Pipeline Around the World

We're flying a pipeline today. The pipeline has already been built, so presumably the owners know where it is, but they want pictures of it, and we get paid to take pictures, so we fuel up and go. The flight is a little unusual in that we're training a new camera operator, so there are three people on board. But the more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned.

Linguistic aside I wrote the previous sentence and then tabbed over to my notes file to see what in particular I had to say about the pipeline flight. By pure coincidence, while I scrolled past the random thoughts at the beginning of the file, looking for the flight-by-flight notes, my eyes found something I wrote months ago about the expression I had just used. The grammar of the more the merrier isn't explainable through modern English grammar. The adverbial use of the is a relic of Old English þy, which was originally the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative þæt. So it literally meant something like "in what degree more, in that degree merrier." I think it's cool that I randomly use expressions of such ancient lineage and my language happily accommodates them. The people who have little fits about "hopefully" or "could care less" really don't have a leg to stand on. English has forever been about what people say, not what makes any kind of logical sense.

But merrily and numerously we taxi out for takeoff and persuade the controller to give us a departure clearance. There's a double delay and I wonder if I've managed to file the flight along some airway that is not authorized for use on Tuesdays, but the controllers are just puzzling out where to fling a CVFR flight. The first controller seemed to understand that I was CVFR, but there was a controller handoff between my calling for clearance them receiving it from centre and the new controller gave me an IFR departure. I don't really care. IFR or VFR I'm going to take off, switch to the next frequency, and follow their vectors and altitude restrictions until I'm in my photo blocks, so I accept the departure and follow it after I'm given a take-off clearance. The next controller gives me a vector that is close enough to direct my entry point that it doesn't matter, and I'm cheerfully following it when he calls back.

"Are you IFR or controlled VFR?" he asks.

"I'm on a controlled VFR flight plan."

"Have you been IFR at any point today?"

"I accepted a published IFR departure."

I think he asked me if I considered myself IFR right now. I tried to give him a professional and aviation-speak version of, "Seeing as I'm pointed in the direction I want to go, climbing towards the altitude I want, I really don't care." If we didn't have the op spec for extended single-pilot IFR duty days it might matter, but as it is it makes literally no difference to me. The only functional difference between VFR and IFR in cruise on a nice day is whether I have to read back clearances or not. And in busy airspace where most traffic is IFR, I often read back VFR clearances to fit in with the crowd. Technically under IFR the controller not me is responsible for my terrain and traffic, but it's not like I'm really abdicating those responsibilities, especially as I can see the terrain.

It shouldn't make that much difference to the controller, either. Under CVFR he's responsible for separating me from other traffic. That's the whole purpose of CVFR: to allow VFR traffic in airspace where IFR separation is required. But I don't mind. I wish I knew the words to make this controller happy. He tells me I'm CVFR and I'm happy with that. He hnds me off to another frequency.

The pipeline goes into the foothills, so that's where we're working. Usually I get a clearance for such and such photo blocks, for such an such a block altitude and then I just work, without a peep out of the controllers. But this lady won't give me a block altitude. I have to ask for every altitude change and heading change, and as often as not it's denied. There's traffic at that altitude, I can't have it. We end up skipping some lines for cloud and other lines because we just can't get by the controller. The thing about filing photo blocks is that theoretically they are supposed to give you the whole block, yours, exclusively. It never really works that way, and I wouldn't really want it to, but this controller doesn't get what is going on.

If I want to fly direct Calgary at 11,000' and there's traffic preventing me from doing so, I can continue towards Calgary at 9000' until the traffic is by me, then accept the climb to 11,000' and I have been inconvenienced only a tiny bit. If my direct Calgary course is 150 degrees and I'm restricted to south for five minutes, I've still been making progress towards Calgary and not a lot of time has been wasted in the five minutes before the controller says, "cleared direct Calgary." But if I want to fly along a line that starts exactly here and goes to exactly there on a track of 150.27 degrees (yes, my heading is displayed in front of me to two decimal places. I remember thinking +/-5 degrees on the commercial flight test was rigourous) at 11,000', it is completely useless to me to be cleared along it at 9000'. And if I need to turn NOW to get onto the line, a five minute heading restriction is worse than useless, because it will have carried me five minutes away from the start of the line and I have to turn around and go back.

In order to improve efficiency I start calling her a few dots before the end of a line, multitasking with my radio call and my dot tracking to try and get the next turn or next altitude approved before I hit the last dot and am ready to turn. It's a little overloading, as I'm focusing almost all my attention on those little dots and don't have a lot of attention over for the designations of photo blocks. The conversation is supposed to go like this:

Me: "In one mile Dotsmasher One requests left turn to zero eight five at one four thousand seven hundred."

Her: "Dotsmasher One cleared left turn zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred."

Me: "Left zero eight five degrees at one four thousand seven hundred, Dotsmasher One."

Her: "Readback correct."

Yeah, what is usually me flying around doing what I need to has turned into a four line conversation. And what is really going on includes both operators telling me what I need next and me reading back what they have said if it isn't clear or I think I have forgotten. So sometimes when I ask the controller for an altitude and she approves it I just say "Dotsmasher One." She corrects me snippily when I miss or muss a readback and the second time I apologize with, "Sorry, I'm just not feeling as though I'm IFR today." I'm turning and swooping and visually negotiating hills. There's a pause as she talks to other traffic then she calls me back just to deride me for that comment. "It doesn't matter," she says, "whether you are VFR or IFR you must always read back assigned altitudes and headings." I just bite my tongue on that one. It's a nice sunny day and she's stuck in a box with a screen while I get to fly in the mountains. I do my best to read everything back and am glad when our progress is sufficient that I am passed on to the next controller.

I give him a request based on the town I know we are working our way towards, then I realize I'm overhead it. Despite the cranky clearances we've been making good progress. The new controller finally gives us a block of airspace and leaves us alone. We keep flying along the pipeline, watching the scenery go by. There are some clouds on the horizon, but we hope we can complete the job before they cast shadows on our work. The senior operator says he wants someone to build a pipeline around the world so we can fly it, segment by segment, all the way around the world. I'd like to do that too, but I tell him he'd have to give me a bit more notice of where he wanted to land so I could arrange customs clearance. We're almost finished when clouds arrive and we're done for the day. We spiral down out of the sky towards the nearest airport for fuel.

The FSS there has a single in the circuit but no other traffic, and I let him know how many minutes I'll be in descent before arriving. I descend over a nearby navaid, then head for the airport when I can arrive at circuit altitude at a reasonable speed and descent rate. He points me out as arriving traffic, calling me a Piper Cherokee. I'm not usually too picky about what controllers call me, as long as they call me cleared to land, but I correct that one. If you're looking for a single and a twin turns up on final you may think you have a conflict.

Airports mostly look the same once you're on the ground, even if they are quite large, because you can't really see that far. We taxi to the self-serve fuel pumps and I shut down and fill out the logbook for the flight. The operator discovers that he has forgotten the company credit card, and his personal credit card doesn't work. Can I possibly ...?

I have an insane credit limit from all those years of ferrying airplanes around North America, so I toss them my credit card as I head to the terminal to find a washroom. I open the door to the terminal and see that there are airline counters and uniformed security inside. I have my pilot licence with me, but I need to make sure I can get back out again. I wave down one of the security guys and make sure he'll let me out. He tells me the code to get back out the door, and says it's written on the outside. Oops, didn't see it. I use the washroom, pick up the payphone to file an ordinary VFR flight plan home, and go back out the door. The code is written on the outside in teeny, tiny letters I didn't see. The senior operator is coming in as I go out. I tell him the code and he says, "I know." He's been here before.

It's funny these little airports. They're all the same to me. There's nothing in the CFS to indicate which ones have which level of security. It's not a function of runway length or altitude or type of air traffic service or of any other published datum. You land and look for somwhere to dump the contents of your bladder, and at some that means watering the grass at the edge of the taxiway while at others it means running the gauntlet of CATSA and throngs of passengers at the x-ray machines. It's disorienting, and without local knowledge you have to be on your toes to walk in the correct door, know the correct codes, have the correct documents and get back to your airplane.

In the meantime a small airliner has landed, but it doesn't need the fuel pumps. We all get back in the airplane and take off before the airliner needs out. We fly home. It takes a quarter the time to get back as it did to get here, because we're not circling around to get on the right lines, and we're talking only to traffic on 126.7 until it's time to talk to the airport controllers.

I land and taxi in, and the boss is waiting with a cheque for the exact amount of the fuel. The operator called ahead with the amount. Fastest expense reimbursement ever.

The Invasion Has Begun

As I arrived at the airport in the morning, I saw this airplane. I could barely bring myself to ask the fueller about it, for fear that it would turn out to belong to some northern resource company with a stylized flame logo. But no, it's what I thought it was. What did I think it was, and who knows the story behind it?

You may name the aerodrome, too, if you're feeling sharp and sleuthy.

Alerting Services

Flight plans serve multiple purposes. One of the purposes is to allow ATC to anticipate my arrival in their airspace, making it easier for them to provide traffic separation and other services. In Canada, except for VFR arrivals at a busy airport, that function is pretty much exclusively for IFR flights. For both IFR and VFR flights, flight plans make it clear where search and rescue should start looking for me if I don't show up at destination. Those two functions are filed together in one flight plan but can be perceived to be separate when an IFR flight plan is cancelled. Cancelling IFR to continue a flight VFR doesn't turn your flight plan into a VFR plan, as you might expect. Instead you have cancelled your flight plan, leaving only alerting services remaining. The difference between a VFR flight plan and alerting services, I discovered, is that you can't amend alerting services to reflect a revised destination. If you need the flexibility of a VFR flight plan following IFR work, you have to file a Y flight plan that actually has separate filed IFR and VFR portions.

The other way to get alerting services without activating a flight plan is to take off without a clearance. Unless From the AIM:

7.10 Alerting Service IFR Departures from Uncontrolled Airports

At locations where communication with ATS is difficult, pilots may elect to depart VFR and obtain their IFR clearance once airborne. In Canada, if IFR clearance is not received prior to departure, SAR alerting service is activated based on the ETD filed in the flight plan. However, if departing from a Canadian airport that underlies airspace delegated to FAA control, then responsibility for SAR alerting service is transferred to the FAA and FAA procedures apply. In such cases, alerting service is not activated until the aircraft contacts ATS for IFR clearance. Therefore, if the aircraft departs before obtaining its IFR clearance, alerting service is not provided until contact is established with ATS.

Once upon a time a Canadian flight plan, and thus alerting service, was not opened until the pilot opened it, but to close the window of vulnerability from a departure accident, flight services will now "assume you off" at the filed departure time. If your departure was significantly late or early, you can call in and amend their recorded departure time. That's important because the time they judge you overdue is based on adding your estimated time en route to your departure time.

ForeFlight versus Nav Canada

A company called ForeFlight has released data for their iPad app that covers IFR procedures in Canada. It includes all volumes of the Canada Air Pilot (approach and departures plates, plus taxiway diagrams) and the IFR high and low enroute charts, and is legal for inflight IFR use. It's not clear whether the database includes the terminal charts, but it kind of has to because the information density around the big cities isn't sufficient in the regular LO charts. It doesn't seem to include the CFS data, but I can't think of information you need for safe IFR navigation that is in the CFS but not the CAP. We'll also have to wait for VFR chart data. Nav Canada is not forthcoming with its data.

There is Transport Canada guidance document and an FAA equivalent governing Electronic Flight Bags, as these systems are called. Page ten of the US version explains how the paper documents can be completely phased out once the system is verified reliable in a given operation, and wording in the Canadian version implies that it allows for completely paperless applications as well.

This isn't something astonishingly new, and I'm sure lots of you are already using such products. What caught my attention today was the price. As far as I can tell, you download the core of the app for free and then pay to add a subscription to the data you need. A ForeFlight Canada subscription costs US $149.99 for a year. For comparison, a subscription to all the editions of the CAP and the high and low charts costs $441 a year, plus taxes. If you only fly in only two regions of Canada, an annual mailed subscription of paper charts will cost you $142, so if you already have an iPad, that's the same cost for paper or electronic. The iPad is probably also about the same weight and the same difficulty to stuff in your flight bag as one LO and one region of the CAP.

Advantages of paper documents over the iPad are that they are unattractive to thieves, still work after they have been dropped or slammed in the trunk door of a cab, will probably dry out to a usable state if you get drenched by rain, are better for starting a fire in an emergency situation, you can write clearances on them, you can unfold them all over the hotel bed to have a wide-screen view of your proposed trip, and the batteries cannot run out. Also they make good auxiliary sunvisors, if you don't have a newspaper.

The iPad wins on staying the same size even if you are flying in all seven regions of Canada, being self-illuminated, allowing scrolling without having to flip the map over, letting you zoom the scale in or out and it probably has a search function. I don't know if you can mark it up with virtual post-its, but you can play Plants versus Zombies on it and check your e-mail while waiting for maintenance to release the aircraft.

What's it like flying with one of these? Does it have a function to do your cold weather corrections automatically or is there a way to mark up a plate after you get the latest METAR, to show all the cold weather corrections and the time to go on a non-precision approach? An iPad seems kind of bulky to mount on the yoke. Where do you put it? How far did you get on Plants versus Zombies?

Nerdy Flight Planning Answer

I asked a few days ago how you would file a long IFR climb segment at a speed well below the normal filed true airspeed for the aircraft. I asked on the blog, and I also asked in real life, asked an IFR data centre employee who codes flight plans. I called the same number I call to file a photo plan and asked.

"I have an incredibly nerdy flight planning question ..."

She said that yes, they know that a light airplane won't be climbing at 170 knots and, and if it's 5 or 10 minutes in climb, don't bother filing anything special. But for a thirty minute climb, yes, code it as N120F210, for the 120 kt climb to flight level 210. I like coding IFR flights. I've always liked languages and codes and getting the grammar and spelling right. Such a nerd.

And while I'm being nerdy, I'll let you know I spent a good day's pay on a new camera, a Canon PowerShot SD1400 IS Digital ELPH, which is the same as an IXUS 130. It is smaller than almost anyhting else I looked at, has all the features I need and was on sale. It has almost four times the resolution of the old camera. I also considered a shockproof, waterproof Sony, but it cost almost twice as much, and if I'm in an aviation situation involving shock and water, I probably have better things to do than take pictures. I'm not a camera power user and probably could have spent less on a simpler camera and not missed anything, but while I'm just pointing it at things and pressing the button, I can pretend I'm going to use the zoom someday, or put it in different modes.

Free the FAA

This article, Free the FAA, came across my desk today and I felt compelled to tell its author, through talking to my monitor, that almost everything related to air travel is a matter of air safety. Unionization gives workers the power to say no to unsafe working conditions or to refuse to sign off inadequately repaired aircraft, because the union can protect them from retribution. Disputes of any kind are a source of stress and intra-workforce friction, a documented factor in accidents. I don't think there is any community in the contiguous United States for which subsidized air service is an essential service, but if it were, the provision of such service would be a safety issue, because left to the free market, communities that the larger airlines found uneconomical to serve would be served instead by the sort of company that undermaintain and overinsure their aircraft, so that a hull loss results in an upgrade.

By Edward L. Glaeser THE FEDERAL Aviation Administration does a fine job at its main duty - making air travel safe. But it’s is also involved with a lot of things it shouldn’t be, from disputes about unionization to subsidies for rural airports. If Americans want to keep flying safely, Congress must free the FAA from obligations unrelated to preventing accidents. The agency got back to work recently after a two-week, politically charged shutdown that had nothing to do with safety. To continue some operations related to planning and maintaining airports, the FAA needed new authorization from Congress. But the Senate initially balked at a House plan that also capped "essential air service" subsidies to rural airports at $1,000 per passenger. Some Senate Democrats also opposed a House plan that, by reversing a pro-union ruling last year by the National Mediation Board, would make it harder for workers on airport projects to organize.

I'm not saying there aren't gross inefficiencies and waste in the FAA giving opportunities for cost savings without loss of function. It's a government body, and one attached to the very large government of a traditionally rich country, so that's to be expected. But it's very difficult to draw a circle around "safety" functions yet exclude some aspects of air travel oversight.

Calgary Sights & Heights

In an account that has drifted loose from the day in which it actually occurred, I will now describe a half day free of duty in Calgary. I e-mailed everyone who responded to my Lunch invitation and whose e-mail comes up when I search on "Calgary" or "YYC," to see if anyone is up for a short notice visit. If I didn't e-mail you, and you wish I had, send me an e-mail with the name and airport identifiers that I might be putting in if I were in your neck of the woods, and you never know. I might have a free day there sometime. I search everything with the label Lunch in my gmail account, looking for the name of the town or airport, so put more than one in if you like, and avoid mentioning places you're not in the same e-mail.

No one is available for the afternoon, so I go solo to investigate the things on the hill behind the hotel. They're ski lifts and ski jumps, leftovers from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. There's not enough snow left to ski--it's summer, after all--but there was enough to climb up a big pile of snow underneath the chairlifts and pretend I'm summitting Everest. Forgot my flag, though. I do climb up the whole hill. It's a little disorienting to find when I get to the top that the hill is really just an escarpment, and that there's a boring subdivision at the top, almost level with the top of the ski hill.

Along the ridge at the top of the ski hill there is a path that goes to the bases of a number of towers. They are the tops of ski jumps. You know when you see ski jumpingon TV and the person goes off the jump and sails through the air, bent forward over their skis into a human aerofoil? That sort of ski jump. The biggest two have elevators going to the top, but the others have stairs, and there's no gate nor "keep out" sign and it's all part of a public park. I walk on up. And up. And up. Maybe they just figured sightseeers wouldn't go up all those stairs. At the top there's a platform with that same potscrubber plastic stuff you get at the loading and unloading area of ski-lifts. There's a bar to hang onto as you position yourself at the top of the ski jump. And there's the steep, steep, precipitous drop. It's kind of freaky and at the same time flattering that the Calgary parksboard thinks highly enough of me to trust me to behave safely up here. I'm a little surprised that no one has killed themselves trying to mountain bike down the ski jump, for example. The amount more daring and less common sense than me that it would take to think that was worth trying is well within human variation. Or a mickey of Crown Royal.

I go down the wooden stairs along the side of the ski jump and then back to the hotel. During dinner, Carlos replies to my call for locals. Remember Carlos? He guest-blogged about a high tech cement mixer he drove. I look it up and that was 2007. I guess a few very loyal readers may do. He lives in Calgary now and has time before his next shift to squire me around the city. He comes by in a low-slung car, definitely not a dump truck and we head downtown. He's rocking the aviator sunglasses and the Latin flair as he points out the Bow River trails and other sights during the drive.

We start off at the Calgary Tower. Every city has to have its phallic symbol. There's an elevator, so I don't have to walk up the stairs. At the top is a similarly dizzying view, with better safety features. There's a glass floor and we entertain ourselves "balancing" on the girders within it, and jumping into the "spaces." It's a fun game of mind over mind, to use the logical part of the brain to overrule the more instinctive part, the one that says, "there's no FLOOR there!" Then we walk all the way around the tower, looking at the landscape. We can see the Rocky Mountains, the suburbs, the airport, along with arrivals and departures, and some of the downtown. Part of the view from the tower is blocked by a tall building that wasn't there when the tower was built. Ironically, it't the same building the controller wouldn't give me permission to overfly at 7,100' a few weeks ago. Now I get a better look at it, closer to the ground. Carlos also explains his crazy scheme to learn to fly and build time as a commercial bush pilot in South America. I realize at this moment that we were so busy discussing his plans that I never got around to telling him that I might be working there this winter. Now he's going to kill me.

Back at ground level it's too late (i.e. within twelve hours of my report time) to have a drink at Carlos' favourite bar, so he vows to find me some dessert. He consults with his dispatcher from work while driving around the city. It's amusingly similar to me trying to get airport information from the FSS while in descent. It's late enough that the best bet turns out to be Dairy Queen, so Carlos pulls up to some young ladies on the sidewalk, cranks the charm up a several notches and gets directions to the nearest. Ice cream doesn't have to be fancy to be good, and this was quick and delicious to get me home in time for my required duty rest.

I remember asking Carlos if he wanted me to hold anything back in my description of the evening, and he said to go ahead and tell it like it was, so I must have been planning to mock him for something, but I've forgotten what it was. Probably his driving. I don't think I screamed at all though, so it's all good.

It's funny sometimes, that a guy doing his best to impress you might not come off as the most impressive, but it makes a girl feel good that he's going to the effort, so in the end she's happy. Carlos was tired and busy, but he postponed some important tasks to make sure I felt welcome and had a great time in Calgary. Yeah, tip for everyone: spend more effort making the person you're with feel important than making them believe that you are important. That takes me right back to some advice I received may years ago from another Albertan: "stop trying to show people how smart you are, and concentrate on letting them see how nice you are." It's a rare friend who will offer constructive criticism that requires them to point out your personality flaws. I don't know where he is now, but if you're out there, K'Harv, you know who you are.

Carlos came to Canada from Colombia and over the past few years I have had the privilege of witnessing his gradual mastery of the English language and his pride in his new country through our e-mail correspondence. He teased me with a put-on accent when I remarked on having expected one. He sounds almost like he was born here now. He's even writing eloquent letters to the CBC, and just had an excerpt from one on climate change read on-air on a province-wide show. You can listen to it via podcast (at minute 20:34), or read the unedited version at his new blog. He notes that the units for the diesel consumption mentioned in the letter read on air should be km/liter, not liters per kilometers.

I'm proud to have friends who stand up and speak out for what they believe in.

Nerdy Flight Planning Question

I seem to spend about an hour a day making flight plans, maybe planning five flights for each one I depart on, because I have to be ready to go now for wherever the weather favours. You'd think after I got the one-way airways sorted out there wouldn't be much to plan, but I have to specify under instrument flight rules what we're going to do on a very non-standard flight. Instead of going from A to B by an efficient route, I'm going from A to a point that I must define precisely, but may depend on the location of the clouds on that day, then hang around in the same reserved airspace for hours, then fly to another arbitrary point to exit, and from there proceed to an airport of landing. An airport that is completely secondary to the purpose of the trip. We really don't care where we land, so long as it is long enough to take off again and they will sell us avgas.

Rather than specifying every photo line, we file "photo blocks" pre-named chunks of sky that you can see if you happen to have an old WAC chart lying around. Photo blocks have names like 093H4, and I file a list of photo blocks with the altitudes we need in each on a special flight plan form, then in the actual flight plan section I write (PHOTO BLOCK) instead of the name of an airway. I can enter the photo block at a conventionally named fix, and I will if there's one handy, but more likely we'll just be entering at an arbitrary point that I specify with latitude and longitude in the form 5100N11230W (ENT). There will be a second fix tagged (EXT) after the photo block, and everything else is like a normal IFR flight plan. Except we don't care where we land, but we still have to put something down.

On an IFR flight plan you specify your true airspeed in one block at the top and I'm used to putting down whatever fiction the manufacturer claims for the aircraft at the flight planned altitude, minus a bit for reality, and just leaving it. ATC knows that I'll climb a bit more slowly, and my initial descent will probably be a bit faster. At least that's how everyone I have flown with files and flies. But there is a mechanism by which you can specify speed changes, and any time you file an altitude change you have to refile your speed anyway, because the format is like this: N175A095 meaning 175 knots at 9,500'. But one day while listening to a departing Westjet flight being given a speed restriction in the climb, I thought about the fact most pilots don't climb into the flight levels by pulling their nose up to Vy with sustainable climb power and waiting patiently. What sufficed on an IFR flight plan down below might not be the best information for one at more rarefied atmospheric strata.

So I called IFR flight data and I asked them how an IFR flight that begins with twenty to thirty minutes of climbing at speeds significantly lower than the aircraft's normal TAS should be filed. The controller had an answer, but I wonder if it would be the same answer across the country and abroad.

What do you think the advice was? Or if you're a controller, what would you expect? I'll tell you what my guy said, in a couple of days.

Hold Short for Crossing Traffic

There's an intersection in my town that needs a crosswalk. In the spring I tracked down the responsible person and asked how one goes about petitioning for a crosswalk. They asked me a few questions, looked up the intersection and told me that they had done a study a few years ago and determined that there was not enough traffic to warrant it, but that they would do a new study once local road construction that temporarily changes traffic patterns was done.

Their clever strategy has been to have continuous construction since then. They're constructing everything but a crosswalk. It's possible that they are doing this because studies have shown that the other things need constructing, and not just to irritate me, as I'm sure it would be cheaper to just paint a crosswalk on the street than to build all this other stuff. That's all I want, a visual marker that shows drivers that there might be someone trying to cross the road here, and that allows pedestrians to choose a good place to cross. It looks from this video to be a pretty quick process.

With a special purpose trough/brush-type tool:

With a spray gun and a steady hand:

There are some very fancy crosswalks in some cities. Here are curved ones. And there's at least one accidental crosswalk to nowhere.

Then I saw this. If all else fails, put up your own. How closely do you think the city tracks crosswalks? If I showed up with a few friends in reflective vests, some orange traffic cones, and some quick-drying white paint, would anyone ever figure out that this wasn't an official crosswalk? Here's an argument against such things. And you can go to jail for it. And I found all those looking for a video someone told me about where a crew is painting the white stripes on a crosswalk, starting from opposite sides of the street. You can guess what happened to the crosswalk, but I can't find the video.

I just got back from work and stuck my SD card in the computer to see my photos, and as suspected the fix was only temporary. Most of the photographs are completely washed out. It's possible that the camera repair shop fixed one thing and broke another, or that the blackness problem has simply remanifest itself in paler tones. Here's the last photo the camera ever took. I believe it's an exciting mountain airport.

So I'm shopping. The IXUS 115 and the ELPH 100, recommended by readers as the successor to the SD10, look to be almost the same camera as each other, maybe in different markets, but they both have the menu buttons where my thumb goes for one handed shots. I know from experience with the borrowed camera that I press those buttons inadvertently and take scenic out the window shots while in macro mode. I'm starting with those suggestions and looking, though. It maybe that an iPhone is what I need to replace camera (broken), cellphone (no bluetooth or cable connection for handsfree or headset interface) and iPod touch (only four years old, but apparently that's ancient in Mac time, and confuses everyone who sees it that it isn't a cellphone). It probably has greater image resolution than the once impressive 4.0 megapixel camera, and it's not like I'll look more nerdy toting an iPhone than an iPod touch, cellphone and camera. If I want to look like an idiot in public places, I can do that without the help of technology.

Always Check NOTAMs

Here's an account of an aviatrix who found that her computer wasn't working to pick up the NOTAMs. She could have called 1-800-WX-BRIEF (this takes place in the USA) and asked, but she hadn't flown in a week and was anxious to get back in the sky. What possible NOTAM could affect her flight in and out of her own backyard strip, in very familiar airspace? She was so used to people admiring her prize-winning airplane that she wasn't fazed by the intercepting F-16s. I won't mention her age, because as the last line of the story mentions, she was a little put out that the FAA released it to the media.

May we all be flying as long, but further from the scrutiny of military aviators.

All I Need To Know

I'm getting teased by my friends for having a tissue-paper airplane, and for making confusing statements like "I hope it rains on Friday so I can go to the park." It's a little odd being in an operation that depends on perfect weather, when many of the real pilot skills are about dealing with imperfect weather. It's also a new thing for me to look at a GFA calling for scattered cloud at 10,000', and have that be unsuitable weather. It's similar to the adaptation you make when you go from VFR flying to IFR flying. In that transition you look at weather that was once unquestionably unflyable and you have to further analyze it to see if the icing en route and the ceilings at destination might still allow flight. I guess in every operation you divide weather into "totally unflyable," "great," and "hmm, lets see if there's a way we can do it." Those two dividers slide around a long way, depending on the nature of the operation and the experience of the pilot.

I was amused by these URLs, which I discovered by accident when I idly typed my guestion of the day into Google's search bar.

http://goingtorain.com/
http://isitgoingtoraintomorrow.com/
and
http://isitgoingtoraintoday.com/

Large print, simple, binary, no complicated decoding. It even detects where I am correctly, except when I'm on VOIP Internet at a shack beside a runway and it thinks I'm in Montréal. I think single purpose URLs like that are hilarious. I regularly visit Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue and I have no idea why. I don't know whether Am I Awesome serves more than one answer, but it said I was "Very" so that's good enough for me.

Where Do I Get My Clearance, Please?

A pilot may not depart on an IFR flight plan into controlled airspace without receiving an IFR clearance from someone air traffic services. Some pilots never have to think twice about where they are going to get their clearance, but they probably always operate from the same few airports and they know the local procedures. The way you get a clearance in Canada can be quite varied, and when the airports you operate out of are that varied sometimes it's tricky.

If it's a busy airport, there may be a dedicated clearance delivery frequency published in the CFS and printed on the departure plate. You tune them up and call for clearance, and if you've filed your flight plan properly they usually have it ready and waiting for you, something like, "ATC clears Flashcube Three to the Peace River airport via the Moose Three departure, flight planned route, maintain 5000', expect higher five minutes after departure, contact departure airborne 125.725, squawk 3671." You copy that all down as they say it, say it all back to them, and when they say, "readback correct" you have a departure clearance.

If there is no clearance delivery frequency, you call ground instead. Both clearance delivery and ground are manned by people in the air traffic control tower at the airport, and often both frequencies will be covered by the same person at once. You discover this when you switch to ground for taxi clearance and get the same guy, or sometimes the clearance delivery guy gives you a taxi clearance with the departure clearance and tells you to monitor ground while taxiing. Ground may send you back to clearance delivery if the IFR data people discover an error in your flight plan, but eventually you switch to tower, who may give you an amendment to your departure or change the assigned departure frequency before clearing you for take off.

If the airport is uncontrolled, but there is still an FSS on the field, you usually call them for your clearance. You include in your request for clearance the runway you intend to depart from, because at an uncontrolled airport the pilot decides that, and that may influence the clearance you receive. They phone IFR data and IFR tells them your clearance, then they read it to you, you read it back to them, they tell you you have it right, and then you have the clearance. After that you just tell the flight service specialist when you're taking off, and off you go.

If there's no FSS on the field, but there's an RCO (Remote Communications Outlet)--a relay that lets you talk to a flight service specialist who is somewhere else--you may call them in exactly the same fashion. Sometimes pilots don't even know whether I'm talking to a remote or local FSS, which can be amusing when they ask "is it okay if i park here?" When I landed at one airport recently I was talking to an FSS specialist as I landed and I asked him when I reported clear of the runway, "do I call you for my clearance in the morning?" He said yes, but when I called his frequency in the morning the specialist working it told me to get my clearance from Centre, unless I couldn't contact them from the ground.

If there is no air traffic services agency reachable at all from the ground, I may be able to get my clearance by phone from the IFR flight planning folk, or possibly through the regional FSS people at 1-866-WX-BRIEF. You just keep calling aviation-related numbers until someone consents to give you a clearance. A clearance received by telephone (and some received by radio) will have a clearance valid time window, so you can use it between two zulu times, but if you miss your window and do not depart by then, you have to call back for a new clearance. So a request for a clearance should include an estimate of when you'll be ready to go, especially if it doesn't match your filed departure time exactly.

If you have no usable frequency and no telephone service, this happens mostly to pilots of amphib aircraft or others who used really remote and unserviced strips, you can't get a clearance before departure. You can then get a clearance in the air, but in that case you have to either depart VFR and remain in VMC until you have received your clearance, or depart on uncontrolled IFR and remain clear of controlled airspace until you have a clearance. Some people do this even when there are facilities on the ground where they could have received a clearance, but they find it to be a time savings. In the US if you do it without even having a flight plan filed it's called a "pop-up clearance" and is not abnormal there, but in Canada filing a flight plan in the air when there were facilities to do it on the ground is considered poor airmanship, and it's rude because it jams the frequency and puts the workload of accepting the flight plan on people who have more urgent work to do. You can see where this is going, with oblivious US pilots annoying Canadian flight service specialists and other pilots when they do here what is perfectly normal at home. As far as I can tell, the standard Canadian behaviour of flying cross-country VFR then calling approach to land VFR at a busy airport is the US equivalent. US controllers really don't seem to like that. Would they prefer me to pick up an IFR clearance before approaching their airspace?

The last option for IFR clearances in Canada is to conduct the entre flight outside of controlled airspace and not have a clearance at all. That's perfectly legal, and an aircraft can transition between IFR and VFR flight just by changing altitude by 500' and changing the transponder code. I haven't done that in a few years.

Beware of Broken Glass

Loyal reader majroj forwarded me this link to an NTSB study on glass cockpits in general aviation. The term "glass cockpit" refers to integrated computerized information screens that augment and take the place of traditional instrumentation and paper documentation both. Instead of the pilot having to look at a paper chart then at separate instruments showing things like altitude, heading, airspeed time, and angular displacement from a selected line, they look at a high resolution screen that combines all that information and computes time en route and descent profile. Twelve years ago these were new shiny toys that some airlines had, and I remember a "hilarious" joke a friend and I had about installing such screens in a tiny two-place airplane. Now they are commonplace. After the initial learning curve, having that much information available seems to represent an enormous decrease in workload and increase in situational awareness. But the NTSB (the agency that investigates air crashes in the United States) didn't find the evidence supported that supposition.

The study compared aircraft of similar age and performance capability, but unfortunately did not control for the fact that people who invest in glass instrumentation use their aircraft differently. The aircraft with conventional instruments were involved in more accidents overall, but fewer fatal accidents, a predictable outcome when it is revealed that the conventional instruments are in airplanes used for flight training, which involves frequent, short, local flights used for flight training, while the glass cockpits were in aircraft flown less frequently but in long distance IFR flights in less ideal weather. Training accidents tend to be runway excursions and botched landings: embarrassing, expensive, but less likely to be fatal, while an accident on an IFR cross country is more likely to involve CFIT or loss of control in icing and thus kill someone.

The study report acknowledges the problem with the comparison, but doesn't appear to have made an attempt to control for it, which is unfortunate. I'd be interested to see a head-to-head comparison of similar flying with and without the modern tools. The integrated screens are fantastic, but the two big dangers I identify are catastrophic failure and tunnel vision, when the pilot gets so caught up in the avionics that they miss the big picture. Ask me if I haven't done that, in the last couple of weeks, and you'll just get an embarrassed mumble from me. People can literally fly into the side of a mountain or mumble mumble bust their assigned altitude while trying to make the little pink line point in the correct direction. When you learn to use conventional instruments, you learn how failures manifest and how to identify them by cross-checking with other instruments. You learn to disregard bogus information from failed instruments, perhaps using exactly the same technique as your flight instructor used to simulate failure in training: putting a post-it note over it. Once the misleading information is removed from your scan, it's gone and you can make decisions using only the believed trustworthy information remaining.

When the information from all the different sensors is processed and presented together, you don't have as smooth a way of removing the faulty information. The computer tries to make sense of conflicting data and while there are circuits and algorithms designed to remove unreliable data from the equation, the loss of control in Air France 447 is probably related to integrated displays reaching incorrect or ambiguous conclusions about the state of the aircraft.

My hypothesis is that if a study were done comparing the safety of similar flights by pilots of similar experience before and after glass cockpits in small GA aircraft they would find an initial increase in safety, followed by a return to pre-glass accident rates, or even worse accident rates. That is, initially they would increase safety, but then people would start taking greater risks. It appears that psychologically people have a certain level of risk tolerance, so if you make something safer, they'll find a way to make it more dangerous again.

The issue the NTSB identified is training. Just because a GPS display requires less interpretation than a VOR, doesn't mean that it needs less training and practice to be proficient and safe in its operation. Probably the opposite. It needs more initial training and more review to get and stay proficient with just one part of that formula, a complex GPS system. I started a while ago documenting my progress towards proficiency with the G530, but I never finished, and am especially guilty for not raving at more length and detail about Max Trescott's GPS and WAAS Instrument Flying Handbook, a book which I highly recommend to anyone using or teaching on the G430/530/1000. I'm never going to finish learning how to use this instrument, but I will post some more about it and the book.

I picked up my unrepairable camera and went to a store look for a replacement. I took out the broken camera and practiced holding and shooting with one hand, to remind myself how small it was and easy to use. I pressed the on button, and pointed it at things. See, easy to balance, and my thumb doesn't change settings while I'm holding it. And I can see my feet in the formerly broken screen.

"Can I help you?" asks the camera counter guy.

"I, uh, came to buy a replacement for this broken camera, but ..."

"Now it works?"

"Yeah."

He looks at it, takes a picture of my happy-my-camera-works smile and agrees that it works.

I guess while putting it back together after determining that they couldn't fix it, they accidentally fixed it. I know it probably won't last long, so I look at the cameras for sale, but none is as tiny. The company doesn't make that kind any more. Anyone have a Canon Power Shot SD10 they are not in love with? Or one that works really well, and which they would like extra batteries and a battery charger for?

More On That Dot

Reader Sarah found this lolcat for me, a perfect laugh at the end of a long day of chasing the red dot, trying to keep it green. Fortunately they can't make me stay late, because we need a sun angle of at least 38 degrees for the work.

It's kind of fun, really, chasing the dots, trying to keep everything as good as it can be, and still having ATC agree to what we ask. And not running out of fuel. And not having to pee before I land. The basics.

Letting Me Down Gently

I like looking at AIM amendments. Even old ones that I should have reported on months ago. Some stuff sits in my buffer and keeps getting bumped until I have a place for it. Every country issues a sort of national pilot's handbook, a combination of sage advice, regulatory requirements, and doorstop. US pilots will be familiar with the FAR/AIM, an annually issued paperback the size of a James Clavell novel. Canada used to have a looseleaf binder about the same size. It was called the AIP--Aeronautical Information Publication--and oh boy amendments were fun back then, because they mailed them out in a sheaf and you had to individually remove the outdated pages and replace them with the new ones. I'm nerdy enough that I kind of enjoyed the ritual, but that doesn't mean I wasn't occasionally a year behind in my amendments.

Some years back, Canada needed to normalize its publications with an ICAO standard that required the AIP to be a document for foreign pilots, containing only ICAO differences, so they changed the name to the AIM (Aeronautical Information Manual), and at the same time they changed the format to 8 1/2 x 11 (that's the standard letter size here, approximately A4) and shortly afterwards started charging for the paper format. I still free update notices electronically and can look at it online.

An amendment that caught my eye was this detail explaining what to include in your flight plan:

RAC 3.16.9 The sentence “INDICATE if aircraft is equipped with a ballistic parachute system.” was added to “N/(REMARKS)”.

It certainly would be relevant to ATC and rescuers to know if the airplane they are looking for could have descended vertically to a survivable landing, or that could pose a hazard to rescuers (thanks, Plastic Pilot). I remember having an aircraft attended by local (non-airport) firefighters after a smoke-in-cockpit incident and they had no aircraft specific training. I showed them where the fuel lines and tanks were located in that airplane, where the battery was and how to shut off the engine and electrical in the cockpit. I know they would simply treat the whole airplane as a dagerous mix of fuel and electrical power, but it was a little startling to realize how little they knew about what they might be dealing with.

I've never flown an aircraft with a ballistic parachute. It's not tempting, even if it were available for aircraft over about 700 kg. My nightmare scenarios are not ones that a parachute would get me out of.

When I'm getting ready to go into town I call to ask if my camera is ready. The guy in the shop says he will call me back. Needing to actually GO into town rather than sit on the couch and wait for the camera guy to call me back, I leave. There's a message to call them. I call them. They have to call me back. This repeats a number of times. I think they have lost the camera. Finally they manage to answer the question. The camera is not lost, but it is not ready either. It is "beyond economical repair." I'll go and get it to get the SD card back, and perhaps I can get another the same and reuse the battery.

Hey, Swimsuits!

I wasn't going to post anything today, so if women in swimsuits and inappropriate-for-the-beach shoes is not your thing, wait until tomorrow and you're not missing anything. If you like to look at pictures of scantily-clad women, then click over here and check out the parade of women with absolutely no bruises or scars. Can you imagine if your job depended on being that flawless? I worry about being in the field scheduled to work and getting diarrhea or coming down with a fever. With a little plastic surgery my belly button could look that perfect. (Ladies, when choosing an obstetrician, ask them to demonstrate their knot-tying skills. I mean honestly how does page three there get that neat perfect dimple in the middle of her belly, when my mother's obstetrician was evidently practising his sheepshank?) But forget belly button envy, I am never going to spend a day with no bruises or scratches anywhere on my body as revealed by a swimsuit.

They're pretty to look at though. I've got a suit kind of like page seven, plus the sense not to wear orange eyeshadow, so I'm way ahead. I'm also glad my job doesn't involve being photographed at the angle shown in number twelve. If you're tall and naturally skinny, go ahead and be a fashion model for a few years. You can use the money to pay for flight school which will allow you to wear more comfortable shoes for your job. You'll still get groped at work, but at least you won't be wearing a bathing suit that's too small and mess of faux pearls.

No actual nudity or toplessness there, but if your workplace is worried about that sort of thing, they might not like swimsuit models either.

Guest Posts

I fairly frequently receive e-mails asking if I accept guest posts for my blog. Almost always these requests are from people with something to sell or promote: people who want to take advantage of the fact that your eyeballs and minds will be on the blog. As far as I am concerned, you guys are not for sale. I'm not in principle opposed to guest posts, and if someone has something to contribute I will give them recognition, but I have standards for what I accept. I'm writing this post not as a solicitation for or warning about upcoming guest posts, but to give my readers a chance to comment on the idea that I might accept them, and so I can simply link to it next time someone asks me if I accept them.

A guest post must be on a topic linked to aviation. If it is a technical topic on which the writer has considerable expertise, that link may be quite tenuous. For example I'd accept a technical post on the production of the multi-layer aluminum sheeting used aircraft skin, on petroleum fractionation, or on the transport of materials to Uranium City for construction of the runway there. It should be well- written and go beyond what I could produce on the same subject with a little research. If it treats a less technical topic, then I would prefer you write a first person account of an interesting aviation experience, something that gives an insider's view. It could be something you'd put on your own blog if you had one, or something you don't want to put on your own blog because it's too embarrassing, but that you'd like to share anonymously.

I'm not interested in posts about ordinary passenger experiences on large commercial aircraft, how to get first class upgrades, exciting places to go on vacation, or the benefits of going to a particular technical college, or anything that reads like an infomercial. I'd welcome a post from a crewmember or controller about an emergency situation, from a customer of a Canadian bushplane operator, from a student describing a first solo or an AME changing a cylinder in the field. If it's a well-written personal account with technical details by a woman in Canadian aviation, then it's probably a homerun. You may include links in the post as necessary to tell the story. Length isn't really important. If it's super short I may throw in a related story of my own or a YouTube link. If it's really long but worthwhile I might split it across more than one post.

I will introduce the guest post, stating my relationship with you, and then at the end I will link to the website you wish to promote and/or to the author's personal website. You keep the copyright, and I don't mind if you simulpost the story to your own blog. I will maintain your anonymity if it's that kind of story.

If you have an idea for something that would fit here, please e-mail me with a specific description so I can give you a go-ahead before you go to any trouble. If you have a product to sell, please include a link to a sample of your writing so I know you don't write like a comment robot. If you're just sharing an experience with nothing to sell, but you happen to write like a comment robot, I can probably fix it up for you.

National Baggage

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

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

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

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

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

Now It's MY Way

My camera still isn't ready. This is like airplane maintenance: they have to wait for the parts to arrive, and can't say when that will be. The DG works, though. They tell us that it was installed incorrectly to begin with, with not enough screws, and there wasn't even a hole for the missing screw. Odd that it worked for so long.

We're going to Vancouver again, but the GFA shows IFR conditions en route with mixed moderate icing to 16,000'. I look at the shape of the forecast areas in space and time, and judge that by my route and at the time I will pass through the area, I will be safe to file at 16,000'. On V304, that one-way airway I was told I couldn't use earlier. At most I expect a few tendrils of ice-bearing cloud above that altitude and I should be able to get a deviation around them.

The actual weather observed for the first part of the route shows the GFA to be startlingly accurate. The brown scalloped line dividing two types of weather went right through the dots representing the three Edmonton area airports that report weather, and overhead Edmonton there's a cloud shield with its edge running so precisely along that line I wonder if I'm in a simulator. I can see the International, half of City Centre and none of Namao. At sixteen thousand I'm also comfortably above the clouds, for now. And the new heater is still working. Groundspeed is low, though. The operator can see the ETA on the GPS and asks about it, because it's a good bit later than I suggested at the departure briefing. "Will we have to stop for fuel?"

"I'm not planning a fuel stop. This should switch to a tailwind as soon as we get into BC."

The clouds rise ahead of us, some convective shapes, which is why the forecast calls for icing even though it's well below freezing. A pilot expects ice in visible moisture (i.e. cloud, mist or rain) when the temperature is close to freezing, because more than a few degrees above zero, water droplets don't freeze and more than ten degrees below freezing and most of the water is already frozen, thus is unavailable to freeze onto your airplane. In convective cloud there is a lot of rapid vertical motion, so liquid water can be churned up from below into the cold levels above. The GFA is again amazingly accurate at forecasting these clouds sitting just at 16,000'. It is a tremendous economic and safety benefit to have such good forecasts. Anyone who works in Edmonton or Montréal putting out these charts, be proud.

A little further on there are a few tendrils of that cloud poking above 16,000'. I flip on the pitot and prop heat before passing through cloud tops, emerging with just a skim of ice on the windscreen and wing leading edges. It's useful to me to note where I see ice first on this airplane. Out in the sunshine again the ice sublimates. I dodge a few tops and then I'm into another cloud for a bit longer. Yeah, I guess now that I know (I believe I have Sarah to thank for the link) that there's ice in there it's time to enact my avoidance plan. I call ATC to climb a couple of hundred feet. They give me a just a moment, then call back with "flight level 200 approved." Uh, that's a bit more than I need. As I apply power to go up I realize what they heard. I explain that I need "two hundred feet" not "FL200" and they assign me 16,000' blocking 17,000'. Perfect. I'm out of all ice and have a nice view and clean wings. There's an overcast in the vicinity of Vancouver that could be interesting, depending on where they hold me. The freezing level is right around the forecast cloud tops. If necessary I can ask for an expedited descent though the region of icing, but I don't expect much, just light rime for a few hundred feet. It will be warm enough below to melt any accumulation off before final.

The headwind switches to a tailwind, an even better one than I had planned on. We'll be a little bit early. The clouds are thinning a little and I can see mountain tops poking through. It's hard to believe that we're over 2000' above the minimum obstacle clearance altitude. The rocks look to be right there. They always do, whenever you fly an IFR procedure in visual conditions, too. The controller asks me if I'm done with the altitude block and I am. The clouds are lower and this type of cloud shouldn't have ice at this altitude, either.

I've put the en route frequency up on COM1, my listening radio and am looking for a good FSS frequency to call to find out what to expect at Vancouver when the operator starts reading me METARs off his iPhone. Is this the way of the future? The FSS won't have anything more current than the METARs, so I try Vancouver's ATIS. I'm still too far out, but at least I have it tuned and ready.

I review the published arrivals for Vancouver and after the next frequency change tell the controller I'm ready for a descent. I'm not pressurized, so it would be nice not to have to dive for the airport at the end. He gives me a couple of descents, first down to fourteen thousand then ending at ten thousand feet, which is just above the cloud deck, and just at freezing. I'm laughing. Everything below me is above freezing, so I don't need to worry about ice on the descent. The controller tells me information charlie is current, and to expect a runway eight.

I'm still unable the ATIS, and I already have a post-it flagging the non-RNAV arrival for the 08s at YVR. I flag and review the ILS for 08R, the runway that goes to the non-secure side of Vancouver airport. I'm coming down V304 towards the airport, but so is everybody and I'm slow. They vector me off the airway, to the north which is a little unnerving, because I'm in IMC and that's where the mountains are, but then they vector me south, to the other side, and then east, away from the airport, descending me to 5000', then 3000', then another vector then another. I hear them advice an American Airlines that they are doing a runway change, so I pull up the approach plates and find the pages for the other end of the runways. The controller tells me to expect 26R, that's the big girls' runway. I tune and identify the ILS and accept another vector, and a descent clearance to 2000', which I'm told to expedite, then another runway change to 26L. I intercept the localizer and am immediately visual and cleared to land. You know, I'm glad I have the autopilot. That was a crazy disorienting set of vectors.

It's actually quite nice at the airport. The weather is all to the east. That's good, because we have work out to the west. Tomorrow.

There's a Comfort Inn right near the airport, but like most of the places I stay, I don't have a chance to enjoy more amenities than the bed and the internet, which tells me the weather will be good again tomorrow, so I should be prepared for an early start.

Duty Time Math

I've questioned before the exact meaning of the rule restricting flight time when single pilot IFR is conducted. Amongst a long list of how many hours a pilot can fly in a year, 18 days, 90 days, month, week and day, there is this:

720.15(1)(a) where the flight crew member conducts single-pilot IFR operations, 8 hours in any 24 consecutive hours

Does that mean that if I ever fly IFR I may never log more than eight in twenty-four? No. Now I have an official interpretation. It only matters what you have done in the last 24 hours, so you can log twelve hours on Monday, have Tuesday off, and then fly eight hours of SPIFR on Wednesday. But you can't depart IFR on Monday, cancel fifteen seconds after departure, and then fly eight hours and one minute VFR. This could be a legitimate problem, considering all the times that the controllers get confused and give us IFR departures in VFR flight.

GUIDANCE: Where the flight crew member conducts single-pilot IFR flights, the flight crew member's total flight time, in all flights conducted by the flight crew member, will not exceed 8 hours in any 24 consecutive hours. In determining if this limitation applies to a given situation, this question must be asked - did the flight crew member conduct single-pilot IFR flights? Yes or no. If the answer is yes, the flight crewmember is limited to 8 hours of flight time in any 24 consecutive hours. The length of time spent conducting single-pilot IFR flights is irrelevant. If the pilot flew a departure under IFR and then cancelled IFR and flew the rest of the day under VFR - the answer is still yes and the 8-hour flight time limit applies.

The limitation is intended to prevent cockpit fatigue and applies to flight time not duty time. Interestingly, if you departed VFR and got an IFR clearance prior to entering Class A airspace the limitation would start then.

So imagine I flew a five hour IFR mission on Monday, cancelled IFR through 12,500' at 00Z, and landed. If I departed at 1430Z the next morning on an IFR clearance, I'd be illegal after three hours. So imagine I flew a five hour IFR mission on Monday, cancelled IFR through 12,500' at 00Z, and landed. If I departed at 1430Z the next morning, even on a VFR clearance, I'd be illegal after three hours: the regulation says any 24-hour period and during the period 1731Z-1731Z I would have flown eight hours and one minute, including some IFR flying.

But if on Monday the mission was all VFR, from 19-00Z, I could start flying VFR on Tuesday at 1430Z, no problem. Then if I were offered an IFR clearance, as I have been because the controllers like it better, I'd have to decline it at 1730Z, because that would put me IFR with more than eight hours logged in the last 24. If that Tuesday morning flight were only three hours long, I could accept an IFR clearance again at the time I took off on Monday, because then the previous five hour flight would start expiring at the same rate I was logging new time, so I'd be legal until about 00Z, when Tuesday's logged time reached eight hours.

Fortunately, we have an op spec (exception) to this rule for our operation.

I got a hold of the camera place, and they say they can fix the camera for $95. It's a bit of cash, but I really, really like that camera (a Canon PowerShot SD10) and I haven't seen anything that measures down (it's tiny), so I gave them the go ahead. They couldn't tell me when it would be ready, though.

Unwarranted Apocolyptic Speculation

The Federal Aviation Administration is the United States agency responsible for air traffic control, aviation permits and licensing, regulatory enforcement and other air safety roles. It's kind of like Transport Canada and Nav Canada rolled into one. They are a government body, a subsidiary of the US Department of Transportation, so natually they are federally funded. The federal bill (bill as in proposed legislation, not as in a really, really large denomination banknote) that provided funding to the FAA expired almost four years ago, so ever since the agency has been financed through a series of twenty temporary extensions to that bill, as the parties involved haven't been able to reach a new long term agreement.

I would tell you what the contentious point was in the negotiations, but after so many iterations, it may be that the issues on the bill that won't pass are not the original issues. To prevent a bill from passing, or to force passage of legislation that opponents would otherwise vote down, American politicians can attach tangentially related riders to each others bills, and also name them, so that a bill proposing that no one under twenty-one be permitted to have a e-mail account could be called the "Anyone who opposes this bill is a pedophile bill of 2011" or a bill forbidding convicted pedophiles from working in ice-cream trucks could have a rider attached to it that forbade teaching kids under twelve what a condom was. So the people are discouraged from voting down either hypothetical bill lest they be branded pedophilephiles. My information on U.S. politics is largely derived from late night comedy shows, so check the comments for knowledgeable Americans explaining how this system makes sense.

Anyway, the new FAA funding bill seems to be held up by a point of labour relations, that would return airline and railroad workers to an older system of voting to form unions. The old system allowed unionization in a airline workplace only if a majority of eligible voters vote yes. That is, anyone who doesn't bother to vote is counted as a no. That sets apathy to the employers' advantage and seems to me to be open to abuse through intimidation, because employers can identify the unionizers through who attends the polls, so it jeopardizes the idea of secret ballot. The new system, only recently ruled valid, allows employees of airlines and railroads to form a union by a simple majority of only those voting. That goes too far in the other direction, in my opinion, because it allows a small group of committed unionizers to take advantage of widespread apathy and establish a union that wasn't generally wanted. I would propose a compromise that requires both a majority of votes cast, and a majority of the eligible voters to turn out. After all, if the majority of the workers can't be arsed to go to the polls to change their working conditions, I'm thinking those working conditions can't be so bad. It's still open to intimidation or employer tricks--e.g. manipulating shifts--to keep people from voting, but it avoids assigning opinions to people who didn't express them. The Democrats (the leftmost of the two main American parties) don't want to go back to the old way, so they want the labour issue removed from the bill, thus are preventing that bill from passing.

In retaliation, or some differently-worded political version thereof, the Republicans (the rightmost most of the two parties) have worded the twenty-first iteration of the extension to the old FAA funding bill to include a provision eliminating federal subsidies for airline service to thirteen rural airports, including of course airports in the constituencies of some prominent Democrats. I note that requiring market-based prices for service from rural airports would not cut people off from food or medical attention without air service. These are places like Ely, Nevada (four hours drive from Las Vegas or Salt Lake City), Glendive, Montana (three and a half hours out of Billings) and Morgantown, West Virginia (an hour and a half drive from Pittsburgh), all on paved, year-round highways. Each of those towns has its own hospital and real grocery stores. Morgantown seems pretty odd to be on that list. I think there are people in Toronto who have to drive more than an hour and a half to get to an airport with scheduled service. And the non-subsidized fares are dirt cheap. I found a round trip from Billings to San Francisco for $118! There must be some historical reason for the subsidies.

All of the above is ignorable background to what I think is the most interesting point, that if the dispute isn't resolved, the FAA's operating authority would expire. Air traffic controllers are deemed an essential service and would continue to work, but 32,000 other FAA employees: presumably inspectors, examiners, file clerks, janitors, approach designers, dangerous goods safety coordinators and all manner of other people I'm not thinking of would be out of work. I found it especially interesting that with the FAA losing its mandate in that way, they would also lose the ability to levy and collect fees. People I know in the appropriate level of US airlines are actually looking at ways to refund or stop charging FAA fees if this happens.

I'm pretty sure the delay is just a game of political chicken, and that the deadlock may be broken by the time this even posts, but it's kind of freaky to think that this is the way a country would go from a world power to a failed state. One by one government agencies would lose their ability to function. While a lot of what any given agency does might be unneeded bureaucracy, once the normal way to get a pilot licence has gone away, you'd presumably get one by paying a guy who kept the machine that prints them after his last paycheque bounced. Or maybe they'd consolidate and transfer the authority to another overworked agency, until the police or the military run everything.

Please forgive me, south-of-the-border (and north of the other one) readers for mangling your political system. Blame the news media, summer heat, and the desire to post this before it became entirely irrelevant, as opposed to after doing sufficient research.

No Photos Today

The only thing clear about the morning is that it's clear we won't be getting any photos taken, and tomorrow's forecast isn't any better, plus there's that thing where we can't get into the military airspace on weekdays, so we fly home. About fifteen minutes before landing I put my fingers on the DG to reset it to the compass (yes, I really, really miss slaved gyros) and the knob turns but the card inside doesn't. The DG (directional gyro) consists of a vertically mounted card with the cardinal compass directions N 3 6 E 12 15 S 21 24 W 30 33 N all around the outside, and intermediate large and small hash marks every ten and five degrees in between. It is stabilized by an air-driven gyroscope, a wheel that rotates vertically around a horizontally-mounted axis. The gyroscope is connected to the card through a series of gears, such that when the airplane turns, the gyroscope remains in the same orientation and thus turns the card. This works okay, but if you turn a lot it gets out sync, and friction plus relocation over the Earth result in precession with time, as well. You address this by resetting it every fifteen minutes, or any time you are about to use it for navigation. To reset it, you press and turn a knob, which is supposed to disengage the card from the gears and allow you to turn it. Only it doesn't. I finish the flight and land with it slightly off, then write it up.

I call the camera shop about my little camera and they say they will call me back, but they don't do so before closing time. It's frustrating not to have it. I have borrowed a camera, but it's bigger, so harder to take the one-handed shots I usually take while flying, (I keep accidentally putting my fingers on the other buttons and programming it to do unknown things) and more likely not to be close at hand when I see something I want to photograph, because it doesn't fit in my little bag with my wallet.

On the bright side, I discovered a new food: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca. It has a name that makes you say, "Wait, what?" if you know the first thing about a Romance language--or at least the first thing most people seem to learn--but it's amazingly good. By leaving out some of the things I always put in spaghetti sauce and putting in some I hadn't considered I get deliciousness. My recipe is from Wikibooks, where it also explains plausibly the eyebrow-raising name. I used the Neopolitan version, because it gave me an excuse to have Neopolitan ice cream for dessert, and I'm always on the lookout for ice cream eating excuses.

Lazio's recipe

Ingredients
600 grams (21 ounces) of spaghetti
50 grams (1.75 ounces) of butter
3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
6 unsalted anchovy fillets, crushed into a paste (omit anchovies for Neapolitan version)
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
200 grams (7 ounces) of black olives, pitted and chopped
1 tablespoon of salted capers, washed well and coarsly chopped
1 to 3 small dried chili peppers, chopped (optional)
600 grams (21 ounces) plum tomatoes, peeled and puréed
1 tablespoon of chopped parsley
salt

Procedure
Put the following in a skillet: butter, olive oil, garlic and anchovy paste.
Before the garlic browns, add the olives, capers, tomato sauce and chili peppers.
Add two to three pinches of salt, mixing at high heat.
Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti in salt water (at least 4 quarts of water per pound of spaghetti being cooked). Strain it when it's al dente. Place it in a large serving bowl and coat it with sauce. Then sprinkle it with chopped parsley.
Mix and serve hot.

I'd show you a picture but ...

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If you like delicious food, you might want to grow your own, but according to this news article it is illegal to do so in Oak Park, Michigan. You can grow grass that will never even be harvested for animal fodder, but not vegetables. I'd rather see people jailed for expending resources and applying pesticides and fertilizers to raise, harvest and discard weekly crops of useless lawn grass.

Oil Exploration

I wake up in the middle of night for no particular reason. Probably a noise in the strange hotel room. I take this opportunity to check the GFA. It looks bad, not bad for normal pilots, but bad for high altitude photo flights. I also check NOTAMs for the areas we want to work. There's an easy thirty minutes worth of firefighting areas, temporary military operations areas and airways changes to transcribe. Does anyone amend their charts with all the changeover point amendments and MEA gaps? Gah, why do I set myself up to let company do this to me with so little preparation time before reporting?

One of the issues is a NOTAMed expansion of military airspace. Wait a sec. It's June. It's the time of year for Operation Maple Flag. Why am I always caught operating in northeastern Alberta during Maple Flag? It's an international air force games week hosted by Canada, because we have these vast swathes of airspace hardly anyone is using, and because it's always "mess up Aviatrix with the crazy NOTAMs" week around here. The NOTAMs actually aren't that bad, and then a little Googling reveals why. Maple Flag is cancelled this year because our forces are stretched thin overseas. It's not unprecedented. It was cancelled in 1990 when we were overextended in Bosnia, too. Man, Bosnia was a long time ago. I hope we did some good there and that people's lives are better as a result.

I go back to sleep and then I'm woken at 6 a.m. to be told we're not flying today. Joy. I get up anyway and try to get ahead on the work. My flight planning software is hung again. "Windows is checking for a solution to the problem." Has anyone ever had Windows find a solution to the problem? A guilty note to two different people who have sent me flight planning software to beta test: I really do need better software and I really did intend to use it, but even though the front end load of installing it and learning to use it would probably be amortized by a few sessions of waiting for this one to finish crashing or having to hand code a waypoint for an airport it's never heard of (how can it not know where Moose Jaw is?), I stick with the devil I know. A personality flaw perhaps.

I'm supposed to plan a flight in the "Christian Lake" area, but as far as I can tell, Christian Lake is a moody-looking male model. You can Google him if you like that sort of thing. It must go by a different name locally.

I call back the armed forces unit that controls the airspace I want to go play in. I get transferred and am soon talking to the gentleman who actually wrote the notation I'm reading on the chart, and as he discusses it I realize that I misread it. I'm so used to seeing things that say XXXXZ-YYYYZ MON-SAT that I didn't notice that this one says 1400Z MON-0100Z SAT, O/T by NOTAM. In other words rather than being active days Monday through Saturday, it's active day and night from Monday morning to Friday evening. Friday evening is Saturday morning in UTC. So we're good on Saturday and Sunday. But what about weekdays, if we need it?

During the week, the officer tells me, that airspace is occupied by "25 year olds with fighter jets". He says, "You couldn't pay me to fly there on a weekday." He is kind, friendly and polite, but also forceful, authoritative and knowledgeable. Again I admire the training that puts him there. Apparently it also equips a man to be a sharp dresser, in the absense of a savvy sister or a gay best friend.

I tell him I was told specifically that we had permission to operate in the restricted area, does he have any idea how that might be registered. I can pretty much see him shake his head over the telephone. "I wish I could give you permission to do that, but it's not safe." I convey this back to company, explaining that it's not that I don't trust them or the client to have obtained permission, but clearly this gentleman is the one in charge and he says it's neither safe nor authorized, so I'm not going. Tomorrow is the weekend, however, so we can stand down from that confrontation until the work needs to be done on a weekday. We decide to relocate to the nearest airport to the work, so we can get it done more efficiently tomorrow.

We get a taxi back to the airport and the operator asks about the drunk driver going off the road, just to give another person the opportunity to describe the excitement, and to hear how much the story varies from person to person. The described spot is the same, but this time the marks on the embankment are from hauling the car out, and the car went over into the ditch from the other side, where there is concrete.

The airplane needs some more oil. I'm down to my last couple of quarts, and I will need more before the weekend. I looked for a case to put on board before we left home, but we were out, and it was too early in the morning to buy one. The CFS says "All" grades of aviation oil are available here, but the fueller says they don't sell oil. There are a couple of airports along our route of flight that also list oil, so I ask the operator--he's a licenced pilot and has a company cellphone--to call and confirm. I don't know why I didn't just borrow his phone. It's almost comical watching him learn what I know about the telephone numbers listed for "airport operator" in the CFS: many of them connect to city hall, leaving you talking to a receptionist who has no idea about the airport. You have to ask for a number for an airport manager, and often there isn't really one. City mowing crews go out there once a week and mow the grass; city paving crews go out there in the spring and seal the pavement cracks in the apron; someone in purchasing goes out to check the levels in the fuel tanks and order more fuel when required and no one knows what to do about the smashed taxiway lights. We must have called five airports, many of which required two or three calls to get someone who could give a definitive answer and none of them could supply us with the oil. Finally I picked one with flight training and lots of general aviation. A detour, but I was sure we could get oil there. "Do you want me to call?" I offer belatedly. He prefers to do it, to finally get some closure on this asking for oil thing. And he gets a definite and friendly yes.

I file a quick flight plan, because the stopover airport is in Edmonton's terminal area and I don't want to have to go through the trouble of figuring out how to get a VFR code another way. I pull numbers out of my hat for how long it will take, and blast off for oil. I get excellent service from Edmonton terminal as always. They are busy and have to cope with traffic ranging from gliders to students to international flights, but they rarely play the "too busy" card and generally help with efficient flights. Terminal competently gives me altitudes I need for a comfortable descent and then hands me off to tower. Tower has a slower airplane in the circuit, but they just move him over to right hand circuits and clear me to a left downwind. I land and then ground asks me what I'm looking for. I name the FBO and indicate unfamiliarity and they give me perfect directions.

There's a taxiway leading into their apron area so I clear the main taxiway, enter and turn around. I must emphasize do this when operating in congested areas: don't go in without a plan to get out, and execute your plan before the environment changes or you can get stuck. We jump out and explain we're the ones looking for oil, only to find that the guy who could sell us the oil has just left. "Left as in left for lunch or as in left for the weekend?" I ask. The fellow isn't sure, but he has the grade of oil we want and he'll hapily sell it to us. We don't have cash, so he takes an IOU. Yeah, aviation is great. People are really like that. Company would have sent him a cheque the same day, except that when the camera operator goes to give the details to the person who writes the cheque, he discovers that the guy with the oil didn't put his name or company on it, just the address. We call back on Monday and get the name, so don't worry, he didn't get stiffed.

We call back ground ready to go, and they give us a different runway, just to keep us out of the way of the students in the circuit. They don't even give us a transponder code, just a take off clearance, so I guess it's not mandatory here anyway, so away we go. Once we're airborne and tower is just about to hand us off to terminal they remember the code. Punch it in (I love love love digital transponders, they save only a few seconds each time, but they are heads down seconds in busy airspace that I can really use for something else), radar identified and over to terminal who give me everything I ask for, even though I change my mind after discovering the first requested altitude is hella bumpy. The operator says he doesn't mind, but let him have one non-miserable flight.

We touch down at destination three minutes after the filed time. Why do I bother doing flight planning properly when I can make up numbers this good without? It's because I've done so much flight planning that I know what the numbers should be, somehow without even knowing how I'm doing it. I love this. I suppose whatever your job is you know things that you can't see a way you could have known, but you know it because you're experienced.

I have been to this airport before, but when I land I feel disoriented, like the apron is on the wrong side. I have no memory of this fuel pump. I look at the CFS and the apron is on the wrong side. Oh crap. Are there two airports at this town and I'm at the wrong one? Exact right time to exact wrong place? No, the larger forestry apron is just more prominent on the CFS diagram and I can hardly see it from here. I didn't fuel last time I was at this airport. And look, there's a familiar terminal behind that jet. It just looks different because there was snow on the ground last time I was here. We call the number in the CFS and the fueller comes out of a building and sells us gas, giving us a heads up that there's no fuel available tomorrow. Good To Know.

I park and then go inside the terminal, grinning as I wait for the operator's reaction. It's ordinary on the outside, but gorgeous on the inside, with comfy chairs, a big screen TV, decorations, like a fancy clubhouse. There are also two other pilots inside, also appreciating his reaction. They are on a hold, having flown some people up for the day to play golf. Round of golf, dinner and drinks and back home. How the other half, or rather other one percent, lives, eh?

Meanwhile we may be joyriding. The forecast is significantly different that when we left, and tomorrow may not be good here either. The operator texts company to see if they want us to go home instead of staying here, so we sit and talk to the pilots D. and C. while we wait for a response. They also didn't know about the one-way airway by Vancouver. D. says he knows of one one-way route, but only because it's where he trained. IFR routing should not be a code based on local knowledge. There should be a definitive list of these things somewhere. We all watch a vampire movie, or maybe a vampire subplot on a daytime TV show, we're not paying too much attention, and then share a cab into town.

The plan was to drop our bags off at a hotel then continue to a restaurant, but our hotel is very slow. One of them is dealing with other customers and the other on the phone. We wait. There's one more person ahead of us, who is slowly dealt with. They have free cookies, so I grab a couple and run them out to our buddies in the cab, telling them it's okay to bail on us if they want, but they aren't in a hurry. We wait. The clerk then comes to us but can't deal with two rooms on one credit card. She turns out to be new and in training, and the trainer goes over what she should do, ever-so-slowly. They will not cut us a break. "Can we just leave our bags here, and pick them up later when the room is ready?" Can they give us the keys and finish the paperwork while we run our bags upstairs? No. No keys until paperwork complete. When I get my room card I bolt upstairs only to discover when I get there that the key doesn't work. Bet she did it on purpose to punish me for being an impatient bitch. Oh well.

The restaurant is okay and we all have a good chat and dinner. They leave first and then when we're done we can't get a cab. Not a single one answers. So we walk about four kilometres back to the hotel. Whatever. Maybe we'll get to take some pictures tomorrow.

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Many of you will enjoy following this blog, written by a pilot training under the British system, and shortly to be a Dash-8 FO. He blogs about the kind of day-by-day detail that I do, and gives you a good idea what it's like learning to fly and progressing onward from there. He'll be flying bigger airplanes than I've ever flown by the time he has less time than I had before I was paid to fly anything bigger than a C172. I explained to him that I hate him, but it's not his fault.

Carmageddon

The public works folk in California closed down a very busy section of the I-405 for a weekend, and the predicted resulting traffic snarls were termed Carmaggeddon by the media. This merits a blog post here because air carrier JetBlue seized the opportunity to get some publicity, by advertising four dollar flights between the Bob Hope Airport at Burbank and Daugherty Field at Long Beach: opposite ends of the closed section of highway. The flight distance direct is 30 miles, but the flight was blocked at 45 minutes to allow time for taxiing and manoeuvring.

A local cycling club decided to challenge the airline to a race, and JetBlue took up the gauntlet. The challenge for the competitors was to get from a North Hollywood intersection (Burbank is the Hollywood airport), to the aquarium in Long Beach. Passengers had to drive to the BUR airport, park, check in an hour before the flight, clear security, board, take the flight and then cab to the aquarium. Cyclists just had to ride the whole way.

Here's the route filed (pale dashed) and flown (green) by the JetBlue A320. It's a little convoluted, but my sources tell me that was for safety. It's very busy low-level airspace with lots of amateur weekend pilots, so they arranged a route that would keep them in class B (the US equivalent of Canadian class C) airspace the entire way. Everyone in the airspace was required to have a transponder and a clearance, and maintain a constant listening watch with ATC. The airborne portion of the flight lasted only twelve minutes, but not having had to drive to the airport or submit to screening, the cyclists reached the destination about an hour before the airline passengers. Another race participant who took public transit arrived midway between the other two teams.

It all sounds like fun. I've operated out of Burbank (excellent FBO service, restrictive noise abatement regulations and insanely expensive hotels) and driven on I-405, but I found a back road to where I was going that I found more pleasant and interesting, despite having a few traffic lights. If a journey takes the same amount of time in a car or bike, unless the weather is very unpleasant, I usually prefer to take a bike. I don't think I've ever made an aircraft trip that would have been faster by bike, though. Maybe, if I count the times I've waited three days for suitable weather.