Giving Up Sleep for Lent

I'm working nights at the moment. So I go to bed in the morning darkness, sleep in with the phone off and a sort of anti-alarm clock telling me "don't get up until" some time in the afternoon that varies with the nighttime natural phenomenon we're currently tracking. That probably sounds like we're following the migration of vampires, but vampires are not migratory, at least not in Canada. And I don't fly an all-black Skymaster with a red interior.

I try to make the next day's to-do list before going to sleep and I succeeded yesterday. Today's list starts with "sleep". While I'm perfectly fine with an official shift to my duty day start, apparently my to-do day always starts in the morning. I tick off item number one and check my e-mail. Non-committal comments from the client team. I'm not sure they realize that my life revolves around them at the moment, that I have people I'd see and places I'd go if they would be a little more definite about when they need a pilot and when they don't. But my job is to be available for their flights, so I can't tell them to poop or get off the pot.

I check the GFA and the TAFs for the area we'll be working in. The forecast looks, well as non-committal as my clients. It might work out. It probably won't. The next forecast will tell. I look at the actual reported weather, the METARs. Pretty close to the corresponding TAFs so far, maybe a little worse. And one METAR includes a code in the remark section. LENT. Huh? Yeah, it is Lent, almost, but that's an ecclesiastic phenomenon, not a meteorological one. Oh I know what it must be. I check it in one of my favourite Nav Canada publications, the MANAB. It's my favourite because its name is consistent with its contents: aviation abbreviations that make sense in context but are sleekly obscure if you don't know. It's fun to work them out. FROIN. PVLNC. NECLY. GSVLK. They're like airway fixes. I was right. LENT designates lenticular clouds, a sign of mountain wave activity.

I don't think that will affect our proposed flight, but you never know. I've finished my breakfast. Blogging wasn't on my list. I could use a nap, though.

Yes, Master

There's a thing that has existed ever since I started flying, called a "master flight plan". It means that the Flight Services personnel have the aircraft "on file", which in turn means that when I call up to file a flight plan, as soon as I give the ident, the specialist knows the details of the type of airplane, what colour it is, your onboard navigation equipment, what kind of survival equipment we carry and how many life rafts we have. With a master flight plan on file, then while filing a flight plan for a particular trip, I need specify only the details that changes from flight to flight. They'll even keep the names and licence numbers of several pilots on file for any given plane, so I give my name and they can fill in the licence number. This is really convenient when filing a flight plan over the radio, which I have to do sometimes.

I sometimes need to modify the master flight plan. While filing a specific flight plan the briefer might ask, "I have a 'Graham' on file. Is that you?" I can tell her that Graham no longer works here, and get her delete him and add me and my licence number to the master. Other changes might be to tell them we've upgraded the instruments and now have RVSM capability, or put the aircraft on floats for the summer. I don't suppose anyone has ever pranked someone by calling up and changing their filed aircraft colour to pink polka dots.

Yesterday the flight services specialist couldn't find the aircraft I filed. It happens from time to time. I called up today to see if it was still lost, or if it was just a glitch. Nope, still not there. It must have expired, she says. Would I like to create a new master flight plan? Yes, yes I would. It's online now. I go to the Nav Canada site to do that. I have to create an account.

Now a number of you are wondering, "Is this really Aviatrix, or my grandmother?" because how can a pilot live in the world today and not have online flight planning mastered? Weeelll, it's because we generally file very special flight plans. Flight plans that need direct communication, and often negotiation, yea even bribes to the relevant Area Control Centre. But that's a topic for another time. I have to create an account.

The site requires me to:

Choose a username
Create a security question and answer
Specify a password (twice)
Submit the application
Receive an email
Click the link therein
Specify a phone number and choose whether to receive a voice or text confirmation code
Enter that confirmation code
Log in with the username and password

So, a bit more security than before. The days of being able to virtually repaint someone's airplanes are apparently over. I follow all those steps and am given the choice of creating a Flight Plan or a Flight Template. The template allows me to specify whatever I want for the defaults for every field in the flight plan, which is kind of cool. So people who fly the same airplane to different places can fill in all the airplane details and leave the route blank. Those who fly different airplanes to the same place by the same route can do the opposite.

Canadian flight plans are different from US ones and don't conform exactly to ICAO standards either. Different geography, different types of aviation, different needs. There are some bugs. For example, to enter the letter codes for various types of navigation equipment I can enter it as SDFG/C or I can click on a symbol beside the entry field and get a popup window in which I can select individual checkboxes next to VHF, VOR, ILS, ADF and GNSS. But I can't exit that window and return to the form. I have to reset the whole form and start over to escape. As I work my way through the familiar fields I see a new one: the Tracking URL. I'll let Nav Canada explain it to you.

Many pilots are now using GPS tracking units, such as Spot or Spidertracks, which convey position information automatically to satellite based receivers and to a unique website address (the ‘Tracking URL’). Information about the location of the GPS tracking unit can be found on the internet using this URL.

Pilots want to include the Tracking URL with their flight plan information.

Prior to this release of NAVCANplan such URLs could not be included in flight plans or flight plan templates as they often contained lowercase letters and reserved words such as ‘com/’. NAVCANplan will now accept the full Tracking URL in the flight plan form.

To be included in the flight plan, the full URL is entered into the Tracking URL field

If you're a non-geeky reader of this blog (apparently there are some) and you have persevered this far (well done) hoping for a good bit, then here you are: ATC for birds. That's your reward. The rest is just geeky rambling. Nav Canada continues:

NAVCANplan automatically transforms it into a shortened, uppercase alias to the original URL. For example, https://www.findmespot.com/tE9HeFE8uIj534R becomes HTTPS://PLAN.NAVCANADA.CA/U/YHTJA.

The shortened URL is not visible on the flight plan or flight plan template forms.

The shortened URL is included in transmitted flight plans in the Survival Equipment Remarks section (i.e. included in field 19 as part of N/).

The shortened URL is also included for pilots and dispatchers in the Details view of the flight plan.

The shortened URL is included in FIMS flight plan templates in the Survival Equipment Remarks section (i.e. included in field 19 as part of N/).

When the shortened URL is accessed, the request is redirected to the original Tracking URL.

The alias between Tracking URL and a shortened URL is created when a flight plan is filed and when a flight plan template is saved.

This all suggests to me that the web interface is still talking to an underlying flight plan processing engine so ancient that it ONLY KNOWS ABOUT CAPITAL LETTERS. I wonder when it was first programmed. It doesn't seem that complex from here, but I suspect it interacts with radar computers and other programs that range so dramatically through the ages that they're terrified to touch it. All the information about how and where the URL turns up isn't really important to the user. I think it's in there mainly because they're bursting with pride for having figuring out how to shoehorn a URL into the data despite the limitations of the way it's stored.

I think birds probably do crash into one another now and again, but they are softer and slower so they keep flying.

How Men Pack

Back before I got fed up trying to find time to blog, I was attempting to write an entry on the hazards of wearing the same pair of shoes sixteen hours a day for weeks on end, and on the mysterious ability my male co-workers have to have everything they need weigh only five kilograms. Now I can follow up.
I don't think it's a really case of my needing more outfits. I wear the same clothing in the airplane as I do to dinner, and I think the guys bring workout gear just as I do. Or maybe they just wear the same clothes. Men can wear workout shorts in a northern town in public without being asked for their rates. They don't need to change bras before going from the airplane to a 15 km run. (For those who don't know, a workout bra is too tight to wear for hours sitting in the plane, but a sitting-in-the-plane bra doesn't provide enough support for running. They should make a bra that instantly adapts to its surroundings, like those Transitions sunglasses, so an ordinary bra instantly becomes a sport bra in turbulence). Another part of it is that the men aren't in the field as long as I am, so can probably get away with one pair of pants and a pair of shorts. The reason they out as long is that they company calls and tells them they are being swapped out, like they have just done. There is no commercial air service from where we are, so I fly to a larger airport and taxi in towards the terminal.
Every airport works a little differently for airside security. Some of them anyone can go anywhere. Some everyone inside the fence has to have an escort or a badge, and some are divided into zones. This one has zones, I think. I tell the controller I have a passenger with baggage to drop off at the terminal, where can I stop? He tells me in no uncertain terms that the terminal gate parking is a restricted area. I acknowledge this, trying to imbue my reply with a calm tone of calm "I would never go in there, sir," referring to the secure zone I can't yet see around the terminal. There's probably a painted line or something. I negotiate permission to shut down briefly near an airside exit gate that is only a short walk from the public entrance to the terminal. In addition to his meagre luggage, my guy has some heavy company equipment to lug home, containing the fruits of our labours.
I offer to help him carry it into the terminal but he's fine, and I let him know it's okay to leave anything he wants in the airplane. That's another reason why they have less baggage. One learns in one's first romantic breakup and has reinforced frequently throughout an aviation career: when you walk away, make sure you have everything with you, because it's really hard to get it back otherwise. There's a pair of hip waders in rear cargo that the guys share, and a pair of thongs--that's the shoes, not the underwear--that belong to someone. On this occasion he says he doesn't have anything but I prompt for the stuff I might forget, "Do you have a knife? Leatherman? Spare laptop battery? Toiletries over 100 mL?"
"No," he says. And this is the part, besides penises, where men are different than women, "I don't bring any of that. I find the hotel-provided toiletries sufficient."
This awes me. Sure he doesn't have any make up with him, but neither do I. Well maybe one lipstick. He's not carrying any sunblock, let alone a different kind of sunblock for his face, as for his arms and hands. He carries moisturizer lotion neither for day nor night, neither for face nor other parts of his body. He uses the mysterious shampoo and conditioner provided by the hotel on his actual hair. He probably has a little mini tube of toothpaste that wouldn't last three weeks, and isn't available in the for-sensitive-teeth brand I prefer. He doesn't need a little bottle of special soap for washing compression socks. He shaves without cream or lotion, or maybe he uses soap for that. Hotel soap. I wish him a good flight, in a subdued kind of way, and get a message that his replacement won't be arriving on the same plane he is going out on, so I should go to the hotel on my own.
I start up and taxi past the terminal, staying clear of the secure area, and waving at the windows, in case he can see me. I park at the FBO and cab to the hotel where I discover that the can of shoe deodorizer has let go in my luggage, filling its plastic bag with nicely scented white powder and leaving no propellant in the can. This is what I meant in the previous entry about "in case it explodes". They're designed with a relief valve, so they don't actually explode explode, they just vent. It's the first time I've had toiletries leak in my luggage, and there's no mess. Next time I'll just buy a box of baking soda.

A Pilot Landed An Airplane

Here's a true story that should be very boring.

A company has many workers trained for the same job, and on every shift they assign two qualified employees to the workstation. Both have plenty of experience and either one could do the whole job alone, but as they are both present, they work together to maximize productivity and minimize mistakes. They never both take a break at the same time, and they take turns doing the various tasks. One day one of them passed out at work. The other one continued doing the job safely while a doctor helped the incapacitated one. It added a little excitement and a lot of paperwork to the work day, but the healthy employee didn't do anything he didn't do any other day. The only concern anyone had was for the health of the affected employee, a twenty-eight year veteran.

The news story says, "A co-pilot was able to land a Seattle-bound Alaska Airlines flight safely in Portland after the plane’s captain passed out Thursday night."

Aaagh. "The assistant manager was able to complete a customer transaction after the manager passed out at a Seattle Wal-Mart on Saturday." Aaagh. "A Jehovah's Witness successfully handed out seventeen leaflets after her sister got a blister and couldn't keep walking." Aaagh.

Both people at the front of the airplane are pilots. They both know how to fly the airplane. The "co-pilot" (not even a term used in the industry) is a pilot, fully qualified on the airplane. It's not newsworthy that he or she can land the airplane!

Maybe other people are so bad at their jobs that they couldn't complete a job they were ostensibly trained and qualified for if their co-worker collapsed. Clearly the person who painted the signs on this fuel truck was in dire need of a co-worker for translation and interpretation of instructions.

I would laugh so hard if that fuel truck pulled up to service my plane, that I would need a co-pilot to take over. If they pulled up right after I had landed after a long flight, I might need a new pair of pants, too.

Aviatrix Makes A Food

My fellow Canadian, Ryan North, writes a comic strip called Dinosaur Comics. It's about awesomeness, including friendship, philosophy, language, Batman, cephalopods and sometimes dinosaurs. I'm sure I've mentioned him before. I probably discussed his strip on how to land an airplane in an emergency. I followed its directions with no bad repercussions except that I was laughing while landing and that might have shaken the airplane a little. (I had to add some procedures that the comic left out, but it was only a six-panel comic: I didn't expect everything to be in there).

Years and years ago Ryan posted this comic which features a recipe, and I've gently nagged him for more recipes, so how delighted was I when his protagonist T-Rex decided to invent his own food?

I set out at once to follow the instructions. Not being a fully-grown Tyrannosaurus Rex, and not having a giant enough frying pan, I divided the recipe by five, and also seeing as I live in modern times and not the late cretaceous period, I used the metric system.  First I assembled the raw ingredients. You see here 465g of ground beef, a couple of eggs, chocolate ice-cream and salt: all the ingredients mentioned in the comic.  T-Rex did not specify an ice cream flavour. I was going to use neapolitan, but I gave the final decision to my  photographer, who chose chocolate. There is certainly a lot of scope to vary this recipe by using different ice cream flavours.

I weighed the ice cream, so as to get the same amount as the beef, per the instructions. You don't realize how much less denser ice cream is than beef until you weight out 465g of it. I heated the frying pan to about medium and added the beef. Astute readers may notice that I made a slight error here in following the instructions. They say to fold the raw beef into the ice cream and the picture depicts me folding the ice-cream into the raw beef. The difference is that had I followed the instructions exactly, no part of the beef would have browned in the pan the way some did before the ice-cream was folded in.

The frying pan was hot before I added the beef, but the addition of most of a litre of cold ice cream reversed that, so it took a few minutes for the pan to reheat. What I was essentially doing was slow-poaching ground beef in sweetened milk, in the presence of guar gum, cellulose gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, mono- and diglycerides and carrageenan. (I'm not sure what "Premium" means in the context of ice cream, but it certainly isn't "contains only things you would put in ice cream if you made it yourself". Although seeing as I just put meat in ice cream, that wouldn't be a good criterion, generally).

Poaching meat generally makes the cooked product more tender and moist than frying, but sugar I thought might draw moisture out. There wasn't much point in speculating or researching on the effects of this combination, as I was about to find out for myself.

The third frying pan picture, showing the ice cream just starting to melt, is taken after two minutes of stirring. T-Rex's hypotheses regarding burning sugar and floating grease were not borne out by the evidence. As soon as the ice cream melted it mixed with any fat that came off my admittedly very lean beef.  As shown in the final photo of that sequence, after twenty-five minutes of stirring on medium heat, the mixture has reduced considerably and has the consistency of chili. I judged it ready for the next addition, "throw some eggs into this."

I cracked the eggs into a bowl and beat them slightly before adding. If you made the full recipe with five pounds of beef and five pounds of ice cream this probably wouldn't be necessary, but with the smaller proportions I needed finer quanta control than whole eggs allow.

Tasting the concoction revealed a need for very little salt, but given that the recipe gave me the latitude at this point to add ingredients to taste, I included some chili powder here, and of course more egg. At a point that my taste buds did not detect a need for more egg, I stirred it a few more times, ladled one helping into a dish, and added the garnish. T-Rex, specified fifty dollar bills, but as you recall I divided this recipe by five, hence the tens you see in the photo. The fifties would have added more colour, and also, being plastic, would have been easier to sterilize, I think. I washed the tens in hot water, but made them little plastic wrap condoms so they didn't come into contact with the food. I hope you can also see from the shower tile and porcelain curve in the background that the concoction is served in the bathtub.

The dish was astonishingly edible, considering it was invented by a fictional dinosaur and deliberately concocted to be as ludicrous as possible. It's pretty sweet, and this is coming from someone who ate Nutella out of the jar with a spoon for lunch. I would recommend decreasing the ice cream-to-beef ratio to perhaps 1:2, add more chili powder and other spices at an earlier stage of cooking and, as I mentioned earlier, play with the ice cream flavour. My photographer had three helpings. He said it was better on toast, and suggested the wine pairing shown below. That is: something cheap, homemade, and plentiful.

I wish to assure my regular readers that I am not converting this to a cooking blog, nor to an "Aviatrix does things the Internet tells her to" blog. I do intend to continue blogging about various aspects of being a commercial pilot in Canada. But you know, relying on a fictional dinosaur for consistency and recipes is not too out of line with the lifestyle.

You Always Do

On Wednesday a Twin Otter with a Canadian crew went down in Antarctica. The aircraft was enroute from the South Pole base to an Italian base, but failed to arrive. An ELT signal indicated the aircraft position, but the weather was too bad to start an immediate rescue mission. The crew was experienced and well-equipped, with ample cold weather survival equipment and food for five days, and everyone had confidence in the captain.

I just learned that an American C130 Hercules crew spotted the wreckage, and another Twin Otter has flown by to confirm their findings. Weather still prevents rescuers from reaching the aircraft, but due to the appearance of the wreckage the crash is deemed unsurvivable.

I so thoroughly bought the image of Captain Heath and crew trading jokes and rationing supplies in their survival tents that the second piece of news came as far more of a shock than it should have. I don't know any of the crew personally, but it's certain that I know someone who does, and likely that I've chatted with one of them at an airport somewhere. It makes me think of another incident, another missing crew and aircraft, and another group of people totally deluding ourselves into believing that SAR would find the crew sitting on a glacier, waiting for rescue. You always do. Sometimes it happens. I worked with someone who was rescued uninjured after just such an incident. Sometimes it doesn't. Now it's a recovery operation. Thanks to the New York National Guard guys for your help, too.

Separation Anxiety

I really really shouldn't laugh at this. I know people who have died in midair collisions, and aircraft separation is deadly serious business. While most of the math cycles in my brain are working out fuel consumption, most of my eyeball cycles are focused on not running into anyone. This joke is utterly predictable, and not even well done. But it's still hilarious.

On the topic of loss of separation, a deer ran into my car the other night. I don't know if it ran away, limped away or died there, because I lost sight of it as soon as it stopped being in my headlights, and stopping on the highway didn't seem wise. For the record, when I saw it the deer was approaching from the right and slightly ahead, so in aviation terms it had the right of way, both because I had it on my right and I was presumably passing it. It failed, however to display any navigation lights or make calls to traffic. No humans were hurt and the car is driveable, plus I've picked up some extra work this week that will cover the deductible.

Oil Confuses Me

I know some things about oil. I know that before start up most of it is in the crankcase, a big metal container-y thing in the middle of my engine. There's a filler neck on the crankcase, capped by the top of the dipstick, and I know which line on the dipstick the oil level should reach. I know how to add more. I'm even certified to do so, because that's considered "elementary work" by Transport Canada. I'm awesome at pouring oil straight from the bottle into the crankcase without spilling any, if the wind isn't blowing. I know that if the wind is blowing, or a helicopter taxies by and I spill oil on the engine it makes a mess, and then the maintenance folk can't tell if the engine is leaking or the pilot is just an idiot. I know how to make a funnel out of an old oil bottle so that I don't make a mess. I haven't yet figured out how to get the oil stain out of my wool sweater from the time I knocked over the funnel, but it just looks like a shadow, anyway. I'm pretty good at estimating how much oil is on the floor, cowling and or belly, if there is a leak. And it doesn't take any special skill beyond resignation to a task to clean oil off the airplane's cowls and belly. When it's time to change it, I can drain the oil from the engine into a bucket without burning myself.

The four functions of oil we learned as student pilots: cleaning, sealing, lubricating and cooling. Thus I know the oil lets the moving parts slide instead of scrape against one another to reduce wear and wasted power; it fills in little gaps around the pistons in the cylinders so the pressure doesn't escape; it exchanges heat between the hot engine and the cold air that blasts in around the oil cooler at 20,000' and 170 kts; and it carries bits of carbon and dirt and whatever with it out of the moving parts and into the oil filter. I can specify the maximum and minimum pressures acceptable oil pressures on the gauge and I even know there's a skinny little line that runs to each cockpit oil pressure gauge along the leading edge of the wings from each engine. It seems too blink-inducingly simple to be the way oil pressure monitoring would work, kind of like using a transparent gas tank for a fuel gauge or a little porthole in the floor to verify gear extension, but I've used such systems, too.

I've always been impressed that the very same oil is also used to control the pitch of my constant speed propellers. A pump steps up the pressure three- to fivefold in order to drive the propeller to fine pitch, and I love those little diagrams of pilot valves opening and closing for on-speed, underspeed and overspeed conditions. (The one on page 72 of this Hartzell manual is, however, astonishingly terrible. You can't even see the way the valve operates. Don't bother looking at it).

So what's my confusion about oil?

It has all these really specific jobs to do and is vitally important to the function of the engine, but after it goes through the pump and filter, it just gets jammed into all the things its supposed to lubricate, and squishes out in a not very orderly fashion. It's supposed to leak in and out of everything, and I'm really not sure how it gets collected back to the sump after its adventures in the engine. Is there a complicated system of check valves and return lines in the oil scavenging system? I know the system used in the Beaver, where the oil just splashes up and drips back down is less advanced than the one in my airplane, but I really don't know how it works. Maybe there are elves. And if so are they the arrogant, bow-wielding kind from The Hobbit or the bumbling ones with oversized hats from Rise of the Guardians. It's probably more complicated than that, because I've watched them cut open the used oil filters and I've never seen any arrows or hats in there.

Also, the FAA mandated this:

INSTALLATION OF A PLACARD ON THE INSTRUMENT PANEL TO PREVENT FAILURE OF THE ENGINE CRANK SHAFT

I hope there's more than a dashboard placard preventing failure of my crankshafts.

Looking Ahead into the Murk

I said some of this in a comment on my previous post, but I know lots of people don't read comments, so I'll say it again, and add some more so that those who do read comments aren't getting ripped off. 

In the days before Blogger allowed me to pre-schedule posts I had to be at a computer at the moment a blog entry posted. Finally Blogger added the much-requested feature of post-dating, allowing me to designate the date and time a post would appear. This allowed me to write lots of posts when I had lots of time and have them appear when I was too busy to post. It also allowed me to respond to a reader's concern that  if I stopped posting without notice, they wouldn't know what had happened to me. I knew that if that happened it would be because either I wasn't all right, I had lost access to the account, or I had become absorbed by something else. I wrote a post that was intended to cover any of those possibilities, and postdated it by six months or so. Every time I've noticed it getting close to posting, I've changed the date on it to further into the future. Until I got really really absorbed in something.

That happened about a year and a half ago, when you probably saw my blogging slow down, and then my job changed to include some desk duties at the same time that another of my hobbies expanded to take up the time I used to spend blogging. I think about blogging fairly often, but when I'm on the road I'm usually straight from the airport to dinner to hotel bed, to flight planning over breakfast and back to the plane. I may wait there for a couple of hours, but have you ever tried to write a blog entry on an iPhone?
I  really appreciate the support readers have given me, and I've had a lot of fun writing my stories and meeting great people over the years. I haven't deleted the blog because I probably will continue to write blog entries. I still think in blogese sometimes.  I know some of you, and probably my favourites of you, do understand that telling the world about my life is logically less important than taking care of my own friends and family, keeping strong and fit, and regrouting my bathroom. Blogging is definitely more fun than regrouting the bathroom, but regrouting the bathroom is m ore fun than dealing with the ceiling falling in, right?
Meanwhile I will share two strategies for coping with elderly relatives who ask the same questions or tell you the same story over and over again all day.

Technique #1: Groundhog Day

This strategy is named after the movie of the same name, in which the main character was forced to relive the same day over and over again. After working through denial and anger--the way you probably want to respond the fifth time in an hour the same relative offers you a food they used to know you didn't eat--Bill Murray's character sets out to make his endlessly repeated February 2nd the best day ever. He puts himself in the right place to catch a child falling out of a tree, says just the right things to make everyone happy, and so on. Each time you repeat the explanation that Aunt Bea is absent from the gathering because she has the flu, the explanation should improve. Eventually you look and feel brilliant, and if you're really good you may hit on an explanation that holds.

Technique #2: Take Two

Some explanations don't improve on repetition. I still don't want a glass of wine. The correct answer is still "no thank you."  It's not, despite how much I want it to be, "No godamnit. and if you ask me again I will put that wine bottle somewhere you don't want it either." In this situation you are in a movie. Your role is the loving relative, and the director has asked you to play the scene again. Your co-star might not get his or her lines correct, so you may need to ad lib to match them, but nothing in your performance must let on that you are on take seventeen of the same scene. You could try reading the line a little differently. Do the best job you can. Get it perfect and the imaginary director may let you move on to the next scene. Or maybe they want to try the same thing with different lighting.

I watched a memory reboot cycle a few days ago between A, an elderly person, and B, a person with celiac disease. The latter can't eat wheat, so has brought his own rice crackers, which happened to be wasabi flavoured.

A: Would you like some crackers? [offering a basket of mixed wheat and rice crackers, which the celiac can't eat, from, because the wheat contaminates the other food on contact]
B: No thank you. I can't eat those.
A: [sees B eating a cracker from his own supply] Are you allowed to eat those?
B: Yes.
A: May I have one?
B: Yes, they're wasabi-flavoured, so you might find them too hot.
A: [tries one] Ow, this is hot.

Ten minutes passes. Dialogue repeats, almost to the word. As it started again for the third time, the celiac hid the wasabi crackers and ended the cycle. It was especially disturbing because I couldn't pass it off as not paying attention or not really understanding that someone couldn't eat a cracker. It was failure to learn from one's own recent sensory experience of pain. I was going to say that even earthworms can do that, but it turns out that after 500 tries at a maze with pain at one fork and a reward at the other, earthworms show only a statistical tendency to choose the better option. But chihuahuas can probably get it in two. And on a deeper level I know that I'm not immortal. As I review aspects of the systems of the airplane I fly all year, I learn facts that I know I must have studied last year, but have forgotten about. I've read over the new aerodrome operating visibility rules for arrivals and departures at controlled and uncontrolled airports at least five times, but I still can't bet on remembering what is first and second priority for determining visibility at an uncontrolled aerodrome. Will the interval slowly shorten and the required repetitions increase until I can't remember for ten minutes what I've studied ten times?

Much of the my problem with the low visibility operations rules is that it isn't really clear why the options for determining visibility are presented the way they are. I usually learn things by understanding them, or at least by imposing some structure on them. Does the brain lose the ability to hold structures over time? Is there someway to strengthen its structure so it can continue to support the things I need to learn and remember? Current theory says that maintaining the brain is similar to maintaining the body's structure: use it or lose it. Keep exercising, stress it, allow it to rest, and keep mixing up the challenges.

Let me see if I can put some structure on the low visibility rules. At an aerodrome with a tower, low visibility operations for departures and arrivals have the same rules: operating visibility is determined "by the following hierarchy" : 1. RVR (an automated beam measurement), 2. ground visibility given in the METAR (a human observation, possibly but not necessarily taken by the controller), and 3. pilot visibility. According to this, the controller's visibility doesn't enter into the formula. The METAR could be 45 minutes old, and the controller able to report better visibility, but according to the rule as written there, the pilot can't move. Then look at the case when there is no RVR and no METAR. That's a little unusual, but I can think of one aerodrome with a control tower that has no RVR equipment and never has a METAR, so we do get down to what the pilot thinks sometimes. Again we skip what the controller thinks. The ATIS says we're zero-zero in fog and I can see fine, I taxi out. But if I'm at another airport twenty miles away and they have a 0/0 METAR, five miles vis on the ATIS and I can see all the way to the horizon, I can't move. Perhaps I can remember the hierarchy through its stupidity.

For an airport without an operating control tower, the arrivals hierarchy is exactly the same, but for departures, METAR and RVR swap places. I'll have to make up a reason. 

Oh yeah, and then under it all there's a note: "Tower observed visibility does not take precedence over reported ground visibility. Where ground visibility is reported, tower observed visibility is considered advisory only. However where ground visibility is not reported, tower reported visibility replaces ground visibility and needs to be considered in determination of the aerodrome operating visibility." 

See what they did there? They made a rule and then undermined it with a note.  Why didn't they just say 1. RVR 2. METAR 3. tower reported visibility 4. pilot visibility?  In reality everything is as murky as peering into blowing snow in the dark. The human taking the ground visibility observation for the METAR is going to be influenced by  her knowledge of the current RVR reading, the visibilities pilots are reporting, and the number of airplanes sitting on the apron with no gate to go to. There's another page and a half of this stuff in the CAP GEN, most of which boils down to "pilots should not taxi around when they can't see far enough ahead to operate safely."

I don't know what's in front of me right now, but have a good year behind me and wish you all a good one ahead. When I get the bathroom regrouted I might even blog about some of it.

Screaming Busy

If this gets posted, I have stopped blogging for long enough to forget this was here. Likely I've run out of prewritten blog entries. I've probably lost interest, internet access, or my password. Or maybe I got a life. Expect the comments section on this entry to contain a note from someone who knows I'm okay, and then a note from me telling you to stop e-mailing me already, because if I'm too busy to blog I'm probably not reading my blog e-mail either.

Busy. Will blog or officially end blog later.

Or if no one turns up to claim I'm okay, then perhaps I'm not, but you are absolutely forbidden to post, quote, read or even refer to the poem High Flight in my memory. I hate it and anyone disregarding this notice will be cut from my will, banned or evicted from my funeral, forbidden to comment on my blog, and haunted by malevolent spirits. Not even mine. Malevolent douchebag spirits whom I'll designate.

Double Generator Failure

I found this in my drafts folder, I guess I was saving it for a busy day. I've been punting it a month into the future every month. Obviously I'm busy today, because it published.

I had a double generator failure once. I'll spoil any suspense now by saying it was not a big deal. The designers of this airplane knew that electricity was fickle, newfangled stuff and not to be trusted, so no essential system for VFR flight was electrical. We were VFR and it was a beautiful clear day after the invention of cellphones. The master was on, no visible circuit breakers were popped, and there was no smoke or fire smell. The reset for the generators was under the dashboard. With multiple people on board we could have reset them it in flight, but not knowing why they had popped, we elected to leave them off.
Our destination was a reasonable-sized controlled airport, not at an especially busy time, so we just pulled out a cellphone and called them to tell them we were coming. They cleared us to land, I can't remember whether it was by a steady green light on final or they just gave the clearance over the telephone. Possibly both. They seemed far more stressed about the event than I was. I never consider a communications failure to be a showstopper, especially when I manage to make contact another way. And why on earth had they dispatched firetrucks to follow us down the runway?

It was kind of fun mind you, and the firefighters were friendly. I think they like driving their trucks around, especially when thy don't have to pull anyone's charred remains out of a burning airplane, so they were happy when we thanked them and assured them that there was no problem.

At the time, it was the only twin I knew the systems on, so I didn't realize that some aircraft have electrically activated landing gear. ATC was worried that I might not be able to lower the wheels. The only electrical component of this one is the indication system, and extension can be verified by the thumps from the mains plus visual identification of the nose gear in the mirror on the nacelle. The air traffic controllers knew that in general a systems failure on an airplane could be a bad thing, and must have thought I was being cool and not admitting I could have a gear problem. Communication by cellphone in an operating aircraft is not simple. ATC they have this great button up there in the tower for letting the firetrucks out, so why not? So long as we didn't make the local news.

I can't even remember the reason for the failure. We had it checked out at a local shop and were certified good to go for the next leg of our adventure. I think I was reprimanded by the aircraft owner for saying "electrical failure" instead of just "comm failure." He was a need-to-know kind of guy and I'm more of an anything-that-might-be-relevant gal.

[Prelude to] How Men Pack

I've been on the road a while. My computer no longer connects to the internet reliably, my single pair of shoes is getting kind of stinky, I'm down to my last pair of clean underwear, and we're almost out of onboard snacks.

For once we land before businesses close for the day. Google finds me a laundromat within walking distance, and while my clothes are going round and round, I find a mall. Shoe deodorizer isn't a product I've ever purchased. At home I do have five pairs of shoes and my shoes get to air out between uses.  But some advertisement or other has lodged in my subconscious and convinced me that what I want now is a can of magic shoe deodorizer. I buy a spray can of the stuff, and after swapping my laundry into the dryer and then hauling it back to the hotel, I try the product. I think it's essentially prettily-scented baking soda and a propellant, but I can't smell my shoes from across the room now.

I pack the bottle in a plastic bag before putting it in my luggage, just in case it explodes.

That reminds me. I picked up a couple of clues regarding the differential luggage weight between me and my coworker.  But that's going to wait until next time, because that was the third time I have opened this same blog entry, written less than one sentence and been called to work. I started writing it on September 12th. I'm now back from work and have other priority tasks, most of which won't be completed by the time I get called out again.

Logical Deductions 101

This post might have followed this post had I blogged things in the order of the notes I made for you. See, I still make notes for you. I make them right on my OFP, my operational flight plan, an official document of sorts which my company has to keep on file for years, or at least months, I don't feel like remembering which. It (this post) still follows it (the other post). There are just intervening things. That's what life's like.

In that post, which was mostly about canola, we had to backtrack a runway, and make other traffic wait for us, after landing despite what appeared to be a perfectly serviceable crossing runway that led back to the taxiway. The other runway was closed. Now for the exciting conclusion.

The next day on preflight inspection I find grass clippings on my aircraft. (Disclaimer, they could have been canola clippings). This isn't completely bizarre. In the last month I have found things as diverse as mouse intestines, dime-sized purple blobs, and fluffy weed seeds on my airplane. I suspect a messy owl dining atop my vertical stab, birds that had previously eaten purple berries, and fluffy weeds, respectively. The last one really doesn't require much in the way of logical deductions, but it still needed cleaning off.

I start up and I listen to the ATIS, which tells me that that the other runway is closed now and the previously closed one is open. There wasn't anything wrong with the one I landed on yesterday, and if they were painting or sealing or something they'd be smart enough not to mow, wouldn't they? It turns out the runway is closed for mowing. They need to close the whole runway for mowing?  It's a paved runway. They don't have to mow the runway itself. I'll bet I have landed more than a hundred times at airports with only one runway, while mowing was occurring. Sometimes there's an elaborate procedure whereby the controller advises the people with the tractors to remain clear of the runway. Sometimes they just publish a NOTAM or say on the ATIS that mowing is in progress. And sometimes you're on short final and it's like "SURPRISE! TRACTOR!" crossing the clearway. But we're pilots. We deal with these things. But that's not apparently how you do it when you have two runways.

The airport is busy. Lots of landing and departing traffic and there's a Nav Canada Challenger jet flying dozens of passes from different directions. I hear they are planning a new RNAV approach into here. I did the DME/LOC the other day, testing the autopilot, and it was pretty usable. You come over a wide canyon on the way in, so no obstacles letting the designers give you a low enough MDA that I had my hands very right there, should the autopilot decide at any moment that now would be a good time to dive. It didn't.

Also my coworker has brought five separate pairs of footwear. I have one: I fly, go to dinner and work out in the same shoes. So why does his luggage weigh so much less than mine?

Alaska. Tired.

I took a short cut through Alaska today. I was going to blog about it, but my brain is tired.

Pointy mountains. Fog. Helpful Flight Services personnel. Oxygen. Shiny rivers. Small settlements. Clouds. Radio frequencies. Hat. Granola bar with coconut flakes. Stick that together with more words and you have an Aviatrix blog entry.

Fragile

As I shut down the airplane I turn off the avionics, bring the power back to idle and then on each engine momentarily turn both magnetos off, then back on again as soon as I have verified that the engine would die without them. That means that when the off position is selected for the magnetos, turning a propeller by hand just to move it out of the way cannot produce a spark and start the engine. Then I return the power to 1000 rpm and shut down the engine by pulling the mixture levers all the way back, cutting off the fuel supply to the engine.

Considering the number of things I have to do right to start the engine when I want it to start, it seems a little ridiculous imagining the slight movement of a propeller during ground handling, with the fuel cut off, causing the engine to start. I wonder if this is a safety precaution that made sense long ago and is no longer relevant, but that we've never stopped following. Has anyone ever heard of a ground-handling propeller strike accident that occurred because of a live magneto, when the mixtures were in idle cut-off and the mags selected off? I have met a few American pilots and mechanics who have never heard of the check, so perhaps it lingers longer in the British Empire.

On this particular occasion I not only put the airplane in the hangar, but then climbed back on board and stowed all the oxygen masks and cables, took everything out of the seat back pockets, removed snacks and garbage and chart collections and generally cleared the way for maintenance to take out the seats and rip out the floor panels for a major inspection. That also means a few days off for me. The exact number will be determined by what they find on the inspection. I go home and put my phone on the charger. For a few days I am set free from the requirement to have it always with me.

The next day I happen to be sitting near the charger and it rings, with my boss' name on the display. I answer and recognize the boss' bad news voice. I wonder what horrible thing they have found with the airplane, and if there is some way I have caused it through poor airmanship, or missed finding it on my preflight inspections. But, it's nothing to do with the airplane. One of my coworkers has been critically injured in an accident. Nothing to do with work, just out with friends. It puts everything else into context. Life is so fragile.

Another Russian Visitor

We're working out of an airport with an implausibly long runway for its location and amount of traffic. I think it's a case of a local airport authority attempting to manifest, "If you build it, they will come," a line from a movie that came out before some working commercial pilots were born. (I never saw it, but I understand it's about a guy who builds a baseball diamond in a cornfield and then the ghosts of his favourite old time players come and use it). Maybe ghostly B747s come by in the middle of the night, but a day or so ago a real live Antonov-124 showed up.

A fleet of double-long fuel trucks arrived from the big city to haul enough fuel for it. They loaded it full of helicopters I'm told and it taxied out. It was sitting on a taxiway by the threshold as I landed, so we stuck around to watch it take off. I used up my camera battery taking video of it slowly taxiing into position, and then doing run ups in position, so this pic is from someone else's camera phone. I kept expecting it to do something. "I guess they have a lot of checklists to run," I suggested to one of my fellow spectators.

"Yeah, and it takes a long time, because they're all in Russian."

Everyone with a licence to be on the apron was watching from the airside, and the road paralleling the runway was lined with the cars of local spectators. It wasn't until started rolling, with what seemed to be impossibly low acceleration, that we realized we should have started a pool on when it would rotate. It used most of the runway, but finally the nosewheel came up and the whole aircraft followed. And then we laughed. It wasn't climbing very fast, and it was so big that it was still clearly visible as it climbed away, so it appeared to just hang there in the sky at the end of the runway. We made jokes about the controllers being able to go for coffee before it reached the handoff altitude.

It left a fair bit of smoke behind it, too.

From Russia with the Munchies

My alarm clock is a company-provided smartphone, and most of the time I just go to sleep with it by my bed, because when it rings or a text message comes in, I have to be at the airport in an hour. Or in the lobby in twenty minutes if I'm on the road. I'll get a heads up at the end of the day what the earliest I may be called is. Sometimes  it's early. We took off at 4:42 a.m. local time a few days ago. So if I ever give you my cellphone number, remember that it is for that one time use, on the occasion that have arranged to meet you for. It is not for you to call me or message me in the future just to say hi, or even if your cat is on fire. If you do, I will wake up, set your other cat on fire and go back to sleep. If you don't have two cats, then fireproof your dog. I feel strongly about my sleep.

When my phone does ring, on this specific occasion with the sound of the alarm clock, because we had arranged a (fairly civilized, as you can see by the time on the phone) meet time in advance the night before, I woke up and checked the graphical area forecast for the weather I could expect. I zoom in on the screen to see what it says.



Can you see that? It says ADDNLY SRN BC LCL FU ALF FM FIRES IN SIBERIA. That's GFA-speak for, "Additionally, in southern British Columbia there will be some areas where there is smoke aloft, from fires in Siberia." The fires in Siberia part is written out in full because, well there just isn't a code for that. There are forest fires in Siberia, over the top of the world, and it's making it dark here. Trees on fire. We joke during the flight that it's Siberian pot fields on fire, as an excuse for our errors and our increasing hunger. All day it's the topic of conversation with ATC and other flight crews. Siberia? The poor visibility affects our work, and we spend the next week trying to escape the smoke. The visibility gets down to less than two statute miles in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. It just shows how environmental impacts in one country affect the rest of the world.

Apparently there isn't a blogspot code for "wrap the fricking text around the pictures, damnit," either because I can't make it work. So, sorry about the ugly gaps.

P.S. Nope, no flashbacks.

Over the Airwaves

I know I haven't updated in a while, but I'm very busy working, among other things. Here's today's flight.

Breakfast and paperwork all on top of one another in the hotel, to file two flight plans covering nine hours of flying over the day. They are somewhat specialized plans, so have to be faxed in to the IFR data centre at least an hour before take-off, so they can process them. We can do a turn in thirty minutes--we measure that touchdown to wheels up, so we taxi clear of the runway, cool the turbos, fuel, pee, refill water bottles, clean the windshield, restart, taxi out and roll again all in less than half an hour, our record is twenty-seven minutes, so the second plan has to be filed before we land the first flight.

Airport shuttle, fuel in the morning, to get cool fuel and fuller fuel tanks, then start up and call for clearance. I'm at an airport served by a Flight Service Station, so I call them, identifying my aircraft by callsign, type and position on the field plus the fact that I'm "looking for IFR to Moose Eddy." He gives me active runway, winds and altimeter setting, and then says nothing else. I call back and ask if I get my clearance from Centre, but he doesn't reply. I take this as a sign he's on the phone to Centre and figure he'll come back with my clearance in a bit. He does. It's a long one, with a crossing restriction and a "not valid if not airborne by" time, details usually absent from northern clearances. I read it back and punch in the transponder code.

I go on with my checklists. Airplane is running great lately. Apparently the magnetos are due for overhaul in under 25 hours, they're on extension already, but they all seem to be running well. The engines start well, run smoothly and the magneto drops are well within the acceptable range. We had a problem with the right engine fuel injectors a while ago: they kept clogging, so we replaced the fuel servo (turned out it had some corrosion that could have been a source of the clogging matter) and also upgraded the injectors. I believe we replaced the left fuel servo too. When everything checks out and the engine temperatures are nice and warm I taxi out and take off, with three minutes to spare on my clearance valid time. Given that my clearance valid time was my filed departure time, they didn't give me a big margin.

The FSS guy says to contact Centre through 5000', which is my crossing restriction altitude, cross 20 DME on course not above 5000'. The trick here is to get in touch with Centre and then they'll lift the restriction, so I climb quickly to 5000' and sure enough the crossing restriction is lifted and I'm cleared to my requested altitude en route. The controller says, "Contact me reaching," and then stops. I pause, waiting to see if he'll add reaching what, but he doesn't, so I read it back as "reaching one three thousand." I heard someone else get a similar fill-in-the-blank clearance here a few days ago. Must be the local dialect. It's amusing how something as aggressively standardized as ATC develops dialects. It demonstrates how easily Latin disintegrated into all the separate Romance languages as soon as it no longer had an army to back it up.

A good tailwind gets us where we're going in an hour, but conditions are not conducive to the work we're here to do, so we turn around and go home. I tell ATC why, referring to "the required quality" of our data. There's another company out doing the same work and my words may have shamed them, as I hear them quit ting too, shortly after we turn tail. We have a headwind going home, so it takes an hour and a half to get back even though our speed is aided by a 15,000' descent (don't worry, no underground stuff: we climbed higher than that initial clearance as we approached the work area). I pass the time listening to my iPod. But not music: Italian lessons. Oh yes, that earlier reference to European linguistic diversity was apropos of something. The differences from Spanish and French are so cool. Verb endings... how the hell to verb endings evolve in a language? It makes me understand how people can deny species evolution. The ability of time and tiny changes to effect big changes is hard to wrap ones mind around. I'm learning Italian because I'm going to Italy, and I you know I can't survive long without the ability to talk to people. Se parleresti italiano, scrivimi! Se potresti Skype posso cercare parlare.

My boss is planning to do a PPC in this airplane this month, so I test the autopilot on the VOR/DME approach. It works okay, but the descent rate it selects is proportionate to the altitude change, so when I ask it to go from 6500' to the 25 nm safe distance it plunges so rapidly that it sets off the terrain warning. It takes its time aligning properly with the runway, and level eight miles final at the no procedure turn altitude the GPS is going crazy with "terrain" and "too low" (I don't even remember seeing that last one before). I take control from the autopilot when I want to put approach flaps down, because the manual says not to operate it with any flaps extended. That seems kinda dumb: what's the point of having an autopilot that can capture a glideslope if it can't do it with flaps? I wouldn't want to have to reconfigure this airplane from clean to landing configuration at decision height. A previous autopilot I used required me to disengage it while extending flaps, which made more sense. (Hand flying makes it easier to immediately recognize asymmetric or runaway flap conditions).

Land and roll out. On the backtrack the FSS guy asks me if I was IFR for the last part. Wha? I specifically told him I had cancelled IFR and that I was going to fly a simulated approach to test the autopilot. I didn't have to tell him that, but I apparently I care enough about what controllers think about me that I wanted him to not consider me an idiot if the autopilot wandered off somewhere and I waited to see if it would figure it out. There was quite a strong crosswind. I can track a radial better than it can. Yes! I'm superior to a thirty-something year old machine! We take our joy where we can.

I taxi clear of the runway and call off with no acknowledgement.  A helicopter pilot starting up on the ground makes two attempts to raise the FSS guy and then calls me to check his radio. I tell him FSS guy is probably on the phone. FSS guy comes back and apologizes, "There was a kerfuffle at Squirrel Inlet."  He's looking after traffic at a different airport as well. The helicopter guy hopes everyone is alright and the FSS guy says yes, just a lot of traffic at once.

And then we shut down and got a cab. Too early to check into the hotel, so I'm blogging in the lobby.

Oh and don't worry, I remembered to cancel the second flight plan.

Confusing Flight Services

This isn't a complaint about flight service specialists being confusing or providing confusing services. Canadian FSS are exceedingly awesome. It's a story about how I confuse flight services. I'll start at the confusing part. Airports, callsigns and aircarft type changed to confuse you.

"Beaver River Radio, this is Aviatrix"

[obligatory pause long enough to make me reach for the CFS to check that I have the correct frequency. Turns out that answering me on the radio isn't the only duty a flight services specialist performs]

"Aviatrix, Beaver River Radio"

"Beaver River, Aviatrix is a Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker Airplane overhead Skunk Lake on a VFR flight plan from Home Base to Skunk Lake. Request to amend my flight plan: new destination Home Base, eta 1915."

[pause, this one not obligatory]

"Aviatrix, confirm you are overhead Skunk Lake on a flight plan to Skunk Lake and you want to amend your destination to Home Base?"

"Correct."

See we left home base with work to do at Skunk, Chicken, Elk, and Slime Mould, but the Chicken work was really easy and the Slime Mould work was cancelled en route, leaving us with enough gas to go home once we were done with Skunk. I wonder if that FSS guy called the folks on the ground at Skunk to see why an aircraft on a flight plan to there would elect to go home rather than land, when they were already overhead. Probably not. I'm sure they figured it out.

We touched down at Home Base three minutes late at 1918. Someone hit a bird on takeoff not long before we arrived, so they sent us to go hold for a bit while the guys in pick up trucks cleaned up the little feathered corpse. I hope it was just feathers, with no aircraft parts mixed in. It was all over by the time we got to the runway.

Geeking on Canola

Flying, flying. This is a flying blog, right?  Nope, it's a blog about what I think about while and as a result of flying. Now I'm thinking it's kinda hazy, but at least I can see the ground because it's so brightly coloured in green and yellow. The green is I don't know, grass or corn or something, and the yellow I know is canola fields. Funny stuff canola. It started out as rapeseed, an industrial crop grown to produce lubricating oil. I decided to do a bit of research and not just tell you what I know off the top of my head about canola, so now we both get to learn stuff. Canadian rapeseed production expanded during World War II, and then they looked for more ways to use it. Health Canada wouldn't approve it as food crop because it was too high in erucic acid and glucosinolates. 

So, wonders Aviatrix, what's erucic acid and why is it bad?  Wikipedia says it's a straight chain of twenty-two carbon atoms with the COOH you'd expect of an organic acid tacked on one end. It's  "monounsaturated" which means it's two hydrogen atoms short of being fully hydrogenated. Which is bad for me again, saturated or unsaturated oils? New diversion ... oh this is complicated, no wonder I didn't remember. Unsaturated fats, that is the ones with double bonds that leave room for more hydrogens, are "good" because they lower bad cholesterol, but apparently they are "even better" if they are monounsaturated, having only one double bond and thus room for only two more hydrogens, because otherwise they might lower good cholesterol, too. The "bad" fats are the saturated ones, all full up with hydrogens, and having no double bonds, because they are solid at room temperature and clog your arteries.
(It's vaguely implied that the solidity is what clogs your arteries, but surely they don't escape the digestive process and make it through the alveolae into the blood with the hydrocarbon chain intact? Maybe I should have taken more biology. If what I eat is really racing around in my blood intact, maybe I should eat fewer Girl Scout cookies. They have kinda scary ingredients.) Finally, we have the "really bad" fats, the trans fats. I think there was even a Family Guy episode about how bad trans fats are. They are produced by hydrogenation, but wait a moment. I know what trans means in a chemical context. It means that the two hydrogens either side of a double bond are on opposite sides of the chain. So trans fats have to be unsaturated. So the "really bad" fats are necessarily members of the "good" or "even better" camps? The depiction of erucic acid structure on Wikipedia shows a cis structure (the opposite of trans). So we're safe.

But wait, why was erucic acid bad for me again? It's present in kale, mustard, brussels sprouts and broccoli, all of which are supposed to be good for me. It tastes bad. It might be bad for rats, because they can't metabolize fats well at all. There's some evidence it causes heart problems, and other evidence it cures them, as well as curing some weird rare disease. I give up on erucic acid.

Maybe the glucosinolates are really the evil part. Glucosinolates occur in almost all plants and react with a plant enzyme to protect the plant from insect attacks. Like everything else that does anything, a little is good, apparently protecting against cancer but a lot is bad, suppressing thyroid function and changing animal behaviour. So okay, too much is bad.

Anyway both compounds are bitter-tasting so they bred them out and then rebranded the result as canola. According to the canola marketing association website they did this, to differentiate the superior low-erucic acid and low-glucosinolate varieties and their products from the older rapeseed varieties, but yeah, right. I'm sure the person doing family grocery shopping in 1978 was far lass likely to balk at an association with glucosinolates than at the word rape. The can is for Canada and ola for oil, or oil low acid, but I've heard the homophony with love, peace and health food granola wasn't entirely coincidental.

Now most of the crop is GM and Roundup Ready and hey look it's pretty and yellow. So, uh, now I have more to think about when I see the bright yellow fields of canola sliding away beneath my wings.

My descent checklist is also colour-coded yellow. Fuel selectors on fullest tanks, anti-ice not required, altimeter set, oxygen off through 10,000', radios set, there's no ATIS so call flight services for the aerodrome advisory.  Hmm, here one normally taxies off via the cross runway, but today the cross runway is closed, so everyone has to backtrack to the apron. It's a busy airport, so we all have to space ourselves out and hustle back to the beginning of the runway to give the following aircraft their turn.

I can't see anything wrong with the cross runway. It turns out they're just mowing the grass beside it. Sometimes there are crops grown on the infield at the airport, but I'm pretty sure this is just ordinary grass. Definitely not canola.

This Might Be The Story of My Life

I'm VFR approaching a busy airport with published VFR arrivals. The controller tells me to "expect direct H (other airport) then direct another landmark." Other airport is approximately a 90 degree turn away from my destination, but okay, I'm expecting that now. I put it in the GPS, even.

And at this point I need a clearance into the airspace ahead of me, but I haven't been given one. I ask, "Did you want me to fly direct airport H now?"

I think he said, "Yes, please," which is even less standard radio language than using the past tense to form a polite question. So I turned direct airport H and descended as instructed.

Another controller than told me to expect the SomethingOrOther Arrival, which I'd already looked up. That arrival requires me to fly direct Landmark A, then on reaching it turn direct Landmark B, and at B tune the next frequency and fly direct Landmark C. It allows the controllers to create a conga line of arriving aircraft without clogging the frequency with explicit instructions to each. But when I'm told to expect something, shouldn't I wait to be given it?

In this case I don't wait. I turn direct Landmark A, with the feeling that I'm going to get yelled at, but I don't, and when told to call the next frequency, I tell them I'm direct Landmark A at altitude. That controller clears me the SomethingOrOther Arrival. Which I was expecting.

But I mean really, shouldn't there be a difference between "Fly direct A, expect direct B" and "Expect direct A then direct B"? Is this a new rule I missed? An old rule I never knew? Am I supposed to automatically behave as though I have already received what I expect? Is that why I have a blog instead of a career?

Aliens Replaced

I picked up an airplane from maintenance. It was there for a 100 hour inspection (that's an inspection performed after the airplane has been flown for a hundred hours, not an inspection that takes a hundred hours). It usually takes two to three days, and can go to more, depending on what they find on the inspection and how much work those those items take to repair, or whether they have to order parts. I'm not sure how many hours get billed to it. I suppose if it's three guys working on it for a few days, and especially if we work them hard enough that overtime comes into the picture, it might sometimes be that kind of hundred hour, too.

Thankfully dealing with airplane maintenance bills is not my job. My job includes inspecting the airplane after it's been inspected and put back together again to ensure that nothing is obviously wrong, in advance of actually needing to fly the airplane. You'd be surprised what you can find. I've reached through the front cowling and discovered a spark plug set in its engine port and not tightened at all. I've opened the access door to check the oil and discovered an electronic testing device sitting on top of the engine. I've found inspection ports left open, lots of missing cowling screws, disconnected cowl flaps, and stuff that was on the work order but that just didn't get done. This reflects years of experience with many different maintainers at many different companies, not a reflection on my current or any particular company.

On this occasion, a hydraulic puddle appears under the airplane after I let down the flaps. It's happened before. I think they're just overenthusiastic about filling the reservoir. Everything else checks out. I also inspect the paperwork to make sure that we have the required documented proof that the inspection has been done. I see that a hydraulic fitting was adjusted, but that was to correct a small leak in the vicinity of the left main, and my puddle came out of the vent line.

The best part of reviewing the documents is AME spelling. It's can get downright cryptic if the AME is from Québec, and not working in his (usually his) native tongue. Today the person doing the paperwork is a native speaker of English, but was likely tired and in a hurry. The left propeller lever has been "realiened." I didn't even know that it had aliens in it in the first place, let alone that the aliens were required for smooth functioning and that they apparently need periodic replacement.

Okay, now I'm making fun, of course. To all AMEs, let me assure you that it is far more important to me that you know how to apply proper techniques to fix the parts of my airplane than that you can spell them. As long as I can tell what component has had what done to it, and that it worked, I'm quite happy with the paperwork you produce for me. Let me take my little bit of joy from appreciating the creative ways you spell things therein. I love that everyone uses printed stickers these days so I never have to read your handwriting, as I did ten years ago. And seriously, who would guess that aligned had a g in it?

Unknown Intentions

I'm flying into a big airport where I haven't been in a while. I'm given a choice of two arrivals. I don't know which will be quicker, but involves flying direct a VFR waypoint that is over a completely featureless area. The IFR fixes are all part of the database, but the VFR ones aren't, even though I'm VFR as often as not. The chart suggests no way to identify it visually, and I do not have time and head down opportunity to look it up and program into the GPS, so I request the other one.

My descent and approach checklist wants the heater off now, but I have the option of leaving it on until any time up to two minutes before shutdown on the ground. The item will recur on later checklists so I just skip it and move onto the next items. "Seat belt on?" I query, reminding myself to check my shoulder belt. I usually leave the shoulder belt on the whole flight unless it starts interfering with the headset, oxygen mask, guidance screen cable, or any of the other lines that define my Borglike existence in the cockpit.

The controllers are busy getting people in and out of here. There's a transient aircraft that appears to be sightseeing, but the pilot hasn't made his request very clear. The controller points him out to traffic by position and "unknown intentions." The pilot doesn't take the hint and the controller has to ask him specifically what he is doing. There is so much to this game of talking on the radio that is subtle and clever. When a new airplane enters the picture, you'll hear a controller pause just long enough to give an alert pilot time to report traffic in sight, or call looking, and spare the controller the obligation of describing the traffic all over again when the pilot who should be looking for it heard them call in. There are rumours about electronic controllers, but robots simply couldn't do what the humans do. The human element helps with sanity as well as safety.

An Air Canada Jazz jet is given a climb clearance and the pilot refuses it. He's flying on a ferry permit with a damaged windshield and is restricted to a maximum altitude of ten thousand feet. There's a story there. Stories everywhere. I'm cleared to land at the big airport and the controller tells me on final which taxiway to exit at. They aren't lettered neatly in order, so he helpfully adds that it's the second left. I remember to turn the heater off on final. I land full flaps and slow down for the second left, but he wants me to go to the next one. Ohhh, at the big airport the first taxiway doesn't count, because who would exit there? Only someone who is used to runways that only have one exit/entrance. I feel so bush as I add a bit of power to expedite to what I still think is the third left.

Tomorrow is an 8:30 take off, so 8:15 engine start, better make it 8:10 with how busy this place will be. Backing up with cab and flight planning and walkaround that means hotel breakfast at 6:50, so I set my alarm for 6:30. Good night.

Now It's Really Broken

The airplane with the broken off wingnut goes into maintenance and comes back out of maintenance still with no wingnut. Damnit. I didn't physically write the defect in the journey log because it was perfectly serviceable. I wasn't going to ground myself in Fort Swamp over a wingnut. I've flown airplanes that required tools to open the fuel caps as standard. But I'm a little teeny bit annoyed. I did tell the PRM the problem and this little tiny thing, the need to pull out a screwdriver to open a fuel cap is going to cost us a tiny bit of time and time and pose a tiny safety risk on every flight. The time is the time it takes for me to get a screwdriver out and put it away again afterwards every time I want to fuel or verify fuel. It's the time I take opening it for a fueller when I could be running to the washroom or filing a flight plan. The safety is the risk that I don't check the fuel level in that tank because it's a pain to get a screwdriver, or that the screwdriver gets dropped somewhere where it ends up in a tire or an aileron. Or just that the time I spend getting the screwdriver, or opening or closing the cap could have been spent spotting something else that was wrong somewhere on the aircraft.

So I e-mail the PRM and request that it please go on the workorder next time, and I go about my business. Today my business is fuelling this airplane to go to work. I open all the fuel caps, including the one without a wingnut and as I open the flap on the broken one, the screw comes all the way through onto the wing. Hmm. It is supposed to remain attached inside the flap. I look closely and inside the flap, next to the real, sealing fuel cap are a couple of bits. One is the tiny rod that is supposed to hold the fastener in place after I give it a half turn. And the other is the bottom end of the fastener, the bit with the bottom of the hole that the tiny rod runs through.

Now it's really broken. Fortunately I'm at home base now, but of course it's lunchtime. It's a rule in aviation. If the airplane doesn't break on a long weekend and/or away from base, it breaks on the engineers' lunchbreak. Lunchbreak and coffee break is sort of an alien concept to pilots. We get breaks, sometimes, between the first engine start of the day and walking away from the airplane parked and chocked after the last shutdown, but they aren't dictated by the clock. They're dictated by a late fuel truck or company telling me to wait. And I wait for lunchbreak to be over before presenting my broken fastener. They tell me no problem, but when I come out to see the repair, it still doesn't have a wingnut. And this time I can't use my Swiss army knife, because it requires a Phillips screwdriver.

They promise me a proper one at the next scheduled maintenance. I'll believe it when I see it. The coin in the photo is a toonie (or twoonie), the Canadian two-dollar coin. It's just there for scale. For the non-Canadians, it's 28 mm across.

Back in the Sky

It's another day, another part of the sky, this time with two functional mixture cables. We're finishing off a job we've been working on for almost a week, and the mission specialist tells me the next area he wants me to work. "How long will the job take?" I ask. He says, an hour, maybe an hour and a half. "I can get there and back, or I can get there and do the job, but I can't get there, do the job and get back to where we're supposed to be tonight." And there's no fuel at the airport where the job is.

There is, however, an aerodrome almost exactly en route that has fuel. I've been there before, years before. They have a crooked PAPI because there's a ridge preventing the final approach from being straight in. So you fly at the threshold at an angle, then straighten out and land at the last moment. The wind is a little too strong for company policy to approve me to land the other way, but someone else is. I announce joining downwind for the crooked approach. There's another airplane also waiting to use the into-wind runway. He's orbiting on the base leg waiting for the wrong-way airplane to land. It all works out with the airplane landing the wrong way, and exiting the runway, then the guy on base turning to the crooked final and exiting just before I reach the dogleg and land.

We taxi slowly off and then stop with the brakes on. Meanwhile the other aircraft has taxied straight to fuel. I watch them finish on one side and pass the hose across. We remain in position for a few minutes, not to cool the turbochargers (although that happens too) but for a mission requirement. They finish fuelling the other tank and are starting to recoil the hose. We taxi slowly up behind them, and then get the hint, pushing the airplane out of the way so we can park at the pumps. The fueller is laughing that there's been no one for hours and now two at once. While we pay for fuel he points out that the other crew seems to know us. We go back outside, and what do you know, we do know them. I met the pilot the day before I slammed into a Canada goose on takeoff. (Oh the adventures you miss when I'm not blogging). We tell them where we're off to and they say it's beautiful, we're really going to like it.

"It's not like we get to land and go to the beach!" I point out. (Yeah, there's a beach. Rocks and trees, too. So we're probably in Canada. Yet it's not named after an animal or a body of water. I looked it up: it's named after the guy who taught the guy who discovered it how to make maps. I wonder if he taught his students how to name places after people.) We take off. I'm about to make a right turn direct, when the controller asks me to make a left two-seventy for noise abatement. Okay, sure, whatever. I didn't see any houses there.

It is beautiful en route. My co-worker gets a text from the boss. If we can't get the work done, we're to land and wait for an hour and then take off and try again. So I've been ordered to fly to the most scenic spot within fuel range and go to the beach for an hour. My greatest problem is that I didn't bring sunblock. Sometimes I try not to brag about my job. Other times I don't bother. Also there are wild berries to eat. So much better than granola bars.

There's a little terminal here, unexpectedly nice for the middle of nowhere. A charter company rep is explaining to some city folk that there is no security here, they can just go out to the airplane. The city folk look confused, maybe a little afraid, as though the airplane will not fly correctly if they don't have their luggage examined first. When the tourists have left the charter company guy tells me that there are no federal employees here at all. They mowed the grass a little while ago and used a helicopter to clear it off the runway. That's right. If you think your neighbour's leaf blower is too ostentatious, try using a helicopter. Presumably the helicopter was taxiing out anyway and they asked them if they could please do a low pass to get the grass off the runway. Presumably.

In our crew of two, my job is to make decisions related to the airplane and the other person makes decisions related to data collection. Obviously these overlap sometimes and, as in my decision to land for fuel, safety trumps all. Normally he (the company doesn't currently have any females in that role) sends most of the communication to company, with my role in that reduced to, "did you tell the flight follower we were up?" and "did you already tell them we're landed?" He is the one who suffers the barrage of contradictory instructions on where to go next and what to make a priority. Except now his phone has run out of battery. I text that fact to company and now I get a slice of his life as the texts suggesting what we do now pile in to my phone. I have an hour and fifteen minutes of holding fuel, that is fuel that is not required to do the mission, get back, or be in reserve. So we take off as soon as we've had enough sun and berries. As it works out we don't need to hold at all. We complete the mission and head back, with me texting an ETE (estimated time enroute) from the driver's seat. After I sent it, I saw that the text wasn't being sent right away, because we were in a poor coverage area. I realized I should have made it an ETA (estimated time of arrival) so that it didn't matter what time it left my phone, it would still be accurate. But as it turned out there was an ATC delay for exactly as long as it took the text to send, so I was exactly on time, as far as the flight follower could tell.

And that's the end of another good day.

Maintenance Day

I left you in a cab on a way to a hotel. I asked the desk clerk if there was some place I could get a good vegetarian meal in town. (I'm not, but that's what I was in the mood for). He asked if sushi was vegetarian, so I didn't hold out high hopes for his next recommendation, but it turned out to be a restaurant that handed me a separate vegetarian menu when I asked. The fare on that menu was mainly "vegetarian meats," you know soy 'chicken' and the like. What I was really in the mood for was a hearty meal in the style of a culture that doesn't find it necessary to base a meal around meat, fake or otherwise, and I convinced them to do me a vegetarian version of a prawn curry dish from the regular menu. It was delicious, and they did artful things with asparagus in lieu of the prawns.

The mechanic told me last night that they start work around here at seven a.m. I left the aircraft keys with him, but planned to be in at seven anyway ... and you know what. I've been trying to tell you things day by day but it's just not working. It's just before six now and my alarm that tells me to get up and check out of the hotel is going off in a few minutes, so I'll cut to the highlights and stop trying to do all-day entries. I just don't have the time anymore.

The cable broke as the mechanic moved the controls to see the problem I was describing, so there was no question on how to proceed. It took all morning to figure out how to and remove the cable. It involved removing the foam sealant from the nosewheel gear door bay and removing almost every cowling on the airplane. I downloaded a maintenance manual and went through it. The only reference I could find to engine control cable installation was with reference to installing the wings, leading me to suspect that if the manufacturer thought about replacing those cables at all, they intended the wing to be taken off for the job. At one point the mechanic was removing a small bolt, blind using two pairs of long pliers. The old cable was out just before noon, which is when I picked up the new one from the express courier office.

It was installed, with no less trouble than the removal. On departure the next morning we had to make a quick return to have the transponder reconnected and later discovered the OAT gauge was similarly inoperative. They had to take that airplane to bits to get that cable in. And there's my alarm. Time to file a flight plan. And screw blogger for killing all my paragraph breaks lately.