Appreciation of Multiple Arms

We enjoy another great breakfast at the hotel. They don't have the noodle dish today, instead something that is labelled Chicken Porridge. Porridge to me is something principally made of mushed grains, but to this translator it is apparently anything served hot in bowls. It's chicken rice soup. Also good. And I eat vast quantities of baguettes with French butter. And juice, which I realize now is Tang. Kind of a shame with all the fresh fruit around, but Tang is actually pretty tasty. We were supposed to go today for our indoctrination at the Tabitha centre, where we would get information about the families we would be working with and to make sure we all understood cultural instructions and NGO rules. Because of the water festival however, they are short-staffed and have decided to postpone it until tomorrow, shortening the Tabitha indoctrination and combining it with our visit to a couple of historical sites necessary for understanding Cambodian history. So today is an unexpected "free day."

I tag along with a group who have similar tastes to me. The early morning tuk-tuk ride reveals piles of garbage on the street, but they are neat piles awaiting collection. Someone has swept them there, by the looks of it. Many people are sleeping on the sidewalks, or just waking up to open their sidewalk-based businesses. My roommate photographs a man sleeping on a parked motorcycle, lying back on the seat with his feet up on the handlebars. Some kids come up and wake him up, apparently to tell him she has done so. There is no social safety net in Cambodia. You work or you die. So people work, at businesses with minimal capital outlay, sitting on the street selling things other people have discarded, or that they have made themselves out of found materials. Food does grow on trees here, and someone with nothing doesn't just walk to where there is a papaya tree and eat, they collect fruit to sell. They can't profit much, because other people can walk to fruit trees too, so there is competition. You see value-added service like pineapples already peeled and scored so they come apart easily to eat. They may then be able to invest their minuscule profits in a cart or a bicycle to increase the amount of fruit they can carry. So long as they don't get sick. Here's a well-capitalized service station. The gentleman operating this has a wicker chair on which sit bottles of gasoline, a compressor for inflating tires, and a small pile of tools with which he can effect roadside repairs. I saw several people using the services of such businesses, and I'll have more pictures of them in operation later.

First we go to a store where they make custom shoes. I could feel guilty for such a luxury, but part of the rationale for us coming here and not just sending donations is to participate in the economy. Buying locally-made items is going to do more for the people here than my sanctimoniously going home and paying five times as much for a pair of ill-fitting shoes made in China. I wonder how many people they employ in the show store and factory. The store wasn't so much like a shoe store, as like a lost and found, a big jumble of shoes and boots of all kinds, displayed somewhat haphazardly. You pick out a pair that is in a style you want, then there's a big box of heels all different shapes, heights and widths, so you pick out your heel, then they have a big ring of leather samples, different colours and weights and you pick out the leather you want. It was paralyzing having so much choice. I finally ordered some strappy turquoise ankle boots and some two-tone pumps. My roommate chooses a really interesting leather for her boots, but fortunately the clerk happens to mention that it is elephant skin. Oops, we don't think we can legally import that back to Canada. She chooses a 'cow skin' sample instead. We get to pick our shoes up up in a week, after we come back from the building project and visiting Angkor Wat.

Our next stop is the National Museum downtown, fortunately still open despite the holiday. Photographs are forbidden inside the museum, so I'll show you this Ganesha statue from the garden outside, and these soldiers in front of the entrance. Hinduism was the first major religion that came to these lands, with Buddhism coming later, but Buddhism seems to leave a lot of room for worship, as I saw statues of cows and of Shiva apparently venerated in different shrines.

The first gallery in the museum is of bronze statues, generally hand-sized up to calf (my calf, not a baby cow) -sized, with a few larger ones, of various gods and goddesses. The labels were very simple, barely more than accession tags, in Khmer and French, with English also on many, probably the later acquisitions. Without knowing the story, I just had to look and imagine the relationships among these figures. Mostly they were seated in the full lotus position or cross-legged, often atop the coils of a naga snake. Some were elephant-headed Ganesha, like the one outside, some were of Buddha, but generally a slimmer Buddha than the stereotype, and some Buddhalike, but female. A common one had many faces, ethnically Khmer. One that I tried to sketch in my notebook had eleven faces and twenty-two arms. The faces were in three tiers of head, and the arms all came from the same shoulders but curved away in different ways. Try to imagine the model for this sketch as liberally bestowed with grace and beauty as it is with limbs.

There's a room dedicated to the art of Khmer dance. It's a very disciplined dance with body positions as strict as ballet. It pleases me that the French, who founded this museum, seem to have recognized this. It's also fascinating to see proof in the ancient inscriptions and artwork that this art form is over a thousand years old.

My favourite part is the history of Khmer writing. I look at the old inscriptions and try to see if the shape of the language has changed. Perhaps the old characters are longer and loopier than the modern fonts, and the old ones may have more serifs. Or perhaps that's just to do with stone inscriptions. There's a thousand-year-old tablet setting out a list of regulations and the penalties for violating them. Sometimes the rules really are written in stone. The early Khmers had a religious custom that historians should get down on their knees to give thanks for. In dedicating their temples--which admittedly did not necessarily coincide with completion of construction--they made elaborate inscriptions giving the exact positions of all the planets they knew and of other astrological features, making them extremely easy to date. They also listed the donors to the projects along with an inventory of their donations. Some things never change. The lists of what constitutes transferable property and how much of it wealthy people had available to share gives valuable information on the culture. There is a list of the names of slaves on one tablet. I like the fact that someone who worked without reward all those years ago can be thought of an honoured by name today.

The museum is not air conditioned. They just leave some windows open for a breeze. Most of the artifacts are stone, so not sensitive to minor temperature or humidity changes, but there are some later ones that are wooden, such as some royal palanquins and the cabin from a fancy boat. Nothing is in cases and many people do not respect the multilingual and pictorial signs asking visitors not to touch. Near the end of the exhibition there are some signs explaining that the museum was closed up during the Pol Pot years, and that the Australian government contributed to its restoration. I don't know what ties Australia has to Cambodia other than proximity, but thank you, Australia. I like that Australia has a hand in preserving cultural heritage at their end of the world.

We leave the museum and walk and talk through the throng of people and interesting food vendors, stopping for a snack (I had a strawberry milkshake or something resembling one). I hope it wasn't made from ice of untreated water. I haven't quite got the guts to buy a frog on a stick. Some of the street food looks like it still has the organs in it, and I don't want to eat a frog that still has the guts in.

The crowds are increasing again for the evening, and we can tell the police must be stretched fairly thin when we see boy scouts directing traffic. We have another group meal, this one at a traditional Khmer restaurant where we take off our shoes at the door and eat sitting on the floor. I take time again to appreciate the texture of the tiles. The first dish is served on a big platter with multiple little domed lids, each over a little indentation in the platter, in which is a spoonful of the dish. It's fish in some sort of sauce. Tasty. I'll later learn that the spice is called amok, and take 500g of it home with me so I can have fish amok all year. Khmer food is served like Chinese food, where you get a bunch of dishes for the table and everyone shares them. This is a set menu, so they just keep bringing food and we all eat it. Or at least I do. The people at my table are kind of squeamish, it turns out, so I get to eat everything that has tentacles or legs or any kind of unusual presentation.

And you probably thought this post was going to include a lot of information on landmine victims. I've actually noticed far fewer people than I expected with limb amputations, and hardly any young people. I hope that a combination of eradication and education is decreasing the incidence, but it's more likely that cultural and economic factors mean that few are in the streets where I am. It's possible that everything around me is so new and different that the part of my brain that processes visual information and would normally flag a person with fewer than four limbs as notable enough to pass to consciousness is just so busy looking at everything and trying to make sense of it, that it hasn't managed, especially if people have prosthetics or are otherwise masking the injury. I did buy a handbag for a friend from an organization that provides retraining and employment to landmine victims. This is an excellent short video on the landmine issue, but watch it even if you don't need any landmine education, just to see the country and the people. It's a very accurate representation of what I saw, and not preachy or gross.

Some people were going to go down to the water festival again tonight, but it was so busy last night, and we're up early in the morning so I pass.

Road Signs

As you might guess from my enjoyment of describing my adventures, I love words. And the astute blog observer has probably noticed that I love signs. So you might believe that instead of blogging on a given day, you might find me laughing my head off at funny road signs. But I sent that to someone and he sent me back more funny road signs. Do not visit these sites if you are susceptible to laughter-induced injuries.

Just so as to have a scrap of originality in this post, I looked through my collection for a funny sign of my own that I hadn't posted. I didn't find one, but there's a sign in that picture and a flying car. As testimony to my extreme professionalism I will tell you that my heart ached to go to the museum and find out about that winged car, but I was on minimum rest, with my schedule allowing me only time to check in, sleep for the required period and check out again, so my curiosity was not satisfied, but the law and safety requirements were.

Also, I am keeping my New Year's resolution. I flew an arrival from the southeast giving me a teardrop entry into a shuttle descent for the the Rwy 11 ILS/DME at Port Hardy, British Columbia. I had to go missed on the first approach because I suck at making fine throttle adjustments on MSFS and I F2/F3ed my way into a destabilized approach.

Middle Seat, Again

It's time to go over to the simulator building. Oh and John billed me as a Canadian bush pilot, but someone involved in the approval process got the idea that I'm a simulator visuals technician. I guess it doesn't take too much message mangling to go from "visual flying" to "visuals." "So maybe you could admire the visuals," suggests John. I'm actually nervous about the sim, not because I might be faking my visual credentials, but as a pilot reflex. Being in a simulator is about succeeding or failing at a job interview, or about getting to keep your job versus having to go back to the bush leagues. Even though no one will ever know if I fly this pretend airplane badly, it's still how I feel. I also don't want to look like an idiot.

The simulator building is inside a fence which we enter through an unlocked gate. John points out a new simulator almost ready for use in its own building inside the compound. It is for another type, which I don't know if I'm allowed to name. Once it is operational that gate will be locked and one will have to enter through the checkpoint around the other side of the fenced area. Today there's no one at this gate to check my ID.

The lower door into the tall room where the simulator sits is open and I can see that it looks pretty much like any other motion simulator, a big pod up on a hoist, with hydraulic hoses and wires hanging off it. It is white, like other simulators; the Marines have somehow resisted the temptation to paint it grey or khaki. Upstairs, past an Uncle Sam "WE'RE AT WAR! ARE YOU DOING ALL YOU CAN?" sign is the entrance to the simulator. There's a North Carolinian touch added to the standard sign forbidding food and drink in the simulator.

We cross the bridge into the simulator pod. At the left side near the back are monitors and controls for the instructor to see what the students are seeing and where they are, and to change weather, location or the operability of the aircraft. There's a flight engineer seat on the right and of course two pilot seats at the front. Each of the two pilot positions has what looks like a clear sunvisor positioned in front of it. When you sit in the seat you can see green lines, providing a horizon, airspeed, altitude and some radio nav information: a heads-up-display. Instead of having to choose between looking at the cockpit instrumentation and looking out the window, you can look at both at once, or switch your focus between them without moving your head a single degree. And I thought the "VFR" button on my transponder was a cool attention-saving device.

You can see a throttle quadrant, a traditional-looking FMS, EFIS screens, standby instruments, and everything else you'd expect to see in an airplane. I'm directed to sit in the flight engineer's seat, which is on a track, such that I can slide it forward and left from its position at the FE console to the middle of the airplane looking between the two pilots. There's a four point harness and I put it all on, then shrug off the shoulder straps so that I can still lean around all over the place to rubberneck.

I'm introduced to the instructor, but it turns out that he hasn't been informed of my presence. John and the instructor both take this as a matter of course. It's always heartening to know that one's own organization is not the only one with communication difficulties. The instructor checks with someone, I think, and then we're on. I asked him if there was anything I would see or hear during the lesson that couldn't be published. He assured me there was not. I still know I have a habit of noticing the one thing I wasn't supposed to know about, so this is all double-checked through John before posting. There is no safety briefing, unlike other simulators I've been in.

The pilots whose session I am sitting in on will be taking their second lesson in this simulator. They have been through basic flight training and upgraded to turbine engines on the military equivalent of a King Air, but they have never flown this airplane for real. They are both very young men, wearing one-piece flight suits with blank velcro for the insignia patches on their shoulders. The instructor closes up the back of the simulator and tells them that today they will take off, climb to altitude, practice as many steep turns as they like and then do some stalls before returning to the airport for circuits. It's a pretty standard familiarization lesson. Their conversation with the instructor is casual and respectful both ways, with no military overtones. I know someone who quit a Canadian military flight instruction job because he didn't like the training atmosphere, but I'd be happy supervising this session.

The trainees are directed to set up the computer. They are entering weight and fuel information, communicating with each other, but not through checklists or crisp SOPs, just talking. They get everything set up and the instructor gives them a tip for entering their fuel burn when the route includes maneuvering, instead of just point to point. When everything tallies they are directed to start up. The first engine they start is #3, and the whole simulator shakes from the vibration of the simulated engine. They continue through the checklist on the glareshield, starting #4 next, then #2 and #1 last. Imagine having twice as many engines that might not start on any given day. At least they are turbines. And their simulated ATIS gave them a 20 degree day. It's twilight, but it doesn't matter if it is dawn or dusk, because the simulator is set to remain frozen in time. The instructor says there is a continuous setting that allows time to run, but instructors never use it.

The instructor offers a hint to the left seat pilot to bring up the power on the inboard engines, in case the FO accidentally turns off the APU. I didn't see the layout that suggested that was likely. There's a simulated marshaller on the ramp, but the instructor turns him off, because he says he's a pain to operate. He just gives the guys a taxi clearance, which in typical American style names no taxiways, so they are free to find their own way to the assigned runway. They go most of the way down the ramp, which the instructor says is fine, when they ask. As they turn they know too go past the intersection before turning, because they are sitting forward of the nosewheel. I would have forgotten; I sit over my nosewheel.

Positioned on the runway, I shrug my shoulders back into the shoulder straps and watch power application. Centreline control isn't perfect, but probably pretty good for someone's second time with that many engines and that much power. I'll have to remember to be right THERE on the rudder as the power comes up. A master caution light illuminates on the panel, "door open," but to my surprise neither pilot calls for an abort. I have written most of "why aren't they aborting?" on my notepad before they decide for themselves that that would be a good plan. Oh yeah, I realize. As cool as they look in their flight suits and as far superior as they are to me in youthful reflexes and expense of training, these guys have less than five percent of my experience. They come to a stop without going off the end of the runway and the instructor reminds them about correct and timely callouts for such an occasion. He says "don't look out the window, it will mess you up," and resets the simulator to the beginning of the runway. Of course I look, and see the mind-warping whoosh as the airplane accelerates backwards and rematerializes on the threshold. If you're prone to airsickness, don't look!

On the next take-off the same door-open alarm sounds and the guys react much better, not flawlessly, but enough to win instructor praise. They joke about getting maintenance to look at that door. They haven't eaten up much runway this time, so he clears them for take-off from that position and this time he fails an engine. They abort correctly, and stay on the runway despite a some directional control problems.

The next time they are allowed to get off the simulated ground with no failures and are quickly at exercise height. They do a good job of the steep turns, both technically and with a good brief from one to the other for the two-crew exercise, and they are happy to move onto stalls after two steep turns each. The computer tells them the speeds to fly to approach each stall for their weight. The left seat pilot has the controls first, approaching at 145 knots to a clean stall, then a dirty one and then a climbing turn stall. He tries another one just letting the stick pusher do the recovery.

There is a ding-dong alert from the avionics, but the instructor clears it. It is a fuel quantity disagree error between the flight computer and the fuel sensors, due to the trick he used with the fuel planning. He tells them how to clear it themselves if need be. The right seat pilot repeats the stalls. Like the largest airplanes I have flown -- none as big as this -- they just power out of stalls with no pitch down.

The instructor simulates the ATIS again for their return to the airport and the pilots run the approach checklist. "Passengers and cargo?" says one pilot from the checklist. Presumably the correct response is something along the lines of "briefed and secure," but there's a pause, perhaps they haven't learned the correct briefing yet, or realize that there isn't really enough time. Then the other pilot replies, "They're all dead," and they get on with the checklist. It's nice that they can concentrate on one thing at a time, and train seriously without having to be super serious.

They are still very high as the instructor gives them vectors onto final. I've never flown this airplane of course, so perhaps it drops like a rock. At the point that I'm wondering what their plan is, one of the pilots jokes that it's a "space shuttle approach." I had a boss once who used to say things went "down like a rocket." Perhaps I've finally realized what he meant. They are high and fast and resolve the problem by doing a go around. They are high on the second one, too, but lose a little altitude getting back to centreline after hooking the approach, and then get it down even though they are only using half flaps. It's a little fast and my flight instructor instincts cause me to shift my feet and arms so as not to take the touchdown impact directly on my once-broken spinal column. But the simulator is merciful and doesn't smack us as hard as a real airplane will. And the seat is a lot cushier than in a C150, too.

The instructor asks the pilots what is considered a good touchdown point for this airplane, and he approves their answer of "in the first third of the runway." Heh. I'm going to do a bush pilot short field approach, and put it at the beginning of the runway, just to see how short you can land this behemoth. Probably pretty short. They continue flying and the pilot improves quickly. I still think he's starting the flare a little too soon, but then we're pretty big.

After a few circuits the instructor directs them to land with full flaps. He says it's easier with half flaps, but that full is the correct way. I'm not sure why it's easier. It looks much more correct to me with full flaps. The right seat pilot takes control and he does right hand circuits, so he can see the turns. They're both having a little trouble rolling out aligned on final, but they work on that. After a couple of hours the instructor freezes the sim and they take a break.

My turn? Oh man, now I have to put my money where my smart-assed blogging fingers are. John checks with the instructor. Narrative continues after I check again with John to see what I can blog.

Two Poor Approaches

Next morning I had to arrange maintenance for the broken tach. It was a weekend, of course. Airplanes know to break when it's a weekend, especially a holiday weekend, because they get more time off that way. I couldn't get a hold of the mechanic we'd planned to use here, so I left a message for the FBO manager asking if there was a weekend contact for him. (Yes, having Aviatrix in town means you sell a lot of gas, but you are at her beck and call, too). There were four other companies listed locally as "aviation repair." One has a an out of service number. I left messages for two others. One looked to be an aircraft manufacturer, not a repair shop, but if you can make one from scratch you can fix one, right? Maybe. I didn't call the the fourth company as it was clearly an aircraft cleaning company, and our problem wasn't dirt. I don't expect to hear from any of them before Monday, Maybe Tuesday if Monday is President's Day or Arbor Day or something. Another possibility is to find out who maintains the medevac helicopter that's parked at the hospital across the street from our hotel. That probably has 24 hour callout service. Broken airplanes inspire lateral thinking.

I go downstairs for the hotel breakfast, which is just ending. The woman cleaning up the breakfast leftovers is from Michigan, and admits to missing the snow, but only the first snowfall. After that she can live without snow just fine. She asks if I'd like another cinnamon bun and I decline. She asks again a little more insistently and I twig. "Do you have to throw them out?" She nods. I'll take them. I'll find someone who likes yummy food. She has a cute little box for the buns so they look really presentable.

I get a call back from Houston. The first company I called no longer has facilities locally, just the phone number, but he's very forthcoming with other possibilities in the vicinity. I write down all the names. The other company calls too. It's a helicopter operation, the owner of the medevac helicopter I saw. They seem to have discussed the problem before calling me back, because he says "we're betting it's a cable, and we wouldn't have the part for you." The FBO guy says he'll have the mechanic call me. He does, with a just woken up sort of voice. Turns out he's just come back from Mexico and is too sick to leave the house. I'm guessing that means too sick to leave the immediate vicinity of the bathroom, poor guy. He will try to look at the airplane tomorrow, if he can.

The PRM comes through with permission to ferry the aircraft. Standard wording: VFR, essential crew only, not over populated areas. I spread my search further afield and find an FBO we've dealt with before whose mechanics are willing to come out on a weekend. I do the counting on my fingers math to determine time to fuel, get a ride to the airport, warm up the engines and fly up there. I tell them I'll be there at noon.

I check the weather at the FBO and there is a line of weather approaching, with rain forecast for here. The satellite shows no high tops, just a bright green very narrow line dividing here from my destination. Weather has been very low at destination, probably corresponding to the front coming through, but is good now and is forecast to improve to clear about the time I'll arrive. Minimum visibility reported or forecast along the route has been two miles. It's so glorious having such density of reporting stations. If I were flying in Saskatchewan I'd have here and destination, with nothing in between.

I note the ferry permission in the logbook next to the snagged tach needle and except for that defect, the airplane runs up fine. I take off into the wind and then peel out of the circuit towards my destination, bombing along at 1900'. It's grey ahead, and I'm soon in the rain. Rain, rain, rain. There's rain coming in the window onto my elbow. Gotta get that seal fixed at the next scheduled maintenance. Two miles visibility and clear of cloud is acceptable VFR, but I can't actually see the ground only two miles away over my nose in level flight. My nose is too long. So I keep looking down over the wing at ground, "yep, still VFR". This is like being back at Victory Airways. The satellite picture was correct though. The rain quickly abates but there's lots of scud behind the front. I'm flying just above a scattered layer. About 30 miles back I pick up the ATIS. They're calling it 700 few, 2600 broken. So I'm expecting this scattered cloud to open up before I arrive. Twenty miles from destination I call approach and tell them the ATIS identifier I have.

There's no warning tone in the controllers voice at all as he asks me to confirm I just want a VFR approach. I answer in the affirmative and assume that he gets a lot of training traffic on a weekend, certainly my experience at most airports with IFR approach facilities. The ILS is NOTAMed out today, so I'm purely VFR. Approach clears me straight in, then ten miles out passes me to tower who immediately clears me to land. I can't even see the airport yet. Eight miles out I'm 500' above circuit altitude and still very much dodging clouds. This is not a picture of "few clouds at 700', broken at 2600'." I widen out to go around clouds, putting me on a kind of base, and then turn final using the guidance of the GPS. My engines are cooled back to the setting for landing, the flaps are set for approach, with prelanding checks are on the way. Five miles back on final I still don't have the runway in sight, but I'm sneaking down towards where the GPS tells me it is. Three miles out I'm at a thousand feet, exactly where I should be in altitude, but this so-called runway is still hidden by cloud. I can see outbuildings that show the airport is there. I put the gear down. It will have time to transit all the way down before I get around this last cloud and have to decide whether to overshoot or not. Taking the gear up before it is all the way down can confuse it.

And there's the runway. I fix my alignment, set landing flaps and props and touch down. That was an ugly, ugly VFR approach and I wouldn't want any student of mine doing it. Student pilots: don't fly like Aviatrix, and don't trust the ATIS. I accept my taxi clearance from the ground controller and suggest that 700 scattered might be more accurate. (The next METAR calls it 500 broken).

I taxi as told and the mechanic is there, marshalling me towards the hangar. He keeps beckoning me forward until my nosewheel bumps over the threshold of the hangar. I shutdown quickly and log the flight. I swear he had the cowl open before I had finished the very simple postflight paperwork. The mechanic asks me to watch the tach. He disconnects the tach cable and puts what looks like a drill into the end. When he powers it up, the tach responds, the needle lifting to about 700 rpm. The tach cable is not broken. Next he has me turn the propeller by hand while he watches the sending unit. It correctly reports the movement. That works. He wiggled the cable a bit more and hooked it up. He had me start the engine. I saw the tach come up, gave him the thumbs up and shut it down. The cable had been loose. That was all. I think the whole repair, including the paperwork, and putting the airplane back on the apron with a tug took twenty minutes.

I fawned with gratitude and gave him the stash of possibly still warm cinnamon buns to share with whomever it was I pulled him away from on a weekend. The weather at this point was still ugly so I decided to wait until it had gone through here, and until it had gone through and cleared up at "home" too. I asked the mechanics if local security would object to my walking down the apron to the FBO lounge. They said that technically I needed local credentials to be on that part of the apron, so I'd better go groundside. I went to the airplane to get my wallet and computer and he went home.

But then I realized I couldn't cut through the FBO to the groundside because the front door only locked with a key or from the inside, and I couldn't leave their shop unlocked. The pedestrian gates were chained and padlocked, but there was a security phone number on it.

"Hi," I said, to the person who answered. "I'm a pilot on the apron by the repair hangar and I want to walk down the apron to the FBO. Do I need a security escort or anything?"

I've given them a choice between saying "go ahead" and actually coming out and dealing with me. I know how this works. And I don't even have any more cinnamon rolls to give out. He says, "No, that will be okay. You can walk down there."

"Thanks," I say, already starting to walk down the apron. "I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to arrest me or anything."

I pass a building with a basketball hoop on the airside. I know of an airport with a horseshoe pit on airside, but this is my first basketball hoop. Just then the door on that building opens, and a uniformed security guard calls out jokingly "arrest her!" I laugh and then point out my surprise at the basketball hoop. I tell them I'm going to take a picture of it. "We're not going to arrest you for walking down the ramp! We're going to arrest you for taking pictures!" I take their pictures with the basketball hoop and continue, unarrested, to the FBO. I won't post the picture, because it's quite possible that they are supposed to arrest Canadians who photograph strategic airport basketball hoops, and it was only their common sense and my feminine wiles that kept me out of Guantanamo.

At the FBO I used their wireless to e-mail everyone about the success of my mission and tell them I'll be back when the weather clears up there, now forecast to be 3 p.m. And then I borrow a car from the FBO to do another of my assigned Texas experiments.

At Sonic, you must have a cherry limeade. You'll be blown away.

So I'm going to have lunch at Sonic, a drive-in I've noticed. They also have a drive-through window, and I steer for that. I drive up to the menu board and choose the accompaniments to my cherry limeade, and then I let my foot off the brake and roll forward looking for the speaker. Someone in the truck ahead of me is being handed a bag, from the first window, so it's not like McDonald's with one order window and one pick up window instead of a speaker. It must have been by the menu. At Tim Horton's the speaker is after the menu, so you have time to think about what you want while you're waiting for the queue to get to the speaker. Fortunately there's no one behind me.

I pull up to the window. "Sorry, I think I missed a speaker."

"That's okay," she says, and means it. It is a valid and important skill to be able to help people without making them feel stupid, and she does it. She could be an air traffic controller. She accepts my order for a small cherry limeade, a chili cheesedog and an Oreo Blast.

There's a sicker on the window reading "Comments? Call [this number] or ask to talk to a manager." When she brings me my order I say to her, "tell your manager you're awesome."

As I put my cherry limeade and my Oreo Blast in the cupholders, I see her actually doing it, pointing at me. The manager came over to the window, "I did, she is awesome," I confirm, and drive off.

I think I'll leave you in the same suspense as I was, driving back to the FBO to find out if I liked cherry limeade.

Injury or Death

I made someone stop and turn around so I could get a photo of this sign. I suppose there might be people who grew up on flat land with one storey underground buildings and never watched TV (or only watched Road Runner cartoons?), read books or were otherwise exposed to this concept, but wow. Does our gene pool need humans who don't equate falling over cliffs with serious injury or death?

And here's something else on the theme of injury, death and ignorance that made me laugh out loud.

Iconic Changes

I saw a "do not put in garbage" icon on the back of a TV remote today and noticed that it depicted a tub with wheels at one side so it can be tipped up and rolled, not the Oscar-the-Grouch style ridged metal can that I expected. I guess that's what garbage cans look like today. The only one on my street that doesn't look that way turns out to be in use as a planter. not a garbage can.

That startled me. Usually icons depict what something looked like one generation of technology earlier. The "telephone" icon depicted a dial long after pushbuttons were ubiquitous. The airplane silhouette signposting a small airport has the rounded wings and stabilizer of a 1940 Piper Cub and the jet pointing the way to the international airport is probably a B747. The children on the pentagonal blue school crossing signs look like refugees from the 1950s. What would the children look like if they redesigned that sign today? I hadn't realized that the wheelie bin had already become so ubiquitous as to define garbage in an icon.

There's an easy reason why the wheeled bins are so popular in real life, and that's that a big tub of garbage is really heavy. In the old days you kept your garbage cans just inside your property line, by the street. You took out individual bags of garbage and carried them through the garden and/or garage to dump them in the bin, and then on garbage day you dragged the heavy bin to the curb. There was a reason that taking out the garbage was traditionally Dad's job, and that was that Dad had the best chance of deadlifting a hundred pounds of cabbage and pizza boxes. Nowadays anyone can roll the bin all the way from the kitchen to the curb. Progress!

The same sort of thing has happened in aviation. Most jobs no longer require the pilot to roll and load fuel drums, and even when they do, there is usually technology like forklifts available, so as long as the pilot can lift 50 lb suitcases into the baggage compartment, she doesn't need to be superhuman.

Mind you, the woman who won't take out the trash in this cartoon is a supervillain, so that argument shouldn't apply to her. She's just lazy. Or evil. Now I'm wondering if the reader who drew the line at mocking Indiana Jones will interpret this post as feminist. He probably gets people calling him "chauvinist" when he's doing nothing more than describing the world from his point of view. Vive la difference, right?

Also, please ignore the political content of this CNN piece and look at the northern community depicted. It's very familiar to me. A hundred and fifty people, mostly if not all native in extreme isolation in a cold northern location. They look like they're doing okay, though. The camera shows houses with siding and real windows, kids in school who look pretty healthy, and can name a neighbouring country; sober adults with opinions, someone doing something with trash other than leaving it where it lies. I'm sorry to say that I've been in communities lacking this much. I suppose their very isolation is protecting them from drugs and alcohol.

Chalk One Up

I like the spelling attempts accompanying this rack for airplane chocks. At some point someone realized they might as well have fun with it.

Multitalented

I've been hanging onto this photo for a while, waiting for some reason to say something about it, but really it speaks for itself. For anyone who can't see pictures, it's a business sign on the side of a red pickup truck, reading, "Beginning Guitar or Chess Lessons" with a phone number.

Airwothiness

Zenflyer's comment on mandated placards in view of the passenger reminds me that the official warning on Lite Flyer's dashboard is missing an R.

Security Transmitted Diseases

Security signs usually make me laugh. They're so earnest and serious and I can imagine them being discussed and approved by a committee somewhere. I suppose that people may see signs reminding them to abide by security procedures for the few weeks that it takes for them to have the security procedures ingrained. Then they completely stop seeing the signs.

This one amused me more than usual. It's a good sign, really, drawing on the psychology of the stop sign, and it's trying to come up with a catchy acronym for the security area. But while SIDA is something you can catch, well-displayed security badges are not the usual prophylactic technique. I believe SIDA is also the Spanish acronym, so perhaps the reference is deliberate, rather than having been conceived in monolingual innocence.

The one below was repeated at about eight metre intervals all along the fence of the Salt Lake City ARTCC. They wanted to be very sure that even casual invaders with poor peripheral vision understood about the threat to human life that their invasion proposed. The facility behind the fence shared an architectural style with my highschool, and probably every other institutional building constructed in the 1960s, but it was in good repair. I guess the signs, and the absence of teenage hordes, kept decay at bay.

And I have no idea what the "flying colors" forbidden on this one are. It must be a gang thing. I didn't go in there.

Refills and Straws

When you order a soft drink in an American restaurant, two things are assumed. One: you will get a drinking straw, wrapped and sealed in a paper tube. You are not required to lift a drinking glass to your lips in the United States. There is always a straw. And two, there will be free refills.

It's kind of disconcerting, sometimes, to be halfway through a glass of lemonade and then discover it has been taken away and replaced by a fresh one. Was there something wrong with the one I was drinking? Not all restaurants are quite that proactive. Most wait until you've actually finished the drink before replacing it, and some actually require you to ask for the refills. If a restaurant isn't going to provide free refills, it's usually for some specialty drink, like mango lemonade, and they write it on the menu. Usually the free refills are provided for pop, lemonade, iced tea and the like.

Some Canadian places offer free refills, but that will be written on the menu, probably highlighted. And those are probably American chains. I always wonder how many Americans visiting Canada ask for several refills of their Coca-Cola over the course of a meal and then are stunned to discover that they have been charged the full price of the drink each time. Of course they probably wouldn't drink them all, because they'd be still waiting for their straw.

So when statistics tell me that Americans drink 600 12-oz servings of soft drinks a year, I have to wonder how many of those they actually drank. I often get myself in trouble if I order a soft drink because they were a rare treat when I was kid, so I drink it all up, end up drinking two or three glasses, and then find I've filled up on sugar water and can't eat my main course.

I Pronounce Me Here

They've been telling me we are going to Nevada next. I was given a day off in which I didn't do much but swim laps in the (big! outdoor!) hotel pool, and draft flight plans for Reno and Las Vegas. There are other places in Nevada, but I figure if I know how to get to the big ones, I'll be able to figure out the way to Winnemucca. (The problem with that would be pronouncing it when I get there. Did you know I managed to pronounce Birmingham wrong!) And then they told me to fly to Salt Lake City. At least I can pronounce that.

That meant a two leg trip, one flat, one with mountains. The flat leg of the trip was the more difficult one, however, because the flat bits of the US are all about thunderstorms this time of year, and these ones had SIGMETs for hail. Unfortunately I can't find the bit of paper on which I scribbled that SIGMET because it didn't just slap down the symbol GR for hail, it spelled out the diameter in inches of the expected hail, and I don't want to exaggerate when I report the size, because it was a number that was sufficiently foreboding without exaggeration, but I can't remember it. It's a little like if someone told you there was a dangerous, angry poisonous spider in your bed, you might forget exactly how big they said it was. Most thunderstorms do have hail; it just doesn't always reach the ground. And thunderstorms have enough nasty components without hail. But when you consider that hail can be thrown out of the storm ten miles away from where the storm seems to be, and hail like that could damage my aircraft even without gusty winds, downdraughts and severe turbulence, you can see that was a no go. The thunderstorms are not air mass thunderstorms, formed pretty much daily over large flat hot areas with available water, but frontal thunderstorms. They are being caused by a fast-moving cold front that is lifting the hot moist air. That makes for a long, impassable line of storms. I have to go around. Not too far around, however, because there are air mass thunderstorms in the area, already topped to 60,000', about as high as they go at this latitude, to the south, and they are moving north. I'm running the gauntlet between two storm areas.

I pick some VORs as follow-the-dots points for a routing and file my flight plan, IFR because there's a lot of moisture associated with the cold front, even away from the convective areas. I took a few pictures of distant convective cloud, but they aren't very impressive because there's no sense of scale.

The flight goes well. The air traffic controllers are friendly and cooperative, offering me more direct routings and giving me information about the convection and rainfall they can see on their scopes. I cut the corner a little on my planned routing. It was conservative, allowing for the front to slow down, but it moved as forecast and I'm able to curl in behind it, going north in the wake of the storms. There is a lot of moisture left and one controller calls me to tell me he sees about fifty miles of light precipitation ahead on my route. I acknowledge that, I've just entered cloud, and tell him that it is smooth. He then comes right back and says "and then the fifty miles after that is moderate precipitation, let me know if you need any deviations." He must be practicing his comedy routine. I found it really funny that he told me about the light stuff, waited for my response and then told me there was heavier stuff to follow. He was pretty much exactly right, then the clouds thinned rapidly after the hundred miles had passed and the skies were clear for my landing in the middle of the country.

The FBO lends me a courtesy car that is parked on the inside of the security gate. I drive up to the gate, pick up a phone and tell them I want out. The stop sign immediately after the gate says not STOP but STOP HERE AND WAIT UNTIL GATE HAS CLOSED COMPLETELY. It's a smaller point size than your regular stop sign. Gas, washroom, food, weather and go: VFR this time because this leg will put me over my eight hours max IFR, and the weather is clear all the way to Salt Lake City. Yippee-kay-yay! On takeoff I'm cleared on course and to me requested altitude right away.

I put on the autopilot while I check out the scenery. The land is still flat, but not level. It's sloping up towards the continental divide. The GPS tells me that I'm crossing the Canadian River. I wonder what's Canadian about it. There's a North Canadian River, too. I have a notebook in which I write down things I want to blog about later, and I see that last month I crossed the Choctawhatchee River. You can't make up names like that.

I've been flying westbound at 8500' watching the ground get closer as it smoothly slopes up. I've also been kicked by light turbulence, chop as I call it in the PIREP I file after 50 miles of it. I wouldn't ordinarily file a PIREP for turbulence that was only light: I'm doing it because there was an AIRMET for moderate turbulence along my route. My PIREP might help the forecasters, or help someone make a decision to fly.

I could possibly reduce the turbulence by climbing higher, but I don't really want to. Eventually the time comes, however, to suck it up and climb. The upsucking is quite literal. Although US rules allow a pilot to fly without oxygen for unlimited periods up to 12,500, I have to obey the more stringent Canadian ones and suck oxygen through a tube for the entire duration over 10,000', if I'm to be there for more than 30 minutes. I can go high enough to go straight up and over all the mountains, but the power of one engine alone wouldn't give me a good safety margin if the other engine quit. I would keep flying on one, but I would drift down, and there might be no escape, no where to drift to, over these mountains. I will follow the line of a pass rather than skimming over the peaks. This route will also give me a better approach into Salt Lake than trying to dive bomb the city.

At this time let it be said that I hate this oxygen mask. It ought to be cool at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, but the OAT is 12 and with the sun blazing into the cockpit from clear skies it's like a greenhouse in here. Clamping a rubber mask over my nose and mouth does not improve the situation, nor does the transit through plastic hoses and rebreathing bag improve the flavour of the bottled oxygen. It's ironic that up here where the mountain air is probably the freshest in the country, I get to breathe out of a bag.

I also get to talk through a bag, with ATC having trouble understanding my routing because I sound like Darth Vader. I wonder idly if I'm suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, or just going mad. I should buy one of those ear-clip things to see if I'm sufficiently oxygenated. I wonder if they have to poke you, in order to get to your actual blood. If so, I'd bleed all over it. Or do they just look at the colour of your ear, in which case they wouldn't work on dark-skinned people.

Here's me heading for an invisible pass in the mountains. You can't see it from this angle, but the road goes through it, and so did I. Wow, I didn't notice until I saw these pictures side by side in the preview how much clearer the air is for the mountain picture. The windshield has not been cleaned between the Canadian River picture and this one: it's the same flight.

After the pass the land became flatter, but not much lower. I overflew one ten-thousand foot plateau, wind-packed snow berms still visible along the top. The visibility is decreasing, but this is a good sign when your destination is at a lake. When the drier mountain air gives way to moister, cloudier air, that means you're almost at the lake. I fly into SLC from the south following ATC instructions to overfly the interstate. I've studied the airport diagram ahead of time and based on the ATIS and the runway lengths, I guess that I will be given runway 35 to keep me out of the way of the faster airliners. I can see the airport ahead. The freeway passes to the east of it. The controller tells me to follow the freeway and maintain 6000'. He will turn me for the runway about three miles back.

It is less than three miles diagonally to the threshold when I'm allowed to turn to land. I've already cooled my engines and slowed to the first stage of flaps, so now I chop the power and pull up the nose to get the speed down so I can dump gear and the rest of the flaps and plummet to the runway. High density altitude gives me a high groundspeed, but also a high descent rate, so I make it down to runway level as I reach the big 35. I've arrived.

Top Secret SUV

As I walked out to my airplane at the FBO today, the whole parking line behind my aircraft was filled with snarling fighter jets, almost cartoonlike with their painted teeth, and very real guns and missiles. They were cordoned off with a low nylon rope around orange traffic cones and there was a very small sign with the word Warning on it, propped in front of the middle airplane. I put my camera in my pocket and walked up to read the sign. It said, roughly,

WARNING:
This is a restricted area.
No entry without direct permission from the commander.
The use of deadly force is authorized.

It didn't say anything about photography plus or minus, but the potential administrator of the deadly force was behind the rope, in a beret and desert fatigues, with a large pistol holstered on his thigh. I pointed to the sign, to indicate I'd read it, and held up the camera. "Is it okay to take photographs?"

He said yes, but indicated I was not to photograph the sign, nor the black SUV parked between two of the airplanes. Apparently it's okay for me to read the sign, and they can't stop me from memorizing it, but I mustn't show it to others. Perhaps there were hidden defences embedded in the sign. The SUV I hadn't even noticed, but of course the forbidden draws attention. It appeared to be their guardhouse. He wasn't alone on the airplane guarding beat. There were others, and presumably snacks and water, inside the vehicle.

I took my photo and went back to my own airplane, to add oil, clean the windshield, and other Aviatrix tasks. As I continued to watch the jets, the guard crossed his perimeter rope and came over to talk to me. I told him about my mission and asked him if he flew one of those airplanes. He said no, he was a cop. I asked him if he had been there all night and he said no, there were shifts. I realized there were shifts, what I was trying to ask was whether he was going to have to stand long in the sun, or was going to get a break. I started to clarify my question, but then figured it might be interpreted as a sensitive security issue, so I aborted that line of inquiry and asked if he got to travel different places for his job. He said yes, he had been all over the world, and that he liked his job.

"I've been doing this a long time," he said.

Regrettably I couldn't help blurting out, "you don't look that old!" and he didn't. Heck he was young enough that I bet he gets IDed in bars. He was young enough that my words were an insult. So that was the end of our conversation. As he turned and walked away I realized that he had a much larger gun, an automatic rifle, slung over his back. He looked great, like a recruiting poster, a Fourth of July exhibit, or many a boy's dream. I wish I'd asked, "Wait, may I take your picture, please." But he probably would have said no, anyway.

Oh and I found out this year that John Adams proclaimed that July 4th, the American Independence Day, "...ought to be celebrated by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations." Go for it, guys.

Optimally Inefficient Check-In

I have a friend who doesn't want me to get a job with Air Canada, because then, for solidarity's sake, he says he'd have to stop complaining about them. I don't work for Air Canada now, so I'm going to take a moment to complain.

This did not seem to be a one-time experience caused by some one-in-a-thousand malfunction: this was the normal everyday experience with checked bags at a major Canadian airport. It wasn't even a Friday or a Monday. What were they thinking when they set it up? What are they thinking when they watch the mayhem that develops?

The check-in area is arranged so that when I come in the door I am between the first class check-in counters and the ticket purchase counters. If I had no checked bags I could walk straight ahead between both and gone to the gate area, because I've already got my boarding pass online. If I were flying first class, I could have checked in right there and continued. But I am flying Tango, Air Canada's lowest fare tier, and I have a bag to check.

Around to my left is a row of about eight check-in kiosks. It's a good thing I've checked in online, because the area where the kiosks are is completely roped off, except for one gap at the front, through which a long queue has formed, wrapping all the way around the kiosks towards the ticket purchase counter. One of the check-in kiosks is in use. The rest are empty.

The online check-in page directed me to go straight to the "Air Canada Web bag drop-off counter." That's listed in bold on the boarding pass, so I search for that sign. I can't see it anywhere. I go up to where the queue passes through the gape in the stanchioned tape and read the sign there. It says something like Bag Check-In. There is an Air Canada employee there so I ask him where the "web bag drop-off" is, and he says this is it. I go to the back of the line. Pretty soon someone comes along and asks to be let through, "I don't have any bags to check! I just need to get to the check-in kiosk!" She clearly doesn't have any bags to check, and we're lining up for the bag drop, so people let her through. Then comes the next guy, "Let me through! I'm late for my flight!" We let him through, too, but less charitably. He should have though of that when he decided what time to leave the house. And then comes another woman.

"Let me through," she says, "I just have to drop off my bags."

"So does everyone else," we say.

"I already checked in," she protests.

"So did everyone else," the crowd choruses wearily.

Variations on this these are of course repeated with every new person. Air Canada couldn't do much better if they wanted to deliberately provoke fights in the queue. There is no one from the airline patrolling the line here. The guy over by the sign doesn't seem to be doing anything service-related. Maybe he's there to make sure the tape barrier doesn't fall down.

The line proceeds into the inexplicably roped off kiosk area and then to the bag tagging stations beyond the check-in kiosks. There are several lanes, so once inside the ropes, people split up into whichever lane they think will give them the best chance. Each line reaches back past the kiosks, so that the people actually trying to use the check-in kiosks have to run the gauntlet. There's no point in having checked in online, because the bag drop is such a huge bottleneck, checking in at the airport at least gives you something to do while waiting to drop your bag.

When you get to the bag tagging station they are nice to you, verify your ticket, and put a routing sticker on the bag. I'm not sure what is self-serve about that. They don't weigh the bag. Next, you have to go all the way to the left to join the queue to actually drop off your bag. This queue is perpendicular to the bag tag lanes, so everyone comes out of the bag tag lane and attempts to jump the queue, until they are told where the end of the line is. As the line inches forward, you pass the special baggage (skis, rifles, musical instruments, strollers) drop, such that people coming out of bag tag with special baggage have to cut through the bag drop queue. They can't easily go all the way around the end of it, because the regular bag drop queue kind of blocks the entrance to the special bag drop area.

Eventually I near the head of the bag drop queue. The area is clogged with abandoned baggage carts, because there is nowhere to put them, and no easy way to leave the area while pushing one. We now notice that people coming through the bag tag lanes on the far right have started a separate tail for the same queue, so there is pretty much no escape after dropping your bag.

Each passenger places his bag on the belt, and it is conveyed towards a scanner. Just before going into the scanning machine it hits a scale. A screen lights up and tells the weight of the bag in kilograms, in green if it is within limits, and in red if it is overweight. There are a lot of red alert bags. At this point the owner of the bag, who would have already been out of earshot if it weren't for the fact that the line is difficult to escape, gets to start his or her argument with the Air Canada employee supervising the belt, over why he thinks 37 kg is okay. The bag now needs to be hauled backwards through the line to the counter where customers are supposed to pay their excess baggage fees. But by this point customers are so hostile, and the actual logistics of getting the bag off the belt and the customer to the counter so daunting, that I'm pretty sure the bags were just getting HEAVY/LOURD stickers and continuing without the extra payment being made.

I overheard the guy with the HEAVY stickers saying that he was running out of stickers. I placed my bag on the belt and watched to see the weight. I knew it wasn't overweight, but I wanted to see. No weight displayed on the screen. I think their solution to running out of HEAVY tags was to disable the weight display function of the belt.

The best thing I can say for the system is that it gave me an insight into Canada's medical system: Canadians don't horribly object to standing in line, but we're outraged by anyone budging in front of us without a fair reason.

Comments overheard:

"Air Canada motto: we're not happy until you're not happy"

"Maybe they hired an inefficiency expert to design this."

"Perhaps it's a service, designed to make the security screening seem pleasant."

Ah the joys of air travel

Flyover Country

It's minus one and snowing lightly at dawn next morning in Montana. I'm glad I had my lined jacket for the walkaround inspection. The wind is still blowing, not nearly as strongly, but enough to keep the dry snow from settling on the airplane. Visibility is good, but I'm up early to get out of here before a front arrives and blocks in the Montana mountains.

The first picture is of a butte, a rock structure that there's even a town named after in Montana. They always make me think of Roadrunner cartoons, but I didn't see any coyotes this trip, let alone coyotes on rocket skates. Can anyone see what I forgot to do this morning, that the May 29th entry and preflight inspection suggested I should have done?

I manage to escape the Montana hills without being swallowed up by the clouds, and begin the more routine part of my transcontinental journey. The sparsely-populated middle of the United States, from say Idaho to Wisconsin to Arkansas to Utah, is sometimes termed Flyover Country. This refers to the fact that people from the heavily populated centres on the east and west coasts don't go there, only fly over, on their way from one coast to the other, or on the way to Florida or Arizona. I'm not sure if it's any more derogatory than "grainbelt," but for me the term is not quite accurate. I can't make it coast to coast or from Canada to Florida on one load of gas. For me, it's fuel stop country.

I often have to go from hither to yon, with very little notice and I simply draw a line on the map, then look for airports of a reasonable size four or five hours apart along the route. Right now I might as well be using a dartboard. For example, I considered landing in Omaha, Nebraska merely because the insurance company Mutual of Omaha sponsored a wildlife program I watched when I was little. One of those shows composed mainly of dramatic footage of large predators either killing or barely missing large ungulates while a narrator applied adjectives and dramatic truths of life to the animals and their dinners. As it was I landed in Lincoln, Nebraska instead, where I had excellent service. They loaned me a nice vehicle to go and get lunch while they fuelled the airplane and cleaned the windows.

But I also I saw a new low in corporate tipping policy in Lincoln. Lunch was at Quizno's, a sandwich chain store, and there was a sign on each cash register: "Tips are appreciated and will be pooled by management for employee events and rewards (separate account)." So yes, the management solicits but steals any tips the employees get, and then gives them back and calls that "rewarding" the employees. I don't normally tip fast food employees, but I suppose I might if I felt that a particular individual did something outstanding for me. But whether fast food employees should be tipped is totally irrelevant to this issue: the management of Quizno's has just told me, in bold letters, that they don't care enough about their employees to reward them themselves. I submitted my opinion of that to the corporate website and have since twice avoided eating at Quizno's, even though it was probably a local restaurant policy.

Anyone have recommendations for quick middle-of-the-country fuel stops? I want quick but not-too-bad-for-me food, fuel, preferably pumped by someone else so I can eat while they do it, deicing in the winter, clean washrooms, friendly service, and simple maintenance available if I should need it. It would be a bonus if there were something interesting in town, even just the world's biggest ball of string, or a giant letter on the local hill, in case it's an overnight stop and I have time to take in the sight. Quizno's not required.

Everpresent Security

So of course to go to work I have to get on a commercial flight. And to get on a commercial flight I have to go through security. Ahh, security. Everyone besides people who intend to blow up the airplane has an immediate keen interest in people who intend to blow up the airplane not being equipped to do so, but no one looks forward to undergoing security screening.

I'd like to give the TSA some credit today for addressing the public animosity in a blog, Evolution of Security. They publish information, stories, refutations and explanations. When the blog first went online it was inundated with comments and complaints. And I give the official bloggers more credit for acknowledging the problems and responding to the comments.

As I see it, security screening areas are unhappy places because:

• Passengers don't know the rules or refuse to follow them.
• The rules appear illogical, vary from place to place, and are inconsistently applied.
• Submitting to the screening process is irritating, time consuming and can be humiliating.
• Passengers are abusive towards screeners.
• Screeners do not treat passengers with respect.

People in airports are already under stress, because of time pressure, carrying heavy objects and important valuables in the presence of many strangers, the nature of the business that calls for them to travel, and for many a fear of getting on airplanes in the first place. Present these people with one more piece of stress, or simply an available human target, and many of them explode into defiance.

The vast majority of air travellers today are familiar with the basic rules: no weapons or explosives, liquids in one baggie, no jokes about threats, possessions all go through the X-Ray machine while the passenger walks through the scanner. In fact general hatred of security screening by frequent travellers probably has the effect of propagating this knowledge through the non-travelling population. And for the very ignorant, there are large signs and often people reiterating the rules as you approach security.

Passengers have to take responsibility for complying with the rules. Unfortunately many don't, and instead blame the screener for the confiscation of their precious sunblock. The way I see it, if I decide to take the risk of trying to carry my sunblock onboard in a 110 mL container, or if I am too lazy or forgetful to put it in my checked baggage, then I can hardly complain if the rule is enforced. If I were to say, "what? how can my sunblock be a threat to the airplane?" I'd be claiming to be an idiot.

This "how can you do this to elderly/innocent/handicapped/military personnel?" argument is a common one, but one that shows an innocence of the entire security mentality. To do good security you actually must believe that everyone is a threat. Bruce Schneier writes about the security mindset.

If the TSA were to assume everyone was a harmless and innocent passenger, they'd let everyone through with no questions or screening, and while that would be quicker, it wouldn't be screening. So instead they assume everyone wants to blow up the airplane, and it is their job to determine how you plan to do that, despite your innocent appearance. That is, there's nothing to stop you from having an artificial hip AND a gun. If grey-haired ladies with a limp were discovered to get a free pass, then anyone who wanted to defeat security would have a grey-haired lady limp it through the scanner for them.

They are aware that the scanning is irritating and not all that effective and are trying to make it more efficient and effective, with devices like the "naked" scanner. I'm not all that concerned about it, and I freaked out when they took my fingerprint at Disney World. I think that Americans are more body-shy than people of many other nations. Certainly more than Europeans. Canadians vary a lot coast to coast in this respect, with the Southern Ontarians being the biggest prudes.

The inconvenience of the security procedure will decrease as the facilities begin to be designed around having to take off your shoes and unpack your toothpaste and laptop. The inconsistency will always be with us, but a little respect in both directions helps with that. I'll come back to respect tomorrow.

Rush Even Less

I realized after I made the early morning pick up arrangement that I had been going east, so that made my pick up an hour earlier by body time, but it still gave me legal rest, so I'm glad I did it.

During the van ride up to Mount Rushmore, in beautiful sunrise light, I saw that it wasn't really tourist season yet. Many museums, campgrounds, horseback riding outfitters, and souvenir stands along the road were still closed for the season. There will be a lot to do here in a couple of months, and it's a nice, relaxing place to visit. You could seriously bring a family here for a week and have a good, albeit somewhat clichéd, vacation. Just don't come in the first week of August, during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Apparently every motel, hotel, campground and condo is full for a hundred miles around.

Today the road itself was pretty much empty. I know what I'm coming to see. It's the faces of four dudes carved in the side of a mountain. I catch my first glimpse as we go around a corner, but it's no surprise. It's a much lampooned monument, kind of a piece of American kitch, but it seems worth a trip. I'm emphasizing the "well whatever" aspect of my decision to visit this tourist attraction, because it contrasts with how I really felt after visiting it.

It was definitely worth the trip. I think anyone would like to come and see this. It is, to begin with a national park. Not as big, rugged or pristine as Yosemite, but still a park. Arriving from the parking area, or in my case the van drop-off point, you walk along a straight avenue of state flags, smooth paving stones under your feet and columns at the side proclaiming the dates of entry into the union of the various states. There's a kind of portico as you enter a terraced viewing area, and from there you can see the faces clearly. They are very white. Park employees clean and seal the rock regularly to prevent erosion by ice and plant roots.

If you come here, you have to arrive like this, by seven-thirty in the morning. It's quiet. Trees, mountains, fresh air, and only the sounds of a few birds and little sticks falling from trees. No one around is around but these four memorialized presidents. You can walk down the stairs from the viewing area and reach a boardwalk. They don't let you walk on the rocks themselves at the base of the mountain. I guess that goes to show how many visitors they get. I'm amused by the very precise warning about the length and difficulty of the trail. It's a boardwalk, less than half a mile long, described as "strenuous." I envision the people who aren't here with me today, elderly or unaccustomed to walking, who have made it down the avenue to the viewing area but are incapable of making it around the boardwalk. Nevertheless they have made a pilgrimage of sorts to this national monument. Maybe they venture out and discover they can navigate such a strenuous trail. Maybe such literal small steps will lead them to venture into more rugged parks. There's something inspiring about this place. The day before yesterday I was looking at giant Sequoias in Yosemite and now I'm looking at giant presidents at Mt Rushmore. How many people get to do this in such quick succession, ever?

Even if it's not part of your culture (I had to identify Jefferson by process of elimination (Washington is the big-nosed one with the square hair, Roosevelt wears glasses, and Lincoln is the skinny, bearded one), it's worth the trip. These were visionary men who are honoured here, and whether you are happy with the state of the nation now or not, their legacy shaped it. But it's not just a patriotic monument. It's an engineering marvel built with 1930s technology. That is, mostly by hand. It's a work of art. It's a human interest story of someone who spearheaded a ridiculous project, a monument that was supposed to draw visitors to the middle of nowhere, in an era before most people owned cars, and before the freeway network was built. He must have been a little bit mad. He did envision his work outlasting his civilization, and standing like the Sphinx or Ozymandias for future generations to wonder at.

As I finished my circuit of the boardwalk (yes, I managed the strenuous trek), park employees (in Smokey-the-bear style ranger hats!) were arriving, and at eight o'clock the buildings opened giving me access to a museum of information on the project, a bookstore and a gigantic gift shop. (They sold souvenirs from every state, so theoretically you could come here and "do" the whole nation. I thought that was pretty funny.) And it's still a fine park. Deer grazed beside the parking lot and along the road with utter unconcern for anything but the spring grass.

I would go back to see it again. I probably will. Also I owe a beer to the maintenance supervisor at the West Jet FBO. If you stop there, please buy him a beer and tell him it's on behalf of the stupid Canadian chick in the pink sweatshirt, the one who needed help starting her own airplane.

The Wilds of Yosemite

We're wrapping up the job in the Fresno area, and the project manager gives the flight crews a day off and the use of a vehicle, so we drive to Yosemite National Park. It was right there in the airplane but our vehicle is land-based, so we have a couple of hours drive up to the park. For some reason I never think of mountains when I think of California, but this park is on top of a mountain.

We keep driving until we reach the park gate, where there is a $20 per-carload admission fee. I notice that the fee is $10 per cyclist, and can't help wondering why they charge four people on bicycles twice as much as four people in a car. I wonder what they would charge a carload of people with four bikes in a rack on the back. Were I ever to cycle up this mountain to this park, accompanied by more than one other cyclist, once I had recovered from the effort, I would ask the park ranger to please pretend we had a car, as much to make the point as to save the money.

This happened the first week of April, and the continuing road was closed due to snow. We parked just beyond the park gates, and walked up Mariposa Grove Road, over the snow drifts. It was maybe three or four kilometres up the road to the trailhead. We were impressed by the volume of snow that was packed on the road. It clearly snows a lot here. In California. It's not all Baywatch. Walking up the road I was thinking to myself, "and if I have to pee, I can just go behind a tree!" I've spent so many hours this week strapped in the cockpit that being able to pee any time I like is a notable luxury. I'm laughing at myself for this, when another crewmember mentions exactly the same thing. I remember when I added "and you don't need to go to the bathroom" to my list that defines when life is good. (The rest of the list is: food in your belly, not too hot or too cold, not in pain, contact with people who appreciate you, and a safe place to sleep).

Before we got to the end of the access road we started seeing the giant sequoia trees. They're not the same as giant redwoods; California has more than one kind of giant tree.

From the parking area at the top of the road there was a trail continuing through the snow among the trees. It was meticulously signed with the short distances to the various trees indicated in tenths of a mile. I get the idea there a lot of people who visit this park can't walk very far at all. It's very accommodating for the park to set it out so clearly so people with no experience reading maps or walking in the woods can choose something at their level of ability. I wouldn't recommend that someone for whom 0.3 miles is more achievable than 0.5 miles come here in this season. The snow on the trails makes it interesting, and in other places there are giant puddles that we variously skirt, leap, ford and wade right through, depending on our shoes and leg length. And obviously anyone daunted by a mile walk hasn't walked up the snowbound road. In fact, so far, no one has. We were the only ones we saw on the way in. (The closed road was only closed to cars, and we saw a number of people coming the other way on our way out, so I guess we're just early risers).

The really old trees had fences around them to protect them from people walking on the ground near them and damaging their roots. I thought that concept was a little fantastic, but we kept our distance. We could walk up to some of the younger trees. The bark was very thick and quite soft. I think I could have punched it full strength with my knuckles and not hurt myself, because of the sponginess. Most of the giant trees had fire scars on their bark. One of the reasons for their longevity is resistance to fire. In fact, the park service used to protect the trees from fire, but then researchers discovered that they needed fire in order to reproduce, so now they set controlled fires.

This is a somewhat superficial post, "We went to the park; we saw big trees," because the third part,"we learned interesting things about big trees" was abruptly cut off. We'd just reached the Grizzly Tree, apparently the oldest one in the forest, when someone's cellphone decided that now was the time to deliver supernatural reception. We're in a forest in a national park and there's cellphone coverage. Bah. It was a message from company. There had been a miscalculation and we were needed back at the airport. That's the way it goes in aviation.

So we all walked back down the snowy trails, back along the road, and drove down out of the mountain. We just got a tiny taste of the park. Yosemite is a huge park, mostly wilderness, with lots of opportunity to camp and hike, and actually take responsibility for yourself. The brochure said that people drown every year from swimming upstream of waterfalls. I'm not glad to know people drown, but I'm glad to know there is a wild place here where people can come and experience the real world, hazards and all. I was afraid that California had been turned entirely into a foam-padded theme park where people were completely protected from themselves.

As we drive back out of the park, everyone's cellphone comes alive with text messages. They are glad to have us reply that we are on our way because they didn't expect to be able to reach us in the park. We could have pretended they didn't, but we're responsible. We don't go swimming upstream of waterfalls, either.

Ice Roads

Two years ago I had to explain to people what an ice road was, and they always remained a little incredulous that a thoroughfare constructed out of the frozen surface of a body of water was suitable for large transport trucks. Then there was a series on the Discovery channel about ice roads, and now I have to wonder if some southern Americans don't think that all roads in Canada are made on ice. The reality TV show about truckers driving on ice roads was very popular, but locals say that they didn't like the way the occupation was depicted as an extreme risk-taking activity, and might not consent to another season.

The ice road is wider than it strictly needs to be for the traffic it gets, but we speculated that clearing that width of insulating snow from the ice ensures a better base of deep ice to support the road. Of course no salt or sand is used on the road, and there are no painted lines. Vehicle handling was no different than good winter conditions on any road, with the benefit that there are no hills or sharp corners.

I like this sign because it graphically explains exactly what an ice road is. I'm still not sure you would really understand it if you didn't know, though. Try showing the picture to someone and see if they say it's a bridge or a ferry.

If you like northern scenery, and don't regularly read Dave's blog, you should have a look at his norther n lights pictures. He regularly bids Alaska night trips, and selects some beautful photos for us to see.