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.

Whom Is This Job Being Saved For?

Someone just sent me a link to this job posting for Nav Canada. It's an excellent job flying a Challenger CRJ-100 jet around this fantastic country to check the calibration of nav aids. The fun and variety of what I do now, plus a fast pressurized airplane, multi-crew environment and very very fine avionics. It wasn't the first time I'd seen that job posting. My chief pilot wants that job, and told me about it and as I listened to the requirements I said "I've got that," and "I've got that!" then "Wait, did you say three thousand hours multi-crew PIC?" For an FO job? Neither I nor my CP has that.

There's nothing wrong with asking for experience, but to ask for that much multi-crew pilot-in-command experience to be the second-in-command is very unusual. I've never seen a posting that asked for that much multi-crew PIC, even for a captain position. My suspicion is that there is someone Nav Canada wishes to hire for the job, someone who fits into their team, is a skilled pilot and is appropriate for the job, but that the corporate rules require posting the job. Perhaps the person is an American or Mexican, so by NAFTA rules they have to show that a Canadian with the appropriate qualifications was not available for the job. I know of a Canadian whose American employer posted his job as requiring fluency in Hungarian, in order to meet the NAFTA requirements. Perhaps Nav Canada tailored the ad to that person's résumé. Or maybe I'm way out of touch and there are hundreds of people who want this job and are fully qualified for it as posted, and that the responsibilities of the job include bona fide reasons for the listed experience requirements.

Panhandling

If we're going back to northern Canada I can reverse my original route, but it sounds like we'll be going to the states, so I am planning a route down the Alaska Panhandle to see if I can do it without landing in Canada. That will save clearing customs twice. It's doable, even though the seasonal headwinds are intense. Planning with ten knots above today's top headwind for the route, I can go Ketchikan to Bellingham in one hop. My alternate kind of has to be Abbotsford or Vancouver, because if the weather is too bad to get into Bellingham, how am I getting into Orcas Island? And I don't think I can plan Whidby Air Base. Paine Field might be stretching it on gas.

I call CANPASS to find out how they would react to an unscheduled landing in Canada from an airplane that had not filed customs paperwork. She's perfectly nice, but doesn't give me any real information. "An emergency is an emergency, we'd just have to deal with it as it comes, but it would have to be an emergency, not just a fuel stop." I don't try to explain the concept of an alternate or an emergency fuel stop. I'd better treat Canada like untracked jungle or an ocean as far as flight planning goes. It's doable, but it has to be IFR because the Alaska Panhandle is permanently IFR. I don't think they ever see the sun there.

I send an e-mail to my boss about the status of the airplane, and my planning so far. He e-mails back to ask if I can fly from Alaska to Washington without clearing customs. I blink. Wasn't that the point of the e-mail I just sent? Next time I'll write a shorter e-mail. The chief pilot (whom I cc:ed) assures me that my e-mail was perfectly clear, but thinks it might be cutting it a bit close. The big problem though, is that my IFR just expired. Another pilot will come up and do the trip with me, which is safer anyway.

Alaska feels lonely in the evening because I don't get any e-mail. I'm west of everyone, so they've all gone to bed already. And you know what else is sad? After all my looking for beluga whales, someone sends me a link to tell me that the beluga whale I was almost guaranteed to fly over on the way to Washington State died.

Sweet, We're In Alaska!

In Whitehorse we're cleared to taxi and then take-off, with no restrictions on turns or altitude, so we're quickly on course for the United States. (I keep saying that, because it's so weird). The weather is definitely poor to the south, but along the highway it's excellent. We look from the dotted line on the GPS to the ground, trying to spot some evidence of the actual border. There's not a river for it it follow, just an arbitrary straight line, and they probably don't mow a line in the trees up here like they do along the 49th parallel in western Canada. We see a pull off with a large building on the highway and conclude that that is the border control station. Kind of low-key, but I doubt it's a hotbed of smuggling.

We soar over mighty rivers and past majestic mountains. All that stuff. Looks just like the Yukon, so far. Which is nothing to scoff at. Our flight plan calls for us to hang a left at an airport with customs, I think it was called Tok. The GPS tells us where it is and we can see the pass to enter on the left. As we make the turn the PIC asks, "did you actually see the airport?" I didn't. It's a broad flat, kind of swampy area with a road running through it. The airport should have been pretty obvious. We shrug and continue on, deciding that perhaps it was a waterdrome. I looked it up just now, and it's a 1700' dirt strip, so we can be forgiven for missing it. But it shows how reliant we have become on GPS. I can't imagine ten years ago turning into a mountain pass without ensuring all the landmarks required to identify it were there.

We have two GPSes working on the project right now, the Garmin 496 and the 430. The 496 is a much better tool for this job, because the 430 is designed for IFR and if it had a personality it would be reduced to a quivering wreck by the proximity of rocks in a pass like this. We can't set a comfortable zoom level on it and use it to look around corners for rocks, because it zooms in close and sounds an alarm whenever we snuggle up to the right side of the pass. The 496 just puts up an inset covered in Xs that it thinks we're going to hit. We always turn so we don't.

The weather in the pass is surprisingly poor, dumping rain on us and reducing visibility in mist. It's really nice to have two pilots in here to confirm the navigation without having to look away from the window. It's a bit of a twisty pass. It's in the middle of nowhere, but there's an RCO, a remote communications outlet, right in the pass, so I can file a PIREP while we negotiate it. Pretty cool. We go around another corner and the weather is fine again. Here we are hooking up with the road (which took a different route) as the pass dwindles back to swamp.

Yeah, swamp. By my estimate almost all the bits of Alaska that aren't mountains or rivers are swamps. Do they call it muskeg here? I forgot to ask. There are hectares and hectares of swampland. Must be millions of mosquitoes down there. It's honestly a bit of a letdown. Alaska gets so much press and here it is looking exactly like northern Alberta. Or northern Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. It doesn't have the sweeping rocky look of the Northwest Territories. It probably looks awesome all covered with snow, though. Great for snow machines.

The bad weather that was to the south is now to the southeast, we've kind of gone around it. There are mountains over there and as we draw closer their spectacular beauty makes up for the swamp. Between the rocks are huge glaciers. I don't think we appreciated how huge. I know that at first I thought the one in the picture was a road coming out of the mountains, you know how a road that has snow on it stays snow-covered well after the surrounding snow has melted, because traffic has compacted the snow? Then I looked at it longer and realized that it was a giant glacier. The roadlike ribbon of ice continues out of the photo to the right. I just couldn't fit it all in. Glaciers aren't very photogenic. You really have to go and look at them.

There was an RV park at the foot of one glacier, close enough that you could probably smell the ice from there. If I were to come to Alaska as a tourist in a motorhome, I would definitely want to stay at that RV park. While the mountains with their glaciers and bad weather are to the left, the hills to the right have a curious sandy quality to them. Maybe it's different rock, or maybe just the way the weather comes through that have given them different erosion or vegetation. I need a geologist to follow me around and tell me what I see.

The sandstone side approaches the rock side more closely and we go to the right of a hill in between the two. That turns out to be a shame, because as we come out the other side of the hill we realize we missed a close flyby of another glacier. Maybe on the way back. If we were doing this for fun we would definitely have headed over closer to check out the glaciers better, but we have a customs ETA into Anchorage soon, and we're not being paid to sightsee.

Also recall that we have been unable to buy proper Alaska charts. We're working off the GPS database and the information I've researched on the net and printed off. It should be pretty good, but you never know. We should be within radio contact of Anchorage around the next corner. We are, and the Anchorage area is a long, broad inlet. We pick up the ATIS approaching Wasilla--yes the Wasilla of which Sarah Palin was mayor. It appears to be a suburb of Anchorage rather than the isolated Alaskan village I had pictured. There are dozens of airports on the delta. I call Anchorage approach with our position, and intentions, and they assign us a squawk code and ask if we're familiar with the something-or-other VFR route. We're not, so they give us a vector. We rejoice. A vector means we can't screw up too horrifically now. We're under ATC control. As long as we do what we're told and we can't blunder into any airspace we didn't know about. Real professional, I know. I promise I'm embarrassed about this.

The vector takes us downwind along the west shore of the inlet, then they give us a new vector, taking us further west. I think at first that I've misheard the instruction, it's away from the airport and we're already 20 miles away, but that's where they want us to go. We hook up with a base leg, and then final. I have the airport diagram out and verify our assigned runway, 7L. It intersects runway 14 a thousand or so feet in.

A couple miles back on final the controller asks us where we are parking. I'm glad I did my research and can answer with the name of the FBO. I call back on short final to add that we're going to customs first. I don't know whether their question was to determine whom to bill for our landing fee, or what taxi instructions to give us, so now they have both pieces of information.

Flaps are down, gear is down, cleared to land--we were cleared to land ages ago--and then just as we flare they ask us to go around. We don't see the reason, but the controller obviously does so we don't question it. The PIC does a textbook go around, transitioning from going down to going up very smoothly and cleaning up the airplane. We then follow further instructions to turn around and fly a close right downwind for another try. We are rolling out of the 180 when the controller changes his mind again, "Can you accept runway 32 from there?" It's a complete chop and drop, with runway 32 right there off our right wing but my coworker nods and we put it on the runway. This actually puts us closer to customs. It's almost straight in front of us as we turn off at the first convenient taxiway.

The controller thanks us for our cooperation and gives us a long taxi clearance which I copy down and read back. Much of PANC is one huge stretch of pavement with taxiways being defined routes over that slab. I don't get to just beeline across the pavement to the customs hall. I always find it a little harder to find my turns in this scenario. I like it when there's grass or dirt between the taxiways. I study the taxiway diagram then realize that the route we've been given does not go to customs. It's to the FBO. I call ground back and reiterate our need to clear customs, so they give us a new taxi clearance. We successfully find customs and shut down. I pull out the aircraft documents, my licence and passport, and the rest of our paperwork, and then open the rear door for the arrival of the customs agent.

He comes out quite quickly and is friendly. After checking the airplane paperwork against the letters painted on the vertical stabilizer, he asks us to bring our paperwork and come inside. We follow him through a secured door into an enormous customs hall, an area that could accommodate a B747 full of people, but aside from a few other customs officers, no one else is there. He takes us over to the desk labelled "crew line," where someone else checks our paperwork and types things into his computer. They also direct us to a phone where we can close our VFR flight plan. Our customs escort is also a pilot; we soon learn that practically everyone in Alaska is. I think we disappoint him by not remembering the names of the passes and glaciers along our route. I feel a little guilty knowing that this casually executed, spontaneous and underplanned jaunt is the trip of a lifetime that I'm sure many pilots spend years plotting. Sorry.

Back in the airplane we start up and taxi to the south side of the airport. Ground switches us to tower in order to taxi across the parallel runways, one of which temporarily doesn't exist, due to construction. A friendly woman with a stop/slow sign waves as we taxi through the construction zone. I'm guessing that airplanes always have right of way through construction, and her job is to stop any trucks that might be approaching as we move through. The FBO is the first one on the other side and we park and shut down under the direction of a marshaller.

We take our bags and head inside. There is great consternation amongst the staff that they didn't know we were coming. One of them has dialed the manager, who isn't in today, and he gives me the phone. Darn. The guy I spoke to didn't make it clear that I needed an explicit reservation. I guess he thought all airports were like that. The manager, however, apologizes profusely for not being prepared for our arrival. I affirm that I did call ahead, but didn't give a definite arrival time or date because I didn't know for sure at the time. Is this going to be a problem? I tell him that I don't need anything special like ice. As I say that, it occurs to me that ice is amusingly far from "something special" in Alaska, so I amend it to caviar sandwiches. The manager, whose name is Louis, says that he could probably get us caviar sandwiches if we wanted them, and that we are welcome to stay there. I guess we pass the screening.

The one thing we do need is charts. Those turn out to be a bit of a problem. We describe the ones we want, but they only have some expired ones for reference. Louis makes some calls and then tells us where we can get them. They aren't available on the field, but there are two sources, one quite near our hotel and another an FBO at a nearby airport.

Meanwhile our customers have arrived via the airlines so they come and pick us up. We check into the hotel, which has small but nice rooms, and the twenty-four hours of daylight mean that I don't really mind that most of the lightbulbs are missing. There is a comfortable windowseat with a view of the mountains. Just before I go to bed I find out what the job here is. Oh boy. This is going to take some diplomacy.

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Also, a former senator with the same name as the airport, Ted Stevens, just died in an air crash. I think he may be the airport namesake even though he was still alive when the airport was named. Americans don't always seem to wait until people are dead before naming things after them.

On the Marge

The next day we load the airplane with our personal gear, cursing as usual the paucity of tiedown points in this thing. Once everything is packed and secured, I call the customs broker to tell him we really are going today. He's used to our 'hurry up and wait' schedules, but now the US won't let us postpone arrival permission from day to day, so he can't file the paperwork and let us catch up to it anymore. Everything has to be done the same day. Good thing I called, because a pilot switch means he doesn't have all the current details on my coworker. I grab his passport out of his bag and provide the broker with the relevant details, and with an estimated time and place for our penetration of US airspace en route. I have to call him again from Whitehorse to get a fax sent to the FBO.

It's very weird for me to be going north across the border to the US. I'm used to going north out of the usual infrastructure of Canadian life. And I'm used to going south across the US border. I'm afraid I'm going to forget some basic rule of going to the US, just because I'm going the wrong way. To me the US being "south of the border" is as cliched as Mexico is in the US. I just received an Aeroplan e-mail that starts "Want to take flight south of the border? Treat yourself to a 10% discount with Aeroplan." It's valid for any flight to the U.S. Imagine if Mexico had a part that was right in the middle of Kansas and that's how disorienting this is.

We take off and fly north, or actually mostly west. It's almost due west by the compass, because the magnetic variation is 21 degrees here. The weather is spectacular in BC and the Yukon. I follow on paper maps to identify the mountains and lakes. We're coming up on Whitehorse, but we're almost parallel to the BC-Yukon border, converging very slowly. We'll cross it just shortly before reaching Whitehorse.

I have a memory of there being something irregular about radio procedures in Whitehorse, but I search the CFS and can't find anything odd. I tune the tower a long way out to get situational awareness coming in. A pilot on frequency position reports "coming up on Lake Leberge" and I freak out. No, not because he's at our position and altitude, but because he's on the marge of Lake Lebarge. My innocent crewmate is 'treated' to a sudden Robert Service recitation.

There are strange things done in the Midnight Sun
By the men who moil for gold.
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your bllod run cold.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

I would have gone on, but mercifully I didn't know any more by heart. I resolved to rectify that at my earliest convenience, but I think that's after my other resolutions about running, simming and building a solar-powered hovercraft, so don't ask me about it soon.

Except for poetic outbursts, descent into Whitehorse is routine. The field is easy to spot and we're sequenced number four for landing, behind a Convair, then resequenced number four again after the first guy lands, because a faster aircraft turned up to fill in one of the gaps. Pretty adept work for what I believe is a non-radar tower. As we exit the runway, on a cross runway, tower asks us where we're going on the field. I say something like "Looking for avgas" or "to refuel" and we're given taxi instructions up a hill. Just when you think you're at a modern airport. At the top of the hill is a little charter operation, or maybe a repair shop, but nothing that looks like a fuel pump. We wave off the marshaller, do a very awkward one-eighty and call back ATC for clarification. They confirm that there is no fuel up here. Whatever I said coming off the runway sounded like the name of the company based up that hill. we taxi back down the hill and across the cross runway, and park where we should have gone in the first place.

We go into the FBO and ask about fuel. It will be about forty-five minutes, because the fuel truck, just went up the hill to fuel a charter fleet. We pick a safe estimated time of departure and divvy up duties: I'll take care of customs and fuel while he does weather and files a flight plan. I also get their fax number and permission to receive a fax. He calls 1-866-WX-BRIEF while I call the customs broker and fill out a fuel order form.

The fax is several pages of all the dirt US customs wants to know about us. I page through it to make sure everything has printed properly and there aren't any glaring inaccuracies. They spelled our names right, anyway. The fueller arrives ahead of schedule and I direct him which tanks to fill, then sign his paperwork.

There are a lot of other aircraft around, some military, I didn't notice whose, and a small fleet of firefighting aircraft from Saskatchewan. They've been working in Alaska, helping to fight forest fires. I didn't know we gave international aid to the Americans. I wonder if the Americans chartered the Canadian firefighting capability, or if there's simply an international agreement and we come to each other's aid in the burning forests. Probably the former. I'm such a communist to think of the latter.

The other pilot, he's the PIC on the customs paperwork, comes back with an 'everything old is new again' discovery. He says that when he called Flight Services they said, "Why don't you come on over?" and they gave him a face-to-face briefing. He's exhilarating in the experience of being right there with a briefer who could point at things on weather charts and at how much easier it was to get a complete picture of the weather. He's too young to remember that that was the way things used to be everywhere. They didn't have GFAs back then, and I don't think the satellite imagery was as good, but it is a good feeling to have an in-person weather briefing. Especially when it was that same person that you were talking to on the radio as you taxied out for departure. The weather is low on the south route, so we'll have to follow the Alaska highway and then cut south down the valley to Anchorage. That makes the trip a bit longer, but within our contingency planning. Also the Alaska-Canada border at Beaver Creek doesn't count as ADIZ, so we don't need to worry about being super accurate with the crossing time.

I call US Customs in Anchorage with our recalculated ETA, and to ensure that they received their share of the paperwork. You'd think this could all be more automated or less labour intensive, but when your dealing with international travel nothing is predicable enough not to worry about. In this case the Americans are ready for our arrival.

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Also: I'm looking for someone who has easy access to CYPK who could do a fun favour for me in the next few days. Please e-mail me if you think you could.

Fireworks and Stuff

Happy Fourth to my American friends. Long may your country prosper and enjoy the freedoms your clever forefathers proclaimed for you.

Why Are You Surprised?

I have previously blogged about discontinued satellite monitoring of 121.5 MHz and the ever-retreating deadline for Canadians to switch to 406 MHz ELTs. In that entry I mentioned that Canada was hoping the Americans would require the new emergency beacons first, so that they would make cheap ones and we could afford them. A better reason is probably so that they wouldn't have to decide between making an exception to the rule for American tourists, or losing the tourist revenue when Americans refused to by a new piece of equipment just to overfly Canada.

Curiously, it isn't the FAA (the U.S. agency that regulates aviation) or the NTSB (the U.S. agency that investigates accidents and makes safety recommendations) that have made the move. It's the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates "interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable." These are the guys that decide who gets to broadcast on what frequency, and the ones who spent hours scrutinizing television footage of Janet Jackson's naked breast. On June 1st the FCC released this document. The ELT ruling is in sections 16 to 19 starting on page ten. It says, in part:

After reviewing the comments, we conclude that we should prohibit the certification, manufacture, importation, sale or continued use of 121.5 MHz ELTs. We believe that if 121.5 MHz ELTs are no longer available, aircraft owners and operators will migrate to 406.0-406.1 MHz ELTs, and the advantages of 406.0-406.1 MHz ELTs will provide safety benefits for search and rescue teams as well as aircraft pilots, crew and passengers, while also preserving search and rescue resources for real emergencies.

The American Pilots and Owners Association immediately opposed the new rule, objecting to the sudden cost it would impose on their members. My reading is that the FCC didn't consider existing installations of ELTs to be use, and weren't actually intending to make it illegal to fly with an old ELT. If they really meant to forbid flight without a 406 MHz ELT, then why would they use words like "believe" and "migrate"? Remove the word "use" and I think it would be a pretty clever solution. You don't need to buy a new ELT until you need to buy a new ELT. And I think anyone who needed to buy a new ELT these days would most likely buy a 406 MHz one anyway. Wouldn't you?

406 MHz

When you get in my airplane, part of your safety briefing includes me telling you where in aircraft the Emergency Locator Transmitter is installed. (It's in the vertical stabilizer, marked on the outside with a sticker, and can be reached by tearing off a panel. You don't need tools to get it off if you're willing to destroy it in the process, and if you need it it's an emergency, so you should be). You shouldn't need to physically reach it anyway, as it's supposed to start transmitting automatically in the case of a crash, advising the world of the need for rescue and the location of the accident. ELTs are required by law to be in almost all aircraft operating in Canada. (There are a few exceptions for things like balloons, skydiving operators, and delays in repairs). The problem is, the law no longer requires the ELT to transmit on the most useful frequency. It's not that the law changed, it's that the useful frequency changed and the law didn't. Satellite monitoring of 121.5 was turned off over a year ago, leaving only the new 406 MHz frequency.

Below is an informative Transport Canada video on the advantages of the 406 MHz units, made somewhat entertaining by its "historical" character. Watch for the old-style green CFS in the tower. I love that the "typical Canadian pilot" is a while male in a Skyhawk. About right, really. The point of the video is to encourage Canadians to embrace the new 406 MHz ELT technology, because they are monitored by satellite and send information on the registered owner of the ELT. Without satellite monitoring, the old ELTs that transmit only on 121.5 MHz are useful only for informing people monitoring that frequency that there may be an airplane crashed in their approximate vicinity. Or maybe just a faulty microwave oven.

Embedding this video seems to crash some people's browsers, so click the check mark in the two-line table on this page.

The unchanged law wasn't an oversight. It was supposed to change years ago, calling for the minimum legal ELTs to transmit on 406. There were handbills and videos and stickers and probably mousepads and t-shirts too, all promoting the new standard. But there affordable general aviation ELTs didn't exist. Canadian advocacy groups said, "Hey, wait, these exceed 20% of the cost of some of our members' airplanes!" Transport Canada funded a 2008 study into reducing the cost of 406 MHz ELTs. Aviation supplies are expensive enough to start with, but usually Canadians can rely on getting the best possible prices as a result of the competitive American market. There are so many GA pilots in the US, that anything they want to buy is available from multiple competing suppliers and innovation plus economies of scale bring the price down. But in this case Canada was mandating equipment that was not required by and was not particularly useful to most US pilots. Alaska is like most of Canada, but flying in the rest of the US being out of radar contact while enroute is so rare that the controllers point it out to you with some concern. Not only were the Americans not going to sell us cheap ELTs, but they were opposed to the regulation.

This US pilot group discussion typifies their concerns, back when Feb 2009 was the deadline. US pilots have three understandable objections.

• They don't want to buy 406 MHz ELTs just to legally cross the border, but the regulation effectively imposes a three thousand dollar per aircraft fee for operating in Canada.
• The discussion demonstrates a national difference in philosophy with "If I waive Search and Rescue service, I shouldn't have to pay for an ELT." I think this is likely the same difference that makes people on opposite sides of the border feel differently about government-funded healthcare. Canadian SAR looks for everyone who is known to be missing, no matter how poorly prepared they are, so we don't consider it out of line to require a level of preparation that will save all taxpayers a lot of money on UNSAR. And of course Americans can't be expected to care about Canadian taxes.
• The pilots believe that having flown in the US, which is itself huge and has some areas of low population density, that they understand the barrenness of Canada. The latter has less than a tenth of the average population density of the former, and the population we do have is more asymmetrically distributed.

Government kept pushing the effective date of the new regulation forward into the future. A requirement to carry a 406 MHz ELT is still not in the current rules. They haven't forgotten about it, but it's dropped off the front page. The only FAQ question about ELTs on the TC site is about the angle you can put the antenna on, on a helicopter. It's still pending.

Meanwhile there's nothing to prevent Canadians from replacing the old ELTs with modern units that broadcast on 121.5 and 406 MHz. Relying on the 121.5 broadcast means hoping that someone hears it and can home in on it by reports of where the signal is audible at what strength.

Go Hockey Men!

Sorry, no blog today. I'm busy watching the Olympics. For the hockey men, I predict Gold: USA, Silver: Canada, Bronze: Slovakia.

I'm just watching the hockey women accept their medals. I hope Canada's men win the gold, but I also hope they will be as gracious as the Americans women in defeat if they don't. And the Finnish women made me love them, all proud to have a medal, regardless of colour, and making little personal gestures at the people they hoped were watching the TV coverage. Probably on the men's teams neither the gold nor silver medalists will cry. I think I see tears on both sides for the gals.

The medals themselves are ugly, though. They look crumpled.

Update: I'm very happy to be completely wrong on my medal prediction. What a fantastic hockey tournament. GO CANADA! U - S - A! HYVÄ SUOMI!

He Already Has a Clipboard

A friend of mine watching videos (like the one below) at Know Your Meme was entranced not so much by the pseudo-scientific approach to pop culture, but by the fact that all the "Internet Scientists" in the videos had lab coats with their names on. "Oh!" he said, with a longing normally reserved for Lamborghinis and private islands full of bikini-clad bodyguards, "I wish I could have a lab coat with my name on it."

How could one not indulge someone on such a simple desire? Lab coats, I knew, are cheap and how hard is it to get anything customized these days? "I am going to get you a belated Christmas present." In minutes I had selected a website selling lab coats. "What colour would you like your name to be in? What font? Any other text?" He was bug eyed with joy at the prospect of having his very own lab coat. Bizarre. I thought we'd all come to terms with the fact that if it exists, you can buy it on the Internet. And lab coats are fully legal without a licence in Canada.

So of course I was doubly amused when the extremely Internet-savvy comic artist Randall Munroe through his comic xkcd expressed the same glee at the availability of lab coats for purchase. It's true that the lab coat is a universal badge of geeky authority, but hey, you can buy laminating badge-making machines on the Internet, too.

The Canadian shipping charges were insane, so I specified that the order be shipped to a receiver in a US border town. They e-mail you when the package has arrived and then charge your $3 to collect it. I know someone who lives near the border on the Canadian side, so arranged a trip to visit her, and then on my way home drove across the border to collect the goods.

At the border the US Customs official closed his booth just before I got to it, in order to go and talk to someone in another booth. I had become distracted reading my passport or something and didn't notice immediately when he returned to wave me forward, so I started off the conversation on a bad note. But this should be routine.

"Where are you going?"

"Just to <border town>."

"Purpose of your visit?"

"Just picking up a package."

'What sort of package?"

"I think it's a lab coat."

"A lab coat?" Suspicion hackles raised on his neck. "What is it for?"

I should have just said, "It's a gift for my friend, who is a scientist." True, and the customs guy didn't have to know he works in a branch of science that doesn't use labcoats. But I'm stunned by his need to know what a lab coat is for, cursed with the need to answer the question that I know he is asking, "To wear," I manage. I mean what else would you do with it? "It keeps stuff off your clothes."

He offered me an out, "For your job?" I could have said yes, but there's a really good chance that the screen of information my passport has pulled up on my identifies me as a pilot, so I continue trying to explain why my friend wants a lab coat.

"Because it's a ... lab coat. It's cool and science-y. Like on TV." Is he contemplating the possibility that he's about to bust up an international methamphetamine ring? Do terrorists wear personalized lab coats while building bombs in cheap hotel rooms?

He looks at the computer screen again to see if I'm a known threat, and I guess I'm not, as he finally waves me on with "Have a nice day."

I pick up the package and open it to get the invoice and to make sure the order is correct. As I cross back into Canada, I prepare to again justify my purchase.

"Where do you live?"

"<Hometown>."

"Purpose of your visit?"

"Picking up a parcel." The wrapping is evident on the passenger seat.

"What did you get?"

"A lab coat. It cost twenty-four bucks."

I brandish the receipt but he doesn't look at it. Lab coats are not suspicious objects in Canada. He was waving me through to Canada and looking at the next driver in line before I'd even finished speaking. I wasn't even asked to go inside to pay duty on my purchase. I guess it isn't worth it for them for three dollars.

So I conclude that there are three types of people with respect to lab coats: those who consider them a useful but mundane piece of apparel, those who consider them to be a cool badge of scientific authority, and those who are suspicious of anyone who would want one.

Looks like this has become the unofficial blog week for exterior markings of authority and worth.

Nooooo! Don't Take My Future!

Just to show you how serious I am about owning a flying car, I started on that to do list. I picked up the phone and called the regional Transport Canada office. And I am crushed. The airplane is not only not registrable in Canada until the manufacturer applies for it, but it's possible that I won't even be able to fly it in Canada.

I started with a generic question, "Would there be any impediment to registering a new, US-manufactured, FAA-certified aircraft in Canada?" The receptionist said tht was a tough one and transferred me to a superintendent. Before I even mentioned which airplane I had in mind, he said that there were US aircraft that could not be imported to Canada because they had never received certification. Doesn't this seem silly? Shouldn't two technologically advanced, safety-conscious countries like Canada and the US be able to agree on a reciprocity arrangement for the certification of manufactured products?

"So," I said, ready with a fallback plan, "I would have to keep it N-registered and fly it on an FAA licence." That's not much of an obstacle.

"Only for 90 days," he says.

"But," I sputter. "How come I know people who have owned November-registered aircraft for years in Canada?"

"Not as private owners. They must be owned as corporate entities."

"I can be a corporation." (Add incorporate to to-do list).

"But," he continues, "If the manufacturer doesn't apply for Canadian airworthiness certification, the aircraft cannot be operated in Canada."

So now I have to raise $200k and shift a government bureaucracy. I have a busy two years ahead of me.

Making Peace

I shower, getting water all over the bathroom, and get dressed. The weather doesn't look excellent, but it's good enough to get out of here. I finish packing and go to breakfast. To my amusement, it is eight forty-two. My coworkers are in the hotel "business centre" looking at weather online. "Get a late checkout," they advise. The weather is worse further northwest, with 700' ceilings and visibility as low as 2 statute miles in drizzle at en route airports. And no one knows what in the 200 mile stretches between airports with reported weather. We can't go IFR because we have some instrument issues.

Conditions here will deteriorate throughout the day, but the weather en route to Watson Lake should improve to 1500' to 2000' ceilings at least as far as Peace River. That gets us that much closer to our destination, and allows the weather here to be impassable tomorrow without affecting us. We agree to try for Peace River, maybe even Fort Nelson. I eat my breakfast, goof off for a couple of hours and then we all go to lunch. (Finally I got the pyrogies I've been craving since Vegreville, and yes, I know by now that I drove right past the world's largest pyrogy. Someone send me a picture and then I can photoshop myself into it and be done).

We call a cab and cram everything, including the printer which I loathe, into the truck and our laps and the driver takes us out to the airport. We direct her into the parking lot and then through the gap in the fence onto the apron. "I can't drive on the runway!" she protests. We assure her that it's not the runway, and that she's allowed. She parks next to the airplane, facilitating our unloading all that gear and then loading it into the airplane. It's raining now, but the ceiling is high enough and we back track and then take off to the west.

We pass Slave Lake, but there is no traffic there. It's the in-between season: too late for fire flights but too soon for heavy oil work. The trees below are a lovely mix of green conifers and yellow deciduous. The clouds are sometimes low enough that we skim through for a moment, but we're at a comfortable height above terrain, mindful of towers. Then we skim through a wisp that turns out not to be a wisp, and of course is the reason you're supposed to remain clear of them in the first place.

The pilot flying does a big 180 turn and flies back until we're back in the clear and then heads south for a while, looking for a way around. For a while there it looked like we were spending the night in Slave Lake, but then we found a way through. I called Edmonton radio via Slave Lake for updated Peace River, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake weather and after a brief discussion changed the GPS destination to Fort Nelson. Watson Lake weather was still nasty and there are mountains between here and there.

It gets sunny enough that I want to put on my sunglasses. I resist for a while, but then I really want them, so I apologize if it causes a jinx, but put them on. Immediately the weather deteriorates. We make a couple of attempts to get around a rainstorm that added poor visibility to the low ceilings. Not a good mix. Ceilings at Fort Nelson were 2000', and that's agl, so as Fort Nelson is 1250' asl, that meant clouds bases at 3250' asl, which was pretty much what we had. Our problem wasn't that we had a patch of low clouds, but that we had a patch of high terrain. We just have to get off this plateau.

I look at the terrain mode on the GPS (after pressing enter to confirm that I know that terrain avoidance is my own responsibility and that Garmin is no way accountable for my use of the data they provide). They provide three coloured contours: red for known obstacles less than 100' below you, yellow for known obstacles less than 1000' below you and black for everything more than 1000' below. We're on a yellow plateau, with our destination ahead in the black. Looking at the shape of our plateau, I see a finger of black extending quite a long way into it, not far to the south. Thinking three-dimensionally, the yellow lining up with that black finger will be lower than the yellow around it: it's a valley. You can see the same thing on the contours of the regular GPS map screen or on the paper chart which is also open on my lap, but it's somehow clearer on the very crude three-colour contour map than it is on the more detailed ones. The pilot flying navigates towards the supposed valley, and it is there. We're flying quite low, and the clouds ahead are quite low, but every time I draw breath to say it's not going to work, it works. There are some lower patches of clouds, but the terrain keeps dropping faster than the clouds. We cheer when we come out on lower ground with a clear distant view below the clouds.

As we approach Fort Nelson, the weather over the mountains even looks good. On approach into Fort Nelson a November-registered aircraft calls Fort Nelson radio on 126.7 to file a flight plan. There's an undercurrent of impatience in the specialist's voice as she explains that 126.7 is the air advisory frequency and is not appropriate to file a flight plan. The pilot can call flight services at "1-866-weather brief" from the telephone at the kiosk or he can contact Edmonton radio airborne on another frequency, which she gives him. We land in Fort Nelson for fuel and a pee break. During shutdown checks the pilot calls back and says the phone number won't work. I bet he tried the number on his cell instead of the kiosk. The Nav Canada number is only available from Canadian phones, and of course he'll be carrying a US cellphone. I wonder how shocked he will be by the roaming charges when he gets home and sees his phone bill.

We go in and use the kiosk ourselves, to see the weather ahead. Both the GFAs and the satellite views show clouds to the north of our route but not the south. We are confident that we can get over the mountains to Watson Lake, and if the clouds move in despite the forecast, we can drop into the Liard River valley and follow it to Watson Lake. We'll do that as soon as fuelling is complete, but tomorrow on the blog.

Securing the Homeland

Up until recently, a person received some kind of American scrutiny upon entering the US, but none upon leaving. I have often entered the US without showing ID of any kind, just the assertion that I was a Canadian citizen resident in Canada. And I have returned to Canada on the same assertion. Now passports are usually requested, but I'm not sure they are always scanned and recorded. I have crossed the US-Canada border on foot, by bicycle, car, boat, private airplane, as an airline passenger, as a commercial pilot, on the bus and probably more ways I'm forgetting. I think I have never swum across nor crossed on horseback, but I wish to preserve my right to do so in the future. I have always reported to the proper authority at the border, and I suppose it is possible that there is an international agreement that the Canadians and Mexicans tell the Americans who has entered their country from the US, so that it can be verified that someone who entered also left, but with an airplane I can leave the US for a country that doesn't even maintain diplomatic relations with the US, let alone freely give them a list of immigrants. The Americans now wish to maintain better knowledge of who is leaving as well as entering. Enter eAPIS.

eAPIS stands for Electronic Advance Passenger Information System, and while the first word under the page title and agency names is "Welcome," the text appearing under that is possibly more characteristic of the feeling one has encountering this thing.

Security Notification:

You are about to access a Department of Homeland Security computer system. This computer system and data therein are property of the U.S. Government and provided for official U.S. Government information and use. There is no expectation of privacy when you use this computer system. The use of a password or any other security measure does not establish an expectation of privacy. By using this system, you consent to the terms set forth in this notice. You may not process classified national security information on this computer system. Access to this system is restricted to authorized users only. Unauthorized access, use, or modification of this system or of data contained herein, or in transit to/from this system, may constitute a violation of section 1030 of title 18 of the U.S. Code and other criminal laws. Anyone who accesses a Federal computer system without authorization or exceeds access authority, or obtains, alters, damages, destroys, or discloses information, or prevents authorized use of information on the computer system, may be subject to penalties, fines or imprisonment. This computer system and any related equipment is subject to monitoring for administrative oversight, law enforcement, criminal investigative purposes, inquiries into alleged wrongdoing or misuse, and to ensure proper performance of applicable security features and procedures. DHS may conduct monitoring activities without further notice.

If I disappear suddenly, you may suppose I've been taken away in a black helicopter for disclosing information gleaned from the system.

My first task is to create a username and password, so I can enroll myself in the program. I have an automatic password generator, but its output doesn't meet the criteria.

ERROR: Your password must be between eight and twelve characters in length and must begin with a numeric character and contain one of the following special characters: "~", "!", "@", "#", "$", "%", "^", "&", "*", "(", ")", "-", "_", "+", "=", "{", "}", "[", "]", "", "|", ";", ":", "/", "?", ".". Your sender id can not be part of the password, and no character can be repeated consecutively more than two times.

I then go through the e-mailed activation key routine common to most websites these days, and then I have to fill out the forms. It wants to know the middle name of my flight follower. What is this American obsession with middle names or middle initials? They even made a president who didn't have a middle name make up a middle initial. What if you have two middle names? Are you supposed to pick one or put them both in the space?

Using this website, I'm supposed to notify the US every time I enter or leave the country in an airplane. I'm not sure they'll know I've left if I park the airplane and ride a horse home, especially as the Canadians who admit me and my horse might not record my middle initial. Nor the horse's.

I'm not quite sure how long eAPIS has been in force, I have been blissfully unaware of it because the customs broker has been doing it on my behalf. I do remember his e-mail when he wanted to know a bunch more information about us, so that must have been him registering us for the system. This has now added internet access and a good level of internet literacy to the requirements for international air travel. A Q&A on a Mexico aviation site notes:

Q: What if I need to file eAPIS and there is no Internet access available at my departing airport.

A: DHS indicates that you must go to another airport that has Internet Access

If any legitimate operation is going to break this system, it will be ours, where airplanes might stay in the US for months at a time, with several changes of pilots. I don't look forward to discovering what they do when the computer loses track of where we've said we are and declares me in violation of something. When that happens, I hope I am facing a customs officer as friendly as the one who gave me the link.

eAPIS, or Praise Be to Customs Expediters

I learn that my next task is not to return to the field with this airplane, but to take a different airplane to Kansas to get the autopilot repaired. Apparently every avionics technician in Canada has washed their hands of this terrible autopilot, and there's a superb shop in New Century, Kansas (I'm guessing that town just celebrated its centennial) where they know how to fix the most reluctant autopilots. Airplane number two is currently sitting in a maintenance shop at another airport, where a different engineer and apprentices are wrestling with the installation of the electronic tachometers. The PRM will drive me there and then I will take the airplane to Kansas and get an airline flight home for my time off. Meanwhile the next shift of pilots will come here to take this airplane back to the jobsite.

So the downside is that I won't get to see the look on the customer's face when he sees that his complaint about the carpet has been addressed in full, but I've never landed in Kansas, as far as I remember. I don't even know much about it. I understand that Kansas is very flat, has powerful cyclonic storms, is located somewhere south of Nebraska and north of Arkansas, and they make Cessnas there. And wheat. I had also heard a rumour that circles in Kansas were officially not quite the way they are in the rest of the world, but that seems to have been Indiana, and not made it into law. I prepare to go to Kansas.

You might think I'd start by increasing my geographical precision beyond the Nebraska-to-Arkansas approximation, but getting there will be the easy part. It's getting permission to get there that will hold me up. I ask the boss if he has started the paperwork with our broker for the flight, or if I should contact them myself. He says that as this is not a commercial flight, I shouldn't bother with the broker, just do it as a private flight to get the work done on the airplane. I start by choosing an airport of entry, one close to a straight line from here to Kansas, with 24 hours customs service, and fairly close to the border so that if anything happens requiring a diversion, I'm not forced to land at a US airport with no customs. I call the airport to find out their procedures. This shouldn't be necessary, but experience has taught me that things are not done the same way at every station and the best way to avoid delays or disapproval is to respectfully find out exactly how they want it done. I reach an amazingly friendly and helpful customs agent who e-mails me the form I need and a link to the appropriate website along with instructions for exactly where to go and what to do at his airport.

As well as filing the usual flight plan and customs arrival intentions, I now have to complete eAPIS paperwork. Except, as the e implies, it's not paper, but electronic. This is where I find out about the work my customs expediter has been doing on my behalf. Mind boggling. Once I see how much work it will be I go to bed, planning to do it in the morning. The airplane won't be ready to go until midday.

Technology Is Whatever Works

The next morning I got a better daylight look at such attractions as the three-story log skyscraper (it appeared from the rows of electric meters and mailboxes, and the vehicles parked around it to be a regular cheap apartment building that just happened to be a three story tower made out of logs) and other places around town. It's like living in an old stone building in another town. The way I calculate it, Whitehorse is a young town that grew explosively at first and then shrunk a little, such that the original buildings were still in use, or at least still existing in the 1960s. And that was a time when there was enough money and sentiment around to try and preserve them. So the old telegraph office and the old railway station are still there on the waterfront, log buildings, both. The original log church is still there and at least as functional as the 1960s replacement next door.

I bought a few souvenirs and talked to some locals, most of whom had come for a short time earlier but never gone home. The tourism centre was huge, a bustling nexus of information on all the places in the territory that a person can go, and all the adventures you can have. There was a hook-up noticeboard for people looking for rides and hiking companions. I smiled the technologies proposed by the note writers to contact them. They ranged from telephone numbers and e-mail addresses down to "leave a note on the green Ford 150 with Nunavut plates." I hope everyone found their rides, companions and lost possessions.

Another notice that caught my attention was this one on import restrictions to Alaska. Apparently you can take anything you like across the border as long as it isn't goat or lamb meat or Florida oranges. So does that mean mutton is okay? I'm familiar with fruit transport restrictions, but into Alaska? It's not like Alaska has a thriving citrus fruit industry, or is Alaska even more unexpectedly amazing than Whitehorse? And South African oranges are okay?

In My Ears

It's almost summer on the calendar, and I think it's safe to say that summer has arrived here. The temperature no longer drops below freezing overnight, and the bugs have arrived. They aren't so bad in the heat of the day--which gets up well into the twenties--but land in the evening and as I'm putting the plane to bed they descend in a whining swarm. When I was a kid, the worst part of mosquitoes was the itching bites. I remember crying over them. But now, although I can feel a few on each forearm as I type, I think I'd rather spontaneously develop itchy welts than have to have to hear them whining in my ears and feel them piercing my skin with their possibly contaminated little proboscises every time I go outside.

My coworker landed at one and while the customer drover her back to the hotel, I prepped the airplane for the next flight. The fueller here is excellent: he's parked in front of the airplane as soon as the propellers have spun down to ask the requested fuel load, and if we land after they have left and ask to be fuelled by a time in the morning, the airplane is always full of fuel when we get there. Also they gave me a very cool pen. The windows were juicy with bugs, so I cleaned them off, just using a soft fibre wipey cloth and soap and water in a spray bottle. There are two spray bottles in the cleaning kit, the other one is filled with Varsol to remove grease from the paint. I know this so I not only check the label carefully, but test spray the one labelled "Soap & H2O" to verify its contents. On my hand. It's properly labelled but I laugh at myself. I guess my hand won't turn permanently discoloured if I accidentally get varsol on it. But literally imposing my flesh between my airplane and harm is somewhat overdedicated.

After start, the FSS (that's their office, in the picture that looks like a tower) tells me that the wind is 080 at ten, preferred runway 08. There's also an aircraft coming in for 03. I say I'll taxi for 08. That's a little awkward as I have to backtrack 03 a short way to get to it. The FSS guy suggests I go to the other end and backtrack 08 instead. That works, and I call "entering 08 at bravo for the backtrack, will hold short of 03." That's for the FSS and the incoming pilot so they know they don't have to worry about a runway incursion. The airplane isn't down as I reach the hold short line, so I just turn around and line up there, leaving 500' of runway behind me. Runway behind me one of the most useless things in aviation. There's still enough for my takeoff in these conditions, but it focuses me on my procedures. Climb performance is slow. It's fun to climb out over the river valley after rotation. It wouldn't be quite so fun if I lost an engine at rotation, but I get the gear up right away and both engines keep turning today.

Further north, on a westbound track, it starts to get hazy. There are large areas of forest fires north and west of here; they even closed portions of the Alaska highway for a few days. I told you it was summer in the north. There are forest fire NOTAMs out but not near enough to where we're working to affect our operations. My eyes are stinging. I think it's mostly sunblock coming off my face, but it's probably exacerbated by smoke particles. Ow ow ow ow. I'm flying with one eye open now, and barely holding the airplane on the precise line I'm supposed to follow. "What's going on up there?" asks the mission specialist.

"You don't want to know," I reply. Finally I grab my waterbottle. It's not the nozzle type, so it's hard to use as an eyewash. It just has a wide mouth so I can drink a lot quickly, so I pour a lot quickly over my face, down my shirt, onto my lap. That cleans out the eyes okay. And I bring lots of water so I won't have to ration. Icky wet seat, though.

I'm monitoring the nearest aerodrome frequency, it's an FSS, and the normal enroute frequency of 126.7. An American voice calls Fort Nelson radio with a position report in a small airplane with a November registration. He is on a flight plan from Watson Lake to Fort St. John. He might be on his way back from a one-in-a-lifetime trip to Alaska. Or maybe he goes back and forth several times a year. I don't think so, because there's a careful precision to the call that suggests to me that he's savouring something that is important to him. I smile for him. He's flown across some amazing but hostile territory and now he's in foreign airspace coping with our rules and regulations. After his position report he asks for the "St. John" weather. Funny. Is it normal to drop the "Fort" from placenames in the US? Do you fly into "Worth"? I know that many Canadian placenames used to have Fort and no longer do. Most of the remaining Forts have non-fort counterparts. Fort Nelson is an Alaska Highway town full of oil and gas guys driving pick up trucks and living in trailers or basic box houses. Nelson is a hippy enclave with cute painted houses and an economy fuelled by marijuana grow ops. Fort St. John is just like Fort Nelson, except 400 km south along a highway inhabited by nothing but moose. St. John is a small city on the east coast. (and, just to keep things interesting, so is St. John's, but in a different province). Ft. McMurray doesn't, and I guess you hear just "McMurray" sometimes, but more often "Fort Mac."

The FSS guy knows that He wants the Ft. St. John weather and not the St. John weather and gives it to him, reminding him that if he wants further services of that type he should call Edmonton radio on 123.55. The pilot reads back that frequency, but seeing as he got all the way to Alaska and back without figuring it out, he probably still doesn't know why he was told that. He knows that you can get weather and flight planning information from an FSS. He called an FSS. So why did the guy send him to another frequency? What he doesn't know, and isn't clear from the publications, is that there are two kinds of FSS duties. The FSS at a field that doesn't havea tower, is a quasi tower. They take position reports and help to maintain safety of landing, departing and transiting aircraft. But if you want weather, or to file a flight plan, you call another frequency and get the central FSS for the whole region, where the person has all the resources, and isn't trying to keep track of B1900 and an ultralight competing for the same runway. It's very common to hear American pilots using on-airport FSS frequencies, or 126.7 for long weather or flight planning related calls. The FSS folks are so nice about it that I suspect the pilots think the new frequency they are given is just the next one along their route of flight, like US flight following.

It makes me wonder what errors I make in the US that mark me, as much as my callsign, as not from around here. What do US pilots cringe at again and again from Charlie callsigns or Canadian-based airlines?

Of course the pilot I heard could be from Alaska, and on his first international flight, but why would you leave Alaska in June, just as the weather is finally getting good?

When I land there's a text from my co-worker apologizing for not cleaning the bugs. I know the feeling: you're on approach thinking "I really have to clean this windshield" but as soon as you're down you have other priorities. When would she have had a chance to do it, anyway? I was there when she taxied in.

SD-8G

SD-8G sounds like a new TV spinoff, about a portal into an alien world, but it's Security Directive 1542-04-08G, an insight into the way the TSA thinks about airports. As of June 1st, 2009 the TSA declared that everyone having unescorted access to the airside at any airport with airline service must undergo background checks for a badge, on a per-airport basis. That would be almost like requiring drivers to have a separate permit for every highway exit they use that is also used by transport trucks. It's so ridiculously infeasible that the Security Directive 1542-04-08F containing that provision did not go into effect, and, thanks to the input of pilot advocacy groups, was watered down to SD-8G which at least allows us to land, pee, and fuel our airplanes.

The new requirements, which have officially gone into effect (but might not be enforced everywhere), tell transient pilots without airport badges to remain close to their aircraft and leave its 'footprint' only for trips to and from the FBO. They haven't yet defined clearly our movements at airports with self-serve fuel, or even exactly which airports count as having airline service. (Does the "airline" have to fly something bigger than a Beaver? Does the "schedule" have to be daily? Do they have to be passenger airlines?)

They say pilots are advised to call ahead to airports they think might have airline service and assure themselves they are in compliance with the new TSA directive. Whom should we call? Are they going to publish TSA 24-hour numbers for us? I don't expect this to really interfere with my movements when I'm south of the border. American FBOs are pretty proactive, so if there is one I'll ask them what the TSA expects of me before I get out of my airplane. Any wandering around I do on the apron is usually in search of FBO personnel, anyway.

TSA hasn't interfered with safety publications yet, at least I've never seen a notation saying "pilots without badges are not permitted to park on apron C". It might be feasible to designate airports by security class, and publish those in the AF/D where pilots know what they are dealing with. Have a few where pilots require A-class badges, with the same background checks required by airline pilots, but allow a pilot to do one A-class security check and then hold a badge valid for JFK, DCA, LAX, etc. If he's at an A-class security airport with no badge or a lower class badge, he needs an escort. B-class airports would have a painted line on the apron around the area where airliners parked and you'd need an A or B-class badge to be inside the line. And so on down to grass fields in Montana with no fence around them and no stinking badges needed. What do they gain by per-airport clearance? Is there really something in my background that could make me safe to walk across the ramp and borrow a Dustbuster in Albuquerque but a threat to national security if I move away from a hangar to get better cell coverage in Spokane?

The thing that really drives security crazy is that they can put up a big fence and lots of rules but they can't control access to the airport. Despite all the barricades, signs and security checkpoints, any old Canadian can still literally fly in over the fence. For any spot on the field, if an airliner can get there, I can get there, too.

If you are a pilot, or even just hope to become one someday if time permits, or want to support the freedom to fly, I really suggest that you join COPA or AOPA. They have excellent publications and member services, but even if you never use those, they are an essential presence in monitoring and countering the regulations and fees that officaldom concoct while wearing airline-shaped blinders.

Suicide By Cop F-16

You probably already know about the 31-year-old Canadian who stole a Cessna 172 from a flying school in Thunder Bay and headed south across Lake Superior to the US, where he was intercepted by but did not respond to American F-16 fighter jets. He landed of his own accord on a road in Missouri, where he parked the airplane under a bridge and ran on foot to a convenience store where he bought a Gatorade and chatted with locals until the police came in and got him. This CBC story has less information but includes photographs of both Adam Leon and the airplane.

His story is that he wanted to commit suicide, but couldn't bring himself to harm himself, so planned his cross-border foray in order to goad the Americans into shooting him down. Some news stories say that he had been treated for depression and left a good-bye note for his girlfriend or a suicide note near the hangar.

I can picture his well-meaning flight instructor teaching him to ensure he has a transponder code and two-way radio contact with ATC when in close proximity to the US border. "If you don't," the flight instructor could easily have said, "the Americans may scramble intercept jets, and if you do not tune 121.5 and do exactly as they ask, they have the right to shoot you down for entering their airspace." Is there a Canadian flight instructor who hasn't given such a warning to students who will be flying near or crossing the border on a cross-country flight? Adam would probably also have known where to find the intercept signals in the CFS, to understand and respond to intercepting aicraft without the use of a radio.

My favourite little detail was that Adam reportedly landed with thirty minutes of fuel remaining. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I like to think that his flight instructor drilled air law into him so thoroughly that even while suicidally defying an international boundary and armed jets, he couldn't disobey the mandate to land with half an hour of gas in his tanks.

Serious credit must go to the American military for their measured reaction to the incident. The population is very easily frightened by things like this. They evacuated the Senate in Wisconsin, after all. But no one got shot down, or shot at all. The guy was arrested for the only crimes he had actually committed: transporting stolen property and illegally entering the country. The FBI found no links to terrorism in his background. He'll likely be sent back to Canada. (Good thing he wasn't an American picked up by the RCMP in Canada. They probably would have tasered him to death). Given a history of depression and a self-confessed suicide attempt, he will lose his Canadian medical and possibly never get it back, so he'll need a new career.

The accompanying conspiracy theory is that rather than being a mentally ill flight student, he's an Islamic terrorist testing the system. He immigrated to Canada from Turkey last year, and used to be named Yavuz Berke. Did his six hours in the Falcons' gunsights give him a chance to think things over and return to a rational appreciation for life, such that the strangest thing the Missourians noticed about him was that he asked to use a "washroom" instead of a "bathroom"? (What's up with that, anyway? Is that something Missourian? Bathroom, washroom, toilet, restroom ... would any of these mark someone as "not from around here, are you?" in your community?)

An argument the linked blog entry didn't notice is that Adam Leon spent money in Missouri. While Americans in border states may accept Canadian bills, Misourri is too far south to be considered a border state, and you can't give someone two dollars or just barely have enough to buy a Gatorade in Canadian bills. The smallest bill is a five. So he was carrying a few dollars in US cash. Just enough to pay for a lift and a snack while waiting to be arrested. Or maybe he had a few bucks US in his wallet because he had a post box in Grand Marais, Michigan for ordering things on the internet. Like plutonium?

I also liked the informational paragraph one article had on the C172. It has a maximum cruise speed of 233 kilometres an hour and a range of 1,130 km. It's true, but it makes it sound so fast!

Controlling One's Language

I was very interested to learn from comments on my last ATC-related post that "How do you hear?" is the official US wording to elicit what ICAO language describes as a radio check. The US controllers clearly understood both my "request radio check" version of the call and the ICAO scale of strengths and readabilities, so this makes me curious. I have some questions specifically for any US air traffic controllers (or ATC of any country that has local differences, but the US seems to have the greatest deviation). When you initially learned radiotelephony, did you learn both US standard language and ICAO standard language as separate vocabularies? Do you have to demonstrate competence in both separately? I'm assuming your regular instructions are what I have observed: that you understand and accept both vocabularies, but give instructions in American. Will you switch to giving instructions in ICAO language if there is a difficulty in understanding or at pilot request?

As a pilot, I learned primarily the local suite of phraseology, and some of it was footnoted with "this is how it works in Canada, but it's not international." For example in Canada I never give the first letter of my callsign, because everyone knows it's C. Pilots don't receive a lot of formal R/T training in Canada. The only exam we take is a horribly outdated one that ensures we know we can be fined for swearing on the radio, and that hydrogen gas is evolved from lead-acid radio batteries. So many of what I think are standard phraseologies may be Canadian-ICAO differences. I know that American pilots do not carry a separate radio operator's licence, so presumably they have no formal test on the subject. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong).

If I were designing the system, I would declare that that pilots could use ICAO language or local differences within their own country and but be required to always use ICAO in foreign countries. By that logic, controllers would be able to use ICAO or local differences with locally registered aircraft, but stick to ICAO standard communication only with foreign-registered aircraft. That would match exactly the rules for using local languages other than English. So why isn't that the rule? I suspect it's that in English-speaking countries people quickly forget that radio language isn't the same as English.

Radio language isn't even the same all over one country. Was it Florida where I was working that the controllers kept saying "one two, twelve thousand" to reiterate that they were talking about 12,000' and not 1000' or 2000'? Turns out the Dallas and Houston controllers I worked with say "one two thousand" without any clarification, just like Canadian controllers. It must have been a regional thing.

Regardless of what language they speak, the controllers here are really good. They juggle all the incoming aircraft into a conga line for the runways at DFW and IAH, while keeping track of the planes going to little airports in between. They don't forget about me and rarely lose track of what I have requested even after several handoffs. And they watch out for the pilots who need more help. The controller was so gracious as he asks a pilot to confirm his destination and recommends a heading change that I don't know if the pilot even realized that the controller suspected he was lost. This particular pilot kept drifting back to the incorrect course, but the controller never lost patience. "What is your means of navigation?" he asked. I didn't hear the pilot answer the question, only the controller's half of the conversation was audible. I suppose the pilot was operating with a map and a directional gyro that needed to be reset to the compass at regular intervals. It was a windy night so either wind or gyro drift or a combination may have led to his difficulties, but eventually the controller gave him "no compass vectors," asking him to put the airplane into a gentle right turn and hold the bank angle until the controller told him to roll out. I admire the versatility of the controller handholding in one call and then in the next telling United to cross AZEDD at 300 knots, in a big game of three-dimensional tetris.

Local Language and Cuisine

In which Aviatrix tries to get her mouth around things.

I've been tasked by a reader familiar with the ways of Texans to try a few experiments. All involve comestibles. Two involve fast food establishments, the first of which is called Whataburger.

At Whataburger, you must have at least one thing on the menu. If it is breffiss time, you MUST HAVE A POTATO AND EGG TAQUITO. Must. If it is 'other' time, have a whataburger. No special requests, just have one.

Whataburger was only about a kilometre from the hotel, but I borrowed a vehicle, because that's how fast food is done, and drove to Whataburger. I still did it wrong, because it was only after I parked in the parking lot and went in that I realized they had a drive through. Look, they do have cars and drive throughs and everything in Canada. I've been through the Tim Horton's drive through and I know what a double-double is. It's just not my lifestyle. And I would have spent too long gawking at the menu and been hard to understand in the drive through, anyway. The instructions proved difficult to follow, as it was, as I'm on the late shift, prepared to work through to the early hours of the morning, so my breakfast is at noon, and Whataburger's breakfast menu ends at 11 a.m. I had carefully memorized the words "potato and egg taquito" but had not been prepared for it to be not available. I choked on the fallback and ended up with a chicken burger, which now that I re-read my instructions might not have been what I was supposed to do, but it was pretty good.

It came in a bag with a space on the side for me to write my name, I guess the idea is that I might reuse the bag for my kid to take his lunch to school. Better than sending your kid to school with a lunch in a liquor store bag. The chicken was crispy and the lettuce and tomato inside actually tasted like lettuce and tomato, not just garnish.

And touching on Airplanes, Breakfast and Chicken, we have this episode of SMBC. The linked cartoon is at the tamer end of the author's range, so don't click on to other examples unless your tastes range to sick adult humour.

I had a short flight in the rain that day, allowing me to return land, fuel and park in time to have supper at a civilized hour. We went out to a local place where I ordered pot roast with carrots and okra. The word okra always makes me think of okapi, but okra is a vegetable. It arrived breaded and deep fried. I keep forgetting that pretty much anything you order might be delivered that way. I should consider myself lucky the pot roast (tender and suculent and way too much to eat) and the carrots (can anyone wreck carrots?) were not breaded and deep fried. I peeled the breaded coating off the okra with a knife and fork and a little bit of fingers and the okra inside was really good. I'm not sure whether it was just the "fat makes everything taste good" principle or whether I actually like okra, but I didn't regret ordering it.

Meanwhile I'm learning not only a new accent, but a new grammar. In Deep East Texas, "you" is used only to denote second person singular. So if I'm talking to one person and they are asking me a question about myself, they say "you." But if I'm at dinner with a group, we are addressed as y'all. That's one syllable, in as much as anything a Texan says involving a vowel can have only one syllable. Rhymes with maul. That is the standard pronoun for seonf person plural. And it has a possessive form: y'all's. It was fascinating, because the word was unfamiliar it stood out. "Do y'all want y'all's salad before y'all's meals?" I don't think the waitress ever used used "you" or "your" to refer to us. And why whould she? I think in her dialect of English that was not an appropriate pronoun. It would have made as much sense to her as addresing us as "he."

I talked to one woman from Houston, she was working in an FBO a bit further north and her north Texas co-workers were challenging her to try not to say y'all. I asked her, "does it feel wrong to not say 'y'all,' and just say 'you' when talking to multiple people?" And she said yes, it did.

I guess people here are used to hearing movies and national news broadcasts and the like where the grammar isn't the same as theirs, so they don't hear my speech as wrong. Sometimes I have to say things a few times to be understood. The experience makes me feel a bit better about the quality of my French, as it shows that a person can be saying something correctly according to their initial instruction, and just not be understood because the local accent doesn't match the instructor's accent. I try to slow down a bit, and not speak 'so Canadian' but I don't want to be perceived as mocking. You can't turn off your native accent without striving to sound like something else. I don't even know if people could tell I was trying. There's a lengthening and lowering and gravelifying of the vowels that is a wonder to behold and at times seems like so much effort that I'm watching and listening to try and figure out if there is some new use they have for what to me are the easier shorter vowels. Do I sound like I'm rushing or clipping my speech?