Underlying Factors

I'm re-reading the TSB Report on an air crash at Fond-du-Lac, in preparation for another class I'm teaching. At every step of the recounting, pilots who have never worked in the north will be crying, "What?" and "No!" while pilots who have may nod their heads with understanding. 

When I got to this sentence ...

Early in this investigation, it became clear that more information was needed to determine whether the underlying factors identified in this occurrence were present elsewhere in the Canadian commercial aviation industry.

... I said out loud, "Where have you been?" How can someone be working in accident investigation in Canada and need any more information in order to know that the underlying factors in that accident are omnipresent across the land? 

The summary refers to "the inadequacy of de-icing equipment or services at these locations."  Inadequacy doesn't begin to describe it. You'd be lucky to get potable water at Fond-du-Lac. They say, like it makes any difference:

There are many defences in place to ensure the clean aircraft concept is followed, such as regulations, company operating manuals, and standard operating procedures. However, all of these defences rely singularly on flight crew compliance.

And sure, that captain could have picked up that cell phone and called company to tell them there was too much ice on the plane and he was not departing. How would that have worked out for him? Well, probably better than the serious back injuries he received in the crash. That sentence should finish, "... defences rely singularly on flight crew ability to defy company expectations." No, the company doesn't expect crews to fly with iced up aircraft. They just expect you to fly, and don't want to hear about the difficulties.

I think five to ten percent of my training in anything is assuring pilots that I really want them to follow the regulations, the company operating manual, and the SOPs, that they won't get in trouble for cancelling a flight if the conditions aren't right, or for grounding an airplane with a snag. By the time I get them, and I'm by no means at the top of the aviation food chain, the industry has already taught pilots that there is one set of rules for the classroom and another set for the skies. I have to beat it out of them. And myself.

Under, Over or Through

Autumn is settling in, but company wants me to go north. The weather is actually better in the north as a ridge of high pressure is pushing in from the territories, but the south is nasty, cold and rainy. The clouds and weather pages of the graphical area forecast are all scalloped edges and green dots as a low pressure system drags itself slowly across the province, dumping snow and rain. I flip over to the icing and turbulence chart and see a vast area of blue dots centred on my airport. Moderate mixed icing, beyond my aircraft capability, from the freezing level to eighteen thousand feet. I flip back to the clouds and weather page to look at the clouds bases and hmmm over whether I could get thorough VFR underneath it. Picturing the terrain, it's iffy, and there aren't weather reporting stations or escape airports at the worst spots. The terrain isn't that high, but the cloud bases are going to be that low, and forecast low visibility under the bases makes scud running a bad proposition.

Back to the icing chart. Can I get VFR under the weather to a point where it would be safe to climb to an IFR altitude? No, I can do better. The freezing level will actually get quite high today, and while it drops as I go north, it's still high enough at the point where the icing forecast ends that I might be able to go IFR close to the minimum allowed altitude. I pull out the chart and find a not-especially-direct route that uses airways all with minimum altitudes below the ice. I won't even have to fly the wrong way, or between the MOCA and the MEA, below nav aid reception. I'll start a climb just before the end of where the ice is forecast, in order to get onto the adjoining higher airway segment. I check NOTAMs and winds, do the math to declare my ETA and file a flight plan.

I realize at the last moment that I haven't chosen an alternate. The obvious one already has low weather, and while it might technically qualify as an alternate because of its precision approach, I'd like an actual alternate that I feel confident I can get into, if my destination goes down in freezing fog. I ask the briefer to recommend one. He starts to name the same obvious one as I was going to, and then clearly has the same thought as I did, and recommends one that I never consider because has no fuel for me. I put it down anyway. I would be safe on the ground at least, and would land there with enough fuel to get back VFR to the original destination.

A few minutes after I get it all filed, the flight is cancelled. My co-worker apologizes, for making me come into work and get the plane all ready for nothing. I really don't mind. Figuring out a flight plan is a bit like solving a crossword puzzle. There doesn't have to be a point or a prize. And now I don't have to go flying in nasty weather. I go home.

Thanksgiving

I was away working last weekend, so I wasn't really thinking of Thanksgiving as a holiday. I usually work right through October, so a proper Thanksgiving celebration only happens by chance. Sometimes a little late, like the one I had this year. But with or without the dinner, I'm still thankful for things that happened and those that didn't.

Things happen and things don't. Whether they happen or fail to because of our own skills and planning, because of stochastic processes, or because of an omnipotent being, I am grateful when the right things happen and the wrong things don't. Neither history, nor science, not even religious texts seem to indicate that gratitude or the lack thereof has great influence on what happens and what doesn't, but I still have gratitude. The engines turned when I needed them to. The electricity flowed when I depended upon its service. The ice and the air and my wings did not interact in a way that had a disastrous effect on my flight. Over the years, the malfunctions that have occurred in flight did so after sunrise, within single-engine fuel range of a usable airport, once I was clear of IMC, when I had sufficient altitude, or before I was too tired. I saw what I needed to, and am surrounded by those who look out for me. I am grateful.

Also, you will find it hard to convince me that there is a better way to eat leftover turkey than cold, with my fingers, while standing in front of an open refrigerator.

P.S. to foreigners: Thanksgiving is a post-harvest festival that Canadians celebrate on the second weekend of October. It's not a public spectacle or a commercial event (for places other than grocery stores), just something you do in your home. People with normal jobs get a day off work on the Monday, but family or groups of friends will get together on any of the weekend days for a meal, usually involving roast turkey and seasonal vegetables, especially squash. If you're crafty you can score two or even three turkey dinners over the weekend, and everyone eats turkey sandwiches, turkey soup and turkey salads for a week afterwards.

The Days I Don't

I'm sitting in a hotel room in British Columbia while an airplane my company wants in Alberta sits on the ramp at the local airport. It's a nice airplane, but some of the equipment that required for dispatch into "known ice" has been removed for weight consideration, so with today's cold weather and convective conditions, it isn't safe or legal to fly it over the mountains. The clouds are too low to go under, too high to go over, and too highly composed of supercooled (liquid below zero) water droplets to go through. And, to be thorough, I should add too extensive to go around. An air mass that has moved across the Pacific Ocean is being forced up and over the BC mountain ranges, producing a lot of precipitation and humidity. It's a very nice hotel room, but it's stressful having my company want me somewhere, and me be unable to go.

I scrutinize each new METAR, each new TAF and each new set of GFAs looking for an opportunity. I set myself a "not after" time: if I left after that time then I would not be able to reach my destination and shut down within my permitted fourteen hours from when I started this vigil. I should just say, "screw it, not happening," but there is always a faint hope of success. And it's miserable weather here, too.

I go for a run in the miserable weather. Too slow, and I can't entirely blame my poor speed on the stumble-making cracked sidewalks, the muddy trail, the cold temperature or the traffic lights and crosswalks I have to navigate on the way to the running trail. I haven't been running enough lately. My body forgets how to do what it hasn't done consistently. I'm always on the road in the summer so I can't enter races to give me the incentive to train hard. Often in the summer there literally are not enough hours in the day for me to get legal rest and work out, too. And in the winter it's so dark in the evening I don't want to run on uneven sidewalks.

I get back to the hotel and before I do anything else I check the weather again. No miraculous path has opened through the mountains.

The glass wall of the shower stall makes up one wall of the bathroom, so I can see though it into the bedroom. It's made of a special adjustable glass, that can switch between transparent and opaque. It's fun to make it clear, and watch TV while I'm in the shower. Too bad there is no switch that will make the weather clear through the mountains.

I call the vigil off for today and go to dinner.

Future So Bright

It's a rainy, miserable fall day with the freezing level a little lower than the minimum en route IFR altitude. I study the GFA showing the cloud levels and types in the area I'll be flying through, and decide that yes, we can do the flight in this airplane. I can climb above the level of the cloud that will carry the most dangerous ice before I reach the area that has those clouds, and destination is clear, giving a safe descent. I file a flight plan beginning with a waypoint that we always file out of this airport, because it's the end of the published departure procedure, but as we're going the other way, I don't expect to actually go there. We'll be in radar contact with ATC as soon as we're off the ground and they will vector us on course.

Except they're busy. I end up flying all the way to the waypoint, and then a little bit past on vectors, and then more vectors. Vectors to the right towards the way I want to go, and then, possibly because I wasn't climbing fast enough for the controller's liking, vectors back to the left. "Vectors" just means the controller assigns me a heading to fly. Altitude is being meted out to me in thousand foot increments, from the departure plate up to the MEA, but still not my filed altitude. We're intermittently in rain, cloud, raining cloud and between clouds. "Raining cloud" isn't a thing that I've ever heard anyone say before, but it's sort of a thing. Sometimes when you're in cloud it's quite light, but you just can't see anything around you. That would be near the top of a cloud with sunlight above. Sometimes it's dark and cold. It's usually very moist, with water running up the windshield, but sometimes it's dark, with obscured vision and pelting rain. I guess on those times I'm inside a cloud underneath another cloud that is raining. It's kind of hard to see, as I'm in a cloud.

I say to my co-worker, "you bring your sunglasses?" He hasn't. "Just wait and see," I tell him. "This is one of the most fun parts of being a pilot."

We're level now, with the outside air temperature flickering between plus and minus zero (it rounds to the nearest degree on the instrument, but must have finer gradations internally). Into another cloud. This one is bumpy, a bad sign, and it's a raining cloud, but water doesn't stream up the windshield. It freezes onto it. All this vectoring around and delayed climb has got me into the area I want to avoid. I can see the water running back on the wings and freezing in little horizontal dribbles, exactly like the icing on the edge of a cake. (I think Americans call that frosting). There's a strip of rime building forward, too. This is not acceptable. Thanks to terrific weather forecasting technology I know exactly where the tops of these clouds are. I tell the controller we are picking up ice and ask for a climb to that level, the level I had wanted to fly in the first place. We get it, breaking through the tops of the clouds, a perspective that changes them instantly from dark monsters that obscure my vision and threaten to burden my airplane enough to tear it from the sky, to a brilliant white reflector for the sun. There's nothing but blue sky overhead, and I quickly put on my sunglasses. The temperature here is below freezing, but the air is dry so the ice sublimates, passes from solid to vapour, leaving me again with a clean airplane after a few minutes.

Approaching destination, ATC advises me that there is opposite direction traffic that could be a conflict, do I want to start down now early, or arrive high? I ask for the early descent and we slip through a few wispy clouds before coming out at our destination, under clear skies. At the end of the day I update the flight time in company records and advise company that there are less than fifty hours left on the right hand vacuum pump. Vacuum pumps have to be replaced every thousand hours. I have often seen them fail early. The possibility of failure is why there are two of them, and I'm pleased that the two on this airplane are out of phase; the left one has only five hundred hours on it.

Bushels of Icing Certification

An accumulation of ice on the surfaces of an airplane in flight can be ridiculously dangerous, so a lot of science has gone into analyzing the causes and effects. It's known, for example, that large droplets of supercooled water are likely to cause clear icing that covers a large area of the wing, while small droplets are more likely to freeze with entrained air and cause wacky shapes to form around the leading edges of the wing. This is called rime icing. Either way, or both (there's nothing to say you can't get a mixture of both types at once) airplane performance is affected. For starters the airplane will fly more slowly, climb less rapidly, and burn more fuel to get to destination. That alone could kill you, and that's just for starters. This post isn't about the effects of icing, though. This paragraph is just here for people who otherwise wouldn't know why anyone cared about the stuff in the paragraphs coming up.

Some aircraft are certified for operation in known ice, that is to be flown in conditions that are known and expected to cause ice to accrete on aircraft. There's a possibility that definition will cause an argument, because I see that the FAA and NTSB have contradicted themselves a little on this. In Canada there is a much lesser density of PIREPs to airspace and a lot fewer airports of escape, so the conservative definition is the only one that makes sense to me. For flight into known ice, the airframe and the airplane deicing and/or anti-icing systems have to be shown to tolerate conditions conducive to moderate amounts of clear or rime icing. NASA (the first A stands for aeronautics, so not all their research is in outer space) tells me the model for the former is called intermittent maximum and represents "liquid water between 1.1-2.9 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-50 microns in diameter over a 2.6 nm encounter," while the latter model is continuous maximum and represents "liquid water between 0.2-0.8 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-40 microns in diameter over a 17.4 nm encounter."

So first of all: less that three grams of liquid water per cubic metre doesn't seem like very much. A gram of water is a millilitre, about the capacity of the plastic screw cap on a pop bottle. A cubic metre is a fair chunk of space, like the storage capacity of one of those IKEA Expedit room dividers everyone has, the 16-box kind, with two more boxes stacked on top. You wouldn't even notice three millilitres of water in one of those, what with all the scented candles and old copies of Aviation Safety Newsletter stacked inside. I know clouds are stereotypically fluffy and insubstantial, but I would have thought they had a lot more water density than that. So huh, clouds are way drier than I thought.

Secondly, why "over a 2.6 nm/17.4 nm encounter"? At first I assumed that was translated from metric, but 2.6 nm is 4.8152 km and 17.4 nm is 32.2248 km. It turns out that they are 2.99 and 20.0 statute miles, respectively. So three miles and twenty miles. Who the heck does science in grams per cubic metre over statute miles? That's crazier than Canadians measuring our room temperature in celsius and our oven temperatures in Fahrenheit. It's even crazier than having to figure out whether something like pumpkin or peanut butter is a solid or a liquid before converting an American recipe. (Seriously, if the recipe says to use a ten-ounce jar of peanut butter, I never know if I'm supposed to weigh it or measure it volumetrically, because the Americans have the same name for two different units, one for solid things by weight, and one for liquid things by volume. Like the TSA, the recipes expect me to just know what they consider a liquid. Take tuna, for example. I was once told that canned tuna ... I'm getting off topic here. But while I'm here, what the heck is a "stick of butter". Who buys their butter in sticks?) It's even crazier than Aviatrix trying to cook from American recipes.

The certification standards are based on data collection flights performed in the 1940s. If you plot all the possible atmospheric scenarios on a graph with liquid water content on the y-axis and droplet size on the x-axis, the area that is considered safe to operate in is bounded by the x-axis, the y-axis and a curve that approximates a line of negative slope. You may now be asking yourself, does Aviatrix get off on writing sentences like that, or is she just too lazy to draw a graph and show you? The answer is that I get off on knowing that many of my readers can parse that sentence just fine, and I'm too lazy to copy someone else's graph. If there's lots of water you can only tolerate small drops, but if there's not that much water the drops can be bigger. The logical conclusion is that if there's no water at all you are allowed drops of infinite size and that you may fly through a tank completely filled with supercooled water if the drops are infinitely small. That's why I said it was a curve. Presumably the axes are asymptotes. Oh yeah, talk graphing to me, Aviatrix.

One could argue that changes in aircraft design since might have changed the validity of those results, but subsequent work in other types and in wind tunnels should be enough to keep the standard valid. Here's a little bit about how the certification is done these days: flying around seeking out the standard conditions for certification, plus using computer models to determine what shape ice would form on the aircraft, and then sending test pilots out to fly with those globs glued on the plane. I guess when they first did tests to determine what an airplane should be able to handle, they flew through convective cloud for three miles and through stratus for twenty miles and then quantified the conditions they had flown through. They probably did it in ounces per bushel or pop caps per IKEA bookshelf, and it's only been converted to grams per cubic metre for the modern day. Beats me how they determined all that, anyway in the days before the laser equipment they have now.

While trying to find the history of the certification standard I get bogged down in documents on the history of the legal "if supercooled water hangs in the sky and there's no airframe there to accrete it, is it known icing?" debate. This PDF seems like a pretty definitive document about the controversy. Given that many of the people arguing that it's not known icing until they take off and know it's there were doing so as the pilot of record at accident tribunals, I'm sticking to my assessment that if conditions known to produce ice are there, it's known icing.

Not So Great Divide

Rotate, retract gear, climb power set, after take-off checks complete and a right turn back towards the terminal airspace. I've kept the same transponder code and they're fine with that, clearing me back into their airspace for a second job. It's pretty much the same altitude and the same bumpiness, but it should only take about forty-five minutes. It takes less, but company wants us to land five hundred nautical miles away across hostile terrain, where the bumps are coming from. Ah heck, you know where the hostile terrain that breeds turbulence is in my country. We're being sent across the continental divide to Vancouver.

Seatbelts cinched tight and ask for the clearance. We're cleared straight to ten five, and told to fly a vector for traffic at first, then cleared direct. Ironically the vector is direct Vancouver, but the GFAs have told us that heading south to hug the US border will be the way to stay clear of the worst of the turbulence and cumulonimbus clouds. So I turn southward, and then a little more directly south, waiting until the way forward doesn't look quite so dark with building clouds. I zip up the top of my flight bag after the first time a jolt of turbulence hits hard enough to fling contents all the way out and onto the floor. The flight bag--a knapsack--is already seatbelted to the passenger seat. All my charts flew out of the map pocket, too. Tighten seatbelts further.

I don't really want to do this for the next ... well it would still be over two hours direct with these winds --headwinds of course--but with the indirect route it will be three hours. I consider landing in Cranbrook for the night, so I call flight services for PIREPs and SIGMETs. There's no SIGMET for the turbulence along my route and they haven't had any pilot reports. I give them mine. It sounds as though the worst of the bumps may be behind us, so I decide we'll continue. I still set direct Cranbrook as a waypoint, because it's a good route to intercept the southern track I want to follow.

Approaching Cranbrook, it occurs to me that IFR traffic approaching this airport could be descending out of the clouds through my altitude. I'm in uncontrolled airspace but I call up Cranbrook radio and sure enough there's a Saab 340 on the way in. I give a position report and Cranbrook has me on radar. Impressive coverage here. The Saab is in descent and once they are through my altitude and I am past the airfield I switch back to the en route frequency. I do the same thing approaching Castlegar, and this time it's a Jazz, can't remember if it's a CRJ or a Dash 8 departing visually, with a left turn over the dam. They will be too fast for us to catch, even as they climb, so no conflict. Top of the next hour I update my weather again. Penticton is all thunderstorms, and I can soon see that ahead, so I look at US airspace across the border. It's a row of giant military operations areas. I know I can sometimes get clearance into them, but I hold off on asking until I see whether the Penticton area is passable within Canada. It is. I fly between Oliver and Osoyoos clear of the storms.

I eat some snacks to keep my brain and body working, but my innards don't feel too great. Then I realize that having a seatbelt cinched to the maximum for two hours is not doing my intestines any favours. I loosen the lap belt and yay for renewed gastric motility. How do those people who wear super tight pants and belts all day digest their food properly?

I try to go through a valley but it's choked with cloud and I end up climbing through one of them, picking up ice as I turn away from the rocks. This is not how you're supposed to do it and I imagine that ice-filled windscreen is the last sight a lot of pilots have seen around here. It wasn't quite how I planned it, but the shadows of rock and snow and cloud are deceiving around here. The ice all slides off as I descend into a wider and less cloudy valley and follow the river to the farmlands around Vancouver. Vancouver Tower clears us straight in, and to land, about ten miles out.

Now It's MY Way

My camera still isn't ready. This is like airplane maintenance: they have to wait for the parts to arrive, and can't say when that will be. The DG works, though. They tell us that it was installed incorrectly to begin with, with not enough screws, and there wasn't even a hole for the missing screw. Odd that it worked for so long.

We're going to Vancouver again, but the GFA shows IFR conditions en route with mixed moderate icing to 16,000'. I look at the shape of the forecast areas in space and time, and judge that by my route and at the time I will pass through the area, I will be safe to file at 16,000'. On V304, that one-way airway I was told I couldn't use earlier. At most I expect a few tendrils of ice-bearing cloud above that altitude and I should be able to get a deviation around them.

The actual weather observed for the first part of the route shows the GFA to be startlingly accurate. The brown scalloped line dividing two types of weather went right through the dots representing the three Edmonton area airports that report weather, and overhead Edmonton there's a cloud shield with its edge running so precisely along that line I wonder if I'm in a simulator. I can see the International, half of City Centre and none of Namao. At sixteen thousand I'm also comfortably above the clouds, for now. And the new heater is still working. Groundspeed is low, though. The operator can see the ETA on the GPS and asks about it, because it's a good bit later than I suggested at the departure briefing. "Will we have to stop for fuel?"

"I'm not planning a fuel stop. This should switch to a tailwind as soon as we get into BC."

The clouds rise ahead of us, some convective shapes, which is why the forecast calls for icing even though it's well below freezing. A pilot expects ice in visible moisture (i.e. cloud, mist or rain) when the temperature is close to freezing, because more than a few degrees above zero, water droplets don't freeze and more than ten degrees below freezing and most of the water is already frozen, thus is unavailable to freeze onto your airplane. In convective cloud there is a lot of rapid vertical motion, so liquid water can be churned up from below into the cold levels above. The GFA is again amazingly accurate at forecasting these clouds sitting just at 16,000'. It is a tremendous economic and safety benefit to have such good forecasts. Anyone who works in Edmonton or Montréal putting out these charts, be proud.

A little further on there are a few tendrils of that cloud poking above 16,000'. I flip on the pitot and prop heat before passing through cloud tops, emerging with just a skim of ice on the windscreen and wing leading edges. It's useful to me to note where I see ice first on this airplane. Out in the sunshine again the ice sublimates. I dodge a few tops and then I'm into another cloud for a bit longer. Yeah, I guess now that I know (I believe I have Sarah to thank for the link) that there's ice in there it's time to enact my avoidance plan. I call ATC to climb a couple of hundred feet. They give me a just a moment, then call back with "flight level 200 approved." Uh, that's a bit more than I need. As I apply power to go up I realize what they heard. I explain that I need "two hundred feet" not "FL200" and they assign me 16,000' blocking 17,000'. Perfect. I'm out of all ice and have a nice view and clean wings. There's an overcast in the vicinity of Vancouver that could be interesting, depending on where they hold me. The freezing level is right around the forecast cloud tops. If necessary I can ask for an expedited descent though the region of icing, but I don't expect much, just light rime for a few hundred feet. It will be warm enough below to melt any accumulation off before final.

The headwind switches to a tailwind, an even better one than I had planned on. We'll be a little bit early. The clouds are thinning a little and I can see mountain tops poking through. It's hard to believe that we're over 2000' above the minimum obstacle clearance altitude. The rocks look to be right there. They always do, whenever you fly an IFR procedure in visual conditions, too. The controller asks me if I'm done with the altitude block and I am. The clouds are lower and this type of cloud shouldn't have ice at this altitude, either.

I've put the en route frequency up on COM1, my listening radio and am looking for a good FSS frequency to call to find out what to expect at Vancouver when the operator starts reading me METARs off his iPhone. Is this the way of the future? The FSS won't have anything more current than the METARs, so I try Vancouver's ATIS. I'm still too far out, but at least I have it tuned and ready.

I review the published arrivals for Vancouver and after the next frequency change tell the controller I'm ready for a descent. I'm not pressurized, so it would be nice not to have to dive for the airport at the end. He gives me a couple of descents, first down to fourteen thousand then ending at ten thousand feet, which is just above the cloud deck, and just at freezing. I'm laughing. Everything below me is above freezing, so I don't need to worry about ice on the descent. The controller tells me information charlie is current, and to expect a runway eight.

I'm still unable the ATIS, and I already have a post-it flagging the non-RNAV arrival for the 08s at YVR. I flag and review the ILS for 08R, the runway that goes to the non-secure side of Vancouver airport. I'm coming down V304 towards the airport, but so is everybody and I'm slow. They vector me off the airway, to the north which is a little unnerving, because I'm in IMC and that's where the mountains are, but then they vector me south, to the other side, and then east, away from the airport, descending me to 5000', then 3000', then another vector then another. I hear them advice an American Airlines that they are doing a runway change, so I pull up the approach plates and find the pages for the other end of the runways. The controller tells me to expect 26R, that's the big girls' runway. I tune and identify the ILS and accept another vector, and a descent clearance to 2000', which I'm told to expedite, then another runway change to 26L. I intercept the localizer and am immediately visual and cleared to land. You know, I'm glad I have the autopilot. That was a crazy disorienting set of vectors.

It's actually quite nice at the airport. The weather is all to the east. That's good, because we have work out to the west. Tomorrow.

There's a Comfort Inn right near the airport, but like most of the places I stay, I don't have a chance to enjoy more amenities than the bed and the internet, which tells me the weather will be good again tomorrow, so I should be prepared for an early start.

None Shall Know the Day Nor the Airport

I did an IFR flight test on an unfamiliar airplane several months ago, so I should be good at this now. I know I know my IFR details, but this is a PPC ride, where I'll be grilled on the airplane. I have been asked crazy details on PPC rides, like how many vortex generators an airplane had (88), the identity and amperage of the largest circuit breaker (hydraulic motor and I think it was 30A), and the identity of every antenna and line sticking out of ports in the belly and engines. Sometimes you have to fall back on, "I don't know! If it comes loose or leaks a lot I'll take a picture of it and e-mail it to maintenance." But I should know how this airplane works. I spend a day with its manuals and many supplements and hope I have the right things memorized. When you're working towards a PPC ride with a particular examiner, the person training you knows what the examiner is sticky about and primes you for such questions. I would not, otherwise, have been counting vortex generators. But not only do I not know who the examiner will be, I don't have anyone training me. I'm a pilot, so I'm supposed to know how to fly this thing.

And now the monitored ride with the Vancouver examiners is unlikely, because company wants me to take this airplane back to Alberta. They're going to find an examiner for me in Edmonton. Okay, I can do that. Except maybe I can't right now, because the mountain passes are choked with stratus and fog, and there is weather all around Vancouver, too. Oddly, although I need an IFR PPC on the aircraft in order to fly it around in beautiful weather at 20,000', my regular IFR rating is sufficient for me to launch into actual IFR conditions, for a ferry flight. It's only for revenue flights that I need a PPC.

So the pilot is approved and the operation is approved, but what about the airplane? It has an autopilot. I have a yoke-mountable chart holder, and a headset with a boom mike, almost archaic (as in who doesn't have these things?) requirements for single-pilot IFR. The airplane, however, does not have leading edge ice protection. It is therefore "not certified for flight into known ice."

So we look at the icing forecast, of which this is part. Red is turbulence, blue is ice.

I'm headed from the bottom left of British Columbia, the province outlined in black, to the middle of Alberta, the next province to the east. That route goes nowhere near the one patch of blue on the whole forecast. So does that mean there's no ice? It doesn't. This seems so weird now that I have to explain it, but if you look at the bottom of the chart, right above the red Canadian flag, you see some bold yet cryptic notes proclaiming that CB TCU AND ACC IMPLY SIG TURB AND ICG. This translates to a reminder that cumulonimbus, towering cumulus and altocumulus castellanus clouds can be counted on to be full of the supercooled water droplets that cause airframe icing. An airplane without leading edge ice protection definitely cannot safely fly through such a cloud. To see where those clouds are, you have to consult the corresponding clouds and weather chart.

Even if you don't read weather, you can pick out ACC and TCU in the bubbles I need to fly through. They are 'scattered', which means that theoretically I could go around them, but what if they are inside other clouds? This looks tricky. Later in the day they are calling for better weather on the coast, but thunderstorms through the mountains. I tell them tomorrow looks better, and they believe me. And now they can't get an examiner this week in Edmonton, but there might be one at some little northern airport somewhere. I'm not sure whether I've finally done enough flight tests that I'm not panicked about this one, or whether I don't really believe they will be able to find an examiner on such short notice.

Vancouver, meanwhile, lives up to its reputation of being rainy.

I have to wait until I can get my camera fixed, because I want to properly document our game of nosewheel roulette (and I'm embarrassed to ask someone else to photograph it for me), so its still not too late to enter the contest to win a pair of sunglasses.

Altitude

I don't usually watch scary movies, but when I saw the publicity photo for this one, with the cast posing in a piston twin, its very familiar cockpit prominent in the background of the shot, I had to see it. Fortunately it isn't really movie-scary. That's not to say that pilots watching this movie won't have nightmares afterward. Let me set the scene.


A non-instrument rated pilot with only a few hours multi-engine experience, poor weather assessment skills and an affected emotional state boards all her closest friends onto an aircraft she has never flown before, with inoperative wing boots, and without providing a preflight safety briefing, securing their baggage nor performing a weight and balance calculation. She departs beneath the dark bases of towering cumulus and then attempts to outclimb them in poor visibility in mountainous terrain.
None of these factors dooms the flight, but an authoritative preflight safety briefing may have helped their case. Or maybe not, considering what the film throws at the terrified group of teens. Unlike my typical movie 'review,' I'm not going to give the whole story away. Most of the scary parts are an old-fashioned movie of the imagination with some depicted B-movie monster fun.
Although some aspects of the initial emergency that drives the plot are roll-in-the-aisles funny to anyone who knows how an airplane works, the aviation parts of the movie show the hand of a competent technical adviser. I know her. She is a commercial pilot who worked on Wings Over Canada. The pilot runs accurate checklists and, before she degenerates into screaming "MAYDAY" on multiple frequencies, makes the most authentic radio calls ever heard in a major motion picture. The weight calculation that she performs in her head (in flight, after icing become a concern) doesn't include any moment arms, but it's almost startling to hear her use terms like "basic empty weight" and explain that the stall speed will increase with weight.
Sadly the movie does not escape the "we have to lighten the load!" trope, involving throwing baggage out of the airplane, but they do avoid cutting to the fuel gauge at dramatically more frequent intervals. The pilot even leaves the Janitrol heater turned off specifically to conserve fuel. You don't realize how many things there are to know about aviation until you see the high ratio of things they got right to things they got wrong in the details.
The aircraft callsign for the purpose of the film is C-MYXZ. That's not a real callsign, as Canadian registrations never have an M after the C. Registrations are often changed for movie purposes. The Americans even have a small group of N-numbers reserved just for movies. This is the first time I've seen this particular obfuscation on a Canadian movie airplane. Maybe it's M for movie. it's like a 555 telephone number prefix for airplane registrations. The actual registration on this airplane is personalized to the owner, while YXZ is about as generic as you get.
I think not being a giant studio movie placed fewer layers between the technical advice and the finished product, and the result lends a lot more verisimilitude to the picture than you'd expect from a scary teen movie set in an airplane. Even though the director may not have intended suspense based on a VFR pilot hand flying through IMC, my heart was pounding. Spotting editing errors like an outside shot of the aircraft crossing the hold short line while the dialogue has the pilot reading back a hold short clearance, or a huge split in the mixtures when both engines are functioning normally is just part of the fun.
So is the ultimate hazard to this aircraft to be a control surface malfunction? Icing? Structural damage from turbulence? Fuel exhaustion? Loss of control from disorientation (and the pilot constantly turning her head around to talk to the people in the back)? Psychotic passengers? Hypoxia? CFIT? Not even close. Try giant space octopus. That's not a spoiler: its tentacles are right on the movie poster. Advance publicity billed this as a Lovecraftian monster movie, but monster fans will probably be disappointed. Aviation B-movie lovers should buy it right away, though.
The writer confesses that the original ending killed them all by crashing into terrain, but the actual ending is clever and satisfying. There are still a few loose ends, but I'll just call them red herrings. My largest complaint is that the visual post-processing was done overseas by a mainland China shop. This is not a quality issue, but because there's a lot of taxpayer funding in this, Kaare Andrew's first feature film, I'd rather it have gone to local talent. I'll forgive them because apparently they tried to have it done locally and then there was some screw-up; a Chinese company, with a Canadian connection, saved the film. It's filmed in Canada with anonymized airports and nav aid names, but if you've been there you'll easily spot where they really are.
It's rated restricted in the US for "language" and a "sexual gesture," but it's not a sweary or obscene movie at all. Apparently in the US, a guy hidden by a seatback who makes a gesture that suggests he may be opening his pants and waggling his wang poses potential trauma for a sixteen year old, while kids are free to see movies where someone is bludgeoned to death, so long as no blood is depicted. (I recall no bludgeoning nor bloodshed in Altitude).
As you can tell from the date on this blog entry and the direct-to- video release date of the movie, I got to see an advance showing, but I don't have a personal or financial connection to the film or its crew. I paid for my ticket and for my own copy of the DVD.

On the topic of products being released imminently by independent Canadian entertainers and of entertaining fictional death, a year or so ago one of my favourite webcomic artists, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, solicited stories about a world in which a person could learn the manner of their death in advance. Selected best stories have been edited into an anthology, and the book is about to be published. In an attempt to get a little bit of attention to a book that major publishing houses wouldn't accept, they ask that if you'd like to buy the book, buy it on Amazon.com on October 26th, in order to spike the sales and get it on Amazon's bestseller list, just for a day. A more cogent argument for that strategy is here. Again, I have no connection to the product, didn't even submit a story, but I appreciate Ryan's work, and I'd love a world where artists did wonderful things and simultaneously had enough money to support themselves, without all the intervening apparatus of the ... I want to say "dinosaur publishing world" but that would imply that they were as cool as Ryan's character T-Rex.

Alaskan Eagles

The missing luggage arrives around mid-morning, after we've discussed and agreed on the flight plan. We must have found some food somewhere, then cabbed out to the airport. I should have parked at PANC: the convenience and not having to pay for cab fare would have made up for the landing and tiedown fee, and just the general inconvenience of being at the little GA airport. We coaxed the cab driver onto the ramp to park right behind the airplane to make it easy for us to load our gear into the airplane. I pull the chocks and together we push back airplane and maneuver it awkwardly around a corner so it can be driven straight out. Of course now there are lots of more convenient open tiedown spots. There's a self serve pump nearby so we taxi over there. She agrees to fuel while I file the flight plan,

I go inside, and call the toll free number for the Kenai FSS. I should have mentioned earlier that 1-800-WXBRIEF often doesn't work here. Not every time, but often. Someone told me that it was being phased out, someone else looked at me like I was crazy when I said it didn't work, and yet another person said it wasn't fully established in Alaska. The Kenai number always works, and other than the number seems to function properly, so I use it. I check for any last minute weather or NOTAM changes, and file the flight plan. It's accepted as is, thanks to the crib notes for filing US flight plans that are imprinted on my clipboard. I was irritated that it was US not Canadian when I was a student but now (yes, I still have the same clipboard and yes, it is battered all to hell, but it still clips) I'm glad to have the US stuff.

I get back to the airplane and my coworker is still pumping gas. It's one of those slow pumps, not only with a low flow rate, but it has to be reset every fifty gallons. There probably was someone who could have come with a truck, but it's done now. We call ground for our IFR clearance and taxi. We had vectors in almost every direction, with "expect climb" or a thousand feet more climb meted out, before they gave us our final climb and a heading to intercept the enroute airway. I can't quite visualize exactly what they did, but we were visual for a while and it looks like we moved north and and east to get around all the heavy airline traffic arriving and departing Ted Stevens International. Only fair considering the care we were given when we flew our grid there.

We're in the clouds, southeast bound, and settle into our altitude. "You are allowed to use the autopilot," the other pilot chides. I'm not using it, because I want to practice for the flight test coming up, in an unfamiliar little airplane without an autopilot. I concentrate on scanning and maintaining altitude, heading and airspeed while managing the deicing boots and doing other minor tasks. I do eventually give in and turn on the autopilot because my concentration is waning and I want to sit back and take pictures.

We're mostly in and out of cloud, but for a while we're on top, and can see mountain peaks across the ocean of cloud. We're not sure if they are in Canada or the US. We try to find them on the chart, but IFR charts aren't much for naming peaks, and we don't have the VFR ones for the panhandle. I have all the deicing on, but a chunk of ice we picked up in cloud comes off the (unheated) windshield wiper and slowly floats up the windscreen. Does anyone have heated windshield wipers?

Our first point of landing today is Sitka. The wind is favouring runway 11. Although we have the Garmin 430 in the airplane, no one has done a ride using it, and the paperwork for the company training program has not yet been approved by Transport Canada, so technically we're not supposed to be using it for RNAV approaches. I choose this approach instead, as my preferred one, should they ask. As I reread what I typed there, I realize that everyone is going to think I really did the RNAV and am just pretending to have done the localizer approach, but remember I'm practicing up for a flight test which will no doubt include such a non-precision approach on standard nav aids. We were radar identified by ATC. I guess they have little remote radar installations down the coast here, wow. I'm expecting to be vectored, or fly direct a waypoint, to intercept the localizer straight in, but perhaps there was someone on the approach, because we end up going all the way to the VOR then coming back to fly the depicted DME arc and trundle through all those step downs. Around five thousand feet I could see lots of sea and islands or coast down there, but seeing as there was another pilot to call runway in sight--and take pictures--I just kept my head down and flew the steps. It was awesome fun.

I'm coming up on MDA and start looking for the runway, but I don't see it. There are a few clouds still slightly in the way, but I've made VFR approaches through much worse crap than this. How can I be tracking a straight in localiser and be so far off the inbound track that the runway isn't in my field of view?

I've mentioned before that pilots develop runway-finding instincts. We just know where we expect to find a runway and what it will look like, so we see it and the non-pilot passenger is still going "where?" until short final. I guess a lot of it is knowing where it's not reasonable to see a runway and not bothering to look those places, with whatever is left to look at being the runway. You don't, for example, look for a 6500' runway on a tiny round island covered in guano. Unless that is, you're looking for Sitka and expect to find it. I have no proof about the guano, but this may be the tiniest island ever to have a mile-long runway on it. They've just used the existing island as the place to build the FBO and stuck the runway out into the sea on fill. Or maybe the whole island is just fill. Hmm, it looks bigger in the picture than it did in the plane. Look at the plate: you can see the runway depicted, but you can't even see an island there. It's that small. I recognize it at some point before I have to go missed, laughing at how it was right in front of my nose, right where it was supposed to be, but I refused to see it because this is a wheelplane, damnit. I put the wheels down and we land. We taxi off and get fuel, washrooms and weather for the next leg.

It's a short one, just to Ketchikan, so that we have the best jumping-off point to go the whole way across Canada to Washington state without stopping for customs. But flight time limitations math comes into play. Despite the fact that there are two of us and I am at the controls, these are legally single pilot IFR flights. And when single pilot IFR is conducted, the CARs limits flight time for that pilot to eight hours of flight time per day. Counting taxiing, as flight time does, the first two legs alone will add up to about five hours. And there's no way we can do the last flight with the headwinds we have in under three hours. So we can only get to Ketchikan tonight. We use the FBO Internet and my credit card number (because I have mine memorized and we'd both left our wallets in the plane) to make a hotel booking in Ketchikan before we depart.

I think this was the departure we were assigned. I remember specifically the shuttle climb at the VOR for which the inbound track was specified. "Wait, that's the inbound track, not the radial? Why would they do that?" We decided it was because it was almost colocated with an NDB, at which the shuttle climb was also approved, and that it might be confusing to have one inbound on the 181 radial and the other inbound on a track of 003. But seeing as they have slightly different tracks anyway, why not do it that way? Or do US shuttles always specify inbound track and not radial at a VOR? We're at altitude before we've gone around enough times to figure it out, and we turn on course.

At Ketchikan I fly an ILS, so the airplane finds the runway all by itself. By the time you look up at decision height on an ILS the runway is all you can see. Either that or fog. There's fortunately no fog here today, because I wouldn't like to be going missed amongst all these mountains. We are marshalled to parking and tell the guy with the sticks that we're here overnight and looking for fuel. He directs us inside. It's the same franchise of FBO as at Sitka. They have a list of rates on the wall. All the standard stuff: avgas per gallon, Jet-A per gallon, towing, fish storage fee. What? Yep, the FBO has enough people asking them to store fish overnight that they have a posted fish storage fee. We're clearly in Alaska. Try asking your Oklahoma City FBO what their fish storage fee it.

We haven't any fish to store, just want to buy fuel, postcards and ask some questions. They're cheerful, take our fuel order, and volunteer to call the hotel shuttle for us. "Make sure you give them a room with a view," she insists. "They'll be on the six-thirty ferry." What? Ferry? Ketchikan airport is on an island, too. We have to take a ferry to get to town. It turns out that this airport (or maybe Ketchikan itself) is the "nowhere" from the "bridge to nowhere" that featured in the US presidential campaign. Governor Palin apparently accepted federal money to build a bridge linking this busy international airport with the town it serves, and then later turned it down. Something like that, what really happened was of course subsumed by the political noise it made. I can tell that the people who live in the town and work at the airport didn't much appreciate being dubbed "nowhere" on the national stage. A bridge across this very narrow channel does not seem to me to be an unreasonable extravagance. In the winter, the five minute ferry ride would probably be more treacherous, and I doubt the five dollar ferry fares paid for the maintenance and operation of the boat. The bridge might pay for itself in a few years, even if they didn't make it a toll bridge. But then I live in the country that built Constitution Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island.

It is quite a small town. It goes back at maximum five or six blocks from the water. That's all there is room for before the coast becomes too steep. The shuttle driver works in the local utilities company in the winter. There is a busy cruise ship dock here, so lots of seasonal work associated with that, and also a fish-packing plant. Our rooms do have a great view. I phone people to tell them, "I'm in Alaska watching eagles fighting over fish out the window of my hotel." There are so many eagles they are like seagulls anywhere else. I've seen this many eagles in trees all at once, but not all sitting on the shore like these guys. There must be excellent fishing here. I suspect the eagles are quite often a problem for the airport, though. They are a heavily protected species in the US, being their national bird and all, so that might limit the bird abatement measures they can employ, too.

We walk to a nearby recommended restaurant. It has Mediterranean decor, and a lot of interesting dishes on the menu, but we decide, laughing at the apparent snobbishness of it, "We'll have Mexican tomorrow in the US West. Tonight we're in Alaska so it should be seafood." I have a crab pasta that had so much crab on it that even after I stopped eating the pasta I had to leave chunks of crab behind on the plate. Seems like a crime, but I can't take it with me.

I didn't mention the roof dogs yet. In more than one place in Alaska we have seen dogs out on the roof. It seems that if you don't have a fenced yard and you want your dog to get some fresh air, you put it on the roof. Or perhaps a reader has a better explanation. Here's one from Ketchikan.

We walk around, take a few pictures of the town and plan our morning to catch the first ferry back to the airport in the morning.

Turn, Turn, Turn

It's go day. The airplane is jammed full of gear so our AME and clients are taking the airlines. It's amazing where airlines go in the US. And it's not a Twin Otter, either. They drop us off at the FBO and then drive back to the terminal to check in.

We bid farewell to the folks at the FBO. They've treated us well. The weather at destination is not great, but should be adequate for us to get in. We just have to bypass the mountains that bar our way in every direction but south. We taxi out and are cleared for take-off on the same runway we used for departure on the mission, but I think it was an intersection departure this time. We follow their instructions to fly south, then by vectors, then on course. I keep my eyes peeled for beluga whales as we go over the inlet. I so want to see a wild beluga whale.

The first route we attempt to navigate is Merrill Pass. It's a very long pass, going in over a low river and lake before reaching the saddle that is the highest point in the pass. We try to fly high, above a scattered layer, but the clouds build in front of us forcing us higher into a sandwich with the layer above. Ahead of us all is indistinct grey-white. We can't tell whether the layers meet each other or grey rock. You already know, as I said this was the "first" route, that this one was unsuccessful. Perhaps a pilot very familiar with this pass would have pressed on, but that's not us. We reverse course and tell flight services we were unable Merrill and we're going to try the lower pass at Lake Clarke. He saves us the trouble by giving us PIREPs indicating that it too is impassable. Okay, maybe we can go around further, at the end of this range. I love having fuel and speed. I'd love more going up and over, but it's a long way up to get to IFR altitudes here. This range contains Mount McKinley, locally known as Denali, the highest point in North America. That means that even with summer temperatures on the ground, the forecast ice in convective cloud is beyond the certification of this airplane.

As we work our way south down the coast the visibility drops in rain and mist. We're down over the sea, watching out for pointy islands and hoping we don't get in trouble for being within 3000' of oil rigs. Finally I say, "Screw it, we're not bush pilots. This isn't going to be safe when there isn't an ocean to the left." I take that unobstructed left turn and head back north. "Is there another airport closer that looks like it has an okay town for an overnight?" He doesn't see one on the chart and after discussion I agree with his recommendation to return to the same airport in Anchorage, where everything is. It's a better place to be stuck.

The FBO don't mind that we've come back. The manager gives us a ride to a grocery store with a deli, so we can buy lunch. We bring it back to the FBO and sit upstairs in the pilots lounge, reading National Geographic and obsessively refreshing the mountain pass webcam sites, as if we can clear the clouds by shear force of clicking. We're still hoping the weather will improve today so we can deliver ourselves and our cargo on schedule.

The manager tells us that he is going home early, but to call him if there is anything we need. We can hear the FBO staff talking downstairs. They don't know their voices drift up clearly through the architecture. They are griping about a change to the corporate policy about dogs at work. It seems someone brought a dog that barked at a customer and wrecked it for everyone. Then they start reading aloud the gory details of a CFIT accident report, with some amount of glee in their voices. I hear laughter as they get to the particulars of the broken bones in the pilots' hands and feet (this is always analyzed in fatal accidents to determine who had control at the time of the accident, and possibly how they were applying force). I don't know whether the accident happened to someone whom they hated with a passion that even death could not dim, or they genuinely think it's funny to play jigsaw with parts of a former human, or it's defensive laughter to show bravado in the face of death.

Finally the webcam shows the Merrill Pass navigable, and the stations reporting ceilings generally have higher numbers than the pass requires. We pay our landing fees and launch again. Low visibility greets us as soon as we look for the entrance to the pass. We haven't even got to the lake yet and already we are peering into gloom. "I see ground, I see ground, I see ... nothing." Mist, cloud and snow-covered rock are all the same colour. If we tried to guess which was which and guessed wrong, mine are the bones that would shatter where I am holding the control column. We turn away back to where we can see and try a different angle. We get a little further, but not far enough, not with enough visibility to be safe through the pass. Defeated, we turn back and park at PANC for the night.

The hotel we were in so far this week is booked up, so we find another. We check in and the receptionist rapidly recites a litany of forbidden activities. It sounds like "no smoking, no pets, no dancing," but the last turns out to be "no damage." You'd think that would go without saying, but a lot of things about this hotel aren't what you'd expect. For example we aren't really in this hotel. We've checked in here, but our rooms are in the scuzzy hotel across the street. The hallways smell of wood rot, and the elevator doesn't go all the way up. I unlock my room, drag my luggage in and look around. The toilet runs continuously. I know how to stop it, temporarily, but I'd like the components of my room not to require disassembly before use.

There is a sign on the window that looks a bit like our airplane emergency exit placard, so I go over to read it. The instructions are very similar, except that the last step is to signal for help, and not to effect an egress independently. Probably wise, as the hotel is on the third floor and there's quite a drop to the ground. But still, you want to be able to get out. There is another building fairly close and lower, but you couldn't get enough forward momentum to guarantee jumping to it. Maybe you could swing on something.

After a while my coworker comes in the still open door to ask if the internet is working for me. I have to confess I haven't tried it. "I was looking at the sign on my window and devising my escape plan. I figure I could take out my knife and cut each bedsheet into strips and tie them together, plus the curtains too. I'd move one of the bedframes over close to the window as an attachment point." I was just deciding whether five strips from each sheet would be enough, or if I should do more, when he came in. He didn't treat me as though I was completely insane, so he probably thought it was just an extension of my safety-consciousness, as opposed to a manifestation of my wandering mind.

I try my computer and it doesn't connect either. I call reception to report the difficulty. The desk clerk, who is very polite, confirms that the internet doesn't work from this particular property. We can go downstairs and across the street to the other building and sit in the lobby there to use it.

We go out for dinner at a little restaurant with red and white checkered plastic tablecloths. It has good service and quite tasty lasagna at reasonable prices. We eat up and go back to the hotel. I skip having a shower because I think I'd have to be dirtier than I am for the laws of dirtodynamics to suggest that I'd become cleaner in that shower.

Cavalry Charge

Did you hear about the A330 that encountered severe turbulence, pitot icing, unreliable airspeed indications, and a cascade of system warnings while crossing the Atlantic towards France? The pilots did a great job getting that airplane to Paris in one piece.

No, I haven't entered an alternate reality where Air France 447 reached its destination. I'm reading a company memo from Hugh Houang, the Air Caraïbes flight safety officer, describing technical difficulties they had with that airline's A330-200 aircraft in August and September last year, and the inadequacy of the Airbus checklists for dealing with them. The memo is in French, but someone who speaks Airbus will probably be able to read it with minimal trouble. Airbus system and warning names are all in English. Below is a highlights summary, with my own commentary in parentheses.

It first documents the flight of F-OFDF, en route from Fort de France, Martinique to Paris, France:

• 22:11 - They encountered adverse conditions. Prescribed weather deviation procedures didn't help flight conditions, so they returned to FL350 at 22:14.
• 22:22 - They reduced speed and power settings, and disconnected the autothrust in accordance with the SEVERE TURBULENCE checklist.
• 22:22 - In seconds, the air temperature rose from -14 to -5, indicating the temperature of the ice, as opposed to of the outside air, a sign of severe pitot icing. The displayed calibrated airspeed dropped from 270 kts to 85 kts (yikes! that's too slow for me!); the flight directors and autopilot disconnected and there were a cascade of warnings and alarms, my favourite of which was CAVALRY CHARGE. (An Airbus speaker explained that this apparent Napoleonic reference is the name of the distinctive audio signal associated with autopilot disconnect). The stall warning sounded, as did the CRICKET (another type of annunciator) and the master warning came on. (I'm skipping many of the alarms listed. Suffice to say, this cockpit looked and sounded like a pinball machine).
• 22:23 Over the next two minutes the temperature dropped again, the airspeed came back up and the altitude jumped up to 34500'. They soon recovered their flight directors and autopilot.

For 86 seconds the crew had no reliable airspeed, mach or altitude indications. (This may seem like a very short time, but 178 seconds was the average time a pilot with that information but without the training on how to use it took to destroy a simulated small airplane. And those test subjects weren't in severe turbulence. All the training in the world doesn't help a crew keep the airplane under control if they don't have the data). The crew concentrated on flying the airplane, using GPS data, and trying to complete the Unreliable Speed Indication checklist. They were helped by the fact that they had already completed the Severe Turbulence checklist, but there was not time during the incident to complete its recommendations. The manual strongly suggests to the pilot flying that the stall alarms are inappropriate. (The picture given by the message RESPECT STALL WARNING AND DISREGARD "RISK OF UNDUE STALL WARNING" STATUS MESSAGE IF DISPLAYED ON ECAM is of someone flying an airplane where the stall warnings are saying that the airplane is stalling, the ECAM screen is telling the pilot to disregard the stall warnings, and the manual is telling the pilot to disregard the ECAM and heed the stall warnings, but the pilot doesn't believe that the airplane is stalling. It's like having your chief pilot, training manager and captain all on the flight deck, telling you do different things).

The next part of the memo then analyzes the event and the warnings in terms of the Airbus protections offered by ALTERNATE LAW, NORMAL LAW, and DIRECT LAW, detailing what was and lost or changed in response to the various alarms, such as the F/CTL ADR DISAGREE. He points out that the checklists contradict each other when the unreliable speed indication checklist says, RELY ON THE STALL WARNING THAT COULD BE TRIGGERED IN ALTERNATE OR DIRECT LAW. IT IS NOT AFFECTED BY UNRELIABLE SPEEDS, BECAUSE IT IS BASED ON ANGLE OF ATTACK, while the icing checklist warns UNDUE STALL WARNINGS MAY MAINLY OCCUR IN THE CASE OF AN AOA DISCREPANCY. (AoA is angle of attack, measured by vanes outside the aircraft, which in severe icing can also be unreliable).

(With the autothrust selected off and the crew confidence that they were not in a stall, no stall recovery inputs were made. Which is good, because the result of stall recovery inputs when you are not in a stall could be an overspeed, and in alternate law, if I understand M. Houang correctly, the high speed protection warnings are reduced).

In response to the two incidents (the second one is not described, but the partial aircraft ident "PTP" is given), Air Caraïbes quickly replaced the pitot tubes on its fleet with a different kind, with drainage designed especially for the heavy precipitation and severe icing encountered.

In October, Air Caraïbes officials met with Airbus representatives, who understood that the stall warning messages were contradictory and that the checklists were difficult to complete rapidly. They said they'd think about modifying the checklists.

And then M. Houang says he hopes the memo has answered everyone's questions, and wishes everyone good flights.

I expect a lot more Airbus pitot tubes to be replaced now, whether or not the similar events preceding the loss of AF447 is determined to stem from the same cause.

Icing Inexperience

Spring has well and truly sprung in Canada and I've been off camping, paying no attention at all to my blog account mail. I peeked at it recently and it's full of unread mail from you guys and news alerts on the Colgan accident investigation. (I originally blogged about the Colgan 3407 crashthe night it happened).

The cockpit voice recorder transcript was released last week, and a lot of information about the pilots' lifestyle was released at the hearing. If you're reading about a fatal airplane crash, the only thing you can read that can really be said to be a relief is that the crash was misreported, and everyone is alright. That's obviously not the case here. It's still a little bit of a relief to find out some of what happened, because it collapses the network of all the possible bad things that could happened into the few that actually did.

The first thing that hits me reading this transcript is the stunning inexperience of the crew in comparison with Canadian aviation. The captain says he was hired with 625 hours. That would have been as first officer, but you'd be lucky to get a job on a Navajo or a King Air in Canada with that time. The first officer had sixteen hundred hours at the time of the accident, but much of that was as a flight instructor in Phoenix. There she would rarely have seen a cloud, nor below freezing temperatures. In her own words, in the recording made not quite five minutes before she died ...

"I've never seen icing conditions. I've never deiced. I've never seen any-- I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to experience that and make those kind of calls. You know I'd have freaked out. I'd have like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash."

So she has no basis beyond company training on which to judge the severity of icing. She's never flown northern routes in the spring to places where the most distinctive landmarks are the crashed remains of airplanes that didn't make it. She is depending on the captains she is flying her now to teach her how to make those judgements. And that's part of being a first officer. She's smart enough to know that, too. When talking about the people hired at the same time as her, she notes that many are agitating for an upgrade but that she "really wouldn't mind going through a winter in the northeast before I have to upgrade to captain."

It sounds as if upgrades happen pretty quickly there, and as if not everyone thinks of their period of time as a first officer as an apprenticeship. I originally looked at the fact that Rebecca Shaw had been with the company through a winter and assumed that meant she had experienced icing conditions in that airplane. But I wasn't thinking about the short routes that Colgan uses the Dash-8 on, and that with a southern base, it's possible to go through a US winter without meeting ice.

The captain you would think had more experience, but he accepted the autopilot setting "I've got you in pitch hold," in icing conditions. Regardless of your experience, one of the things that icing training teaches you so you don't have to find out for yourself is that an ice accumulation that looks exactly like the one the airplane handled fine last week may result in completely different handling today. Very subtle changes can have a huge affect on aircraft stbility and handling. Hand flying allows you to notice how the ice is affecting you, if the airplane is needing more trim or more power to hold the same parameters. You don't want an airplane on pitch hold, holding its own nose up without you realizing what it's having to do to achieve that. In ice, that can lead to a stall. And this airplane stalled fifteen seconds after a cheerfully unconcerned radio exchange with air traffic control.

Not only are they talking to ATC, but they are talking to each other. We're getting a complete career analysis from both pilots right through the flight, interspersed with their clearances and checklists. A reader asked me if he thought that women,stereotypically more chatty, were more likely to disregard the sterile cockpit than men. Anyone who reads my blog can tell that I have a lot of verbiage to dispense. But I know what a sterile cockpit is and what it is for and I STFU when required to. I want to be a professional pilot and it's about more than having your hat on straight. Act like one, sound like one. I don't think this is a male-female issue. The captain is keeping up his end of the conversation. It's company culture. The FO says she's been flying with a lot of captains, some of whom can't finesse the rudder, but none of whom have apparently instructed her or demonstrated to her that one shuts up about ones career below ten thousand feet. It's not a difficult culture to instill because how many times would an FO have to have a a captain point at the altimeter or say, "sterile cockpit please" before she never opens her mouth for non-essential communication below ten thousand?

Other evidence from the hearing shows that pilots paid far too little to live at their bases were living far from their bases were commuting across the country and then sleeping on crew room couches before their duty periods. Ever flown a redeye and then had a nap on a couch in a room where people were coming in and out, having discussions and watching TV? Ready to handle any emergency right? And ready to handle three back to back 16-hour shifts? Yeah, right.

I commute across the continent that, but only once a month, and the company ensures I've had eight hours in a hotel bed before I'm expected to work. Three back-to-back 16 hour duty days is criminal. I'll work three fourteens and I'm beat. There's no way I'd be safe with another two hours on each of those days. I worked back-to-back sixteens like that back when I was seventeen years old. After a few days of that routine, I slept right through my alarm and was late for work. But I didn't get in trouble. The doughnut shop *manager* got in trouble for scheduling me that way. Yes, I was working in a doughnut shop, not flying an airplane. It seems that Canadian doughnuts and coffee are deemed by company upper management to deserve more alert supervision than the controls of a Colgan commuter airline. The FO also seems to have had a cold--she sneezes more than once during the flight and the captain is inquiring about her ability to clear her ears as they descend, even planning the descent profile for her comfort.

A manager at Colgan suggested random audits of the CVR for compliance with sterile cockpit procedures. That's not where professional flying comes from. Train and examine people to the standards you expect. Spot checks? What is this, summer camp? If you have to do spot checks of basic safety proedures, you're hiring the wrong people or training them incorrectly.

Homeward Bound

My replacement pilot is here and my flight home is booked, so there is no impediment to my leaving. I even have breakfast with my co-worker, because he's not working today. There is a large area of freezing rain forecast, here and to the south. Oh oh. I hope I'm still leaving. Freezing rain is a reason to cancel or delay airline flights, and I have connections to make between non-partnered carriers, who don't know I'm coming. I'll have to collect my luggage, check in, and recheck my luggage. I hope I get there, but I don't want to go if the weather is unsafe. I hope the pilots at this little northern airline have the balls to cancel a flight in unfavourable weather.

The hotel van takes me to the airport. I check in at the desk in the little terminal and put my bag on the scale. As the agent goes to lift my bag off the scale I intervene to show her that the top handle is broken, so it has to be lifted from the side. I hear her conveying this information to the baggage handler. I bought that suitcase in Florida. It was cheap, but I was operating on the theory that cheap or expensive, this lifestyle was going to trash my suitcase, so I might as well not spend a lot of money on it. That and the mall by the hotel didn't have any stores above the level of Wal-Mart or Ross. The suitcase hasn't completely self-destructed yet. I'll get a new one soon. The CSA gives me my boarding pass and I go further into the terminal to wait.

It's a little bigger and swankier than the terminal at my old base in Weasel. For example the floor is level and the toilets have doors. But it's not big city. There are no news stands or TVs. There might have been a vending machine. The best part is a partly-completed thousand-piece jigsaw laid out on a table. I love this sort of thing about small airport terminals. I'm sure there some official reason why you couldn't have a jigsaw puzzle table in a departure lounge at l'Aéroport international Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau. Transmission of disease? Choking hazard? The airport authority cannot be responsible for deciding whether the jigsaw should be of kittens chasing string or of balloons floating over the countryside? A jigsaw puzzle has no linguistic or age barriers and it doesn't matter if you come in or leave on the middle of it. One person an work on it or several, with any level of cooperation. And it stimulates your brain, instead of deadening it like TV.

I'm the only one working on this jigsaw puzzle now. I'm looking for an orangish brown piece with really big square corners and a little teeny slightly left of centre tab, when someone comes up and asks about my checked baggage. It's the baggage handler. "I fixed your suitcase," he says proudly. He explains at length that he saw that it was broken and so he looked at the handle, and there was a metal part and he put a bolt through that, and so on. I thank him and he segues off into another story about how he fixed someone else's luggage. This seems to be his hobby. He's single-handedly making up for all the bags that all the other baggage handlers in the world have broken. I'm sure this violates some regulation, as does what I suspect he may have consumed before work. Or maybe he's always this garrulous. I thank him again and go back to the puzzle.

After I get lots of orangish-brown pieces connected, the flight is called. There's no security. I'm in the north. I just pick up my carry on and board the airplane. I've interviewed with this carrier. As look at the airplane I wonder what I was thinking. I don't want to work here. I feel sorry for the pilots. I watch them and hope I don't appear as transparently self-important as I go about my duties. I catch myself looking at the pilots' faces to see if I know them from somewhere. They're younger than me, so I probably don't. I don't want to fly this airplane. I want to fly better ones, skipping this stage. That's not really the way it works, Aviatrix.

They play a recorded preflight safety briefing. I listen to the recording, stow my carry-on and read the evacuation procedures like I mean it. As they start the engines I realize I've made a rookie mistake. There was no assigned seating and I just sat in the first available seat. Experienced passengers move to the back of a turboprop like this, away from the noise. I have earplugs in my flight bag, so I use those.

During the flight I'm watching to see if we're icing. We're not. We're flying between layers. The FO is reading a sheaf of something that doesn't look like approach plates or a checklist. Company memos, probably, or maybe his cheat sheet notes. (When you're new you make yourself a cheatsheat of runway numbers, nav aids, frequencies and other things that you'd have to look up in a variety of places. Tip: laminate your cheatsheet so it looks like a regular checklist). The heater in this airplane works well. Bleed air is a wonderful thing.

My first connection connects and I entrust my safety to another set of strangers. For some reason today I'm more conscious than usual that all pilots are people like me. We make stupid mistakes, get lazy, tired, or sick. And we all want to get home safely. Which I do.

The Season of Ice

It's official almost summer, so for me this can only mean one thing: annual ice awareness training. Yeah, my company training is out of sync with the real world. It's just the way it is. Instead of just having me watch the Transport Canada When in Doubt video on deicing again, they had me do this NASA video course on icing, too. It's excellent. Canadians who only fly in Canada will find some of the weather products unfamiliar, but you can skip those parts. If you do, or might fly in the US, it's a good how-to-use for their icing products, which are different from the Canadian GFAs. And the advice is very practical, not just recitation of examination factoids, like "contamination the texture and thickness of sandpaper decreases lift by 30% and increases drag by 40%."

Here are some examples of academic information transformed to simple, practical advice.

Weather basics tell us that stratiform clouds form in layers, usually not more than a few thousand feet thick, and and cumulus clouds develop vertically. The NASA course says to escape ice in stratiform clouds, change altitude by 3000', but navigate around cumulus clouds.

Weather theory tells us that an air mass loses moisture from crossing a mountain range, and that all else being equal, more moisture in a cloud means more icing. So NASA says, plan to fly on the leeward side of a mountain range.

Fronts are the places where air masses meet, named according to which air mass is advancing. At a warm front, warm air is advancing over a wedge of cold air. At a cold front, a wedge of cold air is forcing warm air up. So the NASA advice is to fly on the warm air side of a front, i.e. traverse a warm front perpendicular to frontal movement and behind the front and traverse a classic cold front perpendicular to movement and in front of it. This is probably good advice everywhere in the US but Alaska, but I'd have to reverse it for the north in the winter, because then the cold air is down below minus thirty, too cold for icing, but if the warm air is up around minus ten it will contain the more dangerous icing.

We already do this for engine failures and depressurization events, so why not develop an icing escape plan for each point along your route.

The NASA course does treat North America wide phenomena. They mapped of the continent for icing potential, illustrating that icing is more common around large bodies of water. At first I blinked at it. Why did it not show massive icing around the northern lakes and bay? Then I noticed the caption "November to March." The northern bodies of water are frozen solid then, so are not a source of moisture for icing until spring.

They acknowledge that their audience already knows things about icing, some of which are myths. NASA is wonderful because they don't just pool the advice of experts and regurgitate it back. They go out and do research, some of which involves flying actual airplanes around in actual icing conditions, and can back up what they say.

Pilots who have flown regularly in ice have all looked out the window and confidently assured their terrified copilots that they've seen worse. NASA research, and you get to trust them more than the grizzled captain because they really do research what they write about, reminds us that it is nearly impossible for a pilot to visually distinguish between an accretion that is flyable and one that threatens survival. I am reminded every time I preflight of how little it takes to change the flyability of an airplane. That's because my airplane has a vortex kit, eighty-eight little metal tabs on the wings and tail. They're tiny, each about the thickness of a dime and the area of the first joint of my thumb. But lose three and the maximum gross weight of my airplane drops by six per cent. I mentally compare that to how an ice accretion could affect airflow over the wing. By how much will it decrease the maximum flyable weight of the airplane?

And no icing video is complete without a nod to the old advice on deicing boots. In the old days, before I learned how to fly, probably before I was born, manufacturers told pilots to wait until there was a significant accretion on the wing before inflating the boots. The theory back them was that if the boots were inflated when the ice was very thin, inflation of the boots could result in bridging, creating a boot-sized airspace surrounded by ice the boots couldn't meet. NASA points out that while this may have been possible with the old, slower inflation boots, it is not with modern boots and that no one has ever shown ice bridging to occur with any boots. "Ho hum," I thought at that part of the presentation. Old news. Everyone has heard that debunked by now. The pilots I have flown with who advocate waiting are not delaying activation to avoid ice-bridging, which they don't believe in either. They are delaying it because they are waiting for the "skin" of ice to be thick enough to pull off the runback ice as the boots pop. This video, however, addresses this too. It admits that studies confirm that larger amounts do shed more cleanly with one inflation. But that research shows that although ice may remain between cycles, the ice will ultimately clear as well as it would have, had you waited for a large build up, and by activating the boots as soon as you have ice, you reduce the maximum amount of ice you are ever carrying. This makes more sense than decreasing the minimum amount.

I have notes on a couple of things I hadn't met before, too.

Freezing drizzle (small supercooled raindrops that freeze on contact with your airframe) is according to NASA most commonly formed by collision coalescence. That is, by even smaller supercooled water droplets bashing into one another and becoming big enough to drift down as drizzle. I had thought that it was usually formed the way textbook freezing rain is formed at a warm front, with rain falling out of the warm air aloft, and becoming supercooled by its passage through the colder air below. I can diagram it and everything. Useful as my original knowledge is for passing Transport Canada exams, there's an important difference: as the NASA course points out, I should not assume that the presence of freezing drizzle indicates warmer air above, into which I could climb to escape the ice.

The other new-to-me thing I remember is electro-expulsive deicing where the shape of the actual wing is mechanically altered to dislodge ice, like flexing an ice cube tray.

It's very usable, multi-media with exercises to do, and so many videos available to watch you can miss a lot of them by not looking at the 'related information' section. The only spelling error that distracted me was the term "full blow thunderstorms" where I would have expected "full blown," but perhaps that's a regionalism. The course is something you have to dedicate a day to. There's that much information.

P-I-C Responsibility

This has been kicking around in my drafts folder for a while and an entry on a new-to-me blog gives me reason to finish it. If there is more than one pilot assigned to a flight, one of them is designated pilot-in-command. As pilot-in-command you are given latitude to make decisions. That's what it's about. There is air law to follow, plus you are given a number of manuals and data to help you make those decisions, but most of them, even the laws, give considerable latitude for a pilot to do what is safe in a particular case.

It's not so much that you are required to follow every manual. It's that you are required to not screw up. You can find justification for almost any action in the manual, but so can the company find condemnation. I can honestly never think of an occasion where a colleague got in trouble for violating a rule when no harm (i.e. regulatory action, aircraft damage, complaint, or harm to public image) was done. Right up until it isn't done well, pilots get praised for their ability to land in stiff crosswinds. That's getting the job done.

That's why the captain is paid significantly more than the FO. The captain is the one who approves or vetoes such a decision, whether she is the one at the controls or not. As PIC you know that if you go off the end of the runway, chew up the props, run out of fuel, damage something with jet blast, blow a tire, ding a wingtip, incur a noise complaint, arrive late, divert, or annoy a customer, questions will be asked. If there's an accident, the relevant authorities will go over everything you did with reference to the laws, the SOPs, the AFM, the FDR, the CVR, the instructions given by ATC, the weather, the NOTAMs, the charts and every other recording and piece of paper they can find. And if they find a recommendation or a policy or a memo that you were not following to the letter, you are screwed.

If something beyond your control goes spectacularly wrong, like the gear lever has been moved to the down position, but one of the wheels won't lock down, you're not blamed specifically for that, although you might be accused of not spotting some damage on the preflight inspection.

I can't remember where I grabbed this exchange from. A movie? A TV show?

"You think you have all the answers."

"I'm the captain. That's my job."

Often I think the first officer's job is even harder, and this story (told on someone else's blog) illustrates that well. Of course Sulako beat me to the punch, but I still wanted to link to it. The story was originally on her personal blog and the traffic from here was more than she wanted, so I've taken out the link. See her medevac stories here. Ensuring a safe flight is the responsibility of both pilots, but the no-go decision is harder for the FO. If the FO wants to go, but the captain says "we're not continuing, the ice is too bad," the FO can say, "oh, I didn't think it was that bad," or even "you're a chicken," (with a smile) but has no reason to argue. The FO might be a bit embarrassed and vow to be more diligent at checking the weather next time. But no one really loses face.

Now let it be the captain who wants to go when the FO says the conditions are not suitable. The FO may have to fight for her life to alter that decision. Had there been passengers and injury or death involved in this flight, as there have been in so many before and after it, Dagny would probably have been exonerated. She repeatedly and strenuously objected to the captain's decisions, and finally did override them. But many first officers who have been placed in that position have no descendants. I hope Dagny gets to tell this story to her kids, to teach them to stand up for what they believe in.

Oh and a straw poll: I say "Pee Eye See" but I've heard people refer to "pick-time" in their logbooks. If you are a pilot, please tell me how you pronounce PIC.