Adventures of an Aviatrix, in which a pilot travels the skies and the treacherous career path of Canadian commercial aviation, gaining knowledge and experience without losing her step, her licence, or her sense of humour.
Li Jingchun, a farmer in China has built what amounts to an art installation or perhaps a plaything, a tribute to his love of airplanes. It's something that he's clearly been inspired to create. It's fun to look at and he has every right to be proud of it, but the media coverage is strange.
Not strange that it's covered at all. I'm assuming the story originated in the PRC, a local man does cool thing story. The same photos and pretty much the same story have appeared in other countries' press. There's nothing wrong with the news featuring a person pursuing an unusual hobby, it's just that the media seems to be unquestioningly accepting that the man built an airplane. An airplane is an aircraft that generates lift by airflow over surfaces that remain fixed while in flight. Look at the picture. Is the media humouring him, or do they really think an engine would solve the issues with this "aircraft"?
It's made of recycled iron plates. There is no camber to the wings or stabilizer. There are no control surfaces or provisions to attach any. The wing surface area is tiny. The propeller is clearly ornamental. Am I just being a spoilsport? I would love to play in Li Jingchun's creation with him. I think it's marvellous. But why does this bother me? There are two reasons.
One is scientific literacy. I'm scared that the people who wrote edited and approved these stories for publication can't tell that's a creative, fun structure inspired by airplane form, and not an airplane. I'm scared that readers depending on media for information will take it at face value that the structure in question is an airplane, thereby discounting the skill and calculation that goes into actually designing and constructing airplanes. Lack of respect for knowledge, skill and engineering leads to lack of willingness to fund education, research and safety.
And the other is that there are people who really do design and build airplanes in their back yards, a project as different from Li Jingchun's as writing a story in Chinese is from creating faux-Chinese writing wallpaper. Many homebuilt aircraft builders don't have access to the education and research that I just whined about in the previous paragraph, but function is inspiring form.
It's not clear whether Ding Shilu's project actually flies, but it appears he designed it himself with some knowledge of aerodynamics. Here's an EAA critique of the might-be airplane.
I don't have this guy's name, or a picture of anything other than his crotch, and his creation isn't an airplane either. It's a freaking gyrocopter. If you think the footage bluescreeened, there's more here, along with someone else in a homebuilt helicopter.
Yang Weiming built his from a kit, and the test flight was reportedly his first solo. Here's video of the flight. While the Gizmodo article suggests that the gyrocopter pilot avoided showing his face because he was doing something frowned on by authorities, the Chinese article implies that the government is quite proud of this activity and puts no restrictions at all on experimental aircraft.
I'm VFR inbound to a controlled airport on a day with a high thin overcast. Beautiful day for flying: no glare, little turbulence, old snow still sparkling on the ground below, but the runways and taxiways perfectly clear. The controller tells me to call ten miles out and asks another aircraft to report "over the OMNI."
How retro. The OMNI? I think the term might be more common in the US than Canada, but it's still pretty old fashioned. Omni means all. A moment here for the non-pilots, because I think I've left them behind in a cloud of terminology a few times recently, and because I still remember the thrill of excitement I felt on first learning how the thing I'm about to explain works. It was like a grade nine physics class come to life and become useful. There's a thing in aviation called Very High Frequency Omnidirectional (Radio) Ranging. Very High Frequency is always and already abbreviated VHF, which is already a type of radio, hence the thing itself is called a VOR. ("Vee-Oh-Arr").
A VOR is two things, one that's on the ground and sends signals and one that's in your plane and receives, interprets and displays the meaning of the signals. The one the air traffic controller referred to was obviously the ground-based one. It sends a VHF radio signal on a published frequency. You know that a radio waves are depicted as squiggles, sine waves oscillating from start to finish, a little repeated radio shape at frequency times per second. That's what frequency means. Now this is the cool part. The same frequency signal is sent out twice. Once starting at the same point all the way around and the second time starting at the same point at north, but offset by one three-hundred sixtieth of the cycle for each degree of the compass away from north the signal is sent.
Now the percentage of you that know how VORs work are either bored or laughing at my obsession with these. It's probably the fifth time I've explained this now aged technology on my blog. And those of you who let your eyes glaze over at anything math or physics related are waiting for this paragraph to be over. But if there's one reader who didn't know this simple, brilliant navigation solution and is now about to grasp it, it's worth boring everyone else. Because the VOR receiver in the airplane measures the difference in phase (how many three-hundred-sixtieths, i.e. degrees, different the two signals are) and displays it as a needle swing. (Nowadays it can be displayed digitally, too, but that's not the super cool part). Do you see it? The difference between the two signals is the bearing from the ground station to the receiver.
I'm sorry if that was never the coolest thing you'd ever heard. I promise to find a more modern piece of technology to rave about soon. But nothing is as elegant anymore, now that everything new has a computer in it. Computers are amazing, but they don't have the simple brilliant simplicity of an airspeed indicator.
Hey look, this flight sim site agrees with me. "The VHF Omnidirectional Range navigation system, VOR, was probably the most significant aviation invention other than the jet engine." True! Jet engines are so amazing that they sound almost as impossible as this perpetual motion air car, but jets are real.
Just as there are certain streets I shouldn't walk down, there are certain parts of the Internet to which I should know better than to go, but sometimes I take a wrong turn. As Randall Munroe lamented, "Someone is wrong on the Internet."
I wasn't brave enough to seek out the site the question appeared on to look at the answers given to this individual, and I know it's not fair to call them out. I have no idea how old they are nor what opportunity they have had to learn information seeking and critical thinking strategies. At least they asked.
When I taught meteorology in ground school, I used to go around the room and have everyone name a place water was found in the environment. They were usually enough people trying to be clever that the resulting list included ponds, lakes, rivers, oceans, people, animals, martinis, glaciers, the air itself, clouds, fog and so on. We'd go through the list and discuss the phase of water present in each case. Almost everyone started the class thinking that clouds were composed of water vapour. A lot of them knew that water vapour was an invisible gas in the air around them, but for some reason they rarely saw this at odds with their ability to see clouds.
While there are "clouds of gas," unqualified "clouds" are made of water, in the form of liquid droplets and/or ice crystals. The higher the altitude, the colder the air and the greater the proportion of ice to water in the cloud. The droplets may circulate upward and downward within a cloud, meaning that liquid water may freeze and ice may melt, but more dangerously, liquid water may be cooled below zero celsius yet not immediately freeze. This is dangerous because supercooled liquids tend to freeze on contact with a surface, such as an airplane flying through them. There's a readout on my dashboard giving the outside air temperature, and when that temperature is between about +4 and -15C, an amber light turns on, warning me that I'm in the icing zone. Any visible liquid moisture (clouds, fog, rain) at that altitude could be supercooled, and turn to ice on my airplane.
I don't have an asteroid warning light. Maybe on the Starship Enterprise.
An earlier version of this said the carrier was Alligiant. My brain must have riffed off "alleged." Good grief I'm a terrible blogger.
Anyway, these guys received vouchers good for free or very cheap first class airline travel from a family friend. They turned up dressed like paying passengers. Their attire was within the bounds of public decency and they wouldn't get a second glance boarding with regular tickets.
The problem is that they weren't flying on regular tickets. They were flying on buddy passes. The airline wasn't going to make any money off of them. Non-rev buddy travel is the airline equivalent of a restaurant employee being allowed to serve left over food to friends at the end of the night. Once all the paying customers are served, the buddies can have some, as long as they behave excruciatingly well, look so respectable that paying customers never guess they are freeloaders, and understand that they will eat what they are served and that there might not be any left for them.
Restaurant food isn't as perishable as airline seats--an empty airline seat becomes unusable by anyone the moment the door is closed--so if restaurants allow their employees to feed their friends, that's probably only in the form of allowing them to take leftovers home. Restaurant employees would probably get in trouble if their friends came in dressed casually to see if there was any free food available.
"But," you might say, "this is different. The airline has a program set up that allow employees' friends to come and get those free seats. They don't have to wait in the alley out of sight of paying customers until after closing." Well they kind of do. They have to wait in the boarding lounge until just before the flight is closed, and they are in no way guaranteed a seat, even if there are empty ones. And they have to be invisible, or at least completely inoffensive, to paying customers.
I'm going to take the men at their word that they had no idea that there was a dress code for first class travel as a non-revenue passenger. I suspect they received the pass from a family member who got it from the friend, and not directly through a friend, because an airline employee with any sense at all will, "put the fear of God into my BP riders," letting them know "I would CUT you," as comments on my Facebook feed put it. If a non-rev behaves inappropriately, the employee loses non-rev travel privileges. The rules were probably printed on the back of the pass, but I can't really fault the guys for not reading the fine print on the ticket.
Every airline has its own non-rev rules. This site lists them for many airlines. I found US Airways here. Including:
An agent will call you to the
podium give you a boarding pass if a seat is available on the flight. Please do not
hover at the counter asking to be boarded. If the agent asks you to check your carry-
on luggage, please comply immediately. If your flight is sold out and you are not
boarded, please wait until the agent is free before asking for assistance. The agent
will either help you or direct you to another source for information.
During Travel
Please maintain a polite, appropriate demeanor during guest pass
travel and refrain from discussing guest pass travel privileges or the fact that you are
flying at a reduced fare.
Dress Guidelines
Guest pass travelers in Coach or First Class/Envoy may wear casual attire.
US Airways asks its employees and their pass ride
rs to exercise good judgment when selecting
their travel attire. Clothes should be in good repair, neat, clean, and conservative. Unacceptable
attire in any class includes any clothing that is torn, faded, soiled, wrinkled, cut−off, has ragged
edges or holes; clothing with offensive graphics
or terminology; and provocative or revealing
clothing such as micro/miniskirts, bare midriff, halter, tank, tube or bra tops.
Coach Class: Eligible Pass Riders may wear casual attire, including shorts, blue jeans,
sandals, and athletic footwear.
First or Envoy Class: Pass travelers may wear casual attire, including blue or black
denim attire, skirts, capri-style pants, and sandals, provided it is well−groomed, neat,
clean, and conservative. Unacceptable attire in First Class/Envoy includes tee shirts,
shorts, jogging suits, athletic gear, baseball−style caps, athletic shoes, beach footwear,
flip−flops including Croc−style footwear.
So jeans are okay, but not t-shirts or baseball caps. They were fine in the regular cabin, but didn't meet the requirements for non-rev travel in first class.
The document at this link describes AA's non-rev dress code for first class, including no denim clothing of any kind or colour, no athletic shoes and no skorts. (Skorts is not a typo. Who knew that the scourge of hybrid shorts-skirts was so great they had to be banned?) Notice that t-shirts are grounds for denied boarding to non-revs in any class on that airline. The price of your free ticket is complying with mid-twentieth century dress codes and being well behaved. Here's an e-how on the subject.
The pair probably wouldn't have upset anyone in first class with their casual attire, but on the off chance that a paying passenger is going to be put off by the presence of an under-dressed seatmate, the under-dressed person darn well better have paid a regular fare. There actually IS a cost of putting someone in an empty seat in first class: the person who paid to sit in the next seat is slightly less satisfied, and first class customers either pay a lot of money for their seats, or fly a lot and earn the miles to pay for the upgrade. Either way, you don't want that person to believe that another airline will give them a better chance at a row to themselves.
It's still possible that the US Airways non-rev dress codes are usually waived, and that gate agent who sent the men away to change was selectively applying the dress code because of personal racial prejudice. I imagine that is what the men's lawyer will have to argue to make the case, although the suit claims that they purchased the tickets. Technically they did, as the buddy passes gave a reduced rate, not completely free travel.
Increased airline loads make it hard enough to use a non-rev pass these days that many employees prefer to buy tickets. That combined with the terrible publicity airlines get from incidents like this might lead to the elimination of the privilege. Too bad.
I'm blogging about trying out a product, because it makes me feel important when people send me things for my opinion, and every once and a while this is fun to do. No one pays me to blog about any of the things they send me, nor threatens to take them away if I say mean things about their product. I'm not telling you what today's product is right off, because it has a kind of embarrassing name, and I have to work my way up to it. Nor am I telling you what it is right off, because I'm not really sure if it has an exact product category. "Clothing Accessory" would be appropriate. But it's not socks. I love socks. But I don't suppose anyone ever needs those tested. I'll test the heck out of any socks anyone needs testing.
I didn't immediately like today's product that much, but someone sent it to me to try and I was going to put it through its paces. I wanted to be fair and open-minded. The one they sent me is straw-coloured, a yellowy beige with a black design on it reminiscent of deciduous trees in winter or maybe neurons ... they come in a lot of colours and patterns, so the colour scheme of mine is not that important. I took it out of the package and stretched it around, finding it to be a short fabric tube, unfinished, no hem or edge or seam or anything, but it doesn't need one, as that would just add bulk, and it doesn't unravel. The diameter is sufficient to fit around my head stretched, or unstretched it sits loosely around my neck. When I felt it against my skin I wrote, "feels similar to poly-cotton." That was before I read the washing instructions. I'd assumed it was some kind of space age fabric, but actually it is a polyester cotton blend. Score one for the calibration level of my face. So one can put it in the washing machine, and then put it in the drier too, or just hang it up to dry and it will be dry in the morning.
But before I got to the bit about needing to wash it, I put it on like a hat and tyed a knot in the top. It hid the fact that my hair was not cooperating in any way, and distracted me from hating my hair. I took it off and hated my hair some more, then went out shopping with a friend, even though I wasn't dressed warmly enough. You know those early spring days when it looks warm because the sun is shining, but it's actually cold. And that's when I discovered one of the great uses of the thing. It has almost no volume, so you can keep it in your purse or pocket in a way you absolutely cannot do with a toque, but it's still pretty warm. Around my neck it works a lot like a scarf, except there are no loose ends, and it goes on instantly without needing wrapping or tying. I pulled it up over my ears to cover from my forehead to the nape of my neck, like a babushka scarf or a really skimpy hijab. (That's probably not a common word combination there). My friend--I hang with geeks--observed, "You're wearing a thing on your head," and when prompted ranked it four out of ten, on a scale of 1 being newspaper and garbage bags and 10 being mink and ermine, if mink and ermine weren't produced in cruel conditions. Four seems pretty low, but it's probably close to my sartorial average. I would not be playing Penny on the Big Bang Theory, the fashion-conscious woman-next-door role in a geek-oriented sitcom. I think if you know how to do fashion, it would probably look good on you. There are pictures and a video at the company's website on how to wear it. And the point is, newspaper and garbage bags are pretty damned warm, and less convenient to carry around than this. It was starting to grow on me.
I wore it work, and explained what it was. One of my co-workers says he had two of them. If you put it on before putting on a full-face motorcycle/snowmobile helmet you don't get your ears bent around during the helmet donning and removal process. I hate the ear-bending ordeal, so this is a big plus. The no ends, no ties, no loops, one-piece construction is especially beneficial in a cockpit where I already have headset cords, a shoulder belt, a reflective vest and oxygen lines in the vicinity of my head. It kept the seatbelt from chafing.
I also wore it for running. If you run you know the bit about going out in the cold wishing you were wearing a parka an then after a couple of kilometres needing to take off some of your clothes and wanting to throw them away. The Hoo Rag (there, I said it) works well for this. I can start off with it wrapped around my neck and/or head, and then as I warm up I can move it around, and take it off, without it being a burden. For the last kilometre or so I wrap it around my right hand, so that my fingers are warm enough to turn the key in the lock when I get home, without having had to wear gloves for the whole run. I threw it in the wash after that. It's been through the laundry a few times now, and kept its elasticity and colours.
So I like it. It's useful and convenient. I imagine it will provide rudimentary bug protection in the months to come. The title of this blog entry could be interpreted as the Hoo Rag's undoubted usefulness as makeshift protection for the nose and mouth in a dust storm, but that's not the reason for the title. It's an allusion to the product's greatest drawback: it's only one Hoo short of what my great-grandmother undoubtedly used in lieu of instrument air filters. Poly-cotton isn't all that absorbent, but in a desperate situation it could probably play that role too.
This gives me the chills, not for the usual "please don't let me forget to put the gear down" reason evoked by seeing someone else land on the belly. I imagine myself flight planned into Iqaluit of origin because having this happen ahead of me is one of the scenarios that goes through my head a lot. If I'm flying into Iqaluit I am probably carrying as much reserve fuel as I can, because there aren't a lot of places to stop n the north. It's like crossing an ocean. There's often a point of no return where I have to continue to my destination, because there's not enough fuel on board to return to Kangiqsualujjuaq. It's not a good position to be in. The weather could go bad. If there's any question of weather I wouldn't be continuing, but what if something happened right out of the blue, like a gear up landing on the only runway?
Maybe this guy (the registered owner has a man's name) knew he had a problem and held off until dusk, to burn extra fuel and wait long enough to let en route aircraft land before he shut the runway down. The type, it's a Twin Commanche has a reputation for landing gear issues. I don't know how deserved the reputation is. Airplanes do get reputations as unshakably as high school girls do, and sometimes for more trivial reasons. So maybe there was nothing wrong with the airplane. Maybe he just forgot to put the gear down. It could happen, long trip, unfamiliar airport, unfamiliar procedures. The airplane is registered to a private owner with a mailing address in Florida, so I'm assuming he doesn't fly into YFB every day.
Maybe I've been fighting a bigger headwind than I anticipated and I'm down to thirty minutes of fuel as I call up the FSS still ten minutes out. They advise me that traffic is a Twin Commanche planning left base for runway three five, no conflict and I continue inbound, to follow. Maybe I'm joining the circuit and I spot him on final, down below me and I don't see that the gear isn't down. I see him touch down and then I focus on completing my prelanding checklist and rolling out on final myself. And there I am on final with twenty minutes of fuel on board and I'm advised by either the landing pilot or the FSS that he will not be clearing the runway any time soon.
I'd spend precious fuel in the overshoot and then what? I'd already know I had nowhere else to go, so I'd throttle right back and configure for best endurance. CYFB has 9000' of runway, so it doesn't really matter where in that length the PA-30 is sitting, there's room for me. I would advise the FSS of my fuel situation and that I would be landing on the available runway. And then I would do it, checking the gear at least twelve times between downwind and touchdown.
If I had enough fuel to hold, I might have stayed circling and watched crews jack up the airplane and get the wheels down. Just because they got them to extend on jacks doesn't mean that it was the pilot's fault they weren't down the first time. The US NTSB will probably publish a report on this, based on Canadian TSB action. I haven't found any more information about the Twin Comanche: it only happened tonight, but here's a great pic of the airport from a couple of months ago.
I landed today, not in Iqaluit behind a Citation that did have its wheels down. I stayed above the glideslope all the way down, because when I centred the needles there was some wake turbulence. Not enough to be dangerous: they were five miles ahead of me, but with clear weather why not be a little high and have smoother air? I had to brake a little more aggressively than usual to make the taxiway, but I think it was worth it.
Edit: A follow up story says it was a gear collapse after landing, and that they only closed 4000' of the runway, leaving the rest open to people like me, and that the incident affected no flights.
I was told once in a human factors course that dehydration by as little as two percent has a measurable effect on a person's decision-making ability. The course was generally dull and redundant--I remember entertaining myself by devising and sharing "Buzzword Bingo" cards--but that factoid struck a chord. I don't have a reference to the study that determined that effect, but it's referred to here, and there's more advanced information on pilot dehydration here.
I carry a 750 mL water bottle with me in the cockpit, sometimes bringing an extra litre in the summer, so I never have to ration myself on water--but then I run up against the problem that not all the water my body processes is lost in sweat or water vapour in respiration. European researchers say that the need to urinate enhances the ability to make decisions but another study says the extreme need to urinate reduces cognition and working memory as much as a 0.05% blood alcohol level.
Flying requires decision making and working memory. I heard a pilot today advise ATC that they were landing "with one secured." If I decide to shut down one engine in flight and am thus landing with the power of only one, it would probably be a good decision to delay putting the gear down until I was sure I would not need to overshoot. But despite all the things I might be thinking during that approach, I would need the working memory to remember that I haven't extended the gear yet. And I'd really rather not be landing with my legs crossed.
There are a lot of resources available through Transport Canada and other aviation agencies around the world to help us pilots improve our ability to make safe decisions. We can get information on accidents others have suffered or avoided, information on weather, deicing, aerodynamics, communication, psychology, physiology and ... I don't have time to read it all. I like to think I have the general idea, however.
There's one thing I'm out of touch on, though. How can you call yourself a professional pilot and take people's life into your hands while impaired on recreational drugs? I'm disgusted. Yellowknife is not a big place, and Tindi hires through the ramp, so he wasn't new in town. There were undoubtedly people who knew what Matthew Bromley's job was, when he was flying and what he was smoking. They are irresponsible too.
I still think this anti pot-smoking poster is hilarious, but I want my fellow pilots to be responsible. Their behaviour reflects on me.
It's time to land so I tune the ATIS, and then tell Centre its identifying letter, the code proving I have listened to the recorded information. I know from it that the wind is as strong as when I left, still straight down the runway. The ATIS gave me an altimeter setting, too, but Centre gives me a new one, and tower may give me a different one again. I dutifully dial in each, so that when I level off at each stepdown altitude I'll be safely above or below whatever traffic I've been stopped there to avoid.
Straight down the runway as it is, the high wind makes my job landing the airplane easier, not harder. It's not a problem today that ATC leaves me high in the sky staring four white PAPI lights in the eyes less than three miles back. I don't need to chop the power more than normal nor slow to final approach speed in order to extend full flaps. I can use normal approach power and speed, and half flaps, giving me my usual descent rate, but because my approach speed is a fixed airspeed, and my descent rate is in feet per minute, the headwind decreases my groundspeed but not my descent rate. Measured in feet per nautical mile, however, the descent rate is greater than usual, so crossing the fence I see two red and two white, and then all four red by the time my focus narrows to exclude them, in the flare. Yes, four red is "too low" but they lead me to a touchdown point at the end of an IFR approach, well into the runway. I want to get down and get off at the first available taxiway.
I do, and tune ground. They're talking to another airplane, so I wait, doing my after-landing checks, for the conversation to finish. The controller is telling a pilot, "We sent a truck out and found that FOD you reported. It was a diaper. That's a first."
The pilot chuckles and makes some remark, but I regret that he didn't--and neither did I--ask, "Clean or dirty." Or maybe we don't want to know. I can imagine an experienced parent doing a quick at-seat diaper change after the seat belt signs came on at top of descent. They're considerate enough not to leave the the dirty diaper at the seat, nor to hand it to a flight attendant on exit. (I imagine aircraft groomers and FAs will tell me that plenty of people do one or the other), but once outside the aircraft, masked by people trundling rollerbags and crowded around the gate check cart, mom or dad gently sets the offending package on the tarmac, collects the stroller, and hauls family and baggage indoors to baggage claim. Or maybe a clean diaper slipped out of a diaper bag as parent juggled luggage and offspring en route to the terminal.
Later on the departure frequency I hear a controller telling a US airliner, "They just finished the runway check and nothing was found." I wonder if they saw a diaper or were afraid something had fallen off their aircraft.
I've had people accuse me of not liking the Dash-8 but the accusation is false. They can look a little ungainly because of their high wing and long gear legs, but why would I disrespect a versatile Canadian-made turboprop? I love Dash-8s. I'd love to be flying one right now. You manufacture over a thousand of any kind of airplane and have all kinds of people fly it in all weather all over the world, and the wheels are going to come off of a few. Sometimes literally.
For me this story started with me failing to immediately recognize that this Air Canada Facebook post was a spoof, on a humour/satire site. I could understand pilots making light of a situation in which everything ended well but usually that kind of black humour doesn't extend to the social media and marketing people. It appears that a couple of months ago a Q400 departed North Bay, landed at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, and then as it was taxiing in the right front nosewheel departed the aircraft. Reporters quote the Air Canada Jazz spokesperson as saying that the right wheel "loosened," but it must have rolled away quite noticeably, seeing as the airport scrambled emergency vehicles. All the landing gear wheels on that airplane are in pairs, two wheels on each of the three gear legs, so the airplane didn't collapse or become uncontrollable.
While looking for more information on that particular incident, I found a slightly similar report wherein a Q400 had a right inboard axle failure while taxiing out in Frankfurt. The wheel stayed attached and the flight was completed successfully, with no one realizing the issue until ATC reported sparks from the wheel area on landing. This sort of thing does happen. Airplanes hold together through all kinds of malfunctions and from the inside we can't see what they are or or not doing. I would say that every week I hear ATC or another pilot report seeing something they thought was anomalous about another airplane. Often it's nothing, like the crew who mistook a B737 gravel kit for a gear door malfunction, but pilots usually appreciate the lookout.
This one is a British Q400 in which ... oh the British are the funniest:
A number of passengers seated on the right side of
the aircraft noticed sparks emanating from the right
inboard wheel area during the takeoff roll and saw the
right inboard wheel fall from the aircraft as the landing
gear retracted. They did not inform the cabin crew
at this point.
Now I know about the stiff upper lip thing, and I appreciate that people don't want to look stupid by appearing alarmed at something that is normal, but a wheel fell off the airplane! How dense or properly British do you need to not report this as an abnormal situation? Intoxicated passengers with a grade-four education and living in a part of the world where people continue to drive trucks after one of the wheels falls off were not shy about informing me of much lesser aircraft anomalies.
Finally we have a video of the wheel falling off a Q400 during landing in Buffalo. You can stop watching after the scene cut. The rest is unrelated incidents.
I had a wheel almost depart from an airplane I was flying once, a long time ago when I logged my flights in a little ten-line-per-page logbook and paid for fuel myself. I'm sure some of you have seen this story from me before, but others haven't, and maybe you can be amused if my recollections have changed. The small single-engine airplane had had maintenance affecting the nosewheel before I borrowed it, and I will take responsibility for probably missing an improperly secured cotter pin on my initial preflight. I flew an hour or so to visit someone and then the airplane sat in the snow there for a few days. Most of my preflight time before flying home went into digging it out of the snow and making sure the control surfaces were clean, so it's possible the pin was actually missing by that time and I still missed it. It was a very windy day and the runway and taxiway surfaces were rough, so I didn't notice anything wrong on the taxi out. At the end of a bumpy flight home I landed carefully in a strong crosswind. I remember being very proud of my gentle touchdown, and that taxiing back to parking in a strong crosswind was dicey. I pulled around tail to the parking spot, shut down and got out to push it back by hand. And then I saw that the nosewheel was not straight in the forks but tilted sideways, just wedged in there by something between friction and magic. Part of the axle was sticking out the side. So yeah. The wheels can come off. I'm not taking a position on the relative contribution made by design, maintenance, and pilots.
The blog title is wrong though: I never have flown the Dash-8 and while I've flown its baby cousin the DHC6, our fleet wasn't equipped with wheels at all, so even if there are landing gear similarities, I can't relate. More knowledgeable readers are welcome to correct or enhance anything here.
I do my flight planning in the morning and drop off the documents for the hotel desk to fax. The Flight Information Region department that takes our flight plans doesn't accept electronic submissions yet. Hotel breakfast is a surprisingly good omelet. It's hard to get those things cooked properly in mass production. It doesn't have as much onion or as tasty a cheese as I would have put in it, but the eggs are cooked right and it isn't too greasy. Breakfast has to last me a long time, so I'm happy when it's good. There's multigrain toast, and honey too. We have to come back to this hotel. My coworker introduces me to "Call Me Maybe" mashups while we eat. This was last summer, but yeah, I'm still a little behind the times on Internet memes. I haven't even seen anyone do the Harlem Shake yet. Knowing that it's this year's Gangnam Style seems to be enough for me.
We check out, and I pick up my faxed flight plan, checking the fax number and number of pages on the transmission record. It won't be the hotel receptionist's problem if it didn't go through correctly. We're halfway to the airport in the cab before I realize that I didn't hand in my cardkey. Does anyone collect these things? I'll send them to you. I sometimes hang onto them for the next time we go back, but some places we'll never go back. I just hate throwing away plastic.
Preflight complete, I'm starting up on the apron. Oil pressure up, power to auxiliary systems, avionics on, get the ATIS, turn to ground. The controller calls me before I call him, asking me to turn my transponder to standby. Oops. I left it on. I'm spoiled by this transponder. It turns on automatically as I take off, so I don't have to select the altitude setting as I enter the runway, but because I haven't turned it on, I don't get that, "haven't turned it off" feeling. It's on the after landing checklist, of course, but I made a deliberate decision to leave it on, because I did my after landing checklist on the runway before taxiing off via runways. I always leave it on until I'm clear of all runways in the hopes that if something went terribly wrong, an aircraft about to land on top of me would receive a TCAS alert. I missed it in the final shutdown checks because it's electronic, so after the avionics master goes off, there's no dial position to show that it isn't selected off.
The controller says it was giving spurious readings now. Uh-oh. A malfunctioning transponder can ground us. He says it's probably just an artifact of start-up, that it read normally on the ILS yesterday, Heh, it's the same controller, and he remembers the dizzy chick who insisted on flying the ILS in VMC. At least I kept it on the glideslope, if he was watching me. He gives me my IFR clearance and I depart, the transponder apparently behaving now.
In response to a request to make text links more readable, I took the plunge and clicked the "update blog template" button, the one I've been ignoring for years. My apologies for not seeing the low contrast issue earlier. For me all the links were always visited, and stood out vividly. I never got to see the pallor of the unvisited links.
As you may be able to see, beyond adding a background (ten Internet points to anyone who knows where it is), I haven't done anything other than click that Update Template link, so all the customization this blog once had is now lost. That's why I delayed so long. Let me know if there is any part of the old sidebar you're going to miss, and especially if the colours and layout are now more pleasing or at least more functional. What did you like more or less about the old one?
I'm thinking of a day I've spent up in the flight levels, technically IFR, because we have to be IFR to fly this high, but my IFR flight plan is so unlike the ones that Air Canada flies that I have to file it with a separate department. I departed IFR from an airport somewhere down there. I think it had an FSS. This flight is not about the origin or destination. It really is about the journey. I'd have to look at the OFP on my lapboard to remember my point of departure, but I'm busy now, so I don't. I like being IFR. There is a greater certainty to what is expected of the pilot, and more security against conflicts with unknown traffic. It's not impossible that there's a rogue Mooney or guy in a lawnchair up here, but it's a lot less likely than in class G airspace, rocketing down some mountain valley at 5500'. ATC has given us a block of airspace to call our own and mostly leaves us alone. Occasionally they vector someone near enough to us that they let us know.
I watch our groundspeed to determine the wind direction and try to get a three-dimensional picture of the weather systems affecting our flight. The wind will back on descent, that is blow from a direction counterclockwise around the compass compared to up here, and it should decrease with decreased altitude as well. The wind affects my turns and will affect my time to get home, where 'home' is an as-yet-unknown hotel in an as-yet-unknown town where we will land. ATC doesn't let me put "TBA" in the destination blank on the flight plan, but I might as well for all the relevance what I did put has to where I'll eventually let rubber touch runway. We have honestly selected a place to land based on a desire for Vietnamese food, although usually our landing criteria are a little more operational than that.
The needles on the analogue fuel gauges are now close enough to the E-markers that I can't see the difference between this and empty, but the fuel flow meter tells me I have how many gallons I have remaining in these tanks. It's about twelve minutes worth, assuming that the fuel is equally distributed between the two tanks, but of course it isn't, because the engines aren't exactly equal and I have leaned each for best economy at this power setting, a fuel flow that changes with altitude and temperature, and probably phase of the moon. Engines are like the economy: a purely manmade thing that we are often at the mercy of. My goal is to switch tanks before there is any decrease in fuel flow caused by fuel starvation, but without leaving anything in the lowest tank. If I wait too long I'll know right away. Pilots call it "blowing a tank." The airplane seems to surge forward on one side, but really it's the airplane lagging on the side where the starved engine has just stopped providing thrust. If I get it exactly right I'll know when I watch the numbers on the fuel truck as they put in slightly more than the placarded useable fuel for this tank. They can get slightly more because "useable fuel" counts only fuel that is available to the engine at all reasonable flight attitudes, and in straight and level flight I can burn some of the fuel that is unusable in climb. When I finally decide that's all the fuel I'm going to get, I put on the electric fuel pumps and move the fuel selector to a set of tanks that are full, fuel except for the tiny amount that I burned in the run-up to make sure there was no malfunction blocking the tank or limiting the movement of the fuel selector. If I couldn't access the fuel in the other tanks I'd have a few minutes of normal flight now before the engines died, and then fifteen or twenty minutes of quiet gliding to find and land at an airport or perhaps a highway.
On this occasion the tank switch works and then we are unexpectedly done work early, so head in to the nearest airport while fuel is no concern. Typically I cancel IFR through 12,500' and complete a VFR approach and landing, but this is a somewhat busy airport with an ILS and there is a lot of traffic, so I hang onto the IFR. I like the extra airspace protection and given the extra fuel I can waste a bit of time. I want to practice flying an ILS. It's a severe clear day and I can hear the controllers being bemused by my request, but they don't try to talk me out of it. I think my request may be a bit annoying for the controllers, but they have more than one runway to play with and I'm sure they'd rather my do this practice now, than have to go missed on a crappy day because my skills weren't up to the task. They vector me around for a long gate. ("Gate" is how far out from the airport you get to intercept the beam that leads you to the runway). In poor weather I get vectored for a really short gate, because I'm slow and light and they want to keep me away from wake turbulence, so this is useful. I get to track the localizer and then descend, tightening up my skills at holding the right glideslope all the way to cleared to land. The needles weren't as close to their respective centreline as that fuel gauge was to the E earlier. That's why we practise.
Taxi off, park and call for fuel. I forgot to record the numbers on how much went into each tank, because I landed with a couple of hours left, so fuel wasn't high on my list of concerns at the end of the flight. Probably only a couple of litres from the shiny dry metal at the bottom of the left outboard. Last flight of the day: secure the aircraft and head to the hotel.
I'm not much of a music aficionado, approaching songs the way a blind person does a Playboy magazine: for the words alone. (Yes, there is, or at least was once a Braille edition of Playboy). I like interesting lyrics that tell a story and make me laugh. And I enjoy listening to songs about the places I'm flying over and landing in. No one has ever written songs to make me laugh about the places I fly like Stompin' Tom Connors. He died yesterday, after a lifetime of singing, travelling and performing in small towns. I doubt I have to introduce any Canadians to him, but foreign readers don't be surprised if he's not as familiar as Shania Twain, Justin Bieber and Celine Dion. He's the musician we kept. He remained in Canada writing Canadian songs for his whole career, and he's a legend here. His death is at the top of the CBC news site, and pretty much every other news outlet, and was immediately commented on by the Prime Minister and the National Hockey League. Here's Jian Ghomeshi's tribute to him. He dedicated the first hour of his show on CBC One this morning to the man. Where Stompin' Tom is concerned, Canadian stereotypes are dialed up to full volume. This song, Sudbury Saturday Night is one of my favourites.
For those Sudbury is a northern town, not so northern in latitude, but northern in attitude. It's on the north shore of Lake Huron, a little bit south of the northernmost reaches of Michigan, but it's hours of bleak driving from anywhere else. Its principle employer used to be the nickel mining company Inco, since bought out by a Brazilian multinational. There's a giant nickel beside the highway (Canadians love our giant roadside things, and don't forget that a Canadian nickel has a beaver on one side, our Queen on the other and is now our lowest denomination coin--we officially stopped producing one cent coins last week). I've never been anywhere in the US that was like Sudbury. Maybe there's a mining town three hours drive from anywhere along a bleak snowbound highway with moose jumping out at you. Listen to the song and maybe you'll recognize it.
I found this version of him singing The Cremation of Sam McGee. Stompin' Tom's stories will be retold for as long as the story poems of Robert Service, and I hope his last words inspire more Canadian songwriters to sing about our land and people and institutions.
P.S. I'm not disregarding the request to make links more visible. It's just going to take a bit of work because I've never upgraded my Blogger template and it will probably break if I use the new tools, so I'm hesitant to go there.
I know that Russia is a very old frontier, probably somewhat explored well before most of North and South America were populated for the first time, and by some of the same people, judging by the similarities of the circumpolar languages, but now it appears to be the cutting edge of lawless innovation. A hundred years ago the vast majority of the population were uneducated peasants. Not stupid or incapable: they operated farms and other pre-technological businesses in a harsh climate in isolated areas where they made what they need out of what they had. They "electrified" and technologized that country in a few decades, but didn't lose the can-do spirit that got the crops in and and the cows home no matter what the weather. Today much of the population has benefited from free and fairly high-quality education under the communists, along with a national pride in science and engineering, and they continued to need innovation and guile to survive their own government. Котоматрица, the Russian equivalent of I Can Haz Cheeseburger? reveals little examples of how the Russians live in a more rugged, less processed society. Food that happens to be in the background of the pictures will be potatoes rather than french fries, fish in a bucket or a chicken waiting to be plucked rather than supermarket meat on a foam slab and there's less of a sanitized safety infrastructure.
Now this can be very bad. But it's also an environment in which innovation occurs. And stuff like this.
I was thinking that the seat of innovation and adventure would move to somewhere in Africa for a while, and I know there are some batshit crazy things done in Africa, with and without airplanes, but while chaos is conducive to invention, there may not be enough money or education in Africa to fuel the next wave of crazy cool stuff. It's not that what is probably a twenty-year old ultralight is innovation in itself. It's just that there doesn't seem to be a lot of attitude stopping it from going further. Not like the time I built a sea-going vessel out of driftwood and old bicycle tires, and some old lady called the coastguard on me. Apparently she thought I was too young to be out there. I was over thirty. I just act young.
I'm further south today, in more civilized climes. We're coordinating with a second crew that operates at different altitudes, a different range of speeds, and has set up the job with totally different parameters. They are from a sister company, but they must be that distant sister who moved out before we really knew what was going on, so we have different SOPs, and oh yes a different language in the cockpit. Coordination takes a career's worth of communication skills, and I'm not sure we all like each other at the end of the day.
After five hours aloft I'm descending out of the flight levels like a bat out of hell. There are no fuel endurance issues, no speed limits and no turbulence, so I'm pitched down at cruise power driving the airspeed indicator into the yellow arc. The yellow speed range denotes caution. It's okay to be here, as long as I don't make abrupt control movements or otherwise stress the airframe. I'm outside controlled airspace and plummeting towards a controlled airport where there will be food, avgas, washrooms, an oxygen fill and taxicabs that take us to hotels. Forty miles out I pick up the ATIS. Or maybe it was an AWOS. The difference is that the content of the ATIS is determined by human beings while AWeOS is created by bored robots. The bored robots at this airport tell me the density altitude and give the winds as "variable." They always say the winds are variable here. I think they are programmed to so that the tower controller can make up whatever wind makes the runway he asks me to land on seem reasonable. I swear I am not kidding when I tell you that once I was coming in here and successively given clearance to all six runways. (To be fair, I called up a long way out and there was a thunderstorm passing right through the airport at the time). I'm given no more than two different runways on this occasion, and land without event on the second one.
There were taxicabs, and I believe sangria.
A lot of the time things like this do the opposite of inspire me, because I feel I have so much but haven't achieved in proportion, but Jessica just looks so darned cheerful. It must be intensely frustrating sometimes to be constantly celebrated for what you don't have instead of what you do. "Shut up about my arms already! I'm going to Ethiopia to help children!" I can achieve the tiniest slice of empathy from the times that people can't get over the fact that I'm a woman and I fly airplanes. I wonder if anyone ever treats Jessica as if her lack of a penis is a greater handicap than her lack of arms. As a Tae Kwon Do black belt I'll bet she considers kicking them in the balls, but I suspect she has better social skills than to follow the thought through.
I'd feel a little voyeuristic watching her do everyday things so naturally, but she's raising money to make a documentary in order to help handicapped kids in less privileged countries. If you'd like more information or to contribute, here's the project page.
I encourage my female readers who will be flying, maintaining, controlling or dispatching airplanes between March 4th and 10th to participate in this challenge. The idea is to log all the flights that women make happen, and presumably they'll make a graphic out of it, connecting the corners of the world. It will show only a fraction of our real participation in the skies, because even with the connectivity of the aviation community, not a high proportion of women will have the inclination or time to participate, but it is a fun idea to show how many flights depend on women, and amazing as it probably is to you, my regular readers, there are still plenty of people out there who exclaim with surprise, "a woman pilot!" or "a woman mechanic!" Many think it's an astonishing rarity, which in turn makes women who might otherwise fly turn away, so there is a non-fun reason for playing.
I can't see that there are many flights in the Canadian sky that are not touched by women at some point between the hangar and shutdown. I don't know if I will fly that week, but if I do, I'll play.
I'm coming in to land from another remote location, once again balancing greater true airspeed at altitude against expected decrease in headwind below, and rationing my gravitational potential energy as I descend. I've been operating under controlled VFR, required for flights between 12,500' and 18,000'. The controller gave me leave to descend unrestricted and I cancelled the CVFR through twelve five, leaving me plain old VFR. On my own and and far from anything, including airports. The GPS shows me forty-five minutes from landing, but that's because of the increased speed on descent. It should be about an hour to landing and I have an hour and thirty minutes of fuel on board.
As I level off, the airspeed drops and the GPS estimated time en route climbs. The groundspeed is a little higher than it was at altitude, but not as much as I had expected. The groundspeed settles down and I've really made no progress with the descent. I'm going to be eating reserve fuel.
I know that's what reserve fuel is for but I'd rather it be in the tank when I land. I reduce power a little. It's always hard when you're eager to get somewhere before the fuel runs out, and you have been trained to think of fuel as time, to reduce power and get to the destination slower, but just as you'd sprint to catch a bus, but slow to a jog or walk if you missed it and thus had to go ten kilometres on foot, the airplane will go further on the same amount of gas at a lower power setting. The problem of how slowly to go when you are also fighting a headwind is another fun curve to play with, but again I'm missing information. I have forecase wind and altitude information from two stations, one to the west and one to the south. I don't know right now whether the wind is stronger than forecast for this altitude or just more from the south than forecast. I'm trying to draw a picture in my head of the high and low pressure spots and figure out how the wind is moving, so as to guess where the wind will let up, or how to use knowledge to beat the system.
Never let the fuel gauge become the primary instrument in your scan. That is don't put yourself in a position where fuel is such a concern that you look at the gauge every five seconds. I'm going to make the field with most of my half hour reserve on board. I still think the headwind will drop as I get further south, but I still need to allow for an airplane crashing on the destination runway just before I get there. But really up here it wouldn't be a hard decision what to do. I'd ask the FSS if they had a preference between me landing on the taxiway and me landing on the runway over or short of the existing wreckage. I don't even recall if that airport had a long taxiway. It may have just had an apron. There are places where I would land beside the runway, but those are flatter places with better groomed airports.
There is no traffic at the airport, crashed or otherwise and I shut down after landing plus a fairly long post-landing engine run with twenty minutes of fuel on board. I take on another load of fuel and then head south again, two hours to an airport most people still consider north. The other crew member (a non-pilot, with no duties on this repositioning flight) sleeps most of the way. I was going to see if I could keep him asleep right to engine shutdown, but turbulence wakes him up in the descent.
Unrelated, B787s are grounded all over the world while Boeing comes up with a solution to the battery problem. Here's a list of where they are.
We're working up at 19,000'. I can't see the ground from my position in the cockpit because by the time the vector representing my angle of vision reaches the ground, it has dissipated into the mist. Mostly I see cirrus clouds around me, and they're kind of pinky orange, the sunset colour of a sun that won't set for a months, as this is a summer story and we're in the north. Between them in the distance I see blueish-green. If I were to put my head against the window so I could see in front of the wing root, down between the fuselage and the nacelle, I'd see little tiny trees. They're not just tiny because I'm way up in the sky. They're tiny because they have a short growing season and a long harsh winter. There are little cutlines and creeks and lakes, and probably rocks and bears, too. And mosquitoes.
I'm constantly doing fuel math, weather math, duty day math, and tweaking the heater controls to try and keep my feet warm. I judge it time to go home, and not just because my feet are cold. We're a decent distance from our intended airport of landing--indeed from any airport we can use--and I'm anticipating a headwind all the way south. I ask for down, both down south and down out of the cold and the worst of the headwind. The trick is to convert altitude to speed, descending rapidly enough in feet per minute to find more favourable winds quickly, but not so rapidly in airspeed that the benefit of the 'free' airspeed is lost to drag, which increases exponentially with airspeed. Someday I should set up the differential equations to determine how fast I should descend in this case. I think it's a solvable problem. Airbus computers probably do it. I just going by gut, though, and the desire to get down to where it's warmer. And today ATC makes that decision for me. They want me to cross a fix that is 30 DME from the destination at 5000'. Fix is aviation speak for any identifiable point at which you're supposed to report or turn, or do something. In this case it was identifiable only in as much as it was 30 nautical miles (DME is almost nautical miles. I'll explain that sometime) from the aerodrome. I'm asked to confirm I can do that.
I tell them I can make the crossing restriction. I didn't do any math for that either. I know how many nautical miles it is to the fix, how many thousand feet I have to descend and my current speed and rate of descent. That would be enough to calculate the altitude I would arrive at the fix, but to arrive there at 5000' I need to increase my rate of descent which will increase my speed (I don't plan to start powering back until I'm a lot closer to the airport than I am now). I used to know a rule of thumb for speed gain with fpm descent, but I think it may have been only applicable to Cessna 152s.
ATC amends my crossing restriction to 5000' at 20 DME, but I don't change my descent profile and reach it at at 30.8 DME, just to prove to myself that I was not incorrect in accepting the clearance. Actually 30.8 was a GPS
distance, so it was a little more in DME.
From there I call the FSS and they give me traffic, nothing but a King Air taxiing out to head south. He'll be well out of the way by the time I'm on final. Land, fuel, park, secure for the night and wait for a cab. The airport manager is painting a railing at the front of the terminal. He tells us they frequently have to go out and get beavers off the runway here. We think this is hilarious. Why would they be on the runway? Maybe because it's warm. Maybe even beavers get tired of slogging through swamps all the time and like a nice paved road once in a while.
I'm at an FBO in a northern boom town, waiting for my aircraft to be fuelled. I'm overnighting here, but the last two times I've ordered fuel here, morning preflight has revealed that no fuel has been delivered to the aircraft, resulting in departure delays. So this time I'm going to stand right here and wait until I can verify the presence of fuel in my airplane, before I get a cab. The fueller is off servicing an airliner down at the terminal, so I have to wait until he is done.
Inside the FBO there are two clean cut white guys in pilot uniforms, and a curvy woman in a jumpsuit flaked out asleep on couches. The woman's jumpsuit bears an aeromedical patch: they're a medevac crew obeying the aircrew maxim: never forego an opportunity to eat, sleep, pee or do laundry.
A fancy car pulls up outside the plate glass window and a pregnant woman walks up to the FBO counter, swinging the car key on her little finger. She asks the attendant about an incoming Gulfstream. It's expected, but hasn't radioed in yet. I don't hear the whole conversation. I can't tell if she's delivering a rental car or meeting someone off the plane. She went back out to the car or perhaps to the washroom.
The guys on the couches wake up. Their paramedic continues sleeping, masses of curly hair hiding her face. In my experience the paramedics usually have better duty days amd rest rules than the pilots, but perhaps she is unlucky.
"Waiting for an ambulance?" I ask the pilots.
They are. I've been there, done that, but this crew has never even heard of the community where I was based to do so. A bizarre thing about medevacs is that they need a plane right now to get a patient to another centre as soon as possible, but the ambulance and patient are never ever ready when you arrive. You can wait three hours for them to turn up. In many cases if they started driving as soon as they called for a medevac, they could have driven the patient to the distant hospital first.
When the ambulance arrives, the pilots gently wake up their paramedic. As she walks groggily out to their aircraft with them I notice a sticker behind her ear. It must be but one of those airsickness medication patches. Her job
can't be fun if she gets airsick. No wonder she's exhausted.
The fueller returns and fills my wings with avgas. I pay and then wait forever for a cab, so I can go to a hotel and sleep, too.
I'm working in the vicinity of military airspace today, where by today I mean the day on which I took these cryptic notes and put them in my blogging file. In Canada the lateral boundaries of permanent military airspace are marked on charts with a busy line itself composed of fine parallel lines that are perpendicular to the line they define. The area so designated is usually tagged CYR and a unique three digit number. That must be C for Canadian, Y for why do Canadians use Y so much in aviation? and R for restricted. The number is so you can look it up in the Designated Airspace Handbook to see who is in charge of it. Some military airspace may be CYA (A for advisory), but that just warns pilots that military aircraft may be present, and doesn't obligate pilots to remain clear or obtain permission the way restricted airspace does.
The vertical and temporal limits of restricted airspace must be discerned by careful scrutiny of the notations inside the marked boundaries. A lot of military airspace is only active nine to five local time Monday through Friday. Given the non-business-hours nature of military operations, this always seems a bit strange to me, but it's nice to be able to use their sky on the weekends. The civilian term for airspace restrictions being in effect is the word I just used, active, but the military controllers say hot and cold which is short and clear and sounds flashy. The military are good at that. Often military airspace is hot between certain altitudes continuously and then at an extended range of altitudes occasionally by NOTAM. That means I have to check the NOTAMs to see if CYA 999 is active today, but of course I have to check the NOTAMs anyway to see if there are any temporary flight restrictions. And yeah, I used that phrasing so I could make fun of the US which has what appear to be permanent TFRs over strategic national locations such as Disney World. They do have some pretty advanced robotics there, and you never know, Disney World might close down before the end of the current chart cycle.
On the particular day I'm writing about, I have done the chart interpretation dance before the flight, and decided that our work doesn't require entrance to the military airspace. I talk to the military controller anyway, for flight following. I go under some airspace, because its floor is above the altitude I need. Some parts are NOTAMed cold, so I get to go through them. There are clouds in the area we want to work, but the actual spot we want to overfly is very small, so we fly around in circles waiting for the clouds to get out of the way, and trying to dodge them and their shadows well enough to complete the work. It takes a number of passes, but we get it all and then inform the military controller that we are going to land at a small non-military aerodrome nearby. There's a published mandatory route to land there, and I tune a particular radial to ensure I follow it. The controller sees what I'm doing and clears me direct. Well that was easy.
There's an elaborate honour system involving multiple codes and keys to obtain and pay for fuel here, and a really questionable restroom. A wave hello to those who know exactly where I am today. I know it can't be too hard to figure out if you've been here, and it's okay to guess in the comments if you want, but more fun for the game to leave cryptic hints than a straight out answer. Once everything is put away I file a new flight plan and depart. The controller again clears me direct through the airspace I planned around. Just in case you need confirmation of your guess where we are, my fellow crew member starts making cow noises after a pilot coming into the same airport reads back his clearance. I laugh hysterically, because I had been about to moo, too.
On the ground an older pilot sees my ride and comes up to me to reminisce because he once worked in Nepal flying the type I'm flying now. He nails the strengths and weaknesses straight off, and tells me something I didn't know, that the fuel selector is designed such that at low temperatures it can become impossible to switch from the inboard to the outboard wing tanks. Interesting. I had not known that. The manual permits take off and landing on any tanks, without a published restriction on which fuel is burned first, as long as there isn't a sizable imbalance between wings.
