Human Factors

My Human Factors training is not yet up for renewal, but I'm looking at notes on the training materials we used last time. They were aimed at the maintainer, not the pilot.

The main benefit of this is realizing how many shortcuts and errors maintenance personnel make. If I take a shorcut, it works or doesn't that day. If they do, their not-quite-right repair or incompletely inspected part might be in there, waiting to kill me for another 500 hours.

Some of the "good practice" and "bad practice" sample conversations from the videos sound just like ones I hear in the hangar, especially the one on the "Lack of Awareness" item. It could be a recording from folks I know. It's a personality trait of maintainers to be proud of their knowledge and to enjoy catching each other out. 

"I thought the tag was good enough."
"Nope, you have to test an aircraft component."

I'm still not sure whether it was an error that I received the maintenance-specific training, or it was just intended as general training with all the examples coming from another specialty. Helicopter pilots must have to suffer that indignity all the time, attending general courses where the examples are all from fixed wing experience. A person should see his or herself reflected in instructional materials, to make it feel relevant and applicable. That goes for gender, race, job, type of operation, and type of aircraft. Even though we know we're all people, working with equipment, there's something about "that's someone like me doing what I do" that makes us sit up and take note.

 That said, lot of advice is applicable across disciplines and the though required to transpose it forces one to think about it a little more. For example the course recommends the maintainer think, "I am a qualified technician, not an idiot. I know what information I need to have to assess and repair this damage." At least I assume she's meant to think that and not say it out loud to her supervisor. Likewise I am a qualified pilot, not an idiot. I know what information I need to plan and conduct a flight."  But that's not something I ever really need to say. People don't hurry me or demand I fly with inadequate weather information or poor equipment.




Maybe this one is more useful: "Safety nets" for stress are being aware of how stress can impact your work, stepping back and rationally analyzing the problem, rationally determining what to do and then doing it, talking to others, asking others to check your work, taking time off or at least taking short breaks, keeping fit and healthy, and using assertive communication."


Stress can definitely affect my work. It can affect the thoroughness of my preflight, the amount of sleep I get, the way I treat my coworkers and my concentration on the job. I ask others to check my logic and my arithmetic. I have a day off today and I just came back from a 7.5 km run. The badder ass you know you are, the more confidence you have to step up and stand up for what you need for safety.

The best one is the advice to look for negative norms, then openly talk about them and work at changing them. It's also very difficult. Fish don't see the water, and it's hard to persuade people that the thing they do all the time, might even take pride in as a source of efficiency, may be a safety risk.




I'll make it my mission to find a negative norm at work this week.

Day Trip

I and a fairly new coworker are assigned to go to a site about an hour away and do some work. It's expected to be a single flight: zip up there, do the work and come back to base without landing. I say, "Just in case the work takes longer and we have to land for fuel, do you have a company credit card?" He doesn't yet, so I grab mine, just in case.

We fly to the location, but don't succeed in completing the work. The conditions aren't appropriate. We've just turned for home when my coworker receives a message on the satellite link. "Do you guys have overnight gear?"

The true answer is, "No," but we understand that it means, "Don't come home until the work is done." Never leave home in an airplane without a toothbrush and a change of underwear. I turn the airplane around and land at an airport nearby where we both know people. We get a ride into town in a veterinary van (no not driven by a Terminatrix), check into a hotel, call our friends, and go visiting.

Next morning we are preparing to do the work they sent us up here to do, but we are sent instead to another province. And then up north. Where we got snowed in. The new coworker goes home on the airlines. I eventually spend almost a week in the field, including the day I spent digging the airplane out of a snowbank. I think it was May. At least it was May by the time I got home.

When I finally get home, the vice president sees me carrying my gear into the office: my flight bag, a Wal Mart bag of emergency clothing and toiletry purchases, ten thousand dollars of credit card receipts, and a straw broom I bought to whisk the snow off the airplane. "What's that for?" he asks, indicating the broom. "Is that how you got back?"

So you see, management considers me to be a mighty and powerful sorceress. Or something.

It Did Not, However, Contain a Live Bobcat

I'm picking an airplane up from a routine maintenance inspection and service. It's early in the morning, before anyone from the maintenance unit is in. This is not unusual. It's a little unusual for us to have scheduled maintenance performed away from home base, but sometimes the person responsible for maintenance makes arrangements with other companies.

I pick up the journey log. If that paperwork is not done, the maintenance is considered incomplete, so I always check it first. The signed maintenance release shows the work that has been performed on the airplane, so I know what to pay particular attention to on my inspection. The entry matches the purchase order, and is unremarkable.

I start the walkaround. Numerous cowling screws are loose. These are things that work themselves loose over time. I find loose ones in the field and just snug them up.  If a particular one is consistently loose, I report it and maintenance repairs the anchor. There's probably a reading of the regulations that requires me to leave my Swiss army knife in my pocket and call a licensed AME to tighten my cowling screws, but who would do that? It's permissible for a few to be missing, but I'd rather they stay in. While I'm not impressed that these folks didn't check that all the screws were tight after replacing the cowling, I'm more concerned about what they didn't tighten that I can't check. I verify through the front opening in the cowlings that the front few spark plugs are tight.  I had a coworker once (different job, different maintenance unit) who came back from a flight reporting a rough running engine.  While waiting with him for the AME to arrive, I poked about in the cowling, not expecting to find anything, just the equivalent of opening the hood and staring at a non-functioning car engine. But in this case my hand came back with a spark plug that had only been finger tight. Someone was distracted between setting it in place and putting a wrench on it. It turned out that day that all the bottom spark plugs were loose.

The spark plugs I can reach are tight here,but the little door in the cowling that can be opened to access the oil quick drain is still open. The oil quick drain itself is closed and there is oil in the engines.  A quart difference between the levels in the two crankcases, but they're both in the acceptable range.

There's a tire gauge in the baggage compartment, a screwdriver in the cabin, and the piece de resistance: there's an electronic multi-tester inside one of the engine cowlings, barely visible through the little door through which I access the oil dipstick.


We do not depart until I have spoken with the PRM and a maintenance supervisor here, and we find ourselves a new maintenance unit in this area. I did return the tools, even though I always figure that anything left in my airplane after maintenance should be mine to keep.

Oh, and if you're confused about the bobcat reference .

Hazards on the Taxi

I'm taxiing into the ramp of a familiar FBO. There's a local airline/charter outfit that flies out of here and I have to run the gauntlet between their ranks of parked airplanes to get to where I'm going. Today there's an additional obstacle. Someone is washing one of their airplanes and a hose stretches from the hangar across my path.

I weigh the possibilities. Probably I can taxi over it with no harm to anything, save a momentary interruption in water pressure for the guy washing the plane.  But there's a possibility, as when taxiing in the vicinity of any rope, that it could be picked up by one of my propellers and turned into a flail of destruction. I've never seen this, and I haven't spoken to anyone it happened to. In fact I can't even remember when I first learned it, but deep in my memories is a flight instructor telling me not to taxi over ropes because they could get caught in the propeller. Before passing on this wisdom I did a little googling to find a student whose instructor learned this the hard way. That's one student who will remember the time and place of the instruction as well as the knowledge.  I can envision the knowledge spreading out around them in ripples as they recount the tale.

So a hose is like a rope. It is however secured to a tap at one end and in someone's hand at the other, so not quite as threatening. But I can shut down and haul the airplane the rest of the way by hand. I put on the brakes. The guy with the hose also knows that airplanes shouldn't taxi over such things. He picks up the hose and crosses back towards the tap with it, leaving the aisle clear for me to taxi through.

Hoses aside, this ramp has more FOD on it than it used to. The pavement is not in great shape and after shutdown I find metal objects--screws and washers--on the ramp. Not impressed. I shut down and do all the piloty post flight things and then after I walk away can't remember turning off the master and mags. I turn around go back and check. Everything is off.


The problem is that now the chief pilot knows not only my every screw up, but even my every almost could have been, thought I screwed up but didn't. And chews me out for it. Oh well, I get to keep my job.

Premature Ditching & Last Minute Go Around

A train carrying Boeing fuselages to assembly plants in Washington state derailed in Montana, dumping the aircraft parts into a river. No one was injured, but I'm guessing someone's airplane deliveries might be late.

The video is taken by river rafters coming up on the scene.

And here's a go around at Barcelona: Russian crew forced to put in the power and abort their landing at the last moment because an Argentinian aircraft was taxiing across the runway. I don't know whether this was the result of an ATC error, or the Argentinians failed to hold short of the runway.

Photo Finish

I checked with maintenance regarding my recent post about the fire protection system. Our fire detector is photocell activated. The photocell is sensitive to a particular wavelength of light, supposedly characteristic of fire.

I didn't get to ask the obvious questions about why fire detection systems aren't overwhelmed with false positives from the sun, an awesome source of almost every electromagnetic wavelength, and able at some time of the day or some practical bank angle, to shine through every chink and opening in an engine cowling. An apprentice had a more pressing question about reinstallation of an exhaust manifold, and I was wearing silly girl shoes for a social event, so I teetered back out of the hangar to the office and left the maintenance to the maintainers.

Along with the answer to my question, and before the apprentice needed direction, I received the following story. A certain air carrier's night maintenance crew (they know who they are) conducted an inspection on at least one of the carrier's fleet. Their fire detection system used visible light, and the crew followed the manufacturer's instructions to test it by shining a flashlight on the detectors. The system failed the test. The crew was preparing to replace several thousand dollars worth of aviation grade electronic gear, when someone realized that that instructions were as old as the system, twenty years or so, and predated the invention of the LED flashlights the crew were using. The diodes were not emitting the necessary wavelength to trigger the detector, because when the instructions said "flashlight" an incandescent flashlight was assumed.

 The Wikipedia article on Fire Detection suggests that our photocell might be tuned to multiple wavelengths, possibly including UV and/or IR to compare the ratios. This still doesn't explain how an ordinary incandescent flashlight would trigger it, but the sun wouldn't, but does make the concept of photometric flame detection clearer. While looking for more information on flame detectors I discovered that there is a whole new generation of fire detection that uses machine intelligence to recognize the appearance of actual flames, something that is pretty fricking clear to humans. Combined with smoke detectors, something a commenter suggested on the previous post, there are enough different kinds of combustion detectors on aircraft to warrant a survey post on the topic, some time when my working day is shorter.

I was also entertained by the Wikipedia article on the Flashlight, which explains why Americans call them flashlights. The earliest zinc–carbon batteries could not provide a steady electric current so when combined with the inefficient carbon-filament bulbs, the result was a light that frequently blinked off so the battery could recover.

Disowned

One of our aircraft has an optional engine fire extinguishing system installed. The extinguishing system is optional. Engine fires are an option we don't want to exercise. The system is fairly simple, a halon bottle installed in the accessories compartment, a sensor, a couple of lights on the dashboard, and a pair of guarded switches to discharge the bottle. There's very little in the way of documentation, because it's not original to the airplane, but what's called an STC. STC stands not very helpfully for "special type certificate" and what that means is that someone has paid a whole lot of money to have this gizmo approved for this airplane.

I don't actually know how the sensor works. I'm guessing the sensor is based on a bimetallic strip that will bend and close a contact if heated to a temperature hotter than a not-on-fire engine should induce at its location. Or it could be a photocell. I've flown an airplane with a photocell-based fire detection system before. Hmm, wouldn't a photocell result in the fire light going on when maintenance did an uncowled runup in the daytime? I don't think that happens. In the event of an engine fire, I'm supposed to select the appropriate switch in after I have completed the original manufacturer's engine fire checklist.

A fire extinguisher needs to be sent out for hydrostatic testing on a periodic basis, and the ones in the engine are no exception. They have their testing due date stamped on the bottles. The director of maintenance tells me he can't find any information on the STC, can I please research and find the schematics and the maintenance instructions for the unit.  I track down the company that bought the company that bought the company that manufactured the STCed (pronounced "ess-tee-seed") system, but they don't have any information on it. They refer me to their European affiliate, which finally tells me conclusively that the product was not profitable for them, so they no longer support it. They have apparently lost or destroyed all information pertaining to the system. Charming.

We will have no choice but to remove it.

GFA Challenge

The GFA is a series of aviation weather maps showing what weather is forecast to affect aviation in a given region in the next twelve hours or so. It shows the centres of high and low pressure regions, the fronts, low visibility, clouds and precipitation, and dangerous weather, including icing and turbulence on a separate page. GFA stands for graphical area forecast (yes, the letters are in the wrong order). It replaced the FA (area forecast) about 15 years ago.

The GFA depicts provincial borders and has little circles for locations that have TAFs. (A TAF is forecast that covers the immediate area of an aerodrome). What takes some people a while to realize is that when you mouse over the little circle on the online GFA, text pops up to tell you the name of the place.  It would be cooler if you could click on said text to see the latest TAF and METAR (which officially doesn't stand for anything), but I'll take what I can get.

I like to think of it as a little geography quiz. Pull up the GFA page, click on one of the regions, then choose any time. I recommend you pick one of the icing, turbulence  and freezing level charts from the right column, because the left column clouds and weather charts can get so busy that you can't see the towns at all.  Now try to name all the cities and towns represented by the circles, before you mouse over and see if you're right.

Sometimes one of the little circles doesn't show anything when you mouse over. I think it's usually when it's very close to a weather depiction.  Some of the circles represent closed aerodromes where there is no observation or forecast, like Edmonton City Centre. They don't recode the GFA when they close an aerodrome, so it's a history quiz as well as a geography quiz.

Taxiiway Closures

I'm arriving at an airport with no control tower, and no flight services on the field, but it's a mandatory frequency, and this time of day the radio is answered by a flight services specialist at another airport. It's not an uncommon situation in Canada. It's funny sometimes listening when a pilot doesn't realize that the control tower at the airport he has just landed at is unoccupied, and asks questions like, "Is this a good place to park?"

The descent is over rugged forest with little lakes in it. I point out a boat on the lake to a new, non-pilot crew member, part of my running commentary on what I'm doing, so they get to know what is normal. I called the flight services specialist about 30 miles out and then again entering the zone. The specialist tells me that three out of the four taxiways are closed, rattling off the identifying letters. This is the wrong part of the flight for me to be fumbling for a publication to determine how this should affect my runway choice or route to the fuel pumps. Taxiway letters don't correspond in an obvious way to the runway layout. How could they, with so many ways to lay out runways? I do know of an airport with taxiways S to the south and E to the east, but even that makes no sense without the diagram out the CFS, Did I miss this mess in the NOTAMs? I often check NOTAMs the night before and not morning of, and perhaps I missed this airport.

I can see a vehicle parked across one of the taxiways.  Another pilot on frequency says somethign about "these baldies."  Bald eagles, he means. They're the most common kind of eagle around here. I was about to describe one, but guess everyone in the world knows what they look like, because they're an American symbol. There's one near my altitude, but fortunately not right in my path. I flare, and no eagles decide to challenge me.

I tax off the runway and negotiate my way to the apron. There is construction going on, and large trucks trundling to and fro. We get to the fuel pumps without incident and refuel. At the end of the day I recheck NOTAMs. There is nothing for this airport about taxiway closures, just three unlighted towers and some non-standard runway markings. Ubiquitous enough NOTAMs that I hadn't written them down.

I call to talk to a flight briefer to see if I've missed a NOTAM somewhere. Nope, they don't have anything either. I tell them about the construction.

This sort of thing undermines my confidence in the system. I depend on this system to tell me if there is fuel and a place to put my wheels when I land. I check NOTAMs again in the morning. Now there are two unlighted towers plus non-standard runway markings. Overnight someone either put up some lights or took down a tower, I guess. But the construction still doesn't exist.

Late Spring

An airplane in Canada is legally required to be equipped with a working oil pressure gauge for each engine. When you start a piston engine, your eyes go to the oil pressure gauge. You're waiting for the pressure to come up. Given that it's the first thing you do on starting an engine, it's one of the first things I learned as a student. (Right after, "in order to start an engine, you have to turn the key to the start position and hold it there until the engine has actually started," which was explained to me immediately after I did it the wrong way. Yeah, I was pretty dense).  If the pressure doesn't come up, you're supposed to shut down the engine and not do anything else.

I'm not sure I've ever followed that instruction. I am starting an engine that I have just verified has oil in the crankcase and does not have a huge puddle of oil on the ground underneath. And I know how hot or cold that oil is, from 'so hot that I had to use a rag to handle the dipstick, and couldn't really see a level anyway', to 'I just spent twenty minutes deicing and I can't feel my toes or fingertips'. If it's the latter, yeah, I know that oil isn't going to come dancing through the tiny line to the pressure gauge in any big hurry. I will give the oil a while to warm up, and thus the oil pressure more time to increase.

In retrospect, I wonder if disciplining student eyes to go straight to the oil pressure gauge was a way of training us to be vigilant for a hot start when we move on to turbine engines.

High oil pressure can be a sign of a blockage, or you're running summer weight oil too far north, so instead of distributed cooling slipperiness, the oil is a viscous glob having trouble getting forced through some part of the system. Yeah, oil that is too thick can cause high or low oil pressure indication, because unless you're short on oil, both high and low oil pressure indications are caused by poor oil circulation. The pressure is high one place and low another place. Or it's the gauge. Low or high oil pressure, it's usually the gauge.

Even when its probably not the gauge, so long as there isn't oil splattered all over the airplane, and the engine didn't quit, the pilot rolls up to maintenance and says, "I have a low oil pressure indication, but it's probably just the gauge." You never want to give maintenance the idea that you are terrified of the airplane they gave you. I'm not sure why we do this. Perhaps I should try the opposite strategy sometimes and insist that ... oh wait I did that last week with a stuck propeller cable that turned out to be ... maybe I'll admit that one another time. While instantly diagnosable by someone leaning into the cockpit from the right-side door, it really wasn't visible to someone strapped into the left seat. Anyway, under-reporting of the severity of our concerns seems to be a pilot thing. Maybe because maintenance likes to show us to be wrong, so if we show little concern, they will work hard to find some way it could have killed us. Which is what we want them to do.

So my story is, I report unequal oil pressure on several consecutive flights in this airplane. It's in the green on both engines, I concede, but used to be equal, I think. I didn't remember there being a split, and I would. A pilot scans the engine instruments far more times than she knows, because we only notice we're doing it when something is wrong, and the two needles for the same thing on the two engines not being in the same position on their adjacent dials comes up as wrong, even when they are both in the green. The oil pressure indication on the right engine is inching up slowly. If it were a single engine airplane I probably would not notice. That's something I say a lot, but I keep reporting these things, because sometimes it matters. It's remarkable what a tiny thing can be a symptom of.


Eventually the needle reaches the yellow and they take it apart and find out what was wrong with it. An oil pressure gauge works the only way one logically could but I was still kind of flabbergasted when I realized that a little pressure line comes off the oil system, ducting a bit of the engine-pressure oil right to the instrument in my dashboard. Its internals consist partly of a ball bearing and a spring, and the pressure of the oil on the ball bearing compresses the spring, driving the needle.  The spring was worn out.

Ups and Downs

Pilot Proficiency Check. Flight test time. The examiner is a check pilot from another company. The ride is scheduled for Friday. I make sure all the right exams have been written and recurrent training signed off.  The examiner calls on Thursday. "Let's do it today. The weather will be better than tomorrow." Why stress for another day when I don't have to?

The examiner doesn't enjoy sitting in an airplane watching people stress out. He just wants this over. After one turn in the hold my inbound leg is too short and I never really intercepted the inbound track completely. That's not abnormal for the first time around on a parallel entry. He asks me how I will correct for the wind, and when I tell him how long I will fly outbound for and on what heading, to try to make the next inbound a neat one minute line along the appropriate radial, he is satisfied and calls for the NDB approach.

I tell him I will fly two minutes outbound from the beacon before turning inbound, but he gets bored watching the scenery go by and tells me to turn in early. This puts me high on the approach. I know that is the main hazard of this step down approach, not being able to make the step down altitudes. It's why I chose the two minute outbound. Now I'm fighting to get down and not overspeed my flaps and gear. I don't make the MDA by the missed approach point. I'm too high to land. It wasn't a trick on his part, he was just impatient. He sees what he did, and says he won't fail me. Still I should have refused the early turn. I know my airplane. I'll take the low score there.

When I get the ride report back I grimace again that it's only good for a year. An instrument rating only has to be renewed every two years, and not too long ago PPCs were good for the same length of time, but they've now shortened it to one year. The first time that happened I called the examiner up to tell him he's made an error on the paperwork. But there's a good thing, too. He didn't even give me a 2, the lowest passing grade on that approach. It's a three, the "minor errors" rating. I don't know if he forgot, or felt badly for asking me to turn early. At any rate I'm licensed to commit aviation in this aircraft for another year.

On the Radio Lately

Today I give you a collection of things pilots and controllers have said that made me smile enough to scrawl them on my OFP.


--
Controller: Aircraft calling, standby. Aircraft .. everybody just standby.

--

Pilot: Centre, Aircraft Z, Any chance of direct the beacon?
ATC: No. [no call sign, just 'no']
--

Pilot: Centre, Aircraft Y, 60 nm W of fix, 16,000.
Centre: That's lovely. You should tell Approach on <freq>.

---
Pilot: <Gives aircraft position report parked at an FBO>
Controller: This is the departure frequency. We'll talk to you later.

--
A controller makes several calls without a reply, to an American Mustang that has been having fun shooting approaches into fogbound airports. Good practice. I've heard that guy up here before. The pilot finally comes back says he had a radio problem. A few minutes later the same controller loses contact with another US airplane. "No one is listening to me today," he laments on frequency.
--
Controller. "Where is that? My map is crappy."

Top Gun Hair

My hair is growing wildly in every direction. I've been working every day for almost as many days in a row as the law and company op specs allow, and the few days off that have materialized haven't aligned with the days my hairdresser is available. (Yes, I could go to another hairdresser. Indeed it was just such a crazy hair situation that caused me to find my current hairdresser, but I don't take cheating on my hairdresser lightly).  The days off have been occupied with laundry and what I call 'weeding.'

'Weeding' for me is pulling out handfuls of green things I don't know what they are so that I can see the colourful flowers that I don't know what they are either.  My favourite part is when the weeds attack one another, e.g. when a climbing vine weed binds itself around a fast-growing vertical weed. My garden is even more unkempt than my hair. I confessed to a neighbour that I really didn't know where to start on the weeding and she said a little contemptuously, "You could at least start." Her yard is enough houses away that I don't think my weeds actually attack hers, so I hope she derives satisfied pleasure that her garden is so much nicer than mine. It's good when one's garden brings others pleasure, don't you think?

I was scheduled to do a PPC ride (annual recurrent flight test) a couple of months ago, but the examiner got sick and missed his ride, so he wasn't qualified to do mine on the appropriate day. It's stressy getting ready for a PPC, because I have to demonstrate flying the airplane in a way I almost never fly it.  I don't even know what approach category I should put myself in. (Approach categories are based on approach speed in Canada, not on stall speed. I can comfortably approach at anything between max gear extension speed and blue line, a range of forty knots, spanning three categories. And in visual conditions I have accepted requests to maintain speeds outside that range at both ends. Sequenced with military jets for a long runway I can keep my speed above gear speed until short final, and then let it bleed off over the runway before dropping  gear and flaps. And sequenced with little training aircraft in a busy circuit I have turned final a few knots below blue line, still going about double the speed of the student in front of me.


Blue line is the best rate of climb speed on one engine, a speed I should be at or above while climbing, so I don't need to try and accelerate to it if I lose an engine. It's still faster than red line, the minimum controllable airspeed or Vmc. That's the speed below which the asymmetrical thrust resulting from an engine failure may render the airplane uncontrollable. Vmc is calculated at full power, so while being below blue line on final represents a low energy situation, it's not one that would flip me upside-down if an engine failed. Should I need to abort the landing and go around because the student in the Cessna didn't make it off the runway in time, I would be sure to increase speed above blue line before raising the nose for the climb.

It's at take off, during a full power go around, or in very low speed practice manoeuvres that Vmc becomes of most concern. The POH advises that at take off the airplane should be kept near the runway until Vmc. Given that the rotation speed specified in the POH is Vmc, except for a different place in the POH where it's given at Vmc+5, I think I can keep the airplane near the runway until after rotation. For approach it recommends only "Maintain sufficient speed during turns in the traffic pattern." Yeah, thanks. I got that. It's a good thing you told me, POH.

So I'm in the office, looking for more specific training materials and someone eyes the baseball cap under which I've crammed all my unruly hair, crying out for the attention of a competent hairdresser. "Is your hair a different colour under there?" he asks. I explain that I'm pretending to be like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun. He is unfamiliar with the reference. "Who is Kelly McGillis?" What is he doing in aviation?

I elaborate, "I'm imagining that if I take my hat off, my hair will cascade out, looking perfect." Everyone has seen that scene in some movie or another. And then I remember that in the scene where Kelly is wearing the baseball cap, she doesn't take it off. She's wearing the cap because that scene was filmed later, after she had already changed her hair colour for another movie she was in. My coworker was right all along. What am I doing in aviation? I'd better re-watch the movie. Surely there is some scene in which she takes off a hat? A motorcycle helmet?  No, I think they don't ride motorcycle helmets in that movie. They're too cool.

Later I overhear a snippet of conversation between an HR person and an office person about maintaining a professional appearance. Hmm, maybe I need a classier baseball cap. Or a day off. Coming soon! Right after my PPC I think.

Balanced Diet

What I have eaten today, and what I was doing while eating it:
(times adjusted to match the time zone I started the day in)

0600 - packet of maple and brown sugar flavoured instant oatmeal - filing a flight plan
1300 - Apple & Cinnamon Larabar - talking to ATC, while flying in turbulence
1600 - A few cashews left in a bag that I opened a few days ago - flying and calculating my remaining oxygen
1605 - bag of Cheezies - flying and calculating my duty day,
1610 - box of raisins. They were all stuck together, so I just peeled the cardboard off and stuck the whole thing in my mouth - figuring out my descent profile so I could go under, not over the cloud layers that were solid at destination
1612 - packet of beef jerky, almost ate the "do not eat" packet, too,
piece of garlic toast my fellow crewmember saved for me from yesterday's dinner, roll of Rockets (Smarties to the Americans) - shoving everything I could reach in my face while the autopilot flew
1800 - a Starbucks cake pop & a persimmon fruit or passion fruit or something iced tea - hugging my ops manager who brought them out to the airplane knowing I'd be tired and hungry from nine and a half hours of flying.
2130 - two burgers, and most of the fixings that were supposed to go on someone else's burger

So the question is, what should I have for dessert?

Expense Report

Hello, my name is Aviatrix. I stayed at your hotel last week. You charged me GST. There is no GST number on the bill. Would you like to refund me the GST or tell me the government-issued number that allows you to charge me the goods and services tax?

 I wonder how many businesses charge it but never bother to remit it. I'm pretty sure I worked for one once. It's easy GST is a tremendous pain in the neck. I had to charge it when i was a contractor. I'm generally considered a smart person, yet I screwed my GST return up every year. I think something about loathing it makes me not want to understand it.

Also, because who wants to read a blog entry solely about taxes, I brought an airplane back right on the dot for the hour it was due for the 100 hour maintenance check, after three flights totalling almost ten hours. I didn't cheat. but anyone will think I did. And the airplane was fresh out of it's last maintenance last week, which explains why no blog entries in a bit, eh?

New Definition of Number One

Overheard on the radio today: You're number one, behind a Pilatus. The pilot didn't seem to have a problem with that kind of counting.

Also overheard, as I was walking into an FBO, a discussion of hiring a new pilot, they were discussing how much to offer. "Ah," said one, "We'll just get them to write up the requirements and see if we can get a guy." "Or a woman," I said, my trajectory through the room such that I was right beside them right at the moment this needed to be said. They agreed completely, and then asked me how much I thought they should pay a Pilatus captain. "It depends on so many things..." I waffled.

"Like whether we hire a woman or not," joked the guy, and I raised a boot as if to kick him the head and then passed by. A pilot doesn't pause long on the route from cockpit to washroom after a flight. The sad thing is that he's right. It's harder for women to get jobs in aviation, so when one is available we'll accept it at lower pay than a man would, and stay longer, because it's harder for us to get the next job too. Men know this, and it's one of the reasons men protest the hiring of women and minorities. We lower the wages. One we do it just by existing: people added to the existing number of white men being available in the labour pool means that there is more supply of labour, so wages go down purely by supply and demand. And then we do it by being hungry. We'll take that lowball job offer. Men can't keep us out of the labour force, so the only way you can fix this and be sure that we and you are hired on merit is to make sure we're paid the same for the same experience and duties.

'Cause apparently in aviation you can be number one right behind someone else.

Getting My GPS Fix

As I searched my bookshelves for a book I needed to prepare for my PPC, I realized that I have been incredibly remiss in not devoting a blog entry to my favourite GPS book, Max Trescott's GPS and WAAS Instrument Flying Handbook. It is dog-eared and filled with notes on the multiple ideas for future blog entries it inspired. Max There are two reasons this entry never has never been written. One is that I had this crazy idea that I was going to be able to fully digest all the information in this book, and then write the mother of all blog entries on GPS, and the second reason is that when I pick it up it's usually because I have to learn something, and get carried away with that.

Today is one of the latter occasions, and I've given myself a time deadline to study this, so I'm just going to transcribe some of the marginal notes I made reading through the opening chapters. "Excellent and now obvious," "Max knows what he is talking about, doesn't just parrot, which explains why I am not understanding things I didn't before." "Explains from zero knowledge without insulting intelligence."

There's lots of information on GPS on the Internet, but my time is worth something in sifting the wheat from the chaff. The Internet seems to be at odds over whether the unit can be programmed to fly a hold. Given that none of the Internet people I saw say it could be done gave useful step-by-step directions on how to do it, I was believing the naysayers, but Max says, "The Garmin GNS 430W and 530W send commands that let an autopilot automatically fly a procedure turn or a course reversal in a holding pattern. On the moving map page, it adjusts the size and shape of holding patterns based on an aircraft's speed and the winds aloft. Once established in a hold, it can command the autopilot to fly the holding pattern as long as you'd like." And now I see that the unit will only do this for published holds. Max does give some tips, some credited to a colleague, Doug Stewart, on flying unpublished holds. I'll reproduce them here to enhance my understanding and remembering.

The typical hold clearance (a "hold" is the way an air traffic control asks a pilot in an aircraft that requires speed in order to stay aloft to "go wait over there for a bit") instructs the pilot to fly directly from her present position to a specified point (called a "fix"). The fix can be any defined point in space, like "thirteen miles from the ABC VOR on a bearing of 298 degrees" but usually it's a VOR or an NDB. The clearance then includes a vague direction (north, east, southwest) from the fix to hold and an exact track on which to be inbound to the fix each time she circles around. The goal is to fly a little racetrack pattern, with each inbound leg taking exactly one minute and being right on the specified track. The outbound leg isn't necessarily parallel or one minute, because winds mess us up. What also messes me up is trying to learn a procedure I use once a year when I renew my qualifications. But if I master this I can probably also use it to fly shuttle climbs and descents, which I do use in real life.

So here is what I should do: Once assigned the holding fix I set the course direct to it, with the autopilot in NAV mode to track to it. Once the autopilot has figured out the heading that will hold me on that course, I should bug that heading and fly in HDG mode on the autopilot, while I set up the hold. I hit direct to again on the autopilot and enter the inbound course as the desired track. That makes it show a pink line to the fix along that track. I should put it in OBS mode so it doesn't automatically go on to the next waypoint. Reaching the fix, I turn the heading bug to my calculated outbound heading. When I have flown outbound for the necessary time I should use the heading bug to turn inbound, but when I am within 45 degrees of the desired inbound track, I turn the autopilot back to NAV and it will intercept and track inbound. In a direct entry, I can use the ETE feature of the GPS to figure out my timing, by looking at the distance when it hits one minute, and I can look at the wind correction to figure out my outbound correction angle. Curiously he suggests triple the inbound correction, while I use double.

I see Max Trescott also sells a CD ROM course for $100. Given that that's the cost of about twenty minutes of dual instruction in a light twin, I suspect it would be worth one's while.

Who is Onboard?

Patrick Smith at AskThePilot.com has ranted on a subject I have ranted on before. There are at minimum two people working in an airline cockpit. Both are pilots. Why do the media pretend there is only one? This isn't a new thing. Ernest Gann started out as a copilot in the ... 1920s? (I'm busy ranting, book is in another room, not looking it up). The correct terminology is not impenetrable airline jargon that has to be dumbed down for the media-consuming proles. As Smith points out, it's largely a matter of adding an -s to a word they are already using. If they boldly go a step further and refer to one of the pilots as the captain and the other as the first officer, even if the public has never heard these terms before, surely they'll figure out that the captain is in charge and the FO is the next in charge. Or does too many Gilligan's Island reruns make everyone assume that anything akin to a First Mate is a bumbling moron? Actually, wasn't Gilligan smarter than the Skipper? Just more accident prone.

The general public knows there are two pilots on board. They see them board. Even in extreme situations they grasp this fact. I recall an article about an airplane that crashed in an urban area. Members of the public ran to help, bravely going on board the aircraft even as it started to to burn, and one of the rescuers looked at the people they had removed from the wreckage and saw that there was only one wearing a white shirt and epaulettes. "Pilots always come in pairs!" he noted, or something similar. They dared to go back on board for the second pilot.

I'm trying to find that article to get the exact wording. I thought it was the King Air that crashed on approach to Vancouver. Radio audio with some photos here. It hit a busy roadway, only clipping a couple of vehicles because a stoplight caused a gap in traffic, but the witness quoted here makes it clear that passengers weren't able to rescue the pilots because the fire was too far advanced in the cockpit. The TSB report linked above mentions confusion over how many passengers and pilots were on board, so unless there was a uniformed pilot among the passengers, this is not the story I recall. Professional rescuers extracted the pilots, but unfortunately both died of "thermal injuries." Ugh. Who knew there was a clinically remote way to say "burned to death."

Interesting that some members of the public were distressed badly enough by the proximity to the crash to require treatment by paramedics, while others were willing to run on board a burning airplane. I commend them for saving lives, but I think my safety training would side with my animal flight-from-fire response and I would instead render assistance that didn't involve entering a confined space probably containing live wires and fumes from ruptured fuel tanks. I guess we don't know what we would do until it needs doing.

This started out as sympathy for a rant but took a macabre turn. It suggests, though, that you merely knowing that there are two pilots on board your commercial passenger flight does not just satisfy our petty need for you to get the words right, but could actually make a life or death difference to the flight crew. The local paper got it right, referring to "pilots" throughout and calling them the captain and first officer. The national one has some exciting photographs and a video of some smoke taken by an excited car driver (not worth watching unless you really like smoke), but implies throughout the article that there was only one pilot on board.

There were two of them. The captain was named Luc Fortin and the first officer was Matt Robic. I didn't know them, but chances are I have met one or the other on my travels and it is certain that someone reading this blog does. My apologies that what started out as a hunt for a story about passengers who could count to two rescuing a pilot turned into revisiting a story that touches you painfully. The TSB suggests aircraft like this have a G-switch to isolate the battery in the event of a crash, and that might have saved them.

On Leadership and Lost

I've been rewatching, or kind of re-listening to--I tend to do chores with the television playing--Lost recently. One of the themes of the show is leadership, which is something I'm dealing with in life, as well. You'll see whatever it is you're focusing on, in whatever you look at, so it's not surprising I'm finding it in Lost.

When I was in high school, and I got into first world funks of depression at the hopelessness of life, (i.e. when I was a normal teenager), I discovered that a good route out was through reading really depressing stories by A.P. Chekhov. He wrote hundreds of the things, generally short simple tales on the futility of life, populated by characters who knew, discovered, or completely failed to realize, that every step they took was merely plodding closer to pointless death. They're well-written, with believable characters and the somewhat alien world of 19th century Russia--took me ages to understand why so many grandmothers slept on the stove--so one can read quite a few. At first I would nod my head in sullen agreement that the world was that way. After a while I would venture an internal opinion that maybe it was not that black. And finally I would yell at the characters not to be so pathetic, to go forth and do something. And I would get up and set an example. For some people, inspirational literature requires actual inspiration, but nothing goads me to do things so much as seeing it done incorrectly.

The same seems to be true of leadership training. As much as I probably need to pick up a book to help train myself in the art of leading a group of people to accomplish a goal without any of them killing one another or being eaten by polar bears, I have no desire to. But watch a couple of hours of Lost, and I'm really wishing the smoke monster would get Jack. Sure, I understand that fiction requires drama and heroes, and that fictional heroes require tragic flaws, but some of the television traditions, dare I say tropes are really aggravating. The leader character on Lost is a doctor named Jack. In the immediate aftermath of the crash he is the hero because he can treat injuries, and resuscitate people, but he ends up racing from place to place being the hero for everything. So here are my non-leadership techniques to learn from Lost.

Playing up the incompetence of those around you is not a leadership skill. This is more something Lost (and every other TV show does) than something Jack does but they are both fictional creations of the same writers, so it counts. To show that Jack is a great and mighty leader, everyone else on the beach is depicted as clueless and incompetent. There's a character, Boone, who is a licensed lifeguard, training which specifically includes a good deal of first aid and emergency scene management. Jack has to take over his resuscitation efforts because he's doing it wrong, and later in the show rescues him from drowning, while they are both trying to save a third person. There's no plot reason for Boone to be a fraudulent or incompetent lifeguard. It would have better showed Jack's leadership abilities if he had come over, approved and encouraged Boone's competent resuscitation and moved on to another victim. He would have looked like more of a leader if he had left the task of resuscitating someone who had been pulled out of he water specifically in the hands of someone whose professional specialty that was. The dramatic point that was made during the swimming rescue would have been made more strongly if it were Boone who had to haul an exhausted Jack back to shore. When Jack needs someone to hold down a patient who has to endure surgery without anaesthetic he chooses a man who specifically and repeatedly states that he can't handle the sight of blood. He sets the guy up to fail.

Doing everything yourself is not leadership. Jack is always running, literally running, from one situation to another, placing himself in danger without developing or drawing on the skills of the people around him to solve problems. This is his major dramatic character flaw, so it couldn't be more blatant, but watching him do it wrong is a good way to make me wonder where I can apply this lesson. My beach isn't covered in able-bodied people who can be pressed into service to do the essential tasks, but I still might be doing more leaping than is strictly necessary.

Meanwhile Ben, the mysterious leader of the others, shows quite a different style of leadership. He doesn't do any leaping at all, accomplishing everything through sinister psychological manipulation. This fascinates me, and I know it can be done without the sinister part, because I willingly go to great effort to achieve goals under psychological manipulation by my own boss and by the director of an organization I volunteer with. You see, I like to feel valuable and appreciated and they know that, so they appreciate me in return for my efforts. I'm always left thinking to myself, "I'm happy, and--in the case of the non-volunteer position--they give me money. Am I being tricked here? If I weren't being manipulated into doing this, I might go and do something else ... which might make me happy ... or money." And then I get confused and stop thinking about that.

So, in conclusion, leadership lessons for the day: Get people around you to do things they are competent at in return for things that they want.

Quick: Name the First Woman to Fly Around the World

First two admissions:
One) I don't remember hearing of her before today.
Two) I don't have time to do any fact checking; I'm trusting this Buzzfeed article, and banging out a quick post for the 50th anniversary of the completion of her flight.

Her name is Jerrie Mock. Is. She's still alive. Because she flew around the damn world and didn't get lost or run out of fuel or crash. It's too bad that she did it under the racelike conditions that she did, and didn't get more of a chance to explore the places she visited. I wish her later years had been happier and that she had had more opportunities to fly since.

I thought it was worth posting, even though I'm prioritizing my sleep over a well-written blog post here. Jerrie Mock.