Human Beings Are Awesome

I'm further south today, in more civilized climes. We're coordinating with a second crew that operates at different altitudes, a different range of speeds, and has set up the job with totally different parameters. They are from a sister company, but they must be that distant sister who moved out before we really knew what was going on, so we have different SOPs, and oh yes a different language in the cockpit. Coordination takes a career's worth of communication skills, and I'm not sure we all like each other at the end of the day.

After five hours aloft I'm descending out of the flight levels like a bat out of hell. There are no fuel endurance issues, no speed limits and no turbulence, so I'm pitched down at cruise power driving the airspeed indicator into the yellow arc. The yellow speed range denotes caution. It's okay to be here, as long as I don't make abrupt control movements or otherwise stress the airframe. I'm outside controlled airspace and plummeting towards a controlled airport where there will be food, avgas, washrooms, an oxygen fill and taxicabs that take us to hotels. Forty miles out I pick up the ATIS. Or maybe it was an AWOS. The difference is that the content of the ATIS is determined by human beings while AWeOS is created by bored robots. The bored robots at this airport tell me the density altitude and give the winds as "variable." They always say the winds are variable here. I think they are programmed to so that the tower controller can make up whatever wind makes the runway he asks me to land on seem reasonable. I swear I am not kidding when I tell you that once I was coming in here and successively given clearance to all six runways. (To be fair, I called up a long way out and there was a thunderstorm passing right through the airport at the time). I'm given no more than two different runways on this occasion, and land without event on the second one.

There were taxicabs, and I believe sangria.

---

A lot of the time things like this do the opposite of inspire me, because I feel I have so much but haven't achieved in proportion, but Jessica just looks so darned cheerful. It must be intensely frustrating sometimes to be constantly celebrated for what you don't have instead of what you do. "Shut up about my arms already! I'm going to Ethiopia to help children!" I can achieve the tiniest slice of empathy from the times that people can't get over the fact that I'm a woman and I fly airplanes. I wonder if anyone ever treats Jessica as if her lack of a penis is a greater handicap than her lack of arms. As a Tae Kwon Do black belt I'll bet she considers kicking them in the balls, but I suspect she has better social skills than to follow the thought through.

I'd feel a little voyeuristic watching her do everyday things so naturally, but she's raising money to make a documentary in order to help handicapped kids in less privileged countries. If you'd like more information or to contribute, here's the project page.

Women Colour the Skies

I encourage my female readers who will be flying, maintaining, controlling or dispatching airplanes between March 4th and 10th to participate in this challenge. The idea is to log all the flights that women make happen, and presumably they'll make a graphic out of it, connecting the corners of the world. It will show only a fraction of our real participation in the skies, because even with the connectivity of the aviation community, not a high proportion of women will have the inclination or time to participate, but it is a fun idea to show how many flights depend on women, and amazing as it probably is to you, my regular readers, there are still plenty of people out there who exclaim with surprise, "a woman pilot!" or "a woman mechanic!" Many think it's an astonishing rarity, which in turn makes women who might otherwise fly turn away, so there is a non-fun reason for playing.

I can't see that there are many flights in the Canadian sky that are not touched by women at some point between the hangar and shutdown. I don't know if I will fly that week, but if I do, I'll play.

Time in the Tanks

I'm coming in to land from another remote location, once again balancing greater true airspeed at altitude against expected decrease in headwind below, and rationing my gravitational potential energy as I descend. I've been operating under controlled VFR, required for flights between 12,500' and 18,000'. The controller gave me leave to descend unrestricted and I cancelled the CVFR through twelve five, leaving me plain old VFR. On my own and and far from anything, including airports. The GPS shows me forty-five minutes from landing, but that's because of the increased speed on descent. It should be about an hour to landing and I have an hour and thirty minutes of fuel on board.

As I level off, the airspeed drops and the GPS estimated time en route climbs. The groundspeed is a little higher than it was at altitude, but not as much as I had expected. The groundspeed settles down and I've really made no progress with the descent. I'm going to be eating reserve fuel.

I know that's what reserve fuel is for but I'd rather it be in the tank when I land. I reduce power a little. It's always hard when you're eager to get somewhere before the fuel runs out, and you have been trained to think of fuel as time, to reduce power and get to the destination slower, but just as you'd sprint to catch a bus, but slow to a jog or walk if you missed it and thus had to go ten kilometres on foot, the airplane will go further on the same amount of gas at a lower power setting. The problem of how slowly to go when you are also fighting a headwind is another fun curve to play with, but again I'm missing information. I have forecase wind and altitude information from two stations, one to the west and one to the south. I don't know right now whether the wind is stronger than forecast for this altitude or just more from the south than forecast. I'm trying to draw a picture in my head of the high and low pressure spots and figure out how the wind is moving, so as to guess where the wind will let up, or how to use knowledge to beat the system.

Never let the fuel gauge become the primary instrument in your scan. That is don't put yourself in a position where fuel is such a concern that you look at the gauge every five seconds. I'm going to make the field with most of my half hour reserve on board. I still think the headwind will drop as I get further south, but I still need to allow for an airplane crashing on the destination runway just before I get there. But really up here it wouldn't be a hard decision what to do. I'd ask the FSS if they had a preference between me landing on the taxiway and me landing on the runway over or short of the existing wreckage. I don't even recall if that airport had a long taxiway. It may have just had an apron. There are places where I would land beside the runway, but those are flatter places with better groomed airports.

There is no traffic at the airport, crashed or otherwise and I shut down after landing plus a fairly long post-landing engine run with twenty minutes of fuel on board. I take on another load of fuel and then head south again, two hours to an airport most people still consider north. The other crew member (a non-pilot, with no duties on this repositioning flight) sleeps most of the way. I was going to see if I could keep him asleep right to engine shutdown, but turbulence wakes him up in the descent.

---

Unrelated, B787s are grounded all over the world while Boeing comes up with a solution to the battery problem. Here's a list of where they are.

Fixed

We're working up at 19,000'. I can't see the ground from my position in the cockpit because by the time the vector representing my angle of vision reaches the ground, it has dissipated into the mist. Mostly I see cirrus clouds around me, and they're kind of pinky orange, the sunset colour of a sun that won't set for a months, as this is a summer story and we're in the north. Between them in the distance I see blueish-green. If I were to put my head against the window so I could see in front of the wing root, down between the fuselage and the nacelle, I'd see little tiny trees. They're not just tiny because I'm way up in the sky. They're tiny because they have a short growing season and a long harsh winter. There are little cutlines and creeks and lakes, and probably rocks and bears, too. And mosquitoes.

I'm constantly doing fuel math, weather math, duty day math, and tweaking the heater controls to try and keep my feet warm. I judge it time to go home, and not just because my feet are cold. We're a decent distance from our intended airport of landing--indeed from any airport we can use--and I'm anticipating a headwind all the way south. I ask for down, both down south and down out of the cold and the worst of the headwind. The trick is to convert altitude to speed, descending rapidly enough in feet per minute to find more favourable winds quickly, but not so rapidly in airspeed that the benefit of the 'free' airspeed is lost to drag, which increases exponentially with airspeed. Someday I should set up the differential equations to determine how fast I should descend in this case. I think it's a solvable problem. Airbus computers probably do it. I just going by gut, though, and the desire to get down to where it's warmer. And today ATC makes that decision for me. They want me to cross a fix that is 30 DME from the destination at 5000'. Fix is aviation speak for any identifiable point at which you're supposed to report or turn, or do something. In this case it was identifiable only in as much as it was 30 nautical miles (DME is almost nautical miles. I'll explain that sometime) from the aerodrome. I'm asked to confirm I can do that.

I tell them I can make the crossing restriction. I didn't do any math for that either. I know how many nautical miles it is to the fix, how many thousand feet I have to descend and my current speed and rate of descent. That would be enough to calculate the altitude I would arrive at the fix, but to arrive there at 5000' I need to increase my rate of descent which will increase my speed (I don't plan to start powering back until I'm a lot closer to the airport than I am now). I used to know a rule of thumb for speed gain with fpm descent, but I think it may have been only applicable to Cessna 152s.

ATC amends my crossing restriction to 5000' at 20 DME, but I don't change my descent profile and reach it at at 30.8 DME, just to prove to myself that I was not incorrect in accepting the clearance. Actually 30.8 was a GPS distance, so it was a little more in DME.

From there I call the FSS and they give me traffic, nothing but a King Air taxiing out to head south. He'll be well out of the way by the time I'm on final. Land, fuel, park, secure for the night and wait for a cab. The airport manager is painting a railing at the front of the terminal. He tells us they frequently have to go out and get beavers off the runway here. We think this is hilarious. Why would they be on the runway? Maybe because it's warm. Maybe even beavers get tired of slogging through swamps all the time and like a nice paved road once in a while.

Waiting at the FBO

I'm at an FBO in a northern boom town, waiting for my aircraft to be fuelled. I'm overnighting here, but the last two times I've ordered fuel here, morning preflight has revealed that no fuel has been delivered to the aircraft, resulting in departure delays. So this time I'm going to stand right here and wait until I can verify the presence of fuel in my airplane, before I get a cab. The fueller is off servicing an airliner down at the terminal, so I have to wait until he is done.

Inside the FBO there are two clean cut white guys in pilot uniforms, and a curvy woman in a jumpsuit flaked out asleep on couches. The woman's jumpsuit bears an aeromedical patch: they're a medevac crew obeying the aircrew maxim: never forego an opportunity to eat, sleep, pee or do laundry.

A fancy car pulls up outside the plate glass window and a pregnant woman walks up to the FBO counter, swinging the car key on her little finger. She asks the attendant about an incoming Gulfstream. It's expected, but hasn't radioed in yet. I don't hear the whole conversation. I can't tell if she's delivering a rental car or meeting someone off the plane. She went back out to the car or perhaps to the washroom.

The guys on the couches wake up. Their paramedic continues sleeping, masses of curly hair hiding her face. In my experience the paramedics usually have better duty days amd rest rules than the pilots, but perhaps she is unlucky.

"Waiting for an ambulance?" I ask the pilots.

They are. I've been there, done that, but this crew has never even heard of the community where I was based to do so. A bizarre thing about medevacs is that they need a plane right now to get a patient to another centre as soon as possible, but the ambulance and patient are never ever ready when you arrive. You can wait three hours for them to turn up. In many cases if they started driving as soon as they called for a medevac, they could have driven the patient to the distant hospital first.

When the ambulance arrives, the pilots gently wake up their paramedic. As she walks groggily out to their aircraft with them I notice a sticker behind her ear. It must be but one of those airsickness medication patches. Her job can't be fun if she gets airsick. No wonder she's exhausted.

The fueller returns and fills my wings with avgas. I pay and then wait forever for a cab, so I can go to a hotel and sleep, too.

Military Code of Honour

I'm working in the vicinity of military airspace today, where by today I mean the day on which I took these cryptic notes and put them in my blogging file. In Canada the lateral boundaries of permanent military airspace are marked on charts with a busy line itself composed of fine parallel lines that are perpendicular to the line they define. The area so designated is usually tagged CYR and a unique three digit number. That must be C for Canadian, Y for why do Canadians use Y so much in aviation? and R for restricted. The number is so you can look it up in the Designated Airspace Handbook to see who is in charge of it. Some military airspace may be CYA (A for advisory), but that just warns pilots that military aircraft may be present, and doesn't obligate pilots to remain clear or obtain permission the way restricted airspace does.

The vertical and temporal limits of restricted airspace must be discerned by careful scrutiny of the notations inside the marked boundaries. A lot of military airspace is only active nine to five local time Monday through Friday. Given the non-business-hours nature of military operations, this always seems a bit strange to me, but it's nice to be able to use their sky on the weekends. The civilian term for airspace restrictions being in effect is the word I just used, active, but the military controllers say hot and cold which is short and clear and sounds flashy. The military are good at that. Often military airspace is hot between certain altitudes continuously and then at an extended range of altitudes occasionally by NOTAM. That means I have to check the NOTAMs to see if CYA 999 is active today, but of course I have to check the NOTAMs anyway to see if there are any temporary flight restrictions. And yeah, I used that phrasing so I could make fun of the US which has what appear to be permanent TFRs over strategic national locations such as Disney World. They do have some pretty advanced robotics there, and you never know, Disney World might close down before the end of the current chart cycle.

On the particular day I'm writing about, I have done the chart interpretation dance before the flight, and decided that our work doesn't require entrance to the military airspace. I talk to the military controller anyway, for flight following. I go under some airspace, because its floor is above the altitude I need. Some parts are NOTAMed cold, so I get to go through them. There are clouds in the area we want to work, but the actual spot we want to overfly is very small, so we fly around in circles waiting for the clouds to get out of the way, and trying to dodge them and their shadows well enough to complete the work. It takes a number of passes, but we get it all and then inform the military controller that we are going to land at a small non-military aerodrome nearby. There's a published mandatory route to land there, and I tune a particular radial to ensure I follow it. The controller sees what I'm doing and clears me direct. Well that was easy.

There's an elaborate honour system involving multiple codes and keys to obtain and pay for fuel here, and a really questionable restroom. A wave hello to those who know exactly where I am today. I know it can't be too hard to figure out if you've been here, and it's okay to guess in the comments if you want, but more fun for the game to leave cryptic hints than a straight out answer. Once everything is put away I file a new flight plan and depart. The controller again clears me direct through the airspace I planned around. Just in case you need confirmation of your guess where we are, my fellow crew member starts making cow noises after a pilot coming into the same airport reads back his clearance. I laugh hysterically, because I had been about to moo, too.

On the ground an older pilot sees my ride and comes up to me to reminisce because he once worked in Nepal flying the type I'm flying now. He nails the strengths and weaknesses straight off, and tells me something I didn't know, that the fuel selector is designed such that at low temperatures it can become impossible to switch from the inboard to the outboard wing tanks. Interesting. I had not known that. The manual permits take off and landing on any tanks, without a published restriction on which fuel is burned first, as long as there isn't a sizable imbalance between wings.

Giving Up Sleep for Lent

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

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

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

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

Yes, Master

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

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

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

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

The site requires me to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Men Pack

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

A Pilot Landed An Airplane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aviatrix Makes A Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Always Do

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

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

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

Separation Anxiety

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

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

Oil Confuses Me

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

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

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

So what's my confusion about oil?

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

Also, the FAA mandated this:

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

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

Looking Ahead into the Murk

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

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

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

Technique #1: Groundhog Day

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

Technique #2: Take Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screaming Busy

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

Busy. Will blog or officially end blog later.

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

Double Generator Failure

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

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

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

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

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

[Prelude to] How Men Pack

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

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

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

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

Logical Deductions 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alaska. Tired.

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

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