Both at Once

I take off from a small airport underneath the overlying "inverted wedding cake" of a large control zone. I call for and am given clearance to climb into the control zone. The GPS claims it's class B, but Canada doesn't have class B airspace below 12,500', so I know it's class C. I don't consider that to be an error in the database, though, more of a translation. An American company provides the database to overwhelmingly American clients, and Canadian class C rules match US class B rules, so it's simplest for all concerned to just tell them it's class B. Likely the Canadian controllers will even understand if someone with a November-registered callsign requests clearance "into Bravo." They'd probably respond with "Cleared as requested," and sidestep the whole issue of it being "Class Cee" here.

I depart controlled airspace to the east. As the controller clears me on route, he tells me to keep the code for when I return. I'm working back and forth below the 9500' shelf of the outlying control zone, when I realize I may be pretty close to the next layer down. I check the GPS and see that according to my trails, I have nicked the controlled airspace a couple of times without contact. And I'm not an anonymous 1200 squawk: the controller knows just who I am.

I'd 'fess up anyway, so as I approach the zone again I retune him on the radio. He's having a personal conversation with another pilot about I can't remember what. It bodes well, though. It shows that he's not busy, not stressed and in a good mood. I make contact and admit "I think I've clipped the corner of your airspace a couple of times. I'm calling to beg your forgiveness and ask permission to do it again." He laughs on the radio and grants my request. Phew.

And yikes, yesterday's insect bite has raised a huge red itchy welt, twice the diameter of a tooney. That couldn't have been a wasp.

Quest for Food

The pilot quest for food never stops. When you're a student or beginning commercial pilot you're searching for food you can afford. (I know someone who did his cross-country time-building to airports selected specifically because they were across the street from McDonald's restaurants. He was living off the the one-dollar burger deal. And yes he did look about as healthy as Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me). At other points in your career the problem is availability of food, and I use that term loosely, thinking of the row of empty vending machines in one Nunavut airport, or time between duties to get the food. This week for me it's getting to the food.

I'm in a perfectly nice hotel in a fairly civilized part of the country, in a hotel that is down the highway from the town. I'm expecting to be called to fly about four, so I'll aim to finish my lunch around three so that I have the calories to sustain me until midnight. The client calls and wants to meet at three-thirty. No problem. I have an hour and a quarter to eat and get back to the lobby with my flight bag.

The first restaurant I try is the one attached to the hotel. Although the changeable letters on the hotel marquee advertise that it opens at 6:30 am, there is a piece of paper on the door advising me that it will open "soon" and "under new management." I go back to my room to ask Google for plan B. It finds me a chain restaurant just under a kilometre away. Sweet! I thought it was just residential around here. That should take me six minutes to walk there, giving me forty-five minutes to order and eat a meal, with time to get back, brush my teeth and be ready to go. I look at the directions. Cross the highway, go two blocks west, turn right and it's about three blocks down on the right. I say "about" because the only straight street in town is the highway. Everything else is little windy roads with cul-de-sacs.

I follow the directions, getting onto the correct street as planned. After about three blocks it still looks very residential, but the street curves away and there could be a plaza just around the curve. After about four blocks I ask someone on a porch. He tells me I'm about as far away from any restaurants as I could get. He gives me some directions, which I start to follow, but as I get further from the hotel I continue doing point of no return math, and stop at the point where I would have seven minutes to get food before having to start the return journey. Fast food service is not a forte in this province. Ain't going to happen.

Hurrying back to the hotel, I must have passed a wasp that didn't like the way I was cursing Google Maps and the non-linear nature of this town, because all of a sudden OW! Something bit me in the uh ... rear upper thigh. Right through my slacks. Son of a flaming firetruck. I slap at it and yeah I'm shaking a large insect like thing off my hand. Ow ow ow.

I get back to the hotel with fifteen minutes to spare and ask the client "Could we please go early and swing by somewhere I can get something to eat"? The first drive-through in sight is a KFC, and I'm in an appropriate stage of the KFC cycle to have some. (I tried to find something to link to describing the cycle of "eat KFC, remember that KFC really isn't all that great, swear not to eat it again, five months passes, eat KFC again" but all I could find was gruesome articles on how they raise their chickens. I'm sorry, chickens. It was for flight safety. I was really hungry.) I order three pieces of chicken, just the chicken, because their fries are mushy and their cole slaw is gooey. The order is relayed across the truck, through the speaker, but they get it right.

On the way to the airport I eat my chicken, taking care not to get grease and bits of chicken skin all over the truck, and not too much on me, either. As we pull into the airport parking lot the client says, "I just have to say, I'm impressed."

I'm thinking back to our last flight. It went well, I guess, but nothing to write home about. What's he impressed about? He continues, "You ate three pieces of chicken in seven kilometres." In fact it left such a lasting impression that he mentioned it later to his boss in front of me. Hey, you never know what will impress the client. I throw out the empty box with the bones so as not to stink up his car with KFC smell.

The flight went as planned and I could feel my tummy being happy because it was full of warm chicken. It may have been full of horrible bad for me ingredients, and clearly it didn't do the chicken any good, but it was better than flying hungry. And that insect bite itches.

Electrical Encore

Here's another data point in the category of resetting breakers. It has a similarity to the NASCAR incident, in that an electrical malfunction deferred after one flight carried over to the next with more severe consequences. This time the incident aircraft is an A319 operating between England and Spain.

About twenty minutes into the outbound leg, a clunk, an overhead warning light and a computer message announced that the the number one electrical generator had gone off line. Checklist actions called for one attempt to reset the generator. (See? The one-reset rule isn't a GA legend, it's a pervasive theme through the industry). That attempt was unsuccessful, so the crew shut down the generator according to the rest of the checklist and fired up the APU (an extra generator normally used for power on the ground) to supply the left electrical network. Company confirmed that the situation was satisfactory to continue to Spain.

After they landed in Spain, an engineer signed off the situation as acceptable for a return flight, with a few provisions. The captain of the return flight knew about the #1 generator problem from a company message, from the deferral in the journey log and in person from the captain of the outbound flight. They complied with all the procedures required for the deferral and brought extra fuel to make up for needing to run the APU for the whole flight. It all sounds safe and normal.

Clunk is rarely a good sound in aviation, but an hour and a half after takeoff there was another one. This one was accompanied by a loss of power to the autopilot, the captain's displays, and most of the overhead panel. The remaining electrical power appears to have been mainly concentrated in the warnings that nothing else was working. They had also lost autothrust, flight director, and all radios, plus the flight control had degraded to alternate law, reducing the smartass quotient of the Airbus.

The first officer's basic flight display was working so he flew while the captain attempted unsuccessfully to restore electrical power. They considered diverting but were concerned that without radios their actions could be interpreted as hostile, plus they already had weather information for Bristol and knew it was good there.

The captain managed to program the landing into the FMS and the airplane followed that profile. They tried to call ATC on two different cellphones, but were unsuccessful. They weren't sure what systems they would have operative for the landing. The flaps worked normally, but the landing gear didn't, until they used the emergency extension procedure, which works by gravity. Gravity is one of the few things in aviation that is always reliable. So it goes.

They landed safely and taxied to parking, where the engines wouldn't shut down using the normal method, so they used the fire switches. The APU continued to run after engine shutdown and the report doesn't mention how they shut it off, just that maintenance were subsequently unable to use the APU for electrical power.

There is plenty of interesting analysis in the report, explaining why things went wrong when there were backups still functioning. For example why didn't the landing gear extend? The Blue hydraulic system was affected by the failure, but the Green hydraulic system that normally operates the landing gear should not have been. However, the A319 cuts off the hydraulic supply to the gear at calibrated airspeeds above 260 knots, as reported by the #1 and #3 ADIRU (Air Data and Inertial Reference Unit) computers. Both were offline. No airspeed data, no gear. That's reasonable. That's the sort of thing manual backups are designed to circumvent.

There are three radio systems onboard, one for the captain, one for the FO and one for the jumpseat. If either pilot's audio control panel fails, there is a switch that allows them to use the jumpseat panel instead. Except that this aircraft had upgraded digital audio management units, and both audio cards in all three AMUs depended on power from the same inoperative bus bar. Oops. Airbus says it is "evaluating" if that power supply needs to be modified. I'll bet.

With all the lights out on the button panel, the captain couldn't tell which buttons were pushed and which were unpushed. Apparently there is a one to two millimetre difference between a button been selected and not selected. I wonder if his inability to restore power may have been related to an incorrect configuration that he couldn't see. That's what I like about old fashioned toggle switches: you don't even have to look at them, just put your finger on them, and you know what is selected.

It's also interesting to read about the incident from the point of view of ATC. The controller working the flight saw the airplane disappear from both his radar screens, as a result of the loss of power to the transponder, and when he couldn't make radio contact, "feared that it might have suffered a catastrophic event." ATC asked another aircplane to call it on company frequency, and then to descend out of its path. Just in time, too, as the other flight reported seeing the missing airplane pass overhead without appearing on TCAS. When the crew of the incident airplane selected 7700 on the second transponder they weren't sure if it was working, but it was, so ATC could see that it was descending on course, and Bristol was cleared of other traffic for their arrival.

There's lots more juicy stuff in this report, especially for you electrical fans, but most of it is readable without an extensive knowledge of aviation. Just note the Airbus abbreviation glossary at the beginning.

X-rated

Someone pointed out to me recently in e-mail that aviation people rarely say the name of the airport, but rather just say or type the code. It's true. Some of it is just because the code is shorter. Why type out Yellowknife or Saskatoon when the recipient knows perfectly well where YZF and YXE are? Why say all four syllables of Iqaluit when YFB does the job in three. (And if it's in written form, also avoids the risk of typing Iqualuit, which is something else entirely). In my experience people rarely say YYZ, because "Pearson" is shorter. But few people are going to say Kangiqsualujjuaq if they can help it. Savvy passengers for whom Kangiqsualujjuaq is a simple word in their native tongue will say "YLU" to make sure they don't get taken to Kangiqsujuaq.

Part of it is because I'm not going to Moosonee. I'm going to YMO. I'm going to land at YMO, get the passengers on board and get back to YTS. I've never actually been to many of the towns whose airports are familiar to me.

Yeah, there are a lot of Xs and other letters with no relationship to the town name in the codes, but you get used to them. Aviation likes Xs. We have a lot of abbreviations with Xs.

The other day someone from mx told me to record "oil px." I'm not sure I'd seen that one before, but I knew exactly what it was. What else can you record about oil that begins with P, other than pressure? The ambiguity of x-based abbreviations can be bad though. It hard to tell a scribbled m from a scribbled w. So if a pilot scrawl looks like "cx for wx," you might later have to go to the journey log to figure out if the flight was cancelled for weather or for maintenance.

Let's see what we've got:

• ax - got one in locker with the emergency gear, although of course I spell it axe
• cx - cancelled
• ex - pilots have a few, the lifestyle isn't good for long-term relationships
• mx - maintenance
• ox - perhaps if you don't have a tractor you could use oxen to tow into the hangar
• px - pressure/pax
• rx - have to clear these with your CAME
• sx - seen this for speed
• tx - seen for tickets, don't know if it's widespread
• vx - best angle of climb speed
• wx - weather
• xx - vertical clouds topped off the chart (weather symbol)

So there's lots of room for more. Anyone seen others in use, or have creative suggestions for bx dx fx gx hx ix jx kx lx nx qx ux yx & zx?

My Wings Over Canadian Water

I'm PIC on the way out of Yellowknife. The weather is a little low here, so we're flying across Great Slave Lake at a thousand feet or so. The weather should improve by Hay River on the other side, so we can stop skimming through the bottoms of these ragged clouds.

As a student pilot I got special permission to fly across a body of water that students at my school were not normally allowed to cross. I had finished my course and was having trouble getting an exam booking, so they decided to make an exception for me so I could go on an adventure. That was fun, and flying across water still hasn't got old for me. I wish I could fly an airliner across the Pacific.

Reaching the other side, the weather does improve. Hurray for Nav Canada. They do a pretty good job. I have now flown across the lakes named Superior, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, Erie, Great Slave (and Lesser Slave), Athabasca, and Winnipeg. These are mighty lakes and I guess part of Canadian identity is wrapped up in our rocks and trees and lakes. I've also flown across James Bay (the south part of Hudson Bay, so I'm totally counting that as flying across Hudson Bay), the Strait of Georgia, and the Bay of Fundy. I've been airborne over the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico. (I would have had the Arctic Ocean in that list too, recently, but plans always change). It's just flying around where I'm told to go, but it feels like an achievement.

I like to imagine that I can identify different kinds of terrain as I fly across the country. Of course anyone can see the quite abrupt change as the lumpy Ontario rocks and trees and lakes on the Canadian shield gives way to the flatter prairies, but I imagine that even up north I can see differences: a kind of stretchiness in the lakes that is different in Manitoba, longer rounded lakes with fewer islands in Saskatchewan, blobbier ones in Alberta, and of course the long windy ones in the British Columbia mountain valleys. As you go north into the territories the rock forms seem more scribbly. They are to southern rocks as cirrus clouds are to lower altitude formations. I'm sure it's all in my head and if I didn't know where I was, I wouldn't see my imagined differences, but that's what I think I see.

The rocks become less scribbly and I imagine that this must be Alberta now. I look at the GPS and our latitude is 59 degrees 48 minutes. I called it!

Ninjerks

I read way too many webcomics. This one is about ninjas who use their stealth and guile to excel at being jerks. It sounds pretty stupid, but the drawing style is simple and fun and I'm enjoying looking at it. Here's an aviation themed one, a salute to Captain Sullenberger, for a sample.

Via Cakewrecks.

Rejecting an Inadequate Aerodrome

E-mail forwarded from the client by the boss indicates that a hotel room is booked for me in an Alberta town. I'm to fly there.

I look it up and e-mail the boss back.

"I got your message about the hotel rooms but I refuse to operate into the local aerodrome on account of it being a heliport."

I know the client has done more research than that about our needs. I find a strip at the next town over that can accommodate jets so I indicate that I will be landing there, almost certain that this is what they intended anyway. My boss appreciates the humour though. He acknowledges my e-mail with a one-word reply.

"Chicken."

---

Plus, here's a bonus helicopter link on the topic of a guy giving his kid a ride to school in a helicopter and the school officials freaking out.

My World

Why my life is good.

Today I:

• slept in until I woke up
• opened the curtains and looked out at a panorama of downtown Yellowknife, Frame Lake and lots of rocks and trees
• enjoyed a bike ride around town in absolutely perfect weather
• ate a huge mouthwatering slab of grilled arctic char
• went for a scenic flight over the untracked wilderness northwest of town
• watched the sunset
• landed back at Yellowknife and went to bed, again without setting an alarm clock

Okay, not every day is like this, but anyone, anywhere, anytime who catches my whining about not achieving my intended career goals should kick my butt.

Rocks in the Middle of Town

Despite the difficulty of construction there, Yellowknife is growing at a phenomenal rate. There are condos perched on rocks all around what used to be the outskirts of town. The area doesn't have a whole lot of soil, just big red rocks poking up everywhere. It's kind of amusing the way what would be a vacant lot anywhere else is just a big rock. Over the last 75 years builders have cherry-picked the easiest spots, so even along the main street you still get half a block or so that is just a chunk of rock with trees on it. Yeah, I don't know how the trees grow out of the rocks. There must be some dirt there too.

The rocks and trees stuff continues in the surrounding landscape. Yellowknife itself sits on Great Slave Lake, which is huge, and there are lesser lakes all around. Here's a picture of the landscape on the way to Rae-Edzo. You can see the road. That's all there is. I think the road ends at Rae, but there's another aerodrome, Snare River, not far beyond that. In the winter this is just white and you can't tell lakes from rocks.

As I mentioned there's a lot of traffic in and out of Yellowknife: helicopters, people landing in the back bay on floats, and airplanes of every size and speed coming from all directions. I noticed that pilots report by radial here, not just "20 miles west" but "20 miles back on the 260 radial." I don't know whether it's an accuracy thing or a habit picked up from the amount of IFR traffic. Lots of larger aircraft like Boeing 737s. It must be quite a challenging environment to work ATC in, but they didn't let the stress show and kept us safely separated from the IFRs without restricting us noticeably.

And here's the view out my hotel window. The hotel is up on a hill (i.e. sitting on a giant hunk of rock) and I'm on the fifth floor. The territorial legislature building is off to the right and downtown to the left.

Not Just the Bush

A captain and first officer for Pakistan International Airlines have been given notice and face an enquiry for following internatial law and their own airline's regulations regarding duty rest. According to the online version of The Nation linked above, Captain Murad Arbab and First Officer S Jamala operated a ten hour flight from Islambad to Manchester. On arrival, they were told to fly as passengers on a noon British Airways flight to London, and then pilot a flight from London to Karachi.

At that point, their own company's air safety manual mandated a 20 hour rest period before their next duty, and the BA flight was only 16 hours away, plus, if I'm reading the article correctly, reporting in time for the connecting flight and then operating the Karachi flight would put them over their legal duty day, not even counting the insufficient rest. They refused the assignment.

The article says that "management is bent upon making these pilots an example for others so that the safety violations are not pointed out."

While a 20 hour mandated rest seems long to me, that was what was prescribed in the company's safety manual and the pilots must, no matter what their dispatcher says, abide by it. I wish I could say that a company that chastises pilots for following the law and the company's own regulations was unheard of, but I've been there. We landed in the early am, told the dispatcher we were dutied out until ten the next morning and went to bed. There were two calls the next day before ten am. One was from dispatch asking us to do another flight that was not within our duty day and the other was from the chief pilot, giving hell for refusing a revenue flight. Both calls, being an interruption of the mandated rest period effectively reset our duty day start eight hours. I was acting captain on the flight but the other crew member a) was the one in a house that had a phone and b) had seniority, so he got the calls. When I found out about the browbeating, I wanted to call that chief pilot back and let it be known that as pilot-in-command I had logged and signed the duty time on the flight and said when we were again fit for duty, and anyone who had a problem with it should call me. I didn't, because I knew it would just bring more wrath upon the other pilot, for not keeping the new hire in line.

No, I wasn't there long.

That's not the way it's supposed to work. I chatted with an Air Canada captain whose entire flying schedule, of flights he had bid on and wanted to make, was messed up because a few minutes after parking at the gate, he released and reset the parking brake. I can't remember why. The onboard computers automatically recorded him parked the second time he set that brakes, which added those few minutes to his duty day, and set off a chain reaction through his whole schedule. That's how seriously a real national airline takes duty days.

But what do you do when your national airline is acting like a ma and pa bush operation? You complain to your union, like the Pakistani crew did (man, a union would have been nice in the bush), and hope that the airline backs down in the face of international scrutiny. So now the few hundred people that read this blog every day, know that PIA doesn't follow its own rules but that pilots Arbab and Jamala stand up for their own and their passengers' safety.

Blue Feather

Richard Bach, the author of Johnathan Livingston Seagull, also wrote a book called Illusions. In it, the character who is seeking answers to some of life's questions is travelling with a professional barnstormer. The barnstormer is a kind of guru who tries to help him answer his questions. He tells the seeker that he can have anything he wants from the universe, he just has to ask for it. The seeker doesn't believe this, so the messiah asks him to test it with something simple.

"Okay," says the seeker, "a blue feather." He looks around and the messiah tells him he'll find it soon. The next day, or maybe a few days later, they're in another town eating breakfast and the seeker is thunderstruck to see a picture of a blue feather on the side of the milk carton. It's from the "Blue Feather Dairy."

He's astonished and points it out to the messiah who just says "I thought you wanted an actual feather."

I think of this story every time I find a blue feather. I found one today on the grass next to the apron, right where I was about to lower the stairs. The hardest part may not be getting what you want, but figuring out what it is that you really want.

Famous on the Internet

I've been to Yellowknife before, but always in the winter or spring. It's odd integrating what I see today with what I remember from previous trips. Everything looks different without show on. It's odd to see the water open everywhere. There are lakes everywhere not just Great Slave and Frame Lake. The whole landscape is a carpet of lakes.

I go down Franklin to a Chinese place that serves breakfast. I've walked through the snow to get here before and I have to quite forcibly assimilate my past memories of being here with the current place. The food is good and the service is friendly.

Returning from breakfast, I see a couple of people in Air Canada uniforms outside the hotel. I was under the impression that Yellowknife was a quick turn for them, not an overnight. Many a quick turn becomes an overnight when the airplane doesn't pass muster, so I wonder if there's a story there. I always forget that while it's obvious to me that uniformed pilots are pilots, that they can't tell that I am one. I'm incognito! So I walk up and chat. It turns out that that I'm dead wrong about the Air Canada Jazz schedule. They have enough flights in and out that there are two crews here every night, one from the last arrival at around eleven p.m. and one for the first departure at six a.m. I guess they have their own ramp to overnight the aircraft and don't get grilled by ATC on where they are going to park. It's a fourteen hour overnight for my new acquaintance, so they do have time to go out and enjoy the city if they want to.

He compares it to a Fort MacMurray turn, where they get in around midnight and report again for duty at five. I must have looked aghast for a moment, "That's not even a ... oh it's a split duty day." Yeah, they just count it as one long duty day where you happen to get a nap in the middle. Just as well. Yellowknife is a more interesting place to spend fourteen hours than Fort Mac.

He asked how I came up to Yellowknife, and I told him, chatted a bit about my job and so on. Suddenly he asked, "Do you know Aviatrix?"

What is there to say? Big grin and finger tap to chest. He's a reader of this blog. That's the first time I remember someone doing that, right out of the blue. A few others have figured it out, but they knew me better, or had more to go on. Guess I'm not so incognito after all. That was fun. I think I was a little stunned, though. I almost forgot to tell him my real name before he got on the airport shuttle.

Also, this is a great way to publicize a vintage airplane and car event. They are re-enacting Canada's first aerial police chase.

North Again

We were supposed to go to Yellowknife last night, but by the time the landing gear was sorted out there was some bad weather building south of Great Slave Lake. Embedded thunderstorms at night. Yay. We spent the night in the south and then flew north in the morning. It was my coworker's leg so I did paperwork and looked out the window while she flew.

The weather wasn't great, so we were fairly low level over all the little towns. It's funny to see all the straight lines on the prairies, with neatly arranged towns, each with its own church, even when the towns are only a few kilometres apart. I know most of these churches date back to when everyone walked or drove the team to church, and that they are a source of community pride. I wonder how many bake sales and work bees they all represent.

We pass over the transition between agricultural land and the north. It's quite abrupt. There's a last wheat field. I'm just thinking it when my coworker says it. "I guess we're in the north now." I write it down in my notebook so I don't forget to blog it and then she asks me what I'm writing.

"So I don't forget things," I say, "So I can tell people about them." I read her what I wrote about the last wheat field. It's the truth. You're people.

Crossing the Great Slave Lake she picks up the ATIS and tried to call tower. It's comical that every time she tried to call, she gets stepped on, usually by the tower. They're actually issuing such rapidfire instructions that most transmissions have a "break break" in them, so the tower can address more than one airplane in one microphone press, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. This goes on long enough that it's funny. She finally gets through and the first thing the controller want to know is if we have parking. Parking is by prior permission in Yellowknife,a and I really get the idea that if we hadn't prearranged a spot, they would have send us away. It's all arranged, thanks to my coworker, so they give us a clearance and we join downwind over the Back Bay. Heyyy, Yellowknife. It's still on a rock and a lake, but now the lake is open water and there is no snow on the rock. I'm too busy looking to remember to take pictures. Sorry!

Prelanding checks complete, we line up on final and she says something about what could go wrong now. Pilots always think that. I gesture to the airplane lining up in front of us, "It could have a gear collapse right there, at the intersection of the two runways." It doesn't, but as it's cleared for take off it seems to be moving really slowly, then I realize I have my perspective wrong. It's not a little taildragger. It's a DC-3. Welcome to Yellowknife.

Wheels of Fortune

The big work assignment roulette wheel spins again. Where will we go next? Somewhere I've been? Somewhere my coworker has been? Somewhere neither of us has ever seen? Somewhere we want to be? Somewhere we wish we weren't? It's all a mystery, until the wheel stops, and the ball bounces to a rest at ... CYZF. Buy a few vowels and trade in some consonants and that comes out to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. But you already knew that, because I let you know in real time.

We're doing scheduled maintenance a little early so we don't have to do it while we're up there. All went well and then they got the same gear problem as before. A look through the logbook shows that a year ago I reported that the gear horn sounded during the hydraulic pump test, also right after maintenance. The engineers have a new theory, that putting the gear up and down on a jack and then lowering it to the shop floor doesn't give the gear the same jar that actually landing a plane does. I'm not sure if they are insulting the quality of our landings or not.

They release the airplane for a test flight and I ask them to tell me what tests to perform. "Just make sure it goes up and down and the horn doesn't sound while it's locked down?" They say that's fine, and then say they'll send someone with me. Beauty. Then if the gear goes up and it doesn't go down again I'll have someone to make smart remarks to as I look for options.

I start walking around the airplane, checking the oil and the like. The engineer asks me if I'm ready to go and I say I'm just looking to make sure all the pieces are there, first. At that point they suddenly remember they've forgotten to attach one piece, and scramble to get it screwed in place before I get to it. It's an access panel, and I pretend I don't notice what they're doing. All the major components I learned about in flying school are there, and seem to be securely attached to the aircraft.

The apprentice comes on board and I give him the passenger briefing, which he politely pays attention to. The engines are warm from a previous run-up so I just do some systems checks and then taxi out past the hangar and call the tower. They give us an intersection departure, holding us briefly short of the taxiway to allow a Jetstream to come off. Then we're cleared to position and cleared for takeoff.

Gauges green, power set, airspeed alive, straight down the centreline. Rotate, raise the nose, wait and let the airplane fly. Positive rate, insufficient runway remaining, gear up. Trim. Climb out. The clunking, lights and mirror all indicate that the gear went up as selected. Turn crosswind. Bring back the power and props. I put down approach flap to keep us comfortable below gear speed and cycle it down and up. All is well. He doesn't play with anything or ask for any special maneuvers. I ask if he is a pilot too. He says yes, so I offer him control and he accepts. Either he has flown an airplane this size before in which case he knows just as well as I what it should feel like, or he hasn't, in which case it is my privilege to give him a new opportunity.

He puts the gear and the flaps down when I suggest. The wheels are down and locked. I take control on final, check the gear again, and then land, with definitely more clunk than an airplane being lowered off a jack. Darn. I should have done an awesome feather soft one, just to combat their theory. I exit the runway and taxi back in according to instructions. I sign it off as "Tests okay," or something equally bland, and the airplane is officially ready to go.

Snowbird Passage

We're flying across Saskatchewan, at least I think it's Saskatchewan. You can see how that poor guy got lost in the vicinity of Red Deer. It's flat and laid out with straight lines and fields as far as the eye can see. A voice comes on the radio, 126.7, to say he's VFR from Saskatoon to Biggar at 2500' over highway 14. It sounds like a call anyone would make, except that at the beginning of the call I'm pretty sure he said "military tutor jet." Sure enough he ends the call with "... conflicts, it's Snowbird eleven."

You don't see one Snowbird tooling around that often. I wonder why he's going to Biggar. (Despite the name, it's littler than most places you'd want to go). I'm surprised that he goes by "Snowbird eleven" when it's just the one plane, and not by some ordinary call letters. I'm picturing the little jet bombing along down there at 2500', thinking maybe it's just an ordinary training solo flight and he's going to visit his mom or something. I mean why not. If he has to fly so many hours to qualify or keep current or whatever, I have no objections to military hardware going to make someone's mom happy.

Another voice comes on the radio. Someone else has also been thinking about the little jet on a cross country jaunt. "I'm jealous," he says. No callsign, just that.

The Snowbird voice answers back, "I'm not even flying!" I'm guessing that means that the guy in the back other seat was doing the radio, as opposed to just being on autopilot.

Left or Right

Just a chuckle overheard on the radio. We're flying and its nice where we are but the cumulonimbus is starting to build further west next to the mountains. An Air Canada calls in requesting to divert to the left around a build up. The controller approved the diversion, but asks him to go right instead. The pilot acknowledges then a moment later the controller reassesses the situation and calls back to let him know that left is okay after all. ATC is quite amazingly obliging at trying to get us pilots what we need to do.

"That's okay," says the pilot. "We already started a turn to the right. We don't want to make anyone sick back there."

"I guess you don't serve meals anymore," quips the controller instantly.

Wayward Student

The FBO at Red Deer is a flying school. The instructors all wear white shirts with ties and even epaulets. I go inside there to pick up a fuel receipt and fax a flight plan to Edmonton Centre. About five instructors and the dispatcher are gathered around a phone. The dispatcher appears to be giving telephone instructions on the operation of a radio. I think I know what has happened. Some student or renter has got the radio into some unusable mode and has called in on his cell phone for help. I wait for someone to tell him to flip the auto switch down.

Further listening casts out that theory. They're not giving him the FSS phone number or telling him to just look out for traffic, land, and sort it out later. Red Deer is not a hugely busy airport and he could surely negotiate his way into the circuit without a radio. No, he's lost. The radio instructions I came in on were for the operation of an ADF. They're trying to get him back by following the needle home. This doesn't seem to be sufficient. Not surprising. Possibly the ADF in the plane isn't working, or there's some other switch he has to turn on that the dispatcher hasn't adequately described.

"How's your cellphone battery?" asks the dispatcher, a couple times until the student understands. The battery is apparently good, because they keep talking while instructors look at charts and relay questions about which side the lake is on. I didn't have a cellphone when I was a student. Most people didn't, and the ability to call your instructor for help on a solo seems to me to remove some of the point of being pilot-in-command. I'm not impressed with the student's problem solving technique. I like to see students get lost and I like to see them use methods they've been taught in the classroom or in the air to find their way home.

I ask an instructor not involved in the huddle, "Why doesn't he climb up and call centre for help?" Apparently the airplane is not transponder-equipped, but still centre could paint him as a primary radar target, radar identify him through turns to assigned headings and give him emergency vectors home. They actually have the ability to tag primaries. I've seen it done. Simpler than that, Red Deer Radio offers DF steers, able to determine the direction to a radio transmitter and tell the pilot the heading to the airport. You ask for DF assistance, hold down the transmit button for a count of five and they bring you home.

I hope the student's instructor takes him out for a flight under the hood and then repeatedly has him take the hood off and figure out where he is. There are section lines here, roads that run north-south and east-west. They should help you get oriented. Every town has a water tower with the name painted on in English. There are lots of lakes with distinctive shapes. If he's north or south of town he should be able to find highway 2, and if he's east or west, highway 11 or 12. If he can't see the highway he should know enough about his position to determine which way to fly to find it, and follow it in. He should have a nav log in front of him showing what time he last identified his position and from there he can determine a circle that must contain his position. Of course that leads back to the joke about the lost student who calls the tower for help:

"What was your last known position?" asks the controller.

"When I was number one for take-off."

You have to be able to turn "I don't know where I am" into a plan. I suppose "phone for help" is a plan after a fashion, and better that than fly around aimlessly until you run out of gas, but I hope the student will have more tools for that job before he finishes his licence.

More Vague Pontification on Resetting CBs

As I said yesterday, anytime anything in the airplane emits smoke, fire or a burning/melting smell, it should be immediately turned off and its circuit breaker pulled and left that way until trusted maintenance personnel have examined it. Whether the behaviour led to a popped CB is irrelevant. There's obviously electricity going where it oughtn't.

Prior to the accident that started this discussion a pilot did exactly that. He wrote on the form provided for that purpose "Radar went blank during cruise flight. Recycled – no response ... smell of electrical components burning turned off unit – pulled radar CB – smell went away. Radar inop." That's pretty much what I'd do. Except that the 'radar inop' note might imply that he reset the CB and turned it back on to check. I would just assume that the release of the magic smoke heralded the death of the instrument. (Everyone knows about that, right? During the manufacture of sophisticated electronic equipment, little puffs of magic smoke are captured and held in various components. If at some point in the operation of the device the magic smoke escapes, that portion of the device will no longer work).

Pilots should not attempt to operate clearly non-functioning or malfunctioning equipment. One member of our fleet contains an old fashioned strike finder that doesn't work. It displays random blips of light but nothing useful. It's been placarded U/S for over a year. I fly it with the CB pulled.

The NTSB pointed out that:

Pulling the circuit breaker for the weather radar stopped a symptom (the burning smell) of the problem by removing electrical power from the circuit; however, it did not correct the underlying problem. Airplane electrical system anomalies that result in smoke and/or burning odors are indications of possible fire hazards. Moreover, the heat, smoke, fumes, and restrictions to visibility associated with an in-flight fire can represent a significant hazard to airplane occupants and adversely affect an airplane’s airworthiness.

The maintenance department told the senior of the two accident pilots about the weather radar problem, both by phone and in person, but the NTSB investigators believe that the other pilot probably reset the breaker as part of his preflight. His preflight should also have included reading the squawk sheet, as I believe Americans call the list of aircraft discrepancies. While some people might say that such resetting falls within the bounds of the "reset once" policy, I think it's a different matter entirely. If you find CBs pulled on preflight you should be finding out why. It may be as simple as asking your engineer "Hey Jan, did you pull the CBs for the lights here?" It's usual for engineers to pull breakers while working on systems and not unheard of for them to forget to reset everything.

According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control records, about 0832:49, shortly after reaching a cruise altitude of 6,000 feet mean sea level, the ATP contacted air traffic control to declare an emergency, stating, “smoke in the cockpit we need…to land at Sanford.” The air traffic controller cleared the flight to proceed directly to SFB and descend to 2,000 feet. DAB airport surveillance radar data indicated that the airplane subsequently turned toward SFB and began to descend. The last radio transmission from the airplane was received about 0833:15. This transmission terminated midsentence and seemed to include the phrase, “shutoff all radios, elec[trical].”

That's startlingly fast. I too would try to make a quick radio call in busy airspace before making the airplane dark and silent. You don't know how long the two were coping with the problem before the initial radio call, but the accident was only ten minutes into the flight, so obviously not very long.

I agree with the conclusion made by the NTSB about the probable cause. It wasn't about circuit breakers.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable causes of this accident were the actions and decisions by NASCAR’s corporate aviation division’s management and maintenance personnel to allow the accident airplane to be released for flight with a known and unresolved discrepancy, and the accident pilots’ decision to operate the airplane with that known discrepancy, a discrepancy that likely resulted in an in-flight fire.

If you're flying an airplane that is flown by many people without a good means of communication of problems encountered, then you probably don't want to reset something even once. If you fly the same airplane all the time and you trust and communicate with all the others who fly it, maybe you do. If you have a journey log or a snag sheet do read through and see what has gone wrong lately, and what is still wrong that you might not want to accept. Reading this accident report and discussion has not made me uncomfortable with any of the times I have reset breakers. It has made me happier about the times I haven't. If it makes any difference to the people who disagree with our attempt to reset the flap CB a couple of weeks ago, we were on the phone to maintenance at the time and that was the first thing they asked.

Of course it's different for them because they are usually on the ground and can run away. As the report says, "An in-flight fire, especially one located in front of the pilots and directly over their legs, would be very distracting." And I thought the faulty gauge was distracting!

Also, this is very relevant to me. I long to tear out the entire dashboard and start over in so many of the planes I have flown.

Postmanufacture electrical system modifications and installations often result in general aviation maintenance personnel performing critical work among densely packed layers of wiring of different ages and materials

And I can always be wrong. The report says that "the ATP’s instructor stated that the ATP was “highly qualified,” required little or no academic instruction, and showed “exceptional” proficiency during his two simulator sessions. As I read that I thought, "That's what I want people to say about me." And then I had to add, "But not under those circumstances."

Circuit Protection & Fire

While we're on the subject of electrical adventure, I'll start answering the question I was asked about resetting circuit breakers. Circuit protection is an important issue in a confined space where fuel and oxygen are readily available and where electrical power is needed for lighting, navigation, communication and control. The circuitry includes two generators, a battery, and multiple buses, so there is a lot to go wrong. As a result of this accident some people are discarding the usual rule of "reset once."

I'm not an electrical engineer and I'll try not to pretend to be one for this discussion, but here are some of the things I think I know about circuit breakers. Real electrical engineers can cringe along, and fill up the comments with useful corrections. Long-ago physics classes left me with the ability to talk about electricity in terms of voltage which is how hard the power source can push electrons through the circuit, current which is how strongly the electrons are flowing, and resistance which is how hard the the electrons have to be pushed to get through whatever is in the circuit. At this point in any discussion of electricity it is also required to mention that the convention for direction of current flow is in fact opposite to the direction of travel of the electrons. This is irrelevant, but if I don't mention it, someone else will.

The device that any given circuit exists to power is a source of resistance. The battery shoves the electrons though it and the thing responds by lighting up, moving a needle, transmitting radio waves, or whatever it does. The light bulb over my VSI requires less current than the starter motor or the hydraulic pump, and the airplane is designed with that in mind. If the light bulb suddenly starts drawing more current than it should, the electrical system gets suspicious and cuts it off, kind of like the power company does if they suspect you're running a grow-op, or the credit card company does every time I buy a thousand dollars worth of fuel in three different provinces on the same day.

The circuit breaker is the thing that cuts it off. To a pilot, a circuit breaker is a cylindrical thing a bit thinner and a bit longer than a pencil eraser. Rows of them are arranged with the circular ends towards the pilot in a breaker panel in the wall, ceiling, and/or dashboard. They all have labels underneath them, although some of the labels are illegible, ambiguous or wrong. Some are flush with the panel until they pop and some stick out a little ways so you can pull them yourself if you want to. When the breaker is in it completes the circuit. When it pops it sticks up and breaks the circuit. Hence the name. I think they work via a bimetallic strip, but there are probably multiple kinds.

There are two basic ways for electrical components to break. Either they don't let electricity go through them anymore, or they let the electricity go the wrong place. When a light bulb burns out, the filament breaks and electricity can't flow all the way through the circuit, so for the purpose of that bulb, the CB might as well be pulled. If a pilot pulls out that bulb and shoves a bulb in from the supply of spares, but gets the wrong kind, or twists it wrong, or there's a some metallic debris caught on it, it could allow the electricity to flow not in the base, through the filament and back through the tip of the base, but instead skip all that hard part about going through the filament and just race around through the metallic debris and out again. The electricity gets very excited about this shortcut. Increased current increases the temperature. Increased temperature increases resistance. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg in this resistance and current chicken coop, because I'd think at some point increased resistance would decrease the current but what do I know. When the current gets going past the limit prescribed by the designer of the circuit, the CB pops and all the instruments on that circuit are plunged into darkness. Cursing and flashlights are in order.

In that example, I would fly the airplane, turn on the cockpit light or the map light or something on a different circuit that would allow me to see the instruments, turn off the control for the suddenly darkened lights, remove the recently replaced bulb, check the breakers and reset the panel lighting one, and turn the lights back on. If the bit of metallic debris was still stuck in the socket and it did it again, I wouldn't know what had happened, so I'd continue my flight on emergency lighting and then later let some apprentice on the ground fish out the debris, look at me like I was retarded, and re-certify the system. If I did happen to look inside the socket and find the bit of steel wool that had caused the problem, I probably would even reset the circuit breaker a second time to see if I could get some lights. I'd let maintenance and other company pilots know it had happened, though.

I can remember two incidents in my career that might be termed electrical fires, although only in the sense of "where there's a burning smell and melted plastic there's fire." Neither progressed to fire extinguisher-requiring flames, nor did either trigger circuit protection. The first was a faulty fuel flow gauge that overheated enough to melt the indicator needle to a crispy brown colour and heat up the case enough to burn a knuckle on the glass and melt itself into the dashboard in less than 15 minutes. The reason the circuit protection did not act was that someone had put a two-amp fuse in the slot protecting the half-amp circuit. The other was a live but loose wire from an instrument light swinging around and striking sparks off everything it contacted inside the dashboard. The display of sparks was impressive. It visibly lit up the cockpit in broad daylight, and the smell was such that 30 minutes after shutting everything off, the guy who opened the back door of the airplane needed no further paperwork or explanation to understand that I had a legitimate reason for landing with no radios. No CB tripped, possibly because I didn't give it a chance: I followed my airplane's electrical fire emergency checklist, so turned off the master and pulled every CB in the panel as soon as I saw the sparks coming out of the panel. Fire, smoke and burning smells must be heeded in the cockpit.

That starts to segue to the accident they wanted me to discuss, but I'm hungry and I've written lots, so I'll continue this later making this week an all-electrical blogging bonanza.

Ideal Conditions

There's a Canadian Tire right across the street from the hotel, so I walk over there the next morning to buy an extension cord. You'd think this would be pretty easy, right? You'd think I couldn't make an entire blog entry out of buying an extension cord. Actually regular readers know I could make an entire blog entry out of choosing which colour cord to buy. Do I think too much, or do I think the regular amount and just write it all down too much?

I pick up an orange one with a locking connector. That's just like the one I thought I had, probably the same brand. I don't know what wattage the equipment is, but I'm pretty sure I don't need a heavy duty cord for this. The others aren't any heavier. There are also some green ones on sale, but they are only ten metres and I need at least a fifteen metre cord to bridge the gap currently served by the patchwork collection. The orange one has a cardboard sleeve around it for display purposes. It says it is a fifteen metre long, 16 gauge, outdoor locking extension cord. Sounds good. I flip it over and read the back. The warnings include "Do not plug extension cord into another."

A Canadian Tire employee sees me staring at the package like Wonko the Sane looking at the instructions on a package of toothpicks, and asks if he can help me. I indicate the warning. "Isn't that what normal people do with extension cords?" They're for extending other cords!

He manages to say with a straight face, "that would be under ideal conditions." Great phrase. Henceforth that's going to be my standard answer to anyone telling me I'm doing something wrong.

I buy the extension cord and I plug it wantonly into the other extension cord, in order to plug the airplane into ground power. I'm aware of the irony that less than a week ago I was mocking someone who was too important to pay attention to the safety briefing on board an aircraft, and now I dare to plug one extension cord into another. I imagine some extension cord experts read this blog and are ready to castigate me for it, so I'll leave the comments open for them to tell me the dangers posed by the added resistance of the second cord.