Carmageddon

The public works folk in California closed down a very busy section of the I-405 for a weekend, and the predicted resulting traffic snarls were termed Carmaggeddon by the media. This merits a blog post here because air carrier JetBlue seized the opportunity to get some publicity, by advertising four dollar flights between the Bob Hope Airport at Burbank and Daugherty Field at Long Beach: opposite ends of the closed section of highway. The flight distance direct is 30 miles, but the flight was blocked at 45 minutes to allow time for taxiing and manoeuvring.

A local cycling club decided to challenge the airline to a race, and JetBlue took up the gauntlet. The challenge for the competitors was to get from a North Hollywood intersection (Burbank is the Hollywood airport), to the aquarium in Long Beach. Passengers had to drive to the BUR airport, park, check in an hour before the flight, clear security, board, take the flight and then cab to the aquarium. Cyclists just had to ride the whole way.

Here's the route filed (pale dashed) and flown (green) by the JetBlue A320. It's a little convoluted, but my sources tell me that was for safety. It's very busy low-level airspace with lots of amateur weekend pilots, so they arranged a route that would keep them in class B (the US equivalent of Canadian class C) airspace the entire way. Everyone in the airspace was required to have a transponder and a clearance, and maintain a constant listening watch with ATC. The airborne portion of the flight lasted only twelve minutes, but not having had to drive to the airport or submit to screening, the cyclists reached the destination about an hour before the airline passengers. Another race participant who took public transit arrived midway between the other two teams.

It all sounds like fun. I've operated out of Burbank (excellent FBO service, restrictive noise abatement regulations and insanely expensive hotels) and driven on I-405, but I found a back road to where I was going that I found more pleasant and interesting, despite having a few traffic lights. If a journey takes the same amount of time in a car or bike, unless the weather is very unpleasant, I usually prefer to take a bike. I don't think I've ever made an aircraft trip that would have been faster by bike, though. Maybe, if I count the times I've waited three days for suitable weather.

Metaphors for Life

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

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Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

Funny Way To Make A Living

The potential employer picks me up at the appointed time, well actually a bit later because he forgot about me until his assistant asked if I was coming today, but I spent the extra time sitting in the hotel lobby reviewing their procedures manual, so it wasn't a waste of time. The original plan was for me to go flying with the chief pilot today, for me to see to see how the operation worked and be persuaded that I wanted to join, and for them to see how I work. The flight would also count towards the required training to put me on his operating certificate, but the chief pilot has not come in today, due to a family medical emergency, and the boss is too busy to do the flight, so we're improvising.

So we chat for a while. I'm not sure it counts as an interview, because no one asks me what kind of tree I would be, what my greatest strengths and weaknesses are, or what I would do if the pilot I were flying with stated an intention to go below minima. We're telling each other stories, comparing our philosophies of life, flying and les politiques des deux solitudes du Canada. The smart psychology people amongst my readers are shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at the screen now, saying "You idiot, Aviatrix, that was the interview," but hell then, my whole life is an interview. Remember when I had a line check and didn't know it until it was over? That was awesome, too. We get along amusingly well. I tell him a story that illustrates the freedom and responsibility of being pilot-in-command compared to terrestrial rules. I've probably told it on the blog before, of driving my car on an icy, windy day, keeping my speed at what I judged safe for the conditions, which happened to be below the city speed limit. As I approached an intersection, the traffic light turned amber. On a normal day, I might have braked to a stop, but today I knew the ice would make my stopping distance longer and that locked wheels would make the car less manoeuvrable if it skidded through the intersection, buffeted by a crosswind. I elected to continue through the intersection at my cautious speed. There was no cross traffic. The combination of my low speed and a rather short duration light left me still in the intersection when the light turned red, and I knew that intersection was equipped with a red light camera, where they snap your licence plate and send you a ticket in the mail when they catch you. As far as I was concerned, the red light rule is secondary to safety, and it so happened that I had made a chain of safest decisions that contradicted the red light rule and was fully prepared to defend my decisions in court should I be issued a ticket. And there my prospective employer picked up the baton because he had had exactly the same experience--it's a Canada thing, I suppose--and he had been issued said ticket, and he had defended himself in court with weather reports and diagrams and calmly reasoned arguments, and he won. So it seems I don't need to paint any walls white for this guy.

He has work to do, so sets me up with another task, something amusingly familiar. I'm writing company exams. "Writing exams" sounds stressful, but in ten years of writing them at least once a year I can only remember one occasion in which it was a timed, competitive, closed-book event (and in that case I scored so well that the chief pilot teased me about it). It's really just an exercise in demonstrating that a pilot has reviewed all the company manuals and is familiar with their contents. You typically complete the exams as you read the manuals, noting the speeds, baggage arms, wingspan, fuel capacity, and other items that the chief pilot has chosen to test you on. There are similar manuals for icing, ground handling, the ops manual and other special aspects of the operation.

The boss pulls up an example of something on his computer. I can't not notice that it's in Xxxxxxxx. There's a chance of me flying in Xxxxxxxx! I know it's probably just like Témiscamingue or Deep East Texas with different accents on the radio, and squiggly letters on the airport terminals, and people excited about buzkashi instead of hockey or football, and mares' milk instead of poutine or barbecue, and ... oh face it, it would be totally different from Témiscamingue and Texas, and I would wrestle on horseback over possession of a goat carcass for the opportunity to go there.

I go back to writing exams, figuring out all the details of the company deicing rules. I hear the boss next door fielding a call that implies that a client has urgent need of his services in Yyyyyyy. He's telling them he has an airplane and a pilot ready to go, and can dispatch them today if need be. Replace buzkashi with surfing, and mares' milk with little drinks with umbrellas in them. The boss's assistant comes into the room where I'm writing and hisses excitedly, "hurry up and finish those exams!" gesturing with her head towards the Yyyyyyy conversation. I grin and nod, but voice reality, "That's not a mission the new hire is going to get." I'm more likely to get the mission to Qqqqqq that I think I heard him negotiating for fuel for. But hey, replace buzkashi with the knuckle hop, and mares' milk with seal blubber. I don't have to leave my own country to find an exotic culture.

If this is all a test, or some sort of set up, who cares. If someone wants to fly me to somewhere in the world, put me up in a hotel and buy me a few meals in order to have me write exams and then be told that I'm not needed after all, I'm okay with that. It gets me out of the house and gives me travel, new people to meet, and at least the opportunity to feel like I'm going to get a cool job.

I finish all the exams and get a tour of the maintenance hangar. There's a garishly-painted partial airplane in there, but I'm assured that it's the parts plane, and not representative of the appearance of the fleet. We'll try again for flying the next day.

Back at the hotel my card doesn't work. I go back to the lobby and tell the desk clerk. I always feel that in someone else's territory you should at least attempt to speak their language. Although I usually waive that rule at service points in highly traveller-oriented places like hotels and airports, I know that this clerk is francophone, so I say, "le clef ne marche plus." The key doesn't work anymore. He says the same thing I've heard a hundred other times I've experienced this, it happens, you need to keep it away from your telephone. I pull my telephone out of the same pocket and display it guiltily. I knew that. I'm clearly out of practice for hotel living. He remagnetizes the card. And then I realize that he continued the conversation in the same language as I started it. Usually bilingual Quebeckers switch into English right away in response to my French. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and presume that they are being polite and accommodating rather then implying that my French is too execrable to listen to. I haven't been here for a while though. Is it a political wind shift, or just that this guy really prefers to speak French, even at the cost of having to listen to my accent. (The word Quebeckers looks so wrong written down, but lots of people say it aloud. I've almost decided that it's the anglo pronunciation of Québecois). I know it doesn't represent any great improvement in my ability.

Oh and did I mention that potential employer number one wants me for that operation? I've stalled them while I check out this opportunity. I find that stressful.

Starting the Build

We were given the option to choose what time the vehicles would come to take us to the build and chose the earlier option of seven a.m. I don't know if anyone else was biting their tongue against suggesting "four a.m." There's something about pilots and black humour. Our transport is a convoy of vans because the rural roads aren't suitable for a bus. Our drivers are here punctually and sort themselves out in the narrow street for boarding. They made a fuss about "our cars aren't like your cars" and "our roads aren't like your roads" in telling us how long it would take to get to the build site, but honestly I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if the same fleet of used but serviceable passenger vans came to take us to a Canadian farm. Most seats even had seatbelts. We have a further briefing reminding us not to touch the children, and don't compliment people's children either. They don't say why. Either it's more fear that we want to take them, or it's a society where so many children die young that it's bad luck to draw attention to their merits, lest the gods take them back for their own. I'm kind of lost for a way to make contact with a person with whom I share almost no language or culture. Can I admire their cows?

We drive off through some poorer areas of the city, and then through increasingly rural communities. It's really difficult to take pictures through the windows of a moving vehicle and impossible not to want to record some of the things we are seeing. All manner of goods are being transported by bicycle. There was a pair of yoked oxen pulling a large cart all hung with different sorts of reddish pottery. I recognized the same kind of platter we'd had our fish served on at the sitting-on-floor restaurant, for example. I can imagine that that identical scene, the oxen, the wooden yoke, the cart and the pottery being sold has repeated for a thousand, maybe two thousand years here. Could be more. Pottery has been made for millenia, and the skill probably came here with the initial human migration to the area? Domesticate the ox? Ditto. Manufacture wheeled vehicles? The same. I love doing things, even the simplest things like running barefoot, kneading bread, or seeing an ox cart laden with pottery, that have been done since before recorded history.

After an hour or so we turn off of paved roads onto a red dirt road. The clay won't need to come far. There's a busy and extremely interesting-looking market right at the corner of the paved road and the dirt one. It's the intersection of the things the people who come down the dirt road produce and the goods that they want to take home with them. We also pass a pony pulling a cart on which there is a dead cow. I wonder what the story is there. I would expect that you would walk a cow to slaughter, and that if a cow died in the field you would butcher it there, or burn or bury it there if the meat were considered unusable.

There are houses and people all along the dirt road. Some of the houses are very simple, at ground level and made of palm fronds and bamboo. Others are more elaborate than the ones we will be building, same style in that they are up on stilts, but larger and with fancy metal railings and painted shutters. I doubt anyone has plumbing. The road is crazy with potholes, but our driver is very skilled at going around them without excessive swerving or braking. In fact, Cambodians in general drive well. No road rage, sensible speeds, and excellent maneuvering in difficult conditions. I can't speak for their adherence to vehicle regulations, because I can't be sure there are any. Certainly there are no rules forbidding four people and a live chicken on the same motorbike.

We pass some flags in a field which someone says mark it as a minefield. There are chickens running around loose everywhere, chickens with longer legs and thinner breasts than the ones at home. The cows are quite a different breed, too. One person on the bus calls them water buffalo, but I know what a water buffalo looks like and these are Asian cows, they look like the ones that wander around India. Other people think the cows and dogs are abused because you can see their ribs, but they look healthy to me. The dead one back on the horse cart even had some meat on it. You can see my ribs and I'm not in any way starving. North Americans have become used to the shape of overfed animals, and of course these animals have much thinner coats than the ones that stand around in Canadian winters. These ones are all either yoked, tethered, or being tended by children with sticks, and the latter two sorts are all languidly eating what looks like lush vegetation. They don't have to get through a cold winter, either.

The van stops. We're here. We get out, surrounded by curious Khmer people, giving us just enough room to follow the Tabitha leader to our marshalling point, while they watch us. I give the "jum reap sur" greeting I've been taught and it is returned, but the experience is more like waving to the crowd than meeting a group of people. There are no introductions. Nari shows us where to put our belongings. It's a low platform made of strips of bamboo nailed to a wooden frame and covered with a mat. There is also a cooler full of water on he ground there, several more cases of water, plus there are hammers are on another table. By the time we can put down our bags and pick up hammers, we're being divided into subteams and led along the paths in the village to the homes that need completing. I say 'completing' because to ensure the project can be completed and for everyone's safety, local contractors have already poured the foundation, erected a frame, put on the roof and laid the floorboards in place. We climb up the wooden ladder and Nari tells us to put two nails in each floorboard at each point that it crosses a joist. She also tells us how to put the walls on, but I didn't do walls until later in the day, so I'll describe that later. Three or four of our six people put on our work gloves and start nailing floorboards down.

I wanted to take a picture of the frame when we began, and of all the building materials you bought, but I didn't want to lag behind and miss out on the instructions that were being given inside. Then once the instructions were given, it was just "go!" I'll take a "before" picture at the next house. We want to get this done and there have been warnings that the work is very difficult. I'm following one board across the house, driving two nails, shuffling backwards to the next joist, and driving two more. I put in about ten nails, straight and true, one after another. I'm setting them with a couple of taps, then using a goofy two handed hammer technique, because if I'm going to do this all day and all the next, a little girlishness is a cheap price to pay for a functional wrist tomorrow. I'm starting to think this will be pretty easy. The next nail bends. I pull it out and try again with a new nail. It goes in a little further, then also bends. I straighten it out and that works for a moment but now the head is bent and I can't hit it straight. I try a third, and bending that makes it three in a row. What the hell? Is my wrist worn out already? There's not a knot here, and the joist seems normal, too. I skip that joist and move on. The next nail goes in properly. The next one I notice before I start driving it has a manufacturing defect, a tail deformity. I knew in advance that the made in Cambodia nails were going to be a little less predictable that the ones I'm used to, but I consider these building materials to be something you have given me to accomplish a mission, and I want to use them well. I select a healthier-looking nail and drive it in. I try counting blows per nail, but I can only count to ten in Khmer, and sometimes it takes twenty hammer blows to get a nail in. Sometimes I hit the nail and it feels like I'm trying to drive it into an engine block. There's just no progress into the wood. I hold it with my pliers and bang and bang on it until it finally succumbs. Yeah, that seems pretty damned wimpy to me, too. I seem to remember that if I hold a hammer right, the nail should be flush in three or four blows. As I clean up my bent nails I realize that as a group we are producing a lot of bent nails. It's not just me. Others have hit the same almost-impossibly-hard spots, too. I had to wait until the the van ride back to figure out why it was so hard to drive a simple nail, but I'll let you in on it now. The boards are made of mahogany. Tropical hardwoods are hard.

I am being extra careful to get the nails all the way down. It's better to leave a hammer imprint around the head of the nail than to have any metal sticking up. Sure it seems like I'm building a tree house, but people's babies are going to be crawling around up here. Babies will probably be born in here. I don't want there to be anything poking up that could hurt someone, or even damage their carefully made bamboo mats.

It seems like a lot longer than twenty minutes before someone calls "water break." We've made good progress, though. The floor is at least half-nailed and the walls are up maybe a quarter of the way around. We guzzle some water and get back to work. There are a few really tough spots in the floor, like the one where I bent three nails, but we get two nails into every joist, and figure out ways to nail down the boards at the tricky corners, where the joist stops a little short of the concrete post or a nail has to go diagonally to hit wood. When the area that still needs nails is smaller than the hands and knees footprint of the number of people we have working on it, I go outside and see if the wall-nailing people need help. They have it under control and don't want to swap out, so I declare that I'm taking a photo break, and no one objects.

There are three mothers with children sitting in the shade of a palm-frond house quite close to the one we are building. I greet them in Khmer and receive the same greeting in return, then hold up my camera and say djaa?. That means "yes" said by a woman. The phrase for "may I please take your photograph?" was really long and I haven't memorized it. The women smile and have the children to look at me and smile. I photograph the first pair and then the mother urges the child to come up and look at the photo on the camera. Mom has seen this before. The first girl seems pleased with her picture, but the second child expresses discomfort when I raise the camera, so I don't take her picture, just lower the camera and say "okay, no picture." I try to talk to them, using the tiny number of useful words my guidebook has given me for this situation. I look at the construction of the existing house. It may not be as sturdy, but the construction has required far more skill. I try to ask if who made it, and only get across that I am interested in it. I understand from them that it is not so good when the rains come.

The wall-builders still don't want a substitute, so I nominate myself to go and get more water for the group. As I walk back with the water I notice a lot of plastic garbage on the ground, so I make that my next task. I find an extra plastic bag on our stuff-platform and start picking up trash around our house and around the village. Where did all this stuff come from? I don't think these people are using hair conditioner and contact lens solution, nor eating Chinese-branded junk food and candies in plastic and foil wrappers. My trash collection route passes by another house, in the same almost-completed condition as ours. The group leader is working on that one. I ask him if he knows where the plastic comes from and he doesn't. "Maybe they go through someone else's garbage looking for things they can use?" The villagers see me collecting the trash. I wonder if they think I'm taking it because I want to keep it, or if they appreciate that I am cleaning up. While I'm picking up the trash I step onto a grassy area between the road and the fence and then I realize what I haven't been doing. Mines! I told myself before I came that I would not step anywhere that was not obviously trodden. Obviously this area next to the fence had to have been stepped on when they were building the fence, and I'm sure people and cows step here all the time, it's just that I wasn't thinking about it. It's like when I land and realize that I didn't consciously do the short final check. I put the gear down, I checked it down, but I missed that last little check. No harm done, but if you can miss one check you can miss another. I think about what I'm doing and fill a bag with gum-wrapper-sized bits of plastic, then go to see if another group needs more hammer power.

Everyone has finished their floors by now and several people have splintered off to start floors on other houses. I find one of those houses and join them. As first there is a conflict, because while my original group was nailing all the way along one board, these people are nailing all the way along one joist. I switch to their way and we stop stepping on each other. I did some wall-nailing too, which I'll describe tomorrow. And then someone says it's time for a lunch break.

Lunch was actually the worst part of the trip. Not that there was anything wrong with the bread or with the food chosen by the committee. It was all excellent. It was turning our backs on all these people and eating baguettes and cheese and cured ham and bananas while they watch us. I have a choice between turning my back on them, looking at them and eating in their faces, or not meeting their gaze. They aren't starving. And yes, I understand that if people don't eat white bread and cheese and butter that they will get sick on eating it. But this makes me feel like an alien. The very least I can do to show you that I am a friend is to squat in the dirt next to you and share a meal. Couldn't we bring food we could share? How about if we bring a sack of brown rice and a basket of dried fish and the villagers cook a meal for everyone while we build. Sure it wouldn't be prepared to Canadian Food Safe guidelines but neither are the restaurant meals we get around here. If their water is so bad that it would irreparably harm us to eat rice that had been boiled in it for forty-five minutes, then we're working on the wrong project here. We may be different, but we are the same species. It would not be an impossible task to devise a way that we could all share a meal.

I eat rapidly and then leave the food behind to try to talk and take pictures. Someone has a better phrasebook and manages to ask a woman how many children she has. "Buan." No "braun." Five. That's nice. I guess. Having lots of children is good in this culture, right? Five is lots, right? We don't know. Maybe five is not enough. We all smile happily at having achieved some sort of communication, and the little conversation gets discussed down the line in Khmer for the people who couldn't hear or understand it the first time. I don't know if the hardest part of a conversation is knowing the words, or knowing what words you need. They probably feel the same way about us. And at least we have the context of being able to see pretty much their whole lives in front of us. They have no idea what our lives are like.

These kids were all sitting on a log next to the main track through the village. You can't see it in the picture, but the kid nearest me, has an infected toenail. Even though the living conditions are so different than home for these people, everything is so different that I'm having to consciously hammer it into my own head that this is the Third World. People in the Third World die of simple things like infections. Ergo, this kid sitting right here on this log might die because he kicked a jagged rock and then stepped in cow manure, or whatever kid-normal thing it is that he did. I have a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my bag over there on that platform, not four metres away. But you don't touch people's kids, so you most certainly don't pour strange foaming stuff over their toes. And disinfectant isn't magic. It's just part of the whole medical apparatus that I have become so accustomed to, I still don't appreciate how much it is lacking here. It's going in about as slowly as those nails into mahogany.

Another floor done and it's only two o' clock. We move on again and have to synchronize nailing systems with another group of people. We're not quite done that on. There's a board that is too close to another one at one end, and partly nailed down, but we managed to work together and lever it away so the boards are not overlapping in the finished floor. That was a good bit of teamwork. By two-thirty they're declaring it time to get back in the bus. "But that wasn't a whole day!" The group leader doesn't want people to get tired and have accidents. We tidy up and get in the vans. Everyone shares the experience of ridiculously hard to hammer wood. Mahogany flooring. Wow. It may not be super straight and some of the nails are bent and then hammered in flat anyway, but do you know anyone with mahogany floors?

The van we're in has worse suspension than the one I rode out. I should have worn a sports bra. We pass a truck laden with women all in matching headscarves, probably coming home from a factory job. It's not so much a truck as a long wooden box with slats across, the women all sitting on the slats, like on the thwarts of a canoe, and the box pulled as a trailer by a motorcycle.

That evening I bought a Khmer phrasebook from a street vendor, and I'll tell you about that, later.

This is a lot of work putting these posts together and I have a lot of things to do, as I imagine many of you do. I'm probably going to take a break from heavy-duty trip-report posts until after Christmas. There will be a few intermediate ones on current affairs and my usual end-of-year topics, then I'll return to the rest of the build and the other parts of the Cambodia trip in the new year.

As Seen on the Internet

Hong Kong International airport is huge and modern, signed in Cantonese first and British English second, with Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and what may be Indonesian ("Perhatikan waktu Hong Kong saat mengecek jadwal keberangkatan") or Tagalog ("Mangyari po lamang na alamin ang takdang oras ng pageakay sa 'Hongkong local time'") on some signs. Surrounding the airport we can see two concentric barbed wire topped fences with about a four-metre no-man's-land gap between the two. I've never seen that level of physical security around an airport perimeter. I've seen less at some Canadian prisons. Security screening is simple, quick and polite: shoes on, belongings into little numbered baskets for which you get a laminated claim card in case of disputes about who owns what once it comes out of the scanner. Something on my person triggers the scanner to beep. I stop and hold out my arms and am told to put them down. I'm not sure if I was holding them too high for the little security officer to reach comfortably with the wand, or if assuming the position just isn't required here.

We have a tight connection, so hustle up the elevator, through the mall, down the escalator and out to the terminal transfer bus, backed in by the door. We start to walk down the right side of the bus as we would at home and are stopped with an "excuse me, this way." Oh right Hong Kong. They drive on the left, so we board the bus on the left. Signs like "please press bell before alighting" also demonstrate Hong Kong's heritage as a British possession. The bus takes us out to the airplane, where we alight. Without pressing the bell actually. It must be a repurposed city bus. The air smells like the inside of a poorly ventilated garage. We board a Dragonair A321, and once we're underway they serve us Dim Sum for breakfast. Hey, it's Saturday morning. It is Dim Sum time. eh?

My first hint that I'm actually going to Cambodia is the immigration forms that are handed around, in Khmer and English. I fill those out and then a couple of hours later we're on approach into Phnom Penh. There's no city evident at first, just a wide muddy river --it's the Tonlé Sap--with some small buildings along it, and fields laid out among tropical trees. We then spot the city. From above it looks like a cross between Paris and Spain: Paris for the star-shaped city with broad avenues and boulevards radiating from circular hubs, and Spain for the red tile roofs and tropical trees. The airplane makes an unusual number of turns for an airline approach in visual conditions, and other passengers comment on the steep bank angle. I wonder if we're maneuvering for traffic or if Phnom Penh tower doesn't have radar, and we're joining the circuit with full VFR procedures rather than just being vectored for a visual approach to the straight in. Later fellow passengers will ask my professional opinion about the landing, and I'll tell them that, without knowing the wind, runway and systems conditions that the crew were considering, I can't evaluate the choice or execution of landing technique. And I've never flown an Airbus outside of a simulator. It was a smooth touchdown and we exited the runway via a taxiway, not over the end or side, without painful deceleration, so it seemed fine to me. We're in Cambodia.

Inside the terminal we present our various completed forms, pay $25 for an embossed, shiny tourist visa and collect our bags. Signs in the airport are in Khmer and English, except for the one for the prayer room, which adds Arabic. We present our passports, newly issued visas and other paperwork and exit into Cambodia. It still looks a fair bit like an airport, an appearance that is not changed by our loading our bags and ourselves onto an air conditioned bus. Yeah, a blog entry and a half of this drivel and I still haven't told you anything about Cambodia. Travel has a big downside, doesn't it?

With our noses pressed against the windows, we join the traffic and head into town towards the hotel. Here, through the bus window, are approximately four of our fellow road users. On one small motorbike. The streets teem with vehicles, powered by engines, people or animals, overloaded to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible if I didn't read Failblog, and weaving in and out of one another's path like the RCMP musical ride. There doesn't seem to be any distinction between different sorts of road users. The backdrop is mostly tropical trees, low plastered buildings, many under construction, renovation or maybe just falling apart, and decorated walls.

As we watch the scenery and receive our first impressions of the country, one of the group leaders provides a narration, as if we would not otherwise be able to comprehend what is passing in front of our eyes. After a few minutes I tap him gently on the arm and ask, "Please, can we just experience it for ourselves?" He is a capable and very organized leader who keeps us well-informed. I had the impression that he had just left his mouth engaged after giving us the necessary information about hotel and agenda. I may have been wrong, though. He stops the play-by-play, but later another leader indicated that she thought many people appreciated the commentary. I've never been on a group tour before. Maybe it's only bloggers whose are constantly composing their own commentaries, and other people need it done for them.

After a couple of kilometres the bus turns right though a gate into a field. Just a field, with grass, and some dirt tracks and a bunch of other vehicles parked in it. I don't see a hotel. It turns out that for the Water Festival this week, they have set up traffic barricades, and vehicles over a certain size are not permitted any closer to the centre of town. I don't think it's a security measure, just a way to reduce the crush of traffic on a busy weekend, the way a downtown street in Canada might become a pedestrian mall for special events. The local officers are wearing street clothes, their badge of office is just a baseball cap with official insignia. The bus driver and one of our group participants go to negotiate with the police, and after a fair amount of handwaving a police officer wearing an entire uniform, not just a ball cap, arrives and grants us special permission to go to our hotel. I'm not sure if that included a police escort, or how exactly we got through the successive barricades. Looks like I did need the commentary after all.

What I did see was increasing amounts of traffic, vendors squatting on the sidewalks next to their wares, people smiling and waving to us from cafés and other vehicles. It is not at all intimidating. I've never been to Asia before, and I was prepared to be sickened by overwhelming poverty, frightened by an unidentifiably alien environment, or simply to have no link to the culture. But it's exciting and welcoming. I had an interview once on a Caribbean island and there was the same chaotic disrepair in the streets and buildings, and the same feeling of people everywhere selling things with minimal infrastructure. People seem better off here than in much of Nunavut, and I don't just mean the weather.

We check into the hotel, which is not a hovel. There's a shrine on the floor of the lobby, along with some clocks telling the time in six places: Hong Kong, United States, Australia, England, Australia and France. Yep, I know, but they apparently don't. Check-in is efficient and polite. The staff are amused that I can recite my room number in Khmer. I learned the numbers and some basic expressions from YouTube before I left Canada. My roommate and I go up to the room. There's a TV, a bathroom, two good sized beds with firm mattresses, mirrors, cupboards, a dresser and a fridge. There's a balcony, but when we go out on it, the outside is walled off with plastic sheets, so we can't see anything. I think it faces the back of another building, anyway. It's also clean. I've had worse hotel rooms in Saskatchewan. Also the internet doesn't work and the hotel staff say they're getting it fixed. Some things are universal.

It's only early afternoon, so I go out to stretch my legs and look around. People are friendly, even if they aren't selling anything, but there are lots of people who are selling things, probably more than usual, seeing as there's a festival underway. I still need some clothes appropriate to the climate. I buy a sunhat for a dollar. It's made out of strips of dried leaves which I assume are palm fronds, all stitched together on a sewing machine and decorated with fabric strips.

Another vendor sells me a loose fitting cotton shirt decorated with a picture of a cat and circles of letters from the Latin alphabet, all printed in reverse, and spelling nothing. She states the price as seven, I offer five (yes, I am a sucky bargainer) and she tells me in almost perfectly accented English that it's a fixed price. Turns out it's not seven dollars, but seven thousand riels, which is just under two dollars.

On another street a man asks me "parlez vous français?" I'm not too surprised, as my guidebook said that some older people might speak French, as a remnant of this region's history as "Indochine." I answer in the affirmative and in the ensuing conversation tell him I'm from Canada. He says he lives in Montréal, and I must have given him a look of complete disbelief, because he opens his wallet to produce a Canadian SIN card and a Québec permis de conduire. I sit down at his invitation for a chat. I haven't been here long enough to have many questions ready to ask. I have heard that the water festival marks the reversal of the flow of the Tonlé Sap so I ask him about that. He confuses me by saying that the festival commemorates a thousand-years-ago naval victory over Islamic forces, a victory that was facilitated by the reversal of the waters. This website says it was started by King Preah Bat Jayvarman VII as an opportunity to train and select skilled boatsmen for the navy, and other sources say it dates back to the 7th century as a thanksgiving festival. Given that under three hundred years has produced some drift in the meaning of the American thanksgiving, I'll cut the Cambodians some slack and say, hey, their river starts flowing the other way. Why not have a three day party? At any rate the experience teaches me not to make assumptions about the worldliness of the people here. Except it doesn't. I'll do it again later in the trip.

Dinner that night is all together with the group at a tourist-oriented local restaurant. Appetizers start with salted roasted peanuts with some little tiny chili pepper garnishes. Yes, one guy eats a chili pepper. For the record, the little tiny red ones are much hotter than jalapeños. While he tries to put out the fire in his mouth by guzzling water, I recommend rice, and it arrives just in time for it to make me his hero. Another appetizer plate includes bean sprouts and vegetables in a sauce that has an offensive fish odour. I try it out, and fight the gag reflex to get it down. It tastes worse than it smells. I hope the "fish Khmer style" that I ordered will be better. It is. It's a delicious curry, spiced warm not hot, with all kinds of exciting flavours going on, none of which is gag-inducing fish guts.

After dinner there is a traditional music performance, with instruments including a boatlike wooden xylophone, a long-necked stringed instrument played with a bow, and a drum. The drummer is sitting cross-legged on the floor and I can see the bottom of his foot. Before coming to Cambodia we were lectured sternly about customs, including taking off shoes in people's homes, sitting or squatting on the floor, and not displaying the bottoms of our feet to anyone. I tried to figure out a way to sit cross-legged on the floor without doing so, and couldn't, so I'm kind of pleased to see that the culture doesn't demand the physically impossible. Or for all I know the drummer thinks it's hilarious to moon the stupid tourists.

On Condition

Aircraft engines must be maintained according to a manufacturer's published TBO (pronounced Tee-Bee-Owe) or Time Before Overhaul. An airplane engine is typically considered reliable for about the same duration as a car engine, perhaps two thousand hours of use, but when a car's engine wears out, most owners discard the car and engine.1 With an airplane, you overhaul the engine: returning it to factory specifications, replacing whatever parts are necessary to achieve that. It's expensive and time consuming, interrupting normal use for the airplane and , like any maintenance procedure, sometimes introducing new problems. Engine life is a bell curve, of course, so a few engines break down and require overhaul before their TBO and many are in fine condition after reaching TBO. For this reason, regulatory provisions are available to allow an operator to run an engine beyond the TBO, subject to various conditions.

I was amused by this line at the beginning of the Transport Canada description of the process: "The program was not being used as envisioned, for an extension to a useful life, but has been extended, beyond its intended purpose, to an overhaul avoidance program." Well duh! What would the purpose of extending an engine's useful life be if not avoiding overhauling it? It's not a humanitarian gesture to allow old engines to feel useful, or an environmental statement. Every decision made in an aviation environment is balancing safety against economics, and if you're cynical even the safety decisions are based on economic criteria: accidents are expensive.

As I read it, the on-condition program is a bet the operator makes that his pilots, AMEs and operating conditions are better than the manufacturer's assumptions and that therefore his engines don't have to be overhauled as soon as the manufacturer says. You have to make that bet for your whole fleet, and stick to it. There's nothing that specifically says you can't hedge your bets and decide to go on condition a few hundred hours from the end of the engine life, but once one aircraft is officially on condition, the others of the same type in the fleet must be too, regardless of the relative time on their engines. Once the "approved maintenance schedule" specifies that the fleet operates on condition, then all the relevant extra checks must be done.

The price of the bet the operator makes is:
a) the specified inspections, which I assume are slightly more thorough than the regular inspections of an engine, and
b) the risk that the engine fails an on condition inspection before TBO.
I think b) is not a great worry, because if an engine component were in a condition that it would fail such a check, then you'd be glad to have caught it in a routine inspection rather than through a catastrophic failure causing further damage and downtime.

The payoff of the bet is that you may be able to extend the engine life past the usual TBO. Experience with our fleet suggest that it's not necessarily a safe bet, because the engines seem to need major attention pretty close to TBO anyway. If the on condition inspections cost any appreciable time or money over the regular ones, it might not be a good bet for the long term. But it always seems like a good idea just as an overhaul is coming due on both engines of a reliable airplane that is needed online.

This afternoon I went out for a run with the new AME. He's fast. His pace quickly sends my heart rate out of my training zone, but just switch off my heart rate monitor and keep up. A fast run now and again is probably good for me. After that it's Pasta Tuesday at Boston Pizza, which we admit sadly has become the highlight of our week.

1. There are people who do overhaul automotive engines, and keep automobiles running rather than discarding them. This is much more common in the US than Canada, and evident as soon as you cross the border, because the mix of automobiles on the road immediately skews to older and more American makes. I'm guessing it's because the American cars manufactured twenty or thirty years ago were a lot more amenable to user-maintenance than the European and Japanese models that were already more common in Canada. American movies always show guys fixing up old cars, sometimes as a rite of passage. I think it's part of the culture.

Good Thing We Weren't in Outer Space

I check the oxygen equipment and set up the oxygen bottle so I can reach the valve from my seat. The oxygen bottle has its own nylon pouch, which protects it from getting scratched or getting dirt in the valve, and the pouch has pockets for the instructions and accessories and straps for carrying it, so it's easy to secure the whole thing so it can't ricochet through the cabin in turbulence. Sometimes you just have a naked oxygen bottle and those are hard to confidently secure. I've also seen pilots just stick the whole thing in a seatback pocket, as if to say, "so long as I have oxygen it doesn't matter if I'm struck in the back of the head by a heavy object."

I run up the airplane. The altitude makes the engines run very rich. Once I am lined up on the runway, I even lean it a little for the take-off, just enough for it to run smoothly. The takeoff now seems to take forever in the thin, high altitude air. The afternoon is going to be hotter and make the air even thinner. That's why the runways are so long out here.

Climbing through 10,000' I try to turn the valve on, but I can't quite get it to work, damnit. I have to get the mission specialist to get it for me. I should have just left it on and controlled it from the little valve on the canula. I adjust that little valve now so the tiny indicator ball lines up with the gradation matching my altitude. I'm sucking oxygen through my nose, but it's hard to tell if it's working, because oxygen is odorless. I check my blood oxygen with a clip on meter.

The heat of the day drives cumulus development again. The same line of thunderstorms probably forms every day. The thunderheads don't seem as high as they do in the Canadian prairies, even though the tropopause is higher, so they are probably higher. I suppose it's because we are higher already, so there isn't as much vertical volume for them to build in. Below us are dry fields. I see something that the mission specialist says is a coal mine. It's an open mine, not the underground kind that they have in West Virginia, hence the lack of tragic news stories associated with midwest mining, the way there are in the east. That was a lazily constructed sentence, but I'm not fixing it, so there.

As I come in to land, I know what is going to happen and I work to compensate, but not quite enough to get it perfect. Although I am flying at the correct indicated airspeed into a very light wind, the countryside is racing by as if I had a horrific tailwind. The air is so thin that I need to go faster over the ground in order to fly through air at the same rate. It's like if you play the same Pac-Man game on a giant monitor, the little yellow guy seems to go twice as fast, even though he's getting the same number of dots. The illusion that I'm going fast makes me think I have more energy than I do. I should have done just a little flare and let the high groundspeed come off on the rollout, but instead I try to land just a touch too slowly and the touchdown is firm. "Sorry," I say, "Getting used to the altitude."

"We were going faster than usual, weren't we," says my critic from the back. Actually, I explain, we were going a touch slower than usual; it just looked faster, which is why I went too slowly and why it wasn't that great. He says he was looking at the GPS and it was faster. I'm not sure he believed my, "Faster groundspeed, yes, but slower airspeed," explanation. Next time how about I just not screw up.

The oxygen gauge is just on the edge of the red. I take the bottle and get in the passenger seat of the other mission specialist's truck to go to get an oxygen fill at the next airport over, while the afternoon pilot fuels and otherwise prepares for the next flight. It's about a twenty minute drive to the bigger airport. It has a couple of different names, because it's a regional airport as well as a local one, but it's well-signed and we find the FBO right away. I've used an FBO of this franchise before in another state. The customer waits outside in the air conditioned car, listening to satellite radio, while I go in with the oxygen bottle. There's another customer at the counter, so I wait and then make my request.

"Oh, sorry," she tells me cheerfully. "The A&P is the only one qualified to use the oxygen equipment and he goes home at one."

To be perfectly fair, when I called yesterday I asked if they provided oxygen service and then asked immediately what their hours were. I didn't specifically ask whether oxygen service was provided throughout their opening hours. But I think that was implied strongly enough that I have a right to be ticked. Rather than making her defuse an annoyed would-be customer I make her expend the same energy more usefully. Her place of business-- whether it was her or not on the phone last night I can't say--implied that I could get oxygen here yesterday, so she is going to figure out where I can get oxygen. I ask her to where I can get an oxygen fill on a Sunday, to call and confirm that I can really get O2 there, and when she doesn't get an answer at first, to see if she can call out the one guy who knows how to use the oxygen equipment, for a fee. She finds someone at the next airport along the road that is there and can fill the bottle. It's another forty-five minutes drive or so and then we have to come back with it. I thank her and get back in the truck to break the bad news.

It's not a bad drive, really. Air conditioned truck, compatible taste in music, fences, bluffs, cattle, authentic western scenery. Someone I know was going to be driving a motorhome up here, all the way from Indiana this month. If you pretend you came some place for a vacation you can usually make it into a fun adventure, and if it's so bad you couldn't imagine going there on purpose, you can at least thank your lucky stars you're not stupid enough to have gone there without being paid. We eventually get to the proper airport and find the FBO, which appears to be named "FBO." A flight instructor takes the bottle and looks at me strangely when I say that the previous airport said only the A&P could do it. Clearly he doesn't think this is a technical job. He brings it back. The gauge reads full. Presumably it will keep our sats up rather than making us talk in a squeaky voice. I pay for it and then get back in the truck for the long drive back.

There's an air conditioned pilot lounge at the airport, so my colleagues isn't baking out there on the ramp. The mission specialist drops me back at the hotel and then he goes flying.

Some idiot is buzzing the town in the evening while I'm trying to sleep. Over and over again. He's doing circuits, I guess what he as an American would call "staying in the pattern," but he's clearly not climbing out at an optimal rate after each takeoff. If I knew where you slept, bozo, I would buzz it at six tomorrow morning.

Wrong Tool for the Job

I'm driving in an unfamiliar city, on my way to the airport in a rental car. I have directions that are supposed to get me right onto the main airport road, but the road unexpectedly bifurcates and I'm pretty sure I was supposed to be on the other half of it. It's not a strict grid system and there are bridges and underpasses, so I can't just turn right and reconnect with the proper road. I pull over and pull out my flight bag GPS.

Of course it's an aviation GPS, so it knows where the airport is. It doesn't know where the roads are, but it's a big enough airport that I figure if I can get going in more or less the right direction for the airport, I'll find a sign with a picture of an airplane on it, and I can just follow those to the airport. The GPS will tell me if I'm getting closer or further from the airport, the bearing direct to it, and if there are any large bodies of water barring my way.

With this dubious logic, I pull back into traffic, casting a glance at the screen once I have forward motion and the GPS can orient itself. Yep, this is kind of the right way. I continue. At the next light it's still showing that I'm going pretty much the right way. Then as the road curves I glance at it again and laugh. The whole screen has gone red! If I travel at a speed greater than would be commensurate with taxiing, terrain within a certain distance turns red to warn me of obstacles. The GPS is terribly concerned that I'm flying too low for safety.

As I go under a highway underpass I spot a sign on the highway above giving directions to the airport. I take the next right and get on that highway. The car is returned and I find my airplane.

When Line Pilots Get Bored

I'm back at home and it's almost Christmas. In a burst of holiday spirit I drive into the city for shopping. This includes a stop at a Canadian Tire -- Canadian Tire ought to have its own blog category by now -- for a timer to turn the Christmas lights on and off at appropriate times of the night. Nothing like fire and forget seasonal cheer.

Driving in the city includes parking in the city, but Canadian Tire has a parking lot where they will validate parking, so it's free. That's a good deal and the not-terribly-spacious parking lot is full of people taking advantage of said deal. To facilitate traffic flow, there is a guy in a reflective vest directing drivers to open parking spots. He is a remarkably competent marshaller giving clear, unambiguous signals, and avoiding the aviation signals "your engine is on fire" or "start engines" that always make me giggle when I see them from policemen or others directing traffic. (Check out the link if you haven't seen the marshalling signals page in a while., They've improved the artwork and descriptions).

He has also spotted my aviation-themed licence plate frame and I confess to being an aviatrix. He's not familiar with the word, so I translate it as an old-fashioned word for pilot, the female equivalent of aviator. He muses that none of his female FOs has ever called herself that. Wait, what did he just say? No wonder he's so good at aircraft marshalling signals. He's an Air Canada captain. I'd love to chat to him longer, but he has a job to do. I'm left wondering how many ex-wives you have to have, or how bored you have to get, to get out of a B767 in order to direct cars at Canadian Tire. Whatever the reason, he was good at what he was doing and did it with a smile that made everyone's day better.

No, my licence plate frame does not say "I'd Rather Be Flying" or "Pilots Make Smoother Approaches." But speaking of approaches, today's was the full procedure ILS/DME RWY 14 into Halifax, under the weather conditions encountered by Air Canada Flight 646 the night they crashed in a go around. They had an eighth of a mile visibility so I dialed my landing visibility up to the advisory value of half a mile, so as to have a chance of landing. I went missed twice, one because it was unstable on the glideslope--pitch control again--over a mile back, and one pretty much exactly what the captain in AC646 saw: descending from minima with the runway in sight but not well enough aligned with the centreline to flare to land safely. That low level shear is very nasty. Then one good one with the autopilot, just to prove it could be done and another one hand flown to success, because no way am I going to let an autopilot outfly me.

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.

Middle Seat

I made sure I had my passport for customs, my pilot licence in case there was any on-base scrutiny of who I was, and my camera so I could take pictures of anything that wasn't a military secret, and got in the car. I drove across the border to catch a cheap flight south. The customs official looks dubious at my reason for going south, but when he asks my profession a light goes on. I think you can get away with all kinds of crazy stuff on account of being a "commercial pilot." It's like having a Canadian flag on your backpack in Europe.

Check-in is painless. It's nice just carrying overnight stuff and not my massive Arctic-to-Florida work bag. It's coming up to American Thanksgiving, so the flight is chock full and the flight attendants are busy trying to get everyone's bags, coats and butts in the appropriate places. A guy is there with two young kids and they don't have seats together, so the flight attendant was obviously trying to rearrange people to create a row for them. Airline should have taken care of that at the gate before seating people, because now it's more complicated. Passengers were apparently refusing some of the offered seat swaps so it wasn't just as simple as emptying a row of individual travellers and replacing them with the family. I volunteered to move and the FA was pathetically grateful when I accepted a move into a middle seat to make it work out for the family, assuring me that she would comp all my drinks in compensation. It's sort of sad that it was that hard to get people to move over so a little kid could sit with his dad.

I liked my new seatmates better, anyway. My original neighbours were a little girl in the window seat next to me an angular mother who seemed to be checking me out for my propensity to molest little girls. And speaking to, smiling at or acknowledging the presence of counted as molestation. Okay, I'm obviously not being fair there, but I got such a cold vibe from her that I was happy to move to the friendlier spot in between an electrician from Alabama and a woman with elaborately hennaed hands and black-tipped fingers, on her way to her sister's wedding. I slept on the flight, so I can't report on the fascinating things that take place in the back of an airliner. Except that the flaps were filthy. filthier than mine, even.

As we came into land, I could see that North Carolina is a little swampy, with lots of trees, just starting to change colours for the fall. I grabbed my carry-ons and headed for the exit. About this time I realized I hadn't booked a rental car. I meant to. We'd discussed it. You could almost hear the chuckle in John's e-mail as he replied to my enquiry about buses or trains from North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham airport. It seems that North Carolina is not a public transit sort of state. "You'll need to rent a car," he'd explained. And then I neglected to. But never mind. I'm a master of flexibility. I jumped on a rental car shuttle, figure I'd go down the line at the rental car desk, and see who had one to rent me.

It turns out that at RDU all the car rental counters are on the individual companies' lots, so I just have to hope that the one I've reached has cars. I ask the gentleman who greets the van and he just gestures at the parked cars, "pick one." That's right, the cars are all parked with the keys in the ignition and you pick the one you want, drive your car to the exit and do the paperwork right there. Americans are masters of car-related convenience. The checkout clerk looks at my Canadian driver's licence and asks if I speak French. He's Arabic-looking and his nametag identifies him as Abdallah, so he's probably from a former French colony in north Africa. "Not as well as you," I say in English. Yeah. I know: chicken. I should have taken the opportunity to practice a disused skill. When we're done I say thanks and good evening in French. I'm a block away before I realize that I forgot to ask for a map. I hope my approaches in the simulator are better planned than my arrival at the base.

I know I have to go southeast, so I take the option directing me to highway 40 "east," and am lucky enough to find a gas station before I get to the on ramp. But they're all out of maps, and no one has heard of Havelock. A truck driver has a GPS unit for his car and plugs in my destination. It's easy: east on I-40 then east on US-70 and that will take me right into Havelock. I'm on my way.

It's dark for most of the drive, so I can't report on much except that US 70 kept bifurcating into the 70-bypass and 70-business and about half the time I took the wrong one, because I couldn't tell the bypass from the business sign from far away enough to get into the correct lane to make the turn. I stopped to get a map, just in case I missed one of those turns and got lost in the dark. Another customer in the store assured me that it didn't really matter which 70 I took at any point because there were about the same number of lights on either.

I stopped at an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant, the kind with the neon-edged pagoda roof. It had obviously been there a long time, and there were lots of cars in the parking lot, so it couldn't be too bad. And it wasn't. Sesame chicken, broccoli beef and ice cream for dessert, then back on the road.

A bit later my phone rang, and not knowing the local rules about cell phone driving I pulled over into what turned out to be a butcher shop parking lot to return the call. Every time I ask anyone if it's illegal to answer a cellphone while driving in their jurisdiction they say something like "sort of" or "only if they catch you." It looks as if North Carolina is okay with me talking on the cell phone unless I'm a teenager or driving a schoolbus. John is just checking up on me, then calls back again as I get into town and guides me to my hotel so we can go out for coffee.

Plans have changed now. I left out some of the previous plan changes, so suffice to say I am not surprised. The colonel has decided that it is best that I be there in the daytime, which may be good news, because I'll possibly be able to fly with an instructor or a trained pilot, to make better use of the opportunity. And it means I get to sleep in tomorrow. We get gently kicked out of the doughnut shop by the staff who want to go home, and John will call me in the morning to plan our day.

Wait, what? They just advertised a 30 calorie energy drink on TV. (I'm multislacking: blogging while watching TV). Wouldn't I burn 30 calories taking a bottle out of the fridge and removing the lid? How is this useful, unless an athlete has a purple food colouring deficiency?

World's Largest What?

I take an airline flight to Edmonton. The guys unloading the airplane are wearing toques. Sigh. Summer is officially over. They were probably wearing shorts last week. Fortunately it's not really that cold out, because I have to rent a car, and for some reason the terminal is designed so you have to go outside and then back in to get to the rental cars. Perhaps there is a tunnel that I can use when it's thirty below and blowing.

The reason I have to rent a car is that we're not working in Edmonton, but at an airport four hours away on the Saskatchewan border, with no airline service. I now know to rent from Avis, because they have a hassle-free policy allowing any fellow employee to drive the car without further payments or paperwork. They offer me a GPS unit at the rental counter, but I have Google maps directions printed off, and it's pretty hard to get lost leaving Edmonton, so I decline.

It was a Ford compact of some sort. It looked boxy with a high side profile but I should have written down what sort, because if you're any taller than me, don't rent this car. At the lowest possible seat setting my head was so close enough to the roof that my hair kept static clinging to the ceiling. Is this some kind of dodge by American car companies to get people to buy larger cars? I've been in plenty of smaller Japanese and European cars and never had head versus roof issues before.

The exit from Edmonton International Airport leads right onto highway 2 north, which ends at an opportunity to get onto 216 and then the Yellowhead Highway eastbound. I do all that, and then settle in for the drive. I don't like driving as much as flying. It's not as comfortable and you keep having to turn for arbitrary reasons. After a very short while I realize I forgot to refill my waterbottle at YEG, and I don't want to drive all that way without water, so I exit at a signed rest stop.

It's the worst designated highway rest stop ever. It has parking. No shade, warmth, vending machines, tourist information, toilets or potable water. That's right, a highway rest stop with no toilets. It doesn't even have any sizable bushes. I assume the truckers are just going in the bushes behind their big rigs. The only facility at the place is a couple of large garbage cans. I move on.

The next town on the highway big enough to be on the Google Maps printout is called Vegreville and the highway signs promise all services, plus the world's largest pysanka. I have no idea what a pysanka is, so I imagine it belongs to the family of edible dough things called names like perogie and pyroshky, depending on who is making and pronouncing it. I exit at the town and shortly see that I am on 50th Avenue at 52nd Street (or possibly on 50th Street at 52nd Avenue, I forget). Because this is Alberta, I know I'm two blocks from the downtown, and if you're going to have a World's Largest Something in your town, isn't that where it would be. There's a plaza there, and a parking space, but no large thing. A nearby store offers "pysanki" for sale, and I know enough of Slavic languages to recognize that as plural of pysanka. I am disappointed to see that it's a pottery store, so a pysanka is unlikely to be food, and she is disappointed I don't want to buy pottery. She does fill my water bottle for me and direct me to the world's largest, and explains that it's a Ukrainian Easter egg. She has some pottery replicas.

The World's Largest Pysanka was constructed for the centennial of the RCMP. It looks to me like a pretty savvy move on the part of the town to use federal horse force money to build themselves a giant tourist attraction, but their little blurb about it symbolizing the safety of their town thanks to the brave Mounties was so convincing that they were awarded extra money for their project. It is an interesting meld of an old fashioned handicraft with the high tech (in 1973 anything using a computer was high tech) construction. I love the line "required the development of new computer programs," as though writing code was an earthshattering breakthrough. Apparently no one had ever modelled an egg before. Hmm, 1973: does that predate Fortran? What would they have written it in?

It was worth exiting the highway for. Giant decorated egg on stick, rotates with the wind, and it's always windy there, so it kept moving as I was photographing it. I decided not to eat in Vegreville, but save my hunger and dine with my colleagues when I arrived. Apparently there is a World's Largest Pyrogy somewhere along that drive, and I missed it.

Any Bets?

Same drill as yesterday. We check out of the hotel, load our gear in the vehicle, drive to the first airport, collect a squat switch and accompanying paperwork, and drive to the second airport. The weather is good here, but poor at destination, however it should clear up by the time the part is installed and we get there. We walk into the hangar with our delivery.

The airplane is up on jacks, with the gear retracted. It looks really creepy that way. I'm used to seeing airplanes sitting on their wheels, and it's okay to have them hoisted onto jacks, but it's very weird when the wheels are up, but the airplane is sitting in a hangar. It looks so precarious like that. The engineer and his apprentice are looking glum. We hold up the part triumphantly, but this doesn't lighten their mood.

"Uh thanks," the engineer says. The switch doesn't seem to be the problem. At the moment they're cleaning out the nose compartment because they had a hydraulic line come off. There's something more other than the switch that sends an electric locked or not locked signal that is causing the airplane to believe its gear is not extended when it is. They aren't going to have this today. This time we check into a hotel in this town, but it turns out we'll have to drive back to the first airport to get a part again tomorrow.

No, I did not just post the same post two days in a row. Yesterday, for example, the weather was poor here and good at destination. Today it's the opposite. In neither case does it matter, as we're not going anywhere until that airplane works. How long do you think we can keep this up?

Getting On and Off in Texas

Heading out for some time out, I once again have to drive to the nearest major airport and do a handover with a replacement pilot. The airplane is in for scheduled maintenance and will be at least a couple of days, so this time I'm dropping off the car and flying out this afternoon, and then my replacement will pick up the car and drive back to the worksite when he arrives.

The USA has great highways. They are usually well-paved, with yellow lines in the middle, clear lane markings and white lines along the edge so you don't drive off the road. They usually have lots of bright reflective cateyes while Canada typically has only the glue marks left behind after the snowplough scraped the cateyes off the pavement. Some amazing engineering goes into the urban highway ramps. Some places they are stacked five or six layers deep. I'm sure there are dozens of advanced textbooks and hundreds of engineering theses on how to curve and bank an exit ramp, how long to make an exit or entrance lane, and where to put signs such that drivers can interpret them in time to make lane changes.

There are national, state and possibly also county highways and they have different formats. So one sign might direct you to 131 North, 23 South and East Loop. And the signs can be on the same pole so you see "East Loop 131 North 23 South." And then you're looking for 23 North and you see "North 23" and you go for it, realizing as you're committed to the ramp that that's 131 North and 23 South. So you're going the wrong way. Fortunately it's usually simple to exit, cross under the highway and get back on going in the proper direction. Okay, further evidence that Aviatrix can't drive. What else is new.

Texas on ramps: Some of them live up to that state of the art engineering picture. And some of them appear to have been built by the Dukes of Hazzard as a one-off. I guess the highway goes through all kinds of towns, and all of them want access. I have literally missed highway entrances to I-20 because I thought the ramp concerned was one of those dirt roads that cops use to do U-turns rather than a legitimate highway entrance. After a time I came to realize that while the interstate has a dependable consistency from Shreveport to Fort Worth and on to California, the entrance ramps aren't necessarily paved. It lends the interstate an exotic flavour, like The Road in Zelazny's Roadmarks.

Oh, and an airplane cartoon, just so I don't have to put the non-aviation tag on this.

And Back to Texas

Passport renewed. Vacation over. It's time to go back to work. Back to Texas.

Or maybe not. I'm at the airport. At check-in, the agent told me that the airplane I was going out on was still on the ground at its point of origin, thanks to freezing rain there. Understandable.

"Do you have more flights to Dallas if I miss my connection?" I asked.

"Oh yes, there's a 5 pm and an 11 pm flight," she says.

Charming. I'm supposed to be in Dallas at five. But weather doesn't cause me stress. That's the province of unscrupulous telemarketers. I have a two hour connection, and freezing rain is usually a short-lived phenomenon, a transitional state between snow and rain. It should be fine. I smile, say something polite, and submit my 48.4 lb suitcase for tagging.

In the departure lounge the airline is good about keeping us updated. The aircraft is enroute, thirty minutes out, so we should be departing at 10:05. Then another update. The airplane has called in range a few minutes early, so we will be able to board at ten. Then another announcement, prefaced by the warning that this is not good news. "The aircraft is at the gate, but ..."

What will the but be? Mechanical? Commuting crew stranded somewhere? No, it's fog at the connecting airport. We're now facing an "indefinite delay". She promises more updates and soon gives us one. The weather at destination is deteriorating. "We need to wait until RVR is at 600 level, right now it's at 400."

I don't know if she knows what that means, but I do. The runway visual range transmissiometer registers a visibility of 400 feet in the touchdown zone. Not enough, for safe identification of the runway environment before committing to land. Fog is a phenomenon notorious for its persistence. I could be here for a while.

The next announcement comes at 10:15. We will be boarding at 10:30. She doesn't know when that means we will take off, but suggests maybe 11:00? I've heard lots of horror stories of passengers being loaded onto airplanes and kept captive there for hours and hours. I'd better stock up on food and water. But they've heard the same horror stories and before 10:30 there's another announcement that they won't be boarding after all. It's still an indefinite delay.

This is rough for them. If it were me flying, I could replan my flight to refuel at a different city, but they have to get these passengers there. Except the connecting passengers. And they are already looking at the connecting passengers. Right now they are rebooking passengers who have overseas connections, sending them back through the terminal to other gates and other flights so they can get where they are going. I approve. They'll get to me soon.

It's now 11:35. There's no internet here. I've already transferred all the phone numbers from my old cellphone into my new one, done two sudoku puzzles and read the blogs I downloaded before leaving home. Now what?

Write my own blog entries in Notepad and play minesweeper, I guess.

The flight finally boards around 12:30, but mysteriously leaves half empty, stranding passengers with the same destination who were ticketed on later flights that were simply cancelled. Somehow this makes sense to the airline.

My connecting flight is long gone, but I see from my online itinerary (this airport does have internet) that the airline has already booked another one for me. I can't check in online or at a kiosk, though. (I tried). I have to stand in a customer service line for about 20 minutes to get my boarding pass. As I get to the counter the agent excuses herself for a moment to go over to the queue, to kick people who aren't flying First Class out of the First Class line. One guy has a temper tantrum, claiming he never saw any sign and that he's been waiting there an hour. He's full of it: that line had maybe three people in it when I arrived, and he wasn't one of them. It only grew long in the last five or ten minutes. The agent returns and issues my boarding pass, and after more waiting and another flight, I get to Dallas at 11:15 p.m.

That's not the end of my day, though. I'm typing this while waiting for my baggage to arrive on the carousel. It hasn't, and people are slowly giving up and drifting over to the monstrous lost baggage line. I don't want to give up hope, but my next step is to rent a car and drive three hours, so perhaps I should get in that line before it gets any longer. The rumour is that with the cancelled and bumped flights our luggage has been lost somewhere.

That doesn't make a lot of sense, because there has been plenty of time for the bags to get on the correct plane at each stop. But I suppose airline baggage handling doesn't always make sense. Another customer smiles as the baggage agent can be heard on the phone, "Well you'd better find it! You should see how many people I have waiting here!" In the end the carousel starts up again and the lost luggage arrives.

I rent a car and drive east. Texas has good roads. I think I may have run over an already flattened skunk. It's also possible that the car is just permeated with some kind of air freshener I can't stand. Yes, the smell is so strong I can't distinguish between distant skunk and proximal industrial air freshener. Just kind of burns out my nose, I guess. I have one more complaint about that car. When the ignition is turned off, all the doors automatically unlock. I suppose it is supposed to be a convenience feature? Let me tell you, when you're a woman travelling alone, and you've pulled into a rest area in the middle of nowhere and reclined your seat for a few minutes nap, it is not a sense of convenience you feel when you open your eyes and realize that the door you carefully locked before departure and have never unlocked is now open, as is every other lock in the car. A convenience feature for whom? Parking lot rapists? I originally wrote "Chevrolet engineers losing your jobs in the current economy, I do not weep for you. What were you thinking?" but then I remembered that the last time I made a comment of that sort on the blog, I got a response from an engineer who had worked on the very project I was lamenting and marketing had overruled his protests. So I just weep for everyone. I do that a lot. I cried at the ending of Bee Movie, which I have seen now four times. Just the ending: I have never seen the beginning.

Back on the road and I reach my hotel. The register marks me as a "no-show" as I check in, but they still have the room. Long day. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to copy Dave and say "life on the line continues." Different sort of line, though.

Alternative Transportation

I think I may have already posted this photograph, but it's a response to a commenter who wanted to ensure that people didn't think all of the US was inhospitable to pedestrians. This sign clearly indicates a city where multiple types of non-car locomotion are encouraged with dedicated lanes and routes. I have never seen an on-street skateboard facility anywhere else. I know it was in the U.S. and I'm pretty sure it was in Portland, Oregon.

In answer to a comment a few days ago asking about what happens to bicycles if they are abandoned when the owner moves or dies, they have a department responsible for collecting abandoned or badly parked bicycles. They register them and make them available to be reclaimed, resold, donated or destroyed as appropriate.

I tried to rent a bicycle in Texas today. A bicycle does not appear to be a vehicle one can rent here. Just out of interest, do you live in a town where a person can rent a bicycle? And while I'm at it, did your parents buy you a car? Did you buy your child(ren) a car? Did most people in the class have parent-provided cars? I get e-mails all the time from teenagers who want to learn to fly and don't know where they could get the money. They seem earnest enough that if they were sitting on a car they'd sell it and spend the money on flight training.

You can rent bikes in all the cities where I've lived, and if you ask nicely at a bike shop, you can sometimes get a loaner bike to ride while yours is in for repairs. My first bicycle was parent-provided, but when I wanted a better one, with gears and caliper brakes, I had to save up to pay half.

Endless Supply of North Winds

Next morning there is no respite on the winds, but the snow has swept through and left Alberta clear. It's threatening to drop the visibility here now, but that's something I can work around. We get a cab back to the airport in early morning darkness. There is no one at the FBO, but they have fuelled the airplane as requested, tied it down and chocked it against the wind. Loaded to the gills, it's still jumping around like a kite. I put my passenger on board and close the door while I do the walkaround with a flashlight, checking especially to make sure that nothing has has blown into the engine cowlings or other important apertures during the night. I untie the ropes, but leave the chocks behind the wheels so it doesn't go anywhere while I'm starting the engines. It's that windy.

The saving grace is that the wind is now blowing straight down the runway, so that all its force will go to shortening my take-off roll and none to trying to push me sideways off the runway. The only challenge is getting to the runway. I taxi very slowly, turning my ailerons at each turn so as to spoil the lift on the into-wind wing. It's a skill I learned as I first learned to taxi in a light little two-place airplane. I don't always do it in this airplane, but today it is needed. I wonder if there is a size of airplane at which you can just leave the ailerons neutral through taxi in any conditions. I wonder if Airbus 380 pilots turn their ailerons for wind anyway, because that's what you do.

I position at the very end of the runway, because that's what you do, complete my pre-takeoff checks and set power. It's an amusingly short take-off roll. I estimate I had seventy percent of rotation speed before I even released the brakes, and there's very little rolling resistance to acceleration at low groundspeed. I climb, but not too high, because this wind is forecast to be even stronger at higher altitudes. My initial heading is due west, because the area of the worst turbulence and of low visibility and snow is approaching from the north. I've chosen a point based on forecasts at which I should be able to head northwest and be clear of the weather.

It works like a dream. I give thanks aloud for modern weather forecasting technology. The passenger is unimpressed and I resolve to shut up about that sort of thing in future. Progress is unbelievably slow. I file a PIREP reporting minimal turbulence and sixty-five knots on the nose. Just as forecast. I watch the scenery go by very slowly. I file another PIREP because I know there will be a lot of people looking at weather reports and forecasts today, wondering if they should venture out.

The frequency on which one files a PIREP up here is 126.7, the same frequency as one makes air-to-air position reports for the benefit of other traffic. Another pilot on frequency recognizes my voice and checks to confirm that it's me. It turns out to be the fueller from one of the places I've stopped recently. He's working on his commercial pilot licence and is on his way back home after a cross-country trip. He too was grounded yesterday. He's headed in the same direction as I am. I shudder to think what his ground speed might be. He's in a C172. He might get to his destination faster by driving. I respect him for being up here at all, with obviously limited experience.

Total flight time for the two legs of the trip, not including time spent on the ground at my planned fuel stop, was six hours, thirty minutes. And I took a more direct route than the 4h 07 southeastbound flight. I once had a student ask, "so where does all that wind COME FROM? Isn't the north going to run out of air?" There's actually a circulation, such that there is a polar high, constantly subsiding and being resupplied by air that circles aloft at the subpolar low.