People

My eye just fell on a story from a month ago, of a Cirrus that flew into restricted airspace over Washington, DC. Intercepting jets noted that the pilot appeared unconscious, and followed the airplane until it crashed into the sea, I'm presuming because it ran out of fuel. Here's a flight log from FlightAware. The incident itself is not astonishing. The pilot was sixty-seven years old, and while I hope I'm still doing many things safely and well at that age, he wouldn't be the first sixty-seven year old to die suddenly and unexpectedly while in control of a vehicle. The thing that elevates the story to the "I have to blog this" level, was the comments I saw on articles about it.

They aren't vituperative rants blaming the government or the other party (or maybe I haven't read that far yet). They are well-meaning people who have read a news article, digested the information and formed opinions on the material, opinions that they are proud enough of to share. (Okay, that's a low bar: I write this blog, for example). I'm fascinated by the ideas some have, the way they see my world.

The article describes the Cirrus as having an emergency parachute. This is true. It's a safety feature. The Cirrus was designed to attract non-pilots into flying, and one thing many non-pilots wanted was a parachute. A number of pilots have deployed the Cirrus parachute and survived situations they did not believe they would have otherwise. And then you get the comment: Something tells me that a plane built with a parachute for engine failures is not a safe plane to fly. Does this person also believe that cars without seatbelts and roads without guardrails are safer? I've seen this before in comments from non-pilots: adding a layer of safety, be it a procedure, an attitude, or a piece of equipment, is perceived as reducing the safety of the operation. It's as if they assume that any aviation operation has a constant level of safety, so any added safety feature causes it to be lacking in another area.

Another reader asserts, This is a good reason why recreational pilots should be required to have co-pilots. While I don't deny that a second pilot in the cockpit represents a huge safety benefit, requiring recreational pilots to fly with a copilot would pretty much destroy recreational aviation. Most recreational airplanes don't have a lot of useful load, so a pilot would have to leave behind a member of her family or most of the fuel in order to take on a another pilot. Recreational pilots can't be paid for their services, so the pilots would have to negotiate where they were going to go and when, I suppose on the basis of "I'll sit with you when you fly to Montreal, if you'll sit with me while I fly to Halifax." Imagine if you were required to have another qualified driver beside you during every car trip you took. While it must have happened, I cannot think of an accident where a person on the ground was hurt because a private pilot was incapacitated. It's not a sufficient problem to require a legislated solution.

This next one fascinates me because it appears to use the term "nanny state" in a non-pejoritive fashion. Or is my sarcasm detector broken? Google is working on a driver free car, next is the pilot free airplane. I'm not going to see a lot of these advancements, but I sure hope my grandkids don't feel the need to rebel against this cradle to grave nanny state. there are enough mindless thrill seekers out there to fill the emergency rooms right now.

This thread is from an aviation site, so most of the farfetched ideas are corrected and explained by other commenters.

This one is from an American public radio station known to be left leading. Its commenters see a coverup for the plane being shot down, or ISIS action. It makes less sense for ISIS to take down a private pilot on his way from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Manassas, Virginia than it would for them to ambush a suburban soccer mom on the way to the grocery store.

This is from an eyewitness in a boat, quoted in this article. “You could tell the jets were extremely well-equipped and in control of the situation. We obviously paid close attention, but at no time did we think we were in danger. I think the jets could have controlled where and when it went down.” While they could have done that with armaments, the way the Cirrus is described descending into the sea is consistent with running out of fuel and not with being blown out of the sky.

And finally, not to forget that the pilot was a person, I found this blog that compiles the NTSB report, a few news stories, and numerous obituaries. It would appear that Cirrus pilot Ronald Hutchinson was an experienced pilot and well-regarded community member. My condolences to his family and friends.

Who is Onboard?

Patrick Smith at AskThePilot.com has ranted on a subject I have ranted on before. There are at minimum two people working in an airline cockpit. Both are pilots. Why do the media pretend there is only one? This isn't a new thing. Ernest Gann started out as a copilot in the ... 1920s? (I'm busy ranting, book is in another room, not looking it up). The correct terminology is not impenetrable airline jargon that has to be dumbed down for the media-consuming proles. As Smith points out, it's largely a matter of adding an -s to a word they are already using. If they boldly go a step further and refer to one of the pilots as the captain and the other as the first officer, even if the public has never heard these terms before, surely they'll figure out that the captain is in charge and the FO is the next in charge. Or does too many Gilligan's Island reruns make everyone assume that anything akin to a First Mate is a bumbling moron? Actually, wasn't Gilligan smarter than the Skipper? Just more accident prone.

The general public knows there are two pilots on board. They see them board. Even in extreme situations they grasp this fact. I recall an article about an airplane that crashed in an urban area. Members of the public ran to help, bravely going on board the aircraft even as it started to to burn, and one of the rescuers looked at the people they had removed from the wreckage and saw that there was only one wearing a white shirt and epaulettes. "Pilots always come in pairs!" he noted, or something similar. They dared to go back on board for the second pilot.

I'm trying to find that article to get the exact wording. I thought it was the King Air that crashed on approach to Vancouver. Radio audio with some photos here. It hit a busy roadway, only clipping a couple of vehicles because a stoplight caused a gap in traffic, but the witness quoted here makes it clear that passengers weren't able to rescue the pilots because the fire was too far advanced in the cockpit. The TSB report linked above mentions confusion over how many passengers and pilots were on board, so unless there was a uniformed pilot among the passengers, this is not the story I recall. Professional rescuers extracted the pilots, but unfortunately both died of "thermal injuries." Ugh. Who knew there was a clinically remote way to say "burned to death."

Interesting that some members of the public were distressed badly enough by the proximity to the crash to require treatment by paramedics, while others were willing to run on board a burning airplane. I commend them for saving lives, but I think my safety training would side with my animal flight-from-fire response and I would instead render assistance that didn't involve entering a confined space probably containing live wires and fumes from ruptured fuel tanks. I guess we don't know what we would do until it needs doing.

This started out as sympathy for a rant but took a macabre turn. It suggests, though, that you merely knowing that there are two pilots on board your commercial passenger flight does not just satisfy our petty need for you to get the words right, but could actually make a life or death difference to the flight crew. The local paper got it right, referring to "pilots" throughout and calling them the captain and first officer. The national one has some exciting photographs and a video of some smoke taken by an excited car driver (not worth watching unless you really like smoke), but implies throughout the article that there was only one pilot on board.

There were two of them. The captain was named Luc Fortin and the first officer was Matt Robic. I didn't know them, but chances are I have met one or the other on my travels and it is certain that someone reading this blog does. My apologies that what started out as a hunt for a story about passengers who could count to two rescuing a pilot turned into revisiting a story that touches you painfully. The TSB suggests aircraft like this have a G-switch to isolate the battery in the event of a crash, and that might have saved them.

International Women's Day

So, as most of the Internet knows, this happened. I wasn't going to grace it with a response, but just the way the Vancouver Canucks took up the white towel as a symbol, instead of a flag of surrender, WestJet has made the inked paper napkin a positive symbol of women in aviation, and that's not as interesting without context.

And then there's this photo of a pilot posing with the mirror shades and the massive watch looks almost as if she's redoubled her efforts to fulfill those stereotypes, to make up for the ones she misses.

I know there are people thinking, "Give it a rest, women are equal now." I hear you, and I actually thought that, coming out of university. But the attitudes like napkin-writing David's are ingrained so deeply in society that being treated as, or assumed to be incompetent becomes part of the background noise. Here's to the day when no one has to second guess whether they are believed, doubted, accepted, rejected, paid or otherwise valued based on anything other than themselves.

Devastation

We're going to Slave Lake again, the community that had the fire. I checked NOTAMs carefully to make sure that services were available, but there is no sign from an aviation planning point of view that there is anything wrong there. Our work is far north of the community, up above the bush and lakes of far northern Alberta, and when we're done I plan the descent to bring me into the aerodrome environment at the right speed and altitude. I'm looking for the runway, right where it's always been, perpendicular to the lake, surrounded by the town, and then I get my first glimpse of the devastation. I have landed in Slave Lake enough times that I have subconscious landmarks that help me find the way to the runway, but it's like landing at an unknown aerodrome. The swathes of nothing are startling. I find the runway nevertheless and put the airplane on it.

I ask the fueller how things have been going in the town, with reconstruction and he says that almost nothing has been rebuilt yet, in fact they hardly have a handle on how to complete the demolition. So far the burned out areas have been fenced off and the remains of vehicles are been towed away, but nothing else has been done. He and everyone else I meet in town are pretty upbeat about their situation, though. They're northerners, I guess. Life goes on and they aren't dwelling on misfortune. We call all the taxi numbers but can't get one. There's a benefit concert going on, with big name bands at a venue just out of town and everyone is taking cabs so they can drink and party. We get a ride with an FBO employee, who tells us a "secret" that I can tell you now, because it's all over. She's just been finalizing arrangements for the arrival of aircraft carrying Prince William and his new bride Kate and their retinue. This was a surprise addition to the itinerary of the royal visit, but you can't keep secrets like that in a small town. Everyone I talk to has heard that they are coming, but some think it's just a rumour to buoy their spirits, and that a prince in line to the throne of Canada wouldn't visit such a small place.

The FBO employee gave us a tour through the destroyed parts of town. Entire blocks were completely razed, just empty yards with grey crumbled foundations and a few twisted pieces of metal. There was very little that was blackened or scorched. It was just gone. Completely incinerated. The fire was so hot that the foundations now crumble to the touch. Here and there is a house that the fire jumped over, or that the firefighters managed to keep from becoming engulfed. Sometimes such relatively untouched houses are sitting between two barren holes, intact except with the siding warped in curvy waves. There's one yard where the concrete steps that once led to the front door are still standing, covered in a waterfall of molten glass. It's a ghoulish little tour.

Our driver also filled us in on some of the worst parts of the fire, not what you would expect. Everyone was evacuated from the town with no notice, and they were not permitted to return for ten days, until power, treated water and emergency services could be provided again. Imagine a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at four in the afternoon. Now imagine a KFC that was abandoned in full operation at four in the afternoon, then left there with no refrigeration, no air conditioning and no cleaning for ten days in the heat of summer. Now add in ten other restaurants, an entire supermarket, and everyone's homes. The stench, I am told, was epic.

I go out for a jog before supper, following the trails by the river, and then crossing a road onto a park playground and across the park. At the far side of the park is a fence, but not your ordinary chain link fence to keep soccer balls from rolling into the street. It's a barricade between the park and one of the burned out areas. I turn left and run along the fence, just looking for the exit, but except for where I came in, the park is almost surrounded by burned out areas. I look at the metal that is visible in the yards. There are some cars, they look ancient, aged a hundred years in a day. The post-nuclear LA scene from Terminator 2 that shows a highway full of burned out cars does not adequately represent the effect of heat. The glass and rubber is just gone, and what's left looks more like the ash casts at Vesuvius than metal chassis. In one yard two cars are stacked one on top of another and I try to envision how that came to be. There are the remains of metal garden sheds in some yards, and after seeing several examples I realize that another common theme is trampoline skeletons. The springs are gone, I guess scattered and buried in the other rubble or incinerated with the synthetic fabric of the bed of the trampoline and the tubes that once made the round or rectangular shapes are twisted too. In one yard is a living tree, it looks like a little fruit tree, and I feel badly that no one can get in through the fence to water it. It survived a fire but may die of summer.

One of the "island" homes, an intact house amid all the devastation has three coloured printed signs inside the front window, proclaiming DONE DONE DONE on blue, pink and yellow paper. I theorize at first that the resident did not want to live there anymore, but further down the street I see what is presumably the reverse side of the same coloured paper, noting NEEDS WATER, NEEDS POWER, NEEDS GAS. Locals probably were instructed to pick up these sheets and post them in their windows to alert the utilities people that the residents had returned and were requesting restoration of services. Another sign in the front yard of what must have been a duplex gives a name and phone number, saying, "I owned the other half. Please contact me so we can decide how to proceed." Even one lot of this rubble would be hard to clear. It's not surprising that so little progress has been made.

We go for dinner at Boston Pizza, me trying not to think too hard about what the kitchen must have looked like after the fire. I notice a help wanted sign, and have seen those all over town, so I ask the server. Of fifty-seven people employed at BP before the fire, only twenty-one returned to the town after the evacuation order was lifted. Restaurant servers are typically young people, free to move where the jobs are, and they took other jobs in other towns, or just saw no reason to return. BP was one of the first restaurants to reopen. It's a chain, so the franchise was probably quickly able to source and ship full replacements for everything unusable, and it was screaming busy because most returning residents couldn't use their own kitchens.

It's actually more surprising to see how mentally healthy everyone seems than it is to gawk at the destruction. I realized during my run that this is an ancient human experience. Humans built homes and humans used fire since before history was recorded, and humans have almost always returned to rebuild. I'm glad the stench was just restaurant and grocery store meat. No one was injured badly enough for it to be reported. There are a few lost dog signs on poles, "ran away during the evacuation" doesn't bode well for a little white dog, but you never know.

Cultural Window

I'm home from Cambodia but I keep wanting to learn more. I've paid a few dollars for iPod Khmer lessons and reading Cambodian news. I'm finding news stories about people killed on the Diamond Bridge during the water festival an interesting window into the culture, values and lives of the people of Cambodia.

This young woman dropped out of school after grade eight to work in a garment factory, to contribute to her family's income. Her mother wishes for her to be reincarnated in a rich and kind family where she can go to university and live a long life.

This young woman was Muslim, a member of the Cham ethnic minority. As far as I can see, her family look and speak the same way as ethnic Khmers. She was already an orphan, living with her grandmother.

In this video, monks place what look like offerings into a hole in the bridge, and issue a blessing before reopening the bridge to traffic.

And here is a play about the effect today of the time of Pol Pot. It's in Khmer, but there is a scene-by-scene translation of the dialogue. If you read just one, read Scene Seven. It sums it up in a way. It seems from my reading of the play that everyone in the country is carrying guilt. Everyone who remembers that time had to do something to survive, and carries the guilt of what they did, even if it's just a starving seven year old girl taking rice from her baby brother.

I'm oddly homesick for Cambodia, after being there only a short time, and I enjoy hearing the language again in these people's voices.

Knowledge is not a Democratic Principle

I wanted to write a post about something scary for Hallowe'en, and I think I just found it. I came across this Answers.com question and answer. The asker wants to know if he can use the Archimedes principle to weigh an airplane without a scale. And he knows that Archimedes developed this principle to determine whether a crown purported to be solid gold was indeed solid gold.

Several people tried to answer this question. Two suggested that the way to do this would be to completely submerge the airplane, evacuating all air. One concluded that this would work, assuming one knew the density and composition of the materials from which the airplane was made ("measure the volume of water displaced and multiply it by the mean average density of the plane to get the weight") and the other, citing "I'm a vampire blur" as sources concluded that such calculations were not possible, "so neh." Three suggested floating the aircraft and one didn't read the question properly, so suggested weighing the airplane on scales, using more or less the methodology cited by the asker in the original question.

The Archimedes principle is this:

"When a body is wholly or partially immersed in water, the upthrust, or loss of weight is equal to the weight of the water displaced."

One of the people who gave me my start in science and mathematics had come from an educational tradition where students learned things by rote memorization and demonstrated their knowledge by standing next to their desks and reciting them. A generation or so earlier they probably had to say it in the original Greek. That was never demanded of me, in any language, but when learned snippets of natural philosophy are recited by someone you respect, they stick anyway. I never have to look that up. Rote memorization is obviously not sufficient for understanding and application, but it's an anchor for the knowledge.

An airplane could be weighed by the water displacement method if you put it on a floating platform in a tank of water, and noted the water level in the tank. Then you hoist the airplane off the platform and measure how much water you must pump in to fill the tank back to the identical water level. That is the amount of water the weight of the airplane displaced, and by multiplying its volume (which you measured while pumping) by its density at that temperature, you have the weight of the airplane. That's easier than filling the tank to the brim without the airplane then collecting and weighing the water that spills over the top when you add the airplane, but it's functionally identical.

But because this is the way the world works now, on Answers.com people voted on which was the correct answer. The vampire blur who wanted to sink the airplane "won." I know this is by no means the nadir of stupidity in online question and answer polls. You might tell me not to get too upset about this because he only received two votes and one of the floaters received one, but it's a second risk of the democratization of knowledge: not only has popularity become the definition of truth, but low voter turnout makes it easy to influence "truth."

Once upon a time in some parts of human history, when people didn't know things and they couldn't easily test them for themselves, they went to people who were wise, or powerful or lucky and asked them for the truth. What they said was accepted as the truth, even in the face of meticulous contradictory observations. Then came the scientific revolution. It wasn't about new knowledge. It was about how we know knowledge. We test it in a way that anyone can reproduce, and experience as truth instead of being told. That's the purpose of laboratory science training in schools, to show students that what they are learning is real and discoverable, not rote and on faith. Scientists worked in Latin and Greek not to be obscure and elitist, but to communicate. The Greeks and the Romans had the first literate engineers in the western world, and theirs became the tradition for communication. Newton reported on some of his discoveries in English, and despite a few centuries of language change, it's some of the most clear readable reporting of primary scientific results you'll ever read. It's not laden with jargon, just uses and defines existing terminology for the phenomena.

Since then knowledge has become more esoteric, experiments more expensive, scientific language more obscure, and people have to rely not only on others to do their experiments for them, but on others to read the results and filter them. We've gone back to individuals choosing which wise man they will turn to, and we've lost the distinction between philosophy and experimental knowledge. There's nothing wrong with turning to someone whose experience, subject knowledge and capacity for thought is greater than yours and asking for help understanding the world. There's nothing wrong with taking ones own knowledge of the world and trying to share it with others (at least there had better not be, because I do it all the time). But it results in a breakdown in the distinction between what is empirical fact and what is opinion. There is very little real historical fact. Some bones, some photographs, some rusted swords, are all. We assume that when numerous sources close in time and space to the occurrence agree with each other and with the physical evidence that we have historical fact, but we have to be open to the possibility of collusion by the only people who knew the truth. Wikipedia has rapidly become a major source of information for individuals and for the media we depend on to give us a broader view. Wikipedia is kind of a shoutocracy. When the only version of events that anyone looks at is the one laid down by he who shouts loudest, then did anything else really happen. Ethics have no empirical truth, and all we can do to determine which are right is to consult our wise people, our consciences, and the norms of our society. But some things are either real or not, and when there is a conflict among voices on determinable facts, but the "winner" is determined by volume¹, popularity, tenacity, intimidation, tradition or apathy, that is very scary. Happy Hallowe'en.

1. Not by immersion in water, but that might be nice, in certain cases, incidentally settling the matter of who is a witch, just in time for Hallowe'en.

San Jose Mine Rescue

I'm watching near live footage of the Chilean miners being pulled from the collapsed mine from the link on this page. It's an extraordinary ordeal these men have been through, and I'm impressed by the planning and details of the rescue operation. It looks as thought it will take a couple of days to get everyone out, even if nothing goes wrong.

As I watch I see parallels with aviation. After fifteen rescuees it's getting a little routine, perhaps, and it is still urgent to rescue everyone, but I'm silently urging the rescuers, "don't get sloppy; don't try to go too fast; inspect it every time; don't get fatigued: sub out with less tired people."

Don't Touch Your Eyes

I wake up and discover that the eyelashes of one eye are stuck together. Aaaah! Pinkeye! Or some kind of eye infection. Firetruck. If it's pinkeye, a.k.a. conjunctivitis it's incredibly contagious. People who are familiar with it are probably moving their hands away from the keyboard as they read this, with an instinctive fear that they can catch it by reading my blog entry. I get up and wash my hands then rinse out my eyes with clean water and salt water and dry them with a clean towel, then throw it on the floor. (That's hotel code for "I'm not going to use this towel again") There is not time to get to a clinic before work. I can go to work, because I don't believe it affects vision in any material way. It is only a little bit painful and itchy. I tell myself sternly, "DO NOT TOUCH YOUR FACE FOR ANY REASON!"

I eat breakfast and go to the airport. Before the flight I go over to the FBO to pay for the fuel we just took and for the hangar. I notice that they charge me half the originally quoted price, which is fair, seeing as we only managed to get the airplane halfway inside.

There are lots of helicopters working today. They are longlining building materials into a camp outside of town. Listening to 126.7 gets tedious because they are all working below me, going in and out of places that aren't on the map. It's a tedious day. The smoke is better, but the view is still not great. I find myself eating my flight bag snacks just for entertainment, not because I am hungry. I finish them all. I don't do that very often. I'm kind of surprised when my fingers reach the bottom of the pocket and there's nothing more there.

It's still what I've seen Canadian ATC call --on an official poster--"November season," which means there are a lot of pilots around who aren't fully familiar with Canadian air traffic services. We have a lot of airports that have no tower, but are manned by a Flight Service Specialist. The FSS gives you te information you need to make decisions, and then you make them and announce them to the FSS, without receiving clearances. The FSS tells one pilot that the active runways are 03, 21, and 26, which simply means that someone is taxiing out to take off 21, someone else has announced an intention to land 03 in eight minutes, and a guy is rolling out after landing 26. Any runway that is currently in use is tagged "active." The pilot doesn't seem to be familiar with this idea and seems a little stunned by three active runways. Other pilots land 21 because they are told 21 is active even though it would be far more convenient for everyone if they would land 03, which leads staight to the apron.

When I am returning for landing there are two American Cessna 182 both maneuvering for the circuit at once. It's not really a problem as the visibility is reasonable now and they aren't on opposite base legs or anything. One, with a female voice on the radio, is approaching from the VOR and the other, piloted by a male, is coming from the south. The male pilot is trying to get a better situational awareness and slips up on his radio language, asking simply, "Where is the other C182?" without addressing the FSS or giving his callsign. It's obvious who he is, but the FSS gives him a bit of a verbal slapdown, replying with a formal, "station calling, identify yourself." They sort it out and we all land

I'm still idling on the apron after the C182s have parked. The woman calls on the radio to report that her cellphone doesn't work, and to ask where there is a payphone. There is cellphone service here, but not for all networks. It turns out that she just wants to call the hotel shuttle, and the FSS specialist volunteers to do that for her. Then the guy gets back into his airplane and the beacon goes on. He calls up to ask if there are any hotels here. The specialist rattles off a catalogue of every hotel in town, along with their relative price point and and amenities. She checks with the hotel that has the shuttle to see if they have a room, but reports back that they are full and as far as they know, so are all the hotels in town. It's not a good season to be here without a reservation, because the hotels are full of long-term stays, like us.

Once the beacons are off on both Cessnas (indicating that they have shut off electrical power and thus are no longer listening to the radio) I compliment to the specialist on her skills as a travel agent. She admits that she's officially just supposed to say that there are several hotels in town, but that she feels sorry for people when they turn up unprepared, and tries to help out.

The woman is waiting by the FBO for the shuttle bus as I leave. She says she wasn't flying that leg, just doing the radio because she was tired. She's with someone, presumably her husband, on the way back to Alaska from visiting grandchildren, I think it was in Oregon. I didn't see the pilot from the other C182. Presumably he found somewhere to sleep. Maybe he had a tent.

Float Plane Safety

A British Columbia newspaper wraps up a series on float plane safety today, but I'm writing this after reading the first installment only. According to that article, British Columbia is home to twenty percent of all commercial float plane operators in Canada. It misrepresents the situation a little by saying that BC movements represent 97 per cent of all float plane traffic at Nav Canada staffed facilities, because BC is the only place in Canada where there are floatplanes taking off and landing under the clearance of a control tower. Hundreds of flights a day take place across the country to and from places that don't even have names, let alone control towers or FSSes.

British Columbia is especially vulnerable to float plane accidents, even if they don't really have the lion's share of float plane movements, because BC float planes service remote coastal areas, where in most other provinces float traffic is in and out of remote lakes and rivers. The coastal inlets in BC are in close proximity to mountainous terrain, prone to fog and heavy rain, and often out of range of conventional nav aids. Salt water, even just moist salt air, is exceptionally hard on aircraft, so I wouldn't be surprised of airplanes operating in that environment suffered more equipment failures.

The introduction to the series criticizes existing regulations governing float planes, including the safety briefing a reported received on a Harbour Air flight, as it did not describe how to operate the exit doors. Last time I flew on a float plane I don't remember if the pilot detailed the operation of the exits, but he did give a demonstration of putting on the life jacket. The briefing card in both cases would have diagrams showing how to open the door.

The idea of passengers routinely wearing lifejackets inside the airplane brings to mind a couple of scenes from Six Days, Seven Nights (which, by the way, I first saw as an in-flight movie). When the engaged couple first travel in Harrison Ford's character's Beaver, they are asked to wear life jackets, and this effectively emphasizes their discomfort with the small aircraft. In later scenes, even ones where the protagonists are flying a bullet-ridden aircraft on a set of makeshift floats, they do not wear life jackets. Life jackets are perceived as a symbol of fear and discomfort.

I'd like to see some testing--not too hard to do in dunk tank egress trainers--on whether wearing lifejackets inside the cabin actually helps passengers escape. A lifejacket, even uninflated, impairs mobility and flexibility, and it could get caught on things. One passenger who became confused and inflated the jacket could impede the exit of others. It may be that these concerns are as silly as the argument people used to make against wearing seatbelts in cars, afraid that they would be trapped in the vehicle by their seatbelt. I'd just like to see it tested, on passengers who have had a standard briefing, including some with simulated injuries.

The safety briefing I give does include step-by-step door opening instructions. I don't fly over water sufficient to trigger a regulatory requirement for lifejackets to be present and briefed.

Iceland: Not Just Ice

I wasn't going to say anything about the volcanic activity in Iceland shutting down aviation across northern Europe, because I didn't think I'd have anything to add to the news coverage. But then CTV had a piece on it, including an interview with a former airline pilot in which they asked him why volcanic ash was such a threat to airplanes. His answer was that it forms very large clouds that don't show up on radar. That's true, but he never got to the nitty gritty of why, the literal nitty gritty, or at least gritty. Volcanic ash does not vanish to powdery nothing on your fingertips like wood ash: it consists of very hard, sharp particles of well-tempered glass. It flames out jet engines as its volume disrupts the airflow, damages the first stage from the inside by etching and abrading the perfectly machined moving parts, and then the glass can melt again inside the combustion stage of the engine and then re-congeal. Where it doesn't melt, it can mix with atmospheric moisture into a concrete-like slurry. The ash cloud also opacifies windscreens and inundates all moving parts, effectively sandblasting them.

Then the reporter set him up perfectly by asking, "Are you saying at an enormous 747 with four big engines could fly into ash and have all four engines snuff out?" By naming that specific type I suspect that the reporter had done some research and wanted the reveal of this flight or this one to be made by an actual airline pilot.

But instead of saying, "It has happened," the pilot said "it would never happen in practice," and went on to describe the satellite imagery and communications that steer aircraft free of ash clouds. I'm sure he knew about the BA flight, and was acting on the side of not panicking people and giving modern information. Technically the ash only shut down three engines on flight 9, as one of the engines had already been shut down as a precaution. That was in what saved them, because the engine that had not been running during the ash encounter was able to restart.

Oh and here's a brilliant piece of ignorance from a commenter on a CNN article. (Sorry I don't have the link, someone forwarded the text to me).

The ash cloud has stopped fights because of the danger of it stopping the aircraft engines? Another blatant lie. How were those aerial photos and videos taken? Those aircraft were far closer to the ash plume than commercial craft would fly. Why didn't their engines stop?

Perhaps the airlines sold this little falsehood because the real problem is that the ash would cause extra wear in some engines and they don;t want the expense of more maintenance. As always, the news media eagerly repeats any "official" story without thinking, "Can this be true?" Follow along now sheeple, nothing to see here. You there! Stop that thinking right now!

That person probably thinks airplanes fly just fine underwater, because he's seen lots of aerial shots of oceans and lakes. Just to be clear, that's from a member of the public in an online comments section, not a paid member of the media. But hey, at least he's not believing everything he's told.

Here's a geekmade tool showing the skies over Britain clearing of aircraft after the warning came out, the largest airspace closure since September 2001. There's an upside, though, according to this infographic on CO2 emissions.

I've never had a volcanic ash encounter, nor had to cancel a flight for ash. I have seen volcanoes and wow. The Earth itself can wreak havoc. Maybe there will be fish to eat in the future after all. Fish that breathe fire!

Territorial News

The article headlined Bust Involved Multiple Kills was the one that made me sit up and pay attention as I scanned the regional newspaper. It was down in a corner of page five of the weekly Yukon News. You might be thinking that this is a pretty hardbitten justice-comes-out-of-a-gun kind of place if a bust involving multiple deaths warrants only a couple of inches on page five. But then you read the article and realize that the deceased consist of two moose and two caribou, taken without a licence, or perhaps in a national park. It's a poaching bust.

The front page went to a group of First Nations youths portaging a dugout canoe in association with the groundbreaking ceremony for a new cultural centre. Page two is a sympathetic article about the overworked half-time privacy commissioner/access to information officer for the territory. The page three story warns that unregistered cabins (there's a $150 a year lease fee for having a cabin in the Yukon) may be burned down with only six months to a year notice. A cabin owner is angry that his aviation fuel was removed and his collapsible boat was junked. The government says that there are cabins and fuel caches in some places that have been abandoned since the gold rush. You have to have a trapping licence to build a cabin, but you can register an existing cabin and keep up the lease without a trapline. Then we have articles on overuse of the ambulance service in transporting drunks, forest fire prevention rules, and caribou population decline. Later in the issue there are stories about government overspending, Michael Jackson's doctor, and how Facebook and Twitter ruined the mosh pit.

Then there are the classifieds. People have placed wanted ads for 1960s STIHL chainsaw parts, Bugs Bunny DVDs, models for a life drawing class, someone to bag catfood, leftover white paint, an "octangular" piece of glass, someone to teach me Russian, a canoe, a plastic toboggan, and a fresh egg supplier. Someone wants to trade a non-running 1990 Isuzu for some gravel. A hundred fifty dollars gets you a kid-sized two dog mushing sled with working brake. There are no dating personals or escort service ads.

Almost everything featured is in Whitehorse, so take everything above and imagine other people complaining about how 'everything in the territory is centred on the big city and they don't understand our way of life,' and you can imagine life in the Yukon outside of Whitehorse. There are 32,000 people living in the whole of the Yukon territory, 27,000 of them in Whitehorse. That means that outside of the one city there are 5,000 people living in the same area occupied by 100,000,000 in Germany.

Landing Blind

Silly silly story from downtown condo owners complaining about airplane noise at Toronto Island Airport.

Bill Freeman, The spokesman for the condo owners is quoted in the article as having said, "We've also just recently learned that after 11 p.m. there's nobody in the [air traffic control] tower ... presumably these pilots are landing blind."

While he has just learned about the control tower opening hours, he evidently has not yet learned that pilot, like most humans, see with their eyes, not their ears. I try to imagine the model of the air traffic control system that is in someone's head to think that the absence of an operating control tower would literally or metaphorically render a pilot blind. The control tower provides no visual information to pilots and any traffic or vectoring would have been provided by the terminal controller. In a high density area with a terminal controller, like Toronto Island, typically the only communication with the tower is a landing clearance and instructions to contact ground for taxi clearance.

I think the commenters on the CBC article have it nailed when they say that the residents are trying to give more credence to their noise complaints by disguising them as safety concerns. Unfortunately this kind of thing is everywhere. You know what happened to Meigs Field. The wonderfully convenient Edmonton City Centre airport is under the same threat. I think I've lost count of the number of petitions I've seen from pilots trying to save local airports. What was once outlying land is now prime real estate and people don't realize how noisy airplanes are until they move in.

Yesterday's News

In order to have something other than the drink menu to read during dinner, I often buy a newspaper at the gas station before I go to a restaurant. Here's it's the Vancouver Sun, published down south and distributed to the whole province. There are only two copies left. And they are of yesterday's paper. That's normal in the north. If there were a large population up here then the paper might be sent electronically and local print run made for distribution here, but there aren't enough people here to warrant that. They print the paper in Vancouver and I initially assumed that they threw a few bundles on a truck going north. It's the "Final Edition" that I buy, so it's not like they rushed the first print run onto a truck. Maybe they gathered up what they hadn't sold by the end of the day yesterday and put it on an overnight truck. We're not considered too important up here.

Today there was no flying so I went to dinner a little earlier. But the store had no papers. "Could you please tell me where else in town I can get a paper?" I asked.

"The airplane doesn't get in until 7:30," she says. "So we'll get them later."

Oh, I'm surprised, they actually fly them in. "I mean Saturday's paper," I clarify. It's Sunday today. That's what she meant, too. It's on it's way here now.

Okay this is just weird. If they are going to fly the paper up, why not load the edition that was printed the same day the airplane leaves Vancouver. It is a morning paper down there. How is it that they put yesterday's paper on the airplane?

Later I go to another store and ask if they have the paper, and see if I can get more information about why the paper isn't even current when it's loaded. They don't have it either. "Sometimes they have too much baggage and they take the papers off," says the vendor. "Then we get them the next day." I had a feeling she could have easily added, "Or the day after."

Okay that I understand. That is the northern experience of waiting for cargo that gets bumped at every station on the way. I think we're the last stop for the airline that comes here. I've heard that even blood products for the hospital take a day to get here. But why do they ship yesterday's paper? Is it like the groceries stores pawning off spoiled produce on their northern pilot customers because they know that by the time the food gets there the customer won't know it didn't rot on the way?

It doesn't really matter that it's yesterday's news. By the time this posts it will be last week's news, or two weeks ago, but the same things will be going on. In international news, Americans, North Koreans, Iranians, Afghanis are all up to something. In Canada the RCMP will be investigating something and some other body will be investigating the RCMP, and politicians will be calling each other names. There's a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. And there will be local news from the city. I feel really disconnected reading the things that are important to the southern city, but obviously have no bearing here. For example the government has cancelled a summer camp subsidy program for low income families, and they're interviewing the parents of tearful kids about that. Not that kids don't learn important lessons at summer camp, but I met an ambitious 20 year old up here, who had never been out of Fort Nelson. The place has six streets and nothing for hundreds of kilometres but bugs and trees and bears. I bet her life could use some enrichment. Vancouver has hundreds of parks and museums and festivals, including a lot of things that are free to take your kids to. True, kids these days in Vancouver probably aren't allowed to go more than six streets from home. But. Ah, weird contrast.

I still have yesterday's paper from here. Which is the day before yesterday's paper going by the date, so I do the crosswords from it. And once again I manage to do an entire crossword between asking for the bill and getting it. I'm not that much of a crossword whiz. The service is just that slow.

And my computer is confirmed dead. When I push the power button the "on" light illuminates, the fan starts to run, the hard drive and CD ROM drive lights flash once, then after a few seconds the light stays on but it goes completely quiet. And I checked right away this time: there's no Buns of Steel CD in the drive.

Continuing the theme of 'yesterday's news,' yesterday someone sent me this link to an article on flight delays at JFK caused by turtles. I think they were copulating on the runway, bu the article is too delicate to make that entirely clear.

The Flaps That Make It Rise

Recently someone forwarded this article to a mailing list I read. In excerpt:

Jumbo jet packed with British tourists seconds from disaster after it fails to rise on take-off

By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 2:21 AM on 01st June 2009

Hundreds of passengers narrowly avoided disaster when their plane nearly crashed after taking off.

The British Airways plane shook violently and did not rise more than 30ft above the ground as it set off from Johannesburg to London.

The pilot has been praised for his quick actions in keeping the Boeing 747 in the air, saving the lives of the 256 passengers on board. Miraculous escape: The British Airways Boeing 747 is thought to have gone into landing mode so that the flaps that make it rise did not work.

Travelling at 200mph, he dumped enough fuel for the aircraft to eventually gain height, before returning it to the airport.

It is believed that a technical fault caused the plane to go into landing mode so that the flaps that normally make it rise did not work.

An investigation is under way as to how the jet came so close to crashing.

A BA spokesman said: 'As a precaution BA56 Johannesburg to Heathrow flight on Monday May 11 returned to the airport shortly after take-off due to a suspected technical problem.

'The Boeing 747 aircraft with 256 passengers on board landed safely and the customers disembarked as normal into the airport.

'We are cooperating fully with the South African aviation safety authority's investigation into the flight.'

Referring to the pilot's quick actions, he added: 'Our crews are trained extensively to deal with all eventualities.'

So "the flaps that make it rise" weren't working. Before reading part on, what would you think this term referred to?

It could be the actual flaps, and there are certainly accidents that result when flaps are mistakenly not extended, but flaps are normally used for landing, so 'going into landing mode' doesn't make sense. If the airplane did get off the ground with no flaps and into level flight, I'd expect it to have accelerated rapidly. They say 200 mph. That's slow, but is it in the slow flight regime for a B747? I don't know. I also don't know which orifice they pulled the 200 mph number out of.

I considered that "the flaps that make it rise" were the two sides of the elevator. It does flap like the flukes of a whale, and certainly when it is raised, the airplane normally pitches up. But operation of the elevator is not suppressed during landing.

I thought also of things like spoilers or leading edge devices: anything tab-shaped that protrudes from the airplane could be a flap. But nothing matched well enough to seem like more than a wild guess.

Fortunately a member of the mailing list found an NTSB report on the flight. Without the identifying details of type, airline and airport I wouldn't even have matched the tabloid story to the report.

On May 11, 2009 at 18:37 UTC, a British Airways Boeing 747, powered by Rolls-Royce RB211-524H2-T engines, experienced a No. 3 thrust reverser unlock light illumination during the takeoff roll from the Tambo International Airport (FAJS - formerly known as Johannesburg International Airport) while the airplane was traveling at 124 knots. The No. 2 engine thrust reverser unlock light came on at 163 knots and just prior to rotation the slats retracted. The airplane rotated and climbed at a 200 foot per minute rate. The flight crew dumped fuel and did an air turn back to FAJS where a safe and uneventful landing was made.

So the flaps that made this particular airplane rise appear to have been the slats, which the NTSB report must be using as a generic term for leading edge lift devices. The B747 uses Krueger flaps instead of slats to modify the wing for takeoff. The Krueger flaps fold out from under the leading edge of the wing, creating a barrier to air incident there. This makes the airflow behave as though the leading edge of the wing were thicker and rounder, just like the wing on an airplane designed to go slowly, thus giving the wing more lift at low speeds.

Mind you, if forced to condense that into six words I'm not sure I'd come up with anything much more meaningful than "the flaps that make it rise." Anyone?

I'm scheduling this to post a week or so after I'm writing it, because everyone is talking about Air France 447 at the moment. Although when you see this, I doubt the voices will have resolved the divided opinions:

• a thunderstorm alone could have done this to a perfectly good airplane
• there must be a flaw in the aircraft for a thunderstorm to do this
• the pilots or the software must have reacted badly to exacerbate the situation
• It was terrorists/a meteor/aliens that did it

People I respect and who are more knowledgeable than I inhabit each of the first three camps, so I'm not putting up my tent anywhere. My traffic is way up from people finding this blog by searching on terms like "coffin corner" and "stall recovery." That means that instead of just talking to the people I hang out with, my regular readers, I'm also addressing a lot of spectators who don't "know" me. I do think it's possible we'll never have a satisfactory answer to what happened on that flight.

Crash Landed

I started this before Captain Sullenberger landed in the Hudson and I think I gave up on the whole landed/crashed/ditched after that, so didn't post the entry, but hey, it's still a blog entry, right?

Someone sent me a link to this story about a Mooney that had an engine failure and ended up in the sea. First off, people in BC, you have to stop driving airplanes into rocks, glaciers and oceans. If you want to gawk at the sight some more, there's a video here; it's just eight minutes of helicopter footage circling the submerged aircraft and the rescue hovercraft. Nothing happens in the video except that a boat circles the site a couple of times. The pilot has lnog since been picked up by a passing twin otter. (And I can't get it to work anymore. Perhaps it's been removed).

The text story describes it as a "crash landed." Do you think that was a crash landing? I've had enough of the term crash landed used to describe every airplane accident that involves an airplane coming to rest on the surface of the planet. The only terms related to wrecking airplanes that are legally defined in Canada are accident and incident. The former involves serious injury or death resulting from an aircraft, major damage, or the aircraft being missing altogether. The latter applies only to large aircraft and includes abnormal conditions like shutting down an engine, or the incapacitation of a required crew member. In media terms, accidents (and many things that aren't accidents) are "crashes" and incidents are "scares." Although I suppose if a large airplane went off the runway and ripped off a wingtip fairing, some stories would call that incident a crash.

Everything bad that happens to an airplane isn't a crash. There has to be an actual crash no? To me, a crash occurs when there is either a loss of control of the aircraft, or a high-speed collision with something, and something more significant than lights and fairings gets bent or smashed.

So a gear up, whether through forgetfulness or mechanical problems, assuming the aircraft doesn't skid off the runway or flip over, is not what I'd call a crash. Catching a wingtip and ripping off a winglet is not a crash. I think a crash landing is an attempt to land, in an irregular situation, that involves loss of control before touchdown and results in a seriously damaged airplane.

If the airplane or pilot or landing area is seriously compromised, but an attempt is made to land, a possible result is a crash landing. Sioux City was definitely a crash landing. The airplane landed, and it crashed. Easy. The pilot points the airplane towards something with the intention of landing and puts the airplane on the ground, but the result is such that the airplane cannot be used again promptly. Yeah, that was a crash landing.

A deliberate landing of a wheel or ski plane in water is usually called a ditching. (Captain Haynes referred to the possibility of attempting to land the DC-10 off-airport "ditching" too, but I myself wouldn't use the term that way). Landing gear, engines, fairings, even wings and tail may be torn off, but if the cabin is sufficiently intact that people get out, I'd call it a successful ditching. In an unsuccessful ditching the airplane may cartwheel, or impact the water at a high speed or angle, causing it to break up. The result of an attempted ditching may be indistinguishable from a crash into water, but that Mooney was successfully, and I would judge skillfully ditched. As a pilot of a single engine airplane, he probably made sure he was within gliding distance of land, but it doesn't take a pilot to see that the land in the area was inhospitable. So he dithed close enough to shore that even badly injured he'd be able to swim to it.

Was this a crash in your opinion? Would you say you "crashed" your car if you lost control and drove it into the water where it sank? Do you used "ditch" to describe non-water off-airport landings?

A better CBC video clip had clearer information on the accident and used the phrase "gone down" instead of crash.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ...Shhhh!

Pilots, mechanics and others in the air transport system are encouraged to report bird strikes whenever they occur, whether or not they damage the airplane. It's very simple. You fill out a paper or online form, either the Canadian Bird/Wildlife Strike Report or the USBird/Other Wildlife Strike Report. (The difference in the names of the forms apparently confirms the conclusion of this Onion cartoon: Canadian birds are not wildlife). You indicate things like where you were, the phase of flight, how many birds you saw and struck, what was damaged, and how much it cost the company in various ways. You can even send what's left of the bird in to have its age sex and species identified.

The government collects the data and from it can derive safety recommendations to pilots, strategies for bird reduction at airports, and determine the economic impact of birdstrikes. I suppose the data is also used by lobbyists, the news media, ornithologists, airport planners, people selling bird deterring devices, and anyone with an interest in birds, airplanes or the interactions thereof. It's like any other data the government collects: people use it to study things, convince people of things and write sensational news stories.

Well no more, at least not if you want to study the wildlife kind of birds. The FAA has announced plans to seal birdstrike report records. That's the USA Today story. The Federal Register notice is here (PDF). They say that releasing the details of birdstrikes could "produce an inaccurate perception" of the risks birds pose to airplanes and "unfairly cast unfounded aspersions on the submitter." They feel that that keeping the data secret would encourage more people to contribute to the voluntary database.

I had a discussion with some airline and media folks and to my surprise many thought it was a good idea to make the data secret. I assume the data will still be somehow available to the people who have to make spending decisions regarding bird deterrents, so it is just the secondary users of the data who will suffer having it withdrawn. But if the government collects the data, the government processes the data, the government allocates spending for birdstrike reduction and the government assesses the results, where does this leave the voters who have to evaluate the government? Will we be told if birdstrikes are up or down this year? That the bird eradication program is working? I offended someone in the earlier discussion who felt I was comparing soldiers to pigeons, when I said that hiding war casualty statistics might also alleviate fear in the population. They could just tell us that the surge is working. And it's not like the birds are going to study our statistics to find weaknesses in our defenses or exploit unease in the population. But regardless of the orders of magnitude separating A320 vs. pigeon from soldier vs. shrapnel, how is it a good strategy to restrict data about bad things in order to keep people from worrying about it?

Those that looked at the link for the US birdstrike form will have seen that, curiously, the data is collected by Embry Riddle University, not by the FAA itself. I suppose that will have to change. Or perhaps ER will collect the data, give it to the government and then also quietly give it to people with legitimate research uses for it.

Will the US now not comply with the ICAO birdstike reporting procedures? "Sorry, but that data is for our use only and cannot be shared with the international aviation community?"

The thrust of the supporters' argument seems to be that the media are morons ("a majority of press can’t even figure out where 12A is, much less know what type of aircraft they are flying") and might misinterpret the data to report that airline A or airplane Z was safer because it had fewer birdstrikes than the competition. Here's an article that discusses the "shocking" number of birds around airports. The limited ability of the media to understand a story on deadline is legend, but so is its short attention span, mirroring that of the public. I suspect the "airplane felled by birds" story has pretty much run its course and that if the FAA hadn't told them they couldn't look at it, media interest in the birdstrike database would have fallen to zero pretty quickly.

Pilots, would you be discouraged from filing a birdstrike report based on the possibility that the local paper would report "A struck a starling just below the windscreen on approach to today. The aircraft was not damaged and the pilot landed the airplane safely"? Naturally the article would quote a fuel truck driver saying "yup, those starlings are all over the place here," and wrap up by reminding readers that birds were responsible for the forced landing of a US Airways A320. I'd think it was pretty funny, even if the article said I "was unable to avoid" striking the bird, as if it was a matter of my competence at starling evasion.

I have some funny quotes about bird strikes and prevention measures, but I think I'll put them in another post, so as not to "discourage you from volunteering information" on the above question.

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.

Anyone at DFW?

It looks like I'm going to in the vicinity of the Dallas Fort Worth airport for half a day around the 1st of March. Do I have any readers around who would like to meet for dinner? Send me contact information and then I can coordinate with you when I find out the exact date and timing.

I have no comment or inside information on the recent Turkish Airlines 737-800 crash on approach into Amsterdam, but I think this is an excellent picture. You have the airplane, the engine, the residential street, and the varied actions of the responders. I like the expressiveness of one emergency worker with her arm up, pointing. There are more pictures here and presumably the story, too, if you read Dutch. There has really been some remarkable photojournalism of recent air accidents, and I don't think it's ghoulish for journalists to get in there and get the images and information for us, as long as they don't interfere with rescue efforts.

Update: Here's an English language link to currently know accident details.

Did You Find Colgan?

I was online late at night when all my little mail and message icons started blinking. Nothing in aviation travels as fast as bad news. A Dash-8 operating under the call sign Colgan 3407 for Continental Airlines ceased communications with the Buffalo, NY approach controller and was subsequently found to have crashed into homes on the ground about five miles short of the runway. News stations are currently reporting 49 fatalities: all 45 passengers and four crew members, plus one person on the ground.

There is no way of knowing what happened at this point and I'm not going to speculate. You can see why it's not a good idea to speculate if you watch what came out on the news and talk websites as people who didn't know what as going on rushed to get news out. The reports ranged from the airplane being a Saab 340 to a "large jetliner," and the persons on board from "a crew of three" up to "two hundred passengers." I've heard that the pilots reported mechanical problems and that the pilots reported icing, but none of that shows up in the conversation between the accident aircraft and the approach controllers.

See, Buffalo approach is available on live streaming ATC, so audio is available now for the radio traffic before and after the accident. In Canada it is illegal to report what is heard on the radio, but I'm using an American blog service to report American ATC transmissions, so I think I'm in the clear. Here's what I hear between the Approach controller and the Pilot. There is a Delta pilot in the conversation, too. (I've left everyone else out).

P: buffalo approach colgan thirty four zero seven twelve for eleven thousand with romeo

A: colgan forty four zero seven buffalo approach good evening buffalo altimeter's two niner eight zero plan an ils approach runway two three

P: two niner eight zero and ils two three colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, proceed direct TRAVA

P: ???

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain six thousand

P: zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain five thousand

P: five thousand thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain four thousand

P: ?

A: colgan thirty four seven descend and maintain two thousand three hundred

P: ?zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven turn left heading three three zero

P: left heading three three zero colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven turn left heading three one zero

P: left heading three one zero colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven three miles from KLUMP turn left heading two six zero maintain two thousand three hundred until established localizer cleared ils approach runway two three

P: left two sixty two thousand three hundred until established and cleared ils two three colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven contact tower one two zero point five have a good night

P: thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four seven approach

A: delta nineteen ninety eight just going to take you through the localizer for sequencing

D: delta nineteen ninety eight thanks

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, buffalo

A: colgan thirty four seven, approach

A: Delta nineteen ninety eight look off your right side about five miles for a dash eight should be twenty three hundred do you see anything there

D: negative delta nineteen ninety eight we're just in the bottoms and nothing on the TCAS

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, buffalo

This transcription stuff is harder than it looks. I don't know why I can't hear the pilot's responses in each case. Perhaps some are blocked, or it's an artifact of receiver position, or of the recording technology.

I'm pretty sure the controller does call the flight by the wrong callsign initially. That's so normal. Almost every callsign gets bungled by someone every flight. The controller gets it right on subsequent calls so either it was just a slip of the tongue or he matched it up with the strip right afterward. Communications are perfectly normal until ATC tells the pilot to switch to tower. she acknowledges the call, but presumably never calls tower, as approach calls back, looking for her.

I suspect the Delta 1998 told to fly through the localizer would have been following her, and was broken off while they figured out what happened. They ask him if he can see the Dash-8 and he can't. Later the controller asks "Do you have VFR conditions there?" but the pilot is then inside clouds.

Another ATC voice comes on calling the missing flight again, with the words "How do you hear?" the words you usually hear right before someone gets chewed out for not paying attention.

ATC sends the Delta to a hold, that is to wait, and makes a broadcast "Ok for all aircraft this frequency we did have a Dash-8 over the marker that, that didn't make the airport. It appears to be about five miles away from the airport. For Delta 1998 I'm going to bring you in sir on the approach. If you could just give me a PIREP when you get to twenty three hundred and if you have any problem with the localizer or anything let me know however we're showing it all in the green here."

They don't know what went wrong, so they're being careful in case there is some problem with the localizer, the part of the instrument landing system that provides lateral guidance. Another pilot intended to do a practice autoland and was told to not do that. The controller wants the pilot not the automation landing the plane.

Another pilot asks ATC if they know about the situation on the ground. Probably he has seen the fire. It is normal to report sights like to ATC. I've reported an upside-down boat, and a forest fire, for example. ATC asks other aircraft in the area for icing reports and some is reported. One departing pilot asks for an unrestricted climb to get through the ice.

After a while a pilot asks "Did you find Colgan?"

The controller responds "Unfortunately he went down over the marker."

It's pretty normal for an airplane to be referred to as "he" even though the voice coming from it is female. Some people are assuming that the woman on the radio was the first officer, but I've seen women as young as she sounds with four stripes on their shoulders at regional hubs, so that may or may not be a valid assumption. It has dawned on the reporter that the lack of stress in the pilot's voice does not mean that the pilots have no concerns, because he's heard how calm Captain Sullenberger sounded on that tape. But crew are required to report abnormalities with the airplane to ATC, and these folks don't.

And I only noticed today's date after publishing. It is the zulu date of the crash.

Update: The names of the crew have been released: Capt. Marvin Renslow and first officer Rebecca Shaw, so it was the F/O on the radio. Plus there was a jumpseater on board, bringing the death toll to an even fifty.

Like the FMS, For Example

One of the blogs I read is Schneier on Security, a blog about the security mindset, and security issues in and out of aviation. Bruce Schneier is a security consultant who has decided to bash his head against the wall in a public forum. The blog gets a little repetitive, because it's mainly driven by news stories, which themselves are repetitive because people don't learn from previous mistakes.

Comments on a recent discussion of the indiscretions of US sky marshals included the not-new suggestion that the cockpit be completely separated from the cabin, with separate food, water and washroom facilities for the pilots.

Meanwhile someone else raised the also not-new suggestion that "Then the only possible target for the pilot to shoot will be the co-pilot. Which, if you arm them all and wait long enough, is sure to happen."

I stopped reading and got the best laugh at a follow up comment, "If you were to survey current pilots, you'll find that there are several pieces of equipment more likely to be shot before the co-pilot."