Another Day

Now I'm feeling madder than yesterday. They aren't going to call me back. I'm in some kind of No Fly database that I can never know about or escape from. Once when I left one job for a better one, the owner of the old company called the manager of the new company to say that I was a terrible pilot and a non-trustworthy employee. Fortunately the new boss already knew me, so realized that the last desperate ploy to stop me getting the new job was actually a compliment about my value as a pilot. Sometimes I picture a vast conspiracy wherein that boss has made it his life's work to sabotage my career, finding out wherever I try to go and poisoning them against me. Hey, some of you thought it was paranoia last week when I had the premonition this job was going to fall apart.

But for now, I'm just fed up. I hate airplanes. They're stupid. I'm going to go buy some chickens and look feed them and collect the eggs. No, I'm going to rent an incubator and buy some fertilized eggs and hatch my own chickens so they imprint on me and I can raise them and train them to fetch, or cluck on command, or not to drown in the rain, or whatever the pinnacle of chicken learning is. And then I'll collect the eggs, and then when the chickens stop laying eggs I will tell them that I have rescinded their job offer, and I will eat them. And yay for the circle of life.

I found a big pile of partially completed to do lists today; I never throw out uncompleted to do lists, it seems, just abandon them half done. And they all seem to have the same things undone, things that always need doing even though I do them fairly often, things that come around again and again. I'm going to do them all. I'm going to go through all my lists and do them until they are done once and for all, and not have any fun because I don't deserve any. Except that feeding my chickens might be fun. I'll let you know.

I turn on my computer to find out where to buy chickens and somehow end up on an aviation job site. I haven't checked it for a week, on account of thinking I had a job. "Hmm, this job looks good." I could raise chickens there instead of here. I start to compose an e-mail to the chief pilot, when the phone rings. It's an ex-chief pilot, in town flying a medevac to here. I go out to dinner with the crew, good to catch up. One of the flight medics observes, "I never knew before this job how difficult it was to be a pilot." I thought she was talking about physical tasks like loading, de-icing, or the hours, but she continues to say, "You can't just decide where you want to work, apply and get a job. You have to work really hard to find a job, and go wherever that job is." She gets it. And it's not just me. It's the industry. I come home and finish the e-mail. And send another to another company. And make a list of more people to contact. Life goes on.

I hate airplanes. At least when chickens shit on you, you can use it to fertilize the garden. I think the worst part is that I know every fricking circuit breaker on this airplane I'll probably never fly. All those brain cells faithfully holding information that I may never use. Who wants me to finish telling you all about the airplane for which I received free groundschool and training manuals, and who wants to skip it and learn about chickens?

Dark Marshall

I didn't see a marshaller yesterday while taxiing in after my second landing. I just headed for where I had parked before. Just as I was about to shut down I saw the marshaller, in front of an open hangar, waving what appeared to be two dark sticks. I don't know whether he had lost his flashlights or the batteries were dead or he hadn't been equipped with any, but it was the darkest marshaller I've ever had at night. I don't think he even had a reflective vest on. Certainly not the new super-bright kind. Maybe I should get one of those vests to wear when I'm walking around a dark ramp at night. Dorky but safer. I think I've determined that the extent of a person's nerdiness is a function of their willingness to sacrifice trendiness for practicality. Tape on the glasses is really the ultimate expression of that: tape is available right at your desk for almost free. Frame repair involves an optician appointment and a lot of money. Once your nerdiness reaches a certain nadir, the tape is a no-brainer.

I shut down and saw we were quite near an ambulance. I hoped he hadn't got us mixed up with an expected medevac, but then a King Air taxiied up and the ambulance went out to it, and he was unsurprised when I just asked for fuel.

Oh, and there is no tape on my glasses.

Diversion

This Air Canada incident involving a celebrity wouldn't have even caught my attention but for a peculiar contradiction. The airline insists that the scheduled flight from Heathrow to Toronto was diverted to St. John's, Newfoundland for a medical emergency. But the linked report implies that the only passenger disembarked was an intoxicated woman who was taken by police, not ambulance, and charged with a number of things, including endangering safety of an aircraft.

I'm not certain I've ever heard of Coleen Walsh, but apparently she hosted for radio and TV including CBC in Toronto, and was released on $2500 bail.

Although the Aviation Herald article refers to Ms. Walsh as "the ill passenger" I suspect they have incorrectly inferred that and that in fact Air Canada did divert for a medical emergency and simply have released no information on its nature. This is supported by the fact that Aviation Herald articles normally give no information on the nature of the medical emergency in such diversions and that the police were called 30 minutes after landing. If an airplane needs emergency services, ATC will make the necessary calls to have them meet the plane as soon as they arrive. It looks like the A330-300 diverted for medical reasons, was met by an ambulance for the actual ill passenger and then when Ms. Walsh proved to be unready for their subsequent departure, the crew called police.

The Star article almost makes it look as if Air Canada is trying to cover for her, "No, no, she wasn't sick, she was drunk!" but I'm sure it's just an error in the writing. That just goes to show how easy it is to have the facts:
1. airplane diverted for medical emergency
2. intoxicated person arrested
and just by sewing them together into a paragraph make the article say something else. I'm sure I do it all the time.

A later article in the same newspaper gives Ms. Walsh's side of the story. She apparently offered her first aid skills in relation to the medical emergency and when she was rejected because they wanted an actual doctor, she persisted, and pushed another passenger who told her to shut up. When asked to leave the airplane she complied, but became enraged when she realized that she was being taken into police custody. She cites an alcohol reaction with sleeping pills and a missed dose of other medication as contributing to her overreaction.

Real Estate Monthly

In which Aviatrix bores you with a small town newspaper.

This restaurant has slow service and when I eat by myself, as I often do, that's very boring. I tried to buy a newspaper. There had been a sign at the hotel earlier saying that they had them for sale. The girl at the desk said they were a week old, and she couldn't bring herself to charge me for it, so she'd just give me one. It was the local town paper, not the national or big city paper I was hoping for. But that's okay, I took it gratefully. Better than reading the drink specials list again.

Service was even slower. I think my strategy backfired, and they decided they could take their time because I was reading the paper. Or maybe it just seemed longer because the paper was more boring that the drink specials list. I kept it, fully intending to report back on the fascinating news in Fort Nelson, but having read it slowly once, I couldn't bring myself to open it again. So I'll just tell you that the front page leads with a rollover accident on the Alaska highway. Victim with head injuries was taken by ambulance to the local hospital, then medevaced down south. Next to that is a 22 year old construction worker who mysteriously dropped dead at work, a Conservative MP celebrating his third election to office, and nominations closed for local elected officials. One of the two mayoral candidates withdrew his nominations, and the schoolboard has been elected by acclaimation, but it appears there will be an election for council. Also a house burned down and the company that closed the local plywood mill says they don't intend the closure to be permanent, but that the mill is for sale. Please don't say you want to know what's on page two.

The advertising supplement is Northern British Columbia's Real Estate Monthly: Serving Fort Nelson, Fort St. John, Dawson Creek, Chetwynd & Area. I'd tell you what a house costs here, but none of the ads actually mentioned WHICH of the communities the listings is for. You have to know the area. For example, here's a picture of what appears to be a double-wide trailer, with a bit of a deck and a side porch.

12314 256 RD * $369,900

Don't pass up this well cared for home located on 1.5 kms from the old Montney Store. This extremely up-dated home boasts new flooring throughout all sitting on 20 acres, perfect for horses. Located just 15 minutes from, pavement all the way to your driveway. Call Today.

I didn't realize how bizarre the grammar in that is until I typed it. The sentences that just end in odd places are from the original, not my typos. Also the Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada is offering a ten year closed mortgage at six and a half percent. Time was, that would be a good deal.

Now you can imagine how I feel, still waiting for my pasta to arrive.

Its Not the Years, It's the Hours

First thing in the morning for the FBO isn't first thing for me, but as soon as he gets in, the engineer starts work on my airplane, even though there is work to be done for his company as well. He has a reconditioned magneto available, and negotiates a trade-in value for the core our magneto, which he will recondition in turn. Paperwork will record all the serial numbers of parts swapped through the aviation world in this manner. It's a pretty normal occurrence. It's actually pretty funny to see one of our airplanes taken apart and to see all the points of origin recorded on stickers or plates on various components. I once had a maintenance shop refuse to do work because an instrument had a sticker on it claiming it was on loan. Fortunately the company whose name was on it was still in business and I was able to get them to relinquish any claim on the equipment. At some point there must have been a trade-in involving that loaner equipment, and no one took the sticker off.

After the installation, which didn't take long, he sent me out to do a runup with one of his apprentices. That's a nice way to do it. I've had shops go and do the runup themselves, come back and sign it off, and I've had shops send me out to test the equipment, and sign it out on my say so. I'm okay with both ways, but this was a best of both worlds. The shop avoids the problem of worrying about messing up my radios or any of my equipment taxiing my plane without me. I get to verify for myself that the magneto is now working correctly. And the apprentice has a strobe-light rpm detector to measure the rpm drop per mag exactly without having to rely on the accuracy of my gauges. I've seen the rpm detector before, when someone was testing the calibration of an RPM gauge, but I'd never seen someone use it to check the rpm drop on a magneto. We taxi back and park. Now it's all over but the paperwork.

It's a bit of a relief to be working in Canada now and know that I don't have to explain journey logs and TTAF to a US AME. This shop has a good system with checklists and workcards that are not loaded with unnecessary overkill items, but have a thorough list of what does have to be done, and I can see they've actually been used on the shop floor as opposed to being all filled in at the end after the work is done anyway. As he signs it off and verifies the billing information, the AME mentions that this is the highest time airplane he has ever certified. My airplane isn't frighteningly old. It just works hard for a living. I think this guy has worked mainly on medevac aircraft, which don't go off on all-day missions like ours.