Three Shades of Guilt

The ops manager asks me to come from the office into the hangar to look at something. That's not a really unusual occurrence, but what I see is a gouge under the wing of the airplane I flew back to base last night. The metal is creased in. Not sharply just enough to make it abundantly clear that this is not a mere paint scratch. I feel sick. This is the result of taxiing or towing the airplane such that the wingtip passes over an object, except that it doesn't pass over, it scrapes over. Obviously it's something that shouldn't happen, but when it does, the pilot should notice and report it. I have no memory of any incident on my just-returned-from rotation that could have caused this.

I look around the hangar at the equipment under the path that wing would have taken into the hangar. Nothing has paint scraped on it. I'm sure the ops manager can see my horror. I don't remember what I said. Either I did this or I missed seeing it on multiple preflight inspections. Either way I bear some responsibility. I care much less that a deer bashed in the side of my own vehicle the week before. This gouge, or some other wingtip damage I failed to spot could have been serous damage that I shouldn't have taken into the air. I'm very sure it isn't, but I'm not a structural engineer. It's not my job to make that call. Had I found it on a preflight there would have been iPhone pictures going to someone with a maintenance certification before I flew it.

I go back and look at the gouge. It is a little difficult to see, just because of the shape of the wing, and the colours of the paint, and my height. I always check wingtips for damage, because that's a common place to get damage on the taxi, in the hangar or while parked on the ramp. I always look at the underside of the wing, looking for blocked vents, signs of bird or insect entry and fluids from the engines splattered under the flaps. I'll look from the wingtip, under the wing and along the length of the spar for signs of airframe stress, but then my focus is not on the near underside of the wingtip. I have to duck down and look at it from a slightly different direction to see this gouge. So embarrassing as it is, I prefer to think that I missed seeing this as opposed to missed doing it.

But I fly this airplane a lot. Did I do it sometime in the past and the difficulty I have just argued for in seeing the gouge means that no one has caught it in months? I look even more closely to see if I can pretend to know the age of the damage from its appearance. And then I see something almost hilarious. Part of the reason the gouge is hard to see is that it has been painted over with touch up paint. I almost laugh. It's an old problem, one that has been inspected, written off and fixed up. It's even more embarrassing that I didn't see it, ever, but it's now certain that I didn't do it last night.

One of the regular maintenance staff says he thinks it's been there since we got the airplane. I think the ops manager is still suspicious that it represents mishandling of the airplane in the hangar, and a cover-up by someone in maintenance. Unfortunately at the time this story takes place we were having some issues there that made this not paranoia. I trust the guy who said it had been there all along, and not just because it conclusively gets me off the hook for having done the damage. He's a trustworthy person, but more than that, and I told him this myself so he knew I wasn't suspicious. "I've seen paint jobs that you have done and you would never have done such a crappy job." You can see every brush stroke and the colours are poorly matched.

Mitigate This

I'm definitely out of practice at my job. Oh I can fly the airplane fine, but I almost injured my wrist falling out of the hotel bed in the dark. I forgot that I don't get to sleep in the same bed twice in a row, and there isn't a ledge here. That has to happen periodically: flight crew injuring themselves badly enough while on the road that company has to send someone else out to fly the airplane home. In this case I remember in time while falling to just crash onto the floor and take it on my shoulder rather than try to catch my whole weight on my hand. Crazy reflex that probably works better in species with less complex wrists, and that run on four legs.

Dress, hotel breakfast, check out: I manage to remember the usual routine. Then it turns out company doesn't want us to take the airplane home. They want us to take it to another province. Okay, we can do that. Our current charts include those for the next province over. We can buy clean underwear there, too. After a week on the road we come home wearing Wal-Mart underwear and thrift store t-shirts, carrying our essential toiletries in now-battered plastic bags. I note once I get home that I have bruises on my legs. I always have bruises on my legs after road trips and I'd assumed before that it was from using my legs as a backstop and rebound point as I hurl my suitcase in and out of cabs, airplane and hotel room luggage racks. But there has been no suitcase this week. I have a new theory.

It's hotel room chairs. For some weird reason, few hotels spend any effort making their chairs match their desks in any way, so sometimes I have to grab a couple of pillows for the chair in order to work at a computer on the desk, and sometimes I can't jam my legs underneath the desk while sitting in the provided chair. Sometimes there's no desk at all and I move the TV to one side to do my paperwork on top of the piece of furniture that supports the TV. These hotel chairs usually have armrests, too, so my theory is that I bash my legs getting in and out of hotel chairs in awkward configurations with hotel desks. I don't bash them hard enough to make myself limp around yelling "ow" or to remember doing it, but just hard enough to come home with a week's worth of bruises.

I will also take this opportunity to complain about hotel lamps. This one has been festering for a while. In your own home you know which switches control what, but in a hotel ... you know what, this is going to take more time than I've got right now. It will have to fester a little longer. I will tell you about hotel lamps another time.

Duck!

I saw a very tall airline captain waiting for a hotel elevator today. "I hope you don't fly an RJ," I said to him, with a grin, thinking of the normal height flight attendant I'd seen recently, stooping during a meal service in the low-ceilinged CRJ-200 cabin.

"I do," he said, and stepped into the elevator with his crew before I could offer an appropriate commiseration.

Now there's a reason to pursue an upgrade.

I call the woman in charge of fuel here. There's a 20,000 litre capacity avgas tank at the airport, so assuming that there's an equal chance of any amount having being in it when we arrived, and knowing how much we take in a day, there's a fifty percent change of us alone running it dry in a week. There have been a few small singles in and out taking forty or a hundred litres at a time, too, and that also adds up. The administrator says she'll dip the tank and check. She can get an order delivered within a day of placing it, so now I won't have to worry about running out.

"My god they're throwing guitars out there"

This is everywhere today, but it's still great. My fellow Canadian, musician Dave Carroll, was sitting in an airplane at O'Hare when he heard those words from another passenger. But I don't need to tell the story, as the music video does it very effectively.

Apparently United now says they get it, and wants to use the video for in house training on how to handle a customer complaint. I'd say the price for that would be at least $1200, plus production costs. See Shiny Objects for more information and links to stories about the saga.

I started writing this with Dave Carroll's website open, but when I went to click a link it 403ed, and then after a few minutes started redirecting to his myspace page so I assume the singer's personal site has been overwhelmed. The band is Sons of Maxwell, and that site is still up and you can buy their music there.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ...Shhhh!

Pilots, mechanics and others in the air transport system are encouraged to report bird strikes whenever they occur, whether or not they damage the airplane. It's very simple. You fill out a paper or online form, either the Canadian Bird/Wildlife Strike Report or the USBird/Other Wildlife Strike Report. (The difference in the names of the forms apparently confirms the conclusion of this Onion cartoon: Canadian birds are not wildlife). You indicate things like where you were, the phase of flight, how many birds you saw and struck, what was damaged, and how much it cost the company in various ways. You can even send what's left of the bird in to have its age sex and species identified.

The government collects the data and from it can derive safety recommendations to pilots, strategies for bird reduction at airports, and determine the economic impact of birdstrikes. I suppose the data is also used by lobbyists, the news media, ornithologists, airport planners, people selling bird deterring devices, and anyone with an interest in birds, airplanes or the interactions thereof. It's like any other data the government collects: people use it to study things, convince people of things and write sensational news stories.

Well no more, at least not if you want to study the wildlife kind of birds. The FAA has announced plans to seal birdstrike report records. That's the USA Today story. The Federal Register notice is here (PDF). They say that releasing the details of birdstrikes could "produce an inaccurate perception" of the risks birds pose to airplanes and "unfairly cast unfounded aspersions on the submitter." They feel that that keeping the data secret would encourage more people to contribute to the voluntary database.

I had a discussion with some airline and media folks and to my surprise many thought it was a good idea to make the data secret. I assume the data will still be somehow available to the people who have to make spending decisions regarding bird deterrents, so it is just the secondary users of the data who will suffer having it withdrawn. But if the government collects the data, the government processes the data, the government allocates spending for birdstrike reduction and the government assesses the results, where does this leave the voters who have to evaluate the government? Will we be told if birdstrikes are up or down this year? That the bird eradication program is working? I offended someone in the earlier discussion who felt I was comparing soldiers to pigeons, when I said that hiding war casualty statistics might also alleviate fear in the population. They could just tell us that the surge is working. And it's not like the birds are going to study our statistics to find weaknesses in our defenses or exploit unease in the population. But regardless of the orders of magnitude separating A320 vs. pigeon from soldier vs. shrapnel, how is it a good strategy to restrict data about bad things in order to keep people from worrying about it?

Those that looked at the link for the US birdstrike form will have seen that, curiously, the data is collected by Embry Riddle University, not by the FAA itself. I suppose that will have to change. Or perhaps ER will collect the data, give it to the government and then also quietly give it to people with legitimate research uses for it.

Will the US now not comply with the ICAO birdstike reporting procedures? "Sorry, but that data is for our use only and cannot be shared with the international aviation community?"

The thrust of the supporters' argument seems to be that the media are morons ("a majority of press can’t even figure out where 12A is, much less know what type of aircraft they are flying") and might misinterpret the data to report that airline A or airplane Z was safer because it had fewer birdstrikes than the competition. Here's an article that discusses the "shocking" number of birds around airports. The limited ability of the media to understand a story on deadline is legend, but so is its short attention span, mirroring that of the public. I suspect the "airplane felled by birds" story has pretty much run its course and that if the FAA hadn't told them they couldn't look at it, media interest in the birdstrike database would have fallen to zero pretty quickly.

Pilots, would you be discouraged from filing a birdstrike report based on the possibility that the local paper would report "A struck a starling just below the windscreen on approach to today. The aircraft was not damaged and the pilot landed the airplane safely"? Naturally the article would quote a fuel truck driver saying "yup, those starlings are all over the place here," and wrap up by reminding readers that birds were responsible for the forced landing of a US Airways A320. I'd think it was pretty funny, even if the article said I "was unable to avoid" striking the bird, as if it was a matter of my competence at starling evasion.

I have some funny quotes about bird strikes and prevention measures, but I think I'll put them in another post, so as not to "discourage you from volunteering information" on the above question.

SkyCatcher Not Catching the Sky Properly?

Cessna introduced the SkyCatcher, a light sport plane, at Oshkosh this year, but it is not yet ready for market. Cessna had two prototypes, but both have been destroyed during flight testing. An aviation week article alerted me to the events of the second flight test accident.

It sounds like a pretty harrowing flight. The test pilot deliberately put the airplane into a spin "during a planned test condition" which I assume, possibly incorrectly, relates to a particular centre of gravity and weight combination. The entry would also have included a particular combination of flaps, power and attitude, inducing a stall with yaw, leading to a spin. The resulting spin was particularly rapid, and the proper control inputs did not cause the airplane to recover from the spin, so the test pilot activated the aircraft parachute.

It deployed correctly, and the airplane stopped spinning, so the test pilot then tried out another function of the new aircraft design: the ability to jettison the parachute and return to normal flying. But that function didn't work. Being a test pilot, he was wearing a personal parachute, too, but by the time he opened the door to use that, there wasn't enough altitude for it to open, so he landed, uninjured, with the parachuting airplane.

I'm intrigued by the NTSB investigator's statement that "surface winds inflated the parachute and drug the airplane." In standard my dialect of English, the past tense of drag is dragged but this writer has chosen "drug." I wonder if that is a regionalism.

The whole story is not a great ad for the SkyCatcher, but things going wrong in testing is why testing is necessary, and why you shouldn't fly your airplane in a non-certified condition.

And in the "ideas to save money" category, the Greater Toronto Airport Authority is talking about closing the Buttonville airport. Yes, they are considering closing the general aviation airport that keeps training, medevac and business flights out of Pearson, the busiest airport in Canada.

Preemptive Fire Suppression

Someone just sent me this link to a story with pictures about what happened to a United Airlines Boeing 767 that had just been refurbished with an all new interior and passenger entertainment system. It was sitting in the maintenance hangar in Chicago, almost ready to be released back to the line, when the hangar fire suppression system activated. It was the third erroneous activation of the system in as many weeks.

Now a hangar full of airplanes needs some serious firefighting capability. An airplane pulled in off the line with a problem may have thousands of pounds of jet fuel inside it, and a fire could kill dozens of workers. So this is not a sprinkler like the one in your office. This is an automatic deluge of thousand p.s.i. water cannons, blowing through eleven side windows and destroying the new interior, and the entertainment system. The list of resulting maintenance issues at the bottom of the page shows that the cockpit was also drenched, with radios and numerous avionics destroyed, including multiple computer display screens. Everything will need to be removed and cleaned, and a lot replaced, and likely the airplane will suffer from irritating avionics problems for years to come.

Word is that the fire system contract went to the lowest bidder.

It Started With Telemarketers

Canada recently instituted a nationwide do-not-call list for telemarketers. Apparently the US Congress recommended such a thing fifteen years ago, but the final decision was to have individual telemarketers maintain their own do-not-call lists. That is fairly stupid, because there are so many companies that you'd never get on all the lists before one company folded and reemerged as another, quite possibly using its old do-not-call list as its new list of hot prospects.

Canada's new do-not-call list is equally stupid. There's a website you can go to in order to register your number(s) as do-not-call and any Canadian telemarketing company or foreign company making calls on behalf of a Canadian corporation is supposed to check their list against the registered do not call numbers and not call them. They can be fined $1500 for calling me anyway, so it sounds like something with teeth, but it disregards the fact the telemarketing is a scummy industry, and it's implemented in a stupid way.

Instead of being required to submit their call lists to be checked and pruned against a master list, the companies are required to buy the master list. That's right, telemarketing companies can buy a list of every Canadian who has asked not to be called by telemarketers. And the way the system works, the larger the company, the more they have to pay for the list. So of course what has happened is that little tiny companies open for the sole purpose of buying the list for cheap, and then selling it offshore where they can call me with impunity.

I got a call today, one of those machines calling. It told me that a friend had entered my name at the Bay or Zellers and that I had won a trip to Costa Rica. Now the Bay and Zellers are Canadian companies, and my friends are smart enough not to enter me in dubious contests, so I knew this was not above board. I pressed 1 to talk to a customer service representative. He had an impenetrable accent, so I couldn't understand his name, nor the name of the company calling when I asked for it. I think he may have made it deliberately unintelligible because when I asked him to spell it, he said for more information he would have to transfer me. Transferring is good, because the higher up the chain of command you get, the more of a nuisance you are able to be. In order to transfer me he wanted to know my name. I told him I wasn't giving him my name because he called me and therefore the onus was on him. He said he had to have my name to transfer me, so I told him sarcastically it was Jane Smith. He either didn't or chose not to recognize that as a default generic name and accepted it, but then wanted to know if I had more than $5000 in credit card debt. I told him I didn't give out that kind of information, just to transfer me please. He tried a few more times to get me to tell him. I told him the answer was Mu. He insisted on a yes or a no, and when I made it clear I wasn't giving it out, he hung up on me.

Scumbucket telemarketing company. This sort of thing is bad for my blood pressure or something, I'm sure. The *69 call told me that the call was from 616-980-2643 which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their service provider is named Lucre but the company name is ex-directory. Michigan has do-not-call laws protecting Michigan consumers, but what can I do about it? Global telecommunications is such that every single country in the world would have to be signatory to a global death-to-telemarketers pact before do-not-call registries are of any use whatsoever. I can't screen my calls by number, because I get calls from all over and who knows when some pilot friend is calling from a hotel or an FBO in Grand Rapids telling me they are coming north and can I meet for lunch? And screening by always letting the machine pick up also causes you to miss important calls from people who want to talk to you now or not at all. I could solve this with technology, but it's not just about telemarketing.

While I was still fuming about this, a story came on the radio about a chemical plant in Canada that had been sold to someone in Edmonton who just walked away from the responsibility of the plant when the economy took a nosedive. No payroll no forwarding address no nothing. Because I live in a modern, responsible country, the government stepped in with an emergency order asking the workers to stay at work and make sure that the plant didn't just explode, or pump hazardous chemicals into the environment or become the incubation ground for a new Batman villain, or whatever happens to untended chemical plants. I'm not sure anyone knows. The government then tried to track down the owner of the company and apparently the trail ends in Slovenia.

That's the way the world is these days. I'm horrified to think of what is happening in countries with lesser ability to step in and deal with this kind of situation. A Canadian company could just walk away from responsibility in Zaïre and who is going to be able to do anything or even know? Someone knows, and with today's global communication I'm sure I could find dozens of such cases documented by concerned individuals, but how is anyone to distinguish real should-be-crimes from made-up stuff posted on the loony websites of whacko sky-is-falling nutjobs? And even if the whole world knows, who can prosecute or hold to account a numbered Uzbekistani company with investors listing addresses in Slovenia, Paraguay and Delaware? For countries that have environmental regulations, it would be possible to require, as part of the initial environmental permitting process for new facilities, the posting of a bond sufficient to safely close down production and clean up the area in the event of abandonment or catastrophe, but that would be a large amount, and the savvy investor would just build the facility in a jurisdiction with a more short-sighted desperation for jobs.

Anything that happens in the world affects the whole world these days. The working conditions and pay at your job may be cantilevered by unions and government regulations, but ultimately in the global economy it is dependent on what the most desperate person will accept. And that person can be anywhere in the world. We can't just fix our own countries. We have to fix the whole world to get this to work. How do you fix the whole world? Historically, the spread of law has followed conquering armies. I don't think conquering the world for freedom from telemarketers is the way to go here. More optimistically, manufacturing and environmental standards also spread by economic pressure. The kids who grew up in the Cold War had it good. They knew they'd be wiped out by the Bomb. Me, I can't figure out which worldwide disaster to be concerned about.

The telemarketing part had a happy ending. I called the Bay's customer service and they efficiently transferred me to a customer service rep who knew about the usurpation of the company's name and assured me that their loss prevention department was working with the relevant authorities to stop the telemarketers, who apparently were also fraudsters. I assume they are going to nuke them from orbit, so if you live in Grand Rapids, you should probably go out of town for the weekend. And if you comment on this blog entry, do take into account that the official Posterperson for Readers of Aviatrix's Blog is employed in the telemarketing business, so any comments demonizing all telemarketers will not be taken well.

The Last Reason for Roman Numerals

That would be Super Bowl XLIII. It's like the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, for American football. I have to admit I've never watched an American football game before. But indications are that the Super Bowl isn't so much about the football as about the marketing and the hype. And seeing as I'm in the USA, the commercials would be the "real" $5-million Super Bowl commercials. (In Canada they are replaced by ordinary commercials, marketing to Canadians). Plus it won't hurt to know enough about the game to have something to talk to my customers about. Guys apparently have to watch a certain amount of football in order to maintain testicular size, and my customers are all guys.

I only saw a few commercials. I stop watching by habit when the commercials came on, and kept forgetting that I was supposed to be checking them out. What did I learn? Some beer makes it summer wherever you drink it. Some beer is more watery (they call it drinkability) than other beer. Other beer (or possibly the same beer) has nice talking horses. Trucks with aluminum transmissions can drive uphill through fiery tunnels (actual demonstration). Drive recklessly enough and maybe the mouth will fall off the woman who is nagging you to slow down. (I'm hoping that one wasn't a beer or a car commercial). If roadies flew aircraft the runway lights would explode during take-off. (I think that one was an ad for a telephone or an internet provider). Pepsi is now teaching the world to sing. I was completely baffled what one ad was for, and then visited the site. Headsnap! It's a "discreet dating service for married people." A domain reseller (which coincidentally my employer uses) will enhance your assets, or possibly cause women to flash their tits at you. There will be a special edition of The Office on later. Thank you for watching and congratulations to the winning team.

I didn't perceive a level far above regular commercials. The money is in the audience not the production. I suppose the boob flashing was a wink to the halftime "wardrobe malfunction" of a few years ago. I'm guessing the broadcasting standards haven't changed in XLIII years? Considering the audience, a topless halftime show ought to be a hit. I guess it's too early in the evening to show skin on network TV. But if they can digitally put markings and advertisements on the field, they can digitally put bikinis on the performers. I can't see anyone in the target audience being really offended, and I bet more people would watch.

It's too bad the athletes have to be so heavily padded so you can't see the shape of their bodies. I understand it's to prevent injury on the field, but how about if they take off their helmets and shirts at the end of the game. All that time in the weight room just for hitting each other and running around? C'mon, show some muscles. I think I like sports where everyone wears spandex better. Yes, that's right, she watches one football game and she's going to tell you how it should be done.

Except I tuned in to watch a cultural event, and a football game broke out. You don't need to know anything about a game to realize that when there's two minutes left and the score is really close, and the ball is right on the edge of where the team that is behind needs to put it to get ahead, it's exciting. The yellow team guy threw the ball and another yellow team guy caught it, and the red team guys jumped on him. And then they did it again but this time the yellow team guy ran a longer way and caught the ball before the red team guys jumped on him. (But not nearly as far as the guy who earlier ran all the way from one end of the field to the other without getting knocked down). Next they threw the ball to a yellow team guy who was in the goal area, but he missed it, but being American football they got a fourth try, and this time the guy caught it. He then got knocked out of bounds, but apparently that was alright. The red team guys got a try at throwing the ball then, but there were only about 30 seconds left and someone caught it wrong or something and they did not get any more goals so the yellow team won. It was very exciting, I assure you.

A behind-the-scenes quirk that amuses me, but that veteran Super Bowl watchers probably know, goes back to the theme of people without shirts on. In anticipation of one of the teams winning, the marketing people print up gazillions of shirts and other merchandise proclaiming each team the champions. As soon as they find out which team is the loser, they deliver all the correct merchandise to where it can be sold to fans, and then send all the stuff with the wrong team declared the champion off to destitute people in refugee camps and disaster zones, where they care even less than I do who won the game, but presumably can clothe a family of five with a couple of 3XL football shirts, a baseball cap and a foam #1 finger. I'm not certain the foam fingers go to the third world, but the hats and ball caps do.

Go team! And they're getting bigger already, I can tell. See?

For television coverage of a different event, you can see the 60 Minutes interview with Captain Sullenberger and his crew online.

So Mosquito Netting Won't Work, Eh?

I do have some December flying stories to write up and post, but I am still reading and thinking about the US Airways ditching, so they can wait a few days more.

People ask why they couldn't just put screens in front of the engines to keep the birds out. I suppose people are envisioning the sort of things you staple around your eaves to keep the birds from flying in and nesting. One letter to the editor of the New York Times compared the concept to that of cowcatchers. Let's compare. A cow weighs about 500 kg. A locomotive tops out around 80 mph, or 36 m/s. The kinetic energy of a moving object is 1/2 m v², so for the locomotive-cow collision that's 0.5 x 500 x 36 x 36 = 324 kilojoules, if I have my units right. I'm told the A320 is going to be climbing out at about 250 knots (corrected from a conservative or 210) or 128 m/s. A Canada goose weighs in at around 5 kg. Put those two together and we have a kinetic energy of 41 kJ. So the energy that must be dissipated when a slowly climbing airplane hits a single goose hits is about an eighth that of a speeding train hitting a cow. Could a structure be built over engine intakes so as to absorb that energy?

The structure would have to span what is about a two metre diameter across the intake, be strong enough to withstand bird strikes and never itself shed foreign objects into the engine. If you're having trouble believing that eight birds in the air equals one cow on the tracks, type "birdstrike" into Google's picture search for images proving that birds penetrate windshields, radomes and wings. This giant screen would have to have small enough holes not to let birds pass through, yet large enough holes to not impede airflow to the engine. That combination is an impossibility, as anything in front of the engine impedes airflow, so either the engine would have to be bigger or the performance of the airplane less, in order to compensate. I don't have the flow dynamics knowledge to begin to construct equations for this, but LTV Aerospace Corp. figures it's feasible, and here's a 2001 patent for a retractable bird deflector grille. I do know that tiny changes to an airframe, such as an angled piece of metal the size of half a Ritz cracker, can make huge differences in handling and controllability, so that even if such a structure were built, the whole airplane might have to be redesigned around it.

A reporter tried to answer the screens question live on CNN while I was watching, and he first admitted he didn't know, and then speculated that accumulated debris would block airflow into the engines. Not a bad speculation. The screens would have to have some way of preventing ice formation, probably by being electrically heated, so that chunks of ice neither blocked the intake nor fell through the engines. Heating the intake air would decrease engine performance, however, and heating a screen that size and weight would take a lot of power.

A lot of thought has gone into birds damaging engines. A Wall Street Journal article pointed me to the lengthy FAA rules governing the testing of engines against birdstrikes. Here are some excerpts.

All ingestion tests must be conducted with the engine stabilized at no less than 100-percent takeoff power or thrust, for test day ambient conditions prior to the ingestion. In addition, the demonstration of compliance must account for engine operation at sea level takeoff conditions on the hottest day that a minimum engine can achieve maximum rated takeoff thrust or power.

The impact to the front of the engine from the large single bird, the single largest medium bird which can enter the inlet, and the large flocking bird must be evaluated.

Medium bird engine tests shall be conducted so as to simulate a flock encounter, and will use the bird weights and quantities specified in Table 2. When only one bird is specified, that bird will be aimed at the engine core primary flow path; the other critical locations on the engine face area must be addressed, as necessary, by appropriate tests or analysis, or both. When two or more birds are specified in Table 2, the largest of those birds must be aimed at the engine core primary flow path, and a second bird must be aimed at the most critical exposed location on the first stage rotor blades. Any remaining birds must be evenly distributed over the engine face area.

The specs include tables of bird weights and numbers and expected performance that any engine must meet before certification. And it has to be said, because this is the internet and someone else is going to say it if I don't: "chicken cannon." Yes, they actually fire (already dead) poultry at airplane components to test them. And no, it isn't always necessary to thaw the chicken first.

Quantum of Solace

Naturally I had to see the latest James Bond movie, despite the poor reviews it has had, and so naturally I have to blog about it, or at least about the parts with airplanes in them. This entry doesn't contain plot spoilers, mainly because the movie doesn't have much of a plot. It was mainly a series of locations and stunts. I do reveal how one of the action sequences ends, and you might be able to infer from the post whether or not the bad guy gets his come-uppance in the end.

James Bond continues to live the high life, and the producers continue their association with Virgin Atlantic, leaving Bond to enjoy a cocktail in the fancy upper deck bar of a VA B747, en route to Bolivia. According to VA, you can actually get the Vesper cocktail on board, or if your first class travel plans don't involve VA, the link includes the recipe so you can mix your own. The scene is shot in a Virgin Atlantic cabin crew trainer near Gatwick. VA doesn't fly to Bolivia, but they did fly a charter to Panama for the film.

Every pilot who has ever flown outside the United States will cringe as Bond butchers the callsign of a British registered Challenger jet, reading off the registration as "Golf Zero Charlie Sierra Delta" when it's clearly a British registered jet, and contains only letters. It has to be "Golf Oscar." It's a mistake that American air traffic controllers make, but Bond is supposed to be a British secret agent, and qualified pilot. There's a slight possibility that the gaffe is an intentional shoutout to sponsor Coke Zero, but I doubt it because the Challenger in question is a real airplane, really operated by Ocean Sky, as it as in the movie, so the callsign is genuine, not scripted. The properties list must have simply called for "a business jet" however, because while Bond departs Haiti in a Challenger, he taxies to the ramp in Austria in a Lear. I guess he did one of his mid-flight air-to-air transfer stunts but it was left on the cutting room floor.

I can't complain about airplanes in this movie though, as the best scene in the movie was a good long segment of aerial combat with Bond in a DC-3 versus the bad guy in a Marchetti. The DC-3 mainly gets shot up, trying to evade its pursuer with some low canyon flying, which was real. Here's a clip showing the DC-3 owner and pilot, Skip Evans, including some shots of them filming the stunt. Yikes. I wouldn't fly like that in any airplane I know, and there he is doing it in a DC-3. That's why the chief pilot reams you out for 'pulling a stunt' when you do something stupid. I'm not criticizing: stunt flying is a whole different standard.

During the chase, smoke starts pouring out of one of the engines and then Bond moves a cockpit lever forward. The smoke increases, blinding the pursuer, and our heroes gain some headway. There's a momentary shot of an aircraft placard reading "feathering pump not fused." Bear in mind that I only saw the movie once, and that there's a known deficiency of the human memory to sequence events that happened in quick succession. At the time I was watching I either didn't notice the smoke before the lever movement, or didn't mark it as unusual --it's a DC-3 after all: I was in the yard of a large DC-3 operator watching flames coming out of an engine during start up, and no one who worked there thought it a noteworthy event. It initially looked like Bond moved a lever forward and smoke poured out of the engine. It had looked like a propeller lever, but I speculated that it was a mixture lever and he was enriching the mixture so much the engine smoked. It wasn't a mixture lever though, so then I'm wondering maybe it was both props, just before increasing throttle, but they cut away before they showed that part?

The "feathering pump" placard had me wondering what that had to do with anything. I found an online DC-3 manual and the Propeller section confirms that the electrical feathering pump indeed has no circuit protection. It is an electric oil pump that uses high oil pressure against a piston in the propeller hub to drive the propeller blades to the feathered position. When the piston reaches the stop, oil pressure continues to increase. At 600 psi the pump trips offline.

More details than most people want on such things, from a Dutch accident report:

The system is powered by an electrically driven gear type oil pump controlled from the cockpit by momentarily pressing the feathering button in the overhead panel. An electrical solenoid will keep the feathering button in the depressed position. This action will activate the feathering pump, which is mounted on the front side of the fire wall. The pump takes oil from a separate part of the engine oil tank and feeds it under high pressure, while hydraulically disconnecting the governor by shifting its high pressure transfer valve, to the propeller blade angle changing mechanism in the propeller dome. This high pressure oil acts on the aft side of the propeller piston forcing the piston to its maximum stop. This movement of the piston turns the blades, via a bevel geared cam and bevel gear segments on the blades, from the actual blade angle through the coarse blade angle range to a blade angle of 88°, which is the feathered position in which the blades are streamlined in the flight direction. When the piston is at this maximum forward position the feathering oil pressure will rise. At about 600 psi a pressure cut-out switch in the feathering oil line, mounted on the governor will automatically switch off the electric power to the solenoid of the feathering button, releasing this button and interrupting electrical power to the feathering pump. Feathering takes approximately four seconds.

In all likelihood, any cockpit lever movements were just an actor moving things to be dramatic, and the placard was just in the shot because it was in the cockpit and required for FAA certification and I wasn't supposed to take anything from any of it. Here's a clip from the scene, but it doesn't show the levers being moved. [The movie was embedded in this blog, but it was redirecting people who didn't have the right plug-ins, so I took it out.]

Here is a clip showing the

At the end of the sequence, Bond pulls the DC-3 up into a vertical climb and then he and the female lead escape out the back using a single parachute, which opens less than ten metres from the ground, but they are both okay. Mercifully the now-unmanned airplane crashes off camera. I didn't want to watch a DC-3 airframe destroyed for the purpose of a movie, even if it was just a junkyard hulk.

From a James Bond movie I don't expect any more than I got in the way of plot. It had a twist, but it didn't make any difference. For me the movie suffered from too much punching and smashing and not enough smarts and witty banter. An added DVD feature for movies could be the optional display of countdown timers during action sequences: Plot Resumes in 3:38, so that those of us who are only interested in who wins the punching know we have time to go to the refrigerator. To be fair, there could be a similar countdown on talky exposition scenes: Action Resumes in 2:59, so the guys would know when it was safe to go for a beer without missing anything they like.

My favourite line came from M, right after what I'll call the unexpected end to their torture session. I won't spoil it, because it may have been the most unexpected moment in the film. I thought the make-up job for one character's supposed burn scar was poor. Until the character history was revealed, I thought it was a coverup for a tattoo on the actress. There was a nice visual and thematic Goldfinger reference, and they did a good job of following that theme through the movie, right to the final revenge.

High Crash Location

Moose kill more people than bears in northern Canada.

Sometimes along the side of the highway they'll post a silhouette of a moose about to cross the road. I'm not sure if they are intended as a reminder to be vigilant, or as a kind of reward for the vigilant driver who keeps scanning the shoulders for a wildlife ambush. Sort of the way they plant real drugs in suitcases to give drug-sniffing dogs a payoff from time to time and keep them from getting bored.

Highway and Ravens

I hang out in the Regina airport for a bit, before I go through security. I buy postcards. And then some bizarre female hormonal fluctuation requires me to buy cute things. It must be some chemical mechanism designed to protect babies or something, but it is seriously miswired. I bought a fuzzy little Canada Goose stuffed toy and a girlie purse, neither of which I have any use for, especially in Grande Cache. But they are cute. And they were even on sale. At least they both fit in my carry on.

Did I mention I'm having a bad technology day? The lifting handle broke off my main suitcase, and the extendable handle snapped on one side. That's checked now, so I don't have to worry about it until lately, but it turns out that I still have my car key in my pants pocket and my coin purse too. I have a routine of where I put everything, and I never carry these things in my pockets, which is why I forget to take them out of my pocket before going through security. So I get beeped by the scanning machine. I apologize, go back, empty my pockets into a tray, go through again without beeping, and then try to recapture my interrupted routine. I do. Right down to not picking up the key and coins that I never have in my pockets and therefore aren't part of my reclaiming from the bins at airport security routine. Fortunately I remember them before the flight is called (because I'm playing with my cute new purse) and when I go back, security has kept them safe for me. Yay for CATSA.

My carry-on fits in the overhead bin, of both the Rj and the connecting Dash-8, although I have to convnce the flight attendant that it will. Flights are both quick and uneventful. The landing on the second flight is good enough that the flight attendant actually looks up in surprise and mentions it to me. I'm sitting in 1C, right in front of her jumpseat. Someone else is starting a good landing streak. I was going to tease the pilots that they should land harder so people can tell we're down, but I didn't see them. I had to go and rent a car. You cross the street to do that at Edmonton.

The Hertz counter is right in the middle. I give my name and say I have a reservation. As I start the paperwork, I mention that my coworker will be driving the car back. The agent doesn't like that idea. "He has to be here to sign the agreement."

I explain that the car exchange will take place in Grande Cache, where there is not a Hertz office. She is not sympathetic. I ask to take a copy of the form and have the other driver sign it and fax it in before driving the car. This won't do because Hertz has to verify the driving licence. I suggest that a copy of that be faxed, too. She counters that the copy could have been made just before the licence was suspended. Okay, what if I had an RCMP officer notarize the copy? She's not budging. I can tell by now that the Hertz agent wouldn't rent a car to her own deity if He wasn't able to produce the documentation she wanted. I tell her that's not acceptible to me, and I go and try the other counters.

"If I rent a car here, can my coworker drive it also without additional paperwork?"

The answer ranges from "Yes, but we only have a Mustang convertible," to "Yes, but we don't have any cars." Avis is incredulous that Hertz won't rent me the car. So this is policy is not based in any kind of law or Alberta insurance requirement. I call the Hertz nationwide line in hopes of finding someone who is permitted to think. But I get exactly the same answer.

"Why is a driver's licence verification from the RCMP not sufficient?"

"The RCMP doesn't have anything to do with Hertz." Neither will I, if I can help it. I ask to escalate the call to the next level. While I'm on hold for that I wander over to the Avis counter with a business card and ask to be put on a standby list for an available car.

The next level up on the customer service hierarchy is no more help. We do locate the nearest Hertz offices to Grande Cache, a couple of hours drive in each case. I suppose I can drive my coworker there, then both drive back. I imagine most people just ignore whose name is on the contract and Hertz' silly rules. But it's rough country. I don't want to have a car I rented hit an animal or something and not be insured.

I go back to the Avis counter. "You could have a car back any time now, right?"

"We have one right now."

"Thank you!" I beam. "Just a moment while I go and let Hertz know I won't need their car." Pause. "EVER!" I do that, and I'm on my way.

It's about five hours drive to Grande Cache. I skirt Edmonton itself and get onto the northwest-bound Yellowhead Highway. It's an excellent road: divided highway, two lanes each way, good pavement. Alberta has money to spend on infrastructure. Just past Hinton, where I had dinner at a Greek restaurant, I take a left turn onto highway 40. It still has reasonably good pavement, but is a narrower two lane road with almost no shoulder. I can tell before I see the yellow road signs that I need to be very, very careful of wildlife on this road. I'm in a small rental car in a wilderness park, and there are likely moose, elk, deer and bear around here, all itching to cross the road, or just to wander along it.

Now, a wild animal encountering a road doesn't have the same thought processes as a human who has to cross a road, or even as a cat. I think a cat gets the concept of the road being a strip of danger that it has to traverse quickly without being caught by the cars. But a deer? A deer does not get the concept of traffic. A deer will bounce onto the road in front of you, then bounce towards you, then stand stock still, then bounce away, and then bounce right back in front of you again. Deer would not score well in Frogger.

It's not dark yet, but it will be twilight soon and I have an hour and a half to drive on this road. Watching the road and the shoulders for wildlife is a bit like doing an instrument scan while flying. Left ditch, road, right ditch, road, left ditch, road, right ditch, road. I turn a corner and spot my first wildlife. It's a raven, much smarter than a deer, and it hops off the road as I approach. My line of vision passes beyond it and lights on a group of several more ravens, all standing on the corpse of what looks like an elk. I wonder whether the animal was struck on the road and scrambled off but didn't quite make it to the trees before dying, or whether it was struck and killed, and either the driver or the highways people just hauled it to the side of the road.

I'll bet this car wasn't tested with the moose crash test dummy that Volvos are. (If you don't read that whole report, you should at least know the best line: "In Australia, tests with kangaroo dummies are hard to generalize due to a very dynamic centre-of-gravity." Boing, boing, boing!

The same scene is repeated about 30 kilometres later, on the other side of the road. Another dead deer or elk, hard to tell, lies in the long grass, with ravens feasting on it. The third dead hulk I encounter by the side of the road is that of a demolished car. I wonder if I'm far enough north now that all carcasses, animal mineral or vegetable, are not hauled away, merely pushed off to the side and left there. You get far enough north and at an airstrip you will find the remains of any airplanes that have ever crashed there, either on the apron or in the bush just past the area that is cleared at the sides of the runway.

I arrive at Grande Cache without having hit any elk, ravens or other vehicles just before dark. Phew.

Aww rats! As I write this up I'm watching a movie, and what was either a flubbed line or a script error just spolied a good laugh. The movie investigators are looking for someone who birthplace they have discovered was in the former Yugoslavia. One agent is telling the others that he has already reached contacts in the relevant agencies in "Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina." A funny jab at the continued balkanization of the Balkans, and would have made the agent look smart, being able to keep up with all that too except that we know Bosnia and Herzegovina to be the name of one country. To emphasize the length of the list, the line should have been "... and Bosnia and Herzogovina." It's a Canadian movie, too, I'm pretty sure, because part of it is set in Iqaluit. A Canadian version of Outbreak with a weird mafia twist. I'm going to assume the writer got it right, the actor didn't know that B&H was one country, and the editor, or whatever you call that job in a movie, missed it.

Appropriately enough, the movie featured an ancient disease being spread by northern birds feasting on a corpse.

Clunk, Part I

Despite local doubt in our ability to progress, we taxi out at Oneonta. I get Lite Flyer to make the call, and she says something reasonably similar to "backtracking" before we enter the runway and taxi out. I think she had me do that takeoff but I don't remember. I remember watching the trees pass below as we climbed out over them, with my hand guarding the throttle while I waited for a suitable altitude and position to pull the throttle back to climb power. The motto on the airport sign was City of the Hills but there are still landable fields around, and where there aren't, there are lakes. It's very freeing having any calm water be a suitable landing site!

The airplane has two throttle levers, one for my right hand and on on the other side for Lite Flyer's left hand. That's a kind of odd thing, because you can have your hand over the throttle and someone else can move it. Lite Flyer hasn't scared me yet, though, because she makes very gradual throttle movements. She has to watch out when she is levelling off because this airplane has enough power to go through Vne in level flight at climb power. The manufacturer's checklist has "flaps as required" after takeoff and "flaps up" in the cruise checks. I have been "requiring" them up in the after takeoff checks, as it would be very easy to overspeed them at level-off. While I'm on the topic of cockpit controls, I'll make it clear that the airplane has dual sticks. The shared controls include the brakes and the trim. The brakes are operated with two hand levers that would fall under my left wrist if I had an armrest. There is one brake on each main wheel, with a separate lever for each. I push the levers forward to brake, a little counterintuitve at first, especially as the levers sit right where I might expect throttles to. The trim is a stubby lever right between the brake levers. It's probably my least favourite control, but I talked with the manufacturer and he tried it in a number of places and that seemed to be the best of a bad list for airplanes that required full dual controls. If the airplane was to be fitted with only one set of controls he could put the trim on the side and that worked better. The trim lever is quite stiff while the controls are very light, so I find that in this airplane I more often 'trim and test' and trim again than trim to what I feel right away. That may also be the fault of the fact that a very small travel of the trim lever makes a big difference to the trim.

I'm expecting four to five thousand foot ceilings for the latter half of our flight, but the winds will be so much better at 5500' that I ask Lite Flyer to climb that high. Reaching 4500' I hear a change in the engine sound that I couldn't testify actually occurred, but that I don't like. Maybe it's just the batteries running low in my noise cancelling headset. Or it's all in my head like the "automatic rough running" you get over inhospitable terrain. I look at the gauges. The cylinder head temperature and oil temperature are high, just as one would expect in a steady climb. They are no higher than they have been in other climbs, but something tells me I don't like it. I ask her to level off for a moment, and set cruise power, just to let the engine cool off a little. So sue us if we're at a wrong way altitude.

The engine changes sound as she sets cruise power, of course, and now I can't say if I still hear or if I ever heard anything I didn't like. We continue at that altitude for a while and the engine temperatures come back down exactly as one would expect. The engine does absolutely nothing unexpected. I feel rebellious and exposed at the wrong-way altitude--going northeast we should be at 3500' or 5500', not 4500'--but I don't tell her to climb again. There are a few clouds above us and she is uncomfortable flying when her visibility is not 360 degrees. And for that matter I can already see that the forecast lower ceilings are going to occur. But I don't ask her to descend, because the terrain ahead will be higher and altitude is life insurance. Plus I want that tailwind. I just can't believe that we are this far north and could still run afoul of a tropical storm.

Winds are just about perfect here, giving us groundspeeds over 80 kts. We reach the New York-Vermont border perhaps an hour and a half after takeoff. I muse to Lite Flyer, somewhat puzzled, about the scepticism that we would make it this far. "They have airplanes. Do they only fly around in circles and not know how small the states are here?"

The ski hills start at the Vermont border, but I quickly see that I have nothing to fear terrain wise. The ski resorts are on ridges which themselves are neither very high nor very wide, and the terrain between them is flat and cleared. I didn't even detour from the straight line route through the pass as I had planned. There was an area beyond the ski resorts where the terrain became crinkly for a while, but its saving grace was that it was dotted with lakes. With this airplane, lake equals landing site.

We continue over an area marked on the chart for heavy glider use, but we spot no gliders. Vermont turns into New Hampshire, which looks the same but is flatter and has bigger lakes. I am tempted to go down and do a touch and go on one, just for fun. The wind is still at our backs, the GPS tells us we'll be in Maine within both daylight and fuel range, and all is well. And then there is a loud clunk.

Lite Flyer had the controls, but we both heard the clunk. "What was that?" she asks me.

No bullshit from me. "I don't know. Was there any feeling from the controls when it happened?"

Nothing. She heard the sound, but the airplane didn't jerk. The engine gauges haven't budged, and the engine is running smoothly. I take control and gently test the control authority about each axis. There is no binding, no difference from before. I direct Lite Flyer to look out her side as I look out mine, for anything flapping, damaged, bent, odd in any way. Neither of us can see anything. All the flying wires we can see are intact. The wheels are still visible outside the windows. There are no feathers or blood on the visible airframe. The baggage is secure, has not shifted, and is composed of small cloth knapsacks, anyway. There's nothing to go clunk.

And it was definitely a clunk, not a snap, not a whump. I'll leave you in suspense for a while to wonder, as we did what that clunk was. I did find out. And let me tell you, my mouth went dry.

Second Class Citizen

So, having passed the portion of the flight test that takes place on the ground, I head out to the airplane. You don't go flying unless you pass on the ground.

When we get to the airplane, the examiner surprises me by pointing to parts of the airplane and asking me questions about them. Not that I mind, I know the systems well; it surprises me that he thought there was a reasonable chance of an instructor candidate not being able to identify and describe the function of a wing root cabin air intake, the filtered air intake, the alternator belt and the underwing fuel tank vent. He is satisfied with my answers, although I have to think a moment about whether the overvoltage light will go on in this aircraft in the case of a broken alternator belt. I hold his door for him, let him know the seat is adjusted full aft, and start to explain how to get in, as if he were a student. That's okay, he says, just get in. "I take it you decline the passenger briefing?" I ask.

"Offered and declined," he says, a mental tick in a box. "I want to spend as little time as possible in these things."

I start up, get taxi clearance and taxi out. He asks for a soft field takeoff, my favourite, and I demonstrate one. Next he wants me to teach him straight and level flight. I show him how to use the trim, and chastise him for looking inside the cabin for it. He makes it easy to pretend he is really a student, as he's a good roleplayer, so I just relax and do what I am good at. He asks me to demonstrate some maneuvers, teach others and evaluate others as he does them. He demonstrates a beautiful perfect steep turn and I tell him he would get a four out of four for it on a flight test. steep turn pretty much perfect, Mine was not as good. I am hamfooted, if that's a word: hamfisted with my feet. The airplanes I fly for work need bootsful of rudder, whereas this little airplane needs me to merely think about the rudder for it to be too much rudder.

As we approached the airport he said that he would do the landing and that I should assess him, as I would before a first solo to see if he was ready to go on his own. I give him control and see that he is set up very high for the field. I ask him matter-of-factly (not with the "you might want to think about this" edge in my voice that an instructor uses when hinting) what flap setting he plans to land with, and what he planned touchdown point is. He says twenty degrees flap, and the beginning of the third centreline stripe. Both are reasonable choices, although I don't usually teach a student to land with more than ten degrees flap until after first solo. I look at his eyes to make sure he keeps a proper lookout, He keeps his hand on the throttle and makes small, necessary corrections around all three axes of movement and with the power. He is on track for a for a flawless landing. He carries it to the runway like that and at the last moment I realize what he is going to do. I brace and put my hand ready to grab the yoke, even though I know that he won't carry through and do what a student might do.

The airplane rounds out sightly and then meets the runway smack!. The nosewheel comes down at the same moment as the mains. It's a perfectly calculated bad landing. I'm not sure I could do a bad landing so well. I say nothing until we have taxied clear of the runway, then I take control and debrief him, praising him for setting up a perfect approach and telling him--as the student--that he will be rewarded for all his good work on the approach if he just holds the airplane off the ground a little longer. I tell him as the examiner that if I were supervising a new instructor with this student I would tell her that she could solo him as soon as he was holding the nosewheel off right through touchdown, and that if that was achieved in the next three lessons, I did not need to fly with the student again.

In the real debrief he tells me that when he does that stunt, many candidates will criticize him for landing long on that exercise. He always responds with "you didn't tell me where to land." So I have scored points for determining where the student planned to put the airplane. I criticize myself for my poor rudder work, and he agrees that that is the worst thing. I am praised for being articulate, adaptable, and am criticized for using trigonometry during the briefing. I admit that I put in the trig because he was pretending to be an instructor and am surprised when he says that knowledge is not necessary, even for an instructor. Not everyone agrees that trigonometry is a beautiful thing and should be exercised whenever possible.

It was one of the most enjoyable flight tests I've ever done, and despite my propensity for overusage of both rudder and trigonometry, I am once again qualified to be paid to tell you how to fly. According to Transport Canada statistics, as of March 2008 there were 302 valid class 2 instructors for aeroplanes in Canada. I wonder how many of them work as instructors.

Beer Credits

I've been sent to pick up an airplane that has been waiting idle for me. I've paid my parking fee (a suspiciously symmetrical $100: I suspect they just pulled the number out of thin air), finished the walkaround, cleaned grime and bug corpses off the windows, loaded the cargo and gone to the bathroom. It's time to make airplane noise.

I run the prestart checklist and reach for the electric fuel pump to prime the right engine for start. The switch goes click. Not whirr. Just click. I turn the switch off and on again a few more times. I listen to the quality of the click to see if the switch is perhaps bad. I recheck the circuit breakers, even though those were part of the prestart checks. Click. I check the other pump. It works.

I've been here before. Anyone remember? I think it was in Stoat Landing, maybe Earwig Creek. The problem was solved by having a grizzled individual crawl underneath and hit it with a hammer, all without taking the cigarette out of his mouth.

I'm now in a town named not after an animal and a body of water, but named after a person, probably the wife of a famous white guy. Perhaps here we will use tools more sophisticated than hammers. I shut off the magnetos and the master, text the boss about the delay, and go back to the desk of the FBO to inquire about professional help. She directs me to a nearby maintenance hangar. There doesn't seem to be anyone inside, but I wander through into an adjacent hanger where there are two young guys at a workbench bench. I ask. They do interiors, not mechanical, and they direct me back to the first hangar, telling me which hidden door to look behind.

I knock and come in, confessing that pilots show no respect for coffee breaks. He's friendly and I tell him my problem. "Did you check the circuit breakers?" he asks. That's an "Is it plugged in?" type tech support question for mechanics. "Where is it?" he asks.

It's underneath, I couldn't point to the exact spot." My memory of watching the investigation being done relates more to the lit cigarette than the exact location of the part. We go out to the airplane and he has me turn on the working fuel pump. He traces its location from the sound and assumes symmetry.

"Wait here a moment," he says. "I'm going to get a ." It sounded like the something was "hammer handle." Must be a technical term.

My phone rings with the boss, who asks me if I checked the circuit breakers, and if I tried turning it on and off again a few times. I tell him yes, that there's someone here who is looking at it.

The mechanic returns with a rubber mallet. I'm still in the cockpit. He passes out of sight under the airplane. whump! whump

"Try it now," he says.

Master on. Fuel pump on. Whirrrr! Big grin from happy pilot. He tells me to leave it on for a moment. He listens and nods. It's good. We're both willing to accept that it just needed a little encouragement after sitting unattended. He waves me off.

I've been helped many times with minor issues like that, without time or opportunity to buy someone who deserves it a beer. I'm glad that last time I met an AME I bought her lunch. In the future, I intend to buy a few beers for unsuspecting GA mechanics. I'm sure they have all done something similarly deserving.

For now I let the boss know that I'm on my way, and taxi out for departure.

No, I Don't Have a Parachute

I have a blog to recommend to you today. It's called Where the Hell Is Phil and is the hilarious and illuminating adventures of a young man working as flight attendant for a national US airline. He's exploring his country, discovering the depth of human stupidity and making me laugh like a crazy woman.

Phil is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and while his history includes evidence that he has both worked as an actor and received military training, he hadn't travelled much beyond Baton Rouge before this job. Read the blog from the beginning, to witness him making the happy discovery that Wal-Mart is a chain, and gradually realizing that everywhere in America has ducks. I wonder how often my own naïvité has been this amusing.

He has a talent for noticing the ridiculous, not that the ridiculous doesn't regularly present itself to flight attendants, nor that he doesn't participate. Some samples ...

On his way to Utah: "Sat next to a teenage girl with a live turtle, and she kept holding it up to the window so it could see."

On the first aid segment of his FA training: "I had done first aid before in the Army, and it's very brief there. Things along the lines of, 'if severed limb is present, transport with but out of sight of victim'."

"I think it's really cool to work on a thing that has a 'galley,' because it makes it sound like your office is a pirate ship. Having said that, the galley is a nightmare. Imagine your kitchen. Now imagine it crammed inside the back seat of a Chevy Nova."

On his duty of closing the aircraft and cockpit doors: "I don't think there's another way to mess up closing a door, but if there is, I feel confident I'll find it."

"I was already having what I call a Bad Physics Day."

"And so now it's official: four out of four pilots recommend Asahi as a painful method of suicide."

A passenger once asked him a question that assumed the flight crew had parachutes. I wish to echo Phil's statement that we don't have parachutes. I have never had a job where I wore a parachute. The only commercial pilots that wear parachutes are those who drop parajumpers, and those who perform aerobatics routines.

It's not really feasible for me to jump out of my airplane during flight. Most airplanes are not suitable for jumping out of. There have been very few air accidents ever where parachutes would have done much to improve survivability. But the passenger belief that pilots all have them gave me a revelation.

Suddenly there is sense in the popular accounts of heroic pilots fighting with the controls to land the airplane in a field instead of hitting an elementary school. The public isn't praising the pilot for choosing between slamming into a brick building or skidding across a soccer field. They're praising him for piloting the airplane all the way to the ground when he could have just leapt out, parachuting to safety while the airplane hit the elementary school.

My very favourite entry is this one on pilot's kids. If you've ever enlisted friends or family to help you study for a new type, you must read this. Oh and when Phil moved to Utah he decided to go snowboarding. Just bought a snowboard and headed for the hills. No lessons, just strapped on the board and tried hard not kill himself. This is the pioneering spirit that brought us aviation in the first place. I bet Phil would accept a Flugtag invitation.

Flugtag Invitation

I believe I've blogged in the past about the insanity that is Flugtag. It's a shameless corporate event dreamed up to publicize Red Bull energy drink, I guess playing off their slogan, Red Bull Gives You Wings. Flugtag is an event where people "fly" homemade "gliders." The scare quotes are because I would expect that a person would have to drink something considerably stronger than Red Bull before they would believe that most of these so-called aircraft would have a glide ratio better than that of a brick.

Check out the video on the official site. Even if you don't usually bother to make your computer pay these things, this one has to be seen to be believed. Various gliders, among them a B747, a dolphin, an eagle, and a submarine are pushed off a ramp and with few exceptions experience complete structural failure within seconds. It looks like a hell of a good time. I received an email last week from an intern, promoting the event, asking me not, as I expected, to publicize it, but to actually enter.

I told the intern I wasn't that crazy, but maybe I lied. There's something inspiring about watching so many improbable aircraft launching off that ramp and then PLUMMETING into the water. It almost makes me want to get a team together. I wish I'd had more than a couple of weeks notice before the deadline. I suppose the idea of giving a short application deadline is to require you to charge up on Red Bull and just go for it.

Maybe next year. It would certainly be fun. What would you like to launch in? A unicorn? A replica Avro Arrow? A Silver Dart? A giant badminton birdie? A flying saucer? A birthday cake? The emphasis is clearly on the bizarre craft, and not the nominal distance-to-glide competition. From the entry form we see the entire aircraft, including pilot, must weigh in at or under 200 kg, with a maximum wingspan of nine metres. It must be entirely human powered with no stored energy, so this opens the possibility of a Gossamer Condor type entry, except we have the added challenge that all components must float. I wonder if this is a new addition, because I see bicycle parts in the videoclip. You can find more clips by searching for Flugtag on YouTube.

It would be a truly glorious moment. Who is in the Ottawa area and wants to help design, build and fly an insanely stupid glider? I don't know if I'm serious, but I'm pretty sure most of the actual competitors aren't serious, so I don't know if that matters.

Unapproved Navigational Aids

Lately I've been using the free version of Voyager navigational planning software, from Seattle Avionics. It's impressive. You tell it the parameters of your airplane, although unless you fly some strange rare airplane, or it is customized like crazy, you'll probably find it already in the list, and you can edit list entries to match your aircraft.

You tell it your point of origin and destination, whether you're flying IFR or VFR and what altitude you'd like to fly. It will suggest corrections for wrong-way altitudes and plot a route for you. Meanwhile, if you have an internet connection, it downloads TFRs and weather so it can show you the conditions you're going to encounter. The profile view shows control zones and forecast ceilings, and my favourite part is that it interpolates all the available upper wind data and calculates a trip time. It's a breeze to try different altitudes (I think the pay version does this for you) and see where I get the least headwind component over the trip, and the times it comes up with have been to-the-minute accurate.

It does far more than this, but I use company software for weight and balance, and file my flight plans by telephone, because I have to check NOTAMs anyway. Software like this feels like cheating. I imagine flight students do use things like this to cheat on their homework assignments. (I say they are cheating because they aren't allowed to use software on the exam, and if they've always used it in practice, they're likely to make errors on the exam).

If I'm using it just to give an estimate to a customer I don't bother entering an altitude, so it just uses the one from the previous flight. This generates lovely precise warnings like Extreme danger! Crash into terrain expected at 475.4 nm (2:56) into flight. I'll also use it to see how many hours it will take to get from Florida to Washington State, for example, and just enter the endpoints, in which case it gravely warns me Insufficient fuel! Fuel will be exhausted before the destination is reached! It will still crank out the numbers though, which is all I want, to see how many fuel stops and how much time-before-maintenance I'm going to need.

Seriously, the most difficult part of flight planning with this software is deciding where to stop for fuel, and I understand that the pay version will even do that for me. As it is, I just guess a likely airport en route and designate it a "stop-and-go" waypoint, with refuelling, and the flight plan is adjusted for me. My weakness is that the outlines of the states are shown, but not the names, so I look at a vaguely rectangular shape in the middle of the country and wonder "Is that Oklahoma or Nebraska?" Remember please, before condemning me for my geographical ignorance that this is not my native country. I can draw a fairly accurate map of Canada showing all the provinces and territories and name and site their capital cities. I'm just a little vague on whether I'm overflying Wyoming or Colorado at any given moment. I always think Wyoming should have more cows, actually. I read a romance novel once set on a Wyoming ranch. I never see any cows, nor romantically entangled cowboys in Wyoming.

Of course, SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLICATION SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE. It's worth noting that the large full-colour weather map on the back of every USA Today newspaper bears no such warning, depicts major fronts, and shows the names of enough cites that I can identify the states. USA Today is actually remarkably useful for navigational planning. For example when your customer asks in the middle of breakfast, "So how long would it take to get to Virginia from here?" Just flip over the free hotel newspaper and use your spread thumb and finger to measure the distance and compare it to the distance of a recent trip for which you remember the time. This makes you sound really knowledgeable if you're talking to the customer by phone, and makes you look like a complete crackpot if the customer is at breakfast with you. Plus the ink doesn't come off on your hands. Seriously, they use some kind of special ink. It used to be the main point on which they advertised the newspaper.

Breaking News

Today I am in Tallahassee, Florida. Specifically, sitting in a nice FBO, waiting for a member of the crew. The wonderful staff remember us from our last visit and still seem to like us. I am informed that there are free cookies available, information that gladdens any pilot's heart. Free food plus pilot equals happy.

I stand up to wander over to the cookie distribution area and something catches my eye on the runway. Our eyes take in images constantly, and our brain processes them, but I suspect that the brain doesn't actually pass things on to the conscious mind unless they represent something out of the ordinary, or particularly relevant to us. It's why you didn't hear anything, but your friend says he heard someone call his name. Or at least I like to think that's the reason, not that years of sitting near propellers are taking their toll. At any rate, the part of my brain monitoring peripheral vision reports that there is something distinctly odd on the runway. I pull my attention circuits away from free cookies and onto the runway. There's an airplane there, but sitting at a distinctly odd angle.

I've just witnessed a gear collapse on what looked like a Dash-8. I believe it's the military version, an E-9A, and the locals tell me they use it as an observation and control platform for drones, used as targets for fighter training. The left main gear has failed.

I point it out to FBO staff and can hear, "look at the runway" echoed in the back room. I can also hear silly things like "why is it there?" and "was that there this morning?" and then I can hear fire trucks. The yellowy-green airport firetrucks race out and surround the aircraft. They spray the runway around it with foam. A few minutes later another set of red firetrucks arrives, probably a city fire company, and a few minutes later there's a third set of ladder trucks and an assortment of police cars and other emergency vehicles.

There is no fire evident, and no ambulances arrive, so presumably there were no injuries. We sit around and speculate on whether the airplane will have to be scrapped. Airplanes are sturdy enough for doing what they are supposed to do, but the wing spar isn't designed for balancing on the side like that.

This isn't good news for Bombardier. There's only so many times you can say, "poor maintenance" before you have to admit to poor design. And I picture the military being pretty by-the-book when it comes to maintenance, at least in a training environment. I'm surprised Air Canada Jazz hasn't had one of these collapse, if it really is a weakness of the type. Jazz flies them on long and short routes, and hot and cold and freezing weather, and has done so for years.

I was going to blog this "live-on-the-scene" but I had the pictures uploaded and it all typed in on FBO computer, when the connection died. Before I could investigate why, my crew arrived and it was time to go, so you get it some hours later.

Oh and the cookies were good. They had Smarties in them. Except I guess they were M&Ms, because the Americans don't have Smarties, they think these are Smarties, while Canadians know them as Rockets. There is a historical reason.