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.

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.

Helicopter Charter

I'm not currently working with helicopters, either as a charter customer or with a company that operates rotary ring aircraft, but I had to love this trojan horse spam.

Your order for our air commuter services has been received and processed. The chopper will be at your disposal from 3.30 p.m. wednesday to 5.45 tuesday. Once again, the rates are as follows:

1 hour in the air: 824$
Takeoff / Landing: 229$
1 hour down time on the ground: 163$
Longest fly-time is 5 hours.
When flying for longer distances, a co-pilot is needed, and the cost accordingly grows by 133$ an hour.


Bill.doc 747kb


With Respect To You
Nellie Nickerson

The purpose of the spam is to get me to click on "Bill.doc," which in the original is a link to an executable. I have to commend these spammers for the completely awesome vehicle they have chosen for what I assume is a trojan horse of some sort. I love the imagination they bring to the rates. I have chartered a helicopter before, and like an airplane the rates applied to the flight time, regardless of the number of takeoffs and landings, and in this case there was no charge for the thirty minutes or so we spent on the ground between flights with the engine shut down. Perhaps somewhere in the world there is a charter rate schedule like this, but I find it hard to believe that in an aircraft where it can be hard to distinguish between takeoffs and landings, that someone would charge over one quarter of the hourly rate per one. I like the fee per extra crew member; in my experience crew usually get about half the amount clients are billed for their services, which implies that a co-pilot could be making $66 a flight hour.

Pipeline Around the World

We're flying a pipeline today. The pipeline has already been built, so presumably the owners know where it is, but they want pictures of it, and we get paid to take pictures, so we fuel up and go. The flight is a little unusual in that we're training a new camera operator, so there are three people on board. But the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

Linguistic aside I wrote the previous sentence and then tabbed over to my notes file to see what in particular I had to say about the pipeline flight. By pure coincidence, while I scrolled past the random thoughts at the beginning of the file, looking for the flight-by-flight notes, my eyes found something I wrote months ago about the expression I had just used. The grammar of the more the merrier isn't explainable through modern English grammar. The adverbial use of the is a relic of Old English þy, which was originally the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative þæt. So it literally meant something like "in what degree more, in that degree merrier." I think it's cool that I randomly use expressions of such ancient lineage and my language happily accommodates them. The people who have little fits about "hopefully" or "could care less" really don't have a leg to stand on. English has forever been about what people say, not what makes any kind of logical sense.

But merrily and numerously we taxi out for takeoff and persuade the controller to give us a departure clearance. There's a double delay and I wonder if I've managed to file the flight along some airway that is not authorized for use on Tuesdays, but the controllers are just puzzling out where to fling a CVFR flight. The first controller seemed to understand that I was CVFR, but there was a controller handoff between my calling for clearance them receiving it from centre and the new controller gave me an IFR departure. I don't really care. IFR or VFR I'm going to take off, switch to the next frequency, and follow their vectors and altitude restrictions until I'm in my photo blocks, so I accept the departure and follow it after I'm given a take-off clearance. The next controller gives me a vector that is close enough to direct my entry point that it doesn't matter, and I'm cheerfully following it when he calls back.

"Are you IFR or controlled VFR?" he asks.

"I'm on a controlled VFR flight plan."

"Have you been IFR at any point today?"

"I accepted a published IFR departure."

I think he asked me if I considered myself IFR right now. I tried to give him a professional and aviation-speak version of, "Seeing as I'm pointed in the direction I want to go, climbing towards the altitude I want, I really don't care." If we didn't have the op spec for extended single-pilot IFR duty days it might matter, but as it is it makes literally no difference to me. The only functional difference between VFR and IFR in cruise on a nice day is whether I have to read back clearances or not. And in busy airspace where most traffic is IFR, I often read back VFR clearances to fit in with the crowd. Technically under IFR the controller not me is responsible for my terrain and traffic, but it's not like I'm really abdicating those responsibilities, especially as I can see the terrain.

It shouldn't make that much difference to the controller, either. Under CVFR he's responsible for separating me from other traffic. That's the whole purpose of CVFR: to allow VFR traffic in airspace where IFR separation is required. But I don't mind. I wish I knew the words to make this controller happy. He tells me I'm CVFR and I'm happy with that. He hnds me off to another frequency.

The pipeline goes into the foothills, so that's where we're working. Usually I get a clearance for such and such photo blocks, for such an such a block altitude and then I just work, without a peep out of the controllers. But this lady won't give me a block altitude. I have to ask for every altitude change and heading change, and as often as not it's denied. There's traffic at that altitude, I can't have it. We end up skipping some lines for cloud and other lines because we just can't get by the controller. The thing about filing photo blocks is that theoretically they are supposed to give you the whole block, yours, exclusively. It never really works that way, and I wouldn't really want it to, but this controller doesn't get what is going on.

If I want to fly direct Calgary at 11,000' and there's traffic preventing me from doing so, I can continue towards Calgary at 9000' until the traffic is by me, then accept the climb to 11,000' and I have been inconvenienced only a tiny bit. If my direct Calgary course is 150 degrees and I'm restricted to south for five minutes, I've still been making progress towards Calgary and not a lot of time has been wasted in the five minutes before the controller says, "cleared direct Calgary." But if I want to fly along a line that starts exactly here and goes to exactly there on a track of 150.27 degrees (yes, my heading is displayed in front of me to two decimal places. I remember thinking +/-5 degrees on the commercial flight test was rigourous) at 11,000', it is completely useless to me to be cleared along it at 9000'. And if I need to turn NOW to get onto the line, a five minute heading restriction is worse than useless, because it will have carried me five minutes away from the start of the line and I have to turn around and go back.

In order to improve efficiency I start calling her a few dots before the end of a line, multitasking with my radio call and my dot tracking to try and get the next turn or next altitude approved before I hit the last dot and am ready to turn. It's a little overloading, as I'm focusing almost all my attention on those little dots and don't have a lot of attention over for the designations of photo blocks. The conversation is supposed to go like this:

Me: "In one mile Dotsmasher One requests left turn to zero eight five at one four thousand seven hundred."

Her: "Dotsmasher One cleared left turn zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred."

Me: "Left zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred, Dotsmasher One."

Her: "Readback correct."

Yeah, what is usually me flying around doing what I need to has turned into a four line conversation. And what is really going on includes both operators telling me what I need next and me reading back what they have said if it isn't clear or I think I have forgotten. So sometimes when I ask the controller for an altitude and she approves it I just say "Dotsmasher One." She corrects me snippily when I miss or muss a readback and the second time I apologize with, "Sorry, I'm just not feeling as though I'm IFR today." I'm turning and swooping and visually negotiating hills. There's a pause as she talks to other traffic then she calls me back just to deride me for that comment. "It doesn't matter," she says, "whether you are VFR or IFR you must always read back assigned altitudes and headings." I just bite my tongue on that one. It's a nice sunny day and she's stuck in a box with a screen while I get to fly in the mountains. I do my best to read everything back and am glad when our progress is sufficient that I am passed on to the next controller.

I give him a request based on the town I know we are working our way towards, then I realize I'm overhead it. Despite the cranky clearances we've been making good progress. The new controller finally gives us a block of airspace and leaves us alone. We keep flying along the pipeline, watching the scenery go by. There are some clouds on the horizon, but we hope we can complete the job before they cast shadows on our work. The senior operator says he wants someone to build a pipeline around the world so we can fly it, segment by segment, all the way around the world. I'd like to do that too, but I tell him he'd have to give me a bit more notice of where he wanted to land so I could arrange customs clearance. We're almost finished when clouds arrive and we're done for the day. We spiral down out of the sky towards the nearest airport for fuel.

The FSS there has a single in the circuit but no other traffic, and I let him know how many minutes I'll be in descent before arriving. I descend over a nearby navaid, then head for the airport when I can arrive at circuit altitude at a reasonable speed and descent rate. He points me out as arriving traffic, calling me a Piper Cherokee. I'm not usually too picky about what controllers call me, as long as they call me cleared to land, but I correct that one. If you're looking for a single and a twin turns up on final you may think you have a conflict.

Airports mostly look the same once you're on the ground, even if they are quite large, because you can't really see that far. We taxi to the self-serve fuel pumps and I shut down and fill out the logbook for the flight. The operator discovers that he has forgotten the company credit card, and his personal credit card doesn't work. Can I possibly ...?

I have an insane credit limit from all those years of ferrying airplanes around North America, so I toss them my credit card as I head to the terminal to find a washroom. I open the door to the terminal and see that there are airline counters and uniformed security inside. I have my pilot licence with me, but I need to make sure I can get back out again. I wave down one of the security guys and make sure he'll let me out. He tells me the code to get back out the door, and says it's written on the outside. Oops, didn't see it. I use the washroom, pick up the payphone to file an ordinary VFR flight plan home, and go back out the door. The code is written on the outside in teeny, tiny letters I didn't see. The senior operator is coming in as I go out. I tell him the code and he says, "I know." He's been here before.

It's funny these little airports. They're all the same to me. There's nothing in the CFS to indicate which ones have which level of security. It's not a function of runway length or altitude or type of air traffic service or of any other published datum. You land and look for somwhere to dump the contents of your bladder, and at some that means watering the grass at the edge of the taxiway while at others it means running the gauntlet of CATSA and throngs of passengers at the x-ray machines. It's disorienting, and without local knowledge you have to be on your toes to walk in the correct door, know the correct codes, have the correct documents and get back to your airplane.

In the meantime a small airliner has landed, but it doesn't need the fuel pumps. We all get back in the airplane and take off before the airliner needs out. We fly home. It takes a quarter the time to get back as it did to get here, because we're not circling around to get on the right lines, and we're talking only to traffic on 126.7 until it's time to talk to the airport controllers.

I land and taxi in, and the boss is waiting with a cheque for the exact amount of the fuel. The operator called ahead with the amount. Fastest expense reimbursement ever.

Unwarranted Apocolyptic Speculation

The Federal Aviation Administration is the United States agency responsible for air traffic control, aviation permits and licensing, regulatory enforcement and other air safety roles. It's kind of like Transport Canada and Nav Canada rolled into one. They are a government body, a subsidiary of the US Department of Transportation, so natually they are federally funded. The federal bill (bill as in proposed legislation, not as in a really, really large denomination banknote) that provided funding to the FAA expired almost four years ago, so ever since the agency has been financed through a series of twenty temporary extensions to that bill, as the parties involved haven't been able to reach a new long term agreement.

I would tell you what the contentious point was in the negotiations, but after so many iterations, it may be that the issues on the bill that won't pass are not the original issues. To prevent a bill from passing, or to force passage of legislation that opponents would otherwise vote down, American politicians can attach tangentially related riders to each others bills, and also name them, so that a bill proposing that no one under twenty-one be permitted to have a e-mail account could be called the "Anyone who opposes this bill is a pedophile bill of 2011" or a bill forbidding convicted pedophiles from working in ice-cream trucks could have a rider attached to it that forbade teaching kids under twelve what a condom was. So the people are discouraged from voting down either hypothetical bill lest they be branded pedophilephiles. My information on U.S. politics is largely derived from late night comedy shows, so check the comments for knowledgeable Americans explaining how this system makes sense.

Anyway, the new FAA funding bill seems to be held up by a point of labour relations, that would return airline and railroad workers to an older system of voting to form unions. The old system allowed unionization in a airline workplace only if a majority of eligible voters vote yes. That is, anyone who doesn't bother to vote is counted as a no. That sets apathy to the employers' advantage and seems to me to be open to abuse through intimidation, because employers can identify the unionizers through who attends the polls, so it jeopardizes the idea of secret ballot. The new system, only recently ruled valid, allows employees of airlines and railroads to form a union by a simple majority of only those voting. That goes too far in the other direction, in my opinion, because it allows a small group of committed unionizers to take advantage of widespread apathy and establish a union that wasn't generally wanted. I would propose a compromise that requires both a majority of votes cast, and a majority of the eligible voters to turn out. After all, if the majority of the workers can't be arsed to go to the polls to change their working conditions, I'm thinking those working conditions can't be so bad. It's still open to intimidation or employer tricks--e.g. manipulating shifts--to keep people from voting, but it avoids assigning opinions to people who didn't express them. The Democrats (the leftmost of the two main American parties) don't want to go back to the old way, so they want the labour issue removed from the bill, thus are preventing that bill from passing.

In retaliation, or some differently-worded political version thereof, the Republicans (the rightmost most of the two parties) have worded the twenty-first iteration of the extension to the old FAA funding bill to include a provision eliminating federal subsidies for airline service to thirteen rural airports, including of course airports in the constituencies of some prominent Democrats. I note that requiring market-based prices for service from rural airports would not cut people off from food or medical attention without air service. These are places like Ely, Nevada (four hours drive from Las Vegas or Salt Lake City), Glendive, Montana (three and a half hours out of Billings) and Morgantown, West Virginia (an hour and a half drive from Pittsburgh), all on paved, year-round highways. Each of those towns has its own hospital and real grocery stores. Morgantown seems pretty odd to be on that list. I think there are people in Toronto who have to drive more than an hour and a half to get to an airport with scheduled service. And the non-subsidized fares are dirt cheap. I found a round trip from Billings to San Francisco for $118! There must be some historical reason for the subsidies.

All of the above is ignorable background to what I think is the most interesting point, that if the dispute isn't resolved, the FAA's operating authority would expire. Air traffic controllers are deemed an essential service and would continue to work, but 32,000 other FAA employees: presumably inspectors, examiners, file clerks, janitors, approach designers, dangerous goods safety coordinators and all manner of other people I'm not thinking of would be out of work. I found it especially interesting that with the FAA losing its mandate in that way, they would also lose the ability to levy and collect fees. People I know in the appropriate level of US airlines are actually looking at ways to refund or stop charging FAA fees if this happens.

I'm pretty sure the delay is just a game of political chicken, and that the deadlock may be broken by the time this even posts, but it's kind of freaky to think that this is the way a country would go from a world power to a failed state. One by one government agencies would lose their ability to function. While a lot of what any given agency does might be unneeded bureaucracy, once the normal way to get a pilot licence has gone away, you'd presumably get one by paying a guy who kept the machine that prints them after his last paycheque bounced. Or maybe they'd consolidate and transfer the authority to another overworked agency, until the police or the military run everything.

Please forgive me, south-of-the-border (and north of the other one) readers for mangling your political system. Blame the news media, summer heat, and the desire to post this before it became entirely irrelevant, as opposed to after doing sufficient research.

Last Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emergency Headset

I'm not sure if I mentioned that I have had some communications difficulties with ATC lately, missing calls, or having to have parts of calls repeated. I thought it was distraction, working with a new task or missing an unfamiliar callsign, but taxiing in at Vancouver I realized that moving the cord made a difference to whether or not I could transmit. What a time for my headset to die. I could get it repaired, but that would involve express shipping it to the manufacturer in Portland, Oregon and back. And I'd have no headset in the meantime.

Or no good headset. There are a couple of spare headsets in the airplane, but wow, sorry, if you've used a good noise cancelling headset for over ten years, passive no longer cuts it. I wonder how people managed with those things. I have to do a PPC ride and work in the flight levels. I can't not have it work.I was an early adopter of noise cancelling technology, reasoning that I only had the one set of ears. People laughed at my bulky earcups, but then they tried it and they bought them too.

I suppose there may be some readers unfamiliar with noise cancelling. It's also called active noise reduction (ANR), active noise cancellation, and probably some other things. Each manufacturer has its own jargon. It works by having a little microphone in each ear cup, sampling the sound that's getting in there, and then generating a noise that is the exact opposite of that noise, cancelling out the first noise. It works because sound is not a thing with form, but only exists as squished and stretched out parts in the air, so you play a sound that squishes and stretches the air in the exact opposite way, and the result is much less sound. There is no time travel technology associated, so it can't predict the future, therefore takes a moment to cut in, and works best on steady sounds, like engines, and therefore actually allows you to hear irregular sounds, like something going "clunk" or someone speaking, even better. The sound dampening provided by merely having something clamped over your ears is called passive protection, and the total hearing protection offered by a headset is the combination of active and passive. Less expensive headsets offer only passive noise reduction.

The noise cancellation still works on mine, but the wiring inside the cord has probably broken. Also the headband doesn't fit as securely and the earseals always fall off overnight. After five thousand hours of service, the headset owes me nothing. I was planning to replace it soon, but had hoped to have leisure to compare and test different headsets.

Fortunately there is a headset dealer at the Vancouver airport, less than a kilometre from where the airplane is parked. I bring my old one and then get straight to the point. "Hi, this is broken. I need a comfortable, high quality ANR headset that fits small. What do you have in stock?" The clerk asks me what my budget is. I know how much a good ANR headset costs, "A thousand dollars," I say, in a way that is intended to convey that I'll pay more if that's what it costs. (Yeah, none of the tools of my trade come cheap). I know that I can't buy new ears, that an airspace violation could cost me that much in fines, and a botched clearance could kill me. I can see the display case of headsets, but instead of going over to it and showing me what's available, he disappears to the back of the store without another word. Weird.

I look at headsets for a while. There are some David Clarks, but while they are the unrivaled leader in durability and movie appearances, they were late on the ANR bandwagon. I remember a guy who sold a homebrew ANR conversion for DCs, and it was better than what the company itself came out with. There's a Telex, but not the ANR model. I think the only ANR headset there is a Bose. Another salesman comes out to help me. I think the first guy figured he didn't know enough about the headsets to deal with me and went to get the expert. The Bose is comfortable, fits me, has good noise cancelling. You can't really tell if a headset is going to work for you until you've flown with it, but it's significant;y lighter than the old headset, and has an excellent reputation and warrantee, including a thirty-day satisfaction return policy. Ordinarily I'd buy a headset letting the seller know I was taking it for a test flight, but when I take off from here I don't know where I will land. I'll take this one based on reputation: I'm sure it will be good enough, and given a chance to test the newest model from other manufacturers, I can mail it back if they are significantly better for me.

I tell him I'll take one. But as I haven't pre-ordered, he doesn't have any in stock. And he's not getting more until September. Bose has a US military supply contract and therefore aren't super concerned about getting their headsets in small retailers' hands.

"What about this one?" I ask, of the display model. He quickly decides that it's worth selling it to me, and puts it in its box. Comes to over $1200 with the taxes. It's a Bose A20 with Bluetooth connectivity, an extra option I wasn't planning on spending $100 on, but that's what it has. Bluetooth is kind of a joke for me as my cellphone is so old it doesn't even have a jack for a handsfree headset, and I still have two perfectly functional non-Bluetooth MP3 players. Come to think of it, I bought the cellphone in a similar, "NEED PHONE NOW!" panic. Is this the way I live my life? I guess some people keep a constant awareness of products they might need, knowing which one they want most at any moment so that when their current one dies they can replace it with confidence. Actually, don't answer that. The normal way is to replace your stuff before it wears out, with newer and better. I like my stuff and hate discarding functional things. I'm going to see if I can get my camera repaired, for example.

So I stash the old headset in the back of the airplane and set up the new one. Comfy!

Also I've noticed that at least two numbers (37 and 107) have two takers each in the sunglasses contest. You don't have to read all the submissions, but to increase your chances, double-check your choice by using the "find" command on the comment list to see if it's already been picked. I'll leave the contest open until we run out of numbers or the first appropriate (not raining at destination) flight after I get a working camera, whichever comes first.

Not Being a Chicken

The Statistics Canada people called back to follow up on my employment status. Did I work in the last 30 days? Well, yes and no. I got a job offer. I went somewhere on my employer's dime and I worked hard at learning things, but I didn't get paid and I didn't get a job out of it, so no. I just tell them the story and let the interviewer encode it the way they want. He probably had a training course on it, and everything. I was looking forward to being a positive datum in the survey. I redouble my efforts to make that happen next month.

I hate online application forms that require me to enter "expected salary" and won't let you go to the next page without it. At least with a paper one you can enter a range or write something vague. Some of the ones I've hit lately ones verify that I enter one proper number. I apply to a couple of jobs at my current level, jobs I should be able to get, but not jobs that advance my career.

The phone rings, I answer with my name. The person actually listens to what I said, then uses my name as he asks to speak to someone else, a male name. There's no one by that name who lives here. I tell him that and he thanks me and hangs up. I psych myself into believing that he bailed because he didn't like the way I sound. I try to knock myself out of that headspace to in order to write sincere, enthusiastic cover letters.

When I run spellcheck on what I've got and it complains about my e-mail address, the non-blog e-mail on my resume, not the cockpitconversation one. It suggests I replace it with one of:

magnetohydrodynamical
electromagnetically
recrystallization
buckminsterfullerene
inapproachable

If you can reverse engineer that, send me an e-mail!

I make a note of that for the blog, then read some e-mail and write an unrelated blog entry. Now what was I doing? Oh yeah, I was revising my resume.

I didn't apply for a job in Yorkton. Nor to another one in the north, posted by an employer who doesn't know the difference between the shift and the caps lock key, for a company that ten years ago had a 'don't bother applying' reputation where women were concerned. The guy probably thinks ovaries interfere with the operation of the rudder pedals. You can picture him, in a tractor hat, typing with two fingers and a pained expression on his face. He can skin a moose, load it into a plane, fly bush IFR and finish off a mickey of rye on the way home. Be assured I'm not implying anything about the particular operator. I don't know him, and for all I know the shift-key-challenged person is a twenty-five year old female. It just amuses me to construct a picture of the boss I'm not applying to serve. The job is in a town where I really don't want to live, and I don't have the particular time they favour, anyway.

Actually, I always summon up a picture of the person I'm writing to. Sometimes I know what they look like, and I usually know what their airport and hangar look like. I imagine them reading my e-mail and looking at my resume and being pleased with what they see. I also picture myself there. I'm not doing it as some kind of New Age visualization process, it's just what I happen to do. I commit to things.

It's irritating the number of little changes I made in my life because I thought I had a new job, and now I have to undo them, or just feel their reminder all the time. They were tiny things like changing the default airports and towns I see the weather for when I check my iPod touch, and rearranging my sock drawer to make it easier to grab the black ones when I get dressed in the morning. The black ones used to be at the bottom, or permanently in my suitcase. I did a bunch of menu planning and associated grocery shopping to make flight bag lunches, so I have to use that up, and kick myself every time. It's also harder to settle down and apply to okay jobs when I can still taste the fine one that got away.

Five Freaking Kilograms

A pilot licence is not valid without an accompanying medical certificate. The medical 'certificate' is now a rubber stamp initialled by the doctor in the same booklet as the licence sticker, but the terminology of 'certificate' and 'accompanying' persists, just like 'dialing' and 'hanging up' a telephone. When I'm working I usually get the medical renewed in the month before it expires, or occasionally I have to get it done the month before that, if I'm going to be working in the states right through the last month of validity. I thought of not renewing my medical when I wasn't sure when I'd be working, just to save a few dollars, but one doesn't want to be applying for jobs with an invalid medical, risking being called for an interview the next day and not being able to get a renewal in time. And I'm kind of wary about running around with no medical. It seems as though I might be scrutinized more closely renewing a lapsed medical than a current one.

A pilot's medical certification expires at midnight on the first of the month, and I have a nine a.m. appointment on the second. For nine hours I'm not certified to fly airplanes. I can cope. Maybe I should have stretched it for another month. But I didn't. I woke up, dug my licence out of my flight bag, looked up my flight time in the last ninety days (zero!) and in the last twelve months in my logbook, drank three glasses of water, and went to the doctor's office.

On arrival there's a form to fill out. These guys print out the usually persistent information from last year's form and just ask me to make any corrections. I also fill in the flight hours, check "no" to the question about aviation accidents since my last medical, and answer the question about consulting a physician since my last medical. Let's see, there was the eye infection, a routine cervical cancer screening test, and all the vaccinations for going to Cambodia. I can't remember anything else. I always feel like I'm going to be arrested later for forgetting that I sought medical attention for some long healed malady. Maybe I should keep a special file. I fill in everything I remember and hand the form back.

Now I'm given a paper cup. (That's what drinking all that the water was for). Unlike Sulako's experience, I'm not subjected to the sight of other people's urine samples. I can't find the link. He must have taken the photo down. It was pretty traumatic. I just leave mine on the toilet tank as instructed, wash my hands and proceed to exam room one.

I know the drill, so I take off my shoes jump on the scale and start sliding the weights to my weight. Except that the pointer on the balance is still hard against the upper stop. I slide the weight forward a kilogram. Another. Another. Another. Another. I have gained five freaking kilograms since my last medical. I start looking for what can be wrong with the scale. The tech comes in and I'm trying to inspect my own butt to figure out where I'm putting five unnecessary kilograms. I continue to rant about it right through the eye test. Stand here, cover your right eye, read the lowest comfortable line on the chart. Repeat with other eye. Repeat with glasses on. The chart is badly lit and I have to go a few lines up with my glasses off, but I can read the bottom line easily with my glasses. I take the glasses off again and read the small text on a piece of card she hands me. I think it's something from Dickens. I always wonder how many people memorize eye charts to keep their licence. She also has me go through a few pages of the Ishahara colour blindness test.

Next is the ECG. Clothes off except for underpants, wear a little paper vest and lie on the table. Technician sticks gel stickers all over me, from clavicle to ankle, and then hooks up electronic leads to them all. She looks at a machine for a few minutes and then unhooks me and peels off the stickers. They don't stick tightly enough to hurt.

I weigh myself again with the clothes off, but it only brings me by 1.5 kilograms (how do my clothes weigh that much?), and besides I am always weighed in my streetclothes. The doctor wants to examine me in the next room. The scale there is in pounds, but when I do the conversion it is giving the same result. I really have gained five kilograms. I continue to rant about this while he asks me questions that presumably test my mental health. I think a woman ranting about her weight is considered normal, so I pass, but hmm, I put on some winter weight last year too. This is not a good habit. There will be no sugar, alcohol or snack foods until I am back where I'm supposed to be.

The doctor has me follow a bright light with my eyes, stare straight ahead while he moves a pen around to test my peripheral vision, and then shines a light in my ears, one after the other. Usually I try to bring home a picture of some cool piece of apparatus, or a new medical fact from these things, but I'm too traumautized by the weight gain. Five kilograms is half a shopping bag full of butter. Where is it?! Maybe I need my eyes checked again. According to this chart I have BMI of 21, putting me in the normal weight range for my height, but there has to be something wrong with that. It thinks I could gain twelve more kilograms and still be a healthy weight. I'd have rolls of fat hanging off me at that. I don't weigh that much with my flight bag.

The doctor uses his stethoscope to listen to the noises my heart, and lungs make, from the back and front, and then probes my throat and abdomen for abnormalities. I am sufficiently normal to pass his inspection, so he stamps and signs my licence and then I pay at the front. Including the ECG it's just under $200.

One Is the Loneliest Number

During a career preparation talk at flight school, an administrator asked my class what we though the greatest single threat to our career progress was. I had a ready answer, "the advent of the single-crew airliner cockpit." I remember getting the most supercilious glare possible from the instructor before being told the correct answer was "recession." I don't think she was thinking long term. Recessions come and go, was my opinion. But once the airlines' pilot complement halves, it's game over.

She said that would never happen, but while it isn't as inevitable as death, taxes, and the next recession, it's not an impossibility. It would require a lot of advances in automation, and telemetry, and security, but such things have considerably reduced the number of people in airplane cockpits over the years. It's a bigger jump from two to one, but I don't think it could never happen. It would make flying a lot less fun and somewhat less safe, but probably more cost effective for the airlines. At first. Then after twenty years or so of the system operating, accidents would spike. As much as I rant about both people in the pointy end being pilots, and the first officer/co-pilot not being a trainee, there is a bit of an apprenticeship going on. The new hire FO doesn't know as much about flying an A320 as the captain does (and sometimes the new hire direct-entry captain doesn't know as much as the experienced FO) but together they have the experience to get the job done. The pilot with the experience appropriate to a situation will take over if they suspect the conditions may be beyond the other's abilities. The newer pilot learns from the other and gains experience without it having to be paid in blood or bent metal. By having to be the person who knows what is going on, even if you don't, you learn more. Kind of like being a parent. Having a single-crew cockpit with a ground-based telemetric backup wouldn't provide the same apprenticeship-type situation. And that might not be so cost effective in the end.

Ryanair carries most international passengers of any airline in the world. Most of these are short hop European flight. They have cheap tickets, and the cheesiest nickle-and-diming fee structure imaginable. For example, they charge you money, I think it's five euros, as an online check-in fee. But you have to check in online. There is no airport check in available. Your base fare might be only twenty euros, but they charge extra for everything. The obvious jokes about "insert two euros to start the flow of oxygen, then place the mask over your nose and mouth, securing behind your head with the optional (one euro) elastic strap," have all been made. The company even makes the jokes.

It's a little scary because you can't tell when they're serious. The Irish accent is hard to take seriously -- sorry, Irish people, some kind of cultural thing. They're semi-serious about eliminating the copilot, according to this Salon article.

I'm not in a position to replay the YouTube clip out loud right now, so you'll have to tell my why my notes for this post say "strip poker." And if it doesn't make sense, I'll have to make something up about Ryanair getting passengers to play strip poker for available seats, in order to facilitate security screening.

Test Flight

I stay in the hotel this morning, anticipating the airplane working in the p.m. and me needing a fresh duty day. I believe they cleared some small deferred snags in the morning and then I joined them for lunch and to check Greyhound for our package. The AME returns to the truck swearing. He has the package. The disinterested girl at the counter has just told him it arrived yesterday. He says he didn't even bother telling her, "You just cost the company $10,000," because she wasn't going to care.

He manages to remove the old servo in an hour, but it takes three to put it on and reassemble the airplane. We go for dinner, where the service is terrible. The waitress never looks at us. She has admirable breasts, and probably complains about people staring at them, but lady the "my eyes are up here" thing works both ways. We get pretty much all of our service requests relayed through a waitress who is working in a different section.

After dinner the AME starts the paperwork. He asks me to check the throttle and mixture cable connections inside the engine, something I haven't been officially assigned before. After verifying that they are attached and that the levers have proper cockpit travel I sign part of the paperwork, too. I've signed many times after a test flight for the airplane conforming to the type, but this is my first dual signature for the work itself. The law allows me to do this as the pilot of the airplane, because I'm expected to know how it should work.

We run up and taxi out for a test flight. The AME wants to fly, so I do the same thing I did as a flight instructor: have him taxi along the centreline of the taxiway so I can see his control. The taxiway is wiggly here, as it goes around the terminal loading area, and he follows the line adequately, so I have him do the take-off. We start with full static power (that is: advance the throttles to full while holding the brakes) to see that the correct power is developing with all the temperatures and pressures correct. It is, so we release the brakes and I let him drive for the take-off roll. I call rotation and coach him to the correct attitude for a blue line climb. Everything looks good and I bring back the power to slow cruise. There's no one around, so it doesn't matter where we go. He does a couple of airborne doughnuts and everything is fine, so I direct him to a downwind back towards the airport and ask him to reduce the throttles by one inch of manifold pressure. He pulls about five inches off and jockeys them back and forth trying to get it right. "Just so you know," I explain, "That's what pilots mean if we complain about a throttle being oversensitive. These aren't that bad, but sometimes they can be almost impossible to set with one motion.

I ask him if he knows how to use the trim, which he does, theoretically, because he knows how to repair it, but he didn't expect the trim to be so sensitive, either. He knows it's about seven turns from one end to the other, so puts in a quarter turn instead of just nudging it, and startles himself. I take over and approach to land. There's no PAPI approach slope indicator on this runway and he asks about that. It's only on the opposite runway. We land and then he tells me we have to let the engines cool off a bit for five minutes and then go up again.

This time I fly a quick circuit, to land back on the end of the runway that has the PAPI, so he can see it. He points out that I have left the emergency fuel pumps on for the whole circuit and I agree. I leave them on any time that it would be severely inconvenient to have an engine quit. If I were teaching a student to fly circuits I'd have them turn them off reaching circuit altitude and on again on downwind with prelanding checks, but for one circuit I deliberately leave them on for the whole time. I put down the gear and turn base, then final. He looks at the PAPI on short final and quotes "four red you're dead!" I explain that if we follow the PAPI exactly to keep two red and two while all the way to the runway we land 1000' in, so since we have to turn around and backtrack the runway to get off, I'm landing on the numbers, which to the PAPI is way low.

We return to parking and I text the PRM with the successful outcome. He replies "Next time don't do a test flight at night." We look around. I guess it might be getting a bit dark now, but I don't think it's night. I didn't check specifically, but usually one can tell. I text back that it's not night yet. He texts back "At 10 p.m.?!" I check with Flight Services. Night officially started six minutes after we landed. We're good. The PRM meanwhile has considered our latitude and conceded that it might still be light here.

I sign the part in the logbook that says the airplane can fly the way it's supposed to, and we head to Boston Pizza where I buy the AME a beer, because he worked hard and I know he's broke. He offers me a sip and laughs at me when I look at my watch before accepting it. That's ingrained. I am never going to be "oops" illegal on a flight as far as alcohol is concerned.

The HSI still doesn't work, and it can't be replaced with the copilot side directional gyro because that DG is driven by pneumatic suction and the HSI is electric, so the connections aren't the same. We're technically legal for night or IFR now because there's another VOR and an NDB, and the law doesn't say where the heading indicator has to be, but a scan involving a heading instrument on the other side of the cockpit isn't the most fun thing to do.

---

Also, there's still time to enter the contest to win a book by telling me your favourite true aviation story, personal or historical. Judging in a couple of days.

Going for the Goldilocks

The first time I ever renewed my instrument rating I did poorly on the ground portion. I think because I had just aced all the airline transport pilot exams and the instrument rating exam itself didn't seem that long in the past, I felt I knew the material and that it was easy. But while being grilled by the examiner I wasn't properly prepared to apply the concepts. It's a terrible feeling, and I think it was the look of horror on my face as I realized that I was not able to rattle off the answers I should know that made the examiner pass me on the ground. He debriefed me with words to the effect of "I know you'll learn that better now." I believe I have scored perfect marks on the ground on every instrument ride and PPC since, so he was correct. I never take it for granted that I know the material anymore.

This flight test will be an instrument renewal, not a PPC, which is subtly different and I haven't done an instrument renewal for quite a few years, because a PPC counts as a renewal if you ask the examiner to check that box, and there are few circumstances when you wouldn't want him to. So I'm nervous about what I might be asked that I haven't been asked on PPCs, which usually focus more on the airplane itself than on the general instrument questions. I leaf through the CAP GEN and other publications, looking for the killer questions. What has been updated that I haven't paid attention to? I know I can refer to this booklet during the the exam, just as I can in real life, but I don't know what I don't know. I book a briefing with Oak and ask him to quiz me hard to find what I don't know.

He asks me questions and tunes up some of my answers, suggesting much better, thorough answers. He asks me some GPS questions, even though I've opted not to use an unfamiliar GPS on the flight test. We go through the CAP [instrument apporach plate booklet] looking for tricky procedures. I've been to lots of places and keep getting off track telling him stories.

He also examines my calculations and chides me for estimating. I'm used to doing everything in block fuel and rounding in the safest direction, only resorting to exact amounts if the generous block fuel allowances are very close to not being enough fuel. I promise to do it properly for the exam. He thinks he has found an error in my chase chart landing distance calculation, but I suggest that he may have used the take-off weight and winds for the landing calculation, and he did. The nav log should make it clearer what values you are using to calculate. It's an easy slip to make, and a scared candidate on an exam might not realize that the examiner used the wrong starting values, and would accept an error. Or more importantly for real life, a crewmember should be able to check another crewmember's work.

After half an hour Oak says he thinks I'm good. I haven't felt challenged yet, and demand more, "Come on, ask me the stuff you would ask me if I were an overconfident jerk student and you needed to slap me down." He insists that he has given me his hard questions and I've done fine, pointing out a couple that are supposed to be trick questions but for which I overleapt the trick and dug into territory beyond that he wasn't even asking for. I know what ccw means on the description of a departure procedure. I know that twenty/twenty -one feet is the crossover between rounding up and rounding down forecast ceilings. I know how to do cold temperature corrections. I can slide alternate minima. I let him off the hook.

He tells the dispatcher to bill for 40 minutes briefing. I correct that to an hour. "But we weren't really briefing the whole time," he protests.

I explain, "If you waste time telling silly stories, then I don't have to pay for it, but if I waste time telling stories then I have to pay for it." I've been a flight instructor. The weather is good now, but he needs those extra few bucks to make sure he eats in November.

We go flying again and I misread my own writing on the hold clearance, holding on the wrong inbound track until he points it out. I also do a poor circling approach. I momentarily bust the circling minimum on the approach, because I had the straight in one in my head, then after I rescue that quickly enough to score a weak but passing two, I overcompensate for yesterday's too steep approach and descend too low, as I circle through base and final for the runway.

We discuss having another flight but I decide not to. My rating is not long enough expired to require his recommendation for the test: legally I could have taken it with no practice at all. It won't reflect badly on him if I don't pass, and I explain that these are my faults, this is me. I'm not the Top Gun and if ten years and thousands of hours of flying haven't cured me of bonehead moves, then one or two or ten more practice flights won't either. I'll go for the goldilocks circling approach (not too high, not too low) on the exam and try to keep my wits about me.

I thank him for all his help and then go back to the lake to study and fret for a few days, because the flight test is booked for next week.

And here's a guy in China who built his own airplane out of what appears from the photo caption to have been scraps of reclaimed material.

Bad Risk

My coworkers is married and getting a mortgage, so wants insurance. He asked on company e-mail if anyone knew of a company that would sell him life insurance for a reasonable price. I don't have any life insurance, but I have always had property or renter's insurance as appropriate, so I asked my insurance company if they covered pilots. They said:

Dear Mr. Anonymous,
Thank you for the inquiry with Canada Life. Yes, we do approve commercial pilots.

However, each case is underwritten individually, and individual circumstances are evaluated. We look at the total number of solo hours, age of the applicant, locations where the flying is done, what kind of hazardous conditions are involved, and more.

After an application is received, from a commercial pilot, we would either mail out our aviation questionnaire if the applicant prefers, or we can have our teleunderwriters gather the information by doing a telephoned interview. This is our fastest way to have a final decision on an insurance application.

I'm not going to object to a knowledgeable analysis of the risk posed by a particular client but solo hours? Solo hours become largely irrelevant after finishing the requirements of the private licence. It makes the insurance company sound like someone's mother. He's already spoken to this company, it turns out, and they gave him a quote that seems to indicate they don't think he has good odds to last out the year. I guess he doesn't have enough "solo hours" for them.

And yes, they did call me Mister.

I Thank You All

You wonderful, wonderful people! I always knew I was blessed with some of the best readers on the internet, so I shouldn't be surprised that you can put your money where your fingers are. I posted my request to fund Cambodian building materials on a Sunday night, knowing that not many people read on the weekend, but that Monday would be a big traffic day, and hoping that perhaps a few people would see fit to contribute to the cause. It looks like more people read on the weekend than I thought. Before midnight we had enough for at least half a house! It literally brings tears to my eyes that so many people are willing to share in this way.

I giggled at the rationalizations you came up with for the various eCards you chose. You're right, it's a somewhat odd selection to go with charity donations, but it was fun clicking on them. I think dandelions and kittens were the leading choices. The pictures didn't matter because your words (and numbers, as that was the point of the exercise) carried the message.

I don't even know what the current total is, because many of you let me know you donated without telling me the amount of your donation. I estimate you have given enough to build at least two houses. In a couple of days I've gone from feeling the responsibility of being the out-of-town team member who isn't there to pull her weight at the pub fundraiser nights, to the completely different responsibility of being the one whom all of you have entrusted to take the materials you have purchased and make them into a real home for someone whose own community has judged them worthy.

It really is that simple. The money has to be all collected eight weeks before the build because the administrators use it to literally purchase lumber and nails and tin and concrete. Local contractors will lay the foundation and frame the houses before we arrive, and then we complete them. I and my team will arrive and presumably see your donations laid out on a tarp. I'll photograph that and then get to work assembling them into the very best homes I can provide.

For me personally this will be a rewarding, exciting experience because I get to travel to a part of the world where I've never been; see cultural and historical sites; attempt communication in some combination of English, French, Russian and Khmer; build something with my own two hands and give people a gift that proportionately will be the biggest most important gift I've ever had the opportunity to give anyone. Giving a home to someone who really needs it is generally the province of a government, corporation, or billionaire.

I think it make a difference as a person grow up what he or she believes the world thinks or expects, and that a child who discovers that the world cares enough to build his family a house will care about the world in return. You've all won yourselves good karma, and if at any time in the future you're feeling that you're not appreciated or not doing anything worthwhile, remember that there's a family in Cambodia whose kids might have died without you.

It's possible I could raise more money with a month-long nagging blog fundraising drive, but the way this worked is the way I like it. I said please; you answered generously; and I'll be saying thank you for the rest of the year. I will drive every nail with care and gratitude. It means a lot to me that you readers see the worth in this project, and agreed to support me.

Next Destination: Cambodia

No, I didn't get lost on the way to Alaska. This blog entry is out of sequence, for reasons that will become evident when you read it. I will return to the Alaska adventure with the next post.

I recently ate breakfast with a group of pilots, one of whom was preparing for a trip to Cambodia in order to do volunteer work. "Wow!" said I, and trained my shark-mounted laser vision on him to demand details.

Cambodia, as I knew only vaguely, is a country in Asia, between Thailand and Vietnam, which suffered a Communist takeover in the 1970s and then a Vietnamese occupation and a civil war in the 1980s. In an attempt to have only a gullible proletariat to rule, the communists set out to kill the intelligentsia, eliminating everyone with the education to mount an effective opposition. This meant statesmen, teachers, doctors, and masters of the cultural arts. The frenzy came to the point where people with glasses were subject to imprisonment or execution, because everyone knows glasses are a symbol of smartness. Many who weren't executed starved to death in the disruption. Look at the people who are leading first world countries today: the politicians, corporate leaders, senior civil servants. They were probably all educated or mentored in the 1970s and 1980s. Cambodia hasn't got those people. Cambodia also has one of the highest proportion of amputees in the world, due to the legacy of land mines from all the conflicts. This doesn't put their infrastructure or agriculture on a firm footing. There's no reason they can't be a self-sustaining nation again, but they need some help.

What is being done to help?

Canada delivers a lot of foreign aid around the world, including Cambodia. Janne Ritskes, a woman who worked with a Canadian government programme delivering aid became frustrated with the organizational inefficiency. Like so many people frustrated with the management of their organizations she said "I could do a better job." Unlike most people she quit the inefficient job and set up shop to prove it. She runs Tabitha, a non-profit organization entirely operated by Cambodians. The organization is Christian, but not evangelical. I suspect many of the staff are Buddhist. A lot of what they do is just encouraging people to save money in order to make incremental improvements to their lives. That may seem obvious to you, but you probably grew up in a society where people were doing that. There is hardly anyone alive in Cambodia who remembers the 1970s, but I can't see that people today have much in the way of role models for long range planning. It takes savings of $960 to build a house, but for some families who have absolutely nothing, Tabitha will build them a house after they have saved a token amount, just to get them into the programme. This group from Vancouver is going to build homes.

Who is going?

The core of this group are members of the Vancouver Police Department, but I don't have to be affiliated with the police in any way in order to join them.

When are we going?

The latter half of November 2010.

What skills or experience do volunteers I need to have?

None. I know how to hit a nail with a hammer, at least nine times out of ten, but apparently even that is in excess of minimum qualifications.

Is it safe?

You know the pilot is going to ask that. The guy who invited me went on a previous trip and he didn't get mugged or sold into slavery. We will need a tonne of vaccinations and precautions against tropical diseases, and not step anywhere there isn't already a path. If you're going to go to a country where conditions are unknown, going there surrounded by police officers seems like a good bet.

"You want to go, don't you?" he asked me. Well, yeah, I do. It was pretty obvious. I've never been to Asia. I've never been anywhere in the third world, unless you count Nunavut. I've never built a house. But as you probably figured from the first person pronouns above, I'm going. I signed up as soon as I checked with my doctor to make sure that all the vaccinations were okay for me.

Originally the group thought that they would get a grant from the Vancouver Police, as in previous years it had been a team-building effort for the force, but this year they didn't receive the money, so I just found out participants have to fundraise for the materials necessary to do the building. Right now the people in Vancouver are busy organizing pub nights and silent auctions and the like to bring in the cash. But I'm not in Vancouver, and I can't be a freeloader. The more we raise, the more houses we can build. The whole housebuilding project is a crafty way to spread awareness of the organization and to get North Americans with enough money to go on foreign trips to raise some money. How will I do my part?

So far this is the best idea I have:

Would you please donate some money? To make it not something for nothing, I'll send donors a postcard, from Cambodia or from somewhere on my travels for work. I can also offer you a blog entry that's not on the blog, perhaps one of the ones that was too emotional, or gave details of an emergency that could be used to pinpoint my company. If you are a new reader and weren't around in 2006, you should probably request the northern smoke saga. I also have some bloglike accounts from before I started the blog of my own initial flight lessons, and of learning to fly a Twin Otter. Maybe you have a special request for a blog topic. Let me know what you would like in appreciation of your donation. You will receive a Canadian tax receipt; sorry if that's not useful in your country. Everyone, whether you donate or not, will get an account of the trip, via this blog.

How to Donate

This is slightly trickier than one-click ordering, so please read carefully to make sure the money is credited on my behalf, to the right team. I've left out the obvious instructions like "click Donate Now" and "enter your donation amount." I'm figuring that Cockpit Conversation readers are all smart enough to be targeted in an anti-elitist purge. Or at least have your glasses on.

1. Go to the Canada Helps website.
2. Search for "tabitha" and select Tabitha Foundation from the results.
4. Opposite Fund/Designation choose 2 - Housebuilding - "Vancouver House Building Team Nov.2010". [This is a change: it was #17 before].
5. Opposite Dedications and Gift Options choose Yes, as a gift in honour/on behalf of and put "Aviatrix" there.
6. Either choose the e-card option, or just e-mail me to let me know what you've donated, so I can know I'm successfully raising funds and awareness, and figure out how many houses we can assemble. My e-mail address is still cockpitconversation@gmail.com.

Thank you very much for anything you choose to donate. Note that your donation is going directly to Tabitha and is used exclusively for building materials which I and the group will use to build homes for brutally poor Cambodians. My airfare, spending money and living expenses for the trip come out of my pocket.

Four Million Dollar Decision

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

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

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

AD
Costs of Compliance

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

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

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

Parts Cost: $190

Total Cost Per Airplane: $510

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

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

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

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

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

Dawson Something

After picking up a part in Regina, and stuffing it in the nose locker so it will be available wherever we are for the next maintenance, I'm going to Dawson Creek. That's Dawson Creek in Northern British Columbia, not to be confused with Dawson City in the Yukon, Dawson's Creek on the WB network, or just plain Dawson all over the place, including a crater on the moon. Yeah, not going to the moon this trip. The O2 bottle only holds about ten hours of supplemental oxygen. The CFS tells me that there are two aerodromes in town, but I am not going to accept dispatch to the one that has a 2000' sloped turf strip and is operated by the Flying L Ranch, so there's no need to call the client to confirm the landing site. The Flying L Ranch sounds like a cool place, but so does the main Dawson Creek airport. It has two separate prepared landing surfaces: one for landing on wheels and one for landing on floats. That is, there's a runway-shaped water-filled trench to the left of the main runway. There's no tower, but the mandatory frequency there is remoted to Peace River radio from 1330Z to 0530Z, which means that when I call, a guy in Alberta will answer.

Weather looks agreeable between hither and yon, despite a steep pressure gradient so I depart, with the addition of another crew member who happens to have been working in the area on his other job, making it an easy pick up. I'm not quite sure what happened to his vehicle. I know a pilot who can tell you off the top of her head how much it costs to ship a car by train from one part of the country to another. Others just own semi-abandoned cars in various places. There ought to be a special pilot car insurance rate for people who only get to use their cars when they aren't flying in another province.

The fuel number is listed in the CFS under "Military" for some reason. Maybe I misread it. They agreed to sell us fuel even though we carry no firearms or bombs, and came fairly quickly.

Dawson Creek is north and west of here. I flew and he manned the charts and radios. We passed fairly close to Saskatoon, so gave them a call to position report and update the weather. I initially just tuned the YXE ATIS for a local altimeter setting, but it was almost an hour out of date and it's always good to talk to someone en route; the FSS will volunteer SIGMETs and other hazards. We check the charts carefully looking for the new boundary between Edmonton and Winnipeg Radio before we call. We identify ourselves and position report, saying we are VFR between Regina and Dawson Creek. Our request is very standard "an altimeter setting and current weather at destination." We at first assume we have a Winnipegger on the line, as he had to ask for the ident of the reasonably large airport that is our destination, but then the conversation got weirder.

Us: It's Yankee Delta Quebec.

Him: Dawson Creek altimeter two nine nine three.

Us: [Silence]

Him: Did you want the rest of the weather?

Us: Yes please

Him: [reads entire METAR for YDQ]

Us: Thank you

Him: [Silence]

Us: [to each other] He's not going to give us a local altimeter setting?

We call back and ask for a local altimeter setting and he provides one. That probably doesn't sound weird to most people, but usually you can't talk to an FSS without being given at least one, and often a whole string of altimeter settings for the route ahead. An altimeter setting is the FSS version of "hello." It was especially relevant that day because of the rapid change in setting along our route. Newbie, I guess.

We could see we would clip the edge of Edmonton's control area. I gritted my teeth as I reached for the CFS, hoping that they weren't one of the zones that have started demanding advance codes for transit. I'm going to have to start making that a part of my VFR flight planning now. I look at where I'm going and where I'm coming from, but I am too often guilty of assuming that the old rules apply for VFR transit. Calgary, I learned the hard way, insists on an advance telephone call for a transponder code. Edmonton, fortunately, doesn't yet, but I promise to check each new edition of the CFS before each planned transit through their airspace. We looked up the appropriate frequency for Edmonton Terminal and let them know where we were and where we were going. No problem. They gave us a squawk code (and an altimeter setting) and cleared us through their airspace. We saw three different airports we've worked out of in the last year or so and then we passed out of their airspace to the north and they cleared us en route to squawk VFR. And updated our altimeter setting.

I was flying at 6500', a VFR altitude appropriate for going west, high enough to be out of the daytime turbulence but not so high as to require oxygen or turning on the heater. As I continued east a layer of daytime cumulus cloud was starting to form, building to just about my level. I dodged a few, and then as the layer thickened, mused about my choice, "Up or down? the eternal question." Down would put me into more turbulence, closer to control zones and terrain. Up requires me to increase the power for the climb and then readjust everything again, and the cumulus tops will build another couple of thousand feet before destination, requiring me to do it all over again. Pilots, if you haven't gathered already, can be really lazy. You want me to move levers? It's not a really difficult choice, just a topic of conversation. Pilots can be hard up for those, too. I got a new altimeter setting form flight services. It is higher, good news weatherwise, but putting in a higher altimeter setting shows me at a higher indicated altitude. If I descend again to an indicated 6500' feet I'll really be in the cloud tops. So I take the head start and climb to 8500'.

This works fine for a while, and then the clouds, as predicted, build back to my level. By this time I'm in the vicinity of Grande Prairie. We won't be in their zone, but call them for traffic advisories anyway. Their new altimeter setting puts me back in the tops again, so I descend back to 6500', which is now cloud-free, thanks to the fact that cloud bases tend to gradually rise during the day, and that my new 6500' is a few hundred feet below my old 6500', thanks to the rising pressure. People who have blindly memorized "from high to low, look out below" without close regard for the underlying physics may need to stop and ponder that for a moment. We report the altitude change and call clear as we continue to the west. They thank us for checking in. It's good when towers do that. Sometimes pilots are ambivalent about calling an air traffic agency we don't have to, and when the controlling agency's response sounds like we've bothered them or that they couldn't care less, it results in subtle pilot behaviour modification. But every one who acknowledges the utility of just knowing there's an airplane out there beyond their sphere of control reinforces our motivation to call.

Now we're almost at Dawson Creek. We call the FSS and the guy in Peace River answers us, as advertised. He can't see the traffic out here in BC, but he keeps track of it. There's someone in a single departing, something else small and slow arriving, shouldn't be any conflicts. Then a medevac faster than us checks in behind us. We're almost overhead and hear a five miles out call. Is this going to work out? Oh phew that five mile call was the slow, departing traffic, not the incoming medevac. We land, after jokingly lining up on the water runway for a photo op, then call clear and taxi for fuel.

It's a more civilized-looking airport than we expected. It has a classy new passenger terminal with a big yellow "secure area" square painted on the apron outside of it, a little tower building (probably vacant, seeing as the radio service is remoted to Alberta) and lots of paved apron. There are two fuel pumps either side of a sign that gives prices (good prices, too) for avgas and jet, but while the right tank has a Jet A sticker on it, there is no avgas marking on the left tank. Weird. The paper cover of the journey log tears on the seat pocket as we take it out to record the flight. Grr. I always buy the hardcover version when I have a choice. But they keep replacing this one before it's full, dunno why.

We unload the airplane and I give the receipts for the ferry fuel to the customer: they are responsible for that. The Regina receipt is just a truck fuel ticket, not a credit card receipt, because the truck driver didn't process the credit card, just called in the information. Client needs a proper receipt. I didn't bring a CFS in from the plane, but the fuel number is in the recently called list in my phone. They fax a copy of the credit card receipt and everyone is happy.

Dinner is at some chain restaurant where they casually offer you garlic bread with your entree, then charge you $3.50 for it. One slice.

I did get a chance to call the airline captain who was one of the first to encourage me in all this. As I was approaching Regina, he had been just leaving, ferrying a smaller airplane in the other direction. I believe that brings his home collection of aircraft to five. He's well, just retired, still happily married to his original wife, and having a great time. I'll see if I can get out to see him when work and other aspects of life let up around ... January I think.

Why Are You Surprised?

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

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

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

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

Split City: Both Halves Boring

There's no flying for me this morning, so I walk to Saskatchewan. The official border is about five blocks away, but visible from the hotel as it's marked with giant orange pylons. It's three degrees outside but so sunny that I go out in just a sweatshirt over a t-shirt. I have to detour around piles of snow blocking the sidewalks, but the weather soon warms up to t-shirt level. Disappointingly, the most interesting things about the place are its double-L name and it's location. And I seem to be the only one who cares about that. I walk all over town without finding any place that will sell me a souvenir postcard or refrigerator magnet to prove that I was here.

The border really does go through the middle of town, right down the centre of 50th Avenue. How harsh a coincidence is that? Or maybe they moved the middle of town to coincide with the border. That would explain the boringness of the buildings there. Perhaps the original ones were destroyed in a fire or something.

There's an appropriate civic government building on the Alberta side, and a museum, but it's on the Saskatchewan side, far enough out that it's not worth the walk. I think it was the Museum of Crude Oil or something. Not enticing enough to get me to walk six kilometres, or whatever it was. Although I'm told the tar sands museum in Fort Mac is worth the trouble. I haven't had a chance to see that one.

The hotel doesn't have a free breakfast, so I buy breakfast food at Safeway. Three dollars will get me 325 grams of instant oatmeal packets laced with too much salt and sugar, or 900 grams of plain oatmeal, which looks like enough for two months, at least. I choose the packets, effectively paying a 200% premium to not have to throw a bunch of food away, or to schlep it around. I'll probably only be here a week or so. I also buy some other groceries, including organic bison rib steak (you wondered last posting what I was doing outside a slaughterhouse, didn't you?) and some fixings for it.

The other pilot (we'd already agreed to divvy the duties here with me in the a.m. and him in the p.m.) has gone flying, so I know I'll be flying in the morning.

Also, note to everyone on the Internet: if you aren't able to spell "voila" reliably, then please replace it in your lexicon with "trumpet fanfare." (Or, if you insist on poor spelling, "trumpat fanfair.") A viola just doesn't suggest "here it is!" and it confuses me every time you write it.

Incomplete Intermediate

This always happens to me. I'm interested in something. I learn a little on my own, or I learn a lot on my own, but not in any organized way. Then I want more information, so I seek professional instruction on the subject. The instructor talks to me and tells me no I don't belong in the beginners' course, so I start straight in at the intermediate level, and promptly get in trouble for having missed something vital in my self-study. (Sometimes I do take the beginners' course, which risks making me bored and distracted and thus missing something that way). If I have one-on-one instruction I say, "don't assume I know anything" but they find out I know X and Z and assume I know Y, without me knowing that there is any interpolation going on. And then later mayhem ensues because I lack all knowledge of Y.

Fortunately, the way aviation is set up in Canada, the system is rigourous and demands that the instructor that sends you through to the next level has seen you complete each qualifying exercise to standard, and can't assume that X + Z implies Y. This is good, because my early aviation education was similar, with me learning what was interesting from books and online, and then being taken up by a friend for doezens of touch and goes, until I could land an airplane by rote without having practiced any of the underlying skills. If you're interested enough in a thing to want to learn it right with no shortcuts it is beneficial to do it from the beginning even if you already know some, provided the ab initio instructor knows what they are doing. You pick up things that true ab initio students miss. (If the instructor is just winging it, you get in trouble, because you're picking up on the stuff the instructor is faking).

My latest episode of learning just enough to get into trouble seems to be cooking. I would say that I can cook. I can buy ingredients, i.e. things from the grocery store or farmers' market that don't have any ingredients listed on the side and produce meals that make me say "yum." But I want to be able to make five dishes featuring a random secret ingredient within an hour and have them look like the ones on Iron Chef. And I want to be able to grab a live cow standing in a field of grain, and turn it into a perfect hamburger. That's right, I'm a Food Network addict.

It sort of makes me wish that I was hooked on the Food Network twenty years ago instead of science fiction. Imagine if the brain cells now occupied by Star Trek and Ray Bradbury trivia were full of information on how to properly braise and marinate and accent. Now I'm hooked on food. But the Food Channel isn't really a good vehicle for learning more about cooking. The shows that tell me how to actually make the food with any kind of step by step instructions are telling me how to make hummus as if it was an amazing reveal that it's made out of chickpeas and sesame paste, or giving detailed steps for making spaghetti sauce, pausing for me to gasp at the idea that it doesn't come out of a can. Once the shows pass the "cute guy or gal reads a recipe at you" mode, they leap over a vast gulf of techniques and generalizations into the territory of ultra elite chefs making things I don't know the names of by processes I'm not certain how to reproduce, faster than the untrained eye can follow. I guess there are lots of people who would like to know something about cooking, a lot who like to marvel at what the experts can produce, and not enough to be a viable market segment who want to know the how of the in-between part.

I looked up a fancy cooking course and discovered that professional chef training will set you back about as much as a commercial pilot licence. I guess good food costs more than avgas. Instead of flying to New York and signing up for an elite cooking course, I order the course textbook. I could focus every moment of my life single-mindedly on aviation progress, but a girl's got to eat. She might as well do it well.

Do I have any readers who are professional chefs? Or do you know of a fun professional cooking blog? (I already know Cake Wrecks, of course).

One thing about watching the world's best chefs prepare itty bitty exquisitely-presented portions of stunning food is that you aren't tempted to down platter-filling glop in the name of sustenance. Seeing how good food could be, actually helps me not overeat.

Last night's meal was eaten while reading the local paper. I was offered a choice of two: the provincial paper and the town one. The town one was a lot thicker, but I had read t at breakfast so I opted for the local one. "Is it exciting?" I joked to the guy at the hotel desk

"There's a goose on the cover," he said, his inflection managing to find a little strip of territory that was neither sarcastic nor falsely enthusiastic. And so there was: a Canada goose, photographed standing on one foot on the edge of the frozen river. It didn't get any more exciting inside. There weren't even any dead bodies.

And then I get a text from one of the apprentices who has been working on the airplane. The airplane is ready and she'll pick me up at 7:30 tomorrow morning to get it.