Anti-Icing Mythologies

Well-developed ground de-icing/anti-icing mythologies have been developed for the airlines.
         - My misreading of an icing education document

The document said "methodologies" not "mythologies" and that's true for the airlines, but I was anticipating what it was going to say for general aviation. It's not that GA pilots are stupider, just that we aren't supported by the infrastructure the airlines are and we usually have to do our own de-icing. And it always takes place in the stupidly freezing cold, and usually in the dark, because people want their airplane ready to depart at the beginning of the day, but the sun doesn't come up in the winter until it has confirmed that the day is well underway. And even then it only comes up far enough to clock in.

Like the sun, GA pilots' first line of defence against icing is to try to take the winter off. This is actually working pretty well for me these days, especially when combined with our "keep the airplane in a warm hangar" strategy, but when the chips are down I still have to resort to the well-developed mythologies.

Sun will take the ice off, even if the air temperatures are below freezing. In temperatures that are just below freezing, sunlight will warm dark areas enough to melt, or at least soften, the ice on them, and even when it's especially cold the air is dry and the frozen moisture will sublimate into to the air as it warms with the morning. Meanwhile we whack the airplane with brooms or mitten-clad hands to crack the ice and then sweep it to dislodge frost or ice chunks. The official video on not taking off with any ice adhering to your airframe ever recommends sawing a rope back and forth across the surfaces. I've never tried that. Never had a rope. Last year I bought a broom at a northern hardware store, just a regular straw broom, and shared it with a Maule pilot stuck in the same snowfall. When I walked into the office at the end of the trip one of my bosses asked, lightning fast, "What's the broom for? Is that how you got home?" It was too funny to take offense at.

One reason we resort to mythological forces, like windshield antifreeze is that it's available. Most GA airports have no deicing services available at all. Even if de-icing is an advertised service of the FBO on the field, you have to find the phone number and persuade the person who answers to come out and do the work. Let's say you're paid by the hour to do a job that mainly involves driving a fuel truck around and pumping fuel into tanks, plus a bit of sitting in an office and answering the phone. How many hours pay would you want to get up at four am, start a different vehicle that you're not sure is going to work and stand on a ladder spraying poisonous fluids on yourself and some cranky pilot's airplane? If an airport is used by an airline, they may have their own deicers, but generally don't have the staffing, spare fluid, insurance, or billing apparatus to deice other peoples' airplanes. If you happen to be departing shortly after the scheduled airline flight, and have a case of beer handy, you may be able to get a few squirts of the pre-heated deicing fluid from the guys that came out for the flight, but you can't count on that. And you have to know what you're allowed to spray on your airplane and where.

Quick rule of thumb, the odd-numbered ones are okay for me. That is Type I deicing fluid, which looks like thick orange Gatorade, gives virtually no holdover time and can be used on any speed of aircraft is safe and so is Type III. Type III looks like urine, requires a minimum rotation speed of 60 knots, and, if you pay first, has a holdover time sufficient to get you to the runway and airborne in light snow. Holdover time is the time period during which you probably won't get more contamination while standing or taxiing. It's measured from the beginning of the application (i.e. measuring by the area that is treated first). Types II and IV have holdover times sufficient to queue with everyone else on the taxiway at Pearson, but they work by enveloping your aircraft surfaces in cozy ooze, so to use them safely you have to have a rotation speed over 100 knots, to ensure they will shear off before rotation and not interfere with wing performance.

Holdover time is just a mythological luxury for me. In ground icing conditions I need to do everything, including a run up, and then shut down, deice and go right away. That can be a tough call because batteries and starters are not at their best in the cold. If you've got the incantation right to start the engines once in a morning, you don't like to shut down and risk having the magic not work the second time.

Summer is Over

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

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

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

Anti-Ice Without Electrical Heating

Yesterday's post was mostly about electrical heating elements that prevent ice from accreting on various parts of the airframe. Today is about anti-icing measures that do not involve electrical heating, except in as much as the flow of electricity always causes some heating.

The leading edge of the wing and tail are covered in what is essentially a network of bicycle wheel inner tubes stretched out straight, covered in a neoprene sheet and connected to a nozzle. At the pilot's command, an electrically operated regulated 18 p.s.i. bleed air inflates the tubes, called boots and pops off the ice. Whether the pilot commands it or not, at all times that the boots are not being inflated, suction pulls the boots back snugly against the wing. The suction also comes from the 18 p.s.i. regulated bleed air, through the same distributor as the positive pressure. I'll explain how it can both suck and blow later. This system is yet another controlled by a three position switch. The OFF position leaves the solenoids controlling the distributor de-energized, and the wing boots connected to vacuum and sucked against the wing and tail. The AUTO position opens the solenoid allowing 18 p.s.i. regulated bleed air into the wing boots, inflating them for six seconds. Then that pressure is dumped overboard and the wing boots gets sucked back against the wing while the tail boots get inflates for four seconds. After that the system rests for 170 seconds and starts over. The third position is MANUAL and all the boots will remain inflated for as long as the pilot holds the switch in that position. Electrical control of the solenoid can be assigned to either the left or right essential bus.

Inside the engine inlet is a probe called the P2T2 probe (or the R2D2 probe, depending on who is talking). Its job ought to be transmitting pressure and temperature readings for that station to the engine computer, but considering that it is kept ice free with P3 bleed air, it seems that it wouldn't be an accurate indicator of the temperature and pressure there. What am I missing? And does its output have to be translated by a C3PO probe before it can be used? This web page has condescending British people telling someone else who dared ask that anyone at the ATPL level who has to ask questions about a P2T2 probe is lazy and stupider than a toenail. Maybe so, but I know how it's anti-iced. Mostly I know. I'm not sure if it is automatically supplied with bleed air at all times or whether that's part of the inlet anti-ice.

I like the way the anti-ice for the oil cooler works. It simply runs the line taking hot oil from the engine around the lip of the air intake before routing it to the oil cooler. No electricity required.

The fuel anti-icing (i.e. to prevent ice crystals from forming in the fuel thus blocking the filters or lines) also uses heat from the oil, but not quite so simply. As the high-pressure engine fuel pumps draws fuel through the filter towards the fuel control unit, some fuel is routed off to the side, through a heat exchanger, heated with scavenged hot oil and then metered through a temperature-controlled anti-icing valve and sent right back to where it started before the filter. I don't know the exact mechanism; it probably involves a bimetallic controller, but the colder the fuel, the wider the anti-icing valve opens and the more fuel has to take the scenic route through the oil-fuel heater. An additional valve in the system, just before the heater, closes when the engine speed is below about 50 or 55% rpm, to prevent any fuel from being diverted during engine start, the only time such low speeds should occur.

Back to the very low tech, the manufacturer claims that the static ports and fuel vents on the airplane are anti-ice. They have no heating, it's just that the fuel vents are concave and out of the airflow, so there is nothing for ice to build up on, and the static ports are also very flat and at the rear of the aircraft. Just in case they were to ice up, there is an alternate static source located in the unpressurized forward baggage compartment.

There are two more anti-icing systems on the standard aircraft, but they are both irrelevant to this fleet, one because the system it belongs to has been removed, and the other because it was an option not installed.

Also, can someone please tell the person who writes the scripts for my bank's drones to read at me while I try to set up automatic payment on my new credit card that (a) a new credit card is not an occasion for "congratulations," and (b) "I want to inform you some points" is not English.

And in current news, when a huge tragedy strikes, and it's too much to take in all at once, people focus on the corners of it that are most relevant to them. I woke up to e-mail chatter about international flight schedules, plus this video of the tsunami associated with Japan's earthquake hitting an airport. Even people with no international connections have something in Japan they can relate to. I laughed to see the internet hasten to assure us that Maru the Cat and his owner are fine. But what is a mass tragedy if not thousands of individual tragedies, and, thanks to stringent building standards combined with preparation and training, millions of people who can say, "I'm okay, and so is my cat."

Heating Elements: Making Coffee, Shedding Ice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Altitude

I don't usually watch scary movies, but when I saw the publicity photo for this one, with the cast posing in a piston twin, its very familiar cockpit prominent in the background of the shot, I had to see it. Fortunately it isn't really movie-scary. That's not to say that pilots watching this movie won't have nightmares afterward. Let me set the scene.


A non-instrument rated pilot with only a few hours multi-engine experience, poor weather assessment skills and an affected emotional state boards all her closest friends onto an aircraft she has never flown before, with inoperative wing boots, and without providing a preflight safety briefing, securing their baggage nor performing a weight and balance calculation. She departs beneath the dark bases of towering cumulus and then attempts to outclimb them in poor visibility in mountainous terrain.
None of these factors dooms the flight, but an authoritative preflight safety briefing may have helped their case. Or maybe not, considering what the film throws at the terrified group of teens. Unlike my typical movie 'review,' I'm not going to give the whole story away. Most of the scary parts are an old-fashioned movie of the imagination with some depicted B-movie monster fun.
Although some aspects of the initial emergency that drives the plot are roll-in-the-aisles funny to anyone who knows how an airplane works, the aviation parts of the movie show the hand of a competent technical adviser. I know her. She is a commercial pilot who worked on Wings Over Canada. The pilot runs accurate checklists and, before she degenerates into screaming "MAYDAY" on multiple frequencies, makes the most authentic radio calls ever heard in a major motion picture. The weight calculation that she performs in her head (in flight, after icing become a concern) doesn't include any moment arms, but it's almost startling to hear her use terms like "basic empty weight" and explain that the stall speed will increase with weight.
Sadly the movie does not escape the "we have to lighten the load!" trope, involving throwing baggage out of the airplane, but they do avoid cutting to the fuel gauge at dramatically more frequent intervals. The pilot even leaves the Janitrol heater turned off specifically to conserve fuel. You don't realize how many things there are to know about aviation until you see the high ratio of things they got right to things they got wrong in the details.
The aircraft callsign for the purpose of the film is C-MYXZ. That's not a real callsign, as Canadian registrations never have an M after the C. Registrations are often changed for movie purposes. The Americans even have a small group of N-numbers reserved just for movies. This is the first time I've seen this particular obfuscation on a Canadian movie airplane. Maybe it's M for movie. it's like a 555 telephone number prefix for airplane registrations. The actual registration on this airplane is personalized to the owner, while YXZ is about as generic as you get.
I think not being a giant studio movie placed fewer layers between the technical advice and the finished product, and the result lends a lot more verisimilitude to the picture than you'd expect from a scary teen movie set in an airplane. Even though the director may not have intended suspense based on a VFR pilot hand flying through IMC, my heart was pounding. Spotting editing errors like an outside shot of the aircraft crossing the hold short line while the dialogue has the pilot reading back a hold short clearance, or a huge split in the mixtures when both engines are functioning normally is just part of the fun.
So is the ultimate hazard to this aircraft to be a control surface malfunction? Icing? Structural damage from turbulence? Fuel exhaustion? Loss of control from disorientation (and the pilot constantly turning her head around to talk to the people in the back)? Psychotic passengers? Hypoxia? CFIT? Not even close. Try giant space octopus. That's not a spoiler: its tentacles are right on the movie poster. Advance publicity billed this as a Lovecraftian monster movie, but monster fans will probably be disappointed. Aviation B-movie lovers should buy it right away, though.
The writer confesses that the original ending killed them all by crashing into terrain, but the actual ending is clever and satisfying. There are still a few loose ends, but I'll just call them red herrings. My largest complaint is that the visual post-processing was done overseas by a mainland China shop. This is not a quality issue, but because there's a lot of taxpayer funding in this, Kaare Andrew's first feature film, I'd rather it have gone to local talent. I'll forgive them because apparently they tried to have it done locally and then there was some screw-up; a Chinese company, with a Canadian connection, saved the film. It's filmed in Canada with anonymized airports and nav aid names, but if you've been there you'll easily spot where they really are.
It's rated restricted in the US for "language" and a "sexual gesture," but it's not a sweary or obscene movie at all. Apparently in the US, a guy hidden by a seatback who makes a gesture that suggests he may be opening his pants and waggling his wang poses potential trauma for a sixteen year old, while kids are free to see movies where someone is bludgeoned to death, so long as no blood is depicted. (I recall no bludgeoning nor bloodshed in Altitude).
As you can tell from the date on this blog entry and the direct-to- video release date of the movie, I got to see an advance showing, but I don't have a personal or financial connection to the film or its crew. I paid for my ticket and for my own copy of the DVD.

On the topic of products being released imminently by independent Canadian entertainers and of entertaining fictional death, a year or so ago one of my favourite webcomic artists, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, solicited stories about a world in which a person could learn the manner of their death in advance. Selected best stories have been edited into an anthology, and the book is about to be published. In an attempt to get a little bit of attention to a book that major publishing houses wouldn't accept, they ask that if you'd like to buy the book, buy it on Amazon.com on October 26th, in order to spike the sales and get it on Amazon's bestseller list, just for a day. A more cogent argument for that strategy is here. Again, I have no connection to the product, didn't even submit a story, but I appreciate Ryan's work, and I'd love a world where artists did wonderful things and simultaneously had enough money to support themselves, without all the intervening apparatus of the ... I want to say "dinosaur publishing world" but that would imply that they were as cool as Ryan's character T-Rex.

Coffee & Anarchy

I'm on my way to work. The coffee should be cool enough to drink right now, but I have put the lid on the travel coffee mug backwards, so it's hard to drink. I try to fix that, which results in my spilling coffee all over myself. At least I can verify that it is now not too hot to put in contact with my lips. I stand up and shake some of the liquid off my jacket, but that doesn't do anything about the part that is all over the front of my pants. An observer with a poor sense of smell and an imperfect grasp of female biology might think I have wet myself. I could change into one of the other pairs of pants in my suitcase before I check it in for departure, but then all my luggage would become coffee scented. I'm not in uniform, so have no one in particular to impress. I'm not worried about horrifying the biology impaired. In fact, horrifying the biology impaired could be legitimately listed as a hobby of mine. I decide to run with Mark Twain's live toad theory and look forward to the rest of my day.

Boarding the flight there's someone ahead of me in the jetway, also not in uniform, but his luggage includes a familiar rectangular leather case with B737 stickers on it, so it's pretty obvious where he works. The case has been almost completely destroyed through use, with giant holes in the bottom. I comment on its state of dilapidation and the pilot says he bought it eight years ago to celebrate his upgrade. By the look of it, the reasonable lifespan of a pilot brain box is about five years. I thought they'd last longer. I used to think that the very young guys with tattered cases were toting hand-me-downs.

I have one, as a result of it being abandoned at an office I worked in once, and me being the only one patient enough to pick the combination lock. I don't use it at work because I don't have the cockpit space for it, and I prefer a bag with a zillion pockets so I know where to find everything. We keep the charts on board the airplanes.

During the flight I complete my company annual exams, verifying that I still know things like how to operate the emergency exits, how to extend the gear if the regular method fails and what types of deicing fluid are appropriate for my airplane. Coffee wouldn't be a good idea, but there is some flexibility.

In the following report, the flight crew of a U.S. air carrier landed at a Russian airport on a scheduled flight only to find that ice had formed on the upper surfaces of the wings due to fuel cold-soak. Perhaps because it was June, the Russian ground crew didn't have deicing fluids available -- but they did have another kind of solution -- and it worked to Absolut Perfection. The Captain's story: "...upper wing ice formed due to fuel cold-soak. No glycol at airport... [Airport] possessed no fluid as well...So, had Russian ground crew spray wings with hot water, then immediately sprayed 25 bottles of Russian vodka on top of wings...[with] garden sprayer. Wings were subsequently checked, they were clear of ice. Normal takeoff."

From NASA.

At destination I meet with my chief pilot and we go over my exams. I've specified the wrong position for the fuel to tee off from the fuel system to the heater, I've chosen the less perfect answer to a question on why we don't use pure glycol, and I didn't have a list of the specific operational specifications my company has. Op specs are deviations from the CARs (Canadian Aviation Regulations), approved specifically for individual companies. For example we have one that allows me to work a fifteen hour duty day instead of the regular fourteen.

When I studied for my commercial pilot written exam, back in the ancient times of the 20th century, I noticed that almost every rule that governed commercial flying concluded with "unless otherwise authorized in the air operator certificate." In fact, when I wrote flashcards for studying, I made up a special symbol, I think it resembled the anarchy symbol: a capital A in a circle, to represent that phrase. Aviation, more than anything else I've done seems to be actually concerned with safety over rules. If an air operator can demonstrate that they can do something safely in a way that is not in strict accordance with the rules, they can get that op spec. It encourages innovation but not anarchy. If as a pilot you're in a dangerous situation you can disobey the rules to get out of it. There will be paperwork, but not blood.

We go over everything that I have wrong, then we both sign the exams and my chief pilot puts them in a file. See? Anarchists don't keep files.

The True North Cold and Frosty

The handover crew reported that the worst problem here has been heavy frost. There's no point trying to get going in the morning before nine because the frost reforms as fast as it can be taken off, and then even if the weather holds, the frost is so heavy that if they land at four to refuel, the airplane is unflyable by the time the tanks are full. Before he leaves, one of the other pilots drives to another airport served by a scheduled carrier and buys five gallons of Type I deicing fluid for $25 a gallon, and that's already partly diluted. It has about a 45 minute holdover time in these conditions, and we use it without further dilution, it can be safely applied down to the mid-thirties. If it's warm enough for dilution we'll mix a themos full of hot water from the hotel coffee maker with a half garden sprayer full of fluid and that will be good to -18, if I recall correctly. It's all written down where I can consult it.

The plan will be to detarp, deice, run up and depart then when we land for fuel to be ready to deice again. It will be worth it for getting the second flight in on a day. The fluid looks like the orange syrup you got to make orange drink, if you ever had a McDonald's birthday party back in the 1980s. We can now carry this on board if we have room for it, and we're expecting to be in one place long enough to actually use the stuff this year. It also has a long shelf life, so if we shut down and go to Florida we can store it somewhere until we return to Canada in the spring.

Deicing is a huge deal in Canada. I can't imagine how many resources go into manufacturing, testing, obtaining, storing and applying deicers, but when the 140-page government Guidelines document has sections on hijacking and bomb threats I have to wonder if someone didn't go overboard on it. Are they talking about people hijacking the deicing truck, or having a company or airport policy that hijacked aircraft go to the head of the deicing queue?

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.

Spirit of the North

The job is done, and the client drops the three of us -- two pilots and the AME -- off at the airport before they drive south. Our mission is to get back to Fort Nelson. It's a five hour drive on a treacherous mountain highway for them and should be an hour and a half up and over the pretty mountains for us. There is a lot of steam fog, still mostly over the lake, but seeing as the runway ends at the lake, it's also right off one end of the runway. It's also overcast at 3000' but we can see that it scatters out to the north and satellite images have shown it scattered over the mountains, so we're not worried about that.

It's very cold, -17 degrees, and there's a lot of frost on the airplane. We brush off as much as we can loosen with soft brushes and then use our spray-and-wipe-before-it-refreezes technique on the layer sticking to the wing, but it's still freezing a little, and so are we. We clear about half of one wing and then retreat inside. The weather is supposed to improve, with a high of -3 and this broken layer scattering out. We have all day to get to Fort Nelson, so we see no reason to freeze our butts and fingers. We go inside.

There is a warm pilot's lounge full of broken down but comfortable couches and old National Geographic magazines. It's just adjacent to the CARS office and we can hear the airport workers coming in and out, commenting on the temperature. "It's not supposed to be this cold yet!" they complain. I read an article about a mountain climber who has soled Everest with no oxygen, and that's only a tiny part of his lifetime of accomplishment. Some people are inspirational and some people go so far beyond that that it's discouraging. People mentoring at risk children should remember that. I read out some of Messner's feats to my coworkers and they toss back, "I'll bet he can't fly an airplane." I'll bet he could deice one better than us at minus seventeen though.

It's not going to get appreciably warmer until the broken layer dissipates, and after a couple of hours it becomes evident that that isn't happening. We'll give it a shot. We finish deicing the airplane. Our method actually did work pretty well. It just needs two iterations to get all the frost off without diluting the fluid to the point that it freezes. When the critical surfaces are bare and dry we un-tent the engines, unplug the cords, pack everything away and pile in. I give a quick and slightly adapted passenger briefing to the AME e.g. "you know how to open the emergency exit, 'cause you do that during the inspection," and then climb in the cockpit. As I put my foot into the footwell the toe catches the centre console and tears off a big chunk of plastic facing. Argh. I pick up the broken piece and hand it back to the AME. "Could you add this to the list of things to fix?" More evidence for him that pilots just gratuitously break things.

While I'm busy wrecking the place, the other pilot starts up the engines. Er, the engine. The right one is a little balky, so he switches over and starts the left one first, making more power available to start the right one. It just doesn't go. We check and double check all the usual things: tank selection, firewall shutoff, magnetos selected on. The starter is working admirably for a motor asked to work in these temperatures and the propeller is going around, but it won't catch. Most likely we kicked the engine heater plug loose during our first deicing attempt, or it was never properly set the night before.

After several unsuccessful attempts, my coworker offers me the chance to make a fool of myself. No joy. I try various permutations ask the AME for any suggestions. So we have three of us in this airplane, professionals in the art of making an airplane go, and none of us can make the sucker run. Anyone who has been there can hear us suggesting tactics to one another. We try flooding it and using the flooded start procedure. We try it with the throttle and mixture full open. We try it with the electric boost pump running. A few times it seems to start, and we cheer, but then it dies again. It's like it's not getting enough fuel. I check the firewall shutoff again.

The AME figures it's just too cold for the fuel to vapourize properly, so even though we flood it to the point that there is liquid fuel dripping out on the ground, there isn't enough fuel vapour in the cylinders to make a combustible mixture. We know these things. We know this is a mechanical device, subject to all physical laws, but as humans we've been working with each other and with draught animals much longer than with combustion engines. It's hard not to imbue it with a personality. We coax it gently, apologizing for how cold it was, promise it an oil change and anything else it wants at the end of the trip. We beg it; we swear at it; we wonder if internal combustion engines have a patron saint we can pray to. I consider sacrificing chickens, but what we really need is a flock of warm, non-pooping, non feather-shedding chickens to warm it up with their body heat.

All the while that we are doing this, hangar guy is driving back and forth to and from the lake, hauling floatplanes. So you know, he wasn't lying about needing the hangar space for floatplanes, but if he's hauling these ones into the hangar now that means that last night there was five floatplanes worth of empty space in his hangar. We don't take up as much space as five floatplanes, and we would have paid good money for that space. The airplane is in a hangar elsewhere as I type this, and lets just say we're paying as much per night for its accommodation than we are for mine.

After over half an hour of attempting to start the engine we come up with a new strategy. We're going to shut down and tent up the engines again, this time with an electric space heater inside the nacelle of the right engine. We'll plug everything in and go back and read some more National Geographics while it warms up.

While the other two implement the heater plan, I also go to see if hangar guy has a Herman-Nelson. That's surely a staple in a WWII hangar in the Yukon. He's at his hangar and I greet him and ask. He has to be aware of our predicament, as there's no mistaking an airplane with one engine running and the other prop halfheartedly turning over for several seconds at a time. "Ah yeah," he says. "I think you flooded it."

Oh we most certainly flooded it. I admit it. Sometimes that works. He does have a Herman-Nelson, but it's lunch time now, he explains. And so he drives off to town.

I'm surprised. He's not obligated to help us, I know. But he does operate a business related to helping people with airplanes. This would have been an easy hundred bucks for him. Maybe two. We wanted the damn thing started. There's some cultural thing I'm missing here. Obviously money is not a great motivator for him. If he's happy with the income he has at the work level he has from the customers he has, then he's happy, and I can't really complain about that. And he seems like a nice friendly guy, really. Just not one inclined to accept our business. It must be a northern thing.

I go back to the National Geographic magazines. This time I read an article on the evolution of the eye. It was something that confounded Darwin, but he didn't know of as many creatures as modern biologists do. I also look at cute furry animals from somewhere, and expensively-attired debutantes in Laredo, Texas.

The picture shows the airport. The closer building is the WWII hangar, with a single otter and other smaller aircraft parked outside. The further building is the terminal, with glimpses of the lake beyond. You'll notice, as we did, that the terminal includes a tower. There's no one in the tower: we know the CARS guy has a desk and office on the main floor near the pilot lounge, and there is no tower controller. The tower is left over from the old days when this was a bustling hub on the building of the Alaska-Canada highway.

We ask the airport manager if there is a way to get into it. We have been around inside the terminal several times and there doesn't seem to be a locked door. "Sure," he says. "Mind your heads on the bracing." He opens a trap door in the ceiling and unfolds a metal staircase out of it. "Look out for bats," he warns cheerily and goes back to his office.

We go up the stairs, and up the wooden stairs beyond that until we come to the first landing. This is a three story log building built in the 1940s, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it seems to be held together by a lot of bracewires and struts. It's also cold. The floor below is insulated so they aren't losing any heat through the tower. I test my footing with each step as I walk across the floor. Judging by the colour and wear of the carpet, this place was refurbished in the 1970s and still in use for a number of years after that. There's only a few items of broken furniture remaining, but we imagine one of the landings was an office, and another a lounge and coffee room.

The tower cab at the top is mostly empty too. There's an old TV and some giant light bulbs in boxes, but no antique radio equipment. Maybe it is still in use downstairs. There's another ladder up to the roof, presumably for weather observations, and a balcony. We finish our tour and go back down, closing the stairs up behind us. It wasn't something I'd describe as a fascinating slice of history, but it was a fun mini-adventure. I think one of the most fun things is that we were allowed to do it at all. Can you think of anywhere in the US or Canada that isn't north of sixty where you would be allowed to just wander into an abandoned area of a public building? This is completely aside from the fact that it was at an airport, normally the most paranoid public place out there.

That's the spirit of the north. You can get yourself into trouble and you can get yourself out, and no one seems particularly inclined to interfere one way or the other.

Will She Fly or Will She Sleep?

Seven a.m. came too soon after getting to sleep after having a four hour nap in the middle of the day, but I got up. Ate breakfast with company and two chainsaw replacement chain salesmen from Portland, Oregon. Raisin french toast with bacon.

Go to plane. I load and secure baggage while she checks weather. "We're not going high, but we're going," she says. Fine with me. I set the radios and the GPS, bookmark origin and destination in the CFS, tell her what I've done and then pick up my crossword puzzle. I'm not sure, but I think there's a possibility that half-assed two-crew procedures when it's legally a single-pilot operation are worse than single pilot with someone who is also qualified but is clearly not doing anything to contribute to the flight. Today I'm working on that theory. She'll assign me duty if she wants help. "I expect you to have that crossword puzzle finished before we arrive," she warns. So I have my flight duty. Also I may have to fly to the end of my duty day tonight, so I should relax now.

Winds favour 07 or 12, but the aprons and taxiways are only set up so that one can easily get to 25 or 30. My reply to her possibly rhetorical question about the best way to get there is "let's just call the FSS and ask which way they recommend."

We don't even have to ask. When she calls to taxi they recommend "alfa, bravo, backtrack 07." She's at the B-12/30 intersection before she says, "Wait a sec, how am I supposed to backtrack 07 from here? Runway 07 crosses at the other end of this runway." They meant backtrack 12, which we do. Meanwhile Jazz calls up and asks to depart off 30. The FSS points out that it's NOTAMed closed for work that isn't currently being done, but it's still closed, so the CRJ will have to backtrack 12 as well. We take off. Gear comes up and gear handle clunks back to the up-neutral position, as it's supposed to. It's more obvious from this seat.

"I guess I should make a quick turn to get out of their way," she says, referring to the Jazz flight.

I can see them out of my window. "Nah, they're just starting their backtrack. Take your time," I say. We loop lazily over the airport and en route. I'm stumped for a while on a clue that asks for a zoology word for permanently attached. I'm thinking that arms, legs, tails, most zoological bits are more-or-less permanently attached, and that the exception like the skink's sheddable tail is more deserving of a special name. And then I work out the crossword theme of NINE to FIVE and fill in a few more words, giving me a couple of letters and the now obvious SESSILE. I'm soon down to three clues. I need a "Fighting" team that fits IL_INI, a simple sugar that fits HE_OSE and "Holly" across with I_E_. The team could be anything, because lots of letters are pronounceable there, but none is recognizable. The holly is probably a Latin name. I run the alphabet on the sugar and decide that HEXOSE sounds like a nice name for a sugar, and as IBEX is fauna not flora I go with ICEX for the holly. It's almost definitely not correct in the crossword, but I don't know the holly or the team, and ICEX is a liquid you use to treat the surfaces of deicing boots to make it easier for them to shed ice. (If you're cheap you use Armor-All, but the latter leaves black streaks on your wings.) The same section of the paper yields another, easier crossword puzzle, a word find, a jumble, comics, descriptions of the top ten new reality shows, and a scrabble puzzle. And that's about how long the flight was. There may have been scenery outside, but I doubt it.

I've been here before so I direct her to where we parked then. It's busy, with three commuters at the terminal, a row of little jets lined up along the back of the apron, and people all over the place. We dodged between a Dash-8 just shutting down and a helicopter just starting up to squeeze into our spot beside a hangar.

I go to the FBO to arrange our stay. There's a pilot on the phone to flight services, making "sorry, I'll be right done gestures." I smile and point at the FBO attendant, who is on a different phone. I'm waiting for him. Another pilot is also waiting.

"Are you the Dash-8?" I ask him.

"Oh no," he says, in an accent that's four or five thousand kilometres southeast of here, "much too slow for me." He's one of the jets.

"Something going on in town?" I ask, still wondering what's brought all the traffic. But it turns out that his accent is from much further south than his passengers. He's based in Calgary, just doing a crew change. Apparently Thursday is a big crew change day here.

It's raining. We go to the hotel. Lunch at Boston Pizza. The rest of the day is overdue paperwork, which is why some of this entry is not fully expanded from the terse notes that begat it.

Texas Scares Me

I'm irrationally scared of Texas. You'll see some criticism in the next few posts. Please forgive me, or educate me, or at least be literate and interesting while flaming me. If you're a die-hard Texan you might just want to skip a few posts. I start out trying to treat Texas fairly, but it just comes out mean. I'm not sure what it is. Texas has a reputation, I guess, as a larger than life, shoot first ask questions later kind of state.

It's enormous, so there's no one Texas. The bit I'm in is flat and cold--we've come all this way and yet the temperature is hovering around freezing. It even snowed in Dallas this week.

We were told we're in the Best Western hotel, and the GPS database in the plane said that was 3 miles from the airport, but the customer who picks us up is clearly driving further than that.

"What hotel are we in?" we ask.

"Best Western. It's nice, but it's way the other side of town."

It turns out that the old Best Western was torn down last year after the new one we're in was completed. There's a sign still up for the Grand Opening Special Rates. The assistant at the customer's company who booked the accommodation must have been working off the same outdated information we were.

On the ride to the hotel a public service ad comes on the radio, addressing pregnant teenagers and scaring them with details of what a difficult task it is to raise a child on your own. We look at one another with raised eyebrows, having never heard abortion advertised, but then the ad wraps up urging the teenagers to give their babies up for adoption rather than keeping them. We realize that abortion isn't even on the table here. The young woman at the hotel check-in desk is pregnant and the others' expressions tell me that I'm not the only one reminded of the ad.

We go for dinner at the Texas Roadhouse chain next to the hotel. Something you have to love about the southern US: food is cheap. We have a tasty steak dinner with side dishes and non-alcoholic beverages and excellent although informal service, for ten dollars. I think I pay that much for a box of Chicken McNuggets and a milkshake at home.

We transported some of the customer's equipment and they shipped some by courier. It turns out we're more reliable today, as some of their equipment is missing, so we'll have the weekend off to wait for it to be delivered.

Something else scary I found today is this news article about a pilot suing three flight attendants who refused to accept his decision not to deice. Notice that the Calgary ground crew also filed a report on the aircraft when they observed ice and offered deicing but were turned down. Some US Airways pilots are more heroic than others, it would seem. Great CRM, dude. If I were him I would bring my own coffee to work.

Elbows and Fists

The first part of the forecast was right. It snowed most of the night. Then it snowed some more in the morning. And some more in the afternoon. It snowed so much that Montréal automobile traffic came almost to a standstill. It took us half an hour to drive the few blocks from the airport to the main street, because the main street was moving so slowly and so solidly, that it was gridlocked and cars from sidestreets couldn't turn on even when the lights were green.

Montréal does know how to deal with snow, however, and the world continued to turn. The police were out cracking down on drivers of what they termed "moving igloos" -- vehicles that had only had the windshields cleared, and were driving around encased in snow and ice. The snowploughs got the roads clear. And the sidewalks. Right after the big dump of snow, I had to walk about twelve blocks from the hotel to another business and back, including crossing a highway, and wondered what a mess that was going to be. It wasn't a mess at all. The sidewalk and all pedestrian crossings were passable and the sidewalks leading to the highway underpass were properly signed and accessible. I have had considerably more trouble making a twelve block journey on foot in Florida. The bike paths were cleared, too, and being used the day after the storm. The city apparently had committed to keeping certain arterial bike routes clear all winter and was keeping their promise. The only points I dock Montreal for car-free accessibility is that you have to pay a new fare to transfer between suburban buses and city transit, because they are separate companies.

It finally did turn to rain early the next morning. Freezing rain. Everything was now not only covered in snow but topped with a shiny layer of clear ice. The promised real rain never came. The temperature dropped and it finished off by snowing another ten or 20 centimetres on top of the ice.

Yeah, snow over ice over snow. A delightful combination. Everyone had had enough snow, so the word came out to proceed to our next job, in the southern US, when able. Our brokers did all the paperwork for us and made an appointment with US Customs across the river in Vermont. Our plan was to check out of the hotel, arriving at the airport just before noon, to get the airplane ready for a three p.m. departure. Weather, time and pilot status permitting we could do a second leg from Vermont to Indiana after clearing customs. I even had a friend in Indiana lined up to visit, and a pocketful of reasons ready to justify why his local airport was a good place to overnight.

Our cab driver was a Haïtian immigrant, very friendly but unfamiliar with the location of our FBO. The province of Québec manages its own immigration, so there's a different mix of immigrants here, more Haïtians, Senegalese, Rwandans and others from French-speaking nations than in English-Canada. It's kind of fun to see how the history of who invaded or colonized whom has repercussions hundreds of years later on who drives your cab and makes your restaurant meals. The cabbie doesn't speak English as well as your average Montréaler, but "left here ... right here ... stop by the Esso" are not difficult feats of communication so we did just fine.

Despite us giving the FBO half a day's head start, the ramp and all the airplanes were still completely covered in snow and ice. They'd run into a bit of a "who deices the deicers?" problem. They had a deicing truck, and a large heated hangar and a front end loader, but everything was covered in thick ice, blanketed in snow, and the temperature was still well below freezing. The standard plan was to tow the deicing truck into the heated hangar to defrost it, then to use it in turn to defrost the airplanes. But the problem was twofold.

Firstly, the loader, i.e. the tow vehicle wouldn't start. Staff weren't certain whether it was the cold or the final step in its decline, but it wasn't going anywhere. The loader was also the snowplough, so that explained the condition of their ramp. The other problem was that even if they had had a functional deicing truck it wouldn't have made much headway against the ice accumulation on the airplanes. Deicing fluid is excellent for melting and removing snow, because snow is very porous. Pour any fluid on top and that fluid seeps right though the snow, saturating it. Even my tropical readers are going to be familiar with this phenomenon, as I understand that the Sno-Cone, under different names, is a worldwide commodity. The deicing fluid is like the flavoured syrup, sinking into the snow, but instead of flavouring it, it lowers the freezing point of the mixture. The deicing fluid is usually applied heated, so really it's triple action: mechanical force of the spray, plus freezing point depression, plus heat to melt it.

When the substance to be removed is actual ice, deicing fluid doesn't live up to its name. Ice is too hard to be removed by a spray, and ice is not porous so the fluid can't saturate it. You have to rely on the transfer of heat from the fluid to the ice. And as the fluid runs right off the ice, that can take a long time and a lot of expensive deicing fluid.

We were on our own, so grabbed brooms and went out to see how bad this was going to be. My coworker had already run down her camera battery taking pictures of our ice-encased airplane. While the bottom layer on most of the wings was snow, the wind had been blowing, so the leading edges and most vertical surfaces were free of snow, directly coated with ice. Ice everywhere. Icicles hung down all along the wingspan. The windows were now double-glazed, along with the entire fuselage. The propeller blades were like popsicle sticks inside huge blobs of ice. Icicles hung everywhere, under the nose like a beard, from the horizontal stabilizer, and under the engines. Imagine if all the rain that fell on and dripped off an airplane in a long rainstorm stuck there instead of completing its fall to the ground and running away.

We started by sweeping off the top layer of snow, down to the ice. The ice layer was about two centimetres thick on the wings. We pounded on it with our fists and elbows to break it up, then peeled off the slices of ice, the size of sofa cushions, and threw them on the ground. Where the ice lay over snow, this worked pretty well. I took a broom and ran it along the lines of icicles, enjoying the musical plinka-plinka-plinka sound of all the icicles breaking off. It's a sound that you either know or you don't. The rhythm is like running the hammer across an endless xylophone, but I don't think there's a musical instrument that can replicate that pitch without being tinny. Perhaps the cold, dense, dry air is part of the required conditions to hear the sound. I had to remind myself that the icicles were formed from water that had fallen on and flowed over my filthy airplane, and as I wouldn't lick the airplane it was not okay to pretend the icicles were popsicles. There are disadvantages to having a neverending childlike outlook on the world.

I banged on the fuselage above and below the windows, as hard as I dared without risking damage to my airplane, and cracked the ice enough that it could be peeled off. It worked. It was just slow and tedious. And cold. We took some warming up hands breaks. The FBO had a tow vehicle going and said that we could get our airplane into the hangar around 3 p.m. The customs facility in Vermont was open until six, so we held onto that hope and continued scraping ice off the machine, so as to shorten the amount of time it would take for the heat in the hangar to produce a bare, dry airplane. Then the hangar availability estimate was revised to 5 p.m. and almost immediately after that to 6 p.m., so we surrendered, cancelled our customs reservation, asking the FBO only that our airplane be ready for the morning, and went back to the hotel.

I felt hokey and small-time that we hadn't been able to do a simple thing like get an airplane ready to fly on a clear bright day. But then I discovered that very few airframes in the city that were on a ramp overnight left Montréal today. My customers had an eight a.m. departure out of Dorval that day, and were wheels up at four p.m. They said they spent an hour and a half in the deicing bay. That's not an hour and a half waiting in line for deicing. That's an hour and a half of having hot deicing fluid pumped onto the airplane. The icicles hanging off the wings of the B757 were proportional to the ones on my airplane, making them as thick as an arm at the root. No way those were going to be knocked off with a broomstick. Any attempt to do so might have damaged the skin of the airplane. I know of an Air Canada executive who checked in for a 7:20 am flight that was cancelled because of the ice. He boarded another flight at 11:05, pushed back at 12:15, finished deicing at 15:15, returned to the ramp for more fuel, and then the flight was cancelled at 16:15.

So our surrender to the elements was simply one of many. Every once in a while mother nature flexes her muscles and reminds us that we aviate at her pleasure.

Snow and Ice and Orange Goup

I'm out at the airplane with the customer, but they don't want to go flying, they just want to make sure everything is working on the computers. I have electrical power through ground power, with the airplane secured and not running, so I don't even have to be on board. Instead I check that the wing covers and engine tents are nicely in place, that the oil quantity is sufficent for the next flight, and arrange for fuelling. It turns out that the fueller is happy to peel back and replace the wing covers, so I don't have to be here for fuelling. Excellent.

It's snowing lightly now. I open up the door and go inside to see how they are doing. They're swearing at Microsoft Windows. That seems to be a universal component of the workplace, whether you work in a cubicle or in the sky. Even if you work on a Mac, I understand that it's still necessary to swear at Windows from time to time, over difficulties with customer file transfers, the non-availability of programs for the Mac, or just on general principles.

I wander off to see what else we have available around here. I saw a deicing truck the other morning and asked at the FBO if that belonged to an airline or was available to me. The latter is true, and he gives me directions to find the man in charge, the airport manager.

It's a Type I fluid they have, so appropriate for my airplane, and they are available on 24-hour call. They heat it up in the truck and apply it at "180 degrees" (I assume Fahrenheit). The charge is $100 to start (i.e. $50 each for a two man crew) plus $4.30 per litre for the fluid applied. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take more than 50L to deice my bird, but I keep the wing covers tied down well just in case. The only problem is that if it rains and then freezes with the covers on, the covers may hold water against the wing, and then you end up with a giant airplansicle. Hence my desire to have the deicing guy's phone number in my back pocket.

The Season of Ice

It's official almost summer, so for me this can only mean one thing: annual ice awareness training. Yeah, my company training is out of sync with the real world. It's just the way it is. Instead of just having me watch the Transport Canada When in Doubt video on deicing again, they had me do this NASA video course on icing, too. It's excellent. Canadians who only fly in Canada will find some of the weather products unfamiliar, but you can skip those parts. If you do, or might fly in the US, it's a good how-to-use for their icing products, which are different from the Canadian GFAs. And the advice is very practical, not just recitation of examination factoids, like "contamination the texture and thickness of sandpaper decreases lift by 30% and increases drag by 40%."

Here are some examples of academic information transformed to simple, practical advice.

Weather basics tell us that stratiform clouds form in layers, usually not more than a few thousand feet thick, and and cumulus clouds develop vertically. The NASA course says to escape ice in stratiform clouds, change altitude by 3000', but navigate around cumulus clouds.

Weather theory tells us that an air mass loses moisture from crossing a mountain range, and that all else being equal, more moisture in a cloud means more icing. So NASA says, plan to fly on the leeward side of a mountain range.

Fronts are the places where air masses meet, named according to which air mass is advancing. At a warm front, warm air is advancing over a wedge of cold air. At a cold front, a wedge of cold air is forcing warm air up. So the NASA advice is to fly on the warm air side of a front, i.e. traverse a warm front perpendicular to frontal movement and behind the front and traverse a classic cold front perpendicular to movement and in front of it. This is probably good advice everywhere in the US but Alaska, but I'd have to reverse it for the north in the winter, because then the cold air is down below minus thirty, too cold for icing, but if the warm air is up around minus ten it will contain the more dangerous icing.

We already do this for engine failures and depressurization events, so why not develop an icing escape plan for each point along your route.

The NASA course does treat North America wide phenomena. They mapped of the continent for icing potential, illustrating that icing is more common around large bodies of water. At first I blinked at it. Why did it not show massive icing around the northern lakes and bay? Then I noticed the caption "November to March." The northern bodies of water are frozen solid then, so are not a source of moisture for icing until spring.

They acknowledge that their audience already knows things about icing, some of which are myths. NASA is wonderful because they don't just pool the advice of experts and regurgitate it back. They go out and do research, some of which involves flying actual airplanes around in actual icing conditions, and can back up what they say.

Pilots who have flown regularly in ice have all looked out the window and confidently assured their terrified copilots that they've seen worse. NASA research, and you get to trust them more than the grizzled captain because they really do research what they write about, reminds us that it is nearly impossible for a pilot to visually distinguish between an accretion that is flyable and one that threatens survival. I am reminded every time I preflight of how little it takes to change the flyability of an airplane. That's because my airplane has a vortex kit, eighty-eight little metal tabs on the wings and tail. They're tiny, each about the thickness of a dime and the area of the first joint of my thumb. But lose three and the maximum gross weight of my airplane drops by six per cent. I mentally compare that to how an ice accretion could affect airflow over the wing. By how much will it decrease the maximum flyable weight of the airplane?

And no icing video is complete without a nod to the old advice on deicing boots. In the old days, before I learned how to fly, probably before I was born, manufacturers told pilots to wait until there was a significant accretion on the wing before inflating the boots. The theory back them was that if the boots were inflated when the ice was very thin, inflation of the boots could result in bridging, creating a boot-sized airspace surrounded by ice the boots couldn't meet. NASA points out that while this may have been possible with the old, slower inflation boots, it is not with modern boots and that no one has ever shown ice bridging to occur with any boots. "Ho hum," I thought at that part of the presentation. Old news. Everyone has heard that debunked by now. The pilots I have flown with who advocate waiting are not delaying activation to avoid ice-bridging, which they don't believe in either. They are delaying it because they are waiting for the "skin" of ice to be thick enough to pull off the runback ice as the boots pop. This video, however, addresses this too. It admits that studies confirm that larger amounts do shed more cleanly with one inflation. But that research shows that although ice may remain between cycles, the ice will ultimately clear as well as it would have, had you waited for a large build up, and by activating the boots as soon as you have ice, you reduce the maximum amount of ice you are ever carrying. This makes more sense than decreasing the minimum amount.

I have notes on a couple of things I hadn't met before, too.

Freezing drizzle (small supercooled raindrops that freeze on contact with your airframe) is according to NASA most commonly formed by collision coalescence. That is, by even smaller supercooled water droplets bashing into one another and becoming big enough to drift down as drizzle. I had thought that it was usually formed the way textbook freezing rain is formed at a warm front, with rain falling out of the warm air aloft, and becoming supercooled by its passage through the colder air below. I can diagram it and everything. Useful as my original knowledge is for passing Transport Canada exams, there's an important difference: as the NASA course points out, I should not assume that the presence of freezing drizzle indicates warmer air above, into which I could climb to escape the ice.

The other new-to-me thing I remember is electro-expulsive deicing where the shape of the actual wing is mechanically altered to dislodge ice, like flexing an ice cube tray.

It's very usable, multi-media with exercises to do, and so many videos available to watch you can miss a lot of them by not looking at the 'related information' section. The only spelling error that distracted me was the term "full blow thunderstorms" where I would have expected "full blown," but perhaps that's a regionalism. The course is something you have to dedicate a day to. There's that much information.

Fixed Base Operator

I'm aware that I keep blogging about "FBOs" but I'm not sure I've ever explained exactly what one is. When I'm talking to people outside of aviation, I sometimes substitute the words "airplane gas station" but that phrase really doesn't adequately describe an FBO.

First off, as you figured out already from the title of this entry, FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator. I think technically any business that provides aviation services on the airfield: maintenance, flight training, airplane washing, or fuelling is a Fixed Base Operator, but when someone says they are going "to the Eff Bee Oh" they are referring to a business that will at minimum fuel their aircraft, and probably provide many other services. If all they do is provide fuel, then I'll probably call them either "the self-serve fuel pump" or "the guys with the fuel truck." But if they offer any other services, even as basic as washrooms and a table for flight planning, then they become an FBO.

A small FBO may be just washrooms and a bulletin board, but in a town of any size I expect a flight planning computer with an internet connection and someone who can arrange ground transportation and hotel rooms. At the high end you might see a pilots' area with TV, internet, a pool table, a weight room, sleeping bunks, a flight planning room equipped with charts and subscriptions to non-government online weather briefing products, and office facilities. They usually have deicing if that's needed in their climate, and can provide a GPU--Ground Power Unit--to help start an airplane on a cold day. You can also order ice, catering and other things passengers might need and often they have rental cars. I expect an FBO to be able to provide me with the telephone number of a local mechanic, and often they have their own repair facility. This is especially nice when you have a very minor problem like a loose wire causing a gauge to not register, or a stuck fuel cap.

If there are multiple staff, the first people you see are the line guys. Sometimes there is a gal or two among them, but the typical division of labour has the guys running around outside, showing you where to park, pumping gas, and helping you with your luggage, while the females work inside in heated or air-conditioned comfort, behind a desk. Their jobs include answering the phone and radio, arranging things for you and printing out your fuel bill. The line guys often also get to be the shuttle drivers.

If the FBO is a Ma & Pa operation, then Pa pumps gas and Ma collects your money inside. It's not a bad little retirement business for a couple. If it's a small airport and they own the building then I guess overhead is fairly low. If it gets busy it shouldn't be too hard for them to hire an airplane-mad kid to help, and if it's quiet they can spend more time just chatting with the visitors. I'm sure I'm being very naïve and that there is far more to it than that, but hanging out at the airport saying hi to people who come by might still be fun.

Flyover Country

It's minus one and snowing lightly at dawn next morning in Montana. I'm glad I had my lined jacket for the walkaround inspection. The wind is still blowing, not nearly as strongly, but enough to keep the dry snow from settling on the airplane. Visibility is good, but I'm up early to get out of here before a front arrives and blocks in the Montana mountains.

The first picture is of a butte, a rock structure that there's even a town named after in Montana. They always make me think of Roadrunner cartoons, but I didn't see any coyotes this trip, let alone coyotes on rocket skates. Can anyone see what I forgot to do this morning, that the May 29th entry and preflight inspection suggested I should have done?

I manage to escape the Montana hills without being swallowed up by the clouds, and begin the more routine part of my transcontinental journey. The sparsely-populated middle of the United States, from say Idaho to Wisconsin to Arkansas to Utah, is sometimes termed Flyover Country. This refers to the fact that people from the heavily populated centres on the east and west coasts don't go there, only fly over, on their way from one coast to the other, or on the way to Florida or Arizona. I'm not sure if it's any more derogatory than "grainbelt," but for me the term is not quite accurate. I can't make it coast to coast or from Canada to Florida on one load of gas. For me, it's fuel stop country.

I often have to go from hither to yon, with very little notice and I simply draw a line on the map, then look for airports of a reasonable size four or five hours apart along the route. Right now I might as well be using a dartboard. For example, I considered landing in Omaha, Nebraska merely because the insurance company Mutual of Omaha sponsored a wildlife program I watched when I was little. One of those shows composed mainly of dramatic footage of large predators either killing or barely missing large ungulates while a narrator applied adjectives and dramatic truths of life to the animals and their dinners. As it was I landed in Lincoln, Nebraska instead, where I had excellent service. They loaned me a nice vehicle to go and get lunch while they fuelled the airplane and cleaned the windows.

But I also I saw a new low in corporate tipping policy in Lincoln. Lunch was at Quizno's, a sandwich chain store, and there was a sign on each cash register: "Tips are appreciated and will be pooled by management for employee events and rewards (separate account)." So yes, the management solicits but steals any tips the employees get, and then gives them back and calls that "rewarding" the employees. I don't normally tip fast food employees, but I suppose I might if I felt that a particular individual did something outstanding for me. But whether fast food employees should be tipped is totally irrelevant to this issue: the management of Quizno's has just told me, in bold letters, that they don't care enough about their employees to reward them themselves. I submitted my opinion of that to the corporate website and have since twice avoided eating at Quizno's, even though it was probably a local restaurant policy.

Anyone have recommendations for quick middle-of-the-country fuel stops? I want quick but not-too-bad-for-me food, fuel, preferably pumped by someone else so I can eat while they do it, deicing in the winter, clean washrooms, friendly service, and simple maintenance available if I should need it. It would be a bonus if there were something interesting in town, even just the world's biggest ball of string, or a giant letter on the local hill, in case it's an overnight stop and I have time to take in the sight. Quizno's not required.

Time Machine

It turns out that my next assignment is to go and do a Pilot Proficiency Check, back in Canada on a different airplane. Rather than flying this one all the way north, I'm to fly to an airport that has airline service and just park it for a while. I smile when I see where that parking lot will be.

I've been to this destination before, almost ten years ago now, in a tiny single engine airplane. I remember turning right off the runway onto the apron and the tower controller welcoming me in. He told me there was no need to switch to the ground frequency, as it was just him, and he was just leaving. He asked me where I wanted to go and I said, "I just need some fuel and a place to park for the night." He cheerfully gave me detailed taxi directions that boiled down to "slight left turn, they're right in front of you." There I was given literal red carpet treatment at a friendly little FBO. They'd never remember me of course, but it would be fun to be back.

So now I'm in a bigger airplane, with a lot more hours in my logbooks, going to the same place. I call up the approach controller as soon as terrain permits radio contact, and I am immediately vectored north and then south to be sequenced behind a regional jet descending from above me. I don't turn in to follow as soon as I'm cleared to, and stay a little above the normal glideslope to avoid wake turbulence, but still feel a couple of bumps on short final. The jet seems to linger on the runway, but is clear on the taxiway before I touch down. There's a slight tailwind in addition to my deliberately high approach. I don't stomp on the brakes to make the first available exit but turn off quickly at the next one. I came from the north before, and now I'm coming from the south, so I know it's a left turn to exit the runway, but, wait ...

I don't recognize this place. Am I even at the right airport? The taxiway diagram shows the tower and the terminal, and they're there, but the terminal the jet is taxiing towards is the wrong shape. And what are all these other buildings? The airport I was supposed to be going to was in more or less wasteland. You hear about people landing at the wrong airport from time to time, but damn, did I do that? The ground controller clears me to taxi in and call Unicom. I can see one FBO from here, and it has the right name. It turns out that there are three FBOs sharing the unicom frequency, so there is a moment of them stepping on one other as they respond to my call, but they all offer the services I need and I just pick one. I'm still shaking my head in bewilderment as I get out of the airplane. I've arrived at the right airport, according to the chart; the only way to get to the airport I remember is to go back in time.

A man marshals me in to parking. (I'm carefully not calling him a kid, because that would make me feel even older). I remember the first time I was here I was nervous about rolling towards a marshaller standing in front of my airplane, because the propeller was on the front. Now it's just the radome that will poke this guy in the head if my brakes fail. I like this better. I finish my paperwork, take my gear and lock up the airplane. Inside I give the FBO contact information and ask them to keep the my key in their safe. That's in case it is a different pilot who does the pick-up. They will let me park there and keep an eye on the airplane including sweeping the snow off if it starts to pile up, for five dollars a day. That's a better rate--and better service--than I get on airport parking with my car, most places. I also plan to bring them some Tim Horton's doughnuts when I come back.

They drive me through a construction zone to the new terminal, and I look at the flight schedule I found earlier on Expedia. I haven't booked a flight in advance because I didn't know when I needed to leave until I got here. United has the next flight out, so I get in line at that counter. I tell the agent my destination and show her the Expedia itinerary with the various flights I have to take to get there. She seems confused by it. I tell her it's okay if she can't sell me the ticket I need for the connecting flight on a Canadian carrier, I just have to get to my destination.

"So you want a reservation?" she asks.

"Uh, well sure. I want to buy a ticket to go on your airplane." Is it called a reservation if it's not in advance? I dunno.

She says she can sell me the ticket right to destination, including the Canadian flight. It won't be for the same price as shown on Expedia, though. I accept this, and in fact she comes out with a price that is two dollars cheaper than the Expedia quote. I suppose Expedia builds in a service charge. But then she tells me she has to charge me a separate $20 service charge.

What's the service charge for? It's for selling me an airline ticket. I have to sign a separate receipt, marked Special Service Charge. Apparently when this major airline sells you a ticket valid for transportation on one of their airplanes, that's a special service. I understood when meals, pillows, upgrades, drinks, and lounge access are special services, but if selling me an air ticket is a special service, what's their core business? It's so hilarious I can't even manage to be annoyed.

It turns out that the airport has free wireless, so theoretically I could have said "just a moment" and wandered off to buy the ticket online, and saved $18. Next time.

The airplane for the Canadian airline I was connecting to arrived late. I saw the old crew get off before we boarded, and the FO was a woman. Even looked a little like me. That's the job I didn't get. Sigh.

An all-male flight crew took over the airplane and delivered me safely and competently to my Canadian destination. They didn't even lose my baggage. Not that I'd expect them to, it's just that I need to introduce this link which shows the durability of cats, the fallabity of TSA baggage scanners and the compassion of strangers. I'm trying to imagine my initial reaction if I had been the person who mistakenly opened that suitcase.