existing booking), please contact the Sales Super Center at 1 888 WestJet (937 8538).

That's right, travelling is misspelled and there are nine spurious characters replacing the apostrophe in you're. If you work at Westjet in Calgary, do me a favour. Find the person responsible for approving that garbage and slap them upside the head for me.

On Keeping Your Mouth Shut

A guy named Dustin Curtis visited the American Airlines website and found it to be a confusing and disharmonious experience. As a designer himself, he couldn't understand why a large company that sells much of its product online would have a website that looks like a cross between a Geocites homepage and a squatter's portal. So he wrote them a letter.

I don't know what Dustin expected to accomplish. Perhaps he thought that his suggestions might be welcomed and that there was a chance he could get some work out of it. I've written a similar letter to a jetshare company whose Internet image was the complete opposite of the high end professionalism the copy professed, and I just wanted to tell them. The way you might tell someone they have a taillight out. People need to know these things and don't always notice them themselves.

A member of the American Airlines design team replied to Dustin. The gist of the reply was, "I agree the site needs work; it's hard to change things in such a large company, but wait patiently and you will see." Dustin was thrilled to hear that someone cared about the site, reversed his opinion of the designers' competence and said so on his blog. An hour after he posted an anonymized version of the reply, the author of the e-mail was fired.

Ostensibly, he was fired for violating the non-disclosure agreement he signed with AA. Billy Sanez, Director of Corporate Communications at American says "We have employees all over the world using social media to communicate. The issue is not posting for us, it is revealing company secrets." What did he reveal? It's certainly no secret that AA is a large company with many departments. Were the spilled beans this list of planned improvements?

Some of our slated efforts include improved navigation; 16 column grid-based layouts; a lighter, more airy visual design; improved user interactions; and an increased transparency to fares and sales policies across the board.

How dare you reveal to our competitors that we plan to improve the user interface! I can't see that that's the real reason, though. The real sin was breaking the facade of unity in the company. That's no secret. It's so unsecret that rather than redesigning the site, AA has created three new booking portals for subdemographics. They're just as cluttered, but they think they can increase their appeal to gays, blacks and women by providing us all with separate drinking fountains. I guess if you're a black lesbian you have your pick. I can be snarky because I don't work for AA.

It doesn't matter how many coworkers you have: you don't tell the customer the landing sucked because your copilot made a lousy landing; you can't tell the charter passenger you're an hour late because management told the dispatcher to schedule two pickups at the same time; and you don't tell them the website sucks because 200 departments are fighting it out for space on the front page. It's tempting to do so, because the quickest way to get the customer off your personal back is to side with them and designate a new, common enemy to blame it all on. But you have to keep ranks.

I worked for a chief pilot once who took this one further. We kept ranks not only within the company but with the regulator, too. He forbade us to use phrases such as "Transport Canada requires you to remain seated with your seatbelt fastened." We weren't to transfer any safety demands to another organization but to make them a personal requirement by us, the flight crew, for your safety. I don't think it was a coincidence that this chief pilot had the best relationship with Transport I've ever seen. He didn't just say that we were all in it together for safety, he meant it.

But we were still free to blame everything on the weather.

Unbelievable

I'm back at work, luxuriating in not blogging, and chatting online.

"Did you see the video of the guy that lands the airplane with one wing?" asks a non-pilot. He provides a link, but I'm too lazy to click it.

"The military jet?" I ask. "Those airplanes get so much lift from the fuselage that it's possible to do that." I realize how pretentious that sounds and add, "Not that I wouldn't lose control of an airplane like that with two wings."

(The six minute video documents an F-15 landing after a training accident that separated almost all of one wing).

"No," says the person. "It wasn't a jet. It had a propeller. It was at an airshow."

So them I'm thinking it's probably Kent Pietsch with his detachable aileron stunt. He has a dummy aileron, and a quick release to disconnect it, so it visibly falls of the airplane in flight. He also throws a wheel out of the airplane, and then lands on one wheel, the wheel facing towards the airshow viewers. It's also set up so the announcer is acting as though this airplane is not part of the show but has violated the NOTAMed off airspace due to its emergency. The first time I saw that stunt I got some shocked reactions from other airshow patrons because I was laughing at what they thought was a serious emergency.

Finally I click the link.

The video is shaky airshow spectator footage showing an aircraft doing a low an over. It pulls up, one wing separates, it comes in and out of frame a few times then makes a knife edge approach, weight opposed by the thrust of the propeller and lift generated over the fuselage. I'm thinking, "The pilot is going to survive this!" Theres a moment of blur and then the airplane is on the ground, on the wheels. A member of the ground crew runs up and the video ends.

Whoa! When did this happen? Why have I not heard of it? Who is the pilot? I found more information at AvWeb.

So it was a good fantasy. Fun to imagine having the skill, power, presence of mind and luck to pull that off.

In Hockey it's an Honour

Yes, in answer to a comment regarding partying in the comments here when I'm away, by all means. You're all welcome to discuss whatever topics strike your fancy here. I just ask that you not be abusive to one another, and that a topic started on one blog entry remain on that blog entry, no matter how many days ago it was, and not get spread over different blog entries. That way the discussion is in one place that people can follow it, (you know how to tick the box to get replies e-mailed to you, right?) and people who are tired of that topic can move on and not have it follow them around.

I do intend to comment on the young Canadian who attempted to commit "suicide by cop" in a C172, and the Garuda pilot jailed for continuing a dangerously unstable approach, but I haven't finished thinking about those stories so today a bit of numerical superstition to go with the date.

I was e-mailing with someone who works with United Airlines and he mentioned that demand is down so much that with corresponding reduction in flight schedules, starting March 29th the range of flight numbers assigned by his airline will be from 1 to 999. They won't need four digit flight numbers anymore. And then as an aside he listed of numbers to be blocked as unusable: 13 93 113 175 213 232 313 413 513 585 613 713 811 813 911 913.

Fascinating. You quickly see that any number that would be pronounced with a "thirteen" is avoided to soothe the triskaidekaphobes, and that leaves 93, 175, 232, 585, 811 and 911. Do you recognize what's happened here? I didn't realize it before, but airlines retire flight numbers the way hockey teams retire player numbers, but in this case it's not for scoring a lot of goals. Each of the unusable flight numbers represents a major air disaster involving that flight number. It's a combination of respect for the dead and avoiding making people uncomfortable to be boarding "United Airlines Flight 93."

UA 175 was the other company airplane lost on September 11th, 2001, and the blocked 911 also refers to that date. United even changed the flight times on that route so that there is no longer an eight a.m. departure that could be said to be the same flight. UA232 was the famous DC-10 landing with no hydraulics in Sioux City. UA585 killed all on board crashing at Colorado Springs due to an uncommanded rudder hard-over. And UA811 had a cargo door come off in flight, resulting in nine fatalities.

Movies and newspaper stories often don't say "United 811" but just "Flight 811" as though there were only one flight anywhere with that number. But of course the same flight number can be used by different airlines, and by the same airline day after day. As I started to write this I knew there had been two different crashes of "Flight 191." American Airlines 191 had an engine separate from the wing during takeoff severing hydraulic lines and cutting off power to some captain-side instrumentation. Delta Airlines 191 was brought down by a microburst while landing at Dallas-Fort Worth. While looking for those Wikipedia links I discovered three other flight 191 accidents. Wikipedia includes a sixth, the recent Turkish Airlines 1951, but I think that's stretching it.

I was assigned the transponder code 0313 recently, and a seat in row thirteen on two different legs of a three leg airline itinerary. One was even an emergency exit row. I wonder if other passengers avoided that row, leaving it for me, the late check-in.

Magic Placebo Pills

Whenever I hear about a cure for the common cold, I remember the old explanation that folk remedies will make the cold go away in about seven days, whereas the cold would probably last a whole week without them. Nevertheless, if I have or think I'm getting a cold, I hit it with everything I've got: all the sleep I can sleep for, copious amounts of weak herbal tea laced with raw honey, chicken soup made chunky with raw sliced garlic, gargling salt water, you name it. I'm not allowed cough and cold syrups or anything drug-related, but I'm all over the folk remedy pharmacopoeia.

So when a reader offered me a trial of Cold-EEZE, a non-pharmaceutical product that is supposed to stave off or, failing that, shorten the duration of the common cold I said yes, please. It would be usable in circumstances where chewing on raw garlic is inadvisable and hey, pilots can't resist free stuff. (On that topic, here's a year-old post on pilot cheapness via The Flying Pinto, a witty and frequently-updated flight attendant blog.)

The theory is that zinc ions interfere with the reproduction of the virus, which sounds plausible, thus increasing its efficacy as a placebo, plus I have seen this in places other than on the manufacturer's website, so I suspect it's even true. The trick seems to be getting the zinc into your system in an active yet palatable form.

Cold-EEZE offers a pretty good choice of how to ingest your zinc. There are lozenges, gumballs, chicklet-sized gum and several different flavours. I find that if you have just one, it's tasty, like a piece of candy, but following the directions and having them every few hours all day the underlying metallic medicinal taste becomes more apparent. It's still perfectly palatable and I find that it helps to vary the flavours, so have a green tea one and then a honey-lemon one and then later a cherry one. They should sell a "mixed flavour" pack. (I'm mixing and matching from the various different boxes). I gave a box to a coworker when she and her husband-to-be were both sick with a sore throat, but she reported them too sweet to be palatable, admitting that she was having trouble swallowing anything so it might not be a fair assessment.

I suppose this is a testimonial, but I have no idea whether they work for me or not because I haven't cut back on the other preventative techniques, and who is to say which times when I thought I might be coming down with a cold but didn't, the Cold-EEZE thwarted the rhinovirus? There's no 'control Aviatrix' out there NOT taking the remedies for me to check up and see if she gets more colds than me. I haven't ever had to beg off work because I was sick or congested, and I don't eat garlic when I'm in close contact with other people, so they're probably helping. I call them my magic placebo pills.

Oh and e-mail just arrived continuing the theme of free stuff: Leading Edge Aviation at the airport in Ogden, Utah has free hot dogs at 5 p.m. on the first Friday of every month. I got on their mailing list by buying fuel, and it makes me laugh every time they e-mail me to invite me, so I have never asked them to take me off.

OAG Flights2Go

A couple of months ago I received an offer from OAG, the company that puts out the Official Airline Guide, to try their online Flights2Go product for free. I am familiar with the print product from a previous life, so I know it is the source of information on what airline goes where when, and hey, free stuff, right? I accepted the free trial.

The online product is a minimalist interface, nothing to install, no javascript, no pictures, just click the URL and get four lines of text:

• 1. Flight Schedules
• 2. Flight Status
• 3. Inbound Flight Status
• 4. Airline Info

The minimalism is a good thing. There's no wait to load it, and it's clearly accessible through even the most primitive internet devices. I use it on my laptop, but they advertise it for web-enabled phones, too.

The flight schedules rejected my first request because I entered four letter airport codes, and it only wanted the last three letters. (If someone who maintains a weather, airline, flight planning or other aviation site wants to make me really happy, they could allow both three and four letter variants of airport codes). You can also just type in the name of the city. If I type "New York" I get a choice of Newark, Laguardia or JFK. Type in "Portland" however, and I get a dropdown offering the choice of "Portland," "Portland," or "Portland," with no disambiguation. I can't get it to accept "Portland, ME" or "Portland, Maine," and when I correctly guess which of the three Portlands is the one in Maine (the second) the only confirmation I get is that the offered flights depart from PWM. If I didn't know the airport code, I'd be stuck.

The results of a search are also in a very condensed format showing the airline abbreviation, the flight number, departure and arrival airports and times, the time enroute, aircraft type, and days of the week that flight is available, ordered by departure time. Each result is itself a link to details, spelling out the abbreviations and showing each leg of a flight with connections. On the result below, you have to click the 2 to see details of the YYZ-YAM leg on the second screen. Which you can't, because the one below is just a screenshot.

The database includes a lot of airlines, including one of the tiny ones I have worked for, but misses some not so tiny ones based in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. I think every airline that codeshares with Air Canada is on the list. I didn't check every one, but the ones I did check are, and the ones I noticed absent don't. It also doesn't seem to be able to chain flights from different airlines that don't code share between each other. For example, it can find me a flight from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg on Calm Air, and it can find me a flight from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay on Bearskin Airlines, but if I ask it for service from Thompson to Thunder Bay it returns "no records available". It's not simply rejecting itineraries that don't connect well, because when I ask for Toronto to Winnipeg it offers me a 24 hour 49 minute odyssey connecting through Thunder Bay. It also offers flights connecting through Ottawa (in the wrong direction) and Chicago (in a foreign country requiring passports). But those aren't OAG's fault. Those, I believe, are connecting itineraries legitimately offered by the airlines themselves.

Navigating through the screens is simple, but once you click on a possible choice and look at the details of the routing, you have to use the back key to get back to the results list, which may be quite a few screens. I found a few cases where it shows same flight twice: the same flight number, same airline same times, same date.

I used it to try and help an acquaintance who was looking for information on flights from LAX to HNL (Hawaii for Christmas, mmm) and found a whole bunch of flights that he didn't know about. I was all excited that I was being helpful but when I looked them up, the flights I had found were all routings like LAX-SLC-HNL or LAX-SFO-HNL. While this would be useful if you were desperate for any flight, it wouldn't work out well for him, because he was travelling on a non-rev pass and couldn't risk being stranded in Salt Lake City.

When I was stranded myself by fog I was able to search the database myself for possible alternate routings to my destination and thus ask for the flight I wanted by number. For a control freak it's nice to have that power. I know someone who booked two flights on an "open jaw" itinerary (outbound to one city and homeward from another) through a travel agent who didn't know you could book two one way tickets! Needless to say he didn't get the best possible deal.

It should be mentioned that this product shows you the schedules only, not the prices. Showing prices would violate the Pauli exclusion principle of airfares, that forbids customers from knowing how much their flight costs and what other flights are available both at the same time. (Or, as has been pointed out to me, perhaps that's more the territory of Heisenberg). Maybe that's not really a fundamental law of the universe, but OAG has wisely decided not to risk it. Nah, it's just that if there's an airplane going from Toronto to Philadelphia, all the seats are going on that route. The same consistency does not apply to airfares.

I use the OAG product in conjunction with Expedia when I am booking flights, but in December expedia.com was down so I checked on OAG to see which airline sites to go to. (I know there are other portals apart from Expedia, it's just the one I have bookmarked for both US and Canadian origins). With OAG I found a direct flight to Canada that bypassed the snowed-in US hubs and Christmas delays endured by my coworkers. "You're flying direct?" they asked, while pondering whether they were ever going to escape from their snowbound hubs.

It can also look up flight status and give you toll free numbers for all the airlines it lists. It's definitely a reference for the stranded or last-minute traveller who really wants to see what flights there are as opposed to which ones the airlines claim they have seats on. They don't always match.

I won't pay to subscribe to this service for myself, because I mainly fly between small centres and, checking my recent itineraries, it wouldn't have found me the combinations of airlines I needed to get where I was going. I don't think I'd get my money's worth. I do see this product as of great benefit to people for whom a reasonable schedule is more important than a rock bottom price, and who fly among major centres served by airlines that are not named after local wildlife. Its forte is to show you how to get from A to B with the most precise timing possible, where A and B are both served by the same airline. If your flight is cancelled or full, having this product to see all the flights that are available could really help you optimize the time spent running from airport counter to airport counter to beg for seats, and if it saved you just one overnight in a strange city, it would pay for itself. In my experience, frequent travellers do know their airport codes and would have no trouble using this product.

If anyone has a search they'd like me to try in the database, just ask. I'll report back.

On the topic of airlines and airfares, this amusing website for a fictitious airline appears to be advertising for Air New Zealand.

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

Boing Boing lists a news story in which a band sticker on a bicycle shut down an airport. The name of the band is "This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb," and apparently it isn't the first time its appearance on an innocently parked bicycle has caused a bomb scare.

Everyone can appreciate that security at an airport has to be taken seriously, but it seems a little odd to base the alert level on the label. If a bicycle being a pipe bomb is a credible threat, restrict bicycle parking to a secure bunker. A bicycle sticker reading, "This bike is not a pipe bomb," wouldn't calm anyone down any. If I knew that there was one bike on the whole rack that was a pipe bomb, I'd expect it to be the one with the only stickers being the manufacturer's name and local registration. The words "pipe bomb" precipitate the security response. Not the credibility of the threat. It has been illegal for as long as I remember to make jokes or false statements about carrying dangerous items while at airport security, but this shouldn't be extended into making any statements about security or dangerous items while at airport security.

A car bombs makes a bigger bang than a bike bomb. I'd love to see a bumper sticker for cars reading "This could be a car bomb," but you know that instead of being taken as either a silly joke or a reminder to maintain constant vigilance, it would get you in trouble. They can be perfectly truthful statements, but if your t-shirt says "Some terrorists look like me" and there's a sticker on your computer saying "No explosive residue," you should probably be wearing underwear that says, "I knew I'd get strip searched today."

I'd buy that underwear, though.

And I'd need some new underwear were I forced to use this bicycle lane.

And finally, despite the really corny gaggle of geese, this animation of the US Airways landing in the Hudson River is very well done.

It Started With Telemarketers

Canada recently instituted a nationwide do-not-call list for telemarketers. Apparently the US Congress recommended such a thing fifteen years ago, but the final decision was to have individual telemarketers maintain their own do-not-call lists. That is fairly stupid, because there are so many companies that you'd never get on all the lists before one company folded and reemerged as another, quite possibly using its old do-not-call list as its new list of hot prospects.

Canada's new do-not-call list is equally stupid. There's a website you can go to in order to register your number(s) as do-not-call and any Canadian telemarketing company or foreign company making calls on behalf of a Canadian corporation is supposed to check their list against the registered do not call numbers and not call them. They can be fined $1500 for calling me anyway, so it sounds like something with teeth, but it disregards the fact the telemarketing is a scummy industry, and it's implemented in a stupid way.

Instead of being required to submit their call lists to be checked and pruned against a master list, the companies are required to buy the master list. That's right, telemarketing companies can buy a list of every Canadian who has asked not to be called by telemarketers. And the way the system works, the larger the company, the more they have to pay for the list. So of course what has happened is that little tiny companies open for the sole purpose of buying the list for cheap, and then selling it offshore where they can call me with impunity.

I got a call today, one of those machines calling. It told me that a friend had entered my name at the Bay or Zellers and that I had won a trip to Costa Rica. Now the Bay and Zellers are Canadian companies, and my friends are smart enough not to enter me in dubious contests, so I knew this was not above board. I pressed 1 to talk to a customer service representative. He had an impenetrable accent, so I couldn't understand his name, nor the name of the company calling when I asked for it. I think he may have made it deliberately unintelligible because when I asked him to spell it, he said for more information he would have to transfer me. Transferring is good, because the higher up the chain of command you get, the more of a nuisance you are able to be. In order to transfer me he wanted to know my name. I told him I wasn't giving him my name because he called me and therefore the onus was on him. He said he had to have my name to transfer me, so I told him sarcastically it was Jane Smith. He either didn't or chose not to recognize that as a default generic name and accepted it, but then wanted to know if I had more than $5000 in credit card debt. I told him I didn't give out that kind of information, just to transfer me please. He tried a few more times to get me to tell him. I told him the answer was Mu. He insisted on a yes or a no, and when I made it clear I wasn't giving it out, he hung up on me.

Scumbucket telemarketing company. This sort of thing is bad for my blood pressure or something, I'm sure. The *69 call told me that the call was from 616-980-2643 which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their service provider is named Lucre but the company name is ex-directory. Michigan has do-not-call laws protecting Michigan consumers, but what can I do about it? Global telecommunications is such that every single country in the world would have to be signatory to a global death-to-telemarketers pact before do-not-call registries are of any use whatsoever. I can't screen my calls by number, because I get calls from all over and who knows when some pilot friend is calling from a hotel or an FBO in Grand Rapids telling me they are coming north and can I meet for lunch? And screening by always letting the machine pick up also causes you to miss important calls from people who want to talk to you now or not at all. I could solve this with technology, but it's not just about telemarketing.

While I was still fuming about this, a story came on the radio about a chemical plant in Canada that had been sold to someone in Edmonton who just walked away from the responsibility of the plant when the economy took a nosedive. No payroll no forwarding address no nothing. Because I live in a modern, responsible country, the government stepped in with an emergency order asking the workers to stay at work and make sure that the plant didn't just explode, or pump hazardous chemicals into the environment or become the incubation ground for a new Batman villain, or whatever happens to untended chemical plants. I'm not sure anyone knows. The government then tried to track down the owner of the company and apparently the trail ends in Slovenia.

That's the way the world is these days. I'm horrified to think of what is happening in countries with lesser ability to step in and deal with this kind of situation. A Canadian company could just walk away from responsibility in Zaïre and who is going to be able to do anything or even know? Someone knows, and with today's global communication I'm sure I could find dozens of such cases documented by concerned individuals, but how is anyone to distinguish real should-be-crimes from made-up stuff posted on the loony websites of whacko sky-is-falling nutjobs? And even if the whole world knows, who can prosecute or hold to account a numbered Uzbekistani company with investors listing addresses in Slovenia, Paraguay and Delaware? For countries that have environmental regulations, it would be possible to require, as part of the initial environmental permitting process for new facilities, the posting of a bond sufficient to safely close down production and clean up the area in the event of abandonment or catastrophe, but that would be a large amount, and the savvy investor would just build the facility in a jurisdiction with a more short-sighted desperation for jobs.

Anything that happens in the world affects the whole world these days. The working conditions and pay at your job may be cantilevered by unions and government regulations, but ultimately in the global economy it is dependent on what the most desperate person will accept. And that person can be anywhere in the world. We can't just fix our own countries. We have to fix the whole world to get this to work. How do you fix the whole world? Historically, the spread of law has followed conquering armies. I don't think conquering the world for freedom from telemarketers is the way to go here. More optimistically, manufacturing and environmental standards also spread by economic pressure. The kids who grew up in the Cold War had it good. They knew they'd be wiped out by the Bomb. Me, I can't figure out which worldwide disaster to be concerned about.

The telemarketing part had a happy ending. I called the Bay's customer service and they efficiently transferred me to a customer service rep who knew about the usurpation of the company's name and assured me that their loss prevention department was working with the relevant authorities to stop the telemarketers, who apparently were also fraudsters. I assume they are going to nuke them from orbit, so if you live in Grand Rapids, you should probably go out of town for the weekend. And if you comment on this blog entry, do take into account that the official Posterperson for Readers of Aviatrix's Blog is employed in the telemarketing business, so any comments demonizing all telemarketers will not be taken well.

Texas Health Care

In which Aviatrix is frightened by the medical care industry and the Monsanto Corporation.

I'm waiting for the customers to need me to work, so I'm watching a lot of TV. I know House is available on cable in Canada, but it seems to be on every channel here, so I'm watching it, and I'm growing to like it. And then there are the ads.

Most of them are for prescription drugs or healthcare. Numerous ads are for cancer care centres, knee and hip surgery, and other sorts of medical care. The medical centres look on TV like holiday resorts. I know someone who is self-employed in Canada and has cancer. She is too ill to work so, being self-employed, has no money coming in. Her friends got together and had a fundraiser for her, to keep the rent paid and the groceries bought. I'm glad she doesn't have to pay for medical care. Hers is not as fancy as the resorts on TV in Texas, but I think she is getting good care. It's unsettling seeing the ads, because I take health care for granted. It's like seeing starving children in ads for NGOs doing overseas aid. Something you don't like to think about. I suppose people who live here are inured to the constant medical advertising, and to the fact that they could be wiped out financially by an illness that they recover from physically. A healthy strong young person can recover from terrifyingly traumatic injuries and go back to work, but how do they manage when they recover with usable limbs but crippling debt? Medical costs in the US make buying a car for your teenager look like a petty cash expenditure.

"Levitra does not protect against HIV/AIDS," warns another ad. Who the heck would think boner pills prevented sexually transmitted diseases? I can't fathom the logic.

I buy some cheese at the grocery store. It says on the side that it is "Made with milk from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST." I'm glad of that. Bovine growth hormone isn't approved for use in Canada, so it seems scary and foreign. I'm only exposed to it down here. Right under that declaration is another one. "The FDA has stated that there is no significant difference between milk from rBST-treated and untreated cows. The difference is that my government thinks the increase in production is not worth the risk, while the US government requires even those producers who don't use the hormone to assure the consumer that the government thinks it's okay. Probably only the cows suffer from it, but absent all other evidence, which government am I going to believe, the one that pays for health care or the one for whom private health care constitutes part of the GDP?

There was freezing rain forecast this afternoon, but it didn't happen.

The Last Reason for Roman Numerals

That would be Super Bowl XLIII. It's like the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, for American football. I have to admit I've never watched an American football game before. But indications are that the Super Bowl isn't so much about the football as about the marketing and the hype. And seeing as I'm in the USA, the commercials would be the "real" $5-million Super Bowl commercials. (In Canada they are replaced by ordinary commercials, marketing to Canadians). Plus it won't hurt to know enough about the game to have something to talk to my customers about. Guys apparently have to watch a certain amount of football in order to maintain testicular size, and my customers are all guys.

I only saw a few commercials. I stop watching by habit when the commercials came on, and kept forgetting that I was supposed to be checking them out. What did I learn? Some beer makes it summer wherever you drink it. Some beer is more watery (they call it drinkability) than other beer. Other beer (or possibly the same beer) has nice talking horses. Trucks with aluminum transmissions can drive uphill through fiery tunnels (actual demonstration). Drive recklessly enough and maybe the mouth will fall off the woman who is nagging you to slow down. (I'm hoping that one wasn't a beer or a car commercial). If roadies flew aircraft the runway lights would explode during take-off. (I think that one was an ad for a telephone or an internet provider). Pepsi is now teaching the world to sing. I was completely baffled what one ad was for, and then visited the site. Headsnap! It's a "discreet dating service for married people." A domain reseller (which coincidentally my employer uses) will enhance your assets, or possibly cause women to flash their tits at you. There will be a special edition of The Office on later. Thank you for watching and congratulations to the winning team.

I didn't perceive a level far above regular commercials. The money is in the audience not the production. I suppose the boob flashing was a wink to the halftime "wardrobe malfunction" of a few years ago. I'm guessing the broadcasting standards haven't changed in XLIII years? Considering the audience, a topless halftime show ought to be a hit. I guess it's too early in the evening to show skin on network TV. But if they can digitally put markings and advertisements on the field, they can digitally put bikinis on the performers. I can't see anyone in the target audience being really offended, and I bet more people would watch.

It's too bad the athletes have to be so heavily padded so you can't see the shape of their bodies. I understand it's to prevent injury on the field, but how about if they take off their helmets and shirts at the end of the game. All that time in the weight room just for hitting each other and running around? C'mon, show some muscles. I think I like sports where everyone wears spandex better. Yes, that's right, she watches one football game and she's going to tell you how it should be done.

Except I tuned in to watch a cultural event, and a football game broke out. You don't need to know anything about a game to realize that when there's two minutes left and the score is really close, and the ball is right on the edge of where the team that is behind needs to put it to get ahead, it's exciting. The yellow team guy threw the ball and another yellow team guy caught it, and the red team guys jumped on him. And then they did it again but this time the yellow team guy ran a longer way and caught the ball before the red team guys jumped on him. (But not nearly as far as the guy who earlier ran all the way from one end of the field to the other without getting knocked down). Next they threw the ball to a yellow team guy who was in the goal area, but he missed it, but being American football they got a fourth try, and this time the guy caught it. He then got knocked out of bounds, but apparently that was alright. The red team guys got a try at throwing the ball then, but there were only about 30 seconds left and someone caught it wrong or something and they did not get any more goals so the yellow team won. It was very exciting, I assure you.

A behind-the-scenes quirk that amuses me, but that veteran Super Bowl watchers probably know, goes back to the theme of people without shirts on. In anticipation of one of the teams winning, the marketing people print up gazillions of shirts and other merchandise proclaiming each team the champions. As soon as they find out which team is the loser, they deliver all the correct merchandise to where it can be sold to fans, and then send all the stuff with the wrong team declared the champion off to destitute people in refugee camps and disaster zones, where they care even less than I do who won the game, but presumably can clothe a family of five with a couple of 3XL football shirts, a baseball cap and a foam #1 finger. I'm not certain the foam fingers go to the third world, but the hats and ball caps do.

Go team! And they're getting bigger already, I can tell. See?

For television coverage of a different event, you can see the 60 Minutes interview with Captain Sullenberger and his crew online.

Texas Scares Me

I'm irrationally scared of Texas. You'll see some criticism in the next few posts. Please forgive me, or educate me, or at least be literate and interesting while flaming me. If you're a die-hard Texan you might just want to skip a few posts. I start out trying to treat Texas fairly, but it just comes out mean. I'm not sure what it is. Texas has a reputation, I guess, as a larger than life, shoot first ask questions later kind of state.

It's enormous, so there's no one Texas. The bit I'm in is flat and cold--we've come all this way and yet the temperature is hovering around freezing. It even snowed in Dallas this week.

We were told we're in the Best Western hotel, and the GPS database in the plane said that was 3 miles from the airport, but the customer who picks us up is clearly driving further than that.

"What hotel are we in?" we ask.

"Best Western. It's nice, but it's way the other side of town."

It turns out that the old Best Western was torn down last year after the new one we're in was completed. There's a sign still up for the Grand Opening Special Rates. The assistant at the customer's company who booked the accommodation must have been working off the same outdated information we were.

On the ride to the hotel a public service ad comes on the radio, addressing pregnant teenagers and scaring them with details of what a difficult task it is to raise a child on your own. We look at one another with raised eyebrows, having never heard abortion advertised, but then the ad wraps up urging the teenagers to give their babies up for adoption rather than keeping them. We realize that abortion isn't even on the table here. The young woman at the hotel check-in desk is pregnant and the others' expressions tell me that I'm not the only one reminded of the ad.

We go for dinner at the Texas Roadhouse chain next to the hotel. Something you have to love about the southern US: food is cheap. We have a tasty steak dinner with side dishes and non-alcoholic beverages and excellent although informal service, for ten dollars. I think I pay that much for a box of Chicken McNuggets and a milkshake at home.

We transported some of the customer's equipment and they shipped some by courier. It turns out we're more reliable today, as some of their equipment is missing, so we'll have the weekend off to wait for it to be delivered.

Something else scary I found today is this news article about a pilot suing three flight attendants who refused to accept his decision not to deice. Notice that the Calgary ground crew also filed a report on the aircraft when they observed ice and offered deicing but were turned down. Some US Airways pilots are more heroic than others, it would seem. Great CRM, dude. If I were him I would bring my own coffee to work.

Ville de Montréal

There's no problem getting my required rest, as I have the next day off. I've spent enough time in Montréal in the past that I'm not interested today in seeing the museums and cathedrals, nor overeating on smoked meat and poutine. It's nice to be back in a big Canadian city, with every amenity I could possibly want, and a few old friends live here too.

One of my co-workers complains about the signs being in French, making it hard to get around. Funny, it's one of the things I like about the place. I don't think it's much harder to get around than any other city. Right turns on red are forbidden by default in the city. It has your typical maze of crooked downtown one-way streets, turn restrictions and bridges forking into highway ramps, but I don't recall any signs that didn't conform to international standards. You don't have to read more than a highway number and an arrow to take the proper exit from an overpass. I guess there are people who don't know their ouest from their est, but that's about the only source of confusion I see. My colleague, and others I've spoken with, feel that the French are being deliberately difficult, but I would say that Québec is more accommodating to English speakers than the rest of Canada is to French speakers.

It's true that language laws restrict the display of English signage, resulting in what to me is an amusing forest of signs advertising goods and services with familiar logos but twisted names and slogans. Canadian corporations go to some trouble concocting names that work equally well in both official languages, like the former Canadi>n Airlines, using a chevron to cover the difference between the French and English spelling.

I'm proud of my country's history, and that includes both solitudes. Quebec is a nation within a nation. It is different, and in a more significant way than Newfoundland is different from Alberta. I don't believe that the culture and language of a people should be subjugated just because their ancestors lost a battle two hundred odd years ago. I'm pretty sure it was exigency not planning that left society and legal system of Lower Canada unchanged after the English victory, but I like the resulting plurality of my country. I see what happens in countries where nationalists of once-independent states are suppressed. Heck, it happened here in Canada the 70s, before the laws. Now the quebecois are more confident in the security of their culture, so there is no need to kidnap cabinet ministers. Sure, some tourists are confused. Other tourists enjoy an exotic experience without leaving their own continent. And you have to get pretty far from the cities before a plaintive, "Does anyone speak English, please?" wouldn't be met with help. Get far enough north and people don't speak much English, but keep going north and they don't speak much French either. How's your Cree? Damn, I love my country and all its crazy languages and cultures.

Montréal has excellent public transit. I take a bus to the metro and buy a six-pack of metro tickets in anticipation of a few more snow days.`(A "snow day" is what you call it when school is cancelled because there is too much snow for the snowploughs to get through).

Quantum of Solace

Naturally I had to see the latest James Bond movie, despite the poor reviews it has had, and so naturally I have to blog about it, or at least about the parts with airplanes in them. This entry doesn't contain plot spoilers, mainly because the movie doesn't have much of a plot. It was mainly a series of locations and stunts. I do reveal how one of the action sequences ends, and you might be able to infer from the post whether or not the bad guy gets his come-uppance in the end.

James Bond continues to live the high life, and the producers continue their association with Virgin Atlantic, leaving Bond to enjoy a cocktail in the fancy upper deck bar of a VA B747, en route to Bolivia. According to VA, you can actually get the Vesper cocktail on board, or if your first class travel plans don't involve VA, the link includes the recipe so you can mix your own. The scene is shot in a Virgin Atlantic cabin crew trainer near Gatwick. VA doesn't fly to Bolivia, but they did fly a charter to Panama for the film.

Every pilot who has ever flown outside the United States will cringe as Bond butchers the callsign of a British registered Challenger jet, reading off the registration as "Golf Zero Charlie Sierra Delta" when it's clearly a British registered jet, and contains only letters. It has to be "Golf Oscar." It's a mistake that American air traffic controllers make, but Bond is supposed to be a British secret agent, and qualified pilot. There's a slight possibility that the gaffe is an intentional shoutout to sponsor Coke Zero, but I doubt it because the Challenger in question is a real airplane, really operated by Ocean Sky, as it as in the movie, so the callsign is genuine, not scripted. The properties list must have simply called for "a business jet" however, because while Bond departs Haiti in a Challenger, he taxies to the ramp in Austria in a Lear. I guess he did one of his mid-flight air-to-air transfer stunts but it was left on the cutting room floor.

I can't complain about airplanes in this movie though, as the best scene in the movie was a good long segment of aerial combat with Bond in a DC-3 versus the bad guy in a Marchetti. The DC-3 mainly gets shot up, trying to evade its pursuer with some low canyon flying, which was real. Here's a clip showing the DC-3 owner and pilot, Skip Evans, including some shots of them filming the stunt. Yikes. I wouldn't fly like that in any airplane I know, and there he is doing it in a DC-3. That's why the chief pilot reams you out for 'pulling a stunt' when you do something stupid. I'm not criticizing: stunt flying is a whole different standard.

During the chase, smoke starts pouring out of one of the engines and then Bond moves a cockpit lever forward. The smoke increases, blinding the pursuer, and our heroes gain some headway. There's a momentary shot of an aircraft placard reading "feathering pump not fused." Bear in mind that I only saw the movie once, and that there's a known deficiency of the human memory to sequence events that happened in quick succession. At the time I was watching I either didn't notice the smoke before the lever movement, or didn't mark it as unusual --it's a DC-3 after all: I was in the yard of a large DC-3 operator watching flames coming out of an engine during start up, and no one who worked there thought it a noteworthy event. It initially looked like Bond moved a lever forward and smoke poured out of the engine. It had looked like a propeller lever, but I speculated that it was a mixture lever and he was enriching the mixture so much the engine smoked. It wasn't a mixture lever though, so then I'm wondering maybe it was both props, just before increasing throttle, but they cut away before they showed that part?

The "feathering pump" placard had me wondering what that had to do with anything. I found an online DC-3 manual and the Propeller section confirms that the electrical feathering pump indeed has no circuit protection. It is an electric oil pump that uses high oil pressure against a piston in the propeller hub to drive the propeller blades to the feathered position. When the piston reaches the stop, oil pressure continues to increase. At 600 psi the pump trips offline.

More details than most people want on such things, from a Dutch accident report:

The system is powered by an electrically driven gear type oil pump controlled from the cockpit by momentarily pressing the feathering button in the overhead panel. An electrical solenoid will keep the feathering button in the depressed position. This action will activate the feathering pump, which is mounted on the front side of the fire wall. The pump takes oil from a separate part of the engine oil tank and feeds it under high pressure, while hydraulically disconnecting the governor by shifting its high pressure transfer valve, to the propeller blade angle changing mechanism in the propeller dome. This high pressure oil acts on the aft side of the propeller piston forcing the piston to its maximum stop. This movement of the piston turns the blades, via a bevel geared cam and bevel gear segments on the blades, from the actual blade angle through the coarse blade angle range to a blade angle of 88°, which is the feathered position in which the blades are streamlined in the flight direction. When the piston is at this maximum forward position the feathering oil pressure will rise. At about 600 psi a pressure cut-out switch in the feathering oil line, mounted on the governor will automatically switch off the electric power to the solenoid of the feathering button, releasing this button and interrupting electrical power to the feathering pump. Feathering takes approximately four seconds.

In all likelihood, any cockpit lever movements were just an actor moving things to be dramatic, and the placard was just in the shot because it was in the cockpit and required for FAA certification and I wasn't supposed to take anything from any of it. Here's a clip from the scene, but it doesn't show the levers being moved. [The movie was embedded in this blog, but it was redirecting people who didn't have the right plug-ins, so I took it out.]

Here is a clip showing the

At the end of the sequence, Bond pulls the DC-3 up into a vertical climb and then he and the female lead escape out the back using a single parachute, which opens less than ten metres from the ground, but they are both okay. Mercifully the now-unmanned airplane crashes off camera. I didn't want to watch a DC-3 airframe destroyed for the purpose of a movie, even if it was just a junkyard hulk.

From a James Bond movie I don't expect any more than I got in the way of plot. It had a twist, but it didn't make any difference. For me the movie suffered from too much punching and smashing and not enough smarts and witty banter. An added DVD feature for movies could be the optional display of countdown timers during action sequences: Plot Resumes in 3:38, so that those of us who are only interested in who wins the punching know we have time to go to the refrigerator. To be fair, there could be a similar countdown on talky exposition scenes: Action Resumes in 2:59, so the guys would know when it was safe to go for a beer without missing anything they like.

My favourite line came from M, right after what I'll call the unexpected end to their torture session. I won't spoil it, because it may have been the most unexpected moment in the film. I thought the make-up job for one character's supposed burn scar was poor. Until the character history was revealed, I thought it was a coverup for a tattoo on the actress. There was a nice visual and thematic Goldfinger reference, and they did a good job of following that theme through the movie, right to the final revenge.

On Javelin Jets and Tree Climbing

I'm going to let someone else blog for me today. This is a long article from an aviation journalist about why people buy jets, why pilots like flying and why he likes climbing trees instead.

Update: My original misspelling suggested a coffee-powered jet. Mmmmm. But fixed, now.