What Do You Mean, One Way?

All the BC work was done in one fell swoop, and just as well because it's cloudy the next day. I'm flying back to Alberta via a little airport in the north where we have an assignment. It will be an IFR flight to the area and then VFR work in the area, so I must file a composite flight plan, a combination of IFR and VFR. This is allowed for in Canada, because flights leave urban areas IFR then continue VFR to remote destinations or even more needed the reverse, where an aircraft departs a northern area VFR, maybe on amphibious floats off a lake, then flies south to where radar coverage begins, climbs onto an airway and picks up an IFR clearance into a urban area. The box for flight plan type allows four choices: V, I, Y or Z. V is for VFR, I is for IFR and the other two are for composite plans. If the first leg is IFR, the composite plan is a Y, and if the first leg is VFR, the composite plan is a Z. You can switch back and forth more than once during a flight, but the letter still designates the first leg. I remember this because if the legs IFR, VFR are in alphabetical order, then you get the first letter, Y, but if they are in reverse alphabetical (V then I) then you file the last letter of the alphabet, Z. Not terribly clever, but if you have an operational need for composite flight plans it can save you looking it up again.

I filed out eastbound on V304, the closest to going in my direction and then when I ran out of airways pointing in the direction of my destination, and the terrain got a little lower, direct the destination. I picked up my departure clearance, but then before I taxied out ground called back and said that IFR flight planning wanted to talk to me. I have, apparently, filed eastbound on a one-way airway. Weird. I don't remember those from any part of my flight training. There is nothing I saw on the chart on the chart to indicate that it is westbound only. I ask the IFR flight planning guy, who reroutes me around to the south, how I should have known. He says I should have consulted the preferred routes in the CFS.

Now that makes no sense. If I am going between two centres that get a lot of traffic, or if I'm generally going in the direction someone on such a trip would take, I consult the preferred routes. But there isn't even an airway going to or in the direction of my destination. You'd have to be psychic to divine that V304 was not for use of eastbound traffic just from the fact that it wasn't the preferred route to Calgary or Edmonton. I accept my amended, detouring clearance and depart as advised, accepting vectors all over the place before finally being cleared direct to "maintain one fife tousand while in controlled airspace." You have to read back the "while in controlled airspace" part too, I guess to acknowledge that you are heading out into the great green beyond. (Canadian IFR charts colour regions of uncontrolled airspace green on the charts).

I have two radios on board, but one of them I have been advised not to transmit on, because ATC always complains about the readability. I monitor ATIS on that radio, or monitor the current ATC frequency when I'm using the talking radio to call flight services for something. Every once in a while, maybe two or three times in twenty flights, the receive button for COM1, the listening-only radio, somehow gets activated and I'll be listening to whatever ATIS or other frequency I have up there. I try to unpress the receive button for COM1 but it won't work and I have to reactivate COM2 in order to get it to go away. I guess I must be reaching for something and hitting the wrong button, but I'm never conscious of having done it. Maybe it's because I'm wearing gloves against the cold.

We climb up to altitude and level off over the clouds. I trim out the airplane, set the power up for cruise and finish off the rest of my cruise checks, then get really decadent and put on the autopilot. The autopilot is good not just for giving me a rest from flying, but for freeing up my mind and hands to do other checks. I pull out my pulse oximeter and clip it on the end of my finger. It freaks some people out the first time I offer it, because they assume something that will check their blood oxygen level is going to take their blood, and they don't want to put their finger inside. But it just shines a light through your fingernail and looks at the colour. The problem is that right now it's reading an oxygen saturation level of 79% for me, and that's not right. I have the operator reset my connection to the system and I'm quickly back up into the nineties where I should be. You really can't tell when you're hypoxic until your visions starts to go. It's worse than being drunk, where you usually have a clue. Like being drunk, even if you do notice, you lose the ability to make good decisions about it. As the oxygen mask manual explains, you may decide that you always wanted blue fingernails.

We clear the last of the mountains and reach the Alberta area where we have work to do. I say the magic words "cancelling IFR" and then we're left alone to fly lines under visual flight rules. The operator says the camera is fine, despite our transit through clouds. I don't know why sometimes a single wisp is a threat and at other times half an hour of solid IMC isn't. Maybe it depends on his level of hypoxia. We fly back and forth in really straight lines until that project area has been completely photographed, and I land at a little airport where we can get the fuel pump activation code by giving a credit card number over the phone. We fill up there and I file another flight plan for some higher altitude work. The heater works, but we hardly need it today, both because it's significantly warmer (yay!) and because we're shut down by the daytime cumulus we call popcorn clouds, for their ability to suddenly pop up and cover the area in white spots.

We're right overhead where he wants to land, so I do a shuttle descent, back and forth with tight turns on the ends, like the weft in a loom, because shuttle is named for the instrument a weaver uses to send the weft back and forth through the threads of the warp, to make cloth. Vehicles that go back and forth--be it from the hotel to the airport or from the airport to outer space--are called "shuttles" after the weaver's back and forth shuttle, but the etymology goes full circle because the name of the weaver's shuttle derives from the Old English scytel "a dart, arrow," and from the same root as shoot. The back and forth motion and the turning and the heat makes the operator sick. I feel badly because another human being is miserable, partly attributable to what I am doing, but there is nothing really that I can do, except put the airplane safely on the ground.

Once there, we park at the fuel pumps and then become the centre of attention from two pilots in a King Air 200. They are on one of those missions where you fly your people somewhere and you wait patiently and they are bored enough that two people they haven't met yet is a fascinating diversion. We all share a cab, us to our hotel and them to a café nearby. The cab driver delights in showing us the spot where a drunk driver went off the road at 150 km/h or so. You take your excitement where you can in a small town.

We go shopping and can't find sick bags available, so we improvise with plastic freezer bags tucked into brown paper lunch bags. Tomorrow's mission is in airspace that I'm told we have permission to operate in, but it's marked on the charts as military restricted airspace Monday to Saturday, with hours, other times by NOTAM. I call the number listed in the Designated Airspace Handbook for the controlling agency, and speak to a very polite but unambiguous and emphatic young man who absolutely cannot give me permission to operate there. He's forceful, but not in the least rude. Even as I am frustrated, I am admiring. The Canadian military has taught him this, and this is exactly the way I like to think my country's soldiers are enforcing the rules wherever they are deployed. If you can be this verbally clear without being demeaning, then nobody needs to get shot, but it's also perfectly clear that while this young man lacks the authority to give me permission to cross the line, he does not lack the firepower to stop me from crossing it by any means necessary.

Clipboard security woman, if you remember her from last year, could really use the training this man has received. And I don't just mean that she should be made to take off her silly shoes and march around in the heat or cold for days carrying heavy objects, although I'd be happy to know she was subjected to that, too. She would greatly benefit from training in giving clear definite prohibitions while being perfectly polite and respectful. I would be happy to be that good at it as a captain. I thank the soldier and ask him how I can get in touch with someone who has the authority to give that permission. I have to call back in the morning to get someone. So I will.

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I'm not going to mention shuttles for nothing. Did you see this picture showing the same father and son watching the first and last space shuttle launches? It's a little daunting to realize that I've lived through the whole era of the space shuttle. What's next?

Pitt Meadows

I'm at an airplane washing station at Pitt Meadows airport near Vancouver. It's nicely designed with a hose on a reel, a water hook-up, a drain, and some really clever metal stanchions around things you shouldn't run into, like the hose area. These stanchions are everywhere: in front of electrical meters, fire hydrants, anything that would normally have poles or pylons to protect it from vehicles and snowploughs, but they are propeller blades. I don't think they are actually propeller blades, unless someone decommissioned a lot of identical, large-propellered airplanes here, but they look just right, complete with manufacturer's stickers. I can't remember if they were Hartzell or McCauley. They just looked right.

The airplane ends up not totally clean, but better. I rewrap the hose on the reel, winding each coil next to its neighbour from to one end to the other in each layer, and then I get lazy near the end and let it wrap more loosely. As I'm putting away the soap, I see a man come up and unroll and reroll my last messy bit. Sorry, man. I can appreciate his need to have every coil perfectly set on the reel. It really does look nice that way and I regret not having done it that way for you myself.

This is not a really big airport, no scheduled flights and just a little terminal with scenic flights, but for some reason it has a giant avionics shop. They sell Lightspeed headsets, the kind I was trying to get when I got the Bose, and they have the new Zulu 2. I try it, but you can wear one and then the other all you want on the ground without really being able to say which is better. You have to go for a flight, preferably a long flight, before you know whether a headset is doing the job well. The logistics of taking one for a test flight are awkward, though, seeing as the next time I take off, I'll probably not land until I'm back in Alberta. I'm pleased with the Bose, so I'll keep it and not start a crazy game of buying extra headsets.

While I'm here, I get a tour of Maxcraft Avionics. It's quite impressive. Good avionics service is hard to get. I've ferried a lot of airplanes with every kind of broken avionics sometimes to more then one airport to try to get them working. I've also done a lot of flights with gaping holes in the panel where avionics had been removed for repair, sent off somewhere. Big doesn't necessarily mean good, but they have the diagnostic equipment, the certification from every manufacturer I can think of and must have a good reputation. The paint jobs on the aircraft in their hangar suggest that they are trusted by the RCMP and Helijet for major refits, and by a private owner with an intercom problem. Aviation electronics can be really hard to get fixed properly; I'm not sure if it's a black art or a science. If these guys are as good as the facility is impressive, then a lot of people will be coming to Pitt Meadows.

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One more South Sudan link. The people, men and women, have been at war for twenty-one years and pretty much the only experienced, established institution they have is the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Considering that the median age in Sudan is 18 years and life expectancy 58, over half of South Sudanese have been at war for their entire life, and most soldiers have probably never held another job. The process of demobilizing the army is further confounded by the fact that there are almost no civilian jobs, even if people had the concept of returning to them. I found this article on the reintegration process. It has lots of pictures so you can see what South Sudanese people look and dress like, too.

Whirlwind Tour

The weather is good in BC, so I'm checking NOTAMs for a whole list of airports all over the province. It doesn't matter which ones I check, I'll be told to fly to somewhere I didn't check, and once airborne I'll be asked to land somewhere entirely different. I check the major northern Alberta ones like Whitecourt (no issues), Fort Mac (surrounded by forest fires), Slave Lake (surprisingly normal considering what they've gone through), Peace River (unlighted obstructions), Edmonton City Centre (all the approaches are messed up), Calgary (closed taxiways) and Lloydminster (more unlighted obstructions). I'm mostly interested in showstoppers like fuel unavailability or closed runways. The obstructions are typically 300' agl and more than a mile away. Unless it's right on final approach, it's not going to be in my path, and to be honest if something went so wrong that I was at 300' agl and not just under a mile back stabilized on final, I wouldn't have room in my brain to remember where the I end up having to update my NOTAMs after I have put away my computer in the morning, so I call a briefer with my embarrassingly long list of possible landing spots. McBride, Nakusp, Vernon, Squamish, Prince George, Fort St. John, Vancouver, everywhere we might go. The briefer tells me it will take a while because it's difficult to know where the NOTAMs are filed for small aerodromes. "They aren't just listed under the airports?" I ask. Nope. It all depends on what was done in the 1940s. Vernon, for example, was a military training base or something, so although it has no air traffic services, it has its own NOTAM file. Larger aerodromes elsewhere in the province are kept in other aerodrome files. The briefer tracks it all down for me.

We head out across the mountains, VFR this time, because we want to take pictures on the way and passing through cloud gets water on the camera, and might leave streaks on the glass that would show up in the pictures. Around Whitecourt there is a lot of cloud and it's raining, so I try to dodge it all, going way south and even a bit east in an attempt to avoid getting wet. Then I make an attempt to outclimb billowing cumulus. I know where this is going, as every altitude I climb too just shows more tops. They probably can't grow faster than I can climb they way they could when I was in Florida in an ultralight, but it's still silly trying to outclimb them. I go back down below the clouds and work on outlasting them. I know the low ones don't extend that far to the west.

I'll be going through a mountain pass below the clouds and this is something that GPSes with their straight pink (the guys call them "magenta") lines aren't as good at as old-fashioned technology. I have my chart out, folded so I can see Grande Cache and the mountains beyond, just as I see Grande Cache below and just ahead. I have a pencil, and I have an accurate watch. I identify my location on the chart and I mark the time I am there, resetting the directional gyro to the compass and paying close attention to which valley I go down. I can cheat big time because the GPS gives me both terrain and exact lat-long position, but this is the way to do it, so you don't lose track of where you are in identical-looking valleys with very different things at their ends, and so that if you take a wrong turn or encounter adverse weather, you know where you were when things were good and how to get back. And it gives me an excuse to look ahead and anticipate where I will see lakes and rivers around the corners.

We cross the Great Divide, which forms the Alberta-BC border here, and marks the time zone boundary as well as the high point of the mountain range. Our destination was originally Prince George but I've gone far enough south in the avoidance manoeuvre that the valley I've chosen will bring me out just south of McBride. I adjust the range on the GPS to show the operator this. He is surprised to learn that there is an airport at McBride. To him it's just a place that we will take pictures. "Can we land there?" he wants to know.

"Pass me that book."

That book is the manual for the airplane, because when it's not a flight test at an airport with a runway twice as long as I need, I do do my calculations. Not landing distance, but take-off, because "Can we land?" really means, "Can we land and then take off again?" and take-off distance is greater. I look up the airport elevation and then follow the line for the next highest elevation, at the hottest temperature it could possibly be down there, rounding up on the weight and assuming no wind, and there is still plenty of runway available to get out of there. "Yes, we can land."

We do, and the operator double-checks the camera glass, plus we both reset our bladders before taking off and taking pictures. We continue up the valley to Prince George, where we climb up to ten thousand feet or so and take some more pictures. We continue in this fashion, a giant, province-wide game of connect-the-dots that doesn't even draw anything, but wow is it scenic. Fuel is down to a little over an hour remaining as we approach Revelstoke, but I bypass it for one more set of photos. Part of my job is to plan fuel for efficient flight, and that means not always having the happy empty bladder and full fuel tanks that one would if it were a pleasure flight. There's opposite direction traffic at Nakusp, where we're taking pictures of a ski resort next to a lake, or maybe a lake next to a ski resort. We let him go by and then descend for the second set of photos, and then it's off to Vernon to land.

Approaching Vernon, I tune their frequency and hear a skydiving airplane preparing to drop. Argh, that wasn't in the NOTAMs. Closer scrutiny of the chart shows the airport to be in a marked advisory area for continuous daytime parachute activity, so it doesn't need a NOTAM. I advise that I will hold outside the area until the jumpers are on the ground. I'm irritated with myself for not noting this earlier, and it must have come out in my voice as the operator asks me if I'm mad at the drop plane pilot. I'm not. The drop plane pilot is pretty lackadaisical about his meatbombs, assuring me that there's no conflict. I ask how long the drop will take and something about the way he starts the sentence makes me think he's going to say "it depends on whether they remember to open their chutes or not." He doesn't though, just describes the seconds of freefall followed by where they open their chutes. I follow his advice and join a downwind without crossing the field. It's a little close to the runway, because of terrain, so I fly an ugly teardrop through final and back again, then over a big group of trees to the runway. The operator says pilots always come in high here because of the trees.

I backtrack to the apron and shut down behind another airplane at the fuel pumps, then we haul ours up to the pumps and fuel. We're pumping a lot of litres in, and quite a line forms behind us as the pilots who normally take maybe thirty to fifty litres at a time wait for us to fill all the tanks with an order of magnitude more fuel. No one is in too much of a hurry, though. They help us shove the airplane off the pump so the next people can fuel. There's a washroom but no payphone in the terminal, an increasing and annoying trend these days. Cellphones die. Payphones connect. I do succeed in filing a flight plan, pretty much guessing at how long our remaining work will take and where we'll end up, then jump in the airplane and fire it up.

We taxi out and take off straight away, climbing straight out over the lake to avoid the parachutes, and then up a valley to get to altitude before the hills do in this heat. Some photos of a secret lake, and then set course for an Indian reserve. Although we're dodging jagged mountain peaks with no sign of any civilization in sight, the chart tells me that I'm approaching Vancouver's inverted wedding cake airspace and lists a frequency to call Vancouver Centre before I enter Class C. Theoretically there's a number there, written against the violent colours and squiggles of the hypsometric tints and contour lines. I think I need bifocal sunglasses. I call the controller for clearance into the airspace and to advise her of a few photo lines that we'll be flying within the area controlled by Vancouver terminal. She has trouble understanding me at first. It's amazing she receives me at all. Do they have repeating antennae out here in the barren mountains? Wouldn't they just blow down, get covered in snow, or be destroyed by rutting moose and itchy bears? She clears me into the class C, but advises me that there are too many photo aircraft in the area and the mission will not be approved. Grr. Damn damn damn. The sun angle will be too low soon, so we can't wait long. I would have got preapproval this morning before coming but it was hard to predict when we would be here and truth-be-told I had some of today's assignment mixed up with the work we did last time we were here, so I didn't realize those Vancouver area dots were new work and not completed work. Communication: important.

The first valley we're in is below the reaches of Vancouver's airspace, so they can't tell us what we can and can't do. I have to fly up a valley towards mountains while on line, which is a little nerve-wracking because it's difficult to look at terrain and photo dots at the same time. I have to assure myself that there is no risk of CFIT on the line, but I still want to look out the window. We have to take a couple of runs at some lines because it takes a bit of a run-in to get on line and from one direction there isn't room to do that. There's a lot of snow up here still and at least one photo is just an overexposed white blob from the glare of the snow.

The next area has very few lines, and is partly in and partly out of terminal airspace. I get on the first line heading towards the airspace boundary, and then call up terminal for clearance in. Nothing about photo lines, just where I am, my altitude, and where I'm going. No problem. I'm coming down a valley and at an altitude where this is a pretty normal request. The line is complete. I look at the chart and where we need to be next. Now I'm taking advantage of the poor communication I've observed between layers of control in the Vancouver airport. I'm betting this guy has no idea I'm a photo flight that was denied.

"Request to overfly Bowen Island west to east at six thousand."

"That's approved."

The operator is laughing at me, because he sees what I'm doing, and it's working. No pressure though. I can't screw up my casual "overflight" of the island. I have to be right on line, but it's not anywhere any airplane might not be. Finishing that line of photos I ask to continue to the river ahead, and that's approved, too. Sneaky, but done before the sun angle or fuel level got too low or my duty day ended. And then I land. As I roll out I see that it was almost to the minute right on the flight plan, which greatly amuses me, considering where I pulled those numbers from. I have an experienced ... hat.

We barely needed the heater, but it seems to work.

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On the subject of pulling things out of body parts, we have the latest thing to be paranoid about: surgically implanted explosives. Perhaps I am glad I'm not going through the secure side of airports much these days. I wonder what proportion of the travelling public has had surgery recently enough to raise TSA suspicions. If the explosive device were disguised in a breast implant as they suggest, the incision could be hidden under the breast where it would take a very thorough search to find it, especially if one covered the mark with that make up putty and made it look like an old implant incision.

Metaphors for Life

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

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Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

Everybody Counts

It's a Census year in Canada, all the ones ending in 1 are, I believe. June was the census month, and my household received two copies of the official form, one addressed to the basement. There's no basement, not even a crawl space you could hide a body in. Normal people just throw out an extra form like that. But me, I'm not normal people. It says it has to be filled out, by law. I can't just throw it in the recycling. I call the number on the form. The woman says I only have to do one.

"So I can do two for fun?" I ask, because that's what sort of idiot I am.

"If you want to." Good grief. How the heck are we going to count who lives here, if that's the advice they give? But I do do two, but by the electronic method. I log into the website and enter the code from the form, and then enter an accurate count of who actually lives here. For the second form I enter zero in the number field. No one lives in the non-existent basement. Why do I do this? I expect it to reject it, and I enjoy feeling superior to computers, and being stupidly accurate. To my surprise the site has a page ready for my response, with half a dozen reasonable suggestions for why there might be zero people at an address. I pick "does not exist or apartment has been merged with main dwelling," which perfectly describes the situation.

I'm impressed. Now you can see I'm not cranky about all questionnaires. Just the vast majority of poorly written ones. My only complaint is that they required every person in the household to be classified as either male or female, no other option. Requiring one or the other has caused pain and persecution for a lot of people. Biology isn't always binary, but boxes on forms and societal pressure cause people to be physically forced into one box or the other shortly after birth, even when they aren't. The expectation and the forced compliance are so pervasive that a lot of people don't even know that not everyone is born into one of the boxes. Everyone wants to know if it's a boy or a girl, but for one in every 1500 to 2000 births in North America, a specialist is called in to decide which box the baby goes into, often via surgical alteration. And although most people have little difficulty identifying with one sex or the other, one in a hundred people has a body that differs from the standard minimum equipment list for their placarded gender. If people are equally represented in the blogosphere as in the delivery room, that's about ten pageviews a day on this blog. Hello ten people, who possibly don't all even know that your bits don't match the spec! You count too.

SouvenAIRs

Company has rush-ordered a new heater, we're almost due for scheduled maintenance, and the weather is turning bad all over the province, and it's already bad in the neighbouring ones. It's a rare convergence of circumstances that suggest so strongly that we fly the airplane back to base, so we check out of yet another hotel and fly home VFR.

The co-owner welcomes us in, then I tidy up the airplane. I don't track down a vacuum cleaner before closing time, but I do neaten up the seatbelts, pick all the muffin crumbs out of the carpet, find my headset bag and stow my headset in it, and refold all the charts properly and sort them all back neatly in the racks where they can be reached for the next flight. When I'm travelling with an airplane, a lot of garbage ends up in locker where I store cleaning supplies. That's because I'll be preflighting, open that locker to get out a cloth and 210 spray (a type of plastic polish for airplane windshields), clean the windows, and toss the spray bottle and used wipe back in. Then I'll check the oil, get out a funnel and a couple of litres of oil. They're actually 946 mL, a quarter of a US gallon: that's the standard size all over North America, and it looks like even in Europe, maybe because the crankcases on American-made airplanes hold an even number of US quarts. Anyway, we call them litres, even though they aren't. I'll add the required oil, then when I get tired of waiting for the last drips to come out of the bottle into the crankcase, I put the lid back on the bottle tightly, and toss the bottle in the locker with the funnel and the other empties. Empty bottles don't weight much and the home airport has some kind of environmental disposal for them, so rather than run around a strange apron looking for a FOD bin, I haul them all home.

As I do so, I'm always amused by the way the bulging and squashed sides of the various bottles tell the story of the trip. Putting the cap on tightly seals in those few millilitres that didn't drip out while the bottle was inverted over the crankcase, but mostly what it seals in is air. Air at the pressure of the aerodrome where I added the oil. If it's a sea level airport, the sides of the bottle bulge out at higher elevations. If it's a mountain airport, pressure at a lower elevation crushes the bottle. I'm easily amused.

I clean things up best I can, report the minor snags (right engine has almost double the oil consumption to the left, noticeable split in the throttles to maintain equal manifold pressure above 10,000', and some hydraulic seepage). Then I am "released" from call for a few days. This will give me time to get my camera repaired, take my friend's kids to the amusement park as I've been promising for so long, and do my laundry.

Back soon with clean underwear!

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On the subject of this stun gun, it's interesting to see that the seatback pockets are the same security hole for JetBlue as they were for Victory Airways. Whenever we'd boarded with something that wouldn't get through security, but we were going south, we'd pop it in the seatback pocket, get off and go through security and have it waiting for us back on board. CATSA never swept the airplane itself.

South Sudan Embarks on Nationhood

I only heard about the new country of South Sudan on July 9th, the day it declared independence and haven't had time to write about them until now. The United Nations should be recognizing them as an official world country in the next couple of days. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight million people

In some places, including on the government website the name of the country is written Southern Sudan, but the official seal styles it as the Republic of South Sudan. I think the Southern Sudan references are from material describing the area before independence. They have a flag, a national animal (the secretary bird), a coat of arms, a national anthem (link plays music), a capital city (Juba) and a president. They're still using the currency and postage stamps of their northern neighbour, so I think getting mail through to South Sudan is going to be a bit like communicating with a friend when you only have the mailing address of her ex. And they've fought for twenty years over the divorce.

They say that a what a country really needs to be official is a sports team, a beer and an airline. It looks like South Sudan is getting right on that. They already have a football team, and it's even played a match already. They lost 3-1 to Kenya but it's not an offical result as they are still waiting on FIFA membership. I thought that a beer would be a no-brainer but they have a good excuse for not having one quite yet. The construction of their new brewery is a big deal because under the former Muslim regime, alcoholic beverages were outlawed. And they even have the beginnings of an airline , complete with a webpage that doesn't actually link to a booking database, just a form. The date of the maiden flight has not yet been announced, but Juba does have an airport with a paved runway (13-31), which was apparently closed on Independence Day but airlines didn't receive a NOTAM, possibly because of that communications via Khartoum thing. The Republic of South Sudan will have to join ICAO, at which point I suspect it will go straight on the list of countries in which one should avoid boarding an airplane at all costs. They're a very poor state with terribly low education and healthcare.

I met a pilot/AME recently who says he started the war in the Sudan. He was there years ago, when the Sudan had nothing of value to the rest of the world, and nothing to fight over internally but camels and goats. He was there surveying for oil. He also made a positive contribution to the national infrastructure because they discovered that he could fix things. He would call for taxi clearance at the airport and then have the clearance rescinded because the airport firetruck wasn't working. They possibly were looking for a bribe the first time, but he solved the problem by restoring the firetruck to working order, and after that there was always something that needed fixing.

I hope South Sudan gets what needs fixing fixed faster than it gets itself into new conflicts and problems. I don't suppose there's anyone reading this blog from there. Few in that country can read let alone have access to communication technology, but if you are, know that I wish your new country well. South Sudan has apparently applied for the internet country code .ss but a regime that collapsed sixty years ago has such a lock on those letters in some people's minds that it may be denied.

P.S. Beda Otwari, the Director of Administration and Human Resources for Southern Sudan Airlines is a Canadian.

Cold

There seems to be a rule that the amount of time you are forced to stay in a place is inversely proportional to the quality of the hotel, and it rained hard overnight, so I was dreading this morning's weather, but the day dawns flyable. With the authority my company notifies us is newly vested in me, I file an IFR photo flight plan by faxing it into the appropriate number. I call Edmonton IFR data back to make sure the plan went through and everything is filed according to their standards. I am planning a VFR departure, and don't anticipate being able to make radio contact on the ground, so I ask them what frequency I should contact them on airborne. The specialist says, "Just do what you normally do."

"I've never been here in my life. There is no normal." I can look up a frequency and use that, but when I do that it's rarely the frequency they actually want me on, so why not give it to me on the phone now and spare some space on the radios. No one seems to know what to do with an aircraft that is going to pop up here wanting IFR. They had better get on that if they want the UFOs to feel welcome around here. Not everyone has intimate local knowledge.

There are puddles on the apron and the operator doesn't want anything splashed on the camera, so we drag the airplane over to the taxiway and do the run-up there. There's no one around to block. Run-up complete, I taxi out, take off, and when I'm clear of the aerodrome area I call ATC on the frequency I did finally manage to talk them out of. They give me clearance up to 16,000', and I have a ways to go, so I make it a leisurely cruise climb, cowl flaps a little bit open, and a medium power setting. As we approach the photo area they clear me higher until we're cleared all the way to our working altitude: "flight level 190 blocking 210" which means that instead of being assigned one altitude which we have to maintain, like everyone else, we have been given a block of altitudes, everything between 19,000' and 21,000' (as indicated with the altimeter set to 29.92"). This gives us freedom to fly at an altitude like 19,100' on one line and 20,300' on the next. Its cool. Actually, it's cold. The OAT is around -23C, and with each passing hour the inside of the airplane gets colder.

I'm wearing a t-shirt, work pants, a hooded sweatshirt, a winter coat, leather gloves and a baseball cap, plus of course my twelve hundred dollar electric earmuffs. My ears aren't cold. I just have running shoes on, because luggage space is limited so I just brought one pair of shoes for both working out and working. My toes are cold. My toes are probably the coldest part. I'm sitting pretty still, just thumbs and forefingers on the yoke, making the slight movements necessary to maintain my course from dot to dot.

I'm level just under FL210. The extra few hundred feet has dropped the outside air temperature to -27C. The air traffic controller asks me if I'm planning on making any turns soon. I can't read the tiny print at the edge of the poorly designed screen telling me the distance remaining on my line , but the operator is practiced at feeding me the answer to such questions. He answers and I relay the answer to ATC. "Next turn in eighteen miles." The controller tells me I may see a Bombardier jet passing. I don't, because I see almost nothing but my dots, but a few moments later there's a call from a Jazz pilot.

"Edmonton, what was that we just passed?"

The controller tells him. There's a pause, just long enough for two guys in the front of a jet to look at each other incredulously and laugh.

"What's it doing up here?" asks the Jazz pilot.

"Taking pictures," says the controller matter-of-factly. The effect on the Jazz pilots of seeing us up here must be like passing a kid on a Big Wheel tricycle on the Autobahn.

Laughing at that keeps us warm for a while. The last few lines we have to fly take us towards an area of cloud. It's more difficult to judge distance to cloud up here, I find. I guess the cues I've learned subconsciously are different, or perhaps it's because I'm so far from the ground that I can't judge them well. I thought there was no way we would get a couple of them, but the operator tells me to keep flying, and we finish both lines before reaching cloud. The next one is over cloud, though, and cloud is encroaching everywhere else, so I request descent for landing.

I bank away from the cloud and with my clearance reduce the power an inch and trim nose down for a good rate of descent. The operator reports fuel coming out of the left outboard tank. There's not all that much fuel left onboard the airplane at this point, so no reason for it to be coming out an overflow. I checked all the caps and they were all secure, with no fuel slopped in the area between the sealed cap and the streamlining flap, but I hypothesize thinks about air pressure changes burping some fuel out of a cap vent early in the flight and now that I'm banking the fuel between the cap and flap is leaking out. He says it's more than that, that he can see it as clearly blue and spraying behind us off the trailing edge of the wing. I can't see it. There's really nothing I can do about it now anyway. I continue my descent through 12,500'. Centre hands me off to the FSS and I cancel IFR with them, then continue my descent, shuttling above the aerodrome. I feel like a student pilot who doesn't do the math properly to plan a cruise descent, but at my altitude I was too close to the aerodrome to land without circling overhead, even at the highest safe descent rate.

I'm passing what would be close to procedure turn altitude when suddenly all the cockpit instruments fog over. The cold-soaked airplane has descended into warm moist air and the moisture condenses on the instrument faces like the 'sweat' you see on a cold beer on a hot day. That is something to remember should I ever be descending in IMC in such conditions. How is this not commonly a safety hazard? I guess non-pressurized aircraft rarely descend from ambient temperatures of -27 to +5 in under ten minutes, and I wouldn't have been rocking the 2000 fpm descent rate in IMC. I look out the window and land the airplane.

On the ground we shut down at the fuel pumps and I extricate myself from my headset, breathing tube, seatbelt, clipboard and yoke, then climb out of the airplane. I do a little "my toes are cold!" dance to warm them up again and tiptoe out to that outboard tank. The outer flap is secure. It's dry underneath, and the inner plug is absolutely secure, perhaps tighter than necessary. There is no damage anywhere to the wing, tank vent or any visible confirmation that fuel was streaming out. I record the exact quantity of fuel taken on board for each tank as it is fuelled and discover a 2L discrepancy between sides, with the leaking side taking less fuel, meaning it was slightly fuller to begin with. Over five hours a couple of liters difference is negligible anyway. Shrug. I'll keep an eye on it. Another theory is that the rubber seal shrank in the cold and fuel leaked into the inter cap area that way. The airplane's published service ceiling is 30,000', so you'd think it could handle summer temperatures at 21,000'. Hmm. I haven't come across a minimum operating temperature. There's a project for me, that will take precedence over writing more on this blog entry.

My feet are warm now.

Last Post

I wrote this not knowing if it was a last blog entry I would never post, or the first blog entry in a new chapter of my blog. Today someone, two people actually, sent me Google+ invites. I thought "Eh, what could it hurt? I might as well try this out." I clicked through on one of them and started filling out the form. I never give my actual birthdate to fun services online, because that's part of the verification information for real services like banking. I give a fake birthdate that I can easily remember. For this account I decided to give the memorable date of my first flying lesson.

Immediately Google seized on this information and determined me underage. I haven't been flying for eighteen years, and apparently you have to be eighteen years old to author a blog. The screen said Google would delete my blog in twenty-nine days if I did not send them government-issued ID demonstrating that I am over eighteen. Unfortunately Aviatrix Anon does not have government-issued ID, so I knew that unless I had a friend at Google, that would be the end of my blog.

I knew that I probably did have a friend at Google, or at least a friend of a friend, but my blog contact list is on Gmail, and Google locked not only the blog, but the Gmail account. Of course that means they also locked the back-up Cockpit Conversation Redirection blog, my account through which I could access Google Help, and even my ability to comment identifiably on other blogs. I sent a fax to the Google people explaining the situation, then plea-for-help e-mail to a few bloggers with common traffic, whose e-mails I happened to have on my home account, and then I waited.

This paragraph was going to contain either gratitude to the person or persons who helped me out, or a fond farewell to all the people who have read and commented on the blog, and even met me in person, over the years. If the blog was deleted, I wasn't going to start a new one. It's too much to lose and try to start over.

While waiting for someone at Google to get back to me one way or another, I decided to try the other offered means of age verification, the credit card. I don't have a credit card with the name Aviatrix Anon on it, either, but maybe they wouldn't check. Seeing as you can get a credit card for your cat or dog and buy preloaded credit cards at the grocery store checkout, I thought it was only scammer porn sites that professed to use credit cards for ID verification, but I decided my blog was worth thirty United States cents, and Google probably wasn't running a credit card scam. I gave Google my credit card information and instantly my Blogger account was restored. Thirty cents is a cheaper bribe than I thought I'd need. Most of you probably never noticed the interruption.

So kids, if you want a blog, lie about your age. Grownups, lie about your age if you will, but make sure you don't take too much off. Either way, any credit card will do to fix your error.

I can't really recommend Google Plus, but if you use other Google services with the identity you use to connect to Google Plus, please make sure you tell it you are over eighteen.

Unexpected Landing Spot

The next day I go to work is kind of a grand tour of the province, as we do a few lines here and a few lines there, then keep moving on to the next patch, usually without landing in between. It's odd having the feeling of having been to Calgary (more golf courses!) and Lloydminster without landing either place. Fortunately we were "on a company note" which means that company, not Nav Canada is responsible for knowing where we are, so I'm not filing a fully fictional flight plan.

One of the assignments is photographing some really small communities, little groups of six houses next to a lake, here and there. The job refers to these communities as "hamlets." Perhaps they have an association or are administered by one government branch which needs records of their growth, agriculture or nude sunbathing activity. Mine is not to question why. Mine is just to fly in really straight lines. To turn or not to turn. Tis nobler in the airplane to suffer the outrageous fortune of these clouds always being in the wrong place. When you put the word "Hamlet" on a piece of paper in front of me and then have me stare at dots for a few hours, it gives me licence to misquote Shakespeare. (Or Tennyson, for those of you about to protest). I can misquote whomever I please, but I'll quote Shakespeare more often whenever you say "hamlet." I'm actually better with MacBeth than Hamlet, and who could resist addressing the dots like Lady MacBeth. "What will this dot ne'er be green?" You get the idea. The camera operator probably pulled out his headset plugs. He does that sometimes. He claims it's because ATC keeps interrupting his iTunes.

We complete the low level hamlet work and climb for some higher altitude work, but clouds cover the target area and we are forced to abort. "Lloydminster?" I ask, turning to a heading that will allow a descent clear of clouds, and reaching for the GPS "direct-to" button. The operator asks for the chart before he decides. He passes it back to me, asking why it says "private" next to the airport he likes. I look. "It means the nearby NDB is private, not run by Nav Canada, so may not be monitored." Makes no difference to us.

I've never heard of the aerodrome he wants to use. I open the CFS and determine that it has sufficient runway, 100LL fuel and is close to the associated community. I call flight services to check NOTAMs and they have nothing concerning to tell me, so that's our new destination. It's getting a little bumpy with the afternoon, and as I descend towards the destination, so it's a relief when we pass over a lake. It's a very attractive lake, too, with beaches where my operator specifies which drinks with umbrellas in he will be ordering. I determine the wind from ground signs and verify with the windsock as I join downwind. It's quite strong, and pretty much across the runway, but we know from High River that this airplane is good at these. Prelanding checks complete, quite a crab gives way in the flare to quite a slip, and then I put down the wheels, into wind, out of wind, nosewheel, one after another.

I taxi up to the pumps and look at its elaborate key system. I pull out the CFS and see two letters at the end of the services entry that I didn't notice in the air. PN Stands for Prior Notice. I have a moment of "oh shit," but as I read the entry more closely I can see that the fuel pumps are managed by a flying club, and multiple members' phone numbers are given in the entry. We can give prior notice now that we would like some fuel sometime between now and tomorrow morning, and that should be enough. The operator calls the first number in the book, and gets a woman who says, "He just left. I think he went to the airport." Couldn't be better. "He" turns up shortly to mow the grass, and sells us some avgas.

He tells us where we can park for the night and confirms that there are cabs available "but don't call Northern if you can help it." I put the airplane away and secure the controls with a seatbelt. There are three cab companies listed in the little pilot shack at the edge of the apron. One of the numbers is not in service and the second goes to voice mail that says simply "Leave a message" -- no personal or company name. The third is Northern. They answer, with lots of talking in the background, and say they'll be here.

It's not the world's cleanest cab and the cab driver's perhaps daughter, perhaps girlfriend is along for the ride, but the driver is sober and knows his way around. He says it's not a big town, but it serves a big area. It's the biggest place in a long ways so everyone comes here for supplies. He said there were over 14,000' people from various First Nations bands, and he didn't know how many non-natives. I ask if they are mainly Cree people around here. He doesn't answer, but the passenger says she is half-Cree, half-Scottish. That's about as Canadian as it gets.

We ask for the Super-8. In the US, the Super-8 can be pretty sketchy, but in Canada they have a pretty reliable standard. You're rarely wowed by a Super-8, but very rarely have real problems at one either. We drive into town and down the main street. It's one of those places that few chains have hit yet. We pass a Mexican restaurant that looks good, a couple of Chinese restaurants, and then reach the new end of town where the Super-8 and the Boston Pizza are. I unload our gear while the operator pays, and carry it into the lobby. It looks fantastic. But they're full.

Back into the cab, and back uptown to the next place, a motel, not great looking on the outside, but nicer when I go inside. Also full. Back in the cab to the motel next to the Mexican restaurant. They have rooms, and the guy in the check in area is cheerful and friendly. We get big old fashioned keys to open our doors. Do I need to describe the motel room beyond, "The towels are brown"? It's one night. I hope. I check the weather. Should be good for the morning. I e-mail the operator through the wall that I'm going out for a walk. Arbitrarily, I turn right, and wander a block or so up the street. It's 50th Street, of course, at about 53rd Avenue. A few blocks from the centre of town. There's some sort of monument with flags across the street, so I cross over when it's clear. In small towns you have to take your time and savour what entertainment there might be. The first monument I read is to the Cree, who first lived here, who helped shape the prairies through annual fire setting, and who were very helpful to the early European explorers, and of course who still live here. The next monument is to the Winnipeg trail, once an extremely important part of the local culture, partially eclipsed by the railroad and now obliterated by the highway, but still something worth remembering. I'm getting the flavour of the town here.

And then I read the next plaque over. "Republic of St. Paul" it starts. The next bit says, "Stargate Alpha," but I'm partly anesthetized from reading historic plaques and I get a few words further before it sinks in. Wait, what?

Republic of St. Paul

~~*~~ Stargate Alpha ~~*~~

The area under the world's first UFO Landing Pad was designated international by the town of St. Paul as a symbol of our faith that mankind will maintain the outer universe free from national wars and strife. That future travel in space will be safe for all intergalactic beings. All visitors from Earth and otherwise are welcome to this territory and to the town of St. Paul.

There's a round, raised concrete platform behind the plaques, with steps going up to it, and ailings all decorated in ultramodern 1960s designs. The effect is like finding the sun while spelunking. Here I am with my capacity-for-amusement circuits tuned to the highest possible sensitivity, seeking to wring entertainment out of small town commemorative plaques. And then BLAM, the world hits me with a UFO landing pad. It's as if I were in a place I expected to be exciting and a UFO landed beside me. There is a sort of UFO beside the landing pad. A bridge connects it to the local tourist information centre, built to look like the stereotypical flying saucer. It's even open, and I buy a dozen postcards, and get a restaurant recommendation.

On the way back to the motel I notice that the landing pad is at the corner of 50th and Galaxy Avenue, and I'm staying in the Galaxy Motel. I wonder if aliens like brown towels.

The Winners Are ...

And now, after much legitimate waiting because I was busy and just a bit of deliberate tantalizing because it's fun, are the results of the Nosewheel Roulette game.

Here is the nosewheel during my preflight inspection, on the ground at an airport expereinced readers may recognize. I actually marked the nosewheel the night before, after parking, in case I was in a hurry the next day, because I had been that day and forgot to do it on the first appropriate flight. Yes, that may not be exactly at bottom dead centre. I had intended to use a plumb bob, but the wind was howling, so that wouldn't have done any good, and I didn't bring a spirit level.

Here is the nosewheel after flight, parked in almost the same place, as we returned to the departure airport that day. It's actually both before and after fuelling, because there was an airplane parked at the avgas pumps when I arrived. I contemplated parking behind it, but that would have blocked the Jet pump, and a helicopter might have needed fuel while I was waiting. So without shutting down I taxied from the runway, to the pumps, to parking, then did a little indecisive twirl, then finally shut down where you see it.

I couldn't find my tailor's tape, the cloth measuring tape I originally used to determine the circumference, but as you can see the mark ended up fairly close to all the way around, and the wind was blowing even harder than the day before, which kept tearing the masking tape I was going to use as an intermediate, so I measured backwards from the bottom and then subtracted that from 128 to find the winning number. I measured two ways, once by cutting a piece of masking tape the right length, intending to save it until I found a ruler, but then I remembered there was a measuring scale on the edge of the chart magnifier I keep on my clipboard. I measured the masking tape with that, then used the flexible measuring tape to measure the distance directly, and both came up with ten centimetres, giving a final position of 118 cm clockwise from the bottom.

(In answer to the valid question on the original post, regarding why clockwise around the left side of the wheel: because that's what first occurred to me. I approach the airplane from the left, like it was a horse, so it doesn't get spooked, I guess, and clockwise seems like the normal way to go. True, it's not the direction the wheel rolls, but I didn't think that closely about it before making the rules).

Speaking of rules, I decided not to disqualify anyone for not following them, except that people who didn't post a guess in the comments didn't get entered at all. You'd be astonished by the number of ways people managed to not follow the instruction: "Post your selection in the comments, then back it up with an e-mail to me with the subject Sunglasses." Another time I may automate the process, so be warned. Here are your winners.

Nosewheel Roulette Spreadsheet

I have completed the nosewheel roulette flight and computed the results, but just to keep things both geeky and suspenseful around here, I will first present my computations for debugging and critique.

I filled a spreadsheet (Open Office - I told you we were going to be geeky) column (column A) with the numbers 0 to 128. (Yes, the numbers should only go to 127, but someone picked 128. Because a wheel is round, that wraps him back to zero, but I didn't put him in the zero box because it was a test of my algorithm having it there).

In the next column (B) of the spreadsheet I put an x next to all the numbers that were spoken for by someone, based on the posted comments. In the next column I put something else I ended up ignoring and in the final column (D), I calculated the distance each guess was from the actual by taking the lesser of:
- the difference between the guess and the answer
AND
- 128 minus the difference between the guess and the answer.

In other words, I measured the shorter distance around the wheel between your guess and the actual final position. If the difference between your guess and the answer was greater than 64, you're getting closer to the answer round the other way.

In the spreadsheet this formula was:
=IF(B4="x";MIN(ABS(F$3-A4);128-(ABS(F$3-A4))))
(There's probably a neater way to do that with modular arithmetic, but I was watching TV at the time and my brain kept resetting).

In the formula, B is the column that has an x to indicate that the number is spoken for, F$3 is the measured answer, and A4 is the guess in row 4. I copied this formula down the whole column (the spreadshhet automatically increments A4 for each row). And then finally I sorted the spreadsheet row-by-row on value in column D, the result of that formula.

I'll leave this overnight for you to find any glaring errors or controversies, before I present the results, your SunglassesShop.com sunglasses winners, and the booby towel designee.

When FL180 Doesn't Exist

I mentioned earlier an air traffic controller saying that FL180 didn't exist today, and that I would explain later. It's later now. Altimeters work based on air pressure changes with altitude, so they need a way to compensate for air pressure changes that are not associated with altitude change. So they have a calibration factor, called the QNH in Europe and the altimeter setting in North America, that you reset according to ATC instructions as you go from place to place. Once you get high enough that you are over all the mountains and short-range traffic, the benefit of adjusting for local changes in air pressure becomes less in comparison to the benefit of not having to keep changing your altimeter setting all the time, so above that altitude, the transition level, you use the standard altimeter setting everywhere.

In non-arctic Canada, the transition level is 18,000'/FL180. That means that we fly using the local altimeter setting all the way up to 18,000' and then we switch over to the standard altimeter setting of 29.92". There are plenty of airplanes flying IFR at 17000', using the local altimeter settings and if the local altimeter setting is low, an airplane flying at FL180, using 29.92 is not a thousand feet above the airplane flying at 17000', using the local altimeter setting. For every tenth of an inch below 29.92, that FL180 airplane is a hundred feet closer to the 17,000' one. But for safety there is supposed to be 1000' separation. So there's a rule.

AIM 6.4.3 Vertical Separation Between Flight Levels and Altitudes ASL

When the altimeter setting is less than 29.92” Hg, there will be less than 1 000 feet vertical separation between an aircraft flying at 17 000 feet ASL with that altimeter setting and an aircraft flying at FL180, (with altimeter set at 29.92” Hg); therefore, the lowest usable flight level will be assigned or approved in accordance with the following table:

Altimeter Setting	Lowest Usable Flight Level
29.92” or higher	FL180
29.91” to 28.92”	FL190
28.91” to 27.92”	FL200

So on low pressure days, flight level 180 doesn't exist, but you won't be assigned 18,000' either. If you had a real operational need to fly at 18,000' when FL190 was the lowest avaialble flight level, I don't know how they'd handle it, probably with a block altitude, same as if you needed to fly between 17,000' and FL180 on a high pressure day.

Yay! Fireworks!

I didn't have time to post this when it belonged, so I'll post it for my American friends, who celebrate their national day today.

CZEG PURSUANT TO SECTION 5.1 OF THE AERONAUTICS ACT, THE AIRSPACE WITHIN 0.5 NM RADIUS 533141N 1133037W (KINSMEN PARK, APRX 3 NM SSE EDMONTON CITY CENTRE(BLATCHFORD FIELD) AD) IS RESTRICTED DRG FIREWORKS ACT. SFC TO 3600 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA DESCRIBED UNLESS THE FLT IS AUTH BY EDMONTON TML FREQ 119.5 1107020455 TIL 1107020555

1107020455 TIL 1107020555 was the evening of July 1st, the 144th anniversary of my country being founded, and we get our faces painted, wave little paper flags, have a day off work during which we often barbecue something or attend a street festival, and then set off fireworks to celebrate. Except for places where it's not dark enough for fireworks in midsummer, so they save them for Hallowe'en or New Year's.

Happy everything that you like to celebrate with firewooks, food, fun and friends.

The Debrief

We both cab back out to the airport for the seven a.m. appointment. I know that it will start with my own assessment and I know the greatest weaknesses of my performance. Knowing one's weaknesses is more important than not having any. I've written down a list. It starts with "I'm sorry about the paperwork problems ..."

I don't get much further than that for a while. She practically explodes. She says she still doesn't have my training records. I'm very surprised. I had understood that my chief pilot e-mailed them right away. The conversation continues, and she points me at a computer in the other room, telling me that if they were e-mailed here then I should get them for her. It finally dawns on me that the examiner, who made that GPS unit do things I still haven't figured out how to do, doesn't do e-mail. I get the camera operator to print the things off for her and I continue with my biggest weakness: not using the GPS to its full advantage for situational awareness. I didn't because it was not for IFR use and I didn't want to get in trouble for relying on an instrument that wasn't certified. But I could tell from the way she brought things up on the GPS that she was demonstrating to me how I should be using it and wasn't. And I would like to be better at using it. Maybe I should spend more time with it and less with e-mail.

She lectures me for a bit on that, a little too intensely for me to ask where the boundary is between situational awareness and reliance on an uncertified tool. When that subsides I venture that I knew my systems well, but was confused by some of the general knowledge questions because I was trying to answer with CARs numbers instead of personal judgement. And that's when the worst of it came. The operator, returning with printouts of my training later tells me that he came that close to intervening and just stopping the whole procedure. He called the chief pilot to say I was catching hell in there, but the chief pilot knows that I've been through a few of these and can keep my cool. I'm being specifically chewed out for not being familiar with the section in my operations manual that deals with company takeoff minima. I have read manuals for three different companies in the last few months, and I'm pretty close to certain that the one for Eagle makes no mention of take off minima. I just nod and say yes, I should know that stuff.

She moves on to my not knowing what 'not assessed' means, and has me turn to the appropriate part in the CAP GEN. It says "IFR departures have not been assessed for obstacles. Pilots-in-command are responsible for determining minimum climb gradients and/or routings for obstacle and terrain avoidance during an IMC departure from that particular runway(s)." I said that it means the pilot is responsible for determining a safe departure route. I'm seriously being told I'm incompetent because I didn't say "Not assessed means that the runway environment hasn't been assessed for obstacles"? Really? That's not what it means it's what it says. Is that how dumb people are? Are there people out there smart enough to be flying airplanes but so dumb that they need to look in the help to know that the "File Save" command "Saves a File" while the "File Delete" command "Deletes a File." She says she could tell I didn't know the answer, so she didn't ask me any more questions on that because she didn't want to get me upset. There's no way for me to say now "I know not assessed means not assessed, what else could it mean?" and "I practically quoted the rest of the section, isn't it obvious I knew what it meant?" I just resolve, as I do after every single interview and flight test, to remember to state the obvious. Even the firetrucking obvious. She also says that re-land capability is required for all commercial IFR operations. That I didn't know, so I'll take that hit, although I haven't been able to find it in the CARs.

I catch flack for what I knew I hadn't done, not having the single-engine climb performance, accelerate stop distance, and the like precalculated for the conditions. I deserved that. I can't quite make myself believe I should do it for every take-off, more that I should know the conditions under which it might be a factor in decision making and calculate it then. But that's what a flight test is an artificial demonstration of. There's no excuse. Maybe I'll create an operational flight plan and do it every day, my legacy to the next poor pilot to have to fill in this OFP. Don't you hate forms that demand unnecessary calculations?

On to the part in the airplane. I didn't brief the emergencies and departure. "I have been told in the past not to do that on a single=pilot ride," I explain truthfully.

"That's probably because you talk too much." Ha! She is exactly right. I talk too much. She wants me to brief them aloud, and then shut up. I'll try that next time.

More nits. She says I didn't check my instruments on the taxi. "I did that one. Probably not the same place most students do, but I know I said it aloud." She believes me. I didn't, however, double check my altimeter with the published runway threshold elevation, double check my watch with ATC or the GPS, make notations on my flight log during the flight, perform a true air speed check, groundspeed, or a revised ETA calculation. I didn't draw my hold on the map. (I've never done that. People do that?) I forgot a lot more things, enough to make me wonder how I remember to breathe on a regular enough basis to remain alive, and how I keep passing these things.

She gives me a bit of heat too for letting a company push me into doing a ride under difficult circumstances and I don't point out that she could use exactly the same advice. The really odd bit is that at the end she tells me it wasn't bad, all things considered. And she offers me a job. It's more or less the same job as I have. I guess everyone needs cheap, flexible survey pilots, but I keep the contact information under consideration.

The operator pays her fee and I go out to the airplane. When he comes behind me I ask, "do they have antelopes here?" I just saw either the smallest antelope or the biggest rabbit I have ever seen. It ran off the taxiway and through a gap in the fence. I'm going to guess it was a rabbit. I bet it chases dogs for sport.

After discussion with the clients we decide not to fly today. We'll just hang out and wait until the next weather opportunity. We find someone who can look at the heater and he tells us to start it up on the ground, but it doesn't even start. He pulls out the igniter, bangs it on the ground a couple of times and and then replaces it. The heater fires up on the next try. I wave my hand in the exhaust to see if it's warming up and it is, but apparently the exhaust should be so hot I could't put my hand in it. The next theory is plugged nozzles, but the entire heater is so old that company says we'll just order a new one. Which takes a month. We call all over the province of Alberta to see if someone has one sitting on a shelf, but the best we can do is an express order that should get us one in a week. I guess we'll be cold for a week.

Meanwhile the operator asks me, "So are we allowed to fly above 18,000' now?" We iPhone the new signature in my licence booklet to company and then we get the thumbs up from Transport Canada that we are.

The PPC Ride

The examiner holds up to ask someone to let a student know she is going to be late for the lesson following my flight test, so I have a chance to go ahead and verify that no one has run into the airplane while it sat there, and that nothing is leaking out of it. Hour eleven of my duty day is beginning as I climb into the pilot seat. I welcome the examiner on board and quickly brief her on the location of emergency equipment. I set my prefolded charts where I can reach them and get myself buckled into my seat. The airplane starts nicely and I record the time then start working through checklists, explaining what I am doing. I made a list of which frequencies to put on which nav aids to get going, and I pre-identify what I can. I have an ADF not an RMI so I do what I always do with these and set north to the top, explaining that is to prevent me from mistaking it for an RMI and thinking it shows the correct heading. I also note to her that the GPS database is expired, hence the prominent NOT FOR IFR USE label across the bottom of the screen. I tell her she's welcome to use it for situational awareness if she wishes. I love it when the examiner has something interesting to look at so I don't freak out from the scrutiny while doing basic preflight checks.

I copy the ATIS and then call for clearance. Someone should tell them to speak slowly. I had to ask for two parts of the clearance to be repeated before I could write it down and read it back correctly. The clearance, from my notes, appears to be B △ eva 1/B M70 Rr^r 'u 4616 7600 on caus followed by A 2Z91 X25 125.42. This apparently all meant something to me at the time, because I taxied out. The examiner tolerated my careful pauses at each intersection while I consulted the taxi diagram for the airport she knew her way around perfectly. After I was clear of the parking area and established en route to the runway I made some small turns and rattled off "turning left, wings, er stick left, decreasing, decreasing, steady, steady," for the various instruments that should and should not respond to directional change on the ground. I told her that as this was the airplane's fourth flight today I would not be doing a run-up, if she was comfortable with that, and she was. The examiner had much better handwriting than me, because I remember seeing something akin to "confident and comfortable in the cockpit" written on her clipboard. I can read pretty much any way up. I didn't realize that was a thing everyone couldn't do until I saw it posited as a trick. I have a moment of "got her fooled" but that's washed away by a realization that I've lived in this cockpit for the last few days, and I do know how to fly, even if I don't have the recent specific experience common to students who have trained here.

I switch to tower frequency when I'm ready to go and they clear me for takeoff. Roll, straight, rotate, going up, going up, gear up, fly straight, climb speed, trimmed, after takeoff checks. I switch to terminal and they radar identify me and clear me direct the NDB. Level off, call level (even though I don't have to, and I'm not hinting for anything). Now concentrate on tracking to the NDB. I get two sets of marks for this, one for en route procedures and one for ADF tracking. And I'm doing it nice and straight. I'm as proud of this as a kid who can tie her own shoes. A basic skill done well. Now I have to keep doing it while doing something else: copy a hold clearance.

It looks like + U D> M70 HN IB 160 <FC 0045. That makes way more sense than the previous clearance, so I must be improving. If inbound is 160 then outbound is 340. With no explicit instruction on the direction of the turns, they must be to the right. I look at the ADF, by which I'm tracking to the NDB, and see that it falls just to the left of the top of the instrument, which according your basic flying school rules indicates a parallel entry, an initial left turn to 340, followed by a left turn to intercept the inbound track and then subsequent right turns on crossing the station. And I'm still tracking like a pro. I tell the examiner my intentions and she asks how it can left turn. Because on a parallel entry you start by going the wrong way ... and I'm an idiot. I'm looking at an instrument that is set to north and not to my course. Three forty is almost directly behind me. They have given me the easiest hold in the world, and I should have anticipated it, because it's the logical hold to give me, and because a sensible pilot would have been thinking about holding at the NDB the easiest way instead of being all proud she could tie her shoes. I know I would have caught that when I looked at the actual heading indicator to make the turn, but jeeeeez, HOLDS, why do I always find a new and exciting way to screw up my holds?!

I enter the insanely simple direct hold. I start the timer in the right place, I turn at the correct second, I have to bank a little more intercept, I time inbound, I declare the required outbound timing and outbound heading and both the intercept and time to station are to the degree and to the second. Not that it matters, as she has only the choice between "major error" and "fail" for my inability to state the correct entry without prompting. They don't have to tell you you've failed or stop the test on the first one. I should put a post it on the ADF: 'this is not an RMI.'

Crossing the NDB, the examiner asks for a block of airspace and now I'm visual to do the manouevring part of the test. A steep turn, which only passes because they don't fail you if you promptly correct excursions from tolerances, and a stall recovery, executed correctly, including the flaps first, then gear order peculiar to this airplane. What else is in the airwork? Maybe that's it. Slow flight included in the stall demonstration, I guess. Back to IFR. They clear me for the VFR-only full procedure approach at the NDB. It's direct the NDB, hockey stick, outbound, timer, don't forget to reset the DG, monitor the morse code for the NDB, turn 45 degrees, see the terrain on the GPS, yikes, no wonder this is not for IFR use. Fly out the time, hold altitude, turn inbound, established within 5 degrees of the inbound track I can start descent to the first stepdown. Reset the DG again. It drifts fast during turns at low power. Man, how is it even legal to do IFR NDB approaches with out a slaved gyro? It's never set to within two degrees. The examiner has set the correct radial on the GPS but I focus on the DG and ADF to track as well as I can, step down, step down, MDA. Should be visual, no contact. The examiner shows me the aerodrome off to the side and makes a note for herself that the track she gave me was not ideal. Unlike the VOR radials I discussed earlier, tracks to an NDB depend on magnetic fields, so they shift when the magnetic poles do, thus a long-outdated IFR approach based on an NDB no longer leads to the runway.

I fly the missed. There must have been a simulated engine failure in all that, as she gave me back my engine after the missed, and then cancels IFR then gets me a clearance for a simulated straight in ILS back to the airport we came from. I tuned the localizer before I left, and set the inbound track, because there weren't any VORs en route, so now all I have to do is slow to approach speed, double check the identifier and follow the vectors to intercept it. I'm cleared to do so. "Loc alive!" Set the DG again and intercept. I overcorrect for a moment, then settle down. Staring at the instrument, I see that it's one of the kind with dots on them. Most of them have dots, but now I'm laughing inside myself at the dots. MORE DOTS! This is what I do all day. I put that needle right in the middle of the dots and pin it there. "Glideslope alive!" It's one of the glideslope indicators that hinges at the side like a drawbridge. I put the gear down as it swings just before level and then put the nose down and descend on the glideslope. I need to pull the power back a bit more, otherwise the turbocharged engines give me more power as I descend and I'll get above the glideslope. Despite the fact that I'm descending on the glideslope, I am given a "not below" clearance, and I reach that altitude while still on the glideslope. I hold altitude and watch the needle drop away below me, until the restriction is lifted then I ask the examiner what she wants me to do. She tells me to recapture the glideslope. I tell her I would normally conduct a missed, not dive for a glideslope, but I do manage to get it back just before reaching the circling altitude. I circle out, mentally choosing points that represent my circling limits, but just as I put down my gear to start turning in, the tower asks me to extend my downwind, they'll call my base. I should have taken the gear up again, but instead I let my speed decay and make the examiner nervous before I'm finally cleared to turn in and do my touch and go. I grin to myself, glad I did one this morning. As I turn crosswind, the examiner says she wants the next landing to be flapless. Ha ha. I admit straight out that I haven't landed this airplane flapless before, that there's no checklist, but that I'll have a shallower approach angle, higher approach speed, more runway... While I'm babbling the examiner grabs the left throttle and pulls it to idle. "This should help you get down." I simulate feathering the propeller and securing that engine and it so happens that as her simulation has taken out my hydraulics, this would be a flapless landing anyway. I simulate activating the gear electrically, and wouldn't have chosen to pump down the flaps with a runway of this length. She tells me I can have the power if I need it, but I entirely forget in the flare that the "zero thrust" simulation that the examiner has set is actually not zero thrust and the residual power, afternoon warmth and lack of flaps prolongs my touchdown so far it's funny. I stop and turn off at the end.

After landing checks done, I ask the examiner for suggestions on where to park and she gets the taxi clearance for me and gives directions. There's a whole back lot full of interchangeably anonymous hangars. It's like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. If I park the airplane back here I'll never find it again. The examiner knows that there is no airplane in this hangar and that the owner won't be here for a while, so it's okay to park in front of it. She's now late for her next lesson, so the debriefing will be in the morning, at 7 a.m.

"Can you please at least tell me if I can tell my company I passed?"

"You passed."

If she had made me wait, you had better believe I would have made you wait. Most of them do. I really wonder how bad some pilots must be, that they are worse than me and actually fail these things. Is my expectation of the world just too high? Like the fact that my customer today said he thought I was the most punctual pilot he had ever worked with. I mean what? How can you be more punctual than on time? And how can your job be to file a flight plan saying you will take off at 1430, and not be sitting at the hold short line waiting for a take-off clearance at 1429? Most of the job that isn't memorizing and practicing emergency procedures is calculating how long things take, and writing that down in four places.

The examiner takes her paperwork and leaves while ponder these things, fill out the journey log and gather my belongings.

There's a young man sitting in a C172 parked on the apron without the engine running. I say hi and ask him if he's practicing emergency procedures. He says no, he's just waiting for his instructor. I apologize, explaining I'm the reason she's late, and hoping I haven't got her in a bad mood for him. He's relaxed about it. He's working on his initial private pilot licence, trying to get landings right. The instructor in me makes me ask what the hardest part is. Not that he doesn't have a very competent instructor, but sometimes even the same words from someone new trigger something. He says just getting everything done, sometimes they work out and sometimes they don't.

The operator has gone to meet with a client, and left me with the name of a hotel where we have reservations, and instructions to get a cab there. I go and find a phone at the flying club and call one. They say I'm first in line for a cab in the area and when I ask how long that might take the dispatcher repeats You're first in line for a cab in your area! I should have hung up and called another company. I'd rather be treated with respect than have an uncracked windshield. But I say whatever and wait. There's another pilot at the club and I express some of my "phew, flight test over" relief to him and he recognizes which airplane I must have been in, from the examiner's voice getting my clearance. He was in the airplane that interrupted my ILS approach, and apologizes for that. I tell him that really it helped me out, because the closer to the airfield I get, the harder it is to keep the needles centres, so breaking me off early made me look better. I go out to wait for the cab. I wait a while. Rude and slow.

The driver is a lot nicer than the dispatcher. He turns out to be an IT guy taking a break from his career. I have supper and should be ready to collapse, but I'm still kind of wired. Maybe that was especially potent coffee. I call the front desk. "Do you guys have a swimming pool or something?" She doesn't even say 'yes,' just gives me directions. The pool has a bunch of kids in it, and I join them on the waterslide, making sure it's all clear below before I launch myself down it. It's a good one! They compliment me on my happy shrieking. One of the 'kids' turns out to be the mom. I tell her I'm decompressing from a flight test, which leads to the usual conversation about what airline I don't fly for. I tell her about taking pictures at Slave Lake and get a blank look.

"Oh, what province are you from?"

"Alberta. But we've been away."

They've been away for six months. The parents have jobs that allow them to work via the internet for a good portion of the year, and the kids are homeschooled, so they've just been travelling. "Oh where?" I ask.

"Everywhere. The whole world."

Wow. I ask about some countries I'm interested in. Cambodia? She doesn't know where it is. I tell her. No, they haven't been to Asia. Or Africa. Or South America. Or Central America including Mexico. She hasn't heard of Estonia. Hasn't been east of Germany. They have been only been to countries dominantly populated by white people who speak germanic or romance languages. I wouldn't challenge your right to call a vacation covering the UK, Australia and Western Europe a world tour, but if you're home schooling your kids, they have to know that that is not "everywhere - the whole world." She has a reason, though, but a kind of weird one, for not wanting to go to 'those places.' Her partner, not currently in the pool area, is from the Caribbean, and dark skinned, so her kids look like 'their kids.' She's afraid that they will be mistaken for locals in one of those places and taken for slaves, because that happens there. I don't know where to start. I'm not going to touch the paranoia that goes with a mother's love, or her subscription to "all brown people look alike," so I tell her that in Cambodia, children in slavery are usually sold by their own parents to feed the others in the family, or by luring runaways, not by snatching the children of the wealthy. I'm pretty sure that's the way slavery works most places these days, because capturing people that the authorities would come looking for is bad for business. I try to express that just because a country doesn't have the same standards or the same traditions as Canada, that it isn't a place you can travel safely. I've never travelled with children, but if they'll eat what's available, sleep where you tell them to and have the basic sit stay and recall training of a pet dog, I think they could enjoy travel, to the whole world.

And at the end of the day-- and it really is the end of the day--it makes me wonder how fundamentally broken my world view is. I need to see more of it, and look harder at the places I already am. I spend a few minutes in the really hot hot tub, then go to bed.

Hours Nine and Ten

This is going to be a flight test like none other I have ever done. In every other case, I have trained to fly the specific airplane in the specific manoeuvres that will be required for the flight test and in the area where the flight test will take place. In every other case the examiner has had some relationship with the company that owns the aircraft. But this examiner knows as much about me and us as I know about her. That would be ... each other's telephone numbers.

She examines my documents, asks me when my medical and IFR is valid until, when my last PPC expired. She confuses me by saying that this won't change the expiry date of my IFR, because it should reset the two-year period, presuming I pass. If I fail it will void the rating. I spell the name of the company for her, including the accent, but she ignores that. I don't know the official number of the company for Transport Canada purposes, but presumably she finds it in the documentation. She's pleased that I have brought the aircraft documents, but needs my training records. Of course, for other PPCs I have either done the training right there and still had custody of my own documents, or company has set up the meeting and provided the examiner with all the documents. Company sort of set up this meeting, but apparently proof of my training has not been included in the communications. I get the examiner's e-mail address then call company and have my records sent. Next, the examiner wants to see the Ops Manual, to confirm that the training I have received conforms to the training required. I remember the training requirements in the ops manual and I remember being a tiny bit amused by how rigourously we stuck to them. The manual specified time to be spent on each aspect of the ground training and we really spent that long on them, possibly a first in I don't know how many companies. We got a little creative in that inventorying the aircraft survival kit counted towards the survival training, but seeing as it included us discussing each item and how we would use it, it was probably more useful than watching another video about people staying calm and remaining with a downed aircraft. The ops manual specified three hours of aircraft training, most of which was directed towards the specific task of playing connect the dots in cooperation with the camera operator. But she's not willing to take my word for it.

I don't believe I'm required to have an ops manual on board for this operation. More importantly I don't believe I have one on board. It might be in the airplane. I go out to the airplane to look for a copy, but I can't find one. I find the camera operator in the flying club and ask if he knows anything about it. He provides me with a copy on a USB stick. I return to the office with this, and the examiner is about as displeased as an examiner could possibly be to see this thing. She wants something she can leaf through. It's not a really extensive document but it's wordy Transport Canada boilerplate, too much to print. She puts verifying my training off until later and asks me about the airplane. She wants to know the procedure if the landing gear fails to extend. Okay, here we go, something I am responsible for and can answer.

"The landing gear safety systems are quite interesting on this aircraft," I begin, because they are, and because I was taught to answer systems questions in essay form, not point form. My first flight instructor insisted. I guess it sounds more prepared, less like someone grasping at any knowledge they happen to remember, the way it might in point form. She interrupts to tell me that she doesn't need me to tell me it is interesting, just what the procedure is. "Using the checklist I would verify that the airspeed is below 150 miles per hour and the gear handle is selected down. Next I would activate the STCed electric gear extension assist ..." I'm a fast talker, and the command I've been given implies that I should get this over with but I follow advice and slow down. If the electric assist fails there is a hydraulic hand pump. If the hydraulic hand pump fails there is a CO2 cartridge, and if the CO2 cartridge fails to extend the gear there is yet another step to saving the aircraft. The examiner has herself landed one of these airplanes with the gear retracted, without damage. I don't remember other systems questions. If they were asked they were also things I knew well and she moved on.

I'm asked the minimum visibility for departure from a particular airport. I look it up and it's marked "not assessed," but the terrain around is flat, and I could safely climb to an en route altitude without a published departure, so I say "one half mile," the legal minimum for an airplane where there is no specified visibility requirement and the company does not have the op spec for low visibility departures. She asks me what is the minimum required visibility for an approach at this aerodrome. I note that approaches are predicates on ceiling but that low visibility can trigger the approach ban, and recite the litany surrounding that. She indicates the advisory visibility on the plate--three-quarters of a mile, in this case--and I explain that while it is not limiting, it is a good predictor of whether the pilot will have the required visual reference at minima. She wants to know what visibility I would really take off in. I tell her the truth, probably not less than a mile. I'm thinking single pilot, unfamiliar aerodrome, only one set of eyes for both runway and instruments, no one wants pictures of fog anyway. She tells me there isn't any point in having an IFR rating if I'm going to be that conservative. I refrain from telling her that the point of the IFR rating in this operation is so I can fly above FL180 on sky clear days, and I just nod and say yes. She already knows the nature of the operation. She asks me what "Not assessed" means. I stare at it again, leaf through the CAP GEN a little. Is there some visibility requirement implied by not assessed? Not that I can think of. What have I missed here? I tell her, "It's the pilot's responsibility to ensure a safe departure ..." She's obviously not happy, but she moves on.

The theme is consistent with me squirming to answer things I can't articulate to her satisfaction. There's so much to know. I feel I know it, but even in an open book unlimited time exam it's impossible to put the right answers in the right spaces to satisfy every examiner. I seem to be particularly bad at this, rarely not knowing but frequently not satisfying. I explain my weight and balance, fuel on board and that I won't be switching tanks during the exam because the selected tanks contain more fuel than the other tanks will on landing.

Fortunately she spends no time on my pathetic nav log, except to suggest I use a pencil another time. She must have asked me more questions than that, but there's no crazy "how many vortex generators?" type questions. I identify the airplane for her through the window and am sent out to it. I see some of the flight instructors who have been in and out during the day and tell them we're going fly. If you fail any item on the ground you don't go flying, so the comfort here is that she hasn't failed me yet.

I'm almost at the door when I think of something. A performance enhancing drug that I don't usually take in this environment, because it's also a diuretic. But this is only an hour to an hour and a half flight, and my alertness could be enhanced. I ask the instructors, "Is there by chance some coffee around here?" There is, but it's not a pot of hours old coffee, but instead a really fancy high tech brewing station. I explain that there's an examiner coming down the stairs right behind me and I jut need to insert caffeine and go. This is not for pleasure. There's a jar of instant on the counter and a rounded teaspoon of that combined with some water from the kettle gives me half a cup of surprisingly palatable lukewarm double-strength coffee, which I down, just as the examiner appears. I start guiltily, "Sorry, stopped for a coffee," and lead the way to the airplane.