Beavers, Thunderstorms, Motel Rooms

No one kicks in the door of my sketchy motel room overnight. Company is not sending another crew member today. I'm to stay here and wait for the weather to change. I make a private bet with our office manager that company will sit me here for three nights and then tell me to leave the airplane here and go home. I pay for another night in the motel, and go out for a run. The best place to run in this town is along the river. There's a path there. Most prairie towns have a river, and a similar trail. This one is deluxe, paved and signposted, with pretty little bridges going across to the other side now and again. One of the signs announces the presence of moose and bear and advises me to take appropriate caution. I am less worried about bears and moose than with my sketchy motel. Were the path not populated by numerous joggers, walkers, and cyclists or were it early spring, when cranky, hungry bears emerge from their dens, I might be more concerned. As it is, the greatest threat to my well-being here is probably either rollerbladers with poor directional control, or those long invisible leashes that connect dog walkers to their dogs. I'll pit them one against the other and run to safety.

As I continue on the path, I see signs of beaver: the stumps of obviously beaver-felled trees and the piles of chips the beavers leave behind. I googled "attacked by beaver" while writing this and discovered that a number of people have suffered quite serious beaver bites, but they all seem to have been swimming or boating, not jogging, and they are far less numerous than the results of an "attacked in motel room" search. As far as I can tell, no beaver has ever broken into a motel room to attack a traveller. I am not attacked by a beaver on the jogging path. I don't even see one, but I do see a deer. It does not attack either. It's fat and happy, grazing in a meadow next to the jogging path. It's not so tame as to realize that joggers don't veer off the path, but it doesn't go far. It's in almost exactly the same spot when I come by again on my way back.

The rodeo grounds are several kilometres out of town and there's no public transit, so I don't check it out. The motel has abyssimal internet too, so I can't watch movies or even read text webpages with any reliability. I buy art supplies and make postcards, including the thunderstorm one I mentioned earlier. There's another thunderstorm here in the afternoon, typical prairie weather. I like the METAR that reports +TSRARA: the + means heavy, the TS means thunderstorm, the RA means rain, and presumably the second RA means even more rain. It's not usual to code the same group twice. I can only assume it's an error, but it's funny and true.

The next day they again tell me to stay another night, but just when I think I'm about to collect on the bet, they send the missing crew member out to join me. He arrives after I've gone to bed. He too spends a night in the sketchy motel, and then we depart for somewhere there isn't a rodeo.

Qausuittuq

At the end of the year I usually check on the progress of my New Year's resolutions, and then make new ones. I did make eight resolutions for 2014, but they were all personal, not aviation, and I'm not telling you exactly what they were, so this will be dull, or at least cryptic:

1. Achieved: A+
2. Social - 71% achieved (51% before the middle of April and 10% after the beginning of November): B-
3. Academic - never set measurable goals, even though that was part of the resolution, achieved maybe 20% anyway: F
4. Fun - 58% (25% before the end of March and 25% during December): C-
5. Ha ha ha ... I don't think that one lasted to the end of New Year's Day: Withdrawn
6. Physical - Achieved by the beginning of March. Now EXACTLY back where I started. I still think that's still a pass, because I did achieve it: C
7. Speed - Negative progress: F
8. Martial arts - Did really well until April 6th, then lost momentum, and had to work through both the events I was supposed to be training for - 40%: F

The general theme is that I kept them well until work got busy and then life became entirely sleep, eat, plan, fly, laundry. I think I just have to not make resolutions that involve doing anything not on that list on a recurring basis through the year. For next year I am going to set month-by-month goals that allow for no progress to be made during peak months, and encourage me to pick things up again as my time increases at the end of the season, without feeling defeated.

Qausuittuq means "place where the sun does not rise" but it's on this post because the place that bears that traditional name is usually called Resolute.

The Days I Don't

I'm sitting in a hotel room in British Columbia while an airplane my company wants in Alberta sits on the ramp at the local airport. It's a nice airplane, but some of the equipment that required for dispatch into "known ice" has been removed for weight consideration, so with today's cold weather and convective conditions, it isn't safe or legal to fly it over the mountains. The clouds are too low to go under, too high to go over, and too highly composed of supercooled (liquid below zero) water droplets to go through. And, to be thorough, I should add too extensive to go around. An air mass that has moved across the Pacific Ocean is being forced up and over the BC mountain ranges, producing a lot of precipitation and humidity. It's a very nice hotel room, but it's stressful having my company want me somewhere, and me be unable to go.

I scrutinize each new METAR, each new TAF and each new set of GFAs looking for an opportunity. I set myself a "not after" time: if I left after that time then I would not be able to reach my destination and shut down within my permitted fourteen hours from when I started this vigil. I should just say, "screw it, not happening," but there is always a faint hope of success. And it's miserable weather here, too.

I go for a run in the miserable weather. Too slow, and I can't entirely blame my poor speed on the stumble-making cracked sidewalks, the muddy trail, the cold temperature or the traffic lights and crosswalks I have to navigate on the way to the running trail. I haven't been running enough lately. My body forgets how to do what it hasn't done consistently. I'm always on the road in the summer so I can't enter races to give me the incentive to train hard. Often in the summer there literally are not enough hours in the day for me to get legal rest and work out, too. And in the winter it's so dark in the evening I don't want to run on uneven sidewalks.

I get back to the hotel and before I do anything else I check the weather again. No miraculous path has opened through the mountains.

The glass wall of the shower stall makes up one wall of the bathroom, so I can see though it into the bedroom. It's made of a special adjustable glass, that can switch between transparent and opaque. It's fun to make it clear, and watch TV while I'm in the shower. Too bad there is no switch that will make the weather clear through the mountains.

I call the vigil off for today and go to dinner.

Human Factors

My Human Factors training is not yet up for renewal, but I'm looking at notes on the training materials we used last time. They were aimed at the maintainer, not the pilot.

The main benefit of this is realizing how many shortcuts and errors maintenance personnel make. If I take a shorcut, it works or doesn't that day. If they do, their not-quite-right repair or incompletely inspected part might be in there, waiting to kill me for another 500 hours.

Some of the "good practice" and "bad practice" sample conversations from the videos sound just like ones I hear in the hangar, especially the one on the "Lack of Awareness" item. It could be a recording from folks I know. It's a personality trait of maintainers to be proud of their knowledge and to enjoy catching each other out. 

"I thought the tag was good enough."
"Nope, you have to test an aircraft component."

I'm still not sure whether it was an error that I received the maintenance-specific training, or it was just intended as general training with all the examples coming from another specialty. Helicopter pilots must have to suffer that indignity all the time, attending general courses where the examples are all from fixed wing experience. A person should see his or herself reflected in instructional materials, to make it feel relevant and applicable. That goes for gender, race, job, type of operation, and type of aircraft. Even though we know we're all people, working with equipment, there's something about "that's someone like me doing what I do" that makes us sit up and take note.

 That said, lot of advice is applicable across disciplines and the though required to transpose it forces one to think about it a little more. For example the course recommends the maintainer think, "I am a qualified technician, not an idiot. I know what information I need to have to assess and repair this damage." At least I assume she's meant to think that and not say it out loud to her supervisor. Likewise I am a qualified pilot, not an idiot. I know what information I need to plan and conduct a flight."  But that's not something I ever really need to say. People don't hurry me or demand I fly with inadequate weather information or poor equipment.




Maybe this one is more useful: "Safety nets" for stress are being aware of how stress can impact your work, stepping back and rationally analyzing the problem, rationally determining what to do and then doing it, talking to others, asking others to check your work, taking time off or at least taking short breaks, keeping fit and healthy, and using assertive communication."


Stress can definitely affect my work. It can affect the thoroughness of my preflight, the amount of sleep I get, the way I treat my coworkers and my concentration on the job. I ask others to check my logic and my arithmetic. I have a day off today and I just came back from a 7.5 km run. The badder ass you know you are, the more confidence you have to step up and stand up for what you need for safety.

The best one is the advice to look for negative norms, then openly talk about them and work at changing them. It's also very difficult. Fish don't see the water, and it's hard to persuade people that the thing they do all the time, might even take pride in as a source of efficiency, may be a safety risk.




I'll make it my mission to find a negative norm at work this week.

The Short Bus

When I was working on my commercial licence I met a guy who flew the Screaming Whippet and one of the things I remember him saying about the aircraft was that it had a very complicated electrical system. I was looking forward to meeting this beast, but we were warned in ground school not to pre-read about it in the manual, because there were many options and modifications and that we'd get confused if we did. So it was unveiled on I believe the morning of the second day of class.

It's not so bad. Yeah, it has DC power and three different flavours of AC power, but I can understand the circuitry. There are two 24V lead acid batteries, two 28V starter-generators, and capacity to accept ground power (max 1000A), which can power electrical systems and/or charge the batteries. I've done this enough time that those are pretty standard numbers. The batteries each have their own relay connecting them to the system, then an additional relay connecting the combination, plus the GPU if connected to the battery bus. The battery bus is power distribution central on this airplane. It's located in a junction box behind the left pilot seat, and everything connects to it. Each starter-generator connects to it through a generator relay and a 325A current limiter. The DC battery bus provides power to the left and right essential buses, through 225A current limiters and also to a non-essential bus, through a 150A circuit breaker. The current limiters and circuit breaker are all located in the junction box. Each of those three DC buses described also has a bus tie switch. They are on the circuit breaker panels, under the windows on the left and right sides of the cockpit.

Most of the services are quite predictable, with the left side of the airplane being on the left bus and the right side on the right bus. There are also nine or ten (the tenth is optional) transferable items that can be switched from the left to the right DC bus in the event of a left DC bus failure. They are the turn and bank indicator, the fuel crossflow valve, the valves controlling wing and tail deicing, the windshield heat, the valve controlling left inlet anti-ice, the valve controlling right inlet anti-ice, the flap and gear position indicators, the valves controlling landing gear operation, the solenoid that applies vaccum to open the dump valve and (optionally) the pilot-side DC cockpit instruments. Flaps, nosewheel steering and all exterior lights, including landing lights are on the non-essential bus.

Each essential DC bus has one inverter, and each inverter is connected to 26V AC bus and a 115V AC bus, so four AC buses in total. The L and R 115V buses are connected together through a circuit breaker, as are the two 26V buses, so that with one inverter online, all four buses are powered. Only one inverter can be online at a time. The fuel pressure, oil pressure and some cockpit instruments are on the 26V AC bus. The fuel quantity gauge takes 115V AC. The cockpit edge lighting is powered from the 115V bus, but stepped down to 6V. Other instruments may be on one or the other depending on the airplane, you need to check the CB panels to see.

My brain is full. Remember this two weeks worth of system spam you've been receiving was a three day blitz for me. And I have SOPs and limitations to learn on top of this. I think I'll go jump on the treadmill for an hour. There's too much snow outside to go running, but it's too slushy to go skiing.

Today is Pi Day. You should celebrate by eating pie. You may heat it in an electric, gas or wood-burning, dung-burning or solar powered oven. Or another sort if you have one I didn't think of.

P.S. I got on the scale after jumping off the treadmill. Target weight minus five hundred grams. Booyah! No sugar, no alcohol and get some damned exercise. It works, people. Girl's got legs and she knows how to use 'em. Now to keep it off.

All the Ones

It's 2011-01-01 or 1/1/11 as the Americans write it. New Year, new resolutions. No loopholes. Short and sweet. Ruthlessly and objectively assessable.

In 2011 I will:

• run or cross-country ski five hundred kilometres. Score out of 500, one point per kilometre.
• do strength and flexibility exercises at least three times a week. Score out of 200, one point per workout, minus one for each week without a single one.
• create, back up and maintain a contact information list of people in my life, and I will exchange communications with everyone on it at least once. Out of how ever many end up on the list.
• make a list of twelve things I don't do merely because I am afraid to, and I will do one every month. Out of 100: four points for making the list, one point for each attempt, and up to seven points each for how well I do them.
• make and keep a weekly flight sim date with myself, and I will learn to like it. Out of 100: one point for simming and up to one point per day for doing it well.
• convince City Hall to paint a crosswalk on my street, for people to get to the bus stop. I score a hundred points when the paint is dry.

Engine Fairies

I wake up and enjoy the hotel breakfast. (That's something I get to do for the first few days, before my reaction to do-it-yourself waffles and chilled apple juice subsides to "tolerate" or "endure.") There's a Far Side cartoon mocking dogs for getting excited every meal about "Dog food again!" I don't know how they do it.

Seeing as there is no one else here and no airplane, I can't be asked to work today, so I make sure I have my cellphone with me and go for a run. A fast one, not a long one. I just warm up for a kilometre, run a fast mile and then do a couple of kilometres of warm down. I'd do my whole run in kilometres, but the standards on the 5BX programme are for a mile run. I finish three seconds over today's target time. I should have pushed harder, but I could have pushed harder, so I'll get it next time.

In preparation for the airplane arriving, I sort out my flight bag. That means digging all the sharp and liquid stuff that I like to carry with me while I'm flying out of the suitcase and putting it in the flight bag, while taking all the heavy and fragile stuff that I didn't want to check out of the flight bag and putting it back in the suitcase. Plus I buy some apples to eat while I'm flying, and start an OFP for working out of here.

At dinner time I ask at the desk if anyone from my company or the expected customer's company has checked in. Nope, they aren't here. I walk across the parking lot to Boston Pizza and there is a group of people I have worked with enough to recognize. They didn't know I was here. Neat trick, seeing as I checked in on the strength of the reservation they made for me and are paying for. At first they are all excited that if the pilot is here the airplane must be too, but I have to disappoint them. The airplane is still down south finishing up an engine install. Company sent me here early to be prepared for the most optimistic possible scenario, which of course never happens in aviation. In this case that most optimistic scenario probably would have had to involve magical engine fairies and teleportation.

The customers are just finishing up, but one very kindly stays to chat while I eat my dinner.

Resolution Update

I made some ridiculously optimistic new year's resolutions this year and with five months left in the year, not only have I neglected them, but I until I looked them up just now, I had forgotten what they were. It's time for some revisions.

The running goal proved to be counterproductive, because while I started off well with a few months of distance and a good base, I then tried to go too fast and kept injuring myself, setting myself back. I've been awesome at keeping to the 5BX programme (wow that reads like something else if you don't know it says FIVE B X, for "five basic exercises"), though, and am almost at the level recommended for a thirty-five year old male, with little doubt that I'll achieve it on schedule. (The women's program was suspiciously wimpy, so I stopped doing it when it diverged enough from the men's that I couldn't just incorporate it. Maybe I'll pick it up again later). It's much better to run healthy and uninjured than to run fast, so I'm going to scrap the speed goals and instead just count how many kilometres I run before the end of the year.

The people idea worked because it did establish a habit, so even after I forgot the goal it snapped my out of being a hermit. My list of unique contacts ends in mid-February. I did pretty well up to then, but I guess I have to cross off the names of people for whom e-mail bounced or postal mail was returned as undeliverable. That's sad. I'll try to track some of those lost people down.

Simming daily was a good idea and a habit I just didn't get established. I need to set it up so it gets done like checking my e-mail and doing my 5BX. I'll keep trying with this one.

I laugh at the home project idea. The only projects I've had at home this year have been unpacking, laundry and repacking. I think I'll revise this one to try to start each work rotation with a clean desk, and that means having actually dealt with the items piled on it, not just dumped them in a cardboard box. (Yes, I actually have a pile of increasingly ancient cardboard boxes under my desk, full of the stuff I have dumped there over the years. Some of it may be address changes of my lost friends, too).

New adventures are always great, and really it's adventures and fun with my friends that have prevented home projects, okay that and watching five seasons of Lost in one frenzied binge this winter.

Situps and Catfights

Another day dawns. There is more snow falling. At least it looks like snow to me. Unlike the robots, I'm willing to call it snow without considering too closely whether it might be snow grains or ice prisms. Most of the looks-like- snow-but-isn't stuff happens when it's much colder than this. Except the frogs and locusts: they happen when it's much warmer, and they don't look this much like snow.

Whether we fly or not, I have to go out to the airport, as the FBO plans to haul all the airplanes out of the hangar in order to get at something in the back. This is called a hangar dump. Once my airplane is out, I want to put the wing covers on and plug in the engine heaters.

I check in with the client to let them know I haven't given up and gone home and that I and my airplane are still awaiting their every command. I also request a ride out to the airport sometime this morning at their convenience to make sure their computer equipment is properly kept warm. The project manager says sure, let him know when I want to go out.

My plan is to have breakfast and do my morning exercises and then call for a ride. I go down to the hotel exercise room but there's a problem with the exercise bike so I go back to my room and work out like a captive. Sarah Connor is my hero.

I'm well into a set of situps when the room phone rings. Stop, get up, answer phone. It's the other pilot. He's up now and wants to know what's going on today. I tell him the plan and he wants to come too: you take your entertainment where you can in Lloydminster. I tell him it will be about an hour and go back to my situps. I've done maybe five more and the phone rings again. This time it's the client willing to take me out to the airport. That translates to meaning that now is a good time and later might not be. So that means I'm ready to go to the airport now. At least that's what I tell the client, and I call the other pilot back while putting my clothes on, and tell him we're leaving in five.

We all go out to the airport and into the hangar. There's a cat sitting on top of a Caravan on floats. It's not Margo, it's a different cat. Apparently there's an FBO cat and a hangar cat. Hangar cats are the lesser of two evils in a way. When they jump up on your airplane, or slide down your windshield, they can't help extending their claws a little, so you get little scratches in your paint and perspex. But hangar cats tend to be very very serious about catching and killing mice before they can nest in your upholstery, insulation, or electrical wiring. So you trade a few scratches for not getting hantovirus infections or electrical fires. And also you get soft, furry cats to pet. Or catfights to watch. It turns out that Margo is in the hangar and she and Caravan cat are now both on the floor, locked into a maelstrom of fur and snarling. If human combat were this dramatic and fluid, I'd be enjoying Lost a lot more. Someone walks up to the cat cyclone and it subsides.

Dennis isn't quite ready to tow the airplane out yet, so we tent up the engines and plug in all the cords, setting them up so they won't drag when it's towed out. Then we wander around and look at the other other airplanes. There's a Chieftain bearing the colours and logo of a local sports team. The registration looks really familiar. I think I've flown that airplane, or perhaps worked around it. Or maybe they all just look the same after a while.

We go back to the hotel and that night we watch the Habs win, saved from elimination.

Hotel Hallway Guarantee

I get up and do my 5BX exercises, still really simple to do in half the allotted time, but they say not to skip any levels. Then I have paperwork to do.

Naturally I left some of the information I need for my weekly report in the plane yesterday, so I had to go back out to the airport and get it. I meant to get it while shovelling off the airplane, but didn't. I swear I should have a checklist for getting out of bed in the morning.

• 1. Consciousness -- ENGAGED
• 2. Left leg -- OUT OF COVERS
• 3. Left foot -- ON FLOOR
• Repeat steps 2-3 on RIGHT.
... and so on.

It would have to be Transport Canada approved, of course, which might in the end require me to have an extra leg. By the time it went through the approval process I'd be retired, anyway. Nah, TC isn't really that bad. It's just traditional to pretend they are.

Documents retrieved, it's now paperwork time. I should do this every night, but then it's actually quicker to get the forms out once and do it rapidly all at once. Date, client name, aircraft ident, aircraft type, airport of operations, province of operations, forestry department work order number, hotel name, hotel city, hotel cost, hourly billing, pilot names, pilot base, contact numbers ... I swear I don't even know what all the blanks are for. I don't have to fill all of them out every time; I just have to remember which ones I have to fill out. Occasionally I try to get ahead, but that guarantees that whatever I fill out in advance will be wrong. We'll move to another airport, yank the plane and send in a new one, or send me to a different client. My name will end up legally changed or they'll redo the calendar and skip February. And then I scan the pages and all the receipts, PDFize the result and e-mail them to the boss.

This is much easier than the old days when I had to photocopy and fax all the receipts, often requiring me to either convince hotel staff to copy them or to let me behind the desk to copy them myself. Nowadays the only copying I have to do is a logbook page, because I can't shove the whole logbook in a miniscanner. Usually it's no problem having the front desk make a copy. This time the desk clerk wants 25 cents for the copy. I manage not to roll my eyes, and go back to my room for the quarter. I don't even retaliate by asking for a receipt.

Paperwork complete, I do pilot in hotel room things. Write postcards, read blogs, write e-mail, watch TV, work out some more. All kind of at once. I've completely lost the ability to do one thing at a time. (For example, I'm currently cooking, watching TV, writing this blog entry and reading webcomics. That's right, I'm switching back and forth. I have to switch between this window and the one with my notes in it anyway, so what's another step on the way?)

After the workout I decide I need something out of the vending machine, so I grab my hotel key and my change pouch and walk two rooms down the hall to the vending machine. There is nothing in the machine that I want. I should have figured that in the first place. But you see this is just the set up for the one thing that is guaranteed to happen when you leave a hotel room in your underwear. Okay, it's not underwear exactly: it's a pink Nike workout bra and shorts, but they are shorts that emphasize freedom of movement, not coverage. And everyone who has ever lived in a hotel knows what happens when I put my key in the hotel lock. The red light goes on. The lock does not open.

So now I have to go down two flights of stairs to the lobby and wait at the reception desk while new arrivals are assigned rooms and the clerk reprograms my key.

Yeah, sorry, my day was less exciting than yours. It's also close to minus thirty out there at the end of the day. I guess this is a 'love your office job' post.

Five Basic Exercises

I think it was a reader here who pointed me at 5BX, a set of exercises developed in the 1950s to keep Royal Canadian Air Force pilots fit even when they were confined to barracks in remote locations with inhospitable climates. I'm always looking for new exercises to do in my hotel room, and I like the cachet of something developed especially for Canadian pilots. Blogger Angus Watson has more information:

In the late 1950s a man named Bill Orban created a worldwide fitness phenomenon. He had been asked to build a workout programme for members of the Royal Canadian Air Force, for whom space and kit was limited. His solution was 5BX, or Five Basic Exercises, which required just 11 minutes of exercise every day (12 minutes for the female programme, XBX). If followed correctly, Orban claimed, 5BX could help anyone attain a decent fitness level in six to 10 months, then maintain it.

Though it was designed for pilots, 5BX found far wider favour, particularly among office workers. The 5BX handbook, Physical Fitness, sold 23 million copies in 13 languages. Today it is out of print, but a loyal band still swears by the 5BX ethos.

Bill Orban seems to have been someone truly interested in helping people achieve and maintain fitness, not just some guy told to do something about all those fat pilots. He dedicated his life to the idea, testing everything on real people and as he got older paying attention to the fitness needs of the elderly and disabled as well.

The 5BX programme has fallen into recent disfavour because the hands behind head situps and bouncing toe touches risk back injury, so I'm doing my toe touches very slowly and will substitute more modern abdominal exercises like stomach crunches and bicycles for the advanced situps.

I've been doing the 5BX program since before Christmas. You are told to start at the beginning and work systematically through, doing each level several times and not skipping any, thus so far it's very easy, but does actually does feel like a bit of a workout. I'm reminded of that complicated machine you see in TV ads and inflight magazines that claims you can do a workout in four minutes a day. The machine costs something ludicrous like $12,000, so if you're going to believe a ludicrous claim like that, you might as well believe the one that is free on the internet. Sometimes I do a mile run instead of the in-place running, and when I do that I usually do a fast half mile at the beginning, do my normal run workout and then another fast half mile at the end. It's still no challenge to make the targets at these easy levels.

You'll notice the above quote mentions a women's programme, the XBX with ten exercises. I initially started doing the 5BX just because it was easier to print off: five charts as opposed to a 51-page PDF booklet. Women have very few muscles that men lack, and I doubted Orban or the Air Force was sufficiently interested in the tone of those specialty muscles to develop five sorts of Kegels, so the men's programme suited me fine. I did come back to look at the women's programme though.

The XBX booklet's age highlights the social changes that have taken place in fifty years. It starts with an assurance that "The XBX is designed to firm your muscles-- not to convert you into a muscled woman." Muscled woman? Hello! Does anyone today look at a muscled female athlete like Serena Williams and not think "I want me some of that" in one sense or another? But I wasn't expecting to bulk up doing floor exercises. These are, with some modifications, the five men's exercises plus five more, concentrating mainly on flexibility.

Some of the modifications make a lot of sense. For example while the first level of the men's program calls for what I call "girl pushups" -- pushups from the knees instead of from the feet -- the first level of the women's asks you to start in the girl pushup position, but raise your body by any means possible, the illustration suggesting that you push your butt back over your feet to straighten your arms. As women typically have less upper body strength and the starting level is supposed to be something anyone can do, then that makes sense. But the ambition set for the women is very low. The top level of running in place given for the women is below the one I have already reached in the easiest chart of the men's program.

Does the program reflect lower physical expectations society had of women in the 1950s, and women just accepted them? Or have women changed that much in fifty years while men have stayed the same? Studying the charts I see that while the highest level of expectation for men is at age 18-15, followed by age 25-29, the peak of expectation for women is in girlhood, 15-17 years of age. WTF? Was the woman of 1960 so continually gravid that her physical capabilities declined as soon as she matured?

My intention is to do continue the 5BX plus the extra exercises in the women's program until I stabilize at my maximum level and then add in new and different exercises. Nothing wrong with continuing to try to level up on the 5BX, but doing the same few exercises without change isn't good. There's supposed to be a tougher program called PX90 or something similar, but al I can find online for it requires equipment or expensive videos.

Running Targets

A couple of months ago I ran a 10 km race and although my finishing time was close to what I had predicted, it was nothing like what I used to be able to do. "Eh," I deceived myself. "I'm not training like I did back then. I could have pushed a bit harder. Just need to build up my conditioning." Yeah right. A few weeks later, I ran four hundred metres (a quarter mile), at what for me was flat out lung-bleedingly fast. And then I looked at the stopwatch and did some math. To be fair to me, there was a slight uphill grade, but were I able to sustain that near-sprint pace for ten kilometres (6 1/4 miles) I would finish five minutes behind the thirteen years ago me. I was never awed by my speed back then. If I placed well, I thought I was lucky that the fast people were having an off day, or at another race. And I remember even back then looking at the international 10k race winners' times and realizing that I couldn't run one kilometre at their average 10k pace. And I bet even now that there are people with no particular health problems who can't run a single block at my current 10k pace. Isn't it amazing to have so much variation in one species?

Why am I being so coy about my speed? It's not that I'm ashamed or secretive about my abilities, but that there is so much variation. I recently discovered that a friend had done a 10k and the time she was proud of was a third again longer than the time I was calling slow. So I'll just let us own travel at our own speeds and be proud of our own progress.

I've already taken thirteen seconds off that quarter mile, and have to go out with a GPS to find out what distances I'm running otherwise. I should also check out a library book on some kind of proper training regime, in case alternating running as fast as I can over short distances and as well as I can over long distances while hoping the two converge doesn't represent the latest in athletic science.

And today's simulated approach featured an arrival from the east to follow the 26 DME arc for the NDB/DME RWY 13R into Whitehorse. It's tricky because there's a 15 degree turn at the beacon just 3.3 nm from the threshold so you have to make the turn and track outbound to the missed approach point. I gave myself clear night skies and saw the runway ahead of me as soon as I made the turn. I'll have to do it again with poor weather to practice my outbound ADF tracking.

Happy New Year

I said I'd reveal New Year's resolutions, so I guess I'd better get something resolved before the new year arrives and it's time to enact them. I mostly know what I wish to achieve, and it's not really any different from what most people want to get out of themselves and their lives: physical fitness, good relations with friends and family, career success, life organization, and self-improvement. But wave those five around vaguely and nothing happens for me, though. I have to quantify my goals. New Year's resolutions are not like figure skating. So therefore:

In 2010:

1. I will follow a physical fitness program to maintain strength, flexibility, and endurance, plus I will run a six and a half minute mile and a 45 minute 10k.

2. I will contact someone I know in real life but don't work with or live with every day. That can be an e-mail, a postcard, a phone call or a visit and it has to be a hundred different people over the year.

3. Any day I don't fly IFR in real life, I will fly at least one approach on my flight simulator game, and I won't blog until that's done.

4. Whenever I get home on a break from work I will, in addition to the usual litany of perennial maintenance tasks, assign myself one new project to complete.

5. I will not let this list of responsibilities, nor other lesser pastimes, stand in the way of new adventures.

There, that's a pretty bold list, and I'll probably frequently let myself get away with fulfilling #2 by cc:ing an e-mailed lolcat to seven people on a Friday, and #3 by chugging down the same saved-at-g/s-intercept ILS while waiting for hotel internet to connect. I'm not even sure whether #5 constitutes a get-out-of-one-through-four-free card when I can find a good adventures. But it's probably better than resolving to watch all six seasons of Lost. I may expand on some of these in later blog posts.

Oh and to the person who was so negative about New Year's resolutions in a previous year "because if you want to do a thing you should do it, not wait until the end or beginning of the year," these are all things I already try to do. Only the accountability is added.

Screw Bronze

I got distracted from my own blogging by a stunning and terrifying blog by someone whom I first accused of being nothing like me, but the more I read the more she is like me. I've been barely keeping a day ahead of posting about the North Carolina trip -- ask John, he's the one who has been receiving chapters to censor as little as an hour before the post goes out. It might be a while before I catch up with writing my own adventures. It might be a while before you want to read mine again, after reading Elizabeth's.

Elizabeth McClung is a Canadian, but she refuses to fall into the national characteristic of settling for third place. She survived some very dark childhood chapters, wrote an award-winning novel, excelled as an amateur epeeist, fell prey to a bizarre and inexplicable disabling condition, took up boxing (yes, in that order), went to Japan, and now endeavours to send postcards to everyone who needs them. There's a tiny Flowers for Algernon feel to some entries, as you get to read first hand accounts from an off-the-charts intelligence on what it's like to lose temporal lobe function.

She's also aiming to keep breathing almost twenty-four hours a day. Most people would include that last one in their goals, if prompted, but few people have to work as hard at it as Elizabeth does. Most people would be dead if they had to. She goes at everything about 150% harder than I do, such that when she was told to get an electric wheelchair because she didn't have the physical capacity for a manual one, she got a manual one and started competing in 10 km races. If I pushed as hard as she does I'd be flying the Space Shuttle by now. All the life lessons in the blog can be overwhelming, but it's readable and hilarious (remember the bit about award-winning novelist) and I've also discovered that people who love goth and animé aren't as different from me as I thought, and I can handle that one. Who even knew there was Goth Hello Kitty?

I know if you've been on the net as long as I have you've heard this one before, but Elizabeth is not a little boy named Craig trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. She is a real person, feeling a little cut off from the world because she doesn't get outside much anymore. So here's my Christmas request: Read enough of her blog to get a little feel for her as a person. It doesn't really matter if you read the early entries full of epee fighting and praise for her novel, the newest entries about the Olympic Torch relay and badminton, or something in between: she's the same person throughout. Some of the entries are about dying in horrible pain, but not so many as you might expect from someone who is doing exactly that. If you like her, send her a postcard to say hi, or some stickers, cards or stamps (U.S. or Canadian) that she can use for her project. When she approved my posting her mailing address she insisted that I let you know that she would love to send a postcard to anyone who is lonely or who would just like to have a postcard.

Elizabeth McClung
PO Box 2560
Port Angeles, WA 98362
USA
(Yes it's a US postbox: she lives near the border).

If you're going to forward this in any way, please include a link to one of her blogs so that people can check to make sure postcards are still wanted and she and her partner are not buried in millions of postcards, the way the former home of Craig Shergold is.

I'm going to make this post the beginning of my end-of-year blogging break. I'll put up one more post in the next couple of weeks reviewing the year, and then I'll see you again on New Year's Day.

Honey Mustard Flavour

"Hey," I wrote in the notebook where I write such things, "Do you think I should do a blog entry about sitting in a hotel room for two days eating potato chips?"

It's autumn in the north. You really can't expect much better than low cloud, fog, snow and freezing rain. I wanted to go out for a run, but the visibility was so poor, I was afraid of getting run over. Eventually the fog lifted to about 300 feet so people could see me on the ground, so I ventured out. I didn't want to run down highway 97, the Canada-Alaska Highway, as it has no sidewalk and still a fair amount of traffic, most of it heavy trucks, so I went down a parallel street. The thing is, in a small town on the Alaska Highway there aren't many long streets that aren't the highway. My chosen street ended at works yard, but there was a dirt road going beyond that, so I followed it. For the most part the ground was frozen enough to not be squishy, but then I got to a steep downhill and dug my feet in more. They came up like hooves, encrusted in massive globs of mud that didn't fall off even when I came out at the highway and ran along the pavement for a while. When I got back to the hotel most of the mud was still there. It stuck together better than most things I've deliberately glued together. When I attempted to wash the shoes in the bathtub I discovered some quite large rocks as part of the glop.

This really is the muddiest town I've ever been in. Even if you assiduously avoid walking in the snowmobile tracks, and try to stick to the sidewalks, you can't avoid the mud. There's mud on the sidewalks and one the streets, and sidewalks keep ending so you're dumped off into the mud. It's caked on everyone's vehicles and clothes.

I go shopping, replace the frozen vegetables and stock up on Hallowe'en candy (yay Rockets!) and potato chips. And I eat them. For two days.

My World

Why my life is good.

Today I:

• slept in until I woke up
• opened the curtains and looked out at a panorama of downtown Yellowknife, Frame Lake and lots of rocks and trees
• enjoyed a bike ride around town in absolutely perfect weather
• ate a huge mouthwatering slab of grilled arctic char
• went for a scenic flight over the untracked wilderness northwest of town
• watched the sunset
• landed back at Yellowknife and went to bed, again without setting an alarm clock

Okay, not every day is like this, but anyone, anywhere, anytime who catches my whining about not achieving my intended career goals should kick my butt.

Big Bike, Little Bike

All right, I'm back online. Chronicles of my life as a pod person, and the subsequent battles with Microsoft Vista will follow in their proper sequence.

In the hotel parking lot, I noticed a flatbed trailer containing an unusual vehicle. I'd call it a bicycle, but a bicycle has two wheels and this has instead four really big wheels. It also has about thirty bicycle seats, thirty sets of pedals, and thirty sets of handlebars all arranged in three columns on a frame with the approximate footprint of a schoolbus. And not the short bus, either. It's would be a really, really, big bicycle, if the word "bicycle" didn't imply two wheels. I noted that it was cool, and assumed that it was headed up to some 4th of July celebration in Alaska. (Happy 4th, by the way, to my U.S.A. readers). Everything else on this highway is headed to Alaska.

The next day I crossed the parking lot on my way back from supper just in time to see the big bike pulling out of the parking lot. Not the big bike on the trailer pulled by the truck: but the big bike being ridden by about thirty people all pedalling like crazy. It was fast!

"Hey!" I asked of people at a table with banners on it. "Who rides on the bike?"

"Teams," she said. "Corporate groups, other organizations. Other people too."

That didn't quite answer my question, so I cut to the heart of the matter, "Can I ride on it?"

And the answer is yes -- for a donation --. The whole escapade is a fundraiser for the Heart & Stroke Foundation. I know someone who has had a heart attack and someone else who has had a stroke in the last few weeks, so in their names I ponied up the cash and joined in the fun. "What team are you on?" they wanted to know. A team captain was within earshot worrying that many of the people from her organization who said they would come hadn't turned up, so I said I was on her team, and they were happy to have the ringer. The fire rescue squad was supposed to be there too, but their captain had told them the wrong date, so the whole bike was ladies, with the middle row of seats unoccupied. Those of us who were there got on and were issued silly noisemakers and then we cranked up the onboard tunes and rode off. The seats were big wide fat-bottomed girl seats, so I had to sit forward on the forward point of the seat in order to pedal properly. The drive train was quite complicated. I think the woman in front of me wasn't putting power into the same chain as I was, but the woman two ahead was. She kept putting her feet up and stopping pedalling, possibly because I was pedalling more furiously than she wanted to keep up with. Hey, if I'm going to ride the big bike, I'm going to ride the hell out of it. Even with only two-thirds of the seats filled and not everyone as enthusiastic about pedalling as I was, we got going pretty quickly. We were riding along the Alaska Highway south service road.

We rode past the laundromat-sex shop-buffalo meat sales outlet and up the hill past the grocery store. It wasn't a very steep hill, but it was a heavy bicycle. We all waved and cheered and shook our noisemakers at everyone we saw. And of course because it's a small town, everyone who isn't a ringer like me knows everyone else they see in the pickup trucks or walking on the sidewalk as we go by. We ride past the hunting store, past the Northern Store (which the locals still call The Bay) and past one of the two Chinese restaurants. When we get to the street opposite the community centre, the one that had been constructed incorrectly and had the roof fall in last year right after a kids hockey tournament, we turned right, crossed the Alaska highway and turned right again down the north service road. Now this was a downhill road, not so steep you notice walking, but enough that when you get a mammoth steel-framed "bicycle" loaded with twenty women, some of whom are still pedalling like they paid to do this, it goes pretty fast. There are stop signs at some of the sidestreets, but our driver is just looking up at anyone coming and I guess staring them down, because we barrel on through. "Hang on everyone," he says. "We're going around the corner pretty fast."

The corner is a cross street with a Yield sign to merge with or cross the Alaska Highway. There's one of those bannered Wide Load trucks coming. And we peel around the corner at about 40 km/h screaming like we're on a roller coaster, across the highway and back into the hotel parking lot. Best fifteen minutes on a bicycle I ever spent, and I've bicycled a lot of places, including down the slope of a volcano, across national borders and mountain ranges, and through some spectacular national parks.

Also, some of the participants were from a hospital team, so I checked if they could clear up my mystery. I wasn't too specific, mentioning only that there was a "particular type of garbage" on the street above the hospital. They immediately recognized the reference, but didn't have a clear answer for me. They said it was right down the street from the high school, where free condoms were available. The hospital gives out free condoms, too, but they said they weren't the same kind. They were not aware of orgies occurring on the street behind the hospital.

Back on the subject of bicycles, the people at Montague sent me an e-mail recently about their Paratrooper bike. It's a full-sized bicycle that uses standard bicycle components and is rugged enough to be dropped out of an airplane on a parachute and for a big soldier to ride around in the desert carrying an additional 35 kilograms of gear. And it folds up to barely bigger than airline checked luggage. The unfolding process is apparently a 30-second, no-tools operation. The price is about $500, too, which is a reasonable price for a rugged bike that doesn't fold.

In the picture on the website you see it folded on the seat of a car and it looks smaller than my much- travelled suitcase. But then you realize that the "car" it is in is one of those giant military jeep things, and the soldier is probably a gigantic guy too. Air Canada and United Airlines both restrict standard checked luggage using a weird formula where they add the three dimensions.

Max size for checked luggage: Width + Length + Height = 62"

Paratrooper bike dimensions: L36" + H28" + W12" = 76"

That's too bad, by a mere fourteen inches. I wonder if I removed the pedals, seat and handlebars if that would squeeze it down enough. Possibly. But you don't want to be so close to the borderline that you risk getting slapped with a $175 oversized baggage fee. Also you'd have to put it in an opaque bag, so that the airline doesn't automatically charge the bicycle fee. After all, if you can drop it out of an airplane, you can entrust it to baggage handlers, right? You can do a bit more disassembly and get everything inside regulation suitcases, and then of course not tell them anything is a bicycle, to avoid the $100 bicycle surcharge.

I only have one checked bag now. It is tempting to travel with a second one, and have a bicycle with me. My wandering radius would expand from ten or so kilometres to thirty or forty. I'm thinking about it. Does it mean I'd have to sell one of my existing and beloved bicycles?

Dating Game

I sleep until nine, drink some water and then sleep again until eleven. Before you get too jealous, sitting there checking your morning e-mail already dressed and at work at eight a.m., let me remind you that it's my job to sleep as much as I can here. Sometime between one p.m. and nine p.m. the customer may call me to fly and I will have to be alert, safe and enthusiastic for the next eight hours.

I turn on my phone and check my messages. My coworker took off at 9:40, so I probably won't be needed until after three. I make a list of all the things I have to and want to do, with "blog" deliberately placed at the very bottom of the page.

• eat
• OFPs [operational flight plans]
• duty times
• send completed duty time spreadsheet to chief pilot
• expenses
• paysheet
• groceries
• rearrange stuff
• blog

Food: Boston Pizza again. It's in the parking lot. I forgot to bring a sudoku or crossword puzzle or something, but one o'clock isn't a busy time and the service is quick. Food is meh. It's going to be a long month if I'm tired of the Boston Pizza menu already, because for walking distance there isn't a lot else. At least there's something here. Sometimes we have to get rides to get food at all. It's awkward having to feel like you're asking for a favour from the customer in order to fulfill your basic physiological needs.

Operational flight plans: I make sure all the fields are filled in properly for the flights I already did. If Transport Canada audits the company and I have filled in the departure time and ETA but not my predicted groundspeed then someone probably gets fined. Make sure the departure and arrival airports are legible and that I got the date right. I'm never quite sure what date to put on a form if I took off at 7 pm and landed at 11:30 pm on the 3rd, because considering that I'm in Alberta, that's 01Z to 0530Z on the 4th. Especially if the next day I fly from two to five pm, making that 20Z to 23Z, also on the 4th. So do I have two OFPs both dated the fourth? Or do I put it all on one OFP and then switch to a second one dated on the fifth if I do another flight at 8 pm on what in local time would still be the fourth?

I have to claim that the first flight was on the 3rd when I do my electronic duty times sheet, because if I put both flights on the line for the fourth, the software interprets it as an illegal duty day. Oddly it doesn't complain about what would be an illegally short rest period between days had I really started at 01 on the 3rd. I can even tell it I reported for duty on the fourth an hour before I went off duty on the 2nd. It looks like keeping track of resetting my duty is my own responsibility. As it always has been. The spreadsheet just lines it up in neat columns so I can e-mail it to my chief pilot who can import it into a bigger spreadsheet and show it to Transport Canada if they ask.

I tend to put the local engine start date at the beginning of the journey log entry, even if the uptime, the first time that actually gets recorded in this particular journey log, is after midnight zulu, or even after midnight local. That's probably wrong, but I find it very weird to go to bed, sleep for eight hours, including some that are dark outside and then write the same date in the journey log for the next flight. There's probably a rule somewhere, but not in the CARs. Transport Canada doesn't seem to mind if the times are local or zulu, as long as they are tracked accurately. When I fly an airplane that has local times in the journey log and I cross a time zone boundary, I record the landing time before changing my watch. I could also record it in the new local time and put an asterisk next to it, then explain the discrepancy with something like "Flight was 4.2h. T/O in EST, landing in AST."

Now that I think about it while not being in the middle of the night, the most correct solution is probably to start a new OFP for each duty day and write on it the range of zulu dates that it covers. The same solution may have to do for the journey log too. I could just put the date the flight starts, which is definitely and legally the moment I start the engines, but for the case when midnight zulu occurs between engine start and takeoff that is ambiguous, because when takeoff is 00:13, only I know whether I started the engines at 2359Z or 0001Z. All this matters little more to the operation than the colour of the sunset, but you are subscribed to Aviatrix's stream of consciousness (Aviatrix extreme of consciousness?) so there it is.

I am just finishing up my paysheet when my coworker texts to say that she has landed. I call the customer to ask if what the plan is. He says I'll be needed in a little over anhour, so I run across the highway to get some groceries. On the way back I stop to take a picture of a trailer full of freezers advertising "N.L. COD." Enterprising individual catering to the homesick Newfoundlanders in the oilfields. Just then my telephone rings. I check my watch. It hasn't been an hour. I hurry towards the hotel while answering, but it's the customer calling to say that I won't be flying today after all. That's very considerate of him. Often I just wait around for hours not knowing if I'll be called to fly or not.

I skip "rearrange stuff" on my list, because I'm not really sure anymore what I wanted rearranged, and I blog. Now I'm done blogging so I guess I'll make a list for tomorrow and go for a workout.

Another glamorous day in the life of a commercial pilot.

Making Money

I sleep through to 9:30. It's hard to sleep much longer because I'm used to getting up early, and the room is hot. I checked already and the thermostat is turned right down. The curtains are fairly dark, but not blackout curtains and the sun has been shining in since an hour or two after I went to sleep. I call Greyhound to see if they have my suitcase yet and discover that they were open from six a.m. to nine a.m. and are now closed. They only open with the bus schedule, and this being the middle of nowhere the bus comes at inconvenient times. They will next be open from one to five p.m.

In the meantime I catch up on e-mail, read about AF447's last messages, and do a workout, yes the aforementioned Buns of Steel, but it's more like Buns of Aluminum because there's something wrong with the DVD. It skipped most of the warm up, freezes for a while mid lunge, skips a few chunks of the cardio and almost all of the abdominal exercises. I decide it counts anyway. The phone rings just as I'm finishing and it's the customer. He wants me to be ready to fly for 2:30 p.m. No problem. He also agrees to drive me down to Greyhound to get my suitcase.

I go into the station and ask eagerly if they have a suitcase with a broken handle sent over from WestJet. As I ask I think I can see my suitcase behind her, and she says 'yes' before I'm quite finished the question. It's mine. It's back. Oh happy reunion with my stuff! As I lift the case into the bed of the truck it's clear that if anyone stole anything out of it, they replaced what they took with rocks, because it's as heavy as ever. And when I get it back to the hotel room I see that everything is where I left it. My hat! My flashlight! My clipboard! My clean underwear that hasn't been washed in a hotel sink! I now have an hour to get ready for the flight, eat a meal (I've really given up on naming the meals I eat), and meet downstairs. The food I have time for is a Tim Horton's "Chili Deal", and I substitute a bagel for the included doughnut. A bagel is a good inflight snack. As I move furniture around in the room to find a good place to set my suitcase I notice that the pilot light is on in the fireplace. (Yes, the hotel room has a fireplace. Swanky, eh?) But just that pilot light is putting out a lot of heat. I an feel it against the glass. I figure out how to turn it off and then go flying.

The plane is already on the ground and fuelled when we arrive. We have a quick meeting. The plan is to go to Grande Prairie first thing tomorrow morning. We'll meet at 6 a.m. That will not give me enough sleep to reset my duty day, but I will be a passenger on the flight and can get eight consecutive hours of rest after we arrive in Grande Prairie.

I go fly. It's a hot day and there is are a lot of convective currents. No thunderstorms, just a lot of bumpiness. A few whacks of moderate turbulence that throw things from the copilot seat onto the floor, but mostly just the discomfort of being whacked around. I reduce power so I don't go over the mission speed parameters while holding altitude in the updrafts. There are more small aircraft flying around below, calling 126.7 to advise of flights between small destinations in northern Alberta and northeastern BC. I ask one of the pilots if they are doing charter, but he says it's just for fun. He sounds envious when he realizes, "you're making money!" Heh, yeah, I guess I am. Cool.

I touch down about 9:30 and taxi in. A C172 is parked on the apron I was using. It's the same one I heard yesterday, CXD. The apron is separated from the taxiway by a strip of dirt, with a bit of a dip. There is one level gap where the pavement is good, and one can taxi through, but the Cessna is blocking that gap. I size up the dirt strip. You have to be careful when taxiing through any kind of trench, because the propellers can strike the ground. I choose a place where the dip is not as great and I am confident it won't be low enough to hit the props. I swing around, secure the airplane for the night and head back. There's a note under my door starting off with, "More Sleep!" The meet is amended to 7:30 tomorrow morning, because we can't get into the hangar until 8:30 anyway.

There's a twenty-four hour grocery store next to the hotel. I don't really feel like food though. I guess the snacks I ate during the flight are to be my final meal for the night.

Pushing It

Nothing says welcome back to work like a six and a half hour flight. The sun went down a hours ago and I'm almost at destination. The ATIS winds on the ground are fourteen gusting twenty, not a big deal, but we're making slow progress towards the airport. There's a calculator on the GPS that tells me the wind strength and direction. It's not perfect, because it makes assumptions about the true air speed from the groundspeed on various headings, but it's okay. It tells me we have 40 knots of wind exactly on the nose. How does the wind know to blow exactly from where we want to go?

There's a layer of cloud forming underneath us. I hope it's not low enough to be fog. The night runway isn't the same as the one that has the working ILS at the moment, so an instrument approach would have to be a circling. I don't want to be doing a night circling approach in low visibility.

The clouds are less in the area of the airport and at least the headwind means I can go straight in and get a rapid descent. The reported wind is forty degrees off the runway, and that's about right. I'm down and on and taxiing quickly, because for arcane reasons, probably not related to witchcraft, the customer needs the airplane perfectly stationary by 0415Z. I set the brakes with about thirty seconds to spare. And we thought we were going to be early.

I broke my New Year's resolution, the one about not eating bad chocolate, with a Reese's Peanut Butter cup at 2:30 in the morning. Don't let this be encouragement to anyone else to shirk on their resolutions. I did do over a hundred and fifty push ups this morning. (Spread out over five separate sets, not all at once). Rowr!