Cessnas and Lying About the ATIS

Yesterday I was inbound to an airport overseen by a Flight Services Specialist. I don't know if other countries have this. There are no controllers, but there is highly trained person in the tower, dispensing altimeter settings, and traffic information, and generally doing everything a tower controller does except issue clearances and instructions. They make recommendations that you would be wise to follow, but if the FSS says, for example, that winds are 150 at fifteen gusting twenty-five, and the preferred runway is 15, the pilot is totally free to declare that she is landing on 33.

The FSS told me, when I was fifteen miles out or so, that there were two Cessnas in the circuit. One of them called final as I neared the field. I washed him do his touch and go, and kept him in sight, so that as I crossed over midfield I was able to say, "I have the red 172 in sight."

"They're both red," the specialist said somewhat acridly. "The other one is at the hold short line." So firstly he knew which one I had in sight, even if the identifying characteristic I chose wasn't distinguishing, and secondly, how is an aircraft at the hold short line--on the ground--considered to be "in the circuit"? It's okay. I'm an incurable smartass, too. I join downwind, ahead of the airborne red Cessna, and land. I refuel and taxi out again. A different specialist is on the radio. She tells me that there are "two Cessna 172" in the circuit. I find it curious that she considers C172 to be an inherent plural. I imagine this being something she feels strongly about, and that she argues for her position at sufficient length that others shrug and humour her sometimes. I mentally run through different aircraft types and try to think of any that I would not make explicitly plural. I do not ask her if either or both the C172s are red, and I depart straight out without seeing either.

I'm on my way to an airport with an actual control tower. I tune the ATIS and note that it is information Hotel. I also note that it's four minutes after the hour, and the ATIS is over an hour old. I know that this particular airport labels their ATIS on the hour, but often doesn't change it until a few minutes past. I'm still twenty minutes out of the destination, so I'll have to pick up the new ATIS before I check in. A few minutes later I hear WestJet checking in on frequency, "with India." I retune the ATIS and listen. It's identical to Hotel, same winds, same altimeter, same multiple cloud layers, same tedious NOTAM about the new rule about STARs being changed back to the way it was, "inform ATC on initial contact that you have information Hotel." What? "This is airport information India ..."

It's not that uncommon to be on frequency right as the ATIS changes letter. But it takes defiance of the laws of spacetime for Westjet to pick up India while I'm still hearing Hotel. Unless the ATIS is available by ACARS. Can you get ATIS by datalink? I don't know. It's also possible that one pilot wrote down the ATIS and the other one read the H sideways and got I, or that they heard Hotel far back, saw it was coming up on the hour, and knew they'd have to pick up India, and then forgot they hadn't. Or that they just flubbed the letter. Or they lied. I think they lied. They didn't want to listen through that tedious NOTAM that every Canadian airport with a STAR has up right now. I don't blame them. ATC would have said on frequency if the new ATIS involved a runway change, a significant change in weather conditions, or the like.

Jean-Paul Vinay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Clearance Cancelled Time is Cancelled

I overheard this post title on switching to a frequency. No one has ever said that to me and I'm not certain which of two possible but contradictory meanings it might have. If I received it, I would ask a clarifying question, but the pilot who received it did not.

Before departing on an IFR flight, a pilot first files a flight plan, specifying for the air traffic control system exactly which route she intends to follow, with what timing. The flight plan may be filed online, by phone, or sometimes by radio. I usually file mine by phone, because I can do that while using my eyes and the non-phone-holding hand for other things, and can say what I'm doing in words rather than having to code it for the online form. I would only file by radio if I discovered while airborne a need to convert to an IFR flight, and I was out of cell tower range so I couldn't use my awesome Bluetooth headset-iPhone combo. (I didn't want Bluetooth at the time I bought the headset, but I needed a new headset RIGHT AWAY and that was all they had in stock. If you ever have reasons to talk to someone on the phone with your engine(s) running, get the Bluetooth. The days of holding the phone against your ear and yelling, "I can't hear you: I'm in the plane" are over).

The IFR flight plan is supposed to be filed minimum thirty minutes before departure, but the controllers are generally so awesome that the plan is coded and available in the system in minutes. When my company says, "Can we go to Fort Dead Royalty now?" and the flight requires an IFR clearance, I say "sure," file the flight plan for thirty minutes hence, and then board, start, run up and call for clearance. My actual take off time will usually be fifteen to twenty minutes after filing, and I'm calling for clearance as few as five minutes after filing, but it's almost always ready as soon as I need it.

The clearance I get may be identical to the one I filed, or it may be altered to comply with local procedures I didn't know about, specific runways that are active, or I may be cleared not to my destination airport but to an intermediate point, requireing me to get a new clearance before I leave that point. (Yes, I would have to stop and hold, flying in a little oval, if I hadn't received the clearance by then, but it's almost always given to me before I need it). If the airport I will be departing is a controlled airport, then when I am ready to take off, the tower controller will talk on the phone to the IFR departure/en route controllers and get an IFR release, allowing them to clear me for take off. But if the airport is uncontrolled: unstaffed or staffed only by a Flight Service Specialist, the initial IFR clearance will include a clearance cancelled time. The controller giving me the clearance is going to ensure there is a space in the system for me, but if I'm not airborne by the clearance cancelled time, I'm not allowed to go, because my space will have passed by. My departure clearance will have been cancelled. Sometimes there is also a clearance valid time, meaning that I can depart any time between the clearance valid and clearance cancelled time.

So if I were given a clearance cancelled time, and then my clearance cancelled time were cancelled, my first guess is that that means the traffic that was going to be a problem after the clearance cancelled time is no longer considered to be interfering with me--perhaps it has changed course or altitude--and that I can delay as long as I like before take off. My second guess is that "your clearance cancelled time is cancelled" is synonymous with "your clearance is cancelled." I'm ninety-five per cent sure that the first meaning is correct, but because there is a chance that I'm wrong, I'd ask. Beats getting run over by a Boeing 737.

We Interrupt This Sequence

I'm going to suspend the trip I've been describing right there to describe--and solicit your help with--the process of converting a Canadian ATPL to an FAA one. I have an opportunity for an interesting short term job, and potentially others in the longer term, if I have an FAA licence. Don't worry, Americans, I'm not stealing your jobs, the job is not in the USA and is not for an American company. It's for a company based in country A that is operating an airplane in country B and that airplane just happens to be N-registered, that is, it's registered in the US. The law says that the pilot's licence has to match the airplane registration. (In many cases you have a period of time, typically six months to a year, to make the transition from in internationally respected licence such as a Canadian one to the local licence, but not for the US).

The process involves getting an FAA medical certificate, passing a written exam, and putting them together with a bit of paperwork and a processing fee. I've already had the FAA physical, and am just waiting for their approval. I'm studying for the exam so I can have that written as soon as possible. I haven't yet figured out if I need to make an appointment to write it or can just show up at a testing centre. Er, I guess that's a testing "center."

My first impression as I look at the material to be studied is that there's a disconnect between what I have and what I'm converting to. There's an assumption that someone writing an ATPL level exam has mastered the material of the private pilot level, but I have to figure that out too. The material is totally unrelated to what I'll be doing, so there isn't a lot of point in thoroughly learning and understanding it. In the US all test bank questions are available in advance, so when you're in this situation you can just learn the correct answers with out really know why. I've never taken a test this way before, but when in Rome Washington, D.C. Things like I've learned that "part 91" means general aviation, "part 135" is on-demand air carriers and "part 121" is scheduled air carriers. But the questions mention "domestic carriers" and "flag carriers" and "supplemental air carriers." They must be defined somewhere. My local pilot shop has run out of the FAR/AIM because the new one is on order, so I've ordered one directly from the US.

I have to figure out how aircraft approach categories (A B C D) work in the US. There's something in the questions that implies that it's not just based on approach speed as in Canada. I have to figure out how the NOTAM system works. Apparently you get different sorts of NOTAMs with different letters from different sources.

Up until now I've almost deliberately not learned about US regulations that don't affect Canadian pilots (like needing one flight attendant for the first 10 passengers (in aircraft with a payload capacity of 7500 lbs and up) of for the first 20 passengers when the aircraft payload is under 7500. With 50 to 100 passengers you need two flight attendants, and one more for every fifty passengers or part thereof after that. And it's based on seating capacity, not boarded passengers, implying that you need three flight attendants for a B737-600 with four people in the back. Or something. Maybe I can store this in a part of my brain that's reusable.

South Sudan Embarks on Nationhood

I only heard about the new country of South Sudan on July 9th, the day it declared independence and haven't had time to write about them until now. The United Nations should be recognizing them as an official world country in the next couple of days. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight million people

In some places, including on the government website the name of the country is written Southern Sudan, but the official seal styles it as the Republic of South Sudan. I think the Southern Sudan references are from material describing the area before independence. They have a flag, a national animal (the secretary bird), a coat of arms, a national anthem (link plays music), a capital city (Juba) and a president. They're still using the currency and postage stamps of their northern neighbour, so I think getting mail through to South Sudan is going to be a bit like communicating with a friend when you only have the mailing address of her ex. And they've fought for twenty years over the divorce.

They say that a what a country really needs to be official is a sports team, a beer and an airline. It looks like South Sudan is getting right on that. They already have a football team, and it's even played a match already. They lost 3-1 to Kenya but it's not an offical result as they are still waiting on FIFA membership. I thought that a beer would be a no-brainer but they have a good excuse for not having one quite yet. The construction of their new brewery is a big deal because under the former Muslim regime, alcoholic beverages were outlawed. And they even have the beginnings of an airline , complete with a webpage that doesn't actually link to a booking database, just a form. The date of the maiden flight has not yet been announced, but Juba does have an airport with a paved runway (13-31), which was apparently closed on Independence Day but airlines didn't receive a NOTAM, possibly because of that communications via Khartoum thing. The Republic of South Sudan will have to join ICAO, at which point I suspect it will go straight on the list of countries in which one should avoid boarding an airplane at all costs. They're a very poor state with terribly low education and healthcare.

I met a pilot/AME recently who says he started the war in the Sudan. He was there years ago, when the Sudan had nothing of value to the rest of the world, and nothing to fight over internally but camels and goats. He was there surveying for oil. He also made a positive contribution to the national infrastructure because they discovered that he could fix things. He would call for taxi clearance at the airport and then have the clearance rescinded because the airport firetruck wasn't working. They possibly were looking for a bribe the first time, but he solved the problem by restoring the firetruck to working order, and after that there was always something that needed fixing.

I hope South Sudan gets what needs fixing fixed faster than it gets itself into new conflicts and problems. I don't suppose there's anyone reading this blog from there. Few in that country can read let alone have access to communication technology, but if you are, know that I wish your new country well. South Sudan has apparently applied for the internet country code .ss but a regime that collapsed sixty years ago has such a lock on those letters in some people's minds that it may be denied.

P.S. Beda Otwari, the Director of Administration and Human Resources for Southern Sudan Airlines is a Canadian.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Morning comes early. I have no recollection of what that hotel room looked like. I was in it an conscious for maybe eight minutes total. I drag my bag down the corridor to the breakfast room with two minutes to spare before the agreed-upon departure time. The cab is already here. I shove a couple of apples and a bagel in my flight bag along with whatever I ordered last night to go, some kind of wrap, I think, and get in the cab.

I check oil and move the airplane from parking back to the pumps and do the run up there, while waiting for the fueller to arrive. He does, and I then finish my preflight inspection and set up charts for the trip and file a flight plan while it's being fuelled. Full all around and caps checked, we take off only a little behind schedule. The wind is calm, so I take off from the apron end of the runway, straight off and then a turn to the northeast as I climb enroute.

I bid adieu to the circuit traffic at Salmon Arm on the ATF and then make a general call on 126.7 to let folks know where I am. The radio doesn't sound quite right. I'm not hearing myself in my own headset the way I should be. The camera operator says he can't hear me. Oh oh. I check the plugs on my headset jack. They're fine. Just my luck to get a headset with a problem. I grab a spare headset. Oh my God it's been a long time since I wore a cheap headset. It's uncomfortable from the earseals, to the weight, to the way it fits on my head, to the amount of noise it lets in. How do people stand these things? I guess I've become a headset snob. From that point of view it's fortunate that the headset swap doesn't fix the problem, because I couldn't work in one anymore, and I'm glad my new headset isn't defective. So is the jack defective? Maybe there's nothing wrong with my old headset. I put my own headset back on and try plugging it in the jack for the other side, trying that intercom jack. No joy. The operator tries the same headset and jack swap in the back.

I can hear the operator, but he can't hear me at all. I'm literally writing notes on my little notepad, then tearing off the sheets and tossing them in the back. He suggests that the intercom may be set incorrectly. It has an electronic control panel that cycles between PILOT, CREW and ALL. I assume that those put the left seat, both front seats or all seats into the intercom circuit, but we test all positions anyway. I'm pretty much in despair about fixing it until I realize that there is a master volume knob for the whole stack and it is in two parts, concentric rings. The inner ring is set to a reasonable volume, but the outer ring, intercom volume, is somehow turned right down. I dial it up and all is well. I still have no idea how it got turned down in the first place. I haven't adjusted anything in that vicinity. I must have hit it with something. How can I have flown so many airplanes and take so long to sort that out. At least I'm in the middle of the mountains in the early morning and not in terminal airspace in a busy time.

We continue over the mountains then I start descent towards a small airport where I have been asked to land. The operator is concerned about some aspect of the camera software, so asks me not to land yet while he tests the system. I fly big circuits overflying the runway at circuit altitude while he sorts it out. It gives me a chance to verify the winds. There's no other traffic around, so my presence isn't interfering with anyone. Each time around it's "just a few minutes more" but eventually I'm given the okay to land. Because of the elevation, landing appears very fast, but it's at a normal airspeed.

We taxi in, looking for the fuel pump, which turns out to be about ten metres across gravel from a narrow taxiway, partially blocked by a tied-down Cessna. I inch by, not wanting to snag my wingtip on the tiedown, nor to put my spinning propeller over the gravel to the side of the taxiway. I go well past the parked airplane then over to the far side of the taxiway to turn around and pull up behind it, making the closest approach to the pump we can without blocking myself in behind the Cessna.

The hose isn't quite long enough to reach the furthest tank, so we ground handle the airplane a little to wiggle closer until it is. The pump isn't clearly labelled as avgas, and it's not a standard cardlock pump, so we call the telephone number in the CFS for information on fuel purchase. They confirm the fuel type, take the company name, aircraft ident and credit card information and then tell us the codes to turn on the pump. I also call Edmonton Centre to notify them of the photo blocks we will be flying in. Meanwhile the airplane and camera have become covered in fine yellow pollen. There are no obvious flowers around, it's a bit early for flowers this far north. I speculate that it's tree pollen and then remind myself that trees have cones not pollen. They're all conifers around here that I can see. I add some oil, too, and clean the windshield, then we start up and roll out to take pictures. A pretty quick turn: thirty-one minutes from engine off to restart.

We're working at about 8,000', I think, and it's cold outside, but we don't dare turn on the heater, lest the backfiring soil the camera lens, or even worse cause a fire in the aircraft. We just wear our parkas and tough it out. The outside air temperature is -7C but it's warmer than that in the airplane, with our two bodies and the multiple cameras and the thirteen computers computers that control them all generating heat. Still the low temperatures can't be good for all the electrical equipment. They aren't like us humans who have adapted to living at altitudes higher and temperatures lower than this. I'm not personally so adapted, so I am breathing supplemental oxygen and wearing leather gloves and a stretchy toque I pulled out of my flight bag. I have to admit to not being too disappointed when clouds prevent us from flying out the complete mission. We made a big dent in it, though. We land at a larger airport and then jump out and bask in the warmth of the sun while the airplane is fuelled.

I also manage to make contact with the examiner, who says that she needs seven days notice to do a PPC test, because Transport Canada needs opportunity to demand to do the ride themselves. I know that company has been working on this for at least that long, so I get the name of the person at Transport who can waive the seven day notice, and then toss the ball back into my boss' court. The examiner says that if that is worked out, tomorrow around 2 p.m. will be fine, and she gives me, when I request it, the route to plan for the flight test.

Fuelling complete, I go and park. The operator climbs underneath to check the camera and comes out raving about a fuel leak. He says there's fuel all over the belly. The fuelling was competent, no overflow, and even fuel running aft off the flaps should have reached the camera. The operator says it's staining the camera red. Wait, red?.

"The fuel we use is blue." I say. "Red is hydraulic fluid." I climb underneath to see.

"Yeah, I know," he says. "I thought something might make it look red."

I don't really see anything. There's the soot stain from the heater outlet, more of that yellow pollen, but nothing covering the belly. A thin oily stripe does run from the edge of a belly panel towards the camera array. It's consistent with dirty hydraulic fluid. He's cleaned the camera lens already. I don't know what that panel conceals. I don't see why a hydraulic line would be running that far aft, but perhaps a hydraulic leak further forward has pooled inside the fuselage then run out of this access panel. I grab a screwdriver and start loosening the panel. I rely on hydraulics to get the landing gear up and down, so regardless of what it does to the camera, I want to know what's going on here. The operator takes a turn removing screws. It's actually pretty tiring lying on your back twisting your arms overhead. We remove enough screws to peel back the panel and see what's inside. Nothing. There is no pooled fluid, no leaking line, no stains. It seems to be a coincidence that the dirty stripe starts just aft of this panel. Perhaps it was clean enough or enough in the airstream that the fluid was carried over it without staining, then it picked up some grime at the aft edge of the panel.

There are a few drops of red hydraulic fluid visible in the nosewheel hydraulic breather line. It's probably just a few millilitres, normal seepage, maybe from the altitude changes, the purpose of having a breather line in the first place. Text messages and photos go between us and the maintenance unit and they don't think it's anything serious. Except that for the mission of this aircraft is is serious. If it happened on gear retraction after takeoff, it has ruined our day's work, and it means the loss of more than a day, because the weather may not be right for this work tomorrow. We hope it happened on extension before landing.

I ask if he can check the photos now, but the resolution is so great that on the screen in the airplane they may look fine when they are really ruined. We'll have to see later. We haul our gear to the terminal then after more discussion I'm assigned to take off and cycle the gear several times to see if it happens again.

As I strap into the pilot seat I grin to myself. "Hey, first solo." I haven't flown this airplane by myself before. I taxi out "for a local test flight" and cycle the gear up and down, up and down, making sure it's locked in each position before restarting the cycle. I give myself a couple of simulated engine failures while I'm at it, to practice the procedure: gear down, approach power, engine failure, maintain direction, power to hold on the other engine, gear up, simulate feather, emergency checklist complete, give myself the engine back, start over. Instead of doing touch-and-goes I just overfly the runway. And then I land and taxi in. There's a little bit of fluid, but not much. He sends me up to do the same thing again. Cycle, cycle, cycle, cycle, up, down, up, down, up, down, make sure it's down, land. Now there is no seepage. So maybe we're good. We go shopping for airplane cleaning supplies, and call it a day.

I now have about forty minutes to prepare for tomorrow's flight test and get to bed in order to have the required rest for tomorrow's report time. Forty minutes is probably more time than I pend on preflight paperwork for a normal flight, but for a normal flight I use the standard, precalculated weight and balance, use block fuel, round times roughly and only calculate takeoff and climb performance if it's an issue because of high temperatures or marginal runways. And then I generally round up to the next highest weight, temperature and altitude that has its own line, and just verify that it doesn't ask for more runway or lower obstacles than I have. For a flight test, I want the examiner to walk in and see about six pieces of paper with neat, meticulous calculations for each phase of flight. Yeah, that's not happening, considering it takes me at least fifteen minutes to figure out how to rearrange everything on board to accommodate an examiner in the front seat and stay within the weight and balance envelope. This airplane is nose heavy, and not usually flown with no one in the back. My next problem is that I can't find the airport I was told to plan to. The examiner mentioned that the approach was a VFR-only training approach and that she would give me the approach plate, but I need to at least plan fuel to get there. I find an airport with a similar name in the approximate area, and plan to that, eventually saying "screw it, I use block fuel and average winds every day, I'm not losing sleep to do calculations per segment for this artificial situation." I know, I know, a flight test is an artificial situation, but my need for sleep is real. It's already too late for me to get the required eight hours. Maybe I'll have some time to do more paperwork in the morning.

I suddenly remember as I'm drifting off to sleep that a single pilot PPC includes demonstration of competence with the autopilot. I've not mastered it, though. I've never had a chance to practice intercepting and descending on an ILS with this one, because the only airport I've been to that has one has controllers who prefer to vector me all over the place for a close-in base below the glideslope, or a visual diagonal final. I've done a PPC before where the autopilot went below the glideslope and I simply took control and finished it by hand, with no censure from the examiner. If I or the autopilot don't set this up correctly, I'll do the same. There are a few more "better figure out how to do that" moments before I drift off to sleep. It's really embarrassing but there has simply not been opportunity for a proper practice flight.

You guys have made a few guesses as to the nature of the Aviation-Themed Towel of Questionable Taste, which will be the booby prize in the sunglasses contest. No one has come close to guessing how bad it is. It has four different aspects of badness to it. Perhaps I should rename it, the Aviation-Themed Towel of Definitely Poor Taste. The only questions about it is why did someone send it to me, and why is it suddenly so popular?

A1 Priority

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover Me

Air Canada has an HR management company called Taleo looking after job applications these days. The site only accepts updated resumes for positions they are hiring for, and as everyone in Canadian aviation probably knows, they have just opened the Pilot job for applications. I was on the road for a few days, but today have opportunity to re-apply. I put it number one on the to-do list and bailed out of bed. How hard can this be? I have to re-total my logbook, combine the various columns in the way that Air Canada asks about, and click though a few webpages. Should be done in time for breakfast, eh?

The adding up and entering in isn't too bad. It's the uploading. I hate my résumé. It's a depressing catalogue of jobs that I accepted or left at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons. It represents people and places I miss, opportunities lost, and a sad lack of overall career progress. Is this why I hate filling out job applications? I update the numbers on my resume, make sure no one has edited it to change my job duties to dirty words, save and upload it. Now the cover letter.

The first part is okay. Name. Address. Date. I got that far without messing up, I think. And just to demonstrate that I have a basic grasp of business etiquette, I know that I should not commemorate Talk Like A Pirate Day in a job application letter. I must write terrible cover letters. I've never got a job through a formal job application. Every job I get is through referrals or personal visits. I can bang off five blog entries in an undisturbed afternoon, but I can't lay out my skills and aptitudes in a simple letter. Let me try again.

Dear Nice Air Canada People:

I am a good pilot. I always check to make sure there is enough gas in my aeroplane before I take off, can fly in really straight lines, follow all the rules, and never ever get into fist fights with my coworkers or customers. I have a nice haircut (or at least I will when I go to work) and know how to make my shoes shiny.

Please hire me to help fly your aeroplanes. I will do a good job and even stop blogging about aviation if you wanted me to.

Love and kisses,

Aviatrix

Nailed, it, eh?

I honestly don't know why this is so hard for me. I put my heart into applying for jobs, because I don't like to do anything halfway, and I hate being rejected without even being seen. Is it so hard to write because I am trying to psych myself up that this time will be different? I don't find other impossible goals so hard to start. I'm still running and although I don't think I'll make my long term speed targets, I enjoy running and second by second I'm inching closer to those distant goals. Of course it's impossible for me to see the difference between being in the pile of instant rejects and the pile that almost got called for an interview.

While I'm agonizing over what to write procrastinating by doing other things, I read an e-mail from someone who hopes one day to be a pilot, describing a co-worker who used to be an airline pilot. The ex-pilot said that the airliners are all under the company's control, and all the time asking:

 Why are you 2 knots slower?
 Why are you 2 degrees of course?
 What happened on this landing?
 Why did you take the wrong exit?

I ask myself questions like that all the time. I want to be super efficient and accurate. But like someone who stands there and tells you what to do just as you're about to do it, someone who asks why you do everything just as you're thinking about it yourself, doesn't sound fun. I want to believe that I hate applying for jobs because mine is so good that I don't want another job, but I suspect that it's more a case that I hate doing things badly, and I know that I'm bad at this game.

So here's me taking advantage of the resources at my disposal. If you can write a better cover letter than the one above, and can handle a bit of negativity and whining, I wouldn't mind some help.

Delayed Reporting Time

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

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

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

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

Part 700.18 of the Canadian Air Regulations says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Marge

The next day we load the airplane with our personal gear, cursing as usual the paucity of tiedown points in this thing. Once everything is packed and secured, I call the customs broker to tell him we really are going today. He's used to our 'hurry up and wait' schedules, but now the US won't let us postpone arrival permission from day to day, so he can't file the paperwork and let us catch up to it anymore. Everything has to be done the same day. Good thing I called, because a pilot switch means he doesn't have all the current details on my coworker. I grab his passport out of his bag and provide the broker with the relevant details, and with an estimated time and place for our penetration of US airspace en route. I have to call him again from Whitehorse to get a fax sent to the FBO.

It's very weird for me to be going north across the border to the US. I'm used to going north out of the usual infrastructure of Canadian life. And I'm used to going south across the US border. I'm afraid I'm going to forget some basic rule of going to the US, just because I'm going the wrong way. To me the US being "south of the border" is as cliched as Mexico is in the US. I just received an Aeroplan e-mail that starts "Want to take flight south of the border? Treat yourself to a 10% discount with Aeroplan." It's valid for any flight to the U.S. Imagine if Mexico had a part that was right in the middle of Kansas and that's how disorienting this is.

We take off and fly north, or actually mostly west. It's almost due west by the compass, because the magnetic variation is 21 degrees here. The weather is spectacular in BC and the Yukon. I follow on paper maps to identify the mountains and lakes. We're coming up on Whitehorse, but we're almost parallel to the BC-Yukon border, converging very slowly. We'll cross it just shortly before reaching Whitehorse.

I have a memory of there being something irregular about radio procedures in Whitehorse, but I search the CFS and can't find anything odd. I tune the tower a long way out to get situational awareness coming in. A pilot on frequency position reports "coming up on Lake Leberge" and I freak out. No, not because he's at our position and altitude, but because he's on the marge of Lake Lebarge. My innocent crewmate is 'treated' to a sudden Robert Service recitation.

There are strange things done in the Midnight Sun
By the men who moil for gold.
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your bllod run cold.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

I would have gone on, but mercifully I didn't know any more by heart. I resolved to rectify that at my earliest convenience, but I think that's after my other resolutions about running, simming and building a solar-powered hovercraft, so don't ask me about it soon.

Except for poetic outbursts, descent into Whitehorse is routine. The field is easy to spot and we're sequenced number four for landing, behind a Convair, then resequenced number four again after the first guy lands, because a faster aircraft turned up to fill in one of the gaps. Pretty adept work for what I believe is a non-radar tower. As we exit the runway, on a cross runway, tower asks us where we're going on the field. I say something like "Looking for avgas" or "to refuel" and we're given taxi instructions up a hill. Just when you think you're at a modern airport. At the top of the hill is a little charter operation, or maybe a repair shop, but nothing that looks like a fuel pump. We wave off the marshaller, do a very awkward one-eighty and call back ATC for clarification. They confirm that there is no fuel up here. Whatever I said coming off the runway sounded like the name of the company based up that hill. we taxi back down the hill and across the cross runway, and park where we should have gone in the first place.

We go into the FBO and ask about fuel. It will be about forty-five minutes, because the fuel truck, just went up the hill to fuel a charter fleet. We pick a safe estimated time of departure and divvy up duties: I'll take care of customs and fuel while he does weather and files a flight plan. I also get their fax number and permission to receive a fax. He calls 1-866-WX-BRIEF while I call the customs broker and fill out a fuel order form.

The fax is several pages of all the dirt US customs wants to know about us. I page through it to make sure everything has printed properly and there aren't any glaring inaccuracies. They spelled our names right, anyway. The fueller arrives ahead of schedule and I direct him which tanks to fill, then sign his paperwork.

There are a lot of other aircraft around, some military, I didn't notice whose, and a small fleet of firefighting aircraft from Saskatchewan. They've been working in Alaska, helping to fight forest fires. I didn't know we gave international aid to the Americans. I wonder if the Americans chartered the Canadian firefighting capability, or if there's simply an international agreement and we come to each other's aid in the burning forests. Probably the former. I'm such a communist to think of the latter.

The other pilot, he's the PIC on the customs paperwork, comes back with an 'everything old is new again' discovery. He says that when he called Flight Services they said, "Why don't you come on over?" and they gave him a face-to-face briefing. He's exhilarating in the experience of being right there with a briefer who could point at things on weather charts and at how much easier it was to get a complete picture of the weather. He's too young to remember that that was the way things used to be everywhere. They didn't have GFAs back then, and I don't think the satellite imagery was as good, but it is a good feeling to have an in-person weather briefing. Especially when it was that same person that you were talking to on the radio as you taxied out for departure. The weather is low on the south route, so we'll have to follow the Alaska highway and then cut south down the valley to Anchorage. That makes the trip a bit longer, but within our contingency planning. Also the Alaska-Canada border at Beaver Creek doesn't count as ADIZ, so we don't need to worry about being super accurate with the crossing time.

I call US Customs in Anchorage with our recalculated ETA, and to ensure that they received their share of the paperwork. You'd think this could all be more automated or less labour intensive, but when your dealing with international travel nothing is predicable enough not to worry about. In this case the Americans are ready for our arrival.

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Also: I'm looking for someone who has easy access to CYPK who could do a fun favour for me in the next few days. Please e-mail me if you think you could.

Going Nowhere

There's low cloud in the morning, then rain, then snow. And of course that's the point at which the client needs me to run the airplane for another computer upgrade. We go out to the airplane. The engines were run for about ten hours yesterday (yes, my co-worker worked his tail off), so after I pull off the engine tents I check the oil. And indeed it's down a quart each side. I grab a couple of bottles and a funnel out of the nose compartment. The wind is making it really cold out here. And it's ironic that two days ago in 25 degree weather I was running less viscous 15W50 oil, but now that it's minus five or so, before the wind chill, I'm trying to get W100 to run out of the little bottle into the crankcase. As I hold the bottle and wish the oil would hurry up, the wind is driving snow into my face.

After I've added a litre to each engine and removed the engine plugs, there is snow and ice caked on my toque and gloves. I pull them off after I climb on board to start up. I can't run the combustion heater on the ground for extended periods, so I'm running an electric heater plugged into the aircraft AC. It's a perfectly normal socket, like the ones in your wall if you're in the US or Canada, but it only works when the airplane is on the ground plugged into an extension cord. It is, but after forty-five minutes or so (yeah, this upgrade isn't going well) that plug comes out and it starts to cool off in here. Plus after another half hour goes by (did I mention that the upgrade is not going well) I run into another problem: I'm running out of fuel.

My co-worker landed last night with minimum legal fuel, and then ran the aircraft on the ground for an hour, and now I've run it for more than another hour. Fuel consumption is less on the ground than at cruise, but it's not none. And I have to run it higher than idle to meet the power needs. They aren't finished yet, but I have to shut down and refuel. There's another reason why I want to refuel sooner rather than later, and that's that the fuel tanks are due to be refuelled today, and we won't be able to buy fuel during that transfer. The FBO manager is here, so he fuels. I don't really have to, but I stand out in the snow with him as a gesture of solidarity. I also want to be here to see how much goes in each tank. I confirm that they were all almost dry after running that long.

He pushes the plane back into its space and I reconnect the heater for another marathon session of wrestling with the computer. There's a bad smell from the heater, though, so we disconnect it. While we're doing this, a tanker truck arrives to refill the avgas tank. We got ours just in time. It finishes and moves on to the Jet A tank and finally I'm cleared to shut down.

As we're on our way back through the FBO to the parking, the tanker truck driver is billing the FBO. I ask how much fuel went into the avgas tank and it's about a week's worth for us. The manager knows this, so it isn't very difficult to get free hangarage for a couple of days. That saves us from having to worry about the computers freezing.