Q-Tips and Canoes

En route to a busy GA aerodrome, I checked the ATIS and started setting up for the runway in use. I needed one more approach before the end of the month to maintain my IFR currency, and was planning on flying it simulated just to get that box ticked. The time then passed the top of the hour, so I checked again, and discovered that the runway with the approach was now "closed per NOTAM" and the cross runway, with no instrument approach was in use. Unexpected, but perfectly manageable. On final I saw a light twin and a pick up truck on the grass at the side of the runway. Something had not gone well for someone.

I landed without incident and taxied to the FBO, where we learned that the disabled aircraft had had a gear collapse, a term which the FBO staff seemed pretty sure had been applied euphemistically to a situation where the pilot had neglected to extend the landing gear. The poor airplane was lifted back to its wheels and towed past the windows of the FBO, where I pointed out to my non-pilot co-worker the characteristic Q-tipped props of an aircraft that lands gear up with the engines powered. I paused as I wrote that. Of a propeller, Q-tipped refers to the ends being bent over. I've always called them that, and I remember the first time I saw a Q-tipped prop, on a fixed gear single whose pilot had tried to make it stop flying and land on a short runway, rather than going around and trying again with a better short-field approach. I think someone with me must have called them that, and I absorbed the term. Searching for an etymology, I discovered that there is a company that makes Q-tip propellers on purpose (and a funny story about an FAA inspector who didn't know that). Trying to find when they were invented, to help determine whether the company was named after the condition or vice versa, I wandered down a rabbit hole of the history of the tip-fin propeller, invented by J.J. Kappel, initially for marine applications. If anyone knows when they were first put on airplanes, let me know. I had to escape from articles like this one before I got wrapped up in the physics. This was meant to be a quickie blog entry.

So we're watching the remains of this once-airworthy vessel towed past, and the FBO staff are all fixated on it. One of them is scrambling for a ramp pass so he can drive down and check it out. My co-worker is confused about the excitement. "Remember how much we had to spend to get the engines overhauled on [the new plane we just bought for our fleet]?" I asked my co-worker. "The engines on the gear-up plane, no matter how new they are, are done now." The force of the prop strike bends and breaks other components of the engine.

"But what's the spectator value?"

I thought about it a while and finally came up with an analogy he could appreciate. He's an outdoorsman. "You know when someone drives their van into a parking garage or under a bridge with a canoe on top? No one is hurt, but the canoe is destroyed, and the van is damaged, and the person who did it is in emotional pain from how stupid they just were, and how much money they just destroyed. And everyone comes to look, and take pictures. You feel the pain, and you're so glad it wasn't you, because you know it could have been you." He got it.

How Far Along Are You?

My company recently bought a new airplane for our fleet. I may have blogged already about the previous owner and his son watching it go like it was a child going off to college. We told them we weren't sure exactly when we would arrive, so to leave it out on the ramp for us to collect, after the payment cleared. But they preferred to make the trip from town out to the airport on our schedule, to open their hangar and tow it out for the last time. The ops manager and I flew it to its new home, and then it sat in our hangar for a while, which maintenance discovered and rectified decades of idiosyncratic repairs. The wiring for the wing strobes was literally wrapped around the aileron cables, because there's nothing better than abrading through electrical wiring right by your fuel tank, while restricting the movement of your flight controls. There were a coupled of days I was alerted for an impending test flight, and then waved off, because the final run up had turned up a new leak or suspicious behaviour. The right side brakes weren't working. Even though I fly it single pilot from the left, and right brakes are optional on the type, a problem with the brakes is a problem with the braking system, and cannot be allowed to stand.

Finally, I was to instructed to fly it to another airport for a specialty refit. The avionics haven't been addressed yet, so I waited for the weather to improve to VFR and then grabbed the minimum plot equipment and flew it up, to take an airline flight back. The first officer stood at the foot of the airstairs as I boarded the commuter airliner, and he spotted the VFR charts sticking out of the pocket of my headset bag.

"You're an aviator," he observed. Not one to interfere with the linguistic process that is eliminating gendered terms for professions, I answered in the affirmative. (I also don't mind, guys, if you want to call yourselves aviatrices. It is a cooler word). "How far along are you?" asked the first officer.

I was halfway up the stairs by then, almost entering the cabin. What's the answer to that? Ten different jobs, an ATPL, eight thousand hours ... I ended up saying something condescending, telling him I likely had five times his hours. It could actually have been ten or twenty times: they're hiring FOs pretty green these days. I didn't mean to be condescending. I don't think he intended his comment that way either. I took it cheerfully, like being IDed at the liquor store. I was planning to apologize on the way out of the aircraft at the end of the flight, but it was windy and noisy and he was busy, so I just said goodbye with the other passengers. If you're reading, dude, this is your apology. If he's not, that's okay. I remember some pretty rude pilot passengers who thought they were better than me, from when I was flying airline, but now they're all just funny stories, so I don't mind being one of his.

To him, professional aviation is a progression from VFR to IFR and from small airports to big airports, so someone with a headset and VFR charts boarding a plane at a little airport was perceived to be near the beginning of the chain. I should have answered "oh maybe three quarters of the way there" based on the number of hours I estimate I'll accumulate before I retire. On the other hand, someone has to teach him that it's a bad idea to ask a woman "how far along are you?"

Annual Airworthiness Infomation Reporting

Every owner of a Canadian airplane is required to file an Annual Airworthiness Information Report for that airplane. It's not a big deal. Most of the time the information to file per airplane is shorter than the term Annual Airworthiness Information Report. It's almost as short as the abbreviation, AAIR. In the bad old days, they sent you a paper form with a built in carbon paper and you filled in the appropriate blanks. I have a few of the forms here, for reasons I will disclose later, so let's check them out.

Most of the form is already populated with the registration data of the aircraft, weight and engines and propellers and such. It's the same information you find in the Canadian Civil Aircraft Register. In fact, an odd error on the AAIR for one of our planes is reflected in a weirdness in the registry entry for that plane, so I suspect they draw on the same database. The data I add to the form is when the last inspection was performed, who did it, and how many hours the airplane flew in the calendar year. We bought a plane late last year from a private individual, and the total time flown in 2015, including flying it to our base for a still-in-progress makeover, was nine hours.

There are still people who own airplanes and not computers, so the forms persist, but I've been doing ours at my current company for the last three or four years, and I do them online. I'm "computer literate" "detail oriented," and anal about stuff getting done on time (what's the resume version of that? "able to work to deadline"?) so I'm a good fit for the job. The forms are due March 30th, but there's no reason not to file them as soon as the year is over, so they were on my list for this month. Today the forms, the actual forms that I hadn't seen for maybe ten years, turned up on my desk with letters on them. The letter tells me that Transport Canada is going to begin electronic notification of the Annual Airworthiness Information Report in order to reduce its environmental footprint and better manage public funds. It informs me that, You are receiving this notification because we do not have an e-mail address or fax number on your aircraft file. The paper forms are pre-populated with data that includes both a valid e-mail and fax number.

They literally sent me a form with my e-mail printed on it, in order to ask me for my e-mail. I suppose it could have been worse. They could have e-mailed and asked for my e-mail. But that way I wouldn't have to walk over to the recycling with all these forms and letters. I e-mailed the AAIR people to tell them about this, and to thank them for the laugh. I flew two hour and did paperwork for the rest of the day.

Why I Love My Director of Maintenance

I'm afraid I have to be much vaguer than I would like to be, due to the company rule forbidding operational information on social media, but I want to share the DoM's awesomeness.

The first part of the story is probably familiar to all pilots and aircraft repair personnel. We had a long text conversation about a possible snag. (Snag is Canadian-speak (I think Commonwealth-wide) for a reportable aircraft defect--Americans call them squawks). I had noticed a small discrepancy between the way I expect the airplane to behave and the way it is behaving. It has done this on a couple of flights. It's subtle, and not a mode that I use for long on a typical flight, so it probably went a while before I noticed it at all. At first I had blamed my technique or inattention for the effect, so didn't perceive it as a reportable defect. But then I got verification from someone else who didn't know what I was expecting him to observe. It's a tiny effect, but if it is a system that breaks a little bit before it breaks altogether, it could be a really big deal.

My director of maintenance patiently texted back explanations of how the system works. The texts themselves were themselves neither condescending nor dismissive, but by assembling the pieces one could read the message "that's not how it works." I respect his knowledge, and I know that the mental model I have built from the description and diagram of the system in the aircraft manual is far from the way it works to the people who actually put wrenches on it. I can understand that what I think is happening isn't readily explained by the construction of the system. It's a difficult system to inspect, but there's a fairly straightforward shop test that can be done that might confirm the observation--but again it might not, because it's possible that the aircraft has to be in flight for the effect to occur. I suggest that that test be done, and promise to try and think of another explanation for my observation.

And then a single text message says it all:

I doubt you are wrong. It's probably fucked up. I will fix it for you.

Trust, directness, and action. Is there anything else one could require from someone who maintains her aircraft?

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.

Dead Reckoning

As usual I have flight-planned for one task and the onboard satellite communications link to base brings us instructions to do something else. We're to fly direct to a particular airport, and get a maintenance extension from an approved maintenance organization there. We can do that. I punch it in on the GPS, O Mighty Box that guides us safely from place to place.

The GPS in this particular airplane is not that mighty. It's a nice colour moving map, WAAS capable IFR installation, but it has a habit of losing GPS position for exactly two minutes at a time, about twice a day.  We don't fly GPS approaches in this airplane. The database isn't up-to-date and it has a great ADF and VOR.

It's almost nice to have the one or twice a day reminder to keep my navigation skills honed.  DEAD RECKONING says the screen, continuing to show the little airplane symbol, assuming that we're continuing on the same track and speed.  People say that it used to be deduced reckoning, reduced to ded. reckoning, and then converted to dead. I don't know if that's a reverse etymology or not, but some people get quite stuffy about spelling it DED. Garmin does not agree. And two minutes later, almost to the second, it knows where it is again. It isn't a satellite configuration issue. It hasn't lost power. I haven't banked excessively, blocking the GPS antenna. it just does it. We track the issue for a while, trying to troubleshoot but never find its periodic outages corresponding to time of day, time in operation, position, anything.

Eventually when the plane was down for maintenance long enough for this to happen, we pulled the entire unit and sent it in for repair. Like all electronic devices these days "repair" consisted of us receiving a reconditioned model of the same type. It hasn't lost GPS position since, and we bought a database subscription for it, so now I trust it with my life. Or at least with my acute embarrassment.

Human Factors

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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




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

It Did Not, However, Contain a Live Bobcat

I'm picking an airplane up from a routine maintenance inspection and service. It's early in the morning, before anyone from the maintenance unit is in. This is not unusual. It's a little unusual for us to have scheduled maintenance performed away from home base, but sometimes the person responsible for maintenance makes arrangements with other companies.

I pick up the journey log. If that paperwork is not done, the maintenance is considered incomplete, so I always check it first. The signed maintenance release shows the work that has been performed on the airplane, so I know what to pay particular attention to on my inspection. The entry matches the purchase order, and is unremarkable.

I start the walkaround. Numerous cowling screws are loose. These are things that work themselves loose over time. I find loose ones in the field and just snug them up.  If a particular one is consistently loose, I report it and maintenance repairs the anchor. There's probably a reading of the regulations that requires me to leave my Swiss army knife in my pocket and call a licensed AME to tighten my cowling screws, but who would do that? It's permissible for a few to be missing, but I'd rather they stay in. While I'm not impressed that these folks didn't check that all the screws were tight after replacing the cowling, I'm more concerned about what they didn't tighten that I can't check. I verify through the front opening in the cowlings that the front few spark plugs are tight.  I had a coworker once (different job, different maintenance unit) who came back from a flight reporting a rough running engine.  While waiting with him for the AME to arrive, I poked about in the cowling, not expecting to find anything, just the equivalent of opening the hood and staring at a non-functioning car engine. But in this case my hand came back with a spark plug that had only been finger tight. Someone was distracted between setting it in place and putting a wrench on it. It turned out that day that all the bottom spark plugs were loose.

The spark plugs I can reach are tight here,but the little door in the cowling that can be opened to access the oil quick drain is still open. The oil quick drain itself is closed and there is oil in the engines.  A quart difference between the levels in the two crankcases, but they're both in the acceptable range.

There's a tire gauge in the baggage compartment, a screwdriver in the cabin, and the piece de resistance: there's an electronic multi-tester inside one of the engine cowlings, barely visible through the little door through which I access the oil dipstick.


We do not depart until I have spoken with the PRM and a maintenance supervisor here, and we find ourselves a new maintenance unit in this area. I did return the tools, even though I always figure that anything left in my airplane after maintenance should be mine to keep.

Oh, and if you're confused about the bobcat reference .

Photo Finish

I checked with maintenance regarding my recent post about the fire protection system. Our fire detector is photocell activated. The photocell is sensitive to a particular wavelength of light, supposedly characteristic of fire.

I didn't get to ask the obvious questions about why fire detection systems aren't overwhelmed with false positives from the sun, an awesome source of almost every electromagnetic wavelength, and able at some time of the day or some practical bank angle, to shine through every chink and opening in an engine cowling. An apprentice had a more pressing question about reinstallation of an exhaust manifold, and I was wearing silly girl shoes for a social event, so I teetered back out of the hangar to the office and left the maintenance to the maintainers.

Along with the answer to my question, and before the apprentice needed direction, I received the following story. A certain air carrier's night maintenance crew (they know who they are) conducted an inspection on at least one of the carrier's fleet. Their fire detection system used visible light, and the crew followed the manufacturer's instructions to test it by shining a flashlight on the detectors. The system failed the test. The crew was preparing to replace several thousand dollars worth of aviation grade electronic gear, when someone realized that that instructions were as old as the system, twenty years or so, and predated the invention of the LED flashlights the crew were using. The diodes were not emitting the necessary wavelength to trigger the detector, because when the instructions said "flashlight" an incandescent flashlight was assumed.

 The Wikipedia article on Fire Detection suggests that our photocell might be tuned to multiple wavelengths, possibly including UV and/or IR to compare the ratios. This still doesn't explain how an ordinary incandescent flashlight would trigger it, but the sun wouldn't, but does make the concept of photometric flame detection clearer. While looking for more information on flame detectors I discovered that there is a whole new generation of fire detection that uses machine intelligence to recognize the appearance of actual flames, something that is pretty fricking clear to humans. Combined with smoke detectors, something a commenter suggested on the previous post, there are enough different kinds of combustion detectors on aircraft to warrant a survey post on the topic, some time when my working day is shorter.

I was also entertained by the Wikipedia article on the Flashlight, which explains why Americans call them flashlights. The earliest zinc–carbon batteries could not provide a steady electric current so when combined with the inefficient carbon-filament bulbs, the result was a light that frequently blinked off so the battery could recover.

Late Spring

An airplane in Canada is legally required to be equipped with a working oil pressure gauge for each engine. When you start a piston engine, your eyes go to the oil pressure gauge. You're waiting for the pressure to come up. Given that it's the first thing you do on starting an engine, it's one of the first things I learned as a student. (Right after, "in order to start an engine, you have to turn the key to the start position and hold it there until the engine has actually started," which was explained to me immediately after I did it the wrong way. Yeah, I was pretty dense).  If the pressure doesn't come up, you're supposed to shut down the engine and not do anything else.

I'm not sure I've ever followed that instruction. I am starting an engine that I have just verified has oil in the crankcase and does not have a huge puddle of oil on the ground underneath. And I know how hot or cold that oil is, from 'so hot that I had to use a rag to handle the dipstick, and couldn't really see a level anyway', to 'I just spent twenty minutes deicing and I can't feel my toes or fingertips'. If it's the latter, yeah, I know that oil isn't going to come dancing through the tiny line to the pressure gauge in any big hurry. I will give the oil a while to warm up, and thus the oil pressure more time to increase.

In retrospect, I wonder if disciplining student eyes to go straight to the oil pressure gauge was a way of training us to be vigilant for a hot start when we move on to turbine engines.

High oil pressure can be a sign of a blockage, or you're running summer weight oil too far north, so instead of distributed cooling slipperiness, the oil is a viscous glob having trouble getting forced through some part of the system. Yeah, oil that is too thick can cause high or low oil pressure indication, because unless you're short on oil, both high and low oil pressure indications are caused by poor oil circulation. The pressure is high one place and low another place. Or it's the gauge. Low or high oil pressure, it's usually the gauge.

Even when its probably not the gauge, so long as there isn't oil splattered all over the airplane, and the engine didn't quit, the pilot rolls up to maintenance and says, "I have a low oil pressure indication, but it's probably just the gauge." You never want to give maintenance the idea that you are terrified of the airplane they gave you. I'm not sure why we do this. Perhaps I should try the opposite strategy sometimes and insist that ... oh wait I did that last week with a stuck propeller cable that turned out to be ... maybe I'll admit that one another time. While instantly diagnosable by someone leaning into the cockpit from the right-side door, it really wasn't visible to someone strapped into the left seat. Anyway, under-reporting of the severity of our concerns seems to be a pilot thing. Maybe because maintenance likes to show us to be wrong, so if we show little concern, they will work hard to find some way it could have killed us. Which is what we want them to do.

So my story is, I report unequal oil pressure on several consecutive flights in this airplane. It's in the green on both engines, I concede, but used to be equal, I think. I didn't remember there being a split, and I would. A pilot scans the engine instruments far more times than she knows, because we only notice we're doing it when something is wrong, and the two needles for the same thing on the two engines not being in the same position on their adjacent dials comes up as wrong, even when they are both in the green. The oil pressure indication on the right engine is inching up slowly. If it were a single engine airplane I probably would not notice. That's something I say a lot, but I keep reporting these things, because sometimes it matters. It's remarkable what a tiny thing can be a symptom of.


Eventually the needle reaches the yellow and they take it apart and find out what was wrong with it. An oil pressure gauge works the only way one logically could but I was still kind of flabbergasted when I realized that a little pressure line comes off the oil system, ducting a bit of the engine-pressure oil right to the instrument in my dashboard. Its internals consist partly of a ball bearing and a spring, and the pressure of the oil on the ball bearing compresses the spring, driving the needle.  The spring was worn out.

A Line of Text

It's a long weekend, or the middle of the night, or maybe both. I'm picking up an airplane that has received scheduled maintenance overnight at a maintenance organization that we have an existing relationship with, but we don't own. The Ops Manager and the Person Responsible for Maintenance are out of contact and out of the country, in a central American country that a Google image search illustrates with palm trees, beaches and masked men carrying machine guns. I'm in Canada, working for a Canadian company, and thus bound by the Canadian Aviation Regulations and Standards, which require not only that the work be done, but that before the airplane is flown the work be documented as complete in the airplane's journey log.

There is no one at the hangar, but I have access to the airplane and the journey log is inside. I read through the entries. Nothing fancy: oil change, lube, basic inspection and the recurring airworthiness directives. ADs are corrective measures mandated to make up for some revealed weakness of the type of airplane. There are six of them required every hundred hours this airplane flies. Each requires a special inspection of a specific component. All were due for this inspection, but only five have been entered in the logbook. I check to see if it has been entered somewhere else in the description of the maintenance. Nope. I page back through the last hundred hours to see if it was done early for some reason. Nope.

I call and e-mail contact numbers we have for the maintenance company. No joy.

Now the work that has to be documented here was almost certainly done. It's a minor inspection requiring no dis-assembly, and while it's not legal for me to declare it inspected, I can look at it and see that it's fine. But it's not documented done with an official signature, so in the eyes of the regulatory authority it has not been done and is therefore unsafe. I could fly this airplane and in the tiny chance that an inspector performed a random check of me, my airplane and its paperwork, there is a multiplicative tiny chance that the inspector would recognize that this airplane was lacking this inspection. They would see from the paperwork that an inspection had been recently carried out. They would walk around and look for evidence that we were neglecting fluid leaks, brake pads or control hinges, check our weight and balance paperwork, make a few token attempts to intimidate me, and then be on their way.

If I failed to spot the missing line item and flew the airplane for a week and back to home base before I "noticed" it, there would be no repercussions for me. But that's not how I roll. I try to think outside of the box.

There are a number of airplanes parked on the ramp, not the same as ours but from the same manufacturer and I know that they have the exact same AD. The company that operates these aircraft is the tenant of the hangar next door, and their door is open. I also remember that because of some complicated personnel-borrowing trick we did last year, that they are legally allowed to sign for our aircraft. I poke my head in and find a lone guy doing something to the airstairs on a Metro. I trot out my sob story, including the detail about where the key personnel from my company are, because it sounds so remote it might as well be the moon, to me.

"That's my country, where I'm from," says the guy with the wrench. Okay, that works too, on the sympathy front, maybe.

The central American is super nice, and a fully certified AME, but he's worked with this company for less than a week so is not yet legally allowed to sign documents as a representative of their company. Yep, the guy is 100% qualified to safely do an inspection that has almost certainly been done anyway, but he still can't sign for my plane.

I get a call back from someone who confirms that the inspection was performed, but that he was a day contractor and therefore can't sign it. I need to get the head aviation maintenance engineer to amend the entry. The next morning he came out to sign it, and then the flight was cancelled.

If you can find an operations that has never lost a flight to fouled up paperwork I'm not sure if you've found a truly amazing company or a really irresponsible one, but something is not normal there. Honestly, more energy goes into making sure airplanes are legal according to the safety regulations than goes into actually making them safe.

Flying Machine

The position of PRM - Person Responsible for Maintenance - is an official one in a Canadian aviation organization. The holder has to write a test and pass an interview to show they understand the regulations and responsibility. There was a while in our company where the holder of the position was trying to transfer the duty and responsibility to someone else because the outgoing PRM was too busy to do the job, but the supposed-to-be trainee PRM didn't hold either a pilot licence or an aviation maintenance licence. That's not a legal problem, but while he was clearly enthusiastic about ensuring the aircraft worked safely, the idea of doing maintenance just because it's legally required was a hard sell. There were clearly a lot of cracks for things to fall in, big holes in those layers of swiss cheese, so I was keeping a close watch, and ended up doing some PRM duties.

The purpose of the above paragraph is to explain why I am the one here talking to the new PRM (neither of the above people) about upcoming maintenance, and why I knew these things. The AME is confused as to why I say the propellers on this airplane will be due for overhaul in the spring, because he knows he just put them on a couple of years ago, and normally propellers have about a ten year overhaul cycle. The AME has previously worked on corporate and private aircraft and, while of course he knows that there is an hours-flown component as well as a calendar time requirement for a propeller overhaul, he can't remember ever seeing anyone fly the hours off before the propeller times out. But we've put almost two thousand hours on these propellers, so we have to overhaul them.

I, on the other hand, have pretty much always worked on commercial aircraft that can easily log twelve hours a day. I'm not sure I've ever seen a propeller time out, except on a plane that we bought for parts. We will send its propellers out for overhaul and swap them onto the airplane whose propellers have timed out.

Castor gras

The guys in the maintenance hangar are working on an outside customer's airplane. It's a Beaver, not one of those stunning privately owned amphibs with a spotless retro paint job and a millionaire owner, but a working airplane, company logo on the tail and oil streaked all over the cowling. There's a joke that you don't have to teach the routes to a new hire at a bush company. They can just follow the trails of oil from place to place, left by the Beavers.

Maintenance folk always seem to like working on Beavers. I guess it's nostalgia and respect for the famous workhorse. And I guess they aren't too fiddly. I've flown the Beaver. I've also flown a Found, one of the recent attempts to replace the Beaver. Yeah, not there yet. And it's not as if most Beavers need replacing, just a little end of season TLC. I say something about the amount of grease on the airplane as I go by. They're quiet, probably trying not to bust a gut from accidental innuendo. We're not unaware that Americans use Beaver as a slang word for female genitals, but for me it's a great airplane, our national animal, the symbol on the nickel and a big chunk of our history first. It was trade in beaver pelts that drove the early Canadian exploration and economy.

They were used to make hats, and the pre-worn greasy ones, castor gras were the most valuable.

Last time I saw a privately-owned one it was parked between me and the FBO. As I walked by, admiring it, a man in his sixties asked, "What are you grinning at?"

"Pretty airplane," I said, as though it weren't self-explanatory.

"We come with it," said another man.

You know, if you wanted to get picked up by rich, self-confident men, an airport would not be a bad place to hang out.

Walkaround Excitement

I walk around the airplane--it's the one with the gouge under the wingtip. I can't miss it now that I know it's there. Everything is in order once I top up the oil, so we haul it out of the hangar and clear of the broken pavement FOD zone that has developed around the front of the hangar. I'm not sure whether the landlord or the airport authority are responsible for maintaining it, but they're not. We don't want to damage the propellers or the payload with flying debris, so ensure that we're on clean pavement for engine start and taxi. I call for fuel and then check all the caps and do my traditional last circumnavigation of the airplane before boarding. It's a last chance to spot an open inspection port, key left in a door, anything like that. I often wonder if other pilots will see me and think that's my whole walkaround, a literal walk once around the airplane. I spot something that shouldn't be there. I'm not even sure how I see it, but the mind learns what should be there and without even reporting to the consciousness when the eyes sees the expected, it quickly raises a flag for the unexpected.

I crawl back under the airplane. There's a screw head sticking out of one the main tires. More to the point, there's a screw point sticking into one of the main tires. The tire tread is good, not much wear, a big solid looking chunk of rubber. And the head of a screw sticking out of it. I have no idea how long this screw is. It's a pretty standard screw head that I've seen on lots of different length screws. It could be so short it's nothing. It could go right through to the tube. It could be only in the tire so far, but the force of one landing could drive it through to the tube and cause a blowout. I don't even know how long it has been there. Did I miss it on the proper walkaround this morning? The airplane could have been standing on it. Did I pick this up hauling the airplane out this morning or has it bee there for a week? Do I check every visible surface of every tire well enough every day I fly that I would have seen this as soon as it occurred?

The most likely case is that I can pull the screw out with my fingers or the edge of my knife blade and then fly the airplane with no ill effects. But I'm not going to do that because there's the possibility that the tire will go flat--either right away, or in flight while it's retracted. If anything is going to be damaged because of this, I want it to be done by someone who can repair it. I get an AME, who looks closely and pulls it out. It's a perfect ambiguous length such that it could still maybe, possibly have nicked the tube, but we don't think so and all agree that we'll go flying.

And the tire still hasn't gone flat, so we were right.

Three Shades of Guilt

The ops manager asks me to come from the office into the hangar to look at something. That's not a really unusual occurrence, but what I see is a gouge under the wing of the airplane I flew back to base last night. The metal is creased in. Not sharply just enough to make it abundantly clear that this is not a mere paint scratch. I feel sick. This is the result of taxiing or towing the airplane such that the wingtip passes over an object, except that it doesn't pass over, it scrapes over. Obviously it's something that shouldn't happen, but when it does, the pilot should notice and report it. I have no memory of any incident on my just-returned-from rotation that could have caused this.

I look around the hangar at the equipment under the path that wing would have taken into the hangar. Nothing has paint scraped on it. I'm sure the ops manager can see my horror. I don't remember what I said. Either I did this or I missed seeing it on multiple preflight inspections. Either way I bear some responsibility. I care much less that a deer bashed in the side of my own vehicle the week before. This gouge, or some other wingtip damage I failed to spot could have been serous damage that I shouldn't have taken into the air. I'm very sure it isn't, but I'm not a structural engineer. It's not my job to make that call. Had I found it on a preflight there would have been iPhone pictures going to someone with a maintenance certification before I flew it.

I go back and look at the gouge. It is a little difficult to see, just because of the shape of the wing, and the colours of the paint, and my height. I always check wingtips for damage, because that's a common place to get damage on the taxi, in the hangar or while parked on the ramp. I always look at the underside of the wing, looking for blocked vents, signs of bird or insect entry and fluids from the engines splattered under the flaps. I'll look from the wingtip, under the wing and along the length of the spar for signs of airframe stress, but then my focus is not on the near underside of the wingtip. I have to duck down and look at it from a slightly different direction to see this gouge. So embarrassing as it is, I prefer to think that I missed seeing this as opposed to missed doing it.

But I fly this airplane a lot. Did I do it sometime in the past and the difficulty I have just argued for in seeing the gouge means that no one has caught it in months? I look even more closely to see if I can pretend to know the age of the damage from its appearance. And then I see something almost hilarious. Part of the reason the gouge is hard to see is that it has been painted over with touch up paint. I almost laugh. It's an old problem, one that has been inspected, written off and fixed up. It's even more embarrassing that I didn't see it, ever, but it's now certain that I didn't do it last night.

One of the regular maintenance staff says he thinks it's been there since we got the airplane. I think the ops manager is still suspicious that it represents mishandling of the airplane in the hangar, and a cover-up by someone in maintenance. Unfortunately at the time this story takes place we were having some issues there that made this not paranoia. I trust the guy who said it had been there all along, and not just because it conclusively gets me off the hook for having done the damage. He's a trustworthy person, but more than that, and I told him this myself so he knew I wasn't suspicious. "I've seen paint jobs that you have done and you would never have done such a crappy job." You can see every brush stroke and the colours are poorly matched.

Diversity in Coveralls

I'm still working on my Human Factors course. In typical training film style the cast features maintenance personnel of varying age, sex and ethnicity, acting out little scenarios. I keep wondering if they are starving actors or actual AMTs. The module tells me that assertive statements are honest, open, and direct and "deal with facts (rather than your opinion)."

Assertive body language requires:
- maintaining eye contact
- talking in a strong steady tone of voice with a normal volume
- standing comfortably (relaxed) but firmly
- standing close enough for your presence to be felt but not so close as to be aggressive
- gesturing with your hands (keep your hands out of your pockets)
- using facial expressions which support your statement
Assertive body language will help you stand up for your rights!

Okay, I can be assertive: state the facts, not too submissive, not too aggressive, untainted by my opinion. But then the same page advises me to include statements like "I feel", "I want, "I think." Wait what? Prefacing a fact with "I feel," "I want," or "I think" is a way to reduce the directness and assertiveness of a statement, and turn it into an opinion. Are they trying to tell me that That tire needs to be changed is less assertive and direct than I feel that tire needs to be changed? Did I write that down wrong? I'm told to use assertive statements like: "I felt embarrassed when you criticized me in front of the others." I don't know that there isn't a scenario in which the reply to that is not somewhere between "Man up!" and "Good, so don't screw up again." Maybe, "Would you like a hankie?" Or what about the suggestion to be assertive and telling your supervisor that you need a variety of tasks in order to avoid boredom? Anyone try that?

They don't show those suggestions as a video dialogue. Instead the actors show the right way and wrong way to approach tasks. Guess which this one is:

AMT #1: "I haven't had a chance to do the APU combustion chamber and external inspection. Can I forget about it?"

AMT #2: "Yeah, takes two hours to do it all, and I've never seen a problem with one."

That's very comparable to pilots skipping checklist items. "It's never been a problem," is a ridiculous reason not to check something, but it totally happens.

There's a strange mix of useful and loopy suggestions, leaving me wondering if I'm too cynical to realize that the loopy ones have their uses, or too naive to realize they are all loopy. I'm not even sure whether Most of the pressure generally comes from you. You create the pressure by accepting unreasonable timelines. is sage or the loopy result of someone who doesn't understand that the timelines predate problems. The pilot finds a problem thirty minutes before the airplane is ready to depart. The customer is waiting. At what point does the AMT accept any of this? Clearly Scotty of the USS Enterprise managed pressure by multiplying his repair time estimates by three, but you notice the Enterprise never had a problem that required a part to be shipped from Vulcan during that planet's High Holy Week. They never had to remove the defective part, send it across the neutral zone to be overhauled and then wait for it to be shipped back. That's the beauty of replicators.

Or maybe when Captain Kirk is yelling over the intercom, Scotty is mentally asking himself ...

What is the reality of the problem? (e.g., Can I safely complete the job in the time allotted?
- What is the worst thing that could happen to me?
- Am I overreacting to the situation?
- Can I change the situation so that something positive can come out of it?
- If I can't, what is the best way to deal with the problem?

Has this happened to me before?
- If so, what did I do? What can I do better?
- If not, then what is a rational plan to solve it?

The warp core goes critical and/or we are tortured by Klingons is usually the worst thing on the Enterprise, but sometimes I think it may be destruction of the universe and another parallel one. Or maybe it's missing a birthday party.

Nancy was pleased that she would have the help of two experienced AMTs for the detailed inspection. This will let her finish the job on time so that she can be at her son's birthday party. She had to work through the last two parties. Nancy's supervisor walked over and said, "Sorry but Jason had to go to Tuktoyaktuk to work on an engine failure and Melissa has to solve a pressurization problem on the plane that just came in. You're going to be on your own for this one. This is a good opportunity for you to prove yourself and keep your job".

Should Nancy prove herself or disappoint her son again?

I'm not even sure what that's supposed to be about. I don't get to go to birthday parties. I think it might be written in my job description, "does not attend birthday parties." Being required to work unscheduled overtime seems to be a sucky thing about working in maintenance, because you could just put down your tools and go home. The pilot doesn't really have that option, so I don't have a broad basis for sympathy. Aviation in general is not compatible with being there for other people's life events. I kind of suspect that Nancy's kid will have a better year in general if she keeps her job than if she loses it over a birthday party. I suppose we're supposed to counsel Nancy to have a hissy fit, excuse me to be assertive and demand additional resources for the inspection, but that's not going to make them appear. The program tells me to Click on "Continue" to see a suggestion.

According to the module, Nancy should "Stop", "Look", "Think", and "Act". The action would be to talk to her boss about how her overtime work affects her family life and how this stress is affecting her job performance. Okay, so she's had a nice talk with her supervisor. Now does she perform the inspection or go home and blow up balloons? The lack of resources advice in the training module consistently fails to address issues that arise when there just aren't resources. There isn't a hangar available. It's going down to -30 tonight and it will be -32 tomorrow night, and soon there won't be day at all until spring. There's no good strategy. So don't pretend like there is.

Oh, now I totally want to see a human factors training course where all the examples are drawn from Star Trek.

Four Bad Omens for a Human Factors Course

There are a lot of accidents cause by pilots flying in poor weather. Decades ago Canadian aviation authorities tried to rectify this by increasing meteorological knowledge requirements and offering more opportunities for ongoing learning, and I think also improved weather information products. In the process, someone realized that pilots knew what kind of weather was forecast, knew the implications for their flight, and went flying in it anyway. It wasn't about what the pilots knew or how good the forecasts were. It was about the decisions they made with that information.

So we have Human Factors training, about the human, not mechanical or meteorological, factors in the accident chain. The theory is that if we understand why and how humans make stupid decisions and arm ourselves with some strategies to avoid such decisions, that we will make safer decisions. It's mandatory recurrent training. I recently had to ground a pilot I supervise because company records didn't show human factors training to be complete.

Last time mine was up for renewal, the safety coordinator and ops manager had signed us up for an online course. That's not an uncommon nor even a totally unwelcome form of information delivery these days. The NASA icing course is fantastic. Also free. This one wasn't, but after the first few minutes my expectations were not high.

Omen #1: The course can only be accessed though Internet Explorer.

Omen #2: When I open the course in IE, the server barfs a full page of java error messages because it can't handle the fact that I have a three letter language code set in the browser for my first choice language.

I reset the browser to en-ca and then again to plain old en and the server will finally talk to me. It asks me, "Do you think you could ever make a mistake leading to a potential aviation accident like that shown in the photograph?"

While the photograph is loading I think, "yes" because I know I make mistakes. The text is saying something similar. And then I look at the picture. It's a helicopter. So I amend my thought to, "No, I probably wouldn't try to fly a helicopter, but if I did, it would look like that shortly."

Omen #3: The next words are "However, this program will help you, an Aircraft Maintenance Technician (AMT), avoid the error you don't intend to make by raising your awareness of how those errors are made."

Um ... I'm not an AMT. Have I got the wrong course here? It's all registered to my name. Good abbreviation though. A way to refer to AMEs and apprentices in one go without having to know their paperwork status.

Omen #4 The words "to facilitate your learning you should view the "Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance" video. The video can be obtained from Transport Canada."

Wait, they are doing web delivery of a course that requires me to go to a branch office of Transport Canada and borrow a video cassette? Okay TC has probably got it on DVD now, but geez, are they going to deliver the content or a pointer to it?

Every slide is illustrated by accident porn: the crumpled strewn remains of an aircraft. It probably sounds really macabre but in aviation we do think about these things all the time. I learned to fly in an airplane that had the words "serious injury or death" placarded in at least two different places on the dashboard in front of me. You pretty much have to present a pilot (or aircraft maintainer) with a crumpled ball of snot and aluminum to make us sit up and pay attention.

Sometimes the text doesn't change when I advance to the next slide and sometimes only part of it changes, so I have to play "spot the difference" to get the content. The core of the content is a menu of "dirty dozen" human susceptibilities. I've seen these before on maintenance breakroom posters. It's the AMT (see, I'm using my newly acquired knowledge) equivalent of the Five Dangerous Attitudes that the pilot-oriented courses teach. The student can work through the dirty dozen in any order, but even though the course encourages you not to try to do it all at once, there is no bookmark, done flag or other indication of which ones you've completed.

There are videos embedded in some slides. Possibly they are embedded in all the ones where nothing seemed to happen when I clicked next, so I clicked next again. If so, the course allowed me to go on without viewing the video. It tells me to "Click on "Continue" to see a suggestion." There's no continue button and I can't go on because the next is greyed out. I pressed the button for French, because that wasn't greyed out, and the program crashed. I log back in and look at some more, then it crashes again on refresh.

There's irony in that I'm doing this training while somewhat fatigued from last night's overnight flight and distracted by constantly checking the weather for tonight's, two of the dirty dozen right there. I'll go get a nap and tell you more about it later.

I'm Not Even the PRM

As pilot in command of an airplane I have to be assured that all the maintenance is done as both safety and legality require before I take to the skies. When I came on with this company they had a problem with missed maintenance events, so I made them an excel spreadsheet with conditional formatting to colour events close to due in bright alerting colours. Every once in a while a new thing that I should have been tracking but wasn't is unearthed, either because I set up the sheet based on the aircraft manufacturer's intervals and the component manufacturer had a more specific requirement, because the requirements are amended, because I made a false assumption or because I just plain missed something. Today it was determined, I think through researching an STC, that a particular check valve, if it was one of two particular possible models, is due for replacement ten years from the date of manufacture. I pulled off the panel under which the check valve lurked and determined with a flashlight and determined squinting that the part was of one of the specified model numbers, dash four. I don't know if the -4 radically changes the life expectancy of the part. I just relay this information to the AME.

And then I go and do some other things slightly more piloty. Or maybe less. I think it may have involved getting a return authorization for oxygen regulators that were adjusting themselves in flight, leaving two crew members with hypoxia in the first week we used them. We stopped using them after that.

And then back to the check valve. Dash-4 or not it still needs to be replaced ten years after manufacturing, so the AME goes back into the panel, with a flashlight and a mirror, hunting for a date. There's a straight line in the manufacturer's label that has been scratched off. Was that the date. I joke and ask him can't he determine the model year from the colour and styling? We kind of suspect that if this check valve were a Volkswagon Beetle it would have a split windscreen and tiny red tail lights. "I'll order one now," sighs the AME.

And then after I went back to my computer, the ops manager kicked me out for working too long a day.