Counting to Ten

My airplane is in the hangar for scheduled maintenance. I flew it here in the dark, with a slight tailwind that brought me in 0.2 h before the maintenance was due, rather than 0.1 before as I had planned. (The 0.1 early was of course planned in case the wind or ATC situation went the other way. I've been here before, and because this is a hundred hour (performed every hundred hours, not taking a hundred hours, but longer than the regular oil-and-filter-change) inspection.

When I arrived I parked outside the maintenance hangar and phoned the mechanic for a ride. Company has rented hangar space and flown one of our mechanics down to do the work, so we have someone familiar working on the airplane, and we're not paying the local shop rate for a simple oil change. I hauled my stuff up to the airfield gate and discovered it was locked, even from the airside. The plate where the combination to get back in would usually be written instructs me to call airfield security to get through, from either side. Both they and my ride arrived quickly and I was allowed out.

Next morning at the hangar they're laughing at my list of snags. Most of it is label-related: the little plastic cover over the emergency exit handle has become brittle from time and sun exposure and cracked into many pieces. The cover isn't essential, but I suspect the exit operation instructions on it are legally required. There are several circuit breakers with illegible labels, and one of the tanks has lost the label declaring its fuel type and capacity. They point me at an electronic label maker and tell me to go for it.

This appears to be one of the areas in which I am mentally arrested at the age of ten. I love making labels. The label machine allows me to change the height and width of the letters independently, print up to four lines of text on one strip of label tape, and choose black or white letters on black, white or clear label tape. I label everything. Now I don't have to squint through scratches to identify my CBs, and I no longer have two radios labelled "Com 1."

I also remove the pilot's seat from the airplane. This is much like one of those twisted wire puzzles, at first appearing completely impossible, without turning off the physical existence of one of the wooden bulkheads. When finally I twist it the right way and get it out of the cockpit, I wonder if I'll ever be able to get it back in. The co-pilot's seat comes out more easily and then three cents (two Canadian, one U.S.), several pistachio shells (definitely my chief pilot's), and assorted small fasteners are no problem to remove. I vacuum the interior of the plane, and am contemplating washing the bits that still have cowls on when I'm called to do another job. They explain my task.

An oil drum has been rolled over next to the airplane on casters, and it is fitted with a hand pump. The outlet for the pump is inserted into the crankcase. To refill the crankcase with clean oil, I should turn the crank handle on the pump backwards until it stops, then turn it forward until it stops again, from stop to stop is about two and a half turns of the handle and equals one quart of oil. I have to add eleven quarts of oil to each engine.

"Wow," I tease our mechanic. "I am going to tell all my friends about the time a mechanic trusted a pilot with a task that involved counting past ten!"

We're just about through the inspection checklist when everything grinds to a halt. An emergency airworthiness directive came out a few weeks ago for this airplane. It passed on initial inspection, but somehow in the last fifty hours, the plug has become out of tolerance. The airplane fails the test and is now grounded until the part can be replaced. It looks fine to the naked eye: the threads seem undamaged and there are only a few nicks and scratches. But a micrometer shows a different story. I could experience a power loss if I go on flying with this one.

While the replacement part is couriered in, we get an avionics tech to come and have a look at a transponder that ATC reports as intermittent, after several hours of flight. It's a KT76, exactly the same model that died on me in Florida last year. I hope it won't be as expensive as that one was. The tech goes into my avionics bay and sets up test equipment that looks like something Mr. Spock would use to analyze zeta radiation density for Captain Kirk. It tells the tech that the transponder is putting out the right power, and has some frequency drift, but likely not enough to produce the problem. He traces the problem to an antenna the length of my finger and the diameter of a chopstick. It needs replacing, and--this is amazing--he has one, and it only costs $160. In aviation maintenance budget terms, that's equivalent to the pennies I found wedged in the seat rails.

Even more amazing, the antenna replacement solves the problem, and ATC is one again happy with my blips.

Traffic Is ...

While I'm flying in California, a hard-working flight follower tells me that "Traffic is an əlɐɹ'əs, one o'clock five miles east to west." I report "Looking," but the truth is I'm not sure what an Elaris, or Alaras or Ayloras is. I've never heard of it. From the calls that it has been making, I am guessing that the pilot is working on his initial IFR rating. And there's a bunch of them in the airspace, with similar tail numbers, so they must be a flying school fleet. I must be somewhere in between a light sport plane and a trainer twin.

I go online after landing to look for likely candidates. I find Alaris Aviation, but they are a used aircraft broker, not a manufacturer. Elaris Designs makes classy sweaters. Aha, I score with Alarus. It's an all-metal, low wing, single. It has sprung steel landing gear, like a Cessna, in the tricycle configuration, but it looks a little like a Tripacer, with the mains further forward proportionally than I expect. That must be truly the case, as it includes a tail skid with shock absorbers, something I've never seen on an aircraft part that is not supposed to contact the ground on landing.

It cruises at 95 to 100 knots, so it's purely a trainer. I think someone who wanted an airplane for personal use would want one either faster or that had some kind of history or interesting reason to be slow.

Anyone ever flown one of these?

I'M BLOGGING FROM THE PLANE

REALLY. APOLOGIES FOR SHORT. BUSY. #END

-------------------------------------------------------
From: FLT_XXXX 04-May-2008 19:15 UTC
N30 04.192 W084 28.314
625m (2050ft), 245 km/h (152 mph), 272 T

U-Turns

I just want to say that I love my coworkers. I avoid blogging about them because I don't have the right to tell other people's stories without their permission. I am willing to suffer--or at least to get into a big snit about--the consequences, of readers completely misinterpreting what I write about myself, but I don't want to visit that upon my co-workers, even anonymously. That said, here's a slice of life after meeting up with the gang.

As the pilot, I'm coming on shift to relieve one of the pilots who is already on the job. There's a lot of work to do here, so there are already two pilots down here, and four technical specialists, and they've been working fourteen hour days for two weeks. They're all a little crazy, but today they finished early, that is to say around six p.m., while the restaurants are still open, and tomorrow a later start is planned. They've seized the opportunity to go somewhere that isn't Denny's for dinner. (Denny's is a North American restaurant with supremely ordinary American food; its only virtue is that it's open twenty-four hours a day).

We all head towards two rental vehicles in order to play follow-the-leader towards the chosen restaurant. I get in the back of the second vehicle and as the co-worker who will be driving gets in, she tells the driver of the lead vehicle, "Okay, but no U-turns and no cutting across three lanes of traffic to turn left from the curb lane on a red light!" That sounds like a reasonable request. I buckle up, imagining that she is exaggerating for humour some previous navigational gaffe by the guy driving the other vehicle.

We go several blocks, at a speed not entirely inconsistent with local speed limits, and then suddenly the vehicle ahead does a U-turn in the middle of the block and turns right into the parking lot of a "Center for Digestive Diseases." Those in our vehicle are agreed on the unsuitability of this as a place to eat dinner, but before we need convey our veto to the lead vehicle, it circles the parking lot and turns back onto the street, initially in the curb lane, but then with a single flash of the turn indicator, he crosses three lanes of traffic and turns left. I look at the others for some confirmation that he only did that to tick off our driver. Deliberate defiance of her stipulation, I guess. But no, this is the way the drive goes. There's another U-turn, more turns, both left and right from the wrong lane, and another circuit of a parking lot.

We finally park at the restaurant. The driver denies responsibility, claiming that the maneuvers were all specified to him by the navigator. The navigator blames the GPS unit. We all eat dinner. It is good.

In defence of the driver and navigator, U-turns are acceptable, legal and normal in this town. Many times when a light turns green everyone who was stopped at the light makes a U-turn. It's a rare town in Canada that allows them and we all think they are crazy manoevers. I can't defend the lane changes though. They were bizarre.

Edit in response to a question:

A U-turn is a procedure by which a driver going down a street maneuvers the vehicle such that it is going the opposite direction down the street, without actually leaving that street during the procedure. If the street is wide enough or the turning radius of the vehicle is tight enough, this can be accomplished in one continuous turn resembling the letter U. In the Canadian cities where I have lived, and the cities where my coworkers live, this is not normal driving behaviour. People do it, but not without checking carefully for police as well as traffic. If you don't like your direction of travel, you have to leave the street and reenter it, perhaps by going around the block, or turning into a parking lot.

Forgetting, Not Breaking

Looks like de Havilland is off the hook for this one. I spoke to a guy on the ramp whose girlfriend works in the tower, and it turns out the gear didn't collapse at all. They just forgot to put it down. The airplane in the picture is partly supported by a now-mangled radar dome on its belly. He also confirmed that no one was injured.

I taxied by it today but didn't get a good shot, as clearance delivery called me back with my transponder code right at that moment. The props, as you could see if I had a cleaner side window, are pretty chewed up, but the fuselage appears to have been somewhat "protected" by the ridiculously expensive radar dome, the wreckage of which must have been removed. I couldn't see wing damage from my vantage point.

Poor pilots. I was thinking as I watched it being swarmed by firetrucks yesterday that that was going to entail a painful amount of paperwork. According the the controller's boyfriend, the tower shares responsibility for the gear up landing. The controllers are supposed to identify extended landing gear and have standard calls to make if they can't see it. I'm not sure I believe him. Long ago Canadian controllers made a "check gear" call to retractable types, and the pilot would acknowledge with "down and locked" or "three green," or the like. The standard joke when the controller accidentally issued that challenge to a fixed gear pilot was "gear down and welded." They stopped doing it officially years ago, but some controllers continued until quite recently, when I believe it was actually banned. Nav Canada, the new tower agency was concerned about liability issues if a pilot thought he could rely on that reminder. I've never heard a "check gear" challenge from a US controller.

I can understand that a controller might feel responsible if an airplane landed gear up on his watch. "I should have seen it!" he might think. But will the FAA controller in question seriously be found at fault for not reminding the pilot to move the wheel-shaped switch to the down position before the flare?

In other news, the airplane I fly is now bigger than a commercial jet, assuming the commercial jet is the one pictured below, a Dayjet Eclipse 500. It has a greater range than I do, but a smaller cabin, smaller payload and smaller engines. (Okay, maybe I'm cheating a bit on the engines. They are physically smaller, though). Hey I wonder if it has a toilet.

I can imagine the passengers squealing, "oh my god, it's so small." Passengers say that about anything. I once overheard someone emphasizing the tininess of a B737 with, "It only has one aisle!" Meh, whatever. My hotel room is huge. It's a suite. I think if you took out the dividing walls you could park my airplane in here. The Eclipse 500, easliy.

Breaking News

Today I am in Tallahassee, Florida. Specifically, sitting in a nice FBO, waiting for a member of the crew. The wonderful staff remember us from our last visit and still seem to like us. I am informed that there are free cookies available, information that gladdens any pilot's heart. Free food plus pilot equals happy.

I stand up to wander over to the cookie distribution area and something catches my eye on the runway. Our eyes take in images constantly, and our brain processes them, but I suspect that the brain doesn't actually pass things on to the conscious mind unless they represent something out of the ordinary, or particularly relevant to us. It's why you didn't hear anything, but your friend says he heard someone call his name. Or at least I like to think that's the reason, not that years of sitting near propellers are taking their toll. At any rate, the part of my brain monitoring peripheral vision reports that there is something distinctly odd on the runway. I pull my attention circuits away from free cookies and onto the runway. There's an airplane there, but sitting at a distinctly odd angle.

I've just witnessed a gear collapse on what looked like a Dash-8. I believe it's the military version, an E-9A, and the locals tell me they use it as an observation and control platform for drones, used as targets for fighter training. The left main gear has failed.

I point it out to FBO staff and can hear, "look at the runway" echoed in the back room. I can also hear silly things like "why is it there?" and "was that there this morning?" and then I can hear fire trucks. The yellowy-green airport firetrucks race out and surround the aircraft. They spray the runway around it with foam. A few minutes later another set of red firetrucks arrives, probably a city fire company, and a few minutes later there's a third set of ladder trucks and an assortment of police cars and other emergency vehicles.

There is no fire evident, and no ambulances arrive, so presumably there were no injuries. We sit around and speculate on whether the airplane will have to be scrapped. Airplanes are sturdy enough for doing what they are supposed to do, but the wing spar isn't designed for balancing on the side like that.

This isn't good news for Bombardier. There's only so many times you can say, "poor maintenance" before you have to admit to poor design. And I picture the military being pretty by-the-book when it comes to maintenance, at least in a training environment. I'm surprised Air Canada Jazz hasn't had one of these collapse, if it really is a weakness of the type. Jazz flies them on long and short routes, and hot and cold and freezing weather, and has done so for years.

I was going to blog this "live-on-the-scene" but I had the pictures uploaded and it all typed in on FBO computer, when the connection died. Before I could investigate why, my crew arrived and it was time to go, so you get it some hours later.

Oh and the cookies were good. They had Smarties in them. Except I guess they were M&Ms, because the Americans don't have Smarties, they think these are Smarties, while Canadians know them as Rockets. There is a historical reason.

This Appears to be a Real Product

The product is astonishing enough; the customer reviews are hilarious.

Crossword Puzzle Pilots

This ad had me in hysterics, because not only am I a pilot, but I like to do crossword puzzles.

It also brings me to a story. Many years ago, before I first decided to become a pilot, I had an office job. And every day before work I would do the New York Times crossword puzzle in my local paper. As the week goes on the puzzles get harder, so on a Thursday or Friday I would usually have some left to do at my coffee break, or lunch. Other people discovered that I did the crossword puzzle and I became the office crossword puzzle finisher. People would call me to get the answers to their crossword puzzles, or sometimes just drop off the crossword for me to fill in the last few pesky words for them.

When I started training to be a pilot I saw how much I had to learn, and how much work ahead I had to do to get the jobs I wanted. I realized that crossword puzzle time and brainpower would be better spent reading From the Ground Up, the Canadian pilot groundschool textbook, or learning the procedures for my airplane. I couldn't bear to throw the crossword puzzles away, though, so I cut them out of the paper each day, and saved them in a file. I thought, "there's probably a lot of waiting around in flying. I'll save these until I'm an airline pilot and then I can do them while I'm waiting for fuel, or catering, or whatever one waits for." The file went into a drawer with other files, the files went into a box, and the box went into storage. In a recent tax-related file clearout, I found the file.

I'm still not an airline pilot, but for one, there's a chance I never will be. I'm just not on the right track, and am loving my job so much that I'm not sure I want to quit it for a less interesting "airline track" job. And doing crossword puzzles would be a silly anti-social thing to do in a multi-person crew environment. And of course any time you're not with your crewmates, you want to eat, sleep, pee or do laundry. There just isn't a right time to do crossword puzzles.

I decided that as a gesture of control over my own fate, to keep my puzzling brain in shape, and because I really like crossword puzzles, I would sit down and do them. and so in a burst of pre-taxes (Canadian taxes aren't due until the end of April) procrastination, I did. It was pretty funny trying to remember the clues relating to long-ago "current" events. But I finished them all and threw them in the recycling.

I've also done my income taxes. (Actually gathered up all the required information and bits of paper and taken them to a professional to do. Unless your taxes are astonishingly simple, the professional can save you more money than she charges in fees, and you don't have to pore over the forms and worry about being sent to jail if you do it wrong). I have even written the required cheque to the Canadian Customs and Revenue agency. The accountant looked at my cheque with great admiration, saying it was the neatest one he'd ever seen. "It looks like a stamp!"

I looked back at it. Apparently filling out the journey log at the end of every day of flying, day in and day out, produces a transferrable skill. I write clear legible numbers. I'm always aware that I'm producing a legal document. And it's taken seriously. I know someone who had to undergo Transport Canada censure and companywide re-education because he had corrected a simple logbook error by scratching it out and initialling the change, instead of signing his full name with the correction.

Replace "Research Paper" with "Blogging"

I'm not dead in a ditch. See here. Also I got a heart rate monitor with a program for the computer for planning my workouts. I never knew knowing how fast my heart was beating could be such fun.

The Bomb Squad May Have My Bag

When I bought new luggage last August to support my constant travel, I tried two different strategies. I bought a big cheap suitcase, on the theory that my suitcases were all going to be destroyed by the airlines and myself anyway, so why pay more. And I paid a bit more for a name-brand rollaboard, to test the theory that paying for a three year warranty would be cheaper than replacing a cheaper suitcase every time it wore out.

It's not a fair head-to-head comparison for the two products (which is why I'm not naming them), because the rollaboard has been on more sidetrips, but the name-brand rollaboard was the first to disintegrate. I went to the manufacturer's website for warranty repair information, and after pawing about in the less accessible corners of the site map, found the address and telephone number of a certified repair shop, and brought the damaged suitcase there.

The warranty in question only covered "manufacturing defects," so the company had the capacity to weasel out of the repairs. The repair shop person looked at my bag and agreed that it had fallen apart at the zipper seam, but had to consult with the manufacturer to determine whether this was an actual defect, or whether this was to be expected of a seven month old bag.

Questioning revealed that the repairs, if not covered by the warranty, would cost more than the bag had. (I didn't buy the really expensive kind, and repairs are expensive). The results still wouldn't be guaranteed, and of course another seam could give out the same way a week later. I don't like to throw things away when they can be reused, but I also don't like to spend too much money on things. I don't plan to pay for repairs if they cost more than the bag. I asked if the bag turns out to be not covered by warranty, were there any options for recycling it?

Yes, I discovered. Anything that could be reused was taken off, and then the remains of the bag--and this is the best part--were given to the dog squad to train luggage-sniffing dogs, and for the bomb squad to practice blowing up unattended bags. Is that cool or what? The remains of bags that don't enjoy that fate can be stripped of all metal, and then the plastic/nylon stuff can be ground up and put back into the plastic recycling stream.

I was only in town for a few days between jobs so I left contact information, warned that I might not be back for a month, and okayed giving the suitcase to the dogs if the manufacturer wouldn't repair it. I still don't know the outcome of that, because they decided they had to ship the bag to the manufacturer for them to decide whether or not its demise was a manufacturing defect. I guess it beats those warranties that cover you "for the life of the product." The repair shop did have some suitcases that were guaranteed, against all damage, for the life of the original purchaser or gift recipient. Tempting. And only five times the price of the original rollaboard. That's about the cost of a three year supply of the cheaper ones.

But luggage or no, the giant wheel of Aviatrix fortune has been spun again and the pointer stopped at ... California. Wow, at this rate I'll be eligible to vote there.

P-I-C Responsibility

This has been kicking around in my drafts folder for a while and an entry on a new-to-me blog gives me reason to finish it. If there is more than one pilot assigned to a flight, one of them is designated pilot-in-command. As pilot-in-command you are given latitude to make decisions. That's what it's about. There is air law to follow, plus you are given a number of manuals and data to help you make those decisions, but most of them, even the laws, give considerable latitude for a pilot to do what is safe in a particular case.

It's not so much that you are required to follow every manual. It's that you are required to not screw up. You can find justification for almost any action in the manual, but so can the company find condemnation. I can honestly never think of an occasion where a colleague got in trouble for violating a rule when no harm (i.e. regulatory action, aircraft damage, complaint, or harm to public image) was done. Right up until it isn't done well, pilots get praised for their ability to land in stiff crosswinds. That's getting the job done.

That's why the captain is paid significantly more than the FO. The captain is the one who approves or vetoes such a decision, whether she is the one at the controls or not. As PIC you know that if you go off the end of the runway, chew up the props, run out of fuel, damage something with jet blast, blow a tire, ding a wingtip, incur a noise complaint, arrive late, divert, or annoy a customer, questions will be asked. If there's an accident, the relevant authorities will go over everything you did with reference to the laws, the SOPs, the AFM, the FDR, the CVR, the instructions given by ATC, the weather, the NOTAMs, the charts and every other recording and piece of paper they can find. And if they find a recommendation or a policy or a memo that you were not following to the letter, you are screwed.

If something beyond your control goes spectacularly wrong, like the gear lever has been moved to the down position, but one of the wheels won't lock down, you're not blamed specifically for that, although you might be accused of not spotting some damage on the preflight inspection.

I can't remember where I grabbed this exchange from. A movie? A TV show?

"You think you have all the answers."

"I'm the captain. That's my job."

Often I think the first officer's job is even harder, and this story (told on someone else's blog) illustrates that well. Of course Sulako beat me to the punch, but I still wanted to link to it. The story was originally on her personal blog and the traffic from here was more than she wanted, so I've taken out the link. See her medevac stories here. Ensuring a safe flight is the responsibility of both pilots, but the no-go decision is harder for the FO. If the FO wants to go, but the captain says "we're not continuing, the ice is too bad," the FO can say, "oh, I didn't think it was that bad," or even "you're a chicken," (with a smile) but has no reason to argue. The FO might be a bit embarrassed and vow to be more diligent at checking the weather next time. But no one really loses face.

Now let it be the captain who wants to go when the FO says the conditions are not suitable. The FO may have to fight for her life to alter that decision. Had there been passengers and injury or death involved in this flight, as there have been in so many before and after it, Dagny would probably have been exonerated. She repeatedly and strenuously objected to the captain's decisions, and finally did override them. But many first officers who have been placed in that position have no descendants. I hope Dagny gets to tell this story to her kids, to teach them to stand up for what they believe in.

Oh and a straw poll: I say "Pee Eye See" but I've heard people refer to "pick-time" in their logbooks. If you are a pilot, please tell me how you pronounce PIC.

Yellowknife Legislature

I have one more non-aviation blog entry to make about Yellowknife. It's such a cool city, and I don't mean that just in the "a half hour walk at -30 give you an awesome ice beard" kind of way. (But that is true. I was there for about a week and most days it was -10, maybe down to -17, not really that cold, because of how dry it was, but one day it dipped to -29. That was cold enough that the moisture in my breath instantly froze white on all the tiny hairs on my face. I looked like an extra from Titanic. Usually it's just guys that get the ice beard, but the temperature, dewpoint and speed I was walking made the perfect storm of supercooled moisture).

I walked up to the Legislature building, out on one of the lakes. Apparently they deliberately built it where the office towers of town were not visible, so that the members of the legislature who are from little communities with no big buildings, just wilderness, could look out on the lake and feel at home.

It's a new building, not built in the time of solid brick and granite and copper roofs like most provincial legislatures. The architects used the shapes of the igloo and the teepee, the traditional homes of the Inuit and Dene people, and a lot of effort went into similar symbolism and tradition with materials and construction details. All the other provinces sent gifts of artwork or fine furniture for the building. It's like Yellowknife is the much younger sibling of the provinces, and they all gave her stuff to help her as she finally moved out on her own.

This is taken in a meeting room upstairs. There was a lot of beautiful artwork in the room, but what I chose to take a picture of here was the ice on the skylight windows. That's all this is: light shining through ice.

Here's a picture of the main council chambers. Note that there is not a government and an opposition like in most of the rest of Canada. Government in the NWT is by consensus. The skin is that of a polar bear that was threatening one of the communities. The member of the legislative assembly for that community shot the bear, and gave it to the council.

I wish every community's problems could be so easily slain, and then laid out on the floor in front of the seats of power. I don't think a rug made from the skins of pimps and drug pushers would be as attractive, though, and it takes more than a good rifle to slay inadequate housing and medical care. And unfortunately even the bears are not such a simple problem. The real problem is not the bears themself but that climate change threatens their food supplies, so that polar bears are ranging further south than ever before, trying to make a living on land instead of ice. A polar-grizzly cross was discovered a couple of years ago, and three starving p olar bears were shot just recently in Deline, well south of their usual range.

Jay Jay the Jet Plane

When you keyword search the TV Guide on "airplanes" you get some weird selections. I will subject you to my latest. Jay Jay the Jet Plane (caution: web page plays voices) is a television programme intended for very young children. Like any kids' show it features bright colours, forcibly cheerful overacting, and simple morals. This one features anthropomorphic aircraft (no pilots, just self-aware airplanes) and little "science and nature moments."

The airplanes look very weird at first, as each has a human face grafted onto the front such that the nose is the radome. The single-engine prop planes even have their propellers right on their noses. The facial features move as the airplanes speak, and even twist a little from side to side. They're almost all conventional fixed gear airplanes, which I suppose is to make their faces turn up as they sit around in the hangar and chat. There's also a little helicopter, a retractable prop twin, and a few others that come to visit from time to time.

My first point of fascination is trying to identify what inspired the features on the various airplanes. The designers obviously had some pictures to work from, but didn't necessarily know what the features they were drawing were. For example, Savanna is a delta wing supersonic jet. She has one engine, mounted in the vertical stabilizer like on a DC10. And she has a little engine-like pod just over where her left ear would be, if she had ears. At first I thought it was an oddly situated APU, and then I noticed that all the airplanes have some sort of vent in that position. (In the cast pictures page sometimes it appears to be over the right side, but they're always on the left in the show: the website designers appear to have flipped the pictures left to right in some places). On the old biplane, and the pink twin jet it's clearly a venturi.

Once the weirdness of the airplanes wears off, you can get to the drinking game. It only needs two rules: drink every time they violate a new air law, or violate the laws of physics during a "science moment."

For example, one of the jet planes, Tracy, decides to go and practice fast flying, to see if she can make a sonic boom. She explicitly selects for this purpose to overfly a national park. The fast flying goes well, until she encounters a tailwind which pushes her supersonic, at which point she tumbles from the sky and ends up stuck on her back like a turtle. No one knows where she's gone, but when they realize no one has seen her in a while, and she doesn't answer the radio, they split up and go to look for her. The supersonic jet is the one who spots her, so elects to make a low pass over the park, such that her sonic boom flips Tracy right side up. Tracy flies home and the mechanic polishes her up good as new.

Are you drunk yet?

You Must Carry Pineapples

Some time ago Air Canada announced that they would no longer accept pets as checked baggage. They weren't cost-effective to carry. They require special handling, cannot tolerate long delays, pose potential for messes, can die from things like cold, stress, heat, or asphyxiation and that brings a lot of negative publicity. Air Canada said, essentially, "We're not accepting pets as checked baggage any more. If you must transport a live animal, do it through our live animal cargo service."

Of course this made many pet owners unhappy, because it costs more in both money and inconvenience to have the pet shipped as cargo, and it probably won't be on the same airplane as the traveller. But if you really want to a) go by Air Canada and b) take your dog, that's the way it works. But apparently it isn't.

The Canadian Transportation Agency has just ruled that Air Canada must begin carrying pets again. I don't get it. If Air Canada declared it was going to stop carrying electric wheelchairs, guide dogs for the blind, or persons of Cree descent, then a regulatory authority should step in. But if Air Canada wants to stop carrying pineapples or charge extra for pink suitcases, aren't they their customers to annoy?

The Canadian charter of rights and freedoms does not provide protection against financial penalty and inconvenience for people who think it would be nice to take their cat to Europe. Service animals were specifically excepted from the ban, so I just don't understand how Air Canada can be forced to accept the risk of carrying a type of baggage that is so easily damaged. They should make smart pet owners continue to send pets via cargo by instituting a high special handling fee, and try to make checking in pets even more inconvenient than checking in regular luggage. Plus they can specify a very broad season for non-carriage due to weather, perhaps if seasonal temperatures at origin, destination or IFR alternate are below freezing, pets are not accepted in checked luggage.

As far as I can tell, Air Canada banned pets in checked luggage because they were not cost effective, considering the volume of normal checked luggage, and because the adverse publicity from pets dying en route is very bad. Why should Fido get more resources than my underwear and t-shirts, for the same price? Why would pet owners so devoted to their pet that they couldn't bear to be on a separate flight from it as they move across the country want to check it in as luggage with an airline that has said it can't look after it?

Go ahead and tell me that all cats are not interchangeable and it makes sense to take yours with you from Halifax to Vancouver, and not just get a new one when you get there. (I understand that cat people feel that way, even if the new one is a good colour match.) But also tell me why Air Canada should be forced to accept your cat as checked baggage.

Edit: In other, very similar news, Westjet has just announced that they will no longer carry unaccompanied minor children. They'll offer a half-priced fare to an adult escort, however. It's the same thing: the airline can't economically offer tge level of safety the service requires, so they aren't going to do it.

Arctic Winter Games

In the far north, before airplanes and telephones and television and treadmills, people developed some simple games that could be played inside an igloo, using what they had on hand. They were games of strength and skill that kept them sane and could also promote skills used in the hunt.

Given that now northern people have satellite TV and pilates classes, the traditional games almost died out. But they promote fitness without needing any expensive equipment, and at the same time foster community spirit and preserve cultural heritage, so they have been preserved as the Arctic Sports and Dene Sports at the Arctic Winter Games. The AWG is basically an Olympiad for northern peoples, from Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, Finland, and Russia. Not everyone has the same traditional games, and the emphasis is much more on sportsmanship than winning, so the competitors help each other out. There are also familiar southern events like indoor soccer, gymnastics, table tennis, hockey and badminton. You see the theme in those: all sports that can be played indoors. There was also biathlon and dog mushing.

The first event I saw was the stick pull. I'm sure the name can be laden with all kinds of lewd innuendo in Dene, too, but the stick in question is about 30 cm long, thicker in the middle and tapers towards both ends. Competitors stand shoulder to shoulder, facing in opposite directions. An official slathers the stick in lard (I suppose it was once seal fat, but this was clearly a tub of Crisco), and then the competitors both grasp the stick, their thumbs facing. On the official's signal each pulls back. Arms must be straight, no jerking or twisting, just pull the stick straight back such that your competitor's hand slides off the other end and you alone are left holding it.

The girl in the blue sweatshirt and faded jeans was an eventual medalist in the event. I can't remember if she took gold or silver. The first picture shows the start, and the second picture is during the competition as both girls try to pull the stick back. Each match-up is best-of-three, with the competitors switching hands for the second contest. If a third round is required, a flip of a coin would determine the competitor who picked which hand to use.

The third picture is of the men's events, and gives a clearer view of the stick.

I also have pictures of the one arm reach. In this event competitors must balance their whole weight on one arm, while reaching a suspended target with the other. It is not immediately obvious from the pictures below, but only the competitor's hand is on the ground, his knees and feet, while they may look like they are on the floor, are actually being held up. You see here the suspended target, a little mini stuffed seal. (I tried so hard to buy one like that, but couldn't find one for sale anywhere). The limitations of my pocket camera and photography skills show here. In a school gym, no flash allowed, I wasn't able to capture the motion of his hand except as a blur as he reached up to touch the seal. The people in chairs behind him are officials, and they were quick to call fouls if the competitor did not keep his balance and form during the reach.

The competitor below is named David Taylor. He won the event easily, playfully doing things like poking or tickling the seal in the early rounds, but you would never say that he humiliated his competitors because he was such a good sport. he was literally coaching the others in between attempts, to the extend that if someone missed the seal, they would turn and look at David, waiting for his analysis and suggestion.

I also love the fact that the other competitors just naturally lay in a circle to watch. You can almost see a giant igloo enclosing them.

I don't have a good photograph of the final event, the knuckle hop. I think I was too busy watching in horror to take a photograph. Competitors start in the position of someone who has just done a push-up: arms extended, body straight from head to feet and weight resting on the hands and feet only, except that their hand are in fists, so they rest their weight on the knuckles. They then bend their arms, like someone starting the down phase of a push-up and push off, hopping forward, and yes, landing on their knuckles. This is repeated, as a means of locomotion, until the competitor collapses from exertion. Each competitor starts when he is ready and goes as far as he can, one at a time. Instructions from the officials to the competitors were, "when you are finished, stay where you are until the officials can mark your place, then go straight to the medical table." There were several nurses working the medical table to clean and bandage damaged knuckles. I heard one spectator say, "this would appear to be a sport where performance could be improved through consumption of large amounts of alcohol." I certainly have never seen sober people inflict so much pain on themselves in the name of competition.

The games were inspiring, both in the "gee, I want one of those little seals to see if I can do that" way, and because it showcased healthy, positive youth, making me proud of them all.

Ice Roads

Two years ago I had to explain to people what an ice road was, and they always remained a little incredulous that a thoroughfare constructed out of the frozen surface of a body of water was suitable for large transport trucks. Then there was a series on the Discovery channel about ice roads, and now I have to wonder if some southern Americans don't think that all roads in Canada are made on ice. The reality TV show about truckers driving on ice roads was very popular, but locals say that they didn't like the way the occupation was depicted as an extreme risk-taking activity, and might not consent to another season.

The ice road is wider than it strictly needs to be for the traffic it gets, but we speculated that clearing that width of insulating snow from the ice ensures a better base of deep ice to support the road. Of course no salt or sand is used on the road, and there are no painted lines. Vehicle handling was no different than good winter conditions on any road, with the benefit that there are no hills or sharp corners.

I like this sign because it graphically explains exactly what an ice road is. I'm still not sure you would really understand it if you didn't know, though. Try showing the picture to someone and see if they say it's a bridge or a ferry.

If you like northern scenery, and don't regularly read Dave's blog, you should have a look at his norther n lights pictures. He regularly bids Alaska night trips, and selects some beautful photos for us to see.

Black and White

I don't know if digital cameras come in black and white, but they might as well, considering these images. I told you I was in Yellowknife for a week but I haven't had time to tell you about it yet.

A snowflake on a black parka. Where I grew up it was so wet that the snow usually fell in moist clumps, making snowflakes like these something I saw only in cartoons. I thought the sixfold geometry existed only at the microscale. I still smile when I see big snowflakes like this for real.

I took this picture lying on my back inside an igloo. You are looking up through the ventilation hole at the top, and light comes through the not-very-thoroughly packed spaces between the snow blocks.

It is hard to digitally capture the depth you can see looking down through the clear lake ice of an ice road. In three dimensions, the imperfections in the ice show how deep it is, because you can see the fissure lines reaching away into the darkness below.

Ptarmigan are white in the winter and dark in the summer. It seems that they don't like to fly much. This one kept sinking neck-deep into the snow and still walking.

Parts Exchange Dance

Ok, now back to my life, and the uncooperative autopilot. If that US Airways A319 had had a bullet through the autopilot, it might start looking deliberate rather than accidental, but there would likely be grounds to consider it to be justifiable gizmocide.

Airplane repairs ought to be a lot like automobile repairs, and I suppose they mostly are, but the process seems different. I'm going to characterize airplane repair as more honest. Everyone admits from the outset that they have no clue what is wrong. The automotive shop pays a slight amount of attention to what the customer says, then tests it for themselves and says "You need a new X." Then when the new X doesn't fix it, they say, "you also need a new Y, and a Z, too." The aircraft maintenance engineer listens to the pilot's description of the symptoms and says, "You might need a new X, or maybe a Y. Could be the Z." So they get an X, and the airplane still doesn't work, so then they try with a Y. Because the stuff is so expensive, the customer gets to be more involved in the process. You'll probably all tell me I just have had bad experience with auto mechanics.

Rarely are airplane parts just available at the location the airplane is being repaired, and you can't get generic parts at Canadian Tire, so you have to order them from the manufacturer. Sometimes there is a loaner X available or another airplane in the fleet that can be cannibalized for parts, so you don't have to wait for everything to arrive. We spent the day alternating between watching the tech tweak things and then getting in the plane to test the tweak. Sometimes the malfunction was evident with the electrics on but the engines off. Sometimes it worked with the engines off, but malfunctioned after start

One of the possibilities is just to fly the whole thing down to some fabled Autopilots R Us facility in Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere where they actually know how these things work. No one here seems to really know.

We never got as far as another test flight before my part in the exercise ended so I could go back to work.

Plausible Explanation

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

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

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

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

Didn't They Expect This?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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