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.

Fragile

As I shut down the airplane I turn off the avionics, bring the power back to idle and then on each engine momentarily turn both magnetos off, then back on again as soon as I have verified that the engine would die without them. That means that when the off position is selected for the magnetos, turning a propeller by hand just to move it out of the way cannot produce a spark and start the engine. Then I return the power to 1000 rpm and shut down the engine by pulling the mixture levers all the way back, cutting off the fuel supply to the engine.

Considering the number of things I have to do right to start the engine when I want it to start, it seems a little ridiculous imagining the slight movement of a propeller during ground handling, with the fuel cut off, causing the engine to start. I wonder if this is a safety precaution that made sense long ago and is no longer relevant, but that we've never stopped following. Has anyone ever heard of a ground-handling propeller strike accident that occurred because of a live magneto, when the mixtures were in idle cut-off and the mags selected off? I have met a few American pilots and mechanics who have never heard of the check, so perhaps it lingers longer in the British Empire.

On this particular occasion I not only put the airplane in the hangar, but then climbed back on board and stowed all the oxygen masks and cables, took everything out of the seat back pockets, removed snacks and garbage and chart collections and generally cleared the way for maintenance to take out the seats and rip out the floor panels for a major inspection. That also means a few days off for me. The exact number will be determined by what they find on the inspection. I go home and put my phone on the charger. For a few days I am set free from the requirement to have it always with me.

The next day I happen to be sitting near the charger and it rings, with my boss' name on the display. I answer and recognize the boss' bad news voice. I wonder what horrible thing they have found with the airplane, and if there is some way I have caused it through poor airmanship, or missed finding it on my preflight inspections. But, it's nothing to do with the airplane. One of my coworkers has been critically injured in an accident. Nothing to do with work, just out with friends. It puts everything else into context. Life is so fragile.

Another Day

Now I'm feeling madder than yesterday. They aren't going to call me back. I'm in some kind of No Fly database that I can never know about or escape from. Once when I left one job for a better one, the owner of the old company called the manager of the new company to say that I was a terrible pilot and a non-trustworthy employee. Fortunately the new boss already knew me, so realized that the last desperate ploy to stop me getting the new job was actually a compliment about my value as a pilot. Sometimes I picture a vast conspiracy wherein that boss has made it his life's work to sabotage my career, finding out wherever I try to go and poisoning them against me. Hey, some of you thought it was paranoia last week when I had the premonition this job was going to fall apart.

But for now, I'm just fed up. I hate airplanes. They're stupid. I'm going to go buy some chickens and look feed them and collect the eggs. No, I'm going to rent an incubator and buy some fertilized eggs and hatch my own chickens so they imprint on me and I can raise them and train them to fetch, or cluck on command, or not to drown in the rain, or whatever the pinnacle of chicken learning is. And then I'll collect the eggs, and then when the chickens stop laying eggs I will tell them that I have rescinded their job offer, and I will eat them. And yay for the circle of life.

I found a big pile of partially completed to do lists today; I never throw out uncompleted to do lists, it seems, just abandon them half done. And they all seem to have the same things undone, things that always need doing even though I do them fairly often, things that come around again and again. I'm going to do them all. I'm going to go through all my lists and do them until they are done once and for all, and not have any fun because I don't deserve any. Except that feeding my chickens might be fun. I'll let you know.

I turn on my computer to find out where to buy chickens and somehow end up on an aviation job site. I haven't checked it for a week, on account of thinking I had a job. "Hmm, this job looks good." I could raise chickens there instead of here. I start to compose an e-mail to the chief pilot, when the phone rings. It's an ex-chief pilot, in town flying a medevac to here. I go out to dinner with the crew, good to catch up. One of the flight medics observes, "I never knew before this job how difficult it was to be a pilot." I thought she was talking about physical tasks like loading, de-icing, or the hours, but she continues to say, "You can't just decide where you want to work, apply and get a job. You have to work really hard to find a job, and go wherever that job is." She gets it. And it's not just me. It's the industry. I come home and finish the e-mail. And send another to another company. And make a list of more people to contact. Life goes on.

I hate airplanes. At least when chickens shit on you, you can use it to fertilize the garden. I think the worst part is that I know every fricking circuit breaker on this airplane I'll probably never fly. All those brain cells faithfully holding information that I may never use. Who wants me to finish telling you all about the airplane for which I received free groundschool and training manuals, and who wants to skip it and learn about chickens?

Retracing My Steps

Back to the hangar, for what should be the last time. We said we'd have the airplane back to the customer today, but this airport is fogged in solid, so we have a little while to work before the pressure is really on. It's cold again today, even colder. I crank the heat on the hangar. We're paying to rent it. I nerd on the iPod for a bit then ask if they are done the cabin inspection so I can close up in there. "Oh, cabin inspection, right." That would be a no. They are done in the nose, so I replace all the gear. It always looks like something is missing when I put it back, because it fits so much better when you have it all out and can play tetris with it to get the best fit, as compared to when you're just digging something out and shoving it back. Then it's like this sort of tetris. My high score there is 100.

I call flight services for an update on weather, seeing as I can't see more than a couple of hundred metres past the door of the hangar. I think I can see further inside than outside. The weather is not good at destination yet, either, but both should improve before long. There's still no NOTAM on the drag racing, so I call the local Flight Services personnel to ask. They tell me the races take place on a disused taxiway on the other side of the airport and have no impact on operations. Ahh. I call back the FSS briefer to pass on this information, so they can mollify any other pilot who is concerned by the signs.

The cabin inspection is complete and one of the AMEs is closing up the panels there. I feel guilty that he is fixing the mess I made in the cabin, pulling everything apart to get to the cables. Those panels come in and out a lot so there were different kinds of holes, different sizes of screws, carpet and other miscellany. As they get ready to tow the aircraft out, I put the seats back in the cockpit. They always go back in easier than out, the opposite of the cabin seats. I see as I secure the locks on the rails that he has done a beautiful job reassembling the floor. It's better than when I started.

I compliment him on that, it's an easy thing to be lazy about, hence the mess it was in when I started. Both guys seem grateful for my help over the last few days, despite my sometimes self-sabotaging assistance. I suppose just having company is good, too. Now it's time for me to go do what I'm good at.

I walkaround and make sure that we haven't left any important bits unattached, then start up and run up the engines. Everything looks fine, sounds fine. They want a fairly long run so call for taxi and, after I let a Cessna 180 go by, go out on the runway to do the break-in for the new brake pads. A couple of accelerate-stops and then I'm back to the ramp. They pull the cowls again and I assume my note "leak check goo" means that it was all good with no leaks, because after that we went back to the hotel to get Internet access for the references needed to finish the last of the paperwork. I load bags my bags into the airplane, thank the guys again for their work and leave while they are still cleaning the hangar.

After take off I keep the speed down so I can cycle the gear a couple of times. Everything works as well as it did on the jacks. Sometimes with the airflow going by the calibration or something isn't quite right, but today it's perfect. I text an "all good" (or possibly "all goo," hope they understood) and steer direct for the waiting customers.

My northbound track takes me right through where the storm was on the way down. I haven't cleared the GPS track, so you can see my route south, my initial 180, slightly kidney shaped as I deked the visible lightning, another foray to the south east, and then a big wide semi-cardiod shape completely avoiding the area of thunderstorms before rejoining the planned track to destination. A little avgas and a little airframe time doesn't compare to the risk of lightning, downdrafts, disorientation and severe turbulence inside those monsters. Now there is nothing but sky and nice little puffy clouds. At destination it's approach, land, rollout, park, text, and get a ride to the hotel. They tell me the sky went black here after I left, too. They saw the same monster that I tickled.

The cardkey encoder still doesn't work at the hotel, so I need to wait in the lobby for an escort to my room. As the encoder is an American-designed security device containing encryption technology it has been held up at customs. At least they ordered two, so they won't be in this bind next time. It could be so miserable for the employees having to deal with customers complaining over this, but my escort has chosen to be unassailably cheerful and friendly about it all. I don't think it would be possible to be miserable to her about the situation. Any negativity you tried to direct at her would bounce right off.

Dinner brings me back to Boston Pizza. No, I didn't miss it. Back in the hotel I watch Casino Royale. I've seen and even "reviewed" it before, but now I'm looking at it in the context of a "reset" in the manner of the new Star Trek movie: take a long-running franchise, retell the beginning of the legend, and then start over in a new time period. I'm sure this has been done again and again, but it's the first time I've noticed it. That's not counting anachronisms like obviously European architecture and principals in biblical artwork, or the stories in Shakespeare being retold in different eras, like Romeo and Juliet becoming West Side Story. It's a good idea, really just an extension of translation to allow people to identify with a work that would otherwise be too far removed from their knowledge. Vesper is still the stupidest password ever, though.

For the Memory Bank

Do we fly today? No, of course we don't fly today. We are pilots in the north with winter approaching, and the clients dictate where we stay. We go together for brunch at the landmark hotel in town. Not a Landmark Hotel, just a hotel that's a landmark. It doesn't take much to be a landmark in a town that has one business street. The hotel has been there for fifty years or so without burning down, so it's a landmark.

We look at the menu then all have the buffet. It's edible. A change from the free waffles and bagels at the hotel. A loop on the TV goes through adverse weather in Nova Scotia, childcare options in Winnipeg, and a seeming serious documentary on how to win the lottery. I believe the trick was to buy tickets. When we realized that it had looped around it was time to go home.

We were all laughing as we walked back to the hotel. It started with some silly thing, joking about why the mechanic's hotel room lacked a shower curtain. I'm not going to say it, but come on, in the comments guys, what's the first reason that comes to mind for someone to remove a hotel shower curtain? So we're laughing and walking along. Although the weather is still not suitable for work, lots of low cloud bases, it's scattered cumulus and sunshine filters through. It's a beautiful day for walking down the street. It's just a silly moment with co-workers, but it's one of those things that I want in my memory vault in twenty years, along with the images of snow-capped mountain ranges and the pristine lakes that no one ever sees without an airplane.

After we get back to the hotel, a big dark thunder cloud moves in and makes it look like evening. Rain pounds the hotel. Then it passes and we're back to sun with scattered scud.

Maybe tomorrow we'll go flying.

Incognito

It's overlap day: the replacement pilot has arrived and the guy I've been working with all month is going home tomorrow. I have another week or so to go, as our schedules have gone out of sync. We three pilots plus the AME have lunch together, making our food orders based on each other's habitual orders. There's lots of catching up to do. The latest company gossip includes the possibility of getting another type of aircraft. These overlap days are our major means of communication and sometimes the only time I see certain pilots in a year.

No one is flying today so we do errands. A recent first aid kit analysis reveals that the standard kit we have is missing four mandated items: splints, burn pads, paper and pencil. We go over to the pharmacy to stock up. "The airplane is made out of splints," I protest. The damn thing is almost entirely composed of strong lightweight aluminum splints, but I guess we have to be prepared for broken limbs in a situation where it would be simultaneously inappropriate to disassemble the airplane and impossible to summon more thoroughly equipped medical personnel. We buy the required items and go back to the hotel.

We're standing in the corridor discussing ambiguities in the maintenance control manual. Someone is just saying, "for example, if you can't get a hold of the PRM and the HSI is broken but it's day VFR ..." when an airline pilot in uniform steps into the elevator lobby and pushes the call button. Even to my peripheral vision the "hey, they're talking about airplanes!" head swivel by the airline pilot is obvious. He boards the elevator and as the doors close I can hear him being interrogated by others in the elevator, "what airline do you fly for?" It's a boon to be recognizable as pilots only by the way we talk, and not by the way we look.

Before my outgoing colleague goes back to his room I wish him well for his month out, in case I don't see him in the morning before his flight, and ask him if he happened to buy any charts I should know about. Gotcha back!

He Bought Charts

Another day, another meal at Boston Pizza. I sleep in, then have microwave oatmeal and an apple for breakfast. We take off but don't get much done because we soon run into rain and cloud at our altitude and that interferes with the work we have to do today. Back at the airport the wind is reported to be 270 at fifteen knots gusting to something. I land on the most into-wind runway, which still gives me a crosswind but it's not a problem for this airplane.

I go back to my room and write postcards before yet another meal at Boston Pizza. My coworker is going home in a couple of days, so he keeps telling me things he might have forgotten to mention when I first came on shift. Today is around the third time that he tells me that he bought current IFR charts I finally tell him, "It's okay, you told me about the charts. I remember."

I go and do some grocery shopping, then on the way back I meet him again. "Oh Aviatrix, I just wanted to make sure you knew I bought charts..." He's joking this time, and I swat at him after he laughs at the "oh my god, my coworker is losing it!" look on my face.

Smoke and Blood

Breakfast is leftover salad from last night. It's about as good as you'd expect leftover salad to be. Maybe I'll have a low carb day. Some people say it's good for your pancreas to have a day off of churning out insulin.

The other pilot has returned from a mission, but he texts that he has a very rough running engine on the ground. He suspects a bad mag. That could have us down for a couple of days if we can't source one locally, but it could be just dirty spark plugs. We go out and meet him.

You know how if a vehicle breaks down, even people who know they have neither the skills nor tools to fix it always pop the hood and peer inside? It's universal. The pilot has pulled the top cowl off and I walk up and look inside. You can't see a bad magneto or a bad spark plug just by looking inside a cowling. It's just gawking. Except that I find a spark plug lead that isn't attached to anything, just dangling out the bottom of the engine. I hold it up and make an ahem noise. We don't need parts, just a wrench and someone who has the proper qualifications to turn it. We manage to borrow the services of a local wrench turner and ensure that all the spark plug leads are secure for my flight.

I put my flight bag on board and start up. Everything is normal, it was just the loose lead. We go flying. Forest fire smoke has reduced the visibility such that while it is safe to fly, there is no scenic vista for me to enjoy. You don't realize how much entertainment you get from the tapestry of rocks and lakes and trees until you can't see them. I guess at night or in IMC I am concentrating extra hard, so I don't miss the view so much. And at night there are usually stars or lights. I complain to the mission specialist that I'm bored, and jokingly ask him to put on a movie. (His computer controls what is displayed on one of my screens). A moment later he comes forward and props an iPod up in front of me, with a movie playing. That gives me a good laugh, which was what he intended. Now I know that if I get really bored, it's there.

My other source of entertainment is the radio. Mostly it's pilots calling in PIREPs about the forest fire smoke. It's bad everywhere, so bad along one VFR route that pilots are turning back. There are a lot of Americans. I guess some are doing their trip of a lifetime to Alaska and some are Alaskans heading down on one of their regular trips to the lower forty-eight. I suppose there could be some just come to visit us, but why? Who comes here to visit?

There seems to be a pattern of Americans not understanding the question "What is your ETA for the field?" Multiple pilots have been baffled by it. The FSS resorts to, "how long will it take you to get here?" and then they answer. I wonder if the common wording is different in the US or if there is just so much radar there that the question is never necessary.

I am just turning around when the information in my cockpit stops matching everywhere. I can't see well enough to line up with features on the ground to fly a straight line, so I zigzag a little before crosschecking confirms the problem. My HSI has died. HSI stands for "horizontal situation indicator" and it's an instrument in the middle of the panel right in front of me. Its name ties, in my opinion, with "Distance Measuring Equipment" for the most stupidly generic in aviation, but it's a very smart instrument. It is half heading indicator and half VOR receiver, combining the direction you are going with your angular distance from a selected track to or from a VOR, in a way that is less confusing to look at than this sentence is to read. The number at the top of the HSI should always match the direction the airplane is heading. I don't even have to adjust it for drift, because it syncs itself. Except that now it sometimes doesn't turn while I'm turning, and sometimes turns while I am going straight. I switch off the power to it (unusually in my experience, this one has its very own switch instead of a circuit breaker) and back on again. It motors to match my heading, but very soon wanders off again. The back up to this instrument is the heading indicator on the other side of the panel, the one that was removed as unserviceable, with its replacement in a box in the other pilot's hotel room. Sigh. They are completely independent, on totally different aircraft systems and they die within a week of one another.

Neither is required for day VFR work, which is what I'm doing now. The compass works, so I can continue. I turn on my cellphone and have a signal, so I text the new maintenance guy, whom I haven't even met yet, to tell him the news. He asks a few trouble-shooting questions, then asks if I'm aborting the mission. I'm not, this will just make it a little more challenging in this visibility.

Avionics is a separate and arcane maintenance specialty, so unless there's something simple like something disconnected, he probably can't do anything except pull it out and send it for repair.

I turn the HSI back on a couple of times to see if it magically got better: maybe it just overheated. This forest fire smoke can't be the best thing for the instrument cooling air filters. It starts motoring back and forth rapidly so I turn it off again, not wanting it to damage itself further. I pull one of the "intentionally left blank" pages out of the last signature of the CFS and fold and tear it to attach to the surrounding knobs and block the instrument. I hate having non-functioning instruments in my scan.

We return for landing shortly before nightfall. I'm entering the circuit as an A-Star is crossing the field at 2000'. I call up and say I am "downwind for 03, not below 2500' until the Astar reports clear." I guess I'm giving myself clearances, but who else is going to. The FSS doesn't issue clearances, except to relay IFR clearances. My call made it clear to the FSS and the helicopter pilot that I was aware of him, and described my strategy for collision avoidance, while saving the FSS guy's breath in relaying positions and intentions.

On the ground, the AME meets the plane. It's time for an oil change. I stay to help with that, because it's much easier to pull cowlings with two people. We have arranged for use of a hangar, but the airplane only fits halfway in. It would go all the way, but the door doesn't travel quite to the top, even though it looks like it should. We leave the tail sticking out and just work on it like that. I position the buckets and turn the quick releases (it's so easy on this airplane, you don't need a wrench or anything) to drain the oil, while he removes the oil filters. It occurs to me that I could probably burn myself doing this, but I never have. Have I just been lucky? Dunno. I haven't even been that careful.

While we're working, a young pilot comes up and asks if we know a good place to camp on the aerodrome. He is flying around the north, looking for a job in the Northwest Territories or the Yukon and he's just stopped here for the night. We recommend he try the local charter operator, because we know he has good machines and the pilots are well treated, but we can't help with a camping suggestion. He sets up a tent between his wing and his horizontal stabilizer and it blends in with the airplane.

The AME discovers that he is missing his oil filter cutting tool. That's a hazard of running an AMO out of the back of a truck. After a bit of cursing he improvises with an ordinary set of cutters, but the wall of the oil filter turns out to be a lot thicker than either of us expected and it takes a while. After a good struggle, he inspects the filter media inside and it shows no metal, which is good. He replaces the filters and I refill the crankcases with clean oil. He also checks the connections on the misbehaving HSI. We push the airplane outside and I run it up. It's not going to be helping the jobseeker sleep in his tent, but such is that hazard of sleeping at an airport. The runup is satisfactory, except that the HSI still doesn't work, and there are no leaks, so we're done that task. It was supposed to be a quick job but it's the next day before we finish. That's not a problem for me because I still have ten hours before I'm back on duty.

We stop by a convenience store on the way back to the hotel and the clerk asks him about the blood on the back of his knuckles. He shrugs it off as an occupational hazard and then I look and see that I too have skinned my knuckles on something. Airplanes are vicious.

Oh and for those who know why this might be relevant: no, the forest fire smoke doesn't trigger any kind of PTSD in me. It's just another day at work. Yay!

Jetlagged and Luggageless

No it's not me who is jetlagged and luggageless. I'm just stranded in a foreign country with impassable weather to the south and an expired IFR. The pilot who is coming up to provide a legal licence to file IFR through the panhandle is the one staggering in with no luggage and a head too many hours west of the last place it was. If I recall correctly there was a vacation involved so this is extra-Canadian jetlag, not just a few hours. I haven't rented a car, so I tell her to take the shuttle. Meanwhile I go downstairs to check that her hotel booking is in order. It isn't.

They say they don't have a room for her, even though her room was booked at the same time as mine. Originally it was going to be the room for the pilot who left yesterday, so the booking was supposed to be delayed one day, not cancelled. I haunt the desk, asking each successive clerk to look for the reservation. This sounds mean or useless, but so many times I have had one clerk find something when others swore it didn't exist. Some of them don't know how their systems work, and others just don't care. Most of them don't care. Probably all of them don't care and most of them don't bother to pretend they do. Eventually one of the clerks escalates me to a manager in order to get rid of me and the manager makes an executive decision to create the reservation despite the overbooking. It's someone who staggers in after midnight who will lose out.

My fellow pilot staggers in after midnight in some time zone, but without her luggage. She didn't expect it to make the connection that she had to run for. Now she wants food and sleep. I take her to the Century, where she can watch float planes land, and then we pick a meet time in the morning so she can rehumanize. We were going to leave first thing in the morning, but now we'll have to wait for her luggage.

---

Meanwhile, I am amused by what Wikio thinks my blog is about. It got Canada in the cloud (but thinks I'm based in the US), and I guess GPS is a pretty common topic, but do I really talk about Texas that much? I'm amused that it picked up on all the Star Trek references, but how does it think my blog is about "crank"?

Delayed Reporting Time

So I slept, or at least held my eyes closed and thought about how I'd better be sleeping, or I was going to be really tired tomorrow, from around six p.m. to 2 a.m., woke up, turned on the computer, got dressed while it unhibernated, and at 2:05 am determined that it had been raining for the last six hours and was forecast to continue doing so for the rest of the thirty-six hour forecast period. I looked outside and yeah, it wasn't raining hard. There were still dry spots under parked cars, but it was raining.

So our meeting was short. I called ATC and the people who were looking after our airplane and told them the flight was cancelled. And then I went back to bed. At that point I noticed that the bedside clock was an hour slow, which made getting up in the middle of the night when it's still light out and then not getting up after all seem all the more surreal. Did it really happen?

I went back to bed and slept until I was done sleeping, which was about six hours. Now, it hasn't been dark yet, and I've slept twice. What day is it? Alaska is confusing, and duty time laws even more so.

We were supposed to report for work at two a.m. but simply woke up and went back to bed fifteen minutes later without leaving the hotel. So what time does our duty day end now?

Part 700.18 of the Canadian Air Regulations says:

Where a flight crew member is notified of a delay in reporting time before leaving a rest facility and the delay is in excess of 3 hours, the flight crew member's flight duty time is considered to have started 3 hours after the original reporting time.

That's the rule that best applies here. For the first six hours of delay, it also gives an advantage--to the person optimising pilot utilization--over the split duty day rule, which allows a duty day extension of one to three hours: one hour of extension for each two hours of rest in the middle of the duty day. For a delay greater than six hours but less than eight hours, the results are identical to applying the split duty day rule. If the delay were a full eight hours, plus time for meals and personal hygiene, then it would be a new day. It's that rather than the calendar or daylight that determine when a pilot's new day dawns.

If our rest period continues without interruption until eleven or so, the duty day has been technically reset, and we could legally be asked to work a fifteen hour day starting any time after then, say five p.m. until eight a.m. tomorrow morning. That would be nasty, but every once in a while the work demands it. There are some other factors that come into play, the trump card being that if we the pilots consider that we are fatigued or likelt to become fatigued as a result of a schedule, we're bound in law to refuse it.

That's the law, here's the application. At nine a.m. not only has it stopped raining, but all forecast of rain is gone from the TAF. I call back ATC and ask when our next window is for the work. Sunday morning is a pretty quiet time at most airports, but PANC isn't most airports. It's the same lady, what kind of duty days do they have? She's a realist though, and I guess she doesn't have vacation comng this week. After some more hmming and making sure I know just how inconvenient this is, she verbally shrugs, "Sooner you start the better." I call everyone to say we're a go, again, and we'll be airborne within the hour.

Out at the airplane, the FBO has reconnected the nosegear scissors after towing. That's rare. but they've screwed up the billing despite my "FUEL ONLY" verbal and post -it-ed designation of the credit card number I gave them. They'll sort it out later. We've decided to fly this two-crew, because of the busy-ness of both the airspace and the radio work. I ask the other pilot if he wants to drive or talk. He says he'd rather leave the talking to me, if I don't mind. He says I'm good at talking to authority figures. He just knows I love to yap. It's the role I would have chosen. The flying isn't different from what we do every day, but the ATC negotiation and traffic will be interesting.

I call clearance delivery right after start up on the ramp and they already know all about us and our unusual mission, so I don't have to do any explaining. They assign me a transponder code and a runway. I ask if they'd like to assign us a temporary operational callsign for the mission, "to avoid all the alphabet soup." This is for me as much as them, because American controllers won't shorten my five letter callsign to the last three the way Canadians will, and they will pronounce the C maybe as Charlie, maybe as Canadian, sometimes include the type and sometimes not, sometimes pronounce the letters in the phonetic alphabet and sometimes just use their names the way they are pronounced in the alphabet song, and just the way you may not hear your name when it is called by someone who pronounces it incorrectly, I may miss a call for me. And I don't want to spend the next five hours reciting my entire callsign in every call. "Sure," says the controller, "what do you want to be?" They want ME to pick? I make something up on the spot, almost as cool as AIRSHARK ONE. They accept it unblinkingly and tell me to call tower for taxi. I acknowledge, laughing as I release the mike button, because I'm an AIRSHARK! I'm hoping that I haven't stolen someone else's handle or done something illegal here. I was expecting ATC to assign me something convenient for them, usually just the type and a number, or a part of my full registration.

We taxi to the threshold of the runway, take off and start work. It's fun. It's awesome. Anchorage is an awesome area, with sea and mountains and a big inlet and airplanes everywhere. At first ATC asks us to call every turn, but they quickly realize that we are going to do exactly what we say we are going to, with clockwork predictability. If I turn the tracklines on on the GPS they make pretty patterns, because even the turns are close to identical. As I'm not flying, I can see the whole ballet unfolding, and keep expecting being asked to turn aside, wait twenty seconds, extend a line or modify a turn.

We play chicken with B747s flown by pilots with minimal English skills, counting on their comprehension, flight plans or habits to have them turn east at four hundred feet. We do what feels like an airshow pass with big-yet-manoeverable metal inbount to Elmendorf air base. "I acknowledged having it in sight without remembering what it was. We report sighting the helicopters, float planes, and even other aircraft the same type as us as they look out for us. An advantage I didn't consider of being AIRSHARK is that we're not advertising the foreign callsign.

Over the course of the flight we were handled by five different controllers, working quite long stints at the mike, considering that they kept up a continuous stream of instructions, advisories and clearances. And after all that time, ATC has not delayed our relentless progress through the grid by as much as one second. They are moving the massive Boeings around us. It's now well into the working day, but they aren't asking us to give them a break, either. Man, they really want to get rid of us.

We told them when we had flown our last line and were cleared in to land, with a Korean Airlines B747 waiting at the hold short line for us. We taxi off triumphant and proud. I call the ground controller and ask him to convey our thanks to everyone involved. Anchorage ATC are awesome. They took full responsibility for a very awkward flight, never asking me to change frequencies nor wasting a second of our time.

I'm on a high after accomplishing this mission. The ultimate in happiness for me is achieving something as part of a team when we weren't sure that it could be done. To get this done the second full day in Alaska is beyond expectations. Except for the pessimist's expectation that the more you want to have an opportunity to explore a place, the quicker you will be yanked out to go somewhere else.

Our supper restaurant has placemats with a map of Alaska on them, and we look at them to see where we're going next. Hmm. The annotation for that region of Alaska says that it is "cool and foggy" in the summer. Just what we don't need. And the food is truly awful.

Loss of Separation

If you're me, when you see news like this Convair 580 crash in British Columbia, you are sad for the pilots and their families, and you hope that your friend wasn't on board. You don't wait for the names to be released, but talk to whom you must to find out enough about the deceased to rule out anyone you know who works for the company. And then you're glad because your friend is alive, and tell him so. And then you are sad for your friend, who has lost beloved colleagues, but still glad because he is alive and well. And then you discover that someone else you know has not been so lucky as to have her friend not be on board that airplane. You feel a little guilty for a moment, until you remind yourself that a burned out cockpit and unreleased crew names is not a Schrödinger's box, with a waveform that will collapse according to who hopes hardest. It's happened. So you are sad for the other friend, and for the pilot you did not know, who was her friend, and for the dead pilots you did not know, and for the other pilots you did know, who did not survive earlier days. And then you shed a few tears without being completely sure whom they are for. And then you check the weather and NOTAMs and go to work. And that's what you do, if you're me.

Everyone fly safe, please.

Cleaning Up

I'm going to get some time now, that's time out as in time off, down south, not as in sitting in the corner because I didn't share my toys. So I'm starting to gather up my scattered belongings, repacking everything that I won't be using for sure in the next day or so, finishing up my food, and organizing my stuff into "carry-on" versus "checked" instead of "flight bag" versus "hotel room." I'm also half listening to the TV.

There's a comedy piece delivered by a guy in a an airline captain's uniform. He's riffing on Captain Sullenberger's Hudson River Airbus landing. "You know what a great pilot would have done? Not hit the birds! That's what I do every day. Where's my ticket to the Grammies?" This makes me laugh because I had a boss once who flew with one of my students and during the flight they ran out of gas. The subsequent forced landing in a field was uneventful and the student impressed by that said boss had demonstrated a great feat of airmanship. The airmanship involved in my not ever running out of gas wasn't nearly as impressive. Plus it's funny to imagine making evasive maneuvres against birds in an Airbus.

The next shift of pilots arrive and we all go out for dinner to catch each other up on our lives and the idiosyncrasies of the airplane. And to put things in our stomachs that our bodies will convert into energy. And of course to watch the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Between periods of the hockey game, the topic came up of who should be the next Governor-General. Although we're all working on the same project, the only thing our whole group has in common is that we are Canadians. Together we're from all different regions of the country, have probably voted for almost every party large enough to get its deposit back, and have different educational levels and religious backgrounds. We must have gone through fifty potential candidates, some joking, some serious. We need someone with public speaking ability and a statesmanlike presence, a strong pride in and knowledge of Canada, a love of people and an ability to relate to them, and enough backbone not to let the Prime Minister push him or her around.

Don Cherry? Would instigate fights instead of mediating them. Michael J. Fox? Has to be able to sign his name. David Suzuki? Eugenics. Conrad Black? Is he out of jail yet? Wayne Gretzky? Sam Sullivan? Ralph Klein? Brian Tobin? Reba McEntire? William Shatner has been put forward as a candidate, but while he basks in attention, he's not the kind of guy who's going to sit down and eat raw seal blubber. The guy won't even eat fruit salad. But his speech from the throne would be fun to watch.

We found two perfect candidates. The first, Pierre Berton, is sadly disqualified on account of being dead. He would have made an amazing G-G. The second may be too young, but I'd love to see him in the job and that's Rick Mercer. Failing that, we'd settle for Marg Delahunty.

Non-Canadians may skip all that and just nod their heads sagely in acknowledgment that foreign countries have politics and public figures of whom they know little about.

One of the replacement pilots asks me, "What's your morning routine?"

Weird question, but he doesn't read the blog, so how would he know. "Uh, I turn off the alarm clock, get out of bed, do my morning exercises, get dressed, nuke my oatmeal ..."

"Less detail!"

"Oh! I meet at seven at [client]'s truck."

Good folks, good conversation. I couldn't decide between dessert and a dessert coffee so with very little encouragement from my tablemates bought both. And then one of the other pilots bought the rest of us pilots dinner, in gratitude for agreeing to a schedule revised in his favour. All I'd asked for accepting the revvision was that he listen graciously to my whining if I had to spend six consecutive weeks in Fort Nelson.

Next morning, two of us got in the rental car and drove homewards.

The Rules

The next day, no must be the day after that because the Canadiens are playing again tonight, the weather is better. I ask Dennis about the hangar cat, are there different rules for the two cats: one allowed in the lounge and one not? Yes, he says. Margo makes the rules and she doesn't allow the other cat in the lounge. The cat makes the rules. I didn't see that coming.

It turns out that Dennis (or maybe it was Margo) was able to rearrange our the airplanes yesterday such that ours spent last night indoors, too. Dennis tows it out this morning and I take all the tents and cords off and put them away before the flight. We top up fuel from the long ground run yesterday and depart.

There are high winds aloft, which make everything fun. There is only turbulence in a couple of spots, but I need to hold a big crab angle to go in a straight line, and plan my turns to finish where I want to be. And guess what, I have to pee. I wonder what fraction of my working life I spend having to pee? Add in the time I spend actually peeing, talking about peeing and being grateful that I don't have to pee and I think it outranks sleep in the list of things I do and wish to do.

At the end of the flight, winds are sixteen gusting twenty-six knots varying between 80 and 100 degrees off the runway. That's okay, I've done lots of crosswind landings with my legs crossed. The only hitch is that my operational 15 degree maximum bank restriction applies throughout the flare and touchdown. I aim a little upwind of the centreline so I have room to drift if needed, but it wasn't required.

Taxi in. Wait for everything to be done in the back. Shut down. Pee. Hand over airplane to the p.m. crew. Back to hotel.

I'm weirdly tired. The two pilots per airplane thing we have going for most jobs now means that I only only do a half day of work anymore, about eight hours from report to shutdown, and I've hardly been going flat out this week. I was going to go straight to bed, but I just found out it's the other pilot's birthday, so I go out and get him a card and a token Tim Horton's doughnut. I was going to put it in a box and leave a note on his door to pick it up at hotel reception, but he texts that he's landed early because of unsuitable weather. We all go out and have dinner together, and I get to give him his doughnut in person. He's a fantastic co-worker, and I'd write more about him in the blog, but I would be creeped out to find my story told on someone else's blog, so I leave his story to him.

Professionalism

Professionalism is two things. Firstly it is always doing your utmost to ensure a safe, legal, efficient flight that meets the needs and expectations of your customers. In the case of passengers that includes maintaining their physical and emotional comfort. And much of that is achieved through the second part of professionalism, always maintaining the appearance of someone who will fulfill the first part.

The first part is achieved by following checklists, learning everything you can about your airplane, insisting that things are done right even when it is inconvenient, keeping current with and obeying all the regulations and policies, always flying with the precision that would be demanded of you in the most extreme emergency, identifying your weaknesses and working to strengthen them, and reporting for duty sober, fed, rested and fit. The second part is achieved with a recent haircut, white shirt, straight tie, and whatever other accoutrement your company has decided the passengers need to see to be convinced that you can fly; treating your customers and coworkers with respect; not being identifiable in any way as a commercial pilot when you celebrate your friend's birthday with half a dozen martinis, and not going out for Hallowe'en dressed as the World Trade Centre with half an airplane stuck to the side of your head.

I find it interesting that these two separate requirements are covered by the same name, and treated as one. You could call it being professional versus maintaining a professional appearance, but part of being professional is maintaining a professional appearance. Some people are better at one than the other. Some people fly safely, stay sharp and work well with everyone except management, because they find the second part to be utter bullshit. I don't think one can maintain the façade of the professional appearance for long without having something underneath it. But then I've never been a good liar.

Maybe It's In CAR Subpart 666

I wish I had a navigational record of how mealtime conversation got there, but there it was. Somehow it became sufficiently relevant to the conversation that a member of our party chose to mention, in all seriousness, that there is a law forbidding two devout Christians from flying together as as commander and first officer of an aircraft, in order to avoid having an aircraft be completely unmanned in the event of the Rapture.

Now, I consider myself to have a pretty thorough knowledge of Canadian Air Law. I hold an airline transport licence and have worked in Canadian aviation under part 702, 703 and 704. I have written the dispatch examinations twice and I hold the qualifications required to run a flying school, plus I have taught commercial air law courses. I get a lot of things wrong in my memory, and laws do change without a lot of fanfare, so I don't pretend to know everything. I have at some point read, if not memorized, almost all of the Canadian Air Regulations and something like that would have stood out in my memory more strongly than the Star Trek-ready requirement to obtain permission of the pilot in command before entering an aircraft in flight. There are some sections of the standards down in the 500s that I've never read, as I've never been a PRM, but anything on crew composition would be in part seven. And now I'm citing air law sections now just to avoid having to say what a bizarre law that would be.

I think I managed to remain neutral as I said, "I'm pretty sure that isn't in Canadian law. There is no dispatch requirement for tracking the religion or virtue of crewmembers." I'm pretty sure it isn't in US air law either, as I'm sure one or more of my irreverent American correspondents would have enjoyed watching my virtual eyes pop, right over the Internet after they sent me the link.

I cannot recall ever seeing a religion-related aviation regulation or company policy anywhere, but I'm sure a few exist. I'd be surprised if Air Canada doesn't have uniform policy exceptions for turbans, kippahs and headscarves. I think one British airline bans all religious symbols while in uniform: I remember a kerfuffle about a CSA who was forbidden to wear a small crucifix necklace to work. I would imagine something has been worked out so that when both members of a crew are Islamic they can take turns observing scheduled prayers. It shouldn't be too hard to punch in Mecca on the FMS to get a bearing. But those are practical day-to-day issues, not preparation for the end times.

"Perhaps," I suggested, "It's company policy somewhere."

It's contradictory, though. A company would not find a reason to concoct such a rule unless it was run by very devout Christians. But a company run by Christians who spent any amount of time worrying about unmanned post-Rapture vehicles would not want to--and in any case would not in Canada or the US be allowed to--discriminate against Christian prospective employees. Yet the only ways to implement such a policy would be either to track the Rapture-eligibility of all pilots and schedule promotions and vacations such that a sufficient pool of sinners was on hand at all times for both the left and right seat; or simply to restrict pilot hiring to sinners only.

And then you get to the issue of why would the company care? Any passengers or bystanders on the ground who were not also swept up in the Rapture would be damned to hell in any case, what difference would being killed in a plane crash make? My experience may be non-representative, but I lived and worked with some very kind, compassionate and intelligent Christians who in prayer affirming their allegiance to Jesus Christ finished with "and anyone who believes otherwise can go to hell," so I can't see them being sufficiently concerned with the manner of death of the non-chosen as to make regulations ensuring it wasn't airplane-related.

Somehow everyone avoided the obvious reason as to why such a law wasn't an issue, so I'll leave it as a straight line for you commenters.

Handover Briefing

The handover briefing includes socializing about progress on people's renos and relationships interspersed with details of the work, airplane quirks, new policies, customer disposition, unwritten policies of the local ATC unit and all the contact information for deicers, fuellers and other contacts we've made over the month.

There's a new project manager. He's very gracious, and the chief pilot suggests that we might have to push him to let him know he can ask us to to work in conditions he doesn't know are safe and leave us to say no if it isn't. There is no hangar space at all and a small ramp that is occasionally filled with unmarked B1900s that appear out of nowhere -- usually without regard for circuit procedures -- disgorge and/or take on passengers and vanish again into the sky. They've seen some larger aircraft too, maneuvering very carefully on the small ramp and following the MF procedures to the letter. The chief pilot has concluded that there's a middle size of aircraft whose pilots think they are too important to follow the rules set out for the C172s but are not yet responsible enough to obey the rules that are actually set out for everyone. There is electrical power for our block heaters, and an extremely low-flow self-serve avgas pump that cuts off and must be restarted every $500, but despite numerous attempts we haven't managed to contact airport personnel.

There are two sorts of military airspace we will be working around on this project. They give us the frequencies and the information they've obtained on them. One is active only Monday to Friday 8 am to 4 pm, like defending your country were some sort of office job. The other is 24/7, no overflights and don't go taking any pictures, either. Who knew that Canada had secret military bases. I was extra good and didn't even look out the window on that side, so I can't tell you what was there. Just kidding. I looked, but it was dark.

The airplane is just out of an inspection and has been behaving well. There might be work in Medicine Hat when we are snowed out of here, which will probably be soon. Also, my coworker hasn't flown this type of mission at night, and doesn't have much actual IFR experience, so I'll go with him on one just so he doesn't have to suffer the dark night disorientation alone the first time.

Back to Work

Even a pilot can only do so much sitting around and reading funny websites before she has to go back to work. I have checklists for packing to make sure I don't get to the job and not have a water bottle, warm socks or my camera battery charger. The list takes into account that during any given rotation I might be going to the Yukon or to Florida, to a big city or to a camp in the middle of nowhere. I have to be ready to work with appropriate clothing, supplies, entertainment and the like. I think I have the suitcase of Dorian Gray: I weigh the same as I did in high school, but my suitcase seems to get heavier every year. It's because every rotation in the field I discover one more gadget I can't live without, or decide that I should have eleven changes of socks instead of ten, so as to go one more day without doing laundry. Now before going to the airport I weigh the suitcase, and evict some of the toys that have snuck in. It helps that I now have the company manuals on the hard drive.

I would like to pre-pack my flight bag, that is the bag that will be in the cockpit with me when I am the pilot, and just have it inside the big suitcase ready to go, but I don't want to check my electronics, so they all go in my carry-on with my laptop. Sometimes when the big suitcase weighs in over the fifty pound limit I just open it up and pull out the flight bag to carry as my "personal item" (it's a leather messenger bag). So I also have to pack the forbidden carry-on items outside the flight bag. So many things that I want in the cockpit are forbidden in the cabin.

Recently I checked in and the bag went on the scale at something like 51.2 lbs. "Do you want me to take out one point two pounds?" I asked immediately.

"Normally I would make you do it, but because you were so willing to, it's okay," she said. Amusingly, nearby check-in agents chimed in to back her up.

"She does! You're so lucky!" It must be a routine to make me feel well-treated. I think I already told that story. Whether you work in an office or in the sky, your life is a routine, the routine is just a different shape and size.

The flight is quite turbulent, but nothing to be alarmed about so long as you and everyone around you has their seatbelts securely fastened. Not too long ago several passengers were injured in turbulence because while they took the suggestion that their seatbelts be fastened while they were seated, they buckled them so loosely around their laps that the buckle part was able to fly up and catch on the arm of the seat, undoing the belt in turbulence. For best results, do up your seatbelt snugly under normal circumstances and when the turbulence starts or the announcement is made, cinch it tight. It should be somewhat less uncomfortable than breaking your neck on the ceiling. We arrive, and so has my baggage, so I proceed to step two.

This month's work site is not served by commercial carriers, so once again I rent a car to travel to the site from the airport. The car is less new than the typical rental car. Maybe I shouldn't have told the agent I wanted it for a crew change. She knows that probably means hard driving on rough roads. There's a bit of a vibration in the steering column, but it goes in a straight line. I drive into town to pick up my coworker. (He's here already because he came out early to visit friends).

We go to a Tim Horton's to supply for the journey. He says he ate recently and is saving his snacks for later, so offers to drive. I warn him about the steering and accept. As I write this up, I realize that our decision not to return the car for a better one was a continuing theme for the month. I'll have to watch for that in out future CRM together.

The local tourist information place was closed for the winter or the weekend or something, but we had Google map printouts and road signs to guide us, and decided that would be enough. It's not like there will be so much traffic and so many interchanges that we won't have opportunity to plot our route safely. It's not snowing and there is no snow on the roads yet, either. After forty-five minutes or so, my co-worker hands me his watch, trying to escape the flagellation from the vibration. I didn't ask him whether he would have preferred me to be late than suffer this car. We'll be there soon.

And despite the amount that all the detail in this account resembled foreshadowing, we were there in less time than we expected, and with no incident. Except after we unloaded, I went out to the car to get my sunglasses and park the car, but then forgot to get my sunglasses and had to go out to the car again, much to the amusement of the others. The crew we were replacing met us at the hotel lobby and it was a joyous reunion. We all went out for supper and debriefing. In a different car.

On Keeping Your Mouth Shut

A guy named Dustin Curtis visited the American Airlines website and found it to be a confusing and disharmonious experience. As a designer himself, he couldn't understand why a large company that sells much of its product online would have a website that looks like a cross between a Geocites homepage and a squatter's portal. So he wrote them a letter.

I don't know what Dustin expected to accomplish. Perhaps he thought that his suggestions might be welcomed and that there was a chance he could get some work out of it. I've written a similar letter to a jetshare company whose Internet image was the complete opposite of the high end professionalism the copy professed, and I just wanted to tell them. The way you might tell someone they have a taillight out. People need to know these things and don't always notice them themselves.

A member of the American Airlines design team replied to Dustin. The gist of the reply was, "I agree the site needs work; it's hard to change things in such a large company, but wait patiently and you will see." Dustin was thrilled to hear that someone cared about the site, reversed his opinion of the designers' competence and said so on his blog. An hour after he posted an anonymized version of the reply, the author of the e-mail was fired.

Ostensibly, he was fired for violating the non-disclosure agreement he signed with AA. Billy Sanez, Director of Corporate Communications at American says "We have employees all over the world using social media to communicate. The issue is not posting for us, it is revealing company secrets." What did he reveal? It's certainly no secret that AA is a large company with many departments. Were the spilled beans this list of planned improvements?

Some of our slated efforts include improved navigation; 16 column grid-based layouts; a lighter, more airy visual design; improved user interactions; and an increased transparency to fares and sales policies across the board.

How dare you reveal to our competitors that we plan to improve the user interface! I can't see that that's the real reason, though. The real sin was breaking the facade of unity in the company. That's no secret. It's so unsecret that rather than redesigning the site, AA has created three new booking portals for subdemographics. They're just as cluttered, but they think they can increase their appeal to gays, blacks and women by providing us all with separate drinking fountains. I guess if you're a black lesbian you have your pick. I can be snarky because I don't work for AA.

It doesn't matter how many coworkers you have: you don't tell the customer the landing sucked because your copilot made a lousy landing; you can't tell the charter passenger you're an hour late because management told the dispatcher to schedule two pickups at the same time; and you don't tell them the website sucks because 200 departments are fighting it out for space on the front page. It's tempting to do so, because the quickest way to get the customer off your personal back is to side with them and designate a new, common enemy to blame it all on. But you have to keep ranks.

I worked for a chief pilot once who took this one further. We kept ranks not only within the company but with the regulator, too. He forbade us to use phrases such as "Transport Canada requires you to remain seated with your seatbelt fastened." We weren't to transfer any safety demands to another organization but to make them a personal requirement by us, the flight crew, for your safety. I don't think it was a coincidence that this chief pilot had the best relationship with Transport I've ever seen. He didn't just say that we were all in it together for safety, he meant it.

But we were still free to blame everything on the weather.

Time to Spare? Go by Air! (And accept unskilled help)

After our magazine reading and tower-visiting we check the engine nacelle. I put my hand inside the front of the cowling. "Hey, it's warm!" This is going to work. We discuss how we'll do it. Untent the right engine now and see if it starts. If it does, leave it running and then untent the left and throw the tent in the cabin. If it doesn't, tent it up again and go and see if hangar guy is back from lunch. We coordinate our movements as to who will do what, but then totally disregard the plan.

The right engine doesn't start right off, but it is sounding much better than it did, and we think we can get it started, but don't want to run the battery down. So we decide to start the left one first again. We put all the cords and tents away in the lockers, start the left to get an alternator running and then the right starts after a couple more tries. Hurrah! We run up the airplane and depart, first to the north to get out from under the local layer, and then to the east, over the mountains. The only traffic we see is once again a far-above jet visible only because of its contrails. And he got me again with his cry of "traffic!" befoe I saw that it was just a distant jet.

The scattered layer thins out just past the mountains and we descend above the flat terrain around Fort Nelson. We have a hangar waiting for us, and arrive in time for the people working there to not have gone home. It's now time for the next scheduled inspection, which is why our AME has been hanging around with us pilot types. He goes straight to work. "Can we bring you anything?" I ask.

"Hawaiian pizza with mushrooms."

I get a large and we bring it back, then ask what we can do. Generally at this point we're delegated to cleaning the junk out of the nose locker so the people who do the real work can get to the battery, or just asked to stay out of the way. It's often less work to do something yourself than to get unskilled labour on it. But this guy puts us right to work. My first job is to remove a couple of manifold heat muffs for inspection. The inside looks like a medieval weapon, with all spikes on it, presumably to help with heat dissipation. He inspects them and I put the muffs back on.

Then he asks, "Have you ever used lockwire pliers?" I haven't, just seen them in use, and seen the results many times. Airplanes have a lot of vibration and vibration has a tendency to cause threaded fasteners to work loose over time. It's fairly important that parts not fall off an airplane in flight, so we use lockwire to back up the fastener. It's fairly thin wire wrapped between a removable part and some other part of the airplane, and wrapped in the direction such that the wire is pulling it in the tightening direction. In order to loosen, the part would have to pull the wire. The wire is always two strands, twisted together incredibly neatly. My admiration for the neatness of this process went down a little when I discovered that there is a special sort of twirly pliers that twists the wire together, but it's still an art. He showed me how to do it on the first part that needed lockwiring, and then send me to replace the hydraulic filter.

That required first cutting the old lockwire holding the filter in place. Sounds easy, but it was a little tricky because it was a tight space and the wire is twisted tightly, so you have to cut it very close to the end, or untwist it in order to get it off. I did a bit of both. Removing the old filter was also tricky, because I didn't know exactly which part was coming off, so I was turning it the wrong way at first. Now it's off, and he has provided me in advance with a rag to catch the fluid that drips out as I remove the case from around the filter.

The filter is a corrugated tube inside the case, and it stayed on the airplane as I removed the case, something he remarks on as being unusual, but desirable, as it's a little tricky to get out of the case otherwise. I'm now left with a tube about the diameter and half the length of my mini-maglite flashlight. It's filled with red hydraulic fluid. "Can I dump this in here?" I ask, indicating the big bucket under the nacelle, into which the last of ten quarts of dirty engine oil are dripping. He says yes, and I upend the little cylinder. The hydraulic fluid pours out but there's a little extra splash and a shift of weight that suggest, "Uh, there was something in there that I shouldn't have dumped in the bucket, wasn't there?"

There was. A little spring. He offers me a magnet on a stick, but the spring doesn't seem to be magnetic, so he finds me some gloves so I can root around in the bucket and find the missing part. Oh man. I'm the absolute definition of why it is less work to do something yourself than to have unskilled help. I find the spring, clean it, the gloves and the magnet on a stick, then reassemble it all with a new hydraulic filter. Now I have to lockwire it in place. I can't get the lockwire pliers to do the little twisty thing, though. Turns out I'm squeezing the release as I squeeze the pliers. That sorted out, I make another stab at it. First try, is completely awful. I cut the wire off and try again. The second try is salvageable. I have to untwist some of the wire and then retwist it better around the part. When I "finished" I still wasn't sure it was tight enough, but he was busy at that moment showing my coworker how to remove brake pads.

I learn how to remove and replace brake pads, too, and then I look after the right brake while the other pilot does the left. The AME checks up on how we're doing, tightens up my lockwiring job and calls us "my young apprentices." He seems pleased with us and pretends we're better than some of the apprentices he has to work with.

"Your apprentices must love you!" I muse.

"Why?" he asks, genuinely confused as to how taking the time to give clear instructions, trusting people to try things and patiently tolerating screwups is anything worthy of appreciation. I guess he's just a natural instructor.

Once everything is done, we clean up and put away the tools, and we get to leave the airplane in the hangar overnight. Ahh, luxury. The cost per night to keep the airplane in the hangar is almost as much as my hotel room, but it's worth it.

Tweeting on a Jet Plane

This song might be really mean if it weren't so funny. Also I love the original, because I'm always leaving on a jet plane and not knowing when I'll be back again. (I wish there were an option to accept a cookie from airline websites such that when I visit the default ticket type is "one-way.")

I promise this is my last post about NW 188, unless something really startling come to light, like it turns out that the crew members they interviewed are really robots made with alien technology, and not the original pilots at all. Even if they are robots made with ordinary Earth technology. But it has to be at least that startling.

In response to this incident and Aluwings' post on the subject, I tried to keep track of what we did on my last flight to pass the time. Once we were clear of controlled airspace and had bade farewell to the local controller, we:

• commented on how much nicer the weather was than last time we came this way
• discussed the best sort of glasses frames for wearing with headsets
• ate some snacks out of our respective flight bags
• talked about the variation in stickiness of those stickers they put on apples
• compared brands of energy bars/supplement bars/meal replacement bars
• marvelled at the thinness of some of the clouds below us
• performed fuel management tasks
• waved our hands around to try and explain how we were getting a 40 knot tailwind when we were flying to the northwest of a low
• took some pictures of the clouds
• looked at the list of nearest airports about forty different times, some of which we then clicked on to see the names and frequencies
• called flight services for altimeter settings and the latest destination weather (14,000 broken) and forecast (tempo three miles in snow broken 2000)
• discussed an alternate plan should there be a snowstorm so fierce that we couldn't get in
• turned on the windshield defroster just to make sure it worked (yes)
• discussed the potential of the defroster as a hand-warmer (good)
• climbed 2000'
• pulled out the POH and looked up the single-engine performance ceiling for our weight, new altitude and outside air temperature
• looked up the times in the journey log for a previous flight so we could laugh at how much faster this one was
• tried to locate the source of a draught, but decided it was just air circulation from the cabin, so cranked up the rear heat
• gratuitously adjusted some heating system sliders which the mechanic said weren't connected to anything that he could see
• kept track of our position on the paper charts as well as in the GPS
• looked up the names of lakes that we passed
• looked up an aerodrome we overflew in the CFS to see who owned it

That's kind of the size of it. It doesn't seem boring when you're there. This song, however is going on my iPod.