Battery of Battery-Related Thoughts

I walked all over town to find a 386/301 battery for my IFR timer and a couple of AAAs for my pulse oximeter. Who knew there could be so many different sorts of small round batteries. When buying devices, it's worth including battery availability in the comparison between brands. Everything in aviation should run off AA batteries. I carry a charger and a little pile of spare rechargeables so that when my headset battery cops out, or my flashlight isn't bright enough, I can swap them out.

Mark that against the Bose A20: the batteries are trickier to change in flight than for LightSPEED. They didn't intend you to change them in flight. They have an elaborate system of green and amber flashing lights designed to tell you your battery health and give you a chance to change them before the flight. These don't work with rechargeables, because of their square power profile: they work fine until they are almost dead then drop off to nothing too fast to give a warning. Bose tells you not to use rechargeable batteries for this reason, but I'm not leaving a trail of mercury all over the country for the convenience of flashing lights.

I keep my spare and used batteries straight in the cockpit using a pair of little plastic boxes, one red and one clear, that hold for AA batteries each. I was using it in the north and my favourite captain asked me where I got it. I didn't remember exactly, but told him I'd get him one, and I didn't, but I had to leave before I gave it to him. I asked for his postal address to send it to him, but then he had to leave, and the e-mail I had for him stopped working, but I kept the box all this time. Last time I was packing, I couldn't find my box, so I 'stole' the one I'd been saving for him, but I tell you, if you're reading this, you who forgave me for ripping the REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT streamer off the engine plug on my first morning at work, send me your address and I will be honoured to send you one.

I have to plug the computer in to use flight simulator programs. The battery runs down too fast otherwise. When I'm flying my toy flight simulator, sometimes the panel lights spontaneously turn off, and I have to cycle the nav lights to put them back on again. Bug or feature to make the whole thing as inscrutably unknowable as a real airplane?

If you thought that last thought was disconnected, how about this one: Originally the forest moon of Endor was supposed to be populated by Wookiees, not Ewoks (wook-ee/ee-wok: original, eh?) but George Lucas decided that since the Wookiee Chewbacca was clearly proficient with advanced technology (i.e. he was pilot and mechanic of the spaceship the Millennium Falcon and also repaired the damaged android C3PO), it would be confusing to show the Wookiees with a primitive, "stone age" culture on Endor.

That's stupid. That's stupid enough to make me angry. That's racist 'logic'. That's the logic that didn't let women run marathons, because they never had. You don't have to be a whiny white moisture farmer with exceptional midichlorians to study and learn things, and it is perfectly possible to learn things that your parents didn't know. You'd have to be keen, and have some aptitude for the subject to make up for the not having the experience of growing up with technology, like Anakin building his own robots and podracers, but there's no reason Kashyyyk couldn't produce competent pilots and mechanics.

You may think this post has gone entirely into deep space, but I'll bring it home by examining Star Wars stored power technology. The Death Star had a massive generator, and no fuel tanks, but the society had batteries, power converters, power couplers and other means of transferring, transforming and transporting energy. I wonder if Han Solo ever had to walk all over Mos Eisley looking for the right sort of power cell for his blaster.

Holding Speeds

In a faster airplane, I suddenly have to start thinking about things that never were an issue in slower ones. Suddenly stuff I skimmed over, like noise abatement rules, advisories to remain below 165 knots in the climb until above a certain altitude and engine-specific rules become relevant. For some reason I loved the 250 and 200 knot speed restrictions when I learned them in private pilot groundschool, but I've never needed to care. Here are the rules from the CARs:

602.32 (1) Subject to subsection (2), no person shall

(a) operate an aircraft at an indicated airspeed of more than 250 knots if the aircraft is below 10,000 feet ASL; or

(b) operate an aircraft at an indicated airspeed of more than 200 knots if the aircraft is below 3,000 feet AGL within 10 nautical miles of a controlled aerodrome unless authorized to do so in an air traffic control clearance.

(2) A person may operate an aircraft at an indicated airspeed greater than the airspeeds referred to in subsection (1) if the aircraft is being operated in accordance with a special flight operations certificate - special aviation event issued pursuant to section 603.02.

(3) If the minimum safe airspeed for the flight configuration of an aircraft is greater than the airspeed referred to in subsection (1), the aircraft shall be operated at the minimum safe airspeed.

602.33 No person shall operate an aircraft at a true Mach number of 1 or greater.

Okay, that last one isn't an issue just yet, but who knows, eh?

It's also the first time I'll be legally required, as opposed to just being sensible, to slow down in a hold.

10.7 Speed Limitations

Holding patterns must be entered and flown at or below the following airspeeds:
(a) Propeller Aircraft (including turboprop)

(i) MHA to 30 000 feet 175 KT IAS

(b) Civil Turbojet

(i) MHA to 14 000 feet 230 KT IAS

(ii) above 14 000 feet 265 KT IAS

(c) Military Turbojet

(i) all except those aircraft listed below 265 KT IAS

(ii) CF-5 310 KT IAS

(iii) CT-114 175 KT IAS

(d) Climbing while in the holding pattern

(i) turboprop aircraft normal climb speed

(ii) jet aircraft 310 KT IAS or less

Minimum Holding Altitude (MHA) – The lowest altitude prescribed for a holding pattern which assures navigational signal coverage, communications and meets obstacle clearance requirements.

I love how all the military section says reduces to, "Look, unless you're a CF-5 Freedom Fighter, you're just a jet. And Snowbirds? You're not really a jet."

So that's holds. Airplanes are so fast, but just when you think you're going somewhere, you find out that you have to slow down and circle back. For the approximately two people who still remember what this post means: yeah, I'm serious.

Trying It Out

Sometimes for my keeping-my-hand-in sim sessions I fly approaches that I know to be tough, or ones that I happen to have plates for, and sometimes I just fly what's in the news. After reading about and discussing the AA runway excursion at Jackson Hole, I decided to sim it.

I set up at and departed from an airport to the west of Jackson Hole. I wasn't playing with a B757, just a King Air, thus setting myself a much easier task than the one the accident crew faced. Also to my knowledge flight sim doesn't have an option to set the CRFI -- that stands for Canadian Runway Friction Index. What's it called in other countries? I set the weather up to match reported conditions at Jackson Hole at the time of the accident: 400' ceiling, light snow, zero Celsius and visibility of 1 mile, with wind 240 at 10 knots. And I sought out the approach plates. I found the ILS or LOC Y RWY 19, printed it off, dug out some LO charts and started playing the game.

My plan for the approach is that on station passage at JAC I turn left to intercept the I-JAC localizer outbound and descend to 14,600', (that's the 14,100' permitted outside QUIRT on the procedure turn, corrected for temperature). I have to get down to 9900' (e.g. FAF 9700' with temperature correction) fairly swiftly after the course reversal in order not to be intercepting the localizer from above, so I check to see how far out I can go on the procedure turn. The plate says "Remain within 10 NM." It doesn't say 10 nm of what. A Canadian plate would give the fix there. It can't be of JAC, because QUIRT is 17.3 DME from JAC, so maybe the rule on US plates is from the depicted FAF at FAPMO. I've decides to try it with that. The published DH is 7063, or 612' above the threshhold. That's unusual, it's usually only 200', but this is a mountainous area so perhaps it doesn't have a good enough missed to allow descent that low. The cold weather correction adds thirty-five feet for a DH of 7100 for me. I can't possibly make the field that way with a 400' ceiling, so AA must have their own approach. That's not uncommon. The missed is easy, climb pretty much straight out tracking a radial for 26 miles.

So go. The JAC VOR doesn't identify on the published frequency. It exists in the game database on a separate frequency, so I switch to that. Twenty-five miles back from the JAC VOR I started descent to 15,000', as depicted for my sector in the MSA (minimum safe altitude) circle. I didn't calculate the correction for that, but by the time I was close to 15,000' I knew I'd be almost outbound anyway. I put the JAC VOR up on NAV2 and the ILS on NAV1, so I was ready to track. The ILS frequency works. The AA crew would have had contact with ATC and vectors, of course, but if my flight sim game has an ATC feature sophisticated enough to give vectors, I don't use it.

I started the course reversal at QUIRT and barely kept it within the 10 nm, chopping throttles and diving as soon as I had intercepted inbound, but the glideslope was already alive below me. I messily dived for it, then realized that I could see the field, ten miles away, with no cloud layer below. This happens a lot in MSFS: somehow the weather I set goes away. I have to miss anyway, because I'm way too high.

I ask a US pilot friend about the vague "within 10 nm" instruction and he produces a company Jeppesen (much better, but more expensive) chart for the same approach, on which it is explicit that the 10 nm is measured from QUIRT. He doesn't remember what the trick is to know what fix to use on the NOAA plates that I have. I then find another version of the approach, this one the ILS or LOC Z RWY 19. I don't know what that Y and Z are, or why the depicted ILS should be different on a plate where the LOC approach is different. It may just be that the approach has been improved since 2009. Maybe they blasted some rock so you can now follow a normal ILS.

I go back to the sim, make another attempt to set the weather, set the rate of change slider for the weather to zero and restart from a saved position approaching JAC VOR descending through 17,000'. This time I go out past QUIRT, do my course reversal damnit the glideslope is still below me. It's not too far down so I dive for it, then do the whole thing again with more aggressive descent through the procedure turn and I intercept the glideslope and localizer together in descent. Practice session done. It's as much practice of working out the details of the approach as it is of the actual handling.

I don't believe the US regs require me to make cold weather corrections, so perhaps the coldest seasonal temperatures are already incorporated in the plate. It's kind of bizarre that an instrument rating in one country qualifies me to fly IFR in any country despite the fact that small regional differences can confuse or even kill.

This isn't intended as any kind of reproduction of the incident, just a sim scenario inspired by it. Tomorrow I may fly out of Cairo, taking my inspiration from that news headline.

Meanwhile I have some more information on the AA overrun that inspired this sim session. On the 757, the aircraft determines if it is flying or on the ground based on the indications from tilt sensors on the main landing gear. My friend says, "Since the "air" input is only 1/2 second, my assumption is that it's not a bounce (I doubt both tilt sensors could show air for only 1/2 second during any kind of bounce). If anything, it was a very smooth landing that momentarily triggered no-tilt, then back to tilt, before showing on the ground, or a momentary malfunction of the air/ground sensing." He confirms that 132 knots is a normal touchdown speed for the 757 for a moderately heavy airplane, which would have applied here, due to a full passenger load and alternate fuel.

He also pointed out an error in my original blog entry. The thrust reversers are not armed during the approach, they are selected manually after landing (the spoilers are armed). I was getting mixed up with the autobrakes.

Meanwhile, I have an HR telephone interview in a couple of days.

X-Plane Mobile

All seven (I added one that I will probably tell you about later) of my New Year's resolutions are on track, despite all the time I used creating the ultimate spreadsheet to track my progress at each in comparison to progress through the year 2011. (Today, as I write this, it's January 14th and we're 3.56% through the year, but I have earned at least four percent of the arbitrary points available for each item). Go me!

My sim progress is in part thanks to X-Plane Mobile, recommended by a reader. I feel stupid saying this, but I am playing with a flight simulator game the size of my hand, and it's a valid simulation of a real instrument scan and some of the thought processes and multi-tasking that go with flying an actual airplane. I was looking for a clunky little app that simulated hold entries, descent profiles, or some other semi-intelligent task, just to elevate my bored moments from Pac-Man and Mahjong to something more skill-enhancing. And what I got was a full flight simulator for ten bucks.

The iPod becomes both the flight yoke and the instrument panel. You control elevator and ailerons by tilting the device, and the rudder autocoordinates, including for slips on crosswind landings, while you are airborne. There's a slider for the rudder if you want to control it, and the same slider operates rudder/nosewheel steering while you are on the ground. There are also sliders for the flaps and throttle which appear when you put your fingers on them, then fade away again once they are set. You can fly it visually--yes, it has full, realistic-looking graphics--with a simulated HUD overlay, or press an onscreen button to be in panel mode and fly by instruments. A clever feature for visual pilots is a little arrow that points to the nearest airport. I know I lose track of airports when I'm visual in a flight sim, trying to fly a circuit but there is only a forward view. There are seven different airplane model options including singles, twins, jets and props. The ones that I've flown seem reasonably modelled. All but the basic Cessna 172 panel include VORs and ILSes but not NDBs, and there are six regions to fly in, five in the United States and one crazy mountainous one in Austria. You can even set the weather, time of day and the weight and loading of the airplane.

The regions are quite small, so if you go bombing around in a fast airplane you'll scroll off the end of the screen and wrap around again, which is kind of confusing, but you can always hop out to the map to see where you are. People who use flight simulators in order to look at the pretty scenery will find it repetitive, but I say if you want to look at scenery, just cruise around Google Earth. I start it up, take off, slam it into panel mode and stay there for most of the time.

That in itself poses a little problem. The HUD screen is the hub of the simulator. You have to be in HUD mode in order to operate the landing gear, see the gear position indicator, or access the map. On the jet panel you can scroll down to find a gear button above the nav radio, but not on the King Air. The way I normally fly an instrument departure is to set the power, look out the front window until rotation then right away I'm on the instruments. I confirm a nose up attitude and a positive rate of climb, then raise the gear. With this sim I need to pause, switch to HUD mode, unpause, raise the gear, pause, switch back to panel view, and back on the instruments. The same routine applies at glideslope intercept on the ILS approach. If I do it without pausing I tend to get off track or altitude. Maybe it's just something for me to practise.

You have to get the instrument plates to fly approaches. I was sort of surprised that the app or at least the support page didn't include them. The US ones are all available easily from links on AirNav, but I had to search through a few dead links to find the Austrian ones; there's just one airport, Innsbruck LOWI, depicted for that region.

After the mobile fun got me psyched to try the Microsoft one again, I grumbled my way through loading it into memory. It actually required me to insert one of the CDs, I'm not sure if that was for copy protection or because I did a minimum install. I wish there were a "no scenery" or "wireframe scenery" option for these things. They'd be a lot faster. They don't make the Microsoft version anymore, but the full version of X-Plane runs on a PC. The Microsoft one is good enough, but I took a peek to see how much the X-Plane one goes for. It's $30. I thought a full flight sim program would cost five times that. I fell silly buying a full on simulator when I never look at the scenery, but pretty soon I'll have had $30 worth of aggravation out of this seven year old Microsoft program. If my hardware can handle it, I may have to switch. Would you believe that X-Plane even has technical support where you e-mail them questions, and a real person e-mails you back? He called me "sir" but then ATC does that sometimes too. I guess my pilot voice isn't much more girly than my typing.

If you prefer your flights of fancy to have some chance of getting you somewhere, and have some multimedia skills, check out Cathay Pacific's Around the World in Eighty Days promotion. Air tickets, hotels and spending money everywhere their network goes for eighty days. Don't forget to stop in Siem Reap and see Angkor Wat.

All the Ones

It's 2011-01-01 or 1/1/11 as the Americans write it. New Year, new resolutions. No loopholes. Short and sweet. Ruthlessly and objectively assessable.

In 2011 I will:

• run or cross-country ski five hundred kilometres. Score out of 500, one point per kilometre.
• do strength and flexibility exercises at least three times a week. Score out of 200, one point per workout, minus one for each week without a single one.
• create, back up and maintain a contact information list of people in my life, and I will exchange communications with everyone on it at least once. Out of how ever many end up on the list.
• make a list of twelve things I don't do merely because I am afraid to, and I will do one every month. Out of 100: four points for making the list, one point for each attempt, and up to seven points each for how well I do them.
• make and keep a weekly flight sim date with myself, and I will learn to like it. Out of 100: one point for simming and up to one point per day for doing it well.
• convince City Hall to paint a crosswalk on my street, for people to get to the bus stop. I score a hundred points when the paint is dry.

AviWAITion

This post got lost. I've been trying to slip it in where it wouldn't look out of place, so it's been floating around with my scheduled posts. I'm just going to jam it in here, out-of-place and out-of-season. You can say it's jet-lagged. Tomorrow the Cambodia saga will start.

I'm in Moose Jaw, where the nice engineer and his apprentices are replacing the left engine turbo wastegate, and there's a part that has to come by FedEx, so I have a day of waiting. Fortunately I'm good at that. I just pretend that every place I'm in is somewhere I have come on purpose for a holiday. I've been to Moose Jaw before, so I've already seen the historical re-enactment in the underground tunnels and admired the almost movie-set ready historical main street, and the murals. But I wouldn't mind going back to the park, and maybe I'll go swimming in the mineral springs again.

One time I was here, my work partner was a casino gambler and an expert wheeler dealer who wrangled rooms in the Mineral Spa Resort & Casino at the same price as the hotel chain we normally stay in. Seeing as it's a holiday weekend, and I'm a negotiation pussycat, that didn't happen this time, but I can still pay the admission fee and go 'take in the waters.' I'm actually more in a swimming mood than a soaking mood, and the public pool feeds off the same mineral springs, so I head there. It's next to the park, anyway.

As I walk across the Boston Pizza parking lot (there's either a Boston Pizza or a Tim Horton's in every hotel parking lot in Western Canada), I spot something shiny on the pavement. When I'm airside, my FOD detection circuits compel me to pick any metal objects off the ramp in order to prevent them from being ingested by aircraft engines or taking chunks out of people's propellers. I pick up this one too. It's a brass shell casing ... ah no, it's an unused small calibre bullet. It probably rolled out of someone's truck or came out of their pocket as they got out of the truck. But now what do I do with it. I feel a responsibility not to chuck it back on the ground where kids might play with it. I don't want to put it in the garbage where it might be incinerated. And my normal approach of letting weird pieces of metal rattle around the bottom of my pocket or suitcase until they end up in the jar next to my washing machine isn't going to cut it with airport security. Plus hey, unexploded ordnance.

I wander down Main Street (isn't this sweet: it's actually called Main Street, not 50th Avenue) past an object in the grass by the railroad tracks that was there yesterday and that I'm 95% sure is a dead cat, but I'm not going to go closer and confirm. See I'm smart enough not to take on responsibility for ALL the awkward to dispose of objects on the streets of Moose Jaw. While I'm walking I make up a sentence that describes the town. The moose sat on real caribou hides and stood on fake hyena rugs. I'll leave it to you to figure out why, apart from the moose reference, it is useful and appropriate.

I have lunch in a little Thai restaurant and read a tourist brochure, which mentions a local business with the address "420 High Street." No prizes for guessing what kind of business it is. That's a few blocks away, and perhaps they sell hemp paper postcards along with their other wares. I walk down that way, but although their sign says they open at eleven, they're still closed at two. Typical stoners. I instead buy a postcard at, of all places, a windshield repair shop. They are a general everything glass shop, including figurines and other glass art, so they have arty cards.

On the way east towards the park there's a police car parked with its lights flashing, but no car pulled over near it. The officer is sitting inside doing paperwork. I come up to the window and he looks up suspiciously to ask what I want. For a moment I wonder how stupid this is going to sound, but I don't have to say any more than "I found a bullet ..." before he becomes friendly and says he'll take care of it for me. Done with less hassle than I was anticipating.

The park is not huge, but it's well laid out with hills and different levels and a river with happy ducks floating on it. It's good for people watching, and it's culturally acceptable to strike up conversations with strangers in front of ducks. You can also talk to strangers in used bookstores (but not new ones) and in health food stores, and in the line-up at a regular grocery store. You can talk to strangers on the street, too, but you have to be careful to pick someone of approximately matching age and apparent economic status. Real life is not like a social MMORPG where you can talk to anyone who crosses your path without alarming them.

The public pool is next to the park, and it's a hundred year old building with the word NATATORIUM graven in its stone façade. It's also closed with some scaffolding up and workers in hardhats. I can see that the outdoor pool is still empty. Just as well. Meanwhile I have received a text that they may have the airplane ready for me this afternoon, so I probably shouldn't be in a swimming pool. I wander up to the museum, which is in the park, but as I go down the stairs into the exhibit hall I lose cellphone signal, so that's off limits, too. Cellphones give you a limited sort of freedom when you're on call.

Walking up a back street towards the hotel, I pass an old funeral home. It's a current funeral home, too, but I see its history in the fact that the doors to the garage for the hearses are clearly carriage house doors. I'm sure hearses pulled by black horses came through them for years before they invested in a motor hearse. Also, and perhaps it's just the power of suggestion, but the adjacent "funeral parking only" lot doesn't have aisles and stalls like a conventional parking lot, but instead just aisles, running lengthwise down the lot, so the cars must park in nose to tail columns, as if they were waiting for a ferry or stopped in a California freeway traffic jam. I picture that being exactly the way you would park a large number of horses-drawn buggies. The lot is paved and there are no hitching posts, but I can imagine the parking routine staying unchanged for a hundred years.

The Europeans must be laughing at me, sitting in cafés that have been in the same place for three hundred years, but in western Canada things are so new that hundred year old stuff is of historical note.

I see a gopher poking out of a hole and try to take a picture, but it runs back down the hole, at which point a different gopher pokes out of a further off hole. I dart back and forth with my camera in a giant game of live whack-a-mole until one of the gophers takes pity and lets me snap a shot.

After all that, the airplane isn't ready before the shop quitting time, so I go back to the hotel and read my e-mail and other things on the Internet. There's an update from John, the person who got me into the KC-130 sim. He describes an interesting problem at a simulator facility in Texas: On two airfields you landed below the runway, on the third you landed about 30 feet up then ran into an invisible wall. Both problems were "mostly fixed."

Anahim Lake

I still have the CAP I bought from renewing my IFR in BC, so that's the one I'm simming with. Anahim Lake is in the coastal mountains of BC. It has two published instrument approaches, an RNAV runway 31 and an NDB A, both from the same direction, but the latter named as a circling approach because it is 14 degrees off the straight in. If you're using the Bella Coola altimeter setting and the wind favours runway 13 in a category B aircraft (i.e. you can keep your speed down to 120 knots while circling to land) then there is only ten feet altitude difference between the RNAV and NDB MDA. That looks weird at first, but seeing as either way the crux of the procedure is circling, the only difference is how precisely the nav aid gets you to the point where you break off and circle.

I set the simulator up for take off from Bella Coola and fly AR 34 to Anahim Lake. The plate says "Use Bella Cools altimeter setting. Available limited hours." Does that mean that the procedure is not approved at all outside those times? I'm not sure. Usually there is an altitude penalty for using an offsite altimeter setting, but this one never has a local altimeter setting and when Bella Coola is closed I guess there is nothing close enough to be safe.

I'll fly the NDB approach, because I don't have a good GPS simulation in in MSFS. The MDA is 5580', so I set up weather layers from the ground to 5000' as few clouds (1/8th coverage) and light rain; from 6000' to 8500' there is 7/8ths cloud coverage and I throw in some altostratus layers above that. I leave the visibility pretty good below the clouds, probably not accurate for the area, but I can ramp it up later. The advisory visibility is 3 nm and the missed approach time is 3:01 at 120 knots groundspeed. So I need to be at the MDA 90 seconds after the beacon, but that's only 1000' to descend, so shouldn't be too bad. Bella Coola has no instrument departure, so I have to climb VFR to--yikes--11600'. This won't really work, so I cheat and turn off a couple of cloud layers until I get to the airway. Too bad I can't do that in real life. A bit of NDB tracking practice then cheat slightly by using the GPS to get a distance back and plan a descent to the MSA. It looks virtually clear below. I thought I turned my clouds back on again. I pause the game and check that both 'global' and 'local' weather are set to include the thick layer of broken cloud down to minima, as I described earlier. They are. I enter a shuttle descent at the MDA.

The weather still looks too good. I check it multiple times and shift the layers around a bit. At first there seems to be more cloud below, but as I complete the shuttle, inbound at 6600' to the beacon I can see the airport easily, so I go land at it.

I tried!

Not All Malfunctions in a Simulator are Simulated

I'm on vacation at a lake in British Columbia, just as I threatened. The lake is lovely, as is the town, the accommodations and the company, But I'm not saying who that was nor blogging about my vacation. I'm blogging about the fact that I have to leave this lovely lake and drive an hour or so to the airport, and renew my IFR. I find the school and check in with dispatch, where I do some paperwork. They tell me my instructor's name. I've never met anyone with this name before. It's the same as the name of a plant, and it doesn't tell me anything about them, except that perhaps my instructor is the child of late-blooming hippies.

Oak (not the real name, but I'll use that to avoid excessive circumlocution) arrives and he is a he. He doesn't look like a hippy, is familiar with the information I gave the school on my experience and needs, and seems to know what he's doing. He proposes we sim today, then fly tomorrow. He's concerned that the fact that I've never flown this airplane before might be a problem. I'm concerned that I have to take a flight test, and AAAAAHHHH! FLIGHT TEST! I'm not worried about flying a new airplane compared to that. Every time I have flown a new airplane, it's turned out to work like all the other ones I have flown. The only tricky bit is usually landing nicely. On an instrument ride if you get to the flare without screwing up too badly, you've passed. I know someone who had to have the instructor land the airplane for him on his initial IFR, because the instructor had arrived late and postponed the flight test later into the dark, for a candidate who did not yet possess a night rating or any night landing experience. (And if he's reading this, please get in touch: both paper and e-mail is bouncing).

We go into the simulator room and start one up. It's a typical flying school simulator with a yoke and pedals and movable controls on a dashboard, into which is set a simulated instrument panel on a computer monitor, connected to a console running some flavour of flight simulator, possibly even the Microsoft one. Once upon a time school simulators had real gauges all the way across with little motors running everything, but those are more expensive to construct and maintain. Real airplanes are going towards glass now, so the simulated ones do too. The pilot seat is on rails bolted to the floor, and after it has been adjusted to the comfort of the pilot, it does not move in any way related to the simulated movement of the airplane. The whole things has been certified by Transport Canada as conforming sufficiently to the characteristics of whatever it simulates to be used for certain types of flight training. As this training is just to acclimatize me to the local navaids and procedures and to assure the poor flight instructor it's okay to fly with me, its certification doesn't currently matter anyway.

I start running through the instrument checks. This is partly a simulation of how I will test all the instruments on the flight test to show that I am a good little pilot, partly a test to make sure the simulator is working properly, and partly a chance for me to familiarize myself with the location and operation of all the instruments. You know how in your car you can put your finger on any control pretty much without looking, but in a rental you have to wait for a stoplight and hunt around for it? Well same in an airplane. In a simulator of this type some of the switches tend to be rinky-dink little things and not located in logical places, either. "Where are the cowl flaps again?" All the installed instruments are familiar ones to me, and I know how to use them, but figuring out how to adjust the rightmost digit of the ADF frequency can be like trying to turn off the windshield wipers on the rental car. Just when you think you have killed them, they turn out to be set on intermittent.

Above is a literal museum example of the oldest kind of ADF I have used. I think anything older would require separate manual tuning of the sense antenna.

I think I may have ranted thusly about ADFs before. Those of you who know or don't care about the various ways one might set the frequency on an ADF receiver can safely skip the following two paragraphs with no loss to the narrative. If you want to know what it's actually for and what it does, not just how to tune it, go here.

An ADF can be set to either a three or four digit frequency, that is between approximately 190 and 1750 kHz: the AM radio band. I believe all the NDBs that the ADF has to receive are in the three digit range, from 190 to 600 kHz, but I speculate that ADF was designed to also receive higher AM radio frequencies, so as to use commercial radio stations for navigation. Radio towers are published with their frequencies on old charts and still better than nothing in the middle of nowhere. The oldest sort of ADF I have used has one big knob that moves an indicator along a scale which you carefully examine to see which frequency you have selected, and then you listen really carefully to the Morse identifier, because you could easily be a few off. That sort is a museum piece now, and pretty much was then, but I doubt I was the last person in the world to use one of those in IFR conditions. The next oldest kind has three frequency adjustment knobs, the way an analogue transponder has four knobs to change the squawk code. The leftmost knob changes its corresponding "digit" through the range one to seventeen (or maybe fourteen, I don't remember) and the other two change their digits through the zero to nine range. The more modern kind (although "modern" and "ADF" don't go together well) has a digital display and the knobs are more compact. Typically there is one big knob with a smaller knob in the centre. They correspond to the three knobs on the older unit like this: the big outside knob does the job of the leftmost knob; the smaller inside knob does the job of the middle one, and then you can pull out the middle one and then when you turn it, it does the job of the rightmost knob on the old unit. You could be stuck for a long time if you didn't know the pulling out trick.

In simulators like this one, for some weird reason, you don't get to pull out the inside knob to set the frequency. I guess someone was shown how it was supposed to work, didn't realize that the person showing him had pulled out the knob, so made up his own way, and pilots are so used to ADFs working different ways that they shrugged and considered it a limitation of the device. So in the sim you turn the outside or first knob to set the first one or two digits, the 1-17 thing, then you turn the second knob to set the second two digits, from 00 to 99. Like that's not a pain. You have to do this sometimes during a missed approach, where one beacon is the missed approach point and the missed approach required you to track to a subsequent NDB, so you have to scroll through up to 50 frequencies while cleaning up the airplane in a simulated go around.

I dial in the frequency of the NDB nearest my simulated airport so I can test the device. It identifies and points, so I then try to tune the first NDB I'll need during the flight. It's at this point that I notice that as I adjust the third digit, I'm only getting even numbers. "How do I get odd numbers on this?" I ask Oak, who is sufficiently confused by the question to clue us into the fact that it's broken. We switch to the other simulator and go through testing everything again before flying.

The simulated ATIS unexpectedly (to me) works, and I copy it, then address Oak as "ground" for my clearance. He gives me the Abbotsford Seven departure off runway 07, The first seven means that there have been six revisions to the procedure since it was first published and the second seven means that the runway is oriented such that the airplane will be on a heading of 070 degrees magnetic as I take off. The departure procedure is a number of instructions, such as the fact that I'm supposed to climb on runway heading to six hundred feet then hang a right to 202 degrees and wait for ATC to give me vectors on course.

The procedures are not a problem, but I do get caught up in getting every detail right, and my altitude control is abysmal. That's not abnormal for the sim. The trim is in the wrong place and doesn't have the same feedback as in an airplane. I make a few dumb mistakes but demonstrate a basic knowledge of how to fly an airplane, so tomorrow we are scheduled to fly one.

I don't want to spend too much time in the simulator because it doesn't even try to simulate the airplane I will be flying, and you do gain habits to appease the simulator. This article suggests that because much better simulators that are used for airline pilot training do not do a good job of modelling aircraft behaviour as the airplane goes out of control, simulator training may be to blame for pilots responding incorrectly to emergency situations, causing some crashes, such as the Continental runway excursion in Denver and the Colgan Dash-8 stall in Buffalo.

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.

Kicking It

I started this post when I ran into this quotation.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
— Bruce Lee

Commenter Frank Van Haste added this one.

"...there's them that's flown a thousand hours, and there's them that's flown the same hour a thousand times."

It's two different points. The first is that you have to focus, perfect one thing, gain complete mastery over your muscles, mind and reflexes. Continue consistent practice until you get it right. It refers to practice, training, which is what I'm doing when I hack at my flight simulator game.

The second is about breadth of experience. Different conditions, different aircraft, different crews, different places, different mindset, always adding what you learned last time to the new experience. And there's something I've found in aviation, that every thousand hours or so, something happens. Inadvertent IMC, engine failure, smoke monster^*, icing, or something you thought you had mastered long ago that suddenly rears its head and becomes an issue again.

I don't think I've practiced ten thousand approaches yet, either different or the same, but I keep practicing.

*My affectionate thanks to everyone who has been with me long enough to know I'm not talking about Lost.

My Flight Sim Setup

Some of you asked about my flight simulator set up, so here's a geek post on the details. The computer is a Toshiba laptop with dual Pentiums at 2.16 GHz and 2 GB of RAM running Vista. I only have the one computer, with my data back ups being a stack of CD-ROMs and my access back up an iPod touch.

When I'm at home I have a CH Pro yoke and pedals which plug into the computer USB ports. I fasten the yoke to the keyboard drawer on the desk, and then jam cardboard into the tracks of the keyboard drawer, so it doesn't roll in and out when I try to make pitch changes. It still does a bit, so I try to control pitch more with trim and power, which doesn't work to well either, so then I use the autopilot. When I start up the simulator I sometimes find that the controls are unresponsive, but I've learned to unplug and replug the USB connectors and that usually fixes the problem.

When I'm on the road, I just have a little butterfly-shaped controller. It's made by Logitech; I think it might be called Wingman. It's about the same size as my hand, including fingers. I have to replace it fairly often, as the action gets damaged in my luggage, even though I pad it with clothes. It has two thumb yokes and lots of buttons and is covered all over with DYMO labels because I never remember what I've assigned to what. When I use my road controller I mostly just fly the autopilot. It's an exercise in sussing out the plates and planning descents and turns to be efficient and legal.

On screen my default aircraft is some fairly generic twin with a six pack panel. I think it's a Beechcraft. There's a King Air style autosynch display on the panel. NAV1 is the HSI and NAV2 is an integrated receiver with a big fat yellowish needle for the ADF and a double striped green needle for the VOR. Instead of having the usual standard head presentation of zero to ten degrees deflection and a TO/FROM indicator, it acts like an ADF. That means if I'm tracking to a waypoint in order to intercept an ILS, it's like ADF tracking, which is okay, because I like ADF tracking. The engine instruments are mostly hidden by the avionics display. I can see just enough of the left ones to know what power setting I have selected.

The only keyboard controls I use are G for Gear and B for Baro--i.e. to reset the altimeter to the current setting. My kudos to anyone who can actually manage a flight entirely from the keyboard.

My system description makes me laugh, because my first hard drive was 40 MB. I remember a friend who returned to Canada after a few years travelling and used my computer to update his resume and re-enter the job market. He asked, "Do you have the Word disks?" When he left the country, the typical computer only had enough memory for its own operating system, so you ran Word right off the disks, then saved your document to another disk. And by disk I mean a 5 1/4" square of thin flexible plastic inside which was the disc-shaped magnetic media. The disk was sealed inside the sleeve and you put the whole thing into a slot in the computer.

Any questions?

Another Nightmare

When I'm in a hotel I take care to plug any chargers into visible outlets, and put a post-it note on the desk reminding me they are there, so I don't abandon chargers and batteries all over North America. Last night I couldn't find a place to plug in my camera battery, so I plugged it into the power bar under my own desk.

"Now remember!" warned the voice that looks after these things. "It's under the desk don't forget!" But I didn't make a post-it note because it's my own home.

And then in the middle of the night I woke up thinking "Oh, no! I left my charger and my camera battery under the desk!" I'd had a dream that I was checking into another hotel. Gah. Now you know what my life is about: moving from place to place and hoping I haven't lost anything. I've done pretty well. I think I've lost one piece of clothing and a plastic water bottle in three years of hotel-to-hotel operations. Do other pilots dream of hotels this much?

Savage chickens has a strip about waking up from a dream.

Further to things forgotten, I was going to include in this entry a wrapping up of loose ends from my last assignment, but instead I think I'll make it a challenge to see if anyone remembers a loose end that needs wrapping, and answer that one in a few days.

In honour of the date, today's sim was an IFR flight CYZE-R23-W-CYVV : that is, a short flight from Gore Bay to Wiarton, Ontario, home of Canada's most famous groundhog. I did not see my shadow at any point in the flight, so that must mean winter is almost over. Or that I have realistic scenery turned off.

Sim notes: I tried out the Flight Planner in MSFS, but it didn't recognize NDB airways, so routed me via the Sault Se Marie VOR and V300. I "filed" from CYZE to the YZE beacon, but never went there. As CYZE has no published departure, I took off from runway 11 then at 400' turned to 154 and climbed to 2800 on that heading, in accordance with the published missed approach procedure for runway 11. That's a good way to enter the system from such an airport. In this specific case I can see that that heading leads out over the shore. Then at 2800' on that heading I was, as I had briefed myself, within five degrees of track for R23, so I simply intercepted the airway towards Wiarton and continued the climb to 5000'. I descended to cross the W beacon at 3000' for a racetrack procedure turn into runway 05 at Wiarton. The approach has a tiny turn at the beacon: tracking 058 degrees to, and 056 from. I wonder why.

Simulator Oddities

Oops, forgot to mark this ready after my sim yesterday.

First, an apology for all the toy flight simulator entries on here lately, and a warning that they will continue. I don't want to turn this into a video gaming blog, but as some of my former blogging time is now being taken up with practicing my professional skills, we should have predicted that some of my blogging thoughts would be turned in that direction, too. I know there are flight sim enthusiasts who read this blog and they can probably help me through my glitches.

I confess to using MSFS 2002. I own Version X but haven't taken it out of the box because my computer isn't optimized for games, so it might not be able to keep up. Remember that I am not interested in scenery graphics, audio ATC, or custom cockpits, just briefing departures and approaches and flying them to minima. In my experience it's really easy to spend more time trying to get a flight sim game to work properly than actually using it. If it's verified that all my little issues are fixed in X, I might upgrade.

Oddity #1 is that the game has only a single command for "raise gear" and "lower gear." I can't do the equivalent of reach out and put my hand on the gear lever without retracting it if it's already down. I have to place the avionics box over the on-screen gear lights, so I can't glance at them to confirm gear position. Gear down is such a separate command from gear up, and so crucial. It should never have been a single command toggle and I hope it's fixed by now.

Oddity #2 is the DME function. (For the non-pilots, DME is possibly the lamest three letter abbreviation in aviation: Distance Measuring Equipment. It's a device on the ground that talks to your onboard receiver and then tells it how many miles away from it you are.) Let's say I start up at CYHZ and tune the IHZ localizer (109.1) on NAV1 and the YHZ VOR (115.1) on NAV2. Both nav aids have a DME source, which is automatically tuned when I select the VHF frequency. The little toggle switch to select which one is displayed is not well depicted, so it's difficult to see by looking whether it is set to NAV1 or NAV2. Fortunately I know where I am, on the button of runway 14, so the one that indicates a distance of 5.2 nm is the VOR. I want to prove DUTSA, 5.2 DME straight off the departure end of 14, so I flip the switch and it shows 0.1 nm. That must be the localizer. I don't take this for granted, though, I click the audio panel button to identify it.

Morse code beeps _ . _ _ / .... / _ _.. . Wait that's something H Z but I is two dots. The something didnt' sound like two dots. I check the plate. Yup. Supposed to be two dots. I listen again and now the identifier is clearly IHZ. I must have heard wrong. take off and fly to DUTSA, then hang a left and track to the VOR, already identified before takeoff. I flip the DME source over to NAV2 also, but don't bother identifying it, because it's for information only. I'll prove station passage with the needle flip. I track outbound on the 297 radial to intercept the localizer outbound, and then put the DME source back to the localizer and ident it. The first time the identifier plays, it's clearly YHZ, then it switches to IHZ. Then it switches back. Experimentation shows that regardless of the position of the DME source selection switch, when the audio DME toggle is selected on, the idents of the two DME sources available play in alternation. I haven't confirmed that at any other airport. Maybe it's just a Halifax glitch.

If anyone cares to fire up Version X to check if this is fixed, could you also see if the Split Crow NDB (364) is in the database now? I couldn't receive it at all, removing the possibility of doing the interesting LOC/NDB approach there.

This post brought to you by another simulated ILS/DME into Halifax in the wind and fog, slightly left of the localizer all the way down, with a conservative correction that brought me onto the centreline just as the approach lights became visible.

When Line Pilots Get Bored

I'm back at home and it's almost Christmas. In a burst of holiday spirit I drive into the city for shopping. This includes a stop at a Canadian Tire -- Canadian Tire ought to have its own blog category by now -- for a timer to turn the Christmas lights on and off at appropriate times of the night. Nothing like fire and forget seasonal cheer.

Driving in the city includes parking in the city, but Canadian Tire has a parking lot where they will validate parking, so it's free. That's a good deal and the not-terribly-spacious parking lot is full of people taking advantage of said deal. To facilitate traffic flow, there is a guy in a reflective vest directing drivers to open parking spots. He is a remarkably competent marshaller giving clear, unambiguous signals, and avoiding the aviation signals "your engine is on fire" or "start engines" that always make me giggle when I see them from policemen or others directing traffic. (Check out the link if you haven't seen the marshalling signals page in a while., They've improved the artwork and descriptions).

He has also spotted my aviation-themed licence plate frame and I confess to being an aviatrix. He's not familiar with the word, so I translate it as an old-fashioned word for pilot, the female equivalent of aviator. He muses that none of his female FOs has ever called herself that. Wait, what did he just say? No wonder he's so good at aircraft marshalling signals. He's an Air Canada captain. I'd love to chat to him longer, but he has a job to do. I'm left wondering how many ex-wives you have to have, or how bored you have to get, to get out of a B767 in order to direct cars at Canadian Tire. Whatever the reason, he was good at what he was doing and did it with a smile that made everyone's day better.

No, my licence plate frame does not say "I'd Rather Be Flying" or "Pilots Make Smoother Approaches." But speaking of approaches, today's was the full procedure ILS/DME RWY 14 into Halifax, under the weather conditions encountered by Air Canada Flight 646 the night they crashed in a go around. They had an eighth of a mile visibility so I dialed my landing visibility up to the advisory value of half a mile, so as to have a chance of landing. I went missed twice, one because it was unstable on the glideslope--pitch control again--over a mile back, and one pretty much exactly what the captain in AC646 saw: descending from minima with the runway in sight but not well enough aligned with the centreline to flare to land safely. That low level shear is very nasty. Then one good one with the autopilot, just to prove it could be done and another one hand flown to success, because no way am I going to let an autopilot outfly me.

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.

Uncanny Valley of Fiction?

This silly piece of fiction about Airline Pilots Behaving Badly showed up in a Google alert. I read it without context, at first thinking its author was trying to pass it off as a real cockpit experience. I started into it with squinty-eyes and a frown that my profession was represented this badly, and then with a different frown as I tried to find a decade when the details would have made any sense.

It doesn't take many details to realize that it is pure, and not very well-researched fiction. A drinks cart doesn't fit in a cockpit, and pilot seats do not adjust that way. The more inaccurate it became, the more I forgave it, until I got to the last line and burst out laughing, allowing me to retroactively enjoy the whole thing.

Funny that. It seems that if something is completely inaccurate, I can relax and enjoy it, but if it's close enough that it could be supposed to be real, then it's uncomfortable. The principle known as Uncanny Valley in animation applies to fiction as well? Or is that just me?

Oops, I just started blogging and I haven't done my sim yet. That's chronic, by the way. Whenever I feel like blogging I realize I haven't done my sim yet, so do I sim? No, I don't feel like simming when I feel like blogging. So instead I surf the Internet. When I feel like simming I sim, but when I'm done simming it's too late to blog, so I don't. I'm now only two days ahead of the proper date when it comes to writing up blog posts. But I'm practically current on the entire Cheezeburger Network. I'll have to come up with a new rule.

Running Targets

A couple of months ago I ran a 10 km race and although my finishing time was close to what I had predicted, it was nothing like what I used to be able to do. "Eh," I deceived myself. "I'm not training like I did back then. I could have pushed a bit harder. Just need to build up my conditioning." Yeah right. A few weeks later, I ran four hundred metres (a quarter mile), at what for me was flat out lung-bleedingly fast. And then I looked at the stopwatch and did some math. To be fair to me, there was a slight uphill grade, but were I able to sustain that near-sprint pace for ten kilometres (6 1/4 miles) I would finish five minutes behind the thirteen years ago me. I was never awed by my speed back then. If I placed well, I thought I was lucky that the fast people were having an off day, or at another race. And I remember even back then looking at the international 10k race winners' times and realizing that I couldn't run one kilometre at their average 10k pace. And I bet even now that there are people with no particular health problems who can't run a single block at my current 10k pace. Isn't it amazing to have so much variation in one species?

Why am I being so coy about my speed? It's not that I'm ashamed or secretive about my abilities, but that there is so much variation. I recently discovered that a friend had done a 10k and the time she was proud of was a third again longer than the time I was calling slow. So I'll just let us own travel at our own speeds and be proud of our own progress.

I've already taken thirteen seconds off that quarter mile, and have to go out with a GPS to find out what distances I'm running otherwise. I should also check out a library book on some kind of proper training regime, in case alternating running as fast as I can over short distances and as well as I can over long distances while hoping the two converge doesn't represent the latest in athletic science.

And today's simulated approach featured an arrival from the east to follow the 26 DME arc for the NDB/DME RWY 13R into Whitehorse. It's tricky because there's a 15 degree turn at the beacon just 3.3 nm from the threshold so you have to make the turn and track outbound to the missed approach point. I gave myself clear night skies and saw the runway ahead of me as soon as I made the turn. I'll have to do it again with poor weather to practice my outbound ADF tracking.

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.

Hercules Extras

There were so many things I learned about the Hercules C-130 and only so much room for asides during sim sessions that this topic has been held over for another blog entry. If you have any questions about the airplane that I can't answer, we can draw on John and knowledgeable readers to find out.

I feel a little guilty about setting a poor example, in that from beginning to end we had almost no plan for the sim session. The time, time of day and the like kept changing with no guarantee I would be able to actually fly it, so we never sat down to make a flight plan. An alternate titles for that blog entry was How Not to Fly an Unfamiliar Airplane. It worked out pretty well, but I wish I had done fewer turns and stalls so I had time for another circuit.

Wikipedia hosts this image of a C-130J HUD but it doesn't look exactly what I saw. I assume the display is somewhat user-customizable, as implied by this fascinating article about testing of the concept of using automation to reduce the number of crew members on board a Hercules. These testers didn't like the HUD as presented in their simulation, but it was simply superimposed over the scenery on the same screen, so not the same at all. I noticed, however, that the same technology was used at the instructor station in the sim I was in, for the instructor's view of what the pilots are seeing. I didn't realize until this experience how useful a HUD would be. Boss, if you're secretly reading my blog, you now know what I want for Christmas.

Looking for information to use to prepare myself for the sim, I found this document. It gives truly excellent advice, most of which is obvious to me now, but which I wish I had had prior to training for my first type rating. Unfortunately it is a companion to the computerized study materials on the C-130J and contains only generic advice, not the aircraft-specific information I sought. John couldn't give me the study CD, although it was probably copyright and not military classification that forbade the external release of the data.

Advice on pre-departure briefings is eye-opening, because of all the various hazards the crew might have to look at, especially flying in parts of the world with poor availability of weather forecasting. And this study question reminds me that there's a type of briefing I never get from Nav Canada when I call:

Before leaving home station on missions departing the CONUS, crews will receive a (an) ____________ briefing that will emphasize terrorist, enemy, and friendly political and military development in the area in which they will be flying.

I have the image of a METAR style symbology with teletype-style abbreviations representing the likelihood of various types of enemy action throughout the day, ending in, "and a thirty per cent probability of small children asking for chocolate and chewing gum in the streets during daylight hours."

Amusingly, one earlier commenter implied that one has to be an American citizen to fly a Hercules. Not true at all. While it is American designed and built, the aircraft is operated by so many countries, including my own, that the list itself has its own Wikipedia article and I don't care to count its members. One of the best summaries I saw of all the missions it can perform was in a magazine article on the use of the C-130 in Australia.

I have more information on those turns, including detailed pre-paradrop checklists and a description of approaching an aerodrome in IMC while staying inside the secured perimeter. I'm sure there are a lot of tricks this thing can do that aren't documented anywhere. It's a versatile airplane that has performed all kinds of missions, all over the world for over fifty years. But I bet it's a bitch and a half to deice in the winter, and good luck finding hangar space for it where I'm going next.

Happy New Year

I said I'd reveal New Year's resolutions, so I guess I'd better get something resolved before the new year arrives and it's time to enact them. I mostly know what I wish to achieve, and it's not really any different from what most people want to get out of themselves and their lives: physical fitness, good relations with friends and family, career success, life organization, and self-improvement. But wave those five around vaguely and nothing happens for me, though. I have to quantify my goals. New Year's resolutions are not like figure skating. So therefore:

In 2010:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There, that's a pretty bold list, and I'll probably frequently let myself get away with fulfilling #2 by cc:ing an e-mailed lolcat to seven people on a Friday, and #3 by chugging down the same saved-at-g/s-intercept ILS while waiting for hotel internet to connect. I'm not even sure whether #5 constitutes a get-out-of-one-through-four-free card when I can find a good adventures. But it's probably better than resolving to watch all six seasons of Lost. I may expand on some of these in later blog posts.

Oh and to the person who was so negative about New Year's resolutions in a previous year "because if you want to do a thing you should do it, not wait until the end or beginning of the year," these are all things I already try to do. Only the accountability is added.