Partial Research is Funnier than None

At 1:35:14 of the movie The Bourne Identity, there's an airplane. It's not important to the plot, just a brief scene to show that Important Serious Guy is going to Paris. It only merited a second glance because Important Serious Guy was going to take the "first flight out" which usually refers to scheduled flights, yet the airplane in question is a Dassault Falcon 900 and the passenger is driven up to the boarding stairs in a limo. It's clearly a private flight. So in between writing the dialogue and getting the location, someone decided that the secret agent guy wasn't going to fly airline, or it was just cheaper for the production to get the plane and the location for one guy boarding a small jet than to arrange a whole airline cabin set, and they missed changing the actor's line. I can even accept that by "first flight" the guy meant, "as soon as the pilots have the airplane ready," and that there's nothing wrong with the dialogue.

It's a three-engine jet, which is kind of cool. Wikipedia tells me that it and the Falcon 7X are the only trijets still in production. On the nacelle of the centre engine we see the aircraft registration N-GIDE. I can't say whether it was the oddity of an N-number followed by a dash and four letters that drew my attention to the fact that the N has clearly been stuck on as a patch, or vice versa, but that is one silly aircraft registration. It took me three guesses to find it as French-registered F-GIDE a Dassault Falcon 900 currently owned by GE Capital Equipement Finance, and based in Paris. The airplane looked like this in 1998, which doesn't match the movie, but the 1998 paint job looks like my high school locker room, so I'm not surprised it would be changed. I'm imagining someone has scouted the location, paid whatever is the going rate is for using someone's airplane as a set for a couple of hours, and got airport permission to drive their limo and camera trucks and whatever around the apron. They put an actor in the cockpit--just one, we'll presume that the other pilot is in the back to greet the passenger--and generally tried to make it look as though it's a US government airplane ready to take this guy to Paris. They slapped a US flag decal on it, by the boarding door, and then someone did just enough research to get in trouble. I think the location manager spotted the F starting the registration and realized that that represented France. They somehow learned that American aircraft registrations start with N, without realizing that they don't have a dash, and they have numbers in them. To me the result is as adorable as a kid trying to hide by covering her eyes: that act of concealment draws more attention than none at all, but it shows that they tried. Had they tried harder, they would have discovered that the FAA reserves the tail numbers N88892, N9748C, and N9747P for use in movies and television, and then I never would have noticed. Probably I wouldn't have noticed if they had left the French registration intact, either. I'm sure the US government leases aircraft in more exotic places than France.

Given that it's the same kind of half-completed research I do all the time for my blog, and will definitely be doing for this year's NaNoWriMo novel, starting today, I hope I'm not alone in getting enjoyment from the funny.

Extra-Vehicular Activities

I was trying to find a clip of the coffee-ordering scene from the movie Pushing Tin. In the film it's a demonstration of how many pieces of data on different aircraft that an experienced controller can hold in his or her head simultaneously. I didn't find the clip, but I came across a pilot ordering coffee and wings in the midst of an emergency, and a fun YouTube channel of humourous exchanges from the New York Kennedy ground frequency.

Taxiing at a large, unfamiliar airport is just about as stressful as flying at night in ice. There's just one of me to keep the airplane moving, watch out for bad pavement, find the directional signs, interpret the taxi diagram, identify the intersections, and spot the aircraft I'm supposed to give way to. It's obvious to the controllers which way I should go, but they know the airport layout perfectly, and from their vantage point they can see where they want to put me. They seem almost as unhappy when I pause to complete a checklist or figure out my route as they do when I think that Foxtrot-Golf is the next turn, not this one right here. Sure, if I get it badly wrong in ice, I'll lose control of the airplane and die, but that consequence might be less painful than the scolding that an irate controller can dish out. The worst case scenario on the taxi is also death: should I venture onto an active runway at the wrong moment, I could get run over and take out a widebody, too. That is part of the reason the controllers can be so stressed. The rest of their focus is knowing that it is ridiculously easy for us poorly-maneuverable ground vehicles to become gridlocked, delaying everyone. The controllers have a plan for getting everyone where we are supposed to be, and if I miss a turn, I'm like the Tetris brick dropped in the wrong place, messing up the whole board. Meanwhile controllers are really smart, constantly building and recalculating plans, but with enough spare brainpower to make smart remarks.

The link above is not to the first or the funniest of the clips on the channel, but rather to one that is more odd than funny: a Lufthansa crew suspects they have an access panel open and once that's confirmed by another taxiing aircraft, ask permission to put a crewmember outside the airplane to close it. It's interesting and a little outside the norm, but the controller seems to think it's hilarious. I wonder what he would have made of a stop-and-go I did the other day: I landed on a long runway, let a crew member out to adjust an external sensor, and then after he was back in and belted, took off again without ever leaving or backtracking the runway. The controller handling me didn't act as though it were an unusual request. I had assessed the approaching traffic on frequency before making the request, so I was confident there was no one close behind me. I'm not sure we spent any longer on the runway than we would have had we landed and taxied off in the normal way.

Top Gun Hair

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Battery of Battery-Related Thoughts

I walked all over town to find a 386/301 battery for my IFR timer and a couple of AAAs for my pulse oximeter. Who knew there could be so many different sorts of small round batteries. When buying devices, it's worth including battery availability in the comparison between brands. Everything in aviation should run off AA batteries. I carry a charger and a little pile of spare rechargeables so that when my headset battery cops out, or my flashlight isn't bright enough, I can swap them out.

Mark that against the Bose A20: the batteries are trickier to change in flight than for LightSPEED. They didn't intend you to change them in flight. They have an elaborate system of green and amber flashing lights designed to tell you your battery health and give you a chance to change them before the flight. These don't work with rechargeables, because of their square power profile: they work fine until they are almost dead then drop off to nothing too fast to give a warning. Bose tells you not to use rechargeable batteries for this reason, but I'm not leaving a trail of mercury all over the country for the convenience of flashing lights.

I keep my spare and used batteries straight in the cockpit using a pair of little plastic boxes, one red and one clear, that hold for AA batteries each. I was using it in the north and my favourite captain asked me where I got it. I didn't remember exactly, but told him I'd get him one, and I didn't, but I had to leave before I gave it to him. I asked for his postal address to send it to him, but then he had to leave, and the e-mail I had for him stopped working, but I kept the box all this time. Last time I was packing, I couldn't find my box, so I 'stole' the one I'd been saving for him, but I tell you, if you're reading this, you who forgave me for ripping the REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT streamer off the engine plug on my first morning at work, send me your address and I will be honoured to send you one.

I have to plug the computer in to use flight simulator programs. The battery runs down too fast otherwise. When I'm flying my toy flight simulator, sometimes the panel lights spontaneously turn off, and I have to cycle the nav lights to put them back on again. Bug or feature to make the whole thing as inscrutably unknowable as a real airplane?

If you thought that last thought was disconnected, how about this one: Originally the forest moon of Endor was supposed to be populated by Wookiees, not Ewoks (wook-ee/ee-wok: original, eh?) but George Lucas decided that since the Wookiee Chewbacca was clearly proficient with advanced technology (i.e. he was pilot and mechanic of the spaceship the Millennium Falcon and also repaired the damaged android C3PO), it would be confusing to show the Wookiees with a primitive, "stone age" culture on Endor.

That's stupid. That's stupid enough to make me angry. That's racist 'logic'. That's the logic that didn't let women run marathons, because they never had. You don't have to be a whiny white moisture farmer with exceptional midichlorians to study and learn things, and it is perfectly possible to learn things that your parents didn't know. You'd have to be keen, and have some aptitude for the subject to make up for the not having the experience of growing up with technology, like Anakin building his own robots and podracers, but there's no reason Kashyyyk couldn't produce competent pilots and mechanics.

You may think this post has gone entirely into deep space, but I'll bring it home by examining Star Wars stored power technology. The Death Star had a massive generator, and no fuel tanks, but the society had batteries, power converters, power couplers and other means of transferring, transforming and transporting energy. I wonder if Han Solo ever had to walk all over Mos Eisley looking for the right sort of power cell for his blaster.

Trial by Ground

We find someone to look at the engine, and he sees nothing visibly wrong with the number two cylinder. They checked the mags, replaced the spark plugs, cleaned the injectors and swapped the #2 and #4 probes. That way they've addressed the most likely issues and if it is the probe or the gauge it will now be a different cylinder complaining. Smart. I'm happy with the work and we fuel and go for the Vancouver mission.

Vancouver International is one of the larger airports I've worked out of for a while, so I have all my charts lines up to find my way around. I listen to the ATIS and call clearance delivery for a departure. He offers me a choice between two departures, They are both in the wrong direction, because the work area is to the east and they are using westbound runways at the moment, so I pick one without much consideration. I'll work out exactly how do get there once they are done vectoring me through the departure. He then asks for more detail on the actual work area and chews me out because I have selected the wrong departure for the most efficient route to that area. He advises me to study a VTA next time. I say "<callsign> checks," contritely. The VTA is an astonishing forest of VFR reporting points, many of which are over the water. Do you get your bearings by identifying particular fish?

Once Clearance is done berating me, I call Ground for taxi. I know I'm on apron two. He asks me pleasantly which pad I will be departing today. Pad? Insert moment of radio silence while Aviatrix processes this question, and then my response, almost student pilotlike in its careful deadpan earnestness. "<callsign> is an aeroplane," pronouncing all three syllables of the last word. "Pad" refers to helipad. This apron is home to some helicopters. There must be a local helicopter with a similar callsign.

"Oh so you'd prefer to depart from a runway today?" he asks. Don't they have a strip on me? Has he been listening to Clearance Delivery telling me where to go and decided to take his turn? Is it a friendly joke like the briefer who pretended he thought I was a B747 on floats for my first student cross-country? I assume it's the last.

"If that would be convenient for you, sir." Sir is routine in the US, but in Canada "sir," like "niner," is often jocular or hypercorrect.

He gives me a taxi clearance I can manage, and I find my way to the correctly lettered piece of pavement and then to the hold short line, monitoring tower. They clear me to position and then for takeoff, and I switch to departure through 1000', as specified on the VFR departure instructions. They quickly vector me around to where I need to go.

It's very beautiful here. The mountains, which still have snow on them, wrap almost all the way around. There are mountains on Vancouver Island to the west, mountains stretching up the coast to the northwest, mountains forming a huge barricade to the north, blocking Vancouver into a valley, and more mountains to the southeast, as the coastal chain continues into Washington state. There's even a ten-thousand foot volcanic peak just south of the US border, with a ski hill on it. I don't get to look at all that much.

I get to look at nearby traffic and a screen with lines and dots on it. Sometimes I talk to the dots. When they talk back, I figure it's time for a snack. I'm improving, but it's easy to lose concentration for a moment, to be distracted by engine management and bank just a little at the wrong moment. "You know," I venture, "This could be made into the world's most boring video came for the iPod." The thing would be, you're not allowed to stop for six hours. So whether you have to make dinner, eat dinner, or attend to other physiological needs, the dots keep coming, and you keep having to follow the line. I also lament that I should get points. The dots should sparkle, like in the game Bejeweled. There should be points for my getting them spot in the middle with the crosshairs centred, and points lost for any red flashes. There should be combos available, and maybe a voiceover telling me to "Get Ready!" for each new line. The game should track high scores, per pilot, and maybe have spaceships. I'm not sure how you'd incorporate spaceships, maybe in the advanced levels I haven't reached yet. If I had an iPod developers' kit, I would try to make this game.

The engines behave perfectly, and lean right back to the fuel flow the operator expects, with normal EGTs. I hypothesize the flaky cylinder had a fuel injector issue or a bad spark plug. Too much fuel or too little ignition might cause combustion to continue too late in the cycle, raising the EGT, and too little of either could cause the intermittent rough running. Whatever it is is fixed now. The video game has to have a screen for fuel management, which you must periodically monitor without losing track of your dots.

Eventually I run out of dots, or spare fuel, I can't remember which, and head back to Vancouver for landing. I've been talking to Vancouver Terminal all this time, so they point me towards a runway and tell me to contact tower. I call them "<callsign>, 3500', with Xray" and tower is already mad at me. They want to know why I'm not with Terminal. I mentally review the last instruction from Terminal. It wasn't "Contact Tower crossing the river," or "Contact Tower through 2500'." It was "Contact Vancouver tower now, <frequency>." Tower has for some reason assumed that I have just appeared in their airspace without deigning to contact the agency that controls ALL the airspace surrounding it. The only way I could reach Vancouver Tower's airspace without passing through Terminal would be to take off from Vancouver. And I've already been through that trial by Ground. Is there such a major problem here with small airplanes bulling their way into class C airspace without a clearance that that is the first assumption on what I must assume is a botched terminal-tower handoff? I'm still cleared straight in, which is a little freaky, because it's a busy time at a busy airport, but I see they are aiming me for the departure runway, so they keep taking off jets in front of me, and landing them on the parallel beside me, and I don't interfere with either set.

I land, can't see a sign on the nearest taxiway, so maybe it's an entry-only taxiway and I roll to the next one, clearing the runway quickly with an Air Canada positioning behind me.

The operator knows I've worked hard today, and asks me if I can do another flight. Yeah, my duty day is good to seven p.m., that's with the time change. And I'm strangely energized after capturing all those dots. The next flight will be just an hour. After fuelling I call clearance again, this time requesting the departure that I think will do me the most good, and he assigns it to me with my squawk code. Ground clears me out and then warns someone else to watch for me. Yeah, watch out for her. He can't see me, but I can see him. He won't run over me. I guess apron II goes all the way to the the east end of the runway, and Ground doesn't know which bit I'm on. Is there a chance I've misnamed my apron location? The chart seems pretty clear.

We take off and go take pictures of a movie set. Cool, eh? I'm high-powered paparazzi now. I'll have to find out what movie. I didn't see the set, just the dots.

Landing back afterwards they clear me for a tight downwind and then clear me to land "keep your base in close." I turn base immediately and plummet to the runway with full flaps and gear down, clearing on that first taxiway, which is labelled, just further back than I looked. I may not know all the VFR departures, but I can keep my base in close.

Getting Things Flowing

I received a phone message regarding another job I applied to. Odd, as I applied maybe two months ago, and it wasn't a large company. Why the long delay? Does the guy plan that far ahead for his employment needs? Did the first two candidates not work out? I'm glad I was out getting plumbing supplies and didn't have to field that one cold. It's a job that could be interesting and right for me, given certain constraints, but it could be a backwards step that would look bad on my resume. I had a list of questions to ask about it by the phone for a while after applying. In fact I just threw my notes on that out the other day.

If the potential employer took two months to think about it, I can take a day. For now the plumbing issue is more pressing. I have already replaced the ball and washers, but the old tap has rotted inside and spews water all over the counter when I turn it on. Under the sink the associated plumbing is crazier than the wiring on a thirty-year-old airplane. It's a mismatched mess of PVC and copper with shutoff valves I run into some difficulty removing the old tap. There should be a nut holding it on underneath the sink, but I can't find it. It's very difficult to see or get any purchase under there because this is a double kitchen sink installed very close to the back wall of the cabinet, so everything is hidden in the sink's cleavage. I do some internet research, trying to figure out if there is an alternate way this might be fastened in, and rein in my urge to just shred it into bits and tear out the bits. There are old copper lines coming directly off the underside of the faucet assembly, and I've already destroyed them looking for what is holding it in place. Besides rust.

Delta, the faucet manufacturer has a toll-free line, so I call for advice. The rep is excellent, listening, understanding, suggesting, then putting me on hold to consult with an expert on older models. He comes back and asks if I have any need to reuse the old faucet. Hell no. He doesn't come right out and tell me to remove the sucker by any means necessary, but I got the idea. The sink is stainless steel and I do need to keep that, preferably untorn, so I destroy the old faucet with tinsnips and a big pair of vice grips so that I can pull its shredded remnants down through the hole in the counter. The new tap goes in easily and the water comes out of it in an attractively coherent stream. When you have done work involving open plumbing lines you need to open the tap up and then turn on the water from below and let it run to flush out any junk from the lines before operating the faucet mechanism. I probably would have run it for a while even if I didn't know that, just to watch the pretty water coming out into the sink and not onto the counter.

And then I signed up with a free trial with Netflix. If I'm going to be off work I might as well get free movies. It's also a way of ensuring I won't get to use it. I should sign up for a gym membership and enroll in a CPR renewal class, too. Every time I do either of those things I have to move halfway across the country for a new job.

And still on the topic of stopped up plumbing, here's a nice job of handling a recalcitrant nosewheel. It looks like a combination of a firm landing on the mains and slowing down enough to reduce airflow pressure was enough to get the nosewheel down and locked.

Escape Route

For all the praise lavished on the DHC-2 Beaver, I don't think anyone has ever called it ergonomic. They were designed back when you were supposed to be a real man in order to fly an a airplane and if you couldn't cope with the fact that the levers weren't in the standard order on the throttle quadrant (as they were on one I flew) then you weren't man enough. I can't remember if it was the throttle and prop, prop and mixture or mixture and throttle that were switched, and the fact that I don't remember perhaps illustrates the problem. Imagine if one of the cars you drove had the accelerator and brake pedal switched. Or maybe the accelerator and clutch. It wasn't the designer's fault in those days.

One of the problems with Beavers has been the door handle. It was designed to close securely, and probably was cool and modern, or at least normal in 1947, but twenty-first century passengers have grown accustomed to a different style and standard of exit door from a vehicle, and have not found it to be an intuitive escape route. Deaths in otherwise survivable accidents have led to a redesign of the door handle, something that is a little unusual in an out of production aircraft, but they are still so popular that a different manufacturer has the licence to make parts for them and has taken on the responsibility of the replacement door handle.

Also: The TSB recommended floatplane passengers wear lifejackets but the airlines object. They say it's because passengers might inflate the jackets inside the airplane, hampering their escape. That's a true risk, and has caused fatalities in water landings, but I personally think there is at least as much, if not more, risk of a passenger inflating a lifejacket inside an aircraft if they have just put it on than if they are already wearing it. And there is certainly more risk of not having a lifejacket on when you need it if you have to put it on in the time period between realizing there is a problem and escaping the aircraft. I was once present when a large floatplane dug a wingtip into the water during landing, and the only person who got the lifejacket out from under his seat during the crucial seconds before the airplane fortunately didn't require an emergency evacuation, was a jumpseating captain. The real reasons the airlines don't want to put lifejackets on passengers before every departure are time, cost and did you see Six Days Seven Nights? Notice that despite all the commercial seaplane flights depicted being in the same type with the same pilot, the only flight in which the pilot required the passengers to wear lifejackets was the one in which the premise required them to be nervous and seem ridiculous.

Two Movies Set in Cambodia

I watched The Killing Fields, a 1984 movie about the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia. It had been recommended to me for context before we went there, but I resisted. I don't usually watch movies with "kill" in the title. Heck, I didn't even see "To Kill a Mockingbird." I hoped it wouldn't be too gory, but seeing as I had it all in my head anyway, I decided to get it over with. I expected it to be a personal story, setting the scene and then following an individual from the Phnom Peng evacuation, to the rice fields, to arrest and interrogation, and finally to the titular fields. It was pretty much that, the requisite landmine exploding almost comically close the the moment I said "we haven't had any landmines yet," but rather than seeing more than I could bear, I was disappointed that there was not enough.

The film opened with a brief historical narration over a scene of a child on the back of a water buffalo in rural Cambodian scenery, but then cut to a group of rude Western journalists. While the experience of a foreign journalist in Cambodia in 1975 is interesting, it's limited to a few dozen people and doesn't have repercussions on the state of the country today the way the experience of millions of Cambodians does. I knew it was a framing device, to give the lives of these unknown people an American context, and, through the mobility of the foreigners, to tell the story with a wider perspective. It turns out to be a true story, too, about the relationship between an American journalist Sidney and his translator Pran, but it was still irritating. I didn't find any of the journalists to be sympathetic characters, and to me every scene of reporters typing, developing film, or arguing over access to the telex machines was a waste of film minutes that could have been spent on the Cambodians. When it becomes clear that Pran will be handed over to the Khmer Rouge, the camera even focuses on Sidney's reaction, not Pran's.

The film was made in 1983 to 1984, still not a stable time in Cambodian history, so it was filmed in neighbouring Thailand. Many of the actors are Thai, and Haing Ngor who plays the lead Cambodian was half ethnic Chinese. He wasn't a professional actor, and was originally hired as a technical expert. He had similar experiences to the man he portrayed, and his actual story is even better than the one he won the Academy Award for. They tried to hire Khmer people for the roles, but all trained Cambodian actors had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Of the suffering in the camps, Ngor kept telling the director, "No, it was worse! It was worse!" and the director had to shake his head and tell him that it was just a movie. Movie standards for violence were much more restrictive back then. The most violence they did show was doubly distanced from the viewer, by having us see Sidney back in New York watching it on TV, and by the standard cinematic technique of replacing the sound effects with classical music. Suffering was implied, but they didn't make me feel it. Perhaps it was a pacing issue. By contrast, the scene in Lost where Richard is chained up in the grounded slave ship is silly fiction, but they take the time to tell the story. Perhaps what we saw was still pretty edgy for 1984. In filming The Killing Fields, they borrowed a woman's rice paddy to dress as a killing field and she walked out into it in the morning, only to see the set dressed with simulated decomposing corpses. "She had to be given a day's rest," says the director's commentary.

I watched it with a friend, then we switched gears by making it a double-header with Tomb Raider, an Indiana Jones movie clone starring Angelina Jolie's boobs. The connection is that it is partially set and filmed on location in Cambodia. Sadly, real life fighting has broken out recently on the Cambodia-Thailand border in the vicinity of some Khmer ruins, a new flare-up in a territorial dispute that has been running for over a hundred years, between two countries that have been fighting on and off for over a thousand years.

Clichés on a Movie

On Wednesday I wake up around noon (I'm working the second shift) and eat leftover pasta for whatever meal this is called. Replacement pilots are arriving on Saturday, so I'm cleared to go home on Sunday. It turns out that I can't get out of this one-horse town on a Sunday. Unless I take the horse, I suppose. I ask the boss if I should get the Monday flight, but the weather and forecast is so terrible I'm approved to leave the same day my replacement arrives, assuming he makes my flight. I'll buy a ticket on the same airplane going back south. I hope the storm of the week doesn't mess that up for me.

The chief pilot comes by my room to borrow scissors. I'm office supplies girl, always the one with tape and glue, post-it notes and scissors. I don't have a hole punch though. The scissors are for some literal paperwork thing, and I can see a metaphorical desire to use them on someone else. Oh Chief Pilot of mine, you have my respect and admiration, and scissors. There's a disagreement going on between PRM and CP, the repercussions of which I am shielded from.

And the weather is too bad to work today, so it's a TV day.

Much of the rest of this post is in the tradition of what I term "movie reviews" but which a reader pointed out is just me recounting a movie, in the form of stream of consciousness while watching it. True, but that's what I do here. I'm saving you the trouble of watching it. And I do mean trouble.

I turned on the TV and flipped to the channel the on-screen TV guide listed for Hawaii Five-O. I'm not sure I've ever seen it, but I wanted to see if they really said, "Book 'em Dano, Murder one," as people do in the cliché. The TV guide was wrong or I misread it though, because I ended up watching Rookie Blue, a new Canadian cop show that may be a comedy or a drama, it's a little hard to tell from the episode I saw, which was pretty funny, but it may have been intended for me to take more seriously. The characters certainly comprised the most attractive, well made-up and perfectly coiffed police squadron I've ever seen. I expect that in between bungling arrests and misunderstanding orders from their superior officers they will have sex with one another in the back of patrol cars. Oh and learn Important Life Lessons.

When the credits roll for that, I shower, and then return to find the television is playing a movie I could call Ants on a Plane. I won't though, because if I did it would so perfectly explain everything about the movie that it wouldn't be worth my while to explain it while half watching the movie. I've missed the opening credits, but I eventually learn from the voiceover before a commercial break that its real title is Destination Infestation.

As I come in, there a dead guy in the aisle of a passenger jet with ants crawling all over him, possibly crawling out of him: it was a quick gross-out shot. And of course there are a bunch of screaming passengers. More ants crawl over all the interior of the airplane, streaming in and out of vents. An attractive female (human), who soon identifies herself as an entomologist specializing in ants, puts on her eyeglasses to inspect and proclaim this to be an extremely dangerous ant species. She urges the bald captain (who comes out of the flight deck to see the body) to land as soon as possible, these ants being the most vicious and venomous insect known to man. They've also been genetically modified and had their mandibles reinforced. She can tell this by looking at them. The captain goes back to the cockpit and tells the FO to "get Miami tower on the line."

The FO addresses "Miami Control" and announces "Trans-South Air 603 declaring an inflight emergency." In response to the obvious question about the nature of their emergency, he responds simply, "Ants." The captain chimes in to elaborate on the ant danger, but the controllers scoff at them. The pilots do not specifically ask for a diversion or landing clearance, and neither volunteer nor are asked for their intentions.

The Captain summons the sexy entomologist to the flight deck and she explains to the controllers how dangerous the ants are, but Miami--this time they are addressed as "Miami Tower"--responds with a slightly sarcastic "are you still requesting an emergency landing?" So apparently ATC understood the original declaration of an emergency as a landing request, but landing slots are so seriously rationed in Miami that you have to convince the controllers that you have a REAL emergency before you can land there.

"Come on McCready you know how this works," says the controller who still won't issue a descent clearance. The thing is I do know how it works: a pilot declares an emergency and tells the controller what he or she needs and then the controllers move heaven and earth to make it happen. Even when you haven't declared an emergency, just indicated that you're having a bit of trouble and are returning or diverting, you're likely to hear words like "Cleared to land, any runway," "Descent your discretion, let me know if you need below flight level 200," and "Halifax is closer, 8000 feet, CAVOK do you want vectors for Halifax?" The worst interference a controller gives an emergency aircraft is pestering the crew for souls on board, fuel on board and intentions, while the crew is still managing the emergency.

But we're in a universe where airplanes are swarming with killer ants and Miami won't allow an aircraft in distress to land. I'm thinking an island diversion might be a good idea, to contain the ants. Maybe Cape Canarval. I think it's all offshore in a swamp separated from the mainland by a salt water channel with one bridge. They can put an ant-proof barrier across the bridge and confine the ants to the rocket-fuel-infested swamp, where they can bring in squadrons of government agents and no one will be the wiser. But they continue to bicker with Miami.

Meanwhile the air marshal is fighting the ants with a fire extinguisher. Why is the captain in the passenger cabin again? Shouldn't he be landing the airplane? The suggestion is made by someone to depressurize the cabin, certainly a common movie trope for discarding contaminants (contaminants: I'm so funny) in a pressurized aircraft. That idea is rejected as dangerous to the infant on board. There's a bit of back and forth about the good of the many versus the good of the few, then the captain gets attacked by the ants and goes into shock.

It doesn't really matter, he's been pretty ineffectual anyway. Maybe the FO will now declare an emergency for an incapacitated crew member and land the plane already. The FO--wearing a full-sized green David Clark headset--instructs the FA to "tell the passengers to strap in. I have to reboot the system."

The FA gives a panic-tinged PA explaining that "the copilot" is going to do a routine inflight procedure that may cause a momentary loss of cabin pressure. The oxygen masks may drop down, but there is no need for panic. The O2 masks do drop, and no one, including the flight attendants, puts them on.

The ants have now entered an area placarded in close-up as the Hydraulic Chamber. This has resulted in, according to the dialogue, an inability to reset the pressurization system, autopilot failure, and fuel leakage at a rate such that they have to stop it in order to make Miami. Or possible Atlanta, their original destination. And then the air traffic controller (who works alone in a darkened room) is threatened by a shadowy overlord with treason charges if he discloses what is going on.

There's a subplot about the hot scientist and her attention-starved daughter, plus romantic implications between the air marshal and scientist. Passive flight attendants--identified by orange aprons: costume budget didn't stretch to real uniforms--continue serving drinks, except to the requisite drunk passenger, who yells at them.

The ant-injured captain returns to the flight deck despite his incapacitation and the FO briefs him on the situation. "No autopilot, half the system gauges are down as are the hydraulics. We've lost fire suppression." The captain assures him that they can operate the hydraulics manually. They do not appear to be straining to operate the flight controls, so they must have it trimmed out the way they want it.

The scientist and air marshal descend through a little hatch in the galley into the cargo bay, which is illuminated by a rotating amber light. However, whether it's through lack of continuity or pity for the viewer, the bulk of the scene is lit normally, not with the flashing light.

Meanwhile, the drunk passenger goes into the lavatory and is attacked by ants. He emerges into the aisle where they use the fire extinguisher on him. I think he's dead. Scene goes back to the cockpit, where they must have finally got permission to land at Miami, because the air traffic controller calls up to tell them "Diversion to Miami has been rescinded."

"Rescinded?" There's a ten dollar word not on the aviation English vocabulary list. I guess "cancelled" wasn't cool enough for them. I think I would have "misheard" or "misunderstood" that word, then said, "Roger, we'll be on the ground in fifteen minutes," and then run the emergency descent checklist.

They don't bother to ask for landing in Nassau or Port au Prince, because "word has gotten out" and everyone knows that it's a plague plane, so there's no point. The hot scientist and the air marshal are playing chemistry set with the cargo in the hold, Apparently detergent precursor chemicals can be mixed with bottled water to produce concentrated hydrochloric acid, which--I'm just going by the movie, folks--is a potent insecticide. Upstairs, hot scientist's jailbait teenage daughter is patrolling the aisles with the fire extinguisher.

Now they're asking Port-au-Prince, but yep, they're denied by a woman with an accent more authentic than I would have expected. The FO is ex Air Force and suggests diversion to a 5000' strip of unknown status at a closed air base in Mobile, Alabama. If they're going to defy the airspace closure, I'm not sure why they aren't doing it at a well-maintained airfield with emergency services available, but hey, at least they are making a decision.

The captain goes back to the cabin (doesn't he learn) to chat with the pax about his decision. He says authorities would block the runway if they tried to land at Miami. (Aha!) A passenger suggests ditching in the water and the captain tells him that's unnecessarily risky and that he came back to tell them his intentions as a courtesy, not for discussion. Hey being bitten by ants was good for this guy.

"I paid a lot of money for my ticket," says the passenger, "and that entitles me to a vote."

"That entitles you to nothing," says the captain, and threatens him with "FAA Security." He probably should have left that one to the FAs.

Meanwhile our heroes are sloshing through a room that is a centimetre of so deep in "fuel." Following instructions from the flight deck, they're going to have to patch the wires together and reboot the pump, using a blue switch labelled "system reset". It doesn't work, but the scientist hits it with a hammer and a blue light comes on in the cockpit. All is well! Well except for the ants.

Meanwhile, the shadowy folks who threatened the air traffic controller are onto the fact that they are making a run for the Alabama military base. I don't know how, since the radar track he is shown to be extrapolating from is so wiggly thay could be aiming for anywhere, but a call goes out to the Pentagon.

The cockpit goes dark. "What just happened?"

"We lost our on board computer."

"Great, now we're flying crippled and blind."

The heroes have now found a puppy in the cargo hold.

A shadowy figure reporting to "Red Leader One" is driving to Mobile. The bad guy, presumably Red Leader One, is arguing with his subordinate because she doesn't want to kill everyone. She walks out.

The disused airstrip has lights, and the view from the cockpit suggests that they are descending at about a 30 degree angle. "Initiating landing gear," says the FO, while they are over the runway lights. The gear comes down instantly and they land normally. I wish I had a manual extension system that fast and easy.

Now they are on the ground and soldiers are surrounding the plane, preparing to kill all witnesses -- except that a live TV news crew shows up and they "stand down." Passengers, ants and fuel are all escaping from the airplane. When the passengers are all off, the scientist pulls a flare gun out of her purse and explodes the whole plane and the ants. The bad government guy reports the situation contained.

They all go off happily to quarantine, where I'm sure scientist and air marshal and scientist and teenage daughter will get quality time together, but not in the same way. And then we cut back to the ants ... some of which have survived! Dun DUN DUN DUNH!

If there are any airplane disaster movie clichés missing from here, it's probably because I forgot to record them, not that they weren't in the movie.

Elephants and Temples

The next day's adventures started early again, to catch the cool of the morning and avoid crowds. We visited a number of temples, including the one that was used as for some exterior shots of the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie. It's a very popular movie here, because just as Canadians all get excited when we're mentioned on US TV shows, even though it's usually just to mock us, or make us the bad guys, people from countries many Americans have never even heard of are delighted to be recognized by the steamroller cultures of rich countries. The temple is overgrown with trees, right up on top of the walls and buildings, their roots simultaneously pulling the stones apart and holding them together. A busload of Japanese tourists was taking turns posing in front of one of the root-framed doorways, all miming shimmying up ropes or dual wielding pistols. As we leave we pass more tourists from all over the world. Listening carefully I could hear the name "Lara Croft" in a dozen different languages.

The terrace below was just a walkway, probably one of hundreds in the old metropolis, but this one happened to be a stone terrace all decorated with bas reliefs of elephants. As we said in more than one temple, bas relief isn't the right word, as many of the frescoes almost amounted to half-sculptures. Look at those elephant trunks! Many of them had been repaired over the years. One of the most interesting things about the elephant terrace was that it wasn't just a raised walkway with one side holding up an embankment, but for some reason it was a series of closely-spaced walls with staircases that allowed you to go down into the little spaces between them, and then wind your way around corners. It made no sense that they were built that way, and you could barely look at the sculpted walls because they were all so close together. It felt like being in a secret passage.

My second favourite temple in the whole of the park was Bayon. It had lots of interesting climbable structures and instead of being topped by towers or pyramids, it depicted huge faces with amazing personality. It so happens that I took my favourite photograph of the trip here, too. Right inside the walls of the temple was a structure with steep steps, probably one of those not-really-a-library libraries. I climbed up it to take pictures of apsara carvings on the walls, to see what was at the top inside and just because it is fun to climb things. There wasn't much inside, but it was a terrific vantage point to look at the layout of the rest of the temple and to take pictures. While I was there a group of monks came in and took turns taking pictures of themselves in front of it, then all filed along the side to go into the main temple. I love the colour of their robes against the stone, and their forms as scale for the giant faces.

The staircases inside were also very steep, and some had "Warning! Climbing at your own risk!" signs, a rarity for Cambodia where it seems to be understood by most people that no one else takes responsibility for your actions. The terrace at the next level puts you right up eye-to-chin with the giant statues. This is lots of people's favourite temple, and it's quite crowded. I'm standing on a ledge looking at some women costumed as apsara dancers. I think you can pay money to have your photo taken with them, but what I'm trying to do is line up a photograph of a Khmer man such that you can see his face at the same angle as one of the giant heads. A monk is coming by along the same ledge and I get out of the way, pulling my headscarf out of the way so it won't brush him. He doesn't make any effort in the other direction and I'm left wondering how much of this "monks can't touch women" rule is to enforce the monk's celibacy and asceticism, and how much is just asking women to stop what they are doing and throw themselves out of the way when a monk comes by. Women in my culture yield more to other people in a crowd than men do anyway. I didn't think to try out just standing my ground like a man and making the monks go around me, but it might have been interesting. I would have felt rude doing it, though. When in Rome.

Outside the temple there was a quiet side with an amazing fresco wall covered in a story that someone could probably spend a whole PhD thesis studying. You'd have to know the whole history of the wars and military campaigns mounted by the king who built this place, and learn about the equipment and battle strategies, and possibly individual generals. The whole length of that wall in row after row was covered by the pictorial story of soldiers and horses and elephants.

Below is a detail with a war elephant and a horse and some of the fallen soldiers. I think some of the bricks have been repaired or replaced, as they don't look the same as the others. I buy a couple of small pineapples from a vendor. They are pre-peeled and cored, and cut in a kind of spiral pattern so it's still in one piece, but easy to eat. I give one to the driver and eat one myself. It's incredibly sweet, not like the pineapples that come out of cans at home. We go for lunch. The menu offers "hold chicken" but I'm full of pineapple and just order a glass of cane sugar juice and some rice. The cane sugar juice is sweet, tastes like brown sugar, with a hint of of lime and coconut. It could believably be a Starburst candy flavour. I guess it's just not a very complex combination of esters.

While we are eating some French tourists just outside the restaurant are being besieged by child trinket vendors. "Une, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six ..." the kids demonstrate, counting the postcards and waving their coconut shell bracelets. I wonder about the whole economy of the trinket vendors. They all have such similar wooden apsaras, silk scarves and wooden flutes in palm frond cases that it's not plausible that they are the result of independent artisans, even if they are all copying one another. Someone is coordinating the design, manufacture and distribution of these things. They're so cheap even at the tourist end, that the people who make them must get next to nothing for them. It is always more fun to buy things from the actual artist or his or her family. One man is selling rubbings that I do believe he has done himself, and I really like one, so I buy it. He gives me a palm frond tube to keep it in, and it keeps it safe all the way home.

By afternoon we have had enough of temples for a while and ask the tuk tuk driver to take us for a tour of the town. He offered one on the first day, before I asked to go to the temples. He takes us to a market, and we try to explain that we really don't want to go shopping, we'd like to see other sights. He takes us to another market and we struggle to explain. We'd rather see parks, famous buildings, a view of the river? What sights are there to see? He says there is a park and as we approach I see a tourist office and ask him to stop there. It's on the edge of the park, so we will go to the tourist office and then the park. The tourism staff are helpful and give us a map of town and some suggestions. I also ask them if there is a restroom here. That's the sort of thing one expects in a tourism office, but I don't see one. "Yes," he says, "behind my office," and gives me the key.

It's on the outside of the building. The floor and the toilet seat are wet, but not with urine. I assume it's just the humidity, but when I'm done I realize that there is no toilet paper and not that they are out of toilet paper, but that this is not a toilet paper using country. There is no bracket for a toilet paper dispenser, or anything. There is however a sprayer on a flexible hose, just like the one in a shower. I noticed these in the well-equipped toilets near the temples, but there there was also toilet paper and I assumed the sprayers were for cleaning or something. Now it dawns on me that they are cleaning me, and that the sprayed water everywhere is the result of similarly clueless tourists trying to use them. I now understand the prohibition sign that was posted in the temple toilets, and I have great sympathy for people who immigrate to Canada and are forced to figure out how to clean themselves with scraps of flimsy paper. It's not like you can ask, or that anyone will be able to explain it to you. I still have no idea how to do the job with a sprayer without getting water everywhere.

We walk in the park, which is kind of an adjunct to the royal residence in Siem Riep. Workers in the park are mowing the grass with gasoline-powered weed whackers, swinging them in slowly advancing arcs across the huge expanse of lawn. Other workers with rakes are collecting the clippings. They've upgraded from scythes and rakes to powered equipment without changing the job one iota. I can see people working with exactly the same motions a thousand years ago, keeping the royal residence well groomed. The king is not here, in fact he's never here. He spends most of his time in China. "China? Why China?" I ask incredulously. China, it turns out, built a nice home for the King and it's more comfortable and convenient for him to live there. "Aren't you worried about that?" I ask. "Doesn't it seem wrong for a foreign power to have that much influence over your leader?" Suddenly our driver speaks much less English than he did earlier. Oops. Clearly he too sees the same politics in play that the ancient Angkorians tried with their gods. I find something else to talk about.

Later I ask to go to the post office. He finds it and I go in, all ready with the Khmer for "Please I would like stamps," although it should be obvious what a woman with a stack of addressed letters and postcards wants. That's not necessary as the postal worker speaks good English and sorts quickly through my stack going to New Zealand, Canada, the USA, and England, weighing the envelopes and counting the postcards. She gives me a total in riels, which I pay in US dollars and she gives me the correct change, not the street rate change, and then just keeps the letters. She's going to put the stamps on herself. I thank her and walk away. And it seems you all got your letters and postcards, which to me says that there is not much corruption in that part of the civil service. It would be easier to take a foreigner's money and postcards and throw them away, but the system is such that everyone trusts that it will be done correctly, and it was. It was a good sign. Honesty was common in Cambodia. For all the merchants' hustling, they didn't try to cheat us on change or take advantage of us misunderstanding and handing over more bills than necessary.

In the evening I walked up the hill to Banteay Phnom and watched the sunset, then rode an elephant back down the hill. I sat in an upholstered seat strapped to the back of the elephant and the mahout sat on the elephant's neck and directed it by tapping its head with his bare feet. He never stopped texting on his cellphone the whole time.

Starts Just Like Work

It still hasn't sunk in that I'm going on an exotic adventure, because for me a vacation starts just like going to work: packing suitcases and getting on an airplane. There are some differences, though. At work I have to be prepared for the arctic and Florida with the same suitcase. This time I only have to pack for three cities, and I know in advance what they will be and what weather to expect, so this should be a snap. But I get to a point where I keep opening and closing the drawers and closets without packing anything. I have a new cultural constraint. I need clothes for thirty to forty degree weather without showing too much skin. I envision long cotton skirts, loose cotton blouses, and those colorful pajama-like outfits the Pakistani women wear. No matter how many times I open and close my closet, I continue not to own these things. I have long black pants, form-fitting work-out clothing, t-shirts, a bit of beach wear, sweaters, and a wide variety of winter clothing. I pack two pairs of long black work pants for the build, a few t-shirts, and a couple of white, short-sleeved, poly-cotton shirts (with tabs for epaulettes). I simply plan to buy more appropriate clothing when I get there.

I use my work packing list to help decide the non-clothing items to take, adding an extra memory card for the camera, an electrical adapter for the various chargers, anti-malarial and severe diarrhea medicine (prescribed by the travel centre that gave me all my inoculations), and a guidebook to Cambodia. I leave my laptop, headset and manuals behind. I'm really not going to work as usual.

I get a ride to the airport late in the evening as the first snow of the year starts to fall. Big flakes swish through the streetlight beams. I hope the airport snowploughs and deicing stations are warmed up and ready to go. I just have a sweatshirt and a light jacket, not wanting to haul anything else through Cambodian heat. I would be woefully unprepared if we had to do an evac on the runway here. No, Aviatrix, you are not going to work. You can stop thinking about these things. Stop thinking about emergency preparedness? Never!

The group leader is taking care of crazy overprepared, anyway. He has us all at the airport something like four hours before the flight. It's a group booking, so the check-in kiosk rejects me, but the girl at the counter has no trouble issuing me a boarding pass and then after I pass through security it's easy to find the large group milling around our gate. Someone hands out the t-shirts and work gloves we've been warned to leave room for in our carry-ons, and we board the flight only about 15 minutes later than scheduled. It's a Boeing 777 if I remember correctly. Despite the size of the aircraft and the number of people who must be on board, the Captain includes a shout-out of our group, going to build houses in Cambodia, in his welcome announcement. I still don't get that I'm doing anything out of the ordinary.

The seatbelts have built-in airbags, but there is no indication on the safety card how they work. I'm already in a foreign country, as English is the second language on the aircraft placards. There's a fancy in-flight entertainment system built into the back of the seat in front of me, with movies in English, Chinese and probably some other languages, too. We're supposed to stay up until at least ten p.m. Cambodian time and then sleep or rest for the rest of the flight, in order to get over jet lag as quickly as possible. Once I've chatted to my neighbours and read enough my dollar thrift-store paperback that I can't concentrate, I turn on the IFE to watch a Hollywood movie. Not being aware that Inception is a mindfuck (sorry, is there a corresponding term without the profanity?) movie, I watch half an hour or so and think my inability to understand exactly what is going on reflects extreme fatigue on my part, rather than deliberate and nested misleading on the part of the filmmaker. I give up and fall asleep about 8:30 p.m. Cambodian time, which is well into dawn back home. I sleep for about four hours and then wake up and watch the rest of the movie. It doesn't get less confusing through inserting a nap break, during which I had actual dreams which may or may not be fully separated from the movie itself, in my head. Also it's normal to have cuts in movie that drop you into new action, so to turn around and say that should be a cue you recognize as a sign of dreaming is pretty mean.

I'm like a nervous airline passenger, in that I imagine that every change in engine sound could be something irregular, except that I'm not nervous about it, aware of other things it is much more likely to be, and confident enough in the ability of a trained triple-seven crew to handle whatever happens. It's really just a way of alleviating boredom. Back to the entertainment system. There's an undernose camera view showing strips of alto cumulus clouds far far below us. I normally fly beneath them. Whether it's an artifact of the camera lens or the altitude I'm not sure, but the picture ahead on the horizon shows the curve of the Earth.

Another movie, this one is called Salt and stars Angelina Jolie as a sexy spy. The opening is copied straight out of a James Bond movie, and is even less believable here, because face it, given Angelina Jolie, waterboarding isn't going to be the evil bad guys' first choice of torture, and James Bond was at least shown to be in terrible physical condition after his ordeal. Angelina turns out to be a Russian sleeper agent, trained since childhood, now working for the CIA. That's interesting, because the denouement has to have her betray her own people, be killed by the Americans, or win, therefore making the American side lose. Any would be unusual for a Hollywood action movie. I never got to see which, because they turned off the IFE in preparation for landing before the end of the highway chase scene. My guess is that she betrayed her own people, presented as her being won over to the superiority of the American way of life, and everyone goes back to trusting her happy happy. I asked one of the other passengers if they had seen the end of the movie, and they had, but didn't remember anything useful about it. I gather it's mostly just a movie about Angelina Jolie and car chases.

As we descend into Hong Kong, a peculiar smell filters into the airplane through the pressurization system, and although the cockpit announcement called it a sunny day, it looks like fog. The air quality is that terrible. It's even worse than Los Angeles. There are mountains out there somewhere, but I just see a few vague shapes. I wouldn't want to land here visually.

Retracing My Steps

Back to the hangar, for what should be the last time. We said we'd have the airplane back to the customer today, but this airport is fogged in solid, so we have a little while to work before the pressure is really on. It's cold again today, even colder. I crank the heat on the hangar. We're paying to rent it. I nerd on the iPod for a bit then ask if they are done the cabin inspection so I can close up in there. "Oh, cabin inspection, right." That would be a no. They are done in the nose, so I replace all the gear. It always looks like something is missing when I put it back, because it fits so much better when you have it all out and can play tetris with it to get the best fit, as compared to when you're just digging something out and shoving it back. Then it's like this sort of tetris. My high score there is 100.

I call flight services for an update on weather, seeing as I can't see more than a couple of hundred metres past the door of the hangar. I think I can see further inside than outside. The weather is not good at destination yet, either, but both should improve before long. There's still no NOTAM on the drag racing, so I call the local Flight Services personnel to ask. They tell me the races take place on a disused taxiway on the other side of the airport and have no impact on operations. Ahh. I call back the FSS briefer to pass on this information, so they can mollify any other pilot who is concerned by the signs.

The cabin inspection is complete and one of the AMEs is closing up the panels there. I feel guilty that he is fixing the mess I made in the cabin, pulling everything apart to get to the cables. Those panels come in and out a lot so there were different kinds of holes, different sizes of screws, carpet and other miscellany. As they get ready to tow the aircraft out, I put the seats back in the cockpit. They always go back in easier than out, the opposite of the cabin seats. I see as I secure the locks on the rails that he has done a beautiful job reassembling the floor. It's better than when I started.

I compliment him on that, it's an easy thing to be lazy about, hence the mess it was in when I started. Both guys seem grateful for my help over the last few days, despite my sometimes self-sabotaging assistance. I suppose just having company is good, too. Now it's time for me to go do what I'm good at.

I walkaround and make sure that we haven't left any important bits unattached, then start up and run up the engines. Everything looks fine, sounds fine. They want a fairly long run so call for taxi and, after I let a Cessna 180 go by, go out on the runway to do the break-in for the new brake pads. A couple of accelerate-stops and then I'm back to the ramp. They pull the cowls again and I assume my note "leak check goo" means that it was all good with no leaks, because after that we went back to the hotel to get Internet access for the references needed to finish the last of the paperwork. I load bags my bags into the airplane, thank the guys again for their work and leave while they are still cleaning the hangar.

After take off I keep the speed down so I can cycle the gear a couple of times. Everything works as well as it did on the jacks. Sometimes with the airflow going by the calibration or something isn't quite right, but today it's perfect. I text an "all good" (or possibly "all goo," hope they understood) and steer direct for the waiting customers.

My northbound track takes me right through where the storm was on the way down. I haven't cleared the GPS track, so you can see my route south, my initial 180, slightly kidney shaped as I deked the visible lightning, another foray to the south east, and then a big wide semi-cardiod shape completely avoiding the area of thunderstorms before rejoining the planned track to destination. A little avgas and a little airframe time doesn't compare to the risk of lightning, downdrafts, disorientation and severe turbulence inside those monsters. Now there is nothing but sky and nice little puffy clouds. At destination it's approach, land, rollout, park, text, and get a ride to the hotel. They tell me the sky went black here after I left, too. They saw the same monster that I tickled.

The cardkey encoder still doesn't work at the hotel, so I need to wait in the lobby for an escort to my room. As the encoder is an American-designed security device containing encryption technology it has been held up at customs. At least they ordered two, so they won't be in this bind next time. It could be so miserable for the employees having to deal with customers complaining over this, but my escort has chosen to be unassailably cheerful and friendly about it all. I don't think it would be possible to be miserable to her about the situation. Any negativity you tried to direct at her would bounce right off.

Dinner brings me back to Boston Pizza. No, I didn't miss it. Back in the hotel I watch Casino Royale. I've seen and even "reviewed" it before, but now I'm looking at it in the context of a "reset" in the manner of the new Star Trek movie: take a long-running franchise, retell the beginning of the legend, and then start over in a new time period. I'm sure this has been done again and again, but it's the first time I've noticed it. That's not counting anachronisms like obviously European architecture and principals in biblical artwork, or the stories in Shakespeare being retold in different eras, like Romeo and Juliet becoming West Side Story. It's a good idea, really just an extension of translation to allow people to identify with a work that would otherwise be too far removed from their knowledge. Vesper is still the stupidest password ever, though.

Life Happens in the Gutter

It sure isn't happening in this hotel room. It was another TV day.

I watched a rerun of a Comic Con interview on one of the geek channels. A graphic artist explained, "Life happens in the gutter." (If there's a specific person who should receive attribution for that quotation, please let me know. As far as I can tell, it's traditional wisdom of the trade). The gutter is the groove between the facing pages of an opened book, and by extension, the space between the panels of a graphic novel¹. The pictures themselves don't move, so graphic novels depend on the reader's participation in creating what happens from frame to frame. The art of designing them is to facilitate that so that the page looks great, but the reader is never confused about where to look next, and the surprises aren't spoiled.

I mostly read webcomics, not printed comics² so I'd never really thought about that. It's an interesting insight into the trade, but more interesting to me as a metaphor for actual life, along the lines of "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," plus the reminder that the static Kodak moments in someone's life aren't their whole life, and that even when you're down and out, living in the gutter, life goes on.

The other movie I watched today was The Life of David Gale. I didn't know anything about it when I turned it on, but very early in the picture I knew what was going to have happened, well before the murder victim was identified. It just so happened that as one of the characters dropped a little clue phrase that was designed to explain the movie in retrospect, I found it interesting enough to ponder how I would approach the issue, and then the rest of the movie fit my solution perfectly. I think the ending was supposed to be a surprise reveal, but the movie was interesting enough that I kept watching. It was remarkably balanced, considering that most of the main characters are anti-capital punishment crusaders. I think in the end that both sides were fairly presented.

The airplane should be back soon, so I can do some work.

1. You can't call them comic books, because a lot of them aren't meant to be funny.

2. I only own two graphic novels: Maus II, which I bought second-hand in New Orleans, and The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Definitely not comic books.

Half a Movie

Okay, let me see if I can return to some semblance of a normal posting schedule around here. I'm going to start with every second day, and if I get far enough ahead to take me through the Cambodia trip, I'll come back and fill some in.

I wake up and there's a text from the a.m. pilot, asking me to call her when I'm up. They didn't fly this morning, because the weather isn't suitable. I call and we meet downstairs for breakfast: first breakfast for me and second breakfast for her. I guess we're being good little hobbitses today. There are zebras loose in the streets of some American suburb on the TV news. The cops are running around trying to catch them,and they keep eluding capture. The zebras are lucky they didn't get tased. I adore zebras. Their stripes are mesmerizing.

The weather is still unsuitable and forecast to remain so all day. We mooch a ride from our maintenance guy out to airplane to pay for last night's fuel and to get the aircraft journey log in order to complete the weekly company paperwork. And that's pretty much it for our official duties today.

I go back to the hotel room and seeing as there is still no Internet I turn on the TV, The Space channel is running all the Star Wars movies in order, so I leave it on that. It's the one with the Ewoks. The top portion of the TV doesn't work at all now, so I see feet and people falling to the ground. but not people being hit. it lends a whole new meaning to "I watched half a movie."

I leave the "do not disturb" sign on the hotel door, because I don't need the room cleaned again, but I attach another note to it "unless you're fixing the TV!" because I don't want the TV repair person to think I'm sleeping and pass me by. As I'm putting it up, the cleaner (I partly want to say "chambermaid" but I'm sure that went out with "stewardess") expresses surprise that it still hasn't been fixed and says she called maintenance again for me.

We go out to lunch. Same restaurant, same waitress. She's coming around, at least looks at us now. It's cheesecake day today. Yum. The service is really really slow here, especially at the end of the meal when it comes to getting a bill and getting payment collected. Usually we just go up to the till, but we don't have anything else to do, so we just wait until the whole transaction is complete, with fifteen to twenty minute gaps between each stage.

Back at my room the "do not disturb" sign looks slightly disturbed. I enter hopefully, but my note is still on the TV. I turn the set on anyway and then realize that it is a new note, on paper torn from the same notepad and taped in the same place, saying that they will bring a new TV.

I'm sure many of you are, so for the record I am aware enough to be embarrassed that here I am complaining about hotel amenities like TV and Internet, while preparing to build someone a home with no TV, Internet, or even electricity. It goes to show how technology can make us miserable. There's a "100 Items" meme where people reduce their possessions to just one hundred items. Hard. I don't think I could become a Buddhist. I love my stuff. I'll have to think about it.

Today I'm spared the introspection, as the maintenance guy brings me a new TV. I blog while Return of the Jedi plays in the background twice in a row. Damn those Ewoks are ugly. Both halves.

Altitude

I don't usually watch scary movies, but when I saw the publicity photo for this one, with the cast posing in a piston twin, its very familiar cockpit prominent in the background of the shot, I had to see it. Fortunately it isn't really movie-scary. That's not to say that pilots watching this movie won't have nightmares afterward. Let me set the scene.


A non-instrument rated pilot with only a few hours multi-engine experience, poor weather assessment skills and an affected emotional state boards all her closest friends onto an aircraft she has never flown before, with inoperative wing boots, and without providing a preflight safety briefing, securing their baggage nor performing a weight and balance calculation. She departs beneath the dark bases of towering cumulus and then attempts to outclimb them in poor visibility in mountainous terrain.
None of these factors dooms the flight, but an authoritative preflight safety briefing may have helped their case. Or maybe not, considering what the film throws at the terrified group of teens. Unlike my typical movie 'review,' I'm not going to give the whole story away. Most of the scary parts are an old-fashioned movie of the imagination with some depicted B-movie monster fun.
Although some aspects of the initial emergency that drives the plot are roll-in-the-aisles funny to anyone who knows how an airplane works, the aviation parts of the movie show the hand of a competent technical adviser. I know her. She is a commercial pilot who worked on Wings Over Canada. The pilot runs accurate checklists and, before she degenerates into screaming "MAYDAY" on multiple frequencies, makes the most authentic radio calls ever heard in a major motion picture. The weight calculation that she performs in her head (in flight, after icing become a concern) doesn't include any moment arms, but it's almost startling to hear her use terms like "basic empty weight" and explain that the stall speed will increase with weight.
Sadly the movie does not escape the "we have to lighten the load!" trope, involving throwing baggage out of the airplane, but they do avoid cutting to the fuel gauge at dramatically more frequent intervals. The pilot even leaves the Janitrol heater turned off specifically to conserve fuel. You don't realize how many things there are to know about aviation until you see the high ratio of things they got right to things they got wrong in the details.
The aircraft callsign for the purpose of the film is C-MYXZ. That's not a real callsign, as Canadian registrations never have an M after the C. Registrations are often changed for movie purposes. The Americans even have a small group of N-numbers reserved just for movies. This is the first time I've seen this particular obfuscation on a Canadian movie airplane. Maybe it's M for movie. it's like a 555 telephone number prefix for airplane registrations. The actual registration on this airplane is personalized to the owner, while YXZ is about as generic as you get.
I think not being a giant studio movie placed fewer layers between the technical advice and the finished product, and the result lends a lot more verisimilitude to the picture than you'd expect from a scary teen movie set in an airplane. Even though the director may not have intended suspense based on a VFR pilot hand flying through IMC, my heart was pounding. Spotting editing errors like an outside shot of the aircraft crossing the hold short line while the dialogue has the pilot reading back a hold short clearance, or a huge split in the mixtures when both engines are functioning normally is just part of the fun.
So is the ultimate hazard to this aircraft to be a control surface malfunction? Icing? Structural damage from turbulence? Fuel exhaustion? Loss of control from disorientation (and the pilot constantly turning her head around to talk to the people in the back)? Psychotic passengers? Hypoxia? CFIT? Not even close. Try giant space octopus. That's not a spoiler: its tentacles are right on the movie poster. Advance publicity billed this as a Lovecraftian monster movie, but monster fans will probably be disappointed. Aviation B-movie lovers should buy it right away, though.
The writer confesses that the original ending killed them all by crashing into terrain, but the actual ending is clever and satisfying. There are still a few loose ends, but I'll just call them red herrings. My largest complaint is that the visual post-processing was done overseas by a mainland China shop. This is not a quality issue, but because there's a lot of taxpayer funding in this, Kaare Andrew's first feature film, I'd rather it have gone to local talent. I'll forgive them because apparently they tried to have it done locally and then there was some screw-up; a Chinese company, with a Canadian connection, saved the film. It's filmed in Canada with anonymized airports and nav aid names, but if you've been there you'll easily spot where they really are.
It's rated restricted in the US for "language" and a "sexual gesture," but it's not a sweary or obscene movie at all. Apparently in the US, a guy hidden by a seatback who makes a gesture that suggests he may be opening his pants and waggling his wang poses potential trauma for a sixteen year old, while kids are free to see movies where someone is bludgeoned to death, so long as no blood is depicted. (I recall no bludgeoning nor bloodshed in Altitude).
As you can tell from the date on this blog entry and the direct-to- video release date of the movie, I got to see an advance showing, but I don't have a personal or financial connection to the film or its crew. I paid for my ticket and for my own copy of the DVD.

On the topic of products being released imminently by independent Canadian entertainers and of entertaining fictional death, a year or so ago one of my favourite webcomic artists, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, solicited stories about a world in which a person could learn the manner of their death in advance. Selected best stories have been edited into an anthology, and the book is about to be published. In an attempt to get a little bit of attention to a book that major publishing houses wouldn't accept, they ask that if you'd like to buy the book, buy it on Amazon.com on October 26th, in order to spike the sales and get it on Amazon's bestseller list, just for a day. A more cogent argument for that strategy is here. Again, I have no connection to the product, didn't even submit a story, but I appreciate Ryan's work, and I'd love a world where artists did wonderful things and simultaneously had enough money to support themselves, without all the intervening apparatus of the ... I want to say "dinosaur publishing world" but that would imply that they were as cool as Ryan's character T-Rex.

Spinning Our Wheels

While we're waiting for the part, we go out and work on the airplane to see if we can find another cause that doesn't require a new part. I think it's a bit like looking for your lost contact lens in the spot that has the best light, but what else do we have to do? It's also kind of entertaining seeing how everything comes apart. We know the fuel isn't getting to the engine fast enough at full throttle, so maybe it could be a fuel flow blockage somewhere.

While the AME works on the main problem, the pilots go to work on some small snags. There's a cowl flap position indicator light that I complained about being unserviceable, then they changed the bulb and now I complain about it shining in my eyes. I get down to figure out what its problem is. The cowl flap position indicator is lit from the side, just a little bulb tucked under the side of the mainly cosmetic in the centre console area. The problem is that the little curved bit right at the edge of the cowl flap indicator has broken off, possibly they broke it while installing the new bulb. So instead of shining sideways and illuminating the indicator, it shines up into my face. The plastic is black, the same colour as an Aeroshell oil bottle, and the Aeroshell oil bottle curves all different ways in different parts. It's like working with an ogee in drafting. I turn the clean dry bottle around and around in my hands until I find the right curve to match the missing one, then I cut out the piece with my Swiss Army knife and fashion a shield to deflect the light. It works perfectly and my coworker declares that it "looks real."

Meanwhile he has one hand, a screwdriver, and a flashlight inside an access port fixing the cowl flap position indicator itself. It has been registering half open when it is fully open. He tweaks the sender one way and now it registers a quarter open when it is fully closed. After a lot of fiddling he gets it to show closed when it is closed and almost all the way open when it is fully open. The AME says it will probably fail completely soon, and he has ordered the part.

The AME does not remove the unserviceable HSI because his licence doesn't permit him to take it apart anyway, and he hopes to have a good avionics shop in Edmonton look at it in situ, which will be quicker and less expensive than removing it and shipping it.

He also can't put on the new tire, not only because we don't have a jack, but also because we don't have the right paperwork. The tire company sent was purchased for another airplane in the fleet in a two-for-one sale, and the certification for both tires was on the same piece of paper, which is in the other airplane's technical log. Or somewhere. We have to get it before this tire can be legally used, to prove that it isn't counterfeit.

In the morning we clean and apply Ice-X to all the pneumatic boots and the rubber over the electrically heated props. We don't get quite to the top of the vertical stabilizer because we don't have a tall enough ladder to do it safely. When the AME thinks he may have solved the fuel flow problem, we haul the airplane outside and test it.

The tow cart starter battery is dead the first time we try to start it, but there are two battery carts in the hangar, so we jumpstart it and leave it running after the tow.

We run the engine for just a short time with the cowl off, but it quickly demonstrates the same problem. That's the way the day goes. We go for lunch, then come up with the idea that with all the smoke maybe the air filter is clogged. It looks good, and doesn't really match the symptoms, but we're grasping at straws now. We run the engine with the entire air filter box removed. No difference.

When the Greyhound bus comes in we go out to get the part, but are told that it hasn't arrived yet. Greyhound has no tracking system, so you just have to wait.

In the evening I watch Spinning Boris, a movie about American election consultants working for Boris Yeltsin in Russia, based on a true story. I mention it merely because it appears to have been partly filmed in Canada. There are only Canadian airplanes visible in the scene at the "Moscow" airport. No attempt has been made to hide the prominent Canadian registration on one, or even a Canadian flag and a Canadian corporate logo painted on another. I wonder if it was easier to get filming permits at an airport in Canada than the U.S. The scene is at night and I don't remember there being snow on the ground, so it's not like they came here for the scenery.

Jean Batten - New Zealand Aviatrix

Here's an old TV movie about Jean Batten, a Golden Age aviatrix who isn't well known--I'd never heard of her before--but has some pioneering achievements to her name. For example, in 1935 she set world records for flying from England to New Zealand and from England to Brazil. She didn't have any money and seems to have financed her flying mainly by being nice to a series of men who hoped to marry her. I should have thought of that, eh? New Zealand On Screen has recently converted the film to a web-viewable format and has been pimping it rather inelegantly to bloggers, so it may have done the rounds of the blogs by now, but I've chosen to hold it until today, which would have been Jean Batten's 101st birthday.

NZ On Screen doesn't seem to be set up to allow me to embed the video, so you'll have to go to their website to view it.

That a pioneer of the technology lived so recently always startles me. Ms. Batten died of infection from a dog bite, of all things. If some Majorcan had a better disciplined canine, she might have been alive today. She was still alive the first time I went up in an airplane. There must be people still living now who were personally acquainted with Orville Wright. What a century that was! If it's any precedent for this one, it's impossible to imagine our society and technology in 2101.

Some of My Best Friends Fly Helicopters

But I laughed so hard at this.

Nostalgia

I listened to a radio show about nostalgia (ha! "I listened to a radio show" is nostalgia enough for some people). The research conclusion was that people like nostalgia because they are pleased to be able to remember something from the past, especially something that their peers confirm that they remember too, proving that it's a correct memory. It's the opposite of the feeling you get when you can't remember how to do something you once did every day.

If you like to get nostalgic about airline history or aircraft liveries you should look at the posters for sale on this site. They have put an impressive amount of work into building airline family trees of the various successor airlines whose fleets and pilots have combined over the years into what are Air Canada and Jazz today. The aviation industry is so dynamic that I remember the airlines a few generations back. An airplane I have flown is even depicted on one of those posters, in different livery than I flew it, and I saw it recently in a new paint scheme again. I wonder if they stripped it, or if it has the layers of paint still on like an onion.

The recent celebration of the 30th anniversary of Pacman, not only by Google but as a general theme for the day in mainstream media made me realize that the Baby Boomers' grip on popular culture has finally been broken. They were such a dominant demographic group that their experiences were touted as human experience, so forcefully that many non-boomers almost believed they were ours. Millions of us who never saw the moon landing on TV, who found out that JFK had been shot from a history textbook, and for whom sex has always carried the risk of death as well as of life are finally taking charge of the world.

As I write this, I'm aware that there are working commercial pilots with no memory of the 1980s, people who have always had to press Start to shut down a Windows computer, who have always had cellphones, and who have never seen a VCR so old it flashes 12:00. Heck some of you might not even remember VCRs. Hang in there. Pretend to like 80s movies, 80s music, absorb some knowledge of late 20th century politics and nod along to what we say. Your time will come.

This post is dedicated to everyone who ever thought that flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong sounded like a pretty good job to have.

Local News

Welcome to a Cockpit Conversation recurring feature: "Aviatrix mocks your town by reading your local newspaper." Today we look at the Regina Leader- Post. I'm not actually in Regina, but, as two readers promptly figured out when I asked, in Estevan, Saskatchewan. This is the complimentary newspaper at the hotel.

Front page news here relates the intriguing tale that "Members of several religions took part [...] to celebrate Good Friday and Easter in Regina." Shouldn't that be "to celebrate Passover, Easter, Songkran, the Feast of Ridvan and the coming of spring?" I suspect that the 'multiple religions' involved in this ceremony were all flavours of the same one. The directory of religious services inside the paper supports that theory: there are forty churches listed under fifteen categories, but every one is Christian. But just when I think I have this community pegged, I see the leftover space on the same page is filled by an open-minded article on Buddhism. Perhaps the multifaith celebrations of other spring festivals were held on other days. The other front page story involves one politician giving another the finger.

Inside the paper we focus mainly on arrests, sentencing, and manhunts. One man who received the minimum sentence for possession of child pornography says he downloaded it because he was curious about whether it really existed. Police are looking for someone who cut across a field in the middle of the night, leaving tire ruts, and for a guy with lots of tattoos who has violated his parole curfew. I wonder if the latter has a tractor. A police spokesman said, regarding other incidents, "There's lots of collisions ... and the people who die, we don't really know what's in their heads." The paper also notes that, "Police say Thursday night and Friday morning were extremely busy, with domestic disputes, fights, and alcohol-fulled incidents." There's a photo of a man in a baseball cap riding his bicycle by sitting backwards on the handlebars and pedalling. He says he was hit by a vehicle once and rides this way to keep an eye on oncoming traffic. I suspect his cycling is alcohol- fuelled, and that if he has a domestic partner, they have had disputes about the wisdom of riding this way.

Last week's paper had a surprising number of reports of unidentified dead bodies. I think all the people that get lost or murdered over the winter here turn up in the same week of spring.

The most interesting news is a wire story on a Canadian named Julia Gaffield who found the Haïtian declaration of independence. No it wasn't lost in the earthquake. It seems that when they originally declared it, they printed up a whole bunch of copies and handed them all out, forgetting to keep one in a safe place. Eventually, as with most ephemera, everyone who had had one had moved or spring cleaned enough times that no one was known to have one anymore. They knew what it says, as they had lots of handwritten copies, just not the original item. Julia found it in the British Library because someone had sent a copy to someone important enough to have had his correspondence archived. Nice timing, and I hope it inspires Haïti during its rebuilding.

There's sports (ice skating, curling, bowling, running, baseball. lacrosse, and hockey, of course), movies (3D everything), homes ($250-600k), and classifieds. The announcements sections has four birthdays, a birth, a graduation, an anniversary and a congratulations to the girl who scored the most points in the playoffs, helping her team win the SFMHL hockey championships.

My favourite part was this cartoon, mostly because I looked at the picture, thought "okay, airliner" and then looked for the joke in the caption, before realizing that the picture is the joke, and the name of the airliner just echoes it.

Oh and the AME at the FBO calls to confirm receipt of the airplane and the work order, and to ask if I happened to notice if the NDB antenna was standing when I arrived. Apparently it blew down. So I guess it was windy enough to be worth tying down the plane.

Also, not local, but way too bizarre not to post, is this story of two eagles crashing into a snowbank while engaged in an aerial mating dance. The male was killed and the female may have a head injury and permanent ligament damage. These birds need to practise safer sex.