You Won't Believe What This KLM Flight Attendant Said

I hate those headlines, but I was feeling uninspired.

There's a human factors exercise known as the "Five Hazardous Attitudes," where pilots evaluate their tendency towards different safety ways of neglecting the safest route. It occurred to me today that airline passengers suffer from exactly the same tendencies. They are anti-authority: disregarding crew instructions just because they don't want to be told what to do. They are impulsive: too busy to pay attention or to do it right. They don't want to think about it so pretend they are invulnerable or can handle it on their own. And very often they are resigned and don't take any responsibility for their own safety.

A friend was irritated by a flight attendant asking her to pay attention to a passenger briefing and commented, "Surely these people don't actually believe that anyone is getting out alive if that thing goes down in Irish Sea?!" Last time I was at my annual medical I was complimented on my low blood pressure and as the doctor explained how the machine worked he commented that at other times, my blood pressure might be higher. I think this is one of those times. Aviatrix rant activated.

People get out. Smart, lucky people who have paid attention in the safety briefing and remembered how many rows to the nearest and alternate exit in each direction. I am a professional pilot and I pay attention to the safety briefing when I am a passenger.

An A340 jet went off the end of the runway into a ravine, in Toronto during a thunderstorm. Half the exits were unusable, and 90 seconds later the aircraft burst into flames and burned to a shell. EVERYONE GOT OUT. With few, minor, injuries.

An A320 ditched in the river in New York. One dipshit passenger who hadn't paid attention to the emergency briefing opened a door that was not to be used in the case of a water landing. That passenger jeopardized the lives of others, and most of the passengers forgot to take their seat cushions with them to use as a flotation device, but EVERYONE GOT OUT. Mainly minor injuries, the worst may have been to a flight attendant who was trapped in the rear because of the stupid passenger.

A B767 that had been hijacked ditched in the Indian Ocean, out of fuel, and while the captain was struggling with hijackers. FIFTY PEOPLE SURVIVED. Many of those who did not survive died because they didn't pay enough attention to the emergency briefing to remember not to inflate their life jackets before leaving the aircraft.

You put down what you are doing, you take off your headset and you pay attention to that announcement as if your life and the lives of those around you depend on it. Because they do. Decades of research have gone into manufacturing the aircraft and safety equipment and training the crew to give you the safest flight possible. The least you can do is pay attention for ninety seconds.

In non-rant mode, I have to admit that Doreen Welsh wasn't really trapped, and that her difficulty evacuating was because of an injury sustained in the crash, but a passenger opening the wrong door and flooding the aft of the aircraft didn't help her or anyone else get out. The point of this blog post, however, is what another friend posted in response, talking about her preflight behaviour. I'm just going to leave it here, because I have no coherent response.

I noted to the flight attendant that I didn't have a flotation device beneath my seat. She said, very quietly, but very aggressively (since she had been quick to already tell me it was nothing to do with her, since it was the flight engineers that do those checks), that we wouldn't be delaying take off to sort this out, since there was no chance we would get out alive anyway. I also never heard back from the letter I wrote to KLM.

The World Is For Me

I imagine a spectrum in which each person's feeling of entitlement shows up as a different colour. On average, people feel entitled to somewhat more than the world can provide for them, leading to the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons, a general dissatisfaction with one's lot, or the assumption that rules are for other people, and that whatever works best for me is the thing to do. So at one end of the spectrum we have Mother Teresa who sees that the world has problems, and that there is something she can do about some of them, so dedicates her life to helping people. At the other end we have extreme psychopaths who will kill someone for entertainment. Some people dump unwanted items and garbage in vacant lots or on the highway. Some people separate all their unwanted items into things that can be used again by others, various types of recyclables, and garbage, and then make the effort to get them all to the right places. Some people organize others in their community and go out to clean up garbage that has been dumped in vacant lots. I'm not saying that Mother Teresa never littered or that if you throw your trash in my backyard you're probably a psycho killer, but these are examples on the spectrum of how much a person feels entitled to inconvenience others.

I once expressed reluctance to be the first person to park in a curb lane after morning rush hour had ended, when it became legal. I said something like, "I hate to be that person who takes that lane out of service for everyone else." My friend thought that was bizarre. She said she loved to be the first person to park on a block, because it was so easy. Someone's going to be the first person to park there, so why not her? The effect one's actions will have on others affects different people's actions by different amounts. Intelligence and experience factor into it a little, but I have observed young children and those with intellectual disabilities make decisions for the good of the many. I'm not talking about decisions driven by ignorance or malice, just those made by assigning different weights to "this inconveniences me" and "this inconveniences someone I don't know." People's behaviour can be artificially bumped along these scales by laws and social norms. I want six cookies, I don't care if anyone else gets one, but I share them equally because it would be more inconvenient to me to have all these people annoyed at me and consider me rude, than it would for me to forego five of the cookies I want. It is a lot of bother to find a legal parking spot in rush hour, but my friend does so, because if she parks in the curb lane before nine am she'll be ticketed and towed, and that would be a lot more inconvenient than driving a few more blocks and walking back.

This spectrum of empathy and entitlement speaks to whether you crowd around the boarding lane at the gate before your row is called, recline your airline seat, put one of your carry-ons under the seat in front of you, and otherwise share the limited space on board a passenger airplane. And then there's this guy. I suppose it is possible that he was really as clueless as he claims, that he didn't figure out that others were queuing in the aisle because that's how one gets off an airplane. But I think he saw a special little door just for him, the way solo drivers in the HOV lanes "didn't see" the signs or the diamonds painted on the tarmac, just the opportunity for them to get where they are going more quickly. The bright side is that he showed that the emergency exits are obvious enough to use that a passenger who wasn't paying attention had no problem operating one. I wonder if he brought his carry on with him.

Secretly, don't we all want to go down the airplane slide? How much would you pay for a chance to do that? How much extra to be the one who pops the door and sets off the slide? At the $16,000 to reset, quoted in the article, I don't think it's a missed revenue stream for the airlines, especially as passengers often sustain minor injuries, such as broken ankles, during real evacuations, but wheeee! slide!

The aircraft I fly doesn't have an escape slide, but I require all crew members to practice opening and egressing through an emergency exit at annual training. It causes a little wear and tear on the aircraft and the crew members, but I flew so many airplanes myself without ever having actually operated their exits, that I wanted it done. It's hard to describe exactly how it opens until you do it, and this way we know for sure that they work.

Oh! Don't tell anyone, but I'm going to see if I can get a toy inflatable slide for this year's training.

Who is Onboard?

Patrick Smith at AskThePilot.com has ranted on a subject I have ranted on before. There are at minimum two people working in an airline cockpit. Both are pilots. Why do the media pretend there is only one? This isn't a new thing. Ernest Gann started out as a copilot in the ... 1920s? (I'm busy ranting, book is in another room, not looking it up). The correct terminology is not impenetrable airline jargon that has to be dumbed down for the media-consuming proles. As Smith points out, it's largely a matter of adding an -s to a word they are already using. If they boldly go a step further and refer to one of the pilots as the captain and the other as the first officer, even if the public has never heard these terms before, surely they'll figure out that the captain is in charge and the FO is the next in charge. Or does too many Gilligan's Island reruns make everyone assume that anything akin to a First Mate is a bumbling moron? Actually, wasn't Gilligan smarter than the Skipper? Just more accident prone.

The general public knows there are two pilots on board. They see them board. Even in extreme situations they grasp this fact. I recall an article about an airplane that crashed in an urban area. Members of the public ran to help, bravely going on board the aircraft even as it started to to burn, and one of the rescuers looked at the people they had removed from the wreckage and saw that there was only one wearing a white shirt and epaulettes. "Pilots always come in pairs!" he noted, or something similar. They dared to go back on board for the second pilot.

I'm trying to find that article to get the exact wording. I thought it was the King Air that crashed on approach to Vancouver. Radio audio with some photos here. It hit a busy roadway, only clipping a couple of vehicles because a stoplight caused a gap in traffic, but the witness quoted here makes it clear that passengers weren't able to rescue the pilots because the fire was too far advanced in the cockpit. The TSB report linked above mentions confusion over how many passengers and pilots were on board, so unless there was a uniformed pilot among the passengers, this is not the story I recall. Professional rescuers extracted the pilots, but unfortunately both died of "thermal injuries." Ugh. Who knew there was a clinically remote way to say "burned to death."

Interesting that some members of the public were distressed badly enough by the proximity to the crash to require treatment by paramedics, while others were willing to run on board a burning airplane. I commend them for saving lives, but I think my safety training would side with my animal flight-from-fire response and I would instead render assistance that didn't involve entering a confined space probably containing live wires and fumes from ruptured fuel tanks. I guess we don't know what we would do until it needs doing.

This started out as sympathy for a rant but took a macabre turn. It suggests, though, that you merely knowing that there are two pilots on board your commercial passenger flight does not just satisfy our petty need for you to get the words right, but could actually make a life or death difference to the flight crew. The local paper got it right, referring to "pilots" throughout and calling them the captain and first officer. The national one has some exciting photographs and a video of some smoke taken by an excited car driver (not worth watching unless you really like smoke), but implies throughout the article that there was only one pilot on board.

There were two of them. The captain was named Luc Fortin and the first officer was Matt Robic. I didn't know them, but chances are I have met one or the other on my travels and it is certain that someone reading this blog does. My apologies that what started out as a hunt for a story about passengers who could count to two rescuing a pilot turned into revisiting a story that touches you painfully. The TSB suggests aircraft like this have a G-switch to isolate the battery in the event of a crash, and that might have saved them.

B737 Down In Resolute Bay

On August 20th a Boeing 737-200 operated by First Air made a radio call "eight kilometres from the airport" the Resolute Bay airport, then crashed ten minutes later. I don't know the content of the radio call but as they don't say it was a distress call, I assume it was a routine call to airport radio. Eight kilometres is five miles, the DME of the final approach fix for the GNSS or LOC/DME approach. The plates at the link are outdated and I don't have a northern region CAP with me to check the current procedures, but there is no reason to assume they have changed.

A reporter's retelling of an eyewitness report describes the airplane coming into view not aligned with the runway and then starting a missed approach. Generally eyewitness accounts aren't worth much because humans aren't actually very good at seeing unexpected events, or at remembering what they saw, but in a community like that, the airplanes are life and everyone would be familiar with what the airplane looks and sounds like coming into land, so the report of a deviation from normal may be accurate. Here's another account, from one of the three survivors, Gabrielle Pelky, a seven year old girl, confirming that everything seemed normal. The Vancouver Sun story says Gabrielle literally walked away from the crash, but an Edmonton story says she had a broken leg, so there's either some inaccuracy here or one damned tough little girl. It's hard to imagine

An odd part of the story is that the emergency response was the best it could possibly have been, because the accident happened during a joint exercise of the military and emergency services, aimed at improving emergency response in remote communities such as Resolute Bay, response to disasters such as a cruise ship sinking or air crash. I wonder if there was a moment of confusion when a real emergency cropped up. Southern readers may find it odd that there were only fifteen people aboard a B737, but the First Air aircraft would have been configured as a combi, with cargo not only below deck as on most passenger airlines, but filling most of what would otherwise be the passenger cabin, with a bulkhead delineating the seating section.

Chances are every single resident of Resolute Bay directly knew or was related to someone on that airplane, and that almost everyone in Nunavut and the NWT knows someone who knew someone. Twelve people out of the entire Nunavut population of 33,000 is, percentage-wise equivalent to 2900 out of eight million residents of New York. Uh, that number is uncomfortably close to matching that of a disaster New York has experienced. I was going to switch to another state, but I think I'll let it stand. To the population of Nunavut, this is a major tragedy. I'm sure it's a horrible thing for First Air, too. It's a community unto itself, as large as many of the destinations it serves. My heart goes out to everyone touched by the loss.

There may have been an e-mail correspondent who was going to send something for this blog on the airplane, and the complete passenger list hasn't yet been released. I'll let you know in the next couple of weeks either by posting information on his research or telling you what it was going to be about.

Update: Here's a good newsreel from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and here's a passenger list with descriptions of the people. The researcher who died was not my arctic researcher. There's an eerie number of first-time air travellers,nervous flyers and and air crash survivors among the passengers. Remember the old joke about the passengers' belief in physics being required to sustain flight?

2nd Update: Reader Sarah linked this excellent article, showing me wrong in several respects, demonstrating the futility of speculating on these things. Commenters on the linked article continue to speculate nevertheless.

Future Predictions

This book was originally published in France in 1911. Aviation was a daredevil sport, conducted in open cockpit single engine aircraft with negligible carrying capacity and unreliable engines. The artist Xaudaro mocked the pursuit of aviation by cartooning ludicrously implausible activities involving aircraft...

.. such as transporting sixteen passengers at once. Note the flight attendant, all the passenger baggage in the rear hold, and the baggage attendant. Both the transit time and the fare on Concorde were at least double that 'predicted' in the caption. And how many hundreds do we cram into one airplane now?

Here he has correctly demonstrated the importance of proper loading and baggage securing on a cargo flight. And I'm sure I told you that there was a dog on my first revenue cargo flight, moving house from one province to the next for a family, including a large dog. The dog rode in the passenger cabin, not on the horizontal stabilizer.

I've carried the mail, and I've picked up objects using a hook attached to my plane, but not quite this way. I love future predictions, whether or not they ever come true. I received e-mail from an editor at Popular Mechanics the other day. He was looking for the author of the information on Landing During an Earthquake. I couldn't help him, but I let him know how much I enjoy the visions of the future in his magazine. Someday I'm going to get my flying car.

The skydiving guy e-mailed back to say that he had just hired everyone he needed. I guess the combined delay of tax guy passing the information on to me and and skydiving guy getting my resume was enough for the pilots to be hired. That's how it goes. I would have liked that job, I think. Simple constraints, people having fun, an operation where I know I can operate safely, and lots of scope to excel in efficiency and customer service. It's kind of wry how quickly I imagine myself in a position. I'm mentally deciding which street I'll live on in the city of another job I've applied to and haven't heard back from. I can't help it! I predict I will get the job.

Smelly Question

This news story poses a very interesting question. A group of people who had used a toiletry item that had an odour other people found offensive were deboarded from a flight. That's the essence of it, but it's complicated by the fact that the complainers were white and the people they were complaining about were black.

An American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, said "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins," and this story that shows that there's more than one way to assail a nose. There must be a line somewhere between someone turning up a nose at an unfamiliar odour, and hence at the person attached to it, versus someone truly experiencing physical distress on account of an offensive odour. It's not uncommon for an airline to refuse carriage to someone with extremely poor personal hygiene, and one often sees requests for people to avoid wearing extreme amounts of cologne in public places. But where is that line, and how do you draw it? If I sit next to you in an airplane I can likely smell your shampoo, your hair control products, your deodorant, whether you had garlic for lunch, and whether you're sacred scared. I may find your smell distracting, but would you deserve to be kicked off a plane for it? Smelly is in the nose of the beholder.

I suspect that if the airline offered to accommodate the complaining passengers on a later flight, they may have suddenly found the odour more acceptable.

One Is the Loneliest Number

During a career preparation talk at flight school, an administrator asked my class what we though the greatest single threat to our career progress was. I had a ready answer, "the advent of the single-crew airliner cockpit." I remember getting the most supercilious glare possible from the instructor before being told the correct answer was "recession." I don't think she was thinking long term. Recessions come and go, was my opinion. But once the airlines' pilot complement halves, it's game over.

She said that would never happen, but while it isn't as inevitable as death, taxes, and the next recession, it's not an impossibility. It would require a lot of advances in automation, and telemetry, and security, but such things have considerably reduced the number of people in airplane cockpits over the years. It's a bigger jump from two to one, but I don't think it could never happen. It would make flying a lot less fun and somewhat less safe, but probably more cost effective for the airlines. At first. Then after twenty years or so of the system operating, accidents would spike. As much as I rant about both people in the pointy end being pilots, and the first officer/co-pilot not being a trainee, there is a bit of an apprenticeship going on. The new hire FO doesn't know as much about flying an A320 as the captain does (and sometimes the new hire direct-entry captain doesn't know as much as the experienced FO) but together they have the experience to get the job done. The pilot with the experience appropriate to a situation will take over if they suspect the conditions may be beyond the other's abilities. The newer pilot learns from the other and gains experience without it having to be paid in blood or bent metal. By having to be the person who knows what is going on, even if you don't, you learn more. Kind of like being a parent. Having a single-crew cockpit with a ground-based telemetric backup wouldn't provide the same apprenticeship-type situation. And that might not be so cost effective in the end.

Ryanair carries most international passengers of any airline in the world. Most of these are short hop European flight. They have cheap tickets, and the cheesiest nickle-and-diming fee structure imaginable. For example, they charge you money, I think it's five euros, as an online check-in fee. But you have to check in online. There is no airport check in available. Your base fare might be only twenty euros, but they charge extra for everything. The obvious jokes about "insert two euros to start the flow of oxygen, then place the mask over your nose and mouth, securing behind your head with the optional (one euro) elastic strap," have all been made. The company even makes the jokes.

It's a little scary because you can't tell when they're serious. The Irish accent is hard to take seriously -- sorry, Irish people, some kind of cultural thing. They're semi-serious about eliminating the copilot, according to this Salon article.

I'm not in a position to replay the YouTube clip out loud right now, so you'll have to tell my why my notes for this post say "strip poker." And if it doesn't make sense, I'll have to make something up about Ryanair getting passengers to play strip poker for available seats, in order to facilitate security screening.

Uncontained Failure

A Qantas Airlines Boeing 747 jet climbing out of San Francisco on Monday experienced an uncontained failure of the number four engine. That means that the outside right-side engine failed so spectacularly that pieces of it penetrated the cowling, the case around the engine. The linked article has photos, and even though they were taken in the dark you can still see some of the turbine fan blades through the hole.

The pilots of course couldn't see the hole in the engine, only feel the vibrations through the airframe and see whatever indications the engine instruments reported. They certainly wouldn't have been normal. They shut the engine down, dumped fuel to get down to landing weight (you can see a couple of orbits on the Flight Aware track in the Flightglobal piece linked above), and returned for landing at San Francisco to investigate. Passengers saw flames and sparks coming from the engine; one of them took a video of the sparks streaking by, even after the engine was secured.

It's always interesting to see how pilots handle PAs in situations like this. (You can hear a little bit of the captain's announcement in the above video). Some companies give you a script, but the nature of emergencies is that they don't always suit the script. This captain emphasized that the crew train for this, and then I think he tried to throw in a bit of humour by saying, "in the simulator." He sounds calm, and I hope that calmed people down. Passengers tend to think they're all going to die whenever anything happens. The problem with reassuring people is that they always think you're lying to them, or at least that there's a reasonable chance of whatever you are saying won't happen, happening. My approach is to be honest, but a little bit vague about the problem and then distract them from worrying about imminent death by reassuring them that we will find them another airplane, and make sure they get to their destination. They can then worry about missed connections and lost baggage, which is not life threatening and returns them to the comfort of the habitual concerns of the air traveller.

This could have been worse if the containment failure had been on the left side of the cowling, (or the right side of an engine on the left of the airplane) because debris could have damaged the other engine or penetrated the cabin. Components leaving a turbine engine have a lot of energy. Those things rotate at over 10000 rpm.

LiveATC recording of the event from the perspective of the radio communications is available buried in this file. The Qantas pilots report their difficulties 18:20 into the recording. Eric M. has edited it down to the eighteen minutes directly concerned with the incident flight but you can only hear that version if you register (for free) at LiveATC.net. There's some confusion on the part of ATC, as Australia and the US seem to have different standards for the information an aircraft with an emergency must convey. Although the Qantas crew do deny they have an emergency. That means they don't believe they need any kind of priority to ensure safety.

An interesting detail about of the B747 is that it is equipped with a hardpoint for carrying a spare engine. Not connected up to fuel and power, just sitting there ready to be installed, like a spare tire on the back of your SUV. They don't carry one around all the time because they add a lot of drag and are very rarely needed. It's just a provision for transporting them. Another Qantas B747 will bring a spare in today for the one on the ground at SFO.

That's today's blog entry early, although I'll edit it to make it look like it appeared at 00Z as usual. Tomorrow's will be at the usual time.

I Almost Win A Car

I almost won a car today. Really. Here's how you almost win a car. You get up in the morning, do your daily exercises, and check the weather. Then you go and discuss the day's flying with the client and they decide to postpone take-off for a while, so you use the time to do paperwork and personal stuff. I called the PRM regarding getting an extension instead of getting a mechanic to come up here, or flying south to Edmonton for the next inspection. Then I mended the torn journey log cover with packing tape. While doing that I noticed that the most recent weight and balance update (about half a pound difference because of an autopilot repair) wasn't entered in the front of the journey log. I don't think it's legally required to be there. We carry all the official W&B docs already, but I updated it. There are lots of lines for updates.

The a tech comes by to ask if I need anything from the store. I say no, then think about it. There are still a couple of hours before we go flying so I should go out for a walk, and get some groceries. That reminds me that I have a phone message to cal my home grocery store, something I can do now because it is during business hours and I'm not in an airplane. And that's when I found out I almost won a car.

Last time I was home and bought a load of groceries, they came with coupons and things, including entry forms for a draw. I took the forms home, filled them all out, and then actually made a special trip to walk back to the store and put them all the barrel before the draw date. I remember folding them in my secret winning way, putting each form in and then turning the barrel before the next one, because you don't want them all in the same place. And it turns out that my name was drawn. (No I won't reveal my secret winning folding technique). Now I'm eligible for the draw-off between the winners from different stores, but I can't win the car because I have to be there in person for the final drawing. I asked if I could send a proxy in my place, but no, it has to be me.

My life is so exciting. This really describes the last five years, doesn't it? The end result is exactly the same as if I had stayed in one spot, but I've had the up and down of the roller coaster the whole way. You know what? I guess I still like roller coasters. As long as the ups and downs aren't so violent I am left bruised. I already have a car that I like and it's only five years old, so I probably would have sold the new one and given half the proceeds to charity, anyway.

Back when I was a kid I entered a contest and resolved that if I won I would give half of my winnings to charity. I won. It was a trip for two, and as I was a kid I had to take a parent, and that was a kind of lame way of giving away half, but the prize included spending money so I did gave half of that away. I think it was to the War Amps, because they helped kids that were missing arms or legs and I really liked having arms and legs, so it seemed like a good idea to help such kids out. I still remember my parents receiving the donation receipt addressed to "Mr. <MyLastName>" and asking each other puzzledly if they had sent a donation. They were calling it a "tax receipt" and I knew bad things happened if you didn't do your taxes properly so I 'fessed up to being the one who had made the donation. I'm not sure how a kid managed to send a donation. Perhaps I had received my spending money in traveller's cheques, or maybe I had a bank account that came with a chequebook. Anyway, giving away half of winnings or found money became my tradition, and I like to think that the ensuing karma makes me win a little more often than most.

Then I'm called to fly, before the rescheduled time that I was planning to have bought groceries before. I ask to eat first. The customer understands about fuelling both the airplane and the pilot, so agrees and I say I'll be back as soon as possible. I run down the block to Tim Horton's and inhale a sandwich on the way back, wiping the mayonnaise off my face before presenting myself with my flight bag ready to go. The client is surprised, "I thought I had longer."

"Take your time," I assure him. "I'm at your service, not vice versa." I am literally paid to wait for the client. Five minutes is nothing. A couple of hours isn't really either. Days is not unknown. Waiting for the client consumes a greater portion of my time than flying the plane for the client. I try to instill this in FOs when I fly charter. "If the customer is an hour late, the customer is on time. If we are one minute late, we are late." This applies more if the customer has chartered the airplane for the day, rather than for one flight in a day of flights for different people.

At the airplane I add oil to both engines, then give a quick passenger briefing. I know this guy has heard this a hundred times, so I make it amusing, advising him, for example, of the location of "onboard amenities for your pleasure" while pointing out the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. I show him the operation of the emergency exits, and then add "In case of emergency egress of bodily fluids we have pee bags, sick bags and kleenex." Saves clean-up if your pax know where to find that stuff.

The engines start beautifully and I call up Flight Services as I'm taxiing out. Just as I enter the single mid-runway taxiway, a Cherokee (small single-engine airplane) calls three minutes out. Eh. There's probably plenty of time for me to backtrack, turn around and take off, but I don't see him, and he might be closer than he thinks. I don't want to cut him off. I skootch over to the side of the taxiway so he can get by me as he comes off the runway, and announce that I'm holding short. Then the Cherokee makes another call, "I'm going to join downwind, or base, if that's okay?" Aargh. If he's still deciding how he's going to join the circuit, he's more than three minutes from landing. I should have gone. I could probably still go, but I wait. The FSS guy declines to advise Cherokee dude on circuit joining and Cherokee dude works it out for himself.

He lands, rolls out and just as I am considering keying the mike to ask him if he will have any trouble getting by me on the taxiway, the FSS guy asks him the same question. Nice situational awareness for someone who is talking to airplanes at three different airports, only one of which he can see. The Cherokee pilot says there is lots of room and goes by. I taxi out and as I'm backtracking I hear him asking, "where can I park?" The FSS guy tells him he can pull in anywhere around the edge of the apron. Next question, "I need fuel, is there a truck?" The FSS guy patiently explains the self-serve pumps. "Can I park here?" asks the pilot.

Finally the FSS guy points out, "I'm in Peace River. I can't actually see you, so it looks good to me." I'm at the numbers with pre-takeoff checks complete so I call rolling and add, "and we look good too." I check the clock and it took barely over a minute to enter the runway, backtrack, turn around and complete pretakeoff checks.

Not that I'm never that guy. But I try to read my publications closely enough in advance that I'm not that guy. Anyway I should have known how long it takes to backtrack a runway that size. I should know exactly how long things like that take me. Why don't I? I should time them all.

It's windy today at altitude, so tough to maintain proper groundspeed and engine temps too. And it's a bit bumpy. I eat almonds and sesame snacks. You know those Sezme things from Poland with four flat sticky wafers in one package? If you don't, you should, unless you're allergic to nuts or something. I love them. They are tasty, unsquishable, not damaged by melting or freezing and last forever in my flight bag. Well until I eat them.

The customer is talkative and friendly, which makes the day go well. He can live with the bumps. We talk to Ft. St. John radio for a bit and then come back to Peace River. They really have the picture over there. After six hours of flying in and out of the Dawson Creek area the person on the radio still knows who we are and what we are doing.

We circle above the airport for a bit. (Don't ask, it's one of the mysterious things we do). Just as I am ready to land, a medevac--might be the same crew as yesterday--calls nine minutes out. I start my timer to keep track of him and call, "Be down in five." I fly away from the airport in order to drop down and circle back. Big circle, because I have strict constraints on my bank angle today so can't crank it around like I'm flying an airplane. Nothing over twelve degrees. (Again, don't ask).

The five minute mark passes while I'm on final and I note that my wheels actually touch at 6:20 elapsed. I exit the runway and call clear, noting that that medivac was down at eleven something. I'm thinking everyone underestimates their time to the field. I'll bet those Peace River guys know that and can handicap us for it, too.

I approach the fuel pump just as a Cessna 180 pulls up. I offer to let him go first, but he demurs. I fuel the airplane. The fuel comes out the nozzle at a reasonable rate, but I need rather a lot of it. Hundreds of litres later, I shut off the fuel pump, and take my receipt. Instead of coiling the hose all up, I just move the unreeled part out of the way and lay the nozzle on the ground, because Cessna guy is still waiting, and this will be quicker and easier for both of us. I start up and pull away to park. I walk back by the pumps to apologize for taking so long and just then he is picking up the nozzle to fuel. It is somehow jammed on, and he gets fuel all over himself before he can shut it off. He says the nozzle was locked open, which is weird, because unlike car gas station nozzles, avgas nozzles don't have the lock-open tab. Plus I know I didn't lock it open, and I definitely turned off the fuel, because that's what triggers receipt printing. He doesn't blame me, which is good because I can't see any way that it is my fault. I commiserate and note that at least it's not Jet A. That stuff is nasty.

After pumping all that fuel I have to pee, but the terminal is locked, so I get in the truck and go back to the hotel. I had dinner with my co-worker at Boston Pizza, and told him about how I almost won a car.

Charter Planning

I'm planning a passenger charter in the airplane with the irritating weight and balance. It can't be flown single pilot with full fuel, so when a charter involves something like flying to A to get people, dropping some off in B, picking more up in C, and taking them all back to A, you have to plan ahead carefully to make sure each leg will work for the number of people and the seats you have put in the plane.

Every fleet seems to have one of these: an airplane that is the same type as the others but through some quirk of history and equipment is way out of balance. I wonder if this continues to widebodies and there's some United captain today looking at his loadsheet and saying to his FO, "Great. We've got N124SA today." Does Air Canada have one B767 that dispatchers and loadmasters despise, and long to see get a shiny new paint job and be towed by the new girl on the ramp crew or left outside in a hurricane? (It's always the shiniest airplane in the fleet, or the one featured in advertising, which gets destroyed in a freak accident).

I work out the permutations and then that airplane is grounded for some mysterious engine problem unrelated to the weight and balance.

Someone is Terrified of This

Continuing the topic of being proactive about telling aircraft passengers what to expect, a South African airline called Kulula Air has painted labels and explanations on the exterior of the aircraft. They've even answered one of my pet peeves by labelling the right cockpit occupant "co-captain - the other pilot on the pa system" to alleviate the fears of all those who believe that "co-pilot" is some sort of apprenticeship for someone who can't fly the airplane yet but nevertheless is the passengers' only hope should anything happen to the captain. I wonder if the "sun roof" label was originally concocted for the older B737 models with the eyebrow window, a feature finally discontinued about fifty years after pilots stopped needing an upward-facing window to take sightings with their sextants.

Despite the humour and the bright friendliness of this paint scheme, I wouldn't have voted for it, for a passenger airline. I think it will subconsciously frighten some people. A student of mine was once greatly discomfited by seeing a training aircraft from which the rear bulkhead had been removed. I showed it to the student so that she could see the cables that ran back to the tail, conveying her control movements to the rudder, elevator and trim. The simplicity of it startled her. She wanted there to be unseen magic holding the airplane aloft, not ordinary cables. I think a lot of airline passengers don't want to be reminded that their safety depends on the sum of a lot of nameable parts and people. They want the smooth shiny paint (and passengers will base their assessment of your aircraft safety entirely on the quality of the paint) to assure them that everything inside is there. It's the same reason you put pilots in white shirts and ties, and jackets with lots of stripes on them.

Flimsy?

While looking for something else on Google I came across this question from a nervous private pilot student expressing concern that his Cessna 172 training airplane was "flimsy."

Flimsy? It's certainly not sexy, and it's definitely tiny and low performance compared to a triple seven, but I don't consider it more fragile. You can stall a C172 onto the runway from high enough to hurt your butt without bending the gear or wrinkling the fuselage. You can fly it through a tree, buckling a wing strut and half tearing and twisting a significant portion of the horizontal stabilizer, yet still fly it home. You can land it on the nose so hard that the fuselage does buckle, the ends of the propellers turned back like hooks, and the poor thing will still fly a circuit and return for a safe landing. An insurance adjuster once told me that in all the claims he has investigated, the only ones where there were deaths were where the pilot had stalled or spun the airplane. The ones who flew it through trees survived. The airplane will tolerate errors of about 30 percent in approach or climbout speeds, and you can fully deflect the rudder at cruise speed without damage.

I believe the aluminum skin of the triple seven is thicker than that of the C172, but not by a lot. All aircraft are built as lightly as their designers dare to maintain the necessary strength, but honestly if I had to choose between "flimsy" and "robust" for the C172, I'd choose the latter.

The student got some good responses and some not-so-good ones, as other misinformed students chime in. I like this description of a landing approach in which a student feels he nearly died: "the instructor flew very low over some trees in a fierce wind, dropping the aircraft onto one side and heading for the ground." It's a pretty good description of a correctly executed crosswind landing. The crosswind technique in a Cessna 172 requires you to bank the airplane into the wind and apply opposite rudder in a way that makes the airplane feel off balance. And of course if you want to land, heading for the ground is an excellent plan. You might be surprised at how many students are nervous about descending low enough to actually land at the airport. Getting them to put the nose down and leave it there until the flare is sometimes a bit of a battle.

Of course I wasn't present as the maligned instructor performed that particular landing, but it's likely that his only error was in not briefing the student on what to expect in a crosswind landing situation. The first lesson is too early to treat a crosswind landing as a full-on demonstration, but any student, or even a passenger, deserves a simple heads up such as, "We will be landing tilted into the wind. This is normal. I'll put the left wheel down after we're on the runway." It turns what can be a scary situation into one where the passengers are impressed by your control because you put the wheels exactly where you said you would.

For anyone operating small aircraft, the whole thread should be a lesson in what students or passengers see and feel that frightens them if the instructor doesn't explain. I had a passenger in a C172 endure fifteen minutes of silent terror through not identifying a banging sound as rain until I happened to say "isn't it cool the way the rain streams off the windshield without any windshield wipers?" If you fly airplanes, and there is something in your work environment that looks bad and that you can't comfortably explain, find out the explanation and/or get it fixed, even if your flight instructor didn't.

Crashing Well

The weather the next day is crummy so no one has to get up super early nor stay up extra late. We all eat breakfast together in the hotel lobby while the television shows images of random airplanes to illustrate a story on a float plane crash. We four pilots are sitting together trying to guess what kind of airplane actually was involved in the accident, and what happened. Our guesses are "Beaver" and "shit happens," possibly engine failure under extenuating circumstances. (I still don't know the result of the investigation, but the accident aircraft turned out to be a Beaver that is in both my logbook and Harrison Ford's).

Floatplanes are unforgiving. Without looking at any statistics we feel that the Beaver is a safe aircraft. It works in a harsh environment, so you're going to see a lot of accidents where people tried to get it off grossly overweight on lakes that were too small and rivers that were too tightly curved. But it isn't a falling out the sky kind of airplane. The engines are tough, too. We've heard stories of them coming in for routine maintenance and being discovered to be not firing on all cylinders.

Conversation moves to the crashability of various aircraft. The aircraft we are operating here has excellent crash characteristics. They do, they crash well. You pretty much have to stall them or fly them into something, or lose structural integrity before they do crash, and people still walk away. One pilot is talking about wanting the boss to get a Caravan ("the 80s van or the airplane?" we tease) in order to build turbine time. They don't crash well, someone points out, and we all laugh because they don't.

It's at about this point that I realize our customers have joined in the happy conversation about our aircraft's superior crashability. This is a totally normal pilot conversation, as normal as segueing from the Riders' sad sad Grey Cup debacle to other great chokes in sports history, but how did we get into this with our customers? They don't see anything wrong with it, though, thank goodness.

If I were an airline pilot I know I couldn't even MENTION the televised crash coverage during a hotel breakfast. Can you imagine sitting in the breakfast room with members of the public while news of an airplane crash came on the TV, and you're in your uniform with your crew. You can't react in any way that appears callous, unnerved, joking ... there's no safe way to react. I think I'd eat in my room.

My Customers Are Smarter

I've been browsing a website of astonishing customer interactions. I'll give you the link in a moment, but first let me give thanks for my own wonderful customers.

I am very grateful that my customers are sane and aviation savvy. They understand that I can't fly the airplane with something wrong, even if they would drive a truck in the same condition. They recognize the safety value of making conservative decisions. And they have never once taken frustration out on me when the weather, aircraft, regulations, late arriving parts or other aspects of the world mean that a flight has to be cancelled. The frequently change their minds, but my job is to be flexible for them. Occasionally they make decisions that don't seem optimal to me, or reject suggestions that I thought would make their lives easier, but I am able to trust that they are sane and will take responsibility for their decisions.

Sometimes I do charter flights with people less familiar with aircraft, but it's expensive enough to book a charter flight that I seem to be shielded from the customers who lack not only a basic knowledge of the world, but the comprehension and information processing skills to ever learn. This post is dedicated to all the front line customer service people who have no protection against such customers.

All the people I interact with seem to be familiar with basic logic and causality, plus know that airplanes need fuel, airports are noisy, weather can make air travel unpredictable, and amazing as I am I am not superhuman.

The site is Not Always Right. I'll warn you that it's so simultaneously hilarious and jaw-dropping that you may not be able to tear yourself away from it. Here's an aviation example illustrating the principle that some customers don't seem to be able to absorb basic information about the world. It \s also a commonly successful type of response: the person serving the customer finds something to say that satisfies the customer, even when it's not entirely true.

On Keeping Your Mouth Shut

A guy named Dustin Curtis visited the American Airlines website and found it to be a confusing and disharmonious experience. As a designer himself, he couldn't understand why a large company that sells much of its product online would have a website that looks like a cross between a Geocites homepage and a squatter's portal. So he wrote them a letter.

I don't know what Dustin expected to accomplish. Perhaps he thought that his suggestions might be welcomed and that there was a chance he could get some work out of it. I've written a similar letter to a jetshare company whose Internet image was the complete opposite of the high end professionalism the copy professed, and I just wanted to tell them. The way you might tell someone they have a taillight out. People need to know these things and don't always notice them themselves.

A member of the American Airlines design team replied to Dustin. The gist of the reply was, "I agree the site needs work; it's hard to change things in such a large company, but wait patiently and you will see." Dustin was thrilled to hear that someone cared about the site, reversed his opinion of the designers' competence and said so on his blog. An hour after he posted an anonymized version of the reply, the author of the e-mail was fired.

Ostensibly, he was fired for violating the non-disclosure agreement he signed with AA. Billy Sanez, Director of Corporate Communications at American says "We have employees all over the world using social media to communicate. The issue is not posting for us, it is revealing company secrets." What did he reveal? It's certainly no secret that AA is a large company with many departments. Were the spilled beans this list of planned improvements?

Some of our slated efforts include improved navigation; 16 column grid-based layouts; a lighter, more airy visual design; improved user interactions; and an increased transparency to fares and sales policies across the board.

How dare you reveal to our competitors that we plan to improve the user interface! I can't see that that's the real reason, though. The real sin was breaking the facade of unity in the company. That's no secret. It's so unsecret that rather than redesigning the site, AA has created three new booking portals for subdemographics. They're just as cluttered, but they think they can increase their appeal to gays, blacks and women by providing us all with separate drinking fountains. I guess if you're a black lesbian you have your pick. I can be snarky because I don't work for AA.

It doesn't matter how many coworkers you have: you don't tell the customer the landing sucked because your copilot made a lousy landing; you can't tell the charter passenger you're an hour late because management told the dispatcher to schedule two pickups at the same time; and you don't tell them the website sucks because 200 departments are fighting it out for space on the front page. It's tempting to do so, because the quickest way to get the customer off your personal back is to side with them and designate a new, common enemy to blame it all on. But you have to keep ranks.

I worked for a chief pilot once who took this one further. We kept ranks not only within the company but with the regulator, too. He forbade us to use phrases such as "Transport Canada requires you to remain seated with your seatbelt fastened." We weren't to transfer any safety demands to another organization but to make them a personal requirement by us, the flight crew, for your safety. I don't think it was a coincidence that this chief pilot had the best relationship with Transport I've ever seen. He didn't just say that we were all in it together for safety, he meant it.

But we were still free to blame everything on the weather.

Snowbird Passage

We're flying across Saskatchewan, at least I think it's Saskatchewan. You can see how that poor guy got lost in the vicinity of Red Deer. It's flat and laid out with straight lines and fields as far as the eye can see. A voice comes on the radio, 126.7, to say he's VFR from Saskatoon to Biggar at 2500' over highway 14. It sounds like a call anyone would make, except that at the beginning of the call I'm pretty sure he said "military tutor jet." Sure enough he ends the call with "... conflicts, it's Snowbird eleven."

You don't see one Snowbird tooling around that often. I wonder why he's going to Biggar. (Despite the name, it's littler than most places you'd want to go). I'm surprised that he goes by "Snowbird eleven" when it's just the one plane, and not by some ordinary call letters. I'm picturing the little jet bombing along down there at 2500', thinking maybe it's just an ordinary training solo flight and he's going to visit his mom or something. I mean why not. If he has to fly so many hours to qualify or keep current or whatever, I have no objections to military hardware going to make someone's mom happy.

Another voice comes on the radio. Someone else has also been thinking about the little jet on a cross country jaunt. "I'm jealous," he says. No callsign, just that.

The Snowbird voice answers back, "I'm not even flying!" I'm guessing that means that the guy in the back other seat was doing the radio, as opposed to just being on autopilot.

"My god they're throwing guitars out there"

This is everywhere today, but it's still great. My fellow Canadian, musician Dave Carroll, was sitting in an airplane at O'Hare when he heard those words from another passenger. But I don't need to tell the story, as the music video does it very effectively.

Apparently United now says they get it, and wants to use the video for in house training on how to handle a customer complaint. I'd say the price for that would be at least $1200, plus production costs. See Shiny Objects for more information and links to stories about the saga.

I started writing this with Dave Carroll's website open, but when I went to click a link it 403ed, and then after a few minutes started redirecting to his myspace page so I assume the singer's personal site has been overwhelmed. The band is Sons of Maxwell, and that site is still up and you can buy their music there.

In Hockey it's an Honour

Yes, in answer to a comment regarding partying in the comments here when I'm away, by all means. You're all welcome to discuss whatever topics strike your fancy here. I just ask that you not be abusive to one another, and that a topic started on one blog entry remain on that blog entry, no matter how many days ago it was, and not get spread over different blog entries. That way the discussion is in one place that people can follow it, (you know how to tick the box to get replies e-mailed to you, right?) and people who are tired of that topic can move on and not have it follow them around.

I do intend to comment on the young Canadian who attempted to commit "suicide by cop" in a C172, and the Garuda pilot jailed for continuing a dangerously unstable approach, but I haven't finished thinking about those stories so today a bit of numerical superstition to go with the date.

I was e-mailing with someone who works with United Airlines and he mentioned that demand is down so much that with corresponding reduction in flight schedules, starting March 29th the range of flight numbers assigned by his airline will be from 1 to 999. They won't need four digit flight numbers anymore. And then as an aside he listed of numbers to be blocked as unusable: 13 93 113 175 213 232 313 413 513 585 613 713 811 813 911 913.

Fascinating. You quickly see that any number that would be pronounced with a "thirteen" is avoided to soothe the triskaidekaphobes, and that leaves 93, 175, 232, 585, 811 and 911. Do you recognize what's happened here? I didn't realize it before, but airlines retire flight numbers the way hockey teams retire player numbers, but in this case it's not for scoring a lot of goals. Each of the unusable flight numbers represents a major air disaster involving that flight number. It's a combination of respect for the dead and avoiding making people uncomfortable to be boarding "United Airlines Flight 93."

UA 175 was the other company airplane lost on September 11th, 2001, and the blocked 911 also refers to that date. United even changed the flight times on that route so that there is no longer an eight a.m. departure that could be said to be the same flight. UA232 was the famous DC-10 landing with no hydraulics in Sioux City. UA585 killed all on board crashing at Colorado Springs due to an uncommanded rudder hard-over. And UA811 had a cargo door come off in flight, resulting in nine fatalities.

Movies and newspaper stories often don't say "United 811" but just "Flight 811" as though there were only one flight anywhere with that number. But of course the same flight number can be used by different airlines, and by the same airline day after day. As I started to write this I knew there had been two different crashes of "Flight 191." American Airlines 191 had an engine separate from the wing during takeoff severing hydraulic lines and cutting off power to some captain-side instrumentation. Delta Airlines 191 was brought down by a microburst while landing at Dallas-Fort Worth. While looking for those Wikipedia links I discovered three other flight 191 accidents. Wikipedia includes a sixth, the recent Turkish Airlines 1951, but I think that's stretching it.

I was assigned the transponder code 0313 recently, and a seat in row thirteen on two different legs of a three leg airline itinerary. One was even an emergency exit row. I wonder if other passengers avoided that row, leaving it for me, the late check-in.

Diversion

This Air Canada incident involving a celebrity wouldn't have even caught my attention but for a peculiar contradiction. The airline insists that the scheduled flight from Heathrow to Toronto was diverted to St. John's, Newfoundland for a medical emergency. But the linked report implies that the only passenger disembarked was an intoxicated woman who was taken by police, not ambulance, and charged with a number of things, including endangering safety of an aircraft.

I'm not certain I've ever heard of Coleen Walsh, but apparently she hosted for radio and TV including CBC in Toronto, and was released on $2500 bail.

Although the Aviation Herald article refers to Ms. Walsh as "the ill passenger" I suspect they have incorrectly inferred that and that in fact Air Canada did divert for a medical emergency and simply have released no information on its nature. This is supported by the fact that Aviation Herald articles normally give no information on the nature of the medical emergency in such diversions and that the police were called 30 minutes after landing. If an airplane needs emergency services, ATC will make the necessary calls to have them meet the plane as soon as they arrive. It looks like the A330-300 diverted for medical reasons, was met by an ambulance for the actual ill passenger and then when Ms. Walsh proved to be unready for their subsequent departure, the crew called police.

The Star article almost makes it look as if Air Canada is trying to cover for her, "No, no, she wasn't sick, she was drunk!" but I'm sure it's just an error in the writing. That just goes to show how easy it is to have the facts:
1. airplane diverted for medical emergency
2. intoxicated person arrested
and just by sewing them together into a paragraph make the article say something else. I'm sure I do it all the time.

A later article in the same newspaper gives Ms. Walsh's side of the story. She apparently offered her first aid skills in relation to the medical emergency and when she was rejected because they wanted an actual doctor, she persisted, and pushed another passenger who told her to shut up. When asked to leave the airplane she complied, but became enraged when she realized that she was being taken into police custody. She cites an alcohol reaction with sleeping pills and a missed dose of other medication as contributing to her overreaction.

Blog Your Way to the Cockpit

Air Asia is running a promotion beginning with the words, "So YOU wanna be a pilot? Simple. What do you have to do? Blog. What? Thats it? Yes, you're reading it right. Blog." Woo! I'm doing it right!

In many countries, including the UK, it is normal for candidates with no flight experience whatsoever to be hired by an airline, trained from square one at that airline's expense and dropped into the right seat of a jet at two hundred odd hours. Students who pay for their own training are considered "self-sponsored," underlining the fat that someone else usually sponsors the process. During my flight training, I had an e-mail correspondence with a fellow student pilot in England. It went pretty much the same, with us debating the differences in radio technique ("what? you're allowed to say 'takeoff' on the radio?") and airspace ("Purple? Our airspace has letters, not colours!") When we both finished, he started flying a B737 and I got a job flying traffic watch in a C172. I'm afraid we kind of lost touch after that.

Usually the selection process for the coveted training spots involves personal interviews, aptitude tests and so on. I'm not sure how they normally choose the people they call to interviews. I imagine a lot of it is the same as me competing with thousands of pilots who meet the minimum standards of Canadian airlines: timing, luck and who you know.

So why not allow ten people whose daddies don't have the right friends to compete with those whose do? As the competition states, "The 10 winners are entitled to be the first to attend the first round of selection for AirAsia's new pilot intake." These folks aren't skipping the interview phase at all. They're just getting an interview. They could winnow resumes based on school marks, but after a certain level you're getting nerdier, not more suited for aviation. Really if you're going to hire someone and train them to fly an airplane, why not select the part of the candidate pool on the basis of spelling, grammar, composition and the knowledge and maturity necessary to write a good blog entry.

The person who pointed me at this thought it was poor publicity for Air Asia, but I don't see that. In my opinion, a passenger delving deeply enough into the workings of his airline to be reading their blog is beyond believing the pilot façade and might be interested to see a bit of the real people who strive to get interviews and make the decisions. Of course I'm biased, but I think you can read a wannabe airline pilot's blog without worrying about the quality of fully-trained pilots.

I'd enter the competition, but I don't have time to learn good Bahasa Malaysian before the competition closes.