Isolated

It's eerily quiet out there. I was on the ramp at an airport that usually makes the top ten or fifteen list for the most aircraft movements in the country, and during the pre-flight briefing I could hear frogs croaking in a distant ditch.

In the air I'm having the sort of chats with air traffic controllers that usually happen at three a.m. I can ask for direct just about anywhere from anywhere and get it instantly. I've a few times called up and had the controller reply "is that [airplane that's not me] calling for [something irrelevant to me]?"  That seems to mean that there's only one airplane in that controller's airspace, and the controller wasn't expecting it to want anything in the near future, so kind of zoned out. Maybe conducting a conversation with another bored controller, at a desk two metres away.

I asked a military controller whose airspace I was working in if he had other traffic on other frequencies, but he said it was just me.

Even in the sky we're isolated. Many thanks to all the people staying home, and staying away from people and places they'd love to visit, so that when some of us get this disease despite everyone's efforts, the hospitals are not overwhelmed and we have our best chance to recover.

Overflow Valve

I didn't really send it. I wrote that last blog post right after completing the form, and I really wrote that on the form, but in the sober light of the next dawn, before the Purolator truck arrived, I was hit by a fit of sanity and reprinted the pages on which I had expressed my personality and frustration, replacing them with blandness.

In the same vein, when today I received the form letter telling me "Good afternoon Mr. Aviatrix, Your submission has been received and will be sent to a regional TDG Inspector for review. The inspector will contact you if they require more information or corrections to your documentation," I didn't write back asking, "Is it your department policy to address all persons in authority by male honorifics, or is that an individual initiative on your part?"

Also I went for a nice little flight today. We brief an emergency procedure before every flight, and today it was an engine failure before rotation. "Okay," I said, "so we're rolling down the runway at full power and for some reason we need to stop."

I paused for breath and my co-worker said, "Coyote on the runway," at the same time as I added, "Maybe there's a coyote." Great minds think alike. "So, clearly there's a psychic coyote on the runway." The runway here is long enough to stop after reaching rotation speed, so I brief that I pull power idle, brake as required, tell ATC, and get off the runway to try that again, once the brakes have cooled. I also brief the full procedure for if an emergency stop were made on a runway too short to accommodate it, necessitating magnetos off, fuel off, inform ATC and electrical off, then evacuate when the aircraft is done crashing into whatever is past the end of the runway. If the day starts somewhere that an engine failure on the roll could leave me without braking room, I brief to the specifics of the environment.

After run-up I was held short of the long taxiway because the controller said, "there are a couple headed your way." I hear other people call for taxi and also get held short, so I move up a bit so there is room for whomever is behind me, but not so much that there isn't room for whatever the couple I'm waiting for are. Not a couple of coyotes, though. Turns out to be a Navajo and a Beech 1900. Once they pass I am given clearance to taxi, and discover I'm catching up to the aircraft ahead of me. Kind of unusual for me. I taxi slowly. They turn a corner and I see that the slowpoke has a foreign registration. That makes sense. Tourist. The locals and the people who come here often enough to know the coyotes by name taxi fast.

I get my clearance and depart. There are no literal coyotes. Today.

You Can Always Go Around

You might want to play the video as background music while reading or responding to this post. You've probably seen all the clips before, so you don't really need to watch it. The song, however, is good advice. I'm trying to remember the last time I did a visual go around. It's been a while. I think in the last year I've had ATC ask me to go around once when someone was slow off the runway, and I believe I've gone around of my own initiative for a tractor on the runway at an uncontrolled airport, but that may have been from a planned inspection pass rather than an intended approach to landing.

I think my recent go arounds have been more in the nature of five miles back, saying, "eh, the tailwind is too strong for this to work out. I'm going to make this a downwind for the opposite runway." I was prepared to do one not long ago when someone on frequency had reported deer near the runway, but there was no sign of them on short final. The helicopter must have scared them off. I'll be sure to practice a go-around at my upcoming recurrency training.

One To Beam Up

I'm on my way into into a major Canadian airport and overhear another pilot on frequency asking to fly direct to a particular fix. A "fix" is a point of latitude and longitude that has been designated with a five-letter code so that air traffic controllers and pilots can refer to it. It might be the point at which pilots are supposed to change frequency, or allowed to start descent, or just another way for a pilot to request to deviate from course, usually to get around convective cloud.

In any event, this pilot asks to fly direct the fix, but the controller doesn't recognize it. That's not surprising, there are hundreds of these things in any patch of airspace, and people only pay attention to the ones that are on the route they are flying right now. The pilot repeats the waypoint name. The controller still doesn't recognize it.

"You're going to have to spell that," advises the controller, sounding a little crusty.

The pilot spells it. It has a couple of Ks in it, I think. VIKOK or KADOK or something.

"Great," says the controller with heavy resignation. "Another place out of Star Trek." I didn't notice if the pilot got his clearance or not.

Hotspots in the Sky

I'm working in a little corner of the sky that includes the top edge of a cylinder of class D airspace that is monitored by a flight service specialist, a slice of class C terminal airspace, and the edge of an area of uncontrolled airspace with its own air-to-air frequency for the low-level local traffic. I checked in with the FSS and they handled me for a while and then decided that I should talk to the terminal controller, to coordinate my movements with inbound IFR traffic. I did so, and tried to monitor both frequencies for a while, but it was an overlapping cacophony of sound. Even turning down the volume for radio tuned to the second frequency, I wasn't sure I wouldn't miss calls on the primary, so I told them I was going to let them go.

When the work was finished there, my next job was in military airspace. Prior negotiation had secured us permission to work in the airspace, so all I had to do was call their controller for a clearance. But just as I was about to do so, we discovered a problem. Data that was supposed to be on board in our computers was not. The data is required to do the work. We have a satellite link on board, which can be used to communicate with company, but only via short text messages, not special format data files. This wasn't an unprecedented situation. I found a community with a cellphone tower and dropped to a suitable altitude to orbit the tower until we had good bars on a cellphone and could set it up as a hotspot to log the laptop into it. The laptop wasn't charging properly and the battery was low, but there should have been enough juice to grab the data. Then I hear cursing from the back of the plane. Windows has decided that this is the right time to download and install updates.

The town with the cellphone tower also has a little airport, with a little tiny terminal. I check runway length and procedures and put my wheels down. It's much easier to download data while on the ground. Also easier to visualize. I caught myself claiming we were "uploading" data, because it had to come up to get into the airplane.

Sorry for the Show

It's a federal offence to swear on the radio. Not that it doesn't happen, but it's extremely rare. We all censor ourselves on the radio, because the style of speaking is different, so the same expressions don't slip out as easily. If you do hear cursing on the frequency, most of the time it's because someone doesn't realize their microphone is turned on. A flight service specialist with an open mic said some truly obscene things about me once and I probably could have got him in no end of trouble, but I didn't. Today a controller made me smile by leaving a space where the taboo word fit, but leaving me to fill in the blank.

We'd called for a clearance, and the controller vectored us one way and then the other, and couldn't give us a good altitude and then finally got us going. "Sorry for the ... show," he said, the missing word before show clearly distinguishable without being pronounced. There are some expressions in English that lack a good non-profane equivalent.

Extra-Vehicular Activities

I was trying to find a clip of the coffee-ordering scene from the movie Pushing Tin. In the film it's a demonstration of how many pieces of data on different aircraft that an experienced controller can hold in his or her head simultaneously. I didn't find the clip, but I came across a pilot ordering coffee and wings in the midst of an emergency, and a fun YouTube channel of humourous exchanges from the New York Kennedy ground frequency.

Taxiing at a large, unfamiliar airport is just about as stressful as flying at night in ice. There's just one of me to keep the airplane moving, watch out for bad pavement, find the directional signs, interpret the taxi diagram, identify the intersections, and spot the aircraft I'm supposed to give way to. It's obvious to the controllers which way I should go, but they know the airport layout perfectly, and from their vantage point they can see where they want to put me. They seem almost as unhappy when I pause to complete a checklist or figure out my route as they do when I think that Foxtrot-Golf is the next turn, not this one right here. Sure, if I get it badly wrong in ice, I'll lose control of the airplane and die, but that consequence might be less painful than the scolding that an irate controller can dish out. The worst case scenario on the taxi is also death: should I venture onto an active runway at the wrong moment, I could get run over and take out a widebody, too. That is part of the reason the controllers can be so stressed. The rest of their focus is knowing that it is ridiculously easy for us poorly-maneuverable ground vehicles to become gridlocked, delaying everyone. The controllers have a plan for getting everyone where we are supposed to be, and if I miss a turn, I'm like the Tetris brick dropped in the wrong place, messing up the whole board. Meanwhile controllers are really smart, constantly building and recalculating plans, but with enough spare brainpower to make smart remarks.

The link above is not to the first or the funniest of the clips on the channel, but rather to one that is more odd than funny: a Lufthansa crew suspects they have an access panel open and once that's confirmed by another taxiing aircraft, ask permission to put a crewmember outside the airplane to close it. It's interesting and a little outside the norm, but the controller seems to think it's hilarious. I wonder what he would have made of a stop-and-go I did the other day: I landed on a long runway, let a crew member out to adjust an external sensor, and then after he was back in and belted, took off again without ever leaving or backtracking the runway. The controller handling me didn't act as though it were an unusual request. I had assessed the approaching traffic on frequency before making the request, so I was confident there was no one close behind me. I'm not sure we spent any longer on the runway than we would have had we landed and taxied off in the normal way.

Delicious Donair

Tower passed me to the centre frequency just in time for me to hear, "We have the delicious donair in sight."

I could see the question marks over my non-pilot co-worker's head before she asked, "Is that a restaurant?"

While I have been asked to report overhead a McDonald's before, that was by a small tower where the controllers knew me, not on a Centre frequency. I gave her my best guess as to what had transpired, and I'll tell you what that was in a moment, after a diversionary paragraph or two on other recent ATC exchanges, in case you want to formulate your own guess before you see mine.

This one also takes place on Centre frequency, but I've been on the frequency a long time, and it's quiet. An airline pilot gives his call sign and asks, "Are you still there?" The Centre controller answers in the affirmative and the pilot explains, "It was getting lonely." That may sound like a frivolous exchange, but it's actually a slightly quirky way of making an often necessary call. It's not uncommon to get out of range of your assigned frequency before you're assigned another. Sometimes the controller is just about to swap you but there's a flurry of activity or a handover briefing and you glide out of range before they can. Aircraft at the same nominal altitude are at different actual altitudes above terrain from day to day, depending on the temperature, so the point at which terrain cuts off a signal for an aircraft at FL180 is not identical from one day to another. Your radio can die, you can accidentally switch frequency, or the controller can think they have you on one frequency when you're really on another. My approach is usually to ask for the latest altimeter setting. That confirms that I'm still in range and gives me useful information, too.

Just today a United flight made a plaintive little call for anyone on frequency to respond. They had lost contact with Centre, and asked me if I could find them a frequency. I wonder if they thought Canada was terribly primitive not to have kept track of them. I relayed their predicament to the controller. I have been in the room where those Centre controllers are, and would have half expected the controller to just lean back in her wheely chair and call out, "Who's looking for United 1126?" But nope, she asked me for the aircraft's position and then, based on that, advised me which frequency to relay back to them.

So back to the donair. My best guess was that the controller had asked them to report the Dornier [probably the Do-228, a boxy turboprop] in sight, and that the pilot decided to call it a Donair [meat sliced from a vertical rotisserie, usually served in flatbread]. If we're really lucky, someone who was on frequency for the whole exchange is a reader and we can find out the truth.

Regional Rivalries

In the course of our operations we operate both VFR and IFR, often switching between the two regimes, sometimes more than once, in the course of a single flight. VFR stands for Visual Flight Rules, and the rules are simple. As long as my company knows where I am, I don't need to file any flight plan, follow any specific route or maintain a particular altitude or speed. Under VFR I am not allowed above 18,000' in most places, and I need to plan a landing with thirty minutes of fuel remaining, and I need at all times to be able to navigate and maintain control of the airplane by looking out the window at visual features, e.g. rocks, lakes, roads, cities and the horizon. If I can't see where I'm going, I must file IFR.

IFR stands for Instrument Flight Rules. It requires an advance flight plan showing a precise routing, a clearance before departure, and permission to make any changes in altitude or heading. In any area, I'm not allowed below the minimum IFR altitude, even if I can see that it's perfectly safe. If I fly IFR at all during a day, I am limited to eight hours of any flying during that day, which may limit reaching an objective. I must fly IFR if the weather conditions anywhere along the route do not allow me to fly visually, or if I wish to fly above about 17,000'.

So you can see that if my company wanted me to leave an area of poor weather, do some low level flying in an area of good weather, and then land somewhere else covered in low clouds, I would need to be IFR then VFR then IFR. But if the task was to fly low over a city for thirty minutes and then climb up to flight level 220 (about 22,000') for three hours and then then land at a tiny airport in the mountains with no instrument approaches, I would be VFR then IFR then VFR. Such a plan is called a composite flight plan. This shouldn't be that complicated, except that the people in the IFR and VFR systems hate one another. As best as I can tell, the controllers that handle the stereotypical high speed, prestigious IFR traffic are contemptuous of the people in the system that handles the slower, lower, quirkier VFR traffic, and the VFR folks in turn resent the IFR controllers. They aren't really set up as two different systems. The Flight Service Specialists who track VFR flights also pass clearances to IFR traffic, but they get it from the people who will be managing the IFR flight after departure. Those same controllers handle many VFR flights, but in many cases they release us as soon as we are clear of controlled airspace, lacking radar coverage or time to pay attention to flights they have no legal obligation to provide coverage for.

Let's say I file an IFR flight plan out of Frog Valley, proposed to last two hours and terminate under VFR in Weasel Swamp. I can file this flight plan with either the predominately VFR FSS or with directly with the IFR data people. If I do the former, the FSS will simply forward the IFR portion to IFR data, where the planners will map it out to ensure that it doesn't interfere with other traffic or violate any rules or procedures. If I file with data they will lob the VFR portion off to the FSS. So imagine I depart on that flight, but after an hour company calls and tells me to fly to Ptarmigan Inlet. I tell the controller that we aren't going to Weasel after all, please amend our destination to Ptarmigan, estimated time enroute, three hours from now. I request descent out of controlled airspace, turn en route for Ptarmigan Inlet and then an hour out call up Flight Services to update destination weather. At least half the time I will encounter a controller who is on the edge of frantic, considering me an hour overdue into Weasel. The IFR controllers forget to propagate the change in destination and ETA through the system, even when I explicitly confirm with them that they will. Simultaneously changing flight rules, destination and ETA is an extremely common occurrence for our operation. I tried for a while explicitly telling the IFR data controller NOT to propagate the VFR portoin of the plan, that company flight following would handle it, but they didn't always comply with my request, so I still had to check, and I discovered that the FSS was annoyed at being circumvented. I now always close the flight plan with both the IFR controller and Flight Services, but often terrain, altitude or remote location prevents me from reaching an FSS right away. I've learned, however, that when I call late, telling the annoyed flight service specialist that I did amend the plan, but the IFR controller forgot to pass on the change immediately soothes the wrath. In fact, just about any error occurring in the course of a composite flight plan can safely be blamed on the part of the system you are not currently speaking to. A similar lack of communication, but not the outright hatred, applies across provincial and territorial borders, even on a flight plan that is not composite. A controller from one flight information region (FIR) was unfamiliar with the abbreviation PTD (proposed time of departure) that designated the content of a blank on a standard form from an adjacent FIR, and to work the edges of our national, integrated air traffic control system, it pays to have an intimate knowledge of regional and departmental preferences.

Your Clearance Cancelled Time is Cancelled

I overheard this post title on switching to a frequency. No one has ever said that to me and I'm not certain which of two possible but contradictory meanings it might have. If I received it, I would ask a clarifying question, but the pilot who received it did not.

Before departing on an IFR flight, a pilot first files a flight plan, specifying for the air traffic control system exactly which route she intends to follow, with what timing. The flight plan may be filed online, by phone, or sometimes by radio. I usually file mine by phone, because I can do that while using my eyes and the non-phone-holding hand for other things, and can say what I'm doing in words rather than having to code it for the online form. I would only file by radio if I discovered while airborne a need to convert to an IFR flight, and I was out of cell tower range so I couldn't use my awesome Bluetooth headset-iPhone combo. (I didn't want Bluetooth at the time I bought the headset, but I needed a new headset RIGHT AWAY and that was all they had in stock. If you ever have reasons to talk to someone on the phone with your engine(s) running, get the Bluetooth. The days of holding the phone against your ear and yelling, "I can't hear you: I'm in the plane" are over).

The IFR flight plan is supposed to be filed minimum thirty minutes before departure, but the controllers are generally so awesome that the plan is coded and available in the system in minutes. When my company says, "Can we go to Fort Dead Royalty now?" and the flight requires an IFR clearance, I say "sure," file the flight plan for thirty minutes hence, and then board, start, run up and call for clearance. My actual take off time will usually be fifteen to twenty minutes after filing, and I'm calling for clearance as few as five minutes after filing, but it's almost always ready as soon as I need it.

The clearance I get may be identical to the one I filed, or it may be altered to comply with local procedures I didn't know about, specific runways that are active, or I may be cleared not to my destination airport but to an intermediate point, requireing me to get a new clearance before I leave that point. (Yes, I would have to stop and hold, flying in a little oval, if I hadn't received the clearance by then, but it's almost always given to me before I need it). If the airport I will be departing is a controlled airport, then when I am ready to take off, the tower controller will talk on the phone to the IFR departure/en route controllers and get an IFR release, allowing them to clear me for take off. But if the airport is uncontrolled: unstaffed or staffed only by a Flight Service Specialist, the initial IFR clearance will include a clearance cancelled time. The controller giving me the clearance is going to ensure there is a space in the system for me, but if I'm not airborne by the clearance cancelled time, I'm not allowed to go, because my space will have passed by. My departure clearance will have been cancelled. Sometimes there is also a clearance valid time, meaning that I can depart any time between the clearance valid and clearance cancelled time.

So if I were given a clearance cancelled time, and then my clearance cancelled time were cancelled, my first guess is that that means the traffic that was going to be a problem after the clearance cancelled time is no longer considered to be interfering with me--perhaps it has changed course or altitude--and that I can delay as long as I like before take off. My second guess is that "your clearance cancelled time is cancelled" is synonymous with "your clearance is cancelled." I'm ninety-five per cent sure that the first meaning is correct, but because there is a chance that I'm wrong, I'd ask. Beats getting run over by a Boeing 737.

Information Asynchrony

As anyone who has tried to contact me through my blog e-mail knows, I'm not amazingly responsive there. It's not by accident, and I'm not ashamed of it. While I love you guys, my blog is a hobby, and the e-mail account attached to it is like a sub-hobby of my hobby. But I happened to look at it this week, and found a request for participants in a research study on a topic that interests me: pilot-ATC communications.

It's very important that information relayed between pilots and controllers be clear and understood by both parties, but it also needs to be sent efficiently. Recently I had a controller tell me that I was hard to understand on the radio, but that it wasn't my radio, it was my rate of speech. I think it may have been that I had just switched from an extremely busy frequency with the controller speaking quickly and saying "break break" between transmissions so as to get everything said, and I had matched my rate of speech to his. But clearly if I wasn't understandable, I was overdoing it.

I'm always fascinated by tidbits of research regarding the way pilots and controllers exchange information. When given a number with a doubled digit, pilots are very likely to double the wrong digit. Does this speak to how we store "3221" and "3211" in our brains? I remember being castigated in the US for reading back a runway number as "zero five" when the controller had said only "five." In Canada there are no single digit runway numbers, and apparently when I am given a runway number I assign it to one of thirty-six pre-labelled boxes in my head, rather than storing the words the controller actually said. (I still think that controller was a bit of a dick, as ATC communications are supposed to accommodate international differences, but it's possible he thought I was "correcting" him, so he was slapping me down.

The researcher says,

Hello:

My name is Samuel Lien and I am a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada conducting research on human factors in aviation / air traffic control. I am from Humans in Complex Systems Lab. Information can be found here.

https://uwaterloo.ca/humans-complex-systems-lab/

I am writing this to ask if you might be able to help me, or direct me to someone who could help me create exposure to a study I am conducting that looks at the effect of information asynchrony on pilot-ATC communication. The study will be conducted completely online.

We are interested in professional pilots, preferably commercial license and air traffic controllers (any domain) as our subject-matter expert and participants for the study.

Participation in this study involves going to our online experiment website from participant’s computer as the experiment will be conducted online. Participation in this study would take approximately 2 and half hours of your time. I would like to assure you that the study has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Committee.

The online experiment website is here:

http://rbhagat.uwaterloo.ca/IDEA/ I haven't opened it yet, because I'm told it will take approximately 2.5 hours to complete. That's quite a chunk of time, but I intend to do it, because I think it will contribute to safety.

As far as I can tell, the information asynchrony under study is pilots getting information at times other than when they actually need it. Maybe when I've done the questionnaire, I'll know what they mean.

Out of My Nose

Six hours ago I was woken for work. Five hours ago I arrived at the airport. Four and a half hours ago I had completed a preflight inspection, towed an airplane out of the hangar, and was supervising fuelling. Three and a half hours ago I knew the weather forecasts everywhere in our purview, and was out of Candy Crush lives and unread Facebook entries. Forty-five minutes ago I was told I would be released from duty in thirty minutes. Half an hour ago I called friends to say I could be at their place in forty-five minutes. Twenty minutes ago I was given a destination to fly to. Nineteen minutes ago I filed an IFR flight plan according to the CFS-listed Preferred Routes, and cancelled with the friends. Thirteen minutes ago I started the engines. One minute ago I was at the hold-short line waiting for departure clearance. "Traffic ahead is in the circuit; turn right ten degrees as soon as safely able so as not to run him over; contact departure airborne; cleared take off." Now I'm airborne.

My clearance was to follow the filed route. I'm coming up on the waypoint at the end of the published departure from the airport. The plate says "expect radar vectors to assigned route" and sure enough the departure controller assigns me a heading. It's a left turn of about twenty-five degrees, keeping me clear of some traffic, I presume. He approves a climb right to en route altitude. I put the ice protection on before entering cloud, but the forecast was correct, and I picked up no ice at all. After about ten minutes, I'm cleared direct my next filed waypoint, to continue on the flight planned route. I come up through the cloud layers into the sun.

For two hours I fly on top of the clouds, enjoying brilliant bright sunshine. Clouds look so much nicer from the top. At top of descent the icing protection goes back on and I start down. Oxygen valve off below ten thousand, but I still have the nasal cannula on my face, because it's tangled up with my headset and I'm busy with charts and checklists and engine controls. The controller clears me to an altitude that is just above the clouds. We skim along, almost touching them. It's the only way you can see how fast an airplane goes, to be that close to clouds whipping by. I take off the cannula and set it aside. Ahh, nose freedom. I'm told to expect direct to the initial fix for the destination approach in five minutes, and I'm starting to slow down to configure for that. The airplane has microswitches in the throttles: retard either one below a certain point before the gear is locked down, and it will set off an alarm. The point at which the microswitch is tripped is a constant amount of throttle travel, but it's not marked on the throttle quadrant--and I don't look at the throttle quadrant markings while adjusting power anyway. I'm looking at the manifold pressure. The manifold pressure reading at which the gear horn will sound varies by an inch or so (I originally wrote "150 rpm or so" which is too confusing to leave, but too funny to just delete). I guess it depends on temperature and air pressure and who tuned the engine last. I sometimes want the power that low before I want to put the gear down, so I warn my crew that the alarm may sound. I do this today, and he replies with a question, "Why would that make the stall horn sound?"

I realize I have inadvertently said "stall horn" instead of "gear horn." I accept the correction and explain, "The wrong word came out of my nose."

At the end of the flight I admitted that I hadn't intended to say "nose" there either. Apparently my brain was busy processing altitude calculations and thought "nose" was close enough to the word I had asked for.

Peer Pressure

As I fly from one airport to another I speak to numerous air traffic controllers. Let's say I depart Grande Prairie (I think they're almost finished the runway upgrade) for Calgary. I would call Grand Prairie Radio, who would ask me to monitor the clearance delivery frequency. Once I had the clearance I would go back to radio, until after take off, when I would switch to Edmonton Centre. They clear me to my cruise altitude and on course heading, and then might switch me to Edmonton Centre on a different frequency to continue monitoring my flight. As I approach Calgary they will switch me to Calgary Arrivals (which is probably the same frequency as Calgary Departures), who will give me an approach clearance. If there are numerous approaches available at an airport, they may ask me which I prefer. If not, they'll just assign me the usable one. If the weather conditions are fine and I can see the airport, the approach may be "visual" -- no fancy electronics required, just fly to the runway. They can assign me the visual, or I can ask for it, but if I don't feel comfortable with the visual, or just want to practise my skills, I can ask for an instrument approach.

On this occasion I've just switched to the arrivals frequency and I hear the controller telling a pilot, "Everyone is doing visuals, but if that's what you really want to do, you can plan it." That pilot had obviously just asked for an instrument approach.

The pilot responds, "Okay, we'll do the visual."

We did the visual, too, as fast as we could and still get the gear down, because that's what tower (the frequency approach handed me off to) asked for.

Migratory Birds

I learned to use a GPS receiver for air navigation when I was working in the north. Many of the airplanes in the fleet had three line text GPS units. Some had none, but even that nascent technology was so useful, compared to the NDB airways and map-compass-watch navigation they supplemented, that captains spent their own money on handheld units, for the days we were assigned airplanes that lacked the magic box. Airports, radio navigation aids and other named fixes are few and far between in the far north. Given a full load of passengers and cargo and fuel to max gross weight, there wouldn't usually be more than four or five airports within range. It was pretty much guaranteed that when we selected the we selected the "nearest" function, the intended destination would be on the first page. That was the quickest way to select waypoints: no tedious dialing in three- to five-letter identifiers letter-by-letter. Back then we just hit NRST (or rather, I don't remember exactly how, selected it from an obscure user interface), and selected the one we wanted from the list.

Of course this technique doesn't work down south, where there may be hundreds of little municipal and farm airports within an hour's range. Now I'm resigned to dialing in my waypoints, one letter at a time, into the much newer, but still not state of the art GPS unit. But every once in a while the way I learned first re-emerges and I hit the NRST button, to be bewildered by a list of unfamiliar identifiers. Today 'm flying in northern Alberta, not much in the way of towns around here, just a big whack of restricted military airspace. I'm given a reroute via a five-letter fix, still called an "intersection" because once upon a time each was defined by the intersection of two airways. Some still can be located that way, but many are simply convenient lat-long points in space. I always wonder why there are so many of them in close vicinity of LETRM. I think it may have something to do with routing aircraft around the military airspace. Usually they aren't that dense outside the terminal airspace of a busy cluster of airports. Or maybe I just remember better not to do that nearest thing when I'm in an urban area.

Approaching destination I hear the controller talking to a pilot who says he's on a migratory bird tracking flight. I'd never heard of such a thing. The controller says it's great to watch the birds migrating on the radar. Wow, I did not know that either. Birds so thick that they paint primary surveillance radar are a force to be reckoned with. The controller offers to send the pilot a tape, and if I weren't busy getting set up for the approach, I might have asked "me too!"

Here's a composite radar picture of bird migration in the US (see the notes on YouTube for an explanation of what you are looking at). I couldn't find a recording of what it looks like on a local level. How many birds does it take to show up, and can you see the V shape of the skein?

I switched to tower frequency and landed in a challenging crosswind, fighting winds twenty to thirty degrees off the runway and twenty-two knots gusting up to thirty-five, all the way down to the runway. I touch down centred and straight and straight, with one little bounce, but I laugh and point out that they were both smooth landings.

Future So Bright

It's a rainy, miserable fall day with the freezing level a little lower than the minimum en route IFR altitude. I study the GFA showing the cloud levels and types in the area I'll be flying through, and decide that yes, we can do the flight in this airplane. I can climb above the level of the cloud that will carry the most dangerous ice before I reach the area that has those clouds, and destination is clear, giving a safe descent. I file a flight plan beginning with a waypoint that we always file out of this airport, because it's the end of the published departure procedure, but as we're going the other way, I don't expect to actually go there. We'll be in radar contact with ATC as soon as we're off the ground and they will vector us on course.

Except they're busy. I end up flying all the way to the waypoint, and then a little bit past on vectors, and then more vectors. Vectors to the right towards the way I want to go, and then, possibly because I wasn't climbing fast enough for the controller's liking, vectors back to the left. "Vectors" just means the controller assigns me a heading to fly. Altitude is being meted out to me in thousand foot increments, from the departure plate up to the MEA, but still not my filed altitude. We're intermittently in rain, cloud, raining cloud and between clouds. "Raining cloud" isn't a thing that I've ever heard anyone say before, but it's sort of a thing. Sometimes when you're in cloud it's quite light, but you just can't see anything around you. That would be near the top of a cloud with sunlight above. Sometimes it's dark and cold. It's usually very moist, with water running up the windshield, but sometimes it's dark, with obscured vision and pelting rain. I guess on those times I'm inside a cloud underneath another cloud that is raining. It's kind of hard to see, as I'm in a cloud.

I say to my co-worker, "you bring your sunglasses?" He hasn't. "Just wait and see," I tell him. "This is one of the most fun parts of being a pilot."

We're level now, with the outside air temperature flickering between plus and minus zero (it rounds to the nearest degree on the instrument, but must have finer gradations internally). Into another cloud. This one is bumpy, a bad sign, and it's a raining cloud, but water doesn't stream up the windshield. It freezes onto it. All this vectoring around and delayed climb has got me into the area I want to avoid. I can see the water running back on the wings and freezing in little horizontal dribbles, exactly like the icing on the edge of a cake. (I think Americans call that frosting). There's a strip of rime building forward, too. This is not acceptable. Thanks to terrific weather forecasting technology I know exactly where the tops of these clouds are. I tell the controller we are picking up ice and ask for a climb to that level, the level I had wanted to fly in the first place. We get it, breaking through the tops of the clouds, a perspective that changes them instantly from dark monsters that obscure my vision and threaten to burden my airplane enough to tear it from the sky, to a brilliant white reflector for the sun. There's nothing but blue sky overhead, and I quickly put on my sunglasses. The temperature here is below freezing, but the air is dry so the ice sublimates, passes from solid to vapour, leaving me again with a clean airplane after a few minutes.

Approaching destination, ATC advises me that there is opposite direction traffic that could be a conflict, do I want to start down now early, or arrive high? I ask for the early descent and we slip through a few wispy clouds before coming out at our destination, under clear skies. At the end of the day I update the flight time in company records and advise company that there are less than fifty hours left on the right hand vacuum pump. Vacuum pumps have to be replaced every thousand hours. I have often seen them fail early. The possibility of failure is why there are two of them, and I'm pleased that the two on this airplane are out of phase; the left one has only five hundred hours on it.

I Would Have Gone With Stephen Hawking

Before making an approach to an airport, every pilot wants to know the wind strength and direction, what clouds they will encounter, the altimeter setting, and what runway is in use. At some airports the pilot figures out this information herself by flying over the field. At others a flight service specialist simply recites the information to each arriving pilot. At busy airports, a recorded message called ATIS recites the information on a dedicated frequency. The information on the ATIS is typically updated once an hour, or when conditions change. At some airports a controller just reads the information into a recording machine, so you can hear his or her voice, fast or slow, annoyed or cheerful, with occasional minor stumbles and the tower background noise. At others an automated voice reads the ATIS.

Here's a live human reading the ATIS:

Here's the ATIS read by the English-language automated voice Nav Canada uses (in Montréal, the Frech ATIS is on a different frequency):

Today I've just picked up an ATIS that uses an automated voice, and my non-pilot co-worker says, "I like him. He reminds me of David Suzuki." It's pretty obvious that "he" is a robot, and I've never thought of David Suzuki as sounding robotic. For foreigners not familiar with Suzuki, here's a clip. (I ask you to please refrain from commenting here on Malthusian economics, environmental sustainability or Suzuki as a person. The clip is there just so you can hear his voice).

I don't hear the resemblance, except perhaps that he has the earnest careful way of speaking, slowing down to make points. But not more so than any other public speaker. It made me realize, though, that I always assumed the robot was a white guy. I'll try and picture him as different ethnicities now, and wearing different funny hats and ties.

Here's a British automated ATIS voice, not as frightfully British as I was expecting.

Bad Technology Day

I've been struggling with my phone lately, not getting text messages, not having it ring when I'm called. An update to the OS did the trick, even though the OS update notes were all for apps I don't use. I heard someone in the air having an equally frustrating time with technology.

"We're struggling with the FMS right now. Can we have direct BOXON?"

The FMS is the flight management system, the magic box that tells the flight director and the autopilot where the airplane is supposed to go. I don't know the clearance that the pilots were given initially, but they were apparently unable to persuade their FMS to accept the waypoint or procedure, so they chose one it would accept to fly towards it while they continued the battle.

I hear another pilot given a hellish multi-stage missed approach clearance including direct to a random sounding lat-long. It's because there is a large swathe of NOTAMed active military airspace blocking access to the normal airways no doubt. Programming a lat-long into the FMS while on approach sounds fun. Not. I screw it up on the ground from time to time. I have to create a user waypoint for the lat-long, can't enter it in the flight plan or direct-to screen. The pilot reads the clearance all back and life goes on. But a while later she comes back to confirm the lat-long. Yep, it's correct.

"The FMS won't take lat-long. Can we go direct [fix]?" she says. Negative, that's in restricted airspace.

"How about [fix]?" That's approved.

We cancel IFR and slip underneath it all.

Mysteries of the Universe

My report time this morning was 5:20 am. I got to work at 5:15. Take off eventually happened at 9:29.

Most of that delay was weather. But while we were waiting for the weather other excitement occurred. Mystery One occurred when we couldn't find the keys to the nose baggage door, but didn't allow that to cause a delay, just stole a set from maintenance. They weren't in yet, and it's not really theft if you send e-mail to say you've done it.. I also couldn't find a funnel, to add oil, but that's not a mystery. People keep throwing out my funnels because i make them out of old oil bottles. Mystery Two is that my Swiss army knife, which I would have used to improvise a new funnel, seems to have gone missing last time I had to check it on the airlines. I hope it's just in the bottom of a bag somewhere. I poured the oil carefully down the dipstick, didn't spill any. Mystery Three was the location of the back-up emergency checklist. It's just a company thing that we have an extra, and not mandated in any of our manuals or regulations, so we resolved to find it later, and started engines without it.

Mystery Four is why the airport was so strangely deserted, and we got to take off with no waiting. This was 9:30 in the morning, not the originally planned 6:20.

We landed at a different airport than was filed in the flight plan, which seemed to confuse the FSS specialist whom I called to close the plan. "That's what we do," I said in a tone that implied I was saying something helpful. Maybe it was because the airport we landed at was in more or less the opposite direction from the filed one. But that is what we do. It was 29 degrees on the ground, and potable water was not available at the airport. None of that is mysterious.

The second flight went well. I called a tower controller to cut through a control zone that hadn't been on the original plan. He assigned me a squawk code and cleared me through quite efficiently. Another aircraft called up right behind us to go sightseeing in the control zone. "Not without a code!" said the controller sternly. The pilot ummed for a bit and then asked if the controller could assign him a code. The controller did. So why did I get one automatically, but the guy behind me had to beg? That is a mystery. I think I'm up to five.

Mystery six is how we landed at home base six p.m. but I didn't get out of the damn office until eight. Does it really take two hours to disembark, get fuelled, tow the airplane in, do the paperwork, send a couple of e-mails, check that the lights are off and the doors locked, set the alarm and leave? I guess there was answering the phone--a call from the bank for someone who went home hours ago. At 7:30 pm? I think someone at the bank got time zones mixed up.

On the way home I decided I wanted Mexican food, but knew there wasn't much in the fridge. Looking for a grocery store to get cilantro and tomatoes I found a Mexican cafe I didn't know existed. I ordered beans and rice for take out. I get it home and they are GREEN beans. Is that a mystery?

Summer One-Liners

I always scribble notes on my OFPs, but I don't always get time to transform them into blog entries. Here are a few.

This is an oldie that has come back.  Many types of flight require a flight plan, a notification to air traffic control of where and when you want to fly your airplane. You "file" the plan either electronically, or still the old fashioned way by telephone. It's often easier to make a phone call than to get an internet connection. When you call to file a flight plan you start by specifying the call sign, the registration of the aircraft. The specialist can sometimes look up the aircraft in his or her database, removing the need for the pilot to specify the aircraft type, onboard navigational equipment, aircraft colours, and other details that don't change from flight to flight. It's common for the controller to double check that they have the right database entry by saying the type after they find it. There's a flight service joke that I first heard as a student, still stumbling over the required information for the flight plan. The specialist takes the callsign, and then says, "Ah yes, here it is, Boeing 747 on floats."

The correct answer to this is obviously, "Nah we put it on skis over the winter, haven't swapped them back yet." Or perhaps, "Nah that's GOLF Mike Tango Foxtrot. People get us mixed up all the time."

One the flight plan is filed, you need a taxi clearance, permission to drive the airplane on the ground to the runway, or maybe from the parking space to the place you pick up your passengers or buy fuel. Much of the ground may be uncontrolled, not requiring a clearance, but at an unfamiliar airport it is not always clear exactly where the controlled portions of the apron are. One always errs on the side of caution and asks for taxi clearance. Or even if I know it's uncontrolled, I'll usually call and tell the controller, so he or she isn't wondering where this airplane is off to. The controllers are usually happy to give directions on the uncontrolled portion of the airport, to help pilots find a particular hangar. So it's wasn't completely bizarre to hear a ground controller say this to another pilot, just funny.


Ground controller, "If you know where you are going, continue."

Then you take off, and the controllers help you stay clear of other traffic.  You know you're pretty far north on a clear day when you hear the words, "you'll be following a VFR 737" and you're not in the approach phase of the flight. One usually expects aircraft as large as a B737 to fly IFR for most of their trip.

But by the end of the flight on a good day everyone is cancelling IFR to make it easier for others to get descent clearance. Descent for us means a chance to take off our oxygen masks, the context for my final quote, from my co-worker. "Taking off an oxygen mask is like taking off ski boots."

Ahhhh.

On the Radio Lately

Today I give you a collection of things pilots and controllers have said that made me smile enough to scrawl them on my OFP.


--
Controller: Aircraft calling, standby. Aircraft .. everybody just standby.

--

Pilot: Centre, Aircraft Z, Any chance of direct the beacon?
ATC: No. [no call sign, just 'no']
--

Pilot: Centre, Aircraft Y, 60 nm W of fix, 16,000.
Centre: That's lovely. You should tell Approach on <freq>.

---
Pilot: <Gives aircraft position report parked at an FBO>
Controller: This is the departure frequency. We'll talk to you later.

--
A controller makes several calls without a reply, to an American Mustang that has been having fun shooting approaches into fogbound airports. Good practice. I've heard that guy up here before. The pilot finally comes back says he had a radio problem. A few minutes later the same controller loses contact with another US airplane. "No one is listening to me today," he laments on frequency.
--
Controller. "Where is that? My map is crappy."