Good Thing We Weren't in Outer Space

I check the oxygen equipment and set up the oxygen bottle so I can reach the valve from my seat. The oxygen bottle has its own nylon pouch, which protects it from getting scratched or getting dirt in the valve, and the pouch has pockets for the instructions and accessories and straps for carrying it, so it's easy to secure the whole thing so it can't ricochet through the cabin in turbulence. Sometimes you just have a naked oxygen bottle and those are hard to confidently secure. I've also seen pilots just stick the whole thing in a seatback pocket, as if to say, "so long as I have oxygen it doesn't matter if I'm struck in the back of the head by a heavy object."

I run up the airplane. The altitude makes the engines run very rich. Once I am lined up on the runway, I even lean it a little for the take-off, just enough for it to run smoothly. The takeoff now seems to take forever in the thin, high altitude air. The afternoon is going to be hotter and make the air even thinner. That's why the runways are so long out here.

Climbing through 10,000' I try to turn the valve on, but I can't quite get it to work, damnit. I have to get the mission specialist to get it for me. I should have just left it on and controlled it from the little valve on the canula. I adjust that little valve now so the tiny indicator ball lines up with the gradation matching my altitude. I'm sucking oxygen through my nose, but it's hard to tell if it's working, because oxygen is odorless. I check my blood oxygen with a clip on meter.

The heat of the day drives cumulus development again. The same line of thunderstorms probably forms every day. The thunderheads don't seem as high as they do in the Canadian prairies, even though the tropopause is higher, so they are probably higher. I suppose it's because we are higher already, so there isn't as much vertical volume for them to build in. Below us are dry fields. I see something that the mission specialist says is a coal mine. It's an open mine, not the underground kind that they have in West Virginia, hence the lack of tragic news stories associated with midwest mining, the way there are in the east. That was a lazily constructed sentence, but I'm not fixing it, so there.

As I come in to land, I know what is going to happen and I work to compensate, but not quite enough to get it perfect. Although I am flying at the correct indicated airspeed into a very light wind, the countryside is racing by as if I had a horrific tailwind. The air is so thin that I need to go faster over the ground in order to fly through air at the same rate. It's like if you play the same Pac-Man game on a giant monitor, the little yellow guy seems to go twice as fast, even though he's getting the same number of dots. The illusion that I'm going fast makes me think I have more energy than I do. I should have done just a little flare and let the high groundspeed come off on the rollout, but instead I try to land just a touch too slowly and the touchdown is firm. "Sorry," I say, "Getting used to the altitude."

"We were going faster than usual, weren't we," says my critic from the back. Actually, I explain, we were going a touch slower than usual; it just looked faster, which is why I went too slowly and why it wasn't that great. He says he was looking at the GPS and it was faster. I'm not sure he believed my, "Faster groundspeed, yes, but slower airspeed," explanation. Next time how about I just not screw up.

The oxygen gauge is just on the edge of the red. I take the bottle and get in the passenger seat of the other mission specialist's truck to go to get an oxygen fill at the next airport over, while the afternoon pilot fuels and otherwise prepares for the next flight. It's about a twenty minute drive to the bigger airport. It has a couple of different names, because it's a regional airport as well as a local one, but it's well-signed and we find the FBO right away. I've used an FBO of this franchise before in another state. The customer waits outside in the air conditioned car, listening to satellite radio, while I go in with the oxygen bottle. There's another customer at the counter, so I wait and then make my request.

"Oh, sorry," she tells me cheerfully. "The A&P is the only one qualified to use the oxygen equipment and he goes home at one."

To be perfectly fair, when I called yesterday I asked if they provided oxygen service and then asked immediately what their hours were. I didn't specifically ask whether oxygen service was provided throughout their opening hours. But I think that was implied strongly enough that I have a right to be ticked. Rather than making her defuse an annoyed would-be customer I make her expend the same energy more usefully. Her place of business-- whether it was her or not on the phone last night I can't say--implied that I could get oxygen here yesterday, so she is going to figure out where I can get oxygen. I ask her to where I can get an oxygen fill on a Sunday, to call and confirm that I can really get O2 there, and when she doesn't get an answer at first, to see if she can call out the one guy who knows how to use the oxygen equipment, for a fee. She finds someone at the next airport along the road that is there and can fill the bottle. It's another forty-five minutes drive or so and then we have to come back with it. I thank her and get back in the truck to break the bad news.

It's not a bad drive, really. Air conditioned truck, compatible taste in music, fences, bluffs, cattle, authentic western scenery. Someone I know was going to be driving a motorhome up here, all the way from Indiana this month. If you pretend you came some place for a vacation you can usually make it into a fun adventure, and if it's so bad you couldn't imagine going there on purpose, you can at least thank your lucky stars you're not stupid enough to have gone there without being paid. We eventually get to the proper airport and find the FBO, which appears to be named "FBO." A flight instructor takes the bottle and looks at me strangely when I say that the previous airport said only the A&P could do it. Clearly he doesn't think this is a technical job. He brings it back. The gauge reads full. Presumably it will keep our sats up rather than making us talk in a squeaky voice. I pay for it and then get back in the truck for the long drive back.

There's an air conditioned pilot lounge at the airport, so my colleagues isn't baking out there on the ramp. The mission specialist drops me back at the hotel and then he goes flying.

Some idiot is buzzing the town in the evening while I'm trying to sleep. Over and over again. He's doing circuits, I guess what he as an American would call "staying in the pattern," but he's clearly not climbing out at an optimal rate after each takeoff. If I knew where you slept, bozo, I would buzz it at six tomorrow morning.

Jean Batten - New Zealand Aviatrix

Here's an old TV movie about Jean Batten, a Golden Age aviatrix who isn't well known--I'd never heard of her before--but has some pioneering achievements to her name. For example, in 1935 she set world records for flying from England to New Zealand and from England to Brazil. She didn't have any money and seems to have financed her flying mainly by being nice to a series of men who hoped to marry her. I should have thought of that, eh? New Zealand On Screen has recently converted the film to a web-viewable format and has been pimping it rather inelegantly to bloggers, so it may have done the rounds of the blogs by now, but I've chosen to hold it until today, which would have been Jean Batten's 101st birthday.

NZ On Screen doesn't seem to be set up to allow me to embed the video, so you'll have to go to their website to view it.

That a pioneer of the technology lived so recently always startles me. Ms. Batten died of infection from a dog bite, of all things. If some Majorcan had a better disciplined canine, she might have been alive today. She was still alive the first time I went up in an airplane. There must be people still living now who were personally acquainted with Orville Wright. What a century that was! If it's any precedent for this one, it's impossible to imagine our society and technology in 2101.

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.

Alaskan Eagles

The missing luggage arrives around mid-morning, after we've discussed and agreed on the flight plan. We must have found some food somewhere, then cabbed out to the airport. I should have parked at PANC: the convenience and not having to pay for cab fare would have made up for the landing and tiedown fee, and just the general inconvenience of being at the little GA airport. We coaxed the cab driver onto the ramp to park right behind the airplane to make it easy for us to load our gear into the airplane. I pull the chocks and together we push back airplane and maneuver it awkwardly around a corner so it can be driven straight out. Of course now there are lots of more convenient open tiedown spots. There's a self serve pump nearby so we taxi over there. She agrees to fuel while I file the flight plan,

I go inside, and call the toll free number for the Kenai FSS. I should have mentioned earlier that 1-800-WXBRIEF often doesn't work here. Not every time, but often. Someone told me that it was being phased out, someone else looked at me like I was crazy when I said it didn't work, and yet another person said it wasn't fully established in Alaska. The Kenai number always works, and other than the number seems to function properly, so I use it. I check for any last minute weather or NOTAM changes, and file the flight plan. It's accepted as is, thanks to the crib notes for filing US flight plans that are imprinted on my clipboard. I was irritated that it was US not Canadian when I was a student but now (yes, I still have the same clipboard and yes, it is battered all to hell, but it still clips) I'm glad to have the US stuff.

I get back to the airplane and my coworker is still pumping gas. It's one of those slow pumps, not only with a low flow rate, but it has to be reset every fifty gallons. There probably was someone who could have come with a truck, but it's done now. We call ground for our IFR clearance and taxi. We had vectors in almost every direction, with "expect climb" or a thousand feet more climb meted out, before they gave us our final climb and a heading to intercept the enroute airway. I can't quite visualize exactly what they did, but we were visual for a while and it looks like we moved north and and east to get around all the heavy airline traffic arriving and departing Ted Stevens International. Only fair considering the care we were given when we flew our grid there.

We're in the clouds, southeast bound, and settle into our altitude. "You are allowed to use the autopilot," the other pilot chides. I'm not using it, because I want to practice for the flight test coming up, in an unfamiliar little airplane without an autopilot. I concentrate on scanning and maintaining altitude, heading and airspeed while managing the deicing boots and doing other minor tasks. I do eventually give in and turn on the autopilot because my concentration is waning and I want to sit back and take pictures.

We're mostly in and out of cloud, but for a while we're on top, and can see mountain peaks across the ocean of cloud. We're not sure if they are in Canada or the US. We try to find them on the chart, but IFR charts aren't much for naming peaks, and we don't have the VFR ones for the panhandle. I have all the deicing on, but a chunk of ice we picked up in cloud comes off the (unheated) windshield wiper and slowly floats up the windscreen. Does anyone have heated windshield wipers?

Our first point of landing today is Sitka. The wind is favouring runway 11. Although we have the Garmin 430 in the airplane, no one has done a ride using it, and the paperwork for the company training program has not yet been approved by Transport Canada, so technically we're not supposed to be using it for RNAV approaches. I choose this approach instead, as my preferred one, should they ask. As I reread what I typed there, I realize that everyone is going to think I really did the RNAV and am just pretending to have done the localizer approach, but remember I'm practicing up for a flight test which will no doubt include such a non-precision approach on standard nav aids. We were radar identified by ATC. I guess they have little remote radar installations down the coast here, wow. I'm expecting to be vectored, or fly direct a waypoint, to intercept the localizer straight in, but perhaps there was someone on the approach, because we end up going all the way to the VOR then coming back to fly the depicted DME arc and trundle through all those step downs. Around five thousand feet I could see lots of sea and islands or coast down there, but seeing as there was another pilot to call runway in sight--and take pictures--I just kept my head down and flew the steps. It was awesome fun.

I'm coming up on MDA and start looking for the runway, but I don't see it. There are a few clouds still slightly in the way, but I've made VFR approaches through much worse crap than this. How can I be tracking a straight in localiser and be so far off the inbound track that the runway isn't in my field of view?

I've mentioned before that pilots develop runway-finding instincts. We just know where we expect to find a runway and what it will look like, so we see it and the non-pilot passenger is still going "where?" until short final. I guess a lot of it is knowing where it's not reasonable to see a runway and not bothering to look those places, with whatever is left to look at being the runway. You don't, for example, look for a 6500' runway on a tiny round island covered in guano. Unless that is, you're looking for Sitka and expect to find it. I have no proof about the guano, but this may be the tiniest island ever to have a mile-long runway on it. They've just used the existing island as the place to build the FBO and stuck the runway out into the sea on fill. Or maybe the whole island is just fill. Hmm, it looks bigger in the picture than it did in the plane. Look at the plate: you can see the runway depicted, but you can't even see an island there. It's that small. I recognize it at some point before I have to go missed, laughing at how it was right in front of my nose, right where it was supposed to be, but I refused to see it because this is a wheelplane, damnit. I put the wheels down and we land. We taxi off and get fuel, washrooms and weather for the next leg.

It's a short one, just to Ketchikan, so that we have the best jumping-off point to go the whole way across Canada to Washington state without stopping for customs. But flight time limitations math comes into play. Despite the fact that there are two of us and I am at the controls, these are legally single pilot IFR flights. And when single pilot IFR is conducted, the CARs limits flight time for that pilot to eight hours of flight time per day. Counting taxiing, as flight time does, the first two legs alone will add up to about five hours. And there's no way we can do the last flight with the headwinds we have in under three hours. So we can only get to Ketchikan tonight. We use the FBO Internet and my credit card number (because I have mine memorized and we'd both left our wallets in the plane) to make a hotel booking in Ketchikan before we depart.

I think this was the departure we were assigned. I remember specifically the shuttle climb at the VOR for which the inbound track was specified. "Wait, that's the inbound track, not the radial? Why would they do that?" We decided it was because it was almost colocated with an NDB, at which the shuttle climb was also approved, and that it might be confusing to have one inbound on the 181 radial and the other inbound on a track of 003. But seeing as they have slightly different tracks anyway, why not do it that way? Or do US shuttles always specify inbound track and not radial at a VOR? We're at altitude before we've gone around enough times to figure it out, and we turn on course.

At Ketchikan I fly an ILS, so the airplane finds the runway all by itself. By the time you look up at decision height on an ILS the runway is all you can see. Either that or fog. There's fortunately no fog here today, because I wouldn't like to be going missed amongst all these mountains. We are marshalled to parking and tell the guy with the sticks that we're here overnight and looking for fuel. He directs us inside. It's the same franchise of FBO as at Sitka. They have a list of rates on the wall. All the standard stuff: avgas per gallon, Jet-A per gallon, towing, fish storage fee. What? Yep, the FBO has enough people asking them to store fish overnight that they have a posted fish storage fee. We're clearly in Alaska. Try asking your Oklahoma City FBO what their fish storage fee it.

We haven't any fish to store, just want to buy fuel, postcards and ask some questions. They're cheerful, take our fuel order, and volunteer to call the hotel shuttle for us. "Make sure you give them a room with a view," she insists. "They'll be on the six-thirty ferry." What? Ferry? Ketchikan airport is on an island, too. We have to take a ferry to get to town. It turns out that this airport (or maybe Ketchikan itself) is the "nowhere" from the "bridge to nowhere" that featured in the US presidential campaign. Governor Palin apparently accepted federal money to build a bridge linking this busy international airport with the town it serves, and then later turned it down. Something like that, what really happened was of course subsumed by the political noise it made. I can tell that the people who live in the town and work at the airport didn't much appreciate being dubbed "nowhere" on the national stage. A bridge across this very narrow channel does not seem to me to be an unreasonable extravagance. In the winter, the five minute ferry ride would probably be more treacherous, and I doubt the five dollar ferry fares paid for the maintenance and operation of the boat. The bridge might pay for itself in a few years, even if they didn't make it a toll bridge. But then I live in the country that built Constitution Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island.

It is quite a small town. It goes back at maximum five or six blocks from the water. That's all there is room for before the coast becomes too steep. The shuttle driver works in the local utilities company in the winter. There is a busy cruise ship dock here, so lots of seasonal work associated with that, and also a fish-packing plant. Our rooms do have a great view. I phone people to tell them, "I'm in Alaska watching eagles fighting over fish out the window of my hotel." There are so many eagles they are like seagulls anywhere else. I've seen this many eagles in trees all at once, but not all sitting on the shore like these guys. There must be excellent fishing here. I suspect the eagles are quite often a problem for the airport, though. They are a heavily protected species in the US, being their national bird and all, so that might limit the bird abatement measures they can employ, too.

We walk to a nearby recommended restaurant. It has Mediterranean decor, and a lot of interesting dishes on the menu, but we decide, laughing at the apparent snobbishness of it, "We'll have Mexican tomorrow in the US West. Tonight we're in Alaska so it should be seafood." I have a crab pasta that had so much crab on it that even after I stopped eating the pasta I had to leave chunks of crab behind on the plate. Seems like a crime, but I can't take it with me.

I didn't mention the roof dogs yet. In more than one place in Alaska we have seen dogs out on the roof. It seems that if you don't have a fenced yard and you want your dog to get some fresh air, you put it on the roof. Or perhaps a reader has a better explanation. Here's one from Ketchikan.

We walk around, take a few pictures of the town and plan our morning to catch the first ferry back to the airport in the morning.

Whom Is This Job Being Saved For?

Someone just sent me a link to this job posting for Nav Canada. It's an excellent job flying a Challenger CRJ-100 jet around this fantastic country to check the calibration of nav aids. The fun and variety of what I do now, plus a fast pressurized airplane, multi-crew environment and very very fine avionics. It wasn't the first time I'd seen that job posting. My chief pilot wants that job, and told me about it and as I listened to the requirements I said "I've got that," and "I've got that!" then "Wait, did you say three thousand hours multi-crew PIC?" For an FO job? Neither I nor my CP has that.

There's nothing wrong with asking for experience, but to ask for that much multi-crew pilot-in-command experience to be the second-in-command is very unusual. I've never seen a posting that asked for that much multi-crew PIC, even for a captain position. My suspicion is that there is someone Nav Canada wishes to hire for the job, someone who fits into their team, is a skilled pilot and is appropriate for the job, but that the corporate rules require posting the job. Perhaps the person is an American or Mexican, so by NAFTA rules they have to show that a Canadian with the appropriate qualifications was not available for the job. I know of a Canadian whose American employer posted his job as requiring fluency in Hungarian, in order to meet the NAFTA requirements. Perhaps Nav Canada tailored the ad to that person's résumé. Or maybe I'm way out of touch and there are hundreds of people who want this job and are fully qualified for it as posted, and that the responsibilities of the job include bona fide reasons for the listed experience requirements.

Airspace Closure

I remember that on September 11th I was angry. Not at the terrorists: we didn't yet know who they were or where they were from. I was angry at my curtailed liberty. I had been ordered to land before I was ready, and was not permitted to fly for the rest of the day, even though it was a beautiful summer afternoon.

It was exciting, then for a day or so, with all the foreign diversions into Canada. The US closed its airspace first, so all the international flights that had not yet entered US airspace had to divert to Canada. Then a few days later they flew out again, exotic types and liveries for the communities they were in.

I originally wrote a longer post about the last nine years, but in the end mine is a different experience than those of my mainly American readers, so I decided to stick to what I knew.

Jetlagged and Luggageless

No it's not me who is jetlagged and luggageless. I'm just stranded in a foreign country with impassable weather to the south and an expired IFR. The pilot who is coming up to provide a legal licence to file IFR through the panhandle is the one staggering in with no luggage and a head too many hours west of the last place it was. If I recall correctly there was a vacation involved so this is extra-Canadian jetlag, not just a few hours. I haven't rented a car, so I tell her to take the shuttle. Meanwhile I go downstairs to check that her hotel booking is in order. It isn't.

They say they don't have a room for her, even though her room was booked at the same time as mine. Originally it was going to be the room for the pilot who left yesterday, so the booking was supposed to be delayed one day, not cancelled. I haunt the desk, asking each successive clerk to look for the reservation. This sounds mean or useless, but so many times I have had one clerk find something when others swore it didn't exist. Some of them don't know how their systems work, and others just don't care. Most of them don't care. Probably all of them don't care and most of them don't bother to pretend they do. Eventually one of the clerks escalates me to a manager in order to get rid of me and the manager makes an executive decision to create the reservation despite the overbooking. It's someone who staggers in after midnight who will lose out.

My fellow pilot staggers in after midnight in some time zone, but without her luggage. She didn't expect it to make the connection that she had to run for. Now she wants food and sleep. I take her to the Century, where she can watch float planes land, and then we pick a meet time in the morning so she can rehumanize. We were going to leave first thing in the morning, but now we'll have to wait for her luggage.

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Meanwhile, I am amused by what Wikio thinks my blog is about. It got Canada in the cloud (but thinks I'm based in the US), and I guess GPS is a pretty common topic, but do I really talk about Texas that much? I'm amused that it picked up on all the Star Trek references, but how does it think my blog is about "crank"?

Panhandling

If we're going back to northern Canada I can reverse my original route, but it sounds like we'll be going to the states, so I am planning a route down the Alaska Panhandle to see if I can do it without landing in Canada. That will save clearing customs twice. It's doable, even though the seasonal headwinds are intense. Planning with ten knots above today's top headwind for the route, I can go Ketchikan to Bellingham in one hop. My alternate kind of has to be Abbotsford or Vancouver, because if the weather is too bad to get into Bellingham, how am I getting into Orcas Island? And I don't think I can plan Whidby Air Base. Paine Field might be stretching it on gas.

I call CANPASS to find out how they would react to an unscheduled landing in Canada from an airplane that had not filed customs paperwork. She's perfectly nice, but doesn't give me any real information. "An emergency is an emergency, we'd just have to deal with it as it comes, but it would have to be an emergency, not just a fuel stop." I don't try to explain the concept of an alternate or an emergency fuel stop. I'd better treat Canada like untracked jungle or an ocean as far as flight planning goes. It's doable, but it has to be IFR because the Alaska Panhandle is permanently IFR. I don't think they ever see the sun there.

I send an e-mail to my boss about the status of the airplane, and my planning so far. He e-mails back to ask if I can fly from Alaska to Washington without clearing customs. I blink. Wasn't that the point of the e-mail I just sent? Next time I'll write a shorter e-mail. The chief pilot (whom I cc:ed) assures me that my e-mail was perfectly clear, but thinks it might be cutting it a bit close. The big problem though, is that my IFR just expired. Another pilot will come up and do the trip with me, which is safer anyway.

Alaska feels lonely in the evening because I don't get any e-mail. I'm west of everyone, so they've all gone to bed already. And you know what else is sad? After all my looking for beluga whales, someone sends me a link to tell me that the beluga whale I was almost guaranteed to fly over on the way to Washington State died.

A Square Meal

The work we did in two flights on our first full day here is judged complete and correct and we're all getting out of here today: me in our airplane and the customers on the airlines. Some of them are going home and some are stopping in Anchorage before taking different flights to the next job, wherever that may be. We seem to always finish any given job on a Sunday or a long weekend and have to wait around for marching orders to the next one.

There is a big weighing scale in a tent outside the lodge. It's for people chartering floatplanes to weigh their loads, but I hop on it just for fun. I weigh the same as I did at last medical two months ago, except that in the doctor's office I wasn't wearing boots and carrying my handbag and headset. Either I've lost a lot of weight in the last couple of months or the people chartering Beavers are getting a deal.

I file a VFR flight plan over the phone, yelling to be understood, then I'm dropped off at the airport, where I call the air traffic controller and ask them to please call the fuel truck for me. (That's a weird way to do it, but there doesn't seem to be a public phone here and my cellphone doesn't work. The tower offers to do it and does it cheerfully when asked, so I assume it's normal for here).While I wait I finish securing my load. That takes a while, but there's still no sign of the fuel truck. I clean the windows, preflight the whole airplane, do my nails, play a couple of games of iPod mahjong and then call the tower back to ask if they know what happened to the fueller. A reader who has been here has been teasing me all week about how lucky I've been with fuel and now I discover the joys of trying to get fuel before noon here. There are a lot of places where fuel before noon on a Sunday is a problem, but here it seems pretty consistent. I laugh every time at his description. I'm laughing right now as I proofread what I've pasted below.

They were consistently unable to have both a fueler and a fuel truck with at least 800 gallons of fuel ready to go at 0630, despite the fact that we (their biggest avgas customer) needed 800 gallons of avgas at 0630, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year, like clockwork. They always seemed a bit surprised that they were there at such an unexpected time, expecting such a large amount of fuel.

I only need a quarter of that amount, but I do need it today, so I call back the tower. The controller says she has already called them back on my behalf to see what the delay is and relays that they are "doing their morning routine." Which apparently doesn't include selling fuel. She says I can get fuel more quickly if I taxi over there, so I tell her I'll start up and call her back for taxi clearance.

I remove and stow the chocks then jump in and start up. She tells me to taxi via November, cross runway 30 and look for the fuel truck on the other side. I look at my official and up-to-date FAA airport diagram. I turn it around a couple of times. I read the footnotes. I sheepishly call back and confess, "I'm sorry, taxiway November doesn't seem to be depicted on the airport diagram."

"Oh," she says cheerfully. "That's just nomenclature. November is what we call foxtrot south of three zero."

Alrighty then. I look at the chart some more and realize that it doesn't depict a taxiway south of three zero foxtrot. It doesn't even depict the part of the apron on which I'm parked. The pavement isn't brand new. I guess they expanded the airport without telling anyone in Oklahoma City. I find taxiway N. It's even labelled as such. I intended to find the proper e-mail address to report this discrepancy to, but I forgot until now and the current airport diagram now depicts the apron and taxiway accurately. That controller seemed pretty sharp. Perhaps she reported the problem after I pointed it out. Or the change was in the works and it just takes a year for the FAA to update publications that come out every 56 days. But I like to think I had some small role in the update. It gives me a sense of control and participation in the universe. If the apron had been expanded in the last year or so it would also explain the sign I mentioned last week, requiring advanced parking permits. Without that new part of the apron, parking might be a problem for transient aircraft.

Once I'm at the fuel station I get fuel fairly quickly. I asked about the 'morning routine' but didn't get a clear answer, so I think it might consist of sleeping in and having a cigarette and a couple of cups of coffee. I sign the credit card receipt for a ridiculous amount of money. There's a maximum single purchase limit on the card, but fortunately it's set for two full loads of fuel at medium-high prices, so the card doesn't explode.

I call for taxi and am cleared down to the main apron during morning rush hour. I'm number three for take off and as I join the queue I see that number five has an awesome paint job. I almost want to delay my departure to pull around and get a better picture than this.

There's a bit of low cloud, on the way out but I avoid it and the traffic and climb up above a scattered to broken layer. It rains steadily for a couple of hundred miles, with about five miles vis, and I file a PIREP because there aren't a lot of reporting stations out here, and it might be relevant to someone. Plus it's an easy way to get my control and participation fix. As I get closer to the final range separating me from Anchorage I gradually climb to 11,500' and sneak over the top of the rocks. It's better weather on the other side and I descend into the pass as soon as I clear the ridge, coming out over Chackachamna Lake. There are dirty glaciers hanging from the rocks right off my wingtips. Spectacular. I give a position report with reference to "the big lake with a really long name beginning with C," and it is accepted and understood.

I descend a few thousand feet so I won't be diving into Anchorage airspace and then get clearance into the class B. They ask me to stay over the west shore and report at a point that is easy to find on the chart, so I comply. I finally spot a beluga, but sadly it is not a whale, just an aerodrome and presumably a town named beluga. The air traffic controller tells me to fly direct Ship Creek. I'm about to give him the "unfamiliar local landmarks" line when suddenly I remember that I know where Ship Creek is. That's where the ulu knife factory was. I look over at downtown Anchorage and pick out the bridge we crossed to get to the industrial area. The creek is obvious. And you thought shopping for souvenirs was a frivolous activity.

I follow Ship Creek into a close right downwind, during which I am cautioned in a friendly, 'just for next time' way that my left wing is in the airspace for Elmendorf Air Force Base and in future I must stay right of Ship Creek. Perhaps I should have picked that up from the chart. I tighten my downwind further and then make a tight turn to final, being too close in to level my wings for any kind of base, and land at Merrill Field. I exit and ask for taxi instructions to transient parking. It's a little parking area, pretty busy, but there's a space I can fit into in the middle row, which is good because I can drive straight in, then straight out when I leave. But this airport not only looks like a shopping mall, but parking here is like one too. I have never had someone take the space I had my eye on while parking an airplane before, but no sooner have I turned into the parking area when I realize that little Taylorcraft has nabbed the space I was planning on. Now the only open space for me is against the fence, so I'll have to push the airplane back manually to get away. But my other option is to shut down right here in the aisle in order to get out of here at all, so I take the fence spot. There's a tiny airplane on one side and a high wing on the other, so I can fit in there without hitting wingtips. I shut down and open the back door while call the customers to let them know I arrived safely with their gear. They know I departed, because their airline flight was only a few airplanes behind me in the departure queue. I was too busy looking at the shark to see. That and I don't have a rear view mirror, anyway. I give them driving directions to come here and get their stuff. I notice as I fill out the journey log that I'm close to the minute on my ETA. Good girl. I start unloading everything into a big pile beside the airplane.

They arrive with a minivan and I dart over to cue the gate to open so they can drive in and load. It won't all fit in one truckload, so they sort it into categories that depend on how they're going to ship it out of here. One of the guys bangs his head on the horizontal stabilizer and I feel guilty because I should have realized that possibility when I stacked gear underneath it. They go off with the first load and I go and see about paying for parking.

It's on the honour system and you just fill out your information and put it in a slot in a desk either a credit card slip or cash, five dollars a night. I pay for two nights, expecting it will take that long to get word from company where to go next. One of the guys comes back for the rest of the load and I go with him to get a few more items from a local storage locker. The locker is pretty much exactly like the warehouse in which the US Government keeps the Ark of the Covenant, in the Indiana Jones movies, so we crack jokes and imaginary whips and adjust our fedoras while we haul stuff out to the van. Some of the storage locker items belong to my company: we left a bunch of gear we didn't need here to make room for the trans-Alaska load, so we stop off at the airplane again.

I ask the client to just leave me here with the airplane, because earlier I made another call I didn't tell you about, to a regular reader and commenter on the blog. He's someone I've never met in person but have known online for years, since even before I started this blog. In fact he knew me under a different alias on in aviation chatroom, and recognized me here by my narrative voice, which to me is extraordinary. I wouldn't have thought I even told stories the same way in a chatroom as on a blog, but there you have it. Perhaps out of the thousands of Canadian women who fly commercially I'm the only one who regularly says both 'yup' and 'whom.' You can probably guess who he is from the fact that he's a knowledgeable Alaskan, the kind that answers my questions like "Who was Sparrevohn?"

He's the one who was in Papua New Guinea when I first contacted him, and when he told me when he would return I automatically knew that would be the date I left Anchorage. Turns out I was off by one day, so I have the privilege of his slightly jetlagged company this afternoon. We start by visiting his airplane, a Cessna 180 still on wheelskis in June, showing how much he's been around to enjoy it since the snow melted. It's a clever design with a little arm putting the ski either under or in front of the wheel so the pilot can choose the landing configuration.

We drive to Earthquake Park, along Cook Inlet, no prizes for guessing the explorer who first anchored here. We park near PANC, departures from runway 32 whistling over our heads, and go down a trail to the beach. I want to touch the sea. I can't remember if it was warmer or colder than i expected, but it was stinkier than seawater typically is. "So, where's your civic sewage discharge, and what sort of processing do you do?" Somewhere in me is a latent civil engineer, because this is actually a question I've asked people at less relevant moments. I'm terribly interested in the development of cities, where and how they grow and the bottlenecks common to different cities around the world.

There was a navigational marker for ships on the shore and I made him wait while I framed an airplane departing PANC together with the marker in one shot in my camera. That's not a long wait as they launch departures as fast as they can line them up on the runway. We went for a walk along the embankment, I'm not sure if it was in the park or not, and then met up with his lady friend at a restaurant that was either called the Snow Goose or served Snow Goose beer (these are the perils of blogging from notes taken two months previously) overlooking Ship Creek and the inlet. It's a great view and good food too, well suited to the company. I'm not just saying that because he bought me dinner, either.

After dinner we went for a walk around Hood Lake, the one at the airport with all the floatplanes. Few of them were especially expensive or fancy aircraft, just basic family transportation, most with little huts next to them on the shore for storage of things like lifejackets, cleaning supplies and off-season equipment. Some were decorated with flower boxes and miniature landscaping. The area around the lake is not part of the airport secure area and a lot of people were there jogging, walking dogs and the like. It's a great area and there seems to be some commitment to keeping it multiuse. I think it was on this expedition that I learned about Gull Island, the island separating the taxi lane from the water runway on the lake. It was, as you can guess from its name and its seclusion from people stomping around, a preferred place for seagulls to nest. But birds and airplanes in critical stages of flight are a poor combination, so to control the gull population, they let loose pigs on the island. The pigs were so efficient at eating all the seagull eggs that there are no longer gulls nesting on the island. I suppose eventually some gulls that haven't heard about the pigs will come back and nest there, but pigs are easy to come by, so that can be taken care of again.

I didn't get to meet Dave, of Flight Level 390, but we exchange some good e-mails. I find in general you have two or three near misses before you actually see someone in person in this business. I do hope we intersect at some point. I did warn him that I was going to brag on my blog that I've landed on a PANC runway that he hasn't. Apparently he's never landed on runway 32 of the international. It's reserved for crazily maneuvering Canadians who have just been asked to go around from 07.

After dinner I let my poor jetlagged friend go to sleep and go back to the hotel to do laundry. I'm in the same room as I had before. The clock is still an hour slow. And I still don't adjust it.

You guys are hilarious with respect to the clip from the couple days' ago post. I found it on the floor of the cockpit during preflight inspection after the AME had been under the dash checking connections on a malfunctioning HSI. I asked him about it and he assured me it was garbage, in a tone of voice that made it clear he, like some of you, considered it garbage when it was brand new. He said he had replaced it with a much easier to use clip, likely the kind that is adjusted with a screwdriver. Most of you called it a hose clamp, but this one was holding wiring bundles. I didn't climb under the dashboard to inspect. I was trying to choose a winner from the creative guesses, but they are all so funny I can't decided. I love clip-on antler piercing, aquatic alien mind control implement and dealie for something that has to be opened at a 25 degree angle. And then after I added this, I see there are yet more suggestions from the people back at work after the Labour Day weekend, and there are just too many brilliant suggestions to do anything with but laugh at. Among those who couldn't resist showing off their knowledge, the link with the spoiler warning was the best solution. If someone has a link to a picture of one in situ that would be appreciated, too.

She Does Not Get Eaten By Wolves At this Time

This much maligned small town in the boondocks of Alaska doesn't seem to be nearly as horrendous as everyone made it out to be. Yes, there are no roads that goes anywhere other than the airport, the dump and the old radar array. The last is left over from the Cold War, but you're not allowed to go up there. Dangerous levels of radiation or wolves or landmines or something. The airport I have described already: it has good pavement even on the aprons, and electronic security systems, as opposed to remote Canadian airports, which are only protected from trespassers by signs like "no snowmobiles beyond this point," and "stray dogs will be shot."

The main road, the one named after the local chief, runs from somewhere that I didn't go to, past the airport, and through town. It's paved, and there might have been a couple of paved side roads, but most roads are gravel with potholes. The town is spread out around the ubiquitous little round lakes. Here's a view across a lake.

There was a shorter road from our camp to the business area, but it was all blocked off with no trespassing signs. There was a fair amount of signage in general, of the "This property protected by Smith & Wesson" and "We don't call 9-1-1" variety. You really didn't get the idea they were joking, either. It was incongruous with my usual experience of northern towns. But I'm happy to step away, saying, "Okay, that bit of mosquito-ridden muskeg is all yours. I'll just hang out on these thousands of other hectares of mosquito-ridden muskeg." There weren't an uncomfortable level of mosquitoes. There were some, but I'm beginning to suspect that my mosquito tolerance level has been permanently reset by my first northern base, or even better by my memories of my first northern base. If it's not worse than I remember, then it's not a problem. I have Victory Airways to thank for a perpetually positive environment. It will be interesting to see how Cambodia compares.

People walk here, as opposed to driving. The main paved road has a wide painted shoulder that is marked off specifically as a pedestrian walkway and I do see people walking back and forth on it, even though it's a few kilometres from the shopping area to the next group of homes. Vehicles and especially fuel are very expensive here. I paid almost nine dollars a gallon for avgas.

All the buildings are on stilts, to keep them from melting and sinkig into the permafrost. There are some new modern buildings, such as a some sort of nature interpretation centre and a museum/library that I didn't get to explore because someone was waiting for me. There is a hospital that was probably considered "new" and "ultramodern" by the architects who came up with it. It looks like something that Captain Kirk would beam down to, along with Spock, McCoy and an unnamed crew member, the last of whom would die without any dialogue. There are many churches, all Christian, but in hugely different states of repair. You'd have to be really committed to Independent Baptism over all other options not to switch congregations.

There's a raised boardwalk that goes across a swampy area, connecting some of the buildings. I see lots of people using them. I mentioned it later to someone and he said, "Oh you mean the sewers?" Makes them a little less picturesque, perhaps. You don't bury anything or leave it lying on top of the ground here, so the sewage lines are raised up, and they've built wooden decks and handrails for them. All that wood had to have been brought in by boat, too. There aren't any trees here at all. Shacks like these were fairly common. I didn't notice evidence that they were inhabited, but I would expect that if they were abandoned that the wood would have been scavenged. The fact that the wondows are boarded up is not in my experience evidence one way or another for occupation. Glass is harder to transport than wood. Is the same joke told in Alaska?

Q: What's the Alaskan word for "window"?
A: Plywood.

It turns out that the grocery store we went to with no vegetables was just a quickstop kind of place, and there is a larger grocery store with the usual complement of fruit and vegetables. And there was a Subway restaurant, a totally normal Subway restaurant with all the fresh toppings and drinks and varieties of bread and everything else of every other Subway sandwich place in North America. Mind you, a footlong with a drink was over twelve dollars, but everything there must have been flown in daily. It's also where the white people are at, but it isn't the only place to eat. There's a not at all bad Asian food restaurant and some pizza places. They told us at the lodge not to be put off by the fact that most restaurants sell most kinds of food.

There were lots of kids of various shades playing in the street with a combination of southern manufactured toys like tricycles and locally made toys like piles of mud and rocks. There was a kid with a wheeled dogsled and a single very enthusiastic dog going like smoke down the paved walking lane. I saw a kid-sized dogsled for use on snow, too, in a yard. The kids looked happy, mostly filthy--not a criticism, they were playing in mud--and adequately fed. They were of all different shades. At first I thought that the local people tended to be darker skinned than the locals in other northern areas, but my current theory is that there were a lot of lonely soldiers here twenty years ago, and the dark genes in the locals have come from Africa through the US, and not over the Bering land bridge. I didn't notice a lot of teenagers. Even if they go away for high school, I'd expect them to be back for the summer. Or maybe once they get out they never come back.

People do come here from all over. We met a woman who had immigrated from Macedonia. Why to here? She said there were jobs. I guess if you're coming from a country most Americans can't find on a map, you might as well move to a state that gets left off many American maps. I wonder if there are Macedonians in Nunavut.

The oddest thing I noticed in town was a tumbledown shack--bigger, but not substantially nicer than the ones pictured above--signed as a "Prematernal Home." Including the Jetsons hospital there were three professionally constructed and maintained medical facilities in town, so this was highly unlikely to be a prenatal clinic. The easiest interpretation is that it is a home for pregnant women with nowhere to go, but the whole concept of being kicked out of your family home for being pregnant seems both temporally and culturally incongruous.

I don't have as many photos as I'd like of the buildings in town, because I accepted the advice not to walk down the road from our accommodations to the town alone, so all my town trips were with someone else in a truck, and they were usually on a quick errand and waiting for me to put away my camera and get back in the truck. I did walk about a kilometre through town and during that time was not attacked by wild or domestic animals nor harassed by humans. It isn't a place I'd be enthusiastic about moving to, but I wouldn't object to coming back and spending a month here. That it was so universally reviled by Alaskans speaks well of the standards they expect for their fellow citizens.

In the evening they take me and the other pilot out to the airport. My fellow pilot is going off rotation, and to ensure he makes all of his connections to get home, he's boarding a flight at the local airport. I'm here to load all the gear we brought out here. It's not too difficult since it's the third time I've loaded and secured this exact same load, and the customers help lift the heavy stuff into the airplane. Ordinarily it would be a trivial load for this aircraft, but I can't load anything on or against the installed equipment, and I can't move the installed equipment, so its as if I have a much smaller airplane with a more finicky C of G. I don't secure the load yet, because some of it isn't in its final position. The best loading configuration still has a space in it for my personal baggage which I'll bring from the lodge in the morning.

This is where we were when a news crawl reported "Seven dead in plane crash in Canada." It's odd to have so little context for the type of aircraft or place. We had to google to find that it was a King Air coming out of Jean-Lesage International, the main airport for Québec City. I found some news stories and this audio clip (en français) of the ATC communications with the departing aircraft. I strained to hear it a few times then passed it off to a reader whose first language is French. He warns that he is an aviation enthusiast not a pilot so may not have rendered everything correctly.

Tower and another plane communicating – taxiway instructions
Aeropro 201: Québec tower, Aeropro 201, problem with right engine, we are coming back for landing runway 30
Québec tower: Aeropro 201, roger, left side right side, your choice, you’re number one for runway 30, do you need emergency services?
Aeropro 201: affirmative we can not climb.
other plane: 701 ready to taxi.
Rescue 5 ("Sauvetage cinq")and Québec ground ("Québec sol") acknowledging each other.
Rescue 5: Information?
Québec ground: Ball of fire north of the airport, plane had problems, it’s a King Air from Aeropro, they’re outside of the airport limits.
Rescue 5: Do you have more precision on where they are?
Québec ground: I don’t know if you see him there's a big black spot on the other side of Mont Belair
Rescue 5: Do you think it would be on this side or the other side of Mont Belair
Québec ground: No no he's on this side of Mont Belair at the base on the other side of the fields.
Rescue 5: roger

The crash is old news now, and by the time you read this it will be old news also that Aeropro was shut down by Transport Canada. Even the India Times reported it. Kind of makes me wonder how many people in India care whether a Québec air operator loses its operating certificate. But none of that answers the question of why a King Air with one engine failed was not able to return safely to the airport. I was hoping there would be more information available by the time I got to posting it, but the investigation must be still in progress now. An AvCanada poster [not a reliable source] says, "I heard from reliable source, no cockpit recorder or FDR, TSB investigator is pretty pissed off, 'All I got to worked with is a burned up crater'." So we may never know. The [Canadian] Transportation Safety Board takes a long time to do an investigation anyway. There's nothing on their site for 2010 yet. They only report on a few a year, at their discretion. The [American] NTSB investigates every air crash in the US and would at least have a preliminary list of facts posted by now.

It's odd to hear news from your own country filtered through another country's media. Your ears perk up every time you hear the name of your country and then you struggle to figure out what it really means. I wonder if there is ever any Macedonian news up here.

Hint: It's Not a Paperclip

I'm afraid this is not nearly as interesting as the engine test stand vehicle, but it's a thing I found that was initially a mystery for me. It was in my pocket at the end of the day, so I took a picture of it for you. Some of you will know what it is right away and may even have used one, and I ask those people as usual to abstain from the game. I'm always on the lookout for something that will test everyone, but collectively you're so smart that it's tricky.

So aside from a thoroughly filthy laptop keyboard (included in the picture for scale, not style) what do you see here?

As usual, silly answers are as welcome as genuine guesses.

Vacation Plans

When I get back from Alaska, I'm going to be on vacation at a lake in BC. No, I'm not telling you which one, except that the beach is hot and the water is pretty and cool and has mountains around it and farms nearby and nice little condos for rent. So it's a lake in BC and not one in the far north. I planned this ages ago, about the time I got to fly over a beautiful BC lake all day, and then had to fly back to Alberta the same day. I didn't solicit people in the area to meet, because I figured it would be a beach and ice cream and going for walks and no airplanes vacation, not the running around and meeting new people kind.

There's only one wrinkle. My IFR just expired and for various reasons that are vaguely vexing to me, and throwing my chief pilot, who knows more, into conniptions (wow, conniptions is a real word that the spellchecker believes in), there is not going to be a company aircraft available for PPCs. Two of us have to just go do regular IFR renewals in whatever we can find. The company will pay us back. So this will be a studying the CAP GEN on the beach sort of vacation.

There is an airport an hour or so away with a flying school that can handle an IFR renewal. I've never flown the kind airplane they have, but I'm pretty sure that if I push down the houses will get bigger, if I pull back the houses will get smaller, and if I pull waaaay back the houses will get bigger again. I ask them to send me some basic information on the airplane so I can prepare and they send me the "SOPs" for the aircraft. The scare quotes are because it's a light twin flown single pilot for training, so there's no regulatory requirement for SOPs. I guess it's to get students used to the concept. Good idea, I guess. All I know about these airplanes is that they have a reputation for gear problems. And I've flown airplanes by the same manufacturer, so how different can they all be?

I ask the administrator to book me with an instructor who can teach me something. I'm not even sure what I mean by this, whether I'm claiming I know lots already, or that I'm a problem learner and need special instruction. She assures me "Our instructors are top scoring graduates of our programme." That doesn't guarantee that they can teach me anything, because I already know that a pilot who graduated at the top of her class and who hasn't done anything but flight instruction tends to think she knows everything, but may not know all that much. But she probably knows enough to get me through the dreaded flight test. And the worst part is that it won't even get it out of the way for two years, because the boss will likely want a PPC before that expires. I actually like that there is a frequent test of my abilities on my job, so I know that I am good enough and not falling into incompetence, but oh I hate the testing.

I pledge to (a) take this training seriously and (b) leave the instructor feeling good about himself. And it would be full on hilarious if the instructor were a reader of this blog and figured it out. Can you imagine being paid to tune up my flying, knowing that your every move would be analyzed online? I promise not to do that. I'll be way too worried about my own performance.

The school was a little confused about where I was, what with a Florida phone number, a home address somewhere else, claiming to be calling from Alaska, and telling them that they wouldn't be able to call me back because I was just on my way to somewhere without much in the way of phone service. But they made me an appointment.

I Can See Russia

Local accommodations consist of a hunting lodge on the edge of the same little lake we flew over on final. The ground floor is a large kitchen/common room area with better-than-expected wireless internet and the aforementioned terrible telephone line. It has electricity and lights and satellite television, and everyone's computers set up on the tables. There are bear pelts and trophy antlers on the walls.

Up a narrow flight of stairs are three rooms full of bunkbeds, and more bunkbeds on the landing at the top of the stairs. As the only female on this expedition, I have a bunkbed room to myself, either four or six beds altogether, and the four guys are sharing the other two rooms. The rooms are very small. There's only just space for me to put my luggage on the floor and stand next to it in order to close the door in my room. There's another bear pelt on the balustrade. The curtains, despite our latitude, are not in any way lightproof.

I go to bed in daylight and wake up early the next morning for my flight. The weather is flawless blue sky from horizon to horizon and very light winds. We drive to the airport and then I realize I can't get to my airplane. The vehicles that picked us up drove out through automatic gates, but they aren't so automatic from the outside. I encourage the driver to interpret clean spots on the keys, and to try the obvious numbers, but the gate does not swing aside.

We drive up to the tower, which is looking pretty fortress-like, but I get out of the truck and walk around from door to door until I find a door with a security camera and an intercom. I get out my pilot licence and then push the button and reach an air traffic controller who may recognize my voice from the day before or maybe just sympathizes with my plight. She tells me the gate code and it works.

The airplane is where I left it and undisturbed. We take off and fly for I think it was thirty to forty-five minutes. We overfly a few tiny communities with little dirt airstrips, but no visible summer roads connecting them. Some communities don't seem to have airstrips: they probably are served by seaplanes. Mostly what we see is endless little round lakes and swamp. The mission specialist says, "Someone had to draw all these little lakes on the map. I bet they thought no one would check and cheated on some." I don't check to see if they cheated.

I keep my eyes out for musk oxen (this was before I knew that musk oxen were hunted to extinction in Alaska, and I don't think this is the area where the first failed domestic herd was turned loose), or for anything in the landscape that isn't a small round lake. No trees. I hope they have rocks. The people who lived here before GPS and compasses would need to them to build inukshuks so they would have something to guide their travels.

The landscape changes when I reach the coast. Now it's little round lakes and a wide meandering river on the land side, and the Bering Sea with a few little islands on the sea side. The Bering Sea. I fly out over the water, over the actual Bering Sea. Some people collect states or counties or airports they have visited. I collect bodies of water. I've flown above the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Hudson Bay, all five Great Lakes, plus Athabaska, Winnipeg, the Great Salt and the the Great Slave Lakes. This is a most excellent addition to my catalogue.

I look for beluga whales. I want to see musk oxen or caribou, but I really want to see a beluga whale. They are my favourite whales, but who ever gets to see one outside an aquarium? I don't see any, but I keep working. I look out over the water towards the western horizon. The next land that way is Russia. I strain to see it, but I have about as much luck as with the belugas. I hit the zoom out button on the GPS a few times. There it is! Now I can see Russia. It's right there on my GPS screen.

While we are flying, there is quite a bit of air traffic into the nearby coastal airport. I'm outside their zone and not on a flight path to anywhere I expect someone would be going, but I monitor their frequency just in case. One pilot inbound in a Citation makes the regular calls to traffic, then adds, "Anyone in the village want to make a few bucks? Someone needs a ride from the airport." I suppose people in town monitor the airport traffic frequency at home. It is after all what is going on in town.

We fly back across the thousands of tiny lakes to the airport, land and taxi in. The tower calls the fueller for us, and although we were warned to expect very poor fuel service, the fueller arrives fairly quickly and is polite, sober and enthusiastic. I notice he has the same family name as the local chief, the namesake of the main road and he confirms it's his family but does not elaborate.

The afternoon crew isn't here before we're done, and there's no way to call them, so I leave the airplane unlocked with the keys on the floor and we just drive back. We find them at a stopsign, coming out as we go back, we wave and tell them where the keys are and they go to work while we go back to rest. We stop for groceries, and the grocery store is pretty normal with a decent range of items, except that they don't appear to believe in vegetables. Pop is on special for a forgettably expected price anywhere. I've always found that when you go to small places there are rumours of pop going for $5 a can, but I've never encountered that place. I hope to have a better chance to explore the town tomorrow.

On The Frontier

We get a call from the customers, still on the edge of nowhere, waiting for both workable weather and an airplane. Today the weather is starting to clear, and they expect it will be good enough to fly by this afternoon or tomorrow, so they're desperate to get the airplane so they can take advantage of the rare opportunity. Their cellphones don't work there, and the one landline available at whatever accommodations they are enduring is so poor that they are almost unintelligible when they call. Before the call is cut off, we understand that they want us there asap, and this message is underscored by numerous texts and calls from our own company president. Yes, we will do what we can to get there today as soon as possible! It's not like we usually dally.

I help the mechanic while my coworker returns to the hotel to reset his duty day, so we can still fly tonight even if it takes us all day to finish up. There also isn't that much left for an unskilled person to do, until it's time to close the cowls. I can crochet okay, but my lockwiring is really abysmal.

I sit next door in the departure lounge for the charter company and do paperwork and, when they give me permission to use their wireless, e-mail. The woman checking in the passengers is a licensed A&P (American version of an AME), and a licensed commercial pilot. We could have used her next door for the last couple of days! I ask her about her career goals, and she wants to be a missionary pilot. I think she's pretty much set. Strong faith: check. Local church outreach experience: check. Can fly airplane: check. Can fix it when it breaks down in the bush: check. She has a tiny bit of flying left to do to complete her licences, because she somehow holds a multi-engine commercial licence without the corresponding single engine one, something that isn't even possible in Canada, because commercial is a licence and multi is a rating for us. That doesn't sound too hard or even too expensive to finish up. I'm sure she'll meet the missionary goal quickly, and I wonder what she'll do next. This business might be a family run one too, so maybe someday she'll come back here and take it over.

At one point when she was talking about where she had flown already for mission work, she held up one hand in a thumbs down gesture, except with the index finger extended as well as the thumb. Picture the "loser!" gesture, but tilted so the thumb pointed down. With her hand held this way she tapped the back of her hand and the knuckle of her index finger, and immediately I saw what she was doing. That is a map of Alaska. The thumb is the panhandle and the index finger the Aleutian islands. It was so cool I immediately wondered what other states or places might have indigenous hand or other signals. I might have used my vertical palm to represent one of the basically rectangular western provinces, but it's not that representative. Do Italians point their toes slightly and tap parts of their foot and calf to describe their travels? Do you have a gesture or hand shape that represents your area? I need to know these things.

Meanwhile there's someone at dispatch answering radio calls. I'm not listening closely, and he's kind of around the corner, but after a while I realize that he's speaking in a Russian-English pidgin. Things like "Skazhi him I'll be tooda ootrom." This really shouldn't be news to me. It's no different than a New Brunswick Acadien sentence like "Je vais hanguper le telephone et callez-vous back." It's normal for a linguistic border with a history of occupation and regime change to have a transition zone where both languages or a combination are spoken. Why am I surprised here? I think it is because it is the Americans, the same people who take to the streets to fend off the encroachment of Spanish. But of course they aren't the same people. The United States is a huge and diverse country and the more I travel in it the more I am convinced that the only thing that unites the whole is the legend of being Americans. This isn't a criticism. If only every country composed of such diverse parts could embrace its nationhood so firmly that civil war was not on the menu.

I wonder now too at how many other borders is there angst about the prevalence of the language from the other side. Certainly Québec has fought hard over the years to maintain its linguistic identity in a sea of English. Do Finns freak out about so much Swedish being spoken? Is there angst in the Alsace Lorraine that there are people there who live their lives in the language of their ancestors, regardless of where the border happens to be this century?

My coworker decides he's done resting and comes back. We help recowl the airplane. I close up all the inspection ports with no screws left over or missing. There's nothing sitting on the wings, the cowls are on properly and there's oil in the engines. I go out to do a run up check. everything checks out, so I ask for high speed taxi on the runway and wear in the brakes according to the package instructions before returning to the hangar. There are no issues or oil leaks, but I spot an open access panel under the horizontal stabilizer I didn't notice before. I point it out guiltily and muse that I didn't have any screws left over. My coworker removed that one and he put the screws on a nearby barrel. Another reason to use a designated screw container, in my opinion. I finish the walkaround and that appears to be the only thing that was wrong.

We load everything back in the airplane, faster this time--because we now know the best way to load it, not because the clients aren't watching--and secure it down. Wonderful, wonderful tie down rings. But couldn't the stupid airplane manufacturer have provided some tiedown points in the aft half of the airplane? I mean, they expected us to put stuff in the airplane, right?

We bid "do svidaniya," to our new friends and takeoff, following ATC instruction out of PANC terminal airspace (but the Americans don't call it that, what do you call it, again?) and the weather allows us to climb high enough to go through the pass with no cloud dodging, just gradually climbing and then descending through a hole on the other side so we don't get stuck above a layer. It's rugged and beautiful until we're clear of the first range and then it becomes more rugged and bleak. The terrain is crinkled and gray-green depending on the rock to short-fuzzy-growing-stuff ratio. I think I spot some caribou, but I was really hoping to see some, so I may have allowed my mind to play tricks on me. Canadian law doesn't permit overflight of caribou below 2000' agl. I don't know if US law is exactly the same, but if an animal manages to make its living out here, year round, I'm not going to make its life any harder, so I couldn't get a close look anyway.

There's a VOR way out here in the boonies. I keep forgetting its name, saying, "Begins in S. A short sounding name, but it has a lot of letters in it. Sparrevohn. I have the story of how it got its name, but I'll tell that another day. Sparrevohn is also a military aerodrome, so I'm watching for it as a landmark. There's a kind of knack you get for finding airports after a while. You look at the lay of the land and there's a place where an airport fits, both because the people who sited the airport put it in a reasonable place, and because subsequent land development has taken into account the approach surfaces and noise areas. I suggest that it will be in a flatter area ahead, behind the second ridge.

I mentioned Sparrevohn to someone at the barbecue last night as a possible emergency landing site "if the emergency was bad enough to overwhelm the fear of doing paperwork for an unauthorized landing at a military aerodrome," but was told that if I had an emergency I really didn't want to land there. I didn't ask why, assuming that it was a particularly paranoid base. But then I see the aerodrome and now I see why you don't want to attempt it in an emergency. For some reason, perhaps old fashioned defensibility, or shelter from wind for the base on the ground, it's tucked in very closely between two ridges. We don't land there.

Beyond Sparrevohn the terrain flattens out into swamp again. We could tell from the sectional map that it would, because the map is one low colour with hundreds of little smooth edged lakes. Any place like that that I have been has been swamp. There are no trees. I think the vegetation below is grass and lichen and maybe some bushes. We find the destination airport and land, approaching over a lake that has floatplanes moored at it. It's a fair sized airport with a paved runway and paved taxiways and apron, too. A foreboding sign suggests that we needed prior arrangements to park here, even though I called ahead to check on fuel and such and was told there was plenty of parking. There is plenty of space, and We find an appropriate place to park, with the assistance of the tower. We can't find a payphone, but the tower volunteers to call for fuel for us, and the clients turn up in two truck they've somehow managed to procure. We unload everything, sorting it into what they need now and what will go back to the hotel, and then they take off in a chartered Beaver to do reconnaissance.

We drive to our accommodations--I'll describe them and town tomorrow--and unload. There will be be no mission for us tonight, but we'll go early tomorrow.

Oh and the person whose company I enjoyed so much in the air charter company next to the maintenance hangar? She's a regular reader and commenter who had previously e-mailed me a welcome to Alaska and invited me to come and talk to her if I happened to be one of the Canadians who had rented the next door hangar. At the time I received her e-mail I didn't know about the hangar plans, so told her it wasn't us. And then--this is the ridiculous part--I chatted with her face-to-face for hours and did not clue in that I already knew her in the virtual world until months later when she e-mailed me about something else and mentioned that she enjoyed meeting me. I was actually worried at the time that I might be annoying her with all my chatter. From this I conclude that (a) I am a champion scatterbrain and (b) Cockpit Conversation readers are simply fantastic people whom I am delighted to meet even when I don't know I'm meeting you. May there be many more.

Uncontained Failure

A Qantas Airlines Boeing 747 jet climbing out of San Francisco on Monday experienced an uncontained failure of the number four engine. That means that the outside right-side engine failed so spectacularly that pieces of it penetrated the cowling, the case around the engine. The linked article has photos, and even though they were taken in the dark you can still see some of the turbine fan blades through the hole.

The pilots of course couldn't see the hole in the engine, only feel the vibrations through the airframe and see whatever indications the engine instruments reported. They certainly wouldn't have been normal. They shut the engine down, dumped fuel to get down to landing weight (you can see a couple of orbits on the Flight Aware track in the Flightglobal piece linked above), and returned for landing at San Francisco to investigate. Passengers saw flames and sparks coming from the engine; one of them took a video of the sparks streaking by, even after the engine was secured.

It's always interesting to see how pilots handle PAs in situations like this. (You can hear a little bit of the captain's announcement in the above video). Some companies give you a script, but the nature of emergencies is that they don't always suit the script. This captain emphasized that the crew train for this, and then I think he tried to throw in a bit of humour by saying, "in the simulator." He sounds calm, and I hope that calmed people down. Passengers tend to think they're all going to die whenever anything happens. The problem with reassuring people is that they always think you're lying to them, or at least that there's a reasonable chance of whatever you are saying won't happen, happening. My approach is to be honest, but a little bit vague about the problem and then distract them from worrying about imminent death by reassuring them that we will find them another airplane, and make sure they get to their destination. They can then worry about missed connections and lost baggage, which is not life threatening and returns them to the comfort of the habitual concerns of the air traveller.

This could have been worse if the containment failure had been on the left side of the cowling, (or the right side of an engine on the left of the airplane) because debris could have damaged the other engine or penetrated the cabin. Components leaving a turbine engine have a lot of energy. Those things rotate at over 10000 rpm.

LiveATC recording of the event from the perspective of the radio communications is available buried in this file. The Qantas pilots report their difficulties 18:20 into the recording. Eric M. has edited it down to the eighteen minutes directly concerned with the incident flight but you can only hear that version if you register (for free) at LiveATC.net. There's some confusion on the part of ATC, as Australia and the US seem to have different standards for the information an aircraft with an emergency must convey. Although the Qantas crew do deny they have an emergency. That means they don't believe they need any kind of priority to ensure safety.

An interesting detail about of the B747 is that it is equipped with a hardpoint for carrying a spare engine. Not connected up to fuel and power, just sitting there ready to be installed, like a spare tire on the back of your SUV. They don't carry one around all the time because they add a lot of drag and are very rarely needed. It's just a provision for transporting them. Another Qantas B747 will bring a spare in today for the one on the ground at SFO.

That's today's blog entry early, although I'll edit it to make it look like it appeared at 00Z as usual. Tomorrow's will be at the usual time.

Just Like the Fourth of July

It's Friday and we discover that in this hangar they celebrate Friday with a barbecue lunch. The entire extended family is present, and it's a little confusing because despite the flat maps we usually work with, where east is east and west is west, the Earth really is round. Just as Russia turned up on the WAC chart for our destination, Russia features prominently in the history of Alaska. Russia owned Alaska until March 1867, and something that had never occurred to me until this trip is that the Russians who already lived here didn't just go home. It had been a substantial trip for them to get here; they had lives and homes and had intermarried with local people, and what difference did it make to them if the czar sold national ownership in their chunk of land to pay his gambling debts or raise money to invade China, or redo his winter palace, or whatever he was going to do with the money. So some Alaskans are of Russian descent and as soon as the Cold War ended they went right back to having good communications. One of the wives of this family was a high school exchange student, and her parents are here, plus the American born contingent break the American English-only stereotype and can speak some Russian. Even one of the dogs prefers Russian, responding lackadaisically to English commands and crisply to Russian language equivalents.

The lunch feast includes barbecued burgers with processed American cheese on top, potato chips, and slices of watermelon. I feel like it's the Fourth of July! There are kids running around too, speaking both languages. It's totally normal for an intermarried family, and such families are very normal at an international border, I just wasn't thinking of Alaska that way.

After lunch the AME sends us across town to pick up a part from a supplier at another airport. While we're waiting for them to find it, we notice a flyer for a customer appreciation barbecue that evening. Hey, we're customers. Think we can score two free barbecues in one day?

We bring the part back to the airplane and get everything into a tidy state just in time for the five o'clock quitting time here. But it turns out that by now we're family so they okay us working on the weekend when they aren't there. The charter company at the adjoining hangar will be there all day, so they can let us in. Superb! we should be finished by tomorrow.

And yes we do go to the other supplier barbecue, worth it both for the flawlessly cooked steaks--aren't the best steaks always cooked by a huge tattooed guy at an outdoor barbecue?--and the contacts we make with people who know the local area and the remote one in which we will be flying. The assessments of the place we are going continue to be grim, but now we have the names of some worse places around it where we should on no accounts go. Not that there are roads, anyway.

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And on the theme of enjoying the generosity of others and of occasions for fireworks, I just got the minutes of a meeting on the Cambodia project. I couldn't be there, on account of being nowhere near there, but they felt my presence. It appears that Cockpit Conversation readers contributed about five thousand dollars towards building supplies. According to the minutes, I was singled out in absentia for my fundraising efforts, even though all I did was say please. You wonderful people did the rest. That goes to show that not only are you jaw-droppingly amazing, but that you are either intent on your anonymity or more generous than you are skilled at following directions. I kept a running total from the people who let me know they donated, and assumed the ones who didn't specify an amount were averaging the same as those who did, my number isn't close to that one. I am so grateful to all of you. You should see how happy I am. Notice that I've posted a blog entry pretty much every day since. That's part of my thank you to you.