Land and Hold Short: on flying small planes.

A special welcome to usndario, the 500th member to join OurAirports.

At my OurAirports account, I’ve added the tag canpass for all of the Canadian CANPASS-only airports. You can use my more general tag customs to see all airports I’ve tagged with customs services (canpass, airport-of-entry, and landing-rights). Zoom in to see specific areas.

OK, the name in the title sucks, but the good news is that OurAirports is now open to community contributions: any member can add a new airport or edit information about an existing one.

How to contribute

When you’re logged into your account (sign up here), you will now see an “edit” tab on every airport page, and an “add a new airport” link at the bottom of the left sidebar.

Think locally

OurAirports has excellent coverage for Canada, the U.S., and Brazil, but even then, we’re missing hundreds or thousands of private, unregistered landing fields. For other countries, the coverage is uneven, and errors and missing information always need correction. Now, if you live in Australia (for example), you can add missing Ozzie airports and correct or add information to existing ones, to make the site more useful for your fellow local pilots.

Checking changes

I’m keeping an individual change history for each airport, and can roll back any changes that look spammy or wrong. An amalgamated list of changes for all airports in inverse chronological order is available on the site-wide change page (also available as an RSS feed), and I’ll be grateful for help watching for any problems. I also plan to add Wikipedia-style watchlists soon, so that you can be alerted about changes on airports that interest you.

Open data

Remember that I won’t hoard your contributions — the site’s full airport list, with data, is available in CVS format for free, Public Domain download, and updated every night.

Unlike airport security …

I plan to keep things simple and open as long as our community is small and there aren’t any serious spam attacks. In the future, I can add moderation, recaptchas, etc. if necessary, but I don’t want to worry too much about problems that don’t actually exist yet.

I’ve expanded my original OurAirports tagging to include all airports of entry and U.S. landing rights airports that I can find under Canadian or U.S. control. You can now use my tag “customs” to find either, for trip planning purposes. Here’s the map zoomed in on the Vancouver/Seattle area, showing only airports where you can clear customs:

Map of customs airports near Vancouver and Seattle

Zoom out and drag to see other parts of Canada and the U.S., or start with the full customs map.

Note that some airports have only seasonal service and/or limited operating hours, and that U.S. “landing rights” airports sometimes charge a fee for customs services. I have not included CANPASS-only airports on the map, because they are available only to pilots who have preregistered in the CANPASS program. I have also excluded unofficial (but frequently-used) customs airports like Maxson Field and Sanderson Field that are located near border crossings.

As I mentioned in a previous post, OurAirports now lets you invent your own tags for airports and view maps of the airports you’ve tagged. This morning, I made a map of 60 of the airports that were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP):

Map: http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/tags/bcatp/

You can drag the map around and zoom in to see specific areas (Eastern Ontario was especially dense). The map (which is still missing a few airports) shows how much the BCATP shaped aviation in Canada — while it used existing airfields when possible, many of the fields were built specifically for the plan, and most of those are still operational. Some still have original hangar buildings, and many maintain the original triangle of three runways that’s so typical of Canadian airports (often with one extended to handle light jets).

While Canada was chosen because of its safe distance from combat and easy access to fuel, wartime flight training was still a brutal business in the BCATP — you could expect at least one fatality in every class training in planes like the Tiger Moth pictured above. Little RCAF Pennfield Ridge, for example, lost 61 student pilots and instructors during its three or four years of operation as a navigational and operational school.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In OurAirports, you can now tag airports any way you want, rather than just marking them as visited, and see a map for any tag. Here are two examples:

1. Canadian customs airports of entry (my tag “airport-of-entry”) Update: expanded to include U.S. airports of entry as well
2. Airports where I’ve done an instrument approach in actual IMC (my tag “instrument-approach”)

You have to be logged in to use this feature, then you’ll see a tags option in the right sidebar on each airport page. You can tag airports you’ve visited in different years or flying different planes; airports with good restaurants or flight schools; or anything else you want. Each tag is a single word, or a series of words connected by ‘-’, ‘.’, or ‘_’, e.g. ‘fuel-stop’, ‘club-member’, ‘fees’, etc.

On the TODO list: rename a tag, to export tags to KML (for Google Earth), show most popular tags on each airport page.

OurAirports is getting better at filtering. While the maps still show everything, you can now filter most of the lists to show any of the following:

• active land airports,
• airports with scheduled airline service,
• seaplane bases, or
• everything, including heliports, closed airports, etc.

(I figured there’s no point showing only heliports, since helicopters can land at regular airports as well).

Here’s a list of airports in Western Australia with scheduled airline service, and here’s a list of the closest seaplane bases to Edmonton, Alberta.

When pilots think of an airport, they think of anywhere they can safely and legally land their planes. It might or might not have a a fence, pavement, fuel pumps, or any structures at all (even an outhouse), much less a terminal building with departure gates and a security checkpoint.

When non-pilots think of an airport, they usually think of somewhere they can buy a ticket and get on a plane. Even in a small city, it will usually have an overpriced parking lot, paved runways, an ugly terminal building, fuel trucks, etc. etc.

Have it your way …

I want to make OurAirports useful for both groups of people, so I’ve been scavenging information on the web to flag which of the 33,000+ airports currently in the database have any kind of scheduled airline service (even in a light piston twin). The roughly 3,000 airports that I’ve found with airline service are now flagged in the database, and have a small note at the top of their right sidebars. Soon, I’ll make changes so that people who want to see only airports with airline service can filter out everything else.

This stuff changes all the time, and my sources might not be entirely reliable, so please send me corrections etc.

CSV format change

NB: for anyone using the CSV data export at http://www.ourairports.com/data/airports.csv, the format will be changing as of tomorrow, adding an extra column “scheduled_service” with the value “yes” or “no”. As far as I know, this is the only free, machine-readable dataset with this information available online.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I had my first experience flying partial panel in IMC on Monday, coming home from Boston. It wasn’t the classic partial panel — a vacuum failure — but a failure of the attitude indicator instrument itself, followed by the airspeed indicator while I was on an ILS approach. The AI had been sluggish for a while, but I had told myself that it was still usable as long as I allowed for a few seconds’ lag. In IMC and moderate turbulence (with a bit of light icing to distract me), however, it was totally useless, and I ended up relying on the turn coordinator to keep the wings more-or-less level, with the heading indicator as a backup.

I’ve heard that partial panel in a slick plane with retractable gear can be a nightmare, but the Cherokee is so slow, draggy, and spiral-resistant that it wasn’t more than an irritant. I’m not sure that simulated partial panel under the hood does anything to prepare you for it, though, because the hardest part is recognizing that you have a problem in the first place (I’m also not convinced that flying under a hood does much to prepare you for flying in actual IMC, but that’s another posting.)

Losing the ASI wasn’t a big deal, since I was already on the glideslope and had a 10,000 ft runway ahead of me, so I just kept a generous power setting on the tachometer and burned off the extra speed in a long flare.

The plane is grounded until the pitot system is cleaned out and tested, the AI is fully overhauled, and new wiring is installed for the intermittent landing light.

I’ll be giving a short demo of OurAirports at DemoCamp Ottawa 9 next Monday (26 May 2008). Feel free to drop by if you’re in town. It’s at The Velvet Room in the ByWard Market, starting at 7:00 pm.

View Larger Map

I flew from Ottawa, ON to Washington, DC (400 nm) today, with a few pilot firsts:

• First time flying south of the Mason-Dixon line.
• First time flying outside the 40-49 degree north latitude band as PIC.
• First time flying into the Washington, DC ADIZ.
• First time dealing with turbulence, icing, IMC, thunderstorms, and extensive routing changes in unfamiliar airspace all at the same time (with no autopilot).

The Internet Death Clock says that I’ll die on 30 August 2038, 30 years from this summer (it doesn’t take into account the longer average life span in Canada). That’s good news, because now I don’t have to worry about running through my preflight checklists, flying VFR into IMC, going up in severe icing, running out of fuel over the mountains, etc. — after checking the death clock, I feel a lot more confident about my flying from now until July 2038.

In the U.S., AOPA president Phil Boyer wants to know how to stop the pilot population from declining — it has fallen below 600,000, and is still heading downhill.

No surprise, really. Flying is a fuel- and land-intensive pastime, when both oil and real estate are expensive and in short supply.

Canada

In Canada, as of September 2007, there were 61,109 pilot licenses and permits in force, with an additional 7,683 student permits [Transport Canada]. If we had the same population as the U.S., that would be the equivalent of nearly 628,000 active pilot licenses. Granted, that’s licenses/permits and not pilots, and a few pilots will hold multiple licenses or permits (e.g. fixed-wing, helicopter, and glider), but it’s probably true that Canada has proportionally more pilots than the U.S. Furthermore, the number seems to be holding fairly steady — ten years ago, in 1998, there were 61,241 licensed pilots (excluding student pilots?) [Transport Canada].

Positive or negative vibes?

What’s the difference? After all, we’re paying slightly more for fuel than the Americans are. One thing might be the hysteria about security and terrorism in the U.S., which paints pilots and planes as, if not exactly potential terrorists, certainly high risks.

Why get involved in a pastime that will make people look at you suspiciously, where your state or city will try to run extra security checks on you, where you read in the news about small planes being intercepted in constantly-changing TFRs, where the less talented investigative reporters will sneak onto your little community airfield to see if your Cessna’s door is unlocked so that they can run a scare story on the news that evening?

That won’t turn everyone away from flying, of course, but it will make some difference — we’re all sensitive to what our friends and neighbours think. In Canada (and, I suspect, parts of the U.S., like Alaska), people still generally react positively when they hear that you’re a pilot, though they learn quickly not mention the weather as a topic of conversation.

The allowed answers for each question are “Canada“, “U.S.“, “both“, or “neither” (for the sake of this quiz, “U.S.” refers only to the continental U.S., excluding Alaska and Hawaii). I’ll post the answers in a comment later.

1. Which country requires pilots to have a clearance to enter class C airspace?

2. Which country requires pilots to file a flight plan for all VFR flights?

3. Which country misuses “class F” in a non-ICAO-standard way to refer to restricted airspace?

4. Which country requires pilots to enter the downwind leg of an uncontrolled airport at a 45-degree angle?

5. Which country requires pilots to have a clearance to fly along (or cross) most Victor airways at or above 12,500 feet?

6. Which country’s controllers will issue landing clearances for more than one aircraft (not flying in formation) landing on the same runway?

7. Which country requires private aircraft to carry liability insurance?

8. Which country levies a fee for customs services for private aircraft?

9. Which country publishes updated VFR charts on a fixed schedule?

10. Which country requires VFR pilots to have copies of current charts on board the aircraft?

11. Which country has a standard, nationwide VHF radio frequency that pilots can use to obtain weather updates and file PIREPs?

12. Which country requires pilots always to use supplemental oxygen at a cabin pressure of 12,500 feet?

13. Which country publishes traffic circuit/pattern direction information on its 1:500,000 VFR charts?

14. Which country plans to require private aircraft to carry 406 MHz ELTs?

15. Which country would charge a Cessna 172 pilot/owner a fee for each IFR flight?

16. Which country has class G airspace above 18,000 ft?

My U.S.-manufactured 1979 Piper Warrior II was originally registered as N22309, until it was imported into Alberta, Canada in 1988 and reregistered as C-FBJO. It wasn’t the only plane to use that registration number.

The first N22309 that I can find was a Cessna 150 based in the Phillipines. On 28 May 1973, a solo student pilot was executing a go-around (touch and go?) at Plaridel Airport before heading to Clark Air Base. Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well, and the plane ended up flying into the trees. The 35-year-old student pilot survived, but the plane was a write-off (summary).

The N-number lay dormant for six years, until it was assigned to a new Piper Warrior II in 1979. The plane kept the number until 1988, when it was exported to Canada (and later bought by me in 2002).

The N-number lay dormant for another seven years, then was reassigned once again in 1995, this time to a Ryan RX-6 (a type I can find almost nothing about). The plane didn’t have it for long, however — it was canceled in 1998. All the database says is “Reason for Cancellation: Destroyed”. There’s no accident report in the NTSB database, so let’s hope it was destroyed while parked on the ground, with no one in it. The number has been available for 10 years now.

Anyone interested in a slightly used N-number?

Here’s what it cost to own and operate a 1979 Piper Warrior II in Ottawa, Canada in 2007 with 80 hours air time (a bit more flight time, of course). Since the US and Canadian dollars are basically at par now, there’s no need to convert:

These are real costs, including sales taxes, not the BS costs you hear people throwing around at the airport. Reserves are $20/hour for engine and paint. I also pay about $500/year for charts and recurrent training, but I’d pay the same as a renter, so I don’t count those as ownership costs.

2007 was by far the cheapest year I’ve had with C-FBJO, and also the fewest hours I’ve flown (I’m usually over 100). I was parked at a less expensive airport and used less gas (flying less), but the biggest difference was maintenance — annual maintenance for a small plane like mine can be $2,000 one year and $10,000 the next, depending on what goes wrong (and even the simplest plane has a lot that can go wrong). I’m keeping a nearly 30-year-old plane operating, so stuff wears out and has to be replaced all the time, just as it would with a 30-year-old car; unlike with cars, however, buying a new plane isn’t a solution — I read recently that routine inspection and maintenance for an SR-22 runs $8,000-$10,000, and that’s without any problems coming up.

Fees include tie-down (and required club membership) at my home airport, transient landing and parking fees during trips, and the compulsory $75/year Nav Canada and $27.50 US customs fees. Consumables are oil (mainly), filters, fluids, etc.

When so many of the costs — tie-down fees, insurance, and (most) maintenance — are fixed, I can see the logic in taking one or two partners. You’ll still pay just as much for fuel and engine/paint reserve, but you slash the other overheads. I don’t think I’ll take a partner in C-FBJO at this point, but if I move up to something bigger like a Cherokee Six, I probably won’t try it alone.

So where did this money take me and my passengers (besides the Ottawa area) in 2007? In chronological order, Maniwaki QC, New York City (Teterboro), Drummondville QC, Pembroke ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville), Sault Ste. Marie ON, Toronto ON (City Centre), Brockville ON, Waterloo ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville) again, Sundridge ON, Sault Ste. Marie ON again, Toronto ON (City Centre) again, Burlington VT, Boston MA (Norwood), Alexandria Bay NY (Maxson), New Jersey and New York City (Caldwell), Montreal QC (Trudeau), Baie Comeau QC, Maniwaki QC again, and Burlington VT again. Not all that exciting a year, but it kept the rust off the wings (mine and the plane’s).

A couple of months ago, Google Maps quietly added a Terrain layer to their maps. I’ve enabled that in OurAirports now, so that you can get at least a rough idea of the terrain around an airport (or in a region, country, etc.).

For example, here’s why there are so many accidents around Hope, BC when the weather gets low.

I’ve finally gotten around to adding free data downloads to OurAirports. You can now download nightly CSV-formatted data dumps of all the airports, countries, and regions in OurAirports at

http://www.ourairports.com/data/

These will open with most spreadsheet and database programs (make sure you import them as UTF-8).

All data is released into the Public Domain and comes with no warranty. If you have any corrections or additions, please make them in the spreadsheet and then send them back to me.

You’ve probably all seen this already, but today the Gimli Glider takes its last flight as an Air Canada aircraft, almost 25 years after its famous power-off glide to a landing in Gimli, Manitoba.

The original pilots and some of the crew members are on board as it heads from Montreal to Tucson on its way to a bone yard in the Mojave desert.