Q.E.D.

A commenter recently asked about the altimeter setting and Q-codes. I have probably blogged on this before, but Blogspot doesn't show it in my archives so it's just as easy to explain again. It is to do with the way the altimeter works.

The instrument in the panel that indicates my altitude is a barometric altimeter. It operates purely by air pressure, mechanically comparing the pressure in its sealed reference capsules to the air pressure sensed immediately outside the airplane. For this purpose there are little holes on the outside of my fuselage called static ports, and tubes conduct the pressure from the static ports up to the altimeters.

As the airplane climbs, the outside air pressure drops, but the pressure inside the reference capsules stays the same and this difference moves the hands around the face of the clocklike altimeter to indicate my altitude. Electronic altimeters work the same way, except that the pressure difference is converted to a digital signal. All the altimeter knows is the difference in pressure. If the pressure goes up, the needles show a lower altitude. If the pressure goes down, the needles show a higher altitude. This also happens without the airplane ever leaving the ground, just because the air pressure changes as weather systems move through.

In order to always start at a known place, there's a knob on the altimeter that moves what the altimeter considers to be the zero altitude up or down. So you could be on the ground with the altimeter reading zero, and turn the knob so that the altimeter read a thousand feet, and then crank it back the other way so the altimeter read two hundred feet below sea level. While you turn the knob, and the altimeter hands are moving, a small dial with numbers is also moving, visible through a cutout in the face of the altimeter. On an North American altimeter the numbers usually range from 28.10 to 31.00. On a European altimeter they range from about 950 to 1050. (International altimeters have two windows and two dials driven by the same knob). Turn the knob so a bigger number appears in the window and the hands go up to indicate a higher altitude. Select a lower number in the Kollsman window and the hands point to a lower altitude. Whee! The pilot will have to set it correctly before takeoff.

But what is correctly? There are actually two systems as to what the altimeter should read when you're parked. One is that it should read zero when you're on the ground, no matter where that ground is. Under that system, a circuit pattern flown at a thousand feet above ground level would always read 1000' on the altimeter, regardless of the elevation of the airport. If the altimeter reads two hundred feet, you're two hundred feet above ground. The number that you would set in the Kollsman window to make the altimeter read zero on the ground at a particular airport is called the QFE for that airport. The QFE system is not very popular. I believe the British military uses it, as does Russia, so probably much of the former Eastern bloc. I highly doubt that a Canadian or American controller would be able to give you a QFE if you asked for one, and many probably would not understand the question. Even if you could get the QFE, there are many airports in the US where you couldn't set it on an ordinary altimeter, because the numbers in the Kollsman window don't go that high.

The far more popular way to set an altimeter is using the QNH, but North American pilots don't learn that term, either. We just call it "the altimeter setting." The altimeter setting is the number you set in the Kollsman window so that the altimeter shows airport elevation while you are on the ground. If the airport is 1200' above sea level, then the altimeter shows 1200' when you're parked, and 2200' when you're in a thousand foot circuit pattern.

Neither the QFE nor the QNH for a particular airport is fixed. It varies from hour to hour with the weather patterns. That's why the controllers and the ATIS broadcast the altimeter setting.

There's a third way to set your altimeter, which everyone does one they climb into the flight levels. That is to set 29.92 and leave it, so that you don't have to keep changing it as you go through different pressure systems en route. If there's a Q-code describing this setting I don't know it. We call it "twenty-nine nine two."

Update: The terse and anonymous first commenter below has indicated that twenty-nine nine two is called QNE. And in verifying that, I'm reminded that with 29.92 set on my altimeter, it is showing the pressure altitude but most people don't call it "setting the pressure altitude" unless they are doing it momentarily for the purpose of determining the pressure altitude for a calculation.

New Pilot Licence Format

While I was getting my photos taken for my passport, I had an extra set done for my new pilot licence. As I mentioned, Transport Canada told me I need to have a new photo licence by the end of March.

That application was very much like a passport application, right down to the square where I had to sign my name without going outside the lines. (But did. It's like failing colouring in kindergarten, and I had to fill out the whole form over again). Then, to my surprise, the new licence arrived inside a week.

It's passport-style, i.e. a little booklet with a blue cover and lots of pages for stamps and notations. It's a bright cheap-looking blue colour, so looks very much like the passport of some obscure third world nation you've never heard of. The cover is embossed with a gold "Canada" (in the government logo with the flag), "Aviation Document" at the top and "Document d'aviation" at the bottom. The first page inside has my photograph twice (not green), my signature (not cut off at the edges) and some logos and personal information. It even has the codes at the bottom of the page, like you use in a passport scanner.

The next page has a little rectangle with my picture again, and abbreviations indicating what licences I hold. Sadly, it says SMELS which, while fortunately isn't a physical description, still isn't nearly as grand as the old All single and multi-engine land and sea aeroplanes. Following that are a whole bunch of pages for examiners to fill in subsequent qualifications, and me to stick official labels affirming them. It includes a page that will replace my PPC card, and a section (with another photograph) replacing my separate medical certificate. The only thing it doesn't include is my radio licence. I'll glue that in the back with rubber cement, so it's all in one place. Unless doing so constitutes defacement and voids the licence, in which case I'm only joking about that.

Oh and the passport code bars even get recognized as a passport. I used it to check in for an international flight at a kiosk recently, and it worked.

Pushing It

Nothing says welcome back to work like a six and a half hour flight. The sun went down a hours ago and I'm almost at destination. The ATIS winds on the ground are fourteen gusting twenty, not a big deal, but we're making slow progress towards the airport. There's a calculator on the GPS that tells me the wind strength and direction. It's not perfect, because it makes assumptions about the true air speed from the groundspeed on various headings, but it's okay. It tells me we have 40 knots of wind exactly on the nose. How does the wind know to blow exactly from where we want to go?

There's a layer of cloud forming underneath us. I hope it's not low enough to be fog. The night runway isn't the same as the one that has the working ILS at the moment, so an instrument approach would have to be a circling. I don't want to be doing a night circling approach in low visibility.

The clouds are less in the area of the airport and at least the headwind means I can go straight in and get a rapid descent. The reported wind is forty degrees off the runway, and that's about right. I'm down and on and taxiing quickly, because for arcane reasons, probably not related to witchcraft, the customer needs the airplane perfectly stationary by 0415Z. I set the brakes with about thirty seconds to spare. And we thought we were going to be early.

I broke my New Year's resolution, the one about not eating bad chocolate, with a Reese's Peanut Butter cup at 2:30 in the morning. Don't let this be encouragement to anyone else to shirk on their resolutions. I did do over a hundred and fifty push ups this morning. (Spread out over five separate sets, not all at once). Rowr!

And Back to Texas

Passport renewed. Vacation over. It's time to go back to work. Back to Texas.

Or maybe not. I'm at the airport. At check-in, the agent told me that the airplane I was going out on was still on the ground at its point of origin, thanks to freezing rain there. Understandable.

"Do you have more flights to Dallas if I miss my connection?" I asked.

"Oh yes, there's a 5 pm and an 11 pm flight," she says.

Charming. I'm supposed to be in Dallas at five. But weather doesn't cause me stress. That's the province of unscrupulous telemarketers. I have a two hour connection, and freezing rain is usually a short-lived phenomenon, a transitional state between snow and rain. It should be fine. I smile, say something polite, and submit my 48.4 lb suitcase for tagging.

In the departure lounge the airline is good about keeping us updated. The aircraft is enroute, thirty minutes out, so we should be departing at 10:05. Then another update. The airplane has called in range a few minutes early, so we will be able to board at ten. Then another announcement, prefaced by the warning that this is not good news. "The aircraft is at the gate, but ..."

What will the but be? Mechanical? Commuting crew stranded somewhere? No, it's fog at the connecting airport. We're now facing an "indefinite delay". She promises more updates and soon gives us one. The weather at destination is deteriorating. "We need to wait until RVR is at 600 level, right now it's at 400."

I don't know if she knows what that means, but I do. The runway visual range transmissiometer registers a visibility of 400 feet in the touchdown zone. Not enough, for safe identification of the runway environment before committing to land. Fog is a phenomenon notorious for its persistence. I could be here for a while.

The next announcement comes at 10:15. We will be boarding at 10:30. She doesn't know when that means we will take off, but suggests maybe 11:00? I've heard lots of horror stories of passengers being loaded onto airplanes and kept captive there for hours and hours. I'd better stock up on food and water. But they've heard the same horror stories and before 10:30 there's another announcement that they won't be boarding after all. It's still an indefinite delay.

This is rough for them. If it were me flying, I could replan my flight to refuel at a different city, but they have to get these passengers there. Except the connecting passengers. And they are already looking at the connecting passengers. Right now they are rebooking passengers who have overseas connections, sending them back through the terminal to other gates and other flights so they can get where they are going. I approve. They'll get to me soon.

It's now 11:35. There's no internet here. I've already transferred all the phone numbers from my old cellphone into my new one, done two sudoku puzzles and read the blogs I downloaded before leaving home. Now what?

Write my own blog entries in Notepad and play minesweeper, I guess.

The flight finally boards around 12:30, but mysteriously leaves half empty, stranding passengers with the same destination who were ticketed on later flights that were simply cancelled. Somehow this makes sense to the airline.

My connecting flight is long gone, but I see from my online itinerary (this airport does have internet) that the airline has already booked another one for me. I can't check in online or at a kiosk, though. (I tried). I have to stand in a customer service line for about 20 minutes to get my boarding pass. As I get to the counter the agent excuses herself for a moment to go over to the queue, to kick people who aren't flying First Class out of the First Class line. One guy has a temper tantrum, claiming he never saw any sign and that he's been waiting there an hour. He's full of it: that line had maybe three people in it when I arrived, and he wasn't one of them. It only grew long in the last five or ten minutes. The agent returns and issues my boarding pass, and after more waiting and another flight, I get to Dallas at 11:15 p.m.

That's not the end of my day, though. I'm typing this while waiting for my baggage to arrive on the carousel. It hasn't, and people are slowly giving up and drifting over to the monstrous lost baggage line. I don't want to give up hope, but my next step is to rent a car and drive three hours, so perhaps I should get in that line before it gets any longer. The rumour is that with the cancelled and bumped flights our luggage has been lost somewhere.

That doesn't make a lot of sense, because there has been plenty of time for the bags to get on the correct plane at each stop. But I suppose airline baggage handling doesn't always make sense. Another customer smiles as the baggage agent can be heard on the phone, "Well you'd better find it! You should see how many people I have waiting here!" In the end the carousel starts up again and the lost luggage arrives.

I rent a car and drive east. Texas has good roads. I think I may have run over an already flattened skunk. It's also possible that the car is just permeated with some kind of air freshener I can't stand. Yes, the smell is so strong I can't distinguish between distant skunk and proximal industrial air freshener. Just kind of burns out my nose, I guess. I have one more complaint about that car. When the ignition is turned off, all the doors automatically unlock. I suppose it is supposed to be a convenience feature? Let me tell you, when you're a woman travelling alone, and you've pulled into a rest area in the middle of nowhere and reclined your seat for a few minutes nap, it is not a sense of convenience you feel when you open your eyes and realize that the door you carefully locked before departure and have never unlocked is now open, as is every other lock in the car. A convenience feature for whom? Parking lot rapists? I originally wrote "Chevrolet engineers losing your jobs in the current economy, I do not weep for you. What were you thinking?" but then I remembered that the last time I made a comment of that sort on the blog, I got a response from an engineer who had worked on the very project I was lamenting and marketing had overruled his protests. So I just weep for everyone. I do that a lot. I cried at the ending of Bee Movie, which I have seen now four times. Just the ending: I have never seen the beginning.

Back on the road and I reach my hotel. The register marks me as a "no-show" as I check in, but they still have the room. Long day. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to copy Dave and say "life on the line continues." Different sort of line, though.

At One with the Sky

Someone asked recently for a full-sized version of the cloud picture I'm using lately for my profile picture. I'll tell you the story behind it. I was searching Airliners.net for photos of airplanes I had flown, because I wasn't sure I had the registration right on one and wanted to double check it without calling the company. I happened upon not the airplane I was looking for, but another one, and the date was very memorable, so although the pilot is not really visible in the picture, I knew it was me.

I e-mailed the photographer, Chris Coates, and he was kind enough to send full-sized versions of not only that picture, but of all the pictures he had taken that day. He said the light wasn't quite right so they weren't all up to the website's very high standards. The last one was a picture of the sky that I disappeared into. When I first saw it I thought of it as a very gloomy sky, then I realized it was sunlight showing through darkness. i really like it because I think of it as a picture of me at one with the sky.

After the recent request, I e-mailed the photographer to make sure it was okay to share his work on the blog and he e-mailed back:

My friend, you can do whatever you please with that cloud photo. Post it wherever you'd like. I appreciate you asking me if that was OK, it was kind of you but not necessary. I don't own the sky, it belongs to everyone!

I think that statement makes the picture even better. You can see more of Chris's photographs at Airliners.net.

New Passport

Because I travel across an international border by air, I require a passport. And there's a funny rule about passports. Countries sometimes require your passport to be valid for six months in order to admit you. And I don't mean that some countries do and some countries don't. I mean that the same country, i.e. the United States will sometimes admit you with a passport that is close to expiry, and sometimes not.

Some people say, "so why don't they just add six months to the expiry date, or subtract them, or something, so the date on the passport really matches when you can use it." The thing is that you can get back to your country, I assume, with one day left on your passport, but you can't get out. The country that is taking you doesn't want to risk you getting stuck there because you stayed past the expiry date on your passport and now your real country won't let you in.

That sounds kind of unlikely to me. "I'm sorry, you were a Canadian yesterday, but now you're not, so you can't come back." Canadian citizenship doesn't expire. You can't even renounce it. The government does not recognize renunciation of citizenship if you, say, burn your passport in a public act of protest or become a citizen of a country that requires you to swear revokation of all other citizenships. You're a Canadian for life. So I suspect that if I were to turn up at a port of entry with an expired pasport, so long as it looked like me and hadn't been reported lost or stolen, that they would let me in. They might make a few phonecalls to verify my identity and possibly fine me. But I don't think they would leave me to wander statelessly forever in the airport.

But I'm not going to test that theory out. My last entry into the US was on a passport that had only four months left on it. It's time to renew. I would have done it earlier, but I needed it. To get a new Canadian passport I have to surrender the old one. And wait. I looked into doing it online.

They call it epass Canada. It claims to not support my browser. I look into that. They officially support Firefox 1.0.6, so I'm betting it will work fine in 3.0.5. There's the usual online service stuff: Choose a userID not already in use. Provide the answers to some terrible user security questions, such as "the name of an important person to you" and "an important date." In the end, after all that, it's not so much an online application as an online form. I have to print it out and bring or mail it in the normal way. Mail will take too long. It won't be done before I have to go back to work.

Taking it in and waiting six weeks for normal processing will take too long, too. But for an extra eighty dollars I can get the renewal process accelerated to two business days, so I opt for that. I get my photo taken and notarized by a photography store. You're not allowed to take your own photo anymore. It has to be a commercial photographer. I stand in two different lines, and pay my extra fee, which was reduced thanks to some calculation by the agent. I overhear a guy who has lost his medical card and had his driving licence taken away ask how he can get a passport. They seemed to have a procedure for him. There's a uniformed guy in a corridor who appears to have been hired expressly for the purpose of telling people nicely that they're in the wrong place. See, there's a preline and then there's the real line. Despite the labyrinth of frustrating procedures, everyone, including the guy who does nothing all day but tell people they're in the wrong place, is very friendly and polite. If you know someone who works on the front line providing passports to Canadians, please tell them "good job!" If you know someone involved in the back office bureaucracy providing passports to Canadians, tell them "Good job on staff training! Now please do something about the procedures!"

Application process done, I leave. When I come back in two days the passport is all ready for me. My photo looks distinctly green, not just my hair, but my skin. Everyone is, for some reason. There's even a piece of paper that comes with the passport explaining that that's normal. I suggest, as I'm signing on the little square where you have to sign but you're not allowed to go outside the lines, that it's too bad you can't apply for a new passport but keep the old one, then just come in to make the exchange once the new one is ready. THe reply is that "It's against the law to have more than one valid passport at a time." Sure, I understand that. But I'm not asking to have more than one at a time. I just want them to get mine ready for me before I have to surrender the one I'm using. This won't get fixed, because Canadian government officials, who would have to be affected in order for them to believe this was a problem, probably get their passports express updated as an internal service.

But I have a new passport. And my photo is really very green. I'm good for another four and a half years, as long as I don't run it through the laundry.

Anyone at DFW?

It looks like I'm going to in the vicinity of the Dallas Fort Worth airport for half a day around the 1st of March. Do I have any readers around who would like to meet for dinner? Send me contact information and then I can coordinate with you when I find out the exact date and timing.

I have no comment or inside information on the recent Turkish Airlines 737-800 crash on approach into Amsterdam, but I think this is an excellent picture. You have the airplane, the engine, the residential street, and the varied actions of the responders. I like the expressiveness of one emergency worker with her arm up, pointing. There are more pictures here and presumably the story, too, if you read Dutch. There has really been some remarkable photojournalism of recent air accidents, and I don't think it's ghoulish for journalists to get in there and get the images and information for us, as long as they don't interfere with rescue efforts.

Update: Here's an English language link to currently know accident details.

Unauthorized Landing?

Interesting story. Pilot lands on roof of shopping mall and someone is injured, while regulatory authority says he shouldn't have landed there. But I'm sure it's not the whole story.

Who wouldn't like to have a helicopter and just be able to fly everywhere and land on the roof, avoiding the traffic, the usual parking problems and the hoi polloi? The Jetsons flew everywhere, why shouldn't you?

As this story takes place in Ireland, their air law applies, so I can't comment specifically on the regulations regarding landing on the roofs of shopping malls. If the story took place exactly the way the pilot said it did, then he knew the shopping mall owner, had general permission from him, and called ahead to make sure he still had permission on that particular day. That's a tough call. I know I've landed on private strips. I call the corporation or group that operates the airport and keep asking to be transferred to someone with authority to grant me landing permission until someone steps up. I thank them, write down their name and go land. I have no way of knowing whether the person was on a power trip or really had that authority. I never considered that it could turn into a run in with Transport Canada or the FAA. Perhaps in future I will ask for faxed permission. Even then, what if it's a fax from a bored guy in the mail room? Who does have the authority? Do you have permission to let someone park in the employee parking lot where you work? Does a security guard have authority to overturn your granting of permission? Does he or she run in front of vehicles to wave them off while parking?

The pilot's account has the attendant only coming onto the roof after landing, while the attendant says he was "ignored" when he tried to wave the helicopter away. There's an easy way to rectify the two accounts. On the first pass, while the attendant was inside, the pilot verified that the landing are was clear, and then approached for landing. While the pilot was maneuvering to land, the attendant, inexperienced in the marshalling of aircraft, came onto the roof and waved at the helicopter from a position where he was not visible to the pilot. He fled the roof, and the pilot only saw him after landing. It was still the pilot's responsibility to ensure that the area was clear, but when people you don't know are present run into your blind spot during final approach you have done all you can.

The pilot's story gets a little fishy when he says he lost his logbook. It does happen, but nice coincidence. And what about the 'subsequent accident?' He also should have (assuming Irish law resembles Canadian in this respect) reported an injury caused by rotor downwash, but I can imagine the conversation.

"Hey! You can't land here!"

"I have permission from the owner."

"No, you can't land here, I told you, and you made the door slam and hurt my hand."

I'm thinking that if the attendant was so unlucky as to catch his hand in a slamming door such that fingers were partially severed or skin was cut through to tendons and bone the conversation would have been more along the lines of "Oh my God, call 999!" Without blood and/or severed appendages is "You hurt my hand" along the lines of "ouch that hurt" or "I require medical attention"? From someone who is angry at you in the first place, you wouldn't be out of line to assume that the hurt is more along the lines of aggrieved than medically afflicted.

On the other hand the pilot may be a complete asshole who saw the guy, deliberately angled rotor wash to scare him off and ignored his cries for help as he sashayed off to get his new keys cut. I have no way of knowing which scenario applies. In any event if he has the cash to go to the mall in his own helicopter, he probably bought the appropriate legal counsel to fly out of this situation, licence intact.

Not All Icing is Deadly

This has not even the tiniest thing to do with aviation, is a blatant abuse of my captive audience, and won't even offer the entertainment value of affronted Texans, but I want to show you my cake.

I like cake. Well, everybody likes cake, right? It's pretty and tasty, offers the opportunity to share, and often denotes a happy occasion. I've been reading the Cake Wrecks blog for a while now. It's written by Jen, a crazy geek with a sense of humour I share, and it features hilarious commentary on the most sidesplittingly horrendous cakes that professional bakers can create. Once a week, Jen gives my laughing muscles a break and features beautiful cakes. Some of them are so smooth and perfect I wondered how anyone could make icing like that, and then by reading the comments I discovered it was called fondant and a little googling found me a recipe and some instructions.

Instead of spreading fondant icing on with a knife, you roll it out like pie crust and then pick it up in a sheet and drape it over the cake. It has enough body that you can make ripples and folds with it. You can also cut it with a cookie cutter or a knife to make ribbons and patterns, or shape it into little figures like play-dough. I tried it out.

This is my first effort. It has lots of flaws. You can see that it isn't smooth and perfect. I didn't spend very long smoothing the icing into perfection before I put it on the cake, because I just wanted to try it out. I left a crinkle in the edge because I liked the way the fold looked, and wanted to see if it would crack or anything. The next one I make will have airplanes.

OAG Flights2Go

A couple of months ago I received an offer from OAG, the company that puts out the Official Airline Guide, to try their online Flights2Go product for free. I am familiar with the print product from a previous life, so I know it is the source of information on what airline goes where when, and hey, free stuff, right? I accepted the free trial.

The online product is a minimalist interface, nothing to install, no javascript, no pictures, just click the URL and get four lines of text:

• 1. Flight Schedules
• 2. Flight Status
• 3. Inbound Flight Status
• 4. Airline Info

The minimalism is a good thing. There's no wait to load it, and it's clearly accessible through even the most primitive internet devices. I use it on my laptop, but they advertise it for web-enabled phones, too.

The flight schedules rejected my first request because I entered four letter airport codes, and it only wanted the last three letters. (If someone who maintains a weather, airline, flight planning or other aviation site wants to make me really happy, they could allow both three and four letter variants of airport codes). You can also just type in the name of the city. If I type "New York" I get a choice of Newark, Laguardia or JFK. Type in "Portland" however, and I get a dropdown offering the choice of "Portland," "Portland," or "Portland," with no disambiguation. I can't get it to accept "Portland, ME" or "Portland, Maine," and when I correctly guess which of the three Portlands is the one in Maine (the second) the only confirmation I get is that the offered flights depart from PWM. If I didn't know the airport code, I'd be stuck.

The results of a search are also in a very condensed format showing the airline abbreviation, the flight number, departure and arrival airports and times, the time enroute, aircraft type, and days of the week that flight is available, ordered by departure time. Each result is itself a link to details, spelling out the abbreviations and showing each leg of a flight with connections. On the result below, you have to click the 2 to see details of the YYZ-YAM leg on the second screen. Which you can't, because the one below is just a screenshot.

The database includes a lot of airlines, including one of the tiny ones I have worked for, but misses some not so tiny ones based in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. I think every airline that codeshares with Air Canada is on the list. I didn't check every one, but the ones I did check are, and the ones I noticed absent don't. It also doesn't seem to be able to chain flights from different airlines that don't code share between each other. For example, it can find me a flight from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg on Calm Air, and it can find me a flight from Winnipeg to Thunder Bay on Bearskin Airlines, but if I ask it for service from Thompson to Thunder Bay it returns "no records available". It's not simply rejecting itineraries that don't connect well, because when I ask for Toronto to Winnipeg it offers me a 24 hour 49 minute odyssey connecting through Thunder Bay. It also offers flights connecting through Ottawa (in the wrong direction) and Chicago (in a foreign country requiring passports). But those aren't OAG's fault. Those, I believe, are connecting itineraries legitimately offered by the airlines themselves.

Navigating through the screens is simple, but once you click on a possible choice and look at the details of the routing, you have to use the back key to get back to the results list, which may be quite a few screens. I found a few cases where it shows same flight twice: the same flight number, same airline same times, same date.

I used it to try and help an acquaintance who was looking for information on flights from LAX to HNL (Hawaii for Christmas, mmm) and found a whole bunch of flights that he didn't know about. I was all excited that I was being helpful but when I looked them up, the flights I had found were all routings like LAX-SLC-HNL or LAX-SFO-HNL. While this would be useful if you were desperate for any flight, it wouldn't work out well for him, because he was travelling on a non-rev pass and couldn't risk being stranded in Salt Lake City.

When I was stranded myself by fog I was able to search the database myself for possible alternate routings to my destination and thus ask for the flight I wanted by number. For a control freak it's nice to have that power. I know someone who booked two flights on an "open jaw" itinerary (outbound to one city and homeward from another) through a travel agent who didn't know you could book two one way tickets! Needless to say he didn't get the best possible deal.

It should be mentioned that this product shows you the schedules only, not the prices. Showing prices would violate the Pauli exclusion principle of airfares, that forbids customers from knowing how much their flight costs and what other flights are available both at the same time. (Or, as has been pointed out to me, perhaps that's more the territory of Heisenberg). Maybe that's not really a fundamental law of the universe, but OAG has wisely decided not to risk it. Nah, it's just that if there's an airplane going from Toronto to Philadelphia, all the seats are going on that route. The same consistency does not apply to airfares.

I use the OAG product in conjunction with Expedia when I am booking flights, but in December expedia.com was down so I checked on OAG to see which airline sites to go to. (I know there are other portals apart from Expedia, it's just the one I have bookmarked for both US and Canadian origins). With OAG I found a direct flight to Canada that bypassed the snowed-in US hubs and Christmas delays endured by my coworkers. "You're flying direct?" they asked, while pondering whether they were ever going to escape from their snowbound hubs.

It can also look up flight status and give you toll free numbers for all the airlines it lists. It's definitely a reference for the stranded or last-minute traveller who really wants to see what flights there are as opposed to which ones the airlines claim they have seats on. They don't always match.

I won't pay to subscribe to this service for myself, because I mainly fly between small centres and, checking my recent itineraries, it wouldn't have found me the combinations of airlines I needed to get where I was going. I don't think I'd get my money's worth. I do see this product as of great benefit to people for whom a reasonable schedule is more important than a rock bottom price, and who fly among major centres served by airlines that are not named after local wildlife. Its forte is to show you how to get from A to B with the most precise timing possible, where A and B are both served by the same airline. If your flight is cancelled or full, having this product to see all the flights that are available could really help you optimize the time spent running from airport counter to airport counter to beg for seats, and if it saved you just one overnight in a strange city, it would pay for itself. In my experience, frequent travellers do know their airport codes and would have no trouble using this product.

If anyone has a search they'd like me to try in the database, just ask. I'll report back.

On the topic of airlines and airfares, this amusing website for a fictitious airline appears to be advertising for Air New Zealand.

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

Boing Boing lists a news story in which a band sticker on a bicycle shut down an airport. The name of the band is "This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb," and apparently it isn't the first time its appearance on an innocently parked bicycle has caused a bomb scare.

Everyone can appreciate that security at an airport has to be taken seriously, but it seems a little odd to base the alert level on the label. If a bicycle being a pipe bomb is a credible threat, restrict bicycle parking to a secure bunker. A bicycle sticker reading, "This bike is not a pipe bomb," wouldn't calm anyone down any. If I knew that there was one bike on the whole rack that was a pipe bomb, I'd expect it to be the one with the only stickers being the manufacturer's name and local registration. The words "pipe bomb" precipitate the security response. Not the credibility of the threat. It has been illegal for as long as I remember to make jokes or false statements about carrying dangerous items while at airport security, but this shouldn't be extended into making any statements about security or dangerous items while at airport security.

A car bombs makes a bigger bang than a bike bomb. I'd love to see a bumper sticker for cars reading "This could be a car bomb," but you know that instead of being taken as either a silly joke or a reminder to maintain constant vigilance, it would get you in trouble. They can be perfectly truthful statements, but if your t-shirt says "Some terrorists look like me" and there's a sticker on your computer saying "No explosive residue," you should probably be wearing underwear that says, "I knew I'd get strip searched today."

I'd buy that underwear, though.

And I'd need some new underwear were I forced to use this bicycle lane.

And finally, despite the really corny gaggle of geese, this animation of the US Airways landing in the Hudson River is very well done.

It Started With Telemarketers

Canada recently instituted a nationwide do-not-call list for telemarketers. Apparently the US Congress recommended such a thing fifteen years ago, but the final decision was to have individual telemarketers maintain their own do-not-call lists. That is fairly stupid, because there are so many companies that you'd never get on all the lists before one company folded and reemerged as another, quite possibly using its old do-not-call list as its new list of hot prospects.

Canada's new do-not-call list is equally stupid. There's a website you can go to in order to register your number(s) as do-not-call and any Canadian telemarketing company or foreign company making calls on behalf of a Canadian corporation is supposed to check their list against the registered do not call numbers and not call them. They can be fined $1500 for calling me anyway, so it sounds like something with teeth, but it disregards the fact the telemarketing is a scummy industry, and it's implemented in a stupid way.

Instead of being required to submit their call lists to be checked and pruned against a master list, the companies are required to buy the master list. That's right, telemarketing companies can buy a list of every Canadian who has asked not to be called by telemarketers. And the way the system works, the larger the company, the more they have to pay for the list. So of course what has happened is that little tiny companies open for the sole purpose of buying the list for cheap, and then selling it offshore where they can call me with impunity.

I got a call today, one of those machines calling. It told me that a friend had entered my name at the Bay or Zellers and that I had won a trip to Costa Rica. Now the Bay and Zellers are Canadian companies, and my friends are smart enough not to enter me in dubious contests, so I knew this was not above board. I pressed 1 to talk to a customer service representative. He had an impenetrable accent, so I couldn't understand his name, nor the name of the company calling when I asked for it. I think he may have made it deliberately unintelligible because when I asked him to spell it, he said for more information he would have to transfer me. Transferring is good, because the higher up the chain of command you get, the more of a nuisance you are able to be. In order to transfer me he wanted to know my name. I told him I wasn't giving him my name because he called me and therefore the onus was on him. He said he had to have my name to transfer me, so I told him sarcastically it was Jane Smith. He either didn't or chose not to recognize that as a default generic name and accepted it, but then wanted to know if I had more than $5000 in credit card debt. I told him I didn't give out that kind of information, just to transfer me please. He tried a few more times to get me to tell him. I told him the answer was Mu. He insisted on a yes or a no, and when I made it clear I wasn't giving it out, he hung up on me.

Scumbucket telemarketing company. This sort of thing is bad for my blood pressure or something, I'm sure. The *69 call told me that the call was from 616-980-2643 which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their service provider is named Lucre but the company name is ex-directory. Michigan has do-not-call laws protecting Michigan consumers, but what can I do about it? Global telecommunications is such that every single country in the world would have to be signatory to a global death-to-telemarketers pact before do-not-call registries are of any use whatsoever. I can't screen my calls by number, because I get calls from all over and who knows when some pilot friend is calling from a hotel or an FBO in Grand Rapids telling me they are coming north and can I meet for lunch? And screening by always letting the machine pick up also causes you to miss important calls from people who want to talk to you now or not at all. I could solve this with technology, but it's not just about telemarketing.

While I was still fuming about this, a story came on the radio about a chemical plant in Canada that had been sold to someone in Edmonton who just walked away from the responsibility of the plant when the economy took a nosedive. No payroll no forwarding address no nothing. Because I live in a modern, responsible country, the government stepped in with an emergency order asking the workers to stay at work and make sure that the plant didn't just explode, or pump hazardous chemicals into the environment or become the incubation ground for a new Batman villain, or whatever happens to untended chemical plants. I'm not sure anyone knows. The government then tried to track down the owner of the company and apparently the trail ends in Slovenia.

That's the way the world is these days. I'm horrified to think of what is happening in countries with lesser ability to step in and deal with this kind of situation. A Canadian company could just walk away from responsibility in Zaïre and who is going to be able to do anything or even know? Someone knows, and with today's global communication I'm sure I could find dozens of such cases documented by concerned individuals, but how is anyone to distinguish real should-be-crimes from made-up stuff posted on the loony websites of whacko sky-is-falling nutjobs? And even if the whole world knows, who can prosecute or hold to account a numbered Uzbekistani company with investors listing addresses in Slovenia, Paraguay and Delaware? For countries that have environmental regulations, it would be possible to require, as part of the initial environmental permitting process for new facilities, the posting of a bond sufficient to safely close down production and clean up the area in the event of abandonment or catastrophe, but that would be a large amount, and the savvy investor would just build the facility in a jurisdiction with a more short-sighted desperation for jobs.

Anything that happens in the world affects the whole world these days. The working conditions and pay at your job may be cantilevered by unions and government regulations, but ultimately in the global economy it is dependent on what the most desperate person will accept. And that person can be anywhere in the world. We can't just fix our own countries. We have to fix the whole world to get this to work. How do you fix the whole world? Historically, the spread of law has followed conquering armies. I don't think conquering the world for freedom from telemarketers is the way to go here. More optimistically, manufacturing and environmental standards also spread by economic pressure. The kids who grew up in the Cold War had it good. They knew they'd be wiped out by the Bomb. Me, I can't figure out which worldwide disaster to be concerned about.

The telemarketing part had a happy ending. I called the Bay's customer service and they efficiently transferred me to a customer service rep who knew about the usurpation of the company's name and assured me that their loss prevention department was working with the relevant authorities to stop the telemarketers, who apparently were also fraudsters. I assume they are going to nuke them from orbit, so if you live in Grand Rapids, you should probably go out of town for the weekend. And if you comment on this blog entry, do take into account that the official Posterperson for Readers of Aviatrix's Blog is employed in the telemarketing business, so any comments demonizing all telemarketers will not be taken well.

Texas In My Rear View Mirror

In which Aviatrix shuts up and goes home.

In wrap up I'll note that over the last couple of weeks everyone here in Texas has been very nice. They're friendly and helpful and don't seem to mind saying things twice when I don't understand the accent or vocabulary. They're also more travelled than typical in the US. Many people I talked to here have been to one part of Canada or another. (The topic of overseas travel never came up, so that's the only metric I have). A commenter on my first Texas blog entry mentioned something about aggressive driving, but I haven't experienced that. There's the usual amount of not signaling lane changes, less than California I think. But the streets are wide, with lots of lanes, huge wide shoulders and dedicated left turn pockets everywhere, so an unexpected lane change isn't a pressing emergency. No one tailgated or honked at me for driving the speed limit. It would seem that everyone here has been driving since they were sixteen, so they're certainly not lacking in practice.

In total, over two weeks of walking around town or driving back and forth to the airport, I saw six people using human-powered transportation: five walking and one on a battered-looking bicycle. The first two walkers I saw were young black men, dressed in a way that I thought only existed in movies, with oversized, falling-off jeans and blinged out with multiple enormous faux gold necklaces. They were walking towards me, coming the other way, along the grass at the side of a road. I was a little bit surprised to finally see someone else walking and said hello, but they were way too cool to deign to acknowledge my greeting. The commonality of us all being human beings aware of the purpose of feet wasn't enough for them, I guess. Or maybe I was looking stunned by their garb. Sorry about that, guys. I am exceptionally square. I just wouldn't have the panache to pull off a fashion statement of that magnitude. I rarely wear accessories that don't serve an immediate practical purpose. Maybe you were equally dumbfounded by my cartoon airplane t-shirt tucked into Marks Work Wearhouse trousers, with the waistband fitting well above my navel.

The other three walking people were caucasian, wearing exercise clothing, and strolling purposefully along a lovely treed path that went from the vicinity of the Wal-Mart all the way downtown, and perhaps further. It followed a pipeline right-of-way and I found it on the way back from downtown. I smiled hello at a man going the other way, and then walked with and chatted to a couple going my way. When we got to the end of the path, there was a parking lot, and their car was there. They had driven to this path in order to walk on it and were now driving home. In fact they offered to drive me to my hotel, even though it was only two blocks away.

My conclusion is that for white people here, walking is acceptable, but only as a recreational activity, not a means of transportation. I'm not quite sure about the other two guys. Perhaps their car had broken down. Or danced away. Although I've seen a lot of overweight folks, it's not everyone. I haven't seen the scarily obese people that TIME magazine keeps doing exposés on, so locals are getting some exercise somewhere.

The Texas work is not complete, so we'll be back, but the customer decides to take a break for a couple of weeks, so we leave the airplane in a hangar and all drive to into the big city to get cheap commercial flights to our various homes all over the continent. We cross our fingers that the connections work and we don't get stuck somewhere with inadequate snowploughs.

I don't get to see clearly what it looks like on the way in by car, the way I would arriving by air, but I can see from the road map and from driving there that it is an enormous gigantic airport, bigger than two "normal" international airports put together. It's so big they call it an "Intercontinental" airport. I find my gate, but shortly after I get there they announce a gate change. It's a full airplane, but there's a delay as they have to remove the baggage of someone who didn't show. Poor sucker probably didn't hear the gate change. I always hope someone like that is just inattentive and not deaf or non-English speaking, because it would be a really rotten reason to not make it to where you are going.

I do not get stranded anywhere en route, and sleep most of the way. I do sleep when other people are flying. I wake up in time to watch as we slip under scattered cloud on approach to the snow-covered Canadian city nearest my home.

ATIS Identifiers

In a recent comment reader ZuluDelta wrote:

I have noticed that the occasional aircraft reports that it is "with Juliet" or "Oscar, Tango, Papa, India, Uniform, Kilo" One checked in "with Whiskey"! Perhaps in some future blog, you could elaborate on what these secret codes are.

I almost think that with a name like ZuluDelta, this person might be kidding, but I always err on the side of treating a question as serious. Plus this is an easy one to answer, so it allows me to fill in a day on the blog without incurring the wrath of Texans by saying something inadvertently critical about one of their freeway ramps.

When an airport has a control tower, whether it's in Texas or not, there is almost always a published frequency that broadcasts a continuously repeating recorded message called the Automated Terminal Information Something. I think it's "Service," and I'm deliberately not looking it up to demonstrate how I don't care. We call it "the ATIS," pronounced Eh-Tiss. It might sound something like this:

This is Somewhere Airport Information Charlie, recorded at one nine three zero zulu. Wind three two zero at one four gusting two zero. Sky clear. Visibility fifteen miles. Altimeter three zero one four. IFR approach is a visual approach runway two zero. Active runways two zero and three five. Note One: Echo three taxiway is restricted to aircraft wingspan under 50 feet. Note Two: construction equipment operating west of runway 01/35. Vehicles will remain 400' from runway at all times. Inform Somewhere Tower on initial contact you have information Charlie.

The recording is often made by a human, just one of the controllers in the tower who checks the current conditions, presses a button on the machine and talks into the recorder. You can hear the regular hubbub of tower activity in the background, and there are stories about things audible on the ATIS that shouldn't be. Sometimes the conditions are coded in machine readable form and the ATIS is provided by a mechanical voice.

Either way, the ATIS is updated as required to keep up with changes in the information, usually at least once an hour. Every time it is changed, the information letter is incremented. So the first one in the morning is Alfa, then Bravo, then Charlie and so on through the radio alphabet. That way you need only listen long enough to hear the letter, called the identifier, to know if you have the latest information.

You tune the ATIS frequency and come in somewhere in the middle of that, drumming your pen impatiently on your kneeboard as they waddle through all the taxiway closure stuff when all you want to know is which approach plate to get out. You copy down the information and then call up the controller and "prove" that you have done your homework by specifying which ATIS information you have. If you don't say, or if you say but they weren't paying attention, they will ask you to "Confirm you have Quebec." If they've changed it between your picking it up and your calling them, sometimes they say "Information Romeo is now current. Inform when you have Romeo" and make you go listen again before they will talk to you.

Pilots and controllers get mileage out of making fun of the names of the letters. I've heard ATIS recordings that advertise "Information Echo-co-co-o" and I'm sure the story about the passenger named Mike or Charlie who asks "why did he ask if I was with you?" Here's a PilotsofAmerica forum thread on silly ATIS messages.

Here's an MP3 of an ATIS recording from Ferihegy airport (I think it's in the Czech Republic in Hungary). Here's live ATIS from Bankstown, Australia, if their tower is open when you click it. This last one contains profanity, and it may or may not have ever been actually broadcast but it perfectly demonstrates the mechanical ATIS voice. And it's very funny if you don't mind hearing a few words that shouldn't be said on the radio.

Alternative Transportation

I think I may have already posted this photograph, but it's a response to a commenter who wanted to ensure that people didn't think all of the US was inhospitable to pedestrians. This sign clearly indicates a city where multiple types of non-car locomotion are encouraged with dedicated lanes and routes. I have never seen an on-street skateboard facility anywhere else. I know it was in the U.S. and I'm pretty sure it was in Portland, Oregon.

In answer to a comment a few days ago asking about what happens to bicycles if they are abandoned when the owner moves or dies, they have a department responsible for collecting abandoned or badly parked bicycles. They register them and make them available to be reclaimed, resold, donated or destroyed as appropriate.

I tried to rent a bicycle in Texas today. A bicycle does not appear to be a vehicle one can rent here. Just out of interest, do you live in a town where a person can rent a bicycle? And while I'm at it, did your parents buy you a car? Did you buy your child(ren) a car? Did most people in the class have parent-provided cars? I get e-mails all the time from teenagers who want to learn to fly and don't know where they could get the money. They seem earnest enough that if they were sitting on a car they'd sell it and spend the money on flight training.

You can rent bikes in all the cities where I've lived, and if you ask nicely at a bike shop, you can sometimes get a loaner bike to ride while yours is in for repairs. My first bicycle was parent-provided, but when I wanted a better one, with gears and caliper brakes, I had to save up to pay half.

Back in the Sky

In which Aviatrix has no fear.

After equipment delays and weather delays and walking all around town looking for Mexican restaurants that only existed on Google, or were hidden in otherwise abandoned shopping malls, I finally got to fly in the area. The FBO gives us cookies and hot chocolate and candy, and tows our airplane out of the hangar.

One of the taxiways is closed so we have to cross over the runway and taxi up the other side. This is explained apologetically on the ATIS and again by the controller. Heck, in Canada they would have only built the one taxiway and you'd have to do that all the time. And the taxiway would be half the width and there wouldn't be a tower.

There's a moment's wait at the threshold, I can't remember why, and then we're cleared for takeoff. Vrooom! I miss it when I don't get to fly for a while. The airplane climbs easily and ATC gives me plenty of time to get stabilized and complete after take-off checks before they call me with a frequency change.

ATC is so laid back that after a while I suspect they have forgotten about me. Even though I can keep up with changes in the altimeter setting just by listening to the numbers given other aircraft, I make occasional calls requesting the current altimeter setting, just to remind them that I'm out here.

The mission specialist in the back is training another person on new equipment. They are using my intercom system, so I listen in and find out what they are doing back there. It would probably make more sense if I could see their screens.

I can see some nice lakes down there. They're just outside of town. I wonder why the town isn't built more on the lakes. In my experience, towns usually follow shorelines, because that's a source of water, transportation, and cooling on hot days. I guess this community has grown around a train station or something. Or maybe they are nasty smelly lakes and they only look nice from the sky.

It's hot again today. The temperature has bounced between freezing and t-shirt weather, literally 0 to 20 overnight. The locals say it's normal, and that it will get cold again soon.

At the end of the flight I hand the airplane over to my comrade and she will fly the afternoon shift.

More Blogging Pilots

Here are a few more airline pilot blogs for you all. (Or "y'all" as they say down here, even ATC. "Are y'all on an IFR approach?" I've heard).

The first blog I had to show you was by "Flyboy" a pilot from Brunei, just to show that being a pilot is pretty similar all over the world. It was this story about a rejected take-off that caught my attention. It's exciting, well-written and is what the pilots of the Continental B737 were trying to do in Denver in December. You have to have the attitude that any take-off can turn into this, and be prepared for it every second of the roll. But if you clicked that link you'll see that it's now by invitation only, and I didn't save the e-mail address. If any of my readers is on the invite list for this one, perhaps you could ask Flyboy if I can be on the list, or at least have a copy of that one entry to share with my readers.

The only quote I kept from Log Book is this one, what he thinks of being a pilot.

The life of an airline pilot may seem glamorous to many but it has its downside. The longhaul flights he flies are filled with fatigue, monotony and days away from his family. If married, it is best he lives with a woman who is resigned to the life of a one parent family who copes with blocked drains and recalcitrant airconditioning. But the pros outweigh the cons most of the time what with discounted tickets for family and friends, generous annual leave and a paycheck that pays the household bills, the children's school fees and more importantly the golf club membership subscription.

The second blog, My Life as an Airline Pilot is from an American pilot, flying for American Eagle. If I could get a green card I could get an airline job like that (and if I had little pink fairie wings I could fly around without an airplane, so that's enough of that). The joke at the end of this entry could be considered crude, but it made me laugh.

Next up is All Things Aviation by John White. I'd call it a retrospective curmudgeon blog, with commentary on current aviation news but John also flies a c152 taildragger, and made me laugh with this tidbit I didn't know: "Captain Sullenberger was honored by being given a lifetime membership in the Seaplane Pilots Association." He apparently didn't have a seaplane rating, but they trained him up for one, for free.

And one more of a sort I don't usually cover, but I know lots of you enjoyed my ferry flight in the Aventura, so here's Tinworm, a student pilot with an even smaller airplane, documnted in Tinworm Wings.

Texas Health Care

In which Aviatrix is frightened by the medical care industry and the Monsanto Corporation.

I'm waiting for the customers to need me to work, so I'm watching a lot of TV. I know House is available on cable in Canada, but it seems to be on every channel here, so I'm watching it, and I'm growing to like it. And then there are the ads.

Most of them are for prescription drugs or healthcare. Numerous ads are for cancer care centres, knee and hip surgery, and other sorts of medical care. The medical centres look on TV like holiday resorts. I know someone who is self-employed in Canada and has cancer. She is too ill to work so, being self-employed, has no money coming in. Her friends got together and had a fundraiser for her, to keep the rent paid and the groceries bought. I'm glad she doesn't have to pay for medical care. Hers is not as fancy as the resorts on TV in Texas, but I think she is getting good care. It's unsettling seeing the ads, because I take health care for granted. It's like seeing starving children in ads for NGOs doing overseas aid. Something you don't like to think about. I suppose people who live here are inured to the constant medical advertising, and to the fact that they could be wiped out financially by an illness that they recover from physically. A healthy strong young person can recover from terrifyingly traumatic injuries and go back to work, but how do they manage when they recover with usable limbs but crippling debt? Medical costs in the US make buying a car for your teenager look like a petty cash expenditure.

"Levitra does not protect against HIV/AIDS," warns another ad. Who the heck would think boner pills prevented sexually transmitted diseases? I can't fathom the logic.

I buy some cheese at the grocery store. It says on the side that it is "Made with milk from cows not treated with the growth hormone rBST." I'm glad of that. Bovine growth hormone isn't approved for use in Canada, so it seems scary and foreign. I'm only exposed to it down here. Right under that declaration is another one. "The FDA has stated that there is no significant difference between milk from rBST-treated and untreated cows. The difference is that my government thinks the increase in production is not worth the risk, while the US government requires even those producers who don't use the hormone to assure the consumer that the government thinks it's okay. Probably only the cows suffer from it, but absent all other evidence, which government am I going to believe, the one that pays for health care or the one for whom private health care constitutes part of the GDP?

There was freezing rain forecast this afternoon, but it didn't happen.

Did You Find Colgan?

I was online late at night when all my little mail and message icons started blinking. Nothing in aviation travels as fast as bad news. A Dash-8 operating under the call sign Colgan 3407 for Continental Airlines ceased communications with the Buffalo, NY approach controller and was subsequently found to have crashed into homes on the ground about five miles short of the runway. News stations are currently reporting 49 fatalities: all 45 passengers and four crew members, plus one person on the ground.

There is no way of knowing what happened at this point and I'm not going to speculate. You can see why it's not a good idea to speculate if you watch what came out on the news and talk websites as people who didn't know what as going on rushed to get news out. The reports ranged from the airplane being a Saab 340 to a "large jetliner," and the persons on board from "a crew of three" up to "two hundred passengers." I've heard that the pilots reported mechanical problems and that the pilots reported icing, but none of that shows up in the conversation between the accident aircraft and the approach controllers.

See, Buffalo approach is available on live streaming ATC, so audio is available now for the radio traffic before and after the accident. In Canada it is illegal to report what is heard on the radio, but I'm using an American blog service to report American ATC transmissions, so I think I'm in the clear. Here's what I hear between the Approach controller and the Pilot. There is a Delta pilot in the conversation, too. (I've left everyone else out).

P: buffalo approach colgan thirty four zero seven twelve for eleven thousand with romeo

A: colgan forty four zero seven buffalo approach good evening buffalo altimeter's two niner eight zero plan an ils approach runway two three

P: two niner eight zero and ils two three colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, proceed direct TRAVA

P: ???

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain six thousand

P: zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain five thousand

P: five thousand thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven descend and maintain four thousand

P: ?

A: colgan thirty four seven descend and maintain two thousand three hundred

P: ?zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven turn left heading three three zero

P: left heading three three zero colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven turn left heading three one zero

P: left heading three one zero colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven three miles from KLUMP turn left heading two six zero maintain two thousand three hundred until established localizer cleared ils approach runway two three

P: left two sixty two thousand three hundred until established and cleared ils two three colgan thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four zero seven contact tower one two zero point five have a good night

P: thirty four zero seven

A: colgan thirty four seven approach

A: delta nineteen ninety eight just going to take you through the localizer for sequencing

D: delta nineteen ninety eight thanks

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, buffalo

A: colgan thirty four seven, approach

A: Delta nineteen ninety eight look off your right side about five miles for a dash eight should be twenty three hundred do you see anything there

D: negative delta nineteen ninety eight we're just in the bottoms and nothing on the TCAS

A: colgan thirty four zero seven, buffalo

This transcription stuff is harder than it looks. I don't know why I can't hear the pilot's responses in each case. Perhaps some are blocked, or it's an artifact of receiver position, or of the recording technology.

I'm pretty sure the controller does call the flight by the wrong callsign initially. That's so normal. Almost every callsign gets bungled by someone every flight. The controller gets it right on subsequent calls so either it was just a slip of the tongue or he matched it up with the strip right afterward. Communications are perfectly normal until ATC tells the pilot to switch to tower. she acknowledges the call, but presumably never calls tower, as approach calls back, looking for her.

I suspect the Delta 1998 told to fly through the localizer would have been following her, and was broken off while they figured out what happened. They ask him if he can see the Dash-8 and he can't. Later the controller asks "Do you have VFR conditions there?" but the pilot is then inside clouds.

Another ATC voice comes on calling the missing flight again, with the words "How do you hear?" the words you usually hear right before someone gets chewed out for not paying attention.

ATC sends the Delta to a hold, that is to wait, and makes a broadcast "Ok for all aircraft this frequency we did have a Dash-8 over the marker that, that didn't make the airport. It appears to be about five miles away from the airport. For Delta 1998 I'm going to bring you in sir on the approach. If you could just give me a PIREP when you get to twenty three hundred and if you have any problem with the localizer or anything let me know however we're showing it all in the green here."

They don't know what went wrong, so they're being careful in case there is some problem with the localizer, the part of the instrument landing system that provides lateral guidance. Another pilot intended to do a practice autoland and was told to not do that. The controller wants the pilot not the automation landing the plane.

Another pilot asks ATC if they know about the situation on the ground. Probably he has seen the fire. It is normal to report sights like to ATC. I've reported an upside-down boat, and a forest fire, for example. ATC asks other aircraft in the area for icing reports and some is reported. One departing pilot asks for an unrestricted climb to get through the ice.

After a while a pilot asks "Did you find Colgan?"

The controller responds "Unfortunately he went down over the marker."

It's pretty normal for an airplane to be referred to as "he" even though the voice coming from it is female. Some people are assuming that the woman on the radio was the first officer, but I've seen women as young as she sounds with four stripes on their shoulders at regional hubs, so that may or may not be a valid assumption. It has dawned on the reporter that the lack of stress in the pilot's voice does not mean that the pilots have no concerns, because he's heard how calm Captain Sullenberger sounded on that tape. But crew are required to report abnormalities with the airplane to ATC, and these folks don't.

And I only noticed today's date after publishing. It is the zulu date of the crash.

Update: The names of the crew have been released: Capt. Marvin Renslow and first officer Rebecca Shaw, so it was the F/O on the radio. Plus there was a jumpseater on board, bringing the death toll to an even fifty.

Walker, Texas Ranger?

In which Aviatrix is frightened by an ATM and the car culture.

This town, despite being fairly compact for an American city, seems to be inhabited by people who do not walk. I mentioned a couple of days ago that kids don't walk to and from school. I present as further evidence a bank with a sign "24h ATM".

I walked up to the bank, but the front door was locked, and there was a sign giving the opening hours of the lobby. And those weren't twenty-four hours. I followed the walk around the corner, looking for an exterior wall-mounted ATM, but the walk dead-ended at a dumpster. There was no sidewalk on the other side of the building, but I tried going that way anyway, and found a drive-up ATM. I pushed the buttons and got my money, feeling a little insecure as an SUV pulled up in line behind me, and then I went back across the parking lot to the hotel. I looked again at the sign, and it definitely did not say drive-through. Apparently ATMs here are drive-through by default. And have no sidewalks.

Two blocks the other way was a Wal-Mart. My coworker made that sidewalkless trip for groceries and reported someone in a pickup truck turning around in a parking lot in order to come back and ask, "Are you okay? Did your car break down? Can I give you a lift?"

It was 16 degrees celsius. Not raining. Pretty much perfect walking weather. After three days I have seen no pedestrians or cyclists here. There were people riding bikes in Montreal at twenty below. You could tell they were their winter bikes, not their good bikes, but they were riding.

Now I told you I was irrationally scared of Texas. This is the sort of thing that makes me scared. It makes me wonder if this is a bad neighbourhood. But all the families are rich enough that their kids have cars. So people aren't going to be mugging me for my shoes. Are there poisonous snakes? I don't think so. Not on the street anyway. I intellectually know that no, there's no danger: people here just don't walk. It's in the culture. But the creepiness of seeing no one walking triggers my 'something wrong here' reflex. It's like when all the water goes away at the beach and you know it's time to run for higher ground before the tsunami crashes in.