Hot Air Rises

In order to continue explaining air masses I must first explain density and pressure. Density is a measurement of how close together the air molecules are, or, put another way, a measure of what weight of air exists in any given volume. More weight per volume is the same thing as higher density.

If you pack socks into a box there are two ways to maximize the sock density. One is to use thin, non-fluffy socks and the other is to cram your socks in as hard as you can, stomping on them to get them to fit before you seal the box. (You know I just moved house, right?) These two factors are the same as the ones that affect air density.

'Fluffiness' of the air corresponds of temperature. The higher the temperature, the greater the volume the air wants to occupy. It's actually because the speed of the air molecules is greater at high temperature, but you can think of the volume they thus occupy as them being all fluffed up hot out of the tumble drier. All else being equal, warm air occupies more volume than the same weight of cold air. Therefore, all else being equal, an equivalent volume of cold air weighs more than warm air.

Stomping on the pile of socks corresponds to pressure. Is pressure, really. Pressure is defined as force per unit area, and in the atmosphere it is a result of all the air stacked up on top of the bit of air you're considering. Imagine you're looking at a cubic litre of air(*). Its pressure is equivalent to the weight of all the ten by ten by ten cubes of air that are stacked on top of it, all the way up to the top of the atmosphere. Sure, one little cube of air doesn't weigh much, but stack enough up and it adds up. So air down near the bottom of the atmosphere is at a higher pressure than air further up in the atmosphere, where it has fewer boxes stacked on top of it. Kind of like the box of drinking glasses underneath four boxes of aviation textbooks is under more pressure than the one that is ony one box into a pile.

You can see pressure and temperature kind of work against one another with respect to density. If the pressure increases and the temperture stays the same, the density will increase. If the temperature increases and the pressure stays the same, the density will decrease. Cold air at a high altitude is less dense than warm air at a low altitude, because the effect of the low pressure at high altitude more than balances the effect of the temperature difference. There's even a formula:
  P x V = T x constant
P = pressure, T = temperature, V = volume.

So, we have a bunch of air hanging about. Air in the same vicinity within the same air mass is pretty much interchangeable. It's all mostly nitrogen, and contains some amount of moisture, and at the same pressure because its under the same pile of air. And its at the same temperature. If some of it were to be heated up to be warmer than the surrounding air, look at what would happen. Firstly, it doesn't warm the air around it. If air were good at sharing its heat with the molecules around it, down-filled parkas wouldn't be such treasured possessions in the north. (The puffy feathers create little air pockets and heat doesn't travel well through air, so that keeps me warm.) If a little bit of air is warmer than the air around it then it is also less dense than the air around it. And that means that the gravitational force holding it down isn't as great as the pressure differential between the air above it and the air below it, so it is pushed up, and rises.

And yes, I did just spend six paragraphs explaining that hot air rises. Just think of it as a demonstration of hot air. The reason I did it that way is that warm air doesn't always rise. If that were true it would be warmer at the tops of mountains than at the bottom. Air rises if it is less dense than the air around it. If the pressure is the same, then temperature determines density. So it rises if it is warmer than the air around it, sinks if it is colder than the air around it, and stays in the same place if it is the same temperature as the air around it.

There's one further trick to the rising air, as it rises, the pressure around it decreases, so according to the formula, if the temperature stays the same, the volume has to increase. And it does. The rising air expands. It actually also cools as it expands, so the result is that the same air occupies a greater volume at a lower pressure and temperature.

What it does next is for next time this multi-threaded blog returns to weather theory.

(*)If you didn't go to elementary school in Canada after metrification you missed out on carefully measuring ten centimetres by ten centimetres by ten centimetres and building a little cardboard box. That's about four inches cubed, for the aggressively non-metric. Once you'd built and folded your cardboard cube, and mended any measuring or folding errors with vast quantities of cellophane tape, you had a concrete way to visualize a ten centimetre length, one thousand cubic centimetres, one litre capacity, and, if you imagined what your cube would feel like if it were filled with water, one kilogram. I'm not making this up. They used to hand these things out at fairgrounds, in modern 1970s colours like pink, yellow and lime green. Someone back me up here. I'll trade you a working flashlight for a genuine 1970s MetriCube.

Great Lumps of Air

I keep promising weather theory, but I get distracted. It's also hard to start in the middle as I have to assume something. So I'll start at the beginning and weave more weather into the continuing story, continuing to be distracted on and off. My life is alrady a soap opera, so now I'll run multiple story lines. In any one week everyone should be able to find something of interest. And that will distract you from the fact that I haven't confessed what I'm doing yet. Today you have my take on some of the basic components of weather.

The Earth, as those of you who breathe regularly will have noticed, is surrounded by air. All the air contains the same gases: nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapour and a number of lesser components like carbon dioxide, helium, and even krypton (no, it's not green). The proportions of the non-water gases are almost completely uniform from place to place, so in dry air, that's 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon (the other gases are present in a few parts per million, sharing that one percent with the argon). Air temperature varies from place to place, both horizontally and vertically. Plus the air is not distributed perfectly uniformly about the earth. There are bigger piles of it some places than others.

Some of you won't believe me about the bigger piles thing, thinking that making a bigger pile of air would be like making a bigger pile of water, and that differences in pressure thus created would fill in the gaps and and even out the piles. Of course that does happen, and that plus the behaviour of the water vapour makes weather.

I didn't mention water vapour yet, because its variation would have made it awkward to include in the general composition of air, and it's important enough to merit its own paragraph. Water vapour is the gas form of the wet stuff we normally call water. It is a colourless, invisible gas. (The steam you see coming out of the kettle is not actually water vapour, it is liquid water droplets. If you want to 'see' water vapour, crouch down to eye level with the spout of the boiling kettle. Be careful not to burn your nose, and you will be able to observe a space in the first centimetre above the spout in which there is no appearance of steam. That's air with a high concentration of water vapour, rising from the kettle. As the liquid water boils, it turns to hot vapour and rises. As it leaves the spout of your kettle it mixes with the much cooler air of your kitchen and condenses, turning back into liquid water. Because the liquid water is in the form of very small droplets, the warm rising air can support its weight and it continues to rise as steam. Until it condenses on the underside of your cupboards and makes them all soggy so they won't hold plates anymore. But I digress.) So there is water vapour in the air all around you, but you can't see it any more than you can see the nitrogen. The proportion of water vapour may be up to about 4% of the total air, but can be 1% or less. So where you sit right now the actual proportion of gases in the air might be something like 76% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 3% water vapour and 1% argon and other.

So we have these great piles of air. Each pile, called an air mass, starts at the surface and wherever it ends, somewhere between around 30,000' and 60,000' up, is called the tropopause. There's more air above the tropopause, but that's called the stratosphere and stratospheric weather is a different subject. Air masses are formed by air lying around in one place for a while. Air masses are big, so by "one place" I mean "Antarctica," "subtropical Africa," "the Pacific Ocean" or "the far north of Canada." The air takes on the relative characteristics of the place it hangs out. Well not all of them. We don't get pointy air or high-crime air or fundamentalist Christian air. We just get moist air versus dry air and cold air versus warm air. It's all relative, so an air mass that forms over the Canadian prairies/American midwest in winter is cold compared to the air mass that formed over the southern states, but warm compared to the one that formed over the bleak arctic tundra and frozen seas. Yes, frozen seas. But it's a dry cold.

Of course everything has special names so that you don't think this weather stuff is easy. Moist air masses, like the kind that form over non-frozen seas, lakes, and jungles is called maritime, and dry air, like the kind formed over deserts or frozen landscapes is called continental. If you've ever had a "continental breakfast" at a Holiday Inn you can remember this by the dry, cellophane wrapped pastry. Or you can just remember it, because continents that don't have the Great Lakes and Michigan/Manitoba in the middle of them tend to be drier in the middle and wetter at the (maritime) coasts. That second way would really be a better way to remember it, because it is actually true, but isn't as funny as Holiday Inn breakfasts.

The cold and warm air masses mostly just go by "cold" and "warm" but they do have fancy-schmancy names, too. From north to south in Canada we are influenced by two different Arctic air masses, Polar, and Tropical air masses. South of the tropical air lurks an Equatorial air mass, but I must confess to being largely unfamiliar with its whims.

How to Post a Website in a Comment

Frequently my readers know of resources or documents relevant to my postings and you post them in the comments. It's great, like an intelligent search engine. Some of the URLs are long, and sometimes they appear truncated or overflow the column. There's an easy way to prevent that. I usually start by explaining how something works, and then get to the result, but today I'll do it backwards. The following line is all you need to know.

<a href="http://www.website.com">text to click on</a>

If you want to post a comment with a URL in it, all you need to do is highlight and copy the above line, and paste it into the comment box. Then you can edit it to insert the real website URL, and the text to click on. Be careful to leave the quotation marks in place around the URL. That way you can type a really long URL but all that displays in the comments are the words you link to, the text to click part of the formula. The text to click on will automatically be displayed like that: underlined and/or in a different colour so that people know they can click it.

In case you want to know what that means, I'll tell you. But you can ignore this paragraph if you don't care or already know. When you tell a webpage to display something you use tags. The tags tell the computer what to do with the part in between, whether it should be displayed as a picture or a paragraph, how big it should be, what colour, what style and if it is connected to other text. The tags go before and after the stuff you want to display, like the opening and closing credits of a movie, except instead of theme music you get angle brackets. The less-than sign is the opening angle bracket. A link comes under the category of "anchor"--you're hooking your text to the text on some other webpage. So a is the opening tag. After that comes a code specifying the kind of anchor, a hypertext reference, so href. And then you specify the reference itself, the URL in quotation marks. And that's the end of opening tag, so you close the angle brackets, giving <a href="http://www.neatwebsite.com">. Don't put a space after the >, just type the text you want clickable right up against it. (It will still work if you leave a space, it will just look dumb). And then after the clickable text, you type the closing tag. The closing tag is simply the opening tag preceded by a slash: that's the bottom-to-top, left-to-right slash that is on the same key as the question mark. </a>. Done.

There's another strategy for making long URLs managable, and that's a service like tinyurl. You can paste any URL you like into the window at that site, and it will give you back a gobbledegook URL that is very short. That is very useful if you have to write down a long URL or dictate it over the telephone. I prefer to see the real URLs on websites, so I have some idea where I am going before I go there. I can't tell whether http://www.tinyurl.com/ad45g is cartoons, porn or airplanes. Also I can't click on it. I have to open a new browser to copy and paste into. Whereas if someone links to something directly, like this I can check it out in advance if it seems to be a good neighbourhood on the internet by placing my mouse over it and looking at the bottom of my window before I click. You'll see the one above takes you to "nastystuff.ca" which probably doesn't exist, but doesn't sound like a good place to go for information on fireproof lifejackets.

Nothing to do with airplanes, but at least it's not the same story as last week.

Oh and you're all welcome to post your websites or other favourite URLs in the comments just for practice.

Mystery Component

The riddle about this component is on this page. Now do you know what it is?

Coffin Corner

My apologies to nervous fliers (believe it or not some read this blog), but there are lots of things in aviation with morbid names. We do take our jobs seriously so when we talk of a "graveyard spiral" or the "coffin corner" it's because we know the associated risks. They aren't theoretical risks. We know the names and families of people who have taken those risks and lost. But, that said, the term coffin corner summons to my mind the shape of a graph, not of the box that probably wouldn't even be needed to dispose of the remains of those who disregarded the meaning of that graph.

The graph in question shows airspeed on the x-axis, the horizontal, and altitude on the y-axis, the vertical. It depicts two lines, one showing the minimum flying speed and the other showing the maximum flying speed. I'll work up to explaining their slope and intersection, but I'll explain stall speed, and Mach in order to get there.

Stall Speed

An airplane is supported in flight by the pressure difference that develops between the upper and lower surfaces of the wing because of its forward motion through the air. The slowest forward speed that develops sufficient pressure difference to counteract the weight of the airplane is called the stall speed. Attempt to fly slower than that and the airflow over the top of the wing starts to break away, resulting in ineffective controls, altitude loss, and usually (but not necessarily) a nose down pitch. This is undesirable in air transport operations, so pilots try to maintain a good margin above the stall speed.

As the air becomes thinner with altitude or high temperature, the speed the airplane must travel through the air mass to get the same airflow over the wing increases. Two days ago I said that that same pressure over the wing represents constant indicated airspeed. That is true for slow airplanes (200 kts is slow in this context!), because for them we can ignore the effect of compressibility of air. When your airplane gets above 10,000 feet and 200 kts, that is no longer true. The ram effect of the speed compresses air inside the pitot tube, causing a higher indication than would otherwise be seen. You can subtract a correction factor to get equivalent airspeed (EAS), but even quoted in EAS stall speed does not remain constant with altitude because of the changes that occur near the speed of sound. So when we are talking about high speed, high altitude aircraft, the speed at which the aircraft stalls actually increases with altitude, whether the speed is given as indicated, equivalent or true. That's the first line on the graph: stall speed. Starting from sea level at the bottom, it slopes slightly towards the right, more so at higher altitudes.

Speed of Sound

The speed of sound in air depends pretty much solely on the temperature of the air: the colder the air, the slower the speed of sound. Air gets steadily colder with altitude, thus the higher you go, the slower the speed of sound. That means without going any faster, an airplane gets closer to the speed of sound as it gets higher. It's sort of like you get closer to the speed limit as you drive towards town, not because you're accelerating, but because the speed limit decreases towards your speed.

While there are airplanes designed to fly at and beyond the speed of sound, most airplanes become unstable as the airflow over the control surfaces approaches supersonic speeds. Because of the way the air travels over surfaces, the airflow in some places is faster than the airplane, so adverse effects may start at an airspeed of about eight tenths the speed of sound, expressed as a "Mach number" of about 0.8. For safety, transport aircraft comply with a maximum operating Mach number (Mmo) specific to that airplane. For example, a Gulfstream V jet has an Mmo of 0.885, and if I keep getting distracted by looking up specs of other aircraft I'll never get this entry written, so that's the only example you're getting. At sea level, the speed of sound is so high that most airplanes would exceed structural limitations based on the airframe before they approached Mmo. So at low altitudes, the maximum operating speed (Vmo) is not related to the speed of sound.

Vmo does not change with altitude, so as you go up in altitude, the maximum operating speed line is vertical, pretty much paralleling the previously mentioned indicated stall speed line. But eventually, the vertical Vmo line intersects the negative slope of the speed of sound with altitude. From that altitude up, the governing maximum speed becomes the Mmo, the safe margin for that aircraft below the speed of sound. The higher you go, the lower the speed of sound, and that Mmo line slopes all the way back to meet the stall speed line.

Understandably, a pilot is always trying to maintain a safe airspeed above the stall and a safe airspeed below the Vmo/Mmo. But as the altitude increases, the difference between the stall and the max narrows into the space inside the pointy apex of that graph. And that is coffin corner. The pilot must fly accurately because pitching down may increase speed towards Mmo, pitching up may decrease speed towards stall, and banking actually increases the stall speed.

As usual, I've discussed a graphical topic without a graph, and you can't see me waving my hands around. The only one I could find online was in this this thread. The thread itself is alternately intriguing and amusing, as the one poster keeps interjecting the fact that the decrease in air density with altitude is the reason for the increase in stalling speed with altitude. He would be correct if the graph were in true airspeed, but it's in indicated airspeed, which already depends on density. I don't have information on the other poster's theory on momentum.

For the sake of completeness, I should mention that in aviation coffin corner also refers to the top left hand corner of an approach plate, where warnings such as mountainous terrain all quadrants or add 200' to all altitudes when using Dog River altimeter setting are located. It's an easy alliterative phrase that turns up on sports, other industries, and is probably the namesake of many a black diamond ski run. It might originate as the name of an alcove in Victorian staircase landings that allowed one to maneuver a coffin down the stairs. I'm not sure why they wouldn't bring the deceased down the stairs sans coffin, but then there's a lot about the Victorians that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Here's a final footnote on the stall speed. A graph I found in Handling the Big Jets by D.P. Davies plots low speeds against the probability of achieving those speeds in the course of an air transport jet flight. (The data comes from flight data recorders and other research). The probability of flying at 1.25 times the stall speed is 1:1, i.e. always, as that is the speed at which the airplane lifts off the runway. The jet quickly accelerates to a higher margin above the stall and usually does not return to that region until just before landing. But the graph shows that this is not always the case. There's a slightly better than one in ten chance of reaching 1.2 times stall speed, a one in a thousand chance of 1.1 times the stall speed, and one in one hundred thousand transport jet flights for some reason hit the actual stall speed of the airplane. Apparently these are almost the same odds as losing an engine near V1, a crucial take off speed. Davies uses the data to demonstrate the need for air transport pilots to know the handling characteristics of their aircraft at the stall.

The Incredibles

I'm working on a coffin corner post, but I'm not done yet, so you're getting a few notes from a movie I saw instead.

One day I watched the DVD extras from the movie The Incredibles (an animated show about the home lives of superheroes). One of the animators was talking about how realistically everything must be animated because any errors irk or distract the audience from the story. He summed it up as:

"If we do a fantastic job, nobody notices."

I guess that applies to a lot of professions.

There's also a funny scene where the mom is flying a jet to the bad guy's secret island hideout, and she's overhead, trying to check in with the control tower. She announces that she is "VFR over the top," which I've never heard in a movie. I wonder where she got the tower frequency from. I've never noticed any secret island airport frequencies published in the CFS or CAP. Apparently she has the right frequency, though, as they hear her, and ... well that would be spoiling the movie for you. It's a fun movie.

November Eleventh

This is an interruption to the Calfornia report, but I want to post it while it is still almost topical. I meant to post it on the eleventh but I hadn't yet had a chance to type it up.

In Canada November 11th is a statutory holiday called Remembrance Day. At 11:00 am on the eleventh day, school classes, radio and television stations, and many places of work simply stop activity to observe two minutes of silence. Every town has a cenotaph, a memorial to soldiers from that community. Their names are usually listed on the monument. It's common for the cenotaph to date back to just after World War I, with the 1914-1918 dead listed on one face of the monument and then as you walk around the monument another face will list the 1939-1945 dead. On Remembrance Day there is usually a public ceremony at the cenotaph, where the mayor and other diginitaries lay wreaths, and surviving veterans attend in uniform to be honoured as well. There might be a fly-by of vintage aircraft in missing-man formation, and maybe some speeches.

It's actually more like Remembrance Fortnight, because around the end of October, people start wearing poppies, as a symbol of remembrance. I've never seen anyone wear a real poppy, but as long as I can remember, volunteers have distributed little plastic and felt pin-on poppies in return for donations to veterans' organizations. I've seen a lapel poppy from England, and it was a different style from ours, but still recognizable.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a man standing on a Canadian street corner, carrying a donation box that was absolutely stuffed with green banknotes. The green ones are twenties in Canada--more than the usual donation for a street-corner poppy, but he was more than the usual person giving them out. He was at least seventy, but fit and trim, standing up straight wearing a green military jumpsuit with faded embroidered patches. He was so dynamic that everyone had to stop and talk to him, and donate for a poppy. I intended to tell you which regiment he had served with, but it turns out that the Duke of Edinburgh shoulder patch isn't enough to identify it, as the Duke is patron to multiple regiments across the country. Someone asked him what year the uniform was, and he said 1953.

I gave him a donation, and he pinned a poppy on my coat. I said thank you, for the poppy, and then I thanked him also for his service to my country. Then I turned away to continue on my errands, and because my voice was cracking. It means a lot to me that people volunteer to fight the battles that we determine are worth fighting. I'm sure they volunteered for all kinds of reasons: to defend the innocent, to prove their worth, to live up to community expectations, for the money, for the travel, to get away from home, or just because all their friends were going. They were probably sometimes scared or bored or lonely and lots of them died. There are still Canadians dying and being wounded in Afghanistan, and I try to remember them all, as I wait for the light to change.

A young Japanese woman, probably an exchange student, indicates my poppy and asks me what it is for. She has noticed that almost everyone is wearing one. I'm taken aback for a moment, because I was under the impression that the 11th day of the 11th month was remembered as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day or the like around the world. I explain that it is to remind us to remember the soldiers in all the wars, that it is not a victory celebration, but to honour those who fought. "You could wear one too," I tell her. She says thank you, maybe for the explanation, maybe for the acknowledgement that soldiers from her country also died in wars. The light changes and we walk away.

A week later, I was in California, watching the news with a couple of members of the Canadian nerd herd I'd come south with. There had just been an election and the outcome could change the balance of power in the Senate and House, legislative bodies which presumably ratify decisions affecting American soldiers, and therefore soldiers of America's allies and enemies. Watching the footage, I noticed an odd thing.

"None of the newscasters or politicians is wearing a poppy," I said. In Canada, anyone putting forward a public face would be wearing one. It crosses political lines, because we're not honouring the decision to send soldiers to fight, nor the causes they fight for, we're honouring the individuals. I've never heard of anyone shunning poppies because they disagreed with a war or a peacekeeping mission.

"Maybe," it was suggested, "November 11th isn't such a big deal here."

"Or maybe they just don't have poppies. After all, a Canadian wrote the poem."

I've since checked to see if the poppy was a mostly-Canadian thing, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The first Google hit on "In Flanders Fields" is from the Arlington National Cemetary site, and the next one is from Belgium. As this Australian site says, "The poppy soon became widely accepted throughout the allied nations as the flower of remembrance to be worn on Armistice Day." It certainly means that in Canada. We have a circulating coin with a red-coloured poppy on it. User Friendly is a cartoon that is usually silly, often geek-topical, but that took the day off making jokes for the commemoration.

As it turns out, I was with Canadians on the eleventh, but we didn't time our day properly, so we were driving at 11 a.m. (we actually got it mixed up and were thinking 11:11) and just after we parked we noticed with regret that we had missed the appointed hour. "Ah well," said one of my companions, "In gratitude for their sacrifice, let us now go and have a good time enjoying our freedom." And so we did.

Time Travel

When major events happen on my blog, sometimes a few readers cry foul, because they discover that I do not rush home and blog for them the events of every day before I go to bed. People somehow feel cheated because a total stranger didn't sacrifice her sleep and her passengers' safety to tell them every terrible or wonderful thing that happened to her on the very day it occurred. Readers get so caught up in my story that they miss references to dates that are in the past, believe that an October day in the north could be so scorching hot that the pilots were sweating on each other, or that a hut by the side of a runway, with no running water, would have internet access.

I love that you get this involved in my story. I love having you with me, and it's exciting that you start to believe that "yesterday" means "the day before you read this" instead of "the day before I wrote this in my notebook." But then people accuse me of being responsible for their disappointment that my stories don't take place as they read them. And that is frustrating and painful. It's quite similar to the feeling I get when one captain castigates me for flying an airplane the way another captain insisted upon. I can't fulfil two conflicting demands at once. Without even addressing the fact that it takes me time to gather the emotional strength to tell even my closest friends about dramatic events in my life, please look at some facts about this blog and my life, and see how much sense it makes to assume that it is being posted in real time.

You probably know most of these facts.

a) I post every day, with rare exceptions.
b) I frequently work fourteen hour duty days with minimum rest periods--that is, just enough time for meals, personal hygiene and sleep.
c) A Canadian charter pilot does not have regularly scheduled days off, just thirteen individual days off out of every ninety. I can legally work forty-two days straight.
d) I take the air regulations seriously.
e) CAR 700.16(4) states "A flight crew member shall use a rest period provided pursuant to subsection (3) and Section 700.19 to obtain the necessary rest and shall be adequately rested prior to reporting for flight duty."
f) It takes time to write and edit a blog entry.

All but (e) should become quickly evident to a regular reader, and even if there were not such a regulation as (e), a reasonable person would expect me to use my rest period that way. It thereby quickly becomes clear that to blog in real time would defy both law and logic.

During any day, I take quick notes on memorable events or interesting thoughts. In fact sometimes I catch myself thinking about how I'll blog something as it happens. If I have I make some attempt to flesh out the entries as soon as I can, before I forget anything. When I have a chance I type them into the computer. I like to have at least five completely written entries ready at any time, so that if I am very busy I need only select, copy, paste and post. In addition, sometimes I dedicate an entry to my take on current world events, a technical discussion, or a joke. Most of my entries follow a chronological sequence, but I try to keep some timeless entries available to be thrown in when I'm not up-to-date on transcribing the scribbles out of my notebook. Sometimes a day is so eventful that it takes two entries to blog it. Every day that I don't post about that day's complete adventures, I get another day behind. Maybe someone else would just skip that day, but if it has something interesting in it, I don't. I have only very occasionally combined two days' entries into one, and I feel dishonest for it. It's important to me that I be truthful and post my entries in order. A time delay is not a lie.

As I post entries, usually I can't help fixing them up a little bit, adding a bit of information that makes them seem more real time, or that will make a later event easier to understand. Also I make the real-time illusion better but the time slippage worse when I try to hold up a little and match the day of the week of a blog entry to the day of the week that I post it. I'm not bothered by the fact that my entries run behind. It puts some distance behind the bad things before people start questioning me about them, and allows me to relive my triumphs after they have initially faded.

The result is that my blog ranges from one to six weeks behind my life. If you read a magazine series or watch a TV reality show, you would be much further behind that that. But it's still fun, right? I keep writing entries at one end, they keep coming out of the pipeline at the other. You get to read them. Folks, I'm not going to risk running out of blog entries any more than I'm going to risk running out of gas!

Missing Links

Historical posts discussing specific jobs have been removed from the blog. They may be published commercially in the future.

Marriage Proposal

I wrote this a week or so ago before all the excitement started. I don't have opportunity to blog right now, just a couple of minutes to send this off.

Most radio conversation with air traffic control goes quickly, using the official 300-odd word vocabulary given to ATC. When the frequency is not so busy, there's a bit of chat, some jokes and personal greetings. But the recording linked below represents what may be a first in Canada.

Special message from the ground controller.

It's perfectly safe for work, even if you're an air traffic controller, but it made me cry the first time I listened to it. The controller's name is Bryson Katzel, and his fiancée, as he says, is Christine Watters.

Apparently Bryson got a talking to from the big cheese in NavCanada in Ottawa, as they discourage this kind of thing, but he wouldn't have been planning on doing it again any time, anyway. I don't know any of the people involved, but I wish the couple all the best.

Thanks to Eric Martin of Futura Studios Digital Design Center for hosting the clip. Be nice to his bandwidth and save it to your computer before you play it for someone else.

Leaving It All Behind

It's kind of melancholy leaving everyone and everything, because I've developed not only friends, but a lot of specialized skills on this job that I won't need on the next one. In the course of saying good-bye to people I'm receiving comments and cards and kudos that confirm that I've done my job well. I know I can do the next one well, too, but it will take a while to go from the new person who has to be watched to the one who can be counted on.

I know every rivet and idiosyncracy of my current fleet. I may know where another company's airplane is going from its callsign. I know the people, the places, the approaches. I know where the bumps are, where the winds are going to be, and how to solve the problems unique to this specialty. And I'm going to walk away and let the knowledge decay.

I've been looking at charts. The VNCs are predominately different colours, the MDAs all seem odd, and the 100 nm safe altitudes are startling. The weather will be different, too.

Initailly I'm flying to my new company. I can drive out later to bring my stuff. The jet bringing me there will take off and fly right over my airport. My old airport. I will probably be able to see it through the scratchy window, if the weather is good.

I've flown over it a thousand times, maybe three thousand times. I learned to fly there. I've worked other places, but this is the first time I've got a job somewhere that I haven't flown to or over during previous jobs. I'll no longer hear the voices of my former colleagues on frequency. There will be new colleagues, new airplanes, new expertise.

Last Day Prank

I apparently have a reputation for snagging airplanes (reporting them defective) right before our maintenance staff is scheduled to go home. They come in before the pilots do in the morning, ensure everything is airworthy for the day, and then go home for beer. I stand accused of regularly throwing a wrench in that routine.

I think I snag airplanes any time of the day that they are broken, but they just notice when I'm keeping them from their beer. They aren't trivial snags. Uncommanded gear extension, alternator failure, tachometer failure, things like that. I'm not one of those pilots who writes up "funny noise" snags. But in appreciation of all the times they stayed late so I could do another flight, I had a stunt for them.

I went out to the most expensive airplane in the fleet, made a few arrangements, and then asked the dispatcher for the journey log. I opened it up and wrote carefully and legibly "Left pilot seat will not slide back on rails." I signed it and added my licence number, all according to procedure. And then I had an intermediary call maintenance to tell them to come out to the line. After a short pause, the dispatch phone rang. The dispatcher, in on the prank, told them, yes, we need the airplane tonight. The head of maintenance and another AME came out of the hangar with "some idiot pilot has dropped a pen in the seat rails" looks on their faces. We watched from the window as they opened the airplane.

No wonder the seat wouldn't slide: I'd wedged a case of beer under it. They came back in with the beer and a grin. I gestured to the journey log, wondering what the rectification would be. I think the official document reads, "Cardboard removed from seat rails. Checks ok," with the signature and licence number of the head of maintenance all in the correct places.

More Excitement

I found out that Vole called one of my references today. (No, this post is not out of order. They called for a reference after offering me a job). The person concerned pried around a bit to find out what was going on, and found out that they are considering putting me on the larger and more complex Monarch Butterfly, instead of the little Weedwhacker.

I'm starting to feel like a bit of a fraud. I'm not telling any lies here, nor on my resume, but this employer is all excited about getting me on board and I feel like I'm going to get there and say "Surprise! it's just ME! You thought you were getting a real airline pilot!" I'd better go re-read what it says on my licence, and remember that I am one.

I've been underemployed for so long that I've failed to realize that my experience has added up, even though I haven't been advancing. GC's misguess as to my new equipment placed me an echelon or two above my real level in the aviation hierarchy. That made me feel like an underaged teenager who has snuck into the bar and is now getting served, thanks only to well-applied mascara and her big sister's ID. But it also gives me a "so there" feeling that despite the fact that I'm just leaving the lowliest level of commercial aviation, my knowledge and experiences fit in with what my passengers would consider being a 'commercial pilot.'

Me Go Girl!

Transferrable Skills

I overheard some ramp workers talking the other day about the skills and knowledge they were developing about the insides of cargo holds and how to cram the most stuff in them.

"Your first day doing this, you wish you'd played Tetris more. And then you know you've been on the ramp too long when a new type of airplane you've never seen taxies up and the first thing you think about is 'I wonder what its cargo hold looks like'."

Me, I sometimes wonder why the area that we park, service and load airplanes is called 'the ramp' when it's flat. Everywhere else in my experience a ramp is a sloped surface that allows loads or vehicles to be moved between levels without lifting them.

Posts are going to get short and sketchy, or like this, some generic pre-written entries, as I prepare to leave, and travel afar. I'll keep lots of notes and try to keep you updated.

From My Scratchpad

I used to copy clearances onto random bits of scrap paper, but a while ago I started keeping a notepad for them. That way I can look back and see what clearance I got last time, and can keep track of silly conversations for you all. Here are a few.

ATC: Mooseflight 123, maintain 6000', advise prior to descent.
Pilot: Maintain 6000, advise prior to descent, Mooseflight 123.
Several minutes later
ATC: Mooseflight 123, say altitude
Pilot: Descending through 4500'
ATC: Didn't we agree that you were going to advise prior to descent?
Pilot: Sorry about that.

From a crew advised of VFR traffic and still looking for the VFR:

"We've got all our Christmas lights on."

And then there's the controllers who like to give instructions to crews that seem to be having difficulty.

ATC: Swan One, contact tower 123.4
Pilot: Over to Tower 123.4, Swan One.
Pilot: Tower, Swan One, out of 5000' with Juliet.
ATC: Still with Centre. You have to push the little button to get 123.4

The controller is referring to the type of a radio with an active frequency and a standby frequency. To swap the two you have to push a button. Half the time the button double clicks, so you end up on the same frequency you started, and if you don't look at the display, you miss it, and embarrass yourself like the guy above.

Hoops Ahead

Nothing in aviation is certain until it has happened. While I have been formally offered the job, here are the hoops I have to jump through before I am safely buckled in as captain. Most of this is normal training requirements at any airline.

One thing that is unusual, there was no sim check as part of the interview process. So the first thing I have to do is a sim check. No pressure here, but within an hour of arriving in the nearest city where Vole has a base, I'm going to be in a simulator, proving I can fly. Probably a couple of approaches, a hold, and an emergency. It wasn't done prior to hiring because they assume I can fly, but make no mistake: if I'm not up to standard, I'm going home. But I'll do fine.

The next morning, they will fly me to another one of their bases for company indoctrination. This probably includes WHMIS dangerous goods handling certification, familiarity with the emergency response plan (best thing about the ERP is you get everyone's phone number, for organizing parties), learning about the company structure, and so on. All the training that applies to no particular airplane type.

That complete -- I think it takes a day -- I am scheduled to fly to yet another company base for groundschool on the Weedwhacker. There will be a series of systems exams on that, and presuming I pass them all, I'll be introduced to a training captain and receive a few hours of training on the airplane. The last step is a pilot proficiency check. That's a flight test, with either a Transport Canada official, or a company pilot who has been designated by Transport to do internal rides. Occasionally you get both: a company pilot doing the ride, with a Transport official monitoring to make sure the PPC is being done according to spec. Or the other way around for the purpose of training a company check pilot. If you should happen to fail a PPC ride, even though it's on an airplane you just met two days before, that invalidates your instrument rating, and you have to go back to square one and requalify to fly IFR. No pressure or anything!

Once the official Transport Canada designation for the new type is inscribed on the back of my licence (the updated licence comes by mail a few weeks later), I will fly further north to my new base, not yet assigned. There I will undergo line indoctrination, flying with a pilot who is familiar with the routes until I and the company are comfortable with me taking command.

As usual, I will let you know how it goes. Or I'll write about holds.

Good Names For Volleyball Teams

Google directs a lot of people to my website as a result of queries for "good name for volley ball team" and similar searches. This seems to be the result of this one posting. If Cockpit Conversation is the best the internet can serve in the interest of numerous volleyball team namers, I think I and my readers can better the situation.

Volleyball is played either in on a court or on the beach with teams of six people whacking a white, slightly squishy ball over a net. The ball enters play by someone serving it, that is whacking it reasonably hard over the net into the other team's court. Neither team is allowed to touch the ball more than three times before it crosses the net to the other side, the same person can't hit it twice in a row, and it has to go over, not under the net. If you break those rules, or the ball touches the ground within bounds on your side of the net, the opposing team gets a point. Whichever team just scored makes the next serve, and when the service changes sides, the members of the team that just won the right to serve all move around one position, so that a new person is doing the serving.

The various sorts of ball-whacking are called set, spike, bump. I think you're allowed to hit the ball with your head or your elbow. Not sure about knees or feet, probably not. Oh and to keep track of who is going to whack the ball, you yell "mine!" That's about all I know.

Here are my suggestions for team names, based mainly on puns, and my mental associations with the game.

Things That Go Bump in the Night
Bumper Cars
Spike Force
Now Serving
Popular Girls
Blonde and Bouncy
Bruise Squad
Itchy Shorts
It Was In
The Miners
Coal Miners
Diamond Miners
Net Profits
Yours Truly
The Volleyball Scene
Six Guys Named Bruce
Courting Disaster
Nothing but Net
What's That Line For?
Sand in Our Shorts
Hundred Pound Weaklings

And here's a volleyball team naming URL that I'm sure my googlers found, but apparently that wasn't enough. Can we contribute anything else?

If you are one of the googling volleyball people, and you use one of the names suggested by me or my loyal readers, you owe us a picture of your team.

Economic Ties

When I first heard that Air Canada was advertising a one-stop flight from Fort McMurray, Alberta to St. John's, Newfoundland I was a little baffled. Why would there be a lot of call for flights from a rugged northern oil town in a western province to the capital of a province famed for codfish and bad weather. For those not conversant with Canadian geography, Fort McMurray is sort of like a combination of Texas and North Dakota, while Newfoundland is more like Maine combined with Alaska. The distance is like Seattle to Maine. It seemed an odd choice.

And then the article explained it. Newfoundland experienced an economic upsurge about ten or fifteen years ago, with the development of offshore oil. Many Newfoundlanders trained as oil workers, and now they are working all across the country, including the Alberta oilpatch. And apparently they travel home often enough to have created a demand for more direct flights. Makes perfect sense. It's why there is Indonesian fast food in the Netherlands, Indian fast food in England and Senegalese street vendors in Paris: history. I like that sort of stuff.

Weedwhacker Flaps

The WD40 has electrically actuated flaps. A flap-shaped lever to the right of the power quadrant controls movement: up for up and down for down. Full flap extension is 40 degrees. When the flap selector is returned to the neutral position, an electric brake stops the flap motor to freeze the flaps where they are.

An electric flap position indicator above the lever shows the position of the left flap. Both flaps are supposed to move together, and any asymmetry will cause roll. "Split flaps" -- one being extended more than the other -- are vanishingly rare on what I fly now, but the training manual discussion of asymmetric flap deployment leads me to suspect that it is a recurring problem with the Weedwhacker. There is some protection in place, but there are a few holes.

Limit switches will cut off power to the flap motor when the left flap reaches the full up or full down position, or if the left flap fails to move off its stop within one second of power being applied to the motor. One second here equates to 4 to 9 degrees of travel of the right flap. So as I read it, if the left flap moves and the right one doesn't, it's up to the pilot to recognize the asymmetry and shut off the flap motor. Likewise there is no sensor other than the pilot if the flaps are at an intermediate position, and then the pilot attempts to retract them or extend them further. For this reason, pilots are cautioned to disengage the autopilot before operating flaps. (The autopilot is not smart enough to say "that's funny," and would continue to attempt to fly the airplane without reporting its need for an unusual amount of anti-roll input). Other advice to pilots is to move the flaps in one second increments, confirming proper roll control before continuing their travel. If the flap circuit breaker tends to pop, there is likely some problem with the flap mechanism, and the flaps should not be extended beyond fifteen degrees.

Later models have a lever that moves in a track, with the lever position corresponding to the selected flap extension. The flaps will automatically run to the selected position and stop. These ones also sense the position of each flap and compare them throughout their travel, shutting off the motor if the difference exceeds five degrees. It even has a test function: while the flaps are moving you press the test button and it sends a false asymmetry signal to the amplifier, and the flaps should stop, until you release the button. I don't know how the circuitry works for that, but it can't be indistinguishable from the real signal, because if a real asymmetry is sensed, the flap system must be reset by maintenance before it can be operated.

Circling vs. Contact

Paul asked of the contact approach Isn't this about the same as a circling approach? I guess in a circling approach if I lose sight of the runway I am to execute the missed procedure, except I was more or less on downwind.

A contact approach resembles a circling approach in that both leave the electronic paths set out by nav aids and ask the pilot to navigate by looking out the window, but they are not the same. The circling approach is conducted when the published instrument approach that the pilot is flying does not lead straight to the landing runway. The pilot flies the approach down to published circling minima, and then, only if the runway is in sight and she has a reasonable expectation of being able to remain visual while maneuvering to land, she turns as required to line up with and land on the correct runway.

A circling approach can be as simple as widening out to the left or right after the runway is sighted. Some approaches are published without a runway number attached, just a letter designation like "NDB A". That means that the approach track is more than 30 degrees off of the runway heading. Sometimes the approach is lined up perfectly with the runway, but there is a tailwind on the approach. A pilot wants to land into the wind, so has to widen out, usually to the right, so she can see the runway on her left, and fly all the way around to the other end of the runway before descending to land.

Sometimes there are circling restrictions published on the plate, a little circle with sectors blocked off and deisgnated "no circling." So you can only circle in the direction allowed on the plate. Other times, if there is a tower, they might clear you to "circle north" to make you conform with, or keep you away from VFR traffic. You have to remain within a specified distance of the runway, depending on your speed: 1.3 nm for up to 90 kts, 1.5 nm for 91-120 kts, 1.7 nm for 121-140 kts and 2.3 nm for over 141-165 kts. There's a category E for over 165 kts, too, but you only find those on military plates. Apparently only the military thinks its smart to build airplanes that can't be safely slowed down to land. The circling altitudes published for most approaches step up for higher airspeeds, so it's not like there's an advantage to going fast.

If you were wrong about being able to remain visual until reaching the runway, and have to conduct a missed approach, you turn towards the centre of the airport and hook up best you can with the missed approach published for the approach you just flew.

So a circling approach starts at a specific point and altitude right at the airport, and must remain within a specified small distance. A contact approach can start miles and miles away. Technically, you might be able to request a contact approach in cruise, four hundred miles from the airport. It wouldn't be smart, but I don't see any rule forbidding it. I can imagine there might be a situation might arise in VMC where for some technical reason a contact approach is better than cancelling VFR or getting a visual.