Four Bad Omens for a Human Factors Course

There are a lot of accidents cause by pilots flying in poor weather. Decades ago Canadian aviation authorities tried to rectify this by increasing meteorological knowledge requirements and offering more opportunities for ongoing learning, and I think also improved weather information products. In the process, someone realized that pilots knew what kind of weather was forecast, knew the implications for their flight, and went flying in it anyway. It wasn't about what the pilots knew or how good the forecasts were. It was about the decisions they made with that information.

So we have Human Factors training, about the human, not mechanical or meteorological, factors in the accident chain. The theory is that if we understand why and how humans make stupid decisions and arm ourselves with some strategies to avoid such decisions, that we will make safer decisions. It's mandatory recurrent training. I recently had to ground a pilot I supervise because company records didn't show human factors training to be complete.

Last time mine was up for renewal, the safety coordinator and ops manager had signed us up for an online course. That's not an uncommon nor even a totally unwelcome form of information delivery these days. The NASA icing course is fantastic. Also free. This one wasn't, but after the first few minutes my expectations were not high.

Omen #1: The course can only be accessed though Internet Explorer.

Omen #2: When I open the course in IE, the server barfs a full page of java error messages because it can't handle the fact that I have a three letter language code set in the browser for my first choice language.

I reset the browser to en-ca and then again to plain old en and the server will finally talk to me. It asks me, "Do you think you could ever make a mistake leading to a potential aviation accident like that shown in the photograph?"

While the photograph is loading I think, "yes" because I know I make mistakes. The text is saying something similar. And then I look at the picture. It's a helicopter. So I amend my thought to, "No, I probably wouldn't try to fly a helicopter, but if I did, it would look like that shortly."

Omen #3: The next words are "However, this program will help you, an Aircraft Maintenance Technician (AMT), avoid the error you don't intend to make by raising your awareness of how those errors are made."

Um ... I'm not an AMT. Have I got the wrong course here? It's all registered to my name. Good abbreviation though. A way to refer to AMEs and apprentices in one go without having to know their paperwork status.

Omen #4 The words "to facilitate your learning you should view the "Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance" video. The video can be obtained from Transport Canada."

Wait, they are doing web delivery of a course that requires me to go to a branch office of Transport Canada and borrow a video cassette? Okay TC has probably got it on DVD now, but geez, are they going to deliver the content or a pointer to it?

Every slide is illustrated by accident porn: the crumpled strewn remains of an aircraft. It probably sounds really macabre but in aviation we do think about these things all the time. I learned to fly in an airplane that had the words "serious injury or death" placarded in at least two different places on the dashboard in front of me. You pretty much have to present a pilot (or aircraft maintainer) with a crumpled ball of snot and aluminum to make us sit up and pay attention.

Sometimes the text doesn't change when I advance to the next slide and sometimes only part of it changes, so I have to play "spot the difference" to get the content. The core of the content is a menu of "dirty dozen" human susceptibilities. I've seen these before on maintenance breakroom posters. It's the AMT (see, I'm using my newly acquired knowledge) equivalent of the Five Dangerous Attitudes that the pilot-oriented courses teach. The student can work through the dirty dozen in any order, but even though the course encourages you not to try to do it all at once, there is no bookmark, done flag or other indication of which ones you've completed.

There are videos embedded in some slides. Possibly they are embedded in all the ones where nothing seemed to happen when I clicked next, so I clicked next again. If so, the course allowed me to go on without viewing the video. It tells me to "Click on "Continue" to see a suggestion." There's no continue button and I can't go on because the next is greyed out. I pressed the button for French, because that wasn't greyed out, and the program crashed. I log back in and look at some more, then it crashes again on refresh.

There's irony in that I'm doing this training while somewhat fatigued from last night's overnight flight and distracted by constantly checking the weather for tonight's, two of the dirty dozen right there. I'll go get a nap and tell you more about it later.

Everybody Counts

It's a Census year in Canada, all the ones ending in 1 are, I believe. June was the census month, and my household received two copies of the official form, one addressed to the basement. There's no basement, not even a crawl space you could hide a body in. Normal people just throw out an extra form like that. But me, I'm not normal people. It says it has to be filled out, by law. I can't just throw it in the recycling. I call the number on the form. The woman says I only have to do one.

"So I can do two for fun?" I ask, because that's what sort of idiot I am.

"If you want to." Good grief. How the heck are we going to count who lives here, if that's the advice they give? But I do do two, but by the electronic method. I log into the website and enter the code from the form, and then enter an accurate count of who actually lives here. For the second form I enter zero in the number field. No one lives in the non-existent basement. Why do I do this? I expect it to reject it, and I enjoy feeling superior to computers, and being stupidly accurate. To my surprise the site has a page ready for my response, with half a dozen reasonable suggestions for why there might be zero people at an address. I pick "does not exist or apartment has been merged with main dwelling," which perfectly describes the situation.

I'm impressed. Now you can see I'm not cranky about all questionnaires. Just the vast majority of poorly written ones. My only complaint is that they required every person in the household to be classified as either male or female, no other option. Requiring one or the other has caused pain and persecution for a lot of people. Biology isn't always binary, but boxes on forms and societal pressure cause people to be physically forced into one box or the other shortly after birth, even when they aren't. The expectation and the forced compliance are so pervasive that a lot of people don't even know that not everyone is born into one of the boxes. Everyone wants to know if it's a boy or a girl, but for one in every 1500 to 2000 births in North America, a specialist is called in to decide which box the baby goes into, often via surgical alteration. And although most people have little difficulty identifying with one sex or the other, one in a hundred people has a body that differs from the standard minimum equipment list for their placarded gender. If people are equally represented in the blogosphere as in the delivery room, that's about ten pageviews a day on this blog. Hello ten people, who possibly don't all even know that your bits don't match the spec! You count too.

Hours Nine and Ten

This is going to be a flight test like none other I have ever done. In every other case, I have trained to fly the specific airplane in the specific manoeuvres that will be required for the flight test and in the area where the flight test will take place. In every other case the examiner has had some relationship with the company that owns the aircraft. But this examiner knows as much about me and us as I know about her. That would be ... each other's telephone numbers.

She examines my documents, asks me when my medical and IFR is valid until, when my last PPC expired. She confuses me by saying that this won't change the expiry date of my IFR, because it should reset the two-year period, presuming I pass. If I fail it will void the rating. I spell the name of the company for her, including the accent, but she ignores that. I don't know the official number of the company for Transport Canada purposes, but presumably she finds it in the documentation. She's pleased that I have brought the aircraft documents, but needs my training records. Of course, for other PPCs I have either done the training right there and still had custody of my own documents, or company has set up the meeting and provided the examiner with all the documents. Company sort of set up this meeting, but apparently proof of my training has not been included in the communications. I get the examiner's e-mail address then call company and have my records sent. Next, the examiner wants to see the Ops Manual, to confirm that the training I have received conforms to the training required. I remember the training requirements in the ops manual and I remember being a tiny bit amused by how rigourously we stuck to them. The manual specified time to be spent on each aspect of the ground training and we really spent that long on them, possibly a first in I don't know how many companies. We got a little creative in that inventorying the aircraft survival kit counted towards the survival training, but seeing as it included us discussing each item and how we would use it, it was probably more useful than watching another video about people staying calm and remaining with a downed aircraft. The ops manual specified three hours of aircraft training, most of which was directed towards the specific task of playing connect the dots in cooperation with the camera operator. But she's not willing to take my word for it.

I don't believe I'm required to have an ops manual on board for this operation. More importantly I don't believe I have one on board. It might be in the airplane. I go out to the airplane to look for a copy, but I can't find one. I find the camera operator in the flying club and ask if he knows anything about it. He provides me with a copy on a USB stick. I return to the office with this, and the examiner is about as displeased as an examiner could possibly be to see this thing. She wants something she can leaf through. It's not a really extensive document but it's wordy Transport Canada boilerplate, too much to print. She puts verifying my training off until later and asks me about the airplane. She wants to know the procedure if the landing gear fails to extend. Okay, here we go, something I am responsible for and can answer.

"The landing gear safety systems are quite interesting on this aircraft," I begin, because they are, and because I was taught to answer systems questions in essay form, not point form. My first flight instructor insisted. I guess it sounds more prepared, less like someone grasping at any knowledge they happen to remember, the way it might in point form. She interrupts to tell me that she doesn't need me to tell me it is interesting, just what the procedure is. "Using the checklist I would verify that the airspeed is below 150 miles per hour and the gear handle is selected down. Next I would activate the STCed electric gear extension assist ..." I'm a fast talker, and the command I've been given implies that I should get this over with but I follow advice and slow down. If the electric assist fails there is a hydraulic hand pump. If the hydraulic hand pump fails there is a CO2 cartridge, and if the CO2 cartridge fails to extend the gear there is yet another step to saving the aircraft. The examiner has herself landed one of these airplanes with the gear retracted, without damage. I don't remember other systems questions. If they were asked they were also things I knew well and she moved on.

I'm asked the minimum visibility for departure from a particular airport. I look it up and it's marked "not assessed," but the terrain around is flat, and I could safely climb to an en route altitude without a published departure, so I say "one half mile," the legal minimum for an airplane where there is no specified visibility requirement and the company does not have the op spec for low visibility departures. She asks me what is the minimum required visibility for an approach at this aerodrome. I note that approaches are predicates on ceiling but that low visibility can trigger the approach ban, and recite the litany surrounding that. She indicates the advisory visibility on the plate--three-quarters of a mile, in this case--and I explain that while it is not limiting, it is a good predictor of whether the pilot will have the required visual reference at minima. She wants to know what visibility I would really take off in. I tell her the truth, probably not less than a mile. I'm thinking single pilot, unfamiliar aerodrome, only one set of eyes for both runway and instruments, no one wants pictures of fog anyway. She tells me there isn't any point in having an IFR rating if I'm going to be that conservative. I refrain from telling her that the point of the IFR rating in this operation is so I can fly above FL180 on sky clear days, and I just nod and say yes. She already knows the nature of the operation. She asks me what "Not assessed" means. I stare at it again, leaf through the CAP GEN a little. Is there some visibility requirement implied by not assessed? Not that I can think of. What have I missed here? I tell her, "It's the pilot's responsibility to ensure a safe departure ..." She's obviously not happy, but she moves on.

The theme is consistent with me squirming to answer things I can't articulate to her satisfaction. There's so much to know. I feel I know it, but even in an open book unlimited time exam it's impossible to put the right answers in the right spaces to satisfy every examiner. I seem to be particularly bad at this, rarely not knowing but frequently not satisfying. I explain my weight and balance, fuel on board and that I won't be switching tanks during the exam because the selected tanks contain more fuel than the other tanks will on landing.

Fortunately she spends no time on my pathetic nav log, except to suggest I use a pencil another time. She must have asked me more questions than that, but there's no crazy "how many vortex generators?" type questions. I identify the airplane for her through the window and am sent out to it. I see some of the flight instructors who have been in and out during the day and tell them we're going fly. If you fail any item on the ground you don't go flying, so the comfort here is that she hasn't failed me yet.

I'm almost at the door when I think of something. A performance enhancing drug that I don't usually take in this environment, because it's also a diuretic. But this is only an hour to an hour and a half flight, and my alertness could be enhanced. I ask the instructors, "Is there by chance some coffee around here?" There is, but it's not a pot of hours old coffee, but instead a really fancy high tech brewing station. I explain that there's an examiner coming down the stairs right behind me and I jut need to insert caffeine and go. This is not for pleasure. There's a jar of instant on the counter and a rounded teaspoon of that combined with some water from the kettle gives me half a cup of surprisingly palatable lukewarm double-strength coffee, which I down, just as the examiner appears. I start guiltily, "Sorry, stopped for a coffee," and lead the way to the airplane.

Heads Up for a Pop Quiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Here I Am

So, here's a bit of review. I had a job I liked, which was actually contract work, for a few years and then the company ceased operations, so I looked for a new job. I didn't find exactly find one, but I kind of found two: two companies that wish to contract me for flying: Eagle and Seagull. Eagle starts right away, and Seagull will pick up in a month or so. It's not the two-pilot IFR operations I had sought, but it's work I can do, with the familiar dynamic of one pilot and one non-pilot crewmember.

My first assignment at Eagle is to fly to Slave Lake. (Yes, that Slave Lake. Who knew that events in Slave Lake would try to interfere with me telling a leisurely story? Canadians, please don't spoil the ending just yet.) Is it becoming a tradition for me that each new job takes me to familiar territory, or have I just spent so much time in so many places by now that it would be more of a coincidence had the job taken me to somewhere I had never been? The community of Slave Lake is where I remember it, the threshold of runway 10 almost against the eastern shore of Lesser Slave Lake and the two-eight end hidden behind little hills until I am almost upon it, helicopter traffic on the radio alerting me to the activity before I enter the zone. Winds favour 28, so I select approach flaps and join a left base. Flaps half, gear speed, gear down, turn final, call final, landing flaps. Three green, one in the mirror, mixtures and props forward. Land (maybe I should work on that) and roll out to the taxiway.

Stop and take my time to confirm after landing checks with a not-yet-instinctive checklist, then taxi to the pumps. It's after six p.m. I still have the phone number for fuel callout here in my iPod, so I call without even getting out of my seat. The after-hours callout fee is $25, very reasonable for the north, and the fueller is friendly. He wasn't here last time I was here, so he doesn't know it's "me again." I'm just another transient aircraft.

I get out of the airplane and it's absolutely gorgeous. It's about twenty degrees here, with a light breeze, almost cloudless sky, and clean fresh air. It's a beautiful place that gets overlooked because of its ugly name. People assume it's going to be like Fort McMurray just because it's in Northern Alberta. But Slave is a friendly little town, with paths and treed greenways all through town so that although it has grown, everyone can still walk to the cool forest in only a few blocks.

Fuelling complete, I taxi to parking and chock the aircraft. The other crew member asks me for the baggage door key and I give it to him. The owner gave it to me on a neck lanyard, stressing that it was the only copy they had at the moment, they hadn't been able to get another cut. "No, not this key, the rear one."

"Isn't it the same key?" I say, but I should have known. I can even recall now the owner complaining that thanks to the front baggage door AD, they now have to lock it with a key. That should have twigged in my mind that the front key was a new key and therefore most likely different from the old ones. Expediency in effecting the AD would probably have hindered someone going to the trouble to find the same sort of lock and tumble it to match the others, even if that lock type was available to satisfy the AD. One of the things you get when you hire an experienced pilot is someone familiar with weather patterns and able to cope with different conditions, but the package also includes someone who knows about the craziness of airplane keys. "I should have asked," I apologize, but he doesn't see how I could have known, and takes full responsibility. There are actually three separate keys, and without the missing one we can't properly secure the aircraft.

I know Slave Lake to be a pretty good area. He warily eyes the gaps in the airport fence. It's not that reassuring to tell people that it's really easy to break into one of these, so the key isn't that important. See that's why I need a blog delay, so you don't know where there are unlocked airplanes sitting in front of the terminal.

Coworkers are already here so we call them instead of a cab for a pickup. I smile at the familiar streets and businesses of downtown Slave Lake. We go by the school, and the new mall. It wasn't quite finished when I was here before. We arrive at a brand new Holiday Inn. I don't even think it was a foundation when I was here last. It's where they are staying, but the Inn is out of non-smoking rooms, so we go across the street to the Super-8. Ahh, the Slave Lake Super-8. Some things never change. Well except the staff here, who seem to change weekly. So what hasn't changed is the quirkiness of the check-in clerk. I ask her, the others waiting in the car, if she has two non-smoking rooms. She's not a multi-tasker, and she has clearly set a rule for herself to help one customer at a time, in order of arrival. So I wait through the slow, careful check in process of another customer before she can tell me that yes, she does have the rooms. And the guy who lost a twoonie in the vending machine has to wait until both of us are checked in before she can help him. "I don't have a twoonie," I hear her say in the end. But she solves the problem herself after only a moment, by giving him two loonies.

It's fun being the one on the team who knows the town, because it completely erases the inequality of being the new one on the team. I can recommend a nearby restaurant, and find the Wal-Mart, Shoppers Drug Mart and Canadian Tire for us to get supplies. I have a delicious Bison burger--hey if you're going to eat large animals, do it in the Alberta plains. I notice that although it's still bright daylight, it's gone nine o' clock and ask the waitress if she knows how late the Wal-Mart is open here. She thinks at least ten, so we're good. The waitress is, by her accent, from the east coast and she says that while at first she was daunted by the short winter days that she adores the long summer ones so much that it's all worth it. She's going camping on the weekend, up in the park, and there will be time after work Friday for her to drive up and set up camp in the daylight. We go and buy batteries, then it's bedtime.

Funny Way To Make A Living

The potential employer picks me up at the appointed time, well actually a bit later because he forgot about me until his assistant asked if I was coming today, but I spent the extra time sitting in the hotel lobby reviewing their procedures manual, so it wasn't a waste of time. The original plan was for me to go flying with the chief pilot today, for me to see to see how the operation worked and be persuaded that I wanted to join, and for them to see how I work. The flight would also count towards the required training to put me on his operating certificate, but the chief pilot has not come in today, due to a family medical emergency, and the boss is too busy to do the flight, so we're improvising.

So we chat for a while. I'm not sure it counts as an interview, because no one asks me what kind of tree I would be, what my greatest strengths and weaknesses are, or what I would do if the pilot I were flying with stated an intention to go below minima. We're telling each other stories, comparing our philosophies of life, flying and les politiques des deux solitudes du Canada. The smart psychology people amongst my readers are shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at the screen now, saying "You idiot, Aviatrix, that was the interview," but hell then, my whole life is an interview. Remember when I had a line check and didn't know it until it was over? That was awesome, too. We get along amusingly well. I tell him a story that illustrates the freedom and responsibility of being pilot-in-command compared to terrestrial rules. I've probably told it on the blog before, of driving my car on an icy, windy day, keeping my speed at what I judged safe for the conditions, which happened to be below the city speed limit. As I approached an intersection, the traffic light turned amber. On a normal day, I might have braked to a stop, but today I knew the ice would make my stopping distance longer and that locked wheels would make the car less manoeuvrable if it skidded through the intersection, buffeted by a crosswind. I elected to continue through the intersection at my cautious speed. There was no cross traffic. The combination of my low speed and a rather short duration light left me still in the intersection when the light turned red, and I knew that intersection was equipped with a red light camera, where they snap your licence plate and send you a ticket in the mail when they catch you. As far as I was concerned, the red light rule is secondary to safety, and it so happened that I had made a chain of safest decisions that contradicted the red light rule and was fully prepared to defend my decisions in court should I be issued a ticket. And there my prospective employer picked up the baton because he had had exactly the same experience--it's a Canada thing, I suppose--and he had been issued said ticket, and he had defended himself in court with weather reports and diagrams and calmly reasoned arguments, and he won. So it seems I don't need to paint any walls white for this guy.

He has work to do, so sets me up with another task, something amusingly familiar. I'm writing company exams. "Writing exams" sounds stressful, but in ten years of writing them at least once a year I can only remember one occasion in which it was a timed, competitive, closed-book event (and in that case I scored so well that the chief pilot teased me about it). It's really just an exercise in demonstrating that a pilot has reviewed all the company manuals and is familiar with their contents. You typically complete the exams as you read the manuals, noting the speeds, baggage arms, wingspan, fuel capacity, and other items that the chief pilot has chosen to test you on. There are similar manuals for icing, ground handling, the ops manual and other special aspects of the operation.

The boss pulls up an example of something on his computer. I can't not notice that it's in Xxxxxxxx. There's a chance of me flying in Xxxxxxxx! I know it's probably just like Témiscamingue or Deep East Texas with different accents on the radio, and squiggly letters on the airport terminals, and people excited about buzkashi instead of hockey or football, and mares' milk instead of poutine or barbecue, and ... oh face it, it would be totally different from Témiscamingue and Texas, and I would wrestle on horseback over possession of a goat carcass for the opportunity to go there.

I go back to writing exams, figuring out all the details of the company deicing rules. I hear the boss next door fielding a call that implies that a client has urgent need of his services in Yyyyyyy. He's telling them he has an airplane and a pilot ready to go, and can dispatch them today if need be. Replace buzkashi with surfing, and mares' milk with little drinks with umbrellas in them. The boss's assistant comes into the room where I'm writing and hisses excitedly, "hurry up and finish those exams!" gesturing with her head towards the Yyyyyyy conversation. I grin and nod, but voice reality, "That's not a mission the new hire is going to get." I'm more likely to get the mission to Qqqqqq that I think I heard him negotiating for fuel for. But hey, replace buzkashi with the knuckle hop, and mares' milk with seal blubber. I don't have to leave my own country to find an exotic culture.

If this is all a test, or some sort of set up, who cares. If someone wants to fly me to somewhere in the world, put me up in a hotel and buy me a few meals in order to have me write exams and then be told that I'm not needed after all, I'm okay with that. It gets me out of the house and gives me travel, new people to meet, and at least the opportunity to feel like I'm going to get a cool job.

I finish all the exams and get a tour of the maintenance hangar. There's a garishly-painted partial airplane in there, but I'm assured that it's the parts plane, and not representative of the appearance of the fleet. We'll try again for flying the next day.

Back at the hotel my card doesn't work. I go back to the lobby and tell the desk clerk. I always feel that in someone else's territory you should at least attempt to speak their language. Although I usually waive that rule at service points in highly traveller-oriented places like hotels and airports, I know that this clerk is francophone, so I say, "le clef ne marche plus." The key doesn't work anymore. He says the same thing I've heard a hundred other times I've experienced this, it happens, you need to keep it away from your telephone. I pull my telephone out of the same pocket and display it guiltily. I knew that. I'm clearly out of practice for hotel living. He remagnetizes the card. And then I realize that he continued the conversation in the same language as I started it. Usually bilingual Quebeckers switch into English right away in response to my French. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and presume that they are being polite and accommodating rather then implying that my French is too execrable to listen to. I haven't been here for a while though. Is it a political wind shift, or just that this guy really prefers to speak French, even at the cost of having to listen to my accent. (The word Quebeckers looks so wrong written down, but lots of people say it aloud. I've almost decided that it's the anglo pronunciation of Québecois). I know it doesn't represent any great improvement in my ability.

Oh and did I mention that potential employer number one wants me for that operation? I've stalled them while I check out this opportunity. I find that stressful.

Resolution Roundup

Here is what I resolved to do in 2010 and whether or not I did it.

1. I will follow a physical fitness program to maintain strength, flexibility, and endurance, plus I will run a six and a half minute mile and a 45 minute 10k.

Ha ha, well that was a terrible overestimation of my abilities. I already revisited this one a few months ago, to remove the speed goal, concerned that I would injure myself. I did maintain a daily physical regime until late in October when there was a bit of a disruption to my routine, but I picked it up again in December, except on indoor gym equipment, so I can't compare speed in a meaningful way. I'll assume that I made the adjustment before the course drop deadline and award myself a C+ for the amended schedule.

2. I will contact someone I know in real life but don't work with or live with every day. That can be an e-mail, a postcard, a phone call or a visit and it has to be a hundred different people over the year.

This was intended as a way of maintaining contact with long term friends, and to keep me from cocooning in a strange hotel room, or just vegging out and catching up on recorded TV when I got home from work. I did the daily contact diligently for three months, and out of that came a cross-country airplane trip that wasn't for work, and two long road trips to visit friends unseen from as far back as the 1980s. I revisited the medevac pilot who didn't fly me out of the untracked north because her airplane was broken, but who instead provided emotional rescue at the time. Those reunions alone were worth the resolution. Sometimes you see someone again after a long time and they turn out to be even better than you remembered.

There are lots of people I still haven't made enough effort to see, and sadly some bounced letters and e-mails sent to people I now can't reach. I was adding up the contacts to see if I made my hundred when I realized why I'm so bad at keeping track of who I should keep track of. A few of you will remember a few life epochs ago for me when I had almost everything I owned stolen by a small gang of teenagers and wasn't able to catch them despite calling the police and limping after them until I passed out. One of the things taken was a pocket computer (I think it was a Windows CE PDA, but I called it a Palm Pilot) and while I lost very little data, I have never since collected all my contacts into one place. so I have Facebook friends and e-mail friends, and other e-mail account friends and paper address book friends and friends whose address must be either in that directory for that organization I joined, or else their business card is in that box over there (please tell me I'm not the only one with one of those scary boxes), and friends I have a phone number for stored in that old cellphone that doesn't have a plan anymore and stupid as this sounds, even friends that I can only contact through intermediaries. As in "hey Jennifer, let's get together, see if Kevin can come too." Because Jennifer and Kevin used to live next door to one another, see, so I only needed to ... okay it's incredibly stupid, but that's what happened.

So, combing through my various lists in mid-December I counted only eighty unique people I knew in real life before the year began, whom I had reached out to in 2010. So I started to give myself a bad mark on this item, when I realized that December is tailor-made for saying hi to and inviting over people whom you haven't seen all year. I'm writing this on the 14th and I'm up to ninety-four, so I'm confident that I'll reach my target by the end of the year. I don't get an A for this because I did cocoon a little, but I think I deserve a B+.

3. Any day I don't fly IFR in real life, I will fly at least one approach on my flight simulator game, and I won't blog until that's done.

And that was a complete disaster. I did this so rarely there is no way I can get above an E grade here. That's the lowest grade in my alphabet. I didn't want to practice doing things incorrectly, so I did things properly, but the tasks of setting up the simulator to do what I wanted to, finding charts, planning the flights, getting the joystick working or working out the keyboard commands made it not fun. For the few occasions I kept this, I blogged several days entries after one sim session, just to avoid having to reconfigure the computer every day. Suggestions welcome.

4. Whenever I get home on a break from work I will, in addition to the usual litany of perennial maintenance tasks, assign myself one new project to complete.

Ha! I just found a big loophole here. I did assign myself projects to complete, every time. Now ask how many I actually completed. Oh I'm so funny. I can't believe I didn't catch this when I assigned it. I'm usually very careful about rules. Do I dare give myself an A+ for loophole exploiting? I think I'll mark this as "incomplete," just like that curtain I bought the fabric for in about 2007.

What thinking about this brings home to me is that there is no such thing as a permanently completed task. Either it's "end world hunger" and it's never completed, or it's "steam clean rug" and it will need doing again next year. Permanently incomplete.

5. I will not let this list of responsibilities, nor other lesser pastimes, stand in the way of new adventures.

And this one is the payoff! I blew off everything in sight to go to two foreign continents for fun this year. In unreported stories, I rode a helicopter to the top of a mountain, a horse up and down mountainous trails, and a rented bicycle over cobblestone streets. And believe it or not I'm usually the one who misses adventures because she has bound herself to responsibilities. An unqualified A+ for this one.

For the year, I think that's a B- average. I mark these pretty easy, don't I? I'll try to do better next year, both with loophole-free resolutions and keeping them. If you're short on accomplishments for the year, you can always use T-Rex' method.

Songs of My Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake It 'til You Make It

Two of us are at breakfast, with one guy late, but it's his birthday so we cut him a break when he wanders down sleepy just as we're ready to go. Once at the hangar I open all the under-wing panels on the right wing, collecting all the screws in a can, then go back to ask for another task. The AME who doesn't know me tells me to inspect the cabling visible through the ports. I reject that task, "I think you should do the inspection. I don't have any experience inspecting the insides of my airplane." That probably sounds stupidly squeamish. It's a cable. A four-year-old child could probably look at it and determine whether it was frayed, corroded, chafing, jammed or sabotaged, versus intact and functional, but surely they have some grunt work for me.

He shrugs and tells me to replace the pneumatic air filter, telling me it's installed under that panel there on top of the nacelle. The replacement part is on the bench and the only tricky part is that I should note which way the airflow arrow points on the installed one, and put the new one in the same way around. People dumber than me and with far less personal concern about the safety of the aircraft work as apprentices under the supervision of an AME every day. Many of them on my airplane. How much more complicated is this going to be than LEGO? I find the right kind of screwdriver and remove the panel, revealing a part with an arrow marked on it, differing from the replacement part only in colour. This one is kind of silverish, while the replacement is gold-toned. It has a bulge in the middle, about the size of an elongated softball, and then tapers down at each end to a ten-centimetre connecting tube. I can't see how the connector attaches to the line in the airplane, because the connection is covered at each end by a thick but flexible cuff, extending beyond my view through the panel in both directions. It's also held in place with screw clamps and numerous zip-ties. They look like the regular zip-ties that you can get at the hardware store, but I'm told they are special airplane-grade zip-ties.

This may or may not be true. You can never believe anything an AME tells you. It's part of their training, perhaps, that they keep up an incessant stream of bullshit just to see how much they can get a pilot to believe. At first I thought they did this entirely for their own amusement, because how hilarious would it be when one AME fixes a problem then tells a pilot her fuel cap was stuck because the cap had become desynchronized from the propeller governor, and then a month later she walks into another shop and asks for the synchronizing spray, because her fuel cap is stuck? But now I think they do it as protection from pilots who have a little bit of knowledge and try to tell the maintainers what is wrong. Pilots are very good at sounding authoritative and knowledgeable about things we have the faintest clue about, because that's our job: to navigate a complex machine through extremely complex and only partially forecast environmental conditions while assuring everyone involved that we know exactly what we're doing. So the maintainers stack the deck against us, and then they can tell our knowledge from our bluffs. Which is why I report snags by stating exactly what I observed. Not "the bulb is burned out" but "the light is not illuminated when the switch is selected on."

I draw an arrow on the nacelle, under where the panel will cover it, to indicate the direction of the air filter arrow, then I cut all the zipties and try to figure out how to get this part out. Typically the jobs you give unskilled labour are the ones that require very little knowledge, but are uncomfortable, tedious or annoying. So I am expecting this connector to work on the principle of pain and annoyance. I wiggle the whole thing in the direction of the more enveloping flexible cuff, in the hopes that the smaller one will slip back and reveal whatever it is at the end that I have to undo. The edges of the sheet metal around the opening in the nacelle appear to be the most likely source of pain. "So," I ask, "Do they sharpen the edges of the aluminum at the factory, or is that something you have to do yourself?" That gets a laugh and an expression of solidarity. I think I have identified the primary danger here. I keep wiggling the air filter and eventually the rubber cuff just slips off one end and that end is loose. There is no connecting snap. It doesn't screw in. The flexible sleeves themselves form the connection between the filter and the line it is inserted in. It's not high pressure, and it's just air, so that makes sense. I wiggle the other end out and ready the replacement, taking the rubber caps off the end and entering today's date in the space provided on the part. It's not too hard to wiggle it back into the same space, and I get the various clamps and zip-ties into place without too much damage to my forearms. I leave the panel open for inspection and move to the other side.

This one has a different screw-clamp to zip-tie ratio, but is basically the same. The arrow is pointing the same way if you think of it as "to the right" but the opposite way if you think of that as "toward the wingtip." I wasn't expecting that. I mark the arrow direction on the airplane again and then notice that the date marked on the installed air filter is only three months in the past. I ask if I should leave it, and he says yes.

My next task is removal and replacement of the brake pads on the left main. I've done this one before. It's easy to loosen the bolts to release the metal plates with the pads on them, then I have to pry the old brake pads off and get the new ones to jam in properly. I reassemble the brake, but there is now a hydraulic leak evident. They suspect that the o-ring has been cut? I don't get a clear answer from them as to whether this is on account of some error on my part, which means I suspect it is. If something goes wrong completely unrelated to what the pilot is doing, the AMEs typically pretend to give her hell for it. But I suspect they aren't chewing me out for this because it really is something I did, but I did it under their supervision so it's their fault. I know about that. If the FO makes an error, it is the captain who takes the blame.

We go for lunch, and when we return it's still leaking, so they add o-rings to the parts order. I take the other one apart more carefully. The brake pads are held against the plate by friction around tiny posts, and one of the AMEs shows me how to mushroom the posts when the pads fit too loosely. If it wiggles when it's in place, it's too loose. I have to hammer the post with a spike to spread it out a bit. He laughs at me for my tentative hammering. The pad wiggles, still wiggles, I keep hammering on it, and then I manage to spread it too much. I'm honestly not trying to get them to send me away. Now we need another brake rivet. The guys are looking around the hangar for this small, common part and then we all laugh as we remember that this is a helicopter repair hangar. Helicopters don't have brakes. (Cue everyone telling me the exceptions, in the comments). The helicopters that normally inhabit this hangar on don't have retractable landing gear, either, so we're also missing a hydraulic cart. The professional manages to fix the brake plate and we get that reassembled.

My next task--you'd really think they'd find something disgusting and foolproof for me now--is to replace the left side alternate air cable. The cable runs from a push-pull knob on the cockpit control panel out to the door in the engine that I can open up to admit combustion air, should the primary air intake become blocked. I have never had to use this for the safety of the flight, only ever tested it, or opened it when it was on an emergency checklist, but blocked air intake has never given me grief. Nevertheless it has to function for the airplane to be flyable. It works, but there is wear in the cable. Following vague instructions, I go into the cockpit and under the dashboard with a flashlight. I identify the cable that comes out from behind the left alternate air knob and start to follow it. It goes under a panel, so I remove that panel, which requires me to remove the scuff-plate for the pilot's feet, which involves crawling under the dashboard and removing the carpet in the cockpit, which is filthy. I pull out the seats, and get to work. After a geologic era or so or so of cramped awkward frustration with small spaces, cut hands, and stripped screws, I ask, "Don't you guys start to hate airplanes?" They're enjoying my misery, not so much just to see me suffer, but because they're seeing that I'm appreciating the difficulty of the work they do.

This is actually a little bit fun for me because there is pride in accomplishment and the sparkly feeling of new brain connections being formed as I solve a problem I haven't been exposed to before, and learn new things. I realize now that AMEs aren't robots programmed with the instructions on how to fix airplanes. They have the meta-knowledge of how to work out how to fix them. That's why my instructions aren't "open panel X and remove cable Y" but "look around and figure out where cable Y goes, and how to remove it." The experienced guys of course have a better idea than I do of where the cable is going to go and how it will be attached, but they can be just as surprised. I've exposed all of its treacherous path through the airframe and we'll pull it through tomorrow.

We leave the hangar at 7 p.m. and go back to the hotel to shower and have supper, then do a Wal-Mart run for shop towels. I also get a dirt cheap sweatshirt (made in Cambodia!) to get grubby in and an equally disposable t-shirt with a sassy slogan. It's marked as my size so I didn't try it on, but it turns out to be too small, which may be suited to my mission tomorrow morning to persuade someone to lend us a hydraulic cart. Clothing has no influence on aircraft cabling, but is there anything a woman in a tight t-shirt can't borrow from a hangar full of men?

Breakfast will be at seven tomorrow.

What We Train For

I'm way too late to the party to comment much on the uncontained engine failure on Qantas flight 32 on November 5th, but I wanted to share with you the cabin PA the captain made during the incident. I'm always interested in what makes these sound frightening or reassuring, and I think this captain did a very good job of this minor detail of the emergency handling, as well as the major job of putting the airplane back on the ground efficiently. They had some hard decisions to make.

The issue that has forced the grounding of Qantas' entire fleet of A380, as you'll know if you've been following the story, is not so much an Airbus problem as a Rolls-Royce problem. The engine failed so spectacularly that Rolls Royce has recalled forty of its Trent 900 engines worldwide, and the incident airframe may be a write-off. Debris from the engine damaged the wing spar and it's not certain how that might be repaired or replaced in this new, composite aircraft. Christine Negroni drew my attention to and summarizes a power point presentation on the extent of the damage, blogged by Ben Sandilands.

Depending on Technology

Studying up on my procedures in AIM 3.16, I'm boggled by how much has happened in the last ten years. When I started flying, RNAV means either inertial nav or maybe the system where a direct route was calculated from the relative position of multiple VORs. Selective availability was still a factor, so the idea of doing precision instrument approaches using GNSS was ludicrous. It's a little difficult for me to take the level of sophistication of current RNAV instrument procedures seriously.

Technological change is part of the package of being a pilot, and I berate myself for goggling at the GNSS advances when pilots retiring today went from purely mechanical fuel control units and cables and pushrods to fly by wire electronic airplanes. And then I argue back that no matter how many computers are packed on board, maxing out the already upgraded electrical system, I'm still flying mid-20th century technology, and should I get off my butt and activate favours and hard work to get into an actual airliner someday, I will have to make the same jump in technology as did the Beaver pilots Air Canada hired in the 1970s.

It's getting easier, not harder to fly an airplane safely. I have genuine admiration for the pilots who flew in the far north by dead reckoning, the sun and stars, and the occasional assistance from their compasses, near useless at those latitudes. They probably groused when they had to learn how to tune the ADF and fly instrument approaches, and I can imagine complaining at the dizzying complexity of the VOR, even though a VOR approach is much more precise than an NDB approach.

On the topic of dizzying, how about Laval St. Germain, the director of flight operations for Canadian North (fantastic airline), who recently made the first Canadian ascent of Mount Everest without oxygen. That link is worth reading, a good interview not just who/where/when. I kind of suspect that St. Germain is the kind of guy who, when flying a non-pressurized aircraft without an oxygen mask doesn't hit a timer the moment he climbs through 10,000' to make sure he's back below it within the regulation thirty minutes. I think he might laugh at me when he saw me do that. I was once asked the time of useful consciousness at some altitude, in an airline interview. I didn't know the answer, but I'd love to see them ask Laval St. Germain that. It seems that such things are quite variable.

Resolution Update

I made some ridiculously optimistic new year's resolutions this year and with five months left in the year, not only have I neglected them, but I until I looked them up just now, I had forgotten what they were. It's time for some revisions.

The running goal proved to be counterproductive, because while I started off well with a few months of distance and a good base, I then tried to go too fast and kept injuring myself, setting myself back. I've been awesome at keeping to the 5BX programme (wow that reads like something else if you don't know it says FIVE B X, for "five basic exercises"), though, and am almost at the level recommended for a thirty-five year old male, with little doubt that I'll achieve it on schedule. (The women's program was suspiciously wimpy, so I stopped doing it when it diverged enough from the men's that I couldn't just incorporate it. Maybe I'll pick it up again later). It's much better to run healthy and uninjured than to run fast, so I'm going to scrap the speed goals and instead just count how many kilometres I run before the end of the year.

The people idea worked because it did establish a habit, so even after I forgot the goal it snapped my out of being a hermit. My list of unique contacts ends in mid-February. I did pretty well up to then, but I guess I have to cross off the names of people for whom e-mail bounced or postal mail was returned as undeliverable. That's sad. I'll try to track some of those lost people down.

Simming daily was a good idea and a habit I just didn't get established. I need to set it up so it gets done like checking my e-mail and doing my 5BX. I'll keep trying with this one.

I laugh at the home project idea. The only projects I've had at home this year have been unpacking, laundry and repacking. I think I'll revise this one to try to start each work rotation with a clean desk, and that means having actually dealt with the items piled on it, not just dumped them in a cardboard box. (Yes, I actually have a pile of increasingly ancient cardboard boxes under my desk, full of the stuff I have dumped there over the years. Some of it may be address changes of my lost friends, too).

New adventures are always great, and really it's adventures and fun with my friends that have prevented home projects, okay that and watching five seasons of Lost in one frenzied binge this winter.

I Am the Paperclip

We have another day of not-so-great weather, and another request to run the airplane for software upgrades. I'm typing up the last several entries out all at once, in anticipation of being too busy to blog, so chances are that you've all been asking "why the hell does she run the engines on the ground to do the software upgrades?" Good question.

We can't take the computers out and upgrade the software on a desk, because the airplane is kind of like the Borg from Star Trek, partly what it was born as, partly computerized implants, and the desire to assimilate all life forms it encounters. That's the real reason why it so quickly becomes encrusted with bugs. So the computers have to stay attached to the airplane, and they are wired up to get their power from it. And airplanes produce power with engines. Some FBOs also have GPU carts that we can rent to provide power, but the typical GPU runs on diesel fuel, may require an attendant of its own, and the charge to use it would be as great as the cost of the fuel we'll burn from our own tanks. And with the engines running we have heat, too.

)On this occasion, however, I manage to secure a ground cart that puts out the right voltage to run our airplane systems, and it plugs into the mains. I plug it into the same recepticle in the nose as a full-sized GPU would connect to, and the appropriate lights go on. (The weird thing is that when you use ground power on this aircraft, you leave the electrical master off. It's a little spooky the way someone can turn on my systems by plugging into an unlocked external recepticle).

You don't realize how much you are doing, just sitting in an airplane chocked on the ground with the engines running for an hour until you are sitting in the same airplane chocked on the ground with the engines not running for an hour. I wasn't really bored when I was monitoring the engines. But now I'm bored. I play with the GPS. I text people. I read manuals. I sort out the things that shouldn't be in here at all (most of them are dead batteries). I clean the cockpit. I had originally planned to clean up oil stains on the outside during this procedure, but there isn't really room for me to get past the people working behind me to get out and do that.

Seeing as there is no engine running noise, I can hear their conversation and I want so much to be helpful. Or just sympathize. If I were on my third marathon computer upgrade attempt in a week, I'd like some sympathy. But it is my curse. I am too eager to be helpful. To these people, and their operation, my input is as wanted as that of Clippy the Paperclip, from Microsoft's very poorly received Office 97. These people don't want suggestions they have already tried or discarded. They don't want commiseration, or another a point of view. They want an airplane that works with a pilot who shows up on time and flies it safely and efficently. I think to myself, "It looks like you're installing BorgTec for Vista 7. Would you like some help?" And then I click on the close button for that thought.

Mentally in Mexico

My PRM said he'd communicate with the client head office about the delay, because we know the field personnel prefer to get information from their chain of command than from their subcontractors. My job is to fly the airplane, and not to indicate possession of any information that they didn't have first. I understand and try to comply with that, but just before eight a.m. I get a text from the client in the field asking about the airplane. The chain of communication has broken somewhere. I suspect someone is playing politics by hoarding information. I let them know I expect airplane at 11. I'd make a lousy politician. Probably the right way to do that would be to say I expected it at one p.m. but I'd see what I could do to make them work faster.

I arrive at the hangar at 10:20 or so and load up the cabin with my belongings and the nose compartment with the airplane's equipment. I add a case of oil. They haven't given me full oil in the crankcases to start with, just sufficient oil. Some engines just spew out the top couple of quarts anyway, so this is fine. They give me the extra oil still in the bottles.

They want to do a runup to check for oil leaks so they have me run it up while the head of maintenance sits in with me. I like it that way, because that way I see what I want to see and they see what they want to see and we're both agreed that it works right. Everything is normal so they cowl it up and start the paperwork. It turns out that the promised release time didn't include paperwork.

I could stress, but my job is not to stress about where the plane is and whether it's ready and whether the weather will hold for tonight. My job is to fly the airplane safely, efficiently and comfortably, according to all the regulations and policies. I have checked the weather, clear skies all the way. I have done my paperwork. I have walked around the airplane (found one inspection panel screw loose, tightened it myself). My charts are ready. I go outside onto the apron to wait for my paperwork.

It is a glorious day, low 20s, quite a bit of wind out on the runway and aloft, but we are sheltered in between the hangars. I find a cleanish bit of pavement outside on the apron and lie back on the concrete, propped up on my elbows. I wiggle my feet inside my work boots and imagine them bare. I imagine myself up a cute little bikini, too, and now I'm lying on the beach. That roar coming from behind the hangar over there is the surf, and any minute now someone is going to come by with a drink for me, with an umbrella in it.

An apprentice comes by and laughs at me, taking it easy. I tell him I'm in Mexico waiting for a Margarita with a little umbrella in it, and he and points out that if I had a drink I couldn't fly the airplane. He's a low time pilot and knows that when the maintenance release requires a test circuit, I'm a pilot who will take an apprentice up with her "to keep an eye on the gauges" and then will let him fly. That's perfectly legal: the pilot in command isn't required to keep her hands on the controls at all times nor to forbid others from touching them. When something costs me nothing and brings joy to someone else how can I not share? In this case, however, there is no test flight required. I think it's only needed if they do something major like change an engine. If they do major control surface work the release is marked "subject to satisfactory test flight" but I sign for the completion of the test flight myself, so unless I'm taking on passengers at the maintenance facility, the ferry counts as the test flight.

The paperwork arrives eventually and I close the doors and do a full runup for myself, checking all the systems. Everything is normal and I give a smile and a thumbs up to the head of maintenance, who is watching me across the apron. I get my taxi clearance and head out. At takeoff power temperatures and pressures are normal, but there's still a split in the throttles at take off power. I've become adept at pushing them up unevenly to keep from swerving on the takeoff roll. Airspeed alive, rotate, climb, gear up, right turnout. And there's still a red light on the gear. That probably means that one of the electrical switches that reports all gear doors closed has a bit of dirt on the contacts. I keep the nose up to stay below gear speed and select the gear down again. Three green lights go on. I select them up again. The green lights go out, the red light goes on, then the transit is complete and the red light goes out too. Occasionally having to recycle the gear to get the correct indication is not acceptable. I'm satisfied that the anomaly was an artifact of the maintenance process and not something serious, so I continue to my destination.

Behind me I hear the tower stating the wind to a landing pilot as "calm gusting fifteen" I can hear laughter in the tower cab as he gives it and the pilot laughs too acknowledging it, "I haven't heard that in a while."

I spend the trip watching the scenery and challenging myself to know my position on the chart with out the GPS. I estimate distances to various airports along the route and then check my work. It's no problem. If I flew internationally I bet I'd be way better at world geography than I am, because man do I ever know my way around North America, especially western Canada, now.

At Lloydminster I check out the GNS430 and the autopilot by flying the RNAV RWY 08 approach. I control the altitude and let the autopilot do the lateral navigation. I tell the FSS that's what I'm doing and he acknowledges disinterestedly. My impression of the approach is draggy. I have approach flaps out and cross each waypoint at the charted altitude, aiming to descend on each leg such that I'll reach the next one without having to level out. (I'm doing this in my head, it's just a vanilla LNAV approach with no vertical guidance). But the descent rate is so slow between waypoints that I hardly have to descend at all, so I have to carry more power than I want to. Doing this in IMC I would want to remain higher longer so I could have a steadier descent to the MAP. The wind isn't that strong.

I should be happy that this approach gets me close enough to the ground to have vertical contact in time to be stabilized and look ahead for the runway lights, so why don't I like this kind of approach? Some of it probably goes back to flying singles, when I never wanted to be on final without sufficient altitude to glide to the runway. With these particular temperature-sensitive piston engines, I don't like having to carry high power until short final then chopping it to land and brake. I want to be able to gradually reduce the power, but I know I can't always do that, especially on a non-precision approach. And if I'm below a normal glideslope, as I am coming in from the FAF here, I believe there's an increased risk of forgetting to lower the gear. And that makes me twitchy. I hold the MDA until I'm on a normal glideslope then lower the gear, check the green lights, and land. I'm at the fuel pumps at my ETA, to the minute.

I text all the appropriate people to let them know I'm here, and then see that they are already here. So I drag my gear out of the plane and let them take over. I let the other pilot know about the red gear light, that we're now running W100 oil, and that the engine issue is on watch. I'm more tired than I have a right to be. For some reason waiting around is really tiring, even when you are on a pretend Mexican beach.

We're not expecting good weather in the morning.

Condolences to Poland

I've been busy flying the last couple of days but have an evening off right now, and the opportunity to read about and interject some comments on the recent tragedy in Smolensk. On April 10th a Tupolev jet carrying 96 people, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, crashed on approach to the Smolensk Airport in Russia, killing all aboard, the political, cultural and military elite of Poland. News reports indicate that the pilot made multiple missed approaches to to the fog-bound airport, and continued the final approach despite an altitude warning from air traffic control.

More disturbingly, the same story relates an earlier incident where President Kaczynski threatened a pilot with "consequences" when he diverted to Azerbaijan instead of landing in unsuitable conditions. That's a factor of company culture that a good investigation may have to address during the investigation. I don't have a problem with the pilot of an aircraft consulting the passengers regarding their wishes after a missed approach. Would they prefer to land as near as possible and seek ground transport to the original destination or to return home? Would they prefer to try another approach and then have to land elsewhere to refuel before returning home, or to return home in one shot? Sometimes passengers mistake this input for having the final decision, but as former president Lech Walesa recalled, "Sometimes the plane captain would make the decision himself, even against the recommendations." The captain should always be making the decision, considering passenger recommendations only after safety is assured. The fact that a Russian-built airplane crashed in Russia, to be investigated by the Russians, brings out the Polish conspiracy theorists, but while I'd totally read that espionage novel, I don't believe it is more than fiction. As Walesa also said, "We do not yet know what happened, so let’s leave the explaining to the experts."

It's not only an aviation tragedy, but a national tragedy. Poland is an ancient country with a long history of strong leadership and culture, but no country can easily absorb the sudden simultaneous loss of its leaders in multiple fields of endeavour. The terrible irony of the situation is that those on board were on their way to a memorial service for a previous generation of Polish leaders and intellectuals who were massacred by the Soviets in Katyn Forest. Approximately twenty-two thousand Poles, such as military officers, professors, lawyers, public servants, priests and other officials were executed there. It's similar to the purges Stalin carried out within the Soviet Union itself; if you remove the intelligentsia--the people capable of understanding, caring about and communicating what is wrong with your regime--then it is much easier to lead the remaining citizenry. Anyone who would otherwise interfere with your power is either dead, imprisoned or terrified.

My condolences to the families and countrymen of all those involved. I trust that Poland will find talented people to take up the reins and continue its national journey. Poland has not yet succumbed.

Do You Regret Silence or Speech?

Today I am looking for an inspirational poster to give to someone so he can see it while he works out. I know he doesn't want to be a bulgingly muscled bodybuilder, and he's not into any particular sports, so I was looking for something generally inspirational, depicting the healthy human form. I liked this one with the Olympic rings over a muscled golden man wearing a crown of laurels and the chariot. Then I looked closer and realized that it was for the Berlin Olympics in 1936, and decided that Aryan eugenics wasn't what he wanted to have in mind while striving for the ideal.

It's almost impossible to take typical motivational posters  non-ironically after seeing the parodies, but I looked at that category anyway. Then I saw this one. If you can't see the image at right, the quotation is: I often regret that I have spoken; Never that I have been silent. It made me do a double take. Just how chatty was this Publilus Syrus?

I take his point. Sure there are times that it is better to be silent than to speak. By talking too much you might cause others to think/realize that you don't know what you are talking about. You might interrupt someone who would otherwise have given you wisdom. You might embarrass someone by telling them something they could otherwise have been happily oblivious to. You could let slip confidential personal, competitive or military information. You might be talking about your cabin when you should be focusing on maintaining airspeed in icing while intercepting the localizer.

But if Publilius Syrus (Wikipedia and Internet consensus favour that spelling) regrets nothing he has neglected to say, then does he never think of what he could have done? I'm thinking of the first officer who didn't say, "Go around!" in Little Rock, or at least didn't say it in a voice loud enough to be picked up by the cockpit voice recorder, and of all the pilots who ever died because they saw something that wasn't quite right but assumed that the flying pilot had it under control, or that it would be safer for them and the cockpit atmosphere to remain silent than to nitpick a small discrepancy. I guess Publilus Syrus never knew anyone who committed suicide because he thought no one cared about him. Maybe Syrus was so irritating that he didn't have any friends, so none of them ever died leaving him wishing he had told them something. And if he followed his own wisdom, he never spoke out against injustice against others, even though he himself was a former slave.

Ironically it was Syrus' smart mouth that got him out of slavery. Had he remained a silent slave, his master wouldn't have been so impressed by his wisdom and entertainment value as to free him. It appears that Syrus became a professional maxim writer. I guess that's the equivalent of someone who makes a living from a cafepress store today. He was pretty good at his job, considering the number of sayings attributed to him that are still in use today, such as "a rolling stone gathers no moss."

I have no quarrel with "It is a bad plan that admits of no modification," (although if that plan is a published instrument approach, ad hoc modification is a very bad plan indeed).  "If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest," is true, but I prefer the way Lau-Tzu put it. Syrus strikes both sides of the coin with the complementary, "Nothing can be done at once hastily and prudently," and "While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity." That way whatever you choose to do, you have a quotation to back you up. One of his sayings, "It is a good thing to learn caution from the misfortunes of others," is part of the slogan of the Aviation Safety Newsletter, from which I keep highlighting things I mean to blog about and then not doing so.

According to Wikipedia, he also worked as a mime. I must admit that as a reflection on a performance as a mime, those words are spot on. But I doubt he was so bad a mime that he kept forgetting not to talk.   Another of his sayings, "Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage," I think is a clearer expression of the same sentiment, but I still say speak out. If you are a sage, then someone can learn something from you. And if you aren't, someone else will likely speak out and help ameliorate your foolishness. And I suppose there are a dozen readers out there who silently think I'm a fool and should regard Syrus' advice.

And in other news, apparently some Indian pilots don't know how to fly. Indian reporters are having trouble reporting, too. Raw data flying is several steps removed from just turning off the autopilot, and if the pilots can't fly raw data in cruise, the chief pilot should be doing a lot more than sending circulars.

Responsibility Never Sleeps

As long-time readers know, I have kept my flight instructor rating current so as to have an additional source of income when I'm not off in the wild beyond. So here I am, the week before Christmas, back in a Cessna 150. I'm in the right seat, flying night circuits from a little strip next to a lake. The snow isn't very deep so the ice glistens through in strips where the wind has bared it. There's enough moonlight and other ambient light reflecting off the snow that I can see the shapes of the evergreen trees below us as we climb out from the touch and go. It's odd yet familiar to fly again in the tiny single engine airplane with the toylike controls. I'm not handling the controls, just supervising as the student practises night take-offs and landings.

I experience a moment of "how did I get here?" disconnection. Did I fall asleep? Instructors do a lot, but it's never happened to me. I make sleep a priority, and now more than ever I'm aware of the need to be alert at night with only one engine holding us above the trees. The windshield is fogged up and I reach to wipe it with my coat sleeve--the little Cessna defogger only clears a patch on the left pilot's side--but then I realize that it's not fog obscuring my view, the window has iced over on the outside. A warning flag goes up in my head. Ice? I still can't see forward. As I scan the instruments to ensure the airplane is maintaining altitude on downwind I wonder why the windscreen would ice in cold, clear weather. If there's ice on the window, where else is there ice? "Is the pitot heat on?" I ask.

Or rather start to ask. Before I've finished the question I'm facing a completely different direction and there are branches. Tree branches. The airplane is in a tree. The windshield remains opaque. I still don't have a complete picture of what has happened. Is the engine on? Another blank in memory. We must have secured it. I'm not sure how we got down, have no memory of anything we might have said to one another. There is no fire. I have a mental snapshot image of the end of a building, the peaked eaves of the roof damaged. We must have hit the tree, bent the tree to hit the building and then stayed in the tree as it bounced back. No memory of it. I can see a large clay pot knocked off a ledge of the building and broken in half, but not an image of the airplane.

For some reason the student is still holding the CFS as we walk, apparently unhurt, to where we know there is a payphone. I'm rehearsing in my head telling the aircraft owner what we've done to the plane. "Everyone's okay, but ..." My career, my confidence, my reputation, my ability to be insured as a pilot, my dreams ...

The student dials the payphone, then I take the handset away. "I'm pilot in command," I say. That's a little rude. A flight instructor did that to me years ago after I eagerly followed protocol on the ground after a radio failure. In my hand the phone is ringing and ringing, no answer. I look at the CFS in the student's hand in order to see the protocol, the correct order of everything to be reported in the event of an aviation accident. For some reason this is important to me at this moment. I want to get the last thing in my career right. Then I see from the page that he has looked up a number for the Transportation Safety Bureau, but it's a daytime number. I hang up in order to redial the Nav Canada twenty-four hour number at 1-888-WX-BRIEF but I never do.

The next thing I know I'm lying down. There's no pain. It's like I'm ... oh ... like I just woke up. I just did. I'm in my own bed. The whole thing was a dream. It probably took three seconds and my subconscious just filled in all the details so it seemed to make sense.

Now I admit that that was a freaking cruel way to tell a story to readers who I know feel for me in my ups and downs, but I hope you gasped in horror. I wanted to tell the story so you would feel what it was like. I didn't even have the dreams tag on the blog entry to tip me off that this wasn't really happening. I guess I should have remembered that I don't have any flight students right now, and don't live near a little airstrip next to a frozen lake, and that real life does not just start into the middle of the story, but I have the excuse that I was not paying really close attention on account of being fast asleep.

As nightmares go, it doesn't rival Kafka. No one was hurt. I'm sitting at my desk now laughing as I realize that I am relating a nightmare that was largely about paperwork. The bad part is that I didn't feel any better about it once I had woken up. As I lay awake in my bed, I knew with one hundred percent certainty that nothing had really happened. No real airplane or building had been damaged. No one was even scratched. There was no paperwork to be done. But it didn't matter. I still felt responsible. I was so overwhelmed with guilt to have been so inattentive as to have had an accident. I was pilot in command. I should have realized that there was a risk of pitot icing, should have known all the obstacle heights, should not have fallen asleep. I'm literally lying awake, unable to sleep, beating myself up for an unforgivable lapse in responsible behaviour which occurred while I was in my own bed asleep. I try to tell myself that it wasn't my fault, but that's no excuse. When you are pilot in command, it is always your fault.

As I lie there thinking it over, I gradually realize where the parts of the dream come from. Sitting in a stationary vehicle with the windshield iced over and the engine running is the story of Canada in the winter. You start the car up, turn on the heater and defroster and then wait a bit to loosen the ice a little before you start scraping. Just as first place someone lived fills the role of "house" in a dream, the first airplane I flew became "airplane." And suddenly I realize that in my life the "responsibility" is represented by airplanes.

What do the top of an evergreen tree and the edge of the roof of a house have in common? It's where you put Christmas lights. This is not a dream about airplanes. It's a plain old holiday stress dream about distributing gifts appropriately, doing my year-end paperwork, filing all those utility bills that I haven't even opened, because they are supposed to autopay through my bank account. So I'm not an irresponsible pilot. I'm someone who can't be bothered to do her Christmas shopping and write cheques to charity. That's much better. The relief is so great it takes away all the Christmas stress too.

I fall back asleep and dream I am staying in a hotel room that has a glass elevator and overlooks a hockey rink in which Steven Spielberg is directing a gangster movie. A gangster movie musical. A huge cast of flapper girls and zoot suited guys toting those old-fashioned guns with magazines the size of a medium pizza are high-stepping in unison towards the blue line while making dramatic arm movements. Life is back to normal.

This blog post brought to you courtesy of the NDB RWY 23T into Alert, NWT. The MSFS flight analysis looks bizarre because it maps it onto a grid with 15" squares and at that latitude the graticules are tall, tall rectangles.

Ess Eye Dee?

I'm being a good pilot and reviewing my regulations by reading the online AIM. I'm in the Rules of the Air section, for some reason this is abbreviated RAC. Back when the AIM (Airman's Information Manual) was called the AIP (Airman's Information Publication) I'd refer to something being in "Eh-Eye-Pee-Rack six point one." I don't recall anyone snickering at me for it, so I guess I was saying it right. Today in AIM-RAC 6.1 I notice a passage:

When the clearance is received on the ground, before departing a controlled aerodrome, and an SID is included in the clearance, the pilot only needs to acknowledge receipt of the clearance by repeating the aircraft call sign and the transponder Code that was assigned.

It's a measure designed to reduce congestion on clearance delivery at busy airports. The airport has a Standard Instrument Departure procedure published and available to study while you're waiting for taxi, so when you are assigned your clearance and transponder code, instead of parroting it all back, you just repeat the transponder code (different for everyone) and your callsign so they know the right airplane received it. It's not something I have reason to do often. I might indeed forget and read back the SID, were I IFR out of an airport big enough to have one. But that's not what caught my attention.

No, I'm distracted by an SID. That implies that the person who drafted that pronounces it "Ess Eye Dee." Who does that? I've heard people call PIC time "pick time" (I say Pea Eye See). I used to talk about monitoring the Eh Tea Eye Ess (why yes, I did learn to fly out of a book) but was quickly mocked for that. Doesn't everyone talk about SIDs and STARs as if they were people named Sidney and astronomical bodies? Did a non-pilot edit that paragraph? Did they just put that in there so that the double take would forever cement the rule in my brain?

Sarah, thanks for keeping me honest. Feel good, not bad about holding me to my resolution. Last night I clicked on the icon to fire up the simulator game, then realized I had to leave right away to be on time for a seminar on peak performance, including avoiding procrastination. I think attending a seminar on not procrastinating is probably the best procrastination technique I have ever used.

I left the computer on overnight, so MSFS was ready to play this morning. (The rest of this blog entry is a description of the sim, so if you're not interested in an account of someone else's video games you can safely skip the rest without missing any real life). I took off from runway 15 at Fredericton, made a left turn direct the NDB, then tracked 221 from the beacon to intercept the outbound for the full procedure VOR RWY 09. The first time out my outbound ADF intercept was execreble, so I looped back to the beacon and did it again properly. I intercepted the VOR track just west of RESOL and tracked for 1:30 outbound before the procedure turn right. Inbound I kept the HSI centred on the inbound VOR track, but I came out not aligned with the runway, a common problem in this game, because the date on whatever plates I have found to use rarely matches the date on the game database. I tweaked the inbound track and flew the missed back to the beacon. On the second approach my altitude was wacky through the turn, because the pitch axis kept sticking on my controller. I'd drop a couple of inches of manifold pressure then not monitor the result closely enough to realize that I had lost ten knots instead of starting a descent. I coaxed the controller into giving me more downgoingness and this time the runway was right in front, but my speed was a little high. Third times the charm and it's fun how I feel my situational awareness expand through repetition. On speed, anticipating each step down, enjoying watching the ADF bearing swing to match the DME (the step down points for this approach are given as bearings from the Fredericton beacon so as not to require a DME, but they give the DME readings as back up). Maybe a little bit fast levelling off at the MDA, probably because the gear coming down doesn't slow me as much in the game plane as the real one. I land and then click flight analysis so I can admire my nice straight tracking and textbook procedure turns. Tomorrow I'll shake up that ego with some howling winds.

Cold and Macho

We meet at 6:30 for breakfast according to our strategy. The rental car can be returned at 7:00, and we've left ourselves a few hours leeway for contingencies so we can still get the airplane put away at destination (that's prearranged) and then get to the terminal and through southern airport security in time for our flights.

My boss texts as I'm gathering up my gear in my room. "Is it going to be too cold to fly?" There's a big bubble of arctic air over half the country. It's -32 here, actually a few degrees colder at destination, but as long as it's forecast to be over -35, we're okay. He doesn't want engines started below that. It takes too long for the oil to reach the moving parts at such low temperatures, and just turning over an engine could damage it.

It's always nice to have a "too cold to work" temperature that allows you to stay in bed, but usually the weather conspires to hover just above that temperature, always freezing your fingers but never allowing them to remain tucked in bed. Still, it's nice to know that it's there. I worked for a company once that had a too-hot-to-wear-a-tie uniform rule. I think the number was in the high 20s. Anything above that on the OAT and you could work in an open collar. Today I'm working in compression socks, two more pairs of heavy socks, leggings, long underwear, work pants, t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, sweater, and I think a sweatshirt over that, then my lined coat -- although not my wonderful parka. I thought we'd be going south before now. Plus a wool toque, a scarf, wool gloves and fleece-lined leather work mittens on top of that.

We unload everything on the apron next to the airplane and then I volunteer to load and secure it while he returns the car. We've done so little work this rotation, that I feel as if I have done less than my share. I had hoped to have everything ready to go when my co-worker returned, what with having to wait for paperwork and a cab and all, but I'm still securing gear when he's back already. The car rental place was all ready for the return and gave him a ride to the airport.

We untarp the airplane together. Everything is in good order, because we've been out shovelling and checking on it. There are a few patches of frozen-on ice where the tarps didn't cover properly, so I use some of the deicing fluid. I have a moment of "oh-no" when I realize that there is some old dilute fluid in the sprayer, but fortunately it hasn't frozen, and I manage to pour it out. Must remember to ... what? Rinse and dry? In the past I've kept deicing equipment in a heated hangar so I haven't encountered the problem of a frozen sprayer. Something to remember if I'm ever doing hot water deicing (works when the temperature is and will stay above freezing) and then stowing the sprayer in the plane. Everything takes more time and space to do in the cold. Anything that has to be folded or coiled actually takes up more space, because they won't bend. And the same goes for your hands. In heavy mitts they don't bend the way you are used to and if you take off the mitts and just work in gloves, pretty soon your fingers still won't bend, at least not without any strength.

My coworker is PIC so he straps into the left seat and I remove the cord from the engine block heater just before he starts. Fires up right away. We exchange delighted thumbs up and I pull the cord from the second engine. The cords are too cold to coil properly, so while he does post start checks I end up stuffing a tangled mess of electrical cords in the back of the airplane. I'm afraid I would break the plastic insulation--or even the wires inside--if I forced them to coil lightly to fit where they usually go.

I secure the rear door and then come up to the right seat. The right oil pressure is still indicating low, but the CHTs and oil temperatures are matched between the two engines. We turn on the heater and take off some of our layers of clothing as we wait for the oil to come up. It's moving--the gauge isn't dead--but really really slowly. After half an hour it still isn't registering enough for take-off. I know that as a student pilot you were taught to shut down an engine if it wasn't registering oil pressure in 30 seconds, maybe a minute if it was really cold, so why have we let it run for this long? We are almost certain we know what is going on in there.

The engine is out on the wing, a couple of metres away from me. It was kept warm enough electrically overnight to start and have oil circulating, which is why we see normal cylinder head and oil temperatures. The oil pressure gauge is on the panel in front of me. The oil pressure gauge works in the absolutely simplest way such a thing could work, and that is by having the actual oil pressure force oil through a line to the gauge. Simple is good. But now think about that line. It comes out of the engine, along the leading edge of the wing, into the fuselage and up to the instrument panel. Much of that path is unheated. We suspect that a little bit of moisture has condensed in that line and frozen solid, blocking the line. The oil coming out of the engine is warm, but cools quickly inside the narrow tube, so is not warm enough to melt the ice. If we thought there was any way that the actual oil pressure in our engine was as low as on that gauge, we wouldn't be running the engine.

Still, we're not going to take off with oil pressure in the red. We text the PRM about our predicament. He asks a bunch of questions, suggesting we do things we've already done, and adds one more. I get out and check the oil filter through the cowling vents. My coworker shuts the engine down so I can do this. I verify that the oil filter looks normal: in place, not swollen or leaking or anything. And the engine, bless its greasy soul, restarts perfectly. There wasn't really much risk of it not, as it was so warm and lubricated, but anytime you shut something down you risk not being able to restart it.

After a few more texts (we text because it's too difficult to talk on the phone in a running airplane) are exchanged the PRM concludes "I don't see that you're going to have any problems."

We text back, "We don't either. We just don't want to go without an ok from the PRM."

Understanding dawns. Now he understands we're not texting for help, we're texting to cover our butts. Butts duly covered, we fly. By the time we're in position on the runway the oil pressure is only a needle width below the green anyway, a situation one of my training manuals even accepts.

We launch and turn on course in good weather. There isn't often a lot of weather in temperatures this low. Almost all the moisture is already frozen. There's no energy to form the weather.

This airplane has two heaters, one that mainly keeps the back warm, and which runs off a heat exchanger with the exhaust gases and one that mainly warms the front, and which burns gasoline. We, obviously are in the front, but we're expecting that with the engines blasting at climb power, we'll start feeling more heat, as we won't be losing our front heat to the back of the plane. But we're feeling colder. We adjust a few knobs and hold our hand in various places before we accept the fact that the combustion heater has shut down. It is designed to run on the ground, but because of reduced airflow it is possible for the plenum to overheat and trip the circuit breaker. A reasonable precaution for a device that is literally on fire inside the fuselage. These heaters are affectionately known as "nose bombs." To prevent cold pilots from resetting the circuit breaker when there is a real problem, the circuit breaker is accessible only from the outside of the airplane.

We both know this. "This two hour flight just got a lot longer." Is that because we turned around, landed back at origin and reset the breaker? No. Is that because we landed halfway at a well-attended airport that was literally under our intended flight path and reset the breaker? No. You know from the post title. It was because two hours seems a lot longer when you are sitting still in subfreezing temperatures. We toughed it out to destination with only the rear heater, definitely not enough to keep us comfortable.

We took turns taking control while the other person reached back for and donned the outer jackets and sweaters set aside earlier. We swapped "what's the coldest you've ever been?" tales. And we laughed at ourselves. The two of us have only had one flight together where we were neither too hot nor too cold: that was the flight with the exploding moon. With passengers, obviously we would have stopped. Without airline tickets booked, perhaps we would have stopped. But whenever you stop you risk not being able to go again. You've seen on this blog how easy it is to be grounded by a stupid thing. And we know how much it costs an hour to run this thing. T land and take off again would add time and money to the cost of the trip. We can take a little discomfort in the name of efficiency. We did have cold weather gear and one heater working. (Notice that the working heater was the simple one: "run outside air past hot exhaust and duct heated air to cabin. Simple is good. We also have simple avionics without those LCD computer screens that seize up at minus five, so we don't need to worry about our radio controls freezing. I guess "liquid" crystal displays require a certain temperature to remain so.

A temperature inversion meant it was even colder on the ground than in flight, and to get there we needed to reduce engine power, drastically reducing the output of our one working heater. Brrrr. But we did it. We reached our destination, found the hangar, and got a ride to the terminal from someone who told us, "you look cold." True that.

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