Solar-Powered Coke Bottles

I don't know what these things are. We see them on mountaintops. We saw one at an airport, just outside the perimeter fence, but obviously not installed. We thought it might have come down for maintenance or be waiting for transport to its mountaintop.

They are made of fibreglass. The transparent panes don't seem to be solar panels--I named these things solar-powered coke bottles when we only saw then from afar, and I assumed they were. The thing at the top appears to be a lightning rod, not an antenna. Are there transmitters inside? Are they radio relays? Lightning detectors? A suit of armor for a tree? Are they all over Canada or just in the mountains where we have noticed them?

I expect the full story from a solar-powered coke bottle expert who reads this blog. Don't disappoint me, Internet.

Guilty Little Pleasure

I love conspiracy theories. I love the idea that the facts as presented could be explained in a way that fits the just as well as the accepted explanation, especially when it conveniently explains some other facts that are conventionally held to be unrelated, but mysterious. So for me "we didn't actually land on the moon: they faked it in a studio" doesn't qualify as fun, because "I don't understand physics well enough to understand how space travel works" isn't a fact that I need explained. But some things do need explaining. We complain when a movie or a book leaves loose ends, and we expect our stories to wrap everything up. If there's a gun in act one, someone needs to be shot by act three. If a loquacious limo driver dominates the prologue, he has to have a role in the denouement. And if an airliner disappears without a verifiable trace, and then another airliner that looks almost the same drops out of the sky in a war zone, we demand that the two be related.

As you may recall, the incomplete location data from MH370 suggested that the airplane was somewhere on a line stretching from Kazakhstan to Australia. My favourite conspiracy theory (link in Russian) postulates that MH17, shot down on the Ukrainian/Russian border, is the same aircraft. MH370, the theory goes, ended up at an American military base Diego-Garcia. from there the CIA transported it to the Netherlands where it took off packed with explosives and the already dead bodies of the original passengers. The pilots parachuted out and the airplane continued on autopilot to the designated location, where it was programmed to explode.

"Evidence" presented for the theory includes the undocumented claims that:

• passports found at the site were all very new, and unscorched
• some of the passports were clipped or punched in the way that their countries indicate invalidated passports
• a flight status screen showed the flight as cancelled
• the registration of the two aircraft differs only by an O versus a D: 9M-MRO for MH370 and 9M-MRD for MH17
• no relatives gave media interviews
• all the Facebook accounts of the passengers were created on April 21st, after the disappearance of MH370, and nothing was posted to them
• The configuration of windows and painted flag shown on news photos of the wreckage matches MRO, not MRD.
• the corpses were said to have a strange odour, and seemed to be drained of blood, not freshly dead

Now I don't have a problem with passports being found in excellent condition despite being onboard an airplane that was shot down. The passports were not in the engines nor the fuel tanks. They were probably in protective cases in secure pockets of people's carry-ons, at least that's where mine is. Unlike human beings, passports held flat the way people tend to put them away are not damaged by extreme pressure changes or long falls, and if we trust Ray Bradbury can sustain temperatures approaching 451 Fahrenheit.

The clipped passports thing is a little odd. I suppose there may be people who keep their expired passport with their valid one. I've seen pilots produce multiple licences ... actually I remember doing that myself once at a flight test. I'd just added the new paper to the original. The examiner told me to put the old one away at home somewhere. Now I have a file folder full.

I'm not surprised that the flight information site would mark the flight cancelled, seeing as they almost certainly didn't program it with the option of "shot down by missile". The data at that page--the same flight number on consecutive days--could be interpreted as a record of arrivals, and the arrival of the July 14th flight has most decidedly been cancelled.

The similarity in the registrations is kind of startling, and it is actually true. It would be a good way to cast doubt on a report by someone who claimed to have seen a change in the tail number from departure to arrival, but it becomes a lot less mysterious if you consider that all Malaysian Airlines operates B777s registered as 9M-MRA through to 9M-MRQ. The prefix 9M simply represents Malaysia, and it's very normal for an airline to buy several aircraft at once and have consecutive registrations.

Perhaps relatives in other countries were more circumspect, but the distraught sister of Andre Anghel, the lone Canadian on board, allowed herself to be interviewed on the radio. I had to pull over and cry after listening to her. She spoke about her brother going to medical school in Romania and then on holiday with his German girlfriend. She had sent him a text saying she loved him, and it was very important to her that he had seen that text before he turned his phone off for the last time, but she didn't know if he had.

Andre has a Facebook page, created January 21st 2007, and the good sense to keep most of his posts private, but updates to his public profile picture, along with comments on them from his friends can be seen prior to the disappearance of MH370.

I like the windows one, because it makes plane spotters into sleuthing heroes, the holders and creators of a distributed database of information on these airplanes that is also shared with the world through sites like airliners.net. I'll leave it to someone else to resolve the disappearing window mystery.

Here are some more English language sources for these and other bizarre conspiracy theories about the two flights. I like the one that just says matter of factly that aliens were responsible for MH370, now let's move on to MH17.

My theory, and it's a pop psychology theory, not a conspiracy theory, is that in this big confusing world, it's on some level comforting that someone has everything under control. Some people prefer to believe that their own government would kill thousands of people, largely their own citizens, as a calculated provocation, than accept that that same government, tasked with their protection, would fail to act against foreign terrorists. Planes don't get accidentally shot down or disappear for no reason we can know. It's all linked up and someone is in control. It's like when you're a kid and trusting that your parents really do know everything. It's like believing that when things go wrong it's a test, it's making way for something better to happen. Anything other than the possibility that things just happen. People abhor disorder and terrible things that have no explanation. Religions literally arise from such things.

Also if you speak a language you want to practise, read things that interest you. My new word of the day is якобы supposedly, a word no Russian-speaking conspiracy theorist should be without.

Mysteries of the Universe

My report time this morning was 5:20 am. I got to work at 5:15. Take off eventually happened at 9:29.

Most of that delay was weather. But while we were waiting for the weather other excitement occurred. Mystery One occurred when we couldn't find the keys to the nose baggage door, but didn't allow that to cause a delay, just stole a set from maintenance. They weren't in yet, and it's not really theft if you send e-mail to say you've done it.. I also couldn't find a funnel, to add oil, but that's not a mystery. People keep throwing out my funnels because i make them out of old oil bottles. Mystery Two is that my Swiss army knife, which I would have used to improvise a new funnel, seems to have gone missing last time I had to check it on the airlines. I hope it's just in the bottom of a bag somewhere. I poured the oil carefully down the dipstick, didn't spill any. Mystery Three was the location of the back-up emergency checklist. It's just a company thing that we have an extra, and not mandated in any of our manuals or regulations, so we resolved to find it later, and started engines without it.

Mystery Four is why the airport was so strangely deserted, and we got to take off with no waiting. This was 9:30 in the morning, not the originally planned 6:20.

We landed at a different airport than was filed in the flight plan, which seemed to confuse the FSS specialist whom I called to close the plan. "That's what we do," I said in a tone that implied I was saying something helpful. Maybe it was because the airport we landed at was in more or less the opposite direction from the filed one. But that is what we do. It was 29 degrees on the ground, and potable water was not available at the airport. None of that is mysterious.

The second flight went well. I called a tower controller to cut through a control zone that hadn't been on the original plan. He assigned me a squawk code and cleared me through quite efficiently. Another aircraft called up right behind us to go sightseeing in the control zone. "Not without a code!" said the controller sternly. The pilot ummed for a bit and then asked if the controller could assign him a code. The controller did. So why did I get one automatically, but the guy behind me had to beg? That is a mystery. I think I'm up to five.

Mystery six is how we landed at home base six p.m. but I didn't get out of the damn office until eight. Does it really take two hours to disembark, get fuelled, tow the airplane in, do the paperwork, send a couple of e-mails, check that the lights are off and the doors locked, set the alarm and leave? I guess there was answering the phone--a call from the bank for someone who went home hours ago. At 7:30 pm? I think someone at the bank got time zones mixed up.

On the way home I decided I wanted Mexican food, but knew there wasn't much in the fridge. Looking for a grocery store to get cilantro and tomatoes I found a Mexican cafe I didn't know existed. I ordered beans and rice for take out. I get it home and they are GREEN beans. Is that a mystery?

LOST

II might as well post this now, because I won't have a chance to update it if the mystery of Malaysian Airlines 370 is solved in the next few days. I don't have any special insights about the disappearance of an entire Boeing 777, but as a pilot I have to wonder about it.

First off, despite what movies like Airport '77 depict, an airplane that crashes into the sea doesn't slip whole and undetected under the waves. With considerable skill, or even questionable skill and some luck, it could alight on the surface of the water without substantial damage. Handled as if it were being landed on land, an airplane can skim over the surface of the water the way a skipped pebble or a snowmobile does. (Unlike the snowmobile, an airplane doesn't immediately sink, because the fuselage is full of air, and buoyant). No sane person would deliberately ditch an aircraft without a substantial emergency, because if something goes slightly wrong, the picture is substantially different. The video below is of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that was out of fuel. The captain was trying to ditch it while fighting with the hijackers. Even that fuselage stayed afloat for a reasonable amount of time, and many of the deaths were not due to crash injuries, but because passengers inflated their life vests before exiting the aircraft, impeding evacuation.

There's a post being shared on Facebook that purports to show the aircraft recovered, but you can tell from the still that it's actually a Lion Air landing accident from last year. Don't click that one because it's probably a virus.

When an airplane comes into contact with it, water is really quite a bit like ground. Do it in landing configuration, descending towards the water at a shallow, about three degree angle, then touching down wings level, slightly nose up and it is quite survivable. Do it at high speed, or inverted, or any other way that doesn't involve control at a low descent rate, and the result is catastrophic. Swiss Air 111 hit the water 20 degree nosedive, and at a bank turn angle of 110 degrees, and disintegrated into millions of pieces. Only one of the passengers was visually identifiable. Alaska Airlines 261 was a similar story. Many of the millions of pieces that make up an airliner and its contents float, so the debris is visible on the surface and drifts ashore. Jet fuel is oily, and floats on water leaving a visible slick. Also both those crews were in contact with air traffic control during the sequence that led to the crash.

When an aircraft suddenly disappears from radar and stops transmitting, one good guess is that it broke up in midair. But when that happens the pieces are in the water in roughly the area where the radar track stopped, and the last week has seen ships, helicopters satellites and and airplanes tasked to search that area with no results. Plus substantial other evidence exists that the airplane did not explode, crash, alight or otherwise make contact with the water in the area they've been looking for it. SATCOM, an automated system on board the aircraft, and one a very diligent Boeing pilot of my acquaintance says he doesn't know how to turn off, continued sending transmissions. It's a passive system that pings about once an hour, sending what's basically a "ready to transmit" signal but no data links were opened, because the companies involved had not subscribed to that level of service from the satellite operator.

Here's what I have gleaned of the timeline. Times are Malaysian local.

• 12:41 a.m. Take off
• 1:07 a.m. The ACARS data transmission system stopped communicating. ACARS is a two-way data transmission system in the cockpit. The pilots can use it to request weather data and the airline will use it to send them connecting flight information, and even to update the flight management system. It automatically transmits some data on phase of flight and things like fuel status and engine performance, so the airline can detect a need for maintenance before it is urgent. It can also be used for communication with ATC, but as far as I know is generally only used with ground controllers to get the complex initial clearance for a flight. It might be used in flight for a complex rerouting, but I don't know. Check the comments to see if one of my more knowledgeable readers does. The ACARS system can be turned off from the cockpit.
• 1:21 a.m. The crew is 'handed-off' by Malaysian ATC. That is they are told to contact the next controller on a specific frequency. They reply normally to this call, implying that they will comply, but do not call the Vietnam ATC.
• 1:21 a.m. The transponder is turned off. The transponder is a simple device that works in concert with ATC radar. Before take-off ATC assigns the airplane a four digit code, which the pilot sets on the transponder. When it receives a ping from radar, it sends back a signal encoded with the aircraft altitude and the four digit code. that the pilot has set on the device. The ATC computers match the code with the aircraft type and destination in its flight plan, plus calculate and display a speed based on consecutive returns. If an aircraft does not have a working transponder, ATC may still see the aircraft on radar, but it is a "primary target." The transponder can be turned off from the cockpit. Transponders malfunction pretty frequently, and an aircraft like the B777 probably has two, for backup and to facilitate changing codes without an interruption in radar track.
• 1:22 a.m. Vietnam ATC expect a check in from the airplane but instead the radar track shows an almost 180 degree turn.
• 1:38 a.m. Civilian radar lose primary target. Without the positive identification of the transponder reply, controllers only know that their radar is hitting something there. Based on the speed and location, they can sometimes deduce that the target is a train, ship, or flock of birds, and they can be pretty confident that a blip going the speed of an airliner, in the location where an airliner transponder just stopped transmitting, is that airliner. Primary and secondary surveillance radars may have different coverage, so an airplane that could normally be tracked by its transponder signal may not be visible as a primary target.
• 2:15 a.m Malaysian military radar detects an unknown aircraft, possibly MH370, on a track that suggests it made another turn.
• 2:30 am Another possible military radar contact with the missing jet. I'm not sure if it shows the jet on the same track or not.
• 8:11 a.m. Final SATCOM ping received from the aircraft.

The aircraft had about eight hours of fuel on board at the speed it was going, and more if they reduced the power settings. I don't know the radar structure of the airspace they were in to say where they could get to without the aircraft being detected by an agency that would recognize and report its significance.

I don't know what it all means. I have a friend who is livid at the apparent lack of cooperation among the various military agencies who almost certainly have more information on the track of the missing airplane, but don't want to divulge their capabilities to one another. He also suggests that if the SATCOM signals were received by multiple satellites their source location could be triangulated. He also implied that a team of children with expertise at Where's Waldo should be put on the case, but I think the former suggestion was the more serious one.

Here is a link that answers some basic questions I didn't think people would ask, but people have some odd questions about airplanes. Someone asked me if this could be a case of pilot incapacitation, with the autopilot or random chance making those turns. I'd say no. The autopilot wouldn't be programmed to make those turns, and if the autopilot wasn't on, I would expect significant altitude changes. It's an odd incapacitation that would cause you to turn off two separate systems, one fourteen minutes before a normal call to ATC.

This one gives a pretty good explanation of tracking technology, and addresses the question of "how can we apply technology so this can't happen, and why haven't we done so already?"

Because I don't like to think of airplanes crashing if it's not necessary, I imagine that the pilots have stolen the aircraft, kidnapping the passengers. Although probably worse. It sounds like some cellphones were still switched on and even logged into social media accounts. Given the attachment some people have for their phones, it seems unlikely that that many people could be taken alive without anyone managing to get a message of some sort away. Despite my recent rewatching of the television Series LOST, I don't believe that the airplane has been spirited away to a mysterious island guarded by a smoke monster.

The facts that there will be wreckage if an airplane crashes, and that they haven't found wreckage, don't mean that the airplane didn't crash. It's a really BIG ocean, and it takes a long time to search. I liked this picture of Malaysian SAR crews. Of course it's probably posed, but I'm always attracted to shots that depict a group of people engrossed in something, not looking at the camera. It suggests expertise, focus, teamwork, and an important task. I also like the simplicity of the way the women's hijabs work with their flight suits.

I'll give the final word to The Onion, a satirical publication that doesn't know the phrase "too soon."

Update: They've pulled some location information out of the satellite data, but don't have enough satellites receiving the signal to resolve the position ambiguity.

Anti-Icing Mythologies

Well-developed ground de-icing/anti-icing mythologies have been developed for the airlines.
         - My misreading of an icing education document

The document said "methodologies" not "mythologies" and that's true for the airlines, but I was anticipating what it was going to say for general aviation. It's not that GA pilots are stupider, just that we aren't supported by the infrastructure the airlines are and we usually have to do our own de-icing. And it always takes place in the stupidly freezing cold, and usually in the dark, because people want their airplane ready to depart at the beginning of the day, but the sun doesn't come up in the winter until it has confirmed that the day is well underway. And even then it only comes up far enough to clock in.

Like the sun, GA pilots' first line of defence against icing is to try to take the winter off. This is actually working pretty well for me these days, especially when combined with our "keep the airplane in a warm hangar" strategy, but when the chips are down I still have to resort to the well-developed mythologies.

Sun will take the ice off, even if the air temperatures are below freezing. In temperatures that are just below freezing, sunlight will warm dark areas enough to melt, or at least soften, the ice on them, and even when it's especially cold the air is dry and the frozen moisture will sublimate into to the air as it warms with the morning. Meanwhile we whack the airplane with brooms or mitten-clad hands to crack the ice and then sweep it to dislodge frost or ice chunks. The official video on not taking off with any ice adhering to your airframe ever recommends sawing a rope back and forth across the surfaces. I've never tried that. Never had a rope. Last year I bought a broom at a northern hardware store, just a regular straw broom, and shared it with a Maule pilot stuck in the same snowfall. When I walked into the office at the end of the trip one of my bosses asked, lightning fast, "What's the broom for? Is that how you got home?" It was too funny to take offense at.

One reason we resort to mythological forces, like windshield antifreeze is that it's available. Most GA airports have no deicing services available at all. Even if de-icing is an advertised service of the FBO on the field, you have to find the phone number and persuade the person who answers to come out and do the work. Let's say you're paid by the hour to do a job that mainly involves driving a fuel truck around and pumping fuel into tanks, plus a bit of sitting in an office and answering the phone. How many hours pay would you want to get up at four am, start a different vehicle that you're not sure is going to work and stand on a ladder spraying poisonous fluids on yourself and some cranky pilot's airplane? If an airport is used by an airline, they may have their own deicers, but generally don't have the staffing, spare fluid, insurance, or billing apparatus to deice other peoples' airplanes. If you happen to be departing shortly after the scheduled airline flight, and have a case of beer handy, you may be able to get a few squirts of the pre-heated deicing fluid from the guys that came out for the flight, but you can't count on that. And you have to know what you're allowed to spray on your airplane and where.

Quick rule of thumb, the odd-numbered ones are okay for me. That is Type I deicing fluid, which looks like thick orange Gatorade, gives virtually no holdover time and can be used on any speed of aircraft is safe and so is Type III. Type III looks like urine, requires a minimum rotation speed of 60 knots, and, if you pay first, has a holdover time sufficient to get you to the runway and airborne in light snow. Holdover time is the time period during which you probably won't get more contamination while standing or taxiing. It's measured from the beginning of the application (i.e. measuring by the area that is treated first). Types II and IV have holdover times sufficient to queue with everyone else on the taxiway at Pearson, but they work by enveloping your aircraft surfaces in cozy ooze, so to use them safely you have to have a rotation speed over 100 knots, to ensure they will shear off before rotation and not interfere with wing performance.

Holdover time is just a mythological luxury for me. In ground icing conditions I need to do everything, including a run up, and then shut down, deice and go right away. That can be a tough call because batteries and starters are not at their best in the cold. If you've got the incantation right to start the engines once in a morning, you don't like to shut down and risk having the magic not work the second time.

I'm Not Even the PRM

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

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

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

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

Safety Dance

I always pee before departure. It's part of the ritual. The "safety pee" I call it. I get back from the restroom (or from behind a tree, depending on the sophistication of the available facilities) and then do one more circumnavigation of the airplane before boarding. That last walk is where I spot unsecured baggage doors, FOD, items placed on the airplane, or the remainder of interrupted tasks. This isn't what I mean by my preflight walkaround: that is more thorough. It's just a last look before I board.

Yesterday I completed the safety pee, walked around the airplane, got in the cockpit, flew for 5.7 hours, drank water when I was thirsty, landed, unloaded, fuelled, taxied from the fuel pumps to parking, and then went to pee, because I felt like I needed to a little. Today I took off after the same preflight ritual and only an hour and fifteen minutes later had to pee so badly I was doing the pee-pee dance right there in the cockpit. I wasn't going to make it to the destination, only forty minutes away. When it comes to technology that makes my life better, folks, the pee bag rivals the wheel. I have landed airplanes without wheels, but landing is so much harder with my legs crossed. So I succumb to the biological need and fill a pee bag to the 600 mL mark. Yeah, my pee bags are calibrated. I have no earthly idea why. Maybe some people like to keep track. Or brag. Am I bragging? Six hundred millilitres isn't bragworthy. I can pee much more than that. I can hold much more than that. Why did my body desperately have to void that 600 mL then and there, when on another day it would happily tanker 900 mL to destination?

So I peed in the bag, flew to destination, landed, threw out the full pee bag, drank more water, and then flew another 5.8 hours without even thinking about my bladder. Body, what are you doing in there? Millions of years of evolution and for most of them our ancestors could pee wherever they were. I did a bunch of reading once on the various nerves and systems that allow us to pee and signal to us that we need to, but it didn't answer the question of why frequency and timing of urgency is so poorly correlated to water intake and recency of voiding.

Solve for X

Today someone in an aviation workplace was either amused or insulted, I'm not sure which, by my excitement that he was genuinely using trigonometry for real things. I'm afraid that he may have thought that my excitement and admiration was over the fact that he knew how use trigonometry at all, but really this is just one cool part of a very cool project he is working on.

What do you think he's up to?

The Invasion Has Begun

As I arrived at the airport in the morning, I saw this airplane. I could barely bring myself to ask the fueller about it, for fear that it would turn out to belong to some northern resource company with a stylized flame logo. But no, it's what I thought it was. What did I think it was, and who knows the story behind it?

You may name the aerodrome, too, if you're feeling sharp and sleuthy.

Nerdy Flight Planning Answer

I asked a few days ago how you would file a long IFR climb segment at a speed well below the normal filed true airspeed for the aircraft. I asked on the blog, and I also asked in real life, asked an IFR data centre employee who codes flight plans. I called the same number I call to file a photo plan and asked.

"I have an incredibly nerdy flight planning question ..."

She said that yes, they know that a light airplane won't be climbing at 170 knots and, and if it's 5 or 10 minutes in climb, don't bother filing anything special. But for a thirty minute climb, yes, code it as N120F210, for the 120 kt climb to flight level 210. I like coding IFR flights. I've always liked languages and codes and getting the grammar and spelling right. Such a nerd.

And while I'm being nerdy, I'll let you know I spent a good day's pay on a new camera, a Canon PowerShot SD1400 IS Digital ELPH, which is the same as an IXUS 130. It is smaller than almost anyhting else I looked at, has all the features I need and was on sale. It has almost four times the resolution of the old camera. I also considered a shockproof, waterproof Sony, but it cost almost twice as much, and if I'm in an aviation situation involving shock and water, I probably have better things to do than take pictures. I'm not a camera power user and probably could have spent less on a simpler camera and not missed anything, but while I'm just pointing it at things and pressing the button, I can pretend I'm going to use the zoom someday, or put it in different modes.

Nerdy Flight Planning Question

I seem to spend about an hour a day making flight plans, maybe planning five flights for each one I depart on, because I have to be ready to go now for wherever the weather favours. You'd think after I got the one-way airways sorted out there wouldn't be much to plan, but I have to specify under instrument flight rules what we're going to do on a very non-standard flight. Instead of going from A to B by an efficient route, I'm going from A to a point that I must define precisely, but may depend on the location of the clouds on that day, then hang around in the same reserved airspace for hours, then fly to another arbitrary point to exit, and from there proceed to an airport of landing. An airport that is completely secondary to the purpose of the trip. We really don't care where we land, so long as it is long enough to take off again and they will sell us avgas.

Rather than specifying every photo line, we file "photo blocks" pre-named chunks of sky that you can see if you happen to have an old WAC chart lying around. Photo blocks have names like 093H4, and I file a list of photo blocks with the altitudes we need in each on a special flight plan form, then in the actual flight plan section I write (PHOTO BLOCK) instead of the name of an airway. I can enter the photo block at a conventionally named fix, and I will if there's one handy, but more likely we'll just be entering at an arbitrary point that I specify with latitude and longitude in the form 5100N11230W (ENT). There will be a second fix tagged (EXT) after the photo block, and everything else is like a normal IFR flight plan. Except we don't care where we land, but we still have to put something down.

On an IFR flight plan you specify your true airspeed in one block at the top and I'm used to putting down whatever fiction the manufacturer claims for the aircraft at the flight planned altitude, minus a bit for reality, and just leaving it. ATC knows that I'll climb a bit more slowly, and my initial descent will probably be a bit faster. At least that's how everyone I have flown with files and flies. But there is a mechanism by which you can specify speed changes, and any time you file an altitude change you have to refile your speed anyway, because the format is like this: N175A095 meaning 175 knots at 9,500'. But one day while listening to a departing Westjet flight being given a speed restriction in the climb, I thought about the fact most pilots don't climb into the flight levels by pulling their nose up to Vy with sustainable climb power and waiting patiently. What sufficed on an IFR flight plan down below might not be the best information for one at more rarefied atmospheric strata.

So I called IFR flight data and I asked them how an IFR flight that begins with twenty to thirty minutes of climbing at speeds significantly lower than the aircraft's normal TAS should be filed. The controller had an answer, but I wonder if it would be the same answer across the country and abroad.

What do you think the advice was? Or if you're a controller, what would you expect? I'll tell you what my guy said, in a couple of days.

First Full Day of Summer

Today (that is the UTC day, not necessarily your local day) is the first full day of summer. In the latitudes I have been operating in there was snow a couple of weeks before, and it doesn't mean there won't be snow tomorrow, but the sun has set once since it had its moment overhead the Tropic of Cancer, and will remain north of the equator until the equinox in September. Yes, it's odd that we've settled on what is also known as Midsummer's Day as the beginning of summer, but it is pretty close to marking the date of the beginning of warm weather in the northern hemisphere.

As announced earlier, today is also the date SunglassesShop.com is sponsoring a contest in which you can win a pair of SXUC mirrored aviator-style sunglasses, specifically these ones. SunglassesShop.com sells expensive brands, as well, but the website copy makes it clear that SXUC is not an expensive brand, just fun, but they do have UV400 protection. (For work I use expensive sunglasses, but when I'm not working I typically wear sunglasses in about this price so that I won't scream in pain when they get sat on, scratched, or lost. I get my optometrist to verify that they have the advertised UV protection, and he puts them in a machine and tells me they do, even though he's the one who sells me the expensive sunglasses).

After considering various options for the workings of a contest, I've decided that we will play nosewheel roulette. On my next flight, I will mark and photograph a chalk line on the left side of the lowest point of my nosewheel tire during preflight. Then I will taxi, take-off, fly an entire flight and return to parking, at which point I will disembark and re-examine the chalk mark. Your task is to predict how many centimetres clockwise around the circumference of the tire the chalk mark will appear once the airplane is stopped. This may be at the fuel pumps or it may be at the final parking location, wherever I first get an opportunity to photograph and measure it for you.

The total circumference of the tire is 128 centimetres, giving a giant roulette wheel with 128 possibilities, from zero to 127. Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses. Your e-mail should contain the same guess, so I don't need to sort out which Anonymous or which David is which, when I need to contact you for your mailing address. You can also save that step and put your mailing address in the e-mail. I won't use it for anything except maybe sending you a postcard sometime, unless you win in which case I will send it to SunglassesShop.com so they can send you your prize. If you live underground and don't need sunglasses, or want to play for glory only, and prefer to cede your prize to the next runner up, you can put that in the e-mail too.

Don't pick a number someone else has chosen, because I'll give priority to the person whose comment appears first. If two guesses are equidistant either side of the correct location, that's okay because there are two pairs of sunglasses available to be won. If there is some added complication I haven't thought of, I'll do my best to be fair.

There will also be a booby prize for the entry furthest from correct. The booby prize is a second-hand (or possibly more) aviation-themed decorative towel in extremely questionable taste. Someone sent it to me and after I looked at it, it went right back into the envelope waiting for its next victim.

Heads Up for a Pop Quiz

I get a lot of requests to advertise on this blog. It doesn't gather millions of eyeballs, but I suppose it's a niche market of people who trust me, and advertisers are feeling around for a way to reach people. I know I should just ignore the robotic linkfarm spam, but I often respond anyway, explaining briefly how vastly unlikely it is that I would ever place a link to their site on my blog. I know it just confirms me as a live one, but it amuses me to reply.

Every once in a while my "Sorry, I don't participate in linkfarms" or "Why would I link to a site scraper?" gets a response from a real human being, who isn't always a linkfarmer or a barely literate employee of a scammer. The problem with linkfarmers trying to look like legitimate bloggers is that sometimes legitimate bloggers end up looking like linkfarmers.

My first contact with John of the cleverly named Golf Hotel Whiskey was like that. I had looked at the site briefly, not parsed the name, seen something I thought was a generic travel review site, and given him a brush off. He defended himself, I took a second look, and while it still isn't a regular read of mine, I acknowledge it as original work, related to aviation and worthy of respect. Another site I dismissed as a site-scraper is How It Flies. I told him flat out that it's obvious that all the content has been scraped directly from Wikipedia, making not only the material unoriginal, but the concept. Paste a chunk of text from any Wikipedia article into Google's search engine with quotation marks around it, and you'll see how popular it is to build a site by plagiarizing Wikipedia. Keith argues that the Wikipedia material is just the seed and that his site has a different purpose. I'm still not entirely convinced, but it isn't advertising supported, so he must be doing this out of conviction. I'll let him explain.

I understand your aversion to site scrapers. I debated long and hard before incorporating Wikipedia content for a number of reasons. One is that the quality is inconsistent, but mostly because their focus is not what I'm aiming for. Their writing is for a general audience while How It Flies is oriented towards pilots. Over time I imagine that the articles will shift focus as people edit them. Their content focus is also limited. I'm looking to have a much larger collection of photos as well as videos. All of this though takes an immense amount of time and my calculations showed that, without seeding the site with content, I would never have the critical mass necessary to create a useful resource. I have been stunned at the results. Since adding wiki articles a little over a month ago, traffic to the site has quintupled.

Besides the different focus, we're also making the information from Wikipedia more useful by creating structured data. Wiki information is one big text file. I've been able to get a great deal of the information into a database which will eventually allow people to search and manipulate it in ways I can't even foresee.

A big-name company interested in grassroots marketing but completely unrelated to the topic of my blog sent me an "infographic" they thought I might like to share with my readers. It was ... an infographic. Someone with some amount of skill in information presentation had crafted it, but still, it had nothing to do with anything. I told him that if it weren't for linkfarm spam, his missive would win the award for the lamest attempt to be featured on my blog that I have received all year, and that I very nearly opened Microsoft Paint to make him an infographic he could put on his wall to commemorate that stunning failure to impress me. "I may yet sponsor a reader contest to do so," I claimed.

Perhaps this inspired me, because recently an advertiser actually associated with a vaguely aviation product enquired about the price of links or banners and instead of saying "no" I said, "I don't do banners, but I would do a contest giveway." I was thinking, "I don't want to burden my readers with ads, but if I can give them something, that's different." And the manufacturer thought it was a fair deal. So I'm just deciding what sort of contest this will be.

Fellow blogger Michael 5000 runs a weekly honour-system quiz which I always have a great time attempting, despite my woefully poor knowledge of art, American literature, and music. I think I may start a similar regular feature: only aviation-related. You would be on your honour not to use Google, Wikipedia, books, posters, roommates or other resources not already located within your own head to answer the questions posed. I think this is probably not the best choice for a contest with a prize, because it would literally reward people for cheating. I don't want to do an open-book quiz, because then it just turns into a Google/Wikipedia competition, and that's no fun.

I have been thinking for years of doing a "how well do you know me" quiz covering everything from random eggs and burrowing mammals to my most abused adverbs, and that would favour long-term and attentive readers, but seems a little narcissistic. (Wow there are a lot of ess sounds in narcissistic). And it might be tantamount to just giving the prize to my friends.

I did a giveaway a while ago where I asked contestants to explain why they were the most deserving of the prize, but you were all so nice to each other that you all just awarded the prize to the first cute kid entrant. Another option is to ask for your creative work, such as your speculation on what the dot was asking me. (Let me tell you, after five hours of keeping it centred, the dot is usually asking me to do unspeakable things).

I'm leaning towards a game of "nosewheel roulette". I make a chalk mark on the nosewheel, normal to its low point on the ground, then I taxi out and do a flight. After shutdown I get out and see where the chalk mark ends up. The pockets on the roulette wheel correspond to the number of centimetres around the circumference of the tire from bottom dead centre to the chalkmark. Whoever guesses closest wins a prize. The downside is that it's purely a game of chance, but the upside is that it's easy to judge, impossible to cheat, and someone gets free stuff. I'll let you know the circumference of the nosewheel when the contest is on.

Pine and Beaver

I'm out for a walk in the rain, pausing at the corner of Pine and Beaver. Where am I?

That Dot

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Green Dot

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

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

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

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

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

Comic Strip Airplane

There's a humour website where I spend too much time these days overanalyzing comic strips. The current plot in Mark Trail involves the hero being shipwrecked on an island of drug smugglers, and trying to escape in an old airplane. It kind of looks like a Cessna 170 but the wing struts go almost to the wingtip and the C170 has a semi-cantilevered wing. I was willing to accept that as an art error, but I keep reading and wondering.

I think the artist Jack Elrod is working from photographs, because there's too much that is accurate compared to what you see when someone just makes up an airplane. He's clearly cutting and pasting older artwork, too. Notice how in the QUICK GET IN AND BUCKLE UP! panel he has forgotten to draw the foliage between the two wing struts. There are some details like what appears to be a change in the cowling paint scheme from day to day that suggest he's working from different airplanes, but comic colouring is often bizarre, so let's discount that.

Combining the QUICK GET IN AND BUCKLE UP! panel with the THE SHED--IT'S ON FIRE! one, we see that the aircraft registration begins in N2 and ends in 171. That makes it a US-registered airplane. Not counting the N, a US aircraft registration mark is not more than five characters long and only the last two may be alphabetic, which they are not. So the aircraft depicted is -- or is pretending to be -- registered as N2?171 where ? is either nothing, or a digit 0-9. That's eleven possibilities, all listed in the FAA database. Can I perhaps discover the actual airplane that has been immortalized in this very silly plot?

N2171 is assigned to an amphibious ultralight called a Searey. I've flown one, and can confirm that it's not suitable for long-range drug smuggling operations. The same registration was previously assigned to a small helicopter.
N20171 is assigned to a helicopter, and before that to a balloon.
N21171 is a 1972 C182P registered in California. Nice airplane, but newer than the one in the cartoon.
N22171 is a 1939 Aeronca 65C and that's very close to the mark. Still not a great drug smuggling airplane, but plausibilty isn't a forté of this strip.
N23171 is a 1939 model Piper J4B cub, so right era but the owner is female and women are never evil in this comic strip, so this can't be our smuggler.
N24171 is currently a helicopter, was a different helicopter before that, but in 1940 it was a brand new Akron B75L, also known as the Funk B. The cowling is wrong, but could have been modified for a different engine.
N25171 is a 1939 Luscombe 8A that the FAA says is in questionable condition, but what do they know about Drug Smuggling Island maintenance procedures?
N26171 is a Grumman Cheetah, a low wing and destroyed in 1994.
N27171 is another Piper Cub, this one a 1940 J5A.
N28171 is also a 1940 Piper Cub, a J3C-65. Different state, different owner, registered ten years apart, just happens to be a popular airplane.
N29171 was a Cessna 206, now deregistered.

I'm amused that six out of the eleven candidates were built in 1939-1940. I'm not sure how representative of overall US airplane ownership this is, but it's true that there were a lot of good airplanes built before the Americans even entered World War II, and lots of them are still flying. If we ignore the logistics and payload issue, it's plausible that Otto would be using one of these airplanes in his operation.

After I wrote the above, the later strips gave a clearer view of the airplane. It's clearer here that the registration is N2171, and we get a better look at the airplane. Also, judging by the apparent size of Mark inside the cockpit, it's doubled in size, but we'll ignore that.

So what do you think they're flying? And will they make it to safety? And how will I do on the phone interview scheduled for tomorrow for a really good company, I'd be happy to make the long move to join?

AviWAITion

This post got lost. I've been trying to slip it in where it wouldn't look out of place, so it's been floating around with my scheduled posts. I'm just going to jam it in here, out-of-place and out-of-season. You can say it's jet-lagged. Tomorrow the Cambodia saga will start.

I'm in Moose Jaw, where the nice engineer and his apprentices are replacing the left engine turbo wastegate, and there's a part that has to come by FedEx, so I have a day of waiting. Fortunately I'm good at that. I just pretend that every place I'm in is somewhere I have come on purpose for a holiday. I've been to Moose Jaw before, so I've already seen the historical re-enactment in the underground tunnels and admired the almost movie-set ready historical main street, and the murals. But I wouldn't mind going back to the park, and maybe I'll go swimming in the mineral springs again.

One time I was here, my work partner was a casino gambler and an expert wheeler dealer who wrangled rooms in the Mineral Spa Resort & Casino at the same price as the hotel chain we normally stay in. Seeing as it's a holiday weekend, and I'm a negotiation pussycat, that didn't happen this time, but I can still pay the admission fee and go 'take in the waters.' I'm actually more in a swimming mood than a soaking mood, and the public pool feeds off the same mineral springs, so I head there. It's next to the park, anyway.

As I walk across the Boston Pizza parking lot (there's either a Boston Pizza or a Tim Horton's in every hotel parking lot in Western Canada), I spot something shiny on the pavement. When I'm airside, my FOD detection circuits compel me to pick any metal objects off the ramp in order to prevent them from being ingested by aircraft engines or taking chunks out of people's propellers. I pick up this one too. It's a brass shell casing ... ah no, it's an unused small calibre bullet. It probably rolled out of someone's truck or came out of their pocket as they got out of the truck. But now what do I do with it. I feel a responsibility not to chuck it back on the ground where kids might play with it. I don't want to put it in the garbage where it might be incinerated. And my normal approach of letting weird pieces of metal rattle around the bottom of my pocket or suitcase until they end up in the jar next to my washing machine isn't going to cut it with airport security. Plus hey, unexploded ordnance.

I wander down Main Street (isn't this sweet: it's actually called Main Street, not 50th Avenue) past an object in the grass by the railroad tracks that was there yesterday and that I'm 95% sure is a dead cat, but I'm not going to go closer and confirm. See I'm smart enough not to take on responsibility for ALL the awkward to dispose of objects on the streets of Moose Jaw. While I'm walking I make up a sentence that describes the town. The moose sat on real caribou hides and stood on fake hyena rugs. I'll leave it to you to figure out why, apart from the moose reference, it is useful and appropriate.

I have lunch in a little Thai restaurant and read a tourist brochure, which mentions a local business with the address "420 High Street." No prizes for guessing what kind of business it is. That's a few blocks away, and perhaps they sell hemp paper postcards along with their other wares. I walk down that way, but although their sign says they open at eleven, they're still closed at two. Typical stoners. I instead buy a postcard at, of all places, a windshield repair shop. They are a general everything glass shop, including figurines and other glass art, so they have arty cards.

On the way east towards the park there's a police car parked with its lights flashing, but no car pulled over near it. The officer is sitting inside doing paperwork. I come up to the window and he looks up suspiciously to ask what I want. For a moment I wonder how stupid this is going to sound, but I don't have to say any more than "I found a bullet ..." before he becomes friendly and says he'll take care of it for me. Done with less hassle than I was anticipating.

The park is not huge, but it's well laid out with hills and different levels and a river with happy ducks floating on it. It's good for people watching, and it's culturally acceptable to strike up conversations with strangers in front of ducks. You can also talk to strangers in used bookstores (but not new ones) and in health food stores, and in the line-up at a regular grocery store. You can talk to strangers on the street, too, but you have to be careful to pick someone of approximately matching age and apparent economic status. Real life is not like a social MMORPG where you can talk to anyone who crosses your path without alarming them.

The public pool is next to the park, and it's a hundred year old building with the word NATATORIUM graven in its stone façade. It's also closed with some scaffolding up and workers in hardhats. I can see that the outdoor pool is still empty. Just as well. Meanwhile I have received a text that they may have the airplane ready for me this afternoon, so I probably shouldn't be in a swimming pool. I wander up to the museum, which is in the park, but as I go down the stairs into the exhibit hall I lose cellphone signal, so that's off limits, too. Cellphones give you a limited sort of freedom when you're on call.

Walking up a back street towards the hotel, I pass an old funeral home. It's a current funeral home, too, but I see its history in the fact that the doors to the garage for the hearses are clearly carriage house doors. I'm sure hearses pulled by black horses came through them for years before they invested in a motor hearse. Also, and perhaps it's just the power of suggestion, but the adjacent "funeral parking only" lot doesn't have aisles and stalls like a conventional parking lot, but instead just aisles, running lengthwise down the lot, so the cars must park in nose to tail columns, as if they were waiting for a ferry or stopped in a California freeway traffic jam. I picture that being exactly the way you would park a large number of horses-drawn buggies. The lot is paved and there are no hitching posts, but I can imagine the parking routine staying unchanged for a hundred years.

The Europeans must be laughing at me, sitting in cafés that have been in the same place for three hundred years, but in western Canada things are so new that hundred year old stuff is of historical note.

I see a gopher poking out of a hole and try to take a picture, but it runs back down the hole, at which point a different gopher pokes out of a further off hole. I dart back and forth with my camera in a giant game of live whack-a-mole until one of the gophers takes pity and lets me snap a shot.

After all that, the airplane isn't ready before the shop quitting time, so I go back to the hotel and read my e-mail and other things on the Internet. There's an update from John, the person who got me into the KC-130 sim. He describes an interesting problem at a simulator facility in Texas: On two airfields you landed below the runway, on the third you landed about 30 feet up then ran into an invisible wall. Both problems were "mostly fixed."

True, Magnetic and Whatever

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Doesn't Have a Coffee Cup Holder

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

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