ATIS Identifiers

In a recent comment reader ZuluDelta wrote:

I have noticed that the occasional aircraft reports that it is "with Juliet" or "Oscar, Tango, Papa, India, Uniform, Kilo" One checked in "with Whiskey"! Perhaps in some future blog, you could elaborate on what these secret codes are.

I almost think that with a name like ZuluDelta, this person might be kidding, but I always err on the side of treating a question as serious. Plus this is an easy one to answer, so it allows me to fill in a day on the blog without incurring the wrath of Texans by saying something inadvertently critical about one of their freeway ramps.

When an airport has a control tower, whether it's in Texas or not, there is almost always a published frequency that broadcasts a continuously repeating recorded message called the Automated Terminal Information Something. I think it's "Service," and I'm deliberately not looking it up to demonstrate how I don't care. We call it "the ATIS," pronounced Eh-Tiss. It might sound something like this:

This is Somewhere Airport Information Charlie, recorded at one nine three zero zulu. Wind three two zero at one four gusting two zero. Sky clear. Visibility fifteen miles. Altimeter three zero one four. IFR approach is a visual approach runway two zero. Active runways two zero and three five. Note One: Echo three taxiway is restricted to aircraft wingspan under 50 feet. Note Two: construction equipment operating west of runway 01/35. Vehicles will remain 400' from runway at all times. Inform Somewhere Tower on initial contact you have information Charlie.

The recording is often made by a human, just one of the controllers in the tower who checks the current conditions, presses a button on the machine and talks into the recorder. You can hear the regular hubbub of tower activity in the background, and there are stories about things audible on the ATIS that shouldn't be. Sometimes the conditions are coded in machine readable form and the ATIS is provided by a mechanical voice.

Either way, the ATIS is updated as required to keep up with changes in the information, usually at least once an hour. Every time it is changed, the information letter is incremented. So the first one in the morning is Alfa, then Bravo, then Charlie and so on through the radio alphabet. That way you need only listen long enough to hear the letter, called the identifier, to know if you have the latest information.

You tune the ATIS frequency and come in somewhere in the middle of that, drumming your pen impatiently on your kneeboard as they waddle through all the taxiway closure stuff when all you want to know is which approach plate to get out. You copy down the information and then call up the controller and "prove" that you have done your homework by specifying which ATIS information you have. If you don't say, or if you say but they weren't paying attention, they will ask you to "Confirm you have Quebec." If they've changed it between your picking it up and your calling them, sometimes they say "Information Romeo is now current. Inform when you have Romeo" and make you go listen again before they will talk to you.

Pilots and controllers get mileage out of making fun of the names of the letters. I've heard ATIS recordings that advertise "Information Echo-co-co-o" and I'm sure the story about the passenger named Mike or Charlie who asks "why did he ask if I was with you?" Here's a PilotsofAmerica forum thread on silly ATIS messages.

Here's an MP3 of an ATIS recording from Ferihegy airport (I think it's in the Czech Republic in Hungary). Here's live ATIS from Bankstown, Australia, if their tower is open when you click it. This last one contains profanity, and it may or may not have ever been actually broadcast but it perfectly demonstrates the mechanical ATIS voice. And it's very funny if you don't mind hearing a few words that shouldn't be said on the radio.

Alternative Transportation

I think I may have already posted this photograph, but it's a response to a commenter who wanted to ensure that people didn't think all of the US was inhospitable to pedestrians. This sign clearly indicates a city where multiple types of non-car locomotion are encouraged with dedicated lanes and routes. I have never seen an on-street skateboard facility anywhere else. I know it was in the U.S. and I'm pretty sure it was in Portland, Oregon.

In answer to a comment a few days ago asking about what happens to bicycles if they are abandoned when the owner moves or dies, they have a department responsible for collecting abandoned or badly parked bicycles. They register them and make them available to be reclaimed, resold, donated or destroyed as appropriate.

I tried to rent a bicycle in Texas today. A bicycle does not appear to be a vehicle one can rent here. Just out of interest, do you live in a town where a person can rent a bicycle? And while I'm at it, did your parents buy you a car? Did you buy your child(ren) a car? Did most people in the class have parent-provided cars? I get e-mails all the time from teenagers who want to learn to fly and don't know where they could get the money. They seem earnest enough that if they were sitting on a car they'd sell it and spend the money on flight training.

You can rent bikes in all the cities where I've lived, and if you ask nicely at a bike shop, you can sometimes get a loaner bike to ride while yours is in for repairs. My first bicycle was parent-provided, but when I wanted a better one, with gears and caliper brakes, I had to save up to pay half.

Back in the Sky

In which Aviatrix has no fear.

After equipment delays and weather delays and walking all around town looking for Mexican restaurants that only existed on Google, or were hidden in otherwise abandoned shopping malls, I finally got to fly in the area. The FBO gives us cookies and hot chocolate and candy, and tows our airplane out of the hangar.

One of the taxiways is closed so we have to cross over the runway and taxi up the other side. This is explained apologetically on the ATIS and again by the controller. Heck, in Canada they would have only built the one taxiway and you'd have to do that all the time. And the taxiway would be half the width and there wouldn't be a tower.

There's a moment's wait at the threshold, I can't remember why, and then we're cleared for takeoff. Vrooom! I miss it when I don't get to fly for a while. The airplane climbs easily and ATC gives me plenty of time to get stabilized and complete after take-off checks before they call me with a frequency change.

ATC is so laid back that after a while I suspect they have forgotten about me. Even though I can keep up with changes in the altimeter setting just by listening to the numbers given other aircraft, I make occasional calls requesting the current altimeter setting, just to remind them that I'm out here.

The mission specialist in the back is training another person on new equipment. They are using my intercom system, so I listen in and find out what they are doing back there. It would probably make more sense if I could see their screens.

I can see some nice lakes down there. They're just outside of town. I wonder why the town isn't built more on the lakes. In my experience, towns usually follow shorelines, because that's a source of water, transportation, and cooling on hot days. I guess this community has grown around a train station or something. Or maybe they are nasty smelly lakes and they only look nice from the sky.

It's hot again today. The temperature has bounced between freezing and t-shirt weather, literally 0 to 20 overnight. The locals say it's normal, and that it will get cold again soon.

At the end of the flight I hand the airplane over to my comrade and she will fly the afternoon shift.

More Blogging Pilots

Here are a few more airline pilot blogs for you all. (Or "y'all" as they say down here, even ATC. "Are y'all on an IFR approach?" I've heard).

The first blog I had to show you was by "Flyboy" a pilot from Brunei, just to show that being a pilot is pretty similar all over the world. It was this story about a rejected take-off that caught my attention. It's exciting, well-written and is what the pilots of the Continental B737 were trying to do in Denver in December. You have to have the attitude that any take-off can turn into this, and be prepared for it every second of the roll. But if you clicked that link you'll see that it's now by invitation only, and I didn't save the e-mail address. If any of my readers is on the invite list for this one, perhaps you could ask Flyboy if I can be on the list, or at least have a copy of that one entry to share with my readers.

The only quote I kept from Log Book is this one, what he thinks of being a pilot.

The life of an airline pilot may seem glamorous to many but it has its downside. The longhaul flights he flies are filled with fatigue, monotony and days away from his family. If married, it is best he lives with a woman who is resigned to the life of a one parent family who copes with blocked drains and recalcitrant airconditioning. But the pros outweigh the cons most of the time what with discounted tickets for family and friends, generous annual leave and a paycheck that pays the household bills, the children's school fees and more importantly the golf club membership subscription.

The second blog, My Life as an Airline Pilot is from an American pilot, flying for American Eagle. If I could get a green card I could get an airline job like that (and if I had little pink fairie wings I could fly around without an airplane, so that's enough of that). The joke at the end of this entry could be considered crude, but it made me laugh.

Next up is All Things Aviation by John White. I'd call it a retrospective curmudgeon blog, with commentary on current aviation news but John also flies a c152 taildragger, and made me laugh with this tidbit I didn't know: "Captain Sullenberger was honored by being given a lifetime membership in the Seaplane Pilots Association." He apparently didn't have a seaplane rating, but they trained him up for one, for free.

And one more of a sort I don't usually cover, but I know lots of you enjoyed my ferry flight in the Aventura, so here's Tinworm, a student pilot with an even smaller airplane, documnted in Tinworm Wings.

Texas Health Care

In which Aviatrix is frightened by the medical care industry and the Monsanto Corporation.

I'm waiting for the customers to need me to work, so I'm watching a lot of TV. I know House is available on cable in Canada, but it seems to be on every channel here, so I'm watching it, and I'm growing to like it. And then there are the ads.

Most of them are for prescription drugs or healthcare. Numerous ads are for cancer care centres, knee and hip surgery, and other sorts of medical care. The medical centres look on TV like holiday resorts. I know someone who is self-employed in Canada and has cancer. She is too ill to work so, being self-employed, has no money coming in. Her friends got together and had a fundraiser for her, to keep the rent paid and the groceries bought. I'm glad she doesn't have to pay for medical care. Hers is not as fancy as the resorts on TV in Texas, but I think she is getting good care. It's unsettling seeing the ads, because I take health care for granted. It's like seeing starving children in ads for NGOs doing overseas aid. Something you don't like to think about. I suppose people who live here are inured to the constant medical advertising, and to the fact that they could be wiped out financially by an illness that they recover from physically. A healthy strong young person can recover from terrifyingly traumatic injuries and go back to work, but how do they manage when they recover with usable limbs but crippling debt? Medical costs in the US make buying a car for your teenager look like a petty cash expenditure.

"Levitra does not protect against HIV/AIDS," warns another ad. Who the heck would think boner pills prevented sexually transmitted diseases? I can't fathom the logic.

I buy some cheese at the grocery store. It says on the side that it is "Made with milk from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST." I'm glad of that. Bovine growth hormone isn't approved for use in Canada, so it seems scary and foreign. I'm only exposed to it down here. Right under that declaration is another one. "The FDA has stated that there is no significant difference between milk from rBST-treated and untreated cows. The difference is that my government thinks the increase in production is not worth the risk, while the US government requires even those producers who don't use the hormone to assure the consumer that the government thinks it's okay. Probably only the cows suffer from it, but absent all other evidence, which government am I going to believe, the one that pays for health care or the one for whom private health care constitutes part of the GDP?

There was freezing rain forecast this afternoon, but it didn't happen.

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.

Walker, Texas Ranger?

In which Aviatrix is frightened by an ATM and the car culture.

This town, despite being fairly compact for an American city, seems to be inhabited by people who do not walk. I mentioned a couple of days ago that kids don't walk to and from school. I present as further evidence a bank with a sign "24h ATM".

I walked up to the bank, but the front door was locked, and there was a sign giving the opening hours of the lobby. And those weren't twenty-four hours. I followed the walk around the corner, looking for an exterior wall-mounted ATM, but the walk dead-ended at a dumpster. There was no sidewalk on the other side of the building, but I tried going that way anyway, and found a drive-up ATM. I pushed the buttons and got my money, feeling a little insecure as an SUV pulled up in line behind me, and then I went back across the parking lot to the hotel. I looked again at the sign, and it definitely did not say drive-through. Apparently ATMs here are drive-through by default. And have no sidewalks.

Two blocks the other way was a Wal-Mart. My coworker made that sidewalkless trip for groceries and reported someone in a pickup truck turning around in a parking lot in order to come back and ask, "Are you okay? Did your car break down? Can I give you a lift?"

It was 16 degrees celsius. Not raining. Pretty much perfect walking weather. After three days I have seen no pedestrians or cyclists here. There were people riding bikes in Montreal at twenty below. You could tell they were their winter bikes, not their good bikes, but they were riding.

Now I told you I was irrationally scared of Texas. This is the sort of thing that makes me scared. It makes me wonder if this is a bad neighbourhood. But all the families are rich enough that their kids have cars. So people aren't going to be mugging me for my shoes. Are there poisonous snakes? I don't think so. Not on the street anyway. I intellectually know that no, there's no danger: people here just don't walk. It's in the culture. But the creepiness of seeing no one walking triggers my 'something wrong here' reflex. It's like when all the water goes away at the beach and you know it's time to run for higher ground before the tsunami crashes in.

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?

The Dancing Car

In which Aviatrix is frightened by shock absorbers and by a medium pizza

The next day I explore my new environment. The hotel is on a busy boulevard with a high school just down the block and across the street. There's also a restaurant over there, so I'm crossing the road to see if it is anything I want for dinner. There's no sidewalk, but there's a pedestrian light. The traffic in the lane in front of me stops and while I'm waiting for the opposite left turning traffic to stop so I can cross, one of the cars does something very strange.

It's an orange car, not the old 1970s kind of orange, but a new metallic orange. It's the first car in line at the light and I suddenly notice movement, but it hasn't moved forward or backwards. I'm not immediately sure what movement I have seen, but then it moves again. The back right corner of the car suddenly lowers.

Now when I land an airplane, if I land it gently and it isn't heavily loaded, often the main gear oleos will not compress all the way. The airplane will be slightly jacked up. But when I taxi around a corner, one oleo may suddenly compress, making the airplane lopsided until something similar makes the other one compress, too. I had this in mind as I considered what I saw in the car.

As it stopped at the light, presumably it was abrupt, and its weight shifted forward, uncompressing the rear shock absorbers, making the rear end look lifted. Then perhaps a passenger in the back moved around, compressing first one and then the other rear shock absorber.

Good theory, but it didn't hold up. As I stared at the car, the front end popped up. Then the rear. Then it went down on one side. And down on the other side. The car was dancing. I'm staring open-mouthed at this thing. I'm sure everyone in the car was busting a gut laughing at me. But it was insane. Who would want deliberate control over the shock absorbers? Does it have a use other than astonishing Canadian yokels? It wasn't high enough to work like this comic. What do the controls look like inside the car?

I was so busy staring at the car that I didn't make it all the way across the road at the light, and had to wait on the central divider for another cycle of the traffic lights. A lot of cars were coming out of the high school, and while I was watching them I noticed that they were almost all newer cars, made in the last five years and almost all contained a single teenaged occupant. I did see one schoolbus, too. It wasn't until later that I realized that I had just watched school get out and saw not one single student leave on foot or by bicycle. It's only about 3 km from the centre of town, and there are residential areas within a kilometre. I don't know if this is a discovery about how rich the kids are in town, how lazy they are, or how behind the times I am. Maybe all the kids in Canada drive to school now, too. I do know lots of university students who walk or bike to school, but perhaps my friends are poorer or more active than the norm. It's also possible that the local kids who walk or bike used a multi-use path I didn't know about, in order to avoid the busy street.

The restaurant turned out to be an all-you-can-eat fast food buffet. That's not good value for money for me, and I wasn't feeling anthropological enough to want to watch the people who would go to a place like that, so I crossed back to the hotel and surrendered to pizza. In Texas, it turns out, you just can't get away with eating a little bit. The small pizza cost considerably more than the medium, so I ordered a medium. The guy at the counter couldn't explain the price discrepancy, but did recognize it as illogical.

I'm suspecting that no one in town walks anywhere. More evidence supporting that theory in a later blog entry.

The Last Reason for Roman Numerals

That would be Super Bowl XLIII. It's like the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, for American football. I have to admit I've never watched an American football game before. But indications are that the Super Bowl isn't so much about the football as about the marketing and the hype. And seeing as I'm in the USA, the commercials would be the "real" $5-million Super Bowl commercials. (In Canada they are replaced by ordinary commercials, marketing to Canadians). Plus it won't hurt to know enough about the game to have something to talk to my customers about. Guys apparently have to watch a certain amount of football in order to maintain testicular size, and my customers are all guys.

I only saw a few commercials. I stop watching by habit when the commercials came on, and kept forgetting that I was supposed to be checking them out. What did I learn? Some beer makes it summer wherever you drink it. Some beer is more watery (they call it drinkability) than other beer. Other beer (or possibly the same beer) has nice talking horses. Trucks with aluminum transmissions can drive uphill through fiery tunnels (actual demonstration). Drive recklessly enough and maybe the mouth will fall off the woman who is nagging you to slow down. (I'm hoping that one wasn't a beer or a car commercial). If roadies flew aircraft the runway lights would explode during take-off. (I think that one was an ad for a telephone or an internet provider). Pepsi is now teaching the world to sing. I was completely baffled what one ad was for, and then visited the site. Headsnap! It's a "discreet dating service for married people." A domain reseller (which coincidentally my employer uses) will enhance your assets, or possibly cause women to flash their tits at you. There will be a special edition of The Office on later. Thank you for watching and congratulations to the winning team.

I didn't perceive a level far above regular commercials. The money is in the audience not the production. I suppose the boob flashing was a wink to the halftime "wardrobe malfunction" of a few years ago. I'm guessing the broadcasting standards haven't changed in XLIII years? Considering the audience, a topless halftime show ought to be a hit. I guess it's too early in the evening to show skin on network TV. But if they can digitally put markings and advertisements on the field, they can digitally put bikinis on the performers. I can't see anyone in the target audience being really offended, and I bet more people would watch.

It's too bad the athletes have to be so heavily padded so you can't see the shape of their bodies. I understand it's to prevent injury on the field, but how about if they take off their helmets and shirts at the end of the game. All that time in the weight room just for hitting each other and running around? C'mon, show some muscles. I think I like sports where everyone wears spandex better. Yes, that's right, she watches one football game and she's going to tell you how it should be done.

Except I tuned in to watch a cultural event, and a football game broke out. You don't need to know anything about a game to realize that when there's two minutes left and the score is really close, and the ball is right on the edge of where the team that is behind needs to put it to get ahead, it's exciting. The yellow team guy threw the ball and another yellow team guy caught it, and the red team guys jumped on him. And then they did it again but this time the yellow team guy ran a longer way and caught the ball before the red team guys jumped on him. (But not nearly as far as the guy who earlier ran all the way from one end of the field to the other without getting knocked down). Next they threw the ball to a yellow team guy who was in the goal area, but he missed it, but being American football they got a fourth try, and this time the guy caught it. He then got knocked out of bounds, but apparently that was alright. The red team guys got a try at throwing the ball then, but there were only about 30 seconds left and someone caught it wrong or something and they did not get any more goals so the yellow team won. It was very exciting, I assure you.

A behind-the-scenes quirk that amuses me, but that veteran Super Bowl watchers probably know, goes back to the theme of people without shirts on. In anticipation of one of the teams winning, the marketing people print up gazillions of shirts and other merchandise proclaiming each team the champions. As soon as they find out which team is the loser, they deliver all the correct merchandise to where it can be sold to fans, and then send all the stuff with the wrong team declared the champion off to destitute people in refugee camps and disaster zones, where they care even less than I do who won the game, but presumably can clothe a family of five with a couple of 3XL football shirts, a baseball cap and a foam #1 finger. I'm not certain the foam fingers go to the third world, but the hats and ball caps do.

Go team! And they're getting bigger already, I can tell. See?

For television coverage of a different event, you can see the 60 Minutes interview with Captain Sullenberger and his crew online.

Texas Scares Me

I'm irrationally scared of Texas. You'll see some criticism in the next few posts. Please forgive me, or educate me, or at least be literate and interesting while flaming me. If you're a die-hard Texan you might just want to skip a few posts. I start out trying to treat Texas fairly, but it just comes out mean. I'm not sure what it is. Texas has a reputation, I guess, as a larger than life, shoot first ask questions later kind of state.

It's enormous, so there's no one Texas. The bit I'm in is flat and cold--we've come all this way and yet the temperature is hovering around freezing. It even snowed in Dallas this week.

We were told we're in the Best Western hotel, and the GPS database in the plane said that was 3 miles from the airport, but the customer who picks us up is clearly driving further than that.

"What hotel are we in?" we ask.

"Best Western. It's nice, but it's way the other side of town."

It turns out that the old Best Western was torn down last year after the new one we're in was completed. There's a sign still up for the Grand Opening Special Rates. The assistant at the customer's company who booked the accommodation must have been working off the same outdated information we were.

On the ride to the hotel a public service ad comes on the radio, addressing pregnant teenagers and scaring them with details of what a difficult task it is to raise a child on your own. We look at one another with raised eyebrows, having never heard abortion advertised, but then the ad wraps up urging the teenagers to give their babies up for adoption rather than keeping them. We realize that abortion isn't even on the table here. The young woman at the hotel check-in desk is pregnant and the others' expressions tell me that I'm not the only one reminded of the ad.

We go for dinner at the Texas Roadhouse chain next to the hotel. Something you have to love about the southern US: food is cheap. We have a tasty steak dinner with side dishes and non-alcoholic beverages and excellent although informal service, for ten dollars. I think I pay that much for a box of Chicken McNuggets and a milkshake at home.

We transported some of the customer's equipment and they shipped some by courier. It turns out we're more reliable today, as some of their equipment is missing, so we'll have the weekend off to wait for it to be delivered.

Something else scary I found today is this news article about a pilot suing three flight attendants who refused to accept his decision not to deice. Notice that the Calgary ground crew also filed a report on the aircraft when they observed ice and offered deicing but were turned down. Some US Airways pilots are more heroic than others, it would seem. Great CRM, dude. If I were him I would bring my own coffee to work.

Cross-Country Lunacy

I'm always a little dazzled by the size and efficiency of American FBOs. There is a sufficient number of rich people who travel by private aircraft in the US to support an industry of impeccable high end service. If you're wealthy enough to charter or buy a jet to go straight to where you want to go, then you have high expectations. And as I mentioned there are many choices of where to land, so if one place is a little grungy, or doesn't have highly attractive and attentive staff, complimentary espresso and scented hand lotion, then you can go somewhere else. I pay for our fuel, double-checking the quantity and grade, and then pull up my flight planning program.

My coworker comes over and I show her our tailwinds. "We can go right to Texas with no intermediate stop, if you're feeling fine for the long day." It's within our duty day, and she's happy with it. I call the flight follower and the customer who will pick us up at destination, and we're off.

The airspace here isn't busy and we're cleared south as soon as we're radar identified. There's a place on the map called Le Roy and I accidentally call it "Le-Wah" as if it were a French name. My coworker cracks up and corrects "LEE-Roy! We're in the States." I declare my new hobby to be pronouncing American place names as if they were French. I wave to day-twah, eel-ee-nwah and sharl-vwah, which leaves me wondering, how do Americans pronounce Charlevoix? Tcharl-voyks? Anyone know?

The sky darkens as we approach Cincinnati on the GPS. We've left ATC flight following, so my copilot is looking up whether we have to call them at our altitude "Cincinnati International KY," she says. "What's the K-Y for?"

"Like the jelly," I deadpan. "The airport is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson." I have no idea. She doesn't kick me, so I push my luck. "Maybe it's in Kentucky?" I suggest, then lapse into my badly sung version of "Living in the air in Cincinnati ... WKRP!" As God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly. It turns out that Cincinnati is in Kentucky. This surprises both of us. We think of Cincinnati as a northern city, but Kentucky as a southern state. The things you learn looking at the GPS.

Our pass through the airspace of a rapid succession of states. We're passing the area where many states narrow towards the Mississippi and the shape is such that our track keeps cutting their borders. We have cheesy jokes to make about all of them, but fortunately we don't remember more than one line from any associated song.

I like flying long distances, letting state after state pass beneath my wings. The sun has gone down and we're seeing the lights of all these cities, with slightly different coloured streetlights and different patterns of streets. But my coworker is bored. I teach her the CFS game. I know I blogged about it before but I can't find the entry to link it, so here are the rules. Take a newish copy of the CFS (spine unbroken) and open it at random. If there is an airport on that page that you have been to as a pilot, score zero. If there is no airport you have used, turn pages until you find one, and score one point for each page you turn. Once each person has found an airport they have used, you open it at random again. You play to a predetermined score or until it's time for the top of descent checklist. Lowest score wins. I was leading beautifully until we got to a letter, I can't remember which one it was, but there were a lot of airports starting with that letter and they were all in parts of the country I hadn't been, or had flown over without landing. I think I scored about 35 points before I finally found an airport I'd been to, and I remember it was some totally obscure Indian reserve somewhere. My coworker is laughing at me because I've been there, but have never landed at any of the civilized southern places dominated by that initial. Hey, as long as she was entertained.

Approaching destination we pick up the ATIS and it's information Hotel. "Yes, we're staying at the Best Western!" quips my co-worker, referencing an old, old pilot joke. I think she would have said it on air, too, except that the air traffic controller knows that joke too, thus is too smart to say, "Confirm you have Hotel." Instead she says "Do you have ATIS information Hotel?" She gives us a vector for a wide base, following a Citation on a close in base. It's a good way for ATC to deal with slow and fast traffic together, but it's tricky for me turning final when I know there is an airplane between me and the runway that is on base. There's no way I will get down final fast enough to cut him off, but I'm turning towards an airplane I can't see, while he's on a track in my direction.

We land and taxi to the FBO where we have arranged hangarage, but tonight is their company party, so the lone individual on duty is the one who doesn't know anything. We park outside and let them sort it out when a manager gets in tomorrow morning. Or tomorrow afternoon, depending on how good the party was.

Yeah, I know: we park outside in Montréal and inside in Texas. You fear the unknown, and the boss is more concerned about hailstorms and tornadoes than icestorms. There's a full moon out; maybe that's why we're so goofy tonight.

Oh and Callsign Echo? You're still on the hook for that word you mentioned. Spit it out.

US Airways 1549 Audio

The audio and transcripts of radio and phone communications by air traffic controllers while the US Airways flight was ditching in the Hudson River last month have been released. I'm going to talk about them today and finish the trip to Texas tomorrow. To hear communications between the pilots and the departure controller, listen to the first one, the New York Tracon.

It's not too hard to understand, once you get past the New York accents. There are very few transmissions from US1549. Talking on the radio is low priority and low priority tasks drop out during an emergency. This explains both how little is said and how little urgency is in the pilot's voice as he relays the information. It's not just that he's calm, he's concentrating on something else. It's like a guy answering his girlfriend's questions while he's watching sports on TV.

"Unable" is the normal radio response to any request that can't be met. A pilot is unable to accept a runway because it's too short, or unable to turn to a particular heading because there are clouds there, and she's VFR. Or in this case unable to accept any of the offered landing runways because the airplane can't glide that far. The controller is working hard to make this work for these guys. You'll hear a telephone-like beep as the controller picks up a direct line to talk to another controllers to arrange landing priority for the emergency aircraft. The pilot initially wants to return to LaGuardia, then realizes he can't make that and warns the departure controller once that "we may end up in the Hudson." He considers Teterboro, but 22 seconds later he knows that's not going to work. "We can't do it," he says, "We're gonna be in the Hudson."

Realize that the air traffic controllers can't see the airplane. They have a radar trace down to maybe a few hundred feet, but the altitude and position on that updates in jumps, so what they see is not completely up to date. Once the airplane descends below radar they know nothing about it.

The controllers know the airplane has gone down, and probably assume the worst. An interesting transcript to read is the cab coordinator, who is trying to stay on top of all this. You only hear his communication with remote positions, not him talking to his controllers. He can't see what's going on out there either, but he's using all his resources, calling for a controller to get him a police helicopter on frequency. Eventually what I believe is a sightseeing tour helicopter is diverted to determine what is going on. And finally the coordinator gets the good news that there are "lots of survivors."

This New York Times article by Matthew Wald interprets the audio well.

To know more about what was going on the the airplane during all this, we'll need to wait for the cockpit voice recorder transcript to be released.

Au Revoir Montréal

Next morning we arrived at the airport at a civilized hour of the morning, our airplane bare and dry and the Montréal weather still cold and clear. Our broker has rebooked our customs appointment, we hope.

"I'll do weather and flight plan while you verify customs," we agreed.

The pilot information kiosk in the FBO is a piece of Nav Canada equipment, essentially a box containing a computer and the slowest modem known to man. It's supposed to connect automatically to Nav Canada's weather servers and provide all the weather products available to the modern pilot. I think it got as far as inquiring whether I would prefer English or French before it got hung up on its own innards. I beat on it for a while and then resorted to the telephone, first reporting the PIK here inoperative, in case someone might care to repair it, and then requesting the weather for our very short flight.

It's not so great. While it's lovely here, we're looking at low cloud and freezing fog for the destination. We might be able to squeeze in under the weather, but then we'd be trapped in the valley in Vermont, unable to proceed southeast through higher terrain. It's supposed to improve, but the briefer doesn't say that with optimism in his voice. We decide to wait for the new forecast and then see.

I load and preflight the airplane while it's still in the hangar. The floor is flooded, from all the melted ice and snow on the airplanes, but the airplane is dry, so it's ready to go. The new forecast, however isn't any better. We don't like to go to unfamiliar airports for customs, because we're a little out of the ordinary. Each station has its own culture and we can get unlucky and run into someone who doesn't accept our classification or doesn't like the way we do our paperwork, and end up stuck for a day, waiting for the broker to fax proof of something or other. But Vermont isn't going to work.

My coworker starts casting around for another place to clear customs, but there's a stationary front sitting over the northeast US, making things ugly everywhere. It looks like we can skirt it by cutting across Lake Ontario, then along the south shore of Lake Erie, to get into Cleveland. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, here we come. When we call the airport in Vermont to say we're not coming, the border guys laugh at us. They know how bad the weather is and were expecting the call. We then call our customs broker to set Cleveland up with the paperwork we need, while we go for lunch.

Lunch is nearby at a cafeteria over the flying school. While we're eating I can here a group at a nearby table working on a weight and balance calculation. It seems to be a couple of male pilots helping a female student pilot with the form. Her voice carries clearly, but I don't hear the others' voices. I guess it depends on which way she is looking. She is an anglophone, not from this province, but I hear her say a couple of times that she'd really does intend to learn French. I'm not deliberately eavesdropping, so my awareness of the conversation fades in an out. Then I hear her pronouncing French words with a heavy English accent. She is in her early twenties and speaks fluent English with a fairly neutral North American accent but it doesn't seem like she has ever taken French in school. Perhaps she is American or Bahamian or something.

"Suis sont nous ... oh what? ... soi sont neuve ..." I look over, a bit puzzled. She's evidently reading something that has been written down for her. After a few starts and quiet corrections, she's saying a recognizable "soixante-neuf." Something from the weight and balance problem, perhaps? I can only hope.

She gets up to use the washroom, still repeating her new word and I turn a raised eyebrow look at the males at the table. They see me, and have the good grace to look sheepish. I think they realize that they'd better fess up or be busted by me, because shortly after she returns to the table I hear a shriek of outrage from her, and laughter all round.

I see her later on the stairs, and confess that I was wondering why they were so eagerly teaching her to say "sixty-nine." She rolls her eyes. The guys of course hadn't told her at first what they were coaching her to say, and had in the end only translated it by miming the sexual meaning, perhaps not realizing that the translation has exactly the same connotation in English. She had a good sense of humour about it.

We call back the customs broker and determine that our arrival is booked in Akron. Akron, Cleveland: it's all the same to us. I confirm that the other pilot is on the customs paperwork as PIC and I file to Akron.

Although she's PIC, she doesn't enjoy flying cross country, so I get the left seat and leave her with the radios. All good for me. There's a little bit of fog and cloud around as we fly south, but nothing to interfere with safe VFR flight.

The Canada-US border takes a funny zig-zag course through the lakes, so as we continue south we cross into the US and then briefly we're back in Ontario overhead its namesake lake. That's now four out of five of the Great Lakes I have flown across the middle of. One more to go. There's something really exciting about flying across big stretches of open water for me. If I ever get a job flying ETOPS across oceans, I'm sure the excitement will wear off, but flying across an ocean will be very exciting for a while.

During the flight, my coworker is trying to plan the next leg. "Anywhere in particular you want to stop?" she asks. Other than the fact that I've never been to Arkansas, there is nothing pulling me to anywhere in particular. You see, in the US there are hundreds, possibly thousand of runways that can accommodate our airplane. Almost all of them have fuel and a town with a chain hotel. And one Hampton Inn or Super-8 is pretty much interchangeable with any other one, so it really really doesn't matter where we stop, as long as it's on the way. That's why my plan to visit a friend in Indiana was in no way abuse of company resources.

"I'm partial to the 'funny names' method of choosing a nightstop," I opine. "All else being equal, stay at the place with the silliest name." She is familiar with that technique and goes through the map and the airport info book, looking at possible stops. We discuss the relative silliness of our options. I should have written down some of the names. It's going to depend a bit on weather, so we don't make a final decision.

We can see the bad weather to the southeast for the whole trip, but we remain in the clear right through our descent into Akron. We're right on time and we don't even have to taxi to a customs area: the customs official comes to us at the FBO. He's friendly and quick. I hand him both sets of passports at the rear door and he looks at them quickly, verifies that the number printed on the customs sticker on our door matches the one on the paperwork and he's done with us. Woo! Akron goes on the 'good place to clear customs' list.

I'll break the blog entry here as we order fuel and go inside for flight planning and washrooms. The day continues next post.

Elbows and Fists

The first part of the forecast was right. It snowed most of the night. Then it snowed some more in the morning. And some more in the afternoon. It snowed so much that Montréal automobile traffic came almost to a standstill. It took us half an hour to drive the few blocks from the airport to the main street, because the main street was moving so slowly and so solidly, that it was gridlocked and cars from sidestreets couldn't turn on even when the lights were green.

Montréal does know how to deal with snow, however, and the world continued to turn. The police were out cracking down on drivers of what they termed "moving igloos" -- vehicles that had only had the windshields cleared, and were driving around encased in snow and ice. The snowploughs got the roads clear. And the sidewalks. Right after the big dump of snow, I had to walk about twelve blocks from the hotel to another business and back, including crossing a highway, and wondered what a mess that was going to be. It wasn't a mess at all. The sidewalk and all pedestrian crossings were passable and the sidewalks leading to the highway underpass were properly signed and accessible. I have had considerably more trouble making a twelve block journey on foot in Florida. The bike paths were cleared, too, and being used the day after the storm. The city apparently had committed to keeping certain arterial bike routes clear all winter and was keeping their promise. The only points I dock Montreal for car-free accessibility is that you have to pay a new fare to transfer between suburban buses and city transit, because they are separate companies.

It finally did turn to rain early the next morning. Freezing rain. Everything was now not only covered in snow but topped with a shiny layer of clear ice. The promised real rain never came. The temperature dropped and it finished off by snowing another ten or 20 centimetres on top of the ice.

Yeah, snow over ice over snow. A delightful combination. Everyone had had enough snow, so the word came out to proceed to our next job, in the southern US, when able. Our brokers did all the paperwork for us and made an appointment with US Customs across the river in Vermont. Our plan was to check out of the hotel, arriving at the airport just before noon, to get the airplane ready for a three p.m. departure. Weather, time and pilot status permitting we could do a second leg from Vermont to Indiana after clearing customs. I even had a friend in Indiana lined up to visit, and a pocketful of reasons ready to justify why his local airport was a good place to overnight.

Our cab driver was a Haïtian immigrant, very friendly but unfamiliar with the location of our FBO. The province of Québec manages its own immigration, so there's a different mix of immigrants here, more Haïtians, Senegalese, Rwandans and others from French-speaking nations than in English-Canada. It's kind of fun to see how the history of who invaded or colonized whom has repercussions hundreds of years later on who drives your cab and makes your restaurant meals. The cabbie doesn't speak English as well as your average Montréaler, but "left here ... right here ... stop by the Esso" are not difficult feats of communication so we did just fine.

Despite us giving the FBO half a day's head start, the ramp and all the airplanes were still completely covered in snow and ice. They'd run into a bit of a "who deices the deicers?" problem. They had a deicing truck, and a large heated hangar and a front end loader, but everything was covered in thick ice, blanketed in snow, and the temperature was still well below freezing. The standard plan was to tow the deicing truck into the heated hangar to defrost it, then to use it in turn to defrost the airplanes. But the problem was twofold.

Firstly, the loader, i.e. the tow vehicle wouldn't start. Staff weren't certain whether it was the cold or the final step in its decline, but it wasn't going anywhere. The loader was also the snowplough, so that explained the condition of their ramp. The other problem was that even if they had had a functional deicing truck it wouldn't have made much headway against the ice accumulation on the airplanes. Deicing fluid is excellent for melting and removing snow, because snow is very porous. Pour any fluid on top and that fluid seeps right though the snow, saturating it. Even my tropical readers are going to be familiar with this phenomenon, as I understand that the Sno-Cone, under different names, is a worldwide commodity. The deicing fluid is like the flavoured syrup, sinking into the snow, but instead of flavouring it, it lowers the freezing point of the mixture. The deicing fluid is usually applied heated, so really it's triple action: mechanical force of the spray, plus freezing point depression, plus heat to melt it.

When the substance to be removed is actual ice, deicing fluid doesn't live up to its name. Ice is too hard to be removed by a spray, and ice is not porous so the fluid can't saturate it. You have to rely on the transfer of heat from the fluid to the ice. And as the fluid runs right off the ice, that can take a long time and a lot of expensive deicing fluid.

We were on our own, so grabbed brooms and went out to see how bad this was going to be. My coworker had already run down her camera battery taking pictures of our ice-encased airplane. While the bottom layer on most of the wings was snow, the wind had been blowing, so the leading edges and most vertical surfaces were free of snow, directly coated with ice. Ice everywhere. Icicles hung down all along the wingspan. The windows were now double-glazed, along with the entire fuselage. The propeller blades were like popsicle sticks inside huge blobs of ice. Icicles hung everywhere, under the nose like a beard, from the horizontal stabilizer, and under the engines. Imagine if all the rain that fell on and dripped off an airplane in a long rainstorm stuck there instead of completing its fall to the ground and running away.

We started by sweeping off the top layer of snow, down to the ice. The ice layer was about two centimetres thick on the wings. We pounded on it with our fists and elbows to break it up, then peeled off the slices of ice, the size of sofa cushions, and threw them on the ground. Where the ice lay over snow, this worked pretty well. I took a broom and ran it along the lines of icicles, enjoying the musical plinka-plinka-plinka sound of all the icicles breaking off. It's a sound that you either know or you don't. The rhythm is like running the hammer across an endless xylophone, but I don't think there's a musical instrument that can replicate that pitch without being tinny. Perhaps the cold, dense, dry air is part of the required conditions to hear the sound. I had to remind myself that the icicles were formed from water that had fallen on and flowed over my filthy airplane, and as I wouldn't lick the airplane it was not okay to pretend the icicles were popsicles. There are disadvantages to having a neverending childlike outlook on the world.

I banged on the fuselage above and below the windows, as hard as I dared without risking damage to my airplane, and cracked the ice enough that it could be peeled off. It worked. It was just slow and tedious. And cold. We took some warming up hands breaks. The FBO had a tow vehicle going and said that we could get our airplane into the hangar around 3 p.m. The customs facility in Vermont was open until six, so we held onto that hope and continued scraping ice off the machine, so as to shorten the amount of time it would take for the heat in the hangar to produce a bare, dry airplane. Then the hangar availability estimate was revised to 5 p.m. and almost immediately after that to 6 p.m., so we surrendered, cancelled our customs reservation, asking the FBO only that our airplane be ready for the morning, and went back to the hotel.

I felt hokey and small-time that we hadn't been able to do a simple thing like get an airplane ready to fly on a clear bright day. But then I discovered that very few airframes in the city that were on a ramp overnight left Montréal today. My customers had an eight a.m. departure out of Dorval that day, and were wheels up at four p.m. They said they spent an hour and a half in the deicing bay. That's not an hour and a half waiting in line for deicing. That's an hour and a half of having hot deicing fluid pumped onto the airplane. The icicles hanging off the wings of the B757 were proportional to the ones on my airplane, making them as thick as an arm at the root. No way those were going to be knocked off with a broomstick. Any attempt to do so might have damaged the skin of the airplane. I know of an Air Canada executive who checked in for a 7:20 am flight that was cancelled because of the ice. He boarded another flight at 11:05, pushed back at 12:15, finished deicing at 15:15, returned to the ramp for more fuel, and then the flight was cancelled at 16:15.

So our surrender to the elements was simply one of many. Every once in a while mother nature flexes her muscles and reminds us that we aviate at her pleasure.

Parlez Vous Airplane?

I sleep late, because I'm on the night shift today. My coworker did an AM flight so I'm on deck for the evening. There's supposed to be more snow on the way early tomorrow morning, a really heavy dump, in fact, and the customer wants to get lots of work done before it arrives. They're ready to go a couple of hours before dark.

The airplane is prepared and both engines start easily this time. When the engine temperatures are up, I taxi clear of the metal buildings and call ATC for clearance. The local controller coordinates with the terminal controller, who manages traffic coming into all the local airports, whether it's a C185 following the river from Hull or a triple-seven arriving from Europe. I'm cleared by the tower controller to climb straight out, with an altitude restriction, then given a vector, then a frequency change to terminal. Terminal wants more details on what I'm doing, then clears me on course. The sun is low in the sky behind me and I turn up the cockpit lights.

The cold air is very clear and as the world darkens, I can see the bright city lights for miles around. Montreal is an island in the St. Laurence River, so there is a black band around the city where the river flows, and then more lights of the suburbs. The physical barrier of the river has prevented urban sprawl, so a lot of the surrounding land is still agricultural. I remember from history class that while the English landowners willed their estates to the eldest son, leaving the younger sons to figure out something else to do with their lives, French landholders divided theirs amongst their sons, resulting in narrower and narrower strips still ending at the river. Before darkness falls I see what I suspect is the result of such land divisions, still existing northeast of the city.

When the sky has faded to black, I'm still not really doing night flying. You never really do in the south. There's always a city or town, if not right below you then within fifty miles, and the light allows you to distinguish up from down, and land from sky without recourse to the instruments. I'm working very close to Dorval, right through one of the busiest times of the evening, so I'm in constant contact with ATC. I try to maintain a mental three-dimensional picture of the airplanes they are handling, so that I spot the descending Airbus before they all with the traffic. It's tougher when half the calls are in French, though. It's bad enough not knowing reporting points, but don't know all the vocabulary I need to understand the calls, either.

ATC in the Montréal area is officially bilingual, with service available in English or French at the pilot's choice. You simply use your preferred language to make the initial call, and they continue to address you in that language. Air France pilots always seem to choose French. I wonder if they have any difficulty with the local accent. Air Canada pilots sometimes choose one and sometimes the other, probably based on the language they are most comfortable using in the cockpit. It is amusing listening to ATC change languages effortlessly, giving the same reporting points different names depending on who they are talking to. For example, most Canadians, whether speaking English or French, pronounce the town and airport of Saint-Hubert like san-too-bear, using the liason and silent H and T of the French. But to English-speaking pilots, the controller doesn't flinch to say saynt WHO-burt with English syllable stress and pronouncing every consonant. I ask to overfly Saint-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, which I pronounce approximately san-ma-too-dbel-oy, and wait with bated breath to see if the official English pronunciation includes something like bell-OIL. Even the controller must have cringed at that thought, as he cleared me "direct Saint Matthew" and left it at that.

All the time I was flying in the Montréal area I only heard a controller flub the language once, making a traffic point out call to Air Wisconsin in French, but catching himself and then returning to perfectly accented English for the American carrier.

We finish the mission and secure the airplane for the night. It's supposed to snow all night, then turn to rain tomorrow and rain for a day before more clear weather.

Oh and I found this on the BBC website. It perfectly explains the anglophone in Québec.

The Canadian journalist Karl Mamer, author of a website on Franglais, says many Canadians speak "cereal box French", as they only get to practise it by reading the bilingual text on the back of the box in the morning.

When they then travel to French-speaking centres, like Montreal or Quebec City, their few words of French are used as a kind of peace offering to shopkeepers. He says they're thinking: "Look, I'm going to try speaking as much French as possible, showing you I'm making a sufficient effort, and then you please switch to your fluent English as soon as I've linguistically self-flagellated myself before you."

It Was Right Next to the "Fly To Calgary" Button

The Aviation Herald reports a little excitement on a Westjet Flight departing Abbotsford BC.

Incident: Westjet B736 at Abbotsford on Jan 20th 2009, navigation system flies different route than pilots

The crew of a Westjet Boeing 737-600, registration C-GWSB performing flight WS-456 from Abbotsford,BC to Calgary,AB (Canada) with 104 people on board, noticed during an RNP (Required Navigation Procedure, precision RNAV navigation) departure, that the airplane was not following the programmed standard instrument departure route. The airplane was below minimum safe altitude. The crew contacted Victoria Terminal and was issued radar vectors away from high terrain. The airplane continued to the destination for a safe landing.

Subsequently it was established, that the engine out procedure had been inadvertently activated in the flight management system.

Now you see why a pilot might want to shoot the FMS?

Aviatrix Versus Duck

The weather warms up a little and it snows. After a while we go out to the airplane to make sure it's still plugged in, and to sweep off the accumulated snow. If you let too much snow pile up, the weight can damage control surfaces or even tip the airplane over. And the more snow we get off now, the less we'll have to get off later when we're in a hurry. I should have brought more warm clothes. I confess I thought I'd be going to the southern states for this rotation and packed a little lightly on the cold weather gear. I was expecting to be offered a ride down the ramp in a golf cart, not to be wishing for snowshoes. Maybe they should have skidoos here instead of golf carts. The rampee apologizes that there may be ice under the snow, but they can't salt the ramp, because it could damage airplanes.

We have a couple of those car snow brushes you get at gas stations, but they are a bit of a joke for something the size of an airplane. I've noticed the flying school students cleaning their airplanes off with brooms, so I go to the school office to ask if we can borrow a couple. The guy there doesn't care if I do or not, so I do and we make short work of the job. It's still cold enough that the snow is dry and comes off easily, but we laugh when we're "done" because the snow has covered the airplane up again as fast as we can sweep. The guys at the FBO say they'll sweep it off again before they go home at nine, so it will be okay for the night.

As I'm leaving, a flashy turboprop with a November registration and a custom stars and stripes paint job pulls up to the FBO. "Fancy ride," I comment to one of the FBO employees. He's bursting with 'discretion' over the VIP customer, and without me asking a single question I learn that he emigrated from Russia to play hockey in New York but now plays here, for the Canadiens. I didn't think there would be more than one player matching that description, so I was going to use some Google-Fu and work it out, but I'm sure I have a reader who knows this sort of thing without looking it up, and who will delight in telling me who I left the FBO with. He was driving an Austin Mini.

With the snow coming down, the rest of the crew was cocooning at the hotel and getting pizza. I know I'm going to end up eating pizza sooner or later at work, because sometimes it's the only thing available, but I like to forestall that moment as long as I can. I find one person who is interested in dinner out and is willing to accede to my desire to try some local cuisine. I warn him that it's a fancy restaurant so might be a bit pricey, but he's game and we walk through the snow to the restaurant. The temperature is dropping again and it's windy, too, but the restaurant is nie and warm.

We look over the menu and order in French, not from some high faluting fancy restaurant snobbery, but because the menu is in French, and we're in Quebec. After the waiter has left with our order, my dining companion asks me what part of the duck the magret in the magret de canard a l'orange I have ordered represents. "I don't know," I confess, "Breast, I thought. I assumed it was some menu word that didn't matter." Heck, half the time I don't understand all the menu words on an English menu. "Don't you know?" I point out. "It's your language." He's francophone, but we're speaking English because he's better at it than I am at French.

"No," he says. "I guess it's a menu word." He sounds a little dubious.

Now I'm scared that the duck a l'orange I'm looking forward to is going to consist of some avian internal organ so obscure that even a native speaker doesn't recognize it. In English, duck a l'orange gives me duck breast, but come to think of it "breast" in this sense is poitrine, so what the heck is magret? There must be more than one word for the same thing.

The order arrives and it's fabulous. It is breast meat, skin on, cooked to perfection in delicious sauce with roast vegetables. Even the beets were delicious. And you know what? The whole meal cost the same as a medium Rustic Italian from Boston Pizza.

Ville de Montréal

There's no problem getting my required rest, as I have the next day off. I've spent enough time in Montréal in the past that I'm not interested today in seeing the museums and cathedrals, nor overeating on smoked meat and poutine. It's nice to be back in a big Canadian city, with every amenity I could possibly want, and a few old friends live here too.

One of my co-workers complains about the signs being in French, making it hard to get around. Funny, it's one of the things I like about the place. I don't think it's much harder to get around than any other city. Right turns on red are forbidden by default in the city. It has your typical maze of crooked downtown one-way streets, turn restrictions and bridges forking into highway ramps, but I don't recall any signs that didn't conform to international standards. You don't have to read more than a highway number and an arrow to take the proper exit from an overpass. I guess there are people who don't know their ouest from their est, but that's about the only source of confusion I see. My colleague, and others I've spoken with, feel that the French are being deliberately difficult, but I would say that Québec is more accommodating to English speakers than the rest of Canada is to French speakers.

It's true that language laws restrict the display of English signage, resulting in what to me is an amusing forest of signs advertising goods and services with familiar logos but twisted names and slogans. Canadian corporations go to some trouble concocting names that work equally well in both official languages, like the former Canadi>n Airlines, using a chevron to cover the difference between the French and English spelling.

I'm proud of my country's history, and that includes both solitudes. Quebec is a nation within a nation. It is different, and in a more significant way than Newfoundland is different from Alberta. I don't believe that the culture and language of a people should be subjugated just because their ancestors lost a battle two hundred odd years ago. I'm pretty sure it was exigency not planning that left society and legal system of Lower Canada unchanged after the English victory, but I like the resulting plurality of my country. I see what happens in countries where nationalists of once-independent states are suppressed. Heck, it happened here in Canada the 70s, before the laws. Now the quebecois are more confident in the security of their culture, so there is no need to kidnap cabinet ministers. Sure, some tourists are confused. Other tourists enjoy an exotic experience without leaving their own continent. And you have to get pretty far from the cities before a plaintive, "Does anyone speak English, please?" wouldn't be met with help. Get far enough north and people don't speak much English, but keep going north and they don't speak much French either. How's your Cree? Damn, I love my country and all its crazy languages and cultures.

Montréal has excellent public transit. I take a bus to the metro and buy a six-pack of metro tickets in anticipation of a few more snow days.`(A "snow day" is what you call it when school is cancelled because there is too much snow for the snowploughs to get through).

Slow Start

My most recent work rotation took me to Montréal, Québec, just in time for the first deep cold snap of the winter. The airplane was parked outside, with electric heaters in the engines and cabin and extension cords snaking across the ramp and through the snowbanks to the electrical outlets. My handover briefing from the pilot I relived included instructions to use only the outlets along the back fence--the ones to the side would blow fuses--and that I should come out and check the cords on non-flying days, as the FBO had more than once managed to unplug them. We were staying not at the city's major airport, the one named after a former Prime Minister, and not at the secondary airport, which once competed for passenger traffic but now has subsided into its role as a cargo hub, but at a smaller airport across the river. Canada doesn't have airports specializing in private jets the way the US does, so most of the airplanes on the ramp were flying school airplanes, giving us 'big airplane' status.

The first morning that I came out to fly was dark and cold and clear. Not that dark, because although midwinter dawn was hours off, we were in the environs of the second largest metropolitan area in the country, and there was a thin layer of snow over higher elevations, reflecting the city lights further than in the summer. As I left the hotel for the airport, the temperature on the most recent METAR was -20C. The cords were all still plugged in and the airplane warm inside. I put my gear in the warm cabin, complete my cockpit checks and then go back outside. I should have brought warmer gloves.

The airplane appeared to be in good condition, with no ice. One advantage of those temperatures is that the air is too dry to hold much water vapour, thus none deposits on the airframe. The tires were firm enough and not frozen to the ground. When I put my hand inside the engine cowling it feels warmer than outside. It would feel warmer anyway, because it's out of the wind, and it doesn't feel that warm, because there's only so much the heater can do against cold and wind, but it's the only way I have to measure that the block heaters have been working. I leave the engine tents wrapped around the cowlings until we're completely ready to go, then pull and stow them and hop aboard. First priority is to start the engines, then with the brakes set I can set up my cockpit the way I like it and fuss about with flight following and the like while the engines warm up.

I start with the right engine. Cowls are open. I set the engine controls, check that the propeller is clear, and press the starter. I wrote "key the starter" but that could confuse you, as there is no key, just a spring-loaded rocker switch. When I hold it down, it energizes a solenoid that closes the circuit connecting the aircraft battery to the right starter motor. I can hear the clunk of the solenoid engaging from the cockpit. The starter motor turns a little toothed Bendix cog, which engages with a flywheel and turns over the engine. I see the propeller go around once slowly, protesting the bitter cold, and the engine does not catch. Everything conspires against my starting an engine in the cold. The metal parts have contracted ever so slightly, so don't move against each other as well as they should. The oil that should facilitate that movement is a viscous sludge in the bottom of the crankcase. The motor that drives the rotation is powered by a battery which itself is less potent and has less endurance in the cold. And in Canada cold equals dark, which means the same battery is powering lights. I only have the legally required ones on now. I'll put the others on after the battery is charging.

I prime some more: the fuel won't evaporate as easily in this temperature, and the air is denser, so I need more liquid fuel to get the same combustible mixture in the cylinders. As the engine turns it should compress that mixture and energize the magnetoes which in turn are supposed to fire the spark plugs, igniting the compressed fuel and allowing the engine to run on its own, without the impetus of the wheezing starter. I key the starter again. Half a rotation and it stops. Rats.

When all else fails, start the other engine. A running engine drives an alternator to generate electricity and charge the battery. Both my starters share the same battery, so if I can get one engine going I can bootstrap the other. The left engine starts. I bite my lip and mentally whisper useless apologies to it as it clunks and misfires for several seconds, trying to find its rhythm. I wait for the oil pressure to come up, and slowly it does. The battery indicator shows charging. I wait a moment or three and double check all the switches for the right engine, then try it again. No joy. Sigh.

I run the left engine until the oil and cylinder head temperatures are in the green and the battery charge rate is zero. That way I'll have at least one engine I know I can start, then I shut everything down and wrap the left engine in the engine tent. I put the engine tent back on the misbehaving right engine too, for all the good it is going to do. There's no heat left in it. I can't find anything wrong visually. The propeller does turn through manually with resistance, but not so much resistance that it couldn't be explained by heavy pistons moving in cold sludgy cylinders. Or maybe not. I go into the FBO for help.

Montréal is a French-speaking city, but the aviation language is English and everyone at the FBO speaks it well or at least passably. I ask them for a ground power unit, which they can provide, and they also offer a Herman-Nelson machine, basically a giant blow dryer to heat up the engine. I drink tea inside while they run the forced air heater, then come out and pull the tents again to try a new start, With the engine warm and the battery bypassed to run the starter off a generator, the engine should start now.

With the starter engaged the propeller turns as slowly as before, and only one revolution. I happen to know that one ramp worker here is an apprentice aircraft mechanic, and he is working today. We communicate by handsignals and I shut everything down so he can turn the propeller and inspect. A few more tries, but no start. There's something wrong beside the cold.

There's a maintenance organization on the field that we have used before. I call and they have time to look at it, but not a lot of time. As luck would have it, there's another company airplane sitting idle here, with a bigger problem, so we have them pull the starter out of that one and put it in this one. That takes a few hours, everything does, so there's lunch and more waiting, and paperwork but we finally get out for a flight, one which takes me to the very last minute of my duty day, including an extra hour that my company op spec allows, provided I get extra rest the next day.

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."

Showing My Stripes

Now that I've done my obligatory take on the news story of the week, I will think about the new year.

Cockpit Conversation was initially supposed to be a blog focused on me learning things that would help me get a job as an airline pilot. I was going to explain things to hypothetical readers, thereby cementing them in my own mind, and forcing myself to research what I didn't know. It's a bit like practicing instruction by teaching things to your dog. (If you want really rapt attention, emphasize your important points by waving a bit of bacon around). I did that for a while, with you, not the dog. And it turned out I had real readers, not hypothetical ones, and I didn't even have to wave bacon. Then I got a really interesting job and the blog turned into an episodic record of that and subsequent jobs that were supposed to lead to the airline career. Two of the jobs were actually at scheduled carriers, so I was an airline pilot, but the most recent airline made me redundant before I ever got in the airplane. Lately this has turned into a blog about me not getting a job as in airline pilot, which really doesn't fit the theory of blogging in order to focus my mind on what I want, does it?

I like blogging. I especially like having my e-mail box full of interesting, clever and friendly comments from all of you. I'm pretty much addicted to it. I like flying airplanes. I like planning and preparing for flights. I like having contingency plans and solving problems. I like briefing passengers. I don't mind delays as long as I have the feeling that I've done what I could to predict, prevent, and work through them. I even get satisfaction out of doing the paperwork that shows what I intend to do, what I have accomplished, and what went wrong each day. And I like flying through the air, the master of the machine. I'm addicted to that, too.

I took down my mammal lists (my record of how recently I had reminded prospective employers of my availability to fly for them), because they were discouraging. They'd pretty much all said no at one point or another, and I felt like I was beating a dead horse. It was better in the short term to stick my head in the sand and be happy where I was, than to be rejected over and over again. But an ostrich isn't a mammal. Here's a clip of a non-burrowing mammal really fighting the odds, so he doesn't become a dead horse.

He's going to be my inspiration this year. If he can half-drown a lioness that has her teeth in his throat, I can get all the way through the airline interview process and into a jet cockpit. Right?

Another zebra video taken at the San Diego zoo illustrates another remarkable length to which the zebra may go, but I'll leave you to find that one on your own. Warning: it may leave human men feeling inadequate.

True to my New Year's resolution, I did not read the YouTube comments.

So Mosquito Netting Won't Work, Eh?

I do have some December flying stories to write up and post, but I am still reading and thinking about the US Airways ditching, so they can wait a few days more.

People ask why they couldn't just put screens in front of the engines to keep the birds out. I suppose people are envisioning the sort of things you staple around your eaves to keep the birds from flying in and nesting. One letter to the editor of the New York Times compared the concept to that of cowcatchers. Let's compare. A cow weighs about 500 kg. A locomotive tops out around 80 mph, or 36 m/s. The kinetic energy of a moving object is 1/2 m v², so for the locomotive-cow collision that's 0.5 x 500 x 36 x 36 = 324 kilojoules, if I have my units right. I'm told the A320 is going to be climbing out at about 250 knots (corrected from a conservative or 210) or 128 m/s. A Canada goose weighs in at around 5 kg. Put those two together and we have a kinetic energy of 41 kJ. So the energy that must be dissipated when a slowly climbing airplane hits a single goose hits is about an eighth that of a speeding train hitting a cow. Could a structure be built over engine intakes so as to absorb that energy?

The structure would have to span what is about a two metre diameter across the intake, be strong enough to withstand bird strikes and never itself shed foreign objects into the engine. If you're having trouble believing that eight birds in the air equals one cow on the tracks, type "birdstrike" into Google's picture search for images proving that birds penetrate windshields, radomes and wings. This giant screen would have to have small enough holes not to let birds pass through, yet large enough holes to not impede airflow to the engine. That combination is an impossibility, as anything in front of the engine impedes airflow, so either the engine would have to be bigger or the performance of the airplane less, in order to compensate. I don't have the flow dynamics knowledge to begin to construct equations for this, but LTV Aerospace Corp. figures it's feasible, and here's a 2001 patent for a retractable bird deflector grille. I do know that tiny changes to an airframe, such as an angled piece of metal the size of half a Ritz cracker, can make huge differences in handling and controllability, so that even if such a structure were built, the whole airplane might have to be redesigned around it.

A reporter tried to answer the screens question live on CNN while I was watching, and he first admitted he didn't know, and then speculated that accumulated debris would block airflow into the engines. Not a bad speculation. The screens would have to have some way of preventing ice formation, probably by being electrically heated, so that chunks of ice neither blocked the intake nor fell through the engines. Heating the intake air would decrease engine performance, however, and heating a screen that size and weight would take a lot of power.

A lot of thought has gone into birds damaging engines. A Wall Street Journal article pointed me to the lengthy FAA rules governing the testing of engines against birdstrikes. Here are some excerpts.

All ingestion tests must be conducted with the engine stabilized at no less than 100-percent takeoff power or thrust, for test day ambient conditions prior to the ingestion. In addition, the demonstration of compliance must account for engine operation at sea level takeoff conditions on the hottest day that a minimum engine can achieve maximum rated takeoff thrust or power.

The impact to the front of the engine from the large single bird, the single largest medium bird which can enter the inlet, and the large flocking bird must be evaluated.

Medium bird engine tests shall be conducted so as to simulate a flock encounter, and will use the bird weights and quantities specified in Table 2. When only one bird is specified, that bird will be aimed at the engine core primary flow path; the other critical locations on the engine face area must be addressed, as necessary, by appropriate tests or analysis, or both. When two or more birds are specified in Table 2, the largest of those birds must be aimed at the engine core primary flow path, and a second bird must be aimed at the most critical exposed location on the first stage rotor blades. Any remaining birds must be evenly distributed over the engine face area.

The specs include tables of bird weights and numbers and expected performance that any engine must meet before certification. And it has to be said, because this is the internet and someone else is going to say it if I don't: "chicken cannon." Yes, they actually fire (already dead) poultry at airplane components to test them. And no, it isn't always necessary to thaw the chicken first.

Safety Is Not a Miracle

A few days ago, a US Airways A320 airplane took off from La Guardia, New York and flew through what is suspected to have been a gaggle of geese. Airplane engines are designed to withstand ingestion of small birds, but that is no guarantee. A jet engine requires a precise flow of air controlled by multiple banks of meticulously shaped fanblades, and when those blades are mangled and clogged by the impact of flesh and bones, it is quite possible for the resulting cascade of shrapnel to overwhelm the engine. Or engines, as appears to be the case, the pilot having radioed the control tower about a "double bird strike."

As everyone in the television-watching or newspaper-reading world is aware, the captain ditched the airplane in the Hudson River and all passengers were quickly evacuated before the fuselage submerged, with no loss of life. And then, having interviewed everyone available and panned around everyone's cellphone photographs, for lack of anything else to say about it, the networks and headline writers started calling it 'a miracle,' and making me yell at the TV. Don't get me wrong: this landing wasn't a routine occurrence. It's a stunning, inspiring event. It's good that no one died. It's also good that no one died on the hundreds of flights US Airways conducted that day without incident. But I think it's somewhat insulting to attribute any of that safe flying to divine intervention.

People set standards for training, materials and procedures and people designed and built and maintained that airplane while other people trained and practiced and did their jobs well. Standard operating procedures are a system of a thousand things that are done every day, in a particular way, even when they are annoying, or boring or time-consuming. Pilots practise the required procedures for engine failure after takeoff. We practise in simulators and/or during training sessions in the actual aircraft at altitude, depending on the aircraft and the company. We recite the procedures aloud in our pre-takeoff briefings and practise them in our heads. I suspect that many pilots who regularly fly out of La Guardia have mentally ditched in the Hudson River many times. It appears to be the best clear path for an aircraft that can manage neither to return to La Guardia nor make the runway at Teterboro.

I don't know how many times I've heard people mock the water landing page on the folding safety briefing card, disbelieving that a commercial airliner could be landed on water and sit there floating like the picture. Up to now I've been citing the B727 B707 that landed on Lake Victoria by accident. In that case the airplane touched down with gear extended, because the airplane was too low on the glideslope for the intended airport. The gear sheared off, the engines on the wings sheared off--as they are designed to do--and the airplane came to rest right side up and floated until the next morning. I understand that the engines sheared off the A320 too: the last I read they were still looking for them in the river, in order to investigate the accident and get the DNA of the guilty birds.

Dave estimates that not more than a dozen line pilots could have kept their cool and landed an airplane on the river that well. I shouldn't question his experience, but every line pilot knows the drilled emergency procedures and has practice every-single-flight in touching down perfectly straight, wings level at the prescribed speed, every single time. Given that place and time and the placid river, I think many could have done it. I don't envy Sullenberger the chance to try, though. A lot of things had to go right for that to work as it did.

The incident inspires me to greater professionalism, to know my emergency procedures more fluently, to mentally practise what could go wrong everywhere I work, to make every routine landing as perfect as possible and to ensure my passengers are thoroughly briefed and understand the importance of following them. I'm sure more passengers will pay attention to the safety instructions before departure now, enough that I need a at-shirt now, saying "I paid attention to the passenger briefing before it was cool.

Curiously, it seems that most people exited onto the wings in this case, but the United Airlines A320 safety briefing (I couldn't find one for US Airways) advises passengers not to use the overwing exits in the case of a water landing. I would expect the instructions to come from Airbus and that US Airways would give similar directions, but then not all the passengers obeyed the instructions that were given. One article mentions a woman who tried to retrieve her cabin baggage from the overhead bin. When told to leave it she insisted that she needed her stuff. A man interviewed on CNN was proud of trying to evacuate "women and children first," but I'm suspecting that in the confined space of an airplane cabin any kind of precedence wasted time needed to get everyone off the airplane. Likewise at least one evacuated passenger re-entered the aircraft from the wing in order to reach a different raft. Puzzlingly, this article states that the captain refused a lifejacket, as though it was somehow a heroic gesture. What the hell? I find it hard to believe that that refused a basic safety device in order to look bold and captainly on the news. I understand that he was searching the cabin to make sure there was no one left behind, and possibly anticipated having to dive down to escape if the airplane changed orientation while it sank, but why not wear the thing as an example, and just not inflate it.

There have been two air incidents in the last month, both engine failures at take-off, that could have been tragedies but had one hundred per cent survival. The system is working, but investigators will still comb the wreckage for ways to improve procedures, facilities and aircraft in order to increase safety for future flights.

Beginning the Walkaround

I'm back from a blissful hiatus with no internet or phone and only occasional and limited TV. There's nothing in the buffer and random notes on the laptop about what I'm supposed to be blogging about. When a blog has been sitting idle this long I can't just start it up and go. I'll have to walk around carefully, sweep all the snow off, remove the pitot tube covers, check the tire pressure, and then do a good long run up, and maybe a bit of high speed taxiing before take-off.

I expect to ramp up to normal bloggage over the the next few days.