Migratory Birds

I learned to use a GPS receiver for air navigation when I was working in the north. Many of the airplanes in the fleet had three line text GPS units. Some had none, but even that nascent technology was so useful, compared to the NDB airways and map-compass-watch navigation they supplemented, that captains spent their own money on handheld units, for the days we were assigned airplanes that lacked the magic box. Airports, radio navigation aids and other named fixes are few and far between in the far north. Given a full load of passengers and cargo and fuel to max gross weight, there wouldn't usually be more than four or five airports within range. It was pretty much guaranteed that when we selected the we selected the "nearest" function, the intended destination would be on the first page. That was the quickest way to select waypoints: no tedious dialing in three- to five-letter identifiers letter-by-letter. Back then we just hit NRST (or rather, I don't remember exactly how, selected it from an obscure user interface), and selected the one we wanted from the list.

Of course this technique doesn't work down south, where there may be hundreds of little municipal and farm airports within an hour's range. Now I'm resigned to dialing in my waypoints, one letter at a time, into the much newer, but still not state of the art GPS unit. But every once in a while the way I learned first re-emerges and I hit the NRST button, to be bewildered by a list of unfamiliar identifiers. Today 'm flying in northern Alberta, not much in the way of towns around here, just a big whack of restricted military airspace. I'm given a reroute via a five-letter fix, still called an "intersection" because once upon a time each was defined by the intersection of two airways. Some still can be located that way, but many are simply convenient lat-long points in space. I always wonder why there are so many of them in close vicinity of LETRM. I think it may have something to do with routing aircraft around the military airspace. Usually they aren't that dense outside the terminal airspace of a busy cluster of airports. Or maybe I just remember better not to do that nearest thing when I'm in an urban area.

Approaching destination I hear the controller talking to a pilot who says he's on a migratory bird tracking flight. I'd never heard of such a thing. The controller says it's great to watch the birds migrating on the radar. Wow, I did not know that either. Birds so thick that they paint primary surveillance radar are a force to be reckoned with. The controller offers to send the pilot a tape, and if I weren't busy getting set up for the approach, I might have asked "me too!"

Here's a composite radar picture of bird migration in the US (see the notes on YouTube for an explanation of what you are looking at). I couldn't find a recording of what it looks like on a local level. How many birds does it take to show up, and can you see the V shape of the skein?

I switched to tower frequency and landed in a challenging crosswind, fighting winds twenty to thirty degrees off the runway and twenty-two knots gusting up to thirty-five, all the way down to the runway. I touch down centred and straight and straight, with one little bounce, but I laugh and point out that they were both smooth landings.

Keeping It Between the Lights

About ten years ago a crew landed a Boeing 737 at Edmonton International in the fog and snow, and touched down beside the runway instead of on it. They got the airplane back on the runway after taking out a sign and a bunch of lights, and no one was hurt. The poor pilots had been up for almost twenty-four hours by the time it happened.

I feel so badly for them. I've landed at Edmonton International at night, and there are a lot of lights. When you land on a northern, snow-covered runway you find the rows of lights or reflectors and you land between them. You can't see the runway. It's exactly the same black and then reflective white as the area outside the runway. You just flare and hope the information you got on the depth of the snow and how packed it is was correct.

I think I did a similar thing when I was a commercial student, landing on a grass field. It was an actual field, just your standard chunk of turf in between the farm roads. There was a windbreak of poplar trees planted along one side, and then a line of tires showing the edge of the area they considered the runway. Presumably the "runway" side was more packed down from landing aircraft, more frequently mowed, and checked for rocks, mole hills, and the like. The CFS entry for the airport didn't mention the tires and I think I may have landed on the wrong side of them. I don't even remember--that's how un-serious my incident was. It could have been bad had the ground been soft or the grass really long and hiding obstacles on the "bad" side. I just remember that someone later told me which was the correct side. Obviously it wasn't an international airport, and before someone put the tires there I'm sure folks just landed all over.

Last time I landed at CYEG it was night, and the end of my working day. The controller asked me to turn a five mile final, but not knowing the local night time landmarks well it was difficult for me to choose a bearing that would set me up for that. I could easily turn final five miles from the airport, but I didn't have a waypoint set for the threshold of the runway, and single pilot at night, and tired in descent for a runway is a really bad place to start calculating a lat and long based off runway information, or perhaps there was a waypoint on a GPS plate, and then programming a lat and long out of a book into the GPS. Normally for that sort of thing you can use the runway as a yardstick and just mentally extend it to where you need to join, but the layout of runways at the International there combined with the angle I was approaching from made it tricky. So I did that thing that is free and safe and doesn't require me to take my eyes off the instruments or the scenery: I asked the controller a question similar to, "does this look good for where you want me to intercept final?" I probably threw in the word "unfamiliar," as well. The controller has a radar screen that shows the runways, and my blip, and he has tools that can show my extended track and distance, but he probably doesn't need them as his job is to look at blips and know whether they will conflict. It definitely made me look less cool. I couldn't pretend to be a completely fearless pilot utterly blasé in the face of any danger. But it saved me a couple of minutes in the air, because the controller told me I was free to fly direct to the threshold. And who wants a pilot inured to danger when you can have one who gets you there safely?

This is in no means intended to imply that the 737 crew wouldn't have had their incident had they asked for help. I was only trying to point out that on a beautiful visibility night a pilot who is a lot less tired can get confused. The visibility was terrible for these guys and they must have been exhausted. The upside is that their company changed the procedures after that, so crews no longer risked having to do that night landing after being up for a full day.

Not Supposed to Say

I'm flying from point A to point B, and remarkably neither A nor B is named after an animal or a body of water. I'm not on a flight plan just "VFR company note" which means my company is in charge of reporting me missing if I don't turn up, and I have flight following which means I'm monitoring the frequency of a centre controller who occasionally looks at my blip on a radar screen and, time permitting, tells me if any other radar blips threaten mine. Presumably if my radar blip disappeared and I stopped talking to them they'd tell someone or make a note, too. At the very least, if I didn't turn up at destination and company reported me missing, they could examine the records (still called "pulling the tapes" as if they were recorded on tapes sitting on a shelf) and see where my blip was and whom I was talking to when I was last recorded as existing. As I cover ground, the controller whose frequency I am monitoring will eventually say, "Switch to my frequency 133.40," or "Contact such-and-such Centre now on 122.75." The same controller may be monitoring different frequencies and she moves me to the one with the best reception for where I am, or I'm moving out of her area and she is passing me on to the next sector. My information moves with me to the new sector so I just have to say my call sign and verify my altitude. They already know where I am going, but they verify it, because there are multiple airports in the same city. Another airplane checks in on the frequency. The controller gives him the altimeter setting and then it's quiet again. My headset detects silence, so lets the MP3 player sound into the earphones. (Currently playing Convoy, featuring another profession with radio jargon). The new check in comments on this, "Kinda quiet today." The controller agrees. "Getting the crossword done?" asks the pilot. "I'm not supposed to say," replies the controller, which was way more hilarious in the airplane than it seems right now. It was the way he said it, like he was really hiding some big secret. The controller passes me on to the next sector and I say to my coworker, "I should have asked him if he had figured out twenty-one across yet."

Level at Fife Tousand

On my flight test, when I levelled off at my assigned altitude after the missed approach I didn't report level right away, but I asked for a vector. I realized a second later that I hadn't made the level call, but I expected that they would have looked at my blip and seen my altitude, so there wasn't any point in making the call, so I didn't. The examiner didn't call me on it, so I looked back at the AIM to see if I was strictly required to make that call.

Although the CARs do not specifically direct pilots to report altitude information to ATC, pilots, if not operating in radar airspace (i.e. radar-identified by ATC), should report reaching the altitude to which the flight has been initially cleared. When climbing or descending en route, pilots should report when leaving a previously-assigned altitude and when reaching the assigned altitude.

Nope, it wasn't mandatory. I was radar identified before I made that call, so I didn't have to report level. I was originally trained to call ATC upon reaching a cleared altitude even in a radar environment, but maybe that's because I trained near a big city and in that environment we never went far enough to leave radar coverage, but they they wanted me not to forget my level calls when not radar identified. Or I just forgot the rule from being away from big cities too much.

That quoted paragraph might be ambiguous, though. Does the "if not operating in radar airspace" apply to just the first sentence or to the entire paragraph? The section continues:

On initial contact with ATC, or when changing from one ATC frequency to another, when operating in radar or non-radar airspace, pilots of IFR and CVFR flights should state the assigned cruising altitude and, when applicable, the altitude through which the aircraft is climbing or descending. In order for ATC to use Mode C altitude information for separation purposes, the aircraft Mode C altitude readout must be verified. The Mode C altitude is considered valid if the readout value does not differ from the aircraft reported altitude by more than 200 ft. The readout is considered invalid if the difference is 300 ft or more. Therefore, it is expected that pilot altitude reports, especially during climbs and descents, will be made to the nearest 100-ft increment.

I guess I shouldn't nitpick it that badly, seeing as it's just a "should" not even a rule.

US Airways 1549 Audio

The audio and transcripts of radio and phone communications by air traffic controllers while the US Airways flight was ditching in the Hudson River last month have been released. I'm going to talk about them today and finish the trip to Texas tomorrow. To hear communications between the pilots and the departure controller, listen to the first one, the New York Tracon.

It's not too hard to understand, once you get past the New York accents. There are very few transmissions from US1549. Talking on the radio is low priority and low priority tasks drop out during an emergency. This explains both how little is said and how little urgency is in the pilot's voice as he relays the information. It's not just that he's calm, he's concentrating on something else. It's like a guy answering his girlfriend's questions while he's watching sports on TV.

"Unable" is the normal radio response to any request that can't be met. A pilot is unable to accept a runway because it's too short, or unable to turn to a particular heading because there are clouds there, and she's VFR. Or in this case unable to accept any of the offered landing runways because the airplane can't glide that far. The controller is working hard to make this work for these guys. You'll hear a telephone-like beep as the controller picks up a direct line to talk to another controllers to arrange landing priority for the emergency aircraft. The pilot initially wants to return to LaGuardia, then realizes he can't make that and warns the departure controller once that "we may end up in the Hudson." He considers Teterboro, but 22 seconds later he knows that's not going to work. "We can't do it," he says, "We're gonna be in the Hudson."

Realize that the air traffic controllers can't see the airplane. They have a radar trace down to maybe a few hundred feet, but the altitude and position on that updates in jumps, so what they see is not completely up to date. Once the airplane descends below radar they know nothing about it.

The controllers know the airplane has gone down, and probably assume the worst. An interesting transcript to read is the cab coordinator, who is trying to stay on top of all this. You only hear his communication with remote positions, not him talking to his controllers. He can't see what's going on out there either, but he's using all his resources, calling for a controller to get him a police helicopter on frequency. Eventually what I believe is a sightseeing tour helicopter is diverted to determine what is going on. And finally the coordinator gets the good news that there are "lots of survivors."

This New York Times article by Matthew Wald interprets the audio well.

To know more about what was going on the the airplane during all this, we'll need to wait for the cockpit voice recorder transcript to be released.

Not a Good Scene

If you can read a technical aviation report, you may want to go straight to this one. The four and a half page National Transportation Safety Board report details an inflight incident where a United Airlines Airbus A320 lost much of its electrical power immediately after takeoff from the Newark Liberty International Airport.

Because of the power loss, many systems stopped working, including three of the six pilot displays, autopilot, autothrottles, landing gear control, all communications radios, and the transponder and TCAS. The ECAM troubleshooting system flashed up messages so quickly that they were erased before the pilots could read or respond to them. They were in good weather, so were able to level off, turn around and land without those systems (the landing gear was stuck down, not up), but that doesn't make it any less of an emergency. An airplane of that sophistication is not designed to be operated just by looking out the window. The co-pilot's screen was also giving false readings and the standby [i.e. emergency backup] attitude indicator gave crazy readings too, before it stopped working altogether on the downwind leg of the circuit. The copilot estimated that if the weather had been bad, and his screen hadn't started working again, the aircraft could have been lost.

Even in good weather, they could have met serious danger. As a footnote points out they were in a large aircraft at low altitude, had failed to make contact with air traffic control, were no longer transmitting the transponder signal that allows ATC to track the aircraft on radar, and were headed for downtown New York. Needless to say, the crew didn't spend a lot of time troubleshooting, just turned back and joined the circuit to land, hoping that the controllers would figure it out. They did, and cleared other traffic out of the way.

Once on the ground, they discovered they had a failure of the #1 electrical bus, but the light indicating the failure had not illuminated in the air. According to Airbus, this is the fiftieth time that electrical bus failures resulted in loss of flight displays, and in some cases all six displays were lost. The failure was consistently difficult to troubleshoot, and in some cases switching manually to the #2 bus did not correct the situation.

A detail that caught my eye is that according to Airbus, the standby attitude indicator is designed to work for five minutes after a power loss. Five minutes?! What possible good is that supposed to do? You can't get anywhere in five minutes. Is that supposed to give you enough time to write a will and make peace with your deity? The NTSB agrees with me here and recommends that Airbus design a backup system that gives a minimum of 30 minutes of standby AI operation, and that the FAA make it mandatory in the US.

It made my muscles feel a little weak, reading that report. Imagine being in cloud, working your asses off to manage an airplane with minimal flight instruments, wondering what hardware was launching to protect New York against you.

Counting to Ten

My airplane is in the hangar for scheduled maintenance. I flew it here in the dark, with a slight tailwind that brought me in 0.2 h before the maintenance was due, rather than 0.1 before as I had planned. (The 0.1 early was of course planned in case the wind or ATC situation went the other way. I've been here before, and because this is a hundred hour (performed every hundred hours, not taking a hundred hours, but longer than the regular oil-and-filter-change) inspection.

When I arrived I parked outside the maintenance hangar and phoned the mechanic for a ride. Company has rented hangar space and flown one of our mechanics down to do the work, so we have someone familiar working on the airplane, and we're not paying the local shop rate for a simple oil change. I hauled my stuff up to the airfield gate and discovered it was locked, even from the airside. The plate where the combination to get back in would usually be written instructs me to call airfield security to get through, from either side. Both they and my ride arrived quickly and I was allowed out.

Next morning at the hangar they're laughing at my list of snags. Most of it is label-related: the little plastic cover over the emergency exit handle has become brittle from time and sun exposure and cracked into many pieces. The cover isn't essential, but I suspect the exit operation instructions on it are legally required. There are several circuit breakers with illegible labels, and one of the tanks has lost the label declaring its fuel type and capacity. They point me at an electronic label maker and tell me to go for it.

This appears to be one of the areas in which I am mentally arrested at the age of ten. I love making labels. The label machine allows me to change the height and width of the letters independently, print up to four lines of text on one strip of label tape, and choose black or white letters on black, white or clear label tape. I label everything. Now I don't have to squint through scratches to identify my CBs, and I no longer have two radios labelled "Com 1."

I also remove the pilot's seat from the airplane. This is much like one of those twisted wire puzzles, at first appearing completely impossible, without turning off the physical existence of one of the wooden bulkheads. When finally I twist it the right way and get it out of the cockpit, I wonder if I'll ever be able to get it back in. The co-pilot's seat comes out more easily and then three cents (two Canadian, one U.S.), several pistachio shells (definitely my chief pilot's), and assorted small fasteners are no problem to remove. I vacuum the interior of the plane, and am contemplating washing the bits that still have cowls on when I'm called to do another job. They explain my task.

An oil drum has been rolled over next to the airplane on casters, and it is fitted with a hand pump. The outlet for the pump is inserted into the crankcase. To refill the crankcase with clean oil, I should turn the crank handle on the pump backwards until it stops, then turn it forward until it stops again, from stop to stop is about two and a half turns of the handle and equals one quart of oil. I have to add eleven quarts of oil to each engine.

"Wow," I tease our mechanic. "I am going to tell all my friends about the time a mechanic trusted a pilot with a task that involved counting past ten!"

We're just about through the inspection checklist when everything grinds to a halt. An emergency airworthiness directive came out a few weeks ago for this airplane. It passed on initial inspection, but somehow in the last fifty hours, the plug has become out of tolerance. The airplane fails the test and is now grounded until the part can be replaced. It looks fine to the naked eye: the threads seem undamaged and there are only a few nicks and scratches. But a micrometer shows a different story. I could experience a power loss if I go on flying with this one.

While the replacement part is couriered in, we get an avionics tech to come and have a look at a transponder that ATC reports as intermittent, after several hours of flight. It's a KT76, exactly the same model that died on me in Florida last year. I hope it won't be as expensive as that one was. The tech goes into my avionics bay and sets up test equipment that looks like something Mr. Spock would use to analyze zeta radiation density for Captain Kirk. It tells the tech that the transponder is putting out the right power, and has some frequency drift, but likely not enough to produce the problem. He traces the problem to an antenna the length of my finger and the diameter of a chopstick. It needs replacing, and--this is amazing--he has one, and it only costs $160. In aviation maintenance budget terms, that's equivalent to the pennies I found wedged in the seat rails.

Even more amazing, the antenna replacement solves the problem, and ATC is one again happy with my blips.

Traffic Is ...

While I'm flying in California, a hard-working flight follower tells me that "Traffic is an əlɐɹ'əs, one o'clock five miles east to west." I report "Looking," but the truth is I'm not sure what an Elaris, or Alaras or Ayloras is. I've never heard of it. From the calls that it has been making, I am guessing that the pilot is working on his initial IFR rating. And there's a bunch of them in the airspace, with similar tail numbers, so they must be a flying school fleet. I must be somewhere in between a light sport plane and a trainer twin.

I go online after landing to look for likely candidates. I find Alaris Aviation, but they are a used aircraft broker, not a manufacturer. Elaris Designs makes classy sweaters. Aha, I score with Alarus. It's an all-metal, low wing, single. It has sprung steel landing gear, like a Cessna, in the tricycle configuration, but it looks a little like a Tripacer, with the mains further forward proportionally than I expect. That must be truly the case, as it includes a tail skid with shock absorbers, something I've never seen on an aircraft part that is not supposed to contact the ground on landing.

It cruises at 95 to 100 knots, so it's purely a trainer. I think someone who wanted an airplane for personal use would want one either faster or that had some kind of history or interesting reason to be slow.

Anyone ever flown one of these?