Aviation Tax

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

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

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

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

New Definition of Number One

Overheard on the radio today: You're number one, behind a Pilatus. The pilot didn't seem to have a problem with that kind of counting.

Also overheard, as I was walking into an FBO, a discussion of hiring a new pilot, they were discussing how much to offer. "Ah," said one, "We'll just get them to write up the requirements and see if we can get a guy." "Or a woman," I said, my trajectory through the room such that I was right beside them right at the moment this needed to be said. They agreed completely, and then asked me how much I thought they should pay a Pilatus captain. "It depends on so many things..." I waffled.

"Like whether we hire a woman or not," joked the guy, and I raised a boot as if to kick him the head and then passed by. A pilot doesn't pause long on the route from cockpit to washroom after a flight. The sad thing is that he's right. It's harder for women to get jobs in aviation, so when one is available we'll accept it at lower pay than a man would, and stay longer, because it's harder for us to get the next job too. Men know this, and it's one of the reasons men protest the hiring of women and minorities. We lower the wages. One we do it just by existing: people added to the existing number of white men being available in the labour pool means that there is more supply of labour, so wages go down purely by supply and demand. And then we do it by being hungry. We'll take that lowball job offer. Men can't keep us out of the labour force, so the only way you can fix this and be sure that we and you are hired on merit is to make sure we're paid the same for the same experience and duties.

'Cause apparently in aviation you can be number one right behind someone else.

Remote Temples

On the list of embarrassingly minor tourist gripes, the air conditioning is too cold and we can't figure out how to turn it down, and the light in the wardrobe won't turn off without turning off the master switch, which we need on in order to recharge our camera batteries overnight. We solve the former by figuring harder and the latter by unscrewing the light bulbs. We're also amused by the laundry list that allows us to specify the number of kimonos we have submitted for laundering, but "bra" is not listed. Do Cambodian women not wear bras? We hadn't noticed, which suggests that yes they do. I'll have to scrutinize my photos some more.

The hotel breakfast spread is phenomenal. It includes the staple foods for a hearty breakfast in North America, Western Europe, and many places in Asia. We can hear the delight in some Korean guests' voices as they discover kim-chee on the buffet. I bypass the omelet station, toast and jam and a spread of sliced meats, cheese and bread to try "fish porridge" (soup thickened with rice), chive cakes and bok choi fried with bacon. I also have a croissant and some dragonfruit. The last has a pink rind, with white fruit and lack dots, like something filled with poppy seeds. It was fresh-tasting, not too sweet, about like a green melon but not as juicy.

The tuk tuk drivers were all waiting and we distributed ourselves among them to head off to the temples of Angkor Wat. Our driver, a fellow I met last night while looking for supper, speaks quite good English and earned the capital to buy his tuk tuk working in a "soldier hospital." He's married and has one daughter, aged six, and she goes to school.

I should stop here and explain that Angkor Wat is literally Temple City, and was the capital of the old Khmer Empire, abandoned in the mid-fifteenth century when the rulers decamped to Phnom Penh. What remains is only the stone buildings, mostly temples, of what was once a huge city of wooden, stone and grass buildings. It is called the Eighth Wonder of the World and the main temple building is the largest religious structure anywhere. We ride out of town towards the temples, through the front gate of the national park containing the temples and buy a three day pass for $40, a fortune by Cambodian standards, but well worth it to see and help them preserve this huge complex. I later confirm that Cambodian nationals don't have to pay that fee. I want every Cambodian possible to be able to see this incredible evidence of their heritage. This isn't like the Aztec and Mayan ruins, relics of a long-gone civilization with no real connection to the people who live there now. This is pretty much the same civilization as exists now, people who are still dancing the same dances, performing the same rituals, and building with the same decorating styles. It must inspire both pride and shame to know that your ancestors did this, and that the civilization has crumbled to this extent. Imagine tourists coming to see the greatest city in your country after it had fallen into ruins and you were living elsewhere.

Today we are starting with Banteay Srei, "the women's temple," but the name is relatively modern. The temple doesn't have anything particular to do with women, but it's over a thousand years old and features carvings of stunning delicacy. It seems impossible that they have survived for so long. Apparently many of the temple façades were guilded and/or painted, so perhaps many layers of paint had to wear off before the elements had access to the stone. I walk through the temple and also around the outside of the moat. There are lotus flowers growing in the moat. The park staff have labelled some of the trees in Latin, Khmer and English, a nice touch for the visitor, acknowledging that the encroaching jungle and not just the temples are worthy of note.

Leaving the temple I enter a merchants' area where I attract a rabble of kids reminiscent of the inchworms in Commander Keen, pause in one place for a while and you're surrounded by them, all clamouring to sell scarves, books, bracelets, and wooden carvings. A full colour guidebook to the temples catches my idea as a good idea. The merchant shows me that the cover price is $27.95 and that he will give it to me for a mere $20. I should have got something like this and studied up before I came, to appreciate it more. I leaf through the book and see that it is nice, but walk on. I don't really have time to read it now. The throng follows me through the whole market. They're polite, and my nature isn't to ignore someone who shows me a pretty thing or says hello. The price of the book gradually decreases as I walk to the end, and finally I buy it for five dollars. It's a 240 page trade paperback with high quality paper and colour photographs on every page. It's published in Thailand. I don't know how the publishing industry works anymore. Did they steal these books to make money at $5? I'm referring to it now to keep my recollections of the temples straight.

Back in our tuk tuk, we stop at a palm sugar ... um place. It's the palm tree equivalent of a maple sugar shack i.e. a cabane à sucre, where you boil the sap from a maple tree to condense it into sugar. At a cabane à sucre you pour the condensed maple syrup on the snow to freeze it and make it into candy, but here they boil the juice from the fruit down into crystals which they sell in palm-frond tubes, three for a dollar. They offer free samples, which are delicious, and I buy some for souvenirs. If you don't have maple sugar where you're from, the nearest thing to it is probably very crystalline vanilla fudge. Very sweet, a bit crunchy, and melt-in-your-mouth. We met this guy later, gathering the juice. He posed very obligingly for the photo and is the only Cambodian I ever heard complain about the heat. That's what you get for climbing trees midday!

From there we went to Ta Som, a fairly isolated overgrown temple with huge piles of rubble everywhere. Even the rubble was beautiful. Each temple is built out of stone blocks, but not huge ones. I could probably just barely lift one. The carvings are not additional items placed in niches (thank goodness, otherwise they probably all would have been looted by now) but a part of each brick. I think they were carved in parts on the stones before the stones were placed here. I did pick up one of the smaller ones just to emphasize the vulnerability. Of course I put it right back, but there must be many of them stolen every year. The Indochine minister of culture even stole some entire carved apsaras (dancing goddesses, more on them later) in 1926. They caught him, but I'll bet that literally tonnes of these temple stones have left the country, some in the hands of people who truly thought they were conserving them.

I'm going to abandon my day-by-day recitation and just let this take as long as it takes to tell, otherwise I won't be able to keep up and I'll be forced to skimp on my story.

Pork Bellies

This posting is utterly off the regular topic of this blog. It was inspired by the fact that I had bacon from a free range pig for breakfast, and it was extremely delicious.

Pork bellies are an economic commodity traded on the stock market. People essentially gamble on the accuracy of their predictions about the future demand, supply and thus price of pork. The traders never actually take delivery of the pork, because during the time they are trading it like a hot potato, the pigs haven't been slaughtered yet, or maybe even haven't been born yet.

That made me think about enormous pig factory farms. By keeping pigs in extremely confined conditions, they're creating inhumane conditions for the pigs, the human workers, and the people who have to live near the effluent. In some places they may also be doing environmental damage to fisheries and drinking water, but are they also devaluing the currency? Would changing the laws so that "standard industry practice" like no longer provides an exemption from prosecution for animal cruelty laws merely address animal welfare issues, or would it constitute tinkering with the economic system itself? Is this the real reason why we as a society don't demand that animals that are made of delicious, delicious bacon are not treated at least as well as convicted rapists? If you treated a single dog the way factory farmed pigs are treated, the dog would be taken away and you would not be allowed to own another animal.

And then I wondered, can people who are forbidden by religion to eat pork or handle pig leather ethically make money in commodities trading if they hold pork belly futures? Is contact with the animal itself unclean, or does that extend to its effects. Pigs aren't soft and furry, and they're very robust, but they're also intelligent and sociable. If I buy factory-farmed bacon, I'm paying someone to abuse an animal for my breakfast pleasure. I don't think I'll do that anymore.

If you haven't had your daily dose of bleeding heart liberal hopelessness yet, see this blog on the myriad ways the planet is doomed.

Cold and Macho

We meet at 6:30 for breakfast according to our strategy. The rental car can be returned at 7:00, and we've left ourselves a few hours leeway for contingencies so we can still get the airplane put away at destination (that's prearranged) and then get to the terminal and through southern airport security in time for our flights.

My boss texts as I'm gathering up my gear in my room. "Is it going to be too cold to fly?" There's a big bubble of arctic air over half the country. It's -32 here, actually a few degrees colder at destination, but as long as it's forecast to be over -35, we're okay. He doesn't want engines started below that. It takes too long for the oil to reach the moving parts at such low temperatures, and just turning over an engine could damage it.

It's always nice to have a "too cold to work" temperature that allows you to stay in bed, but usually the weather conspires to hover just above that temperature, always freezing your fingers but never allowing them to remain tucked in bed. Still, it's nice to know that it's there. I worked for a company once that had a too-hot-to-wear-a-tie uniform rule. I think the number was in the high 20s. Anything above that on the OAT and you could work in an open collar. Today I'm working in compression socks, two more pairs of heavy socks, leggings, long underwear, work pants, t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, sweater, and I think a sweatshirt over that, then my lined coat -- although not my wonderful parka. I thought we'd be going south before now. Plus a wool toque, a scarf, wool gloves and fleece-lined leather work mittens on top of that.

We unload everything on the apron next to the airplane and then I volunteer to load and secure it while he returns the car. We've done so little work this rotation, that I feel as if I have done less than my share. I had hoped to have everything ready to go when my co-worker returned, what with having to wait for paperwork and a cab and all, but I'm still securing gear when he's back already. The car rental place was all ready for the return and gave him a ride to the airport.

We untarp the airplane together. Everything is in good order, because we've been out shovelling and checking on it. There are a few patches of frozen-on ice where the tarps didn't cover properly, so I use some of the deicing fluid. I have a moment of "oh-no" when I realize that there is some old dilute fluid in the sprayer, but fortunately it hasn't frozen, and I manage to pour it out. Must remember to ... what? Rinse and dry? In the past I've kept deicing equipment in a heated hangar so I haven't encountered the problem of a frozen sprayer. Something to remember if I'm ever doing hot water deicing (works when the temperature is and will stay above freezing) and then stowing the sprayer in the plane. Everything takes more time and space to do in the cold. Anything that has to be folded or coiled actually takes up more space, because they won't bend. And the same goes for your hands. In heavy mitts they don't bend the way you are used to and if you take off the mitts and just work in gloves, pretty soon your fingers still won't bend, at least not without any strength.

My coworker is PIC so he straps into the left seat and I remove the cord from the engine block heater just before he starts. Fires up right away. We exchange delighted thumbs up and I pull the cord from the second engine. The cords are too cold to coil properly, so while he does post start checks I end up stuffing a tangled mess of electrical cords in the back of the airplane. I'm afraid I would break the plastic insulation--or even the wires inside--if I forced them to coil lightly to fit where they usually go.

I secure the rear door and then come up to the right seat. The right oil pressure is still indicating low, but the CHTs and oil temperatures are matched between the two engines. We turn on the heater and take off some of our layers of clothing as we wait for the oil to come up. It's moving--the gauge isn't dead--but really really slowly. After half an hour it still isn't registering enough for take-off. I know that as a student pilot you were taught to shut down an engine if it wasn't registering oil pressure in 30 seconds, maybe a minute if it was really cold, so why have we let it run for this long? We are almost certain we know what is going on in there.

The engine is out on the wing, a couple of metres away from me. It was kept warm enough electrically overnight to start and have oil circulating, which is why we see normal cylinder head and oil temperatures. The oil pressure gauge is on the panel in front of me. The oil pressure gauge works in the absolutely simplest way such a thing could work, and that is by having the actual oil pressure force oil through a line to the gauge. Simple is good. But now think about that line. It comes out of the engine, along the leading edge of the wing, into the fuselage and up to the instrument panel. Much of that path is unheated. We suspect that a little bit of moisture has condensed in that line and frozen solid, blocking the line. The oil coming out of the engine is warm, but cools quickly inside the narrow tube, so is not warm enough to melt the ice. If we thought there was any way that the actual oil pressure in our engine was as low as on that gauge, we wouldn't be running the engine.

Still, we're not going to take off with oil pressure in the red. We text the PRM about our predicament. He asks a bunch of questions, suggesting we do things we've already done, and adds one more. I get out and check the oil filter through the cowling vents. My coworker shuts the engine down so I can do this. I verify that the oil filter looks normal: in place, not swollen or leaking or anything. And the engine, bless its greasy soul, restarts perfectly. There wasn't really much risk of it not, as it was so warm and lubricated, but anytime you shut something down you risk not being able to restart it.

After a few more texts (we text because it's too difficult to talk on the phone in a running airplane) are exchanged the PRM concludes "I don't see that you're going to have any problems."

We text back, "We don't either. We just don't want to go without an ok from the PRM."

Understanding dawns. Now he understands we're not texting for help, we're texting to cover our butts. Butts duly covered, we fly. By the time we're in position on the runway the oil pressure is only a needle width below the green anyway, a situation one of my training manuals even accepts.

We launch and turn on course in good weather. There isn't often a lot of weather in temperatures this low. Almost all the moisture is already frozen. There's no energy to form the weather.

This airplane has two heaters, one that mainly keeps the back warm, and which runs off a heat exchanger with the exhaust gases and one that mainly warms the front, and which burns gasoline. We, obviously are in the front, but we're expecting that with the engines blasting at climb power, we'll start feeling more heat, as we won't be losing our front heat to the back of the plane. But we're feeling colder. We adjust a few knobs and hold our hand in various places before we accept the fact that the combustion heater has shut down. It is designed to run on the ground, but because of reduced airflow it is possible for the plenum to overheat and trip the circuit breaker. A reasonable precaution for a device that is literally on fire inside the fuselage. These heaters are affectionately known as "nose bombs." To prevent cold pilots from resetting the circuit breaker when there is a real problem, the circuit breaker is accessible only from the outside of the airplane.

We both know this. "This two hour flight just got a lot longer." Is that because we turned around, landed back at origin and reset the breaker? No. Is that because we landed halfway at a well-attended airport that was literally under our intended flight path and reset the breaker? No. You know from the post title. It was because two hours seems a lot longer when you are sitting still in subfreezing temperatures. We toughed it out to destination with only the rear heater, definitely not enough to keep us comfortable.

We took turns taking control while the other person reached back for and donned the outer jackets and sweaters set aside earlier. We swapped "what's the coldest you've ever been?" tales. And we laughed at ourselves. The two of us have only had one flight together where we were neither too hot nor too cold: that was the flight with the exploding moon. With passengers, obviously we would have stopped. Without airline tickets booked, perhaps we would have stopped. But whenever you stop you risk not being able to go again. You've seen on this blog how easy it is to be grounded by a stupid thing. And we know how much it costs an hour to run this thing. T land and take off again would add time and money to the cost of the trip. We can take a little discomfort in the name of efficiency. We did have cold weather gear and one heater working. (Notice that the working heater was the simple one: "run outside air past hot exhaust and duct heated air to cabin. Simple is good. We also have simple avionics without those LCD computer screens that seize up at minus five, so we don't need to worry about our radio controls freezing. I guess "liquid" crystal displays require a certain temperature to remain so.

A temperature inversion meant it was even colder on the ground than in flight, and to get there we needed to reduce engine power, drastically reducing the output of our one working heater. Brrrr. But we did it. We reached our destination, found the hangar, and got a ride to the terminal from someone who told us, "you look cold." True that.

see more Funny Graphs

Liquor Replacement and Dollar Coins

I paid for my restaurant meal and the receipt said, printed at the bottom, that 25% went to the Liquor Replacement Fund. I was puzzled by this for a while, and then a barely visible sign on the door of the restaurant gave me a clue and a hypothesis. The sign said that this was a private club and that alcohol would be served only to registered members. My guess is that this is thr remnant of a very old local liquor law, that everyone has worked around instead of changing. I speculate that by putting my name on the list for a table, I was registering as a member of the "club." And that the notice at the bottom of the receipt explained that I wasn't exactly purchasing liquor, but rather being served liquor from my private club's reserves. And that the restaurant wasn't taking a profit but rather saving the money to buy more liquor for the members.

Liquor laws can be funny. Some places in Canada you can't serve alcohol without "a meal" so in those places you can buy the most minimal meals known to man. You can collect ten bucks from a bunch of people to buy a few cases of beer, but if you then put them in the fridge with a can on top and ask people to contribute a few coins towards the next case for every beer they drink, you'll get in trouble for selling beer without a licence. At least some places. The laws can be quaint.

When I say "a few coins," I mean more money than I might if I were talking about American coins. Canada doesn't mint one or two dollar bills. We used to, years ago, but now we have one and two dollar coins instead. So when I'm working with money, looking to pay for a cup of coffee or expecting change from something, it's natural for me to go for the coin purse not the billfold for amounts under five dollars. When I first get back to Canada I'm momentarily surprised by getting a handful of coins as change from a ten for a small purchase.

The US does have one dollar coins. I got several once as change from a stamp machine. And they have two dollar bills. I decided to use them. I went to a bank in Texas with a twenty dollar bill and asked for ten ones and five twos. The teller managed to scavenge seven ones from her own and another teller's drawer, but denied having any twos in the whole bank. Well so much for that plan. I took my metal ones, and the rest in paper ones. I can get more coins from post office stamp machines.

Using the US dollar coins isn't a problem with people. The reaction is usually one of slight positive surprise and "hey cool" scrutiny of my proffered dollar. No one has refused a coin or asked me to give them a banknote instead, but I get the idea there are a few people who have never seen one. I read that when Canada introduced the loonie, our one dollar coin, they made sure to mint tonnes of the things to overwhelm the "hey cool" response that would cause people to keep the first few they met as a souvenir. Perhaps the reverse effect helped to cement the switch: people hoarded their last few dollar bills as souvenirs, hastening their withdrawal from circulation.

I can see a reason why the dollar coins might be unpopular in the US. You can't use them in vending machines. A newspaper cost a dollar. The box says "Use Any Coin Combination - Do Not Use Pennies." What the box means is "use any combination of quarters, dimes and nickels." The dollar coin shown doesn't fit in the slot.

Because the denominations of commonly circulating US coins hasn't changed in over a hundred years, but prices have, vending machines compensate in other ways. Many US vending machines accept banknotes. You unfold any bent corners and line up the picture of the president on the bill with the picture on the slot. The machine feeds in the bill, whirrrs it back and forth a couple of times and spits out your chocolate bar and a pile of quarters. If the machine doesn't take bills, there will often be a change machine nearby. There are change machines in Canada, but not as commonly, and of course they spit loonies.

Economic Blogging Cutbacks

My pilot readers all know this, but the fact that Patrick Smith dedicated a second column to it made me aware that the general public doesn't know it, and according to Smith's feedback, is scarcely able to believe it.

To summarize the article at the link above, airlines always and only hire pilots to be probationary junior first officers, and, assuming they pass the probationary period and every subsequent requalifying sim session, they move up slowly from there to higher levels of pay and responsibility. If layoffs occur, they occur in seniority number order, so it doesn't matter how skilled you are, how well you brownnose, or how much everyone loves you, the last hired is the first let go. If you find another airline to hire you, you start again as a junior first officer, even if you were a senior captain in your last job. The captain you fly with may acknowledge your experience in considering your input into command decisions, but you can still have a 35 year captain from a failed company sitting on the right of a tyro captain at an expanding one and right seat's pay and responsibility are commensurate with the hire date at the new company, and utterly unrelated to his previous experience.

At the low end of the aviation scale there are deviations from this. I, for example, was hired as a "direct entry captain" at a very small airline because they had expanded very rapidly and didn't have sufficient qualification inside their ranks to promote new captains. I have also been kept on at an aviation job in a time of layoffs over someone who was hired a week before me. I think it was that I had regular customers who asked for me, and thus was bringing in business. You had better believe that week would have made the difference between job and no job for me in an airline environment. I've seen an airline interview book that recommends that when an airline is conducting interviews in several cities, to travel to the one where they are interviewing first, so as to get an earlier job offer and thus a few seniority numbers higher than if you were hired in your own city. It matters that much.

I see the seniority system in action now as friends are losing their jobs or being demoted based on seniority. After achieving the required seniority, a pilot goes through rigorous training, screening and testing and gets promoted to captain. The economy goes down and everyone (in a case I know of, literally everyone with a lower seniority number than him) below him is laid off. He is no less skilled than he was yesterday, no less intelligent. But he is no longer a captain. he is now the lowliest first officer in the company. With commensurate pay (could mean his salary is halved), control over schedule and risk to his job.

I feel the seniority system even in my job. It's not a union company, but it will almost certainly work this way. There's fairly high pilot turnover because of the stress of being away from home close to 200 nights a year and for stretches of a month or more at a time, so if we have a big drop in flying, I won't be the first to go. And that makes me a little reluctant to move on to another company, where I would be. Had I been hired by one of my targets in the last couple of years, I'd be out of work right now.

As it is, I'm a little bit out of work. Despite a recent assurance by my chief pilot that my schedule would be unaffected, my scheduled April flying has been cancelled, and it now looks as if I may not be back at work until June. I'll weather it without starving or being thrown out on the street, and I'll have lots of free time, but if I have to suffer, you have to suffer, so I'm going to cut back to blogging two or three times a week. Yep, sorry, even your daily Aviatrix fix is hit by the decline in the international economy.

But Aviatrix, blogging is free! Oh come on, when did the economy ever make any sense? Everyone else uses the economy as an excuse to give you less, why can't I? I'll be off taking advantage of my free time, and not tied to my phone and instant availability.

If anyone needs some seasonal flying for the spring, maybe firewatch, drop me a line. I am happy to agree not to blog about your operation, if need be. Or hey, while I'm asking for work: Air Canada Jazz, please call. I dig Dash-8s. You have my number.

Preemptive Fire Suppression

Someone just sent me this link to a story with pictures about what happened to a United Airlines Boeing 767 that had just been refurbished with an all new interior and passenger entertainment system. It was sitting in the maintenance hangar in Chicago, almost ready to be released back to the line, when the hangar fire suppression system activated. It was the third erroneous activation of the system in as many weeks.

Now a hangar full of airplanes needs some serious firefighting capability. An airplane pulled in off the line with a problem may have thousands of pounds of jet fuel inside it, and a fire could kill dozens of workers. So this is not a sprinkler like the one in your office. This is an automatic deluge of thousand p.s.i. water cannons, blowing through eleven side windows and destroying the new interior, and the entertainment system. The list of resulting maintenance issues at the bottom of the page shows that the cockpit was also drenched, with radios and numerous avionics destroyed, including multiple computer display screens. Everything will need to be removed and cleaned, and a lot replaced, and likely the airplane will suffer from irritating avionics problems for years to come.

Word is that the fire system contract went to the lowest bidder.

It Started With Telemarketers

Canada recently instituted a nationwide do-not-call list for telemarketers. Apparently the US Congress recommended such a thing fifteen years ago, but the final decision was to have individual telemarketers maintain their own do-not-call lists. That is fairly stupid, because there are so many companies that you'd never get on all the lists before one company folded and reemerged as another, quite possibly using its old do-not-call list as its new list of hot prospects.

Canada's new do-not-call list is equally stupid. There's a website you can go to in order to register your number(s) as do-not-call and any Canadian telemarketing company or foreign company making calls on behalf of a Canadian corporation is supposed to check their list against the registered do not call numbers and not call them. They can be fined $1500 for calling me anyway, so it sounds like something with teeth, but it disregards the fact the telemarketing is a scummy industry, and it's implemented in a stupid way.

Instead of being required to submit their call lists to be checked and pruned against a master list, the companies are required to buy the master list. That's right, telemarketing companies can buy a list of every Canadian who has asked not to be called by telemarketers. And the way the system works, the larger the company, the more they have to pay for the list. So of course what has happened is that little tiny companies open for the sole purpose of buying the list for cheap, and then selling it offshore where they can call me with impunity.

I got a call today, one of those machines calling. It told me that a friend had entered my name at the Bay or Zellers and that I had won a trip to Costa Rica. Now the Bay and Zellers are Canadian companies, and my friends are smart enough not to enter me in dubious contests, so I knew this was not above board. I pressed 1 to talk to a customer service representative. He had an impenetrable accent, so I couldn't understand his name, nor the name of the company calling when I asked for it. I think he may have made it deliberately unintelligible because when I asked him to spell it, he said for more information he would have to transfer me. Transferring is good, because the higher up the chain of command you get, the more of a nuisance you are able to be. In order to transfer me he wanted to know my name. I told him I wasn't giving him my name because he called me and therefore the onus was on him. He said he had to have my name to transfer me, so I told him sarcastically it was Jane Smith. He either didn't or chose not to recognize that as a default generic name and accepted it, but then wanted to know if I had more than $5000 in credit card debt. I told him I didn't give out that kind of information, just to transfer me please. He tried a few more times to get me to tell him. I told him the answer was Mu. He insisted on a yes or a no, and when I made it clear I wasn't giving it out, he hung up on me.

Scumbucket telemarketing company. This sort of thing is bad for my blood pressure or something, I'm sure. The *69 call told me that the call was from 616-980-2643 which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their service provider is named Lucre but the company name is ex-directory. Michigan has do-not-call laws protecting Michigan consumers, but what can I do about it? Global telecommunications is such that every single country in the world would have to be signatory to a global death-to-telemarketers pact before do-not-call registries are of any use whatsoever. I can't screen my calls by number, because I get calls from all over and who knows when some pilot friend is calling from a hotel or an FBO in Grand Rapids telling me they are coming north and can I meet for lunch? And screening by always letting the machine pick up also causes you to miss important calls from people who want to talk to you now or not at all. I could solve this with technology, but it's not just about telemarketing.

While I was still fuming about this, a story came on the radio about a chemical plant in Canada that had been sold to someone in Edmonton who just walked away from the responsibility of the plant when the economy took a nosedive. No payroll no forwarding address no nothing. Because I live in a modern, responsible country, the government stepped in with an emergency order asking the workers to stay at work and make sure that the plant didn't just explode, or pump hazardous chemicals into the environment or become the incubation ground for a new Batman villain, or whatever happens to untended chemical plants. I'm not sure anyone knows. The government then tried to track down the owner of the company and apparently the trail ends in Slovenia.

That's the way the world is these days. I'm horrified to think of what is happening in countries with lesser ability to step in and deal with this kind of situation. A Canadian company could just walk away from responsibility in Zaïre and who is going to be able to do anything or even know? Someone knows, and with today's global communication I'm sure I could find dozens of such cases documented by concerned individuals, but how is anyone to distinguish real should-be-crimes from made-up stuff posted on the loony websites of whacko sky-is-falling nutjobs? And even if the whole world knows, who can prosecute or hold to account a numbered Uzbekistani company with investors listing addresses in Slovenia, Paraguay and Delaware? For countries that have environmental regulations, it would be possible to require, as part of the initial environmental permitting process for new facilities, the posting of a bond sufficient to safely close down production and clean up the area in the event of abandonment or catastrophe, but that would be a large amount, and the savvy investor would just build the facility in a jurisdiction with a more short-sighted desperation for jobs.

Anything that happens in the world affects the whole world these days. The working conditions and pay at your job may be cantilevered by unions and government regulations, but ultimately in the global economy it is dependent on what the most desperate person will accept. And that person can be anywhere in the world. We can't just fix our own countries. We have to fix the whole world to get this to work. How do you fix the whole world? Historically, the spread of law has followed conquering armies. I don't think conquering the world for freedom from telemarketers is the way to go here. More optimistically, manufacturing and environmental standards also spread by economic pressure. The kids who grew up in the Cold War had it good. They knew they'd be wiped out by the Bomb. Me, I can't figure out which worldwide disaster to be concerned about.

The telemarketing part had a happy ending. I called the Bay's customer service and they efficiently transferred me to a customer service rep who knew about the usurpation of the company's name and assured me that their loss prevention department was working with the relevant authorities to stop the telemarketers, who apparently were also fraudsters. I assume they are going to nuke them from orbit, so if you live in Grand Rapids, you should probably go out of town for the weekend. And if you comment on this blog entry, do take into account that the official Posterperson for Readers of Aviatrix's Blog is employed in the telemarketing business, so any comments demonizing all telemarketers will not be taken well.

Texas Health Care

In which Aviatrix is frightened by the medical care industry and the Monsanto Corporation.

I'm waiting for the customers to need me to work, so I'm watching a lot of TV. I know House is available on cable in Canada, but it seems to be on every channel here, so I'm watching it, and I'm growing to like it. And then there are the ads.

Most of them are for prescription drugs or healthcare. Numerous ads are for cancer care centres, knee and hip surgery, and other sorts of medical care. The medical centres look on TV like holiday resorts. I know someone who is self-employed in Canada and has cancer. She is too ill to work so, being self-employed, has no money coming in. Her friends got together and had a fundraiser for her, to keep the rent paid and the groceries bought. I'm glad she doesn't have to pay for medical care. Hers is not as fancy as the resorts on TV in Texas, but I think she is getting good care. It's unsettling seeing the ads, because I take health care for granted. It's like seeing starving children in ads for NGOs doing overseas aid. Something you don't like to think about. I suppose people who live here are inured to the constant medical advertising, and to the fact that they could be wiped out financially by an illness that they recover from physically. A healthy strong young person can recover from terrifyingly traumatic injuries and go back to work, but how do they manage when they recover with usable limbs but crippling debt? Medical costs in the US make buying a car for your teenager look like a petty cash expenditure.

"Levitra does not protect against HIV/AIDS," warns another ad. Who the heck would think boner pills prevented sexually transmitted diseases? I can't fathom the logic.

I buy some cheese at the grocery store. It says on the side that it is "Made with milk from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST." I'm glad of that. Bovine growth hormone isn't approved for use in Canada, so it seems scary and foreign. I'm only exposed to it down here. Right under that declaration is another one. "The FDA has stated that there is no significant difference between milk from rBST-treated and untreated cows. The difference is that my government thinks the increase in production is not worth the risk, while the US government requires even those producers who don't use the hormone to assure the consumer that the government thinks it's okay. Probably only the cows suffer from it, but absent all other evidence, which government am I going to believe, the one that pays for health care or the one for whom private health care constitutes part of the GDP?

There was freezing rain forecast this afternoon, but it didn't happen.

So Mosquito Netting Won't Work, Eh?

I do have some December flying stories to write up and post, but I am still reading and thinking about the US Airways ditching, so they can wait a few days more.

People ask why they couldn't just put screens in front of the engines to keep the birds out. I suppose people are envisioning the sort of things you staple around your eaves to keep the birds from flying in and nesting. One letter to the editor of the New York Times compared the concept to that of cowcatchers. Let's compare. A cow weighs about 500 kg. A locomotive tops out around 80 mph, or 36 m/s. The kinetic energy of a moving object is 1/2 m v², so for the locomotive-cow collision that's 0.5 x 500 x 36 x 36 = 324 kilojoules, if I have my units right. I'm told the A320 is going to be climbing out at about 250 knots (corrected from a conservative or 210) or 128 m/s. A Canada goose weighs in at around 5 kg. Put those two together and we have a kinetic energy of 41 kJ. So the energy that must be dissipated when a slowly climbing airplane hits a single goose hits is about an eighth that of a speeding train hitting a cow. Could a structure be built over engine intakes so as to absorb that energy?

The structure would have to span what is about a two metre diameter across the intake, be strong enough to withstand bird strikes and never itself shed foreign objects into the engine. If you're having trouble believing that eight birds in the air equals one cow on the tracks, type "birdstrike" into Google's picture search for images proving that birds penetrate windshields, radomes and wings. This giant screen would have to have small enough holes not to let birds pass through, yet large enough holes to not impede airflow to the engine. That combination is an impossibility, as anything in front of the engine impedes airflow, so either the engine would have to be bigger or the performance of the airplane less, in order to compensate. I don't have the flow dynamics knowledge to begin to construct equations for this, but LTV Aerospace Corp. figures it's feasible, and here's a 2001 patent for a retractable bird deflector grille. I do know that tiny changes to an airframe, such as an angled piece of metal the size of half a Ritz cracker, can make huge differences in handling and controllability, so that even if such a structure were built, the whole airplane might have to be redesigned around it.

A reporter tried to answer the screens question live on CNN while I was watching, and he first admitted he didn't know, and then speculated that accumulated debris would block airflow into the engines. Not a bad speculation. The screens would have to have some way of preventing ice formation, probably by being electrically heated, so that chunks of ice neither blocked the intake nor fell through the engines. Heating the intake air would decrease engine performance, however, and heating a screen that size and weight would take a lot of power.

A lot of thought has gone into birds damaging engines. A Wall Street Journal article pointed me to the lengthy FAA rules governing the testing of engines against birdstrikes. Here are some excerpts.

All ingestion tests must be conducted with the engine stabilized at no less than 100-percent takeoff power or thrust, for test day ambient conditions prior to the ingestion. In addition, the demonstration of compliance must account for engine operation at sea level takeoff conditions on the hottest day that a minimum engine can achieve maximum rated takeoff thrust or power.

The impact to the front of the engine from the large single bird, the single largest medium bird which can enter the inlet, and the large flocking bird must be evaluated.

Medium bird engine tests shall be conducted so as to simulate a flock encounter, and will use the bird weights and quantities specified in Table 2. When only one bird is specified, that bird will be aimed at the engine core primary flow path; the other critical locations on the engine face area must be addressed, as necessary, by appropriate tests or analysis, or both. When two or more birds are specified in Table 2, the largest of those birds must be aimed at the engine core primary flow path, and a second bird must be aimed at the most critical exposed location on the first stage rotor blades. Any remaining birds must be evenly distributed over the engine face area.

The specs include tables of bird weights and numbers and expected performance that any engine must meet before certification. And it has to be said, because this is the internet and someone else is going to say it if I don't: "chicken cannon." Yes, they actually fire (already dead) poultry at airplane components to test them. And no, it isn't always necessary to thaw the chicken first.

Loonie Advice

Sometimes things people from other countries say make no sense, even in English. I was momentarily baffled by this advice on mending flats, on a bicycle riding website.

If the tire has a large gash in it, simply place a dollar over it as you reinstall the tube. It’ll reinforce the tire at the hole and get you home. Replace the tire ASAP (don’t forget to save the dollar!).

I stared at this for quite a while, trying to figure out how shoving a large metal disk into the tire would help, before I realized that it was an American website and although Americans have dollar coins, their default "dollar" is a piece of paper.

It's a little reminder that despite the similarities and connections between our economies, our dollar is not the US dollar. Not that anyone knows what's going on with either economy. I hope we all have jobs next year.

Secret Ballot

Now that I have my ballot, I have to decide whom to vote for. I haven't given much thought to it yet. The Canadian election was called well into the American election campaign and we vote on October 14th. The whole Canadian election campaign has been in the shadow of the American theatrics. It's hard to pay attention to what's going on in Canada when the ex-P.O.W., the lipstick-wearing moose hunter, and the community organizer who is a bigger celebrity than Paris Hilton are so fun to watch. But I have to look after my own country now.

We don't vote for the Prime Minister in Canada. We vote for our local representative, and then the Governor-General asks the political party that has the most elected representatives to form the government. Their leader therefore becomes the Prime Minister. The runner-up party forms the official opposition. It's as if the US presidential election were determined by who had a Senate majority.

Some Canadians consider their vote for the local candidate to be purely a vote for the leader of that party, while others vote to elect the most suitable representative for their electoral district. I'm in the latter group, so I start to look for information on the actual candidates in my district, known here as a riding.

I have an alphabetical list of the candidates who will be on my ballot. I go to the website for one of them. There's boilerplate from the party, including a sidebar about the number of women in the House of Commons.

"Oh yeah, this is a woman's name," I realize. Candidate gender was nowhere in my considerations about whom to vote for. I pause to consider whether it should be, and I discard the idea. I don't see it as having any relevance. For that matter, she is a different race than me: also irrelevant. I think these things are not as important in Canadian politics as the US media is making them in the current race south of the border. I don't know whether that's the media or the reality. Or perhaps it's just that she's just a local candidate, and it would be a bigger deal for the party leader. We do have one female party leader and have had others, including a Prime Minister. Anyway I'm impressed by this one's accomplishments, and while she doesn't have experience in government, her volunteer work has exposed her to a lot of politics and her experience includes a lot of negotiation and working with a wide variety of people. I think she would be a strong voice for me in parliament.

The next candidate website I visit leads off with the fact that he's married and has kids. It almost makes me giggle. You have one opportunity to make a first impression on me and you've decided to start with the fact that you've managed to get it up more than once? You want me to say yes to you representing my interests in parliament, and you think reporting that a woman said yes to your marriage proposal will influence me? Perhaps he's trying to assure me that he's not gay. That would suggest that he thinks a candidate's sexual orientation should influence my choice. Or is he protesting too much? I concoct a whole secret life for him. I'm reading way too much into this, I know, but he hasn't given me anything else to read. His bio and personal statements give no evidence of any particular skill or experience that argues for his ability to convey my voice to the halls of power. I think he's here as a placeholder for his party, for the people who are going to vote the party name and not the candidate.

If I'm going to invent secret lives for the candidates, perhaps I should consider that as an immigrant, the first one I looked at could really be a deep cover spy and her success here has been aided by other operatives who want to get their spy into the seat of power.

Another candidate has a website with links in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi, Vietnamese and Tagalog. He's inclusive, anyway. Perhaps he's a spy, too. He's a lawyer, so that implies the ability to think, and a set of useful parliamentary skills. He has a lot of political experience and has been an activist his whole life. He could also be an alien masquerading as a human.

I take a closer look at their party platforms. I don't feel I can trust any party to carry through on its promises, but the direction they are claiming to push will at least indicate which sectors of the economy can expect the most pork from them.

I finally choose a candidate who is unlikely to be part of a plot to enslave humanity under alien masters. I print the name on my ballot and seal it inside all the envelopes, one after the other. It's a bit like entering the Readers' Digest Sweepstakes, except that I'll get a government instead of a book.