Ouch

I finally updated my personal logbook, sitting down with a small stack of journey logs, a calculator and a sunset/sunrise time database, to make entries for about two and a half years worth of flights. I've never got that far behind before. I don't advise it. There's a muscle in my middle finger that hurts like I've been flipping people off all day. It's oddly nostalgic being reminded of events of that day as I copy the flight details into my logbook.

Mitigate This

I'm definitely out of practice at my job. Oh I can fly the airplane fine, but I almost injured my wrist falling out of the hotel bed in the dark. I forgot that I don't get to sleep in the same bed twice in a row, and there isn't a ledge here. That has to happen periodically: flight crew injuring themselves badly enough while on the road that company has to send someone else out to fly the airplane home. In this case I remember in time while falling to just crash onto the floor and take it on my shoulder rather than try to catch my whole weight on my hand. Crazy reflex that probably works better in species with less complex wrists, and that run on four legs.

Dress, hotel breakfast, check out: I manage to remember the usual routine. Then it turns out company doesn't want us to take the airplane home. They want us to take it to another province. Okay, we can do that. Our current charts include those for the next province over. We can buy clean underwear there, too. After a week on the road we come home wearing Wal-Mart underwear and thrift store t-shirts, carrying our essential toiletries in now-battered plastic bags. I note once I get home that I have bruises on my legs. I always have bruises on my legs after road trips and I'd assumed before that it was from using my legs as a backstop and rebound point as I hurl my suitcase in and out of cabs, airplane and hotel room luggage racks. But there has been no suitcase this week. I have a new theory.

It's hotel room chairs. For some weird reason, few hotels spend any effort making their chairs match their desks in any way, so sometimes I have to grab a couple of pillows for the chair in order to work at a computer on the desk, and sometimes I can't jam my legs underneath the desk while sitting in the provided chair. Sometimes there's no desk at all and I move the TV to one side to do my paperwork on top of the piece of furniture that supports the TV. These hotel chairs usually have armrests, too, so my theory is that I bash my legs getting in and out of hotel chairs in awkward configurations with hotel desks. I don't bash them hard enough to make myself limp around yelling "ow" or to remember doing it, but just hard enough to come home with a week's worth of bruises.

I will also take this opportunity to complain about hotel lamps. This one has been festering for a while. In your own home you know which switches control what, but in a hotel ... you know what, this is going to take more time than I've got right now. It will have to fester a little longer. I will tell you about hotel lamps another time.

Fragile

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

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

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

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

Hey, Swimsuits!

I wasn't going to post anything today, so if women in swimsuits and inappropriate-for-the-beach shoes is not your thing, wait until tomorrow and you're not missing anything. If you like to look at pictures of scantily-clad women, then click over here and check out the parade of women with absolutely no bruises or scars. Can you imagine if your job depended on being that flawless? I worry about being in the field scheduled to work and getting diarrhea or coming down with a fever. With a little plastic surgery my belly button could look that perfect. (Ladies, when choosing an obstetrician, ask them to demonstrate their knot-tying skills. I mean honestly how does page three there get that neat perfect dimple in the middle of her belly, when my mother's obstetrician was evidently practising his sheepshank?) But forget belly button envy, I am never going to spend a day with no bruises or scratches anywhere on my body as revealed by a swimsuit.

They're pretty to look at though. I've got a suit kind of like page seven, plus the sense not to wear orange eyeshadow, so I'm way ahead. I'm also glad my job doesn't involve being photographed at the angle shown in number twelve. If you're tall and naturally skinny, go ahead and be a fashion model for a few years. You can use the money to pay for flight school which will allow you to wear more comfortable shoes for your job. You'll still get groped at work, but at least you won't be wearing a bathing suit that's too small and mess of faux pearls.

No actual nudity or toplessness there, but if your workplace is worried about that sort of thing, they might not like swimsuit models either.

Trial by Rain

Morning comes as early as ever and I'm checked out and ready to go in the breakfast room. We are going back to Slave Lake to try to get that work done today before the clouds roll in. Asked me what I want 'to go' for lunch, I specify a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat. I get a funny look for having the dietary preferences of an eight year old, but it won't go bad in the sun, and I can eat it with one hand while flying.

I fax off a request for "photo blocks," clearance into airspace about 12,500' where we must work under IFR or "controlled VFR," and by the time I call to get my transit code for Calgary airspace, they have an approval for me. We launch and soon reach the work area. It takes the controller two tries to get me to do a full readback on the CVFR clearance. Oh, I get it, CVFR is VFR in normally IFR airspace, so I have to do IFR-style readbacks. This can mess a girl up. I'm on oxygen up at 16,000' flying in really straight lines overhead Slave Lake and environs. This s so much easier at altitude. I even get the autopilot to fly one line, to make sure I know how it works, but the operator says he wants it hand-flown. I think the autopilot could be a very good tool to reduce my fatigue and thus increase overall quality, but I've never had one of those jobs where "you push the button and you take the money," as a reader once explained it to me. I get to fly the airplane.

The pattern we are flying is centred on the town of Slave Lake, and I still have the ADF tuned to the Slave Lake NDB -- I haven't used it since I left -- so every time I turn around it points back to town. It's a fine, clear day here and there is no smoke, mist or other obscuring phenomena interfering with good photos. From the air you see the somewhat peanut-shaped body of water that is Lesser Slave Lake, and the town of Slave Lake right at its eastern tip. We're too high to be usefully monitoring the Slave Lake mandatory frequency, but I listen to 126.7 most of the time just to hear who is coming and going across the north. It's a normal day of medevacs, helicopters and other working aviators. We finish all the north-south lines on either side of the Athabaska River and move onto the east-west ones. These were the ones assigned to the other airplane, but they are still in Edmonton getting the camera fixed, so we'll get a head start on their work. We fly until I have fifty minutes of fuel remaining and then head down for landing.

It's funny doing aerial work this high, right above the airport of landing. It's right there but it's going to take me 15-20 minutes to get there, even at a higher rate of descent than I would use for passengers. I check with him that he's used to rapid descents and he is. The wind direction favours runway 10, landing over the lake, so I'm going to make a big descending spiral along the north shore of the lake and back onto final. I start down at about 1500 fpm. I feel my sinuses squeak a little from the air pressure equalization, and there's a little pressure in my temples, but I wiggle my jaw and let the air leak through my head. Pilot Eustachian tubes must be more flexible than the general public's. At the same time I'm trying to reduce power in stages so as not to shock cool them. Passing about 7000' there is a mighty whack of turbulence which I realize is from the southeast winds whipping over the cliffs along the north shore of the lake and being forced up. It was quite a brutal hit. I'm just turning over the shore, but there will be more turbulence everywhere below. And now my camera operator says some terrifying words. "Oh my NECK!"

I've never had someone hurt on board my aircraft. Although I wasn't doing anything unreasonable, and we knew to expect turbulence descending into high winds, was there something I could have done to alleviate this? "Did you hit your head?" I ask. He says, no, it wasn't the turbulence that did it, his neck just started hurting, a spasm like when you wake up and have slept the wrong way. There's nothing I can do but fly well and put the airplane on the ground, so I do, land, short backtrack and roll off at the taxiway. His neck pain has gone away as quickly as it came. As I'm rolling to the pumps I'm mentally running along the streets of Slave Lake looking for a chiropractor or massage clinic. I hope he's not being macho about this, and the feeling of thinking someone has been hurt in the airplane you were flying is like having a pet or child left in your care be sick. Even if it had nothing to do with you, you feel responsible and want to fix it. But he's moving around normally, talking on the telephone, so perhaps it was just a transient ouch, coincident with the turbulence.

Now there's another issue, a perfectly ordinary one, a fuel transfer. There's a big tractor-trailer fuel truck parked in front of the pumps. I narrate what the operator probably already knows, as it's a common enough occurrence. "This can take thirty minutes or more before the pumps are available to us. I'll find out more as soon as I can." I park where I am physically next in line for the pumps, but the truck can still get out, stick chocks around the nosewheel and go do the pee, flight following, close with flight services, file new flight plan routine. They say fifteen minutes for fuel. I eat half of my peanut butter sandwich and then start just the left engine to pull around for the pumps. As soon as I start to apply power to taxi forward I know exactly what I have done. Damnit! Shut down, jump out, remove chocks, restart cranky hot left engine and this time do pull up to the pumps, close enough for the hose to reach but at an angle that will allow me to scootch out without hitting the small helicopter that is also waiting now.

I shut down there and while they are fuelling, chat to the helicopter folks. "You see my stupid?" They didn't, and say they would have come over and pulled the chock for me had they seen. They are doing photo work too. Very low level work with a special camera that hinges down off one of the skids. When my airplane is fuelled I check the caps, and start that left engine again to pull off the pumps, getting a thumbs up from the helicopter guys to indicate that I have correctly judged my wingtip clearance as I pull past. I shut down again and add some oil before the operator comes back aboard and we blast off to do some more work.

There's a split now in the fuel flow. It's a digital fuel flow meter, visible to the operator in the back. I acknowledge that I'm running the left engine richer but while the temperature gauges wouldn't be against it, that engine is noticeably rougher if I lean any more. I feel frustrated that my engine handling, on what is after all a familair engine, is not up to scratch, but I'd rather burn more fuel than an engine. We get a few long east-west lines done, and then a cloud shield that has been slowly moving from the west all day reaches the western end of our lines. We don't do partial lines, so that ends the work here and the operator wants to go land southwest of here, to have the best chance of staging for our next day's work. "Whitecourt," he says. I call the controller and request clearance out of controlled airspace for landing at Whitecourt. She thought we were landing at Slave Lake. So did I. It's a keep you on your toes sort of operation. She gives me a descent and I pick up Whitecourt weather on the way. It's 6000' broken, raining, with 6 sm vis. That's to be expected, given that we're flying towards the system that just put us out of work here.

The operator doesn't like that. Can we go somewhere else? Sure. I suggest Edmonton. We can see from the shape of the cloud that Edmonton doesn't have the rain yet. He wants to go further west than Edmonton, something southwest of Whitecourt? I'm running a map of Alberta in my head and there's not a lot out there. All I can think of is Grande Cache, which I point out that they built because there wasn't anything there , and we don't want to be stuck in the mountains if the weather is bad and they want to go back east tomorrow. Whitecourt it is. I've never been there, but he has.

The controller clears me down to 6000', which seems odd to me, because we should be in uncontrolled airspace out here by now, but whatever, it's nice to have someone looking out for us. Through 7000' it gets ridiculous bumpy again, so we tell her we're staying up until we get closer. She clears me for an approach into Whitecourt, at which point I realize that she thinks we're IFR. I would have liked to accept the IFR approach, into an unfamiliar airport in worsening weather, but I'm not sure that's legal given that we're actually on a CVFR flight plan. I let her know that, having another of what is going to be a very common confused controller conversation on the topic, and then am released VFR into Whitecourt. There's a NOTAM I don't have, rats, I didn't explicitly ask for it with the the weather and should have. There's a forest fire area inside their control zone. I end up having to stay high over the NOTAMed area than doing a left 270 to intercept final, and then I go to turn on the windshield wipers and darnit, this airplane doesn't have any. I bitch about that, as the operator helps me find the airport. He says "We only fly on nice days!" Point taken. This is crummy weather, but it's perfectly safe VFR visibility and this is the worst he normally flies in. I land and taxi to the pumps.

The weather really is miserable here, it actually got colder as we descended westbound into the front, the wind hasn't let up and it's raining big time. I huddle in the airplane and make my postflight calls from the cockpit. The briefer who takes the call is in Edmonton, so as I close my flight plan I add, "The weather is nasty and it's heading your way." She doesn't hear that and asks me to repeat, so I admit it was just irrelevant pilot whining. I whine some more to a helicopter pilot who is part of the forest fire fighting efforts nearby. Once I'm fuelled--gotta love fuel service, it's actually been a while since I fuelled my own airplane in nasty weather--I taxi to parking and put everything away for the night. Walking back across the apron I'm hailed by the pilot, putting blade covers on his helicopter. He asks me if I've called a taxi yet. I haven't. "Call two please, I need one in about half an hour."

In the terminal there are no taxi company numbers or cards by the payphone, but there's a phone book, one of the northern kind that has twenty or so different small communities all in one book. I leaf through the cab section finding "Sparky's" with a Whitecourt phone number. He can be there in ten minutes, and then can go back for the other guy. I don't think it's a two-cab town.

In fact it's not a fully one-cab town. The vehicle arrives has a spiderweb-cracked windshield, no seatbelts and an inoperative right side sliding door. It's the sketchiest cab I've ever been in, and recall that I've been to Cambodia. The driver looks like one of the Yukon prospectors who didn't strike gold. He appears sober, so we ride into town and send him back for helicopter guy, whose name I forgot to ask, so I give the company name from the side of the helicopter.

We're at the Super-8, across the street from Boston Pizza. Ahh good times, old times. You know, you can be nostalgic for anything. I'll bet there are Cambodians my age who manage to have moments of nostalgia for the days that they woke up at five a.m. to try and grow rice under conditions that rice doesn't grow. I alert the operator that I am going to order my "high-maintenance pizza" and he wants to know what that is. "Are you sure you want to hear it twice?" He does. It's a small Rustic Italian, whole wheat crust, double sauce, no cheese, add pineapple, and extra sauce on the side for dipping, please. He rolls his eyes, but the waitress accepts it cheerfully.

It's seven p.m. and we're discussing the next day's plans. He'd like to be over the mountains and working in the Vancouver area at 9:30 a.m. I do napkin math. So take off at nine from an airport near there, maybe Abbotsford, at nine, so have to land Abbotsford at 8:30, assuming unfavourable winds leave here at 5:30, so get to the airport at 5:00 a.m. so allowing for taxi and hotel stupidity, a 4:00 a.m. wake-up call, which means I have to be in bed by eight, the restaurant isn't too busy, so we should be done in time for that. Yup I can do it.

"You can go to bed at eight, just like that?"

"That's my job." I could go to sleep right now, but I'm going to eat my pizza first. You may have noticed that I missed a step in my math. Neither of us did, at that point.

I say I'll have my leftover half peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, and he suggests that I can have leftovers too. That's before he watches me inhale the pizza. I was going to have a dessert too, but have to get to bed for eight.

It's absolutely pouring now. I'm glad I through that big coat in the plane with me. It seemed pretty silly on a 20+ degree day leaving home, but now it's perfect. This is the company coat (logo covered over with a generic patch) that I snared on my first day at Victory Airways, electing to take one size too big rather than wait an uncertain period for someone to get me one the right size. Pilot decision-making at its finest. The hood keeps me dry.

I go straight to bed and encourage sleep by running gently through the alphabet picturing an animal for each letter of the alphabet as it curls up and goes to sleep. Somewhere around giraffe I realize the error in my napkin-based planning, but I will fix it in the morning. I never got past giraffe. Think about it for a while before you scroll down for the horrifying truth. In what position would a giraffe sleep? Standing up? There's no way the head would balance up there. Standing with the head drooping down and lying on the ground? Lying on its side with the head and neck stretched way out where another animal might step on it? Curled up like a cat? I somehow always had sleeping gorillas, gerbils, goats and geckos. This is the first time I've had to contemplate nap time for the poor giraffe.

Sleep is very very important to me, and I won't compromise my duty rest for anything. I know how quickly a sleep debt can build up and how severely it can impact my behaviour. I'll forever wonder if the giraffe would like to get much more sleep, but just can't get comfortable. More on sleep postures and sleep behaviour here.

Illogical Hope

I'm still holding out faint hope for the employer that never called back. The first aviation job I ever got was offered to me after the "expect a call by" date. Sometimes it takes longer than an employer anticipates to make a decision. Maybe I'm not their first choice, but they don't want to tell me to foad yet, because the first choice candidates might go to Air Canada before they get on there. I left a polite "could you please let me know if all the successful candidates have been notified" message on the chief pilot's voicemail, and I'm a little surprised that they didn't at least e-mail, because they seemed to be more respectful than that.

I get home from grocery shopping and there's a phone message. Oooh, lovely phone message. I press the button. It's from a charity that wants to come and pick up used clothing, furniture and small appliance donations. Hey, disabled people, if I get that job you can have bags of it, as I move across the country again. I realize what I've been doing wrong though. I bought a little electric grinder, for grinding spices, because they taste so much better fresh, and I decided I wouldn't open it until I got the job and moved to the new town. That's not how superstition works! I have to open the box, throw the packaging away, and then I will get the job and have to pack it up and get cinnamon or cumin all over my towels. I take it out and use it.

I found this story (many of you have probably already seen it on Bruce Schneier's blog) interesting twice. First, there's the idea that the logic of "If P then Q; P. therefore Q" or "If P then Q; Not Q. Therefore not P," is difficult. I really didn't know that most people found it difficult to follow.

When I was in university there was a third year philosophy course that math majors took for an easy arts credit. (I never grasped the concept of paying for useless courses, so I didn't take it, but I trust the accounts of my friends). It was trivial logic problems. All you had to do was memorize the names of the different types of actual logic and logical fallacies and it was an easy A. You didn't even have to attend the classes. I guess I hang out with logical people. Perhaps I should have followed the logic that if they could get As without trying, there must be other people who were getting the marks at the other end of the scale, but then we also laughed at the kinesiology students whose hardest course was a special version of first year physics that allowed them to understand skeletal structure and musculature in terms of basic Newtonian physics of levers, mass and energy.

I imagine most of my readers will also find that type of logic simple, because the logical elite hang out with me. but I'm fascinated that even those of you who would fail the "if someone is going to Boston he takes a plane" card-flipping test nevertheless have no trouble with the exact same logic in the "has to eat vegetables to get dessert" card test. And I'm now mature enough to realize that people have different skills, and if I hurt my abductor hallucis (which I think I may have) I'd be better off consulting a kin grad than a mathematician.

In case you're wondering, there's no connection between my waiting for an employer to respond and taking a plane to Boston, eating dessert, hurting my foot, or minding my logical Ps and Qs. They're just the top things on my pile.

Actual Quotes from Company Manuals

My all time favourite advice from a company manual is from a chapter that after explaining how to tear out the electrical wiring to make snares to catch rabbits, notes that you will get sick if you eat nothing but rabbits for a week. I've mentioned that one before, but I have a few more gems to share with you.

"Pilots must use their best judgment in dealing with life threatening situations."

Those were from the section on dealing with hijackers. I WISH I had the lack of scruples to quote you the hijack bomb threat instructions because they are hilarious. I am now convinced that airline pilots affect the solemn, noble "I'm sorry I can't tell you that for security reasons" demeanour on this subject because they would be embarrassed to admit the ridiculous advice their company gives them to deal with a whacko with a gun to their head. You might be better off to read the hijacker the manual and hope he keels over laughing.

"In the event of a forced landing, if time permits, it would be advisable to anticipate possible injuries (especially head trauma and broken ankles) to one or both pilots and have an evacuation plan."

So after you've run all the checklists, you turn to the pilot in the other seat and say, "In the four minutes before we hit the ground, I'd like to make a pact with you that if one of us is conscious and capable of locomotion while the other isn't that we'll drag each other's asses out of the burning plane, okay?" Or does it go more like "Anticipating head trauma and broken ankles, lets skip movie night on Tuesday, k?" Maybe someone with more CRM experience can give me a heads up on how that conversation goes.

Elsewhere I'm advised that in the event of complete loss of pitot-static information, I should fly pitch and power. That's easy to say, but in IMC it would be extremely difficult. It's not something a person gets a lot of opportunity to practice.

Fake It 'til You Make It

Two of us are at breakfast, with one guy late, but it's his birthday so we cut him a break when he wanders down sleepy just as we're ready to go. Once at the hangar I open all the under-wing panels on the right wing, collecting all the screws in a can, then go back to ask for another task. The AME who doesn't know me tells me to inspect the cabling visible through the ports. I reject that task, "I think you should do the inspection. I don't have any experience inspecting the insides of my airplane." That probably sounds stupidly squeamish. It's a cable. A four-year-old child could probably look at it and determine whether it was frayed, corroded, chafing, jammed or sabotaged, versus intact and functional, but surely they have some grunt work for me.

He shrugs and tells me to replace the pneumatic air filter, telling me it's installed under that panel there on top of the nacelle. The replacement part is on the bench and the only tricky part is that I should note which way the airflow arrow points on the installed one, and put the new one in the same way around. People dumber than me and with far less personal concern about the safety of the aircraft work as apprentices under the supervision of an AME every day. Many of them on my airplane. How much more complicated is this going to be than LEGO? I find the right kind of screwdriver and remove the panel, revealing a part with an arrow marked on it, differing from the replacement part only in colour. This one is kind of silverish, while the replacement is gold-toned. It has a bulge in the middle, about the size of an elongated softball, and then tapers down at each end to a ten-centimetre connecting tube. I can't see how the connector attaches to the line in the airplane, because the connection is covered at each end by a thick but flexible cuff, extending beyond my view through the panel in both directions. It's also held in place with screw clamps and numerous zip-ties. They look like the regular zip-ties that you can get at the hardware store, but I'm told they are special airplane-grade zip-ties.

This may or may not be true. You can never believe anything an AME tells you. It's part of their training, perhaps, that they keep up an incessant stream of bullshit just to see how much they can get a pilot to believe. At first I thought they did this entirely for their own amusement, because how hilarious would it be when one AME fixes a problem then tells a pilot her fuel cap was stuck because the cap had become desynchronized from the propeller governor, and then a month later she walks into another shop and asks for the synchronizing spray, because her fuel cap is stuck? But now I think they do it as protection from pilots who have a little bit of knowledge and try to tell the maintainers what is wrong. Pilots are very good at sounding authoritative and knowledgeable about things we have the faintest clue about, because that's our job: to navigate a complex machine through extremely complex and only partially forecast environmental conditions while assuring everyone involved that we know exactly what we're doing. So the maintainers stack the deck against us, and then they can tell our knowledge from our bluffs. Which is why I report snags by stating exactly what I observed. Not "the bulb is burned out" but "the light is not illuminated when the switch is selected on."

I draw an arrow on the nacelle, under where the panel will cover it, to indicate the direction of the air filter arrow, then I cut all the zipties and try to figure out how to get this part out. Typically the jobs you give unskilled labour are the ones that require very little knowledge, but are uncomfortable, tedious or annoying. So I am expecting this connector to work on the principle of pain and annoyance. I wiggle the whole thing in the direction of the more enveloping flexible cuff, in the hopes that the smaller one will slip back and reveal whatever it is at the end that I have to undo. The edges of the sheet metal around the opening in the nacelle appear to be the most likely source of pain. "So," I ask, "Do they sharpen the edges of the aluminum at the factory, or is that something you have to do yourself?" That gets a laugh and an expression of solidarity. I think I have identified the primary danger here. I keep wiggling the air filter and eventually the rubber cuff just slips off one end and that end is loose. There is no connecting snap. It doesn't screw in. The flexible sleeves themselves form the connection between the filter and the line it is inserted in. It's not high pressure, and it's just air, so that makes sense. I wiggle the other end out and ready the replacement, taking the rubber caps off the end and entering today's date in the space provided on the part. It's not too hard to wiggle it back into the same space, and I get the various clamps and zip-ties into place without too much damage to my forearms. I leave the panel open for inspection and move to the other side.

This one has a different screw-clamp to zip-tie ratio, but is basically the same. The arrow is pointing the same way if you think of it as "to the right" but the opposite way if you think of that as "toward the wingtip." I wasn't expecting that. I mark the arrow direction on the airplane again and then notice that the date marked on the installed air filter is only three months in the past. I ask if I should leave it, and he says yes.

My next task is removal and replacement of the brake pads on the left main. I've done this one before. It's easy to loosen the bolts to release the metal plates with the pads on them, then I have to pry the old brake pads off and get the new ones to jam in properly. I reassemble the brake, but there is now a hydraulic leak evident. They suspect that the o-ring has been cut? I don't get a clear answer from them as to whether this is on account of some error on my part, which means I suspect it is. If something goes wrong completely unrelated to what the pilot is doing, the AMEs typically pretend to give her hell for it. But I suspect they aren't chewing me out for this because it really is something I did, but I did it under their supervision so it's their fault. I know about that. If the FO makes an error, it is the captain who takes the blame.

We go for lunch, and when we return it's still leaking, so they add o-rings to the parts order. I take the other one apart more carefully. The brake pads are held against the plate by friction around tiny posts, and one of the AMEs shows me how to mushroom the posts when the pads fit too loosely. If it wiggles when it's in place, it's too loose. I have to hammer the post with a spike to spread it out a bit. He laughs at me for my tentative hammering. The pad wiggles, still wiggles, I keep hammering on it, and then I manage to spread it too much. I'm honestly not trying to get them to send me away. Now we need another brake rivet. The guys are looking around the hangar for this small, common part and then we all laugh as we remember that this is a helicopter repair hangar. Helicopters don't have brakes. (Cue everyone telling me the exceptions, in the comments). The helicopters that normally inhabit this hangar on don't have retractable landing gear, either, so we're also missing a hydraulic cart. The professional manages to fix the brake plate and we get that reassembled.

My next task--you'd really think they'd find something disgusting and foolproof for me now--is to replace the left side alternate air cable. The cable runs from a push-pull knob on the cockpit control panel out to the door in the engine that I can open up to admit combustion air, should the primary air intake become blocked. I have never had to use this for the safety of the flight, only ever tested it, or opened it when it was on an emergency checklist, but blocked air intake has never given me grief. Nevertheless it has to function for the airplane to be flyable. It works, but there is wear in the cable. Following vague instructions, I go into the cockpit and under the dashboard with a flashlight. I identify the cable that comes out from behind the left alternate air knob and start to follow it. It goes under a panel, so I remove that panel, which requires me to remove the scuff-plate for the pilot's feet, which involves crawling under the dashboard and removing the carpet in the cockpit, which is filthy. I pull out the seats, and get to work. After a geologic era or so or so of cramped awkward frustration with small spaces, cut hands, and stripped screws, I ask, "Don't you guys start to hate airplanes?" They're enjoying my misery, not so much just to see me suffer, but because they're seeing that I'm appreciating the difficulty of the work they do.

This is actually a little bit fun for me because there is pride in accomplishment and the sparkly feeling of new brain connections being formed as I solve a problem I haven't been exposed to before, and learn new things. I realize now that AMEs aren't robots programmed with the instructions on how to fix airplanes. They have the meta-knowledge of how to work out how to fix them. That's why my instructions aren't "open panel X and remove cable Y" but "look around and figure out where cable Y goes, and how to remove it." The experienced guys of course have a better idea than I do of where the cable is going to go and how it will be attached, but they can be just as surprised. I've exposed all of its treacherous path through the airframe and we'll pull it through tomorrow.

We leave the hangar at 7 p.m. and go back to the hotel to shower and have supper, then do a Wal-Mart run for shop towels. I also get a dirt cheap sweatshirt (made in Cambodia!) to get grubby in and an equally disposable t-shirt with a sassy slogan. It's marked as my size so I didn't try it on, but it turns out to be too small, which may be suited to my mission tomorrow morning to persuade someone to lend us a hydraulic cart. Clothing has no influence on aircraft cabling, but is there anything a woman in a tight t-shirt can't borrow from a hangar full of men?

Breakfast will be at seven tomorrow.

Smoke and Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fly In, Fall Off

There was a notice in the terminal window, next to the airside gate, about a fly-in breakfast. Today. The mission specialist (the one who helped with my jelly bean game) and I decide to attend, although we'll be driving, because our airplane isn't here. Here's the airport, so you can see the water landing area. You can see it's two or three times as wide as the paved one, which is already about six times the wingspan of the typical floatplane.

Not being members of the club, we don't know which is the right hangar, but we go to the one that has trucks parked out front early on a Sunday morning, and we are right. Inside there are tables and a few grills turning out bacon, eggs and pancakes. The hangar doors are open onto the apron, and people are really and truly flying in, and taxiing up to park outside the hangar. Most of them are "landing on the grass" type airplanes.

Pancake production is the bottleneck in the operation. There's lots of bacon and eggs. A woman is running a large grill on which she appears to be tending a single pancake. I try to offer assistance without denigrating her multi-tasking skills, and it turns out that the grill isn't working properly. This is the only hot spot on the griddle and it is barely enough to toast the pancake. I admit to her that I had suspected she was such a perfectionist that she had to focus on one pancake alone, and we laugh at that. Bacon dude is retasked to help with the pancakes, and I am honoured to be served the "single perfect pancake" from the recalcitrant grill.

Another drive-in participant has brought a newborn lamb in diapers. A ewe she was tending for a neighbour had triplets and rejected the third lamb, so she is bottle-feeding it. The diapers were just to keep the car clean on the way over. We all pat the lamb and admire its cute fuzziness while making comments about how it's too small to make a meal for everyone. It stumbles around inside a portable enclosure outside the hangar, and drinks lamb nursing formula out of a bottle.

I meet a couple there who run a catering business and he tells me the secret of the grocery store across the street from my hotel. The other grocery store in town has a good produce manager who sometimes rejects shipments if the produce is not up to his standards. When that is the case, the delivery companies take the shipment to "my" grocery store and sell them at a discount. So I know where I should be buying my groceries. I wonder if they have good jelly beans, too.

After breakfast I spent an hour or so doing paperwork, then go out to be a tourist. The town is at 'Mile 0' of the Alaska Highway, so a lot of Americans come through here every year on their Alaskan pilgrimage, and the area is set up to take advantage of that tourism business. At the tourism info kiosk I learn that Pouce Coupé rhymes with Moose Loopy. The university student working at the kiosk from there, and she thinks Pouce Coupé is actually a corruption of something in Cree, and not a commemoration of someone's injury.

Speaking of injuries, after I'd walked around town and looked at the Alaska Highway Museum, the pioneer village and the mile zero marker I stopped to play at a playground. Dawson Creek may be in BC, but it is an honourary Yukon town, because in the same spirit where the airport manager in Watson Lake let us play in an abandoned control tower, Dawson Creek has iron playground equipment with moving parts and sharp gravel underneath. Kids who grow up here will learn that blood is red and that actions have consequences. I fell off a spinny thing that spun in an unexpected direction and landing on the gravel made a hole in my elbow. My blood is still red. It leaked for a couple of hours, then finally stopped. (It wasn't a grievous wound: I'm just not very good at making scabs). I write this up weeks later, and checking out the elbow I see that, damnit, it has left a scar. Permanent consequences. But it's not like I ever worried about the smoothness of my elbows.

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.

Enlightenment

It's night and the sun has set, but I keep thinking I see a red glow in the distant sky. My peripheral vision catches it and I look up and then I don't see it anymore. Is the the city lights on low cloud? Westjet flights going into land with really bright anticollision lights? An afterimage on my retinas from the dashboard screen I'm staring at? It's not the moon showing through clouds, because it's close to a new moon, so it wouldn't have risen yet, and it wouldn't be that bright.

It could be distant lightning, but it's teasing me, as it's never quite visible when I'm looking that way.

There was a forecast for 30 percent probability of thunderstorms at 04 Zulu, but the sky was still clear at sunset. Now it's dark, so I can't see if anything is building. I call flight services and ask them if there is any forecast precipitation or obscuration below ten thousand in the next three hours. I've discovered that not everyone knows you can do that: ask the briefer to interpret the TAF for you instead of just reading it. If he read it, I could either filter it through my brain as it came, discarding everything that wasn't what I was interested in, or I could write it all down and then interpret the parts I wanted. But that takes up more air time and this is simpler for me. Let the briefer throw out anything irrelevant to me before I hear it. And the briefers aren't robots. If there's a hazardous condition unrelated to the information I've asked for, they'll make sure I know about it.

The thunderstorms are still forecast, but now at 05Z, just after the time I expect to be landing. And they aren't calling for fog tomorrow morning, either. There's no burst of static coinciding with the tiny flashes, so if they are thunderstorms they are quite far away.

I land, taxi in, and shut down. Finally I see the lightning, for of course it is lightning, not out of the corner of my eye. It must be getting closer, because it's more noticeable now, even among the airport lights, but it's still far enough away that I have no concerns refuelling. I park and chock for the night. Driving back in the truck I watch out the window as sheets of lightning advance in a front slowly across the prairie. I'm tucked into bed by the time the storm hits, but it bangs on the window so hard I could believe there was someone out there asking to come in.

I admit it: I originally put the electrical tag on this post purely because of the cheering I've had lately from fans of electrical posts. I was going to put a quick quip here about comparing popup CBs to CBs popping, but I googled for the rating on those CBs. A current of 50,000 A and up to a billion volts is too impressive to laugh at. Lightning is dangerous stuff. I think because I can see it from so far away, and because to an aircraft in flight other components of a thunderstorm are more dangerous, I might not be scared enough by lightning. It's more dangerous than a whole wing locker full of daisy-chained extension cords. Or a day before yesterday's painfully biting insect, which I have been advised was probably a flying ant. Still red. Still itches. I think it's getting better, though.

Both at Once

I take off from a small airport underneath the overlying "inverted wedding cake" of a large control zone. I call for and am given clearance to climb into the control zone. The GPS claims it's class B, but Canada doesn't have class B airspace below 12,500', so I know it's class C. I don't consider that to be an error in the database, though, more of a translation. An American company provides the database to overwhelmingly American clients, and Canadian class C rules match US class B rules, so it's simplest for all concerned to just tell them it's class B. Likely the Canadian controllers will even understand if someone with a November-registered callsign requests clearance "into Bravo." They'd probably respond with "Cleared as requested," and sidestep the whole issue of it being "Class Cee" here.

I depart controlled airspace to the east. As the controller clears me on route, he tells me to keep the code for when I return. I'm working back and forth below the 9500' shelf of the outlying control zone, when I realize I may be pretty close to the next layer down. I check the GPS and see that according to my trails, I have nicked the controlled airspace a couple of times without contact. And I'm not an anonymous 1200 squawk: the controller knows just who I am.

I'd 'fess up anyway, so as I approach the zone again I retune him on the radio. He's having a personal conversation with another pilot about I can't remember what. It bodes well, though. It shows that he's not busy, not stressed and in a good mood. I make contact and admit "I think I've clipped the corner of your airspace a couple of times. I'm calling to beg your forgiveness and ask permission to do it again." He laughs on the radio and grants my request. Phew.

And yikes, yesterday's insect bite has raised a huge red itchy welt, twice the diameter of a tooney. That couldn't have been a wasp.

They're Okay!

I'm doing my preflight, except I can't check oil because the dipstick is too hot to touch, and if I used gloves it wouldn't give a very good reading anyway. I ask my coworker instead, and she says the oil should be fine. I watch the fueller and then check the fuel tank caps. One of them is loose, not because he didn't secure and latch it, but as the aggregate result of its being opened and closed a number of times. Not many people realize that that one is an adjustable cap. It's a rubber plug designed to fit a few different sized tanks. When you pull up on the catch, that releases the form inside that makes the rubber seal firm and round against the inside of the filler neck. Spin the catch one way and the closed size of the plug increases. Spin it the other way and it decreases. Turning the catch a little bit is a normal part of operating the catch, so by coincidence it has been loosened over the last fortnight of fuelling. I spin the catch to embiggify the plug, reseat it in the filler neck and snap the cap closed. The mechanism expands. It fits securely now.

The fueller points out that some fuel is leaking from the tank onto the ramp. I check it: it's just thermal expansion forcing some of the fuel out through the vent again. There's also a little puddle of fuel in the well around the closed cap. I don't complain about having my tanks completely full. It's the only way to really know that I have the fuel I expect on board. Gauges don't tell the difference between full and sorta full. If the fuel level in a wide, flat tank measuring one metre by two metres is one centimetre below capacity that's 20 litres short--about 15 minutes of holding fuel for that engine. Yikes! I secure the metal cover over the fuel cap and repeat my inspection for all the fuel tanks. I also check that the total fuel load matches my expectations based on my colleague's flight time. It does, almost to the litre. If too much fuel went in it could be an aircraft problem. If not enough went in, the fueller might have skipped a tank. I've had that happen. I had it happen almost every day at one FBO, but we're at a good one, now.

The fueller says he doesn't know if anyone was hurt yesterday or what kind of airplane it was. He heard that it had just taken off, and turned and the wind caught it. I don't know if he is also a pilot, but it wasn't windy yesterday, and one you're airborne the wind doesn't knock you over. An abrupt change in wind could cause an airplane to lose lift, but windshear seems unlikely, too. The fueller also mentioned that he heard it was a November-registered aircraft, which is relevant mainly because their National Transportation Safety Board investigates accidents involving US aircraft, even elsewhere in the world. Perhaps it will turn up on their site, even if only as a notation that the Canadian TSB is investigating. As I write this I find a news article (with a picture) about the crash. It is being reported as a power loss, and both occupants suffered only minor injuries. It's significant that just 100 metres from the runway the bush around here is so thick that it took a helicopter to find and direct the police and ambulance workers to the site. It's a relief to hear that they are okay. Too bad about the Pacer.

I start up. (Come on cranky engine, I know you're hot, you can do it). I crack the throttle open a bit and then when the engine catches leave the mixture in the idle cutoff position for a moment, and very very slowly enrich it, and not all the way to full rich either, so I don't flood it. The engine RPM comes up, oil pressure, oil temperature and cylinder head pressure all in the green already, so I start the second engine. Avionics on, computer power on, ground fan on. In less than a week we've gone from needing heating to needing cooling.

Ready for taxi, we take runway 21. It's hotter today and climb performance is noticeably affected by the heat. I'm climbing at blue line (Vy and Vyse are the same on this model) and making less than 500 fpm through 3000'. We are full of fuel and equipment. That's the drawback to taking every drop you can.

As I'm leaving the area, the FSS comes on with a SIGMET for a large area of thunderstorms, relative to Germansen Landing. I have heard of it, but don't know where it is on a map of this province, so I call Edmonton Radio and ask for the lat-long coordinates of the area boundary. It's mostly north of where we are working, and currently the closest part of the line is a degree and a half of longitude west of us. That's about 50 miles this far north. Degrees of longitude get smaller and smaller with increasing latitude, but a degree of latitude is always 60 nm. I don't think those thunderstorms will bother us, but there's a lot of vertical build up here. By the time we reach the work area, fifty miles north of the airport, the weather is unsuitable for the work. That was a quick flight.

Back, land, and take my stuff to the hotel, including the cushion from the airplane. It smells like feet.

Gone Down

So I'm back overflying the same wilderness I've been looking at all week. Trees. Muskeg. A big round lake. Dirt roads. The area is so crisscrossed with oil and logging roads that I'm not sure how the bears manage to propagate so effectively, but the ground crew assure me that there are plenty of bears. Just black bears seen so far, though, not grizzlies. I haven't seen any, but then I'm smart enough not to walk out of town.

Once again I'm monitoring the nearest FSS frequency on one radio and 126.7 on the other for en route traffic. I'm fifty miles from the aerodrome (their control zone radius is five) and I'm not on the way to anywhere that normal people go at my altitude, so the radios are on in the background just kind of for entertainment. I'm also listening to the Arrogant Worms on the iPod nano. A helicopter calls the aerodrome. There's a helicopter maintenance base there so the darn things are taking off, flying a circuit and landing all the time. It still makes me smile when they call final for something that isn't a runway. Like "the gas pumps" or "apron III". The helicopter asked for something I didn't pay attention to, and then the FSS guy replied.

I hear the words and do and do an aural doubletake. I ask my mission specialist, "Did he just say an aircraft 'has gone down'?"

"That's what I heard."

As explained in an earlier discussion, "down" to a pilot is a neutral term. If I get a text that a flight is down, I expect that the airplane is taxiing up to the fuel pumps. I record my down time each time my wheels touch pavement. "Call me as soon as you're down," my boss might ask before departure. But "gone down," that's not neutral. That's bad. Or, at minimum, very interesting.

For a hundred kilometres around, pilots are turning up their radios and turning off their iPods. What went down? Where? How bad is it? Someone calls inbound for landing and is told that runway 03 is temporarily closed. If the accident occurred on the runway, maybe it's just a gear collapse. But the term for that would be something like "disabled aircraft" not "gone down." An airplane could have taken off and then stalled/crashed back on the remaining runway. I keep listening.

Someone says he can see the aircraft. It's a helicopter pilot. He says there's a passenger on the belly. That means the airplane is inverted. I wonder if it's in the river. He says there's another passenger lying on the ground. So it's not in the river. Also lying on ground is bad, but much better than strapped in burning airplane. Obviously the airplane is not on fire, or the passenger would find a more convenient place to stand. I hear the words "light aircraft" from someone.

Light aircraft contact the ground inverted in two ways that immediately come to mind: stall-spin and landing mishap. The presence of two people who got out of the airplane strongly suggests that it was not a stall-spin. It's more likely to have been an inflight loss of engine power, followed by a forced landing on inappropriate terrain. (That's not a criticism of the pilot: the terrain he or she picked was probably the most appropriate within gliding range, but there is a strong shortage of appropriate places to land around here). A classic forced landing accident in a Cessna trainer involves a correctly executed forced approach, touching down slowly and under control, then a wheel digs in or catches and the airplane flips upside down. Typically belted occupants receive minor or no injuries and the airplane is substantially damaged. I've no idea if that's what happened here. I've gone through a number of hypotheses in a few minutes.

The helicopter pilot says he will remain hovering over the site so they can find it. The tower passes someone else a NOTAM on a closed runway with vehicle traffic. It seems that the airplane has gone down just off the end of a runway. The RCMP are driving out to the end of the runway to start the search. The helicopter pilot is talking to the RCMP on another VHF frequency, so I tune up that one, too. I can't hear the cops on the ground, but I can hear the helicopter pilot telling them which way to go. The person on the ground is sitting up now.

The RCMP reach the site by walking towards the helicopter and listening to the pilot's guidance, then the helicopter goes to land. About half an hour later you can still hear the ELT in the background of every call the FSS makes. One pilot points this out. We're so conditioned to report hearing the "whoop, whoop, whoop" of an emergency locator transmitter if we hear one that the pilot hasn't thought it through. If the ELT is audible only when the FSS transmits, than the ELT signal must be coming over the FSS transmission, and therefore be audible to the FSS. Presumably the radio in the FSS that is tuned to 121.5 is on speaker, so that everyone in the room can hear it. The FSS guy simply says "we're already aware of that."

Hours later when I land one of the taxiways is still NOTAMed closed, but when an ultralight wants to take off the FSS says they are lifting the restriction now, and approves the intersection departure. I don't see anyone around to ask to make sure that everyone was okay.

Wind Speed Puzzle

Here is a wind speed puzzle. Your course is due north, 000 degrees. That is you will proceed in a straight line over the ground to a point that is due north of where you are now. The wind is blowing from 100 degrees, that is from mostly off your right wing, but slightly behind you. With no wind at all, your groundspeed would be 100 knots. Will your groundspeed in the described conditions be greater or less than 100 kts?

My answer and why I mention it, in a couple of days. And as usual, if you know you know, give the student pilots a chance to answer first.

Also, I stood on the wing to fuel tonight, then as I slid off the leading edge holding the fuel nozzle I managed to bash my leg on a nacelle fairing. A customer watched me do it, and I was telling him the truth when I smiled and said I was fine, but I have a really amazing colourful bruise on my leg now.

Unauthorized Landing?

Interesting story. Pilot lands on roof of shopping mall and someone is injured, while regulatory authority says he shouldn't have landed there. But I'm sure it's not the whole story.

Who wouldn't like to have a helicopter and just be able to fly everywhere and land on the roof, avoiding the traffic, the usual parking problems and the hoi polloi? The Jetsons flew everywhere, why shouldn't you?

As this story takes place in Ireland, their air law applies, so I can't comment specifically on the regulations regarding landing on the roofs of shopping malls. If the story took place exactly the way the pilot said it did, then he knew the shopping mall owner, had general permission from him, and called ahead to make sure he still had permission on that particular day. That's a tough call. I know I've landed on private strips. I call the corporation or group that operates the airport and keep asking to be transferred to someone with authority to grant me landing permission until someone steps up. I thank them, write down their name and go land. I have no way of knowing whether the person was on a power trip or really had that authority. I never considered that it could turn into a run in with Transport Canada or the FAA. Perhaps in future I will ask for faxed permission. Even then, what if it's a fax from a bored guy in the mail room? Who does have the authority? Do you have permission to let someone park in the employee parking lot where you work? Does a security guard have authority to overturn your granting of permission? Does he or she run in front of vehicles to wave them off while parking?

The pilot's account has the attendant only coming onto the roof after landing, while the attendant says he was "ignored" when he tried to wave the helicopter away. There's an easy way to rectify the two accounts. On the first pass, while the attendant was inside, the pilot verified that the landing are was clear, and then approached for landing. While the pilot was maneuvering to land, the attendant, inexperienced in the marshalling of aircraft, came onto the roof and waved at the helicopter from a position where he was not visible to the pilot. He fled the roof, and the pilot only saw him after landing. It was still the pilot's responsibility to ensure that the area was clear, but when people you don't know are present run into your blind spot during final approach you have done all you can.

The pilot's story gets a little fishy when he says he lost his logbook. It does happen, but nice coincidence. And what about the 'subsequent accident?' He also should have (assuming Irish law resembles Canadian in this respect) reported an injury caused by rotor downwash, but I can imagine the conversation.

"Hey! You can't land here!"

"I have permission from the owner."

"No, you can't land here, I told you, and you made the door slam and hurt my hand."

I'm thinking that if the attendant was so unlucky as to catch his hand in a slamming door such that fingers were partially severed or skin was cut through to tendons and bone the conversation would have been more along the lines of "Oh my God, call 999!" Without blood and/or severed appendages is "You hurt my hand" along the lines of "ouch that hurt" or "I require medical attention"? From someone who is angry at you in the first place, you wouldn't be out of line to assume that the hurt is more along the lines of aggrieved than medically afflicted.

On the other hand the pilot may be a complete asshole who saw the guy, deliberately angled rotor wash to scare him off and ignored his cries for help as he sashayed off to get his new keys cut. I have no way of knowing which scenario applies. In any event if he has the cash to go to the mall in his own helicopter, he probably bought the appropriate legal counsel to fly out of this situation, licence intact.

Arctic Winter Games

In the far north, before airplanes and telephones and television and treadmills, people developed some simple games that could be played inside an igloo, using what they had on hand. They were games of strength and skill that kept them sane and could also promote skills used in the hunt.

Given that now northern people have satellite TV and pilates classes, the traditional games almost died out. But they promote fitness without needing any expensive equipment, and at the same time foster community spirit and preserve cultural heritage, so they have been preserved as the Arctic Sports and Dene Sports at the Arctic Winter Games. The AWG is basically an Olympiad for northern peoples, from Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, Finland, and Russia. Not everyone has the same traditional games, and the emphasis is much more on sportsmanship than winning, so the competitors help each other out. There are also familiar southern events like indoor soccer, gymnastics, table tennis, hockey and badminton. You see the theme in those: all sports that can be played indoors. There was also biathlon and dog mushing.

The first event I saw was the stick pull. I'm sure the name can be laden with all kinds of lewd innuendo in Dene, too, but the stick in question is about 30 cm long, thicker in the middle and tapers towards both ends. Competitors stand shoulder to shoulder, facing in opposite directions. An official slathers the stick in lard (I suppose it was once seal fat, but this was clearly a tub of Crisco), and then the competitors both grasp the stick, their thumbs facing. On the official's signal each pulls back. Arms must be straight, no jerking or twisting, just pull the stick straight back such that your competitor's hand slides off the other end and you alone are left holding it.

The girl in the blue sweatshirt and faded jeans was an eventual medalist in the event. I can't remember if she took gold or silver. The first picture shows the start, and the second picture is during the competition as both girls try to pull the stick back. Each match-up is best-of-three, with the competitors switching hands for the second contest. If a third round is required, a flip of a coin would determine the competitor who picked which hand to use.

The third picture is of the men's events, and gives a clearer view of the stick.

I also have pictures of the one arm reach. In this event competitors must balance their whole weight on one arm, while reaching a suspended target with the other. It is not immediately obvious from the pictures below, but only the competitor's hand is on the ground, his knees and feet, while they may look like they are on the floor, are actually being held up. You see here the suspended target, a little mini stuffed seal. (I tried so hard to buy one like that, but couldn't find one for sale anywhere). The limitations of my pocket camera and photography skills show here. In a school gym, no flash allowed, I wasn't able to capture the motion of his hand except as a blur as he reached up to touch the seal. The people in chairs behind him are officials, and they were quick to call fouls if the competitor did not keep his balance and form during the reach.

The competitor below is named David Taylor. He won the event easily, playfully doing things like poking or tickling the seal in the early rounds, but you would never say that he humiliated his competitors because he was such a good sport. he was literally coaching the others in between attempts, to the extend that if someone missed the seal, they would turn and look at David, waiting for his analysis and suggestion.

I also love the fact that the other competitors just naturally lay in a circle to watch. You can almost see a giant igloo enclosing them.

I don't have a good photograph of the final event, the knuckle hop. I think I was too busy watching in horror to take a photograph. Competitors start in the position of someone who has just done a push-up: arms extended, body straight from head to feet and weight resting on the hands and feet only, except that their hand are in fists, so they rest their weight on the knuckles. They then bend their arms, like someone starting the down phase of a push-up and push off, hopping forward, and yes, landing on their knuckles. This is repeated, as a means of locomotion, until the competitor collapses from exertion. Each competitor starts when he is ready and goes as far as he can, one at a time. Instructions from the officials to the competitors were, "when you are finished, stay where you are until the officials can mark your place, then go straight to the medical table." There were several nurses working the medical table to clean and bandage damaged knuckles. I heard one spectator say, "this would appear to be a sport where performance could be improved through consumption of large amounts of alcohol." I certainly have never seen sober people inflict so much pain on themselves in the name of competition.

The games were inspiring, both in the "gee, I want one of those little seals to see if I can do that" way, and because it showcased healthy, positive youth, making me proud of them all.

Did I Convince You?

I told you a while ago that I was coming north to renew my pilot proficiency check. It doesn't matter which city it's in, as we can fly the airplane there. The chief pilot called around to find an examiner, and then called me to tell me when and where. And who.

Oh, um, rats. I should have seen this coming. I'll bet long time readers did. I know that name. He works for my former employer, Victory Airways. I did a flight test with him at that company, and the title of the blog written at the end of that day was Worst. Ride. Ever. I remember thinking, "Well, I don't want to be at this company in two years, when my renewal comes due." In fact one of the silver linings in the cloud that carried me out of what passed for a town there was that I wouldn't have to get back in an airplane with that examiner again.

Ah, Aviatrix. You forget that wherever you go, there you are. I am the protagonist in my own story, and whatever is dramatically appropriate is pretty much guaranteed to happen. Which is good news, really, because this is the sort of story that should eventually have an inspirationally happy ending.

I wonder if he'll even remember me. Probably he will, as the candidate before me managed to almost sever his finger closing the aircraft door, and the examiner had to drive him to emergency. Heh. There must have been a bad alignment of the planets that day as far as pilots were concerned.

I square my shoulders, laugh at the deviousness of the universe and tell myself what a fantastic opportunity I have been given to redeem myself. I look forward to astonishing him with my prowess.

(Ok, more truthfully, I cower in fear for a while, and think about how a brave, heroic protagonist ought to respond to this situation, and then try to pass that off in my blog as my real response).

Leaving Your House Empty

Here's a nasty consequence of being on the road all the time. Airline pilot Scott McEvoy returned home to discover a squatter in his house. Worse than that, he was attacked, forced to drive around withdrawing money from ATMs until the card stopped working, and then beaten and left for dead. There are some very bad people in the world.

Scott lived, but brain injury has left him with poor mobility and vision, and he's been discharged from the hospital because his insurance company won't pay for full-time rehabilitation. Wow. A downside of having a job that requires high mental and physical standards is that it's very easy to lose it. It's a terrifying thing.

It used to be called brain damage, but now it's recast as brain injury and that makes a lot of sense. Compared it to another injured part. Sure it's scarier, because the brain controls not only mobility but mood and cognition. But like an injured leg, it can recover. It still may get tired faster, have to do some things in different ways, may have good days and bad days, and the person still wants and sometimes expects it to do what it could do before. And our brains have amazing flexibility, so that the tasks of injured portions can be taken over by other parts of the brain.

At least Scott has some insurance, a supportive fiancée, a very positive attitude, and has come back before from a medical setback. I wish him all strength and hope that everything works out positively. I imagine some of my readers have worked with this guy. Please pass on my best wishes, if you know him.

The place I call home usually has one or more people in it, even when I'm not here. I'll be extra careful now when I come home.