LOST

II might as well post this now, because I won't have a chance to update it if the mystery of Malaysian Airlines 370 is solved in the next few days. I don't have any special insights about the disappearance of an entire Boeing 777, but as a pilot I have to wonder about it.

First off, despite what movies like Airport '77 depict, an airplane that crashes into the sea doesn't slip whole and undetected under the waves. With considerable skill, or even questionable skill and some luck, it could alight on the surface of the water without substantial damage. Handled as if it were being landed on land, an airplane can skim over the surface of the water the way a skipped pebble or a snowmobile does. (Unlike the snowmobile, an airplane doesn't immediately sink, because the fuselage is full of air, and buoyant). No sane person would deliberately ditch an aircraft without a substantial emergency, because if something goes slightly wrong, the picture is substantially different. The video below is of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that was out of fuel. The captain was trying to ditch it while fighting with the hijackers. Even that fuselage stayed afloat for a reasonable amount of time, and many of the deaths were not due to crash injuries, but because passengers inflated their life vests before exiting the aircraft, impeding evacuation.

There's a post being shared on Facebook that purports to show the aircraft recovered, but you can tell from the still that it's actually a Lion Air landing accident from last year. Don't click that one because it's probably a virus.

When an airplane comes into contact with it, water is really quite a bit like ground. Do it in landing configuration, descending towards the water at a shallow, about three degree angle, then touching down wings level, slightly nose up and it is quite survivable. Do it at high speed, or inverted, or any other way that doesn't involve control at a low descent rate, and the result is catastrophic. Swiss Air 111 hit the water 20 degree nosedive, and at a bank turn angle of 110 degrees, and disintegrated into millions of pieces. Only one of the passengers was visually identifiable. Alaska Airlines 261 was a similar story. Many of the millions of pieces that make up an airliner and its contents float, so the debris is visible on the surface and drifts ashore. Jet fuel is oily, and floats on water leaving a visible slick. Also both those crews were in contact with air traffic control during the sequence that led to the crash.

When an aircraft suddenly disappears from radar and stops transmitting, one good guess is that it broke up in midair. But when that happens the pieces are in the water in roughly the area where the radar track stopped, and the last week has seen ships, helicopters satellites and and airplanes tasked to search that area with no results. Plus substantial other evidence exists that the airplane did not explode, crash, alight or otherwise make contact with the water in the area they've been looking for it. SATCOM, an automated system on board the aircraft, and one a very diligent Boeing pilot of my acquaintance says he doesn't know how to turn off, continued sending transmissions. It's a passive system that pings about once an hour, sending what's basically a "ready to transmit" signal but no data links were opened, because the companies involved had not subscribed to that level of service from the satellite operator.

Here's what I have gleaned of the timeline. Times are Malaysian local.

• 12:41 a.m. Take off
• 1:07 a.m. The ACARS data transmission system stopped communicating. ACARS is a two-way data transmission system in the cockpit. The pilots can use it to request weather data and the airline will use it to send them connecting flight information, and even to update the flight management system. It automatically transmits some data on phase of flight and things like fuel status and engine performance, so the airline can detect a need for maintenance before it is urgent. It can also be used for communication with ATC, but as far as I know is generally only used with ground controllers to get the complex initial clearance for a flight. It might be used in flight for a complex rerouting, but I don't know. Check the comments to see if one of my more knowledgeable readers does. The ACARS system can be turned off from the cockpit.
• 1:21 a.m. The crew is 'handed-off' by Malaysian ATC. That is they are told to contact the next controller on a specific frequency. They reply normally to this call, implying that they will comply, but do not call the Vietnam ATC.
• 1:21 a.m. The transponder is turned off. The transponder is a simple device that works in concert with ATC radar. Before take-off ATC assigns the airplane a four digit code, which the pilot sets on the transponder. When it receives a ping from radar, it sends back a signal encoded with the aircraft altitude and the four digit code. that the pilot has set on the device. The ATC computers match the code with the aircraft type and destination in its flight plan, plus calculate and display a speed based on consecutive returns. If an aircraft does not have a working transponder, ATC may still see the aircraft on radar, but it is a "primary target." The transponder can be turned off from the cockpit. Transponders malfunction pretty frequently, and an aircraft like the B777 probably has two, for backup and to facilitate changing codes without an interruption in radar track.
• 1:22 a.m. Vietnam ATC expect a check in from the airplane but instead the radar track shows an almost 180 degree turn.
• 1:38 a.m. Civilian radar lose primary target. Without the positive identification of the transponder reply, controllers only know that their radar is hitting something there. Based on the speed and location, they can sometimes deduce that the target is a train, ship, or flock of birds, and they can be pretty confident that a blip going the speed of an airliner, in the location where an airliner transponder just stopped transmitting, is that airliner. Primary and secondary surveillance radars may have different coverage, so an airplane that could normally be tracked by its transponder signal may not be visible as a primary target.
• 2:15 a.m Malaysian military radar detects an unknown aircraft, possibly MH370, on a track that suggests it made another turn.
• 2:30 am Another possible military radar contact with the missing jet. I'm not sure if it shows the jet on the same track or not.
• 8:11 a.m. Final SATCOM ping received from the aircraft.

The aircraft had about eight hours of fuel on board at the speed it was going, and more if they reduced the power settings. I don't know the radar structure of the airspace they were in to say where they could get to without the aircraft being detected by an agency that would recognize and report its significance.

I don't know what it all means. I have a friend who is livid at the apparent lack of cooperation among the various military agencies who almost certainly have more information on the track of the missing airplane, but don't want to divulge their capabilities to one another. He also suggests that if the SATCOM signals were received by multiple satellites their source location could be triangulated. He also implied that a team of children with expertise at Where's Waldo should be put on the case, but I think the former suggestion was the more serious one.

Here is a link that answers some basic questions I didn't think people would ask, but people have some odd questions about airplanes. Someone asked me if this could be a case of pilot incapacitation, with the autopilot or random chance making those turns. I'd say no. The autopilot wouldn't be programmed to make those turns, and if the autopilot wasn't on, I would expect significant altitude changes. It's an odd incapacitation that would cause you to turn off two separate systems, one fourteen minutes before a normal call to ATC.

This one gives a pretty good explanation of tracking technology, and addresses the question of "how can we apply technology so this can't happen, and why haven't we done so already?"

Because I don't like to think of airplanes crashing if it's not necessary, I imagine that the pilots have stolen the aircraft, kidnapping the passengers. Although probably worse. It sounds like some cellphones were still switched on and even logged into social media accounts. Given the attachment some people have for their phones, it seems unlikely that that many people could be taken alive without anyone managing to get a message of some sort away. Despite my recent rewatching of the television Series LOST, I don't believe that the airplane has been spirited away to a mysterious island guarded by a smoke monster.

The facts that there will be wreckage if an airplane crashes, and that they haven't found wreckage, don't mean that the airplane didn't crash. It's a really BIG ocean, and it takes a long time to search. I liked this picture of Malaysian SAR crews. Of course it's probably posed, but I'm always attracted to shots that depict a group of people engrossed in something, not looking at the camera. It suggests expertise, focus, teamwork, and an important task. I also like the simplicity of the way the women's hijabs work with their flight suits.

I'll give the final word to The Onion, a satirical publication that doesn't know the phrase "too soon."

Update: They've pulled some location information out of the satellite data, but don't have enough satellites receiving the signal to resolve the position ambiguity.

Back to the North Pole

We're not anywhere near the north pole actually, just north of most civilization. We departed IFR from an aerodrome that had flight services and they passed us on to Centre. We have an elaborate flight plan that switches to VFR and then back to IFR, so we have to discuss that a little. We will be passing out of controlled airspace shortly, so Centre gives us a clearance that is valid "while in controlled airspace," and then clears us to en route frequencies. The "while in controlled airspace" tag is very common. Many IFR routes pass through swathes of uncontrolled airspace, especially during descent into remote destinations.

We accept the clearance and then change to the en route frequency, 126.7. Across Canada pilots in uncontrolled airspace make reports to one another on their positions and intentions using this frequency. The initial call will be quick and simple, because most of us aren't in each other's way. If a pilot makes a call and it sounds to someone else as though their routes may intersect, then the pilots concerned provide more precise information or negotiate routing or altitudes that will ensure they don't conflict.

I state my position with bearing and distance from the aerodrome I departed, and then give my track merely as, "Northbound for the middle of nowhere." I'm not even expecting anyone on frequency to be close enough to hear, as I'm still climbing out, but there's a reply.

A surprised voice with an Australian accent says, "I've just come from there!"

I ask him, "Is the weather good?" and he says it is.

Later we change our minds about the flight plan, something that happens on about eighty percent of our flights, because that's just the way our operation works. Only problem is that despite being at FL180 we can't contact ATC. We need a clearance to climb higher, and don't want to waste the gas to do so anyway. We can't raise anyone else on the radio to do a relay for us, but we have a satellite-based tracking transceiver that is capable of transmitting text messages to our flight follower. We get the flight follower to call the flight services to cancel IFR and close out the rest of our flight plan.

The weather was very good in the middle of nowhere, and we got a sizable proportion of our work done before returning to the southern reaches of nowhere. But we didn't see Santa. I told you we weren't that far north.

For Altitude

I'm in an area of complex controlled airspace. One agency, a big city tower, controls the airspace from the surface up to 4000'. Above that, the terminal controller is responsible for airspace up to to 12,500', and Centre controls everything above 12,500'. I've been working in high level airspace, but have now descended and am talking to terminal. They know my intentions: to land at an airport just past the big city. They've told me to maintain 6500' VFR. I do this, following the route they specify, following landmarks, then an assigned heading and then direct a nav aid. They have traffic below me, but I must be past it now, because they tell me I'm cleared to 4500', contact tower for lower.

I'm expecting this, so I have the tower frequency already tuned on standby. After I acknowledge the instruction, I push the button to switch to tower frequency. I don't call immediately, because I need to listen for a moment to make sure I'm not interrupting a conversation. I start descent and then call tower, giving them my call sign and that I'm passing "six thousand two hundred for four thousand five hundred." The first number is the altitude they can crosscheck with my transponder readout, and the second number is the altitude I was cleared to.

The tower controller says that he is not responsible for that airspace, and that I should call terminal. "Terminal sent me to you," I say. It's not uncommon for there to be miscommunication between tower and terminal. The tower controller tells me to go back to terminal then, because 4500' is not in his airspace. And now I know the problem: although my destination should be encoded on my radar blip, either the tower controller hasn't looked at it or it's been miscoded. I tell him the airport I want to land at and he clears me down through his airspace for it, grumping that I should have asked for that in the first place.

I wonder out loud to my coworker about who put a frog in the tower controller's cocoa, and continue my descent. But I see the ambiguity there. Pilots say, "Niner thousand for six thousand five hundred," both to request a descent to six thousand five hundred and to indicate a descent in progress, with the intention of stopping there. The latter could be a clearance limit in uncontrolled airspace, or just a pilot stating her intentions, if the descent will take her out of controlled airspace. I could have said "six thousand two hundred requesting descent for ." I went out again and came back the same way later that day, with similar clearances, and I think I used the latter wording without incident.

UK-trained pilots will jump in now with radiotelephony rules, because their language and training is more precise. I agree ours should be, and am somewhat surprised that in thousands of hours of flying this is the first time this particular ambiguity has bitten me. I suppose there have been numerous times when the second controller has taken my statement of an existing clearance to be a request, and recleared me to that altitude, but they didn't stand out enough for me to realize the ambiguity.

Controllers are damned smart. I think most of the time they just figure it out.

Always Check NOTAMs

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

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

When FL180 Doesn't Exist

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

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

AIM 6.4.3 Vertical Separation Between Flight Levels and Altitudes ASL

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

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

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

Pop Quiz Indeed

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

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

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

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

And then I go and take pictures.

A1 Priority

Sometimes when you spend a long time reading dry material, tiny points of interest seem proportionately hilarious. From AIM RAC 8.2.1.

ADS WPR is a service that allows aircraft equipped with FANS 1 (the Boeing implementation of FANS) and FANS A (the Airbus implementation of FANS) to provide certain ATS units with position reports.

ADS WPR is Automatic Dependent Surveillance Waypoint Position Reporting and FANS is Future Air Navigation Systems -- that's going to sound pretty funny when it's the LORAN C of the 2040s -- but the funny-to-me part is the suffix designations for the rival manufacturers' systems. It makes it sound as though neither wants to sound like their system plays second fiddle so they don't want to be 1 and 2, but A for Airbus and B for Boeing would also sound like A was better than B. This initial impression is wrong: according to Wikipedia, ICAO initially developed the concept, then a group of airlines asked Boeing to make it a reality. Their system was originally just called FANS became FANS 1 and they are now at work on FANS-2. Meanwhile Airbus' FANS A has been upgraded to FANS A+ and they're at work on FANS B. Not the usual progression of letter grades. I hope they go to the Greek alphabet after they pass Z. The people who control sixty airplanes at once from the ground while playing video games and instant hologramming their friends can contend with FANS 39/Omicron.

Or maybe it will just be called Skynet. In pre-FANS technology, trans-oceanic pilots out of radar range of air traffic control had to monitor and make position reports via HF radio. The difficulty of sending and receiving the transmissions limited the density of use of the airspace. It was a bottleneck, so FANS automates communication of aircraft position. Coupled with improvements in navigation precision, it allows more airplanes to safely use the same airspace.

I wonder if when RAC 8-2-4 tells me that crews should, "use “A-D-S” after the aircraft call sign" in voice transmissions, they mean "Eh-Dee-Ess" or "Alfa-Delta-Sierra." If my training didn't cover it, I'd just listen in and see what other crews did.

Darn, don't you hate it when you're procrastinating but you end up learning things?

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.

Delayed Reporting Time

So I slept, or at least held my eyes closed and thought about how I'd better be sleeping, or I was going to be really tired tomorrow, from around six p.m. to 2 a.m., woke up, turned on the computer, got dressed while it unhibernated, and at 2:05 am determined that it had been raining for the last six hours and was forecast to continue doing so for the rest of the thirty-six hour forecast period. I looked outside and yeah, it wasn't raining hard. There were still dry spots under parked cars, but it was raining.

So our meeting was short. I called ATC and the people who were looking after our airplane and told them the flight was cancelled. And then I went back to bed. At that point I noticed that the bedside clock was an hour slow, which made getting up in the middle of the night when it's still light out and then not getting up after all seem all the more surreal. Did it really happen?

I went back to bed and slept until I was done sleeping, which was about six hours. Now, it hasn't been dark yet, and I've slept twice. What day is it? Alaska is confusing, and duty time laws even more so.

We were supposed to report for work at two a.m. but simply woke up and went back to bed fifteen minutes later without leaving the hotel. So what time does our duty day end now?

Part 700.18 of the Canadian Air Regulations says:

Where a flight crew member is notified of a delay in reporting time before leaving a rest facility and the delay is in excess of 3 hours, the flight crew member's flight duty time is considered to have started 3 hours after the original reporting time.

That's the rule that best applies here. For the first six hours of delay, it also gives an advantage--to the person optimising pilot utilization--over the split duty day rule, which allows a duty day extension of one to three hours: one hour of extension for each two hours of rest in the middle of the duty day. For a delay greater than six hours but less than eight hours, the results are identical to applying the split duty day rule. If the delay were a full eight hours, plus time for meals and personal hygiene, then it would be a new day. It's that rather than the calendar or daylight that determine when a pilot's new day dawns.

If our rest period continues without interruption until eleven or so, the duty day has been technically reset, and we could legally be asked to work a fifteen hour day starting any time after then, say five p.m. until eight a.m. tomorrow morning. That would be nasty, but every once in a while the work demands it. There are some other factors that come into play, the trump card being that if we the pilots consider that we are fatigued or likelt to become fatigued as a result of a schedule, we're bound in law to refuse it.

That's the law, here's the application. At nine a.m. not only has it stopped raining, but all forecast of rain is gone from the TAF. I call back ATC and ask when our next window is for the work. Sunday morning is a pretty quiet time at most airports, but PANC isn't most airports. It's the same lady, what kind of duty days do they have? She's a realist though, and I guess she doesn't have vacation comng this week. After some more hmming and making sure I know just how inconvenient this is, she verbally shrugs, "Sooner you start the better." I call everyone to say we're a go, again, and we'll be airborne within the hour.

Out at the airplane, the FBO has reconnected the nosegear scissors after towing. That's rare. but they've screwed up the billing despite my "FUEL ONLY" verbal and post -it-ed designation of the credit card number I gave them. They'll sort it out later. We've decided to fly this two-crew, because of the busy-ness of both the airspace and the radio work. I ask the other pilot if he wants to drive or talk. He says he'd rather leave the talking to me, if I don't mind. He says I'm good at talking to authority figures. He just knows I love to yap. It's the role I would have chosen. The flying isn't different from what we do every day, but the ATC negotiation and traffic will be interesting.

I call clearance delivery right after start up on the ramp and they already know all about us and our unusual mission, so I don't have to do any explaining. They assign me a transponder code and a runway. I ask if they'd like to assign us a temporary operational callsign for the mission, "to avoid all the alphabet soup." This is for me as much as them, because American controllers won't shorten my five letter callsign to the last three the way Canadians will, and they will pronounce the C maybe as Charlie, maybe as Canadian, sometimes include the type and sometimes not, sometimes pronounce the letters in the phonetic alphabet and sometimes just use their names the way they are pronounced in the alphabet song, and just the way you may not hear your name when it is called by someone who pronounces it incorrectly, I may miss a call for me. And I don't want to spend the next five hours reciting my entire callsign in every call. "Sure," says the controller, "what do you want to be?" They want ME to pick? I make something up on the spot, almost as cool as AIRSHARK ONE. They accept it unblinkingly and tell me to call tower for taxi. I acknowledge, laughing as I release the mike button, because I'm an AIRSHARK! I'm hoping that I haven't stolen someone else's handle or done something illegal here. I was expecting ATC to assign me something convenient for them, usually just the type and a number, or a part of my full registration.

We taxi to the threshold of the runway, take off and start work. It's fun. It's awesome. Anchorage is an awesome area, with sea and mountains and a big inlet and airplanes everywhere. At first ATC asks us to call every turn, but they quickly realize that we are going to do exactly what we say we are going to, with clockwork predictability. If I turn the tracklines on on the GPS they make pretty patterns, because even the turns are close to identical. As I'm not flying, I can see the whole ballet unfolding, and keep expecting being asked to turn aside, wait twenty seconds, extend a line or modify a turn.

We play chicken with B747s flown by pilots with minimal English skills, counting on their comprehension, flight plans or habits to have them turn east at four hundred feet. We do what feels like an airshow pass with big-yet-manoeverable metal inbount to Elmendorf air base. "I acknowledged having it in sight without remembering what it was. We report sighting the helicopters, float planes, and even other aircraft the same type as us as they look out for us. An advantage I didn't consider of being AIRSHARK is that we're not advertising the foreign callsign.

Over the course of the flight we were handled by five different controllers, working quite long stints at the mike, considering that they kept up a continuous stream of instructions, advisories and clearances. And after all that time, ATC has not delayed our relentless progress through the grid by as much as one second. They are moving the massive Boeings around us. It's now well into the working day, but they aren't asking us to give them a break, either. Man, they really want to get rid of us.

We told them when we had flown our last line and were cleared in to land, with a Korean Airlines B747 waiting at the hold short line for us. We taxi off triumphant and proud. I call the ground controller and ask him to convey our thanks to everyone involved. Anchorage ATC are awesome. They took full responsibility for a very awkward flight, never asking me to change frequencies nor wasting a second of our time.

I'm on a high after accomplishing this mission. The ultimate in happiness for me is achieving something as part of a team when we weren't sure that it could be done. To get this done the second full day in Alaska is beyond expectations. Except for the pessimist's expectation that the more you want to have an opportunity to explore a place, the quicker you will be yanked out to go somewhere else.

Our supper restaurant has placemats with a map of Alaska on them, and we look at them to see where we're going next. Hmm. The annotation for that region of Alaska says that it is "cool and foggy" in the summer. Just what we don't need. And the food is truly awful.

Handover Briefing

The handover briefing includes socializing about progress on people's renos and relationships interspersed with details of the work, airplane quirks, new policies, customer disposition, unwritten policies of the local ATC unit and all the contact information for deicers, fuellers and other contacts we've made over the month.

There's a new project manager. He's very gracious, and the chief pilot suggests that we might have to push him to let him know he can ask us to to work in conditions he doesn't know are safe and leave us to say no if it isn't. There is no hangar space at all and a small ramp that is occasionally filled with unmarked B1900s that appear out of nowhere -- usually without regard for circuit procedures -- disgorge and/or take on passengers and vanish again into the sky. They've seen some larger aircraft too, maneuvering very carefully on the small ramp and following the MF procedures to the letter. The chief pilot has concluded that there's a middle size of aircraft whose pilots think they are too important to follow the rules set out for the C172s but are not yet responsible enough to obey the rules that are actually set out for everyone. There is electrical power for our block heaters, and an extremely low-flow self-serve avgas pump that cuts off and must be restarted every $500, but despite numerous attempts we haven't managed to contact airport personnel.

There are two sorts of military airspace we will be working around on this project. They give us the frequencies and the information they've obtained on them. One is active only Monday to Friday 8 am to 4 pm, like defending your country were some sort of office job. The other is 24/7, no overflights and don't go taking any pictures, either. Who knew that Canada had secret military bases. I was extra good and didn't even look out the window on that side, so I can't tell you what was there. Just kidding. I looked, but it was dark.

The airplane is just out of an inspection and has been behaving well. There might be work in Medicine Hat when we are snowed out of here, which will probably be soon. Also, my coworker hasn't flown this type of mission at night, and doesn't have much actual IFR experience, so I'll go with him on one just so he doesn't have to suffer the dark night disorientation alone the first time.

Restricted Doesn't Mean Impassable

Canadians use the "class F" airspace designation a little differently than the ICAO standard, and Americans skip F altogether in their airspace alphabet. Canadian flight students learn to distinguish between two types of Class F airspace: advisory and restricted. The advisory area is designated with a numeric code prefixed with CYA and there are no restrictions for entering it, but non-participating aircraft are advised to remain clear. It may exist for flight training, aerobatics, parachuting or some other activity that it's inadvisable to go cruising through the middle of. Restricted airspace is designated with a CYR prefix and it is illegal to enter it without permission of the controlling agency. I'm sure I post gleefully about this every time I do it, but I always feel extra smart when I act on the second half of that phrasing.

We're working up by Cold Lake, a large military base, and there aere several areas of restricted airspace around it. The one that most concerns us is based at 7000 feet and active only weekdays from 15 to 01Z. I think we can work around this four-dimensional restriction, but if it works out that we can't, I want to be able to get permission quickly, without making several phone calls and having to talk to someone who is at a conference in New Brunswick this week. Ordinarily I would look up the name and number of the controlling agency in the Designated Airspace Handbook, but the Internet connection at the hotel is slow and intermittent, so I call a Nav Canada briefer instead. She puts me on hold, most likely to consult a paper copy of the same handbook, and gives me a phone number and extension. The person who answers that phone listens to my request and transfers me to the terminal controller. He says it shouldn't be a problem, unless something is going on at the time, in which case it's a problem. He gives me a frequency to call airborne if I need in to the restricted airspace.

This is just the way MOAs work in the US, but that word "restricted" and the fact that you have to make phone calls because the frequencies aren't all printed on the charts. I guess it's not surprising that I get a kick out of working in restricted airspace when you consider that I still grin inside as I go through the "authorized personnel only" doors. I still remember the very first time I did that.

My room is one an "accessible" room, which usually is just a little weird, but this one has a couple of oddities I haven't seen before. There is no shower door or curtain, just an open space through which one could transfer from a wheelchair to the shower seat. Yes, the water does get out all over the floor. Also there is no toilet paper roll holder, the rolls are just left on the top of the toilet tank. Presumably they couldn't come up with a design and position that didn't interfere with transferring from a chair to the toilet seat but that was still operable by someone with limited mobility.

And I was wrong about the Canadian Tire. Maybe later.

Suicide By Cop F-16

You probably already know about the 31-year-old Canadian who stole a Cessna 172 from a flying school in Thunder Bay and headed south across Lake Superior to the US, where he was intercepted by but did not respond to American F-16 fighter jets. He landed of his own accord on a road in Missouri, where he parked the airplane under a bridge and ran on foot to a convenience store where he bought a Gatorade and chatted with locals until the police came in and got him. This CBC story has less information but includes photographs of both Adam Leon and the airplane.

His story is that he wanted to commit suicide, but couldn't bring himself to harm himself, so planned his cross-border foray in order to goad the Americans into shooting him down. Some news stories say that he had been treated for depression and left a good-bye note for his girlfriend or a suicide note near the hangar.

I can picture his well-meaning flight instructor teaching him to ensure he has a transponder code and two-way radio contact with ATC when in close proximity to the US border. "If you don't," the flight instructor could easily have said, "the Americans may scramble intercept jets, and if you do not tune 121.5 and do exactly as they ask, they have the right to shoot you down for entering their airspace." Is there a Canadian flight instructor who hasn't given such a warning to students who will be flying near or crossing the border on a cross-country flight? Adam would probably also have known where to find the intercept signals in the CFS, to understand and respond to intercepting aicraft without the use of a radio.

My favourite little detail was that Adam reportedly landed with thirty minutes of fuel remaining. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I like to think that his flight instructor drilled air law into him so thoroughly that even while suicidally defying an international boundary and armed jets, he couldn't disobey the mandate to land with half an hour of gas in his tanks.

Serious credit must go to the American military for their measured reaction to the incident. The population is very easily frightened by things like this. They evacuated the Senate in Wisconsin, after all. But no one got shot down, or shot at all. The guy was arrested for the only crimes he had actually committed: transporting stolen property and illegally entering the country. The FBI found no links to terrorism in his background. He'll likely be sent back to Canada. (Good thing he wasn't an American picked up by the RCMP in Canada. They probably would have tasered him to death). Given a history of depression and a self-confessed suicide attempt, he will lose his Canadian medical and possibly never get it back, so he'll need a new career.

The accompanying conspiracy theory is that rather than being a mentally ill flight student, he's an Islamic terrorist testing the system. He immigrated to Canada from Turkey last year, and used to be named Yavuz Berke. Did his six hours in the Falcons' gunsights give him a chance to think things over and return to a rational appreciation for life, such that the strangest thing the Missourians noticed about him was that he asked to use a "washroom" instead of a "bathroom"? (What's up with that, anyway? Is that something Missourian? Bathroom, washroom, toilet, restroom ... would any of these mark someone as "not from around here, are you?" in your community?)

An argument the linked blog entry didn't notice is that Adam Leon spent money in Missouri. While Americans in border states may accept Canadian bills, Misourri is too far south to be considered a border state, and you can't give someone two dollars or just barely have enough to buy a Gatorade in Canadian bills. The smallest bill is a five. So he was carrying a few dollars in US cash. Just enough to pay for a lift and a snack while waiting to be arrested. Or maybe he had a few bucks US in his wallet because he had a post box in Grand Marais, Michigan for ordering things on the internet. Like plutonium?

I also liked the informational paragraph one article had on the C172. It has a maximum cruise speed of 233 kilometres an hour and a range of 1,130 km. It's true, but it makes it sound so fast!

Cross-Country Lunacy

I'm always a little dazzled by the size and efficiency of American FBOs. There is a sufficient number of rich people who travel by private aircraft in the US to support an industry of impeccable high end service. If you're wealthy enough to charter or buy a jet to go straight to where you want to go, then you have high expectations. And as I mentioned there are many choices of where to land, so if one place is a little grungy, or doesn't have highly attractive and attentive staff, complimentary espresso and scented hand lotion, then you can go somewhere else. I pay for our fuel, double-checking the quantity and grade, and then pull up my flight planning program.

My coworker comes over and I show her our tailwinds. "We can go right to Texas with no intermediate stop, if you're feeling fine for the long day." It's within our duty day, and she's happy with it. I call the flight follower and the customer who will pick us up at destination, and we're off.

The airspace here isn't busy and we're cleared south as soon as we're radar identified. There's a place on the map called Le Roy and I accidentally call it "Le-Wah" as if it were a French name. My coworker cracks up and corrects "LEE-Roy! We're in the States." I declare my new hobby to be pronouncing American place names as if they were French. I wave to day-twah, eel-ee-nwah and sharl-vwah, which leaves me wondering, how do Americans pronounce Charlevoix? Tcharl-voyks? Anyone know?

The sky darkens as we approach Cincinnati on the GPS. We've left ATC flight following, so my copilot is looking up whether we have to call them at our altitude "Cincinnati International KY," she says. "What's the K-Y for?"

"Like the jelly," I deadpan. "The airport is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson." I have no idea. She doesn't kick me, so I push my luck. "Maybe it's in Kentucky?" I suggest, then lapse into my badly sung version of "Living in the air in Cincinnati ... WKRP!" As God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly. It turns out that Cincinnati is in Kentucky. This surprises both of us. We think of Cincinnati as a northern city, but Kentucky as a southern state. The things you learn looking at the GPS.

Our pass through the airspace of a rapid succession of states. We're passing the area where many states narrow towards the Mississippi and the shape is such that our track keeps cutting their borders. We have cheesy jokes to make about all of them, but fortunately we don't remember more than one line from any associated song.

I like flying long distances, letting state after state pass beneath my wings. The sun has gone down and we're seeing the lights of all these cities, with slightly different coloured streetlights and different patterns of streets. But my coworker is bored. I teach her the CFS game. I know I blogged about it before but I can't find the entry to link it, so here are the rules. Take a newish copy of the CFS (spine unbroken) and open it at random. If there is an airport on that page that you have been to as a pilot, score zero. If there is no airport you have used, turn pages until you find one, and score one point for each page you turn. Once each person has found an airport they have used, you open it at random again. You play to a predetermined score or until it's time for the top of descent checklist. Lowest score wins. I was leading beautifully until we got to a letter, I can't remember which one it was, but there were a lot of airports starting with that letter and they were all in parts of the country I hadn't been, or had flown over without landing. I think I scored about 35 points before I finally found an airport I'd been to, and I remember it was some totally obscure Indian reserve somewhere. My coworker is laughing at me because I've been there, but have never landed at any of the civilized southern places dominated by that initial. Hey, as long as she was entertained.

Approaching destination we pick up the ATIS and it's information Hotel. "Yes, we're staying at the Best Western!" quips my co-worker, referencing an old, old pilot joke. I think she would have said it on air, too, except that the air traffic controller knows that joke too, thus is too smart to say, "Confirm you have Hotel." Instead she says "Do you have ATIS information Hotel?" She gives us a vector for a wide base, following a Citation on a close in base. It's a good way for ATC to deal with slow and fast traffic together, but it's tricky for me turning final when I know there is an airplane between me and the runway that is on base. There's no way I will get down final fast enough to cut him off, but I'm turning towards an airplane I can't see, while he's on a track in my direction.

We land and taxi to the FBO where we have arranged hangarage, but tonight is their company party, so the lone individual on duty is the one who doesn't know anything. We park outside and let them sort it out when a manager gets in tomorrow morning. Or tomorrow afternoon, depending on how good the party was.

Yeah, I know: we park outside in Montréal and inside in Texas. You fear the unknown, and the boss is more concerned about hailstorms and tornadoes than icestorms. There's a full moon out; maybe that's why we're so goofy tonight.

Oh and Callsign Echo? You're still on the hook for that word you mentioned. Spit it out.

With A Fort In It

We've been in Grande Cache for a few days and the customer has started to indicate that we'll be moving on soon. "Where are we going next?" I ask, hoping for a chance to do some advance planning. The customer hasn't yet had the word from head office, but he has an idea.

"Some place with a Fort in it," he says.

Ah yes. Anyone who has worked in northern Canada knows what some place with a fort will be like. It's not a literal fort. We're not going somewhere with a log palisade or stone battlements. We're headed somewhere with a name beginning in Fort. Many places in Canada started out as fortified outposts, but as they became more civilized, people dropped the "Fort" and the place became merely "Vancouver" or "Saskatoon". And then there's the places that never became civilized enough to lose that appelation. Fort Severn, Fort McMurray, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson and many more. You know before you get there that there will be a majority male population, driving white, American-made, pick-up trucks with mud on the fenders and toolboxes in the back. There will be at least a couple of bars in town, and a lot of mud, snow or dust, depending on the season. We're currently in the late mud/early snow season.

My next Fort turns out to be Fort Nelson. The client jokes that perhaps we could base in Nelson, instead of Fort Nelson. Nelson is in the same province as Fort Nelson, but about eight degrees of latitude further south. It probably has art galleries and trendy cafes and minivans with kids in carseats as mom pulls up to the recycling depot. We muse on whether every "Fort" town has a civilized non-Fort counterpart in the south. Our theory breaks down because can't think of a McMurray anywhere, though.

My trip to Fort Nelson will take me northwest, along the eastern foothills of the Rockies without crossing the mountain range. The weather is good in Grande Cache, but there's a trowal pushing eastward, what the Americans call a warm front occlusion, putting a line of poor weather in my way. I'm expecting low ceilings, and low visibility in snow and or rain. As soon as I get out of the Grande Cache area the land will be flat and undeveloped, though, so I can go low level through poor visibility without compromising safety.

I clear the ridges in the Grande Cache area as I climb out. The cloud shield ahead of the approaching weather is already above me, and it has that particular translucent quality that indicates a high proportion of ice crystals in the cloud, usually meaning not a lot of icing potential, but that precipitation will likely fall as snow. My planned track arcs around to the east, bypassing the forecast area of worst weather, to reach the high ceilings and good visibility forecast for the far north of British Columbia. I can see that ceilings and visibility are lower to the west. I think it's snowing just west of Fort St. John, as I approach. In order to be clear of cloud I am less that 3000' agl, so I call Ft. St. John radio to let them know I will be transiting their zone. I barely enter it, my track cutting a thin slice through the eastern edge of the circular control zone. I call entering and they ask me to call five miles past. The radius is five miles, so I'm five miles away almost as soon as the radio exchange is done. A few minutes later the controller tells another aircraft that I will be leaving the control zone shortly. He didn't understand that my "five miles northeast" call was a report and not an echo of his request. I make another position report, and continue on my way, leaving any confusion in my wake.

The weather is getting crappier. I'm in mixed rain and snow, but I'm not picking up any ice. I file a PIREP and get an update on the weather at my destination. They're reporting six thousand feet broken with fifteen miles vis, no reported precipitation. I'm peering through snow now, maybe 1500' agl, keeping an eye on the chart for where there might be towers. There's a big hole in my dashboard where the NDB and the second VOR should be. They're out at some avionics shop being serviced, so I'm VFR. This is not as much fun as it should be.

There's not a lot of difference between what you see when flying in flat featureless prairie with three miles visibility in snow and what you see when flying in a cloud in the snow. It might sound like there should be, but in the first place you see three miles of white blurriness and in the second case you see 10 metres of white blurriness. There's not much to distinguish between one depth of blurriness and another. The ground that I see out of the front of my airplane is about three miles away, so if I have three miles visibility I can maybe sort of see the ground straight ahead of me. Or maybe that's just more snow. You kind of have to look out the side in front of the wing to see nearer ground. And when the visibility is that poor I'm not doing a lot of sightseeing out the sides. Which is why it takes a while for me to conclude that I am no longer clear of cloud in low visibility, but actually in cloud.

Note that three miles visibility is perfectly acceptible for VFR flight in the class E airspace of the airway between Ft. St. John and Ft. Nelson. If I change my track, as I'm gradually doing, so I'm no longer on the airway but in better weather to the east, one mile visibility is legal VFR. I'm not sure why they allow that. I guess it's just sanctioned flight in IMC for people who an't carry IFR fuel or are missing some technicality to file IFR. Like me. It would be utterly inappropriate for someone who actually required visual reference to keep their airplane on track and right side up.

Being in cloud is a situation that induces much pounding of the heart and dryness of the mouth for a VFR-only pilot. When you are an IFR-capable pilot in an airplane with good instrumentation but not VFR only on a technicality it is still a place you don't want to be, but it's more of an irritation. I'm trying to come up with a more politically correct metaphor but what I've got right now is that being in the middle of a cloud when you're supposed to be VFR is a bit like taking the wrong exit from an American freeway and finding yourself in a dead end in the projects. It doesn't matter who you are: you're doing the U-turn to get back where you wanted to go, but whether you're irritated or terrified depends on things like your race, size, and level of armament. In a cloud, the U-turn is the move to make. My eyes are on the gauges. I note, as training dictates, the time including seconds, in case the heading indicator dies in the turn. It should take me a minute to do a one-eighty. I start a rate one turn to the reciprocal heading and fly that heading until I can see ground for sure. It still works just as it did on the private pilot flight test.

I circle around further to the east and remain clear of cloud. I really don't want to have to land in Fort St. John to wait this out. I settle into an altitude with lousy but VFR visibility and cruise along there without further incident. About forty miles from my destination the sky and vis both open up. I can see almost all the way to where I'm going now. I collect the ATIS; I think there was ATIS, there, switch the fuel back to the main tanks and begin my stage cooling and top of descent checks.

I tell the flight service specialist his weather is a lot better than fifty miles south, but he doesn't sound interested. I tell him instead that I will do an overhead join for the active. I do so, turning downwind and landing on a runway that points towards the apron. I roll out, exit the runway and park in a line of aircraft with their backs to the runway. I hop out right away and put tents (quilted, fitted blankets) on the engines before they cool off. I add wing covers too. That snow may yet arrive here.

As Grande As It's Going to Be

Grande Cache is a very ordinary small Alberta town in a spectacular setting. Like almost every other small town in northern Alberta, the roads are named according to an ambitious scheme that imagines the highway and the main street that crosses it as the centre of a huge future metropolis. The highway through Grande Cache, the one I described as strewn with ravens and elk carcasses, becomes 100th Street as it goes through town. There might have been a speed limit change associated with the town, but I'm not certain. The highway is busy day and night with transport trucks. We have to be careful crossing the road for dinner. Perpendicular to the streets are numbered avenues. There's a 99th Avenue and a 101st Avenue, but they've at least given the main street a name, Hoppe Avenue. My hotel, at the side of the highway on the way into town is also at the town centre: 9900 99th Street. The crossing street has a strip mall, containing a post office, a pharmacy a pizza place and a few other stores. There are a few more hotels and associated bars and restaurants and that's about it. The town isn't going to grow any bigger, as it's surrounded by giant rocks.

It's the last town before the Rocky Mountains, and by daylight you can see the peaks thrusting up to the west. To the south is the Willmore Wilderness Park, off limits to all motorized vehicles. I'm allowed to overfly it, though. I also have to be careful to get a clearance before entering nearby class B airspace. There are no large airports around, and Canada doesn't have surface class B anyway. Like Wyoming the peaks are so high that working VFR clear of terrain puts us above 12,500', into the altitude where we need to be under ATC control. As the AIM says:

All low level controlled airspace above 12 500 feet ASL or at and above the MEA, whichever is higher, up to but not including 18 000 feet ASL will be Class B airspace.

The MEA (minimum enroute altitude for VFR traffic) above the mountains is higher than we might usually flying, but if we turn around out over the flat land to the east, we're below the lower prairie MEAs. That's a little weird to be so close to terrain and then suddenly be in class B airspace without climbing.

My first night in town on my own I walk around exploring. The mall is still open but most of the uninspiring stores are closed. The grocery store has just closed. The pizza place has been recommended to me, but I don't need to stoop to pizza so soon, and the amateur sign design turns me off. There's a Chinese restaurant here, probably operated by the descendant of someone who survived the building of the national railway. It has a sign that I can't call amateur, but the sheer abundance of gold and neon dragons is a little frightening. Near that is an ice cream store. Angled peel and stick letters proclaim Thursday to be Ukrainian Night there. At an ice cream store? I go in and enquire. Yep, Ukrainian. Another major pioneering group in this area. I have a plate of perogies, cabbage rolls and sausage, with ice cream for dessert. Yum.

All The Way Home

The province of Nova Scotia is a gigantic hammerhead-shaped peninsula that attaches to New Brunswick at Moncton, northeast of Maine. A straight line from our present position to the aerodrome that will be this airplane's home cuts across the Bay of Fundy, a stretch of open water treacherous to decent-sized boats, let alone little airplanes. If I'm crossing that, I want to remain in gliding distance of land, or if not land, at least calm shore waters. And this airplane glides like a brick, so that will require decent ceilings. The ceiling is good now, but forecast to come down, so I have planned for the possibility of having to go the long way, following the land as one would have to in a car. We've got this airplane this far, and I don't want any slips on the final leg.

As Lite Flyer climbs away from Fredericton, I put my socks and shoes on over wet muddy feet and then we exchange control and Lite Flyer does the same. Yeah, we took off in our bare feet with mud between our toes. I suggest that standard equipment on board in future might include a towel. We follow the highway towards Moncton. We can't get too close to Moncton, because the class E airspace around it is marked on the chart as requiring Mode C altitude reporting. Ever since we passed Space Coast, back in Florida, our transponder has only been putting out mode A responses. The best route doesn't really go through their airspace, anyway. I call them to let them know that we're out here and they tank me for the call but say we're nowhere near the control zone. We're not, it's the class E transponder airspace we're edging on, but they aren't interested.

So we fly. We cross the Cumberland Basin, where when I look at the water I see it isn't as inhospitable as the best available shore that has often been my "out" in a wheel plane. I admonish Lite Flyer that even if we successfully did a forced approach onto open water it could be a long cold, fingers-crossed wait for the Coast Guard to come and find us. I'm trying to keep my heart in it, not to let the little Rotax lure me into a false sense of security, but it just keeps spinning around without a hiccup.

You can kind of see where continental drift has peeled Nova Scotia off the mainland and there are capes and spits of land that still reach out to the drifted land. We take advantage of them to fly the shortest overwater distance, even when we can see a nice straight line to the destination. I cut corners on the planned route, but don't cut straight across. I feel a little silly, actually, but not as silly as I would had I needed to explain to Transport Canada why I had landed an ultralight deadstick on Minas Basin. So we kind of arc around within range of land or at least of calm water and before we know it we are over land, within 20 miles of our destination. Not tonight's destination, but the destination. We've cut so many corners off the original plan that we are way early on our flight plan, so I call Flight Services. I further tempt fate by just giving our position and closing out the flight plan. All we have to do is find the airport and land on it.

I've been teaching Lite Flyer chart symbols, like the numbers that describe an airport on a chart. I tell her she can remember ELF to keep the numbers straight: the first number is the airport Elevation, the next is the runway Length, and the final number is the contact Frequency. I don't make it sufficiently clear that ELF is a mnemonic and she frowns, looking for the E, because she can see the L for lighting. I try to throw the extra L into the acronym , but she atches me and points out me that ELLF has too many Ls. I have to admit that she's right. In this case she reads off the aerodrome elevation with no problem then asks what the H is for. The US charts we've been using up to now don't use H. I guess all their runways are paved by default. "There's an 'H'?" I ask. "That means a hard-surfaced runway. I thought your airport was grass."

"It is."

"Do you think there's a grass runway and a hard surfaced one?" It would be easy for her not to notice the paved one if they took off from the grass one. But it turns out she's never actually flown out of this airport, just came by to arrange hangar space.

This would of course be a good time to consult the CFS entry for the airport. Before take-off would have been another good time. This point in the blog entry would be a good time to admit that we don't have a CFS on board. I've let the GPS database lure me into complacency. Maybe I'm taking on the maverick ultralight lifestyle. What I really want to know about this airport isn't going to be in the CFS, either. I want to know local knowledge things like where the field is soft and where it's firm. All the little tricks of the field that Lite Flyer will know in a few months.

We call with plans to overfly the field at 1500' agl and check it out before joining a circuit to land. Another ultralight calls taking off on runway 07, at right angles to our path. Change of plans. We turn right and join downwind for that runway. It looks like a pretty good surface, although definitely grass, and I can see the grass has been mowed for two other runways, too. Like a big old military airport. There are trees and wires on the approach and while I urge Lite Flyer to descend I can remember how scary such obstacles were when I had as much time as she, but she does it, and turns in another greaser. "Stick back!" after landing, and we roll out on fairly smooth ground. I spy some dark rocky-looking patches that look kind of incongruous, but it's a well maintained grass runway with level ground under fairly dense grass. Some grass runways are pretty much mud.

I'm prepared to do a one-eighty and taxi back to the hangars we overflew on final, but Lite Flyer takes a right onto another runway. Why not, it's pretty quiet around here. I make an appropriate radio call and enjoy the scenery. If this runway deadends into long grass we can always turn around. We're burning less gas than a motorcycle just taxiing around here. That runway is less travelled, but also well mowed and packed firm. They must use a steamroller or something to keep these runways so flat. This runway meets another, running parallel to the apron, so we turn the corner and follow it towards the mowed taxiway onto the apron. And suddenly I spot the "hard surface." We're still taxiing on grass, but off to the side are traces of pavement. Pavement that is easily fifty years old.

We turn off onto a mowed taxiway and then onto the grass apron, where we just shut down, not really knowing where to go next. Getting out, we discover we're parked in a swamp. Advantage of an amphibian: worst case scenario well just raise the gear and slide out. We're early on the ETA given to family, so Lite Flyer suggests we wash all the mud off the airplane and then take off again to make a staged arrival when family arrives here. There's a helpful local here to lend us a hose but as we wade around the airport it dawns on me. "This mud isn't from the river bank. That all washed off at take-off. This mud is from taxiing here. There's no point washing it off."

And then our staged arrival plans are thwarted when people start to arrive. I think they're just glad to see Lite Flyer in one piece and not too disappointed to have missed the actual landing. It just so happens that Friday night is the weekly get together of the local experimental aircraft club, so we're soon surrounded by not only Lite Flyer's Nova Scotia friends and family, but by a dozen people who are delighted to appreciate the new arrival on the field. We're amused by the old-fashioned division in the clubhouse, where the women sit around a table inside playing cards and the men sit on a screened porch talking airplanes. Lite Flyer and I drink champagne pose for photos with family and then join the men on the porch. We're completely welcome there, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that the division is between pilots and non-pilots rather than men and women.

There are two days left before I have to report for work on my next job, and Lite Flyer makes sure I see the sights and eat fresh PEI mussels, scallops and Digby clams before I go. Lobster was suggested at one point but exhaustion had the upper hand and we called it a day.

That concludes my side of the story. I know I left lots out and am watching Lite Flyer's blog to find out what the trip was like from her point of view. I may make one more post on What I Learned On My Summer Vacation with reflections on the overall trip, and what I might do differently another time. The remains of Hurricane Gustav reached Halifax the day after we arrived, giving us a grey rainy day for sightseeing, and Tropical Storm Hanna, which chased us all the way up the coast, arrived in Halifax about an hour after I left, pelting the whole region with heavy rain and high winds. The little airplane was safely in a hangar, awaiting a slightly overdue oil change.

Executive Officer

At the apron in Hagerstown we were greeted by an FBO employee who marshalls us into place and lays out a red carpet. As we are a two door airplane he had to pick which side to place it, and it was on my side. Whee. He had military short blond hair and 1970s-style cop sunglasses. I guess they're in fashion for pilots, but Lite Flyer and I don't subscribe to that one. He's a little brusque, one of the first things he has to say is that the restricted airspace will expand tomorrow at ten a.m., did we know that. We assure him we'll be out of here early tomorrow morning, as soon as the fog clears. For a moment I'm willing to entertain the idea that he's some kind of security droid, masquerading as an FBO employee in order to keep a close eye on the people coming in and out of this facility, but he manages to disabuse me of this notion pretty quickly through his haste in assuring us how important he is.

He talks about the people and aircraft that may come through here tomorrow as if to imply that he knows far more than he's allowed to tell on the subject. He mentioned more than once that he knew the owners of the facility here, and was working because they needed someone. I was going to say that it wasn't any particular thing he said that really spoiled the impression, just the cumulative effect of everything he chose to say, but there's one signature phrase that stood out.

"I am an executive officer of my own company."

At another point he mentioned the presence of a number of Dash-7s on the field. It's a kind of funny airplane to have a fleet of in the States so I asked, "what do they use them for?" Captain Important makes a zipping motion of fingers on lips. One of his other jobs was as a balloon instructor, which I thought was pretty cool. I tried to engage him in conversation on that, because people are always more interesting when they are talking about their area of expertise, but he kind of skims over it, apparently it doesn't fit in with the aura of importance that he's trying to establish.

At this time he was an important person for us, as he had secured permission to use the company van to take us and a gas can to the gas station for our Mogas needs. The first gas station was closed "for technical reasons," but he found a second one a little further away. It turned out to be a Sheetz, with the food ordering touch screens right by the pumps, but the ordering screens were unserviceable. I snapped a photo of the astonishing list of regulations posted on the pumps. Note that I didn't read the regulations, there were just too many. I mentioned the list to a less important person at the FBO, who laughed and said that Maryland has the most regulations anywhere. "If someone has invented a piece of protective gear anywhere, it's required by law to use it in Maryland. I wonder if the very low flow rate on the gas pump was part of the protective mechanism. When you complain that a pump is slow to fill a five gallon can, you know it's slow.

After the second trip--we only had one five gallon can and needed ten gallons--we both thank him and Lite Flyer puts a folded bill in his hand. I don't know what she gave him, but he softened by an unexpected amount. We put the fuel in the airplane, secured it for the night and made our way to a hotel for the night. It was a fine hotel, probably the best of the trip and there were probably many fine restaurants around, but we were beat and opted for pizza delivery. Lite Flyer had the idea of calling the desk for a pizza recommendation instead of choosing randomly from the yellow pages, and it's just as well she did because twenty minutes later when the pizza company had our room number wrong the desk knew whom to call and ask, "Did you order a pizza with .. uh .. everything on it?" Lite Flyer and I have may be compatible in the cockpit, but our pizza topping preferences are incompatible so she had ordered half hers and half mine, making a strange-looking pizza. It was pretty good though and we ate as much as we needed before sleeping.

Next morning we planned our next leg over breakfast and got a ride to the airport. It looked fine, but flight services was calling our airport of departure IFR. The tower was reporting low visibilities. I couldn't really see the runway from the apron, so I'll have to believe them, and the rest of the briefing included poor visibility elsewhere. Plus, as the briefer put it, "At ten a.m. today, the President gets larger." The restricted area would expand to the full 25 nm. I guess Camp David has its own airport, buried inside that white circle.

A couple of helicopter medevac pilots who had just been going off duty when we were there last night were back on duty for the morning. They are on standby for twelve hours at a time, required to be airborne within five minutes if called. So they are essentially on a tether that keeps them within 200 metres of their aircraft at all times. They admired our little craft, easily the most interesting thing within two hundred metres of theirs, and I bored Lite Flyer by asking them lots of questions about how helicopter IFR approaches work.

Eventually, as it always does if you wait long enough, the fog cleared and we deemed ourselves good to go. I told Lite Flyer to leave the chocks in for the run up. "People are going to think we've forgotten to remove them, and they may come up and try to be helpful, so watch carefully, especially for people who come from behind and have forgotten our propeller is back there. Sure enough, she hasn't even completed the start checklist before I have to open the door to yell, "We know! We're doing a run-up!" at the helpful people who approach.

We take the time to warm everything up properly and check over the systems, then we shut down, remove the chocks, and call for taxi. The controller starts to assign us a runway then most likely takes a second look at us, because she switches us to a different one. It's a shorter runway, but it's also a shorter taxi, and directly into the light morning wind. She asks for a "tight left turn immediately after take-off," which we can see is needed for the airspace, and she can see won't be a problem for an airplane this small.

Lite Flyer does the take-off again but it is much poorer than her previous effort. I'm barking "tail up! tail up!" in between cries of "right rudder!" but she never raises the tail, just leaves it in the three point attitude until it mushes into the air.

Later she says, "I didn't know what you meant by tail down!" so possibly I don't even know what I was saying. Eventual debriefing determines that her earlier brilliant take-off was a fluke. In that instance she accidentally relaxed back stick as she set full power and then realized that she had done so, so pulled back at just the right moment to rotate. Pretty funny, but at least we've got it clear now. She brings it around to parallel the runway north. We tell tower we will follow the freeway until well clear of the restricted airspace, and they give us a flight following frequency too. Thursday is underway.

Why Are We Here?

The low cloud that dogged us on the Florida coast is gone, and we can get slightly better winds at a higher altitude, but I have to sell the higher altitude to Lite Flyer. The demo flights she took were all below a thousand feet, probably a combination of cloud avoidance, economy of time, and the manufacturers' desire to make the airplane seem faster. The lower you are to the ground, the faster it seems to go by. In the immediate vicinity of the factory, the demo pilot knows the terrain well, knows where all the wires and towers are and mainly wants to show the customer that she can land on the swamps as well as the runway. Apparently during Lite Flyer's checkout they buzzed a row of alligators sunning themselves by the swamp. When we add a few thousand feet, we can see further, but that visibility tapers off in the distance that wasn't there from low down, and in some places there is a bit of a haze layer. It gives her the impression that she doesn't have proper visibility. A low hours student pilot is very sensitive to the quality of the visible horizon. I respect that, and I don't want to break her most excellent habit of not flying unless she can see well. If this were purely a flight lesson I would not fly when the horizon was not sufficient for her comfort. But job number one is getting the airplane home, so I'm pushing her in ways I wouldn't normally push a student. I keep feeling the voice inside me saying "bad instructor!"

I'm hoping we can get to North Carolina on this leg, but we'll get there when we get there. She has an ambitious schedule, hoping to clear customs on Friday, when the person she has been dealing with over the import paperwork will be in the office. She has verified that we can still import the airplane on the weekend, and I expect that may happen. That cold front is still marching across the continent, still easily visible just from the precipitation and convective activity maps. We'll lose half a day to its passage. The weather should be clear behind it but there is also a low off the maritime coast (isn't there always?) and Hanna is still going strong. Everything has to go right for us to make this trip work.

Lite Flyer has another instructor who can fly the airplane, but he once ferried an airplane that was found to contain contraband, and is no longer allowed to enter the United States. There's an aspect of the preflight inspection that not every pilot thinks of. If we can get this critter across the Canadian border, then even if the worst case weather arrives and it has to be shut in a shed for two weeks, she can her husband to drive her and that flight instructor to the aircraft and eventually get it home. My goal is to get it across the border, with all else being gravy. But not that weird Georgia gravy.

We cross over an area of the chart that is marked "For Reasons of National Security, Pilots are Advised to Avoid Flight Below 2000' MSL" Interesting. Low flight is not explicitly prohibited, we're just 'advised.' We take the advice. I guess it's an area of nuclear power plants, as we see lots of cooling towers. We cross the border into South Carolina and exchange high-fives, establishing a border-crossing tradition. South Carolina looks pretty much like Georgia, Commenting on the physical similarity of one jurisdiction to the next seems to be almost an aviation tradition. I understand that the astronauts take it one further, as they can see half the globe at one and observe that there are no red lines on the globe, just one precious planet we all need to work towards keeping hospitable.

The engine runs smoothly, with all the gauges steady at numbers they established shortly after level-off. I teach Lite Flyer to pay attention to what those numbers are so she can recognize changes before they represent imminent engine failure. I also teach her to look around at the airplane during flight, to make sure that nothing she can see is torn, flapping, working it's way loose or otherwise damaging itself. The fabric of the wings is stitched and the stitched panels are held on by velcro. My inspections so far haven't shown anything that concerns me, but if something lets go half an hour after takeoff, I don't want it to flap in the wind for three hours before we notice it. This isn't anything special to ultralights. Any pilot who can see working parts of his or her airplane will check them visually in flight. It's nice to know before the sun goes down that the engine cowlings are not spewing oil.

This will be the longest leg we've flown so far, and we're still getting used to the correspondence between the fuel gauge, the fuel visible in the fuel tank, and the actual fuel on board. It would be three and a half hours flight time to our planned destination in North Carolina, equal to the total of the two flights we did this morning, but this one had more climbing and less low power maneuvering. I don't yet know the relative fuel burn of various power settings, so we decide to land short, in South Carolina. I call this game, "Eeny Meeny Miney Airport." We don't really know much about the airports other than safety information and whether they sell avgas, which we don't care about anyway. We pick one, I call flight services to check NOTAMs, just in case this airport is closed for resurfacing or something. It's not. We tune the Unicom and there is another experimental preparing for departure, a hopeful sign that it will be hospitable to our needs. We join and land. As we taxi off, the other "experimental" aircraft turns out to be a Cessna, presumably with some modification that hasn't been STCed. We wave cockpit to cockpit as we pass on the apron. There is a Skymaster and a Piper single also parked on the ramp, but we go over to a corner where there are tie-down ropes we can use.

We shut down and our routine has been established: I start the postflight inspection while Lite Flyer looks for transportation. I've only just checked the oil (down a bit) when she returns from the rather drab-looking airport building. She hands up the oil bottle and holds the oil cap while I top up the reservoir. "There's no courtesy car, nothing here, and no one around," she tells me.

"Maybe that experimental who took off will come back and we can mooch a ride," I suggest.

"There are no cars at all," she clarifies.

I put off making any progress in the "where do we sleep or eat?" question while I continue poking at bits of the airplane, making sure there is nothing untoward happening with the control rods and cables, and that nothing is working loose. The splashguards on the vertical stabilizer have not popped any more rivets. As I check over the fabric something strikes me. Or rather something has completely failed to strike me. We have flown today over Florida and Georgia, at some low altitudes in convective weather and we have not one bugstrike. The windshield is as clean as when we left the factory, and the leading edges of our wings are uncontaminated. I guess we're going so slowly the bugs can see us coming and get out of the way. I check the trailing edges of the ailerons to see if overtaking bugs have piled up there, instead. Lite Flyer has nicknamed her little raft "Bug," so perhaps the lack of splatters is a professional courtesy. There are a couple of other minor issues, very light scratches on an aileron push rod show that it is occasionally contacting the bolt in a strut. The latter will have to be filed down a bit. I'd like to re-lubricate some of the control surfaces, so well look for some lithium grease. "I hope this town has a Wal-Mart," I say. I know WalMart may be evil, but when you're in a strange town it's awfully nice to have all the aisles lined up just the way they are in every other town, and be able to buy the cheapest kind of anything that humans can make.

I come and try to help with the getting us out of here task. There's some 1-800 number you can call anywhere that's supposed to connect you to a local taxi company but one I don't recall the number right now and two this isn't the sort of town that would probably be part of such a service. I try a door on the off chance that it leads to a pilot room that might have a taxi number or a phone book inside. The door is locked, but as I try the doorknob I put my other had against the wall and it was occupied. I yell, "Ouch!" or something similar and Lite Flyer very quickly dispatches the large insect responsible for my cry of pain. On inspection of the insect and the wound we decide it is probably a giant South Carolina wasp of some sort and not deadly poisonous. But damn, that hurt. The airport manager's number is displayed in a window, without an area code, but there's another number for hangar rental inquiries that does have an area code, so I use the hangar rental area code and the manager's number and reach him just as he's coming in the door. I grovel that I know this is not his job, but we've just landed and are trying to get into town. Does he know the number of a taxi service?

He says there is a cab, but you don't want to take that cab, he'll come and get us. He gives us a tour of the town (i.e. the street). It includes some restaurants, a Wal-Mart and a Super-8, so we're set for the evening. He says his work crew will be in at 7:30 tomorrow and that he'll be able to help us get Mogas, too. We eat at a Chinese restaurant and my fortune tells me to be aware of gains and losses but not be too greedy and everything will work out. Headwinds, tailwinds, it all comes out in the wash. Wal-Mart doesn't have white grease, but we buy some window cleaner because we have some greasy fingerprints on our bugfree windows.

Everyone we speak to is friendly, curious, and wants to know, "Why are you here?" And then they ask us if we know there is a hurricane coming. It's supposed to be here on Thursday now, which gives us another day before it hits. That is, when we finally sleep, this is the end of Tuesday, the second day of our journey.

On the Button

Next morning the weather in the Toronto area and across the lakes is already fine. No fog. I call Canadian customs with my arrival report. It always irritates me that it's called an arrival "report" when it's really a forecast. I can't report my arrival until I've actually arrived. But they call it a report, so I have to. You have to call everything by exactly the right words with customs people, or you get into trouble. I also file an ICAO flight plan for the border crossing, another legal requirement. The briefer asks me if I want customs advisory service, which is odd, because it doesn't exist anymore. But as you can see from that document, the procedures between the two countries are complex enough and disparate enough that I won't hold it against this Wisconsin briefer.

The airplane is fuelled and in proper shape. I make sure I have my passport and airplane documents easily accessible from my seat in the cockpit, advise my flight follower (unlike South Dakota, Wisconsin has text messaging), and depart.

Wisconsin ends at the shore of Lake Michigan, but my journey continues. I fly across Green Bay. The bay alone is as big as many respectable lakes, but it's just a sliver on the chart. Michigan is a gigantic north-south lake, wide enough east-west that I can't see the other side. I just see lake. It's very cool. Flying over Wyoming is boring, but this seemingly endless expanse of water is hypnotically fascinating. The mist over the lake becomes a mirage of shore and eventually resolves into actual land.

On the other side of Lake Michigan is the state of Michigan. It looks cold. I'm starting to hear other Canadian aircraft idents on frequency, and the air traffic controller handles the alphabet soup of our call signs as fluently as the alphanumeric of the American planes. I'm almost home. One more lake to cross, and that's Lake Huron. It is even bigger than Lake Michigan, and I'm cutting right across it, too. I know you're wondering why I am posting these pictures of nothing but blue, but I love them. Someday perhaps I'll get to fly across an ocean and I'll be tired of this, maybe I'll long for Wyoming, but right now I'm loving it. The international border runs down the middle of the lake, but air traffic control boundaries are not exactly on the border. I'm handed off to a Canadian controller and have to consciously suppress saying "Charlie" at the beginning of the call sign. It's comforting to hear the controller's accent. It sounds like Canada.

I reach shore just north of Goderich, which reminds me of Sulako. It's where he met the love of his life, according to the story he is telling. (And I've met her, so he can't be making it all up). The land beneath me is flat and rural, but I know I am approaching a major metropolitan area and a lot of busy airspace. I tidy up the cockpit a little and switch from the 1:1,000,000 scale WAC chart I've been using to the 1:500,000 scale VNC, and fold the 1:250,000 scale terminal area chart so I can see it clearly. I have to get the American expectations out of my head and fly like I'm in Canada. Canadian flight following isn't as seamless as the US style, and I may need to get my own clearance, and make more decisions on my way in here than I've grown accustomed to. I make sure I have enough paper to write down any long clearances and keep a sharp eye out for other traffic. I do approach math in my head and decide where to start my descent. I'm landing at Buttonville, a crazy little GA airport, not Pearson International. The client's supplier happens to be near Buttonville, and they've arranged parking for me here. I know most of the traffic will be little singles, so I plan to enter the circuit--I've been the States so long that I almost typed "pattern" there--at my approach speed of 120 knots, still above the cruise speed of training aircraft, but easier for me to manoeuvre, easier ATC to fit me in, and safer because it gives me more opportunity to see and avoid any errant students.

I tell ATC I'm beginning my descent and they assign me a heading, "not below 3000', and pass me off to Buttonville tower. They ask me to report three miles back, at the greenhouses. The ATIS says they're using runway 15 and 21, and I'm pretty well set up for right base for 15, but when I call, a little late because I had to wait for another exchange to finish, they clear me to a right downwind on 21. As I manoeuvre for that, the controller calls back and asks uncertainly if I need "a lot of room" to land? He says runway 15 is available. He is probably realizing that it would have made sense to put me there to begin with, but I'd have to circle around to land on it now. I'm light and have lots of flaps so I tell him 21 is fine, I'll just need to teardrop out to align with it. I touchdown on 21 and get taxi clearance to customs. The taxiways are narrower than at the US airports I've been working at. I hold short of 15 for someone else who did get to use it, then follow instructions to customs parking. It's a busy apron. There's a restaurant patio on part of it and lots of people and airplanes. Someone marshalls me to park and after I shut down I tell him I need customs. He hands me a cellphone, predialled and ringing with the CANPASS number. When they answer, I give my name and aircraft ident and they ask if there is an officer there. "I don't know."

"Do you see them?"

"I see a lot of people in uniform. No one has approached the aircraft." I'm sorry, dude, I don't recognize the customs officer uniform twenty metres away through a double door.

There is no customs officer here, which is normal for crossing into Canada. You can clear customs over the phone with no physical inspection. In this case they aren't happy with my customs paperwork, for some reason. I give the ramp guy back his phone and switch over to my own, which has all the numbers I need programmed into it. I have to call the custom broker's office, convince their answering service to make an emergency call-out, convince the guy who takes that call to call the guy who is actually responsible, and then go through several iterations of being referred to customs officers' supervisors. I end up inside the terminal, sitting next to an electrical outlet to charge my cellphone. It's controlled chaos in there.

A child is having a tantrum in the gift shop. Your traditional incoherent screaming while clutching the toy he wants in one hand and hitting out with the other hand. One parent favours the tactic of abandoning everything, including the original mission, and leaving the building. The other parent is trying to negotiate with the child.

On the other side of me, know-it-all flight instructors are telling their students lies in the tones of superiority that can only be gained by having logged four hundred hours in the same airplanes in the same airspace and never having been far enough away to encounter any challenge to their worldviews.

I bite my tongue and refrain from offering my opinions to the parents, students or flight instructors. It's challenging, but I add it to the game of seek-the-weekend-customs-authorization and make it all an exercise in accepting the world.

Ramp workers want to tow my airplane. I have to keep telling them that I am still waiting for a customs clearance, so my airplane may not be towed. One of the officers says I have to go to Pearson to clear a commercial airplane on a weekend. I specifically asked a professional customs broker if there were any hours restrictions for my arrival here, and he said no. More back and forth with my getting people in Calgary to call these guys, and them calling each other. After an hour or so I get bumped to a customs employee with enough authority to make a decision, and his decision is that everything is in order, I'm free to go. I ask him what I should do or say next time to make this easier. Did I use the wrong words? Was the paperwork not clear? He says no, it's just that some people didn't understand the nature of my operation. He reads me my customs authorization number and I copy it into the journey logbook as proof of this conversation.

I restart and call for taxi. Buttonville is a typical training airport. There are Cessna and Piper singles lined up, maybe seven or eight in a row to take off. The runway starts right near the customs area. I have to wait for a lull in this flow of trainers before I can taxi across to my parking.

Chocked and secure at the prearranged parking, I finish all my paperwork, unload my bags, lock up, and call my boss. He tells me to go home. So I do.