Five Freaking Kilograms

A pilot licence is not valid without an accompanying medical certificate. The medical 'certificate' is now a rubber stamp initialled by the doctor in the same booklet as the licence sticker, but the terminology of 'certificate' and 'accompanying' persists, just like 'dialing' and 'hanging up' a telephone. When I'm working I usually get the medical renewed in the month before it expires, or occasionally I have to get it done the month before that, if I'm going to be working in the states right through the last month of validity. I thought of not renewing my medical when I wasn't sure when I'd be working, just to save a few dollars, but one doesn't want to be applying for jobs with an invalid medical, risking being called for an interview the next day and not being able to get a renewal in time. And I'm kind of wary about running around with no medical. It seems as though I might be scrutinized more closely renewing a lapsed medical than a current one.

A pilot's medical certification expires at midnight on the first of the month, and I have a nine a.m. appointment on the second. For nine hours I'm not certified to fly airplanes. I can cope. Maybe I should have stretched it for another month. But I didn't. I woke up, dug my licence out of my flight bag, looked up my flight time in the last ninety days (zero!) and in the last twelve months in my logbook, drank three glasses of water, and went to the doctor's office.

On arrival there's a form to fill out. These guys print out the usually persistent information from last year's form and just ask me to make any corrections. I also fill in the flight hours, check "no" to the question about aviation accidents since my last medical, and answer the question about consulting a physician since my last medical. Let's see, there was the eye infection, a routine cervical cancer screening test, and all the vaccinations for going to Cambodia. I can't remember anything else. I always feel like I'm going to be arrested later for forgetting that I sought medical attention for some long healed malady. Maybe I should keep a special file. I fill in everything I remember and hand the form back.

Now I'm given a paper cup. (That's what drinking all that the water was for). Unlike Sulako's experience, I'm not subjected to the sight of other people's urine samples. I can't find the link. He must have taken the photo down. It was pretty traumatic. I just leave mine on the toilet tank as instructed, wash my hands and proceed to exam room one.

I know the drill, so I take off my shoes jump on the scale and start sliding the weights to my weight. Except that the pointer on the balance is still hard against the upper stop. I slide the weight forward a kilogram. Another. Another. Another. Another. I have gained five freaking kilograms since my last medical. I start looking for what can be wrong with the scale. The tech comes in and I'm trying to inspect my own butt to figure out where I'm putting five unnecessary kilograms. I continue to rant about it right through the eye test. Stand here, cover your right eye, read the lowest comfortable line on the chart. Repeat with other eye. Repeat with glasses on. The chart is badly lit and I have to go a few lines up with my glasses off, but I can read the bottom line easily with my glasses. I take the glasses off again and read the small text on a piece of card she hands me. I think it's something from Dickens. I always wonder how many people memorize eye charts to keep their licence. She also has me go through a few pages of the Ishahara colour blindness test.

Next is the ECG. Clothes off except for underpants, wear a little paper vest and lie on the table. Technician sticks gel stickers all over me, from clavicle to ankle, and then hooks up electronic leads to them all. She looks at a machine for a few minutes and then unhooks me and peels off the stickers. They don't stick tightly enough to hurt.

I weigh myself again with the clothes off, but it only brings me by 1.5 kilograms (how do my clothes weigh that much?), and besides I am always weighed in my streetclothes. The doctor wants to examine me in the next room. The scale there is in pounds, but when I do the conversion it is giving the same result. I really have gained five kilograms. I continue to rant about this while he asks me questions that presumably test my mental health. I think a woman ranting about her weight is considered normal, so I pass, but hmm, I put on some winter weight last year too. This is not a good habit. There will be no sugar, alcohol or snack foods until I am back where I'm supposed to be.

The doctor has me follow a bright light with my eyes, stare straight ahead while he moves a pen around to test my peripheral vision, and then shines a light in my ears, one after the other. Usually I try to bring home a picture of some cool piece of apparatus, or a new medical fact from these things, but I'm too traumautized by the weight gain. Five kilograms is half a shopping bag full of butter. Where is it?! Maybe I need my eyes checked again. According to this chart I have BMI of 21, putting me in the normal weight range for my height, but there has to be something wrong with that. It thinks I could gain twelve more kilograms and still be a healthy weight. I'd have rolls of fat hanging off me at that. I don't weigh that much with my flight bag.

The doctor uses his stethoscope to listen to the noises my heart, and lungs make, from the back and front, and then probes my throat and abdomen for abnormalities. I am sufficiently normal to pass his inspection, so he stamps and signs my licence and then I pay at the front. Including the ECG it's just under $200.

Incognito

It's overlap day: the replacement pilot has arrived and the guy I've been working with all month is going home tomorrow. I have another week or so to go, as our schedules have gone out of sync. We three pilots plus the AME have lunch together, making our food orders based on each other's habitual orders. There's lots of catching up to do. The latest company gossip includes the possibility of getting another type of aircraft. These overlap days are our major means of communication and sometimes the only time I see certain pilots in a year.

No one is flying today so we do errands. A recent first aid kit analysis reveals that the standard kit we have is missing four mandated items: splints, burn pads, paper and pencil. We go over to the pharmacy to stock up. "The airplane is made out of splints," I protest. The damn thing is almost entirely composed of strong lightweight aluminum splints, but I guess we have to be prepared for broken limbs in a situation where it would be simultaneously inappropriate to disassemble the airplane and impossible to summon more thoroughly equipped medical personnel. We buy the required items and go back to the hotel.

We're standing in the corridor discussing ambiguities in the maintenance control manual. Someone is just saying, "for example, if you can't get a hold of the PRM and the HSI is broken but it's day VFR ..." when an airline pilot in uniform steps into the elevator lobby and pushes the call button. Even to my peripheral vision the "hey, they're talking about airplanes!" head swivel by the airline pilot is obvious. He boards the elevator and as the doors close I can hear him being interrogated by others in the elevator, "what airline do you fly for?" It's a boon to be recognizable as pilots only by the way we talk, and not by the way we look.

Before my outgoing colleague goes back to his room I wish him well for his month out, in case I don't see him in the morning before his flight, and ask him if he happened to buy any charts I should know about. Gotcha back!

Food, Water, Medicine, Haircut

I'm up earlier the next day, still with sticky eyelashes. They're actually better today, but I decide not to rely on salt water home remedies where my eyes are concerned. I google up the local medical clinic. I try to call them on the hotel telephone, but every time I dial 9 to get an outside line, as indicated on the telephone itself, I end up talking to the front desk. She asks if I am paying for my room or my company. I say my company is, but it's a local call. She says she'll fix it, but evidently doesn't know the right code, because I still get her and not an outside line. I give up and walk up the road. The clinic is about a kilometre away, near the grocery store. Immediately inside there is a rack for shoes. It's a no shoes zone, a good idea considering that this place has the worst mud and dust of anywhere. I leave my boots in a shelf at the door and proceed barefoot to reception where I admit to not having an appointment.

"Can you wait?" she asks and I can, but I have to be at work at noon. It's quarter to eleven. She says that should be okay. I show her my health card and fill out a short form, then I read Canadian Geographic for a few minutes. I think it was about whales, or bears, or maybe pingoes. I had barely time to get interested in the article before I got in to see the doctor. I tell him my medical details and that I think I have an eye infection. I also tell him I am a pilot because the CARs require me to give that information to any treating physician. He examines my eye briefly, asks about pain, vision, the possibility of a foreign body in the eye, and then writes me a prescription for antibiotic ointment. It isn't even eleven o' clock yet.

I drop off my prescription at the grocery store down the block and buy some more snacks while waiting for it to be filled. It's $14.50 for the ointment, which I consider to be a fair price to keep teeny little nasty things from reproducing in my eyeballs.

I've got something else in my eyes these days: hair. I know that my hair could spread the infection from eye to eye. I'm not very good at cutting my own hair without making myself look like Spock, so I stop in at the town hair salon to see if I can get my hair cut there before work. She's booked solid until next week, and then it's only afternoon availability, when I'm likely to be working. Wow. Not to be catty, but I didn't think there were that many people in this town that bothered with haircuts. The sign on the door said to ask about special appointments at other times, or rates for bridal parties, so I'm about to ask her what her callout fee would be for an appointment before regular opening hours tomorrow morning, when she takes a phone call. Her 11 a.m. customer just cancelled, so she does me, and does a great job.

With all my errands done, I jump in the customer's truck and we go out to the the airport. It's hot out. I put the ground cooling fan on during taxi, then switch it off just before take-off. It's not needed after takeoff because the forward motion of the airplane provides the same advantage. That, and the fact that we'll climb into cooler air. Eventually. The heat produces very poor climb performance, and there is terrible visibility in smoke. It's the worst it's been yet. Everyone is pirepping it all day. It makes my job harder, especially with the non-functional HSI. It's almost like flying in IMC partial panel. Hills loom out of the gloom and I turn the Garmin into terrain mode.

I fly, eat some snacks, and drink some water. I always try to bring enough water that there will not be a need to ration it, but I've just got a one litre canteen. It may be time to start carrying a second bottle. Every once in a while I see a river or a lake through the smoke instead of just indistinct brownish ground and trees. The smoke is so bad along one VFR route that pilots are reporting turning back.

I come back to land. I land on a different runway, than I have been, wondering if it might be more efficient. It's bumpier than the main runway, but no more efficient. I put on the ground fan again. I look at my phone and I have a text from the maintenance guy. He's doing scheduled work tonight and has found another, larger hangar we can use. He asks me to please bring the airplane there. I pull back left engine to let out the mission specialist with the engine running, then taxi to hangar. Again we pull the cowls, and drain the oil. (We're doing shorter oil changes with the new engines to make sure everything is okay). I "help" with compression tests, which means mostly that I get in the way. He is happy that he has the right kind of compression tester, because this one allows him to correct for today's density altitude. He says otherwise he would have to use a default, higher pass rate. I make appreciative noises when all the cylinders test near perfect, so the density altitude correction was not a factor, anyway. With that done, he takes me back to hotel. He will work until 2 a.m. on scheduled maintenance tasks. I feel badly for him, but then I have worked from noon til almost nine. We all do our jobs.

I eat dinner in my room. I haven't managed to get all the grease out from under my fingernails, though. I should remember to put soap under my nails before working on the airplane next time. At least there's no temptation to put stained fingernails in my eyes.

I Have to Get Out of this Plane And ...

I landed somewhere, wherever it was I was working that week, somewhere in the land of civilization. I land, taxi in, but don't see anyone on the FBO ramp, so I tune their frequency. As usually happens, the moment after I call, I see the previously invisible marshaller. He directs me to park facing him and where to stop. It's a quick overnight, so I grab minimal gear and hop out. The fueller welcomes me and thank him and place a fuel order. I undo the nosegear scissors and tell the fueller that I'll be back in nine or ten hours, that the brakes are not set, so the airplane is okay to tow if required. I head inside and get directions to the washroom. That done I return to the desk to chat and wait for fuelling to be complete so I can pay.

The woman at the desk offers to book me into a hotel with a shuttle and a good company rate. That's definitely what I need, so I pass her my credit card and dig out the correct hotel loyalty card for the place she recommends. She makes the call and books the room, saying "non smoking" without even a glance at me to make sure she's got that right. "How do you know?" I start to ask and then realize that I went from the airplane to the washroom to the comfy chair. A smoker would probably have gone right through the building to the groundside and a smoke.

Most Canadians don't smoke, but about 20% of adults do, so it's not a safe bet. It varies among provinces and way more people smoke in the north. According to this, 72% of Inuit smoke. That's sad; there isn't much in the way of cancer treatment available in the north, and having to leave home and go someplace strange when you are sick compounds misery.

Of course lots of Canadians smoke other stuff, as it isn't a huge screaming deal as it is in the US. I remember a pilot saying, "I don't smoke, well except an annual post-medical joint." That's hilarious in multiple ways. He didn't even know me, so it shows how accepted it is. Pot is pretty common in Canada and it's probably not all that uncommon for a Canadian to have smoked marijuana but never have tried tobacco. I'm not particularly interested in either, but I totally understand the "post medical" aspect of that. Even when you know you're totally fit, you step up your workouts and tone down your consumption of things that aren't so good for you in preparation for the annual medical. The doctor's going to complain if you've gained a couple of pounds, and you can write "two drinks a week" on the form in good conscience if it's true for the last two weeks, right? And then once you've survived the inspection and don't have to go back for another year, you can indulge. We aren't even drug tested at our medicals, it's just the concept.

The two guys who got out of the airplane whose panel featured yesterday (answer tomorrow, although I think a couple of you have guessed it, at least) made a beeline for the restrooms and then had a smoke. Tobacco.

Things Starting in Vac- and Ending in -ation

So I got home, did laundry, and had a raft of vaccinations in preparation for going to Cambodia. It was really quite the experience. Some of it was "well, while you're in here, lets update your polio, tetanus, rubella, and everything you haven't had since elementary school." I'm not going to complain about being protected from tetanus when I'm going to a strange country to pound nails. And then there were the specific to Cambodia diseases. It was literally dizzying the speed at which I was told and handed information on the various things that can get into your body and kill you. It's fascinating, too. I've read that parasites and viruses are the primary driver of evolutionary change in humans. We've got ourselves a niche where tigers and lions and bears don't kill us much, and we use tools to fight them if they try, but ickle bickle thingies we can't even see can still kill us by the thousands. After doing the paperwork one person interviewed me on where I was going and what I was doing, giving me information, making recommendations and soliciting my agreement or decisions on which vaccinations to take. Then a second person in the next room pumped the stuff all in.

"This is the tetanus. It might hurt for three days." Ow. She put some in one arm and some in the other. There was some rationale for the one that hurt for three days going in my working arm, but I don't recall exactly what it was. I think I managed to get away without a smallpox vaccination. I got vaccinated for two flavours of hepatitis, plus was given a prescription for anti-malarial drugs and I honestly don't remember everything else. After that I had to wait in the office for twenty minutes to make sure I didn't have a reaction, and then I could go home. I need some booster shots in a month and then I'm ready to go, although with the hepatitis I get a follow-up next year and then it's good for life. Which is good, because hepatitis is pretty bad and you can get it from food, even in Canada.

So then I went home and repacked, this time for a vacation. At a LAKE.

Hearing Impaired Airline Pilot

As a commercial pilot I undergo regular medical examinations to ensure that I am fit to fly. I had an audiogram (hearing test) when I was first licensed, but now I'm just tested without really noticing, as the doctor will ask me a question quietly when I'm not looking at him and when I answer normally he checks a box somewhere. I have had exams where the doctor was more obvious about it, but for the last couple I can't even remember being checked for hearing. Perhaps it was during the physical ear exam, where the poor doctor has to shine a light in my ear and put up with me asking if he's checking to make sure there's something in between my ears.

This weird medical document turned up in a Google alert. I don't know enough about the relevant audio panels to know if there has been some kind of special adaptation for the captains, or if they are just showing his volume level settings.

the hearing impaired airline pilot

Kind of freaky that the hearing aid is bolted to his skull. But then I know so many people that are cyborgs now that it's barely worth remarking on anymore.

To merge the subject of not being stopped by a disability with Caturday, we have another cat with an other-than-normal number of extremities. Avert your eyes if you don't like cute kittens.

Sorry if the videos break people's browsers. I know they do sometimes. E-mail me if it's a problem and I'll remove the videos after a couple of days.

Peter Shewring

I was flying part time for two different companies, just starting out my aviation career and had a little over five hundred hours in my logbook. That was almost enough to take the SAMRA and SARON, two exams that make up part of the qualifications for the Canadian Airline Pilot Transport Licence. I told a mentor I was just going to study for it on my own because I had lots of study materials and was an experienced student. He laughed at me and said, "You don't take this course to learn the material. You take this course to make contacts." So I pulled out my credit card and signed up for the course he recommended.

I was never a very skilled schmoozer, so I can't say I have exchanged job tips with or remember any of my fellow students ever after, but the teacher was terrific. He kept everyone involved and motivated, made the material interesting and kept people learning whether they thought they were lost or thought they knew it all. During a break on the last day of the three-day course, I got a desperate call from one of my companies. I had taken the day off, which they had assured me was no problem, but the pilot rostered for that afternoon had forgotten to renew his medical certificate and the pilot who was supposed to be his back up said he was sick. So instead of going back to class after the break, I had to go to to work.

The instructor, Peter Shewring, was very understanding and promised me I could sit in on the next class, next time he was in my city, any time I wanted. I went to that course, and aced the exams. He wanted students to tell him about any tricky exam questions, and I tend to remember questions quite well so I sent him a list. And then I e-mailed him from time to time for no reason, just because something I had encountered that day was something his course had prepared me for. Funny thing is, it's regarded as a cram course, with the syllabus matched to the exam, but he taught useful material, little tips and tricks in a way that made the on-the-exam stuff easier to remember and the real life stuff easier to do. He encouraged me and said he wanted to do my next IFR ride (he was an examiner too). And I always meant to call him for one, but political reasons determined the next one and then I was in the wrong city, and then I was doing PPC rides instead. I went back to the same course again, years after the first one, for a refresher and Peter remembered me.

I'm not an easy student to have in a class. If the material is interesting and new I become engrossed and ask challenging questions or answer rhetorical ones, which may interfere with the flow of the class. I'm overly helpful and I have been known to unintentionally trample egos in pursuit of knowledge and correct information. Peter kept me interested and channelled my enthusiasm into actually helping others in the class. He even suggested that I might join his team of instructors. High praise indeed. The timing wasn't right then, but just the other day I was thinking I should call him back and see if I could help out anywhere.

And then today I learned that he has died. I don't know the specifics, but I know I'm not the only one who will miss him. There's a thread on AvCanada full of stories from people who feel the way I do.

Update: An obituary.

Magic Placebo Pills

Whenever I hear about a cure for the common cold, I remember the old explanation that folk remedies will make the cold go away in about seven days, whereas the cold would probably last a whole week without them. Nevertheless, if I have or think I'm getting a cold, I hit it with everything I've got: all the sleep I can sleep for, copious amounts of weak herbal tea laced with raw honey, chicken soup made chunky with raw sliced garlic, gargling salt water, you name it. I'm not allowed cough and cold syrups or anything drug-related, but I'm all over the folk remedy pharmacopoeia.

So when a reader offered me a trial of Cold-EEZE, a non-pharmaceutical product that is supposed to stave off or, failing that, shorten the duration of the common cold I said yes, please. It would be usable in circumstances where chewing on raw garlic is inadvisable and hey, pilots can't resist free stuff. (On that topic, here's a year-old post on pilot cheapness via The Flying Pinto, a witty and frequently-updated flight attendant blog.)

The theory is that zinc ions interfere with the reproduction of the virus, which sounds plausible, thus increasing its efficacy as a placebo, plus I have seen this in places other than on the manufacturer's website, so I suspect it's even true. The trick seems to be getting the zinc into your system in an active yet palatable form.

Cold-EEZE offers a pretty good choice of how to ingest your zinc. There are lozenges, gumballs, chicklet-sized gum and several different flavours. I find that if you have just one, it's tasty, like a piece of candy, but following the directions and having them every few hours all day the underlying metallic medicinal taste becomes more apparent. It's still perfectly palatable and I find that it helps to vary the flavours, so have a green tea one and then a honey-lemon one and then later a cherry one. They should sell a "mixed flavour" pack. (I'm mixing and matching from the various different boxes). I gave a box to a coworker when she and her husband-to-be were both sick with a sore throat, but she reported them too sweet to be palatable, admitting that she was having trouble swallowing anything so it might not be a fair assessment.

I suppose this is a testimonial, but I have no idea whether they work for me or not because I haven't cut back on the other preventative techniques, and who is to say which times when I thought I might be coming down with a cold but didn't, the Cold-EEZE thwarted the rhinovirus? There's no 'control Aviatrix' out there NOT taking the remedies for me to check up and see if she gets more colds than me. I haven't ever had to beg off work because I was sick or congested, and I don't eat garlic when I'm in close contact with other people, so they're probably helping. I call them my magic placebo pills.

Oh and e-mail just arrived continuing the theme of free stuff: Leading Edge Aviation at the airport in Ogden, Utah has free hot dogs at 5 p.m. on the first Friday of every month. I got on their mailing list by buying fuel, and it makes me laugh every time they e-mail me to invite me, so I have never asked them to take me off.

Getting Behind

When I get home from work I pick up all my mail and dump everything that isn't screaming urgent onto my desk, Then I dump all the receipts, and other paperwork leftover from the shift on my desk. And remember I'm at work for a month or more. After a while that looming pile of paper gets really scary. Today I tackled it.

I won't just pick everything up one at a time and deal with it, because I need to have all the bills to make sure I don't pay one twice, and I don't want to spend time on non-urgent things on top when there are urgent things at the bottom I should deal with. But I know the risk of sorting things into neat piles and to-do lists: the very act of doing that gives me such a sense of accomplishment that I take a break and then I don't get anything done but the sorting. So I tried a new sorting algorithm.

I sorted everything into piles:

• To Do (Mandatory) - Things that will cost me serious amounts of money, or my licence, if I don't do them.
• To Do (Ought To) - Things I don't have to do but I will feel guilty if I don't
• To Do (Would Be Nice) - Things that would be nice if I did, or fun to do, but can be ignored, guilt and consequence free
• Reuse/Recycle - Paper I can make to-do lists on, envelopes I can keep per diem expense receipts in, and paper that can go in the blue box.

Employment expenses for 2008 taxes, booking an aviation medical and packing for work (yes, I have to do my laundry and repack as soon as I get home) go in the Mandatory pile. Christmas shopping, answering personal letters and getting a new phone plan go in the Ought To pile. Blogging is in the Would Be Nice pile.

Lucky for you, I caught up before I ran out of posts. But I'm going to take a break soon, anyway.

Psych Screening

This is an old story, with some new information about what happened when an Air Canada pilot became so mentally unstable during flight that the captain elected to have him forcibly removed from the cockpit. The captain made the PA announcement that amateur pilots' dreams are made of and the answer came from one of the flight attendants, a commercially licenced pilot with an expired IFR. She occupied the right seat for the remainder of the flight.

It's not unusual for flight attendants to be licenced pilots. For those already pursuing a career as a professional pilot, the job of flight attendant provides financing and acclimatization to the lifestyle. Flight attendants who didn't plan on becoming pilots are exposed to the environment, thus susceptible to the aviation addiction, and may be sucking into the vortex. I have known more than one person who has simultaneously been working as a commercial pilot on small aircraft and working as a flight attendant for a major airline. It's not clear whether the FA in this case had professional piloting experience or just a commercial pilot licence. Either way, she proved useful to the flight and they landed safely.

Air Canada has a rigid psychological screening programme as part of their interview process. I've actually spoken with an Air Canada recruiter who says that sometimes candidates the panel really likes and who score well in the simulator are rejected by the psych evaluation. The recruiters don't get to know what was "wrong" with the rejected candidates, but I wonder if the psych screening is selecting people who think just like the white males born in the 1950s who made up the airline when the ideal pilot profile was developed.

Events like this reflect the stress involved in the responsibility for a large airplane and trying to hold an aviation career together despite economic fluctuations, mergers, pay cuts and the risk of losing everything over a medical problem that would only be a minor blip in many other careers. And I can't help thinking that it's a tiny piece of vengeance for the people whose career progress was halted because they would or would not "like to see a film about an otter" or did or did not "prefer gardening to making wooden toys."

Oh and I asked Magic 8-Ball if I would be an airline pilot again and it told me You May Rely On It. I guess I should do something about that then, eh?

Edit: Reader Christopher provides a link to the report made by the Chief Inspector of Air Accidents in Ireland (where the flight landed). It shows that the captain didn't make an Airplane!-like call for pilots, merely asked an FA to check the manifest for company pilots, and gives some interesting details on the removal. The report commends the captain for his good CRM and professional actions, and also mentions that the FO's condition improved in hospital.

Instructor Renewal

Now that it's determined that I will not be plunged into a B727 training course in the immediate future, and since it's becoming more probable that I will live out my days as a contract pilot, I think it would be a good idea for me to renew my instructor rating. That will give me more areas in which I can contract, and some more stress.

My instructor rating has expired, but recently enough that it can be renewed without much trouble. The trouble required is specifically a one-on-one examination with a Transport Canada inspector, both on the ground to assess my level of knowledge and classroom instruction skills and in the air to make sure I can both fly and teach the maneuvers to the required standard. The former should be easy, but the latter means going back into a type of airplane I haven't touched in a while. It will need some practice.

I know for sure I'll be going home for the first of the month, because my medical expires then: the first is the last day I can fly. In three days can I

• renew my medical
• check out in a rental airplane
• practise the maneuvers to flight test standards, and
• do the flight test?

I'm not sure, but it's worth a try. I book the medical and flight test by telephone, and the rental checkout and practice sessions over the internet. It's not a very smart schedule. I'll probably have to cancel it all. But there's no time like the present.

A Particular Bit of Paper

Keeping track of bits of paper lends little glamour to aviation, but it's part of your job as a pilot and carries significant penalties if not properly done. It's true that the airplane flies just as well with and without paper, but a discrepancy in paperwork can point the way to a safety issue in the airplane itself. And I have a story, which I believe is true, told to me by someone who works in a charter company flight department. Identifying information has been changed to keep everyone out of more trouble than they're already in. It's a story about how a lack of paperwork tried to kill people.

It starts with e-mail between the flight department and the company's assigned Transport Canada inspector. The company was working on an amended Operations Manual (amending manuals is a never-ending process, and all changes must be approved by Transport), so the e-mail was in relation to that

Please look at Appendix "B" amendment #3, shouldn't this be Appendix "C"?

Because, you know, the airplane is going to crash and burn if the pages in the manual aren't numbered correctly. The savvy ops manager leaves a few easily rectified errors of this type in the manual, so that Transport can spot them, and then, feeling useful, approve the corrected version. But the e-mail continued.

I received a notice today that you have removed VBP from your operating certificate, did you sell the aircraft?

It was the second part that chilled my informant's blood. The inspector received a notice that the company removed VBP? That's not a good sign, as VBP was parked at an airport overseas, ready to fly back to Canada early that afternoon. A telephone call to the inspector confirmed that according to Transport Canada licencing, the airplane in question was no longer registered to the company. What? Airplane identity theft?

The airplane I'm calling VBP was not owned by the company, but leased. That's not in itself a problem; leasing is a perfectly acceptable tool in fleet management. In order for an airplane owned by another party to appear on a Canadian operating certificate, there needs to be paperwork. In this case the lessor and the lessee had signed a lease agreement granting use of the airplane for one year. Problem was that that paperwork had been signed and dated fourteen months earlier. A replacement lease agreement was actually signed in the month after the expiry of the first one, but due to a change in personnel in the company, and the rate at which paper accumulates in aviation, the new agreement didn't get sent to Transport. It didn't get sent anywhere, was just quietly buried like an archeological treasure, on someone's desk.

When Transport didn't receive proof of a renewal of the agreement, they cancelled VBP's registry. And fortunately the person responsible had a strong heart, for he survived the shock of discovery.

This is where it pays to have established a reputation for doing ones best to comply with the regulations. The person into whose desk strata the document had been fossilized made the confessional call to the head of the appropriate Transport Canada department.

"How do I reinstate this aircraft."

"Well, is VBJ on the ground?"

"Yes"

"Then it's really easy - just get the aircraft copy of the C of R and fill out the form on the back of it, then fax it in to me."

"Umm, the thing about that is the airplane is on the ground, but it's in another country."

"Oh"....long pause...."Well I guess we'll have to do it the hard way."

Transport faxed some forms to fill out, and then they had to go online in order to pay $60 for a temporary Certificate of Registration and $110 for a permanent one, and print out the receipts. Next step was to fax in those receipts, along with the completed forms, and wait and hope every t was crossed and i dotted.

Meanwhile the crew of VBP were far away, innocently preparing to depart for Canada. A call from company advised the captain to pick up a fax from the FBO before he left. He said sure and went back to preparing for the flight.

VBP was scheduled to depart at 1 pm, and at 12:47 pm the temporary C of R rolled out of the company fax machine in Canada. They turned around and faxed it to the overseas FBO, where the missing paperwork tried a second time to claim the life of a pilot.

Despite the $3-per-minute charge, the overseas pilot called the home office using his personal cellphone. "What the hell? Why do I have a new C of R?"

"Long story. Just be glad you have it."

"What do you guys do in the office all day? Think of ways to give me a heart attack?"

"Yes. Yes we do."

That's the real reason they give us an ECG every second medical. They need to make sure our hearts can withstand this kind of shock.