I See Fourteen Lights

There might be fog or mist present when I depart tomorrow from an uncontrolled aerodrome. The minimum allowable visibility for my departure is half a statute mile, so I need to be able to determine how far I can see along the runway, without a tower, a flight service specialist or an electronic runway visual range (RVR) measurement. I'll have to count runway lights.

I haven't done this in a while--you don't get fog much in the summer--so I had to double check some numbers. I found then in A Quick Reference: Airfield Standards from the US FAA. (Nice little reference. I intend to read it through in its entirety sometime, maybe while waiting for fog). It confirms for me that the lights along the runway edge are spaced 200' apart. There are six thousand feet in a nautical mile, but for some reason ground visibility is measured in statute miles, which contain only 5280 feet apiece. (I had to look that number up, too). That means that I need to be able to see half of that, or 2640' feet along the runway to meet the half-mile minimum visibility. And at this point I realize "well duh: if there is an RVR then a half mile is RVR 2600." So I'm on track. This means that if I pull onto the runway even with one set of runway lights (they are aligned with each other on each edge of the runway) I need to be able to count 2600 divided by 200, or thirteen more pairs of them, stretching away into the foggy gloom, in order to be legal. I'm happy to ignore the extra 40' because RVR values do, and because I'm looking along the hypotenuse of the triangle whose base is on the runway edge, and surely I'll pick up another forty feet there.

Whom am I kidding? This is Cockpit Conversation. We don't make assumptions about trigonometry here, we do trigonometry. The base of the triangle runs from my position at the first runway edge light, to the fourteenth runway light, and is 2600' long. Assume I'm in the middle of a runway, standard width 200', making the height of the triangle 100'. The measurement of the hypotenuse is therefore sqrt((2600 x 2600)+(100 x 100)) = 2602. So no, actually, there is almost no difference between the distance from the first runway light to the fourteenth, and the distance from my eye to the fourteenth light. That's a very skinny triangle. My assumption is wrong. So if I wanted to be a nerd, I could park thirty-eight feet back from the first pair of runway lights. But generally I want to go flying.

In order to save Americans time telling me that the RVR for half a mile is 2400, I'll confirm that in Canada and the other countries I checked researching this post, the RVR for half a mile is 2600. I don't know why Americans use 2400, and neither do the people in this thread on the subject. I especially like the way that the person who initially answers the question there doesn't notice that RVR 2400 for a half mile doesn't add up, until the student points it out. Another thing I expect American commenters to want to tell me today is that "if you have to count runway lights on short final, you should go missed." That's becase their landings are legally restricted by visibility. But Canadian landings are governed only by decision height or MDA. If the runway is visible at DH/MDA, a landing is authorized for us. Our plates have an "advisory visibility" which we can use to calculate whether we expect to be visual at minimums, but its value does not affect our legality to put the airplane on the runway. Once we are past the FAF, the RVR does not restrict us. We do have something called an approach ban which can stop us from legally attempting an approach in terrible visibility, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

Geo Referencing

You have at some point probably seen a movie or a television show, usually for children, that uses a gimmick where a story in a book comes to life, or morph into the action of the show. Usually the pages of a book are shown on screen, with text introducing the story, and then a picture. The picture becomes live action, or perhaps the pictures move around in the text. In a movie it's a sufficiently common device that you know if it starts that way, the movie will end back on the printed page with the ornate words The End. But imagine if you were reading a regular, real book. A familiar reference book whose fonts, diagrams, and footnote style have so long been part of your life that you know exactly what to expect of it. Now imagine that a picture or diagram in that book, the one you are holding in your hand, comes to life and starts explaining itself. That's how my introduction to approach plate Geo Referencing went.

An approach plate is a diagram showing an airport runway and the procedures, points and aids associated with navigating an airplane to a point in space from which a safe landing can be performed. If shows the plan view and the side view, with symbols showing where and how to turn, minimum altitudes for each sector and part of the approach, distances, magnetic variation, and type of lighting. It tells you the frequencies for ATC, how much to add to your minimum altitude if using a remote altimeter setting, and has an effective date. The Canada Air Pilot for each region, the physical book in which these things are published is reprinted with changes every 56 days. Most plates don't change from one revision cycle to the next, but the whole CAP is reprinted. When the new one comes you strip the coil bindings off the old one and toss the pages into the recycling. You can tell there's no change if the new plate has the same effective date, worth looking at in case you have inadvertently memorized some data that has changed.

With the Fore Flight electronic flight bag, these approach plates are replicated on the iPad. Instead of paging through the coil-bound CAP trying to guess whether a particular airport will be alphabetized under its own name, or considered a sub-plate of the larger nearby airport, you hold your finger on an airport displayed on the iPad chart until a box comes up, showing all the airports that your stubby finger could reasonably have been aiming at. Tap More next to the one you wanted, then Details then scroll down to Procedures and you can tap Approach and select the approach plate you want. I haven't done a timed test from pulling the iPad or CAP out of the map box, to looking at the desired plate, but I think the iPad is faster. The paper one is easier to read in bright light conditions, even with the iPad turned up full, but in dim light the self-illuminating iPad is great, until it is pitch black dark, at which point it becomes too bright, even if you follow the instructions and turn the brightness to minimum in settings before dimming within the app.

Either way I get the familiar approach plate, very carefully replicated. It's possible to zoom into the iPad ones to read little numbers, easier than pulling out a magnifying glass, but you have to be careful not to leave it zoomed in, when that moment comes on the approach where you glance back at the plate to confirm the minimum descent altitude, and the data isn't on the screen because you zoomed in to see if that waypoint was spelled with an F or a B. A hundred feet above MDA is not a good place to have to pinch or scroll a screen.

The first time I used the iPad for an approach, I had the conventional paper chart and the iPad both out, and it was VMC. I briefed the approach, flew direct the cleared fix and then eeep! the approach plate came to life. A symbolic airplane representing my position appeared on the screen in the position where I actually was. Even though I have used moving maps for years, the appearance of a moving you-are-here dot, Fore Flight calls it "ownship position" on the plate was freaky exciting magic. Ten years from now pilots will stare at old approach plates in puzzlement, unable to situate themselves mentally. This is a huge benefit for situational awareness. It even switches automatically to the taxi diagram and shows me where I am on the airport after landing.

I learned that this was called Geo Referencing a couple of days ago, from an error message. The app told me that Geo Referencing was not available because the plates were not current. What? These are valid until November 13th. (And the error message came up in October). I think American charts are on a 28-day cycle, so the app auto-expired Canadian stuff after that time period. I brought the iPad into the hotel to try and update them. It's just downloading the same set again, I'm sure, but this is hotel internet. It hasn't worked in all the time I've spent writing this blog entry. Why did it not update everything before I left when I selected "pack" for the flight out here? There are a number of things that Fore Flight doesn't get quite right for Canada, and I haven't found a bulletin board or user forum where these things are discussed, to determine for sure whether it is the product and not me who is missing something. I now know that the iPad has to be updated at the same time as I update the GPS database (which comes from the US, on a 28-day cycle).

Bushels of Icing Certification

An accumulation of ice on the surfaces of an airplane in flight can be ridiculously dangerous, so a lot of science has gone into analyzing the causes and effects. It's known, for example, that large droplets of supercooled water are likely to cause clear icing that covers a large area of the wing, while small droplets are more likely to freeze with entrained air and cause wacky shapes to form around the leading edges of the wing. This is called rime icing. Either way, or both (there's nothing to say you can't get a mixture of both types at once) airplane performance is affected. For starters the airplane will fly more slowly, climb less rapidly, and burn more fuel to get to destination. That alone could kill you, and that's just for starters. This post isn't about the effects of icing, though. This paragraph is just here for people who otherwise wouldn't know why anyone cared about the stuff in the paragraphs coming up.

Some aircraft are certified for operation in known ice, that is to be flown in conditions that are known and expected to cause ice to accrete on aircraft. There's a possibility that definition will cause an argument, because I see that the FAA and NTSB have contradicted themselves a little on this. In Canada there is a much lesser density of PIREPs to airspace and a lot fewer airports of escape, so the conservative definition is the only one that makes sense to me. For flight into known ice, the airframe and the airplane deicing and/or anti-icing systems have to be shown to tolerate conditions conducive to moderate amounts of clear or rime icing. NASA (the first A stands for aeronautics, so not all their research is in outer space) tells me the model for the former is called intermittent maximum and represents "liquid water between 1.1-2.9 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-50 microns in diameter over a 2.6 nm encounter," while the latter model is continuous maximum and represents "liquid water between 0.2-0.8 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-40 microns in diameter over a 17.4 nm encounter."

So first of all: less that three grams of liquid water per cubic metre doesn't seem like very much. A gram of water is a millilitre, about the capacity of the plastic screw cap on a pop bottle. A cubic metre is a fair chunk of space, like the storage capacity of one of those IKEA Expedit room dividers everyone has, the 16-box kind, with two more boxes stacked on top. You wouldn't even notice three millilitres of water in one of those, what with all the scented candles and old copies of Aviation Safety Newsletter stacked inside. I know clouds are stereotypically fluffy and insubstantial, but I would have thought they had a lot more water density than that. So huh, clouds are way drier than I thought.

Secondly, why "over a 2.6 nm/17.4 nm encounter"? At first I assumed that was translated from metric, but 2.6 nm is 4.8152 km and 17.4 nm is 32.2248 km. It turns out that they are 2.99 and 20.0 statute miles, respectively. So three miles and twenty miles. Who the heck does science in grams per cubic metre over statute miles? That's crazier than Canadians measuring our room temperature in celsius and our oven temperatures in Fahrenheit. It's even crazier than having to figure out whether something like pumpkin or peanut butter is a solid or a liquid before converting an American recipe. (Seriously, if the recipe says to use a ten-ounce jar of peanut butter, I never know if I'm supposed to weigh it or measure it volumetrically, because the Americans have the same name for two different units, one for solid things by weight, and one for liquid things by volume. Like the TSA, the recipes expect me to just know what they consider a liquid. Take tuna, for example. I was once told that canned tuna ... I'm getting off topic here. But while I'm here, what the heck is a "stick of butter". Who buys their butter in sticks?) It's even crazier than Aviatrix trying to cook from American recipes.

The certification standards are based on data collection flights performed in the 1940s. If you plot all the possible atmospheric scenarios on a graph with liquid water content on the y-axis and droplet size on the x-axis, the area that is considered safe to operate in is bounded by the x-axis, the y-axis and a curve that approximates a line of negative slope. You may now be asking yourself, does Aviatrix get off on writing sentences like that, or is she just too lazy to draw a graph and show you? The answer is that I get off on knowing that many of my readers can parse that sentence just fine, and I'm too lazy to copy someone else's graph. If there's lots of water you can only tolerate small drops, but if there's not that much water the drops can be bigger. The logical conclusion is that if there's no water at all you are allowed drops of infinite size and that you may fly through a tank completely filled with supercooled water if the drops are infinitely small. That's why I said it was a curve. Presumably the axes are asymptotes. Oh yeah, talk graphing to me, Aviatrix.

One could argue that changes in aircraft design since might have changed the validity of those results, but subsequent work in other types and in wind tunnels should be enough to keep the standard valid. Here's a little bit about how the certification is done these days: flying around seeking out the standard conditions for certification, plus using computer models to determine what shape ice would form on the aircraft, and then sending test pilots out to fly with those globs glued on the plane. I guess when they first did tests to determine what an airplane should be able to handle, they flew through convective cloud for three miles and through stratus for twenty miles and then quantified the conditions they had flown through. They probably did it in ounces per bushel or pop caps per IKEA bookshelf, and it's only been converted to grams per cubic metre for the modern day. Beats me how they determined all that, anyway in the days before the laser equipment they have now.

While trying to find the history of the certification standard I get bogged down in documents on the history of the legal "if supercooled water hangs in the sky and there's no airframe there to accrete it, is it known icing?" debate. This PDF seems like a pretty definitive document about the controversy. Given that many of the people arguing that it's not known icing until they take off and know it's there were doing so as the pilot of record at accident tribunals, I'm sticking to my assessment that if conditions known to produce ice are there, it's known icing.

Modern Technology - Like Fax Machines and Photocopiers

Nav Canada has awesome controllers and really pretty reliable approach facilities, but chart publication must be where they throw the people who lack the attention to detail or management skill to make it in the real time world of air traffic control. You've heard my rants about trying to buy instrument plates electronically. The most frustrating part of that experience was that no one I talked to, and I went as high as I could get people to talk to me, would even acknowledge that it was a problem that the only way to get current information on how to safely use airports all over the country was to have it mailed to a base where I wouldn't necessarily be when the mailed information arrived. They treated me as though it was bizarre that a PILOT could be in Yellowknife and need information on how to get to Thunder Bay NOW, as opposed to two weeks from now, though a mailing address in Saskatoon. Now electronic downloads of some publications are available, but until very recently, i.e. THIS YEAR, I couldn't order anything online from Nav Canada. I could look at their website to see what they sold, but in order to buy it I had to print out a paper form, calculate the cost and the taxes on each item manually--I felt like it would be out of the spirit of the thing not to do long division with a pencil and paper--and then fax in the form.

Now they have online ordering. Here's a challenge for you. Go to the Nav Canada website and try to put a Thunder Bay VFR enroute chart in your basket. It's what the Americans would call a sectional, but it's known in Canada as a VNC, a visual navigation chart. If you can do it in fewer than eight clicks and two scroll-downs, tell me how you did it. I almost gave up and thought they weren't available through the "NEW" online interface. Yeah, and look again at that online store. This isn't a legacy online sales system. This is the best they could come up with in 2013.

And then you get your chart. At first I was working in a flat bit of the world and didn't really notice, but then I unfolded it to a different section and though, "holy shuttlecraft, I have a counterfeit chart!" It looks as though it has been made on a colour photocopier with some of the colour nozzles blocked. The printing, something I have to read in low light, in turbulence, while doing other tasks, is blurry from poor colour registration. The hypsometric tints aren't crisp. Did someone spill something on this map, or is there a hill here? Nav Canada has this to say.

NOTICE

VFR Chart Hill Shade:

NAV CANADA has developed digital production process for the terrain layers of all VNC and VTA charts. There are limited choices in the technology that can generate digital hill shades. As well the combination of digital terrain and hill shading produces unacceptable chart clutter. As part of our analysis we reviewed VFR chart best practices from around the globe. As a result of the current technology limitations, clutter and best practices the shading will not be incorporated into the VNC and VTA charts series effective immediately.

NAV CANADA will continue to reassess shading technology as improvements occur.

To inject a bit of positive I'll make this a message to the people who did whatever they did to make my charts look so great before the digital production process came along. "Wow, your charts looked great and I could always read them easily, day or night and instantly interpret terrain. Thank you for doing such a good job of that from well before I started flying through 2012."

I'd add that thanks to new digital processing charts now have fewer errors and printing delays, but a significant number of the VFR charts I buy were behind schedule, and everywhere I look there's a NOTAm for a missing peak height or frequency correction. Is this all because kids twenty years ago were told they were all winners no matter what?

Levels of Incompetence

I land at a busy northern airport. It's a resource town, so lots of money, lots of workers and lots of airplanes getting them in here. The ground controller says "taxi in" when I tell him my destination on the field and as I approach it I realize there's an opposite direction jet on the same taxiway. While I'm thinking "Uhhh ..." I realize that it's under tow, so that makes it a motor vehicle not an airplane, giving me the right-of-way. At least I think that's how it works. It's also being pushed backwards away from me. It's opposite facing but in actuality same direction. So not really a conflict. I turn my attention to the FBO.

Sometimes a pilot just turns off the taxiway and parks in front of the FBO, alerting personnel after shutdown to the fact that she would like to buy fuel. Sometimes as I manoeuvre for a likely spot I see someone in an orange vest running and gesticulating with the "place yourself opposite me" gesture. I always taxi slowly on an apron, so I indicate I have seen them, give them time to set themselves up and park as directed unless there is an obstruction or pavement condition that prevents me. I am always very aware that the fueller is a soft squishy human being who in a moment of inattention could run into one of my propellers.

Today there is a small army of people in orange vests, and one is marshalling me. "Place yourself opposite me," then "move nose this way" then a signal I can't remember ever receiving before, "proceed to next marshaller." A chain of vested human beings marshals me one to the next around another aircraft until we are finally given the crossed arms signal to stop there. we're laughing at how many there are. I've never been directed from one to another before and I just went through a chain of five. There are easily twelve on the ramp. I'll tell you quickly than none of them ends up anywhere near the propeller. The title of the post refers to pilot incompetence, especially mine, not any rampee error.

I think their numbers are attributable to a combination of a shift change and training, so every new guy is shadowing an experienced rampee and there are two shifts here at once during the whatever hour this is rush. One of them takes my fuel order and I go inside. There's a bucket under the sink in the women's washroom because the sink u-bend leaks. Internet works. The GFAs forecast everything to be lovely and clear until bedtime. I get NOTAMs and fuel and start up again.

"We are very late," I hear a Jazz pilot explain as she reports an increased mach number to ATC.

A controller calls a foreign airplane, "November eight thousand and echo." Presumably that's N8000E, but I could make a case for N800E. Either way the pilot knows who he is, just as I do when American controllers say "zero" instead of "oscar" for an O in my call sign, or otherwise mangle what to them is alphabet soup. It's quite odd for folks both side of the border to cope with call signs that don't match the standard pattern.

I call for my clearance and accidentally call the controller by the wrong airport name. She's about as offended as if I'd called her by the wrong name in bed, and it doesn't get any better when I discover that I filed my actual flight plan as if I were departing from same wrong aerodrome. It's things like this that make me wonder if I've reached my Peter Principle position of incompetence as opposed to my delusion that I've settled just below it. We sort that out and while I guess I'm not getting another date with that controller, I have a clearance.

I feel slightly better about my incompetence as I hear two airliners in a row asking for clearance direct airports that are not their destinations, each gently corrected by the handling controllers, with reference to their filed flight plans. Chances are high that dispatchers, not the pilots filed the flight plans, so the pilots may know where they took off from, but aren't clear on where they are going.

Another N-registered airplane, not eight thousand and echo, gets a rerouting, from ATC. He copies down one fix and says, "I need another letter, that's just two." It's an NDB, it only has two letters in its identifier. In the south, especially in the US, NDB airways are uncommon. They're always defined by VORs. Up here NDBs are more common. Canada and Australia are I think the only countries that do much with NDB airways. Hands up if you had Cambridge Bay in the navigation section of your Canadian commercial written exam.

An airline pilot is told by ATC that the ILS at his destination is NOTAMed out. You can tell from his response that this is unexpected news. I wonder if it went down since his departure, or his company dispatch fell down in informing him. Or he didn't read his briefing package because it was such a nice day. A bit later I hear him say, "It's overcast. We're going to head for the NDB." We're working not far from there. The overcast is high. He'll break out soon.

Just one of those days, I guess.

One of Many Things That May Matter

Remember when I used to obsessively post every detail of almost every flying day? There must have been readers who thought this was a carefully crafted fictional narrative and not a true account, because of the minor details that became recurring themes and that finally ballooned into crucial matters of life and death. There were however thousands of minor details that never turned into anything, because that's the way life is, but we forget those ones. Here's a detail of the sort that occurs every day. Maybe it will be a cool precursor to an inflight incident or a great maintenance catch. Probably it's nothing at all. It's my job to take such things into consideration, day in and day out. I start with background on how the system works.

Very small airplanes, and some older large ones, have a fixed pitch propeller, a single artfully-shaped piece of metal or wood that bolts to the drive shaft and delivers thrust as its airfoil shape spins through the air. Experimentation and science shows that a propeller like this is most efficient at a given angle of attack (or angle of incidence, as the British call it), one particular speed. One can get propellers that are optimized for climbing (useful for a drop zone plane), or for cruise (useful if you rarely need the best climb but want more speed or fuel economy on longer flights), but if you're willing to spend a lot more on a propeller, you can get the best of both worlds: a constant speed propeller.

On a constant speed propeller, each blade is a separate entity, set in a hub in which it can pivot. The pilot sets the desired rotational speed of the propellers and then counterweights within the hub swing out if the propeller is going faster than the set speed and swing in if the propeller is underspeed. When the weights swing in they open a valve, allowing pressurized oil to flow to the hub, twisting the blades to a finer (flatter) pitch. (Americans call it low pitch, I think.) For a given speed and power setting, a finer pitch propeller will turn faster, getting it back on speed. If it goes too fast the counterweights will close the valve, and the propeller blades move towards a coarser pitch, eventually going all the way to the feathered (maximum turning resistance, minimum forward drag profile) position if oil pressure is lost. I can command this drop in hub oil pressure by pulling the propeller lever all the way aft to the "feather" position. The ability to feather is another huge advantage of a constant speed propeller: if one engine fails I can greatly reduce the drag it causes by feathering its propeller.

The oil that does this job is the same oil kept in the crankcase, the oil that performs the regular functions of cleaning, cooling, lubricating and sealing my engine. At start up, this oil is the same temperature as ambient air, and thus it's a little sluggish. The propeller is not feathered during a normal engine shutdown (pins lock the propeller pitch as rotation slows below 1000 rpm) so the oil that was acting to keep the propeller blades at fine pitch before shutdown is still there at start up. Cold oil is not good at circulating nor at moving through little valves, but should I have an engine failure at the worst possible time--right after take-off, low altitude, low speed, nose up attitude, max weight, poor terrain ahead of me--that is what I will urgently need the oil to do. As soon as I recognize an engine failure after take off, and before the propeller slows to below 1000 rpm, I'm going to be pulling the appropriate propeller lever back. I don't just trust that the lever will do its job though. Before the first flight of the day I let the engine warm up enough that the oil can circulate, and then I pull each lever back to the feather position and then forward again, quickly, but just enough that I can see that the rpm is falling in response to the command. I'll do this three times with each propeller, alternating so the rpm can recover in between.

On this particular day I observe that the left propeller doesn't feel quite right on feather check. It doesn't take longer to react. The RPM comes down the same amount. I just don't feel like it's going to feather if I ask it. That's so ridiculously subjective I don't even know what it is. The resistance must be subtly different in the cables. It's the sort of thing I could ignore. There's no quantity check or measure I can point to that it doesn't meet. The left propeller is due for its 500 hour desludging soon. That's probably all it is. But I mention it to maintenance anyway. It's odd what a pilot can sense without knowing how or what. I once told a maintenance unit that the propeller control on a newly overhauled engine didn't feel quite right. I don't know if I had any more specific comment than that, and I don't know whether they took a closer look on account of my statement, or by coincidence, but they told me a few days later that the wrong propeller cable had been installed.

And that's all of this story that I know so far. There are a thousand such stories. Hiccups, unexpectedly difficult starts, flickering gauges, and funny noises and only a few do we ever know the cause of or have any concern about ever again.

Now It's Really Broken

The airplane with the broken off wingnut goes into maintenance and comes back out of maintenance still with no wingnut. Damnit. I didn't physically write the defect in the journey log because it was perfectly serviceable. I wasn't going to ground myself in Fort Swamp over a wingnut. I've flown airplanes that required tools to open the fuel caps as standard. But I'm a little teeny bit annoyed. I did tell the PRM the problem and this little tiny thing, the need to pull out a screwdriver to open a fuel cap is going to cost us a tiny bit of time and time and pose a tiny safety risk on every flight. The time is the time it takes for me to get a screwdriver out and put it away again afterwards every time I want to fuel or verify fuel. It's the time I take opening it for a fueller when I could be running to the washroom or filing a flight plan. The safety is the risk that I don't check the fuel level in that tank because it's a pain to get a screwdriver, or that the screwdriver gets dropped somewhere where it ends up in a tire or an aileron. Or just that the time I spend getting the screwdriver, or opening or closing the cap could have been spent spotting something else that was wrong somewhere on the aircraft.

So I e-mail the PRM and request that it please go on the workorder next time, and I go about my business. Today my business is fuelling this airplane to go to work. I open all the fuel caps, including the one without a wingnut and as I open the flap on the broken one, the screw comes all the way through onto the wing. Hmm. It is supposed to remain attached inside the flap. I look closely and inside the flap, next to the real, sealing fuel cap are a couple of bits. One is the tiny rod that is supposed to hold the fastener in place after I give it a half turn. And the other is the bottom end of the fastener, the bit with the bottom of the hole that the tiny rod runs through.

Now it's really broken. Fortunately I'm at home base now, but of course it's lunchtime. It's a rule in aviation. If the airplane doesn't break on a long weekend and/or away from base, it breaks on the engineers' lunchbreak. Lunchbreak and coffee break is sort of an alien concept to pilots. We get breaks, sometimes, between the first engine start of the day and walking away from the airplane parked and chocked after the last shutdown, but they aren't dictated by the clock. They're dictated by a late fuel truck or company telling me to wait. And I wait for lunchbreak to be over before presenting my broken fastener. They tell me no problem, but when I come out to see the repair, it still doesn't have a wingnut. And this time I can't use my Swiss army knife, because it requires a Phillips screwdriver.

They promise me a proper one at the next scheduled maintenance. I'll believe it when I see it. The coin in the photo is a toonie (or twoonie), the Canadian two-dollar coin. It's just there for scale. For the non-Canadians, it's 28 mm across.

Dauntless Aviation

I'm using software from Dauntless Aviation to study for the FAA exam. I definitely recommend it. It not only shows you all the questions you could see on the exam, with the correct answers, but highlights excerpts from the regulations that explain them and points out tricky parts of the questions. The merchant site is a little intimidating, but I think it's just that they are a very small company and hooked up with a somewhat aggressive payment processing company that they can't really rein in.
Today's confusion is over alternate requirements in the the US regulations. In Canada you always (with some very specialized op spec exceptions) require one alternate and there are complex but interpretable rules governing the weather conditions required to file a particular airport as your alternate. In the US you need one alternate, two alternates or zero alternates and whether you need them depends on what state you are flying in, the weather and possibly what operation type. I confess that I haven't got it all sorted out yet. I'm going to try and make a table of sorts:

Part	Type	Engine	Location	# alternates	Required fuel	Other
121	flag	turbine	?	0	2 hours

Sector Altitudes?

Question: What action should be taken when a pilot is "cleared for approach" while being radar vectored on an unpublished route?

Answer: Remain at last assigned altitude until established on a published route segment.

In Canada, cleared to the approach I would be able to, and probably would get into an untenable position later on the approach if I didn't, immediately descend to the 100 nm or 25 nm safe altitude published on the plate, as appropriate, in preparation for intersecting a published route segment. I would tell ATC I was "leaving one fife tousand for one zero tousand tree hundred" or whatever the sector altitude was, but I'm not sure I'd be required to do that. Saying it helps me remember it, and allows ATC to know what to expect.

I remember being told by a flight instructor long ago that in the US you were not allowed to descend immediately on being cleared for the approach, and commenters here told me that yes you were, but with this question I may have finally found the case that the original flight instructor was considering. It looks like if I'm on an airway or a published transition to an approach, cleared for the approach clears me to the MEA for that route, but if I'm off airway just being vectored towards the airport, I can't descend to a published safe altitude until directed? I suspect this is more because US airspace have more published transitions and routes and less just hammering around through the clag towards the NDB at the airport.

American Birds Follow Airspace Rules

Both countries have a speed limit of 250 knots below 10,000', unless you're flying an airplane so crazy that it would be unsafe to operate it at a lower speed. In Canada the next speed limit restricts you to below 200 knots below 3000' within ten nautical miles of a control zone. In the US, it's below 200 knots below 2500' within 4 nm of the airport inside a class Charlie or Delta control zone. But in a class Bravo control zone, fill your boots at up to 250 kts. I'm writing Charlie out in full for the US version because that's how they say it (we say "cee"). That will maybe help me remember.

According to a document I read recently, the low altitude speed limits were established to reduce the severity of bird strikes, but I'm guessing that was just for the 250 kt ones, because I can't see that the birds would pay really close attention to which airspace they are in. The 200 kt speed limit is probably to help ATC control different speed aircraft.

Although the Americans have most of the same airspace letters as Canada, they don't really line up. They have class Bravo control zones whereas we only have class B airspace over 12,500'. If you pretend US Bravo is Canadian C you'll follow all the right rules, ensuring you have a clearance before entering the airspace. At 200 knots or below.

We Interrupt This Sequence

I'm going to suspend the trip I've been describing right there to describe--and solicit your help with--the process of converting a Canadian ATPL to an FAA one. I have an opportunity for an interesting short term job, and potentially others in the longer term, if I have an FAA licence. Don't worry, Americans, I'm not stealing your jobs, the job is not in the USA and is not for an American company. It's for a company based in country A that is operating an airplane in country B and that airplane just happens to be N-registered, that is, it's registered in the US. The law says that the pilot's licence has to match the airplane registration. (In many cases you have a period of time, typically six months to a year, to make the transition from in internationally respected licence such as a Canadian one to the local licence, but not for the US).

The process involves getting an FAA medical certificate, passing a written exam, and putting them together with a bit of paperwork and a processing fee. I've already had the FAA physical, and am just waiting for their approval. I'm studying for the exam so I can have that written as soon as possible. I haven't yet figured out if I need to make an appointment to write it or can just show up at a testing centre. Er, I guess that's a testing "center."

My first impression as I look at the material to be studied is that there's a disconnect between what I have and what I'm converting to. There's an assumption that someone writing an ATPL level exam has mastered the material of the private pilot level, but I have to figure that out too. The material is totally unrelated to what I'll be doing, so there isn't a lot of point in thoroughly learning and understanding it. In the US all test bank questions are available in advance, so when you're in this situation you can just learn the correct answers with out really know why. I've never taken a test this way before, but when in Rome Washington, D.C. Things like I've learned that "part 91" means general aviation, "part 135" is on-demand air carriers and "part 121" is scheduled air carriers. But the questions mention "domestic carriers" and "flag carriers" and "supplemental air carriers." They must be defined somewhere. My local pilot shop has run out of the FAR/AIM because the new one is on order, so I've ordered one directly from the US.

I have to figure out how aircraft approach categories (A B C D) work in the US. There's something in the questions that implies that it's not just based on approach speed as in Canada. I have to figure out how the NOTAM system works. Apparently you get different sorts of NOTAMs with different letters from different sources.

Up until now I've almost deliberately not learned about US regulations that don't affect Canadian pilots (like needing one flight attendant for the first 10 passengers (in aircraft with a payload capacity of 7500 lbs and up) of for the first 20 passengers when the aircraft payload is under 7500. With 50 to 100 passengers you need two flight attendants, and one more for every fifty passengers or part thereof after that. And it's based on seating capacity, not boarded passengers, implying that you need three flight attendants for a B737-600 with four people in the back. Or something. Maybe I can store this in a part of my brain that's reusable.

Wind, Fuel and Tie-Downs

Before breakfast in the hotel, I get the desk clerk to fax my photo flight plan to the IFR data people and my OFP to company, then grab breakfast. They have oatmeal, my favourite breakfast food, but they only have the maple flavour. Basically, they've taken perfectly good oatmeal and put it in a paper bag with way too much salt and sugar. I can't remember whether I ate it or turned straight to the muffins, but I did try to get a muffin out of a plexiglass case. You can't really see or reach the muffins without opening the drawer, but when I pull it out it somehow locks at a negative angle and muffins start ricocheting all over the room. Someone comes to my rescue and we figure out how to disarm the muffin booby trap. Girl can operate a complex airplane but she's helpless against breakfast.

Despite it all I'm right on the dot for my filed take-off time. Airborne, I tune departure and before I can contact them, the first thing I hear on frequency is, "Are you really an F-18? That's a pretty good rate of climb."

"Yeah, we're light today. It's pretty fun," replies the pilot. 'Cause you know, ordinarily it's so boring flying an F-18.

We check in with the cheerful controller and are cleared higher. We get a rate of climb nothing like that of an empty F-18, but still fine for us and we're soon in the flight levels flying back and forth in straight lines. And dammit, I need to pee already. There's a sound from the back like a clipboard being dropped. I ask the operator if he dropped his clipboard. No, he didn't. It's that stupid heater malfunctioning again. I turn it off. So now I need to pee and I'm going to be cold in a few minutes.

I put on my gloves and coat, zip it up to my chin and continue working. I can pee in a bag if I get too desperate, but they say if you're in a cold survival situation you should hold it because it's warm. The idea is that you're losing heat if you evacuate it. I'm not quite sure I follow that idea, but I follow the straight lines, dot after dot. We use up those photo blocks and ask for more, which the cheerful controller gives us.

With an hour of fuel remaining, I start descent. I planned for thirty minutes to get down and land and I take an odd pride in the fact that landing too is right on the filed minute. We taxi to the pumps and I run and pee while waiting for the fueller. The operator makes a routine check of the camera and discovers that there is fuel on the lens. The air at altitude doesn't have enough oxygen to burn fuel at the rate the regulator supplies it to the heater, and despite the fact that this airplane is certified to almost ten thousand feet higher than we were flying, it has not been equipped with any means of controlling the mixture. You'd think there would be an automatic pressure-controlled leaning operation, but there isn't. So our theory is that the unburned fuel gets barfed overboard through the exhaust, and some of it has ended up on the camera lens. Some of it ignites in the exhaust, causing the clipboard-dropping sound, and the soot around the exhaust that I have to clean off again. But we just had both the heater fuel regulator and the entire heater replaced, so it shouldn't be doing this. Airplanes never know what they aren't supposed to do.

Or maybe that theory is bogus and the heater is working okay, but there's some fuel leak somewhere else. I do the math on the fuel burn, as I've recorded how much went into each tank during refuelling. The fuel burn is right on the money for my planning, and the difference between tanks is negligible. We talk to our AMO ("Approved Maintenance Organization" i.e. home base aircraft maintainers) and they have us check for leaks while running the fuel pumps, switching tanks, and everything else they can think of. We decide to delay departure to make sure there isn't another source of fuel leaking that could wreck our data. We open some inspection ports and eventually conclude that the fuel must have come out of the heater, and we're okay to fly again.

As we're parking the airplane at the end of the day, a November-registered Cessna 180 arrives. It's windy, and of course the wind has a greater effect on the little airplane, but the pilot taxies carefully and shuts down nearby. They've come up to Canada for hunting, fishing and visiting family here. The pilot comments on the absence of tie-downs here, and at most Canadian airports. It's true, in comparison, there are hardly any tiedown spaces for transient aircraft in Canada. It's routine in the states that there are metal cables running across the parking area, and often chains with hooks attached, making it easy for you to secure your airplane. I remember now an American friend who asserted that all airports provided tie-down chains. His experience was limited, but it certainly is common. In Canada there aren't usually even tiedown rings in the pavement outside the paid long-term area. Canadians travelling with a small airplane need to bring ropes and stakes, park on the grass and drive the stakes into the turf to secure their airplanes. Everywhere is different, but what has driven this difference? It's not about snowploughs, as the travelling couple is from Montana and they have just as much snow as here.

Alerting Services

Flight plans serve multiple purposes. One of the purposes is to allow ATC to anticipate my arrival in their airspace, making it easier for them to provide traffic separation and other services. In Canada, except for VFR arrivals at a busy airport, that function is pretty much exclusively for IFR flights. For both IFR and VFR flights, flight plans make it clear where search and rescue should start looking for me if I don't show up at destination. Those two functions are filed together in one flight plan but can be perceived to be separate when an IFR flight plan is cancelled. Cancelling IFR to continue a flight VFR doesn't turn your flight plan into a VFR plan, as you might expect. Instead you have cancelled your flight plan, leaving only alerting services remaining. The difference between a VFR flight plan and alerting services, I discovered, is that you can't amend alerting services to reflect a revised destination. If you need the flexibility of a VFR flight plan following IFR work, you have to file a Y flight plan that actually has separate filed IFR and VFR portions.

The other way to get alerting services without activating a flight plan is to take off without a clearance. Unless From the AIM:

7.10 Alerting Service IFR Departures from Uncontrolled Airports

At locations where communication with ATS is difficult, pilots may elect to depart VFR and obtain their IFR clearance once airborne. In Canada, if IFR clearance is not received prior to departure, SAR alerting service is activated based on the ETD filed in the flight plan. However, if departing from a Canadian airport that underlies airspace delegated to FAA control, then responsibility for SAR alerting service is transferred to the FAA and FAA procedures apply. In such cases, alerting service is not activated until the aircraft contacts ATS for IFR clearance. Therefore, if the aircraft departs before obtaining its IFR clearance, alerting service is not provided until contact is established with ATS.

Once upon a time a Canadian flight plan, and thus alerting service, was not opened until the pilot opened it, but to close the window of vulnerability from a departure accident, flight services will now "assume you off" at the filed departure time. If your departure was significantly late or early, you can call in and amend their recorded departure time. That's important because the time they judge you overdue is based on adding your estimated time en route to your departure time.

Where Do I Get My Clearance, Please?

A pilot may not depart on an IFR flight plan into controlled airspace without receiving an IFR clearance from someone air traffic services. Some pilots never have to think twice about where they are going to get their clearance, but they probably always operate from the same few airports and they know the local procedures. The way you get a clearance in Canada can be quite varied, and when the airports you operate out of are that varied sometimes it's tricky.

If it's a busy airport, there may be a dedicated clearance delivery frequency published in the CFS and printed on the departure plate. You tune them up and call for clearance, and if you've filed your flight plan properly they usually have it ready and waiting for you, something like, "ATC clears Flashcube Three to the Peace River airport via the Moose Three departure, flight planned route, maintain 5000', expect higher five minutes after departure, contact departure airborne 125.725, squawk 3671." You copy that all down as they say it, say it all back to them, and when they say, "readback correct" you have a departure clearance.

If there is no clearance delivery frequency, you call ground instead. Both clearance delivery and ground are manned by people in the air traffic control tower at the airport, and often both frequencies will be covered by the same person at once. You discover this when you switch to ground for taxi clearance and get the same guy, or sometimes the clearance delivery guy gives you a taxi clearance with the departure clearance and tells you to monitor ground while taxiing. Ground may send you back to clearance delivery if the IFR data people discover an error in your flight plan, but eventually you switch to tower, who may give you an amendment to your departure or change the assigned departure frequency before clearing you for take off.

If the airport is uncontrolled, but there is still an FSS on the field, you usually call them for your clearance. You include in your request for clearance the runway you intend to depart from, because at an uncontrolled airport the pilot decides that, and that may influence the clearance you receive. They phone IFR data and IFR tells them your clearance, then they read it to you, you read it back to them, they tell you you have it right, and then you have the clearance. After that you just tell the flight service specialist when you're taking off, and off you go.

If there's no FSS on the field, but there's an RCO (Remote Communications Outlet)--a relay that lets you talk to a flight service specialist who is somewhere else--you may call them in exactly the same fashion. Sometimes pilots don't even know whether I'm talking to a remote or local FSS, which can be amusing when they ask "is it okay if i park here?" When I landed at one airport recently I was talking to an FSS specialist as I landed and I asked him when I reported clear of the runway, "do I call you for my clearance in the morning?" He said yes, but when I called his frequency in the morning the specialist working it told me to get my clearance from Centre, unless I couldn't contact them from the ground.

If there is no air traffic services agency reachable at all from the ground, I may be able to get my clearance by phone from the IFR flight planning folk, or possibly through the regional FSS people at 1-866-WX-BRIEF. You just keep calling aviation-related numbers until someone consents to give you a clearance. A clearance received by telephone (and some received by radio) will have a clearance valid time window, so you can use it between two zulu times, but if you miss your window and do not depart by then, you have to call back for a new clearance. So a request for a clearance should include an estimate of when you'll be ready to go, especially if it doesn't match your filed departure time exactly.

If you have no usable frequency and no telephone service, this happens mostly to pilots of amphib aircraft or others who used really remote and unserviced strips, you can't get a clearance before departure. You can then get a clearance in the air, but in that case you have to either depart VFR and remain in VMC until you have received your clearance, or depart on uncontrolled IFR and remain clear of controlled airspace until you have a clearance. Some people do this even when there are facilities on the ground where they could have received a clearance, but they find it to be a time savings. In the US if you do it without even having a flight plan filed it's called a "pop-up clearance" and is not abnormal there, but in Canada filing a flight plan in the air when there were facilities to do it on the ground is considered poor airmanship, and it's rude because it jams the frequency and puts the workload of accepting the flight plan on people who have more urgent work to do. You can see where this is going, with oblivious US pilots annoying Canadian flight service specialists and other pilots when they do here what is perfectly normal at home. As far as I can tell, the standard Canadian behaviour of flying cross-country VFR then calling approach to land VFR at a busy airport is the US equivalent. US controllers really don't seem to like that. Would they prefer me to pick up an IFR clearance before approaching their airspace?

The last option for IFR clearances in Canada is to conduct the entre flight outside of controlled airspace and not have a clearance at all. That's perfectly legal, and an aircraft can transition between IFR and VFR flight just by changing altitude by 500' and changing the transponder code. I haven't done that in a few years.

Letting Me Down Gently

I like looking at AIM amendments. Even old ones that I should have reported on months ago. Some stuff sits in my buffer and keeps getting bumped until I have a place for it. Every country issues a sort of national pilot's handbook, a combination of sage advice, regulatory requirements, and doorstop. US pilots will be familiar with the FAR/AIM, an annually issued paperback the size of a James Clavell novel. Canada used to have a looseleaf binder about the same size. It was called the AIP--Aeronautical Information Publication--and oh boy amendments were fun back then, because they mailed them out in a sheaf and you had to individually remove the outdated pages and replace them with the new ones. I'm nerdy enough that I kind of enjoyed the ritual, but that doesn't mean I wasn't occasionally a year behind in my amendments.

Some years back, Canada needed to normalize its publications with an ICAO standard that required the AIP to be a document for foreign pilots, containing only ICAO differences, so they changed the name to the AIM (Aeronautical Information Manual), and at the same time they changed the format to 8 1/2 x 11 (that's the standard letter size here, approximately A4) and shortly afterwards started charging for the paper format. I still free update notices electronically and can look at it online.

An amendment that caught my eye was this detail explaining what to include in your flight plan:

RAC 3.16.9 The sentence “INDICATE if aircraft is equipped with a ballistic parachute system.” was added to “N/(REMARKS)”.

It certainly would be relevant to ATC and rescuers to know if the airplane they are looking for could have descended vertically to a survivable landing, or that could pose a hazard to rescuers (thanks, Plastic Pilot). I remember having an aircraft attended by local (non-airport) firefighters after a smoke-in-cockpit incident and they had no aircraft specific training. I showed them where the fuel lines and tanks were located in that airplane, where the battery was and how to shut off the engine and electrical in the cockpit. I know they would simply treat the whole airplane as a dagerous mix of fuel and electrical power, but it was a little startling to realize how little they knew about what they might be dealing with.

I've never flown an aircraft with a ballistic parachute. It's not tempting, even if it were available for aircraft over about 700 kg. My nightmare scenarios are not ones that a parachute would get me out of.

When I'm getting ready to go into town I call to ask if my camera is ready. The guy in the shop says he will call me back. Needing to actually GO into town rather than sit on the couch and wait for the camera guy to call me back, I leave. There's a message to call them. I call them. They have to call me back. This repeats a number of times. I think they have lost the camera. Finally they manage to answer the question. The camera is not lost, but it is not ready either. It is "beyond economical repair." I'll go and get it to get the SD card back, and perhaps I can get another the same and reuse the battery.

National Baggage

I watched United States President Obama on TV last night, appealing to Americans to ask their congressmen to approve raising the debt ceiling already. Don't take this coupled with my recent post on the FAA shutting down as a sign that I'm taking a sudden interest in US politics. The FAA post indicated my interest in the responsibilities of national aviation regulatory bodies, and I didn't tune in to Obama on purpose. He pre-empted the television show I wanted to watch, so that when I turned on the TV, instead of a vapid sitcom there was my neighbouring nation's president, all serious-like, quoting Ronald Reagan and explaining what taxes are used for. He's charismatic, for sure. And there's the "holy shit, the large nation we live next to is really having problems" aspect of the situation. I listened to him for the whole fifteen minutes, my attention only being broken after he left and a station commentator came on to say that Obama's solution was too complicated.

Taxes are a really hot-button item for Americans. They established a whole new country to get out of paying taxes they didn't like, and even their latest political movement, the Tea Party is named to hark back to that tax protest. This made me wonder, what really instigated Canadian nationhood, and is it still a berserk button for Canadians?

Everyone who went to school here knows that we were a bunch of separate British colonies and then the British North America Act united a few of them when the founding fathers all got hammered at the Charlottetown Conference (do you have a photo of the founders of your country all hungover after doing it?) But why did the British decide that 1867 was time these colonies governed themselves?

There'd been some rebellions in the colonies, and Lord Selkirk was sent to analyze why and figure out how to settle us down. He recommended that we be given responsibility for government. What quaint 19th century concerns were the issues in those rebellions? There seem to have been three main ones: ethnic disputes between members of the French and English populations, inequality in government land grants to different religions, and opposition to mass American immigration. I already knew that the English fighting the French was woven deep in the fabric of our nation, but I didn't realize that separate school funding and resenting American infiltration were as originally Canadian as trapping beaver and tapping maple syrup. So yup, it seems that whatever inspired you to create a country remains something your citizens care about. I do believe that goes for the the lofty ideals as well as the grievances, though. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberté, égalité, fraternité; peace, order and good government. That last link is to an essay by a smart, bilingual Canadian politician who was vilified by his opponents on the basis that he had been unduly influenced by time spent in the United States.

And now I go back to watching the American television show (How I Met Your Mother) that Obama displaced, when it would be more useful for me to be watching something in French to improve my language skills. I already did my taxes.

Yay! Fireworks!

I didn't have time to post this when it belonged, so I'll post it for my American friends, who celebrate their national day today.

CZEG PURSUANT TO SECTION 5.1 OF THE AERONAUTICS ACT, THE AIRSPACE WITHIN 0.5 NM RADIUS 533141N 1133037W (KINSMEN PARK, APRX 3 NM SSE EDMONTON CITY CENTRE(BLATCHFORD FIELD) AD) IS RESTRICTED DRG FIREWORKS ACT. SFC TO 3600 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA DESCRIBED UNLESS THE FLT IS AUTH BY EDMONTON TML FREQ 119.5 1107020455 TIL 1107020555

1107020455 TIL 1107020555 was the evening of July 1st, the 144th anniversary of my country being founded, and we get our faces painted, wave little paper flags, have a day off work during which we often barbecue something or attend a street festival, and then set off fireworks to celebrate. Except for places where it's not dark enough for fireworks in midsummer, so they save them for Hallowe'en or New Year's.

Happy everything that you like to celebrate with firewooks, food, fun and friends.

Busy Calendar

A blog reader who flies a Citation XL is going to be in the next town over, and we've made a date for me to meet him at the FBO there at 10:30. As soon as that was confirmed, I received an e-mail asking me if I'm available for an interview, at the same airport, "late morning." The request acknowledges that it's short notice and assures me another time would be fine, but I figure a job interview is a chance for me to show my willingness and flexibility as well as my knowledge and personality. Yet I spend so much of my life ditching my friends for work that I don't want to just cancel the other meeting so I suggest earlier.

"Would nine a.m. be alright? That's late morning for a pilot," I joke.

Nine it is. I'll spare my mainly male audience the "what do I wear to a casual interview for what will be a fairly casual job just before going out to meet a friend?" agonizing and affirm that I put on clothes and drove out there. This is the "Facebook job."

The working conditions are good, the pay okay, the company small but professional, the aircraft well-serviced and the work within my capabilities. I think I will be offered the job. And I think I would take it. But I have to check out the other possibility, too.

I head over to the FBO. I'm a bit early, and I know my friend has to land, clear customs, look after the passengers, and complete all his postflight duties. An FBO is like an airport terminal, but for private aircraft, so (so far, thankfully) there's no security screening or ticket counters, just a lounge with big windows and a counter behind which sit people who will sell you fuel, rent you a car or help you provide services to your passengers. I walk up to the counter and talk to the guy there. He's a retired flight engineer, doing fuelling, towing airplanes and chatting to people like me. I tell him I'm waiting for someone, and recite the tail number. He looks the flight up on Flight Aware and notes that it's just a few minutes away. He laughs that I know the aircraft ident. He says a lot of people show up here to meet a flight not knowing even the aircraft type or point of origin.

We see my friend's airplane (of course it's my friend's boss's airplane) land and then it taxies past to go to customs. They get held up at customs for a while but eventually come back to the FBO and after my friend sorts out an appropriate rental vehicle (a Canadian "full-sized" car isn't big enough for four men and bags) for his passengers. I get a quick tour of the airplane then help him and his FO put in brand new engine plugs. Brand new. The pilots have no more experience using these things than I do. I did had this exact same experience last winter when the boss bought shiny new monogrammed (okay not technically monogrammed, but with the aircraft ident on, just like these) wing covers and engine plugs. These ones fit oddly. The FO announces he's done the other side, then realizes that the ribbon streamer on his is marked "LEFT". We're on the left side. And ours is marked RIGHT. We just assumed the streamer said REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. We swap sides and they fit better.

Someday I'll stop being amused by the way aviation experiences are more the same than different despite radically different operations. They have the same plastic bin in the rear cargo space I had on my last job, and the same products in it: leather wipes, Mr. Clean Eraser, Febreeze and other products for keeping the airplane shipshape. Before we leave, the captain disconnects the aircraft battery. The airplane is only going to be parked for four days. I've left an airplane for months before with the battery connected, but not this sort. Apparently it's a weakness of this type: so many services on the hot battery bus that parking it for a few days can drain the battery.

This is the point at which I should have a fabulous restaurant recommendation, stuff the three of us into my definitely not full-sized car and go find it. But I'm uninspired so we just walk to one on the airport. It's more about people than food, anyway.

I enjoyed meaning the captain reader friend. He too was recently unemployed, when his previous jet charter company stopped operating. He was assigned to take a company jet to Wichita for refurbishing by Cessna for its new owner, and ended up working for the new owner.

He's actualy originally from Canada, with more northern piston time than I have. He tells me that when his first American co-workers found out how much time he had, they thought he must be an idiot. U.S. career progression is different. The newly PPCed copilot on this jet, for example went straight from flight instruction to jets. He knows how lucky he is, though.

My new friend gave me a book, which I'll read and report on later. It's a novel and he says it was a favourite of his years ago, but he hasn't reread it lately. It's foolproof though, he tell me, because either I will read it and enjoy it or I will read it and say "I could write a better aviation novel than this!" and then I will.

The end of the day brings encouraging e-mail from both potential employers. Even after all the times employers have led me on, I feel like two-timing scum talking to both of them.

Trying It Out

Sometimes for my keeping-my-hand-in sim sessions I fly approaches that I know to be tough, or ones that I happen to have plates for, and sometimes I just fly what's in the news. After reading about and discussing the AA runway excursion at Jackson Hole, I decided to sim it.

I set up at and departed from an airport to the west of Jackson Hole. I wasn't playing with a B757, just a King Air, thus setting myself a much easier task than the one the accident crew faced. Also to my knowledge flight sim doesn't have an option to set the CRFI -- that stands for Canadian Runway Friction Index. What's it called in other countries? I set the weather up to match reported conditions at Jackson Hole at the time of the accident: 400' ceiling, light snow, zero Celsius and visibility of 1 mile, with wind 240 at 10 knots. And I sought out the approach plates. I found the ILS or LOC Y RWY 19, printed it off, dug out some LO charts and started playing the game.

My plan for the approach is that on station passage at JAC I turn left to intercept the I-JAC localizer outbound and descend to 14,600', (that's the 14,100' permitted outside QUIRT on the procedure turn, corrected for temperature). I have to get down to 9900' (e.g. FAF 9700' with temperature correction) fairly swiftly after the course reversal in order not to be intercepting the localizer from above, so I check to see how far out I can go on the procedure turn. The plate says "Remain within 10 NM." It doesn't say 10 nm of what. A Canadian plate would give the fix there. It can't be of JAC, because QUIRT is 17.3 DME from JAC, so maybe the rule on US plates is from the depicted FAF at FAPMO. I've decides to try it with that. The published DH is 7063, or 612' above the threshhold. That's unusual, it's usually only 200', but this is a mountainous area so perhaps it doesn't have a good enough missed to allow descent that low. The cold weather correction adds thirty-five feet for a DH of 7100 for me. I can't possibly make the field that way with a 400' ceiling, so AA must have their own approach. That's not uncommon. The missed is easy, climb pretty much straight out tracking a radial for 26 miles.

So go. The JAC VOR doesn't identify on the published frequency. It exists in the game database on a separate frequency, so I switch to that. Twenty-five miles back from the JAC VOR I started descent to 15,000', as depicted for my sector in the MSA (minimum safe altitude) circle. I didn't calculate the correction for that, but by the time I was close to 15,000' I knew I'd be almost outbound anyway. I put the JAC VOR up on NAV2 and the ILS on NAV1, so I was ready to track. The ILS frequency works. The AA crew would have had contact with ATC and vectors, of course, but if my flight sim game has an ATC feature sophisticated enough to give vectors, I don't use it.

I started the course reversal at QUIRT and barely kept it within the 10 nm, chopping throttles and diving as soon as I had intercepted inbound, but the glideslope was already alive below me. I messily dived for it, then realized that I could see the field, ten miles away, with no cloud layer below. This happens a lot in MSFS: somehow the weather I set goes away. I have to miss anyway, because I'm way too high.

I ask a US pilot friend about the vague "within 10 nm" instruction and he produces a company Jeppesen (much better, but more expensive) chart for the same approach, on which it is explicit that the 10 nm is measured from QUIRT. He doesn't remember what the trick is to know what fix to use on the NOAA plates that I have. I then find another version of the approach, this one the ILS or LOC Z RWY 19. I don't know what that Y and Z are, or why the depicted ILS should be different on a plate where the LOC approach is different. It may just be that the approach has been improved since 2009. Maybe they blasted some rock so you can now follow a normal ILS.

I go back to the sim, make another attempt to set the weather, set the rate of change slider for the weather to zero and restart from a saved position approaching JAC VOR descending through 17,000'. This time I go out past QUIRT, do my course reversal damnit the glideslope is still below me. It's not too far down so I dive for it, then do the whole thing again with more aggressive descent through the procedure turn and I intercept the glideslope and localizer together in descent. Practice session done. It's as much practice of working out the details of the approach as it is of the actual handling.

I don't believe the US regs require me to make cold weather corrections, so perhaps the coldest seasonal temperatures are already incorporated in the plate. It's kind of bizarre that an instrument rating in one country qualifies me to fly IFR in any country despite the fact that small regional differences can confuse or even kill.

This isn't intended as any kind of reproduction of the incident, just a sim scenario inspired by it. Tomorrow I may fly out of Cairo, taking my inspiration from that news headline.

Meanwhile I have some more information on the AA overrun that inspired this sim session. On the 757, the aircraft determines if it is flying or on the ground based on the indications from tilt sensors on the main landing gear. My friend says, "Since the "air" input is only 1/2 second, my assumption is that it's not a bounce (I doubt both tilt sensors could show air for only 1/2 second during any kind of bounce). If anything, it was a very smooth landing that momentarily triggered no-tilt, then back to tilt, before showing on the ground, or a momentary malfunction of the air/ground sensing." He confirms that 132 knots is a normal touchdown speed for the 757 for a moderately heavy airplane, which would have applied here, due to a full passenger load and alternate fuel.

He also pointed out an error in my original blog entry. The thrust reversers are not armed during the approach, they are selected manually after landing (the spoilers are armed). I was getting mixed up with the autobrakes.

Meanwhile, I have an HR telephone interview in a couple of days.

Gravel Kit

While I was a student pilot I had a friend and mentor who was an instructor at a big school in California. I gave him an outdated Canada Flight Supplement, the fat then-green [now blue] book that lists all Canadian airports along with their frequencies, runways, nav aids, services, and other information for pilots. He had already given me an equivalent book for California, the A/FD, and I wanted to show him how the information was presented differently in the Canadian equivalent. I thought ours was better, as it includes pictures, and fewer cryptic abbreviations for information required in flight. The FAA seems to agree with me about the pictures, because they've since added them to the American publication.

I've told you this bit and some other parts before, but it's a good introduction to the rest of the post. My friend flipped open the CFS and looked at the first entry that met his eye. "Huh? Why does it say they have Jet-A fuel for sale at an airport with a gravel runway? Why would someone land a jet on a gravel runway?"

Even then I knew enough about my country's geography to have the answer. "Because that's their destination, and it's the only runway for hundreds of kilometres, and it's too far from anywhere to serve easily with piston aircraft." Paving is difficult in remote locations. Gravel is easily relevelled when the ground heaves with the freeze and thaw. It's not as slippery as pavement when covered with ice, and once the snow is packed deep, it doesn't matter what kind of surface is underneath. Pavement is nice to land on, but it won't keep you from sliding off the end on a snowy day.

You need particular techniques and equipment to cope with northern conditions. A lot of it is simply being diligent in applying the techniques you already know. Land under control, at the lowest speed that is safe to maintain on approach, at the beginning of the runway, and with no sideways momentum. Sturdy landing gear and runway friction will forgive a multitude of sins, but if you're going even a little bit sideways at touchdown and there's limited friction, you'll keep going sideways until you meet some resistance, maybe a snowbank at the side of the runway.

Gravel that is not covered in snow actually allows for some very soft landings, maybe because it crunches slightly out of your way, spreading the deceleration from any remaining vertical speed over a longer time than wheels hitting pavement. I flew on gravel for so long I can remember the "whoa, lines!" feeling when I went down south and landed on a paved runway with paint markings. At startup, taxi, and takeoff on gravel you have to be careful not to damage the airplane with flying gravel. Many gravel airports have little paved pads you can park between, positioning your engines over them so that when you start up or apply taxi power, the propellers won't kick up gravel. With jets, the danger is the nosewheel launching gravel that subsequently gets ingested into the engines. Here, and this is the whole point of this post, I have some pictures of the B737-200 gravel kit, a modification that physically deflects gravel from being kicked up by the nosewheel and then pneumatically protects the engine intakes.

This excellent website on the B737 lists nine other modifications that go with the gravel kit, such as extra shields on cabling and a retractable anti-collision light. The page notes that in 1975 dollars, landing on gravel costs about $15 extra in maintenance costs, per landing.

Above is the deflector on the front wheel. It looks as if it is resting on the ground, but there is actually a nine centimetre gap between the plate and the ground. Below you can see the vortex dissipators, spines that shoot out compressed air in front of the engines.

When retracted, the deflector serves acts as a gear door. There are more pictures and information at the website linked above.

Gravel kits are available for various aircraft. Here's one that caused a landing problem for a Challenger CL-600, when another problem combined with the gravel kit to jam the nosegear inside the airplane. No one was hurt, but there you go: there's no such thing as safety, just decisions you make to try to be safer than you would otherwise.

There's a piece of ATC dialogue I'm trying to find, where a pilot at an urban Canadian airport is following a northern airplane on the taxiway, and calls ATC to report that the aircraft ahead has a problem with their gear doors. It is, of course, just the gravel kit, with no problem at all.

Extra fact: The reader who sent me the above pictures is someone I met three different ways, once through this website, once through another website, and once through a shared sport. I never connected them, but fortunately she did.

Unrelated story: an unusually detailed report on a passenger aircraft fatal accident in Cork, Ireland.