Drone vs Helicopter

This wasn't put together as a PSA on drones, but it's being passed around the aviation community as one. I haven't figured out how to embed it as a video, so let me know if the link doesn't open a video for you.

video

Having the audio on is not strictly necessary, but after the main sequence there's an explanation that you may find interesting if you like that sort of thing.

Drones are scary little things. You'd think the danger a small thing like a bird or a drone can pose to a large aircraft would be impressed on the minds of the public after things like US Airways Flight 1549. (I'm not going to call it by its nickname because that undermines the training and expertise of the aircraft designers, SOP writers, pilots, flight attendants and rescue personnel). But people go on thinking that anything in the sky above them is as impervious to as the moon to their interference, and they try to check us out. Transport Canada has a renewed campaign trying to protect us from them. The roads around my airport are marked out with bilingual and graphic "no drones" signs. I was going to say that people wouldn't throw rocks at passing cars, so why do they launch these things at airplanes, but then I remember a relative of mine getting picked up by the police for dropping rocks off a pedestrian overpass, so yeah, people would do these things. I can almost imagine this Casualty One episode inspiring people to attack helicopters.

I've reported drones twice in flight, both times while in the immediate vicinity of an airport, and both times taken very seriously by ATC. Just like playing with fireworks, lasers, or things that look like grenade launchers, even if you think you're not causing any harm, you do that in the vicinity of people operating aircraft and we're going to launch law enforcement (or more) right back at you.

Why Helicopters Work That Way

I've never studied helicopter aerodynamics, but I witnessed a helicopter crash once, and the event was consistent with the theory that it's principally the integrity of the tail rotor that prevents the helicopter from behaving the way the bluebird expects, but the chicken has an excellent point.

2 Cows and a Chicken Comic Strip on GoComics.com

Also as the days get darker and the weather outside arbitrary northern hotels gets bleaker, I'm tending to agree with these chickens.

Currently binging on House, Grey's Anatomy, Community, and Fringe.

Highway 63

I've been to this airport before. I remember that you can't buy fuel on Sundays, but today is Saturday, and it turns out we've landed at the same time as another pilot who has a key to the pump, so she can fuel any time she likes. When she has filled the tiny tanks on her Cessna single, we stretch the hose out to our tanks and put in fifteen times as much fuel. (The fueller who filled us beside at the FBO next to the solar-powered coke bottles said we had set a record for the amount of avgas she had ever put in one plane. But we were really empty then. I'd gone a couple of minutes into our reserves, because we were working overhead the airport, and there was another one just down the valley, in case of emergency). We go in and pay, and call a cab, which arrives eventually, in the manner of small town cabs on the weekend.

It's an okay hotel, but it's on the edge of town, and the town is spread out enough that it would take about forty-five minutes to walk to a restaurant. And probably as long to get that cab back again, so we order pizza. We try to avoid eating pizza on the road, because eventually we'll be forced to, and we want it to be a treat. We eat the pizza together in my room, while watching a show called "Naked and Alone." It's kind of like Survivor except without the odd psychological games and the uncanny ability of the women to maintain an absence of bodily hair through the whole ordeal. There are actually two people, and they do start out naked, but have made themselves television-acceptable clothing by the time I tune in. They are really miserable: diarrhea from eating too much fruit, driven crazy from insect bites, and one of them doesn't like seafood, but the other one makes him eat it. At the end they get scores out of ten for their survival skills.

In the morning we come down to breakfast, standard motel breakfast of wrapped muffins, fruit, and make-your-own waffles. We ask the clerk if she can call us a cab. There are no cabs here until 9 am. The airport is not actually very far away from the hotel, but we'll be behind schedule if we throw in a half hour walk with our baggage. Back to the breakfast room to chat with the guys in reflective outwear and work boots. They have trucks. I ask them where they work.

"We work on highway 63."

They didn't even know there was an airport around here, but agree to make a small detour to drop us off. I've hitched rides before with a friend of the hotel receptionist, a medevac pilot, someone who just came to drop off her friend at the airport, and the guy who came out to sell us the fuel. It's become just part of the adventure.

On Leadership and Lost

I've been rewatching, or kind of re-listening to--I tend to do chores with the television playing--Lost recently. One of the themes of the show is leadership, which is something I'm dealing with in life, as well. You'll see whatever it is you're focusing on, in whatever you look at, so it's not surprising I'm finding it in Lost.

When I was in high school, and I got into first world funks of depression at the hopelessness of life, (i.e. when I was a normal teenager), I discovered that a good route out was through reading really depressing stories by A.P. Chekhov. He wrote hundreds of the things, generally short simple tales on the futility of life, populated by characters who knew, discovered, or completely failed to realize, that every step they took was merely plodding closer to pointless death. They're well-written, with believable characters and the somewhat alien world of 19th century Russia--took me ages to understand why so many grandmothers slept on the stove--so one can read quite a few. At first I would nod my head in sullen agreement that the world was that way. After a while I would venture an internal opinion that maybe it was not that black. And finally I would yell at the characters not to be so pathetic, to go forth and do something. And I would get up and set an example. For some people, inspirational literature requires actual inspiration, but nothing goads me to do things so much as seeing it done incorrectly.

The same seems to be true of leadership training. As much as I probably need to pick up a book to help train myself in the art of leading a group of people to accomplish a goal without any of them killing one another or being eaten by polar bears, I have no desire to. But watch a couple of hours of Lost, and I'm really wishing the smoke monster would get Jack. Sure, I understand that fiction requires drama and heroes, and that fictional heroes require tragic flaws, but some of the television traditions, dare I say tropes are really aggravating. The leader character on Lost is a doctor named Jack. In the immediate aftermath of the crash he is the hero because he can treat injuries, and resuscitate people, but he ends up racing from place to place being the hero for everything. So here are my non-leadership techniques to learn from Lost.

Playing up the incompetence of those around you is not a leadership skill. This is more something Lost (and every other TV show does) than something Jack does but they are both fictional creations of the same writers, so it counts. To show that Jack is a great and mighty leader, everyone else on the beach is depicted as clueless and incompetent. There's a character, Boone, who is a licensed lifeguard, training which specifically includes a good deal of first aid and emergency scene management. Jack has to take over his resuscitation efforts because he's doing it wrong, and later in the show rescues him from drowning, while they are both trying to save a third person. There's no plot reason for Boone to be a fraudulent or incompetent lifeguard. It would have better showed Jack's leadership abilities if he had come over, approved and encouraged Boone's competent resuscitation and moved on to another victim. He would have looked like more of a leader if he had left the task of resuscitating someone who had been pulled out of he water specifically in the hands of someone whose professional specialty that was. The dramatic point that was made during the swimming rescue would have been made more strongly if it were Boone who had to haul an exhausted Jack back to shore. When Jack needs someone to hold down a patient who has to endure surgery without anaesthetic he chooses a man who specifically and repeatedly states that he can't handle the sight of blood. He sets the guy up to fail.

Doing everything yourself is not leadership. Jack is always running, literally running, from one situation to another, placing himself in danger without developing or drawing on the skills of the people around him to solve problems. This is his major dramatic character flaw, so it couldn't be more blatant, but watching him do it wrong is a good way to make me wonder where I can apply this lesson. My beach isn't covered in able-bodied people who can be pressed into service to do the essential tasks, but I still might be doing more leaping than is strictly necessary.

Meanwhile Ben, the mysterious leader of the others, shows quite a different style of leadership. He doesn't do any leaping at all, accomplishing everything through sinister psychological manipulation. This fascinates me, and I know it can be done without the sinister part, because I willingly go to great effort to achieve goals under psychological manipulation by my own boss and by the director of an organization I volunteer with. You see, I like to feel valuable and appreciated and they know that, so they appreciate me in return for my efforts. I'm always left thinking to myself, "I'm happy, and--in the case of the non-volunteer position--they give me money. Am I being tricked here? If I weren't being manipulated into doing this, I might go and do something else ... which might make me happy ... or money." And then I get confused and stop thinking about that.

So, in conclusion, leadership lessons for the day: Get people around you to do things they are competent at in return for things that they want.

LOST

II might as well post this now, because I won't have a chance to update it if the mystery of Malaysian Airlines 370 is solved in the next few days. I don't have any special insights about the disappearance of an entire Boeing 777, but as a pilot I have to wonder about it.

First off, despite what movies like Airport '77 depict, an airplane that crashes into the sea doesn't slip whole and undetected under the waves. With considerable skill, or even questionable skill and some luck, it could alight on the surface of the water without substantial damage. Handled as if it were being landed on land, an airplane can skim over the surface of the water the way a skipped pebble or a snowmobile does. (Unlike the snowmobile, an airplane doesn't immediately sink, because the fuselage is full of air, and buoyant). No sane person would deliberately ditch an aircraft without a substantial emergency, because if something goes slightly wrong, the picture is substantially different. The video below is of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that was out of fuel. The captain was trying to ditch it while fighting with the hijackers. Even that fuselage stayed afloat for a reasonable amount of time, and many of the deaths were not due to crash injuries, but because passengers inflated their life vests before exiting the aircraft, impeding evacuation.

There's a post being shared on Facebook that purports to show the aircraft recovered, but you can tell from the still that it's actually a Lion Air landing accident from last year. Don't click that one because it's probably a virus.

When an airplane comes into contact with it, water is really quite a bit like ground. Do it in landing configuration, descending towards the water at a shallow, about three degree angle, then touching down wings level, slightly nose up and it is quite survivable. Do it at high speed, or inverted, or any other way that doesn't involve control at a low descent rate, and the result is catastrophic. Swiss Air 111 hit the water 20 degree nosedive, and at a bank turn angle of 110 degrees, and disintegrated into millions of pieces. Only one of the passengers was visually identifiable. Alaska Airlines 261 was a similar story. Many of the millions of pieces that make up an airliner and its contents float, so the debris is visible on the surface and drifts ashore. Jet fuel is oily, and floats on water leaving a visible slick. Also both those crews were in contact with air traffic control during the sequence that led to the crash.

When an aircraft suddenly disappears from radar and stops transmitting, one good guess is that it broke up in midair. But when that happens the pieces are in the water in roughly the area where the radar track stopped, and the last week has seen ships, helicopters satellites and and airplanes tasked to search that area with no results. Plus substantial other evidence exists that the airplane did not explode, crash, alight or otherwise make contact with the water in the area they've been looking for it. SATCOM, an automated system on board the aircraft, and one a very diligent Boeing pilot of my acquaintance says he doesn't know how to turn off, continued sending transmissions. It's a passive system that pings about once an hour, sending what's basically a "ready to transmit" signal but no data links were opened, because the companies involved had not subscribed to that level of service from the satellite operator.

Here's what I have gleaned of the timeline. Times are Malaysian local.

• 12:41 a.m. Take off
• 1:07 a.m. The ACARS data transmission system stopped communicating. ACARS is a two-way data transmission system in the cockpit. The pilots can use it to request weather data and the airline will use it to send them connecting flight information, and even to update the flight management system. It automatically transmits some data on phase of flight and things like fuel status and engine performance, so the airline can detect a need for maintenance before it is urgent. It can also be used for communication with ATC, but as far as I know is generally only used with ground controllers to get the complex initial clearance for a flight. It might be used in flight for a complex rerouting, but I don't know. Check the comments to see if one of my more knowledgeable readers does. The ACARS system can be turned off from the cockpit.
• 1:21 a.m. The crew is 'handed-off' by Malaysian ATC. That is they are told to contact the next controller on a specific frequency. They reply normally to this call, implying that they will comply, but do not call the Vietnam ATC.
• 1:21 a.m. The transponder is turned off. The transponder is a simple device that works in concert with ATC radar. Before take-off ATC assigns the airplane a four digit code, which the pilot sets on the transponder. When it receives a ping from radar, it sends back a signal encoded with the aircraft altitude and the four digit code. that the pilot has set on the device. The ATC computers match the code with the aircraft type and destination in its flight plan, plus calculate and display a speed based on consecutive returns. If an aircraft does not have a working transponder, ATC may still see the aircraft on radar, but it is a "primary target." The transponder can be turned off from the cockpit. Transponders malfunction pretty frequently, and an aircraft like the B777 probably has two, for backup and to facilitate changing codes without an interruption in radar track.
• 1:22 a.m. Vietnam ATC expect a check in from the airplane but instead the radar track shows an almost 180 degree turn.
• 1:38 a.m. Civilian radar lose primary target. Without the positive identification of the transponder reply, controllers only know that their radar is hitting something there. Based on the speed and location, they can sometimes deduce that the target is a train, ship, or flock of birds, and they can be pretty confident that a blip going the speed of an airliner, in the location where an airliner transponder just stopped transmitting, is that airliner. Primary and secondary surveillance radars may have different coverage, so an airplane that could normally be tracked by its transponder signal may not be visible as a primary target.
• 2:15 a.m Malaysian military radar detects an unknown aircraft, possibly MH370, on a track that suggests it made another turn.
• 2:30 am Another possible military radar contact with the missing jet. I'm not sure if it shows the jet on the same track or not.
• 8:11 a.m. Final SATCOM ping received from the aircraft.

The aircraft had about eight hours of fuel on board at the speed it was going, and more if they reduced the power settings. I don't know the radar structure of the airspace they were in to say where they could get to without the aircraft being detected by an agency that would recognize and report its significance.

I don't know what it all means. I have a friend who is livid at the apparent lack of cooperation among the various military agencies who almost certainly have more information on the track of the missing airplane, but don't want to divulge their capabilities to one another. He also suggests that if the SATCOM signals were received by multiple satellites their source location could be triangulated. He also implied that a team of children with expertise at Where's Waldo should be put on the case, but I think the former suggestion was the more serious one.

Here is a link that answers some basic questions I didn't think people would ask, but people have some odd questions about airplanes. Someone asked me if this could be a case of pilot incapacitation, with the autopilot or random chance making those turns. I'd say no. The autopilot wouldn't be programmed to make those turns, and if the autopilot wasn't on, I would expect significant altitude changes. It's an odd incapacitation that would cause you to turn off two separate systems, one fourteen minutes before a normal call to ATC.

This one gives a pretty good explanation of tracking technology, and addresses the question of "how can we apply technology so this can't happen, and why haven't we done so already?"

Because I don't like to think of airplanes crashing if it's not necessary, I imagine that the pilots have stolen the aircraft, kidnapping the passengers. Although probably worse. It sounds like some cellphones were still switched on and even logged into social media accounts. Given the attachment some people have for their phones, it seems unlikely that that many people could be taken alive without anyone managing to get a message of some sort away. Despite my recent rewatching of the television Series LOST, I don't believe that the airplane has been spirited away to a mysterious island guarded by a smoke monster.

The facts that there will be wreckage if an airplane crashes, and that they haven't found wreckage, don't mean that the airplane didn't crash. It's a really BIG ocean, and it takes a long time to search. I liked this picture of Malaysian SAR crews. Of course it's probably posed, but I'm always attracted to shots that depict a group of people engrossed in something, not looking at the camera. It suggests expertise, focus, teamwork, and an important task. I also like the simplicity of the way the women's hijabs work with their flight suits.

I'll give the final word to The Onion, a satirical publication that doesn't know the phrase "too soon."

Update: They've pulled some location information out of the satellite data, but don't have enough satellites receiving the signal to resolve the position ambiguity.

Diversity in Coveralls

I'm still working on my Human Factors course. In typical training film style the cast features maintenance personnel of varying age, sex and ethnicity, acting out little scenarios. I keep wondering if they are starving actors or actual AMTs. The module tells me that assertive statements are honest, open, and direct and "deal with facts (rather than your opinion)."

Assertive body language requires:
- maintaining eye contact
- talking in a strong steady tone of voice with a normal volume
- standing comfortably (relaxed) but firmly
- standing close enough for your presence to be felt but not so close as to be aggressive
- gesturing with your hands (keep your hands out of your pockets)
- using facial expressions which support your statement
Assertive body language will help you stand up for your rights!

Okay, I can be assertive: state the facts, not too submissive, not too aggressive, untainted by my opinion. But then the same page advises me to include statements like "I feel", "I want, "I think." Wait what? Prefacing a fact with "I feel," "I want," or "I think" is a way to reduce the directness and assertiveness of a statement, and turn it into an opinion. Are they trying to tell me that That tire needs to be changed is less assertive and direct than I feel that tire needs to be changed? Did I write that down wrong? I'm told to use assertive statements like: "I felt embarrassed when you criticized me in front of the others." I don't know that there isn't a scenario in which the reply to that is not somewhere between "Man up!" and "Good, so don't screw up again." Maybe, "Would you like a hankie?" Or what about the suggestion to be assertive and telling your supervisor that you need a variety of tasks in order to avoid boredom? Anyone try that?

They don't show those suggestions as a video dialogue. Instead the actors show the right way and wrong way to approach tasks. Guess which this one is:

AMT #1: "I haven't had a chance to do the APU combustion chamber and external inspection. Can I forget about it?"

AMT #2: "Yeah, takes two hours to do it all, and I've never seen a problem with one."

That's very comparable to pilots skipping checklist items. "It's never been a problem," is a ridiculous reason not to check something, but it totally happens.

There's a strange mix of useful and loopy suggestions, leaving me wondering if I'm too cynical to realize that the loopy ones have their uses, or too naive to realize they are all loopy. I'm not even sure whether Most of the pressure generally comes from you. You create the pressure by accepting unreasonable timelines. is sage or the loopy result of someone who doesn't understand that the timelines predate problems. The pilot finds a problem thirty minutes before the airplane is ready to depart. The customer is waiting. At what point does the AMT accept any of this? Clearly Scotty of the USS Enterprise managed pressure by multiplying his repair time estimates by three, but you notice the Enterprise never had a problem that required a part to be shipped from Vulcan during that planet's High Holy Week. They never had to remove the defective part, send it across the neutral zone to be overhauled and then wait for it to be shipped back. That's the beauty of replicators.

Or maybe when Captain Kirk is yelling over the intercom, Scotty is mentally asking himself ...

What is the reality of the problem? (e.g., Can I safely complete the job in the time allotted?
- What is the worst thing that could happen to me?
- Am I overreacting to the situation?
- Can I change the situation so that something positive can come out of it?
- If I can't, what is the best way to deal with the problem?

Has this happened to me before?
- If so, what did I do? What can I do better?
- If not, then what is a rational plan to solve it?

The warp core goes critical and/or we are tortured by Klingons is usually the worst thing on the Enterprise, but sometimes I think it may be destruction of the universe and another parallel one. Or maybe it's missing a birthday party.

Nancy was pleased that she would have the help of two experienced AMTs for the detailed inspection. This will let her finish the job on time so that she can be at her son's birthday party. She had to work through the last two parties. Nancy's supervisor walked over and said, "Sorry but Jason had to go to Tuktoyaktuk to work on an engine failure and Melissa has to solve a pressurization problem on the plane that just came in. You're going to be on your own for this one. This is a good opportunity for you to prove yourself and keep your job".

Should Nancy prove herself or disappoint her son again?

I'm not even sure what that's supposed to be about. I don't get to go to birthday parties. I think it might be written in my job description, "does not attend birthday parties." Being required to work unscheduled overtime seems to be a sucky thing about working in maintenance, because you could just put down your tools and go home. The pilot doesn't really have that option, so I don't have a broad basis for sympathy. Aviation in general is not compatible with being there for other people's life events. I kind of suspect that Nancy's kid will have a better year in general if she keeps her job than if she loses it over a birthday party. I suppose we're supposed to counsel Nancy to have a hissy fit, excuse me to be assertive and demand additional resources for the inspection, but that's not going to make them appear. The program tells me to Click on "Continue" to see a suggestion.

According to the module, Nancy should "Stop", "Look", "Think", and "Act". The action would be to talk to her boss about how her overtime work affects her family life and how this stress is affecting her job performance. Okay, so she's had a nice talk with her supervisor. Now does she perform the inspection or go home and blow up balloons? The lack of resources advice in the training module consistently fails to address issues that arise when there just aren't resources. There isn't a hangar available. It's going down to -30 tonight and it will be -32 tomorrow night, and soon there won't be day at all until spring. There's no good strategy. So don't pretend like there is.

Oh, now I totally want to see a human factors training course where all the examples are drawn from Star Trek.

National Baggage

I watched United States President Obama on TV last night, appealing to Americans to ask their congressmen to approve raising the debt ceiling already. Don't take this coupled with my recent post on the FAA shutting down as a sign that I'm taking a sudden interest in US politics. The FAA post indicated my interest in the responsibilities of national aviation regulatory bodies, and I didn't tune in to Obama on purpose. He pre-empted the television show I wanted to watch, so that when I turned on the TV, instead of a vapid sitcom there was my neighbouring nation's president, all serious-like, quoting Ronald Reagan and explaining what taxes are used for. He's charismatic, for sure. And there's the "holy shit, the large nation we live next to is really having problems" aspect of the situation. I listened to him for the whole fifteen minutes, my attention only being broken after he left and a station commentator came on to say that Obama's solution was too complicated.

Taxes are a really hot-button item for Americans. They established a whole new country to get out of paying taxes they didn't like, and even their latest political movement, the Tea Party is named to hark back to that tax protest. This made me wonder, what really instigated Canadian nationhood, and is it still a berserk button for Canadians?

Everyone who went to school here knows that we were a bunch of separate British colonies and then the British North America Act united a few of them when the founding fathers all got hammered at the Charlottetown Conference (do you have a photo of the founders of your country all hungover after doing it?) But why did the British decide that 1867 was time these colonies governed themselves?

There'd been some rebellions in the colonies, and Lord Selkirk was sent to analyze why and figure out how to settle us down. He recommended that we be given responsibility for government. What quaint 19th century concerns were the issues in those rebellions? There seem to have been three main ones: ethnic disputes between members of the French and English populations, inequality in government land grants to different religions, and opposition to mass American immigration. I already knew that the English fighting the French was woven deep in the fabric of our nation, but I didn't realize that separate school funding and resenting American infiltration were as originally Canadian as trapping beaver and tapping maple syrup. So yup, it seems that whatever inspired you to create a country remains something your citizens care about. I do believe that goes for the the lofty ideals as well as the grievances, though. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; liberté, égalité, fraternité; peace, order and good government. That last link is to an essay by a smart, bilingual Canadian politician who was vilified by his opponents on the basis that he had been unduly influenced by time spent in the United States.

And now I go back to watching the American television show (How I Met Your Mother) that Obama displaced, when it would be more useful for me to be watching something in French to improve my language skills. I already did my taxes.

Decorating

I'm in the back of a jet, flying as a passenger to a city in La Belle Province, where I'll meet a potential employer. We got along well on the telephone. I know I have experience he can use, and his operation goes to places I'd like to see. I want to know that it's safe and that I'll fit in with what sounds like a testosterone-charged crowd. He says to call when I get in, but that we'll meet tomorrow. And yes, I still have that friend visiting me. Social events are sort of like laundry in aviation: put a load in the washer or have someone over and you will get called out to fly somewhere. There's food in the fridge and I left her with my home and my car, and explicit permission to drive it wherever she likes. She drove me to the airport and assured me without prompting that she would take good care of it, and not give my car a reputation for being driven rudely. I feel like I've matured a notch, because I'm relaxed about it. I was never good at sharing my crayons.

The airplane has seat-back TVs and I'm watching a show called something like Take This House and Sell It, in which the experts come into someone's house and make it more marketable for a quick sale. The featured house looks pretty good to me, not to cluttered, interiors nicely painted in warm colours. The furniture is a little worn, but not a difficult-to-show house. Then the team come in, rolling their eyes and snickering at the cinnamon-coloured walls, a nude painting in the living room (you can see one female nipple), and what they call disastrous kitchen cupboards. "Is there some story behind that?" they ask the homeowner about the painting. They had the restraint to check their mockery slightly when informed that a niece had painted it, but it still had to go. They repainted the walls white, hauled off most of the furniture, and replaced the doors on the kitchen cabinets with ones that didn't really look better to me. I knew why it all had to be done, but I disagreed. I didn't get to see what else they did, or whether the house sold immediately at the asking price, as we landed and I headed out with my gear.

I called the prospective employer to tell him I've landed and he says he'll come by. So I'm standing on the curb, with my stuff, dressed in the manner of my occupation, waiting to get into a vehicle with a guy I don't know, so he can take me to a hotel. Is there anyone who is not a prostitute who has done this so many times they couldn't say how many? It's a part of my job. I have a moment of realization that seeing as this meeting was set up through my blog, it could be a kidnapping. Sure I've looked at the company website, but did I check with Transport Canada that the company even owns those planes? It could be a fake website. Or a real company but how do I know the guy is who he says he is? And I've just stepped off an airplane with no checked luggage so I'm totally unarmed.

Someone in this conversation with myself watches too much Law & Order. The truck he described arrives, we thrown my bag in the back and go to the hotel. He has a couple of company manuals for me to look over and we set a meet time tomorrow morning. He asks about the flight, and right there I make a decision that just as I'm not selling my body on streetcorners, I'm not a house to be renovated either. You get me or nothing. I tell him about the decorating show, and that it's just like interviewing for an airline job, really. You have to whitewash over all your colourful spots, hide anything about you that is different or quirky in the garage, and replace some perfectly functional opinions with the ones designated for you. I tell him about the airline interview prep course where they told me what my hobbies should be, because mine weren't correct. I let him know that I am structurally sound, well-maintained and in a good neighbourhood, but that I just might have cinnamon walls. I'm not such a rebel that I'm not willing to put a couple of coats of paint on my personality to hold a good job, but I'm going to let you know what's underneath.

Some of you readers probably think I'm an incredible idiot for this. But it's worth rather a lot to me not to lie about who I am. And I've judged him correctly. He doesn't need that.

The hotel is comfortable, and across the parking lot from a Thai restaurant, which turns out to be mostly a Chinese restaurant, with some Thai dishes. There is adequate but not amazing food and friendly service. I saved my fortune cookie fortune to share with you, and moments ago I swear it was on this table, but now I can't find it. I think it said, "A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance" on one side and something like "Un coeur joyeux rend le visage serein" (the same thing in French) on the other. I initially assumed it was something they made up in fortune cookie factories, but a bit of research shows that it's a bible quotation, and really only half of the message. It finishes "... but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken." It's probably not even the original source of the 'positive thinking' message but it's notable that it doesn't promise success from positivity or even threaten failure from negativity, just states that if you feel good you're going to smile and that it's hard to fight on when you're sad. It might as well say, "A good night's sleep makes you rested." I try for that.

Mad Woman

I call back about the job, after waiting a day. I get voice mail and leave a message. I wonder if we're going to enter a passive-aggressive battle over this.

I look through what is available on Netflix. The Canadian selection is really terrible, because we have different copyright laws than the US, and the content providers are afraid to let Netflix licence their shows in Canada. Most of the "movies I'd like to see" list is not available, and it suggests some laughable substitutes when I search for them. It does turn up some suggestions I like, but they are movies I already own. I start watching the TV series Mad Men, because I've heard some good things about it.

It's a meticulously crafted period piece about the 1960s, and not the Vietnam War or the flower children, but the buttoned down conservatives of the era, at an ad agency. They have a lot of fun with establishing identifiable, fairly timeless situations and then smashing the viewer upside the head with anachronisms we weren't expecting, like when they get up from a picnic and just leave all their trash behind. I keep wondering whether it's a clever social commentary or just an an excuse to produce misogynist, racist television, glorifying old fashioned attitudes. Its redeeming feature is perhaps that it will remind some people that the good old days never really were, and by removing the role of advertising to another era, perhaps show people how easy it is to be manipulated.

But the weird thing about psychological manipulation is that it often works even when you're aware it's happening. Just watching this darn show makes me want to mix an old-fashioned martini. If I watch another season I may get the urge to vacuum in pearls and high heels and bake a meatloaf for some man. If you watch people doing something, even if it's only fiction, even if you don't approve, it makes it more likely that you'll accept that behaviour as normal. That's why the conservative right objects to gay couples being treated unblinkingly as normal human beings on television, why my wacky relative (please tell me everyone has one) believes that shows about friendly space aliens are Hollywood grooming us for when the aliens come to help us, and why some parents don't let their kids play violent video games. Or maybe those parents just want their kids to stop playing video games and help make dinner.

Those of you who read comments will remember the calorie counter discussion from a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to tell the non-comment-reading people about this too. If you like to keep an eye on weight, fitness and nutrition all in one little app, I recommend myfitnesspal. You don't even need an iPhone/iPad Touch to use it, because it has a web interface too. You may not be into counting calories, or eat weird stuff that is never in calorie look up tables, but this app has almost everything I've eaten in a month, and allows me to specify the ingredients in a recipe or just tell it the caloric value, if I know. It lets you log exercise, and automatically adjusts your remaining calories for the day. It didn't have "plumbing" as an exercise, but it had automobile maintenance, which was about the same level of physical activity. Its strength is that it is completely effortless to use. You just have to resist the temptation to round out your caloric allocation for the day with a few tablespoons of chocolate chips. They're high in iron, I justify.

The water still comes out of my tap really straight, and that potential employer doesn't return my call. Plus it's apparently open season on B737s in North Carolina. Would you have found it on your preflight walkaround? If they hadn't found the bullet on board I might have believed it had been there a while. The airplane would probably have pressurized without a problem. The Screaming Whippet groundschool instructor described an incident where he did a flight, warm and happy up in the flight levels, only to discover after landing at destination that an entire window had blown out right after take-off. It had accidentally been left unsecured after routine maintenance.

Trans-Pacific Comparative Television Watching

Americans totally have a channel for everything. There are only a few Canadian channels, and then the local area usually has one, but even in Canada we get lots of American channels on cable. You flip though and find a show you like, and if it's on a specialty channel you can go all day watching the same sort of show. I was once not really paying attention to a bad cop show and it took me hours to realize that it was several bad cop shows one after another and I wasn't noticing the difference.

I made a comment about 'the science fiction channel' in an e-mail to an Australian and got an incredulous reply. A whole channel of science fiction shows? Yeah, I think we have two or three: Space, ψφ (or however they spell it), and isn't there something called Xyzzy? Let's see what I have in this hotel ... 53 channels including:

• A few local Canadian channels from different parts of the country
• Four channels from the nearest big US city
• History Channel (USA)
• Comedy Network
• Women's Network - lots of chick flicks
• Spike (USA) - lots of action movies
• Outdoor Life - Fishing and hunting and survivalism
• The Food Network
• Discovery Channel (USA) - wildlife documentaries & Mythbusters
• TLC (USA) - documentaries about people having babies, and how to fix your house
• Home & Garden (USA)
• Teletoon
• Real Estate
• Knowledge Network
• CNN
• Country Music Television
• Family Channel
• YTV - cartoons and youth shows up to high school dramas
• CBC-Francais (Canadian)
• Canadian Learning Channel
• Aboriginal People's Television Network (Canada)
• Two all sports channels

There's also a channel that tells you what is on on all the other channels. It helps to have a remote with numbered buttons so you can just jump to the channel you want.

There were about ten channels where I grew up. There were 13 on the dial, but at least three of them were just static. But we had an old TV.

In case you're interested, here's the Australian equivalent.

• ABC (taxpayer funded, runs news and current affairs, kids shows, BBC comedies and dramas, no ads)
• ABC 2 (same deal, but has more local (ie. bad) stuff, indigenous programming and music tv and repeats of ABC 1, doesn't run overnight)
• ABC 3 (same deal, kids shows only)
• ABC 24 (brand new, news all the time)
• SBS (taxpayer funded, foreign language ABC basically, foreign films, news
from lots of different coutries, and esoteric local stuff)
• SBS 2 (same thing, but worse)
• Channels 7, 9 and 10 (commercial stations with American movies and tv shows but local news, current affairs and game shows. And Home and Away)

My correspondent says that some areas have a local channel too, but those are dying out.

One last comment on television is a TV Tropes quote about the series Lost: Generally, science fiction can have an open ending as long as the fates of the most interesting characters are resolved. Unfortunately, on Lost, a large chunk thought the island was the most interesting character. Perfect summary.

I promise not to watch any more TV at you this week. My rotation is at least Tivoed, so I can fast-forward to the day I fly out.

Life Happens in the Gutter

It sure isn't happening in this hotel room. It was another TV day.

I watched a rerun of a Comic Con interview on one of the geek channels. A graphic artist explained, "Life happens in the gutter." (If there's a specific person who should receive attribution for that quotation, please let me know. As far as I can tell, it's traditional wisdom of the trade). The gutter is the groove between the facing pages of an opened book, and by extension, the space between the panels of a graphic novel¹. The pictures themselves don't move, so graphic novels depend on the reader's participation in creating what happens from frame to frame. The art of designing them is to facilitate that so that the page looks great, but the reader is never confused about where to look next, and the surprises aren't spoiled.

I mostly read webcomics, not printed comics² so I'd never really thought about that. It's an interesting insight into the trade, but more interesting to me as a metaphor for actual life, along the lines of "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," plus the reminder that the static Kodak moments in someone's life aren't their whole life, and that even when you're down and out, living in the gutter, life goes on.

The other movie I watched today was The Life of David Gale. I didn't know anything about it when I turned it on, but very early in the picture I knew what was going to have happened, well before the murder victim was identified. It just so happened that as one of the characters dropped a little clue phrase that was designed to explain the movie in retrospect, I found it interesting enough to ponder how I would approach the issue, and then the rest of the movie fit my solution perfectly. I think the ending was supposed to be a surprise reveal, but the movie was interesting enough that I kept watching. It was remarkably balanced, considering that most of the main characters are anti-capital punishment crusaders. I think in the end that both sides were fairly presented.

The airplane should be back soon, so I can do some work.

1. You can't call them comic books, because a lot of them aren't meant to be funny.

2. I only own two graphic novels: Maus II, which I bought second-hand in New Orleans, and The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Definitely not comic books.

No Work Wednesday

My coworker flew a mission today and then took the bird south for maintenance, leaving me with no duties in a town too small to even have a Tim Horton's. So you're expecting a tale of adventure and cultural exploration. Please. This town has basically one street, a kilometre long, and I've been here for a month already. There are woods, but nowhere destination-like within them. Plus I'm alone and unarmed and it's the season when bears are our foraging to fatten up before hibernation. Adventure does not call.

The Aviatrix catalogue of markers of depraved indolence includes such pursuits as eating nutella out of the jar with a spoon, watching shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek on the Space channel for ten hours straight, remaining naked all day, getting drunk at nine in the morning, rocking out to the Cake Song on my iPod, and surfing internet porn.

You think I'm that depraved? ah you know I'm not. I didn't do all that. I don't drink when I'm in the field, and, if you'll recall, the Internet here doesn't work.

Also I totally think Doctor Who should do a gag where they go to England in the 1950s and there are police call boxes every couple of blocks, and they forget which one is theirs. Not the whole plot, just a one-off gag.

I'm really not under the influence of anything chemical today as I write this up, either, but the fact that I posted this is probably a good indication that a really bad head cold is incapacitating for reasons other than pressure change tolerance. My misery is tempered only by my fascination by the millennia-prolonged evolutionary arms race between the things that make us sick and our own immune systems. I like the organisms that live in me without making me sick, better.

Half a Movie

Okay, let me see if I can return to some semblance of a normal posting schedule around here. I'm going to start with every second day, and if I get far enough ahead to take me through the Cambodia trip, I'll come back and fill some in.

I wake up and there's a text from the a.m. pilot, asking me to call her when I'm up. They didn't fly this morning, because the weather isn't suitable. I call and we meet downstairs for breakfast: first breakfast for me and second breakfast for her. I guess we're being good little hobbitses today. There are zebras loose in the streets of some American suburb on the TV news. The cops are running around trying to catch them,and they keep eluding capture. The zebras are lucky they didn't get tased. I adore zebras. Their stripes are mesmerizing.

The weather is still unsuitable and forecast to remain so all day. We mooch a ride from our maintenance guy out to airplane to pay for last night's fuel and to get the aircraft journey log in order to complete the weekly company paperwork. And that's pretty much it for our official duties today.

I go back to the hotel room and seeing as there is still no Internet I turn on the TV, The Space channel is running all the Star Wars movies in order, so I leave it on that. It's the one with the Ewoks. The top portion of the TV doesn't work at all now, so I see feet and people falling to the ground. but not people being hit. it lends a whole new meaning to "I watched half a movie."

I leave the "do not disturb" sign on the hotel door, because I don't need the room cleaned again, but I attach another note to it "unless you're fixing the TV!" because I don't want the TV repair person to think I'm sleeping and pass me by. As I'm putting it up, the cleaner (I partly want to say "chambermaid" but I'm sure that went out with "stewardess") expresses surprise that it still hasn't been fixed and says she called maintenance again for me.

We go out to lunch. Same restaurant, same waitress. She's coming around, at least looks at us now. It's cheesecake day today. Yum. The service is really really slow here, especially at the end of the meal when it comes to getting a bill and getting payment collected. Usually we just go up to the till, but we don't have anything else to do, so we just wait until the whole transaction is complete, with fifteen to twenty minute gaps between each stage.

Back at my room the "do not disturb" sign looks slightly disturbed. I enter hopefully, but my note is still on the TV. I turn the set on anyway and then realize that it is a new note, on paper torn from the same notepad and taped in the same place, saying that they will bring a new TV.

I'm sure many of you are, so for the record I am aware enough to be embarrassed that here I am complaining about hotel amenities like TV and Internet, while preparing to build someone a home with no TV, Internet, or even electricity. It goes to show how technology can make us miserable. There's a "100 Items" meme where people reduce their possessions to just one hundred items. Hard. I don't think I could become a Buddhist. I love my stuff. I'll have to think about it.

Today I'm spared the introspection, as the maintenance guy brings me a new TV. I blog while Return of the Jedi plays in the background twice in a row. Damn those Ewoks are ugly. Both halves.

Rivers and Mountains and Chocolate

I sleep for not long enough, but there's too much noise and light to sleep more, so I get up and make a phone call. I sit on hold for half an hour. I ordered The West Wing complete series earlier but the friend who receives mail for me e-mailed to say he already owned it and I could borrow his any time. So I wait on hold until I get a Return Authorization Number to send mine back, then go for breakfast. I take the Do Not Disturb sign off the door for my weekly room cleaning.

I get back from breakfast (a waffle). The room is cleanish, but the TV is still not fixed. So I nap. Then I go to Boston Pizza. May I go home yet?

The a.m. crew got off to a late start again. Fog, of course. I meet them after landing at four and we discuss a brake that was spongy on the taxi out, and the left inboard fuel gauge showing half full between half and quarter tanks. Neither of these is groundable now, so the AME says he will look at them tonight. That discussion over, I say, "Well, I guess it's time to make airplane noises," and both the other pilot and my mission specialist immediately and simultaneousy make propeller noises with their lips. I love my coworkers. We get in and make airplane noises using the actual airplane.

It's a good flight, out over the mountains and rivers, with the sun slowly creeping past the layers of clouds down to the horizon. The clouds serve as a sunshade from the glare of the sunset. I'm grateful when they do that. Finally the sun does go all the way down, and then darkness follows, about the time that we're almost done anyway. We finish up and head back to the airport. It's harder to track a straight line in darkness, especially without an HSI. I scan across to the right side one, and use the GPS. I might be quite literally lost without them. The compass is not that useful here. The wisdom of the rule stating that I need a heading indicator at night is sound.

The airport is invisible on our first pass, because we're not in the direction of a runway and the trees alongside the airport block the edge lights I might have seen. Or maybe they weren't turned up yet. They are bright enough to find the airport, and on final I have red-blue-green and a light in the mirror. (That's the red mixture levers forward, the blue propeller levers forward, three green lights on the dashboard and the light mounted on the nosewheel reflecting off the mirror on the nacelle, confirming that the nosegear is down and the landing light works.

I'm wired after the night flying. I haven't done a night landing in ages, having been the morning pilot or in the north all summer. It's still legal for me to have done one tonight because there are no passengers on board, just crew. It goes well. I guess I haven't forgotten how. The AME meets airplane as I shut down, here to look at the gauge issues reported by the a.m. pilot. I can't confirm the fuel gauge issue because I landed with half tanks on the inboards, and the brakes worked fine for me. He opens an access panel to confirm the type of fuel sender. He'll order a new one.

The FBO charges $50 for a callout between five and nine pm and $100 for one between nine pm and seven a.m. Fog is not forecast tomorrow, and even if they don't get going before seven, they will want fuel first thing, so we decide to pay the $100 callout fee now, and not risk not being able to get a fueller to come on Sunday a.m. Sometimes you can't buy fuel before noon on a Sunday at all. It's not that they are closed, just that you can't get anyone to come out. Just because there's a callout phone doesn't mean the person who took it home is going to answer it. They answer my night call--I did warn him we might call around midnight. It looks like the fueller's friends have decided to keep him callout company. There are about half a dozen people here, one wearing pajama bottoms. I ask if I may just leave now and come back and pay tomorrow. They okay that, so yay, day over.

I've had the same very slight headache for three days. I self-medicate with chocolate.

Aaarrrrrr!

I have a text at 8:45 saying the first flight was delayed due to fog. It's still foggy. I think the Season of Fog has arrived. It will persist until the Season of Frost, from which I will flee before the snow gets too deep.

I consult the first aid kit list to confirm that we have everything, and then I realize we forgot one item, an eyepatch. Of course: "pailit" "pairit" -- what's the difference? I go out and acquire an eyepatch. Except I have remembered this wrong, because I was there with another pilot and we bought a lottery ticket at the same time. We only matched two numbers, so we can't retire yet, though.

At 10:05 I receive a text message (with a timestamp of 11:05 -- all my text messages here are like that. It must be something about being close to a time zone border) The message says they are taking off now. The hotel Internet is down, so I can't look at the forecast, but it's clear outside. I make a telephone call to get weather and NOTAM for my flight. I expect them to return around 4:40 pm, so I go for a meal at 2:30. On the way out I wait a long time for underclued clerk to deal with some people at the counter, and after all that he doesn't know where to put the postcards I ask him to add to outgoing mail.

The other pilot lands and texts back that the weather failed on them. They return after a detour to the airport terminal to pick up their e-mail using the free internet there. We discuss the fuel flow readings. After the fuel servo failure we're paranoid, I guess. Yeah, the right fuel flow shows lower when it's leaned out, but I never really worried about that. I guess I chalked it up to parallax. I'll check on it if I go flying later.

The lack of Internet really cuts into my entertainment and connection with the world. I watch TV instead, although the television doesn't work that well. The remote doesn't work and the controls on the TV only have channel up and channel down, so I have to scroll though all the channels (they have cable, so there are over fifty) to get to the one I want. And any time I turn it off it goes back tot he default one advertising the hotel and the pay movies. And every once in a while the top half of the picture disappears so I can only see the bottom. I call the front desk to complain about the TV, for repair or replacement, but the promised maintenance guy never arrives.

The internet starts working a little bit. My e-mail program polls for new mail ever seven minutes, and every two hours or so it manages to actually connect and download something. But surfing the web is almost impossible. You have to keep hitting the reload button and having it time out until finally you happen to hit it during one of its brief spurts of workingness. And most websites these days require you to load more than one page, for example log in or choose from a menu, so unless I'm willing to invest half an hour in seeing a web page, I'm not seeing it. I go back to watching TV. There's a show called Say Yes to the Dress, the moral of which is "brides are crazy." Or maybe this show just deals with that segment of the population that is already stark raving bonkers, and happens to be getting married. Oh also brides' mothers are insane. I really understand how some men come away with the idea that all women are crazy. You look at something like that from a human being and you have to attribute it to something, so you go with the most obvious difference.

With television like this, I might as well do something more productive. It's around nine p.m. and I get dressed for a run, but there's a knock on the door. It's our client at the door. "Ready to go flying?" he asks.

I wasn't expecting that, as we haven't usually been going out this late, so I say something like "oh," instead of the more appropriate, "Certainly, please give me five minutes."

Before I can translate he says "just kidding." He told his boss he didn't want to go out in the dark with this terrain. I explained that the door was propped open because I was expecting TV repair. He sympathized with my internet and TV woes. His remote works a little bit and he enumerates the pieces into which the remote will dissociate if you throw it hard enough. (six).

My run is good: up to the traffic light (yes, there's a traffic light in town), across the street to the post office, up the road that goes to the airport where I pass a guy sitting on a front porch playing a country western tune on a harmonica. I don't know what it was, but it sounded good. "Hey, that's good" I yelled. Musicians deserve recognition. I continue along the same road until it connects with the other road that goes to the airport, and I follow that one back to the highway to get to the hotel. The whole route is a couple of hundred metres short of ten kilometres. It's kind of dusty with the trucks, though. Next time maybe I'll pick out a hillier route through quieter roads in town.

The Best Stories

I flip on the TV guide channel and wait for it to scroll to the channels that there is a chance of me watching. But it's not the listings of channel numbers, names and shows that captures my attention. Instead of the usual advertising or muzak, the audio for the cable listings channel is a local radio station, and they are just introducing a dramatic reading of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. There is definitely nothing better than this to switch to listed on the TV guide, so I listen. I'm familiar with the story, but its been a long time since I've read it, so I don't remember exactly when it ended, although of course I remember where and how. It's an excellent story, so I'm being vague so I won't spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't read it.

I appreciated the storytelling, both by the reader and the author Ambrose Bierce. On first reading, each detail makes perfect sense in the narrative and then later when you know what is coming it still makes sense with the real story. I also like the way at first the protagonist is a sympathetic character, so we're rooting for him, then as we learn a little at a time more about the way he treats people, we don't like him as much, just in time to be shocked but not disappointed by the ending.

I read a modern version of the story once, involving thieves who make their getaway down an empty elevator shaft. It still captures the imagination, but it wasn't written with the same complex layers and attention to both readings of the story.

---

This is my opportunity to segue from that well-written fictional story to your opportunity to vote on contest entries. If the trick I tried there to link to a not-yet-published-as-I-type-this post didn't work, and I haven't had opportunity to fix it, someone please link to the 14th October Jet Age post in the comments. Last week I offered you an opportunity to win a copy of Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World, by telling me a story. I asked:

What is your favourite anecdote from the history of aviation? In the comments for this post, leave a description, up to 200 words long, of the funniest, most poignant, most inspirational or whatever you think is the "best" story to come out of man's urge to fly.

Please review the entries posted there and in the comments on this post, give your vote (or votes) for the best story there. Use whatever criteria you like for "best," and feel free to lobby, debate, and have fun. I know you will remain your usual civil selves. When I get back to Internet access I will announce the winner, casting an arbitrary vote of my own if your anarcho-democracy has not done my work for me.

For Those Who Aren't Watching Lost Right Now

In most Canadian time zones, this post is set to publish during the Lost finale extravaganza. Yes, I've been sucked into the vortex of the island, not because it's a particularly great show, week after week, but because I need to know how it all works out. Here's my take.

Some of the characters that are alive in the alternate timeline but dead on the Island, die, sacrificing themselves for the common good. There is a lot of punching and some gun brandishing. Everyone on the island dies in a huge explosion, and the island disappears forever. The newly exploded characters become themselves in the happy alternate timeline, and don't remember the island. We never learn why women who conceive on the island die if they stay there, how the island got there in the first place, why the DHARMA food drops continued in the present or how the Lighthouse (either one) was built. Some fans complain about the ending being too mystical and others complain that it had too much bogus science. Next television season sees a lot of new shows with ensemble casts, mysterious happenings and fist fights.

And with a little luck the polar bears (who will survive the destruction of the island by escaping to Tunisia) will figure out how to survive the melting of the polar ice caps. I think their main strategy so far involves interbreeding with grizzlies, who have the whole finding food on dry land a little better worked out.

Incomplete Intermediate

This always happens to me. I'm interested in something. I learn a little on my own, or I learn a lot on my own, but not in any organized way. Then I want more information, so I seek professional instruction on the subject. The instructor talks to me and tells me no I don't belong in the beginners' course, so I start straight in at the intermediate level, and promptly get in trouble for having missed something vital in my self-study. (Sometimes I do take the beginners' course, which risks making me bored and distracted and thus missing something that way). If I have one-on-one instruction I say, "don't assume I know anything" but they find out I know X and Z and assume I know Y, without me knowing that there is any interpolation going on. And then later mayhem ensues because I lack all knowledge of Y.

Fortunately, the way aviation is set up in Canada, the system is rigourous and demands that the instructor that sends you through to the next level has seen you complete each qualifying exercise to standard, and can't assume that X + Z implies Y. This is good, because my early aviation education was similar, with me learning what was interesting from books and online, and then being taken up by a friend for doezens of touch and goes, until I could land an airplane by rote without having practiced any of the underlying skills. If you're interested enough in a thing to want to learn it right with no shortcuts it is beneficial to do it from the beginning even if you already know some, provided the ab initio instructor knows what they are doing. You pick up things that true ab initio students miss. (If the instructor is just winging it, you get in trouble, because you're picking up on the stuff the instructor is faking).

My latest episode of learning just enough to get into trouble seems to be cooking. I would say that I can cook. I can buy ingredients, i.e. things from the grocery store or farmers' market that don't have any ingredients listed on the side and produce meals that make me say "yum." But I want to be able to make five dishes featuring a random secret ingredient within an hour and have them look like the ones on Iron Chef. And I want to be able to grab a live cow standing in a field of grain, and turn it into a perfect hamburger. That's right, I'm a Food Network addict.

It sort of makes me wish that I was hooked on the Food Network twenty years ago instead of science fiction. Imagine if the brain cells now occupied by Star Trek and Ray Bradbury trivia were full of information on how to properly braise and marinate and accent. Now I'm hooked on food. But the Food Channel isn't really a good vehicle for learning more about cooking. The shows that tell me how to actually make the food with any kind of step by step instructions are telling me how to make hummus as if it was an amazing reveal that it's made out of chickpeas and sesame paste, or giving detailed steps for making spaghetti sauce, pausing for me to gasp at the idea that it doesn't come out of a can. Once the shows pass the "cute guy or gal reads a recipe at you" mode, they leap over a vast gulf of techniques and generalizations into the territory of ultra elite chefs making things I don't know the names of by processes I'm not certain how to reproduce, faster than the untrained eye can follow. I guess there are lots of people who would like to know something about cooking, a lot who like to marvel at what the experts can produce, and not enough to be a viable market segment who want to know the how of the in-between part.

I looked up a fancy cooking course and discovered that professional chef training will set you back about as much as a commercial pilot licence. I guess good food costs more than avgas. Instead of flying to New York and signing up for an elite cooking course, I order the course textbook. I could focus every moment of my life single-mindedly on aviation progress, but a girl's got to eat. She might as well do it well.

Do I have any readers who are professional chefs? Or do you know of a fun professional cooking blog? (I already know Cake Wrecks, of course).

One thing about watching the world's best chefs prepare itty bitty exquisitely-presented portions of stunning food is that you aren't tempted to down platter-filling glop in the name of sustenance. Seeing how good food could be, actually helps me not overeat.

Last night's meal was eaten while reading the local paper. I was offered a choice of two: the provincial paper and the town one. The town one was a lot thicker, but I had read t at breakfast so I opted for the local one. "Is it exciting?" I joked to the guy at the hotel desk

"There's a goose on the cover," he said, his inflection managing to find a little strip of territory that was neither sarcastic nor falsely enthusiastic. And so there was: a Canada goose, photographed standing on one foot on the edge of the frozen river. It didn't get any more exciting inside. There weren't even any dead bodies.

And then I get a text from one of the apprentices who has been working on the airplane. The airplane is ready and she'll pick me up at 7:30 tomorrow morning to get it.

Even Han Solo and Chewie ...

I'm watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and his guest is Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto. I've blogged about him before, and I use checklists for everything but getting out of bed, but I'm still amazed by three things.

One is the difference that checklists make. The hospital that first implemented a checklist system just to stop infections estimated that checklists saved 1500 lives a year. That's staggering. I wonder how many aircraft accidents checklists avert.

Another is the amount of time it has taken this simple safety device to move from one industry to another. Boeing introduced checklists in 1935 after their test pilots forgot to remove a gust lock and crashed a prototype B-17. It makes me wonder what safety or efficiency techniques I could find in other industries and steal to improve mine.

And finally I am surprised by the reticence of people to adopt the system. I shouldn't be, because I've seen myself the machismo that denies the benefits of acknowledging anyone else's expertise. But as Mr. Gawande pointed out, most people have seen their entire lives that people in high profile macho jobs like astronaut work from checklists. Even Han Solo and Chewie used checklists on the Millennium Falcon.