Overflow Valve

I didn't really send it. I wrote that last blog post right after completing the form, and I really wrote that on the form, but in the sober light of the next dawn, before the Purolator truck arrived, I was hit by a fit of sanity and reprinted the pages on which I had expressed my personality and frustration, replacing them with blandness.

In the same vein, when today I received the form letter telling me "Good afternoon Mr. Aviatrix, Your submission has been received and will be sent to a regional TDG Inspector for review. The inspector will contact you if they require more information or corrections to your documentation," I didn't write back asking, "Is it your department policy to address all persons in authority by male honorifics, or is that an individual initiative on your part?"

Also I went for a nice little flight today. We brief an emergency procedure before every flight, and today it was an engine failure before rotation. "Okay," I said, "so we're rolling down the runway at full power and for some reason we need to stop."

I paused for breath and my co-worker said, "Coyote on the runway," at the same time as I added, "Maybe there's a coyote." Great minds think alike. "So, clearly there's a psychic coyote on the runway." The runway here is long enough to stop after reaching rotation speed, so I brief that I pull power idle, brake as required, tell ATC, and get off the runway to try that again, once the brakes have cooled. I also brief the full procedure for if an emergency stop were made on a runway too short to accommodate it, necessitating magnetos off, fuel off, inform ATC and electrical off, then evacuate when the aircraft is done crashing into whatever is past the end of the runway. If the day starts somewhere that an engine failure on the roll could leave me without braking room, I brief to the specifics of the environment.

After run-up I was held short of the long taxiway because the controller said, "there are a couple headed your way." I hear other people call for taxi and also get held short, so I move up a bit so there is room for whomever is behind me, but not so much that there isn't room for whatever the couple I'm waiting for are. Not a couple of coyotes, though. Turns out to be a Navajo and a Beech 1900. Once they pass I am given clearance to taxi, and discover I'm catching up to the aircraft ahead of me. Kind of unusual for me. I taxi slowly. They turn a corner and I see that the slowpoke has a foreign registration. That makes sense. Tourist. The locals and the people who come here often enough to know the coyotes by name taxi fast.

I get my clearance and depart. There are no literal coyotes. Today.

Resident Coyotes

I'm taxiing out at an airport that I haven't been to much and I can hear the ground controller coordinating with wildlife control, with input from various pilots, in pursuit of a coyote that is on the airport. I don't see the coyote, and I depart. A few days later I land at that airport again, and in the short time I'm taxiing, hear another report of a coyote on the grass. The ground controller thanks that pilot for the report. I overnight, and when I depart the next day the coyote is still a topic of conversation on the ground frequency. One pilot suggests that they just issue the animal an airside access permit and be done with it. Another counters that he wouldn't make it though the security interview. The ground controller shushes the wise-asses, but a few days later the authorities seem to have accepted the suggestion.

Pilot, "Ground, there's a fox or something just crossed the taxiway."

Ground, "That's just one of our resident coyotes."

I suspect that eventually wildlife control will shoot the animals, because they could cause an accident, but in the meantime I cheer for their wiliness and adaptability. I hope it's a tranquilizer gun and that they find them a home with fewer aircraft. A coworker suggested that they issue the coyotes transponder-equipped collars so we at least know where they are.

Extra-Vehicular Activities

I was trying to find a clip of the coffee-ordering scene from the movie Pushing Tin. In the film it's a demonstration of how many pieces of data on different aircraft that an experienced controller can hold in his or her head simultaneously. I didn't find the clip, but I came across a pilot ordering coffee and wings in the midst of an emergency, and a fun YouTube channel of humourous exchanges from the New York Kennedy ground frequency.

Taxiing at a large, unfamiliar airport is just about as stressful as flying at night in ice. There's just one of me to keep the airplane moving, watch out for bad pavement, find the directional signs, interpret the taxi diagram, identify the intersections, and spot the aircraft I'm supposed to give way to. It's obvious to the controllers which way I should go, but they know the airport layout perfectly, and from their vantage point they can see where they want to put me. They seem almost as unhappy when I pause to complete a checklist or figure out my route as they do when I think that Foxtrot-Golf is the next turn, not this one right here. Sure, if I get it badly wrong in ice, I'll lose control of the airplane and die, but that consequence might be less painful than the scolding that an irate controller can dish out. The worst case scenario on the taxi is also death: should I venture onto an active runway at the wrong moment, I could get run over and take out a widebody, too. That is part of the reason the controllers can be so stressed. The rest of their focus is knowing that it is ridiculously easy for us poorly-maneuverable ground vehicles to become gridlocked, delaying everyone. The controllers have a plan for getting everyone where we are supposed to be, and if I miss a turn, I'm like the Tetris brick dropped in the wrong place, messing up the whole board. Meanwhile controllers are really smart, constantly building and recalculating plans, but with enough spare brainpower to make smart remarks.

The link above is not to the first or the funniest of the clips on the channel, but rather to one that is more odd than funny: a Lufthansa crew suspects they have an access panel open and once that's confirmed by another taxiing aircraft, ask permission to put a crewmember outside the airplane to close it. It's interesting and a little outside the norm, but the controller seems to think it's hilarious. I wonder what he would have made of a stop-and-go I did the other day: I landed on a long runway, let a crew member out to adjust an external sensor, and then after he was back in and belted, took off again without ever leaving or backtracking the runway. The controller handling me didn't act as though it were an unusual request. I had assessed the approaching traffic on frequency before making the request, so I was confident there was no one close behind me. I'm not sure we spent any longer on the runway than we would have had we landed and taxied off in the normal way.

Summer One-Liners

I always scribble notes on my OFPs, but I don't always get time to transform them into blog entries. Here are a few.

This is an oldie that has come back.  Many types of flight require a flight plan, a notification to air traffic control of where and when you want to fly your airplane. You "file" the plan either electronically, or still the old fashioned way by telephone. It's often easier to make a phone call than to get an internet connection. When you call to file a flight plan you start by specifying the call sign, the registration of the aircraft. The specialist can sometimes look up the aircraft in his or her database, removing the need for the pilot to specify the aircraft type, onboard navigational equipment, aircraft colours, and other details that don't change from flight to flight. It's common for the controller to double check that they have the right database entry by saying the type after they find it. There's a flight service joke that I first heard as a student, still stumbling over the required information for the flight plan. The specialist takes the callsign, and then says, "Ah yes, here it is, Boeing 747 on floats."

The correct answer to this is obviously, "Nah we put it on skis over the winter, haven't swapped them back yet." Or perhaps, "Nah that's GOLF Mike Tango Foxtrot. People get us mixed up all the time."

One the flight plan is filed, you need a taxi clearance, permission to drive the airplane on the ground to the runway, or maybe from the parking space to the place you pick up your passengers or buy fuel. Much of the ground may be uncontrolled, not requiring a clearance, but at an unfamiliar airport it is not always clear exactly where the controlled portions of the apron are. One always errs on the side of caution and asks for taxi clearance. Or even if I know it's uncontrolled, I'll usually call and tell the controller, so he or she isn't wondering where this airplane is off to. The controllers are usually happy to give directions on the uncontrolled portion of the airport, to help pilots find a particular hangar. So it's wasn't completely bizarre to hear a ground controller say this to another pilot, just funny.


Ground controller, "If you know where you are going, continue."

Then you take off, and the controllers help you stay clear of other traffic.  You know you're pretty far north on a clear day when you hear the words, "you'll be following a VFR 737" and you're not in the approach phase of the flight. One usually expects aircraft as large as a B737 to fly IFR for most of their trip.

But by the end of the flight on a good day everyone is cancelling IFR to make it easier for others to get descent clearance. Descent for us means a chance to take off our oxygen masks, the context for my final quote, from my co-worker. "Taking off an oxygen mask is like taking off ski boots."

Ahhhh.

Hazards on the Taxi

I'm taxiing into the ramp of a familiar FBO. There's a local airline/charter outfit that flies out of here and I have to run the gauntlet between their ranks of parked airplanes to get to where I'm going. Today there's an additional obstacle. Someone is washing one of their airplanes and a hose stretches from the hangar across my path.

I weigh the possibilities. Probably I can taxi over it with no harm to anything, save a momentary interruption in water pressure for the guy washing the plane.  But there's a possibility, as when taxiing in the vicinity of any rope, that it could be picked up by one of my propellers and turned into a flail of destruction. I've never seen this, and I haven't spoken to anyone it happened to. In fact I can't even remember when I first learned it, but deep in my memories is a flight instructor telling me not to taxi over ropes because they could get caught in the propeller. Before passing on this wisdom I did a little googling to find a student whose instructor learned this the hard way. That's one student who will remember the time and place of the instruction as well as the knowledge.  I can envision the knowledge spreading out around them in ripples as they recount the tale.

So a hose is like a rope. It is however secured to a tap at one end and in someone's hand at the other, so not quite as threatening. But I can shut down and haul the airplane the rest of the way by hand. I put on the brakes. The guy with the hose also knows that airplanes shouldn't taxi over such things. He picks up the hose and crosses back towards the tap with it, leaving the aisle clear for me to taxi through.

Hoses aside, this ramp has more FOD on it than it used to. The pavement is not in great shape and after shutdown I find metal objects--screws and washers--on the ramp. Not impressed. I shut down and do all the piloty post flight things and then after I walk away can't remember turning off the master and mags. I turn around go back and check. Everything is off.


The problem is that now the chief pilot knows not only my every screw up, but even my every almost could have been, thought I screwed up but didn't. And chews me out for it. Oh well, I get to keep my job.

Taxiiway Closures

I'm arriving at an airport with no control tower, and no flight services on the field, but it's a mandatory frequency, and this time of day the radio is answered by a flight services specialist at another airport. It's not an uncommon situation in Canada. It's funny sometimes listening when a pilot doesn't realize that the control tower at the airport he has just landed at is unoccupied, and asks questions like, "Is this a good place to park?"

The descent is over rugged forest with little lakes in it. I point out a boat on the lake to a new, non-pilot crew member, part of my running commentary on what I'm doing, so they get to know what is normal. I called the flight services specialist about 30 miles out and then again entering the zone. The specialist tells me that three out of the four taxiways are closed, rattling off the identifying letters. This is the wrong part of the flight for me to be fumbling for a publication to determine how this should affect my runway choice or route to the fuel pumps. Taxiway letters don't correspond in an obvious way to the runway layout. How could they, with so many ways to lay out runways? I do know of an airport with taxiways S to the south and E to the east, but even that makes no sense without the diagram out the CFS, Did I miss this mess in the NOTAMs? I often check NOTAMs the night before and not morning of, and perhaps I missed this airport.

I can see a vehicle parked across one of the taxiways.  Another pilot on frequency says somethign about "these baldies."  Bald eagles, he means. They're the most common kind of eagle around here. I was about to describe one, but guess everyone in the world knows what they look like, because they're an American symbol. There's one near my altitude, but fortunately not right in my path. I flare, and no eagles decide to challenge me.

I tax off the runway and negotiate my way to the apron. There is construction going on, and large trucks trundling to and fro. We get to the fuel pumps without incident and refuel. At the end of the day I recheck NOTAMs. There is nothing for this airport about taxiway closures, just three unlighted towers and some non-standard runway markings. Ubiquitous enough NOTAMs that I hadn't written them down.

I call to talk to a flight briefer to see if I've missed a NOTAM somewhere. Nope, they don't have anything either. I tell them about the construction.

This sort of thing undermines my confidence in the system. I depend on this system to tell me if there is fuel and a place to put my wheels when I land. I check NOTAMs again in the morning. Now there are two unlighted towers plus non-standard runway markings. Overnight someone either put up some lights or took down a tower, I guess. But the construction still doesn't exist.

Fitting In

I'm working out of an airport where traffic has outstripped construction and the construction that is trying to catch up has made the taxiways and frequencies even more congested. When I get a word in edgewise with ground I'm cleared to taxi, but then have to pull over for a do-si-do at the compass rose so an opposite direction caravan can get by. Wait a few minutes stacked up behind traffic for departure, then cleared for the immediate, with a northbound turn as soon as able so they can keep pumping out faster traffic.

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On the way home, I'm sequenced, allowed to descend towards the runway, and then told to keep it in close behind the departing jet. The controller's goal and hence mine is to put me on the pavement as soon as the jet is safely out of the way. I don't want to land into jet blast, the disturbance to the air made by the jet engines as the aircraft accelerates along the pavement, but I don't have to worry about his wake turbulence, because the vortices made by the wings of a flying aircraft don't start until rotation, and I will be stopped and turned off the runway before the point at which the jet gets airborne and the vortices start. I hear another aircraft behind being told to bring back the speed, follow the ... ATC gets my type wrong, but he's to be forgiven. I know it's me, and from the point of view of the B737 pilot behind me, we're much the same.

Someone on frequency asks the controller if they have software that advises them of traffic conflicts or just use their own cleverness. The controller assures them it's just cleverness and the next few calls to tower include praise for the controllers' cleverness. They have to undergo some pretty comprehensive aptitude tests for that job, and then a lot of training and supervised practice, so the cleverness is innate and trained.

I keep it close behind the jet, and plan to keep my speed up to the intersection where they usually ask me to exit. The fading jet blast affects the flare giving me a sudden headwind that dies, I bubble up and then touch down harder than I planned to before I can bring up the power to compensate. I've lost all my speed, because of that, but just as well because ATC asks me to exit on a sooner taxiway than I'd planned. I can refuse that if I consider it unsafe, but a bit of braking and I do it. The 737 must have landed behind me, and by the time I get my taxi clearance and turn onto the parallel taxiway there's a CRJ taking off.

The Winners Are ...

And now, after much legitimate waiting because I was busy and just a bit of deliberate tantalizing because it's fun, are the results of the Nosewheel Roulette game.

Here is the nosewheel during my preflight inspection, on the ground at an airport expereinced readers may recognize. I actually marked the nosewheel the night before, after parking, in case I was in a hurry the next day, because I had been that day and forgot to do it on the first appropriate flight. Yes, that may not be exactly at bottom dead centre. I had intended to use a plumb bob, but the wind was howling, so that wouldn't have done any good, and I didn't bring a spirit level.

Here is the nosewheel after flight, parked in almost the same place, as we returned to the departure airport that day. It's actually both before and after fuelling, because there was an airplane parked at the avgas pumps when I arrived. I contemplated parking behind it, but that would have blocked the Jet pump, and a helicopter might have needed fuel while I was waiting. So without shutting down I taxied from the runway, to the pumps, to parking, then did a little indecisive twirl, then finally shut down where you see it.

I couldn't find my tailor's tape, the cloth measuring tape I originally used to determine the circumference, but as you can see the mark ended up fairly close to all the way around, and the wind was blowing even harder than the day before, which kept tearing the masking tape I was going to use as an intermediate, so I measured backwards from the bottom and then subtracted that from 128 to find the winning number. I measured two ways, once by cutting a piece of masking tape the right length, intending to save it until I found a ruler, but then I remembered there was a measuring scale on the edge of the chart magnifier I keep on my clipboard. I measured the masking tape with that, then used the flexible measuring tape to measure the distance directly, and both came up with ten centimetres, giving a final position of 118 cm clockwise from the bottom.

(In answer to the valid question on the original post, regarding why clockwise around the left side of the wheel: because that's what first occurred to me. I approach the airplane from the left, like it was a horse, so it doesn't get spooked, I guess, and clockwise seems like the normal way to go. True, it's not the direction the wheel rolls, but I didn't think that closely about it before making the rules).

Speaking of rules, I decided not to disqualify anyone for not following them, except that people who didn't post a guess in the comments didn't get entered at all. You'd be astonished by the number of ways people managed to not follow the instruction: "Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses." Another time I may automate the process, so be warned. Here are your winners.

Neither Fish nor Fowl

Next day report time is not until eight a.m. so I have studied all my departures before I get there. You're supposed to make a phone call to get a VFR transponder code within 30 minutes of your departure. Yesterday when I made that call I asked to confirm if I was supposed to squawk VFR once I left the zone. That's the default rule, but Vancouver seems to be special. The specialist said to keep the code, but that I would need a new code to get back in, but that seeing as I wasn't landing anywhere else I could get it by radio.

It's easier to call flight services on the radio than by phone, so I decide I'll do that. The specialist says sorry, he's not allowed to give out any codes by radio. It's a new rule. So I call the same guy back on the phone and get a code. Not sure what that accomplished. Maybe he gets a cut from my cellphone company.

I listen to the ATIS. It's a long recitation of runways and approaches in use, along with the mandatory cautions about SIRO and SPIA--I may have made up the latter abbreviation, but that's what I write down when I copy the ATIS and they are advertising Simultaneous Intersecting Runway Operations and Simultaneous Parallel Instrument Approaches in use. The former means that you might be asked to land and hold short of a crossing runway, or you might be cleared to use a runway that crosses another runway that someone is landing on. One of the pilots has to acknowledge a "hold short" instruction for each such instance. The latter means that you had better not fly through the localizer because there may be another airplane on approach beside you. It's like turning left at an intersection where there are two left turn lanes: you have to stay in your lane and watch for people who aren't.

I call Clearance Delivery, and he assigns me a Metrotown departure at 2000'. I find that on the chart. It's in the opposite direction as the active runway, so that's kind of confusing, but if the takeoff clearance doesn't assign me a routing to it, then I'll ask. I copy my departure squawk code and switch to Ground.

I tell the ground controller my position on the apron and assigned departure, and request taxi clearance. He says Metrotown is not available and gives me a different departure. Now I'm paranoid. Was the clearance delivery guy messing with me in retaliation for asking for a less efficient departure route yesterday? Then the ground controller says, "I presume you'll be wanting a runway again today?" Hey, it's the same guy who mistook me for a helicopter, and he remembers me. Cool.

But then the paranoia cuts back in. Maybe I'm supposed to specify the runway I want in my taxi request. It's not standard, but this wouldn't be the first (nor second, third or fourth airport) I've encountered with its own unique way of doing things. Or have I been away from flying for long enough to have forgotten how to make simple radio calls? I almost freak myself into believing that until I realize that while I've been on frequency I've heard a lot of calls as simple as "Air Canada, taxi." So that's not it. I read back my taxi clearance and follow it to the runway.

I don't remember what we took pictures of that flight. I think we were finishing up lines from a previous flight. I hope nobody blinked. I think I explained the improvements I wanted to the pilot guidance screen, beginning with colours and numbers I can actually see while working and working all the way to my demands for an opportunity to score points by flying well, and a high score list. And the dots should sparkle more, like in Bejeweled. Yes, I think I already blogged about this, because I remember the internal conflict it sets up for me, having to spell "bejewelled" incorrectly for my country, because it's the name of a product.

Back into Vancouver, this time with a straight in clearance that seems to take forever. I keep feeling as if I'm going to be run over by a landing B747, but then I realize that they do all the heavy landings on the north runway and the takeoffs on the south one, so a light airplane coming in for the south one isn't holding anyone up unless we're slow clearing the runway. I scramble off at the first available taxiway and call ground for taxi in.

The next flight has an interesting complication, because we will be flying above 12,500', in class B airspace. VFR traffic is not permitted in class B airspace in Canada, but there's a loophole where you can file "controlled VFR" to follow IFR rules on what is essentially a VFR flight. The CVFR clearance is further complicated by the fact that we are flying photo blocks. I've heard of "flying photo blocks" lots of times, but always assumed it was just jargon for flying around taking pictures in a grid. No, it turns out that there is a specific thing called a photo block that we photo-taking pilots have to know about. I'll explain it another day. Let it suffice for now to say that I filed an IFR-type flight plan and then started up and called for clearance "for a local Controlled VFR flight." I notice pilots here say "round robin flight" instead of "local flight" to indicate that their destination and departure airport are the same, but I stick to the phraseology I first learned. To me "round robin" implies that you are landing at other airports before returning.

The controller says he only has an IFR strip on me. I've been warned about this: there is no separate procedure at ATC units for CVFR: a strip can be either IFR or VFR and CVFR gets an IFR strip. I try to explain that I'm CVFR, departing VFR and then climbing above 12,500' but he says he doesn't have the capability to accept composite flight plans, and basically puts me on hold while a long line of people with more normal requests get their clearances. I can't even get a word in edgewise to say I can accept an IFR departure. Finally the controller gets back to me and assigns me an IFR departure. I look for it in the CAP, hoping it isn't too complex. It's trivial, easier than the VFR departure routes. It tells me to take off, climb straight ahead, and wait for further instructions. I call ground "for taxi two six left" and take off when cleared to do so. The clearance specified to contact departure airborne, so I do that as soon as my gear is up and climb power set, and they radar identify me and immediately give me another frequency to contact. The next controller is baffled by my strip, because I'm an IFR departure but he can't vector me to an airway and be done with me. He wants to know if I'm cancelling IFR. Uh, sure, I can't be CVFR and IFR both at once. I say it, "Cancelling IFR" because they need me to be clear about it. He transfers me to a different terminal controller and we have to go through this all over again, because I still have an IFR strip. Eventually I'm cleared to the photo area. Oxygen on through ten thousand and then I fly in straight lines while the operator takes pictures. We're over Bowen Island and the Gulf Islands, taking pictures of the shoreline. This job can only be done during the two hours of low tide, so every time I mess up, by not being quite straight enough, or having a wing down what seems like just a tiny bit, were it not for the glaring red dot, it costs more than the fuel to turn around and go get it. In just the couple of hours we've been out here there is a huge difference in how much is rocks and how much is water. There are some clouds over the islands, but they are over the middles of the islands, not the shorelines, so we keep snapping. We don't quite finish the work in the time allotted, but there is another, non-tide-sensitive job we work on to round out our mission.

After all that I'm not sure whether we are on a VFR flight plan or an IFR one, so I call flight services to close it, just in case.

Trial by Ground

We find someone to look at the engine, and he sees nothing visibly wrong with the number two cylinder. They checked the mags, replaced the spark plugs, cleaned the injectors and swapped the #2 and #4 probes. That way they've addressed the most likely issues and if it is the probe or the gauge it will now be a different cylinder complaining. Smart. I'm happy with the work and we fuel and go for the Vancouver mission.

Vancouver International is one of the larger airports I've worked out of for a while, so I have all my charts lines up to find my way around. I listen to the ATIS and call clearance delivery for a departure. He offers me a choice between two departures, They are both in the wrong direction, because the work area is to the east and they are using westbound runways at the moment, so I pick one without much consideration. I'll work out exactly how do get there once they are done vectoring me through the departure. He then asks for more detail on the actual work area and chews me out because I have selected the wrong departure for the most efficient route to that area. He advises me to study a VTA next time. I say "<callsign> checks," contritely. The VTA is an astonishing forest of VFR reporting points, many of which are over the water. Do you get your bearings by identifying particular fish?

Once Clearance is done berating me, I call Ground for taxi. I know I'm on apron two. He asks me pleasantly which pad I will be departing today. Pad? Insert moment of radio silence while Aviatrix processes this question, and then my response, almost student pilotlike in its careful deadpan earnestness. "<callsign> is an aeroplane," pronouncing all three syllables of the last word. "Pad" refers to helipad. This apron is home to some helicopters. There must be a local helicopter with a similar callsign.

"Oh so you'd prefer to depart from a runway today?" he asks. Don't they have a strip on me? Has he been listening to Clearance Delivery telling me where to go and decided to take his turn? Is it a friendly joke like the briefer who pretended he thought I was a B747 on floats for my first student cross-country? I assume it's the last.

"If that would be convenient for you, sir." Sir is routine in the US, but in Canada "sir," like "niner," is often jocular or hypercorrect.

He gives me a taxi clearance I can manage, and I find my way to the correctly lettered piece of pavement and then to the hold short line, monitoring tower. They clear me to position and then for takeoff, and I switch to departure through 1000', as specified on the VFR departure instructions. They quickly vector me around to where I need to go.

It's very beautiful here. The mountains, which still have snow on them, wrap almost all the way around. There are mountains on Vancouver Island to the west, mountains stretching up the coast to the northwest, mountains forming a huge barricade to the north, blocking Vancouver into a valley, and more mountains to the southeast, as the coastal chain continues into Washington state. There's even a ten-thousand foot volcanic peak just south of the US border, with a ski hill on it. I don't get to look at all that much.

I get to look at nearby traffic and a screen with lines and dots on it. Sometimes I talk to the dots. When they talk back, I figure it's time for a snack. I'm improving, but it's easy to lose concentration for a moment, to be distracted by engine management and bank just a little at the wrong moment. "You know," I venture, "This could be made into the world's most boring video came for the iPod." The thing would be, you're not allowed to stop for six hours. So whether you have to make dinner, eat dinner, or attend to other physiological needs, the dots keep coming, and you keep having to follow the line. I also lament that I should get points. The dots should sparkle, like in the game Bejeweled. There should be points for my getting them spot in the middle with the crosshairs centred, and points lost for any red flashes. There should be combos available, and maybe a voiceover telling me to "Get Ready!" for each new line. The game should track high scores, per pilot, and maybe have spaceships. I'm not sure how you'd incorporate spaceships, maybe in the advanced levels I haven't reached yet. If I had an iPod developers' kit, I would try to make this game.

The engines behave perfectly, and lean right back to the fuel flow the operator expects, with normal EGTs. I hypothesize the flaky cylinder had a fuel injector issue or a bad spark plug. Too much fuel or too little ignition might cause combustion to continue too late in the cycle, raising the EGT, and too little of either could cause the intermittent rough running. Whatever it is is fixed now. The video game has to have a screen for fuel management, which you must periodically monitor without losing track of your dots.

Eventually I run out of dots, or spare fuel, I can't remember which, and head back to Vancouver for landing. I've been talking to Vancouver Terminal all this time, so they point me towards a runway and tell me to contact tower. I call them "<callsign>, 3500', with Xray" and tower is already mad at me. They want to know why I'm not with Terminal. I mentally review the last instruction from Terminal. It wasn't "Contact Tower crossing the river," or "Contact Tower through 2500'." It was "Contact Vancouver tower now, <frequency>." Tower has for some reason assumed that I have just appeared in their airspace without deigning to contact the agency that controls ALL the airspace surrounding it. The only way I could reach Vancouver Tower's airspace without passing through Terminal would be to take off from Vancouver. And I've already been through that trial by Ground. Is there such a major problem here with small airplanes bulling their way into class C airspace without a clearance that that is the first assumption on what I must assume is a botched terminal-tower handoff? I'm still cleared straight in, which is a little freaky, because it's a busy time at a busy airport, but I see they are aiming me for the departure runway, so they keep taking off jets in front of me, and landing them on the parallel beside me, and I don't interfere with either set.

I land, can't see a sign on the nearest taxiway, so maybe it's an entry-only taxiway and I roll to the next one, clearing the runway quickly with an Air Canada positioning behind me.

The operator knows I've worked hard today, and asks me if I can do another flight. Yeah, my duty day is good to seven p.m., that's with the time change. And I'm strangely energized after capturing all those dots. The next flight will be just an hour. After fuelling I call clearance again, this time requesting the departure that I think will do me the most good, and he assigns it to me with my squawk code. Ground clears me out and then warns someone else to watch for me. Yeah, watch out for her. He can't see me, but I can see him. He won't run over me. I guess apron II goes all the way to the the east end of the runway, and Ground doesn't know which bit I'm on. Is there a chance I've misnamed my apron location? The chart seems pretty clear.

We take off and go take pictures of a movie set. Cool, eh? I'm high-powered paparazzi now. I'll have to find out what movie. I didn't see the set, just the dots.

Landing back afterwards they clear me for a tight downwind and then clear me to land "keep your base in close." I turn base immediately and plummet to the runway with full flaps and gear down, clearing on that first taxiway, which is labelled, just further back than I looked. I may not know all the VFR departures, but I can keep my base in close.

Unfair Fight ATC

Here's an update with the ATC dialogue during the incident. There's not a whole lot of information to hear. ATC uses the designation "Super" for the Air France A380, a step up from "Heavy" The Airbus is taxiing, apparently according to instructions from a perky, alert-sounding controller, when the Delta pilot calls in languidly to report that he's just been hit by the Air France. The controller immediately dispatches emergency equipment and asks the CRJ pilot if he needs any specific assistance.

I think some of the transmissions from the CRJ are not on the tape, and obviously we're missing a lot of dialogue inside the control tower as they decide which taxiways to shut down and how to reroute traffic. The controller asks the Air France to "shut your engines" and the pilot asks to confirm "close the engines?" Neither is normal English usage, but it's clear. I'm curious as to whether the controller was using an official phrase, or was used to French Québecois crews translating "fermer le moteur" directly into English and used that phrase for Air France. There's no indication that the Air France pilots are having any difficulty understanding normal English, they just have fantastically French accents. Update: See the comment conversation between myself and Ghislain for more about this. It appears that the Air France pilot actually says "hold the engines?" (not "close") and doesn't understand the "shut" instruction, because that does not correspond to the idiom in France.

I'm slightly amused that the offer of assistance for the A380 comes almost as an afterthought. I'm reminded of Hamish versus the MD-80. Did one Airbus pilot ask the other if he felt a bump?

Unfair Fight

An A380 struck a CRJ while manoeuvring on the ramp at JFK Monday night. No one was injured, but look at how far the Airbus spun that little jet around.

Variable Authority

Up to now in my career, I have flown airplanes that I steered on the ground through pure mechanical linkages powered by my own muscles. I was using levers to physically shove the nosewheel into pointing the way I wanted to turn the airplane. The Screaming Whippet one is too big for me to kick around by myself, or they don't want to make levers that big, so it uses electrically controlled, hydraulically activated, variable authority nosewheel steering. I have to remember that description in case I'm asked about it on the ride. (Ride is pilotspeak for flight test). I also have to remember a whole lot more about how it works.

First pass, what I remember and understand from the class and the reading without looking anything more up:

Nosewheel steering is on the non-essential DC electrical bus. It must be armed and activated to be used. You arm it with a toggle switch, the location and position of which I can't picture now and it becomes activated when the squat switch indicates that you are on the ground and one of the following things happens. Either a) the right speed lever is moved into the low position or b) a button on the side of the left power lever is pressed and held. (Yes, I have both speed and power levers: resolving units, you'd think you'd get a power lever by forcing the speed lever, but that would be a geeky joke and not the reality of this airplane). Once the system is activated, you steer with the rudder pedals, just like old times.

Moving a rudder pedal sends a signal to a potentiometer. There's a pile of potentiometers, I think it was four. One of them represents the input you gave to the rudder pedal, one the position of the nosewheel, one the target position and one for good luck. So maybe it was three. The difference between the target and the position is sent to a selector valve which shuttles the appropriate way to send hydraulic fluid to a piston operating rack and pinion steering to pivot the nose gear in the appropriate direction. The channels in the shuttle valve go straight through for left turns and criss-cross to reverse the pressure for right turns. When the commanded steering meets the actual steering, the system holds that input until a new input is received or the system is disarmed. In the later case it smoothly recentres. The maximum steering in this mode is ten degrees either side of centre, but you can get up to sixty-three degrees deflection in park mode, by pressing and holding the park button. This is for manoeuvring into a tight parking spot. I really hope I don't often have to parallel park this airplane.

There's an annunciator for the system being armed, an annunciator for it activated and a flashing one if it fails. Because it's an electrical system, there is a chance of transient weirdness, and transient weirdness is not something you want to see in large vehicle steering If there's a three degree disagreement between two of the potentiometers, representing some form of where it's requested to be and where it thinks it is going, the system disconnects. You can still steer with braking and power.

Now let me see if by re-reading the chapter I can fix that up, and add things I forgot.

There is a command potentiometer (my "input you gave the rudder pedal") on the left side of the rudder pedal linkage, and a fault protection monitor potentiometer (my "target position") on the right side. There are two more potentiometers on top of the steering actuator, a control follow-up potentiometer (my "position of the nosewheel") and another one for the fault protection monitor circuit. So I was right, there are four, and if monitoring faults is good luck, I got them all right. Well, let's see.

There is a "Nose Steer Computer/Amplifier" which "contains Servo Valve Solenoid drive circuitry to initiate steering based on Rudder Pedal Potentiometer and Nose Gear Follow-up Potentiometer Position." (Why yes, this training manual is apparently so old that it predates the late eighteenth century English move to distance itself from its Germanic roots and not capitalize all nouns).

Okay, reading the quasi-incunabulum more closely, I surmise that the follow-up potentiometer simply turns with the nosewheel steering column, and has the same type of electrical connections as the rudder pedal potentiometer. When the "wiper resistance," a term I am not familiar with, but which I'll read as "the combined effect of the electrical connection and the turning," of the two is the same, the steering is deemed to have turned as far as commanded. The hydraulic supply ports close, so the wheel is locked in the position it was steered to.

I think the Rudder Pedal Monitor Potentiometer must be at the same wiper resistance as the Rudder Pedal Potentiometer--perhaps one potentiometer can only be compares with one other potentiometer, so the latter needs the former to shadow it. My manual names former, and the fourth potentiometer, the Hydraulic Actuator Monitor Potentiometer only once, in the sentence, "In either case, if a difference greater than approximately 3 degrees exists between the Rudder Pedal Monitor Potentiometer and the Hydraulic Actuator Monitor Potentiometer, the protective circuitry within the computer will shut down the system." I can't quite follow that all the way, but I know it means that if the monitor circuit thinks that the commands sent to the hydraulic system are incorrect, it will disconnect the steering to avoid having an electrical irregularity steer an airplane off a runway.

Absent positive steering, you still have directional control of an airplane through braking and differential power, so this is better than definitive by incorrect steering inputs. The "in either case" above refers to the case of a wheel being locked in place despite commanded steering versus uncommanded steering occurring.

The arming switch is located on the left hand console.

I also need to remember the fault test switch and that the system acts as a shimmy damper when not activated, but left in what is known as castoring mode, and that on retraction it automatically centres because the centre position is the low point in the race ... ah I guess I don't understand that well enough to explain it clearly. Also variable authority. I'll say that again to make sure I remember it.

Today is, I believe, International Women's Day. There is one male on our course and the rest are females, who happened to all be connected. The man had a eureka moment when the women all had connections to one another, either having previously met, knowing people in common, or just the familiarity of being females in aviation. We were all talking about then and catching up. He suddenly realized what it must feel like to not be part of the "old boys' network," and the girls saw it at about the same time. We promised not to exclude him from our network, and of course had no intention to do so, but through the week I noticed that our conversations would drift into discussions of female interest topics like clothing, or career planning in the context of postponing or forgoing pregnancy and he would be unintentionally excluded by dint of not having experience or opinions. It must have been for him exactly as it is for me when my usually all male colleagues start discussing football, or someone getting drunk while hunting and rolling his truck. It's hard to get into a conversation when you can't identify with the decisions being made or discussed. I can sort of feel for the men who feel threatened about women in traditionally male-dominated fields, but I don't think it will hurt them to learn to say "aww" when they hear about strangers' babies any more than it has hurt the women to feign interest in football for social purposes.

Taxi Through Construction

This morning the weather is worse, and is forecast to be that way for several days. The decision is made--and I say it that way because I'm not sure who proposed it, approved it or finalized it--to do the next scheduled maintenance here, ahead of time while we wait for weather. The two attempts to find our way through the big rocks put just enough time on the airframe that it is now eligible for an early inspection.

We move out of the rotting hotel and back to the original one and then see about where the airplane will stay. The FBO at PANC is convenient and well- appointed, but they have a lease tenant in their adjoining hangar, and the tenant don't want others using their hangar. At least that's what we infer from their $750 a day quote for hangar usage. Our engineer looks elsewhere and finds a hundred dollar a day hangar at a business at nearby Merrill field.

I go out to move the airplane the few miles between the two airports. It would almost be quicker to taxi down the highway to Merrill Field instead, it's so close. As I settle up with the FBO I pick up a copy of a memo to pilots on the state of construction. It explains what I already know from the NOTAMs and the ATIS, that runway 7R/25L doesn't exist right now. They've removed the signs and will not refer to the runway by name, instead just saying "Taxi through construction, Hold short of Runway seven left" when we cross its ghost. The memo is exceptionally clear, and they've even painted a line to follow through the construction zone. The controllers too are very clear in their phraseology. I would call it one of the least confusing pieces of airport construction I've had to navigate. I wish all airports worked half as hard to alleviate confusion during construction.

Still, not everyone has the memo. A Korean crew is cleared to "taxi through construction, hold short runway seven left" and reads back "taxi across runway seven left." The controller makes two attempts to correct the readback without success. The controller responds to the third incorrect readback, while the B747 trundles across the runway, with a resigned "whatever." He was smart enough not to star his take-off rolling until he knew he had the non-English traffic stopped.

What I don't like about the construction awareness is that they put all the construction information on the ATIS. PANC ATIS is clogged with construction information, and this is not even the slightest bit unusual. It's very irritating when they do this. Sure it's at the "end" of the ATIS "after" the more ephemeral information, but the ATIS is circular. There's little chance I won't have to listen all the way through the construction NOTAMS before I can hear the beginning. I like it better when the ATIS says "see NOTAMs regarding taxiway closures" or "tune 121.975 for construction information." That is, put the construction NOTAMs on their own separate ATIS on a different frequency and let the people who haven't checked the NOTAMs listen to that, while keeping the regular ATIS clean and streamlined. I listen through all the gunk and call clearance delivery.

The active runway, naturally, is the one pointing away from Merrill Field, so after takeoff they immediately vector me back towards the GA airport at 1500'. Once I confirm I see the floatplane crossing right to left, they switch me to Merrill Field tower, who ask me if I have received their ATIS. I didn't think to check if I could receive Merrill Field ATIS on the ground at PANC, and I certainly didn't have time to pick it up since takeoff. Merrill Field has their own set of construction NOTAMs, also turning their ATIS into the extended remix. So now. They give me the wind, runway and altimeter setting and clear me to the circuit.

I land and roll out, taking a left exit before I reach the construction zone, and then I call ground. They ask where I'm going on the field. I know the name of the company and have an approximate location plus a description of the hangar. I read the name to them off my OFP, and they give me directions right to the hangar door. There are some parking Ts painted on the ramp there. Usually you park an airplane with the wings over the crosspieces of the T, but they are marked with tall cones at the sides and I'm afraid I'll hit the cones with the props, so I shut down kinda sideways. The others have meanwhile driven over and are already here. So it really would have been shorter to taxi. We push the plane into a spot (it wouldn't have hit the cones), chock it, and leave it outside for the night. We have use of the hangar starting tomorrow morning.

Sweet, We're In Alaska!

In Whitehorse we're cleared to taxi and then take-off, with no restrictions on turns or altitude, so we're quickly on course for the United States. (I keep saying that, because it's so weird). The weather is definitely poor to the south, but along the highway it's excellent. We look from the dotted line on the GPS to the ground, trying to spot some evidence of the actual border. There's not a river for it it follow, just an arbitrary straight line, and they probably don't mow a line in the trees up here like they do along the 49th parallel in western Canada. We see a pull off with a large building on the highway and conclude that that is the border control station. Kind of low-key, but I doubt it's a hotbed of smuggling.

We soar over mighty rivers and past majestic mountains. All that stuff. Looks just like the Yukon, so far. Which is nothing to scoff at. Our flight plan calls for us to hang a left at an airport with customs, I think it was called Tok. The GPS tells us where it is and we can see the pass to enter on the left. As we make the turn the PIC asks, "did you actually see the airport?" I didn't. It's a broad flat, kind of swampy area with a road running through it. The airport should have been pretty obvious. We shrug and continue on, deciding that perhaps it was a waterdrome. I looked it up just now, and it's a 1700' dirt strip, so we can be forgiven for missing it. But it shows how reliant we have become on GPS. I can't imagine ten years ago turning into a mountain pass without ensuring all the landmarks required to identify it were there.

We have two GPSes working on the project right now, the Garmin 496 and the 430. The 496 is a much better tool for this job, because the 430 is designed for IFR and if it had a personality it would be reduced to a quivering wreck by the proximity of rocks in a pass like this. We can't set a comfortable zoom level on it and use it to look around corners for rocks, because it zooms in close and sounds an alarm whenever we snuggle up to the right side of the pass. The 496 just puts up an inset covered in Xs that it thinks we're going to hit. We always turn so we don't.

The weather in the pass is surprisingly poor, dumping rain on us and reducing visibility in mist. It's really nice to have two pilots in here to confirm the navigation without having to look away from the window. It's a bit of a twisty pass. It's in the middle of nowhere, but there's an RCO, a remote communications outlet, right in the pass, so I can file a PIREP while we negotiate it. Pretty cool. We go around another corner and the weather is fine again. Here we are hooking up with the road (which took a different route) as the pass dwindles back to swamp.

Yeah, swamp. By my estimate almost all the bits of Alaska that aren't mountains or rivers are swamps. Do they call it muskeg here? I forgot to ask. There are hectares and hectares of swampland. Must be millions of mosquitoes down there. It's honestly a bit of a letdown. Alaska gets so much press and here it is looking exactly like northern Alberta. Or northern Saskatchewan, Manitoba, or Ontario. It doesn't have the sweeping rocky look of the Northwest Territories. It probably looks awesome all covered with snow, though. Great for snow machines.

The bad weather that was to the south is now to the southeast, we've kind of gone around it. There are mountains over there and as we draw closer their spectacular beauty makes up for the swamp. Between the rocks are huge glaciers. I don't think we appreciated how huge. I know that at first I thought the one in the picture was a road coming out of the mountains, you know how a road that has snow on it stays snow-covered well after the surrounding snow has melted, because traffic has compacted the snow? Then I looked at it longer and realized that it was a giant glacier. The roadlike ribbon of ice continues out of the photo to the right. I just couldn't fit it all in. Glaciers aren't very photogenic. You really have to go and look at them.

There was an RV park at the foot of one glacier, close enough that you could probably smell the ice from there. If I were to come to Alaska as a tourist in a motorhome, I would definitely want to stay at that RV park. While the mountains with their glaciers and bad weather are to the left, the hills to the right have a curious sandy quality to them. Maybe it's different rock, or maybe just the way the weather comes through that have given them different erosion or vegetation. I need a geologist to follow me around and tell me what I see.

The sandstone side approaches the rock side more closely and we go to the right of a hill in between the two. That turns out to be a shame, because as we come out the other side of the hill we realize we missed a close flyby of another glacier. Maybe on the way back. If we were doing this for fun we would definitely have headed over closer to check out the glaciers better, but we have a customs ETA into Anchorage soon, and we're not being paid to sightsee.

Also recall that we have been unable to buy proper Alaska charts. We're working off the GPS database and the information I've researched on the net and printed off. It should be pretty good, but you never know. We should be within radio contact of Anchorage around the next corner. We are, and the Anchorage area is a long, broad inlet. We pick up the ATIS approaching Wasilla--yes the Wasilla of which Sarah Palin was mayor. It appears to be a suburb of Anchorage rather than the isolated Alaskan village I had pictured. There are dozens of airports on the delta. I call Anchorage approach with our position, and intentions, and they assign us a squawk code and ask if we're familiar with the something-or-other VFR route. We're not, so they give us a vector. We rejoice. A vector means we can't screw up too horrifically now. We're under ATC control. As long as we do what we're told and we can't blunder into any airspace we didn't know about. Real professional, I know. I promise I'm embarrassed about this.

The vector takes us downwind along the west shore of the inlet, then they give us a new vector, taking us further west. I think at first that I've misheard the instruction, it's away from the airport and we're already 20 miles away, but that's where they want us to go. We hook up with a base leg, and then final. I have the airport diagram out and verify our assigned runway, 7L. It intersects runway 14 a thousand or so feet in.

A couple miles back on final the controller asks us where we are parking. I'm glad I did my research and can answer with the name of the FBO. I call back on short final to add that we're going to customs first. I don't know whether their question was to determine whom to bill for our landing fee, or what taxi instructions to give us, so now they have both pieces of information.

Flaps are down, gear is down, cleared to land--we were cleared to land ages ago--and then just as we flare they ask us to go around. We don't see the reason, but the controller obviously does so we don't question it. The PIC does a textbook go around, transitioning from going down to going up very smoothly and cleaning up the airplane. We then follow further instructions to turn around and fly a close right downwind for another try. We are rolling out of the 180 when the controller changes his mind again, "Can you accept runway 32 from there?" It's a complete chop and drop, with runway 32 right there off our right wing but my coworker nods and we put it on the runway. This actually puts us closer to customs. It's almost straight in front of us as we turn off at the first convenient taxiway.

The controller thanks us for our cooperation and gives us a long taxi clearance which I copy down and read back. Much of PANC is one huge stretch of pavement with taxiways being defined routes over that slab. I don't get to just beeline across the pavement to the customs hall. I always find it a little harder to find my turns in this scenario. I like it when there's grass or dirt between the taxiways. I study the taxiway diagram then realize that the route we've been given does not go to customs. It's to the FBO. I call ground back and reiterate our need to clear customs, so they give us a new taxi clearance. We successfully find customs and shut down. I pull out the aircraft documents, my licence and passport, and the rest of our paperwork, and then open the rear door for the arrival of the customs agent.

He comes out quite quickly and is friendly. After checking the airplane paperwork against the letters painted on the vertical stabilizer, he asks us to bring our paperwork and come inside. We follow him through a secured door into an enormous customs hall, an area that could accommodate a B747 full of people, but aside from a few other customs officers, no one else is there. He takes us over to the desk labelled "crew line," where someone else checks our paperwork and types things into his computer. They also direct us to a phone where we can close our VFR flight plan. Our customs escort is also a pilot; we soon learn that practically everyone in Alaska is. I think we disappoint him by not remembering the names of the passes and glaciers along our route. I feel a little guilty knowing that this casually executed, spontaneous and underplanned jaunt is the trip of a lifetime that I'm sure many pilots spend years plotting. Sorry.

Back in the airplane we start up and taxi to the south side of the airport. Ground switches us to tower in order to taxi across the parallel runways, one of which temporarily doesn't exist, due to construction. A friendly woman with a stop/slow sign waves as we taxi through the construction zone. I'm guessing that airplanes always have right of way through construction, and her job is to stop any trucks that might be approaching as we move through. The FBO is the first one on the other side and we park and shut down under the direction of a marshaller.

We take our bags and head inside. There is great consternation amongst the staff that they didn't know we were coming. One of them has dialed the manager, who isn't in today, and he gives me the phone. Darn. The guy I spoke to didn't make it clear that I needed an explicit reservation. I guess he thought all airports were like that. The manager, however, apologizes profusely for not being prepared for our arrival. I affirm that I did call ahead, but didn't give a definite arrival time or date because I didn't know for sure at the time. Is this going to be a problem? I tell him that I don't need anything special like ice. As I say that, it occurs to me that ice is amusingly far from "something special" in Alaska, so I amend it to caviar sandwiches. The manager, whose name is Louis, says that he could probably get us caviar sandwiches if we wanted them, and that we are welcome to stay there. I guess we pass the screening.

The one thing we do need is charts. Those turn out to be a bit of a problem. We describe the ones we want, but they only have some expired ones for reference. Louis makes some calls and then tells us where we can get them. They aren't available on the field, but there are two sources, one quite near our hotel and another an FBO at a nearby airport.

Meanwhile our customers have arrived via the airlines so they come and pick us up. We check into the hotel, which has small but nice rooms, and the twenty-four hours of daylight mean that I don't really mind that most of the lightbulbs are missing. There is a comfortable windowseat with a view of the mountains. Just before I go to bed I find out what the job here is. Oh boy. This is going to take some diplomacy.

---

Also, a former senator with the same name as the airport, Ted Stevens, just died in an air crash. I think he may be the airport namesake even though he was still alive when the airport was named. Americans don't always seem to wait until people are dead before naming things after them.

On the Marge

The next day we load the airplane with our personal gear, cursing as usual the paucity of tiedown points in this thing. Once everything is packed and secured, I call the customs broker to tell him we really are going today. He's used to our 'hurry up and wait' schedules, but now the US won't let us postpone arrival permission from day to day, so he can't file the paperwork and let us catch up to it anymore. Everything has to be done the same day. Good thing I called, because a pilot switch means he doesn't have all the current details on my coworker. I grab his passport out of his bag and provide the broker with the relevant details, and with an estimated time and place for our penetration of US airspace en route. I have to call him again from Whitehorse to get a fax sent to the FBO.

It's very weird for me to be going north across the border to the US. I'm used to going north out of the usual infrastructure of Canadian life. And I'm used to going south across the US border. I'm afraid I'm going to forget some basic rule of going to the US, just because I'm going the wrong way. To me the US being "south of the border" is as cliched as Mexico is in the US. I just received an Aeroplan e-mail that starts "Want to take flight south of the border? Treat yourself to a 10% discount with Aeroplan." It's valid for any flight to the U.S. Imagine if Mexico had a part that was right in the middle of Kansas and that's how disorienting this is.

We take off and fly north, or actually mostly west. It's almost due west by the compass, because the magnetic variation is 21 degrees here. The weather is spectacular in BC and the Yukon. I follow on paper maps to identify the mountains and lakes. We're coming up on Whitehorse, but we're almost parallel to the BC-Yukon border, converging very slowly. We'll cross it just shortly before reaching Whitehorse.

I have a memory of there being something irregular about radio procedures in Whitehorse, but I search the CFS and can't find anything odd. I tune the tower a long way out to get situational awareness coming in. A pilot on frequency position reports "coming up on Lake Leberge" and I freak out. No, not because he's at our position and altitude, but because he's on the marge of Lake Lebarge. My innocent crewmate is 'treated' to a sudden Robert Service recitation.

There are strange things done in the Midnight Sun
By the men who moil for gold.
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your bllod run cold.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

I would have gone on, but mercifully I didn't know any more by heart. I resolved to rectify that at my earliest convenience, but I think that's after my other resolutions about running, simming and building a solar-powered hovercraft, so don't ask me about it soon.

Except for poetic outbursts, descent into Whitehorse is routine. The field is easy to spot and we're sequenced number four for landing, behind a Convair, then resequenced number four again after the first guy lands, because a faster aircraft turned up to fill in one of the gaps. Pretty adept work for what I believe is a non-radar tower. As we exit the runway, on a cross runway, tower asks us where we're going on the field. I say something like "Looking for avgas" or "to refuel" and we're given taxi instructions up a hill. Just when you think you're at a modern airport. At the top of the hill is a little charter operation, or maybe a repair shop, but nothing that looks like a fuel pump. We wave off the marshaller, do a very awkward one-eighty and call back ATC for clarification. They confirm that there is no fuel up here. Whatever I said coming off the runway sounded like the name of the company based up that hill. we taxi back down the hill and across the cross runway, and park where we should have gone in the first place.

We go into the FBO and ask about fuel. It will be about forty-five minutes, because the fuel truck, just went up the hill to fuel a charter fleet. We pick a safe estimated time of departure and divvy up duties: I'll take care of customs and fuel while he does weather and files a flight plan. I also get their fax number and permission to receive a fax. He calls 1-866-WX-BRIEF while I call the customs broker and fill out a fuel order form.

The fax is several pages of all the dirt US customs wants to know about us. I page through it to make sure everything has printed properly and there aren't any glaring inaccuracies. They spelled our names right, anyway. The fueller arrives ahead of schedule and I direct him which tanks to fill, then sign his paperwork.

There are a lot of other aircraft around, some military, I didn't notice whose, and a small fleet of firefighting aircraft from Saskatchewan. They've been working in Alaska, helping to fight forest fires. I didn't know we gave international aid to the Americans. I wonder if the Americans chartered the Canadian firefighting capability, or if there's simply an international agreement and we come to each other's aid in the burning forests. Probably the former. I'm such a communist to think of the latter.

The other pilot, he's the PIC on the customs paperwork, comes back with an 'everything old is new again' discovery. He says that when he called Flight Services they said, "Why don't you come on over?" and they gave him a face-to-face briefing. He's exhilarating in the experience of being right there with a briefer who could point at things on weather charts and at how much easier it was to get a complete picture of the weather. He's too young to remember that that was the way things used to be everywhere. They didn't have GFAs back then, and I don't think the satellite imagery was as good, but it is a good feeling to have an in-person weather briefing. Especially when it was that same person that you were talking to on the radio as you taxied out for departure. The weather is low on the south route, so we'll have to follow the Alaska highway and then cut south down the valley to Anchorage. That makes the trip a bit longer, but within our contingency planning. Also the Alaska-Canada border at Beaver Creek doesn't count as ADIZ, so we don't need to worry about being super accurate with the crossing time.

I call US Customs in Anchorage with our recalculated ETA, and to ensure that they received their share of the paperwork. You'd think this could all be more automated or less labour intensive, but when your dealing with international travel nothing is predicable enough not to worry about. In this case the Americans are ready for our arrival.

---

Also: I'm looking for someone who has easy access to CYPK who could do a fun favour for me in the next few days. Please e-mail me if you think you could.

As Easy As Picking up A Rental Car

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. I'm at a a swanky FBO within easy walking distance of the passenger terminal at a large Canadian airport. There's a spacious waiting room with windows looking out on the runways, and I can recognize one of our company airplanes parked outside at the back of the large apron. Inside there are leather couches, a big TV and a fancy coffee machine.

I order the tanks all topped off, which based on how much should be in there right now, will probably mean three or four hundred litres of avgas, but the FBO lady say there might be a problem. Kind of two problems. The first problem is that the avgas truck broke down this morning, and the second problem is that the totalizer on the avgas truck indicates that there is barely more than four hundred litres in the bowser. This may or may not be the amount that can be actually pumped, so they might have four hundred litres or they might not. I guess they don't always reset the totalizer properly, or something. I didn't press for an explanation.

They estimate that the truck will be operational in about an hour. I tell them that as long as I'm getting good fuel that I'll take what they have once the truck is ready. The FBO woman lets me leave my luggage in a conference room while I go and get some lunch at the terminal. It was Swiss Chalet, or Subway or something. And an apple. A fast food restaurant on the terminal concourse was selling apples and oranges. There might be hope for the world after all.

When I return, the good news is that the truck is fixed, but the bad news is that it only put out two hundred litres or so. I've lost track of the number of FBOs--or entire airports--that I have run out of avgas. I go out to the airplane, noting to myself that if you buy fuel for an airplane, you can get access to the airside at this international airport without producing a ramp pass or any ID. I don't think I even gave my name. Everything is in order with the airplane, but it does need a couple hundred more litres of fuel. No problem, there's a flying club that sells avgas, at the other end of the airport. I start up and call ground for taxi clearance.

They give me clearance, and a simple routing. I read back the hold short instruction and trundle along, in that direction, keeping my nosewheel on the yellow line. I can check it by looking in the mirror I use to ensure the gear is down, but I don't have to. Even though the line is only about the width of my hand, I know when my nosewheel is on it just by looking ahead through the front window. I remember my first or second lesson, when I asked the instructor if I could just taxi today, because I needed more practice. He told me it wasn't necessary, I'd get enough practice as part of normal lessons. I guess I have lots of practice now.

I pass an El Al jet, just sitting there off to the side. There's a visible security presence, so I guess they know how easy it is for me to get onto the apron with my airplane full of shoulder- launched missiles and high explosives perfectly innocuous, harmless cargo. I taxi on by, hold short of a runway and then am cleared across.

The general aviation area is a little crowded. Ground instructs someone else to hold for a Katana, and then me to hold for someone else, and then I find my way to the avgas pumps. And there's someone already at the pumps. I stop and idle waiting for him. He sees me and makes elaborate, "do you want to come here?" gestures. I nod emphatically and then he pushes his small single-engine airplane out of the way. There's a yellow line painted on the tarmac leading up to the fuelling area, but I don't know what wingspan it's for. I'm afraid it's a little too close, so follow a bit to the left of the yellow line. Someone appears to marshall me, so I follow his instructions, still watching out for my own wingtips. It would still be my responsibility if he directed me to taxi into something. When I'm opposite the pumps, he signals me to shut down, so I do, but by the time I get out of the airplane, he's gone again.

I inspect the pumps and they don't look like self-serve. I go up to someone getting out of a light twin behind me and ask if the pumps are self serve. He says no, so I go inside the building to place my fuel order. When the airplane is fuelled, the guys at the hangar say they don't want me to start up there, because I will blast the hangar as I turn out. Someone comes back with a tractor. The tractor is dragging a lawnmower attachment, and on the back of the lawnmower is a hook, and on the hook is a sort of trailer, a tongue pulling a little platform with four wheels on it. And, after a bit of winching, on the platform is the nosewheel of my airplane. This contraption tows my airplane out to where I can start up without blasting anyone, and I do so.

Ground control states the wind and asks me if I can accept the small runway at the flying school end of the field. I glance at the CFS for its length, then at the OAT, and answer in the affirmative. It's not hot enough or high altitude enough for me to have to pull out the chart and do the exact calculation to accept this length. I have a number in my head that I an accept in calm winds up to 2000' density altitude up to 20 degrees. I'm number one on the taxiway and cleared for takeoff after a Cessna 172 lands. I use lots of the runway, but not all of it, and climb out on vectors.

Post continued after you folks have fun deciding where I am.

The USA No Longer Holding Short of Canada

A few readers have written to alert me to a change in FAA regulations effective June 30th. The new rule requires controllers to issue, and pilots to receive, explicit clearances to cross any runway, including an inactive or closed one. Controllers are no longer allowed to simply say "taxi to" the active runway and must give a routing and explicit instructions to cross or hold short of each runway encountered en route. They can still assign an airplane to follow another, instead of giving explicit routing, but must issue crossing and/or hold short instructions to the following aircraft if the route crosses any runways. The "follow the 737" type of instruction is very useful for pilots who are unfamiliar with an airport that has confusing taxiway instructions. The controller can just have us follow someone that they know knows the way, such as a scheduled airline flight.

This rule change makes me happy, because the rule has existed in Canada since before I learned to fly, and was deeply ingrained in my psyche before my first solo. Every time an American controller blithely says to me, "Taxi to runway seven," I frown and consult my runway diagram, thinking "how does she want me to get there?" I choose a route using the taxiway diagram, but my instinct is still to stop at all hold short lines. To tell the truth, even when I am in the States and know that the rule allows me to proceed across the double lines ahead of me, most of the time I still call ground and "confirm cleared across two seven?" The ground controller might sound irritated, but not as irritated as she would sound if I committed a runway incursion.

I believe some US airports have had this in place as a house rule or a local regulation for some time, because I have had explicit US runway crossing clearances in the past. In fact on June 20th I landed at a US airport and my taxi clearance to parking included an explicit runway crossing. The next day when I was taxiing out it didn't, so I confirmed and then followed up with "I guess you guys don't need to issue that clearance until next week, eh?" The previous day's controller was possibly practicing for the change.

What safety procedures already present in the US should Canada adopt? Off the top of my head, I'd like to suggest that Nav Canada print airport identifiers on WACs and VNCs (charts).

Out of Calgary

I fly to Calgary International Airport and then jump in a cab, asking the driver if he knows where the Springbank airport is. He says yes, that he did his citizenship exam in Springbank. "Congratulations," I say. He is originally from Kashmir. I ask him why he chose to come to Canada and he says his father worked in the Indian Embassy here and he loves the country. He doesn't think Calgary is too cold, and the scenery is familiar, because you can see the Himalayas from Kashmir.

He's fascinated by the fact that I'm going to fly an airplane, and when we arrive at the maintenance hangar he gets out of the cab and wants to see it. I don't even know where it is, but I point through the fence at some that are larger and smaller than mine, looking for one that is the same type, but then I see mine at the back behind a twin otter and I point it out. I tell him he can go down the road a bit and get a fam flight at a school, and he'll be able to see what it's like to fly. I wonder if he'll be at the controls of an air taxi someday.

I go inside the FBO and introduce myself. The airplane isn't quite ready yet, as I expected, so I get an estimate as to when it will be, and go down the field to get lunch and updated charts at the flying club. Springbank is the Calgary area's training airport, a busy little patch of airspace where students can do hours of touch and go landings without congesting the runways at YYC. They're still all up in Calgary's airspace, and in fact as of a recent NOTAM, Springback Tower controls only its immediate airspace, and Calgary Terminal takes over again all around it. I review the reporting points here so I won't get caught out be being told to fly direct some place I've never heard of. On my new chart, I cross out the Springbank frequency and write in the Calgary one as directed by the NOTAM. I call an 888-number to prerequest a transponder code. The controller can't give it to me now, but my call ensures one will be generated for me, and he says I'll get it from the ground controller.

When the avionics work is complete and the airplane is released to me, I start a preflight inspection. They have installed that new GPS I told you about, replaced the ADF loop antenna, and adjusted the pitch control of the autopilot by tightening the elevator cables. The first thing I do is go on board. The panel is all closed up, circuit breakers reset and so on. I can just see the elevator if I have my head up against the window, so I pull on the yoke to make sure it goes up not down. (It's happened!) It goes up but there's a shuddering noise in the yoke, like there's no lubrication or something. I try the same thing with the right side yoke, and curiously there is no such noise. What the heck? The two should be completely connected and do exactly the same thing. I go back inside to get the technician. He comes out to see and then understands my concern. He explains that the bushing on the copilot yoke is worn and now that he has tightened up the elevator cables (they were loose, explaining the altitude hold problem of the autopilot) there is vibration. He says it's safe to fly, so I defer the yoke sleeve according to the company maintenance control manual and get on with it. I won't in flight routinely pull the yoke that hard or far anyway. I check all the trims, jumping in an out of the plane to see what I can't see from my seat, and I tell the techs that I will continue to destination regardless of whether everything works to spec. I know that the work was being done on a time available basis and that the contract I'm flying to means the time is no longer available. Canada needs more good avionics techs.

I call for fuel and while that is being delivered I determine that all the bits I need are sufficiently attached to the airplane for flight. There's some sun damage to the nosewheel tire, not enough to pose a risk, just an unusual thing for this airplane because it usually works hard enough to wear it out before it rots at all. It's been a slow winter.

The airplane starts easily. When I turn on the avionics master I laugh because a local AM radio station starts blaring through the overhead speaker. The techs have been using the ADF navigation radio for entertainment during the work. I don't mind, but if you're an AME or apprentice who wants make the best impression, I'd recommend you turn down the volume and set the ADF to a different frequency before giving the airplane back to the customer. I flick the ADF speaker switch back to headset and tune the Pidgeon NDB. It identifies extremely faintly, and the needle doesn't point, but it's ten miles away, so it might not work on the ground.

I monitor the ATIS and call the ground controller. He does indeed have my departure squawk code ready for me, and taxi via Charlie. Just before I start rolling forward they amend the taxi instructions to include the few metres I will have to travel on A to get to C. The controller automatically spat out the standard instructions from the flying school apron and then had to revise them to match the fact that I'm not at the flying school. I wonder if I could have got in trouble for being on alfa without an explicit clearance. I don't think so. There is a run up area by the runway, but it's not that big. I'm glad I finish before another twin comes up. I'm cleared to position and then for takeoff, "maintain runway heading, not above 5000'." That sounds pretty good until you remember that Springbank is at 3940' elevation. As soon as I'm radar identified they allow me up to 5500' and give me a vector, then switch me to the Calgary frequency. Calgary gives me another vector, then clears me direct to destination, but they apologize that they can't give me higher until I'm out of their airspace. They point out a couple of helicopters and a regional jet for me and then I'm squawking 1200 and on my own.

Road Bumps

A while ago -- a long while ago, I just found some old notes -- a fellow pilot out at Oakland in his Cessna Skyhawk had a closer-than-comfortable encounter with an MD-80 that was transporting federal prisoners.

We were e-mailing about the juicy non-blogged details, and then I said, "Can you imagine if there had been a collision and they had to evacuate it on the runway? It would have been like a scene out of The Fugitive!" (I love that movie. I probably rewatch it a couple times a year). But then a moment's thought made me realize, "Mind you, running over you probably wouldn't have damaged it at all."

He produced this speculative cockpit conversation aboard the MD-80:

"What was that noise?"

"I dunno... probably just the new embedded hold short lights. Oh look, there's that weirdo Piaggio parked next to Execjet again! Now where the hell did that 172 in the runup area go?"

Ouch. He continues to be vigilant so that scenario does not come to pass.

My aircraft is only big enough that I have to worry about where my prop wash goes more for courtesy than endangering smaller aircraft, but I suppose there are airplanes small enough that I could run one over in the dark. I think I'd notice, though. I know right away as I add power if some helpful FBO employee has chocked a wheel without me noticing.