You Can Always Go Around

You might want to play the video as background music while reading or responding to this post. You've probably seen all the clips before, so you don't really need to watch it. The song, however, is good advice. I'm trying to remember the last time I did a visual go around. It's been a while. I think in the last year I've had ATC ask me to go around once when someone was slow off the runway, and I believe I've gone around of my own initiative for a tractor on the runway at an uncontrolled airport, but that may have been from a planned inspection pass rather than an intended approach to landing.

I think my recent go arounds have been more in the nature of five miles back, saying, "eh, the tailwind is too strong for this to work out. I'm going to make this a downwind for the opposite runway." I was prepared to do one not long ago when someone on frequency had reported deer near the runway, but there was no sign of them on short final. The helicopter must have scared them off. I'll be sure to practice a go-around at my upcoming recurrency training.

Who Knew September Was Such a Busy Month

I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth. I've been flying, amassing comments on the iPad, assessing the proposed new duty time regulations for pilots and how they will affect my company's operations, and mostly stuck in hotels with terrible Internet. That makes company paperwork take twice as long and leaves no room for blogging. Oh good grief, "An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post," and this is one of the better hotels this week. Okay, this is what I've got got for you today: an aviation headset has two plugs, one that connects the earphones to the system so the crewmember can hear, and one that connects the microphone to the system so the crewmember can speak on the intercom or radio. Each seat in the airplane has two receptacles to hold these two plugs. The intercom in this plane has three settings: ISO, CREW, and ALL. The ISO setting allows the left seat pilot to hear and transmit on the radio and talk to herself, while everyone else plugged into the intercom can talk amongst themselves but not hear or disturb the pilot or the radios. The CREW setting allows the two front seat occupants to speak without being heard by the person in the back, and ALL puts everyone in the loop. Generally the intercom is on ALL for normal operations. I will use the ISO settings if the crewmember in the right seat is training the crewmember in the back (or vice versa) and they are talking over ATC or want to talk during sterile cockpit times. I use CREW if I'm training a pilot in the front and want to give feedback in private. Or if the crewmember in the right seat is training the one in the back and we want to make snide remarks about them. I'll also use the ISO setting if I notice the crewmember in the back has fallen asleep (this is permitted, and indeed encouraged when they have no duties) but hasn't pulled out his or her headset jack, so that radio transmissions don't wake them up. I encourage them to pull their headset plugs if they want to sleep, because that way they don't have to throw crumpled up wads of paper at me to get me to turn the intercom back on when they wake up and want my attention. And then there's today: howling headwinds had us slowed to a crawl, done our work but proceeding to another aerodrome where they want us to start tomorrow. And the pilot starts singing, "The propellers on the plane go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round ..." Usually I swing my microphone away from my mouth before I sing, but sometimes my fellow crewmembers must suffer. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I teach you how to pull out your headset plugs.

Celebritails

My thanks go to regular reader Sarah for linking me to this article on the Canadian Forces Celebritail programme. I haven't managed to get a blogworthy picture of one in the field, must be the subtle colours, and I don't see most of these types at all at the airports I frequent. If you know the history behind all the people honoured on the tails, then you are a connoisseur of Canadian history and culture. The funniest one is the Bieber Bomber, and its mysterious poor dispatch record. I'll bet they're extra glad they took that picture off now!

In Concert with the Season

It's warm on the ground, but we're headed back to the flight levels today so the operator has cleaned out the local Canadian Tire of chemical hand and foot warmers. I've also noticed that just having a clipboard on my lap made a difference to warmth, so we have taken a sleeping bag out of the survival kit to use as a sleigh robe. I think the American for that is car blanket, but I like the imagery of sitting behind trotting horses on a frosty morning.

There's no delay on our clearance or departure and we're soon in climb direct the project area entry point. Through ten thousand feet, checklist item: oxygen on. Through 18,000', checklist item, altimeter set to 29.92. Level off and go to work. At first it's warm because it takes a little while for the warm air we've carried aloft to be replaced and/or cooled by the subzero air around us, but inevitably it happens. "I'm ready for those footwarmers now," I say, and then I untie one shoelace and fly with my sock foot for a bit. Cold. There's a bit of shuffling and swearing from the back as the operator realizes he has disconnected his oxygen while searching for the Canadian Tire bag. He takes a few deep breaths, regains his equilibrium and then passes the first footwarmer up. "It's already broken and mixed?" I ask. He says yep, it should be starting to work now. It doesn't feel warm yet, but I put it in the toe of my shoe and put my shoe back on, then repeat for the other side. Not warm.

That's what you get for buying handwarmers in the summer. These things work because of an exothermic reaction between two different chemicals. Old stock. The barrier must have broken down over the last year and the chemical reaction was spent to no one's benefit. I squish my toes a bit and ask him again if he's sure he mixed them or shook them or whatever. He says the instructions just say to take it out of the package to make it work. It is at this moment that I realize there must be two varieties of chemical handwarmers. The kind that heat when two sealed chemicals mix, and the kind we have, that react exothermically with ambient oxygen. Pro tip: if there isn't enough oxygen for a human to breathe, then oxygen-activated footwarmers aren't going to work either.

We descend out of the flight levels to do some low level work. I filed this flight plan as a "Y": IFR then VFR, but I still have to say the words "cancelling IFR" to make the transition. Now that I don't need them, the footwarmers warm up. The low level work has the fuel low level light flashing before we land, but my calculations after we fuel show that we landed with 30 minutes in the tank.

The FBO guy carries my bag for me. "You don't have to do that!" I protest. "There's lots of things in life you don't have to do," he says. The hotel is nearby and Gene Simmons' bus is parked outside. So at Slave Lake we got everyone from Nazareth to Susan Aglukark to Dwight Yoakam and here we get Kiss. Northern concert tours are the best. Enough people come from surrounding communities that the size of the audience can exceed the population of the town.

In the restaurant I ask the server what the veggie burger is like. She says "I don't know, I'm not a ..." then midsentence realizes that non-vegetarians can eat vegetarian items and ammends it to, "I've never had it." She's confused when I want to know if she knows anything about it.

"If you had a "meat burger" on your menu customers would ask you what kind of meat it was. What kind of vegetable is this? Rice? Beans?" She doesn't know but I order it anyway and five minutes later I hear another customer asking the same question. She does come over to find out what it's like, so the next customer will be able to get an answer. Dessert is Turtle cheesecake. No question there.

Next day's work is two projects in one in the city of Edmonton. I'll have to send the controllers a map so I can negotiate for each line, but neither map is any good. The maps are different scales, don't cover exactly the same area, have the rong landmarks on them and are completely unfaxable. I redraw it on a separate piece of paper, showing only the river, the major roads and the reporting points the controllers will know. I'm interrupted once by a fire alarm, but get it all done in time to meet the operator for a bedtime snack. We had dinner pretty early so we're having a snack now to tide us over to the morning. I show him my map and explain that I have renumbered the lines for the second project so that we don't have to say "line one on the second map" just "line twenty-one." He approves and he raves about my map. I'm proud of it myself.

Devastation

We're going to Slave Lake again, the community that had the fire. I checked NOTAMs carefully to make sure that services were available, but there is no sign from an aviation planning point of view that there is anything wrong there. Our work is far north of the community, up above the bush and lakes of far northern Alberta, and when we're done I plan the descent to bring me into the aerodrome environment at the right speed and altitude. I'm looking for the runway, right where it's always been, perpendicular to the lake, surrounded by the town, and then I get my first glimpse of the devastation. I have landed in Slave Lake enough times that I have subconscious landmarks that help me find the way to the runway, but it's like landing at an unknown aerodrome. The swathes of nothing are startling. I find the runway nevertheless and put the airplane on it.

I ask the fueller how things have been going in the town, with reconstruction and he says that almost nothing has been rebuilt yet, in fact they hardly have a handle on how to complete the demolition. So far the burned out areas have been fenced off and the remains of vehicles are been towed away, but nothing else has been done. He and everyone else I meet in town are pretty upbeat about their situation, though. They're northerners, I guess. Life goes on and they aren't dwelling on misfortune. We call all the taxi numbers but can't get one. There's a benefit concert going on, with big name bands at a venue just out of town and everyone is taking cabs so they can drink and party. We get a ride with an FBO employee, who tells us a "secret" that I can tell you now, because it's all over. She's just been finalizing arrangements for the arrival of aircraft carrying Prince William and his new bride Kate and their retinue. This was a surprise addition to the itinerary of the royal visit, but you can't keep secrets like that in a small town. Everyone I talk to has heard that they are coming, but some think it's just a rumour to buoy their spirits, and that a prince in line to the throne of Canada wouldn't visit such a small place.

The FBO employee gave us a tour through the destroyed parts of town. Entire blocks were completely razed, just empty yards with grey crumbled foundations and a few twisted pieces of metal. There was very little that was blackened or scorched. It was just gone. Completely incinerated. The fire was so hot that the foundations now crumble to the touch. Here and there is a house that the fire jumped over, or that the firefighters managed to keep from becoming engulfed. Sometimes such relatively untouched houses are sitting between two barren holes, intact except with the siding warped in curvy waves. There's one yard where the concrete steps that once led to the front door are still standing, covered in a waterfall of molten glass. It's a ghoulish little tour.

Our driver also filled us in on some of the worst parts of the fire, not what you would expect. Everyone was evacuated from the town with no notice, and they were not permitted to return for ten days, until power, treated water and emergency services could be provided again. Imagine a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at four in the afternoon. Now imagine a KFC that was abandoned in full operation at four in the afternoon, then left there with no refrigeration, no air conditioning and no cleaning for ten days in the heat of summer. Now add in ten other restaurants, an entire supermarket, and everyone's homes. The stench, I am told, was epic.

I go out for a jog before supper, following the trails by the river, and then crossing a road onto a park playground and across the park. At the far side of the park is a fence, but not your ordinary chain link fence to keep soccer balls from rolling into the street. It's a barricade between the park and one of the burned out areas. I turn left and run along the fence, just looking for the exit, but except for where I came in, the park is almost surrounded by burned out areas. I look at the metal that is visible in the yards. There are some cars, they look ancient, aged a hundred years in a day. The post-nuclear LA scene from Terminator 2 that shows a highway full of burned out cars does not adequately represent the effect of heat. The glass and rubber is just gone, and what's left looks more like the ash casts at Vesuvius than metal chassis. In one yard two cars are stacked one on top of another and I try to envision how that came to be. There are the remains of metal garden sheds in some yards, and after seeing several examples I realize that another common theme is trampoline skeletons. The springs are gone, I guess scattered and buried in the other rubble or incinerated with the synthetic fabric of the bed of the trampoline and the tubes that once made the round or rectangular shapes are twisted too. In one yard is a living tree, it looks like a little fruit tree, and I feel badly that no one can get in through the fence to water it. It survived a fire but may die of summer.

One of the "island" homes, an intact house amid all the devastation has three coloured printed signs inside the front window, proclaiming DONE DONE DONE on blue, pink and yellow paper. I theorize at first that the resident did not want to live there anymore, but further down the street I see what is presumably the reverse side of the same coloured paper, noting NEEDS WATER, NEEDS POWER, NEEDS GAS. Locals probably were instructed to pick up these sheets and post them in their windows to alert the utilities people that the residents had returned and were requesting restoration of services. Another sign in the front yard of what must have been a duplex gives a name and phone number, saying, "I owned the other half. Please contact me so we can decide how to proceed." Even one lot of this rubble would be hard to clear. It's not surprising that so little progress has been made.

We go for dinner at Boston Pizza, me trying not to think too hard about what the kitchen must have looked like after the fire. I notice a help wanted sign, and have seen those all over town, so I ask the server. Of fifty-seven people employed at BP before the fire, only twenty-one returned to the town after the evacuation order was lifted. Restaurant servers are typically young people, free to move where the jobs are, and they took other jobs in other towns, or just saw no reason to return. BP was one of the first restaurants to reopen. It's a chain, so the franchise was probably quickly able to source and ship full replacements for everything unusable, and it was screaming busy because most returning residents couldn't use their own kitchens.

It's actually more surprising to see how mentally healthy everyone seems than it is to gawk at the destruction. I realized during my run that this is an ancient human experience. Humans built homes and humans used fire since before history was recorded, and humans have almost always returned to rebuild. I'm glad the stench was just restaurant and grocery store meat. No one was injured badly enough for it to be reported. There are a few lost dog signs on poles, "ran away during the evacuation" doesn't bode well for a little white dog, but you never know.

Connecting the Dots

Some people want to hear more about my flights and less about the hotels or the keys or the fuellers or the taxicabs, but my flights are a long sequence of lines with dots on them. Have you ever sat down to play a simple videogame, not a fancy one with a plot and cut sequences and realistic graphics, but the sort you get for your phone that mostly just have dots or blobs you have to shoot or catch, like Bejeweled Blitz or Pac-Man or Space Invaders or Stack the Cats and then looked up four hours later with sore fingers and almost no perception of the time passing? That's whatit's like flying photo survey, except that instead of being filled with guilty self-loathing over having wasted so much time, you have a great feeling of accomplishment of having taken seven hundred twenty three photographs without missing a dot.

Sometimes the lines are parallel with the endpoints lined up, so I can just turn around, and attack the next line, but sometimes the next line is longer or shorter or we skip one, so I need to be directed to the next one before it comes on screen. The scale jumps to zoom in as I approach the lines until it switches to what I call the "jumpscreen." (Yah, because it jumps. My creativity wanes when I'm totally focused on dots.) It depicts the track I have to cruise right down the middle of. The main dots appear on the screen green, then turn yellow and blue and sometimes red. Red is bad, and I should tell the operator if I see a red dot, but he has the same screen and has usually seen it before me, in that he isn't flying an airplane at the same time.

So there are two sorts of dots, the sometimes red one that I have to chase to make it stay in the middle and greem, and the ones on the line that I have to gobble up like Pac-Man. It makes me crave Skittles and Smarties (the Canadian kind: the American kind, which we call Rockets, aren't brightly enough coloured, enough).

I can do engine management, look up new frequencies, and all the other things you do while flying in the few seconds between dots, or in turns. And I listen to my MP3 player through the headset, on a setting that mutes the tunes as soon as there is any activity on the intercom or radio. This also has the effect of shutting the music off right away if I start to sing along, a blessing for the camera operator.

Morse Code, Part II

This is continued from a previous post on how I remember the signals for various letters in Morse code. So far we've done V B U D E T A N S H I and O. Here's the rest of the alphabet.

More Dashes

From the previous post on the topic, one dash is T, like the top of a capital T. Follow on from this to remember that two dashes is M, like serifs on the tops of an M. Okay no one draws an M that way, but you can imagine it. I have three more letters that I think of as dash-based, even though they aren't entirely made of dashes.

There's W which is a dot and two dashes: . _ _

You could think of that as E followed by M and concoct a story about the M saying "eee" because it was upside-down, turning it into a W, but I just hear it as "da WHIS KEY" like in the song, "Coulda been the whiskey, coulda been the gin ..."

Opposite to W is G: two dashes then a dot. If your name begins with G you can think of it as ME, but for non G-named folk it's "GO GO g!" Hey, I didn't say these were going to be really good ways to remember the letters.

My last dashy letter is J, a dot followed by three dashes (. _ _ _ ). It's the only letter that has three dashes and something else besides, and its the longest Morse letter. It was in the identifier of an airport that took a long time to get to while I was training. If the letter goes on for a long time and you can't remember what it is, maybe it's a J. Or maybe it's a number. I'll have to do those later.

Palindromes are Branchy

The letters with Morse the same backwards as forwards are the branchy letters. I continue to have weird ways of equating the dashes and dots with the shapes of the letters. K is a dash, a dot and a dash _._ and I just discovered that I can't put it in parentheses or it looks like an ASCII butt. That in itself is possibly more memorable than anything I can say next, but before I knew that, I thought of the dot as the upright of the K and the two dashes as the "branches" going off in different directions. X is like K but more so, with its branches going off in all directions, so it gets two dots in the middle. Imagine it an X-wing fighter _.._ if you like.

X and K ones have the dashes on the outside, but the curvy letters P and R have the dots on the outside. There's R ._. and then P ._ _. which is annoying, because the P ought to have one less dash than the R, to represent the fact that it is exactly like an R, except missing the little downwards branch. I've always had trouble with P.

Rhythm

Obviously you have to learn all the letters by rhythm eventually if you want to be any good at this, but some of them I know only by rhythm, because they say their own names, or something I can easily associate with them.

C _._. CHARlie CHARlie
F .._. Happy BirFday (you have to say it with a lisp)
Q _ _ . _ God save da Queen (I don't know if that works for non-commonwealth people)
Y _ . _ _ becomes instantly familiar to Canadian students, as it begins the identifier on almost every nav aid colocated with an airport, so you can't not recognize it. The few that don't begin with Z, and there's even a RUSH song commemorating YYZ, the main airport serving the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area, that has the rhythm of YYZ in Morse, giving you also
Z _ _ ..

That leaves only L. I can never remember L. If I don't know what it is, it's L. . _ .. I try to say it as "a LOLlipop" but that's not working for me.

Later I'll do numbers. At first I thought, "ah, I don't need numbers and they look hard" but some nav aids do have numbers in their identifiers, and they are actually super easy.

Morse Code, Part I

One of Amelia Earhart's weaknesses was that she did not know Morse Code, and it seems that information wasn't communicated to the ships that were providing weather and guidance for her during her final flight. I don't know Morse Code well enough to send and receive sentences, and I discovered that I can't read visual flashes at all, but I can understand all the numbers and letters at the slow speed broadcast by nav aid identifiers.

I was triggered to learn by a ground school instructor who related what he thought was an amazing story about a student who didn't have to look at the dots and dashes provided on the charts while he was identifying the nav aid, because the student had "memorized Morse Code." I knew that memorizing Morse Code was not an amazing feat, and it sounded like a way I could get an advantage in the air. I knew already that if you can spend thirty minutes on the ground to save one minute in the air, you should do it. And you can probably learn Morse Code well enough to understand nav aid identifiers in about thirty minutes. It is not that hard. This post and the next couple are my hints for achieving that skill.

First thing is, and this doesn't count in your thirty minutes, because you'd have to learn it regardless and you probably know it already, is the idea of "dots and dashes." Morse code is produced by pulsing a signal. It doesn't have to be a wire or radio transmission or use a special device. It works with any signal. It could be light, sound, touch, arranged objects. The only requirement is that it is possible to differentiate two sorts of signal. The way to do that is usually long versus short, which is why this suggestion wouldn't work, even if the guns had been operational. Although it's a space ship, so maybe they could have pulsable laser guns.

Each letter in Morse code is between one and four pulses long, in some combination of short and/or long pulses. In transcribing a message, the short pulses are written as dots and the long ones as dashes. The short pulses are also called dits and the long ones dahs. If, like me, you learn by memorizing what things look like, you can picture each letter as its corresponding sequence of dots and dashes. They're just some associations that I use when I forget which letter is which. My suggestions here are not predicated on visual learning, though. There are also a stunning number of mnemonics on Wikipedia's page on the subject.

Morse Code You Probably Know Already: O S V

It's classic rock, but if you've heard The Police "Message in a Bottle" just once, you've heard about sending out an SOS about thirty times, so you should know what that is. The official Morse code distress call is an S, O, and S sent out with no spaces between. That's three short, three long, and three short signals. The triangle is the official shape of distress, and three is its number. All you have to do is remember that S is the three dots (...) and O the three dashes (---). O is fatter, while S is skinny, so S can is the fast three and O the slow ones.

The other letter you already know is V (...-), instantly recognizable in the "da da da dum!" of Beethoven's fifth symphony. The symphony has even been used as a code signifying victory, for that reason. You can learn three more letters in relation to V.

Letters Related to V: U B D

This is just me, so maybe this doesn't work for you, but here goes. You already know V (...-). The written letter U is just like V except without the point. The Morse U (..-) is just like V with one fewer point, too. In Spanish B and V are extremely similar sounds, so I have no problem remembering that B (-...) is V reversed. And a capital D is shaped like a capital B except with one fewer thingy. Thus we get D (-..), one fewer thingy.

The Commonest Letters: E T A

If you've ever played with word games or cryptography, you know that the most common letters in English are E, T and A, in that order. Samuel Morse must have known it too, because he made them the simplest codes. E (.) is a single dot, the commonest letter and the fastest to send. A lower case e is a bit like a single dot, too. If the font is small enough: e e e . Meanwhile, T (-) is a single dash. Like the one on top of a capital T. If you put E and T together you have A (.-). But that's not how I remember A.

The A-N Beacon: A N

One of my favourite pieces of navigation history is the four course radio range, or the A-N beacon. Its operation is dependent on the fact that A (.-) and N (-.) have opposite signals. And that's how I like to remember A and N.

Hi Dots: H I

We know one dot is E and three dots is S, which leaves two dots for I (..) -- eyes are after all two dots in the front of your face -- and four dots for H (....). I think Morse code enthusiasts probably have a special Q-code for greeting one another, but if they wanted to say "hi" it would be an easy six dots.

That's enough for today. The next part of this post isn't finished yet, so there might be a few posts in between.

Bankeþ Airplane

In honour of the beginning of summer, this post arrives on your blogstep at the same moment as the sun is overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and I have a summer song for you.

This is possibly the oldest known English song. It dates from around 1240, so after the Norman invasion, before the great vowel shift, before foreign typesetters tossed out the thorn, and before post-inflected English had established its current SOV word order. All the eþ endings you see are the archaic third person singular, spelled -eth in Shakespeare, and omitted entirely in modern speech and writing.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu;

Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

You can figure most of it out if you know your animal-specific English verbs. The only word that doesn't exist at all in modern English is swik which means "stop". To figure it the rest out, pronounce u as ow (like what you say when you're hurt) except in the word cuccu make it a long oo and immediately before e pronounce it as v. You can find a modern translation here. There's music, too and here's a video of it being performed.

I find it interesting that some of the specific verbs related to animals are becoming obscure in English. Maybe it's just because I don't work with animals, but I would probably say that a ewe "baas" and a cow "moos," before I thought of bleats and lows. I think I only know the latter because of the Christmas carol in which "cattle are lowing."

I'm trying to think of any verbs relating to airplanes and engines that are not shared with animals. Our engines sputter, splutter, cough, roar, hum and purr. An airplane banks which I think is related to the meaning of bank "earthen incline, edge of a river," which is at least as old as this song. A banked road or racecourse would allow a chariot or bicycle to corner more easily, and the leaning sense must have transferred from the earthen bank to the vehicle. Pitch, roll and yaw are similarly not new with airplanes. Airplanes land and take off, but so do birds. A little internet research confirms the feeling I am getting here: it is easier for new nouns to enter a language than new verbs. So airplanes flooded us with new words naming the parts of the new invention, but we didn't make up many brand new words for what the heavier-than-air machines did. Honestly, if you can think of any verbs that were newly coined with the airplane, I bet they are verbed nouns.

Come back at midnight zulu for tomorrow's post, the contest I promised you, in which you can win a pair of new sunglasses.

Updated with working YouTube link.

I Still Don't Know What That Means

Back to my course in linguistic theory and analysis. Different verbs require different sorts of objects, i.e. a verb like smile doesn't have any, a verb like take needs one, and a verb like give usually needs two, except in special cases like "gave blood," or when it means "give way." Chomsky eventually decided that grammar did not have to account for these things, and that they were lexically determined, part of the definitions of the words. This was groundbreaking stuff in the 1950s. (I'm allowed to make cheap quips about other people's areas of expertise even after I've mocked someone else for doing just that, because this is a blog not an academic textbook. It's a case where hypocrisy is allowed). A verb can have up to three complements (sorry, I don't seem to have kept an example of one that needs three) but a noun can have an infinite number of adjuncts.

The professor showed us a sentence similar to "You saw a green-eyed, fire-breathing, egg-laying, bandy-legged, scaly-skinned monster and I saw one too," where "one" replaces all the adjectives and the noun. But what about "You saw a green-eyed, fire-breathing, egg-laying, bandy-legged, scaly-skinned monster and I saw a feathered one," or "... I saw one with no eyes." One then substitutes for the noun and all the attributes that weren't revisited in the second part of the sentence. He asked us to break into groups and discuss whether this was true, but not using his example, coming up with examples of our own. So my little group is the people next to me and behind me. Seeing as I'm not actually in the class, I'm trying to fade into the background, but there are things you learn out of university that most university students haven't learned yet, and one seems to be leadership. No one else steps up in what seems a reasonable amount of time to start such a simple exercise. Lack of caffeine? It is a 9:30 class, and I hear that's considered early if you're in the arts faculty. I suggest a coffee house order example. Between the group of us we found enough adjectives to fill the bill.

I ordered a soy milk, super-sized, double-shot, extra-hot, latte with whipped cream on top. You ordered one too.

And we can manipulate this so that "you ordered one without the whipped cream," or "one with homo milk," or "a regular-sized one" or "an iced one." It didn't seem quite right that you needed to have so much semantic knowledge about the descriptors to know what "one" could or could not stand for, given the added descriptors, but the professor walked around the classroom to each group and approved our analysis. We then discussed infinite trees and recursion and drew trees showing the various descriptors.

The next class consisted of a class discussion of a paper I hadn't read but was interesting because students were bringing their own experience to it. The paper, I gather, was on a similar theme to that first class where experiments showed that what people heard depended on who they thought was speaking. Asked to report on how 'properly' people spoke, subjects had quite different opinions depending on whether they were told the recorded voice belonged to a university scholarship winner or a high-school dropout. Accents and other regional speech variations are processed differently depending on circumstances. There was a student who considered herself to have an Asian accent but reported that in Minnesota everyone commented on her Canadian accent. The idea that it could be stronger than the accent that to her was more closely linked to her identity was disorienting to her.

Another topic was forensic linguistics identifying a speaker based on phonetics and other discourse markers for investigative purposes. There was a kidnapper who had specified that the ransom money be left on a box on the "double strip" and the linguist involved reported that that term was used only in one county, which was enough to identify the kidnapper from among other suspects. A double strip is the grass between the sidewalk and the curb, also called "devil's row," or "boulevard," and according to a survey of the class, "the lawn." There are five aspects of the sound of someone's speech, says the professor: voice, dynamics, pronunciation, vocabulary and style.

At one point the professor asked, "Why do humans have language?" and I was trying really hard to be a good, unobtrusive observer of these classes, so I repressed the desire to say, "to get laid." I was really quite astonished that nobody gave that answer. There were only insipid non-committal answers produced. Isn't that why we do pretty much anything? Language is not all that useful for fleeing or fighting. Except if you're going to include internet flamewars in fighting behaviour.

The last class of the day is called something like "Topics in Grammar" and is held over in another faculty's building. Even though I've never been here, it feels comfortable. It's a science building for an area I have a degree in, from another university and some combination of the decor, sounds and smells make me feel at home. I find my classroom and sit down near the back. The overhead projector is turned on and displays a slide which is the cover of a book, titled in what I think is Chinese. I guess today's topic in grammar is Chinese grammar. I don't know anything about Chinese grammar, so this should be interesting. Looking around, I notice that almost all the students are Asian, and so is the professor. Hmm. What if the class is conducted in a language I don't speak? There's a student near me looking at a handout or a homework assignment that is in English, and I can hear students chatting in English. But there's a map of China at the front of the classroom, also in Chinese. I'm holding my breath to find out what language the class will be in.

The professor starts to speak. Shoot. I don't know that language. It's probably Mandarin. I slip out, noticing as I go that the girls I had tagged as Caucasian have Chinese features. Ther naturally black hair has been bleached and dyed. I've learned one thing though. No one cares what classes I attend. No one even stared at me for being so obviously in the wrong class.

There's a meme I can share on this topic. A UCLA student posted a rant about Asian students who talk on their cellphones in the library, and rather than being shocked and outraged, Jimmy has written her a tribute song, using many of her own phrases to great effect. If everyone who found themselves maligned by haters could rise to such a height of creativity and hilarity, what a world we would have.

Songs of My Country

We got everything ready and took off today, but after flying back and forth for about five minutes, before all the green lights were even lined up on the mission, we were forced to abort for poor environmental conditions. I love this plane, because I can carry full fuel and a mission specialist and still land immediately after take off. All airplanes in the fleet are not the same, and one that is heavier empty may require me to fly for about an hour before I'm down to landing weight. I have no ability to dump fuel. In an emergency I could land overweight, and if it was a high quality landing on a sufficient length runway, there would be no damage at all. But the specifications for the aircraft have to allow for the sloppiest normally acceptable landing--I don't know if that's defined somewhere, it's a corner of the envelope I've never elected nor had the misfortune to push--and still land safely at the max allowable weight. So I must legally burn down to that before landing. This lovely, svelte aircraft would let me do touch and goes with my full mission payload. So when the mission specialist calls it, I'm wheels on the ground as soon as the local FSS confirms the runway is mine. It's always the mission specialist's call to land for any mission-related reasons, of just because he or she feels like it, just as he or she can't overrule my decision to land for any safety reason. I don't get to call flights on whims though.

The AME arrives to meet the flight. It's one of the guys I was working with down south, just not the same one as was up here before. They swapped over and used their overlap days to do the inspection. He's here this afternoon just to make sure there is no aircraft reason for the quick return, and to familiarize himself with the working environment up here. I feel like I'm on the Snowbirds or something with this attentive ground support.

Back at the hotel, I have e-mail with an iTunes recommendation, based on my quoting Robert Service. He's right, I like this. I've heard it many times, but never remembered the title or artist at a moment when I was downloading music.

My country is definitely wild and savage. The song goes into my cross country playlist along with all the songs that contain the names of states and provinces or other places I fly over. Yes, my list is heavy on Stompin' Tom. My correspondent reminds me that Stan Rogers also has an aviation connection, as he was killed in the fire on the Air Canada deathwish plane.

Meanwhile iTunes censors the word "Honky" in Honky Tonk Man and Honky Tonk Blues censored. What the heck? How is this a bad word? I believe it's a really old fashioned derogatory term for caucasians, based I suppose on the fact that white people have the biggest noses of any race, but has anyone ever been actually offended by the word? I love reading stories about ridiculous things done in the name of profanity filtering, but I don't like it so much when they affect things I'm trying to look at.

A victory has been achieved against the forces for terrorist infiltration of hotels, as the card encoder works again, and we can all go in and out of our hotel rooms without an escort.

Breaking Things

I wake up and check my text messages. I should buy a scrubbing brush so I can clean my nails better. There are three texts for me. The first one says the a.m. flight departed at 16Z. The second one says it didn't depart after all, but aborted on the runway for an engine problem. One of the engines--not the one that had the problem earlier--wasn't making full manifold pressure. The third text asks me if I noticed any unusual yaw or power loss. No, I didn't. It climbed like a dog,but it was thirty freaking degrees out, so I can't blame it. They're disassembling it looking for a problem.

Meanwhile I play on the Internet. Dav e Carroll, the United Breaks Guitars guy has release the third and final song to make good his threat to United. This one is no longer angry or sad. It acknowledges that United "broke" his career, but that while he has come out well from the incident, there are a lot of other customers whose damage claims have been ignored and who haven't been able to fight back as well. And it's funny Canadian folk music, which is what I like.

I check the weather and it's ... um ... interesting. Not the weather itself, but the delivery. The METARs have been served up on the screen in completely random order, not chronological at all. The number after 06 in each row is the observation time. There are hardly any two in the right order, just scrambled all over the place. The weather turns out to be irrelevant because the problem is suspected to be a failure of the fuel servo, brand new with the engine, and we don't have a spare with us. We are getting one on Greyhound, yes, the bus. It's the fastest way to get it here, short of chartering a plane to fly it directly.

As we go out to dinner I hear the AME on his phone telling someone about the problem. "And then the GFY light came on," he explains. I ask the other pilot sotto voce what that is and he whispers the answer back to me. Oh. Right.

One Hundred and Forty-Three Years

It will be Canada Day on July 1st, and I think I'll be celebrating it both in Canada and with friends for the first time in years. This will involve a backyard barbeque, beer, face painting, and I'm going to sing God Save the Queen and O Canada. I won't go to the fireworks, though. Fireworks displays are kind of boring for me. I think appreciation of extended explosions is linked to the Y-chromosome.

So if you're Canadian, whether you're celebrating the continuation of the country of your birth, being accepted for immigration into this society, or not having had your people totally eradicated by the newcomers, I hope what you're eating is tasty, what you're drinking slakes your thirst, what you're doing is fun and whom you're doing it with are a joy to you. I'll raise a cold one to those of you who are working, and hope that you're enjoying a good day.

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.

Ominous Signs

I probably blogged about this the first time I installed iTunes, but it makes me laugh every single time I see it.

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

Is there some way you can use Abba tunes to calculate an air position? Is there a way to stay on glideslope using country western lyrics? Is there some method of cross-connecting my iPod to the autopilot that will steer me clear of the Danger Zone? Should I turn off the iPod before making a course correction? I was given a POH to study once and the very first page of the manual, before the title page and the table of contents, the very first page warned me in all capital letters that I was never to put the propellers into reverse while in the air. The position and strictness of the warning told me immediately that (a) this has already had disasterous consequences, (b) quite a lot of people did it, so it must be pretty cool.

I'm clearly missing some vital function of the iPod shuffle, considering that I merely use it to listen to music during quiet moments. I hope it's okay with Apple that I sometimes listen to my music while navigating?

Also, message to iTunes: contrary to what you think, it's not all about you. You can stop putting up a "what should I do about this?" box every time I insert a CD ROM or add a peripheral. Your purpose on my computer is to manage songs on my iPod. You are not the operating system.

And I think it's lame that the iPod Touch has a whole app for managing YouTube videos, but all it does is bookmark them and play them back. What's the point if I can't save them to watch when I don't have an Internet connection? The Kindle is pretty cool, but I'm disturbed by the whole shift in the way published content is meted out to the consumer. Whole cultures have survived attempts at extermination because they preserved and hid their literature, in tangible printed form. Centralized control over access and content of publications is too 1984 for me. I don't want a corporation to decide for me that something is no longer worth reading or listening to; I don't want a seriously compromised server to wipe out a decade of literature; and I don't want governments to have a means of determining who is reading what. Whether or not they are using it for navigational purposes.

Done Like Dinner

The customers have emerged from their conference call and the verdict is that they are done with us. They pack up and drive away, before any more snow arrives and they get stuck up here. It's now up to the boss to decide where to send us, before the same thing happens to us.

I make sure I'm packed and ready to go and try to eat up all the perishable food in the hotel refrigerator. I abandon so much food in a year, it's sad. I try to buy just what I'm going to eat in meals I know I'll have in the hotel, but sometimes things aren't available in a small enough size, or the estimate of how long I'll be in a place is way off and I'm called to move right after I've stocked up. And sometimes I just forget I have food in the fridge. I think I left fudge behind once.

I kill some time doing stupid things. Damn YouTube for giving me the opportunity to watch mindless shows that I managed to miss the first time. (But if you haven't seen Susan Boyle from the British Idol show Britain's Got Talent you must. This is from at least a year ago, so all the cool people have already seen it, I'm sure, but it's the uncool people who have to see it. She is the stereotype of frumpy, and the only members of the audience and judging staff who aren't openly laughing at her are squirming with embarrassment for her. And then she sings. She has the last laugh.

I also review some instrument plates and regulations, just to keep myself current and not forget everything I've learned, especially if I'm going to watch brain-rotting television. It would be terrible if I crossed over the NDB on final approach and could remember a pithy remark Simon made to a contestant (he's so mean -- I had an interview like that once. I wish I'd said "Who do you think you are? Simon Cowell?") but didn't remember to start my timer for the missed approach. Now I'm going to be flying and every time I catch an error there will be Simon Cowell's voice asking me "have you ever been in an aeroplane before?" (And the nice judge next to him saying perkily, "I think you have a really nice attitude.")

It's only an hour before dark when the boss calls with the verdict. He doesn't want us to go to West Virginia right away. Just fly south to where we can park the airplane and get an airline ticket home. It's an early Christmas -- yes, I'm over a month behind on my blogging. No more work for the month means a smaller paycheque, but I don't mind going home anyway. If we flew tonight, by the time we got the plane there, secured for a few weeks, then got ourselves and baggage to the terminal it would probably be too late to get a flight home tonight anyway, so we'll fly out tomorrow a.m. and then home on the airlines the same day. We risk the potential for jinxing and both book tickets.

Cheapest Airplane Fix Ever

Last week I blogged about a mystery item handed over to me at crew change and challenged you to tell me why my chief pilot purchased these. If I have opportunity to, I will edit this paragraph to mock or commend you on your most excellent guesses. If not, you know I'm busy this week.

The greatest hint to what they were for was not in the photo, but in the title of the blog post "The Future's So Bright ..." Those well-versed in eighties music will be able to complete the line "... I gotta wear shades" suggesting that the gag glasses had been sunglasses. It was the lenses that were of use, not the frames themselves.

You'll remember me complaining about the undimmable digital rpm display on my new high-tech tachs. From the install up until now it was either endless summer in the north, or working low altitudes in mountainous areas, so I had suffered no personal pain from the overbright avionics. The manual includes installation instructions, which recommend it be configured for a permanent backlight. This at least suggests that it could be otherwise configured, and a reader dug out the specification for a part required, which information I have passed on to maintenance. I'd planned to request it more vigourously once I started into the winter night work.

The night work came for this crew and the light from the tachometers was as obnoxious as I had predicted. They couldn't find a source of sunscreen film in the small town, but there was a dollar store and the lenses from the gag glasses filled the bill. They cut them up to create little shields for the displays. The numbers are clearly visible in daylight yet not retina-piercing at night.

Tweeting on a Jet Plane

This song might be really mean if it weren't so funny. Also I love the original, because I'm always leaving on a jet plane and not knowing when I'll be back again. (I wish there were an option to accept a cookie from airline websites such that when I visit the default ticket type is "one-way.")

I promise this is my last post about NW 188, unless something really startling come to light, like it turns out that the crew members they interviewed are really robots made with alien technology, and not the original pilots at all. Even if they are robots made with ordinary Earth technology. But it has to be at least that startling.

In response to this incident and Aluwings' post on the subject, I tried to keep track of what we did on my last flight to pass the time. Once we were clear of controlled airspace and had bade farewell to the local controller, we:

• commented on how much nicer the weather was than last time we came this way
• discussed the best sort of glasses frames for wearing with headsets
• ate some snacks out of our respective flight bags
• talked about the variation in stickiness of those stickers they put on apples
• compared brands of energy bars/supplement bars/meal replacement bars
• marvelled at the thinness of some of the clouds below us
• performed fuel management tasks
• waved our hands around to try and explain how we were getting a 40 knot tailwind when we were flying to the northwest of a low
• took some pictures of the clouds
• looked at the list of nearest airports about forty different times, some of which we then clicked on to see the names and frequencies
• called flight services for altimeter settings and the latest destination weather (14,000 broken) and forecast (tempo three miles in snow broken 2000)
• discussed an alternate plan should there be a snowstorm so fierce that we couldn't get in
• turned on the windshield defroster just to make sure it worked (yes)
• discussed the potential of the defroster as a hand-warmer (good)
• climbed 2000'
• pulled out the POH and looked up the single-engine performance ceiling for our weight, new altitude and outside air temperature
• looked up the times in the journey log for a previous flight so we could laugh at how much faster this one was
• tried to locate the source of a draught, but decided it was just air circulation from the cabin, so cranked up the rear heat
• gratuitously adjusted some heating system sliders which the mechanic said weren't connected to anything that he could see
• kept track of our position on the paper charts as well as in the GPS
• looked up the names of lakes that we passed
• looked up an aerodrome we overflew in the CFS to see who owned it

That's kind of the size of it. It doesn't seem boring when you're there. This song, however is going on my iPod.

AC/DC

You might think this post is about electrical matters, continuing to pander to zb, but it isn't. It's about the myriad things that might disrupt ones schedule in aviation. Flight delayed for weather: common. For maintenance: you bet. Because the client was late or changed their mind: that's why they're the ones that pay the bills. Frequently fuel is not available when you want it. Sometimes the pilot is sick. Sometimes the airport or airspace is closed for an airshow, or a security event. I've had required equipment not arrive in time for the flight. It is not uncommon for me to check out of and back into the same hotel three times on three consecutive days because that day's flight keeps being scratched.

I knew I hadn't seen it all, but today was a new one for me. The planned flight was cancelled because of an AC/DC concert at destination. What did that have to do with anything? There were no hotel rooms available.

Whitehorse is Awesome

I was expecting Whitehorse to be a one horse town. After all, it's not called "Whitehorses." But before we'd completed the cab ride into town we saw that this place was at least a kilohorse town. It has multilane paved roads with signs and traffic signals. We see some chain stores like Home Depot and Costco on the way in and then my co-worker cries, "There's a Starbucks!"

"There are two Starbucks," responds the cab driver, but don't think the corporate interests have taken over the town. It consists mainly of interesting wooden buildings two or three stories high. We later learn that the building code maximizes construction at four stories, so there are no skyscrapers, just medium density along astonishingly well-kept streets.

We checked into the hotel. It's obviously done up for the tourists, with moose and mounties and that sort of kitsch. You can fly direct to Whitehorse from Germany, and Whitehorse has taken pains to be the Canada the Germans expect. The elevator door is made up to look like the entrance to an old- time bank vault. Upstairs some of the corridors are very narrow, so although the hotel is in excellent repair, I think parts of it are actually quite old. We met up with our relief shift and all went out to eat in a building with an antique airline advertisement painted on the side. Menu choices included caribou stew, Musk ox stroganoff and grilled arctic char (a sort of fish). I had the musk ox, as I'd only tasted musk ox in jerky before. It was delicious, and very generous portions, too. The meals came with good salads, focaccia bread, and vegetables, all for $24, a good price for a meal of that quality and quantity anywhere in Canada. We all stuffed ourselves.

We walked around town some more. It's eminently walkable, plus dozens of people were on bikes and there were bike racks everywhere. There were a lot of stores selling things to tourists, but they tended more towards interesting well-crafted items specific to the place and not just plastic tourist junk. There were also a few very nice consignment clothing stores. Not thrift stores. That gave me pause. For stores like that to exist, there have to be women who live here who don't just wear parkas and sweaters in the winter and shorts in the summer. There have to be women here who make enough money to buy nice clothes and there have to be events and business calling for such clothes, and they have to live here long enough that the clothes go out of fashion and are replaced. I guess that was my first clue that people don't just pass through here, they come to stay.

That evening there was a midnight music festival and I went to that. I wasn't terribly impressed with the bands, but I got in free by asking the gate security people nicely, so I shouldn't dis their show. I just wanted to hang out. Wow, Whitehorse is diverse. Most northern towns just have native folk, lots of white men and a few white women. Whitehorse is every bit as diverse as Toronto, but more integrated. Caribbean accents were not what I was expecting at a midnight sun party.

When that wound down, I walked around taking pictures, giggling at myself that it was light enough to take outdoor pictures of historic buildings at 12:30 a.m. One of the rows of buildings I photographed turned out to be a trompe d'oeil mural in an alley. You know your town is clean when the tourists are photographing the dumpsters.

Despite the primping for the tourists, Whitehorse is genuine. It really is the beginning of any wilderness adventure you could want: dogsledding, horseback riding, the Chilkoot trail, river rafting, and mountain climbing all here. And it's not just any old trail or river: you'd be following the gold rush routes. That's why it's here. And ever since the gold rush people have come for one reason and stayed on. I really wished I didn't already have a ticket home. At least it's not until tomorrow afternoon so I have another half day to look around.