Callout Fee

The following is an e-mail I sent to accounting, with only the obvious redactions:

At Mustelid Falls the last couple of weeks we have been buying fuel at a place that officially closes at 6 p.m. but we kept getting the fueller to stay late or come back and fuel us later.  There was no formal callout  procedure, so she didn’t have a way to add a fee to the fuel bill, so I gave her some cash, the cheapest callout fee ever, really, less than $10 a day but it made the difference between treating someone badly and having them feel respected.

This is only about the third sketchiest receipt I’ve ever submitted at Our Company, and it probably allowed us to bill several more hours to Customer Company than we would otherwise, so well worth it.

You’ll see the expense form on your desk.

Said expense form was accompanied by a receipt handwritten by me with a sharpie, on the back of a company form, and signed by the long-suffering fueller, on top of the pumps. She was a maintenance apprentice who hadn't known that her job was going to involve fuelling airplanes.  When I found out that she wasn't getting paid any extra for it, I peeled off some twenties. This was all in the before-times, pre-COVID-19. I found the e-mail while looking for something else, and decided to share it with you.

The sketchiest ever was either a fuel receipt for over $800 cash, written on a Super-8 scratchpad by the third-in-command of the local flying club, or any of a number totally formal government liquor store receipts for cases of beer that the accountant has to take my word for that I've exchanged for goods or services.

And The Winner Is ...

I would be disappointed with your response to the Jet Age book giveaway except that it tells me something amusingly wonderful about the community of people who read this blog. You really do think it's better to give than receive. That is, when I asked you to donate something to help me help Cambodians recover from decades of brutality, so many of you responded, and so fast and so generously that I literally lost count. But when I had an opportunity to give a prize to you, you had some fun telling stories, but there wasn't much enthusiasm in voting or competing for a prize. I guess for the American majority there's been too much talk about voting this week.

What votes there were produced a tie between Chris's story of the downed C172 pilot:

A friend of mine told me a story of his service in the Royal Australian Air Force - it even has a Canadian connection.

He was ferrying the original flight of DHC-4 Caribou aircraft from Canada to Australia which necessitated a number of stops, the Caribou being relatively short legged and not equipped for inflight refuelling. Somewhere over North Africa he picked up a very faint distress signal on 121.5. He diverted to the source of the signal and because it was so faint they had a hard time tracking it down, often losing it entirely. Eventually he found a lone pilot standing under the wing of his wrecked C172. Circling for a bit, the crew dropped some food and all the water they had, then bid the pilot farewell and flew on for their destination, reporting the crash site at the next aerodrome. They flew onward but before reaching their original destination of Australia they were again diverted - this time for South Vietnam. He never learned of the fate of that bloke, stranded in the sea of sand.

Years later, standing in a bar in Laos in a small village in the middle of nowhere. An Air America pilot heard the Australian voices and came over shouting the whole crew a drink. He said bought drinks for any Australian flight crews he met because years earlier he had an engine failure ferrying a C172 across North Africa, crash landed and was on his last legs when a Caribou dropped food and water and sent rescuers to his position...it was the same bloke whose life they had saved.

... and an anonymous reader who e-mailed me before posting to identify himself:

When I was a boy I listened to Tom Rutledge tell a story about when he was a young man. Tom worked for the Wright engine company and was tasked with building J5 engines and “running them in”. A variety of plane and pilot teams were then attempting to be the first to cross the Atlantic non-stop. Since the Wright J5 was the a reliable engine most were choosing it for their planes. Tom’s coworkers with more seniority were allowed first choice of whose engines they would build.

After assembly, the J5 engines would run on a test stand with the valve cove removed so that one could “hit” the valve rocker arms with a rubber mallet when the valves became stuck. The valves would stick sometimes until they had been run for a time. While Tom was working with an especially difficult engine, whacking on it with his mallet, he was introduced to Charles Lindberg, his engine’s owner.

I like both stories. Note that they both were stories the teller had heard someone else tell. Telling each other stories is part of aviation, for sure. Together they illustrate some true things, good and bad about aviation. The risk involved in crossing stretches of water in smaller airplanes. Dependence on our engines and our mechanics. Looking out for one another, and paying it forward. All favours and bribes are paid in beer. And no matter where you are, if there's another pilot there you'll have a connection.

As I have to cast the tie-breaking vote, I'll choose the C172 story. Chris, please send me your mailing address.

Prepreflight Planning

I'm going to a new place; what do I need to know before I get there in order to look like I know what I'm doing? I can plan a flight to a random place named by the client in the time it takes for the fuel order to arrive, or divert in midair and still be okay, but when I'm going to be based out of a place for a while, I can give myself a head start by finding out a few things in advance.

CYMM has a single runway 07/25, with right hand circuits on 07, making all circuits to the south, away from the aprons. The runway is paved, 150' wide, 7000' long and at 1211' elevation. (Yes, Canadians still use the old imperial measurements for such things. It was, I assume, deemed to dangerous to make an overnight switch to a new system of measurement. Or maybe we're afraid that thirty party suppliers of approach plates and electronic navigation products, would (like Microsoft with its British, American but no Canadian spellchecker), deem Canada too small a market to cater to, and thus we'd be deprived of useful products in our measuring system of choice.) It is served by at least three FBOs, with almost every variety of aviation fuel for sale. It's a small airport choked with oilfield traffic. The Google satellite view indicates that almost every building on the field is under construction.

The aerodrome has METARs and its own 24 hour TAF, with other useful weather coming from YZH, YNR, YOD, YPY and maybe YVT. The weather systems move mainly east and southeast here. Northern Alberta is reporting mainly clear this morning. Seven degrees as I type this, but was three two hours ago, probably sub-zero overnight.

The aerodrome has an RCO to the Edmonton FSS, plus there's an FSS on the field (with, according to one report, hot female staffers). There's a VOR and an NDB, but I'll have to get the approaches when I get there as the only Alberta plates I have with me are way out of date.

There are a fair number of small airports in the vicinity. Fort Mac is the only nearby place with services, but there will be at least telephones and emergency shelter on the ground at:

• Gordon Lake Airport (23 nm E)
• Muskeg Tower Airport 30 nm NNE
• Mildred Lake Airport 26 nm N
• Fort MacKay 34 nm N
• Horizon 46 nm N
• Namur Lake 67 W

There are others. The nearest bigger airport is probably CFB Cold Lake, 138 nm south, and Edmonton International is 216 nm south-southwest, so I'm practically in the big city.

As for the town itself, no one picked up the good news/bad news part of my line about going to Fort McMurray for work. It's not known across the country as a centre of civilization, shall we say. It's known as the place that a young man can go straight out of school and make a lot of money. In the daytime the town appears to have been hit by some bizarre plague that has wiped out every able-bodied male over the age of seventeen. They are all in the oilfields, because no one would work in a service industry in this town if they could work where the money is. And young men with lots of money spend it on trucks, boats, women, alcohol and in many cases stronger drugs.

A coworker reported that the young women of Fort Mac had only two questions for him: "Where do you work?" and "How big's your truck?" He drove an F150 so that was the last question they asked him, but apparently the welder (a welding truck is pretty big) was quite a hit.

So I'm prepared for busy airspace and a cultural experience. Who knows, there might even be barbeque.

Liquor Replacement and Dollar Coins

I paid for my restaurant meal and the receipt said, printed at the bottom, that 25% went to the Liquor Replacement Fund. I was puzzled by this for a while, and then a barely visible sign on the door of the restaurant gave me a clue and a hypothesis. The sign said that this was a private club and that alcohol would be served only to registered members. My guess is that this is thr remnant of a very old local liquor law, that everyone has worked around instead of changing. I speculate that by putting my name on the list for a table, I was registering as a member of the "club." And that the notice at the bottom of the receipt explained that I wasn't exactly purchasing liquor, but rather being served liquor from my private club's reserves. And that the restaurant wasn't taking a profit but rather saving the money to buy more liquor for the members.

Liquor laws can be funny. Some places in Canada you can't serve alcohol without "a meal" so in those places you can buy the most minimal meals known to man. You can collect ten bucks from a bunch of people to buy a few cases of beer, but if you then put them in the fridge with a can on top and ask people to contribute a few coins towards the next case for every beer they drink, you'll get in trouble for selling beer without a licence. At least some places. The laws can be quaint.

When I say "a few coins," I mean more money than I might if I were talking about American coins. Canada doesn't mint one or two dollar bills. We used to, years ago, but now we have one and two dollar coins instead. So when I'm working with money, looking to pay for a cup of coffee or expecting change from something, it's natural for me to go for the coin purse not the billfold for amounts under five dollars. When I first get back to Canada I'm momentarily surprised by getting a handful of coins as change from a ten for a small purchase.

The US does have one dollar coins. I got several once as change from a stamp machine. And they have two dollar bills. I decided to use them. I went to a bank in Texas with a twenty dollar bill and asked for ten ones and five twos. The teller managed to scavenge seven ones from her own and another teller's drawer, but denied having any twos in the whole bank. Well so much for that plan. I took my metal ones, and the rest in paper ones. I can get more coins from post office stamp machines.

Using the US dollar coins isn't a problem with people. The reaction is usually one of slight positive surprise and "hey cool" scrutiny of my proffered dollar. No one has refused a coin or asked me to give them a banknote instead, but I get the idea there are a few people who have never seen one. I read that when Canada introduced the loonie, our one dollar coin, they made sure to mint tonnes of the things to overwhelm the "hey cool" response that would cause people to keep the first few they met as a souvenir. Perhaps the reverse effect helped to cement the switch: people hoarded their last few dollar bills as souvenirs, hastening their withdrawal from circulation.

I can see a reason why the dollar coins might be unpopular in the US. You can't use them in vending machines. A newspaper cost a dollar. The box says "Use Any Coin Combination - Do Not Use Pennies." What the box means is "use any combination of quarters, dimes and nickels." The dollar coin shown doesn't fit in the slot.

Because the denominations of commonly circulating US coins hasn't changed in over a hundred years, but prices have, vending machines compensate in other ways. Many US vending machines accept banknotes. You unfold any bent corners and line up the picture of the president on the bill with the picture on the slot. The machine feeds in the bill, whirrrs it back and forth a couple of times and spits out your chocolate bar and a pile of quarters. If the machine doesn't take bills, there will often be a change machine nearby. There are change machines in Canada, but not as commonly, and of course they spit loonies.

Northern Gossip

In December 2003, the operations manager of a northern air charter company went to Trinidad & Tobago for a week on business. I'm not sure how a Caribbean island relates to the business of schlepping pop and chips around northern Alberta, but I can't blame the guy for taking advantage of whatever connection he found. Unfortunately, that's not all he took advantage of, and the waitress whose breast he grabbed and squeezed reported his actions to police. I suppose Trinidad and Tobago is a little more civilized than the oilfields. I've never been to that country, but the culture isn't going to be the same as in Canada.

He was arrested, spent a five days in a miserable Trinidadian prison and then returned to Canada. The Court of Appeal of Alberta has just approved a Trinidad and Tobago request to extradite him for trial. I suspect his behaviour at home isn't that different from abroad, and that there are a number of Fort McMurray waitresses high fiving one another on hearing that news.

Beer Credits

I've been sent to pick up an airplane that has been waiting idle for me. I've paid my parking fee (a suspiciously symmetrical $100: I suspect they just pulled the number out of thin air), finished the walkaround, cleaned grime and bug corpses off the windows, loaded the cargo and gone to the bathroom. It's time to make airplane noise.

I run the prestart checklist and reach for the electric fuel pump to prime the right engine for start. The switch goes click. Not whirr. Just click. I turn the switch off and on again a few more times. I listen to the quality of the click to see if the switch is perhaps bad. I recheck the circuit breakers, even though those were part of the prestart checks. Click. I check the other pump. It works.

I've been here before. Anyone remember? I think it was in Stoat Landing, maybe Earwig Creek. The problem was solved by having a grizzled individual crawl underneath and hit it with a hammer, all without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

I'm now in a town named not after an animal and a body of water, but named after a person, probably the wife of a famous white guy. Perhaps here we will use tools more sophisticated than hammers. I shut off the magnetos and the master, text the boss about the delay, and go back to the desk of the FBO to inquire about professional help. She directs me to a nearby maintenance hangar. There doesn't seem to be anyone inside, but I wander through into an adjacent hanger where there are two young guys at a workbench bench. I ask. They do interiors, not mechanical, and they direct me back to the first hangar, telling me which hidden door to look behind.

I knock and come in, confessing that pilots show no respect for coffee breaks. He's friendly and I tell him my problem. "Did you check the circuit breakers?" he asks. That's an "Is it plugged in?" type tech support question for mechanics. "Where is it?" he asks.

It's underneath, I couldn't point to the exact spot." My memory of watching the investigation being done relates more to the lit cigarette than the exact location of the part. We go out to the airplane and he has me turn on the working fuel pump. He traces its location from the sound and assumes symmetry.

"Wait here a moment," he says. "I'm going to get a ." It sounded like the something was "hammer handle." Must be a technical term.

My phone rings with the boss, who asks me if I checked the circuit breakers, and if I tried turning it on and off again a few times. I tell him yes, that there's someone here who is looking at it.

The mechanic returns with a rubber mallet. I'm still in the cockpit. He passes out of sight under the airplane. whump! whump

"Try it now," he says.

Master on. Fuel pump on. Whirrrr! Big grin from happy pilot. He tells me to leave it on for a moment. He listens and nods. It's good. We're both willing to accept that it just needed a little encouragement after sitting unattended. He waves me off.

I've been helped many times with minor issues like that, without time or opportunity to buy someone who deserves it a beer. I'm glad that last time I met an AME I bought her lunch. In the future, I intend to buy a few beers for unsuspecting GA mechanics. I'm sure they have all done something similarly deserving.

For now I let the boss know that I'm on my way, and taxi out for departure.

"Air Force One Dropped Me Off"

So it seems a drunk guy managed to wander onto the runway in Dallas. That's quite a trick, getting onto airside, crossing the apron, and heading either down the taxiway or across the rough all the way to the runway. Those expanses of pavement are bigger than they look.

It sounds like someone who released him from a drunk tank may be at fault for leaving him on airside, as opposed to him actually getting through an airside door. But stranger things have happened.

Personally, I would have gone with "little green men" over "Air Force One."

Jay Jay the Jet Plane

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

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

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

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

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

Are you drunk yet?

I Sit Back and Think of England

The following blog comment, made this morning by Steve at the Pub, reveals passenger-think so stunningly bizarre that it deserves a whole blog entry.

Occasionally when asked by passengers what I thought about when flying (rotor wing), I stated (accurately) that am always running through in my mind where and how I would land if the engine quit. (This scenario updated mentally every few seconds).

The (puzzling but all too common) response: "Hmmpff, we CERTAINLY aren't flying with you then!"

I've said several times on this blog that as pilots it's our job to think about what could go wrong, and that that becomes a permanent mindset. I've described, for example, being laughed at for noting a feature of an SUV that could pose a hazard during an emergency evacuation. In a single-engine aircraft I am doing exactly what Steve does, surveying the countryside for an appropriate place to land if the engine failed. Once upon a time I had a job where I flew a small single-engine airplane at fairly low altitude over the same area every day. On my day off I took my car and I drove around the area to inspect the emergency landing sites I had chosen from the air, looking for wires and ditches and other hazards that I might not have noticed from above. I paced them off to see how long they were, and whether there were good things to crash into in the overrun. I learned their names so that I would be able to broadcast "Landing on the sports field of Sir John A. Macdonald school" as opposed to "Landing on some school field down here." I never had to use any of my chosen sites, but I was prepared.

I can understand why passengers would be taken aback to learn that the pilot is thinking about such a thing. They were thinking about how funny cows look from on top, or about how a lot more people have swimming pools than they expected. I can see them being frightened by the reminder that the engine could quit. I can see them being surprised that the pilot would have enough control to choose a landing site. But to have them reject the pilot for that? It makes no sense.

I wonder what answer they were expecting. "I admire the majesty of the scenery"? Surely not, "It takes all my concentration to remember what all these dials and levers do." Perhaps, "I think about my giant pilot paycheques," or "I daydream about going down to the pub for a few and then shagging my girlfriend," or "It depends how close to lunchtime it is." I mean honestly, if the safety-oriented answer isn't the safe one, what is? I suppose a more reassuring wording could be, "I'm always concentrating on what I can do to enhance the safety of the flight," but that's so insipid it doesn't sound believable, even though it's a variety of the truth.

If the safe answer is not a safe answer, then there's no safe answer. It makes you want to lock the passengers behind the cockpit door and not tell them anything that isn't on the list of approved PAs.