Automatic Rough Running

I'm re-reading Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. It's available here for free. I know it has been translated into English, but perhaps the copyright hasn't expired on the translations yet, because I didn't find it online in translation. It's one of those novel like Fate is the Hunter that pilots like to read because the author identifies situations and feelings we didn't even know were there to express. Non-pilots can read them and get a glimpse what a pilot thinks and feels. Both are about what now is history, so they allow me to look into the past and imagine life without SIGMETs, without reliable weather forecasting or reporting at all.

The passage that made me want to share was this. It's a conversation between a pilot and a manager, about the pilot's experience when his instrument lights failed. He has already admitted to being afraid.

Je me sentais au fond d'un grand trou dont il était difficile de remonter. Alors mon moteur s'est mis à vibrer...

— Non.
— Non ?
— Non. Nous l'avons examiné depuis. Il est parfait. Mais on croit toujours qu'un moteur vibre quand on a peur.

My translation: (if someone has a copy in English, a professional translation is probably better).

"I felt like I was at the bottom of a big hole that was difficult to get out of. Then my engine started vibrating..."

"No."

"No?"

"No. We examined it afterwards. It was perfect. But one always believes that an engine is vibrating when one is afraid."

It's so true. The name in English for the phenomenon is "automatic rough". You get automatic rough running as you get overhead a large body of water, impenetrable mountains, or simply go further from your home airport than you've ever been.

Finding Things in the Dark

I'm on another VFR night flight, but there's no fog this time and lots of bright lights around for most of the flight. I'm on the destination arrival frequency for a while before I descend to land. I hear there's a last minute rush of traffic at twenty to midnight, and then peace on the frequency. There's probably a curfew for jets here. I know I'm allowed to land here twenty-four hours a day.

Eventually approach transfers me to tower. The final approach here will be over darkness, no houses or roads, so I'm briefing myself on precautions against black hole effect, but that doesn't turn out to be my problem. While I'm on right downwind, tower asks me to keep my base in close. That means I won't have as long a final to get set up, but I can descend more rapidly than usual to meet ATC needs, so I turn base at a distance out that is safe for me and still keeping it in close. As I drop the right wing into the turn to base leg I lose sight of the runway lights. There's cloud between me and the runway. I try to get my bearings by looking further around, spotting clues beyond the perimeter of the airport to help me align, but I really need to see this runway in order to descend for it, and to turn final in the right place. I can see the constellation Orion above me out the left, as clearly as if it were outlined with little arrows in a planetarium, but the constellation defined by two parallel lines of lights about a mile away eludes me.

I confess to tower about not having the runway in sight anymore and am given vectors, plus clearance to land long. The vector brings me out where I can see the runway lights and I plummet onto the welcoming strip of three parallel bright lines. My approach briefing to myself didn't include the fact that this runway has centreline lighting, not that I would have found it any more easily had I been looking for three parallel lines instead of two. Someone is cleared into position behind me as I roll out, my nosewheel juddering slightly as it rolls over the inset centreline lights. They're ever so slightly off centre, but so am I. I think the other crew silent apologies for their delay, and they probably laugh at the ditzy aviatrix who can't find a runway on a fine night. I probably snuck behind the only cloud in the sky.

Simple Maintenance Ferry

I wake up to fog and low cloud, the same thing that has delayed departure for the last few days. I'll call the client about that after I get ready. Of course the phone rings while I'm in the shower. I answer it wet, discuss the weather, then finish my shower. The decision has been made: no mission this morning, so I'll fly south for maintenance. There are a few more hours on the airplane than needed to get to the maintenance facility, but not enough to be worth waiting around for. I pack up my gear, stashing some of it in my co-worker's room, eat breakfast, and then dally. The visibility improves, but we continue with low cloud and misery. Thunderstorms are forecast later, but there's a respite in the middle of the day that should get me there.

I spend all day refreshing the weather reports and forecasts. I need 2000', considering terrain. (The HSI has been removed now and sent somewhere for evaluation, so we're still not IFR). The weather is giving me mostly 1500' broken. There are some breaks here, but the general forecast is still low overcast with drizzle. I don't want to get stuck out there in a valley I can't escape. The maintenance crew is there waiting, but I'm not going if it's not safe. It's just maintenance.

The weather is good at destination, but still marginal for departure here, with mostly uninhabited rough terrain in the middle. There's an unusual patch on the graphical area forecast, a little round spot only a hundred kilometres or so in diameter in which it is forecast to be "30BKN50 P6SM PTCHY 1-4SM BR CIGS XNTSV CIGS 4-10 AGL. CIGS AND VIS BECMG LCL BY 20Z." The GFA doesn't usually forecast phenomena that limited, and the terrain doesn't suggest a reason for the little spot of doom. Weird. Satellite views are unrevealing, because there are higher clouds.

The weather here still hasn't improved as originally forecast. Instead the periods of poor weather have kind of merged in the new forecast. So it's still calling for improvement at 20Z, as FM252000 01006KT P6SM SCT025 BKN050 which would be great: scattered 2500' good to go, except that those groups are immediately followed by TEMPO 2520/2606 P6SM -SHRA BKN020 PROB30 2521/2604 VRB15G25KT 5SM TSRA BR BKN020CB FM260600 34006KT P6SM SCT007 OVC015 TEMPO 2606/2607 3SM BR OVC007 , warning that for the same time period, I can expect on-again off-again 2000' in rain--still acceptable for the flight--with a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms. Note that this forecast is only for the airport, there's a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms at the airport, but close to a hundred percent chance that there will be thunderstorms somewhere along the route. I have to integrate the station forecasts with the GFA and the progress visible on the successive satellite images in order to build a forecast for the route. The thunderstorms are building ahead of a front that is coming from the west, bringing the worse weather. After 06Z the weather is forecast to be unflyable with temporary periods of insanely unflyable. But before that front arrives, if my airport is clear and the destination is clear, I can go around thunderstorms. The GFA is calling for only isolated thunderstorms, and the satellite shows only a few buildups, still well off to the west. Maybe this will work.

Twenty zulu comes and goes but the ceiling never got as high as 2000'. What I got was:

METAR 252300Z 34004KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 BKN090 13/08 A2990 RMK SC6SC1AC2 SLP136
SPECI 252240Z 31003KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 RMK SC6SC1
METAR 252200Z 35003KT 10SM -DZ OVC015 13/07 A2992 RMK SC8 SLP141
METAR 252100Z 31006KT 10SM -DZ OVC012 13/07 A2993 RMK SC8 CIG RAG SLP145

So I go for dinner, eat, pay and return. My hotel card key has finally stopped working. I go back downstairs to the desk, and get an escort to let me into my room. They still don't know when the new card encoder will arrive. It has been shipped from Texas, which probably means it was at the Canadian border in a day and then will sit there for a week before getting lost entirely on its way this far north.

The good news is that the weather has cleared. There are now a very few clouds at 2500' and a scattered layer at 4000'. The line of thunderstorms is moving very slowly from the west, they are behind schedule and satellite imagery shows one lousy cell heading towards my track. The destination is forecast wide open for most of the night. Awesome.

I get a ride to the airport, preflight, run up, and text my flight follower and maintenance guys that I'll be at destination in an hour. There are a couple of hours left until nightfall and the trip should take only one of them, but I put my nav lights on anyway. They may help someone see me. I take off and turn southeast at 3500'.

It's raining a bit, so I put the pitot heats on. It's pretty gloomy outside. I put the instrument lights on too, and make sure I'm not wearing my sunglasses. You wouldn't believe how often that happens, that I'm peering through miserable weather and then realize it would look a lot better without sunglasses. But I don't have them on now. My altitude is good. My route keeps me out of the mountains and I have the terrain warning mode on the GPS on. The light that is supposed to illuminate the #2 VOR is flashing on and off. I'm not using the VOR, but I can't turn off the light without turning off other lights that I'm using. Something else to be fixed.

It's raining harder. The forward visibility is not so great, but it's not like there is anything to see out here. In cruise, if the visibility is less than five miles, I can't see anything ahead of my airplane anyway, because the nose is in the way, so I check to the sides to make sure I'm not in cloud. I'm not. It's just raining. Whatever. Life in the sky.

I double check that the radio frequency is 126.7 in preparation to make a position report and check for other low level traffic in the area. It's dark enough that the flashing nav radio is starting to irritate me. The comm frequency is correct, but there's a burst of static before I can transmit. I hate that interference sound when two people are transmitting at the same time and all you hear is scratching and squealing. I do what I usually do in that circumstance and tune the radio to another frequency for a a moment, to let the transmission conflict pass. There's static on the other frequency, click, click ... static on multiple frequencies. Wait a moment ... getting dark fast ... really dark, considering it's an hour before sunset, , raining harder, annoying flashing and static on all frequencies? Hey kids, what is big and dark and full of rain and electricity?

Shit, I've just flown into that thunderstorm cell I was planning to fly around. I didn't see it coming, the stratus fractus below and the 4000' stratus layer hid the obvious shape, and my expectation of poor visibility in rain below the stratus allowed me to ignore the other signs. The wisdom is that if you are forced to fly through a thunderstorm, you lower your seat, and crank the cockpit lights way up so you're not blinded by the flash of the lightning. They also say don't turn around, but that is so as not to stress the airframe in turbulence and I'm not in turbulence, nor in an up or downdraft. Altitude is steady. I know it's worse ahead of me than behind me. There is high terrain to the west, so I choose to turn left. It's a big cell or group of cells and I'm getting the heavy rain, but not the downdraft. I can see the lightning right ahead of me as I start the turn. Yeah, don't want to go there. It's dark, dark like night, even though it's an hour and half until nightfall. I do the textbook one-eighty prescribed to pilots to get away from bad things and then I fly straight and wait to get out of there. I can see the lightning flashes behind me even though peripheral vision isn't supposed to work that way. I guess it comes in through the side windows and illumnates the whole plane. This is a lot of lightning. When the sky goes back to the colour it should be this time of evening, I head east.

Did I blindly fly into the one cell in three hundred kilometres, or is there something more developing than I thought? It looks good both north and east now. I fly a bit further east and then the southern sky looks like sky, too. That's a big fricking cell. Idiot.

I'm literally halfway from origin to destination. I try to call flight services but no joy. The forecast for the destination was much better than the continuing forecast for my originating airport. I finish the big detour and continue south. I'm going to be twenty minutes late on my eta, maybe thirty. Yes, that was a big detour. About 50 nautical miles from the destination I manage to raise the FSS and give them my amended eta. I'm not on a Nav Canada flight plan, but I tell them that they may get a call from my flight follower looking for me. After a few tries I manage to get a text off to the people waiting for me at the hangar, too. I'm not sure it went through. I'll get there when I get there.

A bit later, I call flight services at the destination with a position report and ETA. They issue me a transponder code. "Hey," I ask them, "When did you guys get radar?" Last time I was here it was with a comm failure, and it would have been nice to squawk 7600 and get some attention, instead of just flying in triangles and being ignored. Apparently they have had radar for almost a year. That's the problem with being always on the move. You think you're familiar, but you don't know what's going on. They give me a convenient runway and I ask for taxi directions to the named hangar.

I miss the turnoff and have to do a one-eighty on the taxiway. It's not a really well-lit apron and there is a little slope with grass growing through cracks in the pavement. It's really easy to taxi into a ditch at an unfamiliar airport. Even on the apron, I don't know about its level of maintenance. I'm concerned about taxiing into a hole, so I go very gingerly. I stop on the taxiway in front of what I think is the hangar and call on my cellphone to say that I'm here. The lights go on inside the hangar, so I picked the right one. I shut down and call my flight follower. He was worried about me, but hadn't called the FSS yet, so didn't get my revised eta. "Yeah, sorry. I had to go around thunderstorms, and then I couldn't find the right hangar."

The guy who brought the hangar key gets a tug and tows the airplane in. We quickly drain the oil and I unload my gear while I listen to the two AMEs discussing with fervour the work that is to be done. It's a pretty nice hangar, but lacks some of the equipment they had been promised.

We all go to the hotel, and agree to meet for breakfast at eight.

Rivers and Mountains and Chocolate

I sleep for not long enough, but there's too much noise and light to sleep more, so I get up and make a phone call. I sit on hold for half an hour. I ordered The West Wing complete series earlier but the friend who receives mail for me e-mailed to say he already owned it and I could borrow his any time. So I wait on hold until I get a Return Authorization Number to send mine back, then go for breakfast. I take the Do Not Disturb sign off the door for my weekly room cleaning.

I get back from breakfast (a waffle). The room is cleanish, but the TV is still not fixed. So I nap. Then I go to Boston Pizza. May I go home yet?

The a.m. crew got off to a late start again. Fog, of course. I meet them after landing at four and we discuss a brake that was spongy on the taxi out, and the left inboard fuel gauge showing half full between half and quarter tanks. Neither of these is groundable now, so the AME says he will look at them tonight. That discussion over, I say, "Well, I guess it's time to make airplane noises," and both the other pilot and my mission specialist immediately and simultaneousy make propeller noises with their lips. I love my coworkers. We get in and make airplane noises using the actual airplane.

It's a good flight, out over the mountains and rivers, with the sun slowly creeping past the layers of clouds down to the horizon. The clouds serve as a sunshade from the glare of the sunset. I'm grateful when they do that. Finally the sun does go all the way down, and then darkness follows, about the time that we're almost done anyway. We finish up and head back to the airport. It's harder to track a straight line in darkness, especially without an HSI. I scan across to the right side one, and use the GPS. I might be quite literally lost without them. The compass is not that useful here. The wisdom of the rule stating that I need a heading indicator at night is sound.

The airport is invisible on our first pass, because we're not in the direction of a runway and the trees alongside the airport block the edge lights I might have seen. Or maybe they weren't turned up yet. They are bright enough to find the airport, and on final I have red-blue-green and a light in the mirror. (That's the red mixture levers forward, the blue propeller levers forward, three green lights on the dashboard and the light mounted on the nosewheel reflecting off the mirror on the nacelle, confirming that the nosegear is down and the landing light works.

I'm wired after the night flying. I haven't done a night landing in ages, having been the morning pilot or in the north all summer. It's still legal for me to have done one tonight because there are no passengers on board, just crew. It goes well. I guess I haven't forgotten how. The AME meets airplane as I shut down, here to look at the gauge issues reported by the a.m. pilot. I can't confirm the fuel gauge issue because I landed with half tanks on the inboards, and the brakes worked fine for me. He opens an access panel to confirm the type of fuel sender. He'll order a new one.

The FBO charges $50 for a callout between five and nine pm and $100 for one between nine pm and seven a.m. Fog is not forecast tomorrow, and even if they don't get going before seven, they will want fuel first thing, so we decide to pay the $100 callout fee now, and not risk not being able to get a fueller to come on Sunday a.m. Sometimes you can't buy fuel before noon on a Sunday at all. It's not that they are closed, just that you can't get anyone to come out. Just because there's a callout phone doesn't mean the person who took it home is going to answer it. They answer my night call--I did warn him we might call around midnight. It looks like the fueller's friends have decided to keep him callout company. There are about half a dozen people here, one wearing pajama bottoms. I ask if I may just leave now and come back and pay tomorrow. They okay that, so yay, day over.

I've had the same very slight headache for three days. I self-medicate with chocolate.

Not the End of the World

Did I get to the part where we fly the airplane yet? Seriously, did I? We did fly the airplane this rotation. Twice, even. And if you think the blog took a long time getting there, try real life.

Just as hotel keys get deprogrammed when you're wearing the least clothing, the client is ready to fly when you are the maximum number of minutes from being conveniently ready. If you really want to fly, do laundry at a laundromat. You'll be required to go to work right now as soon as the clothes are all wet and soapy. (And then sent to another base for a week while your clothes rot). In this case I wasn't doing laundry. I believe I'd already tried that trick. I was out for a walk about as far from the hotel as I could get and still be in civilization. My coworker came to pick me up. We stopped fro my flight bag and then off to the airport to get things going.

We took the tarps off the airplane, the flimsy polyethylene sheets so stiffened by the cold that they handled like stiff canvas. Fuel tanks were still full, so no leaks, and the oil levels were good. I jumped inside and closed the door, then flicked on the master and all the lights while my coworker gave me a thumbs up on all the exterior lights being operational. Everything else looked good inside, and the clients were arriving, so I went back outside and finished up unplugging cords and putting away tarps.

As soon as the engine heaters are unplugged, the engines start to cool, and you've seen what happens when we try to start cold engines, so we board right away. "I'll start up while you brief," I say as I jump in the left seat. Technically these guys are crewmembers not passengers so they don't need a briefing every time they board. I keep it to once per rotation, so they are at least apprised of any configuration changes and seasonal issues. Today, for example, there are parkas up the back behind the electronics rack, the first aid kit and fire extinguisher in the cockpit, and extra winter survival gear in the nose.

My coworker is an experienced pilot but he hasn't flown passengers commercially. He laughs as he climbs in the right seat, "I haven't given a passenger briefing since my commercial flight test." Both engines start easily and everything warms up okay. I fuss with the checklists, conscious that I haven't flown yet this month. The left throttle is really twitchy, you hardly move it at all for a big change, and the right propeller lever has very little resistance. It's sort of the opposite of the left propeller lever being sticky. It's exactly a friction setting issue, because everything else is correct, but perhaps there's something crooked in there making the tension uneven. These aren't no-go items, just things to say "hmm" about and pass on to maintenance in case they presage something more momentous.

I call taxiing and backtrack for take off. With checks complete, brakes released, airplane rolling straight, gauges green, keep it straight, airspeed alive, rotate. Positive rate, beautiful cold weather performance, insufficient runway remaining, gear up. Engines turning, tweak the propeller lever that is nudging rpms into the red, keep straight, set climb power and make a slow left turn on course.

There is forecast to be mist tomorrow morning, so we're alert to the possibility of it forming early. There is some present, but we conclude that it is not a threat, and that we will be able to see if it starts to spread to where we do care, even after dark.

The point of there being two pilots here today is so that my new coworker can find his way around this cockpit at night. So as the sun goes down I show him where all the lighting controls are and hand over control. He flies the airplane as you would expect a professional pilot to do, with no trouble at all. He gets an opportunity to observe how hard it is to tell you're rolling as you do a flat turn with no lights on the horizon, but there's only one dark quadrant in this area. There are a lot of farms in the area and some towns, plus whatever it is the military have going on over there, so lots of light.

What do the military have going on over there? There's a weird glow from the direction of the restricted area. We turn around and go the other way for a while, but when we turn back it's more pronounced. There's something on fire. We hope it's just an unoccupied farm building, but it's a little freaky. We don't think the military are hiding dangerous superweapons around here, but maybe that just means they are really good at hiding their dangerous superweapons. And then after another pass we figure it out.

It's the moon rising on the horizon, and its light is interacting with cloud and mist. The shape and variable opacity of the cloud made a a very convincing exploding secret missile base.

Plus, someone just forwarded me this:

STL approach: "United XXX best forward speed to the marker, you're number one."

United XXX (male): "Roger, balls to the wall."

STL approach: "American XXXX, you're number two behind a 737, follow him, cleared visual, best forward speed."

American XXXX (female): "Well I can't do 'balls to the wall' but I can go 'wide open'."

-Radio silence-

Unknown Pilot (male): "Is American hiring?"

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.

Being an AME Really Sucks Sometimes

I'm expecting to fly at around noon today, after the magneto has been replaced, but in the morning I get a call from Whitehorse. One of AME's flights was delayed, causing him to miss connections, so now he's arriving in Whitehorse around one p.m., getting him here for six p.m. I book a hotel for him and call hangar guy to see if he wants me to pick up a key in advance so as not to bother him outside business hours. He says we'll work it out when the AME arrives, because, "he'll probably want to wait until the morning." I assure him that the company wanted the work done yesterday, so there's no way this is going to wait until the morning, but he is sure that we can work it out when the time comes. I pass this, hangar guy's home number and the hotel reservation info on to my co-worker in Whitehorse.

I spent the day napping, eating, doing crosswords on my iPod and going for a stroll around the community. The weather is spectacularly perfect for flying. It's a sadly ugly town compared to the beauty of its surroundings. I think there are three scrapyards on the main street, and everything has the look that you'd expect if it was hauled up the Alaska Highway on the back of a truck and then left out in Yukon weather for a few years. Some houses still had wide load signs on the end. But everyone is friendly and the only dogs that ran out of at me were eager to have their ears scratched.

Our AME, as I discovered the next morning, spent the day flying to Whitehorse, being driven to Watson Lake and then changing the magneto. Outside. On the ramp. In the dark. At minus ten celsius. And then he got to check into his hotel and sleep. And they put him in the poorly-rated hotel. Which turned out to be not so bad. So the Internet and the cab driver were wrong in that respect.

Hangar guy answered his phone, but thought the repair could wait until morning. I would have thought there would have been some solidarity among the profession. Hangar guy has been an AME in the Yukon for decades. He must know the pain of working in freezing darkness. Maybe he wants our AME to build character. I think he must have plenty of character already, seeing as he got the job done in those conditions. He even changed a spark plug and mended a gasket while he was in there.

(And to Firefox spellchecker: don't wave your squiggly red line at me; celsius should not be capitalized. It's the name of a metric unit. The abbreviation C is capitalized because it's named after a person, but the full word is not.)

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.

Everything at Once

Not only are we out of fuel at this base, but as we fly out the last hours before scheduled maintenance, the airplane throws a fit and we have a burst of minor defects we have to defer in consultation with maintenance: the aforementioned CHT gauge, a couple of instrument lights, and a bit of an oil leak that maintenance was right about when they said it would be messy but would not worsen or cause a mechanical problem. (That wasn't done lightly: two pilots, two engineers and the PRM all had to agree on it). It`s pretty embarrassing how much can go wrong at once. You probably don't want to know how many things are wrong with any airplane you ride on as a passenger.

During my last revenue flight before scheduled maintenance, during flight the compass started sitting at an odd angle in the housing. I rarely consult the compass after start up, because I have other instruments that use a different compass to do the same job more effectively, but it's still a required instrument. I'm used to the compass bowl being tilted as an effect of northern latitudes -- I'll do a post on that sometime, as it's rather interesting -- but as I changed heading I saw that the behaviour of the compass wasn't matching the angle of the magnetic field lines at our latitude. The compass read accurately on all headings and led and lagged as expected on turns to north and south, but it just wasn't sitting the way it usually did inside the bowl.

There is much in the way of preventative maintenance that is done on a compass. It's just there. It isn't connected to anything, except it has wires running to its light. It's calibrated once a year, and the couple of degree differences between its indicated and bearings and what it should read are recorded on a card for my use, but it doesn't get oiled or tuned or remagnetized. It's just one more thing for this stupid weekend. I imagine the rectification for this snag will be "Compass told to smarten up and fly straight," or possibly "Pilot headrest adjusted so she can see straight."

My next flight will be a ferry, to take this bag of aluminum bones to a shop where it will have its complaints attended to. They are also going to change out the tachometers for electronic ones, as we've been changing too many tach cables lately. The right tach needle is already oscillating slightly, in the way that says "order a new tach cable now before I break."

Shortest Night

I spent a while arranging these and captioning them last night, but when I pulled up the blog entry to add something to it, I found that between lousy hotel Internet and Blogger misbehaving, the PHOTOS were gone from the entry. So I've re-added them quickly. Times are in the filenames.

I took a series of photographs for you, of the 'night' sky on the evening of the June 21st. That day at noon the sun was directly overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and we're 36 degrees north of there. That means its zenith was 54 degrees above the horizon, and from our perspective today the sun described a big loop, arcing diagonally across the sky, westward and downward to the southwest horizon, setting at 22:25 local time, and then sneaking back along, just below the southern horizon, towards the east, reaching a nadir of seven degrees below the horizon and then rising again from the southeast at 3:58 local. Officially night began at 23:50 and ended at 02:34 If that's symmetrical, then the darkest point of the night should be about 01:15.

Curiously, the Sunrise/Sunset times link on the Nav Canada site was broken when I tried it, so I had to call a briefer instead. I admitted that it was for my blog. No shame.

There are no tricks with the camera: no long exposures or filters. It's just an ordinary camera. I tried to keep the automatic light meter from fixating on the lights along the highway, so it would expose the sky correctly. The camera started thinking that it was dark around 11:30, but the sky was still quite light. And this is a cloudy night. You can see how light it is where the clouds aren't.

Flip that around to December and the sun struggles seven degrees into the sky at high noon, only to set two hours later. And after it sets there it is very very dark.

Refraction Distraction

I walk towards my airplane on the ramp and I can see that it is pissing fuel out of the left wing, a steady stream, not a drip but a spray like it's pressurized. I remember the wide-eyed horror I felt the first time I saw fuel streaming out of a parked airplane. Today my feeling is just, "Hmm, this had better not be something bad." I could write a long blog post on various reasons that fuel has dripped, flowed or sprayed out of my parked airplane. I duck under the wing to look at the source. It's coming out of a vent. The vent is recessed so that incident air doesn't pressurize it, but it still faces forward so the stream spurts out in front of the wing. There's no visible damage. To confirm my first suspicion about the cause, I open the fuel cap for that tank. The tank is completely full and some fuel flows out of the filler neck onto the top of the wing. Suspicion confirmed.

This airplane was fuelled last night while we were wearing sweaters and jackets on a rainy, overcast day. Now I'm wearing a t-shirt, and the angle of the sun over the hangar puts the left wing in bright sunlight. The fuel is expanding inside the wing and being forced out the vent. It's perfectly normal. That's one of the reasons the vent is there. (The other reason is so that as fuel is burned, air can get in to replace the volume so that the fuel will continue to flow).

The fuel stain on the ramp looks nasty, but the rest of the airplane is fine. I set up what gear I have, conscious that the bag in which I normally organize my spare batteries, extra flashlights, snacks, waterbottle, and the like is packed inside my checked luggage. I have enough equipment to be safe and legal, just not everything I usually have.

All is normal on the run up, and I talk to the flight services guy in the tower and then take off. I say good bye to flight services guy but continue to monitor his frequency, and tune 126.7 on the other radio for en route traffic. At eight-thirty in the evening up here the sun angle is like four in the afternoon down at the 49th. It's hot in the cockpit, but I need to run the heater for the comfort of the picky computer equipment in the back. I spend a while moving vent sliders around trying to make it comfortable for me, and cozy for the computers, too. The mission specialist goes off headset for a while in order to take off his fleece.

Not only have I not flown in three months, but they have changed out the type of equipment I am using, so I'm looking at a screen I haven't seen in about a year. I stare at it for a moment, trying to remember where it means I'm supposed to go, and then I go to work. I remember this. I know how to do it. I'm good at this. Somehow my temperament--and bladder--is suited for this type of flying. I settle back into my routine, burning an hour of fuel out of each set of tanks so that nothing is so full it's spilling out the vents, and then systematically work through the various tanks. I plan to land at 2:15 a.m.

There are a couple of pilots in Cessna 172s hopping around beneath me, position reporting between small places I saw on the map. They chat to each other about how fine the weather is tonight and where they are going. As they say their call letters I picture them painted on the side of the airplanes. I remember things better visually then as sounds. One of them is CXD, which trips a switch in my head because they are all letters used in Roman numerals: 110-500, not that that means anything. When there's a break in their conversation I call up CXD and ask them what they're doing, just trying to join the conversation. The answer is a fairly terse "flying from Worsely to Fairview." And then they stopped talking to each other. I guess they forgot they weren't alone up here.

Fifty gallons of avgas later I'm still in the sky and so is the sun. My hat is in my checked bag, so I have to depend on my skinny sunvisors and my sunglasses for protection from that ball of fire. I estimate it is still fifteen degrees above the horizon, maybe a little less. When will it set? When I'm flying I can't put my whole brain over to arithmetic, because I'm looking out the window, manipulating the controls, squinting at my screens, and paying attention to all the little things I don't even realize I'm looking at. So I chunk arithmetic up into easy bits. Three hundred sixty degrees in twenty-four hours, one hundred eighty in twelve, ninety in six, forty-five in three, so fifteen degrees an hour. But I know it will be in the sky for a lot longer than an hour. The sun doesn't go straight down here, it moves diagonally towards the horizon. At my latitude, three weeks before the solstice I suppose I could calculate its angle of descent and use trigonometry to determine when it will reach the horizon. But I just eyeball it and estimate that it will hit the horizon at about eleven. If I were a few degrees further north and it were a few weeks later it wouldn't go down at all. It would just slide around the edge of the horizon before angling back up.

I didn't see the exact moment it ducked behind the horizon, I just turned and saw that it was no longer trying to burn my eyeballs. It was about eleven. It's still light, but the light is more orangeish. I try to picture the refraction process that is making the light orange. I'm pretty sure it's the same reason that the sky is blue. But is it because the red light is refracted more by the atmosphere or less? I think the blue is refracted more, because the blue is on the inside of the rainbow, but I can't quite picture it. Now that I'm on the ground I could look it up, but I'll give you my airborne thought processes. I think that as the sun's rays hit the atmosphere at a low angle the blue is being refracted up away where I can't see it, but the red is refracted less, so it's the last colour I see. There's a moon, too, and its light is whiter. An hour after sunset it's not really dark yet. I can still see clouds in the distance and the shapes of lakes on the ground.

I call flight services for an altimeter setting. It hasn't changed in over four hours. 'Are you coming in to land now?" he asks. No, we have another couple of hours.

The mission specialist is tired and calls it done a little early. We touch down just before two a.m. I chat to the FSS guy on the way in, "when do you get to go home?" It turns out that he worked the day shift and then got called in to do the overnight, so he'll be there until 8:30 a.m. Nasty. I tell him he'll still be there when my flight partner comes on shift in a few hours. He asks her name so he can say hi. I forgot to ask his name.

I'm hungry enough to eat the seven hour old sandwich I bought before departure, and tired enough to go right to sleep.

Not on the Menu

I'm on final for a landing late at night. In the back is a mission specialist who is sharp on aviation matters. I have briefed for a sterile cockpit--no conversation not directly related to aviation safety--between confirming the cabin secure for landing and exiting the runway after landing. He understands and respects this, and tolerates me reciting my checklists aloud. Perhaps he even appreciates it. "Landing flaps and props to go ... landing flaps coming set ... props up ... prelanding checks complete." I'm over the approach lights and double check "red blue green silver." Mixtures (the red levers) are full rich, props (the blue levers) are full fine, gear position indicator (the green lights) are all on, with no red lights there, and the silver mirror on the nacelle reflects the landing light. That's not so much to see that the light is working, but that the nosewheel has come down. The light is attached to the wheel.

I'm past the threshold. I've come in a little high, as I do here on purpose. It's a long runway and this end is in the woods, where I've been warned there may be deer. I have a better chance of seeing them if I wait until I'm over the darkness by the threshold before I start to flare. There are no slender-legged shadows on the runway and no mysteriously missing runway lights. I level out, still in descent, hold off ...

"HELLO!" There's a yell from the back. It's the sort of thing you yell if you wonder if someone is there, or have fallen asleep. Or if you have to yell something NOW to get someone's attention and can't formulate a better word to say, like "gear!" or "deer!" In that instant above the runway I recheck everything, and then realize at the end of the last instant before touchdown that "HELLO!" is also what you say when you're answering a telephone.

The mission specialist has picked up a cellphone call, probably from a manager calling to say, "have you landed yet?" and he has not swung his headset microphone far enough out of range not to pick up his voice. It turns out to be a good landing anyway. My heart catches up and we taxi in.

"You scared me," I confess. But he's taken off the headset now, still on the phone, and doesn't hear me. Just as well. The pilot is supposed to be unflappable.

He's hungry, and wondering what might be open this late at night. I remember that Whataburger was open 24 hours, and has a drive-through. He suspects that only the drive-through will be open this late at night, but as we pull into the parking lot we can see that the place is hopping. We park and walk in. The tables nearest the door are taken by a fairly large group of young twenty-something men. It never crossed my mind until just now as I wrote that sentence and thought of how it might sound to someone else, that the group could be a gang, even though they were clearly hanging out together. They were all so individualistic. Different fashions, different way of standing, different hair. I thought they were young to have no need for a group identity, and creative to have developed their own styles from what in this small town must be a limited palette of available wardrobe options. One is wearing a long khaki jacket and jeans hanging down to his knees. Another is almost preppy. One white guy sports a kind of orange mohawk, and military dogtags worn on the outside of his clothes. (Could be just a style thing, you can order them on the internet, or maybe he's grown out and dyed his hair during leave). You could cast him as the scary redneck in a Hollywood movie, except that he's lounging around peaceably at the Whataburger with all his black friends. And you know Hollywood didn't put together this group of friends, because they're missing a chubby one with glasses.

The breakfast menu at Whataburger is available from 11 p.m. to 11 a.m. and we were well after eleven, so now was my chance to try the assigned egg and potato taquiera. Or taquito. Taquiero? Taquito, te quiero! What was it called. I looked at the menu. There were taquitos (taquitoes?), but egg and potato wasn't listed. "Uh, I'm looking for a potato and egg taquito, but I don't see it on the menu."

"That's okay. Lots of things aren't on the menu."

Woo, I'm getting a secret menu item.

"He asks me, "Do you want any sauce with that?"

I confess that I've never had one and I don't know what it is, but that I'd like to have one how people normally have them, please. He says people like to have hot sauce to dip them in, and throws some hot sauce in the bag. I also order a cinnamon roll and a medium milkshake.

While we're waiting another party who were sitting further into the restaurant leaves. They are three women, a lot dressier than I'd expect for a fast food restaurant. I guess they've stopped for a meal on the way home from a dressier establishment. They are all wearing long western skirts, down to their ankles. One looks very much like a pair of blue jeans opened up into a skirt with extra fabric added, but still quite close fitting. The others are similar styles. They are also wearing cowboy boots, and short fitted jackets. That's when I realize that Texas forms a bridge between the Wild West and the Deep South. No wonder it's so different. That's a lot to assimilate.

We take our food back to the hotel to eat, so I get to investigate mine while blogging about it. The milkshake is unremarkable, what I'd expect of a fast food milkshake, except that the medium is huge. I think I ended up throwing over half of it away, and I usually drink a large McDonald's milkskake easily. The cinnamon bun is also what I expected, but I have no idea and no expectations of this taquito.

It's wrapped in paper, and when I open it up it looks like a burrito. But what's inside the tortilla shell? It's mostly scrambled egg, but it's spicy, probably lots of salt. Presumably there is potato inside, too. It is, as promised, really good. I dip it in the salsa provided, and it tastes even better. I wish I had bought two of these. I can't really distinguish the potato, but I suspect it's been fried in something spicy before being mixed with the egg. I would eat this again. I wonder what other secret items are not on the menu. Also I promise to stop posting so much about food.

Hail the Rampee

I woke up this morning and turned the TV on to the weather channel. They were talking about the hailstorm that went through last night, calmly pointing out the areas with golf ball-sized versus softball-sized hailstones. Eeeyow! Texas has Texas-sized hail. We got in too late to get the airplane in the hangar. I hope it's alright. I guess I would have heard by now, because the weather is good, so my co-worker must be up flying already. Yep. She is. It's fine.

The weather is clear today, with a waxing crescent moon. But instead of being upright, like the curving part of a capital D the moon at this latitude and time of year appears to be a hat, like a jauntily worn beret. I think about it for a moment, making arcs with my fingers and trying to picture where the sun and moon are, and how the moon is the wrong way up, but we've arrived at the airport and it's time to preflight the airplane so I let it go.

The sun sets off my right wing during the flight. I'm still startled by how fast the sky goes from orange to black around here. The sun sets faster the further south you go. I turn on the navigation lights as the disc approaches the horizon, and then I turn up the cockpit lights so I can see the instruments. About this time a GPS alert tells me that it is sunset and that the GPS is switching into night mode. That means that it dims and uses different colours, a darker background with light markings so it doesn't affect my night vision so much when I look at it. I usually dim it further as well. My night vision isn't coming in right tonight, though. The cockpit lights seem too dim and the battery must be fading on my headset light, because it doesn't illuminate my kneeboard when I look down at it. It's a slight hassle to change the battery, and I really don't think it needs changing, because it's a low power LED light, and it's only run for ten hours on these batteries. Maybe it doesn't take well to the rechargeables I put in.

It must have been pitch black for two hours before I finally scratch my nose and feel the frame of my glasses bend. Bend? Yeah, I have "flexframes" that are designed to not break if I sit on my sunglasses. On my sunglasses. I sheepishly take my sunglasses off and all of a sudden the cockpit lighting is much better.

The moon is still out there, too, but now it's a smiley moon. At night the crescent part appears to be on the bottom, just like that on Arabian flags. The stars do not shine through the moon, however.

I mention the lazy southern moon to my coworker and he says he was noticing that satellite dishes point up around here. I guess you have to put them on your roof instead of on the south side of your house.

At the end of the flight I make my way across the ramp to parking. We have a spot staked out within reach of electrical power so we can plug in equipment overnight, and the FBO know we're using it, but it's a bit of an obstacle course tonight. Around behind a couple of Cessnas watching out for the fuel truck parked behind that, then up towards the wall, but not too close, watching to be sure that the wing will not hit the electrical cart on one side and the chain on the airplane on the other. My wingtip will go under that airplane's wingtip, but not through the chain. I have it lined up and am about to go forward when a rampie comes running out of the FBO. I hold my position while he darts each side, checking the clearance and then waves me ahead.

I knew it was good because I did more or less the same thing the last night I came in here, unassisted after the FBO was closed, and I knew it was good then because I was being careful. I've parked in gnarlier places than this with worse lighting, but I've cut it too close before too. It's always good to have an extra set of eyes.

Also, my earseals didn't fall off when I took off the headset at the end of the flight.

Trickling Red Fluid

I knew it was the right hotel, because the clerk greeted me by name when I stumbled in at three-something in the morning. I had already been marked as a no-show, but I checked in and e-mailed the clients to tell them I was in the hotel, but not to be disturbed until my rest period was legally complete, turned off my phone, and slept in as late as I could, to ready myself to fly the next day. In the morning I set up my flight bag, got some exercise, and I was finishing up breakfast (or "lunch," as the people who don't sleep until the afternoon call it), when the call came. We went out to the plane.

The FBO interior was being repainted so I sat outside in the breeze to avoid getting stoned from the fumes. The temperature had been hovering just above freezing on the drive from Dallas last night, but it was about ten degrees in the daytime. My coworker taxied in from her flight and shut down, so I took over the airplane. I first went onboard to put my gear in the cockpit. Flight bag on the copilot seat, strapped in with the seatbelt. Charts, taxi diagram, OFP, set out where I can reach them. Headset out of bag and plugged in. The headset earseals fall off. The glue is not very sticky anymore, after so many cycles of hot and cold. I pick the earseals up off the floor and stick them back on the headset.

Today's mission specialist has experience working in an aviation environment. He used to be in the military and has some funny stories I might share later. For now he has spotted a problem. The nose oleo, i.e. the compression strut that offers shock protection and connects the nosewheel to the airplane, is leaking fluid onto the tire.

I got a rag out of the forward cargo compartment and wiped the fluid off. It was thin, oily and slightly pink. Hydraulic oil. That's required for shock absorption and also hydraulic centring of the nosewheel. Already the fluid is making its way down the strut again. It's almost a trickle, not just a drip. "How many drips per minute can you tolerate on that?" asks my specialist. I don't have a number, but it doesn't look good. I get the FBO to call an A&P --airframe and powerplant mechanic-- for a verdict. The specialist tells me the military had an acceptable drips per minute threshold for every conceivable leak.

The mechanic arrives. I've pretty much decided I want this fixed before I take it up, and then he points out that if I lose enough fluid that the centering mechanism doesn't work properly, then the wheel might not come back down out of the nose compartment at all. It will take a few hours to fix, but it would take a lot more time to fix the consequences of landing without the front wheel. In that case I might need a new cushion on the pilot seat, too. The catch is that the mechanic isn't sure he has a seal that will fit. If he doesn't, he'll have to order one and we won't get it until tomorrow morning. He goes to check.

That take a long time. I decide that taking a long time is a good thing. I reason that if he didn't have the part, he'd look it up in the computer, see no part, and then call back to the desk to tell the pilot he can't fix her plane. But if he does have it, then he has to go back into stores to verify that it is on the shelf, verify that he has the manpower to fix it today, and come back with a tug to take the plane. But I do one more thing to make sure that he has the part.

You see, if the part is not available, I have to take all my stuff back out of the plane, and go back to the hotel. Whereas if he does have the part, I need only take my wallet and cellphone and leave the other stuff there for a couple hours, because I'll use it when I come back. So, drawing on the principle that the universe loves to inconvenience me, I take all my stuff out of the plane. The ear seals fall off my headset again. I stick them back on again. And my plan works. As soon as I have I gathered everything up and left the aircraft, the mechanic returns to tell me he has the seal in stock. He takes it to fix.

A few hours later, the airplane is back on the line, paperwork and all, within his initial time estimate. Guy knows what he's doing. The seal looks good and everything else checks out. I put everything back in the airplane. We're ready to go.

On rotation there is a loud clattering noise, reminiscent of the sound of the gear door falling off the airplane. Further reflection on the matter makes it a sound much more like that of the clipboard with the airport information on it skittering off to parts unknown. All the lights are out on the gear indicator panel. I put the clipboard away and complete the after takeoff checks.

Landing is nearly seven hours later, well after nightfall, and after both the tower and approach controllers have gone home to bed. Or possibly gone out to prowl the red-lit streets of town and suck the blood of unsuspecting citizens, But I doubt it. I mean no one walks here in the daytime. Whom can a vampire find to prey on at night? Perhaps they fear me when I walk, because only zombies walk in this town. Anyway, where was I? Sadly, that question would be opportune in this narrative even had I not digressed into speculations about the local undead.

Ahem. So approximately where was I? Dark. No controllers. Airport. Clipboard. Airport information. The airport has three or four different names, and two to six runways, depending on which version of the airport information publication I use. That would be the one on the clipboard that fell somewhere on rotation or the one in the airport directory that I can easily reach. You can see where I'm going with this. At least someone can see where I'm going.

I know that I have a decent north wind up here. I know surface winds are light, but the wind aloft will help me set up for runway 36. I took off from runway 18, so by airport runway logic there is a runway 36. I check the publication to see if there is any reason not to land there at night. Nope. The lighting is pilot controlled after tower hours. The two other runways (two? I must have mistaken one for a taxiway) are not lit. Because of the nature of our operation, I don't get to fly a regular descent and approach, and don't fly a circuit quite by the book either. So I'm too close in and descending into a really poor excuse for a downwind, but I'll fix it on base. Except on base I can't see the runways lights. I re-key the pilot controlled lighting, and turn final, but despite frantic clicking, there's nothing there but a big black hole.

We don't go don into big black holes. Mixture, props, power, nose, gear, flaps, airplane. They all go up. And now there's the stupid runway. It's not 36. Three-six is not lighted after hours. And I'm not getting away with telling the savvy guy in the back that there was a chicken on the runway. (A boss I had once told me to always claim there was a chicken on the runway if I had to go around in VMC. Never admit to an unstabilized approach, inappropriate winds, or failure of the gear to lock down, he ordered.) Sigh. I come back around for the brilliantly illuminated runway, put the gear down and double check three green lights in the panel and one nosewheel light in the nacelle mirror. In the dark I have no way of verifying that it's straight.

I clunk onto the runway--no it wasn't a beautiful landing--and taxi in. Every bump we go over makes me glad I got the hydraulic leak fixed. Once on the ground the red fluid that is supposed to supply oxygen to my brain tissues trickles through to the appropriate brain cells and I realize that I read the wrong page in the publication and allowed myself to be tricked as if by a shell game shyster. I assumed that as the runways revealed in the book were not lighted, that the one that was not mentioned was the lighted one. But that runway wasn't on that page at all. There aren't even two other runways.

Dumb error. Good thing it didn't cost me more than pride. I was well within legal duty limits, and I really felt as though I was adequately rested, and but that's got to be a factor. Either that or I'm an idiot.

I take off my headset. The ear seals fall off. I shine my flashlight on the floor so I can find them to stick them back on.

Pushing It

Nothing says welcome back to work like a six and a half hour flight. The sun went down a hours ago and I'm almost at destination. The ATIS winds on the ground are fourteen gusting twenty, not a big deal, but we're making slow progress towards the airport. There's a calculator on the GPS that tells me the wind strength and direction. It's not perfect, because it makes assumptions about the true air speed from the groundspeed on various headings, but it's okay. It tells me we have 40 knots of wind exactly on the nose. How does the wind know to blow exactly from where we want to go?

There's a layer of cloud forming underneath us. I hope it's not low enough to be fog. The night runway isn't the same as the one that has the working ILS at the moment, so an instrument approach would have to be a circling. I don't want to be doing a night circling approach in low visibility.

The clouds are less in the area of the airport and at least the headwind means I can go straight in and get a rapid descent. The reported wind is forty degrees off the runway, and that's about right. I'm down and on and taxiing quickly, because for arcane reasons, probably not related to witchcraft, the customer needs the airplane perfectly stationary by 0415Z. I set the brakes with about thirty seconds to spare. And we thought we were going to be early.

I broke my New Year's resolution, the one about not eating bad chocolate, with a Reese's Peanut Butter cup at 2:30 in the morning. Don't let this be encouragement to anyone else to shirk on their resolutions. I did do over a hundred and fifty push ups this morning. (Spread out over five separate sets, not all at once). Rowr!

And Back to Texas

Passport renewed. Vacation over. It's time to go back to work. Back to Texas.

Or maybe not. I'm at the airport. At check-in, the agent told me that the airplane I was going out on was still on the ground at its point of origin, thanks to freezing rain there. Understandable.

"Do you have more flights to Dallas if I miss my connection?" I asked.

"Oh yes, there's a 5 pm and an 11 pm flight," she says.

Charming. I'm supposed to be in Dallas at five. But weather doesn't cause me stress. That's the province of unscrupulous telemarketers. I have a two hour connection, and freezing rain is usually a short-lived phenomenon, a transitional state between snow and rain. It should be fine. I smile, say something polite, and submit my 48.4 lb suitcase for tagging.

In the departure lounge the airline is good about keeping us updated. The aircraft is enroute, thirty minutes out, so we should be departing at 10:05. Then another update. The airplane has called in range a few minutes early, so we will be able to board at ten. Then another announcement, prefaced by the warning that this is not good news. "The aircraft is at the gate, but ..."

What will the but be? Mechanical? Commuting crew stranded somewhere? No, it's fog at the connecting airport. We're now facing an "indefinite delay". She promises more updates and soon gives us one. The weather at destination is deteriorating. "We need to wait until RVR is at 600 level, right now it's at 400."

I don't know if she knows what that means, but I do. The runway visual range transmissiometer registers a visibility of 400 feet in the touchdown zone. Not enough, for safe identification of the runway environment before committing to land. Fog is a phenomenon notorious for its persistence. I could be here for a while.

The next announcement comes at 10:15. We will be boarding at 10:30. She doesn't know when that means we will take off, but suggests maybe 11:00? I've heard lots of horror stories of passengers being loaded onto airplanes and kept captive there for hours and hours. I'd better stock up on food and water. But they've heard the same horror stories and before 10:30 there's another announcement that they won't be boarding after all. It's still an indefinite delay.

This is rough for them. If it were me flying, I could replan my flight to refuel at a different city, but they have to get these passengers there. Except the connecting passengers. And they are already looking at the connecting passengers. Right now they are rebooking passengers who have overseas connections, sending them back through the terminal to other gates and other flights so they can get where they are going. I approve. They'll get to me soon.

It's now 11:35. There's no internet here. I've already transferred all the phone numbers from my old cellphone into my new one, done two sudoku puzzles and read the blogs I downloaded before leaving home. Now what?

Write my own blog entries in Notepad and play minesweeper, I guess.

The flight finally boards around 12:30, but mysteriously leaves half empty, stranding passengers with the same destination who were ticketed on later flights that were simply cancelled. Somehow this makes sense to the airline.

My connecting flight is long gone, but I see from my online itinerary (this airport does have internet) that the airline has already booked another one for me. I can't check in online or at a kiosk, though. (I tried). I have to stand in a customer service line for about 20 minutes to get my boarding pass. As I get to the counter the agent excuses herself for a moment to go over to the queue, to kick people who aren't flying First Class out of the First Class line. One guy has a temper tantrum, claiming he never saw any sign and that he's been waiting there an hour. He's full of it: that line had maybe three people in it when I arrived, and he wasn't one of them. It only grew long in the last five or ten minutes. The agent returns and issues my boarding pass, and after more waiting and another flight, I get to Dallas at 11:15 p.m.

That's not the end of my day, though. I'm typing this while waiting for my baggage to arrive on the carousel. It hasn't, and people are slowly giving up and drifting over to the monstrous lost baggage line. I don't want to give up hope, but my next step is to rent a car and drive three hours, so perhaps I should get in that line before it gets any longer. The rumour is that with the cancelled and bumped flights our luggage has been lost somewhere.

That doesn't make a lot of sense, because there has been plenty of time for the bags to get on the correct plane at each stop. But I suppose airline baggage handling doesn't always make sense. Another customer smiles as the baggage agent can be heard on the phone, "Well you'd better find it! You should see how many people I have waiting here!" In the end the carousel starts up again and the lost luggage arrives.

I rent a car and drive east. Texas has good roads. I think I may have run over an already flattened skunk. It's also possible that the car is just permeated with some kind of air freshener I can't stand. Yes, the smell is so strong I can't distinguish between distant skunk and proximal industrial air freshener. Just kind of burns out my nose, I guess. I have one more complaint about that car. When the ignition is turned off, all the doors automatically unlock. I suppose it is supposed to be a convenience feature? Let me tell you, when you're a woman travelling alone, and you've pulled into a rest area in the middle of nowhere and reclined your seat for a few minutes nap, it is not a sense of convenience you feel when you open your eyes and realize that the door you carefully locked before departure and have never unlocked is now open, as is every other lock in the car. A convenience feature for whom? Parking lot rapists? I originally wrote "Chevrolet engineers losing your jobs in the current economy, I do not weep for you. What were you thinking?" but then I remembered that the last time I made a comment of that sort on the blog, I got a response from an engineer who had worked on the very project I was lamenting and marketing had overruled his protests. So I just weep for everyone. I do that a lot. I cried at the ending of Bee Movie, which I have seen now four times. Just the ending: I have never seen the beginning.

Back on the road and I reach my hotel. The register marks me as a "no-show" as I check in, but they still have the room. Long day. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to copy Dave and say "life on the line continues." Different sort of line, though.

Cross-Country Lunacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Au Revoir Montréal

Next morning we arrived at the airport at a civilized hour of the morning, our airplane bare and dry and the Montréal weather still cold and clear. Our broker has rebooked our customs appointment, we hope.

"I'll do weather and flight plan while you verify customs," we agreed.

The pilot information kiosk in the FBO is a piece of Nav Canada equipment, essentially a box containing a computer and the slowest modem known to man. It's supposed to connect automatically to Nav Canada's weather servers and provide all the weather products available to the modern pilot. I think it got as far as inquiring whether I would prefer English or French before it got hung up on its own innards. I beat on it for a while and then resorted to the telephone, first reporting the PIK here inoperative, in case someone might care to repair it, and then requesting the weather for our very short flight.

It's not so great. While it's lovely here, we're looking at low cloud and freezing fog for the destination. We might be able to squeeze in under the weather, but then we'd be trapped in the valley in Vermont, unable to proceed southeast through higher terrain. It's supposed to improve, but the briefer doesn't say that with optimism in his voice. We decide to wait for the new forecast and then see.

I load and preflight the airplane while it's still in the hangar. The floor is flooded, from all the melted ice and snow on the airplanes, but the airplane is dry, so it's ready to go. The new forecast, however isn't any better. We don't like to go to unfamiliar airports for customs, because we're a little out of the ordinary. Each station has its own culture and we can get unlucky and run into someone who doesn't accept our classification or doesn't like the way we do our paperwork, and end up stuck for a day, waiting for the broker to fax proof of something or other. But Vermont isn't going to work.

My coworker starts casting around for another place to clear customs, but there's a stationary front sitting over the northeast US, making things ugly everywhere. It looks like we can skirt it by cutting across Lake Ontario, then along the south shore of Lake Erie, to get into Cleveland. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, here we come. When we call the airport in Vermont to say we're not coming, the border guys laugh at us. They know how bad the weather is and were expecting the call. We then call our customs broker to set Cleveland up with the paperwork we need, while we go for lunch.

Lunch is nearby at a cafeteria over the flying school. While we're eating I can here a group at a nearby table working on a weight and balance calculation. It seems to be a couple of male pilots helping a female student pilot with the form. Her voice carries clearly, but I don't hear the others' voices. I guess it depends on which way she is looking. She is an anglophone, not from this province, but I hear her say a couple of times that she'd really does intend to learn French. I'm not deliberately eavesdropping, so my awareness of the conversation fades in an out. Then I hear her pronouncing French words with a heavy English accent. She is in her early twenties and speaks fluent English with a fairly neutral North American accent but it doesn't seem like she has ever taken French in school. Perhaps she is American or Bahamian or something.

"Suis sont nous ... oh what? ... soi sont neuve ..." I look over, a bit puzzled. She's evidently reading something that has been written down for her. After a few starts and quiet corrections, she's saying a recognizable "soixante-neuf." Something from the weight and balance problem, perhaps? I can only hope.

She gets up to use the washroom, still repeating her new word and I turn a raised eyebrow look at the males at the table. They see me, and have the good grace to look sheepish. I think they realize that they'd better fess up or be busted by me, because shortly after she returns to the table I hear a shriek of outrage from her, and laughter all round.

I see her later on the stairs, and confess that I was wondering why they were so eagerly teaching her to say "sixty-nine." She rolls her eyes. The guys of course hadn't told her at first what they were coaching her to say, and had in the end only translated it by miming the sexual meaning, perhaps not realizing that the translation has exactly the same connotation in English. She had a good sense of humour about it.

We call back the customs broker and determine that our arrival is booked in Akron. Akron, Cleveland: it's all the same to us. I confirm that the other pilot is on the customs paperwork as PIC and I file to Akron.

Although she's PIC, she doesn't enjoy flying cross country, so I get the left seat and leave her with the radios. All good for me. There's a little bit of fog and cloud around as we fly south, but nothing to interfere with safe VFR flight.

The Canada-US border takes a funny zig-zag course through the lakes, so as we continue south we cross into the US and then briefly we're back in Ontario overhead its namesake lake. That's now four out of five of the Great Lakes I have flown across the middle of. One more to go. There's something really exciting about flying across big stretches of open water for me. If I ever get a job flying ETOPS across oceans, I'm sure the excitement will wear off, but flying across an ocean will be very exciting for a while.

During the flight, my coworker is trying to plan the next leg. "Anywhere in particular you want to stop?" she asks. Other than the fact that I've never been to Arkansas, there is nothing pulling me to anywhere in particular. You see, in the US there are hundreds, possibly thousand of runways that can accommodate our airplane. Almost all of them have fuel and a town with a chain hotel. And one Hampton Inn or Super-8 is pretty much interchangeable with any other one, so it really really doesn't matter where we stop, as long as it's on the way. That's why my plan to visit a friend in Indiana was in no way abuse of company resources.

"I'm partial to the 'funny names' method of choosing a nightstop," I opine. "All else being equal, stay at the place with the silliest name." She is familiar with that technique and goes through the map and the airport info book, looking at possible stops. We discuss the relative silliness of our options. I should have written down some of the names. It's going to depend a bit on weather, so we don't make a final decision.

We can see the bad weather to the southeast for the whole trip, but we remain in the clear right through our descent into Akron. We're right on time and we don't even have to taxi to a customs area: the customs official comes to us at the FBO. He's friendly and quick. I hand him both sets of passports at the rear door and he looks at them quickly, verifies that the number printed on the customs sticker on our door matches the one on the paperwork and he's done with us. Woo! Akron goes on the 'good place to clear customs' list.

I'll break the blog entry here as we order fuel and go inside for flight planning and washrooms. The day continues next post.

Parlez Vous Airplane?

I sleep late, because I'm on the night shift today. My coworker did an AM flight so I'm on deck for the evening. There's supposed to be more snow on the way early tomorrow morning, a really heavy dump, in fact, and the customer wants to get lots of work done before it arrives. They're ready to go a couple of hours before dark.

The airplane is prepared and both engines start easily this time. When the engine temperatures are up, I taxi clear of the metal buildings and call ATC for clearance. The local controller coordinates with the terminal controller, who manages traffic coming into all the local airports, whether it's a C185 following the river from Hull or a triple-seven arriving from Europe. I'm cleared by the tower controller to climb straight out, with an altitude restriction, then given a vector, then a frequency change to terminal. Terminal wants more details on what I'm doing, then clears me on course. The sun is low in the sky behind me and I turn up the cockpit lights.

The cold air is very clear and as the world darkens, I can see the bright city lights for miles around. Montreal is an island in the St. Laurence River, so there is a black band around the city where the river flows, and then more lights of the suburbs. The physical barrier of the river has prevented urban sprawl, so a lot of the surrounding land is still agricultural. I remember from history class that while the English landowners willed their estates to the eldest son, leaving the younger sons to figure out something else to do with their lives, French landholders divided theirs amongst their sons, resulting in narrower and narrower strips still ending at the river. Before darkness falls I see what I suspect is the result of such land divisions, still existing northeast of the city.

When the sky has faded to black, I'm still not really doing night flying. You never really do in the south. There's always a city or town, if not right below you then within fifty miles, and the light allows you to distinguish up from down, and land from sky without recourse to the instruments. I'm working very close to Dorval, right through one of the busiest times of the evening, so I'm in constant contact with ATC. I try to maintain a mental three-dimensional picture of the airplanes they are handling, so that I spot the descending Airbus before they all with the traffic. It's tougher when half the calls are in French, though. It's bad enough not knowing reporting points, but don't know all the vocabulary I need to understand the calls, either.

ATC in the Montréal area is officially bilingual, with service available in English or French at the pilot's choice. You simply use your preferred language to make the initial call, and they continue to address you in that language. Air France pilots always seem to choose French. I wonder if they have any difficulty with the local accent. Air Canada pilots sometimes choose one and sometimes the other, probably based on the language they are most comfortable using in the cockpit. It is amusing listening to ATC change languages effortlessly, giving the same reporting points different names depending on who they are talking to. For example, most Canadians, whether speaking English or French, pronounce the town and airport of Saint-Hubert like san-too-bear, using the liason and silent H and T of the French. But to English-speaking pilots, the controller doesn't flinch to say saynt WHO-burt with English syllable stress and pronouncing every consonant. I ask to overfly Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, which I pronounce approximately san-ma-too-dbel-oy, and wait with bated breath to see if the official English pronunciation includes something like bell-OIL. Even the controller must have cringed at that thought, as he cleared me "direct Saint Matthew" and left it at that.

All the time I was flying in the Montréal area I only heard a controller flub the language once, making a traffic point out call to Air Wisconsin in French, but catching himself and then returning to perfectly accented English for the American carrier.

We finish the mission and secure the airplane for the night. It's supposed to snow all night, then turn to rain tomorrow and rain for a day before more clear weather.

Oh and I found this on the BBC website. It perfectly explains the anglophone in Québec.

The Canadian journalist Karl Mamer, author of a website on Franglais, says many Canadians speak "cereal box French", as they only get to practise it by reading the bilingual text on the back of the box in the morning.

When they then travel to French-speaking centres, like Montreal or Quebec City, their few words of French are used as a kind of peace offering to shopkeepers. He says they're thinking: "Look, I'm going to try speaking as much French as possible, showing you I'm making a sufficient effort, and then you please switch to your fluent English as soon as I've linguistically self-flagellated myself before you."

Slow Start

My most recent work rotation took me to Montréal, Québec, just in time for the first deep cold snap of the winter. The airplane was parked outside, with electric heaters in the engines and cabin and extension cords snaking across the ramp and through the snowbanks to the electrical outlets. My handover briefing from the pilot I relived included instructions to use only the outlets along the back fence--the ones to the side would blow fuses--and that I should come out and check the cords on non-flying days, as the FBO had more than once managed to unplug them. We were staying not at the city's major airport, the one named after a former Prime Minister, and not at the secondary airport, which once competed for passenger traffic but now has subsided into its role as a cargo hub, but at a smaller airport across the river. Canada doesn't have airports specializing in private jets the way the US does, so most of the airplanes on the ramp were flying school airplanes, giving us 'big airplane' status.

The first morning that I came out to fly was dark and cold and clear. Not that dark, because although midwinter dawn was hours off, we were in the environs of the second largest metropolitan area in the country, and there was a thin layer of snow over higher elevations, reflecting the city lights further than in the summer. As I left the hotel for the airport, the temperature on the most recent METAR was -20C. The cords were all still plugged in and the airplane warm inside. I put my gear in the warm cabin, complete my cockpit checks and then go back outside. I should have brought warmer gloves.

The airplane appeared to be in good condition, with no ice. One advantage of those temperatures is that the air is too dry to hold much water vapour, thus none deposits on the airframe. The tires were firm enough and not frozen to the ground. When I put my hand inside the engine cowling it feels warmer than outside. It would feel warmer anyway, because it's out of the wind, and it doesn't feel that warm, because there's only so much the heater can do against cold and wind, but it's the only way I have to measure that the block heaters have been working. I leave the engine tents wrapped around the cowlings until we're completely ready to go, then pull and stow them and hop aboard. First priority is to start the engines, then with the brakes set I can set up my cockpit the way I like it and fuss about with flight following and the like while the engines warm up.

I start with the right engine. Cowls are open. I set the engine controls, check that the propeller is clear, and press the starter. I wrote "key the starter" but that could confuse you, as there is no key, just a spring-loaded rocker switch. When I hold it down, it energizes a solenoid that closes the circuit connecting the aircraft battery to the right starter motor. I can hear the clunk of the solenoid engaging from the cockpit. The starter motor turns a little toothed Bendix cog, which engages with a flywheel and turns over the engine. I see the propeller go around once slowly, protesting the bitter cold, and the engine does not catch. Everything conspires against my starting an engine in the cold. The metal parts have contracted ever so slightly, so don't move against each other as well as they should. The oil that should facilitate that movement is a viscous sludge in the bottom of the crankcase. The motor that drives the rotation is powered by a battery which itself is less potent and has less endurance in the cold. And in Canada cold equals dark, which means the same battery is powering lights. I only have the legally required ones on now. I'll put the others on after the battery is charging.

I prime some more: the fuel won't evaporate as easily in this temperature, and the air is denser, so I need more liquid fuel to get the same combustible mixture in the cylinders. As the engine turns it should compress that mixture and energize the magnetoes which in turn are supposed to fire the spark plugs, igniting the compressed fuel and allowing the engine to run on its own, without the impetus of the wheezing starter. I key the starter again. Half a rotation and it stops. Rats.

When all else fails, start the other engine. A running engine drives an alternator to generate electricity and charge the battery. Both my starters share the same battery, so if I can get one engine going I can bootstrap the other. The left engine starts. I bite my lip and mentally whisper useless apologies to it as it clunks and misfires for several seconds, trying to find its rhythm. I wait for the oil pressure to come up, and slowly it does. The battery indicator shows charging. I wait a moment or three and double check all the switches for the right engine, then try it again. No joy. Sigh.

I run the left engine until the oil and cylinder head temperatures are in the green and the battery charge rate is zero. That way I'll have at least one engine I know I can start, then I shut everything down and wrap the left engine in the engine tent. I put the engine tent back on the misbehaving right engine too, for all the good it is going to do. There's no heat left in it. I can't find anything wrong visually. The propeller does turn through manually with resistance, but not so much resistance that it couldn't be explained by heavy pistons moving in cold sludgy cylinders. Or maybe not. I go into the FBO for help.

Montréal is a French-speaking city, but the aviation language is English and everyone at the FBO speaks it well or at least passably. I ask them for a ground power unit, which they can provide, and they also offer a Herman-Nelson machine, basically a giant blow dryer to heat up the engine. I drink tea inside while they run the forced air heater, then come out and pull the tents again to try a new start, With the engine warm and the battery bypassed to run the starter off a generator, the engine should start now.

With the starter engaged the propeller turns as slowly as before, and only one revolution. I happen to know that one ramp worker here is an apprentice aircraft mechanic, and he is working today. We communicate by handsignals and I shut everything down so he can turn the propeller and inspect. A few more tries, but no start. There's something wrong beside the cold.

There's a maintenance organization on the field that we have used before. I call and they have time to look at it, but not a lot of time. As luck would have it, there's another company airplane sitting idle here, with a bigger problem, so we have them pull the starter out of that one and put it in this one. That takes a few hours, everything does, so there's lunch and more waiting, and paperwork but we finally get out for a flight, one which takes me to the very last minute of my duty day, including an extra hour that my company op spec allows, provided I get extra rest the next day.