The Moral of the Story

I'm sure many readers of this blog already follow Randall Munroe's xkcd ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,") but not everyone knows about his side projects, like his what-if blog. In it he answers questions of life, the universe and everything, such as "could an airplane fly in the atmospheres of other planets?" His answers tend to be both amusing and comprehensive, plus you don't need any math to understand the pictures illustrating the calculated success of flights on the various bodies of our solar system.

Turns out Titan is our best bet. It would be even easier to fly there, but too cold. Cold, Randall points out is merely a materials science problem. He says, "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive." Yes, Randall, yes. So many stories ask me to accept baffling morals.

I more than once got in trouble in English class for laughing at stories that were supposed to be sad, or just being plain baffled as to why the story ended where it did. Shadow of a Gunman features a young women infatuated with a writer. She asks him to typewrite their names together on a scrap of paper and later protects him during a raid by hiding contraband that he in her room. At the end of the story she has been arrested, then shot dead while attempting to escape custody. A neighbour reports this, saying that the police found a scrap of paper in her breast with her name on it, and someone else's name, all covered in blood. I howled with laughter right there in class and when I explained that I liked the irony that she thought she was protecting him, but really she has condemned him by keeping that paper. The English teacher patiently explained that her blood had obscured the name, so she had protected him, and the teacher refused to accept that the most basic of 1920s police procedure would be able to read typewriter ink despite blood. I believe I challenged her to bleed so profusely on a piece of paper that I could not distinguish typewritten words using merely tools I could prove existed in 1920. I never considered it a bad thing to be kicked out of that English class.

Romeo and Juliette is another one. How is that not a hilarious lesson on the stupidity of overly dramatic teens? Or the story about the woman who sells her hair to buy a watch chain for her lover, who sells his watch to buy a jewelled hair comb for her. A lesson for all on basic communication in a relationship. And her hair will grow back. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer teaches us that it's okay to mock and exclude someone for being different up until the point that that difference is proven to have a material benefit to us, at which point we can do an about-face. An earlier version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears ended with the titular intruder (then a silver-haired old woman) impaled on a church steeple for her crimes, but now I could think I was supposed to believe it's about not giving up until you've found something that's just right, and running away if anyone questions your right to it.

Sometimes the story doesn't support the moral, but if the story itself is well told, then people accept the moral they are fed. How about this TSB accident report. (Hah, yu thought I'd wandered so far off aviation I was never coming back, didn't you?) Normally I love the attention to detail and the simple laying out of discovered facts in an accident report. Nothing is pushed on you. You can see what they found, what occurrences the experts find it consistent with and pretty much draw your own conclusions. While it is quite startling to see the altitude deviations correlated with the pilot talking on the phone and sending text messages, I think this accident was more a convenient place to hang the "no cellphone use during flight" message than it was a demonstration of the dangers thereof. Read it and don't you get the idea that the TSB considers the cellphone use a bigger deal than the fact that the pilot was flying at night for a company not certified to do so, and therefore with no recent night-specific training and quite likely no recent night experience? My company hung the cellphone message on this accident, too: the preliminary report year or so ago was the trigger for my own company's ban on pilot cellphone use during flight. Oh well, I could never get Facebook check-ins to work at 15,000', anyway.

A moral that doesn't match the story isn't necessarily a bad moral, and a story with a mismatched moral isn't necessarily a bad story, I just feel like someone is trying to cheat me when I encounter the combination. Also, the air gets cooler the closer you get to the sun until well after the altitude at which Icarus would have asphyxiated.

She Does Not Get Eaten By Wolves At this Time

This much maligned small town in the boondocks of Alaska doesn't seem to be nearly as horrendous as everyone made it out to be. Yes, there are no roads that goes anywhere other than the airport, the dump and the old radar array. The last is left over from the Cold War, but you're not allowed to go up there. Dangerous levels of radiation or wolves or landmines or something. The airport I have described already: it has good pavement even on the aprons, and electronic security systems, as opposed to remote Canadian airports, which are only protected from trespassers by signs like "no snowmobiles beyond this point," and "stray dogs will be shot."

The main road, the one named after the local chief, runs from somewhere that I didn't go to, past the airport, and through town. It's paved, and there might have been a couple of paved side roads, but most roads are gravel with potholes. The town is spread out around the ubiquitous little round lakes. Here's a view across a lake.

There was a shorter road from our camp to the business area, but it was all blocked off with no trespassing signs. There was a fair amount of signage in general, of the "This property protected by Smith & Wesson" and "We don't call 9-1-1" variety. You really didn't get the idea they were joking, either. It was incongruous with my usual experience of northern towns. But I'm happy to step away, saying, "Okay, that bit of mosquito-ridden muskeg is all yours. I'll just hang out on these thousands of other hectares of mosquito-ridden muskeg." There weren't an uncomfortable level of mosquitoes. There were some, but I'm beginning to suspect that my mosquito tolerance level has been permanently reset by my first northern base, or even better by my memories of my first northern base. If it's not worse than I remember, then it's not a problem. I have Victory Airways to thank for a perpetually positive environment. It will be interesting to see how Cambodia compares.

People walk here, as opposed to driving. The main paved road has a wide painted shoulder that is marked off specifically as a pedestrian walkway and I do see people walking back and forth on it, even though it's a few kilometres from the shopping area to the next group of homes. Vehicles and especially fuel are very expensive here. I paid almost nine dollars a gallon for avgas.

All the buildings are on stilts, to keep them from melting and sinkig into the permafrost. There are some new modern buildings, such as a some sort of nature interpretation centre and a museum/library that I didn't get to explore because someone was waiting for me. There is a hospital that was probably considered "new" and "ultramodern" by the architects who came up with it. It looks like something that Captain Kirk would beam down to, along with Spock, McCoy and an unnamed crew member, the last of whom would die without any dialogue. There are many churches, all Christian, but in hugely different states of repair. You'd have to be really committed to Independent Baptism over all other options not to switch congregations.

There's a raised boardwalk that goes across a swampy area, connecting some of the buildings. I see lots of people using them. I mentioned it later to someone and he said, "Oh you mean the sewers?" Makes them a little less picturesque, perhaps. You don't bury anything or leave it lying on top of the ground here, so the sewage lines are raised up, and they've built wooden decks and handrails for them. All that wood had to have been brought in by boat, too. There aren't any trees here at all. Shacks like these were fairly common. I didn't notice evidence that they were inhabited, but I would expect that if they were abandoned that the wood would have been scavenged. The fact that the wondows are boarded up is not in my experience evidence one way or another for occupation. Glass is harder to transport than wood. Is the same joke told in Alaska?

Q: What's the Alaskan word for "window"?
A: Plywood.

It turns out that the grocery store we went to with no vegetables was just a quickstop kind of place, and there is a larger grocery store with the usual complement of fruit and vegetables. And there was a Subway restaurant, a totally normal Subway restaurant with all the fresh toppings and drinks and varieties of bread and everything else of every other Subway sandwich place in North America. Mind you, a footlong with a drink was over twelve dollars, but everything there must have been flown in daily. It's also where the white people are at, but it isn't the only place to eat. There's a not at all bad Asian food restaurant and some pizza places. They told us at the lodge not to be put off by the fact that most restaurants sell most kinds of food.

There were lots of kids of various shades playing in the street with a combination of southern manufactured toys like tricycles and locally made toys like piles of mud and rocks. There was a kid with a wheeled dogsled and a single very enthusiastic dog going like smoke down the paved walking lane. I saw a kid-sized dogsled for use on snow, too, in a yard. The kids looked happy, mostly filthy--not a criticism, they were playing in mud--and adequately fed. They were of all different shades. At first I thought that the local people tended to be darker skinned than the locals in other northern areas, but my current theory is that there were a lot of lonely soldiers here twenty years ago, and the dark genes in the locals have come from Africa through the US, and not over the Bering land bridge. I didn't notice a lot of teenagers. Even if they go away for high school, I'd expect them to be back for the summer. Or maybe once they get out they never come back.

People do come here from all over. We met a woman who had immigrated from Macedonia. Why to here? She said there were jobs. I guess if you're coming from a country most Americans can't find on a map, you might as well move to a state that gets left off many American maps. I wonder if there are Macedonians in Nunavut.

The oddest thing I noticed in town was a tumbledown shack--bigger, but not substantially nicer than the ones pictured above--signed as a "Prematernal Home." Including the Jetsons hospital there were three professionally constructed and maintained medical facilities in town, so this was highly unlikely to be a prenatal clinic. The easiest interpretation is that it is a home for pregnant women with nowhere to go, but the whole concept of being kicked out of your family home for being pregnant seems both temporally and culturally incongruous.

I don't have as many photos as I'd like of the buildings in town, because I accepted the advice not to walk down the road from our accommodations to the town alone, so all my town trips were with someone else in a truck, and they were usually on a quick errand and waiting for me to put away my camera and get back in the truck. I did walk about a kilometre through town and during that time was not attacked by wild or domestic animals nor harassed by humans. It isn't a place I'd be enthusiastic about moving to, but I wouldn't object to coming back and spending a month here. That it was so universally reviled by Alaskans speaks well of the standards they expect for their fellow citizens.

In the evening they take me and the other pilot out to the airport. My fellow pilot is going off rotation, and to ensure he makes all of his connections to get home, he's boarding a flight at the local airport. I'm here to load all the gear we brought out here. It's not too difficult since it's the third time I've loaded and secured this exact same load, and the customers help lift the heavy stuff into the airplane. Ordinarily it would be a trivial load for this aircraft, but I can't load anything on or against the installed equipment, and I can't move the installed equipment, so its as if I have a much smaller airplane with a more finicky C of G. I don't secure the load yet, because some of it isn't in its final position. The best loading configuration still has a space in it for my personal baggage which I'll bring from the lodge in the morning.

This is where we were when a news crawl reported "Seven dead in plane crash in Canada." It's odd to have so little context for the type of aircraft or place. We had to google to find that it was a King Air coming out of Jean-Lesage International, the main airport for Québec City. I found some news stories and this audio clip (en français) of the ATC communications with the departing aircraft. I strained to hear it a few times then passed it off to a reader whose first language is French. He warns that he is an aviation enthusiast not a pilot so may not have rendered everything correctly.

Tower and another plane communicating – taxiway instructions
Aeropro 201: Québec tower, Aeropro 201, problem with right engine, we are coming back for landing runway 30
Québec tower: Aeropro 201, roger, left side right side, your choice, you’re number one for runway 30, do you need emergency services?
Aeropro 201: affirmative we can not climb.
other plane: 701 ready to taxi.
Rescue 5 ("Sauvetage cinq")and Québec ground ("Québec sol") acknowledging each other.
Rescue 5: Information?
Québec ground: Ball of fire north of the airport, plane had problems, it’s a King Air from Aeropro, they’re outside of the airport limits.
Rescue 5: Do you have more precision on where they are?
Québec ground: I don’t know if you see him there's a big black spot on the other side of Mont Belair
Rescue 5: Do you think it would be on this side or the other side of Mont Belair
Québec ground: No no he's on this side of Mont Belair at the base on the other side of the fields.
Rescue 5: roger

The crash is old news now, and by the time you read this it will be old news also that Aeropro was shut down by Transport Canada. Even the India Times reported it. Kind of makes me wonder how many people in India care whether a Québec air operator loses its operating certificate. But none of that answers the question of why a King Air with one engine failed was not able to return safely to the airport. I was hoping there would be more information available by the time I got to posting it, but the investigation must be still in progress now. An AvCanada poster [not a reliable source] says, "I heard from reliable source, no cockpit recorder or FDR, TSB investigator is pretty pissed off, 'All I got to worked with is a burned up crater'." So we may never know. The [Canadian] Transportation Safety Board takes a long time to do an investigation anyway. There's nothing on their site for 2010 yet. They only report on a few a year, at their discretion. The [American] NTSB investigates every air crash in the US and would at least have a preliminary list of facts posted by now.

It's odd to hear news from your own country filtered through another country's media. Your ears perk up every time you hear the name of your country and then you struggle to figure out what it really means. I wonder if there is ever any Macedonian news up here.

Float Plane Safety

A British Columbia newspaper wraps up a series on float plane safety today, but I'm writing this after reading the first installment only. According to that article, British Columbia is home to twenty percent of all commercial float plane operators in Canada. It misrepresents the situation a little by saying that BC movements represent 97 per cent of all float plane traffic at Nav Canada staffed facilities, because BC is the only place in Canada where there are floatplanes taking off and landing under the clearance of a control tower. Hundreds of flights a day take place across the country to and from places that don't even have names, let alone control towers or FSSes.

British Columbia is especially vulnerable to float plane accidents, even if they don't really have the lion's share of float plane movements, because BC float planes service remote coastal areas, where in most other provinces float traffic is in and out of remote lakes and rivers. The coastal inlets in BC are in close proximity to mountainous terrain, prone to fog and heavy rain, and often out of range of conventional nav aids. Salt water, even just moist salt air, is exceptionally hard on aircraft, so I wouldn't be surprised of airplanes operating in that environment suffered more equipment failures.

The introduction to the series criticizes existing regulations governing float planes, including the safety briefing a reported received on a Harbour Air flight, as it did not describe how to operate the exit doors. Last time I flew on a float plane I don't remember if the pilot detailed the operation of the exits, but he did give a demonstration of putting on the life jacket. The briefing card in both cases would have diagrams showing how to open the door.

The idea of passengers routinely wearing lifejackets inside the airplane brings to mind a couple of scenes from Six Days, Seven Nights (which, by the way, I first saw as an in-flight movie). When the engaged couple first travel in Harrison Ford's character's Beaver, they are asked to wear life jackets, and this effectively emphasizes their discomfort with the small aircraft. In later scenes, even ones where the protagonists are flying a bullet-ridden aircraft on a set of makeshift floats, they do not wear life jackets. Life jackets are perceived as a symbol of fear and discomfort.

I'd like to see some testing--not too hard to do in dunk tank egress trainers--on whether wearing lifejackets inside the cabin actually helps passengers escape. A lifejacket, even uninflated, impairs mobility and flexibility, and it could get caught on things. One passenger who became confused and inflated the jacket could impede the exit of others. It may be that these concerns are as silly as the argument people used to make against wearing seatbelts in cars, afraid that they would be trapped in the vehicle by their seatbelt. I'd just like to see it tested, on passengers who have had a standard briefing, including some with simulated injuries.

The safety briefing I give does include step-by-step door opening instructions. I don't fly over water sufficient to trigger a regulatory requirement for lifejackets to be present and briefed.