Beavers, Thunderstorms, Motel Rooms

No one kicks in the door of my sketchy motel room overnight. Company is not sending another crew member today. I'm to stay here and wait for the weather to change. I make a private bet with our office manager that company will sit me here for three nights and then tell me to leave the airplane here and go home. I pay for another night in the motel, and go out for a run. The best place to run in this town is along the river. There's a path there. Most prairie towns have a river, and a similar trail. This one is deluxe, paved and signposted, with pretty little bridges going across to the other side now and again. One of the signs announces the presence of moose and bear and advises me to take appropriate caution. I am less worried about bears and moose than with my sketchy motel. Were the path not populated by numerous joggers, walkers, and cyclists or were it early spring, when cranky, hungry bears emerge from their dens, I might be more concerned. As it is, the greatest threat to my well-being here is probably either rollerbladers with poor directional control, or those long invisible leashes that connect dog walkers to their dogs. I'll pit them one against the other and run to safety.

As I continue on the path, I see signs of beaver: the stumps of obviously beaver-felled trees and the piles of chips the beavers leave behind. I googled "attacked by beaver" while writing this and discovered that a number of people have suffered quite serious beaver bites, but they all seem to have been swimming or boating, not jogging, and they are far less numerous than the results of an "attacked in motel room" search. As far as I can tell, no beaver has ever broken into a motel room to attack a traveller. I am not attacked by a beaver on the jogging path. I don't even see one, but I do see a deer. It does not attack either. It's fat and happy, grazing in a meadow next to the jogging path. It's not so tame as to realize that joggers don't veer off the path, but it doesn't go far. It's in almost exactly the same spot when I come by again on my way back.

The rodeo grounds are several kilometres out of town and there's no public transit, so I don't check it out. The motel has abyssimal internet too, so I can't watch movies or even read text webpages with any reliability. I buy art supplies and make postcards, including the thunderstorm one I mentioned earlier. There's another thunderstorm here in the afternoon, typical prairie weather. I like the METAR that reports +TSRARA: the + means heavy, the TS means thunderstorm, the RA means rain, and presumably the second RA means even more rain. It's not usual to code the same group twice. I can only assume it's an error, but it's funny and true.

The next day they again tell me to stay another night, but just when I think I'm about to collect on the bet, they send the missing crew member out to join me. He arrives after I've gone to bed. He too spends a night in the sketchy motel, and then we depart for somewhere there isn't a rodeo.

Diversions

The days start early in the summer. Our flight planning is done in the space between the completion of eight hours of sleep and the engine start time required to be in the right place at the right time. If we're lucky, hotel breakfast is also available during that period. The real reason my charts need replacing every 56 days has more to do with the effects of toast and orange juice than of airspace changes. Ironically the further the place we need to be is from the place sleep and flight planning occur, the less time in which I have to do flight planning. I look at the GFAs and scan as many NOTAMs as I can for runway closures and fuel unavailability. The weather is generally good, I don't see any problems that will stop us from reaching our destination, or slow us down enough to affect planning.

We have some work to do, but the main goal of the day's flight is to get the airplane back to base for a scheduled inspection, so when the work is done I push a couple of buttons on the magic GPS box--I love that box so much. I can't imagine how much time I would have had to spend flight planning every morning if I had to get from A to B for innumerable values of A and B not necessarily known in advance of take off, without GPS. We don't have enough fuel to get all the way to base, but I have a good picture in my head of the airports along the route, and I can check my intuition by adding my choice as a GPS waypoint to see how far it is and how straight a line it makes. Not requiring a detour is a good property for an en route fuel stop, but I also need to consider the quality of the apron so we won't contaminate or damage our equipment and the ease of fuelling. Better to go a few minutes out of the way for an airport with an easy drive-up fuel pump with a high flow rate than to land at one that is right on the way but requires waiting for a slow response to a callout.

The visibility is dropping straight ahead. It's not obvious at first, because there isn't anything I'm looking for many miles straight ahead, but the next sign is that the cloud layer above gets a little darker. The unmissable sign is when the clouds ahead are illuminated by lightning. I'm flying towards an active thunderstorm. I deviate towards a lighter area of the sky and try to turn back behind the storm that blocked me, but there's another one too close behind it. I call flight services and pick up SIGMET M1, reporting this line of previously unforecast thunderstorms and forecasting them to remain. I love that radar and other modern technologies allow weather forecasters to sit in another province and see the factors that lead to thunderstorms forming, but that these ones still managed to sneak in without being on the GFA. There are enough of them that I have to bypass two airports and proceed to my third choice airport for landing.

I land behind and park next to a small single-engine airplane and chat to the pilot about the weather. It's a smart-looking composite airplane but I don't ask him what it is, because I know it's something I should recognize, and am just blanking on the type. I go in and update the weather at the FBO computer, and then plot an alternate route to destination. The flight services specialist asks me as I line up for take off if I have the SIGMET. "Affimative, we have M2," I say. I sound so like I know what I'm doing. I must know somewhat, as I get home without incident and taxi to our ramp.

I shut down, and complete the post shutdown checklist items, which includes making a journey log entry. The ops manager keeps the journey log in the back of the airplane, but it's always behind the seat when I fly. I like to fill it out before I get out of the airplane. For me it's the best way to make sure it gets done. Meanwhile our maintenance personnel have opened the hangar door, hooked the airplane up to the tug and towed me inside before I even get my seatbelt off. They do this to me a lot. I'm never really fast at getting out of an airplane after a flight.

And I figured it out. It was a Diamond Katana. I'm slow at airplane identification as well as egress.

Northern OFP Notes

After take-off I routinely scan the instruments. The left oil temperature is a little high in the climb. It's no concern. The summer heat is here. I climb at a slightly higher speed: that probably sounds contradictory, but that means I leave the power the same and lower the pitch of the nose slightly, giving more airflow through the oil cooler. And I leave the cowl flaps open until after level off. I usually close them a couple of hundred feet below the target altitude.

I'm flying in the north. It doesn't really matter north of what. Every province turns from roads and fields to rocks and trees and lakes as you move north. We're in the north and some of the lakes are still partly frozen. I can't tell if the rocks or trees are frozen, given that they remain solid summer and winter. Also there's smoke again, another constant of the north. Water from the lakes evaporates. The sun heats up the rocks, causing the moist air to rise into thunderstorms which unleash lightning, setting the trees on fire, hence the smoke. The only relief from this is when winter comes and the lakes freeze. Or you get far enough north that you run out of trees. Lichen doesn't support much of a fire. I make a note on the OFP to get maintenance to check the air filters early, and keep flying.

I wrote a few other notes on the OFP to share with you.

"We already nuked the strip." I didn't write down the context for that, but obviously it's Centre's line. The "strip" is the data on where an airplane is going and what clearance they have to get there. It used to be a literal strip of paper, but now it's just data in a computer. Someone must have cancelled IFR and then wanted something that required ATC to have the just-deleted information. It was probably funnier at sixty degrees north.

I'm pretty sure that if I had been able to hear the response to the ATC call "German Air Force 55 heavy, what are your intentions here?" I would have written it down, so we'll all have to wonder together.

An airline pilot was told, "You were cleared for an IFR approach, not a circling." The answer was a testy mumble followed by ATC saying, "Now you're cleared for it all." ATC aren't that forbidding, you just have to ask for what you want before you do it.

The OFP also contains a note about how much I would like to eat BBQ shishkababs.

Special Thunderstorms

A probably not so recent anymore AIM update identified two changes in the publication for which I wanted to look up the details.

The following airports have been identified for SPECI criteria for significant temperature changes between hourly reports: about half of Canadian airports

It then lists almost half of Canadian airports, the biggest ones. Normally an aerodrome observation, called a METAR is published once an hour, but if one of a number of specific significant changes occur, like precipitation starts or ends, or the ceiling or visibility changes past a specific limitation, they issue a special update observation called a SPECI. It's pretty clear from the descriptions that they are aimed at given a pilot the best chance of making the right decision about whether or not she can land there with her equipment and training.

It doesn't say why they have added temperature to the criteria. Temperature in and of itself doesn't offer the same impediment to landing as fog, hail, or thunderstorms, but a sudden change in temperature indicates the passage of a front, which could mean an abrupt change in weather, or sometimes freezing rain.

The second change is to Met 3.13 and I was curious when I looked at it what they had changed.

(a) active thunderstorms–the cumulonimbus (CB) symbol is used when thunderstorms occur, or are forecast to occur, over a widespread area, along a line, embedded in other cloud layers, or when concealed by a hazard. The amounts and the spatial coverage (in brackets) are indicated as:

ISOLD (isolated) – for individual CBs (less than 25%)
OCNL (occasional) – for well­separated CBs (25 – 50% inclusive)
NMRS (numerous) – for CBs with little or no separation (greater than 50%)

It looked the same as I remembered. As an instructor I used to teach students to match ISOLD to FEW (1-2 octas), OCNL to SCT (3-4 octas) and NMRS to BKN (>4 octas), where an octa, or maybe it's an okta--damn you really forget this stuff when you're not lecturing someone on it every day--is a one-eighth proportion of the sky. I houled out an older paper copy of the AIM and looked up what it used to be, and the old version omits the bits that are in parentheses in the lines quoted above. I wonder how I knew it, then. I guess it was in the old, old version, the AIP and somehow didn't get added to the new AIM until recently.

That's exactly how lore is created, but someone added it back in, so now it's information again. I love lore. Especially when it's incorrect but it can be traced back to a loopily logical origin.

The Forecast That Cried "Thunderstorm"

I'm at an airport in the afternoon and the goal is to be at another airport early tomorrow morning. Ideally we should have left several hours ago, before the summer afternoon thunderstorms developed in the mountains, but the goal didn't exist then. Or at least I hadn't been apprised of it. This airplane does not have the service ceiling to fly over these thunderstorms; flying under them in the mountains is not a winning proposition; flying through a thunderstorm would probably mean icing and turbulence beyond the limits of the aircraft, so I'm plotting a route around them. Or at least up to them, so that tomorrow we won't have to go as far.

We could leave super early to go tomorrow instead. I do the math as to when we should get up to be where we need to be when we need to be at seven am. It's something like half hour to get ready, plus half hour to the airport plus half hour preflight, plus fifteen minutes for engine start, runup and taxi, plus three hours en route, plus an hour to land, pee, refuel, taxi and take off again, plus half an hour for generally screwing up somewhere in there. That adds up to leaving at 12:45 a.m., or just enough time for me to reset my duty day. But neither of us really wants to do that, so I look again at the going around the weather option. I chat to a flight services specialist to get his interpretation of the latest radar imagery. Together we select a route that should keep me free of the storms without too much inefficiency, and I file it.

Depart, call the departure frequency, fly a heading, maintain an altitude, fly direct a fix and cleared own navigation as filed. I'm through the lower level stratus with a good view and there are no TCUs en route as far as I can see. A centre controller calls me and offers me direct destination, but I decline, citing weather concerns. The next controller says, "You're not negative RNAV today are you?" Now I'm not exactly going to the most popular airport in the country, but surely someone else is getting diversions for this weather. I call up flight services, give them a position report and ask for an update on the area of thunderstorms. The specialist says they are still a threat and describes the locations of the largest-painting cells. What the hey? We're past the biggest one, and I passed that little thing without a second glance. I ask centre for the vector direct they have been trying to give me for an hour, and then we never see anything we have to avoid the whole way.

Darn you, weather forecast. If there's nothing dangerous going on, don't make me look stupid and waste time and fuel going all the way around when i could go straight. I go straight from here on in, skip over the proposed intermediate airport and land at airport B for the night. We're in position for the morning's mission and we have enough time for dinner and a good night's sleep, despite incredibly slow restaurant service.

Retracing My Steps

Back to the hangar, for what should be the last time. We said we'd have the airplane back to the customer today, but this airport is fogged in solid, so we have a little while to work before the pressure is really on. It's cold again today, even colder. I crank the heat on the hangar. We're paying to rent it. I nerd on the iPod for a bit then ask if they are done the cabin inspection so I can close up in there. "Oh, cabin inspection, right." That would be a no. They are done in the nose, so I replace all the gear. It always looks like something is missing when I put it back, because it fits so much better when you have it all out and can play tetris with it to get the best fit, as compared to when you're just digging something out and shoving it back. Then it's like this sort of tetris. My high score there is 100.

I call flight services for an update on weather, seeing as I can't see more than a couple of hundred metres past the door of the hangar. I think I can see further inside than outside. The weather is not good at destination yet, either, but both should improve before long. There's still no NOTAM on the drag racing, so I call the local Flight Services personnel to ask. They tell me the races take place on a disused taxiway on the other side of the airport and have no impact on operations. Ahh. I call back the FSS briefer to pass on this information, so they can mollify any other pilot who is concerned by the signs.

The cabin inspection is complete and one of the AMEs is closing up the panels there. I feel guilty that he is fixing the mess I made in the cabin, pulling everything apart to get to the cables. Those panels come in and out a lot so there were different kinds of holes, different sizes of screws, carpet and other miscellany. As they get ready to tow the aircraft out, I put the seats back in the cockpit. They always go back in easier than out, the opposite of the cabin seats. I see as I secure the locks on the rails that he has done a beautiful job reassembling the floor. It's better than when I started.

I compliment him on that, it's an easy thing to be lazy about, hence the mess it was in when I started. Both guys seem grateful for my help over the last few days, despite my sometimes self-sabotaging assistance. I suppose just having company is good, too. Now it's time for me to go do what I'm good at.

I walkaround and make sure that we haven't left any important bits unattached, then start up and run up the engines. Everything looks fine, sounds fine. They want a fairly long run so call for taxi and, after I let a Cessna 180 go by, go out on the runway to do the break-in for the new brake pads. A couple of accelerate-stops and then I'm back to the ramp. They pull the cowls again and I assume my note "leak check goo" means that it was all good with no leaks, because after that we went back to the hotel to get Internet access for the references needed to finish the last of the paperwork. I load bags my bags into the airplane, thank the guys again for their work and leave while they are still cleaning the hangar.

After take off I keep the speed down so I can cycle the gear a couple of times. Everything works as well as it did on the jacks. Sometimes with the airflow going by the calibration or something isn't quite right, but today it's perfect. I text an "all good" (or possibly "all goo," hope they understood) and steer direct for the waiting customers.

My northbound track takes me right through where the storm was on the way down. I haven't cleared the GPS track, so you can see my route south, my initial 180, slightly kidney shaped as I deked the visible lightning, another foray to the south east, and then a big wide semi-cardiod shape completely avoiding the area of thunderstorms before rejoining the planned track to destination. A little avgas and a little airframe time doesn't compare to the risk of lightning, downdrafts, disorientation and severe turbulence inside those monsters. Now there is nothing but sky and nice little puffy clouds. At destination it's approach, land, rollout, park, text, and get a ride to the hotel. They tell me the sky went black here after I left, too. They saw the same monster that I tickled.

The cardkey encoder still doesn't work at the hotel, so I need to wait in the lobby for an escort to my room. As the encoder is an American-designed security device containing encryption technology it has been held up at customs. At least they ordered two, so they won't be in this bind next time. It could be so miserable for the employees having to deal with customers complaining over this, but my escort has chosen to be unassailably cheerful and friendly about it all. I don't think it would be possible to be miserable to her about the situation. Any negativity you tried to direct at her would bounce right off.

Dinner brings me back to Boston Pizza. No, I didn't miss it. Back in the hotel I watch Casino Royale. I've seen and even "reviewed" it before, but now I'm looking at it in the context of a "reset" in the manner of the new Star Trek movie: take a long-running franchise, retell the beginning of the legend, and then start over in a new time period. I'm sure this has been done again and again, but it's the first time I've noticed it. That's not counting anachronisms like obviously European architecture and principals in biblical artwork, or the stories in Shakespeare being retold in different eras, like Romeo and Juliet becoming West Side Story. It's a good idea, really just an extension of translation to allow people to identify with a work that would otherwise be too far removed from their knowledge. Vesper is still the stupidest password ever, though.

Simple Maintenance Ferry

I wake up to fog and low cloud, the same thing that has delayed departure for the last few days. I'll call the client about that after I get ready. Of course the phone rings while I'm in the shower. I answer it wet, discuss the weather, then finish my shower. The decision has been made: no mission this morning, so I'll fly south for maintenance. There are a few more hours on the airplane than needed to get to the maintenance facility, but not enough to be worth waiting around for. I pack up my gear, stashing some of it in my co-worker's room, eat breakfast, and then dally. The visibility improves, but we continue with low cloud and misery. Thunderstorms are forecast later, but there's a respite in the middle of the day that should get me there.

I spend all day refreshing the weather reports and forecasts. I need 2000', considering terrain. (The HSI has been removed now and sent somewhere for evaluation, so we're still not IFR). The weather is giving me mostly 1500' broken. There are some breaks here, but the general forecast is still low overcast with drizzle. I don't want to get stuck out there in a valley I can't escape. The maintenance crew is there waiting, but I'm not going if it's not safe. It's just maintenance.

The weather is good at destination, but still marginal for departure here, with mostly uninhabited rough terrain in the middle. There's an unusual patch on the graphical area forecast, a little round spot only a hundred kilometres or so in diameter in which it is forecast to be "30BKN50 P6SM PTCHY 1-4SM BR CIGS XNTSV CIGS 4-10 AGL. CIGS AND VIS BECMG LCL BY 20Z." The GFA doesn't usually forecast phenomena that limited, and the terrain doesn't suggest a reason for the little spot of doom. Weird. Satellite views are unrevealing, because there are higher clouds.

The weather here still hasn't improved as originally forecast. Instead the periods of poor weather have kind of merged in the new forecast. So it's still calling for improvement at 20Z, as FM252000 01006KT P6SM SCT025 BKN050 which would be great: scattered 2500' good to go, except that those groups are immediately followed by TEMPO 2520/2606 P6SM -SHRA BKN020 PROB30 2521/2604 VRB15G25KT 5SM TSRA BR BKN020CB FM260600 34006KT P6SM SCT007 OVC015 TEMPO 2606/2607 3SM BR OVC007 , warning that for the same time period, I can expect on-again off-again 2000' in rain--still acceptable for the flight--with a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms. Note that this forecast is only for the airport, there's a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms at the airport, but close to a hundred percent chance that there will be thunderstorms somewhere along the route. I have to integrate the station forecasts with the GFA and the progress visible on the successive satellite images in order to build a forecast for the route. The thunderstorms are building ahead of a front that is coming from the west, bringing the worse weather. After 06Z the weather is forecast to be unflyable with temporary periods of insanely unflyable. But before that front arrives, if my airport is clear and the destination is clear, I can go around thunderstorms. The GFA is calling for only isolated thunderstorms, and the satellite shows only a few buildups, still well off to the west. Maybe this will work.

Twenty zulu comes and goes but the ceiling never got as high as 2000'. What I got was:

METAR 252300Z 34004KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 BKN090 13/08 A2990 RMK SC6SC1AC2 SLP136
SPECI 252240Z 31003KT 20SM -SHRA BKN015 BKN040 RMK SC6SC1
METAR 252200Z 35003KT 10SM -DZ OVC015 13/07 A2992 RMK SC8 SLP141
METAR 252100Z 31006KT 10SM -DZ OVC012 13/07 A2993 RMK SC8 CIG RAG SLP145

So I go for dinner, eat, pay and return. My hotel card key has finally stopped working. I go back downstairs to the desk, and get an escort to let me into my room. They still don't know when the new card encoder will arrive. It has been shipped from Texas, which probably means it was at the Canadian border in a day and then will sit there for a week before getting lost entirely on its way this far north.

The good news is that the weather has cleared. There are now a very few clouds at 2500' and a scattered layer at 4000'. The line of thunderstorms is moving very slowly from the west, they are behind schedule and satellite imagery shows one lousy cell heading towards my track. The destination is forecast wide open for most of the night. Awesome.

I get a ride to the airport, preflight, run up, and text my flight follower and maintenance guys that I'll be at destination in an hour. There are a couple of hours left until nightfall and the trip should take only one of them, but I put my nav lights on anyway. They may help someone see me. I take off and turn southeast at 3500'.

It's raining a bit, so I put the pitot heats on. It's pretty gloomy outside. I put the instrument lights on too, and make sure I'm not wearing my sunglasses. You wouldn't believe how often that happens, that I'm peering through miserable weather and then realize it would look a lot better without sunglasses. But I don't have them on now. My altitude is good. My route keeps me out of the mountains and I have the terrain warning mode on the GPS on. The light that is supposed to illuminate the #2 VOR is flashing on and off. I'm not using the VOR, but I can't turn off the light without turning off other lights that I'm using. Something else to be fixed.

It's raining harder. The forward visibility is not so great, but it's not like there is anything to see out here. In cruise, if the visibility is less than five miles, I can't see anything ahead of my airplane anyway, because the nose is in the way, so I check to the sides to make sure I'm not in cloud. I'm not. It's just raining. Whatever. Life in the sky.

I double check that the radio frequency is 126.7 in preparation to make a position report and check for other low level traffic in the area. It's dark enough that the flashing nav radio is starting to irritate me. The comm frequency is correct, but there's a burst of static before I can transmit. I hate that interference sound when two people are transmitting at the same time and all you hear is scratching and squealing. I do what I usually do in that circumstance and tune the radio to another frequency for a a moment, to let the transmission conflict pass. There's static on the other frequency, click, click ... static on multiple frequencies. Wait a moment ... getting dark fast ... really dark, considering it's an hour before sunset, , raining harder, annoying flashing and static on all frequencies? Hey kids, what is big and dark and full of rain and electricity?

Shit, I've just flown into that thunderstorm cell I was planning to fly around. I didn't see it coming, the stratus fractus below and the 4000' stratus layer hid the obvious shape, and my expectation of poor visibility in rain below the stratus allowed me to ignore the other signs. The wisdom is that if you are forced to fly through a thunderstorm, you lower your seat, and crank the cockpit lights way up so you're not blinded by the flash of the lightning. They also say don't turn around, but that is so as not to stress the airframe in turbulence and I'm not in turbulence, nor in an up or downdraft. Altitude is steady. I know it's worse ahead of me than behind me. There is high terrain to the west, so I choose to turn left. It's a big cell or group of cells and I'm getting the heavy rain, but not the downdraft. I can see the lightning right ahead of me as I start the turn. Yeah, don't want to go there. It's dark, dark like night, even though it's an hour and half until nightfall. I do the textbook one-eighty prescribed to pilots to get away from bad things and then I fly straight and wait to get out of there. I can see the lightning flashes behind me even though peripheral vision isn't supposed to work that way. I guess it comes in through the side windows and illumnates the whole plane. This is a lot of lightning. When the sky goes back to the colour it should be this time of evening, I head east.

Did I blindly fly into the one cell in three hundred kilometres, or is there something more developing than I thought? It looks good both north and east now. I fly a bit further east and then the southern sky looks like sky, too. That's a big fricking cell. Idiot.

I'm literally halfway from origin to destination. I try to call flight services but no joy. The forecast for the destination was much better than the continuing forecast for my originating airport. I finish the big detour and continue south. I'm going to be twenty minutes late on my eta, maybe thirty. Yes, that was a big detour. About 50 nautical miles from the destination I manage to raise the FSS and give them my amended eta. I'm not on a Nav Canada flight plan, but I tell them that they may get a call from my flight follower looking for me. After a few tries I manage to get a text off to the people waiting for me at the hangar, too. I'm not sure it went through. I'll get there when I get there.

A bit later, I call flight services at the destination with a position report and ETA. They issue me a transponder code. "Hey," I ask them, "When did you guys get radar?" Last time I was here it was with a comm failure, and it would have been nice to squawk 7600 and get some attention, instead of just flying in triangles and being ignored. Apparently they have had radar for almost a year. That's the problem with being always on the move. You think you're familiar, but you don't know what's going on. They give me a convenient runway and I ask for taxi directions to the named hangar.

I miss the turnoff and have to do a one-eighty on the taxiway. It's not a really well-lit apron and there is a little slope with grass growing through cracks in the pavement. It's really easy to taxi into a ditch at an unfamiliar airport. Even on the apron, I don't know about its level of maintenance. I'm concerned about taxiing into a hole, so I go very gingerly. I stop on the taxiway in front of what I think is the hangar and call on my cellphone to say that I'm here. The lights go on inside the hangar, so I picked the right one. I shut down and call my flight follower. He was worried about me, but hadn't called the FSS yet, so didn't get my revised eta. "Yeah, sorry. I had to go around thunderstorms, and then I couldn't find the right hangar."

The guy who brought the hangar key gets a tug and tows the airplane in. We quickly drain the oil and I unload my gear while I listen to the two AMEs discussing with fervour the work that is to be done. It's a pretty nice hangar, but lacks some of the equipment they had been promised.

We all go to the hotel, and agree to meet for breakfast at eight.

For the Memory Bank

Do we fly today? No, of course we don't fly today. We are pilots in the north with winter approaching, and the clients dictate where we stay. We go together for brunch at the landmark hotel in town. Not a Landmark Hotel, just a hotel that's a landmark. It doesn't take much to be a landmark in a town that has one business street. The hotel has been there for fifty years or so without burning down, so it's a landmark.

We look at the menu then all have the buffet. It's edible. A change from the free waffles and bagels at the hotel. A loop on the TV goes through adverse weather in Nova Scotia, childcare options in Winnipeg, and a seeming serious documentary on how to win the lottery. I believe the trick was to buy tickets. When we realized that it had looped around it was time to go home.

We were all laughing as we walked back to the hotel. It started with some silly thing, joking about why the mechanic's hotel room lacked a shower curtain. I'm not going to say it, but come on, in the comments guys, what's the first reason that comes to mind for someone to remove a hotel shower curtain? So we're laughing and walking along. Although the weather is still not suitable for work, lots of low cloud bases, it's scattered cumulus and sunshine filters through. It's a beautiful day for walking down the street. It's just a silly moment with co-workers, but it's one of those things that I want in my memory vault in twenty years, along with the images of snow-capped mountain ranges and the pristine lakes that no one ever sees without an airplane.

After we get back to the hotel, a big dark thunder cloud moves in and makes it look like evening. Rain pounds the hotel. Then it passes and we're back to sun with scattered scud.

Maybe tomorrow we'll go flying.

Canada & Intergalactic Spaceport: Two Places We Didn't Land

Now comes the leap across Canada. I've probably flown point to point in the US before while passing through Canadian airspace but not landing, but this is the first time I will have done it between points that I couldn't drive between without clearing customs.

The airplane is ready to go, as we fuelled last night. I'm on the radio and she's flying today. I call for our clearance and they ask us how soon we will be ready. The engines are almost warm enough for takeoff, just a few checks to do. She holds up three fingers. "Three minutes." There's inbound IFR traffic but apparently that's the right number for them. We're give a clearance that expires three minutes hence, and told to taxi and call when ready. I don't know how long the delay would be if we don't make this time, probably not more than ten minutes. Run up complete, taxiing for the hold short line I call ready. Tower has VFR traffic inbound and tells them they have an IFR waiting to go with a tight departure slot. The pilot understands and agrees without being explicitly asked to slow it up--maybe literally reducing speed, extending a downwind or flying a wider base, I'm not sure where the he was--for us. We're cleared for takeoff before his arrival, to roll with seconds to spare in our clearance valid time. I irritate her by specifying the required heading twice, when she already knows where she's turning to. She points out that we're not under two-crew procedures, so she's not obligated to read back or crosscheck the bearing. I apologize, "It was just that you didn't have the heading bug set." We're not using the autopilot for the departure, so it's not essential, but using a heading bug has long been a habit of mine, across many non-autopilot- equipped aircraft. Two crew SOP approval is on our list of things to do, along with certification of our training program on the GNS 430.

We climb to enroute altitude and join the appropriate airway and in a couple of handoffs we're talking to Canadian ATC It's such a welcoming thing, even though I'm not headed home I can now leave the C out of our callsign and they will say "decimal" and other subtle things that I don't so much notice the absence of, as welcome the return to.

Canadian ATC has a reroute for us, if we're willing to accept transit through uncontrolled airspace. I'm ready to copy. It's pretty simple compared to what it could be, just direct a particular waypoint after passing another one, and they spell each five letter combo slowly so I can copy them down and then find them on the chart.

We amuse ourselves for a while with the GPS, finding the worldwide locations of the five letter identifiers corresponding to parts of our names, friends names, etcetera. I think one of mine was in Hawaii.

As we get further south the weather is improving and we get glimpses of the land and water below. We're over the water between Vancouver Island and mainland BC, so seeing ocean, and shoreline and bits of mountains below. Another frequency change and then they have another reroute for us. We filed via the YVR VOR, but we want to be in descent by then for Bellingham and might be in conflict with Vancouver International traffic, so the reroute takes us out to the west over Nanaimo and Victoria. The weather below continues to improve. We could almost cancel IFR and descend VFR to complete the trip more efficiently, except you never know what the weather will be like the rest of the way. I'm about to ask for a more direct routing so we don't have to go all the way to YYJ, when they give us vectors almost direct. ATC does a fantastic job of keeping traffic separated without impairing efficiency. It would be a much more complex process with a much lower capacity for throughput of traffic without them.

The final VOR in our routing is HUH. Huh? It's close to Bellingham airport, but not actually on the field, so it used to be called BLI. But some years ago, I think it may have been partly triggered by the American Airlines flight that flew direct the wrong NDB in South America, they started renamng all the nav aids that shared names with airports but were not physically at the fields. So the one by Bellingham is now called the Whatcom VOR. I think it's on Whatcom Road or in Whatcom county. We wondered at the rename whether the identifier HUH is a joke, because in Canada "What?" and "Comme?" each mean the same thing as "Huh?"

It may be coincidence, but there are definitely jokes in naming nav aids. The Reno VOR was renamed "Mustang" and now there's a "Ranch departure" out of Reno. (The Mustang Ranch is an infamous brothel there).

Our vector has us approaching the mainland USA, the Whatcom VOR and the Bellingham airport on vectors, above a cloud deck that started just before the shore. Approach is trying to pass us onto tower, who are reporting clear skies and have a visual approach posted on the ATIS. I can sense some frustration on the controller's part that I am insisting I am still above cloud. Sometimes I just want to take pity on the controllers and admit that I know where the airport is, but we're above a solid layer, and if I'm not visual I won't say I am. We come over the edge of the cloud deck just in time to spot the airport and descend to land. As the NOTAM's told us, there are lots of taxiway closures here with construction, but it's well in hand. We taxi in and are marshalled to a stop right away. We get directions to the washroom and quick fuelling. There's no pilot's lounge, but they let me use an office computer and phone. If we can get out of here VFR we can get across the country to our next destination. It has to be VFR because the sum of the flights will exceed her eight hour limit for single pilot IFR, and I neither count as a second pilot nor am allowed to log any IFR until I renew my rating. So now we'll be VFR and flying on my licence, but she will still do the flying. This is fine and legal. I can let my cat fly, or the autopilot, as long as I take responsibility for the flight. I go with company flight following rather than a flight plan.

Weather looks good from here, so we depart VFR to the south and turn west when we have the clearance to and the altitude to go over the mountains. A controller calls us "November Charlie blah blah blah blah" for a while and I accept that because although there's no "N" at the beginning of or callsign it's obviously us, and that's just the way some controllers talk. Eventually she asks us, "Are you November Charlie or just Charlie." I tell her there's no November, without pointing out that it's the designation for American aircraft and Charlie is for Canadian, so it would be hard to be both. Possibly the first controller that checked us in for flight following explicitly entered an N on our electronic flight strip. As soon as we cross the first range of rocks eastbound, the ground gets drier, then it continues to get drier and higher as we go east.

Tailwinds are awesome, better than forecast. I never put too much hope in tailwinds and count headwinds as worse than forecast. But we're smoking. A bit of math reveals that we don't need our planned fuel stop after all. I turn on my phone and enter a text message with our new ETA, then wait until we are going over a town and hit send. It finds a cellphone tower and sends it before we pass it by. We squeeze over some higher terrain, doing a few zigzags here and there to avoid having to climb into oxygen territory. We'll need oxygen tomorrow morning and don't want to use it up now.

I call flight services to update the weather and they tell us sternly that VFR is not recommended in Wyoming or Colorado due to an aggressive line of thunderstorms. We listen to the SIGMET and thank the briefer, then look at each other and smile. We respect thunderstorms, but we're not avoiding two entire states for the presence of one line, even widespread air mass thunderstorms. They are a highly visible weather phenomenon. We discuss it and determine that if we have any doubts about the proximity of a thunderhead, or we encounter an area where storms pose an impassable barrier, we'll just land at one of the hundreds of conveniently located airports. There are so many here. It's not like we're in Northern Ontario and will be SOL if we can't make it from Thunder Bay to either Dryden or Kenora. There's an airport behind every bush out here. People have airports just for fun.

As an example, I notice that we will be passing not far from the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. That's a real airport, not in the greatest condition, but we could land there safely. I bring it up on the GPS, plus find the official description of the little airport, to amuse my fellow pilot. Shortly afterwards I realize that she has altered our course to fly direct the spaceport, "We can't be this close and not fly by!"

We see some distant and retreating CBs but nothing interferes with our flight, which passes through airspace of both Wyoming and Colorado. We reach our destination without incidents and descend to land, rolling out at a long, high altitude strip across from a golf course, and somewhere that we suspect we can buy excellent Mexican food.

We check into the hotel and then I make a couple of phone calls to find out where oxygen service is available. There's nothing at the airport where we are parked, but one airport down the highway I find an FBO that says "yes" to providing oxygen and "six am to seven pm" for their hours. Fantastic. We'll probably be in tomorrow. I get driving directions.

And I'm off to bed, because there's more work to do in the morning.

Déjà Flew

For the first part of my flight there is very poor visibility in smoke. At Ottawa (because that's where it was, and I have no doubt you've guessed it correctly by now) the ATIS called it four miles visibility, and that's about right. It very slowly opens up. I mentally note how far ahead I can see until finally around Petawawa it opens right up and I have normal visibility. I call flight services with a PIREP to that effect, and get the latest weather from them. I'm flying towards a front that has some low ceilings and thunderstorms associated with it. When I checked the weather before take-off, I was expecting to meet the front over Lake Superior, but it's moving faster than anticipated and now it looks like I'll hit it just past Sudbury.

Sudbury lies exactly on a straight line between Ottawa and Thunder Bay. Considering how few big centres there are in Canada, and that most of them were founded before air travel, it always seems to me that a disproportionate number of them lie on a direct line between others. The highways aren't straight enough to explain the phenomenon. I imagine there is some kind of computational analysis that could be done to determine if this is true, or if it's just selection and memory bias, but it's nice how often it works, especially when the town in the middle is just right for a fuel stop.

I'm approaching the Sudbury area, and tune their FSS frequency just in time to catch part of a long PIREP about the thunderstorms. I didn't hear the type, but background noise suggests its a helicopter, and he's encountering numerous cells and poor visibility in moderate rain. I position report, get a new altimeter setting, and prepare for the onslaught.

Just past Sudbury the scattered cloud above me solidifies into a broken ceiling, and I deviate slightly to the north around an obvious cell with rain associated. As I get far enough around it to see past, there's nothing more. A bit of mist, maybe some scud, but not even enough rain to wash the giant northern Ontario bugs off my windshield. Different cruising speed and altitude, and twenty minutes time can all make a big difference to the weather experience. Or the thunderstorms have spent their thunder on Chapleau or thereabouts, with nothing left to rain on me. Once I circumnavigate the dark area I encounter clearing skies and good visibility before the lake comes into view.

So here I am again, only a week later, over the northern reaches of Lake Superior. This time I'm going about three times as fast, and I can cut the corner over the water so long as I remain within 50 miles of shore and within 60 minutes (at one engine failed speed) of a suitable emergency landing site. But there's something about northern Ontario that makes time pass slowly. I think I'll start a tradition of donating to the Terry Fox fund every time I pass this way. I think this is a long trip? Terry ran it. Why do you think he maintains his status as a Canadian hero a generation after he died? He travelled across northern Ontario when he didn't have to. Canadians respect that, regardless of how many legs a person has.

Weather across the lake past the front is fine and I'm soon descending into Thunder Bay. Back to the same FBO as last week, and the C150 is still parked there safely. I order fuel then update my weather and call company while the fuel is being pumped. The boss wants me in Regina tonight. I'm not sure that will work with my duty day: I legally started my duty day a few hours before take off from Ottawa and I'm keeping it properly in zulu time, so I know I won't go over. I initially say that I will overnight in Thunder Bay, but then decide to continue, because the weather between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg can be an obstacle--as we so recently discussed. I promise up and down that I will be there at seven a.m. tomorrow, an hour before the eight a.m. time at which the airplane is supposed to be available. This will be fine with tomorrow's duty day, too.

For my route to Manitoba, the current forecast period, the GFA shows scattered thunderstorms coming from the south. I would be able to make Regina within my current duty day, if it weren't for the headwinds. I decide to make it as far as I can legally make it and then land for the night. I plan to Winnipeg. Right after takeoff I remember one more thing that I should have done on the ground in Thunder Bay: clean the bugs of the windshield. A clean windshield is not just so I can take good photos for you, but it is important for a good lookout for traffic. And it was right around here where a well-known failure of the Big Sky principle of traffic separation occurred. It's very difficult to see an airplane on a collision course until right before it hits you, so you have to keep looking for it, all the time.

I climb into the somewhat darkened sky and level off a bit lower than I'd planned on account of a cloud ceiling. It's raining to the southwest. I slalom around a few cells, getting a few raindrops on the windscreen. I snap on the pitot heat switches. No need for windshield wipers: I'm above the placarded speed and the rain all slides off the window anyway. It's funny how instantly cold the airplane gets as you fly into rain. I guess it's partly psychological and partly evaporative cooling. It's as if I can feel the rain actually falling on me. Hey! I can feel the rain falling on me. There's a leak somewhere. I don't see it coming in anywhere, but I'm not breaking out in a cold sweat. I knew I wasn't flying a pressurized airplane, but I thought I could at least expect it to be waterproof.

I call up flight services and file a PIREP. It's not necessary, as the weather is exactly as depicted on the GFA, but I might as well let them know they are absolutely right, and other pilots know that it isn't any worse. The briefer has access to weather radar and based on my position advises me to deviate north as far as Dryden for the next one, because it's a really big one. I do, amusing myself by taking pictures of tranquil weather out the right side of the airplane and foreboding thunderheads out of the left.

This dodging has used up some more of the time I was going to use to get to Regina tonight. The GPS predicts my arrival time at about five minutes late, and that would be ten or fifteen minutes late when I add in time for slowing down to land, then taxiing in and shutting down. I oscillate between pushing it and being legal. I could pretend I wasn't smart enough to get the winds before the flight or to use the GPS and that the fifteen minutes was due to unforeseen circumstances. But headwinds on the prairies are foreseen circumstances and who wants to draw attention to yourself and company by filing the paperwork required to make up for an duty day overrun? I could lie in the journey log or my duty record, but I don't do that. It makes me look lazy to break off for the sake of fifteen minutes, but in truth it's more work to do it this way, because it will be another airport, another landing and another takeoff. But I can do that in the morning. I land in Winnipeg.

There's some confusion at the FBO because it used to be a Shell but is now Kelly something, and there is a new Shell in a different place. They haven't quite sorted everything out with the new name and billing procedures. They sold the Shell franchise and kept the business, I think. They're very friendly and helpful and I think to myself that Canadian FBOs are finally catching up to US ones in terms of service. It's no longer "you have to buy fuel from us anyway, so shut up and deal with whatever kind of service we give you."

The hotel they recommend is not expensive and has a shuttle. When I get there I grab a reasonable approximation of supper, log on to the company website to send my daily flight report, and open the windows for tomorrow's weather.

FIRETRUCK! Tomorrow morning Regina is calling for 1/4 mile visibility in fog. Nothing I can do about it now. I make a short but heartfelt plea for the weather gods to be merciful to me, and then go right to sleep.

Oh and here's the El Al, probably on a diplomatic mission. I believe there were RCMP officers in dress uniform and Israeli and Canadian flags hoisted.

Enlightenment

It's night and the sun has set, but I keep thinking I see a red glow in the distant sky. My peripheral vision catches it and I look up and then I don't see it anymore. Is the the city lights on low cloud? Westjet flights going into land with really bright anticollision lights? An afterimage on my retinas from the dashboard screen I'm staring at? It's not the moon showing through clouds, because it's close to a new moon, so it wouldn't have risen yet, and it wouldn't be that bright.

It could be distant lightning, but it's teasing me, as it's never quite visible when I'm looking that way.

There was a forecast for 30 percent probability of thunderstorms at 04 Zulu, but the sky was still clear at sunset. Now it's dark, so I can't see if anything is building. I call flight services and ask them if there is any forecast precipitation or obscuration below ten thousand in the next three hours. I've discovered that not everyone knows you can do that: ask the briefer to interpret the TAF for you instead of just reading it. If he read it, I could either filter it through my brain as it came, discarding everything that wasn't what I was interested in, or I could write it all down and then interpret the parts I wanted. But that takes up more air time and this is simpler for me. Let the briefer throw out anything irrelevant to me before I hear it. And the briefers aren't robots. If there's a hazardous condition unrelated to the information I've asked for, they'll make sure I know about it.

The thunderstorms are still forecast, but now at 05Z, just after the time I expect to be landing. And they aren't calling for fog tomorrow morning, either. There's no burst of static coinciding with the tiny flashes, so if they are thunderstorms they are quite far away.

I land, taxi in, and shut down. Finally I see the lightning, for of course it is lightning, not out of the corner of my eye. It must be getting closer, because it's more noticeable now, even among the airport lights, but it's still far enough away that I have no concerns refuelling. I park and chock for the night. Driving back in the truck I watch out the window as sheets of lightning advance in a front slowly across the prairie. I'm tucked into bed by the time the storm hits, but it bangs on the window so hard I could believe there was someone out there asking to come in.

I admit it: I originally put the electrical tag on this post purely because of the cheering I've had lately from fans of electrical posts. I was going to put a quick quip here about comparing popup CBs to CBs popping, but I googled for the rating on those CBs. A current of 50,000 A and up to a billion volts is too impressive to laugh at. Lightning is dangerous stuff. I think because I can see it from so far away, and because to an aircraft in flight other components of a thunderstorm are more dangerous, I might not be scared enough by lightning. It's more dangerous than a whole wing locker full of daisy-chained extension cords. Or a day before yesterday's painfully biting insect, which I have been advised was probably a flying ant. Still red. Still itches. I think it's getting better, though.

North Again

We were supposed to go to Yellowknife last night, but by the time the landing gear was sorted out there was some bad weather building south of Great Slave Lake. Embedded thunderstorms at night. Yay. We spent the night in the south and then flew north in the morning. It was my coworker's leg so I did paperwork and looked out the window while she flew.

The weather wasn't great, so we were fairly low level over all the little towns. It's funny to see all the straight lines on the prairies, with neatly arranged towns, each with its own church, even when the towns are only a few kilometres apart. I know most of these churches date back to when everyone walked or drove the team to church, and that they are a source of community pride. I wonder how many bake sales and work bees they all represent.

We pass over the transition between agricultural land and the north. It's quite abrupt. There's a last wheat field. I'm just thinking it when my coworker says it. "I guess we're in the north now." I write it down in my notebook so I don't forget to blog it and then she asks me what I'm writing.

"So I don't forget things," I say, "So I can tell people about them." I read her what I wrote about the last wheat field. It's the truth. You're people.

Crossing the Great Slave Lake she picks up the ATIS and tried to call tower. It's comical that every time she tried to call, she gets stepped on, usually by the tower. They're actually issuing such rapidfire instructions that most transmissions have a "break break" in them, so the tower can address more than one airplane in one microphone press, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. This goes on long enough that it's funny. She finally gets through and the first thing the controller want to know is if we have parking. Parking is by prior permission in Yellowknife,a and I really get the idea that if we hadn't prearranged a spot, they would have send us away. It's all arranged, thanks to my coworker, so they give us a clearance and we join downwind over the Back Bay. Heyyy, Yellowknife. It's still on a rock and a lake, but now the lake is open water and there is no snow on the rock. I'm too busy looking to remember to take pictures. Sorry!

Prelanding checks complete, we line up on final and she says something about what could go wrong now. Pilots always think that. I gesture to the airplane lining up in front of us, "It could have a gear collapse right there, at the intersection of the two runways." It doesn't, but as it's cleared for take off it seems to be moving really slowly, then I realize I have my perspective wrong. It's not a little taildragger. It's a DC-3. Welcome to Yellowknife.

Fancy Footwork

The routine continues. Wake, turn on phone, shower, wash hair, get dressed, check e-mail, check weather, tidy room, do OFP, do customer billing paperwork, fill waterbottle, replenish flight bag snacks, check e-mail again, eat, check e-mail & weather again, meet customer and go to airport.

There are thunderstorms building north of the airport, which is where we want to be, so I go into the PIK booth to check the 19Z weather that came out during the drive to the airport. There's another pilot seated at the terminal.

"Hi," I greet him, and ask, "Where are you going?"

"Whitehorse," he says.

"Ah, I'm going north too, so I'll just follow along."

"Why don't you drive," he suggests. He's unfamiliar with the Nav Canada terminal. Truth be told, while I know the website it reaches intimately, I'm not too fluent in Pilot Information Kiosk use either. The interface uses a touchpad mouse, just like my own laptop, but instead of tapping anywhere on the touchpad to select, there's a specific ENTER circle you have to tap inside. So move the cursor by sliding your finger around on the touchpad, then pick up the finger to tap on the circle. I haven't figured out how to use scroll bars with this interface. Maybe click with my thumb on the enter circle while sliding with my finger on the rest of the touchpad. I just used the arrow keys on the keyboard for scrolling.

I started with the GFA, which goes right up to Whitehorse, showing a big low there, and forecast as low as 1500' agl with generally 6000-8000' agl bases on TCU topped at 22,000'. Not a lot of change in that forecast on the subsequent GFA charts. On the the TAF/METAR page. There are thunderstorms forecast right at this airport, starting in a few hours. The traveller (or I suppose he's a "traveler") decides to wait another day before continuing north. I don't check upper winds and NOTAM because I already looked them up at the hotel. We won't be crossing mountains so I tell my customer that it is safe to go, as long as we plan to return early, so that if there is a storm cell right over the airport, I'm not trying to wait it out with minimum fuel. Also we'll talk to our respective colleagues when they land.

The airplane taxies up, completes the post-mission work with the engines running and then they shut down and the door opens. I can call a no-go decision for safety, but a no go for operational reasons is up to the customer. I repeat that I consider it safe, even though I suspect he's hunting for a pilot-driven excuse not to work today. He cancels the flight.

The other pilot sweet talks the guys into sharing one truck back to the hotel and lending us one of theirs so we can go sightseeing. There's a trapper's store seven miles (I use miles because addresses up here are based on the old mileposts from when the Americans built the Alaska Highway) south. As soon as you walk in you smell smoke-cured leather. There are full pelts for sale from all the local species, crafts made out of silly things like shellacked moose-droppings, silverwork, outdoor supplies, old-fashioned leg-hold traps (as rustic decorations: hunters use more humane traps now), and some just for display items like a pair of beaded leather mukluks. There were some amazing elbow-length gauntlets with thick leather palms and various sort of fur on the back. I was in awe of them mainly because I know it gets cold enough to need them, and that the craftspeople who made most of these things are descended from people who lived up here before there were any warm hotels to go back to. I end up buying a pair of moose leather moccasins beaded with a bear claw pattern and trimmed in beaver fur. They cost about the same as a pair of boots or of fancy party shoes, but they are a lot prettier than the former and a lot sturdier and warmer than the latter. How will anyone know I go to exotic places if I don't bring home some souvenirs?

They're Okay!

I'm doing my preflight, except I can't check oil because the dipstick is too hot to touch, and if I used gloves it wouldn't give a very good reading anyway. I ask my coworker instead, and she says the oil should be fine. I watch the fueller and then check the fuel tank caps. One of them is loose, not because he didn't secure and latch it, but as the aggregate result of its being opened and closed a number of times. Not many people realize that that one is an adjustable cap. It's a rubber plug designed to fit a few different sized tanks. When you pull up on the catch, that releases the form inside that makes the rubber seal firm and round against the inside of the filler neck. Spin the catch one way and the closed size of the plug increases. Spin it the other way and it decreases. Turning the catch a little bit is a normal part of operating the catch, so by coincidence it has been loosened over the last fortnight of fuelling. I spin the catch to embiggify the plug, reseat it in the filler neck and snap the cap closed. The mechanism expands. It fits securely now.

The fueller points out that some fuel is leaking from the tank onto the ramp. I check it: it's just thermal expansion forcing some of the fuel out through the vent again. There's also a little puddle of fuel in the well around the closed cap. I don't complain about having my tanks completely full. It's the only way to really know that I have the fuel I expect on board. Gauges don't tell the difference between full and sorta full. If the fuel level in a wide, flat tank measuring one metre by two metres is one centimetre below capacity that's 20 litres short--about 15 minutes of holding fuel for that engine. Yikes! I secure the metal cover over the fuel cap and repeat my inspection for all the fuel tanks. I also check that the total fuel load matches my expectations based on my colleague's flight time. It does, almost to the litre. If too much fuel went in it could be an aircraft problem. If not enough went in, the fueller might have skipped a tank. I've had that happen. I had it happen almost every day at one FBO, but we're at a good one, now.

The fueller says he doesn't know if anyone was hurt yesterday or what kind of airplane it was. He heard that it had just taken off, and turned and the wind caught it. I don't know if he is also a pilot, but it wasn't windy yesterday, and one you're airborne the wind doesn't knock you over. An abrupt change in wind could cause an airplane to lose lift, but windshear seems unlikely, too. The fueller also mentioned that he heard it was a November-registered aircraft, which is relevant mainly because their National Transportation Safety Board investigates accidents involving US aircraft, even elsewhere in the world. Perhaps it will turn up on their site, even if only as a notation that the Canadian TSB is investigating. As I write this I find a news article (with a picture) about the crash. It is being reported as a power loss, and both occupants suffered only minor injuries. It's significant that just 100 metres from the runway the bush around here is so thick that it took a helicopter to find and direct the police and ambulance workers to the site. It's a relief to hear that they are okay. Too bad about the Pacer.

I start up. (Come on cranky engine, I know you're hot, you can do it). I crack the throttle open a bit and then when the engine catches leave the mixture in the idle cutoff position for a moment, and very very slowly enrich it, and not all the way to full rich either, so I don't flood it. The engine RPM comes up, oil pressure, oil temperature and cylinder head pressure all in the green already, so I start the second engine. Avionics on, computer power on, ground fan on. In less than a week we've gone from needing heating to needing cooling.

Ready for taxi, we take runway 21. It's hotter today and climb performance is noticeably affected by the heat. I'm climbing at blue line (Vy and Vyse are the same on this model) and making less than 500 fpm through 3000'. We are full of fuel and equipment. That's the drawback to taking every drop you can.

As I'm leaving the area, the FSS comes on with a SIGMET for a large area of thunderstorms, relative to Germansen Landing. I have heard of it, but don't know where it is on a map of this province, so I call Edmonton Radio and ask for the lat-long coordinates of the area boundary. It's mostly north of where we are working, and currently the closest part of the line is a degree and a half of longitude west of us. That's about 50 miles this far north. Degrees of longitude get smaller and smaller with increasing latitude, but a degree of latitude is always 60 nm. I don't think those thunderstorms will bother us, but there's a lot of vertical build up here. By the time we reach the work area, fifty miles north of the airport, the weather is unsuitable for the work. That was a quick flight.

Back, land, and take my stuff to the hotel, including the cushion from the airplane. It smells like feet.

In a Flap

The customer called me at noon for a mostly daytime flight today. I picked up a strawberry chicken sandwich at a deli and ate it in the truck on the way to the airport. It was slightly messy, but definitely good.

The before takeoff checklist requires me to verify all the gauges are green: oil temperature, oil pressure, cylinder head temperature, fuel flow, EGT: every needle sitting in the proper range. As I add power, my eye flicks again to the two three-fold engine gauges. When I flew this airplane two crew the non-flying pilot's line was "green six ways" and I still think that as I start to add power for the takeoff roll. Airspeed alive, rotate, positive rate, insufficient runway remaining, gear up. The engines are at full power now, and I'll leave them that way through five hundred feet of climb. I'm not going to mess with them until I have at least a few seconds of glide time in which to think.

I'm never conscious of having just looked at my engine gauges, but my wheels were barely off the pavement before I knew that the needle on my right engine oil temperature gauge had fallen to zero. Perhaps the motion was rapid enough that I caught it in my peripheral vision. Presumably I'm descended from the cavemen who saw the sabre-toothed tigers sneaking up, and not from the ones who missed that slight movement of a stalking cat, so this sort of thing gets my attention. It's training not evolution that resulted in absolutely no reaction from me though. That's not steely astronaut nerves. It's just knowing that there is no emergency that causes oil temperature to suddenly zero. It's just the gauge. I continue the flight, tapping the instrument from time to time, but it never comes back to life.

The route took us over Texarkana, a town name that reminds me of the names of the American republics in Robert Heinlein's future America in his novel Friday. It's actually a town on the border of Texas and Arkansas, mostly the latter. I don't know what it has to recommend itself apart from its cool name and accessible airport. While we were on frequency there, a departing jet reported a flap problem. The flaps were stuck at nine degrees, I think the pilot said. "Do you want any equipment?" asked the air traffic controller, after confirming that the filed destination was unchanged. The pilot gave a rambling answer, saying that he'd discussed the issue with company, and that he wasn't declaring an emergency, and he didn't expect any problems, but under the circumstances, yes, he'd like trucks. For those of you not familiar with aviation euphemisms, both "equipment" and "trucks" here refer to the sort that have flashing lights all over them, and sirens.

After a while he changed his mind and said that yes, he was declaring an emergency, but that his situation hadn't changed, he was going to be fine. I don't think the paperwork is any different whether you use the e-word or not.

I'm sure he arrived safely, after a somewhat slower than usual flight and a somewhat faster than usual landing. I hope his passenger briefing was more succinct than that radio call. I'm not saying I'm any expert on emergency PAs, nor that I don't make the same mistakes, but you can hear some cringeworthy cabin announcements from pilots who are more worried about scaring the passengers than about the upcoming landing. The rule I'm trying to cement in my head is keep it brief. If you say there's nothing to worry about once, some passengers start to worry. But if you say it twice, everyone starts wondering just how worried they should be. Phil has an amusing account at his blog of a flapless landing.

A reader sent me the clip above of a propeller malfunction at fifty feet after takeoff. Not only did the propeller go into beta uncommanded, but pulling the prop control back to minimum didn't fix the problem, so he had to shut down the engine. All done correctly by a brand new captain, I'm told.

There's nothing in his PA that shouldn't be. It doesn't matter whether the engine is surging, on fire or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir jumped out of it and started dancing on the nacelle, "experienced a slight abnormality" and "precautionary shutdown" are reasonable things to say. The bullshit might be less obvious if he had left off the "slight." You don't want it to come out like, "Nothing is wrong, we're just going back to land because uh, I forgot my wallet." I think it's mostly the repetition of "here" that undermines his message. He sounds like that not because he can't talk, but because talking is occupying only a small part of his attention. Passengers hear that and think that the rest of his attention is taken up with "Oh my God, we're all going to die!" A Dash-8 climbs like a bat out of hell on one engine, and he's in VMC, so while I'm sure he's focused on landing the plane, he's also thinking about the inevitable paperwork, fending off idiotic comments from his FO, wondering if this is going to screw up his whole work schedule for the month (answer: no, a newly upgraded captain already has the worst possible schedule), and hoping his SOPs are letter perfect on the tape.

I approached my destination just after dark. The shape of clouds that had not been topped very high at sunset obscured some of the stars. I was focusing on my descent checks and noticing flashing on the engine nacelles. As the sun goes down the strobes reflect off the nacelles and I almost always think, "was that lightening?" One the sunset was so bright and orange reflecting off the bottom of the nacelle that I did a double-take, looking for flames. The strobes can become distracting, so I switched them off, but I had a little suspicion already that it wasn't just the strobes this time. I turned slightly and at that moment the clouds right in front of us lit up the sky, right to the back of the airplane with its blacked out windows. You can't count the seconds between the flash and the bang in the air, because you hear the lightning instantly on every radio frequency. There was little radio interference, and winds at the airport below were light, both consistent with my belief that the lightning was a good ways off. Terminal passed me off to tower and I joined "downwind" (in quotes because I had been required to stay high until very close to the airport, so we were still plumetting towards circuit altitude, not flying a level circuit). I land, and taxi in past someone washing his car on the ramp.

Not Flying Tonight

I'm not flying tonight because the forecast was poor. I'm just sitting in the hotel room with the TV on. Law and Order, or some similar crime drama, I think. But the weather is drowning out the TV. Here's a 60 second video clip as poor as the weather. There's enough ambient light that I can see the rain between the lightning flashes on my copy, but uploading to blogger drops the resolution enough that you only need look at the first few seconds to see all there is to see.

The beginning of this storm was a thunderclap so loud that the next morning when an airport dog barked at me it hurt my ears all over again. I would easily have believed that the sound was a bomb falling on the building. According to the desk clerk it set off part of the fire protection system, and guests were calling to ask what it was. The storm had been going on for at least fifteen minutes before I thought to film it, so this is actually a clip of the storm dying down. It was over perhaps fifteen minutes later. Just long enough for me to realize that I really should have turned off the TV before taking the video. You can use it for perspective and note that the TV volume is turned up fairly loud because ten years of sitting between engines has taken a toll on my hearing. It may need to be louder still thanks to that thunderclap. Plus the TV is in the room with me, while the audio of the storm is coming through a double-glazed window. I'd love to have a better shot of the sky, but you can see why I didn't want to go outside.

That would be quite something to fly through. The rain is forceful enough, and there may be some hail mixed in with it, without adding the speed of the aircraft to the impact. The weather is supposed to be good for tomorrow morning, though.

Lightning Reflexes

I'm supposed to head north tonight, but one nav light (the red one, on my left wingtip) is burned out and I'm waiting for someone who may be able to sell me a spare bulb. I check the weather while I'm waiting. I have clear skies ahead, but there are thunderstorms approaching from the southwest. I haven't seen the radar image myself, because I don't have internet access here. I've just talked to a briefer who described them. The storms are moving northeast at 15 kts, and the last radar image has them 25 nm away. So I had better be ready to go in an hour. I can already see lightning flashing to the south, but even though I am outdoors I can't hear the thunder, so it must be a good ways off.

Soon the lightning flashes creep around me, visible to the south and west, really lighting up the sky, even though they still aren't close enough for me to hear the thunder. That's weird. Sometimes I see vertical cloud to ground strikes, sometimes horizontal cloud to cloud discharges, and sometimes there's a sheet of undifferentiated light illuminating the countryside. It's quite the storm.

The guy who might have the bulbs comes by with his camera, to take pictures of the lightning, then goes to the stores and finds lightbulbs with the correct part number. We get two bulbs so as to have a spare for next time, but by the time it's installed and I do a runup I decide the storms are too close. If it were daylight I'd do it, as I could see clearly what I wasn't flying into, but I admit my possible overcaution with, "You know what they say about old pilots and bold pilots." No one argues.

Early next morning on the drive to the airport we pass utility crews repairing power lines. I start the engines and have made it to the run-up area talking to "Villeneuve Traffic" before the tower opens. As is usual in this situation, the after-hours "Traffic" frequency is the same as the tower frequency. I know the controllers are probably in there, listening already, so I note in my transmission that I am monitoring the Ground frequency as well. I make it all the way to the run-up area before the tower broadcasts words to the effect of, "Villeneuve Tower is now open. All aircraft in the control zone, all ground vehicles, say your position." I'll bet you a nickel the controller is looking straight at me as he says it. I think I'm the only one in the zone and I taxied right by him. He has to know where I am.

I dutifully report call sign and type, in the runway 26 run up area, VFR to my destination on a company note. When my engines are warm and all systems check out I call ready. He clears me for takeoff, and to make the necessary turn after departure. The day is smooth and calm, clear to the south with layers thickening to the north. I slip under a layer of low cloud to land where I'm needed next, before I'm actually needed.

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."

Escaping Florida

I don't sleep very well. I was blaming the hotel pillow, but I think there's only so much a pillow can be expected to do to counteract stress. There's a lot more here than in my regular job. Here we are surrounded by weather. There's Gustav sending a huge counterclockwise swirl of weather up from the south and Hannah driving weather in from the east. And once we've run the gauntlet of the two hurricanes, there's a huge cold front sweeping across the continent. It's producing thunderstorms in the Dakotas today, but those storms will be in the northeast in a few days. And here I am with someone's pride and joy in my hands, responsible for keeping it and her safe all the way to Canada. If I have to make the decision to lock in in a hangar and wait it out, I'll have to leave, and she'll be stuck. I try to make that not my problem, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Yesterday the blind encoder and then the whole transponder died in fairly quick succession, and the fuel gauge indicated we have a magical airplane that doesn't burn fuel for the first hour. Those are quite surmountable snags because I don't plan on flying through complex airspace and we'll probably be able to beg an exception to the rule for the border crossing. I don't think there's a lot of paranoia in Maine and New Brunswick, where people used to cross the border all the time with shared volunteer fire departments and the like. I'm not sure that post nine-eleven rules have a huge effect on people who are mostly doing things the way they did them a hundred years ago. As for the fuel gauge, Transport Canada requires us to have a means of determining fuel quantity from the cockpit. We do. The fuel tank is translucent and the level is visible behind the seats. But what will go wrong tomorrow? Is it something I can fix? This ultralight airplane long distance flying is not something people do every day, and its success is quite dependent on the diligence and decisions of the pilots. I get up to check the weather at two am, then go back to bed. I got some sleep for sure, because the alarm clock did wake me up.

We eat at Denny's, because nothing else is open at oh dark hundred in an off-season tourist town. Lite Flyer teaches me something: you can ask for oatmeal with fruit on it at Denny's and it's delicious. We take a cab back to the airport and as we walk out onto the ramp we see the beginning of a sunrise. It's spectacular, but the rays of light are filtered through cloud that is already vertically developed. So much for using a dawn start to escape Florida thunderstorms. I walk around the airplane, checking that that everything has survived the previous leg. My plan was to do a thorough postflight after each leg, but I was too tired last night and didn't get anything done but checking the oil, which has to be done while it's hot.

The little parade of curious onlookers that always appears near our airplane makes 'helpful comments as I scrutinize the sky. We wait for a cell to pass out of our departure path and then take off and head north again. There are a few cloud banks across our path, and I go variously under, over and around. The wind was supposed to be from the east today, but our 49 knot ground speed suggests a more northerly wind. We've started to climb up a bit, to get over a layer of sparse cloud, and to search for that easterly wind, or at least an escape from the north one. Ahead of us is another cloud bank. Initially I'm planning to go over that one too, but while the others have been little grey blobs of stratocumulus, this one proves to be building upward faster than I can climb. The top has gone from 2000' to 3500' as I cruise towards it. It's an impressive thing to watch, but somewhat inconvenient. I'm heading now in a space between two towers, not generally a good idea, but 3500' doesn't really qualify as a TCU. But the airplane is so slow I can't time a passage through the space in the moving cloud bank.

As I see little tendrils of cloud moving towards me I instinctively look at the panel. And then I really see it in a way I didn't before. This is a handy, stable little airplane. It is easy to hold attitude and smooth to fly. I carved off a better steep turn during my checkout than I did during my instructor test last month. But the panel is basic. There is no attitude indicator, no turn coordinator, and I can't even see the tiny slip-skid ball from the right seat. If I lose horizon, there's not much left but prayer. Academically, I know tricks to keep the wings level with the float compass, but this is not an academic situation. Perhaps some day I'll go up under the hood with an instructor and practice them. Here and now is not the time. I stop playing stupid pilot tricks and decide to go around the cloud bank. I saw that it only went a short way off the beach. I head east, against the wind, but the former end of the cloud bank seems to have disappeared, and now it's building towards me as well as up. I turn around. Can't go over it. Can't go through it. Can't go around it. Under is left, and I descend but at 1200' I still don't have a clear path up the beach, plus raindrops appear on the windshield. In the few minutes I've been playing around here my little cloud bank has developed upwards into a cumulonimbus. This uncowled engine is not designed to ingest more than light sprinkles of rain, and and airplane should be avoiding a CB. I ask Lite Flyer to tune a frequency, and then I spin around to join the circuit at Fernandina Beach. We're back on the ground after only an hour and fifteen minutes of flight.

From the perspective of convective radar in the FBO I see that a line of thunderstorms is coming straight in from the Atlantic, in the little time loop shown on the computer they are shotgunning the Florida-Georgia border. I know that Gustav is driving cloud and moisture up from the southwest and that Hannah is chasing more from the southeast. Is this it? It's possible that there will be nothing but impassible weather until Hurricane Hannah arrives. Some of the locals think so, and we have spontaneous offers of hangar space. The great thing about this airplane is that it fits in an already full hangar, because it will just go underneath something else. For now we're going to assume it is a normal thunderstorm and will pass by as quickly as it built.

Everyone is curious about our little airplane, and I find myself fending them off. The wings are made of fabric, and while the fabric is strong and waterproof, it's fabric and susceptible to cumulative damage from oils and other things people an have on their hands. Why does everyone find it necessary to pling the stretched fabric on a fabric wing airplane? It's like the compulsion to put fingers in wet paint. And I don't know what else they're going to grab that could do more immediate damage. Airplanes are designed to be strong enough to fly, but there are a lot of parts that can be damaged by ignorant handling.

Lite Flyer put the doors on last night, and we didn't take them off this morning, so when the rain starts at the field it's not coming in the open doors. It is coming in around the edges of the loosely fitted doors and I decide to just let it to see how bad it is. I have the aircraft facing directly into the wind, so it will be a bit like what we could expect flying in rain.

We're lucky this time. There is an early end to this line of thunderstorms and we're airborne again within the hour, making it across the Georgia border on our third try. We exchange high fives for escaping Florida.

I Pronounce Me Here

They've been telling me we are going to Nevada next. I was given a day off in which I didn't do much but swim laps in the (big! outdoor!) hotel pool, and draft flight plans for Reno and Las Vegas. There are other places in Nevada, but I figure if I know how to get to the big ones, I'll be able to figure out the way to Winnemucca. (The problem with that would be pronouncing it when I get there. Did you know I managed to pronounce Birmingham wrong!) And then they told me to fly to Salt Lake City. At least I can pronounce that.

That meant a two leg trip, one flat, one with mountains. The flat leg of the trip was the more difficult one, however, because the flat bits of the US are all about thunderstorms this time of year, and these ones had SIGMETs for hail. Unfortunately I can't find the bit of paper on which I scribbled that SIGMET because it didn't just slap down the symbol GR for hail, it spelled out the diameter in inches of the expected hail, and I don't want to exaggerate when I report the size, because it was a number that was sufficiently foreboding without exaggeration, but I can't remember it. It's a little like if someone told you there was a dangerous, angry poisonous spider in your bed, you might forget exactly how big they said it was. Most thunderstorms do have hail; it just doesn't always reach the ground. And thunderstorms have enough nasty components without hail. But when you consider that hail can be thrown out of the storm ten miles away from where the storm seems to be, and hail like that could damage my aircraft even without gusty winds, downdraughts and severe turbulence, you can see that was a no go. The thunderstorms are not air mass thunderstorms, formed pretty much daily over large flat hot areas with available water, but frontal thunderstorms. They are being caused by a fast-moving cold front that is lifting the hot moist air. That makes for a long, impassable line of storms. I have to go around. Not too far around, however, because there are air mass thunderstorms in the area, already topped to 60,000', about as high as they go at this latitude, to the south, and they are moving north. I'm running the gauntlet between two storm areas.

I pick some VORs as follow-the-dots points for a routing and file my flight plan, IFR because there's a lot of moisture associated with the cold front, even away from the convective areas. I took a few pictures of distant convective cloud, but they aren't very impressive because there's no sense of scale.

The flight goes well. The air traffic controllers are friendly and cooperative, offering me more direct routings and giving me information about the convection and rainfall they can see on their scopes. I cut the corner a little on my planned routing. It was conservative, allowing for the front to slow down, but it moved as forecast and I'm able to curl in behind it, going north in the wake of the storms. There is a lot of moisture left and one controller calls me to tell me he sees about fifty miles of light precipitation ahead on my route. I acknowledge that, I've just entered cloud, and tell him that it is smooth. He then comes right back and says "and then the fifty miles after that is moderate precipitation, let me know if you need any deviations." He must be practicing his comedy routine. I found it really funny that he told me about the light stuff, waited for my response and then told me there was heavier stuff to follow. He was pretty much exactly right, then the clouds thinned rapidly after the hundred miles had passed and the skies were clear for my landing in the middle of the country.

The FBO lends me a courtesy car that is parked on the inside of the security gate. I drive up to the gate, pick up a phone and tell them I want out. The stop sign immediately after the gate says not STOP but STOP HERE AND WAIT UNTIL GATE HAS CLOSED COMPLETELY. It's a smaller point size than your regular stop sign. Gas, washroom, food, weather and go: VFR this time because this leg will put me over my eight hours max IFR, and the weather is clear all the way to Salt Lake City. Yippee-kay-yay! On takeoff I'm cleared on course and to me requested altitude right away.

I put on the autopilot while I check out the scenery. The land is still flat, but not level. It's sloping up towards the continental divide. The GPS tells me that I'm crossing the Canadian River. I wonder what's Canadian about it. There's a North Canadian River, too. I have a notebook in which I write down things I want to blog about later, and I see that last month I crossed the Choctawhatchee River. You can't make up names like that.

I've been flying westbound at 8500' watching the ground get closer as it smoothly slopes up. I've also been kicked by light turbulence, chop as I call it in the PIREP I file after 50 miles of it. I wouldn't ordinarily file a PIREP for turbulence that was only light: I'm doing it because there was an AIRMET for moderate turbulence along my route. My PIREP might help the forecasters, or help someone make a decision to fly.

I could possibly reduce the turbulence by climbing higher, but I don't really want to. Eventually the time comes, however, to suck it up and climb. The upsucking is quite literal. Although US rules allow a pilot to fly without oxygen for unlimited periods up to 12,500, I have to obey the more stringent Canadian ones and suck oxygen through a tube for the entire duration over 10,000', if I'm to be there for more than 30 minutes. I can go high enough to go straight up and over all the mountains, but the power of one engine alone wouldn't give me a good safety margin if the other engine quit. I would keep flying on one, but I would drift down, and there might be no escape, no where to drift to, over these mountains. I will follow the line of a pass rather than skimming over the peaks. This route will also give me a better approach into Salt Lake than trying to dive bomb the city.

At this time let it be said that I hate this oxygen mask. It ought to be cool at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, but the OAT is 12 and with the sun blazing into the cockpit from clear skies it's like a greenhouse in here. Clamping a rubber mask over my nose and mouth does not improve the situation, nor does the transit through plastic hoses and rebreathing bag improve the flavour of the bottled oxygen. It's ironic that up here where the mountain air is probably the freshest in the country, I get to breathe out of a bag.

I also get to talk through a bag, with ATC having trouble understanding my routing because I sound like Darth Vader. I wonder idly if I'm suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, or just going mad. I should buy one of those ear-clip things to see if I'm sufficiently oxygenated. I wonder if they have to poke you, in order to get to your actual blood. If so, I'd bleed all over it. Or do they just look at the colour of your ear, in which case they wouldn't work on dark-skinned people.

Here's me heading for an invisible pass in the mountains. You can't see it from this angle, but the road goes through it, and so did I. Wow, I didn't notice until I saw these pictures side by side in the preview how much clearer the air is for the mountain picture. The windshield has not been cleaned between the Canadian River picture and this one: it's the same flight.

After the pass the land became flatter, but not much lower. I overflew one ten-thousand foot plateau, wind-packed snow berms still visible along the top. The visibility is decreasing, but this is a good sign when your destination is at a lake. When the drier mountain air gives way to moister, cloudier air, that means you're almost at the lake. I fly into SLC from the south following ATC instructions to overfly the interstate. I've studied the airport diagram ahead of time and based on the ATIS and the runway lengths, I guess that I will be given runway 35 to keep me out of the way of the faster airliners. I can see the airport ahead. The freeway passes to the east of it. The controller tells me to follow the freeway and maintain 6000'. He will turn me for the runway about three miles back.

It is less than three miles diagonally to the threshold when I'm allowed to turn to land. I've already cooled my engines and slowed to the first stage of flaps, so now I chop the power and pull up the nose to get the speed down so I can dump gear and the rest of the flaps and plummet to the runway. High density altitude gives me a high groundspeed, but also a high descent rate, so I make it down to runway level as I reach the big 35. I've arrived.