Someone Has to Read Them

The flight that was cancelled in the previous blog entry is back on again, but there's a new weather puzzle to solve. The scud is still present in the low terrain, but this time the air is stable, only trace icing expected. The clouds only go up to ten thousand, so I can climb through them and fly on top with no fancy routing. We'll cancel IFR and alerting after we get into uncontrolled airspace further north, so we can descend out of radio contact and look at the things that it's our job to look at, without people getting all antsy about us showing up to do an approach at our destination.

This time we do depart, and the flight goes as planned. The wings and windshield stay clean as we climb through the slowly brightening grey. I switch to sunglasses as we break through the top into the sunshine. I'm going northwest, and the sun has risen behind me, projecting a round rainbow on the clouds below me, visible through the propeller. It's called a glory or the glory of the pilot because you have to be between the sun and the clouds to see it. The colours repeat through the ring, faintly right into the centre and fading away to the outside. It's a light refraction effect, obviously, but according to the Wikipedia article it isn't certain how they are formed.

As we continue north, dark shadowy holes appear in the solid deck of clouds below, and then they widen to become green and grey and sparkling as the clouds scatter out and we can see the rocks and lakes and trees that define most of Canadian geography. the lakes are not yet frozen and some of the deciduous trees still have their coloured leaves. The clouds thin to occasional wisps and I cancel IFR to fly without having to follow a clearance or stay so far above terrain. Once we finish our work we turn again toward our destination. I'm listening to the Centre frequency as well as the air-to-air en route frequency of 126.7. I can't communicate with Centre, but I can hear other aircraft talking to them and pick up some information that way. A Dash-8 announces that they are in the missed approach from what we'll have to call Elk Creek. The fact that Elk Creek is below minima is a bad sign for the weather at my destination, because the two airports are relatively close, but then the Dash-8 pilot reads back a clearance to my destination. That's a good sign that overrides the bad one. He wouldn't miss and then go somewhere dubious. Sure enough I soon hear the Dash-8 pilot say he's planning the contact approach, which means he has the terrain in sight and is confident he'll remain visual all the way to the runway. He asks to fly direct a fix I'll call WIBEL and then I start to be able to hear the controller, who can't find WIBEL, even after the pilot spells it. The pilot tells him which approach it's on, and that it's the fix before AXFUG. (I wonder who makes these things up. It's kind of fun.) The controller says that the fix before AXFUG is WAGPO. I know what the problem is, but I can't interrupt their conversation. The two of them discuss this for a while, get the pilot an appropriate clearance, and then the controller has a number of calls to catch up on. When he's done I check in and add, "There's a NOTAM out today on the WIBEL/WAGPO situation." I knew I was planning in here VFR, but my eye ran over a NOTAM mentioning a waypoint substitution, and them repeating the waypoint name has triggered my recall.

The controller says, "Thanks, Aviatrix," using my real name over the frequency. He finds the NOTAM and reads it out. WAGPO has been temporarily replaced by WIBEL. It's curious that the airliner had a database that showed the new temporary waypoint while the controller didn't. I would have expected it to be the other way around, or to have them both be operating with post-its on their screens.

Incognito

I'm at my desk checking NOTAMs while my co-worker pops out for a quick Tim Horton's run before boarding. Seconds after he leaves, I hear footsteps on the stairs again. Thinking he has forgotten his keys or something, I start to say, "That was the quickest Tim Horton's run ever," but it's not someone I recognize. He works for the company next door.

He says, "Oh, not one of your pilots. Do you know where he has gone?"

It takes me a moment to parse this. The first sentence makes perfect sense, because I'm the chief pilot here, so a pilot working for this company is in some sense "my" pilot. But why does he want to know where my non-pilot co-worker has gone, or even know that he exists? Then he continues with why he's here, and my understanding cuts in. In his eyes I am not a pilot. I am a woman working at a desk. The possibility that I am the pilot he seeks has not even crossed his mind.

The guy who is now on his way to Timmy's towed the aircraft out to an inappropriate position, and it is blocking the egress of another airplane that is ready to depart. I apologize and leap up to help move it, but he says that's okay, he has a co-pilot. With my permission they will push it back a few metres. About a minute later their assistant chief pilot comes in with the same complaint, but he knows who I am. I grab a reflective vest and go out to the ramp even though I know it's handled.

I suppose I could choose to be offended or outraged that some twenty-something (who is inexplicably wearing a toque even though it's about twenty degrees now and will go up to thirty by the afternoon) has a concept of "pilot" that does not include people who look like me. On the broader scale, there are huge problems in a society when people's concept of "law-abiding citizen," "person suitable for employment," "person worthy of respect as a human being," and "potential friend" arbitrarily exclude huge swathes of the population, but today I will just be amused by my own power of invisibility.

How Far Along Are You?

My company recently bought a new airplane for our fleet. I may have blogged already about the previous owner and his son watching it go like it was a child going off to college. We told them we weren't sure exactly when we would arrive, so to leave it out on the ramp for us to collect, after the payment cleared. But they preferred to make the trip from town out to the airport on our schedule, to open their hangar and tow it out for the last time. The ops manager and I flew it to its new home, and then it sat in our hangar for a while, which maintenance discovered and rectified decades of idiosyncratic repairs. The wiring for the wing strobes was literally wrapped around the aileron cables, because there's nothing better than abrading through electrical wiring right by your fuel tank, while restricting the movement of your flight controls. There were a coupled of days I was alerted for an impending test flight, and then waved off, because the final run up had turned up a new leak or suspicious behaviour. The right side brakes weren't working. Even though I fly it single pilot from the left, and right brakes are optional on the type, a problem with the brakes is a problem with the braking system, and cannot be allowed to stand.

Finally, I was to instructed to fly it to another airport for a specialty refit. The avionics haven't been addressed yet, so I waited for the weather to improve to VFR and then grabbed the minimum plot equipment and flew it up, to take an airline flight back. The first officer stood at the foot of the airstairs as I boarded the commuter airliner, and he spotted the VFR charts sticking out of the pocket of my headset bag.

"You're an aviator," he observed. Not one to interfere with the linguistic process that is eliminating gendered terms for professions, I answered in the affirmative. (I also don't mind, guys, if you want to call yourselves aviatrices. It is a cooler word). "How far along are you?" asked the first officer.

I was halfway up the stairs by then, almost entering the cabin. What's the answer to that? Ten different jobs, an ATPL, eight thousand hours ... I ended up saying something condescending, telling him I likely had five times his hours. It could actually have been ten or twenty times: they're hiring FOs pretty green these days. I didn't mean to be condescending. I don't think he intended his comment that way either. I took it cheerfully, like being IDed at the liquor store. I was planning to apologize on the way out of the aircraft at the end of the flight, but it was windy and noisy and he was busy, so I just said goodbye with the other passengers. If you're reading, dude, this is your apology. If he's not, that's okay. I remember some pretty rude pilot passengers who thought they were better than me, from when I was flying airline, but now they're all just funny stories, so I don't mind being one of his.

To him, professional aviation is a progression from VFR to IFR and from small airports to big airports, so someone with a headset and VFR charts boarding a plane at a little airport was perceived to be near the beginning of the chain. I should have answered "oh maybe three quarters of the way there" based on the number of hours I estimate I'll accumulate before I retire. On the other hand, someone has to teach him that it's a bad idea to ask a woman "how far along are you?"

Aviation Tax

Once upon a time I had a math teacher, an old school, male, teacher who taught geometry as though the ability to bisect an angle with a compass was going to be a life skill that could sustain us in our old age. I'm pretty sure I could still bisect an angle if my life depended on it but then angle bisection is the sort of thing you'd figure out how to do pretty quickly on your own, so long as for you messing around with a compass was about drawing arcs and not seeing how many different things you could stab holes in with the pointy end. The latter seems to me a more life sustaining skill than bisecting angles, but I don't have a bad word to say about geometry.

My math teacher cared about his students, even sponsored a shiny award plaque for the top math student in grade eight. And he would encourage us to get going in life. I suppose math was a frequently failed subject. He'd urge us to do well, and if we couldn't do well right away, to go to summer school and get the course completed. He was very fond of telling us that if you spend one more year in school than you need to, you will lose one year of the top salary you will earn in your life. Students often looked confused when he said this. He thought we couldn't understand that we weren't losing the first year of pay, because they were going to get that anyway, that the money was going to come off the top end, right before retirement.

I'm not sure if he realized that we were confused by the unstated assumption. We didn't see our future careers as an even steady staircase leading upwards in salary from fresh out of school to the day we would retire at sixty-five. Do people do that? It was only two years ago that I reattained the salary of my first career, the one that I left to go into aviation. Given that money was probably worth a bit more back then, I may not have reached that level yet. There are other careers with published salary schedules that I could step sideways into with a slight salary decrease, and then pass my current salary quite quickly, for a bigger pile of money on retirement. But I don't think I'll make the career change. I like flying.

And that's how it works. There are some captains at the major airlines that make a metric tonne of money, but for the most part people in aviation make less money than people with comparable training, experience and responsibility do in other fields. The people who maintain my airplane make less than the ones who maintain my car. The people who taught me to fly made less than the ones who taught me to drive. It goes all the way up: there's never a shortage of investors willing to lose money on aviation. Aviation is cool. That's the tax.

Logbook Strategy

I finally got my logbook up-to-date, every flight entered, every page totalled, grand total calculated. Each line represents one flight, and includes the date, aircraft type, aircraft registration, point of origin, destination, crew, and duration of the flight. There's also a remarks field which I sometimes use to include information like "annual review," "hit an eagle at rotation," "picking up new airplane," or "ferry permit with u/s flaps." Long ago I used to write my first initial and full last name in the pilot in command or copilot field, as appropriate, but that got tiring and sometime over the last couple of logbooks ago I switched to "self" and then "me," with the other crewmembers reduced to initials after the first few entries with their complete names.

The duration blank for each flight is not a single column, but eighteen columns, the whole facing page, in all appropriate combinations of single- and multi-engine time, night and day, pilot-in-command, dual instruction, and copilot, plus additional columns to record time in instrument meteorological conditions (clouds), simulated IMC, and in a flight simulator. For the last seven years I have used two columns: multi-engine day PIC and multi-engine night PIC. I'm even pilot-in-command for my annual training flights, because we hire outside experts who aren't ensured on our aircraft. So on every page I complete there are only two columns I need to total, multi-PIC-day and multi-PIC-night. I sometimes fill in numbers for IMC, or landings, but long, long ago stopped totalling them. There are a even a couple of do-it-yourself columns in which I sometimes track time on floats, turbine vs. piston or tailwheel. I tried to persuade myself to stop carrying forward the times in the columns other than the two that actually get updated every page, unless for some reason I flew a single-engine aircraft or acted as co-pilot, but despite being lazy enough not to update my logbook for three years, once I started updating, I felt obligated to carry those stupid numbers forward, page after page. According to the numbers, at some point in my career I acted as a copilot at night. I can't even think when that was, as the two-crew aircraft in which I logged my copilot time was a day-only operation. I think I must have been acting as co-pilot for new captain. But I'm copying forward that 2.0 every time I turn the page. Also the 13.1 night dual single engine. I have this minor fantasy of renting a single-engine aircraft and flying just long enough, day, night, PIC, and dual, in order to bring all my logged hours up to even numbers. The trickiest part about copying the numbers forward though, is making them fit in the boxes.

Both my single- and multi-engine daytime hours extend to five digits, including the one after the decimal point, and the boxes allocated for the totals are not very big. There are a few possible strategies for coping with this. I generally used a fine-tipped pen and very small printing, but depending on how many 4s, 6s and other digits that don't compress well there are in the total, sometimes I combine this with writing the number diagonally from corner to corner of the tiny box, or writing the decimal point and final digit on a second line. Sometimes I just give up and write the total in the bottom margin, with an arrow pointing into the box it should occupy. I suspect most of you with this kind of time don't bother keeping a personal logbook at all, just hand the paperwork that shows you're legal into company, and then at medical time just add what you've flown in the past year onto whatever total you gave the year before. That's what I've done for the last three years. The real timekeepers among you will be using an electronic logbook that, at a couple of button presses, can extract all your multi-engine turbine time flown on a Tuesday. But I can't be the lone holdout Luddite enough to be still using paper logbooks, but having trouble fitting the big numbers on the page. What's your preferred strategy?

The Wrong Trousers

On my first job with a uniform, I was required to wear black pants and a white pilot shirt. That's a pretty standard outfit, and a lot of companies just leave it to the pilot to obtain those articles of clothing. That first company didn't pay much, so I just wore whatever black pants kind of fit me at the second-hand store. Another company sent me to Mark's Work Wearhouse to buy a particular style. I think they wanted beige, but the style number was a men's style, so I spent half an hour or so trying to find the women's style that looked the most like the men's style, yet still fit me. I don't remember how that worked out. At a later company I actually did wear a men's style because I could get far better quality for the same price, and while the fit at the hips was not stellar, at least the legs were long enough, the pockets actually able to hold things, and they didn't have little cutesy buckles or offer tummy control or butt enhancement. Seriously, if you've never bought women's pants, you'd be amazed by what they claim to do. Stupid things had to be dry-cleaned though, and I'm pretty sure they were flammable.

In my job I have to crawl, literally crawl on my hands and knees, under aircraft. I have to lug things against my legs. I sometimes wipe oily hands on my pants (not my underwear, British readers). I sit on my butt for five or six hours at a time. I occasionally need to wear thermal underwear under my clothes. I want pants that are black, cotton, durable, and machine washable. They need to be comfortable, not too tight, but not so loose that you're going to see my underwear as I crawl under the plane. Not that I care all that much about that last one. I always figure if you're hard up enough that seeing a pilot's underwear is going to do it for you, then I can throw you that one for free.

After a while I settled on a style at Mark's Work Wearhouse. I would buy several pairs at a time, making them ship extra ones in from elsewhere to fulfill my order. A couple of years ago they stopped selling them. It wasn't just that they'd changed the style, they no longer sold a medium duty woman's work pant. They had the really heavy duty ones, not something I wanted to sit for hours wearing, and they had yoga pants and dress pants. So last year I carefully measured myself according to the instructions on the website, and ordered a few different styles from Dickies, all of which arrived big enough for two of me. I sent them back and ordered four more that fit me about as well as the ones from the second-hand store, but by this point the old ones that fit me well all had patches on them, so I kept and wore the ill-fitting ones. Now I have a collection of badly-fitting black pants some of which have holes in them.

Today I tried to buy more pants. I finally gave up when a link for women's work pants took me to a page where not only were all the pants too short for the actual models, but the models were all wearing high heels. I guess "working women" need work pants too. I'll have to go back to men's styles.

Extra-Vehicular Activities

I was trying to find a clip of the coffee-ordering scene from the movie Pushing Tin. In the film it's a demonstration of how many pieces of data on different aircraft that an experienced controller can hold in his or her head simultaneously. I didn't find the clip, but I came across a pilot ordering coffee and wings in the midst of an emergency, and a fun YouTube channel of humourous exchanges from the New York Kennedy ground frequency.

Taxiing at a large, unfamiliar airport is just about as stressful as flying at night in ice. There's just one of me to keep the airplane moving, watch out for bad pavement, find the directional signs, interpret the taxi diagram, identify the intersections, and spot the aircraft I'm supposed to give way to. It's obvious to the controllers which way I should go, but they know the airport layout perfectly, and from their vantage point they can see where they want to put me. They seem almost as unhappy when I pause to complete a checklist or figure out my route as they do when I think that Foxtrot-Golf is the next turn, not this one right here. Sure, if I get it badly wrong in ice, I'll lose control of the airplane and die, but that consequence might be less painful than the scolding that an irate controller can dish out. The worst case scenario on the taxi is also death: should I venture onto an active runway at the wrong moment, I could get run over and take out a widebody, too. That is part of the reason the controllers can be so stressed. The rest of their focus is knowing that it is ridiculously easy for us poorly-maneuverable ground vehicles to become gridlocked, delaying everyone. The controllers have a plan for getting everyone where we are supposed to be, and if I miss a turn, I'm like the Tetris brick dropped in the wrong place, messing up the whole board. Meanwhile controllers are really smart, constantly building and recalculating plans, but with enough spare brainpower to make smart remarks.

The link above is not to the first or the funniest of the clips on the channel, but rather to one that is more odd than funny: a Lufthansa crew suspects they have an access panel open and once that's confirmed by another taxiing aircraft, ask permission to put a crewmember outside the airplane to close it. It's interesting and a little outside the norm, but the controller seems to think it's hilarious. I wonder what he would have made of a stop-and-go I did the other day: I landed on a long runway, let a crew member out to adjust an external sensor, and then after he was back in and belted, took off again without ever leaving or backtracking the runway. The controller handling me didn't act as though it were an unusual request. I had assessed the approaching traffic on frequency before making the request, so I was confident there was no one close behind me. I'm not sure we spent any longer on the runway than we would have had we landed and taxied off in the normal way.

Information Asynchrony

As anyone who has tried to contact me through my blog e-mail knows, I'm not amazingly responsive there. It's not by accident, and I'm not ashamed of it. While I love you guys, my blog is a hobby, and the e-mail account attached to it is like a sub-hobby of my hobby. But I happened to look at it this week, and found a request for participants in a research study on a topic that interests me: pilot-ATC communications.

It's very important that information relayed between pilots and controllers be clear and understood by both parties, but it also needs to be sent efficiently. Recently I had a controller tell me that I was hard to understand on the radio, but that it wasn't my radio, it was my rate of speech. I think it may have been that I had just switched from an extremely busy frequency with the controller speaking quickly and saying "break break" between transmissions so as to get everything said, and I had matched my rate of speech to his. But clearly if I wasn't understandable, I was overdoing it.

I'm always fascinated by tidbits of research regarding the way pilots and controllers exchange information. When given a number with a doubled digit, pilots are very likely to double the wrong digit. Does this speak to how we store "3221" and "3211" in our brains? I remember being castigated in the US for reading back a runway number as "zero five" when the controller had said only "five." In Canada there are no single digit runway numbers, and apparently when I am given a runway number I assign it to one of thirty-six pre-labelled boxes in my head, rather than storing the words the controller actually said. (I still think that controller was a bit of a dick, as ATC communications are supposed to accommodate international differences, but it's possible he thought I was "correcting" him, so he was slapping me down.

The researcher says,

Hello:

My name is Samuel Lien and I am a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada conducting research on human factors in aviation / air traffic control. I am from Humans in Complex Systems Lab. Information can be found here.

https://uwaterloo.ca/humans-complex-systems-lab/

I am writing this to ask if you might be able to help me, or direct me to someone who could help me create exposure to a study I am conducting that looks at the effect of information asynchrony on pilot-ATC communication. The study will be conducted completely online.

We are interested in professional pilots, preferably commercial license and air traffic controllers (any domain) as our subject-matter expert and participants for the study.

Participation in this study involves going to our online experiment website from participant’s computer as the experiment will be conducted online. Participation in this study would take approximately 2 and half hours of your time. I would like to assure you that the study has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through a University of Waterloo Research Ethics Committee.

The online experiment website is here:

http://rbhagat.uwaterloo.ca/IDEA/ I haven't opened it yet, because I'm told it will take approximately 2.5 hours to complete. That's quite a chunk of time, but I intend to do it, because I think it will contribute to safety.

As far as I can tell, the information asynchrony under study is pilots getting information at times other than when they actually need it. Maybe when I've done the questionnaire, I'll know what they mean.

Out of My Nose

Six hours ago I was woken for work. Five hours ago I arrived at the airport. Four and a half hours ago I had completed a preflight inspection, towed an airplane out of the hangar, and was supervising fuelling. Three and a half hours ago I knew the weather forecasts everywhere in our purview, and was out of Candy Crush lives and unread Facebook entries. Forty-five minutes ago I was told I would be released from duty in thirty minutes. Half an hour ago I called friends to say I could be at their place in forty-five minutes. Twenty minutes ago I was given a destination to fly to. Nineteen minutes ago I filed an IFR flight plan according to the CFS-listed Preferred Routes, and cancelled with the friends. Thirteen minutes ago I started the engines. One minute ago I was at the hold-short line waiting for departure clearance. "Traffic ahead is in the circuit; turn right ten degrees as soon as safely able so as not to run him over; contact departure airborne; cleared take off." Now I'm airborne.

My clearance was to follow the filed route. I'm coming up on the waypoint at the end of the published departure from the airport. The plate says "expect radar vectors to assigned route" and sure enough the departure controller assigns me a heading. It's a left turn of about twenty-five degrees, keeping me clear of some traffic, I presume. He approves a climb right to en route altitude. I put the ice protection on before entering cloud, but the forecast was correct, and I picked up no ice at all. After about ten minutes, I'm cleared direct my next filed waypoint, to continue on the flight planned route. I come up through the cloud layers into the sun.

For two hours I fly on top of the clouds, enjoying brilliant bright sunshine. Clouds look so much nicer from the top. At top of descent the icing protection goes back on and I start down. Oxygen valve off below ten thousand, but I still have the nasal cannula on my face, because it's tangled up with my headset and I'm busy with charts and checklists and engine controls. The controller clears me to an altitude that is just above the clouds. We skim along, almost touching them. It's the only way you can see how fast an airplane goes, to be that close to clouds whipping by. I take off the cannula and set it aside. Ahh, nose freedom. I'm told to expect direct to the initial fix for the destination approach in five minutes, and I'm starting to slow down to configure for that. The airplane has microswitches in the throttles: retard either one below a certain point before the gear is locked down, and it will set off an alarm. The point at which the microswitch is tripped is a constant amount of throttle travel, but it's not marked on the throttle quadrant--and I don't look at the throttle quadrant markings while adjusting power anyway. I'm looking at the manifold pressure. The manifold pressure reading at which the gear horn will sound varies by an inch or so (I originally wrote "150 rpm or so" which is too confusing to leave, but too funny to just delete). I guess it depends on temperature and air pressure and who tuned the engine last. I sometimes want the power that low before I want to put the gear down, so I warn my crew that the alarm may sound. I do this today, and he replies with a question, "Why would that make the stall horn sound?"

I realize I have inadvertently said "stall horn" instead of "gear horn." I accept the correction and explain, "The wrong word came out of my nose."

At the end of the flight I admitted that I hadn't intended to say "nose" there either. Apparently my brain was busy processing altitude calculations and thought "nose" was close enough to the word I had asked for.

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?

Mysteries of the Universe

My report time this morning was 5:20 am. I got to work at 5:15. Take off eventually happened at 9:29.

Most of that delay was weather. But while we were waiting for the weather other excitement occurred. Mystery One occurred when we couldn't find the keys to the nose baggage door, but didn't allow that to cause a delay, just stole a set from maintenance. They weren't in yet, and it's not really theft if you send e-mail to say you've done it.. I also couldn't find a funnel, to add oil, but that's not a mystery. People keep throwing out my funnels because i make them out of old oil bottles. Mystery Two is that my Swiss army knife, which I would have used to improvise a new funnel, seems to have gone missing last time I had to check it on the airlines. I hope it's just in the bottom of a bag somewhere. I poured the oil carefully down the dipstick, didn't spill any. Mystery Three was the location of the back-up emergency checklist. It's just a company thing that we have an extra, and not mandated in any of our manuals or regulations, so we resolved to find it later, and started engines without it.

Mystery Four is why the airport was so strangely deserted, and we got to take off with no waiting. This was 9:30 in the morning, not the originally planned 6:20.

We landed at a different airport than was filed in the flight plan, which seemed to confuse the FSS specialist whom I called to close the plan. "That's what we do," I said in a tone that implied I was saying something helpful. Maybe it was because the airport we landed at was in more or less the opposite direction from the filed one. But that is what we do. It was 29 degrees on the ground, and potable water was not available at the airport. None of that is mysterious.

The second flight went well. I called a tower controller to cut through a control zone that hadn't been on the original plan. He assigned me a squawk code and cleared me through quite efficiently. Another aircraft called up right behind us to go sightseeing in the control zone. "Not without a code!" said the controller sternly. The pilot ummed for a bit and then asked if the controller could assign him a code. The controller did. So why did I get one automatically, but the guy behind me had to beg? That is a mystery. I think I'm up to five.

Mystery six is how we landed at home base six p.m. but I didn't get out of the damn office until eight. Does it really take two hours to disembark, get fuelled, tow the airplane in, do the paperwork, send a couple of e-mails, check that the lights are off and the doors locked, set the alarm and leave? I guess there was answering the phone--a call from the bank for someone who went home hours ago. At 7:30 pm? I think someone at the bank got time zones mixed up.

On the way home I decided I wanted Mexican food, but knew there wasn't much in the fridge. Looking for a grocery store to get cilantro and tomatoes I found a Mexican cafe I didn't know existed. I ordered beans and rice for take out. I get it home and they are GREEN beans. Is that a mystery?

We Just Don't Always Use It

A fueller once told me that he loved watching me take off because the shallow climb angle is different from the way the other aircraft at that airport behave. He thinks it looks cool. Interesting.

Almost all the traffic there besides me are training aircraft, light singles flown by students. Having worked as a flight instructor, I know that such aircraft are also usually close to max weight with an instructor on board. Students tend to rotate late and lift the nose wheel higher, thinking they are pulling the airplane off the runway with their own strength. The manufacturers recommend climbing at the best rate of climb speed, which makes sense because if the one and only engine fails, the more altitude the better. They're only going to climb to three or four thousand feet above ground level anyway, so that's reasonable for them. they are climbing at 500' to 700' per minute, maybe less if it's hot.

Most of my takeoffs are within two percent of max take off weight. At rotation speed I lift the nosewheel just enough to have it clear of the runway, with no attempt to haul the entire airplane off the ground. I know that will come. At that point I am waiting for the speed to come up to blue line, the single engine best rate of climb speed. That happens just before I run out of runway, and then I raise the gear. When both engines are functioning, there is no reason to climb at as low a speed as single-engine best rate. There are no obstacles or noise abatement areas off the end of the runway, so I don't use the two-engine best angle of climb speed. I could climb at the two-engine best rate of climb speed, but the manufacturer recommends a speed fifteen to twenty knots faster than that. I know that I can reduce power slightly, and then climb at the manufacture's recommended climb speed for thirty minutes without overtemping anything. So that's what I do. I stay low over the runway, get my speed, ensure the airplane is flying properly and then climb away at a sustainable rate. I'm climbing at around 750' per minute, but because I'm doing so at around twice the forward speed of the little guys, this translates to a lower climb gradient. I guess it looks cool because it's the way heavies take off.

Obviously if there is terrain, or IFR climb gradients in excess of my default climb rate, then I'm leaving take off power set and climbing at the angle required to meet safety and regulatory requirements. And if I'm on a test flight or empty for some other reason, then my take off profile might be a little different. It's never like the one at the beginning of this video, though.

The second take off in the video, with the immediate left bank, is pretty common for me, when I'm at an airport served by large jets. ATC wants me out the way, fast, so they clear me to make a left (or right, but the most recent one was left) turn as soon as safely able. As soon as have stable control of the airplane, I bank and turn myself out of the path of the Boeing or Airbus that ATC will clear to take off as soon as they are content that I am clear. The other day I saw a Boeing 737 doing a fairly steep low level turn. It was a bright sunny day and I guess they didn't want to go way the heck west to intercept the ILS.

Airplanes are way cool.

Drawing From Both Bags

When I get to the airport company sent me to in the previous post, there is a NOTAM on the ATIS  for fire fighting operations on the edge of the control zone. There's a forest fire. I should have checked NOTAMs during the diversion. I did tell Centre were were headed here, and I hope they would have mentioned it had the airport been actually closed. When told to divert, I had just enough fuel to get here with thirty minute reserve, and I accepted the mission.  There were other airports available en route if I had had an emergency, but I'm almost here now.

Some people are going to think that it is irresponsible to plan to land with only 30 minutes reserve. Most private pilots plan a healthier margin.  But there's a business margin to be considered too, and if I waste an hour of the day descending, fulling and climbing back up again, will there be money in the bank account to pay for tires, alternators and other parts I need to be safe? Part of being a commercial pilot is knowing your aircraft well enough that you can plan to get the optimum usage out of it in a day.  Legally I need to plan the flight such that I can arrive at my destination with thirty minutes reserve fuel. After I take off that rule is no longer in effect. it would not be illegal for me to land with two minutes of fuel left in the tanks. If I ever did, it would suggest that I had been stupid, or had had a very serious unforeseen situation. If I were to run out of fuel I would probably be charged with something.Something with "endangering" and or "failure" in it, I suppose.

It definitely would have been smart to check NOTAMs. I don't remember now whether I tried to call an FSS or just didn't think of it, or had looked them up hours ago, before the first flight of the day. As we hold clear of the airport for the fire fighting aircraft, we have a great view of the orange fire suppressant streaming out of the bomber onto the blaze.  White smoke, green trees, yellow water bomber, orange fire suppressant, red fuel gauge.

After the bomber run, and a detour I come in to land. It's hot. The blast of heat from the pavement makes the airplane bobble in the flare. I finesse with power. It's like flying a C172 again.

There is about twenty minutes left in my lowest tank. So less than I aim for, but that's sort of what reserve fuel is for.  If I never ever used it, it wouldn't be worth hauling around. I think I've only gone  this far into my reserve three times in my career. Once for strong winds, this time for a forest fire, and the first time for strong headwinds and a forest fire diversion.

I taxi clear of the runway and onto the FBO apron. The guy from the normally very quick Esso FBO walks up and tells me the fuel truck is broken. I have a moment of "oh---FIRETRUCK!" When you don't check NOTAMs, you can get it from both sides. And then he says, "I'll call the Shell for you." Oh right. This airport has more than one FBO. That's one of the reasons we use it.

We fuel, start with the engines facing the wrong way for the wind, but it's not strong, and then take off with a quartering tailwind. Long runway, no obstacles ahead, and it's operationally much more efficient.

Day Trip

I and a fairly new coworker are assigned to go to a site about an hour away and do some work. It's expected to be a single flight: zip up there, do the work and come back to base without landing. I say, "Just in case the work takes longer and we have to land for fuel, do you have a company credit card?" He doesn't yet, so I grab mine, just in case.

We fly to the location, but don't succeed in completing the work. The conditions aren't appropriate. We've just turned for home when my coworker receives a message on the satellite link. "Do you guys have overnight gear?"

The true answer is, "No," but we understand that it means, "Don't come home until the work is done." Never leave home in an airplane without a toothbrush and a change of underwear. I turn the airplane around and land at an airport nearby where we both know people. We get a ride into town in a veterinary van (no not driven by a Terminatrix), check into a hotel, call our friends, and go visiting.

Next morning we are preparing to do the work they sent us up here to do, but we are sent instead to another province. And then up north. Where we got snowed in. The new coworker goes home on the airlines. I eventually spend almost a week in the field, including the day I spent digging the airplane out of a snowbank. I think it was May. At least it was May by the time I got home.

When I finally get home, the vice president sees me carrying my gear into the office: my flight bag, a Wal Mart bag of emergency clothing and toiletry purchases, ten thousand dollars of credit card receipts, and a straw broom I bought to whisk the snow off the airplane. "What's that for?" he asks, indicating the broom. "Is that how you got back?"

So you see, management considers me to be a mighty and powerful sorceress. Or something.

Balanced Diet

What I have eaten today, and what I was doing while eating it:
(times adjusted to match the time zone I started the day in)

0600 - packet of maple and brown sugar flavoured instant oatmeal - filing a flight plan
1300 - Apple & Cinnamon Larabar - talking to ATC, while flying in turbulence
1600 - A few cashews left in a bag that I opened a few days ago - flying and calculating my remaining oxygen
1605 - bag of Cheezies - flying and calculating my duty day,
1610 - box of raisins. They were all stuck together, so I just peeled the cardboard off and stuck the whole thing in my mouth - figuring out my descent profile so I could go under, not over the cloud layers that were solid at destination
1612 - packet of beef jerky, almost ate the "do not eat" packet, too,
piece of garlic toast my fellow crewmember saved for me from yesterday's dinner, roll of Rockets (Smarties to the Americans) - shoving everything I could reach in my face while the autopilot flew
1800 - a Starbucks cake pop & a persimmon fruit or passion fruit or something iced tea - hugging my ops manager who brought them out to the airplane knowing I'd be tired and hungry from nine and a half hours of flying.
2130 - two burgers, and most of the fixings that were supposed to go on someone else's burger

So the question is, what should I have for dessert?

Fireproof Clothing One Can Pee Out Of

Fireproof clothing that doesn't need to be removed before urinating: is that too much to ask? I have asked this question before on this blog, but then it was more rhetorical, Now I'm actually in the market for Nomex flightsuits compatible with in-flight urination. Preferably in company colours. (Protip: if you want to save money on flightsuits in company colours, make your company colours navy blue or khaki). So I turn to the first resort of anyone in the 21st century looking for anything: Google (because my phone isn't new enough to have Siri).

Try and guess what the entire first page of Google returns for "flight suit reviews" consists of. Just try.

Unless you guessed diapers for pet birds, you guessed wrong. You'd be close if you guessed Halloween costumes, like this one, that comes complete with Top Gun patches and aviator sunglasses. Or the kid-sized replica of the NASA Advanced Crew Escape Suit the author of this blog entry started out reviewing, before she got distracted by thinking about what it would really be like to be an astronaut's mother. And then there are the ones that don't seem to be costumes, but marketed like costumes, as though their primary customer just wants to look like a pilot. They sell a women's flight suit, at about a hundred and fifty dollars more than the typical men's price I've seen, but I'm not sure whether the mark-up is for the smaller woman's market, or because this is for people who want "genuine, authentic flight suits like real pilots wear," as opposed to those who want to put genuine fireproof clothing on real pilots. I'm also wary of ordering a "women's flight suit" that is only available in men's sizes, and is sold on a page with the html title "MENS POLYCOTTON FLIGHTSUIT".

When I do find women's suits listed, and this one looks pretty good, it is sometimes difficult to determine which is the corresponding men's suit. I don't object to the men having a much greater selection of styles nor to the women's ones often being more expensive: I do understand economies of scale. I just want there to be a corresponding men's suit to the one women's suit on offer. These are, after all, intended as a uniform. I want male and female crew members to have the same pocket layout and styling, for the overall look even if what's underneath our zippers is a little different.

Because of the difference under the zipper, I'm looking closely at the styling, trying to work out how I pee in there. If the zipper went far enough down, I could get a portable urinal in there. If there's lots of extra room in the legs, I guess I could get the bag to hang down one leg while I used it. Some of the pictures don't even look like they would make it convenient for the males to engage their equipment with a relief tube. Zippers are men's natural enemies, right? And I'm still not finding reviews of flight suits intended for those without cloacae. If you wear or have worn one, and are not an incontinent bird, let me know what you think of yours, what features you like or wish it has, and whether you can pee in it without, you know, peeing IN it.

I hope I can find a better solution than this style, although I do appreciate the fact that the vendor charges less for the women's version, in light of the reduction in fabric required. I'm seriously tempted to buy that last one and show up in it on Halloween.

It's Enough to Make Me Forget the Wheels

I really should be working, not blogging. But I have to pass on this pearl of operational wisdom.

Wheel up landing ARE NOT authorized

The above is actual wording from a Power Point slide I was given, to help me develop better in-house training on our aircraft. I'm not sure which bothers me more: the grammar or the implication that the operator who developed the slideshow thought there was a real possibility that they might hire a pilot who was stupid enough to need to be told this. I'm leaning towards the grammar bothering me more, because I can't just tell myself, "Chill, Aviatrix. Someone forgot an s." I'm endlessly tortured by the indecision of whether the s is missing from the end of wheel or the end of landing. Either, but not both, would fix it. But perhaps the grammar issue is a positive, distracting me from the message.

Maybe it's a joke. Throw that in, lighten up the mood. Certainly it's lighter than the preceding slide, which lists the dimensions, ply and recommended pressure for all the tires. I don't truly understand the purpose of slides like the tire one. No one should be expected to memorize this stuff. A photograph of a tire that has been damaged by excessive braking (been there, done that), showing the various ply exposed would make a better slide. Hmm, did I take a photo of my shame? You have to look up the part number to order a tire anyway, so knowing the size isn't sufficient. The only useful datum in the list is the tire pressure, and we write the recommended tire pressure on the rims in Sharpie because who wants to trust memory or look that stuff up when you don't have to.

When I teach systems and procedures to professional pilots, people who have both completed commercial pilot training and worked for a few thousand hours in industry, I shouldn't need to tell them which way up the airplane goes, right? I should be able to assume a basic grasp of the concepts embodied by hydraulic and electrical power. But the little voice that caused the person who made that slide to include the instruction above spoke to me. It tells me I should explain that the hydraulic system is a means of transmitting a pushing force at a distance, around corners, by means of fluid pressurize. And I've figured out how to do it too. I'll invite non-pilots in the organization, people who do flight following and who might benefit from knowing what "we have a hydraulic problem" could mean to the beginning of the session and load them up with a quick overview of "what the pilots already know." In case they don't.

Connecting the Dots

Some people want to hear more about my flights and less about the hotels or the keys or the fuellers or the taxicabs, but my flights are a long sequence of lines with dots on them. Have you ever sat down to play a simple videogame, not a fancy one with a plot and cut sequences and realistic graphics, but the sort you get for your phone that mostly just have dots or blobs you have to shoot or catch, like Bejeweled Blitz or Pac-Man or Space Invaders or Stack the Cats and then looked up four hours later with sore fingers and almost no perception of the time passing? That's whatit's like flying photo survey, except that instead of being filled with guilty self-loathing over having wasted so much time, you have a great feeling of accomplishment of having taken seven hundred twenty three photographs without missing a dot.

Sometimes the lines are parallel with the endpoints lined up, so I can just turn around, and attack the next line, but sometimes the next line is longer or shorter or we skip one, so I need to be directed to the next one before it comes on screen. The scale jumps to zoom in as I approach the lines until it switches to what I call the "jumpscreen." (Yah, because it jumps. My creativity wanes when I'm totally focused on dots.) It depicts the track I have to cruise right down the middle of. The main dots appear on the screen green, then turn yellow and blue and sometimes red. Red is bad, and I should tell the operator if I see a red dot, but he has the same screen and has usually seen it before me, in that he isn't flying an airplane at the same time.

So there are two sorts of dots, the sometimes red one that I have to chase to make it stay in the middle and greem, and the ones on the line that I have to gobble up like Pac-Man. It makes me crave Skittles and Smarties (the Canadian kind: the American kind, which we call Rockets, aren't brightly enough coloured, enough).

I can do engine management, look up new frequencies, and all the other things you do while flying in the few seconds between dots, or in turns. And I listen to my MP3 player through the headset, on a setting that mutes the tunes as soon as there is any activity on the intercom or radio. This also has the effect of shutting the music off right away if I start to sing along, a blessing for the camera operator.

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?

Now It's MY Way

My camera still isn't ready. This is like airplane maintenance: they have to wait for the parts to arrive, and can't say when that will be. The DG works, though. They tell us that it was installed incorrectly to begin with, with not enough screws, and there wasn't even a hole for the missing screw. Odd that it worked for so long.

We're going to Vancouver again, but the GFA shows IFR conditions en route with mixed moderate icing to 16,000'. I look at the shape of the forecast areas in space and time, and judge that by my route and at the time I will pass through the area, I will be safe to file at 16,000'. On V304, that one-way airway I was told I couldn't use earlier. At most I expect a few tendrils of ice-bearing cloud above that altitude and I should be able to get a deviation around them.

The actual weather observed for the first part of the route shows the GFA to be startlingly accurate. The brown scalloped line dividing two types of weather went right through the dots representing the three Edmonton area airports that report weather, and overhead Edmonton there's a cloud shield with its edge running so precisely along that line I wonder if I'm in a simulator. I can see the International, half of City Centre and none of Namao. At sixteen thousand I'm also comfortably above the clouds, for now. And the new heater is still working. Groundspeed is low, though. The operator can see the ETA on the GPS and asks about it, because it's a good bit later than I suggested at the departure briefing. "Will we have to stop for fuel?"

"I'm not planning a fuel stop. This should switch to a tailwind as soon as we get into BC."

The clouds rise ahead of us, some convective shapes, which is why the forecast calls for icing even though it's well below freezing. A pilot expects ice in visible moisture (i.e. cloud, mist or rain) when the temperature is close to freezing, because more than a few degrees above zero, water droplets don't freeze and more than ten degrees below freezing and most of the water is already frozen, thus is unavailable to freeze onto your airplane. In convective cloud there is a lot of rapid vertical motion, so liquid water can be churned up from below into the cold levels above. The GFA is again amazingly accurate at forecasting these clouds sitting just at 16,000'. It is a tremendous economic and safety benefit to have such good forecasts. Anyone who works in Edmonton or Montréal putting out these charts, be proud.

A little further on there are a few tendrils of that cloud poking above 16,000'. I flip on the pitot and prop heat before passing through cloud tops, emerging with just a skim of ice on the windscreen and wing leading edges. It's useful to me to note where I see ice first on this airplane. Out in the sunshine again the ice sublimates. I dodge a few tops and then I'm into another cloud for a bit longer. Yeah, I guess now that I know (I believe I have Sarah to thank for the link) that there's ice in there it's time to enact my avoidance plan. I call ATC to climb a couple of hundred feet. They give me a just a moment, then call back with "flight level 200 approved." Uh, that's a bit more than I need. As I apply power to go up I realize what they heard. I explain that I need "two hundred feet" not "FL200" and they assign me 16,000' blocking 17,000'. Perfect. I'm out of all ice and have a nice view and clean wings. There's an overcast in the vicinity of Vancouver that could be interesting, depending on where they hold me. The freezing level is right around the forecast cloud tops. If necessary I can ask for an expedited descent though the region of icing, but I don't expect much, just light rime for a few hundred feet. It will be warm enough below to melt any accumulation off before final.

The headwind switches to a tailwind, an even better one than I had planned on. We'll be a little bit early. The clouds are thinning a little and I can see mountain tops poking through. It's hard to believe that we're over 2000' above the minimum obstacle clearance altitude. The rocks look to be right there. They always do, whenever you fly an IFR procedure in visual conditions, too. The controller asks me if I'm done with the altitude block and I am. The clouds are lower and this type of cloud shouldn't have ice at this altitude, either.

I've put the en route frequency up on COM1, my listening radio and am looking for a good FSS frequency to call to find out what to expect at Vancouver when the operator starts reading me METARs off his iPhone. Is this the way of the future? The FSS won't have anything more current than the METARs, so I try Vancouver's ATIS. I'm still too far out, but at least I have it tuned and ready.

I review the published arrivals for Vancouver and after the next frequency change tell the controller I'm ready for a descent. I'm not pressurized, so it would be nice not to have to dive for the airport at the end. He gives me a couple of descents, first down to fourteen thousand then ending at ten thousand feet, which is just above the cloud deck, and just at freezing. I'm laughing. Everything below me is above freezing, so I don't need to worry about ice on the descent. The controller tells me information charlie is current, and to expect a runway eight.

I'm still unable the ATIS, and I already have a post-it flagging the non-RNAV arrival for the 08s at YVR. I flag and review the ILS for 08R, the runway that goes to the non-secure side of Vancouver airport. I'm coming down V304 towards the airport, but so is everybody and I'm slow. They vector me off the airway, to the north which is a little unnerving, because I'm in IMC and that's where the mountains are, but then they vector me south, to the other side, and then east, away from the airport, descending me to 5000', then 3000', then another vector then another. I hear them advice an American Airlines that they are doing a runway change, so I pull up the approach plates and find the pages for the other end of the runways. The controller tells me to expect 26R, that's the big girls' runway. I tune and identify the ILS and accept another vector, and a descent clearance to 2000', which I'm told to expedite, then another runway change to 26L. I intercept the localizer and am immediately visual and cleared to land. You know, I'm glad I have the autopilot. That was a crazy disorienting set of vectors.

It's actually quite nice at the airport. The weather is all to the east. That's good, because we have work out to the west. Tomorrow.

There's a Comfort Inn right near the airport, but like most of the places I stay, I don't have a chance to enjoy more amenities than the bed and the internet, which tells me the weather will be good again tomorrow, so I should be prepared for an early start.