Runner's High

This story starts about five years ago when I first realized that combining my fondness for running, maps, and cool watches in one technological device was possible and affordable, even if it did barely fit on my wrist. I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305. It's essentially a stopwatch integrated with a GPS, heart rate monitor, and computer, so I can know where I am, how fast I'm going, and how hard my body is working to achieve it, all at once. And then I can upload the resulting data to my laptop and stare at it in tables and graphs and maps to come to conclusions like "I get really tired when I run up mountains" and "I should run faster." I used to come to such conclusions without the technology, but now I have data to back it up. It's ludicrous how much more fun it is to go running when you get statistics at the end. I don't remember how I ever went running without a box on my wrist telling me if I was doing it right or not.

I took my GPS watch in my flight bag everywhere I went, so that if I had time to go running at the end of the day, I'd have the motivation of knowing how far and fast I was going, and also so I could activate the "Return to Start" feature. Return to Start gives turn-by-turn directions to get me back to the hotel, regardless of how identical the suburban streets, wooded trails, or gravel road turn-offs appear to be. I don't know that I would be still wandering around a highway truck stop somewhere without it, but there's more oxygen deprivation in my brain after fifteen kilometres of pushing my pace than after five hours of sucking supplemental oxygen through my nose at 17,000'. It's nice not to have to worry which forks I took in the trail network of an unfamiliar town.

I have my data all in Garmin's Training Center software: years of runs from Alaska to Florida and many where I have to zoom out on the little map several times before I figure out which little town with limited map information is traced by the record of my exertions. I like to review this data and use the Training Center "Compare" feature to virtually race the years-ago Aviatrix. (I'm pretty sure I can still take her). But while I've become sleeker, faster and more resilient with the years, the watch hasn't fared as well. It became harder to charge, and reluctant to connect to the computer to give up its data. The beeping sounds stopped working, and then it started shutting off in mid-workout. It's well out of warrantee, and the model is discontinued, so I had to choose a replacement. I could probably export the data in a standard format. Garmin is so prevalent in the GPS field that any manufacturer that couldn't convert or use their formats might be a little silly. But my first choice was just to stick with Garmin.

Their website is a mess of poor feature explanations. It doesn't suggest an upgrade path from the 305 to another product. I didn't find an overview on what the focus of the Forerunner, vivo-, or fēnix lines is, nor could I see any coherent logic to the Forerunner model numbers and suffixes.

I thought I'd had an e-mail conversation about this back when the Forerunner was still available and one could send it in to a Garmin-approved dealer for a flat-rate "repair" (obviously a replacement with a reconditioned model, but it was worth the $75 for me back then). Mining my e-mail archive for "GPS watch" found me all my old blog posts that mention "GPS" and "watch". The insane detail I included allowed me to relive some interesting flights and revisit all manner of places. No wonder people who weren't on the flights to begin with enjoyed reading them. This has somewhat inspired me to find a way to keep blogging about them. Perhaps I'll talk to the owner about the blog.

I tore myself away from my former adventures to google up second hand explanations and information on features and backwards compatibility of Garmin products. There are SO many models. Finally I decided to artificially limit my choices by going to a store and making my selection from only what they had. I took my flaky old Forerunner with me, and on the bus ride there, noticed that the crack between the layers of the case was quite wide. With no prying or wiggling, I lifted the face of the watch right off the back, revealing its electronic innards. Well no wonder it wasn't staying on, charging and connecting. I was lucky it hadn't fallen apart during a run. I feared I had killed it by carrying it with me everywhere, including into the flight levels in an unpressurized airplane.

The higher you go in the atmosphere, the less air there is on top of you, thus the less pressure you feel, so that instead of being all squished together to sea level pressure, the molecules are all spread out. One breath takes in less oxygen, unless I supplement it from a tank, which I do, through the aforementioned nose tubes. Anything with air sealed into it that I bring up from ground level retains the same pressure inside that it had on the ground. As it ascends, the differential between the inside pressure and the outside pressure increases, producing a force acting to expand the sealed container. The tank full of breathing oxygen is cylindrical, and its strong walls and robust valves are inspected weekly to ensure that as the pressure outside the tank decreases, the tank will not rupture, bulge or leak from the added force. Potato chips are deliberately packaged with trapped air, to protect the chips, and their bags will bulge out drum-tight, and sometimes burst, as we ascend. The gases in our intestines and ear canals expand and escape through the usual routes. I was afraid that the air sealed into my GPS watch damaged it. But then I realized that the Forerunner 305 isn't waterproof, and my Timex wristwatch, which works perfectly, is. (I'd tell you what model Timex, but it's so old that all the words have worn away, and the chunks of decorative plastic stuff have fallen off, leaving a bare case with buttons on it). A little more research showed me that plenty of people had their Forerunners come apart, sometimes falling off bike mounts and/or being run over by cars.

I got to the store and interrogated the clerk about the selection. I was almost ready to buy a Garmin Forerunner 225. It has the heart rate monitor integrated in the watch itself, with no need for a chest strap. It has a built-in accelerometer to give pace and distance information on indoor treadmill runs. "What about winter?" I asked. "Can I use it with a chest strap in the winter, when I wear the watch on the outside of long-sleeved garments?" To answer this question, the clerk went not to the Garmin website, but straight to the blog of DC Rainmaker, an obsessive sports technology reviewer. I'd encountered one of his reviews while googling for compatibility information earlier, and not noticed that everything I could ever want to know about pretty much any sports watch is on this guy's blog. The Forerunner 225 will pair with a chest strap, for people who mount it on bicycle handlebars, as well as winter runners, but it was missing a couple other features that I wanted. Indeed none of the watches they carried had the Back to Start feature, so I went home without buying any of them, and went back to DC Rainmaker's site.

Ray Maker (get it?) conveys the excitement of taking a new electronic toy out of the shipping box, gazing at its packaging, and then breaking the shrinkwrap. He includes photographs detailing the plastic bags and twist ties containing all the sub-components of the products. He does more running, biking, and swimming to test one device for a review than some buyers will log in the lifetime of their device. Every review is ridiculously detailed. Some people would say too detailed. So a little like many of my blog entries, if I did way more research. It parallels the way I'd like to blog if I had the diligence to drill down to the technological and legal root of everything I said, rather than speculating and drawing on knowledge already in my head. It made me cheer a little when I found a typo now and again, on his site, because it just goes to show that typo-free is not a requirement for an insanely awesome blog. He also displays a lot of integrity: he borrows and returns all reviewed gear despite the fact that his reviews are clearly enough work to deserve a lot of freebies. If you run or bike and like gear, you almost certainly already know his site, but if you don't you're in for a treat. If you never do anything more energetic than opening the refrigerator, but just like tech, especially GPS, you'll probably still want to read his site. The comparison tool there allowed me to quickly determine that the correct watch for my needs is the Forerunner 310XT. It wasn't at the store nor prominent on Garmin's website because it is ALSO being discontinued. I decided to get one now, through a site DC Rainmaker partners with, to compensate him for the work he does. I had some trouble with that site, so posted a comment on his blog, and as I was already thinking of blogging about the experience, I signed the comment "Aviatrix."

It turns out that DC Rainmaker is a long-time reader of Cockpit Conversation. It made me feel like a member of an elite when he asked if I was that Aviatrix. As I told him, some days I’m convinced that there are far fewer people on the Internet than is generally thought. Maybe it’s just you, me, the awesome people who comment on our blogs, and a lot of Chinese spambots.

Meanwhile I ordered a Forerunner 310XT somewhere else, bound my Forerunner 305 together with rubber bands, found it worked perfectly, glued it together with silicone sealant (as recommended by several people on the Internet), and am currently in high level discussions with my printer on why it should print the return mailing label for the 310XT. When the 305 gasps out its final beep I'll do this again, probably with a whole new set of features. I might get one of the "lifestyle" watches that track your every move, including sleeping.

Shutdown Checklist

During an annual training session for flight followers, my ops manager stated that no information on company operations was to be posted on social media. This restriction definitely wasn't targeted at me, and don't think anyone at work knows about this blog, but the ban definitely includes the sort of things I have been posting here. I'm going to respect that request. Kinda too bad, because I have lots of stories to tell, but I have a rule that if your employer wants something done, and it's safe, legal and moral, you do it.

I will blog less now, and what I say will probably be duller without the personal anecdotes, but it may be truer to the original purpose of the blog: to learn by explaining.

Screaming Busy

If this gets posted, I have stopped blogging for long enough to forget this was here. Likely I've run out of prewritten blog entries. I've probably lost interest, internet access, or my password. Or maybe I got a life. Expect the comments section on this entry to contain a note from someone who knows I'm okay, and then a note from me telling you to stop e-mailing me already, because if I'm too busy to blog I'm probably not reading my blog e-mail either.

Busy. Will blog or officially end blog later.

Or if no one turns up to claim I'm okay, then perhaps I'm not, but you are absolutely forbidden to post, quote, read or even refer to the poem High Flight in my memory. I hate it and anyone disregarding this notice will be cut from my will, banned or evicted from my funeral, forbidden to comment on my blog, and haunted by malevolent spirits. Not even mine. Malevolent douchebag spirits whom I'll designate.

Not the Weather Report

I have a few requests to blog about the weather more, and I mean to, but somehow haven't for a while. I was going to today, with a report on the Weather Channel as a jumping-off point, but then I realized something that sidetracked me on that entry.

There's two sorts of being identified as the blogger. One is when someone who reads the blog meets me, or perhaps already knew me but figures out that I am me. Those ones are great, because if you read the blog you must know I mean well, plus you like the blog: no one goes on reading something they dislike. The kind I find more uncomfortable is when someone who doesn't read the blog and who knows me, but not as a friend, discovers that I have a blog, and who then goes quoting me out of context. You see that sort of thing done by and to politicians all the time. They end up defending stupidly innocent actions like where they shop or what their kids wore to the prom. This hasn't happened to me, but I don't think I'd like it if it did. Sometimes I think I should put my real name on the blog so that no one can "out" me, my already having done it myself. Politicians do that, too, "full disclosure"--telling the public things we don't care, just to pre-empt anyone else claiming they are hiding it.

I don't think I will do that in the near future, but I will present for your amusement ...

The Top Ten Ways to Accidentally Out Yourself On Your Own Blog

(I have caught myself doing all of these).

• 10. Forget to censor your own name when quoting conversations.
• 9. Post a photograph that shows your recognizable reflection in a shiny object.
• 8. Post a story about yourself that also makes the national news.
• 7. Leave yourself logged in to a shared computer.
• 6. Visit your blog from an FBO computer with a giant screen.
• 5. Do a real life meet up with fellow bloggers who like to post pictures.
• 4. Leave your blog in the browser history of someone else's computer.
• 3. Post the callsign of your aircraft.
• 2. Send e-mail to a customer from your alter ego e-mail address, with your blog URL in the signature field.

And the number one way to embarrassingly out yourself on your own blog is to ...

• 1. Post a video taken of an amusingly dire report on the Weather Channel, when said video was taken in the hotel room, and clearly shows your reflection in the TV throughout ... naked.

And that's why this blog entry isn't about the weather.

Projected Absence

I'm really wrapped up in a creative project that is using the same part of my brain and my day as blogging, and for now I'm going to give it priority.

I'll try to catch up later, but here's a tidbit from my day.

While I was preflighting today I saw a Canadian Forces Airbus in military grey, with muted markings and the only colour the red Canadian flag on the tail. The FBO crew parked an airstairs truck at the forward door and a long line of soldiers came out, carrying duffel bags across the apron to the FBO. I don't know where they had come directly from, or whether the range of the airliner would support it, but it was most interesting to imagine that they were returning directly from Afghanistan. I shouted "Welcome home!" across the ramp, but it wouldn't have been audible above the sound of the APU and of other idling aircraft.

Later, after takeoff I heard the Canadian Forces callsign, with a female pilot's voice, check in with departure. She was on the same instrument departure as I was, and given the same instruction after departure. I realized that she was climbing up behind me, then was given another vector that would put her past me on the right. I wonder if they loaded more soldiers to take back to wherever they got the first lot, or if they were ferrying empty.

Guest Posts

I fairly frequently receive e-mails asking if I accept guest posts for my blog. Almost always these requests are from people with something to sell or promote: people who want to take advantage of the fact that your eyeballs and minds will be on the blog. As far as I am concerned, you guys are not for sale. I'm not in principle opposed to guest posts, and if someone has something to contribute I will give them recognition, but I have standards for what I accept. I'm writing this post not as a solicitation for or warning about upcoming guest posts, but to give my readers a chance to comment on the idea that I might accept them, and so I can simply link to it next time someone asks me if I accept them.

A guest post must be on a topic linked to aviation. If it is a technical topic on which the writer has considerable expertise, that link may be quite tenuous. For example I'd accept a technical post on the production of the multi-layer aluminum sheeting used aircraft skin, on petroleum fractionation, or on the transport of materials to Uranium City for construction of the runway there. It should be well- written and go beyond what I could produce on the same subject with a little research. If it treats a less technical topic, then I would prefer you write a first person account of an interesting aviation experience, something that gives an insider's view. It could be something you'd put on your own blog if you had one, or something you don't want to put on your own blog because it's too embarrassing, but that you'd like to share anonymously.

I'm not interested in posts about ordinary passenger experiences on large commercial aircraft, how to get first class upgrades, exciting places to go on vacation, or the benefits of going to a particular technical college, or anything that reads like an infomercial. I'd welcome a post from a crewmember or controller about an emergency situation, from a customer of a Canadian bushplane operator, from a student describing a first solo or an AME changing a cylinder in the field. If it's a well-written personal account with technical details by a woman in Canadian aviation, then it's probably a homerun. You may include links in the post as necessary to tell the story. Length isn't really important. If it's super short I may throw in a related story of my own or a YouTube link. If it's really long but worthwhile I might split it across more than one post.

I will introduce the guest post, stating my relationship with you, and then at the end I will link to the website you wish to promote and/or to the author's personal website. You keep the copyright, and I don't mind if you simulpost the story to your own blog. I will maintain your anonymity if it's that kind of story.

If you have an idea for something that would fit here, please e-mail me with a specific description so I can give you a go-ahead before you go to any trouble. If you have a product to sell, please include a link to a sample of your writing so I know you don't write like a comment robot. If you're just sharing an experience with nothing to sell, but you happen to write like a comment robot, I can probably fix it up for you.

Last Post

I wrote this not knowing if it was a last blog entry I would never post, or the first blog entry in a new chapter of my blog. Today someone, two people actually, sent me Google+ invites. I thought "Eh, what could it hurt? I might as well try this out." I clicked through on one of them and started filling out the form. I never give my actual birthdate to fun services online, because that's part of the verification information for real services like banking. I give a fake birthdate that I can easily remember. For this account I decided to give the memorable date of my first flying lesson.

Immediately Google seized on this information and determined me underage. I haven't been flying for eighteen years, and apparently you have to be eighteen years old to author a blog. The screen said Google would delete my blog in twenty-nine days if I did not send them government-issued ID demonstrating that I am over eighteen. Unfortunately Aviatrix Anon does not have government-issued ID, so I knew that unless I had a friend at Google, that would be the end of my blog.

I knew that I probably did have a friend at Google, or at least a friend of a friend, but my blog contact list is on Gmail, and Google locked not only the blog, but the Gmail account. Of course that means they also locked the back-up Cockpit Conversation Redirection blog, my account through which I could access Google Help, and even my ability to comment identifiably on other blogs. I sent a fax to the Google people explaining the situation, then plea-for-help e-mail to a few bloggers with common traffic, whose e-mails I happened to have on my home account, and then I waited.

This paragraph was going to contain either gratitude to the person or persons who helped me out, or a fond farewell to all the people who have read and commented on the blog, and even met me in person, over the years. If the blog was deleted, I wasn't going to start a new one. It's too much to lose and try to start over.

While waiting for someone at Google to get back to me one way or another, I decided to try the other offered means of age verification, the credit card. I don't have a credit card with the name Aviatrix Anon on it, either, but maybe they wouldn't check. Seeing as you can get a credit card for your cat or dog and buy preloaded credit cards at the grocery store checkout, I thought it was only scammer porn sites that professed to use credit cards for ID verification, but I decided my blog was worth thirty United States cents, and Google probably wasn't running a credit card scam. I gave Google my credit card information and instantly my Blogger account was restored. Thirty cents is a cheaper bribe than I thought I'd need. Most of you probably never noticed the interruption.

So kids, if you want a blog, lie about your age. Grownups, lie about your age if you will, but make sure you don't take too much off. Either way, any credit card will do to fix your error.

I can't really recommend Google Plus, but if you use other Google services with the identity you use to connect to Google Plus, please make sure you tell it you are over eighteen.

Heads Up for a Pop Quiz

I get a lot of requests to advertise on this blog. It doesn't gather millions of eyeballs, but I suppose it's a niche market of people who trust me, and advertisers are feeling around for a way to reach people. I know I should just ignore the robotic linkfarm spam, but I often respond anyway, explaining briefly how vastly unlikely it is that I would ever place a link to their site on my blog. I know it just confirms me as a live one, but it amuses me to reply.

Every once in a while my "Sorry, I don't participate in linkfarms" or "Why would I link to a site scraper?" gets a response from a real human being, who isn't always a linkfarmer or a barely literate employee of a scammer. The problem with linkfarmers trying to look like legitimate bloggers is that sometimes legitimate bloggers end up looking like linkfarmers.

My first contact with John of the cleverly named Golf Hotel Whiskey was like that. I had looked at the site briefly, not parsed the name, seen something I thought was a generic travel review site, and given him a brush off. He defended himself, I took a second look, and while it still isn't a regular read of mine, I acknowledge it as original work, related to aviation and worthy of respect. Another site I dismissed as a site-scraper is How It Flies. I told him flat out that it's obvious that all the content has been scraped directly from Wikipedia, making not only the material unoriginal, but the concept. Paste a chunk of text from any Wikipedia article into Google's search engine with quotation marks around it, and you'll see how popular it is to build a site by plagiarizing Wikipedia. Keith argues that the Wikipedia material is just the seed and that his site has a different purpose. I'm still not entirely convinced, but it isn't advertising supported, so he must be doing this out of conviction. I'll let him explain.

I understand your aversion to site scrapers. I debated long and hard before incorporating Wikipedia content for a number of reasons. One is that the quality is inconsistent, but mostly because their focus is not what I'm aiming for. Their writing is for a general audience while How It Flies is oriented towards pilots. Over time I imagine that the articles will shift focus as people edit them. Their content focus is also limited. I'm looking to have a much larger collection of photos as well as videos. All of this though takes an immense amount of time and my calculations showed that, without seeding the site with content, I would never have the critical mass necessary to create a useful resource. I have been stunned at the results. Since adding wiki articles a little over a month ago, traffic to the site has quintupled.

Besides the different focus, we're also making the information from Wikipedia more useful by creating structured data. Wiki information is one big text file. I've been able to get a great deal of the information into a database which will eventually allow people to search and manipulate it in ways I can't even foresee.

A big-name company interested in grassroots marketing but completely unrelated to the topic of my blog sent me an "infographic" they thought I might like to share with my readers. It was ... an infographic. Someone with some amount of skill in information presentation had crafted it, but still, it had nothing to do with anything. I told him that if it weren't for linkfarm spam, his missive would win the award for the lamest attempt to be featured on my blog that I have received all year, and that I very nearly opened Microsoft Paint to make him an infographic he could put on his wall to commemorate that stunning failure to impress me. "I may yet sponsor a reader contest to do so," I claimed.

Perhaps this inspired me, because recently an advertiser actually associated with a vaguely aviation product enquired about the price of links or banners and instead of saying "no" I said, "I don't do banners, but I would do a contest giveway." I was thinking, "I don't want to burden my readers with ads, but if I can give them something, that's different." And the manufacturer thought it was a fair deal. So I'm just deciding what sort of contest this will be.

Fellow blogger Michael 5000 runs a weekly honour-system quiz which I always have a great time attempting, despite my woefully poor knowledge of art, American literature, and music. I think I may start a similar regular feature: only aviation-related. You would be on your honour not to use Google, Wikipedia, books, posters, roommates or other resources not already located within your own head to answer the questions posed. I think this is probably not the best choice for a contest with a prize, because it would literally reward people for cheating. I don't want to do an open-book quiz, because then it just turns into a Google/Wikipedia competition, and that's no fun.

I have been thinking for years of doing a "how well do you know me" quiz covering everything from random eggs and burrowing mammals to my most abused adverbs, and that would favour long-term and attentive readers, but seems a little narcissistic. (Wow there are a lot of ess sounds in narcissistic). And it might be tantamount to just giving the prize to my friends.

I did a giveaway a while ago where I asked contestants to explain why they were the most deserving of the prize, but you were all so nice to each other that you all just awarded the prize to the first cute kid entrant. Another option is to ask for your creative work, such as your speculation on what the dot was asking me. (Let me tell you, after five hours of keeping it centred, the dot is usually asking me to do unspeakable things).

I'm leaning towards a game of "nosewheel roulette". I make a chalk mark on the nosewheel, normal to its low point on the ground, then I taxi out and do a flight. After shutdown I get out and see where the chalk mark ends up. The pockets on the roulette wheel correspond to the number of centimetres around the circumference of the tire from bottom dead centre to the chalkmark. Whoever guesses closest wins a prize. The downside is that it's purely a game of chance, but the upside is that it's easy to judge, impossible to cheat, and someone gets free stuff. I'll let you know the circumference of the nosewheel when the contest is on.

I'd Rather My Life Be About Flying, Too

A few days ago, a reader posted a comment that I was expecting. Truthfully I was expecting more resembling this comment, and sooner.

OK, I think this diversion was fun. I also think it has gone on long enough and we ought to get back to flying or something close. Don't ya 'spoze... If we don't (or won't) want to write about flying anymore, let's reclassify and get off the aviation lists. Frankly, I DO think you still give a twit about flying and you are just hiding it because you are a bit frustrated - and I can appreciate that. Maybe it is time to take a slightly lesser flying job, keep those hours building and do what you are supposed to do. Some folks on their way up the ladder believe that ANY flying is better than no flying. Where do you stand?

I answered briefly (or at least as briefly as I get) in a comment, but decided to take some more room here to answer more thoroughly, point by point. As I learned as an instructor, most of the time when someone asks a question there are others wondering the same thing. I appreciate your attention and your comments, and enjoy hearing from different people as I happen to veer into your areas of expertise. This blog, as it has always said up there at the top, is about the adventures of an aviatrix: me. I am doing my level best to make them once again aviation-related adventures, but I can only write so many posts about PDFs of resumes. I like to be a reliable blogger, but in my case reliability is in the regularity my posts, or at least reliable information on when I'll blog next, as opposed to reliably blogging on a given topic. Despite my diversions, I think I produce as many aviation-themed posts in any given year as any other non-aggregator in the blogosphere. Remember in that vein that a non-aviation post is not depriving you of an aviation one, just giving you something to see before the next time I have an aviation-related one ready.

I'm a little surprised to have given the impression that I was unwilling to write about flying, or that I didn't care about flying. I didn't think much more than a week went by without me saying something about my desire to be flying, my impatience to hear back from a company I had interviewed with, or at least comparing what I was doing to some aspect of flying. I'm definitely not trying to hide it. Getting off aviation lists wouldn't really be something I could do of my own accord. Most blog directories, well the good ones, at least, classify blogs themselves and I wouldn't even know where to look to find what lists I'm on or how to get off them.

The "time to take a slightly lesser flying job" question is an interesting one. I wonder if he has ever tried to take a slightly lesser flying job. What is a "lesser" flying job? For less money? The job for which I attended groundschool would have paid half as much as my previous one, and for close to twice as much work. A slower or smaller airplane? Not out of the question. Every type of commercial operation is different, and the management want pilots who have direct, recent experience in the narrow area they are hiring for, yet who do not have so much experience that they could easily get a different job. I apply for but don't get called to interview for near-entry level jobs, even ones I really want, because my resume is clearly not one of an entry level pilot, and the employers want someone who needs the job as a rung on the ladder, and who will take some time to be eligible for a different one. Cynically, such a pilot is easier for them to abuse, and practically they feel they have a better chance of amortizing their investment. I'm already eligible for almost any job advertised without specific type-rating demands, but as the specific type of time any given employer might be asking for falls further into the past, my competitiveness as a candidate declines. And yes, that's very frustrating, and it's something that sent me to go back to school and prove that I could go and learn things like I was still twenty.

I have absolutely no interest in time-building. It's one of the strengths of my resume, that any employer can look at it and see that I'm not applying because I'm looking to build time. My time is built. I'm not sure what "do what you were supposed to do" means in the question. If I was supposed to fly airplanes and write only about aviation, then you not I are the one doing the supposing. I'm a whole person and I do lots of stuff, little of which I consider to be something I'm not supposed to do.

Any flying is most definitely not better than no flying. If you are flying unsafe aircraft, with undocumented dangerous goods, with abusive management or customers, or otherwise operating in an environment hazardous to the physical or mental health of yourself or others, you're making a poor decision. I will fly for any operation I consider to be safe and respectful. Regular readers have seen me accept a contract to fly an airplane I could lift without starting the engine, and jump in a simulator for an airplane that could probably lift my house. I'll follow any SOPs I consider safe, legal and moral, but I won't stay long where I'm not respected.

It so happens that the school from which I embezzled the most recent phase of my education ended its winter term. The students all applauded the professors on the last day of classes, something that seems superior to what happened when I went to school. I think we all walked out grumbling about the exam schedule. I cancelled the Netflix subscription without watching anything else I deemed worth reporting on. Except that I watched all the Red Dwarf episodes, including a few series that weren't out the first time I watched them. I discovered that you can be inspired and roll your eyes at the same time, with the line, "Even the word "hopeless" has hope in it." Netflix Canada has a very poor selection. I'm holding back on trying another movie delivery option because whether DVDs-by-mail will work depends on whether the job I am destined to get is in Nowhere, Nunavut or Downtown Distribution City.

And all this blogging isn't a complete waste of time, as I now have e-mail from a couple of blog readers with real job tips: jobs that are available to a Canadian, and related to my experience. One of the companies experiences an unfortunate setback actually during our rapid-fire e-mail conversation but the other one seems promising, as the employer e-mailed me back.

Update: I removed the reader's posting name from this blog entry because, while I wasn't intending it as a name and shame, he took some heat from the blogosphere and sent me a sincere apology. So we're good now.

Alphabet Google Meme

A meme, a meme. An embarrassing way of revealing and reviewing what I've been up to lately. An excuse for a blog post when I've been preoccupied with textbooks and visitors. All you do is go to your Google search bar and enter each letter of the alphabet in turn, reporting the first suggestion. That tells you what you've searched for most recently, or if you've never searched for anything beginning in that letter, then I think you get the most common recent search. I, for example, have never actually searched for anything beginning in the Old English letter thorn. I just threw it in to be silly.

adapted for American audience
bruschetta
calves weaned natuarally age
Dario
eth html
first air
geek holidays
Harry Potter changes american market
interference drag
jackson hole b757 runway
kwakiutlh
longcat
movethatbus.org
ntsb endorsement
ornithopter
parasite drag induced
Qesnel
russian vowels ipa
schwa html
tea cosy etymology
US gallons Jet A pounds
Viking twin otter
Wright Flyer
xaudaro
YNE
Zenith 5555
þingvellir

Starting the Build

We were given the option to choose what time the vehicles would come to take us to the build and chose the earlier option of seven a.m. I don't know if anyone else was biting their tongue against suggesting "four a.m." There's something about pilots and black humour. Our transport is a convoy of vans because the rural roads aren't suitable for a bus. Our drivers are here punctually and sort themselves out in the narrow street for boarding. They made a fuss about "our cars aren't like your cars" and "our roads aren't like your roads" in telling us how long it would take to get to the build site, but honestly I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if the same fleet of used but serviceable passenger vans came to take us to a Canadian farm. Most seats even had seatbelts. We have a further briefing reminding us not to touch the children, and don't compliment people's children either. They don't say why. Either it's more fear that we want to take them, or it's a society where so many children die young that it's bad luck to draw attention to their merits, lest the gods take them back for their own. I'm kind of lost for a way to make contact with a person with whom I share almost no language or culture. Can I admire their cows?

We drive off through some poorer areas of the city, and then through increasingly rural communities. It's really difficult to take pictures through the windows of a moving vehicle and impossible not to want to record some of the things we are seeing. All manner of goods are being transported by bicycle. There was a pair of yoked oxen pulling a large cart all hung with different sorts of reddish pottery. I recognized the same kind of platter we'd had our fish served on at the sitting-on-floor restaurant, for example. I can imagine that that identical scene, the oxen, the wooden yoke, the cart and the pottery being sold has repeated for a thousand, maybe two thousand years here. Could be more. Pottery has been made for millenia, and the skill probably came here with the initial human migration to the area? Domesticate the ox? Ditto. Manufacture wheeled vehicles? The same. I love doing things, even the simplest things like running barefoot, kneading bread, or seeing an ox cart laden with pottery, that have been done since before recorded history.

After an hour or so we turn off of paved roads onto a red dirt road. The clay won't need to come far. There's a busy and extremely interesting-looking market right at the corner of the paved road and the dirt one. It's the intersection of the things the people who come down the dirt road produce and the goods that they want to take home with them. We also pass a pony pulling a cart on which there is a dead cow. I wonder what the story is there. I would expect that you would walk a cow to slaughter, and that if a cow died in the field you would butcher it there, or burn or bury it there if the meat were considered unusable.

There are houses and people all along the dirt road. Some of the houses are very simple, at ground level and made of palm fronds and bamboo. Others are more elaborate than the ones we will be building, same style in that they are up on stilts, but larger and with fancy metal railings and painted shutters. I doubt anyone has plumbing. The road is crazy with potholes, but our driver is very skilled at going around them without excessive swerving or braking. In fact, Cambodians in general drive well. No road rage, sensible speeds, and excellent maneuvering in difficult conditions. I can't speak for their adherence to vehicle regulations, because I can't be sure there are any. Certainly there are no rules forbidding four people and a live chicken on the same motorbike.

We pass some flags in a field which someone says mark it as a minefield. There are chickens running around loose everywhere, chickens with longer legs and thinner breasts than the ones at home. The cows are quite a different breed, too. One person on the bus calls them water buffalo, but I know what a water buffalo looks like and these are Asian cows, they look like the ones that wander around India. Other people think the cows and dogs are abused because you can see their ribs, but they look healthy to me. The dead one back on the horse cart even had some meat on it. You can see my ribs and I'm not in any way starving. North Americans have become used to the shape of overfed animals, and of course these animals have much thinner coats than the ones that stand around in Canadian winters. These ones are all either yoked, tethered, or being tended by children with sticks, and the latter two sorts are all languidly eating what looks like lush vegetation. They don't have to get through a cold winter, either.

The van stops. We're here. We get out, surrounded by curious Khmer people, giving us just enough room to follow the Tabitha leader to our marshalling point, while they watch us. I give the "jum reap sur" greeting I've been taught and it is returned, but the experience is more like waving to the crowd than meeting a group of people. There are no introductions. Nari shows us where to put our belongings. It's a low platform made of strips of bamboo nailed to a wooden frame and covered with a mat. There is also a cooler full of water on he ground there, several more cases of water, plus there are hammers are on another table. By the time we can put down our bags and pick up hammers, we're being divided into subteams and led along the paths in the village to the homes that need completing. I say 'completing' because to ensure the project can be completed and for everyone's safety, local contractors have already poured the foundation, erected a frame, put on the roof and laid the floorboards in place. We climb up the wooden ladder and Nari tells us to put two nails in each floorboard at each point that it crosses a joist. She also tells us how to put the walls on, but I didn't do walls until later in the day, so I'll describe that later. Three or four of our six people put on our work gloves and start nailing floorboards down.

I wanted to take a picture of the frame when we began, and of all the building materials you bought, but I didn't want to lag behind and miss out on the instructions that were being given inside. Then once the instructions were given, it was just "go!" I'll take a "before" picture at the next house. We want to get this done and there have been warnings that the work is very difficult. I'm following one board across the house, driving two nails, shuffling backwards to the next joist, and driving two more. I put in about ten nails, straight and true, one after another. I'm setting them with a couple of taps, then using a goofy two handed hammer technique, because if I'm going to do this all day and all the next, a little girlishness is a cheap price to pay for a functional wrist tomorrow. I'm starting to think this will be pretty easy. The next nail bends. I pull it out and try again with a new nail. It goes in a little further, then also bends. I straighten it out and that works for a moment but now the head is bent and I can't hit it straight. I try a third, and bending that makes it three in a row. What the hell? Is my wrist worn out already? There's not a knot here, and the joist seems normal, too. I skip that joist and move on. The next nail goes in properly. The next one I notice before I start driving it has a manufacturing defect, a tail deformity. I knew in advance that the made in Cambodia nails were going to be a little less predictable that the ones I'm used to, but I consider these building materials to be something you have given me to accomplish a mission, and I want to use them well. I select a healthier-looking nail and drive it in. I try counting blows per nail, but I can only count to ten in Khmer, and sometimes it takes twenty hammer blows to get a nail in. Sometimes I hit the nail and it feels like I'm trying to drive it into an engine block. There's just no progress into the wood. I hold it with my pliers and bang and bang on it until it finally succumbs. Yeah, that seems pretty damned wimpy to me, too. I seem to remember that if I hold a hammer right, the nail should be flush in three or four blows. As I clean up my bent nails I realize that as a group we are producing a lot of bent nails. It's not just me. Others have hit the same almost-impossibly-hard spots, too. I had to wait until the the van ride back to figure out why it was so hard to drive a simple nail, but I'll let you in on it now. The boards are made of mahogany. Tropical hardwoods are hard.

I am being extra careful to get the nails all the way down. It's better to leave a hammer imprint around the head of the nail than to have any metal sticking up. Sure it seems like I'm building a tree house, but people's babies are going to be crawling around up here. Babies will probably be born in here. I don't want there to be anything poking up that could hurt someone, or even damage their carefully made bamboo mats.

It seems like a lot longer than twenty minutes before someone calls "water break." We've made good progress, though. The floor is at least half-nailed and the walls are up maybe a quarter of the way around. We guzzle some water and get back to work. There are a few really tough spots in the floor, like the one where I bent three nails, but we get two nails into every joist, and figure out ways to nail down the boards at the tricky corners, where the joist stops a little short of the concrete post or a nail has to go diagonally to hit wood. When the area that still needs nails is smaller than the hands and knees footprint of the number of people we have working on it, I go outside and see if the wall-nailing people need help. They have it under control and don't want to swap out, so I declare that I'm taking a photo break, and no one objects.

There are three mothers with children sitting in the shade of a palm-frond house quite close to the one we are building. I greet them in Khmer and receive the same greeting in return, then hold up my camera and say djaa?. That means "yes" said by a woman. The phrase for "may I please take your photograph?" was really long and I haven't memorized it. The women smile and have the children to look at me and smile. I photograph the first pair and then the mother urges the child to come up and look at the photo on the camera. Mom has seen this before. The first girl seems pleased with her picture, but the second child expresses discomfort when I raise the camera, so I don't take her picture, just lower the camera and say "okay, no picture." I try to talk to them, using the tiny number of useful words my guidebook has given me for this situation. I look at the construction of the existing house. It may not be as sturdy, but the construction has required far more skill. I try to ask if who made it, and only get across that I am interested in it. I understand from them that it is not so good when the rains come.

The wall-builders still don't want a substitute, so I nominate myself to go and get more water for the group. As I walk back with the water I notice a lot of plastic garbage on the ground, so I make that my next task. I find an extra plastic bag on our stuff-platform and start picking up trash around our house and around the village. Where did all this stuff come from? I don't think these people are using hair conditioner and contact lens solution, nor eating Chinese-branded junk food and candies in plastic and foil wrappers. My trash collection route passes by another house, in the same almost-completed condition as ours. The group leader is working on that one. I ask him if he knows where the plastic comes from and he doesn't. "Maybe they go through someone else's garbage looking for things they can use?" The villagers see me collecting the trash. I wonder if they think I'm taking it because I want to keep it, or if they appreciate that I am cleaning up. While I'm picking up the trash I step onto a grassy area between the road and the fence and then I realize what I haven't been doing. Mines! I told myself before I came that I would not step anywhere that was not obviously trodden. Obviously this area next to the fence had to have been stepped on when they were building the fence, and I'm sure people and cows step here all the time, it's just that I wasn't thinking about it. It's like when I land and realize that I didn't consciously do the short final check. I put the gear down, I checked it down, but I missed that last little check. No harm done, but if you can miss one check you can miss another. I think about what I'm doing and fill a bag with gum-wrapper-sized bits of plastic, then go to see if another group needs more hammer power.

Everyone has finished their floors by now and several people have splintered off to start floors on other houses. I find one of those houses and join them. As first there is a conflict, because while my original group was nailing all the way along one board, these people are nailing all the way along one joist. I switch to their way and we stop stepping on each other. I did some wall-nailing too, which I'll describe tomorrow. And then someone says it's time for a lunch break.

Lunch was actually the worst part of the trip. Not that there was anything wrong with the bread or with the food chosen by the committee. It was all excellent. It was turning our backs on all these people and eating baguettes and cheese and cured ham and bananas while they watch us. I have a choice between turning my back on them, looking at them and eating in their faces, or not meeting their gaze. They aren't starving. And yes, I understand that if people don't eat white bread and cheese and butter that they will get sick on eating it. But this makes me feel like an alien. The very least I can do to show you that I am a friend is to squat in the dirt next to you and share a meal. Couldn't we bring food we could share? How about if we bring a sack of brown rice and a basket of dried fish and the villagers cook a meal for everyone while we build. Sure it wouldn't be prepared to Canadian Food Safe guidelines but neither are the restaurant meals we get around here. If their water is so bad that it would irreparably harm us to eat rice that had been boiled in it for forty-five minutes, then we're working on the wrong project here. We may be different, but we are the same species. It would not be an impossible task to devise a way that we could all share a meal.

I eat rapidly and then leave the food behind to try to talk and take pictures. Someone has a better phrasebook and manages to ask a woman how many children she has. "Buan." No "braun." Five. That's nice. I guess. Having lots of children is good in this culture, right? Five is lots, right? We don't know. Maybe five is not enough. We all smile happily at having achieved some sort of communication, and the little conversation gets discussed down the line in Khmer for the people who couldn't hear or understand it the first time. I don't know if the hardest part of a conversation is knowing the words, or knowing what words you need. They probably feel the same way about us. And at least we have the context of being able to see pretty much their whole lives in front of us. They have no idea what our lives are like.

These kids were all sitting on a log next to the main track through the village. You can't see it in the picture, but the kid nearest me, has an infected toenail. Even though the living conditions are so different than home for these people, everything is so different that I'm having to consciously hammer it into my own head that this is the Third World. People in the Third World die of simple things like infections. Ergo, this kid sitting right here on this log might die because he kicked a jagged rock and then stepped in cow manure, or whatever kid-normal thing it is that he did. I have a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my bag over there on that platform, not four metres away. But you don't touch people's kids, so you most certainly don't pour strange foaming stuff over their toes. And disinfectant isn't magic. It's just part of the whole medical apparatus that I have become so accustomed to, I still don't appreciate how much it is lacking here. It's going in about as slowly as those nails into mahogany.

Another floor done and it's only two o' clock. We move on again and have to synchronize nailing systems with another group of people. We're not quite done that on. There's a board that is too close to another one at one end, and partly nailed down, but we managed to work together and lever it away so the boards are not overlapping in the finished floor. That was a good bit of teamwork. By two-thirty they're declaring it time to get back in the bus. "But that wasn't a whole day!" The group leader doesn't want people to get tired and have accidents. We tidy up and get in the vans. Everyone shares the experience of ridiculously hard to hammer wood. Mahogany flooring. Wow. It may not be super straight and some of the nails are bent and then hammered in flat anyway, but do you know anyone with mahogany floors?

The van we're in has worse suspension than the one I rode out. I should have worn a sports bra. We pass a truck laden with women all in matching headscarves, probably coming home from a factory job. It's not so much a truck as a long wooden box with slats across, the women all sitting on the slats, like on the thwarts of a canoe, and the box pulled as a trailer by a motorcycle.

That evening I bought a Khmer phrasebook from a street vendor, and I'll tell you about that, later.

This is a lot of work putting these posts together and I have a lot of things to do, as I imagine many of you do. I'm probably going to take a break from heavy-duty trip-report posts until after Christmas. There will be a few intermediate ones on current affairs and my usual end-of-year topics, then I'll return to the rest of the build and the other parts of the Cambodia trip in the new year.

Home Safe

I'm back from Cambodia, with about a thousand photographs and a suitcase full of souvenirs, the latter of which has been left outside so the winter temperatures can kill anything laid by tropical insects before I bring it into my home. I suppose I have to weigh that strategy against the possibility of hardy Canadian insects or perhaps silk-loving moose attacking it, but I have to cope with them anyway.

You'll have pre-trip posts for a few more days before I get up to speed to blog about my experiences in Cambodia. I've come so far around the world today that I'm not sure it wouldn't have been quicker to go the other way. Here's a sneak peek to tide you over.

Tired, Cold, Bored and Hungry

There's a lot of intellectual and highly skilled work in aircraft maintenance. It's not all blood and cursing. Today the airplane is up on jacks and the experts are solving problems. The tasks that are appropriate for me to do are either done, not safe on a precariously balanced airplane, or would interfere with what the AMEs are doing. So I'm sitting on one of the removed airplane seats, with the brightness turned way down on my iPod in order to ration the remaining power for as long as possible. I'm alternating between games of Pac-Man (Namco, just the free demo version, high score 14680 out of a possible 14990 (I could score 15000, but the demo version only updates the high score table if I don't finish the board, so I have to leave one dot uneaten)) and making notes for the blog. So far the blog notes say "tired, cold, bored, hungry." I go to the emergency bag and put on a parka to cope with the second on the list.

Aircraft maintenance is a little like laws and and sausage, I think. It's nicer to just benefit from someone else having made them than it is to be there while the blood is flowing. Not just because you get to keep more blood on the inside of you that way, but because it can make you squeamish about the product. Pilots like to pretend to ourselves that we are the only ones in the chain who simply make the best decisions we can based on time and available information, and that somehow after we hand the airplane over to the maintainers, some kind of perfection can be produced. It's still impossible to know exactly what is going in in the airplane's innards. They do several gear swings, and my notes say "hydraulic leak, brake overflow" which doesn't sound good, it sounds as though the latter is a simple explanation for the former.

They then find something for me to do, with one of the guys asking me to, "Take all the stuff out of the nose locker." The nose locker is where a lot of the airplane specific equipment lives, things like spares, cleaning supplies, and, seasonally, deicing equipment. That I'm asked to remove it is not unusual. A lot of the avionics and the battery are accessed through there. What makes me double-take is the phrasing. "Did you say it that way to pandering to my feminine sensibilities?" I ask? He knows exactly what I meant, and concedes that he he did. No aircraft maintainer has ever before referred to the contents of that cargo compartment without employing a fecal metaphor.

They treat me well. They really do speak a different language. Not so much the conversation about parts but a non-stop stream of insulting banter to each other. They are not fighting, not even disagreeing most of the time and are working efficiently, and it's rarely offensive, but it's steadily profane. Is this all guys? It's almost aircraft maintainers, in my experience. Most of them moderate their language in the presence of customers or females, but once they relax to my presence, they revert to their native tongue. I can translate most of it.

On the way to lunch I notice a sign beside the road advertising drag racing at the airport on the weekend. I call Flight Services to check NOTAMs and find out how this will affect my ability to depart the aerodrome, but they have no NOTAM on any such activity. Maybe they won't call it in until Friday. I promise to check back, or let them know if I find out anything myself.

The guys ask me to turn on the aircraft electrical master, so I climb up to do that. My eyes automatically go first to the gear handle: training demands that I confirm the gear handle is in the down position before entering an aircraft cockpit. The handle is in the up position. I have a moment of "uhh..." before I remember that the aircraft is on jacks. Even though I know it is, because I just got in. That gets me every time.

I get out the Ice-X and clean and treat the wing and tail boots. I can't get all the way up the vertical stabilizer even with the ladder. Anyone know of anyone who died because ice clung to the very top of the leading edge of their vertical stab? I treat the propeller boots too. According to the instructions that's supposed to be done every fifteen hours, that's every day if we were flying steadily. We don't do that. I suppose we would if we were in hard IMC, or even rain every flight.

The guys have to do an impossible-looking job involving the landing gear cable. I disassemble the screens in the back of the nose compartment so they can get at it, and they work from both sides as well, apparently accomplishing their task. I get back in and confirm that I see three green and they lower it back to the wheels. There's still a chance we could have a problem with it, because it's extremely hard to test in the hangar. I don't understand all the details. There's so much I still don't know about my own airplane. I try to know everything.

My notes also say "washers." This may have been the result of delirious musings as I reassembled the nose compartment, wondering what kinds of homework assignments people got in AME school, and mentally composing an essay on the various uses of washers. I used to think the main purpose of metal washers was so that you could always have some bits left over when you had finished reassembling something, but I've come to appreciate their uses. Sometimes they are spacers, to redress a gap where the screw is too long for the thickness of what it is connecting. Sometimes it is reinforcement, where the hole is too big or the material not strong enough to be held in place just by the diameter of the screwhead. Sometimes the washer prevents damage to the paint from turning the screw. There are special lockwashers that deform as you tighten the screw down on them, so they are always pushing back against the screw, helping it not to vibrate loose. Or possibly my "washers" note refers to me dropping some under the floor and having to use guile and needle nose pliers to get them out.

We're now done except for some scat hose replacement, which can't be done today because they sent the wrong size scat hose. There is also some cosmetic work to be done on the door, but it involves disassembling the entire door, more complex than it sounds, and it's another one of those things that if they find something wrong, the airplane is grounded. We have a spare door, but there is a possibility that there is something wrong with the airframe where the door attaches. If airplanes are starting to sound like the reason you don't go in that part of your basement, you understand. Except that with airplanes it's illegal to close the door and pretend that must just dust bunnies.

We quit at 5:30 p.m., or at least I do. The guys are going back to the hotel to get ahead on paperwork, which is a huge part of their job, and a sizeable proportion of the work to be done on any inspection or scheduled maintenance task.

Posting Process

The plan is to go south for maintenance either today after my flight or tomorrow morning, depending on the weather, and on last minute whims of the client, owner and airplane. This time it will be my turn to go slightly further south for a few days. I understand that there is more than one street at the place we're getting the maintenance done. I look forward to that, for sure. Or maybe I'm just going insane. You know the old Dickens line about income and expenditure and pounds sixpence and happiness or misery? There's something similar to do with pilots, being in the field, having enough to eat and going insane. Six weeks consecutive weeks in is around the tipping point for insanity for me these days.

Let me explain my blogging process: I take notes during the day--on my OFP, in a notebook, on the back of the box the brake pads came in, on anything that will hold the ink, and by taking photos just so I remember the thing I want to blog about. I copy the notes into a notepad file. I used to have a different notepad file for every day, but now I only start a new one every month. It's easier to ensure continuity between blog entries, refer back to things, and make sure I've covered everything when they're all in one place and I don't have to keep opening and closing files to check if I mentioned the hotel key problem or the broken TV yet.

When I have more time, I tweak the notes into a usable post with raw html tags, notations like e' and [photo] or [foxeatingcat.jpg] where I want non ASCII characters and photos. When I have both time and Internet access, I copy paste the text to the blog, make up a title, and then upload the photos and try to remember to expand the special characters. Let me know if I forget one or the other.

I assign each upload the next available date. I leave some gaps so I don't have to move EVERYTHING if I want to put in a more timely posting, and so that the already written entries last longer if I get busy and can't blog. It's better to have one post every two days reliably for two weeks, then to have a week of posts every day then nothing for a week. If there's breaking news I drop it in the nearest open space, moving posts around to get it sooner, if I can do so without unduly breaking up a narrative arc. Sometimes there is a post that I know in advance should go on a particular day: a holiday or date significant to the post, so those go in on those dates and I have to be careful not to accidentally move them as I shuffle things around.

Two or three days, occasionally get as much as a month ahead with queued posts. This summer I fell three months behind turning my notes into posts, then got lazy and didn't write them up as soon as I had a break.

This is the long way of saying that I have no idea what I did today, but it must have involved flying, because the next day I took the airplane to maintenance, and that was a memorable day, so I'll make you wait for it.

Insert Reptile Here on a Plane

I have been on the road for the last couple of weeks and ISP issues kept me mostly without e-mail, so I haven't caught up on comments yet. I'm amused that you're all way better at telling stories than you are at voting on your favourites, so it looks like I'll have to pick a winner myself, probably tomorrow.

For tonight, the first pass through my e-mailbox gives me a much forwarded story about a crocodile bringing down an airplane. It seems that on August 25th of this year a Let-410 turboprop (that's the same type as in the famous lions-under-the-wing photo) was en route from Kinshasa to Bandundu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Shortly before landing the aircraft crashed, with no prior reports of difficulty. The single human survivor, a passenger, said that passengers had stampeded to the front of the aircraft to escape a crocodile that escaped from a passenger's luggage.

Initial analyses were skeptical about the crocodile, but later ones confirm this was the testimony at the hearing.

The best comment I've found on the subject is from David Learmount on his blog Learmount, when he says,

"The painfully obvious solution to prevent further accidents like it is to prevent passengers bringing crocodiles - or other dangerous animals - on board. But in the DR Congo, which has had the worst aviation accident record in the world for two decades, this sort of event is, unfortunately, just 'part of life's rich tapestry'."

I'm not guaranteeing a blog entry tomorrow: I've run out of already-written buffered entries and don't have a lot of time, but I have a lot of story notes and will try to transfer them to the blog so you have something to read while I'm away. Meanwhile, if anyone out there speaks Khmer, can you teach me some basics?

Other Projects

I was going to write a blog entry today, really I was, but I don't have time. It was going to be about a project reader Townmouse is associated with, a project to rebuild a Link trainer.

Update: Sorry, there's no information on the link trainer there, just about the museum where it is happening. Townmouse says in the comments:

Yay! Thanks for the link to the museum site - there probably won't be anything there about the link trainer project because the whole place is run by old boys in overalls who are much happier with a spanner in their hands than sitting at a computer. My other half (despite not having any overalls and not being that old) is busy taking the Link trainer apart piece by piece and lovingly restoring it. It's a fascinating project because the trainer itself was based on player piano and organ technology so it's all operated by bellows and vacuum pipes and the electronics are 40s technology, if that. Complicated doesn't even begin to describe it. A few people have restored them and there are a few resources around on the internet but mostly it's been a question of looking at the original manual and tinkering. A few weeks ago they managed to get it turning and pitching under power, although there's still a long way to go

If anyone is in SouthWest Scotland and is interested, it's being restored right there in the museum in a polytunnel so go and have a look. In fact, I recommend the museum to anyone in the area who's interested in old planes and world war 2. It's run entirely by volunteers and while not the slickest museum in the world, it's full of interesting stuff and they let you climb into most of the planes and make aeroplane noises if you like.

Them's the Brakes

Back home from what was salvageable from my vacation break, I'm now packing to go back to work. I'm always either living out of a suitcase or packing or unpacking one. There's an empty brake pad box in the bottom of my suitcase with writing on the inside. I must have thought it was terribly important to record for posterity. "Walkaround. AME inflating nosewheel, inspecting work done yesterday, brake disk, brake pads, fuel, break in, three airlines arriving one behind the other, us, exit, cooling period, test, happy, depart."

I remember that. The nosewheel tire pressure was low and the AME was inflating it while we did the walkaround. I'm often trying to start a walkaround inspection while my airplane is still being put back together, or even end up putting the airplane back together as part of my walkaround. Gotta love it when you find a part on the wing or lying in the cabin and have to ask, "Does this need to go back somewhere?" I should keep a spare spark plug in my flight bag for the purpose of frightening AMEs.

We use the metallic brake pads, described in the right hand column in the picture. Typically the brake pads are changed as part of a scheduled inspection so an engine run up is required too. In such a case I will run up the engines then do the brake conditioning on the runway and then taxi back and shut down, using the break for leak checking as the cooling period, then checking the brakes again before departure.

It occurs to me that people who can't spell well enough to know the difference between taking a break, braking to a stop and breaking in the brakes may be confused by this post. Spelling is important, folks.

You've probably noticed a lot of typos and mismatched sentences lately. I've been blogging offline due to terrible internet and using Notepad, which has no spellchecking capability so it doesn't catch my frequent letter transpositions, and sometimes scrolling goes amok, so the insertion point for editing is not where it appears to be. Sorry about that. I know spelling is important for good communications.

Having Issues. May Be A Bit.

This is so my new motto. Maybe I'll do one of these every day until I run out of famous images of historical figures having issues.

My coworker goes straight to bed after landing, not that he's especially tired after just waiting around for a while and making a short flight, but after eight hours sleep it's a new day and anything I don't get done, he can do tonight before tomorrow's icky weather arrives. I fuel and get ready for the flight, and then we're off. On the takeoff run I bring up the throttles, leading with the right lever as I have been doing, to compensate for a MP split at high power. But as I watch the power develop I adjust and discover that I don't have to do that, the left falls behind if I do that. Looks like they fixed that. They have been tweaking one thing every time it goes into maintenance, so they must have got it this time. The airplane accelerates to rotation speed and I lift the nosewheel about eight or ten degrees nose up for my initial climb. The mains come off and then there's a change in sound in the left engine and a little bit of yaw. Could be a turbocharger issue. The manufacturer specifically instructs pilots not to reject a takeoff with a failed turbocharger, so I just keep it at blue line and fly the plane. Now the left engine is surging. It's like an unsynched propeller, except that at this altitude the props are still unsynchronized. I wonder if I'm going to lose one here. Regardless, if it's putting out power, I fly a dodgy engine to a safe altitude before trying to diagnose it. The first order of business, even in a full engine failure or a fire is Control the airplane.

It flies. I reduce to climb power. The manifold pressure gauge needle isn't flicking noticeably and the tach isn't fluctuating between lights. At this angle and lighting I can't see clearly if the digital tachometer readout is fluctuating with a particular pattern. There is no gauge indication anywhere that says there is something wrong. The airplane isn't yawing crazily, it just doesn't sound right. I look at both engines out the windows. Who is to say whether the left one is surging down or the right one is surging up. The mission specialist has noticed too, which is good, because without a clear gauge indication it's easy to think you've gone insane.

I level off at cruise power and tweak things for a bit, switching fuel tanks in case I have something blocking a line, or a fuel contamination issue. No perceptible change for that or with alternate air. There's obviously something not right, so we circle back and land.

I run it up on the ground so I can report everything, but it doesn't do it on the ground, of course. I shut down and call my PRM while walking around the airplane and looking inside the cowlings from various angles to check for loose hoses, blocked intakes or any other obvious defects. The PRM asks the basic questions and says he'll get back to me. After ten minutes or so, the head of maintenance calls me. I describe the issue again, answer some more questions, and let him know I'm willing to take it up for a trouble-shooting flight, but he doesn't want me to. I joke, knowing it's not really a joke, that it probably won't do it again. He says the airplane is grounded, and he's driving up tonight to see it. I'm not sure he realizes how far north this is. I promise to get him a hotel room and tell him to call me whenever he is ready to work.

And then I have to tell everyone else that I just broke the airplane.

Back at the hotel I look at the information I have compiled on the Alaska flight. The fact that sunrise and sunset times are given as Never/Never today means that vampires must love it in the winter. Do vampires get cold? You'd think they could do quite well with a winter home in Alaska and a summer home in southern Chile. Or do vampires these days not mind the sunlight? PANC looks like one of those stupid airports. I mean this not as a slur on the airport but as a gesture of admiration for the pigheadedness of the skill and technology and rules required to make it work as an international hub, with ridiculous weather, almost total winter darkness and crazy terrain, not to mention frequent volcanic activity in the vicinity. There are mountains everywhere and no doubt horrible icing in the spring and fall given the temperatures and water all around it. Of course we're going to Alaska in what will probably be the best month of the year, because that's the kind of lucky folks we are.

Yesterday I e-mailed Dave of FL390, but he won;t be there while I am. I know (internet "know," but for many years, since before this blog) a pilot who lives in Anchorage, but when I e-mail him it turns out he'll be in Papua New Guinea until after I leave, so I won't be able to meet up with him. Of course. It is pretty much par for the course that if I finally happen to get to the remote location where someone I know lives, they will be out of town, either somewhere even more remote, or in my own town, for the duration. And if they ever come to my town I'm away. (The one glorious exception that proved that rule was that Phil (yes, he's fine, just not blogging these days) called me up out of the blue to say he was in town on the day I was having a birthday party! Perfect timing, and then after the party I drove him back to his crew hotel and instead of him getting out we steamed up my car windows for hours until security guards banged on the outside. But that's all you need to know about that).

So in this case, early to bed and waiting to see what the verdict is on the engine in the morning.

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This B767 had a hard landing that damaged the fuselage but Boeing's horses and men put it back together again. Notice that the FO of the subsequent flight found the damage on the walkaround, while boarding passengers, and the comments are worth reading, describing and praising Boeing repair savvy.

Four Million Dollar Decision

No, not my decision. Although, considering the cost of my airplane, the equipment and other airplanes around me, I technically make four million dollar decisions every time I taxi to parking. But this is about Airworthiness Directives (pronounced Eh Deez).

Anytime there is a failure of some part on a manufactured airplane and it is deemed to be a design flaw, or something that could happen anytime to another airplane, an airworthiness directive may be issued, requiring you to inspect, replace or modify something. The American FAA issues ADs, and usually Transport Canada just copies them. I think they call it promulgation. I imagine Transport Canada issues them too, if they get to the problem first, but the Americans have so much more aviation they tend to lead the way here. If there is an AD for your airplane, you are required to comply with it within the specified time, or your airplane is deemed unairworthy. The specified time may be "before you fly your airplane again," "within N days," "within M flight hours" or the like. There are one-time ADs, which are usually expensive, but you comply with them once and it's done, and there are recurring ADs which usually just require a trained individual to inspect something to see if it's broken, but are annoying because they have to be done every N hours of flight, and there is no leeway. They cannot be postponed a few hours even when other maintenance legally can be.

I think I've explained most of this before, probably many times while waiting for ADs to be completed, but I happened to run across a document today showing part of the logic process that goes into determining whether a problem with an airplane ends up as an AD or just a Service Bulletin. It shows how quickly a bureaucratic decision can multiply.

AD
Costs of Compliance

We estimate that this AD affects 8,000 airplanes in the U.S. registry.

We estimate the following costs to do the inspection and parts replacement:

Labor Cost: 4 work-hours X $80 per hour = $ 320

Parts Cost: $190

Total Cost Per Airplane: $510

Total Cost on U.S. Operators: $4,080,000

It's some inexpensive (two hundred bucks is a cheap airplane part) part buried somewhere that takes two guys most of an hour to take the airplane apart to get at it, a few minutes to replace, and then another hour to reassemble test and certify. And that's a one-time AD.

Speaking of decisions with consequences, some time ago I told my boss about my blog. I was sitting in a hangar typing on my laptop and he ambushed me with some friendly question like "what are you doing?" and, being completely untrained in the art of lying, I told him I was blogging. I figured the word "blog" makes most people think of twilight fan fiction, emo angst and accounts of shopping trips, and that he would be even less inclined to read it than he is to read my status reports. But he asked for the blog URL. He read some of it, laughed and moved on. I figured that would be the end of it. After all What business owner has time to read blogs?

Then, weeks later, I was taking video of a tractor engine that was on the verge of catching fire. A contractor was using the self-destructing tractor as a tug, and I was teasing him that using that vehicle to tow airplanes in for maintenance was like a sign painter advertising his skills with a billboard done in crayon. I mean you can't keep your own tractor in good repair, but we should trust you with an airplane? The boss saw me intently pointing the camera. "For your blog?" he asked. The look on my face was probably something like "Uhh, you remember that?" and I answered, "Yeah, if it works out." (It didn't, too dark to see what was going on). I suppose this blog is more interesting than the paperwork and terse status reports I keep sending him, but the status reports are more up-to-date.

And as I've said from the beginning, if anyone associated with the operations described in this blog wants anything removed, censored or changed, no problem. Plus I can write more verbose status reports, too. Just ask.

Crazy Schedule

I have a kind of crazy schedule this summer so my blogging may not keep ahead of my flying schedule. As you may have noticed I'm defaulting to posting every second day, so that I can get wy ahead, but if I have time I can still insert topical posts as they come up without having to re-date all my queued posts. While this keeps me a few days ahead on write-ups any given day, it makes a longer lag between experiencing things and writing about them, so I'm not sure I can keep all my notes in good order.

I believe I have eight days at home between the beginning of June and mid-September, and my instrument renewal still has to be scheduled in there somewhere. I hope I get a chance to write everything up before I forget it. So if the narrative seems disjointed or if I suddenly stop blogging altogether, it probably doesn't mean that I'm snaring rabbits in the wilderness while waiting for Search and Rescue to find me.

In the meantime, here is a curiosity that didn't get attached to its proper post before that post got published. The passenger terminal at Calgary International Airport now has wireless internet, but you have to 'register' for it. You provide a name and e-mail address, then they give you limited access for fifteen minutes, during which you're supposed to check your e-mail and click the confirmation link, then you get online. That's the first airport I've encountered that does that. I wonder why they chose that route. I haven't been spammed by them yet. (I gave them a "special" e-mail address, so I'd know). I like it best when I can just tell my computer to connect, and then it does so, and then on all subsequent visits to the same place it connects automatically.