Dating Game

I sleep until nine, drink some water and then sleep again until eleven. Before you get too jealous, sitting there checking your morning e-mail already dressed and at work at eight a.m., let me remind you that it's my job to sleep as much as I can here. Sometime between one p.m. and nine p.m. the customer may call me to fly and I will have to be alert, safe and enthusiastic for the next eight hours.

I turn on my phone and check my messages. My coworker took off at 9:40, so I probably won't be needed until after three. I make a list of all the things I have to and want to do, with "blog" deliberately placed at the very bottom of the page.

• eat
• OFPs [operational flight plans]
• duty times
• send completed duty time spreadsheet to chief pilot
• expenses
• paysheet
• groceries
• rearrange stuff
• blog

Food: Boston Pizza again. It's in the parking lot. I forgot to bring a sudoku or crossword puzzle or something, but one o'clock isn't a busy time and the service is quick. Food is meh. It's going to be a long month if I'm tired of the Boston Pizza menu already, because for walking distance there isn't a lot else. At least there's something here. Sometimes we have to get rides to get food at all. It's awkward having to feel like you're asking for a favour from the customer in order to fulfill your basic physiological needs.

Operational flight plans: I make sure all the fields are filled in properly for the flights I already did. If Transport Canada audits the company and I have filled in the departure time and ETA but not my predicted groundspeed then someone probably gets fined. Make sure the departure and arrival airports are legible and that I got the date right. I'm never quite sure what date to put on a form if I took off at 7 pm and landed at 11:30 pm on the 3rd, because considering that I'm in Alberta, that's 01Z to 0530Z on the 4th. Especially if the next day I fly from two to five pm, making that 20Z to 23Z, also on the 4th. So do I have two OFPs both dated the fourth? Or do I put it all on one OFP and then switch to a second one dated on the fifth if I do another flight at 8 pm on what in local time would still be the fourth?

I have to claim that the first flight was on the 3rd when I do my electronic duty times sheet, because if I put both flights on the line for the fourth, the software interprets it as an illegal duty day. Oddly it doesn't complain about what would be an illegally short rest period between days had I really started at 01 on the 3rd. I can even tell it I reported for duty on the fourth an hour before I went off duty on the 2nd. It looks like keeping track of resetting my duty is my own responsibility. As it always has been. The spreadsheet just lines it up in neat columns so I can e-mail it to my chief pilot who can import it into a bigger spreadsheet and show it to Transport Canada if they ask.

I tend to put the local engine start date at the beginning of the journey log entry, even if the uptime, the first time that actually gets recorded in this particular journey log, is after midnight zulu, or even after midnight local. That's probably wrong, but I find it very weird to go to bed, sleep for eight hours, including some that are dark outside and then write the same date in the journey log for the next flight. There's probably a rule somewhere, but not in the CARs. Transport Canada doesn't seem to mind if the times are local or zulu, as long as they are tracked accurately. When I fly an airplane that has local times in the journey log and I cross a time zone boundary, I record the landing time before changing my watch. I could also record it in the new local time and put an asterisk next to it, then explain the discrepancy with something like "Flight was 4.2h. T/O in EST, landing in AST."

Now that I think about it while not being in the middle of the night, the most correct solution is probably to start a new OFP for each duty day and write on it the range of zulu dates that it covers. The same solution may have to do for the journey log too. I could just put the date the flight starts, which is definitely and legally the moment I start the engines, but for the case when midnight zulu occurs between engine start and takeoff that is ambiguous, because when takeoff is 00:13, only I know whether I started the engines at 2359Z or 0001Z. All this matters little more to the operation than the colour of the sunset, but you are subscribed to Aviatrix's stream of consciousness (Aviatrix extreme of consciousness?) so there it is.

I am just finishing up my paysheet when my coworker texts to say that she has landed. I call the customer to ask if what the plan is. He says I'll be needed in a little over anhour, so I run across the highway to get some groceries. On the way back I stop to take a picture of a trailer full of freezers advertising "N.L. COD." Enterprising individual catering to the homesick Newfoundlanders in the oilfields. Just then my telephone rings. I check my watch. It hasn't been an hour. I hurry towards the hotel while answering, but it's the customer calling to say that I won't be flying today after all. That's very considerate of him. Often I just wait around for hours not knowing if I'll be called to fly or not.

I skip "rearrange stuff" on my list, because I'm not really sure anymore what I wanted rearranged, and I blog. Now I'm done blogging so I guess I'll make a list for tomorrow and go for a workout.

Another glamorous day in the life of a commercial pilot.

SD-8G

SD-8G sounds like a new TV spinoff, about a portal into an alien world, but it's Security Directive 1542-04-08G, an insight into the way the TSA thinks about airports. As of June 1st, 2009 the TSA declared that everyone having unescorted access to the airside at any airport with airline service must undergo background checks for a badge, on a per-airport basis. That would be almost like requiring drivers to have a separate permit for every highway exit they use that is also used by transport trucks. It's so ridiculously infeasible that the Security Directive 1542-04-08F containing that provision did not go into effect, and, thanks to the input of pilot advocacy groups, was watered down to SD-8G which at least allows us to land, pee, and fuel our airplanes.

The new requirements, which have officially gone into effect (but might not be enforced everywhere), tell transient pilots without airport badges to remain close to their aircraft and leave its 'footprint' only for trips to and from the FBO. They haven't yet defined clearly our movements at airports with self-serve fuel, or even exactly which airports count as having airline service. (Does the "airline" have to fly something bigger than a Beaver? Does the "schedule" have to be daily? Do they have to be passenger airlines?)

They say pilots are advised to call ahead to airports they think might have airline service and assure themselves they are in compliance with the new TSA directive. Whom should we call? Are they going to publish TSA 24-hour numbers for us? I don't expect this to really interfere with my movements when I'm south of the border. American FBOs are pretty proactive, so if there is one I'll ask them what the TSA expects of me before I get out of my airplane. Any wandering around I do on the apron is usually in search of FBO personnel, anyway.

TSA hasn't interfered with safety publications yet, at least I've never seen a notation saying "pilots without badges are not permitted to park on apron C". It might be feasible to designate airports by security class, and publish those in the AF/D where pilots know what they are dealing with. Have a few where pilots require A-class badges, with the same background checks required by airline pilots, but allow a pilot to do one A-class security check and then hold a badge valid for JFK, DCA, LAX, etc. If he's at an A-class security airport with no badge or a lower class badge, he needs an escort. B-class airports would have a painted line on the apron around the area where airliners parked and you'd need an A or B-class badge to be inside the line. And so on down to grass fields in Montana with no fence around them and no stinking badges needed. What do they gain by per-airport clearance? Is there really something in my background that could make me safe to walk across the ramp and borrow a Dustbuster in Albuquerque but a threat to national security if I move away from a hangar to get better cell coverage in Spokane?

The thing that really drives security crazy is that they can put up a big fence and lots of rules but they can't control access to the airport. Despite all the barricades, signs and security checkpoints, any old Canadian can still literally fly in over the fence. For any spot on the field, if an airliner can get there, I can get there, too.

If you are a pilot, or even just hope to become one someday if time permits, or want to support the freedom to fly, I really suggest that you join COPA or AOPA. They have excellent publications and member services, but even if you never use those, they are an essential presence in monitoring and countering the regulations and fees that officaldom concoct while wearing airline-shaped blinders.

Will She Fly or Will She Sleep?

Seven a.m. came too soon after getting to sleep after having a four hour nap in the middle of the day, but I got up. Ate breakfast with company and two chainsaw replacement chain salesmen from Portland, Oregon. Raisin french toast with bacon.

Go to plane. I load and secure baggage while she checks weather. "We're not going high, but we're going," she says. Fine with me. I set the radios and the GPS, bookmark origin and destination in the CFS, tell her what I've done and then pick up my crossword puzzle. I'm not sure, but I think there's a possibility that half-assed two-crew procedures when it's legally a single-pilot operation are worse than single pilot with someone who is also qualified but is clearly not doing anything to contribute to the flight. Today I'm working on that theory. She'll assign me duty if she wants help. "I expect you to have that crossword puzzle finished before we arrive," she warns. So I have my flight duty. Also I may have to fly to the end of my duty day tonight, so I should relax now.

Winds favour 07 or 12, but the aprons and taxiways are only set up so that one can easily get to 25 or 30. My reply to her possibly rhetorical question about the best way to get there is "let's just call the FSS and ask which way they recommend."

We don't even have to ask. When she calls to taxi they recommend "alfa, bravo, backtrack 07." She's at the B-12/30 intersection before she says, "Wait a sec, how am I supposed to backtrack 07 from here? Runway 07 crosses at the other end of this runway." They meant backtrack 12, which we do. Meanwhile Jazz calls up and asks to depart off 30. The FSS points out that it's NOTAMed closed for work that isn't currently being done, but it's still closed, so the CRJ will have to backtrack 12 as well. We take off. Gear comes up and gear handle clunks back to the up-neutral position, as it's supposed to. It's more obvious from this seat.

"I guess I should make a quick turn to get out of their way," she says, referring to the Jazz flight.

I can see them out of my window. "Nah, they're just starting their backtrack. Take your time," I say. We loop lazily over the airport and en route. I'm stumped for a while on a clue that asks for a zoology word for permanently attached. I'm thinking that arms, legs, tails, most zoological bits are more-or-less permanently attached, and that the exception like the skink's sheddable tail is more deserving of a special name. And then I work out the crossword theme of NINE to FIVE and fill in a few more words, giving me a couple of letters and the now obvious SESSILE. I'm soon down to three clues. I need a "Fighting" team that fits IL_INI, a simple sugar that fits HE_OSE and "Holly" across with I_E_. The team could be anything, because lots of letters are pronounceable there, but none is recognizable. The holly is probably a Latin name. I run the alphabet on the sugar and decide that HEXOSE sounds like a nice name for a sugar, and as IBEX is fauna not flora I go with ICEX for the holly. It's almost definitely not correct in the crossword, but I don't know the holly or the team, and ICEX is a liquid you use to treat the surfaces of deicing boots to make it easier for them to shed ice. (If you're cheap you use Armor-All, but the latter leaves black streaks on your wings.) The same section of the paper yields another, easier crossword puzzle, a word find, a jumble, comics, descriptions of the top ten new reality shows, and a scrabble puzzle. And that's about how long the flight was. There may have been scenery outside, but I doubt it.

I've been here before so I direct her to where we parked then. It's busy, with three commuters at the terminal, a row of little jets lined up along the back of the apron, and people all over the place. We dodged between a Dash-8 just shutting down and a helicopter just starting up to squeeze into our spot beside a hangar.

I go to the FBO to arrange our stay. There's a pilot on the phone to flight services, making "sorry, I'll be right done gestures." I smile and point at the FBO attendant, who is on a different phone. I'm waiting for him. Another pilot is also waiting.

"Are you the Dash-8?" I ask him.

"Oh no," he says, in an accent that's four or five thousand kilometres southeast of here, "much too slow for me." He's one of the jets.

"Something going on in town?" I ask, still wondering what's brought all the traffic. But it turns out that his accent is from much further south than his passengers. He's based in Calgary, just doing a crew change. Apparently Thursday is a big crew change day here.

It's raining. We go to the hotel. Lunch at Boston Pizza. The rest of the day is overdue paperwork, which is why some of this entry is not fully expanded from the terse notes that begat it.

Too Many Swans

We meet at 7:30 as planned and load the airplane. She flies and I admire the scenery, taking a few pictures: I hope some of them worked out well enough to post later. I haven't had time to look at them yet.

She calls the FSS 30 miles out, with our intention to land on runway 25. The FSS advises us of a Jetstream with the same ETA, for runway 30. They are converging runways with enough room for us to stop before the intersection. We'll work out any conflict as we get closer.

My coworker thinks the Jetstream has a stupid name, because it's not a jet. For some reason I can't quite fathom, I try to defend it. It's marketing: they wanted it to sound cool "jet" was cool then. Heck when they named that airplane "streamlining" was still cool. It brings to mind "Gulfstream" a prestige aircraft. She points out that it was probably named after the meteorological jetstream. Now that I write this I wonder when the jetstream was named. Was it named after the jets that use it, or was it named after what a jet engine was named after: a jet, i.e. a narrow fast moving band of fluid? Probably the latter.

Regardless of what the Jetstream was named after, it's still on approach. They say they will hold short of our runway. We can also hold short of the intersection. The FSS guy isn't concerned about us landing at the same time, and we do, touching down at the same instant. They call the FSS with an intention to backtrack 30 to Swanberg Air, and the FSS gives us the choice of backtracking 25 or 30 to the apron. My colleague says "We're going to Swanberg, too. We'll follow them in."

"Oh are we going to Swanberg or Swan Aero?" I ask. She's been talking to company.

"There's more than one swan?"

"This town has a thing about swans," I explain. "They have some kind of rare whistling swan breeding ground. Everything is named after swans."

"You've put some thought into this," she teases.

"We were in the Swan Aero hangar last time."

She shrugs and amends her taxi call to the FSS, "I didn't know there were so many swans around here." The FSS guy chuckles and admits there are a few.

I direct her to the hangar we used last time and she checks her watch. The turbochargers need another minute to cool off before shutdown. Before the minute is up someone comes up to marshal us to another area. I bet he thinks we've come for fuel, but lacking a hand signal meaning, "no, we really want to be here, we're here to use the hangar" we follow his marshalling signals to an adjacent pad and then shut down and explain. He hasn't heard anything about us coming for maintenance.

Our company maintenance guy comes up and tells us Swanberg is two hangars over. We're supposed to be there, but there's a Jetstream in the way right now, so we have to wait. I wonder if Air Canada and Canadian Airlines used to have this kind of problem.

We eventually arrive in front of Swanberg, are towed into the hangar and go to work pulling cowls and opening panels for the inspection. The engineer offers us an electric screwdriver, but we both decline. Engineers, surely you know better than to place an electric screw destroyer in the hands of a pilot! The resident engineers are curious about this operation with a male:female ratio of less than one, and we are invited for coffee. Oh yeah, coffee break. That's something that engineers do. It always seems weird to me that everyone just stops working every two hours even though everything was going fine. We work until all the panels are open for inspection then go find a hotel.

Our engineer plans for this inspection to be done by tonight, but that will run us up against the end of our duty days. Even though I didn't fly here, my duty clock started ticking at the 7:30 a.m. report. But if I get opportunity for at least two hours of sleep, then I can apply half of that rest period as an extension to my duty day. I get to the hotel just before eleven. If I can sleep until three that will extend me by two hours, which should be enough. I do manage to sleep pretty well, despite the fact that the hotel has really pathetic curtains. Who builds a hotel in the land of the midnight sun and then equips it with transparent curtains?

At four my coworker returns and we look for food. The first two restaurants we try are closed down. Weird. The town seems to be doing pretty well. (We later find out that they closed down last year at the height of the boom because they couldn't hire enough staff.) Near the centre of town we find an open bistro. It's Mediterranean, maybe Tunisian. We both have the special which is goat meat and potatoes cooked with turmeric and served with a Greek salad. It's served right away at the counter where we order, so no waiting. The food is really good, and the service is friendly. I wish I remember the name so I can recommend it to anyone who happens to pass through Grande Prairie and is tired of chain restaurants.

Back at the hangar we reverse the morning's work and help put the panels back on. We also need to test the ELT. It's 5:15 p.m. The rules for testing an ELT require tests to take place only during the first five minutes of a UTC hour. We reinstall all the other panels and then wait four minutes for the top of the hour. I hop in the cockpit, turn on the electrical master and avionics master and tune the radio to 121.5 with the audio set to speaker. "Okay!" I call. "Ready!" It's 6:01.

Someone outside flicks the ELT switch to "ON" and we can all hear the whooping sound of the alert transmitted from the ELT and picked up on the radio. You're really supposed to test it using another radio not right in the aircraft, to make sure the signal is strong enough, but that was pretty strong. The ELT is set back to ARM and we replace the cover.

We tow the airplane outside and I run it up with the cowls off so the engineer can tinker with it. It's a little disconcerting having someone working that close to a running engine. He's inside my normal no-go radius for people walking on the apron. I put my hand on the mixture and the mags of the engine so I can shut it down if anything happens, but if he is so close to the propeller that I might not have time to react if he stumbles or zones out and walks in the wrong direction.

We recowl the engine and run it up again. Everything passes inspection and we shut down the airplane for the night. The customer can't get hotel rooms for us tonight at our destination, so we're to stay here tonight and fly tomorrow. Now after four hours of napping it is going to be hard to get to sleep and be rested for my 7:30 report, but I'd better do my best as I'll probably have to fly a late mission tomorrow night.

Making Money

I sleep through to 9:30. It's hard to sleep much longer because I'm used to getting up early, and the room is hot. I checked already and the thermostat is turned right down. The curtains are fairly dark, but not blackout curtains and the sun has been shining in since an hour or two after I went to sleep. I call Greyhound to see if they have my suitcase yet and discover that they were open from six a.m. to nine a.m. and are now closed. They only open with the bus schedule, and this being the middle of nowhere the bus comes at inconvenient times. They will next be open from one to five p.m.

In the meantime I catch up on e-mail, read about AF447's last messages, and do a workout, yes the aforementioned Buns of Steel, but it's more like Buns of Aluminum because there's something wrong with the DVD. It skipped most of the warm up, freezes for a while mid lunge, skips a few chunks of the cardio and almost all of the abdominal exercises. I decide it counts anyway. The phone rings just as I'm finishing and it's the customer. He wants me to be ready to fly for 2:30 p.m. No problem. He also agrees to drive me down to Greyhound to get my suitcase.

I go into the station and ask eagerly if they have a suitcase with a broken handle sent over from WestJet. As I ask I think I can see my suitcase behind her, and she says 'yes' before I'm quite finished the question. It's mine. It's back. Oh happy reunion with my stuff! As I lift the case into the bed of the truck it's clear that if anyone stole anything out of it, they replaced what they took with rocks, because it's as heavy as ever. And when I get it back to the hotel room I see that everything is where I left it. My hat! My flashlight! My clipboard! My clean underwear that hasn't been washed in a hotel sink! I now have an hour to get ready for the flight, eat a meal (I've really given up on naming the meals I eat), and meet downstairs. The food I have time for is a Tim Horton's "Chili Deal", and I substitute a bagel for the included doughnut. A bagel is a good inflight snack. As I move furniture around in the room to find a good place to set my suitcase I notice that the pilot light is on in the fireplace. (Yes, the hotel room has a fireplace. Swanky, eh?) But just that pilot light is putting out a lot of heat. I an feel it against the glass. I figure out how to turn it off and then go flying.

The plane is already on the ground and fuelled when we arrive. We have a quick meeting. The plan is to go to Grande Prairie first thing tomorrow morning. We'll meet at 6 a.m. That will not give me enough sleep to reset my duty day, but I will be a passenger on the flight and can get eight consecutive hours of rest after we arrive in Grande Prairie.

I go fly. It's a hot day and there is are a lot of convective currents. No thunderstorms, just a lot of bumpiness. A few whacks of moderate turbulence that throw things from the copilot seat onto the floor, but mostly just the discomfort of being whacked around. I reduce power so I don't go over the mission speed parameters while holding altitude in the updrafts. There are more small aircraft flying around below, calling 126.7 to advise of flights between small destinations in northern Alberta and northeastern BC. I ask one of the pilots if they are doing charter, but he says it's just for fun. He sounds envious when he realizes, "you're making money!" Heh, yeah, I guess I am. Cool.

I touch down about 9:30 and taxi in. A C172 is parked on the apron I was using. It's the same one I heard yesterday, CXD. The apron is separated from the taxiway by a strip of dirt, with a bit of a dip. There is one level gap where the pavement is good, and one can taxi through, but the Cessna is blocking that gap. I size up the dirt strip. You have to be careful when taxiing through any kind of trench, because the propellers can strike the ground. I choose a place where the dip is not as great and I am confident it won't be low enough to hit the props. I swing around, secure the airplane for the night and head back. There's a note under my door starting off with, "More Sleep!" The meet is amended to 7:30 tomorrow morning, because we can't get into the hangar until 8:30 anyway.

There's a twenty-four hour grocery store next to the hotel. I don't really feel like food though. I guess the snacks I ate during the flight are to be my final meal for the night.

Refraction Distraction

I walk towards my airplane on the ramp and I can see that it is pissing fuel out of the left wing, a steady stream, not a drip but a spray like it's pressurized. I remember the wide-eyed horror I felt the first time I saw fuel streaming out of a parked airplane. Today my feeling is just, "Hmm, this had better not be something bad." I could write a long blog post on various reasons that fuel has dripped, flowed or sprayed out of my parked airplane. I duck under the wing to look at the source. It's coming out of a vent. The vent is recessed so that incident air doesn't pressurize it, but it still faces forward so the stream spurts out in front of the wing. There's no visible damage. To confirm my first suspicion about the cause, I open the fuel cap for that tank. The tank is completely full and some fuel flows out of the filler neck onto the top of the wing. Suspicion confirmed.

This airplane was fuelled last night while we were wearing sweaters and jackets on a rainy, overcast day. Now I'm wearing a t-shirt, and the angle of the sun over the hangar puts the left wing in bright sunlight. The fuel is expanding inside the wing and being forced out the vent. It's perfectly normal. That's one of the reasons the vent is there. (The other reason is so that as fuel is burned, air can get in to replace the volume so that the fuel will continue to flow).

The fuel stain on the ramp looks nasty, but the rest of the airplane is fine. I set up what gear I have, conscious that the bag in which I normally organize my spare batteries, extra flashlights, snacks, waterbottle, and the like is packed inside my checked luggage. I have enough equipment to be safe and legal, just not everything I usually have.

All is normal on the run up, and I talk to the flight services guy in the tower and then take off. I say good bye to flight services guy but continue to monitor his frequency, and tune 126.7 on the other radio for en route traffic. At eight-thirty in the evening up here the sun angle is like four in the afternoon down at the 49th. It's hot in the cockpit, but I need to run the heater for the comfort of the picky computer equipment in the back. I spend a while moving vent sliders around trying to make it comfortable for me, and cozy for the computers, too. The mission specialist goes off headset for a while in order to take off his fleece.

Not only have I not flown in three months, but they have changed out the type of equipment I am using, so I'm looking at a screen I haven't seen in about a year. I stare at it for a moment, trying to remember where it means I'm supposed to go, and then I go to work. I remember this. I know how to do it. I'm good at this. Somehow my temperament--and bladder--is suited for this type of flying. I settle back into my routine, burning an hour of fuel out of each set of tanks so that nothing is so full it's spilling out the vents, and then systematically work through the various tanks. I plan to land at 2:15 a.m.

There are a couple of pilots in Cessna 172s hopping around beneath me, position reporting between small places I saw on the map. They chat to each other about how fine the weather is tonight and where they are going. As they say their call letters I picture them painted on the side of the airplanes. I remember things better visually then as sounds. One of them is CXD, which trips a switch in my head because they are all letters used in Roman numerals: 110-500, not that that means anything. When there's a break in their conversation I call up CXD and ask them what they're doing, just trying to join the conversation. The answer is a fairly terse "flying from Worsely to Fairview." And then they stopped talking to each other. I guess they forgot they weren't alone up here.

Fifty gallons of avgas later I'm still in the sky and so is the sun. My hat is in my checked bag, so I have to depend on my skinny sunvisors and my sunglasses for protection from that ball of fire. I estimate it is still fifteen degrees above the horizon, maybe a little less. When will it set? When I'm flying I can't put my whole brain over to arithmetic, because I'm looking out the window, manipulating the controls, squinting at my screens, and paying attention to all the little things I don't even realize I'm looking at. So I chunk arithmetic up into easy bits. Three hundred sixty degrees in twenty-four hours, one hundred eighty in twelve, ninety in six, forty-five in three, so fifteen degrees an hour. But I know it will be in the sky for a lot longer than an hour. The sun doesn't go straight down here, it moves diagonally towards the horizon. At my latitude, three weeks before the solstice I suppose I could calculate its angle of descent and use trigonometry to determine when it will reach the horizon. But I just eyeball it and estimate that it will hit the horizon at about eleven. If I were a few degrees further north and it were a few weeks later it wouldn't go down at all. It would just slide around the edge of the horizon before angling back up.

I didn't see the exact moment it ducked behind the horizon, I just turned and saw that it was no longer trying to burn my eyeballs. It was about eleven. It's still light, but the light is more orangeish. I try to picture the refraction process that is making the light orange. I'm pretty sure it's the same reason that the sky is blue. But is it because the red light is refracted more by the atmosphere or less? I think the blue is refracted more, because the blue is on the inside of the rainbow, but I can't quite picture it. Now that I'm on the ground I could look it up, but I'll give you my airborne thought processes. I think that as the sun's rays hit the atmosphere at a low angle the blue is being refracted up away where I can't see it, but the red is refracted less, so it's the last colour I see. There's a moon, too, and its light is whiter. An hour after sunset it's not really dark yet. I can still see clouds in the distance and the shapes of lakes on the ground.

I call flight services for an altimeter setting. It hasn't changed in over four hours. 'Are you coming in to land now?" he asks. No, we have another couple of hours.

The mission specialist is tired and calls it done a little early. We touch down just before two a.m. I chat to the FSS guy on the way in, "when do you get to go home?" It turns out that he worked the day shift and then got called in to do the overnight, so he'll be there until 8:30 a.m. Nasty. I tell him he'll still be there when my flight partner comes on shift in a few hours. He asks her name so he can say hi. I forgot to ask his name.

I'm hungry enough to eat the seven hour old sandwich I bought before departure, and tired enough to go right to sleep.

Random Suitcases

My co-worker took the early shift this morning, so I slept in until eight. I would normally do a workout, but I haven't got any workout clothes with me and I don't want to get what I have all sweaty. WestJet says my bag is in Grande Prairie now and they promise to send it here on the 12:45 p.m. bus, to arrive about three hours later.

My co-worker calls. She's not flying, right now, but she has heard from our boss who says he wasn't able to get a hold of me. WestJet phoned him about my bag. That must be because I gave the WestJet agent my business card with my cellphone number circled. I guess someone decided to call my head office instead of me. The boss couldn't reach me because he was using a phonelist on which he hadn't updated my cell number since the last time I was up here, and had to get a new cell phone so that people could reach me. A communications difficulty because I was proactive about solving an earlier communications difficulty.

"It's okay," I tell my coworker, "I talked to them already. They're shipping it by bus--"

"Wait!" she interrupts, "We're supposed to take the airplane to Grande Prairie tonight for scheduled maintenance. You can pick it up yourself."

I'd love to go get my bag, if it isn't already on the bus, but the customer won't want the airplane yanked out from underneath them yet. We told them we had an extension. The customer is sufficiently not pleased that phone calls go back and forth until it is decided that the airplane will be released some time in the next few days, at the customer's convenience. The mechanic can wait there until the airplane arrives. The customer is delighted. Crisis averted.

Then another call, from the mechanic who is en route. His flight was delayed and he's missed his connection in Calgary. He's not impressed to learn that he may be cooling his heels for a while. Happy customer, pissed off mechanic. There's a law of conservation of pissed-offness somewhere, I'm sure.

After all that phoning, I realize that it's after 4 p.m. I call Greyhound to see whether I pick up the suitcase or they deliver. "Twelve forty-five?" says the agent, "There's no 12:45 bus to here from Grande Prairie."

WestJet sent my stuff on a 12:45 bus. Where, I wonder, did they send it? I'm beginning to suspect that WestJet has a shelf somewhere with "random eggs" on it. Does anyone else remember the random eggs? WestJet baggage opens again in Grande Prairie between nine and ten pm so I'll find out then.

The bus from Grande Prairie will arrive tonight, but the baggage office is closed then, so if it is on that bus, I can't get it until 6:30 tomorrow morning.

"Aviatrix," I tell myself, "These readers are tuning in to find out about your job, not your company communications and lost luggage." But dealing with company communications and lost luggage is my job. Anyone who thinks it's all about soaring majestically above the peaks and lakes needs a strong dose of reality.

But okay, you want flying, here's flying. The customer wants a flight at eight p.m. tonight. The good news is that this far north it probably won't even be dark by the time I land at two in the morning. The bad news being that I'll be flying an airplane until two in the morning. Night will come and go while I'm in the air. And then WestJet, Greyhound and the hotel will all try to wake me up while I'm trying to sleep the next day.

Next Northern Town

I promised you Fort McMurray and now I haven't even seen the Oil Sands Museum before shipping out. I've recently been informed that the Athabaska Oil Sands are this years ice trucks on American TV. I'm always surprised to have Americans know weird details about the north of Canada, but apparently it's all content for cable TV. So maybe you know all about Fort Mac already. I can tell you only that it's strung out along highway 63. There's no downtown 100th Street and 100th Avenue or any grid pattern at all: the oldest streets are named after people and the streets loop around in little sections off the main road. It's an overgrown bush camp, is what it is, and it's still growing. The service is indifferent, like most places in Northern Alberta. People can get high paying jobs easily and it's hard to recruit motivated workers for the service industry.

On the weekend there's no parking at all at the airport, and the long term parking lot contains a lot of very long-term parked vehicles with flat tires. I guess sometimes people who live elsewhere buy a local truck and fly back and forth, then when the contract isn't renewed they abandon the truck. From the air it's like anywhere in northern but not arctic Canada: rocks and trees and lakes. The trees are very green, a combination of the springtime new growth on the evergreens and a large deciduous mix. There's a lot of muskeg swamp. People come up here for recreation, too. Right by the airport there are two camps, one surrounding a little lake and one just at the airport for convenience of its occupants. There aren't many people who say, "I wish I had had longer for sightseeing in Fort McMurray."

After lunch I settle the fuel bill for our training flights. One of my colleagues is short only a few hours PIC for her airline transport pilot application, so I give her the leg to fly. She plans it and tells me there's some low stuff so we'll be at 1500' agl. That's fine with me. She's legally single pilot, but I offer to do the radios and she accepts. I set the GPS for the destination, being careful not to set it to Moose Jaw, this time. She asks my opinion a few times about which way to go around rainstorms, but I know that she doesn't really need it. It's just girl-style CRM. We're flying above a big river and she looks it up on the GPS. "That's the Athabaska." One of the fun things about this job is the number of times I get to just casually fly above some hugely significant geographical feature. The Great Lakes, the Hudson Bay, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Athabaska, Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Fraser Rivers, the Rocky Mountains, the Canadian Shield, the chain of volcanoes that runs from BC to California, the South Dakota badlands, the astonishing flatness of the Canadian prairies in winter. That I can recall being slightly bored above all of these vistas just makes it all the more amazing.

Once en route there's no one to talk to on the radio. I tell her I'm napping and actually do fall asleep for a while despite all the low level bumps. I wake up about fifteen minutes out of our destination. It's still the same rocks, trees, lakes and oil extraction infrastructure, maybe a bit lumpier terrain as we're closer to the Rockies now.

We land and taxi in, asking the flight service specialist where we can buy fuel. The fueller is even there, despite it being Sunday, and tows our plane to parking after fuelling. He even helps with the luggage. Wow, where are we? Texas? You never get service like this in Canada. The customer picks us up in a truck. He's talking on his cellphone "just picking up the pilots ... well, they do have their own vehicle, but it doesn't work so well on roads."

The airport is a ways out of town, so we get to see it. It's another northern town I've never been to. There are trucks and trees and mud. There's talk of building a nuclear power plant here. We go to dinner at a restaurant with a startling large menu: everything from cheeseburgers to lobster dinner. We all order Chinese, the house specialty and get large portions of excellent food, with superior service from a soft-spoken young man who turned everything I ever wrote about northern Alberta service on its ear. He wasn't just enthusiastic. He was skilled. At the end of the meal my fortune cookie promised that I would be reunited with a "lost treasure" this month. Everyone laughs as I express hope that this is my suitcase.

The WestJet website still lists the case of my missing suitcase as "Open" which they define as still looking for it. I had hoped it would be at least "Matched" by now. I've already called them when I found out that I was leaving Fort McMurray, but now I have an address where they can send it, so I call them back. It turns out that my suitcase has been found. It's in Fort McMurray, of course. It got there about the time we left, I imagine. Too bad their tracking system didn't work well enough for me to intercept it. They will fly it to Grande Prairie and then send it to me by bus.

Muddled Mouth, Standard Head

Next morning the hotel wake-up call works, but the cellphone alarm doesn't. I don't investigate why, just shower and dress. I forgot to check the tag, but I haven't broken my rule to never get on an airplane, any airplane, without toothpaste, deodorant, my cellphone charger and a change of socks and underwear. And I have my computer, of course, and Internet. The weather looks fine, but Westjet has no new news about my luggage.

Off to the airport. The airplane is parked on the Esso ramp. It's been based here for a couple of weeks. The chief pilot and another pilot flew it up from Calgary in May. We walk around the plane, add a couple of litres of oil and determine ourselves ready to go. My co-worker informs me that we're testing in order of height, tallest person first. It takes me a moment to realize that's me. Oh well, someone's got to go first.

I have my headset--that was in my carry-on--but I don't have my kneeboard, my IFR timer or any of the little gadgets that make life easier on a ride. And did I mention having plates so old they didn't have the tower frequency on them? For that reason I didn't even look at them. The ride is mainly VFR handling stuff anyway. It's just as well I'm getting an opportunity to fly the airplane with just my boss and coworkers on board, before I fly with paying customers.

I know it was close to freezing overnight, but the engines start easily. I let everything warm up, pick up the ATIS (VFR with broken layers starting about 4000' agl) and get a taxi clearance via G and F for a runway 25 departure, contact tower holding short. Taxiway E is a huge wide one, so I pull off there and do a runup, plus a completely mangled pretakeoff briefing, on which I received notes after the flight. I have to practice that in the shower or something.

My problem is that I think too much (surprise, surprise) so I think about the words while they are coming out of my mouth instead of just spewing them out, and then they get all tangled up, and I miss some out.

The briefing most companies want is not actually what Transport Canada wants in a takeoff briefing. Specifically, TC wants only what changes from departure to departure to be recited, where most companies have a long memorized script with only a couple of points that may change. Transport says if it is standard to always abort the take-off in the event of a malfunction before V1 (and it should be) there is no need to repeat this fact. But every takeoff briefing I have ever been asked to use includes the statement of what I will do in the event of a failure while on the take-off surface, airborne with sufficient landing area remaining, and after takeoff with insufficient runway remaining. And the actions are pretty much the same whatever you are flying.

Any critical failure before rotation or after rotation with sufficient runway remaining I will reject: power idle, land/stop straight ahead. After rotation with insufficient runway remaining, it will be a single engine go-around: control, max power, gear up, flaps up, maintain Vyse, confirm & secure failed engine, inform ATC and land with the single engine checklist.

I think about this before every takeoff, but I have to say the words out loud more or I'm going to look like an idiot again.

But I get through looking like an idiot, including in a radio call where I get the alphabet in the wrong order, thinking for a moment that I am on F and have to go further east to taxiway E, when it's actually the other way around. I take off, set climb power, use the appropriate checklists, deal with the electrical fire described, perform a 45 degree banked steep turn to the left, all the way around to the original heading. I use a trick that I learned long ago, and that is to first make a couple of "clearing turns" to look out for any traffic. This is a normal safety procedure, but I do mine at slightly over 30 degrees, making the clearing turns a warm up for the correct horizon position and the tendency of the airplane in the bank. Whether it worked or not, I don't know, but my turn is passable. The next assignment is a turn to the right, this time at 30 degrees bank for the first 90 degrees and then at 45 degrees for the remainder of the turn. This I suppose would catch up someone who had memorized the rhythm of the exercise as opposed to having conscious control over airspeed, bank angle and altitude, but as I haven't been flying enough to have anything memorized, I'm just happy not to have to hold 45 degrees all the way around.

Next are stalls. The first assigned configuration is power idle, flap 25: an approach stall. I'm asked to recover at the first indication of a stall, which in this airplane I know will be the stall horn, unless by some coincidence the stall horn has just broken, in which case it will be either a pre-stall buffet or the chief pilot yelling that there's something wrong with the stall horn. The stall horn works. I shove all the levers forward and recover, wings level, but am told that while not losing altitude is good, I did not check the nose forward sufficiently. For any stall recovery demonstration considered perfect by one examiner, you will find another examiner who considers the recovery to have been performed too soon or too late, and one who considers the pitch to break the stall to be too little or too much. The next exercise is a clean stall, at a power setting that simulates hot day performance at climb power, in a climbing left turn. When the stall horn bleats I keep the wings level with the rudder pedals, overemphasize my pitch change and put the mixtures, props and throttles full forward. That one is approved.

I'm asked to turn left towards that pond over there. The chief pilot is twisted around facing backwards talking to the pilot in the seat behind me. They're trying to find a C172 we know is nearby. It's a trick to distract me as one of the throttles is pulled to idle. I don't see the throttle go back, as I too am looking for the C172, but it's the sort of thing you expect on a ride, so I control the yaw, increase power to hold altitude, and confirm the dead engine matches my "dead" foot -- i.e. the foot that isn't pushing hard on the rudder pedal to keep the airplane straight. I ask as I check the magnetoes, fuel selectors and gauges if there is smoke or fire issuing from the victimized engine and am told no. I simulate a shutdown, indicate that I will advise ATC and return for landing at Ft. Mac, and then am given my engine back. The pilot in the back mutters something like "tabarnouche!", caught off guard by the yaw from the suddenly simulated engine failure.

I'm handed an approach plate and brief a mercifully simple approach. I would have liked to fly the DME arc, but am told not to worry about that part and just fly a full procedure VOR approach. The HSI isn't working today, so this is done on a standard head VOR in the bottom right corner of the panel. I use the VFR GPS for situational awareness to help me find the radial that will take me direct to the VOR, and distinguish between being off track and simply coming up on station passage. As I turn to the outbound I spend a moment deciding whether to set it for the inbound and use reverse sensing on the outbound or to set it outbound and then reset it for the inbound. I decide on the later, and then there's a moment when I'm still waiting to intercept the outbound track when I think I may have set it incorrectly. But I haven't and complete the procedure turn to intercept the inbound. I remember to start the timer every time, something I tend to forget on time-based approaches, and am psyched for the missed approach, but am asked to do a touch and go. Just before I reach my MDA the chief pilot calls in sight and I maneuver back over to the right where the runway is. The runway heading is seven degrees different from the radial tracked on that approach, so I don't know if the radial needs recalibration or the VOR just happens to be offset a little. The last moment maneuvering takes the place of flaps as an altitude adjusting tool and I touch down with just approach flaps before taking off again.

The next approach is a vectored ILS, again on the standard head VOR, for a full stop. I overcorrect, weaving down the approach, but manage to be on the localizer, on slope when I call "should be visual" at the DH and the chief pilot says I have the runway in sight. I'm still at approach speed, but apply landing flap and bring it right down to the centreline for what my colleague in the back calls a greaser. Anything that makes the people in the back happy is okay with me.

Post-flight notes praise my handling even after three months off, criticise me for the mangled briefing and pick up other items I can improve, but the scoresheet is a row of only Ss. Other possibilities are SB ("satisfactory with briefing" i.e. you're getting away with the error because you understand it and I chewed you out for it) or U (unsatisfactory). I would have given myself a few SBs on that, but I won't complain for not getting them.

Oh and we're not staying in Fort McMurray now. The customer changed his mind. We check out and go for lunch before flying to where we're really supposed to be. I call WestJet and get put on hold for twenty minutes only to find out that there is no news on the suitcase. I tell them to send it to Grande Prairie when they find it.

And in an ugly segue regarding things that are missing, as I write this an Air France A330 has gone missing en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Much of the trans-Atlantic route is without radar coverage, so radar contact was lost three and a half hours after departure. Forty-five minutes later the airplane (not the pilots) sent an automated signal documenting an electrical fault and a possible pressurization failure. (Any automated message following an electrical fault is suspect). There were no further messages from automation nor crew. The pilots also missed a planned radio call to Brazilian ATC. There were extensive thunderstorms in the area. I expect they will have found confirming wreckage by the time this posts.

Company Exams

The chief pilot met me at the airport, and told me we were staying at the Super-8. "Is there just one?" I asked, having been burned by the existence of two Holiday Inns in Regina.

"Might be, but ours is the one near the airport. It's on Takasakawaka Drive, or something."

I conveyed that information to the customer service agent, who recognized the street name easily. "It's pronounced 'Highway sixty-three'," she explained, and gave me a URL at which to track the progress of my suitcase.

At the hotel, the chief pilot gave me a big pile of annual exams to complete, (wow, has it been a year already since my last PPC ride?) and told me to meet in the breakfast room at seven a.m. for my annual proficiency check. But mine is good until next month, I'm thinking to myself. I even reinstalled Microsoft Flight Simulator on my computer so I could practice up this month on the sorts of approaches I rarely do. Turns out that two other pilots were due this month, and it's more efficient to do everyone at once. I guess it's nice to have the nervous anticipation truncated.

On first hire, written company exams are an exercise to ensure you go through the entire operating handbook and find all the answers (these exams have in my experience always been open book and take-home - or at least "take-to-hotel-room"). So in subsequent years they are a test of how well you can keep track of the pile of papers that includes the photocopies you took of the pilot's operating handbook, the ops manual and the completed company exams the first time around. I know exactly where mine are. They are on my desk at home, where I put them the night before I left. I haven't flown the airplane for three months, so I spent my last evening reviewing the procedures and specs. Yeah I know that runs against the stereotype of spending ones last day off in drunken debauchery.

So I complete the exams, fairly pleased with how much I remember. I'm also pleased that I manage (but only just) to avoid answering this question in the manner it deserves:

When cleaning the windows, what substances should not be used?

To tell the truth, the only thing that stopped me from listing silly answers was that I couldn't quite decide what was the silliest thing that should not be used to clean the windows. Trinitrotoluene? Hydrofluoric acid? Peanut butter? I wrote down "ammonia" and "gasoline" and left it at that.

And then there was the deicing exam. Am I doomed, my entire career, to having my icing recurrency in June? I've been hired in November and in March before, but I always seem to be watching When in Doubt in June. I didn't read that exam over before leaving. I mean please, it's June. There are fifty-six questions. Most of them are sensible enough, although many treat types of deicing fluid I don't ever use and my favourite question is:

Although there are many factors that contribute to aircraft icing in ground operations, there are ___ major factors of which you should be aware. a) 37 b) 20 c) 13 d) 6

What's your favourite number? I do as much of the exams as I can and then check online see how my suitcase is doing. Westjet hasn't put any more information about it on their site. Maybe they are just slow to update the site.

My present luggage includes my computer but not my travel alarm, so I set the alarm on my cellphone and ask for a wake-up call and go to bed early so as to be ready for the seven a.m. report.

Tanstaafl

There might be what appears to be a free lunch, but something else always gets you in the end.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho. It's off to work I go. With a headset and a map And a suitcase full of crap Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Hi Ho.

Except in this case, scratch the suitcase.

I checked it in before departure, and dropped it wheels up on the appropriate conveyor belt, but I didn't do what a savvy traveller should really be doing every time. I didn't look at the paper tape that the agent attached to the handle. It's mostly bar codes, but it should also have borne the letters YMM. You know what is coming now, but I was oblivious, just happy that the airline had a complimentary copy of the Globe and Mail for me, and that there was a short line for security. And then I was distracted until just before boarding by difficulties unhibernating my computer.

On the descent into Calgary, I had put away my Globe and Mail, and cinched up my seatbelt for the roller coaster turbulence coming from high winds over the Rocky Mountains on a hot day. I still had my boarding pass on my lap, and something odd caught my eye. The checked baggage sticker on the back started with the code YU. It's common for internal codes to omit the first Y of an airport code, so that VR is Vancouver (YVR) and UL is Montreal (YUL), but YYU is Kapuskasing. I'm going to Fort McMurray, YMM. Does YYU even have airline service? I examine it more closely and realize that YU isn't a partial airport code. It's someone's name. It's followed by a slash and the first name. Is that who checked me in? She didn't look like a Yu. I look over the rest of the claim check. It lists two flight numbers, one to Calgary, but not mine, and one to YXE. That's Saskatoon.

It's possible that I just have the wrong claim check sticker and that everything is fine with my bag. Or it's possible that my bag does not have the same travel plans as I do today. I explain my concerns to the gate staff where I disembark and they recognize the problem. Sure enough, there is no piece of checked baggage associated with my itinerary. I describe the bag and they type at computers and radio the baggage handlers to divert it. The situation appears to be under control, so I continue to my planned lunch meet.

Daniel recognizes me right away -- green hair is easy to spot, especially blowing wildly in the Calgary winds -- and I ask him if he's the man with the falafels. He admits to a change of plans: for various complicated reasons my free lunch is an enormous amount of chicken (or possibly beef: I'm not sure which one I ended up with) shwarma, with lots of spices and lettuce and whatever the Arabic is for tzaziki, all wrapped up in pita bread. Also olives and upscale orangeade.

Security chased us away from the first picnic table we chose. I had to ask, "is this a special secure picnic table?" No, it was the place the truck drivers ate. We went to another, not much further along. There we ate our sandwiches, talked about the same sort of things I talk about on the blog, chased down the bits of our picnic that kept blowing away in the wind, and wished each other well. Altogether preferable to eating at a chain restaurant in the terminal.

At the gate I enquired about my suitcase. They weren't the same people I had spoken to before, but they looked it up and said that it appeared to have been found. Ten minutes later they paged me to assure me it was on the flight. Except it wasn't. Right after I had explained to the person who came to pick me up that my suitcase had almost gone to Saskatoon without me, the baggage carousel stopped moving and there was a "that's it" announcement. I got to explain the saga again to the YMM customer service people, who got to work on tracing it.

I was just ruing my failure to notice the mis-tagging at the origin, but they were amused that I had noticed and interpreted the codes, and further amused that I produced a printed list of everything that had been in the bag when they asked what was in it. This is actually the first time I remember an airline (not counting Victory: they lost everyone's bags all the time) misplace my gear when it wasn't caused by a late flight and a tight connection.

Damnit, I should have double-checked that bag tag!

On Time So Far

Indications are that I will be landing in YYC as scheduled.

Also, if you copy Buns of Steel IV off an ancient VHS tape onto a DVD, and then you leave that DVD in your computer and hibernate it, the computer will not come out of hibernation until you use a bobby pin to open the DVD drawer and remove the DVD.

Yeah, a bobby pin. Like a 1950s detective novel, eh?

Prepreflight Planning

I'm going to a new place; what do I need to know before I get there in order to look like I know what I'm doing? I can plan a flight to a random place named by the client in the time it takes for the fuel order to arrive, or divert in midair and still be okay, but when I'm going to be based out of a place for a while, I can give myself a head start by finding out a few things in advance.

CYMM has a single runway 07/25, with right hand circuits on 07, making all circuits to the south, away from the aprons. The runway is paved, 150' wide, 7000' long and at 1211' elevation. (Yes, Canadians still use the old imperial measurements for such things. It was, I assume, deemed to dangerous to make an overnight switch to a new system of measurement. Or maybe we're afraid that thirty party suppliers of approach plates and electronic navigation products, would (like Microsoft with its British, American but no Canadian spellchecker), deem Canada too small a market to cater to, and thus we'd be deprived of useful products in our measuring system of choice.) It is served by at least three FBOs, with almost every variety of aviation fuel for sale. It's a small airport choked with oilfield traffic. The Google satellite view indicates that almost every building on the field is under construction.

The aerodrome has METARs and its own 24 hour TAF, with other useful weather coming from YZH, YNR, YOD, YPY and maybe YVT. The weather systems move mainly east and southeast here. Northern Alberta is reporting mainly clear this morning. Seven degrees as I type this, but was three two hours ago, probably sub-zero overnight.

The aerodrome has an RCO to the Edmonton FSS, plus there's an FSS on the field (with, according to one report, hot female staffers). There's a VOR and an NDB, but I'll have to get the approaches when I get there as the only Alberta plates I have with me are way out of date.

There are a fair number of small airports in the vicinity. Fort Mac is the only nearby place with services, but there will be at least telephones and emergency shelter on the ground at:

• Gordon Lake Airport (23 nm E)
• Muskeg Tower Airport 30 nm NNE
• Mildred Lake Airport 26 nm N
• Fort MacKay 34 nm N
• Horizon 46 nm N
• Namur Lake 67 W

There are others. The nearest bigger airport is probably CFB Cold Lake, 138 nm south, and Edmonton International is 216 nm south-southwest, so I'm practically in the big city.

As for the town itself, no one picked up the good news/bad news part of my line about going to Fort McMurray for work. It's not known across the country as a centre of civilization, shall we say. It's known as the place that a young man can go straight out of school and make a lot of money. In the daytime the town appears to have been hit by some bizarre plague that has wiped out every able-bodied male over the age of seventeen. They are all in the oilfields, because no one would work in a service industry in this town if they could work where the money is. And young men with lots of money spend it on trucks, boats, women, alcohol and in many cases stronger drugs.

A coworker reported that the young women of Fort Mac had only two questions for him: "Where do you work?" and "How big's your truck?" He drove an F150 so that was the last question they asked him, but apparently the welder (a welding truck is pretty big) was quite a hit.

So I'm prepared for busy airspace and a cultural experience. Who knows, there might even be barbeque.

Calgary Picnic Meet

I'm meeting a reader just north of the YYC passenger terminal on Saturday, about 11:30 a.m. Calgary time. He knows of some picnic tables near the meeting spot shown, and is bringing me non-airport food. (I just had to brag about that).

View I suggest this meeting place. in a larger map

If you're in the area, feel free to join us. BYOP. Don't come far, because this does involve airplanes, and as such is susceptible to circumstance. I'll try to post an Saturday morning update confirming that I'm on schedule.

Good News, Bad News

I have good news and I have bad news. I'll let you figure out which are which.

• I'm going back to work soon.
• I'm going to be working in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
• I had a great time on vacation/layoff.
• I'm busy getting ready for work, so I'm not blogging this week.
• I'll be in YYC on Saturday for long enough to meet someone for lunch, if you happen to live/work near the airport.
• You'll soon have more blog posts that are first hand information about airplanes and fewer of my crackpot theories.

Icing Inexperience

Spring has well and truly sprung in Canada and I've been off camping, paying no attention at all to my blog account mail. I peeked at it recently and it's full of unread mail from you guys and news alerts on the Colgan accident investigation. (I originally blogged about the Colgan 3407 crashthe night it happened).

The cockpit voice recorder transcript was released last week, and a lot of information about the pilots' lifestyle was released at the hearing. If you're reading about a fatal airplane crash, the only thing you can read that can really be said to be a relief is that the crash was misreported, and everyone is alright. That's obviously not the case here. It's still a little bit of a relief to find out some of what happened, because it collapses the network of all the possible bad things that could happened into the few that actually did.

The first thing that hits me reading this transcript is the stunning inexperience of the crew in comparison with Canadian aviation. The captain says he was hired with 625 hours. That would have been as first officer, but you'd be lucky to get a job on a Navajo or a King Air in Canada with that time. The first officer had sixteen hundred hours at the time of the accident, but much of that was as a flight instructor in Phoenix. There she would rarely have seen a cloud, nor below freezing temperatures. In her own words, in the recording made not quite five minutes before she died ...

"I've never seen icing conditions. I've never deiced. I've never seen any-- I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to experience that and make those kind of calls. You know I'd have freaked out. I'd have like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash."

So she has no basis beyond company training on which to judge the severity of icing. She's never flown northern routes in the spring to places where the most distinctive landmarks are the crashed remains of airplanes that didn't make it. She is depending on the captains she is flying her now to teach her how to make those judgements. And that's part of being a first officer. She's smart enough to know that, too. When talking about the people hired at the same time as her, she notes that many are agitating for an upgrade but that she "really wouldn't mind going through a winter in the northeast before I have to upgrade to captain."

It sounds as if upgrades happen pretty quickly there, and as if not everyone thinks of their period of time as a first officer as an apprenticeship. I originally looked at the fact that Rebecca Shaw had been with the company through a winter and assumed that meant she had experienced icing conditions in that airplane. But I wasn't thinking about the short routes that Colgan uses the Dash-8 on, and that with a southern base, it's possible to go through a US winter without meeting ice.

The captain you would think had more experience, but he accepted the autopilot setting "I've got you in pitch hold," in icing conditions. Regardless of your experience, one of the things that icing training teaches you so you don't have to find out for yourself is that an ice accumulation that looks exactly like the one the airplane handled fine last week may result in completely different handling today. Very subtle changes can have a huge affect on aircraft stbility and handling. Hand flying allows you to notice how the ice is affecting you, if the airplane is needing more trim or more power to hold the same parameters. You don't want an airplane on pitch hold, holding its own nose up without you realizing what it's having to do to achieve that. In ice, that can lead to a stall. And this airplane stalled fifteen seconds after a cheerfully unconcerned radio exchange with air traffic control.

Not only are they talking to ATC, but they are talking to each other. We're getting a complete career analysis from both pilots right through the flight, interspersed with their clearances and checklists. A reader asked me if he thought that women,stereotypically more chatty, were more likely to disregard the sterile cockpit than men. Anyone who reads my blog can tell that I have a lot of verbiage to dispense. But I know what a sterile cockpit is and what it is for and I STFU when required to. I want to be a professional pilot and it's about more than having your hat on straight. Act like one, sound like one. I don't think this is a male-female issue. The captain is keeping up his end of the conversation. It's company culture. The FO says she's been flying with a lot of captains, some of whom can't finesse the rudder, but none of whom have apparently instructed her or demonstrated to her that one shuts up about ones career below ten thousand feet. It's not a difficult culture to instill because how many times would an FO have to have a a captain point at the altimeter or say, "sterile cockpit please" before she never opens her mouth for non-essential communication below ten thousand?

Other evidence from the hearing shows that pilots paid far too little to live at their bases were living far from their bases were commuting across the country and then sleeping on crew room couches before their duty periods. Ever flown a redeye and then had a nap on a couch in a room where people were coming in and out, having discussions and watching TV? Ready to handle any emergency right? And ready to handle three back to back 16-hour shifts? Yeah, right.

I commute across the continent that, but only once a month, and the company ensures I've had eight hours in a hotel bed before I'm expected to work. Three back-to-back 16 hour duty days is criminal. I'll work three fourteens and I'm beat. There's no way I'd be safe with another two hours on each of those days. I worked back-to-back sixteens like that back when I was seventeen years old. After a few days of that routine, I slept right through my alarm and was late for work. But I didn't get in trouble. The doughnut shop *manager* got in trouble for scheduling me that way. Yes, I was working in a doughnut shop, not flying an airplane. It seems that Canadian doughnuts and coffee are deemed by company upper management to deserve more alert supervision than the controls of a Colgan commuter airline. The FO also seems to have had a cold--she sneezes more than once during the flight and the captain is inquiring about her ability to clear her ears as they descend, even planning the descent profile for her comfort.

A manager at Colgan suggested random audits of the CVR for compliance with sterile cockpit procedures. That's not where professional flying comes from. Train and examine people to the standards you expect. Spot checks? What is this, summer camp? If you have to do spot checks of basic safety proedures, you're hiring the wrong people or training them incorrectly.

Snakes on a Plane

So guess what's on TV. It's Snakes on a Plane. I've never seen this movie but I've been watching way too many episodes of Mayday lately, so I'm all revved up for bad acting and overstated dire emergencies. I know it's possibly the stupidest movie on earth, but can it be stupider than an China Airlines crew nearly destroying a Boeing 747 because they couldn't keep it right side up after losing power in one engine? I'm about to find out. And so are you unless you stop reading, because I thoroughly spoil any movie I blog about. Much like the movie, this occassionally devolves into random scenes and pithy remarks.

I knew it was a bad movie, but still, it doesn't start well. I almost turned it off because I thought it was the wrong movie. It starts with a violent scene where a Hawaiian surfer dude witnesses the revenge killing by gangsters of a public official. The justification for the rest of the movie involves the surfer being taken under police protection to LA to testify. The titular snakes are apparently the bad guys' best shot at offing this witness. I would have thought a movie this crazy could get away with no justification whatsoever, and considering this scene I would have preferred that.

In order to get the witness to LAX, the FBI protection dude, played by Samuel L. Jackson commandeers the entire First Class section of a Boeing 747 passenger flight. This is, according to the movie, permitted by an FAA regulation that says the FBI can do whatever they like. I gave it a few points there just for trying, and I suspect that my flight attendant readers can confirm that the behaviour of the displaced Premium Club fliers was true to life.

We see the bad guy communicating with his agent. He apparently has the power to have dozens of illegal deadly poisonous snakes from all over the globe loaded on a plane in Hawaii at short notice. (It's illegal for private individuals to import or own snakes in Hawaii). He has the access required to spray all the farewell leis with attack-inducing snakes pheromones. But apparently that's the only last best desperate move he can make against our hapless witness.

I even gave them a few points here for handwaving the special snake pheromone and not just pretending that snakes prefer hunting down, lunging and biting people over lying quietly in warm places and digesting the food they've already got. But I was forced to take the points away later when they belaboured the point several times, each one more and more blatantly, until they got down to explaining what pheromones are. So this is an all access movie. Everything is set up, Let the snakes roll.

The flight attendants were depicted much more competently than is typical in movies. I don't think any of them succumbed to screaming in panic, and they had some sass, too. There's an exchange I liked after the sole occupants of first class noticed some hostility from one FA. Jackson's character calls her on it.

She's still ticked about having to put up with the bitchiness of all the Premium Club fliers she had to deny F-class seating too. Another time, she suggests, "You people give us some warning."

"You people?" says Jackson archly. Even though it's completely obvious to everyone that "you people" meant the FBI, Jackson forces her to realize that she's used a term (she's white and he's black) that can be used to lump everyone with the same sort of skin together in one stereotype.

I'd want to roll my eyes and tell him he knew perfectly well what she meant, but the FA backs down. She doesn't get an apology out before Jackson admits that he's joking. I thought it was clever, and it set the race relations tone for the movie. It reminded me of a piece I heard on the radio where a woman described people saying "oh I don't care if you're black or blue or red or green. I just see people." The woman pointed out that that there aren't red or blue people and by saying that, you were denying an important thing about her. I can appreciate that. I guess it has shades of "I don't care if someone is a man or a woman, now shut up and act like a man." Equality shouldn't mean that everyone has to become just like the people they are now allowed to be equal to.

Yes, I'm managing to squeeze social relevance out of a movie that features passengers getting attacked by snakes while making out in an airplane toilet stall. It's not like I was too busy contemplating the complex plot and message of the movie to have time to think about other things.

We cut to the snakes, somewhere in an avionics bay, ferociously biting the electrical wiring. Naturally, sparks arc wildly off the avionics and I'd laugh, but I've had that happen to me, showers of sparks right in front of where I sat in flight, coming out of a hole in the instrument panel. It wasn't all that funny then, although it turned out to be one loose wire from a deferred inoperative eyebrow light. So I can't say the Star Trek-style fireworks were unrealistic. We now cut to the cockpit.

One of the pilots announces, "We've just lost avionics." It looks like they did, too. The whole panel goes dark. One snake and they lose all cockpit avionics. Nasty. You'd think they'd have more redundancy in the B747 electrical system. Oh wait, I'm not watching Mayday anymore.

"Notify LAX," commands the captain. And so he does. Um, if they've lost avionics, what does he call them with? Apparently the radios are on a separate circuit that they don't consider to be avionics. At first I thought that seeing as he's calling LAX and not Center they must be pretty close to landing, but he position reports 1500 nautical miles southwest of Los Angeles. I applaud him for tracking his position manually, so as not to depend on avionics for that information. And apparently he's so confident in his no-avionics navigation that he's going to continue to LAX even though that position puts him only a third of the way there. I suppose it's a lot harder to miss the coast of California than the Hawaiian Islands when flying by dead reckoning. Or he has a heck of a tailwind. It's such a no-brainer decision for him in fact, that not only is there is no cockpit discussion on the matter, but ATC doesn't even ask his intentions. I believe the whole conversation shown was:

Pilot: Mayday. We have lost avionics.

ATC: Roger. You have have priority.

Priority for anything, apparently. Oh and they still have autopilot function, too. I'm thinking maybe someone just turned the brightness down on the multifunction displays. Look, Aviatrix, this movie is not about command decisions and aircraft circuitry. It's about snakes. On a plane.

Back to the snakes. Now guys, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you would normally pee in an airplane toilet while looking at neither the toilet nor the appendage channelling the pee? I would think looking ninety degrees off to the left was a recipe for getting urine all over at least the washroom and likely your pants. But nevertheless this happens, as does the completely predictable appearance and target of the snake. And apparently you can smash an airline toilet mirror with your head. I was kind of relieved to have gotten the obligatory stupid snakes biting people in the naughty bits gags out of the way fairly early on, so we can get down to snakes chasing people all over the airplane.

The captain must have decided after a while that flying a compass heading all the way to LA might be pushing it, so he's gone down to the avionics bay to investigate the failure. The giant size of an airliner crawl spaces is a given in movies, forgivable out of cinematic necessity. The captain is descending into one just as the FA shows up. I think the cabin lights had gone out too and she'd come to ask what the problem was. The captain explains that he's going to fix the problem, but he never comes out. So the FA goes into the flight deck to tell the FO that something has happened to the captain. The FO immediately gets up, to investigate too. I guess that autopilot really works. I missed a bit here, phone call or laughing too hard or something, but the FO then returns to the controls and declares another MAYDAY, informing Los Angeles that the pilot in command has suffered a fatal heart attack. Wow. He went down there and autopsied him already. Los Angeles is as unimpressed with this emergency as they were with the original one. The FO does mention in passing that it is now shorter to continue than it would be to turn around, so we're making good time.

There are a couple of cute kids on the airplane, of course. They're even wearing UM (unaccompanied minor) necktags. It was an unexpectedly authentic touch. Maybe the aviation technical advisor on this picture was a flight attendant. That would fit with everything. FA competence, a thorough passenger briefing, FAs have the run of the airplane, picture depicts what they have to put up with, but has them come out on top. I love the scene where an FA steps on a coral snake to immobilize it, then deftly picks it up by the tail, slings it in the microwave, and sets the oven to quick cook for 2:10. My favourite part is that he needs not a moment's hesitation to know how long to nuke a snake. This is a professional at work.

There's a bitchy first class passenger with a little dog in her handbag. The dog meets a bad end, which is too bad. It was at least as smart as some of the passengers. It was a shame no one had a mongoose in her handbag.

Oookay, they're going to build a snakeproof barrier out of carry-on baggage. I don't have to tell you how that works out. Ahh, I've just realized that that is a special effect, not something going occasionally wrong with my TV. We get to see some of the scenes in snake-o-vision, overlayed with green prismy lines, from the point of view of the hormone-crazed snakes. Wait, are these poisonous snakes or snakes that cause fatal bleeding wounds? Everyone who has been bitten by a snake is marked with a lot of blood.

Oh why is the FO still running around the cabin?

WTF?

"Sporks."

We have to suck out the poison. I should have seen that coming. They're using the airfone to communicate with a snake expert who has a remarkable command of logistics. In the scene with the snake expert and the FBI guy it's as if their dialogue hadn't been marked with who was supposed to say what and they were just randomly sharing a script. Each character seemed to fluctuate randomly in intensity, command and knowledge of snakes. We get the idea, however, that this is a whole lot of very dangerous snakes from all over the world, and our expert knows that there's only one man that could have got this many snakes onto this plane. And it's important to know what kind of snake someone was bitten by, because you give them the wrong antivenom and they'll die. There's a passenger on board who is a competent and experienced snake venom sucker-outer. Olive oil. You can get an incoming call on an airfone?

"Hey," I suggest to the TV, "how about using a digital camera to photograph person with snake, so we know who was bitten by what." They take my idea and they do it one better. They are going to e-mail the pictures to the expert. Using an internet connection with an acoustic modem over the airfone, I guess. I know some airlines are now experimenting with internet on board, now, but when this movie came out? Available technology is kinda fluid here. And good lord there's a lot of breakable glass on this 747.

They now have abnormal vibrations on engines one and two. I wonder if it's snakes.

The aircraft is heating up. It's apparently because they have "lost power to the outflow valve motor." That's related to pressurization. The breaker for that is down in the cargo hold with the snakes. So presumably the outflow valve motor is stuck wherever it was when the motor failed. I'm guessing the valve isn't stuck open, or else they'd have trouble holding pressure. Masks haven't deployed and the cabin temperature is rising. But the outflow valve is normally closed in cruise. There's enough leakage that the cabin would depressurize with it closed anyway. But if we're going to ignore that perhaps we can make a new outflow aperture by firing a bullet into some appropriate point in the rear fuselage. That would be suitable for this movie. Presumably the FO can advise you on this.

The next line of the movie after I have these thoughts is, "That gun goes off in this pressurized cabin we all die." How can you talk about an outflow valve, i.e. a big hole in an airplane designed to let the air out, in one scene and then the very next scene subscribe to the "one tiny bullet hole and we all die" theory? Also a B747 has two outflow valves, a left and a right. I suspect they don't share the same motor. Maybe they should descend and depressurize. Oh wait. They're going to depressurize, but not using the checklist or the aircraft controls. When the captain said "avionics" he meant "pressurization controls." That must be it. The good guy (yes, the good guy) fires a couple of shots and shoots out two of the airplane windows. In the passenger cabin, right where people are seated. About six square metres of the fuselage around the windows departs too, turning this into a scene from yet another episode of Mayday. All the snakes are sucked out of the airplane, but the humans hang on and are not.

So now it's time for the emergency descent. Someone tell the pilot. And now after the FAs have been barging in and out of the cockpit for the whole flight, the cockpit door is locked and the armed maniac, er I mean the good guy, has to shoot it open. The FO has, of course, been eaten by snakes, so the FA puts out a call for a passenger who can fly an airplane. No one volunteers, but the famous rapper points out someone in his entourage who talks about nothing else but all the flying he has done. He does admit to having over 2000 hours. I bet to myself that it was in Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was wrong. It was on Playstation. And one of the funniest lines of the movie for me was when ATC quicky identifies this guy (from his unorthodox radio work) as a videogamer and not a pilot, and he protests, "It's not a video game. It's a flight simulator." If you ever want to annoy a flight sim enthusiast, tell them that you like to 'play' Microsoft flight simulator sometimes. That's authentic.

The would-be pilot doesn't understand the big problem. "Just give me the VOR numbers and radar vectors," he demands. They say that you laugh at the unexpected, which must explain how hard I was laughing when this movie suddenly started displaying some of what I would expect from real world aviation. He asks what runway to expect and ATC tells him they're in the process of clearing traffic so he can use any runway, but that the wind is favouring 24L. My expectations for this movie are so low I'm whooping in delight because they understand the concept of landing into the wind. They even explain that the tailwind on the straight in will have him landing too fast and lead to an overrun.

Our pilot doesn't want to turn around, though. I get the idea that he hasn't mastered turns yet. And I give the movie more points for sparing me a drawn out approach scene. We just cut to an under the fuselage shot of a pretty damned good touchdown, and then hilariously a bounce. Now a bounce is more likely to be the consequence of carrying too much airspeed, not groundspeed, but perhaps this guy has both. The tires do not disintegrate on touchdown. He goes straight off the end of the runway, and then is advised by the good guy (sitting in the right sit all this time) to turn left, in order to miss something I didn't see, because I was laughing too hard. Approach lights or an NDB antenna or something, I guess.

He somehow ends up on the apron, where ambulances storm the set. Oh no, it's not over yet. They evacuate via the slides. One of the cute kids was bitten by a snake and his brother displays a lovely crayon drawing of a cobra. "I couldn't find the snake that bit him, so I drew a picture."

And then the witness has a snake burst out of his shirt, Alien-style. WTF? And the good guy shoots him in the chest and he falls down the emergency slide. Wait what? Oh Duh. Witness is revealed to be wearing a bulletproof vest. He was shooting the snake. They really do they have every cliche ever in this movie.

That was a lot better than I expected. I might even steel myself to see Soul Plane now.

Liquor Replacement and Dollar Coins

I paid for my restaurant meal and the receipt said, printed at the bottom, that 25% went to the Liquor Replacement Fund. I was puzzled by this for a while, and then a barely visible sign on the door of the restaurant gave me a clue and a hypothesis. The sign said that this was a private club and that alcohol would be served only to registered members. My guess is that this is thr remnant of a very old local liquor law, that everyone has worked around instead of changing. I speculate that by putting my name on the list for a table, I was registering as a member of the "club." And that the notice at the bottom of the receipt explained that I wasn't exactly purchasing liquor, but rather being served liquor from my private club's reserves. And that the restaurant wasn't taking a profit but rather saving the money to buy more liquor for the members.

Liquor laws can be funny. Some places in Canada you can't serve alcohol without "a meal" so in those places you can buy the most minimal meals known to man. You can collect ten bucks from a bunch of people to buy a few cases of beer, but if you then put them in the fridge with a can on top and ask people to contribute a few coins towards the next case for every beer they drink, you'll get in trouble for selling beer without a licence. At least some places. The laws can be quaint.

When I say "a few coins," I mean more money than I might if I were talking about American coins. Canada doesn't mint one or two dollar bills. We used to, years ago, but now we have one and two dollar coins instead. So when I'm working with money, looking to pay for a cup of coffee or expecting change from something, it's natural for me to go for the coin purse not the billfold for amounts under five dollars. When I first get back to Canada I'm momentarily surprised by getting a handful of coins as change from a ten for a small purchase.

The US does have one dollar coins. I got several once as change from a stamp machine. And they have two dollar bills. I decided to use them. I went to a bank in Texas with a twenty dollar bill and asked for ten ones and five twos. The teller managed to scavenge seven ones from her own and another teller's drawer, but denied having any twos in the whole bank. Well so much for that plan. I took my metal ones, and the rest in paper ones. I can get more coins from post office stamp machines.

Using the US dollar coins isn't a problem with people. The reaction is usually one of slight positive surprise and "hey cool" scrutiny of my proffered dollar. No one has refused a coin or asked me to give them a banknote instead, but I get the idea there are a few people who have never seen one. I read that when Canada introduced the loonie, our one dollar coin, they made sure to mint tonnes of the things to overwhelm the "hey cool" response that would cause people to keep the first few they met as a souvenir. Perhaps the reverse effect helped to cement the switch: people hoarded their last few dollar bills as souvenirs, hastening their withdrawal from circulation.

I can see a reason why the dollar coins might be unpopular in the US. You can't use them in vending machines. A newspaper cost a dollar. The box says "Use Any Coin Combination - Do Not Use Pennies." What the box means is "use any combination of quarters, dimes and nickels." The dollar coin shown doesn't fit in the slot.

Because the denominations of commonly circulating US coins hasn't changed in over a hundred years, but prices have, vending machines compensate in other ways. Many US vending machines accept banknotes. You unfold any bent corners and line up the picture of the president on the bill with the picture on the slot. The machine feeds in the bill, whirrrs it back and forth a couple of times and spits out your chocolate bar and a pile of quarters. If the machine doesn't take bills, there will often be a change machine nearby. There are change machines in Canada, but not as commonly, and of course they spit loonies.

Crash Landed

I started this before Captain Sullenberger landed in the Hudson and I think I gave up on the whole landed/crashed/ditched after that, so didn't post the entry, but hey, it's still a blog entry, right?

Someone sent me a link to this story about a Mooney that had an engine failure and ended up in the sea. First off, people in BC, you have to stop driving airplanes into rocks, glaciers and oceans. If you want to gawk at the sight some more, there's a video here; it's just eight minutes of helicopter footage circling the submerged aircraft and the rescue hovercraft. Nothing happens in the video except that a boat circles the site a couple of times. The pilot has lnog since been picked up by a passing twin otter. (And I can't get it to work anymore. Perhaps it's been removed).

The text story describes it as a "crash landed." Do you think that was a crash landing? I've had enough of the term crash landed used to describe every airplane accident that involves an airplane coming to rest on the surface of the planet. The only terms related to wrecking airplanes that are legally defined in Canada are accident and incident. The former involves serious injury or death resulting from an aircraft, major damage, or the aircraft being missing altogether. The latter applies only to large aircraft and includes abnormal conditions like shutting down an engine, or the incapacitation of a required crew member. In media terms, accidents (and many things that aren't accidents) are "crashes" and incidents are "scares." Although I suppose if a large airplane went off the runway and ripped off a wingtip fairing, some stories would call that incident a crash.

Everything bad that happens to an airplane isn't a crash. There has to be an actual crash no? To me, a crash occurs when there is either a loss of control of the aircraft, or a high-speed collision with something, and something more significant than lights and fairings gets bent or smashed.

So a gear up, whether through forgetfulness or mechanical problems, assuming the aircraft doesn't skid off the runway or flip over, is not what I'd call a crash. Catching a wingtip and ripping off a winglet is not a crash. I think a crash landing is an attempt to land, in an irregular situation, that involves loss of control before touchdown and results in a seriously damaged airplane.

If the airplane or pilot or landing area is seriously compromised, but an attempt is made to land, a possible result is a crash landing. Sioux City was definitely a crash landing. The airplane landed, and it crashed. Easy. The pilot points the airplane towards something with the intention of landing and puts the airplane on the ground, but the result is such that the airplane cannot be used again promptly. Yeah, that was a crash landing.

A deliberate landing of a wheel or ski plane in water is usually called a ditching. (Captain Haynes referred to the possibility of attempting to land the DC-10 off-airport "ditching" too, but I myself wouldn't use the term that way). Landing gear, engines, fairings, even wings and tail may be torn off, but if the cabin is sufficiently intact that people get out, I'd call it a successful ditching. In an unsuccessful ditching the airplane may cartwheel, or impact the water at a high speed or angle, causing it to break up. The result of an attempted ditching may be indistinguishable from a crash into water, but that Mooney was successfully, and I would judge skillfully ditched. As a pilot of a single engine airplane, he probably made sure he was within gliding distance of land, but it doesn't take a pilot to see that the land in the area was inhospitable. So he dithed close enough to shore that even badly injured he'd be able to swim to it.

Was this a crash in your opinion? Would you say you "crashed" your car if you lost control and drove it into the water where it sank? Do you used "ditch" to describe non-water off-airport landings?

A better CBC video clip had clearer information on the accident and used the phrase "gone down" instead of crash.

Licence Plates

A long time ago a friend told me a joke, and immature as it is, it's still funny. It's a bit like adding "in bed" after a fortune cookie saying. The joke is that someone who moves around a lot always gets a personalized licence plate reading MY BODY. It's an affirmative statement that could be New Age-y, a political statement, or a fitness buff showing off. It doesn't matter. The joke just needs some rationale to display it on different licence plate.

The fun comes when you combine the personalization with the slogans already embossed on various jurisdictions' plates. Head over to the Acme License Maker to see what I mean.

Wisconsin, Idaho and Ontario made me laugh out loud, but Alaska, West Virginia and and Washington DC were worth it too.

I always find myself looking at licence plates. They stand out as different every time I fly to a new state or province, and I try to find some pattern to the numbers. Sometimes there is a different first letter for a different year, or a different part of the state. And I like to wonder about the significance of personalized plates.

Here is a real personalized licence plate I spotted on an old station wagon in Scarborough. I'll let a reader comment on the significance of this one, for those who don't already know.

In California I'm sure there are more cars than in all of Canada put together, so they have seven characters on their licence plates. They also use the letter Q, and have strange characters like hearts. I think the hearts and the like are only for personalized plates. This picture I took to show the heart and the Q, oddly raised, to distinguish it from an O.

Florida has a lot of different designs and colours for affiliations with things like sports teams or "Protect Florida Whales." I don't think it takes much to get a special licence plate designed for an affiliation group.

I think I just liked the old grille on this car. The only thing special about the plate is that it's a handicapped one.

I didn't see this one myself, it was on Failblog, but, if the photo isn't a fake, a big "You GO Girl!" to Gina for managing to sneak that by the California DMV. I'll bet they recalled it.

This school bus plate was on a perfectly ordinary car, not a schoolbus at all. I don't know why it had a special plate. Perhaps the driver was a schoolbus inspector or this was a very, very short bus.

And the piece de resistance of my collection, no this is not my car, and I didn't take the picture. "Aviatrix" is quite a common handle for my ilk. There are probably hundreds of pilots who use the pseudonym in one context or another. I know two pilots with the same first name and very similar e-mail addresses using the word. But still, "hey it's me!"

If you see any other licence plates that could be mine, please send them my way.