In Concert with the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wind, Fuel and Tie-Downs

Before breakfast in the hotel, I get the desk clerk to fax my photo flight plan to the IFR data people and my OFP to company, then grab breakfast. They have oatmeal, my favourite breakfast food, but they only have the maple flavour. Basically, they've taken perfectly good oatmeal and put it in a paper bag with way too much salt and sugar. I can't remember whether I ate it or turned straight to the muffins, but I did try to get a muffin out of a plexiglass case. You can't really see or reach the muffins without opening the drawer, but when I pull it out it somehow locks at a negative angle and muffins start ricocheting all over the room. Someone comes to my rescue and we figure out how to disarm the muffin booby trap. Girl can operate a complex airplane but she's helpless against breakfast.

Despite it all I'm right on the dot for my filed take-off time. Airborne, I tune departure and before I can contact them, the first thing I hear on frequency is, "Are you really an F-18? That's a pretty good rate of climb."

"Yeah, we're light today. It's pretty fun," replies the pilot. 'Cause you know, ordinarily it's so boring flying an F-18.

We check in with the cheerful controller and are cleared higher. We get a rate of climb nothing like that of an empty F-18, but still fine for us and we're soon in the flight levels flying back and forth in straight lines. And dammit, I need to pee already. There's a sound from the back like a clipboard being dropped. I ask the operator if he dropped his clipboard. No, he didn't. It's that stupid heater malfunctioning again. I turn it off. So now I need to pee and I'm going to be cold in a few minutes.

I put on my gloves and coat, zip it up to my chin and continue working. I can pee in a bag if I get too desperate, but they say if you're in a cold survival situation you should hold it because it's warm. The idea is that you're losing heat if you evacuate it. I'm not quite sure I follow that idea, but I follow the straight lines, dot after dot. We use up those photo blocks and ask for more, which the cheerful controller gives us.

With an hour of fuel remaining, I start descent. I planned for thirty minutes to get down and land and I take an odd pride in the fact that landing too is right on the filed minute. We taxi to the pumps and I run and pee while waiting for the fueller. The operator makes a routine check of the camera and discovers that there is fuel on the lens. The air at altitude doesn't have enough oxygen to burn fuel at the rate the regulator supplies it to the heater, and despite the fact that this airplane is certified to almost ten thousand feet higher than we were flying, it has not been equipped with any means of controlling the mixture. You'd think there would be an automatic pressure-controlled leaning operation, but there isn't. So our theory is that the unburned fuel gets barfed overboard through the exhaust, and some of it has ended up on the camera lens. Some of it ignites in the exhaust, causing the clipboard-dropping sound, and the soot around the exhaust that I have to clean off again. But we just had both the heater fuel regulator and the entire heater replaced, so it shouldn't be doing this. Airplanes never know what they aren't supposed to do.

Or maybe that theory is bogus and the heater is working okay, but there's some fuel leak somewhere else. I do the math on the fuel burn, as I've recorded how much went into each tank during refuelling. The fuel burn is right on the money for my planning, and the difference between tanks is negligible. We talk to our AMO ("Approved Maintenance Organization" i.e. home base aircraft maintainers) and they have us check for leaks while running the fuel pumps, switching tanks, and everything else they can think of. We decide to delay departure to make sure there isn't another source of fuel leaking that could wreck our data. We open some inspection ports and eventually conclude that the fuel must have come out of the heater, and we're okay to fly again.

As we're parking the airplane at the end of the day, a November-registered Cessna 180 arrives. It's windy, and of course the wind has a greater effect on the little airplane, but the pilot taxies carefully and shuts down nearby. They've come up to Canada for hunting, fishing and visiting family here. The pilot comments on the absence of tie-downs here, and at most Canadian airports. It's true, in comparison, there are hardly any tiedown spaces for transient aircraft in Canada. It's routine in the states that there are metal cables running across the parking area, and often chains with hooks attached, making it easy for you to secure your airplane. I remember now an American friend who asserted that all airports provided tie-down chains. His experience was limited, but it certainly is common. In Canada there aren't usually even tiedown rings in the pavement outside the paid long-term area. Canadians travelling with a small airplane need to bring ropes and stakes, park on the grass and drive the stakes into the turf to secure their airplanes. Everywhere is different, but what has driven this difference? It's not about snowploughs, as the travelling couple is from Montana and they have just as much snow as here.

Pipeline Around the World

We're flying a pipeline today. The pipeline has already been built, so presumably the owners know where it is, but they want pictures of it, and we get paid to take pictures, so we fuel up and go. The flight is a little unusual in that we're training a new camera operator, so there are three people on board. But the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

Linguistic aside I wrote the previous sentence and then tabbed over to my notes file to see what in particular I had to say about the pipeline flight. By pure coincidence, while I scrolled past the random thoughts at the beginning of the file, looking for the flight-by-flight notes, my eyes found something I wrote months ago about the expression I had just used. The grammar of the more the merrier isn't explainable through modern English grammar. The adverbial use of the is a relic of Old English þy, which was originally the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative þæt. So it literally meant something like "in what degree more, in that degree merrier." I think it's cool that I randomly use expressions of such ancient lineage and my language happily accommodates them. The people who have little fits about "hopefully" or "could care less" really don't have a leg to stand on. English has forever been about what people say, not what makes any kind of logical sense.

But merrily and numerously we taxi out for takeoff and persuade the controller to give us a departure clearance. There's a double delay and I wonder if I've managed to file the flight along some airway that is not authorized for use on Tuesdays, but the controllers are just puzzling out where to fling a CVFR flight. The first controller seemed to understand that I was CVFR, but there was a controller handoff between my calling for clearance them receiving it from centre and the new controller gave me an IFR departure. I don't really care. IFR or VFR I'm going to take off, switch to the next frequency, and follow their vectors and altitude restrictions until I'm in my photo blocks, so I accept the departure and follow it after I'm given a take-off clearance. The next controller gives me a vector that is close enough to direct my entry point that it doesn't matter, and I'm cheerfully following it when he calls back.

"Are you IFR or controlled VFR?" he asks.

"I'm on a controlled VFR flight plan."

"Have you been IFR at any point today?"

"I accepted a published IFR departure."

I think he asked me if I considered myself IFR right now. I tried to give him a professional and aviation-speak version of, "Seeing as I'm pointed in the direction I want to go, climbing towards the altitude I want, I really don't care." If we didn't have the op spec for extended single-pilot IFR duty days it might matter, but as it is it makes literally no difference to me. The only functional difference between VFR and IFR in cruise on a nice day is whether I have to read back clearances or not. And in busy airspace where most traffic is IFR, I often read back VFR clearances to fit in with the crowd. Technically under IFR the controller not me is responsible for my terrain and traffic, but it's not like I'm really abdicating those responsibilities, especially as I can see the terrain.

It shouldn't make that much difference to the controller, either. Under CVFR he's responsible for separating me from other traffic. That's the whole purpose of CVFR: to allow VFR traffic in airspace where IFR separation is required. But I don't mind. I wish I knew the words to make this controller happy. He tells me I'm CVFR and I'm happy with that. He hnds me off to another frequency.

The pipeline goes into the foothills, so that's where we're working. Usually I get a clearance for such and such photo blocks, for such an such a block altitude and then I just work, without a peep out of the controllers. But this lady won't give me a block altitude. I have to ask for every altitude change and heading change, and as often as not it's denied. There's traffic at that altitude, I can't have it. We end up skipping some lines for cloud and other lines because we just can't get by the controller. The thing about filing photo blocks is that theoretically they are supposed to give you the whole block, yours, exclusively. It never really works that way, and I wouldn't really want it to, but this controller doesn't get what is going on.

If I want to fly direct Calgary at 11,000' and there's traffic preventing me from doing so, I can continue towards Calgary at 9000' until the traffic is by me, then accept the climb to 11,000' and I have been inconvenienced only a tiny bit. If my direct Calgary course is 150 degrees and I'm restricted to south for five minutes, I've still been making progress towards Calgary and not a lot of time has been wasted in the five minutes before the controller says, "cleared direct Calgary." But if I want to fly along a line that starts exactly here and goes to exactly there on a track of 150.27 degrees (yes, my heading is displayed in front of me to two decimal places. I remember thinking +/-5 degrees on the commercial flight test was rigourous) at 11,000', it is completely useless to me to be cleared along it at 9000'. And if I need to turn NOW to get onto the line, a five minute heading restriction is worse than useless, because it will have carried me five minutes away from the start of the line and I have to turn around and go back.

In order to improve efficiency I start calling her a few dots before the end of a line, multitasking with my radio call and my dot tracking to try and get the next turn or next altitude approved before I hit the last dot and am ready to turn. It's a little overloading, as I'm focusing almost all my attention on those little dots and don't have a lot of attention over for the designations of photo blocks. The conversation is supposed to go like this:

Me: "In one mile Dotsmasher One requests left turn to zero eight five at one four thousand seven hundred."

Her: "Dotsmasher One cleared left turn zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred."

Me: "Left zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred, Dotsmasher One."

Her: "Readback correct."

Yeah, what is usually me flying around doing what I need to has turned into a four line conversation. And what is really going on includes both operators telling me what I need next and me reading back what they have said if it isn't clear or I think I have forgotten. So sometimes when I ask the controller for an altitude and she approves it I just say "Dotsmasher One." She corrects me snippily when I miss or muss a readback and the second time I apologize with, "Sorry, I'm just not feeling as though I'm IFR today." I'm turning and swooping and visually negotiating hills. There's a pause as she talks to other traffic then she calls me back just to deride me for that comment. "It doesn't matter," she says, "whether you are VFR or IFR you must always read back assigned altitudes and headings." I just bite my tongue on that one. It's a nice sunny day and she's stuck in a box with a screen while I get to fly in the mountains. I do my best to read everything back and am glad when our progress is sufficient that I am passed on to the next controller.

I give him a request based on the town I know we are working our way towards, then I realize I'm overhead it. Despite the cranky clearances we've been making good progress. The new controller finally gives us a block of airspace and leaves us alone. We keep flying along the pipeline, watching the scenery go by. There are some clouds on the horizon, but we hope we can complete the job before they cast shadows on our work. The senior operator says he wants someone to build a pipeline around the world so we can fly it, segment by segment, all the way around the world. I'd like to do that too, but I tell him he'd have to give me a bit more notice of where he wanted to land so I could arrange customs clearance. We're almost finished when clouds arrive and we're done for the day. We spiral down out of the sky towards the nearest airport for fuel.

The FSS there has a single in the circuit but no other traffic, and I let him know how many minutes I'll be in descent before arriving. I descend over a nearby navaid, then head for the airport when I can arrive at circuit altitude at a reasonable speed and descent rate. He points me out as arriving traffic, calling me a Piper Cherokee. I'm not usually too picky about what controllers call me, as long as they call me cleared to land, but I correct that one. If you're looking for a single and a twin turns up on final you may think you have a conflict.

Airports mostly look the same once you're on the ground, even if they are quite large, because you can't really see that far. We taxi to the self-serve fuel pumps and I shut down and fill out the logbook for the flight. The operator discovers that he has forgotten the company credit card, and his personal credit card doesn't work. Can I possibly ...?

I have an insane credit limit from all those years of ferrying airplanes around North America, so I toss them my credit card as I head to the terminal to find a washroom. I open the door to the terminal and see that there are airline counters and uniformed security inside. I have my pilot licence with me, but I need to make sure I can get back out again. I wave down one of the security guys and make sure he'll let me out. He tells me the code to get back out the door, and says it's written on the outside. Oops, didn't see it. I use the washroom, pick up the payphone to file an ordinary VFR flight plan home, and go back out the door. The code is written on the outside in teeny, tiny letters I didn't see. The senior operator is coming in as I go out. I tell him the code and he says, "I know." He's been here before.

It's funny these little airports. They're all the same to me. There's nothing in the CFS to indicate which ones have which level of security. It's not a function of runway length or altitude or type of air traffic service or of any other published datum. You land and look for somwhere to dump the contents of your bladder, and at some that means watering the grass at the edge of the taxiway while at others it means running the gauntlet of CATSA and throngs of passengers at the x-ray machines. It's disorienting, and without local knowledge you have to be on your toes to walk in the correct door, know the correct codes, have the correct documents and get back to your airplane.

In the meantime a small airliner has landed, but it doesn't need the fuel pumps. We all get back in the airplane and take off before the airliner needs out. We fly home. It takes a quarter the time to get back as it did to get here, because we're not circling around to get on the right lines, and we're talking only to traffic on 126.7 until it's time to talk to the airport controllers.

I land and taxi in, and the boss is waiting with a cheque for the exact amount of the fuel. The operator called ahead with the amount. Fastest expense reimbursement ever.

More On That Dot

Reader Sarah found this lolcat for me, a perfect laugh at the end of a long day of chasing the red dot, trying to keep it green. Fortunately they can't make me stay late, because we need a sun angle of at least 38 degrees for the work.

It's kind of fun, really, chasing the dots, trying to keep everything as good as it can be, and still having ATC agree to what we ask. And not running out of fuel. And not having to pee before I land. The basics.

Flying, Finally

There is time for a Seagull flight before I go home, but the chief pilot has been up most of the night at the hospital, and says he is not fit to fly. This scores more points with me, because it indicates the company's safety culture. The boss doesn't press him for a moment, despite the fact that it is pretty inconvenient, and the boss says he'll take me flying, at which point the chief pilot elects to go along as a passenger.

We go out to the flight line, walk around the airplane. It has a pilot relief tube, something I've coveted for a few years of landing cross-legged. The boss hasn't hired a female before, and this is one of those rare cases in employment where having the boss think about your personal anatomy as part of the hiring process actually makes sense. I know I can manage with products like the TravelJohn, but he's come up with a solution that he thinks is better for everyone. The airplane type already has one passenger seat that hides a toilet, so he's going to re-install those. Zipper placement on the flight suits might be more of an issue if the manufacturer hasn't thought of anatomical variations. Mr. Seagull indicates that the flight suit manufacturer has placed safety over anatomical convenience, giving as an example the fact that the forward hip pockets are actual pockets not open at the bottom. "Ah yes," I indicate my understanding, "So you can't get at the things in your regular pockets." That, too, he admits, but the primary inconvenience is that when you're a guy, sitting for any period of time, sometimes things need adjusting, and that's difficult to do in a flight suit. Flying is a full body job. It's a feminist cry that unless a job actually requires a penis or a vagina it should be open to all, and I don't disagree. I'm just amused that I am coming on board in an operation where the equipment I will be operating actually has a penis-to-airframe interface. I think I can improvise a female-to-male adaptor for it, though.

I take the left seat and we go for a short local flight, where I do some standard manoeuvres and I would discuss the rest of the flight but instead I will report a conversation from the day before.

Me: I guess I have one more question. You know I keep a blog. I don't name companies, coworkers, customers or anything that I think could place the company in a bad light, are there any aspects of your operation that ...

Him: No, you can't blog about this.

That also explains the Xs, Ys and Qs you might have wondered about in the previous post about potential work locations. I'll still tell you stories, I'll let you know what I'm learning, and perhaps the friend of Mr. Seagull who connected me with this company will have a chance to explain that my style reveals nothing, and get my leash loosened, but as a show of good faith I'm cutting off here, even though it was an interesting flight.

I went back to the passenger terminal and flew home, expecting to be called for a contract in a month and a half or so. My houseguest has forgiven me for abandoning her, but hasn't been as successful this week as I have. And there waiting for me at home is a very polite rejection letter from the previous company that interviewed me. That's good in a way. Never being told is like never finding the body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rules

The next day, no must be the day after that because the Canadiens are playing again tonight, the weather is better. I ask Dennis about the hangar cat, are there different rules for the two cats: one allowed in the lounge and one not? Yes, he says. Margo makes the rules and she doesn't allow the other cat in the lounge. The cat makes the rules. I didn't see that coming.

It turns out that Dennis (or maybe it was Margo) was able to rearrange our the airplanes yesterday such that ours spent last night indoors, too. Dennis tows it out this morning and I take all the tents and cords off and put them away before the flight. We top up fuel from the long ground run yesterday and depart.

There are high winds aloft, which make everything fun. There is only turbulence in a couple of spots, but I need to hold a big crab angle to go in a straight line, and plan my turns to finish where I want to be. And guess what, I have to pee. I wonder what fraction of my working life I spend having to pee? Add in the time I spend actually peeing, talking about peeing and being grateful that I don't have to pee and I think it outranks sleep in the list of things I do and wish to do.

At the end of the flight, winds are sixteen gusting twenty-six knots varying between 80 and 100 degrees off the runway. That's okay, I've done lots of crosswind landings with my legs crossed. The only hitch is that my operational 15 degree maximum bank restriction applies throughout the flare and touchdown. I aim a little upwind of the centreline so I have room to drift if needed, but it wasn't required.

Taxi in. Wait for everything to be done in the back. Shut down. Pee. Hand over airplane to the p.m. crew. Back to hotel.

I'm weirdly tired. The two pilots per airplane thing we have going for most jobs now means that I only only do a half day of work anymore, about eight hours from report to shutdown, and I've hardly been going flat out this week. I was going to go straight to bed, but I just found out it's the other pilot's birthday, so I go out and get him a card and a token Tim Horton's doughnut. I was going to put it in a box and leave a note on his door to pick it up at hotel reception, but he texts that he's landed early because of unsuitable weather. We all go out and have dinner together, and I get to give him his doughnut in person. He's a fantastic co-worker, and I'd write more about him in the blog, but I would be creeped out to find my story told on someone else's blog, so I leave his story to him.

Time Check

I wake at six to the sound of my calypso alarm. It's actually an old cellphone, but I like the distinctive cheery alarm so much that I keep it just to serve as an alarm clock. It's not just the cheerfulness but that nothing else sounds like it, so that no matter what weird shift I am working, I can sleep through all kinds of buzzing and beeping of alarms in other rooms, trucks backing out and other sounds without worrying that I have missed my alarm.

So rise, bathroom, dress, nuke oatmeal in lobby while eating banana, eat oatmeal while checking weather. For some reason slush NOTAMs are persisting in the system even though two days of well above freezing temperatures have made the runways bare and dry. There are still piles of snow on the edges of the aprons, but nothing impeding aircraft movement.

100065 CYLL LLOYDMINSTER
CYLL OBST LGT U/S TOWER 531742N 1094908W (APRX 9 NM E AD) 250 FT AGL 2274 MSL TIL APRX 1004301800

000000 CYLL KILLAM/KILLAM-SEDGEWICK
CEK6 RSC 11/29 100 PERCENT SLUSH 1 INS 1004141650

000000 CYLL LLOYDMINSTER
CYLL RSC 08/26 80 FT CL 100 PERCENT BARE AND DRY REMAINDER 95 PERCENT BARE AND DRY 5 PERCENT 1/4 INS SLUSH BRKG ACTION GOOD 1004182040

I put on my boots and meet the client at his truck at 6:30. We drive to the airport and history repeats. Let the cat in. "Hi Margo!" Unplug the airplane, stow cords, put my gear inside, preflight. There's only one litre of oil left so I split it between the engines.

The airport manager said he'd be here at seven but isn't, so I taxi to the pump and start fuelling. I don't see a light or a switch for one anywhere at the fuelling area. It's light now, so I don't need one. The manager comes out and takes over fuelling when I'm halfway through and confirms that there isn't a light. I guess we're not that far north, so operations can be scheduled to fuel in daylight. There's a little charter company here, but they haven't been too active. During preflight I find a knob on the floor, it's for the pilot-side instrument panel dimmer switch. I put it back on its post and verify that all the swiches and circuit breakers are in their proper positions. And I left the mags on after the taxi. Wake up, girl. I leave them on and start the plane, recording it at 1320, that's 7:20 a.m. local. I taxi out to the main apron and set the brakes for the lengthy warm up and run up and bootup.

When that's done, there's a small airliner coming in to land, calling four minutes out. I quickly backtrack and take off, recorded at 7:36. That was a pretty quick bootup. The mission specialist on board today prides himself on his efficiency. Unfortunately efficiency is hurting today as one of the computers throws a small fit and we have to circle above the airport for thirty minutes while the specialist talks soothingly to it, or whatever he does back there. Our manoevers are confusing the FSS, especially as the airliner is taxiing out for takeoff.

"We're at 6000', two miles west, circling towards the airport, just coming up on the button of 08," I report.

"Are you aware the Beechcraft is departing 26?" asks the FSS.

The pilot of the B1900 settles the matter by stating "We won't be at 6000' for four miles after takeoff." They depart underneath me, no conflict.

I switch from circles to flying in a straight line for ten minutes. Then back to circles for exactly five minutes, then straight lines again. It's good to have variety. I text our flight follower with an updated arrival time while flying in a straight lines. I go eleven metres to one side while texting, but this is an acceptable deviation. Don't try it on the highway.

Normally I just mark operational times like take-off and for fuel management, but today I try to rememebr to mark down everything, for your entertainment.

9:00 Eat apple.

9:30 Tell guy in the back where the pee bags are.

9:31 Add nose down trim.

9:32 Restore nose up trim.

9:56 Turn on the pumps to transfer fuel from the nacelle holding tanks to the main tanks, and switch the tank selector from main tanks to outboards. I also notice that the right engine is running a little too hot, so I crack the cowl flaps and enrich the mixture slightly. The gauges indicate that the engine likes that solution.

10:51 Turn off pumps, switch to inboards until gauges register and confirm that the correct amount was transferred, then switch back to outboard tanks.

11:05 I'm starting to think about needing to pee. Eat arrowroot cookies on the completely unsupported theory that they will soak up liquid in my digestive system.

11:30 Run out of arrowroot cookies.

12:15 Switch tank selectors to inboards.

12:30 Now I'm sure I need to pee.

12:33 Discuss the clouds that are forming

12:34 Conclude that they are above the aircraft altitude and will stay there, plus aren't building rapidly enough to be a threat for rain.

Sometime after one we make our way back towards the airport for landing and circle overhead for a bit. There's a Piper single taking off and the FSS asks me for an estimated time to landing. I say four minutes, and the Piper departs. I was off by two or three minutes, my actual landing time was 13:56.

We idle on apron, at 1200 rpm then taxi to the pumps and shut down at 14:08, turning the mags off this time. My coworker is right there, so I brief him on the temperature/cowl flap issue. and then I get to PEE!

I come back out and get the soapy & water spray bottle and a soft towel out of the nose to clean the bugs off the windows. Yes, that's right, in Canada there is an overlap between bug season and snow season. I guess we have tough bugs. The other pilot is on a stepladder fuelling when I'm done with the nose compartment, so I put the airplane key in his back pocket, explaining what I'm doing so he doesn't think he's getting groped. I also tell him I'm taking the journey log, because it's paperwork day.

14:34 I go inside the FBO and throw out the empty oil bottle from this morning, plus call a number we have for Dennis. He doesn't answer, so I call the other number. I pat Margo, even though she's kind of grimy-looking for a cat. Probably because oily-handed pilots keep patting her.

14:53 I text our PRM to find out where to fly for the scheduled maintenance tomorrow.

14:55 Pay for fuel, ride back to hotel.

15:10 Talk to project manager about our maintenance break. I'll take the plane over alone first thing tomorrow, before the p.m. pilot's duty day starts.

15:15 Eat buffalo sausage on crackers. Check e-mail. Start listening to CBC podcast of Quirks & Quarks.

16:00 Realize I have too much to do to goof off like this. I get the journey log page photocopied at reception then cross check all the numbers on my daily flight tickets with my e-paperwork. Scan receipts and flight tickets for the week. Curse my thrashing computer and multitask by packing while it tries to figure out what it is doing. I should reinstall the operating system. Maybe with a hammer. It's something to do with Firefox I think. Or maybe something to do with me running eleven tabs in Firefox, iTunes, Voyager 4 (my flight planning program), and Neat Receipts all at once.

17:55 Paperwork and flight planning complete, I read webcomics. Fourteen more tabs. Suck it up, Firefox.

18:25-20:00 Mediocre supper with incredibly slow service.

20:00 Blog.

20:30 Work out on a semi-functional exercise bicycle in the hotel weight room.

21:15 Text coworker to come and get journey log when he lands so he can update and sign it before I leave. Also update my duty time sheet, marking days I am "off," not counting the ones where I waited around all day for an airplane that wasn't ready, washed airplanes, or otherwise had duty, even if it wasn't flying. I believe the strict Transport Canada definition of duty days would allow me to mark those as off, too, and certainly Victory Airlines would have expected me to do so, but this company believes in pilots actually getting to relax on their days off.

10:05 Pilot came back from flight and filled out journey log. He saw the same issue on the right engine.

10:30 Bed. The person who will drive me to the airport tomorrow says to meet at 7:30, so I set the calypso alarm for 6:30. That means I get to sleep in for half an hour compared to yesterday.

What Feels Good

A reader of this blog works with teenage refugees. Think about teenage refugees for a moment. Being a teenager is bad enough. Now imagine you're a teenager and you have to move and leave not only all your friends but your whole country. And you can hardly take anything with you, and you're leaving because you or your parents are persecuted or in an area destroyed by war or natural disaster. So you have to learn a new language, a new culture, and fit in to a new group at a time of life where people in their own culture are feeling like misfits, and you have to get on with the usual figuring out who and what you are going to be when you grow up, even though the rules of the game may be radically different from where you came from.

One of these young people expressed interest in becoming a pilot. Another kid in the group told him he couldn't be an airline pilot because his name and appearance was obviously Arab. My reader turned to me to find out whether this was a problem, and how he could find out more about what was required to meet this kid's goal. I answered from my own knowledge, but then remembered an airline pilot reader in that same city. I connected the two people, in the hopes that information and maybe some stickers and postcards would be exchanged, and felt happy to have maybe helped.

Then a couple of weeks later I received an e-mail that leaped into ALL CAPS in its inability to to contain the writer's squealing delight. The airline pilot had set up a full tour of the operations center and maintenance hangar, including a chance to sit in the cockpit of a CRJ. The young prospective pilot received inspiration, and his outreach worker says he now looks to his supervisor and coworkers like a genius who can set up any kind of job experience in a moment's notice. And I who just sent a couple of e-mails feel fantastic. It felt as good as a perfect squeaker landing with the owner and the chief pilot on board. It's as delicious as chocolate macaroons. Feeling good about helping others does appear to be something that is encoded in our psychology/physiology. Thank you to all involved for today's high. And it's non-fattening, too.

Just One of the Guys

An image for you from North Carolina. It looks like the building was designed to standard building codes, but as there was very rarely a female in the building, the guys were using whichever washroom was available, so someone made it official. The washroom door locks and inside is a toilet and a washbasin with shaving cream and other toiletries indicating that people practically live in this building. I have no problem with using a unisex head. I'm often surprised to find that a maintenance hangar or other mostly male province has a ladies room.

Making Peace

I shower, getting water all over the bathroom, and get dressed. The weather doesn't look excellent, but it's good enough to get out of here. I finish packing and go to breakfast. To my amusement, it is eight forty-two. My coworkers are in the hotel "business centre" looking at weather online. "Get a late checkout," they advise. The weather is worse further northwest, with 700' ceilings and visibility as low as 2 statute miles in drizzle at en route airports. And no one knows what in the 200 mile stretches between airports with reported weather. We can't go IFR because we have some instrument issues.

Conditions here will deteriorate throughout the day, but the weather en route to Watson Lake should improve to 1500' to 2000' ceilings at least as far as Peace River. That gets us that much closer to our destination, and allows the weather here to be impassable tomorrow without affecting us. We agree to try for Peace River, maybe even Fort Nelson. I eat my breakfast, goof off for a couple of hours and then we all go to lunch. (Finally I got the pyrogies I've been craving since Vegreville, and yes, I know by now that I drove right past the world's largest pyrogy. Someone send me a picture and then I can photoshop myself into it and be done).

We call a cab and cram everything, including the printer which I loathe, into the truck and our laps and the driver takes us out to the airport. We direct her into the parking lot and then through the gap in the fence onto the apron. "I can't drive on the runway!" she protests. We assure her that it's not the runway, and that she's allowed. She parks next to the airplane, facilitating our unloading all that gear and then loading it into the airplane. It's raining now, but the ceiling is high enough and we back track and then take off to the west.

We pass Slave Lake, but there is no traffic there. It's the in-between season: too late for fire flights but too soon for heavy oil work. The trees below are a lovely mix of green conifers and yellow deciduous. The clouds are sometimes low enough that we skim through for a moment, but we're at a comfortable height above terrain, mindful of towers. Then we skim through a wisp that turns out not to be a wisp, and of course is the reason you're supposed to remain clear of them in the first place.

The pilot flying does a big 180 turn and flies back until we're back in the clear and then heads south for a while, looking for a way around. For a while there it looked like we were spending the night in Slave Lake, but then we found a way through. I called Edmonton radio via Slave Lake for updated Peace River, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake weather and after a brief discussion changed the GPS destination to Fort Nelson. Watson Lake weather was still nasty and there are mountains between here and there.

It gets sunny enough that I want to put on my sunglasses. I resist for a while, but then I really want them, so I apologize if it causes a jinx, but put them on. Immediately the weather deteriorates. We make a couple of attempts to get around a rainstorm that added poor visibility to the low ceilings. Not a good mix. Ceilings at Fort Nelson were 2000', and that's agl, so as Fort Nelson is 1250' asl, that meant clouds bases at 3250' asl, which was pretty much what we had. Our problem wasn't that we had a patch of low clouds, but that we had a patch of high terrain. We just have to get off this plateau.

I look at the terrain mode on the GPS (after pressing enter to confirm that I know that terrain avoidance is my own responsibility and that Garmin is no way accountable for my use of the data they provide). They provide three coloured contours: red for known obstacles less than 100' below you, yellow for known obstacles less than 1000' below you and black for everything more than 1000' below. We're on a yellow plateau, with our destination ahead in the black. Looking at the shape of our plateau, I see a finger of black extending quite a long way into it, not far to the south. Thinking three-dimensionally, the yellow lining up with that black finger will be lower than the yellow around it: it's a valley. You can see the same thing on the contours of the regular GPS map screen or on the paper chart which is also open on my lap, but it's somehow clearer on the very crude three-colour contour map than it is on the more detailed ones. The pilot flying navigates towards the supposed valley, and it is there. We're flying quite low, and the clouds ahead are quite low, but every time I draw breath to say it's not going to work, it works. There are some lower patches of clouds, but the terrain keeps dropping faster than the clouds. We cheer when we come out on lower ground with a clear distant view below the clouds.

As we approach Fort Nelson, the weather over the mountains even looks good. On approach into Fort Nelson a November-registered aircraft calls Fort Nelson radio on 126.7 to file a flight plan. There's an undercurrent of impatience in the specialist's voice as she explains that 126.7 is the air advisory frequency and is not appropriate to file a flight plan. The pilot can call flight services at "1-866-weather brief" from the telephone at the kiosk or he can contact Edmonton radio airborne on another frequency, which she gives him. We land in Fort Nelson for fuel and a pee break. During shutdown checks the pilot calls back and says the phone number won't work. I bet he tried the number on his cell instead of the kiosk. The Nav Canada number is only available from Canadian phones, and of course he'll be carrying a US cellphone. I wonder how shocked he will be by the roaming charges when he gets home and sees his phone bill.

We go in and use the kiosk ourselves, to see the weather ahead. Both the GFAs and the satellite views show clouds to the north of our route but not the south. We are confident that we can get over the mountains to Watson Lake, and if the clouds move in despite the forecast, we can drop into the Liard River valley and follow it to Watson Lake. We'll do that as soon as fuelling is complete, but tomorrow on the blog.

World's Largest What?

I take an airline flight to Edmonton. The guys unloading the airplane are wearing toques. Sigh. Summer is officially over. They were probably wearing shorts last week. Fortunately it's not really that cold out, because I have to rent a car, and for some reason the terminal is designed so you have to go outside and then back in to get to the rental cars. Perhaps there is a tunnel that I can use when it's thirty below and blowing.

The reason I have to rent a car is that we're not working in Edmonton, but at an airport four hours away on the Saskatchewan border, with no airline service. I now know to rent from Avis, because they have a hassle-free policy allowing any fellow employee to drive the car without further payments or paperwork. They offer me a GPS unit at the rental counter, but I have Google maps directions printed off, and it's pretty hard to get lost leaving Edmonton, so I decline.

It was a Ford compact of some sort. It looked boxy with a high side profile but I should have written down what sort, because if you're any taller than me, don't rent this car. At the lowest possible seat setting my head was so close enough to the roof that my hair kept static clinging to the ceiling. Is this some kind of dodge by American car companies to get people to buy larger cars? I've been in plenty of smaller Japanese and European cars and never had head versus roof issues before.

The exit from Edmonton International Airport leads right onto highway 2 north, which ends at an opportunity to get onto 216 and then the Yellowhead Highway eastbound. I do all that, and then settle in for the drive. I don't like driving as much as flying. It's not as comfortable and you keep having to turn for arbitrary reasons. After a very short while I realize I forgot to refill my waterbottle at YEG, and I don't want to drive all that way without water, so I exit at a signed rest stop.

It's the worst designated highway rest stop ever. It has parking. No shade, warmth, vending machines, tourist information, toilets or potable water. That's right, a highway rest stop with no toilets. It doesn't even have any sizable bushes. I assume the truckers are just going in the bushes behind their big rigs. The only facility at the place is a couple of large garbage cans. I move on.

The next town on the highway big enough to be on the Google Maps printout is called Vegreville and the highway signs promise all services, plus the world's largest pysanka. I have no idea what a pysanka is, so I imagine it belongs to the family of edible dough things called names like perogie and pyroshky, depending on who is making and pronouncing it. I exit at the town and shortly see that I am on 50th Avenue at 52nd Street (or possibly on 50th Street at 52nd Avenue, I forget). Because this is Alberta, I know I'm two blocks from the downtown, and if you're going to have a World's Largest Something in your town, isn't that where it would be. There's a plaza there, and a parking space, but no large thing. A nearby store offers "pysanki" for sale, and I know enough of Slavic languages to recognize that as plural of pysanka. I am disappointed to see that it's a pottery store, so a pysanka is unlikely to be food, and she is disappointed I don't want to buy pottery. She does fill my water bottle for me and direct me to the world's largest, and explains that it's a Ukrainian Easter egg. She has some pottery replicas.

The World's Largest Pysanka was constructed for the centennial of the RCMP. It looks to me like a pretty savvy move on the part of the town to use federal horse force money to build themselves a giant tourist attraction, but their little blurb about it symbolizing the safety of their town thanks to the brave Mounties was so convincing that they were awarded extra money for their project. It is an interesting meld of an old fashioned handicraft with the high tech (in 1973 anything using a computer was high tech) construction. I love the line "required the development of new computer programs," as though writing code was an earthshattering breakthrough. Apparently no one had ever modelled an egg before. Hmm, 1973: does that predate Fortran? What would they have written it in?

It was worth exiting the highway for. Giant decorated egg on stick, rotates with the wind, and it's always windy there, so it kept moving as I was photographing it. I decided not to eat in Vegreville, but save my hunger and dine with my colleagues when I arrived. Apparently there is a World's Largest Pyrogy somewhere along that drive, and I missed it.

Quest for Food

The pilot quest for food never stops. When you're a student or beginning commercial pilot you're searching for food you can afford. (I know someone who did his cross-country time-building to airports selected specifically because they were across the street from McDonald's restaurants. He was living off the the one-dollar burger deal. And yes he did look about as healthy as Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me). At other points in your career the problem is availability of food, and I use that term loosely, thinking of the row of empty vending machines in one Nunavut airport, or time between duties to get the food. This week for me it's getting to the food.

I'm in a perfectly nice hotel in a fairly civilized part of the country, in a hotel that is down the highway from the town. I'm expecting to be called to fly about four, so I'll aim to finish my lunch around three so that I have the calories to sustain me until midnight. The client calls and wants to meet at three-thirty. No problem. I have an hour and a quarter to eat and get back to the lobby with my flight bag.

The first restaurant I try is the one attached to the hotel. Although the changeable letters on the hotel marquee advertise that it opens at 6:30 am, there is a piece of paper on the door advising me that it will open "soon" and "under new management." I go back to my room to ask Google for plan B. It finds me a chain restaurant just under a kilometre away. Sweet! I thought it was just residential around here. That should take me six minutes to walk there, giving me forty-five minutes to order and eat a meal, with time to get back, brush my teeth and be ready to go. I look at the directions. Cross the highway, go two blocks west, turn right and it's about three blocks down on the right. I say "about" because the only straight street in town is the highway. Everything else is little windy roads with cul-de-sacs.

I follow the directions, getting onto the correct street as planned. After about three blocks it still looks very residential, but the street curves away and there could be a plaza just around the curve. After about four blocks I ask someone on a porch. He tells me I'm about as far away from any restaurants as I could get. He gives me some directions, which I start to follow, but as I get further from the hotel I continue doing point of no return math, and stop at the point where I would have seven minutes to get food before having to start the return journey. Fast food service is not a forte in this province. Ain't going to happen.

Hurrying back to the hotel, I must have passed a wasp that didn't like the way I was cursing Google Maps and the non-linear nature of this town, because all of a sudden OW! Something bit me in the uh ... rear upper thigh. Right through my slacks. Son of a flaming firetruck. I slap at it and yeah I'm shaking a large insect like thing off my hand. Ow ow ow.

I get back to the hotel with fifteen minutes to spare and ask the client "Could we please go early and swing by somewhere I can get something to eat"? The first drive-through in sight is a KFC, and I'm in an appropriate stage of the KFC cycle to have some. (I tried to find something to link to describing the cycle of "eat KFC, remember that KFC really isn't all that great, swear not to eat it again, five months passes, eat KFC again" but all I could find was gruesome articles on how they raise their chickens. I'm sorry, chickens. It was for flight safety. I was really hungry.) I order three pieces of chicken, just the chicken, because their fries are mushy and their cole slaw is gooey. The order is relayed across the truck, through the speaker, but they get it right.

On the way to the airport I eat my chicken, taking care not to get grease and bits of chicken skin all over the truck, and not too much on me, either. As we pull into the airport parking lot the client says, "I just have to say, I'm impressed."

I'm thinking back to our last flight. It went well, I guess, but nothing to write home about. What's he impressed about? He continues, "You ate three pieces of chicken in seven kilometres." In fact it left such a lasting impression that he mentioned it later to his boss in front of me. Hey, you never know what will impress the client. I throw out the empty box with the bones so as not to stink up his car with KFC smell.

The flight went as planned and I could feel my tummy being happy because it was full of warm chicken. It may have been full of horrible bad for me ingredients, and clearly it didn't do the chicken any good, but it was better than flying hungry. And that insect bite itches.

She Can Talk, Too!

This is a really old article from 2003, and I started to write it up as "a few years old but sounds like it's from fifty years ago," a commentary on how far ahead women in the west are of their third world counterparts. And then I read on and realized that the Kiowa helicopter pilot Adrineh Shahijanian it describes is in the American military. it was an American soldier who looked at her in uniform, then turned to a man sitting next to her and asked if women flew Kiowas.

When I bookmarked this I honestly thought the story was about some remote country in central Asia where the women are just crawling out from behind their veils. I know there are quite a lot of women in air combat roles in the US. And women were ferrying American combat aircraft before some of today's soldiers' parents were born. I guess some corners of the military are fifty years behind the general population when it comes to women. I'm so lucky to be in an environment where I don't encounter this. Or perhaps simply a mindset where I don't see it.

The "pee in the field" directive is an interesting one, because here is an area where, yeah, men are better equipped than women. But only if they are both wearing flight suits styled for men. If it were me who had to pee in fields on a regular basis, I'd extend the flight suit opening far enough south (with a velcro closure) that I didn't have to do the Kabuki dance to pee. If circumstances require me to participate in literal pissing competitions, I'm up for it.

You've got to love the part where the soldier asks the man who is with the woman about her capabilities, as if following some cultural law where he can't address a woman directly himself. This sort of thing alone would be hilarious, except that you know that for every man who asks if women can fly helicopters, there are a lot who just assume we can't, or can't do it well enough to be worth hiring. I try and think of it as their loss, and the gain of employers who don't think that way.

Also, Canadian Centennial of Flight celebration. John Lovelace is the Wings Over Canada guy, so he knows how to organize air travel, but hee hee, I want to know what happens to sleepy YQR ATC when 123 little airplanes pull into Regina for the night.

''I closed comments not to stifle debate, but because I laughed so hard at "People who suffer that attitude always seem to have lots of spare aggression, so it seems silly to treat women soldiers that way and NOT let them blow things up!" that I wanted it to remain the last word.''

Counting Calories

The customers want to take a commercial flight to Alaska while we transport their uncheckable oversized gear instead. We went out to the airplane to check if the most awkward piece of customer equipment would fit in the airplane. With some rearranging of what we already have, the conclusion was yes. It's amazing how asymmetric an airplane can be and still look symmetrical. The wing lockers are not the same size or shape.

The other odd thing, as I mentioned before, is going north to the United States. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that. As I packed for this trip, I looked at my passport and thought to myself that it was unlikely I would need it. I knew we would be concentrating on the northern areas during the few weeks of the year that they aren't covered in snow, but of course I brought it anyway and now I'm headed north across a border. I keep having to remind myself that all the things that apply going south, apply to this border crossing, too. In Canada the US is referred to as "Our Southern Neighbours." It's just odd going north into their country, and not have it be one of the technically north bits like between the Great Lakes in the Detroit-Windsor area or the Angle near Kenora. The customers promise to get us a list of all the equipment and serial numbers for our customs broker. Our route will pretty much follow the Alaska highway to Fairbanks, where we'll clear customs and from there up the Dalton Highway to the coast. I was really surprised to learn that there was a road all the way to the coast.

I went to buy the rest of the Alaska emergency supplies. The rules didn't specify that we needed a fishing rod, just fishing tackle, and I'm sure one could improvise a fishing rod from the wreckage or catch fish on handlines, but I'm thinking we could have some fun and "test" our survival gear. A collapsible fishing rod is $30 but a kid's rod is only $15. I have a choice of Pirates of the Caribbean, Barbie, or Disney Princesses. I chose the one that came with a bonus tackle box.

Bughoods are cheap and available, no problem. The guy at the hunting store tried to sell me a better, electric device for repelling mosquitoes. He touts it as able to create a five metre radius zone devoid of mosquitoes. An area effect spell, in D&D terms. He didn't use D&D terminology, though. Not a lot of hunting store proprietors do, I imagine. It would probably be great, sitting on the ramp in northern Alaska in a mosquito-free zone. But I stick to the shopping list.

I'm also looking for survival food. What I want is a little pile of bland-to-yucky, shelf stable, high calorie, survival food bars. Something that won't be destroyed by immersion, won't tempt someone to eat out of boredom, and that requires no preparation, so you can eat it while sitting in the remains of your mangled aircraft with a broken leg, cowering under your bughood and wrapped in your emergency blanket. The hunting store has lightweight foil-packaged meals, but you have to boil them in a pot with water, and I want no-preparation food.

This store is out of signalling devices, so I try another. Most people probably fulfill this requirement with special shells, but lacking a rifle or shotgun, I have to find a self-contained device. Eventually I find a pen-type device that comes with both signal flares and bear bangers. Seems to fill the bill. It's almost fifty dollars, but it has to be both safe, and fire pyrotechnics, so one has to pay for that. This store also just has boil-in-bag hunting food, for people who plan to eat it. Emergency food should, you see, be barely palatable, so you only eat what you have to.

Plan B is to just buy reasonably long-life items like granola bars. Not as calorie-dense, but they'll have to do. Now that I reread the requirement for "food sufficient to sustain life" for one week, I kind of go "huh?" A pack of tic-tacs should meet that. You don't starve to death in a week. You just get really hungry. But on the shopping trip I had "a weeks worth of food per person" in my head, and hadn't read carefully enough to see that all I had to do was sustain life. So what's a week's food? I fixed on the number two thousand calories a day. I think that's what the RDA on food packaging is based on. So with two people on board, I needed 28,000 calories (or kcal, or however you want to count them). The word calorie is kind of like pesos: you have to know which multiplier you are dealing with. According to the side panel nutritional information, a box of granola bars is about 1000 calories. I pick up seven of those. So, 21,000 calories to go. How about some sardines? I pick up a can and read the label. It's only a hundred and ten calories. So I'd need eighteen cans for a day's worth of calories. What? I know for a fact that I can bicycle for fourteen hours fuelled by only eight cans of sardines. Maybe these are low-calorie sardines. There are some of those little cheese snack things with cracker sticks. They are also marked as 110 calories each. What? I could eat eighteen of those before dinner and still eat dinner. I think I don't understand calories. I throw in a couple of bags of raisins, some beef jerky. Still 19,000 calories to go. I eye the candy aisle. I mean, wow, I'm starting to understand why so many people fulfill much of their daily caloric requirements through junk food.

I fill the quota mainly with different sorts of energy bars. I'm imagining how mad or grateful people would be if they really were stranded in the woods for a week eating what I had purchased. So maybe I will throw in a bit of candy, too.

Back at the hotel, I mention the 2000 calorie per day figure that I used and get responses ranging from "maybe for YOU; I'd need at least 3000!" down to "I'd think 300 would be enough." I probably went overboard, but the food will get eaten in the end. I buy a mouse-resistant plastic container to seal it all in, and stash it in the airplane with the axe, tarps, water purification and other emergency supplies. Also my computer, which I left running, seems to have shut itself down. Curious. At the time I thought perhaps it downloaded an automatic update and got confused trying to reboot itself. I hit the on-button: the light came on and the fan started up, so I went for supper. Damn that constant need for calories.

Ironically, I return to the hotel in time to catch the second half of an episode of Survivorman. I've never seen it before but another blogger recommended it. The star of the one-man-show is pretending to have survived a small airplane crash in the Temiscaming winter, with a broken arm. After four days he admits he's not doing that well, and has just abandoned the fake broken arm to take a partly frozen rabbit out of a snare. As he prepares the rabbit, the footage is edited to reduce the gore on TV, which is too bad because I've never dressed a rabbit. I know some wild animals have musk glands that you should remove properly before cooking, and I don't know what they look like. I also remember that you can get sick from a diet of only rabbits. He does mention the latter and explains that you can protect yourself from protein poisoning by eating the bone marrow, eyeballs and organs.

His next move goes against the normal advice for air crashes. He builds a toboggan out of the wreckage and starts to walk back to civilization, towing his gear on the toboggan. I think that's part of the premise of the show, that he always has to prove his ability to escape from the situation. Air crash wisdom is that one should stay with the airplane because it is an easier target for searchers, may have been observed on radar (okay, probably not in Temiscaming), may be sending an ELT signal, and perhaps provides shelter. And you need fewer calories to stay in one place than to struggle through the snow.

Flare to Land ... Squat to Pee

As I mentioned, some time ago I won a silly contest. Where the prize was a Go Girl, a device designed to allow women to pee standing up.

It's smaller than I expected. So just like what it emulates, really. The whole thing is packed in a tube just a little fatter than the English Smarties tube. (Much fatter than the unrelated American Smarties roll). I need a more international basis of comparison. To tell the truth, it's pretty close to the typical flaccid size of what it's emulating.

I open up the tube and and it contains a rolled up plastic bag with a sticker on it. I peel the sticker of and a silicone thing pops up into shape. It's a funnel with a specialized shape and a this-way-up arrow. There are also instructions, for those who need instructions on peeing into a tube.

So I try it out. Following the instructions, just in case. I have no problem relaxing my bladder while standing up facing the toilet, but some people might have trouble. I understand that for some people they can't let it go unless they perceive they are in the 'right place.' I used to do long distance racing where the right place was without checking your speed during the race. I think it was mainly the guys, however who couldn't just let it run down their leg indistinguishable from the sweat. So it works for me. The pee comes out the correct end, and nowhere else. It pretty much all runs out, and then you've got to do the same little shake the guys do. With the same that's-why-you-put-the-seat-up results. Then you have to wipe both yourself and it. Weirdest part: having to put the seat down after using the toilet.

The makers suggest that some people will want to throw it away as a single-use item. I rinsed it out in the sink. In a public restroom, you'd want to take a paper towel into the stall with you to wipe it. You could wash it easily, and probably pretty discreetly while you wash your hands. I'm not sure how I'd manage in a port-a-potty, or other environment where, the manufacturer suggests, you'd want to use it because you didn't want to sit down. I don't really see it useful for that, because in any situation where it would be more appealing to use this than to sit, it would be more convenient to squat than to do this. My kind have been squatting to pee ever since we learned to walk upright and I find it a pretty effective way to go. I was hoping I could use this to pee while flying but it kind of requires standing. Maybe it could be hooked into a receptacle of some sort, but I'm not yet ready to simulate that with experimental apparatus.

Both flaring to land and squatting to pee are risk management techniques. They make the operation slightly less efficient than it could otherwise be, but leave a lot more room for error. I've got to admit, that if you can get it just right, flying an airplane right onto the runway without flaring makes for a very fine landing. You have to know exactly where your wheels are. And if you do it wrong, it has a fantastic potential to make a mess. As anyone who has cleaned a bathroom knows, the penis analogy remains sound here.

April Fool

Sooo, it's that date again. I was just going to skip it, as I didn't want to do a fake post about getting an airline job, quitting blogging, losing my licence, winning the lottery, being taken hostage by extraterrestrials (who, of course, let me blog) or my being baffled by something in Texas. But I found something more foolish to blog about.

I entered a very silly contest hosted by The Flying Pinto, and even sillier than that, I won.

The really foolish part is that I've kind of obligated myself to blog about using the prize, now. It hasn't arrived yet, but when I next get home I gather it will be there, a little too late in the season for me to write my name in the snow.

Like the FMS, For Example

One of the blogs I read is Schneier on Security, a blog about the security mindset, and security issues in and out of aviation. Bruce Schneier is a security consultant who has decided to bash his head against the wall in a public forum. The blog gets a little repetitive, because it's mainly driven by news stories, which themselves are repetitive because people don't learn from previous mistakes.

Comments on a recent discussion of the indiscretions of US sky marshals included the not-new suggestion that the cockpit be completely separated from the cabin, with separate food, water and washroom facilities for the pilots.

Meanwhile someone else raised the also not-new suggestion that "Then the only possible target for the pilot to shoot will be the co-pilot. Which, if you arm them all and wait long enough, is sure to happen."

I stopped reading and got the best laugh at a follow up comment, "If you were to survey current pilots, you'll find that there are several pieces of equipment more likely to be shot before the co-pilot."

Too Much Information

Pursuant to yesterday's non-adventure of the missing pilot, my first order of business today was to replace my cellphone with one that works in BC. The choice was Telus (shouldn't that be TelCan?) or Bell. In an attempt to demonstrate to the clients that I am taking prompt and immediate action to address the problem, I take their recommendation and walk across the Alaska Highway (a.k.a. 50th Avenue, if you hadn't guessed) to go to the Telus store.

This was going to be an entire post about buying a cellphone, but comments on the previous post show that you can all predict how that goes. There's the phone itself, with the possibility of cameras, video games, holographi projectors and laser death rays, when what I am really looking for is good predictive text messaging software and buttons that won't wear out quickly. There's the option of pay as you go, versus contract (and you can't swap between these, because they involve different telephones. Pay as you go is ludicrously expensive (how about 55 cents a minute for nationwide long distance?) The contract probably isn't much better when I consider that I have to pay for it in months when I'm not using that telephone. And the contracts are complex with plans and add-ons that I kind of need but aren't really appropriate to the way I use the phone. And of course there is the difficulty of getting a phone number that won't be long distance when I'm at home. I grumble, then suck it up, acknowledging apologetically to the young women working at the store that overpriced Canadian cell service is not their fault. I buy the phone, sign the contract, memorize my new number, and go back to the hotel. That's enough about that. I'll give you too much information about something else.

Here I am flying the airplane. It's ten thirty, two and a half hours into a seven hour flight, and my body has just reminded me that I forgot to pee before takeoff. It's part of my routine, but I didn't have to "go" then, and was busy folding wing tents or something, right up to departure. It's not killing me yet, but there are four and a half hours left before I'll be on the ground. There's nowhere convenient to land, and even if I were passing directly over an airport, I can't just say, "ladies and gentlemen, we now have an unscheduled stop because the pilot didn't learn a lesson her mother should have taught her by the time she was four." Always go before you go.

Last time I ordered oxygen cannulas I topped up the order with a package of disposable portable urinals that are supposed to be effective for men and women. They have a powder in them that turns to a gel when wet, so they can't spill. I included their presence in my passenger briefing and one passenger, a male, confirmed that the product worked. I should have tucked one in my flight bag, but I left them all the airplane, and I'm not in that airplane now. After another hour or so has passsed, I'm furtively looking around the cockpit for a container. I'm not picky. Funnel plus hose plus window seems like a really good idea right now. There's nothing.

It's hard to do the pee-pee dance while flying an airplane. You just have to take your mind off it. I manage to make the urge go away for a while, but the duration of that while subsides to nothing by the end of the flight. And there's a chain reaction. I want to minimize the amount of water I drink, because that will exacerbate the situation, but of course I don't want to spend hours without water. And I'm hungry, but it takes water to digest food, especially the energy bars that I fly with, so I have to limit food, too. So now I'm hungry, a little bit thirsty and floating on my own distended bladder. I somehow survive the flight, turn in a surprisingly good landing, and rush through engine-off checks. The fueller meets the flight at shutdown and I almost knock her over on the way to the washroom.

The next day I completely wring out my bladder before the eight a.m. takeoff. I'm not going through that again! Ten o' clock and all is well ... 10:15 ... 10:30. Oh oh. Same problem. Hey! What's going here? Have I lost my touch. Did I break something by holding it so hard yesterday? Can you do permanent damage by holding your pee? There's a Seinfeld episode about that. I endure another excruciating flight. I think having to pee sits above several levels of pain in the scale of impediments to conentration and enjoyment. In fact, I can vouch for that, having attended a ground school course with a broken back. I survive that flight too, and hit the internet for information.

First off, anyone who hits the comments and tells me, perhaps citing Tycho Brahe, that people have died from holding their pee, are full of it. (But not as full as I was). The sphincter concerned is going to let loose and wet the left seat long before it explodes out any other avenue. Like anything else on the Internet, I get a mixed set of results. The first batch of hits I get are with reference to children, and they promise dire consequences from forcing children to hold it.

"Infrequent urination and incomplete emptying lead to an ever-increasing bladder size and capacity. This is turn leads to a decrease in sensation to empty the bladder... Renal failure may ultimately develop secondary to bladder function abnormalities" (MedHelp.org, Urology Forum).

This one says that if the bladder gets too full urine can back up into the kidneys causing extra pressure which may damage the tiny blood vessels in the kidney.

Over time, the pressure can cause the bladder muscles to become very thick and the bladder may generate frequent, strong contractions... The high pressures in the bladder may force urine backwards (reflux) up the tubes (ureters) from the kidneys and damage the kidneys." (Christopher S. Cooper, M.D., 2000, Pediatric Urologist).

I'm guessing there's a difference between adults and children, and that part of the maturing process that allows us to understand the urges that allow us to be toilet trained in the first place is a change in our bodies that allows us to hold it.

There are a lot of medical-sounding hits that indicate holding your pee is in itself not a bad thing, but that if you have a urinary infection that delayed urination can spread the infection to the kidneys.

On the other side of the issue, the admitedly amateur WikiHow Says there's no medical impact of holding it in, and gives suggestions on how to hold it.

I wonder also if this is a sex-specific question, as my anatomy doesn't quite match that of those who are warned of possible protate problems.

At any rate I didn't break anything vital, as subsequent flights went fine and my bladder allowed me to eat and drink, land the plane, put on the engine tents and wing covers and then find the washroom.

I wonder where NASA gets their famous astronaut diapers? Anyone know? Maybe I'll write them.

Fuel Inerting

While discussing the recent Qantas B747 incident with some very knowledgeable pilots I learned something that bears more research, about oxygen supply and fuel inerting technology. I'll start with some background and an overview of oxygen supply options in aircraft, before I finally get to the cool stuff that I learned.

The simplest way handle the problem of ensuring people on board can breathe is for the airplane to have an unpressurized cabin and non-turbocharged engines and to be operated only at altitudes where the engines and everyone on board has access to adequate oxygen in the outside air. Pretty much everyone who learns to fly does so in an airplane this simple. It works well. The laws of physics and of the government work in concert to forbid climb beyond a safe altitude.

The next method can be retrofitted into any aircraft, and that is to carry an oxygen cylinder and masks. Gaseous oxygen is compressed into the cylinder and the flow regulated by a valve. There are various mask and flowmeter technologies to ensure comfort and efficient use of the oxygen available, and you've read about some of the ones I've used. You can also have a similar oxygen system built in, which just means that the oxygen cylinder is stowed in a custom compartment, as opposed to in the cabin. Individual occupants attach their masks to outlets throughout the cabin. It has the advantage of being integrated with cockpit systems and seeming more sophisticated to the passengers, but the disadvantages that you can't easily take the cylinder somewhere to be filled and that you're married to masks that fit the outlets that were manufactured into your airplane at the time that Galaga was the pinnacle of videogame technology.

Remember that there IS oxygen at any altitude where airplanes fly, and it is present in the same proportions everywhere. You probably already know that air is 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% other gases. we only actually need the oxygen to breathe, the rest could be replaced with something else harmless. So that proportion of oxygen stays the same as you go up, it's just that the air at altitude is at a lower pressure, so there is less of it in the same volume. One lungful of air at 18,000' has half as many oxygen molecules as the same lungful at sea level. If there were a way to cram more of that thin air into your lungs, you would have access to just as much oxygen as at sea level. And there is: pressurization. Under normal circumstances, most high altitude aircraft pressurize the fuselage to a breathable atmosphere. It's important to realize that this isn't a matter of sealing in ground level air and keeping it from escaping. The air in the airline cabin is constantly being replaced with air from the outside, it's just that it's compressed and cooled on the way in. A significant portion of a turbine engine is dedicated to compressing air, and there's enough left over, called bleed air to power some aircraft systems and pressurize the cabin. The airplane is fitted with outflow valves to prevent overpressurization. You can sometimes hear them making horrible whistling sounds. This explains why a small hole in the fuselage doesn't cause movie-style airliner disasters: there are already holes in the fuselage to let the air out. Adding another one might make the pressurization system work a little harder, but escaping air is replaced.

Sometimes, like on the Qantas flight I mentioned, something happens to create a bigger hole in the fuselage. The pressurization system can no longer keep up with the outflow, and the airplane depressurizes. The checklist in such a case calls pilots to don their own oxygen masks and commence an emergency descent. That means they cause the airplane to descend just as fast as it structurally can. Kind of a fun one to practice! Pressurized aircraft are required to have a supplemental oxygen system in place to allow everyone to breathe during the time it takes to descend from cruise altitude to ten thousand feet, where there is breathable pressure. In an airliner, pilot emergency oxygen is always supplied from oxygen bottles, as their masks are positive pressure, designed not just to increase the partial pressure of oxygen, but to exclude noxious substances like smoke. That's because pilots have to perform useful functions in an emergency, while passengers just have to stay alive. It's fair, really.

This is all extra scary for unknowing passengers because they witness the depressurization event, probably accompanied by a loud noise. The masks drop, which despite all the safety briefings still awaken some human fright instinct based on snakes dropping out of trees. The drop in cabin pressure is such that moisture in the air may condense into mist, which looks like smoke, and then the airplane plummets. Try to keep in mind, if this happens to you, that the plummeting is deliberate and for your own good. The masks really aren't designed to muffle your screams in order to maintain the concentration of the flight crew, (but I'm not saying that might not be a useful auxiliary function) so put them on and breathe normally.

Now, what are you breathing? In a Boeing 747 you're breathing out of an oxygen bottle, just like the pilots, just with a different mask. The airplane literally contains a big bank of oxygen bottles, bristling with valves and lines running all over the cabin to the passenger oxygen masks. As you breathe in wearing one of those masks you get some cabin air and some extra oxygen from the cylinders. Ironically, it was one of those oxygen cylinders, positioned in the nose of the aircraft, that caused the Qantas decompression in the first place.

On any other airliner, you are not breathing out of a bottle, but breathing oxygen custom made for you in response to your pulling the mask towards you, as directed in the passenger briefing. The compartment above your head contains a chemical oxygen generator, based around a compound that contains oxygen, in the same way that H₂O contains oxygen, but less stable. It takes a lot of energy to liberate oxygen from water, but just ignite something like sodium peroxide (Na₂O₂) and it starts to decompose. Na is elemental sodium, O is oxygen, and it takes two oxygen atoms to make oxygen gas (O₂). The sodium peroxide breaks down into sodium oxide (Na₂O) and releases oxygen gas. Here's the equation.

2 Na₂O₂ --> 2 Na₂O + O₂

You don't have to have understood high school chemistry to count that up and see that there are two Na atoms and 4 O atoms on each side of the equation, with nothing left over. Now, that's pretty neat if you can get around the bit I skimmed over and that is that in order to start this reaction, you set the oxygen generating chemical on fire. When you pull the mask briskly towards you, you are pulling a pin to fire an ignitor. You may even smell it burning. But despite the scary sounding implications, they are maintenance free devices. The only incident I know of where chemical oxygen generators caused a fire ValueJet where a number of the devices were being transported in the cargo hold, mistakenly labelled empty. They should have been deactivated for the flight. A real drawback of chemical oxygen generation is that it is a short lived system capable of putting out about 12 minutes of oxygen, just enough to get down to 10,000'. For flight in areas with a lot of high terrain, supplemental gaseous oxygen is required. Boeing offers this as an option on the B737NG and as a retrofit on other aircraft.

It would be nice to have oxygen available that didn't have to be held in either a pressurized container or an unstable chemical compound. And there is. In the air. There exists technology to separate nitrogen from oxygen in the ambient air. While the unpressurized air at 30,000' doesn't contain enough partial pressure of oxygen to sustain consciousness, the same pressure of close to 100% oxygen does. And the cool part is that generation of oxygen in this manner is just a side effect of fuel tank inerting.

See, when an airplane takes off, typically the tanks are full of fuel. In the absence of fuel tank inerting, as the fuel is burned, the resulting space (cool word alert: it's called the ullage) is filled by ambient temperature air and fuel vapour. Given the right conditions, this mixture of fuel vapour and air can ignite, to disastrous consequences. The idea behind fuel inerting is to fill the fuel tank ullage with something inert. Like nitrogen. And now if you didn't already, you see where this all comes together. During the flight, take the air that is already going by anyway, and make almost pure nitrogen, used to fill the unused space in the fuel tanks, and then have close to pure oxygen as a byproduct. I don't know much about the actual system that will be on the B787 Dreamliner, but apparently the whole apparatus weighs about as much as one passenger with luggage, and draws 40 kW of power.

The Boeing 787 will use this system. The B787 will also make a liar out of me for what I said about bleed air, but this post is about the fuel inerting. It's so symmetrically beneficial, it's almost as if putting my laundry in the washing machine somehow created both clean underwear and groceries.