NOTAM of the Week

170201 CYCD NANAIMO HARBOUR(WATER)
CAC8 AD CLSD DUE BATHTUB RACE
1707011745 TIL 1707011815

Because apparently that's how Nanaimoians celebrate Canada Day.

Is The Best Part Taking Off?

A friend wrote today to congratulate me and my countrymen on the 106th anniversary of powered flight in Canada, and then he followed up to ask "is the best part taking off? I always imagine that the best part must always be taking off." And he's right.

You get in and put on your seatbelt and make sure everyone's settled and nothing is in the way, just like heading out for a car trip if you have multiple children inside and pets possibly running around outside. (Don't forget to preflight your car by banging on the hood to evict cats or squirrels that might be snuggling up to your engine block for warmth). You start the engines, and while each one springing into life and turning around is a little victory, especially when it's cold, that's only a little more triumphant than getting the car started. It's nice to see the oil pressure come up, the vacuum pumps show that they are online and sucking, and the alternators come on line and flip the polarity of the charge rate shown on the ammeter, but those are just steps in the preamble. Taxiing to the runway is a bit of a warm up for the pilot, just as the run-up is a warm up for the engines, but finally you're cleared into position on the runway. It's big, like a wide open stretch of three-lane highway with no traffic ahead of you and you know for sure no speed traps. Cleared for take off, you put in the power and feel acceleration, and the rumbling of the tires against the pavement. You keep the airplane aligned with the centreline with your feet. At the correct speed you pull back on the yoke and lift the nosewheel off just a little bit. You wait, and in a few seconds there is no more rumbling. You are in exactly the same attitude, slightly nose up, but now YOU ARE SUSPENDED IN AIR! That's the best part.

Take off is also the part where the most spectacular things can go wrong, so it’s very alert and exciting, as you have to watch all the indications to ensure that none of those things are going wrong, and mostly they don’t go wrong, so that’s a good part too. Imagine that every time before you merged onto the highway you were legally required to recite what you would do if a bad thing happened, so you were all psyched to do whatever one would do if a semi crossed two lanes and tried to take you out. And then you merged and nothing bad happened at all. It’s a mini celebration every time.

I can't imagine the multiplication factor for the thrill of taking off in the Silver Dart in 1909. The aircraft took off from an ice surface, but was on wheels, not skis.Tricycle gear with fairly large, spoked wheels. (On later flights the rear wheels were replaced with skids). The vibration on the take off roll must have been quite juddering. Sea ice is not smooth like a hockey rink and those wheels are not mounted on piston-like oleos the way mine are. The account says that the craft was airborne in about a hundred feet. It would have been very obvious to the pilot the instant the wheels left the ice. People were throwing their hats and mittens in the air. The pilot flew for about half a mile and landed back on the ice, quite gently by his own account.

While a smooth landing is satisfying, and harder to achieve in an airworthy craft than a smooth take off, anything can land. For millennia we could only dream of taking off.

My Job is Almost This Cool

Here's a quick look at how beautiful my country is in the winter, and at how obsessed we are with hockey. I get to fly over these same panoramas, and while we don't get to organize alpine lake hockey games, we do choose our restaurants on playoff nights to ensure we can see the games. We can also get the scores from air traffic control if we have to fly during a game. I know of at least one tower that used their local hockey team's name instead of a letter of the phonetic alphabet to designate the ATIS, just to oblige the pilot of the visiting team's jet to say it.

Yes, my job is nearly this cool, and often a lot colder. See them wearing toques in the helicopters? The other day I was wearing a full-on men's parka, complete with the stereotypical fur around the edge of the hood. The fur is removable, but when it's really cold, they haven't made an artificial material that stays soft and doesn't chafe your skin. (Ever notice how much of the really premium stuff is made by animals? Leather, fur, wool, silk, cream, steak, caviar ... I'm surprised there isn't a chocolate beetle).

That lake in the shot is amazing, before there are any skate marks or ice-testing holes on it. Often as we fly over lakes in late fall we're trying to gauge whether they are frozen or not. You see a little bit of white at the edge of the lake and it's difficult to tell if it's ice just beginning to form, or if it's a little bit of snow on the edge of a completely frozen lake. I'm glad it's never been my job to determine if one is safe to land on. Speaking of safety, before you criticize the flight safety involved in a helicopter playing hockey, see the behind-the-scenes planning from this blog entry.

Not Supposed to Say

I'm flying from point A to point B, and remarkably neither A nor B is named after an animal or a body of water. I'm not on a flight plan just "VFR company note" which means my company is in charge of reporting me missing if I don't turn up, and I have flight following which means I'm monitoring the frequency of a centre controller who occasionally looks at my blip on a radar screen and, time permitting, tells me if any other radar blips threaten mine. Presumably if my radar blip disappeared and I stopped talking to them they'd tell someone or make a note, too. At the very least, if I didn't turn up at destination and company reported me missing, they could examine the records (still called "pulling the tapes" as if they were recorded on tapes sitting on a shelf) and see where my blip was and whom I was talking to when I was last recorded as existing. As I cover ground, the controller whose frequency I am monitoring will eventually say, "Switch to my frequency 133.40," or "Contact such-and-such Centre now on 122.75." The same controller may be monitoring different frequencies and she moves me to the one with the best reception for where I am, or I'm moving out of her area and she is passing me on to the next sector. My information moves with me to the new sector so I just have to say my call sign and verify my altitude. They already know where I am going, but they verify it, because there are multiple airports in the same city. Another airplane checks in on the frequency. The controller gives him the altimeter setting and then it's quiet again. My headset detects silence, so lets the MP3 player sound into the earphones. (Currently playing Convoy, featuring another profession with radio jargon). The new check in comments on this, "Kinda quiet today." The controller agrees. "Getting the crossword done?" asks the pilot. "I'm not supposed to say," replies the controller, which was way more hilarious in the airplane than it seems right now. It was the way he said it, like he was really hiding some big secret. The controller passes me on to the next sector and I say to my coworker, "I should have asked him if he had figured out twenty-one across yet."

Calgary Sights & Heights

In an account that has drifted loose from the day in which it actually occurred, I will now describe a half day free of duty in Calgary. I e-mailed everyone who responded to my Lunch invitation and whose e-mail comes up when I search on "Calgary" or "YYC," to see if anyone is up for a short notice visit. If I didn't e-mail you, and you wish I had, send me an e-mail with the name and airport identifiers that I might be putting in if I were in your neck of the woods, and you never know. I might have a free day there sometime. I search everything with the label Lunch in my gmail account, looking for the name of the town or airport, so put more than one in if you like, and avoid mentioning places you're not in the same e-mail.

No one is available for the afternoon, so I go solo to investigate the things on the hill behind the hotel. They're ski lifts and ski jumps, leftovers from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. There's not enough snow left to ski--it's summer, after all--but there was enough to climb up a big pile of snow underneath the chairlifts and pretend I'm summitting Everest. Forgot my flag, though. I do climb up the whole hill. It's a little disorienting to find when I get to the top that the hill is really just an escarpment, and that there's a boring subdivision at the top, almost level with the top of the ski hill.

Along the ridge at the top of the ski hill there is a path that goes to the bases of a number of towers. They are the tops of ski jumps. You know when you see ski jumpingon TV and the person goes off the jump and sails through the air, bent forward over their skis into a human aerofoil? That sort of ski jump. The biggest two have elevators going to the top, but the others have stairs, and there's no gate nor "keep out" sign and it's all part of a public park. I walk on up. And up. And up. Maybe they just figured sightseeers wouldn't go up all those stairs. At the top there's a platform with that same potscrubber plastic stuff you get at the loading and unloading area of ski-lifts. There's a bar to hang onto as you position yourself at the top of the ski jump. And there's the steep, steep, precipitous drop. It's kind of freaky and at the same time flattering that the Calgary parksboard thinks highly enough of me to trust me to behave safely up here. I'm a little surprised that no one has killed themselves trying to mountain bike down the ski jump, for example. The amount more daring and less common sense than me that it would take to think that was worth trying is well within human variation. Or a mickey of Crown Royal.

I go down the wooden stairs along the side of the ski jump and then back to the hotel. During dinner, Carlos replies to my call for locals. Remember Carlos? He guest-blogged about a high tech cement mixer he drove. I look it up and that was 2007. I guess a few very loyal readers may do. He lives in Calgary now and has time before his next shift to squire me around the city. He comes by in a low-slung car, definitely not a dump truck and we head downtown. He's rocking the aviator sunglasses and the Latin flair as he points out the Bow River trails and other sights during the drive.

We start off at the Calgary Tower. Every city has to have its phallic symbol. There's an elevator, so I don't have to walk up the stairs. At the top is a similarly dizzying view, with better safety features. There's a glass floor and we entertain ourselves "balancing" on the girders within it, and jumping into the "spaces." It's a fun game of mind over mind, to use the logical part of the brain to overrule the more instinctive part, the one that says, "there's no FLOOR there!" Then we walk all the way around the tower, looking at the landscape. We can see the Rocky Mountains, the suburbs, the airport, along with arrivals and departures, and some of the downtown. Part of the view from the tower is blocked by a tall building that wasn't there when the tower was built. Ironically, it't the same building the controller wouldn't give me permission to overfly at 7,100' a few weeks ago. Now I get a better look at it, closer to the ground. Carlos also explains his crazy scheme to learn to fly and build time as a commercial bush pilot in South America. I realize at this moment that we were so busy discussing his plans that I never got around to telling him that I might be working there this winter. Now he's going to kill me.

Back at ground level it's too late (i.e. within twelve hours of my report time) to have a drink at Carlos' favourite bar, so he vows to find me some dessert. He consults with his dispatcher from work while driving around the city. It's amusingly similar to me trying to get airport information from the FSS while in descent. It's late enough that the best bet turns out to be Dairy Queen, so Carlos pulls up to some young ladies on the sidewalk, cranks the charm up a several notches and gets directions to the nearest. Ice cream doesn't have to be fancy to be good, and this was quick and delicious to get me home in time for my required duty rest.

I remember asking Carlos if he wanted me to hold anything back in my description of the evening, and he said to go ahead and tell it like it was, so I must have been planning to mock him for something, but I've forgotten what it was. Probably his driving. I don't think I screamed at all though, so it's all good.

It's funny sometimes, that a guy doing his best to impress you might not come off as the most impressive, but it makes a girl feel good that he's going to the effort, so in the end she's happy. Carlos was tired and busy, but he postponed some important tasks to make sure I felt welcome and had a great time in Calgary. Yeah, tip for everyone: spend more effort making the person you're with feel important than making them believe that you are important. That takes me right back to some advice I received may years ago from another Albertan: "stop trying to show people how smart you are, and concentrate on letting them see how nice you are." It's a rare friend who will offer constructive criticism that requires them to point out your personality flaws. I don't know where he is now, but if you're out there, K'Harv, you know who you are.

Carlos came to Canada from Colombia and over the past few years I have had the privilege of witnessing his gradual mastery of the English language and his pride in his new country through our e-mail correspondence. He teased me with a put-on accent when I remarked on having expected one. He sounds almost like he was born here now. He's even writing eloquent letters to the CBC, and just had an excerpt from one on climate change read on-air on a province-wide show. You can listen to it via podcast (at minute 20:34), or read the unedited version at his new blog. He notes that the units for the diesel consumption mentioned in the letter read on air should be km/liter, not liters per kilometers.

I'm proud to have friends who stand up and speak out for what they believe in.

All I Need To Know

I'm getting teased by my friends for having a tissue-paper airplane, and for making confusing statements like "I hope it rains on Friday so I can go to the park." It's a little odd being in an operation that depends on perfect weather, when many of the real pilot skills are about dealing with imperfect weather. It's also a new thing for me to look at a GFA calling for scattered cloud at 10,000', and have that be unsuitable weather. It's similar to the adaptation you make when you go from VFR flying to IFR flying. In that transition you look at weather that was once unquestionably unflyable and you have to further analyze it to see if the icing en route and the ceilings at destination might still allow flight. I guess in every operation you divide weather into "totally unflyable," "great," and "hmm, lets see if there's a way we can do it." Those two dividers slide around a long way, depending on the nature of the operation and the experience of the pilot.

I was amused by these URLs, which I discovered by accident when I idly typed my guestion of the day into Google's search bar.

http://goingtorain.com/
http://isitgoingtoraintomorrow.com/
and
http://isitgoingtoraintoday.com/

Large print, simple, binary, no complicated decoding. It even detects where I am correctly, except when I'm on VOIP Internet at a shack beside a runway and it thinks I'm in Montréal. I think single purpose URLs like that are hilarious. I regularly visit Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue and I have no idea why. I don't know whether Am I Awesome serves more than one answer, but it said I was "Very" so that's good enough for me.

More On That Dot

Reader Sarah found this lolcat for me, a perfect laugh at the end of a long day of chasing the red dot, trying to keep it green. Fortunately they can't make me stay late, because we need a sun angle of at least 38 degrees for the work.

It's kind of fun, really, chasing the dots, trying to keep everything as good as it can be, and still having ATC agree to what we ask. And not running out of fuel. And not having to pee before I land. The basics.

Hey, Swimsuits!

I wasn't going to post anything today, so if women in swimsuits and inappropriate-for-the-beach shoes is not your thing, wait until tomorrow and you're not missing anything. If you like to look at pictures of scantily-clad women, then click over here and check out the parade of women with absolutely no bruises or scars. Can you imagine if your job depended on being that flawless? I worry about being in the field scheduled to work and getting diarrhea or coming down with a fever. With a little plastic surgery my belly button could look that perfect. (Ladies, when choosing an obstetrician, ask them to demonstrate their knot-tying skills. I mean honestly how does page three there get that neat perfect dimple in the middle of her belly, when my mother's obstetrician was evidently practising his sheepshank?) But forget belly button envy, I am never going to spend a day with no bruises or scratches anywhere on my body as revealed by a swimsuit.

They're pretty to look at though. I've got a suit kind of like page seven, plus the sense not to wear orange eyeshadow, so I'm way ahead. I'm also glad my job doesn't involve being photographed at the angle shown in number twelve. If you're tall and naturally skinny, go ahead and be a fashion model for a few years. You can use the money to pay for flight school which will allow you to wear more comfortable shoes for your job. You'll still get groped at work, but at least you won't be wearing a bathing suit that's too small and mess of faux pearls.

No actual nudity or toplessness there, but if your workplace is worried about that sort of thing, they might not like swimsuit models either.

Metaphors for Life

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

---

Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

SouvenAIRs

Company has rush-ordered a new heater, we're almost due for scheduled maintenance, and the weather is turning bad all over the province, and it's already bad in the neighbouring ones. It's a rare convergence of circumstances that suggest so strongly that we fly the airplane back to base, so we check out of yet another hotel and fly home VFR.

The co-owner welcomes us in, then I tidy up the airplane. I don't track down a vacuum cleaner before closing time, but I do neaten up the seatbelts, pick all the muffin crumbs out of the carpet, find my headset bag and stow my headset in it, and refold all the charts properly and sort them all back neatly in the racks where they can be reached for the next flight. When I'm travelling with an airplane, a lot of garbage ends up in locker where I store cleaning supplies. That's because I'll be preflighting, open that locker to get out a cloth and 210 spray (a type of plastic polish for airplane windshields), clean the windows, and toss the spray bottle and used wipe back in. Then I'll check the oil, get out a funnel and a couple of litres of oil. They're actually 946 mL, a quarter of a US gallon: that's the standard size all over North America, and it looks like even in Europe, maybe because the crankcases on American-made airplanes hold an even number of US quarts. Anyway, we call them litres, even though they aren't. I'll add the required oil, then when I get tired of waiting for the last drips to come out of the bottle into the crankcase, I put the lid back on the bottle tightly, and toss the bottle in the locker with the funnel and the other empties. Empty bottles don't weight much and the home airport has some kind of environmental disposal for them, so rather than run around a strange apron looking for a FOD bin, I haul them all home.

As I do so, I'm always amused by the way the bulging and squashed sides of the various bottles tell the story of the trip. Putting the cap on tightly seals in those few millilitres that didn't drip out while the bottle was inverted over the crankcase, but mostly what it seals in is air. Air at the pressure of the aerodrome where I added the oil. If it's a sea level airport, the sides of the bottle bulge out at higher elevations. If it's a mountain airport, pressure at a lower elevation crushes the bottle. I'm easily amused.

I clean things up best I can, report the minor snags (right engine has almost double the oil consumption to the left, noticeable split in the throttles to maintain equal manifold pressure above 10,000', and some hydraulic seepage). Then I am "released" from call for a few days. This will give me time to get my camera repaired, take my friend's kids to the amusement park as I've been promising for so long, and do my laundry.

Back soon with clean underwear!

---

On the subject of this stun gun, it's interesting to see that the seatback pockets are the same security hole for JetBlue as they were for Victory Airways. Whenever we'd boarded with something that wouldn't get through security, but we were going south, we'd pop it in the seatback pocket, get off and go through security and have it waiting for us back on board. CATSA never swept the airplane itself.

Yay! Fireworks!

I didn't have time to post this when it belonged, so I'll post it for my American friends, who celebrate their national day today.

CZEG PURSUANT TO SECTION 5.1 OF THE AERONAUTICS ACT, THE AIRSPACE WITHIN 0.5 NM RADIUS 533141N 1133037W (KINSMEN PARK, APRX 3 NM SSE EDMONTON CITY CENTRE(BLATCHFORD FIELD) AD) IS RESTRICTED DRG FIREWORKS ACT. SFC TO 3600 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA DESCRIBED UNLESS THE FLT IS AUTH BY EDMONTON TML FREQ 119.5 1107020455 TIL 1107020555

1107020455 TIL 1107020555 was the evening of July 1st, the 144th anniversary of my country being founded, and we get our faces painted, wave little paper flags, have a day off work during which we often barbecue something or attend a street festival, and then set off fireworks to celebrate. Except for places where it's not dark enough for fireworks in midsummer, so they save them for Hallowe'en or New Year's.

Happy everything that you like to celebrate with firewooks, food, fun and friends.

First Full Day of Summer

Today (that is the UTC day, not necessarily your local day) is the first full day of summer. In the latitudes I have been operating in there was snow a couple of weeks before, and it doesn't mean there won't be snow tomorrow, but the sun has set once since it had its moment overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and will remain north of the equator until the equinox in September. Yes, it's odd that we've settled on what is also known as Midsummer's Day as the beginning of summer, but it is pretty close to marking the date of the beginning of warm weather in the northern hemisphere.

As announced earlier, today is also the date SunglassesShop.com is sponsoring a contest in which you can win a pair of SXUC mirrored aviator-style sunglasses, specifically these ones. SunglassesShop.com sells expensive brands, as well, but the website copy makes it clear that SXUC is not an expensive brand, just fun, but they do have UV400 protection. (For work I use expensive sunglasses, but when I'm not working I typically wear sunglasses in about this price so that I won't scream in pain when they get sat on, scratched, or lost. I get my optometrist to verify that they have the advertised UV protection, and he puts them in a machine and tells me they do, even though he's the one who sells me the expensive sunglasses).

After considering various options for the workings of a contest, I've decided that we will play nosewheel roulette. On my next flight, I will mark and photograph a chalk line on the left side of the lowest point of my nosewheel tire during preflight. Then I will taxi, take-off, fly an entire flight and return to parking, at which point I will disembark and re-examine the chalk mark. Your task is to predict how many centimetres clockwise around the circumference of the tire the chalk mark will appear once the airplane is stopped. This may be at the fuel pumps or it may be at the final parking location, wherever I first get an opportunity to photograph and measure it for you.

The total circumference of the tire is 128 centimetres, giving a giant roulette wheel with 128 possibilities, from zero to 127. Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses. Your e-mail should contain the same guess, so I don't need to sort out which Anonymous or which David is which, when I need to contact you for your mailing address. You can also save that step and put your mailing address in the e-mail. I won't use it for anything except maybe sending you a postcard sometime, unless you win in which case I will send it to SunglassesShop.com so they can send you your prize. If you live underground and don't need sunglasses, or want to play for glory only, and prefer to cede your prize to the next runner up, you can put that in the e-mail too.

Don't pick a number someone else has chosen, because I'll give priority to the person whose comment appears first. If two guesses are equidistant either side of the correct location, that's okay because there are two pairs of sunglasses available to be won. If there is some added complication I haven't thought of, I'll do my best to be fair.

There will also be a booby prize for the entry furthest from correct. The booby prize is a second-hand (or possibly more) aviation-themed decorative towel in extremely questionable taste. Someone sent it to me and after I looked at it, it went right back into the envelope waiting for its next victim.

Autocow

I went to an agricultural fair recently. You know the sort I mean? With cows and pigs, and games where you try to throw a dart to win a giant stuffed dog, brightly coloured spinny rides with loud music, and cotton candy and barrel racing. I was describing the events of the day to a friend, when I realized I remembered all the animal pictures (you were supposed to "collect" them on a checklist, but I didn't bother) displayed inside a maze made of straw bales, and I could recite biographical information on the various cows I saw. Why did my brain choose to store that? That storage capacity would be much better occupied by information on how to ensure my autopilot doesn't fly me into a tree today. I got it to work well once, but ever since when I have tried to engage it, it is excessively pitchy.

Perhaps if my autopilot had clear operating instructions printed on the side of a cow I would have as firm a grasp of its use. Mind you, if only my autopilot had clear operating instructions, I might have a firm grasp of its use. It has vague operating instructions, without pictures, and leaves the rest to experimentation. For example, I don't really know if there is a tree-seeking mode, or if there is something specific I must do to disable it. That's the sort of thing I'd expect an autopilot instruction manual to be clear about, if I hadn't read this one.

It has approximately five on/off switches. There's a large rocker switch for roll, square push on-push off buttons for heading, altitude, and something else not clearly specified on its switch, but probably pitch, plus a separate wing leveller. That's five, or it's six if you count the red pushbutton on the yoke, which doesn't work quite the way I expected.

Roll is the basic mode. There is a left-right roll knob, like balance on an old stereo system. You're supposed to centre that knob, toggle the heading lock button off, and engage the roll rocker switch. The airplane should now roll up to a 30 degree bank angle in response to turning the roll knob. If you toggle the heading lock on, bank should be restricted to twenty degrees.

Pitch only works when roll is already engaged. You're supposed to disengage the altitude on/off push button and centre the pitch "command disc," a vertically-mounted edge-on wheel with a flat spot that presumably represents the centre position. It tells me "with the airplane in level flight," implying that this isn't something I can do on the ground before takeoff, to rotate the altitude selector DN/UP knob (looks just like the roll knob) until the trim UP/DN indicator is level. The trim UP/DN indicator is a tippy line in a circle. The instructions next say to calibrate the altitude indicator to match the altimeter by rotating the knurled altitude indicator dial. The altitude indicator is a wide vertically mounted edge-on white plastic wheel with numbers on it representing altitudes, and intermediate lines between them. One edge of it has knurled ridges, so you can change which altitude is displayed, but it doesn't go that far. When I was at 8000' it was displaying 13,500' and I could only coax it down to 12,000'. Just two more steps: rotate the altitude selector knob to select the desired altitude and finally push the altitude preselect button to ON.

The pilot can trim the airplane with either the trim crank or the electric trim on the yoke, but trimming is automatic when the pitch section of the autopilot is engaged. There is a pitch trim warning light which should illuminate if the pitch is out of trim for four seconds while the pitch section of the autopilot is engaged. To me this could mean inoperative trim, runaway trim or possibly some balance problem with the trim surface such as ice accretion. You shouldn't use an autopilot in icing conditions.

Wing Leveller: The manufacturer has given this a cutsie name, shared by a passenger briefing system and a kind of torque converter, obscuring for the pilot what this function is supposed to do, but the hints that it is approved for use during take off and landing and is automatically disengaged by selecting the roll rocker switch suggest to me that it's a simple wing leveller. The pilot is advised that to make turns using this mode, she should press and hold the the off button on the control wheel, make the turn and then release the off button to re-engage the wing leveller. That would be the first 'momentary off' yoke-mounted autopilot disconnect button I've ever encountered. It looks to me as though the wing leveller mode is needed because the rest of the system is so crazy that it can't be momentarily engaged so the pilot can take her sweater off.

The instructions do summarize this in a way that sounds simple:

• trim airplane
• engage wing leveller
• ensure directional gyro and artificial horizon are functioning properly
• engage roll section
• engage pitch section

My issue has been that there is so much pitching that I can't troubleshoot it with someone in the back.

There is also an array of navigational functions that the autopilot can be selected to follow. There's heading, to follow the heading bug, OMNI and NAV to track the selected radial on the VOR receiver with approach or en route precision respectively, and there's a LOC and BC mode, which I've had no chance to check. There's also a glide slope coupler, and curiously, the instructions imply that the landing gear must be extended in order to use this mode. Or perhaps they just figure that extending the landing gear is such a good idea they will include it in the instructions.

There is also a procedure to ground check the systems before flight.

Turn everything off. Engage the roll rocker switch and rotate the roll knob full left and right. The yoke should follow. Centre the knob.

Rotate the pitch command disk full DOWN and full UP and see that the control column similarly moves fore and aft. Then centre the disc.

Engage the pitch function and hold the press-to-test for the trim warning indicator. After four seconds it should illuminate.

Ensure autopilot disengaged before takeoff.

I'm going to need a pretty big cow for all this, aren't I? I wish I were as resistant to stress as Highland cattle claimed to be on their info card.

Update: I've since found some better instructions, and seem to have better control of it now.

Happy Winter Holiday

This post is scheduled as the sun is directly overhead the Tropic of Capricorn, giving northerners like me the darkest day and the beginning of the return to longer days. No, I have no pagan upbringing. I like physics and I like understanding the model of the solar system that allows for a simple explanation of seasons, day length, and apparent solar and lunar positions. As far as I'm concerned, the reversing of the seasons is like the reversing of the Tonlé Sap river, an obvious reason to celebrate. Lots of people celebrate lots of things, about this time of year, and many of their festivals involve lights, probably influenced in timing if not in substance by the beginning of the end of the winter darkness.

I feel a little improper pronouncing to people what is in effect the blessing of a religion I don't strictly follow. Of course I do it sometimes, just as in Cambodia I gave many polite greetings and gestures that I didn't have the cultural or linguistic background to understand. I'm feel equally hypocritical wishing someone a happy Hanukkah or giving them Diwali greetings. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing so, nor in giving a religious greeting to someone who doesn't follow the corresponding faith. One Christian I know assured me that, despite the antics of some of his coreligionists, it is okay by him that not every joyous greeting or commercial activity in the entire month of December is labelled with the name of his God. In that vein, I will simply thank you all for reading, commenting, correcting, informing, and participating in what has turned into a quasi-community that I have the honour to host. I'm especially grateful to everyone who donated to the Cambodia effort, and I promise to continue telling you all about that next year.

I'll be back just before New Year's to see how I did on resolutions this year. I know already it's "badly," but a tradition is a tradition. It made me disproportionately happy when reader GPS Direct rolled off a list of silly and serious descriptors of me and admitted to knowing what my usual end-of-year topics would be. I think I didn't yet have "having people remember something about me" on my list of things that make me happy, but it should have been there. Thank you all for remembering my URL well enough to keep checking up on me for all this time.

In the meantime, enjoy anything you like to celebrate, and please keep an eye out for people for whom this is a season of pressure and loneliness. If you are someone who hopes only to survive this season, please hang on, and know that I at least am not expecting you to be automatically filled with joy and happiness just because of the date on the calendar, or the position of the sun with respect to the equator.

Markets and Festivals

The hotel includes a breakfast buffet consisting of some western food and some local foods: baguettes, real French (as in imported from France) butter, sliced pancakes, French toast, fried eggs, noodles with chicken, fried rice with vegetables, fruit juice, and excellent coffee. The noodle dish and the baguettes were really good. The French colonial masters burdened this country with their style of bureaucracy (there's a reason that word has a French origin) but tempered that with French architecture, city planning and baking. Parts of the city are reminiscent of New Orleans, which is only odd until you realize that the French had a hand in both places.

After breakfast a group of us hire a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle with a trailer (seats four Canadians, or approximately fourteen Cambodians plus a live pig) to take us to the Russian market. I suppose the market takes its name from communist times, either because manufactured goods were mainly imported from the Soviet Union or because the Russians were the ones who had the money to shop there. It's now a huge complex, not a mall, just a whole lot of ordinary vendor stalls grouped along dark, narrow aisles by type of product and absolutely spilling over with manufactured goods and foodstuffs of every description. At the entrance we came in, the vendors had tourist stuff like t-shirts of the local signs and beer brands. I can't remember if slogans went quite as low as "Someone I know went to Cambodia and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" but it wouldn't have been out of place. I remember being startled by a sandals stand, because all the shoes were displayed with fake feet in them. A young man is selling large silk cloths embroidered with elephants and his come-on describing their use amuses me because he is accidentally demonstrating a feature of the Khmer language that is confounding me. There are two separate b sounds, one like English and one that does not involve exhalation of breath. The phoneme is written in my guidebook as "bp" and I can hear the young man urging me to consider his product as a "bped cover" or "tabple cover." I have lately noticed the decrepit condition of the things covering both my bped and tabple, and they are both reasonably priced and gorgeous, so after a little bargaining I have two for $12. Other people try to sell us jewellery, scarves, wooden carvings, pretty boxes, incense, handbags, books, and more. I'm not sure if it's cooler inside the market than outside because of the shade, or hotter inside than out because of the confinement. It's hot, maybe mid-thirties. I buy a light wraparound skirt and a top that matches.

While I am negotiating for the skirt and top, a woman comes up selling cards made by landmine victims. The country is absolutely riddled with landmines that not even the soldiers who laid them have records of. Someone who tries to care for his family by clearing land for crops or grazing may end up crippled by a mine. The woman is herself a victim of something, not a mine, but she has been severely burned. Her eyes have been spared, but the flesh of her nose is completely burned away and I can see mottled scar tissue down her chest, too. Could be a cooking accident or maybe an acid attack. It's something you see, and then stop seeing, because she doesn't physically carry herself like a person disfigured, or otherwise seem to expect anyone to waste any time over it. I look at the cards. They are watercolours of local scenes. I ask if there are any with tigers, or other animals. I like tigers. There aren't, but she flips through and points out oxen and birds in various scenes. The cards are pretty, and I need something to send home anyway, so I buy a package of ten. She counts out ten envelopes to go with them. If you sponsored the house building project and requested a postcard, you may have received it in an envelope with one of these cards. And these stamps.

I've seen people wearing thongs (the shoes that have a strap between the toes) with socks here: they have special socks with one toe. I ask the vendor if she sells those, or knows who does, and she tells the landmine card woman where. I follow her through the various aisles of the market in search of the right socks. At one point she leaves me and comes back with a vendor and socks, and I choose a couple of pairs. It's good to be able to wear thongs, yet have some protection against sun and blisters. And I like strange socks.

We wander through the aisles of the market some more, switching from shopping to sightseeing. We have seen enough repeats of the same carvings and crafts that we realize we'll see these all over the country and don't need to buy right away even if we see something we want. The card woman comes back and finds us again, this time with an armload of placemats featuring tigers. They would have been the best thing ever when I was about nine years old, as they are plastic and feature 3D images, with lots of depth, the tigers jumping right out of the jungle at you. My tastes have moved on a little since then and I have to turn her down, but I'm impressed and appreciative. If you go to a place like this, a personal shopper is pretty useful. In some cases a tuk-tuk driver will be able to come and help you find or ask for what you need.

We wander deeper into the market and find ourselves in the food market area. A lot of the food is still alive, fish flopping in baskets and shrimp escaping down the corridors. There's no refrigeration, meat just hangs on hooks the same way handbags and second hand car parts do in their respective parts of the market. The meat picture is by permission of my roommate who has more skill and a fancier camera than I do. Mine wasn't capable of capturing images at the light level inside the market.

We get back in the tuk-tuk and go to another market, the Olympic market. This one is in an actual two-story building as opposed to an area mostly roofed in patchwork tin. There I buy another suitcase, as it's already evident that souvenirs are going to overwhelm the one I brought, and a pair of light cotton trousers labelled XL, and falling to about mid-shin on me. I'm not entirely sure they were designed as capri pants, but they'll serve that function for me. It's a conservative country and we've been warned not to wear shorts or tank tops, especially in the village. I don't really want to wear shorts, and risk getting that much sunburn, anyway.

It's time for lunch. We buy a couple of pastries from a stall on the ground floor, and then go outside and look at the food displayed there. There are a lot of dried fish, and they smell good, but they are entire large fish, or dried really hard such that they would have to be boiled to be reconstituted. They are such interesting shapes. I'm reminded of the discovery of the coealacanth. Only the fishermen who caught this stuff know what wonders lurk in the Tonlé Sap. We buy a couple of meals by pointing at things displayed and then nodding in response to questions we don't understand. Between us we have fish with noodles and a variety of fried things with rice. The food is displayed on the counter and then they deep fry it after you select it. It's tasty and we have delicious coconut pastries for dessert.

In the afternoon we go to Wat Phnom, the hill temple, as are many of the people in town for the water festival. It's not an ancient temple, but it's probably an ancient site, the latest of many rebuildings. The whole scene is completely analogous to any number of public holiday events I've attended in good weather in Canada or the US: lots of people in a park with things to buy and eat and just milling around smiling at people. There's a big garden clock near the base of the hill, paths up to the temple at the top, and vendors all around the paths at the base.

First we go up the hill. There's an admission fee of one dollar for foreigners. We'll see this kind of thing a lot, and I don't have any problem with contributing my share to something the others probably support with their taxes. Right after I pay my dollar, for which I receive a receipt, an old woman in white robes offers to tie a red string around my wrist. For a moment I think this is the equivalent of a fairground plastic wristband or hand stamp, and then realize as it's being tied that it's an optional service, a good luck blessing in return for a donation. It even matches my hatband, and the donation is about 30 cents Canadian.

At the top of the hill is a tiled terrace and a roofed pagoda housing a large number of Buddha statues. I take off my shoes on the terrace and realize that as this is a culture where you take your shoes off indoors, even in public places, the floors are very important. The texture of the terrace is very interesting to my feet and I'm glad to feel it. I wonder what else my feet have missed. Inside the pagoda there are musicians playing on the concave xylophones we saw at the restaurant, people praying (kneeling and bowing low with their hands pressed together fingertip to fingertip and palm to palm), people leaving offerings of fruit, flowers and money on and around the buddhas, and incense burning in pots of sand. We go back outside on the terrace and wander down the paths on the other side. There is another smaller temple a little lower down on the hill, with Chinese-language banners.

At the base of the hill is the most exciting part, the food. We didn't know what most of it was, and didn't have enough language in common with the vendors to ask. A popular item was eggs containing half-developed foetal chicks. I don't think there was ever any possibility of us deciding to sample those. A borderline item was what looked like very large frogs barbecued while held in split bamboo sticks. While trying to rationalize these we discussed our own fairground food. "They're frogs-on-a-stick, like corndogs ... cornfrogs!" We did not sample cornfrogs at this time. Our excuse was that a group meal was planned, and we didn't want to spoil our dinners. We did try some kind of roasted insect, they looked like grasshoppers or crickets. They looked exactly like grasshoppers or crickets, large ones, too. They were tasty, spiced with something good, but the hard parts of the insect stuck in my teeth for hours, the way the seed coating does with popcorn.

We just had fun walking around and looking. At one point I felt a hand and turned, suspecting a pickpocket, but it was a little kid being carried who had just reached out from mom's shoulder to investigate this strange milk-coloured person. When I turned, mom realized what was going on and stopped him, but I smiled to show no offence taken and then we all laughed and the kid turned shy. We sat down on the base of a statue to eat and people watch. A family came up to sit next to us and I made sure I made room for them all, but the littlest girl obviously wasn't sure she wanted to sit next to the scary foreign people, and sat on mom's lap. I caught a Khmer word I knew, thom meaning big and a gesture around the end of the mother's characteristic flat nose. They were discussing the looks of these peculiar strangers. I grinned and echoed the word and gesture with my own nose. Djaa, yes, I agreed, inducing giggling in the kids. I don't actually have a big nose, by Western standards, but it's not flat and broad like theirs, either.

I bought a small bag of crickets to take back and share, but got few takers. Not knowing the shelf life of roasted insects, nor how to tell if they have gone bad, I threw some away. That's the first time I've felt badly about putting dead bugs in a garbage can.

Dinner is at the FCC --Foreign Correspondents' Club-- obviously a fairly longtime enclave of privileged foreigners amongst the natives. I imagine it's the sort of place one can get a gin and tonic. I'd rather get frog-on-a-stick or barbecued Mekong eel or something else I've never seen before, but I also want to bond with my team, so a European meal won't hurt me. There's a group walking and another group taking tuk-tuks to the FCC. I elect to go with the walkers, but somehow get my times crossed and miss their departure time. Never mind, I'm a fast walker. I get directions and set out. "Straight down the main boulevard to the river, then turn left and just ask for the FCC. Everyone knows where it is." I clarify that it is the Foreign Correspondents' Club or if it has another local name, and am told no, just say "Eff-See-See," they'll understand.

The main street quickly becomes extremely congested with people, mostly walking, but a few embedded in the crowd on bicycles and motos, and occasionally beggars sitting on the ground in the midst of it all. The streets are partly taken up with booths, selling food, or mobile phone services, or things I can't figure out because I don't read Khmer. Again it's typical festival booths, just translated into a different culture. Many of the booths are blaring music or announcements. One might be a bingo game as I recognize a lot of numbers being said. Or maybe when numbers constitute over half the words you know in a language, everything sounds like a number. There are too many people on the street to move at a normal walking pace, but I've given myself almost an hour to go a couple of kilometres, and it looks as if I'll need every minute in this crowd.

I can see a decorated bridge ahead with people standing on it. (Fortunately I'm tall and everyone here is short, so I can see well, even in big crowds). That must be the river. As I try to keep going forward towards it, I'm not certain that it's a road that continues this way. I may be in a riverside park now. There is a Ferris wheel and other fairground equipment straight ahead, but I think that may be on the other side of the river. I turn left. There is too much noise from all the loudspeakers for me to easily ask anyone about the FCC, so I just go a couple of blocks, looking. There's a gated building with a security guard but while he's clearly willing to be helpful he doesn't understand my guidebook Khmer rendition of "Please, where is the FCC?" The thronging crowd presses me up against a metal barricade across the road, but I just need to make my way across to the gap in the fence. It's a roadblock stopping vehicles from coming this far into the festival. I repeat my FCC query to a police officer who is supervising the crowd, but he doesn't know either. He finds me another officer who speaks some English, but he also does not know what is this FCC of which I speak. He wants to know if it is a hotel. "It's a restaurant." It might be a hotel. "It's a big restaurant, lots of Europeans there." Europeans means white people here, the way Africans means black people in the US. I get uncertain directions to continue the way I am going. It's possible that there are out-of-town cops here for the festival, but this is the biggest city in the country. Most of them must be from here.

A few blocks later--or maybe it was half a block and just felt like a block--I spot a tourist information building. They speak English and have heard of the FCC. They mark it on a map and say it's about four hundred metres on, just past the National Palace. These sound like great directions and it's only when I'm back in the thick of the crowd that I realize that I can't see any street signs because of the crowd, that everything in this country looks like a national palace to me, and I couldn't read the words National Palace in Khmer if they were suspended on a two metre wide banner over my head. Which they probably are, but it's getting kind of dark now.

The river is on the right and I can see incredibly decorated barges sailing back and forth. Each barge has a superstructure which must be the height of a three-storey building, depicting a temple or a Buddha or a goddess, all illuminated with electric lights, probably LEDs judging by the precision and brightness of the lettering and designs. This festival dates back at least to the eleventh century and probably to the seventh, so at one time these boats must have been decorated with candles or bonfires or something. I pass something that looks like it could be a national palace, so I study my map. Wait, according to this map, either the FCC is on the other side of the street, in the other direction, or the person marked the map incorrectly. I think the last. I make my way to the sidewalk and ask again. A "European" (actually, judging by the accent, a southern United Statesian) is in earshot of my question and he knows where the FCC is. I suspect that my informant's "everybody" (who knows where the FCC is) consists of all European-descended people who have been in Phnom Penh more than two days. He didn't consider that I was going to ask locals. Silly Aviatrix. I'm told now that the FCC is about another block on, on the right, big white building, can't miss it. So I relax about being able to find it and struggle slowly through the crowd, appreciating the festival for a bit longer. It's remarkable how quickly it gets dark in the tropics. Fireworks start over the river. I know I'm late now, as part of the purpose of going to the FCC was to see the fireworks from their balcony. I hope they aren't worried about me.

After what I'm sure is well over four hundred metres past the tourist place and more than a block past the American, I still haven't found a big white building that says FCC or Foreign Correspondents' Club, so I ask again, this time smartening up and asking a white person. A New Zealand accent tells me that it's back the way I came, "You could miss it." This time I don't. It's easier to see from this direction, being kind of halfway around the corner onto the side street. By the time I arrive, everyone has pretty much finished their dinners. Some people were worried about me, but the group leader knew me well enough that he was fully confident I'd turn up eventually, so it wasn't too bad. I apologize for my tardiness and get a great meal out of sampling other people's leftovers. There are geckos running across the ceiling eating bugs. I wonder if they would have liked my spicy roasted crickets.

We all walk home together, as it's now much too crowded to get any kind of taxi or tuk-tuk down here. We start out on some back roads, which aren't too bad, and must have been the way the other walking party came, but then we merge with the main road and it's even more packed than it was on the way down. Now it's like the area in front of the stage at a concert, hot, everyone pressed up against one another and happy, smiling. Lots of people step on my feet, but they're all wearing sandals or thongs and they don't weigh very much. The motorcycle going over my toes is going to leave a mark, though. It gets to a point where we can hardly move at all. We've been trying to go the short half block from the main street to our hotel street for over half an hour. It's disconcerting when I realize that there are some food vending carts in the crowd--and I know the technology they use to heat things on the card is concrete pots of hot coals. We're packed tightly enough that there could be a real problem here. I don't know enough to Khmer to be able to yell something useful to prevent people from pushing forward if there was fire, or a child fallen, or something. There's a car embedded in the crowd near me. I could jump on it and grab children up to safety, hope people understood. I know how to say "Help me," and as there are no noun or pronoun cases in the language and it follows strict SVO word order, I can reverse that to declare "I help." A siren starts to wail and I realize that one of the embedded vehicles is an ambulance. There's not a chance of it moving. There's nowhere to get out of the way. People walking with bicycles or astride motos make it impossible for the crowd to push sideways, and there isn't any room anyway. We're already right out to the sides of the street. "Now you see why I was late!" I explain to the people still within earshot, but admit that it wasn't this bad on the way down.

We all get home safely and watch the crowd, festive searchlights, and more fireworks from the roof of our hotel.

For the Memory Bank

Do we fly today? No, of course we don't fly today. We are pilots in the north with winter approaching, and the clients dictate where we stay. We go together for brunch at the landmark hotel in town. Not a Landmark Hotel, just a hotel that's a landmark. It doesn't take much to be a landmark in a town that has one business street. The hotel has been there for fifty years or so without burning down, so it's a landmark.

We look at the menu then all have the buffet. It's edible. A change from the free waffles and bagels at the hotel. A loop on the TV goes through adverse weather in Nova Scotia, childcare options in Winnipeg, and a seeming serious documentary on how to win the lottery. I believe the trick was to buy tickets. When we realized that it had looped around it was time to go home.

We were all laughing as we walked back to the hotel. It started with some silly thing, joking about why the mechanic's hotel room lacked a shower curtain. I'm not going to say it, but come on, in the comments guys, what's the first reason that comes to mind for someone to remove a hotel shower curtain? So we're laughing and walking along. Although the weather is still not suitable for work, lots of low cloud bases, it's scattered cumulus and sunshine filters through. It's a beautiful day for walking down the street. It's just a silly moment with co-workers, but it's one of those things that I want in my memory vault in twenty years, along with the images of snow-capped mountain ranges and the pristine lakes that no one ever sees without an airplane.

After we get back to the hotel, a big dark thunder cloud moves in and makes it look like evening. Rain pounds the hotel. Then it passes and we're back to sun with scattered scud.

Maybe tomorrow we'll go flying.

Things Starting in Vac- and Ending in -ation

So I got home, did laundry, and had a raft of vaccinations in preparation for going to Cambodia. It was really quite the experience. Some of it was "well, while you're in here, lets update your polio, tetanus, rubella, and everything you haven't had since elementary school." I'm not going to complain about being protected from tetanus when I'm going to a strange country to pound nails. And then there were the specific to Cambodia diseases. It was literally dizzying the speed at which I was told and handed information on the various things that can get into your body and kill you. It's fascinating, too. I've read that parasites and viruses are the primary driver of evolutionary change in humans. We've got ourselves a niche where tigers and lions and bears don't kill us much, and we use tools to fight them if they try, but ickle bickle thingies we can't even see can still kill us by the thousands. After doing the paperwork one person interviewed me on where I was going and what I was doing, giving me information, making recommendations and soliciting my agreement or decisions on which vaccinations to take. Then a second person in the next room pumped the stuff all in.

"This is the tetanus. It might hurt for three days." Ow. She put some in one arm and some in the other. There was some rationale for the one that hurt for three days going in my working arm, but I don't recall exactly what it was. I think I managed to get away without a smallpox vaccination. I got vaccinated for two flavours of hepatitis, plus was given a prescription for anti-malarial drugs and I honestly don't remember everything else. After that I had to wait in the office for twenty minutes to make sure I didn't have a reaction, and then I could go home. I need some booster shots in a month and then I'm ready to go, although with the hepatitis I get a follow-up next year and then it's good for life. Which is good, because hepatitis is pretty bad and you can get it from food, even in Canada.

So then I went home and repacked, this time for a vacation. At a LAKE.

A Square Meal

The work we did in two flights on our first full day here is judged complete and correct and we're all getting out of here today: me in our airplane and the customers on the airlines. Some of them are going home and some are stopping in Anchorage before taking different flights to the next job, wherever that may be. We seem to always finish any given job on a Sunday or a long weekend and have to wait around for marching orders to the next one.

There is a big weighing scale in a tent outside the lodge. It's for people chartering floatplanes to weigh their loads, but I hop on it just for fun. I weigh the same as I did at last medical two months ago, except that in the doctor's office I wasn't wearing boots and carrying my handbag and headset. Either I've lost a lot of weight in the last couple of months or the people chartering Beavers are getting a deal.

I file a VFR flight plan over the phone, yelling to be understood, then I'm dropped off at the airport, where I call the air traffic controller and ask them to please call the fuel truck for me. (That's a weird way to do it, but there doesn't seem to be a public phone here and my cellphone doesn't work. The tower offers to do it and does it cheerfully when asked, so I assume it's normal for here).While I wait I finish securing my load. That takes a while, but there's still no sign of the fuel truck. I clean the windows, preflight the whole airplane, do my nails, play a couple of games of iPod mahjong and then call the tower back to ask if they know what happened to the fueller. A reader who has been here has been teasing me all week about how lucky I've been with fuel and now I discover the joys of trying to get fuel before noon here. There are a lot of places where fuel before noon on a Sunday is a problem, but here it seems pretty consistent. I laugh every time at his description. I'm laughing right now as I proofread what I've pasted below.

They were consistently unable to have both a fueler and a fuel truck with at least 800 gallons of fuel ready to go at 0630, despite the fact that we (their biggest avgas customer) needed 800 gallons of avgas at 0630, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year, like clockwork. They always seemed a bit surprised that they were there at such an unexpected time, expecting such a large amount of fuel.

I only need a quarter of that amount, but I do need it today, so I call back the tower. The controller says she has already called them back on my behalf to see what the delay is and relays that they are "doing their morning routine." Which apparently doesn't include selling fuel. She says I can get fuel more quickly if I taxi over there, so I tell her I'll start up and call her back for taxi clearance.

I remove and stow the chocks then jump in and start up. She tells me to taxi via November, cross runway 30 and look for the fuel truck on the other side. I look at my official and up-to-date FAA airport diagram. I turn it around a couple of times. I read the footnotes. I sheepishly call back and confess, "I'm sorry, taxiway November doesn't seem to be depicted on the airport diagram."

"Oh," she says cheerfully. "That's just nomenclature. November is what we call foxtrot south of three zero."

Alrighty then. I look at the chart some more and realize that it doesn't depict a taxiway south of three zero foxtrot. It doesn't even depict the part of the apron on which I'm parked. The pavement isn't brand new. I guess they expanded the airport without telling anyone in Oklahoma City. I find taxiway N. It's even labelled as such. I intended to find the proper e-mail address to report this discrepancy to, but I forgot until now and the current airport diagram now depicts the apron and taxiway accurately. That controller seemed pretty sharp. Perhaps she reported the problem after I pointed it out. Or the change was in the works and it just takes a year for the FAA to update publications that come out every 56 days. But I like to think I had some small role in the update. It gives me a sense of control and participation in the universe. If the apron had been expanded in the last year or so it would also explain the sign I mentioned last week, requiring advanced parking permits. Without that new part of the apron, parking might be a problem for transient aircraft.

Once I'm at the fuel station I get fuel fairly quickly. I asked about the 'morning routine' but didn't get a clear answer, so I think it might consist of sleeping in and having a cigarette and a couple of cups of coffee. I sign the credit card receipt for a ridiculous amount of money. There's a maximum single purchase limit on the card, but fortunately it's set for two full loads of fuel at medium-high prices, so the card doesn't explode.

I call for taxi and am cleared down to the main apron during morning rush hour. I'm number three for take off and as I join the queue I see that number five has an awesome paint job. I almost want to delay my departure to pull around and get a better picture than this.

There's a bit of low cloud, on the way out but I avoid it and the traffic and climb up above a scattered to broken layer. It rains steadily for a couple of hundred miles, with about five miles vis, and I file a PIREP because there aren't a lot of reporting stations out here, and it might be relevant to someone. Plus it's an easy way to get my control and participation fix. As I get closer to the final range separating me from Anchorage I gradually climb to 11,500' and sneak over the top of the rocks. It's better weather on the other side and I descend into the pass as soon as I clear the ridge, coming out over Chackachamna Lake. There are dirty glaciers hanging from the rocks right off my wingtips. Spectacular. I give a position report with reference to "the big lake with a really long name beginning with C," and it is accepted and understood.

I descend a few thousand feet so I won't be diving into Anchorage airspace and then get clearance into the class B. They ask me to stay over the west shore and report at a point that is easy to find on the chart, so I comply. I finally spot a beluga, but sadly it is not a whale, just an aerodrome and presumably a town named beluga. The air traffic controller tells me to fly direct Ship Creek. I'm about to give him the "unfamiliar local landmarks" line when suddenly I remember that I know where Ship Creek is. That's where the ulu knife factory was. I look over at downtown Anchorage and pick out the bridge we crossed to get to the industrial area. The creek is obvious. And you thought shopping for souvenirs was a frivolous activity.

I follow Ship Creek into a close right downwind, during which I am cautioned in a friendly, 'just for next time' way that my left wing is in the airspace for Elmendorf Air Force Base and in future I must stay right of Ship Creek. Perhaps I should have picked that up from the chart. I tighten my downwind further and then make a tight turn to final, being too close in to level my wings for any kind of base, and land at Merrill Field. I exit and ask for taxi instructions to transient parking. It's a little parking area, pretty busy, but there's a space I can fit into in the middle row, which is good because I can drive straight in, then straight out when I leave. But this airport not only looks like a shopping mall, but parking here is like one too. I have never had someone take the space I had my eye on while parking an airplane before, but no sooner have I turned into the parking area when I realize that little Taylorcraft has nabbed the space I was planning on. Now the only open space for me is against the fence, so I'll have to push the airplane back manually to get away. But my other option is to shut down right here in the aisle in order to get out of here at all, so I take the fence spot. There's a tiny airplane on one side and a high wing on the other, so I can fit in there without hitting wingtips. I shut down and open the back door while call the customers to let them know I arrived safely with their gear. They know I departed, because their airline flight was only a few airplanes behind me in the departure queue. I was too busy looking at the shark to see. That and I don't have a rear view mirror, anyway. I give them driving directions to come here and get their stuff. I notice as I fill out the journey log that I'm close to the minute on my ETA. Good girl. I start unloading everything into a big pile beside the airplane.

They arrive with a minivan and I dart over to cue the gate to open so they can drive in and load. It won't all fit in one truckload, so they sort it into categories that depend on how they're going to ship it out of here. One of the guys bangs his head on the horizontal stabilizer and I feel guilty because I should have realized that possibility when I stacked gear underneath it. They go off with the first load and I go and see about paying for parking.

It's on the honour system and you just fill out your information and put it in a slot in a desk either a credit card slip or cash, five dollars a night. I pay for two nights, expecting it will take that long to get word from company where to go next. One of the guys comes back for the rest of the load and I go with him to get a few more items from a local storage locker. The locker is pretty much exactly like the warehouse in which the US Government keeps the Ark of the Covenant, in the Indiana Jones movies, so we crack jokes and imaginary whips and adjust our fedoras while we haul stuff out to the van. Some of the storage locker items belong to my company: we left a bunch of gear we didn't need here to make room for the trans-Alaska load, so we stop off at the airplane again.

I ask the client to just leave me here with the airplane, because earlier I made another call I didn't tell you about, to a regular reader and commenter on the blog. He's someone I've never met in person but have known online for years, since even before I started this blog. In fact he knew me under a different alias on in aviation chatroom, and recognized me here by my narrative voice, which to me is extraordinary. I wouldn't have thought I even told stories the same way in a chatroom as on a blog, but there you have it. Perhaps out of the thousands of Canadian women who fly commercially I'm the only one who regularly says both 'yup' and 'whom.' You can probably guess who he is from the fact that he's a knowledgeable Alaskan, the kind that answers my questions like "Who was Sparrevohn?"

He's the one who was in Papua New Guinea when I first contacted him, and when he told me when he would return I automatically knew that would be the date I left Anchorage. Turns out I was off by one day, so I have the privilege of his slightly jetlagged company this afternoon. We start by visiting his airplane, a Cessna 180 still on wheelskis in June, showing how much he's been around to enjoy it since the snow melted. It's a clever design with a little arm putting the ski either under or in front of the wheel so the pilot can choose the landing configuration.

We drive to Earthquake Park, along Cook Inlet, no prizes for guessing the explorer who first anchored here. We park near PANC, departures from runway 32 whistling over our heads, and go down a trail to the beach. I want to touch the sea. I can't remember if it was warmer or colder than i expected, but it was stinkier than seawater typically is. "So, where's your civic sewage discharge, and what sort of processing do you do?" Somewhere in me is a latent civil engineer, because this is actually a question I've asked people at less relevant moments. I'm terribly interested in the development of cities, where and how they grow and the bottlenecks common to different cities around the world.

There was a navigational marker for ships on the shore and I made him wait while I framed an airplane departing PANC together with the marker in one shot in my camera. That's not a long wait as they launch departures as fast as they can line them up on the runway. We went for a walk along the embankment, I'm not sure if it was in the park or not, and then met up with his lady friend at a restaurant that was either called the Snow Goose or served Snow Goose beer (these are the perils of blogging from notes taken two months previously) overlooking Ship Creek and the inlet. It's a great view and good food too, well suited to the company. I'm not just saying that because he bought me dinner, either.

After dinner we went for a walk around Hood Lake, the one at the airport with all the floatplanes. Few of them were especially expensive or fancy aircraft, just basic family transportation, most with little huts next to them on the shore for storage of things like lifejackets, cleaning supplies and off-season equipment. Some were decorated with flower boxes and miniature landscaping. The area around the lake is not part of the airport secure area and a lot of people were there jogging, walking dogs and the like. It's a great area and there seems to be some commitment to keeping it multiuse. I think it was on this expedition that I learned about Gull Island, the island separating the taxi lane from the water runway on the lake. It was, as you can guess from its name and its seclusion from people stomping around, a preferred place for seagulls to nest. But birds and airplanes in critical stages of flight are a poor combination, so to control the gull population, they let loose pigs on the island. The pigs were so efficient at eating all the seagull eggs that there are no longer gulls nesting on the island. I suppose eventually some gulls that haven't heard about the pigs will come back and nest there, but pigs are easy to come by, so that can be taken care of again.

I didn't get to meet Dave, of Flight Level 390, but we exchange some good e-mails. I find in general you have two or three near misses before you actually see someone in person in this business. I do hope we intersect at some point. I did warn him that I was going to brag on my blog that I've landed on a PANC runway that he hasn't. Apparently he's never landed on runway 32 of the international. It's reserved for crazily maneuvering Canadians who have just been asked to go around from 07.

After dinner I let my poor jetlagged friend go to sleep and go back to the hotel to do laundry. I'm in the same room as I had before. The clock is still an hour slow. And I still don't adjust it.

You guys are hilarious with respect to the clip from the couple days' ago post. I found it on the floor of the cockpit during preflight inspection after the AME had been under the dash checking connections on a malfunctioning HSI. I asked him about it and he assured me it was garbage, in a tone of voice that made it clear he, like some of you, considered it garbage when it was brand new. He said he had replaced it with a much easier to use clip, likely the kind that is adjusted with a screwdriver. Most of you called it a hose clamp, but this one was holding wiring bundles. I didn't climb under the dashboard to inspect. I was trying to choose a winner from the creative guesses, but they are all so funny I can't decided. I love clip-on antler piercing, aquatic alien mind control implement and dealie for something that has to be opened at a 25 degree angle. And then after I added this, I see there are yet more suggestions from the people back at work after the Labour Day weekend, and there are just too many brilliant suggestions to do anything with but laugh at. Among those who couldn't resist showing off their knowledge, the link with the spoiler warning was the best solution. If someone has a link to a picture of one in situ that would be appreciated, too.

Vacation Plans

When I get back from Alaska, I'm going to be on vacation at a lake in BC. No, I'm not telling you which one, except that the beach is hot and the water is pretty and cool and has mountains around it and farms nearby and nice little condos for rent. So it's a lake in BC and not one in the far north. I planned this ages ago, about the time I got to fly over a beautiful BC lake all day, and then had to fly back to Alberta the same day. I didn't solicit people in the area to meet, because I figured it would be a beach and ice cream and going for walks and no airplanes vacation, not the running around and meeting new people kind.

There's only one wrinkle. My IFR just expired and for various reasons that are vaguely vexing to me, and throwing my chief pilot, who knows more, into conniptions (wow, conniptions is a real word that the spellchecker believes in), there is not going to be a company aircraft available for PPCs. Two of us have to just go do regular IFR renewals in whatever we can find. The company will pay us back. So this will be a studying the CAP GEN on the beach sort of vacation.

There is an airport an hour or so away with a flying school that can handle an IFR renewal. I've never flown the kind airplane they have, but I'm pretty sure that if I push down the houses will get bigger, if I pull back the houses will get smaller, and if I pull waaaay back the houses will get bigger again. I ask them to send me some basic information on the airplane so I can prepare and they send me the "SOPs" for the aircraft. The scare quotes are because it's a light twin flown single pilot for training, so there's no regulatory requirement for SOPs. I guess it's to get students used to the concept. Good idea, I guess. All I know about these airplanes is that they have a reputation for gear problems. And I've flown airplanes by the same manufacturer, so how different can they all be?

I ask the administrator to book me with an instructor who can teach me something. I'm not even sure what I mean by this, whether I'm claiming I know lots already, or that I'm a problem learner and need special instruction. She assures me "Our instructors are top scoring graduates of our programme." That doesn't guarantee that they can teach me anything, because I already know that a pilot who graduated at the top of her class and who hasn't done anything but flight instruction tends to think she knows everything, but may not know all that much. But she probably knows enough to get me through the dreaded flight test. And the worst part is that it won't even get it out of the way for two years, because the boss will likely want a PPC before that expires. I actually like that there is a frequent test of my abilities on my job, so I know that I am good enough and not falling into incompetence, but oh I hate the testing.

I pledge to (a) take this training seriously and (b) leave the instructor feeling good about himself. And it would be full on hilarious if the instructor were a reader of this blog and figured it out. Can you imagine being paid to tune up my flying, knowing that your every move would be analyzed online? I promise not to do that. I'll be way too worried about my own performance.

The school was a little confused about where I was, what with a Florida phone number, a home address somewhere else, claiming to be calling from Alaska, and telling them that they wouldn't be able to call me back because I was just on my way to somewhere without much in the way of phone service. But they made me an appointment.

Just Like the Fourth of July

It's Friday and we discover that in this hangar they celebrate Friday with a barbecue lunch. The entire extended family is present, and it's a little confusing because despite the flat maps we usually work with, where east is east and west is west, the Earth really is round. Just as Russia turned up on the WAC chart for our destination, Russia features prominently in the history of Alaska. Russia owned Alaska until March 1867, and something that had never occurred to me until this trip is that the Russians who already lived here didn't just go home. It had been a substantial trip for them to get here; they had lives and homes and had intermarried with local people, and what difference did it make to them if the czar sold national ownership in their chunk of land to pay his gambling debts or raise money to invade China, or redo his winter palace, or whatever he was going to do with the money. So some Alaskans are of Russian descent and as soon as the Cold War ended they went right back to having good communications. One of the wives of this family was a high school exchange student, and her parents are here, plus the American born contingent break the American English-only stereotype and can speak some Russian. Even one of the dogs prefers Russian, responding lackadaisically to English commands and crisply to Russian language equivalents.

The lunch feast includes barbecued burgers with processed American cheese on top, potato chips, and slices of watermelon. I feel like it's the Fourth of July! There are kids running around too, speaking both languages. It's totally normal for an intermarried family, and such families are very normal at an international border, I just wasn't thinking of Alaska that way.

After lunch the AME sends us across town to pick up a part from a supplier at another airport. While we're waiting for them to find it, we notice a flyer for a customer appreciation barbecue that evening. Hey, we're customers. Think we can score two free barbecues in one day?

We bring the part back to the airplane and get everything into a tidy state just in time for the five o'clock quitting time here. But it turns out that by now we're family so they okay us working on the weekend when they aren't there. The charter company at the adjoining hangar will be there all day, so they can let us in. Superb! we should be finished by tomorrow.

And yes we do go to the other supplier barbecue, worth it both for the flawlessly cooked steaks--aren't the best steaks always cooked by a huge tattooed guy at an outdoor barbecue?--and the contacts we make with people who know the local area and the remote one in which we will be flying. The assessments of the place we are going continue to be grim, but now we have the names of some worse places around it where we should on no accounts go. Not that there are roads, anyway.

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And on the theme of enjoying the generosity of others and of occasions for fireworks, I just got the minutes of a meeting on the Cambodia project. I couldn't be there, on account of being nowhere near there, but they felt my presence. It appears that Cockpit Conversation readers contributed about five thousand dollars towards building supplies. According to the minutes, I was singled out in absentia for my fundraising efforts, even though all I did was say please. You wonderful people did the rest. That goes to show that not only are you jaw-droppingly amazing, but that you are either intent on your anonymity or more generous than you are skilled at following directions. I kept a running total from the people who let me know they donated, and assumed the ones who didn't specify an amount were averaging the same as those who did, my number isn't close to that one. I am so grateful to all of you. You should see how happy I am. Notice that I've posted a blog entry pretty much every day since. That's part of my thank you to you.