As Seen on the Internet

Hong Kong International airport is huge and modern, signed in Cantonese first and British English second, with Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and what may be Indonesian ("Perhatikan waktu Hong Kong saat mengecek jadwal keberangkatan") or Tagalog ("Mangyari po lamang na alamin ang takdang oras ng pageakay sa 'Hongkong local time'") on some signs. Surrounding the airport we can see two concentric barbed wire topped fences with about a four-metre no-man's-land gap between the two. I've never seen that level of physical security around an airport perimeter. I've seen less at some Canadian prisons. Security screening is simple, quick and polite: shoes on, belongings into little numbered baskets for which you get a laminated claim card in case of disputes about who owns what once it comes out of the scanner. Something on my person triggers the scanner to beep. I stop and hold out my arms and am told to put them down. I'm not sure if I was holding them too high for the little security officer to reach comfortably with the wand, or if assuming the position just isn't required here.

We have a tight connection, so hustle up the elevator, through the mall, down the escalator and out to the terminal transfer bus, backed in by the door. We start to walk down the right side of the bus as we would at home and are stopped with an "excuse me, this way." Oh right Hong Kong. They drive on the left, so we board the bus on the left. Signs like "please press bell before alighting" also demonstrate Hong Kong's heritage as a British possession. The bus takes us out to the airplane, where we alight. Without pressing the bell actually. It must be a repurposed city bus. The air smells like the inside of a poorly ventilated garage. We board a Dragonair A321, and once we're underway they serve us Dim Sum for breakfast. Hey, it's Saturday morning. It is Dim Sum time. eh?

My first hint that I'm actually going to Cambodia is the immigration forms that are handed around, in Khmer and English. I fill those out and then a couple of hours later we're on approach into Phnom Penh. There's no city evident at first, just a wide muddy river --it's the Tonlé Sap--with some small buildings along it, and fields laid out among tropical trees. We then spot the city. From above it looks like a cross between Paris and Spain: Paris for the star-shaped city with broad avenues and boulevards radiating from circular hubs, and Spain for the red tile roofs and tropical trees. The airplane makes an unusual number of turns for an airline approach in visual conditions, and other passengers comment on the steep bank angle. I wonder if we're maneuvering for traffic or if Phnom Penh tower doesn't have radar, and we're joining the circuit with full VFR procedures rather than just being vectored for a visual approach to the straight in. Later fellow passengers will ask my professional opinion about the landing, and I'll tell them that, without knowing the wind, runway and systems conditions that the crew were considering, I can't evaluate the choice or execution of landing technique. And I've never flown an Airbus outside of a simulator. It was a smooth touchdown and we exited the runway via a taxiway, not over the end or side, without painful deceleration, so it seemed fine to me. We're in Cambodia.

Inside the terminal we present our various completed forms, pay $25 for an embossed, shiny tourist visa and collect our bags. Signs in the airport are in Khmer and English, except for the one for the prayer room, which adds Arabic. We present our passports, newly issued visas and other paperwork and exit into Cambodia. It still looks a fair bit like an airport, an appearance that is not changed by our loading our bags and ourselves onto an air conditioned bus. Yeah, a blog entry and a half of this drivel and I still haven't told you anything about Cambodia. Travel has a big downside, doesn't it?

With our noses pressed against the windows, we join the traffic and head into town towards the hotel. Here, through the bus window, are approximately four of our fellow road users. On one small motorbike. The streets teem with vehicles, powered by engines, people or animals, overloaded to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible if I didn't read Failblog, and weaving in and out of one another's path like the RCMP musical ride. There doesn't seem to be any distinction between different sorts of road users. The backdrop is mostly tropical trees, low plastered buildings, many under construction, renovation or maybe just falling apart, and decorated walls.

As we watch the scenery and receive our first impressions of the country, one of the group leaders provides a narration, as if we would not otherwise be able to comprehend what is passing in front of our eyes. After a few minutes I tap him gently on the arm and ask, "Please, can we just experience it for ourselves?" He is a capable and very organized leader who keeps us well-informed. I had the impression that he had just left his mouth engaged after giving us the necessary information about hotel and agenda. I may have been wrong, though. He stops the play-by-play, but later another leader indicated that she thought many people appreciated the commentary. I've never been on a group tour before. Maybe it's only bloggers whose are constantly composing their own commentaries, and other people need it done for them.

After a couple of kilometres the bus turns right though a gate into a field. Just a field, with grass, and some dirt tracks and a bunch of other vehicles parked in it. I don't see a hotel. It turns out that for the Water Festival this week, they have set up traffic barricades, and vehicles over a certain size are not permitted any closer to the centre of town. I don't think it's a security measure, just a way to reduce the crush of traffic on a busy weekend, the way a downtown street in Canada might become a pedestrian mall for special events. The local officers are wearing street clothes, their badge of office is just a baseball cap with official insignia. The bus driver and one of our group participants go to negotiate with the police, and after a fair amount of handwaving a police officer wearing an entire uniform, not just a ball cap, arrives and grants us special permission to go to our hotel. I'm not sure if that included a police escort, or how exactly we got through the successive barricades. Looks like I did need the commentary after all.

What I did see was increasing amounts of traffic, vendors squatting on the sidewalks next to their wares, people smiling and waving to us from cafés and other vehicles. It is not at all intimidating. I've never been to Asia before, and I was prepared to be sickened by overwhelming poverty, frightened by an unidentifiably alien environment, or simply to have no link to the culture. But it's exciting and welcoming. I had an interview once on a Caribbean island and there was the same chaotic disrepair in the streets and buildings, and the same feeling of people everywhere selling things with minimal infrastructure. People seem better off here than in much of Nunavut, and I don't just mean the weather.

We check into the hotel, which is not a hovel. There's a shrine on the floor of the lobby, along with some clocks telling the time in six places: Hong Kong, United States, Australia, England, Australia and France. Yep, I know, but they apparently don't. Check-in is efficient and polite. The staff are amused that I can recite my room number in Khmer. I learned the numbers and some basic expressions from YouTube before I left Canada. My roommate and I go up to the room. There's a TV, a bathroom, two good sized beds with firm mattresses, mirrors, cupboards, a dresser and a fridge. There's a balcony, but when we go out on it, the outside is walled off with plastic sheets, so we can't see anything. I think it faces the back of another building, anyway. It's also clean. I've had worse hotel rooms in Saskatchewan. Also the internet doesn't work and the hotel staff say they're getting it fixed. Some things are universal.

It's only early afternoon, so I go out to stretch my legs and look around. People are friendly, even if they aren't selling anything, but there are lots of people who are selling things, probably more than usual, seeing as there's a festival underway. I still need some clothes appropriate to the climate. I buy a sunhat for a dollar. It's made out of strips of dried leaves which I assume are palm fronds, all stitched together on a sewing machine and decorated with fabric strips.

Another vendor sells me a loose fitting cotton shirt decorated with a picture of a cat and circles of letters from the Latin alphabet, all printed in reverse, and spelling nothing. She states the price as seven, I offer five (yes, I am a sucky bargainer) and she tells me in almost perfectly accented English that it's a fixed price. Turns out it's not seven dollars, but seven thousand riels, which is just under two dollars.

On another street a man asks me "parlez vous français?" I'm not too surprised, as my guidebook said that some older people might speak French, as a remnant of this region's history as "Indochine." I answer in the affirmative and in the ensuing conversation tell him I'm from Canada. He says he lives in Montréal, and I must have given him a look of complete disbelief, because he opens his wallet to produce a Canadian SIN card and a Québec permis de conduire. I sit down at his invitation for a chat. I haven't been here long enough to have many questions ready to ask. I have heard that the water festival marks the reversal of the flow of the Tonlé Sap so I ask him about that. He confuses me by saying that the festival commemorates a thousand-years-ago naval victory over Islamic forces, a victory that was facilitated by the reversal of the waters. This website says it was started by King Preah Bat Jayvarman VII as an opportunity to train and select skilled boatsmen for the navy, and other sources say it dates back to the 7th century as a thanksgiving festival. Given that under three hundred years has produced some drift in the meaning of the American thanksgiving, I'll cut the Cambodians some slack and say, hey, their river starts flowing the other way. Why not have a three day party? At any rate the experience teaches me not to make assumptions about the worldliness of the people here. Except it doesn't. I'll do it again later in the trip.

Dinner that night is all together with the group at a tourist-oriented local restaurant. Appetizers start with salted roasted peanuts with some little tiny chili pepper garnishes. Yes, one guy eats a chili pepper. For the record, the little tiny red ones are much hotter than jalapeños. While he tries to put out the fire in his mouth by guzzling water, I recommend rice, and it arrives just in time for it to make me his hero. Another appetizer plate includes bean sprouts and vegetables in a sauce that has an offensive fish odour. I try it out, and fight the gag reflex to get it down. It tastes worse than it smells. I hope the "fish Khmer style" that I ordered will be better. It is. It's a delicious curry, spiced warm not hot, with all kinds of exciting flavours going on, none of which is gag-inducing fish guts.

After dinner there is a traditional music performance, with instruments including a boatlike wooden xylophone, a long-necked stringed instrument played with a bow, and a drum. The drummer is sitting cross-legged on the floor and I can see the bottom of his foot. Before coming to Cambodia we were lectured sternly about customs, including taking off shoes in people's homes, sitting or squatting on the floor, and not displaying the bottoms of our feet to anyone. I tried to figure out a way to sit cross-legged on the floor without doing so, and couldn't, so I'm kind of pleased to see that the culture doesn't demand the physically impossible. Or for all I know the drummer thinks it's hilarious to moon the stupid tourists.

Starts Just Like Work

It still hasn't sunk in that I'm going on an exotic adventure, because for me a vacation starts just like going to work: packing suitcases and getting on an airplane. There are some differences, though. At work I have to be prepared for the arctic and Florida with the same suitcase. This time I only have to pack for three cities, and I know in advance what they will be and what weather to expect, so this should be a snap. But I get to a point where I keep opening and closing the drawers and closets without packing anything. I have a new cultural constraint. I need clothes for thirty to forty degree weather without showing too much skin. I envision long cotton skirts, loose cotton blouses, and those colorful pajama-like outfits the Pakistani women wear. No matter how many times I open and close my closet, I continue not to own these things. I have long black pants, form-fitting work-out clothing, t-shirts, a bit of beach wear, sweaters, and a wide variety of winter clothing. I pack two pairs of long black work pants for the build, a few t-shirts, and a couple of white, short-sleeved, poly-cotton shirts (with tabs for epaulettes). I simply plan to buy more appropriate clothing when I get there.

I use my work packing list to help decide the non-clothing items to take, adding an extra memory card for the camera, an electrical adapter for the various chargers, anti-malarial and severe diarrhea medicine (prescribed by the travel centre that gave me all my inoculations), and a guidebook to Cambodia. I leave my laptop, headset and manuals behind. I'm really not going to work as usual.

I get a ride to the airport late in the evening as the first snow of the year starts to fall. Big flakes swish through the streetlight beams. I hope the airport snowploughs and deicing stations are warmed up and ready to go. I just have a sweatshirt and a light jacket, not wanting to haul anything else through Cambodian heat. I would be woefully unprepared if we had to do an evac on the runway here. No, Aviatrix, you are not going to work. You can stop thinking about these things. Stop thinking about emergency preparedness? Never!

The group leader is taking care of crazy overprepared, anyway. He has us all at the airport something like four hours before the flight. It's a group booking, so the check-in kiosk rejects me, but the girl at the counter has no trouble issuing me a boarding pass and then after I pass through security it's easy to find the large group milling around our gate. Someone hands out the t-shirts and work gloves we've been warned to leave room for in our carry-ons, and we board the flight only about 15 minutes later than scheduled. It's a Boeing 777 if I remember correctly. Despite the size of the aircraft and the number of people who must be on board, the Captain includes a shout-out of our group, going to build houses in Cambodia, in his welcome announcement. I still don't get that I'm doing anything out of the ordinary.

The seatbelts have built-in airbags, but there is no indication on the safety card how they work. I'm already in a foreign country, as English is the second language on the aircraft placards. There's a fancy in-flight entertainment system built into the back of the seat in front of me, with movies in English, Chinese and probably some other languages, too. We're supposed to stay up until at least ten p.m. Cambodian time and then sleep or rest for the rest of the flight, in order to get over jet lag as quickly as possible. Once I've chatted to my neighbours and read enough my dollar thrift-store paperback that I can't concentrate, I turn on the IFE to watch a Hollywood movie. Not being aware that Inception is a mindfuck (sorry, is there a corresponding term without the profanity?) movie, I watch half an hour or so and think my inability to understand exactly what is going on reflects extreme fatigue on my part, rather than deliberate and nested misleading on the part of the filmmaker. I give up and fall asleep about 8:30 p.m. Cambodian time, which is well into dawn back home. I sleep for about four hours and then wake up and watch the rest of the movie. It doesn't get less confusing through inserting a nap break, during which I had actual dreams which may or may not be fully separated from the movie itself, in my head. Also it's normal to have cuts in movie that drop you into new action, so to turn around and say that should be a cue you recognize as a sign of dreaming is pretty mean.

I'm like a nervous airline passenger, in that I imagine that every change in engine sound could be something irregular, except that I'm not nervous about it, aware of other things it is much more likely to be, and confident enough in the ability of a trained triple-seven crew to handle whatever happens. It's really just a way of alleviating boredom. Back to the entertainment system. There's an undernose camera view showing strips of alto cumulus clouds far far below us. I normally fly beneath them. Whether it's an artifact of the camera lens or the altitude I'm not sure, but the picture ahead on the horizon shows the curve of the Earth.

Another movie, this one is called Salt and stars Angelina Jolie as a sexy spy. The opening is copied straight out of a James Bond movie, and is even less believable here, because face it, given Angelina Jolie, waterboarding isn't going to be the evil bad guys' first choice of torture, and James Bond was at least shown to be in terrible physical condition after his ordeal. Angelina turns out to be a Russian sleeper agent, trained since childhood, now working for the CIA. That's interesting, because the denouement has to have her betray her own people, be killed by the Americans, or win, therefore making the American side lose. Any would be unusual for a Hollywood action movie. I never got to see which, because they turned off the IFE in preparation for landing before the end of the highway chase scene. My guess is that she betrayed her own people, presented as her being won over to the superiority of the American way of life, and everyone goes back to trusting her happy happy. I asked one of the other passengers if they had seen the end of the movie, and they had, but didn't remember anything useful about it. I gather it's mostly just a movie about Angelina Jolie and car chases.

As we descend into Hong Kong, a peculiar smell filters into the airplane through the pressurization system, and although the cockpit announcement called it a sunny day, it looks like fog. The air quality is that terrible. It's even worse than Los Angeles. There are mountains out there somewhere, but I just see a few vague shapes. I wouldn't want to land here visually.

AviWAITion

This post got lost. I've been trying to slip it in where it wouldn't look out of place, so it's been floating around with my scheduled posts. I'm just going to jam it in here, out-of-place and out-of-season. You can say it's jet-lagged. Tomorrow the Cambodia saga will start.

I'm in Moose Jaw, where the nice engineer and his apprentices are replacing the left engine turbo wastegate, and there's a part that has to come by FedEx, so I have a day of waiting. Fortunately I'm good at that. I just pretend that every place I'm in is somewhere I have come on purpose for a holiday. I've been to Moose Jaw before, so I've already seen the historical re-enactment in the underground tunnels and admired the almost movie-set ready historical main street, and the murals. But I wouldn't mind going back to the park, and maybe I'll go swimming in the mineral springs again.

One time I was here, my work partner was a casino gambler and an expert wheeler dealer who wrangled rooms in the Mineral Spa Resort & Casino at the same price as the hotel chain we normally stay in. Seeing as it's a holiday weekend, and I'm a negotiation pussycat, that didn't happen this time, but I can still pay the admission fee and go 'take in the waters.' I'm actually more in a swimming mood than a soaking mood, and the public pool feeds off the same mineral springs, so I head there. It's next to the park, anyway.

As I walk across the Boston Pizza parking lot (there's either a Boston Pizza or a Tim Horton's in every hotel parking lot in Western Canada), I spot something shiny on the pavement. When I'm airside, my FOD detection circuits compel me to pick any metal objects off the ramp in order to prevent them from being ingested by aircraft engines or taking chunks out of people's propellers. I pick up this one too. It's a brass shell casing ... ah no, it's an unused small calibre bullet. It probably rolled out of someone's truck or came out of their pocket as they got out of the truck. But now what do I do with it. I feel a responsibility not to chuck it back on the ground where kids might play with it. I don't want to put it in the garbage where it might be incinerated. And my normal approach of letting weird pieces of metal rattle around the bottom of my pocket or suitcase until they end up in the jar next to my washing machine isn't going to cut it with airport security. Plus hey, unexploded ordnance.

I wander down Main Street (isn't this sweet: it's actually called Main Street, not 50th Avenue) past an object in the grass by the railroad tracks that was there yesterday and that I'm 95% sure is a dead cat, but I'm not going to go closer and confirm. See I'm smart enough not to take on responsibility for ALL the awkward to dispose of objects on the streets of Moose Jaw. While I'm walking I make up a sentence that describes the town. The moose sat on real caribou hides and stood on fake hyena rugs. I'll leave it to you to figure out why, apart from the moose reference, it is useful and appropriate.

I have lunch in a little Thai restaurant and read a tourist brochure, which mentions a local business with the address "420 High Street." No prizes for guessing what kind of business it is. That's a few blocks away, and perhaps they sell hemp paper postcards along with their other wares. I walk down that way, but although their sign says they open at eleven, they're still closed at two. Typical stoners. I instead buy a postcard at, of all places, a windshield repair shop. They are a general everything glass shop, including figurines and other glass art, so they have arty cards.

On the way east towards the park there's a police car parked with its lights flashing, but no car pulled over near it. The officer is sitting inside doing paperwork. I come up to the window and he looks up suspiciously to ask what I want. For a moment I wonder how stupid this is going to sound, but I don't have to say any more than "I found a bullet ..." before he becomes friendly and says he'll take care of it for me. Done with less hassle than I was anticipating.

The park is not huge, but it's well laid out with hills and different levels and a river with happy ducks floating on it. It's good for people watching, and it's culturally acceptable to strike up conversations with strangers in front of ducks. You can also talk to strangers in used bookstores (but not new ones) and in health food stores, and in the line-up at a regular grocery store. You can talk to strangers on the street, too, but you have to be careful to pick someone of approximately matching age and apparent economic status. Real life is not like a social MMORPG where you can talk to anyone who crosses your path without alarming them.

The public pool is next to the park, and it's a hundred year old building with the word NATATORIUM graven in its stone façade. It's also closed with some scaffolding up and workers in hardhats. I can see that the outdoor pool is still empty. Just as well. Meanwhile I have received a text that they may have the airplane ready for me this afternoon, so I probably shouldn't be in a swimming pool. I wander up to the museum, which is in the park, but as I go down the stairs into the exhibit hall I lose cellphone signal, so that's off limits, too. Cellphones give you a limited sort of freedom when you're on call.

Walking up a back street towards the hotel, I pass an old funeral home. It's a current funeral home, too, but I see its history in the fact that the doors to the garage for the hearses are clearly carriage house doors. I'm sure hearses pulled by black horses came through them for years before they invested in a motor hearse. Also, and perhaps it's just the power of suggestion, but the adjacent "funeral parking only" lot doesn't have aisles and stalls like a conventional parking lot, but instead just aisles, running lengthwise down the lot, so the cars must park in nose to tail columns, as if they were waiting for a ferry or stopped in a California freeway traffic jam. I picture that being exactly the way you would park a large number of horses-drawn buggies. The lot is paved and there are no hitching posts, but I can imagine the parking routine staying unchanged for a hundred years.

The Europeans must be laughing at me, sitting in cafés that have been in the same place for three hundred years, but in western Canada things are so new that hundred year old stuff is of historical note.

I see a gopher poking out of a hole and try to take a picture, but it runs back down the hole, at which point a different gopher pokes out of a further off hole. I dart back and forth with my camera in a giant game of live whack-a-mole until one of the gophers takes pity and lets me snap a shot.

After all that, the airplane isn't ready before the shop quitting time, so I go back to the hotel and read my e-mail and other things on the Internet. There's an update from John, the person who got me into the KC-130 sim. He describes an interesting problem at a simulator facility in Texas: On two airfields you landed below the runway, on the third you landed about 30 feet up then ran into an invisible wall. Both problems were "mostly fixed."

Songs of My Country

We got everything ready and took off today, but after flying back and forth for about five minutes, before all the green lights were even lined up on the mission, we were forced to abort for poor environmental conditions. I love this plane, because I can carry full fuel and a mission specialist and still land immediately after take off. All airplanes in the fleet are not the same, and one that is heavier empty may require me to fly for about an hour before I'm down to landing weight. I have no ability to dump fuel. In an emergency I could land overweight, and if it was a high quality landing on a sufficient length runway, there would be no damage at all. But the specifications for the aircraft have to allow for the sloppiest normally acceptable landing--I don't know if that's defined somewhere, it's a corner of the envelope I've never elected nor had the misfortune to push--and still land safely at the max allowable weight. So I must legally burn down to that before landing. This lovely, svelte aircraft would let me do touch and goes with my full mission payload. So when the mission specialist calls it, I'm wheels on the ground as soon as the local FSS confirms the runway is mine. It's always the mission specialist's call to land for any mission-related reasons, of just because he or she feels like it, just as he or she can't overrule my decision to land for any safety reason. I don't get to call flights on whims though.

The AME arrives to meet the flight. It's one of the guys I was working with down south, just not the same one as was up here before. They swapped over and used their overlap days to do the inspection. He's here this afternoon just to make sure there is no aircraft reason for the quick return, and to familiarize himself with the working environment up here. I feel like I'm on the Snowbirds or something with this attentive ground support.

Back at the hotel, I have e-mail with an iTunes recommendation, based on my quoting Robert Service. He's right, I like this. I've heard it many times, but never remembered the title or artist at a moment when I was downloading music.

My country is definitely wild and savage. The song goes into my cross country playlist along with all the songs that contain the names of states and provinces or other places I fly over. Yes, my list is heavy on Stompin' Tom. My correspondent reminds me that Stan Rogers also has an aviation connection, as he was killed in the fire on the Air Canada deathwish plane.

Meanwhile iTunes censors the word "Honky" in Honky Tonk Man and Honky Tonk Blues censored. What the heck? How is this a bad word? I believe it's a really old fashioned derogatory term for caucasians, based I suppose on the fact that white people have the biggest noses of any race, but has anyone ever been actually offended by the word? I love reading stories about ridiculous things done in the name of profanity filtering, but I don't like it so much when they affect things I'm trying to look at.

A victory has been achieved against the forces for terrorist infiltration of hotels, as the card encoder works again, and we can all go in and out of our hotel rooms without an escort.

On Condition

Aircraft engines must be maintained according to a manufacturer's published TBO (pronounced Tee-Bee-Owe) or Time Before Overhaul. An airplane engine is typically considered reliable for about the same duration as a car engine, perhaps two thousand hours of use, but when a car's engine wears out, most owners discard the car and engine.1 With an airplane, you overhaul the engine: returning it to factory specifications, replacing whatever parts are necessary to achieve that. It's expensive and time consuming, interrupting normal use for the airplane and , like any maintenance procedure, sometimes introducing new problems. Engine life is a bell curve, of course, so a few engines break down and require overhaul before their TBO and many are in fine condition after reaching TBO. For this reason, regulatory provisions are available to allow an operator to run an engine beyond the TBO, subject to various conditions.

I was amused by this line at the beginning of the Transport Canada description of the process: "The program was not being used as envisioned, for an extension to a useful life, but has been extended, beyond its intended purpose, to an overhaul avoidance program." Well duh! What would the purpose of extending an engine's useful life be if not avoiding overhauling it? It's not a humanitarian gesture to allow old engines to feel useful, or an environmental statement. Every decision made in an aviation environment is balancing safety against economics, and if you're cynical even the safety decisions are based on economic criteria: accidents are expensive.

As I read it, the on-condition program is a bet the operator makes that his pilots, AMEs and operating conditions are better than the manufacturer's assumptions and that therefore his engines don't have to be overhauled as soon as the manufacturer says. You have to make that bet for your whole fleet, and stick to it. There's nothing that specifically says you can't hedge your bets and decide to go on condition a few hundred hours from the end of the engine life, but once one aircraft is officially on condition, the others of the same type in the fleet must be too, regardless of the relative time on their engines. Once the "approved maintenance schedule" specifies that the fleet operates on condition, then all the relevant extra checks must be done.

The price of the bet the operator makes is:
a) the specified inspections, which I assume are slightly more thorough than the regular inspections of an engine, and
b) the risk that the engine fails an on condition inspection before TBO.
I think b) is not a great worry, because if an engine component were in a condition that it would fail such a check, then you'd be glad to have caught it in a routine inspection rather than through a catastrophic failure causing further damage and downtime.

The payoff of the bet is that you may be able to extend the engine life past the usual TBO. Experience with our fleet suggest that it's not necessarily a safe bet, because the engines seem to need major attention pretty close to TBO anyway. If the on condition inspections cost any appreciable time or money over the regular ones, it might not be a good bet for the long term. But it always seems like a good idea just as an overhaul is coming due on both engines of a reliable airplane that is needed online.

This afternoon I went out for a run with the new AME. He's fast. His pace quickly sends my heart rate out of my training zone, but just switch off my heart rate monitor and keep up. A fast run now and again is probably good for me. After that it's Pasta Tuesday at Boston Pizza, which we admit sadly has become the highlight of our week.

1. There are people who do overhaul automotive engines, and keep automobiles running rather than discarding them. This is much more common in the US than Canada, and evident as soon as you cross the border, because the mix of automobiles on the road immediately skews to older and more American makes. I'm guessing it's because the American cars manufactured twenty or thirty years ago were a lot more amenable to user-maintenance than the European and Japanese models that were already more common in Canada. American movies always show guys fixing up old cars, sometimes as a rite of passage. I think it's part of the culture.

Home Safe

I'm back from Cambodia, with about a thousand photographs and a suitcase full of souvenirs, the latter of which has been left outside so the winter temperatures can kill anything laid by tropical insects before I bring it into my home. I suppose I have to weigh that strategy against the possibility of hardy Canadian insects or perhaps silk-loving moose attacking it, but I have to cope with them anyway.

You'll have pre-trip posts for a few more days before I get up to speed to blog about my experiences in Cambodia. I've come so far around the world today that I'm not sure it wouldn't have been quicker to go the other way. Here's a sneak peek to tide you over.

Retracing My Steps

Back to the hangar, for what should be the last time. We said we'd have the airplane back to the customer today, but this airport is fogged in solid, so we have a little while to work before the pressure is really on. It's cold again today, even colder. I crank the heat on the hangar. We're paying to rent it. I nerd on the iPod for a bit then ask if they are done the cabin inspection so I can close up in there. "Oh, cabin inspection, right." That would be a no. They are done in the nose, so I replace all the gear. It always looks like something is missing when I put it back, because it fits so much better when you have it all out and can play tetris with it to get the best fit, as compared to when you're just digging something out and shoving it back. Then it's like this sort of tetris. My high score there is 100.

I call flight services for an update on weather, seeing as I can't see more than a couple of hundred metres past the door of the hangar. I think I can see further inside than outside. The weather is not good at destination yet, either, but both should improve before long. There's still no NOTAM on the drag racing, so I call the local Flight Services personnel to ask. They tell me the races take place on a disused taxiway on the other side of the airport and have no impact on operations. Ahh. I call back the FSS briefer to pass on this information, so they can mollify any other pilot who is concerned by the signs.

The cabin inspection is complete and one of the AMEs is closing up the panels there. I feel guilty that he is fixing the mess I made in the cabin, pulling everything apart to get to the cables. Those panels come in and out a lot so there were different kinds of holes, different sizes of screws, carpet and other miscellany. As they get ready to tow the aircraft out, I put the seats back in the cockpit. They always go back in easier than out, the opposite of the cabin seats. I see as I secure the locks on the rails that he has done a beautiful job reassembling the floor. It's better than when I started.

I compliment him on that, it's an easy thing to be lazy about, hence the mess it was in when I started. Both guys seem grateful for my help over the last few days, despite my sometimes self-sabotaging assistance. I suppose just having company is good, too. Now it's time for me to go do what I'm good at.

I walkaround and make sure that we haven't left any important bits unattached, then start up and run up the engines. Everything looks fine, sounds fine. They want a fairly long run so call for taxi and, after I let a Cessna 180 go by, go out on the runway to do the break-in for the new brake pads. A couple of accelerate-stops and then I'm back to the ramp. They pull the cowls again and I assume my note "leak check goo" means that it was all good with no leaks, because after that we went back to the hotel to get Internet access for the references needed to finish the last of the paperwork. I load bags my bags into the airplane, thank the guys again for their work and leave while they are still cleaning the hangar.

After take off I keep the speed down so I can cycle the gear a couple of times. Everything works as well as it did on the jacks. Sometimes with the airflow going by the calibration or something isn't quite right, but today it's perfect. I text an "all good" (or possibly "all goo," hope they understood) and steer direct for the waiting customers.

My northbound track takes me right through where the storm was on the way down. I haven't cleared the GPS track, so you can see my route south, my initial 180, slightly kidney shaped as I deked the visible lightning, another foray to the south east, and then a big wide semi-cardiod shape completely avoiding the area of thunderstorms before rejoining the planned track to destination. A little avgas and a little airframe time doesn't compare to the risk of lightning, downdrafts, disorientation and severe turbulence inside those monsters. Now there is nothing but sky and nice little puffy clouds. At destination it's approach, land, rollout, park, text, and get a ride to the hotel. They tell me the sky went black here after I left, too. They saw the same monster that I tickled.

The cardkey encoder still doesn't work at the hotel, so I need to wait in the lobby for an escort to my room. As the encoder is an American-designed security device containing encryption technology it has been held up at customs. At least they ordered two, so they won't be in this bind next time. It could be so miserable for the employees having to deal with customers complaining over this, but my escort has chosen to be unassailably cheerful and friendly about it all. I don't think it would be possible to be miserable to her about the situation. Any negativity you tried to direct at her would bounce right off.

Dinner brings me back to Boston Pizza. No, I didn't miss it. Back in the hotel I watch Casino Royale. I've seen and even "reviewed" it before, but now I'm looking at it in the context of a "reset" in the manner of the new Star Trek movie: take a long-running franchise, retell the beginning of the legend, and then start over in a new time period. I'm sure this has been done again and again, but it's the first time I've noticed it. That's not counting anachronisms like obviously European architecture and principals in biblical artwork, or the stories in Shakespeare being retold in different eras, like Romeo and Juliet becoming West Side Story. It's a good idea, really just an extension of translation to allow people to identify with a work that would otherwise be too far removed from their knowledge. Vesper is still the stupidest password ever, though.

Tired, Cold, Bored and Hungry

There's a lot of intellectual and highly skilled work in aircraft maintenance. It's not all blood and cursing. Today the airplane is up on jacks and the experts are solving problems. The tasks that are appropriate for me to do are either done, not safe on a precariously balanced airplane, or would interfere with what the AMEs are doing. So I'm sitting on one of the removed airplane seats, with the brightness turned way down on my iPod in order to ration the remaining power for as long as possible. I'm alternating between games of Pac-Man (Namco, just the free demo version, high score 14680 out of a possible 14990 (I could score 15000, but the demo version only updates the high score table if I don't finish the board, so I have to leave one dot uneaten)) and making notes for the blog. So far the blog notes say "tired, cold, bored, hungry." I go to the emergency bag and put on a parka to cope with the second on the list.

Aircraft maintenance is a little like laws and and sausage, I think. It's nicer to just benefit from someone else having made them than it is to be there while the blood is flowing. Not just because you get to keep more blood on the inside of you that way, but because it can make you squeamish about the product. Pilots like to pretend to ourselves that we are the only ones in the chain who simply make the best decisions we can based on time and available information, and that somehow after we hand the airplane over to the maintainers, some kind of perfection can be produced. It's still impossible to know exactly what is going in in the airplane's innards. They do several gear swings, and my notes say "hydraulic leak, brake overflow" which doesn't sound good, it sounds as though the latter is a simple explanation for the former.

They then find something for me to do, with one of the guys asking me to, "Take all the stuff out of the nose locker." The nose locker is where a lot of the airplane specific equipment lives, things like spares, cleaning supplies, and, seasonally, deicing equipment. That I'm asked to remove it is not unusual. A lot of the avionics and the battery are accessed through there. What makes me double-take is the phrasing. "Did you say it that way to pandering to my feminine sensibilities?" I ask? He knows exactly what I meant, and concedes that he he did. No aircraft maintainer has ever before referred to the contents of that cargo compartment without employing a fecal metaphor.

They treat me well. They really do speak a different language. Not so much the conversation about parts but a non-stop stream of insulting banter to each other. They are not fighting, not even disagreeing most of the time and are working efficiently, and it's rarely offensive, but it's steadily profane. Is this all guys? It's almost aircraft maintainers, in my experience. Most of them moderate their language in the presence of customers or females, but once they relax to my presence, they revert to their native tongue. I can translate most of it.

On the way to lunch I notice a sign beside the road advertising drag racing at the airport on the weekend. I call Flight Services to check NOTAMs and find out how this will affect my ability to depart the aerodrome, but they have no NOTAM on any such activity. Maybe they won't call it in until Friday. I promise to check back, or let them know if I find out anything myself.

The guys ask me to turn on the aircraft electrical master, so I climb up to do that. My eyes automatically go first to the gear handle: training demands that I confirm the gear handle is in the down position before entering an aircraft cockpit. The handle is in the up position. I have a moment of "uhh..." before I remember that the aircraft is on jacks. Even though I know it is, because I just got in. That gets me every time.

I get out the Ice-X and clean and treat the wing and tail boots. I can't get all the way up the vertical stabilizer even with the ladder. Anyone know of anyone who died because ice clung to the very top of the leading edge of their vertical stab? I treat the propeller boots too. According to the instructions that's supposed to be done every fifteen hours, that's every day if we were flying steadily. We don't do that. I suppose we would if we were in hard IMC, or even rain every flight.

The guys have to do an impossible-looking job involving the landing gear cable. I disassemble the screens in the back of the nose compartment so they can get at it, and they work from both sides as well, apparently accomplishing their task. I get back in and confirm that I see three green and they lower it back to the wheels. There's still a chance we could have a problem with it, because it's extremely hard to test in the hangar. I don't understand all the details. There's so much I still don't know about my own airplane. I try to know everything.

My notes also say "washers." This may have been the result of delirious musings as I reassembled the nose compartment, wondering what kinds of homework assignments people got in AME school, and mentally composing an essay on the various uses of washers. I used to think the main purpose of metal washers was so that you could always have some bits left over when you had finished reassembling something, but I've come to appreciate their uses. Sometimes they are spacers, to redress a gap where the screw is too long for the thickness of what it is connecting. Sometimes it is reinforcement, where the hole is too big or the material not strong enough to be held in place just by the diameter of the screwhead. Sometimes the washer prevents damage to the paint from turning the screw. There are special lockwashers that deform as you tighten the screw down on them, so they are always pushing back against the screw, helping it not to vibrate loose. Or possibly my "washers" note refers to me dropping some under the floor and having to use guile and needle nose pliers to get them out.

We're now done except for some scat hose replacement, which can't be done today because they sent the wrong size scat hose. There is also some cosmetic work to be done on the door, but it involves disassembling the entire door, more complex than it sounds, and it's another one of those things that if they find something wrong, the airplane is grounded. We have a spare door, but there is a possibility that there is something wrong with the airframe where the door attaches. If airplanes are starting to sound like the reason you don't go in that part of your basement, you understand. Except that with airplanes it's illegal to close the door and pretend that must just dust bunnies.

We quit at 5:30 p.m., or at least I do. The guys are going back to the hotel to get ahead on paperwork, which is a huge part of their job, and a sizeable proportion of the work to be done on any inspection or scheduled maintenance task.

Extracting One Angry Wasp

Back to work in the morning. The first thing is to finish that cable replacement task. What I'm calling the "cable" consists of both the actual wire that moves when I pull the cockpit knob, and its surrounding, what I'll call a housing or a channel. It's like the way an electrical wire is inside of its coating of insulation, except that this cable is designed to move inside its housing while the housing stays still. I am to remove and replace the cable and the housing together.

Before pulling the cable out of the airframe, I follow AME instructions and attach a thin wire to the end. The housing is made in a kind of spiral pattern, so when I tie another wire to the outside, it's resistant to slipping off, because of all the ridges. Also the end of the wire that was attached to the alternate air door is kinked from being held into its fastener for however long it has been there, so that too serves as an anchor for the wire. I attach the wire as well as I can, and push it a bit, following it along through all the clamps holding the wire bundles together along the leading edge of the wing until there's some slack just outside the fuselage. I jump back in the airplane and slowly pull on it it from the cockpit, then run outside and feed it through the tight spots to make sure it's not caught on anything, and repeat. It's not quite as difficult as I thought it would be, but the AMEs are not leaving me hung out to dry here, so I may be underestimating the amount they helped me. The original cable is now out, and its path is marked all the way by a length of lockwire. I celebrate this triumph by switching tasks for a moment, to go and borrow a hydraulic cart.

I ask at the next door hangar, and am directed to an airline hangar where they generally . They are wonderful. When they ask me where I'm parked, and I explain that I walked over, and am now going to go back and send the people with the truck to come and get it, one of their guys simply drives the cart and me back to the helicopter hangar. Aircraft maintenance people are typically incredibly generous. I'm very fortunate to be in a symbiotic relationship with this profession. (I break airplanes, so that they can be employed fixing them; they maintain airplanes, so I can be employed flying them). I'm very proud of having gone off on this mission and brought back a hydraulic cart as proposed, dampened only slightly when it turns out that they were already prepared to give us some help because our boss called them yesterday and asked nicely, in response to the AMEs reporting the lack of equipment.

My sense of triumph is further diminished when one of the AMEs looks closely at the cable we removed. It's missing something. It's missing the damage that was the reason he asked me to remove it. He does acknowledge that he asked me to remove the left one, but that doesn't change the fact that it's actually the right one that needs to come out. And that the left one has to go back in. Guided by the lockwire, the rethreading is less painful than I thought, but again I benefit from the assistance and experience of the guys.

It's back to the cockpit to prepare to remove the right one. I open a window and ask, "I have the floor all opened up here on the left. Do you need to inspect under here, or should I put it back together?" They need to inspect it anyway and may have other tasks that need it up, so I disassemble the right side of the cockpit while leaving the left in disarray. I try to keep everything neat and organized, but it degenerates into an unholy mess of carpet, kickplates, access panels and little things that go on other things, of the sort that always seem to be called "escutcheons" when I ask. I identify the correct cable in the underfloor area, wiggling the already identified portion, and continuing to cut the zip-ties and loosen the clamps that hold it into bundles of other cables. Some asymmetries of the airplane, plus bad luck about where this particular cable ends up within the bundle make this side harder to work with. And this airplane was never designed with the idea of replacing this cable. When the aircraft was built, all the cables that had to run from the engine to the cockpit were laid out along the shiny new leading edge of the wing and then twisted and clamped neatly together. Removing and replacing individual ones is like getting one wasp out of a mason jar full of angry wasps. Except that I could get one wasp out by poking a one-wasp-sized hole in the lid, then as soon as the first one climbed most of the way through the hole, quickly sliding something in to cover the hole behind it, and duct-taping it down. And wasps hurt when they sting you, but won't tear open your flesh the way badly trimmed zip-tie ends will.

I attach the wire as before and repeat the push, pull, feed, wiggle, thread sequence until the right cable is out. Now I see the damaged part they were talking about. I undo the lockwire from the old cable and hold it above my head in triumph. I get the brand new cable out of its bag and ready it to follow the lockwire back into the airframe. The first problem is that the housing doesn't have the same grooves and the wire protruding from the end is perfectly straight and unkinked. There's nothing to keep the lockwire on. I bend the end a little bit, and wrap the lockwire the best I can. Here goes. "Whatever you do," I'm warned, "Don't kink the new one."

So, there's more of the same. Greasy, sweaty, blood-flecked frustration. "They should be required to write the builders' names on airplanes," I suggest, "So you know whom to swear at." I wonder if surgeons sometimes feel this kind of hatred towards the oozing, gooey, uncooperative masses that they are expected to manipulate and suture. "How is it that you don't hate airplanes?" I ask. I am generally a patient and tolerant person, but this is maddening. They're laughing at me, but also with me, appreciating my articulation of what they know.

Eventually it takes all three of us feeding and threading and coaxing the cable through the airframe, but we get it into place. The panel hardware doesn't quite match, but the alternate air door knob is there to serve an occasional function, not to look pretty. I tighten it up.

Meanwhile the guys have had some trouble assembling hydraulic equipment that makes the cart interface with our airplane. The different shapes, sizes and colours of the hoses and connectors they are sorting through is reminiscent of a big LEGO set, except that the AMEs don't squabble over who gets the long red pieces. I can't help with that, but they ask me to replace the left pneumatic air filter after all. Even though it's only three months old, it will mess up the maintenance schedule later if it's not zero time now. I hop up on the nacelle and change it out. It's a piece of cake. I don't know if how much is the practice effect of doing the right one yesterday, and how much is by comparison with that fracking cable.

We go for dinner early because we're waiting on a part, and then after dinner go straight to the terminal to the cargo counter to collect a part that we've been promised is on the six p.m. flight. There is no six p.m. flight into here. The AME investigates. The part is coming from Texas, connecting through Vancouver, and it's on the six p.m. flight out of Vancouver, which is supposed to be here at 7:30. The cargo agent picks up the phone and asks someone what time the 7:30 flight is arriving today. We came south to get here, but obviously we're still in the north.

Fake It 'til You Make It

Two of us are at breakfast, with one guy late, but it's his birthday so we cut him a break when he wanders down sleepy just as we're ready to go. Once at the hangar I open all the under-wing panels on the right wing, collecting all the screws in a can, then go back to ask for another task. The AME who doesn't know me tells me to inspect the cabling visible through the ports. I reject that task, "I think you should do the inspection. I don't have any experience inspecting the insides of my airplane." That probably sounds stupidly squeamish. It's a cable. A four-year-old child could probably look at it and determine whether it was frayed, corroded, chafing, jammed or sabotaged, versus intact and functional, but surely they have some grunt work for me.

He shrugs and tells me to replace the pneumatic air filter, telling me it's installed under that panel there on top of the nacelle. The replacement part is on the bench and the only tricky part is that I should note which way the airflow arrow points on the installed one, and put the new one in the same way around. People dumber than me and with far less personal concern about the safety of the aircraft work as apprentices under the supervision of an AME every day. Many of them on my airplane. How much more complicated is this going to be than LEGO? I find the right kind of screwdriver and remove the panel, revealing a part with an arrow marked on it, differing from the replacement part only in colour. This one is kind of silverish, while the replacement is gold-toned. It has a bulge in the middle, about the size of an elongated softball, and then tapers down at each end to a ten-centimetre connecting tube. I can't see how the connector attaches to the line in the airplane, because the connection is covered at each end by a thick but flexible cuff, extending beyond my view through the panel in both directions. It's also held in place with screw clamps and numerous zip-ties. They look like the regular zip-ties that you can get at the hardware store, but I'm told they are special airplane-grade zip-ties.

This may or may not be true. You can never believe anything an AME tells you. It's part of their training, perhaps, that they keep up an incessant stream of bullshit just to see how much they can get a pilot to believe. At first I thought they did this entirely for their own amusement, because how hilarious would it be when one AME fixes a problem then tells a pilot her fuel cap was stuck because the cap had become desynchronized from the propeller governor, and then a month later she walks into another shop and asks for the synchronizing spray, because her fuel cap is stuck? But now I think they do it as protection from pilots who have a little bit of knowledge and try to tell the maintainers what is wrong. Pilots are very good at sounding authoritative and knowledgeable about things we have the faintest clue about, because that's our job: to navigate a complex machine through extremely complex and only partially forecast environmental conditions while assuring everyone involved that we know exactly what we're doing. So the maintainers stack the deck against us, and then they can tell our knowledge from our bluffs. Which is why I report snags by stating exactly what I observed. Not "the bulb is burned out" but "the light is not illuminated when the switch is selected on."

I draw an arrow on the nacelle, under where the panel will cover it, to indicate the direction of the air filter arrow, then I cut all the zipties and try to figure out how to get this part out. Typically the jobs you give unskilled labour are the ones that require very little knowledge, but are uncomfortable, tedious or annoying. So I am expecting this connector to work on the principle of pain and annoyance. I wiggle the whole thing in the direction of the more enveloping flexible cuff, in the hopes that the smaller one will slip back and reveal whatever it is at the end that I have to undo. The edges of the sheet metal around the opening in the nacelle appear to be the most likely source of pain. "So," I ask, "Do they sharpen the edges of the aluminum at the factory, or is that something you have to do yourself?" That gets a laugh and an expression of solidarity. I think I have identified the primary danger here. I keep wiggling the air filter and eventually the rubber cuff just slips off one end and that end is loose. There is no connecting snap. It doesn't screw in. The flexible sleeves themselves form the connection between the filter and the line it is inserted in. It's not high pressure, and it's just air, so that makes sense. I wiggle the other end out and ready the replacement, taking the rubber caps off the end and entering today's date in the space provided on the part. It's not too hard to wiggle it back into the same space, and I get the various clamps and zip-ties into place without too much damage to my forearms. I leave the panel open for inspection and move to the other side.

This one has a different screw-clamp to zip-tie ratio, but is basically the same. The arrow is pointing the same way if you think of it as "to the right" but the opposite way if you think of that as "toward the wingtip." I wasn't expecting that. I mark the arrow direction on the airplane again and then notice that the date marked on the installed air filter is only three months in the past. I ask if I should leave it, and he says yes.

My next task is removal and replacement of the brake pads on the left main. I've done this one before. It's easy to loosen the bolts to release the metal plates with the pads on them, then I have to pry the old brake pads off and get the new ones to jam in properly. I reassemble the brake, but there is now a hydraulic leak evident. They suspect that the o-ring has been cut? I don't get a clear answer from them as to whether this is on account of some error on my part, which means I suspect it is. If something goes wrong completely unrelated to what the pilot is doing, the AMEs typically pretend to give her hell for it. But I suspect they aren't chewing me out for this because it really is something I did, but I did it under their supervision so it's their fault. I know about that. If the FO makes an error, it is the captain who takes the blame.

We go for lunch, and when we return it's still leaking, so they add o-rings to the parts order. I take the other one apart more carefully. The brake pads are held against the plate by friction around tiny posts, and one of the AMEs shows me how to mushroom the posts when the pads fit too loosely. If it wiggles when it's in place, it's too loose. I have to hammer the post with a spike to spread it out a bit. He laughs at me for my tentative hammering. The pad wiggles, still wiggles, I keep hammering on it, and then I manage to spread it too much. I'm honestly not trying to get them to send me away. Now we need another brake rivet. The guys are looking around the hangar for this small, common part and then we all laugh as we remember that this is a helicopter repair hangar. Helicopters don't have brakes. (Cue everyone telling me the exceptions, in the comments). The helicopters that normally inhabit this hangar on don't have retractable landing gear, either, so we're also missing a hydraulic cart. The professional manages to fix the brake plate and we get that reassembled.

My next task--you'd really think they'd find something disgusting and foolproof for me now--is to replace the left side alternate air cable. The cable runs from a push-pull knob on the cockpit control panel out to the door in the engine that I can open up to admit combustion air, should the primary air intake become blocked. I have never had to use this for the safety of the flight, only ever tested it, or opened it when it was on an emergency checklist, but blocked air intake has never given me grief. Nevertheless it has to function for the airplane to be flyable. It works, but there is wear in the cable. Following vague instructions, I go into the cockpit and under the dashboard with a flashlight. I identify the cable that comes out from behind the left alternate air knob and start to follow it. It goes under a panel, so I remove that panel, which requires me to remove the scuff-plate for the pilot's feet, which involves crawling under the dashboard and removing the carpet in the cockpit, which is filthy. I pull out the seats, and get to work. After a geologic era or so or so of cramped awkward frustration with small spaces, cut hands, and stripped screws, I ask, "Don't you guys start to hate airplanes?" They're enjoying my misery, not so much just to see me suffer, but because they're seeing that I'm appreciating the difficulty of the work they do.

This is actually a little bit fun for me because there is pride in accomplishment and the sparkly feeling of new brain connections being formed as I solve a problem I haven't been exposed to before, and learn new things. I realize now that AMEs aren't robots programmed with the instructions on how to fix airplanes. They have the meta-knowledge of how to work out how to fix them. That's why my instructions aren't "open panel X and remove cable Y" but "look around and figure out where cable Y goes, and how to remove it." The experienced guys of course have a better idea than I do of where the cable is going to go and how it will be attached, but they can be just as surprised. I've exposed all of its treacherous path through the airframe and we'll pull it through tomorrow.

We leave the hangar at 7 p.m. and go back to the hotel to shower and have supper, then do a Wal-Mart run for shop towels. I also get a dirt cheap sweatshirt (made in Cambodia!) to get grubby in and an equally disposable t-shirt with a sassy slogan. It's marked as my size so I didn't try it on, but it turns out to be too small, which may be suited to my mission tomorrow morning to persuade someone to lend us a hydraulic cart. Clothing has no influence on aircraft cabling, but is there anything a woman in a tight t-shirt can't borrow from a hangar full of men?

Breakfast will be at seven tomorrow.

Simple Maintenance Ferry

I wake up to fog and low cloud, the same thing that has delayed departure for the last few days. I'll call the client about that after I get ready. Of course the phone rings while I'm in the shower. I answer it wet, discuss the weather, then finish my shower. The decision has been made: no mission this morning, so I'll fly south for maintenance. There are a few more hours on the airplane than needed to get to the maintenance facility, but not enough to be worth waiting around for. I pack up my gear, stashing some of it in my co-worker's room, eat breakfast, and then dally. The visibility improves, but we continue with low cloud and misery. Thunderstorms are forecast later, but there's a respite in the middle of the day that should get me there.

I spend all day refreshing the weather reports and forecasts. I need 2000', considering terrain. (The HSI has been removed now and sent somewhere for evaluation, so we're still not IFR). The weather is giving me mostly 1500' broken. There are some breaks here, but the general forecast is still low overcast with drizzle. I don't want to get stuck out there in a valley I can't escape. The maintenance crew is there waiting, but I'm not going if it's not safe. It's just maintenance.

The weather is good at destination, but still marginal for departure here, with mostly uninhabited rough terrain in the middle. There's an unusual patch on the graphical area forecast, a little round spot only a hundred kilometres or so in diameter in which it is forecast to be "30BKN50 P6SM PTCHY 1-4SM BR CIGS XNTSV CIGS 4-10 AGL. CIGS AND VIS BECMG LCL BY 20Z." The GFA doesn't usually forecast phenomena that limited, and the terrain doesn't suggest a reason for the little spot of doom. Weird. Satellite views are unrevealing, because there are higher clouds.

The weather here still hasn't improved as originally forecast. Instead the periods of poor weather have kind of merged in the new forecast. So it's still calling for improvement at 20Z, as FM252000 01006KT P6SM SCT025 BKN050 which would be great: scattered 2500' good to go, except that those groups are immediately followed by TEMPO 2520/2606 P6SM -SHRA BKN020 PROB30 2521/2604 VRB15G25KT 5SM TSRA BR BKN020CB FM260600 34006KT P6SM SCT007 OVC015 TEMPO 2606/2607 3SM BR OVC007 , warning that for the same time period, I can expect on-again off-again 2000' in rain--still acceptable for the flight--with a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms. Note that this forecast is only for the airport, there's a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms at the airport, but close to a hundred percent chance that there will be thunderstorms somewhere along the route. I have to integrate the station forecasts with the GFA and the progress visible on the successive satellite images in order to build a forecast for the route. The thunderstorms are building ahead of a front that is coming from the west, bringing the worse weather. After 06Z the weather is forecast to be unflyable with temporary periods of insanely unflyable. But before that front arrives, if my airport is clear and the destination is clear, I can go around thunderstorms. The GFA is calling for only isolated thunderstorms, and the satellite shows only a few buildups, still well off to the west. Maybe this will work.

Twenty zulu comes and goes but the ceiling never got as high as 2000'. What I got was:

METAR 252300Z 34004KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 BKN090 13/08 A2990 RMK SC6SC1AC2 SLP136
SPECI 252240Z 31003KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 RMK SC6SC1
METAR 252200Z 35003KT 10SM -DZ OVC015 13/07 A2992 RMK SC8 SLP141
METAR 252100Z 31006KT 10SM -DZ OVC012 13/07 A2993 RMK SC8 CIG RAG SLP145

So I go for dinner, eat, pay and return. My hotel card key has finally stopped working. I go back downstairs to the desk, and get an escort to let me into my room. They still don't know when the new card encoder will arrive. It has been shipped from Texas, which probably means it was at the Canadian border in a day and then will sit there for a week before getting lost entirely on its way this far north.

The good news is that the weather has cleared. There are now a very few clouds at 2500' and a scattered layer at 4000'. The line of thunderstorms is moving very slowly from the west, they are behind schedule and satellite imagery shows one lousy cell heading towards my track. The destination is forecast wide open for most of the night. Awesome.

I get a ride to the airport, preflight, run up, and text my flight follower and maintenance guys that I'll be at destination in an hour. There are a couple of hours left until nightfall and the trip should take only one of them, but I put my nav lights on anyway. They may help someone see me. I take off and turn southeast at 3500'.

It's raining a bit, so I put the pitot heats on. It's pretty gloomy outside. I put the instrument lights on too, and make sure I'm not wearing my sunglasses. You wouldn't believe how often that happens, that I'm peering through miserable weather and then realize it would look a lot better without sunglasses. But I don't have them on now. My altitude is good. My route keeps me out of the mountains and I have the terrain warning mode on the GPS on. The light that is supposed to illuminate the #2 VOR is flashing on and off. I'm not using the VOR, but I can't turn off the light without turning off other lights that I'm using. Something else to be fixed.

It's raining harder. The forward visibility is not so great, but it's not like there is anything to see out here. In cruise, if the visibility is less than five miles, I can't see anything ahead of my airplane anyway, because the nose is in the way, so I check to the sides to make sure I'm not in cloud. I'm not. It's just raining. Whatever. Life in the sky.

I double check that the radio frequency is 126.7 in preparation to make a position report and check for other low level traffic in the area. It's dark enough that the flashing nav radio is starting to irritate me. The comm frequency is correct, but there's a burst of static before I can transmit. I hate that interference sound when two people are transmitting at the same time and all you hear is scratching and squealing. I do what I usually do in that circumstance and tune the radio to another frequency for a a moment, to let the transmission conflict pass. There's static on the other frequency, click, click ... static on multiple frequencies. Wait a moment ... getting dark fast ... really dark, considering it's an hour before sunset, , raining harder, annoying flashing and static on all frequencies? Hey kids, what is big and dark and full of rain and electricity?

Shit, I've just flown into that thunderstorm cell I was planning to fly around. I didn't see it coming, the stratus fractus below and the 4000' stratus layer hid the obvious shape, and my expectation of poor visibility in rain below the stratus allowed me to ignore the other signs. The wisdom is that if you are forced to fly through a thunderstorm, you lower your seat, and crank the cockpit lights way up so you're not blinded by the flash of the lightning. They also say don't turn around, but that is so as not to stress the airframe in turbulence and I'm not in turbulence, nor in an up or downdraft. Altitude is steady. I know it's worse ahead of me than behind me. There is high terrain to the west, so I choose to turn left. It's a big cell or group of cells and I'm getting the heavy rain, but not the downdraft. I can see the lightning right ahead of me as I start the turn. Yeah, don't want to go there. It's dark, dark like night, even though it's an hour and half until nightfall. I do the textbook one-eighty prescribed to pilots to get away from bad things and then I fly straight and wait to get out of there. I can see the lightning flashes behind me even though peripheral vision isn't supposed to work that way. I guess it comes in through the side windows and illumnates the whole plane. This is a lot of lightning. When the sky goes back to the colour it should be this time of evening, I head east.

Did I blindly fly into the one cell in three hundred kilometres, or is there something more developing than I thought? It looks good both north and east now. I fly a bit further east and then the southern sky looks like sky, too. That's a big fricking cell. Idiot.

I'm literally halfway from origin to destination. I try to call flight services but no joy. The forecast for the destination was much better than the continuing forecast for my originating airport. I finish the big detour and continue south. I'm going to be twenty minutes late on my eta, maybe thirty. Yes, that was a big detour. About 50 nautical miles from the destination I manage to raise the FSS and give them my amended eta. I'm not on a Nav Canada flight plan, but I tell them that they may get a call from my flight follower looking for me. After a few tries I manage to get a text off to the people waiting for me at the hangar, too. I'm not sure it went through. I'll get there when I get there.

A bit later, I call flight services at the destination with a position report and ETA. They issue me a transponder code. "Hey," I ask them, "When did you guys get radar?" Last time I was here it was with a comm failure, and it would have been nice to squawk 7600 and get some attention, instead of just flying in triangles and being ignored. Apparently they have had radar for almost a year. That's the problem with being always on the move. You think you're familiar, but you don't know what's going on. They give me a convenient runway and I ask for taxi directions to the named hangar.

I miss the turnoff and have to do a one-eighty on the taxiway. It's not a really well-lit apron and there is a little slope with grass growing through cracks in the pavement. It's really easy to taxi into a ditch at an unfamiliar airport. Even on the apron, I don't know about its level of maintenance. I'm concerned about taxiing into a hole, so I go very gingerly. I stop on the taxiway in front of what I think is the hangar and call on my cellphone to say that I'm here. The lights go on inside the hangar, so I picked the right one. I shut down and call my flight follower. He was worried about me, but hadn't called the FSS yet, so didn't get my revised eta. "Yeah, sorry. I had to go around thunderstorms, and then I couldn't find the right hangar."

The guy who brought the hangar key gets a tug and tows the airplane in. We quickly drain the oil and I unload my gear while I listen to the two AMEs discussing with fervour the work that is to be done. It's a pretty nice hangar, but lacks some of the equipment they had been promised.

We all go to the hotel, and agree to meet for breakfast at eight.

Posting Process

The plan is to go south for maintenance either today after my flight or tomorrow morning, depending on the weather, and on last minute whims of the client, owner and airplane. This time it will be my turn to go slightly further south for a few days. I understand that there is more than one street at the place we're getting the maintenance done. I look forward to that, for sure. Or maybe I'm just going insane. You know the old Dickens line about income and expenditure and pounds sixpence and happiness or misery? There's something similar to do with pilots, being in the field, having enough to eat and going insane. Six weeks consecutive weeks in is around the tipping point for insanity for me these days.

Let me explain my blogging process: I take notes during the day--on my OFP, in a notebook, on the back of the box the brake pads came in, on anything that will hold the ink, and by taking photos just so I remember the thing I want to blog about. I copy the notes into a notepad file. I used to have a different notepad file for every day, but now I only start a new one every month. It's easier to ensure continuity between blog entries, refer back to things, and make sure I've covered everything when they're all in one place and I don't have to keep opening and closing files to check if I mentioned the hotel key problem or the broken TV yet.

When I have more time, I tweak the notes into a usable post with raw html tags, notations like e' and [photo] or [foxeatingcat.jpg] where I want non ASCII characters and photos. When I have both time and Internet access, I copy paste the text to the blog, make up a title, and then upload the photos and try to remember to expand the special characters. Let me know if I forget one or the other.

I assign each upload the next available date. I leave some gaps so I don't have to move EVERYTHING if I want to put in a more timely posting, and so that the already written entries last longer if I get busy and can't blog. It's better to have one post every two days reliably for two weeks, then to have a week of posts every day then nothing for a week. If there's breaking news I drop it in the nearest open space, moving posts around to get it sooner, if I can do so without unduly breaking up a narrative arc. Sometimes there is a post that I know in advance should go on a particular day: a holiday or date significant to the post, so those go in on those dates and I have to be careful not to accidentally move them as I shuffle things around.

Two or three days, occasionally get as much as a month ahead with queued posts. This summer I fell three months behind turning my notes into posts, then got lazy and didn't write them up as soon as I had a break.

This is the long way of saying that I have no idea what I did today, but it must have involved flying, because the next day I took the airplane to maintenance, and that was a memorable day, so I'll make you wait for it.

That's It: I'm Making a Tag

I leave the phone on again, but wake up at eight anyway, and there's no text message. Why isn't there a message? They should have taken off at least an hour ago. The weather report shows that there was fog for a few hours, but it looks clear now. I have a shower and then when I get out I hear an airplane take off. It sounds like ours. The first time someone told me they could recognize their airplane by the sound I thought they were nuts, and even still I don't really trust myself when I think I hear our airplane. Besides, there was no text message announcing the impending take off. And then in comes the text message. They'll be back in six and a half hours, bringing my turn around about three p.m. again.

Unless they're back early, which they are. The weather turned bad. So it's the three of us at lunch again. Being silly people again. This time it's just the pilots making wild free association on wide-ranging topics. The AME warns us that we're at risk of having our heads explode. The other pilot confesses to a retirement plan involving winning at Jeopardy. The AME isn't stupid either. He just has a dumb guy act, because he's so smart he knows that most places there is a stigma associated with being the smart one. I think it's gradually dawning on him that he can be himself here and he won't stick out as being either too smart or too weird.

He mentions that while he was working at the hangar after the flight today he witnessed a crane migration. Apparently there's some kind of crane that comes through here by the hundreds. One of the other mechanics on the field had told him about it, and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. They're all going south to eat yummy American crops for the winter and then they'll come back in the spring to mate and have their chicks. chicks? Do cranes have chicks? Don't all birds have chicks? No, swans have cygnets, and geese have goslings. But geese are just weird. They don't even have flocks, they have gaggles. Similarly, we insist, you have one moose, multiple meese, and their little offspring are called moslings. Also if they fly in a group, that's called a maggle. Oh wait, aren't geese just a gaggle on the ground and a skein in the air?

The AME looks now like he's ready to cause some head explosions if we don't stop it. At least he has that well-lubricated waitress from the other day to distract him. "Humans," I mention, "are the only animal I can think of that use mammary glands in mating displays." The other pilot nods while the AME asks us what the hell we are talking about. "BOOBS" we chorus in stereo.

When we get back to the rooms the other pilot discovers that her door card key no longer works. I let her in through my room, and it's just as well, because it turns out that the hotel's card coding machine is broken and they can't fix cards after they stop working. There's a new one on order from Texas, but for now, everyone who doesn't have a working card has to get an escort to their room.

I go up to the grocery store for more lunch and snack foods, and to replenish my chocolate supply. They have premium chili chocolate (thank you to the reader who introduced me to that stuff) but I notice that the bars on the shelf are up to six months bast their best before date. That's not even a northern thing. You see that all the time if you check carefully. Stores think they can get away with it because a lot of people don't check the expiration date on their chocolate. But if you're going to pay $3.50 for 100 grams of premium chocolate, there's no reason for it not to be fresh. I throw all the expired bars in a basket and take them up to the front. Maybe if they're lucky the staff will get to eat them.

It appears from my notes that I settled for Oreos. I note from the package information that twelve and a half Oreos will provide the daily recommended allowance of iron for an adult. Also, they claim two cookies constitute a "serving." Anyone knows that a single serving of Oreos is a whole row. I think I'll have a second serving.

Rivers, Mountains, and Cuuuute Baby Animals

I'm woken up by a text message on my telephone. Of course we don't fly for days and I do it all right, and then the one day I forget to turn off my phone before going to sleep we do fly, so I'm woken up by the message that I should have gotten after I woke up and turned on my phone. No great harm done: it's 8 a.m. already. Yeah, I slept past eight on a working day. It's my job, so I can work late if need be.

Around three p.m. it's my turn to actually do my job. It's so exciting. I get to fly an airplane. Water, headset, snacks, emergency supplies, checklists and jump in the customer's truck to go out to the airport. The other flight has already landed but the engines are still turning as they finish shutting down the computers. The fuellers here are good. They understand our operation and have good communication, so they are right there as soon as the engines stop turning, fill us up and then my coworker pays for both loads of fuel together as I start the engines anew. Everything is warm and we haven't forgotten how to do our jobs so we taxi out. I follow the little wiggle in the taxi way that is designed to take me around the end of the tails of the airliners parked at the terminal, even though there aren't any parked there. I always follow the taxi centrelines.

Silent self brief before take-off, notify the FSS that I'm taking the runway, position, power, airspeed, rotate, liftoff, climb rate, airspeed, brakes, gear up, lights out, climb speed, after takeoff checks, and into the weird ballet that starts one of our missions. Today's mission takes us out over a winding river, up its sloping bank to some jagged hills and then over an almost vertical escarpment into another valley. The escarpment curves towards the valley and its lip slopes down from north to south. It's a challenge to put the airplane just where it needs to be on each pass, while maintaining the assigned speed.

It's a great flight, with clear weather for a change, but I forgot to take any pictures until after landing. After I called for fuel and we drove away I tried to get a shot of the full moon. I forgot to turn off the flash on the first attempt, however, and that one zap of the flash killed the battery. I had a spare in my bag, but I didn't want to ask the driver to wait while I switched batteries and tried again to capture the drama of the evening in a tiny five year old digital camera. I'll have to just tell you about it.

What appeared to be a completely full moon has already risen to at least thirty degrees above the horizon while across the sky the sun was just touching the northwest horizon, sunset still a half hour away. That's not the way they described the relationship between the full moonrise and sunset in science class, but then in kindergarten they taught us that the sun rises and sets daily. I love the north.

I love in general when nature doesn't seem to conform to its stereotypes. Like these marvellous shots of baby cheetahs playing with a baby impala. If the game eventually got rough and they killed it, the photographer either didn't capture that, or chose to leave those shots out of the series. I imagine either mother turning up and giving her offspring hell for hanging with the wrong crowd.

For the Memory Bank

Do we fly today? No, of course we don't fly today. We are pilots in the north with winter approaching, and the clients dictate where we stay. We go together for brunch at the landmark hotel in town. Not a Landmark Hotel, just a hotel that's a landmark. It doesn't take much to be a landmark in a town that has one business street. The hotel has been there for fifty years or so without burning down, so it's a landmark.

We look at the menu then all have the buffet. It's edible. A change from the free waffles and bagels at the hotel. A loop on the TV goes through adverse weather in Nova Scotia, childcare options in Winnipeg, and a seeming serious documentary on how to win the lottery. I believe the trick was to buy tickets. When we realized that it had looped around it was time to go home.

We were all laughing as we walked back to the hotel. It started with some silly thing, joking about why the mechanic's hotel room lacked a shower curtain. I'm not going to say it, but come on, in the comments guys, what's the first reason that comes to mind for someone to remove a hotel shower curtain? So we're laughing and walking along. Although the weather is still not suitable for work, lots of low cloud bases, it's scattered cumulus and sunshine filters through. It's a beautiful day for walking down the street. It's just a silly moment with co-workers, but it's one of those things that I want in my memory vault in twenty years, along with the images of snow-capped mountain ranges and the pristine lakes that no one ever sees without an airplane.

After we get back to the hotel, a big dark thunder cloud moves in and makes it look like evening. Rain pounds the hotel. Then it passes and we're back to sun with scattered scud.

Maybe tomorrow we'll go flying.

Do I Need a "Boobs" Tag?

There's a text on my phone asking me if the weather is "flyable." I go to the window and assess. It looks low, almost too low to get in and about six-eighths sky cover, broken. The recent METARs call it a seven to eight-hundred foot ceiling and seven-eighths broken. It's definitely improving, but hasn't broken open yet. I pass on what I know. It's funny how you can look at weather reports all day, but you like to hear from a pilot what they see.

The weather continues to improve, and soon there's a knock at the door. I go and open it, but there's no one there. I look left and right down the hallway. Often in a hotel when someone knocks on the next door room door it sounds like it's on my door. But there's no one knocking on either side door. I'm just about to close my door and write it off as my imagination when my co-worker's voice says, "Wrong door." She's in the adjacent room to mine and she's knocking on the connecting door.

This is awesome, not just for silly jokes and turning our two rooms into one big party suite, but because when I open the connecting door I see that it's constructed so there is a separate door on each side of the connecting doorframe. There's a gap between the two doors where we can leave the aircraft key, the journey log, secret messages, anything we want to pass between each other without having to wake each other up. Nice. Normally we either try to fit the stuff under the hotel room door or leave it at the front desk for each other. It also means I don't have to get dressed again if I forget to pass the key on to my sleeping co-worker before getting ready for bed. And if we don't fly for a couple of days we don't have to keep passing the stuff back and forth. We can just leave it in the connecting compartment.

We leave the connection unlocked then collect our aircraft mechanic and all go out for dinner. One of the waitresses has taken considerable effort in displaying about as much of two of her body parts as you can without being arrested. We all conclude that if someone is going to that much effort to show you something it would be rude not to look. So we look, and discuss whether it's baby oil or sunblock that makes them glisten so. Does she have glitter on them? Who does that? Have I been in the field too long? Yes.

National Opt-Out Day

As the use of whole-body imaging scanners increases at airport security checkpoints in the US, so does public objection to the technology. Voiced opposition is a combination of concern about the radiation exposure, objection to being seen virtually naked (and to the possibility of the resulting images being disseminated), and defence of the American "fourth amendment" which protects citizens from unreasonable searches.

There are two technologies being deployed, backscatter x-rays and millimetre-wave scanners. They both produce similar resolution images using different technologies. The US FDA says that passing through a TSA backscatter x-ray scanner delivers radiation equivalent to two minutes of airline flight or 42 minutes of everyday living. Other sources disagree on whether the effect is proportional.

The millimeter wave is electromagnetic radiation at the extreme high frequency end of the radio band. The waves are transmitted simultaneously from two antennas that rotate around the body of the person being screened. The reflected energy is detected and analyzed into a three-dimensional image. The millimetre waves have not been demonstrated to cause any health effects, but the technology is new and this study suggests that terahertz radiation may affect DNA.

There are not yet enough scanners to make them the standard. At checkpoints where the new scanners have been installed, selected passengers are asked to pass through them, with the option of declining the scanner and submitting instead to a thorough manual search, including (through clothing) the genital and breast areas. It certainly makes for good slogans. One way or another, the TSA is going to examine your junk. It's the porno scanners versus the grope search. If you want to get on an airplane, the choice is between having them look at your body or feel it. Excepting Islamic nations, the US has one of the most body-private cultures I know of, and this is where people are starting to draw the line.

A citizen has made a call for people to join in a national Opt Out Day, refusing the scanners and requesting the manual pat down. It's not that the organizers believe that the manual search is less invasive, but that they want opter-outers to receive their pat down in public so that occasional or unthinking travellers can see the extent of the examination. They have chosen November 24th because it is a day when many infrequent travellers who may not be familiar with all the new regulations are in the airports and then afterwards everyone will sit down with their families and perhaps make the airport experience, and whether it has gone too far, part of their family discussion. The action may impede efficient movement on one of the busiest air travel days in the US, but on the other hand if many people are refusing the scanners, then perhaps it leaves the scanners free as a fast lane for those not participating in the protest. Perhaps some of my readers will report back on what it was like. And to my American readers, whether you celebrate or mourn that day, I give you my best wishes for you and your family.

Airline pilots are especially incensed by the intrusion. I haven't been subjected to either type of scanner or the enhanced search yet, but it is inevitable with my travel pattern. I suppose I'll try each way at least once, and probably stick with the enhanced search. I usually prefer human contact over being shut up alone in a box. I have done only momentary research on the topic, but whenever something is proclaimed safe for humans, I remember hearing that in the 1950s they had x-ray machines in shoe stores so you could see how well your toes fit inside the shoes.

If you prefer your radiation in the visible spectrum and to see underwater creatures over blurrily naked Americans, http://www.backscatter.com offers some beautiful images, and the gear used to photograph them.

What We Train For

I'm way too late to the party to comment much on the uncontained engine failure on Qantas flight 32 on November 5th, but I wanted to share with you the cabin PA the captain made during the incident. I'm always interested in what makes these sound frightening or reassuring, and I think this captain did a very good job of this minor detail of the emergency handling, as well as the major job of putting the airplane back on the ground efficiently. They had some hard decisions to make.

The issue that has forced the grounding of Qantas' entire fleet of A380, as you'll know if you've been following the story, is not so much an Airbus problem as a Rolls-Royce problem. The engine failed so spectacularly that Rolls Royce has recalled forty of its Trent 900 engines worldwide, and the incident airframe may be a write-off. Debris from the engine damaged the wing spar and it's not certain how that might be repaired or replaced in this new, composite aircraft. Christine Negroni drew my attention to and summarizes a power point presentation on the extent of the damage, blogged by Ben Sandilands.