I See Fourteen Lights

There might be fog or mist present when I depart tomorrow from an uncontrolled aerodrome. The minimum allowable visibility for my departure is half a statute mile, so I need to be able to determine how far I can see along the runway, without a tower, a flight service specialist or an electronic runway visual range (RVR) measurement. I'll have to count runway lights.

I haven't done this in a while--you don't get fog much in the summer--so I had to double check some numbers. I found then in A Quick Reference: Airfield Standards from the US FAA. (Nice little reference. I intend to read it through in its entirety sometime, maybe while waiting for fog). It confirms for me that the lights along the runway edge are spaced 200' apart. There are six thousand feet in a nautical mile, but for some reason ground visibility is measured in statute miles, which contain only 5280 feet apiece. (I had to look that number up, too). That means that I need to be able to see half of that, or 2640' feet along the runway to meet the half-mile minimum visibility. And at this point I realize "well duh: if there is an RVR then a half mile is RVR 2600." So I'm on track. This means that if I pull onto the runway even with one set of runway lights (they are aligned with each other on each edge of the runway) I need to be able to count 2600 divided by 200, or thirteen more pairs of them, stretching away into the foggy gloom, in order to be legal. I'm happy to ignore the extra 40' because RVR values do, and because I'm looking along the hypotenuse of the triangle whose base is on the runway edge, and surely I'll pick up another forty feet there.

Whom am I kidding? This is Cockpit Conversation. We don't make assumptions about trigonometry here, we do trigonometry. The base of the triangle runs from my position at the first runway edge light, to the fourteenth runway light, and is 2600' long. Assume I'm in the middle of a runway, standard width 200', making the height of the triangle 100'. The measurement of the hypotenuse is therefore sqrt((2600 x 2600)+(100 x 100)) = 2602. So no, actually, there is almost no difference between the distance from the first runway light to the fourteenth, and the distance from my eye to the fourteenth light. That's a very skinny triangle. My assumption is wrong. So if I wanted to be a nerd, I could park thirty-eight feet back from the first pair of runway lights. But generally I want to go flying.

In order to save Americans time telling me that the RVR for half a mile is 2400, I'll confirm that in Canada and the other countries I checked researching this post, the RVR for half a mile is 2600. I don't know why Americans use 2400, and neither do the people in this thread on the subject. I especially like the way that the person who initially answers the question there doesn't notice that RVR 2400 for a half mile doesn't add up, until the student points it out. Another thing I expect American commenters to want to tell me today is that "if you have to count runway lights on short final, you should go missed." That's becase their landings are legally restricted by visibility. But Canadian landings are governed only by decision height or MDA. If the runway is visible at DH/MDA, a landing is authorized for us. Our plates have an "advisory visibility" which we can use to calculate whether we expect to be visual at minimums, but its value does not affect our legality to put the airplane on the runway. Once we are past the FAF, the RVR does not restrict us. We do have something called an approach ban which can stop us from legally attempting an approach in terrible visibility, but that's a whole 'nother topic.

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.

Not the Weather Report

I have a few requests to blog about the weather more, and I mean to, but somehow haven't for a while. I was going to today, with a report on the Weather Channel as a jumping-off point, but then I realized something that sidetracked me on that entry.

There's two sorts of being identified as the blogger. One is when someone who reads the blog meets me, or perhaps already knew me but figures out that I am me. Those ones are great, because if you read the blog you must know I mean well, plus you like the blog: no one goes on reading something they dislike. The kind I find more uncomfortable is when someone who doesn't read the blog and who knows me, but not as a friend, discovers that I have a blog, and who then goes quoting me out of context. You see that sort of thing done by and to politicians all the time. They end up defending stupidly innocent actions like where they shop or what their kids wore to the prom. This hasn't happened to me, but I don't think I'd like it if it did. Sometimes I think I should put my real name on the blog so that no one can "out" me, my already having done it myself. Politicians do that, too, "full disclosure"--telling the public things we don't care, just to pre-empt anyone else claiming they are hiding it.

I don't think I will do that in the near future, but I will present for your amusement ...

The Top Ten Ways to Accidentally Out Yourself On Your Own Blog

(I have caught myself doing all of these).

• 10. Forget to censor your own name when quoting conversations.
• 9. Post a photograph that shows your recognizable reflection in a shiny object.
• 8. Post a story about yourself that also makes the national news.
• 7. Leave yourself logged in to a shared computer.
• 6. Visit your blog from an FBO computer with a giant screen.
• 5. Do a real life meet up with fellow bloggers who like to post pictures.
• 4. Leave your blog in the browser history of someone else's computer.
• 3. Post the callsign of your aircraft.
• 2. Send e-mail to a customer from your alter ego e-mail address, with your blog URL in the signature field.

And the number one way to embarrassingly out yourself on your own blog is to ...

• 1. Post a video taken of an amusingly dire report on the Weather Channel, when said video was taken in the hotel room, and clearly shows your reflection in the TV throughout ... naked.

And that's why this blog entry isn't about the weather.

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.

Do I Need a "Boobs" Tag?

There's a text on my phone asking me if the weather is "flyable." I go to the window and assess. It looks low, almost too low to get in and about six-eighths sky cover, broken. The recent METARs call it a seven to eight-hundred foot ceiling and seven-eighths broken. It's definitely improving, but hasn't broken open yet. I pass on what I know. It's funny how you can look at weather reports all day, but you like to hear from a pilot what they see.

The weather continues to improve, and soon there's a knock at the door. I go and open it, but there's no one there. I look left and right down the hallway. Often in a hotel when someone knocks on the next door room door it sounds like it's on my door. But there's no one knocking on either side door. I'm just about to close my door and write it off as my imagination when my co-worker's voice says, "Wrong door." She's in the adjacent room to mine and she's knocking on the connecting door.

This is awesome, not just for silly jokes and turning our two rooms into one big party suite, but because when I open the connecting door I see that it's constructed so there is a separate door on each side of the connecting doorframe. There's a gap between the two doors where we can leave the aircraft key, the journey log, secret messages, anything we want to pass between each other without having to wake each other up. Nice. Normally we either try to fit the stuff under the hotel room door or leave it at the front desk for each other. It also means I don't have to get dressed again if I forget to pass the key on to my sleeping co-worker before getting ready for bed. And if we don't fly for a couple of days we don't have to keep passing the stuff back and forth. We can just leave it in the connecting compartment.

We leave the connection unlocked then collect our aircraft mechanic and all go out for dinner. One of the waitresses has taken considerable effort in displaying about as much of two of her body parts as you can without being arrested. We all conclude that if someone is going to that much effort to show you something it would be rude not to look. So we look, and discuss whether it's baby oil or sunblock that makes them glisten so. Does she have glitter on them? Who does that? Have I been in the field too long? Yes.

Breaking Things

I wake up and check my text messages. I should buy a scrubbing brush so I can clean my nails better. There are three texts for me. The first one says the a.m. flight departed at 16Z. The second one says it didn't depart after all, but aborted on the runway for an engine problem. One of the engines--not the one that had the problem earlier--wasn't making full manifold pressure. The third text asks me if I noticed any unusual yaw or power loss. No, I didn't. It climbed like a dog,but it was thirty freaking degrees out, so I can't blame it. They're disassembling it looking for a problem.

Meanwhile I play on the Internet. Dav e Carroll, the United Breaks Guitars guy has release the third and final song to make good his threat to United. This one is no longer angry or sad. It acknowledges that United "broke" his career, but that while he has come out well from the incident, there are a lot of other customers whose damage claims have been ignored and who haven't been able to fight back as well. And it's funny Canadian folk music, which is what I like.

I check the weather and it's ... um ... interesting. Not the weather itself, but the delivery. The METARs have been served up on the screen in completely random order, not chronological at all. The number after 06 in each row is the observation time. There are hardly any two in the right order, just scrambled all over the place. The weather turns out to be irrelevant because the problem is suspected to be a failure of the fuel servo, brand new with the engine, and we don't have a spare with us. We are getting one on Greyhound, yes, the bus. It's the fastest way to get it here, short of chartering a plane to fly it directly.

As we go out to dinner I hear the AME on his phone telling someone about the problem. "And then the GFY light came on," he explains. I ask the other pilot sotto voce what that is and he whispers the answer back to me. Oh. Right.

Getting Ready

Before he goes to the wilds of remote Alaska, the AME wants to buy some consumables that weren't worth hauling on the airlines, but that we can carry on board the plane for his use at destination. We still have a couple of hundred pounds of weight available and can find space to secure what he needs. The first one is easy, a couple of cases of oil. I start by calling the FBO to see if they sell it. They tell us to go to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, for aviation oil? Yes, Wal-Mart carries aviation oils. Who'd have thunk it. Unfortunately when we get there they don't anymore. They've just discontinued it. I'm sure they sold lots in this town, so I'm guessing head office didn't understand why they were carrying something that no other town's Wal-Mart had a demand for. Back to Merrill Field. I remember the store that sold charts also had oil.

When we get there, they have oil, but not our grade. There's an empty space where it should be. We ask if there is more somewhere, but no. The person in charge of ordering it has just returned from vacation. She recommends another place on the field, Reeve's. We recognize that name. There was an exhibit on them at the museum, lauding them as a one of the pioneers of aviation in the state. A piece of history. We find the establishment and inside see a couple of cases of W100 oil being used to hold up a boombox, so I told them we were here to buy a radio stand. There was apparently something wrong with those cases, or else the boombox was too delicate to use another grade of oil for its repose, because they went in the back and brought us two different cases of W100.

I told the man it was interesting to be here, seeing as they were featured in the museum and all, and I asked, did they still have 100 year old junk in the back room? There's some stuff no one ever throws out. It turns out that the business isn't exactly the one that ran the famous air service. The current owner, whom we're talking to, bought the name from Reeve, who was a good friend. He points out the window towards the building that housed the original Reeve's and acknowledges that it did have a lot of very old junk a hundred years worth of burned out pitted cylinders, expired survival kits, waterlogged kapok life jackets and the like. The museum was give their pick and most of the rest was finally junked. We come back again to Reeve's for miscellaneous things like oil filters and grease and the proper glue for holding on brake pads. Alaska is an awesome aviation city. You can get anything for airplanes here.

It looks and feels just like an American city, with all the same kinds of traffic lights and cars and everything. I suppose if the Americans built a moon base they would make it this much like home, too. I wondered out loud at all that stuff coming up the road from Canada, but it doesn't. Nothing comes and goes through Canada. The customs hassle is just not worth it. It comes by sea--the place isn't named "Anchorage" because it has such great airports, after all--or it is flown. If you're sending or receiving anything from Seattle don't bother sending it air: it has to go by air, even if you only pay for ground. Every once in a while the facade slips and you ask for something ordinary and it's not available, because they're out. It's a northern town after all, just doing a very good impression of being southern.

I write a thank you card to the brilliant and helpful controllers at PANC tower. Amusingly, this friendly note fulfills three of the USPS nine criteria for suspicious letters, four if you count the shape being unusual for a business letter. I hope they read it and didn't take it out to the range and blow it up.

Oh and at some point earlier in the week I got fed up of not being able to get prognostic weather charts of the area and called a 1-800-WXBRIEF for a US flight services briefer, to ask how to find Alaska on the ADDS site. The answer is that it's not on there. Alaska has its own site. I don't know why. And if that site isn't nice enough for you, they are migrating over to this site. Possibly both those links will go the same place soon. That's strange that a single state has a separate website when the rest of the country has one integrated one. You can get the METARs and TAFs for Alaska by typing them in at the prompt on the regular site, but not the graphical information. Hawaii has its own site, too. I'll bet Hawaii has many of the same problems Alaska has, related to isolation and not being included as a real state. Hawaiians don't have the problem of dying of exposure if they pass out drunk, though. And the sun goes down at the same time every day there. Goes down in like five minutes, too. It's freaky. I guess if you're from Hawaii and come north you get freaked out by the fact that the sun is just hanging there, not down yet, even though sunset started forty-five minutes ago. Is the sun stuck? I love the world.

Then we're driving out to the airplane with two pick up trucks full of gear to load. This is just like old times for me. And I have the precious, precious tie down rings. The first load includes a solar panel. It's in a wooden box, which is bulky, and they say we can take it out and leave the box if we want, but the box has handles by which it can be secured, and will protect the panel. We put most of the awkward to secure things in the wing lockers, but we can't do that with batteries. Those must be in the cabin so if there's a fire we can fight it. Make sure we have our letter of exemption for northern dangerous goods carriage. I doubt it would be asked for up here, but you never know. I feel like I work for a living.

We're going to have to figure out where to stow all this stuff, so I say anything that can sit in the rain (of course it's raining), just put on the ramp. If it can't get rained on, we'll put it straight inside, to be juggled later. Do you have another box you can put that loose stuff in? They do. Excellent. The clients go back for a second pick up truck load, and then call to ask if we can wait forty-five minutes to an hour. Something came up.

Yes of course. We are paid to wait for you. If you tell us to be here at two and you turn up at five, we are doing what we are paid to do, and you are exactly on time for the service you have paid for. If you tell us to be here at two and we turn up at 2:01, we are late. Telling us that you will be delayed is polite, but our job as charter pilots is to 1) fly the plane and 2) wait around. Or maybe the other order makes more sense. Sometimes we wait for days.

When the second truckload arrives we start loading in earnest. It's like a wacky game of tetris in the rain, except even if you get a whole row loaded perfectly, it doesn't disappear. Just as well. Some of it is expensive gear. When it's all on board and secured it doesn't look pretty, but we know it's not going anywhere. I take a few photos so I can remember where everything is when I double check the weight and balance later. Our engineer trying to psyche us out out by asking if we're sure the load is safe. We just elbow him.

Back at the hotel there's a power failure. Ten minutes dim and then back on, but the internet is still broken. Another sign we are in the north.

We go for dinner at the Century, a hotel right at the end of Lake Hood. We can see the airplanes landing and taking off from the tables. We get to chatting with two women at the table behind us. They shriek and shudder when we tell them where we're off to tomorrow, and warn us about our destination, asking if I am the new teacher. Apparently the last one was eaten by bears. They also tell us that it's legal in Alaska to grow marijuana for personal use. They deny on both counts that they are having us on. No wonder the rest of the USA forgets their existence.

Wind Missing

By next morning conditions have not changed much:

SPECI CYLL 241225Z AUTO /////KT 1 1/4SM -SN SCT006 BKN011 BKN019 OVC028 M00/M01 A2973 RMK SLP095 WND MISG

That means it's just at freezing, still snowing, with lots of clouds, and the wind went missing overnight. I wonder if the anemometer blew down or froze.

If I start to feel too trapped in my hotel room, I can always signal for help, though. This isn't from this hotel, but I forgot to post it then, and it amuses me. You're supposed to stick it under the door to call for help. Good idea, really.

Iron Chef: Hotel Room

The snow continues while our airplane is safely ensconced in a hangar. It's cold and windy and nasty outside, so no one really wants to go out to a restaurant, even though there are lots on this block. It's time to stay in and eat the stuff I've bought and placed in the hotel fridge.

It's time for buffalo. Or bison. Or whatever. The giant humped bovine that once dominated the grasslands here is properly called a bison (really: the scientific name for the subspecies is Bison bison bison, so they're really sure about the bison part) but everyone calls it a buffalo. I'm using the words interchangeably, because that's how I talk. I bought the rib steak when the project manager mentioned that he had brought a barbecue, but the weather hasn't supported barbecuing, so I'm going to have to prepare it another way.

A reader commented recently, I look forward to The Aviatrix Cookbook - 101 gourmet meals you can prepare in a hotel microwave oven, featuring special recipes suitable for re-heating on a Lycoming Turbo 540 and/or Janitrol cabin heater. That's pretty close to reality. At the same time, I was thinking about a new Food Network show in which contestants are given a per diem, a knapsack, a microwave-safe Tupperware container and a Swiss Army knife. They can source any ingredients and supplies they like as long as they can walk to where they are sold, pay for them on the per diem, and carry them back to the hotel in the knapsack. And then you have to prepare the best meals possible. Your only cooking appliance is a single microwave oven in the hotel lobby. You may also use a plastic spoon, a hotel ice bucket, and a daily copy of the National Post. Here are my instructions for Buffalo Stew.

Create a cutting board by laying the plastic bag liner from the icebucket on top of yesterday's National Post. Using the large Swiss Army knife blade:

• Cut one 300-400 g bison steak into bite-sized pieces
• Dice one medium onion
• Halve a handful of mushrooms

Place the diced onion in the tupperware bowl with a 15 mL olive oil and about 5mL salt-free Italian herb seasoning. Nuke five minutes, stirring once.

Add mushrooms, steak, 20 mL tomato paste, 200 mL red wine (you can buy it in Alberta liquor stores in mini 250 mL bottles), and some more seasoning mix. Nuke with lid as splatter guard, four or five minute at a time, stirring and adding more wine as required. When the meat is just done let sit for a few minutes, right in the hotel lobby where everyone coming out of the hotel restaurant is looking at you and wishing that the restaurant food was as good as that smells. Take back to hotel room and eat.

I had mine with spring salad greens and a multigrain dinner roll. It wasn't all piled up with radicchio on a cute little plate, though.

A before-bed weather check reveals:

METAR CYLL 240500Z AUTO 31012G19KT 9SM -RAUP OVC007 01/00 A2967 RMK SLP071 MAX WND 31019KT AT 0454Z

The AUTO group indicates that human observers have gone home and robots are doing the reporting. The -RAUP group indicates that the robots have observed light rain and unknown precipitation. I always like to imagine for a moment that that it means a biblical plague like frogs or anvils or blood, but so far it never has been. The unknown is probably snow or related white frozen precipitation. Stupid robots. Stupid weather.

Crossing the Mountains

If a cellphone has an alarm, the concept that the device might sit next to a sleeping person has occurred to its manufacturer. And they have probably grasped the idea that during the day the user would be moving around, not next to an outlet, and thus that nighttime would be a reasonable time to charge it. So why then would they have it beep every hour or so while it is plugged into a charger? With my cellphone fully charged, I check out of the hotel and meet my coworker at seven a.m.

The weather is good, with the exception of very low visibilities in Revelstoke, but I attribute this to valley fog. The river there will be open now, but there will still be snow in the valley, setting up conditions for moist air to be cooled from below. I don't think it represents extensive cloud to altitude. The latest visible satellite photos are still black for BC, and the infrared show clouds but you can't tell the heights. We just have to go on experience. There are still headwinds, but not the crazy turbulence-inducing ones from yesterday, so it's a go.

We load all the gear and secure it, coil our electrical cords, and put away the engine plugs and tents. After warming up the engines while sitting on the grass, I just power off the grass and onto the apron. It's pretty level and not that soft, doesn't even take run up power. We climb out westbound towards the rocks, keeping below ten thousand feet and then climbing again when the looming rocks suggest it's necessary. I note the time as we pass 10,000' so we know how long we can legally stay above it. We have oxygen equipment on board, but we'd rather not breathe with tubes up our noses or bags over our faces if we don't have to. The weather is good, with excellent visibility and we fly right over Golden airport, position reporting with Flight Services on the Golden RCO as we do so. I seem to recall they didn't answer, so I just made the report blind. Perhaps their antenna was damaged in yesterday's windstorm. I don't remember seeing that NOTAM.

I don't know how many times and in how many places I've flown over the spine of the Americas, but I never get tired of admiring the sharpness of the peaks and the tenacity of the snow and ice that highlight them. When you see mountains from the plain or from the coast they look two-dimensional, a jagged line between you and the other side. But every peak you climb over seems to reveal another one behind it, and they stretch on to the north and south all the way to Alaska and Chile. My coworker regretted not having a camera and I pointed out mine for his use, but now that I look at the card I see he didn't take any pictures, so I have none to share.

The next valley over is Revelstoke, but we don't see the airport, just a glimpse of the river, as most of the valley is choked with low cloud. After Revelstoke the mountains subside into big hills and we come over one of those hills to descend into the valley where we land. Through the magic of time zones we're there bright and early. We immediately fuel and then take off for another flight over the hills and valleys. It's really beautiful country. We imagine waterskiing down that long lake. It's probably still way too cold for swimming, but the grass is green and the lake is blue. We're looking forward to spending some time in a town that exists because people want to be here as opposed to because the town is where the minerals are.

I notice a column of smoke coming from the ground and we look at it more closely as we go by. It's a house on fire. Firetrucks arrive fairly quickly, and after a while the smoke subsides. I hope everyone is alright down there.

After some hours I'm hungry and cranky. There are granola bars up for grabs (last summer's Alaska food box is reaching its expiry date) but I haven't brought enough water to eat them. I bemoan my plight and am rewarded with someone's spare water. Drink, eat, happy. Life is good. We're almost done the work so we land for more fuel.

The fueller is great, offers to stay late to fuel us again if need be, and offers us premium parking in front of the terminal, within reach of an electrical outlet. This airport is well supported because there are over 200 medevacs a year out of here, and there's also a very active local pilot community. It might have more hangars than Red Deer. There's no airline service because the valley fogs up too easily and is too narrow to design a safe GPS approach that would come low enough to reach the runway in those conditions. There are literally high hills on all sides of the little runway and the CFS warns that only those familiar with the local area should use it during the hours of darkness.

We have a couple hours before dark, and seeing as we started our day at 7 a.m. we are good until 9 p.m. for duty day, so we have time to go up and finish the mission. I offer the flight to my coworker, but he says to go ahead and finish what I started. He's making things efficient by fine tuning the engine so I can concentrate on not flying into the hills. I give him the radios too, so he can watch traffic while I watch rocks. There's a slight tailwind for the more easily accessible runway, and as I didn't take full fuel for this hop and considering the moderate temperature, I elect to take it for flight efficiency. When we call airborne, another pilot calls up with intentions to join downwind for the runway we announced vacating. I know from his callsign that he's flying an ultralight, much more sensitive to a few knots of tailwind than I am. As I draw breath to ask my copilot to warn him, he's already on the radio doing just that. The other pilot thanks us and amends his intentions to land with the headwind.

We're about to set up for the aerial mission when the mission specialist discovers he has an equipment problem and asks us to land. We fly down the valley far enough to turn around and come back onto the same runway as the ultralight used. He's clear now. I pull off the runway into the runup area and wait while the problem is sorted out. It's almost seven o' clock and the mission shouldn't take more than an hour and a half, but I'm looking forward to it being over. After a few minutes on the ground the specialist decides it is over, to be continued tomorrow, and we taxi in and park. There is a chance of frost, and we want an early start tomorrow, so we cover it all up with tents and wing covers and head to the hotel.

As we check in we realize that we changed our watches crossing the provincial and timezone boundary, but not the idea that 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. is fourteen hours. As we turned our watches back we almost scheduled ourselves for a fifteen hour day. Scratching the second mission left us with only thirteen hours worked, so we're legal. But tired. I discover I have left my wallet in the airplane, but I have my passport for ID and the client pays for the rooms anyway. My most excellent coworker lends me supper money. After waiting way to long for supper and the bills, it's back to the hotel where I curse out the finicky hotel Internet as I do my daily report (10.4 hours flight time) to company, and finally I go to sleep.

Booted Indeed

I successfully fended off the cries of the Easter eggs last night, and am looking at NOTAMs after a healthy breakfast. I hate stuff like this:

100022 CYQR REGINA INTL
OBST STATIONARY VERTICAL GREEN LASER LGT BEAM PROJECTION 0.125 NM RADIUS 501214N 1044247W (APRX 14 NM S AD). LASER LGT BEAM MAY BE INJURIOUS TO EYES WITHIN 5200 FT VERTICALLY OF THE LGT SOURCE. FLASH BLINDNESS OR COCKPIT ILLUMINATION MAY OCCUR BEYOND THESE DIST. LASER BEAM WILL BE ACT PERIODICALLY IN NON PRECIPITATION CONDS ONLY
TIL APRX 1004291800

Not the block of all caps text. I'm not super fond of that, but it's normal for NOTAM. I hate the information about a hazard that I can't do a lot about. Am I just supposed to close my eyes and hope for the best as I go in and out of Regina? (And yes, I phrased like that for all you people who think Saskatchewan's capital city is the funniest thing since Dildo, NL). Also most pilots hate lasers being fired into our workplace, so that's double hate.

The job here is over and I was told at breakfast that I would be released (I'm not actually shackled: that's the word for when they are done with me and I can fly the airplane away) in about an hour. That was two and a half hours ago. So I'm packed, including stuff from the fridge, which I once again forgot to check for proper temperature before putting my snacks in it, so I have a bag of baby carrotsicles. I have instructions from company on where to go next, am flight planned, and ready to go. But I can't go and do a workout, because when the client says "we'll take you to the airport now," that means now, not after I have showered, changed and packed away my workout gear. As it is, all I have to put on my boots, put my computer in my bag, and check out of the hotel.

Just as I wrote that. the phone rang and one of the guys asked "How soon can you leave?" I simply read him the sentence I had just typed, and then met him in the hotel lobby. "Do you have the box of spare parts?" I asked.

"Yes."

Okay, excellent. He helps me with my stuff, and folding the wing covers and things. All very unnecessary, but appreciated. I offer him some carrotsicles, but he declines. I explain that people always turn the fridge up to coldest to chill their beer faster and I forget to turn it down before putting my vegetables in it. He points out that he hears a lot more people complaining about warm beer than frozen carrots, so the temperature is correct.

The fueller happens to be at the field. I guess someone else called him out on Sunday morning. There's a $50 callout fee though, and I think the fueller gets most if not all of that, so he's made some money off us this weekend. He asks me if I need anything, but I'm good on fuel. His daughter is with him so I ask her if the Easter Bunny came to her house. Turns out that that renowned rabbit brought her a bicycle. How awesome is that? The weather is perfect for a new bike, and I think she's the right age to learn.

With my bags all loaded and the preflight inspection complete I fly northwest along a highway. I think every paved road that goes somewhere in this province is designated a highway. The highway parallels a railway and little priarie towns are spaced along it at perfectly regular intervals. Someone told me recently that the spacing of the towns is equivalent to the distance a steam engine could travel before it needed its boiler topped up with water.

I'm ashamed of my reliance on GPS these days. I used to confidently fly all over the continent without one. I never had one during training. Sometimes I'd rent a plane with one in and I'd let the passenger play with it for entertainment. I remember doing time building at night with a student pilot passenger. She had just bought a really fancy tablet GPS; this was years ago, it must have cost a mint. I asked her to keep it hidden from me and periodically quiz me on where I was, how long it would take me to get to the next destination and so on. And I knew. I flew to the southern US in a rented C172 and locals came over to check me out. One guy looked in the airplane and said, "Where's your GPS?" When I told him I didn't have one, he looked at me in awe, "You came all the way from Canada without a GPS?" I remember looking confused, and telling him I had maps. Why would I need a GPS?

Now I'm looking at the GPS all the time, to plan cooling, to stay clear of airspace, to plan my descent. To verify that I have correctly identified the lake on the chart. I try not to look for a while, but I keep slipping up. I can't turn it off, because it's my comm radio now too.

I concentrate on the landmarks. Another highway will intercept the one I'm following and there will be a double set of powerlines five miles back from my destination. I must stay north of the highway to avoid military airspace. I call traffic, slow the airplane gradually as I cool the engine, and find the runway. I add approach flaps, then gear, and on final I double check my GPS groundspeed with the TAS--that's a really useful trick--to make sure I don't have a tailwind. I have four knots of headwind at 1000' agl, but I think none at all at ground level. The windsock is straight across the runway. Windsocks are kind of two-state devices in the prairies. Either the wind is light and variable, or the windsock is straight out. I guess that's because a windsock straight out indicates fifteen knots or more, and fourteen knots of wind is light in the prairies. I touchdown, pull power idle, brake brake brake on the short runway and do a 180 back to the centre taxiway.

I taxi off and look for a place to park. I'm getting an oil change at the FBO here, but they won't be here today because it's Sunday. I would park on the apron in front of their hangar, but a pressurized Skymaster with a November registration has already claimed that spot, and I don't want to park close beside it in case the wind changes and one of the airplanes blows around. All the tiedown spaces that I would fit into on the apron are taken, and I don't want to block anyone in or out of their spot. And I kind of would like to tie down. Maybe it's overkill as this is a pretty heavy airplane and I don't think the wind is too much over 15 kts, but better safe than sorry. There are two spray planes tied one behind the other, and a space with painted tires on either side in sequence behind them. In this context tires like that are usually filled with concrete for tying an airplane to. I know there's not a third spray plane due back any minute, because no one would spray in this wind: the product wouldn't go where you wanted it. I pull into that spot and shut down.

Years ago in another century, the first time there was a big overnight windstorm at the airport where I had my first job, I couldn't sleep after the wind woke me up. I got up and went out to the airport at about five in the morning to check on my airplane. It was fine, but some other airplanes were loose. I called an emergency number posted outside a flying school, because one of the airplanes was theirs and the person on call called a few other people so we became an airplane capturing team. I discovered that it's almost impossible to manhandle an airplane against the wind. They really have been designed to point into the wind. I also saw that the worst damage was from airplanes crashing into one another. And I saw the way the majority of airplanes had come loose from their tie downs. They hadn't broken their ropes. As long as the rope was long enough for a knot to pull tight before it pulled through it wasn't poor knot tying by the pilots that allowed the airplanes to escape. It was almost always the rope coming untied from the tiedown point on the ground. Since then I have disciplined myself when tying down an airplane to always look at what it is tied down to and I have found a surprising number of really solid tie-down points, such as doubled over rebar embedded in a buried concrete anchor, with a rope tied in a thumb knot with only five centimetres of loose end left over. That will pull through quite easily if you wiggle it back and forth.

Like this.

I retie the anchor knot into a bowline, which results in my boots becoming filthy with mud. It's some kind of especially sticky unwipeoffable prairie mud. I think it's made out of cow pee and manure or something. You can follow everything I did after that by the footprints, going to the nose locker to get the chocks, placing them, then back to the boarding door, then crawling in on my knees trying not very successfully not to get mud on the floor while I retrieve my bags, then checking the tie downs one more time, then running after my bag which blew over, then writing a note for the maintenance guys. I haul the bags into the lee of the hangar and call a cab. While I wait for the cab (yeah I thought of calling it while I finished up, but you can never predict how long that will take) hangar cats meow soundlessly at me through the window of the FBO.

At the hotel I turn on my computer and it makes all the right noises, but nothing comes on the screen and I realize there is no hard drive activity at all. I turn it on and off forlornly a few times, then flip it over and pull out the battery. There is a tiny bit of water on the bottom of the computer, but it's not inside the battery compartment. It doesn't work without the battery either. I remove and reseat the hard drive. No joy. Damn. It must have hit the ground harder than I thought when everything blew over. I thought the case would protect it. I open some more things that probably contain no user-serviceable parts, but nothing seems to be loose or wet. Still doesn't work. I guess I'll have to fax the paperwork.

And then I go to another compartment in the same bag that has the paperwork and it's sopping wet, as is a brand new book on GPS that someone gave me. A waterbottle with a not-quite-screwed-on lid has flooded the bag. I don't know which aperture the water entered my computer through, but it's not happy about it. I wrap the books in towels and upend some of the hotel furniture on them to keep them flat and squeeze out the water. I prop the opened laptop up on one side and leave it there to dry while I go and do a workout in the gym.

A few hours later I try the computer again. It works. Resurrection! It is Easter Sunday after all.

Always Watch Your Autopilot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging Out

It's almost a shame to check out of our luxurious rooms, but the snow has truly stopped and the ceiling is sufficient for us to make our escape. The airport shuttle is out of order so we call a cab to get to the airport.

We somewhat regretfully call the after hours number for our hangar contact. It's 8:30 on Sunday morning the day after Hallowe'en and it's a safe bet he wasn't planning on coming in quite this early. He answers though, and says he'll be there in half an hour. He is, and maybe a little bit early. We load our gear, preflight, and confirm that the hangar bill is taken care of. We're ready to go.

Before we can get the airplane out of the hangar, we have to get the other airplanes out, but before we can do that, we have to clear the snow. He has a little Honda tractor, the same one we've been towing airplanes with, fitted with a plough blade. He starts by driving around in an oval pattern, with one straightaway across the ramp entrance of the hangar. We shovel the snow away from the ends and he orbits until there is enough of a clear space immediately in front of the hangar for him to push snow straight away from it. He tows a caravan out and then goes after ours. The beams supporting the roof of the hangar are lower to the sides of the hangar than the middle, and where our airplane is parked the beams are lower than the top of our vertical stabilizer. So how did the airplane get parked back there? Same way as we're going to get it out. The expert hooks up the tow bar, I stand on the rear airstairs and my coworker jumps up and hangs off the horizontal stabilizer. That tips the whole empennage down enough that it will pass under the beam as the tow tractor pulls it. That's not an uncommon procedure. Sometimes they have a concrete block already to hook up to the tail tiedown ring, for the same purpose.

With the airplane outside, we're ready to go. We apologize again for rousing the other pilot on a Sunday morning, and hope that some of the hangar fees we've been paying will find his way into his paycheque. He says he expects it will be reflected in a full employee beer fridge. Ah beer: the Canadian currency of debts that mere money cannot address.

I text the customers with a pessimistic arrival time. There's a low ahead to the south, so I am expecting a headwind or at best a crosswind, and I don't want to be late after they've been waiting for three days. The run-up is uneventful and this time not only is visibility good, but we have an absolutely hammering tailwind. Yeah, tailwind. The low isn't where I thought it was. We're above a very thin layer of cloud that we can see right through and we're going to be an hour ahead of schedule. The customers are going to think we forgot the time change last night.

The very thin layer of cloud thickens a lot, but we still want to be over it. Canadian VFR over the top rules require our destination to be pretty much clear for hours before and after our forecast arrival and there's no weather report or forecast for our destination, so to avoid scud running, we would be obligated to use the GFA, which definitely doesn't forecast such a thing in our area. The nearest station to our destination is currently 11,000 broken, which is just fine, but its TAF is calling for 2000' broken and a mile in snow. So we can't fly above a cloud layer on the basis of that forecast. We have a band of cloud here, ending just to the south, with the winds clearly showing that the low is to the north. So are we rebels to think we're better than the forecast and overfly the cloud layer despite the nasty forecast? Heck no. We'll use a trick the trans-Atlantic carriers do. The ol' file 'n' switch.

So as far as the VFR-over-the-top is concerned, we're going to Regina. We've got the fuel. Regina has a TAF and is wide open. And there is nothing illegal about being on our perfectly legal way to Regina and then landing somewhere else along the way instead. Airlines do the opposite. They can't carry enough fuel for the legal requirement to get all the way from North American points of origin to many European destinations. So they officially fly to London, and then when they have almost reached London, switch over to Berlin, because the excess fuel required to go from London to Berlin is less than from New York to Berlin. You're allowed to file to any airport you please, and you are never restricted from landing early or refiling to anywhere you can legally go.

The clouds below thin out just before top of descent and we descend through the scattered layer without even having to detour to the south as we expected. The airport is easy to find and the plug-ins at transient parking even work, once we reset the circuit breaker. We put on the wing covers, which are the wrong size, but were all along. I remember them from last year. You have to be creative. And you know, based on our flight planning, that we are.

There's a surprisingly lovely pilot lounge with new, matching furniture and a big flat screen TV. It's sort of confusing. Standard pilot lounge decor is the discards from someone else's remodelling.

Then the customers pick us up and take us to an even classier hotel. We thought we were lucky with our upgrade at the last place. Ha! This hotel room is big enough to get lost in. And it's brand new. Almost too bad we're going home as soon as our replacements arrive, probably tomorrow. I have to finish up my paperwork then repack everything so anything sharp or liquid is in my checked bag and anything valuable or fragile is in my carry-on.

A friend of mine just lost a digital camera to someone who had access to her checked luggage, and it's disturbing. Not just in the sense of "damn, I liked that camera and it was expensive" but also in the sense that if they can take something like that out of your suitcase and get it out of the secure area unobserved, what can they put in it?

Cold Temperature Correction

While nominally the aircraft altimeter measures altitude, what it really measures is air pressure, so the needle shows the pressure difference between the altimeter setting source and the aircraft. An altimeter setting source is just a station (usually an aerodrome) that gives out altimeter settings. When you call a station for their "altimeter setting" they tell you a number that instructs you how to set the altimeter to display station elevation at that station. If the air pressure where you are is the same as at the station, your altimeter will read station elevation. For every one inch of mercury ("inches of mercury" is a measure of atmospheric pressure) difference between the pressure at the altimeter setting source and at the airplane, the altimeter displays an altitude gain of one thousand feet.

If the air is at standard temperature, then a column of air a thousand feet deep exerts just enough pressure to equal one inch of mercury. But if the air is colder than standard, it's denser, so a column of a thousand feet of air actually weighs more. Or, equivalently, the column of air sufficient to produce a one inch of mercury change in pressure is less than a thousand feet thick. So an airplane with an altimeter that claims it has climbed a thousand feet over the aerodrome is actually less than a thousand feet over the aerodrome.

I've written about the above before, but yesterday I was in the position of simultaneously knowing the laser-measured, linear height above sea level of the cloud base (5536') and the altitude displayed on a correctly set altimeter at that altitude (5700'). Was the altimeter wrong? No, the altimeter was correctly displaying what the altimeter is legally required to display. This cold weather discrepancy is one that pilots are trained to be aware of, and to compensate for.

There are formulae for those who like that sort of thing, and also a table for those who would rather not have to work everything out from first principles. Neither way is convenient to do in situ, so you work out the corrections ahead of time and scrawl them on a photocopy of the the approach plate. I'm guessing that if you have modern avionics you can tell it the location and temperature of the altimeter setting source and it will work out and display all your new minima for you, right on the EFIS.

Imagine that for safety I was supposed to be at 5536' asl, perhaps because there was a hill on approach. In cold weather, I would want to know how high to fly by my altimeter in order to know that I was really that high. The elevation of the altimeter setting source is 2255' and it was -10 on the ground. So I go to the table in Figure 9.1. (You're welcome to use the formula instead. Let me know how that works out for you.) Minus ten is the second row. You can see that's really not all that cold by chart standards. It is, after all, only October. The height above the elevation of the altimeter setting source is 5536-2255=3281'. I think of that as 3000 + 200 + 81. The correction at -10 are:

3000': 290'
200': 20'
81': .4 x 20 = 8'
total: 318'

The example uses the 2000' correction to work out the per-foot correction, but if you look carefully at the -10 row, you'll see it's a 10% correction all the way to 2000, and that's close enough for me.

Three hundred eighteen feet is about double the correction I actually observed, and admittedly not what I was expecting when I started to blog this. Reflecting back I recall that there was a temperature inversion that day, so when we cruising at 8500' it was only zero outside. The table is very conservative, rounding up at every opportunity and assumes a decrease in temperature with altitude. So while it's not a very good example, it is real life. I was thinking of reworking the numbers to make it work out to match the table, but I'm too honest.

Cloud bases on a METAR are given as height above the aerodrome. That value may be measured with a laser ceilometer, reported with reference to the height of a nearby mountain, calculated based on the temperature-dewpoint spread, or transcribed from a PIREP. The METAR never indicates which of these methods has been used, but to properly estimate ones chances of seeing the field at minimums, the ceiling should be compared to the uncorrected minima for the first two case and to the cold-corrected minima for the second. That is, a pilot breaking through a ceiling measured at 5500' asl with a ceilometer could be indicating over 5800' at the relatively mild temperature of -10. With very cold temperatures and high minima, there would be a considerable discrepancy between accurately reported and pilot-observed ceilings. I wonder if Nav Canada has a policy about this, if the FSS applies a correction to PIREPs, or if the METAR/ATIS ceilings fluctuate between pilot reports and observations relative to mountain heights.

Not Done After All

My Thanksgiving flight was supposed to be our last in the area, but a communications error between our customer and our customer's customer mean that we have to go back. A shame, as the weather was perfect on Thanksgiving and now it's ... not. The weather is good to the north, but is forecast here to come as low as 2000' broken and five miles visibility in snow. We head out to the airport anyway to try and get the job done.

The airport is on the edge of Watson Lake, with the approaches to two of the runways (one is closed, but you can still see the markings, it used to by runway 02) coming right over the water. If you slid off the end of the runway you would get wet. The air is cold, maybe minus ten or fifteen on the ground, but the lake is still open water, and thus warmer than the ambient air. The layer of air immediately over the lake water becomes warm (where one degree above freezing equals "warm") and saturated. Warm air rises, but as it does it cools by expansion and by contact with the sinking cold air. The water vapour it collected from the lake condenses into fine droplets, making plumes of fog appear all over the lake. This is called steam fog. You can see it over the ocean in the high arctic.

The fog is making a wall to the south, but we are headed north and decide to give it a try. I mark a waypoint in the GPS as my coworker climbs out, and mark it as 3 MILE FINAL 08. Five miles vis in snow is not a lot for setting up a visual approach, and it could end up being special VFR visibility on our return. We climb to about 4500' indicated and we've reached the misty beginnings of the cloud bases. It would be possible to sneak into the valley between the first two peaks we can see, but it would not be wise. It's fully possible that the clouds part after only a few miles of this, and we know it's high overcast at the destination camp, but there are too many rocks in these clouds for it to be worth pursuing. This isn't like on our way up when we were flying above the altitude of all terrain within miles and ducked under low cloud to access a gully leading off a flat plateau. These mountains get higher to the north, and we are already below the height of peaks within sight. We fly west a little ways in case there is a clearer route from that direction, but soon return to the airport and call it a day.

As we tent the engines and plug everything in one of the plug receptacles breaks. It was held against the inside of a hole in the nacelle by a plate. I can find the part with my fingers, but I can't pull it out. I can see that it was plastic, and it just snapped. Funny that something designed to withstand pressure in the cold would be made of plastic. It's cold enough overnight that the engine won't start if it is left to cool overnight. I have to find a way to plug it in.

This airplane is wired a little funny. Usually these heater plugs are on the inboard side of the nacelles, but on this one they are on the outboard. And it's the left side, such that the wing inspection light, the light I can turn on at night to see if ice is accumulating on the wing, is right above it. I could probably remove the screws all around the wing inspection light, as I would do to change the light bulb -- something I am authorized for in elementary work -- and while I was in there I could just happen to reach down and plug in the tanis heater. I'd do that if I were on my own, but it so happens that the AME who changed the mag is still here, so we assign him the problem instead.

He reports back that he managed to reattach what was left of the plastic plate to the inside of the receptacle, so as long as we are careful it should last until the next scheduled maintenance. "How did you get to it?" I ask. He says he went through the deicing light. I feel smart.

Clouds and Mountains are Higher in the Cold

It was too cold or perhaps too windy last night for overnight frost, so we get away without having to clean the airplane. We just need to wait for a layer of cloud at the airport to lift or scatter out. While we are waiting we chat about the forecast to the CARS guy on duty. The TAF is calling for 4000' broken, but the last three METARs have had a ceiling of 2500'. We ask him if the 2500' is still his best guess. He points out the heights of some of the nearby hills that he is using to gauge his observations, and explains that it's common for the TAF to remain at odds with the forecast for hours. (Usually a forecast shown by reality to be incorrect is updated, cleverly 'predicting' that the weather will continue to be what it is. It's not just making the forecasters look better: it's safety). But our CARS guy says that the TAF here is rarely changed to reflect reality. He has had the Edmonton Environment Canada forecasters telephone him to say that it can't be snowing, when his submitted observation contains snow. I really think that a guy who lives in the Yukon Territory should be trusted to identify snow when he sees it.

I suspect there may be some sort of political issue at work where the Environment Canada forecasters grudgingly acknowledge the Nav Canada folks who are their eyes and ears at all the reporting aerodromes, but deny the existence of CARS personnel. It's true that CARS workers don't have the same training as flight service specialists (and they aren't in the union), but they provide a valuable service at airports that would otherwise be unstaffed, and they can usually be trusted to look out the window. There's even talk of leaving CARS observations off the Nav Canada website that distributes Environment Canada forecasts. That's not right. Pilots should have access to all available information, be it autostation, FSS, CARS or the copilot's grandmother looking out her window. We know from experience the relative reliability of the different observers and would rather make up our own minds about what to believe.

At the next observation he calls it 3000', and says it might be a little more, he's being conservative. We needed to get to a thousand metres over the airport to do our job, and that's a little more than 3000', so we decided to give it a try. The time-building pilot graciously offered the left seat and controls to me--apparently our insurance company doesn't care if the time he builds is dual or PIC--and I accepted.

I take off and fly north of the airport. At 5700' on my altimeter, we are 1000 metres above the ground, and just below the cloud bases. I turn and fly over top of the airport. By the time I am south of the lake, the other side of the runway, there are tendrils of cloud reaching for the airplane and I descend. I call back with a PIREP. "Cloud bases over the airport are five thousand seven hundred indicated."

He asks, "Is that ASL?"

I say yes, even though that's not quite true. Someone with FSS training would know that the indicated altitude is similar to the altitude above mean sea level, but is not corrected for temperature. And as I write this I realize that seeing as I know I was 1000 true metres above the ground, and that the airport elevation was 2255' asl, we can work out exactly how much that temperature correction needed to be.

One thousand metres (thanks Google) is 3281'. Add the height above the runway to the runway elevation and I was 3281 + 2255 = 5536' asl while indicating 5700'. That's because the air below me was colder and thus denser than standard and thus the pressure drop in my climb through 3281' was equivalent to the pressure drop after climbing 164' more in standard temperature air.

Pilots will be able to use the above information to calculate the temperature at the aerodrome. I'll write more about cold temperature corrections later.

The area of cloud ended about ten miles north of the airport and I climbed up over the mountains with blue sky above. Even though there was a fair amount of wind we had almost no turbulence. We were all giddy with the beauty of the scenery, and our proximity to the spectacular peaks. "Oh, traffic," pointed out my co-worker and I looked, startled, not having heard a word on 126.7 or 123.2. We saw a small single leave the crooked runway hours ago, but he didn't climb much so we probably just going to a nearby camp. I swivel my head looking until I laugh to see that he is teasing me, pointing out contrails in the sky, far overhead.

"Are we still working?" asked the mission specialist, and we were. What a job. It was a bit of a disappointment to have to dip back under the clouds to still-overcast Watson Lake at the end of the day.

I know I already typed part of this, but I can't find it. I think I must have opened the same blog entry twice in two different windows and saved the wrong one, overwriting changes. Or you'll get to read part of the adventure twice.

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"You engaged in conduct that put your passengers and your crew in serious jeopardy ... while you were on a frolic of your own."

As mentioned in comments a couple days ago, the pilots of the errant flight NW188 had their licences revoked by the FAA. Here's an image of the letter the captain received. They sent each pilot three copies: regular mail, FedEx and certified mail. Ouch. I feel really badly for those guys. I'd definitely be good for a few beers for them to cry into.

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Update at 0208Z: I edited the post to remove the implication that Nav Canada produced the faulty forecast. As a Nav Canada reader pointed out, they just publish the stuff, and also suffer when the forecast is way off.

The Internet Was Right

Climbing out of Fort Nelson, we watch the bands of yellow and green trees recede below us. Before long there are a few patches of snow visible on the ground between the trees. We're climbing over the beginning of a mountain range, and the peaks and ridges of the rock formations are capped with snow. We level off a thousand feet above the highest en route peak, and can see many higher mountains to the south, covered, rather than merely capped, with the white stuff. Just snow, no cloud. The Liard River snakes back and forth under our track, sometimes shadowed in its valley and sometimes reflecting the rays of the late afternoon sun brightly into our eyes.

To the north there are more mountains, but they are covered by a blanket of scattered to broken cloud. It's just as the Internet told us it would be, and it stays that way right through the flight. After we pass the highest ground in and return to flatter land to the west of the mountains there is no longer snow on the ground. The view the the south is spectacular, but I know the light is all wrong for photography, so I just admire it and don't get out the camera.

Watson Lake doesn't have a tower, and doesn't have an FSS either. It has a different kind of service, unique to the territories, called CARS, Community Aerodrome Radio Services. A CARS operator doesn't give ATC instruction or control traffic. He usually makes local weather observations and can pass pilots Nav Canada weather information, but he doesn't have the same level of training as a flight service specialist. The CARS guy at Watson Lake responds to our call and gives us the current weather after long thoughful pauses. We all giggle at his deliberation, but he could be multitasking. We land and taxi to the apron then call him back to ask for a parking recommendation. He indicates what he refers to as "the old runway" but it doesn't line up with the end of the disused cross runway. It's an area of cracked pavement with grass growing through. I think it's just a disused apron. We'd like to get in the hangar, but the chief pilot's advance enquiries about that have not been fruitful. We'll try to work that out before any bad weather.

Considering him and this morning's taxi driver together, I wonder if "runway" is a common layman's term for any aircraft movement area. I do remember before I was a student pilot, using the term taxiway to describe a place where an airplane taxis but doesn't take off or land. I thought I was making up the term, but expected it to be descriptive enough for the pilot I was talking to to recognize what I meant and supply the correct term. When he didn't, I asked and was a little surprised to find that what then seemed like a very awkward word was the correct one.

Whatever this piece of the ramp is or once was, the chief pilot rejects taxiing onto it because of a big puddle. We shut down on the apron side of the puddle and then look around for plug-ins. I spy some in the parking lot, against the outside side of the fence. Obviously they are for cars, but we can easily run our extension cord through the fence and plug in there. I run around through the terminal to plug in the cord, but the outlet is not live; there's no electricity.

I go back into the terminal to see if there is someone we have to ask to get the power turned on. The CARS guy says no, and instead offers us another place we can plug in. He takes me through the terminal to a little garage with a plug inside. He says we can run our cord through the door. It's a typical hangar door, with a chain to raise it, kind of like the string you pull to draw a curtain. I walk over and start looking for a latch to release before I start pulling on the chain: sometimes there's a deadbolt or something near the floor. Here it turns out to be a pull handle in the ceiling. Nowmal for a garage, I guess. He reaches up and releases it, then raises the door by brute force. The chain is broken, he explains.

We plug in there, and then pile in a taxi. The driver gives us a tour of town on the way to our hotel, rating all the restaurants and hotels. We apparently did well to avoid the one the Internet panned, and the only one better than the one we are in costs more than twice as much.

Making Peace

I shower, getting water all over the bathroom, and get dressed. The weather doesn't look excellent, but it's good enough to get out of here. I finish packing and go to breakfast. To my amusement, it is eight forty-two. My coworkers are in the hotel "business centre" looking at weather online. "Get a late checkout," they advise. The weather is worse further northwest, with 700' ceilings and visibility as low as 2 statute miles in drizzle at en route airports. And no one knows what in the 200 mile stretches between airports with reported weather. We can't go IFR because we have some instrument issues.

Conditions here will deteriorate throughout the day, but the weather en route to Watson Lake should improve to 1500' to 2000' ceilings at least as far as Peace River. That gets us that much closer to our destination, and allows the weather here to be impassable tomorrow without affecting us. We agree to try for Peace River, maybe even Fort Nelson. I eat my breakfast, goof off for a couple of hours and then we all go to lunch. (Finally I got the pyrogies I've been craving since Vegreville, and yes, I know by now that I drove right past the world's largest pyrogy. Someone send me a picture and then I can photoshop myself into it and be done).

We call a cab and cram everything, including the printer which I loathe, into the truck and our laps and the driver takes us out to the airport. We direct her into the parking lot and then through the gap in the fence onto the apron. "I can't drive on the runway!" she protests. We assure her that it's not the runway, and that she's allowed. She parks next to the airplane, facilitating our unloading all that gear and then loading it into the airplane. It's raining now, but the ceiling is high enough and we back track and then take off to the west.

We pass Slave Lake, but there is no traffic there. It's the in-between season: too late for fire flights but too soon for heavy oil work. The trees below are a lovely mix of green conifers and yellow deciduous. The clouds are sometimes low enough that we skim through for a moment, but we're at a comfortable height above terrain, mindful of towers. Then we skim through a wisp that turns out not to be a wisp, and of course is the reason you're supposed to remain clear of them in the first place.

The pilot flying does a big 180 turn and flies back until we're back in the clear and then heads south for a while, looking for a way around. For a while there it looked like we were spending the night in Slave Lake, but then we found a way through. I called Edmonton radio via Slave Lake for updated Peace River, Fort Nelson and Watson Lake weather and after a brief discussion changed the GPS destination to Fort Nelson. Watson Lake weather was still nasty and there are mountains between here and there.

It gets sunny enough that I want to put on my sunglasses. I resist for a while, but then I really want them, so I apologize if it causes a jinx, but put them on. Immediately the weather deteriorates. We make a couple of attempts to get around a rainstorm that added poor visibility to the low ceilings. Not a good mix. Ceilings at Fort Nelson were 2000', and that's agl, so as Fort Nelson is 1250' asl, that meant clouds bases at 3250' asl, which was pretty much what we had. Our problem wasn't that we had a patch of low clouds, but that we had a patch of high terrain. We just have to get off this plateau.

I look at the terrain mode on the GPS (after pressing enter to confirm that I know that terrain avoidance is my own responsibility and that Garmin is no way accountable for my use of the data they provide). They provide three coloured contours: red for known obstacles less than 100' below you, yellow for known obstacles less than 1000' below you and black for everything more than 1000' below. We're on a yellow plateau, with our destination ahead in the black. Looking at the shape of our plateau, I see a finger of black extending quite a long way into it, not far to the south. Thinking three-dimensionally, the yellow lining up with that black finger will be lower than the yellow around it: it's a valley. You can see the same thing on the contours of the regular GPS map screen or on the paper chart which is also open on my lap, but it's somehow clearer on the very crude three-colour contour map than it is on the more detailed ones. The pilot flying navigates towards the supposed valley, and it is there. We're flying quite low, and the clouds ahead are quite low, but every time I draw breath to say it's not going to work, it works. There are some lower patches of clouds, but the terrain keeps dropping faster than the clouds. We cheer when we come out on lower ground with a clear distant view below the clouds.

As we approach Fort Nelson, the weather over the mountains even looks good. On approach into Fort Nelson a November-registered aircraft calls Fort Nelson radio on 126.7 to file a flight plan. There's an undercurrent of impatience in the specialist's voice as she explains that 126.7 is the air advisory frequency and is not appropriate to file a flight plan. The pilot can call flight services at "1-866-weather brief" from the telephone at the kiosk or he can contact Edmonton radio airborne on another frequency, which she gives him. We land in Fort Nelson for fuel and a pee break. During shutdown checks the pilot calls back and says the phone number won't work. I bet he tried the number on his cell instead of the kiosk. The Nav Canada number is only available from Canadian phones, and of course he'll be carrying a US cellphone. I wonder how shocked he will be by the roaming charges when he gets home and sees his phone bill.

We go in and use the kiosk ourselves, to see the weather ahead. Both the GFAs and the satellite views show clouds to the north of our route but not the south. We are confident that we can get over the mountains to Watson Lake, and if the clouds move in despite the forecast, we can drop into the Liard River valley and follow it to Watson Lake. We'll do that as soon as fuelling is complete, but tomorrow on the blog.

TLA Fever

Usually I get my weather and NOTAM information from the internet, but sometimes the hotel Internet isn't that good, or the computer is in the throes of rebooting. (Damnit, what is it with Vista that it thinks it's okay to reboot without asking after it has downloaded an update. Recently it did so with an unsaved file full of blog entry notes open on the desktop. It asked me if I wanted to save and I clicked yes, then when I fumbled the filename it rebooted anyway). If I'm not getting along with my computer at any given time I have the option to pick up the phone and call a flight services specialist. It's often faster if the computer isn't already turned on and connected, and the specialist may know better than me the identifiers of all the en route airports that have weather.

Recently I dialed flight services and was momentarily confused by an initial message telling me I had reached Lockheed-Martin Flight Services. I then realized that I had dialed 800-WX-BRIEF (the US number) instead of 866-WX-BRIEF (the Canadian number) and reached the American FSS. From a Canadian hotel. That didn't used to be possible. I'm going to pretend that it was my letter about the problems encountered by Canadians trying to close flight plans that caused the change. I can't find my original blog entry, but it used to be when you tried to dial the US number on a Canadian cellphone, it would be rejected because you were dialing from a Canadian number, but if you tried to call the Canadian number it would be rejected because it was coming through an American exchange.

So I dialed again and got the proper number, pressed 2 for a specialist, and asked for the weather I needed. I listened and wrote down:

CLD FNT MVG SWD TWD YQF 00Z.

Heh, I realize that I have strung seven three-letter abbreviations in a row, just by writing down what I hear. How long can I keep this up?

GEN SCT TCU. G30 KTS VC FNT. HDWNDS 18KTS.

Ah, blew it with the VC.

Translation, for those who don't speak aviation/Aviatrix shorthand: Cold front moving southward toward Red Deer at 0000 Zulu. Sky condition generally scattered towering cumulus cloud. Winds gusting to thirty knots in the vicinity of the front. Headwinds of 18 kts enroute.

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.