Post Mortem

Well what a clusterfailure that was. Imagine if that vacuum and indication failure had all happened over the course of once turbulent flight in night IMC across the mountains. Suction failures are extremely dangerous. The suction-driven instruments are central to the instrument scan and experiments and studies of actual accidents show that they have a very high chance of killing you. The "ninety percent" figure sometimes quoted is misleading: accidents attributed to vacuum failures (about three per year in the US) result in fatalities 90% of the time. That's because there aren't many ways to crash an airplane due to spatial disorientation without it being deadly. More than ten percent of pilots who experience vacuum failure in IMC do get out alive, but I'm not going to guarantee I would be one of the survivors.

Here's what a vacuum failure can look like.

The gyrating blue and black instrument is the attitude indicator. It won't necessarily look that energetic in a failure. Its slide to one side or the other may look exactly like a functional instrument indicating a real wing drop, prompting the pilot to bank and pitch in an attempt to return the aircraft to straight and level flight. The pilot must fly by the turn coordinator, the tippy little white symbolic airplane at bottom left. It indicates rate of turn, not bank angle, so doesn't respond as instantaneously to changes in attitude.

I had difficulty identifying the failed vacuum system because its own indication system did not work properly. When I felt that the heading indicator was not working properly, I suspected the vacuum system, but the indicator lied to me, telling me the system was okay. When I shut down an engine, the associated vacuum failure indication appears immediately, leading me to believe that the same thing would happen in the case of a real suction failure. The two vacuum pumps are in two different engines, had widely separated serial numbers and had been installed by different people at different times. I had never heard of one vacuum pump failing and taking out another one.

If an electric instrument has a power loss, it immediately throws up a flag, so I know not to trust it. There is no failure indicator on the heading indicator or attitude indicator and without other reference, it is really easy to follow the dying instrument. The autopilot tried to follow it, too. With TWO failing vacuum pumps, there was no pressure differential across the shuttle valve to pull the autopilot out of the system. Flying across the mountains to the FBO where company has shipped the replacement pumps, I have post-it notes over the failed instruments, still the only indication, apart from their unresponsiveness, that they are not working. When practicing flying on instruments, if the pilot can see the real horizon, even a little, the task is much easier. Even if you try to ignore it, you subconsciously draw on a lifetime of doing what your species does: visually determining which way up you are. While it's easy to design an indicator that is invisible until electrical power is removed from it, I guess it's harder to calibrate one to not enough suction. Maybe it could depend on gyro rpm. This FAA document claims that "attitude indicators with failure warning flags are available in newer model aircraft and are slowly making their way into the general aviation fleet as retrofits," but I think they may be talking about replacing vacuum-driven AIs with electric ones.

The cause of the double failure is eventually determined to be poorly-installed air-oil separators. Oil was able to enter the dry vacuum pumps and damage the vanes. I'm not sure if the indication issue was because it was a gradual failure, or because oil got in the indicator, too. It is all functional now, but now the vacuum pumps are in phase, which makes me nervous, because that airplane has flown about 900 hours since that happened, and I'm back in it. This article seems to think that vacuum pumps fail every 500 hours or so, but our mandated time between overhaul is definitely 1000 h.

Are there one or two Ns in "Brokenness"?

I start the engines the next day to do some VFR work. As the engines fire up, the engine start checklist directs my eyes to the tachometer, then the oil pressure, and to the suction gauge. The suction gauge indicates that the right vacuum pump has died. Okay! That sort of explains the zombie heading indicator, and means that I've snagged the wrong instrument. I should have not written it up while it was questionable. The laws don't allow me to write, "never mind, it's not broken after all," which is why there are so many airplanes flying around with sort of broken stuff. As soon as it's written down, it grounds or restricts the airplane. As I understand it, only a maintenance engineer is allowed to correct a pilot's mistaken snags.

Fortunately, the effect of the unserviceability is the same, as I'm not allowed to conduct IFR flights with only one vacuum pump working, and we're in the north in the summer, so "night" is virtually non-existent. What's weird, though, is that the reason there are two vacuum pumps, is that one is supposed to be able to serve as a back up. Either suction pump on its own is supposed to be sufficient to run both the attitude indicator and heading indicator. I'm supposed to be able to safely complete an IFR flight with one suction pump failed. Come to think of it, the autopilot is not supposed to engage if only one vacuum pump is operating, to ensure that there is sufficient suction to run the essential instruments. The autopilot is still working, although a little half-heartedly, as the heading indicator is still sluggish. So is the attitude indicator. The shuttle valve that is supposed to disable the autopilot must have failed, so the autopilot is remaining on line, leaving not enough suction for the heading indicator and attitude indicator. I turn off the autopilot, but it doesn't help much.

After a few hours the heading indicator and attitude indicator are both completely useless. Weirdly, the autopilot will still engage. (I keep forgetting and snapping it on when I want to look something up or open a Clif Bar to eat). But it will attempt to follow the slowly toppling attitude indicator. Pretty scary, really. How far would it roll the airplane? That's not in the manual.

In the old days, there were no heading indicators or attitude indicators or autopilots. The turn and bank instrument and the compass were all you had for staying right side up, and if the former died, it was just the compass, which has all kinds of errors or lag and lead. The old bush pilot trick for letting down through an overcast was to do so on a heading of south. On south, if you bank at all, the compass will immediately swing around, even before the heading has changed, especially at high latitudes. I try this at the end of the flight, because my destination is pretty close to due south of my position. It's pretty hard. Try it sometime.

As I taxi in at the end of the flight the suction gauge indicates that the second vacuum pump has failed. Well this would make a fair amount of sense: the pressure differential between the working and failed vacuum pumps is what is supposed to throw the shuttle valve to disconnect the autopilot. And obviously if they have both failed I can't expect the suction instruments to work properly.

Company has already made arrangements to ship a vacuum pump to a maintenance shop a few hours flight away, so now they will ships two vacuum pumps, and we will head there on the next flight.

Death Rates

I'm IFR in the flight levels on a clear VMC day. The IFR part means I'm following a set of rules and procedures ("Instrument Flight Rules") designed for pilots of aircraft in weather conditions that don't allow them to navigate by looking out the window. The flight levels part means I'm flying above about 18,000'. In Canada the "transition altitude," between altitudes designated by the local air pressure and those altitudes designated by a universal standard pressure setting, is 18,000'. One never flies at 18,000', but instead sets the altimeter to 29.92 and flies at flight level 180. I don't know how our transition level was determined. Our highest mountain is about 19,000', so it wasn't set relative to that. VMC is "Visual Meteorological Conditions," that is weather that permits navigation just by looking out the window.

So why am I IFR in VMC? Because in Canada everyone operating in the flight levels is required to do so under an IFR clearance. It's a safety regulation. I have to fly only as directed and cleared by ATC, in order to ensure separation from all other aircraft. And I'm up this high because this is where I need to work. There's only half as much air pressure up here as at sea level, which means only half as much oxygen per breath, so I'm wearing a mask that provides me with supplemental oxygen. The masks do a great job of that. Testing my blood oxygen level always shows me at 98 or 99% saturation, the same level I get sitting on my chesterfield at home. (The tester looks at my blood by shining a light through my fingernail: it doesn't take a blood sample). Only problem is that in providing a tight seal around my face and being secured to my head underneath my headset, the mask give me no opportunity to eat or drink during the flight. Air before food.

The mask also interferes with the seal between my headset earpieces and my ears, so it's a little noisier with the mask on. Even noisier when my noise cancelling cuts out because my headset batteries died. I'm not sure if the noise cancelling "works harder" to keep up, or if it has the same battery consumption regardless of the ambient noise, and this is just coincidence. I use rechargeable batteries, which when they are new last about fifty hours in the airplane before they die, but after many cycles have shorter lives. I have numbered all my rechargeables and track how long each set (the headset takes two AAs) lasts before it dies. When they can't go a full flight, they get retired to a plastic baggie in my kitchen. Eventually they will go to recycling, when I figure out where to recycle rechargeables. They last pretty well: there are only six batteries in the retirement baggie and I've been using rechargeables in my headset and flashlights for at least eight years.

I change batteries and then notice I'm off my heading. The autopilot has disconnected. I must have hit the button. I reset it and then turn to a new heading, but something doesn't look right. The GPS says I'm going where I want to be, but the heading indicator is way off. I reset it to the compass, and it follows for a while, but soon loses interest again. The heading indicator is powered by two engine driven vacuum pumps, one of which I reported close to needing replacement a few days ago. The suction gauge shows slightly less of a vacuum than ideal, but in the green range and no less than it has for a few weeks. The other part of the instrument shows both vacuum pumps on line. The attitude indicator, powered by the same system, still appears to be working. Legally I'm required to inform ATC of the failure of a heading indicator. I do so, and they seem confused. No, it isn't affecting my operation at all. I'm using an electronic guidance system, and I will be landing at an airport that I'll be able to see sixty kilometres away. I don't need it for the flight. Maybe people don't routinely comply with that regulation anymore.

Before I land, the stupid thing comes back to life. Charming. I'm far from base, but I call maintenance so they can order one, or pull one out of another plane or something for when I come back. They don't have any troubleshooting tips for a zombie heading indicator. It's working now, but it's not reliable, so I snag it. That is, I write in the journey log that it is not operating correctly. This will limit our operations to day VFR (the looking out the window counterpart of IFR) only, which is a huge pain in the neck, because it prevents me from continuing the work above FL180, even though its effect on safety is negligible. I have had transient problems with equipment that never recur, but usually they hint at trouble and then throw a full failure if ignored. I think I've only seen simple heading indicators (as opposed to the more expensive and complex HSI) fail twice before in about 7000 hours of flying. And one was a simple fix, turned out that there was an installation error that had made a screw come loose. I wonder if the suction line is leaking or blocked or something. Nothing I can do about it, anyway.

Future So Bright

It's a rainy, miserable fall day with the freezing level a little lower than the minimum en route IFR altitude. I study the GFA showing the cloud levels and types in the area I'll be flying through, and decide that yes, we can do the flight in this airplane. I can climb above the level of the cloud that will carry the most dangerous ice before I reach the area that has those clouds, and destination is clear, giving a safe descent. I file a flight plan beginning with a waypoint that we always file out of this airport, because it's the end of the published departure procedure, but as we're going the other way, I don't expect to actually go there. We'll be in radar contact with ATC as soon as we're off the ground and they will vector us on course.

Except they're busy. I end up flying all the way to the waypoint, and then a little bit past on vectors, and then more vectors. Vectors to the right towards the way I want to go, and then, possibly because I wasn't climbing fast enough for the controller's liking, vectors back to the left. "Vectors" just means the controller assigns me a heading to fly. Altitude is being meted out to me in thousand foot increments, from the departure plate up to the MEA, but still not my filed altitude. We're intermittently in rain, cloud, raining cloud and between clouds. "Raining cloud" isn't a thing that I've ever heard anyone say before, but it's sort of a thing. Sometimes when you're in cloud it's quite light, but you just can't see anything around you. That would be near the top of a cloud with sunlight above. Sometimes it's dark and cold. It's usually very moist, with water running up the windshield, but sometimes it's dark, with obscured vision and pelting rain. I guess on those times I'm inside a cloud underneath another cloud that is raining. It's kind of hard to see, as I'm in a cloud.

I say to my co-worker, "you bring your sunglasses?" He hasn't. "Just wait and see," I tell him. "This is one of the most fun parts of being a pilot."

We're level now, with the outside air temperature flickering between plus and minus zero (it rounds to the nearest degree on the instrument, but must have finer gradations internally). Into another cloud. This one is bumpy, a bad sign, and it's a raining cloud, but water doesn't stream up the windshield. It freezes onto it. All this vectoring around and delayed climb has got me into the area I want to avoid. I can see the water running back on the wings and freezing in little horizontal dribbles, exactly like the icing on the edge of a cake. (I think Americans call that frosting). There's a strip of rime building forward, too. This is not acceptable. Thanks to terrific weather forecasting technology I know exactly where the tops of these clouds are. I tell the controller we are picking up ice and ask for a climb to that level, the level I had wanted to fly in the first place. We get it, breaking through the tops of the clouds, a perspective that changes them instantly from dark monsters that obscure my vision and threaten to burden my airplane enough to tear it from the sky, to a brilliant white reflector for the sun. There's nothing but blue sky overhead, and I quickly put on my sunglasses. The temperature here is below freezing, but the air is dry so the ice sublimates, passes from solid to vapour, leaving me again with a clean airplane after a few minutes.

Approaching destination, ATC advises me that there is opposite direction traffic that could be a conflict, do I want to start down now early, or arrive high? I ask for the early descent and we slip through a few wispy clouds before coming out at our destination, under clear skies. At the end of the day I update the flight time in company records and advise company that there are less than fifty hours left on the right hand vacuum pump. Vacuum pumps have to be replaced every thousand hours. I have often seen them fail early. The possibility of failure is why there are two of them, and I'm pleased that the two on this airplane are out of phase; the left one has only five hundred hours on it.

Top Gun Hair

My hair is growing wildly in every direction. I've been working every day for almost as many days in a row as the law and company op specs allow, and the few days off that have materialized haven't aligned with the days my hairdresser is available. (Yes, I could go to another hairdresser. Indeed it was just such a crazy hair situation that caused me to find my current hairdresser, but I don't take cheating on my hairdresser lightly).  The days off have been occupied with laundry and what I call 'weeding.'

'Weeding' for me is pulling out handfuls of green things I don't know what they are so that I can see the colourful flowers that I don't know what they are either.  My favourite part is when the weeds attack one another, e.g. when a climbing vine weed binds itself around a fast-growing vertical weed. My garden is even more unkempt than my hair. I confessed to a neighbour that I really didn't know where to start on the weeding and she said a little contemptuously, "You could at least start." Her yard is enough houses away that I don't think my weeds actually attack hers, so I hope she derives satisfied pleasure that her garden is so much nicer than mine. It's good when one's garden brings others pleasure, don't you think?

I was scheduled to do a PPC ride (annual recurrent flight test) a couple of months ago, but the examiner got sick and missed his ride, so he wasn't qualified to do mine on the appropriate day. It's stressy getting ready for a PPC, because I have to demonstrate flying the airplane in a way I almost never fly it.  I don't even know what approach category I should put myself in. (Approach categories are based on approach speed in Canada, not on stall speed. I can comfortably approach at anything between max gear extension speed and blue line, a range of forty knots, spanning three categories. And in visual conditions I have accepted requests to maintain speeds outside that range at both ends. Sequenced with military jets for a long runway I can keep my speed above gear speed until short final, and then let it bleed off over the runway before dropping  gear and flaps. And sequenced with little training aircraft in a busy circuit I have turned final a few knots below blue line, still going about double the speed of the student in front of me.


Blue line is the best rate of climb speed on one engine, a speed I should be at or above while climbing, so I don't need to try and accelerate to it if I lose an engine. It's still faster than red line, the minimum controllable airspeed or Vmc. That's the speed below which the asymmetrical thrust resulting from an engine failure may render the airplane uncontrollable. Vmc is calculated at full power, so while being below blue line on final represents a low energy situation, it's not one that would flip me upside-down if an engine failed. Should I need to abort the landing and go around because the student in the Cessna didn't make it off the runway in time, I would be sure to increase speed above blue line before raising the nose for the climb.

It's at take off, during a full power go around, or in very low speed practice manoeuvres that Vmc becomes of most concern. The POH advises that at take off the airplane should be kept near the runway until Vmc. Given that the rotation speed specified in the POH is Vmc, except for a different place in the POH where it's given at Vmc+5, I think I can keep the airplane near the runway until after rotation. For approach it recommends only "Maintain sufficient speed during turns in the traffic pattern." Yeah, thanks. I got that. It's a good thing you told me, POH.

So I'm in the office, looking for more specific training materials and someone eyes the baseball cap under which I've crammed all my unruly hair, crying out for the attention of a competent hairdresser. "Is your hair a different colour under there?" he asks. I explain that I'm pretending to be like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun. He is unfamiliar with the reference. "Who is Kelly McGillis?" What is he doing in aviation?

I elaborate, "I'm imagining that if I take my hat off, my hair will cascade out, looking perfect." Everyone has seen that scene in some movie or another. And then I remember that in the scene where Kelly is wearing the baseball cap, she doesn't take it off. She's wearing the cap because that scene was filmed later, after she had already changed her hair colour for another movie she was in. My coworker was right all along. What am I doing in aviation? I'd better re-watch the movie. Surely there is some scene in which she takes off a hat? A motorcycle helmet?  No, I think they don't ride motorcycle helmets in that movie. They're too cool.

Later I overhear a snippet of conversation between an HR person and an office person about maintaining a professional appearance. Hmm, maybe I need a classier baseball cap. Or a day off. Coming soon! Right after my PPC I think.

Where Do I Get My Clearance, Please?

A pilot may not depart on an IFR flight plan into controlled airspace without receiving an IFR clearance from someone air traffic services. Some pilots never have to think twice about where they are going to get their clearance, but they probably always operate from the same few airports and they know the local procedures. The way you get a clearance in Canada can be quite varied, and when the airports you operate out of are that varied sometimes it's tricky.

If it's a busy airport, there may be a dedicated clearance delivery frequency published in the CFS and printed on the departure plate. You tune them up and call for clearance, and if you've filed your flight plan properly they usually have it ready and waiting for you, something like, "ATC clears Flashcube Three to the Peace River airport via the Moose Three departure, flight planned route, maintain 5000', expect higher five minutes after departure, contact departure airborne 125.725, squawk 3671." You copy that all down as they say it, say it all back to them, and when they say, "readback correct" you have a departure clearance.

If there is no clearance delivery frequency, you call ground instead. Both clearance delivery and ground are manned by people in the air traffic control tower at the airport, and often both frequencies will be covered by the same person at once. You discover this when you switch to ground for taxi clearance and get the same guy, or sometimes the clearance delivery guy gives you a taxi clearance with the departure clearance and tells you to monitor ground while taxiing. Ground may send you back to clearance delivery if the IFR data people discover an error in your flight plan, but eventually you switch to tower, who may give you an amendment to your departure or change the assigned departure frequency before clearing you for take off.

If the airport is uncontrolled, but there is still an FSS on the field, you usually call them for your clearance. You include in your request for clearance the runway you intend to depart from, because at an uncontrolled airport the pilot decides that, and that may influence the clearance you receive. They phone IFR data and IFR tells them your clearance, then they read it to you, you read it back to them, they tell you you have it right, and then you have the clearance. After that you just tell the flight service specialist when you're taking off, and off you go.

If there's no FSS on the field, but there's an RCO (Remote Communications Outlet)--a relay that lets you talk to a flight service specialist who is somewhere else--you may call them in exactly the same fashion. Sometimes pilots don't even know whether I'm talking to a remote or local FSS, which can be amusing when they ask "is it okay if i park here?" When I landed at one airport recently I was talking to an FSS specialist as I landed and I asked him when I reported clear of the runway, "do I call you for my clearance in the morning?" He said yes, but when I called his frequency in the morning the specialist working it told me to get my clearance from Centre, unless I couldn't contact them from the ground.

If there is no air traffic services agency reachable at all from the ground, I may be able to get my clearance by phone from the IFR flight planning folk, or possibly through the regional FSS people at 1-866-WX-BRIEF. You just keep calling aviation-related numbers until someone consents to give you a clearance. A clearance received by telephone (and some received by radio) will have a clearance valid time window, so you can use it between two zulu times, but if you miss your window and do not depart by then, you have to call back for a new clearance. So a request for a clearance should include an estimate of when you'll be ready to go, especially if it doesn't match your filed departure time exactly.

If you have no usable frequency and no telephone service, this happens mostly to pilots of amphib aircraft or others who used really remote and unserviced strips, you can't get a clearance before departure. You can then get a clearance in the air, but in that case you have to either depart VFR and remain in VMC until you have received your clearance, or depart on uncontrolled IFR and remain clear of controlled airspace until you have a clearance. Some people do this even when there are facilities on the ground where they could have received a clearance, but they find it to be a time savings. In the US if you do it without even having a flight plan filed it's called a "pop-up clearance" and is not abnormal there, but in Canada filing a flight plan in the air when there were facilities to do it on the ground is considered poor airmanship, and it's rude because it jams the frequency and puts the workload of accepting the flight plan on people who have more urgent work to do. You can see where this is going, with oblivious US pilots annoying Canadian flight service specialists and other pilots when they do here what is perfectly normal at home. As far as I can tell, the standard Canadian behaviour of flying cross-country VFR then calling approach to land VFR at a busy airport is the US equivalent. US controllers really don't seem to like that. Would they prefer me to pick up an IFR clearance before approaching their airspace?

The last option for IFR clearances in Canada is to conduct the entre flight outside of controlled airspace and not have a clearance at all. That's perfectly legal, and an aircraft can transition between IFR and VFR flight just by changing altitude by 500' and changing the transponder code. I haven't done that in a few years.

When FL180 Doesn't Exist

I mentioned earlier an air traffic controller saying that FL180 didn't exist today, and that I would explain later. It's later now. Altimeters work based on air pressure changes with altitude, so they need a way to compensate for air pressure changes that are not associated with altitude change. So they have a calibration factor, called the QNH in Europe and the altimeter setting in North America, that you reset according to ATC instructions as you go from place to place. Once you get high enough that you are over all the mountains and short-range traffic, the benefit of adjusting for local changes in air pressure becomes less in comparison to the benefit of not having to keep changing your altimeter setting all the time, so above that altitude, the transition level, you use the standard altimeter setting everywhere.

In non-arctic Canada, the transition level is 18,000'/FL180. That means that we fly using the local altimeter setting all the way up to 18,000' and then we switch over to the standard altimeter setting of 29.92". There are plenty of airplanes flying IFR at 17000', using the local altimeter settings and if the local altimeter setting is low, an airplane flying at FL180, using 29.92 is not a thousand feet above the airplane flying at 17000', using the local altimeter setting. For every tenth of an inch below 29.92, that FL180 airplane is a hundred feet closer to the 17,000' one. But for safety there is supposed to be 1000' separation. So there's a rule.

AIM 6.4.3 Vertical Separation Between Flight Levels and Altitudes ASL

When the altimeter setting is less than 29.92” Hg, there will be less than 1 000 feet vertical separation between an aircraft flying at 17 000 feet ASL with that altimeter setting and an aircraft flying at FL180, (with altimeter set at 29.92” Hg); therefore, the lowest usable flight level will be assigned or approved in accordance with the following table:

Altimeter Setting	Lowest Usable Flight Level
29.92” or higher	FL180
29.91” to 28.92”	FL190
28.91” to 27.92”	FL200

So on low pressure days, flight level 180 doesn't exist, but you won't be assigned 18,000' either. If you had a real operational need to fly at 18,000' when FL190 was the lowest avaialble flight level, I don't know how they'd handle it, probably with a block altitude, same as if you needed to fly between 17,000' and FL180 on a high pressure day.

Magnetic North is Not the Same

People not involved in map-related sports or professions probably don't think about "north" much. I think most people have learned that "true north" and "magnetic north" are not the same, but I worded the title of this post the way I did to cover the fact that magnetic north is also not the same as itself over time. The earth's magnetic field varies somewhat randomly on a daily basis and also steadily over time. It still amuses me when I come across concrete manifestations of the unconstant nature of magnetic north, and I saw one in a NOTAM recently.

110345 CYVR VANCOUVER INTL
YVR- VANCOUVER VOR 115.9 ROTATION, ADD 4 DEG TO ALL PUB APPROACH RDL ASSOCIATED WITH YVR. SPECIFIC RDL ISSUED BY ATC SHALL BE ADHERED TO AS PER THE RECEIVED AND ACKNOWLEDGED CLEARANCE
TIL 1105050901

YVR is a VOR -- a navigational radio station -- near the CYVR airport and it "tells" a pilot that her airplane is on a particular radial, i.e. that it is located a particular magnetic direction from the VOR ground station. She uses that information to navigate in the vicinity of the airport, perhaps to do an instrument approach that follows a specified radial straight to a runway, or to stay out of a restricted area that she has determined from the chart to be west of a particular radial. A number of radials are published on charts as named routes, for example on the expired chart I have here, the 037 radial from the YVR VOR was designated as part of the V304 airway to Calgary, sort of like Portage Avenue in Winnipeg forms part of the Trans-Canada Highway. A pilot tracking a radial makes heading corrections as needed to compensate for any crosswind, but she expects that in zero wind she will be flying on the same magnetic heading as the radial while tracking away from a station, and on the reciprocal heading while tracking towards a station. (To get to the station on the 000 radial, you fly 180, or south). A pilot who filed a flight plan from Vancouver to Calgary along V304 would expect to be flying on a heading of 037, and because the published minimum obstacle clearance along that radial is 9000', she would also expect that by keeping the 037 radial selected and centred on her VOR at 9000' that she wouldn't fly through any clouds with crunchy centres.

A VOR does not use the orientation of the earth's magnetic field to function, but it is set up and calibrated so that its zero radial runs due magnetic north of the station. That means that when the earth's magnetic field shifts, the YVR 037 radial still runs along a safe path between YVR and the next VOR on the airway. The pilot might just have to fly a different heading to stay on the airway. But after a number of years the accumulated magnetic shift is enough that Nav Canada wants to recalibrate the VOR such that the 037R really does run in the 037 direction. So they rotate the actual VOR signal. I'm pretty sure they just go in there and electronically adjust the direction in which the station sends its signals, but it's more fun to imagine that they jacked the whole thing up (they're usually about the size of a garage, except round) and cranked it around four degrees counterclockwise. But once they've done that, the 037 radial no longer runs through that safe route towards Calgary. It might pass a lot closer to some pointy rocks. So they have to amend all the publications so that what once specified the 037 radial now specifies the 041 radial, and so on all the way around. There are about fourteen airways defined off the YVR VOR. And they do amend all the publications that show those airways, and pilots or their companies are required to buy new ones every fifty-six days, but they didn't rotate the VOR on the same day as the new publications come out. This NOTAM informed me that until the new chart became effective, on May 5th, that I should add four degrees to any published radial from YVR. The new chart labels the 041 radial as V304, and the 039 radial subsides into unpublished obscurity.

There was a Nav Canada Challenger at YVR while I was there, probably in town to check the alignment of the airways and approaches.

Trial by Fire

My telephone rings at 4:20 a.m. It's the camera operator and mission logistician, if that's a word. He's still agonizing over the decision about where to attempt to work today. He wants to make hay while the sun shines, but in the most efficient way. He wishes we could wait until the next GFA comes out. This is where I relay the information I realized last night, "We can. It's an hour earlier in Vancouver. We can go back to sleep for another hour." I did my napkin math in local instead of UTC and totally forgot about the time change. He likes that plan, and I go right back to not being a giraffe. Not being a giraffe means sleeping comfortably.

An hour later the weather picture is clearer and he wants to go to the coast. I get a quickie phone briefing that reveals the weather has cleared overnight except for low lying fog, en route. I plan to Abbotsford, a big airport outside of the busy mess of Vancouver airspace. We get the same cab, with a different driver and go back to the airport. There's someone, presumably a pilot, asleep in the terminal. He has a sleeping bag and a pillow and a whole set up going on there. I hope guiltily that the cab driver did come back for my helicopter guy, and wonder who this guy is. Fire suppression pilots are paid well enough that a cab and a hotel shouldn't be an issue, and most of the transient aircraft seemed to be associated with the fire. The sleeping pilot's cellphone is ringing, or maybe it's his alarm, but he doesn't even budge. I'm not going to wake him up. If he needs sleep that badly, whatever it is can wait.

We ready the airplane, including wiping accumulated rain and dew from the outside of the front window, and working out how to turn on the defrost for the inside of the window. More condensation forms on the outside after I start up so I have to taxi cautiously, looking out the side. Another reason to have a windshield wiper. We backtrack to the appropriate end of the runway, turn around and ensure we're lined up and roll. The airspeed soon clears the window and I can climb and turn on course. The provincial boundary is along the great divide, the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and marked on my GPS so I call off the crossing and announce that we're now on BC time. There are several ranges of mountains to cross, so I don't descend yet, in fact climb a little, because there's more cloud and I'd rather not be dodging it when I can't see which clouds are crunchy in the middle. I'm trying to lean the mixture, but I seem to have a one hot cylinder. I'm trying to keep exhaust gas temperatures around 1425 degrees, but while the analogue EGT and CHT gauges show everything normal, the digital gauge shows that #2 on the left engine is spewing out gases at 1900 degrees. I enrich the mixture on that engine to get the temperature down to the range that would be green on the EGT, even though that leaves the other cylinders cold. I explain that the analogue EGT, which is the one that he can see, takes its reading from the outlet of one cylinder, the normally hottest, while the digital one has pickups per cylinder. "What would happen if you didn't have that one?" he asks.

"I wouldn't know about the problem and I'd lean the others to 1425, not knowing that I was cooking the other one to death, until it fried, and we had a rough running engine. The engine would run on the remaining cylinders, it just wouldn't sound pretty. And in fact we're below our single engine service ceiling, so we could fly on one engine right now. But given that we've paid for the extra information about this cylinder, we can use it to avoid destroying it." I'm trying to strike a balance between, "It's important that I not destroy this cylinder" and "We won't die if something happens to it." I'm concerned, but my concern is about loss of production, and my looking bad for taking a perfectly good airplane into the field and destroying it.

"How does it get that way?"

"If it's abused once, it gets pitted walls and that leads to poor combustion. Could be a bad valve ... I don't know. It's kind of freaky how placidly painted-on the the analogue gauges appear compared to the frenetically spiking #2 cylinder. How many times has this drama been played out in my engine without my knowledge?

"Could it be the gauge?"

"Yep. But it not being the gauge would be consistent with the rough running we've been getting when I lean it the same as the right engine." It's been the gauge for me before when there was other corroborating evidence. You can always find evidence.

I'm over the highest of the maintains and can start to descend. My chart tells me that I'm coming up on Vancouver's airspace. (Oh yeah, we're going to Vancouver now, not Abbotsford. It's sort of a rule that the destination has to change midflght here, apparently). I talk flight services out of a code for Vancouver, get the ATIS, and then call Vancouver centre on a gradual descent through 11,300'. She acknowledges, then asks me again for my altitude. "Descending through one one thousand." She calls me again radar identified and asks again for the altitude. "One zero thousand eight hundred."

"What altitude are you descending to?" she asks.

I resist replying, "Sea level," but I don't really know what she is asking. "Descending for landing at YVR." I already told her that. "Do you wish to issue an altitude restriction?" Kind of a non-standard call, but what the heck does she want?

She solves her problem by handing me off to Vancouver terminal, which gets the whole descending for landing thing more clearly, and does give me an altitude restriction of 3500', then 2500'. They fly me over the airport and then out for a right downwind for runway 08R and a 180 to land back on that runway. I exit read back a crossing clearance in the taxi instruction and find my way to parking on the apron. Company has already lined up someone to look at the overtemp indication.

Fortunately, while the EGT got pretty high, there, the fire of this blog entry title was not mine, but Slave Lake's. At the end of the day I learn that much of the town of Slave Lake has been destroyed by fire. In an astonishingly short time it went from no fires nearby, to a few forest fires in the vicinity -- a not uncommon situation anywhere in the north in the summer -- to full on evacuation as subdivisions and main street businesses blazed. Forest fires are burning all summer all over the north, but the area is so sparsely populated that there is not much property damage. In Slave it just so happened that two fires converged on a community. There wasn't even an intermediate step of a voluntary evacuation. Fortunately it has good highways and it's a prosperous and friendly community so pretty much everyone had a truck or a ride from someone. I'm glad in a way that I got to walk its streets one last time, and I'm extremely glad to hear that there were no deaths or injuries. It means that I don't need to worry individually about the fate of the waitress who was going camping, the fueller who happily came out early and stayed late for our crews, the non-smoking hotel receptionist who saved our time by admitting that the smoking rooms (all they had left) definitely smelled like smoke to her, or the non-multitasking hotel receptionist who slowly checked us in at the Super-8. It's bizarre that all those businesses and homes have gone up in smoke. I find later that the crew of the airplane that had been in Edmonton for camera repairs did spend the night there, and had to be evacuated with their hotel staff, because the airport was shut down and the fuel reserved for fire-fighting. I realized that the pictures we had taken that day were the last pictures of Slave Lake as it was; someone else realized that too and allowed our crew back up to take some "after" pictures and then return south and escape the evacuation zone with their airplane.

Here's a video that shows a lot of the destruction: you'll see homes, the city hall, a main street Ford dealership and the new mall completely gutted. A lot of the scenes that show fire behind a screen of trees is not forest fire at all, but the actual town blazing up that brightly, behind a windbreak. There are a lot of videos of the fire, but this one best encapsulates the fire, the aftermath and the feeling of losing ones community that way.

The second video shows just how thoroughly the destroyed houses have been destroyed, and has some information on the cleanup. The RCMP are going through the remains of the homes, looking for objects of value, before people return, to prevent looting and injury, and reunite people with whatever can be saved. It's tragic how little is left, and sweet that the authorities recognize the value the little things may have. I think Slave Lake will rebuild and rebound.

I've noticed some comments about "who started it?" There is no wasn't an arson fire or a cooking accident. It didn't start in town, but in the forest, probably from lightning strikes, the cause of most Alberta forest fires. It was a natural phenomenon that didn't stop just because it wasn't in its natural habitat anymore.

That Dot

I guess I should tell you what we're doing here. There's a million-dollar camera mounted in the belly of the airplane and I'm contracted as a photo survey pilot to fly it around and take pictures. The mystery crosshairs and dot from a couple of days ago are part of the pilot guidance screen. Let me explain that.

The crosshairs is only one small part of the guidance system. While I am on line, the main screen depicts a red line for the track I am supposed to follow and an amber line with a green airplane on it for the track I am on. There are also two other parallel lines denoting out of bounds to either side of the central red line. That only gives my lateral positioning over the ground. I also have to keep the camera level and maintain the proper groundspeed and altitude. Groundspeed and altitude are poorly represented with tiny-font tapes slightly too far from my area of focus, and the targets not marked on the tapes but hidden off to the side, in among too many other unnecessary pieces of data. But the pièce de résistance is that little green dot.

With the green dot centred exactly on the crosshairs, the airplane is perfectly level and the camera pointed straight down at the ground. (The operator adjusts the camera to maintain "level" for different cruise attitudes at different power settings). You see that in my representation the green dot is slightly above the line and a little bit further towards the left. Many of you guessed that it represents a needed change in aircraft pitch attitude and bank angle. Did you guess that I have to steer towards the dot, by pitching up slightly and rolling left a bit more? You would be wrong. Did you guess that I have to "fly the dot" back to the centre by pitching the nose down ever so slightly and rolling to the right? You would also be wrong. Amazingly, one person did get it, albeit on his fifth guess, but you've mostly demonstrated the natural way to think about it. This is not a natural interface.

The configuration shown indicates that I should pitch down slightly (away from the dot) and roll left slightly (towards the dot). They are both minuscule corrections. The airplane is pretty much wings level in a level pitch attitude, but it is asking me to apply the tiniest bit of forward pressure on the control column and a touch of roll to the left. I was completely baffled as to how any sane human being could think this was a reasonable interface, until I showed it to a computer programmer. He explained, "If the dot is up, the nose is too high. If the dot is to the left, the left wing is too high." It makes perfect sense, so long as you don't know how an airplane actually works. And thanks to the amazing adaptability of the human brain, I am able to use this thing. I don't know if I'll be able to fly IFR on an attitude indicator anymore, but we shall see.

The crosshairs depiction on my screen is at the bottom left, far enough away from the lateral placement line that I can just see both at once, and far enough from the altitude information that I almost never see that. If you're thinking, "That's an awfully pale dot colour. Why didn't you use a brighter green?" then you are thinking something that I have spent several hours thinking. The dot on my screen is actually paler than the one in the simulation above, and the crosshairs on my screen are tiny. If the light is bright, I can't see the dot at all, and because of how pale it is, I have to focus on it to see it, not rely on peripheral vision. When the dot goes "too far" (I don't know how that is defined) from the centre in any direction it turns red, which is helpful in that the colour change allows me to see it, but bizarre in that in bright light it's like playing whack-a-mole, just flying along wondering where the red dot will pop up next.

It is a lot like playing a video game all day. I make Pac Man jokes all the time. "Maybe this dot will give me the energy boost!" I loved all your creative explanations of the nature of the dot.

Small Green Dot

When I was shown this, and had its function described to me, I thought it was an imperfect design, but usable and logical, but that's because I hadn't been listening closely enough to the explanation. I showed it to a computer programmer and he managed too backfit a sort of logic to it, but I don't think he could have done so had I not told him the rules. So here's your turn.

The question is, given that the display above asks the pilot to make control inputs that will centre the green dot exactly on the crosshairs--I'll give you that much--what control inputs does it ask for as depicted? Give your answer in direction and relative magnitude of pitch, roll, yaw and/or speed. If you're not sure what those terms mean (and those who are not probably have a better chance of getting it right), just describe what you think it might be asking the pilot to do, in whatever terms make sense to you. As usual I ask any of you familiar with this particular instrument of guidance to recuse yourselves, or at least hide your knowledge in polite snickering.

I'll give you one more piece of information, although it would be incorrect to call it a 'hint,' and that is that sometimes the dot turns red.

en français:
le point - dot
la réticule - crosshairs
le lacet - yaw
le tangage - pitch
le roulis - roll

Pour mettre le point vert sur le centre de la réticule on doit ajuster le lacet et le tangage, ou peut être le roulis et la vitesse.

X-Plane Mobile

All seven (I added one that I will probably tell you about later) of my New Year's resolutions are on track, despite all the time I used creating the ultimate spreadsheet to track my progress at each in comparison to progress through the year 2011. (Today, as I write this, it's January 14th and we're 3.56% through the year, but I have earned at least four percent of the arbitrary points available for each item). Go me!

My sim progress is in part thanks to X-Plane Mobile, recommended by a reader. I feel stupid saying this, but I am playing with a flight simulator game the size of my hand, and it's a valid simulation of a real instrument scan and some of the thought processes and multi-tasking that go with flying an actual airplane. I was looking for a clunky little app that simulated hold entries, descent profiles, or some other semi-intelligent task, just to elevate my bored moments from Pac-Man and Mahjong to something more skill-enhancing. And what I got was a full flight simulator for ten bucks.

The iPod becomes both the flight yoke and the instrument panel. You control elevator and ailerons by tilting the device, and the rudder autocoordinates, including for slips on crosswind landings, while you are airborne. There's a slider for the rudder if you want to control it, and the same slider operates rudder/nosewheel steering while you are on the ground. There are also sliders for the flaps and throttle which appear when you put your fingers on them, then fade away again once they are set. You can fly it visually--yes, it has full, realistic-looking graphics--with a simulated HUD overlay, or press an onscreen button to be in panel mode and fly by instruments. A clever feature for visual pilots is a little arrow that points to the nearest airport. I know I lose track of airports when I'm visual in a flight sim, trying to fly a circuit but there is only a forward view. There are seven different airplane model options including singles, twins, jets and props. The ones that I've flown seem reasonably modelled. All but the basic Cessna 172 panel include VORs and ILSes but not NDBs, and there are six regions to fly in, five in the United States and one crazy mountainous one in Austria. You can even set the weather, time of day and the weight and loading of the airplane.

The regions are quite small, so if you go bombing around in a fast airplane you'll scroll off the end of the screen and wrap around again, which is kind of confusing, but you can always hop out to the map to see where you are. People who use flight simulators in order to look at the pretty scenery will find it repetitive, but I say if you want to look at scenery, just cruise around Google Earth. I start it up, take off, slam it into panel mode and stay there for most of the time.

That in itself poses a little problem. The HUD screen is the hub of the simulator. You have to be in HUD mode in order to operate the landing gear, see the gear position indicator, or access the map. On the jet panel you can scroll down to find a gear button above the nav radio, but not on the King Air. The way I normally fly an instrument departure is to set the power, look out the front window until rotation then right away I'm on the instruments. I confirm a nose up attitude and a positive rate of climb, then raise the gear. With this sim I need to pause, switch to HUD mode, unpause, raise the gear, pause, switch back to panel view, and back on the instruments. The same routine applies at glideslope intercept on the ILS approach. If I do it without pausing I tend to get off track or altitude. Maybe it's just something for me to practise.

You have to get the instrument plates to fly approaches. I was sort of surprised that the app or at least the support page didn't include them. The US ones are all available easily from links on AirNav, but I had to search through a few dead links to find the Austrian ones; there's just one airport, Innsbruck LOWI, depicted for that region.

After the mobile fun got me psyched to try the Microsoft one again, I grumbled my way through loading it into memory. It actually required me to insert one of the CDs, I'm not sure if that was for copy protection or because I did a minimum install. I wish there were a "no scenery" or "wireframe scenery" option for these things. They'd be a lot faster. They don't make the Microsoft version anymore, but the full version of X-Plane runs on a PC. The Microsoft one is good enough, but I took a peek to see how much the X-Plane one goes for. It's $30. I thought a full flight sim program would cost five times that. I fell silly buying a full on simulator when I never look at the scenery, but pretty soon I'll have had $30 worth of aggravation out of this seven year old Microsoft program. If my hardware can handle it, I may have to switch. Would you believe that X-Plane even has technical support where you e-mail them questions, and a real person e-mails you back? He called me "sir" but then ATC does that sometimes too. I guess my pilot voice isn't much more girly than my typing.

If you prefer your flights of fancy to have some chance of getting you somewhere, and have some multimedia skills, check out Cathay Pacific's Around the World in Eighty Days promotion. Air tickets, hotels and spending money everywhere their network goes for eighty days. Don't forget to stop in Siem Reap and see Angkor Wat.

True, Magnetic and Whatever

I'm up north, and I have a whack of GPS equipment on board that tells me which way is which, so the lowly whiskey compass at the top of the windshield doesn't get much regard. Not that I disregard it. A compass is a very cool device, incredibly low tech, but working all over the planet without power. I can imagine an advanced technological society that had lost the knowledge of compass navigation. They could have built so many structures, electronic devices and power transmission lines that compasses didn't work most places, and have so much signage and technological assistance that no one used them anyway.

The Earth's magnetic field lines, with which a compass aligns, encircle the planet emerging from and disappearing into the poles. My compass is a hemispheric shell suspended by a point in liquid (the "whiskey") and free to rotate and tilt to align with the local magnetic field. I can't use it to roll out on a heading because the turning errors are enormous at this latitude, and even in level unaccelerated flight the tilt of the bowl is such that it's not easy to read.

The HSI is a kind of stabilized compass, as it gets its information from a magnetic compass, but right now mine isn't working. It hasn't been removed from the aircraft, because we're planning to go south to Edmonton soon. There's an avionics shop with an excellent reputation there, and the AME wants them to examine the HSI in situ. That would allow them to spot if it's something simple and removes the risk and cost associated with removing and shipping it, especially as we're still orbiting the black hole of postal and shipping services. In the absence of an HSI, I'm setting the copilot side directional gyro; habit and original training makes me look at the compass to do this, even though I have far more information available from the GPS and INS.

I'm tracking 270 degrees true, and the compass reads 260 degrees, which is obviously a magnetic reading. The chart says the local magnetic variation is 23 degrees east of true. The compass correction card says for 270 degrees steer 272, and is reasonably consistent from south through west, and it's dated last month. The computer says I'm crabbing four degrees to the north. How do I put that together to make any sense?

270 true minus 23E suggests we're tracking 247 degrees magnetic, but we're crabbing four degrees north, which makes a heading of 251 magnetic, for which I should steer 253 magnetic. So there are seven degrees missing. I'm willing to believe it's the result of all the extra kit that wasn't running when the compass was swung, because we stow some of the valuable non-aviation equipment before giving the airplane over for extended maintenance. Either that or the universe is wrong.

Eastbound on the exact reciprocal track of 090 true, the compass reads about 035, but I didn't write all the associated numbers down, so I can't play with them.

HSI OBS CDI XQJ

I keep talking about the HSI, and implying that it is somewhat replaceable with an "HI" or a "DG" so I think I'll try to make this all clearer. An HSI is an HI/DG combined with a VOR receiver. I promise to explain. Or at least make it muddier in an acronym-rich way.

HI stands for heading indicator, which does just what it says: indicates what heading the airplane is on, which means which direction the pointy end is pointing. The face of the instrument is a circle numbered with angular degrees around the outside of its face. Most have a tick every ten degrees and a number every thirty, except that the number is abbreviated by leaving off the final zero, so "3" is thirty degrees and "15" is 150 degrees. They fit on the instrument better that way and you learn to read it with no trouble. The numbers are written right side up at the top and upside down at the bottom, because the way the heading indicator indicates is that the disc rotates such that the current heading is constantly at the top.

DG stands for directional gyro, which is a synonym for heading indicator, "directional" referring to heading and "gyro" to gyroscope, which is what is inside the instrument, behind the disc. On start up you set the indicated heading on the DG to match the one reported by the compass. The spinning gyroscope maintains its orientation in space despite the motion of the airplane, so the difference between the position of the airplane and the initial position of the gyro is used to drive the heading card. It can get out of sync after a while, so if it isn't slaved to a fluxgate compass, you have to reset it to a more stable source of heading information, usually a magnetic compass, ever 15 minutes or so.

A VOR receiver is an instrument that indicates your angular displacement from a selected track to or from a VOR broadcasting station on the ground. You select the track with the OBS (a.k.a. "knob") and the displacement is shown by the CDI (a.k.a "needle") swinging across the instrument between zero and ten degrees in either direction, with "ten degrees" meaning "ten or more." Plus there's an additional recognizable indication if you happen to be exactly 90 degeees from the selected track, or directly overhead the station, or the instrument is broken. Same indication, on the "To/FROM indicator." I have no idea why the TO/FROM indicator doesn't have a silly name like "TFI" or "XJQ." VOR, by the way, is pronounced "vee- oh-are" and it doesn't matter what it stands for.

Note that the angular displacement is the angular displacement of the aircraft position, not the angle the aircraft heading makes with the selected track. The reading on the VOR is not affected by the aircraft heading. This can be confusing on a standard VOR because if the indication is that the aircraft is five degrees left of the track to the VOR, but the airplane is not facing towards the VOR, the pilot may need to turn left to get on track. The proper way to use the instrument is to look back and forth between the VOR and the heading indicator, do a little math and then turn to the correct heading for the intercept.

The HSI puts the VOR CDI and the OBS right on the DG. (Yay, I got all the abbreviations in the same sentence). It does the calculation for you, flipping the CDI to the correct side of the instrument for the heading, so the pilot can turn towards the needle no matter which way she is flying. So really, despite its vagueness, the name "horizontal situation indicator" accurately describes its function.

Test Flight

I stay in the hotel this morning, anticipating the airplane working in the p.m. and me needing a fresh duty day. I believe they cleared some small deferred snags in the morning and then I joined them for lunch and to check Greyhound for our package. The AME returns to the truck swearing. He has the package. The disinterested girl at the counter has just told him it arrived yesterday. He says he didn't even bother telling her, "You just cost the company $10,000," because she wasn't going to care.

He manages to remove the old servo in an hour, but it takes three to put it on and reassemble the airplane. We go for dinner, where the service is terrible. The waitress never looks at us. She has admirable breasts, and probably complains about people staring at them, but lady the "my eyes are up here" thing works both ways. We get pretty much all of our service requests relayed through a waitress who is working in a different section.

After dinner the AME starts the paperwork. He asks me to check the throttle and mixture cable connections inside the engine, something I haven't been officially assigned before. After verifying that they are attached and that the levers have proper cockpit travel I sign part of the paperwork, too. I've signed many times after a test flight for the airplane conforming to the type, but this is my first dual signature for the work itself. The law allows me to do this as the pilot of the airplane, because I'm expected to know how it should work.

We run up and taxi out for a test flight. The AME wants to fly, so I do the same thing I did as a flight instructor: have him taxi along the centreline of the taxiway so I can see his control. The taxiway is wiggly here, as it goes around the terminal loading area, and he follows the line adequately, so I have him do the take-off. We start with full static power (that is: advance the throttles to full while holding the brakes) to see that the correct power is developing with all the temperatures and pressures correct. It is, so we release the brakes and I let him drive for the take-off roll. I call rotation and coach him to the correct attitude for a blue line climb. Everything looks good and I bring back the power to slow cruise. There's no one around, so it doesn't matter where we go. He does a couple of airborne doughnuts and everything is fine, so I direct him to a downwind back towards the airport and ask him to reduce the throttles by one inch of manifold pressure. He pulls about five inches off and jockeys them back and forth trying to get it right. "Just so you know," I explain, "That's what pilots mean if we complain about a throttle being oversensitive. These aren't that bad, but sometimes they can be almost impossible to set with one motion.

I ask him if he knows how to use the trim, which he does, theoretically, because he knows how to repair it, but he didn't expect the trim to be so sensitive, either. He knows it's about seven turns from one end to the other, so puts in a quarter turn instead of just nudging it, and startles himself. I take over and approach to land. There's no PAPI approach slope indicator on this runway and he asks about that. It's only on the opposite runway. We land and then he tells me we have to let the engines cool off a bit for five minutes and then go up again.

This time I fly a quick circuit, to land back on the end of the runway that has the PAPI, so he can see it. He points out that I have left the emergency fuel pumps on for the whole circuit and I agree. I leave them on any time that it would be severely inconvenient to have an engine quit. If I were teaching a student to fly circuits I'd have them turn them off reaching circuit altitude and on again on downwind with prelanding checks, but for one circuit I deliberately leave them on for the whole time. I put down the gear and turn base, then final. He looks at the PAPI on short final and quotes "four red you're dead!" I explain that if we follow the PAPI exactly to keep two red and two while all the way to the runway we land 1000' in, so since we have to turn around and backtrack the runway to get off, I'm landing on the numbers, which to the PAPI is way low.

We return to parking and I text the PRM with the successful outcome. He replies "Next time don't do a test flight at night." We look around. I guess it might be getting a bit dark now, but I don't think it's night. I didn't check specifically, but usually one can tell. I text back that it's not night yet. He texts back "At 10 p.m.?!" I check with Flight Services. Night officially started six minutes after we landed. We're good. The PRM meanwhile has considered our latitude and conceded that it might still be light here.

I sign the part in the logbook that says the airplane can fly the way it's supposed to, and we head to Boston Pizza where I buy the AME a beer, because he worked hard and I know he's broke. He offers me a sip and laughs at me when I look at my watch before accepting it. That's ingrained. I am never going to be "oops" illegal on a flight as far as alcohol is concerned.

The HSI still doesn't work, and it can't be replaced with the copilot side directional gyro because that DG is driven by pneumatic suction and the HSI is electric, so the connections aren't the same. We're technically legal for night or IFR now because there's another VOR and an NDB, and the law doesn't say where the heading indicator has to be, but a scan involving a heading instrument on the other side of the cockpit isn't the most fun thing to do.

---

Also, there's still time to enter the contest to win a book by telling me your favourite true aviation story, personal or historical. Judging in a couple of days.

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!

It Doesn't Have a Coffee Cup Holder

I'm up to my old tricks: sticking my head and camera in every cockpit I'm allowed to, and serving them up for you to analyze.

What aircraft is this, and if that's too easy, guess what they were eating for inflight snacks. As usual, if you know for sure, don't spoil the fun of those working on figuring it out, but feel free to comment on how annoying it is to try to fly IFR with an attitude indicator like the one on the right. Once again, if you know the answer, please abstain from posting it. If you don't know for sure and want to guess, don't read the comments until you have made your guess, because typically some readers disregard this request and jump to reveal the answer.

Wreck Vacation, Not Airplane

Flight test day dawns. I drive out to the airport early, preflight the airplane, and use their computers to get the weather and NOTAM for the flight. I use their printer, because on an exam you need to show the examiner where you have obtained your data, and be able to explain the bases for your decisions.

Abbotsford is riddled with NOTAMs, the ILS is out of service, most of the taxiways are closed, all the TODA/TORA/ASDA/LDA runway distances are amended, the PAPI is out, the fire response service is downgraded, and there's probably an unlighted tower somewhere, there always is. I also look at the NOTAM for the airport where I'll be doing my ILS approach and at my alternate. They both have some closures considerably more significant than unlighted towers. In fact one is so significant that I lead the flight test with it.

I meet the examiner, and introductions out of the way, I present him my problem and proposed solution. The radar is out at Victoria. The NOTAM warns that FLT WITHIN 80 NM RADIUS MAY BE DENIED ROUTING AND/OR ALT REQUESTS. A flight test has a reasonable amount of priority, so we can go there, but all the arrivals require either RNAV or radar vectors, and I haven't spent any time learning or using the installed GPS. I suggest to the examiner that we file RNAV so that we can legally do the approach, but that I use conventional nav aids and he give me the minimum help required to close the STAR (that is get through the portion of the flight that requires either radar or RNAV), so we don't have to cancel. examiners rarely want to cancel tests, especially once they are already there and it's not Friday afternoon, so he agrees.

We start with the oral portion of the exam. It appears that I have somewhat forgotten how to play the game of taking an exam. I'm answering the questions the way I would to another pilot who was just asking me about the decisions I made, as opposed to demonstrating that I know the rules and the full reasons for each stage. For example I have planned one leg at 4000'. The examiner asks why. I grin sheepishly and say, "Because I'm a bush pilot." It's the lowest legal altitude for that leg, and when you're constantly doing short legs it's not efficient to climb to altitudes that make sense on longer legs. This isn't a very long leg, but perhaps it would have been more elegant to do it at 6000', the next legal altitude up.

The examiner says, "Wrong answer," and suddenly I realize that the question isn't asked with the assumption that I know that my choices are four, six or eight. I re-answer the question explaining that the minimum enroute altitude to guarantee obstacle clearance and nav aid reception is 3500' and that for the westward direction of flight an even thousand is required, and that I have chosen four thousand, because it is a relatively short leg and not worth the time to climb higher. That's the right answer.

He asks me the expected question about the weather requirements for my alternate, Vancouver International, and I lead with an interesting situation presented by the NOTAM there. Vancouver has three runways with five ILSes among them. But three ILSes are NOTAMed unserviceable and one is NOTAMed unauthorized, leaving only one operational ILS approach. The rules allow for different alternate minima depending on whether the airport in question has one or more than one usable ILS approaches. I say I am going to use the minima applicable to two usable approaches, and here is my reasoning. The purpose of the rule is to hedge against something going wrong with the one usable instrument approach in bad weather. The reason the runway 12 approach is not authorized is that it converges with the approved approach in use, and presumably some issue of equipment, personal or regulations doesn't permit them to have airplanes on approach to converging runways at the same time. But if the 26L approach went belly up, the runway 12 approach would no longer be converging. It presumably works fine, just isn't approved, but they could approve it and assuming the winds are as light as forecast, it would be perfectly usable. The examiner follows and agrees with my logic so then I demonstrate the arithmetic required to determine the minimum weather to file this as an alternate.

He asks me what other alternates I could choose and I point out that if the weather permitted, a better alternate might be Victoria, because being a company destination there would be facilities there for our passengers and airplane, and we wouldn't be hit with exorbitant landing and ramp fees. He says Vancouver isn't too bad that way, but where else could we land? There's Bellingham. I tell him I was just there last week, and they have an ILS. There would be a lot of customs and homeland security hassles, but provided you keep your hands visible and don't make any sudden movements, that's not going to kill you the way running out of usable airports will. "And where else could you land?" I'm scouring the chart now. The airplane carries quite a bit of fuel, so I start looking at airports in a wider and wider radius, trying to find ILS approaches. If everything here on the coast were fogged in we could go inland. I put aside the terminal chart and look for something to the east. I'm not sure what he's getting at here. He asks about Nanaimo. It's a long enough runway, served by an NDB approach that has a bend in it. He wants to know the minima for filing that as an alternate.

I look at the plate. It has one non- precision approach with a straight in minimum of 880 feet asl (798 agl) and an advisory visibility of 2 1/2 miles. To file it as an alternate aerodrome, assuming the weather allows a straight in approach, the forecast weather needs to be "600 and 2 or 300 and 1" above the MDA and advisory visibility, whichever is greater. That is a forecast ceiling of 798 + 300 = 1098 at least 1100' and a forecast visibility of at least three miles. (Two and a half plus one is three and a half, but the rules max out at a three mile visibility requirement). He accepts my answer and asks, "what else is that called?" I get the frowny face of concentration. It's not standard alternate minima. He supplies the answer, "It's called VFR." He's just underscoring the fact that Nanaimo is a pretty horrible alternate. Heck, I knew that. He was the one who suggested it.

The ground work is actually very fair and pretty easy. Thanks, Oak. Thanks, years of experience. Thanks, remembering to study.

We talk about the actual flight and what I will be required to do. He says that any options or questions put forward by ATC are mine to choose or answer. As long as I demonstrate what has to be demonstrated I can choose full procedure or vectors and any approaches I want. As this is a renewal I do not need to demonstrate a circling approach, so I can fly straight in if I like. I like.

I go to file the flight plan and the radar is back on line, so I can fly into Victoria without cheating. It's time to go to make the filed departure time.

I ask the examiner what he wants me to do about the fact that the VORs are impossible to identify on the ground. He asks me if they worked last time I flew. "That was a week ago, but you did a flight test yesterday, did they work then?" They did and that turns out to be good enough for both of us.

I start up and successfully do all the required checks and get my clearance. Take off, climb, remember to advance throttles to maintain manifold pressure on no-turbocharged airplane, accept vectors, intercept airway, get ATIS, accept assigned arrival, switch VORs at the noted point on the airway, fly outbound on the published radial, accept vectors to the localizer, reduce power for the 110 kt ILS approach speed, intercept localizer, intercept glideslope, gear down, adjust power, enrich mixtures, make tiny changes to maintain glideslope. This is going well.

We're about seven miles back on the glideslope (yes, they vector you into next week here) and the examiner asks me when I expect to be switched from terminal to tower. Any time now, I guess. He tells me to ask and I do. They tell me to switch now. Later he tells me that they asked me to switch earlier but that it was a poor call on their part, faint and badly worded. He only heard it because he expected it there, and they didn't ensure I received it. It may also have something to do with the fact that the brand new batteries for my noise cancelling headset are in my purse in the back seat of the airplane and not in my headset. The noise cancelling cut out all together on the approach. I can change them in flight, but now is not a good time. I pass the beacon but don't switch over to the missed approach frequency. Oak recommended against it here, as a distraction. There are enough distractions. Tower gives me a bunch of verbiage on short final, about where the traffic is, and not to descend below minima because there is a B737 positioning on the runway, something like that. I respond, as I am required to, distracting me just enough that I deviate from the ideal flight path. I get it back on before decision height but it's enough to makes the ILS approach score a 3 instead of a perfect 4. The examiner later says that the tower always does that, making it a slight rant to the effect that they have no idea how busy we are right then. He's one of the examiners who is on the candidate's side, cheering for them to pass.

I've already been briefed that I won't see the runway at decision height, so I call "minima no contact" and shove everything up without looking out at the runway, presumably right in front of me and adorned with a shiny Boeing. This is a nice easy missed approach, straight ahead with five miles in which to clean up the airplane and switch to and identify the NDB to which I have to turn next. Only I can't identify it. It's a steady barrage of static. I really cannot honestly say I hear any Morse code in there. I stab at the certified GPS receiver in the airplane and find the beacon only a few entries down the nearest column and turn direct using that. Then I second guess myself and wonder if that's cheating, seeing as I am claiming to be doing this without RNAV. Here is the one thing I know I have learned about IFR in the last ten years: ATC is your friend. I tell them them I am "unable to identify" the NDB and ask for a vector. They give me one right to where I'm going, making life easier. I can't quite reach the bag on the back seat. Maybe it fell on the floor. In real life, either the bag with batteries etcetera would be on the right seat where I could reach it, or I could ask the person in the right seat to "find me the batteries in that bag on the back." But it's a flight test, so he is not allowed to help me.

I get the ATIS for Abbotsford, five knots on the tail for 07, sounds like a straight in for me. I copy a hold clearance for the Whatcom beacon. It's an easy direct entry to the published hold, and I double check the radial so I don't screw up like last time. except I do. I manage to track inbound on my expect further clearance time. It's only about fifteen degrees off the assigned one, but seriously! It takes a special talent to screw up like Aviatrix. I think the appropriate three letter abbreviation here is FML. And that's not on the aviation abbreviations list linked at right. It's probably on Urban Dictionary though. The examiner has me check the track again and after I fix it allows me to get through with a barely passing two for my idiocy.

I accept ATC's offer of vectors for the straight in NDB 07 approach, and chop and drop for the beacon crossing. Of course that's where I get the engine failure: control, power drag identify, verify, feather and secure, while plummeting out of the sky to make the MDA before the timer tells me I should see the runway. I start to advance my one remaining throttle two hundred feet above MDA, because you can always go down more, but you can't go up more after a bust. He tells me I have runway in sight before I have completed the level off, so I reduce the throttle again and put down gear and approach flap. I can't remember if I used the final stage of flaps, but that's optional on a single engine landing, anyway. It's on the runway, it's straight, and the only thing I really screwed up was the hold, which he has already implied did not flunk me.

I exit on D, one of the two available taxiways on the whole airport, and call for taxi clearance. It's granted, and as I pull forward something catches my eye. The artificial horizon, hub of my pathetic little instrument scan has just rolled over and died. These things happen. This one could have happened in a turn while I was intercepting the inbound track on the NDB approach, or as the engine failed. I don't know that I would have caught it, disregarded it and re-established a scan in time to stay inside all the lines. It could have happened in hard IMC with a real engine failure and no one beside me, too. When the instrument that has at least sixty percent of a pilot's attention, and which the pilot follows almost without conscious thought, rolls over and dies, you can guess what a lot of pilots do. It's remarkable that after all these years my bag of luck still has some left. I'm not confident I would have passed that flight test partial panel.

The examiner leaves the plane telling me "no suspense, you passed," and I secure it then go inside for the debrief. He criticises my descent rate and choice of a straight in landing, saying that if I had looked at the windsock I would have seen more like ten knots than the five that was on the ATIS, but he admits that with the long runway I had leeway and that I landed it safely. "You would have done better to circle," he says. I don't admit to him that I doubt that. But I should have considered that five knots on the tail is a bigger chunk for the training aircraft than the one I work in.

My other score of two was a full on boneheaded move, again not playing the game of the flight test and completely not getting into the role. When asked what I would do in the event of an alternator failure I discussed landing ASAP and reducing electrical load. IN this airplane you do not cycle the alternator, and I knew that, but instead of pulling out or even mentioning the freaking emergency checklist, I spent a couple of minutes musing over the relative power draw of the old time analog radios and the big screen and sleek modern electronics of the GPS navcom. If he had said "simulated: you have an alternator failure" or I witnessed the alternator fail, I would have gone through the checklist item by item. But I treated it like a conversation and ignored the obvious stuff, just skipping to the interesting question of what had the greatest electrical draw. I was just out to lunch. I promise that in real emergencies I DO use my freaking checklist, memory items first then the piece of laminated paper, right to the end. Moron.

The rest was threes and fours, any minor error loses you the four: a little altitude loss here, a few degrees of track there. If anyone can hand fly perfectly for two hours at a time, then feel free to feel superior to me. You are. All fours on the ground, though. I know things. I just have to do them.

Finish the paperwork, get the licence signed (there's a space in the new booklet for him to sign, and he says Transport will send me a sticker), and back to the lake. Now I can relax and vacation. If you were ever wondering, being on vacation at a fabulous place does make an instrument renewal better, but not nearly to the same degree as renewing your instrument rating takes the sweetness out of being on vacation. I do not recommend it. But it's done. Until the company gets its act in gear and we have to do real PPC renewals, or RNAV rides or who knows we get a new type and I have to PPC on that. Probably in November right before I go to Cambodia, or something else crazy just to distract you from thinking, "Damn, this chick can't fly at all!"

---

Meanwhile, on the topic of wrecking airplanes, I'm unfamiliar with the landing gear extension system in the Piper Saratoga. Does anyone have information or theories as to why this one was landed with the gear retracted after an engine failure? Is gear extension totally dependent on engine-driven hydraulics, with no manual back up? Is the gear susceptible to not locking down properly if electrical power is removed before the squat switch registers weight on wheels? My first guess was that in the excitement of the forced approach the pilot neglected to extend the gear, but there's a brief interview with the pilot in which he expresses satisfaction with the landing as an outcome of his training. He also doesn't act the way I expect someone would if he executed a beautiful forced approach and then emergency responders collapsed the landing gear by pushing in the wrong place. The fire chief is quoted saying, "He did a good job landing that plane," and most of the headlines call it a smooth landing.

What Is Odd About This Panel?

You know I love to look at instrument panels, and that I go crazy over unusual or clever instruments. Here's a panel I saw recently. There's nothing particularly unusual about it, but the sum total is a little odd. I never would have guessed what it was, but I'm sure Cockpit Conversation readers will.

What am I sitting in as I take this picture? It is not an instructional aid or a museum piece. It is a real, installed engine instruments panel connected and working.

There will be a hint in the next post.