Stealth Intercom

Every plane in our fleet has an intercom, so that we can talk to one another through our headsets, instead of yelling over the engine noise. The intercoms automatically pick up our voices when we speak into the headset microphone, without us having to press any buttons. The intercom control panel has two knobs on it, one for volume and one for squelch. The volume knob adjusts how loud the voices on the intercom system sound in your headset, and the squelch knob adjusts how strong sounds have to be before they are picked up by the headset microphones and transmitted by the intercom. The intercom is different from the radio, which we use to talk to air traffic controllers, not each other.

At take-off, I typically turn the radio up, so I can hear the air traffic controllers over the engine noise. I might turn it down a little bit in cruise, but I like to keep the radio volume greater than the intercom volume so that cockpit conversation doesn't drown out radio calls. I don't usually adjust the intercom volume at all, unless it's really unacceptable.

Likewise the intercom squelch: unless the intercom is picking up every breath I take and playing it back in my ears, or is so choppy that I only hear half of every word, I usually leave it alone. And seeing as everyone who flies these airplanes keeps the same engines attached to them and wears similar headsets, and they all have to breathe, the intercom controls generally stay in one place.

I wish I could say the same for the intercom control panel. It's a little thing, about the size of the face of a VOR (I guess that's about 10 centimetres across). Two knobs and a switch. Because it's an after-market add-on for the airplane (they didn't come from the factory with intercoms) it has been installed randomly whereever it fits. Different airplanes have different other equipment, so where it fits varies throughout the fleet. And I can never find it. It will be right in front of me, or right under the VOR, or just over by the circuit breakers, or sort of sideways almost by my knee. (If you don't know what a VOR is, substitute "one of those round dially sort of airplane gauge things.") And when I need to make an adjustment it's like it isn't there. I asked maintenance once how to adjust the intercom volume on the airplanes that don't have panel-mounted controls, and they assured me they all do.

You have probably seen these mind games:

Read this first one aloud.

PARIS
IN THE
THE SPRING

Count the number of times the letter "F" appears, in upper or lower case in the sentence below.

Finished files are the re-
sult of years of scientific
study combined with the
experience of many years.

It's easy to miss the fact that the word "the" appears twice in a row in the first one, and there's a tendency to undercount the F's, missing the ones in the word "of" (there are six F's all together). Somehow for me the intercom controls have become as elusive as F and THE. I know I'm not alone in this, as I once heard a story from a pilot who put six extra hours on an airplane taking it back to a maintenance unit because the radio didn't work. There was a master switch on the panel that he had never seen or used in a summer of flying that airplane. The mechanic had turned off the master during work on the airplane.

Shorts Jokes

An aviatrix I know just completed a PPC ride on the Shorts 360. In honour of her achievement, here are some jokes about the Shorts. As you can see from the picture linked above, it's a medium-sized, extremely boxlike airplane. It's also fairly slow moving, so other airplanes may need to slow down or circle to avoid overtaking it on approach.

This is a classic, but of course people know it and copy it, so I've heard it on the radio for real:
         ATC: "Keep the speed up."
Shorts pilot: "We're pedalling as fast as we can!"

Citation pilot to Shorts pilot: "Nice airplane. I'll bet it goes faster when you take it out of its packing crate."

A C172 reports pulls up to an intersection hold line while a Shorts 360 positions at the threshold.
Cessna pilot: Ready on Charlie
Female ATC: Standby, I've got to get my Shorts off first!

ATC: You're number two, after the Shorts 360
Pilot: Left or right 360?

You can also insert your own Daisy Duke joke, if you like that sort of thing.

---

And as this is a short (ha ha) blog entry, I'll add the fact that I just found out that on the TV show The West Wing, they film the exterior shots of "Air Force One" using a Virgin Atlantic 747, and they use special effects to transform it into the blue and white livery with the presidential seal.

Wrong Arabic Word

Seat pitch is the term describing the front to back seat spacing on a passenger airliner, i.e. how much legroom you have. The closer the seats are spaced, the more tickets the airline can sell, but the more miserable the pax are. If the controls in your armrest turn on the reading light over the seat two rows away from your seat, then the seats pitch has been reduced to cram more pax on board.

This is commonly done during especially busy times of the year, typically on flights carrying pilgrims to Mecca. Perhaps the theory is that your typical middle eastern person is smaller than your typical American, has saved up for a once in a lifetime trip to the holy land, and accepts a little discomfort as part of the price of the pilgrimage. The trip is called a hajj, so those are hajj flights.

The other day I asked my brain for that term and it supplied my mouth with "jihad flights." I earned a very odd look. I didn't mean it that way. Apparently my brain keeps all the Arabic words it knows in one box and just pulls out whichever is on top when I call for one. If I ever have to use that word in a PA announcement, I think I'll just say something else.

The middle east is a common topic in blogland this week. Meryl Getline has an interesting tale of two swimming pools. Her entries are sometimes a little unbloglike, as they are newspaper columns which she sells, but the trick to reading her blog is to realize that the picture near the top under the date is a permanent part of the blog header, and that the actual entry starts underneath.

Breaking Airplanes

Ask any AME (airplane mechanic) what pilots do all day and the list will include "break airplanes." Pilots can get affronted at this attitude, but honestly, look at it from the point of view of the guys in the coveralls. They pull a serviceable airplane out of the hangar, hand it over to pilots, and the next time they see the airplane, it's broken again. I've just accepted their viewpoint and will cheerily stride into their hangar to announce, "I've broken another airplane."

When something goes wrong with an airplane, the pilots are legally required to write it down in the airplane's journey log, a book that reports who flew the airplane, where, when and how long it took. Literally every minute the airplane is in the air is recorded. "Dear Diary, Today I flew to Pickle Lake. Again." Any defect reported in the journey log must be repaired, officially deferred, or confirmed acceptable under the minimum equipment list, before the airplane can be dispatched to fly.

In Canada airplane non-workingness is referred to as a snag, and that's a verb, too, as in "the Navajo is snagged again" or "Call maintenance, please. I just snagged Romeo Charlie." When you write a snag, you want it to be concise, precise and in the correct terminology. You may spend a moment summoning the fewest words to convey the problem. "Nosewheel oleo flat" or "Eng #1 L mag rough." Pilots aren't supposed to diagnose the problem, just report the observation. After all, I don't know whether it's the alternator, the voltage regulator or a wire that has broken. I just know that I see a discharge on the ammeter when it's supposed to be charging. Maintenance diagnoses and fixes the problem, then writes a corresponding entry to indicate what they did in answer to the pilot's complaint. A common one is "no fault found" or "ground checked ok," meaning that it doesn't look broken to them. Then if the problem persists the pilot has to come up with more detail or a way to reproduce it.

There's a list of humourous journey log entries that you may come across. Please do not forward it to any pilot or AME. Yes it's funny the first few times. But we've seen it. We can quote it from memory. It appears over five thousand times on the internet. Really. I googled it.

Recently I had to snag an item in an airplane and I spent a moment, pen poised over paper, composing the entry. Finally I just wrote, "Com 1 frequency selection knob fell off." There's no "cool" way to say that a knob fell off the radio. I handed the knob to the mechanic along with the journey log.

Harrison Ford

Besides being a licenced pilot, what do I have in common with the actor Harrison Ford? In addition to being fabulously attractive and well regarded, of course.

When Harrison Ford was starting out in Hollywood he landed a number of bit parts like bellhop, cowboy, and suspect number two. Naturally he played each role to the best of his ability, putting his considerable talent towards making the audience believe he was indeed a bellhop, a cowboy or a suspicious individual. He wanted bigger roles, but they were not forthcoming. One studio executive apparently told Ford that he was delivering the lines he was given, and was well-suited to portraying a bellhop or a waiter, but that he lacked star quality.

"Check out Tony Curtis in HIS first role," the exec said. "He's a grocery clerk but you KNOW he's a movie star."

"I thought the point was you were supposed to think he was a grocery clerk", countered Ford, quite reasonably.

Let's just say the conversation didn't end with Ford getting a bigger part.

I'm in a similar position. Recently a customer said to me that it was clear that many of my colleagues were just time building in this job, but that I was a professional. I said thank you. And underneath I seethed the way Harrison Ford must have when he was told he made a good bellhop. Even my boss was taken aback at the discovery that I do not intend to spend the rest of my career in this job.

I hear things like this every time I mention the possibility of my career advancement. You're suited so well to it ... You're so good at it ... You put so much effort into it ... Don't you like it? ... Your talents would be wasted as a flying bus driver.

Well yes. This is my job and I do it well. Would anyone be served if I were to do otherwise? Perhaps I should act like I'm too good for this job, put on airline captain airs, and neglect those tasks that I can ignore without penalty. Of course not. I'll do this job well until the very last day I do it.

In an airline environment, everyone will see me as an airline pilot. Because I'm a professional and that's the way it's done. Harrison Ford eventually got tired of fighting for minor roles and took on a carpentry job to pay the bills. Some days I want to quit this job and go and work for a large airline doing anything. Honestly, I look at baggage handling jobs in Iqaluit and think, "what about that one?"

Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter on the set of Star Wars when he was asked to read Han Solo's lines as a stand in. Apparently he did it better than any of the 'real' actors they were considering, and was cast. You probably know how that worked out. My Star Wars will come.

Lying Still Does Not Pay

Here's an excerpt for a job posting from AvCanada that offers evidence that it's not just Steve Vizcacha who has had to repeat the hiring process because of a dishonest job seeker.

Seeking qualified person to fill Chief Pilot position in 704 operation. Hired pilot, experience not suitable. All previously interested applicants please re-apply. New applicants welcome. Must meet Chief Pilot experience requirements as per applicable C.A.R.’s Standards. Very important.

CARs 724.07(2)(b) (scroll down to 2b) outlines the required qualifications for a part 704 chief pilot. He or she has to have an airline transport licence with a valid instrument rating, a type rating in at least one of the types operated by the company, and at least 3 years experience as pilot-in-command of a commuter aeroplane. Most of the rest of the list of qualifications are training items that will be accomplished after hiring, and the company might provide the type rating, too, for the right person.

There is another requirement that the chief pilot have never had any conviction under subsection 7.3(1) of the Aeronautics Act. With a beautifully circular logic, the very first transgression listed under subsection 7.3(1) of the Aeronautics Act is:

(a) knowingly make any false representation for the purpose of obtaining a Canadian aviation document or any privilege accorded thereby;

Therefore being caught lying to try to get any aviation job disqualifies you from ever being a chief pilot. I wonder if this was this person's problem.

Another thing the observant job-seeker should learn from this posting is how amazingly disorganized employers can be. Note that they just hired someone. I'm guessing that person was then disqualified by Transport Canada during the enstatement process, yet the company had already disposed of the stack of resumes applying for the position. They didn't even have the contact information of their original second choice candidate. Perhaps they didn't even have a second choice candidate. And no, I don't have three years experience as PIC of a 704 operation.

Disembarking Unwanted Passengers

Preflight inspection revealed the presence of a number of non-revenue passengers on board the aircraft. Wasps had entered one wing through a vent and were building a nest inside it. The weight of a paper nest and a few dozen wasps wouldn't affect the flight properties of the aircraft, but that vent would give them access to the cockpit. It might negatively impact flight safety if I were to share the cockpit with a number of disgruntled poison-injecting stinging creatures.

I'm not afraid of nor allergic to wasps, but a pilot shouldn't try to do everything herself. I believe in CRM. I called maintenance. The guys smiled tolerantly, as though I had somehow caused the wasps' presence through shear bumbling pilotude. They promised to see to the problem. True to their word, they had evicted the wasps by the time the preflight paperwork was complete. One lone straggler staggered out during the runup, and the rest of the flight was wasp-free.

The next day, I noticed a wasp-coloured object lodged deep inside the opening to the stall horn. I didn't think it would affect the function of the stall horn, so I left it, intending to tell maintenance later that there was still a dead wasp in there. I flew the airplane, then before the next flight noticed that the object had moved closer to the wing opening. I took the cap of a pen and poked it inside, hoping to dislodge the stripey corpse. It moved, and not just because I was poking it with a pen. After a bit more poking and manipulation, I turned the wasp head-side out and it crawled out through the opening in the leading edge of the wing, and flew away. Apparently it had endured at least two flights in there. Tough little critter.

Living the Dream Stereotype

It's a blazing hot day and I'm driving into the company parking lot, looking like I own the world. (Or at least the car. There's no way anyone is still making payments on a car that looks like this). The wraparound sunglasses with the mirrored lenses are on my face, to maximize the "cool" look (and to hide the fact that I'm on minimum sleep this week). There's even a leather jacket in here somewhere to complete the ensemble. (Or in case the car breaks down and I need to use it as a blanket?).

The windows are cranked down and the tunes are cranked up, announcing my arrival. And what is the soundtrack for the arrival of Aviatrix for another day of tearing strips off the sky? Why the music from the movie Top Gun soundtrack. "Take you right into the danger zone!" Life is good, really. (Even while taxiing a hot plane on hot tarmac and waiting far too long at the (double striped) hold short line for take-off clearance).

The heat thins out the air, making the airplane engines and wings act like they are at a higher altitude. It takes more runway to take off, and more time and distance to climb.

"Playing with the Boys" blares out of the speakers on the way home, and there's a beer waiting at the end of the day.

Flying Out of The Box

I asked myself, how do you get a chief pilot to read your resume, when he receives a hundred resumes a week? How do you get him to remember yours when you're one of dozens with similar qualifications? How do you get him to keep it, and to call you? How do you stay in someone's face without making them hate you. And then something occurred to me.

If you ever read comic books in the 1970s or 1980s, you might remember the ads for Hostess Twinkies. They took the form of extremely lame comic strips, and the villain was always felled in some unlikely manner, usually through the application of cream-filled dessert cakes.

That's what I need: a resume in the form of a serialized comic strip. Do you remember when you were a kid, no matter how bad the Hostess Twinkie adventures were, you couldn't help but read the things? There's the other option: convince Steve Badger that I'm sane enough to fly his airplanes, but loopy enough that Air Canada would never touch me. Of course, that leaves WestJet, who seem to like their employees a little loopy.

Not that I'd ever do anything that mad. Or did I?

Also the chief pilot of Armadillo Airlines called me yesterday, based on an ordinary, non-cartoon resume. I don't think it will pan out because my PPC is not current on his aircraft, but it's nice to be thought of. And I love his accent.

Noise Complaints

Not all members of the public appreciate the sound of an airplane engine as much as we pilots do. Some of them complain about the noise. A few make it their mission in life to stop it.

A while ago, an affronted gentleman came into our place of business and asked to speak to a manager. The manager who met him is expert at public relations, but the exchange was classic even for her talents. Mr. Public produced and unfurled a map, and, placing a finger on it, righteously declared, "My house is right here." The manager looked at his map with great interest and then, in the most cheerful, neighbourly way you could imagine, placed her own finger on the map nearby and responded "Really? My house is here!" Not quite the effect he had intended.

If you buy a house near the sea, you're going to have seagulls in your yard. If you buy a house near a mushroom farm, you're going to smell manure. If you buy a house near a dairy farm you're going to smell manure and hear a lot of mooing. And if you buy a house near an airport, you're going to hear airplanes. If you don't like it, don't buy a house there. If you already did, move.

There are restrictions on how low and how fast aircraft can fly in the vicinity of built-up areas and other structures, but those rules are prefaced by the words "except for the purpose of take off and landing" because we've got to start and end the trip at zero feet above the ground.

At another company I worked, the chief pilot's assistant created a special voice mailbox just for one complaining lady. Because of airspace and operational concerns, we flew at 3500' over her house and she'd still call in to complain about the noise. Unfortunately the chief pilot always seemed to be out when she called, and his assistant would helpfully route her call to his other voice mail. Complaining about the noise must have been like a hobby for her, something to give purpose and structure to her days, and something to talk to her friends about. Maybe she couldn't afford a poodle.

Boxcutters

I was recently airside (i.e. on the part of an airport with the tarmac and airplanes, as opposed to the part with the car rentals, gift shops, metal detectors and baggage carousels) at an international airport in the United States. There might be no place in the world more uptight than an American international airport. Take the attitude of homeland security, the FBI, the FAA, customs officials, and security guards and roll them all together with an eight-foot fence, then top that with four strands of barbed wire, and you get the idea. You could cut the paranoia with a knife. Which is ironic, because I needed a knife, and discovered that I'd left mine in my other handbag. How girlie of me. What are the chances of getting a hold of a sharp knife airside?

Quite good, actually. The very first person I asked, less than a hundred metres from my airplane, was able to provide me with a genuine boxcutter knife. They are extremely useful tools. The presence of the knife passed from one pilot to another and back (thank you again, sir) didn't compromise anyone's security, just amused me because of its status as one of the least welcome items on a passenger aircraft.

Clearing customs, the border guard had had the temerity to ask us if we were carrying any "knives? guns? weapons of mass destruction?" And we weren't, at that point. One of the most excruciating thing about clearing customs is having to pass up the straight lines. I could have replied to the last with, "We looked, but we couldn't find any."

Obvious Rules

Dave at Flight Level 390 reports three rules of the airway passed on to him from a senior captain. His rules reminded me of another fundamental.

Never piss off the people who handle your food, set your schedule or service your airplane.

You'd think that was obvious, but I'm sometimes appalled to see how pilots treat support staff. A little goes a long way. It's not the dispatcher's fault that she had to call a crew at four in the morning. Yell at her now and then wonder why you have so many five am starts on next month's schedule. If you need de-icing service again tomorrow, which crew will respond faster and do a better job, the one you greeted with "it's about time," or the one you brought doughnuts for? Most people in the aviation environment are very professional and wouldn't deliberately do anything to sabotage a flight, even if you left them seething with rage, but they might not lift a finger to help you out when you need it, either.

I know of a bizjet crew who routinely added a pizza for the ramp workers onto their catering bill. That's a trivial fifteen bucks, giving them priority service every time. And you never know when the eyes, ears and goodwill of the ramp crew can save you a lot more than the cost of a pizza.

Flying Firetrucks

I saw the new Star Wars movie. I got my $12 worth from one scene fairly early in the film. I'm not going to give away anything of the plot, but if you haven't seen it yet, and are one of those people who wants to go into the movie knowing nothing about it, then you should stop reading this entry.

The scene that made me realize I hadn't wasted my money starts out in outer space. Our heroes are aboard one of those big space ships that the the camera stereotypically takes half the opening credits to pan over. For reasons directly related to our heroes' presence, an emergency situation arises. They enter the atmosphere and the emergency snowballs, or perhaps more accurately, fireballs, until the craft is on final approach, blossoming with flames, and flanked by firetrucks. The firetrucks, or should I say, fireships, fly next to the burning spaceship and spray water on it while it is still in the air.

It lands and skids blazingly down a landing strip that is really quite long, considering that every other ship in the movie lands delicately and comes to rest on a single spot. Maybe it was a special emergency landing strip. I was laughing so hard and clapping, that someone else said I made that her favourite part.

Plus R2D2 kicks a surprising amount of butt.

Lying to be Hired

Steve Vizcacha phoned to ask me the same question he asked before, this time telling me first the answer he wanted to hear. I told the truth. He told me that if I had had a particular requirement he would hire me right now. He said those words. There was a simple way I could achieve that requirement. I could lie.

I know a lot of people in my position would have done it. It felt as though he expected it. It would have been only a slight exaggeration of my qualifications. I could have claimed that a certain number of flights I did in multi-engined airplanes were with me in charge of the airplane instead of someone else. No one would have checked. There would have been no difference to the flight. The other person didn't help me fly. He just owned the airplane and had the insurance in his name. But he was legally in charge of the flight. After ONE WEEK on the job my real qualifications would have exceeded the claimed ones, but I missed the cutoff for hiring. His insurance comapny would never even have known.

I know it's done all the time. People get jobs at companies with strict minima and we look at one another knowing that there is no way they meet the minima, and they're not sleeping with the boss either. There are amusing stories of people who claim they have flown a particular type, in order to get a job, and once in the airplane it becomes evident that they haven't flown it. Sometimes the company just keeps them, because they have invested the ground training and one day of flying, and don't want to start again with another candidate who may have told the same lies.

I can put up with all that. What really gets me down is that employers probably assume I am lying too, so the time I have really accumulated is being discounted. I have never given anyone a resumé that listed even a part of an hour more than I have actually logged. I tell the truth and I round down to the nearest hour. It's a very sad industry that makes me wonder if this is a career-damaging error.

There's a triumphant postscript to this story. I e-mailed Steve to thank him for considering me, and I used the words "I could have lied to you, but a pilot who lies about time might lie about doing the job properly, too. At least that's how I'm consoling myself." He e-mailed back to say that the pilot he hired DID lie, and that the client checked his logbooks and caught the lie. Seldom does one receive such swift divine reassurance. The path of truth leads me where I want to go.

Setting Priorities

Yesterday I was given a message that there were "two employment-related messages on the answering machine." No further details. I had the rest of the day to wonder who they were from, decide who I hoped they were from, and be generally excited and happy about my prospects. It's like holding a scratch and win ticket that's not yet scratched, or a Tim Horton's coffee cup with the rim still waiting to be unrolled. Pragmatically, I realize that it will most likely say "Sorry, Play Again" but until I do, it's Schrödinger's cat, with all manner of possibilities contained in its quantum waveform.

When I have to make a go/no-go decision for a flight, I first decide on the acceptable limits of visibility, ceiling, freezing level, and other conditions, and then I check the weather forecasts. That helps me turn what could otherwise be a tough decision into a mathematical true-false question. So while wildly speculating on what two companies were vying over my attention, I realized that I should know the ranked order of all the companies I wanted to work for. I don't yet. I can divide them into two tiers, one of which I may skip over if recent predictions are correct. But do I want to skip over part of the aviation experience? I'd like to fly a large jet, but I'd like to have had more experience than I already have at flying small turboprops. More things happen on such jobs: more emergencies, and things that could have been emergencies, so you learn things. Experience isn't measured purely in hours. I'd like to sit next to a captain who has a lot of experience, and I want my future first officers to do the same.

But even within one tier I don't know whether I'd prefer Aardvark, Badger or Ichneumon. They are all great companies and I'd be thrilled to bits to work for any of them. But what if I came home and the answering machine revealed that they all wanted to hire me? After I regained consciousness, I'd have a serious decision to make. There are different things I would get out of each job. Perhaps it would be better to work a season with Air Vizcacha and then get on with Ichneumon Flight Services. I could spend the next twenty-five years flying for Aardvark and feel myself a complete success. I still haven't decided.

But you probably want to know about the answering machine messages. One was from Frank Ferret, returning my call, and confirming that he had passed my resumé on to Steve Ferret. Another was from Steve at Yapok Airlines, who sounded genuinely confused as to why Mike from Opposum Airlines had told him to call me. Neither looks much like an immediate job opportunity, but if you keep trying, eventually you will win a free doughnut.

Sticks

Q: What's brown and sticky?
A: A stick.

That one has made me laugh since grade two. Apparently it was the most submitted joke to a "funniest joke on the internet" competition, but no one on the committee voted it to win. I guess there were no grade two kids on the committee.

Airplanes have three axes of control: pitch, tipping nose up and nose down, like the movement a rocking chair makes; roll, tipping from side to side like a cyclist leaning into a corner; and yaw, pivoting from side to side, like you can on a piano stool. There are two different types of cockpit controls to manage the movement.

The most common type is the yoke, a steering-wheel like arrangement which produces roll when turned to the side like a steering wheel and pitch when pulled or pushed away from or towards the dashboard. Some airplanes have a control stick instead of a yoke. The stick ranges in appearance from ski pole to video game joystick, but in each case you pull it straight back and forth along the nose-tail line of the airplane to control pitch and waggle it back and forth perpendicular to that line to control roll. If you pull and turn the yoke or move the stick diagonally, you control two axes of movement at once, even if you didn't intend to. Yaw is almost always controlled by pedals on the floor.

The airplanes I trained in had control yokes, and so have all the ones I have flown for work. There are two types of airplanes that have sticks: small, old fashioned recreational airplanes and the most modern airliners. So some airline pilots learned with a stick, progressed to airplanes with yokes and then back to sticks. The cited reasons for the airliner sidestick include freeing up space in the cockpit, and ease of computer control (it truly is a computer joystick), but I wonder how much influence the fact that todays senior airline pilots mostly learned to fly in the J3 Piper Cub had on the argument for the stick.

I have flown a few different airplanes equipped with control sticks (even a modern airliner in a full motion simulator). My first time was in an old cloth-covered airplane with neither differential ailerons nor a turn coordinator. After a few minutes of battling it, I commented that I was overcontrolling because it was difficult to tell when the stick was centred. My instructor replied, "If you were a guy you'd know when the stick was in the middle." I'm not sure whether that was supposed to refer to the presence of a stick-sensitive area of the male anatomy, or a reference to tha amount of time lonely male pilots spend manipulating that centrally located anatomical part. In any event, I wasn't overwhelmed by penis envy, and soon I managed to keep the wings level, stick or none.

But Which to Choose?

I received e-mail from the hiring departments of both WestJet and Air Canada this week. And I am not joking, nor talking about frequent flyer spam, phishing expeditions, or bounced e-mail. Nevertheless, and probably fairly predictably at this stage of the game, they were not interview calls either.

The Air Canada missive was a form letter, the one they send you if you mail in your paper resume. It encourages you to register with their online application database and states quite sternly that "Applications are only being accepted electronically. Telephone enquiries or referrals will not be accepted." I haven't sent them a paper resume lately, as I've long been registered in their electronic database, and make my updates there. I can only assume that this one has fluttered down to me as a result of someone I know at Air Canada shaking the tree on my behalf. It's always fun to have the quarry stalk me^*, for whatever reason.

Meanwhile, how many of you would have read a message with a common personal name you did not recognize as a sender and no subject? That's a classic hallmark of spam. Add to that the fact that the body of the message consisted of a short amount of text and a long URL, and any spam filter worth running will throw it in the Junk folder, as did mine. But it turned out to be from WestJet. The only reason I saw it, is that I previewed my messages from work, using an internet mail program that doesn't filter spam, and it was in the mailbox right after a message from someone I knew. After I had read and deleted the known message, the next, subjectless message automatically displayed.

The name belonged to someone whom I don't know who toils deep in the WestJet "People" department (that's what they call it). I guess it'a a good thing her name isn't Watermelon Q. Minnow, or even fewer people would have read it. It was a note "requestiong" (that's the spelling in the e-mail) that I resubmit some data to the WestJet database, "due to a technical upgrade." It's virtually identical to one of those e-mails that asks you to follow a dubious link in order to "reconfirm" all your banking information so they can steal your money. Except all Ms. Minnow wanted to know was whether I could work in Canada, hold a secure area pass, and to reconfirm my flight time totals, none of which is confidential. It didn't even ask my name. My application number was coded in the link.

So now I have a simple route into WestJet. Presumably WestJet has sent this out because their database has collapsed, and they have lost track of who is qualified to fly. So that reduces the total WestJet hiring pool from everyone who applied over the last six months, down to only those who click the link on that e-mail. But ninety percent of the people who received that e-mail won't even have read it, because it looks so much like spam. Only uninteresting people read their spam on purpose, so even if they have more flight time than me, the interview process will reveal them personally deficient, and I will be the only choice.

^*Sorry about the sudden change in metaphor from vegetable to animal. If you find it dizzying, I'll refund your blog subscription fees in full. If you can think of a way I could have made a further transmutation to mineral without entirely losing the thread of the conversation, please mention it in the comments.

Aviatrices and Other Powerful Women

My mammals are up to date. Kolinsky Air doesn't warrant a call at this time, I'm waiting on some information before calling Quoll Air, and Shrew Air appears to be having financial difficulties that suggest they will be shedding not hiring pilots this year. I've also been talking to a few other companies, that remain unnamed because I haven't had anything to say about them. My duties fulfilled, I'm now allowed to blog.

I've always liked the word aviatrix. It's a specifically female form of the word aviator that doesn't appear to diminish the main meaning as the feminizing endings -ess or -ette seem to on some words. It even has an interesting plural form, aviatrices. Too bad for men, who only get to be aviators, and women can be aviators too.

Although Aviatrix is my handle here, I don't have a monopoly on the word, of course. The address aviatrix.blogspot.com wss taken when I signed up, sadly by someone who blogged once and abandoned the project, without so much as leaving an e-mail address so I could ask her nicely to surrender the URL. None of the Aviatrices in online forums (or fora if you prefer: I like latinate plurals, but I prefer the commonest form for intelligibility) is me. I've twice had people e-mail me to say they know who I am, either because they know someone else who goes by Aviatrix, or because they know a woman who flies and who has computer skills and thinks we're so rare they have it in one guess. Neither guess was right. It doesn't take much beyond finding the ON button to blog, and you can blog without even owning your own computer.

Aviatrix is a nice-sounding word, and it has interesting company. I know of six English words ending in -ix and denoting females. Five relate to sex, power, death or combinations thereof. The sixth is aviatrix. Does that mean flying is sex, power, and death all rolled into one?

As for the five other words, you probably thought of dominatrix, a well-known figure combining sex and power. Surrounding death we have the inheritrix, thanks to the powers of the executrix. Apparently a female director may be called a directrix, but I've never heard that one used.

The fifth is as good a word as firetruck; it starts with the same letter and is even naughtier, as it denotes a participant in an act that remains illegal in several US states. Last time I told it to someone she didn't quite believe it was a word, until she looked it up and declared it her new favourite word. I suspect this word may be the reason prostitutes are said to turn "tricks." The word is fellatrix. It's certainly classier than any of its synonyms.

And no, my real name isn't Beatrix.

Valid Medical

In order to fly an airplane, a person is required to hold not only a pilot licence that matches the airplane and flight operation being conducted, but a valid medical certificate. In Canada the licence is currently a bluish bit of high quality paper, embossed and indented with lines so pilots can easily fold it to fit in our wallets. The medical is a similar document printed on grey-beige paper. In the past, the medical was known as a licence validation certificate, a very accurate term, because without it, a pilot licence is not valid. At regular intervals, depending on age, pilots must visit a specially qualified doctor, a Certified Aviation Medical Examiner or CAME to undergo an examination that renews the medical. If a pilot has any any temporary incapacity--e.g. the flu or a broken ankle--she should not fly. She might consult a CAME if there is any doubt.

A pilot I know is approved for a Category 1 (commercial) medical even though he takes medication to control his blood pressure. One morning while driving his car to the airport, he momentarily greyed out and lost control of the car. He went off the road, driving up over the curb and onto a suburban lawn. He succeeded in stopping the car without hitting the gentleman who was on that lawn, watering flowers.

The gardener was a doctor. But not just a doctor, the gardener was a CAME. But not just any CAME. My acquaintance had blundered woozily onto the lawn of the head of civil aviation medicine for the entire region, one fifth of the country.

The pilot had had a recent change in his blood pressure medication and his doctor had neglected to give him an associated restriction on flying and driving. Didn't his doctor know he was a pilot? But of course. In fact, his personal doctor happens to be the head of civil aviation medicine for the region. That's whose lawn he was on.

He's back flying now, and he gave me permission to tell this story.

Are Too Satellites

Well, I wrote a long article in response to yesterday's anonymous comment claiming that there were no extra GPS satellites involved in the SBAS system. It linked to plans, pictures and launch timetables for SBAS GEO satellites in Europe, India and Austraila. It quoted from the AIP, the FAA and the ESA. And it concluded triumphantly with a picture of a GEO satellite. It completely soothed the initial sense of guilt I felt when it was implied that I had given out incorrect information. And then Blogger ate it, saying on its status page, "We will also be down for about 10 minutes right now to reboot some servers."

Here are a couple of links salvaged out of my history. EGNOS, the European effort and an AvWeb article showing the network of stations.

I'm not rewriting it, and I'm ticked at Blogger now, for wasting my time so I'm not posting anything more until all my mammals are up to date.