The Second Best Place To Set a Bomb

An airplane I flew today had an oddly located fire extinguisher. While looking up the rules in CARS 525 on where the fire extinguisher has to be with respect to the pilot's duty station, I found some rules on airplane interior design that weren't there when I learned to fly.

(c) An aeroplane with a maximum certificated passenger seating capacity of more than 60 persons or a maximum certificated take-off gross weight of over 100,000 pounds (45,359 Kilograms) must comply with the following:
(amended 2010/06/16; no previous version)

    (1) Least risk bomb location. An aeroplane must be designed with a designated location where a bomb or other explosive device could be placed to best protect flight-critical structures and systems from damage in the case of detonation.

According to this FAA document the Least Risk Bomb Location (LRBL) has been a thing since approximately 1972. The crew should be aware of the LRBL, but we can be forgiven for not knowing, as the guidance document includes a prohibition on marking it with cute international graphics or bilingual block lettering saying something like "place unattended bombs here." For more information on determining the best location of an LRBL, you may consult a document entitled “DHS Recommended Least Risk Bomb Location Procedures for Airlines,” Sensitive Security Information (Limited Distribution). The FAA will need your letterhead and an e-mail address. I hope they do more than glance at the letterhead and go, "ooh, it's embossed, and someone used expensive design software on this, they must be a legit airline. Quick, e-mail them the secret LRBLs." Probably they have more secure procedures than that, but the whole letterhead thing is so quaint that I had to make fun of it.

If you don't have a need to know, or a fancy letterhead, you can still find out about LRBLs. The public document is interesting enough, with little diagrams and recommendations on how the LRBL should work. If you click through to look a the document, don't forget to scroll down to the name of the person responsible for it, and imagine how much fun he has at airports when he's "randomly" selected for special screening based on his name, and then they discover his carry one is full of Sensitive Security Information about where to put bombs on airplanes. Whatever city he lives in, that's where the meetings are.

The airplane I fly does not have a passenger seating capacity of more than 60 persons. Were we to discover a bomb on board, I would direct it to be thrown out the emergency exit. Such a measure would be an extreme emergency procedure for me, but its physically impossible to open an exit on a pressurized aircraft in flight, because the exits are plugs held in place by the pressure. The only way to open one would be to blow it up. The implication of the document is that that's kind of what some LRBLs do. It also points out that decompression is less harmful if it's not done explosively, so I imagine the "oh no there's a bomb on board" procedure involves an emergency descent and controlled depressurization. The descent would be so that by the time the airplane was depressurized and the oxygen in the generators was exhausted, the ambient oxygen would be sufficient to sustain the surviving passengers.

    (2) Survivability of systems:
        (i) Except where impracticable, redundant aeroplane systems necessary for continued safe flight and landing must be physically separated, at a minimum, by an amount equal to a sphere of diameter
        D = 2 v (H0 / P )
        (where H0 is defined under 525.365(e)(2) and D need not exceed 5.05 feet (1.54 metres)). The sphere is applied everywhere within the fuselage limited by the forward bulkhead and the aft bulkhead of the passenger cabin and cargo compartment beyond which, only one-half the sphere is applied.
        (ii) Where compliance with subparagraph (c)(2)(i) of this section is impracticable, other design precautions must be taken to maximize the survivability of those systems.

I think that is meant to imply that if you want to take out redundant systems, you'll need more than one bomb. Plus I'll throw you overboard with your bomb.

    (3) Interior design to facilitate searches. Design features must be incorporated that will deter concealment or promote discovery of weapons, explosives or other objects from a simple inspection in the following areas of the aeroplane cabin:
        (i) Areas above the overhead bins must be designed to prevent objects from being hidden from view in a simple search from the aisle. Designs that prevent concealment of objects with volumes 20 cubic inches and greater satisfy this requirement.
        (ii) Toilets must be designed to prevent the passage of solid objects greater than 2.0 inches in diameter.
        (iii) Life preservers or their storage locations must be designed so that tampering is evident.

What and ruin the plot of so many bad airplane movies? At least there's no rule about disabling the secret passage out of every airplane washroom into the giant avionics bay. I think the life jacket one is interesting. I've never noticed the lifejacket pouches to appear particularly tamper-resistant.

(d) Each chemical oxygen generator or its installation must be designed to be secure from deliberate manipulation by one of the following means:
(effective 2015/03/20)

    (1) by providing effective resistance to tampering,
    (2) by providing an effective combination of resistance to tampering and active tamper-evident features,
    (3) by installation in a location or manner whereby any attempt to access the generator would be immediately obvious, or
    (4) by a combination of approaches specified in (d)(1), (d)(2) and(d)(3) of this section that the Minister finds provides a secure installation.

(e) Exceptions. Aeroplanes used solely to transport cargo only need to meet the requirements of (b)(1), (b)(3) and (c)(2) of this section.
(effective 2015/03/20)

I haven't yet seen a bad airplane movie in which the bad guys repurpose the oxygen generators as poison gas grenades, but maybe it was so awesome I forgot.

What Kind of Airplane?

"Huh. Wow. What kind of airplane?"

As far as I remember, that's more or less the first thing I said ten years ago on learning that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. Yeah, cringe, but I was trying to distinguish between incidents like this and something that would do more damage. Some context: I had driven to work listening to a CD (or maybe a cassette tape: it was an old car) because the radio reception along my commute was poor, and it wasn't a time of day when I could expect good programming. I had arrived, grabbed the aircraft documents, inspected the airplane, ensured it had been fuelled and come back to the airside office to drop off my preflight paperwork. It was a small shared office, so I had to squeeze between my coworkers and a television set to get to the filing cabinet where I needed to drop my operational flight plan and weight and balance documents. They were staring at the TV, but then it was a media-related company so they were always staring at the TV. On my way back outside to start the airplane, someone said, "An airplane just hit the World Trade Center." The TV wasn't at an angle that I could see it. In answer to my question, he told me it was a Learjet. I didn't even know which world trade centre it was. I assumed it was in the US, but I guessed Chicago, because the old airport was right by downtown. I ran up my airplane engine wondering if the crash was a control problem or pilot incapacitation or what.

I know someone who was woken up by a call from his friend that morning and ordered to turn on the TV. After seeing the burning buildings his response was even more cringeworthy than mine. "I think I've seen this movie."

My non-pilot coworker--yeah, I've always had jobs like this--jumped in the plane and tucked Walkman (look it up, kids) headphones under his aviation ones, as usual. I told you it was a media-heavy company. He was less conversational than usual, but I assumed this had to do with low caffeine intake, not realizing what he was hearing on the radio. Half an hour or so into the flight he said something was on fire.

"Where?" I asked, looking out the window for smoke or the flashing lights of firetrucks.

"The Pentagon is on fire," he repeated.

The pentagon? What pentagon? I sifted though associations with the word, my strongest image being something from witchcraft, imprisoning demons in a chalked pentagram ringed with candles. That made no sense. Then I thought of another possibility. "You mean bombs and missiles Pentagon?" I asked. He shushed me, so I tuned the ADF to a local news station, just in time to hear a synopsis of the morning's terrorism, and that US airspace had been closed.

Before I had a chance to call flight services to find out if this would affect me, the air traffic controller whose frequency I was on instructed me to land. I landed back at our base, not a major airport, and as I was on short final an ultralight took off, the pilot and the controller who cleared him still oblivious to the day's events.

This is probably the third time I've told the story on the blog and I imagine I've told it dozens of time in real life. Every generation has to have its "where were you?" moment. Ask an old American where they were when they heard Kennedy had been shot. (Yeah if you remember Kennedy, you're officially old. You're welcome). I hope the next such "everyone remembers where they were" event is a good one. There have been good ones, like humans landing on the moon. What amazing good thing could happen today that would be tweeted around the world and that would compel people to tell the story of where they were when it happened, even ten years later? What some people might consider good could be controversial, so please don't mock or condemn any commenter for their choice of an earthshaking positive moment. Is there anything? Or are we too jaded and too divided now to all be awed by an event?

Whirlwind Tour

The weather is good in BC, so I'm checking NOTAMs for a whole list of airports all over the province. It doesn't matter which ones I check, I'll be told to fly to somewhere I didn't check, and once airborne I'll be asked to land somewhere entirely different. I check the major northern Alberta ones like Whitecourt (no issues), Fort Mac (surrounded by forest fires), Slave Lake (surprisingly normal considering what they've gone through), Peace River (unlighted obstructions), Edmonton City Centre (all the approaches are messed up), Calgary (closed taxiways) and Lloydminster (more unlighted obstructions). I'm mostly interested in showstoppers like fuel unavailability or closed runways. The obstructions are typically 300' agl and more than a mile away. Unless it's right on final approach, it's not going to be in my path, and to be honest if something went so wrong that I was at 300' agl and not just under a mile back stabilized on final, I wouldn't have room in my brain to remember where the I end up having to update my NOTAMs after I have put away my computer in the morning, so I call a briefer with my embarrassingly long list of possible landing spots. McBride, Nakusp, Vernon, Squamish, Prince George, Fort St. John, Vancouver, everywhere we might go. The briefer tells me it will take a while because it's difficult to know where the NOTAMs are filed for small aerodromes. "They aren't just listed under the airports?" I ask. Nope. It all depends on what was done in the 1940s. Vernon, for example, was a military training base or something, so although it has no air traffic services, it has its own NOTAM file. Larger aerodromes elsewhere in the province are kept in other aerodrome files. The briefer tracks it all down for me.

We head out across the mountains, VFR this time, because we want to take pictures on the way and passing through cloud gets water on the camera, and might leave streaks on the glass that would show up in the pictures. Around Whitecourt there is a lot of cloud and it's raining, so I try to dodge it all, going way south and even a bit east in an attempt to avoid getting wet. Then I make an attempt to outclimb billowing cumulus. I know where this is going, as every altitude I climb too just shows more tops. They probably can't grow faster than I can climb they way they could when I was in Florida in an ultralight, but it's still silly trying to outclimb them. I go back down below the clouds and work on outlasting them. I know the low ones don't extend that far to the west.

I'll be going through a mountain pass below the clouds and this is something that GPSes with their straight pink (the guys call them "magenta") lines aren't as good at as old-fashioned technology. I have my chart out, folded so I can see Grande Cache and the mountains beyond, just as I see Grande Cache below and just ahead. I have a pencil, and I have an accurate watch. I identify my location on the chart and I mark the time I am there, resetting the directional gyro to the compass and paying close attention to which valley I go down. I can cheat big time because the GPS gives me both terrain and exact lat-long position, but this is the way to do it, so you don't lose track of where you are in identical-looking valleys with very different things at their ends, and so that if you take a wrong turn or encounter adverse weather, you know where you were when things were good and how to get back. And it gives me an excuse to look ahead and anticipate where I will see lakes and rivers around the corners.

We cross the Great Divide, which forms the Alberta-BC border here, and marks the time zone boundary as well as the high point of the mountain range. Our destination was originally Prince George but I've gone far enough south in the avoidance manoeuvre that the valley I've chosen will bring me out just south of McBride. I adjust the range on the GPS to show the operator this. He is surprised to learn that there is an airport at McBride. To him it's just a place that we will take pictures. "Can we land there?" he wants to know.

"Pass me that book."

That book is the manual for the airplane, because when it's not a flight test at an airport with a runway twice as long as I need, I do do my calculations. Not landing distance, but take-off, because "Can we land?" really means, "Can we land and then take off again?" and take-off distance is greater. I look up the airport elevation and then follow the line for the next highest elevation, at the hottest temperature it could possibly be down there, rounding up on the weight and assuming no wind, and there is still plenty of runway available to get out of there. "Yes, we can land."

We do, and the operator double-checks the camera glass, plus we both reset our bladders before taking off and taking pictures. We continue up the valley to Prince George, where we climb up to ten thousand feet or so and take some more pictures. We continue in this fashion, a giant, province-wide game of connect-the-dots that doesn't even draw anything, but wow is it scenic. Fuel is down to a little over an hour remaining as we approach Revelstoke, but I bypass it for one more set of photos. Part of my job is to plan fuel for efficient flight, and that means not always having the happy empty bladder and full fuel tanks that one would if it were a pleasure flight. There's opposite direction traffic at Nakusp, where we're taking pictures of a ski resort next to a lake, or maybe a lake next to a ski resort. We let him go by and then descend for the second set of photos, and then it's off to Vernon to land.

Approaching Vernon, I tune their frequency and hear a skydiving airplane preparing to drop. Argh, that wasn't in the NOTAMs. Closer scrutiny of the chart shows the airport to be in a marked advisory area for continuous daytime parachute activity, so it doesn't need a NOTAM. I advise that I will hold outside the area until the jumpers are on the ground. I'm irritated with myself for not noting this earlier, and it must have come out in my voice as the operator asks me if I'm mad at the drop plane pilot. I'm not. The drop plane pilot is pretty lackadaisical about his meatbombs, assuring me that there's no conflict. I ask how long the drop will take and something about the way he starts the sentence makes me think he's going to say "it depends on whether they remember to open their chutes or not." He doesn't though, just describes the seconds of freefall followed by where they open their chutes. I follow his advice and join a downwind without crossing the field. It's a little close to the runway, because of terrain, so I fly an ugly teardrop through final and back again, then over a big group of trees to the runway. The operator says pilots always come in high here because of the trees.

I backtrack to the apron and shut down behind another airplane at the fuel pumps, then we haul ours up to the pumps and fuel. We're pumping a lot of litres in, and quite a line forms behind us as the pilots who normally take maybe thirty to fifty litres at a time wait for us to fill all the tanks with an order of magnitude more fuel. No one is in too much of a hurry, though. They help us shove the airplane off the pump so the next people can fuel. There's a washroom but no payphone in the terminal, an increasing and annoying trend these days. Cellphones die. Payphones connect. I do succeed in filing a flight plan, pretty much guessing at how long our remaining work will take and where we'll end up, then jump in the airplane and fire it up.

We taxi out and take off straight away, climbing straight out over the lake to avoid the parachutes, and then up a valley to get to altitude before the hills do in this heat. Some photos of a secret lake, and then set course for an Indian reserve. Although we're dodging jagged mountain peaks with no sign of any civilization in sight, the chart tells me that I'm approaching Vancouver's inverted wedding cake airspace and lists a frequency to call Vancouver Centre before I enter Class C. Theoretically there's a number there, written against the violent colours and squiggles of the hypsometric tints and contour lines. I think I need bifocal sunglasses. I call the controller for clearance into the airspace and to advise her of a few photo lines that we'll be flying within the area controlled by Vancouver terminal. She has trouble understanding me at first. It's amazing she receives me at all. Do they have repeating antennae out here in the barren mountains? Wouldn't they just blow down, get covered in snow, or be destroyed by rutting moose and itchy bears? She clears me into the class C, but advises me that there are too many photo aircraft in the area and the mission will not be approved. Grr. Damn damn damn. The sun angle will be too low soon, so we can't wait long. I would have got preapproval this morning before coming but it was hard to predict when we would be here and truth-be-told I had some of today's assignment mixed up with the work we did last time we were here, so I didn't realize those Vancouver area dots were new work and not completed work. Communication: important.

The first valley we're in is below the reaches of Vancouver's airspace, so they can't tell us what we can and can't do. I have to fly up a valley towards mountains while on line, which is a little nerve-wracking because it's difficult to look at terrain and photo dots at the same time. I have to assure myself that there is no risk of CFIT on the line, but I still want to look out the window. We have to take a couple of runs at some lines because it takes a bit of a run-in to get on line and from one direction there isn't room to do that. There's a lot of snow up here still and at least one photo is just an overexposed white blob from the glare of the snow.

The next area has very few lines, and is partly in and partly out of terminal airspace. I get on the first line heading towards the airspace boundary, and then call up terminal for clearance in. Nothing about photo lines, just where I am, my altitude, and where I'm going. No problem. I'm coming down a valley and at an altitude where this is a pretty normal request. The line is complete. I look at the chart and where we need to be next. Now I'm taking advantage of the poor communication I've observed between layers of control in the Vancouver airport. I'm betting this guy has no idea I'm a photo flight that was denied.

"Request to overfly Bowen Island west to east at six thousand."

"That's approved."

The operator is laughing at me, because he sees what I'm doing, and it's working. No pressure though. I can't screw up my casual "overflight" of the island. I have to be right on line, but it's not anywhere any airplane might not be. Finishing that line of photos I ask to continue to the river ahead, and that's approved, too. Sneaky, but done before the sun angle or fuel level got too low or my duty day ended. And then I land. As I roll out I see that it was almost to the minute right on the flight plan, which greatly amuses me, considering where I pulled those numbers from. I have an experienced ... hat.

We barely needed the heater, but it seems to work.

---

On the subject of pulling things out of body parts, we have the latest thing to be paranoid about: surgically implanted explosives. Perhaps I am glad I'm not going through the secure side of airports much these days. I wonder what proportion of the travelling public has had surgery recently enough to raise TSA suspicions. If the explosive device were disguised in a breast implant as they suggest, the incision could be hidden under the breast where it would take a very thorough search to find it, especially if one covered the mark with that make up putty and made it look like an old implant incision.

Re-Registration of All N-Registered Aircraft

In Canada when you buy or import an aircraft, or change any of the information (e.g. your name or address or the registration of the aircraft) you must obtain a certificate of registration for said aircraft. It's a piece of paper, about the size of a trade paperback, with another similar piece of paper stapled to it. The paper lists the basic information on the aircraft: make, model, registration, serial number, owner's name and address and commercial or private registration. The other piece of paper attached has the aircraft information and blanks for the name and address. If you sell the airplane or move, you fill in the new owner information on both pieces of paper, and send the main one into Transport. The secondary piece serves as a C of R until Transport sends you an amended one.

If you rent, borrow, ferry, or otherwise take command of an airplane, one of the things you do before flying is is check to ensure that the C of R and other key documents are on board and valid. Licence applicants are asked to list the required document and then asked questions like "when does this C of R expire?" They are expected to recognize that it's kind of a trick question, because it doesn't expire. A good answer would be, "It doesn't, but you need a new one if any of the information on it changes, or if this one becomes illegible." Most people keep their documents in a waterproof envelope, and it's pretty common to see a slightly dog-eared Canadian C of R that dates back to an aircraft import date in the 1970s.

I assume that the procedure is not completely different in the US. Except they're going to change it. It turns out that either Americans haven't been very good at sending in their aircraft registration cards, or that the FAA hasn't been very good at filing them and keeping their data entry up to date. Of the 357,000 private and commercial aircraft they do know about, they are aware of problems in the paperwork of 119,000, about a third.

This has come to light because, in pursuit of terrorists and drug runners, the US tracks the movement of aircraft based on their registration numbers. Not knowing who owns an airplane makes it less useful to track it. I guess you could say that right now the US tracks airplanes the way they track kids. You're expected to register them when you first get them, but they don't check back every year to make sure you still have that kid. The new system will make them more like automobiles, where you have to renew the registration every year. Canadians and Americans already do this every year with cars, with new licence plates or licence plate stickers (the Americans call them DEEcals), so it's not an alien concept, but I expect resistance.

Here's an anecdote from another news story, one I don't have a link to:

There have already been cases of criminals using U.S. registration numbers, also known as N-numbers or tail numbers, to disguise their airplanes. In 2008, Venezuela authorities seized a twin-engine plane with the registration number N395CA on the fuselage and more than 1,500 pounds of cocaine on board.

Soon afterward, airplane owner Steven Lathrop of Ellensburg, Wash., received a call from a reporter. "He sort of started the conversation with, 'Do you know where your airplane is? ... Your airplane's in a jungle in South America,'" Lathrop said.

Lathrop's Piper Cheyenne II XL was locked safely in its hangar at the Ellensburg airport. The smugglers had apparently chosen his tail number because the model was similar to their plane. "Anybody with a roll of duct tape can put any number they want on an airplane," Lathrop said.

The re-registration of hundreds of thousands of aircraft wouldn't eliminate that tactic. Just find an airplane that doesn't fly much, and that is similar to your stolen or re-marked airplane, and make your questionable flights under that registration. It would narrow the pool of suitable registrations, by removing thousands of derelict, abandoned or I've seen some US aircraft with registrations in tiny letters and numbers. Many do have large numbers. I suspect that specification of the required size of registration number included a clause that grandfathered existing ones until the aircraft were repainted, and some people never repaint their airplanes.

In Canada we send in an AAIR (Annual Airworthiness Information Report) on each registered aircraft, so if an airplane is sold, scrapped or disused, that information reaches Transport Canada through that channel. It's still possible, I suppose that Canadian records are in disarray, but they've always been okay for any aircraft I've been familiar with that I've looked up. If Canada instituted an annual aircraft registration scheme it would be awful: we would have to pay a fee and no matter how much they charged, the bureaucracy collecting the fee would cost more than it made, and they'd still screw up the database. Such confidence I have in government and in databases.

The FAA plans over the next few years to cancel the registration certificates of all 357,000 aircraft, and require owners to re-register. The first batch of notices have already been sent to aircraft owners. I expect American aircraft owners to be displeased.

Airspace Closure

I remember that on September 11th I was angry. Not at the terrorists: we didn't yet know who they were or where they were from. I was angry at my curtailed liberty. I had been ordered to land before I was ready, and was not permitted to fly for the rest of the day, even though it was a beautiful summer afternoon.

It was exciting, then for a day or so, with all the foreign diversions into Canada. The US closed its airspace first, so all the international flights that had not yet entered US airspace had to divert to Canada. Then a few days later they flew out again, exotic types and liveries for the communities they were in.

I originally wrote a longer post about the last nine years, but in the end mine is a different experience than those of my mainly American readers, so I decided to stick to what I knew.

Secret Security Measures

Oh look, I forgot to do a blog entry for tonight. I thought I had them all done for the week. Those of you who read the comments on The Wings Stayed On! know that I was just ruminating over whether to blog about the US federal crackdown on someone using bloggers to leak the TSA security directives enacted immediately after the Christmas Day underwear bomber incident on NW253. I guess that settles it: this will be today's entry, then.

Within hours of the discovery of a man who tried to blow up an a airplane using explosives concealed in his underpants, the TSA provided airlines with a new set of security rules to add to all the existing ones. That's a pretty quick reaction on the second most major holiday on the American calendar. I don't know the exact method of dissemination but getting this thing in the hands of everyone who had to know about it was probably some combination of fax, e-mail and hand delivery. The complete text is here in an entry by Steven Frischling on his blog Flying with Fish.

Almost all the rules in the document are things that passengers had to submit to or were not allowed to do. To summarize, all passengers (with the exception of heads of state) and their carry-ons must be re-scrutinized at the boarding gate with a physical pat-down; for the last hour of international flight to a US destination passengers must remain in their seats with nothing on their lap and no access to carry-on baggage; passengers may have no external communication nor real time information about the flight path. There are no secret codes in the security directive, and nothing that you wouldn't learn from taking a flight while subject to the regulations. Just those rules.

Obviously all flight attendants, pilots, boarding area staff and their supervisors would have to know this information. That includes such staff members of foreign carriers operating into the US. The document, as is standard for such documents, requires acknowledgment by the airline and prohibits further dissemination of "this document or information contained herein." So the TSA have made it technically illegal for the airline to specify to passengers what they are required to do or not do. The airlines callously ignored this, and if you travelled across the border over Christmas you know that most of the elements of that document were repeatedly yelled, broadcast, or posted for your attention before and during your flight.

The reason the complete text appears on Flying with Fish (and another blog, Elliott) is that someone along that chain of distribution leaked the document to a number of bloggers. Those two posted it.

Aviation security was not compromised. The entire procedure as experienced by the passengers had been tweeted, texted, blogged, relayed by old fashioned word of mouth and even published in mainstream media before the blogs went live with it. Maybe the bit about no locational PAs would take a while to deduce. Perhaps no one had yet noticed the exception for the heads of state. But nothing in it is or should be secret. It should have been posted on the TSA website for passengers to read before embarkation.

Both bloggers who posted the text of the document were subpoenaed by the feds. Both subpoenas have since been dropped. Fish had his MacBook damaged in the process (perhaps it was dropped too?) but he has faith that the feds will do the right thing and replace it, so that episode is over. I don't know whether it is because they found the leak, realized that there was nothing harmful in it, or decided there was no point in trying to stop information being passed on when it was so widely disseminated to foreign nationals in the first place.

The concept of secret rules that must be obeyed without being communicated does explain why people over the last eight years have suddenly found themselves being arrested for queuing for the restroom and other "what was I doing wrong? where is this written down?" offenses. It's illegal for you to do it and it's illegal for the airlines to tell you it's illegal. I don't like that.

I can see the screening policy and things like secondary screening criteria being guarded; I don't mind rules giving airline personnel some leeway for interpretation and enforcement, but the actual RULES should be public and known. I want to live in a society where the rules are publicly available and subject to public debate. If there's a secret rule out there saying that my government can make secret rules, then I want a new government.

Update:

Today, the Transportation Security Administration issued new security directives to all United States and international air carriers with inbound flights to the U.S. effective January 4, 2010.

The new directive includes long-term, sustainable security measures developed in consultation with law enforcement officials and our domestic and international partners.

Once again the changes are secret, distributed only to the airlines, so you won't know what you are doing wrong until they tell you.

Underwear Bomber

My only response to this is that, given a choice, I would prefer to pass though airport security completely naked than have to be separated from all my stealable and smashable personal electronics every time I board someone else's airplane.

Red Deer Airport

The airport at Red Deer has two good paved runways, some good taxiways and at least one "wait, are you sure there wasn't an X on this?" taxiway. That's Delta. I was glad that I had specifically checked NOTAMs for the airport before coming here, so that I could be reasonably confident that I wasn't about to fall into a pit. This must be why the controller offered me the backtrack yesterday.

There is a proper airport terminal here, with washrooms and gates (okay, gate: I think there's only one) and PA announcements and CATSA security screening. In front of the terminal is a large paved apron with a big yellow square painted on it. The square is about the size of a B737 and it's the secure area of the airport. When there is a scheduled carrier parked there, no one without a badge or a security escort may cross the line. When there's no scheduled carrier, anyone may walk or taxi anywhere on the apron. When I first arrived at the airport there was a B737 parked in the square, but the FSS folk cheerfully assured me that it was just a charter, not scheduled, so the line was not in force. Because it's so much more practical to commit terrorist acts on a scheduled flight than with a private charter that operates on your schedule, I guess.

From the airside, the terminal has the name of the airport and the field elevation written on it and there is the word enter over one door. The other door goes to the FSS in the tower cab on top of the terminal. The FSS personnel don't go in and out that door, though, they use a wooden walkway with handrails that goes along the roof to the groundside, and then down a set of metal stairs. It must be a chilly gauntlet to run in the winter, but the summer weather is quite nice, not getting below ten or so overnight. The metal stairs end in a fenced cage with a coded entry door, next to the airport staff parking. From there a secure fence with a combination lock runs along the edge of the airfield. (Pilots: your first guess at the code is correct, and there's a sticker on both sides of the gate that gives the name of the four digit number clearly enough that it could be googled). Not to worry about the security of the airfield however, because the security fence ends a couple of hangars down the ramp and anyone can just walk or drive onto the field. Just like Miami.

As I'm leaving the airport at eleven p.m. a man comes down the stairs to his car. I ask if he's leaving for the night or just a shift change. I thought I remembered that it was 24 hour here, but I could be wrong. Eleven is a common time for services to stop. It's just a shift change, though. He explains that overnight when Edmonton City Centre tower closes, Red Deer Radio steps in and looks after that frequency. I told him that I had assumed it went to a pool of people in a room in Edmonton somewhere. He says it used to, but this is new. It's not a bad idea. It gives Red Deer Radio enough work to justify them being open twenty-four hours.

Suicide By Cop F-16

You probably already know about the 31-year-old Canadian who stole a Cessna 172 from a flying school in Thunder Bay and headed south across Lake Superior to the US, where he was intercepted by but did not respond to American F-16 fighter jets. He landed of his own accord on a road in Missouri, where he parked the airplane under a bridge and ran on foot to a convenience store where he bought a Gatorade and chatted with locals until the police came in and got him. This CBC story has less information but includes photographs of both Adam Leon and the airplane.

His story is that he wanted to commit suicide, but couldn't bring himself to harm himself, so planned his cross-border foray in order to goad the Americans into shooting him down. Some news stories say that he had been treated for depression and left a good-bye note for his girlfriend or a suicide note near the hangar.

I can picture his well-meaning flight instructor teaching him to ensure he has a transponder code and two-way radio contact with ATC when in close proximity to the US border. "If you don't," the flight instructor could easily have said, "the Americans may scramble intercept jets, and if you do not tune 121.5 and do exactly as they ask, they have the right to shoot you down for entering their airspace." Is there a Canadian flight instructor who hasn't given such a warning to students who will be flying near or crossing the border on a cross-country flight? Adam would probably also have known where to find the intercept signals in the CFS, to understand and respond to intercepting aicraft without the use of a radio.

My favourite little detail was that Adam reportedly landed with thirty minutes of fuel remaining. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I like to think that his flight instructor drilled air law into him so thoroughly that even while suicidally defying an international boundary and armed jets, he couldn't disobey the mandate to land with half an hour of gas in his tanks.

Serious credit must go to the American military for their measured reaction to the incident. The population is very easily frightened by things like this. They evacuated the Senate in Wisconsin, after all. But no one got shot down, or shot at all. The guy was arrested for the only crimes he had actually committed: transporting stolen property and illegally entering the country. The FBI found no links to terrorism in his background. He'll likely be sent back to Canada. (Good thing he wasn't an American picked up by the RCMP in Canada. They probably would have tasered him to death). Given a history of depression and a self-confessed suicide attempt, he will lose his Canadian medical and possibly never get it back, so he'll need a new career.

The accompanying conspiracy theory is that rather than being a mentally ill flight student, he's an Islamic terrorist testing the system. He immigrated to Canada from Turkey last year, and used to be named Yavuz Berke. Did his six hours in the Falcons' gunsights give him a chance to think things over and return to a rational appreciation for life, such that the strangest thing the Missourians noticed about him was that he asked to use a "washroom" instead of a "bathroom"? (What's up with that, anyway? Is that something Missourian? Bathroom, washroom, toilet, restroom ... would any of these mark someone as "not from around here, are you?" in your community?)

An argument the linked blog entry didn't notice is that Adam Leon spent money in Missouri. While Americans in border states may accept Canadian bills, Misourri is too far south to be considered a border state, and you can't give someone two dollars or just barely have enough to buy a Gatorade in Canadian bills. The smallest bill is a five. So he was carrying a few dollars in US cash. Just enough to pay for a lift and a snack while waiting to be arrested. Or maybe he had a few bucks US in his wallet because he had a post box in Grand Marais, Michigan for ordering things on the internet. Like plutonium?

I also liked the informational paragraph one article had on the C172. It has a maximum cruise speed of 233 kilometres an hour and a range of 1,130 km. It's true, but it makes it sound so fast!

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

Boing Boing lists a news story in which a band sticker on a bicycle shut down an airport. The name of the band is "This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb," and apparently it isn't the first time its appearance on an innocently parked bicycle has caused a bomb scare.

Everyone can appreciate that security at an airport has to be taken seriously, but it seems a little odd to base the alert level on the label. If a bicycle being a pipe bomb is a credible threat, restrict bicycle parking to a secure bunker. A bicycle sticker reading, "This bike is not a pipe bomb," wouldn't calm anyone down any. If I knew that there was one bike on the whole rack that was a pipe bomb, I'd expect it to be the one with the only stickers being the manufacturer's name and local registration. The words "pipe bomb" precipitate the security response. Not the credibility of the threat. It has been illegal for as long as I remember to make jokes or false statements about carrying dangerous items while at airport security, but this shouldn't be extended into making any statements about security or dangerous items while at airport security.

A car bombs makes a bigger bang than a bike bomb. I'd love to see a bumper sticker for cars reading "This could be a car bomb," but you know that instead of being taken as either a silly joke or a reminder to maintain constant vigilance, it would get you in trouble. They can be perfectly truthful statements, but if your t-shirt says "Some terrorists look like me" and there's a sticker on your computer saying "No explosive residue," you should probably be wearing underwear that says, "I knew I'd get strip searched today."

I'd buy that underwear, though.

And I'd need some new underwear were I forced to use this bicycle lane.

And finally, despite the really corny gaggle of geese, this animation of the US Airways landing in the Hudson River is very well done.

Simple Procedure

I came across this on an online bulletin board recently.

All a terrorist has to do is get his commercial pilots license - get hired by an airline - use his 'right' to flying with a gun - get on board - shoot the co-pilot, lock the cockpit door and crash the plane"

I'm not interested in hijacking, and I've already accomplished step one, so thanks to this helpful poster I now see that there's a single trivial step remaining to achieve my goals. Why didn't I think of that?

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."

What the Pentagon Wants

The Pentagon (that's the "bombs and missiles Pentagon, not the demon-summoning sort," as I remember having to clarify seven years over a poor intercom, when I was told that it was on fire) wants aircraft to be fitted with a Kill Switch. Not to actually kill the occupants, and specifically not to interfere with the crew, but to disable the aircraft. They specify that the innovation should allow the aircraft to be quickly (and presumably economically) returned to operation, but that it should block the aircraft from taking off.

This runs against the entire design of aircraft, which strive to avoid any single point of failure. As soon as you design one in, you have one, and it can fail, thereby making the airplane more dangerous. The simple fact that you have designed the airplane with a single system that can independently shut down the airplane, means that someday it will, unintentionally. I promise that every other single thing that can break has happened to an airplane.

The strategists have divided their desire into disabling an aircraft before take-off and then preventing an aircraft in flight from overflying a particular area. Let's look at the first. If they wanted a legitimate aircrew to abort a flight by remote command, that would be simple: turn on a fire bell. Immediate abort of a takeoff in progress, or if it occurred after V1, an inflight engine shutdown and immediate return for landing. There's nothing wrong with the aircraft, you just ask the crew to perform one of the highest risk procedures in aviation, at the most critical phase of flight. Usually this can be accomplished without injuries or significant damage, because aircrews practice and pass a test in it at every renewal, and recite to one another the procedures for doing it before every take-off. That's how critical it is.

But of course that's not even on topic, because it's unauthorized take-offs they want to prevent, and for an unauthorized take-off, that wouldn't work. If you are breaking the rules, you probably break all of them. If you're planning to die you might as well do it on one engine at take-off power, so the airplane has to be actually disabled. This is where an airplane is not like a car. Take the example of the fuel pump issue I had a while ago. It was fixed with a few taps of a rubber mallet, and I went on my way. A reader expressed concern that I didn't have it checked out more thoroughly. "What would happen," he asked, "if it were to refreeze most of the way through a take-off?" The answer, as people who read the comments know (some don't, which is why I am repeating myself) is "nothing at all." The other, engine-driven, fuel pump for that engine would supply sufficient fuel pressure to keep the engine operating at full power. I would not even notice that the electric pump had failed until the next time I went to start the engine. Not only the electric fuel pump, but the entire electrical system--both alternators and a battery--could spontaneously shut down and my take-off would be unimpeded. At night I would notice my lights going out, and probably abort. By day I might notice the sudden cessation of radio chatter. But the essential functions of my airplane would still function. A more complex airplane, is more reliant on electrical systems, but has even more redundancy, (although, as discussed recently, the A320 could use a bit more), so a kill switch would have to cut a wider swath through systems, making the airplane more vulnerable.

Most airplanes have what's called a squat switch, a sensor that tells systems whether or not there is weight on the landing gear. Systems may be squat switch limited (e.g. landing gear retraction or operation of heaters that require significant airflow) so that they won't work on the ground even if the pilot tries to turn them on, or squat switch activated (e.g. transponders), turning on automatically as the airplane leaves the ground. I would expect Pentagon-mandated disabling mechanisms to be squat-switch limited. But this doesn't solve the problems that whatever measure the kill switch takes--cutting off fuel, deflating tires, deploying spoilers--could for one, happen accidentally once it has been rigged to happen, and for two, happen at the end of the take-off roll, after V1 when an abort is exceptionally dangerous. And I should mention that the squat switch can fail just like anything else: it's not like it gets tested before every flight, so the accidental kill could happen in the middle of the Pacific, or during climb out, too.

The 'prevent the airplane from flying over a particular area' part is a little more science fictional, but presents the same sort of safety issues. It could be done by requiring airplanes to fly by autopilot at all times, with clearances physically enforced, but the danger of that should be apparent. There are plenty of approach plates that warn pilots to take independent action if not cleared to turn onto the ILS, because of high terrain beyond. And there are plenty of cases where ATC radios have failed. I don't think I have ever flown across the country without hearing reroutes or accommodations being made for failed ATC equipment. And then the terrorists can forget about going after aircraft and just go straight for the ground stations that control them, or by breaking the code of the transmissions made to the control mechanisms. Aircraft must be able to navigate independently.

I understand the military desire for a way to stop errant aircraft in their tracks, but I think it's an issue of design philosophy rather than just finding the right switch to throw. And I haven't even bothered to address the issue of the implications of a remote control off switch for airplanes. Airplanes malfunction quite enough on their own without help; what's keeping us in the air is redundant design that opposes single points of failure, and pilots who are trained to troubleshoot and take appropriate action.

Edit: I neglected to include a reference for this entry. I don't remember where I heard about it, but here is the Pentagon RFP. The anti-aircraft measures are Objective C on that page.

Everpresent Security

So of course to go to work I have to get on a commercial flight. And to get on a commercial flight I have to go through security. Ahh, security. Everyone besides people who intend to blow up the airplane has an immediate keen interest in people who intend to blow up the airplane not being equipped to do so, but no one looks forward to undergoing security screening.

I'd like to give the TSA some credit today for addressing the public animosity in a blog, Evolution of Security. They publish information, stories, refutations and explanations. When the blog first went online it was inundated with comments and complaints. And I give the official bloggers more credit for acknowledging the problems and responding to the comments.

As I see it, security screening areas are unhappy places because:

• Passengers don't know the rules or refuse to follow them.
• The rules appear illogical, vary from place to place, and are inconsistently applied.
• Submitting to the screening process is irritating, time consuming and can be humiliating.
• Passengers are abusive towards screeners.
• Screeners do not treat passengers with respect.

People in airports are already under stress, because of time pressure, carrying heavy objects and important valuables in the presence of many strangers, the nature of the business that calls for them to travel, and for many a fear of getting on airplanes in the first place. Present these people with one more piece of stress, or simply an available human target, and many of them explode into defiance.

The vast majority of air travellers today are familiar with the basic rules: no weapons or explosives, liquids in one baggie, no jokes about threats, possessions all go through the X-Ray machine while the passenger walks through the scanner. In fact general hatred of security screening by frequent travellers probably has the effect of propagating this knowledge through the non-travelling population. And for the very ignorant, there are large signs and often people reiterating the rules as you approach security.

Passengers have to take responsibility for complying with the rules. Unfortunately many don't, and instead blame the screener for the confiscation of their precious sunblock. The way I see it, if I decide to take the risk of trying to carry my sunblock onboard in a 110 mL container, or if I am too lazy or forgetful to put it in my checked baggage, then I can hardly complain if the rule is enforced. If I were to say, "what? how can my sunblock be a threat to the airplane?" I'd be claiming to be an idiot.

This "how can you do this to elderly/innocent/handicapped/military personnel?" argument is a common one, but one that shows an innocence of the entire security mentality. To do good security you actually must believe that everyone is a threat. Bruce Schneier writes about the security mindset.

If the TSA were to assume everyone was a harmless and innocent passenger, they'd let everyone through with no questions or screening, and while that would be quicker, it wouldn't be screening. So instead they assume everyone wants to blow up the airplane, and it is their job to determine how you plan to do that, despite your innocent appearance. That is, there's nothing to stop you from having an artificial hip AND a gun. If grey-haired ladies with a limp were discovered to get a free pass, then anyone who wanted to defeat security would have a grey-haired lady limp it through the scanner for them.

They are aware that the scanning is irritating and not all that effective and are trying to make it more efficient and effective, with devices like the "naked" scanner. I'm not all that concerned about it, and I freaked out when they took my fingerprint at Disney World. I think that Americans are more body-shy than people of many other nations. Certainly more than Europeans. Canadians vary a lot coast to coast in this respect, with the Southern Ontarians being the biggest prudes.

The inconvenience of the security procedure will decrease as the facilities begin to be designed around having to take off your shoes and unpack your toothpaste and laptop. The inconsistency will always be with us, but a little respect in both directions helps with that. I'll come back to respect tomorrow.

Plausible Explanation

After trying so hard to make a post composed entirely of uninformed speculation yesterday, I succumbed to temptation and did some research. Ignorance was bliss. The process is worse than I imagined, but far more pilots than I guessed subject themselves to it. Using information from sources such as the TSA itself and airline pilot association websites I found a lot more specific information than my speculations covered, and thus evidence that the TSA and FFDOs themselves are not trying to propagate security through obscurity. Although I'm not really impressed with the guy on a gun site who was bragging about his wife's activities as a FFDO. It's now looking like TSA procedures lined up the circumstances for this accident to happen.

Specifically, FFDO pilots are given a week of excellent training and then issued and required to use this holster. They leave the weapon loaded during transport, but any time that the pilots are not locked behind the cockpit door, it is secured with a digital padlock. Web videos show that attempting to apply the padlock to a holstered gun that had been subjected to a little bit of turbulence could cause an accidental discharge, and that the padlock itself can be opened with a paperclip in about the time it would take to dial in the combination. Loaded and trigger locked is also a weird way to transport a gun. I wonder if that's what they do if they overnight in Canada. Here you have to have a handgun unloaded, trigger-locked and in an opaque lockbox for transport, and there is not an exception for foreign law enforcement personnel.

I'm not sure what any of this proves, but there is evidence that the government agencies involved are deliberately making things difficult for the pilots involved. Now that I have found out what is involved in the application procedure, I wouldn't apply under the current rules. Pilots think going once or twice a year to a medical doctor and asking them to find some reason for you not to fly is bad. Imagine having to go to a psychologist who is looking for reasons to consider you irresponsible. (Yes, the process includes threats of reporting anything they find back to the FAA and/or your employer). For example, they asked applicants, "Would you ever want to be a fighter jet pilot?" and "Do you think you could take a human life?" What are the pilots who have seen military combat, or the ones who still fly fighter jets in the reserves, going to answer? "You want to see pictures?"

So um, yeah, keep on not letting the bad guys into the cockpit.

Didn't They Expect This?

The TSA allows airline pilots to qualify as Federal Flight Deck Officers, undergoing selection and training to carry a loaded firearm in at their workplace. The program came into effect in 2003, as a response to the 2001 terrorist attacks using airliners. This past Mar 22nd, one of these guns was fired on the flight deck of an A319, puncturing the fuselage.

The result, as I'm sure has been explored in a Mythbusters episode, was that the airplane got a hole in the side. No one was sucked out, and the airplane did not explode. The plane was only at 8000', coincidentally the altitude to which the cabin was probably pressurized for most of the flight, so this can't count as a real life test of the Mythbusters' television show. The expectations of this entry's title are not, however, those of Adam and Jamie, but those of the TSA.

One of the lessons that aviation has learned well is that if something can go wrong, it will. It may take a long time, but eventually it will happen, and safety is all about being prepared for it to happen. Give thousands of pilots cups of coffee and some of them are going to spill coffee on themselves and the autopilot. (Hmm, maybe that's why my autopilots never work?) Give dozens (hundreds?) of pilots handguns and eventually one of them is going to accidentally fire it. Eventually one of them will accidentally shoot him or herself or another crew member, too. I wonder if any pilot has yet used his government-issued weapon to commit suicide. In Canada, eighty percent of gun deaths are suicides, and maybe five percent accidental, so I'd expect some suicides along with the accidents.

The TSA knew this when they resisted the FFDO program. I said that while I didn't think there was a huge risk posed by pilots having guns in the cockpit, that the risk from the guns was greater than the risk without the guns. Since 2003 I don't know of any US airplanes that had to be removed from service because of terrorist actions that would have been prevented by armed crews, nor do I know of any terrorist actions that were prevented by the presence of armed crews, but that doesn't mean there weren't any. The United States is pretty secretive these days.

There was no terrorist threat to this flight, and the discharge has been described as accidental, and tentatively as mishandling. Well, I'd think so. If a gun fires where and when it's not supposed to that would indicate poor manufacture, poor maintenance or poor handling. The expensive .40-caliber semiautomatic Heckler & Koch pistol was selected for the program as a gun that wasn't going to fire because it was dropped or subjected to turbulence, so either the pilot so abused the weapon that it was no longer safe, or he handled it in an unsafe manner. "An unsafe manner" here being a manner in which made it possible to be accidentally fired into his own airplane.

Apparently he was stowing the gun in preparation for landing. Now anyone who knows the details of the FFDO program is not allowed to disclose them, but I don't know anything about it that isn't posted on the website, so I'm free to speculate. As the gun is approved for a particular pilot, clearly the gun comes on board with the pilot at the beginning of his workday. So either the pilot carries the weapon through the airport and through security, himself or some secure designate does, and gives the weapon to the pilot at the airplane. The latter seems weird and needlessly complicated: the pilot would have to check in, find the designated person to carry his weapon to the airplane for him, and then rendezvous with that person on the airside. It would be a pain in the neck. So maybe that's how it works. Either way, once the pilot is on board the airplane he has his weapon. Now did it come through the terminal loaded or unloaded? Either he loads it at home right after putting on his tie, and then carries it, loaded and holstered, right through his day, or he carries it through security unloaded and then loads it in the airplane.

Loading it at the beginning of the day means less handling throughout the day, but also that the gun is loaded at times when it is not needed to be ready. Loading it on the flight deck might require loading and unloading several times during the day, as the pilot changes airplanes during one duty period. I would be willing to believe either strategy, perhaps leaning towards 'loaded all day' because otherwise they'd be standing in the galley loading their guns, so as not to be seen by people staring at them through the windows of the terminal. (I once had an airline pilot come up and speak to me reassuringly, because he'd recognized me as the one who'd had her nose pressed to the glass watching, and mistaken my "I wonder if I'll make it" expression as one of apprehension about the flight rather than hope about my career).

Whether the gun comes on board in a case or a holster, it has to be accessible during the flight, or there is no point in it's being there. I would think that a shoulder holster would be a natural place to keep it. Amusing as it would be, it doesn't make much sense to slap it down on the centre console: it could slide off and end up under the rudder pedals or seats. Unless A319s have been modified to include a dashboard gun mount, there's no secure but accessible place to put it down.

I'm guessing that the pilot in question did find some place to put the gun that he felt was a better compromise between secure and accessible in cruise. The turbulence and movement associated with descent and landing was such that he intended to return it to its holster before landing. Perhaps he picked up the gun in a way that allowed his finger to put weight on the trigger, or almost dropped it and grabbed at it, causing the discharge. I don't want to believe he was playing with it.

I am certain that there is not a single control in an airplane that some commercial pilot has not accidentally mishandled. If you retract the gear instead of the flaps, it's embarrassing and expensive. If you mishandle manual pressurization it's painful. If you make a PA on an ATC frequency it's embarrassing. I still don't think that the risk of not having guns is worth the risk of having them, but perversely, I'd probably apply for the FFDO program if I were eligible. But I wouldn't be handling my gun at 8000' unless I perceived an imminent threat of the sort that can be countered with a gun.

The comments on this issue are by definition amusingly uninformed, because anyone who knows enough to comment in an informed way is bound by law not to disclose what he knows.

And Then They Kill Me

This morning someone sent me a link to a news story about 122 missing FAA investigator badges. If an accredited representative of the local aviation authority, which in the United States is the FAA, requests access to an airplane, I must accommodate him or her. The only way a crew could say "no, you can't ride along with us in the cockpit" is if all cockpit seats were already filled by persons essential to the flight. The FAA inspector can also go anywhere in the airport.

FAA inspectors may pose as ordinary passengers to evaluate airline compliance of passenger briefings. And then in cruise the inspector could present his credentials to the flight attendant and ask for cockpit access. I believe in this case he could be denied access if the airline SOPs forbade opening the cockpit door for any non-emergency reason during flight.

According to the article, FAA inspectors may also bypass airport security checkpoints. So here we have a scenario where someone can carry as much shampoo as they like onto any airplane they choose, and then ask to be taken directly to the cockpit and remain there for the duration of the flight. With their family-sized bottle of shampoo.

I'm thinking I might print that article out. If someone with an FAA (or Transport Canada or especially Civil Aviation Authority of Moldova) badge asks onto my airplane I will delay access until I can verify, through a published FAA telephone number, that the badge number is valid and that the person is supposed to be on my airplane. i crack myself p here, because as anyone who has ever called the FAA knows, no one seems to know what they are supposed to be doing, let alone what anyone else is supposed to be doing, and they rarely get back to you. I apologize to any affronted FAA people reading my blog, but truly to an outsider the system seems to be set up as a number of impenetrable shells, denying access to the people who know anything unless the caller is unusually persistent and lucky. If the badgeholder is legit and seriously concerned about the safety of my airplane, they shouldn't complain. If they are a legitimate FAA inspector looking for a free ride for personal reasons, they'll change their mind, and if they are an impostor ... hmm, maybe I'd better have a plan B.

Happy Louis Riel Day

It's a statutory holiday today in much of Canada, under various pretenses, and I believe our southern neighbours are celebrating the birthday of one or more of their presidents. No one is actually celebrating the day's honoree; we all know it's just an excuse for a holiday during the long cold stretch between New Year's and Good Friday. But I was going to write about Louis Riel (that's "loo-ee ree-el" -- even monolingual anglophones do not say "loo-iss"), anyway.

He's certainly a controversial hero. Riel was born in 1844 in what would later become Manitoba. He studied to be both a priest and a lawyer, but never completed either. His fellow Métis looked to him as a leader, and when political events foisted an anti-French governor on the colony, Riel led an armed takeover of a government fort, then escaped capture, fled to the United States, was elected three times to parliament (in absentia), returned to lead a rebellion, surrendered, was arrested, tried and hanged for treason.

He's been hailed as a messiah, reviled as a terrorist, and formally recognized by the federal and provincial governments for his contribution to the development of the Canadian Confederation. Some people say he had gone mad before leading the second rebellion. Two parliamentary bills have been introduced to reverse his conviction for high treason and recognize him as a Father of Confederation, but neither bill passed.

I don't know as much about him as I think ought to. I'll have to get a biography better than what I can find with Google and Wikipedia. Can anyone recommend a good biography of the man? Something that is readable, but that cites primary sources. It's probably going to be something out of print, because everything I see on Chapters.ca now is kind of meta, or addressing one aspect.

As long as Canada exists, its citizens will want to read about Louis Riel because his life summarizes in a unique way the tensions of being Canadian: English versus French, native versus white, east versus west, Canadian versus American.
--Thomas Flanagan