On Again

A new day, a new decision. We'll fly to Fairbanks, clear customs, and then take commercial flights home while maintenance does a phase check and the replacement crew flies in. Someone must have factored in the airfares and that shifted the math. Airfares are relatively cheap in and out of Fairbanks, as they are for most big-city American destinations. We won't get to see the remote Alaskan spot we had hoped to visit, but the novelty would probably have run out before the work, and we will get to cross northwest into Alaska.

After I get that news, I go flying. If all goes well, this will be our last flight returning to this base -- although my Alaska charts still haven't arrived. Apparently this place has some sort of repellent force that prevents newspapers, courier deliveries, mail and airline passengers from arriving on time.

The last three METARs report cloud bases at 5900', 5800', and 5700', which is odd because I asked the specialist earlier and he said they didn't have a ceilometer. All cloud heights are estimates. How would they, in the absence of nearby mountains, determine a hundred foot difference just by estimation? On other days the bases have been given to the nearest thousand feet. I ask about it.

The answer is that today, because the clouds are all cumulus, they are reporting the bases not by visual estimation, but according to a formula. I understand. I know that formula. I didn't know anyone used it for anything other than written pilot examinations. Here's how it works: cumulus clouds are formed when rising air is cooled to its dewpoint by expansion. Rising air cools through adiabatic expansion at a rate of 3 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. The dewpoint decreases by about 0.5 degrees per thousand feet. Therefore the temperature approaches the dewpoint at a rate of 2.5 degrees per thousand feet. The reported surface temperature is 21 degrees and the surface dewpoint is 5.2 degrees. So at the surface the temperature is 21 - 5.2 = 15.8 degrees above the dewpoint. The temperature will reach the dewpoint 15.8/2.5 = 6.3 thousand feet above the aerodrome. (This doesn't match the earlier report because they have given me current temperature and dewpoint values and the temperature-dewpoint spread has evidently increased by a degree since they did their last calculation. Drop the temperature to 20 and do the same math and you get 5900'). METAR altitudes are given above aerodrome elevation, which is 1250', so I can expect bases to be at about 7500' above sea level, as displayed on my altimeter.

Another pilot hearing this conversation calls in to report bases at 7500'. Science! It works. Also don't you love Canada? We have formulae that combine degrees C with Imperial feet and we think it's just fine that way.

In Canada either a flight plan or a flight itinerary must be filed for a VFR flight of more than 25 nm. A flight plan is filed with Nav Canada but a flight itinerary can be filed with anyone responsible enough to report you missing. Commercial operations like mine generally file with company and when we inform ATC of this we say we are "on a company note." That shortcuts ATC asking if we want them to open our flight plan. In imitation of this practice, a small aircraft pilot taxiing out calls the FSS and says he is "VFR to Helmut on a note." He then decides that this needs more explanation, as the FSS knows he is a private owner and not a company, so he adds, "My wife."

Another pilot calls up "Looking for the airways to Ft. St. John." That's a non-standard way to ask for an IFR clearance, but seeing as the FSS probably has his clearance sitting there and is is waiting for him to call to ask for it, he could probably have said anything he liked and still received it. If you don't ask for it, they offer it, as when the tower says to a airline pilot after he makes a taxi call. "Grab your pen."

Then it's my turn. The wind is straight down runway 26 at 10 knots, so it's an easy taxi and take-off. As the airplane waddles up to altitude in the hot weather I call to report airborne, and my turn. The FSS does a shift change. It's a woman with an unfamiliar voice, and she comments to someone on air that she's just back after two weeks. I guess she's out of practice, because she keeps getting confused, forgetting which airplane is where, scrambling our types and needing constant position reports. I am ready with a position report whenever she calls me for one and make sure I am keeping track myself of where the other aircraft are.

Or Maybe Not

The reported weather across the north slope of Alaska has been solid IFR all week. I'm remembering when we were sent to work in Florida in thunderstorm and hurricane season, and southern California in fire season. "Did someone research when this place has a good season we could work there?" I idly ask my chief pilot.

"This is the good season," is the reply.

Company is working out how to schedule maintenance when we are in northern Alaska. Flurries of e-mail, (including attachements I can't open on either the iPod or the crippled business centre computer) go back and forth. Plan A is for us to fly to the job site, work until just before maintenance is due, then ferry south to Fairbanks and have company maintenance personnel fly into the large airport to do the work. Plan B is to do scheduled maintenance twenty hours early, before we leave here, and then try to do the ferry north, the work, and the ferry back to Canada, all within fifty hours plus an extension. That requires everything to go right: no diversions, no aborted flights, and no unscheduled maintenance requirements. This is highly unlikely. Airplanes are never that cooperative. Doing the maintenance twenty hours early essentially costs the company the profit that they could have earned on those twenty hours of flight. A ferry, at maximum three hours each way, costs the company the profit they would have earned on that six hours of flight, plus the fuel and wear and tear on the airplane. Those aren't the only costs to consider.

It is also at least twice as expensive to fly maintenance personnel to our current location as it would be to have them to fly to Fairbanks. Accommodations are probably about the same. Not doing what makes the customer happiest may cost future contracts. It's complex.

Management decides on option B. In fact they will add a multiplier to the expense of airfare out of here, by doing a crew change before the trip, and swapping pilots during the maintenance. I've flown home commercially from this airport once before and it was the most expensive one-way fare I've ever purchased. Recall that I've flown one-way two or from seven out of ten provinces from coast to coast, plus many states, including California and Florida. I don't care personally about the expense of the flight, but I was looking forward to flying to Alaska. We both were. And I'll bet you wanted to hear about such an adventure too.

Personal Value Judgement

Our destination in Alaska is in the vicinity of a town called Deadhorse. To my amazement Deadhorse is a proper town, not just an Indian reserve. There's even a road all the way up, and it's paved in a lot of places. Tourists go there. It isn't decided yet whether we will stay in Deadhorse or at the customer site at a private strip, or at some other mosquito-infested hellhole.

I e-mail a pilot friend who lives in Alaska, to warn him of my possible arrival and see if we can coordinate some sort of meeting on my way through southern Alaska. It turns out he has worked out of Deadhorse, and he sends me more information than fits on my tiny iPod screen about the airport, the town, the weather and the available diversion aerodromes.

"What's there to do in Deadhorse?" I asked.

"Eat," he said, then added a number of tourist quasi-attractions, like trying to get to the beach (should be almost completely ice-free this time of year) despite the fact that the shore is chock-a-block with oil companies hunkering behind paranoid security.

I had already noticed that northern Alaska had two sorts of June weather: when it's not IFR in 300' ceilings and rain, it's IFR in fog. My friend claims that there a third sort of weather, in which it's actually possible to fly VFR, but that it was frequently and rapily replaced with one of the other sort, hence the need to be familiar with all the possible options.

Deadhorse has a long, paved runway. Most of the other options in the area don't, so my friend has the skinny for me on which would give me access to telephones, lodgings, roads and other luxury amenities, should I happen to land there. One he describes as "... abandoned and not maintained ... it would make a better place to crash than out on the tundra someplace." Then he reconsiders that last and points out that whether it would be better to try to land there versus being "quietly and inconspicuously dead in some out of sight place is a personal value judgment that I can't make for you."

I write back and tell him that the last-mentioned abandoned and not maintained strip is the one our customer wants us to use.

He offers his condolences and amends, "If you're going to be based out of there, you can disregard all my previous suggestions for entertainment. The new list is: Swat mosquitoes, watch the river go by, swat more mosquitoes."

This strip does have a road near it, and we have some support crew going up there this week so we'll ask for photographs of the runway, and get them to walk or drive it to report on the surface condition.

Also I discover that the quasi-on state of my dead computer does not supply power to the USB ports, so not only can I not buy software for my iPod, I can't recharge it, either. I'm guessing that there is a low tech solution to the latter problem. I go downstairs to the hotel desk.

"May I please look in the box of chargers and cords left behind by previous guests?"

Every hotel has one of these. I learned about it when a coworker who checked out a day early phoned back to get us to ask at the desk to see if they had found his phone charger. If you need a telephone wall charger, just go to your nearest hotel and ask. As the woman at the Super-8 put it, "If you see anything you can use, just take it: it's better than it going to landfill." This box is well organized: each item is coiled up and held with a rubber band. The first one I saw was a single tangled mass of cordage. A first inspection of the box shows no Apple-white cords, so there isn't an Apple-specific iPod wall charger in here, but I'm expecting there to exist a transformer that I plug into the standard 110V North American wall socket and that has two or three USB outlets on the back. I know there's a 12V to USB converter for the car, so there has to be a 110V to USB converter for people who have more USB-powered gadgets than USB ports on their computers. But there is nothing in here that I can plug a USB cord into. By far the favourite piece of electronics to abandon here is the Motorola phone charger.

I put everything back neatly in the box and ask where in town I might buy a computer cable. There is one, on one of the back streets, between a gym and a store that sells second hand Harlequin romances and maternity clothes. Here's the sign on the door of the computer place:

Fortunately it's not Sunday, so I go on in. They don't immediately recognize my description of a 110V-to-USB converter but eventually come back with a device marketed as "Charge your iPod at home!" The existence of the device makes me realize the existence of a demographic who only have Internet access at work, and have iTunes installed on their work computer, then worry about running down the battery over the weekend. It comes with a cable and is $34 dollars. There's a cheaper similar device that has no cord, just the one USB port, so I get that instead.

Becoming a Pod Person

I never realized how much I used my computer until it died on me. It's my entertainment, my connection to company, my connection to home and friends, my weight and balance worksheet, my flight planning tool, the way I check on the progress of that charts order (still not here), the way I look up regulations, and where a lot of my data is stored.

I have the essentials printed out on a sheet that I keep meaning to laminate, but instead just print out again every time it gets tattered. I have more data, including encrypted passwords for more sites than I can remember, in a memory stick. I take the memory stick down to the hotel "business centre" and pop it in a USB slot to get what I need. It's a nifty little thing that will put the password I need in the clipboard so I can paste it, and then clear the buffer. That way I need never type my password when anyone, including a potential keyboard stroke counter, is watching. But this business centre computer has been so thoroughly sanitized that I cannot run the executable necessary to get at my data. It won't run from the E: drive and it can't be copied onto the hotel computer.

Fortunately my company e-mail is web-based, and I remember that password, so I can communicate that way. I don't want to sit in the business centre and blog, though, and besides the blog entries I intended to post this week are all in partially-written note form on the hard drive of the dead computer. I don't want to have to reconstruct them.

I do have one more Internet-capable device, that I'd almost forgotten. An iPod Touch. I know, how do you forget you have a cool pocket-sized computer? It is mine, a gift, but I passed it to someone else to use while I was at work, because I had my iPod shuffle and my laptop and didn't see a need for what was essentially a second computer and a second iPod. And I don't like things to go to waste. I have only just reclaimed it, and not really used it yet except as a photo album.

I turned it on and it easily connected to the hotel Internet. Some websites automatically detected that it was a mobile and provided a mobile interface that was easy to use. Others were virtually impossible to use, as their navigation conflicted with the touch interface. The on-screen keyboard wasn't quite as hard to use as I would have expected for something that small, and it does make fairly intelligent autocompletion and autocorrection suggestions. Except when I had some grease on my hands from the airplane and then it would crazily autocorrect to strings like "triiiiiyyyuyiiiiing tyyyyyo". Washing my hands and cleaning the screen helped there.

I knew that most of my problems could be solved with software, and I was willing to pay for some, so I googled things like "iPod touch spreadsheet" and tried to download what I found. The sites told me that I needed to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. "Simply connect your device to your computer," it told me. I guess thinking of this as a kind of miniature emergency back up computer is not the right model. I guess it really is just a mobile Sudoku, YouTube and photograph display tablet.

And the one time I didn't bring my camera on a flight we're overflying both the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. The change in terrain is subtle but in the corner of the Yukon where I am there are eskers on the ground, long ridgy things, very recognizable, somehow formed during glaciation. These were very clear and would have been easy to photograph, although I can't upload any pictures until I get my computer back.

Yesterday's News

In order to have something other than the drink menu to read during dinner, I often buy a newspaper at the gas station before I go to a restaurant. Here's it's the Vancouver Sun, published down south and distributed to the whole province. There are only two copies left. And they are of yesterday's paper. That's normal in the north. If there were a large population up here then the paper might be sent electronically and local print run made for distribution here, but there aren't enough people here to warrant that. They print the paper in Vancouver and I initially assumed that they threw a few bundles on a truck going north. It's the "Final Edition" that I buy, so it's not like they rushed the first print run onto a truck. Maybe they gathered up what they hadn't sold by the end of the day yesterday and put it on an overnight truck. We're not considered too important up here.

Today there was no flying so I went to dinner a little earlier. But the store had no papers. "Could you please tell me where else in town I can get a paper?" I asked.

"The airplane doesn't get in until 7:30," she says. "So we'll get them later."

Oh, I'm surprised, they actually fly them in. "I mean Saturday's paper," I clarify. It's Sunday today. That's what she meant, too. It's on it's way here now.

Okay this is just weird. If they are going to fly the paper up, why not load the edition that was printed the same day the airplane leaves Vancouver. It is a morning paper down there. How is it that they put yesterday's paper on the airplane?

Later I go to another store and ask if they have the paper, and see if I can get more information about why the paper isn't even current when it's loaded. They don't have it either. "Sometimes they have too much baggage and they take the papers off," says the vendor. "Then we get them the next day." I had a feeling she could have easily added, "Or the day after."

Okay that I understand. That is the northern experience of waiting for cargo that gets bumped at every station on the way. I think we're the last stop for the airline that comes here. I've heard that even blood products for the hospital take a day to get here. But why do they ship yesterday's paper? Is it like the groceries stores pawning off spoiled produce on their northern pilot customers because they know that by the time the food gets there the customer won't know it didn't rot on the way?

It doesn't really matter that it's yesterday's news. By the time this posts it will be last week's news, or two weeks ago, but the same things will be going on. In international news, Americans, North Koreans, Iranians, Afghanis are all up to something. In Canada the RCMP will be investigating something and some other body will be investigating the RCMP, and politicians will be calling each other names. There's a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. And there will be local news from the city. I feel really disconnected reading the things that are important to the southern city, but obviously have no bearing here. For example the government has cancelled a summer camp subsidy program for low income families, and they're interviewing the parents of tearful kids about that. Not that kids don't learn important lessons at summer camp, but I met an ambitious 20 year old up here, who had never been out of Fort Nelson. The place has six streets and nothing for hundreds of kilometres but bugs and trees and bears. I bet her life could use some enrichment. Vancouver has hundreds of parks and museums and festivals, including a lot of things that are free to take your kids to. True, kids these days in Vancouver probably aren't allowed to go more than six streets from home. But. Ah, weird contrast.

I still have yesterday's paper from here. Which is the day before yesterday's paper going by the date, so I do the crosswords from it. And once again I manage to do an entire crossword between asking for the bill and getting it. I'm not that much of a crossword whiz. The service is just that slow.

And my computer is confirmed dead. When I push the power button the "on" light illuminates, the fan starts to run, the hard drive and CD ROM drive lights flash once, then after a few seconds the light stays on but it goes completely quiet. And I checked right away this time: there's no Buns of Steel CD in the drive.

Continuing the theme of 'yesterday's news,' yesterday someone sent me this link to an article on flight delays at JFK caused by turtles. I think they were copulating on the runway, bu the article is too delicate to make that entirely clear.

Counting Calories

The customers want to take a commercial flight to Alaska while we transport their uncheckable oversized gear instead. We went out to the airplane to check if the most awkward piece of customer equipment would fit in the airplane. With some rearranging of what we already have, the conclusion was yes. It's amazing how asymmetric an airplane can be and still look symmetrical. The wing lockers are not the same size or shape.

The other odd thing, as I mentioned before, is going north to the United States. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that. As I packed for this trip, I looked at my passport and thought to myself that it was unlikely I would need it. I knew we would be concentrating on the northern areas during the few weeks of the year that they aren't covered in snow, but of course I brought it anyway and now I'm headed north across a border. I keep having to remind myself that all the things that apply going south, apply to this border crossing, too. In Canada the US is referred to as "Our Southern Neighbours." It's just odd going north into their country, and not have it be one of the technically north bits like between the Great Lakes in the Detroit-Windsor area or the Angle near Kenora. The customers promise to get us a list of all the equipment and serial numbers for our customs broker. Our route will pretty much follow the Alaska highway to Fairbanks, where we'll clear customs and from there up the Dalton Highway to the coast. I was really surprised to learn that there was a road all the way to the coast.

I went to buy the rest of the Alaska emergency supplies. The rules didn't specify that we needed a fishing rod, just fishing tackle, and I'm sure one could improvise a fishing rod from the wreckage or catch fish on handlines, but I'm thinking we could have some fun and "test" our survival gear. A collapsible fishing rod is $30 but a kid's rod is only $15. I have a choice of Pirates of the Caribbean, Barbie, or Disney Princesses. I chose the one that came with a bonus tackle box.

Bughoods are cheap and available, no problem. The guy at the hunting store tried to sell me a better, electric device for repelling mosquitoes. He touts it as able to create a five metre radius zone devoid of mosquitoes. An area effect spell, in D&D terms. He didn't use D&D terminology, though. Not a lot of hunting store proprietors do, I imagine. It would probably be great, sitting on the ramp in northern Alaska in a mosquito-free zone. But I stick to the shopping list.

I'm also looking for survival food. What I want is a little pile of bland-to-yucky, shelf stable, high calorie, survival food bars. Something that won't be destroyed by immersion, won't tempt someone to eat out of boredom, and that requires no preparation, so you can eat it while sitting in the remains of your mangled aircraft with a broken leg, cowering under your bughood and wrapped in your emergency blanket. The hunting store has lightweight foil-packaged meals, but you have to boil them in a pot with water, and I want no-preparation food.

This store is out of signalling devices, so I try another. Most people probably fulfill this requirement with special shells, but lacking a rifle or shotgun, I have to find a self-contained device. Eventually I find a pen-type device that comes with both signal flares and bear bangers. Seems to fill the bill. It's almost fifty dollars, but it has to be both safe, and fire pyrotechnics, so one has to pay for that. This store also just has boil-in-bag hunting food, for people who plan to eat it. Emergency food should, you see, be barely palatable, so you only eat what you have to.

Plan B is to just buy reasonably long-life items like granola bars. Not as calorie-dense, but they'll have to do. Now that I reread the requirement for "food sufficient to sustain life" for one week, I kind of go "huh?" A pack of tic-tacs should meet that. You don't starve to death in a week. You just get really hungry. But on the shopping trip I had "a weeks worth of food per person" in my head, and hadn't read carefully enough to see that all I had to do was sustain life. So what's a week's food? I fixed on the number two thousand calories a day. I think that's what the RDA on food packaging is based on. So with two people on board, I needed 28,000 calories (or kcal, or however you want to count them). The word calorie is kind of like pesos: you have to know which multiplier you are dealing with. According to the side panel nutritional information, a box of granola bars is about 1000 calories. I pick up seven of those. So, 21,000 calories to go. How about some sardines? I pick up a can and read the label. It's only a hundred and ten calories. So I'd need eighteen cans for a day's worth of calories. What? I know for a fact that I can bicycle for fourteen hours fuelled by only eight cans of sardines. Maybe these are low-calorie sardines. There are some of those little cheese snack things with cracker sticks. They are also marked as 110 calories each. What? I could eat eighteen of those before dinner and still eat dinner. I think I don't understand calories. I throw in a couple of bags of raisins, some beef jerky. Still 19,000 calories to go. I eye the candy aisle. I mean, wow, I'm starting to understand why so many people fulfill much of their daily caloric requirements through junk food.

I fill the quota mainly with different sorts of energy bars. I'm imagining how mad or grateful people would be if they really were stranded in the woods for a week eating what I had purchased. So maybe I will throw in a bit of candy, too.

Back at the hotel, I mention the 2000 calorie per day figure that I used and get responses ranging from "maybe for YOU; I'd need at least 3000!" down to "I'd think 300 would be enough." I probably went overboard, but the food will get eaten in the end. I buy a mouse-resistant plastic container to seal it all in, and stash it in the airplane with the axe, tarps, water purification and other emergency supplies. Also my computer, which I left running, seems to have shut itself down. Curious. At the time I thought perhaps it downloaded an automatic update and got confused trying to reboot itself. I hit the on-button: the light came on and the fan started up, so I went for supper. Damn that constant need for calories.

Ironically, I return to the hotel in time to catch the second half of an episode of Survivorman. I've never seen it before but another blogger recommended it. The star of the one-man-show is pretending to have survived a small airplane crash in the Temiscaming winter, with a broken arm. After four days he admits he's not doing that well, and has just abandoned the fake broken arm to take a partly frozen rabbit out of a snare. As he prepares the rabbit, the footage is edited to reduce the gore on TV, which is too bad because I've never dressed a rabbit. I know some wild animals have musk glands that you should remove properly before cooking, and I don't know what they look like. I also remember that you can get sick from a diet of only rabbits. He does mention the latter and explains that you can protect yourself from protein poisoning by eating the bone marrow, eyeballs and organs.

His next move goes against the normal advice for air crashes. He builds a toboggan out of the wreckage and starts to walk back to civilization, towing his gear on the toboggan. I think that's part of the premise of the show, that he always has to prove his ability to escape from the situation. Air crash wisdom is that one should stay with the airplane because it is an easier target for searchers, may have been observed on radar (okay, probably not in Temiscaming), may be sending an ELT signal, and perhaps provides shelter. And you need fewer calories to stay in one place than to struggle through the snow.

"My god they're throwing guitars out there"

This is everywhere today, but it's still great. My fellow Canadian, musician Dave Carroll, was sitting in an airplane at O'Hare when he heard those words from another passenger. But I don't need to tell the story, as the music video does it very effectively.

Apparently United now says they get it, and wants to use the video for in house training on how to handle a customer complaint. I'd say the price for that would be at least $1200, plus production costs. See Shiny Objects for more information and links to stories about the saga.

I started writing this with Dave Carroll's website open, but when I went to click a link it 403ed, and then after a few minutes started redirecting to his myspace page so I assume the singer's personal site has been overwhelmed. The band is Sons of Maxwell, and that site is still up and you can buy their music there.

Screwing Up

I mentioned we had an airplane in maintenance. They replaced a fuel pump that was starting to sound like the Beach Boys. (It's possible that just my copy of that song sounds like a bad fuel pump, because before being converted to the iTunes format, mine was purchased on cassette tape, copied to a mix tape on a borrowed boom box with two tape decks, then later after much use the mix taps was ripped to CD with the assistance of a different tape recorder. All that is legal in Canada. I suppose I'm supposed to remove all non-iTunes-purchased music before going south. Or--whoa--north! Do the June 1st security rules apply on a gravel strip with no roads or fences?) With the replacement pump installed and the rest of the inspection done, we pilots helped button up the airplane

I've no objection to working, and I know how to put cowling screws in, but I'm always a little leery when it's me closing up, because it's going to be me who is responsible for checking the work afterwards and if I miss something now, I'm likely to miss it later. It's especially important to make sure all the cowling pins have engaged properly. I note every screw that doesn't quite fit and ask the engineer to check it. I also decline an electric screwdriver. Honestly what would you have to be thinking to arm a pilot with an electric screw destroyer?

There was a problem with the airplane after maintenance. It was related to the maintenance, but unrelated to the pilots' ability to apply cowling screws. My coworker handled it flawlessly, so I'll leave it at that. It's fixed now. Another day in the life.

Alaska Bound

So, Alaska. Cool. And of course when my company goes to Alaska they aren't talking about Anchorage or Fairbanks. The destination is on the north coast. It's still not certain we're going, but I start to do some research.

First of all, I remember there being a rule requiring a firearm be carried on board all aircraft in the state of Alaska. I don't normally carry a weapon more threatening than a Swiss army knife, so this might have to be rectified. It's certainly a more interesting avenue of preliminary investigation than the names of the charts I'll need.

I start with the local Yellow Pages. Firearms ... see guns. There are three entries, all in Whitehorse, Yukon. "Local" is a relative term for northern telephone books. This one seems to cover every Canadian community from here to the arctic sea. We could buy a gun in Whitehorse on the way up, but it would be better to have one already. I try Sporting Goods. Two places are listed locally. The first number is out of service but the second one answers and says, "no problem, what you need, right or left handed?" I tell him I was just checking on availability, that I'll get back to him when I know our requirements. A hunting rifle would be the coolest thing ever to go on my expense account.

I mention the gun thing to my co-worker. She looks at me like I'm insane and says that was discontinued ages ago. So I don't keep up on the individual state laws of places I've never been. The way she looked at me made it sound like it hasn't been a requirement since 1963, so I do a bit of research to see just how stupid I am. It was discontinued in 2001. That was after I finished my pilot training, so I'm not completely stupid. Hmm, I wonder what high profile event of that year made them decide not to require foreigners to carry guns on airside? It probably didn't actually decrease the carriage of weapons by Americans in Alaskan airplanes, but probably by foreigners who would have to figure their way around import regulations.

The law that once required guns still requires some things that aren't in my airplane. Alaska Statute 2.35.110 says:

1. The minimum equipment to be carried during summer months is as follows: (for all single engine and for multiengine aircraft licensed to carry 15 passengers or less)
(A) rations for each occupant sufficient to sustain life for one week;
(B) one axe or hatchet;
(C) one first aid kit;
(D) an assortment of tackle such as hooks, flies, lines, and sinkers;
(E) one knife;
(F) fire starter;
(G) one mosquito headnet for each occupant;
(H) two small signaling devices such as colored smoke bombs, railroad fuses, or Very pistol shells, in sealed metal containers;

We have B, C and F on board already. Everyone has a leatherman or some sort of knife, and the rest can be obtained locally. Yeah, at least I can go buy fishing gear for work.

Meanwhile the trip is a go. My coworker is trying to order charts. "What's the green book called?" she asks me.

"It's the A/FD," I say, and as this is over the phone the fact that I don't know if that's spelled A/FD or AF/D doesn't matter. It stands for Airport Facilities Directory. Or I suppose Airport/Facilities Directory.

"They don't have it," she says. "I have to know the name of which one I want and they say there isn't one for Alaska." Weird. I know it's not in the Northwest book. But there has to be one for Alaska. She's talking to a Canadian company. I suggest she try Sporty's, a US chart supplier. She's not familiar with them -- she's worked in the arctic more than I have, and I've worked in the US more than she has. Neither of us has worked in the US arctic. She turns the charts task over to me.

I go online to Sporty's and click the link for sectional maps. There's a list of all the ones available, but nothing for Alaska. I click the reference map, and Alaska is on there. Very strange. After a while I notice a separate section for "Alaskan Charts." I wonder if this is the sort of being singled out and forgotten that Alaskans have to put up with all the time. Do they perpetually 'not count' because you have to drive through Canada to get there? I've heard of Hawaiians being denied rental cars in the continental US because the agent insisted that they have a U.S. driver's licence. (Mind you, a New Mexico resident at the telling of that story had had the same experience, so the geographic knowledge of rental car employees is not necessarily a benchmark for national policy.

I eventually find the A/FD for Alaska and discover why the Canadian dealer couldn't find it based on a request for "the green book, the AFD for Alaska." First it's not green, it's orange. And Secondly it's not called the A/FD, but rather the chart supplement, with a note that it includes the A/FD. Now a seller with a clue would have figured out what the customer wanted, but its true that there was neither a green book nor a book called A/FD for the Alaska region. I put an Alaska Chart Supplement in the shopping cart.

Now for the sectionals. I notice that all the charts are obsolete, just like those for the far northern Canadian areas. At least theirs are in print. A lot of the Canadian WACs are out of date, out of print and no planned reprinting date. You hold onto your old ones as the only source of knowledge. It's funny to see that the US has abandoned its north, too. Even the A/FD Chart Supplement expired on the 7th of February. Oh wait, strike all that. American dates go M/D/Y, with the day in the middle. They are all current. Wow. Someone updates the northern Alaska charts every six months. That's more of what I expect from the US.

I order them all and hope there is no problem with customs.

Meanwhile more company mail has arrived in the inbox. We're going to a private strip in the middle of nowhere. I'm CCed on e-mail to the customer where my boss asks, "Get us some info on the strip such as elevation, runway heading, accurate GPS coordinates. Any controlling agency frequencies if they have one (whether it’s a Unicom or MF) Basically a frequency the pilots can communicate on with other pilots operating in and out of the strip."

I'm thinking Alaska is going to be more like northern Canada than it is like Nunavut, but I imagine it will have a flavour all its own. We're in for an adventure.

Here's a non-standard maintenance incident that didn't come from the North. The person who forwarded this to me commented that the engineer in question probably didn't use parts salvaged from a crashed B747 at the side of the runway. I'm just imagining the incredulity from the crew. I'm sure he wasn't the first passenger ever, when faced with an eight hour delay, to say "I can fix it." His engineers licence was probably shown to the flight attendant, who passed it to the captain, who faxed it to company.

Notes and Screeching

Another maintenance cycle has turned. I flew a shorter than usual flight today in order to land before the next phase check was overdue. An airplane is not any riskier to fly when it's ready to go into maintenance than it was 25 hours earlier. It tends to leak or burn a bit more oil and there may be a few other things that rattle, but on average I am certain that the last flight before scheduled maintenance is safer than the first flight after such maintenance. That's not even counting the fact that I'll be landing with extra fuel because of the shortened duration.

Then a propos of nothing, just flying along, there's a really horrible noise. I turn off my iPod to listen more closely, and it goes away. It turns out that the base line, played through the left earbud in stereo, from The Beach Boys Surfing Safari sounds exactly like a cavitating fuel pump. A fuel pump cavitates when there isn't enough fuel in the tank for it to pump, or when it's so turbulent that the line unports. It's not a good sound to have in ones left ear during flight. I'm removing that song from my in-flight playlist.

After landing I help tear the panels off the airplane for the inspection and then we go over to a house belonging to one of the engineers. He mentioned that he has a parrot, which I asked to see. I'm disappointed that it isn't a big colourful African parrot like a red or blue macaw. I didn't know that the category of parrot was broader than just those birds. His is a cockatiel cockatoo. It looks like a giant lovebird, white with a hint of pink and yellow. He has it because someone asked him to look after it for a year while he went to Africa. It's been nine years now and he's never come back.

The bird doesn't seem to talk or imitate sounds like the birds I think of when you say "parrot." It just screeches. but it's friendly and lets me pet it. It stepped onto my hand, when I offered it. It's fun to pet a bird. They are simultaneously the descendants of the dinosaurs, and man's inspiration for flight. This one sits on my hand, gripping with his scaly feet, and lets me preen him. When I was a kid I used to find bird feathers on the ground and carefully align all the barbules together, marvelling at how the invisibly tiny hooks held them together, converting scraggly disarray into one continuous smooth vane. I always wished I could do that with my hair.

The bird seemed to like it a lot when I bobbed my hand up and down, exaggerating the movements of my hand by stretching and crouching, like someone pumping on a swing to go faster. Then it walked up my arm (yes my bare arm, and yes with claws, but fortunately even a big bird is a lot lighter than a cat) to my shoulder where it sat for a while before launching into the air and flying over to the owner's shoulder. I washed my hands and arms thoroughly when I got home. I hope parrots don't carry salmonella or something. The scratches completely vanished after only a few hours, so it looks like he didn't break enough layers of skin to leave a welt.

Meanwhile the latest news is that we're going to Alaska next, "but don't buy charts yet."

Dead End

As everyone who lives in a hotel knows, one of your first duties upon dropping your suitcases in the room is to determine your emergency exit route. Unless I'm actually carrying my seventy pounds of luggage with me at the time, I typically get from floor to floor in a hotel using the stairs anyway, so I want to know where they are even if there isn't a fire.

Not too long ago I was staying near the middle of the upstairs floor in a two-storey hotel. It had a staircase at each end and an elevator in the middle. I noticed an EXIT sign in the middle of the upstairs corridor. It's the red, ceiling mounted kind, not the ankle-level green ones you get in California, and it's pointing to the elevator foyer. Had I missed a staircase? The foyer contained the elevators, a pop machine, an electrical room door, an unmarked, locked door a little narrower than standard--probably a closet--and a window. The window did not have any opening hardware on it and did not have a fire axe next to it or a fire escape leading from it down to the pool patio below.

I asked a member of the hotel staff about it, and they confirmed that the only way out of the building through the foyer was the elevators. They did realize the inappropriateness of the fire exit sign, so I think it will be fixed, but how does a fire inspector not catch that?

Big Bike, Little Bike

All right, I'm back online. Chronicles of my life as a pod person, and the subsequent battles with Microsoft Vista will follow in their proper sequence.

In the hotel parking lot, I noticed a flatbed trailer containing an unusual vehicle. I'd call it a bicycle, but a bicycle has two wheels and this has instead four really big wheels. It also has about thirty bicycle seats, thirty sets of pedals, and thirty sets of handlebars all arranged in three columns on a frame with the approximate footprint of a schoolbus. And not the short bus, either. It's would be a really, really, big bicycle, if the word "bicycle" didn't imply two wheels. I noted that it was cool, and assumed that it was headed up to some 4th of July celebration in Alaska. (Happy 4th, by the way, to my U.S.A. readers). Everything else on this highway is headed to Alaska.

The next day I crossed the parking lot on my way back from supper just in time to see the big bike pulling out of the parking lot. Not the big bike on the trailer pulled by the truck: but the big bike being ridden by about thirty people all pedalling like crazy. It was fast!

"Hey!" I asked of people at a table with banners on it. "Who rides on the bike?"

"Teams," she said. "Corporate groups, other organizations. Other people too."

That didn't quite answer my question, so I cut to the heart of the matter, "Can I ride on it?"

And the answer is yes -- for a donation --. The whole escapade is a fundraiser for the Heart & Stroke Foundation. I know someone who has had a heart attack and someone else who has had a stroke in the last few weeks, so in their names I ponied up the cash and joined in the fun. "What team are you on?" they wanted to know. A team captain was within earshot worrying that many of the people from her organization who said they would come hadn't turned up, so I said I was on her team, and they were happy to have the ringer. The fire rescue squad was supposed to be there too, but their captain had told them the wrong date, so the whole bike was ladies, with the middle row of seats unoccupied. Those of us who were there got on and were issued silly noisemakers and then we cranked up the onboard tunes and rode off. The seats were big wide fat-bottomed girl seats, so I had to sit forward on the forward point of the seat in order to pedal properly. The drive train was quite complicated. I think the woman in front of me wasn't putting power into the same chain as I was, but the woman two ahead was. She kept putting her feet up and stopping pedalling, possibly because I was pedalling more furiously than she wanted to keep up with. Hey, if I'm going to ride the big bike, I'm going to ride the hell out of it. Even with only two-thirds of the seats filled and not everyone as enthusiastic about pedalling as I was, we got going pretty quickly. We were riding along the Alaska Highway south service road.

We rode past the laundromat-sex shop-buffalo meat sales outlet and up the hill past the grocery store. It wasn't a very steep hill, but it was a heavy bicycle. We all waved and cheered and shook our noisemakers at everyone we saw. And of course because it's a small town, everyone who isn't a ringer like me knows everyone else they see in the pickup trucks or walking on the sidewalk as we go by. We ride past the hunting store, past the Northern Store (which the locals still call The Bay) and past one of the two Chinese restaurants. When we get to the street opposite the community centre, the one that had been constructed incorrectly and had the roof fall in last year right after a kids hockey tournament, we turned right, crossed the Alaska highway and turned right again down the north service road. Now this was a downhill road, not so steep you notice walking, but enough that when you get a mammoth steel-framed "bicycle" loaded with twenty women, some of whom are still pedalling like they paid to do this, it goes pretty fast. There are stop signs at some of the sidestreets, but our driver is just looking up at anyone coming and I guess staring them down, because we barrel on through. "Hang on everyone," he says. "We're going around the corner pretty fast."

The corner is a cross street with a Yield sign to merge with or cross the Alaska Highway. There's one of those bannered Wide Load trucks coming. And we peel around the corner at about 40 km/h screaming like we're on a roller coaster, across the highway and back into the hotel parking lot. Best fifteen minutes on a bicycle I ever spent, and I've bicycled a lot of places, including down the slope of a volcano, across national borders and mountain ranges, and through some spectacular national parks.

Also, some of the participants were from a hospital team, so I checked if they could clear up my mystery. I wasn't too specific, mentioning only that there was a "particular type of garbage" on the street above the hospital. They immediately recognized the reference, but didn't have a clear answer for me. They said it was right down the street from the high school, where free condoms were available. The hospital gives out free condoms, too, but they said they weren't the same kind. They were not aware of orgies occurring on the street behind the hospital.

Back on the subject of bicycles, the people at Montague sent me an e-mail recently about their Paratrooper bike. It's a full-sized bicycle that uses standard bicycle components and is rugged enough to be dropped out of an airplane on a parachute and for a big soldier to ride around in the desert carrying an additional 35 kilograms of gear. And it folds up to barely bigger than airline checked luggage. The unfolding process is apparently a 30-second, no-tools operation. The price is about $500, too, which is a reasonable price for a rugged bike that doesn't fold.

In the picture on the website you see it folded on the seat of a car and it looks smaller than my much- travelled suitcase. But then you realize that the "car" it is in is one of those giant military jeep things, and the soldier is probably a gigantic guy too. Air Canada and United Airlines both restrict standard checked luggage using a weird formula where they add the three dimensions.

Max size for checked luggage: Width + Length + Height = 62"

Paratrooper bike dimensions: L36" + H28" + W12" = 76"

That's too bad, by a mere fourteen inches. I wonder if I removed the pedals, seat and handlebars if that would squeeze it down enough. Possibly. But you don't want to be so close to the borderline that you risk getting slapped with a $175 oversized baggage fee. Also you'd have to put it in an opaque bag, so that the airline doesn't automatically charge the bicycle fee. After all, if you can drop it out of an airplane, you can entrust it to baggage handlers, right? You can do a bit more disassembly and get everything inside regulation suitcases, and then of course not tell them anything is a bicycle, to avoid the $100 bicycle surcharge.

I only have one checked bag now. It is tempting to travel with a second one, and have a bicycle with me. My wandering radius would expand from ten or so kilometres to thirty or forty. I'm thinking about it. Does it mean I'd have to sell one of my existing and beloved bicycles?

I can has scrollbar?

My computer won't boot and it's just too hard to exit HTML on an iPod, so expect one-line posts until I can return to civilization and computer repair service.

Northern Ambitions

I ate at a fried chicken place, but I didn't have chicken. I'd been told the perogies were the dish to have here. Boiled, fried in butter, then loaded with sour cream and big chunks of real chopped bacon they may have been, but not too often if you have to keep a current medical. Someone who I think is the cook/owner takes my order at the counter, and then I sit and wait for it. The only other customers are a young man drinking a pop at a window table, and two Mennonite couples. The men take off their traditional black felted hats and the women of course leave on their white caps. They're an unusual sight this far north. Most of the headgear here is trucker caps. A young waitress admires the men's hats and ask where they got them, wondering if she'll see something like that when she goes to London.

London, Ontario is quite near where they are from, but it turns out she is going to London, England. She explains that she is a member of the local Slavey First Nation and has obtained a study grant from the band to study cuisine abroad. She wants to be a chef. She has learned cooking from her mother, and taken courses at the local college. She dreams of being a chef. Not just any chef but a top world chef. The only thing is ... she's never been out of this town.

"Oh wow!" I say, in anticipation of the culture shock this young lady is about to experience. She's worried, She sees so many movies and TV shows about cities and thinks she'll be mugged or kidnapped or shot. These aren't my fears for her. I try to reassure her about the things she is worried about, but underneath I'm hoping she can cope with the sensory assault of London, with the impersonal unfriendliness of the big city. "People won't seem as friendly at first. They don't talk to strangers. But you'll get to know people and they'll like you."

She has already demonstrated a head start on defeating peer pressure and being true to herself. At age nineteen members of her band receive $20,000 in 'heritage money' and she is proud that unlike many of her peers, she still has most of hers, didn't spend it all on alcohol and vehicles. She goes back to the kidnapping fears. I try to point out that she already knows how to look after herself. "This can be a tough town, I bet, with all the people here. You know which people to avoid and how not to get into trouble here. You can do it in the big city."

She tells me that really she knows everyone in town here, but the real way people get into trouble here is sleeping with other people's husbands and wives. There's no way people aren't going to find out eventually, but the worst part about it she says with unembarrassed candour, is that you never know who your relations are. She gestures to the young man with the Pepsi. "I thought for a while that my boyfriend and I were related, but it's okay, we're not." Still, it turns out, she's hoping to find special someone abroad. I guess it wouldn't hurt this little gene pool to have some fresh blood, but there doesn't seem to be anything lacking in her. I look at her with admiration. What is it that makes fifty teenagers happy to get drunk and crash their new trucks, and this one look to the stars?

I really want her to make it. And if she doesn't, I hope she will be happy being a good chef somewhere, and has a good time in London. I can't tell you what name to watch for in whatever source lists the world's foremost chefs, because her boss came out and yelled at her to stop chatting with customers and get some work done.

Back at the airport, another young person just starting out is fuelling my airplane. He asks if mine is a good job. He himself has two jobs right now. He works at the FBO and he goes on contracts as a remote area medic, working at rig sites to stabilize accident victims and coordinates medivacs. He's clearly proud of his skills there. I ask him what his ambitions are and he admits they are in music, folk and blues. He's realistic about the liklihood of making it in the music industry. I ask if he has any demo tracks I can download, but he says no.

I watch carefully as he fuels and put the caps back on myself. Some fuel is spilled into the well around the cap, but I know the caps are secure, so that in flight when I see blue lines streaming back over the nacelles I don't have to wonder or hope. I'll know that it's just the spillage. I might have already described that, but it's true every time. You never want to be assuming that the cap is tight and the streaks are just the bit that sloshed out during fuelling.

Tour of theTown

Happy Canada Day. Having told you were I am this week, I might as well show you around Fort Nelson. It's raison d'être is its position on the Alaska Highway, 400 km north of Ft. St. John, and its being an base camp for oil and gas exploration. The full time population is probably close to half and half native/non-native. The transient population is a combination of young white males driving pick up trucks, and retirement age white couples driving motorhomes with American licence plates.

The highway runs right through the middle of town, paved, with a paved service road each side. There's are a couple of traffic lights with pedestrian crossings down by the plaza where city hall is, but in front of the hotel to cross over to the restaurant there's just a sign indicating a pedestrian crossing. Drivers are pretty watchful, usually stopping to let me go across. It's a hard road to drive. We've met two couples so far who are stuck here because of problems with their vehicles. One had so much rock damage to the windshield from the highway that they have to wait for a windshield replacement to be delivered from down south. Another couple were coming out of a gas station and were hit by a crazy local driving on the wrong side of the road. Both are injured and their vehicle damaged.

There are about six cross streets, two converge half way to the airport and the others I think just peter out at the top of the hill as they run out of trailers parked beside them. There's a hospital, halfway up the hill, and for some weird reason the street behind the hospital is littered with condoms. Who goes to "park" behind a hospital? The other side of that street is a normal residential street like any other in town, so it's not like it affords any privacy. There are plenty of more cloistered areas to park within a few blocks. There's even a the "Community Forest" a once-logged area on the northwest of town with marked walking trails through the regrowth. Maybe the hospital gives out free condoms and people just can't wait? Who knows. Another mystery.

There are two grocery stores, a post office, an RCMP station and some mini strip malls, but few chain stores like a Subway (sandwich place) and a Northern Store, with dreary lighting and merchandise, but very friendly service. The little stores are mostly independent, many of them with hand-lettered signs. They contain a mixture of what you need living up here and what people can sell to the Americans passing through to Alaska, like snacks, small toys, car games, and magnetic ribbons. Businesses tend to be pretty versatile. One store is a combination Rock Shop (i.e. cigarette lighters and t-shirts with heavy metal band logos on them) and used bookstore (mostly Harlequin romances and blockbuster spy novels). There's a guy with a trailer full of freezers selling various kinds of fish, including "N.L. COD." The intended audience knows what that is. Check out the products and services offered by the store pictured. There are quite a few places like that. "And you also sell WHAT?"

Although a lot more of Canada is "North" than of the US, I think far more Americans go to see their north over the course of their lives. Firstly it's a dream or a goal for a lot of people. They know where to go: Alaska! You can drive up one road and see the highlights. A Canadian who wanted to see the "North" wouldn't know where to start. And the Americans have a road. The Canadian arctic requires aircraft and a big budget. Check out this amazing national park. be sure to click on the "How to Get There" link. There's no roads, no boats, no trails. It's a $15,000 charter flight. Each way. And that's from Resolute Bay. It's probably another $2000 to get to Resolute Bay from somewhere in the south. That's not something that you can load up the kids and dogs and go do one summer instead of Disneyland. It also requires advanced camping and wilderness skills. Of course a Canadian could always go to Iqaluit or Churchill, or take a tour, and many do, but it's a specialty thing, not a cultural icon. Canadians don't make a tourist pilgrimage to explore as far north as they can drive, because they just get to smaller and smaller places with poorer and poorer services until the road ends at some place most people haven't even heard of. Or maybe they end up some place in the oilfields that isn't exactly a tourist destination.

Or they could get this place. The next place along the highway as big or bigger than this is Whitehorse. That's worth seeing, and a worthy destination. After a few more small places you're into Alaska. Best of luck to everyone driving up there. I bet there's a lot of stories of people who didn't make it all the way.

New Use for a Transponder

The transponder is a box full of circuitry in the airplane, connected to an antenna. There are fancy transponders that transmit all kinds of parameters, but your standard Mode C transponder transmits only the pressure altitude (it's gets the number from the encoding altimeter) and the four digit code that is entered on the transponder. You enter it either by turning a knob for each digit (the old kind) or by punching the four numbers on a keypad (the new kind).

The four digit code is assigned by the ATC unit, usually just the next sequential one in the block that that unit controls. So the pilot puts 1254 on his box and the controller enters the details about that airplane on her computer. Now when the controller looks at her screen, the blip to which she has assigned 1254 is identified by call sign, destination, groundspeed and altitude.

There are a number of default transponder codes, for pilots to use when they haven't been assigned anything else, and there are a few codes that signify a special message. When the controller's radar computer detects an airplane squawking (that's the proper verb) one of those codes it sets off an alarm, and the controller knows that an airplane has a problem even if the pilots can't transmit that information. For example, 7600 signifies a communications failure and 7700 signifies an emergency. Sometimes controllers and pilots will use the transponder as a means of communication. E.g. "Aircraft north of PLACE squawking 7600, if you receive this transmission squawk 2522." It's common for an aircraft to have a radio problem that renders it able to receive but not transmit.

This is background to a story a reader told me about an exhausting sim session during which the instructor piled on emergency after emergency. The pilot had, if I recall correctly, just taken off from an airport in poor weather conditions and been handed an engine failure and a communications failure. After handling the engine failure according to the checklist, the pilot now needs to return for landing. If he had only the communication failure, there is an established procedure to follow, squawking 7600, following any published airport-specific comm failure procedures, and proceeding en route with altitudes and approaches according to established rules. But with one engine out, he's hardly going to continue to destination. If it were an engine failure alone, he would report that and tell the tower he was coming back for landing on runway 22. But with both, he's a little bit screwed. Just a little bit, though, because he came up with a clever plan.

He set the transponder to:

7600 - just long enough for the tower to recognize the comm failure

Then to 7700 - so they could see it was also an emergency. At this point the controller is probably picking up a phone and or calling across the room to colleagues, about the situation, but not knowing what the emergency is, has no idea what the airplane is about to do. So far that's what any pilot would do in this situation.

Then the pilot changed the code again, to 0022. In the telling of the story I recognized it immediately as informing ATC that he would be returning for landing on runway 22.

In the simulator, the instructor understood it too, saw that the pilot had this extreme situation under control, and thus said, "we're done." And the pilot got to keep his job for another six months.

I thought it was clever enough to add to my bag of tricks and to share with you.

Flare to Land ... Squat to Pee

As I mentioned, some time ago I won a silly contest. Where the prize was a Go Girl, a device designed to allow women to pee standing up.

It's smaller than I expected. So just like what it emulates, really. The whole thing is packed in a tube just a little fatter than the English Smarties tube. (Much fatter than the unrelated American Smarties roll). I need a more international basis of comparison. To tell the truth, it's pretty close to the typical flaccid size of what it's emulating.

I open up the tube and and it contains a rolled up plastic bag with a sticker on it. I peel the sticker of and a silicone thing pops up into shape. It's a funnel with a specialized shape and a this-way-up arrow. There are also instructions, for those who need instructions on peeing into a tube.

So I try it out. Following the instructions, just in case. I have no problem relaxing my bladder while standing up facing the toilet, but some people might have trouble. I understand that for some people they can't let it go unless they perceive they are in the 'right place.' I used to do long distance racing where the right place was without checking your speed during the race. I think it was mainly the guys, however who couldn't just let it run down their leg indistinguishable from the sweat. So it works for me. The pee comes out the correct end, and nowhere else. It pretty much all runs out, and then you've got to do the same little shake the guys do. With the same that's-why-you-put-the-seat-up results. Then you have to wipe both yourself and it. Weirdest part: having to put the seat down after using the toilet.

The makers suggest that some people will want to throw it away as a single-use item. I rinsed it out in the sink. In a public restroom, you'd want to take a paper towel into the stall with you to wipe it. You could wash it easily, and probably pretty discreetly while you wash your hands. I'm not sure how I'd manage in a port-a-potty, or other environment where, the manufacturer suggests, you'd want to use it because you didn't want to sit down. I don't really see it useful for that, because in any situation where it would be more appealing to use this than to sit, it would be more convenient to squat than to do this. My kind have been squatting to pee ever since we learned to walk upright and I find it a pretty effective way to go. I was hoping I could use this to pee while flying but it kind of requires standing. Maybe it could be hooked into a receptacle of some sort, but I'm not yet ready to simulate that with experimental apparatus.

Both flaring to land and squatting to pee are risk management techniques. They make the operation slightly less efficient than it could otherwise be, but leave a lot more room for error. I've got to admit, that if you can get it just right, flying an airplane right onto the runway without flaring makes for a very fine landing. You have to know exactly where your wheels are. And if you do it wrong, it has a fantastic potential to make a mess. As anyone who has cleaned a bathroom knows, the penis analogy remains sound here.

The Flaps That Make It Rise

Recently someone forwarded this article to a mailing list I read. In excerpt:

Jumbo jet packed with British tourists seconds from disaster after it fails to rise on take-off

By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 2:21 AM on 01st June 2009

Hundreds of passengers narrowly avoided disaster when their plane nearly crashed after taking off.

The British Airways plane shook violently and did not rise more than 30ft above the ground as it set off from Johannesburg to London.

The pilot has been praised for his quick actions in keeping the Boeing 747 in the air, saving the lives of the 256 passengers on board. Miraculous escape: The British Airways Boeing 747 is thought to have gone into landing mode so that the flaps that make it rise did not work.

Travelling at 200mph, he dumped enough fuel for the aircraft to eventually gain height, before returning it to the airport.

It is believed that a technical fault caused the plane to go into landing mode so that the flaps that normally make it rise did not work.

An investigation is under way as to how the jet came so close to crashing.

A BA spokesman said: 'As a precaution BA56 Johannesburg to Heathrow flight on Monday May 11 returned to the airport shortly after take-off due to a suspected technical problem.

'The Boeing 747 aircraft with 256 passengers on board landed safely and the customers disembarked as normal into the airport.

'We are cooperating fully with the South African aviation safety authority's investigation into the flight.'

Referring to the pilot's quick actions, he added: 'Our crews are trained extensively to deal with all eventualities.'

So "the flaps that make it rise" weren't working. Before reading part on, what would you think this term referred to?

It could be the actual flaps, and there are certainly accidents that result when flaps are mistakenly not extended, but flaps are normally used for landing, so 'going into landing mode' doesn't make sense. If the airplane did get off the ground with no flaps and into level flight, I'd expect it to have accelerated rapidly. They say 200 mph. That's slow, but is it in the slow flight regime for a B747? I don't know. I also don't know which orifice they pulled the 200 mph number out of.

I considered that "the flaps that make it rise" were the two sides of the elevator. It does flap like the flukes of a whale, and certainly when it is raised, the airplane normally pitches up. But operation of the elevator is not suppressed during landing.

I thought also of things like spoilers or leading edge devices: anything tab-shaped that protrudes from the airplane could be a flap. But nothing matched well enough to seem like more than a wild guess.

Fortunately a member of the mailing list found an NTSB report on the flight. Without the identifying details of type, airline and airport I wouldn't even have matched the tabloid story to the report.

On May 11, 2009 at 18:37 UTC, a British Airways Boeing 747, powered by Rolls-Royce RB211-524H2-T engines, experienced a No. 3 thrust reverser unlock light illumination during the takeoff roll from the Tambo International Airport (FAJS - formerly known as Johannesburg International Airport) while the airplane was traveling at 124 knots. The No. 2 engine thrust reverser unlock light came on at 163 knots and just prior to rotation the slats retracted. The airplane rotated and climbed at a 200 foot per minute rate. The flight crew dumped fuel and did an air turn back to FAJS where a safe and uneventful landing was made.

So the flaps that made this particular airplane rise appear to have been the slats, which the NTSB report must be using as a generic term for leading edge lift devices. The B747 uses Krueger flaps instead of slats to modify the wing for takeoff. The Krueger flaps fold out from under the leading edge of the wing, creating a barrier to air incident there. This makes the airflow behave as though the leading edge of the wing were thicker and rounder, just like the wing on an airplane designed to go slowly, thus giving the wing more lift at low speeds.

Mind you, if forced to condense that into six words I'm not sure I'd come up with anything much more meaningful than "the flaps that make it rise." Anyone?

I'm scheduling this to post a week or so after I'm writing it, because everyone is talking about Air France 447 at the moment. Although when you see this, I doubt the voices will have resolved the divided opinions:

• a thunderstorm alone could have done this to a perfectly good airplane
• there must be a flaw in the aircraft for a thunderstorm to do this
• the pilots or the software must have reacted badly to exacerbate the situation
• It was terrorists/a meteor/aliens that did it

People I respect and who are more knowledgeable than I inhabit each of the first three camps, so I'm not putting up my tent anywhere. My traffic is way up from people finding this blog by searching on terms like "coffin corner" and "stall recovery." That means that instead of just talking to the people I hang out with, my regular readers, I'm also addressing a lot of spectators who don't "know" me. I do think it's possible we'll never have a satisfactory answer to what happened on that flight.

Phases on Stun

There's been a change to our maintenance control manual. Previously we would have a minor, half-day inspection (called a 50 hour inspection), fifty hours of flying, a major four day inspection (called a hundred hour inspection), fifty more hours of flying and then repeat from the beginning. Now we still have an inspection every fifty hours, but our maintenance is now ''phase based''. All inspections take two days. On one inspection they look at the left engine, empennage and wings really thoroughly. Then on the next one it's the right engine, fuselage and landing gear. I don't have the MCM with me, so I may not have that exact. The point is that they distribute the work of the old 100 hour check across two inspections. The work of the old 50-hour is still done at every inspection. different inspections are called Events. There are four events. The AME who explained it to me said that Events #1 & #3 are the same, as are Events #2 & 4. It's not clear to me yet why they need different numbers.

We're having a company mechanic fly up to do an Event #3 while the weather is bad. Of course the "takes two days" part assumes they don't find anything serious that requires parts.

And a couple of blogs to tell you about. I was going to work them cleverly into relevant posts, but I haven't got anything appropriate scheduled, and I don't want to forget about them.

Decision Height is updated infrequently by a senior pilot at a major airline. It includes more opinion and more of the downside to being an airline pilot than Dave's FL390 (which most of my readers are familiar with).

The other is Report on Conditions, a title generic enough to be misleading, as this is a firefighting blog. I had no idea how varied the work was. As blogger Captain Schmoe describes it, he concentrates on the human side of the job, both through empathy for the people he deals with and in discussing the decisions firefighters have to make.

NOTAMs of the Day

This is more of a technical how-the-system-works post, than a funny post about me spilling things on myself while flying. But I did knock the leftover remains of my rootbeer float off the desk while editing it.

When I pulled up my flight planning information today, I decided that some of the NOTAMs from the the Edmonton FIR (Flight Information Region) were interesting enough to talk about. Others were boring unlighted tower and closed heliport NOTAMs. I had to read them, but I deleted them for you.

090172 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG DUE TO TEMPO TELECOMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS OUTAGES IN THE
ANCHORAGE FIR, EDMONTON ACC WILL BE UNABLE TO ACCOMMODATE REQUESTS
MADE NORTH OF 70N, FOR ALT TRANSITION ON NW BOUND TRACKS ENTERING
THE ANCHORAGE FIR AND DESTINED FOR DEVID, RAMEL, ORVIT OR NIKIN
TIL 0906300400

According to that, until the end of the month (which often means "indefinitely," as they renew and revise it each month) some northern relay transmitters are out of service so Edmonton won't be able to talk to you north of 70N and west of those intersections. Oh and they have to make sure they pass the blame to Anchorage, so you don't blame them. A polar bear ate the power supply or something. No kidding, it's possible. We've had bears nibble on our equipment. Presumably when they get a shock from it that's when they get mad and destroy it.

090187 CZEG EDMONTON ACC
CZEG PAL 265.6 AT CALGARY U/S TIL 0907020900

That means that a UHF frequency out of service at Calgary. I don't thing they can blame that on the Americans.

090281 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG DESIGNATED PORTIONS WITHIN CZEG AIRSPACE IS STRUCTURED FOR ONE WAY TFC AS FOLLOWS:
1. FL350 AND FL390 ARE STRUCTURED AND AVBL AS WESTBOUND
CRUISING FLT LEVELS BTN 1300/2300 DLY (DST:1200/2200 UTC), WITHIN AN AREA BOUNDED BY A LINE BEGINNING AT DOGGY TO 701520N 12000W TO 6540N 12000W TO 6400N 11700W TO 591133N 992227W THENCE COUNTER CLOCKWISE ALONG THE CTA BOUNDARY TO THE POINT OF BEGINNING.
2. FL310 IS STRUCTURED AND AVBL AS WESTBOUND CRUISING FLT LEVEL BTN 1300/2300 DLY (DST:1200/2200 UTC), WITHIN AN AREA BOUNDED BY A LINE BEGINNING AT 623600N 8500W TO 760131N 8500W TO 701520N 12000W TO 6540N 12000W TO 6400N 11700W TO 591133N 992227W TO 621625N 9000W TO THE POINT OF BEGINNING.
TIL APRX 0907312359

There are default altitudes of flight for traffic going in different directions, just as there are default lanes in the road, but NOTAMs can change that. In this case they are putting extra westbound lanes in to accommodate the rush hour traffic coming in from Europe. You might notice that the extra flight levels are available for westbound traffic between 1300 and 2300 daily, that's Zulu time of course, so you might be taken aback by the (DST:1200/2200 UTC). UTC doesn't have daylight savings time. But the world does, and the westbound tracks are to accommodate the world's needs. Right now the NOTAM only goes to the end of July, but the NOTAM could have started or could extend into the winter. This wording makes sure that it always refers to the hours of 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. Alaska time. That's when the flights that will be landing in North America during reasonable hours are coming through the north.

090288 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG LO2: PANEL F: V317 BETWEEN FARNS AND HOWZR NOT AUTH TIL APRX 0907291800

090294 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG LO1 CHART V306 BTN YPE AND YZU MEA 9000 VICE 8000 WITH A 13 NM GAP ABOUT THE MID-POINT TIL APRX 0907301800

090295 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG HIGH ALTITUDE ENROUTE CHART 2 AND 3: J486 FM YEG TO YSM NOT AUTH TIL APRX 0907301800

090301 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG V325 BTN YPE AND YMM: MEA GAP TO READ 17NM VICE 13NM TIL APRX 0907301800 090302 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG J528 BTN YPE AND YSM MEA 24000 VICE 22000 MEA GAP 25 NM APRX MID POINT TIL APRX 0907301800 090303 CZEG EDMONTON FIR
CZEG LO1 CHART: V21 BTN YMM AND YSM: MEA GAP TO READ 15 NM VICE 8 NM TIL APRX 0907301800

There were a whole raft of NOTAMS similar to these. I didn't pull them all out. V21, J528 and V325 are airways, defined by a series of VORs and other waypoints. The MEA is the minimum enroute altitude to receive the nav aids properly, determined by a combination of terrain (reception is line of sight) and distance (the signals attenuate with an inverse square law). So how are a number of VORs temporarily worse until the end of July? I don't know what's going on here.

I noticed that the FSS here doesn't use HJ/HN but has reverted to the old SR/SS for "from sunrise to sunset" as in "ALL ACFT TO REMAIN CLR SR/SS DLY". But come to think about it, SR/SS and HN/HJ should be the same thing. Especially here, la nuit ends well before the sunrise and le jour begins well after the sunset. They're allowed to use either abbreviation.

Oh and if this is an unreadable mess, I apologize. I did put line breaks in it, but Blogger has been ignoring the br tag sometimes lately.