Geo Referencing

You have at some point probably seen a movie or a television show, usually for children, that uses a gimmick where a story in a book comes to life, or morph into the action of the show. Usually the pages of a book are shown on screen, with text introducing the story, and then a picture. The picture becomes live action, or perhaps the pictures move around in the text. In a movie it's a sufficiently common device that you know if it starts that way, the movie will end back on the printed page with the ornate words The End. But imagine if you were reading a regular, real book. A familiar reference book whose fonts, diagrams, and footnote style have so long been part of your life that you know exactly what to expect of it. Now imagine that a picture or diagram in that book, the one you are holding in your hand, comes to life and starts explaining itself. That's how my introduction to approach plate Geo Referencing went.

An approach plate is a diagram showing an airport runway and the procedures, points and aids associated with navigating an airplane to a point in space from which a safe landing can be performed. If shows the plan view and the side view, with symbols showing where and how to turn, minimum altitudes for each sector and part of the approach, distances, magnetic variation, and type of lighting. It tells you the frequencies for ATC, how much to add to your minimum altitude if using a remote altimeter setting, and has an effective date. The Canada Air Pilot for each region, the physical book in which these things are published is reprinted with changes every 56 days. Most plates don't change from one revision cycle to the next, but the whole CAP is reprinted. When the new one comes you strip the coil bindings off the old one and toss the pages into the recycling. You can tell there's no change if the new plate has the same effective date, worth looking at in case you have inadvertently memorized some data that has changed.

With the Fore Flight electronic flight bag, these approach plates are replicated on the iPad. Instead of paging through the coil-bound CAP trying to guess whether a particular airport will be alphabetized under its own name, or considered a sub-plate of the larger nearby airport, you hold your finger on an airport displayed on the iPad chart until a box comes up, showing all the airports that your stubby finger could reasonably have been aiming at. Tap More next to the one you wanted, then Details then scroll down to Procedures and you can tap Approach and select the approach plate you want. I haven't done a timed test from pulling the iPad or CAP out of the map box, to looking at the desired plate, but I think the iPad is faster. The paper one is easier to read in bright light conditions, even with the iPad turned up full, but in dim light the self-illuminating iPad is great, until it is pitch black dark, at which point it becomes too bright, even if you follow the instructions and turn the brightness to minimum in settings before dimming within the app.

Either way I get the familiar approach plate, very carefully replicated. It's possible to zoom into the iPad ones to read little numbers, easier than pulling out a magnifying glass, but you have to be careful not to leave it zoomed in, when that moment comes on the approach where you glance back at the plate to confirm the minimum descent altitude, and the data isn't on the screen because you zoomed in to see if that waypoint was spelled with an F or a B. A hundred feet above MDA is not a good place to have to pinch or scroll a screen.

The first time I used the iPad for an approach, I had the conventional paper chart and the iPad both out, and it was VMC. I briefed the approach, flew direct the cleared fix and then eeep! the approach plate came to life. A symbolic airplane representing my position appeared on the screen in the position where I actually was. Even though I have used moving maps for years, the appearance of a moving you-are-here dot, Fore Flight calls it "ownship position" on the plate was freaky exciting magic. Ten years from now pilots will stare at old approach plates in puzzlement, unable to situate themselves mentally. This is a huge benefit for situational awareness. It even switches automatically to the taxi diagram and shows me where I am on the airport after landing.

I learned that this was called Geo Referencing a couple of days ago, from an error message. The app told me that Geo Referencing was not available because the plates were not current. What? These are valid until November 13th. (And the error message came up in October). I think American charts are on a 28-day cycle, so the app auto-expired Canadian stuff after that time period. I brought the iPad into the hotel to try and update them. It's just downloading the same set again, I'm sure, but this is hotel internet. It hasn't worked in all the time I've spent writing this blog entry. Why did it not update everything before I left when I selected "pack" for the flight out here? There are a number of things that Fore Flight doesn't get quite right for Canada, and I haven't found a bulletin board or user forum where these things are discussed, to determine for sure whether it is the product and not me who is missing something. I now know that the iPad has to be updated at the same time as I update the GPS database (which comes from the US, on a 28-day cycle).

Dead Reckoning

As usual I have flight-planned for one task and the onboard satellite communications link to base brings us instructions to do something else. We're to fly direct to a particular airport, and get a maintenance extension from an approved maintenance organization there. We can do that. I punch it in on the GPS, O Mighty Box that guides us safely from place to place.

The GPS in this particular airplane is not that mighty. It's a nice colour moving map, WAAS capable IFR installation, but it has a habit of losing GPS position for exactly two minutes at a time, about twice a day.  We don't fly GPS approaches in this airplane. The database isn't up-to-date and it has a great ADF and VOR.

It's almost nice to have the one or twice a day reminder to keep my navigation skills honed.  DEAD RECKONING says the screen, continuing to show the little airplane symbol, assuming that we're continuing on the same track and speed.  People say that it used to be deduced reckoning, reduced to ded. reckoning, and then converted to dead. I don't know if that's a reverse etymology or not, but some people get quite stuffy about spelling it DED. Garmin does not agree. And two minutes later, almost to the second, it knows where it is again. It isn't a satellite configuration issue. It hasn't lost power. I haven't banked excessively, blocking the GPS antenna. it just does it. We track the issue for a while, trying to troubleshoot but never find its periodic outages corresponding to time of day, time in operation, position, anything.

Eventually when the plane was down for maintenance long enough for this to happen, we pulled the entire unit and sent it in for repair. Like all electronic devices these days "repair" consisted of us receiving a reconditioned model of the same type. It hasn't lost GPS position since, and we bought a database subscription for it, so now I trust it with my life. Or at least with my acute embarrassment.

Advantage Cancelling

I should report in on my new headset. It is a fine thing. It is comfortable. I even find myself looking forward to putting it on in the morning, reminding myself of a horse I encountered once that was so eager to get out of the paddock for a ride that it walked right up and dropped its head in the halter I was carrying¹. I can hear ATC clearly, and adjust the volume per ear, and there's a jack for me to connect my MP3 player. (It also accepts Bluetooth, but I don't own any Bluetooth devices to test it with). The MP3 jack is interesting because there's a three-position switch controlling how it behaves. Off doesn't allow you to hear the music at all. The middle position allows you to hear the MP3 player and ATC both at once. And the top position automatically mutes the music when there is any activity on the intercom (i.e. from another crewmember speaking or an transmission on an ATC frequency being monitored. I use the top position and it's remarkable effective.

I have some notes here that I didn't post earlier on the research I did before I realized that I would have to buy whatever headset was available. I could have ordered a headset directly from the LightSPEED website. They have international shipping, but they irritatingly only listed American units for the specifications. I wish Americans would learn that only they and the Liberians know what sixteen ounces is, and list things in grams. Also they're one of the sellers that require me to create an account in order to buy something. Hey, I want to click on the item and give you my credit card number. I could have traded in my old headset for a LightSPEED Zulu for $587 with trade-in and shipping, but the new Zulu isn't available through the trade-in plan yet.

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

Sennheiser lists international units on its website, but it doesn't sell headsets from the website and won't show me the location of a dealer. Their dealer-finder app maxes out at 300 nm, and finds zero that distance from where I was when I needed one. I would have loved to try one as they are known for good technology, but they don't seem to be in the 21st century. I think the headset is heavier, though, too. And then there's this, not so much about the headset as about the very attractive young lady who is wearing it.

I have to wonder about "Certified for commercial duty" though. Is there any country in which functional headsets have to be separately certified for pilots to use them while being paid? Throw one piece of balderdash like that into your marketing statement and I suspect that everything else you have to say is a deceiving distortion, too. Dumb sort of advertising to use on a very informed group. Or so we think.

Q: What do you get when you cross an ape with a pilot?
A: An ape with a big watch.

I was musing though, that my new headset isn't as good as my first ANR headset, even though the technology is better. Back then I was the only one in the company with ANR and I had superhuman abilities. Now everyone has them, so ANR is no longer an advantage over others. It's pretty much essential. I have a coworker who doesn't use ANR, just an old fashioned bulletproof set of David Clarks, and I wonder how he does it. I couldn't go back to a passive headset. I met someone recently whose first boss discouraged his employees from wearing headsets at all, because he said you can't hear the engine properly with it on. His employees weren't bold enough to tell him the reason he couldn't hear the engine, or much else for that matter, was that he had been flying for forty years without a headset.

Also, I wrote down this quotation from someone because it made me laugh, and have now completely forgotten the context: "It was so quiet it was like wearing a Bose noise cancelling headset, but without the noise cancellation, and without the headset.

1. Unfortunately for eager-horse, I was there to catch a different horse. A horse sufficiently less eager to be ridden that it bit me, if I recall correctly.

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Meanwhile a reader in the USA writes:

I am wrapping up my dispatch training and am looking to talk to an active dispatcher. Do you know of anyone that might be able to answer a few questions for me?

If you can help, please drop me a line and I'll connect you two.

Direct, But Not From Here

I mentioned taking deserved flack on my PPC ride for not using the GPS (it had an expired database and thus was not approved for IFR operations) to improve my situational awareness. While approach procedures change, and airway radials get renumbered, it's very rare that an airport or navaid is actually moved and pilots are encouraged to use situational awareness tools that are available to them, whether $15,000 installations or reused pieces of cereal box. (You can make a hold entry cheat sheet that way, if you have the normal problems with holds and not the crazy, make up a new way to screw up a hold everytime ones that I devise. Hint: do not track inbound on your EFC). The GPS avaialble to me here is a Garmin 530W.

It is familiar. There's a large rectangular screen with buttons and knobs all around it. It's a navcom unit, meaning that you use it to talk on the radio as well as tell where you're going, but the radio transmission readibility is poor, so we only use it for monitoring frequencies. I suspect an antenna connection, just because that was the cause of a simiar problem in a C172 years ago, and the maintenance manager said they hadn't investigated that yet. On the left side are knobs to adjust com volume and squelch and nav radio volume, plus there are flip flops switches to exchange active and standby frequencies. That means you never adjust the frequency you are actually using, but select the new frequency on standby and then switch them. That way it doesn't sound like you're in scan mode on your car stereo.

The exact tuning procedure is easy, with one little trick. The bottom left knob tunes either comm or nav frequencies, and by default it's the commuications frequency. You push it to toggle between control of each and it will time out and go back to comm. It's a double knob, with MHz on the outside knob, and kHz, in 25 kHz steps on the inner one. I'm not someone who walks around with a perfect picture of the wavelengths and frequencies of all her devices in her head, so I'm grateful to a pilot who years ago must have forgotten the English word frequency, because while he was in the run up area he asked the ground controller to repeat it with "Vat is ze megahertz?" That simple call forever reminds me that com and VOR frequencies are in MHz and I can place the others in relation, thanks to having learned my metric prefixes in grade three.

The bottom row is buttons: CDI, OBS, MSG, FPL, VNAV and PROC, are also familiar from other modern Garmins like the GNS430, and the right side has a range rocker, the lovely Direct-to button (looks kind of like D> except that the line carries right through the letter and ends in a rightward-pointing arrow), and MENU, CLR and ENTER buttons. On the bottom left is a double knob that cycles between page groups on the outside and individual pages on the inside. Yes, this is pretty much like the GNS430. Not that that means I'm awesome with it. I have a resistance to being really good with GPS units because I fear the loss of the navigation skills I developed before they were so ubiquitous. But really I am already losing those skills, but using GPS badly. In fact, if I learn to use this so well that it needs only the least amount of my attention, and I know its limitations well, that leaves more attention over to do real navigation.

A quick example of something I've already learned and used is how to use the direct to funtion to select a track not direct from my present position, but along a particular track to a facility. It's so obvious, once you know how: select the fix you want, hit the direct-to key, and then on the screen that comes up verifying the fix you asked for, cursor through the fields to the one that shows the direct track and change it to the desired track. Hit enter twice and there is the radial/track displayed on the moving map. This can be used to intercept final approach, a VOR radial or a track to an NDB. It's great when doing the last in wind, because it provides great confirmation that I am really on track, and improves my ability to intercept a track that is a moving and very unsteady target in a turn. (Banking affects the direction an ADF needle points, so you can never be sure you're on track until you're wings level again, making it hard to know if you have to increase or decrease bank to have the turn work out).

ForeFlight versus Nav Canada

A company called ForeFlight has released data for their iPad app that covers IFR procedures in Canada. It includes all volumes of the Canada Air Pilot (approach and departures plates, plus taxiway diagrams) and the IFR high and low enroute charts, and is legal for inflight IFR use. It's not clear whether the database includes the terminal charts, but it kind of has to because the information density around the big cities isn't sufficient in the regular LO charts. It doesn't seem to include the CFS data, but I can't think of information you need for safe IFR navigation that is in the CFS but not the CAP. We'll also have to wait for VFR chart data. Nav Canada is not forthcoming with its data.

There is Transport Canada guidance document and an FAA equivalent governing Electronic Flight Bags, as these systems are called. Page ten of the US version explains how the paper documents can be completely phased out once the system is verified reliable in a given operation, and wording in the Canadian version implies that it allows for completely paperless applications as well.

This isn't something astonishingly new, and I'm sure lots of you are already using such products. What caught my attention today was the price. As far as I can tell, you download the core of the app for free and then pay to add a subscription to the data you need. A ForeFlight Canada subscription costs US $149.99 for a year. For comparison, a subscription to all the editions of the CAP and the high and low charts costs $441 a year, plus taxes. If you only fly in only two regions of Canada, an annual mailed subscription of paper charts will cost you $142, so if you already have an iPad, that's the same cost for paper or electronic. The iPad is probably also about the same weight and the same difficulty to stuff in your flight bag as one LO and one region of the CAP.

Advantages of paper documents over the iPad are that they are unattractive to thieves, still work after they have been dropped or slammed in the trunk door of a cab, will probably dry out to a usable state if you get drenched by rain, are better for starting a fire in an emergency situation, you can write clearances on them, you can unfold them all over the hotel bed to have a wide-screen view of your proposed trip, and the batteries cannot run out. Also they make good auxiliary sunvisors, if you don't have a newspaper.

The iPad wins on staying the same size even if you are flying in all seven regions of Canada, being self-illuminated, allowing scrolling without having to flip the map over, letting you zoom the scale in or out and it probably has a search function. I don't know if you can mark it up with virtual post-its, but you can play Plants versus Zombies on it and check your e-mail while waiting for maintenance to release the aircraft.

What's it like flying with one of these? Does it have a function to do your cold weather corrections automatically or is there a way to mark up a plate after you get the latest METAR, to show all the cold weather corrections and the time to go on a non-precision approach? An iPad seems kind of bulky to mount on the yoke. Where do you put it? How far did you get on Plants versus Zombies?

Pitt Meadows

I'm at an airplane washing station at Pitt Meadows airport near Vancouver. It's nicely designed with a hose on a reel, a water hook-up, a drain, and some really clever metal stanchions around things you shouldn't run into, like the hose area. These stanchions are everywhere: in front of electrical meters, fire hydrants, anything that would normally have poles or pylons to protect it from vehicles and snowploughs, but they are propeller blades. I don't think they are actually propeller blades, unless someone decommissioned a lot of identical, large-propellered airplanes here, but they look just right, complete with manufacturer's stickers. I can't remember if they were Hartzell or McCauley. They just looked right.

The airplane ends up not totally clean, but better. I rewrap the hose on the reel, winding each coil next to its neighbour from to one end to the other in each layer, and then I get lazy near the end and let it wrap more loosely. As I'm putting away the soap, I see a man come up and unroll and reroll my last messy bit. Sorry, man. I can appreciate his need to have every coil perfectly set on the reel. It really does look nice that way and I regret not having done it that way for you myself.

This is not a really big airport, no scheduled flights and just a little terminal with scenic flights, but for some reason it has a giant avionics shop. They sell Lightspeed headsets, the kind I was trying to get when I got the Bose, and they have the new Zulu 2. I try it, but you can wear one and then the other all you want on the ground without really being able to say which is better. You have to go for a flight, preferably a long flight, before you know whether a headset is doing the job well. The logistics of taking one for a test flight are awkward, though, seeing as the next time I take off, I'll probably not land until I'm back in Alberta. I'm pleased with the Bose, so I'll keep it and not start a crazy game of buying extra headsets.

While I'm here, I get a tour of Maxcraft Avionics. It's quite impressive. Good avionics service is hard to get. I've ferried a lot of airplanes with every kind of broken avionics sometimes to more then one airport to try to get them working. I've also done a lot of flights with gaping holes in the panel where avionics had been removed for repair, sent off somewhere. Big doesn't necessarily mean good, but they have the diagnostic equipment, the certification from every manufacturer I can think of and must have a good reputation. The paint jobs on the aircraft in their hangar suggest that they are trusted by the RCMP and Helijet for major refits, and by a private owner with an intercom problem. Aviation electronics can be really hard to get fixed properly; I'm not sure if it's a black art or a science. If these guys are as good as the facility is impressive, then a lot of people will be coming to Pitt Meadows.

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One more South Sudan link. The people, men and women, have been at war for twenty-one years and pretty much the only experienced, established institution they have is the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Considering that the median age in Sudan is 18 years and life expectancy 58, over half of South Sudanese have been at war for their entire life, and most soldiers have probably never held another job. The process of demobilizing the army is further confounded by the fact that there are almost no civilian jobs, even if people had the concept of returning to them. I found this article on the reintegration process. It has lots of pictures so you can see what South Sudanese people look and dress like, too.

The PPC Ride

The examiner holds up to ask someone to let a student know she is going to be late for the lesson following my flight test, so I have a chance to go ahead and verify that no one has run into the airplane while it sat there, and that nothing is leaking out of it. Hour eleven of my duty day is beginning as I climb into the pilot seat. I welcome the examiner on board and quickly brief her on the location of emergency equipment. I set my prefolded charts where I can reach them and get myself buckled into my seat. The airplane starts nicely and I record the time then start working through checklists, explaining what I am doing. I made a list of which frequencies to put on which nav aids to get going, and I pre-identify what I can. I have an ADF not an RMI so I do what I always do with these and set north to the top, explaining that is to prevent me from mistaking it for an RMI and thinking it shows the correct heading. I also note to her that the GPS database is expired, hence the prominent NOT FOR IFR USE label across the bottom of the screen. I tell her she's welcome to use it for situational awareness if she wishes. I love it when the examiner has something interesting to look at so I don't freak out from the scrutiny while doing basic preflight checks.

I copy the ATIS and then call for clearance. Someone should tell them to speak slowly. I had to ask for two parts of the clearance to be repeated before I could write it down and read it back correctly. The clearance, from my notes, appears to be B △ eva 1/B M70 Rr^r 'u 4616 7600 on caus followed by A 2Z91 X25 125.42. This apparently all meant something to me at the time, because I taxied out. The examiner tolerated my careful pauses at each intersection while I consulted the taxi diagram for the airport she knew her way around perfectly. After I was clear of the parking area and established en route to the runway I made some small turns and rattled off "turning left, wings, er stick left, decreasing, decreasing, steady, steady," for the various instruments that should and should not respond to directional change on the ground. I told her that as this was the airplane's fourth flight today I would not be doing a run-up, if she was comfortable with that, and she was. The examiner had much better handwriting than me, because I remember seeing something akin to "confident and comfortable in the cockpit" written on her clipboard. I can read pretty much any way up. I didn't realize that was a thing everyone couldn't do until I saw it posited as a trick. I have a moment of "got her fooled" but that's washed away by a realization that I've lived in this cockpit for the last few days, and I do know how to fly, even if I don't have the recent specific experience common to students who have trained here.

I switch to tower frequency when I'm ready to go and they clear me for takeoff. Roll, straight, rotate, going up, going up, gear up, fly straight, climb speed, trimmed, after takeoff checks. I switch to terminal and they radar identify me and clear me direct the NDB. Level off, call level (even though I don't have to, and I'm not hinting for anything). Now concentrate on tracking to the NDB. I get two sets of marks for this, one for en route procedures and one for ADF tracking. And I'm doing it nice and straight. I'm as proud of this as a kid who can tie her own shoes. A basic skill done well. Now I have to keep doing it while doing something else: copy a hold clearance.

It looks like + U D> M70 HN IB 160 <FC 0045. That makes way more sense than the previous clearance, so I must be improving. If inbound is 160 then outbound is 340. With no explicit instruction on the direction of the turns, they must be to the right. I look at the ADF, by which I'm tracking to the NDB, and see that it falls just to the left of the top of the instrument, which according your basic flying school rules indicates a parallel entry, an initial left turn to 340, followed by a left turn to intercept the inbound track and then subsequent right turns on crossing the station. And I'm still tracking like a pro. I tell the examiner my intentions and she asks how it can left turn. Because on a parallel entry you start by going the wrong way ... and I'm an idiot. I'm looking at an instrument that is set to north and not to my course. Three forty is almost directly behind me. They have given me the easiest hold in the world, and I should have anticipated it, because it's the logical hold to give me, and because a sensible pilot would have been thinking about holding at the NDB the easiest way instead of being all proud she could tie her shoes. I know I would have caught that when I looked at the actual heading indicator to make the turn, but jeeeeez, HOLDS, why do I always find a new and exciting way to screw up my holds?!

I enter the insanely simple direct hold. I start the timer in the right place, I turn at the correct second, I have to bank a little more intercept, I time inbound, I declare the required outbound timing and outbound heading and both the intercept and time to station are to the degree and to the second. Not that it matters, as she has only the choice between "major error" and "fail" for my inability to state the correct entry without prompting. They don't have to tell you you've failed or stop the test on the first one. I should put a post it on the ADF: 'this is not an RMI.'

Crossing the NDB, the examiner asks for a block of airspace and now I'm visual to do the manouevring part of the test. A steep turn, which only passes because they don't fail you if you promptly correct excursions from tolerances, and a stall recovery, executed correctly, including the flaps first, then gear order peculiar to this airplane. What else is in the airwork? Maybe that's it. Slow flight included in the stall demonstration, I guess. Back to IFR. They clear me for the VFR-only full procedure approach at the NDB. It's direct the NDB, hockey stick, outbound, timer, don't forget to reset the DG, monitor the morse code for the NDB, turn 45 degrees, see the terrain on the GPS, yikes, no wonder this is not for IFR use. Fly out the time, hold altitude, turn inbound, established within 5 degrees of the inbound track I can start descent to the first stepdown. Reset the DG again. It drifts fast during turns at low power. Man, how is it even legal to do IFR NDB approaches with out a slaved gyro? It's never set to within two degrees. The examiner has set the correct radial on the GPS but I focus on the DG and ADF to track as well as I can, step down, step down, MDA. Should be visual, no contact. The examiner shows me the aerodrome off to the side and makes a note for herself that the track she gave me was not ideal. Unlike the VOR radials I discussed earlier, tracks to an NDB depend on magnetic fields, so they shift when the magnetic poles do, thus a long-outdated IFR approach based on an NDB no longer leads to the runway.

I fly the missed. There must have been a simulated engine failure in all that, as she gave me back my engine after the missed, and then cancels IFR then gets me a clearance for a simulated straight in ILS back to the airport we came from. I tuned the localizer before I left, and set the inbound track, because there weren't any VORs en route, so now all I have to do is slow to approach speed, double check the identifier and follow the vectors to intercept it. I'm cleared to do so. "Loc alive!" Set the DG again and intercept. I overcorrect for a moment, then settle down. Staring at the instrument, I see that it's one of the kind with dots on them. Most of them have dots, but now I'm laughing inside myself at the dots. MORE DOTS! This is what I do all day. I put that needle right in the middle of the dots and pin it there. "Glideslope alive!" It's one of the glideslope indicators that hinges at the side like a drawbridge. I put the gear down as it swings just before level and then put the nose down and descend on the glideslope. I need to pull the power back a bit more, otherwise the turbocharged engines give me more power as I descend and I'll get above the glideslope. Despite the fact that I'm descending on the glideslope, I am given a "not below" clearance, and I reach that altitude while still on the glideslope. I hold altitude and watch the needle drop away below me, until the restriction is lifted then I ask the examiner what she wants me to do. She tells me to recapture the glideslope. I tell her I would normally conduct a missed, not dive for a glideslope, but I do manage to get it back just before reaching the circling altitude. I circle out, mentally choosing points that represent my circling limits, but just as I put down my gear to start turning in, the tower asks me to extend my downwind, they'll call my base. I should have taken the gear up again, but instead I let my speed decay and make the examiner nervous before I'm finally cleared to turn in and do my touch and go. I grin to myself, glad I did one this morning. As I turn crosswind, the examiner says she wants the next landing to be flapless. Ha ha. I admit straight out that I haven't landed this airplane flapless before, that there's no checklist, but that I'll have a shallower approach angle, higher approach speed, more runway... While I'm babbling the examiner grabs the left throttle and pulls it to idle. "This should help you get down." I simulate feathering the propeller and securing that engine and it so happens that as her simulation has taken out my hydraulics, this would be a flapless landing anyway. I simulate activating the gear electrically, and wouldn't have chosen to pump down the flaps with a runway of this length. She tells me I can have the power if I need it, but I entirely forget in the flare that the "zero thrust" simulation that the examiner has set is actually not zero thrust and the residual power, afternoon warmth and lack of flaps prolongs my touchdown so far it's funny. I stop and turn off at the end.

After landing checks done, I ask the examiner for suggestions on where to park and she gets the taxi clearance for me and gives directions. There's a whole back lot full of interchangeably anonymous hangars. It's like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If I park the airplane back here I'll never find it again. The examiner knows that there is no airplane in this hangar and that the owner won't be here for a while, so it's okay to park in front of it. She's now late for her next lesson, so the debriefing will be in the morning, at 7 a.m.

"Can you please at least tell me if I can tell my company I passed?"

"You passed."

If she had made me wait, you had better believe I would have made you wait. Most of them do. I really wonder how bad some pilots must be, that they are worse than me and actually fail these things. Is my expectation of the world just too high? Like the fact that my customer today said he thought I was the most punctual pilot he had ever worked with. I mean what? How can you be more punctual than on time? And how can your job be to file a flight plan saying you will take off at 1430, and not be sitting at the hold short line waiting for a take-off clearance at 1429? Most of the job that isn't memorizing and practicing emergency procedures is calculating how long things take, and writing that down in four places.

The examiner takes her paperwork and leaves while ponder these things, fill out the journey log and gather my belongings.

There's a young man sitting in a C172 parked on the apron without the engine running. I say hi and ask him if he's practicing emergency procedures. He says no, he's just waiting for his instructor. I apologize, explaining I'm the reason she's late, and hoping I haven't got her in a bad mood for him. He's relaxed about it. He's working on his initial private pilot licence, trying to get landings right. The instructor in me makes me ask what the hardest part is. Not that he doesn't have a very competent instructor, but sometimes even the same words from someone new trigger something. He says just getting everything done, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.

The operator has gone to meet with a client, and left me with the name of a hotel where we have reservations, and instructions to get a cab there. I go and find a phone at the flying club and call one. They say I'm first in line for a cab in the area and when I ask how long that might take the dispatcher repeats You're first in line for a cab in your area! I should have hung up and called another company. I'd rather be treated with respect than have an uncracked windshield. But I say whatever and wait. There's another pilot at the club and I express some of my "phew, flight test over" relief to him and he recognizes which airplane I must have been in, from the examiner's voice getting my clearance. He was in the airplane that interrupted my ILS approach, and apologizes for that. I tell him that really it helped me out, because the closer to the airfield I get, the harder it is to keep the needles centres, so breaking me off early made me look better. I go out to wait for the cab. I wait a while. Rude and slow.

The driver is a lot nicer than the dispatcher. He turns out to be an IT guy taking a break from his career. I have supper and should be ready to collapse, but I'm still kind of wired. Maybe that was especially potent coffee. I call the front desk. "Do you guys have a swimming pool or something?" She doesn't even say 'yes,' just gives me directions. The pool has a bunch of kids in it, and I join them on the waterslide, making sure it's all clear below before I launch myself down it. It's a good one! They compliment me on my happy shrieking. One of the 'kids' turns out to be the mom. I tell her I'm decompressing from a flight test, which leads to the usual conversation about what airline I don't fly for. I tell her about taking pictures at Slave Lake and get a blank look.

"Oh, what province are you from?"

"Alberta. But we've been away."

They've been away for six months. The parents have jobs that allow them to work via the internet for a good portion of the year, and the kids are homeschooled, so they've just been travelling. "Oh where?" I ask.

"Everywhere. The whole world."

Wow. I ask about some countries I'm interested in. Cambodia? She doesn't know where it is. I tell her. No, they haven't been to Asia. Or Africa. Or South America. Or Central America including Mexico. She hasn't heard of Estonia. Hasn't been east of Germany. They have been only been to countries dominantly populated by white people who speak germanic or romance languages. I wouldn't challenge your right to call a vacation covering the UK, Australia and Western Europe a world tour, but if you're home schooling your kids, they have to know that that is not "everywhere - the whole world." She has a reason, though, but a kind of weird one, for not wanting to go to 'those places.' Her partner, not currently in the pool area, is from the Caribbean, and dark skinned, so her kids look like 'their kids.' She's afraid that they will be mistaken for locals in one of those places and taken for slaves, because that happens there. I don't know where to start. I'm not going to touch the paranoia that goes with a mother's love, or her subscription to "all brown people look alike," so I tell her that in Cambodia, children in slavery are usually sold by their own parents to feed the others in the family, or by luring runaways, not by snatching the children of the wealthy. I'm pretty sure that's the way slavery works most places these days, because capturing people that the authorities would come looking for is bad for business. I try to express that just because a country doesn't have the same standards or the same traditions as Canada, that it isn't a place you can travel safely. I've never travelled with children, but if they'll eat what's available, sleep where you tell them to and have the basic sit stay and recall training of a pet dog, I think they could enjoy travel, to the whole world.

And at the end of the day-- and it really is the end of the day--it makes me wonder how fundamentally broken my world view is. I need to see more of it, and look harder at the places I already am. I spend a few minutes in the really hot hot tub, then go to bed.

Digital Fuel Management

I've spent my career flying airplanes with instrument panels that haven't been substantially updated since the aircraft were designed in the 1950s or 1960s. Anything electronic is a newfangled after-market device not in the original aircraft specifications. Of course I haven't had any trouble using the newfangled stuff with which my various employers retrofit their aircraft. A new installation always comes with a manual, and you can usually find manufacturers' information online, too. I've enjoyed electronic tachs, EGTs, navcoms, and even a Sandel-OMFG-it's-everything-in-one-instrument, please don't let me push the button that makes it turn into a microwave oven just as I'm intercepting the glideslope (okay I had a little trouble with that one, but not as much trouble as the poor guy who owned it and had hired me to help him pass his IFR renewal with it). There's an instrument I've seen a few times, in airplanes I've flown once, or flown for short flights, and never bothered to learn how to use, but now there's one installed in an airplane I will fly for work, so I'd better learn to use it properly.

It's a Shadin Digital Fuel Management System, a fuel flow meter that, given information on how much fuel you started the flight with, should give excellent information on how much is left. See, normally you spend the flight comparing the known time and power setting with the fuel gauges and hoping everything you are looking at is as accurate as the agreement among them. You could have some weird fuel leak on the same day as you had a fuel gauge over-reading error and had your watch stop. It's not likely, but you could. That's the sort of not likely but it could happen scenario that pilots are paid to think about every day. The Shadin is another tool for tracking fuel consumption, and it's supposed to be extremely accurate, much better than fuel gauges, and it's digital, with readouts like fuel endurance so I don't have to peer at parallax, estimate needle widths, or even do any math.

Here's a post based on the manual for the Digiflo model, with notes on the slightly different Digidata model, which I think is on another member of the fleet. I start by verifying the fuel quantity the only way I really can, by visually confirming how much fuel is in the tanks. So this is on the ground, immediately after fuelling. Then I enter fuel on board into the device. It doesn't have a keyboard. In fact it's one of those nifty little pieces of electronics designed to fit in the dashboard hole made for a traditional round instrument, about the size of the bottom of a standard soup can. The picture below isn't quite the right product. Mine has three display windows, three push buttons, one three position toggle switch and a four position rotary knob. The top window normally displays whatever is selected by the rotary knob: NM/GAL, GAL. TO DESTINATION, GAL RESERVE or ENDURANCE HRS:MIN, and is flanked by the GAL REM. and GAL USED push buttons, which while held change the display appropriately. The bottom two windows display the fuel flow per engine.

The Digidata has the "ENTER/TEST" button in the left, a "REM/USED" toggle in the middle, a "FULL/ADD" toggle on the right, a rotary knob, and two display windows, one for the fuel flow and one for whatever is selected on the rotary knob. On that model, to display the fuel flow per engine you squeeze the REM/USED and FULL/ADD toggles together. I'm not sure if this is the right picture.

There are three options for entering fuel on board on the Digiflow. One is if I have filled all the tanks, in which case I move the FULL/ADD toggle to the FULL position and hold it there while pressing the ENTER/TEST button. I can then press the REM button to verify that it reads the full amount as fuel remaining. That's already set for the airplane. If I'm not filling the tanks I have to specify how much fuel I have added, by holding the REM button and pressing the TEST/ENTER button until it reaches the right level. For some reason there's a second way to do this, by holding the FUEL/ADD toggle in the ADD position and pressing the REM button to reach the right number. If I overshoot, I can press and hold the USED button and then press and hold the TEST/ENTER button until the right value is shown.

On the Digidata model I hold the REM/USED toggle in the REM position and hold down the ENTER/TEST button until the window displays the fuelled quantity. If I overshoot, I can remove some by holding the REM/USED toggle in the USED position and pressing the ENTER/TEST button to reduce the displayed quantity.

Once the amount is entered, I press the “ENTER/TEST” button and it should display in succession:

• 1. GOOd to verify that the display is OK
• 2. the K-factor (a calibration value for the fuel flow transducers)
• 3. the maximum usable fuel for the aircraft
• 4. software & revision version #
• 5. distance to a waypoint or destination

It achieves the fifth calculation because it can talk to--and I love this old meets new specification--the panel mount GPS or the LORAN C. Someone must have really loved his trusty LORAN C.

Fuel flow transducers are like little turbines spinning in the fuel lines, but if you thought "hmm, the speed of the turbine might not always be directly proportional to the fuel flow rate" then you would be right. If you not only did not pause to wonder that, but aren't sure whether it's worth pausing to wonder what it means, then you should pause instead to give thanks that there are engineers in the world, because it's important. The math to take into account the effect of 'viscous', 'transient' and 'turbulent' flows is probably fascinating. Maybe instead of stealing linguistics, I should have been stealing fluid dynamics. Those classes are probably harder to figure out when you drop in three quarters of the way through the semester, though. The manufacturer also assures us that if a transducer somehow gets stuck and stops spinning, it will not impede fuel flow to the engine.

The readout updates very rapidly and is easier to see than the EGT. I can see that once I get some familiarity with the airplane I will be setting mixtures by fuel flow, and then confirming that the EGT is within limits, rather than peering at the tiny digital or usually inaccurate analog EGT gauges. Also the display flashes if the fuel remaining is insufficient to reach the selected destination with 45 minutes reserve fuel.

En français:
un carburant - fuel
l'essence aviation (f) - aviation gasoline
le débit carburant - fuel flow
à court de carburant - low on fuel
avoir une panne d’essence - run out of fuel

Je veux apprendre à utiliser cet indicateur du débit carburant pour je n'ai jamais avoir une panne d'essence.

Not All Malfunctions in a Simulator are Simulated

I'm on vacation at a lake in British Columbia, just as I threatened. The lake is lovely, as is the town, the accommodations and the company, But I'm not saying who that was nor blogging about my vacation. I'm blogging about the fact that I have to leave this lovely lake and drive an hour or so to the airport, and renew my IFR. I find the school and check in with dispatch, where I do some paperwork. They tell me my instructor's name. I've never met anyone with this name before. It's the same as the name of a plant, and it doesn't tell me anything about them, except that perhaps my instructor is the child of late-blooming hippies.

Oak (not the real name, but I'll use that to avoid excessive circumlocution) arrives and he is a he. He doesn't look like a hippy, is familiar with the information I gave the school on my experience and needs, and seems to know what he's doing. He proposes we sim today, then fly tomorrow. He's concerned that the fact that I've never flown this airplane before might be a problem. I'm concerned that I have to take a flight test, and AAAAAHHHH! FLIGHT TEST! I'm not worried about flying a new airplane compared to that. Every time I have flown a new airplane, it's turned out to work like all the other ones I have flown. The only tricky bit is usually landing nicely. On an instrument ride if you get to the flare without screwing up too badly, you've passed. I know someone who had to have the instructor land the airplane for him on his initial IFR, because the instructor had arrived late and postponed the flight test later into the dark, for a candidate who did not yet possess a night rating or any night landing experience. (And if he's reading this, please get in touch: both paper and e-mail is bouncing).

We go into the simulator room and start one up. It's a typical flying school simulator with a yoke and pedals and movable controls on a dashboard, into which is set a simulated instrument panel on a computer monitor, connected to a console running some flavour of flight simulator, possibly even the Microsoft one. Once upon a time school simulators had real gauges all the way across with little motors running everything, but those are more expensive to construct and maintain. Real airplanes are going towards glass now, so the simulated ones do too. The pilot seat is on rails bolted to the floor, and after it has been adjusted to the comfort of the pilot, it does not move in any way related to the simulated movement of the airplane. The whole things has been certified by Transport Canada as conforming sufficiently to the characteristics of whatever it simulates to be used for certain types of flight training. As this training is just to acclimatize me to the local navaids and procedures and to assure the poor flight instructor it's okay to fly with me, its certification doesn't currently matter anyway.

I start running through the instrument checks. This is partly a simulation of how I will test all the instruments on the flight test to show that I am a good little pilot, partly a test to make sure the simulator is working properly, and partly a chance for me to familiarize myself with the location and operation of all the instruments. You know how in your car you can put your finger on any control pretty much without looking, but in a rental you have to wait for a stoplight and hunt around for it? Well same in an airplane. In a simulator of this type some of the switches tend to be rinky-dink little things and not located in logical places, either. "Where are the cowl flaps again?" All the installed instruments are familiar ones to me, and I know how to use them, but figuring out how to adjust the rightmost digit of the ADF frequency can be like trying to turn off the windshield wipers on the rental car. Just when you think you have killed them, they turn out to be set on intermittent.

Above is a literal museum example of the oldest kind of ADF I have used. I think anything older would require separate manual tuning of the sense antenna.

I think I may have ranted thusly about ADFs before. Those of you who know or don't care about the various ways one might set the frequency on an ADF receiver can safely skip the following two paragraphs with no loss to the narrative. If you want to know what it's actually for and what it does, not just how to tune it, go here.

An ADF can be set to either a three or four digit frequency, that is between approximately 190 and 1750 kHz: the AM radio band. I believe all the NDBs that the ADF has to receive are in the three digit range, from 190 to 600 kHz, but I speculate that ADF was designed to also receive higher AM radio frequencies, so as to use commercial radio stations for navigation. Radio towers are published with their frequencies on old charts and still better than nothing in the middle of nowhere. The oldest sort of ADF I have used has one big knob that moves an indicator along a scale which you carefully examine to see which frequency you have selected, and then you listen really carefully to the Morse identifier, because you could easily be a few off. That sort is a museum piece now, and pretty much was then, but I doubt I was the last person in the world to use one of those in IFR conditions. The next oldest kind has three frequency adjustment knobs, the way an analogue transponder has four knobs to change the squawk code. The leftmost knob changes its corresponding "digit" through the range one to seventeen (or maybe fourteen, I don't remember) and the other two change their digits through the zero to nine range. The more modern kind (although "modern" and "ADF" don't go together well) has a digital display and the knobs are more compact. Typically there is one big knob with a smaller knob in the centre. They correspond to the three knobs on the older unit like this: the big outside knob does the job of the leftmost knob; the smaller inside knob does the job of the middle one, and then you can pull out the middle one and then when you turn it, it does the job of the rightmost knob on the old unit. You could be stuck for a long time if you didn't know the pulling out trick.

In simulators like this one, for some weird reason, you don't get to pull out the inside knob to set the frequency. I guess someone was shown how it was supposed to work, didn't realize that the person showing him had pulled out the knob, so made up his own way, and pilots are so used to ADFs working different ways that they shrugged and considered it a limitation of the device. So in the sim you turn the outside or first knob to set the first one or two digits, the 1-17 thing, then you turn the second knob to set the second two digits, from 00 to 99. Like that's not a pain. You have to do this sometimes during a missed approach, where one beacon is the missed approach point and the missed approach required you to track to a subsequent NDB, so you have to scroll through up to 50 frequencies while cleaning up the airplane in a simulated go around.

I dial in the frequency of the NDB nearest my simulated airport so I can test the device. It identifies and points, so I then try to tune the first NDB I'll need during the flight. It's at this point that I notice that as I adjust the third digit, I'm only getting even numbers. "How do I get odd numbers on this?" I ask Oak, who is sufficiently confused by the question to clue us into the fact that it's broken. We switch to the other simulator and go through testing everything again before flying.

The simulated ATIS unexpectedly (to me) works, and I copy it, then address Oak as "ground" for my clearance. He gives me the Abbotsford Seven departure off runway 07, The first seven means that there have been six revisions to the procedure since it was first published and the second seven means that the runway is oriented such that the airplane will be on a heading of 070 degrees magnetic as I take off. The departure procedure is a number of instructions, such as the fact that I'm supposed to climb on runway heading to six hundred feet then hang a right to 202 degrees and wait for ATC to give me vectors on course.

The procedures are not a problem, but I do get caught up in getting every detail right, and my altitude control is abysmal. That's not abnormal for the sim. The trim is in the wrong place and doesn't have the same feedback as in an airplane. I make a few dumb mistakes but demonstrate a basic knowledge of how to fly an airplane, so tomorrow we are scheduled to fly one.

I don't want to spend too much time in the simulator because it doesn't even try to simulate the airplane I will be flying, and you do gain habits to appease the simulator. This article suggests that because much better simulators that are used for airline pilot training do not do a good job of modelling aircraft behaviour as the airplane goes out of control, simulator training may be to blame for pilots responding incorrectly to emergency situations, causing some crashes, such as the Continental runway excursion in Denver and the Colgan Dash-8 stall in Buffalo.

Always Watch Your Autopilot

Once I'm clear of Calgary's airspace, I climb to 7500' and then level off and trim every which way while the speed stabilizes. The GPS is set direct to destination, the trackbar to the track I am following to get there and the heading bug to the heading I'm flying to hold it in northwest winds. I turn on the autopilot, and press the Engage button. Unlike Star Trek the airplane doesn't flash and disappear into a rainbow rubber band of light. Instead it rolls into a thirty degree right bank and drops into a 300 fpm descent. I retake control, climb back to 7500', disable altitude control and switch it from nav mode to heading mode. When I reengage it, it follows the bug straight ahead, and left and right when I move it. I go back to nav mode and watch it for a bit. I'm a few hundred metres off the centre of the track and apparently when you're an autopilot this calls for drastic measures to regain track. I guess when you're an autopilot that's your whole job, so you take it pretty seriously. Or when you're an autopilot designed in the seventies, you only know one strategy for getting on track: you bank thirty degrees towards the track until you're within some logic of centred and then you roll level.

It's kind of interesting that the autopilot, which was designed in the 1970s works with a brand new GPS unit. There's no computer in the autopilot and no mechanical parts in the GPS. The truth is, they don't talk at all. They communicate entirely through an intermediary, the HSI ("horizontal situation indicator," the second stupidest aviation abbreviation after DME). The autopilot also talks to the flight director, which is part of the attitude indicator, but I don't believe the GPS participates in that conversation. The GPS tells the HSI how far off course we are and then the autopilot rolls the airplane into a bank to regain the course, with the flight director telling the autopilot when it has reached the bank limit. I have to set the heading bug and track bar manually.

After I get tired of correcting the autopilot, I turn off the altitude hold feature and keep altitude myself while the autopilot holds the course. This doesn't work that well because it doesn't take much force to disconnect and doesn't have a disconnect alarm, and every once in a while I turn the yoke inadvertently and disconnect it, so that it drifts off course. But I persevere. I'll have to get used to this.

Spring is coming to the prairie but there are still snow curls on the ground, highlighting all the ditches and gullies. As I approach the destination airport, I start looking at water features on the ground for confirmation that the runway I am anticipating is the correct one. I get caught by this every time: when the snow is off frozen ponds look just like open water from the air, and the ripples are frozen right in. So they're only useful to determine landing direction if I have a time machine to the day they froze. I take a guess and then compare the GPS ground speed to my airspeed to confirm that I don't have an untenable tailwind.

I land and taxi slowly in, then text the flight follower. He tells me whom to call for a pick up. Fuel is closed for the night, so I park in front of the terminal and plug into an outlet there. I don't know anything about what kind of power I can draw from it, so I only activate the cabin heater to keep the computers warm overnight. The engines will have to settle for tents and plugs. Shiny new engine plugs which keep the heat in in the winter and the birds out in the spring and summer.

I see the uv damage lines on the tire again as I chock. They're just on the surface, but they bug me because they aren't usually there. I unload my baggage, and a box of parts which must be everything they took out while doing the work. The client picks me up and laughs at the parts box. He offers to leave it in his truck so I don't have to keep it in my hotel room.

Supper is something generic at a local restaurant. I use a trick I learned from another pilot to avoid eating more than I need: I ask to have a takeout container brought with the meal. Then right away, before I eat any, I put half the food in the takeout container. That protects me from unconsciously eating it all even though its more than I need. My other strategy for this month is the iTunes tactic: whenever I'm tempted to buy a chocolate bar from the hotel vending machine, I'm going instead to buy a new song from from iTunes. It costs exactly the same and I'll have the at least as much fun picking it out. And they I'll put it on repeat and get up and dance to it.

It's the end of the day so I just check in and veg out. The TV comes on at the weather channel. A lot of hotels do that. If they don't have their own dedicated advertising channel shilling for the pay movies, they have the default channel be weather. It's useful to most people and completely inoffensive. It will never come on in the middle of a violent TV show or a sexy movie. Unless you're offended by pressure charts or footage of a woman walking down the street carrying her cat in a front slung baby carrier, you're going to be happy or bored watching this. And then they toss off a casual mention that a Chinese oil tanker has just taken a dump on the Great Barrier Reef. I literally scream. I don't know what caused the accident. Probably a stupid autopilot. I don't want to read more about it. I hate horrible things that I can't do anything about, and as a consumer of petroleum products I have to acknowledge some responsibility, too. Not too many years from now global climate change will result in easy passage through the once treacherous Northwest Passage and countries that didn't even know it existed before will be plying the arctic waters. It's a completely different ecosystem, but just as vulnerable as the coral reefs. I'm glad I'm not immortal. The future has amazing 3-D movies but dead barren seas.

Out of Calgary

I fly to Calgary International Airport and then jump in a cab, asking the driver if he knows where the Springbank airport is. He says yes, that he did his citizenship exam in Springbank. "Congratulations," I say. He is originally from Kashmir. I ask him why he chose to come to Canada and he says his father worked in the Indian Embassy here and he loves the country. He doesn't think Calgary is too cold, and the scenery is familiar, because you can see the Himalayas from Kashmir.

He's fascinated by the fact that I'm going to fly an airplane, and when we arrive at the maintenance hangar he gets out of the cab and wants to see it. I don't even know where it is, but I point through the fence at some that are larger and smaller than mine, looking for one that is the same type, but then I see mine at the back behind a twin otter and I point it out. I tell him he can go down the road a bit and get a fam flight at a school, and he'll be able to see what it's like to fly. I wonder if he'll be at the controls of an air taxi someday.

I go inside the FBO and introduce myself. The airplane isn't quite ready yet, as I expected, so I get an estimate as to when it will be, and go down the field to get lunch and updated charts at the flying club. Springbank is the Calgary area's training airport, a busy little patch of airspace where students can do hours of touch and go landings without congesting the runways at YYC. They're still all up in Calgary's airspace, and in fact as of a recent NOTAM, Springback Tower controls only its immediate airspace, and Calgary Terminal takes over again all around it. I review the reporting points here so I won't get caught out be being told to fly direct some place I've never heard of. On my new chart, I cross out the Springbank frequency and write in the Calgary one as directed by the NOTAM. I call an 888-number to prerequest a transponder code. The controller can't give it to me now, but my call ensures one will be generated for me, and he says I'll get it from the ground controller.

When the avionics work is complete and the airplane is released to me, I start a preflight inspection. They have installed that new GPS I told you about, replaced the ADF loop antenna, and adjusted the pitch control of the autopilot by tightening the elevator cables. The first thing I do is go on board. The panel is all closed up, circuit breakers reset and so on. I can just see the elevator if I have my head up against the window, so I pull on the yoke to make sure it goes up not down. (It's happened!) It goes up but there's a shuddering noise in the yoke, like there's no lubrication or something. I try the same thing with the right side yoke, and curiously there is no such noise. What the heck? The two should be completely connected and do exactly the same thing. I go back inside to get the technician. He comes out to see and then understands my concern. He explains that the bushing on the copilot yoke is worn and now that he has tightened up the elevator cables (they were loose, explaining the altitude hold problem of the autopilot) there is vibration. He says it's safe to fly, so I defer the yoke sleeve according to the company maintenance control manual and get on with it. I won't in flight routinely pull the yoke that hard or far anyway. I check all the trims, jumping in an out of the plane to see what I can't see from my seat, and I tell the techs that I will continue to destination regardless of whether everything works to spec. I know that the work was being done on a time available basis and that the contract I'm flying to means the time is no longer available. Canada needs more good avionics techs.

I call for fuel and while that is being delivered I determine that all the bits I need are sufficiently attached to the airplane for flight. There's some sun damage to the nosewheel tire, not enough to pose a risk, just an unusual thing for this airplane because it usually works hard enough to wear it out before it rots at all. It's been a slow winter.

The airplane starts easily. When I turn on the avionics master I laugh because a local AM radio station starts blaring through the overhead speaker. The techs have been using the ADF navigation radio for entertainment during the work. I don't mind, but if you're an AME or apprentice who wants make the best impression, I'd recommend you turn down the volume and set the ADF to a different frequency before giving the airplane back to the customer. I flick the ADF speaker switch back to headset and tune the Pidgeon NDB. It identifies extremely faintly, and the needle doesn't point, but it's ten miles away, so it might not work on the ground.

I monitor the ATIS and call the ground controller. He does indeed have my departure squawk code ready for me, and taxi via Charlie. Just before I start rolling forward they amend the taxi instructions to include the few metres I will have to travel on A to get to C. The controller automatically spat out the standard instructions from the flying school apron and then had to revise them to match the fact that I'm not at the flying school. I wonder if I could have got in trouble for being on alfa without an explicit clearance. I don't think so. There is a run up area by the runway, but it's not that big. I'm glad I finish before another twin comes up. I'm cleared to position and then for takeoff, "maintain runway heading, not above 5000'." That sounds pretty good until you remember that Springbank is at 3940' elevation. As soon as I'm radar identified they allow me up to 5500' and give me a vector, then switch me to the Calgary frequency. Calgary gives me another vector, then clears me direct to destination, but they apologize that they can't give me higher until I'm out of their airspace. They point out a couple of helicopters and a regional jet for me and then I'm squawking 1200 and on my own.

Garmin 430 Overview

I'm training on a new GPS NAVCOM next week. (That is a GPS receiver that has an integrated communications radio and simulates traditional navigation instruments). This one talks to the radio navigation instruments and can combine their knowledge with its. The GPS can drive my HSI CDI so that I'm looking at the traditional instruments, but navigating by GPS information. This is good, because the traditional instruments have a better display and are right in front of me, so more comfortable to use. The system is complicated, but fortunately it's a Garmin, and I've used a lot of Garmin GPS receivers, so the logic isn't completely foreign; I'm working my way through the first online manual now.

Equipment like this has a lot of context sensitive keys. For example if you push the middle of the bottom right knob, you activate or deactivate the GPS cursor. If the cursor is deactivated, turning that knob changes screens, but if the cursor is active, turning that knob moves the cursor from field to field. But not to all fields. There's a separate cursor for changing VHS standby frequencies¹, and two separate frequency swapping buttons. I like that, as I have been caught out on units that had one cursor, messing up my standby frequency just before I needed it, because I was hunting for the approach page. The section of the screen that acts as what would be labelled NAV on the analog radios is designated VLOC here. That represents VOR plus LOCalizer², i.e. this radio is used to tune VOR or ILS frequencies. They needed a more specific term than NAV, because the whole thing is for navigation.

The 29 possible display pages are in logical groups, so you first use the bottom right knob, cursor deactivated, to select a group, i.e. NAV, WPT, AUX or NRST, then you turn the inside right knob to select an individual page within that group. I need to familiarize myself with which information is available on which pages. Setup is under AUX. Airport information is under WPT. If I get lost³, I can press and hold the CLR key to get back to the default NAV page.

Hmm, on page 17 it says that to stop navigating a flight plan I select Delete Flight Plan. Single use flight plans? That seems a little drastic. That option is usually Stop Navigation. It isn't until page seventy-five in the full Pilot's Guide that it confirms "Deleting a flight plan does not delete the waypoints contained in the flight plan from the database or user waypoint memory." You're really just deleting it from RAM and it's still stored, ready to be selected again.

Some of the pages can be accessed without going through the menu system. The approaches and all their associated pages are accessed with one touch, the PROC key. This is good. All those other pages are just pretty information screens. The approaches are going to actually tell me--or the autopilot⁴--where to go. The unit will tell me if I select an approach that has not been approved as standalone GPS. For such approaches I have to navigate primarily by the traditional nav aids, and monitor the GPS only for situational awareness. If traditional nav aids are available, I'll be monitoring them anyway, but it's a matter of what is driving my CDI⁵. I press the CDI button to select that, or "An ‘Auto ILS CDI’ setting provides automatic switching to ‘VLOC’ once established inbound on the final course segment of an approach." Nice, but dangerous, in the way that autothrottles are: more than one pilot accustomed to the airplane doing things for him has forgotten to do them himself when the occasion called for it. I'll have to make verifying that that AUTO CDI switch occurred a part of my routine.

Ever memorized something because you were told to, without being given enough context to use it or even understand it? I hate doing that, but I did so years ago in order to know the answers to questions I was told would be on the exam. I guess they were. I had to know the CDI scaling for different phases of flight. I don't remember them now, so I don't know if they are the same as on this 430, but the numbers here are:

Phase	Scaling	Location
ENR	5.0 nm	enroute
TERM	1.0 nm	<30 nm from destination or 1-5 nm from departure
APR	0.3 nm	<2 nm from destination when on a GPS approach

I think those are full scale deflection each side. I'll have to confirm that with the next manual. I'll make the procedures for flying an approach on this unit a post unto itself, for another day, because despite all the bells and whistles, that's what I'm really here to learn. This whole week will be Garmin 430 posts.

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Notes

Anyone know if there is an html tag that will automatically number footnotes, and superscript the index, like in LaTeX? Ideally it would provide internal page links to the footnote and back to the text, too.

1. If you press and hold the com swapping button for about two seconds, you get the emergency frequency of 121.5. I wonder how long it takes before the unit malfunctions and you risk getting 121.5 any time you swap frequencies. It's very common for older radios to double-flip when you try to swap them, leaving you talking to the same controller who just told you to switch frequencies. Embarrassing, but having that happen on 121.5 would be more so.

2. This makes VLOC a deeply recursive acronym, as VLOC is short of VOR/LOCalizer, and VOR is short for VHF Omnidirectional Range, and VHF is short for Very High Frequency, but no one ever thinks about what VOR stands for as they are saying it. It's usually pronounced Vee-Oh-Are, but there are a few people who say "vore." I suspect they are all students of the same eccentric flight instructor.

3. Lost in the menu screens, not lost flying the plane, nor can I get Lost the TV series on the little screen. It is in colour, though.

4. I'll believe that the autopilot works in this plane when I experience it myself.

5. The CDI is the little needle that tells me which way I need to correct to be on course.

Simulator Oddities

Oops, forgot to mark this ready after my sim yesterday.

First, an apology for all the toy flight simulator entries on here lately, and a warning that they will continue. I don't want to turn this into a video gaming blog, but as some of my former blogging time is now being taken up with practicing my professional skills, we should have predicted that some of my blogging thoughts would be turned in that direction, too. I know there are flight sim enthusiasts who read this blog and they can probably help me through my glitches.

I confess to using MSFS 2002. I own Version X but haven't taken it out of the box because my computer isn't optimized for games, so it might not be able to keep up. Remember that I am not interested in scenery graphics, audio ATC, or custom cockpits, just briefing departures and approaches and flying them to minima. In my experience it's really easy to spend more time trying to get a flight sim game to work properly than actually using it. If it's verified that all my little issues are fixed in X, I might upgrade.

Oddity #1 is that the game has only a single command for "raise gear" and "lower gear." I can't do the equivalent of reach out and put my hand on the gear lever without retracting it if it's already down. I have to place the avionics box over the on-screen gear lights, so I can't glance at them to confirm gear position. Gear down is such a separate command from gear up, and so crucial. It should never have been a single command toggle and I hope it's fixed by now.

Oddity #2 is the DME function. (For the non-pilots, DME is possibly the lamest three letter abbreviation in aviation: Distance Measuring Equipment. It's a device on the ground that talks to your onboard receiver and then tells it how many miles away from it you are.) Let's say I start up at CYHZ and tune the IHZ localizer (109.1) on NAV1 and the YHZ VOR (115.1) on NAV2. Both nav aids have a DME source, which is automatically tuned when I select the VHF frequency. The little toggle switch to select which one is displayed is not well depicted, so it's difficult to see by looking whether it is set to NAV1 or NAV2. Fortunately I know where I am, on the button of runway 14, so the one that indicates a distance of 5.2 nm is the VOR. I want to prove DUTSA, 5.2 DME straight off the departure end of 14, so I flip the switch and it shows 0.1 nm. That must be the localizer. I don't take this for granted, though, I click the audio panel button to identify it.

Morse code beeps _ . _ _ / .... / _ _.. . Wait that's something H Z but I is two dots. The something didnt' sound like two dots. I check the plate. Yup. Supposed to be two dots. I listen again and now the identifier is clearly IHZ. I must have heard wrong. take off and fly to DUTSA, then hang a left and track to the VOR, already identified before takeoff. I flip the DME source over to NAV2 also, but don't bother identifying it, because it's for information only. I'll prove station passage with the needle flip. I track outbound on the 297 radial to intercept the localizer outbound, and then put the DME source back to the localizer and ident it. The first time the identifier plays, it's clearly YHZ, then it switches to IHZ. Then it switches back. Experimentation shows that regardless of the position of the DME source selection switch, when the audio DME toggle is selected on, the idents of the two DME sources available play in alternation. I haven't confirmed that at any other airport. Maybe it's just a Halifax glitch.

If anyone cares to fire up Version X to check if this is fixed, could you also see if the Split Crow NDB (364) is in the database now? I couldn't receive it at all, removing the possibility of doing the interesting LOC/NDB approach there.

This post brought to you by another simulated ILS/DME into Halifax in the wind and fog, slightly left of the localizer all the way down, with a conservative correction that brought me onto the centreline just as the approach lights became visible.

Cold and Macho

We meet at 6:30 for breakfast according to our strategy. The rental car can be returned at 7:00, and we've left ourselves a few hours leeway for contingencies so we can still get the airplane put away at destination (that's prearranged) and then get to the terminal and through southern airport security in time for our flights.

My boss texts as I'm gathering up my gear in my room. "Is it going to be too cold to fly?" There's a big bubble of arctic air over half the country. It's -32 here, actually a few degrees colder at destination, but as long as it's forecast to be over -35, we're okay. He doesn't want engines started below that. It takes too long for the oil to reach the moving parts at such low temperatures, and just turning over an engine could damage it.

It's always nice to have a "too cold to work" temperature that allows you to stay in bed, but usually the weather conspires to hover just above that temperature, always freezing your fingers but never allowing them to remain tucked in bed. Still, it's nice to know that it's there. I worked for a company once that had a too-hot-to-wear-a-tie uniform rule. I think the number was in the high 20s. Anything above that on the OAT and you could work in an open collar. Today I'm working in compression socks, two more pairs of heavy socks, leggings, long underwear, work pants, t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, sweater, and I think a sweatshirt over that, then my lined coat -- although not my wonderful parka. I thought we'd be going south before now. Plus a wool toque, a scarf, wool gloves and fleece-lined leather work mittens on top of that.

We unload everything on the apron next to the airplane and then I volunteer to load and secure it while he returns the car. We've done so little work this rotation, that I feel as if I have done less than my share. I had hoped to have everything ready to go when my co-worker returned, what with having to wait for paperwork and a cab and all, but I'm still securing gear when he's back already. The car rental place was all ready for the return and gave him a ride to the airport.

We untarp the airplane together. Everything is in good order, because we've been out shovelling and checking on it. There are a few patches of frozen-on ice where the tarps didn't cover properly, so I use some of the deicing fluid. I have a moment of "oh-no" when I realize that there is some old dilute fluid in the sprayer, but fortunately it hasn't frozen, and I manage to pour it out. Must remember to ... what? Rinse and dry? In the past I've kept deicing equipment in a heated hangar so I haven't encountered the problem of a frozen sprayer. Something to remember if I'm ever doing hot water deicing (works when the temperature is and will stay above freezing) and then stowing the sprayer in the plane. Everything takes more time and space to do in the cold. Anything that has to be folded or coiled actually takes up more space, because they won't bend. And the same goes for your hands. In heavy mitts they don't bend the way you are used to and if you take off the mitts and just work in gloves, pretty soon your fingers still won't bend, at least not without any strength.

My coworker is PIC so he straps into the left seat and I remove the cord from the engine block heater just before he starts. Fires up right away. We exchange delighted thumbs up and I pull the cord from the second engine. The cords are too cold to coil properly, so while he does post start checks I end up stuffing a tangled mess of electrical cords in the back of the airplane. I'm afraid I would break the plastic insulation--or even the wires inside--if I forced them to coil lightly to fit where they usually go.

I secure the rear door and then come up to the right seat. The right oil pressure is still indicating low, but the CHTs and oil temperatures are matched between the two engines. We turn on the heater and take off some of our layers of clothing as we wait for the oil to come up. It's moving--the gauge isn't dead--but really really slowly. After half an hour it still isn't registering enough for take-off. I know that as a student pilot you were taught to shut down an engine if it wasn't registering oil pressure in 30 seconds, maybe a minute if it was really cold, so why have we let it run for this long? We are almost certain we know what is going on in there.

The engine is out on the wing, a couple of metres away from me. It was kept warm enough electrically overnight to start and have oil circulating, which is why we see normal cylinder head and oil temperatures. The oil pressure gauge is on the panel in front of me. The oil pressure gauge works in the absolutely simplest way such a thing could work, and that is by having the actual oil pressure force oil through a line to the gauge. Simple is good. But now think about that line. It comes out of the engine, along the leading edge of the wing, into the fuselage and up to the instrument panel. Much of that path is unheated. We suspect that a little bit of moisture has condensed in that line and frozen solid, blocking the line. The oil coming out of the engine is warm, but cools quickly inside the narrow tube, so is not warm enough to melt the ice. If we thought there was any way that the actual oil pressure in our engine was as low as on that gauge, we wouldn't be running the engine.

Still, we're not going to take off with oil pressure in the red. We text the PRM about our predicament. He asks a bunch of questions, suggesting we do things we've already done, and adds one more. I get out and check the oil filter through the cowling vents. My coworker shuts the engine down so I can do this. I verify that the oil filter looks normal: in place, not swollen or leaking or anything. And the engine, bless its greasy soul, restarts perfectly. There wasn't really much risk of it not, as it was so warm and lubricated, but anytime you shut something down you risk not being able to restart it.

After a few more texts (we text because it's too difficult to talk on the phone in a running airplane) are exchanged the PRM concludes "I don't see that you're going to have any problems."

We text back, "We don't either. We just don't want to go without an ok from the PRM."

Understanding dawns. Now he understands we're not texting for help, we're texting to cover our butts. Butts duly covered, we fly. By the time we're in position on the runway the oil pressure is only a needle width below the green anyway, a situation one of my training manuals even accepts.

We launch and turn on course in good weather. There isn't often a lot of weather in temperatures this low. Almost all the moisture is already frozen. There's no energy to form the weather.

This airplane has two heaters, one that mainly keeps the back warm, and which runs off a heat exchanger with the exhaust gases and one that mainly warms the front, and which burns gasoline. We, obviously are in the front, but we're expecting that with the engines blasting at climb power, we'll start feeling more heat, as we won't be losing our front heat to the back of the plane. But we're feeling colder. We adjust a few knobs and hold our hand in various places before we accept the fact that the combustion heater has shut down. It is designed to run on the ground, but because of reduced airflow it is possible for the plenum to overheat and trip the circuit breaker. A reasonable precaution for a device that is literally on fire inside the fuselage. These heaters are affectionately known as "nose bombs." To prevent cold pilots from resetting the circuit breaker when there is a real problem, the circuit breaker is accessible only from the outside of the airplane.

We both know this. "This two hour flight just got a lot longer." Is that because we turned around, landed back at origin and reset the breaker? No. Is that because we landed halfway at a well-attended airport that was literally under our intended flight path and reset the breaker? No. You know from the post title. It was because two hours seems a lot longer when you are sitting still in subfreezing temperatures. We toughed it out to destination with only the rear heater, definitely not enough to keep us comfortable.

We took turns taking control while the other person reached back for and donned the outer jackets and sweaters set aside earlier. We swapped "what's the coldest you've ever been?" tales. And we laughed at ourselves. The two of us have only had one flight together where we were neither too hot nor too cold: that was the flight with the exploding moon. With passengers, obviously we would have stopped. Without airline tickets booked, perhaps we would have stopped. But whenever you stop you risk not being able to go again. You've seen on this blog how easy it is to be grounded by a stupid thing. And we know how much it costs an hour to run this thing. T land and take off again would add time and money to the cost of the trip. We can take a little discomfort in the name of efficiency. We did have cold weather gear and one heater working. (Notice that the working heater was the simple one: "run outside air past hot exhaust and duct heated air to cabin. Simple is good. We also have simple avionics without those LCD computer screens that seize up at minus five, so we don't need to worry about our radio controls freezing. I guess "liquid" crystal displays require a certain temperature to remain so.

A temperature inversion meant it was even colder on the ground than in flight, and to get there we needed to reduce engine power, drastically reducing the output of our one working heater. Brrrr. But we did it. We reached our destination, found the hangar, and got a ride to the terminal from someone who told us, "you look cold." True that.

see more Funny Graphs

Cheapest Airplane Fix Ever

Last week I blogged about a mystery item handed over to me at crew change and challenged you to tell me why my chief pilot purchased these. If I have opportunity to, I will edit this paragraph to mock or commend you on your most excellent guesses. If not, you know I'm busy this week.

The greatest hint to what they were for was not in the photo, but in the title of the blog post "The Future's So Bright ..." Those well-versed in eighties music will be able to complete the line "... I gotta wear shades" suggesting that the gag glasses had been sunglasses. It was the lenses that were of use, not the frames themselves.

You'll remember me complaining about the undimmable digital rpm display on my new high-tech tachs. From the install up until now it was either endless summer in the north, or working low altitudes in mountainous areas, so I had suffered no personal pain from the overbright avionics. The manual includes installation instructions, which recommend it be configured for a permanent backlight. This at least suggests that it could be otherwise configured, and a reader dug out the specification for a part required, which information I have passed on to maintenance. I'd planned to request it more vigourously once I started into the winter night work.

The night work came for this crew and the light from the tachometers was as obnoxious as I had predicted. They couldn't find a source of sunscreen film in the small town, but there was a dollar store and the lenses from the gag glasses filled the bill. They cut them up to create little shields for the displays. The numbers are clearly visible in daylight yet not retina-piercing at night.

Not So Bright, Avionics Guys

Over dinner the pilots brief me on the maintenance situation. The oil leak on the right engine turned out (after two o-ring changes) to be the governor leaking. Each time they changed the o-ring, the associated sealant held off the the leak for about ten hours, but now it's fixed, using the governor from the airplane that still hasn't gone to Kansas, because it's now waiting for an on-order governor. (Its papers turned up in someone's briefcase). The CHT is still deferred, as they have apparently determined that the replacement gauge was faulty.

The electronic tachs work well, except -- and my co-worker knew me well enough to preface this with "you're not going to like this" -- the numeric readout does not dim in response to the dimmer switch.

He's right. I don't like it. What is the matter with avionics manufacturers these days? I don't think I've had a newly manufactured avionics item installed in an aircraft that has hooked properly and completely into the dimmer rheostat. In this case the circumference LEDs dim, but the display on the face of the tach doesn't. Add that to the fuel transfer light and much of the specialized mission equipment, and the cockpit looks like a fricking pinball machine when I want it to look like London in the Blitz. And not the parts that were on fire. I need my night vision for finding things like conflicting traffic and airports, and I don't appreciate being half blinded because some equipment designer never considered that someone might fly an airplane in the dark and have better things to look at than their blinking lights.

There's a Canadian Tire in town. I'm going out tomorrow morning to get some of that static cling film you put on your car windshield to declare that you love Siamese cats or brake for shoe sales, and I'm going to cut bits the right size to go over the offending pixels at night.

Another Reason Not To Outsource

While looking for the date of the last pitot-static certification, I found the following snag and rectification in an aircraft journey logbook.

Avionics master comes on with battery switch. Found stall warning power connected to avionics bus and stall warning system connected to pilot instrument light power.

I picture some inadequately supervised apprentice somewhere in Temiscaming or Chatanooga playing with the panel wiring like an old fashioned telephone switchboard. That would be why our PRM has decided not to have remote shops supervise the maintenance work.

The engineer comes by to tell me which breaker he will put the new tachs on. It's so completely unrelated that I've forgotten what it was, maybe with the landing light on the CB for the "rear cabin door open" warning light (I just looked it up).

"There are a couple of unused circuit breakers behind my elbow in the cockpit," I mention, assuming that it is neater to have every piece of equipment on its own. He already knows about the spares, but explains that it would take another hour of aircraft disassembly to wire the tachs in there. He has done an electrical balance and there is plenty of room for them to share. A light bulb goes on for me, as I now realize why two airplanes of the same type don't have the same equipment on the same circuit breakers. Anything that isn't original factory equipment is just wired into whichever breaker was convenient to the person who installed it.

eAPIS, or Praise Be to Customs Expediters

I learn that my next task is not to return to the field with this airplane, but to take a different airplane to Kansas to get the autopilot repaired. Apparently every avionics technician in Canada has washed their hands of this terrible autopilot, and there's a superb shop in New Century, Kansas (I'm guessing that town just celebrated its centennial) where they know how to fix the most reluctant autopilots. Airplane number two is currently sitting in a maintenance shop at another airport, where a different engineer and apprentices are wrestling with the installation of the electronic tachometers. The PRM will drive me there and then I will take the airplane to Kansas and get an airline flight home for my time off. Meanwhile the next shift of pilots will come here to take this airplane back to the jobsite.

So the downside is that I won't get to see the look on the customer's face when he sees that his complaint about the carpet has been addressed in full, but I've never landed in Kansas, as far as I remember. I don't even know much about it. I understand that Kansas is very flat, has powerful cyclonic storms, is located somewhere south of Nebraska and north of Arkansas, and they make Cessnas there. And wheat. I had also heard a rumour that circles in Kansas were officially not quite the way they are in the rest of the world, but that seems to have been Indiana, and not made it into law. I prepare to go to Kansas.

You might think I'd start by increasing my geographical precision beyond the Nebraska-to-Arkansas approximation, but getting there will be the easy part. It's getting permission to get there that will hold me up. I ask the boss if he has started the paperwork with our broker for the flight, or if I should contact them myself. He says that as this is not a commercial flight, I shouldn't bother with the broker, just do it as a private flight to get the work done on the airplane. I start by choosing an airport of entry, one close to a straight line from here to Kansas, with 24 hours customs service, and fairly close to the border so that if anything happens requiring a diversion, I'm not forced to land at a US airport with no customs. I call the airport to find out their procedures. This shouldn't be necessary, but experience has taught me that things are not done the same way at every station and the best way to avoid delays or disapproval is to respectfully find out exactly how they want it done. I reach an amazingly friendly and helpful customs agent who e-mails me the form I need and a link to the appropriate website along with instructions for exactly where to go and what to do at his airport.

As well as filing the usual flight plan and customs arrival intentions, I now have to complete eAPIS paperwork. Except, as the e implies, it's not paper, but electronic. This is where I find out about the work my customs expediter has been doing on my behalf. Mind boggling. Once I see how much work it will be I go to bed, planning to do it in the morning. The airplane won't be ready to go until midday.