Testing Engines and Patience

The head of maintenance drives all night then calls me midmorning. I get along with him well and we get into these silly preaching to the converted routines where we follow our shared philosophy to the extreme. Things like writing a snag like "pilot's left arm gets wet during flight in rain" instead of "cockpit left side window seal leaks," or him playing devils advocate on how he wants me to communicate "soft snags" such as fuel pressure being low but still within limits, or a door latch being slightly loose. I want to communicate any change to maintenance but I don't want to mess up the paperwork. We go out to the airplane and he peers into all the same orifices that I did and doesn't see any more than I did. I run it on the ground and there is nothing, so we taxi out for a short test flight.

I apply full power with the brakes held, and everything is perfect. There is no surging after brake release, through to rotation and then airborne--still nothing. That airplane runs beautifully. They're old engines, approaching the number of hours that requires them to be overhauled in any case, but the props sync up nicely the engines run smoothly and beautifully with every parameter snugly in the green. Nothing I do induces the surging to return. I pretty much called that. The maintenance chief knows this sort of thing happens, and in fact is beaming with pride at his well-tuned engines. At this point I'm very glad that I had someone in the back yesterday verifying my observations. And we weren't eating the same 'jelly beans' either.

We land and taxi in. The maintenance chief suspects my surging was a transient turbocharger issue, and says it will probably come back, but if it does it's okay to continue a flight, no harm will come of it and I don't need to worry about it being a precursor to a complete engine failure. In the meantime he wants to put some duct tape on something he has seen chafing (yes, the one thing about the finalé of Lost that was realistic was when they mended the airplane with duct tape).

There's now a fuel truck parked on the pumps. I walk over and ask the guys how long before avgas is available and they say half an hour. Meanwhile there is a localized duct tape shortage so we get in his truck and go to Canadian Tire for more.

When we get back to the airport, I can see the tail of the Hawkair Dash-8 parked on the ramp. I brace myself. There are also a couple of medevac pilots standing just outside the security gate, smoking, so I ask them if "the mean security lady" is there. They answer in the affirmative. I brief the maintenance chief on the implications of this, then walk through the security gate (which is wide open: the medevac pilots say the latch is broken) and wave to security lady. She gives us leave to cross the ramp to the airplane. He works on the duct tape shielding and I call the customer to let them know we'll be ready to go as soon as I refuel.

When he is done I thank him. He says he'll stay here until I land the flight in case there is any issue. He has brought a new turbocharger just in case. I sit in the airplane with the door open, while he crosses through the danger zone back to the groundside. There's an ambulance parked not far from me on the ramp, a regular ambulance with four wheels, not an air ambulance. Security lady goes over and chews out the ambulance crew for some transgression.

The Hawkair moves off and a medevac airplane lands and shuts down on the other side of the ambulance. I let them know what I was told about when fuel would be available, which is any minute now. As my customer isn't here quite yet, when the fuellers are done and drive off, I let them go first. While they are fuelling, I see my customer arrive. I go up to the cockpit and do my prestart checks. As soon as I see them shut off the pump and rewind the hose I start up, getting ready to taxi up to the pump as soon as they move off. One of the pilots looks towards me and gestures me over, so I start to taxi. Neither of the pilots is in the cockpit though, and there isn't really room for me to park at the pumps and reach the fuel while still giving them room to leave without blasting me. I stop in the middle of the apron and then the ambulance goes by me.

Ah, they weren't beckoning to me but to the ambulance. The ambulance parks there; they talk a while. I shut down. The patient transfer takes a long time. They probably think I am crazy, rude or stupid to have taxied up towards them while their ambulance was coming over. I think they're rude to do their patient transfer at the pumps. They knew I had been waiting half an hour for fuel before they even got there. It wouldn't have been a great hardship for them to taxi off the pumps before doing the transfer. Yeah, it's an extra start cycle on their engines, and I suppose their SOPs tell them to avoid extra starts at all costs, especially when they're mine. I wouldn't have hung out at the pumps doing non-fuelling stuff when someone else was waiting for fuel.

Finally I get my turn at the gas, then we take off. The flight goes well with no recurrence of the problem. Everything just purrs along, even the asymmetrical cylinder head temperature we had before doesn't materialize. We land after less than six hours, making it a "short flight" for us, and I text everyone involved with the good news.

My fellow pilot replies, "Sweet, we're going to Alaska." My boss invokes thanks to his deity that nothing else has gone wrong. The head of maintenance comes up and helps me refuel for the trip north, probably tomorrow morning, while I assure him everything ran well. The quantities the tanks take show that fuel burn was almost perfectly even. I thank him again for driving up for what seems to have been nothing. He gives me the turbocharger parts that I may need if the problem comes back to stay, and some other just-in-case parts for the northern trip. Considering where we are going we're probably bringing coals to Newcastle, but it's good to be prepared. I bid him farewell for his drive back south.

Evening is packing up, getting ready to go. I call the customs broker to verify that everything will be ready when we need it, and plug in my American cellphone to charge overnight.

Having Issues. May Be A Bit.

This is so my new motto. Maybe I'll do one of these every day until I run out of famous images of historical figures having issues.

My coworker goes straight to bed after landing, not that he's especially tired after just waiting around for a while and making a short flight, but after eight hours sleep it's a new day and anything I don't get done, he can do tonight before tomorrow's icky weather arrives. I fuel and get ready for the flight, and then we're off. On the takeoff run I bring up the throttles, leading with the right lever as I have been doing, to compensate for a MP split at high power. But as I watch the power develop I adjust and discover that I don't have to do that, the left falls behind if I do that. Looks like they fixed that. They have been tweaking one thing every time it goes into maintenance, so they must have got it this time. The airplane accelerates to rotation speed and I lift the nosewheel about eight or ten degrees nose up for my initial climb. The mains come off and then there's a change in sound in the left engine and a little bit of yaw. Could be a turbocharger issue. The manufacturer specifically instructs pilots not to reject a takeoff with a failed turbocharger, so I just keep it at blue line and fly the plane. Now the left engine is surging. It's like an unsynched propeller, except that at this altitude the props are still unsynchronized. I wonder if I'm going to lose one here. Regardless, if it's putting out power, I fly a dodgy engine to a safe altitude before trying to diagnose it. The first order of business, even in a full engine failure or a fire is Control the airplane.

It flies. I reduce to climb power. The manifold pressure gauge needle isn't flicking noticeably and the tach isn't fluctuating between lights. At this angle and lighting I can't see clearly if the digital tachometer readout is fluctuating with a particular pattern. There is no gauge indication anywhere that says there is something wrong. The airplane isn't yawing crazily, it just doesn't sound right. I look at both engines out the windows. Who is to say whether the left one is surging down or the right one is surging up. The mission specialist has noticed too, which is good, because without a clear gauge indication it's easy to think you've gone insane.

I level off at cruise power and tweak things for a bit, switching fuel tanks in case I have something blocking a line, or a fuel contamination issue. No perceptible change for that or with alternate air. There's obviously something not right, so we circle back and land.

I run it up on the ground so I can report everything, but it doesn't do it on the ground, of course. I shut down and call my PRM while walking around the airplane and looking inside the cowlings from various angles to check for loose hoses, blocked intakes or any other obvious defects. The PRM asks the basic questions and says he'll get back to me. After ten minutes or so, the head of maintenance calls me. I describe the issue again, answer some more questions, and let him know I'm willing to take it up for a trouble-shooting flight, but he doesn't want me to. I joke, knowing it's not really a joke, that it probably won't do it again. He says the airplane is grounded, and he's driving up tonight to see it. I'm not sure he realizes how far north this is. I promise to get him a hotel room and tell him to call me whenever he is ready to work.

And then I have to tell everyone else that I just broke the airplane.

Back at the hotel I look at the information I have compiled on the Alaska flight. The fact that sunrise and sunset times are given as Never/Never today means that vampires must love it in the winter. Do vampires get cold? You'd think they could do quite well with a winter home in Alaska and a summer home in southern Chile. Or do vampires these days not mind the sunlight? PANC looks like one of those stupid airports. I mean this not as a slur on the airport but as a gesture of admiration for the pigheadedness of the skill and technology and rules required to make it work as an international hub, with ridiculous weather, almost total winter darkness and crazy terrain, not to mention frequent volcanic activity in the vicinity. There are mountains everywhere and no doubt horrible icing in the spring and fall given the temperatures and water all around it. Of course we're going to Alaska in what will probably be the best month of the year, because that's the kind of lucky folks we are.

Yesterday I e-mailed Dave of FL390, but he won;t be there while I am. I know (internet "know," but for many years, since before this blog) a pilot who lives in Anchorage, but when I e-mail him it turns out he'll be in Papua New Guinea until after I leave, so I won't be able to meet up with him. Of course. It is pretty much par for the course that if I finally happen to get to the remote location where someone I know lives, they will be out of town, either somewhere even more remote, or in my own town, for the duration. And if they ever come to my town I'm away. (The one glorious exception that proved that rule was that Phil (yes, he's fine, just not blogging these days) called me up out of the blue to say he was in town on the day I was having a birthday party! Perfect timing, and then after the party I drove him back to his crew hotel and instead of him getting out we steamed up my car windows for hours until security guards banged on the outside. But that's all you need to know about that).

So in this case, early to bed and waiting to see what the verdict is on the engine in the morning.

---

This B767 had a hard landing that damaged the fuselage but Boeing's horses and men put it back together again. Notice that the FO of the subsequent flight found the damage on the walkaround, while boarding passengers, and the comments are worth reading, describing and praising Boeing repair savvy.

I Thank You All

You wonderful, wonderful people! I always knew I was blessed with some of the best readers on the internet, so I shouldn't be surprised that you can put your money where your fingers are. I posted my request to fund Cambodian building materials on a Sunday night, knowing that not many people read on the weekend, but that Monday would be a big traffic day, and hoping that perhaps a few people would see fit to contribute to the cause. It looks like more people read on the weekend than I thought. Before midnight we had enough for at least half a house! It literally brings tears to my eyes that so many people are willing to share in this way.

I giggled at the rationalizations you came up with for the various eCards you chose. You're right, it's a somewhat odd selection to go with charity donations, but it was fun clicking on them. I think dandelions and kittens were the leading choices. The pictures didn't matter because your words (and numbers, as that was the point of the exercise) carried the message.

I don't even know what the current total is, because many of you let me know you donated without telling me the amount of your donation. I estimate you have given enough to build at least two houses. In a couple of days I've gone from feeling the responsibility of being the out-of-town team member who isn't there to pull her weight at the pub fundraiser nights, to the completely different responsibility of being the one whom all of you have entrusted to take the materials you have purchased and make them into a real home for someone whose own community has judged them worthy.

It really is that simple. The money has to be all collected eight weeks before the build because the administrators use it to literally purchase lumber and nails and tin and concrete. Local contractors will lay the foundation and frame the houses before we arrive, and then we complete them. I and my team will arrive and presumably see your donations laid out on a tarp. I'll photograph that and then get to work assembling them into the very best homes I can provide.

For me personally this will be a rewarding, exciting experience because I get to travel to a part of the world where I've never been; see cultural and historical sites; attempt communication in some combination of English, French, Russian and Khmer; build something with my own two hands and give people a gift that proportionately will be the biggest most important gift I've ever had the opportunity to give anyone. Giving a home to someone who really needs it is generally the province of a government, corporation, or billionaire.

I think it make a difference as a person grow up what he or she believes the world thinks or expects, and that a child who discovers that the world cares enough to build his family a house will care about the world in return. You've all won yourselves good karma, and if at any time in the future you're feeling that you're not appreciated or not doing anything worthwhile, remember that there's a family in Cambodia whose kids might have died without you.

It's possible I could raise more money with a month-long nagging blog fundraising drive, but the way this worked is the way I like it. I said please; you answered generously; and I'll be saying thank you for the rest of the year. I will drive every nail with care and gratitude. It means a lot to me that you readers see the worth in this project, and agreed to support me.

Does Alaska Really Exist?

I think maybe there was giant earthquake in Alaska overnight. Before I went to bed I ran my nav program to determine that in good VFR weather with calm winds Anchorage is five hours and fifty minutes away. I left the application open when I hibernated the computer, but when I turned it on today it immediately told me Alaska is 9,358.5 miles away and my time on route would be 55h 43 minutes, including a one hour stop. For lunch, I assume. I always like to have a lunch stop in the middle of a fifty-six hour trip. I restart the application and start making phone calls.

There is no point trying to buy charts from US suppliers, because they'd never make it through customs in time for the trip. I need a supplier in Western Canada in order to get them shipped here fast enough. VIP has same-day shipping and has a beautiful graphical interface for buying US charts on its website, but only the lower forty-eight. I phone them to ask about Alaska and they say they don't carry them. Aviation World in Vancouver isn't open yet, so I call Aviation World in Toronto to find out if the store carries the charts and can do rush shipping. They say that shouldn't be a problem, and to call the Vancouver store.

It looks as though there may be some weather issues en route. The mountains in Alaska are very high and the temperature and conditions at altitude suggests icing in excess of what the aircraft systems can shed. I plan a second route around further to the north, following the Alaska highway. It's longer, but much more weather-resistant. There's low weather forecast up "the trench" and around the Alaska Highway route. No airports in the trench, and most of the Alaska highway ones are 1500' dirt strips. Alaska is like northern Canada, except with more people. I wonder if the natives in Alaska will be more like Americans or more like Canadian Inuit.

I pull up the US "Aviation Digital Data Service" weather site. I use it all the time but what I've never noticed before is that it's just the lower forty-eight. Alaska isn't on the normal weather site. This invisibility of Alaska is getting annoying.

I get a text from the pilot who is with the airplane. Instead of the expected, "taking off in ten minutes" message, it reads, "Having issues. May be a bit." I'm thinking I should add that message to my cellphone quick text menu. It covers so much, so succinctly. I'm inspired to create now:

A follow up text message explains that he couldn't get into the hangar where the airplane was, then couldn't get a hold of the guy with the aircraft logbook, and finally was thwarted by bad weather. Meanwhile we have great weather here, and I have to explain before eight o' clock why we won't have an airplane at eight o' clock, while hoping that it won't be too much longer.

Back to planning my route to Alaska. We'll go via Whitehorse for sure. It's the last good place to land in Canada, to reconfirm our border crossing time and make sure all the customs paperwork has preceded us to Anchorage. Even if the weather permitted direct Anchorage from Whitehorse, the mountains east of the city are so high I'd still have to come into the area from the north or south. I plan an approach via the ominous-sounding NOEND intersection for now, just to see how the time works out. I assume that Anchorage will be very busy with FedEx and international traffic at all hours, so we'd better be ready.

Yeah about that. Aviation World in Vancouver are super friendly but don't have the Alaska charts or the A/FD for the state. They are out of the old ones, and the shipment of the new ones isn't in yet. Being in Canada, he explains, they are the last priority to get US data. They would ship the stuff to me if they had it, though. I start collecting data from the internet. I have Canadian charts as far as Whitehorse, and FAA charts and information are online available. I gather up what I hope matches my needs and put it on a USB stick for the hotel to print for me.

I also try to line up a place to park at Anchorage. I'm reading between the lines while looking online for FBOs at Anchorage and it looks as if everyone is catering to jets. I need avgas, twenty-four hour access to my aircraft, and a place to park. At an airport like Anchorage I will need that associated with a business. There won't be a piece of pavement that is just spare for transient aircraft to hang out. Someone will have to pay rent on my bit of pavement, and someone will have to take responsibility for admitting me in and out of the FAA airport facility. A pilot lounge would be nice, but we don't need passenger handling services, as everyone on board is legally crew and doesn't need to be security cleared for our aircraft or carried around in a golf cart. I call and ask an FBO that is listed as having avgas if they can accommodate us. "Yes, yes, we can do that. That will be fine," he assures me. "When are you arriving?" I can't say that for sure, because we have to wait to be released from this job, and then there are the vagaries of weather. I give an approximate date and time and warn that nothing is confirmed. He's fine with that, so I write down the name and telephone number for when we need it.

Eventually, the airplane arrives, and I go flying, but that's a story in itself.

Next Destination: Cambodia

No, I didn't get lost on the way to Alaska. This blog entry is out of sequence, for reasons that will become evident when you read it. I will return to the Alaska adventure with the next post.

I recently ate breakfast with a group of pilots, one of whom was preparing for a trip to Cambodia in order to do volunteer work. "Wow!" said I, and trained my shark-mounted laser vision on him to demand details.

Cambodia, as I knew only vaguely, is a country in Asia, between Thailand and Vietnam, which suffered a Communist takeover in the 1970s and then a Vietnamese occupation and a civil war in the 1980s. In an attempt to have only a gullible proletariat to rule, the communists set out to kill the intelligentsia, eliminating everyone with the education to mount an effective opposition. This meant statesmen, teachers, doctors, and masters of the cultural arts. The frenzy came to the point where people with glasses were subject to imprisonment or execution, because everyone knows glasses are a symbol of smartness. Many who weren't executed starved to death in the disruption. Look at the people who are leading first world countries today: the politicians, corporate leaders, senior civil servants. They were probably all educated or mentored in the 1970s and 1980s. Cambodia hasn't got those people. Cambodia also has one of the highest proportion of amputees in the world, due to the legacy of land mines from all the conflicts. This doesn't put their infrastructure or agriculture on a firm footing. There's no reason they can't be a self-sustaining nation again, but they need some help.

What is being done to help?

Canada delivers a lot of foreign aid around the world, including Cambodia. Janne Ritskes, a woman who worked with a Canadian government programme delivering aid became frustrated with the organizational inefficiency. Like so many people frustrated with the management of their organizations she said "I could do a better job." Unlike most people she quit the inefficient job and set up shop to prove it. She runs Tabitha, a non-profit organization entirely operated by Cambodians. The organization is Christian, but not evangelical. I suspect many of the staff are Buddhist. A lot of what they do is just encouraging people to save money in order to make incremental improvements to their lives. That may seem obvious to you, but you probably grew up in a society where people were doing that. There is hardly anyone alive in Cambodia who remembers the 1970s, but I can't see that people today have much in the way of role models for long range planning. It takes savings of $960 to build a house, but for some families who have absolutely nothing, Tabitha will build them a house after they have saved a token amount, just to get them into the programme. This group from Vancouver is going to build homes.

Who is going?

The core of this group are members of the Vancouver Police Department, but I don't have to be affiliated with the police in any way in order to join them.

When are we going?

The latter half of November 2010.

What skills or experience do volunteers I need to have?

None. I know how to hit a nail with a hammer, at least nine times out of ten, but apparently even that is in excess of minimum qualifications.

Is it safe?

You know the pilot is going to ask that. The guy who invited me went on a previous trip and he didn't get mugged or sold into slavery. We will need a tonne of vaccinations and precautions against tropical diseases, and not step anywhere there isn't already a path. If you're going to go to a country where conditions are unknown, going there surrounded by police officers seems like a good bet.

"You want to go, don't you?" he asked me. Well, yeah, I do. It was pretty obvious. I've never been to Asia. I've never been anywhere in the third world, unless you count Nunavut. I've never built a house. But as you probably figured from the first person pronouns above, I'm going. I signed up as soon as I checked with my doctor to make sure that all the vaccinations were okay for me.

Originally the group thought that they would get a grant from the Vancouver Police, as in previous years it had been a team-building effort for the force, but this year they didn't receive the money, so I just found out participants have to fundraise for the materials necessary to do the building. Right now the people in Vancouver are busy organizing pub nights and silent auctions and the like to bring in the cash. But I'm not in Vancouver, and I can't be a freeloader. The more we raise, the more houses we can build. The whole housebuilding project is a crafty way to spread awareness of the organization and to get North Americans with enough money to go on foreign trips to raise some money. How will I do my part?

So far this is the best idea I have:

Would you please donate some money? To make it not something for nothing, I'll send donors a postcard, from Cambodia or from somewhere on my travels for work. I can also offer you a blog entry that's not on the blog, perhaps one of the ones that was too emotional, or gave details of an emergency that could be used to pinpoint my company. If you are a new reader and weren't around in 2006, you should probably request the northern smoke saga. I also have some bloglike accounts from before I started the blog of my own initial flight lessons, and of learning to fly a Twin Otter. Maybe you have a special request for a blog topic. Let me know what you would like in appreciation of your donation. You will receive a Canadian tax receipt; sorry if that's not useful in your country. Everyone, whether you donate or not, will get an account of the trip, via this blog.

How to Donate

This is slightly trickier than one-click ordering, so please read carefully to make sure the money is credited on my behalf, to the right team. I've left out the obvious instructions like "click Donate Now" and "enter your donation amount." I'm figuring that Cockpit Conversation readers are all smart enough to be targeted in an anti-elitist purge. Or at least have your glasses on.

1. Go to the Canada Helps website.
2. Search for "tabitha" and select Tabitha Foundation from the results.
4. Opposite Fund/Designation choose 2 - Housebuilding - "Vancouver House Building Team Nov.2010". [This is a change: it was #17 before].
5. Opposite Dedications and Gift Options choose Yes, as a gift in honour/on behalf of and put "Aviatrix" there.
6. Either choose the e-card option, or just e-mail me to let me know what you've donated, so I can know I'm successfully raising funds and awareness, and figure out how many houses we can assemble. My e-mail address is still cockpitconversation@gmail.com.

Thank you very much for anything you choose to donate. Note that your donation is going directly to Tabitha and is used exclusively for building materials which I and the group will use to build homes for brutally poor Cambodians. My airfare, spending money and living expenses for the trip come out of my pocket.

Scheduling versus Safety

The airplane is still away. The pilot who is with it tells me that they could have completed the minimum scheduled maintenance work and had it back today, but the weather here isn't appropriate for our clients' work, and is forecast to remain thus for days, so they are keeping the airplane in Edmonton, doing small fixes that will have to be done sooner or later, so might as well be done before the parts actually break and delay an important mission. It seems like a sensible thing to do, and I expect the client to be happy with it. We're being proactive. That's still a good buzzword, isn't it?

Information flows along various different routes in this operation. I'm happy that it almost always goes through the pilots, so we know what is going on, but this time somewhere between my boss, the mechanics who have the plane, the pilot who is with the plane, and the client's head office, a message has not reached the client field staff. The people in the same hotel as me. The project manager is not happy with the proposed situation, and wants to have the airplane back on site by tomorrow morning. They pay for the airplane, they get to choose these things. I make a few calls and then can go back to the project manager. "The airplane can be here by eight a.m." Now he's happy.

When it's not a safety issue, there's no harm in giving the choice to the client. The time can be now or later. There are a lot of fixes that can be done either preemptively or as after the part actually breaks. The cost of unexpected downtime usually outweighs the cost of replacing parts early, but when it's scheduling not safety we won't hold an airplane back unnecessarily. One of ours is down with a grounded engine right now, but demand hasn't been enough to spur replacing the engine.

I go out for a run. It's hillier than it looks from the air, always is. The sidewalks aren't very good, either. I'm not running consistently enough to see any improvement in my speed or fitness, but I guess as long as I'm staying fit and not getting injured it's good. I can't remember my New Year's Resolutions this year, and I'm afraid to look them up, because I know I must have blown my chances on all of them already.

When I get in, I learn two things. One is that thanks to the time difference between here and Edmonton, they're going to do some of the work and have the airplane here for eight, and the other is that we're going to Anchorage, Alaska in three days. Do we have charts? Hell no. We have three sets of Alaska charts from last year, but none in this airplane. It's too late to try and order any tonight, so I just play with routes to Anchorage in my Seattle Avionics navigation program. I add "find charts" to my to do list for tomorrow.

Local Positioning Signal

I was chatting online with some non-pilots who knew I was a pilot and one, whom I have dubbed Rhubarb, asked me, "Why doesn't each airport have a local positioning signal?" They kind of do, so I asked what he meant.

<Aviatrix>   What is a local positioning signal?
<Aviatrix>   A lot of them have a green and white flashing beacon, if that counts.
<Rhubarb>    heh
<Rhubarb>    Well, like GPS, but local.
<Rhubarb>    A collection of transmitters whose signals can be recieved and processed the same way.
<Aviatrix>   A lot of them also have an AM radio broadcast signal in morse code from quite nearby. You can't put it ON the runway because the antenna would be inconvenient.
<Rhubarb>    Sure.
<Aviatrix>   Some have a transmission in the range 108-117.9 MHz with directional information that helps you align with the runway.
<Rhubarb>    What I'm proposing would undoubtedly involve a whole 'nother receiver, and I guess adding more instruments is not an easy proposition. :-P
<Aviatrix>   And some even have information in that signal that tells you how far away the runway is, and/or your deviation from an ideal glideslope to the runway.

Rhubarb kind of answered his own question, by recognizing that every technology needs a receiver, before I got into historical techniques like A-N beacons, painting the name of the airport in big letters, or lighting bonfires leading to the airport. A local positioning signal is a very good idea, and has been implemented in many ways. Maybe when I'm in a researchy mood I'll enumerate the dates and instigators of all the various local positioning signals that have been used over the last hundred years.

If another blogger wants to steal that idea, and backlink it here for the traffic, it's yours for the taking.

Four Million Dollar Decision

No, not my decision. Although, considering the cost of my airplane, the equipment and other airplanes around me, I technically make four million dollar decisions every time I taxi to parking. But this is about Airworthiness Directives (pronounced Eh Deez).

Anytime there is a failure of some part on a manufactured airplane and it is deemed to be a design flaw, or something that could happen anytime to another airplane, an airworthiness directive may be issued, requiring you to inspect, replace or modify something. The American FAA issues ADs, and usually Transport Canada just copies them. I think they call it promulgation. I imagine Transport Canada issues them too, if they get to the problem first, but the Americans have so much more aviation they tend to lead the way here. If there is an AD for your airplane, you are required to comply with it within the specified time, or your airplane is deemed unairworthy. The specified time may be "before you fly your airplane again," "within N days," "within M flight hours" or the like. There are one-time ADs, which are usually expensive, but you comply with them once and it's done, and there are recurring ADs which usually just require a trained individual to inspect something to see if it's broken, but are annoying because they have to be done every N hours of flight, and there is no leeway. They cannot be postponed a few hours even when other maintenance legally can be.

I think I've explained most of this before, probably many times while waiting for ADs to be completed, but I happened to run across a document today showing part of the logic process that goes into determining whether a problem with an airplane ends up as an AD or just a Service Bulletin. It shows how quickly a bureaucratic decision can multiply.

AD
Costs of Compliance

We estimate that this AD affects 8,000 airplanes in the U.S. registry.

We estimate the following costs to do the inspection and parts replacement:

Labor Cost: 4 work-hours X $80 per hour = $ 320

Parts Cost: $190

Total Cost Per Airplane: $510

Total Cost on U.S. Operators: $4,080,000

It's some inexpensive (two hundred bucks is a cheap airplane part) part buried somewhere that takes two guys most of an hour to take the airplane apart to get at it, a few minutes to replace, and then another hour to reassemble test and certify. And that's a one-time AD.

Speaking of decisions with consequences, some time ago I told my boss about my blog. I was sitting in a hangar typing on my laptop and he ambushed me with some friendly question like "what are you doing?" and, being completely untrained in the art of lying, I told him I was blogging. I figured the word "blog" makes most people think of twilight fan fiction, emo angst and accounts of shopping trips, and that he would be even less inclined to read it than he is to read my status reports. But he asked for the blog URL. He read some of it, laughed and moved on. I figured that would be the end of it. After all What business owner has time to read blogs?

Then, weeks later, I was taking video of a tractor engine that was on the verge of catching fire. A contractor was using the self-destructing tractor as a tug, and I was teasing him that using that vehicle to tow airplanes in for maintenance was like a sign painter advertising his skills with a billboard done in crayon. I mean you can't keep your own tractor in good repair, but we should trust you with an airplane? The boss saw me intently pointing the camera. "For your blog?" he asked. The look on my face was probably something like "Uhh, you remember that?" and I answered, "Yeah, if it works out." (It didn't, too dark to see what was going on). I suppose this blog is more interesting than the paperwork and terse status reports I keep sending him, but the status reports are more up-to-date.

And as I've said from the beginning, if anyone associated with the operations described in this blog wants anything removed, censored or changed, no problem. Plus I can write more verbose status reports, too. Just ask.

Loss of Separation

If you're me, when you see news like this Convair 580 crash in British Columbia, you are sad for the pilots and their families, and you hope that your friend wasn't on board. You don't wait for the names to be released, but talk to whom you must to find out enough about the deceased to rule out anyone you know who works for the company. And then you're glad because your friend is alive, and tell him so. And then you are sad for your friend, who has lost beloved colleagues, but still glad because he is alive and well. And then you discover that someone else you know has not been so lucky as to have her friend not be on board that airplane. You feel a little guilty for a moment, until you remind yourself that a burned out cockpit and unreleased crew names is not a Schrödinger's box, with a waveform that will collapse according to who hopes hardest. It's happened. So you are sad for the other friend, and for the pilot you did not know, who was her friend, and for the dead pilots you did not know, and for the other pilots you did know, who did not survive earlier days. And then you shed a few tears without being completely sure whom they are for. And then you check the weather and NOTAMs and go to work. And that's what you do, if you're me.

Everyone fly safe, please.

Pork Bellies

This posting is utterly off the regular topic of this blog. It was inspired by the fact that I had bacon from a free range pig for breakfast, and it was extremely delicious.

Pork bellies are an economic commodity traded on the stock market. People essentially gamble on the accuracy of their predictions about the future demand, supply and thus price of pork. The traders never actually take delivery of the pork, because during the time they are trading it like a hot potato, the pigs haven't been slaughtered yet, or maybe even haven't been born yet.

That made me think about enormous pig factory farms. By keeping pigs in extremely confined conditions, they're creating inhumane conditions for the pigs, the human workers, and the people who have to live near the effluent. In some places they may also be doing environmental damage to fisheries and drinking water, but are they also devaluing the currency? Would changing the laws so that "standard industry practice" like no longer provides an exemption from prosecution for animal cruelty laws merely address animal welfare issues, or would it constitute tinkering with the economic system itself? Is this the real reason why we as a society don't demand that animals that are made of delicious, delicious bacon are not treated at least as well as convicted rapists? If you treated a single dog the way factory farmed pigs are treated, the dog would be taken away and you would not be allowed to own another animal.

And then I wondered, can people who are forbidden by religion to eat pork or handle pig leather ethically make money in commodities trading if they hold pork belly futures? Is contact with the animal itself unclean, or does that extend to its effects. Pigs aren't soft and furry, and they're very robust, but they're also intelligent and sociable. If I buy factory-farmed bacon, I'm paying someone to abuse an animal for my breakfast pleasure. I don't think I'll do that anymore.

If you haven't had your daily dose of bleeding heart liberal hopelessness yet, see this blog on the myriad ways the planet is doomed.

Resolution Update

I made some ridiculously optimistic new year's resolutions this year and with five months left in the year, not only have I neglected them, but I until I looked them up just now, I had forgotten what they were. It's time for some revisions.

The running goal proved to be counterproductive, because while I started off well with a few months of distance and a good base, I then tried to go too fast and kept injuring myself, setting myself back. I've been awesome at keeping to the 5BX programme (wow that reads like something else if you don't know it says FIVE B X, for "five basic exercises"), though, and am almost at the level recommended for a thirty-five year old male, with little doubt that I'll achieve it on schedule. (The women's program was suspiciously wimpy, so I stopped doing it when it diverged enough from the men's that I couldn't just incorporate it. Maybe I'll pick it up again later). It's much better to run healthy and uninjured than to run fast, so I'm going to scrap the speed goals and instead just count how many kilometres I run before the end of the year.

The people idea worked because it did establish a habit, so even after I forgot the goal it snapped my out of being a hermit. My list of unique contacts ends in mid-February. I did pretty well up to then, but I guess I have to cross off the names of people for whom e-mail bounced or postal mail was returned as undeliverable. That's sad. I'll try to track some of those lost people down.

Simming daily was a good idea and a habit I just didn't get established. I need to set it up so it gets done like checking my e-mail and doing my 5BX. I'll keep trying with this one.

I laugh at the home project idea. The only projects I've had at home this year have been unpacking, laundry and repacking. I think I'll revise this one to try to start each work rotation with a clean desk, and that means having actually dealt with the items piled on it, not just dumped them in a cardboard box. (Yes, I actually have a pile of increasingly ancient cardboard boxes under my desk, full of the stuff I have dumped there over the years. Some of it may be address changes of my lost friends, too).

New adventures are always great, and really it's adventures and fun with my friends that have prevented home projects, okay that and watching five seasons of Lost in one frenzied binge this winter.

Hearing Impaired Airline Pilot

As a commercial pilot I undergo regular medical examinations to ensure that I am fit to fly. I had an audiogram (hearing test) when I was first licensed, but now I'm just tested without really noticing, as the doctor will ask me a question quietly when I'm not looking at him and when I answer normally he checks a box somewhere. I have had exams where the doctor was more obvious about it, but for the last couple I can't even remember being checked for hearing. Perhaps it was during the physical ear exam, where the poor doctor has to shine a light in my ear and put up with me asking if he's checking to make sure there's something in between my ears.

This weird medical document turned up in a Google alert. I don't know enough about the relevant audio panels to know if there has been some kind of special adaptation for the captains, or if they are just showing his volume level settings.

the hearing impaired airline pilot

Kind of freaky that the hearing aid is bolted to his skull. But then I know so many people that are cyborgs now that it's barely worth remarking on anymore.

To merge the subject of not being stopped by a disability with Caturday, we have another cat with an other-than-normal number of extremities. Avert your eyes if you don't like cute kittens.

Sorry if the videos break people's browsers. I know they do sometimes. E-mail me if it's a problem and I'll remove the videos after a couple of days.

Fly In, Fall Off

There was a notice in the terminal window, next to the airside gate, about a fly-in breakfast. Today. The mission specialist (the one who helped with my jelly bean game) and I decide to attend, although we'll be driving, because our airplane isn't here. Here's the airport, so you can see the water landing area. You can see it's two or three times as wide as the paved one, which is already about six times the wingspan of the typical floatplane.

Not being members of the club, we don't know which is the right hangar, but we go to the one that has trucks parked out front early on a Sunday morning, and we are right. Inside there are tables and a few grills turning out bacon, eggs and pancakes. The hangar doors are open onto the apron, and people are really and truly flying in, and taxiing up to park outside the hangar. Most of them are "landing on the grass" type airplanes.

Pancake production is the bottleneck in the operation. There's lots of bacon and eggs. A woman is running a large grill on which she appears to be tending a single pancake. I try to offer assistance without denigrating her multi-tasking skills, and it turns out that the grill isn't working properly. This is the only hot spot on the griddle and it is barely enough to toast the pancake. I admit to her that I had suspected she was such a perfectionist that she had to focus on one pancake alone, and we laugh at that. Bacon dude is retasked to help with the pancakes, and I am honoured to be served the "single perfect pancake" from the recalcitrant grill.

Another drive-in participant has brought a newborn lamb in diapers. A ewe she was tending for a neighbour had triplets and rejected the third lamb, so she is bottle-feeding it. The diapers were just to keep the car clean on the way over. We all pat the lamb and admire its cute fuzziness while making comments about how it's too small to make a meal for everyone. It stumbles around inside a portable enclosure outside the hangar, and drinks lamb nursing formula out of a bottle.

I meet a couple there who run a catering business and he tells me the secret of the grocery store across the street from my hotel. The other grocery store in town has a good produce manager who sometimes rejects shipments if the produce is not up to his standards. When that is the case, the delivery companies take the shipment to "my" grocery store and sell them at a discount. So I know where I should be buying my groceries. I wonder if they have good jelly beans, too.

After breakfast I spent an hour or so doing paperwork, then go out to be a tourist. The town is at 'Mile 0' of the Alaska Highway, so a lot of Americans come through here every year on their Alaskan pilgrimage, and the area is set up to take advantage of that tourism business. At the tourism info kiosk I learn that Pouce Coupé rhymes with Moose Loopy. The university student working at the kiosk from there, and she thinks Pouce Coupé is actually a corruption of something in Cree, and not a commemoration of someone's injury.

Speaking of injuries, after I'd walked around town and looked at the Alaska Highway Museum, the pioneer village and the mile zero marker I stopped to play at a playground. Dawson Creek may be in BC, but it is an honourary Yukon town, because in the same spirit where the airport manager in Watson Lake let us play in an abandoned control tower, Dawson Creek has iron playground equipment with moving parts and sharp gravel underneath. Kids who grow up here will learn that blood is red and that actions have consequences. I fell off a spinny thing that spun in an unexpected direction and landing on the gravel made a hole in my elbow. My blood is still red. It leaked for a couple of hours, then finally stopped. (It wasn't a grievous wound: I'm just not very good at making scabs). I write this up weeks later, and checking out the elbow I see that, damnit, it has left a scar. Permanent consequences. But it's not like I ever worried about the smoothness of my elbows.

Another Funny CVR Story

Grant linked to this in a comment yesterday. It is spot on, taking the Onion`s usual formula of perfectly copying the format of a familiar news story while twisting it silly.

Guatemalan Flight's Data-Recording Parrot Holds Clues To Crash

I laughed too hard not to share it with those of you who don't read the comments. (You should, though: Cockpit Conversation readers are witty, well-informed, interesting people).

"Explosion!"

Those Are Jelly Beans In Your Tanks

I see from the journey log that the airplane got back late last night. It would have been outside my duty day. There's still enough time left on the airframe for my flight. I do all my preflight things, including splitting the last litre of oil between the engines, and we go out and once again do what we do. Thanks to my groceries, I have a new strategy for tracking time and fuel, because once the power is set, fuel is time. I have a baggie of gourmet jelly beans (told you everything looked good at the grocery store) tucked into a pocket of my flight bag, and every twenty minutes I get to eat one. While it's tucked into the pocket, I can't see into the bag, so I make a game of what colour the next one will be. The mission specialist plays too, but he gets fed up because there are too many weird colour ones. It's pretty hard to predict "yellow with green spots." I can't even figure out what some of them taste like. I wanted normal-style jelly beans, but they were among the things at that grocery store that didn't look so good.

I land with five jelly beans to spare, and offer the specialist his choice, or all of them if he wants. He pretends he's going to take a black one. During the flight I mentioned that the black ones were my favourite, so he's actually just saying that to tease me. He takes some other colour and I eat the rest while waiting for the computers to shut down.

Off to my right a pilot reports on final, "Landing two four on the grass."

Peace River radio instructs him to, "Report off runway." This amuses me, because he's not landing on the runway, so he'll never be on it. He lands on the grass beside the runway. The airplane is a taildragger on tundra tires, so pavement would reduce his directional control and put unnecessary wear on the soft tires.

Someone else calls, "Landing two four on the water," but I can't remember if he was asked to report off runway.

I pull up to the fuel pumps and shut down my engines. I swipe the fuel card. The stupid pump, I might have mentioned earlier, wants me to enter my "tail number" so it can print it on the receipt. That may be okay for the Americans who can just tap it in on the number pad, but I'm not into hitting the arrow keys enough times to spell out all the letters of a Canadian ident. I just bang on one number a few times and hit enter. I think today I'm 1-1-1.

I don't know why they ask for that. I suppose there are various reasons. Some people who get reimbursed for fuel have to prove they bought it and didn't just pick up a left-behind receipt, so they'd have to put their whole tail number in. I assume the information is available to the FBO, and they might track how much fuel was purchased by which customers so they could advertise to them or give them loyalty bonuses. If you crashed later I'm sure the TSB could use it check to see if you bought fuel there for an estimate of how much was on board, in case there was a possibility that your fuel status played a role in the accident. And if the fuel from that tank turned out to be contaminated, they could contact all the pilots who had recently fuelled there to help prevent accidents. But most days I assume it's just there to annoy me. Tomorrow I'll be 2-2-2 or 5-5-5.

After I confirm that the airplane is grounded and specify avgas, the next on-screen prompt asks how many gallons I want. I know my fuel needs in both litres and gallons, because I work in Canada and the US. but the button says litres. Which does it really want? I guess that the prompt should be in litres too, and that the hardware has been localized but not the software. I enter the number of litres I want and it displays a total price that makes sense for litres, so I press the confirm button. After an irritatingly long pause it verifies the credit card and sends power to the pump so I can open the valve.

My fellow pilot arrives. He's taking the airplane to Edmonton again, this time for scheduled maintenance. This time we knew about the flight in advance, so I left him my hotel card key and he put some of his gear in my room before checking out. We finish up fuelling and I clean the windshield for him.

I like clean windshields. I once gave a student a major penalty for presenting me with an airplane as fit to fly when the windshield was almost opaque with bugs. Then he was surprised when I asked him to go and clean it before the flight. I found out that his regular instructor regularly complained about dirty windshields, but had never waited and made him actually clean it. The student didn't even know where the cleaning supplies were kept. The instructor, in an attempt to keep to his schedule, had inadvertently taught the student that clean windshields were nice, but not worth doing anything to achieve.

I wish him a good flight and head back to the hotel, knowing I'll have a day off tomorrow while the airplane is at the spa.

Attitude Does Not Equal Authority

The next day there is no delay. I wake, eat breakfast and go. Today I add two litres to the left engine and one to the right. You can tell we're getting close to maintenance when the oil consumption increases, but I haven't burned that much since yesterday. I'm putting more in than what is required just to replace what was there yesterday. A greater amount of oil will, I hope, amortize the cooling job across more oil so I won't need to use the cowl flaps so much. I text my fellow pilot to ask him if he can buy some more oil today. We're almost out. I clean the windows, give a straightforward briefing to a person who my instincts say would not appreciate the silly one, and we go fly.

We're just five hundred feet below the clouds, working fairly near the airport. A little Cessna takes off and joins us up here too. I later looked it up by its registration and learned that it's a privately owned C150 registered to two owners, one in Dawson Creek and one in nearby Pouce Coupé. I wonder who they are, not living together, different last names, but sharing an airplane. Every time the pilot position reports, she is much lower than us, and having recently been in a C150 I think that's because she doesn't want to take the time and trouble to climb this high. They land after perhaps an hour. Probably she was just up for a joyride.

We fly over Pouce Coupé and kill a few minutes trying to decide how to pronounce it. I think it retains close to the French pronunciation (it means "cut thumb") and rhymes with Moose Toupée, but for all we know it rhymes with Mouse Poop. After six or seven hours of equally inane conversation we are overhead the airport ready to land. "Down in six minutes," I tell the FSS guy, and my touchdown is six minutes and six seconds later. My sense of victory is brief, because I flub the flare glancing inside to check my time accuracy. Dork. Smooth landings require follow through.

After I exit the runway I stop on the apron and set the parking brake. As I wait for all the equipment to be shut down properly in the back, I text my flight follower and discover that I am to fly to another destination right away. Then I get a call from the other pilot saying that he will do the flight, to avoid giving me an overlong duty day in case there's a long hold. He's probably been awake for almost as long as I have, but I don't argue because he didn't fly yesterday at all. And his duty day has probably only just started, He may have been napping all morning. I taxi to the fuel pumps.

There are a couple of people standing in the "secure area" square outside the terminal, and some small pieces of furniture possibly symbolically blockading it. I pull around the outer boundary of the square and park at the pumps. There's a guy there in ear defenders, reflective vest, etcetera and as the mission specialist disembarks ear-defender guy asks him how much fuel we are taking. I hear "You'll have to ask the pilot" so I come out and tell him 700-800 litres, but I want to check with the pilot of the next flight first. He's on his way, so I'll start fuelling while I wait for him to arrive. The guy asks me if I want 100LL or jet and I tell him 100LL and then get out my credit card to activate the pump while he unfurls the hose. He tells me that a Hawkair plane is coming in for fuel too.

"Do you work for Hawkair?" I ask.

He gives an answer that I don't remember verbatim but that was roughly equivalent to "I work for you too." It's not uncommon for the operator of a self-serve pump to provide fuel service when he's around, especially when the pump is busy, so this isn't incredibly irregular. I turn on the pump once the credit card has been verified, and he pumps fuel. He momentarily knocks the nozzle out of the tank and sprays fuel all over the wing. Some pilots freak out about this sort of thing, but it's probably about 30 cents worth of fuel. "It happens," I say, to let him know I'm not fuming at him. He puts the nozzle back in the tank and I open the other tanks I want filled. I tell him that I will be right back. After seven hours in a plane, the sound of rushing fuel is not conducive to continued bladder control. I can also see the other pilot approaching from about 30 metres away, so he'll be here to say what fuel he wants before this tank, which I know he wants, is full. I wave to the approaching pilot and head towards the terminal.

I can see the Hawkair on its landing rollout, as I recall it was a small Dash-8. At this point there's a number of people on the ramp in high visibility clothing and ear defenders, plus a woman in a skirt. She's the only one who isn't visibly doing something, so I ask her, over the roar of the turboprop taxiing in, if she knows if it's okay if I cross the yellow square to the terminal without a badge. She says yes, but I won't be able to get out, and I say yes I know. I have the code. I bolt for the toilet. That done, I go out the groundside door, around the building to the codelocked side gate, dial in the code and jog back to my airplane. The person who was fuelling is now gone, the pump turned off and the fuel nozzle left propped in an open tank, and a number of people, including skirt woman, are glaring at me. "There was someone here fuelling me when I left!" I say by way of apology, and take the nozzle out of the tank so I can restart the fuel pump without risking it ricocheting out.

"It's self-serve fuel!" she says. True, and I have no idea why the guy was helping me, but he was. And my coworker should have arrived to take over before he had to flee. Then I realize that he is at the pumps, but skirt woman has him cornered, as she is chewing him out for walking in between the Hawkair and the terminal. "It's a SECURED airplane," she tells him. "It's going to VANCOUVER!" In fact she's so busy chewing him out that I think she failed to see me do exactly the same thing moments ago. I thought she meant I wouldn't be able to get out again because I wouldn't be able to get back through the CATSA people to exit the terminal, not that I wouldn't be allowed back in the yellow square.

The Hawkair turboprop is now parked behind our airplane and although the Jet A hoses reach it in that position, they can't start fuelling until I'm done, because the keypad that controls both tanks is shared. If she would stop hassling my co-worker we could get out of the way faster. My coworker rekeys the fuel pump and we finish fuelling while everyone glares at us. I mean WHAT? Sure the Dash-8 is bigger than me, but there's no reservation system for the pumps. I was here, pumping fuel before it even landed, and so there's no way I can be accused of having cut in front. If there is some reason why it should have priority, the young man with the reflective vest could have told me to push off and wait. Yes, it does take a while to fuel my airplane. But it probably takes a while to fuel a Dash-8 too, and we're departing immediately to Edmonton, with the pilot's duty day ticking. We have every right to be here. We ignore the glares and chat about how he didn't have a chance to buy more oil yet, but it's available at the airport, and how we should get badged so we don't get hassled for doing our jobs. Skirt woman (who wears absolutely no symbolic or official badge of authority, not even a reflective vest or a clipboard) says it wouldn't make any difference. No one is allowed to go between the airplane and the terminal. It's SECURED! Because it's going to VANCOUVER. We remain unimpressed. We've both been to Vancouver.

When I get to the last tank, I give my coworker the nozzle to finish fuelling so that I can remove my gear from the airplane and let him get on his way. I leave the key on the floor inside the rear boarding door and tell him that. Everything done, I wish him a good flight, pick up my bags and the in-flight garbage and very carefully go around the Dash-8, outside the magic yellow square, not between it and the terminal. At no point during my transit am I any closer to the Dash-8 than I was while I was at the fuel pumps. When I re-emerge to her view on the other side, skirt woman comes over to yell at me.

"You're not supposed to be there! If Transport Canada were here ... This airplane is SECURED to go to VANCOUVER!"

I gesture at where my feet are. "I'm not inside the yellow square." I resist the temptation to touch it with my toes.

She says it doesn't matter, that the nearest I'm allowed to be, "is .. is .. there!" while gesturing vaguely westward. She may be pointing at a distant maintenance hangar. It is not clear. She says I need to be escorted if I go anywhere. I literally throw up my hands. "Escort me" I say in exasperation.

"Where do you want to go?"

"A FOD bin."

She doesn't know what that is, but one of the rampees does and gestures for her. She escorts me to a big yellow drum and I throw out my in-flight garbage, and then continue past to the exit gate.

I am in general a law-abiding, cooperative person. I have read all the NOTAM and posted signs for this airport and I have worked at airports large and small all over North America. I was actively trying to comply with the security protocol. Moreover skirt woman had ample opportunity to explain her particular security rules. I initially approached her for instructions. Then she stood around and glared at me for five minutes or so while I pumped gas. She could have spent that time explaining her rules. The aren't the same at every airport. I have had many cordial conversations with security people as I stood just outside the magic yellow square. I was willing to grant her the authority to dictate limitations. Just tell me lady, please, what I may not do; tell me what I need to do. I'm not cowed by the mere presence of an airplane bigger than mine, so without further instructions it's business as usual. She did nothing to indicate what procedure I must to follow in order to respect the "secured airplane," until the third time I crossed the ramp.

Sigh. She probably hates that aspect of her job, and doesn't really like confronting people, so that by the time she does she becomes bitchy and ranting. And now I'm bitchy and ranting, too. My customer also ran afoul of her, but because he didn't have to be on the ramp he just fled to his truck until I was done. We go to Canadian Tire on the way back and rant to each other about the difference between authoritative and bitchy. I buy a flashlight to replace the broken one in the airplane. As we leave we notice the "secure" Hawkair taking off. My customer notes snidely that no one is clinging to the tail, and that's enough to snap me out of my rant.

I finally have a chance to get those groceries I've been needing, at a chain supermarket across the street from the hotel. The appearance of the produce section is a bit of a shock. There is hardly any green, and what there is, is rotten. There are paved roads coming in here, but I guess I'm further north, culturally speaking, than I thought. Despite the paucity of produce, I'm so hungry that most other things look good, and I buy a bunch of stuff I shouldn't. The produce truck pulls in just as I'm crossing the street back to the hotel. I hope they are bringing something fresh and green. Also I was so eager to escape from skirt woman that I completely forgot to hunt down that oil.

The customer calls to say that I have a 05:30 report tomorrow, so I eat some of my groceries and go straight to bed.

---

His Casket Was Almost Orange!

And here's an update too interesting to leave to the people who follow old comments. A few days ago I posted "His Casket is Actually Orange," a short blog entry on the passing of David Warren, inventor of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. His son, Peter Warren, stopped by the comments, and fortunately father and son share a great sense of humour because Peter answered the blog's flippant questions with both a link to a picture of the coffin (apparently they did consider painting it orange, but went with plain wood), adorned with messages from family, the words "Flight Recorder Inventor: Do not Open," plus his actual last words. "I was a lucky bastard."

I love it. I've never seen anything like it in Canada. Everyone is going to die eventually and I think there's a lot to gain in admitting humour and personality to the last rites.

I Almost Win A Car

I almost won a car today. Really. Here's how you almost win a car. You get up in the morning, do your daily exercises, and check the weather. Then you go and discuss the day's flying with the client and they decide to postpone take-off for a while, so you use the time to do paperwork and personal stuff. I called the PRM regarding getting an extension instead of getting a mechanic to come up here, or flying south to Edmonton for the next inspection. Then I mended the torn journey log cover with packing tape. While doing that I noticed that the most recent weight and balance update (about half a pound difference because of an autopilot repair) wasn't entered in the front of the journey log. I don't think it's legally required to be there. We carry all the official W&B docs already, but I updated it. There are lots of lines for updates.

The a tech comes by to ask if I need anything from the store. I say no, then think about it. There are still a couple of hours before we go flying so I should go out for a walk, and get some groceries. That reminds me that I have a phone message to cal my home grocery store, something I can do now because it is during business hours and I'm not in an airplane. And that's when I found out I almost won a car.

Last time I was home and bought a load of groceries, they came with coupons and things, including entry forms for a draw. I took the forms home, filled them all out, and then actually made a special trip to walk back to the store and put them all the barrel before the draw date. I remember folding them in my secret winning way, putting each form in and then turning the barrel before the next one, because you don't want them all in the same place. And it turns out that my name was drawn. (No I won't reveal my secret winning folding technique). Now I'm eligible for the draw-off between the winners from different stores, but I can't win the car because I have to be there in person for the final drawing. I asked if I could send a proxy in my place, but no, it has to be me.

My life is so exciting. This really describes the last five years, doesn't it? The end result is exactly the same as if I had stayed in one spot, but I've had the up and down of the roller coaster the whole way. You know what? I guess I still like roller coasters. As long as the ups and downs aren't so violent I am left bruised. I already have a car that I like and it's only five years old, so I probably would have sold the new one and given half the proceeds to charity, anyway.

Back when I was a kid I entered a contest and resolved that if I won I would give half of my winnings to charity. I won. It was a trip for two, and as I was a kid I had to take a parent, and that was a kind of lame way of giving away half, but the prize included spending money so I did gave half of that away. I think it was to the War Amps, because they helped kids that were missing arms or legs and I really liked having arms and legs, so it seemed like a good idea to help such kids out. I still remember my parents receiving the donation receipt addressed to "Mr. <MyLastName>" and asking each other puzzledly if they had sent a donation. They were calling it a "tax receipt" and I knew bad things happened if you didn't do your taxes properly so I 'fessed up to being the one who had made the donation. I'm not sure how a kid managed to send a donation. Perhaps I had received my spending money in traveller's cheques, or maybe I had a bank account that came with a chequebook. Anyway, giving away half of winnings or found money became my tradition, and I like to think that the ensuing karma makes me win a little more often than most.

Then I'm called to fly, before the rescheduled time that I was planning to have bought groceries before. I ask to eat first. The customer understands about fuelling both the airplane and the pilot, so agrees and I say I'll be back as soon as possible. I run down the block to Tim Horton's and inhale a sandwich on the way back, wiping the mayonnaise off my face before presenting myself with my flight bag ready to go. The client is surprised, "I thought I had longer."

"Take your time," I assure him. "I'm at your service, not vice versa." I am literally paid to wait for the client. Five minutes is nothing. A couple of hours isn't really either. Days is not unknown. Waiting for the client consumes a greater portion of my time than flying the plane for the client. I try to instill this in FOs when I fly charter. "If the customer is an hour late, the customer is on time. If we are one minute late, we are late." This applies more if the customer has chartered the airplane for the day, rather than for one flight in a day of flights for different people.

At the airplane I add oil to both engines, then give a quick passenger briefing. I know this guy has heard this a hundred times, so I make it amusing, advising him, for example, of the location of "onboard amenities for your pleasure" while pointing out the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. I show him the operation of the emergency exits, and then add "In case of emergency egress of bodily fluids we have pee bags, sick bags and kleenex." Saves clean-up if your pax know where to find that stuff.

The engines start beautifully and I call up Flight Services as I'm taxiing out. Just as I enter the single mid-runway taxiway, a Cherokee (small single-engine airplane) calls three minutes out. Eh. There's probably plenty of time for me to backtrack, turn around and take off, but I don't see him, and he might be closer than he thinks. I don't want to cut him off. I skootch over to the side of the taxiway so he can get by me as he comes off the runway, and announce that I'm holding short. Then the Cherokee makes another call, "I'm going to join downwind, or base, if that's okay?" Aargh. If he's still deciding how he's going to join the circuit, he's more than three minutes from landing. I should have gone. I could probably still go, but I wait. The FSS guy declines to advise Cherokee dude on circuit joining and Cherokee dude works it out for himself.

He lands, rolls out and just as I am considering keying the mike to ask him if he will have any trouble getting by me on the taxiway, the FSS guy asks him the same question. Nice situational awareness for someone who is talking to airplanes at three different airports, only one of which he can see. The Cherokee pilot says there is lots of room and goes by. I taxi out and as I'm backtracking I hear him asking, "where can I park?" The FSS guy tells him he can pull in anywhere around the edge of the apron. Next question, "I need fuel, is there a truck?" The FSS guy patiently explains the self-serve pumps. "Can I park here?" asks the pilot.

Finally the FSS guy points out, "I'm in Peace River. I can't actually see you, so it looks good to me." I'm at the numbers with pre-takeoff checks complete so I call rolling and add, "and we look good too." I check the clock and it took barely over a minute to enter the runway, backtrack, turn around and complete pretakeoff checks.

Not that I'm never that guy. But I try to read my publications closely enough in advance that I'm not that guy. Anyway I should have known how long it takes to backtrack a runway that size. I should know exactly how long things like that take me. Why don't I? I should time them all.

It's windy today at altitude, so tough to maintain proper groundspeed and engine temps too. And it's a bit bumpy. I eat almonds and sesame snacks. You know those Sezme things from Poland with four flat sticky wafers in one package? If you don't, you should, unless you're allergic to nuts or something. I love them. They are tasty, unsquishable, not damaged by melting or freezing and last forever in my flight bag. Well until I eat them.

The customer is talkative and friendly, which makes the day go well. He can live with the bumps. We talk to Ft. St. John radio for a bit and then come back to Peace River. They really have the picture over there. After six hours of flying in and out of the Dawson Creek area the person on the radio still knows who we are and what we are doing.

We circle above the airport for a bit. (Don't ask, it's one of the mysterious things we do). Just as I am ready to land, a medevac--might be the same crew as yesterday--calls nine minutes out. I start my timer to keep track of him and call, "Be down in five." I fly away from the airport in order to drop down and circle back. Big circle, because I have strict constraints on my bank angle today so can't crank it around like I'm flying an airplane. Nothing over twelve degrees. (Again, don't ask).

The five minute mark passes while I'm on final and I note that my wheels actually touch at 6:20 elapsed. I exit the runway and call clear, noting that that medivac was down at eleven something. I'm thinking everyone underestimates their time to the field. I'll bet those Peace River guys know that and can handicap us for it, too.

I approach the fuel pump just as a Cessna 180 pulls up. I offer to let him go first, but he demurs. I fuel the airplane. The fuel comes out the nozzle at a reasonable rate, but I need rather a lot of it. Hundreds of litres later, I shut off the fuel pump, and take my receipt. Instead of coiling the hose all up, I just move the unreeled part out of the way and lay the nozzle on the ground, because Cessna guy is still waiting, and this will be quicker and easier for both of us. I start up and pull away to park. I walk back by the pumps to apologize for taking so long and just then he is picking up the nozzle to fuel. It is somehow jammed on, and he gets fuel all over himself before he can shut it off. He says the nozzle was locked open, which is weird, because unlike car gas station nozzles, avgas nozzles don't have the lock-open tab. Plus I know I didn't lock it open, and I definitely turned off the fuel, because that's what triggers receipt printing. He doesn't blame me, which is good because I can't see any way that it is my fault. I commiserate and note that at least it's not Jet A. That stuff is nasty.

After pumping all that fuel I have to pee, but the terminal is locked, so I get in the truck and go back to the hotel. I had dinner with my co-worker at Boston Pizza, and told him about how I almost won a car.

His Casket is Actually Orange

According to Yahoo News, David Warren, the inventor of the aircraft "black box", died last week. He was an Australian, and his father died in an airplane crash when he was nine. Here's an Australian article, with different details.

"Black box" is the nickname given to both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, both of which seem to have been included in Mr. Warren's invention. To come up with the idea of such devices was pretty visionary in the 1950s when instant recording was a novelty and data recording usually on paper reels. I wonder if the idea was germinating in his mind waiting for the technology to be up to the task. And then he made the idea into a working model. Both the idea and the technology could easily have died without being adopted, as I'm sure many useful safety ideas have, so credit to Australia for putting it into law.

The CVR/FDR comprise a peculiar piece of safety technology. They do no good whatsoever to the pilots or passengers whose aircraft they are installed in, but can provide huge benefits to others, later. I have worked in an airplane with a CVR and in another that was supposed to have one, but for which management successfully obtained a waiver from Transport to spend the money on a more immediately useful piece of technology. Most of the time the airplane was flown single crew, which I think was the grounds for the exemption.

Neither article cites Mr. Warren's last words. Do you think they were "Oh shit" or "What's it doing now"?

Dawson Something

After picking up a part in Regina, and stuffing it in the nose locker so it will be available wherever we are for the next maintenance, I'm going to Dawson Creek. That's Dawson Creek in Northern British Columbia, not to be confused with Dawson City in the Yukon, Dawson's Creek on the WB network, or just plain Dawson all over the place, including a crater on the moon. Yeah, not going to the moon this trip. The O2 bottle only holds about ten hours of supplemental oxygen. The CFS tells me that there are two aerodromes in town, but I am not going to accept dispatch to the one that has a 2000' sloped turf strip and is operated by the Flying L Ranch, so there's no need to call the client to confirm the landing site. The Flying L Ranch sounds like a cool place, but so does the main Dawson Creek airport. It has two separate prepared landing surfaces: one for landing on wheels and one for landing on floats. That is, there's a runway-shaped water-filled trench to the left of the main runway. There's no tower, but the mandatory frequency there is remoted to Peace River radio from 1330Z to 0530Z, which means that when I call, a guy in Alberta will answer.

Weather looks agreeable between hither and yon, despite a steep pressure gradient so I depart, with the addition of another crew member who happens to have been working in the area on his other job, making it an easy pick up. I'm not quite sure what happened to his vehicle. I know a pilot who can tell you off the top of her head how much it costs to ship a car by train from one part of the country to another. Others just own semi-abandoned cars in various places. There ought to be a special pilot car insurance rate for people who only get to use their cars when they aren't flying in another province.

The fuel number is listed in the CFS under "Military" for some reason. Maybe I misread it. They agreed to sell us fuel even though we carry no firearms or bombs, and came fairly quickly.

Dawson Creek is north and west of here. I flew and he manned the charts and radios. We passed fairly close to Saskatoon, so gave them a call to position report and update the weather. I initially just tuned the YXE ATIS for a local altimeter setting, but it was almost an hour out of date and it's always good to talk to someone en route; the FSS will volunteer SIGMETs and other hazards. We check the charts carefully looking for the new boundary between Edmonton and Winnipeg Radio before we call. We identify ourselves and position report, saying we are VFR between Regina and Dawson Creek. Our request is very standard "an altimeter setting and current weather at destination." We at first assume we have a Winnipegger on the line, as he had to ask for the ident of the reasonably large airport that is our destination, but then the conversation got weirder.

Us: It's Yankee Delta Quebec.

Him: Dawson Creek altimeter two nine nine three.

Us: [Silence]

Him: Did you want the rest of the weather?

Us: Yes please

Him: [reads entire METAR for YDQ]

Us: Thank you

Him: [Silence]

Us: [to each other] He's not going to give us a local altimeter setting?

We call back and ask for a local altimeter setting and he provides one. That probably doesn't sound weird to most people, but usually you can't talk to an FSS without being given at least one, and often a whole string of altimeter settings for the route ahead. An altimeter setting is the FSS version of "hello." It was especially relevant that day because of the rapid change in setting along our route. Newbie, I guess.

We could see we would clip the edge of Edmonton's control area. I gritted my teeth as I reached for the CFS, hoping that they weren't one of the zones that have started demanding advance codes for transit. I'm going to have to start making that a part of my VFR flight planning now. I look at where I'm going and where I'm coming from, but I am too often guilty of assuming that the old rules apply for VFR transit. Calgary, I learned the hard way, insists on an advance telephone call for a transponder code. Edmonton, fortunately, doesn't yet, but I promise to check each new edition of the CFS before each planned transit through their airspace. We looked up the appropriate frequency for Edmonton Terminal and let them know where we were and where we were going. No problem. They gave us a squawk code (and an altimeter setting) and cleared us through their airspace. We saw three different airports we've worked out of in the last year or so and then we passed out of their airspace to the north and they cleared us en route to squawk VFR. And updated our altimeter setting.

I was flying at 6500', a VFR altitude appropriate for going west, high enough to be out of the daytime turbulence but not so high as to require oxygen or turning on the heater. As I continued east a layer of daytime cumulus cloud was starting to form, building to just about my level. I dodged a few, and then as the layer thickened, mused about my choice, "Up or down? the eternal question." Down would put me into more turbulence, closer to control zones and terrain. Up requires me to increase the power for the climb and then readjust everything again, and the cumulus tops will build another couple of thousand feet before destination, requiring me to do it all over again. Pilots, if you haven't gathered already, can be really lazy. You want me to move levers? It's not a really difficult choice, just a topic of conversation. Pilots can be hard up for those, too. I got a new altimeter setting form flight services. It is higher, good news weatherwise, but putting in a higher altimeter setting shows me at a higher indicated altitude. If I descend again to an indicated 6500' feet I'll really be in the cloud tops. So I take the head start and climb to 8500'.

This works fine for a while, and then the clouds, as predicted, build back to my level. By this time I'm in the vicinity of Grande Prairie. We won't be in their zone, but call them for traffic advisories anyway. Their new altimeter setting puts me back in the tops again, so I descend back to 6500', which is now cloud-free, thanks to the fact that cloud bases tend to gradually rise during the day, and that my new 6500' is a few hundred feet below my old 6500', thanks to the rising pressure. People who have blindly memorized "from high to low, look out below" without close regard for the underlying physics may need to stop and ponder that for a moment. We report the altitude change and call clear as we continue to the west. They thank us for checking in. It's good when towers do that. Sometimes pilots are ambivalent about calling an air traffic agency we don't have to, and when the controlling agency's response sounds like we've bothered them or that they couldn't care less, it results in subtle pilot behaviour modification. But every one who acknowledges the utility of just knowing there's an airplane out there beyond their sphere of control reinforces our motivation to call.

Now we're almost at Dawson Creek. We call the FSS and the guy in Peace River answers us, as advertised. He can't see the traffic out here in BC, but he keeps track of it. There's someone in a single departing, something else small and slow arriving, shouldn't be any conflicts. Then a medevac faster than us checks in behind us. We're almost overhead and hear a five miles out call. Is this going to work out? Oh phew that five mile call was the slow, departing traffic, not the incoming medevac. We land, after jokingly lining up on the water runway for a photo op, then call clear and taxi for fuel.

It's a more civilized-looking airport than we expected. It has a classy new passenger terminal with a big yellow "secure area" square painted on the apron outside of it, a little tower building (probably vacant, seeing as the radio service is remoted to Alberta) and lots of paved apron. There are two fuel pumps either side of a sign that gives prices (good prices, too) for avgas and jet, but while the right tank has a Jet A sticker on it, there is no avgas marking on the left tank. Weird. The paper cover of the journey log tears on the seat pocket as we take it out to record the flight. Grr. I always buy the hardcover version when I have a choice. But they keep replacing this one before it's full, dunno why.

We unload the airplane and I give the receipts for the ferry fuel to the customer: they are responsible for that. The Regina receipt is just a truck fuel ticket, not a credit card receipt, because the truck driver didn't process the credit card, just called in the information. Client needs a proper receipt. I didn't bring a CFS in from the plane, but the fuel number is in the recently called list in my phone. They fax a copy of the credit card receipt and everyone is happy.

Dinner is at some chain restaurant where they casually offer you garlic bread with your entree, then charge you $3.50 for it. One slice.

I did get a chance to call the airline captain who was one of the first to encourage me in all this. As I was approaching Regina, he had been just leaving, ferrying a smaller airplane in the other direction. I believe that brings his home collection of aircraft to five. He's well, just retired, still happily married to his original wife, and having a great time. I'll see if I can get out to see him when work and other aspects of life let up around ... January I think.

Baffin Island Hatchlings

This video is perfectly named, because the behaviour of the parachutists in their wing suits is exactly like downy chicks trying to copy their parents flight before they have developed the feathers, muscles and cardiovascular system required for flight. They jump up and down, fall on their bellies and crash into one another, all of which tones them up so that when they are fully fledged they can fly, albeit with an initial amusing lack of directional control.

I like they way they have used the tent as an egg metaphor, too.

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On a completely different topic,

This is a good review site for pilot-related iPod apps.