Cold, Hypoxia and Spiders

From time to time a person stows away in the wheel well of an airliner. There's a big space up there, with room for all the hydraulics, a retracted wheel, and a person. Doors close over the opening to provide streamlining, but I don't know that they close tightly enough to prevent draughts. Mine certainly don't. My gear doors don't even cover the whole opening. There is no pressurization and no heating in that space. At altitude the proportion of oxygen in the air is the same as at sea level, but the total air pressure is less, so the partial pressure of oxygen is also less. This pressure is important. A person can't get sufficient oxygen just by breathing faster. The pressure of the oxygen is what allows oxygen to enter the bloodstream. If the pressure isn't high enough, there is insufficient oxygen for the brain to function. A person loses the ability to make decisions, passes out and if the deprivation is severe enough, eventually dies.

The air temperature decreases by two or three degrees for every thousand feet of altitude, down to about -56C. I've never seen one of these where the stowaway had sufficient knowledge--or resources--to wear a parka. I've been outdoors in temperatures down to about -40. Wearing a parka, and gloves, and a toque underneath my parka hood, and giant Sorel boots, and mittens, while physically active. If I had stopped and curled up for a few hours I know I would have become very very cold.

Most of the time the cold, lack of oxygen and sometimes falling out of the wheelwell kills the stowaway. But sometimes they make it, like this kid from California. Humans can be freaking tough. I find it hilarious, but not that surprising that an unhappy teenager successfully breached airfield security. There is trust involved in aviation. Many places we pay for fuel on the honour system. It takes no genius and rarely requires tools to breech an airport gate. There is also a trade off, mutual assistance among aviators is a tradition much older than airfield security. It's hard to stop people from helping one another. And absolutely any tool someone might need on an airport can literally fly over the fence.

I'm amused that the commenters on that CBC piece include someone who insists a wheelwell monitoring camera and pre-departure check thereof should be standard, someone who doesn't believe the incident happened at all, and someone who sees a conspiracy theory at work.

My airplane often carries little stowaways that seem to suffer no ill effect. Spiders crawl up in my wheel wells. I landed the other day, taxied a short distance off the runway, shut down and got out to clean the windshield. In that time, maybe five minutes since the propellers had stopped spinning, a spider had already strung silk from the propeller across to the fuselage, such that I had to break the web to access my forward cargo area, where the windshield cleaner is. I don't know that it was one of the spiders I carry with me, but I like to think the conditions are producing super spiders. I wonder if insects are attracted to the heat coming off the nacelles, making that a prime spot for web building.

Paper or Plastic?

So we're about to evaluate the electronic cockpit. That is have all the charts on an iPad. Eliminate the two boxes of maps in the cockpit, the express ordering of charts for regions we suddenly have to venture, the hunt for a vendor that has the new VTA in stock, and possibly the chore of checking the charts periodically to see if a new one has come out. (Canadian VFR charts do not have a predetermined expiry date: there is a website that lists the probable release date of updated versions, but that list is a bit like the to do list that indicates when I will clean my kitchen or get my hair cut: that is, almost never happens on time.

The proposal presents two contradictory reactions. The progressive, "hey cool stuff, think of all the things a computer can do that paper can't" is checked by "wait a moment, what about all the basic stuff paper can do that e-charts can't?" In this blog entry I'm going to ask the questions, kind of make myself a to-do list for research and experimentation. I'll start with the strengths and weaknesses of old fashioned paper because that's what I know best.

• You can spread paper charts over the whole wall/bed/floor to get a big picture of where you are going. To be fair, this is also a weakness of paper. You have to have a large surface to see a long VFR trip in one go. Given that I can presumably scale in and out at will on the electronic one, I think the only thing I lose here is the physical scale, and to tell the truth I haven't done the multi-chart array thing for ages. Ooh, except that I had a couple of interns put together one on the wall of the office, and that's damned useful. But that won't go away.
• Paper charts don't become useless when broken. Paper charts retain most of their usefulness despite being dropped on the floor, stepped on, ripped in half, slammed in the door, having water spilled on them (they're pretty good quality paper) and other indignities that they suffer regularly. The destruction of one paper chart does not eliminate access to everything else on board. The robust case Transport Canada requires for an iPad should partly address this, but is this concern founded or not? I've never heard anyone say, "Our iPad just crashed, in the missed approach." Does it happen?
• Paper charts are temperature and pressure independent. (At least up to 451F). I have had electronic equipment fail for me because it got too hot or too cold, and I suspect my running computer stopped working because it was depressurized on a daily basis. We'll stress test one of the units (i.e. subject it to normal operations) and see how it does.
• Paper doesn't glare or wreck your night vision. anyone who has tried to use a computer near a window knows how hard it can become to read in the sunlight, something my cockpit usually has no shortage of. Now the iPad has to score some points for being self illuminating during those times when the sun is not flooding the cockpit with light, but can it illuminate itself with a dull red light, making the chart visible, without reversing the up to thirty minute process my eyes eyes have undergone to make the optimum adjustment to darkness. Again, a point for testing. Perhaps the robust case can include an anti-glare screen cover.
• You can write on a paper chart. The technique I was taught in low level mountain flying, and which I still use, despite all the augmentations of a terrain equipped GPS, is to mark with a pencil on the map where I am, and the time at each waypoint, so that if I ever get disoriented or discover I have taken the wrong valley, I have a track that tells me when and where I last knew where I was. Even without that particular navigational technique, it's useful to be able to write on paper. When the NOTAM says AMEND PUB, I'm supposed to actually amend the publication, to fix the incorrect frequency, the nav aid removed from service or the new restricted area. Does the electronic version support both 'pencil' (temporary, relevant to a limited number of journeys only) and 'ink' (permanent, to be retained until that chart is replaced) markings by the pilot? Done correctly, this could be a huge advantage for electronic: allowing markings to be searched, saved, scaled, and never obscuring map features. If Nav Canada would only update their NOTAM format (and I have faith that they will, someday) the NOTAMs could conceivably be applied directly to the electronic charts.
• You can set up a series of paper charts to show the important stages in your journey. Let's say I'm departing Edmonton, flying through a mountain pass to stay out of icing, and then heading into Vancouver. Before departure I set up the Edmonton VTA to show the western portion of the zone. I fold the Edmonton chart to centralize the area of the pass I will be negotiating, I have the enroute charts handy opened to the correct area, and i have the Vancouver VTA opened up so I can just grab it as I descend into their complex airspace, to know whom to talk to and where. I need to find out how to bookmark certain 'views' on the iPad, for the same effect. I will be disappointed if it cannot do that, but the iPad scores points for its ability to scroll continuously from one area to the next without my needing to dig in the box for the next chart.
• Paper is just paper, it can't do anything. A computer is a computer: it can compute. I imagine if I want to find Moose Creek airport I can do a search, rather than hunting all over the map for it, or looking up its lat-long in the CFS. If i want to know the distance and bearing from Moose Creek to Squirrel Pond, I expect the electronic product will draw a line on it for me, and tell me its bearing, distance and MEA. It would be nice if it could also line up the frequencies I should expect, but I'll be pleasantly surprised if it is that clever.
• I've already mastered paper's sneaky tricks. The most hilarious thing paper does when you're trying to use it is be hard to fold, and take over the entire cockpit, or rip. Approach plates don't change, zoom, or close when you poke them. If i put my finger on the MAP, will I change my view?

I was in the field for the meeting at which this purchase was decided, so I asked if it was intended to be supplemental or replace the paper charts. I got one answer (supplemental) from the ops manager and the opposite answer (replacing) from the pilot who I think is spearheading the project. So it's the old busted versus the new hotness. Any experience, tips, or features I've not thought of?

My Job is Almost This Cool

Here's a quick look at how beautiful my country is in the winter, and at how obsessed we are with hockey. I get to fly over these same panoramas, and while we don't get to organize alpine lake hockey games, we do choose our restaurants on playoff nights to ensure we can see the games. We can also get the scores from air traffic control if we have to fly during a game. I know of at least one tower that used their local hockey team's name instead of a letter of the phonetic alphabet to designate the ATIS, just to oblige the pilot of the visiting team's jet to say it.

Yes, my job is nearly this cool, and often a lot colder. See them wearing toques in the helicopters? The other day I was wearing a full-on men's parka, complete with the stereotypical fur around the edge of the hood. The fur is removable, but when it's really cold, they haven't made an artificial material that stays soft and doesn't chafe your skin. (Ever notice how much of the really premium stuff is made by animals? Leather, fur, wool, silk, cream, steak, caviar ... I'm surprised there isn't a chocolate beetle).

That lake in the shot is amazing, before there are any skate marks or ice-testing holes on it. Often as we fly over lakes in late fall we're trying to gauge whether they are frozen or not. You see a little bit of white at the edge of the lake and it's difficult to tell if it's ice just beginning to form, or if it's a little bit of snow on the edge of a completely frozen lake. I'm glad it's never been my job to determine if one is safe to land on. Speaking of safety, before you criticize the flight safety involved in a helicopter playing hockey, see the behind-the-scenes planning from this blog entry.

Summer is Over

It's still sunny some places. I still have my cap on for shade not warmth when I step out of the airplane on the ramp, but the mornings are starting to get cold. I ran my finger through the morning dew on the wing yesterday morning, to make sure the sheen was not ice. They can look exactly the same, but only one flows harmlessly off the wing without dangerously affecting its aerodynamics. The sky is starting to pink up when we land about suppertime and it's still dark when we get up for flight planning. Winter is just around the corner.

Last week I scared my fellow crewmember on approach. It was a VFR arrival, already cleared straight in, but straight from where I was cleared would have been either through a hill or dive-bombing over it, so I was coming around the side of the hill, so as to enter the zone on final. I could see a structure on the hill, something standing out from the green trees. Towers tend to be on the ridge at the top, but this was on the side of the slope. Was it a banner? A piece of heavy equipment? An old wreck? As I got closer I realized what it was, "Whoa!" I said, in surprise: not something you want to hear your pilot say all of a sudden. I apologized. The thing that had caught my attention was a tree, an ordinary deciduous tree, bright yellow in fall leaves. We weren't even that far north,. Ten days later and a couple of degrees of latitude further north the deciduous trees are yellow and orange everywhere I look. In a week or two they will be bare.

Comes the seasons of block heaters, engine tents, toques and boots. This morning already I wore work gloves during the walk around, and not just because I was wiping hydraulic fluid seepage off the left main. (Maintenance knows about it. Replacement seal on order.) Someone asked me once which I preferred: winter or summer flying. Sure there's density altitude, sweltering taxiway queues, bugs to clean off the windshield, bugs eating you alive, and sunburn on the ramp, but does anyone not accept those things gladly to escape icy runways, frozen water bottles, de-icing, scraping snow out of the hangar door tracks and frozen condensation making things not work everywhere?

Hazard Mitigation

I hear cursing from the operations manager's office and go to investigate. A new client requires all their contractors to submit worker safety hazard mitigation plans for hazards that could exist on the job. We're all for safety. We've had serious discussions on how to mitigate the risk of slip and fall due to water spilled from the water cooler. (Confession: the spilling is usually my fault. I always put too much water in my water bottle and then displace some when I put the cap on). So taken individually, the hazards and need to mitigate them seem reasonable, but when I see the laundry list of hazards our mitigation document requires I can understand how this has caused temporary insanity in the ops manager.

Bears. How will we mitigate the hazard to workers caused by bears? We will not open the doors of the aircraft if there are bears observed in the vicinity. We will not carry uncaged bears on the aircraft. We will not stay at hotels infested with bears. We can't carry bear spray because in an unpressurized but none the less reasonably closed and confined space, the risk of spraying ourselves far exceeds the possible benefits.

Heat/cold stress: How will we mitigate such hazards? We will wear appropriate clothing. We will use the heater and air cooling vents as appropriate. We will drink water and eat food. We will use the sweat glands and shiver reflex that biology has provided us with.

Dehydration: We will mitigate the hazard of dehydration by making potable drinking water available to all crew members at their stations, and drinking it.

Weather fluctuation: We will mitigate the hazards of weather fluctuation by following the basic instructions we learned from our mothers or other caregivers around the time we learned to dress ourselves and walk to the park to play. We will wear appropriate clothing, monitor changing conditions and choose alternate routing or end the mission if the weather proves challenging.

Solar radiation: We will wear sunscreen. And hats. And really cool aviator sunglasses.

Try it. Try to explain with a straight face how you will mitigate the hazard of slipping and falling while boarding an aircraft, and then go on to explain how you will mitigate the hazards of bee stings, fallen trees, earthquakes, traffic accidents, stabbing oneself with the pointy end of a pencil, and encounters with a man wielding a mango. You can do a few, but after a while you end in profanity, sarcasm or wondering sadly about the fate of humanity when workers need a written policy to know when to come in from the rain.

In Concert with the Season

It's warm on the ground, but we're headed back to the flight levels today so the operator has cleaned out the local Canadian Tire of chemical hand and foot warmers. I've also noticed that just having a clipboard on my lap made a difference to warmth, so we have taken a sleeping bag out of the survival kit to use as a sleigh robe. I think the American for that is car blanket, but I like the imagery of sitting behind trotting horses on a frosty morning.

There's no delay on our clearance or departure and we're soon in climb direct the project area entry point. Through ten thousand feet, checklist item: oxygen on. Through 18,000', checklist item, altimeter set to 29.92. Level off and go to work. At first it's warm because it takes a little while for the warm air we've carried aloft to be replaced and/or cooled by the subzero air around us, but inevitably it happens. "I'm ready for those footwarmers now," I say, and then I untie one shoelace and fly with my sock foot for a bit. Cold. There's a bit of shuffling and swearing from the back as the operator realizes he has disconnected his oxygen while searching for the Canadian Tire bag. He takes a few deep breaths, regains his equilibrium and then passes the first footwarmer up. "It's already broken and mixed?" I ask. He says yep, it should be starting to work now. It doesn't feel warm yet, but I put it in the toe of my shoe and put my shoe back on, then repeat for the other side. Not warm.

That's what you get for buying handwarmers in the summer. These things work because of an exothermic reaction between two different chemicals. Old stock. The barrier must have broken down over the last year and the chemical reaction was spent to no one's benefit. I squish my toes a bit and ask him again if he's sure he mixed them or shook them or whatever. He says the instructions just say to take it out of the package to make it work. It is at this moment that I realize there must be two varieties of chemical handwarmers. The kind that heat when two sealed chemicals mix, and the kind we have, that react exothermically with ambient oxygen. Pro tip: if there isn't enough oxygen for a human to breathe, then oxygen-activated footwarmers aren't going to work either.

We descend out of the flight levels to do some low level work. I filed this flight plan as a "Y": IFR then VFR, but I still have to say the words "cancelling IFR" to make the transition. Now that I don't need them, the footwarmers warm up. The low level work has the fuel low level light flashing before we land, but my calculations after we fuel show that we landed with 30 minutes in the tank.

The FBO guy carries my bag for me. "You don't have to do that!" I protest. "There's lots of things in life you don't have to do," he says. The hotel is nearby and Gene Simmons' bus is parked outside. So at Slave Lake we got everyone from Nazareth to Susan Aglukark to Dwight Yoakam and here we get Kiss. Northern concert tours are the best. Enough people come from surrounding communities that the size of the audience can exceed the population of the town.

In the restaurant I ask the server what the veggie burger is like. She says "I don't know, I'm not a ..." then midsentence realizes that non-vegetarians can eat vegetarian items and ammends it to, "I've never had it." She's confused when I want to know if she knows anything about it.

"If you had a "meat burger" on your menu customers would ask you what kind of meat it was. What kind of vegetable is this? Rice? Beans?" She doesn't know but I order it anyway and five minutes later I hear another customer asking the same question. She does come over to find out what it's like, so the next customer will be able to get an answer. Dessert is Turtle cheesecake. No question there.

Next day's work is two projects in one in the city of Edmonton. I'll have to send the controllers a map so I can negotiate for each line, but neither map is any good. The maps are different scales, don't cover exactly the same area, have the rong landmarks on them and are completely unfaxable. I redraw it on a separate piece of paper, showing only the river, the major roads and the reporting points the controllers will know. I'm interrupted once by a fire alarm, but get it all done in time to meet the operator for a bedtime snack. We had dinner pretty early so we're having a snack now to tide us over to the morning. I show him my map and explain that I have renumbered the lines for the second project so that we don't have to say "line one on the second map" just "line twenty-one." He approves and he raves about my map. I'm proud of it myself.

ForeFlight versus Nav Canada

A company called ForeFlight has released data for their iPad app that covers IFR procedures in Canada. It includes all volumes of the Canada Air Pilot (approach and departures plates, plus taxiway diagrams) and the IFR high and low enroute charts, and is legal for inflight IFR use. It's not clear whether the database includes the terminal charts, but it kind of has to because the information density around the big cities isn't sufficient in the regular LO charts. It doesn't seem to include the CFS data, but I can't think of information you need for safe IFR navigation that is in the CFS but not the CAP. We'll also have to wait for VFR chart data. Nav Canada is not forthcoming with its data.

There is Transport Canada guidance document and an FAA equivalent governing Electronic Flight Bags, as these systems are called. Page ten of the US version explains how the paper documents can be completely phased out once the system is verified reliable in a given operation, and wording in the Canadian version implies that it allows for completely paperless applications as well.

This isn't something astonishingly new, and I'm sure lots of you are already using such products. What caught my attention today was the price. As far as I can tell, you download the core of the app for free and then pay to add a subscription to the data you need. A ForeFlight Canada subscription costs US $149.99 for a year. For comparison, a subscription to all the editions of the CAP and the high and low charts costs $441 a year, plus taxes. If you only fly in only two regions of Canada, an annual mailed subscription of paper charts will cost you $142, so if you already have an iPad, that's the same cost for paper or electronic. The iPad is probably also about the same weight and the same difficulty to stuff in your flight bag as one LO and one region of the CAP.

Advantages of paper documents over the iPad are that they are unattractive to thieves, still work after they have been dropped or slammed in the trunk door of a cab, will probably dry out to a usable state if you get drenched by rain, are better for starting a fire in an emergency situation, you can write clearances on them, you can unfold them all over the hotel bed to have a wide-screen view of your proposed trip, and the batteries cannot run out. Also they make good auxiliary sunvisors, if you don't have a newspaper.

The iPad wins on staying the same size even if you are flying in all seven regions of Canada, being self-illuminated, allowing scrolling without having to flip the map over, letting you zoom the scale in or out and it probably has a search function. I don't know if you can mark it up with virtual post-its, but you can play Plants versus Zombies on it and check your e-mail while waiting for maintenance to release the aircraft.

What's it like flying with one of these? Does it have a function to do your cold weather corrections automatically or is there a way to mark up a plate after you get the latest METAR, to show all the cold weather corrections and the time to go on a non-precision approach? An iPad seems kind of bulky to mount on the yoke. Where do you put it? How far did you get on Plants versus Zombies?

Cold

There seems to be a rule that the amount of time you are forced to stay in a place is inversely proportional to the quality of the hotel, and it rained hard overnight, so I was dreading this morning's weather, but the day dawns flyable. With the authority my company notifies us is newly vested in me, I file an IFR photo flight plan by faxing it into the appropriate number. I call Edmonton IFR data back to make sure the plan went through and everything is filed according to their standards. I am planning a VFR departure, and don't anticipate being able to make radio contact on the ground, so I ask them what frequency I should contact them on airborne. The specialist says, "Just do what you normally do."

"I've never been here in my life. There is no normal." I can look up a frequency and use that, but when I do that it's rarely the frequency they actually want me on, so why not give it to me on the phone now and spare some space on the radios. No one seems to know what to do with an aircraft that is going to pop up here wanting IFR. They had better get on that if they want the UFOs to feel welcome around here. Not everyone has intimate local knowledge.

There are puddles on the apron and the operator doesn't want anything splashed on the camera, so we drag the airplane over to the taxiway and do the run-up there. There's no one around to block. Run-up complete, I taxi out, take off, and when I'm clear of the aerodrome area I call ATC on the frequency I did finally manage to talk them out of. They give me clearance up to 16,000', and I have a ways to go, so I make it a leisurely cruise climb, cowl flaps a little bit open, and a medium power setting. As we approach the photo area they clear me higher until we're cleared all the way to our working altitude: "flight level 190 blocking 210" which means that instead of being assigned one altitude which we have to maintain, like everyone else, we have been given a block of altitudes, everything between 19,000' and 21,000' (as indicated with the altimeter set to 29.92"). This gives us freedom to fly at an altitude like 19,100' on one line and 20,300' on the next. Its cool. Actually, it's cold. The OAT is around -23C, and with each passing hour the inside of the airplane gets colder.

I'm wearing a t-shirt, work pants, a hooded sweatshirt, a winter coat, leather gloves and a baseball cap, plus of course my twelve hundred dollar electric earmuffs. My ears aren't cold. I just have running shoes on, because luggage space is limited so I just brought one pair of shoes for both working out and working. My toes are cold. My toes are probably the coldest part. I'm sitting pretty still, just thumbs and forefingers on the yoke, making the slight movements necessary to maintain my course from dot to dot.

I'm level just under FL210. The extra few hundred feet has dropped the outside air temperature to -27C. The air traffic controller asks me if I'm planning on making any turns soon. I can't read the tiny print at the edge of the poorly designed screen telling me the distance remaining on my line , but the operator is practiced at feeding me the answer to such questions. He answers and I relay the answer to ATC. "Next turn in eighteen miles." The controller tells me I may see a Bombardier jet passing. I don't, because I see almost nothing but my dots, but a few moments later there's a call from a Jazz pilot.

"Edmonton, what was that we just passed?"

The controller tells him. There's a pause, just long enough for two guys in the front of a jet to look at each other incredulously and laugh.

"What's it doing up here?" asks the Jazz pilot.

"Taking pictures," says the controller matter-of-factly. The effect on the Jazz pilots of seeing us up here must be like passing a kid on a Big Wheel tricycle on the Autobahn.

Laughing at that keeps us warm for a while. The last few lines we have to fly take us towards an area of cloud. It's more difficult to judge distance to cloud up here, I find. I guess the cues I've learned subconsciously are different, or perhaps it's because I'm so far from the ground that I can't judge them well. I thought there was no way we would get a couple of them, but the operator tells me to keep flying, and we finish both lines before reaching cloud. The next one is over cloud, though, and cloud is encroaching everywhere else, so I request descent for landing.

I bank away from the cloud and with my clearance reduce the power an inch and trim nose down for a good rate of descent. The operator reports fuel coming out of the left outboard tank. There's not all that much fuel left onboard the airplane at this point, so no reason for it to be coming out an overflow. I checked all the caps and they were all secure, with no fuel slopped in the area between the sealed cap and the streamlining flap, but I hypothesize thinks about air pressure changes burping some fuel out of a cap vent early in the flight and now that I'm banking the fuel between the cap and flap is leaking out. He says it's more than that, that he can see it as clearly blue and spraying behind us off the trailing edge of the wing. I can't see it. There's really nothing I can do about it now anyway. I continue my descent through 12,500'. Centre hands me off to the FSS and I cancel IFR with them, then continue my descent, shuttling above the aerodrome. I feel like a student pilot who doesn't do the math properly to plan a cruise descent, but at my altitude I was too close to the aerodrome to land without circling overhead, even at the highest safe descent rate.

I'm passing what would be close to procedure turn altitude when suddenly all the cockpit instruments fog over. The cold-soaked airplane has descended into warm moist air and the moisture condenses on the instrument faces like the 'sweat' you see on a cold beer on a hot day. That is something to remember should I ever be descending in IMC in such conditions. How is this not commonly a safety hazard? I guess non-pressurized aircraft rarely descend from ambient temperatures of -27 to +5 in under ten minutes, and I wouldn't have been rocking the 2000 fpm descent rate in IMC. I look out the window and land the airplane.

On the ground we shut down at the fuel pumps and I extricate myself from my headset, breathing tube, seatbelt, clipboard and yoke, then climb out of the airplane. I do a little "my toes are cold!" dance to warm them up again and tiptoe out to that outboard tank. The outer flap is secure. It's dry underneath, and the inner plug is absolutely secure, perhaps tighter than necessary. There is no damage anywhere to the wing, tank vent or any visible confirmation that fuel was streaming out. I record the exact quantity of fuel taken on board for each tank as it is fuelled and discover a 2L discrepancy between sides, with the leaking side taking less fuel, meaning it was slightly fuller to begin with. Over five hours a couple of liters difference is negligible anyway. Shrug. I'll keep an eye on it. Another theory is that the rubber seal shrank in the cold and fuel leaked into the inter cap area that way. The airplane's published service ceiling is 30,000', so you'd think it could handle summer temperatures at 21,000'. Hmm. I haven't come across a minimum operating temperature. There's a project for me, that will take precedence over writing more on this blog entry.

My feet are warm now.

The Debrief

We both cab back out to the airport for the seven a.m. appointment. I know that it will start with my own assessment and I know the greatest weaknesses of my performance. Knowing one's weaknesses is more important than not having any. I've written down a list. It starts with "I'm sorry about the paperwork problems ..."

I don't get much further than that for a while. She practically explodes. She says she still doesn't have my training records. I'm very surprised. I had understood that my chief pilot e-mailed them right away. The conversation continues, and she points me at a computer in the other room, telling me that if they were e-mailed here then I should get them for her. It finally dawns on me that the examiner, who made that GPS unit do things I still haven't figured out how to do, doesn't do e-mail. I get the camera operator to print the things off for her and I continue with my biggest weakness: not using the GPS to its full advantage for situational awareness. I didn't because it was not for IFR use and I didn't want to get in trouble for relying on an instrument that wasn't certified. But I could tell from the way she brought things up on the GPS that she was demonstrating to me how I should be using it and wasn't. And I would like to be better at using it. Maybe I should spend more time with it and less with e-mail.

She lectures me for a bit on that, a little too intensely for me to ask where the boundary is between situational awareness and reliance on an uncertified tool. When that subsides I venture that I knew my systems well, but was confused by some of the general knowledge questions because I was trying to answer with CARs numbers instead of personal judgement. And that's when the worst of it came. The operator, returning with printouts of my training later tells me that he came that close to intervening and just stopping the whole procedure. He called the chief pilot to say I was catching hell in there, but the chief pilot knows that I've been through a few of these and can keep my cool. I'm being specifically chewed out for not being familiar with the section in my operations manual that deals with company takeoff minima. I have read manuals for three different companies in the last few months, and I'm pretty close to certain that the one for Eagle makes no mention of take off minima. I just nod and say yes, I should know that stuff.

She moves on to my not knowing what 'not assessed' means, and has me turn to the appropriate part in the CAP GEN. It says "IFR departures have not been assessed for obstacles. Pilots-in-command are responsible for determining minimum climb gradients and/or routings for obstacle and terrain avoidance during an IMC departure from that particular runway(s)." I said that it means the pilot is responsible for determining a safe departure route. I'm seriously being told I'm incompetent because I didn't say "Not assessed means that the runway environment hasn't been assessed for obstacles"? Really? That's not what it means it's what it says. Is that how dumb people are? Are there people out there smart enough to be flying airplanes but so dumb that they need to look in the help to know that the "File Save" command "Saves a File" while the "File Delete" command "Deletes a File." She says she could tell I didn't know the answer, so she didn't ask me any more questions on that because she didn't want to get me upset. There's no way for me to say now "I know not assessed means not assessed, what else could it mean?" and "I practically quoted the rest of the section, isn't it obvious I knew what it meant?" I just resolve, as I do after every single interview and flight test, to remember to state the obvious. Even the firetrucking obvious. She also says that re-land capability is required for all commercial IFR operations. That I didn't know, so I'll take that hit, although I haven't been able to find it in the CARs.

I catch flack for what I knew I hadn't done, not having the single-engine climb performance, accelerate stop distance, and the like precalculated for the conditions. I deserved that. I can't quite make myself believe I should do it for every take-off, more that I should know the conditions under which it might be a factor in decision making and calculate it then. But that's what a flight test is an artificial demonstration of. There's no excuse. Maybe I'll create an operational flight plan and do it every day, my legacy to the next poor pilot to have to fill in this OFP. Don't you hate forms that demand unnecessary calculations?

On to the part in the airplane. I didn't brief the emergencies and departure. "I have been told in the past not to do that on a single=pilot ride," I explain truthfully.

"That's probably because you talk too much." Ha! She is exactly right. I talk too much. She wants me to brief them aloud, and then shut up. I'll try that next time.

More nits. She says I didn't check my instruments on the taxi. "I did that one. Probably not the same place most students do, but I know I said it aloud." She believes me. I didn't, however, double check my altimeter with the published runway threshold elevation, double check my watch with ATC or the GPS, make notations on my flight log during the flight, perform a true air speed check, groundspeed, or a revised ETA calculation. I didn't draw my hold on the map. (I've never done that. People do that?) I forgot a lot more things, enough to make me wonder how I remember to breathe on a regular enough basis to remain alive, and how I keep passing these things.

She gives me a bit of heat too for letting a company push me into doing a ride under difficult circumstances and I don't point out that she could use exactly the same advice. The really odd bit is that at the end she tells me it wasn't bad, all things considered. And she offers me a job. It's more or less the same job as I have. I guess everyone needs cheap, flexible survey pilots, but I keep the contact information under consideration.

The operator pays her fee and I go out to the airplane. When he comes behind me I ask, "do they have antelopes here?" I just saw either the smallest antelope or the biggest rabbit I have ever seen. It ran off the taxiway and through a gap in the fence. I'm going to guess it was a rabbit. I bet it chases dogs for sport.

After discussion with the clients we decide not to fly today. We'll just hang out and wait until the next weather opportunity. We find someone who can look at the heater and he tells us to start it up on the ground, but it doesn't even start. He pulls out the igniter, bangs it on the ground a couple of times and and then replaces it. The heater fires up on the next try. I wave my hand in the exhaust to see if it's warming up and it is, but apparently the exhaust should be so hot I could't put my hand in it. The next theory is plugged nozzles, but the entire heater is so old that company says we'll just order a new one. Which takes a month. We call all over the province of Alberta to see if someone has one sitting on a shelf, but the best we can do is an express order that should get us one in a week. I guess we'll be cold for a week.

Meanwhile the operator asks me, "So are we allowed to fly above 18,000' now?" We iPhone the new signature in my licence booklet to company and then we get the thumbs up from Transport Canada that we are.

Mountain Valleys

The next morning's weather actually is better, it wasn't just a procrastination technique on my part. I let the operator know I'm willing to do the flight. The weather at Vancouver is still marginal, but the altitudes I need through the Rockies should be ice-free, so I file an IFR flight plan for the trip. I may be able to do it VFR, depending on when the operator actually chooses to go, but I'd like a chance to fly this airplane IFR before the ride. I also get his okay on doing the approach to destination (in visual weather) with the power to one engine pulled back, so I can see what this airplane flies like on one engine.

We go to the airport, but now the operator doesn't want to leave yet. I unpack various cleaning supplies from the nose and use the leather cleaner to try and make the seats look nicer. They aren't disgusting, just a little grimy, but like all cleaners, the product isn't magical and while my effort makes the rags noticeably dirtier, it doesn't make the seats seem a lot cleaner. This is an airport where people have security badges like crazy, and I don't have one. I go on the airport website to try and find a ramp badge policy, but there doesn't seem to be one. I know I could get in trouble if I'm standing about poking at an airplane with no badge, if I'm supposed to have one. But I can't tell if I am. I call security to ask about the south side badging policy. The guy puts me on hold twice. I get the idea it's his first day. Or maybe he's the team enforcer. He seems to be telling me that it's the responsibility of whoever's hangar we're working out of. That would be the maintenance unit that looked into the EGT overtemp situation, but they aren't escorting me. They said my pilot licence would do the trick. I try to get security guy to confirm that my pilot licence is sufficient ID for a ramp check here, but he defers to my employer. Well of course THEY say I can be here. How does he know I don't work for a radical BC Separatist organization that wants to bomb the local legislature? I ask if it's possible to get a temporary badge, but apparently it would take a couple of weeks just to get an interview to apply for any sort of badge. Funny that. A friend who works at Air Canada said that the non-union temp workers they brought in to cover during the strike all seemed to get badges overnight.

I get an e-mail with an examiner's name and instructions to call and arrange the ride directly. I leave voice mail with my own e-mail and phone number and the fact that I am on the road, but am hoping to be there to do a ride on Tuesday. My guess for when we are leaving is about to expire, so I call back to flight services to change my filed departure time, just guessing a new one, I can change it again later. While I am waiting to be told to I sit down to study the aircraft operating handbook and the CAP GEN for my mysteriously situated PPC ride. I think I know most of it. I was well-prepared last time, but I'll never forget the ride I was underprepared for. It was a similar situation, "I did a ride recently. I know this stuff," but I didn't. So I study again.

When the operator is ready to go, I discover the weather is pretty good now, and also good on the webcams through the mountains. He only wants to get across the first mountain range tonight, to be sure we won't be trapped in Vancouver by coastal weather. I call Flight Services to file a VFR flight plan (can probably do the whole trip around 9,500' and get out of here more efficiently) to possibly replace the IFR flight one (at 15,000'). For some reason this is a big deal for them. It turns out that I've called on the day that some kind of changeover is happening, so they could have done it easily yesterday and will be able to do it effortlessly tomorrow, but today it's an issue. They can't have two flight plans in the system at once for the same airplane. I suggest that they put the VFR one with a proposed departure after the ETA of the IFR one and then I can change it just before departure if I go VFR, but that doesn't work for them. I can't remember how we resolved that, possibly by departing IFR and then taking advantage of the phenomenally poor tower-terminal relationship to cancel in the air. Or the ground controller was surprisingly accommodating and helped me have the best of both worlds. There's a massive banner on the control tower, cheering on the Vancouver Canucks hockey team.

I was originally planning to fly eastbound along the Fraser River to Hope and up the highway, but once airborne, I see that the more northerly route looks better initially, and that ties in with the worst of the weather being to the south, too. I request an altitude that will take me through the passes up the valley overhead Whistler Mountain, where the 2010 Winter Olympics were. I'd show you pictures, but did I tell you? My camera is sort of broken. In some sort of cosmic joke, while I fly a giant camera around, the one in my flight bag doesn't work. It still thinks it is taking pictures, but all the resulting saved images are just pure black rectangles. I hope maybe there's just a broken spring (do cameras even have springs anymore?) somewhere and that the shutter isn't opening properly. I'll try to get it repaired, and in the meantime I may be able to borrow one.

I plug a few coordinates in on the GPS and set it in terrain mode, but mostly this kind of flying is about looking out the window and making sure the valleys in real life match the valleys on the VFR chart. There are clouds above, but not in sufficient numbers to hamper my turning around if some low ones block the valley, and I don't think they will. Their bases get higher as I go up the valley. I do reach one wall of cloud. It's a cumulus build-up along a ridge that I thought I could hop over by going visually between peaks. There are too many clouds to do that, so I turn south along the valley the ridge defines, to climb in order to turn back and go over them. Normally outclimbing a bank of Cu is a poor proposition, because there tend to be higher and higher ones beyond. This I'm pretty sure is just at this ridge, with a lower plateau without the buildups beyond it. I'm right, but as we climb over it, there's a kind of a slapping sound, like a loose strap or a hatch come open. Maybe it's the new headset. Wouldn't that be rich, buy a new headset and have it be defective.

There's that noise again. Maybe it's a cable slap. The ailerons make some odd noises as a result of rerouting for the camera port in the belly. That's a little freaky, but it's all STCed and frequently inspected. The sound stops. I ask the operator if he heard it, and he did. I pull my headset plugs out to see if he still hears it. There's a long pause, but it happens again without my headset in the system. And then it's quiet. Maybe the ANR screwed up the intercom. I've been blamed for intercom problems before, back when I was an early adopter of ANR technology and everyone else with passive DC units would blame problems on freaky electronic headset girl. But the operator still hears the noise when he unplugs from the intercom.

Some minutes later I hear it again, variously a banging, slapping, popping sound. I have to adjust the trim as the operator wanders around trying to pinpoint the source. It seems more on the left than the right, sometimes further forward, sometimes further back. There is no yawing or fluctuating engine indication. We keep thinking it's stopped, then it starts again. The operator suggests turning off the heater, and I try that. It doesn't happen for a long time ... then it continues to not happen for a further long time. It seems to have stopped. Not good. The heater burns fuel. We hate to think what it's doing when it malfunctions.

We continue without further incident over the plateau and then dip down over the lake to land at Salmon Arm, the same place in the BC mountains where I surveyed last summer. I make a call on the traffic frequency and there's a small airplane up. He tells me the wind is calm. I cross over the town and join downwind, the narrow valley clearly showing why the CFS recommends using this airport at night unless you are very familiar with the area, and all the hazard beacons are operating. I land close over the trees and the golf course and roll out to the exit. There's a guy in a little airplane in the run up area. I wave and taxi in for fuel, which according to the CFS is available for another thirty minutes.

We park at the pumps and call all the numbers listed for fuel, with no reply. I walk over to the hangar where the pilot has parked and ask him when the fuel is open until. He agrees that it should still be open this time of year and says the guy was around recently. He gives me another number, and I call that. It's now about seven minutes to the time the CFS says fuel closes. The fueller doesn't want to come out now, so he agrees to come in a bit early the next morning to get us going on time.

Meanwhile, it's obvious the heater was the problem. There's a stream of soot down the belly of the airplane. I wipe off what I can and put "soot remover" on my shopping list. The pilot is done in his hangar and gives us a ride into town where we get a hotel and a quick meal. The waitress is intrigued by our "detailed maps" as we pore over the next day's flying, and she is very helpful in packing "to-go" meals for tomorrow's lunch. The time we have to leave in the morning is the same time breakfast starts at the hotel, but we can probably grab muffins and fruit to go as the cab arrives.

Heating Elements: Making Coffee, Shedding Ice

You know you've been reading too many airplane manuals when you can't turn on the coffee maker without thinking, "horizontally-mounted unlabelled three-position rocker switch spring loaded to the centre position, with an adjacent amber indicator light illuminating when the heat cycle has been activated by momentary left pressure on the rocker switch," and then wondering about the circuitry of the heating cycle and of the timer that deactivates it if you walk away and leave it on.

The Screaming Whippet has electrical heating elements, but not for making coffee. Both left and right pitot tubes are electrically heated, from their respective DC power buses, and there is a switchable loadmeter in the cockpit for checking their operation. The pitot heats are operated by a vertically mounted three-position rocker switch, but the upper, pitot heat position is rarely used, in favour of the lower position which heats both the stall indication vane and the pitot tubes. The windshields are also electrically heated, through the largest (60A & 50A) circuit breakers on the airplane, via the left and right essential DC buses. With windshield heat selected to LOW, the panes in front of both the pilot and the copilot are heated together, with single thermostat, such that if the sun is to one side or the other of the airplane and one windshield reaches the 90-100 degree Fahrenheit temperature, it will cycle off despite the other one not being hot yet. With the windshield heat switch set to HIGH the windshields cycle separately, with twice as much power as before going to the captain's side. I'll have to check, but I think the FO may not get any more heat on HIGH.

Let's see, what else is electrically heated? The propellers are. On the leading edge of each blade there is a little grid of wires, kind of like the ones on your car's rear window defogger, except that these are under a rubber cover. There is an inner and outer element, although it looks like just one. And there's a really really long skinny cord so that it can wrap round and round and round the propeller without coming unplugged. No, I'm kidding about that. It's tricky to have an electrical cord on a propeller. There is instead a slip ring assembly with a brush block so that electrical contact can be made without a hardwired connection as the propeller goes round and round about two thousand times a minute. Each propeller heating element draws power through a 25A CB on its same-side 28V essential DC bus. The system operates on a timer, switching on all inner and then all outer elements on either propeller, and it's not crystal clear from the description whether that means a four stage cycle with only one propeller at a time or a two stage cycle with the inner for both props together and then the outer for both props. There's an ammeter that shows the current being supplied to the prop anti-ice; the manual says it should be about 14-18 A per propeller, which suggests to me that they are both on at once. You can switch the ammeter back and forth to show the left propeller or right propeller draw. But then it also says there is a separate timer for each propeller, so I'm not quite sure. When you turn it on, heating starts wherever it left off last, not at any predetermined position.

Propeller heat is on the same switch as nacelle inlet anti-ice, but in the case of a failure of one essential DC bus, only the inlet anti-ice can be switched to the other. Power can not be supplied to the propeller elements on the side with the failure.

I didn't mentioned the inlet anti-ice before the above paragraph, because it doesn't include an electrically heated element, but seeing as it's on the same switch as the propeller heat, I'll put it here. Inlet anti-ice refers to the engine inlet, the part at the front of the engine where air comes in to make the engine work. It is important that this area not become clogged with snow or ice. Instead of using electricity to heat this area, really hot air is blasted into it. This works well and being that the engine inlet is really close to the engine, it has a ready supply of really hot air. It's not exhaust: that's too hot and is at the other end of the engine. (A number of readers will now being going clue! because believe it or not "the exhaust comes out the back of the engine" is not a universal truth with airplanes). This is bleed air that has been heated by compression in the front part of the engine.

I will now quote some facts about the engine intake air from the training manual. Keep in mind this is a training manual, a collection of useful information felt essential for new pilots to learn before flying this airplane. It is not a maintenance and repair manual or a set of blueprints. The first paragraph of the description tells me that bleed air is obtained for this purpose from two different ports, one being "the main anti-icing bleed port" and the other the "cabin pressurization bleed port." It doesn't tell me the relative location of these ports in the engine or how the two sources are different, so I'm not sure why I should care, but in the second paragraph they want to be sure that I know that "the flow from the main anti-icing bleed port runs through an anti-ice valve to a tee: the tee has an orifice of 0.234 inch diameter." Sadly, I will now remember this, and possibly I will also remember that "the line supplying the left-hand side of the distribution duct has a 0.204 inch diameter orifice." Why? Why am I burdened with this information? I understand that the brain does not actually fill up with facts, so that having this one thrust upon me does not decrease the likelihood of my remembering the essential items to complete in case of an engine fire (stop it, close the firewall fuel shutoff, close the hydraulic shutoff, discharge the fire bottle), but still, it's distracting.

Manual-provided information of which I do approve includes more about the switches and annunciator lights. The switches (one for each side) each have three positions: ON, OFF and TEST. In the ON position, the electrically operated valve that allows bleed air to flow through those very specifically sized orifices to do its deicing job is commanded to open, and if the circuitry can verify that the valve did indeed open, the appropriate INTAKE HEAT ON annunciator is illuminated. In the OFF position, the valve should close. Assigning bleed air to this task comes at a cost: a drop in engine torque and a rise in exhaust gas temperature. That is to be expected because the compressed air would otherwise have been used to cool and contain the combustion area and to drive the power turbines. Because of the performance hit we would take if the valves did not motor to the off position when so commanded, electrical power to those valves can be taken from either essential DC bus. There is also a means of verifying that they actually did close: when the switch is depressed to the test position, if the circuitry can verify that the valve is closed, the INTAKE HEAT ON annunciator illuminates. That's kind of backwards, but pretty clever, really. And far more interesting than the diameter of the bleed air orifices. Hey, I just figured out why they included the diameter of the bleed air orifices in the manual. It's to ensure that the test function of the inlet anti-icing valves could be far more interesting than something.

There are more anti-icing measures on the Screaming Whippet, but there are several more anti-icing systems on the airplane, most of which have an electrical component, but I'll put them in a different post, because this one is mainly about heating elements.

Also I've been reading over the details of the job offer. I think this is a real job. Like I get paid extra for working on statutory holidays. Just to keep the Canadian content up, I'll tell you what they are: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving Day, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. It seems that for International Ice Cream for Breakfast Day (first Saturday in February) I'll be on my own.

No Stalling

No, I'm not slacking off or stalling by blogging. Telling other people how a system works is one of my favourite ways of integrating knowledge. And stall protection is an important system on this airplane. Aviation people know what a "stall" is and non-aviation people can probably follow this if I say merely that a stall is a loss of aerodynamic lift experienced when an airplane is not getting the right airflow over its wings, typically a result of going too slowly. Its only relation to the locomotion problem of the same name experienced in an automobile (say if there's a problem with the engine or if the driver is out of practice operating a manual transmission) is that the vehicle in question stops going forward. This is especially bad in an airplane because then it goes down. This is a gross simplification to get to the topic. For more information on the physics of the stall, see your local aerodynamics textbook or the comment pedants below. If you are bored or baffled by the technical aircraft information in this and the following posts, recall that the other option would be no posts at all while I am busy.

The Screaming Whippet has a multistage stall prevention system. Indications to the pilot of the possibility of a stall include an angle of attack indicator with coloured sectors (green for cruise, white for approach, yellow for slow, black and red striped for the warning area and red for stall), an audible stall horn, a stick pusher, and a plethora of annunciator lights for the various states of the system.

The system gets its inputs from an angle of attack vane (which may be either a paddle that is pivoted so that it is free to align with the airflow against the side of the left forward fuselage or a motoring pitot tube-like arrangement on the outboard right wing leading edge), a flap position transmitter (the same speed may be safe or not, depending on flap position), an airspeed limit switch in the copilot's pitot system, a squat switch inboard on the left main gear (it is not a danger to be going slowly while on the ground), and a test circuit. The first three inputs go to a computer which uses them to calculate the ratio of V/Vs (current speed to stall speed) and output it to the pointer on the AoA indicator. At approximately 1.1 Vs, or 5-10 kts above stall, a warning horn will sound. At stall speed (from 1 knot below to 4 knots above) a stick pusher will apply 60 lbs of forward force to the control column, commanding the airplane into a nose-down attitude, the first step in stall recovery.

The motive force for the stick pusher comes from a loud servo motor (everything on the Whippet screams) for which there is a slip clutch, so that it can be overpowered by the pilot if need be, and a magnetic clutch to enable it to give a varying amount of pulling force. It's attached to the elevator actuator beam, which is linked directly to the yoke my cables. Its engagement serves to both jolt the nose down and jolt the pilot out of whatever stupidity caused her to almost stall the aircraft. The servo is not powered unless the squat switch indicates that there is no weight on the wheels, the airspeed limit switch indicates that the airspeed is below 140 (+/-5) kts, and the emergency override switch has not been set to disengage the clutch. So if the airplane is flying, but below 140 kts, that switch should be on and an annunciator light should indicate that the system is armed.

If something is not working, the system tells me about that too. The warning light flashes if the servo has stopped or the clutch is disengaged, and comes on steady if the computer fails. (It's steady if the servo and/or clutch has failed as well as the computer).

The system must be tested before flight, so there is a test function. It consists of a three position switch, spring-loaded to the centre off position. The other tow positions connects the servo to power and respectively give the computer stall and cruise inputs. The indicator, warning horn and stick pusher should all respond as at a stall to the first position, and the indicator should show 1.3 Vs, with no horn or pusher at the cruise position. It's important to ensure that the gust lock system is disengaged before testing the stick pusher, and also to hold the control column firmly to prevent the stick pusher from smashing any instruments.

We were told in class that if the test mode was unserviceable, we could still test it on the ground by manually moving the external AoA vane, from the stalled position to the cruise position, while having someone manually depress the squat switch. (I know it sounds odd that a squat switch could be manually bypassed without lifting the airplane, but this is an odd design where lifting the weight off the wheels depresses the switch and placing weight on the wheels unpresses it).

Also, this hotel room is freezing. What is this? Winter in Canada?

And in isn't it supposed to only be in movies that you can escape the passenger cabin through an aircraft toilet?

Gravel Kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Going Nowhere

There's low cloud in the morning, then rain, then snow. And of course that's the point at which the client needs me to run the airplane for another computer upgrade. We go out to the airplane. The engines were run for about ten hours yesterday (yes, my co-worker worked his tail off), so after I pull off the engine tents I check the oil. And indeed it's down a quart each side. I grab a couple of bottles and a funnel out of the nose compartment. The wind is making it really cold out here. And it's ironic that two days ago in 25 degree weather I was running less viscous 15W50 oil, but now that it's minus five or so, before the wind chill, I'm trying to get W100 to run out of the little bottle into the crankcase. As I hold the bottle and wish the oil would hurry up, the wind is driving snow into my face.

After I've added a litre to each engine and removed the engine plugs, there is snow and ice caked on my toque and gloves. I pull them off after I climb on board to start up. I can't run the combustion heater on the ground for extended periods, so I'm running an electric heater plugged into the aircraft AC. It's a perfectly normal socket, like the ones in your wall if you're in the US or Canada, but it only works when the airplane is on the ground plugged into an extension cord. It is, but after forty-five minutes or so (yeah, this upgrade isn't going well) that plug comes out and it starts to cool off in here. Plus after another half hour goes by (did I mention that the upgrade is not going well) I run into another problem: I'm running out of fuel.

My co-worker landed last night with minimum legal fuel, and then ran the aircraft on the ground for an hour, and now I've run it for more than another hour. Fuel consumption is less on the ground than at cruise, but it's not none. And I have to run it higher than idle to meet the power needs. They aren't finished yet, but I have to shut down and refuel. There's another reason why I want to refuel sooner rather than later, and that's that the fuel tanks are due to be refuelled today, and we won't be able to buy fuel during that transfer. The FBO manager is here, so he fuels. I don't really have to, but I stand out in the snow with him as a gesture of solidarity. I also want to be here to see how much goes in each tank. I confirm that they were all almost dry after running that long.

He pushes the plane back into its space and I reconnect the heater for another marathon session of wrestling with the computer. There's a bad smell from the heater, though, so we disconnect it. While we're doing this, a tanker truck arrives to refill the avgas tank. We got ours just in time. It finishes and moves on to the Jet A tank and finally I'm cleared to shut down.

As we're on our way back through the FBO to the parking, the tanker truck driver is billing the FBO. I ask how much fuel went into the avgas tank and it's about a week's worth for us. The manager knows this, so it isn't very difficult to get free hangarage for a couple of days. That saves us from having to worry about the computers freezing.

How To Not Fly in the Mountains

Next morning at breakfast time there are still strong winds. The forecast calls for severe turbulence until noon, and moderate is being reported right now by B737s in Edmonton, plus there's bad weather on the ground at Revelstoke. Golden looks okay. The highest mountain range is between here and Golden, which is only a 45 minute flight, so we plan to make that hop as soon as the turbulence subsides out of the danger zone, and then we'll be right there with one less granite barrier separating us from our destination when the weather clears there.

Out at the airplane, the ramp is a skating rink. We're glad to be parked on the grass, because it makes it easy to walk around the airplane without slipping and falling on the ice. We weren't expecting it to be this cold. We spend the morning cleaning the plane, but it still doesn't look that great because we don't have a power washer and we're getting our hot water one bucket at a time from the terminal. While we are working, we discover that contrary to the forecast, Golden has now gone IFR, so we mooch some power to plug in and tent the engines for another night. The wind makes tenting a two person job, as the covers balloon like parachutes, the usually tightly-fitting fabric still pulling up away from the airplane still finding a way to flap once they are fastened down. Our electricity providers say they get in at seven a.m. tomorrow, so we'll be able to recover our cord (shut under their airside door) for an early departure tomorrow morning. We'll make the trip tomorrow in one shot and save some flight time.

As soon as I make a decision like that I should stop checking the weather, but of course I don't. It starts looking better in the afternoon, and I champ at an imaginary bit, thinking "C'mon c'mon lets go!" Really I have no information on the the weather in the mountains, just at three valley stations along the route. There are also TCUs across the mountains. It's snowing and raining at the destination anyway, and we'll be there early tomorrow, especially considering the time change as we cross the Rockies.

Haven't Done My Sim Yet

Seeing as Sarah busted me yesterday for breaking my New Year's resolution, today's blog post is postponed until I fulfill it. Also my hands are too cold to type properly, because I just got in from a run.

Update: Done now. The post will appear at 00Z tonight on schedule.

Cold and Macho

We meet at 6:30 for breakfast according to our strategy. The rental car can be returned at 7:00, and we've left ourselves a few hours leeway for contingencies so we can still get the airplane put away at destination (that's prearranged) and then get to the terminal and through southern airport security in time for our flights.

My boss texts as I'm gathering up my gear in my room. "Is it going to be too cold to fly?" There's a big bubble of arctic air over half the country. It's -32 here, actually a few degrees colder at destination, but as long as it's forecast to be over -35, we're okay. He doesn't want engines started below that. It takes too long for the oil to reach the moving parts at such low temperatures, and just turning over an engine could damage it.

It's always nice to have a "too cold to work" temperature that allows you to stay in bed, but usually the weather conspires to hover just above that temperature, always freezing your fingers but never allowing them to remain tucked in bed. Still, it's nice to know that it's there. I worked for a company once that had a too-hot-to-wear-a-tie uniform rule. I think the number was in the high 20s. Anything above that on the OAT and you could work in an open collar. Today I'm working in compression socks, two more pairs of heavy socks, leggings, long underwear, work pants, t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, sweater, and I think a sweatshirt over that, then my lined coat -- although not my wonderful parka. I thought we'd be going south before now. Plus a wool toque, a scarf, wool gloves and fleece-lined leather work mittens on top of that.

We unload everything on the apron next to the airplane and then I volunteer to load and secure it while he returns the car. We've done so little work this rotation, that I feel as if I have done less than my share. I had hoped to have everything ready to go when my co-worker returned, what with having to wait for paperwork and a cab and all, but I'm still securing gear when he's back already. The car rental place was all ready for the return and gave him a ride to the airport.

We untarp the airplane together. Everything is in good order, because we've been out shovelling and checking on it. There are a few patches of frozen-on ice where the tarps didn't cover properly, so I use some of the deicing fluid. I have a moment of "oh-no" when I realize that there is some old dilute fluid in the sprayer, but fortunately it hasn't frozen, and I manage to pour it out. Must remember to ... what? Rinse and dry? In the past I've kept deicing equipment in a heated hangar so I haven't encountered the problem of a frozen sprayer. Something to remember if I'm ever doing hot water deicing (works when the temperature is and will stay above freezing) and then stowing the sprayer in the plane. Everything takes more time and space to do in the cold. Anything that has to be folded or coiled actually takes up more space, because they won't bend. And the same goes for your hands. In heavy mitts they don't bend the way you are used to and if you take off the mitts and just work in gloves, pretty soon your fingers still won't bend, at least not without any strength.

My coworker is PIC so he straps into the left seat and I remove the cord from the engine block heater just before he starts. Fires up right away. We exchange delighted thumbs up and I pull the cord from the second engine. The cords are too cold to coil properly, so while he does post start checks I end up stuffing a tangled mess of electrical cords in the back of the airplane. I'm afraid I would break the plastic insulation--or even the wires inside--if I forced them to coil lightly to fit where they usually go.

I secure the rear door and then come up to the right seat. The right oil pressure is still indicating low, but the CHTs and oil temperatures are matched between the two engines. We turn on the heater and take off some of our layers of clothing as we wait for the oil to come up. It's moving--the gauge isn't dead--but really really slowly. After half an hour it still isn't registering enough for take-off. I know that as a student pilot you were taught to shut down an engine if it wasn't registering oil pressure in 30 seconds, maybe a minute if it was really cold, so why have we let it run for this long? We are almost certain we know what is going on in there.

The engine is out on the wing, a couple of metres away from me. It was kept warm enough electrically overnight to start and have oil circulating, which is why we see normal cylinder head and oil temperatures. The oil pressure gauge is on the panel in front of me. The oil pressure gauge works in the absolutely simplest way such a thing could work, and that is by having the actual oil pressure force oil through a line to the gauge. Simple is good. But now think about that line. It comes out of the engine, along the leading edge of the wing, into the fuselage and up to the instrument panel. Much of that path is unheated. We suspect that a little bit of moisture has condensed in that line and frozen solid, blocking the line. The oil coming out of the engine is warm, but cools quickly inside the narrow tube, so is not warm enough to melt the ice. If we thought there was any way that the actual oil pressure in our engine was as low as on that gauge, we wouldn't be running the engine.

Still, we're not going to take off with oil pressure in the red. We text the PRM about our predicament. He asks a bunch of questions, suggesting we do things we've already done, and adds one more. I get out and check the oil filter through the cowling vents. My coworker shuts the engine down so I can do this. I verify that the oil filter looks normal: in place, not swollen or leaking or anything. And the engine, bless its greasy soul, restarts perfectly. There wasn't really much risk of it not, as it was so warm and lubricated, but anytime you shut something down you risk not being able to restart it.

After a few more texts (we text because it's too difficult to talk on the phone in a running airplane) are exchanged the PRM concludes "I don't see that you're going to have any problems."

We text back, "We don't either. We just don't want to go without an ok from the PRM."

Understanding dawns. Now he understands we're not texting for help, we're texting to cover our butts. Butts duly covered, we fly. By the time we're in position on the runway the oil pressure is only a needle width below the green anyway, a situation one of my training manuals even accepts.

We launch and turn on course in good weather. There isn't often a lot of weather in temperatures this low. Almost all the moisture is already frozen. There's no energy to form the weather.

This airplane has two heaters, one that mainly keeps the back warm, and which runs off a heat exchanger with the exhaust gases and one that mainly warms the front, and which burns gasoline. We, obviously are in the front, but we're expecting that with the engines blasting at climb power, we'll start feeling more heat, as we won't be losing our front heat to the back of the plane. But we're feeling colder. We adjust a few knobs and hold our hand in various places before we accept the fact that the combustion heater has shut down. It is designed to run on the ground, but because of reduced airflow it is possible for the plenum to overheat and trip the circuit breaker. A reasonable precaution for a device that is literally on fire inside the fuselage. These heaters are affectionately known as "nose bombs." To prevent cold pilots from resetting the circuit breaker when there is a real problem, the circuit breaker is accessible only from the outside of the airplane.

We both know this. "This two hour flight just got a lot longer." Is that because we turned around, landed back at origin and reset the breaker? No. Is that because we landed halfway at a well-attended airport that was literally under our intended flight path and reset the breaker? No. You know from the post title. It was because two hours seems a lot longer when you are sitting still in subfreezing temperatures. We toughed it out to destination with only the rear heater, definitely not enough to keep us comfortable.

We took turns taking control while the other person reached back for and donned the outer jackets and sweaters set aside earlier. We swapped "what's the coldest you've ever been?" tales. And we laughed at ourselves. The two of us have only had one flight together where we were neither too hot nor too cold: that was the flight with the exploding moon. With passengers, obviously we would have stopped. Without airline tickets booked, perhaps we would have stopped. But whenever you stop you risk not being able to go again. You've seen on this blog how easy it is to be grounded by a stupid thing. And we know how much it costs an hour to run this thing. T land and take off again would add time and money to the cost of the trip. We can take a little discomfort in the name of efficiency. We did have cold weather gear and one heater working. (Notice that the working heater was the simple one: "run outside air past hot exhaust and duct heated air to cabin. Simple is good. We also have simple avionics without those LCD computer screens that seize up at minus five, so we don't need to worry about our radio controls freezing. I guess "liquid" crystal displays require a certain temperature to remain so.

A temperature inversion meant it was even colder on the ground than in flight, and to get there we needed to reduce engine power, drastically reducing the output of our one working heater. Brrrr. But we did it. We reached our destination, found the hangar, and got a ride to the terminal from someone who told us, "you look cold." True that.

see more Funny Graphs

But the End of the Assignment

There's more work to be done here but it snowed again and the temperature keeps dropping, so the customers can't pretend that the snow is going to melt. They need less than ten centimetres of snow on the ground to do their work, so the word came this morning from their head office to shut it down here.

They still have us contracted and don't want to let us go yet, so they pack up and leave but ask us to stay here while they decide what to do with us next. Meanwhile my boss is getting prepared to send us elsewhere. It's Saturday and he boss asks me to buy charts for a trip to West Virgina, possibly leaving as early as Tuesday. There's no way in hell that any shipper will get charts to me here by then, so I check if I'll be able to pick them up en route. I call the FBO where we will clear customs, should the West Virginia trip materialize, and ask if they sell what I need. They don't, but agree to receive a shipment on our behalf. See, I have the charts to get that far already, and we'll have to stop and buy gas there, anyway, might as well pick up the charts too. That way I can order the charts from a US supplier, guaranteeing stock, and the charts don't have to cross the border and they don't have to go into the neverland of northern Canadian shipping. (Honestly I sent a friend a t-shirt in November and in early January I got an excited thank you e-mail from her. It had just arrived. She doesn't even live in the sticks. It's a fair-sized city in Northern Ontario).

I call Sporty's to order the charts and he's happy to ship to a c/o address at an FBO but I have to twist the guy's arm to get him to ship the current charts now, because they expire very soon and normal policy is to wait and ship the new ones. "But I need this week's charts, because I'm going this week." He finally agrees, cheerily telling me that he will ship the updated ones at the end of the week. "But I won't be there at the end of the week. I'm only going to be there on one day." I don't think I can stop him from shipping the follow up ones, but perhaps if we actually get to West Virginia I can divert them to wherever we actually end up. Wouldn't be the first time.

I tire of sitting in the least comfortable hotel chair ever, apparently designed for someone whose curved spine somehow connected to their legs without having an intervening butt. So I put on practically all my clothes, one on top the other like Heidi, and go for a walk to the post office. It's twenty-nine degrees below freezing. As soon as I step outside I feel my nostril hairs freeze inside my nose. It's quite dry here, so I'm not getting frost on my face or eyelashes as I walk along. My eyes tear--that is tears come out, not that they rip--from the cold. As I walk along I reject the idea that my tears would freeze. They are salt water, after all, and I know that the Fahrenheit temperature scale is based on the freezing point of a saturated saline solution, 32 degrees below the pure water freezing point. (It was a good idea, really, because it's easier to get a saturated saline solution than pure water). And it's only minus twenty-nine. You'll immediately spot the error here, but that was my thought process. I only thought about it for an instant. I guess part of my brain was frozen.

It's only when I take the sunglasses off, just before entering a store, and see slush on them that I recalculate and realize that while a saturated salt water solution freezes thirty-two little Fahrenheit degrees below the freezing point of pure water, that point was passed many big Celsius degrees ago and it is indeed cold enough to freeze tears. It's not cold, or maybe just not windy enough to freeze my lashes together, though. I mail my postcards, wander around town a bit more and then go back to the hotel. The customers are having a conference call tomorrow to decide where to send us.

Not the End of the World

Did I get to the part where we fly the airplane yet? Seriously, did I? We did fly the airplane this rotation. Twice, even. And if you think the blog took a long time getting there, try real life.

Just as hotel keys get deprogrammed when you're wearing the least clothing, the client is ready to fly when you are the maximum number of minutes from being conveniently ready. If you really want to fly, do laundry at a laundromat. You'll be required to go to work right now as soon as the clothes are all wet and soapy. (And then sent to another base for a week while your clothes rot). In this case I wasn't doing laundry. I believe I'd already tried that trick. I was out for a walk about as far from the hotel as I could get and still be in civilization. My coworker came to pick me up. We stopped fro my flight bag and then off to the airport to get things going.

We took the tarps off the airplane, the flimsy polyethylene sheets so stiffened by the cold that they handled like stiff canvas. Fuel tanks were still full, so no leaks, and the oil levels were good. I jumped inside and closed the door, then flicked on the master and all the lights while my coworker gave me a thumbs up on all the exterior lights being operational. Everything else looked good inside, and the clients were arriving, so I went back outside and finished up unplugging cords and putting away tarps.

As soon as the engine heaters are unplugged, the engines start to cool, and you've seen what happens when we try to start cold engines, so we board right away. "I'll start up while you brief," I say as I jump in the left seat. Technically these guys are crewmembers not passengers so they don't need a briefing every time they board. I keep it to once per rotation, so they are at least apprised of any configuration changes and seasonal issues. Today, for example, there are parkas up the back behind the electronics rack, the first aid kit and fire extinguisher in the cockpit, and extra winter survival gear in the nose.

My coworker is an experienced pilot but he hasn't flown passengers commercially. He laughs as he climbs in the right seat, "I haven't given a passenger briefing since my commercial flight test." Both engines start easily and everything warms up okay. I fuss with the checklists, conscious that I haven't flown yet this month. The left throttle is really twitchy, you hardly move it at all for a big change, and the right propeller lever has very little resistance. It's sort of the opposite of the left propeller lever being sticky. It's exactly a friction setting issue, because everything else is correct, but perhaps there's something crooked in there making the tension uneven. These aren't no-go items, just things to say "hmm" about and pass on to maintenance in case they presage something more momentous.

I call taxiing and backtrack for take off. With checks complete, brakes released, airplane rolling straight, gauges green, keep it straight, airspeed alive, rotate. Positive rate, beautiful cold weather performance, insufficient runway remaining, gear up. Engines turning, tweak the propeller lever that is nudging rpms into the red, keep straight, set climb power and make a slow left turn on course.

There is forecast to be mist tomorrow morning, so we're alert to the possibility of it forming early. There is some present, but we conclude that it is not a threat, and that we will be able to see if it starts to spread to where we do care, even after dark.

The point of there being two pilots here today is so that my new coworker can find his way around this cockpit at night. So as the sun goes down I show him where all the lighting controls are and hand over control. He flies the airplane as you would expect a professional pilot to do, with no trouble at all. He gets an opportunity to observe how hard it is to tell you're rolling as you do a flat turn with no lights on the horizon, but there's only one dark quadrant in this area. There are a lot of farms in the area and some towns, plus whatever it is the military have going on over there, so lots of light.

What do the military have going on over there? There's a weird glow from the direction of the restricted area. We turn around and go the other way for a while, but when we turn back it's more pronounced. There's something on fire. We hope it's just an unoccupied farm building, but it's a little freaky. We don't think the military are hiding dangerous superweapons around here, but maybe that just means they are really good at hiding their dangerous superweapons. And then after another pass we figure it out.

It's the moon rising on the horizon, and its light is interacting with cloud and mist. The shape and variable opacity of the cloud made a a very convincing exploding secret missile base.

Plus, someone just forwarded me this:

STL approach: "United XXX best forward speed to the marker, you're number one."

United XXX (male): "Roger, balls to the wall."

STL approach: "American XXXX, you're number two behind a 737, follow him, cleared visual, best forward speed."

American XXXX (female): "Well I can't do 'balls to the wall' but I can go 'wide open'."

-Radio silence-

Unknown Pilot (male): "Is American hiring?"