A Line of Text

It's a long weekend, or the middle of the night, or maybe both. I'm picking up an airplane that has received scheduled maintenance overnight at a maintenance organization that we have an existing relationship with, but we don't own. The Ops Manager and the Person Responsible for Maintenance are out of contact and out of the country, in a central American country that a Google image search illustrates with palm trees, beaches and masked men carrying machine guns. I'm in Canada, working for a Canadian company, and thus bound by the Canadian Aviation Regulations and Standards, which require not only that the work be done, but that before the airplane is flown the work be documented as complete in the airplane's journey log.

There is no one at the hangar, but I have access to the airplane and the journey log is inside. I read through the entries. Nothing fancy: oil change, lube, basic inspection and the recurring airworthiness directives. ADs are corrective measures mandated to make up for some revealed weakness of the type of airplane. There are six of them required every hundred hours this airplane flies. Each requires a special inspection of a specific component. All were due for this inspection, but only five have been entered in the logbook. I check to see if it has been entered somewhere else in the description of the maintenance. Nope. I page back through the last hundred hours to see if it was done early for some reason. Nope.

I call and e-mail contact numbers we have for the maintenance company. No joy.

Now the work that has to be documented here was almost certainly done. It's a minor inspection requiring no dis-assembly, and while it's not legal for me to declare it inspected, I can look at it and see that it's fine. But it's not documented done with an official signature, so in the eyes of the regulatory authority it has not been done and is therefore unsafe. I could fly this airplane and in the tiny chance that an inspector performed a random check of me, my airplane and its paperwork, there is a multiplicative tiny chance that the inspector would recognize that this airplane was lacking this inspection. They would see from the paperwork that an inspection had been recently carried out. They would walk around and look for evidence that we were neglecting fluid leaks, brake pads or control hinges, check our weight and balance paperwork, make a few token attempts to intimidate me, and then be on their way.

If I failed to spot the missing line item and flew the airplane for a week and back to home base before I "noticed" it, there would be no repercussions for me. But that's not how I roll. I try to think outside of the box.

There are a number of airplanes parked on the ramp, not the same as ours but from the same manufacturer and I know that they have the exact same AD. The company that operates these aircraft is the tenant of the hangar next door, and their door is open. I also remember that because of some complicated personnel-borrowing trick we did last year, that they are legally allowed to sign for our aircraft. I poke my head in and find a lone guy doing something to the airstairs on a Metro. I trot out my sob story, including the detail about where the key personnel from my company are, because it sounds so remote it might as well be the moon, to me.

"That's my country, where I'm from," says the guy with the wrench. Okay, that works too, on the sympathy front, maybe.

The central American is super nice, and a fully certified AME, but he's worked with this company for less than a week so is not yet legally allowed to sign documents as a representative of their company. Yep, the guy is 100% qualified to safely do an inspection that has almost certainly been done anyway, but he still can't sign for my plane.

I get a call back from someone who confirms that the inspection was performed, but that he was a day contractor and therefore can't sign it. I need to get the head aviation maintenance engineer to amend the entry. The next morning he came out to sign it, and then the flight was cancelled.

If you can find an operations that has never lost a flight to fouled up paperwork I'm not sure if you've found a truly amazing company or a really irresponsible one, but something is not normal there. Honestly, more energy goes into making sure airplanes are legal according to the safety regulations than goes into actually making them safe.

Hockey Gold

Someone asked me once if all Canadians are obsessed with hockey. Are we? This is the 401, Canada's busiest highway, during the men's Olympic hockey final. I must admit that it was Sunday morning, so not a time you'd expect a lot of traffic. But then consider that more than one province made temporary changes to the liquor laws to allow bars to sell beer during the game. Hockey has a special place in our hearts.

A Day at Work

We don't look like this, but this is me, the ops manager and a line pilot.

Be strong out there. Never become a management pilot, unless you aspire to spend more time discussing how to get other pilots to do things than you do flying.

It's Enough to Make Me Forget the Wheels

I really should be working, not blogging. But I have to pass on this pearl of operational wisdom.

Wheel up landing ARE NOT authorized

The above is actual wording from a Power Point slide I was given, to help me develop better in-house training on our aircraft. I'm not sure which bothers me more: the grammar or the implication that the operator who developed the slideshow thought there was a real possibility that they might hire a pilot who was stupid enough to need to be told this. I'm leaning towards the grammar bothering me more, because I can't just tell myself, "Chill, Aviatrix. Someone forgot an s." I'm endlessly tortured by the indecision of whether the s is missing from the end of wheel or the end of landing. Either, but not both, would fix it. But perhaps the grammar issue is a positive, distracting me from the message.

Maybe it's a joke. Throw that in, lighten up the mood. Certainly it's lighter than the preceding slide, which lists the dimensions, ply and recommended pressure for all the tires. I don't truly understand the purpose of slides like the tire one. No one should be expected to memorize this stuff. A photograph of a tire that has been damaged by excessive braking (been there, done that), showing the various ply exposed would make a better slide. Hmm, did I take a photo of my shame? You have to look up the part number to order a tire anyway, so knowing the size isn't sufficient. The only useful datum in the list is the tire pressure, and we write the recommended tire pressure on the rims in Sharpie because who wants to trust memory or look that stuff up when you don't have to.

When I teach systems and procedures to professional pilots, people who have both completed commercial pilot training and worked for a few thousand hours in industry, I shouldn't need to tell them which way up the airplane goes, right? I should be able to assume a basic grasp of the concepts embodied by hydraulic and electrical power. But the little voice that caused the person who made that slide to include the instruction above spoke to me. It tells me I should explain that the hydraulic system is a means of transmitting a pushing force at a distance, around corners, by means of fluid pressurize. And I've figured out how to do it too. I'll invite non-pilots in the organization, people who do flight following and who might benefit from knowing what "we have a hydraulic problem" could mean to the beginning of the session and load them up with a quick overview of "what the pilots already know." In case they don't.

Mocking the Manual

"This manual serves as a series of checklists and a record of experience for pilot duties at Company. It does not include many basic airmanship tasks that are expected of any competent pilot."
- my current company pilot procedures manual

Long time readers will recall my habit of mocking passages in my company documents as I study them and ordinary sentences suddenly become ridiculous through boredom and fatigue. Now the shoe is on the other foot. I have to write the damned things. I figured out pretty early on that company manuals have two primary purposes. One is to fulfill legal requirements. The other is. like the air law itself, to serve as a comprehensive list of things the pilot can be blamed for doing wrong in the even that that pilot has an accident or otherwise inconveniences the company. That, and the never-ending task of keeping it up-to-date in the face of new routes, procedures and aircraft, explains the contradictions and impossibilities. Pilots rarely get in trouble for contravening company policy if they bring an undamaged aircraft back on time without customer complaint.

Ideally you would be able to tell pilots to fly the plane safely and efficiently, obey the law, and don't scare the customers and then instead of a three-hole punch and a ring binder you'd just laminate the one page manual and be done with it. But you have to anticipate what pilots might not know and give them the information in a way they can understand to it, refer to it and recognize its importance. There's a balance to be achieved, and I hope I've done that.

Keeping It Between the Lights

About ten years ago a crew landed a Boeing 737 at Edmonton International in the fog and snow, and touched down beside the runway instead of on it. They got the airplane back on the runway after taking out a sign and a bunch of lights, and no one was hurt. The poor pilots had been up for almost twenty-four hours by the time it happened.

I feel so badly for them. I've landed at Edmonton International at night, and there are a lot of lights. When you land on a northern, snow-covered runway you find the rows of lights or reflectors and you land between them. You can't see the runway. It's exactly the same black and then reflective white as the area outside the runway. You just flare and hope the information you got on the depth of the snow and how packed it is was correct.

I think I did a similar thing when I was a commercial student, landing on a grass field. It was an actual field, just your standard chunk of turf in between the farm roads. There was a windbreak of poplar trees planted along one side, and then a line of tires showing the edge of the area they considered the runway. Presumably the "runway" side was more packed down from landing aircraft, more frequently mowed, and checked for rocks, mole hills, and the like. The CFS entry for the airport didn't mention the tires and I think I may have landed on the wrong side of them. I don't even remember--that's how un-serious my incident was. It could have been bad had the ground been soft or the grass really long and hiding obstacles on the "bad" side. I just remember that someone later told me which was the correct side. Obviously it wasn't an international airport, and before someone put the tires there I'm sure folks just landed all over.

Last time I landed at CYEG it was night, and the end of my working day. The controller asked me to turn a five mile final, but not knowing the local night time landmarks well it was difficult for me to choose a bearing that would set me up for that. I could easily turn final five miles from the airport, but I didn't have a waypoint set for the threshold of the runway, and single pilot at night, and tired in descent for a runway is a really bad place to start calculating a lat and long based off runway information, or perhaps there was a waypoint on a GPS plate, and then programming a lat and long out of a book into the GPS. Normally for that sort of thing you can use the runway as a yardstick and just mentally extend it to where you need to join, but the layout of runways at the International there combined with the angle I was approaching from made it tricky. So I did that thing that is free and safe and doesn't require me to take my eyes off the instruments or the scenery: I asked the controller a question similar to, "does this look good for where you want me to intercept final?" I probably threw in the word "unfamiliar," as well. The controller has a radar screen that shows the runways, and my blip, and he has tools that can show my extended track and distance, but he probably doesn't need them as his job is to look at blips and know whether they will conflict. It definitely made me look less cool. I couldn't pretend to be a completely fearless pilot utterly blasé in the face of any danger. But it saved me a couple of minutes in the air, because the controller told me I was free to fly direct to the threshold. And who wants a pilot inured to danger when you can have one who gets you there safely?

This is in no means intended to imply that the 737 crew wouldn't have had their incident had they asked for help. I was only trying to point out that on a beautiful visibility night a pilot who is a lot less tired can get confused. The visibility was terrible for these guys and they must have been exhausted. The upside is that their company changed the procedures after that, so crews no longer risked having to do that night landing after being up for a full day.

Ditching Instructions

I'm delivering recurrent emergency training to pilot and non-pilot crewmembers in a couple of weeks, so I sat down to brainstorm some of the items to cover. Challenge-response checklists, the names of the various levers, the protocol for what to say if the right engine is on fire and the pilot asks you to confirm left as she shuts it down. (Hint, not "right!"). I covered evacuation, including special life-saving tips like "wait until the aircraft has stopped moving" and "be careful not to get run over by a firetruck". It would be depressing that so much of training people consists of telling them what they could figure out for themselves, except that it in comparison to reading reports of accidents caused or exacerbated by people not doing things they could figure out for themselves, it's not depressing at all.

I move onto bullet points for the Off-Airport Landing. We don't fly floats or bushplanes, so this represents a fairly drastic emergency situation. I type in ...

• possible reasons
• pilot briefs situation
• secure cargo, self
• consider needs
• distress call
• landing configuration
• brace position
• evacuate

An extreme form of off-airport landing is ditching, landing on the water. That's obviously going to be the next item. As I'm starting on that, I notice that one of my keycaps is loose, so I wiggle it into place and press down on it to fix it. Then I look back at my document. It says...

Ditching

• aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Maybe I'll leave it like that.

Grandployees

I’ve come to the conclusion that bosses want their employees to become managers for the same reason parents want their kids to have children. It's not just the obvious reason that they seek to extend their line and influence beyond what they themselves can do in a flat hierarchy. They seek the schadenfreude of seeing the subordinate suffer as the subordinate made them suffer.

Dear former Chief Pilots,
I am truly sorry for any time I needed to be reminded to give you my medical renewal, PPC report, completed exams, or any other bit of paper you have to keep track of. I had no idea of how much of a pain it was.

Love,
   Aviatrix

Anti-Icing Mythologies

Well-developed ground de-icing/anti-icing mythologies have been developed for the airlines.
         - My misreading of an icing education document

The document said "methodologies" not "mythologies" and that's true for the airlines, but I was anticipating what it was going to say for general aviation. It's not that GA pilots are stupider, just that we aren't supported by the infrastructure the airlines are and we usually have to do our own de-icing. And it always takes place in the stupidly freezing cold, and usually in the dark, because people want their airplane ready to depart at the beginning of the day, but the sun doesn't come up in the winter until it has confirmed that the day is well underway. And even then it only comes up far enough to clock in.

Like the sun, GA pilots' first line of defence against icing is to try to take the winter off. This is actually working pretty well for me these days, especially when combined with our "keep the airplane in a warm hangar" strategy, but when the chips are down I still have to resort to the well-developed mythologies.

Sun will take the ice off, even if the air temperatures are below freezing. In temperatures that are just below freezing, sunlight will warm dark areas enough to melt, or at least soften, the ice on them, and even when it's especially cold the air is dry and the frozen moisture will sublimate into to the air as it warms with the morning. Meanwhile we whack the airplane with brooms or mitten-clad hands to crack the ice and then sweep it to dislodge frost or ice chunks. The official video on not taking off with any ice adhering to your airframe ever recommends sawing a rope back and forth across the surfaces. I've never tried that. Never had a rope. Last year I bought a broom at a northern hardware store, just a regular straw broom, and shared it with a Maule pilot stuck in the same snowfall. When I walked into the office at the end of the trip one of my bosses asked, lightning fast, "What's the broom for? Is that how you got home?" It was too funny to take offense at.

One reason we resort to mythological forces, like windshield antifreeze is that it's available. Most GA airports have no deicing services available at all. Even if de-icing is an advertised service of the FBO on the field, you have to find the phone number and persuade the person who answers to come out and do the work. Let's say you're paid by the hour to do a job that mainly involves driving a fuel truck around and pumping fuel into tanks, plus a bit of sitting in an office and answering the phone. How many hours pay would you want to get up at four am, start a different vehicle that you're not sure is going to work and stand on a ladder spraying poisonous fluids on yourself and some cranky pilot's airplane? If an airport is used by an airline, they may have their own deicers, but generally don't have the staffing, spare fluid, insurance, or billing apparatus to deice other peoples' airplanes. If you happen to be departing shortly after the scheduled airline flight, and have a case of beer handy, you may be able to get a few squirts of the pre-heated deicing fluid from the guys that came out for the flight, but you can't count on that. And you have to know what you're allowed to spray on your airplane and where.

Quick rule of thumb, the odd-numbered ones are okay for me. That is Type I deicing fluid, which looks like thick orange Gatorade, gives virtually no holdover time and can be used on any speed of aircraft is safe and so is Type III. Type III looks like urine, requires a minimum rotation speed of 60 knots, and, if you pay first, has a holdover time sufficient to get you to the runway and airborne in light snow. Holdover time is the time period during which you probably won't get more contamination while standing or taxiing. It's measured from the beginning of the application (i.e. measuring by the area that is treated first). Types II and IV have holdover times sufficient to queue with everyone else on the taxiway at Pearson, but they work by enveloping your aircraft surfaces in cozy ooze, so to use them safely you have to have a rotation speed over 100 knots, to ensure they will shear off before rotation and not interfere with wing performance.

Holdover time is just a mythological luxury for me. In ground icing conditions I need to do everything, including a run up, and then shut down, deice and go right away. That can be a tough call because batteries and starters are not at their best in the cold. If you've got the incantation right to start the engines once in a morning, you don't like to shut down and risk having the magic not work the second time.

Bushels of Icing Certification

An accumulation of ice on the surfaces of an airplane in flight can be ridiculously dangerous, so a lot of science has gone into analyzing the causes and effects. It's known, for example, that large droplets of supercooled water are likely to cause clear icing that covers a large area of the wing, while small droplets are more likely to freeze with entrained air and cause wacky shapes to form around the leading edges of the wing. This is called rime icing. Either way, or both (there's nothing to say you can't get a mixture of both types at once) airplane performance is affected. For starters the airplane will fly more slowly, climb less rapidly, and burn more fuel to get to destination. That alone could kill you, and that's just for starters. This post isn't about the effects of icing, though. This paragraph is just here for people who otherwise wouldn't know why anyone cared about the stuff in the paragraphs coming up.

Some aircraft are certified for operation in known ice, that is to be flown in conditions that are known and expected to cause ice to accrete on aircraft. There's a possibility that definition will cause an argument, because I see that the FAA and NTSB have contradicted themselves a little on this. In Canada there is a much lesser density of PIREPs to airspace and a lot fewer airports of escape, so the conservative definition is the only one that makes sense to me. For flight into known ice, the airframe and the airplane deicing and/or anti-icing systems have to be shown to tolerate conditions conducive to moderate amounts of clear or rime icing. NASA (the first A stands for aeronautics, so not all their research is in outer space) tells me the model for the former is called intermittent maximum and represents "liquid water between 1.1-2.9 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-50 microns in diameter over a 2.6 nm encounter," while the latter model is continuous maximum and represents "liquid water between 0.2-0.8 g/m³ with drop sizes 15-40 microns in diameter over a 17.4 nm encounter."

So first of all: less that three grams of liquid water per cubic metre doesn't seem like very much. A gram of water is a millilitre, about the capacity of the plastic screw cap on a pop bottle. A cubic metre is a fair chunk of space, like the storage capacity of one of those IKEA Expedit room dividers everyone has, the 16-box kind, with two more boxes stacked on top. You wouldn't even notice three millilitres of water in one of those, what with all the scented candles and old copies of Aviation Safety Newsletter stacked inside. I know clouds are stereotypically fluffy and insubstantial, but I would have thought they had a lot more water density than that. So huh, clouds are way drier than I thought.

Secondly, why "over a 2.6 nm/17.4 nm encounter"? At first I assumed that was translated from metric, but 2.6 nm is 4.8152 km and 17.4 nm is 32.2248 km. It turns out that they are 2.99 and 20.0 statute miles, respectively. So three miles and twenty miles. Who the heck does science in grams per cubic metre over statute miles? That's crazier than Canadians measuring our room temperature in celsius and our oven temperatures in Fahrenheit. It's even crazier than having to figure out whether something like pumpkin or peanut butter is a solid or a liquid before converting an American recipe. (Seriously, if the recipe says to use a ten-ounce jar of peanut butter, I never know if I'm supposed to weigh it or measure it volumetrically, because the Americans have the same name for two different units, one for solid things by weight, and one for liquid things by volume. Like the TSA, the recipes expect me to just know what they consider a liquid. Take tuna, for example. I was once told that canned tuna ... I'm getting off topic here. But while I'm here, what the heck is a "stick of butter". Who buys their butter in sticks?) It's even crazier than Aviatrix trying to cook from American recipes.

The certification standards are based on data collection flights performed in the 1940s. If you plot all the possible atmospheric scenarios on a graph with liquid water content on the y-axis and droplet size on the x-axis, the area that is considered safe to operate in is bounded by the x-axis, the y-axis and a curve that approximates a line of negative slope. You may now be asking yourself, does Aviatrix get off on writing sentences like that, or is she just too lazy to draw a graph and show you? The answer is that I get off on knowing that many of my readers can parse that sentence just fine, and I'm too lazy to copy someone else's graph. If there's lots of water you can only tolerate small drops, but if there's not that much water the drops can be bigger. The logical conclusion is that if there's no water at all you are allowed drops of infinite size and that you may fly through a tank completely filled with supercooled water if the drops are infinitely small. That's why I said it was a curve. Presumably the axes are asymptotes. Oh yeah, talk graphing to me, Aviatrix.

One could argue that changes in aircraft design since might have changed the validity of those results, but subsequent work in other types and in wind tunnels should be enough to keep the standard valid. Here's a little bit about how the certification is done these days: flying around seeking out the standard conditions for certification, plus using computer models to determine what shape ice would form on the aircraft, and then sending test pilots out to fly with those globs glued on the plane. I guess when they first did tests to determine what an airplane should be able to handle, they flew through convective cloud for three miles and through stratus for twenty miles and then quantified the conditions they had flown through. They probably did it in ounces per bushel or pop caps per IKEA bookshelf, and it's only been converted to grams per cubic metre for the modern day. Beats me how they determined all that, anyway in the days before the laser equipment they have now.

While trying to find the history of the certification standard I get bogged down in documents on the history of the legal "if supercooled water hangs in the sky and there's no airframe there to accrete it, is it known icing?" debate. This PDF seems like a pretty definitive document about the controversy. Given that many of the people arguing that it's not known icing until they take off and know it's there were doing so as the pilot of record at accident tribunals, I'm sticking to my assessment that if conditions known to produce ice are there, it's known icing.

My Job is Almost This Cool

Here's a quick look at how beautiful my country is in the winter, and at how obsessed we are with hockey. I get to fly over these same panoramas, and while we don't get to organize alpine lake hockey games, we do choose our restaurants on playoff nights to ensure we can see the games. We can also get the scores from air traffic control if we have to fly during a game. I know of at least one tower that used their local hockey team's name instead of a letter of the phonetic alphabet to designate the ATIS, just to oblige the pilot of the visiting team's jet to say it.

Yes, my job is nearly this cool, and often a lot colder. See them wearing toques in the helicopters? The other day I was wearing a full-on men's parka, complete with the stereotypical fur around the edge of the hood. The fur is removable, but when it's really cold, they haven't made an artificial material that stays soft and doesn't chafe your skin. (Ever notice how much of the really premium stuff is made by animals? Leather, fur, wool, silk, cream, steak, caviar ... I'm surprised there isn't a chocolate beetle).

That lake in the shot is amazing, before there are any skate marks or ice-testing holes on it. Often as we fly over lakes in late fall we're trying to gauge whether they are frozen or not. You see a little bit of white at the edge of the lake and it's difficult to tell if it's ice just beginning to form, or if it's a little bit of snow on the edge of a completely frozen lake. I'm glad it's never been my job to determine if one is safe to land on. Speaking of safety, before you criticize the flight safety involved in a helicopter playing hockey, see the behind-the-scenes planning from this blog entry.

Flying Machine

The position of PRM - Person Responsible for Maintenance - is an official one in a Canadian aviation organization. The holder has to write a test and pass an interview to show they understand the regulations and responsibility. There was a while in our company where the holder of the position was trying to transfer the duty and responsibility to someone else because the outgoing PRM was too busy to do the job, but the supposed-to-be trainee PRM didn't hold either a pilot licence or an aviation maintenance licence. That's not a legal problem, but while he was clearly enthusiastic about ensuring the aircraft worked safely, the idea of doing maintenance just because it's legally required was a hard sell. There were clearly a lot of cracks for things to fall in, big holes in those layers of swiss cheese, so I was keeping a close watch, and ended up doing some PRM duties.

The purpose of the above paragraph is to explain why I am the one here talking to the new PRM (neither of the above people) about upcoming maintenance, and why I knew these things. The AME is confused as to why I say the propellers on this airplane will be due for overhaul in the spring, because he knows he just put them on a couple of years ago, and normally propellers have about a ten year overhaul cycle. The AME has previously worked on corporate and private aircraft and, while of course he knows that there is an hours-flown component as well as a calendar time requirement for a propeller overhaul, he can't remember ever seeing anyone fly the hours off before the propeller times out. But we've put almost two thousand hours on these propellers, so we have to overhaul them.

I, on the other hand, have pretty much always worked on commercial aircraft that can easily log twelve hours a day. I'm not sure I've ever seen a propeller time out, except on a plane that we bought for parts. We will send its propellers out for overhaul and swap them onto the airplane whose propellers have timed out.

Back to the North Pole

We're not anywhere near the north pole actually, just north of most civilization. We departed IFR from an aerodrome that had flight services and they passed us on to Centre. We have an elaborate flight plan that switches to VFR and then back to IFR, so we have to discuss that a little. We will be passing out of controlled airspace shortly, so Centre gives us a clearance that is valid "while in controlled airspace," and then clears us to en route frequencies. The "while in controlled airspace" tag is very common. Many IFR routes pass through swathes of uncontrolled airspace, especially during descent into remote destinations.

We accept the clearance and then change to the en route frequency, 126.7. Across Canada pilots in uncontrolled airspace make reports to one another on their positions and intentions using this frequency. The initial call will be quick and simple, because most of us aren't in each other's way. If a pilot makes a call and it sounds to someone else as though their routes may intersect, then the pilots concerned provide more precise information or negotiate routing or altitudes that will ensure they don't conflict.

I state my position with bearing and distance from the aerodrome I departed, and then give my track merely as, "Northbound for the middle of nowhere." I'm not even expecting anyone on frequency to be close enough to hear, as I'm still climbing out, but there's a reply.

A surprised voice with an Australian accent says, "I've just come from there!"

I ask him, "Is the weather good?" and he says it is.

Later we change our minds about the flight plan, something that happens on about eighty percent of our flights, because that's just the way our operation works. Only problem is that despite being at FL180 we can't contact ATC. We need a clearance to climb higher, and don't want to waste the gas to do so anyway. We can't raise anyone else on the radio to do a relay for us, but we have a satellite-based tracking transceiver that is capable of transmitting text messages to our flight follower. We get the flight follower to call the flight services to cancel IFR and close out the rest of our flight plan.

The weather was very good in the middle of nowhere, and we got a sizable proportion of our work done before returning to the southern reaches of nowhere. But we didn't see Santa. I told you we weren't that far north.

Cleared to Land

All the best, folks. I'm not flying today, so I can have all the rum and eggnog I want*. Please enjoy all of whatever it is you enjoy this season and smile graciously when declining whatever it is you don't.

*That would be none. I don't like eggnog, and while it's possible to add enough rum to hide the taste, I don't like straight liquor much either.

Castor gras

The guys in the maintenance hangar are working on an outside customer's airplane. It's a Beaver, not one of those stunning privately owned amphibs with a spotless retro paint job and a millionaire owner, but a working airplane, company logo on the tail and oil streaked all over the cowling. There's a joke that you don't have to teach the routes to a new hire at a bush company. They can just follow the trails of oil from place to place, left by the Beavers.

Maintenance folk always seem to like working on Beavers. I guess it's nostalgia and respect for the famous workhorse. And I guess they aren't too fiddly. I've flown the Beaver. I've also flown a Found, one of the recent attempts to replace the Beaver. Yeah, not there yet. And it's not as if most Beavers need replacing, just a little end of season TLC. I say something about the amount of grease on the airplane as I go by. They're quiet, probably trying not to bust a gut from accidental innuendo. We're not unaware that Americans use Beaver as a slang word for female genitals, but for me it's a great airplane, our national animal, the symbol on the nickel and a big chunk of our history first. It was trade in beaver pelts that drove the early Canadian exploration and economy.

They were used to make hats, and the pre-worn greasy ones, castor gras were the most valuable.

Last time I saw a privately-owned one it was parked between me and the FBO. As I walked by, admiring it, a man in his sixties asked, "What are you grinning at?"

"Pretty airplane," I said, as though it weren't self-explanatory.

"We come with it," said another man.

You know, if you wanted to get picked up by rich, self-confident men, an airport would not be a bad place to hang out.

Legs

A few people have asked about NaNoWriMo, my one-month novel-writing stint. National Novel Writing Month is a thing people do, an international event, despite the name, open to anyone but largely done by English-speakers because it started in the US and the website is monolingual. The exercise is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Everyone who writes fifty thousand words or more is considered a winner. You're allowed to develop your characters, conduct research, or outline a plot before the beginning of the month, and you're allowed to continue writing after the month is over, but I'm doing other things the rest of the year, so I finish writing and print out a copy before December starts. My NaNo started November first with a few ideas scrawled on a post-it, and the File New command. I had arranged to meet a couple of friends downtown at seven a.m. for the ceremonial beginning of our novels, but before I could leave for that, I was called into work.

I'm usually pretty happy to go to work. I get to fly an airplane, with great people, over spectacular Canadian scenery, but this has been a long season with a lot of flying, plus more than I wanted to do of that other stuff I have to do since I succumbed to the pressure and let them make me chief pilot. I stomped a little. I went to the airport, researched the route, filed a flight plan, walked around the airplane, hauled it outside, supervised fuelling, sorted out charts and an operational flight plan, and loaded the gear. The flight was then postponed for a couple of hours.

I started up my computer and banged out a couple of pages about a pilot who had something else to do but had to work, and about a bitchy charter passenger, who was also going the to last place she wanted to be. Write what you know, they say, but I got off track pretty fast. I had a cow spontaneously burst into flames by the end of that chapter. The flight was eventually cancelled. I kept writing. I wrote at home on the couch, on airplanes, in airports, on trains and buses, in hotels, in restaurants and coffee shops and at my friend's house. There are some airplanes, sentient electromagnetic catapults, a volcano, and radioactive Polynesian artifacts. Now even without the foregoing you have to know that a novel written in a couple of hours a day over the course of a month is not going to be a work of art. The working title was "Legs," and my point-of-view characters legs number between zero and ten. Not all of the characters are human, although one of the zero-legged ones is. He and the hermit crab (technically a decapod) are my favourites. I think I might bring them back for a sequel. Of course the sequel might turn out to be a bad Victorian era mystery drama instead of a bad science fiction drama. I was initially intending to write a tech horror, but space aliens turned up and they were having so much fun that the genetically engineered pine beetle predators (six legs each) who were supposed to kick off the plot barely got a cameo. So did Ian Hanomansing. I like him.

I thought the novel might be horrifying, but fortunately it's ridiculous enough that I think it's just funny. It's not very funny, scientifically accurate, poignant, or gripping. It's not even very weird. It's just your everyday novel about biologists who don't even know they are dealing with a new life form, and explorers who take too long to figure that out.

Here's an excerpt. The space aliens aren't very knowledgeable about matter. They're visiting Earth, and they have just discovered gravity.

Having a sense of the organization of such a complex planet was empowering to the group, so when they detected a large piece of solid matter suspended well above the rest of the solid matter, up in the gas layer with the clouds, they were confused and disappointed. They analyzed the situation more closely.

The outside of the object was solid, but it enclosed both liquid and gas components. There were no photosynthesizing plants present, but the front of the object was emitting moderate amount of heat energy, and parts of the structure contained constrained linear flows of electrical energy, so common on this planet. The electrical energy transmuted into heat and light in some places, but nothing other than its suspension in midair seemed unusual. There was moving warm matter present too, two discrete quantities. They scanned the larger one. It was extremely complex, had to be a product of intelligence, but what was it for? It didn't convert energy in any way they could detect. And then suddenly they spotted something they had missed before with animal matter. The warm matter contained double helix energy signatures. It was not a mistake, or some stray plant matter. The same signature was repeated throughout the structure, always identical, missing only from the dead, outer layers in some places. But this was alive.

They started paying closer attention to the energy flows within the structure, and found that the main electrical flow was from the inside of the roughly spherical top part, down a roughly straight column. From there it branched out to the other parts. They probed the inside where the electrical impulses were centred. It was a kind of solid liquid mixture. They couldn't figure out what the impulses were for. They were not being transmitted anywhere outside the structure, and were not resonating at all with the energy flows that produced heat and light. The electrical activity of the alive thing increased, and the ends of the structure moved around quite a lot. That was very interesting. They thought that might be a reaction to stimulus, but after a short while the electrical activity stopped all together.

So yeah, the Nobel committee doesn't haven me on their short list this year, but I had fun. Any other NaNoers among my readers?

As Pretty As An Airport

Douglas Adams said many sage things. Way back in school I was asked to write a term paper on the Brandt Report, and I summarized my criticism with Douglas Adams' observation on the oddity of proposing movement of small green pieces paper as solutions to the problems of people being miserable, given that it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy in the first place. But when, in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul Adams asserts, "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport'," it becomes clear that he does not understand the true beauty of an airport.

An airport is soothing when it appears along my route, its inviting stretch of flat unobstructed pavement serving as a marker that I am on course, a milestone in my journey and a source of refuge if anything should go wrong. An airport is pretty when it comes into sight right ahead during descent, and I am cleared to the circuit, especially if I need to pee. An airport is a stunningly beautiful sight, dark and lashed with pounding rain, blowing snow or almost obscured in fog, when it appears at minima on an IFR approach. No one who has ever flown any distance with peripheral vision repeatedly drawing her eyes to needles flickering at the E on the fuel gauges, or the red line on the oil pressure, or illuminated red caution lights on the glare panel can fail to appreciate the all-surpassing glory of an airport.

The closure of an airport is the loss of a refuge, and in the case of Edmonton City Centre, which finally closed on 30 November of this year, it's the loss of a great place to stay when there's no emergency either. It really was in the centre of the city, within walking distance--with luggage--to hotels, restaurants and malls. It's been under threat of closure for years. They shut down runway 16/34 years ago, meaning that when the afternoon winds picked up there was almost always an exciting crosswind challenge getting in there. YXD has dodged the axe so many times that I haven't flight planned into it for a few years without double-checking that they were still open, and still had fuel available. Lately that caution has been warranted. A month or so ago the FBO sold their oxygen equipment, so we had to go to Edmonton International for an O2 fill. The last time I was there, less than a month before it closed, I had to track down airport security to get off the airport. It had been designed around 24-hour FBOs and when the last one cut its hours, there were no pedestrian gates to let me out after midnight.

In 1926 the Edmonton City Council approved a $400 outlay to pack the soil and cut a few trees to turn the Hagmann Farm into Jimmy Bell's Air Harbour. It became Canada's first licensed airfield and was later named Blatchford Field, after the mayor who approved it. It has also been known as #2 Air Observer School, RCAF Western Air Command, Industrial Airport, and Municipal Airport. I've been a passenger on a B737 that landed at Edmonton International, made a short hop to the Muni, and then continued north to Grande Prairie and Fort Nelson.

This site used to discuss the decision to close the airport but now that it's a done deal, it's just a page about the development process, mentioning the airport only as history of the site. I suppose we'll be landing at the International more often. Their ATC are great, handling our little aircraft without making us feel like we're second class, and the FBO we used provided everything we needed, plus they had an Estonian consulate on site, because you never know when you're going to need one of those. Once you leave the airport you're in a little bubble of hotels, way the hell out of town, and the other remaining airports in the area are no better. You can't even get a pizza delivered to Villeneuve.

CYXD, I'll miss you.

Edit: I looked it up on the NavCanada weather site.

METAR/TAF

CYXD -> Invalid or unknown aerodrome ID

Erased from existence.

For Altitude

I'm in an area of complex controlled airspace. One agency, a big city tower, controls the airspace from the surface up to 4000'. Above that, the terminal controller is responsible for airspace up to to 12,500', and Centre controls everything above 12,500'. I've been working in high level airspace, but have now descended and am talking to terminal. They know my intentions: to land at an airport just past the big city. They've told me to maintain 6500' VFR. I do this, following the route they specify, following landmarks, then an assigned heading and then direct a nav aid. They have traffic below me, but I must be past it now, because they tell me I'm cleared to 4500', contact tower for lower.

I'm expecting this, so I have the tower frequency already tuned on standby. After I acknowledge the instruction, I push the button to switch to tower frequency. I don't call immediately, because I need to listen for a moment to make sure I'm not interrupting a conversation. I start descent and then call tower, giving them my call sign and that I'm passing "six thousand two hundred for four thousand five hundred." The first number is the altitude they can crosscheck with my transponder readout, and the second number is the altitude I was cleared to.

The tower controller says that he is not responsible for that airspace, and that I should call terminal. "Terminal sent me to you," I say. It's not uncommon for there to be miscommunication between tower and terminal. The tower controller tells me to go back to terminal then, because 4500' is not in his airspace. And now I know the problem: although my destination should be encoded on my radar blip, either the tower controller hasn't looked at it or it's been miscoded. I tell him the airport I want to land at and he clears me down through his airspace for it, grumping that I should have asked for that in the first place.

I wonder out loud to my coworker about who put a frog in the tower controller's cocoa, and continue my descent. But I see the ambiguity there. Pilots say, "Niner thousand for six thousand five hundred," both to request a descent to six thousand five hundred and to indicate a descent in progress, with the intention of stopping there. The latter could be a clearance limit in uncontrolled airspace, or just a pilot stating her intentions, if the descent will take her out of controlled airspace. I could have said "six thousand two hundred requesting descent for ." I went out again and came back the same way later that day, with similar clearances, and I think I used the latter wording without incident.

UK-trained pilots will jump in now with radiotelephony rules, because their language and training is more precise. I agree ours should be, and am somewhat surprised that in thousands of hours of flying this is the first time this particular ambiguity has bitten me. I suppose there have been numerous times when the second controller has taken my statement of an existing clearance to be a request, and recleared me to that altitude, but they didn't stand out enough for me to realize the ambiguity.

Controllers are damned smart. I think most of the time they just figure it out.

NaNoWriMo

I'm participating in the NaNoWriMo one month novel challenge, so there will be no blog posts this month.

Look Up, Waaaay Up

The VP sends me a kmz file and asks me to recommend a suitable airport to base at for this work. I'm looking for sufficient hard-surfaced runway length, fuel, local services, not prone to fog this time of year, that kind of thing. The file is named Bathurst. While I'm waiting for Google Earth to load and open the file I try to remember how far out of town the Bathurst, NB airport is. New Brunswick is an east coast province. Designated mountainous region three. Fish, lobster. Borders Maine. French and English speaking. This is where the Cajuns lived before distance and language changed their name from Acadians. The file brings me out by the river, but I don't see the airport or the town. I zoom out a little bit. Oh it's a lake, not the river. This doesn't look like New Brunswick.

Oh, Bathurst must be the client name. I think there's a pulp and paper company called that. I must be in Quebec or Ontario. The middle of the country. I zoom out a little more. I don't see the Great Lakes. I don't see the St. Lawrence. I don't see the Hudson Bay. Where the heck am I? I zoom out some more. And some more. And then finally I see where I am. Bathurst Inlet. In Nunavut. About 65 degrees north. No wonder he needed a pilot to comment on this one.

I seem to recall something about funding for paving the runway in Cambridge Bay, but the latest CFS still calls it gravel. I know it's good gravel, but if they want pavement we'll have to work out of Yellowknife. There isn't a lot of pavement north of Yellowknife. There isn't a lot of anything except rocks and lakes. Even trees are in short supply.

I tried to duplicate my zooming out in confusion experience with a Google Maps link, but now that I know where I am it seems obvious that it's in the arctic on first glance. Expectations influence experience.