Windex

I'm at an airport. I've been here before. Some of you have too, no doubt, and will recognize it from the following I know the essential things a transient pilot needs to know. I know the gate code to return to airside. It's a truncation of a famous mathematical constant. I know how to find the fueller. He often monitors the traffic frequency so if I announce my need for fuel exiting the runway, he'll probably park the fuel truck in front of the airplane as I shut down, but if that doesn't work, there's no specific FBO frequency. He has an office with an entrance inside the airline office, so I can ask the customer service agents at the airline counter to alert him for me. I know where the women's washroom is. It's downstairs past the stuffed bear. The men's is probably there too, but a sign implies there's a unisex accessible washroom on the main floor, for those who can't navigate stairs. I've filled my water bottle in the women's washroom before, but the water from there tastes terrible. Much better-tasting water, and baked snacks are available at the café.

On this particular occasion all my knowledge of this airport does not help us have a quicker turn because we are waiting here for something. I don't remember what we're waiting for. It' snot my job to decide when it's time to leave. It's my job to be ready to leave when I'm told it's time to leave, or to explain succinctly why we can't. On this occasion I am waiting in the café for whatever configuration of factors is required for it to be time to leave. I have eaten all the baked snacks that I require and am now entertaining myself by reading a book that someone has left at the café. I don't have a really discriminating taste in literature. I'm reading Maximum Boy starring in Attack of the Soggy Underwater People by Dan Greenburg. Its eleven year old male protagonist obtains superpowers from moon rocks. He also has to get his homework done. The story climax is predicated on an immediate need for ammonia at the north pole. Mr. Greenburg nursed my willing suspension of disbelief all the way through the scenes of conflict with the protagonist's sister, negotiations with the titular soggy underwear people and meetings with the president and then broke the whole concept by having Maximum Boy identify the the helicopter pilots (they were also at the north pole, but I won't spoil the whole story) as a potential source of ammonia. They use Windex to clean their helicopter windshields. Noooooo! It spoiled the story for me. It wasn't a detail. It was the pivotal moment in the story, and it was supposed to be a science teaching moment too. There's no way the helicopter pilots were using ammonia-based Windex to clean their acrylic windshields.

If you're cavalier with the integrity of your windshield you might use non-aviation specific products like Pledge furniture polish or acrylic polish marketed for the marine industry, but generally pilots use a product specifically designed and marketed for care of aviation windshields. The windshield allows us to see oncoming aircraft; it keeps the air inside pressurized cockpits and it protects us from the onrush of air and particulate matter we're flying through. If it fails in any one of these endeavours we could die of the results. Windshields and their care are kind of a big deal. I've heard and generally abide by the vertical strokes only rule too. The idea is that if you put a scratch in the window you definitely don't want it to be in a direction that would align with the wings of an oncoming aircraft.

I usually use 210 Polish, but if I run out and I'm in Winnipeg or something, I may have to settle for Prist (not to be confused with the fuel additive). Prist is foamier and doesn't work if you keep it in a cargo compartment where its temperature drops below freezing. And neither of them contains Windex. And that is why I am never supporting the Maximum Boy franchise again. I didn't think much of the new Star Trek either.

Boarding During an Earthquake

I had this forwarded to me without a name. It's a first hand account by a Delta Airlines captain whose flight was boarding at Narita when the 8.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan.

We were at the gate onboard ship 7001 with passenger boarding in progress when the earthquake began. My F/O, Joe Haggerty, had taken his seat and I was standing behind the center radio console when the airplane began shaking. Initially thought it was wind gusts but ruled that out since it had been calm when we left the hotel. Jet blast from a taxiing aircraft? Nope, look, the terminal windows are flexing and the building is...moving! It's an earthquake...immediately, in a brilliant display of airmanship, Joe reached over and set the parking brake. It seemed quite possible that we could jump our wheel chocks and roll into something hard. After a minute of this, the shaking got much worse and lasted about 2 1/2 minutes total. Our passengers intuitively decided that the safest place in all of this was on the aircrart and not in the terminal or the jetway. Never seen 261 people board a 777 so quickly! Two long and impressive aftershocks followed during the next hour. Narita closed it's runways and our inbound flights began diverting. 281 from Atlanta was about 10 minutes from landing and diverted to Nagoya. Hanada and Narita were both closed. They evacuated everyone from the Narita terminals deeming the structures unsafe for occupancy. The Narita tower was evacuated, Narita Approach Control was evacuated. At about 4pm, the airport was notam'd closed "until 0600 tomorrow morning". So, Delta cancelled us and all of the other flights out of Narita.

Well.........there was only one "safe area" established at the airport (outside in a cold rain) where passengers could be taken if they deplaned. It became full. There was no chance of deplaning into the terminal. No chance of deplaning at all. No ground transportation as all busses and trains were shut down and the highways had been closed. So, Delta calls the Narita Airport Authority and suggests that since the runway had been inspected, it might be a real good idea to allow 6 Delta departures and get maybe 1,400 customers out of this mess. They agreed and after a four hour wait at the gate, we got out of there. On departure we could see four distinct, large fires in downtown Tokyo, 50 miles to the south. A refinery was on fire at the coastline to our east. We had no real idea of the size of the disaster until we had a datalink discussion with our dispatcher who filled us in. Now, watching the news at home, I am stunned at the devastation. All Delta crews and employees are safe and uninjured in Japan. I am not sure if the layover hotel has power. I'm glad I'm not in room 932 anymore with the aftershocks that they are getting.

Happy to be home and thanks for your concern.

It's weird when you're on the ground and the airplane is moving in a way you haven't commanded it. I remember the first time I couldn't taxi straight in wind, and can see why that was the captain's first impression.

As Seen on the Internet

Hong Kong International airport is huge and modern, signed in Cantonese first and British English second, with Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and what may be Indonesian ("Perhatikan waktu Hong Kong saat mengecek jadwal keberangkatan") or Tagalog ("Mangyari po lamang na alamin ang takdang oras ng pageakay sa 'Hongkong local time'") on some signs. Surrounding the airport we can see two concentric barbed wire topped fences with about a four-metre no-man's-land gap between the two. I've never seen that level of physical security around an airport perimeter. I've seen less at some Canadian prisons. Security screening is simple, quick and polite: shoes on, belongings into little numbered baskets for which you get a laminated claim card in case of disputes about who owns what once it comes out of the scanner. Something on my person triggers the scanner to beep. I stop and hold out my arms and am told to put them down. I'm not sure if I was holding them too high for the little security officer to reach comfortably with the wand, or if assuming the position just isn't required here.

We have a tight connection, so hustle up the elevator, through the mall, down the escalator and out to the terminal transfer bus, backed in by the door. We start to walk down the right side of the bus as we would at home and are stopped with an "excuse me, this way." Oh right Hong Kong. They drive on the left, so we board the bus on the left. Signs like "please press bell before alighting" also demonstrate Hong Kong's heritage as a British possession. The bus takes us out to the airplane, where we alight. Without pressing the bell actually. It must be a repurposed city bus. The air smells like the inside of a poorly ventilated garage. We board a Dragonair A321, and once we're underway they serve us Dim Sum for breakfast. Hey, it's Saturday morning. It is Dim Sum time. eh?

My first hint that I'm actually going to Cambodia is the immigration forms that are handed around, in Khmer and English. I fill those out and then a couple of hours later we're on approach into Phnom Penh. There's no city evident at first, just a wide muddy river --it's the Tonlé Sap--with some small buildings along it, and fields laid out among tropical trees. We then spot the city. From above it looks like a cross between Paris and Spain: Paris for the star-shaped city with broad avenues and boulevards radiating from circular hubs, and Spain for the red tile roofs and tropical trees. The airplane makes an unusual number of turns for an airline approach in visual conditions, and other passengers comment on the steep bank angle. I wonder if we're maneuvering for traffic or if Phnom Penh tower doesn't have radar, and we're joining the circuit with full VFR procedures rather than just being vectored for a visual approach to the straight in. Later fellow passengers will ask my professional opinion about the landing, and I'll tell them that, without knowing the wind, runway and systems conditions that the crew were considering, I can't evaluate the choice or execution of landing technique. And I've never flown an Airbus outside of a simulator. It was a smooth touchdown and we exited the runway via a taxiway, not over the end or side, without painful deceleration, so it seemed fine to me. We're in Cambodia.

Inside the terminal we present our various completed forms, pay $25 for an embossed, shiny tourist visa and collect our bags. Signs in the airport are in Khmer and English, except for the one for the prayer room, which adds Arabic. We present our passports, newly issued visas and other paperwork and exit into Cambodia. It still looks a fair bit like an airport, an appearance that is not changed by our loading our bags and ourselves onto an air conditioned bus. Yeah, a blog entry and a half of this drivel and I still haven't told you anything about Cambodia. Travel has a big downside, doesn't it?

With our noses pressed against the windows, we join the traffic and head into town towards the hotel. Here, through the bus window, are approximately four of our fellow road users. On one small motorbike. The streets teem with vehicles, powered by engines, people or animals, overloaded to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible if I didn't read Failblog, and weaving in and out of one another's path like the RCMP musical ride. There doesn't seem to be any distinction between different sorts of road users. The backdrop is mostly tropical trees, low plastered buildings, many under construction, renovation or maybe just falling apart, and decorated walls.

As we watch the scenery and receive our first impressions of the country, one of the group leaders provides a narration, as if we would not otherwise be able to comprehend what is passing in front of our eyes. After a few minutes I tap him gently on the arm and ask, "Please, can we just experience it for ourselves?" He is a capable and very organized leader who keeps us well-informed. I had the impression that he had just left his mouth engaged after giving us the necessary information about hotel and agenda. I may have been wrong, though. He stops the play-by-play, but later another leader indicated that she thought many people appreciated the commentary. I've never been on a group tour before. Maybe it's only bloggers whose are constantly composing their own commentaries, and other people need it done for them.

After a couple of kilometres the bus turns right though a gate into a field. Just a field, with grass, and some dirt tracks and a bunch of other vehicles parked in it. I don't see a hotel. It turns out that for the Water Festival this week, they have set up traffic barricades, and vehicles over a certain size are not permitted any closer to the centre of town. I don't think it's a security measure, just a way to reduce the crush of traffic on a busy weekend, the way a downtown street in Canada might become a pedestrian mall for special events. The local officers are wearing street clothes, their badge of office is just a baseball cap with official insignia. The bus driver and one of our group participants go to negotiate with the police, and after a fair amount of handwaving a police officer wearing an entire uniform, not just a ball cap, arrives and grants us special permission to go to our hotel. I'm not sure if that included a police escort, or how exactly we got through the successive barricades. Looks like I did need the commentary after all.

What I did see was increasing amounts of traffic, vendors squatting on the sidewalks next to their wares, people smiling and waving to us from cafés and other vehicles. It is not at all intimidating. I've never been to Asia before, and I was prepared to be sickened by overwhelming poverty, frightened by an unidentifiably alien environment, or simply to have no link to the culture. But it's exciting and welcoming. I had an interview once on a Caribbean island and there was the same chaotic disrepair in the streets and buildings, and the same feeling of people everywhere selling things with minimal infrastructure. People seem better off here than in much of Nunavut, and I don't just mean the weather.

We check into the hotel, which is not a hovel. There's a shrine on the floor of the lobby, along with some clocks telling the time in six places: Hong Kong, United States, Australia, England, Australia and France. Yep, I know, but they apparently don't. Check-in is efficient and polite. The staff are amused that I can recite my room number in Khmer. I learned the numbers and some basic expressions from YouTube before I left Canada. My roommate and I go up to the room. There's a TV, a bathroom, two good sized beds with firm mattresses, mirrors, cupboards, a dresser and a fridge. There's a balcony, but when we go out on it, the outside is walled off with plastic sheets, so we can't see anything. I think it faces the back of another building, anyway. It's also clean. I've had worse hotel rooms in Saskatchewan. Also the internet doesn't work and the hotel staff say they're getting it fixed. Some things are universal.

It's only early afternoon, so I go out to stretch my legs and look around. People are friendly, even if they aren't selling anything, but there are lots of people who are selling things, probably more than usual, seeing as there's a festival underway. I still need some clothes appropriate to the climate. I buy a sunhat for a dollar. It's made out of strips of dried leaves which I assume are palm fronds, all stitched together on a sewing machine and decorated with fabric strips.

Another vendor sells me a loose fitting cotton shirt decorated with a picture of a cat and circles of letters from the Latin alphabet, all printed in reverse, and spelling nothing. She states the price as seven, I offer five (yes, I am a sucky bargainer) and she tells me in almost perfectly accented English that it's a fixed price. Turns out it's not seven dollars, but seven thousand riels, which is just under two dollars.

On another street a man asks me "parlez vous français?" I'm not too surprised, as my guidebook said that some older people might speak French, as a remnant of this region's history as "Indochine." I answer in the affirmative and in the ensuing conversation tell him I'm from Canada. He says he lives in Montréal, and I must have given him a look of complete disbelief, because he opens his wallet to produce a Canadian SIN card and a Québec permis de conduire. I sit down at his invitation for a chat. I haven't been here long enough to have many questions ready to ask. I have heard that the water festival marks the reversal of the flow of the Tonlé Sap so I ask him about that. He confuses me by saying that the festival commemorates a thousand-years-ago naval victory over Islamic forces, a victory that was facilitated by the reversal of the waters. This website says it was started by King Preah Bat Jayvarman VII as an opportunity to train and select skilled boatsmen for the navy, and other sources say it dates back to the 7th century as a thanksgiving festival. Given that under three hundred years has produced some drift in the meaning of the American thanksgiving, I'll cut the Cambodians some slack and say, hey, their river starts flowing the other way. Why not have a three day party? At any rate the experience teaches me not to make assumptions about the worldliness of the people here. Except it doesn't. I'll do it again later in the trip.

Dinner that night is all together with the group at a tourist-oriented local restaurant. Appetizers start with salted roasted peanuts with some little tiny chili pepper garnishes. Yes, one guy eats a chili pepper. For the record, the little tiny red ones are much hotter than jalapeños. While he tries to put out the fire in his mouth by guzzling water, I recommend rice, and it arrives just in time for it to make me his hero. Another appetizer plate includes bean sprouts and vegetables in a sauce that has an offensive fish odour. I try it out, and fight the gag reflex to get it down. It tastes worse than it smells. I hope the "fish Khmer style" that I ordered will be better. It is. It's a delicious curry, spiced warm not hot, with all kinds of exciting flavours going on, none of which is gag-inducing fish guts.

After dinner there is a traditional music performance, with instruments including a boatlike wooden xylophone, a long-necked stringed instrument played with a bow, and a drum. The drummer is sitting cross-legged on the floor and I can see the bottom of his foot. Before coming to Cambodia we were lectured sternly about customs, including taking off shoes in people's homes, sitting or squatting on the floor, and not displaying the bottoms of our feet to anyone. I tried to figure out a way to sit cross-legged on the floor without doing so, and couldn't, so I'm kind of pleased to see that the culture doesn't demand the physically impossible. Or for all I know the drummer thinks it's hilarious to moon the stupid tourists.

More Evidence Pilots Can't Count to Three

Exactly eight hours after I put my head down on the pillow, the alarm tells me to wake up and go back to work. I get out of bed, switch on the computer, and put on my clothes while it reloads windows. And I see that the weather gods have rewarded me for my scrupulous adherence to duty time laws, as the fog at Regina has not materialized. Why should weather gods care about duty time? I don't know, but I feel virtuous so I accept the reward.

Breakfast will be a meal replacement bar out of my flight bag. A "company note" (flight itinerary) will stand in lieu of a flight plan. I call down to the front desk to let them know I am looking for an airport shuttle. It's on another mission and won't be back for over half an hour. Aargh. I come down to the desk and check out, asking about taxis. It turns out there's one sitting outside. That will do.

I ask the driver to take me to the airport, but not the passenger terminal, the Kelly FBO, "It used to be the Shell," I explain. He asks me which airport. "The big one, the international, Winnipeg International ..." Damnit, it has another name. Which dead politician or war hero is this one named after? "The one Air Canada flies into." Good thing he asked. I'd have hated to end up at a cropdusting strip or one of the flying school fields around here. I put my head down and start texting my flight follower. Then I look up. We're approaching the passenger terminal. "This is the wrong side," I explain. "I need to be on the other side of the runways, where the Esso is." The Esso hasn't changed names lately, I hope.

"You said the big airport," he counters.

And my realization dawns. To non-pilots the airport is not the place with the runways. It's the terminal. To him this is two separate airports, the one with the big airplanes and the one with the charter planes and scruffy pilots like me. He drives back around the runways and I'm at the FBO only a little later than I had planned. I've yet to find the perfect words to explain to cab drivers where I need to go.

I paid for my fuel last night, so I just go through and preflight the airplane. No water in the fuel, lots of oil in the engines (or maybe not and I added some). All the airplaney bits are still attached in the right order. I load my flight bag and overnight bag into the airplane and secure them in place, then open the CFS to get the clearance delivery frequency and check on any special departure procedures. And there is one I hadn't planned on. Aircraft not on a VFR flight plan must call flight services at least 30 minutes prior to departure, in order to obtain a transponder code. Sigh. I shut down. They're doing this everywhere now. I call clearance delivery and see if I can get away without one, but he is unbending. I call flight services on the radio and ask if I really have to wait half an hour. "Try in five minutes," he recommends. I start up again and then a guy comes by in an Esso truck and signals for me to shut down. I do so and he tells me there's something on the ground by the plane. I open the door and look and it's the little bag in which I keep my wallet, licence and passport. It fell out of my flight bag while I was loading. I thank him profusely and check to make sure my head is screwed on.

Restart the engines. Clearance delivery has my transponder code, ground gives me a prompt and easy taxi clearance, and tower clears me for takeoff. Vroom into the sky I go, approved for a left turnout. There's a little bit of mist over the ground, in low spots, but other than that it's a lovely day. I climb out to some bush pilot like low altitude and level off. I hear a call from a flight number "911." I think it may be that company's standard medevac flight number, but they do have a 9-1-1 of sort. They also have just taken off and are requesting a return for landing because of fuel leaking visibly out of the tank caps. Someone else is having one of those mornings. They decline all emergency services, fire trucks and other offers of assistance. I think I would have left off the reason for my return in my request, and just let ATC be curious.

About 50 miles outside of Regina I make a call to traffic on 126.7. It's not strictly necessary, as I'm going to call tower in a few minutes and they will provide traffic information in the vicinity of their control zone, but it's what I'd do in the bush approaching an airport, so I do it here. A voice answers with my real name, recognizing my voice even though it's been a long time. It's a mentor, my very first aviation mentor. The guy who gave me a postcard with an A319 on it on my first cockpit visit. He is so awesome. He gives me his phone number and I promise to call tontight.

I copy the Regina ATIS and call tower. They sequence me and ask me if my destination is apron II. I look at the airport diagram in the CFS and see apron I opposite the terminal, apron IV way down taxiway Charlie, and II and III down that way too. I'm not sure which of II, III or IV is right, but it's down that way, so I answer in the affirmative. I'm cleared to land, do so and then call ground.

Ground gives me taxi instructions that don't gyve with my destination. I look at the CFS diagram now that I'm not flying an airplane, and realize that the area I'm looking at isn't marked II and III, but is marked III in two different places. Apron II is off on the opposite side of the terminal. I call back and admit that I can't count past two and need to taxi the other direction, which he approves. It's twenty to eight as I pull up, but there is no one waiting impatiently for me. I've made it. I shut down and fill out the journey log.

Cleared for Sliding

Now I'm at YEG, which brands itself as EIA: Edmonton International Airport. I'm here two and a half hours before the flight, a little excessive, but that's when I got here. I saunter leisurely to the bag drop. The suitcase I wanted to check weighs 54 pounds. I crack it open and pull out my bag of cords and battery chargers, stuffing it in my carry on. Now the big suitcase weighs 52 pounds. So, "how much," I ask, "will it cost me to check a suitcase weighing an extra two pounds?" The answer is fifty dollars plus GST, so $52.50. Yeah, the marginal value of my stuff is not $25 per pound. I go over to another scale and pull random other stuff out of the big bag until the suitcase weighs 49.9 lbs. I zip it up and check it. I try to zip up the carry on. Not quite. Sigh. I'm getting too comfortable on the road. Have to slim it down. After the suitcase has been tagged and marked with a Heavy/Lourd tag, I consider shoving the stuff that barely fits in the carry-on back into the suitcase, before I drop it on the conveyor belt, but I have friends who chuck bags for a living, and fifty pounds is heavy enough.

I head out with my overstuffed carry on towards the gate, looking for things to entertain me as I wait. There's a big colourful playset with the words YOU ARE CLEARED FOR SLIDING written down the slide. It's so inviting. I look around for a bit and don't see any rules posted. "Do you see any sign with an age limit?" I ask a woman who is sitting near the playset, watching a boy climb inside.

"Go ahead," she says. "I've been in it with my kids."

I don't need any more of an excuse than that. I take off my boots and go for it. The playground is really well-designed. The way up and in is a steep slippery ramp with little clouds to step on. That's trickier than it looks, a mini-climbing wall and a barrier to access for kids who shouldn't be on it. And also for adults who don't have the toe and arm strength to navigate the little footholds. Once at the top I go left into a twisty plastic fuselage with little airplane windows. There's a crossroads in the tunnel where a boy asks for my ticket. I take a moment to dig out an invisible airplane ticket, which he inspects before letting me pass. There's a spot to sit in the cockpit and look out the nose, and then around the corner to a curvy slide. I call out a warning as I go down it, in case there's a child at the bottom, and then find myself in a little cage made of rollers. I have two squeeze myself out like I'm laundry in an old fashioned wringer washer, to escape. It's awesome. I go back up and try a few more paths through the game before going back to the chairs and sitting with my stuff. There's a guy there now, instead of the woman.

"That's a great playground," I say as I crawl out and sit next to him in the chairs.

"She designed it," says the man, gesturing to the woman I spoke with earlier. She is just coming back with the boy.

"Really?" I say. What are the chances? "You're funning me!" But it's true. Her name is Elizabeth and she is in charge of graphic design and appearance at the whole airport. She was hired, I think she said fourteen years ago to do graphics like I suppose the signs that tell you where the baggage carousel is, and her job expanded to fill her area of expertise. She figured there should be a playground here, so she designed it, told the airport how much space it would require, had all the components built and put it together. She is not the paperclip. I wonder what I would be doing if my job could do that!

I rave about her play structure, but she probably had the most sincere compliment she could get from me the moment I was so captivated by it that I had to put down my luggage and play in it. Later when I was photographing it from different angles I found a small sign that restricted use to ages twelve and under, but if you ever go there, know that the designer thought it was just fine for grown-ups. Just remember to have your invisible ticket ready if there are any kids inside.

As I get up to find my gate, there is a PA announcement reminding the owner of Charlie the Tank Engine to return to the gate for a toy left on an airplane. A few minutes later the FO comes through the gate area, asking us if we've lost it. So sweet. I hope Charlie and his young owner are reunited.

Seeing other people being nice makes me happier. It makes me look for an opportunity to be nice to someone else and keep it going. By coincidence, today I had another opportunity to link two people I only know through the Internet. One of them hopes to work in airline logistics, and the other already does. I told the former I'd get in trouble from my blog if he was Muslim, but he says he'll have to get back to me on that. He thinks his grandmother might have been. That's a sleeper cell in deep cover.

Crazy Schedule

I have a kind of crazy schedule this summer so my blogging may not keep ahead of my flying schedule. As you may have noticed I'm defaulting to posting every second day, so that I can get wy ahead, but if I have time I can still insert topical posts as they come up without having to re-date all my queued posts. While this keeps me a few days ahead on write-ups any given day, it makes a longer lag between experiencing things and writing about them, so I'm not sure I can keep all my notes in good order.

I believe I have eight days at home between the beginning of June and mid-September, and my instrument renewal still has to be scheduled in there somewhere. I hope I get a chance to write everything up before I forget it. So if the narrative seems disjointed or if I suddenly stop blogging altogether, it probably doesn't mean that I'm snaring rabbits in the wilderness while waiting for Search and Rescue to find me.

In the meantime, here is a curiosity that didn't get attached to its proper post before that post got published. The passenger terminal at Calgary International Airport now has wireless internet, but you have to 'register' for it. You provide a name and e-mail address, then they give you limited access for fifteen minutes, during which you're supposed to check your e-mail and click the confirmation link, then you get online. That's the first airport I've encountered that does that. I wonder why they chose that route. I haven't been spammed by them yet. (I gave them a "special" e-mail address, so I'd know). I like it best when I can just tell my computer to connect, and then it does so, and then on all subsequent visits to the same place it connects automatically.

Flying Across America

People who fly for fun or who work commercially out of little airports like I do know that new security regulations are made without regard to, and often without knowledge of the way little airplane operate. They are assumed to be toys, or only present during business hours, and the rules can make it difficult to operate.

A couple of pilots in an airplane just like the one we were ferrying start today on a sponsored trip across the US, trying to raise the profile of GA and demonstrate that it isn't necessarily a rich man's sport. I forwarded the website to my companion in the C150 and she was halfway between amused and irritated that these men were making such a big deal of flying this airplane across the country. "Look at all the airports they have down there and all the support they have! How is this a big deal. I'm not making a big deal out of flying my airplane. It's an airplane, it goes places."

She may have a point, that in making an event out of the simple act of flying an airplane across the country, they are effectively claiming that it is some kind of feat, as opposed to an everyday event. People do fly little airplanes across and between both of our countries all the time. Should we make noise about it? I don't know. It's both more fun and more challenging than driving. I would prefer that the challenges remain with the weather and terrain and not include getting permission to land, park and taxi at the only places where fuel is available.

---

There are some spectacular pictures here of a DC-3 crash in Germany. The first one looks like an airplane-on-a-stick monument, but keep going and you'll realize that it's a photo taken moments before impact. My German isn't good enough to decipher the nature of the malfunction (a problem with the Triebwerk), how many on board or the seriousness of their injuries. Unless "fest" means something totally different in German than English, I'm reading that there was some kind of photography event going on at the time.

Always Watch Your Autopilot

Once I'm clear of Calgary's airspace, I climb to 7500' and then level off and trim every which way while the speed stabilizes. The GPS is set direct to destination, the trackbar to the track I am following to get there and the heading bug to the heading I'm flying to hold it in northwest winds. I turn on the autopilot, and press the Engage button. Unlike Star Trek the airplane doesn't flash and disappear into a rainbow rubber band of light. Instead it rolls into a thirty degree right bank and drops into a 300 fpm descent. I retake control, climb back to 7500', disable altitude control and switch it from nav mode to heading mode. When I reengage it, it follows the bug straight ahead, and left and right when I move it. I go back to nav mode and watch it for a bit. I'm a few hundred metres off the centre of the track and apparently when you're an autopilot this calls for drastic measures to regain track. I guess when you're an autopilot that's your whole job, so you take it pretty seriously. Or when you're an autopilot designed in the seventies, you only know one strategy for getting on track: you bank thirty degrees towards the track until you're within some logic of centred and then you roll level.

It's kind of interesting that the autopilot, which was designed in the 1970s works with a brand new GPS unit. There's no computer in the autopilot and no mechanical parts in the GPS. The truth is, they don't talk at all. They communicate entirely through an intermediary, the HSI ("horizontal situation indicator," the second stupidest aviation abbreviation after DME). The autopilot also talks to the flight director, which is part of the attitude indicator, but I don't believe the GPS participates in that conversation. The GPS tells the HSI how far off course we are and then the autopilot rolls the airplane into a bank to regain the course, with the flight director telling the autopilot when it has reached the bank limit. I have to set the heading bug and track bar manually.

After I get tired of correcting the autopilot, I turn off the altitude hold feature and keep altitude myself while the autopilot holds the course. This doesn't work that well because it doesn't take much force to disconnect and doesn't have a disconnect alarm, and every once in a while I turn the yoke inadvertently and disconnect it, so that it drifts off course. But I persevere. I'll have to get used to this.

Spring is coming to the prairie but there are still snow curls on the ground, highlighting all the ditches and gullies. As I approach the destination airport, I start looking at water features on the ground for confirmation that the runway I am anticipating is the correct one. I get caught by this every time: when the snow is off frozen ponds look just like open water from the air, and the ripples are frozen right in. So they're only useful to determine landing direction if I have a time machine to the day they froze. I take a guess and then compare the GPS ground speed to my airspeed to confirm that I don't have an untenable tailwind.

I land and taxi slowly in, then text the flight follower. He tells me whom to call for a pick up. Fuel is closed for the night, so I park in front of the terminal and plug into an outlet there. I don't know anything about what kind of power I can draw from it, so I only activate the cabin heater to keep the computers warm overnight. The engines will have to settle for tents and plugs. Shiny new engine plugs which keep the heat in in the winter and the birds out in the spring and summer.

I see the uv damage lines on the tire again as I chock. They're just on the surface, but they bug me because they aren't usually there. I unload my baggage, and a box of parts which must be everything they took out while doing the work. The client picks me up and laughs at the parts box. He offers to leave it in his truck so I don't have to keep it in my hotel room.

Supper is something generic at a local restaurant. I use a trick I learned from another pilot to avoid eating more than I need: I ask to have a takeout container brought with the meal. Then right away, before I eat any, I put half the food in the takeout container. That protects me from unconsciously eating it all even though its more than I need. My other strategy for this month is the iTunes tactic: whenever I'm tempted to buy a chocolate bar from the hotel vending machine, I'm going instead to buy a new song from from iTunes. It costs exactly the same and I'll have the at least as much fun picking it out. And they I'll put it on repeat and get up and dance to it.

It's the end of the day so I just check in and veg out. The TV comes on at the weather channel. A lot of hotels do that. If they don't have their own dedicated advertising channel shilling for the pay movies, they have the default channel be weather. It's useful to most people and completely inoffensive. It will never come on in the middle of a violent TV show or a sexy movie. Unless you're offended by pressure charts or footage of a woman walking down the street carrying her cat in a front slung baby carrier, you're going to be happy or bored watching this. And then they toss off a casual mention that a Chinese oil tanker has just taken a dump on the Great Barrier Reef. I literally scream. I don't know what caused the accident. Probably a stupid autopilot. I don't want to read more about it. I hate horrible things that I can't do anything about, and as a consumer of petroleum products I have to acknowledge some responsibility, too. Not too many years from now global climate change will result in easy passage through the once treacherous Northwest Passage and countries that didn't even know it existed before will be plying the arctic waters. It's a completely different ecosystem, but just as vulnerable as the coral reefs. I'm glad I'm not immortal. The future has amazing 3-D movies but dead barren seas.

Spirit of the North

The job is done, and the client drops the three of us -- two pilots and the AME -- off at the airport before they drive south. Our mission is to get back to Fort Nelson. It's a five hour drive on a treacherous mountain highway for them and should be an hour and a half up and over the pretty mountains for us. There is a lot of steam fog, still mostly over the lake, but seeing as the runway ends at the lake, it's also right off one end of the runway. It's also overcast at 3000' but we can see that it scatters out to the north and satellite images have shown it scattered over the mountains, so we're not worried about that.

It's very cold, -17 degrees, and there's a lot of frost on the airplane. We brush off as much as we can loosen with soft brushes and then use our spray-and-wipe-before-it-refreezes technique on the layer sticking to the wing, but it's still freezing a little, and so are we. We clear about half of one wing and then retreat inside. The weather is supposed to improve, with a high of -3 and this broken layer scattering out. We have all day to get to Fort Nelson, so we see no reason to freeze our butts and fingers. We go inside.

There is a warm pilot's lounge full of broken down but comfortable couches and old National Geographic magazines. It's just adjacent to the CARS office and we can hear the airport workers coming in and out, commenting on the temperature. "It's not supposed to be this cold yet!" they complain. I read an article about a mountain climber who has soled Everest with no oxygen, and that's only a tiny part of his lifetime of accomplishment. Some people are inspirational and some people go so far beyond that that it's discouraging. People mentoring at risk children should remember that. I read out some of Messner's feats to my coworkers and they toss back, "I'll bet he can't fly an airplane." I'll bet he could deice one better than us at minus seventeen though.

It's not going to get appreciably warmer until the broken layer dissipates, and after a couple of hours it becomes evident that that isn't happening. We'll give it a shot. We finish deicing the airplane. Our method actually did work pretty well. It just needs two iterations to get all the frost off without diluting the fluid to the point that it freezes. When the critical surfaces are bare and dry we un-tent the engines, unplug the cords, pack everything away and pile in. I give a quick and slightly adapted passenger briefing to the AME e.g. "you know how to open the emergency exit, 'cause you do that during the inspection," and then climb in the cockpit. As I put my foot into the footwell the toe catches the centre console and tears off a big chunk of plastic facing. Argh. I pick up the broken piece and hand it back to the AME. "Could you add this to the list of things to fix?" More evidence for him that pilots just gratuitously break things.

While I'm busy wrecking the place, the other pilot starts up the engines. Er, the engine. The right one is a little balky, so he switches over and starts the left one first, making more power available to start the right one. It just doesn't go. We check and double check all the usual things: tank selection, firewall shutoff, magnetos selected on. The starter is working admirably for a motor asked to work in these temperatures and the propeller is going around, but it won't catch. Most likely we kicked the engine heater plug loose during our first deicing attempt, or it was never properly set the night before.

After several unsuccessful attempts, my coworker offers me the chance to make a fool of myself. No joy. I try various permutations ask the AME for any suggestions. So we have three of us in this airplane, professionals in the art of making an airplane go, and none of us can make the sucker run. Anyone who has been there can hear us suggesting tactics to one another. We try flooding it and using the flooded start procedure. We try it with the throttle and mixture full open. We try it with the electric boost pump running. A few times it seems to start, and we cheer, but then it dies again. It's like it's not getting enough fuel. I check the firewall shutoff again.

The AME figures it's just too cold for the fuel to vapourize properly, so even though we flood it to the point that there is liquid fuel dripping out on the ground, there isn't enough fuel vapour in the cylinders to make a combustible mixture. We know these things. We know this is a mechanical device, subject to all physical laws, but as humans we've been working with each other and with draught animals much longer than with combustion engines. It's hard not to imbue it with a personality. We coax it gently, apologizing for how cold it was, promise it an oil change and anything else it wants at the end of the trip. We beg it; we swear at it; we wonder if internal combustion engines have a patron saint we can pray to. I consider sacrificing chickens, but what we really need is a flock of warm, non-pooping, non feather-shedding chickens to warm it up with their body heat.

All the while that we are doing this, hangar guy is driving back and forth to and from the lake, hauling floatplanes. So you know, he wasn't lying about needing the hangar space for floatplanes, but if he's hauling these ones into the hangar now that means that last night there was five floatplanes worth of empty space in his hangar. We don't take up as much space as five floatplanes, and we would have paid good money for that space. The airplane is in a hangar elsewhere as I type this, and lets just say we're paying as much per night for its accommodation than we are for mine.

After over half an hour of attempting to start the engine we come up with a new strategy. We're going to shut down and tent up the engines again, this time with an electric space heater inside the nacelle of the right engine. We'll plug everything in and go back and read some more National Geographics while it warms up.

While the other two implement the heater plan, I also go to see if hangar guy has a Herman-Nelson. That's surely a staple in a WWII hangar in the Yukon. He's at his hangar and I greet him and ask. He has to be aware of our predicament, as there's no mistaking an airplane with one engine running and the other prop halfheartedly turning over for several seconds at a time. "Ah yeah," he says. "I think you flooded it."

Oh we most certainly flooded it. I admit it. Sometimes that works. He does have a Herman-Nelson, but it's lunch time now, he explains. And so he drives off to town.

I'm surprised. He's not obligated to help us, I know. But he does operate a business related to helping people with airplanes. This would have been an easy hundred bucks for him. Maybe two. We wanted the damn thing started. There's some cultural thing I'm missing here. Obviously money is not a great motivator for him. If he's happy with the income he has at the work level he has from the customers he has, then he's happy, and I can't really complain about that. And he seems like a nice friendly guy, really. Just not one inclined to accept our business. It must be a northern thing.

I go back to the National Geographic magazines. This time I read an article on the evolution of the eye. It was something that confounded Darwin, but he didn't know of as many creatures as modern biologists do. I also look at cute furry animals from somewhere, and expensively-attired debutantes in Laredo, Texas.

The picture shows the airport. The closer building is the WWII hangar, with a single otter and other smaller aircraft parked outside. The further building is the terminal, with glimpses of the lake beyond. You'll notice, as we did, that the terminal includes a tower. There's no one in the tower: we know the CARS guy has a desk and office on the main floor near the pilot lounge, and there is no tower controller. The tower is left over from the old days when this was a bustling hub on the building of the Alaska-Canada highway.

We ask the airport manager if there is a way to get into it. We have been around inside the terminal several times and there doesn't seem to be a locked door. "Sure," he says. "Mind your heads on the bracing." He opens a trap door in the ceiling and unfolds a metal staircase out of it. "Look out for bats," he warns cheerily and goes back to his office.

We go up the stairs, and up the wooden stairs beyond that until we come to the first landing. This is a three story log building built in the 1940s, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it seems to be held together by a lot of bracewires and struts. It's also cold. The floor below is insulated so they aren't losing any heat through the tower. I test my footing with each step as I walk across the floor. Judging by the colour and wear of the carpet, this place was refurbished in the 1970s and still in use for a number of years after that. There's only a few items of broken furniture remaining, but we imagine one of the landings was an office, and another a lounge and coffee room.

The tower cab at the top is mostly empty too. There's an old TV and some giant light bulbs in boxes, but no antique radio equipment. Maybe it is still in use downstairs. There's another ladder up to the roof, presumably for weather observations, and a balcony. We finish our tour and go back down, closing the stairs up behind us. It wasn't something I'd describe as a fascinating slice of history, but it was a fun mini-adventure. I think one of the most fun things is that we were allowed to do it at all. Can you think of anywhere in the US or Canada that isn't north of sixty where you would be allowed to just wander into an abandoned area of a public building? This is completely aside from the fact that it was at an airport, normally the most paranoid public place out there.

That's the spirit of the north. You can get yourself into trouble and you can get yourself out, and no one seems particularly inclined to interfere one way or the other.

World's Largest What?

I take an airline flight to Edmonton. The guys unloading the airplane are wearing toques. Sigh. Summer is officially over. They were probably wearing shorts last week. Fortunately it's not really that cold out, because I have to rent a car, and for some reason the terminal is designed so you have to go outside and then back in to get to the rental cars. Perhaps there is a tunnel that I can use when it's thirty below and blowing.

The reason I have to rent a car is that we're not working in Edmonton, but at an airport four hours away on the Saskatchewan border, with no airline service. I now know to rent from Avis, because they have a hassle-free policy allowing any fellow employee to drive the car without further payments or paperwork. They offer me a GPS unit at the rental counter, but I have Google maps directions printed off, and it's pretty hard to get lost leaving Edmonton, so I decline.

It was a Ford compact of some sort. It looked boxy with a high side profile but I should have written down what sort, because if you're any taller than me, don't rent this car. At the lowest possible seat setting my head was so close enough to the roof that my hair kept static clinging to the ceiling. Is this some kind of dodge by American car companies to get people to buy larger cars? I've been in plenty of smaller Japanese and European cars and never had head versus roof issues before.

The exit from Edmonton International Airport leads right onto highway 2 north, which ends at an opportunity to get onto 216 and then the Yellowhead Highway eastbound. I do all that, and then settle in for the drive. I don't like driving as much as flying. It's not as comfortable and you keep having to turn for arbitrary reasons. After a very short while I realize I forgot to refill my waterbottle at YEG, and I don't want to drive all that way without water, so I exit at a signed rest stop.

It's the worst designated highway rest stop ever. It has parking. No shade, warmth, vending machines, tourist information, toilets or potable water. That's right, a highway rest stop with no toilets. It doesn't even have any sizable bushes. I assume the truckers are just going in the bushes behind their big rigs. The only facility at the place is a couple of large garbage cans. I move on.

The next town on the highway big enough to be on the Google Maps printout is called Vegreville and the highway signs promise all services, plus the world's largest pysanka. I have no idea what a pysanka is, so I imagine it belongs to the family of edible dough things called names like perogie and pyroshky, depending on who is making and pronouncing it. I exit at the town and shortly see that I am on 50th Avenue at 52nd Street (or possibly on 50th Street at 52nd Avenue, I forget). Because this is Alberta, I know I'm two blocks from the downtown, and if you're going to have a World's Largest Something in your town, isn't that where it would be. There's a plaza there, and a parking space, but no large thing. A nearby store offers "pysanki" for sale, and I know enough of Slavic languages to recognize that as plural of pysanka. I am disappointed to see that it's a pottery store, so a pysanka is unlikely to be food, and she is disappointed I don't want to buy pottery. She does fill my water bottle for me and direct me to the world's largest, and explains that it's a Ukrainian Easter egg. She has some pottery replicas.

The World's Largest Pysanka was constructed for the centennial of the RCMP. It looks to me like a pretty savvy move on the part of the town to use federal horse force money to build themselves a giant tourist attraction, but their little blurb about it symbolizing the safety of their town thanks to the brave Mounties was so convincing that they were awarded extra money for their project. It is an interesting meld of an old fashioned handicraft with the high tech (in 1973 anything using a computer was high tech) construction. I love the line "required the development of new computer programs," as though writing code was an earthshattering breakthrough. Apparently no one had ever modelled an egg before. Hmm, 1973: does that predate Fortran? What would they have written it in?

It was worth exiting the highway for. Giant decorated egg on stick, rotates with the wind, and it's always windy there, so it kept moving as I was photographing it. I decided not to eat in Vegreville, but save my hunger and dine with my colleagues when I arrived. Apparently there is a World's Largest Pyrogy somewhere along that drive, and I missed it.

Red Deer Airport

The airport at Red Deer has two good paved runways, some good taxiways and at least one "wait, are you sure there wasn't an X on this?" taxiway. That's Delta. I was glad that I had specifically checked NOTAMs for the airport before coming here, so that I could be reasonably confident that I wasn't about to fall into a pit. This must be why the controller offered me the backtrack yesterday.

There is a proper airport terminal here, with washrooms and gates (okay, gate: I think there's only one) and PA announcements and CATSA security screening. In front of the terminal is a large paved apron with a big yellow square painted on it. The square is about the size of a B737 and it's the secure area of the airport. When there is a scheduled carrier parked there, no one without a badge or a security escort may cross the line. When there's no scheduled carrier, anyone may walk or taxi anywhere on the apron. When I first arrived at the airport there was a B737 parked in the square, but the FSS folk cheerfully assured me that it was just a charter, not scheduled, so the line was not in force. Because it's so much more practical to commit terrorist acts on a scheduled flight than with a private charter that operates on your schedule, I guess.

From the airside, the terminal has the name of the airport and the field elevation written on it and there is the word enter over one door. The other door goes to the FSS in the tower cab on top of the terminal. The FSS personnel don't go in and out that door, though, they use a wooden walkway with handrails that goes along the roof to the groundside, and then down a set of metal stairs. It must be a chilly gauntlet to run in the winter, but the summer weather is quite nice, not getting below ten or so overnight. The metal stairs end in a fenced cage with a coded entry door, next to the airport staff parking. From there a secure fence with a combination lock runs along the edge of the airfield. (Pilots: your first guess at the code is correct, and there's a sticker on both sides of the gate that gives the name of the four digit number clearly enough that it could be googled). Not to worry about the security of the airfield however, because the security fence ends a couple of hangars down the ramp and anyone can just walk or drive onto the field. Just like Miami.

As I'm leaving the airport at eleven p.m. a man comes down the stairs to his car. I ask if he's leaving for the night or just a shift change. I thought I remembered that it was 24 hour here, but I could be wrong. Eleven is a common time for services to stop. It's just a shift change, though. He explains that overnight when Edmonton City Centre tower closes, Red Deer Radio steps in and looks after that frequency. I told him that I had assumed it went to a pool of people in a room in Edmonton somewhere. He says it used to, but this is new. It's not a bad idea. It gives Red Deer Radio enough work to justify them being open twenty-four hours.

I Love Paper

After seeing as much as I could of Whitehorse, I took the hotel shuttle to the airport where I chatted with a Toronto geologist who was originally from the Caribbean and an outfitter who was originally from Calgary but now lived further north than Whitehorse and had come south to here for business. There's a lot of Canada I don't think about from day to day.

As a result of my experiences in the airport, I made the following list.

Ten Things You Can Do Easily with a Paper Air Canada Boarding Pass
(but not with the iPod)

1. Hold it in your teeth
2. Use it as a bookmark
3. Fold it inside your wallet
4. Abandon it in the seat pocket in front of you before changing planes
5. Roll your luggage over it
6. Watch security personnel drop it on the floor
7. Get a new one for free if it is lost or mutilated
8. Walk through the security scanner carrying it
9. Staple it to your expense report
10. Get admitted to the secure area at Whitehorse airport

Details on that tomorrow.

SD-8G

SD-8G sounds like a new TV spinoff, about a portal into an alien world, but it's Security Directive 1542-04-08G, an insight into the way the TSA thinks about airports. As of June 1st, 2009 the TSA declared that everyone having unescorted access to the airside at any airport with airline service must undergo background checks for a badge, on a per-airport basis. That would be almost like requiring drivers to have a separate permit for every highway exit they use that is also used by transport trucks. It's so ridiculously infeasible that the Security Directive 1542-04-08F containing that provision did not go into effect, and, thanks to the input of pilot advocacy groups, was watered down to SD-8G which at least allows us to land, pee, and fuel our airplanes.

The new requirements, which have officially gone into effect (but might not be enforced everywhere), tell transient pilots without airport badges to remain close to their aircraft and leave its 'footprint' only for trips to and from the FBO. They haven't yet defined clearly our movements at airports with self-serve fuel, or even exactly which airports count as having airline service. (Does the "airline" have to fly something bigger than a Beaver? Does the "schedule" have to be daily? Do they have to be passenger airlines?)

They say pilots are advised to call ahead to airports they think might have airline service and assure themselves they are in compliance with the new TSA directive. Whom should we call? Are they going to publish TSA 24-hour numbers for us? I don't expect this to really interfere with my movements when I'm south of the border. American FBOs are pretty proactive, so if there is one I'll ask them what the TSA expects of me before I get out of my airplane. Any wandering around I do on the apron is usually in search of FBO personnel, anyway.

TSA hasn't interfered with safety publications yet, at least I've never seen a notation saying "pilots without badges are not permitted to park on apron C". It might be feasible to designate airports by security class, and publish those in the AF/D where pilots know what they are dealing with. Have a few where pilots require A-class badges, with the same background checks required by airline pilots, but allow a pilot to do one A-class security check and then hold a badge valid for JFK, DCA, LAX, etc. If he's at an A-class security airport with no badge or a lower class badge, he needs an escort. B-class airports would have a painted line on the apron around the area where airliners parked and you'd need an A or B-class badge to be inside the line. And so on down to grass fields in Montana with no fence around them and no stinking badges needed. What do they gain by per-airport clearance? Is there really something in my background that could make me safe to walk across the ramp and borrow a Dustbuster in Albuquerque but a threat to national security if I move away from a hangar to get better cell coverage in Spokane?

The thing that really drives security crazy is that they can put up a big fence and lots of rules but they can't control access to the airport. Despite all the barricades, signs and security checkpoints, any old Canadian can still literally fly in over the fence. For any spot on the field, if an airliner can get there, I can get there, too.

If you are a pilot, or even just hope to become one someday if time permits, or want to support the freedom to fly, I really suggest that you join COPA or AOPA. They have excellent publications and member services, but even if you never use those, they are an essential presence in monitoring and countering the regulations and fees that officaldom concoct while wearing airline-shaped blinders.

Calgary Picnic Meet

I'm meeting a reader just north of the YYC passenger terminal on Saturday, about 11:30 a.m. Calgary time. He knows of some picnic tables near the meeting spot shown, and is bringing me non-airport food. (I just had to brag about that).

View I suggest this meeting place. in a larger map

If you're in the area, feel free to join us. BYOP. Don't come far, because this does involve airplanes, and as such is susceptible to circumstance. I'll try to post an Saturday morning update confirming that I'm on schedule.

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

Boing Boing lists a news story in which a band sticker on a bicycle shut down an airport. The name of the band is "This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb," and apparently it isn't the first time its appearance on an innocently parked bicycle has caused a bomb scare.

Everyone can appreciate that security at an airport has to be taken seriously, but it seems a little odd to base the alert level on the label. If a bicycle being a pipe bomb is a credible threat, restrict bicycle parking to a secure bunker. A bicycle sticker reading, "This bike is not a pipe bomb," wouldn't calm anyone down any. If I knew that there was one bike on the whole rack that was a pipe bomb, I'd expect it to be the one with the only stickers being the manufacturer's name and local registration. The words "pipe bomb" precipitate the security response. Not the credibility of the threat. It has been illegal for as long as I remember to make jokes or false statements about carrying dangerous items while at airport security, but this shouldn't be extended into making any statements about security or dangerous items while at airport security.

A car bombs makes a bigger bang than a bike bomb. I'd love to see a bumper sticker for cars reading "This could be a car bomb," but you know that instead of being taken as either a silly joke or a reminder to maintain constant vigilance, it would get you in trouble. They can be perfectly truthful statements, but if your t-shirt says "Some terrorists look like me" and there's a sticker on your computer saying "No explosive residue," you should probably be wearing underwear that says, "I knew I'd get strip searched today."

I'd buy that underwear, though.

And I'd need some new underwear were I forced to use this bicycle lane.

And finally, despite the really corny gaggle of geese, this animation of the US Airways landing in the Hudson River is very well done.

Homeward Bound

My replacement pilot is here and my flight home is booked, so there is no impediment to my leaving. I even have breakfast with my co-worker, because he's not working today. There is a large area of freezing rain forecast, here and to the south. Oh oh. I hope I'm still leaving. Freezing rain is a reason to cancel or delay airline flights, and I have connections to make between non-partnered carriers, who don't know I'm coming. I'll have to collect my luggage, check in, and recheck my luggage. I hope I get there, but I don't want to go if the weather is unsafe. I hope the pilots at this little northern airline have the balls to cancel a flight in unfavourable weather.

The hotel van takes me to the airport. I check in at the desk in the little terminal and put my bag on the scale. As the agent goes to lift my bag off the scale I intervene to show her that the top handle is broken, so it has to be lifted from the side. I hear her conveying this information to the baggage handler. I bought that suitcase in Florida. It was cheap, but I was operating on the theory that cheap or expensive, this lifestyle was going to trash my suitcase, so I might as well not spend a lot of money on it. That and the mall by the hotel didn't have any stores above the level of Wal-Mart or Ross. The suitcase hasn't completely self-destructed yet. I'll get a new one soon. The CSA gives me my boarding pass and I go further into the terminal to wait.

It's a little bigger and swankier than the terminal at my old base in Weasel. For example the floor is level and the toilets have doors. But it's not big city. There are no news stands or TVs. There might have been a vending machine. The best part is a partly-completed thousand-piece jigsaw laid out on a table. I love this sort of thing about small airport terminals. I'm sure there some official reason why you couldn't have a jigsaw puzzle table in a departure lounge at l'Aéroport international Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau. Transmission of disease? Choking hazard? The airport authority cannot be responsible for deciding whether the jigsaw should be of kittens chasing string or of balloons floating over the countryside? A jigsaw puzzle has no linguistic or age barriers and it doesn't matter if you come in or leave on the middle of it. One person an work on it or several, with any level of cooperation. And it stimulates your brain, instead of deadening it like TV.

I'm the only one working on this jigsaw puzzle now. I'm looking for an orangish brown piece with really big square corners and a little teeny slightly left of centre tab, when someone comes up and asks about my checked baggage. It's the baggage handler. "I fixed your suitcase," he says proudly. He explains at length that he saw that it was broken and so he looked at the handle, and there was a metal part and he put a bolt through that, and so on. I thank him and he segues off into another story about how he fixed someone else's luggage. This seems to be his hobby. He's single-handedly making up for all the bags that all the other baggage handlers in the world have broken. I'm sure this violates some regulation, as does what I suspect he may have consumed before work. Or maybe he's always this garrulous. I thank him again and go back to the puzzle.

After I get lots of orangish-brown pieces connected, the flight is called. There's no security. I'm in the north. I just pick up my carry on and board the airplane. I've interviewed with this carrier. As look at the airplane I wonder what I was thinking. I don't want to work here. I feel sorry for the pilots. I watch them and hope I don't appear as transparently self-important as I go about my duties. I catch myself looking at the pilots' faces to see if I know them from somewhere. They're younger than me, so I probably don't. I don't want to fly this airplane. I want to fly better ones, skipping this stage. That's not really the way it works, Aviatrix.

They play a recorded preflight safety briefing. I listen to the recording, stow my carry-on and read the evacuation procedures like I mean it. As they start the engines I realize I've made a rookie mistake. There was no assigned seating and I just sat in the first available seat. Experienced passengers move to the back of a turboprop like this, away from the noise. I have earplugs in my flight bag, so I use those.

During the flight I'm watching to see if we're icing. We're not. We're flying between layers. The FO is reading a sheaf of something that doesn't look like approach plates or a checklist. Company memos, probably, or maybe his cheat sheet notes. (When you're new you make yourself a cheatsheat of runway numbers, nav aids, frequencies and other things that you'd have to look up in a variety of places. Tip: laminate your cheatsheet so it looks like a regular checklist). The heater in this airplane works well. Bleed air is a wonderful thing.

My first connection connects and I entrust my safety to another set of strangers. For some reason today I'm more conscious than usual that all pilots are people like me. We make stupid mistakes, get lazy, tired, or sick. And we all want to get home safely. Which I do.

No Swans but No Turkeys Either

While the scheduled maintenance is being done on the airplane, I sleep in, laze around a bit, and then just before checkout time call the engineer for a progress check. His answer will tell me whether I should check out or extend our stay another night. He says everything is going fine, but he needs to order new brake rotors and, funny thing, he can't get a hold of anyone to sell him some on Thanksgiving Day. He says he thinks he can AOG some tomorrow morning, to arrive on a nine a.m. Air Canada flight. Ay-oh-gee is a verbed form of the abbreviation A.O.G., for "aircraft on ground". It is the aviation equivalent of super-rush. Anyone in the industry knows that an aircraft on the ground is costing, not making, money and a part tagged or ordered AOG is required to get that machine back into the air.

I message the PRM about our progress, knowing that he's going to be out of town tucking into appetisers somewhere, with the smell of roast turkey wafting about, but for some reason he not only reads the message, but replies that he'll swing by the hangar and ship some too us on the next flight out. I call the mechanic back to tell him that the brakes will be here tonight, do a workout, catch up on paperwork and then I go see the town.

I mean, wooee! This is it, the town that puts the Grande in the prairies, right? The wind is absolutely howling. I'm not looking forward walking back to the hotel, upwind, but there's nothing in the other direction. I walk down the main street, which is also the highway, I forget the number, then across a bridge and find myself downtown. Three guesses, readers, for the name of the streets at this central downtown intersection. If you can't get it in two, you haven't been paying attention, but for those of you just tuning in, I'm at the corner of 100th Street and 100th Avenue. The only places I've found open on Thanksgiving are the Salvation Army thrift store and the Co-op grocery store. I checked out the former and I'm now wandering around the latter, planning to buy a small package of turkey pepperoni and a yam. If you're going to have Thanksgiving in a small town where you don't know anyone, you might as well play it for the maximum pathos, right? And then my phone rings.

It's the mechanic. He's ready for a dinner break, so I put down the package of pepperoni and meet him on 100th Avenue, or maybe it was 99th. We go to a good chain restaurant called Earls, where I enjoy roast chicken (the closest I could get to turkey) and pumpkin pie. The service is slow but you can tell it's through inexperience, not laziness. Anyone in the restaurant industry with any seniority at all has today off. I sort have have today off. After all, I didn't fly. The engineer is good company. He does a good job on the airplane, too. He's a great guy. I hope he is well paid.

After our leisurely dinner we head out to the airport to pick up the brake parts from Air Canada Cargo. It's a small terminal of a familiar design: the cargo counters are located at the side of the building, staffed by the same folks who man the check in desk. There's no one in sight, so we ring the buzzer. A harried-looking man comes through from the check-in desks and asks us to hang on for a bit. We do, for quite a while, until he finally returns and thanks us deeply for being so patient. "It's a cluster-eff here today he says." Just like that "cluster-eff". He finds out what we're looking for and goes off to look for it, while we giggle over his choice of minced oath.

It's okay," we tell him, "We're in aviation too." We know about the delays and chaos that can result when technology meets Mother Nature in the presence of government regulation. I suspect that the strong winds have caused flight delays across the country and it doesn't take many accrued minutes of delay to duty out a crew. And then how do you find replacement pilots who will interrupt carving their turkeys to answer the phone? He's friendly and happy despite the muttered curses and he finds our package.

The mechanic says he has hours of work left to do, so he drops me back at the hotel to go to bed.

Airport Goth

Once upon a time people dressed up to go on airplanes. It was some kind of occasion, like dressing to dine at the captain's table on an ocean voyage. Then the sixties came and dress codes changed almost overnight. I know a woman now in her seventies who was on an extended trip in Europe when the sixties arrived. When she returned to Canada she was quite stunned. what had happened to everyone? What were they wearing? They had gone from white gloves and hats to tie-dyes and beaded headbands in the turn of a decade. Also around the same time, air travel became more commonplace and no longer an occasion. People now usually wear whatever they are wearing when it is time to leave, or what they need to be wearing when they get there.

That makes most air travellers dressed for either business or vacation, with the business shading from suits and ties to workboots and jeans, depending on the route flown. But a few independent souls buck the trend and wear astounding things. They probably aren't really bucking the trend at all, and are simply wearing what they wear every day, or what they need to be wearing when they get where they are going, but still, they make waiting at the airport more exciting.

I saw this woman as I walked towards my gate. She was reading a magazine as I walked by. I stared, hoped she didn't notice, then got a few rows of seats past her and remembered the old retaliatory taunt for staring, "take a picture, it lasts longer!"

I doubled back and simply asked her, "excuse me, may I take your picture?" She put down her magazine and struck a pose. I guess you don't dress like that if you're averse to a little attention. Thank you to all the airport goths. You make my day.

And on the topic of all kinds of people with all kinds of normal, I skipped a day blogging yesterday in order to extend the Secret Ballot discussion. I'm really enjoying everyone's opinions and ideas. I'm proud to have readers who can discuss politics without getting into a slanging match.

Mountains. Lots of Them.

I just picked the worst time ever not to have my camera charged on a flight. I had come straight from camping at Oshkosh, (yes, that's how far behind I am on blogging) where I had little opportunity to plug in electronics, and then my company flew me out to Campbell River, British Columbia to pick up an airplane and take it across the mountains.

The main terminal at Vancouver International Airport is pretty much like an airport terminal in other cities: heavy on the ethnic artwork and with some interesting architecture and confusingly multilevel departure and arrival vehicle areas. Like every other airport in the world, it's also under constant construction. But then there's another part of the airport, that you'd swear was up north or in a small town somewhere. It's called the South Terminal.

You take a shuttle from the main terminal to the south terminal and there you find a small town airport terminal. I think there was even free parking. There is a float plane base across the road, just like in Weasel Inlet. Inside there is a small concourse, a cafe and one, maybe two gates. Passengers mill around with their fishing gear, waiting for charters. The check-in desk stamped my ticket "security required," implying that some departures did not require security. I think I did see a group of people going out the side door for a charter, bypassing the security routine.

When my flight was called, the FO introduced herself and walked us out across the tarmac to the turboprop. We boarded, she gave the passenger briefing and then she slipped into the--no door--cockpit with the captain and they flew us up to Campbell River. I was watching carefully out the window to get a preview of the weather I was in for. Some low cloud, but not low or thick enough to affect VFR flight.

It was a quick turn at Campbell River, with the local agents saying hi to the crew as the only passenger for this stop (me) disembarked, my luggage unloaded from the cargo hold in the time it took me to walk down the steps. I thanked everyone and went into the terminal, as security requires, before coming back out onto the apron through a different gate. I was amused that the airside gate immediately next to the terminal was a fancy electronic one, but the other side of the flight services station it was the old mechanical kind where you can press one and two together and then five, or whatever the code was. The previous pilot had given it to me along with directions on where the airplane was parked and where the keys were hidden. This is so small town, isn't it?

I walked back down the ground side of the airport to the Pilot Information Kiosk, an infuriatingly slow internet connection to the Nav Canada flight planning website. There I looked at GFAs at about 300 baud, checked some TAFs, METARs and NOTAMs, got the upper winds and called it a preflight briefing. Everything looked good until the final range of mountains, where there might be thunderstorms. And of course there are afternoon thunderstorms on the prairies, too. I don't mind skirting thunderstorms in the prairies, but they aren't something to mess around with in the mountains. I told boss there might be an overnight en route to wait for storms and he okayed that. The airplane I was meeting was on the ground waiting for a new antenna to be installed and the part wouldn't be delivered until Tuesday, anyway. And then I taxied out for takeoff.

Pretty much immediately I was flying above the most amazing jagged mountains. There is snow, which I suppose is mostly glaciers but, being summer, lots of rocks show through, and some of those rocks are jaw-dropping. I flew right by a vertically upthrust black cylinder on top of a cone of rock. I knew exactly what I was looking at but could hardly believe it. The black part was the glassy hardened lava that hadn't quite made it out of the top of the mountain during a long ago volcanic eruption. The sides of the former mountain that originally contained it had mostly eroded away, leaving just the plug, atop what was left of the mountain. The glaciers around it made it look even blacker, and it seemed perfectly flat on top, like you could land a fair-sized helicopter on top with just enough room to walk around it. I wonder if anyone ever has. It would feel so amazing. It was phenomenal just to fly by. I'm looking at the inside of a volano, so old that an entire mountain has eroded away around it.

Elsewhere the mountains appear to be tilted layers of very sharp rock, upthrust into the teens of thousands of feet. It's hard to believe that rocks can taper into such knife-edged jagged ridges without breaking off in the wind. I kept imagining what it would be like to walk along one of those ridges like a tightrope. It would be terrifying. If you slipped you would fall off, just plummet, as surely as if you stepped off the side of a skyscraper. But it would be amazing. I want to do it.

The landscape is cut by rivers snuggled up to glaciers, so raw that you can see geology happening. It's like being inside a giant geology textbook. The mountains get higher and sharper, and then gradually round off. There is an intermediate phase in the interior of British Columbia where the land is high and hilly, but not really mountainous, and then the mountains start again, ever higher, all the way to Calgary. Just before Calgary they disappear quite abruptly, such that I was flying over complete wilderness, surrounded by ten thousand foot plus peaks while I was looking up an appropriate waypoint with which to report my position to Calgary Terminal, only about twenty-five nautical miles from the centre of the control zone, which is on a flat plain.

The Calgary controller was a little snippy about my not having a discrete transponder code. I later checked the procedures section of the CFS and sure enough VFR traffic just transiting is supposed to call ahead on an 888 number and get a code. I confess that I do not read the CFS entries for every en route airport across the country. I asked him if there was a frequency I should call to belatedly acquire such code and he said he'd assign me one. I suppose the snippiness is required so I'll remember next time. Because it works: next time I will.

From there I had an excellent tailwind across the prairies, mostly flat and featureless, with the exception of Diefenbaker Lake. I landed in Regina, which by contrast to Calgary has no terminal controller at all, and they assigned me a transponder code with no complaints at all.

And yeah, no pictures. I'm very sorry about that. Also my C-key is acting up. I think I got them all, but if any of this doesn't make sense, "reonsider if it ould be more omprehinsible with the insertion of a ouple of Cs."

Looking Down

It's not uncommon for an airline trip from the jobsite to take more hours and more stops than it would if I just flew the company airplane, even though it travels at less than half the speed of an airline jet. Last time I flew across the country my client dropped me off at the GA side of the airport, then drove around the field to turn in his rental car and go through the passenger terminal to get on an airline flight to the same destination. He thought it would be faster, and liked the idea of having a washroom on board. I was checked into the destination hotel hours before he arrived. And then he had to drive back to the airport the next day to get his even more delayed luggage. There are three reasons.

First, I didn't have to go through check-in, baggage check, security or any other part of the airport terminal before flying. I walked out to my airplane, loaded my own bags, confirmed the FBO had put in the fuel I ordered, poked at the airplane a bit to make sure all the parts were properly attached, then got in and started it up. Second, I fly as direct as the weather permits, instead of having to go the wrong way to a hub. And third, I don't have to change airplanes when I stop.

So much of the time saved by travelling at Mach 0.8 in an airliner is eaten up by wandering around airport terminals. If I don't have paperwork to do, I fill in the time buying postcards, eating candy, and taking photographs.

I photograph funny things, interesting people, stupid signs, and other interesting things I might want to blog about later. I realized recently that I had accumulated a collection of airport floor shots. I love it when airport designers make the floor interesting. I suppose there are times when it is bad design, because if it is too interesting, it can slow down people in traffic areas and cause congestion. But it makes me happy every time to see unique airplane-related designs on the floor.

I could tell you where they all are, but that would spoil the fun.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the airports by what is underfoot.